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Intro: I’m Paul Higgins, an ex-corporate executive turned business owner who, for five years, struggled to grow a cloud Consulting business whilst battling a chronic disease. With the help of mentors and experts, I got the business model right, built a sales and marketing engine, and developed a high-performing team that ended in a successful exit. I received a kidney transplant from a mate, and now on my second life, I dedicate my time to helping other Cloud Consultants go quickly with less effort to enjoy life. Detecting an accent, I'm an Aussie working globally from Melbourne, Australia. I interview successful Cloud Consultants sharing their scaling story to give you inspiration and practical tips. I have dedicated experts for Cloud Consultants on the show to save you time and money by working with the right people. If you want to scale quickly with less effort to enjoy life, you're in the right place. Let's get started.

Speaker 1 (0:55): I'm Paul Higgins and welcome to the Cloud Consultant Show Episode No. 484. Today's topic is going from 0 to 5 million in four years and you're going to learn why they picked to be multi-cloud salesforce from the start. Second is their sources of growth. 70% comes from 1, 30% from the other and learn what they are and how you can capitalize on those yourself. And the third thing is when to hire a sales director and when to step out of the way. If it's your first time welcome and if you love what you hear please subscribe. That's for cloud consultants. So sometimes that's a turn not everyone understands but it's basically if you consult and implement a SaaS platform you're in the right place. nd for regulars really appreciate when I hear from you just email me at [email protected] also mentioned maybe a guest could even be you that you'd love to have on the show or a topic and for the full transcript and more information just go to Paulhigginsmentoring.com/podcast.

Speaker 1 (1:55): So before we go into the interview with Adam, I'd like to thank our two sponsors one is the cloud consultants collective. It's a collective of peers helping each other with business questions. Yes there's google, there's youtube, there's now chat GPT and also but believe me this is the best place to get your answers from people with practical experience done very quickly. Just check it out it's for free at the cloudconsultantscollective.com. And the second is Workflow Academy. Are your top performers almost feeling overwhelmed? Well, we have an innovative solution for you. What we do is go and provide you highly trained junior talent to supplement your top performers so they can do what they're best at. You can find out more about this game changing solution at paulhigginsmentoring.com/WFA. 

Speaker 1 (2:45): Our guest today is Adam, who's the co-founder, Managing director of Skie Solutions. And they are an APAC Salesforce partner. He's passionate and a creative technologist with an extensive consulting background and history in the consumer goods industry. He had a career change from a professional musician, a band drummer to a business owner. And Adam ihass a different approach to business, culture and engagement that connects people and ideas. And he definitely shares that today. What I'll do now is hand you over to Adam Troughear from Skie Solutions. Great to have you here Adam.

Speaker 2 (3:21): Thank you. Good to finally be here.

Speaker 1 (3:23): Yeah, well look, we had a great conversation. We both live in the same town, which is rare for me. Normally, I'm interviewing salesforce partners from all around the world, but it's great to have you by default, you know what I actually mean by like today you're in Sydney. So that's just the way the world works. But yeah, I thoroughly enjoyed the conversations we've had and to, you know, to grow to $5 million in top line in 4 years is no min feat. So that's what we want to dig into today. But before we get into that as a specific topic, why don't we talk about your ideal client, what problems you solve? So who are your ideal clients and what problems you solve for them?

Speaker 2 (4:00): Yeah, sure. Our ideal client is really someone who's invested and committed on a transformation journey. Someone who's looking to digitally transform their business. We obviously operate on Salesforce and that's a fantastic platform for us to be able to have all the tools and the toolkit to be able to do a lot of different things with businesses. But at the end of the day, a tool is only one part, it's one thing and without will, without people, without a vision behind it, it's just another widget. So for us, people who really believe in the journey that they're about to take and are open to having someone work with them, that's our ideal customer. The problems we solve - Like I was talking about with Salesforce, it's such a broad tool. So it allows us to solve a lot of different problems. But really, I would say it comes down to kind of two main broad buckets. You've either got an engagement challenge. The business wants to better engage with their customers in one way or another, whether that's on the marketing side, whether that's on the sales side, and they want to better engage with them and understand and record them to have more meaningful conversations, something like that. Or it's a productivity play. Basically, they want to get more productivity out of the business, improve efficiency, something like that. And sometimes they're very much hand in hand. So those are typically the two kinds of challenges that we solve and they manifest in different ways, with different customers.

