Ep. 136: Jonty Yamisha, Axxonsoft | What It Takes to Execute a Value Creation Plan

0:00Hey, everybody.

0:01Jonty Yamisha: Before we get started with today's episode, I want to take an opportunity to tell you about my new book, AI Marketing Blueprint. It just hit number one bestseller status across multiple categories on Amazon, and it walks you through a proven framework that we are taking our clients through here at How to SaaS and how to stay relevant and visible in a world with AI platforms. One of the biggest problems that we have seen across clients and companies is that the traditional channels that they relied on, like paid search or SEO, have declined significantly or are getting more expensive and competitive.

0:34Jonty Yamisha: The reason for this is that a lot of buyers are starting to self-educate themselves and research on AI platforms. So a lot of that volume that was previously going to those channels is now moving to these new AI platforms. So to stay relevant, the book walks you through seven new rules that companies in all kinds of verticals and industries need to consider so that they can continue growing their pipeline and revenue and ultimately their enterprise value. So if this applies to your business or one of the companies that you've invested in, I definitely recommend that you pick up a copy. It's available on Amazon, on Apple Books, on Barnes and Noble, and even share it with your teams.

1:10Jonty Yamisha: Grab a bunch of copies so that you can kind of consume the content together and start to apply it to your business. And with that said, let's move on to the episode. Welcome to the Private Equity Value Creation Podcast, where we interview leading investors, operators, bankers, and advisors to help you answer one question. How do we increase the enterprise value of our companies? My name is Shiv Narayanan, and each episode, I will dive deep with a guest to help you become a better value creator and capital allocator. So with that said, let's jump right in and let's get started with today's episode.

1:46Jonty Yamisha: My guest today is Jhonti Yamisha, and he's the CEO of Accentsoft. And I met Jhonti many years ago when we were working on some long-art companies, as he used to be the driver of their GTM excellence team. And since then, he's gone on to become an operator and lead a company as a CEO at Accentsoft. And what I really enjoyed about this episode and conversation with Jhonti is that, in general, we have a ton of private equity investors or advisors on this podcast. It's rare that we have a CEO. And in Jhonti's case, he's also been a consultant. He's operated within a private equity firm as well. And so he's able to kind of connect the dots on all sides of the ecosystem.

2:25Jonty Yamisha: And Jhonti had some great perspectives on how to build a great team, how to align the work that you're doing with investors, how to build a data model for a company to build value creation initiatives, and how to really rally everybody around a central objective to drive more growth and enterprise value for a company. And I think that's a message that a lot more PE investors need to hear. A lot of CEOs need to hear just so that they can achieve that ultimate goal of actually growing their companies and ultimately selling or creating enterprise value for the companies that they're operating in.

2:59Jonty Yamisha: So it's a really great conversation and Jaunty brings a ton of wisdom and I hope you get from it as much as I did. And so with that said, I'll leave you to it. Enjoy the episode.

3:14Jonty Yamisha: All right, Jati, welcome to the show. How's it going? It's going great. Thanks for having me here today, Shiv. Yeah, excited to have you on. Why don't we start with your background and what you're up to now, and let's go from there. Sure. I have a little bit of a non-traditional background. The super short version of this is my mom and dad came to the country as refugees, and I did not know what an entrepreneur was. I just thought if you have a funny name or a funny accent, you got to go make yourself the job. Started my career as a serial entrepreneur. Started and sold three businesses before I was 30.

3:46Ended up doing my MBA at NYU Stern. Worked at Alderman in strategy work for a little bit. Was the right place at the right time. Got a Darth Vader field promotion to go work at Marshall McLennan. I sat on the global operating committee there. A lot of the work that I did when I was there was post-merger integration work into one of our business units. I ran FP &A, corporate development, business development, and strategic planning, in addition to the merger integration work. From there, because I had done some carve-outs and a couple of tuck-in acquisitions, found my way to FTI Consulting. Was there for four or five years in corporate finance group.

4:25Stood up a strategy group within the restructuring business. did more than a dozen, less than two dozen restructurings while I was there, mostly on the operational performance improvement side, margin enhancement side of the house. One thing led to another. One of my clients asked for me by name. FTI blessed the opportunity. And by the way, the common theme there was it was either hedge funds who were buying distressed debt looking to take a first lien position or private equity firms who were buying distressed companies that had very limited diligence timelines behind them. So one thing led to another.

