Podcast Episode 53: Firing Yourself as CEO with Charlotte Whitmore of Analytics Pros

Hello, Paul Adams here. Welcome to Sound Financial Bites, where we help you with bite-sized pieces of financial and life knowledge to help you design and build a good life.

Hello, and welcome to Sound Financial Bites. My name is Paul Adams, president and CEO of Sound Financial Group. I’m so glad you could be with us today on today’s podcast. Today, we’ve got a unique guest by the name of Charlotte Whitmore. Charlotte and her husband, Caleb, founded a company called Analytics Pros together. They grew it and ultimately hired somebody else to run it.

Now, let’s think about that for a minute. How unoften an entrepreneur unshackles themselves from the amount of obligation they have to their very own company. For most people, the only exit possibility is to sell it, and you’ll hear her story of one point, something like that was even an option: sell it or shut it down, and what could we do instead? And they actually designed a way that they could have somebody else run the company for them.

Now, right before we get in the interview, know that we’re always open. If you’re listening to these podcasts and you think you need some help with your finances, give us a call. Reach out to [email protected]. Go to the website, soundfinancialbites.com, and we’d be happy to have a 10-minute financial triage call with you and see whether or not we’d be an appropriate fit or be able to help you. But, back to our interview here, Charlotte, I want to thank you for being here. Welcome to the podcast.

Thanks for having me.

I am excited today because of all the little bits of side conversations we’ve had leading up to this. So, maybe just start with sharing with our listeners just a little bit about how you and Caleb co-founded the company. What caused that, and then I’m going to ask you, for a layman listening to our podcast today, what does your company do?

Absolutely. We’ve got one of those crazy entrepreneurial stories that only comes when life is going very badly. We started the company in February 2009 after I’d been in a serious crash. I fell off a ladder, I shattered both my arms and my skull, and we’d just had a baby, and we got pregnant with another baby, and it was just kind of this crazy time period for us. My husband was working in another company, doing analytics. They decided that that wasn’t the direction that they wanted to go, and this is back in the beginning when analytics was an up-and-coming idea, and most companies weren’t using it well at this point.

I said, “You know, I think we can do this on our own,” and I said, “Yeah, I want to help.” I was a nurse and I couldn’t go back because of my arm injuries. I didn’t have any grip strength, and I said, “I would love to help with the business side,” and Caleb really wanted to do the analytic side. So, with a brand new baby, and another baby on the way, and arms in casts, and a couple surgeries later, we said, “Why not? It’s the beginning of a major recession. It seems like a really, really good time to leave our high-paying jobs and start a new one with no clients.” So, that’s what we did.

It seems reasonable.

In 2009, we launched Analytics Pros with no clients and no money, and here we are. We survived.

And to give people a little bit of a broad scope, we’ll talk about what Analytics Pros does here in a moment. I think there’s a few things people are going to take away from the podcast today. One is they’re going to take away what they can do if they’re that entrepreneur business owner, but they’re also going to understand a little known area that’s not talked about enough if you’re an executive inside of a large company, what you might be able to do differently to add value at that company. But, to a layman, what does Analytics Pros do?

We started Analytics Pros with a focus on small to mid-sized companies really wanting to help them to grow their customer base through understanding their digital atmosphere. So, digital atmosphere is anything on your website, or if you have a mobile app, or if you’re running TV ads, anything that we can tie together digitally. We wanted to help these smaller companies understand their customers and make a great user experience. I’m sure you guys have all been to a website where like, “I want to buy this. Why won’t it work?” and you’re on that last page and you’re trying to click buy and it’s erring, and you are sad, and you give up and you leave.

Well, you’re not the only one that’s sad. The company is also sad because they did not get your dollars. So, we help companies understand who is trying to come, what is the hiccups that are happening, and then how we can fix those hiccups. Now, we work with Fortune 500, Fortune 100-level companies, helping them understand the same thing. Who are their customers, what are they coming to do on their digital landscape, how is that working, how is that not working, how can that be better?

So, people might be trying to interact with you and they can’t. People are interacting with you but they could do more, or the people that you think are interacting with you aren’t the ones that are actually interacting with you.

