SaaS Scaling Secrets
The SaaS Scaling Secrets podcast reveals the strategies and insights behind scaling B2B SaaS companies to new heights. Dan Balcauski, founder of Product Tranquility, leads conversations with successful SaaS CEOs, exploring their challenges, triumphs, and the secrets that propelled their businesses to the next level.
SaaS Scaling Secrets
Driving Growth in Private Equity-backed SaaS with Jim McGinnis, CEO of Vanco
Dan Balcauski speaks with Jim McGinnis, the CEO of Vanco, a software and payments provider for faith groups, schools, and community organizations. Jim shares his extensive experience scaling SaaS businesses, including his success at MyCase, where he doubled the business in 18 months. They discuss challenges in convincing different customer segments to adopt new technologies, the importance of focus and operational metrics, and the necessity of employee engagement. Jim also highlights the advantages of private equity backing and his strategies for maintaining high customer satisfaction and innovation levels in a lagging market.
00:27 Guest Introduction: Jim McGinnis
02:34 Focus and Operational Changes at MyCase
04:07 Metrics and Growth Strategies
09:38 Private Equity and Enterprise Value
16:45 Aligning with Private Equity Investors
20:53 Innovations at Vanco
24:33 Employee Engagement and Its Impact
25:44 Measuring Employee Satisfaction
27:15 Effective Communication Strategies
31:09 Leadership and Team Building
33:16 Making Tough Leadership Decisions
35:19 Rapid Closeout Questions
Guest Links
Welcome to SaaS Scaling Secrets. The podcast brings you the inside stories from the leaders of the best scale up, B2B SaaS companies. I'm your host, Dan Balcauski, founder of Product Tranquility. Today I'm excited to speak with Jim McGinnis. Jim is CEO of Vanco, a software and payments provider, empowering faith groups, schools, and community organizations. Previously, A CEO of MyCase, Jim doubled the business in just 18 months before successful acquisition by Affinipay. His extensive leadership experience spans roles at Intuit. Activision and global marketing positions at PepsiCo and p and g where he helped launch the Tide brand in China. Let's dive in. Welcome Jim to SaaS Scaling Secrets.
Jim McGinnis:Thanks for having me. I'm glad to be here.
Dan Balcauski:I'm very excited for our conversation today. I think you'll have a lot of value for our listeners. As I hinted at in the introduction, you've led marketing sales and companies across all types of customers, consumers, lawyers, now, churches and schools. To begin with, what's harder convincing a Chinese consumer to buy Tide detergent in 1995, or a church to adopt giving software today?
Jim McGinnis:That's a great opening question. It was easy to convince Chinese consumers in 1995 to adopt Tide because it was fundamentally a better product that completely transformed their lives. I I wish that it were as easy to convince churches to adopt e our e giving solutions, but they're happy with any donor they get. So sometimes it moves more slowly.
Dan Balcauski:Well, hopefully this is just a temporary blip in the road and and maybe 20 years from now you'll be like, actually once we cracked it, it was just as easy as selling people tide. So, I've full faith that you'll be able to tell the same story of the future. Well look, before you pivoted to this world of selling software to churches and community organizations you were selling software to another group that's. Well known for loving the adoption of software, which is attorneys your time at MyCase. As I hinted at in my introduction, you guys really had an incredible run in the 18 months that you were leading that company where you doubled the revenue there. One of the are the topics that's come up over and over again. On this show has been the importance of focus. So rather than asking you what you did, was there anything that you had to stop the company from doing in order to hit those targets when you first joined that company?
Jim McGinnis:Yeah, that, that's a wonderful question. So it was a carve out. It had a great team that had been growing it for years as a sort of a, an underutilized division of a different company. And so, I think, stop limiting themselves. Might be a way to think about it. We had been freed by our new private equity backer to really step on the pedal of growth. And so, there was a very much of a return on a short term return on investment mentality that was there when I arrived and we were really go, go, go get'em with growth and that was very exciting.
Dan Balcauski:As you sort of, looked at that, investment opportunity or that ability to really go after the opportunity that was in front of you from this freeing from the chains of your previous corporate owners. I guess what were the first, what was the first operational change that you looked at that, and I guess what were you watching as a leader? Like what metrics were you tracking as you sort of made these changes?
