#464 How to go to market in healthtech - Ross Drynan from We Don’t Consult

0:02Ross Drynan:Do you think we spend all day talking about software, but don't spend four years building a product with no feedback. You've literally just hired a chaos machine, not an economic engine that's going to drive your growth. The true figure is 32%. The cost of your business over a five-year period is£190 ,000 in missed opportunity.

0:23Hey everyone, delighted to have Ross Drynan with me today. He is the founder CEO of We don't consult which ironically as you can imagine or not imagine is a consultancy firm but it kind of isn't a consultancy firm uh an absolute expert in go-to-market and so uh i've been in a load of conversations recently i was just talking to ross about actually that uh founders are coming to me in a go-to-market phase and actually as a comms guy i'm like unsure whether now's the right time for them to engage us and actually that's one of the questions i've got for you ross to talk about that but um yeah delighted to have you man how are you doing thanks for having me yeah i'm i'm

1:01Ross Drynan:living the dream i'm i'm good thank you i'm good the summer holidays are killing me a little bit with the kids but that's like i'm very well how how are you i'm all right i'm all right it's uh yeah it's it's back end of the summer we made a decision to to just stay in the country for the summer this year because we're like we live somewhere like nice and green and actually we're just going to enjoy it and so the idea of course was that our work work slows down a bit in August we'll we'll get out a bit we'll have a couple of day trips and we'll we'll have nice evenings walking down the river and all that sort of stuff uh obviously just you know you you you're a founder of a services-based company just doesn't work out that way does it Parkinson's law is always after you work expands to fit the time allowed and so no matter what free time you think you can muster up the business the beast of the business will always come in and go oh but you could you could just improve this thing oh you could just solve that problem or you could just spend a bit more time to make sure that deliverable goes over and looks you could just do that proposal you could anyway so it's been good it's been a good summer and actually having the time to work on some of that stuff has been actually quite useful i think the problem is rosh you never get to the bottom to-do list do you it's always there it's always there we tell ourselves the same lie every year and we're telling ourselves the lie in the future that agents are going to do it all for us but that's a that's maybe a story for another day but yeah every year just gets busier do you know it's funny i'm looking at my whiteboard over here there's my to-do list right which exists in 12 different places also as you see there's actually a second column which is all the agents that i need to build so it's not solved any problems yet it's just create it's literally just created a new to-do list it's like when they said that the railways or the roads or the this was agriculture machines were just gonna oh everyone's just gonna be sat around doing absolutely nothing i heard ilan must say the day like on a on some video or podcast it might have been the thing that he did the economist um which fantastic interview by the way that interview is absolutely superb um but i even heard it then like oh money's going to be irrelevant it's all just gonna we're all just gonna have like such abundance that everything's going to be fine i'm like this just coming from like a billionaire with an ego that must be better than other humans and so like that exists like it's not what should be sat around content in some sort of like communist utopia like it's not i don't think it works that way i don't know i don't think a lack of meaning is is generally good advice for us is it you know if there's a lack of meaning i think we'll be in trouble i'm one of those people you know when i go on holiday i'll sit on the sunbed and i'm like right I need to be doing something now.

