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We put Dawn Stallwood in the hot seat with a real crisis: a $1.8M contract that fell apart 11 days after signing because the sales deck promised things the paperwork didn't back up. Almost three decades as in-house counsel, a law partner, and a notary taught her how to spot the gap between what gets said and what gets signed, and she's built an entire career around closing it.
We get into why she calls herself a Chief Integrity Officer, how to apologize without admitting fault, and why vulnerability might be the most underused negotiating tactic in sales. We also press her on AI in the sales funnel, and on the founder dependency trap that quietly tanks a business right before an exit.
If your org treats integrity as a value on the wall instead of an operating principle, this one's for you.
We discuss:
- Crisis management and the art of apologizing without admitting fault
- Vulnerability as a trust-building and negotiating tool
- AI's role and risk in authentic sales outreach
- Founder dependency and succession planning before an exit
Chapters
(00:00) Introduction
(00:00) Introduction
(01:56) The Art of the Apology in a Crisis
(05:09) What a Chief Integrity Officer Actually Does
(08:30) Vulnerability as a Negotiating Tactic
(13:15) Building a Culture Brave Enough for Hard Conversations
(18:27) AI, Authenticity, and the Sales Funnel
(21:12) Succession Planning and the Founder Dependency Trap
(25:47) Navigating Equity, Earnouts, and Exit Conversations
(27:29) Monday Morning Move: The Contract Gap Analysis
(32:46) Uncensored Questions: Hard Truths and Lessons Learned
Creators and Guests
What is GTM Uncensored™?
Most GTM content covers the same ground. GTM Uncensored finds the operators actually in the seat and digs into what's true in today's GTM, not what sounds good.
Every guest is currently building a company, leading a revenue team, or running a GTM function inside a real business. During the show, Adam and Dale push the envelope until the real story comes out.
The show goes where most content won't: The motions that determine whether a company stays in business, or goes under.
GTM Uncensored is built for B2B revenue leaders at $5M–$100M ARR who are accountable to a number and need a real-world playbook, not philosophy.
Every episode ends with a Monday Morning Move. One specific action you can take this week, and a series of Uncensored Questions where listeners get unfiltered answers from people who've actually been there.
What we cover: Pipeline & GTM motion, post-sale architecture, CS & retention, NRR/GRR mechanics, RevOps, AI in the revenue org, executive branding, and more.
Your hosts: Adam Jay and Dale Zwizinski are co-founders of Revenue Reimagined. They didn't build a consulting firm. They flipped the fractional CRO model because strategy without execution doesn't move the needle. The questions they ask on air are the same ones they're solving inside real companies right now.
GTM Uncensored is the GTM conversations nobody else is having.
[00:00:00] Dawn Stallwood: What I don't like is where AI pretends to care as much about you as I do, because it won't. And it can learn my language model all day long, but it still won't be me. I do think that it's an integrity problem in the making. I think that if organizations who are very sales-oriented are going to use it as part of their sales funnel up front, they need to be very careful.
If an individual had come to me via LinkedIn and clearly pointed to the fact that they knew me via a podcast they'd heard, or they'd read the book, or somewhere where I've spoken, or a mutual connection, then immediately I've got more interest in them. You've got to be really conscious about how you use AI in sales
[00:00:46] Adam Jay: All right, Dawn. So on "GTM Uncensored," we always like to start with a cold scenario. I'm gonna put you in the hot seat for a little bit. Vivintree Data, they're a $26 million B2B software company. Their VP of sales just closed the largest deal in company history. It's a three-year, $1.8 million contract with a logo that everyone in the office knows and wanted. 11 days after signing, the customer's GC sends a formal letter. Three commitments from the sales deck never made it into the contract. Two more quietly got changed during redlines, and nobody ever told the customer. The CEO is now on the call with the customer threatening to walk away. The VP of sales is insisting the team did nothing wrong, and the board wants to know how the hell this happened on the biggest deal of the year. You've spent almost three decades in rooms just like this, in-house counsel, law partner, notary whose entire job is certifying that sh*t actually is what we say it is.
You've built Floodlight Business because you kept watching this exact thing happen over and over and over again. I love the term chief integrity officer, by the way. What do you tell the CEO in the next 48 hours, and what really went wrong long before this call?
[00:01:56] Dawn Stallwood: So the first thing I would do is I'd have everyone just take a breath. That's the first thing that
[00:02:01] Adam Jay: Great start. Let's calm down, y'all.
[00:02:03] Dawn Stallwood: Everybody needs to just calm down and take a breath. And, the second thing I would do is, gather the information. You can call it evidence, but that sounds a bit scary and people get into their sort of offense/defense mode.