Absolutely, and a lot of understanding customers is about just knowing who’s there and what are they trying to do, and maybe you’re wanting them to do something different, but they’re trying to do something different, and somebody needs to change. We either need to find the customers that want to do the same thing that you’re trying to do, or give them what they want, and we help bring those insights to the table.

Charlotte, there’s an industry that does this. You and your company are uniquely suited to do it for these very large companies, but does a lot of this just come out of the fact that, years ago, what would happen and how you’d know who was interacting with you as a customer is you saw them. They walked into your office, or they walked into your retail store, and you could see who they were, and now we don’t.

Yeah, so just like if you had a mom and pop shop and, say, you were selling baby items, and somebody walked in and they kind of were looking around and they smiled, and they walked around the aisle, and you got your front desk clerk, and she’s able to go around and say, “Ma’am, can I help you find this?” and they say, “Oh yes, here’s what I’m looking for. I heard of this pacifier, and it’s this best thing. It’s going to make my baby sleep,” yadda-yadda, and they know exactly what it is, and of course, they have that product, and everyone is very happy. Then, the next person that walks in is maybe an older gentleman and he looks around and he looks surprised, A, that he even walked in the store. Gosh, that’s not what he thought it was, and he walks right out. Well, there’s no real surprise there from the front desk clerk. Of course, that guy did not find what he was looking for and he left.

Well, same kind of thing we can help you understand digitally. So, when someone comes to your site, and I can see them scroll down on your website, I can see how far they scroll, I can see how their mouse moves around, I can see if they try and click on something, whether or not that click has a hyperlink. So, maybe something on your website looks like it’s clickable, it’s not actually. Maybe they click on it, they’re surprised, they immediately go back, that’s not what they’re looking for.

Maybe they’re scrolling all around, trying to look for something. They’re looking for something in the footer, they’re looking for something in the header. They’re not finding it. Well, we can help you understand what those insights are, what’s not working. Or, does someone move fairly seamlessly through the process? Is your website simple? Does it offer good information and you can clearly see the progression of someone moving through it and moving to whatever is the endpoint that you want them to move towards?

And times millions and millions and millions of interactions.

Times billions and billions and billions of interactions.

Yeah, and now that being the big difference in why you have how many folks working for Analytics Pros?

We’ve got about 55 people.

55 folks, all of them, what I would call, super smart folks, because I know you and Caleb are super smart, and what they’re doing is they’re going to look across all this data, what all these people are doing, and finding out whether or not what the people interacting with their storefronts or with their information tools is actually producing the outcome that the owners, or the publicly traded company initially thought was going to happen.

Correct, and it’s also just understanding what is happening, getting the data right. That’s one of the biggest hiccups that we initially find is that they are collecting data, but it’s based on a foundation where it wasn’t installed correctly. The tool that they’re using isn’t actually serving them in the way that they think it might be. So, no one trusts the data and we’re not able to take action. So, we want to get that tool initially installed correctly so that data is even possible.

So, something that I know you can’t give away any confidential information on a client, but something you might do is find out that people are consistently coming to a particular website to find one outcome and, say, a product line that a company is ready to abandon because it’s not doing very well, and be able — the kinds of things this sort of look at data could do would literally be to reintroduce a product line that they’ve already had or that they’re getting ready to scrap and have it actually become a moneymaker now.

Yeah, one of my favorite stories of understanding what we do and how we can do it is we have this great company that we work with, and when you go to their initial interface, it’s going to show you a video, and the C-suite was really questioning whether or not that was making people run away from their product, and we said, “Gosh, that could very well be. You might be totally right.” Let’s A/B test whether or not this is actually correct.

So, we ran a version of the website where when you go to the website, there’s no video. It’s just a normal screen with a photo, and then the other one where there’s a video, and they were 100% correct. The ability for people to quickly abandon the page was much, much higher with the video, because most people look at websites while they’re at work, and if a video pops up with sound while you’re at work, you know what the first thing you do? You click X because you don’t want to be caught looking at videos you’re not supposed to be looking at at work.

Now, the really interesting part is that we kept that test running, and we didn’t just look at the initial abandonment. We looked at what happened to the shopping cart at the end, and it turned out that while more people abandoned when there wasn’t a video, also less people bought. So, that video was causing more people to buy, and if we had just taken that video down and said, “Well, we just want more people to the website,” we actually would have had a massive impact on our top-line revenue because a lot less people would have bought. So, A/B testing doesn’t look at just one thing, but it looks at how it affects everything else on the site.

