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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.
Paul Stansik: I think if you ignore the relationship in this job, you're, you're fooling yourself. And then I, I think it starts with working with people on the most important things inside the business, not just issuing orders from your, uh, you know, from your office in another city.
Welcome to Rev Ops Rock Stars in Pursuit of Unicorns. I'm David Carns. And I'm Jaren Chu. Join us as we interview Rev ops leaders to explore the challenges they have faced, the biggest lessons they've learned and what they think makes a rev Ops rockstar. This show is brought to you by Op. Focus on a mission to help companies run their businesses better by letting you focus on growth while we scale your operations.
Let's get this show on the road.
David Carnes: Today's guest works with portfolio companies to improve their marketing, sales, and growth strategies. He's helped companies acro across a wide range of industries driving effective growth and lasting results. He's an established leader who creates successful teams. Operating partner at Parker Gale Capital.
Paul Stanek. Welcome to the podcast, Paul.
Paul Stansik: Thanks for having me guys.
David Carnes: So Paul, we wanna dive right in by asking you what do you wish Rev Ops teams within your portfolio companies would stop wasting time on?
Paul Stansik: Uh, my answer is I wish Rev ops teams would stop going directly to the data without clarifying the question that they're answering first, and happy to unpack all the different ways that that shows up. But, I think the role of information, the role of data, especially inside a sales and marketing team, yeah, it's fun to get curious and peel the onion and look at every little facet of what's going on.
But if you're not answering a question that leads to improving performance of the business, you are at risk of wasting your time.
David Carnes: Okay. Yeah, it was just what, what went right to my mind as sort of time wasting by exploring and creating a bunch of metrics that may not actually solve challenges or, like you said, answer questions that the business needs to answer.
Paul Stansik: Yeah, and it can be fun, right? And so if you're just having fun or getting curious or peeling the onion or, or recognizing that you're in that mode of any analytical project where you need to bump around in the dark hallway a little bit, that's totally okay. But. You always need to have this paranoia in the back of your mind that brings you back to, well, what question am I answering here?
And if you find yourself not getting tugged back to that one single question that you're answering honestly and objectively with data, it's time to develop that, uh, that spidey sense a little bit more.
David Carnes: And and do you find yourself asking that question of, All right, so, you know, what are we trying to answer here? Do you, do you hear yourself saying that over and
over
Paul Stansik: All the time. I can, I can be, I can picture myself floating above my body, seeing my, me answer that or ask that question to every one of our portfolio companies and, and sometimes I think that's my, like, annoying but necessary role is just to remind people of like, Hey. There's a question embedded in this conversation somewhere, that if we figure out a good answer to it, it's probably gonna unlock something good for us.
Let's not forget to ask that question and make sure we're all satisfied with the answer. So I, I think we'll get into like the role of the operating partner a little bit later in this conversation. I think that's a big part of the role is just getting back to the really basic, obnoxious question of, Hey, what are we trying to answer here?
Jarin Chu: Paul, you're starting to talk a little bit about the portfolio companies. For our listeners, can you first paint a bit of a picture of what types and sizes of companies does Parker Gale invest in?
Paul Stansik: Yeah, how rude of me to start talking about what I do for a living without, uh, telling you where I work. So I'm an operating partner here at Parker Gal Capital. We're a small PE fund headquartered in the West Loop of Chicago, and we buy founder owned B2B software businesses. I. Typically what we're investing in is software businesses of, call it 10 million to 30 million top line, profitable, usually around a hundred ish people when we first get involved.
So if you break that down into sales and marketing teams, including rev ops, you know, 20, 30, 40 people depending on the, on the business, but, Yeah. Um, we've been doing this for quite a while. I've been here for five years. Before that I was at Bain and Company before that, uh, sold stuff to hedge funds for about five years.
So it's been a long and winding path, but I'm pretty happy with where I ended up.
Jarin Chu: And how does Parker Gale differ from, you know, the very large group of growth equity firms that are out there? You mentioned of course, that you are focused on that 10 to 30 million top line and profitable, so, so that's a. Differentiator, but from your angle, how is your investment thesis different from the others?
Paul Stansik: Typically we are the exit for the founder. Um, so in many cases, these are businesses where we're the first institutional capital in the door. So we're not growth equity, we're not venture capital, we're a buyout shop. So we want to come in with a majority investment where our operational approach can have a big impact.