So let's just gather the information in an no blame, authentic way. And then once you've got the information, you're able to then work out your plan, your position. But if you want that particular customer, then you have to go to some degree and say transparently, " This is what's happened. We really value you. Let us prove to you that we really value you. This is how we're gonna learn and grow through it," because you want to secure the opportunity. In essence, what you actually really need is for your sales VP, who's obviously, you know, feeling pretty sort of, vulnerable and exposed right now, you need to give that person permission to put their self-interest aside. And until you do that in a very, intentional way that could be trusted, you won't get the help you need from that individual who has been living and breathing that opportunity to bring it through to conclusion. So you need to allow that person to actually put aside their own position, their self-interest, their worries, to actually just get it resolved, and then go speak transparently to the customer.
That's, that's where I would take the conversation, with the CEO once I'd got them to take a breath and, and calm down.
[00:03:25] Adam Jay: Dale, you're actually very good at that. Dale tells me constantly, "I need to sleep on it." I tend to respond pretty quickly. So I like the “take a breath”. Really good advice
[00:03:34] Dawn Stallwood: At the end of the day, you know, it's all about perspective. And if the customer feels aggrieved and/or, you know, takes a dim view of what's happened, if you want the customer, you've got to find a way through that. And it might mean that you have to have some humility about you and, you know, the art of an apology is not, you know, is, is something that I see a lot these days as being, "Oh no, don't apologize, and don't say sorry." And actually, the very first thing that you can do
[00:04:02] Adam Jay: The very first thing most lawyers tell you to do is never say you're sorry cause you're admitting guilt
[00:04:06] Dawn Stallwood: and I'm one of those lawyers who won't say that. I, I will be, as a human being, you can apologize without actually asserting blame. I'm sorry you feel that way. I'm sorry this has happened. This is an unfortunate situation we find ourselves in. And it just diffuses it, takes the energy out. I get very annoyed with service providers who fall short and don't apologize, but just go on the defense. It drives me to distraction, and, and actually "I'm then a much harder person to deal with as a result of that
[00:04:40] Adam Jay: I'm struggling to picture you as a difficult person to deal with. Maybe it's the accent, but you're like so calm And
[00:04:47] Dawn Stallwood: Trust me, there's a moment, there are moments where this version is not the version that shows up. And it's often driven by a service provider not accepting their responsibility in a particular situation or being defensive and/or just not having a human response. Those things really irritate me, and then I do become a difficult customer
[00:05:08] Dale Zwizinski: As Adam said, 'cause I love your title of Chief Integrity Officer, but as you probably know as well, most companies just treat this as like a value on the wall, like integrity, um, and, and not as a job title or authori- or actual authority. Um, so walk us through a little bit the day-to-day, what the value statement looks like. Like, that's not on the website. Like, what is an integrity officer and how do you... How does, how does a company ingest that?
[00:05:35] Dawn Stallwood: So let's, um, let's walk it slightly backwards. I'm just gonna give you a moment of English language. So the word integrity comes from the Latin root word integer. and the Latin integer word means a state of undivided whole or completeness. So when I look at integrity, I look at it from the perspective of not just about, you know, corporate culture, code of conduct, ethics. I also look at it, look at it from a perspective of are we operating in a way where we are whole and undivided without fraction or friction? And if you look at that definition and the use of the word in that way, chief integrity Officer becomes so much more than just compliance.
[00:06:15] Dale Zwizinski: It's like the connectivity tissue throughout the organization
[00:06:19] Dawn Stallwood: If you take the example that Alan's just given us in terms of the hot seat moment, you are at risk of the internal team being really fractured and divisive between each other as everyone tries to jostle for position and blame each other.
Whereas what you want is everybody to show up in a state of undivided whole to resolve the problem. And so that's where integrity comes in. Integer, a state of undivided whole or completeness. That's the way in which I use the word integrity in chief integrity officer. And the phrase was coined really off the back of a particular client who started introducing me to her management and leadership team as her corporate conscience And basically that boils down to I don't sleep at night, but she does.
[00:07:00] Dale Zwizinski: It is about sort of the conscience of, of the organisation and the conscience of individuals, um, who are enrolled, you know? So that's, that for me is, is how I operate
I would think that organizations and/or founders and/or leaders, I would have to think that it's very niche because I, I, we've worked with a lot of founders and leaders, and I don't know if they can get to that place. Like they always see that as like a, chief operating officer or as a someone else that isn't from the integer integrity connectiveness tissue
[00:07:33] Dawn Stallwood: It is unusual, and so that's quite nice to have a niche. I think it's, uh, for a particular type of CEO or founder. It's somebody who's enlightened, has got strong self-awareness, a persistent attitude towards learning, so they've got a teachable spirit. Because you have to give that person, if they're going to have a reasonable stab at actually being useful, you have to give that person permission.
