You're listening to RevOps FM with Justin Norris. If you had to pick one agency that's had the biggest impact on B2B marketing over the past five years, the decision would be easy. Whether you agree with their approach or not, you'd have to say, refine labs. Refine labs have set the agenda, they've defined the terms of the debate, they've introduced ideas and methodologies that have come to be widely acknowledged as aspirational best practices, even if they're not universally practiced yet.
And of course, the face most of us associate with refine is former CEO Chris Walker. Today's guest was a partner with Chris nearly from the beginning of that journey, helping grow refine labs from just a few people to nearly 100. Megan Bowen was a COO at Refine for three and a half years before taking over from Chris as CEO at the beginning of 2024. And we all know that the impact of operations often happens below the surface.
It's a lot less visible from the outside, you don't see it on LinkedIn, but it keeps everything going, it makes the magic happen. So we're going to pull back the curtain today and take a look at the refine lab story from an operational perspective, dig into some lessons learned about agency ops and talk to Megan about where she's staring refined next as CEO. Megan, it's such a pleasure to have you here today. What an intro, I love that.
Thank you so much. I'm excited to be here and excited to chat about all of the things. And so thanks again for having me on. A little bit about you first looking at your CV.
You had roles in sales account management customer success ops. You've kind of really done a full circuit. And now you're CEO. I'm curious about the stack of skills you've built up through these different roles.
And is there one of these functions that you feel most rooted in or how they contributed to who you are today? I'll give you my quick career arc because I think that it is a really interesting evolution from where I started to where I am now actually right out of high school before I went to college. I got sucked into probably an MLM scheme, cut co-cutlery. And that was a really formative experience for me because I really learned the hard skills of sales.
I actually sold over $10,000 worth of these knives. I actually had some success. And that was when I first started to realize the importance of sales and move away from a lot of my childhood dreams about being a filmmaker and looking at the bigger picture and thinking, hmm, maybe I have a path in the business world. And maybe that's where I'm headed.
Let me make my millions and then I'll retire and make movies until I die. My first job at college was an educational technology company called Echok. My core foundational skill set I learned there was account management, customer success, and customer service. I was here for seven years.
I got some promotions, but I was doing the same job for seven years. And that allowed me to really master the discipline of account management and customer success. And this was actually before customer success was even really a thing. Ready for my next challenge after that really great run went to Zokdoc.
This is 2012. I took a huge step back in my career, became a customer support agent, over a 50% pay cut. But I said, this is a place where I will be able to grow my career. They're offering something that people are definitely going to use.
After nine months on the phone, emails had set, sitting on a stability ball, answering calls and emails for 14 hours a day. I was able to synthesize that the core problem in the business was a complete lack of a post-sale function. At the time, the business's only solution was let's just keep hiring more support reps. And I was like, hey, guys, if you have a post-sale team, you properly onboard your doctors, you don't need 60 support reps dealing with all of the problems that exist.
It took me a while, but I put a business case together and it gave me the opportunity. And that was my first time building out a team from scratch. So in 18 months, I built a team from zero to 24, designed the entire post-sale function. That was an amazing experience.
And I realized I love leading a team, building a team. This is what I really love to do. I got recruited from GrubHub seamless. They said, we need someone to build out our B2B account management function.
I was like, I can do that. I want to do it again. Let's go. So I left Sockdock went to GrubHub seamless.
Post-merger, pre-IPO built that function from scratch there on the B2B side was there for the IPO. So they acquired a bunch of companies and I learned I basically had to like fold in a lot of their acquired companies into the broader brand. That was another really formative experience. GrubHub got really big.
I was there for four years and I was like, I need to go back to building something. Small company managed by Q reached out. We need you to build our account management function. Like, I got this.
Went to manage by Q. Managed by Q was when I broke out of the account management lane. I started as the director of account management. I ended as the COO at Managed by Q.
First, I took over sales, had a lot of experience there. Then I took over marketing, didn't have as much. Then I took over operations. Then I became the COO.
We eventually exited to WeWork via acquisition. That's another story for another day. Maybe over a glass of wine. I then went back into the food tech space.
I got recruited to go to this company Platters. I was like, I know this space. It's very crowded. A lot of them in the activity can probably get my next exit this way.
