In today’s episode we talked with Mark Jacobson, Founder & CEO at Terrain, about scaling talent in a startup, how to interpet data, and how to make sure the decisions you’re making work for you and your business.
In today’s episode, we talked with Mark Jacobson, Founder & CEO at Terrain, about scaling talent in a startup, how to interpet data, and how to make sure the decisions you’re making work for you and your business.
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Hatchet Ventures website: https://www.hatchetventures.com
Hatchet Ventures LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/hatchet-ventures/
Chet Lovegren’s LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/chetlovegren/
Connect with Mark Jacobson on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/markjacobson1/
Check out Terrain’s Website: https://www.terrainanalytics.com/
Listen on Spotify: https://tinyurl.com/36ub3fpy
Listen on Apple Podcasts: https://tinyurl.com/ystuxubt
Listen on Google Podcasts: https://tinyurl.com/bdee8y9h
1, 2, 3, 4. Are you a founder, co-founder, aspiring entrepreneur, or just someone who loves to hear about how companies are built? Then join us as we talk with founders and CEOs who have been there and done that. Welcome to the Founders Formula Podcast. Sponsored by Hatchet Ventures and now your host, Chet Lovegren.
[00:00:32] Chet: Hello and welcome one. Welcome all to the Founders Formula podcast, the show that is designed to bring you the latest and grace insights with founders and CEOs worldwide. Sponsored by the one and only Hatchet Ventures, our partner in the podcast space. I'm really thrilled for today's guest because he's got over a decade of leadership experience from the point of a founder.
He is a three time founder who is also a co-founder and fund advisor at SignalFire, a strategic advisor and former founder managing partner in the talent recruiting space, and currently the founder and CEO at Terrain. Please welcome the one and only Mark Jacobson. Mark what's going on?
[00:01:08] Mark: Hey, how are you, Chet? Nice to see you. Thanks for having me. Nice to see you.
[00:01:11] Chet: Yeah, we're, I'm really excited because I think that you've got a lot of relevant experience, um, especially your experience in the talent space, and then with what you're doing now with data and analytics, that's really gonna help founders get an insight on building their business and maybe a formula for success, um, as they look to bring on talent and look to bring on external people to help build their business.
Because I'm, I'm a firm believer in a recurring theme that we hear from a lot of founders, both tenured and experienced founders like yourself as well. First time founders or early stage startups is that you can't do it alone. There's no such thing as an army of one. Um, you can be a Swiss Army knife for a certain amount of time, but at some point you just gotta start building out the toolbox, right?
You, you gotta start bringing on additional pieces, tools, tech people, concepts and strategies that help you grow. Um, before we dig deep into some of those insights, let's walk the listeners through the story of Mark Jacobson. You can gimme, I always tell guests, you can gimme the 30,000 foot view, or you can gimme.
Christopher Nolan directed a movie version of your memoir. It's up to you. Let let us know about your journey up to being a founder and some of those professional experiences that you've had and how they played into you being a founder.
[00:02:15] Mark: Awesome. Well, hopefully I can make this as interesting as a Christopher Nolan, uh, storyline.
Um, Uh, I'm not sure that I can do that, but, uh, you know, early in my career I was, um, working at one of the largest firms in Silicon Valley, uh, one of the law firms. And, um, we were doing everything from like incorporations and financings to IPOs and m and a. And, uh, at the time, like one of the things that I kind of learned along the way was, um, Law was not my calling
So I remember being, uh, like distinctly in awe of the power players that would walk through the halls, like the deal makers. And it struck a chord to me cuz like I grew up in LA so this was very, uh, similar to the agency world of like the Hollywood studios and you know, one somewhere I was like, fielding calls from South Washington.
So getting that kind of like, oh wow, like this is really interesting moment happened kind of early for me. Uh, but the other thing that I kind of heard about was, This repeated mantra of invest in A teams over B ideas rather than a ideas over B teams. And that stood out to me as really interesting at a time because in college business plan competitions were pretty much just about the idea, right?
It was never about the people executing it. Uh, so different day and age then different stuff. But it stood out to me. So, um, and that shaped my. Uh, I'm kind of unique in the sense that if you ask most recruiters how they got into recruiting, there's some version of, like, I didn't set out to be a recruiter.