And in giving that person permission to speak to the leader or the founder about issues of conscience or integrity as defined, you're making yourself vulnerable. And so it's not for all leaders, and I've learnt that the hard way, where I come at it from a particular perspective, and actually that's not really what the leader or the chair wants from you, in which case it's, this isn't a good fit for us, let's move on, no harm done.
I'm, you know, I'm 52 now. If I can't actually deliver, some value that's congruent with my own values, then I'm not interested in doing that work
[00:08:30] Dale Zwizinski: So I think vulnerability is a really underrated skill. Um, it's one that took me years to master. I, you know, often talk about the time where I was denied a promotion because I was told that I was an asshole and my ego is in the way and I was always right, and you have to be vulnerable. When we talk about vulnerability, I, I want to tie that into some research, you know, specifically '25, '26, that keeps coming up with the same thing.
[00:08:58] Adam Jay: So B2B buyers rank competence, dependability, consistency as what earns trust. and on the flip side, they don't, if you ask them, count vendors as trusted sources at all. And that's by and large your entire argument. Does the average revenue leader, the average CEO, the average person that you work with, like do they really actually believe this and get this or are they just nodding their head at the keynote of like, "Yeah, you know, we, we have to earn trust, rah, rah, rah"?
[00:09:27] Dawn Stallwood: I think some do and some absolutely don't But those who have, um, had situations where vulnerability has actually played out positively for them, they do get it. It's quite interesting when you play the vulnerable card in a negotiation or in a conversation, and the vulnerability can be as simple as, "I've misunderstood."
[00:09:45] Adam Jay: Up 100%.
[00:09:47] Dawn Stallwood: So but it... So however you coin it, you know, vulnerability has a scale. If you have had a vulnerable moment and you've been surprised, pleasantly surprised at, how that's played out in terms of the outcome, you know, I always find when I negotiate, acquisitions and deals for clients, that it's better to just get out in front of the gate and just be vulnerable about where your hard lines are.
It's not a negotiating tactic that's basically saying, "I'm playing hardball," and, you know, tough. It's actually more, " You need to understand that I've got constraints from my board or my chair, and I haven't got a mandate to go beyond this. You either trust me when I say I haven't got a mandate or not, but I'm telling you, vulnerably speaking, I don't have a mandate.
And if you ask me for this, X, Y, and Z will happen." Normally, the response, if you've got a pragmatic person on the other side of things, will be to try to workshop and problem solve through it. so then they become vulnerable too, so you end up being vulnerable together. It's a bit like saying sorry.
If you get out ahead of it with some vulnerability, people sort of, you know, dial down the rhetoric,
[00:10:48] Adam Jay: There's so much power in a couple of words. Like, I'm thinking whether it's business or even personal. I messed up the other day with my kid. Like I did something that I shouldn't have without asking him. And like I looked at him afterwards and like, I was like, "Dude," like, " Z," like his name's Zachary.
I'm like, "I'm sorry. Like I, I should have asked you first and like I'm genuinely sorry that I didn't." And like the look on his face, and I don't apologize a lot, um, as much as I should, but like the vulnerability of that, of admitting to a child, for lack of better terms, that I was wrong, like an adult.
Like y- you have to be comfortable admitting that you're wrong to drive business forward and form a true partnership, because that's what business should be. It should be a partnership
[00:11:38] Dawn Stallwood: And the interesting thing about being vulnerable is that, you know, if it doesn't work, they're probably not the sort of people you want to be engaged with anyway, right? So it tells you something about the people that you want to be in partnership with. I don't want to be in partnership with someone I can't be vulnerable with, because then, then you're not getting a whole version of me, are you?
You're getting a slightly guarded version of me. So I think vulnerability is actually quite powerful in terms of you being able to measure a relationship, the worth of a relationship, because people buy people at the end of the day. And the other thing that I think is useful about, being vulnerable is when you catch yourself first.
So if your, if your son, Adam, had come to you and said, "Dad, I can't believe you did that," and you are literally clueless, you've not realized that you've done it, and then you apologize, means nothing.
[00:12:28] Adam Jay: 100%.
[00:12:28] Dawn Stallwood: But if you come along and say to him, "Hey, look, I've had a reflective moment, and I just... I fell short there. I'm sorry," you get a- out ahead of it. it's worth a lot, I think
[00:12:39] Dale Zwizinski: I love that.
[00:12:40] Adam Jay: could not agree more.
