Jeff is joined by one of his closest mentors, Mark Holland. Mark was Jeff's manager at Endeca and helped shape many formative ideas with his background at Accenture. Since then, Jeff and Mark worked together at Brightcove, and then Mark ran one of the largest communities in the world at Applause. Tons of best practices covered here!

Transcript:

Jeff  00:11

All right, it's Jeff Kushmerek. So very excited to bring the latest episode to you. This is with Mark Collins. So anybody who knows me, they were like probably like, Marco, I'm gonna be the podcast. So Mark was my boss. And then we work together Brightcove and just been one of my mentors all along this path here. And he's been at just a remarkable number of places that have had fantastic exits from we had in DECA and Brightcove and applause and now he's at toasts. Helping them scale internally was a lot of the things that we learned along the way that we talked about in this episode. So I was just went back and listened to it. And we went through just so many topics, from growing understaffed groups to growing to x in six months and how to structure and set up the best way to interview people when you have to hire like to x as many people. Also, how did you serve his organization to have 400,000, crowdsourced independent contractors, we just hit the hit the gamut of things. But also we went into some of the deep metrics. We talked about margin a lot and fixed proposals and how to make those successful as well, too. So hope you enjoy marks awesome, and really happy to bring this up. All right, I'm here with Mark Holland, longtime friend, boss, co worker,

Mark Holland  02:35

subordinate.

Jeff  02:38

I want to say that, but so I'm so glad you got on. On this. I know we've had some scheduling issues. But this is this is the one I've been wanting to have for a while because I wanted to get in depth on some ops. And I always remembered just for people listening to like, Mark was the guy who sort of expose me to all of the math that goes into professional services. Before I've worked with Mario, I was like, Oh, I'm gonna go over here. I'm gonna manage this project. And then I'm gonna go over here. And then then you started mentoring me like so. Right? So you know, this 20,080 hours in a way you just?

Mark Holland  03:13

Yeah, that math thing, since two tends to work out pretty well, actually.

Jeff  03:17

Exactly. So before we get into a little bit history, I was gonna start into this when we weren't recording, but I just love to hear what you're doing now over toast, which is the other massive in deca, unicorn that's, that's going on now. Yeah, sure.

Mark Holland  03:32

Yeah. So I'm, I'm still working on the title. But I'm a VP of CS excellence. So I have three functions that I'm responsible for. One is the education side of things. So not only training our customers, but also internal education. Separate from our whole learning and development team, which we have a pretty large one there as well, you and are talking before we get started is that we have a new start class today and tell us something like 110 people in the last month, right, which is just mind boggling. So we have a whole group of folks that are focused on getting them up and running. But you know, I also have what we call enablement, which is for customer success, our customer success team is about 500 people, and we're looking to grow to about 750 By the end of the year. Wow. Yeah, it's, it's the scale is is

Jeff  04:21

really impressive. And if people were looking to tell us they want to know like, why and it there's a lot of local markets, right? It's it's enabling, actually, I don't want to take too much because my vision of the company is two years old. So I

Mark Holland  04:33

just finished my responsibilities. I have an enablement function. So we need to hire about 250 more people into CES, we need to make sure that they're up and running and functioning and productive as quickly as possible. And then the third one I have is what we call CS strategic operations. And that's their twofold pieces. That one is to act as sort of the product manager relating to the Business Systems team internally, as we tried to get you know, Salesforce and other tool sets up and running as as well as the data analytic side where all that math live. So yeah, so those are the three functions that I have. So it's an internal support role for, for the CS team. It's run by Emanuel scholar who was one of the index alums. So she's the SVP of CS. And given the scale and everything that we have to do, you know, the roll that I'm coming into, which wasn't here before, decided to put it together to make sure that we as a company, as we have goals, to scale to 2300 by the end of the year, and continue to double in revenue for the next five years, that we have somebody who can help drive that forward.

Jeff  05:33

I mean, it makes sense, because if you remember over adult beverages, we were talking and then she was like, maybe like a chief of ops person or something. I'm like, Yeah, I know who your

Mark Holland  05:47

dose is unique in certainly my experience, because it basically focuses almost completely on SMB. And so as you know, you know, throughout my career, I spent a lot of time on the enterprise side, in fact, came into a plus to build out that enterprise practice. And, and so what we do is we sell to individual restaurants, and we do have an enterprise restaurant and focus for some of the larger accounts, Jamba Juice is one of our biggest customers. In the end, we sell to, you know, a mom and pop and one and two and three restaurants kind of customers. And so we have about 17,000 of them. And we're looking to that only represents about three and a half percent of the overall US market for restaurants. So there's a lot of, you know, market acquisition focus here in terms of trying to drive a lot more restaurants into the pipeline and become customers. And so the CES team, one of the reasons why we're as big as we are, is because we the other unique thing about toasters that we sell both hardware and software. And so you know, the devices that we have on the floor, you know, we have to get them installed, we have to wire them, we have to set up Wi Fi access points. So our biggest team is the services team. And they have a large responsibility around getting the physical location set up and running, because as soon as they go live, that's when we start generating revenue.

Jeff  07:00

Yep, yep. No, I remember that. I was in there, like two years ago and talking and you're basically walking up to a barista and asking her to set up like, like an Android operating system, or like, at the time was like, you know, and then maybe set up your own access points. So yeah, that's

Mark Holland  07:17

it's a bit more full service, and certainly a lot more mature, two years later. But yeah, it's it's definitely a different shift for me, but it's, it's very

Jeff  07:27

cool. Oh, great. It's great. So I know, it's it may be funny, you know, switching into some other subjects after that, but you did have a deep professional services background. And, and I wanted to touch into a little bit that and you know what, I'm gonna switch off video because there's seems to be a little bit of latency just so I don't want to Sure, no problem. Yeah, I mean, that's just for us to see each other. But we've certainly seen plenty of each other over the years. So I my background was I always knew you as a you were an extension, right? And that's where you weren't like a lot of these professional services chops. Did you come straight out of school and go into a management consulting or one just help me out with that?

