Reverse Engineering Revenue and Growth Success

Transcript

[00:00:01] Steve MacDonald: Welcome to the Contact Center Perspectives podcast. I’m Steve MacDonald, your host. Today we have a super interesting guest on, Tim Wilbourn. Now, Tim, you are currently the SVP of Support and Customer Success at Crexendo, and I’d love to learn a little bit more about what you’re doing there. You’ve had a huge background.

[00:00:19] Steve MacDonald: You went through pre-IPO to IPO, tremendous scaling success at RingCentral. Took it from what, in the hundreds of millions, to over 2.5 billion in revenue and tremendous employee growth. And so that scaling is a part of the business that not a lot of us ever go through and understand, and it provides, I think, a really good backdrop for what we’re going to be talking about today. We’re talking about reverse engineering success, like revenue and growth success. And to underscore why this is so important is that it’s not easy to connect CX to revenue and growth.

[00:01:00] Steve MacDonald: And as much as we look at KPIs and we can talk the talk, the bottom line is that our senior management usually isn’t looking at it through that same lens, and we don’t get the credit that we need. And it leads to much shorter tenures for CX leaders and support leaders. So a big part of what we’re going to talk about today is not only how do you connect that, but how do you advocate for and set expectations that things don’t just happen overnight. Because we live in a short-term, Wall Street-driven, quoted-driven world, right? But we can’t look at the entire operation of the company that same way. So, a lot to unpack here today, but I’d love to hear a little bit more about you.

[00:01:47] Steve MacDonald: I did learn some interesting things. I think you are exactly on the US average for number of kids, dogs, and married. Three kids, two dogs, probably right at the heart of the American dream. If you can expand a bit more on your background, then we’ll get started here.

[00:02:04] Tim Wilbourn: Yeah, absolutely. In the last 14 years it’s been in the tech world. Prior to that, it was restaurants and retail where, when you think about what all three of those have in common, it’s the customer. Running successful restaurants that scale, each and every one of those opportunities and interactions.

[00:02:20] Tim Wilbourn: For some people, they may be regulars, they come once a week, twice a week. But for some of those people, they only get out once a year. So how do you make that interaction the best possible? And then that’s the fine orchestration of the entire ecosystem of a restaurant, from the minute they walk in to the servers, into the back office and the kitchen, making sure that meal is perfect.

[00:02:40] Tim Wilbourn: Taking those experiences and then moving into the retail world, I had great success in the retail world. And then, like kind of most people in the 2008–2009 kind of timeframe, it was like, hey, something’s got to change here with some of the downturn of the economy. Got a cold call from a recruiter saying, “Hey, what about an individual contributor?”

[00:03:00] Tim Wilbourn: Something that’s pretty interesting is that at the last company I was at, I started as an individual contributor. I started in sales and joked with a couple of guys that I worked with that we just kept getting promoted as we went through.

[00:03:11] Tim Wilbourn: It’s like we all kept beating each other’s records for the most promotions in the shortest amount of time. But we saw great success and also saw a culture of reward in that success. And I think that’s why we were able to see some of those numbers. The numbers were insane, just watching every year.

[00:03:27] Tim Wilbourn: Beat and raise. You would also see this shift from how companies operate pre-IPO to post-IPO, where it’s revenue is king, win at all costs, to hey, we’ve got a bottom line now and we’ve got to manage this. We need to ensure that everything is in place.

[00:03:45] Tim Wilbourn: And how do you make sure the customer experience throughout that entire process is? So currently I’m here with Crexendo, SVP of Support and Customer Success, where I’ve got an interesting role in the fact that I oversee three different parts of our business. Got a Managed Service Provider business that’s run out of the Midwest that focuses on not just the unified communications portion of it, but also the networking, data security, cybersecurity side.

[00:04:12] Tim Wilbourn: We’ve got the retail side, which is our Crexendo VIP product where we’re unified communications. We’ve got the phone, got the video, messaging, all of that jazz. Then there’s this third part where we also have the platform. We’ve a partnership with 300 different communication platforms that provide services to various parts of the country and oversee them.