Jim McGinnis:Yeah, the there are two embedded questions in there. The first is it was a carve out and a carve out is a special beast for those who've done it. They know we had nothing. We didn't have an accounting system. We didn't have accountants. We didn't even have a CFO and so, we had to stand up all the operational capabilities of the company. And I think that was an underestimated focus area for us initially. Then you asked about metrics. We really. Focused on those SaaS metrics we were looking for growing our monthly recurring revenue. And that was done in two ways for MyCase. One was standard SaaS just getting people to sign up for the software. And the secondary one was payments. We had our own payments engine. We were at the time one of the few legal practice management solutions with embedded payments. And so we were looking for payments adoption. At first sale, but then penetration of the base, which hadn't been terribly penetrated when I got. There.
Dan Balcauski:So I guess, so you mentioned right the carve out is a special, it's, its own beast in that, it doesn't have all the, it's not been an ongoing separate entity. So a lot of the kind of business operational support functions you might think of, like, accounting or. Finance. Right. They may not have had, or they don't have at all, right?'cause they just only have the product or whatever been spun out. I guess as you sort of look beyond that, like what do you think was, what helped unlock that acceleration in growth that wasn't happening underneath, the larger corporate umbrella before the company was carved out.
Jim McGinnis:Yeah I, I think it was having a team that was laser focused on the metrics of growth. So we were investing every dollar, making sure that it grew the business rapidly. I think back to the marketing funnel we rethought the entire marketing funnel. We rethought how we handled the leads under a new. Rev Ops leader we thought rethought how quickly the sales team would pick up those leads and act on them under a new sales leader. So, so, accelerating every step of the funnel with a focus on growing business faster.
Dan Balcauski:guess in, again, right? It's easy to look, backwards and be like, oh, well, like, if only, there's. Endless number of companies, right when they're acquired, right? There's all this ink spilled and, wall Street Journal, et cetera, around all, the CEOs talk about all these, synergies, et cetera. They don't materialize. I guess like why, what was it about the company being part of this large organization before that like. Prevented them from looking at that, right. Because I could see this, there's multiple ways to un untether this, but I see this a lot, right? Either companies become, multi-product or we have like, tuck-in acquisitions. You're living the reverse of that. So, what were they missing? Is it just purely the way that, larger corporations need to sort of incentivize and structure, accountability and ownership within organizations? Or is it, is, was there something else there?
Jim McGinnis:When a business is and it became non-strategic. The previous owner their earlier thesis had been that in order to succeed they needed to develop SaaS offerings in different verticals. And so they acquired a small good but not very big legal practice management. Vertical. And then three or four years into it they decided that no, their core vertical of real estate was real estate tech was more than sufficient for them, but they had this nice little business. It was growing it wasn't losing money. So why not keep it around? And so they kept it around for a number of years. Meanwhile, our core competitor had the opposite philosophy. They were. All in on legal tech and they were investing heavily in driving penetration of the market. And so we went from long before I was there from, first mover and market leader to being two or three times smaller than our next, than our biggest competitor. And it was just lack of focus. It was lack of intent to be the market leader in the legal tech space. And so, When we carved out. We had three, we had a very clear thesis that we could grow this business faster. The first was just focus on driving new logos. And that meant investment in a team and modern SaaS practices. The second was acquire companies. And while I was there we acquired small, four smaller SaaS businesses that were interesting and important tuck-ins. But it helped. Begin to build the momentum and cross-fertilize the ideas. And then the third was payments. And that, that was my backer had a lot of experience in monetizing payments. And payments is tricky and it's hard and if you don't focus on it, it doesn't just happen. And so, the previous owner. Was, didn't have the luxury to focus on the legal tech business. MyCase, let alone the sub part of that, which is the payments in the legal tech business. And so, suddenly the business just got a ton of oxygen. And when it did it took off.
