Innovation Junkies Podcast

5.4 Mastering Your Goals with Tamara McMillen

Tamara McMillen and the Jeffs chat about how to find the balance between planning, strategy, and execution, touching on leadership’s critical role in course correction and the need for both “peacetime” and “wartime” leaders in today’s business environment.

Jeff Standridge (Intro):

Welcome to season five of the Innovation Junkies Podcast. In this season, you’ll learn from successful innovators who have influential stories, practices, and strategies that will have your gears turning. Prepare to be inspired, challenged, and empowered. This is the Innovation Junkies Podcast. 

Jeff Standridge:

Hey guys. Welcome to another episode of the Innovation Junkies podcast. I’m Jeff Standridge. 

Jeff Amerine:

Hey, this is, how are we doing today, Jeff? 

Jeff Standridge:

Better than I deserve. How about you? 

Jeff Amerine:

It’s college football season. Life doesn’t get much better than 

Jeff Standridge:

That. That’s right, that’s right. And speaking of football, different kind of football over in the UK. We’ve got a guest coming from the south of London today, Tamara McMillen. Tamara, great to have you with us. Welcome to the Innovation Junkies podcast. 

Tamara McMillen:

Thank you so much. And you’re right, we do have a different type of football here, but I’m delighted to say that I’ll be seeing the Bears who won their game last night when they come to London in October. So they’re beginning to enjoy American football as well. 

Jeff Standridge:

Very good. Are they playing at Wimbley? 

Tamara McMillen:

Actually, the game’s now at Twickenham. 

Jeff Standridge:

Oh, Twickenham. So I got to watch the, go ahead. I’m sorry. 

Tamara McMillen:

Oh, I’ve been to Wembley. I saw the Niners play at Wembley in one of the earlier games, and I’m delighted that we’re going to Twickenham this time. 

Jeff Standridge:

So I went to Twickenham to watch the England National Team Play Wales back 2004, I guess, and it was just one or two train stops away from Teddington and a phenomenal place, phenomenal rugby match. It was the best. 

Tamara McMillen:

Yeah, I was spoiled. I got to see England play New Zealand, so I got to see the hka and all that stuff. I mean, I didn’t really understand the game, but I had a great time. 

Jeff Amerine:

Yeah, yeah, for sure, for sure. The All Blacks from New Zealand are an intimidating group to play. No doubt about it. 

Jeff Standridge:

Well, Tamara, why don’t we start with you telling us and our listeners, quite frankly a little bit about you and how you went from the US to Europe and ultimately the uk, and a little bit about your professional background as well. 

Tamara McMillen:

Sure. I’ll keep it brief not to bore your listeners. I’ve been in tech since the mid nineties. I started in California with MCI, so those of you listening probably know the journey of that business that was bought after going bankrupt with WorldCom by Verizon and a really wonderful career there and moved up the ranks always in sales, running commercial teams and ended up running a region for them. I moved to Europe in 2008. My husband took a role with Phillips, so we went and lived in Amsterdam for four years, which was fabulous. And then I got a call to take a role in the UK working for Teradata. So that took me on that aspect of the journey. And since that time I’ve worked for a variety of organizations, publicly traded and privately backed, worked in very high growth businesses. I’ve been A CRO multiple times. I’ve been an operating partner for HD Capital, which is a well-known SaaS investor. I’ve also worked as an advisor to founders and been on boards. So I’ve done a few different bits and pieces and I’m really delighted to be here today to speak with the two of you. Thank you very much for having me on. 

Jeff Standridge:

Absolutely. So great to have you. So what I want to jump into, knowing that you’ve spent quite a bit of time in multiple size companies leading the growth engine building and leading the growth, excuse me, the growth engine. Let’s talk a little bit about what perhaps maybe some things that don’t get talked about a lot in terms of building that growth engine for a company. 