[00:12:41] Dale Zwizinski: Yeah, I love that. As we progress through this conversation, I think pressure from, and you mentioned it, from like a board or investors or any of these things, like a lot of CEOs, founders, companies that we work with, they say they value the integrity right up until like they're getting pressure at the end of a quarter or at the end of a year, or their earnings weren't as good as they are.
How can you actually build that discipline into fast-growing sales organizations where it doesn't become like a friction point?
[00:13:15] Dawn Stallwood: So I think you have to have brave individuals. So in the book Beautiful Leadership, in the framework B in Beautiful is the foundational quality of all leadership, and its B is for brave.
And I think that's really fundamental. So let me give you an, a, an example. A few years ago, so COVID, uh, one of our clients was involved in life sciences, and as a result of the COVID, beginnings of COVID, you know, there were some very sort of scared investors.
They were a listed company, so some of the investor groups were pretty scared about, you know, valuation, et cetera. And there was a very strong edict that came down to the CEO around, you know, essentially hiring and firing, including the really key departments like, research and development, which are fundamental to the long-term trajectory of any life sciences business.
And their, you know, their, essentially their pipeline of, of sales, what comes next in terms of therapeutic solutions and so on. and he had a moment, he had a moment in time as a leader where he could decide to show up in one way or another. It could either have been, " Yes, I'm going to follow the edict and basically retrench a whole bunch of individuals who have, who have actually grown our business in terms of value," or, "I'm gonna stand firm and say, in this moment, we're going to do the right thing, and we're gonna stand by these people for a period of time because we have got the ability to do that financially, and we're going to believe in this being a long-term play."
And that's what he did. and he didn't remain with the organization a few years later. And I think probably for him, at that moment in time, there was a realization that his values and the cultural direction of the organization were at odds with each other, but he showed up brave. So I think in answer to your question, if you want to make sure integrity is a core principle of through which you operate, not just something you put on a sound, as a soundbite or in a deck, you have to have brave individuals prepared to be the custodian of it
[00:15:13] Dale Zwizinski: I love that. Brave. and able to have hard conversations. Like, I think that aligns with brave. People are afraid to have difficult conversations, then leads into placating potentially boards, CEOs, et cetera
[00:15:28] Adam Jay: people are, confrontation adverse
[00:15:29] Dawn Stallwood: They are. And, and let me g- let me give you, uh, something that helped me massively, quite a few years ago now when I had a very difficult, season with an aggrieved client. I went and saw a psychologist, 'cause I was worrying myself literally to death around a particular issue.
And she wrote the words, uh, wrote one word on this whiteboard, and it was fear, F-E-A-R. and I just looked and I went, "Yeah, fear. What's that got to do with what I'm feeling right now?" And then she said, " False evidence appearing real." And it completely changed my life, because in that moment, I had been manifesting in my mind all of the scenarios that things would...
How things would play out in relation to this particular thing I was concerned about. Evidentially and in terms of, like, logic would tell me that if I stopped long enough and got myself out of my own way, none of those things were likely to manifest. False evidence appearing real.
So part of being brave is also this piece around checking and calibrating the things that worry you, or stop you. are they really right to worry me or to stop me, or is false evidence appearing real, which requires you to slow down? And the biggest concern I have about leaders and founders, uh, and it's always been my professional life, is space and time.
They don't have it. and they don't have enough of it, a lot of them. Some do, but the vast majority don't. And it's only in those quiet moments, in those, those space-giving moments that you can actually have these sorts of strategic, reflective times where you can work out, you know, your response to something.
If you're always doing it in a firefighting way, like the CEO in a hot seat moment could be doing, you know, into, like, quick panic reaction is not necessarily the right reaction for the organization or the individuals. The space and holding, the art of waiting well and the art of restraint, those things really help you be brave
[00:17:21] Adam Jay: Oh, I'm still learning that. Going, going back to Dale sleeping on it and my instant response is like, I'm still learning to
[00:17:29] Dawn Stallwood: Yeah, me too. I, I, I persistently read my book, as in I wrote the book for other people, and then I realized I wrote the book for me.
[00:17:37] Dale Zwizinski: we get in our own way, you know? I'm forever getting in my own way. So it's the phrase I use a lot with my leaders and myself, you know, am I in my own way? And am I checking myself? Have I got a role to play in all of this?
[00:17:49] Adam Jay: Let's talk about how AI comes into play here. So there's a stat going around right now that 45% of B2B buyers say that they are less likely to consider a vendor if the outreach feels automated or synthetic. And people are openly saying, we see it on LinkedIn all the time, that almost everybody feels fake right now, right?