3:41Ross Drynan:And so I need purpose. So even if it's made up purpose, so if agents and AI are doing everything in the future, I'm just going to make up little games in my head that I'm doing important work. That's the goal. But I'm actually seeing this thing as well. I don't know about you, but I've built like 10 agents recently and I only actually ever used two of them. The rest are just redundantly doing stuff in the background. I should probably kill them actually. That's another thing on my to-do list now. So that is, well, that is so real. that is so so so real i mean i i'm looking at my claude now right if i go to the scheduled section of my let's make this super practical and real for people if i go to my scheduled section on claude now i can count one two three four five six seven eight nine seven probably like 20 different things that are scheduled you're absolutely right that two of them are useful literally two of them are useful and the others are do you know what i heard mark i'm just name dropping people that i don't know here that i just happen to hear a sentence from and pretend that i know them i mark cuban said the other day um on something that one of the biggest problem is people might just be was it mark was it that same elon musk interview but anyway uh people are just optimized like creating ai agents for things that don't need ai agents it was hormosy saying this it was hormosy saying this so it's this is the thing i feel like i see with ai people are building all of these dashboards that show them their to-do list and dashboards that show them how their revenue is linked to their time sheets and like da-da-da for gross margin da-da-da-da all these things that I've got by for seven years absolutely fine without I'm now sort of building an agent for something to visualize something just so I feel better I guess or that I feel like I've got a view of it which i get like you know perception is reality and actually if it makes you feel better than it is a thing no matter what the thing is like i do get that but i don't know man like i do feel like i'm spinning the wheels quite a lot like just just creating stuff that i it's definitely not mission critical let's put it let's put it that way it makes sense though doesn't it because there's there's fear right and when fear sells unfortunately you know if you look at the algorithms on social media if something winds you up and makes you angry or afraid you stay so there's fear and that fear puts you into i've got to take action and then when you take action you're just doing stuff and just doing stuff is useless and oh mose is right like so if you outsource your thinking to ai you're not interested to anyone because people are interested in human thought leadership not ai talking to ai i go on linkedin sometimes i'm like ais are just talking to each other through humans on there these days and it's it's like yeah just take a step back you've got so much in your head that is so valuable to other people just take some time to document it and then use ai to use that information but do the first bit first capture your thoughts and then let then use ai to optimize it there's such a better way around um but yeah i you know you know what it's like i spent a lot of time diving in our fear because i'm like okay you know I built this metaphor that's like you imagine a well-drilled army uh Roman army for example that's the best in the world they're the fittest the most motivated the most organized um but they're going to war and the other type the other side are not particularly disciplined or organized but they got tanks it doesn't really matter and that's the fear that we all have with AI isn't it it's like well if my competition are using AI better than me uh I could lose just because of that oh no i better build agents and then you build a load of redundant stuff so i think being disciplined in that space is is really important and optimizing for what matters whilst not you losing the humanness like this year for example i don't know about you but i've gone to more face to face events this year than i ever have because i need connection and i actually think face to face events are going to grow so much over the next few years it's the biggest which you know it's the biggest growing side of our business mate genuine it's biggest biggest growing side of our business people are literally just getting in touch now just just saying they they saw what we did with neko they saw what we're doing with this event we've got in four weeks time with jeremy hunt and tara donnelly and they're seeing these things and they're just like yeah we just want that we just want to fill a room with people we want we want to build connection with people We want to like people genuinely sort of going the information that we can get from A to B in a room now is considered as you write, it's considered much higher value because you're you're you're feeling that information going from human to human.

8:28And we don't really have a language for this at the moment as to why that's more valuable or relevant or whatever it is. I just think that it definitely, there's some metric that's going up in that scenario, whether people actually act on it more or whether they trust it more or whether they appreciate the nuance and context because more is being communicated non-verbally than it would be online or through a screen or whatever. There's probably a lot to it. And I think that's the same with medicine as well. Like we, we're, we're sort of learning, aren't we? That, you know, the difference between an AI chatbot and a human, I actually thought the gulf was a lot wider than it, than it is.

9:06There are actually great examples, even in mental health of chatbots being incredibly useful. It's just, we're figuring out where that is, but as a result, we're also figuring out that humans, human communication is gold standard, but, but was, was, I think we're starting to learn why. which is really fascinating for medicine as a whole, to be honest. I think it's, honestly, it's just so, it's such a frontier. And I'm very interested to see where it goes, because I don't think it's going to be binary. I think there's going to be a really interesting, not even grey area. I think there's going to be like, it'll look grey if you zoom out.

9:45When you zoom right in, it's going to be like really clear black and white. It's this type of communication here. It's this type of communication here. I think that's probably where it's going to end. But anyway, I digress. Let's talk about you, man. Let's talk about where this all starts for you. How did you get into it? You help startups go to market. What does that even mean? Yeah, let's start at the beginning. What about you? What about your journey?

10:13Ross Drynan:Yeah, so I think it's worth saying, look, I'm not a clinician. I've never treated a patient. but I've spent 12 years at the intersection of technology and healthcare and all of it has been in go-to-market so a lot of that journey was spent in the what is now the biggest technology company in dentistry interestingly enough when I started it was a a small company we had about 20 % market share in the UK. So exciting journey. And we built between me and my partners, we built the go-to-market that got them to market leadership kind of internationally. And that's where our expertise is, is in go-to-market.

