In this episode we discuss: a COO's journey to a Google exit. We are joined by Shane Harris, Former COO @ Cameyo. 

Love The Operations Room? Please support us by rating and reviewing it here.

We chat about the following with Shane Harris: 

• What role does sustainable growth, cash flow positivity, and dynamic budgeting play in a company’s success?
• How can company culture and strategic alignment influence decision-making and long-term growth?
• Why is understanding customer lifetime value and identifying productive customers critical for sustainable business strategy?
• What steps should startups take to prepare for a successful exit?

References 

• https://www.linkedin.com/in/shanecharris

Biography 

Shane is a seasoned tech executive with a passion for building high performance teams, optimizing business systems and establishing KPI frameworks that drive scalable growth. As COO of enterprise software company Cameyo, acquired by Google, he has a proven track record of strategic leadership through scale and exit. Prior to Cameyo, Shane led operations and helped grow Vasion (formerly PrinterLogic) from 13 to 300+ employees and over 35x revenue growth. Shane has an MBA from Duke University where he graduated at the top of his class.

To learn more about Beth and Brandon or to find out about sponsorship opportunities click here. 

Summary

06:46 Introduction

27:05 Startups, goals, and roadmaps

28:07 No frills

28:49 Cameo's Exit Strategy and Company Culture

30:42 Exit strategies

32:18 The Value of Bootstrapping vs. Funding

33:54 Navigating Growth Paths and Strategic Decisions

35:26 The Role of Operations in Business Success

39:38 Preparing for Acquisition: Metrics and Data

42:58 Stages of Development and Strategic Objectives

47:40 Lessons Learned for Future Exits

Hello and welcome to another

episode of The Operations Room, a

podcast for CEOs.

I am Brandon Mensing and joined by

my amazing co-host, Bethany Ayres.

How are things going, Bethany?

Not very well.

Look, I feel like this has been a

year of highs and lows.

So I was pick pocketed

on Thursday

in London.

I was coming back from Manchester to

meet some friends for dinner in

Soho, and there was

a mini landslide

on the train tracks

between Manchester and London.

I don't know what a mini landslide

is, but it means that the trains are

moving very slowly.

So I was getting in 45 minutes

late.

I had already cut it fine for

dinner, so I was in a real rush and

I was clearly a target.

Like in retrospect, I have my

backpack on.

I have a big coat.

You have my wheelie bag.

I'm pushing through people trying

to get to the restaurant as quickly

as possible.

And because London has had so

many sun thefts

right now, you know, it's talking

about it's in the news.

I just felt like it was inevitable

that I felt was going to get stolen.

I bought my iWatch

so that I would not have to take my

phone out and be less

of a target.

And to do navigation on my

watch. But I haven't figured out how

to do navigation well on my watch.

And it was 100% the navigation that

got me. So I knew where I supposed

to turn down. I turned down and it

was just taking a really long time

to get to the restaurant.

And so I picked up my phone to make

sure I was still where I was going.

And I kept further down, put my

phone back in my pocket and zipped

my pocket.

And then going down the

road, I'm kind of passing people,

everybody. You know, it's Soho.

People are slow, there's tourists,

I'm annoyed, and

somebody jostles me.

And maybe it took a little longer of

a jostle than normal or I just

somehow noticed this one,

but I didn't think, they're just

stolen my phone. I was just kind of

like, Why is this person so close to

me? Carried over great Marlborough

Street and I was like, God,

is this restaurant really that much

further away? Stuck my hand in my

pocket. I want to stick my hand in

my pocket and my zip was undone

and my stomach just fell.

And I was like, fuck.

And I put my hand in my pocket,

phone gone.

And then, of course, I look in,

there's the restaurant.

So Russian get

to my friends and

borrow one of their phones.

And luckily I have my husband's

phone number memorized.

The only number that is not

a childhood phone number that I have

memorized in my whole world,

and the only reason why I have it

memorized is because he hasn't

changed his number since we started

dating, and I used to have to call

him from America and had figured

out how to memorize it.

Never thought that I would need it

for not having a phone so

horrific disaster.

Losing a phone like so

huge amount of admin and hassle

with the phone. I won't go into all

of it, but all I have to say are the

staff at the Apple Store

are just so amazing.

They must get paid really well

because compared to all the other

retail people you deal with, like

the Apple staff is just another

level.

I'd like to thank all of them.

When I was like nearly in tears

trying to sort out my fucking phone.

