SPOTLIGHT: Untangling Tech Debt and Finding Product-Market Fit with Russ Mikowski of SurePeople | with Russel Mikowski, CEO @ SurePeople

0:05Sam Jacobs: Welcome to Topline, the podcast for the best founders, operators and investors in B2B tech. Every week, AJ Bruno, Asad Zaman and me, Sam Jacobs, will break down what's important for you to know to be the most well-informed professionals in the market.

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1:13Sam Jacobs: Hello, everybody. Hello, everybody. It's Topline Spotlight, a nice little place to be. And Topline Spotlight, you know Topline Spotlight. It's that mini segment of the Topline podcast released every Thursday, each episode featuring a one-on-one interview between us, the hosts of Topline, and an incredible operating executive, leader, CEO, founder, visionary, influencer, that's talking about a problem that they've solved in the last year to year and a half. And what a time, what a time, ladies and germs, to be talking about solving difficult problems in an era of unprecedented volatility and uncertainty.

1:54Sam Jacobs: A.J. Bruno, the CEO of Quotapath, Sam Jacobs, and I, that's me, Sam Jacobs, have Russ Mikowski on the show. Russ is the CEO of Shore People. He's a founding member of Pavilion when it was known as Revenue Collective. He's a longtime operating executive and CRO in the HR tech space. And also, when he's not a CEO, he gets on the other side of the table, and he is a retained compensation consultant for Pavilion. He helps hundreds of executives every year negotiate better deals with their companies thanks to Russ's support. So he gives back. He supports the community. He's an incredible leader and partner and Sure People is an incredible company.

2:39Sam Jacobs: Russ, welcome to Top Line Spotlight.

2:42AJ Bruno: Thanks for the kind intro, Sam. I'm excited for the conversation.

2:46Russ Mikowski: Russ, do you remember your first event at Revenue Collective? Was it a dinner?

2:52AJ Bruno: I think it was more of a mixer, if I recall, at the Smith, perhaps.

2:58Sam Jacobs: That was. Maybe it was a breakfast. You might have had breakfast with me at the Smith. It may have been. It's so long ago.

3:05Russ Mikowski: Didn't Revenue Collective have like koozies, like swag koozies that they like handed out at the mixer?

3:11AJ Bruno: At breakfast as well.

3:14Sam Jacobs: We had handwritten note cards. All right. Russ, well, first of all, AJ, how are you?

3:21Russ Mikowski: I'm great. I'm great. Yeah. We may have filmed a top line yesterday where I said I'm fine. And now today I'm actually really doing well. I'm excited for this conversation. That makes me happy.

3:36Sam Jacobs: When you're doing well, I'm doing well. That's how I feel about you doing well. Russ, did I forget anything in your bio? Anything that you would like to follow up?

3:44AJ Bruno: No, I don't believe so. Where are you from originally?

3:48Sam Jacobs: Where'd you grow up? So I like to say upstate New York, which anyone in the Northeast seems to use to clarify that they were born north of Manhattan, not upstate as far as like Syracuse or Rochester, but Orange County about an

4:06AJ Bruno: hour north of New York City.

4:09Sam Jacobs: Where Tuxedo is, right? Or Tuxedo Park, you know where that place is?

4:13AJ Bruno: Not far at all. Yeah. I played tuxedo sports teams in high school athletics.

4:19Sam Jacobs: Did you ever go this, the place where they've got a, they've got like all of the, they've got that old tennis, like they have, it's like a haven for racket sports around the lake. Anyway, I don't need to belabor the point. You are the CEO of Sure People. Tell us about Sure People. What does the company do? Why is it important?

4:38AJ Bruno: Yeah, so Sure People is disrupting a traditional psychometric assessment model. We own proprietary IP to a psychometric self-assessment called PRISM. It's actually the most robust vehicle of its type on the market today. And where traditional psychometric assessments like DISC, Myers-Briggs, Hogan can be really valuable when an individual is looking to learn more about themselves. They're often reserved for small privileged groups like the leadership team at an executive offsite or a group of high potential employees that the company wants to provide a kind of coach led session for. But the lack of universal deployment across an organization carries with it kind of like a limited value for these assessments.

