Ariana (00:00:07) - Welcome to Secret Ops, the podcast. I'm covering the world of business operations, one episode at a time. I'm your host, Ariana Cofone, and today's guest is Tom Andrews, Director of Systems and insights at Pavilion and a revenue at technology expert. Tom, I am pumped to chat today.

Tom (00:00:26) - Me too. I'm so excited to be here. Thank you so much for having me.

Ariana (00:00:30) - Thank you for joining us. I definitely wanna start because you are in a particular niche of operations and I am so dang curious how you got there. So can we just take a step back and talk a little bit about where you started in your career and how you ended up doing revenue technology?

Tom (00:00:48) - Yes, of course. Definitely a similar story to many people in ops. I tripped and fell in love. So my background is actually in computer engineering and after university I wanted to stay in that world but not necessarily do dev work all day every day. So I became a technology consultant, a very large big tech company, and it was great fun and a great start to my career, but it didn't necessarily give me all the challenges I was looking for. I was working on client sites a lot, so I was out and about, which seemed fun on the surface, but it meant I was never really around my colleagues or able to solve problems that our own business has. I was always solving another business's issues and every Friday without fail, when I was in the actual office, various sales managers would come over because they'd heard I was a whiz with Excel.

Tom (00:01:43) - They asked me to fix their spreadsheets, which it turns out I now know are called pipelines. And essentially six months later I got a call from HR saying I've been referred to a position by the sales management team. Took it, had no idea what sales operations was, but now nine years later, still doing it, still analyzing all the numbers and have realized over time that there's such a huge link between good data and good analysis. And so in my quest to be a better and better analyst and get better and better numbers, I've got deeper and deeper into the revenue systems and technology to actually build the data from scratch and make sure I'm creating good data to then do great analysis with. And that's definitely been what's driven my career forwards. It isn't just being great with bad data, but knowing how to play with all the technology and fiddle with all the moving parts until I get exactly the right kind of data we need. And then just kind of build and scale from there.

Ariana (00:02:45) - Do you think Excel is the gateway tool for people to get into operations? Cause it seems like a common tool and then it goes from there.

Tom (00:02:54) - 1000%. I think it's the first time people realize the link between business problems, data, business outcomes. And also for me, it was the first time I realized what I could do with formulae rather than code. Code is a big block that does a lot of things. Formulae allow you to achieve something really small very quickly and when you build them together, you end up almost getting a workflow. And I think it's that mindset of how do I change this data into this data, into this data? That is essentially what brings all of us in the many spheres of operations together. We're always transforming things and using those different building blocks to get to an outcome that probably looks nothing like the original input.

Ariana (00:03:39) - Yeah. That accessibility is infectious. So your specific niche of operations, even though you've done a lot of different parts of it is revenue technology. And before we get into the deeper layers of that, can you level-set for the audience who may be hearing those two words together for the first time, what that means exactly?

Tom (00:04:02) - Yes, for sure. I think revenue operations is a way in which you better understand the flow of the data within a revenue team. And I always think of it as the processes and the workflows by which the revenue numbers are made to make sense. And then revenue technology underpins all of that. It's the daisy chain of technologies that work together as part of the revenue ecosystem to create useful data.

Ariana (00:04:36) - Do you think it's a 50-50 split between the two? Do you think there's more one versus the other? What is the split with revenue technology?

Tom (00:04:46) - A great question. I really think that is the most underrated part of the arsenal of most people in Rev Ops these days. Obviously I'm extremely biased because revenues technology has become my real passion in life. I love it. So many companies have so many band aids, so many bandages, so many workarounds, so many janky, clever, weird things that go on in them. And actually they don't need those. They could just build good tech to begin with. But revenue technology is a niche. It's a skillset, it's a, it requires someone with a background probably in computer engineering or years of familiarity with big enterprise technologies. It's much easier to be able to make a workaround in Google Sheets or in Excel. And so I think often when you look at really fast scaling startups, especially if they've been lucky enough to have someone who's truly great at any kind of operations, what you'll find is that really smart people came up with really bizarrely dumb processes that all work together at perfect symphony to make something work.