Speaker 1 (5:38): Right, and any consistency in verticals or do you play multi-industry, multi-vertical?

Speaker 2 (5:43): That's a very good question because we're just kind of going through this identity reshape, I guess, over the last year. And I think it's come very much just as we've matured and grown as a business. So we typically find ourselves a lot in retail and consumer goods, a lot in real estate property, high-tech and professional services, and, finally, enough sports and associations. Those are the industries that we've kind of got a concentration of our clients in. But we've sort of come from being, I guess, a salesforce at best while ago specialists, generalists. And I think that's a really good badge of honor. It means that we're able to come in and our team is pliable, goes in and just actively listens, understands the problem, tries to build some empathy for their business, their challenge, what they're going through, and then be able to use a tool like Salesforce to solve that problem. So yeah, I guess from still got a really broad set of customers, but now we have those kind of typical concentrations in the industries.

Speaker 1 (6:47): And cloud-wise, are you multi-cloud? 

Speaker 2 (6:50): Yeah. We started out myself and my two co-founders, intentionally multi-cloud from day one. So myself, Sales and Strategy, my business partner, David, Core Consulting, and then my other business partner, Matt on the marketing side. So, yeah, very intentionally from the beginning, looking at Salesforce as a whole solution, rather than coming from a, you know, being a core partner and seeing an opportunity in marketing or being a marketing partner and seeing an opportunity in core, we really set out to be an entire platform partner.

Speaker 1 (7:27): Yeah, great. I've interviewed and spoke to both, right, but I do think, you know, especially if you look at your sales and hubspot, which, you know, is growing at a rate of knots as well, it's, yeah, multicloud, I think, is where it is. And then maybe picking verticals with a multi cloud approach. And I think now, like you said, to improve that customer experience, it's got to be right throughout the value chain, rather than think you can just segment anymore, like we used to be able to do in the good old days. So look, like I said, you've had fantastic growth, you've five million and four years. Where's most of the source of that growth? Where's it come from? Has it come from Salesforce itsefl? Has it come from your own self-generated leads? Give us a bit of an indication where that growth's come from.

Speaker 2 (8:12): Yeah, most of it, I'd say probably at least 80% of that has come directly from Salesforce, although our customer retention is great. So we see roughly 50-50 of our ongoing revenue from new logos to existing repeat business. But in Salesforce ecosystem, certainly in Australia, I know it's not exactly the same in other geographies. But certainly here, the partnership and the alignment with Salesforce is absolutely key. Salesforce does incredibly well. It's got just recently the 10th year in a row of the Gartner number one CRM with market share of 23 or 24% of something. So it obviously generates a lot of interest in itself. So for us aligning and putting a lot of our energy in partnering through their alliances and channel team is really out of the focus. We do a lot of our own marketing as well and that's come through especially in the last couple of years and it sort of evolved a little bit more from just personal networking of myself and some of the senior leaders to starting to engage more in the ecosystem and then also more externally outside and looking at non-salesforce external conventions and exhibitions and all that sort of stuff.

Speaker 1 (9:35): Yeah. Great. And you talked about salesforce, let's say 80%, like you said, and, you know, some partners, they start straight away and then just madly scramble to handle the volume of work and just hope that it works or others like do generate a bit of their own first to build the team up and then open the fire hose. Like, for you guys, how was it in that first 12 months? Was it, you know, the former or the latter or a bit of a combo? 

