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Welcome to Opfocus’s podcast RevOps Rockstars. Join hosts David Carnes and Jarin Chu as they interview RevOps professionals and explore the challenges they face today. Throughout the show, we dive into how guests got started with their careers, their best tips and tricks, and what excites them about the future of the industry.
Henry Mizel: I think it's like, it's back to that alignment piece. It's so, it's so important to share as much as you can with, with all of the teams. Like, if there's context in decisions, it makes it much easier to execute and execute effectively.
David Carnes: Today's guest on the podcast is a high caliber leader at a high growth company. He has a proven track record of developing go to market strategies and has led RevOps at a number of companies. Today's guest is SVP of Revenue Operations and Partnerships at Apollo. io. Henry Mizell, welcome to the show.
Henry Mizel: Thank you for having me.
David Carnes: So Henry, we're really curious, what is something in RevOps that you've had to learn the hard way?
Henry Mizel: I think, I mean, most... Most things, uh, are, are generally learnt the hard way. Um, I think early on just how, critical it is to drive alignment across all, go to market teams and product teams. Um, if, if everyone's aligned around definitions, metrics, strategies, initiatives, like the job becomes exponentially easier to do.
David Carnes: And so how do you herd the cats to do that?
Henry Mizel: Keep beating a continuous drum. Create a lot of transparency and enablement. Understand the audience you're speaking to. And that's kind of multi dimensional, right? Like, are the higher executive team all the way down? Are you speaking to people that are really technical? Are you speaking to kind of non technical folks?
and like translating in the simplistic way possible. What is generally quite complex, themes and, uh, and, uh, and definitions.
Jarin Chu: What I've heard recently is that Apollo's really been growing like a rocket ship. Um, the company provides buyer data, uh, buyer data for sales teams. You've recently, just last month, announced a very impressive 100 million Series D. And I think that officially takes Apollo, uh, Apollo's valuation to 1. 6 billion and is officially a unicorn.
Congratulations.
David Carnes: That's amazing.
Jarin Chu: In your own words, I'd love to hear you describe Apollo to really be doing, and what does that latest round of funding mean for you and the team?
Henry Mizel: Yeah. So I think, um, Apollo, I guess like the way, the way I always try to articulate it is we're a go to market solution for sales and marketing teams. We have a huge, huge user base. So 500, 000 companies, a little over 3 million, uh, users. And really that, like the all in one platform enables. Um, both the sales intelligence side, so kind of data prospecting, sales engagement side.
So how do you kind of then engage with those, uh, with those prospects? How do you email them? How do you run them through those kind of automated prospecting loops and then the automation to do that as well? And that's all in one platform. Um, so it really does make operationalizing a company's go to market very simple, very straightforward, um, and then creates more productivity and more efficiency for those teams.
It's like, it's like having ZoomInfo and Outreach rolled into one platform with all the automation on top.
Jarin Chu: And let's take it. And more personally for your RevOps team, with the new funding that is available and also the corresponding growth expectations, what is the current sized, uh, RevOps teams you're working with and how do you see its purview or its size growing with the latest injection of funding?
Henry Mizel: Yeah, so we're a team of 23 at the moment. We have a few open hires. Um, and really the way that I build rev ops teams is firstly to be centralized, um, at the executive layer. So like kind of plugging in as kind of functional peers to both like the product growth and, and go to market teams. And then within rev ops we have three pillars.
Um, one is your strategy in go-to-market operations. One is your go to market, uh, stack, revenue stack, um, so all the systems, um, and tooling. And then the third is the BI analytics, or, so central analytics, insights, as well as operational analytics that feed back into the go to market teams to enable them to, to kind of run their tactical day to day, uh, initiatives.
It's grown from that team of one to two and a bit years ago when I joined. Um, so it's a, it's a pretty rapid growing team. Very, very high output, which is, which is awesome.
Jarin Chu: That is incredible. And I, I kind of want to just. Dig in one step deeper and say, like, how do you hire so quickly? Right? Especially to find not only people who have, let's say Salesforce certifications or whatever, which seems to be everyone. Um, how do you really find good people who are the right fit for your RevOps team?
And I'm guessing they're all over the country, if not around the world as well. What are, what's your process for finding the right people to add to your RevOps team?