5:26AJ Bruno: The intelligence that's derived from them is not available in the moments that matter most in the flow of work. And that's what we're here to address, right, by really looking at a go to market model that encourages deployment across whole organizations, democratizing access to these psychometrics. We build this really cool people intelligence data layer that can then be used to fuel within the flow of work tools that we already use and communicate within like Slack and Zoom. It's really cool stuff.

5:58Russ Mikowski: Yeah, Russ, I took the assessment in December. The first thing I noticed was the UI of the, especially on the mobile app, like it actually makes it feel like you're going through an experience. experience um i don't know if that's just the color palette or whatever but i was like clicking through it i'm like oh i actually feel good answering these questions where most of them they're just like these surveys that are just like put in front of you and just like oh you got to click through but you all did a great job um on the front end of making it feel like you have to read the question to make sure you engage was that that i'm sure that's an intentionality

6:33AJ Bruno: on your part right yeah definitely intentional when we think you know again to the traditional assessment world. Not too long ago, we were taking these things with, you know, Scantrons and number two pencils, right? And the results were metaphorically, sometimes literally stuffed in your desk drawer in a manila folder, unaccessible to anyone outside of a human coach walking you through every element of it. And, you know, the cost that that carries with it is one of the reasons that, you know, these assessments have been targeted at smaller privileged groups. the intelligence gained from those things was not easily accessible.

7:13AJ Bruno: We really focused on educating people in exchange for the time that they've committed to answer these questions and doing so within a UI that's very comfortable, familiar, inviting, and hopefully encouraging people to come back and use the tools again, not only to learn about themselves, but also others within their organization.

7:31Sam Jacobs: Russ, how old is the company? Tell us a little bit about the history of SurePeople and how you came to be CEO.

7:38AJ Bruno: Yeah, so Sure People's been around for about 10 years now. We've been working with historically primarily larger Fortune 500 type businesses and big health care, big banking, professional sports organizations use our product. coaching development, surprise, surprise, is important in athletics. And I was brought on about a year ago, a year ago, excuse me, to think about taking the company to the next stage commercially and really zero in on finding maybe a more focused ICP. Think about trying to address some of the technical debt that we've amassed over the years and build out a more of an integration oriented data product strategy as opposed to how we'd operated historically, which was as more of a platform tool set.

8:32AJ Bruno: And that's a transition that's still underway, but we're making nice progress with it.

8:36Russ Mikowski: Were you an advisor to the company before you joined?

8:40AJ Bruno: No, I was not. I was recruited by one of the typical exec recruitment firms. And what I'm realizing is pretty frequently the case these days, even when talking to pavilion members, I'm advising about negotiations is a lot of these CEO searches conducted by, you know, companies who maybe haven't hit the second or third stage of growth are targeted on folks who've more recently been CROs in a particular space, you know, hopefully with a little bit of an exit track record, right? And this particular company slash investor set slash recruiter was looking for someone who hadn't actually been a CEO before.

9:22AJ Bruno: So this is my first at scale CEO gig.

9:24Russ Mikowski: Were you looking for a CEO gig?

9:28AJ Bruno: Absolutely not. I wasn't looking for any gig, to be honest.

9:33Sam Jacobs: I think that's so I can just see. I can see how relevant your comment is, because there's clearly so many companies probably, I would imagine, with product-led founders that built something that really was probably very useful, but maybe under-commercialized, under-monetized. I can imagine, I don't know if the origins are sure of people, but I imagine it's like some academics, and I can see why a CRO background would be a good profile for leadership at this stage. Yep.

10:08AJ Bruno: And I think, you know, when you've had that kind of experiential set rising up through the leadership ranks, a certain level of commercial acumen applied to decision making that's often based on focus and defining things like the ICP and thinking about metrics like CAC to LTV ratio is something that maybe doesn't come as naturally, like you inferred, Sam, to folks from more of a product or academic oriented background, right? So, yeah, that doesn't mean that we as leaders who came up in the commercial discipline don't have our own blind spots, right? And the assessment certainly tells me about mine every day.

