Adam Sandman:
Thanks A.J. for having me on the show. It’s my pleasure to be here today and hopefully have some good conversations and be great to hear your questions and also just share some of the journey and the fun and excitement I’ve had for the most part. Fun and excitement, not always running a company from scratch.

A.J. Lawrence:
As a bootstrapper, I know that lovely fun and excitement sometimes is after the fact, not always in the moment. But yes, I fully agree. Before we kind of get into where you are in journey, one thing I found really exciting when I was going through your background. Well, two things. One, you were at Sapient about the time I back before the first really big dotcom crashed and the first dotcom boom that late 98 through 99 to the early 2000 where it just dropped. I had interviewed there and I turned down a role at Sapient to go to some crazy roll up wannabe whatever it was. And I had an amazing year traveling around the world but then it blew up. But you were at Sapient where they expanded a little bit too much but they didn’t go under and they really did well. So that’s kind of cool that you were there during that boom slash crash error.

Adam Sandman:
Right. It was interesting to be there and that was my first job out of college. It really informed some of the decisions I made starting the company, which I’ll get to later. But well, I’d come on a vacation in 97 and this was the time as you mentioned, the dotcom boom. So one of the great things was everyone was talking about technology, web, you know, everyone and their grandmother wanted to know about what’s this thing called Java, what is this web thing? And so my first job in America had a J1 visa for three months to to come to America was to help people set up their dial up internet. So it used to dial up and I was in the north shore of Boston in a one man company that I worked for at the time. His business was providing local dial up for people in the North Shore that weren’t served by AOL or CompuServe or any of the big companies. So in those days you had to have an area code that people could dial into. It was free because that’s how people would get it. And the five away area code in the north shore of Boston was one of the ones that the big companies had skipped. So his business model was to create a niche, was to cover that area code. And so over the summer I did tech support, called people up and said your DNS settings have to be changed. Click in this, click in that, do this. And it was during that time that I met someone at Sapient, call it a friend of a friend of a friend, actually a friend through a family, and he got me an interview there and I got a visa to come over here in the late in the January 1998. And I think it was an opportune time because it was a time when America was calling out people to come here and work in technology. So it was much easier to get a visa. Now, it’s much more difficult. And it was exciting time because we were literally building the internet in front of people’s eyes, including our own. And Sapient was involved with some of the crazy ones like I think it was startup.gov. If you’ve watched that movie, they’re in there, e-toys and a bunch of those early dotcom pioneers. Sapient was a supporting actor helping to build. But one of the things was interesting about Sapient, it was actually a bootstrap company. So it was founded in 91 and it had very strong core values. And unlike some of the other companies that you may have mentioned, they were bootstrapped and so they never took VC money. And one of the things they did during the dotcom boom was they kept their portfolio of companies only like 30% could be startups, the other 70% had to be banks, energy companies. So I think they weathered the storm as you mentioned, because they had good values and the leadership had made a plan that they wanted to be around for the long term. And they weren’t chasing the hot money. And so that’s actually one of the reasons when I started Inflectra, it has to be bootstrapped and not chase the hot money that I think VCs have a tendency to do maybe without generalizing. And in any industry there’s pros and cons to raising money and, well, the one pro I think of doing it in a bootstrap way, you can do things at your own pace and in your own way. And if you fail, you fail. But ultimately it’s your decision, not someone else’s.

A.J. Lawrence:
I’ve always found you can be more flexible in how you deliver. Yes, sometimes you don’t get the rocket ship ride, but the nice part is you’re not relying purely on a very finicky fuel source to get the rocket ship. You’re building upon what you believe and what the customers are willing to pay directly for, not what you hope. And look, every business model has its pros and cons, but it really is fun looking at. And I think a lot of us who’ve gone through the dot com crash and saw that experience, I think we brought it into our business and how we structure things and the type of clientele we look for when we build when we do build. I mean, kind of jumping to Inflecta, you’ve been running this since 2006. Where do you see yourself as an entrepreneur these days?