Henry Mizel: Yeah, we have a very distributed team, um, I think of the 23 folks, I think there's probably 16 or 17 different states, um, in the U. S. So, very, very distributed. Um, in terms of practically finding, um, we, we do use Apollo. It's a, it's a very good tool for sourcing, um, in terms of... Skill set just higher, like the highest talent density people we can find wherever they are.
Um, and, and hire people and give them a ton of autonomy to, to go and execute.
Jarin Chu: What a great use case. I love hearing how folks are using the tool that they're working on internally and drinking their own champagne. So that's, that's really awesome. As you're growing, I'm guessing there's probably a calculus you have in, in your mind or that you've given to your team around how you balance which roles to hire in house versus which roles to bring on consultants for or have a external team that you can kind of increase or decrease bandwidth based on needs.
What do you use to determine that right balance of what you do in house versus what you might outsource or even offshore?
Henry Mizel: Yeah, I think stuff augmentation, offshore, external resource, um, can be, can be very effective. I think where it comes in, certainly in my mind, is, is the zero to one. Um, so when you're trying to stand up something completely new, that's where it's really helpful. You can tap into experience, um, in kind of multiple companies and kind of collect those learnings early on.
I think beyond that, you, you end up building a reliance. that can become quite costly to unpack. And then what often happens is that person or that company that you're bringing in, um, they, they can struggle a lot between context switching between multiple customers. So when you get into kind of the, the kind of the, the weeds of it and the details.
Um, it can be, it can be slightly less efficient. So I tend to err more on like hiring, um, for the big strategic, uh, initiatives, but ones that will run for kind of many years and can support teams and orgs.
Jarin Chu: Yeah, I love that nuance you mentioned around, you know, knowing and acknowledging that obviously external vendors and consultants are likely working with multiple companies. And they have to do that contact switching. You did mention in the zero to one case where you're trying to stand up something completely new, you might rely externally on experts or other folks who've done it before.
Are there projects you've encountered, be that at Apollo or in other places where you've thought, this is definitely something we don't want to do alone. Like this is something we need to make sure we have external support on, um, just so that we avoid the pitfalls and potholes and make sure we stand it up correctly the first time.
Henry Mizel: Yeah, I think, um, early days of, of, uh, my tenure at Ollo, um, one of the big objectives was to stand up a. analytics data warehouse and business intelligence tool. So we did use a firm to help us get from that kind of zero to one, but then relatively quickly bought it in house. And I have a phenomenal BI leader and BI team, um, uh, who, who have kind of taken that on and really developed it into, into a world class instance.
Jarin Chu: Amazing. And I know you mentioned earlier that that's already one of your, um, three areas of how you structure your revolves team. So that's super exciting. Um, speaking of being, uh, bringing roles in house, because of your latest round of funding, I'm guessing you might be hiring, what roles might be open and would you want to give a pitch for it while you're on the podcast?
Henry Mizel: Yeah, we have a, we have a few roles within the Revs team. Uh, we have a lot of roles across the whole company, particularly in the kind of product engineering r d side. Um, specific to my org, I'm hiring two ops leaders, so a marketing, marketing ops director, um, and a sales ops director. Uh, we're also hiring, um, in BI for a kind of senior.
Analytics engineer, um, and then I also lead our partnerships team. So we're hiring two partner managers
David Carnes: you've got your hands full with the hiring. That's fantastic.
Henry Mizel: there. Yeah, keeps me busy, but it's fun. It's fun.
David Carnes: So, Henry, your title is SVP Revenue Operations and Partnerships. What does your day to day entail?
Henry Mizel: Uh, yeah, I mean, it's hard to, I wouldn't say any, any one day is, is, is the same as another. I think in the same way I've set up my team, it probably breaks down into three areas. So you've got your kind of strategic, uh, planning. Um, you have your system and process piece and then your kind of proactive insights.
Um, I think on the strategic planning, that's obviously more, uh, seasonal. We're all in planning season right now, so there's a ton of work going on there. Um, obviously with a, with a large team, there's a lot of just general team management and kind of planning within the department. Uh, process optimization, so like this is kind of a more continuous one, but really like trying to proactively identify where teams are blocked or where there's bottlenecks We could have automated a lot of that away, that generally flows through to increase productivity and efficiency within the growth market teams.
Um, I did like the insights piece is huge. Like if we're practically identifying insights and new levers that go to market and product teams can pull on to drive that productivity and efficiency, that's really how RevOps can help drive the company forward. Technology and tools. We have a, we have a very large goods market team.
