Sam, hey everyone and welcome. We're thrilled to have you join us today for our webinar with Sam Jacobs leading with humanity, building high performance sales teams without burnout. Before we dive in, let's cover a couple of housekeeping items. This webinar is being recorded, and we will be sending out the recording and any resources mentioned within 24 hours. We do encourage you to ask questions. Please use the Q and A feature or the chat at the bottom of your screen to submit your questions. At any time, we'll do our best to answer as many as possible during the dedicated Q and A session at the end. And if you experience any technical difficulties, please try to refreshing your browser. And if that doesn't work, feel free to send a message in the chat, and our team will assist you. Now it's my absolute pleasure to introduce our speaker Sam Jacobs. Sam is the founder and CEO of pavilion, the Wall Street Journal, best selling offer of kind. Folks finish first and the co host of the top line podcast, he launched pavilion as a revenue collective in 2016 and impressively bootstrap the company to 10 million ARR before securing 25 million in growth financing round early in 2021 today, pavilion empowers a global community of over 10,000 go to market executives helping them unlock their full professional potential through private peer groups, education, events and research. Prior to founding pavilion, Sam spent spent 15 years as a senior revenue leader at various VC backed companies in New York, including gershen Lehman group, Axio, livestream, slash, Vimeo, the Muse and behave box. Sam's extensive experience and unique perspective make him a great guide for today's discussion. So without further ado, I'll hand it over to you, Sam.
Thank you, Brian. Hi everybody. Greetings from Barcelona, Spain. The red light in the background is meant to conjure pavilion red, not necessarily that I'm in the red light district of any any town around the world, and I'm just going to share my screen, and we're going to talk today about leading with humanity. So I put together a couple of slides and and hopefully at the end of these slides, you know, we can have a little bit of Q and A if you have questions in the interim, please drop them into the chat. There might be a Q and A feature as well. But what I really want to talk about is the nature of humanity right now, because you might hear leading with humanity and have a certain set of assumptions about what I mean when I say leading with humanity. But of course, what I'm referring to is specifically in contrast to everything that's happening in AI, because the world is an uncertain place. So let me walk you through and set the stage a little bit. One of the things I like to do is just sort of underscore the current environment, and then we can talk about principles for how we lead our teams through this environment, after we look at some data. So here's what's happening out there in the world, first of all, over the last couple of years, some of this you may know, but if you don't know, it there we are facing, you know, people say unprecedented very often. I think at this point, uncertainty is precedented. What we know in the B to B ecosystem specifically, which is where I spend my time, and that's the segment of the market that pavilion is specifically focused on serving. We know that annual revenue growth rate. So by the way, this data comes from a publicly a cohort of about 100 different publicly traded B to B technology businesses, and so we're looking at their revenue growth rate, and we're looking at their client acquisition cost as a percent of net new ARR, and both of those numbers are moving in the wrong direction. So yes, we've heard all kinds of things about cursor and bolt and these companies that are growing from zero to 10 million in a matter of weeks. But for most large B to B organizations, we're facing significant headwinds. So ARR has gone from 36% top line growth to 18% client acquisition cost has almost doubled. So that means that the cost of acquiring a new customer is moving in the right is moving in the wrong direction. We all know it's not that, you know, the markets are good or bad, it's just that they're all over the place, and volatility is the new normal. You can see that we've seen the uncertainty index spike as of of course, Liberation Day. Now we know that there's, you know, all kinds of deals that are being that are happening in the macro world. But the point is really that uncertainty is here to stay and is the new normal, right? And so this is the part of the world that we're facing. We can also look at some other data. One of the things you see in that middle screen is growth efficiency. So part of what we're talking about isn't just that growth is slowing down. But that we are spending increasing amounts of money, and of course, we're talking about leading organizations and leading sales teams in this in this conversation, and it's requiring an increasing amount of money to deliver the same dollar of growth. And that's why the in the efficiency metrics are going in the wrong direction at the same time that revenue growth rates are going down, and sales and marketing spending as a percent of total budget is increasing. We also know when, when we survey the pavilion community, that, you know, there's all kinds of uncertainty within the ecosystem. So this was as of April, so it's about two months old at this point, but 45% of the people in our pulse survey, and we survey a couple 100 people lowered their 2025 targets. Now, does this mean that folks went to their board of directors and specifically asked to, you know, to lower the number? I'm not sure that it means that, but it does mean that people in their internal minds have lowered what they expect from 2025 and every month seems to be different. 