Adam Sandman:
Oh, that’s a long question. I mean, I would say that we’re on the beginning of the next phase of our journey. And so just to sort of give a little bit of, I guess, background, I think we’ve had four stages of the company. There was the startup phase when I first founded the company, the survival phase, and I started the company part time. I actually left Sapient in 2005, 2006. The only place I’d worked. And I really wanted to build a company but I also had young children and I wanted to start a company part time. So I started it part time for the first couple of years. And it was a lifestyle business till probably 2012, maybe 13, maybe a little bit around that time. And then at that point I decided I wanted to grow the company. My kids were older, I had more time. And also the product market fit was such that I felt there was an opportunity that would be left if it was just a side business. And that’s when we started hiring some people to professionalize our sales and marketing. I wasn’t going to be the only developer doing on the side. It was going to be a team. And then I think that led to our growth phase. And then in the last two or three years we’re now moving into the global phase where instead of trying to do it all from the United States, we’re now really focusing on how we grow at the next level and taking some of the lessons from the books Good to Great and Built to Last, which actually Sapient had introduced me to and adopting that methodology of the right people on the bus and also having the right people in the right countries. And we’ve now really globalized the company. I think 40% of our team now is outside the US. We’ve got people doing pre-sales in Ireland and the UK and Australia and places. So we’re in the beginning of the going global next growth phase piece of the company. So I would say it’s also the other thing I would say is we’ve moved from founder-led sales and founder-led stuff to where I’m much more of a supporting person and that can be challenging because people used to come to me for everything and now I have to say no, no, that’s not my responsibility. I’m happy to be there as an escalation or supporting point but really you need to go to person X and Y and you don’t unintentionally undermine your team members. Because if they have come to you, you don’t want to say no to them. But on the other hand, I don’t want to do an end around my managers, people who I’m supporting and guiding to be that next level in the company.

A.J. Lawrence:
That is a great position to be in as you look at it. And let’s maybe take a quick step back because you referenced in that founder-led everything, it was like, oh, I was the sales, I was the developer. Being that to then, what was that transition like for you? Was that when you decided to make it full time or was it after it became a full time entity? How did that transition go for you? What was that sort of?

Adam Sandman:
That’s a good point. I mean, I went full time relatively early so I think by 2008/09 was during my full time job. But it was still in a small team like four people.

A.J. Lawrence:
So a few years before you brought.

Adam Sandman:
Yeah. And then I started to bring in more people to do the specific jobs. But even so for a lot of the particularly on the sales side, I kind of got out of some of the dev and the support side more quickly. But on the sales side, the challenge is always as the owner and founder, you will always be the best salesperson. The clients have this sense. They know somehow that you’re more vested. And so it’s quite difficult, especially when we always from day one had a global audience. So we also people, you know, from every country in the world because internet marketing, right? People can buy software from any country and we buy say no to them. So it was sort of the danger was you’re working around the clock. But as you start to bring people in, what happens is you sort of fill in the gaps in the other places that you don’t have people. So you hire people in the US to do a demos and do pre-sales. Well now, I’m doing more European stuff because we don’t have someone and then I do more Australian stuff. So wrecks your life. But to get to the point where it’s completely, you’re not in any of it, that takes many, many cycles of that. And getting it right, knowing the right type of people to hire, I think as an entrepreneur hiring salespeople, it can be very difficult because you need to understand the sales process. And when you’re the entrepreneur, you understand it at an intuitive level. You understand, I got this product, I designed it, I’ve thought of it. I can take you from talking to you, doing a discovery call, doing a demo, closing the deal. I don’t even know what these phases are, but I know I can do them. And now you’ve got to bring in people and for the most part you want to professionalize it so that the person who’s doing the demo may not be the same person scheduling it, maybe it is. And if and someone who’s a salesperson that you bring on with a Rolodex, that’s a lead gen person. And I wasn’t sophisticated enough to know that’s not what we needed. We have plenty of lead gen through Google and SEO. We need someone to demos. That’s a very different skill set. That’s a technical skill set. And so I think it took as many years to find the right people, many false starts and hiring some wrong people. And so I think for anyone listening to the call, I think you need to define your sales process differently before you start hiring people because otherwise what you’ll do is you hire people like you or you hire people who call themselves salespeople but that may or may not be what you need in your particular moment, in that particular phase.

A.J. Lawrence:
I 100% percent agree. I chased expensive salespeople for years until I was like, this is never working. The only thing that seems to be working is when I say start moving some of my junior people up to help me do the follow up. And then it was like predictable revenue was I came across and some people, it’s out of date and it’s a little bit heavy on pounding phone calls and stuff, whatever. But it was like, oh a process and eyes in as an analytics person, I was like, oh, I can isolate each step. And then lo and behold, we figured out.

Adam Sandman:
And find out which steps you will continue to do for a while and that’s okay. And what gives you the most leverage? Like if I can do a complex, difficult POC, proof of concept, kind of demo for our product and I may still do that now, whereas if it’s going to be a basic demo, other people can do that. And that way I’m leveraging my time better and their time better than trying to hire someone to do something that’s inappropriate for the company’s phase and growth stage.

A.J. Lawrence:
And just to go off quickly, it lets you also figure out how to grow your people. It allows you to figure out gaps because you can see how well things are going once you understand, oh, there are segments and there are ways to measure different pieces. So yeah, I love that you had that experience. Well, as you’ve done that and you’re now looking to go further, it seems, what’s funny is as an expat who seems that you’ve had a more international approach and I think many Americans, I love my country but it seems like you have a small segment of America that’s like, hey, check out those amazing worlds. And then a much larger part that’s like, you mean the people over there in the next town over?