So I now have a phone but I don't

have a sim so I still can't do

any to f.a.

I'm still waiting for O2 to deliver

me my sim and then I

had to fill in the police report.

One of the things that did not

require two factor authentication

and filling, and it was great to be

able to fill it in like online and

not have to call the police and do

everything. And if you

did your name and where it happened

and describe what happened and then

there's like a bunch of check boxes

of things you have to fill in.

And one of the questions is,

what is your relationship to the

crime?

Something like that.

And so it was I am the

victim.

I am a bystander.

And the top one is I'm a victim.

And I was just like, no.

And so I read the list

for it.

Has to be something.

Else. Yeah.

And I was like, my God.

And it was so hard for me to click,

I am a victim

of it. It's a it's fine.

It's not really either.

But, you know, technically,

as I found that really hard

to click the victim button filled

in everything.

And also because of my find my

iPhone, I could put in an exact

address where it disappeared and

you know the address of where it happened,

the whole thing.

And then the next day I got a

here's your case number and then a

couple of hours later and now your

case is closed.

We've looked at the CCTV footage.

Nothing obvious, no where

to pursue this. Done.

So we have got a great topic for

today, which is a CEO's journey

to the Google exit.

We have a wonderful guest for this,

which is Shane Harris.

He's the former CEO of Cameo,

which was acquired by Google in

2024, and he is now

working at Google in operations

and go to market strategy.

So one little caveat to Shane.

Unfortunately, we had some technical

difficulties in the conversation

whereby we didn't quite get to the

the Google exit part of it as much

as we had hopes for the

conversation. But that aside,

just wanted to, as usual, start with

you, Bethany, in terms of our back

and forth.

And the first

thought I want to drop on to you is,

Shane, you talked about

bootstrapping a culture of getting

stuff done, a cameo and a bit of

this no frills, more with

less attitude.

Do you think the finance SEO person

and finance voice perhaps more

broadly, is undervalued

and now it is being valued with our

current circumstances that we have?

Once you raise a bit of money,

you need somebody who's a grown up

to control that money and

make sure you don't do stupid

things.

So there's obviously the basics

of getting your accounting right and

your cash collection right and

making sure people pay you.

I'm actually surprised the number of

companies that don't have their

accounts payable set up and don't

really know who is and isn't

paying them and don't have

conversations with their customers

about if you're not paying us, you

don't have source anymore.

Like I think a lot of startups,

every customer is so hard.

One that even

a customer that's not paying somehow

counts as a customer and you don't

want to take it out of your numbers.

I'm working with the company, not

Peak, a different company where that

exact scenario has just happened

and they're like, We just want to

clean up some churn.

And then there are churn cleanup for

customers that have just never paid.

Like, I don't think this is churn.

Well, this is stuff that just should

not have been counted in your

numbers full stop.

And they don't have a finance

person. I guess for me, that's a

perfect example of you need

those checks and balances.

You can't just rely

on the glory of growing

your M.r or your RR

without making sure that it's

actually translating into cash.

And if it's not translating into

cash, what are you going to do about

it? And that's just like a

fundamental that's not even advanced

finance, but that's kind of the

first thing you need, that you need

somebody who is creating

a budget, managing a budget,

explaining to people why they can

and cannot have things and

make sure that the money is being

used appropriately and also

something that finance, at least in

my experience, finance should do

rather than the CFO or Ops

is the reporting.

I actually prefer reporting to be

with finance rather than

with ops because it's like

for me, the more trustworthy,

you know, because even Ops has skin

in the game around how things are

going to look and maybe

cutting metrics in a slightly more

flattering way. Whereas I just trust

the finance people are like, This

is the definition.

I have run it through the definition

and this is the metric.

It's good or it's bad financial

metrics or pipeline metrics or

whatever. Plus, finance tend to be

really good at visualizing data

and making stuff understandable.

He also spoke about from

day one at the outset,

kind of like Mark Farnell making

sure that you take your data hose

and make sure that it's clean and

wrap your process around it and

carve your metrics out according

to whatever that process is in a way

that's meaningful and helpful to the

business.

And I'm just wondering what you make

of that in terms of his

view that it should happen from the

very beginning and culturally set

that because oftentimes in

companies, they don't spend the time

and effort to do this upfront.

We just need to get customers on

board and sell effectively to get

the RR rolling and we'll deal with

this afterwards.

So I'm curious the balance between

upfront versus later.

We see this all the time and I get

it because most founders and founder

CEOs don't care

about metrics.