Dan Balcauski:Yeah. Well, and something I picked up there, right? So your, it sounds like they were sort of straddling two very different buyers and because of that they weren't sort of all in on one particular market persona. And I think that a lot of companies can end up in that phase, especially as they go. Multi-product. And I've been part of companies where that can happen, where you're like, okay, we, we sell to it. And now we think like, oh, there's a developer, a DevOps persona we can go after. Not realizing it's like, okay, well that, that customer's almost entirely different. Like they, they might look similar. It's like, well, real estate's, real estate transactions often involve lawyers and, they have similar workflows and kind of the firm sort of, if you squint sort of their eyes can look, similar. But you know, there's all those nitty gritty differences that, take your eye off the ball. And especially if that's not kinda their primary focus I could see how that'd be problematic. So, we were talking before about leading as you were underneath this new private equity owner they were unleash you and like really said, Hey, let you know, let's hit the gas. I think that might come as a surprise to some folks because private equity doesn't always have that doesn't always carry that connotation of, grow, grow, grow. Let's go after this market. I guess that seems counterintuitive to me, but I guess what have been your sort of biggest realizations or surprises sort of leading SaaS businesses with underneath, private equity ownership?
Jim McGinnis:Yeah. Well, I know private equity can get a bad name, but I've had nothing but very positive experiences. If you think about what private equity is they are, taking money from folks and being asked to manage it and get returns that are higher than that. Their partners can get in other venues, public venues, et cetera. So what are they looking for? They're looking for returns. And where does return come from? Return fundamentally comes from. Rapid expansion of the enterprise value of the company and the enterprise Value of the company can be different depending on its stage. And sometimes in growth oriented businesses, it's someday gonna trade on a multiple of a RR. And so, obviously you don't want to lose so much money so rapidly that there's no hope for ever turning it profitable. But as long as you can grow the top line in those kinds of businesses rapidly you're growing enterprise value and your private equity backers should be very, very happy. There are other businesses that are more mature and there it's less about driving the top line growth and more about. Managing to the bottom line growth. And so that's where you can start looking for synergies and efficiencies and other ways to drive enterprise value. But working with private equity first it's a realization that at the core it's driving enterprise value and that there should be a very clear thesis on how that enterprise value is driven. And then the third is what I've loved about it is they unleash a leader and a team. To execute against that agreed thesis and as long as you execute against agreed thesis. The relationship with private equity is fabulous. It's wonderful to be given the keys to, to really make the engine hum.
Dan Balcauski:Yeah and make. Make no mistake to any of my private equity friends who may be listening. I was not trying to insinuate that there was not, it was a negative connotation behind private equity back, but more so, that in terms of the level of investment to really sort of go after a market, because there's definitely different types of, we, we hear. Different types of private equity investment. Right. And I think this is more sort of on the we might term like sort of the growth equity side of the fence, right? Versus the what used to be termed the kind of the RGR de Bisco corporate Raiders versus barbarian at the gate type private equity back in the day, right? The, they think they operate, very differently. I guess as you've sort of. Gotten, more accustomed to, this role of leading in as a CEO at a private equity backed organization. You've mentioned things like, enterprise value. I. And I think, some people if you have an MBA right or have spent a bunch of time running corporate financial models, right? You just might sort of really get like, okay what's, what does that compose of, what does that even mean? Help break that down. Are there ways that you think about like. As you're looking at growth initiatives like these things, is there a test that you use of like, yes, these are the things that are really gonna drive enterprise value versus otherwise, versus else? Because I think, a certain point, there's a lot of discussion in the market around, okay there's revenue, and then they have like, revenue multiples, right? And you just sort of assume that multiple is a given. Right? To a certain extent. Maybe some companies have, faster growth rates, so maybe they get a little bit better of a multiple. Are there more nuanced ways that you're thinking about it as you're sort of leading one of these firms in terms of how you're thinking about specific investments and what's actually gonna drive that enterprise value? Yeah.