5:06One of my clients pulled me into one of their portfolio companies. I ended up moving my family from New Jersey, where I was living at the time, to Chicago. Joined as chief marketing officer for a PE-backed company. We doubled the size of the business in four years. We sold it to a publicly traded firm. It was a great exit. Wasn't sure what I was going to do next? The same investors came back to me a second time around. Rinse, wash, repeat, did my second exit two years later. From there, I found my way to working as an operating partner, leading value creation and building out what is now called the GoToMarket Center of Excellence, where that particular private equity firm eventually found my way to work as the CEO of a global software technology company, which is the role that I'm leading right now.

5:55A lot of the work that I, We're held by a family office, which is effectively permanent capital. But a lot of the work that I have done is a chunk of what I would have done were I still at FTI in terms of restructuring and margin improvements. And a chunk of the work that I did do when I was at Longark Capital, really building out our go-to-market engine and accelerating our growth. And that's my journey. And that's where I am.

6:18Jonty Yamisha: Yeah, that's where we met. We met at Longark when you were leading the go-to-market center of excellence. So talk a little bit about that. like now you're obviously leading your own business here, but how did the, the working on the financial side and then working inside the PE firm, and then also obviously being an operator as a CMO and having that exit, like how has that kind of changed your approach over the years in terms of how you look at companies? So, you know, I have to sort of preface this by saying I've, I've always been one of those people that one could say is maybe the odd man out, or perhaps the guy that's able to kind of walk amongst a whole bunch of different circles.

6:55And, you know, I've done due diligence. I've done underwriting. I've written my fair share of sims over my career. So I do understand the financial side of things, what makes a good deal, how to structure the financials in such a way that you're going to give a good return to your LPs, to your GPs, to the stakeholders inside the company as well. but I've also built businesses from zero to one. I've transformed businesses. I've done divestitures, carve outs, tuck ins. I've executed and led buy and build theses. And so I had that operational play as well. So I've never felt like there was a divide between the underwriting thesis and then the actual implementation of a value creation plan.

7:37But I have often felt that sometimes the theory and the practice are a little bit divided from one another. And there is a gap between what makes sense on paper, what is realistically able to get done, and then what the organization has appetite, will, desire, and capability to do. So I think the biggest factor there is not just the plan, but also the cultural aspects of the plan, the change management components, understanding the value of culture, making sure that people feel safe and protected in their roles so that they're willing, ready, willing, and able to take risks. Because if you're not taking risks, you're not going to be able to achieve rewards.

8:16And I feel that, you know, in as much as an operator, I feel equally comfortable speaking the language of finance or strategy or operations or sales or marketing. Likewise, when it comes to value creation, I feel equally comfortable looking at a balance sheet, talking about a P &L, building a 13-week cash flow statement, thinking about how we structure a transaction so all the tranching makes sense from a technical perspective, making sure that cash in equals cash out plus value at, it just kind of all makes sense to me. So for me, it's sort of different signs of a Rubik's cube rather than different pictures.

8:53I've always thought of this as a team sport. I just think of myself as a utility player.

8:57Jonty Yamisha: Totally. I mean, I'm in full agreement with that because all sides of the Rubik's cube kind of work together, right? The financials should directly impact how you look at your product strategy or your go-to-market strategy and how much you're willing to spend or what kind of margins you're aiming for. So I definitely think a lot of those things are connected. That being said, I think if, you know, we do a ton of work with private equity, and if there's one criticism I have of the PE industry is that there are a lot of people in VP or analyst or even managing partner roles that haven't built businesses.

9:32Jonty Yamisha: And so you end up in certain situations where there is like a spreadsheet model for the business or like a math exercise for what it takes to grow the business and then the actual reality of what it will take. And oftentimes, like I find that the best PE leaders or the investors or CEOs are the ones that are able to connect the dots on those two things because the ones that don't, like I I think you're almost setting up the companies for failure. So maybe talk about that piece, which is like, how do you connect the dots between those two areas? Yeah, so there's, I think this is as much art as it is science.

10:15And I've, this is a framework or just a perspective, not quite a framework. It's a perspective that I've used for most of my professional career. I remember once I was at some sort of lecture and there was a doctor who was giving a presentation and he asked the audience, do we like pain? Do we like stress? And of course, everyone said no. And the point he made was that pain and stress are your body's way of telling you that you're pushing yourself to a certain limit and that you're above a certain limit and you should be careful about going too high. If you're never experiencing pain, if you're never experiencing stress, then you're not actually pushing yourself forward.