If I can, let me take a stab for the layperson listening about A/B testing is. It is a tool that sits — so, we have a URL, a website people click on, it goes somewhere, and there’s a random generator that says, “Half the people go here, and half the people go here,” regardless of source as long as they clicked on that link, and that allows you and your team to then — you effectively build two landing pages that produce two different outcomes, and then that’s the A/B testing you’re talking about.

Correct, and we won’t build the landing pages, but we will advise on the creative process around what those should look like. One thing to note about A/B testing, if you’re thinking about doing it, is running it for what we would consider just a proper or a good amount of time, because a lot can happen. Your users on Sunday are going to behave different than your users on Monday versus on Wednesday. There’s seasonality issues, and so we would never commit to an A/B test that’s less than two weeks, and oftentimes, it’s a multi-month process to really understand what’s going on and how people are behaving. So, keep that in mind if you’re thinking about trying that.

Well, one thing that I thought was so interesting, I heard somebody who was a big website designer. He was an entrepreneur who also had a primarily website-driven company. He said, “Everybody out there who tells you, as a web designer, ‘This is going to work, or that is going to work, and this is what we have to change,’ they don’t know. Nobody knows.”

Because, he even talked about his own website where he changed one little thing to have an orange background behind the font on one particular link, and it caused 70% more people to hit that page to finish out the transaction and go to the shopping cart, which is, for those of you that don’t know, 70% is an enormous gain. It was a totally random change that he made just to see what would happen as he was testing his A/B testing software and found it by accident. The web designer, it didn’t even look good, but it did work.

Absolutely. We’ve done one of those ourselves for a salon everyone would know the name of, and when we did it, it was literally a single button color change, and the results were just absolutely outstanding, and it was somebody saying, “Wow, it seems like that blends in a little bit. What if we changed the color?” That was the whole question, and so we changed the color. It turns out the color needed to be changed.

Interesting. So now, when it comes to data in a company, so data can be valuable. People, maybe, aren’t as familiar with data being valuable. You know, one of the biggest mistakes you see people make, big companies, small companies, what do you see, across the board, people make mistakes in data with?

As people start to work with us, our biggest issue that we see is they are either making no decisions based on data, or they are making decisions based on bad data. Installing tools to gather data could be Google Analytics, it could be Adobe, it could be a Microsoft product, could be IBM. You got a lot of different tools to choose from. We worked with the Google Analytics suite. They’re just hard.

They’re really hard to get right. It seems simple, but actually getting it correct, just a single period could throw off an entire algorithm, and now you’re going to be making decisions on data that’s not correct, which is then going to lead to mistrust, which then leads to nobody wanting to make decisions based on data, and that principle is wrong. Data is actually a wonderfully helpful tool. You do need good data to make those decisions.

And then you mentioned something when we were talking over lunch a little bit about. Who has access to data?

This happens more at larger companies, but when you think about your finances, you only allow a few people to look at your business finances, and the person that has the most clearance is going to be somebody who has a 10, maybe 20-year experience, at least they’re going to be overseeing other people. The other people might have certain privileges. Well, often what happens with analytics data is anybody that wants it gets full access to data. That includes abilities to delete, to change things, and also for them to add their own personal email addresses versus a company email address to be able to see that data, which then allows them, if they leave the company, to still have access to the data.

So, something to be really careful about is who has access to all of your data, are they using a company email address, and what are they going to be doing with that data? So, you want people that are inside the data who are either going to be actionable, or they’re advising actionable people to work with that data. You want it to all be very purposeful. Not just somebody sitting in the background who might accidentally click something and break something.

How predictive can data be for a company if they manage it well?

Highly predictive, and it really helps understand when a market change is happening, when more people are looking at, maybe, a certain type of product, or this is particularly helpful in retail, as we see, the beginning of a season happening. We can see, very quickly, what’s going to be the biggest sellers. Where is the inventory going to need to increase and how are we going to need to counterreact to the data that is being given to us? It’s just a really excellent tool.

You’ve talked a little bit, in our one-on-one conversations, about restrictions you have to put on your own employees with dealing with publicly traded companies, because it’s so predictive.