10:50AJ Bruno: So I continue to focus on filling that.

10:52Russ Mikowski: Russ, that's one thing that I get asked a lot about being a sales leader by trade of just from a product standpoint, how have I learned or worked on my acumen as it relates So the product org coming in to share people, how would you say, what was your own like self-evaluation of you coming in to understand how products deployed, how it works versus what's been kind of your learning and growing during the last year plus on that front? Yeah.

11:24AJ Bruno: So I think I have a relatively, I don't want to say unique, but advantageous background in the sense that I've had a lot of exposure to product as an advisor and kind of like a tinker on the side. So I write some code. I've definitely built things before. I'm relatively familiar with user testing. However, you know, there's a difference between being able to creatively come up with an idea and effectively communicate with some slides or a really basic prototype to a great engineering leader about what you envision and, you know, really getting into the technical weeds, which is not my strong suit.

12:08And, you know, I think fostering the relationship with a

12:16AJ Bruno: tremendous technical person that I trust, and I mentioned technical debt kind of earlier in the conversation, is something that I believe will bear out to be a significant key to how we rectify our problems here because as someone who's thinking about growth and fundraising and all the great things that every other CEO is thinking about, it's just impossible for us to keep up with the speed of evolution in the technology world, right? I mean, we're seeing companies get to 100 million in revenue with 10 to 15 employees without armies of engineers. Offshoring isn't as popular as it was five years ago.

12:55AJ Bruno: So, you know, massive scrum teams or massive amounts of scrum teams is not as familiar or commonplace a scenario as it was in the past. So I need somebody else who is aware and ahead of those trends that I can talk to about my creative vision and they can translate that to reality on the engineering side.

13:14Russ Mikowski: Well, let's talk about that tech debt piece of it for a second, because I think back-end architecture and just how the real technical guts of an application work with databases, it's not sexy. And your investors aren't going to want to hear about tech debt or the technical aspects of it. You as a CEO are thinking about innovation and urgency, and that's not what tech debt is. It's fixing someone else's broken problem. but it's massively important work because otherwise like it just snowballs and you you hit scaling issues from i'm saying this from personal experience a little bit and i wonder if if you've seen some of those and how you've dealt with uh that as you're you're developing a platform or thinking about the data and then those two pieces of it how they like get combined as well.

14:04AJ Bruno: Yeah, so that all hits home pretty significantly. We're lucky to have a very supportive investor who really wants to change the world when it comes to disrupting these traditional assessments because he understands the potential impact on workplaces in general when this kind of like problem is addressed appropriately. So we have a great partner there. I've, you know, kind of been forced to make a decision that in a lot of cases, preparing for scale means building over as opposed to rebuilding, which I'd imagine you may have either.

14:51Russ Mikowski: The term is refactor here, Russ, just use refactor. No one knows what that means. And people are just like, okay, cool. I'm refactoring. I don't know what that means, but sure.

15:00Sam Jacobs: Where was the other?

15:01AJ Bruno: So like untangling a bunch of –

15:05Sam Jacobs: Go ahead, Russ. Go ahead, Sam. Sorry. No, I was just – AJ had another phrase similar to refactor that one of your investors is using. I forget what it's about. But anyway, it's something to do with revenue. All right, Russ. I'll think about it. AJ will remember.

15:22AJ Bruno: I'm just saying I think that, you know, untangling a bunch of spaghetti code that has built technical debt over the course of a decade, right, is something that while, you know, painful to diverge from towards building from scratch in some ways is probably going to take less time and resources and better prepare us for scale. So that's a lot of what we've been focused on, building some things over again. And I think that will put us in a position that we can grow and scale without as many longer term problems as we might have if we had just refactored.