10:56I've always taken that to heart And my analogous interpretation of that is that when you're building a cross-functional team, and to be clear, whether you're working in private equity at a portfolio company, a family-owned founder-led business, or publicly traded firm, or anything in between, success is a team sport. And so as you're assembling the different members of that team, and you can think of offense versus defense, you can think finance versus operations, whatever analogy you want to use, there has to be a certain level of tension, right? And in this, now that I'm adapting the analogy, you know, I think of tension as sort of a rubber band around a bundle of goods, right?

11:36If that rubber band is too loose, it adds no value, and that bundle is just going to fall apart. By that same token, if that rubber band is stretched beyond its limit, it will snap and you will get an equally bad outcome. So this is where the art and the science comes into play. It's understanding what are the lower bound and upper bound limits of the positive tension that a team can undertake and how do you then navigate that from the perspective of data as well as intuition. So I think the best outcomes are when somebody in operations has a perspective and somebody in strategy has a perspective and somebody in operations and somebody in finance and somebody in sales and somebody in marketing, the sponsors, the operators, when they all bring their perspectives together, they're creating that positive tension that ultimately is going to move that organization forward.

12:33The challenge is, and this really only comes with a little bit of gray hair over time, the challenge is being able to navigate and understand when you come up to that limit and how to play to get as close to that limit as possible. So you're always at the upper core, Kyle, the upper decile of performance, but you mitigate the risk of going too far and breaking something.

12:55Jonty Yamisha: Yeah. And I guess there's a difference between, I guess, good tension and then pressure that is not even realistic for a business. So talk about like conceptual, I get the concept, but like help us understand like how can investors or boards or firms, you know, build that tension with their businesses, but at the same time be grounded in reality for what is possible for that business in terms of growth, in terms of margins, in terms of, let's say rule of 40 or whatever other targets that they're aiming for. So the best way I can answer that is something that I, something I always try to bring into a conversation when we're in a room, right?

13:36And let's say you have the L, you have the GPs or the LPs in, in a portfolio company who have financial pressures to deliver an outcome, to deliver a return in some period of time, right? And so what typically will happen is they'll say, this is, this is our immovable goal. we need to be at a certain point from a financial return perspective in 2028, in 2027, whatever the time period may happen to be. And I think there is this sort of natural feeling that if that's what needs to happen, we're just going to push everyone operationally to achieve that outcome. That's a little bit of a lopsided conversation.

14:16And I think the easiest way to flip this is to move away from this notion of, I'm just making up a number. We have to be at $100 million of revenue with a 30 % EBITDA margin by August of 2028 in order to exit and do the things that our LPs want us to do, right? That's one way of articulating it. I think a more instructive way of articulating it would be to say, if this is the delivery that we need to collectively align upon, what needs to be true in order for that outcome to be delivered? And That's a very subtle distinction, but it completely transforms the dialogue from, Shiu, this is your problem to fix, to what are the unspoken assumptions?

15:00What are the unconquerable truths in the room that we need to get out on the table and have a dialogue around? Because if one says we need to be here by August of 2028, come hell or high water, it becomes very, very challenging to say that's not possible because of X. because now you are attacking the person, you are attacking the plan, you are a naysayer, you're dragging your feet, right? Whether implicit or explicit, that is the sort of presumption.

15:30Jonty Yamisha: When you flip this with this little subtle thing and say what needs to be true, you are inviting all the unspoken things that people feel in their hearts and minds, and then you can drop them into the appropriate buckets and work them back one by one to try to resolve. Yeah, I completely agree with that, which is sitting on the same side of the table and saying, what are all the variables or inputs that go into this business or what's in front of us? And then what is realistic or here are some potential targets we can hit and then what needs to happen for us to get there? And then you can have an open dialogue about what's actually possible.

16:05Jonty Yamisha: This is one of the things that we often encourage our own clients and even CMOs because CMOs sometimes are given a target, but the budget that they have is not realistic to get there. And so it's like bringing it to the board level, even like informational information parity to say, here's our budget within this budget. Here's what's possible. If we want to grow faster, here's how much more budget I would need. And here's where I would allocate it or here's the ROI we should expect on that additional spend. That's a conversation that needs to happen so that everybody's fully aware about how the table is being set.

16:39Jonty Yamisha: And I think in cases where there isn't as much success, that conversation is is not happening enough. And so I think that's really good insight to align everybody involved. You know, I'm sorry, Shiv. I just want to dive a little bit more deeply into that because I agree with what you're saying. But I also think that there is a little bit of an implicit assumption that I just want to tease out in this because I've been a CMO. I've been a CRO. I've been a CEO. I've been an operating partner. I've been in the room where those conversations have been had. And I do think I'm going to be overly dramatic now.