Tamara McMillen:

Yeah, I think there’s a few different things to unpick their own what doesn’t get talked about a lot. I think the first thing is sometimes how hard it actually really is. There’s so many playbooks out there and there are so many success stories that it’s easy to focus on wanting to be the next unicorn and believing that those formulas are going to crack the code to growth. But there’s still a lot of luck and fortune involved being in the right place at the right time, capitalizing on tailwinds and not running into headwinds. And I think we don’t give that enough credit. I have the fortune of working with quite a few founders and trying to guide them on how they should think about going to market. And one of the things I always tell them, they’re always grateful. They have to ask for a lot when you’re a founder and you have to do a lot of work. So when they express their gratitude, my response is always, you are doing the hardest job on the planet and that is starting a company. You have the courage of a lion and now also at the heart of one too. So I think we don’t talk enough about some of the challenges of really growing and making a business successful. 

Jeff Standridge:

What would you say are some of the top, maybe the top one or two challenges that you’ve observed and that you’ve been able to positively affect? 

Tamara McMillen:

I think one of the things we don’t talk enough about actually is strategy. I think a lot of growth happens with some good planning, but probably not as much strategy and intention and it wastes a lot of time, particularly in the early days of scaling. There’s a natural aspect of identifying product market fit with your early clients and building that out, which is sensible. I think the part that gets difficult is really reigning that in understanding what you’re really good at and then designing the future that you want to materialize. I think far too many still go down the path of where they’re led, whether that’s by the benevolent investor or a customer or something else. I think the strategy is where a lot of us probably get it a little bit wrong and it ends up costing us whether that’s an opportunity or cash burn or just in frustration. 

Jeff Standridge:

Let’s dig into that a little bit because Jeff and I talk a lot about how in strategic planning, by the way, strategic planning’s done so badly in so many organizations, but just go with me on this if you will, that in strategic planning, there’s a lot of planning and there’s very little strategy. So let’s tease apart your perspective on what exactly is strategy and how would you define it and how would you go about building it? 

Tamara McMillen:

Sure. So I love that you asked that question and I’m going to add one. I think you’re right. There’s a lot of planning and strategy. I think the part for me that then really gets misses the execution so we can plan and strategize, but a lot of times it’s left on the page and then the execution is never in regards to the strategy. So what is strategy? Strategy is the plan that we have. I’m mixing the two things together, but the strategy is how we think we’re going to go about achieving the art of what we believe is possible, of what it is that we want to look like when we grow up, where do we want to get to? And obviously when you get pretty far close to that point, you need to set a new strategy. You need to continue to extend yourself to understand the next level. 

So the strategy is how we think we’re going to get wherever it is we think we’re going, and the plan should be how we’re going to execute to deliver on that strategy and achieve the goal. The problem I think comes in that a lot of people are good at identifying what they want, thinking they’ve got a strategy to get there, even figuring out a plan, but they don’t ever really execute the plan. They do other things instead. And the reason I think companies don’t catch themselves at it is that early on in my days at MC, I had an SVP used to go around and do these quarterly reviews in the regions and you had to talk about your top accounts and your strategic plan. He used to always say, well, look, at the end of the day you have to inspect what you expect. 

And he was really right that oftentimes we have a great conversation and story, but we don’t really go back and look at the KPIs or look at the OKRs in a way that’s meaningful and in a way that holds our feet to the fire in a way that allows us to course correct. I mean, we’re not going to get it all right at the beginning, which I think is something that holds people back from setting a strategy and executing is they feel like they can’t get it perfectly right. And the market’s always changing and everything’s always changing. And so how do you set something? It feels concrete, but I think when you go through that method and you do inspect what you expect, you have plenty of opportunity to course correct, but if you don’t have a plan to begin with, you’re going to end up where you didn’t know you wanted to go. 

Jeff Standridge:

Well, and strategy is kind of uncertain, right? It’s like this is what we think is going to happen in the market. This is how we think we are best positioned to take advantage of or to withstand or what have you, but it’s still what we think and it’s based upon our experience and our research and so’s a little scary. Sometimes it’s real easy to put steps down on a plan, but it’s a little more difficult and a little less certain to articulate what we think is the right strategy. 

Tamara McMillen:

And I think it’s also sometimes challenging for people to take it down to what does that really mean when we execute it? I’m in the process of working with the business right now and had a conversation with someone and I said, it would be great to have a clear strategy. And the answer was, oh, well I know the strategy and the reality is, but I don’t think everybody knows the strategy because you can see evidence of decisions being made that don’t appear to be strategically in mind, which doesn’t mean they don’t have benefit or they might not be even the right decision, but it would be difficult to defend it to say the decision was made because it connects to the strategy which leads us to the goal. And when you don’t have that, I think it can create a lot of questions and confusion and usually adds complexity into the business or distraction where there’s only ever so many resources and when you have people working on things, you want to be working on the right things. 