"Hi, Adam, because you're the CEO of this, you must suffer from that, and I could solve it with this and want 25 leads," or whatever it is. Is that a marketing problem or is that truly the integrity problem you've been talking about for 25 years showing up in a different channel?
[00:18:26] Dawn Stallwood: Oh, that's a really interesting question.I'm not on the fence about AI, but I have some very significant concerns around it. And one of the things I have concerns around is authenticity. Things that are automating, that helps efficiency, I'm all for it.
But what I don't like is where AI pretends to care as much about you as I do, because it won't. and it can learn my language model all day long, but it still won't be me. I do think that it's an integrity problem in the making. I think that if organizations who are very sales-oriented are going to use it as part of their sales funnel up front, they need to be very careful.
So I've had two emails today where it's clearly AI, and they've said, "Hi, Dawn. We've noticed from your website that you're involved in facilitation. Uh, would you be interested in me creating 20 leads for you?" And I had another one that was similar. And I was like, "No, not remotely interested." If an individual had come to me via LinkedIn and clearly pointed to the fact that they knew me via a podcast they'd heard, or they'd read the book, or somewhere where I've spoken, or a mutual connection, then immediately I've got more interest in them.
Unless it's something that I would say is a low-grade commodity service that I really don't care about, I'm not gonna be buying that way. You've got to be really conscious about how you use AI in sales, because the very thing that makes clients sticky, it might well be the technology solution.
But I would hazard a guess, in a lot of instances, the reason why a client is sticky is because of the individuals who've shown up in a crisis, how their client's been onboarded, how the after-sale support's been managed, and that to me is a human endeavor. that's my take on it
[00:20:10] Adam Jay: I agree with you. We're huge proponents of AI. I think it's where you use AI, how you use AI, being transparent about where
[00:20:19] Dawn Stallwood: Absolutely. Yep. use AI. Yep
[00:20:21] Adam Jay: AI's not capable of caring, right? and I think it's very easy to know when some AI email is, "you know, we went to the same school here," or, "We did this," or like, there are so many ways to tell.
Like, there's a place for it, but be authentic where you need to be authentic.
[00:20:37] Dawn Stallwood: Or, or if you really want to engage the customer, sit down with your key customers, define what that looks like for you as an organisation and say, "Right, we've been mandated by our board to have a look at AI, but we don't wanna make any moves on AI until we understand which parts of AI in our relationship are gonna turn you on and turn you off."
[00:20:56] Adam Jay: Dale talks about this all the time. What's the AI charter?
[00:20:59] Dawn Stallwood: yeah, ask the customer, " I don't mind if a s- support ticket is AI-driven, but I do mind if this is." and then you're saying, "Okay, well, we've heard you, and we'll design our AI response with you in mind." That's gonna speak volumes
[00:21:12] Dale Zwizinski: Want to talk a little bit about, like, succession planning and effectiveness in that succession planning. And so you've done some work with multi-generational families, PE-backed businesses. When a founder finally feels like they're ready to hand off the company, what actually breaks first in the customer relationships and how, like how fast does it happen?
[00:21:31] Dawn Stallwood: The first thing I would say is that quite often when a founder decides that they're ready to exit, it's already too late. Because really the work should be being done three or four years out. So that at the point when they decide that it is time for them to go, they can literally go and there's no dependency on them.
a constant challenge I have with the leaders and founders I've worked with over the years, is around, you know, " So you say you think you're gonna exit in three years' time?" Yeah. "Okay. Well then, we need to start now." "No, no, no, no. Three years' time." " No, no. We need to basically start doing the succession planning now."
" but I'm not ready to have someone else take my role." and then you end up stuck, and then later on they ask the question, "why is my business not valued as highly as it should be?" It's like, well, because you're still the person in the hot seat building and responsible for these relationships.
So the first thing that tends to break if you haven't done the uncomfortable work of truly having succession in place, particularly as regards sales, is the relationship with the customer.
And the reason why it becomes a problem is that obviously deals are confidential. You can have a situation where the client finds out literally through a change control request,Their contract says, you know, the contract can be terminated if there's a change of ownership in the shares. And that's the first thing they hear, that there's an impending exit, and the individual that they've trusted and grown with over the years is leaving,
Is a request for, "Could you please give us permission to sell the company to company X? Because Joe Bloggs is selling." That's the first time that they hear about it because of the way the deals are constructed. How are you gonna react if you're a customer?
[00:23:01] Adam Jay: Piggyback on that for me for a second. So if that's the case, and if most of the biggest accounts are with that founder or that one rep or that one name and not the company itself, is it actually a business or is it just a well-paid job that ends the second there's a change of control or the second that person leaves?