Jim McGinnis:Yeah, that, that's a wonderful question. The first thing to really understand. Is what the multiple is being driven off of. So if you're a growth company and it's being driven off of your a RR or your revenue that leads to a certain set of things. And if it's in a later stage and it's being driven on, off of ebitda, that leads to a different set of things. So you you know that you're driving enterprise value because it's some, multiple times either revenue or ebitda. And so you can think about every decision. If you're on a revenue basis as what how much it's likely to drive revenue, and then by some multiple, and you don't have to think about the multiple. You just focus on driving the revenue. And the same with goes with ebitda. If you're focused on EBITDA multiple there are two ways to drive ebitda. One is to reduce costs improve your margin but the other is top line growth that flows through to ebitda. So you're always looking at every decision in terms of how much will it grow ebitda over the period of time that I'm likely to have a multiple applied to me, and then the multiple is the one that I enjoy most teaching and talking to my team about, because the multiple fundamentally is a measure of confidence in the sustainability of whatever it is you're presenting. And so, if you're growing quickly, your multiple will be higher. But it will only be high if people are convinced that the growth that you've delivered not only is there, but it's sustainable into the future. And so lots of innovation. One of the things we did wonderfully, in MyCase, to support the innovation case or the multiple was we had some fabulous innovation and some. Upstream demonstration of things that we could continue to sell to our existing base and beyond. So an example is we launched an accounting module for MyCase. Well, that's fabulous because you show the growth of adding logos, but you can also show that the wallet share will go up over time. And so the confidence that the growth rate will be sustained is quite high and that drives multiples. The other is all the things you do to run a great company. I'm you and I talked a little bit and I'm passionate about. I love serving the investors, but the only sustainable way to serve the investors is to have a great product and really delight customers because at the end of the day, you're only sharing the value you create from the customers with the investors. And then to serve and delight customers, you have to have a wonderful team and an engaged employee base. And so. I've always worked on employee engagement that shows that over time I can consistently delight customers, and then that shows that you can consistently grow the grow the business. And that combination leads to a pretty believable set of circumstances that supports an attractive multiple and ultimately the enterprise value.
Dan Balcauski:Man, I wish I had a whiteboard here'cause you just laid out a bunch of gold and I, I wanna try to make sure that we, I don't know if we get to all of it, but I wanna at least help the audience sort out everything you just laid out there. So, so, okay, you've got your, sort of, your, your revenue growth. Like those could be a big driver, but then, the other things you laid out is like, what are those components that actually. Underpin that revenue and that revenue growth, right? Customers are sticking around, they're delighted. You've got employees that are continuing to help drive the success. You've got an innovation pipeline that's gonna, continue to deliver those results into the future. So those are all great. And then you mentioned, right, things like, making sure you have employee engagement. those are a beautiful array of breadcrumbs and I want to take a piece of the time if we can, I guess, help me understand, going back to what you said even before that last response you were talking about, if you and the. Private equity investors can align on sort of a direction forward, right? Then it's then they're there to support the team and you're off to the races. I guess let's start there. Like how do you think about getting that alignment sort of off the bat and sort of building that trust and then like, how do you think about that relationship such that you can effectively sort of manage the team? Does that make
Jim McGinnis:Yeah, it does. And, often the communication with a backer because they're interested in the enterprise value growth and therefore they're interested in the revenue growth and the multiples. That comes down to agreeing on fundamentally a set of financials. I mean, at the end of the day it's numbers one of my favorite things that I'm not sure they advertise that anymore, but TurboTax for a lot of time. Talked about your income tax was the story of your year. In numbers. Did you get married? Did you buy a house? And so, your company, the story of your company appears in numbers. So you can see how it's grown over time. You can see whether you're adding customers or losing customers. You can see whether for instance, churn is going up or going down. All those things projected or looking backwards and projecting in the future is the story of your company. And then you fill in the, you put the meat on those bones with, explanation for, and a lot of times we do waterfall charts and bridges that shows that I believe that revenue is gonna go up this much because of these four building blocks that we're working on. And then beneath that, there's confidence that those building blocks have a high degree of confidence that they'll play out the way that you play them out. So you start with in your communication, you start with a set of numbers that tells the story of your company, and then you unpack it and put meat on the bones with the. The specifics of how and why they should have confidence that you're gonna deliver against those things. And then the next piece is communicate, communicate, communicate. So you want to put that forward clearly. You want to make sure that it's been heard you want to agree that it's reasonable going back and forth. And then when things inevitably don't work out the way that they, that you expected that you will. It's important that you come to them with. Clear understanding of the business and why things aren't working exactly as you said they would, but what changes what action you're taking to make things put things back on track or accelerate things further. So, you never wanna surprise. Well, it's probably true in any, every relationship. Surprises are not usually welcome and you certainly don't want to surprise your private equity backer.