Tom (00:05:57) - But actually then you need to hire someone like me who's almost righting the leaning tower of Pisa, pouring concrete into that soggy soil and brings all that infrastructure to not actually change any of the processes, but make them robust, engineer them properly, make them scale. And so I almost see myself as the person you need to hire once you decide it's time for hypergrowth, because otherwise all of that spit and sawdust and scotch tape is gonna fall apart. And we've seen so many examples of startups and scale up almost like blowing themselves apart at the the seams because they never repaid their tech debt. They went through time scaling faster and faster and faster, hiring more and more amazing people into go-to-market teams, but never turn around and saying why are these people spending four hours a day on admin? They could literally talk to their computer instead and it would do it for them.

Ariana (00:06:55) - Well, and selfishly you and I met doing exactly that. Essentially doing a migration into Salesforce. That's where we sort of just realized our mutual passion for operations and figuring out how to rebuild something in a smart way. Using a particular tool. So I mean, Tom is amazing at it and just was an incredible guide through all of it. 'm curious what a day in the life of you looks like ?

Tom (00:07:25) - Yeah, it's a brilliant question. And the truth is no two days are the same, which is actually probably true for everyone in operations. But for me, there are days where I'm pouring over a single spreadsheet and there are days where I don't leave the guts of the machine. And then sometimes I'm just context switching between all of them. I think there's definitely a huge part of my job, which is translating incredibly complicated processes into incredibly simple charts. Normally for the board or our senior leadership team, I'd say all the work I do these days is directly for executive leadership. And so while they may have incredible experience in business, it's probably been a few years since they built their own spreadsheets. And so I'm always trying to translate into the insight rather than just looking at the data. And then I think the opposite is true, taking a very vague set of business objectives or a very cohesive strategy, but turning that into what the machines need to do is deeply complex and it requires such an incredible understanding of capability.

Tom (00:08:36) - I think something people rarely get their heads around is that there is no longer such a thing as a strategy in isolation. There is no business in the world that can just come up with a strategy and put it into effect without some kind of technological, onboarding. I've started to see a shift in the people have started to ask me, you know, what's possible before we come up with this incredible new strategy? Or we get together and we try and problem-solve this and workshop it. What's possible? And that's where every business's mindset needs to go in the future. You need to consider what is possible with what you've got before you try and have an idea that changes the world. And if you find out it's not possible with what you've got, you should probably start with the technology and build your underpinning, because otherwise it's just gonna cause more friction in all of your workflows and then just be less efficient and probably more annoying.

Tom (00:09:34) - And that will lead to bad adoption. And then six months later you'll pivot and you'll have a new strategy because every company is trying to get their teams behind these amazing strategies they think they have, but the team finds it so hard to live the strategy, they never adopt it. And then the company's like, you know what? We need another strategy. And the answer is no. You need to go back to basics, go back to your first principles, rebuild from the ground up, and have your strategy be a thing that lives and breathes and not just a PowerPoint somewhere on your Google drive.

Ariana (00:10:06) - Absolutely. I mean, it's a domino effect. Yes. Because anytime that you change strategy, it is a domino effect through the people process, technology to everything and especially the technology piece. Sometimes strategy actually needs to come from what can you do and what should you do with technology? And it needs to kind of reverse. I've talked to a lot of people in operations and what our jobs look like today. We could not have predicted a year ago or two years ago just because the technology is changing so quickly. So if those two things aren't going hand in hand, you're missing something and you're actually creating a lot of work and headache and stress for the team unnecessarily. But this is a huge mindset shift. And, and I guess this gets to the next question that I love to ask because when I think about operations, there's two kinds of big bubbles of approaches. You've got opportunity-mindset, which is, you know, looking and being forward thinking almost from a futuristic mindset of where you can use new opportunities to grow what you're doing. And then there's the problem-first mindset, which is the, oh dang, this thing is on fire, I need to fix this. When you're approaching your kind of work, what mindset comes first?