Mark Holland  08:09

Sure. Yeah. No, I graduated a while ago. And the economy was not the most open to unmotivated college students. That was I was as a senior. So I didn't do a lot of preliminary job search before I graduated. And then so I'm sitting there in the summertime going, well, maybe we should find a job. And actually the first job I went to work for my fraternity, college fraternity, the national organization. I was going to do that as a sort of quick six months, one year stint and get out into the real world, and ended up getting promoted into as what did we call the director of Chapter Chapter services role. And I learned more about liability and leadership and a couple of three, four years than I ever had, because one of my main jobs was to go around and tell a bunch of college students that they couldn't have taken anymore because it was too dangerous. So I learned a lot about conflict management and some of those other things. So I did that for about four years, and I moved back to Boston and then I started Accenture. About six or nine months after I moved back to Boston. I'm from here originally, so did that for about two years. It was you know, the classic road warrior. I was down in lovely Woonsocket Rhode Island, working for CBS. And we were putting in three major systems for them. I was the business intelligence developer. So I worked with MicroStrategy and built probably one of the first reasonably large commercial data warehouses.

Jeff  09:29

It's still running actually,

Mark Holland  09:32

I don't know they kicked us out after a couple of years. I wasn't there anymore, but ours was the more successful as the three there's a whole strategy thing around promos and another one around pricing. So you know, it is what it is. Those kind of projects are big and unwieldy. But I decided that it was time to move back to Boston permanently when one of my good friends asked me if I still live there. So I was living in Cleveland, five days a week working for Bridgestone airstone and at that point, I'm like, Well, you know, if my friends don't think I still live here, it's time for me to come back. So I went over to epsilon up in Burlington, and did a bunch of business development or sorry, business intelligence development there, in Cognos and in business objects. And then from there, started my started my high growth venture backed companies where they wanted to call the E price over in Framingham, which was a rural based content company. We went public in 2001, right before the tech crash, so good that we had money in the bank, bad that the market went down the toilet, so and then went over, we got there was a bunch of other things that got bought, but then went over to in Dhaka, where I met you, and had a great run there, a lot of fun. Three and a half years, you know, did a bunch of different things around North America, what we call consulting, we changed it in we we went from customer solutions to consulting, it was professional

Jeff  10:58

services. I remember, I remembered consulting in the end, because of some interesting meetings that we had.

Mark Holland  11:05

I think I still have a vest that says consulting on it. Right? So you're right.

Jeff  11:11

Yes, I have the same one somewhere. Yeah. Yeah, that's right. Actually,

Mark Holland  11:17

that was an awesome run. But yeah,

Jeff  11:18

yeah, good. You know, and then we're at break COVID. Actually, I love talking about that little group that we're a part of for a year. And this might get into the ops conversation a little bit more. But when I tell people about what you were able to sort of pull together in the team, and what we did for sort of scaling the group out, people were like, I can't believe that you guys were allowed to do that as an a good thing, like not many people. Yeah. So I'd love for, you know, get into the genesis of that. And, and sort of what our goal, what our mandate was, and sort of what we're able to kind of accomplish in a year there.

Mark Holland  11:57

Sure. Yeah. So so we had a transition in leadership, when from Xander Mark graves, and, you know, in that throughout that, Mark, wanted to run the actual business that I had been shepherding in between the transition. And we talked about, you know, a good opportunity, you know, as we grew to build an internal function that would allow us to scale, right, because we were part of what we worked through. Before regs got there was working with Papa, he is the Papa, the CEO, he helped us realize that we were drastically understaffed for what we need to accomplish, both currently. And in the future. And I think I still have a slide somewhere where we basically overlaid a 10% uplift on everything that we were doing, because we needed that many more people. So in support of that, knowing that we're going to need to grow rather large, right, man, I think we're probably 40 or 45, and had to grow to 100 or 120. And something like six months, you know, we needed to put a bunch of stuff in the place everything from career ladders to you know, the work that you did, in terms of, you know, you were one of the first people to put agile in place, right? In terms of how we go and deliver things back in, you know, 10 years ago, plus, we also had Nile with the partner piece. And that was a big component, right? Because our solution was so technical, we had to be able to enable these partners to go out and be successful, because we just didn't literally didn't have the capacity. And then there's the various infrastructure, so everything from standardized and PayScale to, you know, career ladders, and hiring. So hiring, I think, you know, what you and I talked about this, this was, this is a really interesting, you know, thing that worked out tremendously well, in retrospect, but one of the things we were starting to see, because it was such a high velocity, we had so many people to go through, we'd set up these these two, two times a week, things were actually going through real physical resumes, resumes. And so we started to get people, you know, we were, we were a story company, certainly at the time, and you know, people wanted to come work for us, but we start to get people to reject us. And so, you know, we did a smart thing, which is actually go talk to them and ask them why it is that, you know, they weren't there more coming on board. And the theme that started to show up, which was, you know, I felt like the process was a little disorganized. And I felt like everybody was asking me the same question. And I didn't get a good sense of, you know, what it was like to work here, right? It's just dependent on the people. And so I remember from, you know, our perspective, in terms of being there going to interview, everybody is so busy that, you know, you'd literally say, oh, you know, I got to reading the resume walking into the room, or I'm reading it sitting down across the candidate, right? It not a great experience for them. Obviously, not prepared, but you know, everything's going a million miles a minute. So we got together a few of us internally and said, How could we improve this process? And so, you know, the end result was we created a persona based interviewing process and we also the other thing that they complained about was that was taking too long to get an offer. So we set the goal is we want to be able to turn around and offer that day. Not If it all worked out, well wasn't always able to do so. But that was the goal. It's either an offer or walk to the elevator early, right? Yeah, well, we can get to that part too. So yeah, so what we did is we said, Okay, listen for the role, we want to have two peers, two people doing that job currently talk to them. And we also we had, you know, project managers and technical resources. So we'd have somebody who has a compliment, right? So if you're interviewing for a job, we talked to two project managers, and one of the technical folks, and then the hiring manager was the last person. And so in order to prevent that, people asking all the same questions, we've prepared a set of behavioral interview questions for each persona. And so what we did was we said, Persona one is going to look at this aspect of, of the of the candidate in terms of whether it's culture fit or skill set, or what have you. And the other thing we felt we needed to do was sell the culture, right, because we thought it was something that was really powerful. You know, to this day, people still talk about how great it was. So going in and be able to say, Hey, listen, I want you to sell on, you know, I can, of course, remember the values of the moment, but you know, I want you to sell on, you know, whatever particular culture value was. And what we did was that each of those personas do different things, right. So they, So collectively, we'd get the whole view of the candidate. And they'd get a good view of what, what DECA represents. So the other thing that that you alluded to, which I thought was pretty important, because we were so busy and so much going on, and we had such an a huge amount of throughput, that we wanted to give everybody the ability to basically call the ball and say, Hey, listen, this, this person is not going to work. And, and let him know. Right? So, you know, I think we didn't do that terribly often, you know, maybe five or twice. Yeah, you know, if somebody walks in, and they haven't done any research on us, they don't know anything about us, you know, chances are, if they're not going to do that, they're not going to do that when they go to talk to a customer. And that's the bad news for everybody. So, but I think that was I think that was great for the folks doing the interviews, because when it really limited their prep time, right? They were able to walk we actually had we handed folders to people and said your persona three, and here's the list question your culture. Exactly. Here's the cultural one that you need to look at. And, you know, I think it worked out well. And, you know, it showed I think in the results, our goal was to hire 40 People in the in depressional services and consulting in six months, and we hired 32. And we had no duds like that was that was probably the most impressive thing on the back end, which was looking at the quality of folks that we hired, it was really high.