Dan Balcauski:Probably good for the long term survival of everyone in their roles. Everyone has a boss. Even the CEO so, and you probably have be, you have many bosses, right? Customers, employees. You, you're responsible to everyone for better or worse. Well, I guess. So, so you're laid out sort of this operating plan, your or the high level sort of goals you have, sort of your rationale for, the story that's gonna be told. Talk to me a little bit. One of the other breadcrumbs you laid out there was around this idea of investing to make sure that you're delighting customers, that they're sticking around. And I'm curious because this is often an area where, you know, especially as it pertains to private equity backed companies, it's like, one of the cliches, and you could tell me, please tell me if I'm absolutely incorrect here. One of the cliches of, the. The founder led, maybe VC backed firm is the missionaries. We don't care like about the, the p and l. We're gonna, we're gonna, we're bringing, we're gonna change the world. We're gonna be the ultimate disruptors versus the mercenaries or with, we've got the spreadsheets and we're gonna make sure this business has high enterprise value. Talk to me about like, within, first of all, you could agree or disagree with that framing, but then also like, how do you think about within a private equity based firm. Investing in innovation, investing in r and d, and and especially where you're at, like Vanco, like do, does that, is that you maybe are in a laggard type market where your customers are not, they're not I doubt they're aggressively adopting AI and all their workflows. Like maybe some of the other, some of the, some, business customers might. How do how, if at all, does that affect the way you think about investing in innovation in a private equity backed firm?
Jim McGinnis:Yeah. Oh. I am very, very proud of my team's increased pace of innovation at Vanco. Just as an example, e even though our our market isn't broadly growing, double or triple digits or something like that. I mean, there's still enormous opportunity to innovate and grow the business. Some of the things that we have determined working with our customers and some of our partners is the importance of donor engagement. Believe it or not, less than half of the total donations given at a church. Are likely to be e given so people are still putting cash and checks into into the basket as it gets passed along. So that's an opportunity for us to continue to grow and it's really important for the churches as well because just think that through that basket's full of. Cash and checks. And where does it go? It goes back probably to a church volunteer in the back who has to count it and credit to the donors make sure it gets to the, bank on time. And they can't, they don't have a ton of visibility as to who came to church and who didn't come to church who's giving. More who's giving less. All that is lost when it's just cash. But when it's a, when it's a e giving solution like ours a whole bunch of visibility and security comes to the church. And we know another thing that happens is that when their donors give. In a recurring way. If they Ms. Church on Sunday as an example, they still give because it's deducted from their checking account or run on their credit card on a weekly basis. That's the intent of the donor. They would've given money had they gone to church. They just got busy that week. So the church is able to fund their mission more reliably and the donor better able to deliver their intent. Back to the innovation a little bit, the donor engagement's really important. So we work on a seamless mobile experience and. We want people to spend more time in the mobile experience. And so we've added content that includes AI generated devotionals. So there's a good reason to look at our app other than just to give you can actually find inspiration. Another thing that we've done recently is as people moved online because of Covid, many churches including my brother-in-law who's a, a minister. They continue to put their sermons up on YouTube, and they have a decent following of people that go. But if you go to YouTube, there's no mechanism to give directly. So we've created an overlay, a streaming service where we have embedded giving opportunities into the sermons. So if people go through the church site they can see the sermon and give. So, it's getting very close to your customers and looking for other opportunities to continue to drive. The business through innovation, and that leads to customer delight and the customer delight makes your business stickier and ultimately leads to positive outcomes for the employee, for the customer and the investors as well.