So our kind of revenue stack is evolving and growing. Um, making sure we select the right ones that fit both the strategy and the existing architecture is key. Um, and then stakeholder management, a lot of stakeholder management.
David Carnes: So given all that, how do you measure success in your role?
Henry Mizel: Um, I think it depends. So ultimately achieving company goals, um, or if you kind of move into the individual squads, like the squad or departmental goals for that internal stakeholder. Ultimately, if Apollo continues to do well and grow, then we're doing our job well. And I kind of like, in a more abstract way, like I mentioned earlier, if the company is aligned around strategy, definitions, um, data, then I think RevOps is doing a good parameter.
David Carnes: So I'm really curious, we talked earlier about you taking this round of funding, you have a number of roles open. How do you plan, are you partnering with the CFO or somebody who's in FB& A to plan out the future of the structure of the team? How does that process work?
Henry Mizel: Yeah, so we have a... We have an extremely strong finance org with, um, with a really great FB& A team, um, that RevOps works very closely with in that, in that planning cycle. So whether that's kind of departmental budgets, whether that's like aligning, uh, bottoms up modeling to their kind of top down planning, um, whether it's trying to set goals around, Um, new product launches or initiatives.
Um, and then really kind of setting efficiency thresholds. So like what is, like, a lot of our growth, um, has been done so with an extremely, like, efficient, uh, mindset. And so making sure we continue that where, where appropriate, um, is, is where we partner very closely with finance.
David Carnes: So, Henry, it seems inevitable given the level that your team is operating at and the size and pace of growth, what would be some examples of corporate cross functional initiatives that your team might own that supports the broader organization?
Henry Mizel: Yeah, I think quarter to quarter vary, varies, there's a, there's a lot of, uh, initiatives that we're, we're plugged into, um, across all of RevOps. I think two that really kind of spring to mind right now, one is our automated SDR program. So I have a guy, uh, that leads my growth ops, uh, Casey, um, and he, he's driving our automated SDR.
And really what that is, is leveraging Apollo. Um, kind of really drinking our own champagne and then operationalizing that with not just demographic signals, but product signals as well. So we can trigger automated emails in a really timely personalized way. To, uh, to the install base, to signups, to users, um, uh, and try and engage with them in a way that creates pipeline for sales.
And last quarter, I think that program drove about, I think it was a thousand and two, uh, meetings for sales from effectively one person's efforts.
David Carnes: That's incredible. It must be really quite something to be at that forefront of. The automated SDR, uh, movement, we are having lots of conversations about that and how technology can solve it, uh, must be very gratifying to have a solution that your team is producing, uh, and be
Henry Mizel: Yeah, I mean, it's testament to, I think, our product team, like, they've built such a strong sales engagement tool, um, that when you layer that in with the, kind of, Apollo's, uh, B2B database, and then you layer that in with your CRM and you can kind of pump CDP data in, like, it really gives you a very unique, very powerful tool to use.
To kind of really drive that top funnel.
David Carnes: So, Henry, I'd love to shift gears, uh, one of the most popular topics, whether it's on the podcast or webinars that we do or other events that we host is the interfacing that RevOps leaders do with their boards. Can you share your own experience within Apollo for your interaction with your board?
Henry Mizel: Yeah. So we have, we have monthly board meetings, which, uh, which, which are great. Um, Redbox works extremely closely with the finance team. So building out the board deck, um, the kind of metrics, the insights, the data to populate that. Um, there is a, I generally attend most of the board meetings as well, so RevOps does have a kind of seat at that table.
Um, and I think that's really helpful, both in feedback loop to the RevOps team and the broader company, in terms of like, how the, what we're talking about at that board level. As well as being able to share kind of insights and opinions and, uh, and break down some of the data.
David Carnes: So what I think is really great about what you just shared, we hope for all of the RevOps teams that we partner with to have a seat at the leadership table. And always understand the why behind the, you know, the, the corporate decisions that are made that, you know, come downstream and impact RevOps.
You're sharing that RevOps has a seat at the board, at the board meetings, uh, which is really outstanding. So you've gone a level, uh, beyond.
Henry Mizel: Yeah, I mean, I think it's like, it's back to that alignment piece. It's so, it's so important to share as much as you can with, with all of the teams. Like, if there's context in decisions, it makes it much easier to execute and execute effectively.