On the eventual outcome and trajectory of the business. So that philosophy is one part that differentiate us, differentiates us. I'd say the other thing that differentiates us is just how our team is made up. Um, we're small. We're only about 16 people. And about half of us at any given time, uh, are wearing an operational hat where we're working alongside our businesses to help them figure out, Hey, what's the most important gap that we're trying to close?
What's the plan that we're using to close it? And kind of co-creating that plan and monitoring that plan with our companies.
David Carnes: How do you measure success within Rev ops within the portfolio?
Paul Stansik: We could probably spend the whole time talking about this one. I mean, uh, one of my mentors, Dave Kellogg has this great, uh, saying that he uses that I'm sure he stole from somebody else, but it's more about marketing and sales. And his take is marketing is there to make sales easier. And I think there's a very similar parallel with Rev Ops probably as it relates to both sales and marketing.
So, you know, if I'm sitting down for a coffee with one of our rev ops leaders, Uh, eventually we're gonna get to a part of the conversation where we kind of talk about it as if it's a, you know, a servant leadership type role. Like, hey, you've got people out there on the front lines carrying a quota on the sales teams.
You've got people out there on the marketing teams trying to figure out how to build the next great butterfly net and catch us a bunch of customers. Help is defined in the mind of the recipient, right? So yeah, you can build this amazingly complex machine that shows you down to the second decimal point, how every campaign is performing, and how every sales rep is gonna come in versus their forecast.
But when was the last time you asked that sales leader or that marketing leader where they need clarity or confirmation or help? And I think that's always the balance that you need to be striking in a role like that. So that's a bit of a philosophical answer. I think the, the foundation of it is you are there to help make growth inside the company.
More predictable, more repeatable, and just feel easier. But you're also there in kind of a customer service role. And your customer is, are those people who are leading sales, leading marketing, um, inside the business. And I think that second part is easy to forget about.
David Carnes: I really like that concept of servant leadership. I think, uh, you really painted that picture well. Um, how do you prefer to engage with the rev ops teams that you work with?
Paul Stansik: Something we say here at Parker Gale is we, we like to do things with people, not to people, so I. You know, I'm not sure this exists, but I I think the classic, uh, model of effective private equity investing is the person flies in on a first class flight, drops off the playbook on somebody's desk and says, Hey, I'll see you at the next board meeting.
Good luck. Um, I don't think that works. I think people who think that works are sort of fooling themselves and that's not how we do things. So typically what I'm doing is I am trying to 1 form a relationship with that person. And forming a relationship means spending time with them in person, getting on a plane and doing it.
And the second is how can we create a conversation that feels really natural that happens every week or every month, where we're just asking ourselves some of these questions like, Hey, How are things going? Where are the gaps? Where are the problems? Where do we expect to land? And how do we build the machine that helps to surface a really honest objective, data-driven answer to those questions instead of the kind of gut feel, instinctual answer that many businesses run on?
So, I don't know, kind of a sideways entrance to the answer to that question, but I think it starts with the relationship. I think if you ignore the relationship in this job, you're, you're fooling yourself. And then I, I think it starts with working with people on the most important things inside the business, not just issuing orders from your, uh, you know, from your office in another city.
David Carnes: How might a Rev Ops team disappoint you?
Paul Stansik: again, I, I think it comes back to the idea of, of servant leadership. Like, hey, if you have the perspective that the sales team's gonna do what the sales team is gonna do, and the marketing team is gonna do what the marketing team is gonna do, and those guys don't really get what Rev ops is all about, so I'm just gonna stay over here and do my thing and build my machine the best way that I know how.
I don't know if you're putting yourself in a situation where things are feeling siloed. Or it feels like you're more on a swim team than a water polo team. I think that can be disappointing. And then I think that when it comes time for a bigger conversation about how the business is performing, whether that's at a board meeting or just when we get together, uh, you know, in the office that becomes, uh, Pretty obvious.
It's like, Hey, you guys are working at cross purposes. You're obviously not asking each other what questions you're trying to answer. How do we get back into that mode where there's more give and take and not just like, Hey, I'm gonna go build my little fiefdom the best way that I know how.