11:01Ross Drynan:Now, go-to-market can mean loads of different things, right? But essentially for us, it is anything to do with getting your product out there into the market and getting it adopted but there's a whole cycle around it that is just completely ignored so but the role that really changed everything for me was when I took the global head of partnerships role at Henry Shine One and it put me in front of founders all over the world and a huge amount of them and James I'm sure you've seen this you see a lot of clinicians with deep pattern recognition and expertise, the kind of people that should be building products because they've been on the front end of things, they're going out there building products and then I watched them fail.

11:48Ross Drynan:And they didn't fail because there was some other product out there that was much better than their product or someone's intellectual property was much better than their intellectual property. They failed because their go-to-market was pretty rubbish and slow and there wasn't much speed to it. and that's what We Don't Consult was kind of built to fix between me and my two partners and our team. So, you know, clinicians and experts are starting out, they're the founders in the messy middle and they're struggling. So we serve three people. We serve, number one, we serve clinicians and business owners who want to become entrepreneurs and grow a SaaS business.

12:31Ross Drynan:So that's number one. they're earlier on in their journey for example number two are the ones who have tripped over a bit of market share with their sas product they've invested a lot and they're kind of on the line for it now they they've raised and you know they're between half a million and five million but they're struggling to grow anymore they've hired a team and they can't quite get over the hump if you think about the law of diffusion of innovation they've tripped over two and a half to five percent of their market, but now they're stuck. So we work with them to unlock them. And finally, we work with more established go-to-market teams who are trying to suss out and work out this AI adoption problem in their business.

13:16Ross Drynan:Recently, I was in a business and quite a senior leader said, I'm going to need lots of handholding with AI. And I kind of thought, you're an extremely experienced person who leads massive teams and you need hand holding now like that that just tells me there's fear around it and there's this perception that ai is this big technical thing whereas yeah it's the easiest software tool in history to learn how to use and the knowledge to use it in fact they said how do i use this i said ask it how to use it you know uh so so there's all of that so but we we serve those three three niches um we don't build products ourselves although um i say we don't build products ourselves we are we have got a sas product that um turns average sales people into great sales people that we uh that we've launched and scaled and i actually have another startup called our story magic which is an ai bedtime story tool for exhausted millennial parents like me.

14:21Ross Drynan:Oh my God. You know, at the end of the day, you've got nothing left and you want to teach your children wisdom, help them make sense of their day, emotional literacy. And that's what that tool's for. We've got about 3 ,000 users on that now as well. So in the busiest season of life, starting multiple businesses, but I'm really, really enjoying it. But really, behind all of it is a personal thing, right? So in my family, we've lost a couple of generations of people or a couple of direct family members far too soon through things that should have been detected far earlier. And we've got an opportunity moving forward with the technology that's available to try and avoid those things.

15:05Ross Drynan:And so that's kind of driving me on to help the right founders get their products adopted. because if we can do that i'm playing my part in helping future families not have to suffer the kind of tragedies that happened in my family as as time's gone on that's really nice man it's incredibly motivating isn't it the amount of people that we have on here that have got you know similar patient or family journeys is is is crazy and i think it's it's so difficult to to run through the brick walls of running a business every day because it can it can really be tiring exhausting i think you know having that purpose and motivation behind you is is really nice um it's really nice to to yeah to just get things done um oh yeah and to have that higher purpose behind it i've got loads of questions man because this is it's it's such an interesting part of business that definitely hasn't had a light shone on it on this episode yet just the idea of go to market and i think it'd be great if you could just start right from the beginning actually and because you support those people at the earliest stage as well that might not even know or understand that this is what it's called or that they can even get help with it or that there are even principles and philosophies and strategies and tactics behind it they probably don't know that it's an industry within an industry so when you're when you're thinking about even defining what go-to-market is and when perhaps you're working with those clinicians with ideas or business cases and looking to make their first sales and all that side of things how do you explain what do you what what you do how do you explain what go-to-market is and what are the basic principles behind it to get it right yeah it's um it's a lot to unpack but essentially, I've seen a couple of really unfortunate things over the last few years.