David Carnes: how about your team's involvement with the prep of board materials?
Henry Mizel: Uh, yeah. So again, partnered with finance really closely there. Um, it's, a lot of it is automated now. Um, you know, in a kind of. Typical WebOps sense. So we have, um, a lot of that fed from our BI tool, from our, from our warehouse into, into our board deck. And then we work cross functionally with product and growth teams in putting the narrative together.
Jarin Chu: I want to ask a follow up question to what you just mentioned regarding wanting to make sure not only that RevOps has a seat at the table, but also you're sharing as much as possible with as many teams as possible. I want to get specific about the board Meeting though, there is oversharing of information where it's no longer relevant or it's no longer, um, consumable for the board members.
You know, they're kind of thinking at a certain level. And, of course, there's a lot of operational details that we have visibility and access to. Can you share a bit around how you. What are the questions you ask yourself when you're preparing for that board deck and when you're presenting those details to the board around what to share and how?
Any tips on just the way you filter the information you're providing?
Henry Mizel: Yeah, I think it's, it's just like I mentioned earlier, it's knowing your audience. Um, like every board's makeup is going to be different. The appetite for understanding and like the level of detail is going to be different. Um, I've been here, I've been at Apollo enough, coming up on three years. So, it's more or less kind of 30, 36 board meetings I've now been at, um, you get to know the, the individuals, uh, and, and you can, you can kind of tailor your, your kind of board deck accordingly.
Um, I, I don't think there is a one size fits all. I do think... Um, simply it's often better and if rev ops are there and if like the kind of fp a team is there and, and the rest of the leadership, like they can add the color and the context which they, which they have at at hand.
Jarin Chu: Got it. And because you're here, I just want to pick your brain up with one more question related to this, which is, you know, having, you mentioned you've been in 30 some board meetings today already with Apollo. Were there any questions that a board member had asked, um, that, you know, your team hadn't previously thought of where you're like, oh, wow, like, that makes sense.
And I want to incorporate that every single presentation moving forward.
Henry Mizel: Um, yeah, I mean there like almost certainly, uh, I think that there's probably been questions that have driven the content of futures. Um, I think one of them probably just is. Probably like churning counts, like the top 10 kind of why just some like. Um, granular context. Um, but there's like the, the border have a wide background of, of experience, like learning their experience and like using that to fold into kind of how we decide to run our respective teams. Like it's a hugely valuable, um, part of the business.
And I think like in our, in our most recent round, bringing, bringing Bain on, Um, brings a new level of would really like help accelerate Apollo's journey. And that's true of when we had Sequoia join for our, our CXC and all the other, um, investors who came on.
Jarin Chu: And you're pointing out some really important reminders, which I think for some of the listeners that we have on the podcast, who are up and coming RevOps leaders, or maybe they're inviting, getting invited to board meetings for the first time, asked to prepare board decks, um, it can often feel like it.
It's a one directional sort of presentation, but really what you're calling out is, obviously based on the board conversation, they're here to help, right? So knowing their backgrounds and knowing what are ways and perspectives they can bring to kind of round out what the team is doing, that's incredibly important.
Henry Mizel: Yeah, a hundred percent.
Jarin Chu: To shift a bit into tech now, we can't not talk about tech when we talk about RevOps, and we obviously can't not talk about tech, uh, when we're speaking to the head of RevOps at Apollo. Um, are there any tech stack tools that you personally can't live without? Be that Apollo tech that you're using internally or sort of tech that's out there right now that you're like, Oh, this is really just changing the way my team runs its day to day.
Henry Mizel: Yeah, I mean, it's going to sound cliche, but Apollo, um, and really not just saying that. And I think something that kind of would highlight. That outside of how we drink our own champagne, um, by using Apollo internally is I was a Apollo customer before I joined Apollo. Um, so I was an Apollo customer back in 2017, really, really early days.
Um, and probably was a customer for about four, just over four years in that four year time period. We probably spent. 60, 000 was a huge contract value. We 4.4 million of direct sales revenue and we attributed about 3 million incremental to our marketing campaigns. Being able to fold in all the, so like the R O I on that was like absolutely staggering.
One deal in particular I think was from a cold outman deal with a 30 day sales cycle. Uh, I remember when the rep closed that, it was just like a phenomenal achievement and it was fully, it was fully Apollo. So, um, definitely drank the Kool Aid there very, very early on prior to joining Apollo. And I think, as I mentioned, Casey, who leads growth ops, uh, to book a thousand, just over a thousand meetings for sales in a quarter.