Jarin Chu: I love the fiefdom analogy. Paul, you started talking a little bit about how.
the 16 people at the company, all, uh, maybe more than half are involved with the operators directly in some co-creative way. It sounds like it's a very different kind of approach in terms of what an operating partner means.
Can you elucidate a bit further? What does being an operating partner or being on that operating team really entail? What is your typical week-to-week or day-to-day look like?
Paul Stansik: Yeah, it's the weirdest job I've ever loved. So I'm happy to talk about this one and if, if folks wanna read more, just a different take on this role. Uh, I've written something, one of my more popular articles from the last year. Is called literally what does an operating partner do? Uh, so clearly that's a question that I think both people, not in this role, but also people in this role are asking.
The way I see it, this job is really for jobs, I think the most classic view of the operating partner role, uh, is an important one, but it's to be the keeper of the standard.
If you don't have a very strong opinion on within your area of business operations, whether that's sales or marketing or finance or talent or whatever it is, if you don't have a, uh, religious level belief of what good looks like for that area, Without that strong of an opinion, you're gonna have a hard time adding value, especially to people who've been doing this job for a long, long time, which is most of our management teams inside our portfolio.
So you need to have seen reps in multiple environments. You need to be good at pattern matching. You need to be able to fly to an office and notice what's going on and pick out the problems in a day or two. And you need to have some sense of causality. So you need to have some ability to say, if we do we X, then we can expect Y to happen.
Where Y is usually some measure of financial performance. So that's job number one, be the keeper of the standard. I think too many people. Believe that that's all you need. I think job number two is it's your job to create agreements that improve the business, and yeah, you need to have that standard and the means to detect whether the standard is being met.
But I wouldn't be any good at my job if I couldn't diagnose problems within sales marketing, or the C-Suite, and then get people to agree on what we should do next. So sometimes I describe the job of an operating partner as that of a strategic diplomat. So you need to be equally adept at noticing what's going on, but then getting people to come along with the plan that arises once you've successfully diagnosed the problems.
That's, that's 0.2 is you're creating agreements or kind of the strategic diplomat. The third, which I think is, is what we're circling around in this conversation, is it's your job to help keep score. And you can't know if you're winning or losing if you can't see the scoreboard. people who are good at this job, I think they're good at creating simple and consistent reporting. And both of those things are equally important, and I think they're good at measuring things in a way that cuts through the chatter. And the drama and makes it obvious when you're on track or off track.
And funny enough, I think, uh, the cool thing about this job is when you get that, right, when you create that higher level of visibility for a business, it's a sneaky way to build psychological safety. And it makes it easier to bring up tough problems, which is what, you know, all the researchers out there would tell you is probably the most important trait of a high performing team.
And then I think the fourth thing is, Like we're there to create a special kind of, I don't know, like loving pressure sometimes I, I talk about creating a demanding and supportive environment, and I think PE gets a bad name for raising the bar on people without giving them the resources they need to meet it.
And if you're gonna ask a company to do things that they've never done, you better be there to teach and coach and pitch in. Especially when it gets hard. So I think the thing that makes this job interesting, the thing that keeps me on my toes and a little off balance at any given moment is it's really four jobs, right?
Like you're the keeper of the standard. You're the strategic diplomat. You're there to help keep score, and you're there to help create this constant gentle pressure where there's a new kind of environment a year into an investment that's a little more demanding, but a lot more supportive at the same time.
Jarin Chu: I'm very intrigued because the collaborative nature, like you called out Paul, is not usually something that gets pointed out as much. Right. Usually PE firms are seen. To be completely just looking at the results. Uh, they don't really care about how you get there. You know, it's kind of like, Jump into the deep end and good luck for your role specifically given these four jobs.
How do you measure success at different stages of a portfolio company's involvement with your firm in the first six months? In the first year, you know, first three years, whenever the exit is? How do you kind of keep tabs on whether you as the operating partner are doing the right things for Port Co.
Paul Stansik: Well, the, the easiest one. It's the one you, you. You first hit on, it might be the one that matters the most, but in my mind it's necessary, but not sufficient is the financial results, right? So one of the things that we work most collaboratively with our businesses on is the budget and the budget is an agreement, right?
