In part 1, Matt Milligan, co-founder of Uhubs, discusses the importance of assessing and benchmarking sales team capabilities to drive performance. He shares insights on the significance of combining technology and consulting services for meaningful business transformation. Matt also highlights the value of having mentors and coaches in both professional and personal development, drawing parallels between business and sports. The conversation touches on the challenges of scaling sales teams and the need for a data-driven approach to performance management.

Hello. Welcome to the growth workshop podcast with

myself, Matt Best and Jonny Adams. Today, we're joined by

Matt Milligan from Uhubs and Uhubs are a capability platform.

They help you assess and benchmark and measure on a long

term basis the capabilities of your sales organization. So

Matt, thank you so much for joining us today on the Growth

Workshop Podcast. It's fantastic to have you here. Jonny and I

were talking just this morning about what interesting questions

we could ask our guests.

And the question today is, if you could choose

two people to be on your personal board of advisors, who

would they be and why? And these people could be people who have

now passed these could be people who are celebrities. You don't

know who would those two people be for you?

So I'm gonna go with is a little bit cliche.

I've read quite a few of his books and recently re engaged

with some of his content. And he's just got so many, so much

wisdom. Tony Robbins, love the guy's energy, just love like the

back story. I think he's feeding like 30 million people a year.

He's known as kind of like a coach to the rich and famous and

very big in that kind of self help world, which, if that's

your cup of tea, that's your cup of tea. But if you kind of look

between the fluff, the guy's just full of wisdom, and he's so

cool, headed and calm, and he runs 120 businesses now, and he

feeds 30 million people a year. So I think just spending 30

minutes with that guy, you're gonna get a lot of value. So

that would definitely be be number one. The second one's bit

of a niche one, but I played a lot of golf growing up, so I

played a bit of professional golf, and one of my mentors

growing up was a guy called Rob watts, who was my golf coach.

And Rob and I still stay in touch today. He's a legendary

guy, but the coolest head out of anyone I've ever met business

sport. So he coaches the England golf team. He does a lot of

work. He was Darren Clark's coach. The guy is so good with

psychology and performance psychology, and I'd benefit

probably more from him. Never actually told him this until

now, yeah, but just in terms of, you know, things like creating

containers around your emotions and being able to develop a high

performance mindset resilience. You know, he taught me a lot

from a young age. So gotta get Rob in there.

I love that. I think if people see when we ask

that question, whenever we get a response, you know, the first or

second, one of my eyebrows go like that, and depending on the

first I'm like, oh, that's an interesting one. I reckon you

could have a pretty good night out with Tony Robbins and Rob.

Nice. I think that's when you're talking about golf

coaches. I was thinking about it in the context of the full swing

on on Netflix. Yeah, you look at some of those. I forget the name

of the player, but one of the players was talking about not

having a coach, and the impact, and then just actually the

importance of that. We obviously talk a lot about the importance

of coaching, yeah, working with leadership teams and and that

everybody needs to, you know, everybody needs a coach, but how

impactful a coach can be? And I think, like so many times,

leaders are saying, well, I don't need to, you know, I'm not

the very best of that. How could I possibly be a good coach in

that context? It's just kind of recognizing, right? I'm sure Rob

wasn't the greatest of probably not as good as Dan Clark when he

was coaching him. So that's okay. It's the other things

outside of it, like you said, like containerizing your your

thoughts and controlling yourself talk when you stood

over a part on the 18th green on the last day and thinking, this

needs to go in for me to be able to pay my mortgage.

Exactly. Yeah, it's huge, and I'm sure we'll

dive a bit deeper into that. But like the world of professional

sport, I think there is so much crossover between business, and

I think business can learn so much about performance and high

performance from the world of sport, but it's also things.

It's not any mindset and the psychology side of things. It's

things about structure and process and routine, you know,

and the importance of your pre shop routine and nailing that

down and that like there's so much that we could go into but,

but I've learned, I reckon I've learned, hands down more on the

golf course about business and life than I have in any lecture

theater or event.