Jeff  17:28

So absolutely, and overall, is really successful. And we're fighting up against, you know, Google Microsoft, like we're, you know, we're dealing with a lot of MIT grads, you know, people who had a lot of people wanting to hire them and everything. So that was that was pretty amazing. Yeah,

Mark Holland  17:45

yeah, it was very competitive environment that no doubt. Yeah.

Jeff  17:49

So. So then we, you know, we, we, we had bright Cove and then and then a pause. But I sort of said, Yeah, I know, we spent some time walking through a couple of those those jobs already, I had a couple things that sort of concepts that we were discussing beforehand on the Google Doc. And one of them, maybe there's a good way to talk about breakover. And we're going to bring it in with the points that you just brought up. I use the term on an island when you're on a service. And you're like, What do you mean? Like, you know, I said, you know, well, I felt we were pretty standalone at Breitkopf. Like, we're our own organization. And we even had our own, like technology, infrastructure and everything. versus sort of, you know, very different situation within deca, and you just kind of summarize it up a lot better than I could. So just just some views of of, you know, we've got sales we've got, we've got very coupled organizations with sales and marketing and finance teams and engineering teams. And just sort of what your perspective was seeing that at indeco, which was very much professional license sticking on a server versus bright Cove, which was, you know, a SAS base thing, and then then your apply situation.

Mark Holland  19:10

Yep. So I think, I think a lot depends on on the overall solution that you're selling, right? Because invariably, you know, there's not a lot of true SAS out there where, you know, you're just buying software and never touch the thing again, right. So, you know, at indeco You're right, it was perpetual. So it was a little bit, not perfectly apples to apples, but I remember very clearly, you know, sales, have part of it had to do with their comp, but sales, you know, tried to minimize as much of the technical sorry, of the professional services component of it. But in the end, the right mix was about two to one, right. So software was, you know, two thirds of the overall deal. And services was about 1/3. Right. And that's pretty high, right? So it was a super complex solution. And in some cases, that obviously is very good. But you know, that it is what it is. It's rare, I think, you know, there were times were over indexed and under in the sales team, certainly under indexed on a few. But you know, we had tremendous success in doing so. But it was a very technical complex solution. Whereas, you know, breco, it was very complex on the back end, but it was, it was much more true SAS than, than anything. And the themes, let you know, I think our team for the for we were public company in 2012, I think our service team was only 21 or 22 people, right? And we're doing things like, you know, player customizations, and video, things like that,

Jeff  20:33

let me just put an asterisk, we weren't allowed to hire, that's meant to pass a lot of revenue along, because you don't want to distort the balance of your, your revenue stream,

Mark Holland  20:44

the optic can't have?

Jeff  20:46

Yeah, well, because you'll look like a really big complex needs tons of professional services, which really wasn't we were just really good at building these experiences. And the break of aspects was like, Okay, we're just gonna drop this code in here, and then we're gonna build up the rest of this stuff, but because

Mark Holland  21:04

engineering teams credit to, you know, they did a pretty good job of getting it to the point where customers could adopt it with very little help from us. Right. So, you know, I think it was much more along the, along the sort of SAS promise in terms of the model and the ability to go. And there are certainly if you want to do something, you know, completely crazy want to fly in things from the side. So you can buy it in the middle of a catwalk, right? No, we did that. Right. So that makes sense. You probably can't figure that out on your own, you know, but, you know, we as the experts in the organization were there, but it was, like said much smaller and, and I think you're right, we were almost more responsible for our own revenue than anything else, which were in a DECA we were, we were sold as a package, right. And then at applause, it's sort of, it's almost completely different. It is a SaaS platform, I joke, it was services, that software rather than services. But you know, in the end, what we were doing was is crowdsource testing. And that's a very unique kind of thing. And so there are a huge number of dynamics, especially on the people side with, with testers around the world, we had 400,000 people around the world who are independent contractors that helped us deliver the the testing results for our customers, everything from incentive models, to cultural differences, there's a huge component to managing that crowd incentive models, you know, in a way that these people don't, aren't on salary, if I need them to do something, I can't say be in your seat and do it, I have to find incentives for them to do it. And it's not always money, but it's often money. So we, we as a team, really, you know, sort of built that, that muscle memory and the ability to handle different situations. And it really didn't lend itself to a self serve model. And in fact, we had lots of conversations internally at applause around self service. And, you know, one of the things I got back, or the learnings I heard from being, you know, on the front lines was that almost never did anybody say, Oh, I really wish I could do it myself. There were there were certainly a handful of 20 or 30. Guys that, you know, were QA folks in an emerging market kind of startup under 25 kind of thing, who needed to maintain the control, but for the most part, everybody's perfectly happy turning it over to us. They deliver their requirements to us, and then we'll go and execute form and deliver the results. So that's what a lot of people want, especially if you're, you know, QA manager or QA director, you know, under the gun with not enough resources, you're, you're happy to get stuff off your plate and hand it off to somebody else, as long as the results come back the way you want them to,

Jeff  23:35

ya know, it's a fascinating model to especially the I'm sure it wasn't the easiest to sleep at sometimes when they're not your employees, but yet you need you need to deliver, like a company expects an enterprise solution to deliver on.

