Unlock the potential of customer success pipeline stages for Procurement

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hey I'm your host Scott herf today I had the honor of sitting down with Jay Nathan a customer success veteran and expert he's the chief customer officer at higher logic and the co-founder of the gain grow retain customer success leadership Community now this is one of the Premier customer success communities out there it's 12 000 members tens of thousands of weekly readers check it out if you can gangrowretain.com in this episode you're going to learn how to lead and scale SAS customer success teams and that's really important to do it efficiently because this is a world where there's no more free money I also want you to be ready you're going to get to hear a little bit of breaking news on this one so please enjoy what's up Jay good to see you man I figured we'd start by just chatting a little bit about what you're working on now and uh what you're into yeah sounds good good to see you Scott um so um as you mentioned in the intro I am the chief customer officer and actually um I'm a slightly modified role at higher logic 2 where I'm the general manager of one of our business units and so my days right now are occupied with um sort of pathfinding on our go to market strategy we're working really hard on a on a partner strategy at higher Logic for for the products that my team sells and so um working working real hard on that that's a the ecosystem play is so important these days and so we uh a lot of energy into it um other than that just you know keeping customers and retaining them I also do a lot of writing so um got a couple projects there I'm working on as well which is impressive I mean I I find it writing to be clarifying but finding the time for that carving that out it's you know it's like getting your reps in or eating your broccoli sometimes but then once you do it you feel amazing right yeah you know there's no such thing as an overnight success right most of the most people that appear successful out of nowhere have been diligently working away at things for years sometimes and uh uh writing is just one of those things for me that it to your point it does help clarify my thinking whether it's thinking about things that are happening in my personal life or things that I'm trying to accomplish from a business perspective and I think that has been um one thing one unexpected benefit of spending so much time writing is that it's just clarified my thinking so much um and it's now it's more of a habit than anything to just write every single day so I love that I mean and I like how you you format it distribute it distill it down because it's so consumable but so you can tell it's just been refined right it's that um the phenomenon of uh the rock tumbler Steve Jobs used to talk about where you've got all these you know ideas working you know together in this and I'm going to butcher the metaphor but you know everything seems just so Punchy and refined and I always come away after reading one of your posts like oh okay I'm gonna pause and think on that so I appreciate you putting that out into the world and then you've got uh Game grow retained right your your huge community of um CS professionals yeah so yeah great call out we um we launched a community called gangery today we call it ggr for short because it's a little bit of a mouthful but uh we launched it back in so we did we started a podcast back in 2019 and um you know of course we had a Blog and everything I had a consulting firm back then and and we were using this community strategy and the blog and the podcast much like we use it here at jerky right you use it to help you know educate the market draw attention to the brand we were doing the same thing for for the consulting firm we worked with B2B tech companies on their um customer success strategies we have a management consulting firm basically is what we were but we built this community and um during the pandemic it just exploded people wanted to talk to each other they wanted to figure out okay we're seeing this at our company are you seeing the same thing and what are you going to do about it and how's it going to work and uh we we just sort of caught lightning in a bottle um back in like early 2020 when the pandemic started we started it actually the community was really started with a weekly Zoom call we called it CS leadership office hours and first week we had 50 people the next week we had 75 then we had 125 and it just kept growing and growing and growing and people started to pull from us they said hey if like we're getting together every week we'd love to be able to chat in between these calls as well and and make personal connections and have content and you know be able to you know so we we built an online community we now have live events that are part of that we still run those office hours calls which are really important to create person-to-person connections um because that's really what community is right it's all about writing people and knowledge and ideas is and so um yeah it's uh it turned turns out to have been one of the more fun professional things that I've done in my life and it was almost completely serendipitous like we did not set out to build a community of 12 000 people we just didn't it just happened in in our Mantra from the start was let's just give as much value as we can just give it and and over time it's come back you know tenfold to us but we just continue with that mantra today how do we keep giving our community members more value yeah it's fun to see that DNA still carry through with the office hours I mean that schedule was incredibly robust and that's all that's tough to pull off you know and it's really impressive especially with that scale of people yeah we had to learn how to facilitate big Zoom calls that was we were using zoom and luckily Zoom was available to us um in 2020 and um so yeah it was a new skill set we had to learn to be able to facilitate that but lots more stories we can share from from ggr you know as we as