Dan Balcauski:I love that because you know that the story of the, hey, there's devotionals, there's other content as it pertains to the particular religious organization, right. That may you may go to outside of the context of actually the donation, we've seen similar playbooks, right? There's a reason why Zillow sends you weekly updates about the home price. Your estimate of your home has changed.'cause you only engage in a home sale, once every five, 10 years on average for American consumer. But you're really interested in your home value changing much, similar, like LinkedIn did something very similar with like, oh, like I only go to LinkedIn, update my profile once I'm in a job search every three years. But, otherwise, now they have the. Things like the newsfeed to increase that stickiness. And so yeah, it, in innovation doesn't have to be the sort of I guess, the hard science innovation. We often accompany with it in order to drive those meaningful outcomes. And I can see how those would all drive ultimate that bottom line. You did talk before about sort of employee engagement and I guess. I can under, and you talked about it in the concept of its importance to, enterprise value. I guess I've struggled a little bit with something like employee engagement.'cause enterprise value, very tactical, very spreadsheet. I could put it in Excel and I could calculate it. Employee engagement feels very fluffy. Like how do you square those two things together? How do you sort of think about the investments that you make there against those very hard sort of metrics that you're being measured against.
Jim McGinnis:Yeah you first have to remember that the only thing you have to sell are the talents of your employees because it's the employees that write the software who sell the software who. Work with the customers who implement the software and who make sure everything is compliant and stays on track in the back office. So, every employee has a important share of the task and delivering the customer delight and multiply and ultimately. The investor happiness and enterprise value. So if you start there and you remember that that's all you have are the employees, they quickly become the most important thing that you've got. We do measure it. We measure it with a quarterly employee, net promoter score. And it's quite simple. I'm a huge fan of net promoter score. If I would presume that everybody who listens to this is probably on that, but and you have to do it very. Correctly and very simply and very consistently, but it's quite straightforward from a scale of zero to 10, and you always start with zero because if you start with one, people aren't sure whether one's good or bad, but zero's never good. So on a scale of zero to 10, how likely do you recommend. Vanco is a place to work to a friend or colleague. And by asking that of the employees, we only we get a net promoter, which is the people who say nines and tens. Those are promoters, less, anybody less than a seven. And the net of that, if you're above a 30, if known, to be highly consistent with a growing, successful, happy workforce. And so, there's one other trick, which is you say. What's the main reason for you giving us that score? And that gives them a chance to type in a brief answer. And we talk a lot about conservation of comments. People might have 15 things on their mind, but the most important one will pop up in that one. We run that survey every quarter. I read it, I read every single one of the comments from every single employee. And that gives us a lot of direction as to what we can do to make sure that we are improving our employee engagement over time. The themes change. We go through a lot of change. Things that weren't important to the employee base become important, and then they become less important. And we are work hard to stay in front of that all the time.
Dan Balcauski:Well, and you mentioned before your sort of, reliance on communication as it pertains. I, within that context, you mentioned before to the to the investors making sure you communicate the state of the business over and over. How do you think about sort of your communication back to the, sort of employee base as it pertains to maintaining this employee engagement?
Jim McGinnis:Yeah, that's another one, and I've learned this from some of the great leaders that I've worked for before, but. One of the things I did in MyCase, I carried out here is a consistent all hands. I've always done it weekly 30 minutes on Thursday, not 27 minutes, not 31, but we always kept it to 30. We always focused on the employees celebrating successes, promotions, new hires, focused on the customer, talking about customer of the week, and then a brief section on the investor. Just letting people know how the business is going. A frequent interaction like that can go a long way towards making sure that. My leadership team and I stay connected to the broad employee group. The second is absolutely an open door policy. We live in the best of times. I can't imagine when I was just starting out PG walking into the CEO's office with a cup of coffee sitting down and having a chat. But I'm available all the time on teams email. Even text and phone. And so, I have nearly continuous interaction with all levels of employees which is a great thing, right? This, that just wasn't really a thing when I started out in my career, but now it is. So you have that. And then I'm a big believer in going the other way. Sometimes people won't reach out to me, but I'll do consistent skip levels is something that an old boss used to call it. So I just let somebody who reports to me. Or somebody who reports to them know, Hey, don't get scared, but I'm gonna reach out to your employees next week. I'm just gonna have a quick conversation with'em. Sometimes individually, sometimes as a group and ask'em what's working, what's not working? What can I do better? And any feedback for me or the company. And then often questions like, are we missing any obvious ways to improve? Our growth or our outcomes. And I've got just a little under 300 people in my company. I've been here two years probably been around twice, I think where I've talked to everybody like that. And working on my third time around.