Mark Holland  23:50

Yeah, I mean, it. So one of the yeah, there's a whole lot of interesting sides on the on the on the model, but we'd sell unlimited testing. And when I walked in the door, I was like, this seems to be a pretty big business risk. And it's talking to the CEO is like, No, it really hasn't proven out to be and there are a bunch of reasons, a lot of which is you know, enterprise customers don't have a ton of velocity, typically in terms of delivering new applications and websites. So there's this sort of process pause and in each of these large accounts, so there's not like they're gonna they're gonna,

Jeff  24:23

it's like a yellow sticker, right? Also, it's free, but nobody uses it. Exactly.

Mark Holland  24:28

There are two customers that that did break the model. You're in my favorite from Bronco Viacom, so

Jeff  24:37

I just got more Greg

Mark Holland  24:41

shiver there.

Jeff  24:43

My hotel I just was in New York City as you know, my hotel was right next door to

Mark Holland  24:47

Oh god. Oh, yeah. That was quite a quite an entertaining customer. So yeah, so So those guys broke us but you know, it was only a month long project. And then the one other customer And basically, all they wanted to do was no matter what they always wanted to do a full regression test across a pretty complex, large internal facing some. And they literally had 3000 bugs in the back. And we'd like, Listen, you know, we know about these bugs, you know, we don't want to report them. Because whenever a tester would find a bug, we have to pay them on it. And they're like, no, no, no, we want to see every single bug. And so when we asked them, they said, well, because we want to see if anything changed. But it had nothing to do with things that they were trying to change, they just want to see if something changed, because it sends them code updates they did. So that was the other customer. So we decided to part ways, but for the most part, it's a very, you know, the company is doing great. Yeah, got bought by partners about a year and a half ago for a nice sum of money. And you know, they continue to excel in doing some really cool stuff. That is an interesting model and company.

Jeff  25:49

Yeah, no, it's great. I mean, they obviously found a good niche. Because before that, I remember I was using like this random five person shop in San Fran before they came along. So

Mark Holland  25:58

yeah, I think it's a couple things happened really interesting there. One is, they started in 2008. And that was, you know, when when the when the markets were in the toilet, and things were not going well. So what you know, what do companies do, they start to cut QA, right. So they were able to step into the, into the gap there. And then you know, the Smartform, phone, smartphone ubiquity is really what made a massive difference for the company. Because, you know, sure, you could be able to test the website by yourself in your lab, no problem. But what about, you know, just the Android fracturing alone, between all the devices and all the different operating systems. With one point, we were showing a slide, I think, in 2012, or 13, that had something like 1200, different Android intersections of Android OS versions and devices. And it's probably, you know, it's geometrically more complex at this point. So the nice thing there is that, you know, we have all these people with these devices around the world, you can test them what we call in the wild that no corporation could ever figure out how to do, because it's just the scale of it was massive.

Jeff  26:59

That's great. That's great. Hey, so I'm gonna switch gears, I'll just try and do something. Let's see if I can bring two concepts together, it might not work. But let's see if we can do it. I've got a graph in my mind, right? of concepts. On one graph, we have sort of the the standards as you how you run, you basically like your operating metrics for a professional services organization. Right. So we I think we all know what those are. However, you brought up an interesting concept that I'd love to be like, the other axis on the graph, which is maturity of the organization. Right, right, because you do a lot of stuff when you're closer to the corner, than when you start sort of going up into the up into the right.

Mark Holland  27:43

Yep. Yeah, I think, yeah. So you know, the, the various companies that I've been part of in terms of high growth, I've been employee about 75 225, you know, it's a totally different animal, but, you know, helped grow it to 300 to 500. And, you know, we had our exits. And, you know, I think, you know, right, in the various times, we went from embraco, for example, not worrying about, you know, the cost of the team in terms of delivering for the professional services side of things to worrying about it, right. So, starting to pay attention to those kinds of metrics and putting in a resourcing tool and things like that. So yeah, I think as companies evolve, right, especially if they, you know, call it 100, person level, even 150, it's kind of do what it takes, right? In the end, it's, it's clearly accepted that the professional services organization as a cost center, you know, the goal is to really, you know, often fill the gaps for where product isn't also where the customers are pushing it, right. So getting out on the bleeding edge of things. So in the end, you know, you value things like creativity, and, you know, creative problem solving, and, you know, the true GSD, right, to get an approach. Absolutely. And nobody cares, right? Because, you know, at this point, you're not that big, sure your cost center, but the whole idea is to drive, you know, a level of software adoption, or SAS adoption, because that's where the revenue comes from. As however time goes on, people start looking at that cost center starts to get bigger. And of course, when it starts to get bigger than the finance team starts looking and says, Well, how can we reduce these costs because we're either driving towards an IPO or some sort of other kind of liquidity event? And so we need to be able to, you know, to your point you alluded to earlier, which is it Listen, we need to look less like a services company and more like a SaaS company, because there are those commonly accepted, you know, percentage metrics that says, services should never be more than x percent of overall headcount. Because otherwise, it's, it's not the promise of SAS. Right. Right. So, you know, moving through that, then, you know, the first thing was funny when I went into applause, I started talking about margin day one, because I knew at some point we'd get there and I wanted to start getting it in people's heads and I think it's also a good probably the best metric to look at as a leader.