we continue to chat right on gangrow retain.com it's uh yeah it's good stuff um so you've you've been thinking deeply about you know SAS companies and customer relationships for a long time and and what we're seeing now and and you know we're feeling this at churn key too we're it's Market correction and you know in search of efficiency and and you know the realization that cheap money and spending your way out of problems is no longer the reality and I want to get your perspective on you know what needs to happen within SAS companies to maintain deep customer relationships while being efficient um because you know that's the root of all of all SAS success really yeah um no you well said I often say that SAS companies are customer success machines right you have to make your customers successful if you want to win as a business it's just there's no separating the two because the cost of acquisition is so high for customers and if they only stay for a year or 18 months or 24 months you're probably going to be upside down as you continue to grow um so you know I think if you look at the past 10 or 15 years in the SAS ecosystem as you pointed out there's been a ton of money that's been pumped into here and you know a lot of the folks that institutionally invest in companies like Cherokee and higher logic you know they know on the surface level that you need to have a customer success team right everybody should just have that and we want you to go scale up sales and marketing so you need to go hire some more bdrs you need to go hire sales people but there's a lot of nuance in each of these businesses and um what I've found is that even customer success teams have sort of just thrown a lot of spaghetti at the wall to see what sticks and it's not been very efficient um customer success as it's sort of grown and evolved over the past 10 or 15 years has really come from a place of very high touch so I think like I touch account management um you know calls with your customers every week if that's one thing if you've got big Enterprise customers you have to do that right you can't avoid that but there's a lot of companies out there especially a lot of the types of companies that TurnKey serves that serves hundreds or thousands or tens of thousands of very small businesses so what does customer success look like there it's completely different but some of the same Technologies and techniques that you use to engage large audiences also work in Enterprise because guess what Enterprise companies don't necessarily want to be on the phone talking to you every day because they use 20 other products just like yours right so they need to know it's working they need to know that if they have a problem they can submit a an issue to the to the company to do the support Channel and it's going to get resolved correctly and quickly and then they want strategic guidance like what is it what do my peers look like am I performing as well as they are or do I need to be doing things differently so when we think about scaling customer success we think about content the best practices the webinars the office hours all the kind of stuff we did for ggr we think about the same kind of techniques for scaling and making that customer success function more more uh efficient because it really is all about enablement and the product enablement of the best practices and processes and then you know making sure that customers are adopting and getting the usage out of the product that they need to prove its value it's it's really interesting you connecting growing ggr in a way that you would you would scale you know customer success team or operations it's really interesting comparison um kind of like turn the light bulb on in my head right now but um yeah I think it's interesting that customer success has this um High touch enterprising reputation um and it's one of the more interesting Dynamics about um the topic in my opinion because um you know I don't know why it's gotten that reputation of being you know sloggy and expensive and I gotta get on the call again with this guy right yeah because it has been yeah it has been slogging and expensive and inefficient in my opinion so I think you're you're spot on yeah well and and that segues when we spoke earlier you said something that I loved where when you're advising companies you're you're uh you know your question is well how can I convince you to not create a customer success team um and that's just so you know that's that's what you do this is your role this is what you love to do but you know hearing you say that it just you know I want to know what you know what would you do instead why is this what does that mean right yeah I had a call with a friend of mine from the community uh uh a couple weeks ago and he's in a new role uh company just got a big funding round you know it's a series C uh round of fun funding big one like a nine figure kind of deal and he's like yeah I got brought in to to build out the customer success function that's and I asked him a bunch of questions and um like you know first question is like what is your gross retention rate well it's above 95 that's fantastic it's world class right like right so where's the problem like what problem are you solving and um you know it it's CSM teams because that's sort of the thing right in customer success you often think about a team of csms yep um but and it's but that's a blunt force instrument right a CSM team is a high cost blunt force instrument that's only going to give you so much reach across your customer base because it's so high touch so when when I think about customer success I think about it as that's the outcome that we're trying to drive right it's it's not renewals it's not upselling it's not advocacy um it's not even adoption it's like is the customer getting the getting what they thought they were buying right are they are they getting that result that outcome now how we help the customer get that is what we call customer success as like a team or a function it could be CSM csms are a customer success Channel or a Channel