Going back to what I just talked about, the budget is an agreement on, this is a challenging but achievable plan that if we do what we think we can do as executives, as a team, as a company, this is what we think the scoreboard's gonna look like at the end of the year. And so, you know, when you, when you meet a team who talks about the budget as, as if it's this third party thing that's over there that someone else decided for them, you know, that's not so great.
We work very closely with our teams to make sure that doesn't happen, and so that we have a really easy way to measure success every quarter, every month, and to notice when things are off track. So I'd say like, yes, financial performance matters. I think the collaborative way that we build budgets with our company is a sneaky driver of like, the linkages between us and just having a, a, a scoreboard.
The other ways that I measure success are. Am I able to arm the team with tools, resources, a plan, examples, connections with other people in the portfolio, and they can pick it up and run with it. I think the, the two biggest predictors of success in the business world, in the western world anyway, are something like, you know, problem solving and drive.
So can you break down a problem? Can you analyze things? And then can you actually make sure that things happen? And the thing that I'm paying attention to, most of all, when we're having a monthly commercial review or a board meeting or, or any kind of like regularly scheduled check in on how things are going is.
Are we making it obvious that we've delivered on the commitments from the last time that we got together? And are they taking what's worked from inside the portfolio, making it their own, and then picking up and running with it? And I'd say the third thing that I look for is, is the team asking for help?
Because most of what we're asking our companies to do, uh, especially in the later years of an investment, it might be the first time that they're doing it. Right. Maybe they've never stood up an ABM campaign. Maybe they've never gone, you know, as deep as they are on digital, maybe they've never built an S D R team.
And if it's the first time that they're doing it, you know, there are some earned secrets out there either inside my head or inside the head of another executive inside our portfolio. And if they're not asking for help, that's indicative of one of two things. One, You know that person has got it and they don't need any help and they're gonna execute on it.
We should just leave them alone. Or two, like there's something going on environmentally that's making it hard for that person to raise their hand and say something like, Hey, this is a lot, or, I'm not exactly sure what to do next. Or I need some help. You know, noticing where we might get off track. And that's a signal for me to check kind of the health of the relationship and say, you know, is there anything that I'm doing that's making it hard for this person to speak up and raise their hand?
But once we take that off a table, we're gonna pay attention to, Hey, you have to be the owner of this. We're there to support you in it. What help do you need? Because I'm sure the answer is not nothing.
David Carnes: That's so interesting, Paul. when you and your, your colleagues on the ops team, uh, do due diligence, what's an example of a red flag, uh, related to rev ops?
Paul Stansik: a funny one in diligence is just how long it takes to turn around a data request. So, uh, You know, are they practicing industrial revenue operations or artisanal revenue operations? Like is this stuff being manufactured every day inside of the business per usual? And it's like, oh yeah, let's just send you the report that we're already looking at the data, we're already grabbing the results, we're already tracking.
Or is this. Oh crap. We know we should be measuring that, and now we gotta go back and dig it up and massage the numbers and all that. And that can be measured really simply in just the lag times of when you ask for the thing and when you get it. So it's not necessarily a red flag. Like that's, that's not necessarily something we would look at and say, you know, we're gonna run far away because.
Achievement versus quota for the sales force is taking a week to turn around. But, uh, I filed this under the, the folder of like tiny noticeable things that you pick up in diligence. And all of that kind of gets filed away in my mind in terms of, okay, where is the company on the maturity model of revenue operations, or go to market in general?
And again, that's not necessarily a bad thing, it just goes into my ledger and mental calculus of how hard is this gonna be? I'd say the bigger red flags for us as it, as it relates to revenue operations or go to market, would be, um, you know, stuff that actually comes out in the outputs. So if there's really high levels of customer concentration or really high levels of churn or you know, there's a lot of money being spent on sales and marketing and there's not a lot of return for it, that's less revenue operations and more just go to market in general.
But I'm most interested in. It's not even rev ops, it's more just like what is the conversation that's going on inside of the company every single week, and how numbers driven is that conversation and how much work is required, additional artisanal work to go and get those numbers. Because what we find is that there's a lot of businesses out there that are what I call data aware, not data driven.
And so they know those numbers are there and they go back to the well and go get a dip of 'em every time they need to, or every time a potential investor needs them, but they're not using that to actually make decisions. Or going back to the very first thing that we talked about, answer the questions that surface what you should go and do next inside of that company.