52% of people are concerned about macro. 33% already seeing demand softening. And if you, if you follow me on LinkedIn, you'll know that a couple of weeks ago, I was in Denver for our CRO Summit, and I hosted a dinner of about 20 CROs, heads of Rev ops, people that are go to market leaders. And I asked, what's the challenge? And every single one of them said, pipeline, pipeline generation and pipeline and effectively demand and demand generation is everybody's number one challenge, and probably will be for a very long time. So in that world, we're constantly replanning right? Two thirds of sales organizations are revising their strategy more than two times a year, two times a year, think about the impact that that has on on your teams and on your on the on the folks that you are working with right there are meaningful impacts. Change management is a key issue that people are facing right now, and as we see, the circumstances are changing almost by the minute. So we know that our organizations, our teams, are feeling the pressure, they're feeling the burnout, and they're feeling this constant volatility. Now some people and we can talk about this, and I really do hope we get to some Q and A so that we can have a conversation. Because, you know, I'm just sharing my perspective, but I would love to hear from some of the folks that are in the audience. But my perspective is that this is putting tremendous pressure on our mental well being and our and even our physical well being. And so as you see the rise of volatility, the rise of AI, I'm also seeing the rise of almost like a wellness revolution, where people are really focused on mental well being on physical fitness. To a degree. People have been focused on this for a long time, but I think it's spreading across the community in a way that I really haven't seen I've seen more people that are forsaking alcohol than I've seen before, all of it because we need to be in shape, both mental and physical, shape, so that we can meet this moment as it meets us right the and you can see right here on the screen, they this is how leaders are spending their time that everybody I mean, I think this is now. I don't know that this is specifically changing, but I will say that if you've heard that phrase, most people are spending their time in the business, not on the business, certainly a CEO spending their time and constantly, CROs are talking about, you know, how do we close the gap for h1 you know, we're recording this today. I believe it's June 17. So we've got, you know, two weeks left. In fact, under two weeks left in the first half of 2025, if you can believe it. And and what I hear CEOs talking about is not, you know where we're going to be in 2027, necessarily. What I hear them talking about is, hey, we need to find a way to close this number, this ARR target that we have between now and June 30, because then they close the books on h1 so you know, we are in, I think, a crisis of leadership. Some people are doing incredibly well. Some people are not, and this is a moment that we can rise to the challenge. I also think that there's this dislocation happening where, you know, we have all of these hybrid work environments at the same time that there's this vibe shift. And I don't know if you felt it out there in the audience, but I certainly have where the I think everybody prefers on the individual level. You know, people prefer remote work.
I don't know that managers prefer remote work. And so there's this pull. You feel this gravitational pull. I live in Spain, I feel the pull. I feel the pull towards San Francisco. I feel the pull towards New York City, where people are in office and incredible companies are in office, building, great things. And you just feel like there's again dislocation. There's this stress that's happening where you're not sure you. What are the strategies that we need to employ? And at the same time, the jobs themselves are changing. And this, I think, is really, really interesting that, you know, we had this, this, this distribution of labor, where we had SDRs and we had customer success and we had account executives, and not necessarily in that order. And now we're seeing the return of full cycle selling. In fact, in fact, I'm actually seeing the growth, not just a full cycle selling, but of the consolidation and this, you know, this poses challenges for my good friend Nick Mehta Gainsight, but the consolidation of customer success into revenue organizations. You know, when I, when I grew up in SAS beginning, really, in, you know, like, I guess it was 2010 that I really became, you know, immersed in it, there was predictable revenue. Had just come out. Aaron Ross wrote that book. We had sales development, feeding leads, generating leads, warming up leads, handing it over to account executives, closing the leads, turning it into revenue, then handing it off to CS to nurture, the customer, make sure that they were on the good path, and hopefully renew and upsell them. And now there's account management teams that are certainly sometimes focused on upsell. But the point is, there is a consolidation in a world of efficiency, which is the world that we're operating in, there is tremendous pressure to come down and focus on do we want a revenue focused person that owns the entire customer relationship. And so again, what are these slides telling us that that we are in a time of change? And I will say that I don't think that there is, you know, I literally was talking to somebody earlier this week who said, you know, maybe after 2025 2026 maybe 2028, maybe there's