Tom (00:11:23) - Usually I'm gonna be really annoying and say a third one. Which is, I always look at a capability mindset. I see my job when I do it really well as unleashing an organization's true capabilities or engineering new capabilities or managing the sunset of old capabilities. Everything I do gives people capability to do something in a hopefully new innovative and efficient way. And so if I'm solving a problem, I'm, and anyone who's ever managed me or probably worked with me will tell you, I never bandaid fix anything and I refuse to. If you want me to solve something in the next hour, you have come to the wrong guy. I'm going to engineer everything I can. I'm gonna test it, I'm gonna yes, fix the problem, but it will be a fix forever. And I'll never do a fix just for now. And so sometimes I sound like I'm massively over-complicating things, but it's because I come from this position of if it's a problem today, it will still be a problem tomorrow.

Tom (00:12:28) - I'm not going to contribute to this ever growing tech debt. I'm going to re-engineer part of our system to offer a capability where that problem is either worked around forever or is no longer an issue. And then on the other side, you know, I think there's a lot of people in organizations who are there to think about the big picture, think about that vision and think about moving forwards. I see myself almost as the hammer that smashes the metal until it fits the shape of that vision. And so I want them to come to me with their biggest, wackiest, craziest ideas of those opportunities you mentioned. And I will build capabilities that support that with infrastructure so that by the time they get to the point they truly want to pursue that opportunity…hopefully the organization truly has the capability to do so, because I actually think a lot of people pursue opportunities without the capability of pursuit. And I think a lot of people solve problems for today rather than tomorrow, or solve problems in a way that actually means they never get to the root cause. If you think about most problems you've probably solved in your career and I've solved in mine, it was never the problem we thought at first. There was always something.

Tom (00:13:42) - It was always something buried between all sorts of different things. And when we found it, we probably felt like geniuses. And it was probably one of the points where operations got its claws into us and would never let us go because we were like, ah, I did this thing. And that's why I don't think you should ever bandaid a problem because you will never find the root cause. When you find the root cause and you re-engineer it, you might accidentally make more money for a company or make it easier for everyone to do their jobs or accelerate everything because you took the care to go a layer deeper. So I always think about my kind of, maybe my purpose as helping an organization have the capabilities it needs to perform in the world of tomorrow, whether or not I have any ability to predict what tomorrow will need, I'm at least gonna try.

Tom (00:14:41) - And I think that leads really nicely into the other side of capability management, which is the technologies that businesses use are changing constantly. Some of the largest enterprise technologies, Salesforce always being my favorite example, they release hundreds and hundreds of pages of release notes every trimester. So three times a year, summer, spring, and winter. And a lot of organizations will see the email and ignore it. I try and read every page of the release notes within reason or at least for the products we have and see that one feature where I can suddenly be like, oh wow, this could really accelerate things. This is a new capability I can't wait to turn on. And because it comes from a capability mindset, there's never part of me that's like, oh, I don't have time because I'm like, whether we use it today or not, this is a new capability for everyone and so I should put some time and effort into deploying it or whatever it needs for me to make it work.

Ariana (00:15:45) - That a beautiful mindset shift. That just honestly helped me a lot think to about what I do on a daily basis. Cause a lot of the times I find that I try to look at the pain point and solve the pain point and sometimes the pain point are problems that have to be solved. But if you reframe it and say, it's not a problem. I'm just trying to enable some new capabilities for this business or this team to be able to do their job better. What a beautiful reframe into such a more positive and progressive way of thinking. Well, this gets into operations in general. I would say a blanketed definition is people process technology, making those three things work in harmony. Now we've talked, obviously technology is a big piece of the puzzle that you're managing on a daily basis, but processing people all three things have to work well. So let's start out with the, the people focus of your responsibilities and your roles. What would you say are some things that you consider in revenue technology from a people standpoint that if you have these things in place, things run smoothly?