Speaker 2 (10:01): Um, we very lucky. I mean, we've been in the salesforce game for, uh, I've been in the ecosystem for about eight or nine years. So I was on a previous salesforce partner. So I had good relationships. One of salesforce’s, core tenants is trust, right? So when we started our business, I was very lucky that I already had trust and good relationships with some Salesforce execs, you know, Canned execs and some of the sales teams. So we were very fortunate, we were able to start and be able to leverage those relationships and get into some decent customer straightaway. And then also, some of my own customers from my personal network. So we were very lucky. And look, I also think we started that a very interesting time. We started the business in January of 2019. We all know what happened on March 2020. And honestly, when the pandemic hit, you know, myself and my business partners, we were freaking out. What have we done? We've taken the plunge, started this business and got a couple of people working for it for us and what's going to happen now. And I think what we saw was just incredible growth. I think if anything, the pandemic for us made people look at their priorities and go, you know what, that CRM thing that's been kicking around on our to-do list for the last couple of years, we really need this. This whole cloud thing, you know, being able to have people work remotely and wherever and be productive, there's something to that. So for us, we were exceptionally lucky, we were able to pivot, obviously, to be able to work remotely and whatnot. And our customer base, especially at that time was small businesses, they were generally a bit more nimble, they could pivot quicker because of our customer sizes that we were looking at when we were brand new. And it actually really grew for us. So that first kind of year, 2 years, it was a combination of trust and the relationships that I had with Salesforce. And then what sure is timing of the pandemic for us. Not so much for a lot of other people, but for us, it really worked well.

Speaker 1 (12:19): Yeah. That's great. And, and, you know, around, even if you take it to today, you will talk about your sales director in a moment. But, you know, what are some unique ways that you work with A.E.s, you know, is that, give us a little bit of your secret sources to how you continue those great relationships.

Speaker 2 (12:36): It's just people, people are people, people want to work with people they like, they trust, they get along with. So, investing time and energy into building those relationships, nurturing them, and trying to build empathy and respect people's motivations, right? So, you know, Salesforce AEs, they've obviously got a job to do, and you know, driven to customer success, sell licenses, these are the things that they need to do, and set businesses up for the long term. So if we're aligned there and motivated to do the same things, and just recognize that this is the game, this is what we need to do, that's how you win. It seems really simple, but that's all it is, you know, this is services as a people business, you're selling people's time, their ability to deliver, you're working with people, you know, Salesforce itself obviously is a great product, but we're not selling that, that's the Salesforce AE’s job. Our job is to sell and deliver on the possibilities of that software.

Speaker 1 (13:39): Yeah, great. And as far as, like you said, you said, this fantastic growth due to COVID, which, and it's not only COVID, but that was a big fuel on the fire for you guys, which was fantastic, right? From what could have been a very poor situation, I feel for people listening. And if you weren't one of the lucky ones, I definitely feel for you. But most of us were, right? Most of us sort of rode that wave. What about for the next 12 months, 18 months? Are you guys still forecasting significant growth in the business? Or are you saying, well, there was a one off event now, you know, the reserve bank keeps putting up inches, what are you guys doing from a forecast of growth for the next 12 months, two years?

Speaker 2 (14:20): Yeah. We're still seeing growth. We did five mil last FY, we're on track to do about eight this FY. We're looking at least 10 in the forecast for FY24. Again, we're investing in our sales team. We’ve open Singapore recently, and we're starting to see some good traction there. We've made some big bets on customers, on segments, and also in Singapore, and just working myself and our leadership team just working relentlessly towards that. I know that it's a certainly over the last five months or so it's been a you know tumultuous kind of time in Salesforce with everything that's been happening there but again it all comes in my opinion it all comes back down to fostering those relationships doubling down on who we are and just making sure that when we're talking the talk, that we can walk the walk basically. So for us we're lucky we're still seeing growth, still projecting growth. You know diversifying as well of course like with clouds, we're really leaning into the data cloud and the new marketing products and you know from a geographical perspective as well, obviously, I was saying we've got Singapore that's really starting to hit it stride. So just trying to make sure that we keep up pace. We can't rest. Inherently, this industry moves at a million miles an hour. And there's always fantastic people out there that are starting up new businesses and whatnot. And if we don't take advantage of those opportunities or see and recognise some of these things that are happening in the industry that are challenging, but with all challenges, there's opportunities. So if we don't see them and sort of reframe the way that we're thinking about things and see it as an opportunity, see it as a positive, we'll get left behind. So that's fundamentally what we're doing is just plowing ahead.