Adam Sandman:
That’s true.

A.J. Lawrence:
A lot of people I’ve heard start using this phase, the business mullet, which is Americans for client facing roles and then international for back office. And it’s like, okay, it’s cute and it’s funny. And I get the point now where a lot of people are like, oh, if we have remote cultures and stuff like that, we can have talent anywhere. But I think it misses the point. Seems from a very early that you started bringing in international one because of your background, but two, also from the type of clientele you were going after.

Adam Sandman:
Yeah, it’s interesting, I guess. We started the business we did, we launched with using search advertising. So our first for those starting a company back in 2006 it was much easier. Our competitors like HP, they were not spending money on search ads. So you could basically undercut all these big companies. Now, of course, they’re all in the game now. They’re all doing SEO, they’re writing blogs, and it’s much, much harder. There are some tricks and tools like instantly we’re starting out using, which is still new for AI driven email. There’s still some cool stuff, but the level, the flamethrower is much more level than it was maybe back then. So as a result though, when you start doing online advertising, you get leads from all over the world and I guess you have two decisions. We could have said we’re only going to advertise in the US and we’re only going to focus on US, but we didn’t. Because I think there was less competition over keywords, we actually ended up having a bigger European business than an American business at the beginning. Now it’s about 50% US, I think 35% Europe, 40% Europe. And we’re trying to grow Asia PAC, that’s our weaker area. LATAM, those are our weaker areas. There’s challenges there because of purchasing power and Asia time zone can be challenging. But we were using our partner network to do that. And I’ll talk a little bit more about that in a second. That’s a good thing. I think a lot of people underestimate is a partner network. But I think we decided to do global from day one. And I guess being British, I think coming from Europe, it didn’t seem that much of a lift. And then we had a partner in Germany and then things like GDPR came along, which were difficult, but also gave us an opportunity to differentiate ourselves around privacy and security, which has been a differentiator. The other thing I found which was interesting, if you’re an American company in America, you’re one of a hundreds and thousands in your industry. You’re one of a hundred in Europe. Europeans perceive, for the most part and certainly outside of Europe even more so, they perceive American tech to be better. Rightly or wrongly, they perceive it so in the same way that if you go buy an Audi A4 or a BMW or Mercedes, you will perceive that as being better than haters on the call a Ford or a GM. But it may not be true, but that’s the perception. And the same thing is true in tech. American tech is considered number one. And so if you go compete against a European firm, you’ve got much higher chance of winning. And if you are then an American firm and you’ve hired a local salesperson as the front office, so flipping your model, the front office is actually local and the back office is American, you actually have the strongest position of all because you’re seen as having innovative tech but also local sensibilities and it’s not that hard to do. I would give a shout out to one of the companies we’ve been using called Papaya. They’re a PEO firm. They let you hire other people in other countries legally with all the pensions and all the rules. And as a small company it lets you scale globally in a way that I think 10 years ago would have been harder for us.

A.J. Lawrence:
Glad you called out because I’m actually looking at Papaya for my team. So that’s pretty neat.

Adam Sandman:
I looked at three. I looked at Deal, Papaya, and one other one I forget and I like papaya and I would recommend Papaya. Anyone on this call, they’ve done a great job. We’ve got people in France, UK, Ireland and Canada. We’re going to do Australia and I have no hesitation with using them.

A.J. Lawrence:
As you look to this world where you’re now supporting one, the cracks but also more supporting the people who are moving things forward, what’s helping you? Are you using coaching, reading? What is helping you kind of become the transition point from the doing to that support and crack and finger, finger sticking?

Adam Sandman:
Three or four years ago I was very lucky. I went to a DC Tech event. It’s a local meetup and I met a local DC area coach.Name is Glen Hellman. He was known as Mr. Cranky for a while. He had a blog and he does executive coaching and he has two models and I’m kind of part of both. One is he has a group that I’m a part of where other CEOs who are non-competitive and we meet meet once a month but then he also does one-on-one coaching as well. So we do a combination of that. And then I think what really helped recently is doing that for three or four years now and that’s been really helpful and he would go through and rate how’s the business this month and help me figure out the things I didn’t know yet because he started several companies and sold them and that was really helpful around some of these transition points. The other thing is I recently had my two co-leaders. There’s three of us who run the company, my CTO and CRO and then myself. I’ve had them join, had one-on-one coaching with him as well. And that’s now to grow them. And then we brought in another level of people under them so that I’m sort of being coached to help manage them and they’re being coached to manage the next level. And I think that’s really helped because it gives all three of us a place we can talk privately, confidentially, and discuss what we’re worried about. And Glenn is very good at not disclosing to each other what we’re talking about because it might be each other.