Tom (00:16:56) - I think a lot of change overwhelms everyone. Even the best people I've met in whatever field it could be sales, marketing, et cetera. Constant change isn't necessarily something that anyone is particularly comfortable with. If someone is very comfortable with constant change, they should probably move into operations. I feel like there always has to be a technology that's there to support the adoption and ongoing training and utilization of tools, whether it be understanding the adoption in terms of who's logging in and when, or the utilization of a tool in terms of how much time do they spend on it. Whether it helps you manage your technology budget or empowers your team to better learn how to use something. I think there's an area of technology there that almost sits in a world of revenue enablement or procurement that's super important. I think people ultimately are your users and I often think of them as my own customers. I always want them to get a really good service from what I build. And so I try to record all my trainings, make them available, put together decks, write it all up. But it takes an enormous amount of time to do that. It normally takes as long as it took me to build the stuff in the first place and I spent a lot of time.

Ariana (00:18:16) - Yup!

Tom (00:18:17) - So I feel like that's still something I'm figuring out. How do I almost create a delivery side to myself? Because I want to be in a position where I'm always innovating and managing capability, but there's no point having loads of new and shiny capabilities if I haven't told anyone about them or help them figure out how to use it. So there's definitely tools out there that I think are amazing and one that I started using a few companies ago is called Spekit. And it sits on top of all of your tools and allows you to basically build a help text. And it has constantly blown away from just the level of utility you can get from it. Because once you have it, you can deploy it on anything, whether it's Google sheets or it's LinkedIn or it's Salesforce, it can just sit on the top and help you to understand how things work. It's linked to a wiki, it's even linked to a data dictionary, which you can imagine working with me. Everyone needs–

Ariana (00:19:22) - Love that!

Tom (00:19:23) - a data dictionary. And so you can jump in and see how different things work and it links to fields. And then the best part is if you've got a brand new dashboard or a brand new process, they even have flows where it's shining a light on different parts of the page to walk a user through what they need to do. And that is game changing when you really get used to deploying it. Cuz it allows me to train people on technology by using more technology, which is my kind of solution.

Ariana (00:19:58) - How do I automate myself in all the ways that is, I'm gonna dive into that tool after we hop off in this chat. I feel like every person I've interviewed, we've talked about the educational piece and the distilling of information and how vital that is…actually how much of a huge part that is to operations. I will just say having used your trainings, they're amazing and you can tell that you put a lot of care and effort in them because it's the essential part of, especially as I work more globally, you're based in the UK I'm in the US I don't always have access to talk to you when I need to. Vice versa. So it's how do you download yourself, how do you download your brain for anybody globally to be able to have access that information when it comes to technology, you have a whole suite of options available to do what you do. How do you go about deciding what tools make sense, whether that's in training people, the sales CRMs that you're using? What is your vetting process for bringing a tool into an organization?

Tom (00:21:01) - Yeah, I mean personally I feel like this is gonna be a role in the next five years is gonna be buying management, replacing, renewing, understanding technology because there are more vendors out there than there has ever been. I'll always stand by the fact that the backbone of any great system probably requires Salesforce just because it's so customizable and a lot of the true revenue technology gurus out there will have started their career in Salesforce. It's such an empowering ecosystem where you can land so much so quickly it's just so familiar. And once you've got your backbone technologies, which would normally be your ERP, which for many companies will be something as simple as zero, but it could be all the way up to an Oracle NetSuite where you've got a super complex beast of enterprise resource planning, your CRM and then you'll also have marketing automation tool or an MAT and those almost form your core systems. They let you take care of pretty much everything. Now you might also have some kind of HR system.

Ariana (00:22:06) - Actually can we pause one moment and just go back to ERP? I think this is something that's worth, again, breaking down for our audience a little bit more. When we say ERP, what are we meaning? What is included in that? Just break it down a little bit further

Tom (00:22:22) - For sure. So it depends on the type of organization for, you know, most SaaS businesses, it's all about the money. So it's where your money is. It could take care of accounts payable, accounts receivable, invoicing, revenue recognition, it's gonna be your finances home base. It could scale up to also include your supply chain and your materials. And so if you're a physical supply chain business, it's also gonna be managing that. So it's where all of your resource planning is. Whether that resource is a dollar or a brick or a pen, who knows? And it's the backbone of especially more traditional businesses. But it's definitely an underutilized and underappreciated segment that more SaaS businesses should put a lot more time and effort into. Because if you can harmonize the system where your money is and your actual money, your physical dollars with your conceptual dollars, which is where your CRM is in play, that's where you start to unlock real quick great financial reporting.