17:18I do think that on one end of the spectrum, there is a caricature of a CMO who would say, in order to get there, I need more budget. I need more fuel in the car to go that extra mile or to go faster. And I think on the flip side of that, again, to use a caricature that's overly dramatized just to illustrate the point, there's going to be your CFO who rolls his eyes and says, here's this again. Why can't we do more with less? So getting back to a variation of the theme that I talked about earlier, I think the more successful CMO who is going to walk into that room and think to him or herself, I've got a lot of financial people here.

18:01I've got a lot of people here who have a different perspective than me. I think a better way to frame this would be, this is what I can do with the allocation of resources that you have given me. If you want different outcomes, I need to reallocate these resources or I need more or different resources. This now is a subtle variation where you're not saying I need more budget, but you might say, look, I can dump a lot of this stuff into tactical bottom of funnel. It's going to give you a pop in revenue and EBITDA for the next quarter or two. for brand awareness is going to drop and therefore three or four quarters into the future, it's going to become more expensive to deliver MQLs, SQLs, and close one, et cetera, et cetera.

18:46Now, if that's what you want to do, we can have that conversation. And then what happens is the CMO becomes a subject of discussion rather than an object of derivation around capital allocation as a function of growth and value creation.

19:05Jonty Yamisha: Yes, 100%. Yeah, I think similar to what we were saying earlier about like, hey, investors need to factor in the operational piece. I think executives, whether it's a CMO, CRO, CPO, need to factor in the financial constraints of the business and speak the language of the investor and the board to be able to get people on board. That's something we talk about a lot as well. Like, yeah, you need more budget, definitely that's an ask that we see every marketing leader have. But then at the same time, like with your current budget, are you fully efficient? Is there waste in your existing spend? Is there stuff that should be reallocated?

19:44Jonty Yamisha: Are there activities that should be stopped? Like bringing all of that to the table with data builds a ton of confidence to say, okay, this person is actually bringing us everything and is on top of everything. And so with that, it's way easier to trust when they ask for more budget. When there's like a blanket ask for more budget, that's kind of harder to trust. And then with that, then you can kind of have this conversation about opportunity costs and what's possible. And then ultimately, like, hey, here's what it'll take to help us scale to the next level. I guess that story is not told enough inside function.

20:19Jonty Yamisha: So I'm curious, like, now that you're in a CEO role, like, how do you go about managing that with your sponsors? And also, how do you think about growing the business? Like, is there a framework that you're running your organization with? Yeah, so there's two things in there. I think the first one I'll address is the first one you asked, and then I'll go into what our framework and what our model is for value creation. What I have found oftentimes, and I'm sure, Shiv, you've seen this as well, is that there's a set of KPIs that your marketing function is going to look at, and not all of them are financially oriented, although I would argue all of them are value creation oriented.

20:56For example, brand awareness, NPS score, impression share, right? What else? Kind of stuff that might be top of funnel and hard to directly correlate into a closed one client. And we all know what those dashboards look like earlier in our careers. I'm sure we built more than our fair share of them. And those dashboards and those KPIs, they're going to be similar to, but distinct from what a sales leader, what a sales professional is going to look at. And oftentimes, they're also derived from different platforms, from different systems, whether they're internal or they're external. A marketer might be looking at Google as an ad platform, LinkedIn as an ad platform.

21:36There might be an attribution platform. They might be using HubSpot for marketing automation, et cetera, et cetera. Then your sales professional or your sales leader might also be looking at HubSpot, might be using Microsoft Dynamics, Salesforce, something of that nature. They're looking at pipeline. they're looking at velocity, speed to lead, close time, average contract value, things of that nature. That then gets summed up into revenue that's booked, cash that's received. And so there's going to be a third set of things that the CFO is going to look at. And then the Venn diagram of overlap between what your CFO and what your sponsor is likely to look at is very high.

22:11But when you look at your marketing KPIs, your sales KPIs, and your financial KPIs, the Venn diagram overlap there can be shockingly small. And so what often ends up happening is people have different definitional terms with no unified data nomenclature or taxonomy to be able to have an informed conversation. For example, how often have we been in the room and we've heard, we need more leads. What's the definition of a lead? Is a lead somebody who you met at a trade show? Is it some form submission on a landing page or is a lead defined by a high level of fit with our ideal customer profile? If it is at the ICP level, is that at the firm level or the individual who actually made that contact?

