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Welcome to Founder-Led, featuring founders scaling 7 and 8 figure companies who share the strategies and mindset driving real growth.
Brought to you by LinkedIn Growth Engine. We help established recruitment and staffing firm owners land new clients from LinkedIn by turning their executive content and insights into a trust building inbound lead engine.
We partner with $1M to $20M+ agency founders to build visibility, authority, and trust that drives pipeline, without turning you into a “content creator.” Over the last 12 months, we've helped drive $20M+ in booked revenue from LinkedIn.
If you're done relying on referrals and want prospects coming in pre sold, you're in the right place.
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Rohan
Welcome to founder Leg, where we sit down with some of the sharpest founder operators to learn what's working and their business today.
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Rohan
This episode is brought to you by Frontier Studio,
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Rohan
a revenue minded content agency helping founders grow their visibility, trust and ultimately demand for their products and services through LinkedIn.
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Rohan
So if you're ready to join over 30 businesses
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Rohan
that are turning conversations like this into real pipeline,
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Rohan
comment thought leadership below and someone from our team reach out.
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Rohan
Now let's get to today's episode.
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Rohan
Today we're joined by Ian Fitzgerald, president of Allied Revenue.
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Rohan
Ian has spent the last seven years helping B2B companies build revenue systems with a different end goal in mind not just more growth, but more enterprise value.
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Rohan
In this conversation, we discuss how he connects revenue decisions to valuation,
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Rohan
what he's learned, helping founders navigate pivots and exits,
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Rohan
and why Allied is building technology into its service model.
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Rohan
Ian, welcome to the show.
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Ian
Thank you for having me.
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Rohan
Well, Ian would love to start off with, you know, a bit around your
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Rohan
founding journey and entrepreneurship journey. What were. You know, some of the key points that led you to, starting the business and what was the gap you saw in the market that led you to have confidence to start Allied revenue?
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Ian
Sure.
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Ian
So I suppose
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Ian
the journey for this company, really started
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Ian
when I was working, you know, in a private equity company,
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Ian
managing multiple companies at once.
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Ian
And, I saw how much
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Ian
the beginnings of those companies
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Ian
impacted the options they had later on, how much the strategies they chose, led them down. Dead ends or places of
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Ian
much greater difficulty than they needed to be.
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Ian
And I
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Ian
got a
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Ian
hunger for not just kind of managing and working with the C-suite, but actually being into the business and helping make those pivots in a more, instrumental way. And so
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Ian
I founded this business,
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Ian
quite honestly, a little bit on accident, because I had sold another one that had a bunch of staff that we, didn't transfer in the sale.
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Ian
And so we needed to do something with those people. But what I turned it into was a way for us to, not only provide advice for how companies can grow through transitions, as well as just in general, but also execute on that advice to, kind of put our money where our mouth was and make sure that the initiatives landed in a successful way.
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Ian
So, it's really just because it's what I enjoy doing, quite honestly. I didn't anticipate that when I was a kid, but I really enjoy the mechanics of business. I enjoy the, the systems that you have to build to be able to execute a business, to plan.
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Ian
And so now I get to share that with a bunch of companies and make an impact.
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Ian
That feels great.
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Rohan
Yeah. You know something I stood out from our past conversation was this idea of when you go in for an engagement, it's really aligning the people, the process, the technology around the EV, right. The enterprise value. And that sounds like an obvious concept for like a rev ops firm or a consultant consulting to come in. But it's actually the first time I've heard it, like articulately articulated this clearly as a value proposition.
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Rohan
So what was the thinking that that led to that? And
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Rohan
yeah, what's the reception when you go, go in, with that end goal in mind?
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Ian
Yeah. So I love business growth, but I've never actually been a huge fan of sales. In a lot of ways, because, I don't like the unnatural pressure that sales creates and some of the, the problems, I can kind of come out of that. So, where we landed on as a business model, in this is that
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Ian
and it's really just kind of comes back to my core philosophies and the way that I was trained as well, that you can be sold a trick or two, and it might work for a little while, but the goal is to make something work a little bit for a little while.