like a new a new administration in the United States, and all of a sudden, things will calm down. I don't think things are calming down ever. I don't think things are going to calm down. I think that this is the world in which we live. And every day there's going to be a geopolitical issue. Every day AI is going to shift in some way. There's going to be a new model. There's going to be a new use case, and we've got to help our teams navigate through this. The other thing I would say, you know, and I would just underscore this, because leading with humanity, right? It's like you might, you might think that what I'm going to be talking about is, is, you know, being nice to everybody and making sure that, you know, we give them mental health days. And I do want to be nice. It's not that I don't, and I did write a book on kindness. But kindness isn't necessarily ruinous empathy, as as Kim Scott would say. And so what I what I want to underscore to everybody and share with everybody a lot of the lessons that we've learned. Again, just thinking about, when did I start working in in this industry I was in, I was at Gerson Lehrman group, you know, which, which was mentioned earlier, from 2003 to 2010 and the great financial crisis was 2009
so 2010 and during the great financial crisis. You know, the Fed lowered interest rates down to very, very low rates. And we had low interest rates, meaning of freely abundant capital, from 2010 to when, you know, they started raising interest rates, which, you know, I think maybe 2023 but maybe it was 2022 so what's the point? The point is, well, I don't know about you, but if you worked, if you came of age from 2010 to 2022 that's 12 years. That's 12 years. So, so a lot of the lessons that you've learned about, that we've learned, that I've learned about how to structure the team, about how to compensate the team, about how to motivate the team, all of those were in an era of artificially, not artificially just, you know, an era of very free capital, cheap capital, where growth at any cost was favored over profitable, efficient growth. Now we're in a different operating environment, and that last column that you see on the right. So Jamin ball, from clouded judgment, puts out, you know, some data. He works at altimeter, and he just told us that for q1, new ARR for public SAS was down 30% year over year. So think about that. In 2024 there was a number. That number for new ARR, net new ARR is down 30% year over year. So what's what's happening here? The bar is raised. That's the point. The bar is raised. And what I mean by that is the degree of excellence that is required to execute in this environment is higher than it's ever been. It's higher than any of us have experienced so far, right? This is a different operating environment. There is no thing that's easy, you know, again, maybe if you are one of the lucky few that works at open AI or works at Anthropic or works at bolt or cursor or replit, maybe things feel easy for you, but for the rest of us, there's nothing easy. It's not that outbound is not dead. Cold calling is not dead. You know, Account Based Marketing is not dead. And 10. Data is not dead. Nothing is dead. It's just harder. It's just much, much harder, right? And that's something we have to internalize, that the degree of execution, and therefore the profile of the people that we work with on our teams, that has to change because, because we have to be more perfect, we have to hit that Bullseye more frequently than perhaps we ever had to right that that's it's not that you know that we're doing anything necessarily wrong. It is just that the degree of difficulty has increased, and the quality of our execution therefore has to increase. So what do I think? You know, let's talk about leading with humanity, right? And I want to counter that. I want to balance some of these ideas against how to incorporate AI, because AI is incredibly important, but AI is not going to replace the things that make human special, or at least not yet. And we want to learn how to use AI in the right way so that we can create more headspace for our teams, so we can we can outsource and offload administrative and manual tasks. And of course, that's where otter comes into play. That's where great tools like clay come into play. So we want to use AI and technology in the right way so that we can give our teams the ability to spend more time with customers, to spend more time with prospects, and to and to show up in the right way. Now, again, it depends. You know, your values may different, but but one of the things I really want to underscore here is that leadership with humanity doesn't necessarily mean ruinous, ruinous empathy. I think it starts with clarity and accountability. So if you want to just pick out two things that you see on the screen from my perspective, but again, what I hope is that we, you know, we'll wind down my prepared remarks, such as they are in, you know, 1015, minutes. And then what I would really love is, is an interaction and a contribution from, from, from folks. So if you have any reactions to what I'm saying, Please drop them into the chat. And if, if you don't like anything I'm saying, you can say that too. But the point is, what I think is required is, particularly if you're remote, first is clarity and accountability. There's a great book, if you want to write this down. There's a great book called first break all the rules. And first break all the rules is sort of about management and leadership. It's an old book, but it's one that I often recommend. And I think there's 12 different principles of leadership that are really important when you're leading your team, and it's really 12 questions