[00:04:36] Tim Wilbourn: I’ve got this very unique position right now where I’ve got to build and scale these teams to make me happy because not only am I leading them, I’m also a customer from one of the sides where I’ve got my own retail offering. Really interesting to be in the position I’m in right now.

[00:04:52] Tim Wilbourn: But also, I took the role because of the opportunity that was out there in the unified communications and customer experience world.

[00:05:00] Tim Wilbourn: Nobody does it super well from the very beginning all the way through to post-acquisition and on. And we’ve got the opportunity now with this MSP where we can give that white-glove-for-service opportunity.

[00:05:13] Tim Wilbourn: The technology’s there, the people are there. And just making sure that a customer, our customers, are successful in engaging with their customers and driving the successful outcomes.

[00:05:24] Steve MacDonald: Driving successful outcomes is what it’s all about. And you’ve got a really interesting way of defining the success. You talked about thinking about a future press release. I’d love just to hear a little bit more about what you meant by that.

[00:05:40] Tim Wilbourn: Yeah. Somebody actually brought it up to me a long time ago and I was like, I don’t care. That doesn’t make a whole lot of sense. Why would I think about that? But I was young and naive and, like everything in life, you have to go through some hardships before you realize that wow, that actually makes a lot of sense.

[00:05:54] Tim Wilbourn: And that’s pretty good. But yeah, I approach things with what I call a press release exercise. So if we come up with an idea or we have a vision of somewhere we want to get to, gather the core team and say, awesome, in three years from now we’re going to have a press release that goes out.

[00:06:09] Tim Wilbourn: What is the title of that press release going to be? Simple as that. And you sit back and you go, oh man, what do I think about? And then go back to some of the most famous press releases of all time that are out there. Churchill wins the war, or whatever it’s going to be across there. Start thinking about this and you go, oh wait a minute, okay.

[00:06:30] Tim Wilbourn: I get my name or my company’s name or the actions, the projects I’m working on, in lights. It’s not about one person, it’s about the entire team. So then you think about it, and it was one of the first exercises I did here at Crexendo, where I said, what do you want that press release to be? And there’s a platform administrator who also happens to share the name Tim with me. To clarify:

[00:06:52] Tim Wilbourn: He is known as Tim-Tim, I’m known as Tim. That’s just how we do it. But I asked him, I said, what would you want to do? How would you want this to look like? And he’s looking and he’s thinking about it and he was like, Tim-Tim unifies the communications world. Awesome. How are we going to do that, Tim? And then he started coming up with the action plans.

[00:07:14] Tim Wilbourn: You go, all right. Now what can you do in the next 30 days, 60 days, 90 days? What’s gonna take longer? Where do you need the help of the product team, the engineering team, the network team to make these things come to life? And then you start going to have those conversations and it changes from Tim.

[00:07:30] Tim Wilbourn: Tim unifies the communications world to Crexendo® simplifies, and now you’ve got a whole team of advocates that are working aligned with you to make sure that we all hit that goal. And you have to make sure that when that press release does come out, it’s there. Now what I’ve actually done is gone, and I have pre-bought future press releases that will come out on future dates for a number of folks on my team.

[00:07:55] Tim Wilbourn: But it’s a fun exercise and it’s a fun way to think about it because then you can go back to it. And then you start talking about the project. What’s the project? Hey, is Tim gonna save the world? What’s it look like? I’m doing this, I’m doing this, I’m doing this. And it helps keep them aligned with where they need to focus.

[00:08:13] Steve MacDonald: I gotta tell you, that’s such a vivid picture of what you’re talking about. And I’m not trying to pick on product development right now. I’m a former SaaS founder myself, and it’s very easy to just get caught up in, “Oh, it’d be a great feature. Let’s go produce it. What about this? What about that? Let’s go produce. Let’s go do, do.”