17:07Ross Drynan:So I'll just give a couple of examples. So we had one founder who he had extreme domain expertise. So he owned a practice for 10 years and he decided that he was going to create a business that helped dental practices understand their business because if the business is thriving everything downstream of that gets better the patient experience everything gets better and he had some fantastic thinking and methodology but what he what he unfortunately did is he spent a huge amount of his personal wealth and years and years of his time building a product and that's fine but building a product over a long period of time that no one ever sees is actually a fundamental mistake because you're investing and betting all of your money on an idea that you've not fully fleshed out to anybody else yet which is a problem but you've also got this problem of I've assumed because I know what all of the problems are that I'm solving for yeah I can communicate it well and that's really interesting because founders do not communicate what's in their head very well because they've never practiced it so before they even start to think about go to market they've got two problems number one they've done no testing of the market to get validation of their idea and we can talk more about that but number two is they've not they've not tested how to actually talk about their product you know in a way that's compelling so there's there's those kind of two two problems and there's more that come out of that as well so if i talk a little bit about validation first there's never been a better time than now to quickly validate ideas it's so cheap you don't have to spend a hundred grand on building a product No, you really don't.

19:13Ross Drynan:James, do you think Vibe Coding has got a bad rap? In some ways, yes. All over LinkedIn, I see engineers, and of course they would say this because it's doing some of their job, but I see engineers going, oh, all these rubbish Vibe Coded apps. It's like, we need to understand what Vibe Coding is for. It's for early stage founders. It's to go, I need to build something around all of my ideas that I can quickly validate. It doesn't have to work well. It doesn't have to be scalable. I just need to be able to show people it to judge if they're interested in it or not. And then I need to do some experiments.

19:54Ross Drynan:I need to understand if I can get 100 people, and Daniel Priestley, Alex, and Mosley, they all speak about this stuff, right? I need to understand if I can get 100 people on a wait list for this product, which means I can demo it briefly. I can show people. that if I can get 100 people in my niche interested, okay, step one, I can then pursue a go-to-market strategy on it because I know they're interested. Then I can spend some money on building a product. But don't spend four years building a product with no feedback. It's a humbling lesson. The second you put a product in front of users, they think of 100 things that are most of which are valid that you've never thought of as the founder.

20:34Ross Drynan:And so So you're wasting all of that failing fast. And I guess as a clinician, you don't want to fail because failure has high stakes as a clinician. But as a SaaS founder, failure is you have to do that as quickly as possible, get the feedback from users, and then validate. So that's the first bit. So just Vibecode something. We help people do that. We can do it for them. In a couple of days, you can have an MVP that you can just sense check with your market. it so so that's kind of like a really important step one but then step two is how do i talk about this you know you you i i ask founders quite often tell me about the problem that you solve how you diagnose it and then how you solve it and they then end up talking to me for half an hour and i just have to tell them like i'm bored now it needs to be three sentences yeah you need to be able to explain this very, very clearly and they can't.

21:30Ross Drynan:So I think the first thing is for an early stage founder, just think about those two problems. If you can overcome those two problems, you're ahead of almost everybody. You hear these stats that most startups fail. No wonder, because if you invest all of your, if you bet all of your money on an idea you've not validated, of course that's going to happen right so um i think that's the first step and then um then there's a series of disciplines that we we can talk about as well as part of a go-to-market strategy but i do think that the validation point is is huge i'm sure you've seen the same yes definitely i mean the bias obviously is that i of course will see those people because as they're tripping up they either get advice or they realize that they need to improve the messaging and then they're on the hunt for who can help them and then that's obviously when we turn up so but but yes i mean that that's actually the reason that somics came about really was that i was noticing it when i was running accelerators helping startups with everything and i was like hold on a minute there's not the there's not the health tech specific advice on comms that they're getting they're getting generic comms advice that's not really working out so i was fortunate to be able to plot that path definitely um it's really interesting what you're talking about man and those disciplines yes i want to talk about them because i think the of the people that you help that second category now we've touched on the early stage founders that second category of they've raised they've raised significantly they've got they've captured the early adopters the innovators potentially two to five percent of their market you know they're they've they've done that relatively quickly but now the wall has been hit like that's a real i think that's going to apply to most the majority of the people listening to this podcast to be honest and so i really want to zoom in on this and let's talk about those disciplines speed was one of them i don't know you mentioned um speed of what speed doing what like all those different things let's let's talk about that category now like how do we how do we capture the parts of the market that didn't notice notice it notice us originally and how do we go after that that revenue now yeah so i i'm sure you'll agree with me on this business is just so humbling right so it's unbelievable like the amount of times i've stopped and said oh no i'm not as good as i thought i was it's it's quite scary uh So, and I think that respect, by the way, that you get for people, like, honestly, like the amount, you know, I look, I look at, I look at people, I remember, I've had a few people on this podcast, actually, like, I don't know, one that comes to mind immediately, for whatever reason is Mohammed from Patients Know Best, like, such a kind and humble individual, really humble man, talked to him a lot about fatherhood, and, and, and he's just gave some great words of wisdom and advice.