Jarin Chu: That's the first time I've ever heard of data extraction described as olive oil production. Uh, but industrial and artisanal is a great descriptor. I wanna continue on this through line with Rev Ops team a bit further. I. And understand from your perspective, what are some of the things that Rev ops teams don't seem to ever get around doing that you wish they should be doing more of?
Paul Stansik: Asking is this working and getting to like a v3, V4 V five of whatever new process or report or thing that they just stood up? Um, I think it was Ernest Hemingway who said, you know, pardon my French, but the first draft of anything is shit. And it's really important to get a first draft out there and to cover the canvas and, you know, maybe get that new report up or that new data tracking process up, or that new sales process into the c R m.
But there is tons of goodness to iterating on that thing that you just built and asking yourself the semi vulnerable question of what did we miss? Um, And so I, I see too many teams stopping at a V1 saying, Hey, we delivered on the ask. We gave the investors what they wanted. You know, the CRO asked for this thing, so I'm gonna give them a thing.
And not getting back to the, the base level question of like, what are we solving for here and how do we make a 5% improvement on this new report, this new process, this new wrinkle. So that's number one, is just stopping at a v1. Um, I'd say that the v the, the second thing is, There's a difference between pulling some data and getting into a rhythm.
And I did an experiment, uh, about a year ago where I asked one of our most successful CROs, what's the number one thing that we did for you from an investor standpoint that improved the performance of your team the most? And his answer surprised me a little bit. He said, you made us look at the data every single week.
And when we did that, it kind of became obvious what we needed to fix next. And that kind of blew me away because before that point, I kind of viewed reporting and metrics and the, you know, the Excel that gets sent out every week, as you know. That's not the most important thing, and there's plenty of other processes and playbooks and all that to build, but all of this does come back to like the quality of the conversation that the management team has every single week.
And I think if you're a rev ops professional, it is your job to QA that conversation, not to, you know, call time out on your c e o and say, Hey, you're asking the wrong question, but to say, There's some important questions being asked in that meeting every week, whatever that meeting is, there is a sliding scale between completely subjective and completely objective in terms of answers that you can give to those questions.
You know, everything from the classic gut feel like deal centric classic sales guy from central casting answer to like the second decimal point, airtight rev ops answer. Um, How do we nudge ourselves towards the right of that spectrum a little bit more, a little bit more, and get ourselves into an operational analytical rhythm where every week a couple things are happening.
One, it's really obvious what's on track and off track without doing any extra work. Two, the team's able to take stances on what they should do, and three, we know if we're making progress against the problems that the management team chooses to throw themselves against.
Jarin Chu: Two of the main things you're describing, Paul, that's getting me really. Really excited here. Um, is like something we're hearing also when speaking to, uh, rev ops leaders themselves, leaders who are actively saying, we're not just order takers, right.
We're not just here to run some reports and present them to you when you need them.
We have opinions, we have prescriptions. We're coming in and we're gonna say, Hey, you're not looking at this as closely as you should be. And by the way, This is how you should be thinking about it, because we're close to the data. We can tell you and we can identify trends. It's not just taking whatever, uh, the C-suite is coming in and saying, this is what we're gonna look at
instead.
Paul Stansik: Totally and, and it becomes this really interesting mix of psychological and data and human relational problems, right? Because even if I'm an amazing rev ops person and I have this airtight. Forecasting model or predictive, you know, analytical ability to tell you what's gonna happen or what the results were like, that's not the only important thing about solving that problem.
The other important thing is assessing like, what is that management team ready for? Like, how hard and how fast can you push them into this? You know, the nethers of complete objectivity that maybe they've haven't gotten to yet, and like, how much do they understand why this is actually better in their opinion than what they're doing today?
So I, I think you're hitting on something really important, which is, you know, you can have the right answer, but this is where the diplomatic tool set that I lean on all the time comes into play. Also, for the rev ops folks out there, it's like you need to assess. What this person is going to agree to do differently, to look at differently, to analyze differently and meet them where they're at.