[00:08:31] Steve MacDonald: But unless we have the goal line in mind, the major outcome won’t be met and I love that. Write the headline. Then, does that feature or does that workflow or does that project that you’re working on in CX right now, does that make sense to get us where we want to go? Because we can get distracted so easily in the weeds of just doing without remembering where we’re going.

[00:08:57] Steve MacDonald: I love that. I love that. So I’m gonna tie that now to something else here. You started at the beginning and you said of all three industries that you’ve worked in, what tied it all together was the customer. So I’m thinking about the future. I’m thinking about that press release.

[00:09:15] Steve MacDonald: What does the customer have? What’s the role when you’re thinking about that press release and the customer, and getting that focus to be one that is thematic throughout the organization?

[00:09:30] Tim Wilbourn: Yeah, well, it starts with making sure that the themes or the vision is there at every level of the organization. And you start out talking about the… in publicly traded companies, it’s a quarter at a time. You have 13 weeks. You have 13 weeks to go hit your quota, to hit your number, to make sure that your shareholders are satisfied. And then you start all over again.

[00:09:53] Tim Wilbourn: But when it comes to customer experience or long-term strategy or change, you don’t necessarily have that benefit of just starting over and saying, “Hey, sorry Mr. Customer, day one of a new quarter.” Nope, you don’t get it. So we have to make sure that at all parts of the business, that customer thread in some form or fashion is there.

[00:10:13] Tim Wilbourn: And there’s the idea of OKRs and KPIs and how they all integrate and what that looks like. And I’ve been part of so many meetings and reviews where it’s the revenue side of the house. Let’s go through your KPIs. We had this many leads, converted this many deals, closed this many turnups.

[00:10:31] Tim Wilbourn: OK. And then you go to the onboarding or implementation side. Where are you at with this many projects closed, this many new seats. And you go to support, how many cases closed. But what you don’t have is how many customers did you close, that you successfully onboarded, saw adoption and value in your product or your tools, and are actually benefiting from it and aren’t becoming a burden by constantly calling in and driving up your support costs.

[00:10:59] Tim Wilbourn: Every phone call, every case has a cost. Every implementation has a cost. Every deal has a cost. These are the things that I don’t necessarily think are all aligned across all different parts of the business, because everybody is so laser-focused on their business with their blinders on saying, “I have 13 weeks to close out my quarter. I need to hit my revenue number.” Or, “I need to get this much in bookings delivered, or this many projects done, or these milestones and get that going.” And then you forget about the customer experience.

[00:12:00] Tim Wilbourn: Every company that’s out there, especially in the SaaS world, they do such a good job building relationships with customers, buying the trust to get them to buy your product. Very few products sell themselves. You’ve got to take some level of need. But then it’s like, OK, great. And we celebrate those wins. But then, do we celebrate the turnups? Celebrate the fact that this customer was so successfully implemented that they’ve only called in three times in 90 days, and the average is 10?

[00:12:09] Tim Wilbourn: No. And that’s where you’ve got to generate this and make sure that everybody understands where it’s at. And having a unified leadership team is key to that, because so many people are just focused. Their stock price is going down. Why is stock price going down? Go look at any earnings report that’s out there.

[00:12:24] Tim Wilbourn: It’s the first thing. They look at revenue, then free cash flow. Customers are how all of that happens. Flip it on its head. Think about it a little bit differently. How many customers have we implemented? What’s the revenue associated with that? And what are the success outcomes out of those?

[00:12:43] Steve MacDonald: It’s almost like there needs to be a vernacular that the entire company adopts. ‘Cause you’re right. Wall Street, what are they looking at? They’re looking at revenue. And the extension between, or the connective tissue between revenue and what you’re talking about, the successful onboarding…

[00:12:57] Steve MacDonald: Guess what? It’s less churn. Less churn means greater NRR. And there was a great study that Forrester did a couple of years ago that talked about how for organizations, 73% of new annual revenue, 73%, should be coming from existing customers. But we chase new logos like there’s no tomorrow.