Speaker 1 (16:14):  Yeah, and look, the sales partners that I've interviewed and your friends, may comes to mind that successful out and exit to media monks, you know, like, if you choose this path, you have to keep running. Like you've got to keep in front of the game. And I think you guys are doing it well. And that’s showing by your growth that you've got now but also your future growth. Now, just to pivot a little on the conversation around sales, because obviously this growth comes through sales is, how sales director on for a couple of years now. What was sort of the pivotal moment for you guys to decide that that was the case that you had to sort of, you know, step back a little and bring someone in because I know often employing that person is the hardest thing you're going to do as a business owner. So tell us a little bit about how you went around about doing that.

Speaker 2 (16:59): Yeah. So it was the guy that Dan Cambridge that I've worked with previously at another Salesforce partner. So there was history there, a lot of trust. He's got great relationships as well. And look, we just recognized, myself and the other co-founders, we recognized that if we wanted to scale the business and kind of do what we wanted, we needed to bring on and have the right senior leaders, have the right people that could be purely focused on those areas with sole relentless focus. Otherwise, you become too scattered. You can only chase one rabbit. I had a fantastic manager before my Salesforce life firm when I was at Swiss and it was funny, I wanted to be a CIO. I was like, you know, my path was I want to be a CIO. And then I saw this woman Felicity, come into the business. And I saw what a great CIO was. And I was like, yeah, I'm not that. She's incredible. But I've got a different, you know, set of skills. Anyway, she was always saying you can only chase one rabbit. So for me, it was recognizing that for us as a business to do what we needed to do, we had to bring on some great heavy hitters. And in the sales space, that was that was Dan.

Speaker 1 (18:18): And was that sort of funded out of working capital or did you seek some funding at the time to bring on those key senior roles?

Speaker 2 (18:25): No. Everything's been bootstrapped. We were completely completely debt free.

Speaker 1 (18:29): Yeah. I think given the increase in interest rates both here, but also most of you listening in the US, it's a good place to be. And I know that you’re still involved in large sales, but when do you know it's time to step in and when do you know that it's time to not chase that rabbit?

Speaker 2 (18:49):  That's a really good question. I think that Dan and I have just got a pretty good understanding and intuitively. No, and look, I have complete trust in Dan. So unless Dan comes to me and sort of, you know, we're in a conversation about a particular customer or, you know, it happens to be a customer that comes through me in a personal network. Or something like that. You know, I let him do his thing. So it's really a natural thing. We don't have a specific set of guidelines that if a deal is looking like it's over this threshold then I want to be involved. It's nothing like that. It's a lot more fluid especially look if you know if a deal is a bit longer, they need a bit more executive engagement, they feel like they want multiple senior stakeholders there or we get the sense that that is going to you know help grease the wheels of the sales cycle then sure that's what we would talk about and what we would do but it's not a structured thing. It's very much a sense that we have just built.

Speaker 1 (19:50): And I think you know like it's going to ask you a question about your leadership style but I think you've just summed that up well right. You trust your people, you know the tools and everything they need. But yeah, I think that sort of sums up that. The last question I'll ask you is about, you know, some of you directly, you've talked about Salesforce and getting leads to get that 5 million mark and under 8 and 10 as you say, from your own marketing perspective and self-generating leads, what's worked really well in that, in that space?

Speaker 2 (20:18): Personal networking, to be honest, I mean, that's really the main sense of it. We've done a few things with LinkedIn campaign and whatnot, obviously participating in the Salesforce ecosystem, like, you know, sponsors at World Tour. Salesforce is a massive, incredible apparatus that is set up truly to help you. So, work with your partner team, work within that framework that's there and that's there for a reason. There's so many tools there, there's so many things there that you can leverage. So that's been really helpful, but I would say that for us at the moment has basically just reinforce and add validity to the personal networking, going out, doing great work with our customers and then getting referrals. That's really where it comes down to. I would say it's the same with everyone. The best source of marketing is your existing customers. If you've got a happy customer, and a happy customer recommends you to their friend or something like that. I mean, half the job's done. There's no better reference than that. Again, fostering that, making sure that you're going back, having conversations with your key customers. Nurturing those relationships is paramount. It's very simple. Again, it comes back to what I was saying before, people, especially in a services business. It's all people. You're working with people that you want to work with, that you like, that you trust, that you build a bit of a relationship and rapport with. It's really that simple.