Um, if you look at like just general benchmarks in SAS, you're probably talking at like 250 at the low end, um, for like the cost per meeting. So in terms of what we're generating in value from one person using the tool, it's a quarter million dollars of pipeline generated. Um, so yeah, just couldn't, really couldn't do it without Apollo, whether, whether at Apollo or...
Or in any other modern go to market stack. we leverage our product data pretty heavily. So I think, uh, we, we've actually partnered with census, uh, on multiple product integrations. So census is a reverse ETL tool. Um, and that enables a lot of the ops team to just use basic SQL query to extract data from our data warehouse and pull it into other go to market systems.
So Casey's using that in our automated SDR. We're using it to put product data into HubSpot. Um, it, we, we, we worked with Census to build a direct partnership. So you can actually reverse ETL into Apollo, uh, which is super cool. Um, and then I think Looker, which is our BI tool, uh, that's where all of our insights come from.
I think the stage of company we're at, or even we were at a couple of years ago, being able to model those complex data from multiple sources, transform that together. It's like critical to be able to develop a kind of modern go to market growth strategy.
Jarin Chu: I love.
Henry Mizel: A lot of our decisions.
Jarin Chu: Yeah, I think what you mentioned towards the end here around making sure that that product and usage data can flow back into, be that your CRM or your marketing ops systems, that's such a key component of a SaaS company being able to have this coordinated cross functional motion. And, um, it's incredible to hear just the way you've thought through and, and built it up over time.
Earlier, when you were talking about Um, sort of cross functional initiatives. You had also mentioned Apollo having a qualified account functionality. I'm curious if you wanted to
Henry Mizel: Yeah. So this, this is, this is a really exciting one. Um, rev ops really drove like, uh, cross-functionally, but then within all of ops from systems, um, the ops team and, and the BI team, uh, building a product qualified account motion. Um, so we get. We get a huge number of signups per week, um, probably about 50, 000 signups.
Um, sorting through that is, it's trying to, it's really like a needle in a haystack. Um, it's not, it's not scalable without, without some help. Um, so we, we built a really sophisticated, uh, PQA, uh, motion to identify the top scoring teams. within Apollo that looks at kind of weakly active users, like to set a level then cut by contact and account demographic scores and then cut by like a product fit score as well.
So like, is it a free to pay? Is it an upsell? Is it a cross sell to, um, maybe conversation intelligence, which is a new product we've recently launched. Um, and that's all based on like quantified signals. The BI team were like instrumental in identifying. Um, and what that does is spit out a pretty good number of, um, of leads for sales that are high propensity value, but potentially also based on like the behavioral patterns we've seen, high friction to purchase.
So like really things that warrant bringing in a sales human intervention to guide that deal, nurture it and bring it forward. Um, so that launched. Two weeks ago, um, and has already driven a pretty significant volume of, of pipeline for sales. So very, very excited to see how that, that starts to shape up and develop over the coming, coming months.
Jarin Chu: The way I'm understanding what you just said is that in addition to traditional sort of intent platforms out there, be that your Sixth Sense Demand Basis of the World and Zoom Info, which is much more top of funnel, by developing this qualified account functionality, Apollo is able to kind of close that gap in between, especially for PLG motion companies, and take that product usage data and incorporate into Uh, part of that scoring so that sales doesn't need to be kind of shuffling through the 50, 000 signups a week and actually reach out to people who have meaningful interaction with your platform.
Henry Mizel: Yeah. Yeah. That's, that's the idea.
Jarin Chu: Very cool.
David Carnes: So, Henry, you mentioned benchmarks and mentioned before Bain's involvement in this latest round. Um, I'll be curious to check in with you after a period of time to see if you've come across OPEX Engine, uh, which is a technology that Bain acquired a few years back that does financial benchmarks. They also do sales ops benchmarking for SaaS companies.
So probably not yet. You've had your hands full this past month, but I'll be interested to
Henry Mizel: Not yet, but sounds, sounds interesting.
David Carnes: Yeah. Yeah. The OPEX engine is, it's, it's a great, great team. We've known them for years. So Henry, I'm curious about the next big, big disruption in RevOps. Do you have any... Thoughts in mind on what, what that might be.
