036: Trading for Equity: A Case Study in Leveraging Skills for Success or Quantifiable Results

00:00 - 00:25 | Bart:
That's when it really took off for me. Talk about core progression or compound learning, compound interest, clearly a financial concept at Splunk full of energy and concepts that I was going to lock down and build so that we could scale a new company. And it was like all the bad stuff, move it aside, all the good stuff, create it, shine it up, and let's build something that can scale. And that's when it all really started was the run at Splunk.

00:26 - 02:40 | Christopher:

Welcome to podcast for financially focused technology employees. Are you working for equity? Do you have questions on how your career and money work together? Then welcome. Every week we discuss strategies and tactics for how to grow your career, build wealth and reach your financial and lifestyle goals. Hi, welcome to Tech Careers and Money Talk. I'm your host, Christopher Nelson. Thank you so much for joining here today. We're going to continue the conversation around expertise today. If you listen to episode 35, I break down expertise and what it is and what it means to technology employees. And essentially, when you trade your time and talent for equity, that time and talent, if you develop it to expertise, you can build a personal brand and you can build a business around it. And so today, I'm going to interview a good friend of mine, Bart Fanelli, who developed an expertise around selling complex SaaS software. He developed this over a series of years I had an opportunity to work with him and partner with him as he was developing some of these skills to a very high level that one awards the he's written a book around and it's a great example for you on how. Step-by-step as he was growing his career, he got insights into things that he really enjoyed, things that he was getting good feedback on, and then also how he advocated for himself to be able to continue invest in what he was doing and test it out by getting inside of real projects and helping companies grow and scale. I'm excited to walk you through this case study today. Let's go meet my good friend, Bart. Welcome to TechCruise and Money Talk. I am excited to introduce you to my good friend, Bart Fanelli. Bart Fanelli is the founder and CEO of Scalibrium. Scalibrium is a skill building platform for SaaS sales teams. And I'm excited to share his story today because building this came out of skills that he learned from many years selling and then also teaching other people to sell. Welcome, Bart.

02:40 - 02:53 | Bart:

Thank you. And you left out a part. You were part of that whole process in the early days as well. We collaborated quite a bit on the underpinning tech that allowed us to do what we were doing when we were at Splunk.

02:54 - 03:22 | Christopher:

We did, and I'm excited to get in and share some of that story with people. Because, you know, ultimately, I think is, you know, we're talking today about leveraging skills to build your career. But there is, you know, and you and I had dinner recently and had the chance to just really enjoy the fact that you meet great people along the way. And it truly is that collaboration of the people that you meet and in the special times that you have that makes it all worthwhile.

03:23 - 03:25 | Bart:

There's no doubt. I love that.

03:25 - 03:59 | Christopher:

But let's dig into your story today. I'm excited to share with everyone because you and I share the same concept that it's really investing in yourself and building a set of skills to the level of expertise that allows you to set yourself apart in technology and, you know, garner promotions, garner wages or, you know, or more equity and get you started on your journey. And so when did you in your career start seeing the value of really building these skills to the level of expertise?

03:59 - 04:39 | Bart:

Well, it kind of started, I would say, later in my time at BMC, or actually earlier in my time at BMC when I started switching roles. You start to realize that there's this different skill set that applies in all of the different functions that you may participate in. But when you bring them all together and you have a common understanding, of what all the different roles do, back office, front office, whether it's operations or your frontline selling, the combination of that knowledge becomes really powerful. That changed the dynamic for me, realizing how the puzzle fit together, so to speak, of business.

04:39 - 05:22 | Christopher:

Yeah. And that's, it's interesting because when you start understanding the concept of how, how the SAS businesses work, software sales works, it is a combination of front office and back office working together to get this machine working. Cause ultimately we work in this environment of these hyper growth companies that are constantly evolving and changing. for you to really like start seeing your career progress, you have to understand how this machine works, how all the parts fit together, so that then you can understand, okay, here's now the set of skills that I want to build around my discipline that can start separating me.