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Ian
The goal is sustained growth of enterprise value. It's sustained, safety for your employees and, and kind of stewarding your business to a, a more successful future or whatever. However you,
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Ian
however you envision that, whether that's making a lot more money or creating better products down the road or, doing more for your employees, it's there's so much more impact out of creating true enterprise value than there is bolstering a pipeline.
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Ian
For a little while now, most of our companies need us to make an impact, for on, on their behalf when we engage with them. So we do end up doing some
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Ian
top of funnel revenue systems for them, for sure. But instead of just focusing on like leads, meetings, pipeline volume, we kind of go from the other end of it and we look at what is going to either, make this business worth acquiring or sustain or grow to a premium valuation and then sustain that valuation, over time.
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Ian
And we have to build in a knowledge that markets change and the economy changes at
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Ian
an increasingly fast rate. So it's all about building these systems that really make sure that end point of enterprise value growth, is in mind when we do all the other execution.
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Rohan
Yeah.
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Rohan
I'd love to, you know, make this real because there are many folks listening who run their own business, and
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Rohan
this sounds great to them. It's like how can I ultimately, yeah, increase the enterprise value, the valuation of my business, make it, a more kind of sellable
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Rohan
asset down the road. So walk us through maybe your systems level thinking when you go into business, what do you look for when you kind of diagnose the the revenue system, the overall business operation?
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Rohan
To understand whether.
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Rohan
Yeah, the company is like really just building towards and or true enterprise value or just to hit a number for next quarter. How do you educate them through that
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Rohan
diagnosis and that system? Rebuild?
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Ian
Yeah. Well, I think a habit trained into me by,
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Ian
venture capital, private equity. Is that the first thing you have to understand is, is where your exit is. Where is your goal? Are you just trying to make a bunch of money for yourself, or are you trying to sell to another company? What are you trying to position your company to achieve?
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Ian
And once you decide that end goal, then you have to create the major metrics that get you there. What is it that if these things are true, equals your enterprise value or your, ability to be acquired by another company? And then we just kind of work it back from that position to what are we doing and what are our other choices that we could be doing?
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Ian
It's not so much that, well, you know, we're a company that's always had really great results on Google ads. So we're just going to scale up Google ads. Maybe. But maybe also you need to look across other channels and see what are those
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Ian
opportunities. Maybe it's not even an outbound opportunity, maybe to look at channel, partnerships more.
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Ian
Maybe you need to grow a, another type of your business that just hasn't had the experience. Internally to be grown properly or maybe even at all. So it's about kind of weighing the options of not only what's a good idea, but what's the right good idea. And then getting into that. So I guess my advice to other people would be, you know, start with your end goal in mind and then work towards what is the most efficient path to achieve that.
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Ian
Let's take a,
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Ian
a customer we have where they're trying to scale locations are, a service provider essentially for, for businesses, and they're trying to scale locations across the country. We help them not only understand what are the best markets to go into, but, what are the right ways to position your company to be purchased by a company that's buying similar companies to you?
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Ian
And so we end up making ourselves look a lot like the other companies are getting acquired for a lot of money. And the roadmaps are already there. All we have to do is align with it. And that's what we just kind of take a lot of the hard work out of the situation, find the success, find the path to success, and then just start building it.
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Rohan
Okay.
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Rohan
And just based on your engagements, is there any pattern recognition that you see where founders or leaders might be optimizing for a certain thing,
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Rohan
but it might end up being the wrong lever once you go in and do a diagnosis. I know you know things like, of course, like, you know, make sure there's no common risk where there's a single point of failure is really important.
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Rohan
Multiple making sure no single client or small handful of clients makes up more than X percentage of top line revenue. What are some of those
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Rohan
maybe like like important things to optimize? Then what do you founders
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Rohan
what have you seen maybe some founders focus on in the wrong areas?
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Ian
Yeah, it's really interesting. I see this being a period where founder led companies, are really getting a huge advantage because they're so much more aligned in strategy and swift to execute that strategy that, this is a great time to be a founder led business. And
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Ian
where I see
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Ian
successful ones going is that they are relying more on their founder.