They live five, ten years in the

future. They have a vision that

they're trying to get to.

The boring metrics along the way

just are slowing them down as

an archetype.

And so you do end up

not looking at numbers are on

the whole companies don't look at

numbers till really late

until they have to pre

a post a depending on

how they gather their a round

where they realize they need to

somehow prove that they have

traction and they other than they

are, they have no proof of traction

or proof over traction.

And so if you're at the point

where you want to move from founder

led sales to sales

leadership, you need to be able to

put those numbers in place because

otherwise, how are you going to tell

whether or not you've hired a good

leader? Is your pipeline growing

or your cost of acquisition

acceptable?

And at that point, you should hire

in rev ops or

biz ops or whatever kind of ops

you want to call it, depending on

how broad people are looking.

The ops systems thinking person

is like, you should do it from day

one and build it into the culture.

But then both the realist and

also there's a lot of

things you have to fix in the

beginning.

Like, does it actually just slow you

down?

Particularly if you're doing

enterprise sales.

If you're doing high volume sales,

you need to do it from the start.

Or if you're doing product led

sales, you need to do it from the

start, a product that grows PLG.

Because then it's all about metrics

and you have enough numbers to make

a difference.

If you're selling 500,000

pound ACV

or dollar ACV deals and you're

selling for a year,

your metrics really don't matter

because there is nothing repeatable

there for a very long time.

It's almost like a descending scale,

isn't it? Enterprise Mid-Market,

SMB, PLG.

As you go down that pathway, the

earlier you have to start in terms

of tracking the stuff in a way that

actually makes sense for the

business.

But I think at the end of the day,

what I've seen over and over again

is that the Series A, when the

company grows to a certain size and

as you're getting toward the series,

B and the founder are starting to

not lose control, but they don't

know what's going on in the

business. They don't know what everyone

is doing as they used to, and they

start freaking out a little bit and

they're like, Brandon, I just want

to see a dashboard, one dashboard

that tells me what's happening.

So that's where that flipped.

The switch I think really happens in

a substantial way where the CEO

that maybe would not have been

behind it earlier gets behind

it because they're feeling like

they're losing control.

They need to see a dashboard.

And that's the point by which you

can actually step in to make

something happen.

And that's when you can get the data

to be accurate, because up until

that point, no matter how accurate

you'd like the data to be,

everything's on a spreadsheet

somewhere hidden and HubSpot

is empty or randomly

half used and there's no information

in there. And so you have to go and

actually start to enforce

data quality.

I cannot tell you the number of

times I've seen HubSpot being

licensed and just kind of sitting

there.

And then you also have nobody in the

business who knows how to use it

exactly.

You have somebody who's kind of like

a little bit systems has maybe

watched one demo, has

done things and customized

a little bit of it.

In a strange way, it's not working

and then they just revert to the

spreadsheet.

I always find the attitude funny

because on the one side of it

they're always like, Well, we

know we need to have HubSpot.

So they license it and I, okay, well

we got it now.

And then they just kind of ignore

it. And then at some point when

things start to like really go

haywire at some stage in terms of

just not knowing what's happening in

the business, like, okay, we

should actually do something.

And then that revolves higher

happens, then the cleanup happens,

then the tracking happens and the

metrics happen and the culture piece

of sales reps actually doing stuff

properly happens.

Or doesn't, where they

hire the rev ops person and the rest

of the culture, change doesn't

happen. And you have this revolves

person is just banging their head

against a wall trying to change

the culture and nobody else goes

with it.

I mean, this is where the operator

comes in, doesn't it? Because

oftentimes his rev ops people are

fabulous, but they're not great

communicators. And I greater change

transformation in the business.

If you're sitting there with 25 reps

or 30 reps, nobody's going to do

Jack unless they're

in a, I don't know, a well thought

out transformation program to get

them in a place where they

understand why it's useful.

They're being held to account.

And it's not for me, the Red Bob's

person that does that, it has to be

somebody else.

And also, sometimes they're

perfectly fine communicators.

They're just not senior enough.

When the CEO's like, I don't care

about it, I never look at it, Here's

my spreadsheet. Nobody is going to

listen to the rev ops person who's

trying to get them to use HubSpot.

So here's another question for you,

because I've also seen this

repeatedly where the CEO, the

company recognizes it needs

to happen. He or she wants to do it.

It starts happening in some form,

but it's still kind of half baked.