05:23 - 06:33 | Bart:

Yeah. So everybody's different, right? Like for me personally, I don't know that when you think of education, the normal way of getting into a career, you're either you go through your college education or you don't. But then when you join a company, there's another education that starts. It's relative to that company and how that company operates. You have to be open to all of those different inputs from the company you're joining, so that you end up shaping how you want to be represented within business. And today, it's more than ever. It's completely different than when we started. We're old, right? So I try to learn by looking and reading what the generations behind me are embracing, but now in, you know, from my journey from Splunk or from BMC to Splunk to OutSystems and now Scalibrium, there's inputs from all of those that I still use and apply because they're all different. They're all good. They're all bad in their own way. They're just, it's how you end up, you build who you are and what you want to be as you grow up. I just don't think it's a straight line.

06:33 - 07:48 | Christopher:

It's not. And you, you bring up a very salient point there, which is, you get out of college, college gives you a framework that allows you to get employment. And once you then start working for a company, you're then going to get a whole different set of skills. And I think in tech, you can start at small tech, and you can learn what it is to grow companies to to hustle. And sometimes you don't get the same formal training as I know. You went to BMC. I went to Accenture. I got a whole other additional graduate course on business. And then as you go from company to company, you get the opportunity to add into that entire collection that creates this broader skill set that you get the opportunity to bring to different companies or you get the opportunity to go build your own company. And at some point, you started off and you started in the discipline of sales, which is critical to all companies. And then you started teaching salespeople. At what point was it the fact that you got how to sell and you had some success that you thought that you could then scale and add value by teaching other people? What was that inflection point that said, I want to take this discipline and now go teach it instead of execute it?

07:48 - 10:53 | Bart:

That's a great question. So for me, that the choice, it flowed like this. So, and this all started, I would say at BMC, they had a very good training program. And there were a lot of legacy IBM folks, I think that were at BMC in the early days, where, you know, if you remember, IBM, and all the big providers, they had go away for a month and get indoctrinated into their culture and how they were running their businesses. BMC had a 2-week bootcamp. The idea that you're going to learn or immerse yourself in the company and what they're all about in 2 weeks is kind of like a crash course in an MBA or whatever the company is all about. Their brand, their product, their culture, it all surfaces through that process. So at BMC, I learned complex selling, which was great. However, it was all technical. I wasn't a technical guy. So that was tough. But I ended up finding success in building business relationships while selling. And that was the part that got me really excited. And then there's a an organization within BMC that was called Best Practices. And it was the behind the scenes contract terms and conditions, RevRec, as well as all of the commercial terms that you might put in place to make a big contract palatable for you and for the customer. So I ended up going into that role. That ticked the box for me. It was a service role where I was doing best practices for the Southeast team. And that was the start of me wanting to lead others. And then I did it as a sales leader. After that, I ran a team. That was frustrating because you had to command respect immediately from other salespeople. And if you've only been in your sales gig for the first time, you don't really know how to do that. So I had to learn how to do that pretty quick. And then you realize people don't follow in a lot of ways. And I was never a follower. So I understood that. It was painful. It was really painful. But the choice to go into enablement, that was made for me. And so at the end of my run at BMC, So, uh, the first eight years, super successful seller, best practices, and then sales leader. And then we had a culture change and, um, John McMahon and blade logic crew came in. I tell the story all the time and they only really ran with their own. So, so I was a sales leader and they're like, yep, you're not, we don't know your DNA. You're not going to be able to learn fast enough. We're going to move really fast. So you get to go do this enablement job. And I was like, I don't know about that. So I challenged it. And, um, I think they wanted to reduce my pay and to do it at a reduced salary. And that's what I resisted on. I said, no way. I said, I'll run your playbook and I'll learn it, but you're not going to cut my pay in half. So I won that little battle because I stood up for myself. And then I'll tell you that that 2 years was a massive education in how to operationalize a business because that's what that organization was known for. Go-to-market operational cadence.