Jeff  29:55

It was a day right? So this project cost us are we paying the customer to do it? are

Mark Holland  30:00

right. And so so looking at margin just start to build that in to the mentality but of the team's just so they knew it wasn't it was a good gauge to you could you know as a way to evaluate the team and their their ability to deliver effectively? If you look at that in concert in context with NPS? You know, our Do you have folks that are driving good NPS and high margins? You know, those are those are the people that you want to hang your hat on. And so those that aren't doing those either sacrificing one for the other, you know, there's there's learning opportunities there. So I do think it shifts and then, you know, at a pause when I was just left, and you know, the focus really now is, and this is part of the private equity playbook is they bought applause and they want to make it more efficient. So they can turn around and sell it somebody else in three to five years, right? So there's a lot of EBIT, focus, and all that. So the cost component, the margin component of, of our projects is, you know, very much at the forefront of everybody's perspective, right, they So on my way out, we were talking about ways to improve margin, which are very high for what we're doing. Another four full points, right across $100 million dollar business that's not insubstantial. Right. So. Yeah, yeah. But that's, you know, the journey when I got there was nobody even used the term margin. Right. And we just did it right. And over six years, we go from 17 million to 101. And, you know, now the sudden margins are, you know, the end all the bill. So, yeah, the maturity definitely does change things. And the makeup of the teams too.

Jeff  31:33

Yeah, it's funny, because now because I have them all listed out in front of me, right, but they all roll up to margin. Right. They're all they're all factors that go into it right project over on billable utilization, you know, annual revenue, per employee, and per billable consultant, you know, those all, you know, those just become lower on your margins.

Mark Holland  31:54

Yeah, I think if you look at like, you know, the billable utilization thing always kind of drove me nuts, probably because, you know, two years of having a beat in my head at Accenture, but you know, that's an individual productivity measure, right. And, you know, when collectively as a team, you're going to, you're going to build it, you know, the question is, how much? How much output are you getting for your cost, your cost is relatively fixed. So that's what that's trying to address. It's just, you know, not my favorite one. And I remember somebody, somebody's executor that you and I both know who we had it into the bonus piece, and he maximized on on that particular piece of it, to make sure he got paid, and I'm not gonna blame him. Right. That's how the incentive structure is set up. So yeah, I mean, it's, it is what it is, but it's, it's, it's not a great one. But you're right, I think everything does lead back to margin, because in the end, that's what people are gonna look at when you look at companies reporting, you know, in the public markets, there's always margin on the service side, every single time, right, that is a good gauge of the health of the business.

Jeff  32:53

Yeah, it's so interesting. And all the different factors you can play with, but just now just really talking about it getting into it is that margin aspect of things. What you said the Accenture thing, what was your you built your your expected percentage where you're like the 90%? Clip or higher?

Mark Holland  33:11

How about 200%?

Jeff  33:12

Are you

Mark Holland  33:16

expected but instead of what project fewer, but we were working 80 hour weeks? There? Yeah, no great to be 25. Again, working 80 hour weeks, the joke was we'd spend 40 hours coding things. And then the next 40 hours fixing the bugs from last week, because we were so tired working the last day there are we? Yeah, so So the targets, there were 100%, you know, at least and, you know, they weren't going to ding you if you're under it. But you know, they managed it very aggressively. And, you know, every every hour that you spent, they were making, you know, especially for folks that were entry folks like us, you know, they're making probably charged out at 150 bucks an hour and not paying us anywhere close to that. So we wanted to maximize that. And again, it's a good model, right? There were literally billions and billions of dollars in doing so. And you know, the customers often get a lot of value from them. There's, there's ones that don't like that, like that hurts the buckle, but you know, take the good with the bad and

Jeff  34:13

yeah, that hurts one's interesting. I think I told the last president, I want to do like a, like a panel on that one. Because I do feel like when you get that much into the whole, like, the customer has got to have some, like, you know what I mean?

Mark Holland  34:27

Yeah, I mean, come on. Now, you know, I think center probably, you know, based on, you know, it's just an article so who knows what really

Jeff  34:32

happened? And well, there's a couple now that are out. But yeah,

Mark Holland  34:35

I mean, I'm sure that Accenture could have, you know, handles a little bit differently. But yeah, ever they also there is a method to their madness, right?

Jeff  34:44

If you do totally want to get deep into it. Like if you go back to that article, all the gold is in the comments because I think Do you remember what well there was a certain article that came out and then just became like the place where everybody talks about a certain company or at like, that's how I feel like but that article turned Yeah, So what can we be talking about? Yeah, so don't want to take that on too often. So now I don't feel so bad about like a 70% utilization number of Reiko, like, Hey guys, can you just do 7%? Like, and then because you didn't get admin time you have company meeting times, and then I'm trying to give some of the other activities that we that we would do, right? We would be part of like, hey, like Brandon's on the advertising scrum team, because we're the experts in implementing advertising, right? So we can, yes, and this is that what a what a massive change. We have about I think, like, 85% here. But it's, it's we are very low for the people who are billable to that we were just not a meeting heavy to have a company so so that it all works out. People are like, Oh, my God. 85%. So, yeah.

Mark Holland  35:57

Again, it's a lot depends what you're trying to dry. Right? So I think we're just more than anything, just trying to build the muscle. You know, hey, listen, how do we move away from being a doctor cost center? To a smaller one? Right. And so I think that, you know, 70% is, you know, I don't know if it's humane, but it's, you know, it's achievable. And, you know, in a place like toast, you know, I don't know, if you could get anywhere close to something like that, because of the number of meetings that we have so depends, right, I'm, I'm in a lot of things that, you know, individual contributors wouldn't be, but regardless, you know, there's, again, I don't love that metric much at all. But it is a good gauge of individual productivity, but also, it can be gained. That's one of the reasons why I don't

Jeff  36:42

like Yeah, I do feel like when you get pulled into a fix situation, like, you know, hey, we want you to come here and fix our professional service, kind of like, that's, that's one of the ones that just like, we need to get over this number and new, so you have to reverse engineer and find out all the things that are broken along the way to kind of kind of get there.