of engaging with your with your customers but there's other things you can do and it comes back to this community concept every company I think should have an online community of course I think that because that's the product my company but um it's a way of letting customers connect with one another right and learn from one another because oftentimes customers have better insights because they sit in the exact same role as your other customers versus you your csms don't necessarily have that direct Hands-On been in the seat experience [Music] um eat so communities are really important for helping Drive uh just the the overall feeling that I'm part of something bigger right like yes I'm buying a product from TurnKey or from higher logic but I'm actually part of their ecosystem too and they have tons of resources and people for me to network with so I can become better at my job and better at using their products so that's you know that that's one thing when I think about you know the statement that I made to you about I'm going to convince you not to hire a CSM team but the the question that I asked my buggy you know when he described what he was looking at doing is like okay you have an the other thing he he shared with me is that there's an account management team who's doing a lot of the quote unquote customer success functions like they're meeting with customers they're handling escalations they're you know doing the value and Roi report outs with the customer the kind of thing the proactive engagement you'd expect from the CSM team yeah my question is well okay if you look across that team it sounds like they're already doing a lot of this work but what's one thing that they're doing and if you could take that one task off of their plates across the whole team what what would that look like and could you specialize a role to just go do that one thing so we talked about billing inquiries right they handle all the billing increase well why not centralize that in one person you can just go handle that maybe they're part of the finance team maybe they're part of the renewal team um so to me it's all about looking at what's working today how do you leverage that without creating something brand new if you don't already have it if you don't already have a CSM team why create it but do start layering in things that give you leverage and scale on what is already working so maybe it's billing inquiries maybe it's a support team or maybe it's an onboarding function that just specializes in that onboarding that new customer implementation motion that has to be done well and done right every single time without fail right and so I think of the world you know as you grow a SAS company as you scale your customer success practice really about uh or I think about the world in terms of creating specialist roles that handle very specific moments in the customer Journey along the way that's powerful I mean and I'd love to jump into that um I I love process and uh you know uh just you know examples of the practicalities of of things and what would you say are the top few practical achievable examples of of scaling customer success so you mentioned one um you know a few there but where some like must-haves in your experience well the the you know early on in in a company's stage when you're in the seed round or maybe in your round of funding you may just have a team of what people might refer to today as like a full stack CSN like it's a person who handles the support requests if a renewal's coming up they might have a conversation with customers they're doing it all they're at right jack or Jill of all trades right um but the oftentimes the first functional roles that need to be scaled inside of a SAS company are going to be your support team your support function right because it's very specific when a customer reaches out to you you want to be able to respond to them as quickly as possible and solve that issue as fast as possible Right um the other one like I mentioned is onboarding or implementation however you look at that but it's getting your new users off the ground and if you have enough new users coming in or new customers coming in onboarding it's a little bit like support right when it ha when a new customer comes on board you it's you have to react to that you have to go do the work to get them implemented now you know in a product like growth model your product May guide them through that process yeah but you know for anything anything else like onboarding is is super critical in SAS right and and so it should be specialized pretty early in that because they've the customers clear time in their schedule maybe they've gotten Engineers whoever on board were teed up ready to go the button's not working you know or whatever right right I need an answer now right because I'm trying to use a product but it's not now it's not doing what it's supposed to do so it's got to be lightning fast and there's got to be a deep connection with the engineering function for for that type of issue right so we can get resolved quickly um you know once a company gets you know their first tranche of customers through the initial term of their agreements with you yeah some companies sign customers up on a monthly recurring basis and it's you can turn it off or on anytime in a lot of Enterprise SAS you know B2B you're actually signing annual agreements for things maybe a one two or three year contract but when those contracts start coming up for renewal you need to you need to be able to reliably renew those contracts and to do that you know one of the roles that I've had a lot of success creating in my career is a renewal manager role which basically takes all the commercial negotiation of a renewal off the plate of a CSM or off the plate of a sales team who needs to be you know ideally booking new new business new new logo uh bookings right and and it centralizes it and you can have one or two people be really really good at renewal price increases you know annually and uh you know maybe a little bit of expansion there as well and so that it at