A.J. Lawrence:
It’s an interesting thing that you’re talking about coaching your team because I sold my business back in early 2014 and there was a little bit about coaching structure. And I had worked with some really good coaches, but the general conversation was how do you manage as the company gets bigger and does all the stuff and that top down. And there were some approaches to the bottom up approach and employees first, but that was much, much smaller, at least in the noise I was hearing. But I am very interested that I have heard in the past year a lot about the benefit not of managing your teams but of coaching your team. And it’s, you know, in the vocabulary you’re using here in that approach. Yes, you still have to do long term directive strategy, you still have to provide the resources and sort of cohesive morale, but it seems that coaching’s having a big impact on how you move your team forward.

Adam Sandman:
That’s a really good point. And I think we’ve always had a fairly decentralized culture and intentionally so. One of the experiences I had before I left Sapient actually, well one is Sapient was quite good at that. They were for the most part we’re not a top down culture. Obviously things have to be top down as a public company but my last engagement before I left it was with the US Marine Corps. And the US Marine Corps is a fabulously decentralized leadership at every level organization and I learned a lot from how they do things. But their model is that you don’t tell people how to do something. You tell them what needs to be done. Give them the tools to do it, help them get there and if they make mistakes, you within reason fail safely and let them forgive them. And actually I was a Boy Scout leader as well and that’s also the same concept in Scouts. You let people fail safely. I went to Goshen Scout Camp and we had many, many of the 17 or 18 year olds who are leading and all the younger scouts and they would come to you and how do I do this, how do I do that? And as adult leaders, you are told not to help them, let them figure it out and help them. If the leaders came to you, fine, you would not tell them what to do. And it can be quite hard. Let them try it out and fail, especially because in so many activities that kids do these days, they’re very directed by adults. It was a nice opportunity to have to be much more youth driven as they call it. And so I would say to transfer that to a company setting, having it be team driven as opposed to management driven, it’s not that different. Again, there are times when you have to, for safety reasons or financial reasons, cash flow, whatever it is, you may have to step in. You’re not abrogating your leadership and managing. But that shouldn’t be your first answer to a problem, if possible.

A.J. Lawrence:
No, it’s sort of leadership by growth, growth of the culture and the team and individuals. Inherently, everything we do, especially in building, is about the quality of our talent that works with us and the reasoning why. Given if we can help them grow, especially these days, if you can plug in, people can figure out a way to work for companies around the world. They don’t need companies to work for, they can independently. So the idea is if you can give them the growth that helps them on their journey, you’re just aligning them back.

Adam Sandman:
Yeah, you’re right. Remote working, having remote teams has definitely changed that. People look for more community amongst each other but also they want more autonomy. It’s different. And you have to teach people. You can’t just walk. I used to offer on Sapient just walk when I was a manager there, walking around the room and just chatting with people. And that was one of my management styles too. And if you read the Marriott way, that was Bill Marriott Jr, he would go out all the hotels and meet everyone. Well, in a remote culture, that’s not economically feasible. You can’t go to someone’s house and start walking around their desk. So it’s tricky, it’s trickier. So how do you have that indirect culture of management where you basically want to feel the vibe, understand what’s going on without being on top of people remotely? And I don’t know if we figured that out yet. That’s a hard part.

A.J. Lawrence:
And I think that’s what’s interesting because getting rid of an office, when I sold we had an office manager. We had gotten big that had a lot of body, we had a lot of people. But we didn’t have the cash flow and the stuff to also have infrastructure. So it was like we were still almost all frontline, deliverable from an agency point of view. But it was like, okay, the Wifi went down, that’s my job. We had an office manager. The coffee machine, you know, does it. And it’s like, okay, yeah. And now of course, the person who went from like the easy DZ kurik that we could do it to like the super machine that could do 20,000 things and of course got dirty five times faster and had all the more. That was my choice so it is was my fault. But those were the things that going to a remote culture kind of is nicer. I have my own infrastructure at home. But yes, it is that like, how do you then talk?