Mark Holland  37:01

I don't know how much how much 60 stuff you do but fix, you know, if you're getting good, you know, I think you and I did get good at doing fixed proposals. If you can get away from that hourly build stuff, then then that the pressure on the billable hourly utilization piece goes at least gets reduced, because you've done a decent job of scoping what it looks like, and there's there's literally no incentive to overbill like the deal. The reason why I don't like straight line Bill stuff is because the incentive is always to you know, to go over, right? Because you get charging by the hour. So

Jeff  37:33

yeah, it was interesting for a while. So, you know, my preference is always to do that, like, here's your reference implementation, and then we're gonna go redo like the pages situation, right? Like, here's, here's a package, slap a logo on it, and you know, it might have cost us 70k The first time to do it internally, but we're just going to bang it out for 40k, you know, 100 more times and get high rep. Like, that's great. That's great. And we did

Mark Holland  37:58

that a couple times. You remember what we refer to and what Sondra used to refer to a mess.

Jeff  38:03

No, but I should ask him he's right around the corner from

Mark Holland  38:06

we need to go build a toaster. Right? That's right. I need to make toast I need to put you know put stuff in and have toast come out. Okay, find ironic now that I'm at a place called toast.

Jeff  38:18

Yes. Oh, yeah. That's crazy. i Wow. Great memory on that one.

Mark Holland  38:23

Yeah, no, that we did that both of them DECA and it Bronco, right, I think, you know, if you want to, that's absolutely one way to drive better margins is to, especially when you know, when the customers are asking for it is to go out and build, you know, sort of pre pre call it a predefined solution, like we did with the video portal allows you to customize certain things and you know, include that either in the price or they can charge them for for for those customizations. But in the end, they get good value, they get much better speed. And we get good things out of it too. So I absolutely think that's

Jeff  38:56

a great way. It was always great, because, you know, I always we actually had three of the pages in the in the sales stuff, right? Where we had, here's your thing, you're gonna stick a logo on here. And I'm like, Yeah, you know, this is great, right? But if you're talking to the really big media properties and everything, or like, you know, you know, you want to be better.

Mark Holland  39:13

That's not what we were building it for. Right? You know, right? You want to totally custom solution. Great. Let's, let's talk right, we were happy to do that, too.

Jeff  39:21

Exactly. Then you want to get your teams working on those types of things, right? Like I'd rather have like Jesse and those guys at the time, working on these really great, fantastic experiences, and then have these like, either either, you know, newer employees or partners, you know, just to get that signal to noise ratio outside of the organization. So your group can really work on these things. So it's like, hey, people need breakover they need a portal, or deck or whatever. Here's something that you can basically load the data in and slap a logo on and you're good to go. So these guys are gonna go do it for you. And we're gonna go work on that like two year plus, we're gonna put your video on X boxes. and stuff like that, like, yes. 8020 rule, right? Yeah. Yeah, good stuff. Hey, so I got I wanted to talk to tools, but just because I needed to talk about the spreadsheet. I closed my eyes and I still see it.

Mark Holland  40:14

I know I have this very vivid memory of being in the meeting. I can't remember what flirt was in the in the 55. Cambridge Parkway, or I believe so for the fifth floor. Yeah, just going in there and just know as a floor fifth was all the people in the room and just like, and sitting there for an hour going through every single one of it. I was like me, and you have Rene and Diana and Jack and and then people from products and people from engineering and people. Yeah, it's just yeah.

Jeff  40:41

Exactly. Yeah. So

Mark Holland  40:42

the spreadsheet that Jeff referring to is how we used to, well, there's one or two of them. There's one of them is staffing spreadsheet, but the one he's referring to here is around addressing any kind of outstanding complaints, right, is that which one? Are we

Jeff  40:57

talking about? Both of both of them? Because I do feel like for a while they were tabs on?

Mark Holland  41:01

I think so maybe you're right. Yeah, cuz we had to go. Yeah, I think you're right, right. We used to color anyway,

Jeff  41:07

the color coding Exactly.

Mark Holland  41:09

Oh, this one's for traveling. And this one again? Here I am on PTO. So yeah, so we had this big spreadsheet. And it was fine when we were probably what 25 and 30. And then when we started get to that, but we've literally, you know, scheduled people's days, because five days in the week. And there's also like, I think you said a tab on it. That was all the sort of outstanding issues and the impacts that would happen. This is this massive spreadsheet that we literally get a room of probably 15 or 18 people together and talk about it for a good hour, every single week. And it was it was remarkable. But you know, I think we went through a couple different versions of it. And when we finally put that one to bed, I think there were some some joy. Yeah, yeah.

Jeff  41:50

It's funny going back now, in retrospect, well, first of all, there's a lot of us, that's our first hyper growth company, right. And so you think everything's broken all the time. But like, you go back and look at it, like for a small company, just trying to get like 100% reference ability. That's probably the right move. It's an expensive meeting. But you know, it, we did what we had to do. And we were kind of in a place where we needed to get the leaders of all these different groups, I didn't feel like there were like, What's that guy doing here? Likewise, everybody was kind of necessary. So but then, you know,

Mark Holland  42:21

no, in fact, it was. Go ahead. I was just gonna say it was remarkable that everybody was engaged as they were right. So because we were talking about customer problems that had, you know, support on the front end, you know, potentially services who are either built or still engaged with them, engineering. And so, you know, there was a lot of discussion and focus, and we even do some prioritization in that meeting. And you're right, I think it was, it was, it wasn't expensive one, but I think it was very effective.

Jeff  42:50

Yeah, exactly. And so and I think we retire that as do we go right into NetSuite at that point in time, or?

Mark Holland  42:58

Yeah, it wasn't.