least in my experiences is much better done centralized into a specialist kind of role and there are a number of other roles like that um when you think about developing content in webinars for your customers like who does that right the run of the mill CSM doesn't have experience that looks more like a marketing kind of role when you think about the tools and the process of facilitating a one-to-many engagement with a customer whether it's around the product roadmap in a webinar or it's you know around a certain topic that we're trying to educate our customers on in the product so there's all kinds of opportunities for specialization as you grow right you have to sort of think through it as you grow in that example would um would you be would the customer success role be leading that webinar or they they be feeding marketing the the content for that or or maybe both maybe both yeah yeah it's really a matter of who's organizing that program yeah right because it's back to the skill set thing traditionally the CSM skill set is a relationship manager a product expert a coach consultant right right so when I think about they're going to get a lot of stories that come out of their interactions with customers and they're going to be able to identify okay this customer is they're really doing things better than anybody else and we should put them in the spotlight so they can be a really valuable source of recruiting people to participate in these things both from as a participant and as a leader in them and then they can also um be a valuable source of content because their ears to the ground constantly right uh and they're getting great feedback now what we have to train csms to do is be attuned to what they're hearing and know that it's the role they play is more than just the conversations they have with those customers that day yes that's important but it's also important for you to bring those insights back to the business so we can load up our our scaled programs with great content great ideas and great people that um that they're coming across in their day-to-day work with them yeah that is that's one thing we're we're trying to work on at chernke where um you know both to recognize patterns uh and to recognize you know new developments but also not to be you know what's what's the phenomenon where a doctor learns about some disease and then they diagnose that disease you know yeah every time they're after for a little while so um you know not to get too stuck in the mud on on certain feedback on certain days right so it's a very human problem but it really is I'd rather have that than being caught by surprise you know with with cancellations or negative feedback or whatever right 100 um so who who are some customer or what cut what companies do you admire that are customer Centric and that are doing really Innovative things with customer success great question so um I I actually the the I have a little bit of recency bias on this too you were mentioned in there with the doctor yeah I've been reading um invent and wonder by Jeff Bezos um and basically invent and wonder is the collective writings of Jeff Bezos so it's really just a collection of of his shareholder letters and other you know writings on certain topics that he's done over the years and I I love Amazon probably doesn't even have a customer success team right yeah I mean they they may somewhere across their vast Empire they probably have a CS team somewhere but what I love about Amazon and why I consider them one of the most customer-centric customer companies in the world is because their Innovation is based on customer centricity they built you know Amazon Marketplace to show third party seller products next to products that they sell themselves right right and many people including many members of their board were like you were crazy what are you doing why would you do that you cannibalize your own sales because they know that it's not about me it's not about maximizing the value of any single transaction it's about maximizing the lifetime value of that customer and having them I mean Scott how many things have you ordered off of Amazon in your life I couldn't even tell you at this point yeah it's probably embarrassing for me to tell you um over the past 15 years it's nuts exactly right now we go back there because we know we've got the best selection um you know another thing they um um when they made the decision to allow reviews of products on the site people were like why would you do that what if they give negative reviews well it's it's all about the customer so the customer is going to be better educated they're going to trust us and they're going to come back and buy more and you know you see that flywheel he calls it a flywheel of growth um a lot in how they've built that business and and it just permeates through every part of it Amazon web services Marketplace prime those are all very customer-centric ideas that you know they they knew were going to be costly when they launched them but they had faith that they were going to feed that flywheel and uh you know the sum of the lifetime value of transactions was going to far outweigh any single transaction that they could do their customers so Amazon right now is just my favorite and I love reading about them and and learning more about their culture of innovation for customers I was actually working in e-commerce when they launched the third party Marketplace in Raleigh actually you're kind of your neck of the woods yeah back in like 07 and um yeah people were calling them crazy you're competing against yourself and you know but it was enabled by this other Innovation they had which seems obvious at the time or now but it wasn't at the time where you know their main competition was eBay and if you search for say I don't know I'm looking at my kids Lego set so search for a Star Wars Lego set you would get different listing pages of the same product well an example of them being customer-centric was well that product should have one page you know the in a single what they call you know the the