Chris Marientis

We called them coaches in those days, because we were a managed services company.

And what we saw is our gross margin starting to go up because we're able to do a lot of the work in a more automated way.

be able to do reporting easier to our customers.

And we saw a lot of benefits to that.

So when you scale with technology, it takes human error out and it gives you easier ways to implement things.

Around 2017, we got that software mature enough that we said, let's give this to our customers, and let's test the assumption that SMBs will actually use software, and not only use the software, but use all the different pieces of the software, because we're all in one.

We had a lot of different pieces.

Will they really get that idea?

When we launched it to our customers in 2017, we saw

adoption month over month just continued to go up and it was going up with all the different pieces of the functionality that we provided to them we knew we're on to something we learned a lot from that and then we said let's launch the next generation of this software and leapfrog from where we thought we were and we did that in 2019 and it was clearly the best product in the industry

clearly the best product in the industry.

But as we tried to start to now shift to selling software, my leadership team in sales, in customer support, in marketing, really wasn't able to make that shift with us.

And I knew that was super apparent.

So in 2020, I started thinking about new leadership and brought in somebody like Mike Pierce, who had four different scale opportunities, at scale opportunities in selling into the SMB space.

And had a really different approach than what I was at that time doing.

And the rest is history in terms of our growth.

So what this playbook sort of consists of, and I'm thinking about this word at executive level, is number one, the idea of committing to a process.

And that commitment means spending some money on the enablement of that process, not only in talent, but also in technology and also in leadership thinking about how to implement that process.

And you might be wrong.

We were committed to a process before.