Jeff Amerine:

Let me ask you a follow up to that, and this is something that came out recently from one of the groups that was in our portfolio, a guy named Justin George. He ran a company called Apge that really dominated the ed tech space and they had a great exit and he said something I’ve not heard a lot of other founders say, and from a strategy sales execution standpoint, I’d be interested in your take on it. He said, we need to teach founders how to not constantly look for pattern matches, but to think differently about nearly everything they do in their business. 

Jeff Amerine:

What he meant by that was we programmed a lot of people to say, go read Aaron Ross predictable revenue and from impossible to inevitable and kind of make that formulaic. And he did a certain amount of that, but then they changed and modified every aspect of that to think differently. As an example, he wouldn’t even use PowerPoint presentations or slideshows in customer interaction at all. It was kind of, they wanted to have a different approach in terms of how they told the story and how they gauge with that as kind of a backdrop, that whole idea of thinking differently and how that informs strategy and sales execution. What’s your take on that? 

Tamara McMillen:

Well, first of all, I think you’re right that we have done that, and particularly in the US market because of the sheer numbers of companies that not only have been successful, but the playbook start to get hardened. And that was a little bit of what I was referring to earlier, that we believe that there’s a bit of a formula for success, whether it’s a set of thought leaders or practices or businesses that you follow and try to do the same thing as a founder. It’s not that it doesn’t have value, it does. You can learn from those lessons, but you are uniquely in your business. And certainly doing things in a disruptive or different manner is a great way to get people’s attention and throw them kind of off guard. If you show up with a PowerPoint, my physical posture is going to already relax into a certain post and then you’re going to have to really captivate me with a great story, which with no disrespect to founders, they’re not very good at telling. They describe their technology and solutions very well, but storytelling is not something that they initially have in their early days. So I think it’s a great idea. Anything that you can do that lets people sit up and listen is definitely going to be helpful in that journey and help you have more meaningful conversations so you can qualify in or out faster, which is really what we want to do. 

Jeff Standridge:

Well, and we’ve talked a little bit about strategy. Let’s shift and talk about the plan a little bit. My experience is that a number of founders seem to feel as though, okay, we’ve got the plan. Maybe we’re just on autopilot now executing the plan. And I like to suggest that a good strategy and a good plan doesn’t absolve you of the leadership responsibility of making decisions. It just gives you a good framework within to make those decisions because you may run into something in 18 months down the road of a three-year plan that you didn’t contemplate when you built the plan. And the easy answer is, yeah, nope, it doesn’t fit in our plan. But the right answer might be, yeah, maybe we need to change our plan. 

Tamara McMillen:

Yeah, the courage to course correct is definitely a skill that’s needed. One of the other things I was going to say when we talked about what is it that we don’t talk about when building and driving growth is people. And one of the other challenges that I think has happened in the last 15 years with SAS and the explosion of tech companies and growth is I don’t believe we’re thinking right about people. And I believe it’s actually something that’s hindering us today. Leading a panel discussion a few months ago, and one of the operating partners that was speaking made the greatest statement, he said, the challenge is that right now SaaS businesses need wartime leaders and we only have peacetime leaders. And that’s because for as hard as we say it is to be a scaling business, the reality is scaling businesses have operated in a time of plenty of openness of businesses willing to experiment brick and mortars, large organizations we’re willing to take in very new products with nascent customer bases because they wanted to be innovators. They had an appetite and ability to take risk that now isn’t there. So it’s a very different environment to sell in, but a lot of the talent that’s in this space are people that have only worked in peace time and a lot of the guidance from investors, I love my investors, love all of you, but a lot of the guidance has been hire somebody that’s done A to B because that is part of this formula of success. So if they’ve not done the zero to 10, the 10 to 30, the 20 to 50, the 50 to a hundred, they’re not the right person. And we also have a market filled with people who are great at a stage, but how many people do we have that are great at growing companies and businesses with a bit more of that GM muscle that have seen peace, time and war time have seen large businesses and small businesses have had retractions and have had influxes of growth. And I think it’s the people piece that ends up being so instrumental because people have to execute the plan and how well you can garner those people in your business and keep them on the pitch, make them feel motivated, inspired, and led will determine a business’s success. We all know it’s not the greatest idea that wins 