The, you know, recruiting found me, the career found me. Uh, I'm the guy that actually picked it. Uh, and I, I did it early because, uh, you know, if every, uh, super smart entrepreneur, operator, VC. All believed the talent was more important than anything I thought. Learning how the best companies and investors built and scaled their teams would be really invaluable.
Uh, and then I could apply that one. I started a company someday, so I did that a bunch, uh, for a number of years and kind of fast forward to 2009. Um, You know, we were in the, uh, financial crisis and I just started to start my, uh, my own company at that point. Uh, I started what became Ignition Talent Group.
So, uh, I did that because I was really interested in finding a job that I loved. Uh, it was something that I knew deeply, uh, but I really wanted to incubate ideas that would impact not only the search world, but venture capital as well. So I started Ignition Talent Group, uh, with my longtime best friend.
Uh, he had built his career as an operator, a management consultant. Um, and he was a VC at a top firm for a while. Uh, and you know, we were just talking about trends in the market, really, like trying to understand, hey, what's going on? Uh, What, what's, uh, what's happening from a systems and data perspective in a legacy industry like venture capital?
We felt that it was kind of antiquated and we were seeing some, uh, some new themes kind of come to fruition. So we ended up building Ignition Talent Group as a test box of ideas. Uh, and then two things stemmed outta that. One. Uh, I merged my recruiting team into True Search, uh, that is now the sixth largest search firm in the world.
Hundreds of employees. I joined, uh, employee 20, and uh, Chris went on to start signifier to which I remain an advisor, uh, and kinda part of the fund as they need me. Um, and it was that same theme of just kind of looking at how data applies to legacy industries that brought me to start my current company today, analytics.
So there we have it. I love it. That's, that's awesome. And so you've got this experience with, you know, part of the company, uh, going over to True Search. So in acquisition there, um, it also stem off the, the stemmed off the fund part, um, that your co-founder and fund advisor at, and you still have that relationship with your previous co-founder who you started Talent Ignition with.
So that's great as well. Right? It ended up in a happy marriage. Right. , that's what they always say like that. Well, we still work
together. That's the beauty of it. Uh, yeah, I actually, uh, went back inside the signifier and spin Terrain back out. So longstanding relationships. Uh, really great relationship with Chris.
Um, you know, we just worked together forever and probably always will. So very lucky in that regard.
[00:06:20] Chet: Yeah. So let's talk, let's talk a little bit more about Terrain. What does Terrain do? How does it help businesses? And, uh, more importantly, dig into that story right now of, of like what you're going through and what you're building at Terrain and what you've kind of experienced in this founding journey.
[00:06:36] Mark: Yeah. Terrain is, um, just a labor of love, uh, for me because, uh, so much of my career had been spent watching companies hire at different levels, right? Whether it was, uh, what's happening at the board level, what's happening at the C level, how do you work with everything from seed and series A companies all the way to Fortune 500?
There was just a lot of like, recurring things that I saw and heard, which, uh, despite the growth of the HR tech space, uh, still felt very manual to me. Uh, every search, every process was like, we're. Uh, you know, one at a time, we're fighting the war for talent since 1997. And, uh, just having enough experience, I was like, Hey, listen, I think there's probably some kind of cool things that we can do in that space to accelerate the speed at which companies can grow.
Uh, and so we tested some ideas early on. Uh, we wanted to kind of look at data and say, Maybe there's a way to accelerate, uh, the precision of aqui hires. Can we do that through systems and technology and data ranking talent, uh, doing some cool things there. Uh, we evolved that into, hey, you know, what about pre-merger and post-merger acquisition?
And ultimately, uh, it was really the, um, the Amazon HQ two. Uh, moment, uh, which you may remember, uh, they were looking at expanding. It was caught up in the media. Uh, almost 240 cities were responding to this R F P saying, you know, let's bring Amazon to our city. It's gonna have huge economic development.
And most of the stuff that we saw was like, well, you know, where does Bezos have a house? And, uh, you know, where are they already? Uh, The thought of like 5,000 high quality Amazon employees in any city is kind of audacious to begin with. So didn't make a lot of sense to us why 240 cities were actually like, really, uh, prepared to, to meet those demands.
So rather than look at like tax incentives or political preference or, you know, maybe where does someone have a home? Uh, we just said, let's build it, you know, let's build our own answer to that question through our own data. So we ran the data and it was kind of on the premise of like, Hey, if you needed to hire super high quality people at scale, where would you go and why?