Because I think too often, you know, someone who's not used to dealing in data or numbers or process or analysis, which let's be honest, describes a non-trivial, uh, portion of the sales and marketing folks out there. Like you can't take them from zero to one overnight. Uh, it's important to, to allow them to kind of see the light on their own timing, and I don't know, to me, improving revenue operations and improving the quality of that conversation at the management team level.
For most companies, it's as much a negotiation as it is an analytical problem, and I think there are a lot of folks out there that miss that important wrinkle of you need to meet people where they're at. And you can't just have the the airtight logical argument. You need to create that agreement between you and the executive in order to earn that right, to not just be the order taker.
Jarin Chu: Right. I like that. And it's advocating it's youth. A much wider set of tools in the toolkit that perhaps sometimes more analytical folks that have come through the ranks to lead rev ops may not have honed as much.
Paul Stansik: and sometimes it can come down to just using, um, inquiry versus advocacy. So, You know, advocacy is like, Hey, I've got a better way. I've got these new numbers. Here's what they say. This spreadsheet will tell you everything you need to know. Inquiry would sound like, you know. Do you have any ideas on how we could get a little tighter on our forecasting process?
Because I've been working on a few things in the background, but I'm curious what's on your wishlist? And you can just sense immediately how that first way could put someone on their back foot. And the second way, like there's a. There's an implicit respect there where you're starting from asking that person what they think, even though you've got your, your better process kind of hidden behind your back, and you're ready to spring with it, right?
Jarin Chu: Paul, my last question for you is really in response to our current market conditions, and I'm interested in whether you recommend actions that Rev ops teams should take now today and not wait to do, especially given the very many changes we're seeing and the adaptability and efficiency that the market is demanding.
Paul Stansik: My advice is don't just accept the broader narrative of what's happening. Because if you just read the news, and especially if you read some of the publications out there that, that talk about what's going on in the go-to-market world and the software world, the headline is, it's bad, right?
Like, uh, deals are gone. Nobody's spending any money. Like even if you do get an opportunity, you're gonna have to haul yourself in front of the C F O and they're gonna do this gladiatorial type activity where they give you the thumbs up or thumbs down, like Joaquin Phoenix. And, you know, maybe that's true, but I think the, the mistake that many teams are making is they haven't figured out what's actually going on with their business and what's changed with their business.
Right? They haven't done that analysis and asked themselves what the actual impact has been. And there's a fairly easy way to do that. Like my favorite, my favorite way to do it is through what's called cohort analysis, which, you know, there are a lot of folks out there that when they hear me say that, probably know exactly what it means.
But if you pull a very simple report and depending on the structure of your business, you know, whether that's in your, your marketing, uh, tech stack or your c r m, like, Just pull all of the opportunities you've created in the last two years by their create date and where they ended up, like did they close one close loss?
Were they still sitting in some pipeline stage? Of the ones that closed one, how long did they take? What's the a s p? And just look at the trend. And ask yourself, has that gotten better, gotten worse, gotten slower, gotten faster, gotten more uncertain? And that's a powerful exercise because one, it's just more rigorous than accepting, you know, what the media is bathing you with every day.
So I think it's just a more honest approach. And second, you're gonna look smart when you go to your executive team and say, Hey, we're all feeling that things are a little different right now, but here's exactly what's been going on inside of our business and what the real change has been. Let's have a discussion about what that means and what we should do about it.
If anything,
David Carnes: Paul, we'd like to talk about you next and your background. You studied management at Bucknell. You did an MBA at marketing at Wharton.
You're a professional athlete. You've got so many interesting, uh, interests and areas of expertise. How did you get into private equity?
Paul Stansik: I would say the two things, the most defining experiences of my career to date have been. Selling stuff to hedge funds for five years and starting that portion of my career at the beginning of the financial crisis. 25 year old Paul heard an offer to become the first b d R at an unproven research company.
As the investment banking world was imploding on itself in New York City for not a lot of money and said, that sounds pretty good, let's go give that a shot. Uh, but through that I learned a couple really important things. One was just grit. Like if you read my series, why Sales Sucks, I talk all about my first day on that job.
And the title's not gonna spoil it, but it was a pretty rough first day and it didn't get better for a while after that. But I figured it out, right? And for five years I apprenticed under some really great enterprise salespeople. Hired a couple teams of my own, and kind of learned from my own pain what I wanted to save other go-to-market teams from.