Tom (00:23:28) - And if you ask most people that small businesses where their challenges are with putting together a board deck or a pitch deck or getting investment, it's probably running due diligence between the CRM and the actual money in the bank and where it came from. Then you should be thinking, do I have an ERP that integrates with my CRM and then does my CRM integrate with the marketing automation system? Once you've got that kind of foundation, every single thing needs to integrate with one of those three and it needs to do it logically. So if you are thinking about collecting cash it needs to be built onto the ERP. If you're thinking about visualizing data, build it on the CRM in the middle cuz that's where all roads meet. That's Rome. If you're thinking about, planning your social it needs to connect into your MAT and you always have to link it to one of those three that will knock out 75% of the tools out there. Especially if you're using more niche technologies. And so it's a great way of just cutting down your short list. And it's also the easiest way to refuse a cold call or refuse to speak to a vendor.

Tom (00:24:39) - Obviously if you use the enterprise standards, the big tools out there, but then you need to start thinking about the workflows and whether the workflow is symbiotic with what you've already built. If it's gonna require a huge amount of people-change, is it really worth it? And if it is, then prepare yourself for some change management and give up the rest of your life and priorities Cause that will become–

Tom (00:25:09) - what all your time is sucked into. And then I always like to look at rate of innovation and so this is the one I would recommend. Anyone who's more mature in the world of looking at tools, how often do they release new features? How often do they build new value? You know, are they three or four times a year pumping out useful value building capabilities or are they just patch fixing and bug fixing? Has the tool you wanna buy been produced by a company that was recently acquired? And does that company wanna invest in its ongoing innovation or absorb it into some other leviathan tool? When you look at some of the more traditional tools that no longer really exists, it's where they were bought in sunset by whoever bought them and they bought it maybe to get access to the customer list, maybe to get access to the data. Who knows? So that's what I always look for. I want a tool that's gonna live and grow with my business rather than something that isn't necessarily gonna go the distance or might be sunset pretty soon.

Ariana (00:26:16) - Wow. They're truly in that response. So many things to unpack that I couldn't agree with more when it comes to setting up the suite, first of all, just connecting your marketing tool with your sales CRM. So tracking all your sales opportunities with your financial tool, those three things absolutely need to go in harmony. And then I'm on the other side of operations that should integrate into your project management tool, our communications tool, your HR tools. So when you're setting up operations, I think sometimes what people get wrong is, they're like, why are they taking so much time to decide on these tools? And it's because you're not just looking for one tool to integrate into one tool. You're looking for about 8 to 10 tools to integrate seamlessly with each other at a minimum. Also, when we're talking about innovation, I do have a question for you. Since Salesforce bought Slack, have you seen, I don't know if you have seen a shift in how Salesforce has been doing releases? Have you seen anything? This is just more like a side note curiosity.

Tom (00:27:20) - There is now a Slack section in Salesforce's release notes and as someone who already loved Slack, the biggest feature that came out recently is that visual workflows you build in Salesforce can be deployed through Slack. If you have ever wanted to put data into Salesforce, now is the golden age because you can get Slack…you could maybe, you know, you've got a forecast meeting every Wednesday, so every Tuesday evening a Slack bot can shoot them a message with a linked form where they update a deal they haven't updated for 14 days and suddenly, suddenly they'll probably do it. And normally it would just be me Slacking them saying, can you update it? And now I've got something to do it for me. So that's been really big. I definitely think–

Ariana (00:28:11) - I'm curious.

Tom (00:28:12) - We're definitely gonna see a lot more in that area as well. There is definitely gonna be a lot coming. That is a harmonization of Salesforce's conversational intelligence and natural language processing with Slack itself.

Ariana (00:28:26) - Hmm. It's cause it's been less, less than a year, a year maybe since they purchased it. I am very curious to see how those two tools evolve together, especially now living under the same umbrella. It should be really curious. So when it comes to revenue operations, revenue technology operations, what do you think people get wrong? If you could set the record straight on something right now, what would you want to set the record on?