[00:23:19] Dawn Stallwood: And the answer is sometimes it is exactly that. It is that it's one individual looking after a number of key accounts. They're quite dangerous businesses to exit. The best scenario is that the founder CEO starts to realize that their worth is in empowering and growing other people to be successful, and that rather than the floodlight being on them and their success of landing a client, which is what they did fifteen, twenty years ago, that's not the measure of their success.
Now the measure of success is the success that other people in the organization have, and that they can bask in their success, the light of their success. And leaders who get that will start to make the transition. If the business culture, or perhaps sometimes the board, especially if it's not a fully owned, founder business, it might have PE involved or VC money, you know.
You've also got to be clear about how you are directing the individual, the founder. If you're sending a mixed message to a founder or CEO that what they are delivering and what they're building and growing and booking by way of business is equally important as their sales team's activities, then there's something desperately wrong at that point if later on you want to exit the business.
you point people where the money is, and they go in that direction. I was married to a golf professional, before my second husband, and whenever I used to go and watch him practice at the driving range, he would literally just tell me where he was going to hit the ball. He'd slice it or fade it or how far he'd shoot it, and his body would line up with the club, and off it went.
And the ball would go in exactly the direction that he'd sent it because of his body positioning. So it's the same thing. If you show people or point people to what you're telling them is important, that's where they'll go. think about the signposting, is the message I would have for, non-exec teams and chairs
[00:25:06] Dale Zwizinski: Yeah, I'm trying to, like, digest some of it because these are really powerful thoughts. and I'm curiousCause when you're, when you're doing the succession planning and the new company's coming in to buy them, we have a lot of conversations around equity or holdout or, like, this has to happen before you get the payout.
Like, how do you help the founders and CEOs go through this? I've had a conversation with a couple people lately where they're like, " It sounds like a good deal outside," right? And then, like, when I dig into it, I think of it like an American football contract. It's like, okay, well, you have all these incentives.
How do you kind of walk them through making sure that they understand the gotcha points in, in the, uh, process?
[00:25:47] Dawn Stallwood: Well, I think the first thing is before you even get even close to beginning to think about a deal or that a deal's on the table, is we've got to have an upfront conversation with those individuals to say, "Look, this is in the realm of possibilities. You know, it is highly probable because of your importance to the organization that you are going to be required for a period of time."
Whether that's in consultancy or they want you to stay in and roll your equity, you need to be prepared for that before we even start having a conversation with prospective, exit partners. Because if that's an absolute red line for you, then, then you need to rethink or we need to regroup so that they don't need to ask that of you.
The ideal world is that they don't need to ask that of, an individual because the individual can show the dependency isn't there and that the team members can actually carry on without them, in which case, then yes, they can stay on, but then they can stay on in a far more strategic role where you don't feel like you're there under sufferance.
I've done buy side and sell side, and there is nothing worse on the buy side than having a bunch of individuals in the management or leadership team who are there because they feel that they've been held hostage. It doesn't help the synergy, the transition, or integration.
It's problematic. So if you can find a way of reducing the dependency on those individuals and still want them to stay, and then they want to be a part of the journey and the growth in the future, then that's a completely different thing. But if you're completely binding it up with their exit package and the value that they've driven into the business previously, it can lead to a level of disenfranchisement and disinterest, which will only play out badly for the buyer
[00:27:29] Adam Jay: 100%. shift gears to what we call our triple M, our Monday Morning Move. So I'm gonna share a practical takeaway that our listeners, in theory, can go test this week. And what I want you to do, Dawn, is I want you to push back, tell me what you would add, change, or just tell me that my thinking is way off. So here we go. Pull your last three contracts or proposals that your team closed last quarter. For each one, all I want you to do is go check, does the signed scope and pricing match exactly what was promised out loud during the sales cycle? Flag anywhere where AI helped write the proposal, a claim, a case study, a number, a compliance line, anything, and confirm that a human actually verified if that was true before it went out.
If you find a gap between what was promised and what's written down, that's not a legal problem waiting to happen. It's a legal problem that's already happened that you just haven't been billed for yet. Fix it once, decide who signs off on claims before they leave the building, not after a customer's procurement team catches them for you
[00:28:33] Dawn Stallwood: Yeah, I wouldn't add anything to that. I love the fact that you're talking about like a gap analysis
between human interaction and the contract language. And the fact that you're trying to catch it before it becomes a problem, because what you're doing here is this, this activity basically is to promote a set of behaviors for the next time, right?
So it's about a learning exercise that informs how you show up the next time you do it or the next time you engage AI. And that's what, and that's what it's all about. It's all about improvement. So I wouldn't add anything to that. If I knew that the company was in a deal cycle, I might add some extra things in.