[00:13:19] Steve MacDonald: But what you’re talking about is OKRs and KPIs that drive that NRR. Any good CEO or CFO should know our business. One of the number one KPIs should be NRR and reducing churn. ‘Cause then those are the customers that also have the highest NPS scores. They’re the ones that are gonna refer the most.

[00:13:41] Steve MacDonald: The impact on revenue beyond their contribution specifically in revenue beyond that is exponential. I love the way that you connected all that together. Now, the reality that we live in is that quarterly short-term focus gets reverberated all throughout the organization.

[00:14:05] Steve MacDonald: Talk to your CRO. If he’s not performing or she’s not performing on this quarter’s quota, there’s issues. And it’s the very first thing when you walk into the boardroom. Nobody is asking about customer experience. Nobody’s asking about any KPIs on customer experience. What they’re doing is they’re saying, “Hey, how are we doing on the quotas this quarter?

[00:14:22] Steve MacDonald: What does next quarter look like?” So how do we… This is where the disconnect happens. This is where the short-term focus impacts us as customer experience, customer support, and a lot of other departments, where we have an extraordinarily short tenure. And that’s the unfortunate truth.

[00:14:55] Steve MacDonald: The question is, what can we do to combat that if we know what we’re doing has significant contributions to revenue and growth in the business, but we’re not being credited for it?

[00:15:00] Steve MacDonald: And we’re not being given the time to put the programs into place. Like you said, you can’t just say to the customer, “Oh, we’re starting over again. It’s a new quarter.” You know? What do we do? What [00:15:07] Tim Wilbourn: Yeah. It comes down to being just relentlessly focused on the customer. And that’s easy to say—putting the customer at the forefront of it. But when you put the customer at the forefront of the board meetings, any advisory boards, anything like that that you do, it becomes this constant narrative in every interaction that you have.

[00:15:31] Tim Wilbourn: Whether it’s a one-on-one with a direct employee of yours or a presentation you’re giving to the whole team, town halls, or all-hands-type meetings, you’ve got to make sure that communication is there and what you’re doing is being reported. Yeah. I’ve had success in the past.

[00:15:49] Tim Wilbourn: I remember in previous roles, I oversaw the churn for the whole company. The company at that time was probably about 2,400 or 2,500 people globally. There were two people, me my boss and I, who had churn as a part of our compensation in the entire company. So, I sound like the village idiot going, we need to do this, we need to do that.

[00:16:11] Tim Wilbourn: Pitchforks and fire and everything, trying to make it happen. What I did was take a different approach. I started having those conversations. Every conversation I had—with product, with engineering, with support—didn’t matter what part of the business it was. Let me give you the why. Let me explain why I’m asking about this.

[00:16:32] Tim Wilbourn: Why am I saying this is here? Data doesn’t lie. You’ve got to make sure you have all your data in line. Here are the themes. Over three months, we’ve lost X number of customers or X dollars in customers. Here are their churn reasons. Here are their dissatisfaction reasons, whether it’s CSAT, DSAT, NPS, churn—whatever scoring. Pick up the phone, call the customers.

[00:16:54] Tim Wilbourn: It’s crazy how much you can get out of a customer when they’re out—already out of their contract or they’ve already left the business. They will just give you everything, whether you want to hear it or not. Also, at the same time, you’ve got to have thick enough skin to take the feedback.

[00:17:11] Tim Wilbourn: I think that’s also something a lot of people miss. “No, perfect. Our product doesn’t have any issues.” Your product is perfect for how—as you were saying earlier—the engineers built it, but did they take the customer’s ideology or thoughts into mind of how they’re going to actually use the product?

[00:17:29] Tim Wilbourn: You get into their customization, you get into all this that’s not scalable, that’s not long-term supportable. So everything’s got its give and take that you have to think about. But by making sure that you’re using that feedback and you’re sharing it, you can take things like myself being one of the two people in the entire company who had churn—next thing, pretty much every director-plus across the entire organization had churn as part of their metric. And we had quarterly business reviews that we were doing with executive levels where churn was becoming a household name.