And the message that I get back from

the CEO is that I want

reporting to happen, but I do

not want to look at it.

And HubSpot, I hate those charts and

I'm not going to bother to log in.

I have also seen that one.

You kind of get one or the other of

either I don't want to log in.

I hate the way it looks, can't be

bothered or gets

really excited by it and drills in

but doesn't quite understand it and

goes into like these weird

like rabbit holes and

misunderstandings.

So I think there's two things.

Either you work at getting

them to like it and keep working

at it or accept

that HubSpot is your database

and you're going to export the

information into pretty charts

for that person on a regular basis,

either weekly or monthly,

and then like refer back to

the finance people who can

make pretty charts.

It's a bit of a waste of time, but

at least you have a good database at

that point, even if the consumption

of the information is not

in the tool.

I think in the SEO case that I've

experienced taking that data, that

hopefully is good data that actually

is clean to your point and track

properly, you can export it

and either visualize it in Excel,

which people understand, or Google

sheets or possibly

start thinking about like things

like Power BI and visualizing there.

But I always find that's like just a

whole other world of pain, to be

honest. If we don't need to do it,

then I think kind of in that AB

world, visualizing it outside

of HubSpot and just Google sheets or

something like that is perfectly

acceptable.

I think I would not spend my budget

on power by any spare

budget I have. I'd be spending on

I. Tools for the company to

just experiment with in this new

world of cash is not free and

constrained. And where am I going to

spend my IT budget?

It would not be for a

company that's.

Series A series B,

maybe even series C.

I wouldn't be spending my money on

buy tools anymore.

Yeah, there's a good point.

And there's so many of those buy

tools and they're so expensive.

Typically, like if think about these

things like Snowflake and Tableau,

they are super, super expensive,

like crazy expensive and a list of a

certain size and transactional

scale.

It's hard to argue that it makes any

real financial sense, especially

when people either.

Don't use it, can't use it, or

whatever does show up on those

dashboards is not correct for all

sorts of reasons.

When it comes to metrics.

What do you love?

What do you hate?

What gets Bethany excited when it

comes to the world of metrics and

what kind of metrics?

I like to strip it back to the ones

that really matter.

The gross margin.

Are you making money or not?

Payback, period.

Are you making money or not?

Those are probably my big

ones. And then net revenue retention

because are you growing?

Are you standing still?

Are you going backwards because you

can't retain customers?

Everything after that is

interesting to see how well

the system is functioning.

And is the SAS flywheel rolling?

How about you, Brandon?

So I love the standard stuff.

Obviously I slice and dice it to

death in terms of RR

year on year, quarter on quarter, a

month on month growth rates that are

attached to that.

Looking at the forecast and figure

out where our burn rate is, how it's

tracking, and if you increase budget

here a little bit or increase

revenue there, how that affects the

cash burn itself. So I like the cash

burn as an actual.

Thing to to focus on and obviously

gross margin or whatnot.

Operating income are always quite

interesting in this respect as well.

Other ones of interest for sure.

We call that net dollar retention

out trend, my last company.

But effectively, you know, if you

combine expansion,

churn all those other factors,

are we incrementally growing our

customer asset from a revenue

perspective or are we starting

to lose steam?

And also looking at the cohorts of

the some segments within that is

quite fascinating because oftentimes

you see very clear trend lines

of like segment A is

tanking it for some reason.

Segment B is kicking ass and just

understanding what that difference

looks like, what kind of customer

assets are maybe not

entirely suitable.

And you can kind of see it where

they're not growing at the other

rates of the other customers.

And there's a reason for that.

And digging into what that reason

is, recognizing it's not the best

customer set for you to be targeting

or that perhaps you need to be

doubling down in that segment to

actually bring forward more

functionality or experiences to to

get them more excited by what's

happening, perhaps.

So I've worked with one company that

has a very traditional

small, medium, large processor

in the smaller micro, and so

it was all credit cards and

it was low touch, but

in the beginning it was not low

touch, but they were the ones that

were turning on and off all the

time. So it wasn't necessarily

churn, but because it was a monthly

subscription, they would turn it on

when they needed it, turn it off.

And so in the numbers it looked like

churn. So one of the first things I

did was really delve into what's

going on because they were going out

for a fundraiser.

I was like, my God, you have all

this churn and by doing Get into the

Cohorts, you could see that

Enterprise actually had a really

strong expansion.

Mid-Market was fairly okay,

and the churn, as we called it, was

all in the small markets.