Dan Balcauski:Is there any, is, let me ask you a question.'cause I've always been probably painfully upfront and direct with my superiors to the point where like, if I've got a problem, like they know I have a problem but with it but I definitely have friends who are like, oh man, like. My my CMO did a skip level and like I was just like terrified and I just like didn't wanna get in trouble and didn't say anything. I guess When you have those conversations with folks who are maybe a little bit lower in the organization is there, are there ways that you've learned to approach it such that you can help, like, help have a more actually authentic and productive conversation versus them just maybe being like, I hope I don't say something stupid in front of the big boss.
Jim McGinnis:Yeah usually humor obviously lets the guard down. Those interactions are the most positive when the employee's intent is to improve the company. And then it's just a, it's a fabulous gift to me. And so I work to tease out as much as I can, the why behind the why behind the why. That really is about improving the company as a whole. And if you look at it that way, sometimes something that seems a little bit shy you can dig deeper and understand more of what's really going on. Sometimes something that sounds like a whine or a complaint if you just leave it there, it can be a little annoying, I guess I might say. But if you push further and you say no, why are they how are they trying to improve the company by sharing that with me? And then ask questions that direct them in that. Way you get some really nice insights around ways you can make the company better, either for the employees or the customers, and sometimes for the investor. But usually the employees are most helpful with employees and customers.
Dan Balcauski:Well, so, so you've got multiple levels of employees. So I wanna pivot slightly the lens here, right? So you've be talking about the broader employee base, but look you as a. You're not the founder. You haven't been the founder of a couple of companies. You've been CEO in, you've got private equity investors who just spent a lot of money to make a big stake in a company. They've got dreams of, the, where this company can go. So you've gotta come in as CEO and make some really hard quick assessments of your leadership team. I guess, are there specific kind of non-negotiable traits that you're looking for from your those executives to know that they're gonna be successful in this private. Private equity backed environment when you take over.
Jim McGinnis:Yeah. Absolutely some of the things that I look for I, I look for been there, done that. I had a old boss who used to talk about at the senior level, we usually don't have time in a private equity backed company for people to quote unquote learn on our dime. So you need to know that they know how to do what you're hiring them to do. So been there, done that is a, is an important thing. And I certainly recognize that everybody does something for the first time. And in fact, when I was hired for MyCase, it was my first time, CEO. So there are exceptions and sometimes the exceptions make the rule, but been there, done. That's the first. The other is I look for people that are builders. And what I mean by that is they leave a place, a function, a, a. An offering, whatever it is that they do, they leave it better than they found it. So they're they're up for that. And then there are different ways to say it. The least probably politically correct is GSD get stuff done. The other is people that do windows. You're looking for people who like to solve problems themselves and are willing to roll up their sleeves and they don't delegate complexity down, but they embrace the complexity and learn themselves. So, when I talk to leaders, I look for those three things. I look for somebody who's been there and done it. I look for somebody who's clearly a builder and has stories of leaving things better than before. And then you want to ask lots of detailed questions to make sure that they actually did it and then they weren't just a passenger or present when it was happening.
Dan Balcauski:All right. Well, I'm gonna give you a tough follow up to this because, that's all right. I'm selecting this person for a role. I'm looking for builders. I'm looking for people who get shit done. That's, that would be ideal. But maybe you take over a team and you've got a leader and maybe they're not getting it done. I, and a lot of leaders struggle with. It was like, okay, do I do we coach them through this? How do we, how do I figure this out? Like to make it work? I guess what signs tell you, you really gotta part ways with one of your leaders.