Jeff  43:00

I like

Mark Holland  43:02

open air with open air, right? And I got bought by NetSuite. Okay, well, we did that we put that in. And that was another thing that we did this that thing, right, the velocity of what we were able to accomplish on that team that you talked about that, that sort of see us ops team, which was, you know, it was me, and you and Niall and, again, was on that team. And the stuff we were able to accomplish was, was great, because we were we were literally enabling the the lines of business out of us to be productive. And you know, that being able to focus on for example, that that open air, I think that's what's called Yeah,

Jeff  43:34

it was open air. Absolutely,

Mark Holland  43:36

yeah, we got it done. In, I don't know, two months, less than two months, we got done really fast. Usually they take three to six. And, you know, it worked out well for us. So,

Jeff  43:46

ya know, it was it was great stuff. So I'm trying to think here. You know, one of the things was, you know, we didn't cover the whole I feel like it's going backwards in history, if we go into the whole sales team, you know, opposing POS has revenue drivers and things like that, but, but it did now just bring it up again. So have you are you bumping into that now? Or what's your story standard strategy on on this concept, as we know, in the in the when you're working for a product company that needs services?

Mark Holland  44:19

Yeah, so I think, have very interesting experience that applause with that, in that sales owns the number, right. So, you know, everything. So what made that a challenge was not so much that. So so the interesting thing is, is that we got a lot of credit for building strong relationships with customers. And then we we, you know, we'd help identify upsell, cross sell opportunities, feed them into the sales team, they go and close them. And, you know, I think once that started to happen, we were clearly seen as the partners I don't think we got a ton of credit from it for it, but you know, it is what it is and Yeah, what's happened recently is they just reorg and the folks that are responsible for the, basically the account management, so I think we call them solution delivery managers now reporting the sales, so they've sort of absorbed them into that group now. So I think it really depends on on, you know, who owns the number, are they split? Are they not, you know, the sales have a, you know, a hunting number, and then, you know, does another organization have a farming number? And I think, in many ways, as you know, right, building those relationships, and proving your ability to partner with them goes a long way to help eliminate that, that idea on the sales side that, you know, services in the way or slows things down. When I when I was at applause, the first few years, I had the SEC, so I had an SES in addition to the delivery function. And that was tremendous, because, you know, we could really handle the requirements, and, you know, I kept them accountable, because they'd have to be, you know, they're accountable to me, which then, you know, my team would have to go deliver on on the on the customer side. So that worked out tremendously well. But, you know, one of the things I had to sign up for which was a under 24 hour SLA on any requests coming in, right? Requests, like, can

Jeff  46:09

you turn it on? Okay, yeah, yep,

Mark Holland  46:11

I need to stay at work, I need to I need to hop on this call and needed to go somewhere. And so our commitment, right, in order to, to reassure the sales team that we weren't in the way was to commit to a 24 hour turnaround or less, typically, we feed it, but those are the kinds of things you asked, and I don't blame them, you know, they should be asking for that kind of pressure. Yeah, of course. Yeah. And, and it's good for the company, right? The earlier in the cycle, you close the deal, the more revenue, you get the SAS model, so that becomes important. So I think it's just the balance lot has to do with the folks and the responsibility. And then who has the numbers?

Jeff  46:44

Yeah. So at Bright Cove, one reason I mean, of course, I'd say relationships and everything like that, but they were incentivized on services deals, because we didn't have a quota as sales, for sales things. And in NPS leadership, we just had a sort of p&l number that we had to hit. So there was no commissions to be had. So I was basically saying, like, what then take the Commission's on these deals, and so they were giving them some pretty high percentage points on them, I can't remember. And then we, they would do spiffs, with certain different numbers and things like that for services. But what wound up happening is that gigalitres second time mentioning here, he was always just killing it on his number. And first of all, he was like, just an amazing sales guy. But second of all, he always brought in services. And those would tip, those would be the things that tipped his number over to like President's Club stuff, because every deal had an extra 100 to 300k added into it with services, or we would do it right, where we'd sell a little discovery just to get the deal closed, and then he, you know, then it's a turns into an annuity for him. So but I think that if they get the number, I mean, you know, or they, they certainly get in good points on it. Because if it's too low, they're just gonna be like, forget this. But you know, sales guys are driven by money, right? And if they're getting quota relief, based on selling professional services, you remember, they're like, hey, it's getting low on the corner, can you sell these guys in audit? Can you guys sell them this or that, like, go in there, and the consultants and things like that they started telling you what we needed for packages?

Mark Holland  48:24

Yeah, I mean, I think that the incentive piece is one huge component of that, like, remember, I don't know if you remember, but we Sunil about him in a while. But Neil used to, you know, keep us on the outskirts all the time. And that was during the East I was, I was closely aligned with him. And I wanted to try to build that relationship with him, like, Listen, you know, the other component of this that that we can do, especially in a technical solution, like in deca, which is, we can sit there and look him in the eye and tell him that we've done that, you know, we've been there, we've done it, we've done it successfully for customers. And we have that credibility. So selling something like that, we actually can help you close the deal. So that was one thing. I felt like, I call them enlightened sales guys, the enlightened ones get that Yeah. And know that we can help them really move the needle when it comes to that, but then it really becomes around incentive models. And so previously, I think that the DECA sales team was being comped in a particular way. And Steve recognized some of the impact of that, and he went and changed it. And literally, that next day, you know, Sunil comes into my office. Hey, Mark, I'd like to sit down with you and work through this proposal. I was like, All right, you know, this is fantastic. And yeah, people do what they're intended to do. So I guess that's another component to sales and services partnerships is how are the sales guys and Senate because they're going to do what they're intended to do.