And although they were small

companies, they actually made up a

large chunk of the revenue.

And so it looked like it was all

bad churn when you rolled it all up

together. But by segmenting it into

in those cohorts, we could see what

was actually going on.

And then we focused on

there wasn't anything with the

product that you could change.

It was a structural issue, like

these customers just were not going

to ever commit to a year.

And so we focused instead

on massively lowering

the cost of acquisition

and making it completely

no touch, only

credit cards.

If somebody's credit cards expired

immediately turn them off from

the product.

And therefore we still had this

really bitty revenue.

But the profitability

of the customers massively increased

that.

My former company, we had exactly

this, which is you had freelancers

that would turn the software on and

off depending on their workload and

what was happening from a contract

perspective.

And you could very clearly see them

as we find at the time, churning out

and that we could clearly see them

reactivating at a later point.

So we actually call that bucket

reactivation.

So it became very clear a bucket of

trend was in the forecast that we

had a certain expectations around

reactivation, what that look like

and just making sure that it was

cleanly segmented from the churn

number to ensure that investors

understood.

And then you got some profitability

out of it as well. Like if you make

it no touch low touch,

you're not actually paying for it,

then that's nice.

Extra money.

What do you think of the rule of 40

combining profitability with growth

as a thing?

It seemed like it was really, really

trendy Right after the

tech crash.

It was articles about it every.

But he's talking about it.

And I think it's because it's coming

from private equity and it's a way

of PE firms being able to

value companies.

Are you still hearing it?

Not as much.

What I do think about is the

RR Peretti.

So the amount of revenue that you're

making divided by the number of

employees that you have, it's a

direct correlation of the efficiency

of like to be 30 people to get to

this revenue level or

is it 60 or 90, 120?

And how does that benchmark versus

other companies in a similar

category? It's quite a useful

benchmarking tool.

And also it'll be interesting with

all of the AI being

rolled out in companies,

what the new benchmark will become.

I read an article about

a AI and

tech professional services, a

professional services like

lawyers and accountants

and consulting

firms, the vertical professional

services.

And they were saying that because

I can do

a lot of what juniors do,

basically, like a junior lawyer does

just all of the shit work and now a

machine can do it, that a lot of

these organizations are not planning

on hiring nearly as many graduates

now. But that's like kind of an

existential issue of like,

where do all these kids go and

having children. I am a bit worried

about this. You know what?

Where are their jobs in the future?

But also, experienced

people are not worried about losing

their jobs because they can see

what is good and not good

in AI and like where the

hallucinations are.

But what you end up having is

because we're not having the

next generation trained on it,

when the experts retire, you don't

have people who are going to be able

to tell what's good and what's not

good.

I also just thinking about

like what's going to happen

to tech companies in the future.

Would you hire graduates?

Like I think if you have a company

with a good culture that's growing

steadily, companies might

just kind of age together.

And not hire juniors.

You mean and not hire juniors?

And not just the P.W.

seasoned eccentrics of the world,

but across the board?

It's going to be interesting to see

what happens to

the workforce in the coming years.

What are we going to do with all of

our kids if we don't hire them?

We have to do something with them.

Yeah, but you're right.

Especially for scale ups when you're

being very efficient with your cash

and only spending where you have to.

If you don't need juniors to be in

the business because you have A.I.

doing a bunch of that stuff for you,

then you're not going to, period.

It does matter what your values are

of your organization.

It's taken a slightly away from

metrics, but we'll be able to do is

measure the metrics.

But as interesting as it came from

the R per head, this whole

little bit of conversation.

So reason why the metrics

matter and the philosophically,

what does it show us?

And is part of your your number

one goal usually is growth, right?

Andrew and our

original founders, they read

the market well in that they

forecasted in the future

they could see that there was going

to be a major impact from

cloud on virtualization.

So from day one, we actually knew

that acquisition was a likely

exit path for us.

We didn't box or sell sent where

that was the only exit path, but we

knew that that was a very likely

exit path.

And then another piece of it was

we looked at scaling and

every company has culture

and core values and something

that we as an executive

team really focused on.

I know that sounds silly, but

we got things done and no

frills, no hype, just all

results focused in what we were

doing.

And do more with less

was something that we were used to

doing. And so part of our culture

was being gritty, being scrappy,

finding ways to get results and make

things happen without getting

involved in the hype and the waste.

And it's really interesting because

at the time, money was so cheap.