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Ian
Again, in this age of AI, in this in the shifting economy to help maintain strategy that the founders coming back in in a bigger way and aligning the company to, the new environments that it's in.
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Ian
So I see a lot of success there in terms of common mistakes.
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Ian
I really, at the moment, the the thing that jumps to my mind is, is how enterprise companies are working where there's less of a, unified vision around what's happening.
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Ian
Things are changing at such a fast rate, and they don't have the process instilled in those organizations to keep their decision making up with the fast changes of the market, whether it, you know, especially I see this in in manufacturers where there's I mean, all sorts of businesses have been disrupted by the manufacturers after the bad supply chain issues that have come from Covid.
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Ian
It's it hasn't fully recovered and the markets have changed a little bit to where their primary channels and distributors and dealers are working less well, they're less certain, they're less understood, and they're needing to move to more of a kind of direct approach. So,
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Ian
I guess I see founders in that range taking more control over their sales across the board than relying just on,
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Ian
a good relationship.
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Ian
They're they're providing structure to those things and making sure that, their pipeline is secure.
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Ian
So on.
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Rohan
Okay. Yeah, I, I love that the idea of
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Rohan
holding division. And again, it's like, I think Andreessen Horowitz talk about, you know,
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Rohan
inflexible on division, flexible on the details are the pathway to get there. Right. Because there's that unifying principle, an organizing principle that is really important to be held in is use, like the founders vision.
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Rohan
So now I would love to, kind of think about
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Rohan
again, there's so much change happening with
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Rohan
with the rise of AI and agents, especially this year.
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Rohan
Talk a bit about how you're evolving your own business, allied and like the the technology and the service offering and how you think about embedding technology into the service model. What does that look like and how do you see things evolving there?
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Ian
Yeah. You know, so I see kind of the partnership between technology and humans on a continuum. And it's really evolved over the last ten years. When SAS came around and started making things a lot easier for humans to do, kind of the clerical work, especially of, whatever their processes were. But we all kind of hoped they would go a lot further than that, and it really never did.
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Ian
And,
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Ian
and so for a while, technology and humans were balanced, and that technology had limitations. Now it's it's not so much that technology has limitations, except on quality and personalization. And so the relationship from humans to technology has kind of changed a little bit, where we internally use technology for scale and to kind of bake in stylistic parameters and, strategic judgment.
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Ian
But when it comes to very human touch, very the high quality touch, we definitely use humans for that. So a lot of people mistake it and they kind of use technology a lot for things like first touches or making sure that, you know, there's a thousand of your templates going out. 2000 different people a day. But, but we don't also recommend that we recommend using the technology when it it's important to scale.
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Ian
But having the people make sure they connect all those high value, high opportunity things, to whether it's in operations or sales, to make sure that no context is lost. So basically, we're kind of creating super workers at an everybody because we're partnering them with something that helps them do their work and use their judgment at scale.
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Rohan
I think that's such a great point. We had recently had the chief, the first chief HR officer of LinkedIn, on the podcast, and we're talking about, you know, the future of work.
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Rohan
And he was saying, this was a few months ago. There's so much, again, in light of a lot of the technology layoffs,
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Rohan
there's so much fear around cost cutting and doing more with less and driving profitability, which is, you know, it's important.
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Rohan
But the younger generation, especially folks who are like recent grads, it's really hard for them to to get jobs and to get gainful employment, because a lot of those entry level works has been, you know,
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Rohan
abstracted away with, with AI and, and technology and automation and enabling, like existing employees to do more with less and give them the superpowers.
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Rohan
And what he was saying is
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Rohan
a more kind of like optimistic
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Rohan
and, yeah, just kind of like more exciting future is how do we
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Rohan
educate and provide the training for, you know, these people to upskill and uplevel and then provide them the opportunities to add value in their own unique way, given how digitally native and AI native they can be within an organization.