16:03Sam Jacobs: So we, Russ, one, you've mentioned a few times ICP. I just want to double click on that for a second because I think it's probably, again, I can imagine there's lots of people out there listening that are executives, revenue executives, and they have aspirations to be CEO. And I think this use case is going to be common for a first, you know, for an operator turned CEO from the go-to-market side, which is talk through. but here's what I'm inferring. You tell me if I've got it right. A capability, but no clear focus on ICP. You know, we could sell to this big investment bank. We could sell to this healthcare firm.

16:44Sam Jacobs: We could sell to this department. We could sell to that department with a smattering of clients kind of everywhere. And there's probably some determination that you make when you get in about like, here's where we're going to focus. Walk us through, because I think that was one of the core challenges that you've, besides the tech debt, I'm sure, is how do we take this great product, but commercialize it in the right way with the right focus? Is that accurate?

17:08AJ Bruno: Yeah, tremendously accurate. And I think it's obviously difficult for a founder who's building a business to say no, right? Even if a prospect that could be a relatively large customer that that might wind up being the only customer in a particular industry is asking for a lot of custom stuff and, you know, bastardizing your roadmap. If that's going to be your first 300K ARR deal, it's difficult at that stage to make the decision not to pursue it. Right. And what happens the next time something similar to that pops up, but it's an entirely different industry. And they're asking you to redo the interface and build this custom software application before they sign the contract.

17:54AJ Bruno: The result of that often winds up being this cobbled together a few million dollars in ARR spread across every industry, every size company with multiple code bases. And I think that's a problem then that oftentimes the kind of second CEO has to think about addressing. And I just didn't see a way for us to scale effectively if we didn't focus more on building product and delivering product that would address a set of challenges that are most common to at least two different groups of buyers as opposed to seven to eight. And I think if we lick that and get it really well, there's plenty of TAM there.

18:43AJ Bruno: Beyond that, we can always kind of build concentrically from there with heavier tools. But I also look at the larger the companies that you're serving, in a lot of cases, at least historically, the more kind of like platform functionality expectations there would be. and those are difficult to maintain for a company that's earlier in stage not funded with tens of millions of dollars right so we've made the decision very intentionally to uh leave more of that platform stuff to the big hcms and and focus on this incredible layer of data that we can collect via our assessment which is a core element of our product and then use that data to make people smarter about how to work with others and optimize their work experience.

19:35Russ Mikowski: Russ, how often are you talking to the company about these focuses and these initiatives? Is that something that's very clear in every all hands, monthly calls, or comes out in more just like quarterly board conversations?

19:50AJ Bruno: Yeah, no, we have a whole company stand up every week. We're very transparent at this point. And, you know, we've gone through a series of restructures to ensure that we have the right people, the right number of people, the right people thinking about the right things. And I think it's really important as you go through changes like that to be very transparent, communicative, make sure the team understands why we're making the decisions that we are. You know, we don't always all agree about everything. We like to operate, you know, with a modicum of disagree and commit philosophy where it's necessary.

20:25AJ Bruno: but we certainly listen to everyone's opinions. We're small enough that we still can. And we frequently talk about our direction.

20:35Russ Mikowski: I think a little bit about the, my own, I mean, we're having this conversation, but it's like a back and forth in some of the own messaging that I have in my own company and how I think about it in terms of similarly, like the ICP and TAM and then bringing it back to the customer value that we're delivering. it feels like your delivery in terms of what you're doing as well as really like you're tying those two things together for the organization. And that makes a ton of sense to me.

21:05Sam Jacobs: Russ, what did you choose? So I understand the theory of like, you know, you could be focused on seven or eight things. We should focus on one or two. So what did you choose? Like what did you what did sure people decide to focus on? Tell us your ICP.

21:18AJ Bruno: Yeah, so we're focused on earlier stage technology companies primarily. So 52, call it 2000 on the high end employees, right? Companies that are very likely to be remote or hybrid have more asynchronous communication challenges than other companies. Retaining great people is tremendously important to them. They understand the value of data and making decisions. They're probably wasting incredibly important employee time and unnecessary meetings. We help to solve all those challenges and problems. And that doesn't mean that we don't have something for certain larger customers who have a certain way of doing business.