Yeah, this is really considered insider information. Insider information is something that somebody from the outside wouldn’t know and wouldn’t understand with just looking at a company at face value. This is that. This is data about how is the company doing? What are customers doing? How are they reacting? What is being bought or sold, for that matter? What is going to be bought? Where are people stopping in the shopping cart process and adding things and taking them away? It’s understanding if they’re using a coupon product to see if things are cheaper somewhere else. This is all customer data. It’s insider information, and so —

But, when you have so much of it at once and you can see it, it literally is the degree of knowing whether or not a company lost a trade deal with a particular country’s government, and releasing that, or trading on that information, trading the stock ahead of the public markets knowing — when we were talking and you mentioned that, talk about an outside third party, totally outside of the analytics industry, that says, “This is really important and can affect things in a big way for a company that literally it could be a Federal crime for your employees to trade on information they have, not knowing the CFO, not knowing the CEO, or being his buddy, or having cigars with him.” Rather, just by looking at the full set of analytical data and the way people are behaving with a company’s website could be insider information.

Absolutely, 100%. If you listened to quarterly earning calls with Fortune 500 companies, publicly traded companies, you will hear more than a handful at this point, but a solid handful giving you data on their digital analytics. That’s because it’s coming out at that quarterly earnings call. If you got that information early, that would be considered insider information.

So, back at the beginning of our conversation, we talked about this idea, we’re going to get to where you and Caleb actually designed a way that you’re no longer president and CEO of your own company, and you actually have somebody else, a pro running that company. Before getting there, what was it like for the two of you growing the company, both as a married couple and a couple of hard-driven entrepreneurs?

Yeah, so that was a fun ride. As I told you guys, we started kind of in these crazy rough conditions, and we had to get our stuff together really quickly, and the bottom line is we had a lot of mouths to feed. We now have four kids. We had all of those children while bringing up this fast-growing company. The realness in that is that marriage and running a fast-growing company are not the best combinations. It’s a really, really hard combination. Not to say that we haven’t done well through it. That part would be true, but the during it part, that was really, really hard.

We had a lot that we were both incredibly passionate about. We’re both incredibly passionate about people, about having amazing employees about treating them extremely well. We have this total obsession with brands and going after the most kind of fun brands that we would want to buy from, that we would want to work with. We’ve always wanted it to feel like a family that even our clients are like, “Oh yeah, here’s all the people at Analytics Pros that I love.” Everybody exchanges Christmas cards. It’s just that’s the atmosphere. But, that doesn’t mean that strategy wasn’t incredibly hard on how to get to those goals, or when to let go of employees that were no longer the right fit. Those, we just totally clashed many times over on how to execute on that.

We really got to a place, two years ago, just where we were drowning. I was the CEO at that point and I was spending my whole week and weekend in the office trying to make life work. My children, we had a full-time nanny at home that was living in our home and she would bring the kids to the office to see me. I had like little desks set up, and they would come and do a little bit of schoolwork, and I would kind of interact with them and ignore them at the same time while I was trying to get a lot done, and it was miserable, and we were drowning, and we were fighting at home, and fighting in our bedroom, which isn’t allowed, and we were breaking all the key tenets of marriage. We were just fighting all the time, and I was done.

Our company, on paper, looked really good, like really, really good. We were like, “Man, this looks really good and it’s killing us, and we hate it, and it needs to be over,” and we were like, “Oh, but look at all these people and they work for us. We can’t just end it. What are we going to do?” This is where I just think blessings. Right time, right people come into play, and I had been looking for a new CEO for about eight months at that point and just thinking, “We need to make this transition. We need somebody else with more experience.”

And I kind of had a tagline, at that point, “I shouldn’t have to Google this,” and I was Googling all these major business decisions like, “How do you merge with a company?” You don’t want to Google that. If you don’t know how to do that, don’t Google it. Go hire somebody that does know how to do that, because if you Google it, it’s just going to be really confusing. You’re going to do it wrong, and I did a lot of things wrong.

Quick pause there. I think one takeaway people could take, regardless of where they’re at in life, is you think to yourself, “Is this a crucial enough decision I should not be Googling the answer to?”