I'm snipping that and sharing it with my wife.

Okay, well, let's get into the meat of it. Matt,

so I mean, we've known each other for a number of years now.

You know SBR? Well, you know a lot of the colleagues at SBR,

and I love your background in your career, and now what you're

doing at Uhubs, it's fantastic for the audience out there that

are listening to today. If you could share a little bit about

the story or journey, maybe even like the founders story. As you

are a founder yourself, you and your co founder are building,

and have been building, a fantastic piece of technology

that we all advocate for. SBR, so yeah, tell the audience a

little bit about you.

Yeah, I'll try and keep it brief and not too

much of a backstory. But grew up in a, you know, really loving

home, South African parents. So kind of first generation

immigrant, if you like, grew up in a very competitive household,

sport mad. My dad was a former rugby player, yes, but sport

fanatic from a very young age. But was always, always kind of

hustling, always, you know, scheming, selling things from a

young age. So my first job was at 13, was Caddying at

Sunningdale Golf Club. We get 25 quid for 18 holes as a junior.

And then I remember, I think my second job was Caddying in the

group behind Ant and Dec in the ITV golf day. And I was just

there, like 13 I was like, This is amazing. And I get paid for

this, and I love golf. So that was great.

Was there any type of, like, countries of people or

so, was it Americans when they came over, you'd get the best

tips. Or was it like the Brits were the worst?

You know, the Brits are the worst, allergic to

tips. But I was obviously young at the time, and I was jumping

on the train to Sunningdale, so I would I became quite

proficient at bunking the train, and the one day I rocked up, and

course, was packed. Caddy Shack was empty, and Vince comes up to

me at 8am and he goes, Milligan, it's your lucky day. I go, well,

where's that? Vince? And he goes, just had a cancelation.

One of the caddies is sick, so you've got an adult rate for 36

holes with a buggy. And it was American guys, so I'm just

there. Oh my god, this is amazing. So all I did was drive

the buggy around for 36 holes in a glorious summer day. And

instead of getting the 25 I'm trying to remember now, I think

the adult rate was 60. So I got 120 cash, and then he gave me

100 quid tip in 50 pound notes. And at 13 years of age, like

this is like the most money I've ever held. And the ticket lady

at Sunningdale, pretty sure she knew that I used to bunk the

train, but that day, I rocked up to her with a big smile on my

face, and I put down a 50 pound note. I said, I'll have a first

class seat.

I love it.

So that was like the, you know, the introduction,

really, I guess, to sales, and you're constantly selling your

services. And, you know, you're, you're approaching members and

pitching them, if you can walk their dog for five pounds. So

you just pick up little things. And then obviously, being in

that environment, you get to learn. Because most of the

members are, by default, successful, you know, in the

business world, and you're just there as a sponge for four hours

a day, absorbing all this information about these guys,

talking about deals that they're closing and how it works. And I

just became fascinated with that side of it. So that was the kind

of first, I guess, where my passion for for business and

sales and deals came about. I found it exciting.

And then, you know, the time that we spent together

and the mutual clients that we've got between Uhubs and SBR,

one thing that I love working with you and the team loves

working with you is because you have a consultative background.

So, so you once at EY, if I'm not mistaken, yeah, what's the

type of role you were doing there?

Terrible employee.

That's why you're your own boss now, right?

So roundabout way, ended up went at South

Africa, and then came back to the UK, and my mom was sat me

down, and she was like, you have to get a proper job by this

point. So that's how I managed to get into EY. Was through a

bit of a connection through the golf course, one of the partners

at EY and I managed to work my ass off and get through the

assessment process to get in. Started off in tax, in the

reading office, and lasted about a week. Completely hated it, but

managed to network with a consulting partner, which

sounded more interesting. So I ended up kind of it was really

awkward, but I fired my manager after a week, I had to go up to

her, and I prepared a little speech down. I was like, I'm

changing my internship, and I'm not going to be in tax anymore.