Asin and then you know all these um listings roll up under that page and it's just a better search shopping experience for everyone enables reviews and all that stuff so um eBay's never recovered from that no yeah I mean eBay's I mean they're still doing okay right but they're a distance the cool thing about the cultural the way that works culturally at Amazon is they they tried an auction site too I believe yeah they did yeah with eBay and they ended up failing and they said all right let's move on to the next thing so they're not afraid to take chances on behalf of their customers to find it's like the overnight success thing right Marketplace wasn't a success overnight they had two or three failed tries at it before they hit on what the right idea was for the product pages that you mentioned and everything so yeah and many many companies would have just ditched it after the first one right oh yeah of course or they would have tried one of the tactics they would have tried to copy one of the tactics that they saw their competitors doing that worked yep in isolation of having the whole culture of innovation of driving prices down of making selection bigger of making information more democratized like that's a cultural thing and if you do any one of those things and I say you know another uh another very customer-centric company is Southwest Airlines great story there right they they but but they start by being very clear about who they are and who they are not they'll tell you like if you want to you know a first class seat on an airplane like don't fly Southwest because we're not doing that right they know who their customer is and they serve them relentlessly with the same so other airlines have tried to copy you know the cultural the fun aspect of what Southwest does and they've tried to you know pair back some of the benefits but they haven't adopted the entire mindset the entire culture that Southwest Airlines does so all they're doing is adding more cost and less Revenue to their to their books right and they're they're not actually winning culture winning formula yeah exactly love it um well I want to shift back to you and the work you're doing real quick and we got a little breaking news here you're joining turnkey's Board of advisors which is something we're all extremely excited about and and word finally ready to let out to the world we've been you know what's chomping at the bit to tell people about this um you know we're huge fans of your work and your thinking and just admire how you um you know reinforce The Importance of Being customer-centric it's one of our values um but also you know the we just discussed the Practical realities of actually doing that it's not just um you know just some platitude or whatnot so yeah we're crazy excited um breaking news here guys yeah uh very exciting and you know it's it's almost like Serendipity in a lot of ways because half your team is based here in Charleston which you know how many software companies are actually based here oh I know not that many um and how many and then to have a software company you know with half of its team in Charleston focused on essentially what is a subset of customer success is just super exciting so um I'm just happy that the network the the skill set the exposure that I've had over the past 20 years just happens to be it's to have this line up perfectly with what y'all are doing and I can really does about it so um you know when I looked at Sharon key I've known Baird for a lot of years actually I used to work with his wife at a at a former uh company that we were both at and but um as I got to know more about churn key you know when I hear some good advice maybe for your listeners yeah uh at least I think it's good advice when you're evaluating a company whether it's to invest in or join as an employee or become an executive of or join The Advisory Board of there are three things to look for the one number one is are you in a good Market right the market you really want to be when you choose a company to do anything with you want to be on top of a wave not under it as I like to say um and I mean just look at the world of subscriptions right it is exploding right now not only can you buy software and subscription which is you know one of one of the earlier companies to take advantage of this but I mean look at Costco right I'm a member at Costco um I can get my haircut and my car wash I can buy that on subscription now there's so many I heard the other day that Taco Bell was trying out a subscription service Scott did you know that sign me up yeah t-a-a-s um so I don't know if that'll stick or not but um but it's clear that churn key was on a on a market wave right now yes it's down the right way so excited about that number two thing I look for is the product is the product good because the product sucks it's going to be a slog and I've been in situations where you know the product was not in a good spot we had to really work at it to to get it into that spot but um you know just looking at the product and how clean and tight it is obviously it's a it's it's it's only been born over the past few years it's on the latest and greatest Technologies which makes it lightning fast for us to iterate yeah on it customers um it's performing it stands up to you know the task um so you know the the product is excellent by the way even the analytics capabilities of what churn key could do and the visibility that it gets one of the things that I love is a customer success leader is working with a product where you can very visibly see the outcome of using it right right luckily TurnKey deals with an area of the customer subscription model where you can actually literally give day by day an Roi score you know how you're doing right that's that's awesome not all software companies have that luxury um and then the third thing I look for is a team is the team good in in this team is small and Mikey y'all have been together through multiple startups and uh had great exits and are committed to this thing as a uh as a group and it's just infectious so