Tom (00:28:57) - I think there's two parts of it. Number one is that people think in the wonderful world of revenue operations, everything is a report away. And they very frequently will come up with something they think and want it proven with data and then they will say they're data driven. They are not, they are not even data informed or data curious. They are simply looking at a chart that enforces an opinion they already hold. I think shifting that mindset to looking at the data first and then having your opinions, which is being truly data driven, I think that's gonna take a very long time, but I think it's up to everyone in revenue operations to permanently and only speak from that point of view because that's what we should be all building towards. And that leads me very nicely into part two, which is, I've heard it said before, there are technical Rev Ops people and non-technical Rev Ops people, very controversial point of view, but I don't believe there are non-technical revenue operations people. I think there are technical Rev Op people who are Rev Op people, and then I think there are people who are a laggard from the sales operations era who are calling themselves revenue operations because it's still such a nebulous term, but they aren't really embracing what revenue operations is, which is de-siloing and centralizing workflows and creating an understanding of where your revenue and money is coming from within an organization.

Ariana (00:30:30) - Absolutely. Well this gets, I think to the next part, whenever we chat, you always put me in such a good mood. You're a very positive human being, but I am sure that your days are not always filled with sunshine and rainbows. So what would you say is the hardest part of operations? What is the thing that when you wake up in the morning and you're excited for the day, you're like, Ooh, but I'm not excited for that part. What do you think Is that thing?

Tom (00:30:55) - Probably delivering bad news virtually every hour of every day. Our role beyond everything else, our role is to hold the entire go-to-market organization accountable. And especially as I've become more and more senior, my role is to hold everyone accountable to the numbers. I often see things first. I've been told before that I've exposed the company's, confidential information to other members of staff because in a meeting I predicted something that happened to the company a few months later. So I had no actual knowledge of the confidential information. The exec team did. But from looking at numbers, I could make assumptions. And that's a terrifying position for a lot of companies to accept. That there are people who are good enough at looking at numbers. They know when there's gonna be redundancies or they know when there's gonna be job losses. They know when the end of a cash runway is even without knowing when the end of a cash runway is.

Tom (00:32:00) - They know performance data that, you know, only certain people are supposed to know. So I think the hard part for me is as we go through almost the evolution we just spoke about where people become more data literate and understand what's possible in technology, I'm always slightly nervous to shine the light on things that maybe aren't so great about businesses because suddenly there can be quite a big panic reflex and people wonder why they never would call that before. Why did the head of sales not tell me that half the sales team hadn't hit quota in four quarters? I don't know. And that's not my job to know, but often the reaction to scary things in the data is either the data's wrong or that I don't have enough experience to speak about something, but that's not it. I'm very happy to say, these days I've got a lot better at choosing the companies I work for and especially right now I work with one of the most data literate exec teams I've ever worked with.

Tom (00:33:07) - And it's so empowering to go into every meeting, and have everyone be there with an open mind and almost an appetite for the bad news. And when there is bad news, it's never, you must be wrong. It's always, can we dive into this, this, and this, and then can you come back with some recommendations, which is what I've always dreamt of hearing. But it's always those conversations about performance that are really challenging because people hate being called out. But the truth is sometimes, especially in small SaaS businesses, they accept a lot of dead weight and a lot of dead wood and they always think things are gonna get better. It very rarely does. And I've definitely been in the position before where I've got into a meeting and had to say, because of this data and these results, the only possible recommendation is that we've replaced this team and given another go or completely re-strategize or restructure. And maybe that's come to pass and maybe what I said had nothing to do with that. But then I've been in a very tricky situations because of it. And I think that's really unfair. If anything, we should be empowering the people who have that foresight rather than castigating them and getting annoyed that someone said we weren't performing when we weren't. Maybe if we're told we're not performing, we should figure out how to perform better.