Jeff Standridge:

For sure. I was in the m and a space for a number of years, probably did 50 45 to 50 different transactions, and I can point to one this is going the other direction. I can think of one founder whom we acquired their company that made the transition from being a founder to being a corporate executive. One, just one out of multiple within each acquisition. And back at that time, this would be in the mid nineties when I actually been more the mid two thousands rather, but some of the research was saying that about 50% of all mergers and acquisitions actually produced the shareholder value that was expected when they contemplated the acquisition. And the biggest issue is a cultural mismatch, which goes back to your point about people. 

Tamara McMillen:

Yeah, it’s true. I mean, particularly when you have larger businesses and larger groups of people, those machines really depend on those employees to keep moving forward and they can’t be replaced in a sufficient period of time and then they don’t have the experience. So yeah, people at the end of the day, it’s all about the people and how you treat people and how you equip them to succeed. I’ve spoken before about the fact that I think one of the greatest crimes we commit is a turn turnstile of humans. In businesses, in sales we’re particularly bad. We don’t take enough time. 

When you hire salespeople and you’re a salesperson, it’s easy to get sold. Now, that doesn’t actually mean they’re a bad salesperson, but at the same time, we get caught up in the story. So we don’t really identify where they do have gaps that we can fill and we probably don’t do enough to onboard them successfully. We may not actually set up territories and segment our customers and markets very well. So then we have a lot of people coming that fail at a high rate jeopardizing customer relationships and our brand and everything else, and not, of course costing a lot of money and harming people along the way. So there’s always opportunity to improve the people part of the business. And I think with the companies that succeed and got that down quite well. 

Jeff Amerine:

Quick follow up, and I loved your analogy of peacetime versus wartime in the way you think about it. We’ve heard, and we run a VC fund in addition to a lot of other things, but we’ve heard from other VC fund managers, SaaS software is dead. A IML are eating the world. And a certain amount of that is, we’ve heard the story before, A certain amount of that is FUD for sure, but some of it is there’s a reality and when the VC market begins to believe that it has impact on those existing SaaS companies, it has impact on the enterprises because they think differently about what they want to buy or they assume that they can generative AI here, they can do it themselves. If you’re a founder, you’re a sales lead and you’re in this fray and it’s clearly wartime, you’re still competing for talent. You’ve got the rise of IML and generative ai. How do you think about it? How do you sort that out in a way that you’re not just totally consumed by the panic of fighting the fire with this new disruption? What advice would you give? I know it was a big question. 

Tamara McMillen:

It’s a big question. It’s also, it’s a bit of a funny one, isn’t it? Because essentially AI is delivered to SaaS. I mean, the way you consume it is SaaS. It’s a recurring revenue subscription based product. So I don’t really know how SaaS is dead if AI is essentially delivered through SaaS. But yeah, I think it’s really important. We pay attention to what’s happening in large language models and ai, and these are meaningful. It is absolutely a landscape shift, but I don’t think that we should confuse SaaS and AI in a way when we think about the business models. I mean, AI is a couple of different things. One, it can be the product that a company sells and they could deliver it most likely as something in SaaS, and that’s great. But the use of AI within organizations to help themselves operate more efficiently and do a variety of things like surface insights and make better decisions and capitalize on all this great human talent and not waste it by doing mundane activities using more robotics, I think all of these things are really meaningful and they need to go hand in hand. 

VCs are, VCs have a lot of influence, but they also operate at a certain end of the market. So I think we also have to separate where we are looking to make investments and bet on the next great knowing that nine out of 10 of them will fail, we need to pay attention to that. But I think more meaningfully right now, we should be looking at what are larger organizations? What are PLCs? How are they using these technologies? Because the scale at which they can harness the power of what these things bring to the table is what should really be concerning us in catching our attention. That is probably the greater threat to SaaS. I think the other thing is that tech as an industry, is it still an industry? There’s a question mark there, isn’t there? When you have manufacturing and construction forestry, all of these areas themselves becoming technology businesses, creating recurring revenue streams by having their own SaaS applications to interact with their supply chains and others, you have to begin to wonder if we don’t have to just think altogether differently about how we grow businesses, how we incubate the next great thing and then broaden the ways in which we want to drive revenue. 