10:53 - 12:56 | Christopher:

Wow. And because there's so much to break down in that where, you know, and this is, this is so important for people to understand is that when when you get the opportunity to get into a business, right, we come out of school, we start working in, Technology company smaller large you want to find the things that you know the passion the things where you do fit in the interesting thing that you talked about the beginning is you want very technical like you obviously you love technology i know you love tech. But yeah, I'm not very technical. I'm more on the business side. And then you saw an opportunity in this value selling, because I know I can speak to this because I was on the buy side and I always resonated as a buyer with your message, which is, let's take all of the challenging parts of this, the contract, the language, how we're going to make the finance department happy. let's start streamlining that and making sure that we're not just selling technology, but we're, we're executing this full business sale. You then found something where it fit, it aligned with your values, it aligned with things that you enjoyed. So then you dig in. Then I think it's also important for people to understand in large companies and even smaller companies, regime changes happen. And when that happens, be prepared to know your value. What you were clear on is they came to the negotiating table and said, we think your values here. You spun around the paper and said, no values here. Give me time and I'll prove it to you. And I'm sure that that was probably an incredibly challenging time. Like you were spending a lot of time learning their playbook. You had to spend extra hours to do it, but then the value that you got out of it. And I'm curious about your response. I would probably think that it was exponential, like it was compounding what you got because you took your skills, the things you enjoyed, and you said, I'm doubling down. I'm going all in.

12:57 - 15:10 | Bart:

It's you're totally right. So one thing I wasn't, I wasn't shy. I always had a really strong opinion. And I never wanted to be considered like a salesperson, because they had a bad connotation in a lot of ways, like, oh, you're going to go whine and die and your clients and then and you're going to, you know, do these big contracts. God, it's so far from the truth that it's ridiculous. It's a really hard job. Professional selling is a hard job. So when I got challenged by the new culture, when BMC acquired BladeLogic, my response was, no, no, you're not going to take it away from me. I've been here for eight years. They agreed. Everybody agreed. I got to stay in the earning zone that I was in, but moved to leadership enablement. It was a front seat to force management, to John McMahon, to Blade Logic. And there were good and there was good and bad to that. But and I became to some degree, I had to stand in front of probably the most aggressive group of salespeople that I had ever met in my career. And I had to help channel their energy into what was true and what was not true about BMC software. And what they liked about it was I was calling it for what it was, and they didn't. That made me one of them in their mind, or at least they accepted me. So I stayed for two years before the opportunity to move again to Splunk presented itself. That's when it really took off for me because talk about core progression or compound learning, compound interest, which is clearly a financial concept, compound interest. Well, that two years of me compounding my learnings and applying it to everything I had learned the previous eight years was what I showed up when we met. I showed up at Splunk for full of energy and concepts that I was going to lock down and build so that we could scale a new company. And it was like, all the bad stuff, move it aside, all the good stuff, create it, shine it up, and let's build something that can scale. And that's when it all really started, was the run at Splunk.

15:10 - 15:48 | Christopher:

Well, and I think that's so powerful that it was, it was a very similar experience for myself where I had a lot of experience, you know, in, um, building the salesforce.com practice at Accenture. So in implementing salesforce.com at scale, understanding it, and it was, um, you know, I had a deep skillset when there weren't a lot of people that had that skillset. So that was then the opportunity to take a good opportunity that I had at Accenture to continue to grow Take those chips off the table, go somewhere like Splunk, and really get the compounding from a career perspective, and then also from a compensation perspective as well.

15:48 - 17:01 | Bart:

Well, you know, and part of that, like, somewhat apropos, like, we didn't know for sure. Like when I joined Splunk, I was following Tom because he was the opposite from a leadership perspective as what I was experiencing at BMC at the time. So I always say that the operational mindset was what I learned from McMahon and force management. I learned coaching and people development from Tom. And then so therefore, my whole DNA kind of from that journey 2010 on is it really has two sides. There's an operational reason you're doing things. There is a way to coach people and develop them to understand that and bring them on the journey. And combined, if you can do that, you can probably take any role in any company and make something really powerful out of it, provided the culture lets you. That's the big that's the big. When you talked about You got to be a chameleon because power groups change or executive teams change and companies change over time. But you could be a chameleon within your range. Otherwise, you're a hypocrite. I struggle with hypocrisy.