What are the markets that would have that talent? Uh, how do you justify that decision? What kind of economic impact does that have, not just on the. , but actually on the company and the hiring managers as well. How do you compete? Uh, how do you ensure you have kind of depth in that market? And this was stuff that, um, really nobody was answering.
It was very similar to when we started Signal Fire and everyone's like, what does a good founder look like? They're like, well, hey, look at like Google grads and Facebook adss and PayPal Mafia, and did you go to Stanford or Harvard? There was all this like kind of anecdotal or, uh, you know, kinda conventional wisdom that said this is what the composition should look.
But in reality, founders can come from anywhere, right? And so you can build your company anywhere, but you really needed the data to kind of back it up and prove it and say, if I'm gonna go to market A versus market B, how do I justify that? And then when we entered Covid, uh, the world just got much bigger and much more complicated because, you know, now we were no longer just working in the largest tech centers in office five days a week.
What we're really doing is we're talking about a massively distributed workforce that could be anywhere. So it was easy and super complicated all at once, and we are ill-equipped to answer those questions today. We can't walk back in and justify and say, I know that if I go and open up an office in Dublin or Denver, Alava, like, here's the real impact.
So we started looking to things like census data, LinkedIn data, uh, and then, you know, we would kind of go, well, I can get a tax break here and I can go get like this over there. None of that answered the core question. Uh, and the core question is really where do I get access to the best talent markets?
They're gonna help me and my company. And so that's fundamentally the, the problem statement that Terrain solves is how do you crunch all the global data of the best markets to hire the best talent anywhere in the world? Whether you're expanding your consolidating. That's, uh, that's kinda where my experience led us to
take train.
And so what's interesting about this to me is as you're talking, I'm thinking to myself, it almost sounds like you and your company pride the self on this concept of there's no one size fits all. It's kinda like you have to take the things around you and the things specifically, you have to get more granular.
Like I see it all the time, uh, talking with founders and just hearing like, oh, these are the seven steps to a perfect pitch deck. This is how I take something to market. Even now, like on LinkedIn, there's all this thought leadership around it. This is the outbound sales sequence that's gonna help you, you do this or this is the, these are the, uh, um, this is the cold calling script that I use.
Like I'm in the sales world a lot and I see all these, and it's like, no, it's, it's not really, like frameworks are okay and they're good to get a starting point and understand what's worked for other people, but you really have to dig deep into your own stuff and you have to find ways to measure that.
What is, what is the saying? You can't manage what you don't measure, or you can't monitor what you don't measure. And so it sounds like this is kind of a theme for you all and, and that you're kind of passionate about this idea of. Just because their external markers saying, Hey, I should be doing that.
You kind of have to find your own way. Is that correct?
A hundred percent. I mean, everybody loves their top five, top 10 lists, you know, us included. Um, we, we provide lists for our companies, but I think there's just a lot more context and subtlety and nuance that goes into building all these businesses. I mean, you can't sit there and say that, you know, the way you build a consumer.
Is the same way you build an enterprise business. What you build in, you know, a developer oriented market versus a retail market, like they're totally different. Um, and one thing that we kind of, uh, you know, we discovered along the way is the composition of talent in markets is not equally distributed.
So you don't have the exact same number of engineers or salespeople or marketers in San Francisco as you do Austin and New York and Miami. But we talk about these labor markets, like they're all equal and they're all equally good, and that they have an equal impact on how you build and scale that company.
Um, that's just categorically not true. Uh, there's different reasons to be in certain markets. Some of our clients are, you know, fortune 50 companies and they come to us saying, We can't compete with Google and Facebook in the major tech markets, but we need to go get a specific type of talent, data science, data analysts, engineers, whatever.
Show us the other markets where there's, you know, high quality talent at lower costs. And then if we're gonna do that, well what if we have, you know, an office in Manila or what if we have an office in. Zurich or you know, we're thinking about India, how do we compare and contrast those markets? Um, the level of questioning decisioning that happens after you kind of just make a selection of cities to compare.
Gets really, really granular, and this applies for companies at every size and every stage. So you can be thousands of employees and asking these questions. You can be a series a company saying, where do I go to find the most talent rich environments that I can attract, that I can win, that I can compete for, and retain, um, very different, you know, uh, ways to stratify markets and think about building what's best for your company.