that you have to answer, and the first two are the most critical, the most critical, and these are your team is asking these two questions. There's a number of different questions that they asked, but these are the first two. The first is, do I know what is expected of me? Do I know what is expected of me? And the second is, do I have the resources necessary to execute what is expected of me? And that's where clarity and accountability come into play. We do need to empathize, but in a remote first world where we cannot look over everybody's shoulder, the very first thing we need is clarity, right? We need to understand. Here are the goals, here are the expectations that we have set. Here's what good performance looks like, here's what bad performance looks like. And then we need to create systems and structures. Those could be OKRs. Those could be monthly operating sprints. It could be some mechanism that you have so that you can clearly identify these are the things I'm expected to do. I have the resources necessary to do them, and now I am working towards accomplishing that goal. In my experience, the number one cause of burnout is not working too hard, working too hard and seeing measurable progress and understanding how what you're doing fits into the broader organization that often creates joy. The thing that creates burnout is a sense that you're moving in a variety of different directions all the time without a clear plan, that you don't understand the plan, and that again, to that first question of, you know, first break all the rules that you do not know what's expected of you. So I think you know, if you're out there and you want to figure out, like, how do I do this, these don't have to be your values. But I think it starts with, what are your values, what is important to you, and is that clear across the organization? So that's one thing that I would I would really forcefully underscore. And then I would say, let's make sure that we're using artificial intelligence in the right places. So there's all this anxiety and panic. I feel it every day about how are we going to use AI in the right way? I would say, as you see, we want AI to do things that we don't feel like doing. And AI can do things like manually update CRM. It can make sure that people are adhering to, you know, selling methodologies like MEDDIC or medpic. I certainly think, you know, we've otter. For us has become a verb. Did you send your otter? Can you send your otter into that meeting? Because one of the things we want to. Use AI to do is to capture data and capture information about our organizations. But I really think the two things that you see in the middle there and on the right side of the screen are super, super critical. And one of my, if you want to know, my biggest concern about AI, it is that, and I've shared this on my on the podcast that I do top line. I think, if you assume that you understand how the model is working, and you assume that it is a prescient, omniscient, all knowing intelligence that is accessing a perfectly structured database in order to give you a precise, correct answer all the time, that is not how the system is working, and that is not how it is designed. And what is the point of that? The point of that is we need humans. We need our teams, and we should clarify that we need them, because they cannot outsource critical thinking skills just to AI, many, many times. And I'll give you a specific example. I you know. So to the point of clarity, what is one of the ways that at pavilion, as an as a CEO, I try to provide context and clarity and to to the organization. Well, I write a weekly update. So I write a weekly email every Sunday that I send out to the entire organization. Now, the inputs to that weekly email often come from department heads, so they, they send me everything, and I've created a GPT, you know, in chat, GPT, where I upload all of these weekly updates so that I can synthesize everything and then share a consolidated Company update out to the entire organization. Now, if I didn't fact check that or quality control, that we would be in a world of hurt, because oftentimes the AI is making up data points, is making up or drawing or referencing information that was not previously made available to it. It's saying things that are not true and and so I correct it, and I and I review it every single time, and there isn't a single instance where I'm not making a specific correction. So my point is, what is the role of humans leading with humanity? What is the role of humans in our new world? Certainly for now, it's to provide quality control. We cannot just copy and paste something into chat, GPT and send it out to the organization. We need to be in the loop. I will share with you. You know, you may know this, but there, you know it's it's probably well known that, you know for a long time, for probably 20 years now, maybe 25 you know, a computer can beat a human, the best chess player at chess. But what may not be known is that actually a human with a machine can beat just a machine, and they call that a centaur. And I think it's also true in in Chinese go checkers, that is, you know, that is like their famous, you know, problem problem solving, game and, you know, and difficult and complicated, complicated game. And the point is, a human plus a machine can often beat a machine, and so we need to be in the loop, because we cannot just outsource all of our critical thinking skills to artificial intelligence. And I think if you're thinking about the role that you can use with your teams, they need to be making you need to be making sure that they are fact checking the AI, that they are providing oversight and quality, and that