Yeah, and there was more things than that. It was real embarrassing, I got to tell you that, and all these people, they want to do well by you, and they’re working for you and you’re paying the money, and there’s just so many questions that come up, and there was just a lot of legal and a lot of HR. We were growing really quickly. We ended up at a conference, which is just incredible. It’s a sabbatical conference. It’s on the East Coast in Boston. It’s a small group, and it was with all just major Fortune 500 executives. Here, Caleb and I, I was 28 years old, Caleb was 29. I mean, we were like really weird for being there.

Just to set the stage, this one happened to have only women in it. They do have men as well, but this certain one had only women. So, we walk in and there’s all these older ladies there and we’re like, “We’re in the wrong place. This is going to be awkward,” and it turns out it was actually fairly awkward to begin with. These people were more in the phase of they had had these amazing careers, worked for amazing companies. They were either retired or thinking about retiring, and they were trying to figure out what to do next, and it was a total wake up call for Caleb and myself. We were listening to these just ridiculous women. Just CEOs, Fortune 500, most of them had worked in the White House under multiple different presidents. They’d been in the Army, they were generals. I mean, they were just like ridiculously cool people, and here we are. We were not ridiculously cool people.

We’re listening to them and they’re like, “We just don’t know what to do next, and we don’t know how to engage. We don’t really want to go back to these big companies and do corporate life, but nobody will hire us. We’re too old,” and Caleb and I are looking at each other, and we’re like, “Jackpot!” We’re like, “I don’t think we can afford these people. Maybe they would work for less money,” and this is what we’re thinking because we couldn’t afford these people, and we ended up developing some really key relationships in that group, and one of those people was someone named Vicki O’Meara. She had been just the GM of Pitney Bowes beforehand and sold off a major portion of it, and worked under two different presidents.

Just a little thing like that.

Just a little thing like that, and she was just kick-ass. She just had this posture about her that was incredibly impressive, and seemed to know what needed to happen and wasn’t scared when we told her about where we were feeling overwhelmed, like she had a vision of where to go next. So, as I was considering what to do about that, I asked her to just come out and do a two-week advisory period, and we were really looking like, “Okay, what’s the most we can kind of throw at the situation?” and we threw that number out there. “We’ll pay you this to come out,” and she said yes, and she came out, and this is like maybe my all-time favorite story about the company.

She came out, she had this ginormous Dell laptop. I mean, just think a company that only works on very, very skinny MacBooks, and there’s no desktops. I mean, this is all laptop environment. We’re very, very lean.

She’s got like a pole start bell?

She starts lugging this thing in, and we were like, “She’s older. She’s going to need an office. We got to clean this place up. We got to give her something with a door. Older people like doors and offices,” and so we set this whole thing up and we were really proud of ourselves, just as a side note, and she comes in, and she’s talking to employees on the first week. She came in on a Monday, and on the first Friday, she calls me in for this meeting, and this is just something I will never forget, and she’s like, “I have a presentation for you,” and I’m like, “You have a what? I’m 28. Don’t present anything for me,” and she had printed – I repeat – printed PowerPoints, and i was like, “Where did you find the printer?” I didn’t even know that worked.

She had printed all these things out, and she had this yellow legal pad. You know the ones with the lines and you flip the pages, and she had all these notes on it. I’m like, “This person, she writes things down on paper, she prints things,” and what she was presenting to me was all of these management alternatives, so how to manage a team. It was just this amazing different ways to do that.

She gave you like six or five different ways you could –?

No, she gave me three, and she said, “I’ve narrowed it down,” as in there was other options, and, “These are the ones I’ve used all of these. Here’s where I used this one, here’s where I used this one, and here’s where I think this is going to work,” and I don’t actually remember the rest of the conversation, but what I do remember is I was like, “How did you know? Who told you how to know about those options? I don’t know about any of those options. I didn’t even know there was different ways, really, to manage people. I just thought you did it,” and she was actually considering different systems. Crazy. That was a crazy thought to me at that point.

So, I left that point and I was just like my mind was like, “Pfft,” just blown. So, I left and I have this kind of side thing where I also help babies be born. I do love that from my past work and it feeds my soul. Anyway, so I left for the weekend and I went and helped deliver a baby on Saturday night for a good friend down the street. I was up all night Saturday night and I was helping to deliver this baby on Saturday morning and all I could think of was, “I can’t do this anymore. I can’t be the CEO of Analytics Pros because I don’t even know the options,” and that’s not doing justice to all these wonderful people that are killing themselves working for this company that I’m killing myself for to grow and build, and the reality is if somebody knew the systems, maybe they could choose the right system and we all wouldn’t have to kill ourselves. That would be an amazing transition.