17:01 - 17:48 | Christopher:

Well, and I've never heard that analogy before of the chameleon. And I think that that is is so true because, you know, companies, when they think about when we were at Splunk and it was doubling in employees and revenue every single year, it was becoming a different company. I always remember when we would have the all hands meeting every year, they'd say, who was here so many years? And it just kept changing and changing. And so the culture will evolve. And change as much as you can. And at some point, you're right, there's going to be a shift that you say, no, this is not like I'm now crossing a line where I think it doesn't represent my values. And it's, it's probably time for me to go.

17:48 - 18:43 | Bart:

But you're, you're absolutely right, man. That's, that's it. You can't, you can't challenge it. You can't compromise what you believe in at the core. And as soon as you start to dig into that a little bit, it's, it is time. And in fact, I think there's a skill to recognizing the pattern that's approaching. I wish I was better at it, but because you can start to see the patterns. And I think you don't want to believe it sometimes, but certain there are certain things that you can never change in cultures. A lot of it has to do with the origins of the company and the leadership and how long they've been around, which I think Splunk was just an anomaly. We had a CEO that came in at $25 million who was not a founder of the company. Right. And completely ran it like a seasoned CEO would run it. And sure enough, the results played out. And, you know, we had that wonderful journey because of that.

18:43 - 19:09 | Christopher:

And I think he was very intentional about how he surrounded himself and how he created and executed that culture because he'd been there and done that with Hyperion and other companies as well. So he had, you know, I mean, that was one of the big, for me, selling points, right? At that point, when I came on, I'm sure it was the same for you, like Godfrey interviewed all directors. And so sitting down with him, hearing the business plan, the vision, I mean, that helped me.

19:09 - 20:01 | Bart:

He was selling it constantly. Yeah. He was selling the company constantly. And that's it. You learn that. You watch that. You're like, oh my God, this is it. He's telling me the story that he's telling the street. or potential suitors for the company. And he was right. I believe the story. So guess what? I'm going to take my narrative, and we called it translating the message. That was a Showdorf thing. You translate the message from CEO as cleanly as you can down through all of the orgs. So the descendants, and provided we all stay within a certain range on the message, the momentum becomes unstoppable. Everybody believes. And what happens is people will stand up and challenge if we're going too far in a certain direction, because we allowed that. Yes. We didn't box them and shut them down.

20:02 - 21:01 | Christopher:

Right. Yeah. We wanted, we wanted people to in, in, in, I remember so many of those meetings where people would stand up and say like, Nope, we've gone too far off center on this. We need to pull it back. And it definitely gave, um, you know, people pause. And the other thing that I would add is I definitely think it was an organization where I had, I never have since seen or experienced that alignment from the top down where we were all rowing the boat in the same direction. And it was a, an outside-in company, right? It was everybody is focused on the customer, then it's the company, then it's the department, then it's your team, then it's yourself. It was this outside-in focus that, and then what I thought was amazing was it was a great balance between a technically focused company and a business focused because Godfrey wasn't ashamed to say from the top, everybody works for sales. Like we, and we could all advocate for the product.

21:01 - 22:24 | Bart:

That's it. It's so true. And there's a lot to be said for that. So the book, The Success Cadence, was written with Shodorff and David Mattson, who's the CEO of Sandler, sponsored it. And it was based on that exact premise. Everybody works for sales. That's not an arrogant statement. That is It's a statement that revenue is required to run the company. And if we run the revenue engine as clean as we can with discipline, with an understanding of how our revenue, when we how we structure terms and conditions, how we treat the customer and give them the outcome that they wish, how we how we we represent ourselves in public as Splunk, because we were a big brand, right? The T-shirts everywhere. It all compounded into accelerated growth, momentum and great success. So, you know, I can't tell you enough that I narrate or I tell the story constantly because I believe in it. I don't think I think it was all intentional. And we all got on the same page as soon as we joined the company. And we all did a great job holding everybody, each other accountable, regardless of role. And that was that to me was was super important learning. It didn't matter what your title was.