I uh I'm I'm super honored and excited just to be a small part of it uh you're making me blush man um no it's it's good to step back and and you know take take the wins and think through the success and how we've gotten here and um you know and and it's just you know but we're looking forward to the next to the next phase you know to your point um to kind of uh adopt and change mark andreessen's quote subscriptions are now eating the world and they're everywhere for better for worse but it's the reality and um you know what we want to do is just make sure that um we you know subscriptions are an interesting thing right it's a relationship it's an ongoing relationship and some in any relationship there are tension points and what we want to do is make sure that um everybody who is subscribed to a product um feels like they're seen gets their their needs met um and it's done in a customer-centric user-friendly way like they're never any dark patterns never any um you know uh a billion emails if your payment doesn't go through once you know like we we want to bring respect back to this this relationship at scale all across the world and there's you know even legislation doing that in places like uh New York and um California and then you know internationally Europe and India have some really interesting laws around subscriptions and because that respect hasn't been um present it's been abused that relation's been abused so um that's a big Focus uh for us and especially too on the data side you mentioned you know um we respect our customers too to show them how good we're doing we're not going to hide that if it's not if we're not doing a good job then we're all going to know about it and we can fix it um so that goes many many layers deep so yeah you're going to help us with the next phase um you know it's been two and a half years kind of figuring out who we are and then you know Off to the Races for the next three to ten right yeah it's exciting you have a lot there's a lot of head room for for what TurnKey is doing and so just excited to be a part of it love it love it um well let's keep talking about you I want to talk about um just close out um with a few questions and I just want to understand your love of customer success and and what Drew you in and and what keeps you interested there and this is a little um uh you know selfish on my part too because I I like understanding how people continuously um you know and stay in a single space and learn from it and Rich it and all that yeah um I grew up working for my parents when I was young um they had they were entrepreneurs they had retail stores in you know at the time of shopping malls you don't seem to get those anymore yeah um and you know I learned a few things from from them you know one is you just gotta show up every day you gotta work um the other thing I learned from it is that the customer isn't always right but they believe their perspective is always right and you have to be empathetic to that and so I really I credit you know being working in their businesses and watching my mom and how she served our customers back then really um it sort of embody that and it stuck with me and then you know the third piece is quality you know my mom used to um she used to do artwork on on these uh products that we would sell she would actually hand draw this stuff oh cool and uh and it was always if there was a slightest mistake in any one of those things she'd tossed the product out and start over even if she was on the phone and I was like man it's such hard work but she just she believed in making sure that the customer got what they paid for and that it was valuable to them and you know so I've carried those lessons with me over time I when I came at actually when I came out of college I I was a techie I mean I was a developer um an engineer I was working for a utility company right out of school in 2001 because the economy sucked because the.com level had burst um this is just before 9 11 happened um so you know I learned what working inside of a big Enterprise I.T organization looks like I knew I didn't want to do that forever but it was good to get that exposure and then I went in I got into sort of these Consulting type roles where I was working with customers on a consultative basis uh for for years and even in my first software company job that I had I was still in that like pre-sales and consultative architect kind of role and so it was very high touch right but and again back to the high touch customer success mindset the work that I was doing Hands-On then was very much like Hands-On customer successes today as I've learned more I just said as I've gotten involved with SAS companies over the past 20 years that's been where I just sort of fell in love with the business model right there's the the metrics are are fun to think about they're fun to try to figure out how to impact uh what's going on like jerky right like if you have a higher uh gross cancellation rate than you want like but what it what's it going to look like when we put a product like churn key in the mix or when we add a CSM team to help Drive account Health preemptively um you know how do we make those bets and put our put our money in the right place uh it's always intrigued me um and it's really more of just a pure business curiosity I think than anything um and then you know over the past seven years I've just done a lot of writing like I talked about at the top right as I've tried to assimilate or I've tried to sort of process what I've learned writing about it help has just helped me grow my love for for SAS and B2B technology b2c technology and subscription business models more more than anything else so um I don't know I just partly I guess it's what I know I've always been around this stuff and um and that's what what's kept me interested in it as long as I have been now that's powerful stuff I I didn't know about um your your parents and owning the shop that's was it was it in you so you said actual like malls you know you're in uh yeah shopping shopping malls and like strip malls