Jeff  49:43

And I'd recommend what you just said not just for professional services, but also SAS based implementation, consulting, all those things account management because basically, you know, it wasn't I saw stuff now like it's, it's, it's, you know, what you're dealing with when you Dealing with a salesperson, people think they're gonna go like, run away. How does this actually, what's the story here about how I become successful once I signed the deal. And if you bring those people in, it's just a different, it's just a different conversation. And it's like, this is what I do every day I make people like us successful. And that that changes it from like, yeah, you guys would be fine. Yeah, you know, it's just it's just, it's game changer. So yeah, and

Mark Holland  50:23

I think the other two one of the really interesting things about applause was, you know, SaaS company. Yes. But we didn't, there were no competition, right? We literally had no competition, because we are defining this this category. And so it's not a feature function costs kind of sale, right? You don't get in there, we literally stopped doing demos, because nobody cared. All they really cared about was the result. But the only way to sell it then was to sell through storytelling, right. And so the best guys that we had, were the ones that had, you know, the 568 10 stories in their back pocket that, you know, ask the right questions, and then tell the related story back to the customer to tell them how we had done this for somebody else. And I call this a lightbulb moment that gets you a lot closer to that light bulb going off over their head saying, Oh, here's how crowdsource testing can help me in the context of my organization. Once you get that light bulb moment, then it's just a matter of money, right? You just need to get to the right dollar amount based on budgets, everything else. But once they see the opportunity, you know, that was just a tremendous transition for them that paradigm shift. But they had to get to that light bulb moment, the only way you got there was through storytelling.

Jeff  51:29

No, absolutely. And that's probably a great way to, you know, stop the the work stuff here. And just you know, I know you run to a meeting in five minutes. So what are you doing now? That's fine, because you're always traveling places that I know, my kids would like, kill me brought them and stuff like that.

Mark Holland  51:45

So they'd love it. So

Jeff  51:49

out there their age, maybe? Yeah, my

Mark Holland  51:51

boys are now they're 15 and 13. Last year, we went to Vienna, so I spent a semester in college there. I also got engaged in there to my wife. So it has a lot of meaning for me. So I brought my boys there. And my sons literally wasn't last month said, Hey, Dad, when can we go back to Vienna? Yeah, he had a tremendous experience. You know, again, it's just gorgeous and beautiful city. We spent an entire week there were Airbnb it you know, we we tried not to over program it and just really enjoyed ourselves and, and there was an indelible memory for them. A couple years ago, we did a, a two week tour out into the western part of the country where, yeah, that's a camper for a no, no, we did it in a car. But I'll tell you about that last day in a sec. So it turns out that the national parks, it was 100 year anniversary. And so it turned out all fourth graders were and their families were allowed free access to any of the national parks in the year. And so I had a fourth grader. So I'd always want to go to Glacier National Park before the glaciers melted, although they're pretty close to melted already. And so we planned this trip, and we basically two weeks in the summer, we flew into Salt Lake, and we drove about 2000 miles up through Idaho and Utah, and Wyoming and Montana, and came back around. And it was just an unbelievably great trip. That's Jackson, we went to Yosemite glacier was amazing. But the last night my wife plans for us to go to this a true glamping kind of place called conasauga something and the old kind of dog wagons, they used to travel, you know, West in the 17 1800s. They turned them into like down comforter beds and you know, they you had a fire concierge so if you want to put a fire on you call them and they come and build a fire pretty place. It was pretty classic. So that was a pretty

Jeff  53:42

busy with your scarf. So you

Mark Holland  53:46

know, the problem was it was in Utah and I couldn't find any beer. So yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah. No, we love to travel travel, to me is one of those tremendously liberating and wonderful things, you know, opens you up to new experiences and different ways of thinking about things. And I think in many ways, you know, from a fresh professional perspective also helps you become more creative, right? Because you start to think differently, and your experiences are different. And I find it very, very entertaining and in many ways, rejuvenating

Jeff  54:15

100% Anytime you're taken out of your life, this is my comfort zone, right? And you know, unfortunately, that's what we do. We just like, we got this big trip in San Diego to see my wife's sister. And it's like, we're just basically transporting our home to San Diego for two weeks. There's nothing crazy about that. Like, we're just like, here's our house over there for you know, Airbnb, but doing that and the driving and what are we going to do and no, that's, that's amazing. And I think my my girls are finally hitting that age soon where we can we can start doing a little bit more of that without having to, you know, make sure the iPads are charged for 15 hours and stuff. So

Mark Holland  54:48

yeah, I mean, we had an interesting thing around that. That was you know, we were afraid because if you get up and do if you get out into the western part of the country, especially if you're from the East Coast, it's such a just amazing place. It's so big and I literally thought I would be bored out of my mind driving, you know, four or five hours at a time. And I just literally look out the window and watch the mountains go by is amazing. But we put in a rule that said, you can only use your iPads for two hours of time in the car. And then the other two hours you need to read or what have you worked out remarkably well as books on tape or, you know, whatever books on CD or mp3, where we were, you know, we went through a couple of three books, but they were totally riveted and they and they got a chance to pick their heads up out of the device and look out the window and see, that's a

Jeff  55:31

great idea, like throw some Harry Potter on or so. But whatever, is something that would hit all three of them. Like, they love the jacket, like the uncle Jocko podcast that's out there now.

Mark Holland  55:41

Is that okay for children?

Jeff  55:43

Oh, no, not That's not his, not the general. And he's got another one that's in the persona of his.

Mark Holland  55:50

The one that wrote the book. He's got the child Uncle Jake. Right. Yeah.

Jeff  55:53

So yeah, it's like struggling with my phone. This is great podcast material, but it's called the warrior kid podcast. And I swear to God, it's like, you know, all the stuff that you try and say to your kids that they just kind of handwave to but like, even my oldest, the 13 year old, she, she listens to it and finds it interesting. So you know, and you know, I tell him like once a month in my truck, so it's cool. But hey, listen, I know you got to run. This was great. We got to make sure we try and schedule a lunch and I'll run out there. But I'll stop the recording and what you get to next meeting. And this is awesome. And I love going over all these things because I've been dying to actually talk to an expert about some of these things. So

Mark Holland  56:32

well, thanks. I enjoyed it a lot. Thanks a lot for putting this together. I listened to the other ones going through and it was definitely parts of trips down memory lane and learning and learning something and every one of them. So

Jeff  56:41

everybody's got a different situation, right? It's just how you apply you know those best practices and stuff. So very cool. Thanks, man. Thanks. Okay.