22:24 - 23:38 | Christopher:

Exactly. And I think going, going back to your point, like of, of you building the skills and coming here and you were operationally very sound coming from BNC and then you learned the coaching. I think that that was to me, again, some of the secret sauce of, of Splunk was everybody in their own right was incredibly experienced in their, in their operations and could execute. And we became this very people focused company. And you had this opportunity to create this value selling organization that was lights out. I mean, it was your team was able to, for this product that we created our own, you know, segment, right? Operational intelligence. Oh, yeah. It was brand new. And there needed to be a lot of education. There also needed to be, we were pricing our product in a way that was very, very different to the market. How did they have a lot of conversations condensed in a short period of time? What were some of your focus areas that made you successful in developing this value selling that was so unique for its time? Because you had to generate a lot of ideas. There was a lot of out-of-the-box thinking that came into this.

23:39 - 30:43 | Bart:

Yeah. So it's that's an interesting question. And there's two names that will come up. So Doug May and then David Jenkins. And we had dinner with them the other night. Yes. But I'll go back to BMC. So and then I'll then I'll fast forward to when we started the value org at Splunk. BMC had a big value practice. It just was difficult to make it work because it was a multi-product. I mean, there were hundreds of products. So it was very difficult and the company was very big, right? So there was a thousand sales, you know, at the time in the open systems or the, we call it the BSM space. It was, I guess, a thousand salespeople. And that ship had sailed. So it's very difficult to turn how 1000 people work together. But when you start with 50, and you start to define how they work together from a value perspective, and you compound and add skills, capabilities and tools and people, and it keeps improving over time, we started that whole process, there was probably 50 to 60 salespeople at Splunk. And when we ended that, or when I left the company in 17, I mean, there were 4000. But we were running the same playbook, where we just kept improving it based on what we learned. That's a Doug May thing. So I'll give you I'll give you the narrative on it. He almost didn't come and work for me because I was hiring a best practices role to work on contracts. And that wasn't his sweet spot. He was the value guy. So he was coming to see me. He came to San Francisco. We sat down and he told me the story afterwards. I was going to break up with you at the hiring meeting. Literally, he goes, and then you turned the paradigm and said, I think you should build a value practice here. Let me explain why. And so I changed the role. And that's the beauty of being in a nimble company. Tom trusted. Hey, Tom, I don't know about this. We actually, I think we could benefit more from a value selling type role and organization because Splunk was a horizontal and the data didn't discriminate. So the use case was pretty It was obtuse. In the beginning, we were trying to learn what was the best use case. Well, attaching data to a critical business service was really when it started to resonate because critical business services, they either make money, they reduce cost, or they reduce risk. for companies we serve. And we were able to do that very uniquely with Splunk. Well, Doug said, Yeah, that's, I believe in that. And that's exactly what I would prefer to do. He took the job. Long story short, we went to dinner that night. This is a funny pause on the story. And after dinner, I sent them off in an Uber to the airport or to the hotel before he was flying the next day home. And this was right when Uber was becoming a big thing in San Francisco. It was 2012. Got the app. He thought I was all into it. Like, oh, man, you Czech guy, this is great. You're in San Francisco. Well, a black car pulled up, and it wasn't an Uber. It just happened to be a black car driver. And I put him in it, and I sent them off. And we didn't know this until Doug had to pay when he got to his hotel. So I had to reimburse him for the ride. And I was like, I'm looking at the app. I'm like, dude, what's going on? My ride never took. Sure enough, that was that was my first exposure to was just a black car that stopped and picked him up. So fortunately, he was safe. But that guy built the practice of what I'll I'll consider repetitive value selling. And the business allowed us to build a very big, a very expensive, but very efficient function. You built the underpinning technology over time that allowed us to build business cases in near real time. And I'm convinced that's one of the flywheels that helped the company scale to the extent that it did in that range from 2012 to 17. And that was a period where we went from, well, I joined, we were 60 million in 2010. When we went public in 12, it was probably $140 million, up to $1.5 billion in a five-year run, five to seven-year run with Doug at the epicenter of all of the sellers and him building the team. It was an amazing experience. He won an award. He's still mad at me. He won an award at TSIA for the metrics that we drove. And then I, of course, mentioned the award in my profile and stuff. He was like, ah, you took credit for the reward. I'm like, the award? I'm like, no, it's all you. But we still joke about it today. But here, I'll give you some of the metrics, which are stunning. And these travel. He uses them, I use them. And everybody should create their metric story for their brand and their experience. Well, and this is where Jenkins comes in. He was the ultimate storyteller. We had all the metrics. He would help us whiteboard the narratives because he built and sold whiteboard selling. That was his forte. You were helping with the tech underpinning. Doug was running the business case module playbooks. We had 50 little calculators that we were assembling to do real-time business case calculation with our customers collaboratively while we were selling large multi-year transactions. There were 5,000 business cases when I left through our process. Doug leading them all. 2 to 10x was the metric range when we did a collaborative business case for the originating transaction size change. It either doubled or up to 10x. 5,000 units. The biggest one, that 10 extra was a unique one. It was inside sales, single page business case, 100K transaction turned into like 1.2 million. Doug May's process. We embedded it into all of the go-to-market and the way we worked our cadence, the way we trained, the way we coached, and then the way we led the teams. But those were the results. But it got better. So the award that was won from TSIA was an expand selling award, where if they bought the business case that we sold, the use case in the business case were the same, and they deployed it through customer success and PS at Splunk. We had about 500 examples of those. What happened is the subsequent transaction, because lead time to first value was so true and fast, they bought 270% more two quarters sooner. 500 examples. You can't argue with it. The process worked. He architected it all. Jenkins narrated it all. We all advocated it and sold it internally constantly at Splunk and the rest took care of itself.