So, I walked in on Monday morning and I called Vicki to my office for a meeting and I said, “I need to talk to you about being the CEO and gosh, we are so thankful.” Through a couple weeks of negotiation, she said, “Absolutely.” She fell in love with the people in that time period as well, and she’s been absolutely steadfast with us for the last two years, transitioning our company from being a very fast-growing kind of crazy-looking startup to a stable, efficient, effective, mid-sized company with EBITDA to actually name.

Yeah, and in that, you did what is really unthinkable for many entrepreneurs in their own mind is in what I would say the market that you work in, that’s what I wanted to spend so much time talking about specifically what you do because I think many people would think, if they’re listening to this and they’re a business owner, they’re going to say, “Yeah, but my really big companies, like if they have a North Face, or an Outdoor Research, or an F5, or GoPro, they’re going to say that company needs me as the owner involved from sale to delivery, and what you’ve discovered is they don’t.

Yeah, that was painful. It’s a really hard transition. That’s the biggest thing I’ve got to say. Working with companies like Starbucks or Visa, just these huge companies and you’ve done so well by them so far, and then to say, “Okay, I’m not going to be the main person on that account, making sure that the top dog is happy. I’m going to let my team do that. I’m going to ask my team to do that.

First of all, having some humility, which is really needed in that we screwed plenty of things up. I mean, the reality is that, yes we started it, yes we were good at it, yes we grew, yes we screwed up a lot along the way, and we had to realize that. Our customer service was not the most perfect customer service that has ever existed. We didn’t have the systems to allow for growth, those kinds of things.

So, as Vicki put in those systems, trusting that she was going to take care of all of our clients, including our marquee clients, and make sure that we were executing in a ridiculously amazing way, which is our basic level standard. That transition really took a whole year, and it took, first, the disengagement from Caleb and myself, and it was not 100% disengagement to start with, but it was a to watch instead of act, to ask more questions instead of do more, and to allow more time to pass before changes were made. Caleb and I have kind of an attitude that if we think of something and we think it’s a good idea, today or tomorrow is a great time to start it, and I don’t think we’re ever not going to think that way.

That is an entrepreneurial mindset, it gives us incredible energy. I love starting things the same day. We recently just bought a home. We decided to buy a home in this area on a Friday. We found a home on Monday and we quickly executed the deal, and that’s just how we work. I understand that’s not how most people work, but that’s why most people have to be part of a company instead of starting a company.

So, we do a really good job starting companies. At the point that you need systems in place, we’re not maybe the best people to do systems. That’s not our key strength, and so Vicki brought forth systems. Systems take time, like a lot of time, like painful amounts of time, like months in order to implement them, to test them, to check them, to refine them, and the only people that can refine them are the people who are in the system. You actually can’t have top-down approach of system repair, because that doesn’t actually produce any repairs. You have to have people recognizing what’s working and not working, and having a system where they are able to be flexible in that change.

A lot of that took a lot of time. Sales was also a huge area. Caleb has been sales for all of these years until we brought the team into that, and now Caleb doesn’t touch sales, which is just if you’re an entrepreneur out there listening to this, you should be clapping, because I’m clapping on the inside. That’s an incredible thing, as the owner, to not have to sell, and that took a year of somebody else on our team stepped into that role. He’s incredible and he has his own system, and it’s not Caleb’s system and that had to be okay. Turns out he can sell really, really well.

Now, he’s bringing up more people, and they’re not exactly like him but they’re also really, really good. So, it’s kind of one of those funny areas where we’re like, “But, this one works,” and it’s like, “Well, it does. But, there might be other ways that it needs to work,” and honestly, it just can’t depend on us anymore. We had to move away from that.

What was prior to bringing in some just solid outside leadership, somebody else is running your company that you still own. For you and Caleb, what’s life look like now where before it was this like grind constantly? What does life and scheduling look like now for the two of you that somebody else is running your company?