[00:18:00] Tim Wilbourn: Then it became NPS was a household name. And customer experience became a household name. And it’s helping drive that. But it wasn’t just, “Hey, we have to put it in there and start at the top and move down.” It was this ground-level movement of explaining the why, and you start to see, “Okay, here’s where this goes, this is why.” And that methodology and that approach that I took—get a few people bought in, now they start speaking it, and it just grows and grows.

[00:18:30] Tim Wilbourn: I think one of my proudest moments as a leader was seeing those people that bought into my approach become extremely successful—both internally in the organization, but also externally at other companies. They grow and lead. And now you start to see this network of customer advocates that are just out there going, “Here’s how you do it, here’s what we have to do, and here’s how we’re gonna go.”

[00:18:53] Tim Wilbourn: And that’s one of the reasons I’m in the role I’m in today. We have a phenomenal opportunity in a company that’s growing extremely fast. I want to say our user base grew—I think we’ve had 2 million end users between when I started in June of last year and today. And it just keeps growing, and we’re just getting bigger.

[00:19:13] Tim Wilbourn: At the same time, that’s awesome. That means the product is there, the desire’s there, the appetite’s there. But do we have the teams set up to scale and grow? I’ve got leaders who take it to—use football terms—we’re gonna get you to the one-yard line. We’re gonna get you there.

[00:19:30] Tim Wilbourn: We are not gonna fumble it. Because if we fumble it on the one-yard line, that’s a problem. So you as a customer are going to be successful. There’s a part of this where the customer’s gotta take it over the goal line to be successful. But we make those people look like rock stars, and now all of a sudden that manager or whoever it is ends up looking like the superstar. They get promoted, and those are the stories I love to see. When you’re looking through LinkedIn, it’s, “Oh, so-and-so is now Senior Director or VP or CIO.” It’s like—we did our job.

[00:20:00] Steve MacDonald: I had envisioned a two-years-out press release that had this headline. So now you’ve got me thinking. I think you’ve forever changed the way that I’m thinking. And here’s the headline: Customer churn drops by 50% led by customer obsession.

[00:20:17] Steve MacDonald: If everybody in the organization had that focus, and you weren’t, like your analogy, one of two people in the entire organization that were even thinking about churn. Because when we’re compensated by something, that tends to drive our actions.

[00:20:32] Steve MacDonald: So, that’s one of my main takeaways—that any organization, that’s one of the biggest mistakes you’ll ever make. Churn should be one of the biggest KPIs that you’re looking at. So when you talked about making these other people rock stars, I would love to— we remember things so much better.

[00:20:47] Steve MacDonald: Twenty-two times better, actually—it came out of a Harvard Business School study—when we hear a story. Can you tell us a story about how CX is making rock stars out of the different departments and the department heads, and the people around that are your internal customers?

[00:21:04] Tim Wilbourn: Yeah, absolutely. One of my first hires in the CSM world was somebody who wanted to take a risk on me. They saw during the interview process that this could be a good fit. I liked the vibe and energy that I was getting here. This could be a great opportunity.

[00:21:20] Tim Wilbourn: This person was one of the first people that I hired. And we grew and we scaled, and we got it to a point where I actually took over a different department at that point. He kept going on the track there. I think we hired 18 CSMs to start. That team grew as high as 80, I believe, under his tenureship.

[00:21:41] Tim Wilbourn: But then it got to a point where that customer thread disappeared. You had different teams doing different things, and he was frustrated. But he had an opportunity to actually go to another company. It wasn’t in a role of, “Hey, let’s have you come in as a director, and here’s your team of 12, 13 people.”

[00:22:02] Tim Wilbourn: It was head of Customer Success globally. And it was one that—what I saw him do under my foliage—he learned a ton, but then he became his own person. I make mistakes. I’m the first person to tell you I’ll make mistakes. And there are times that I could go back to text messages, and we probably have some like, “Hey, you screwed up on this.”