21:59AJ Bruno: But that's where we're focusing most of our marketing and product build at this point. Cool.

22:05Sam Jacobs: Russ, we're just about at the end of our time together here on Topline Spotlight. But what we do like to do is pay it forward a little bit, find out what inspires you. It could be podcasts you've listened to recently, books you've read, people that you think we should be aware of that have influenced you. Who comes to mind?

22:26AJ Bruno: Wow, that's really such a great question. There's so many. I've been lucky to have some great mentors and work alongside some tremendous leaders. Colin Day, who founded iSIMS, where I was the head of sales from about 40 to 200 million in growth is one individual that comes to mind. He always kind of preached this philosophy of building with one code base and operating under what he called a pure SaaS philosophy, even when it meant sometimes saying some difficult no's to prospects who are interested in trying to commandeer the roadmap. And, you know, he always carried an org chart, a printed version of the org chart everywhere he went in the office.

23:09AJ Bruno: This was pre-COVID when everyone was there every day. Right. And that was like not only a symbolic kind of association to how important he felt his people were. Right. When everyone saw the CEO carrying this org chart around into every meeting. but he was also the type of individual who was always thinking about like where people could be moved or promoted or learned into a new realm that would be better for them and the company right and i think i've learned a lot from that i i don't carry an org chart around with me but i'm definitely thinking about the fact that in my opinion the most important element of building a great company is attracting and retaining great people and removing obstacles to let them do their best work.

23:59Sam Jacobs: Awesome. Russ, if folks want to learn more about Sure People or get in touch with you, what's the best way to reach you?

24:07AJ Bruno: Sure, surepeople.com. You can click to book a consultation, contact me directly at Russell at Sure People or on LinkedIn.

24:15Sam Jacobs: And what's your prism archetype, Russ, before we go?

24:19AJ Bruno: So I'm a catalyst, which means a combination between powerful and versatile primarily like bigger picture thinker looks exactly like that yes is that yours aj that is mine that's mine so we have a lot in common and probably need a really strong uh right hand man or woman who is great on the like precision side right you're reading aj's

24:45Russ Mikowski: mind he was literally talking about that yesterday 100 literally 100 that's what i need has someone to like keep me focused controlled but also operationally has like all the things done and honestly if i can get three of those people then i'm in good position you're killing it i'm

25:01AJ Bruno: a guardian what do i need so a guardian is a really interesting combination between amiability and precision with a little bit of power sprinkled in as well so you're kind of like a uh we would call it like a three discipline specialist as opposed to a two. I think guardians need people who are going to be able to go through details and keep plans on track as well. Does that sound like the type of people you surround yourself with?

25:34Sam Jacobs: Yes, I also need people that understand the difference between being nice and being kind so that when I'm not nice, they know that I am I'm still kind.

25:45AJ Bruno: Well, a guardian used to be a tough and tender, right? Yeah, exactly. That's how he is sometimes.

25:53Sam Jacobs: That's what they have to say. That's how he is sometimes. It's okay. He's a nice guy. Russ, thanks so much for being on Top Line Spotlight. Great job on Sure People. We're super excited to support your growth. And if you're out there, go to surepeople.com, take the prison self-assessment and figure out what type you are. And without further ado, have a great, have a great day, everybody.

26:15Russ Mikowski: Thanks, everyone. Thank you, guys. Appreciate it. Thanks, Sam.

26:23Sam Jacobs: Thanks for listening to Topline. New episodes come out every Sunday. If you like what you heard today, subscribe so you never miss an episode, leave a five-star review, and share it with your friends. Don't forget to join our Topline Slack channel to connect with us and discuss the topics we cover with other listeners. Click the link in the show notes. Lastly, if you're interested in joining Pavilion, you can learn more about membership at joinpavilion.com forward slash membership. Thanks again for listening.