And she was like, What do you mean? I was like, I've networked

with the partner over there, and he's going to send me to the BBC

to do a consulting project. And she was like, what? So that was

the end of my tax career, last of the week. And then went into

went into consulting, and, yeah, ended up at an E wise

transformation team. So doing strategy consulting, spent a lot

of time on go to market. So I think one of the early projects

I did was a CRM Salesforce implementation, a big energy

company. So that was like nine months of just brutal 100 hour

weeks with meeting rooms with no natural light, trying to

migrate, you know, they were running off some really old

sebul system onto onto Salesforce, cloud based system.

So look like really great education, I guess. And the UI

network was really valuable. But then I got into the startup side

of things, because I still had this kind of hunger to build

businesses. And lots of my mates were building companies. So that

started the idea for something called the EY Startup network.

So that was just like an initiative that I set up side of

desk, and I went to one of the partners I was working with, guy

called Mark Hutchinson, who's now an investor in you hubs. And

I said, Mark, I got this idea. I think there's a huge opportunity

for EY to tap into startups and use them in the projects that

we're running. And that was kind of like a business idea born, I

guess so. Mark said, All right, I'll protect you. You've got six

months. So that meant I could get off chargeable work for six

months to try and build this thing. And yeah, and then we

ended up building an internal venture, if you like. So I've

built the startup network, and then they actually hired an

external partner to come in from the US, a guy called Rich Gould,

is a big mentor of mine. And we grew. We turned what was the

startup network into something much bigger, which was e wise,

fast growth platform, and that's their service offering for scale

ups in in Europe. So so that then gave me this business, and

I seconded to E. By seven because they had to get me off

the books, basically because it wasn't technically chargeable.

So, yeah, that was the consulting side of things.

Pretty unorthodox journey, I think.

And then what's the bridge between there to now

Uhubs? Like, when did you start Uhubs? And maybe even a little

bit about what Uhubs is, just for those that are not entirely

sure, be great.

Yeah, happily. So we'll comment to UHubs in a sec.

But I think the journey of how we got there was many of our

customer base in that fast growth environment were VC or

private equity backed businesses. We're talking here

sort of 2015, onwards. So we were starting to enter that kind

of SaaS boom. So we were doing a lot of work with B to B software

companies, particularly helping them scale into the US and doing

their legal, doing their corporate finance advisory, and

then doing go to market transformation as well. And the

biggest challenge for pretty much every CEO that we were

working with at the time was I've hired a bunch of

salespeople because my investors have told me I have to, and only

15, 20% of them are hitting target. So I was like, This is

nuts, because I'm watching the investors pour their money into

these businesses, hire these teams when the existing teams,

you know, only a handful of them are hitting target, and so the

capacity model is just completely off. And I'm watching

these businesses kind of crash and burn because they're hiring

way too quickly and they have no ability to enable, you know,

predictable performance across the team. So I sort of Lent into

that problem. I was like, this is like a massive problem for

these businesses. And around about that time, I met my co

founder, Ash, who was the first marketing director at just eat.

So ash had taken a bit of time out, done some engine investing,

and have written a book, and I got ash to do a couple of

speaking slots at UI for the start of network. And mentor

found, you know, found a mentoring and ash took this

problem to ash. And I said, you know, seeing this crazy problem

in the market with sales teams. And he pitched back to me his

philosophy around his book, which is called the unfair

advantage. And he says, You know, I think a really big part

of this is skill development, because you think about the

sales career is not professionalized in the way many

other careers are. He says, there's a massive opportunity

for you know us to help sales professionals understand their

unfair advantages and how they can become more competent and

and that led us down this path of this vision of creating a

business that could help solve this problem. A few pivots along

the way in terms of how we've got there, but the visions

always stayed the same. It's about turning potential into

performance. You know, it's about helping people realize

their potential. Long way of saying but what we do at you

hubs is is exactly that, like we specialize in helping people

realize their potential, and we do that through assessing and

benchmarking capabilities of teams. So helping Chief Revenue

officers, chief sales officers, answer the question, what does

good look like in my organization? Because

fundamentally that if you can't answer that question, then you

cannot hire the right profile. You definitely cannot replicate

or get close to good if you don't actually understand what

it looks like in the first place. So we see that as you

know, the core problem that needs to be solved.