you are encouraging them, that that is their place in the organization. Now we can't, you know, we have to. We should talk about, what are some tools like? Okay, if we want to have humans with human conversations, interacting with our customers. And I think that should be the goal, right? I think the goal should be, if we have a sales team, if we have a Mar you know, we want as much time talking to customers and humans, interacting with each other as possible, most of the time we saw in that previous slide that, you know, CROs are spending 85% of their time firefighting. Well, what percent of the time do sellers spend actually selling? And it's an abysmally low percentage, because so much of what they do pre AI is data entry. So we really want to focus on making sure that you know the manual stuff, the stuff that leads to boredom, the stuff that leads to people looking for new jobs, is replaced by technology. So here's some tools that I think if you're looking for specific use cases for where can I use AI on the team? So first of all, obviously, I think you should use otter. We use it because and I use it so that it can record every single meeting, and then it can have an intelligence. And I can query that broad intelligence. I can ask it things about trends in the organization. I can ask it things about, you know, my tonality or my perspective. I can, you know, interact with it in a way that that tells me what's happening in the organization and synthesizes all of these different meetings to its transcription. So, you know. And again, as I mentioned, it's become a verb at this point. So we say, Send in the otter interactive role playing and coaching. So Avara, there's, there's, there's so many that are emerging right now. But one of the things that you really can do from an enablement perspective is you can, you know, pilots spend 1000s and 1000s of hours in the flight simulator. And, you know, I sometimes refer it as as hours in the sim, you can train. AI to provide interactive role playing and coaching to your reps. And Avara is one of the companies. And, you know, I advise some of these companies, but not all of them, but Avara is, is a really interesting company I know. Owner.com uses Avara to train their reps and onboard their reps. One of the things you can do is you shorten ramp time and and you, of course, improve adherence across the organization. Obviously, everybody knows about clay at this point, there's so many capabilities that you can do using data enrichment and automated workflow triggering. I'll give you a specific example, which is really quite cool. We built a clay workflow where, if you honestly, all you have to do is, like, one of my posts on LinkedIn, Clay enriches your information that it finds from LinkedIn, and it finds your email address, and then it can drop you a note saying, Hey, do you want to hear more from pavilion and Sam Jacobs? And that's just one of the things that you can do with with clay, automated messaging and calendar management. That's fixer. And then you know, hockey stack is doing all kinds of things on intent data and really building out like a full scale marketing stack. So those are some tools that you can use. Of course, we can talk about,
you know, tools that you might not have. What's the point? The point is, I think we have a mandate right now to make sure that we continue to up level our teams. There is going to be an emphasis and a need to make sure that we're hiring a players and that we are up again. The bar is raised, right? So this is the cost of not leveraging AI the right way, and the cost of not effectively allocating capital. And I think it's a very high cost. And you know, one of the ways, apparently, that we're going to pay down this massive debt in the United States is by having massive productivity gains, and that's what we need to do. We need to make sure that we're hiring AI first people so that we can drive this kind of productivity improvements. So I guess a couple of things on this slide as we think about your leadership operating system, but it really comes down to those values that I articulated. First of all, accountability can be delivered with compassion, right? So I do think leading with humanity doesn't necessarily mean lowering your goals at all or lowering your standards, but it does mean that you can, you can hold people to account while still finding compassion and and that just means, if people are not the right fit for the organization, you can, you can find the right path for them. You can deliver feedback in a caring and compassionate way. If you haven't read radical candor by Kim Scott, I would highly encourage, encourage you to do that. And here's some data. Well, actually, we'll get to it in the next slide. But these are, these are some of the pillars that that I think are important. So again, all of it relates to clarity, right, clarity and accountability. I think if you take nothing else from, you know, from this webinar, I think what you what you want to do is go back to your organization and figure out, do we have extremely clear goals? Have we communicated them, and then do I communicate them regularly? Do you have a system? So again, I have this weekly email. We have two all hands meetings. We're a fully remote organization. Some people think it's overkill. We have a Monday all hands and then a Friday all hands. The Monday is sort of setting the stage for the week. The Friday is a celebration of sort of member success and customer success stories. But again, all of it comes down to clarity and accountability. And if you have clear standards, the thing that you cannot afford in this world is a lack of clarity. And that doesn't mean that I'm perfect, you