Ariana (00:34:32) - Absolutely. Well there's also, you know, I hate to say it, but if you are looking at the data, the narratives that you're being told, you immediately know they're not true. So that's, I think that is the hardest part is that, you know, if I were to give a tip to leadership, you know, when you're speaking, just assume that everybody has spoken about all the data that they're aware of it, don't try and sugarcoat things, but also we don't need to be doomsday people as well. There is a, there's a way of speaking about the reality of something without being dramatic or whatever it may be. It’s just better to approach it that way. Yeah. That you can also talk about something before it becomes a necessity. Right. By the time that you and I are involved in conversations, things are really an issue and they don't need to get there if we had talked about it 3, 4, 5, 6 months before. And that's kind of the, you know, being able to have that feedback loop happen more frequently with data and having to have those real conversations earlier to prevent those types of things, that's really what it's about. It actually to just makes things smoother across the board

Tom (00:35:41) - And not having the fear to have those conversations. Like yes, it's a hard conversation, but it could, it could actually lead to really positive change unless you leave it too late, in which case the damage is already done, especially for marketing. Marketing can be very, very expensive and probably anyone who's worked in a startup has seen it go wrong and very often you spend huge amounts of money on it with very little return or you get an amazing return and it's an art form. Like I always say, I'm glad not to be a marketer because great marketers and good marketers are worlds apart. And that's the kind of thing where very often I'll hear, oh, let's just see how the next campaign goes. And before, you know, there's been six or seven figures spent for no return and no one's really willing to have that difficult conversation. And actually you could have solved that six months in advance if you had looked at the data and been more open to those difficult discussions.

Ariana (00:36:44) - Yeah. Oh, a hundred percent. Well this gets to my last question, which is if you aren't scared off by the things that are hard in this role, and if you aren't scared off by the misconceptions of this, what advice would you give to somebody that's interested in getting into revenue technology? Where should they begin?

Tom (00:37:06) - Ah, this is my favorite question. I'm so glad you've asked it. There is a world of knowledge out there called the worldwide web and it constantly blows my mind how underutilized it is as a resource. There is no, there is no business challenge most businesses face that hasn't been probably tackled by far greater minds than ourselves before. And by piecing together multiple strategies and understanding outcomes and trawling through forums especially in my case tool websites and technology websites, you can learn some incredible things. People often ask me how I figured out how to do recursive ARR equations in a CRM, how to get realtime views of lagging data, how to…I'm trying to think of all the clever things I've done, how to build my own CPQ and I'm like, oh, I have no idea how I figured it out.

Tom (00:38:05) - I never learned it, no one ever taught me it. I just pieced all these little things together that I read somewhere on the worldwide web and it all came together into this solution. So for anyone looking to get into, in my opinion, the greatest of all career paths, I think unleash your curiosity and your hunger to learn. And if you don't have a hunger to learn, I don't know whether operations is the world for you, but if you wanna learn something new every day and you want to constantly be able to push yourself, not just by virtue of the fact you are probably in quite a difficult role, but because this field is still being written, it's such a great opportunity. The thing that makes me jump outta bed every morning with glee after two espressos is the idea I could literally be coming up with something today that is at the bleeding edge of my field and that will be adopted universally in five years time when I eventually write it all down in a book.

Tom (00:39:06) - Who knows? But it's so exciting to think that we could be coming up with solutions to problems that very few people have really faced yet, and solving it in innovative ways that use different technologies in ways maybe those technologies weren't even designed for. It's having the willingness to fail, go and try it. Go and read something, give it a go yourself. And if you can't do it, go and read it again and see if you missed something and then maybe bring in something you've thought of before and then maybe come and speak to me and see if I've got any ideas and put it all in there together and see what comes out. Because odds are, if you're in the world of operations, you are used to iterating and testing and just giving it a go. And that's where all the coolest stuff happens.

Ariana (00:39:58) - Yeah, I and that's where I just to plus one on what you said, that's where I find joy…it’s literally figuring out the thing I thought was a possible and I just googled the right thing and the right words and I found a solution and oh my God, I just saved myself an hour's time because I figured out how to do this thing. Now we are at the end of our journey here, Luigi, my dog is equally as excited. So I'm gonna ask some rapid fire questions to you to wrap up the day. And this is more from a human level, we're gonna, we're gonna take the operations-- we've literally stolen so much information from your brain. I wrote a whole thing of post notes here. So this is really about as a human and I'm gonna kick off with what morning rituals do you start your day with besides, I guess the double espresso. Now we know that.