And it's really, really helpful that you know,

hearing your your founder story in the background and the

journey that you've been on. I'm not a founder, right? And I

think that there's a bone within me that I really want to be one

day, and I don't know whoever I will be, but it strikes me as

quite a lonely environment. And maybe that's why you've got a co

founder in ash. But I would imagine that there are elements

that are really challenging to you as a founder, being

vulnerable, and vulnerability is a really important part. Could

you describe a really vulnerable moment that you have had as a

founder over the number of years?

Yeah, totally hands down. The standout example

of this, and it's front of mind because I was talking about it

over dinner last night with with my co founder and our partners,

we got off to a really good start with the business early

days. 2022 we got some really good traction. We were building

out this amazing vision for, you know, assess the world's sales

capability, and the VC market was still pretty hot back then.

So we were, you know, burning cash. We were, you know, we'd

raised some money prior to that, but we had attracted the

interest of some big, big VCs in here and the US. So we went on a

fundraising process, which started in September 2022, we

had six months of runway, which is pretty normal for a startup.

So six months of cash left to sustain the business, if you

like. And we went out to the US. We did a brief sort of tour of

duty over there. We came back with a term sheet, which is an

offer of investment from a VC. And then we met with heaps more

in Europe. And the market was still running hot in the summer

of 2022 so we ended up, within about three weeks, we had three

term sheets, which and we were like, Oh, this is amazing. Like,

great, you know. And these were significant offers for us at the

time. So, you know, we're talking multiple millions here

of investment, two to 3 million. And it was a kind of crazy,

crazy turn of events. So what? Then happened, if you cast your

mind back to q4 2022, was the software mark. Well, the

software markets, the global markets, tanked, the bubble

popped, the bubble burst, and overnight, one of the investors

pulled the term sheet, and they were like, we're we're not sure

about the market environment. We're holding off valuations of

tumbling. We're out. So we're okay, fine. So then it was two

of them, and we'd already started sort of initial due

diligence with both of those investment firms. And one of

them, we did a tech audit, so they even got access to our code

base and saw what we had built so far as a v1 then turned

around to us and said, Ah, we're out, because one of our

portfolio companies is pivoting into your space. And we were

like, Ah, well, you've literally, we've literally just

opened up the hood and taken you through everything that we

built. So yeah, that wasn't great. And then the worst bit

about all of this was that the third VC then found out through

the market that they were the only horse in the race, so they

had us over a barrel. Yeah. And by this point. So the process is

starting, say, August, three term sheets in September, and

this basically was capitulating as around in October, and then

it was like week by week, just everything got worse and worse.

The news headlines were getting worse and worse. The valuation

our term sheet kept dropping, and then the investor kept

adding all of these crazy terms that, like, I've been around the

startup world quite a bit with my previous world, you know,

role never even heard of some of this stuff, right? So it was

like mandatory board seats plus an observer. So then you've got

two people on our board, which is not standard at that stage.

We basically ended up getting all the way to November, and we

had gone from like having an amazing business that was

growing and a huge opportunity, but then you've taken three or

four months out of your business. So growth has gone

like this because with we were founder led sales, so we're busy

doing DD with investors. We're not spending the focus on sales

like we should be. So then your business is going down and

you're running out of money. So we ended up in a situation where

we basically had a month's runway and one awful term sheet

on the table, and despair, really. And coupled with, you

know, ashes, had some family emergencies at the time, so I

was basically, like, on my own, grappling with the situation and

fate, staring into oblivion. And, yeah, we had like, 15

employees at the time, and I was thinking, this is, you know,

this is existential. Yeah, that was the difficult moment for

sure.