24:36I look back at that conversation now and I'm thinking like this dude has run a massive business whilst retaining that Zen nature and that kindness and all that stuff. And I just, I guess maybe emotionally about it now. Like I'm like, wow, such a respect for someone that's able to achieve that. The other one that comes to mind, by the way, when you said that was when Jean Nem, he sold touch surgery to Medtronic. Like the very first thing he said to me on a phone call once was, by the way, I know we've just met, but I just want to say congratulations for creating something out of nothing because I know how hard that is.

25:10And I'm not joking, mate. I nearly burst into tears. It was one of those days where I honestly nearly burst into tears when he said that. I was like, God, I feel so seen. So yes, I agree. Short version, yes, I agree. Long version, you just heard it.

25:23Ross Drynan:But how amazing is that? And these people, they're the people you want to be spending your time with, right? Yes. from them because you go into business and you think everything's going to be all right for me i'm different i'm the outlier and etc etc and actually you get lured into a full sense of security then because in most markets if you have a fairly innovative product you'll trip over the first bit because there's people just at the front of the queue simon sinek talked about it in 2009 right he said people queue around around the corner for the latest iphone even though tomorrow they can just walk in and get one those people you you know you'll just trip over them but what that does to you as a founder is it gives you some some hubris you just go yeah i've nailed it and then suddenly it gets hard and you're humbled and that feels horrible actually because the pain of that isn't just uh the the business needs to pivot and stuff like that the pain of it is I've taken money, I've hired a team, and this is now, to an extent, this feels like my self-worth.

26:27Ross Drynan:If this fails, who am I? And it's an identity thing. And when my businesses have stalled, I've felt that pain and it's really, it's not cool, it's not nice. But on the other side of that, on the other side of that is a joyful, profitable business. It really is the other side of it. But here's the problem. There's a narrow set of things that work consistently. And then there's loads of noise. And one thing that we suffer from is access to information. And that sounds stupid, but there's so many podcasts there's so many books there's so much information llms will tell you a million different things depending on what it thinks you want to hear sometimes which is a problem yeah and what that leads founders to do is pivot and pivot and pivot and try something give up try something else and give up and they end up just treading water for a long time once So they tripped over that first bit of the market.

27:33Ross Drynan:And so what we've tried to identify as a business, and we're always learning ourselves, is there's a narrow bridge. We call it the narrow bridge. There's a narrow set of things that if you execute on in a disciplined way, you unlock the growth. And in health tech specifically, it's predicated on something that I think is quite important, but I'd love to get your opinion on it as well. And that is the first part, we've already talked about it, is get your fail fast, get your MVP out there, test the market, do a scorecard, as Daniel Priestley would say. Test if you can get leads, test if you can fill a wait list.

28:14Ross Drynan:All of that stuff is absolutely correct. But the problem you have once you trip over the first bit of the market is you're not selling to a typical B2B environment in any way. so there's kind of i would say there's four kind of stages of sort of awareness so most um most of the time you have somebody that's unaware of that there's even a problem right uh in their business or there's problems they're not aware of so they're just carrying on with their day-to-day and and it is what it is you then get people in step two who have got some awareness that things aren't perfect in their in their workflow in their efficiency in in the practice of the business and whatever it is then you get people who are slightly more solution aware so they they've nailed down this is a big problem that i need to solve i don't know how to solve it yet but i'm aware of it and there must be a solution and then you get people who are actually shopping around looking for a solution to solve their problem.