[00:22:26] Tim Wilbourn: But I watched him go and take this company that was a COVID app, was the COVID darling, and it just went bonkers. Watching him grow—and then he’s actually now at another company after that success—because now he has that passion of coaching and mentoring and developing. That, it’s out there.

[00:22:49] Tim Wilbourn: People always ask, “Why do you do this?” If you say you do it for a paycheck, that’s secondary. The reason you do this and the reason you grow is for the people. It’s for being good in the world and helping drive change. And that’s where he is. We’re still good friends today.

[00:23:03] Tim Wilbourn: Actually, I had a chance to catch up with him last week. He’s in great spirits, and he’s now working in a completely different industry. That’s where I love to see it. And I’d love to be able to use names and all that stuff. I haven’t had the conversation with him, so I don’t want to embarrass him. But to see growth like that—and it’s not just him.

[00:23:21] Tim Wilbourn: I’ve seen it with other people. And when you have that focus and that approach, it’s not just finding a diamond in the rough. We’ve done it multiple times with multiple methods. I’ve got product leaders whom I just created relationships with, and we still, to this day, call ourselves the Diamond Dogs after Ted Lasso.

[00:23:45] Tim Wilbourn: But I had rules. I had two rules that if you worked for me, one was: you don’t piss off person number one. Second rule was: you don’t piss off number two. And the third rule was: learn from your mistakes.

[00:24:00] Tim Wilbourn: Simple as that. The reason that I had rule one and two in place was I need one to support the product and I need two to change the product—the roadmap—take the customer buy-in. So you treat those two people as if they are your parents, your family. With all the respect, you approach it the right way with: here are the details, here are the facts, and here’s what’s being asked.

[00:24:26] Tim Wilbourn: “This so that can fit into the roadmap.” We joke today, and that person—she has gone on—she’s now with a very large tech company in the Bay Area and overseeing the product there. But we still joke about it today. And I told her that whenever she retires, I’m sending her a plaque that has my three rules on it.

[00:24:45] Tim Wilbourn: Why are we doing that? We’re doing that because they control the roadmap that is going to impact the customer. But they’ve got to make sure that everybody understands why is the customer asking for this, how is it gonna be utilized, and how do we make sure it goes.

[00:25:01] Steve MacDonald: Because we’ve gone this far into the conversation, I want to ask a really important question while we have time to do it. And that is: you’ve had tremendous experience in large scaling environments, and you’re growing so much now. You were at RingCentral, so I want to know—how do you impart to us the lessons learned from going through that kind of scaling environment, and what should we know?

[00:25:28] Steve MacDonald: What should we have learned? What did you learn?

[00:25:32] Tim Wilbourn: The biggest one is: don’t be afraid to make mistakes. You’re going to make mistakes. When I was younger in my career, as I said, I went in as an individual contributor. And then it was like, “Hey, we have this idea. Would you like to help run this team?” So I’ve got all this kind of pressure on me of “Don’t mess up, Tim. Don’t make any mistakes.”

[00:25:50] Tim Wilbourn: And that was—it was like a fear-based approach. That is something that was… I think it held me back initially. And it wasn’t until I learned: you’re going to make mistakes. Now, there’s a difference though, between an unplanned mistake—that’s gonna happen—

[00:26:11] Tim Wilbourn: But hey, we’re gonna change how we’re approaching, let’s say, chat interactions with a customer, right? And then all of a sudden it creates an outage or an inability to execute your job for that customer. That should be planned. That should be reviewed. But a mistake happens, and then you ask yourself, why?

[00:26:31] Tim Wilbourn: Why did it happen? And if you’ve ever been in a situation where someone asks the “why” five times, it’s uncomfortable and it gets really tough. Have the ability to ask yourself that. Why am I doing this? Why is that gonna make an impact? How is that gonna make an impact?