Jeff Amerine:

Yeah, we’ve talked about question. No, that was good. That was good. And it’s one of those things that we’ve been, actually, we could probably have some really interesting conversations about your MCI days because I ran a FCC two 14 licensed international carrier around that same time in the middle nineties after leaving Westinghouse. And the changes you see in terms of the way technology has progressed, yeah, they’re amazing. And yet some of the fundamental issues remain the same. Two, three years down the road, there’s the new shiny object, but there’s fundamentally not a lot of difference in the way it goes to market, what it does, et cetera. And so this just seems like the latest example of Fudd where the world is ending, enterprise software is dead because the organizations, the enterprises are going to do it themselves. Now they’ve got the capability where a business analyst can create all this stuff, and you find out it’s not ever really as dramatic as you think along 

Tamara McMillen:

The way. Yeah. One of the companies that I work with has a built an AI platform, and as you would expect and has had happened certainly during the telecom and IT services days, you run into the buy versus build question. We were having a conversation about this today and positioning. I said, the reality is it’s very simple. If you’re getting into the weeds of how many data scientists do you have and have they built an AI tool before and do they understand this area of expertise, you’ve already lost the game. The reality is buying is an accelerator, so how meaningful is the problem that you’re trying to solve to you? And so how meaningful would it be to solve it faster than later? What opportunities does it create? What risks does it negate or open up? And that’s the conversation we need to be having as a business value conversation. 

There’s always going to be great engineers. There’s always going to be an appetite to have it invented here, but that’s the wrong question. And so yeah, none of this is going to get ruined. We’re still doing digital transformation. We still talk about it. We were doing it in the nineties. I mean, I die whenever in cloud. That was the other one. People are like cloud. I’m like, yeah, we sold those a few decades ago, but I hear you. It’s like some things move far more slowly than we think they will. They’ll have an initial uptake in impact, but the reality of it settling in, I mean, we’re still hearing about legislation that’s going on and we have no idea how that’s going to start changing things. The EU is passing certain legislation, will the UK follow suit or not? California’s got their whole idea of, I mean, we really don’t know yet. So I think it’s definitely getting the water, but you’re going to have to swim with your eyes. Opens a good pair of goggles on. I think. 

Jeff Standridge:

Yeah, it’s interesting to look at the intersection of the curves of the development of technology and the humans adoption of technology. And I’ve said for a long time that just in the marketing space, the ability to deploy technology in the acquisition of customers has far outpaced just the general digital marketing world’s ability to adopt it at scale, I guess I should say. Yeah. Well, Tamara, tell our listeners how do you spend your time today working with clients predominantly, and then how they can get in touch with you? 

Tamara McMillen:

So I do a couple of different things. I am an NED for a FinTech company, so I give a portion of my time to that. And then I advise founders and early stage companies. You guys can connect to me through LinkedIn, and I also love just engaging in really interesting conversations. So hit me up for a chat. 

Jeff Standridge:

Very good. Jeff Amerine, anything you would add? 

Jeff Amerine:

Thanks for coming on and maybe a future conversation. We can talk about the early ugly days of telecom eight portability, anyone? Yep. I remember a lot of that all too. Well, I mean the scars from international telecom prior to voiceover IP and the scars associated with prepaid cellular. I have many, so we can talk about that for sure. 

Tamara McMillen:

That’d be great. 

Jeff Standridge:

Very good. Tamara, thank you for joining us. This has been another episode of the Innovation Junkies podcast. We appreciate you. 

Tamara McMillen:

Thank you so much. 

Jeff Amerine:

See you next time, everybody. 

Jeff Amerine (Outro):

Thanks for tuning into another episode of the Innovation Junkies Podcast. We hope you gain some valuable insights and inspiration from today’s conversation. Be sure to subscribe for more episodes featuring leaders in the forefront of innovation. And don’t forget to connect with us on social media to continue the conversation. See you next time.

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