So there was this temptation to

raise a series, a round, and we

actually had an opportunity to do

that at a pretty meaningful

valuation.

But when we took a step back,

we just looked at the things that

we're being asked to do, the

expectation of growth at all costs

and, you know, hire a bunch of

people if things go wrong, you fire

them all later, you know, like it

just was it was a little bit counter

to our culture.

And what was crazy was like

six months later, after we made

that decision, the wheels

fell off, like the interest rates

started going sky high, adventure

firms coming back and say, hey, you

know what?

You got to be profitable.

Your growth, you got to be cash flow

positive. You got to show results

for all this money you're sending,

which that was something we cared

about from day one and was

part of our culture.

So the founders probably made

as much by not taking funding

as they would have had they grown a

bigger company.

You know, when you do the math, it's

crazy just speaking in general

terms like bootstrapping

and being cash flow positive does is

it preserves your autonomy so that

you're never stuck in a situation

where you have to raise money

at a valuation you don't like or,

you know, the market takes a turn.

You end up in a scenario where

upside down, I mean, the scenario

described is like absolute tragedy

to me and it happens a lot where you

have a very hyped up firm.

We're going to hire a ton of people,

We're going to get these crazy

evaluations or pay wild

salaries to the executive,

and then the market shifts

or something happens and three years

down the road, they end up selling

at still a very meaningful

valuation.

But in doing that, nobody

made any money because of the way

they financed their growth leading

into it.

It's hard to make that call.

And I think this is where it comes a

bit to Brandon's question of do you

know what kind of exit you want?

Because sometimes if you have that

idea that you believe in that

is that unicorn idea

and you're going to create a

category and you're going to take

over the world and that's your

ambition, then it's really

hard to not want to take the money

and to feel the urge

that if you don't move fast enough,

somebody is going to come and steal

your idea.

And like the glory of

being the next Salesforce.

Not that Salesforce is like exciting

for anyone anymore versus

actually what I want is a nice

amount of money for my

children and my family

and keep the autonomy and

grow a business that I like.

And all those things are

considerations.

There's no one size fits all,

but I think there's something

beautiful about being

I don't want to use the word

realistic. That sounds wrong, but

being pragmatic about

what you're doing because

there are a lot of visionaries out

there and the road

is there's carcasses all along

the path to becoming a unicorn.

You know, there's a lot of

people that they go too hard

when they should have just taken

a more sustainable path.

And it aligns to

culture. I really think it aligns.

The person highlights the culture.

So when you think about the secret

sauce, Shane Harris is the CEO

in Cameo specifically.

What is it about Shane that really

helped make this happen?

The role of operations

is to enable the

strategic business objectives

of the company.

It's everything that is happening.

You're helping the company get from

A to B in the most efficient,

effective way.

A great CEO is to

have a way to combine everything

the company is doing from

There's so much data flowing through

your company is so much information

to be harnessed by just your day

to day processes and operations and

you need to establish performance

metrics across the organization.

It tells you how the company is

doing.

And then also you have to put

systems in place that

fuel those metrics, right?

So you're collecting the data that

you need to collect to make the

right decisions. As a company to be

able to take risks in Belfast,

to be able to optimize, to be able

to determine what should we change

to reach our strategic plan.

What things do we need to adjust?

We need to get out ahead of those

things.

You're talking about systems as in

more of the like supply

chain as a system or a customer

journey as a system rather than

literally technology

that you're putting in place.

It's actually both.

That's what I mean. Whereas I think

people think systems like you're

talking about whether you're using

HubSpot or not, but we were actually

talking about is the system

of the customer journey or the

interconnectedness system that is

the entire company.

So when I'm saying system, what I

mean, you have a business process,

right? We have the work that needs

to get done and you put in place a

process. Here's how that work is

done. The system is what facilitates

that process.

It could be the technology

that you're using.

I mean, maybe it's a spreadsheet,

but you have to have some framework,

some structure around how

you're doing your work or else it's

just chaos and nothing can be

measured and you don't know why

you're getting whatever results

you're doing and everyone's scattered.

You can't scale that way.

So a system is probably

the combination of the technology,

but also the process that

you're following to get work done.

And if you think

through whether the metrics that

I need to have, when you're putting

those systems in place, you're going

to do it right and you're going to

have clean data.

If you have the expectation that we

collect this data as an

organization, we have metrics that

we follow and measure to when

you bring a sales rep on.

You train them in the process for

collecting the data.

They're inputting the data.

And it could be HubSpot, it can be

whatever.