Adam Sandman:
Yeah, it’s interesting. Scaling with low infrastructure is something we’ve tried to do more of. And so we have an office here in Silver Spring and we have people in the D.C. area, which is our headquarters. We have people in New York and Boston and Argentina and Canada and other places and other time zones. So for the most part, people in the D.C. area come in once a week on a Thursday. So we try and maintain that in-person culture. We do happy hours, we do lunches, we have a coffee machine, but it doesn’t wear out as fast. And then other people come in during the week. Some people come in three days a week. Some people come in only that one day, particularly those in Virginia because of the Beltway. And then once a year, we bring the entire company together. So we flew everyone in from all over the world for a week and we’ve done it twice now. We’ll do it again hopefully next year. And that’s pretty neat. We get a week here and that’s actually bigger than our office. We can’t fit everyone. So we went to another space in Silver Spring. And then we do dinners and we do various team building activities. We also did some stuff around the company culture and the core values. We did some exercises from Built to Last around preserve the core, if you’ve read the book, and stimulate growth. We took a lot of the information from the book about how we’re going to grow and made it and had people present back to us with these drawings of how they saw the company growing and their ideas and we broke them into teams. So very much a Sapient workshop actually, to give credit to Sapient there. And I think that was really helpful for our culture and helped us expand. But then I think beyond that, our infrastructure is quite light. We’ve gone cloud first so we got rid of all of our servers. We’ve got a cloud VPN. People have their own Wifi so for the most part, we ship laptops to people. So in that sense, the office manager role we don’t really have. We actually, we’re going to hire office manager and we said we don’t need it. I mean, for the office here, I can do some of it. The other people can take turns. Just people, the water comes. It’s not as complicated as it used to be where you had to have six offices in different countries, in different cities. Or we do a WeWork if you want something collaborative too.

A.J. Lawrence:
Well, if they stay in business. But yeah.

Adam Sandman:
WeWork or similar. Regus or, you know, Spaces.

A.J. Lawrence:
I was in Regus back in the day when I first started my last company. But yeah, I mean, I fully agree because I remember we had gotten to three offices and it really was like, all right, if you have a good office manager, that office would go fine. And not because of the people there, but literally because of all the extra secondary stuff. Where nowadays it’s like, are there lights? Is there heat? Is there Internet? You know, everything else is a button, is a screen, is a service. It is interesting data. When you talk about building the culture, is this something like from your coaching? Is it a structure on the culture? How did this evolve? Like, where did this come in? You have this hybrid environment, you have a global team, but you’re doing these things to kind of work on the culture and move it. What was sort of that movement towards like, okay, we’re doing more hybrid. We have to keep our international alignment, our teams internationally aligned. How did that evolve?

Adam Sandman:
I mean, organically? It wasn’t like we planned it. The pandemic happened and we had to have virtual meetings. And then some people lost their jobs who we’d known from before. And we thought, well, we need somebody. This guy’s a good guy. He’s in Brazil. We hire him. He moved to Canada. We still like him. So he went to Canada and we kept hiring him. And then things like papaya made it easier to bring people on. It wasn’t super intentional. We just had people we liked and then we knew we need people in earlier time zones because of the sales stuff. And so that was Something that was more intentional. We need to hire people to do in Europe. We have customer support. We need to provide customer support in the early morning. Well, we could have people work nights or we could hire someone in Europe which is more sane and which is more culturally aligned. Hiring someone in Europe and also it just makes more sense for us to grow a team there anyway. And so I think it wasn’t like we planned that part of the culture that really just evolved the global piece. The culture was more intentional. We always had the culture. We had spent a lot of time, even when we were a smaller company, working on it, defining it. Our last off site with the company, we talked about it. Do we change it? Is it, is it? Are they the right values? Do we still agree with them? And for the most part people thought they were still the right ones and that we had a discussion and a presentation about that from people. And we do hire, but we hire to that. When we interview people, we interview them both from a skill fit, but a core value fit. When we look at how we do business, we try and align our business practice with our values. One of our values is called build for users, not for Wall Street. Build for customers, not for Wall Street. And the idea is we want to be around for the long term, build things that the customers find useful, even if it may be against the grain of where the industry has gone. And a classic example would be many of our competitors are going cloud first, only to the cloud, because a lot of the investors are saying anything that’s not cloud or you know, it’s not subscription revenue, we don’t want that. Yet many of our customers want to stay on premise because they’re in security, in high security industries. And so that’s differentiated. We don’t have to follow the crowd and the herd in doing that. And that’s one of the values that we believe in is important if our customers want something. And then things like one of them is also like no drama. Another really important core value of ours is called second acts. It’s trying to find people who might have not gone into the workforce and bring them in. And we actually have some people who didn’t, weren’t in technology and we helped them transition into a career in technology or into marketing or into sales. And also some people didn’t go to a four year college but had finished high school and were programmers, but they were really good programmers. Like well, that’s fine. And so I think especially in DC, which is a very credentialed city, we could find people who fit the pattern but had the skills and had the culture. And so that’s more important to us than necessarily things on paper.