I would be interested to understand change, so change control, liabilities that lasted sort of longer than you would say would be normally in your industry, CapEx requirements that were, you know, beyond what you would expect. Those sort of things that a buyer would look at and go, "Ooh, I'm on the hook for that, am I?" Or, "Oh, that, that contract's not as secure as I thought it would be." I would look at those sort of things as well. In my world, we call that reverse diligence
[00:29:33] Dale Zwizinski: Ah, I like that. Reverse diligence
[00:29:36] Dawn Stallwood: Yeah.
[00:29:36] Dale Zwizinski: Uh, well, it's funny, I was-- One of my friends just sold his company, and, one of the things that he was, uh, made sure was in the contract was that all of his people would still have jobs. Like, he took himself off job, but he said, "I will not sign this deal." It was a lot of money for a lot of people, but the people were what brought us to the success that we're having, and you want to buy our client base and, like, what we're doing. But I promised our people that they will have jobs. and I talked to him over, you know, the three to six months that it was going through, he was saying that the deal almost fell apart a couple of times.
In fact, they went so far as to pay upfront all of their people's bonuses for the year following prior to the contract getting signed so that their people would not, not get paid by the new company. It's a, it was a really interesting integrity conversation
[00:30:34] Dawn Stallwood: I love those sorts of businesses. They're not as common as I wish they were. If a founder or a seller shows up like that, it's interesting how the buy side reacts. Because an individual like that is trying to match their culture with an equivalent culture that they see or hope to see in a buyer. And it's in those sorts of conversations where you start to realize whether that's just words on a piece of paper or a debt to try to encourage you to be, you know, someone that you sell to, or whether it's actually meant.
You'll soon see in a negotiation where people stand. It's a bit of a test balloon in some ways to send up just to see whether, retaining the employees really does matter
[00:31:10] Dale Zwizinski: and I think a lot of founders are trying to get out of it. I just thought the integrity part of that, like, "No, you keep all my people. They're on a 12-month contract. They get to prove themselves in a new org." Like, that is, really good.
[00:31:23] Dawn Stallwood: I had a client years ago who, um, who exited for a lot of money, had a very successful transaction, and then the buy-side team basically just pillaged all of the customer contacts that they needed and let everybody go. And we're talking about, you know, some very senior people, and very experienced hands in this particular, R&D business.
And he was so mortified, he then set up four other businesses and employed all of those individuals that had made
[00:31:55] Dawn Stallwood: Money so that he could basically, you know, help them be creative and innovate and go again. And it became his sort of life's work in a way. He was so, he was so mortified. And the sad part was that all of the shine of the success of the deal went just because of how, you know, the buyer had decided to realize their synergies.
[00:32:15] Dale Zwizinski: Right. Totally.
[00:32:17] Dawn Stallwood: Yeah
[00:32:17] Dale Zwizinski: Well, this has been an awesome conversation. We end our podcast with what we call uncensored questions. So we kind of want to get, like, to the heart of some of these things. And I'm super curious after all of our conversation, like, you spent a long time with a lot of CEOs, founders, powerful people, to tell them uncomfortable truths in the room, in a call, whatever.
What's one of those uncomfortable truths or sentences that got you not invited back?
[00:32:46] Adam Jay: I like that one
[00:32:47] Dawn Stallwood: if you don't stop putting hand grenades into this deal room, I'm gonna walk away. And then I got fired off the job, and about six months later I got reestablished because like, Dawn we really need your help." This particular client was just throwing hand grenades in left, front and center, and it was like, "You are the problem. I understand what you're doing, but you are the problem,
[00:33:06] Adam Jay: Oh, we've had that conversation so many times. It's so hard to look at someone and say that. I like that
[00:33:13] Dawn Stallwood: I think it's gotten easier as I've gotten older. So I think in my 30s I wasn't as brave.
[00:33:18] Dawn Stallwood: I think, now I'm, you know, established, different, different time of my life. I do think bravery comes with, you know, with time
[00:33:27] Dale Zwizinski: Yeah, experience, wisdom
[00:33:28] Adam Jay: Yeah absolutely. Dawn, you, uh, you call yourself a cheerleader to CEOs. How is that different from what most people are gonna read into that and think, "Oh, I just tell CEOs what they wanna hear"? What does it really mean to be a cheerleader to CEOs?
[00:33:43] Dawn Stallwood: To be a cheerleader of a CEO means that you try to stand in their shoes and work through one of their days or their weeks or their months, because it is a very hard role, and it is one where it is typically very lonely, unrelenting and unforgiving. for me, when I talk about being a cheerleader, it's literally just recognizing individuals.