[00:26:50] Tim Wilbourn: What am I gonna do if I have to change? What’s my exit strategy? Be afraid to make mistakes, but learn from them. And I’ve had plenty of opportunities in my life to do that. And I think that is how I also lead all of my employees. Look, you’re going to make mistakes. Just learn from it.

[00:27:05] Tim Wilbourn: If we have to have that conversation again, then it’s a little bit different, right? It’s the “can’t” versus “won’t.” Is it that you can’t do the job, or is it that you won’t do the job? Getting rid of that fear, because that also creates timidness in just how you approach it. If you don’t have the confidence, it’s how you’re talking, how you’re approaching it, and what you talk about that’s game over.

[00:27:27] Steve MacDonald: Yeah, you know, I keep thinking about this term psychological safety. If you don’t have the psychological safety to make a mistake, you’ll get paralyzed by the fear of making a mistake, and then you won’t experiment. You’re not gonna try new things. You’re not gonna innovate.

[00:27:42] Steve MacDonald: And so I have one last question, and this is the most important question of all that I’ve asked. Okay, so I didn’t wanna put too much pressure on you. But we’ve talked about so much. For the audience that is tuning into this, if there was one thing that you wanted them to take away, what would that one thing be?

[00:28:03] Tim Wilbourn: Build a true world-class team that scales, that puts the customer at the heart of it. You must ensure that you understand your employees. I think that today, many people also view it as “I’m simply an employee of X company,” and it’s a transactional relationship. If you look at things like CSAT as transactional versus NPS, that’s a relationship. You have to have that relationship with your employees, so that they understand the why and they get bought into the why, and they go the extra mile. You’ll see a happier employee base, happier teams, and you’ll see teams that understand that this is a good place, a place where you can innovate and make mistakes. Because it’s not going to be a, “Oh, did that wrong, slap on the hand. Oh, you did that wrong again. You’re done.” ‘Cause we are in a world today where the tenure of CX leaders is very short. It is not long. And because of that, we’ve to make an impact quickly, but you also have to lay the foundation for the long term, so you can show little changes and improvements as we go.

[00:29:19] Tim Wilbourn: You can’t do that on your own. As we said earlier, the scaling that I have seen, I had great teams behind me, and I had great leaders behind me, and I had great people who still, to this day, I consider great friends and mentors, and still talk to them constantly.

[00:29:37] Tim Wilbourn: And not about the good old days, but more about, “Hey, what are you doing now and how are you going?” And, “Help, here’s guidance. Here’s how I would approach it, or here’s how you could help.” We do that quite often. Take from it that you’ve got to understand your employees, and they’ve gotta be bought into it.

[00:29:53] Tim Wilbourn: ‘Cause if you’ve got them behind you and they’re not looking at this as simply a transactional, “I get a paycheck every two weeks and then I’m done,” if they actually see the vision and the end goal, you’re gonna be in a much better place to make the changes long term.

[00:30:08] Steve MacDonald: One of many things you just said there, that you stay in touch and you talk with folks that you’ve worked with before, and you learn from them. What are you doing now? What are the challenges? What are you trying? That’s the goal. That’s the mission of this podcast, is to bring executives from all over the industry to come and share what’s worked, what hasn’t.

[00:30:29] Steve MacDonald: What have we tried? How have we failed? How are the latest challenges today, whether it’s the short tenure or what do we do, right? Those are the kind of things. We don’t talk enough to our peers. We just don’t. I just wanted to say thank you today. I think you contributed to the mission of the podcast and the education of your entire peer community in phenomenal ways, and so I just wanted to say thank you for that.

[00:30:53] Tim Wilbourn: Of course, you’re very welcome. And I guess the parting thought that I’d leave it with is be afraid to ask for help. And that, I think, is one of the things that holds everybody back, especially in the leadership world. ‘Cause you’re looked at as the person to go fix it.

[00:31:08] Tim Wilbourn: And there’s times where you may have to say, “Hey, you know what? I don’t know that I know how to. Can you help me? Or what would also make you successful?” I appreciate the opportunity to be on the call, help spread the word, and continue the mission.