My Favorite Startup

People ask me about the best company I've been part of. I usually give them a name and a year and we move on.

The honest answer is that it isn't a company.

Twenty-six years of marriage and three kids. A house that has been loud since the first one showed up, and a calendar that mostly belongs to somebody else's practice schedule.

That's the thing I'm proudest of building, and I think it's the only one where nobody could have swapped in for me.

I've spent more than twenty years selling technology into banks and credit unions. Six President's Club years between 2012 and 2017. Those were good years on paper, and they cost something at home.

What raising kids taught me about running a team

My father was a full Colonel in the Air Force. Structure was not optional in our house.

I kept some of that and left some of it behind. What I kept is that people do better when they know what's expected and when the standard doesn't move around based on how the week is going. Kids read an inconsistent parent fast. Sales reps read an inconsistent manager faster.

What I left behind is the volume. You can hold a hard line quietly, and it took me a long time to learn that.

There is a person attached to every number

A lot of my work now is math. Win rate at 25%, so you want 4x coverage, and 5x if you'd like to sleep. Model attainment at 77 to 80% and build the plan from there.

I like that work. It's clean and it doesn't flatter anybody.

But a rep sitting at 40% to plan in August has somebody at home who already knows it. A founder watching the runway has a kid asking why he's on the phone again on a Saturday.

That doesn't mean you go soft on the number. I think it means you tell people the truth in September instead of letting them find it out in December. Generally the kind thing and the disciplined thing turn out to be the same thing, just done earlier.

Why I stopped keeping the two separate

For a long time I ran work and home as two different operations. Different voice, different standard.

That was mostly ego, I think. The patience it takes to sit on a nine month bank deal without pushing is the same patience it takes to let a teenager work something out on their own. The discipline of a weekly pipeline review is not that far from the discipline of showing up to the thing on a Tuesday night when you're wiped out.

I'm better at both since I quit pretending they had nothing to do with each other.

I run Solano Advisory Group now, working with fintech and B2B SaaS companies between $5M and $20M in ARR that sell into banks and credit unions. Good work, and it keeps me home a lot more than the road years did.

Anyway. When somebody asks about my favorite startup, that's the one. Still early and definitely unprofitable. I wouldn't trade it.