23:01What if they contacted us, but they never showed up for a discussion? Those conversations oftentimes fall so far below the fold, but they are the enabler to being able to build unified reporting. So this is, I'm starting to get into my theory of value creation, but those are the enablers to be able to build a unified data structure and unified reporting structure that a marketer, a sales professional, a CFO, a CEO, board member, or sponsor could look at and understand the flow of capital. And so the holy grail here would be to say, if I spend a dollar in marketing today, in three, six, or 12 months, I will deliver this quantum of revenue, which translates to this level of EBITDA, which gets into this level of enterprise value.

23:50And this is not your traditional marketing attribution challenge. This is really a data cleanliness challenge and a systems integration challenge. And to be clear, there's always going to be some stuff at the marketing phase that is hard to directly attribute. And this is mostly going to be top and middle of funnel type stuff. But that's a fraction of the overall volume of sources, whether resources, whether it's your marketing budget, whether it's your human capital, whether it's your investment into IT services, or even just assigning revenue attribution to your customer success, customer support people, who oftentimes just by doing a great job are engendering cross-sell and up-sell.

24:31building that unified nomenclature, the data taxonomy that then sits across all the different systems and provides that unified level of reporting, I think that's the holy grail. And what I see more often than not is the marketing function has their stuff. The sales guys have their stuff. The CFO is looking at something different. Your sponsor oftentimes has this grand unified reporting package that none of the portfolio companies actually like because it's so unified that it's losing meaning from the operators. So bringing that all together, it's not easy. Frankly, it's not even sexy. It's one of those things that people don't realize that they need until they've actually experienced it.

25:11But I think that is an absolute predicate to being able to have a consistent path to value creation in the near term and in the long term.

25:20Jonty Yamisha: We'll get back to the show in just a moment. But before we do, one of the most common and important value creation levers that we hear about on the show from private equity investors and our own PE partners is go to market. Yet when these same PE partners bring us into their portfolio companies or new target investments that they're exploring, we find that the marketing function is quite immature, underutilized and under optimized. And so that's a huge opportunity that we see inside these companies. And if you have a portfolio company that you feel like it's scaled a lot faster to drive more pipeline and revenue or you're looking at a new investment where you feel like that could be core to your investment thesis but we'd love to explore that with you and figure out how we can partner with you to drive more enterprise value creation on the marketing side similar to the way that we've done with major PE firms like TA, Updata, HG, SDG and many more.

26:13Jonty Yamisha: At this point we've done hundreds of engagements across hundreds of industries and verticals and we have a ton of benchmarks and frameworks that we bring to these engagements to help you drive as much enterprise value as quickly as possible. So if that sounds like something that you might be interested in, you can just email me directly at shiv at howtosass.com or go to our website and schedule a demo. And we'd love to speak with you about it further. And now with that said, let's get back to the show. Having everybody be on the same page on what the nomenclature taxonomy is, what we're actually aiming towards and having a unified understanding about the data model of a business is critical.

26:54Jonty Yamisha: We actually see that as like a gap where companies have the financial, let's say, statements and metrics that they're able to look at. But what is the actual model for growing the company and what are the key variables that go into that? We see that less often where companies truly actually do actually understand that. And so I think building that and having everybody on the same page and you also get insights when you have a model like that, you learn where the gaps are. So if you, for example, you have a target of MQLs or opportunities that you need to hit, it can feel like, hey, we just need more opportunities or more MQLs, right?

27:34Jonty Yamisha: But if you start to look at conversion rates or average deal sizes or by territory or by type of customer, there's all kinds of insights that come. Or maybe you might find out that you actually don't need more opportunities. You need to close them better. Or you're getting enough MQLs, but your MQL to operate is too low. And maybe that's because you're targeting the wrong customers and your spend is inefficient because you're in the wrong channels or focusing on the wrong people. So those kinds of insights are harder to uncover if you don't have a data model like that for the business. So I think it's a good transition point.

28:06Jonty Yamisha: Is that kind of how you're running your current company? It is. So the way, and this is an evolutionary thing that takes place over time. am I? I'd be lying if I said to you, I invented this 10 years ago. I'd be lying if I said to you, I invented this. But through trial and error, through exposure to others, through just seeing what works, I've kind of evolved into this operating model, if you will. And this is not only my operating model, it is fundamentally my value creation model. And before I get into it, and it's going to be shockingly simple, perhaps even underwhelming when I describe it.