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Rohan
So
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Rohan
how do you think about, you know, you talk about
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Rohan
inspiring buyers rather than pressuring buyers, like, how do you apply that mindset within your own organization and building your own company culture?
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Ian
You know, interesting.
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Ian
You know, I think that,
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Ian
unfortunately,
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Ian
elegance does not always be Britishness in a market.
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Ian
And, there are some companies are taking kind of a simple approach to let's spend less to get more of the same level of production. But the winners are going to be the people that say, let's get everybody next, not necessarily spend any less, but just be ten more, ten x more productive than we were before.
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Ian
And the people that embrace that possibility are going to be the winners of that race. So people that limit themselves to what the smallest number of staff can maintain is going to lose diversity. It's going to lose, diversity of perspective. It's going to lose,
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Ian
a lot of, ingenuity in terms of how the company grows properly.
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Ian
So, what we're trying to do is,
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Ian
make sure that
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Ian
every team member is backed up with
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Ian
a
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Ian
ability to, do their job at a both more comprehensive level and hopefully at a faster level. And that's how we integrate AI to people's jobs. There's nobody there's no positions. We've really thought of letting go, through AI adoption.
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Ian
It's really been about what more can we do and how much essentially can we increase billable per, per employee. And so far, we found that to be a much better strategy than limiting what we can do. And just having robots do everything, because pretty soon
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Ian
everybody's gonna have robots doing everything. And that's not a competitive advantage. So maintaining that integration properly I think is
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Ian
fairly important for us.
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Rohan
Yeah.
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Rohan
Yeah I think as well said. Yeah. A lot of firms are thinking about, you know, this service as a software model where now there's so much more forward deployment
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Rohan
of services. Because again, while
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Rohan
I can be very powerful, these agents can be very powerful, as we've learned from my own experience, when you try to spin up an agent, there's a lot of training and learning and trial and error that happens.
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Rohan
And especially once, adopter tools or technology or workflow that human touch needs to be for deployed to make sure that a customer can be successful.
00:15:45:17 - 00:15:56:02
Rohan
I know before we started recording, you were talking about how you've been building, you know, your own agents and you had a bit of a breakthrough over this past week. So I would love if you can kind of share some context there.
00:15:56:02 - 00:15:58:05
Rohan
And, yeah, what you're kind of tinkering with.
00:15:58:09 - 00:16:04:05
Ian
Sure. It's deeply nerdy stuff. I don't really get to share that much inside the company, but,
00:16:04:10 - 00:16:04:19
Ian
you know,
00:16:04:23 - 00:16:14:02
Ian
I, I can make the most impact when I focus on, strategic decisions and strategic positioning for the brands that we work with.
00:16:14:06 - 00:16:14:20
Ian
And
00:16:14:23 - 00:16:20:04
Ian
in doing that, there's a lot of small decisions and a lot of,
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Ian
research that you have to do to make sure that you're choosing the right one at each stage.
00:16:24:08 - 00:16:49:01
Ian
And so I've, you know, for several months had different agents that I've trained to be able to make sure that I stay on point in terms of my style, in terms of getting to the end result that, I expect to deliver to a customer my goals, as well as make sure that while I'm doing this extra stuff, I don't lose sight of the people I'm managing and lose sight of the way that I'm stewarding our company to be able to deliver on those.
00:16:49:03 - 00:16:58:10
Ian
So, it's been good, but. And when you communicate with agents, you kind of have to maintain a lot of the context yourself because you have to bring
00:16:58:13 - 00:17:02:02
Ian
ideas from one agent to another agent, have them kind of discuss it.
00:17:02:06 - 00:17:06:09
Ian
Then I kind of came up with this round robin system where you
00:17:06:12 - 00:17:11:14
Ian
have each agent kind of put together its own philosophy on a topic, and then you have
00:17:11:17 - 00:17:20:15
Ian
the other agents critique those, try to find consensus or consensus of disagreement, and then kind of work those out until you have that consensus.
00:17:20:15 - 00:17:26:12
Ian
And, and then it kind of walks me through the logic. It helps me understand what the different points are at different times.