Henry Mizel: Uh, I think. Right now, maybe tech stack consolidation, and it could be good, could be, could be negative, um, I think, depending on what's driving it. So, there's obvious economic headwinds for a lot of companies right now, which will be forcing that consolidation. But there's also a lot of, um, just product consolidation happening. And, as anyone who's been kind of deep in, in kind of the ops world, especially on the systems side, Like the more pieces that you put into your kind of revenue stack, the more points of failure you, you potentially open up. And so I think that's where Apollo can be really, really effective. It's like, we have eight or nine product, like product lines within, within the tool, all of which are, um, pretty sophisticated integrations into kind of Salesforce or kind of other tools.
If you can consolidate three or four down into one and kind of managing that, that one tool makes everyone's lives a lot easier. Um, but notwithstanding like a lot of time and investment goes into building like on a rev up side goes into building these kind of tech stacks out. And so unpacking that can create a lot of risk and a lot of, um, uh, headache and kind of resource, uh, resource use.
So, uh, disruptive on a kind of good slash potentially, potentially negative side. Um, and then probably cliche at the moment, but I think AI will have a pretty big impact. Um, I think operators that know how to leverage that to make themselves more productive will see a huge boost, uh, in output to the team.
I don't think, like, AI is not going to come and take Ravop's jobs. I think it's more like how we utilize that to, um, to just make the team more effective.
David Carnes: Yeah, it's fascinating. Uh, I'm just back from Salesforce's Dreamforce conference. And not only was the whole conference AI driven, every keynote had AI splashed throughout it. I spent day zero, the day before the event at the tower, inhaling AI, um, content for the day, uh, really quite something. So there's still a lot to be.
Unveiled and still a lot to be developed, but, uh, it's, it's certainly exciting what that impact will be on RevOps. So, Henry, we'd like to talk to you about, we'd like to talk about you now. Uh, you, uh, live in New York City. You, uh, studied in the University of West of England. Uh, I believe, is that in Bristol? You studied... Property development and planning. You did a master of planning and a built environment. Uh, I'm sure that lends nicely to your time at Breather.
this makes me curious, how did you get into SaaS RevOps?
Henry Mizel: Uh, good question. So yeah, originally, um, originally it was in, in the real estate world, um, more on the corporate finance side, did that for four or five years. Um, so that was obviously kind of very finance heavy, um, very kind of numbers heavy, very, very slow deal cycles and like large, large deals. Um, So moved from that into more kind of straight finance sales, uh, kind of city of London world for, for a couple of years, and then ended up, uh, joining a startup, which was similar to breather.
It was a kind of aggregator of, um, uh, corporate workspace. Um, in a kind of similar Airbnb fashion, did that for about a year and a half, sold that, um, pretty early on, which was, which was exciting. And that's kind of when I joined Breather, but kind of shifted into, into SaaS world through kind of real estate SaaS.
And then, uh, COVID came along and, uh, real estate SaaS or real estate in general took a hit there. So I've moved more into, into pure SaaS, but I've always had that kind of RevOps, um, Binance strategic side from kind of even pre COVID. Pre technology.
David Carnes: So you're coming up on three years at Apollo. If you could turn around and give yourself advice back on day one at Apollo, what would you say?
Henry Mizel: Um, it's a good question. I'm sure there's, I'm sure there's things I would have done differently. I'm sure there's, uh, things that I would have prioritized in a different way. Um, but on the whole, just enjoy it. Like it's been a, it's been a phenomenal growth trajectory. I think the, um, product team. Building out a world class product led motion that is complementary to our go to market sales team as well.
It doesn't cannibalize sales like the two work in concert very, very well. Um, and it's just led to absolutely phenomenal growth in the last three years. Um, so I would have probably, probably said enjoy that, take it in.
Jarin Chu: You've really demonstrated this meteoric rise through RevOps, um, starting out doing RevOps in the real estate industry, joining, uh, the SaaS space. And of course, now you're SVP of RevOps and partnerships. I would love to know. If you had a lifetime career bucket list, what might be on that career bucket list that you'd eventually want to get to?
Experiences, be that in SaaS or another industry, um, other businesses, other ideas, what might be motivating you ultimately, uh, to get to this really, really cool next? role or position.