30:43 - 31:35 | Christopher:

Well, in what lives on, literally lives on as the legacy is truly those statistics, right? You did the work, you created this practice, you created this unique expertise around value selling, created a business inside of a business. And now you have these stats that show the value of what you created. And this is so important. And I really, you and I are so aligned in what you said, is that whatever you do, whatever role you have, keep some salient metrics and talk about the result. Because the conversations, I mean, the book you wrote, the company that you're building now, all of these things come out of the fact that we've created this expertise around value selling. Now that becomes the product. That becomes the thing of value.

31:35 - 33:36 | Bart:

I totally, you know, I believe in it. And the reason I believe in it is we know it works. We got a repeat. I got to do it at OutSystems. Doug didn't follow me. He made a different choice. He went to Databricks. His worked out in a different way. Mine worked out in a different way. But we knew that there is a core set of skills required and a core set of assets. And when you marry skills and assets and you bundle them together, you create a process. This is my whole belief system. And it can be for anything. Mine just happens to be in complex SaaS tech sales. And that process now is what is embedded within Scalibrium, within the company. Right. Where you start to create, you harness what you've built over time, and then you start to create and brand, you define and lock down IP, and then you keep narrating and you hopefully gain traction and you build or create something that scales. And that's the fun part of it. Historically, it was just a job. Right. But but I'm a firm believer. It's so. And look, this is your mission now is to help people understand. Right. It's way more than a job. You actually are creating and you have to. What's yours is yours. And you have to have that conversation. So when I went into out systems, I wrote I wrote a long, detailed email on my IP. This is what I'm going to bring. And this is what I want to take. And we ended up putting an IP agreement in place when I left, actually. Because, well, it was mutually agreed on the way in at the CEO level, so that was fine. A long, detailed email. We put it in place. So OutSystems was 0 to 100 million in 17 years. A little different than Splunk. And from 100 million to 300 million was three years.