Went to business school as a bit of a reset. Was lucky enough to get a job at Bain, and Bain was the second defining experience in my career because that place taught me the value of rigor, the value of structured thinking. The value that a framework inserted at the right time can really bring order from chaos.
Can, can help create that agreement and commitment that I talked about earlier, even with a team that disagrees on a whole bunch of different stuff. So, you know, I, I'd been at Bain for five years. I'd done the generalist consulting thing. I had built a practice at Bain and I'd kind of picked my head up and I said, you know, I like this combination of strategy and building organizations and maybe the chance to get back to the world of go to market.
And, you know, Funny enough, I, I got connected with an ex colleague of mine at that exact same time, got connected with the Parker Gale team and I left my interview here just thinking a couple things. One, I like the idea of going back and helping small companies who have a lot of goodness to unlock and finishing the work that the founder started.
There was something very appealing about that to me. Um, and the second was I just love the team. Like these are people that I would be totally okay growing up and becoming a little more like, and thankfully the feel, the feeling was mutual. And I, I think when I look back on that, um, the thing that I talk the most about in my interview and the thing that I spend a lot of time on today, yeah, I do a lot of work in our portfolio and I spend a lot of time sitting alongside our executive teams and helping them solve problems.
But, um, This idea of practice building is really important if you're gonna be in the, the operating world of private equity. Like you can't have the playbook or the tools or the resources or the how to guide or the earned secrets locked up in your head. Uh, there's a great executive coach that I, I like a lot who says, if you say it twice, write it down.
So yeah, how did I end up here? Short answer is, I don't know. Long answer is I had a couple defining career experiences that I think open my eyes to what I like and what I'm good at.
And then had a lucky encounter with, uh, a team that I clicked with, and they've let me stick around for a while, which is nice.
David Carnes: It sounds like a real win-win that you have there at Parker Gale, and that you also have the perfect background and you know, mix of different experiences to really su support the portfolio Well.
Paul Stansik: Thanks for that.
Jarin Chu: If you say it twice, write it down. You've been full of really, really good quotes this entire conversation. Um, it, it perfectly segues into my question around resources. You are personally a quite a prolific writer of. Follows you on LinkedIn. Enjoyed a lot of your articles and your thought pieces external to Parker Gale, you know, for all of our listeners and audience members who are tuning in today, what kinds of resources or people do you.
follow that you would direct other rev ops leaders to check out so that they can continue their learning and, um, hone their skillset in the marketplace?
Paul Stansik: mean, if I could point people towards one resource, Dave Kellogg, who's run a couple of software businesses and is a, a good friend and mentor of mine, I. Has been unbelievably generous with what he's learned and how he thinks and how entertaining he is.
And his blog, Kel blog, I think is 10 or 15 years old at this point, as something like 800 posts. So I'm just trying to play catch up with him both in terms of how good he is at this job and how much he's shared externally. And the coolest thing about the content that he puts out is. Almost everything that he writes both on his blog and he's now a, uh, executive in residence at Bald Capital, which is a European VC fund.
It has, it touches all three elements of sales, marketing, and rev ops. Because he doesn't talk about anything without talking about how it influences the numbers, how to track the data, the templates he uses to create better conversations. So if people want, I don't know, like the Yoda level course on how to think about this stuff, and they want to read, you know, some explanations of what, what good looks like while still being entertained and being able to laugh a little bit.
He's the best in the business by far.
David Carnes: I've, uh, had the pleasure of seeing, uh, Dave speak a few times at Saster, and I've really enjoyed his content as well. So really glad to know that, uh, he's a mentor of yours.
Paul Stansik: Yeah, he's, um, he's been on a couple of our boards and you always look forward to a board meeting with Dave Kellogg, not just because you're gonna laugh a lot, but because you know you're gonna unearth something really important that's gonna make the business better.
Jarin Chu: You've also been working on some resources yourself. Right. With Parker Gale. Are there any, um, resources you wanted to call out that you've been really excited about to share with the community?
Paul Stansik: Yeah, the two that I'm most proud of, one's published and one is coming out this week as we speak. Um, we think hiring is, you know, if you had one value creation lever to go and get really good at, it's probably hiring people. If you hire someone really good, that moves your business forward, and if you miss on an important hire that moves your business back, that's a two point swing.