00:17:26:16 - 00:17:32:06
Ian
That was fine. But what I was able to do this week that was helpful is
00:17:32:10 - 00:17:36:06
Ian
what what Cloud Code asks you to do, what pretty much all of
00:17:36:10 - 00:17:43:08
Ian
the AI builders are do. It's kind of standard right now is that when there's a problem, you identify the problem and then you have, you know,
00:17:43:11 - 00:17:48:22
Ian
one to a swarm of these bots that gets spun up, for kind of like fruit flies.
00:17:48:22 - 00:18:00:20
Ian
They get spun up and they deal with this problem, and then they finish the problem and they all die. And there's no context. There's no to me, there's no value in a swarm of of non contextualized agents,
00:18:01:00 - 00:18:09:00
Ian
solving a problem. You can give them context, but it's not the same thing as them remembering why you made a decision last week or why you chose to go path.
00:18:09:01 - 00:18:35:14
Ian
See, in this other engagement this time you need to go past that. You need to keep that persistent memory, available for that decision making. And at the same time, you also have to keep available that, personality for it. So the kind of midpoint of transition. I'm sorry, this is very dorky, but no, I wish that I was able to get the agents to, keep persistent memory, but not, their personalities for a long time.
00:18:35:15 - 00:19:00:08
Ian
And we couldn't keep it so that they had, essentially adopted my style of how to deal with each situation and be able to kind of remind of that. And this week, I was able to both keep the persistent memory and the persistent style together during those committee kind of stress testing situations. And what that allows me to do basically is, have kind of a, a very active thinking pad.
00:19:00:08 - 00:19:11:01
Ian
If this is an issue we have to go after, how does kind of this committee and agents, depending on what the issue is, react to that, what sort of things might not be thinking out? And that's, that's the thing that,
00:19:11:05 - 00:19:14:07
Ian
you know, you've heard that the phrase like shower thoughts, like, that's
00:19:14:10 - 00:19:21:04
Ian
it's way too, coincidental to run a company where some of your best ideas happen passively.
00:19:21:07 - 00:19:35:21
Ian
I don't want to do that. One of the certainty of being able to really get to my my creative place where I can understand different options and choose from them. And in order to do that, I had to keep that sense of style, as well as that sense of internal memory as to how we work as a company.
00:19:36:01 - 00:19:51:01
Ian
And so now it's, you know, still expensive, but I've got my whole committee maintaining, those, those two things. And it helps give me some really great ideas that then I can share with other people and, and go from there. But it really speeds up my, my time to ideation by quite a bit.
00:19:51:04 - 00:19:58:00
Rohan
Really interesting. Is there a specific decision that you've had your agents help you with? It'd be great to kind of like make this concrete.
00:19:58:04 - 00:20:00:09
Ian
Yeah, absolutely. So,
00:20:00:14 - 00:20:20:05
Ian
let's see. So there's it's two examples of this week. So one is, we produce a lot of kind of service as a software. Software's out there. We have probably six that we're maintaining at this moment. And they're all, things where it's like 70 to 80%,
00:20:20:09 - 00:20:29:17
Ian
built ahead and then kind of 30 to 20% customized for the customer, understanding, you know, so I just did an exercise with them this week for marketing.
00:20:29:22 - 00:20:48:05
Ian
So we're looking at not only who is most often interested in talking about a certain software, or services or software, but also who's buying those things. And we got to a place where we're trying to make the decision of how do we spend our internal time developing these things? Where should we put our priority? Where does the market want to be?
00:20:48:07 - 00:20:48:18
Ian
And
00:20:48:21 - 00:21:16:00
Ian
those agents understood the context of our operational constraints, as well as our marketing constraints, and our what we're currently doing is able to kind of go round table to the product advisory, to the marketing team, to the CFO, to understand what the most, kind of profitable next six months would be in this. And then back to a CEO, which then lays out the, the goals for each of the agents as well as their tasks.
00:21:16:02 - 00:21:24:04
Ian
Now, sometimes I do this a little bit redundantly, where there's people internally that are really going to do that, but I still want to have that perspective coming from multiple places.