Speaker 1 (21:49): Yeah, yeah. And look, you know, and sometimes simple things are hard to do, right? And I think sometimes we get lost in the technology, we get lost in the features, and we forget that there's real people dealing with real business problems that want real results. So I think that in context, and that you can have the growth like Adam’s had. So what we're going to do now is change gears, Adam. So I'm going to ask you four questions and we get some rapid fire responses. So you're ready for that?

Speaker 2 (22:13): Let's go.

Speaker 1 (22:13):  All right, let's do it. So what are some daily sales habits that help you to scale?

Speaker 2 (22:18): I'm a huge fan of personal productivity. So I was using a combination of salesforce to do us different things there just to, you know, you can't be an elephant. You can't remember everything. So using those tools to make sure that you presented as best you can and you sort of never left any stone unturned, so to speak. So that was probably my main thing there was just going through and leveraging those to make sure that you just didn't forget anything.

Speaker 1 (22:44): Yeah, great. The next is for you and the growth of the business, where do you go and find more. What are your resources, people? How do you constantly learn to stay ahead of that fast-moving curve?

Speaker 2 (22:58): Stay curious, stay humble. So I try to stay active on LinkedIn and it's really the only social that I'm involved in. I'm actually terrible at contributing. The first time I've really taken a podcast and trying to create content, but I'm a big consumer of content. Read, stay up to date on as much as you can. Try to connect the dots on what's happening, what's going going on out there. Good and bad. And also just staying really curious and up to date on current events, trying to keep as even killed as you can on politics, world events, all of these different things, because they all have an interesting effect. And then also, probably more importantly, when you meet people, you can have a conversation with them and instantly try and build a bit of rapport, because you never know what someone's going to be interested in. I try to stay like your pub quizzes, right? Have great general knowledge, because it's going to come in handy at some stage.

Speaker 1 (23:57): Yeah, yeah, totally agree. Totally agree. The next is what's one wish we could grant you?

Speaker 2 (24:03): More time. More time for the family, more time for golf, more time for playing music again. Yeah, time is our absolutely our greatest asset and it's extremely precious so you've got to be very very careful with it you know. Just more time. More time is what everyone wants I think.

Speaker 1 (24:20): The last one is you know what do you know now four years in that you wish you have known of earlier?

Speaker 2 (24:25): How important your leadership team is and the alignment from the very beginning. I've got a great leadership team, great co-founders you know some great stakeholders with Dan and Yvonne, and we've all been aligned. But really drilling into that and making sure that the definition and the understanding of that alignment is exactly the same. That is probably the thing that I wish I had of known or or I think I knew but I didn't really nurture enough and we've got there and we have great you know constructive conversations and a few fiery ones which is great but I'd say just you know the importance of team the importance of team I think I've known that but I didn't really fully understand how massively important it is.

Speaker 1 (25:21): Yeah, well look, you're listening to Adam episode 484 of the cloud consultants. Will talk a little bit more about where all the links and everything is. But Adam thanks a lot for coming on today and sharing your experience. Well done for you and the co-founders but the whole team and what you've achieved. And I look forward to getting an update on when you hit that 10 million mark. So, well done and keep up the great work. 

Speaker 2 (25:44): Thank you very much. Cheers.

Speaker 1 (25:46): Great interview with Adam and you know, their growth is phenomenal and it's going to continue to do that. So whatever you learnt please give him a shout out on LinkedIn. He said that he's on LinkedIn often and send a photo of that. Also if you've got some peers whether it be Salesforce partners or any other platform, why don't you share it with them. They might get some great ideas from this and think you're a rock star for doing it. Check out our solo shows and if you're scaling your cloud consulting business don't forget our blueprint. You can find out more about that at paulhigginsmentoring.com.blueprint. And please take action to grow with less effort and more reward.