Yeah, lessons learned, though. Like, what was

that one lesson learned from that? I mean, we could make our

assumptions as we're listening, but what's the one thing that

you would do differently moving forward?

Well, I think the big takeaway is that the

business only dies if you if it sounds stupid to say that

actually, because there are things out of your control, for

sure, but most of startups die when the founder gives up. I do

genuinely believe that, because, like, even as bad as things were

there, I could have easily just jacked it in. Be like, you know

what we're done? Like, let's just wrap it up and, you know,

take, take a break and go to the next one. The mindset, yeah,

just, just bite down on the gum shield and be like, this is just

a problem that has to be solved. What's, what's an essential

solution? So, you know, in that instance, I ended up going and

getting the train up to Sheffield, going to our previous

lead investor, and organized an in person meeting, and I put, I

printed out the term sheet, all these awful terms, and I put it

on the table, so a board member at the time, and I said, we've

been in the market for four months. Huge distraction

fundraising. We've been through hell with this investment around

this is the best offer we've got. Do you want to protect your

investment? And then they went through the thing and they came

back like a day later, called me, the CEO called me, and he

was like, don't take that deal. We'll give you some money. All

Well, that journey itself, it'd be good to dig into

right.

maybe some of the successes and the challenges you've got,

because I'm sure there's a few.

Have we got enough time for them?

That laugh just tells me there's a few in there.

My background. And I was thinking about this this

morning, as I knew we were meeting you, and I when I was

18, I wasn't too sure what I wanted to do. I was fortunate

enough to be given the opportunity to become a European

licensed coach. And we were taught by a international coach

at the time. So I thought, You know what, I'm going to be the

next England football coach, right? Absolutely buzzing for

it. And I've got a philosophy around coaching. You know, the

output of the one nil victory or the two one loss is not, you

know, there's a byproduct of the inputs that go into the team.

And when I was coaching an 11 aside team, you had to go

through transitioning the team throughout the game. Yeah, talk

about transitions. Now you had to move from a 442, formation to

a five back, five, etc, three in the middle and two up front.

Here we go, getting right into the detail. But I was used to

look at the team and break them down into components. So that

person would be really skillful, or that person would be a great

person who was great at heading. Is that? How you see, you know,

a sales function, do you break them down into different

functions? Or how does that work in your head? You know, UHubs?

Yeah, totally. So there's a really good book by a

guy called Jim Collins called Good to Great. So one of. The

key principles of successful or endearing, enduring rather

businesses, is he talks about, you have to figure out how to

get the right people on the bus and get them sitting in the

right seats. So, you know, to use a football analogy, we talk

about something similar, but we say, figure out how you get the

right players on the pitch and get them in the right positions.