it was it was like a it was a um uh like a gift in candy kind of store so it wasn't you know these weren't it wasn't um rocket science it was just good basic straightforward business and you know customers are you doing a high quality way and there's other stories I could share from that too about you know how we tried to create quality products and and uh for our customers but and it worked I mean customers came back and you could really see the value of the repeat business even if you sell a product not on subscription you still need repeat business that's how business grows Word of Mouth repeat business and you know so totally it's all to say at the end of the day are they uh if you don't mind my asking or is are the stores still around they are not no they are not um you know as as um malls got put out of business yeah they they sort of went by the wayside and we never transitioned that business to be like an online kind of thing I think we had that opportunity but it just we we didn't know how to do it back then because it was new right we had no clue how to really do it and Shopify didn't exist or you might have right yeah you had to call up the Gateway companies and you know exactly whatever whatever all that stuff yeah got it yes buy a million dollars with the hardware to put in a data center which we don't have to do any of that anymore luckily right right um so in terms of uh reading watching listening anything you've seen red listened to lately that's had an effect on you yes um the the thing that I am binging right now is a podcast called the founders podcast have you ever heard of this so good you like it David syndra yeah um he he did one on Christopher Nolan recently right uh yeah it wasn't Christopher Nolan a is he a director yeah he did um Oppenheimer and all that yeah I haven't listened to that one all the way through yet but so for people who don't know Founders podcast David senra highly recommend it he goes through basically he reads biographies of great entrepreneurs so all The Usual Suspects and of course like uh Charlie Munger Warren Buffett um Steve Jobs of course Larry Ellison like all the big Tech folks but then he hits like one one of his favorites is is James Dyson right Have you listened to the Dyson episodes that's the one that got me hooked to begin with okay I need to check that one out I've always admired the guy and uh I read his book back in the day but I haven't seen that one so yeah it's it's so funny is I initially wrote wrote the podcast off in a way I don't know because it just seemed like such a simple thing and like well I can read the book myself why would I listen to it but then it just it's just accelerating your intake on on the topic and he breaks it down so well yeah he also does a good job of you know I was listening to he uh he did an episode on Coco Chanel I mean that's the other thing some of these fashion Moguls like you have no clue the grit that these people had totally to go build their Empires and but one of the things he'll do like even if it's Coco Chanel right he'll he'll he'll say you know sort of walk through the story of their life and their business and what happened and he'll be like yeah this is just like when Warren Buffett says this or when you know Jeff Bezos says this and he sort of think does a really nice job of of bringing multiple stories together every time he tells the story end you know to your point you can consume basically the equivalent of a book in an hour as opposed to I don't know I'm a slow reader it would take me you know 12 hours to read some of those books that he's he's from rising for me in an hour yeah yeah that's a great point and I and when he can when he's starting to create you know the connections of basically his notes and database and his thinking that's when it starts a really like oh okay you know like the lights the lights come on in my head and um then you start making it less about the person and more about a process or a way of thinking right yeah that's cool oh sorry go ahead no after you I was gonna say one of the things he says in there which I really like is um history doesn't repeat itself human nature does and you know when you think about the things the the kind of discrimination and grit and um beliefs that you have to have to get a company off the ground it's like this is just good reminders to have in my ear every day right for sure I'm building this business that I work in now which is now currently my entrepreneurial um pursuit or anything else so it's you know participating in TurnKey with you with you guys yeah you know it's all about the inputs so I love it I'm gonna go fire up some episodes after this um uh all right closing question what's the craziest thing you wish you could do right now but can't oh man um um I don't know if it's crazy uh but you know one of my ambitions professionally is to to run my own company again at some point so I had um I was the I guess you could call me the CEO of my consulting firm which we were a very small firm so CEO is definitely an aggrandized uh kind of title for what we were doing um but that that's the thing I really want to get back to is running running a business in its entirety um and you know right now is not the time for that for me but um but that that's something that I'll that I'll do hopefully in the next five to ten years again awesome man awesome well hey appreciate your time awesome catching up and um this is a great one appreciate it you too man let's do more of these definitely see you don't miss out on future episodes get alerts for new drops at subscriptionheroes.com or follow us on your favorite podcast platform special thanks to cheer and Keith for sponsoring the show learn how to make customers happier while boosting Revenue at churnkey.com your support for this show has been incredible so far and let's keep the momentum going we are all slaves to the algorithm ratings and reviews really do help please rate US five stars on your platform of choice we'll be truly grateful that's all for now I'm Scott herf and this has been subscription Heroes