Henry Mizel: Yeah, I mean, I definitely have career aspirations, like, like everyone, I'm sure. Um, think I'm pretty happy with that current trajectory. Right now, I'm focused on Apollo and making, I think Apollo is... Uh, it's a great success story, but like, that story is, is definitely not finished. Um, there's a lot still to do, there's a lot of growth ahead of us, and like, great, but being a, being a part of something like Apollo is, is, is far superior.
And so, um, really just focused on, on, on building the best company that we can.
Jarin Chu: What I'm hearing is just that pure thrill of being on a rocket ship that's shooting straight up for the stars. So that's really, really exciting to hear that you're enjoying the process wholeheartedly.
Henry Mizel: Yeah, a hundred percent.
Jarin Chu: Leading Rev Ops and certainly helping grow the team through these rounds of funding can, I would say, maybe take over your life at the very least, be very, very intense. Are there things you do regularly To unwind from what has to be the insanity of this kind of, uh, fast paced growth.
Henry Mizel: yeah, I mean, there probably should be, I, I have a terrible work life balance. Uh, I, I'm not gonna, I'm not gonna suggest anything else. I have two young kids. who, um, are, like, I spend most of my non working time, uh, with. We're obviously relatively new to New York, having moved from London a couple of years ago.
So generally, like, either exploring the city or just going kind of further afield. Um, and then a big foodie, like whether that's cooking or going out, I think that's, uh, that tends to be pretty cathartic and a good way to switch off.
David Carnes: certainly being in New York City, there's lots and lots of cool things to do with, uh, with little ones. So, I'm excited for you and your family. So, given the pace that you've been operating at the last number of years, I'm really curious, uh, how quickly you've grown your team, the rounds of funding, uh, the intensity of the work.
Where do you turn for your own RevOps learning?
Henry Mizel: Uh, that's a good question. I think, um, depends on, on what I'm trying to learn. Um, I think there's a ton of resources, so kind of read and read as much as I can, listen to kind of some great podcasts. Um, always trying to think from like first principles, but having that guided by like others' experiences is, is super important. I have, I also have a great incredible network of operators that I've kind of met over the past kind of 10 years or so. Um, like. Brad Smith at Sonar, Matt Curl at Chekka, Pete Kazanji at Atrium, like a lot of um, just to name a few, but like a lot of people in my network that
you can kind of very, very new, very specific problems we're trying to solve for. It helps to get that perspective of others who have either been there or who kind of aren't so close to it that they can take a step back and ask some questions that maybe people have missed.
David Carnes: And since, you know, we're always on the lookout for great podcast guests, it sounds like Brad and Pete and the person at Checkr would be good suggestions.
Henry Mizel: think so,
David Carnes: Fantastic, and we'll include links to their LinkedIn profiles in the show notes, so thank you for sharing that. So, Henry, where can people find you? Are you out on social media these days?
Henry Mizel: uh, LinkedIn,
I think, um, not, not hiding on there. So pretty easy to find.
David Carnes: And it's just under Henry Mizell. That's great. Um, and tell us about, uh, finding your company website.
Henry Mizel: Yeah. So just io um, we, it's fully free forever, so get started like five minutes. Um,
David Carnes: Well, that's pretty cool. Henry, it's really been a pleasure having you on the podcast today. I've certainly learned a lot. I'm really impressed. Anytime I hear that someone goes from being a customer for, for even for four years, spending 60, 000 generating 4. 4 million, I mean, that's incredible. To then joining the company and leading the charge, uh, for the, for the growth and rev ops, that's a pretty cool.
Uh, you shared with us about the automated SDR program, booking a thousand meetings without a human. I mean, my mind's sort of blowing up over here. Uh, and I really appreciated you sharing even just RevOps, not only having a seat at the leadership table, but also, um, in the board meetings as well. It's really, really super.
So thank you so much for sharing your, your experiences and all your learnings with our listeners.
Henry Mizel: no, it's my pleasure. It's been fun.
Jarin Chu: And I want to thank our audience for joining us today and taking an inside peek at the latest unicorn, uh, in the form of Apollo. io. So glad to have you on the show, Henry, and I would encourage everyone who's listening to follow Henry on LinkedIn and certainly subscribe and follow this podcast wherever you get your podcasts.
Thank you again for being on the show, Henry.
Henry Mizel: Thank you.
Jarin Chu: And this has been another exciting episode of Revolve's Rockstars. See you next time.
David Carnes: Stay classy, Rockstars.