[00:13:33] Chet: So with all that being said, I'm gonna pose a question to you. That sounds like a one size fits all, but I'm, I'm curious cuz this comes from, this comes from personal experience and probably something that a lot of the listeners are thinking about, um, as they're standing up their sales, uh, sales work.
Mm-hmm. specifically. Um, there's a lot of context and I've seen this question come up a lot more on LinkedIn as well. , do I hire VP of sales first or do I go hire some sales staff? Well, how do you stand up your playbook? Yeah. In your, in your go-to-market strategy. Well, there's, there's companies that can do that.
There's consultants, people that can help me with playbooks. Mm-hmm. , there's advisors. I can bring those people on or, yeah. But then the. The vp s l starts when they want to implement all their own stuff anyway. Well, who's to say their stuff is the best? Maybe they're better at leading and managing than they are creating a whole sales motion.
Like there's a lot of conversations. So as someone who specializes in talent, let's say I'm a, I'm a startup founder. I'm, I'm seeing positive revenue. What are some things I should be looking for in my business? Data that tells me that, hey, it's either time to go hire ahead of sales, or maybe ahead of customer success.
There I should go focus on the reps first. Like what would you advise reps first, like team members, first, individual contributors or leaders?
[00:14:40] Mark: So, um, it's definitely not a one size fits all, uh, answer Chet but I think there's a lot of kind of common characteristics that you can apply to diagnose, like what's gonna work for you.
Um, I'm a pretty outgoing market facing person. I'm pretty comfortable selling. Uh, so for me, Uh, what I wanted to do was really think about do I understand the sales process? Do I understand the customer? Am I solving their pain points? Uh, are they, you know, not just buying one time? Are we able to keep them?
Are they happy? Are they creating the recommendation loop? Um, some founders are very technical and they don't like to sell. They're very uncomfortable with it. And so I think very quickly they kind of wanna offload that, uh, to, to a different personality. And someone's gonna go bang the phones and work their network.
I think when it comes to kind of systematizing hiring, you really should understand your sales motion deeply. As the founder, you should understand your sales motion better than anybody. Uh, and why is that important? Well, whether you hire a VP of sales or you start hiring SDRs, uh, you have to be able to educate them on the sale.
You have to be able to answer all the questions that you're gonna get, all the objections. How does it work? There's, there's a, there's a lot of education when you're bringing a new product to. Where they need to be really equipped to, um, sell against the competition to overcome objections. Uh, in our case, um, we, you know, we're, we've done founder led sales, so we're going, uh, that proverbial like zero to million dollar a r r.
In a founder led motion. We both love to sell. Riley and I, my co-founder, um, there's tons of questions that come up and I think if we hadn't been in that position, there is no way that we could properly train ahead of sales or SDRs and ensure that they were successful when we hired them. And, and that's like one of those things that I feel responsible for as a founder is, you know, we go out, we raise money.
I, I, I've got a responsibility to investors. We're building a product. I've got a responsibility to. I've got a strong responsibility to my team to make them successful if I'm gonna pull 'em from somewhere else. We're talking about their live. So I wanna make sure that I can get them successfully spun up and, you know, hitting their quota.
Uh, and I think, you know, for some, again, having a senior person selling that's like coming from that industry that really knows all the process, that's cool. But for us it was a repeatable sales process. Um, and we actually started by hiring customer success because our land is very different than our expand.
And that may be different with a different type of sales motion. .
That's great. That's really actionable and I like that too. Um, but as you said, yeah, like, Hey, I like being in front of customers. I have no problem with founder-led sales. Now, for all you technical founders who might wanna hide behind the screen, it might be, well, we're all behind screens, but it might be a little bit different.
Um, you might have to take that with a grain of salt and then see what works for you. Mm-hmm. , kind of curious, when you're looking at making those hires, what level of seniority do you look for? Do you look for someone who's. Just, you know, kind of younger in their career, so they're gonna really get down in the dirt and get nitty gritty.
Do you look for that hire that you can put on a shelf somewhere and say, Hey, look at the accolade of who's working for us? Or do you kind of have to find like a healthy balance in between senior and junior talent?
Yeah. Um, So I think when you're more product focused and technical, um, bringing in someone that you have confidence in that can actually be in the room, that can pitch, uh, you know, your prospect, um, I would probably err on the side of hiring someone slightly more senior than I would someone more junior.