28:44So I'm it up. But before I do, I'd like to use an analogy to contextualize the way that I think about this. Imagine an experience you had at the best hotel you've ever been to. Perhaps it's a resort. Perhaps it's just a really nice hotel. And just think through what that amazing experience was, what value you took from that experience, right? You received an email confirmation thanking you for trusting them with your trip, welcoming you to the army of satisfied people who are going to go to this hotel. You show up, there's a bellhop, greets you, opens your door, takes your baggage, and magically whisks it away to your room where it's waiting for you even before you've checked it.

29:28You get to the registration desk. They know who you are. They hand you your card. They tell you how to get to your room. You get up there. There's music going in the room. There's a TV screen that says welcome shib and family, whoever might happen to be with you. There's a concierge who's eager to help you navigate this city, who's eager to help you understand what amenities are available there. You pick up the phone, you order room service. It's there within 30 minutes. And this experience is so phenomenal that you leave thinking two things. One, I can't wait to come back to this property. And two, I'm going to tell all my friends to come here.

30:06Okay, that is the best metaphor for value creation for two fundamental reasons. One is you have experienced value, right? That's such an amazing and sadly unique, valuable experience. And you have created value by thinking to yourself, I can't wait to come back and I can't wait to tell all my friends how amazing this is. Now, think of how complex it is to do what I just described. There's an IT system somewhere that may not even be the hotel's own IT system where you booked your stay, right? There is somebody who's paid a certain wage, who sits outside of the building, who takes your bags up to your room.

30:50There's a different person with a different level of skill in everything that I just described to check you in, to check you out, to come wait on your room, to clean your room. Probably two thirds of what I've just described is invisible to you and taking place behind the scenes. And the person who delivers your food has no connection to the person who built the website that sent your email confirmation and may not even know the person who checked you in or the person who carried your bags. The person who took the bags from you may not be the same person who carried them up to your room. And yet all of this is orchestrated in such a seamless way that you have this amazing experience.

31:29And now think of what happens when any one of those things does not go according to plan. It takes every single one of those things to be nothing short of perfect for you to think, Maybe I should tell my friends about this. And all it takes is one chink in that armor for you to say, this place stinks. I'm never coming back here. They get a three-star review as far as I'm concerned. This is what value creation looks like within an organization. And so this is my framing principle.

31:57Jonty Yamisha: Yeah, yeah. No, that totally resonates. How does that look like in practice when you're looking at the product side or the sales team or marketing? Can you bring that to life for us? Yeah, absolutely. So first, the framework that I'm going to share now, I believe it is independent of whether the firm in question is private equity backed or founder family owned. I believe it is independent of industry. So whether you are a service firm, a technology firm, a software firm, a manufacturing firm, I'm going to try to create a framework that will work for just about everybody. Right. Within the confines of your organization, you can be a plastic injection molding business.

32:41You can be an insurance entity. You can be SAS. You can be a consulting service, anything in between. There's going to be three areas of the business. The first area is going to be your product, your technology, your service, your delivery, whatever industry you're in. It's going to be the part of your business that makes or delivers the thing that people associate with your business, right? And again, the thing they associate with your business might be the product they buy, but the thing that delivers the service is the sum total of these three different areas, okay? So let's just call that delivery for lack of a better term, okay?

33:18So you're going to have a delivery function. You're then going to have a customer service, customer support, customer success. and in different industries, you might have all three of those. But that first area of your business makes the thing and delivers the thing, whether it's tangible or intangible, that customers associate with what they're buying. The second part of your business is then going to be the group of people who after that commercial transaction takes place are there to provide support, to provide expansion, to make sure that any of your questions are answered, right? And let's call that post-sale.

33:57Then the third area of your business is going to be your sales and your marketing function. Okay. So to simplify, again, understanding that this is sort of industry agnostic, let's say you have three factories within your business. You've got your delivery factory. You've got your success factory. And you've got your go-to-market factory. Right. So the first guiding principle is if you don't have a good delivery, if you don't have a good product or service or experience as a result of that first interaction, you have no right to win no matter how well the other factories are operating. When you go over to your success factory, if you don't have an army of people to cultivate a relationship, whether it's subscription or one-time purchase, whatever it is, to engender repeat purchases, to engender a positive NPS score, or to just answer the phone if and when something breaks 18 months into the future and you need some customer support, you don't have a right to win.

34:59And the reason for this is if you don't have happy, satisfied customers who will say nice things about you, you have no sales enablement materials. So the idea is to borrow a terminology from Seth Godin, make remarkable products. Product services that are so good that people remark upon them. Make sure that you stand behind the thing that you deliver, product, service, technology, whatever it may happen to be. so people feel that they're part of your community and you have not abandoned them. And then from a marketing perspective, marketing is shockingly easy. Marketing is the amplification of customer satisfaction.