00:21:24:07 - 00:21:38:14
Ian
Another thing was we're meeting with a client today. That was a great meeting. And, they we initially started the conversation talking about, helping them with top of funnel stuff, because that's where their need was.
00:21:38:16 - 00:21:59:06
Ian
But in discovery, we realize they're at this, like, very rare. And opportune moment where a another business that is kind of eye forward, is kind of the only one in its space. And they have an exclusive ability to sell it. And we were able to kind of I used my committee to kind of help me research, you know, what does that mean for their company?
00:21:59:07 - 00:22:28:23
Ian
How do we integrate growth in this? The side business, into their current needs as well as, you know, everything about this investment, which is backed by some fairly famous investors, what the pressures are around when the next rounds are coming, so that we can design a system that not only gets them more revenue, but really in a timely way, answers their opportunity, which is like it's really a pretty infrequent opportunity that you get to have a,
00:22:29:04 - 00:22:34:20
Ian
almost zero competitive landscape and a very highly demanding field, which is essentially AI.
00:22:34:23 - 00:22:57:07
Ian
Services. I probably shouldn't talk about the actual customer, but, yeah, they work in the travel industry, essentially, and they're, there's only one other tool that has anything close to what they have in terms of businesses being able to book, through AI led software and really lower the cost of that. And they're in this moment where for no good reason, all these companies are saying, you've got to be an AI first company.
00:22:57:10 - 00:23:18:19
Ian
So even if the demand wasn't there to switch or to get a cheaper, option for booking travel for your company, you have all these companies that have just sworn that they're going to make it an AI first company, and they kind of have to adopt things like this. And so they're in this like really great niche right now in this great time where, it's the market is theirs to lose.
00:23:18:21 - 00:23:24:05
Ian
And so we want to help them set all the oxygen out of the room. And that's going to be a lot of fun to do it.
00:23:24:10 - 00:23:41:07
Rohan
Yeah, that's really interesting because now going into a meeting you can do a lot of this kind of like strategic research and come in as a. Yeah, like a strategic advisor, which might be for an adjacent service offering. Right. That, that it wasn't a core part of like what you might be doing for them. But you can come in with so much value add
00:23:41:10 - 00:23:45:02
Rohan
given this, this team, this advisory board of agents that you've spun up.
00:23:45:05 - 00:23:45:20
Rohan
That's how a lot.
00:23:45:20 - 00:24:05:17
Ian
Of companies focus on their challenges, you know, so we're not making enough revenue this quarter or we're not getting enough leads to make that revenue. They don't often focus on their opportunities. And I think that's where somebody in venture capital, private equity is kind of trained to see a broader landscape and see, you know, what else could you be doing besides what you've always done or what is occurring to you next?
00:24:05:21 - 00:24:14:05
Rohan
How can how can business owners, how can founders adopt more of that muscle you seem to like, really have a knack for it. How can someone
00:24:14:09 - 00:24:24:06
Rohan
really start to operationalize this? Is it, you know, listening to certain podcasts or reading certain books? Or is there like an operating principle just be a bit more tuned to identify opportunities in their industry?
00:24:24:06 - 00:24:28:21
Rohan
Like how do you advise a founder to be more opportunistic in this way?
00:24:29:00 - 00:24:32:10
Ian
Yeah, I mean, certainly education helps. I would focus on
00:24:32:13 - 00:24:42:03
Ian
kind of the classics, honestly, because value investors like Buffett and Graham are still laying out the foundations that you need to know. A lot of what's been built on top of that is
00:24:42:06 - 00:24:55:14
Ian
kind of temporarily interesting fluff that changes that. The dialog changes every five years, but at the end of the day, companies are built off of either the value that they produce or the value that the market perceives in them.
00:24:55:16 - 00:24:58:18
Ian
And so educate yourself on that. The second thing is
00:24:58:22 - 00:24:59:17
Ian
probably
00:24:59:20 - 00:25:14:19
Ian
probably adopt a little bit of cynicism that the people that you might be selling your business to are not necessarily as good at operating businesses as you, or even making decisions as good as you. They're just in a different tier of the economy and they get to buy businesses.