Um, whether that's full-time or part-time. And the reason for that is, um, if you are uncomfortable selling, you've probably never been in a sales role, so you probably don't know how to manage an SD R or an ae. Build comp plans or create repeatable processes, you're probably more focused on the product and that's totally fine.
So your perspective might skew a little bit more experience. The challenge that early stage companies have is typically they want to kind of overhire. They want that super proven c r o that comes from the industry leader because that's the way they can kind of demonstrate externally we're successful and that's just not a viable strategy for most companies.
I think some can do that, but you're more likely, uh, going to find success in hiring people. That have been on the front lines, that are having that kind of career upward mobility. They've been in good companies, they've seen best practices, they've got networks. They know the process, and they're willing and hungry to do that job for you because going zero to one and even one to 10 is the hardest work that you're gonna put in, uh, to prove yourself and put yourself on the map.
Uh, when you're at 10 million, like then, like the world changes, uh, your ability to recruit world class CROs and c. , it changes. And that's not necessarily a statement about your business so much as it is opportunity that they have. If you're running a 50 million book of business, a hundred million book of business or more, 10 seems really small, even as big as that is for the founder.
So there's just this like, uh, career risk opportunity and like the equity. Uh, timeline, the return on equity there that, uh, the market is going to force upon you. So if your product, if you're engineering focused and you really need sellers, Find the people that are gonna roll up their sleeves and do the work, not the ones that you're kind of like, you know, kinda able to put like that, you know, piece on the mantle and say, Hey listen, I got my star higher.
Go do it. And then, you know, maybe they're just not at a point in their career where they want to do it or you know, they typically wanna go in and immediately hire, so that's gonna ramp you burn. There's a lot of risk with over-hiring too early.
[00:20:18] Chet: So you're saying if I'm a, if I'm a technical founder and I'm not able to do the things that, you know, people like yourself are doing in founder-led sales, go for someone who's, who's more senior with the aptitude and the ability, but maybe not too senior, that it's kind of a, a prize on the shelf where it's like, Hey, look at the c R o, we just landed.
You know what I mean? Cuz they might not wanna roll up their sleeves as much and do the dirty work of hopping on discovery calls, generating demand, all those sorts of.
[00:20:43] Mark: Yeah, I think there's a lot of risk to over-hiring too early, um mm-hmm. . And I think one of the benefits of working with both, um, full-time hires as well as working with, uh, fractional hires is they teach you all the incremental things that happen in your sales process that have a material outcome on success.
So you just don't have enough reps, and if you're not close enough to it, you're not gonna know what's happening in every moment. So again, like that's the way you're gonna create this repeatable process and you're gonna show, Hey, we've got traction, we're retaining our customers. Like, we know every component of our sales process and our, our customer success and retention process.
Um, you know, you, you've, you've just gotta be really close to that early on so that you can kind of train an onboard and enable, uh, as you scale.
[00:21:31] Chet: Yeah. I want to dig into, um, continuing on the conversation about talent. Um, I would love to open the floor up to you, um, for founders who might be hiring for certain roles, what are some, what are some things you do in the talent process?
to make sure that you got the right person. Like I'm sure that's a, there are a lot of founders, I'm sure listening to this and they're either ready to hire a VP of product or a VP of sales or a VP of Cs, or even maybe like a founding account executive to help sell alongside them. So obviously the roles are different, but not, not contingent on the role, just contingent on making sure they're a fit for the business.
What are some of the questions or the things that you look for, either through their LinkedIn on their resume, how they carry themself in an interview that make you feel that, hey, I can verify that this would be a good fit as best as you can in an interview process.
[00:22:20] Mark: So interviews are really tricky. Um, and I think that interviewing tends to be a very flawed, uh, you know, process anyway.
Um, I'm a, I'm a fan of really building out kind of a, a strategic game plan before you ever start recruiting. And so it involves, you know, a lot of different things. I'll, I'll try to be brief here, but. As simple as just understanding the compelling value proposition for why a candidate should be interested in your company.
Uh, you know, founders, um, we tend to be on the front lines. We tend to be the ones that get people really excited and bought in. Um, so I think you have to kinda like be relatable. You know, on whatever that means. Who are you, what do you stand for? What are your values? Uh, what is that company gonna be about?