29:20Ross Drynan:Now, traditional wisdom is, okay, if you're working with a founder of a SaaS business that is pure B2B and they're solving problems for other SaaS companies, for example, the people that work in those industries are only thinking about their problems. They're only thinking about optimizations. They're only thinking about the next thing that they can achieve. In healthcare, that's not the case. Most people are not even problem aware in healthcare because they're thinking about the problems in front of them. The stakes are higher. They're thinking about the patient. They're thinking about the notes they have to write up.

30:00Ross Drynan:They're thinking about compliance. They're thinking about running a business alongside that. They're not sitting there thinking about your problems. And there's a good, I said about business humbling you. I run an NPS survey for a large company that I was working for. And the NPS, you know, how likely would you be to... Net promoter score for people that don't know. Yeah. How likely would you be to recommend us to friends and family? And this guy wrote in the box, do you think we spend all day talking about software? And it was... What a humbling thing to write. it's the best piece of feedback i've ever got they don't they're not sitting there going oh look this this chair time optimizer tool is i'm gonna recommend it to my friends and family now that's not the case so in healthcare technology we operate and this is found in principle we operate somewhere where the the buyers the decision makers are not aware of most of their problems and it is your job to make them aware of their problems.

31:11That's your job.

31:15Ross Drynan:Most SaaS companies in this space, most AI companies in this space go out and bore people to death with features about their products and they kind of get ignored once they trip over the first part of the market. How does that resonate with you? Has that been your experience? Yeah, it has. And I think people, so for me, especially on that messaging part that you just said, you know, people wanting deeply to talk about features and that kind of thing. It's that genuine belief that that is the most important thing. And I think that definitely skews earlier stage, I would say as well. But the early stage hunters will definitely feel that because often, and actually they have been the ones who have experienced the problem, which means that they care so much about the features and that that being the I suppose the focus of the sale for them and you're you're right in the sense that yeah that is going to get over the line with with a few people I think that it's definitely something that we have to you know coach and work on and do so relatively sensitively sometimes that there are other things at play that we need to push the pedal on and the way that we do that really is we talk a lot about different audiences that are required to get on board in order to make this business work as a whole yes those features are incredibly relevant to the user 100 but the user's not the buyer so what's actually important to the buyer the buyer cares about price the buyer cares about ROI in year one.

32:57The buyer cares about, like, there are all these things that, so therefore, and it's just walking through that story, right? Okay, so what therefore are your business goals? Okay, we need to sell a thousand units. Okay, cool. In order to sell a thousand units, we need the users to create bottom-up demand. Great, we're going to do some product marketing. We're going to market some features. We're going to do that sort of stuff. but actually you know you've got i don't know three b2b contracts in the pipeline that need nurturing to the end well actually well who's the audience for that oh it's the cfo of blah blah cool okay what does the cfo care about oh they care about price they care about roi they care about they care about cool well in that case do you agree that we need to now talk about these things as well and make that part of the strategy yes it's it's it's i guess it's it's i guess that and then we can talk about different ratios of how much we say that messaging and how much of it reaches the top line company messaging and all the rest of it there's lots of i guess detail within that but broadly it is it is that it's it's the the the the maturation i guess of that understanding and and how that messaging as a whole and and actually as well i'm also saying while we're here there's there's there's a lot in terms of where you put certain messages to reach certain people as well because certain audiences live in certain areas what you say on linkedin aiming at cfos is going to be quite different to what you're putting in a few very well read newsletters of junior doctors that you're trying to create bottom-up demand with you're going to tell those two stories very very differently you're going to talk about very different things and so yeah that's why when it comes to us supporting with whether you call it go-to-market or whether you just talk about you know um business development as a whole like yeah we're playing in a lot different places not different ways in order to do exactly what you just said um yeah so that's that that's that's i guess how it resonates with me what what does like gone right in inverted commas like gone well what does a great go-to-market look like and start if you could start for me with like there must be like a before it even begins type phase so if you could just start that just run me through like what what does a great go-to-market strategy and execution look like