A.J. Lawrence:
I like that approach and I do believe that’s becoming more prevalent, but did that come out because DC I have noticed for when you look at companies that say we need X, Y and Z, it’s very competitive. But when you have a more flexible approach, did it become out of necessity or did it come out of just like this looks like the right way of going? How did that kind of-

Adam Sandman:
I think it’s 100% both. I mean, we’re a small company and we’ve got to compete against Lockheed Martin and Northrop, who got hired programmers out of college. We also had some people though in our leadership team who had done that. And I actually had done that at Sapient. I wasn’t a CS major, I was a Physics grad, but I’d done programming as a hobby. They were willing to overlook that so that helped. I think it was being from our own experiences internally, but also the fact that it allowed us to hire people that maybe wouldn’t have been hired by the other guys. And so we weren’t necessarily competing with the same labor party. And we’ve tried some other things as well. In Argentina, we’ve helped some people use our products and give them away for free to build some people there. And so we’re trying to find ways we can find an underserve parts of the community who aren’t in technology. Because if you look at a typical tech team, they often go to the same schools, they do the same thing. They all went to University of Maryland if they’re in Maryland, they went to UVA or Virginia Tech, and they’ve all been the same CS classes together. It’s a homogeneous group so can we find people who don’t necessarily fit that as well as people from that group. It’s not like we’re not saying no, but it widens our pool, which helps us.

A.J. Lawrence:
Very cool. Now, and you don’t have to tell us where you are in revenue, the money. Even though we’re talking about how to go beyond 8 figures as a thing, to me, it’s this aspirational concept as entrepreneurs. I did hear someone recently say, well, you’re only a real entrepreneur if you go past nine figures. I was like, well, goddamn it. Excuse my language, folks. But oh, well, I guess I’ve been playing tiddlywinks here. But as you look to whatever that next big transition point is, you’re positioning here already. You were talking about this, you mentioned earlier you are transitioning for the next phase, your fourth phase. What is it that you think is going to help you? Like what are the things you’re doing now to get to that next big transition phase?

Adam Sandman:
Okay, that’s a great question and I do have a good answer for that one because it’s something we’re investing heavily in. It’s just not yet paid off but we believe it will. It’s an investment. It’s really our partner strategy. I hadn’t quite got to it so it’s just good that you brought that back up because I think that is the next phase. So up until now to get to our current scale, it’s been 90% direct sales. We do have partners and they do bring in deals to us and it’s great. And we do have resellers to help process transactions for large companies where they’re required. But we haven’t had a systemic partner program. And about two years ago we had a director of global alliances and we’ve now had a partner manager and we’ve been building this program for the past couple of years. And it takes this long and it takes longer because you have to not only, if you’re selling to a customer. First of all, you sell the customer once and you get the deal. That’s it. When you sell to a partner, you might sell to the partner and they’re now a partner, then they’ve got to sell to their customers. So it’s another. It takes a year longer to get anything, any revenue. The second thing I would say is more difficult with the partner is if you sell to a customer, you’ve got to solve their need. If you’re going to sell to a partner, you’ve got to sell to 40% of all their customers needs and that means you have to do it better than some other tool that they’re looking at or using or might be using. So it’s a much more differentiated business and you have to be much better at your job to sell to them and or find some large clients that are big enough that will entice the partner. But the benefit then if you can start to transition from 100, from this 90% direct sales to a smaller percentage of indirect sales, basically, as I say in the military, a force multiplier because we have a sales team of maybe six or seven people around the world total. We could double that obviously but that’s expensive and that’s a big investment that may or may not pay off. And they don’t necessarily have the relationships. Whereas if you can hire, have a partner network that allows you to, you know. One partner could sell at any given year five or six deals and you have 20, 30 partners. Those are the small ones. The big ones could do more. It’s a way to force multiply your message. And also if you’re selling to a big company, they’re hearing from you. But if you’re a partner especially, you know, talking about you to you, it creates this groundswell of people knowing about you and you seem a player. It makes the sales process and everything brand building much easier. So the partner program I think for us is one of the key levers that will propel us to that next level. Because trying to get to a nine figure through organic sales is very difficult. I think you have to have some kind of partner program. I think that’s for us is what will give us. It will be. It takes longer in the short term, but once it starts to build this flywheel of momentum, that’s where I believe will move us forward to that next stage.

A.J. Lawrence:
It is really interesting because I’ve worked my own businesses and then clients, I work a lot. There’s this like initially it’s sort of trench warfare relationship sales, you know, whoever will respond to you, friend of friends type of stuff. But it’s generally very much that concept of inbound. And I generally believe the transition of that mid piece, that two to five, whatever the range is generally happens when you move from beyond that generalized inbound, good relationship structure to having your own direct and only having approach date, not having cross. I’ve heard other people start talking about partnership and other structures so it’s you’re once again going to a more loose deal flow. But you’re going to a strong, you know, to get to that point, you’ve had to have a stronger one who you are, what you do, and a stronger customer avatar so your partners can better target and increase it.

Adam Sandman:
Right.

A.J. Lawrence:
I always love those things like do nothing. Yeah. The beginner does nothing. The middle does like everything. And then the expert is once again in that do nothing piece in a sense. And I know there’s a lot more work into a partner structure, having supported other people. But it is that funny route where it’s like you go from hope to structured will to once again constructed help.