Because it ends up being a byproduct of what you put in motion. So being really clear and, you know, again, this is not like the top five cultural, you know, values that, you know, you read on a, uh, in an article somewhere. I mean, you, you really gotta think through what you stand for, what your behavior is. Um, I tend to think of culture as what happens when the CEO is not in the room or the founder's not in the.
What is the behavior that ensues? So being really crisp on that employee value proposition. Um, what are they gonna get out of it as much as what are they gonna contribute to it? And then I think running a really good process on how you quantify. Uh, experience. Um, the questions that you ask, who's going to ask them?
What is the feedback loops? Who's part of that, um, interview process. Part of it is, you know, you the founder of the founding team. Part of it is, you know, the team members they're gonna work with. You might be pulling in investors, advisors, board members to help with this being really explicit about what everyone's role in interviewing is.
And when and how they're going to provide feedback so that you can consistently evaluate talent, um, does a better job at removing bias. We all have bias when it comes to recruiting, but what I think you're really trying to look for is, you know, who has those hard skills and soft skills, who's gonna be a good, uh, cultural addition, and then who's stage specific.
Uh, you know, when we're talking about early stage companies, if you're coming from a Google today, you're probably very talented. You know, you're, you've been recruited there for a reason, but that's not always directly applicable to the plight of, you know, going from 500 k and a r r to 5 million, right? It just may not be the right thing.
Uh, and different stages have different needs. Really being able to understand what a candidate has solved for what they bring to the table, how that's gonna impact your business over the next X number of years. This shouldn't be a 10 year exercise. You know, we're talking like 18, 24 months, uh, 36 months down the road.
Do you really have the skills and capabilities in place to go execute the game? Um, that's really critical. And then I think referencing is also, uh, just unbelievably important. Um, good referencing doesn't happen enough. Uh, I think, you know, when you got the luxury of a recruiting firm or whatnot, that might kind of go the extra mile.
Um, I do all the reference calls myself. I want to talk to those former hiring managers. I want to hear it from peers. I want to hear it from the subordinates, other investors, what really happened and when this person is in this circumstance, how are they going to perform? And it's amazing what people will say.
Like, you know, you don't always get like, here's where they're gonna fail, but you really hear strengths and how they overcame challenges and and whatnot. Uh, and it gives you a very clear idea of, You know, what you can expect. And lastly, I think having something unique to your process, uh, we have a very unique way of, um, understanding kind of how candidates overcome objections and how they think through our, like, through our interview process.
And more times than not, we've really surfaced yellow and red flags as much as we found, like, you know, the green flag of like, this is the candidate you have to. And you gotta stay true to that because those, um, those markers pop up regularly and it's whether we choose to, you know, look at them or listen to them.
I think that has a direct outcome on the success of those hires. And I've made tons of great hires. I, I, I also have to own not making some great hires. And every time I've made not a great hire, I've ignored something in that process that I probably should have paid more attention to. But I, like, I talked myself into it and said, you know what?
We're gonna reallocate up this over here and ignore that for a bit. And sure enough, that thing came back up and I was like, you know what? We should have just held out a little bit longer. So hire slow, fire fast. Um, you know, the stuff that you hear, I think is all true, but that's kind of the recipe that I see for how you can reduce the risk in hiring and increase probability of.
[00:27:04] Chet: Yeah. Hiring is such a black box to me sometimes because I've, I've had scenarios where I go, I don't know if I would really hire this person, but there's a need. And that person turned out to surprise us all. There were times where I was like, this person is the answer. And that person got let go in two months because it was just a failure to adhere to culture.
You know, not even no call, no showing to one-on-ones. Um, taking, taking calls and like, A house that seemed like it was construction going on during a workday. like, what are we doing? Are we contract, are, do we have a contractor show on tlc? We don't know about that. You're doing part-time, like a, a lot of, a lot of wild things.
Yeah. Um, I love what you said about culture though. What are you doing when the ceo, e and founders not in the room? And, uh, I love that cuz um, Adam, j c r o at Falcon posted on LinkedIn the other day asking, you know, people that have hired people, what are some things you look for when you, when you scope culture?
And I said something very similar. I said, if I go on vacation for a week, am I gonna come back? And you're gonna have the same inputs, if not greater inputs, than when I'm around 24 7. You know what I mean? Like, what are you doing when I'm not there to hold your hand, essentially? Um, are you going, Hey, my boss isn't here.