00:25:14:19 - 00:25:30:00
Ian
But realize like take some of the intimidation out because they're not going to be nearly as thoughtful about buying your business or looking at your business as you're going to be. So think about if you want to get to those next levels. What are the, like, dumb everything down in terms of what
00:25:30:04 - 00:25:35:22
Ian
you really love about everything about your business, and think about what are those metrics that other people are interested in as well?
00:25:36:04 - 00:25:37:03
Ian
You kind of have to, like,
00:25:37:07 - 00:25:40:12
Ian
let that go a little bit as a founder in terms of like,
00:25:40:15 - 00:25:51:11
Ian
this is you're controlling your whole destiny and you're going to make the best product possible. You really have to adapt to what the market wants, and whether it's a sales function or an enterprise value function, you've got to see what that is.
00:25:51:11 - 00:26:13:01
Ian
And everything becomes so much less complicated when you get how people make decisions, because nobody makes decisions. Over 35 different data points, they really don't. They'll analyze them, but they don't. What they'll make decisions on is EBITDA, your sales velocity, your revenue growth over the last few years, like it's really a lot more constrained. So figure out, you know, what those goals are for you make your life so much simpler.
00:26:13:05 - 00:26:14:18
Ian
Would would be my advice.
00:26:14:22 - 00:26:15:15
Rohan
Okay. Yeah.
00:26:15:20 - 00:26:16:12
Rohan
Keep it simple.
00:26:16:17 - 00:26:27:20
Rohan
Well, great. And, you know, as we wrap it up here, what is a message that you might want to get out to our audience, which are, you know, founders, builders, executives
00:26:27:23 - 00:26:31:04
Rohan
who are going to organizations who are looking to adopt more
00:26:31:07 - 00:26:39:23
Rohan
AI to become more differentiated with their service offerings through technology based on your pattern recognition and helping businesses navigate through transition.
00:26:40:02 - 00:26:42:06
Rohan
You know, what are some words of wisdom you might want to share with them?
00:26:42:11 - 00:26:44:04
Ian
If if I'm thinking about
00:26:44:07 - 00:26:50:21
Ian
larger companies or even smaller, but especially larger, having
00:26:51:01 - 00:27:08:04
Ian
real visibility into your how your company's working. It's so important these days that you can create spreadsheets and do modeling, even PR companies, they do so much modeling of things, and eventually the narrative of the company starts forming around the modeling. Instead of the modeling, just revealing what's true.
00:27:08:04 - 00:27:29:03
Ian
So working on systems where you have a tremendous amount of insight into, what's coming into your business, what the costs of that are, what the opportunities are, what the opportunity costs are of doing certain things is so important because you've got to be able to pivot quickly, especially when technologies like cloud are essentially putting companies out of business every day.
00:27:29:07 - 00:27:32:10
Ian
You've got to really understand your moat, your value,
00:27:32:14 - 00:27:49:22
Ian
to people in the long term. And it's got to be outside of like doing clerical duties. It's got to be outside of doing, kind of simple, repetitive tasks. It's got to be a bigger picture. And you can find that picture. You've you've experienced that picture. And when you get that,
00:27:50:02 - 00:27:54:17
Ian
start using yourself to, to train the AI you work with.
00:27:54:18 - 00:28:14:10
Ian
If, if you're going to in terms of what your needs are and, and B, you start having to educate yourself and keep up on the new developments, because that thing that was holding you back a year ago has been perfected at this point. And, and incorporating that into your own business, is
00:28:14:14 - 00:28:16:07
Ian
if you're if you're patient and you do
00:28:16:12 - 00:28:18:02
Ian
what you can do in technology.
00:28:18:03 - 00:28:19:11
Ian
I don't want to be too vague here, but
00:28:19:16 - 00:28:40:14
Ian
if you're patient and you do what you can do now and you keep using it to kind of understand your personal viewpoints, your personal experiences, and the ways that you've concretely added value, you will eventually have kind of a copilot that helps you make decisions, that helps you spread those decisions throughout your organization, and helps you keep consistency across.