Adam Sandman:
Right, right, right. There’s definitely a phase where like anyone we can be at a conference, every potential partner, let’s talk to them, let’s try get meetings. And it can be difficult especially because a lot of these partners, they have to justify spending time with you, not someone else, whereas a client doesn’t think that way. And also they have relationships with other companies that already are selling into your same segment. And I think the last one is also you’ve got to find the right size of partner. Without mentioning names, we’ve talked to some of the very large SIs, system integrators, and we’re too small for them. They work with the public companies, they work for their competitors that are doing 6, 7 billion in revenue a year and that’s the scale they operate at. But you can find smaller companies that are competitors with these SIs and they want someone that’s going to differentiate them to the clients against the big SI. So they’ll be willing to work with you because you will be a force multiplier for them in the same way that they are for you. Because instead of them competing on a service engagement doing the exact same thing as everyone else, they’ve got a tool that they can provide that maybe is kind of higher ROI or just as different. It’s a differentiator for them. But if you to a bigger site, they’ll be like, we don’t need you. We’ve got these 10 public companies that we do, Microsoft and others. We do everything with them. And that makes sense because that’s how their tool is for those very big type of companies.

A.J. Lawrence:
Okay, is there anything else other than partner networks that you’re kind of hoping is going to have a big impact on your move forward?

Adam Sandman:
Yeah, the other thing is actually first of all having the people, the direct sales in APAC and LatAm. We’ve always been strong in Europe, we’ve always been strong in North America, building APAC and LatAm. LatAm is more difficult because of currency but still it’s interesting. A lot of the companies we talk about in North America or Europe have offices and teams in South America. HSBC Bank, Citibank, Pan America, all those stuff. Telecom companies from Europe are there. So having a global presence lets us build relationships between those different regions. That’s helping a lot too. And I think LatAm and APAC are still in their early, there may be three or four years behind the rest of the company. So that’s an area where we’ve invested over two years and haven’t yet got the growth. The third area is actually more interesting. We mentioned it, direct sales. We were doing a lot more inbound. We’re relaunching, trying to be more selective around our outbound approach. We’ve tried various things and it’s been very difficult with the pandemic. No one answers their phone, no one checks text messages anymore. We’re trying a platform called Instantly, which looks very interesting. It’s a AI driven cold email platform. So it’s like the next generation after ZoomInfo and Apollo and all these tools that people probably use already and we’re going to try and do that as well. So trying a lot of different things but the partnerships and the cold emails are the two systematic approaches plus a bunch of trade shows. I’m going to Dubai in a few weeks. I’m going to California, Australia, so that’s fun. That’s the fun side.

A.J. Lawrence:
Right before I sold, I got invited to do something and I was like, I’m in the middle of selling and I haven’t been to Dubai since the 90s. And everyone, it’s like it’s another planet is what I’ve heard. So I really do want to get there. So that’s very cool you’re going. But I think also, especially as you grow with your partner sale, the great thing about really focusing on your direct is it allows you to get the type of clients because partners is yes their structure and you try and find the right partners so it’s still a little ad hoc of the type of clients that come in through them. While direct sale, you can be very specific on, Okay, great. We’re generally aligned here but you know, we want to get a little bit more here that you can be that much more specific on your client growth or at least your attempt.

Adam Sandman:
Yeah, one other thing that we’re doing a big work on this second half of the year which is going to help all those factors is messaging. You mentioned earlier on, as you get more mature, you start to really hone your messaging and I think we have not done a good job of that until recently. And so when we’re actually doing a job to really define our ideal customer and narrow it down to we really understand that a much greater level of clarity. This is in part to help with the customer sales but also what we’re finding is as the world gets more complex online, there’s so many more blogs. If you’re using ChatGPT to write blogs, you have to be much more targeted in your messaging, even just globally and even just for direct sales. So messaging has become, I think, a much more important thing to have well-defined. And that’s something we’re actually going to be working on to really hone that, which I think will make all the other channels more efficient too.

A.J. Lawrence:
Very cool. Yeah, I agree. I mean, it’s the one I tell clients the most is like the more work we can put on defining who, the better things are going to go. But it’s the one that as my own effort, as my own cobbler efforts, I’m like if they pay us, that’s good. And it’s like, no, you got to kind of get out. You know, I realized four or five years into my last business, it was like, all right, that’s holding us back. The more I finally said no, we’re not doing that. We’re only going to do X. It was like, oh, we’re growing faster.

Adam Sandman:
Yeah. So it’s counterintuitive, right? You think oh, we’re going to have a smaller client base because we’ll have a smaller target window. But it doesn’t work that way somehow.