We'll check out and see you later. You know, I'm taking a mini que myself or am I coming back and you're like, Hey, I had to make up for that. You know, the fact that we weren't able to strategize and sit together, so I put an extra effort to supplement my pipeline, you know, those kinds of things. So I love that you called that out.
What is the CEO or founder doing, uh, when you're not, or what are you doing when the CEO founder is not in the room?
[00:28:27] Mark: It's just so important. Well, you know, when you, when you think about all that you can do as a founder or as the executive team, and. You know, look like if you wanna be a sole practitioner, just do that.
But if you're gonna build a company, you have to hire people that you can trust and that are going to maintain the bar or raise the bar. To your point, when you're not there, you can't touch everything. You can't be a part of, you know, every moment, even though you may want to. You have to create scalable processes through extremely talented people.
Um, we tend to use the crutch of, uh, certain social metrics, right? Like, where did you work? Where did you go to school? Like, some kind of thing that says, well, I think this is going to be good for me, without really kind of testing and proving out, are they gonna go do that? Are they motivated to do that? Um, I've kind of adopted this.
I almost wanna find outliers as opposed to ones that are more mainstream, because I think that they're going to hustle. I think they're going to fight, they're gonna ask different questions, they're gonna look at the world very differently. And for us, in, in, in, in the Terrain business, that's really important.
That may be true for certain founders, that may not be true for others. But, uh, you know, to me, I can walk out of the room and I know exactly what that bar is. I know exactly what's gonna happen and I can trust in my. They will teach that as we continue to grow and scale. And so that's where I think we get the benefit of, you know, that initial core that we hire, that that culture set, uh, and really being able to amplify that as we grow.
[00:29:55] Chet: Yeah. And I love that you say that because, uh, you're not looking just to fill a role at that point when you're looking for the outliers mm-hmm. , you're looking for the person where you go, Hey, I wanna hire Chet. Hey, I wanna hire Mark. I'm not trying to hire a CMO a CRO and senior SDR and AE I wanna hire that person.
That's why I love that you have that focus on, it's actually, um, something in, in my career, uh, while back, Dalton Van, van Hatchet, the co-founder of, uh, Hatchet Ventures, said to me, was, You know, I was given him some stuff where I was like, Hey, what's going on here? What's going on here? And he goes, Chet you're going about this interview's all wrong.
These people are just looking to fill roles. You want to go to a company that wants to hire Chet. And that just changed my perception when I started interviewing is I could very quickly see who was interested in hiring Chet versus. Who wanted to just fill this head of sales role. And I was, and, and that very quickly told me like where the red flags were and where I would be unhappy in 18 months down the road.
Yeah. Um, but that's why I love your, your concept of going for the outliers, because when you notice an outlier, you go, Hey, I wanna hire that person, not just trying to fill a role anymore. And I think that's just such a better formula for success when it comes to scaling. Yep.
[00:31:02] Mark: And I think, you know, to find them, you have to ask the right questions too, because they don't just raise their hand and be like, Hey, I'm an outlier,
Yeah. You know, you, you have to kind of pull it out and you gotta like challenge people too. So that's where I think that really rigorous process, um, that you consistently apply to every hire. Uh, you end up becoming very good at discerning what are those moments? Who are those people? Um, you know what to click into and what to.
[00:31:30] Chet: Yeah. I love that. Mark, this has been really informative. Um, let the viewers and listeners know, um, if, if they want to connect with you or Terrain, where can they do so, how can they get in contact with you?
[00:31:41] Mark: Absolutely. Um, so you can email me Mark at Terrain Analytics. You can look at uh, terrainanalytics.com.
Uh, happy to, happy to chat with anyone anytime.
[00:31:50] Chet: I love it. This has been a great episode. Also, for those of you that don't know, mark must have got the memo because we're both wearing black today. If you, if you're not watching the episode and just listening, , we're, we're virtually wearing almost the same thing, just different styles, so I love it.
We really came correct today. Great episode. We appreciate having you, mark, for those of you that are interested in engaging with marketing analytics, further, we'll have links to everything in the episode description in the. Below as well as links to the Founders Formula Podcast, hatchet Ventures, and myself.
If you're interested in connecting with us further or interested in potentially being a guest on the podcast, we'll release a new episode every week on Tuesday and we look forward to seeing everyone on the next one. Thanks for your time, mark. Thanks so much for having me.
[00:32:28] Mark: This was fun.
[00:32:30] Chet: Bye.