35:42It is the illustration of customer success, right? It is the articulation of happy, satisfied customers saying, I love these guys. I want to tell all my friends. And that becomes your sales enablement for your salespeople to be able to then have a consultative conversation that is demonstrated to not be transactional in nature. Even if you're buying something transactional, just knowing that the brand, the company, the organization, the culture is going to be there post-purchase, things become shockingly easy. Now, the hard part is not only building that unified novenclature and data and taxonomy that I talked about earlier, the hard part is aligning all these different people who have different views at different points in the sort of interaction process.

36:31So what I have found over time is that it is challenging to talk to a sales professional about customer success. It is challenging to talk to a customer success person about marketing. It is challenging to talk to a marketing person about the realities of product or service delivery. So the unifying framework that I think everyone can rally around is the customer journey, right? So if you have the right culture, if you have a okay, even if you have just an okay culture in your business, I think a lot of people can get around this idea that I want to solve problems in the lives of my customers.

37:08And if I think about what my customer is thinking and experiencing and doing before they're even probably aware, they're talking to friends and family, then they're going to go to Google, they're going to do some discovery, they're going to come across our website. They're going to interact with our brand. They're going to consume some sort of information. One of our colleagues then may make kinetic contact with that individual to have a conversation, to do a consultation, to demo our platform. There's going to be a commercial transaction where they trade money for value. They're then going to be onboarded and supported.

37:43And then we're going to ask them over time, what can we do better? If you think about that as sort of a high-level view of your guiding principle, that is the connective tissue that unifies delivery with success with go-to-market. And what I love about this is it moves everyone away from this defensive posture. While marketing would be more successful if those sales guys would close the leads, while the sales guys would be more successful if those product or service people would just do their jobs. It takes this completely out of the scope and it just says, what can we collectively do individually and as a business to solve problems that our customers experience and

38:23Jonty Yamisha: keep doing a better job of it time after time after time. And so it removes this sort of defensive posture. And it says, hey, man, you, me, and everyone else, we have one mission in life to solve the problems and add value to the lives of our customers. And that's such a fun thing to rally around. A lot of what you said resonates and it's very aligned with kind of how I see building companies. I guess some of it is it takes time, you know, and it takes time to align everybody. It takes time to do some of this work around product or customer experiences and then channeling that into marketing and really aligning the whole organization and delivering exceptional outcomes to customers.

39:05Jonty Yamisha: How do you balance that with sometimes PE sponsors or just sponsors in general want revenue growth yesterday or there's more of an aggressive push to grow faster or more short term thinking? Like, how do you balance that so that the on the investor side and the board side also everybody is aligned? Yeah. So it's not easy. It's not easy. Let me talk about what it takes to do what I just described, and then I'll talk about what it takes to then align your sponsor and have those hard conversations when it takes this much time to get something done, and it has to be done in this amount of time. So as a guy who did spend more than a decade in consulting, and as a guy now who is in the captain's seat when it comes to leadership, it is draining.

39:57It is time consuming. It is hard, but it is absolutely necessary for leaders in the organization. So something I did when I joined this organization as our CDO. I met with every single person in my organization. There are several hundred people in my organization across 30 some odd countries. I met with every single one of them. Not necessarily one-to-one, but I don't think any of my group sessions were larger than a dozen people. And as I went, one of the first things I said was, you guys have been running this business for over 20 years. I just got here yesterday. I need you to educate me on our business, our culture, our customers.

40:44And then there's another added dimension of what I'm describing in that we operate with 30 some odd different countries. So what are the realities in Brazil and how are they different than Malaysia and how are they unique relative to Canada and different again relative to Poland, right? And I spent an inordinate amount of time being in true listening mode and coming in and trying to demonstrate by my actions, not my words, that I had no preconceived notions of what good looks like because I was a listening mode. And then what I do is I kind of go back and I say, here's what I think the path to a better version of what we're doing today looks like.

41:22Not a perfect version because perfect is the enemy of the good and it's an impossible goal, but just a better version and a path that will get us to a better and a better and a better version over two, three, five work steps. Then I go back to my senior leadership team and I have one-on-one conversations and I say, this is what I'm thinking. Tell me what's scary. Tell me what's wrong. Tell me what's broken. Tell me what's unrealistic. And I go back into listening mode and I try to have these as one-on-one conversations, preferably in person, and to just sit there and listen so that they feel safe.