A.J. Lawrence:
Somehow you just become that much more knowledgeable. So that is really cool that you’re moving into that. Those are three things that I think really do flow well together. And I do think, given the structure and the platform where you are, I think that will help you a lot. As you look forward into the distance, it seems you have very strong understanding of what success looks like for the business. But you’ve talked about you’re a scout master for your children. Your children are in university. They’ve gone off, they’re older. Do you have definitions of what success is going to look like for you separate from the business?

Adam Sandman:
Oh, that’s the hard question my coach always talks about every month. And I’m probably the worst at that because I’m probably a workaholic. Well, I think you mentioned earlier on, maybe before the call in our earlier conversation was, you want to leave the world a better place. You want to leave things better than you found them. That’s the scout motto. I think that’s what’s always driven me even when I started the company. So I think that’s the lodestar. That’s the direction. Now, what does that mean longer term? Now at some point ultimate success will be take the company public and that’ll be great. But if that’s only one outcome, I guess what I wouldn’t want to do is let the company be bought into a roll up where the mission and the vision is destroyed and all the value and all the loyalty that people put in us is thrown away. So between those two extremes, somewhere in there I think is where I would like it to be. So I feel like we left the world a better place. The company or the product or the team obviously will change over time, but in itself wasn’t for nothing. It wasn’t just something that got bought and then discarded by another company. And then in our lives we look for meaning. And I think everyone who works for companies as well as a paycheck ultimately looks hopefully for meaning. And you know you’re going to spend many hours of your life working for somewhere you want it to have meaning, so I think I’ve always looked for that. And so at some point, you’ll know when the right time is to sell something or do something different. But it’s not like I’m actively looking to get out of it. One of the things that helps, I think, is my kids are older. I have more time. My wife and I have time together and I can work at the business. I’ve gotten better trying to manage my time so I’m not quite working so much. I make time for my wife, we go away for weekends and things. So I think my coach has been good at helping me with that too. And that’s one thing about having a coach, is that a business coach or an executive coach isn’t there to coach you just about the company. It’s also to coach you about you as a person and how to make sure you are sustainable with your own life. And I would say Glen has been very good at that. And he has coached me on going away for weekends. When your kids go to university, you’ll need to plan on these things because you’ll be the two of you again. And that’s been quite a hard transition is to go from a family of four to a family of two. It’s been 20 something years since we had that. And that’s sort of weird.

A.J. Lawrence:
Yeah, I mean, I’m going through this thing where my son is going off next week to St. Andrews and it literally is like stuck in my head. The moment that I held him right after he was born and it’s like pretty much 24/7 for 18 years now, over 18 years. And all of a sudden now it’s like, oh, and yes, he’s already become this amazing human being. He worked all summer as a counselor and like I was the one who was like, oh, no. He was like, you know, having the best time ever of his life. It is just growing and letting those things happen and preparing for just what it means as both as entrepreneurs but as our lives go on and our families evolve and grow.

Adam Sandman:
Yeah. And I guess you still some in high school as well?

A.J. Lawrence:
So I have two more. My middle child is a senior this year, so she goes next year. The youngest one just started middle school.

Adam Sandman:
Okay.

A.J. Lawrence:
A few more years, five more years. But hopefully we don’t over baby her.

Adam Sandman:
Right, Right.

A.J. Lawrence:
Oh, don’t leave. But, you know, we’re trying to let them have their independence also and let them grow even though we’re now like, no, don’t change. Change.

Adam Sandman:
Right. Mine are both gone, but they come back, they visit, but it is different. And I think one of the things I would say is plan for it, plan for them leaving, and make sure you spend time to rediscover your relationship with your spouse outside of the kids because it’s been a project. In my case, it was 23. I think the two of them combined 20, 24 years, and to go from that to something different is different. And in the same way, when you had kids, you baby proof the house, you changed everything, and everything changed in an instant. It’s a little bit slower, but it does change. And you have to sort of plan to rebuild, find things to do together and stuff. So I would tell them, or whatever it is with your life, it’s a different phase, like a business, and you’ve got to plan for whatever that looks like.

A.J. Lawrence:
Plan for that phase. Well, thank you so much. I really can’t wait to see what Inflectra is and what you’re able to lead it for, because you gave such great advice and such great insight into this experience as an entrepreneur transitioning through the different stages of the business. So thank you so much for coming on the show today. I greatly appreciate it.

Adam Sandman:
Oh, it’s a pleasure. Thanks so much for having me on.

A.J. Lawrence:
All right, talk with you soon.

This episode of Beyond 8 Figures is over, but your journey as an entrepreneur continues. So if we can help you with anything, please just let us know. And if you like this episode, please share it with someone who might learn from it. Until next time, keep growing and find the joy in your journey. This is A.J., and I’ll be talking to you soon. Bye-bye.