And that's part of your culture

because they see, you're making

decisions off of this, and that's

how we're growing. That's how we're

scaling. You make that available,

you make metrics visible to

everybody in the company.

They understand from day one how

important those things that

people typically hate to do.

I've had the luxury of working

for CEOs that get it and

understand how strategic

it is to a company to have that

data on hand.

I promise you, if you're having

issues with the CEO, the second

that you show them a

real time live

just simple dashboard that shows

them the metrics they care about,

the answers and question every CEO.

When you get past like 1020

people in a company, the

CEO can't be involved in everything.

They just can't.

What drives them nuts is

wanting to know how are we doing

and why are we doing how we're

doing, good or bad?

You know, that's the question that

every CEO has.

And in operations, you're answering

that question.

If you build the system,

the metrics, the flow.

With that in mind, where you can

give them real time answers to that

question, they're going to love you

and then you won't have to fight

them and they're going to be begging

you for more because that's what

you need as an executive

to lead your business.

Does that help put you in a good

place for the acquisition?

So we're able to build business case

as well. What was the integration

like? Because I think some CEOs

go, yeah, okay, I can have some

metrics, but a story about

how having good metrics means

a better evvie

that is probably more compelling for

most CEOs.

I know if you're considering

buying a business, right,

you want to know why

is this business worth buying?

And at the end of the day, whether

you're raising venture funds

around, whether you sell yourself to

your cut, I mean, this goes back

to your question, how can operations

be strategic to a company?

Everything you do boils down

to a mini business case.

Why should we do this?

What's the evidence that tells us

that this is a good thing to do,

whether it's internal external data,

but like, why are we making this

decision and how do we measure

if this was a good decision or a bad

decision and pivot?

So coming into an acquisition

and coming into raising funds,

yeah, they want your data.

They want to know all of your your

top performance metrics.

Why are things going well?

Why are they going poorly?

They need an answer for

you need to know the metrics they're

going to be looking at. You need to

have a flow of data that

honestly answers those metrics, but

you also need to be out

in front of it.

You don't want to wait until you're

trying to raise around put all this

in place because what's going to

happen is it's going to boil up.

Hey, wow, we had this weird blip

over here. Why did we have that blip

over there? And if your answer is,

I don't know, we just found it, you

know, you're going to look like an

idiot. But if you can say,

yeah, you know, we actually

recognize this dip

in conversion rates, our leads

in Q1.

And we knew that that was never

going to hurt sales in Q4.

And so what we did was instead of

doing this campaign, we shifted

those funds into another campaign

with higher conversion rates.

And what happened is as a result,

sales in Q4, we nailed our forecast

because we were three months ahead

following the leading indicators.

You showed them that and that just

gives them. Confidence to give them

trust.

And that's your job as a CEO, is to

to have all that information on hand

and to have the story.

But the story comes out naturally if

you're following it in real time.

It gets awkward and clunky and

people can smell the B.S.

if it's something that you not

addressed until you're pulling the

data last minute for somebody who's

asking for it.

So if you think about what you just

said and you had to break it down in

terms of stages of development with

Cameo, in terms of what you did,

just to give it a level of

granularity as to what that looks

like.

Coming back to strategic objectives,

Right? Like the first thing I did

when I came on is

is towards the tail end of a year.

So we had the luxury of kind of

measuring how we performed.

And then it was putting in place a

forecast model that

made use of our historical data

drew on external information,

on market sizing and all this

and, you know, industry metrics.

And let's create a forecast model of

what we're going to achieve as a

business over the next three

years and what are the metrics

that are going to tell us,

like what assumptions are driving

this forecast model?

And you can piece all of those

assumptions out into metrics.

And okay, so here

are the assumptions we're making

that's going to drive this forecast

model. How do we measure those so

that we know that we're on track

for this forecast or do we need to

shift things? Where do we need to

shift things? And the forecast was

dynamic in that not just was

it applying to,

hey, this is the goal we want

to reach, but what are

the pressure release valves and the

ways to, you know, we have X amount

of funds right now.

We've decided we're not going to

raise money.

So how do we use

those funds to get us

from A to B, which is this

strategic objective, this goal that

we're setting, that that's

attainable? You know, but it's a

stretch.

How do we deploy those funds in a

way to get us there?

Let's put in place metrics so that

we know we're marching to that plan

and we're using our resources to

grow at the most

sustainable possible rate.