These are just regular individuals trying to bring their best on any given day, and they are as humanly fallible as the rest of us. And yet they find themselves on this pedestal or platform that we call CEO. And so for me, cheerleading is literally just to be graceful really, and to just honor them.
Be strong when you need to, but just come alongside and just be a friend. As my old pastor at church used to say, "Show me your friends and I'll show you your future." So it's not about being a friend who just says yes and agrees with you all the time. It's actually about friends who are brave enough to actually stand in the gap for you.
And that's what being a cheerleader to a CEO means to me
[00:34:42] Adam Jay: I love that
[00:34:43] Dale Zwizinski: So you wrote your book and like that's not easy. what was the best thing about writing your book? Probably the last, like getting it out. And what was the hardest part about writing your book?
[00:34:54] Adam Jay: so the best part about writing the book was, the sense of achievement of having done it, because it's probably the hardest professional work I've ever done in my life. The worst part of, writing the book was, frankly, dealing with some of the service providers around it in terms of like, you know, editing, copyright, et cetera.
[00:35:11] Dawn Stallwood: I had a few false starts. Um, I ended up with a great team, but it was deeply frustrating, and some of that was driven by people showing up online, freelancers and such, and then you realize that actually it was AI and not real people. And authenticity is the key part of the book, so I was-- I had some disappointment around that, so it was the worst part.
And I think the hardest part was because it's a book that reflects on thirty years' worth of looking after and working with leaders and businesses, inevitably it becomes a little bit therapeutic, right? It becomes a bit autobiographical, so you do look back at the great experiences you've had, but you also look back at some of the really difficult relationships that you've had, with clients, et cetera.
And often that's where most of the learning and growth work comes from. But you have to do the work. So that would be my best, worst, and hard. But I would say if you're thinking about writing a book, do it, because I am so much better for having done it
[00:36:05] Dale Zwizinski: Love that
[00:36:06] Adam Jay: cool. All right, my last one and then Dale will wrap it up with his favorite one. If a CEO can't answer what they would do the moment integrity cost them the quarter, 'cause that all happens, right? There's gonna be a time where you're gonna have to stand up and say no. Do they have any business running a revenue organization if they can't answer that question?
[00:36:25] Dawn Stallwood: If they're not prepared to protect integrity, and if integrity is the hallmark of how they win their business and the relationships that they have, then no, I don't think they should be in role
[00:36:35] Dale Zwizinski: Yep. I totally agree.
[00:36:36] Dawn Stallwood: It, it's top-down. It, it, culture is top-down. It's a soundbite, but it's true
[00:36:41] Dale Zwizinski: Yep. I totally agree. Last one as we wrap this one. This one's an easy one. Dream vacation destination? Maybe, maybe not
[00:36:48] Dawn Stallwood: I'd love to go to the Maldives, but I'm not sure I would manage it very well just going round a little island. Maybe I'd have to write another book whilst I was on the island. So yeah, Maldives would be lovely. I would love to do that, and motor homing around Norway, so
[00:37:00] Dale Zwizinski: Ah. Motor homing around Norway, I love it.
[00:37:03] Adam Jay: Norway was a Christmas option for us. Um, ultimately went in a wildly different direction, um, but it's definitely on the list
[00:37:12] Dawn Stallwood: I would recommend, Adam, that you look at, Norway as a summer option because you have the midnight sun
[00:37:18] Adam Jay: Ooh.
[00:37:18] Dawn Stallwood: So you get, you get incredibly, incredibly long days, and a lot of Scandinavians leave Scandinavia in July and August and go elsewhere. So, there are less people around.
[00:37:29] Adam Jay: We were gonna do Iceland, and then I was like, three hours of daylight doesn't work for me. And we're actually doing Morocco. Um, but Norway is on the list. It's a good place. Supposed to be a great place. I love working with Norwegians, because their integrity levels are off the scale,
[00:37:46] Dawn Stallwood: And transparency and trust are really high. So they're actually really good organizations to, um, look at how they're modeling what they do would be maybe something to think about
[00:37:55] Adam Jay: I love it. Dawn, thank you so much for joining the show. Thank you for getting uncensored with us and sharing your thoughts. Uh, where can people learn more about you and what you do?
[00:38:04] Dawn Stallwood: So, LinkedIn they can find me, but please just don't just follow, make a connection and have a meaningful message 'cause that's about being human. So that's one way. They can also go to floodlightbusiness.com, and they can go to thebeautifulleader.com where you can also obtain copies of the book, which is also available on Amazon as well.
[00:38:21] Adam Jay: Awesome. Thanks, Dawn
[00:38:22] Dawn Stallwood: Take care. Thanks again,
[00:38:24] Dale Zwizinski: A good one. Cheers.