We get to sit on the board. That’s fun. We have a full board. We have a financial board, independent board members, as well as Caleb and myself, as well as Vicki sits on the board as president and CEO of the company. We have quarterly understanding of where have we been, and where are we going, and are we meeting objectives? We get a budget that’s brought forth to us for the following year that includes growth numbers, and before we transitioned, under 100% growth was fairly unacceptable to Caleb and myself. That came from a comment my dad made to me very early on when he said, “You know, a consulting business can’t go that far. You’re only going to be able to make the hourly rate,” and I basically said, “You know what? Watch. Just watch. Just watch me do it,” and maybe I’m right now.

So, I had this obsession with growth, and the reality is growth has to turn into something that has more systems or the growth fails, and you just fail the company, which is really where we almost went. Now, we have insider information on what’s happened and where are we going, and we get to help say, “Here’s things that you need to look out for in the industry. Here’s where we really like to see you growing. We can bring forth those ideas. Those ideas are not necessarily taken and used,” and that has to be okay. The team has to decide where they’re going to go with the company, which is I don’t want to understate that that is incredibly painful. To have great ideas and other people not want to use them is really painful, especially when you own the company.

So, that is a reality, and it’s kind of like your kids leaving the nest. They’re gone. They get to make their own decisions. We’re still mom and dad of the company. We still own the shares of the company. But, we need them to fly. We don’t need them coming home and asking us what to do all the time. That’s not showing that they’re independent and running it themselves.

So, now you’re not involved in sales, Caleb doesn’t have to be involved in sales. The two of you, although I know you just went through a big speaking tour at conferences. So, you go through those. Is it more like surge and rest?

Yeah, we do a lot of speaking, international speaking. I head to Budapest in two weeks, and I’m in Japan and Germany this year just in the first half of the year, and Caleb’s in New Zealand and Australia. Anyway, we’ll be around the globe, it will be fun. So, we do a lot more travel. We travel with our kids, we homeschool all four of our kids so that we can travel with them, and we get to go to these different countries or different cities all over the U.S., and we speak on board work, on having millennials on boards, because I’m a millennial and Caleb is a millennial, and how to get more millennials on your board to look at analytics and marketing. We speak on digital analytics and how to engage with large companies, large companies’ boards in particular, and then we also speak a little bit on our transition and where we come so far.

Share with me, if somebody wanted to get a hold of you or Analytics Pros, what’s the best way to engage Analytics Pros? Somebody hears this and they’re like, “Maybe this would work for my company.” They don’t know. Where should they reach out to?

You can reach out to the website. Just reach straight out to Analytics Pros. You can call, you can email. Somebody will get back to you the same day. We’re highly responsive. You can be a great company fit, and if you’re not a great company fit, maybe you’ve just got a mom and pop shop, we have so many people that we refer out to all across the nation, your area. We always want you to get the help that you need even if you’re a smaller company.

That’s awesome. Well, Charlotte, thank you so much for being here. I sure appreciate the time. I know our listeners have heard this and should be able to take away, at least, a few things around the importance of data, the importance of safeguarding some of that data, and who has access, which I think is big, and then that idea of just being able to, if you’re the owner, entrepreneur, one day not being able to run the company, and if you’re one of those key employees at one of those companies, this might be a great podcast to forward to the owner of that company, because maybe you’re that person that might be able to step in and become the president and CEO of the company that somebody else created. So, thanks again for being here, Charlotte.

Absolutely. Thanks for having me.

Hi, Paul Adams here. I want to acknowledge you for taking the time to invest in yourself by listening to our podcast. Not everybody does that, and out of my commitment to you, I will take just a few of our podcast listeners between each of our episodes and spend time with them one-on-one. And if you think you’d like some of that one-on-one time to learn more about our process, our philosophy, or whether or not we’d be a fit to work together, just email [email protected] – that’s [email protected] – and I’ll be more than honored to take that time with you. You can also go to our website, www.sfgwa.com, download the first three chapters of my book, see upcoming in-person events that we have, or listen to past episodes. You can also go to our Facebook page and engage us there, our LinkedIn, and send us questions for upcoming podcasts. You might hear one of your comments or questions on a future podcast. For our full disclosure, you can check the description on this podcast, or on the podcast series, or go to our website. Have a great day.

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