Right? And we have like something

that we did that that was just

really, really impactful is

we had this dynamic budgeting

process. You know, you can't live in

a world when you're bootstrapped and

you're working to scale.

You can't live in a world where you

have a static budget.

Never you just spend money when

they're not showing results, right?

So we put in place a plan

that was like our document, right?

That we're working off of is

spreadsheets. It's systems, it's

metrics that built that plan

out. Define the metrics that would

tell us how we're performing against

it, and then

modified our system so that we could

collect that data in real time

and constantly see where we're

marching. We mean as an executive

team, we would meet weekly

to review where are

we on this path to

our strategic objectives and

how are we doing?

So we've talked a lot around

building the operations for building

the company.

We haven't talked a huge amount

about the exit.

Looking back on what you've done, is

there anything you would do

differently or looked at everything

that you have done? Is there

anything you would do differently at

your time at Mayo to put

yourself in an even better position?

The time to prepare for an exit is

two years before you

actually are going to need

to exit. The main thing that I would

focus on just sharply,

like make sure you have your data

and your metrics there and ask

questions about your performance.

You need to be able to answer that

and you need to have clean

financials.

It's so much better if

you are internally auditing

your data, auditing your financials,

answering the hard questions as

an executive team, as a CEO,

and then the rest of the

organization so that you can

be more than prepared and show

you're prepared when you start

having those conversations, those

negotiations, the stuff we've been

talking about, systems, metrics,

forecasts, that applies

directly to having a successful

exit.

The next thing I would say is,

you know, especially a startup, you

don't want to spend a lot of money

on legal.

But the reality is

that is such an important

piece, especially when you

start looking at getting acquired

by a large organization.

So I would

strongly recommend spend

that time to make sure your employee

contracts are exactly where they

need to be in industry standards.

Spend the time to make sure all your

customer contracts are where they

need to be.

Another one that's really big and

this is probably one of the hardest

ones that I've learned

is not every customer

is actually a good customer.

You're so desperate for money as a

startup is so desperate for

customers to show growth that you're

inclined to do things

to just land an account

that sometimes

could come back to bite you.

There's two things that could

happen. One is you could find out

that this customer segment that was

easy to win early, right,

is actually a higher churn customer

segment that's not going to be

as attractive to people you're

raising funds from or.

Or to a potential acquirer.

We have to take a step back and say

what customers do we really want?

And a lot of times the early stage

customers that you win to help you

get your business off the ground are

not the right customers to increase

enterprise value long term.

And you want to shift into those

customers that give you the best

growth and the

lowest churn and the highest

customer lifetime value to customer

acquisition costs ratio.

That's a metric I love.

And then another thing I would just

say is

on the culture piece,

if something deviates from your

culture, whether it's a hire or

whether it's a strategic

decision in an investment,

if it just doesn't feel right,

revisit that over and over again

and be sure

that that's something you really

want to do before you do it.

It's quite interesting that you're

talking about like so much of what

you just talked about today is the

metrics, follow the metrics, follow

the data, and yet follow

your gut. Your instinct, your

culture is actually just

as important, if not more.

And so it's a little bit of where's

the art, where's the science?

So I would just say this culture

should guide your starting point

decisions, right?

Data will inform you how to

pivot after you make those decisions

rarely where you make the perfect

decision or execute perfectly.

Right? So it's like your culture

sets your goals, that your vision

sets how you're going to operate

as a business. Those are gut

decisions, right?

You're making and then

your judgment calls where there

isn't data to tell you this is

the right answer, or sometime maybe

the data does say something and it

just doesn't feel right because

there's something else there that

you haven't considered.

But when it comes to this, like

planning, measuring, optimizing,

making sure everyone's accountable,

every meaningful decision

should be treated like a mini

business case, like you should be

able to justify why you made that

decision. And then a month down the

road, why are you continuing on that

path based off of how you're

performing?

Before we end, like to ask

you the final question, which

is if our

listeners can only take one thing

away from our conversation today,

what is it?

Make sure you have in place the

systems and metrics

that tell you

your progress towards your strategic

goals. Right? It's worth the time

to get that right because

you need to know how you're doing

against where you want to go,

and you need to know that in real

time so that you can steer

yourself there.

That's the role of operations.

And in my opinion, the best thing

operations can do is

create that so that an organization

can reach their strategic

objectives.

Lovely. So thank you, Shane Harris,

for joining us on the operations

room. If you like what you hear,

please leave a comment or subscribe

and we will see you next week.