41:56They feel that I'm not here waiting for them to stop talking so I can sell them on my vision. Because let's just say for whatever objective measure, I'm right and they're wrong. If they believe that they're right, it doesn't matter if I'm right and they're wrong. They're not going to come on that journey with me. So there's multiple times where you have to speak to the organization overall. You have to have these conversations one-on-one. There's two or three feedback loops. and then there's a reorchestration of the entire organization. By the time you've gone through these three to five different feedback loops, everyone just says, yeah, that's exactly what we should be doing.

42:35We talked about this three or four times already. Why are we even having this conversation? We decided this two weeks ago. And I kind of laugh when I get into that state because that shows that the process works. When you literally get to the point where people are saying, I thought we decided this two or three weeks ago. Why are we even having this conversation? You know that you've over communicated and synthesized everybody's view in, and that just takes time. And, you know, it also, you know, as an executive leader, it forces you to take whatever might be top of mind, compartmentalize it, push it off and be present for that conversation, for those hard conversations, for the listening conversation, whatever it may happen to be.

43:19So that's what it looks like on the operational side. There's an element of that that is analogous on the investor side as well. And I've been in the room when the unrealistic expectations are articulated with somebody sort of pounding on the table and no one in that room really feels comfortable saying otherwise. So the analogous process is identical, except when you're having those conversations, the thread that you try to unravel is to not go back to an LP or a GP and say, your plan is wrong, right? But rather to say, what are the drivers that support? So, hey, Mr. Sponsor, Mrs. Sponsor, you said to us that we have to hit this level of revenue and this level of EBITDA with these OKRs and these KPIs by August of 2028 come hell or high water.

44:15Help me understand what's driving that. Is it a continuation vehicle? Is there something in our disclosure documents or operating agreements that says that the whole period is absolutely unmovable past this? Is there somebody who has a liquidity issue that they're trying to help me understand what the actual problem is so I can partner with you to try to determine whether the solution that you've given me is the only solution or even maybe not the optimal solution? So it's a very analogous process to what I just described, but it's with a slightly different lens. And I dare say that it's a harder conversation to have because investors have a certain level of pressure and a certain level of use.

44:57And it's easier to have over time in all candor when you're a guy like me who sat in the investor seat, sat in the operator seat, and can have real heart-to-heart conversations about what needs to be true on the operational side strategically in terms of the market context, the market conditions, as well as financial conditions.

45:17Jonty Yamisha: Yeah, I think a big part of it is having a person in the CEO seat that knows how to manage all these stakeholders because you kind of have to manage the team, your executive team, the investors, and at the same time have this data model or value creation approach that really focuses on the customer and drives value for them and then has the right go to market and then can connect it to financials and overall objectives at an investor level. while keeping everybody happy and educated on, hey, this is where the business is and this is the reality and these are the constraints and here's what we're focused on.

45:55Jonty Yamisha: And I think that is a really important takeaway here is just the amount of work that you're describing and you're obviously putting in to make sure that everybody is kept in the loop with all of that. We're coming up on time here, Johnny. I wish we could keep talking, but I think there's a lot of great takeaways here. But before we close off, if there's somebody listening that wants to reach out or get more from your wisdom, what's the best way to get in touch? Best way to go up, get in touch. I'm the only John T. Yamisha in the entire United States. I just realized I did not put my last name on the little screen here, but I'm the only John T.

46:31Yamisha in the United States, probably the only John T. Yamisha in the world. You can find me on LinkedIn. You can also go to yamisha.com, which is just my personal website and you can get in touch that way.

46:41Jonty Yamisha: Awesome. We should include all of that in the show notes. And with that said, John T., Thanks for coming on and sharing your wisdom as an operator and an investor. I think a lot of firms that are trying to figure out how to grow their companies can learn a lot from your approach and even how to interact with their own CEOs. So appreciate you coming on and doing this. Thanks for having me, Shiv. Thanks for listening to today's episode. Before you take off, just a few requests from our side. Number one, if you haven't done so already, please subscribe to the podcast on iTunes or Spotify or YouTube or wherever you go to listen to your podcasts.

47:13Jonty Yamisha: Number two, if you are in the market for due diligence services, strategy consulting or fractional CMO services, please get in touch with us at www.howtosass.com. And third, please buy a copy of my new book, Exit Ready Marketing. It covers a ton of concepts that we take our customers through, private equity investors, B2B companies, CEOs, operating partners and marketers. And there's a ton of great value in there that expands on my previous book, Post Acquisition Marketing. as well. So with that said, I hope you enjoyed today's content and we'll see you on the next episode.