Tom (00:40:47) - So I wake up, turn the shower on, turn my coffee machine on, shower and then drink the espresso. And then I pretty much get on my first call of the day. I think, I've really embraced the world of hybrid work and virtual work and you never know where I'll be at any time during the day or whether I'm working or not. I'm always vaguely available. So I wouldn't say I'm that ritualistic, but I need a lot of coffee in the morning to fire up my brain. And then the biggest challenge for me is the end of the day, slowing it back down and trying to get to sleep.

Ariana (00:41:22) - Well, and that's my next question, which is what do you do to wind down? How do you take the day and step put it on the shelves to get some rest?

Tom (00:41:30) - I've realized one thing about myself is my brain is happiest when it's in hyperdrive and so I always need to be doing something that fully engages my brain or it will just go back to the last problem I was trying to solve at work. So I play an awful lot of video games and I really love theory crafting video games. So if there's ever maths to figure out about an upcoming change in a game, sometimes I'll be building a spreadsheet about the damage my fireball will do instead of building a spreadsheet to work out a sales commission plan.

Ariana (00:42:03) - Okay. Well I'm gonna give an a prompted question, which is what video game are you currently playing? What's the current obsession?

Tom (00:42:09) - I always am playing League of Legends. It's my number one favorite game that I always go back to. I'm really excited about the upcoming, the next expansion of World of Warcraft. It's coming out in two weeks. And then I'm also playing a lot of Outriders on my console, which is like a space sci-fi game that's just so good, quite dark and apocalyptic, but really, really fun.

Ariana (00:42:34) - Ooh, I'm gonna check those out. From a reading book standpoint, what are you currently reading, whether it's a book or an audio book, what's on the docket?

Tom (00:42:44) - Yeah, so I read an awful lot of science fiction. Again, for me, my brain's got to be trying to do a few gymnastics. So my go-to author is Adrian Chaikovsky and I'm currently reading one of his many, many books. But I would massively recommend him to any fans of sci-fi and fantasy.

Ariana (00:43:04) - Whoah. I just keep thinking of Charlotte's Web on steroids. Yeah, that's all I keep thinking. What is your favorite quote?

Tom (00:43:14) - My favorite quote is actually I think on my LinkedIn. And it comes from TJ Watson originally. So the person who essentially helped IBM go through its biggest growth era and really set the stage for IBM to be who they are today. And that consequently their AI Watson was named after, which is fear less the label of crackpot than the stigma of conformity. And that's the kind of mantra to take into everything I do.

Ariana (00:43:45) - What along that line, what do you think at this point in your life is the most important lesson that you've learned?

Tom (00:43:51) - Ooh, this is a very me response, but having an unerring sense of self, knowing what makes me happy, what excites me, my own patterns. So I think yeah, knowing yourself and being confident in it, being willing to make sacrifices and scary choices to pursue what you believe makes you happy.

Ariana (00:44:14) - My last question for you is what do you wanna be when you grow up?

Tom (00:44:20) - Ah, a great question. I would like to be Chief Innovation Officer of Salesforce, probably like I have no idea if I'll still want that by the time I'm remotely capable of being it, but I built my whole career on learning this technology and it's served me so well because it's grown way faster than me and it's given me such a huge opportunity to develop my own expertise and find my own niche in the world. And it's been the gateway alongside Google Sheets and Excel to falling in love with a very niche area that it turns out there's a huge amount of demand for these days. So I'd love to one day go and figure out what's next for it.

Ariana (00:45:10) - Tom, this has been such an energizing conversation. I am so grateful for you sharing your brain and all of the things that we have to look at in our lives that we don't really think about. I'm so thankful to you and I really wanna make sure that people can find you. So where should people find you?

Tom (00:45:28) - The best place to find me is definitely LinkedIn. I’m pretty active and I always read it and my handle is just slash TomAndrews.

Ariana (00:45:38) - Perfect. Thank you again so much and thank you to our wonderful audience for listening to Secret Ops. Please follow us wherever you find your podcast and check us out secret-ops.com. We'll see you next time.