35:23Ross Drynan:yeah let's assume that we're talking about the the typical founder right so they they've taken some funding they've got a small team maybe 10 to 15 people maybe perfect right um they we've talked about speed already but one thing that they're not very good at is slowing down so that they can go fast and interesting those these days i actually think that that's incredibly difficult to do and i think our brains have changed a little bit for dopamine hits so just get the result go quick go quick and i know i've already mentioned fear creating urgency as well you mentioned it before because we dude we get that so so just i mean just to validate this i say at the beginning of all our retainer engagements where we're doing comms across multiple pillars doing multiple different things i said there's initially a messaging and strategy exercise done right it takes four to six weeks i would say over 50 of people go it needs to be quicker and i'm like this is the foundation for everything the answer is always no so i can't go quicker no is the answer you mentioned um you mentioned homozy as well he he was talking the other on the podcast i think we listen to the same podcast the yeah he was talking to um he was talking about the fact that if you if you want to there's founders and they go my goal is to create a hundred million dollar business but they don't build the foundations for that they build the foundations for a five million dollar business and once they try to go beyond that they just crumble because the foundations aren't there so i i think slowing down to speed up is really important but coming back to to the narrow bridge and the narrow set of things that we've seen you know through pattern recognition testing and working with lots thousands of different clients the first thing is you know you have to identify what each step of the journey is.

37:22Ross Drynan:So step one has to be foundations. It's not rocket science. But what do we mean by foundation? So we're not a communications or marketing company. So we're not that, but we do have a marketing consultant that we work with. But foundations, when it comes to a team, most first-time founders have never built a team before. and therefore they kind of rely on the cult mentality but that only survives up to 20 people and then it falls apart so you have to build foundations and for us one of the first engagements that that we do yes we talk about the ideal customer persona and who you're actually speaking to and crafting your message and we do speak about that but before we do anything we've got to decide on a few things so um we focus on um something that we call the alignment spine of the business and so step one is you have to decide the purpose for your existence as an organization and that sounds silly but i so many that i speak to is like oh yeah well we want to make this workflow more efficient for our users and it's like yeah that's not a reason to exist that's just fixing a problem so it should be and you know you can listen to Simon Sinek talk about this in the infinite game which is a great book and all that kind of stuff but you need to it's just there if you have if you're watching on YouTube just there on my desk I love that um yeah we're I'm a Sinek fan but it's why do what's the purpose for your existence beyond money and if you could decide on that you can then immediately screen for people that believe what you believe and don't believe what you believe in your recruitment process and in your team so you have to have that and the idea of building a strategy document like the alignment spine isn't to build a document and never look at it again it's how you manage your business moving forward and that's crucial right so you decide on that foundation why you exist you then decide on your story that you you're going to tell the market about your reason for existence and the vision and mission of your business.

39:35Ross Drynan:And you do that as a kind of a leadership team, co-founders, whatever that might be. The next layer down from that is to go, okay, in order to achieve said mission, who do we need to be? What behaviours do we need to exhibit? And behaviours is the next rung down. if you try and build a team of people who all exhibit completely different behaviours you're going to fail because it depends on what kind of business you're looking to build so for example if you want a culture of people who are all relentless ambitious high achievers and then you hire someone that wants work-life balance immediately you have a big problem in your business.

40:19Ross Drynan:So you must decide what good looks like. So you need to identify the five behaviours that everyone in your business needs to have in order to work in your business. One of them could be curiosity. You know, you have to be curious about AI to work here. If you're not, it's not going to work out for you. So you have to have that. And that is the top performance benchmarking your business is the behaviors that are exhibited you want to look at you want to look at people's performance you just have to look at their incentives if you incentivize people for a numeric goal and not a behavioral standard they'll probably hit the goal but they might be an arsehole right so you've got to get your behaviors right before you think about anything else we then get into the realms of what are we here to achieve and um i i uh what's the book essentialism there's a book called essentialism that um uh mckenna i think he is but i can't i can't remember 100 but they talk about how priorities only became a verb in the last hundred odd years before that it was priority one thing and there always has to be something in your business that is the most important thing, your key priority.

41:36Ross Drynan:And everybody in the business needs to feed that thing to create alignment. So part of the alignment spine is you decide what the most important thing is in your business. Underneath that is like the things you do to make that thing happen. And underneath that are just your core metrics that you have to measure to keep the lights on. That's a one-page document. And the test for it is if I ask anybody in the team they can all basically say around the same thing about that. If you've not done the foundations in that way, nothing else after that really matters because you've got a bunch of people, you've built a team and they're all behaving differently.