And like speaking to CROs every day, you know, particularly the

ones that are new to role. That's kind of like priority

number one. You know, once you've done your your Tam and

ICP definition, it's like, then what the hell have I inherited

here? You know, how do we figure out we how we optimize that

team? So, so, yes, absolutely. And then you think about how you

you break that down so you have an organization that you inherit

often, in particularly private equity businesses, right? How do

you then understand, Okay, where is everybody, what levels are we

talking about, and what characteristics, attributes,

capabilities that they possess, once you've got that initial

baseline, the next step we find is then you can start thinking

about role definition, because then once you understand what

you're working with, you can start to think about, okay, in

order for us to get to the number that we need to hit in

the next 1224, months, we're going to need x percent to come

from new business. We're going to need x percent to come from

expansion. We're going to need to maintain this NRR to get

there. So then you start thinking about specialism. So

that might be new business sales roles, so you might have an

account executive or even an outbound so I think a big part

of going on that journey is step one, like baseline, what you

have? Step two, start thinking about that operating model and

that role definition. And then step three, once you understand

what good looks like in each of those roles and where those

because every organization, I mean, otherwise you wouldn't be

around as an organization has pockets of excellence, has

pockets of brilliance, that wow, there's something really working

there. You know, like this rep has smashed out the park for

eight quarters in a row. What the hell is it? Yeah, these reps

are doing, yeah, that the others that the others aren't. And I'll

just carry out that with an important point, I think, which

is not to say that there's one profile for success, and it's

not to say that we're trying to create a cookie cutter factory

of undiverse teams. I think everyone has superpowers, and

everyone has unique superpowers. And some sales people are

amazing prospectors, and they're just pipeline machines, and

they've always got amazing pipeline coverage. Others are a

little bit more lone wolfy and are, you know, a bit more

Maverick, and they're just really good closes. So, but what

it's about is, it's about identifying what are those macro

behaviors that are working across the board? Because if you

don't directionally understand that, then, then you're lost,

you know, then, like we're talking about, you can't go

back, and you can't hire the right capability, and then you

can't run performance management effectively, and you definitely

can't invest in the right enablement and training and

resources that focuses on building capability in the right

areas.

Just going to ask, because I think one thing I find

really interesting there, Matt, is you talk about looking at

what you've got right now in the team. Because some people were

thinking, Well, you might have 80% rubbish, 20% good. So is

there an argument actually, for not building around what's

currently there, but instead building around what the future

should look like, how does I mean, of course, one informs the

other in different directions. Or what have you seen working

with the businesses that you work with as the as a sort of

good balance? Or is there no such thing, and it just really

depends on where the business is?

It's a great question, really good question.

And we haven't even come on to talk about AI yet, because AI

fundamentally rethinks this for every single organization, is

the viewpoint that I'm forming. But just to park that for a

second, I think something that is really important is

benchmarking organizations can tend to be very insular. Most of

the ones that we've had the pleasure of working with would

probably admit that in the beginning. So this is where the

power of being able to actually benchmark externally as well as

internally, is really, really important. And our bigger vision

as a business at you hubs is we want to create a global standard

for sales capability. We want people to take their Uhubs

profile with them on their career journey in a number of

different organizations that they work at, and that becomes

the de facto standard for how you assess the true capabilities

of someone. So that goes to say that we're building a pretty

sizable benchmarking data set as we go on this journey of

building the business and being able to where we start now,

which is focusing very heavily on private equity backed B to B

businesses. Mostly means that we can go really deep on the

profiles that are working for other organizations that have

similar deal sizes, similar sales cycle lengths, are selling

to similar industry verticals, and then you can start borrowing

those insights and ideas for your own organization.

I think that's fascinating. And so many

organizations are looking out there for Okay, well, what are

our competitors? Still not even what our competitors doing. But

what does good look like? Jonny, you and I were talking at a

recent an event recently focused in a particular area of

financial services, and talking actually about some of the

things or I was sharing with some of that group, some of the

learnings that I'd had from a technology background when it

came to client engagement and measuring customer satisfaction,

of which, you know, tech firms have tended to be quite towards

a sort of front, you know, bleeding edge of that when it

comes to sort of compared to other industries. And, you know,

there's an experienced group of leaders in this room, and a lot

of light bulbs firing off around the room being like, I hadn't

thought about that, or we don't really look at that. And I

think, like, that's an interesting perspective, as well

as taking this, okay, what are sales that like in in a in a

SaaS world, versus what a sales look like in a consulting world

versus what a sales look like in a, you know, B to C versus B to

B. There's so much of that complexity like so I guess

there's, it's probably not one benchmark. It's a range of

benchmarks that come together that can inform the direction.

Totally, yeah, and the lines are getting

massively blurred. I've got a chief revenue officer of 100

million ARR software business that we're working with at the

moment. His big emphasis right now is hiring management

consultants. He's an ex consultant himself. He's an ex

McKinsey guy, but he is recognized that in the current

environment, they're selling bigger ticket items. He's found

that the ramp time is shorter if he brings in management

consultants and up skills them on the commercial skill set,

rather than trying to take commercial sales people and

upskill them on the consulting solution sale skill set, which

is super interesting, I think.

Matt, let's take a pause right there, and to

everyone listening, join us for part two as we continue this

conversation.