know, oftentimes I'm suffering, you know, I'm sure, if you ask people, you know, within pavilion, they might have some feedback. But this is the aspiration, right? The aspiration is, here's a long term plan, here's the goals that we're working towards, here's how we expect to be measured and evaluated, and here's the path that we're working towards to get there. Now we know that human centric organizations drive higher engagement, and higher engagement drives growth. So that's, by the way, why this is important, because human leaders and again, all we mean is being real, bringing your authentic self, being clear, compassionate, but clear and accountable, I think are the key measurements for how we're going to drive success in this modern world. I think that's that's what we can do in this in this age of uncertainty, is provide clarity, provide accountability, artic. And then I think the other part of it is articulate the reality of the world that we live in. I don't think we should sugar coat it. I think we should be really, really honest about how we drive these things and how we motivate our teams going forward. So a couple of things that I think are important. First of all, and you know, obviously there's a little bit of a sales pitch for pavilion, because that's where I work. But whether or not it's with pavilion, I would encourage you to think about mentorship. To think about, are you pairing, you know, the future generation, with the next generation, so that with with an existing generation of leaders, are you forming cohorts like can you do? Are you doing hackathons or workshops? Are you investing in education and professional development? I do think that in this world, community becomes really, really important. Because, you know. Nobody's done this before. Nobody's been a CRO in 2026 or 2027 and so I think if you're thinking about, how do I, how do I equip my organization? I think part of what you need to be thinking about is, is your organization connected to the world in the right way? I don't think this is a thing that we can do in a silo. That could just mean LinkedIn, that could mean joining this webinar, but it probably needs some way of bringing people together, either virtually or in person, in real life, trying to give them some content that they can work on, and then really helping to guide their professional development. And of course, you know, I work at pavilion, so some of the lessons that you that we've talked about here, you can, you can get CRO school. It starts July 10. We're also doing an AI and go to market series, which, you know, if you are interested, you can. We'll share the slides with and we're hosting a conference as well. But that's, that's really, that's the webinar. I hope that was useful. Feel free to ask questions. There's a question in the Q, amp, A, so I'm going to ask it. So you're talking about burnout, and someone says, anonymously, you were talking about burnout, what happens when you wear the company's colors? Company's colors and feel motivated to work and go through the extra mile until you start feeling exhausted because you realize it's not your company, not your product, etc. I guess my question is more around what is a good balance that is such a great question. Here's what I think. I think that there's a couple, there's a couple answers to this question, sir or ma'am, whoever you are out there. The first is, listen, I think that giving your all to your role is never a bad thing. That's one thing I think, like I think that, you know, let me flip back to to this other slide right here. I just want to show you this slide. Let's, let's look at this slide. The bar is raised, right? So, first of all, I do think that we operate in a world where there are going to be increased expectations. And I think it's not always pleasant or comfortable, but I think it is the reality. And so, you know, I think that if you're out there wearing your company's call it colors, and really going the extra mile, I just think that that's the way you have to approach your life at this point, and I know that you're feeling exhausted. That's why the second thing I would have to say is that's why there's a wellness revolution. That's why you have to think about what are the practices and behaviors that you embody in order to make sure that you can that it is a marathon and not a sprint. And I think that that could include meditation, that can include good sleep, that could include that could include, you know, exercise that can include, you know, having a great social network and going out and being with friends, but all of that is key to how we have to approach the current world, because the requirements of this world are greater than we are used to, and that's why there's going to be a little bit of dislocation that you're going to feel, because you feel like, is it fair, you know, is it fair? And I don't know that it always is. So that's my that's the final another point, two more points. You're never going to feel as energized as when it's your company. So if you really have felt like this persistently, the reality is that if you're an employee, it is going to be somebody else's business and and I think that that's just, that's just true. And so if you really don't like that feeling. I think it's a great call to start your own business. And I think that the final piece of it is just sharing feedback with the organization. Now they don't know, you know, sometimes you share feedback and they don't respond to it. And my general lesson is, you know, if you've given feedback for six to 12 months and they're not doing anything, and it's a good labor market, then maybe it's time to move on. But the labor market is not