Jim McGinnis:Yeah, if if you're very clear on what you're trying to accomplish and it's not getting done you gotta go a different direction. There's not a, there's not a fit. And so it's important to move quickly. I always remind myself that it's a fit issue and sometimes somebody was a fabulous fit. Maybe they've been with the company for a long time and they were instrumental and, captain of leading us to where we are. But as I'm leading in a different direction or we're pivoting they're not the right person for the next phase of growth. You just have to remind yourself that that's okay and that those people are gonna be unhappy. Because they're used to a high level of success and all the good things that come with it, and they're not succeeding. So they're gonna get frustrated. You're gonna get frustrated. And the quicker you can move to a new situation, the better for everybody. And so, it's no fun to disrupt somebody's life. I've been terminated twice in my life, so I know what it feels like to be on the other side of the desk. It isn't fun. It takes a while to get over. But I certainly wouldn't be where I am now if I hadn't been released by people who recognized before I did that I wasn't a good fit in the previous the previous organization. So, and then the other thing I'll add to it is a couple times I've made mistakes where I was absolutely sure that I had a great new leader in a role and I ran with them for a period of time. And it turned out they weren't a great fit. And you have to accept that. You're far from perfect and at the end of the day you're still guessing whether somebody's gonna work out and if they don't work out, that's okay too. Again, free'em up to go do something where they can be their very best. And you can bring in somebody who can take you to that, that next phase of grade.
Dan Balcauski:Oh man, what a fantastic answer. And Jim, like I could talk to you all day, but like, we're almost out of time. So I do wanna pivot finish out with a couple of rapid closeout questions. Is that okay with you?
Jim McGinnis:Absolutely. Let's do it.
Dan Balcauski:Well, Jim, I am, I'm proud that we are both Kellogg MBAs. If you could go back to Kellogg and add a SaaS CEO 1 0 1 course to Kellogg's program, what would be the most important topic you'd include? I.
Jim McGinnis:Oh my goodness. That's a great question. I gotta go to that. I gotta go to that team building thing again. One of my favorite stories is I, recognized not too long ago that I graduated. I'm gonna date myself from Kellogg in 1991 and since 2008, I haven't worked on anything that existed when I graduated from Kellogg in 91. So, you people need to I think learn the fundamentals of growing a company and being successful knowing that whatever it is they're working on. Or think they're gonna work on outta school is likely to change many times over before they end their careers.
Dan Balcauski:Yes, we are in a rapidly changing environment, whether you like it or not. So, so, so embrace it. What's something you believe that most people disagree with? I.
Jim McGinnis:I, I. I believe it's not that complicated, I guess. And I've gotten myself in trouble a couple a couple of times as I've tried to show people that I think it's simple. Usually it's the fundamentals. It's just the fundamentals. And we try to make it complicated and tell ourselves lots of stories on why the fundamentals don't matter this time but it usually is very simple.
Dan Balcauski:It's not that complicated. You told us to communicate, communicate, communicate. What's one comms habit? Every sas EO should steal from you.
Jim McGinnis:I, I really like that. Weekly, all hands. I I. It's just been a, it's been a great success and, some people some people think it's too frequent. We're, to be honest, we're actually trying it every other week. I'm not sure how it's going'cause I feel a little disconnected, not doing it every single week but that was very successful at MyCase and it was very, has been very successful here as well.
Dan Balcauski:Weekly, all hands or every other week? All hands. I think, I could see either one working. Well, you'll have to, you have to keep us updated on, on how
Jim McGinnis:I will, I
Dan Balcauski:unfolds. If I gave you a billboard, you could put any advice on there. For other CEOs trying to scale their B2B SaaS companies, what would it say?
Jim McGinnis:A billboard. Okay. So I've had experience in marketing, and the problem with billboards usually is that they're too small, they're fonts too small. So in order to have a billboard be effective, it has to be very straightforward. I'll give you two words. Be curious. I think if I, if you drove by a billboard that said, be curious. That might lead you to do all the right things, leading a company.
Dan Balcauski:Be curious. I absolutely love that. Jim I've loved this conversation. If our listeners wanna connect with you, learn more about Vanco, how can they do that?
Jim McGinnis:LinkedIn is the way. I once did a lot of Facebook and Twitter and who knows what else. But I find that with my limited time I'm trying to cut down on my channels. And so really LinkedIn is a great way to connect.
Dan Balcauski:I will put the link to your LinkedIn in the show notes for listeners so they have that as well as to the Vaco website. Thank you so much, Jim. That wraps up this episode of Sask Gallic Secrets. Thank you for sharing your journey and insights. For our listeners who found Jim Insights valuable, please leave a review and share this episode with your network. It really helps us out.