And the more two point swings you can create, the better you're gonna do, both as an investor and a manager. So we built a, uh, how to interview better curriculum, and we've taught, I think every company in our portfolio. Seminar. We give them resources and examples and interview guides. And I do a lot of interviewing, especially at the CEO in CX O ranks, and we decided to open source our hiring handbook.
So if you Google Parker Gale hiring handbook, Uh, I put that together a couple years ago. It's still the curriculum that we teach inside our portfolio, and like everything that we do, it's plagiarized from a lot of different resources. But, uh, it's, it's our own little spin on it and it also incorporates the feedback that we've gotten from members inside our portfolio of what they think is, is most helpful.
So I would definitely point people towards the Parker Gal hiring handbook. I've talked a lot during this conversation about the concept of operational rhythm and how you get into this, this flow where every week you're having a really, let's get real conversation about how the business is performing.
And that all starts with having a really good weekly report. So this week we're gonna release our weekly sales metrics playbook, and that's gonna include a couple things. One is just some writing on why we think this matters. And the two questions. Going back to the first thing we talked about, the two questions that executives need to be able to answer every single week, that leads to a better conversation.
We're also actually including the same exact Excel template that we use inside the portfolio with zero changes. So like, Hey, use exactly what we use with our companies. And a video walkthrough that tells you how to set it up, but also what to look for in the data once you get it up and running. So, I'm very proud of what that has been able to do inside the portfolio, and I'm pretty proud to be able to work at a place that feels like it's important to share that with the world.
So that's coming out next week. If you Google Parker Gale Weekly Sales Metrics Handbook, and I'll be obnoxiously promotional about it on LinkedIn too, if people wanna see that.
David Carnes: I think that sounds amazing, and that.
leads into our next. Next, uh, uh, questions for you. Where can people find you out on social media or otherwise?
Paul Stansik: I'm fairly active on LinkedIn. My wife would probably say too active on LinkedIn, so that's a good place to go. Um, Jaren was very nice to compliment the medium, but I've put 45 pieces of writing out there in the last few years on what I do and how I think and what seems to work for us inside the portfolio.
So if you Google Paul Stanza medium that's out there. I'm trying Twitter, Twitter's a different beast, uh, but you'll notice me making clumsy attempts at, at packaging my thoughts into tweets. But I'd say the two best places are LinkedIn and, uh, my Medium account,
David Carnes: Well, that's great. And how can somebody learn more about Parker Gale?
Paul Stansik: parker gale.com is a great place to go. We're also very proud of the Parker Gale, uh, the private equity fund. So we've been producing a podcast for, I think close to 10 years now, and there's lots in there about what seems to work for us inside the portfolio, what it's like to work inside a private equity, and, um, just some of the, the situations that we find ourselves in on a quarterly basis.
David Carnes: That's why you're so good at this. Uh, Paul, it's really been a pleasure to speak with you, uh, today on the podcast. Uh, you've, uh, shared so much about the operating partner role being keeper of the scorecard, applying that constant gentle pressure. Um, uh, I really appreciated the, what you talked about, about, um, hiring great people as this value creation lover in particular.
It's, it's been such a pleasure having you on the, on the show today. Uh, thank you so much, Paul.
Paul Stansik: Thanks guys. It was fun.
Jarin Chu: And I of course, wanna thank everyone who's been listening. I've been personally blown away with the amount of resources that Paul's been able to name, drop and mention during this short conversation. We will be sure of course, to include links to all those Parker Gale resources, Paul's blog, et cetera, in the show notes.
So if you haven't already, please subscribe on your favorite podcasting platform and give it a like, share it with a colleague who could find the weekly sales metrics useful or the hiring guide useful. Paul, it was so much fun to have you on the podcast today. Thank you so much.
Paul Stansik: Thanks.
Jarin Chu: And this has been another exciting episode of Groff Rock Stars.
See you next time.
David Carnes: Stay classy. Rock stars.
that wraps up another episode. Thank you so much for joining us. For show notes and other episodes, visit rev ops rockstars.com. Rev Ops Rockstars is sponsored by OP Focus. Visit op focus.com to learn more about how OP Focus helps SaaS companies scale their revenue operations.