00:28:40:14 - 00:28:49:21
Ian
And as you're growing and pivoting and doing all these other changes because you don't want to lose what made you great in the first place. As you're navigating a turbulent environment.
00:28:50:01 - 00:29:02:02
Ian
And some of those people are going to feel really intimidated and encumbered by all the change that's happening. And other people are going to really see the opportunity in it and kind of grow right towards it.
00:29:02:05 - 00:29:08:04
Ian
And, those are the type of companies we really want to help is that there's so much opportunity now,
00:29:08:07 - 00:29:23:22
Ian
people that are my age, I'm 40, you know, we've lived through the housing crisis, we lived through Covid, we lived through a bunch of, economic change. And and each of those changes, new people become the winners of those those rounds.
00:29:23:22 - 00:29:34:00
Ian
And this is a round that everybody can win, especially the founders, especially a founder led companies that can see that vision, align with it and move toward it. So that's what I would use
00:29:34:04 - 00:29:38:16
Ian
AI for and how to integrate it. Just to make sure you stay on on track with that vision.
00:29:38:20 - 00:29:39:05
Rohan
Yeah,
00:29:39:08 - 00:29:45:04
Rohan
I think that's really well said. I think Tobi, founder and CEO of Shopify, who's on a podcast, he recently said
00:29:45:09 - 00:29:49:02
Rohan
in 2026, every industry is up for grabs.
00:29:49:06 - 00:30:03:06
Rohan
And so that can be scary, but it can also be very exciting. And I think what you're saying makes a lot of sense. It's also, you know, our approach as well, which is what are the things that make us truly differentiated, like what is the zone of genius?
00:30:03:06 - 00:30:16:12
Rohan
And for us, it's, you know, the Human Torch of connecting with founders, understanding their stories, helping them bring their stories into the market in a way that's relevant and valuable and differentiated to their audience and their decision makers.
00:30:16:16 - 00:30:18:11
Rohan
And in a in a world where there's,
00:30:18:14 - 00:30:22:11
Rohan
you know, infinite abundance of information, knowledge and now intelligence,
00:30:22:16 - 00:30:27:07
Rohan
we believe that, you know, trust is a scarce resource, and trusted relationships
00:30:27:11 - 00:30:31:03
Rohan
are scarce, as well as judgment and pattern recognition.
00:30:31:03 - 00:30:35:16
Rohan
And seeing the the future and like how things are going to unfold. And I think
00:30:35:21 - 00:30:40:22
Rohan
that's really what you're talking about as well, which is what are your core differentiators. And now how can you
00:30:41:01 - 00:30:51:20
Rohan
adopt technology agents Copilots to help sharpen your thinking, come with a fresh set of ideas and analysis that might have taken a McKinsey consultant, you know, weeks to prepare for you.
00:30:51:20 - 00:30:56:05
Rohan
But now you can do it. And, you know, ten, 20 minutes. And how can we take advantage of it? Because
00:30:56:09 - 00:31:06:00
Rohan
that is like the pace at which the world is moving. And that's also an opportunity to leapfrog maybe the incumbents or larger companies that aren't as adaptive or as agile.
00:31:06:03 - 00:31:07:03
Ian
Yeah. That's right.
00:31:07:03 - 00:31:19:03
Rohan
Yeah. Cool. Well, Ian, where can folks, go to to learn more about you? The approach and, yeah, potentially wanting to learn more about, the business as well. And allied revenue.
00:31:19:07 - 00:31:28:04
Ian
They can go to our website, Allied Redfin.com. They go to our LinkedIn page. We're probably most active there. And they can of course, book a call with us to talk to it.
00:31:28:08 - 00:31:35:03
Rohan
That sounds great. Well, thanks so much for joining us, sharing your insights. And, look forward to doing, around to sometime in the future. Thank you so much.
00:31:35:06 - 00:31:35:20
Ian
Thank you Ron.