33:36 - 34:31 | Christopher:

And I do that's where I want to let's take a pause right there. And I want to understand. So you left Splunk, you walk into OutSystems, it takes them 17 years to get to 100 million, then you you triple that in three years. Was it literally taking the value playbook and plan from Splunk and just tweaking it and screwing it in and implementing it or what was that? And I want to call out that this to me is when you go and you build an asset like this, Then you turn around and you say, okay, now, and this is what I talk about is you want to invest in test. So you invested your time in your talent by taking this IP and you said, I'm going to invest and I'm going to test this thing. And I'm going to show people that this wasn't a fluke. This wasn't, you know, survivor bias or one off. Like I'm going to go do it again. What were some of the things that helped you get that, you know, in place in, in scaling?

34:31 - 36:33 | Bart:

There was a whiteboard that Jenkins helped me create. It's the basis of Scalibrium. It started at Splunk. I brought it to OutSystems. And LPEC is, we call it LPEC, Learn, Practice, Execute, Coach, Remediate. And in the middle of it was Doug May's organization, which was market specialization value selling. And to this day, I still have it on my whiteboard. That was the pitch that I gave to the CEO when I met him. And he hired me on the spot to advise. Oh, I like this. Come in and advise. And this is when I wasn't sure what I was going to do after I left Splunk. I wrote the book. I was toying with Scalibrium. And I was like, Paolo Rosato is his name. He was CEO. He is CEO. Can I build this if I come here? Yeah, absolutely. Well, I'll even you can even build it as an employee, you know, after three or four months and becoming a SVP. And then I took a CRO gig, or he provided me the opportunity to take the CRO gig. And he let me build the whole part of the code base while I was there. Wow. Doing the job. And, you know, so we got the proof. We did a business case platform. We did a four box coaching platform and we did stand and deliver. And all of the curriculums were Scalibrium, all the stuff that we built that we used in the selling motion. And over three years through the pandemic, we rebuilt a lot of the operational models within the company and grew the company to 300 million. And ultimately, my relationship with the company didn't work out for various reasons that are unimportant, different belief systems at the end of three and a half years. But we left the company in a way better spot than it was because we added discipline, structure, and process that allowed the company to sell better. So that was it. That was all I needed at that point when I separated. I knew what I was going to go do.

36:33 - 38:37 | Christopher:

Right. Well, and at that point, you had invested this time, I mean, investing, you know, three, three years, three plus years to go invest and say, okay, we now have in three years gone from 100 million to 300 million, where that took them previously 17 years, like there's huge value all over that, you know, an ROI delivered. Now you can go do something else. And this is where I want to take a quick pause, because this first half, we really built the story of you working in sales, building this value selling framework that you now have turned into an asset, and you've built a company with that. And I want to go into the second half, and I really want to do the breakdown of what are some lessons that you learned in building this asset over time, protecting it, that now is launching this company, that other people can take away as well? in their different disciplines. So hold on, everyone. We'll be right back. Okay, this break is going to be a little bit longer than normal because I've made the decision to cut this episode into two parts. I think we've hit a nice stopping point right here. We've learned about Bart's career and how he took this skill of Field enablement of go to market strategies of value selling and invested in that tested it by going to work as a chief revenue officer for different companies and really putting everything that he learned on the line any size success next week when you come back we're going to then break down, You know, what can you do? What are some of the key takeaways and how can you learn in whatever role you are, whatever discipline, what are some key steps of how you can build skills and develop those into expertise? That's something that you can build a brand and you can build a business around. I'm excited to share that one with you, so make sure you get that for next week. And in the meantime, our ask would be, please leave us a review. We are fueled by reviews, so please go on to our website, go on to Apple, Spotify, wherever you listen to podcasts. We'd love for you to leave us a review. Thank you so much.