great right now. Just so you all know, it's not great. And I think that there's, there's probably a series of people that are quiet, quitting, anonymous attendee. The person that asked this question, I would say, like, what I would advise you to do is find some wellness practices within your life, and that, by the way, let me speak for myself. That's what I've done, right? I've been working on pavilion for nine years. We've had some good years and some bad years. We're going through some changes. It's a difficult operating environment. So what do I do? I make sure that I meditate every day. I work out every day. Get my five grams of creatine. I have, you know, I take seven pills at this point, from methyl B 12 to, you know, Omega fish oils, to magnesium, all this crap. But I do it, and I feel good. I drink a lot less, I spend a lot of time with my family. I read books, try to get out in the sun. Those are wellness practices, because I'm not stepping back from my intensity level. Adam at pavilion, I am not, you know, I am. I am more engaged than I've ever been, and I am ready to go. But the reason I'm ready to go and I have this energy is because I'm taking care of myself on the side. So that was my answer. Micah asks, as a leader, do you expect your team to act the same way you do, or is the ball bar always higher for a leader? I here's what I expect from the team. And. And I don't always get this and and so this is, you know, my answer to folks, but
I expect curiosity and passion and accountability, you know, like I, I can't How many time if you don't ask any questions on an all hands, right? Let me if you're out there listening, and I don't know who's who's listening, I don't know the profiles of everybody, but if you, if, if you never participate in the group conversation that your company is trying to host, I don't think it's always fair to give the negative feedback. What are the kinds of people that I'm looking for? I don't need them to be perfect. What I want them to do is be energized and enthusiastic and curious, and I want them to be I want them to want to do a good job, because that's how they were raised. You know, there's this classic phrase you can't put in what God left out. I can't always uncover the intrinsic motivation that that is going to unlock, you know, the excitement in you. But I, I do want to hire people that have some level of motivation and then I can activate it. I do think that the bar is higher for me as a leader, and that's okay, but what I really want is curiosity and passion from the team. It's okay if you don't know the answers. It's okay if you make mistakes, but in terms of, like, how we should be thinking about our teams, I think we we can raise the bar for what is expected from our teams just from a passion and curiosity perspective. It doesn't mean people have to work 80 hours a week or 100 hours a week, but it does mean you have to be curious. It does mean you have to want to do a good job, because I just think that's what's required to execute well in this environment, any other questions or anything anybody wants to share in the chat, I'm just gonna linger on, where was it? This? This slide a second. The other thing I would say is, if you're listening and you're out there, you got to spend some time and again, doesn't have to be pavilion, although, of course, it could be, but you do, you have to be thinking about, what is the amount of time I'm spending, not working in my company, but really developing my skills that could be vibe coding and lovable. That could be, you know, participating in some other community, that could be going to an in person meetup or an event, but it really does have to be, you have to be focused on self development and self improvement, because the world is just moving at a torrid rate right now. If you want to learn some of these skills. CRO school begins July 10. AI and go to market. Our new course starts today, which is June 17. Hope to see you in DC. And if you if you're here and you want to save 20% on your membership, you can, but otherwise, we're at the end. Nancy says wanting to do a good job and actually getting results are two different things. Sometimes it is just the market you are selling into. I agree with that 100% and, but I think that you want to make sure, and this is only a question that you can answer, which is, did you give it everything that you had? And, and we all know, you know that answer is personal, that's, that's, that's, that's something that we have to answer for ourselves. I But I definitely agree with you that sometimes it is just the market, you know, and some markets are more difficult, and some solutions are out of product market fit. And there's not a, you know, there's not a motivational speech that can make that work. But to your point, Nancy, if you're giving your all every single day, I think that's all that can be asked of you, and I commend you for doing it. You're welcome Well,
folks, if you don't have any more questions, thank you. Thanks for joining. 40 minutes. Highly efficient. I hope it was useful. If you want to reach out to me, if you have a one on one question, you can email me sam@joinpavilion.com you can ping me on LinkedIn. But if you want a one on one conversation, I'm always happy to provide assistance or support. And if you haven't used otter, I really encourage it, because it really is something where you can send it into the meeting and you don't have to you can listen more presently. You can be more present. That's part of leading with humanity, because the otter is taking notes for you, so we use it every day here at pavilion.
Thank you. Micah, thanks Sam, this is great. Thanks everyone for joining. Thanks. Nancy.