42:13Ross Drynan:They've all got different values. They're all trying to achieve different things. You've literally just hired a chaos machine, not an economic engine that's going to drive your growth. So that's why foundations is fast. And it is a team thing, but it's also a strategy thing. It's everything. It's your Bible as a business. It's like here it is and then once a quarter you test it and make sure that you're still aligned to it make your changes if you need to but if you're not managing the whole business against something like that you're you you're just chaos and so that's the first thing we do with our clients that's amazing it's interesting isn't it that people talk a lot about um they talk a lot about diversity of thoughts particularly when and how valuable that can be and it's interesting to me that um your framework of identifying the key behaviors absolutely does not negate diversity whatsoever in that regard it's just your what you're creating is the alignment probably on uh it's it's it's what's pulling people towards meeting the goal and the and broadly how they're doing that and i think that's probably going to breed quite a lot of respect and allow people to find working relationships a lot easier and i really like the fact that you talked about like a key priority and i've written it down here like key priority and i've circled the word visible because actually i think if if everyone's got visibility on the key priority it's everyone when there's a decision to be made about do you do this or this a b or c you're always going to go to the one that feeds the key priority and actually you're going to generate alignment that way which is absolutely ideal um once people have done that spine then and got their ducks in a row um they've hired good people and that kind of thing i i def i can definitely appreciate already that you're far more likely to then not trip up once you've got that initial bit of revenue coming through in those initial customers i can already see how that will start to unlock a bit more what then are the principles that go beyond that in terms of creating this ideal kind of go-to-market system or um yeah what talking about that as that as that develops into into delivering more results Yeah, for sure.

44:40Ross Drynan:I think the first thing is once you've got your, the first thing to say is once you've got your strategy document, consistency is better than intensity. So you use that all day, every day. You talk about it. And once you're bored of talking about it, your team probably still don't understand it. You've got to just, that is a consistent thing. You never stop with that. So that overarches everything. But the next step is to codify. And we're still in that slowing down to speed up phase. And what I mean by codify is, is you, again, have to appreciate that you're going to market to people who are not problem aware, which means you have to build a hell of a lot of opinion-based content and disruptive content that you can then use.

45:27Ross Drynan:You know, you hear people talking about AI, for example, and it's like AI only works when you give it context. What most founders do is they don't get the context out of their head into a tool like Notion, for example. We don't need to boil the ocean and have loads of fancy tools. If you don't have your methodologies for how you get customers from point A to point B documented, how are you ever going to scale a team? How are you ever going to get AI to actually work for you. So it's to codify your methodology for getting a customer from point A to point B and how to get the customer to understand their problem.

46:07Ross Drynan:Once you've done that, you can move on to the next phase, which is then to give it all away for free. Because giving it all away for free is magic. Because what you do is you go, okay, here is a playbook for understanding the problem we solve in your business. And here is a playbook for solving that problem once you've understood what the problem is. And it's free. Because if you can't afford to work with us, that's fine. You can still have all of our ideas. If you want us to help you implement it, here's our subscription product. Here's our coaching program. Here's everything else. The ideas always have to be free.

46:48Ross Drynan:If the ideas aren't free, you're actually, your marketing funnel and your lead generation is not going to be very good. And I work with founders to go, they asked to sign NDAs and they've just got an idea and stuff like that. And it's like, no, no, no, give your ideas away because everything is dependent on your ability to create interest in what you do. And to do that, you have to give away ideas and diagnostics. So we actually recommend giving all of that away. And the only thing you market is not your product. The thing that you market is a deep discovery with a diagnostic attached to it that uses your prospect's data to teach them a problem they didn't know they had that is worth solving right and we've built a software platform that does that for you um that that does uh looks online does a deep discovery on your prospect but also enables your prospect to drop some key data into it it reads all the data and it goes here is your health score in your business here's the risks here's what happens if you don't solve this problem here's what happens if you do solve this problem now it's up to you you can solve it on your own or you could or you can use our sas product to supercharge it and speed you up and get you to the point where you can in a very low effort way recognize the outcome that you're looking to achieve so it is a free early access point people get quite interested in what you're trying to do over time you then land on a message that's not about your product because products are boring to people and they're commoditized you go with a diagnostic and a playbook session which is your sales conversation so you're almost productizing yourself and then you move on to your subscription then you can probably sell other stuff to that customer as well you know you've got you probably have a customer success program of some sort but you can have a services program that helps the customer get the outcome even faster.