Let's go. Pandemic happened though. And then that negatively affected that business. And I decided to walk away.
I was actually going to start my own kind of COO consulting customer success sales. I was like, go to market consulting and Chris found me and ultimately convinced me to team up with him and build refine labs. My first question was like, out of all the things that I do, I'm decent at marketing, but you want me to help you build a marketing agency? That's not really my core competency.
And he said, no, you have all the skills I don't have. I think we're going to make a really good team. Obviously I said, yes, here we are today. And we were building the agency side by side ever since.
And then as things evolved, you see how things have transpired over the last three to four months. The theme I've took from there is building. Yes. It seems to be your happy place.
But you hadn't done a service-based business before. I guess GrubHub to an extent was a lot of a service component to it. All the companies I worked at were really tech-enabled services. The thing about it, ZokDoc.
You book the appointment online, but all my support calls were about what happened in the doctor's office or an issue with the appointment, et cetera. GrubHub, you order online, you get the food in real life. The food has to be good. Managed by Q, you order office services online, someone's coming to clean or paint your office.
So all my roles, it was about both technology adoption and management of the in real life experience. And how do you manage expectations and deliver on your promises to customers with that amount of complexity? So having partnered with Chris really early on in that journey, and I've heard him talk a fair bit about that arc from his point of view, and there's actually an episode of Dementia Live where the two of you discussed Refine Labs, which really stuck with me. I got a bit of your perspective, but I'm just curious to replay that movie through your eyes and what it was like going on that journey building Refine Labs.
I joined it was the summer of 2020. I think there was five employees, maybe about six customers at the time. And all six customers were using really a random assortment of services. This is the beginning of the agency.
So the core offering hadn't really fully been fleshed out. It was really an amalgamation of people that thought Chris was smart and wanted to hire him and his team to help with a variety of things. It was interesting in my first 90 days, like all of the customers that ended up canceling, that we had to quickly replace them. I remember making my first sale in week three of joining the company with Chris.
So I would say the first six months, you know, I kind of came in and I was like, every customer is sort of getting something different. Everyone's paying a different amount. We're grossly undercharging for the value that we're providing. And really, I would say the first thing that I was trying to focus on in coming in and using my experience and expertise in working with Chris was like, who is our real customer?
And what is really the core set of services that really are our core competency? And what are we like, sure, we can do these other things, but are those things that we're really good at? So I'd say in the first six months of working together, we really were able to craft, I would say, what is still probably the core of our business strategy, which was leading into demand strategy, media execution. I built out the creative team from scratch in the beginning of 2021.
We added that once we realized that was a key need of our customers and really started playing around with pricing and increasing those prices. We then had the COVID boom. So 2021 was our hyper growth year. And sure, me and Chris would probably like, we're so smart.
We grew this amazing agency. It's just because of us because we were so smart. We're so good. And it's not to diminish either of our skill sets, but I think it was predominantly a function of the market conditions.
If I'm being honest, we had all of this VC money coming in high pressure to grow as well as a ton of money to inject into that growth and a total lack of consideration for any customer acquisition costs or any other unit economics that mattered. Right. So that was perfect for us. And honestly, in that period, I remember when I joined, we were charging our clients like around eight K per month.
And we rode that COVID boom. I think at the peak, we were charging between like 35 and 45 K per month for our services. It was some gradual price increases up until that point. Obviously, the market has corrected around now 20 to 27 K a month.
But that's when we had hyper growth. So it was, how do we hire people? How do we build a repeatable process for service delivery? How do we design the delivery process so that it's repeatable?
How do we find the right talent? How do we train them in an agency? The team is the product, the people that you get, how you enable them, how they feel about being at the job is crucial to be successful. That's when I started leveraging the core marketing principles for a talent acquisition.
I basically recruited probably the first 60 people at the company personally and started posting on LinkedIn. We later started a podcast called Talent Destination was really intentional about why working at our agency would be different from working at other agencies. The reputation isn't great. Burn out too many customers, not caring about the individual, unable to take vacation, difficult customers that you have to deal with without any support from the leadership team.
So everything that I was doing was like, how do we not be that? How do we be the opposite of the negative connotations of what it's like to work at an agency? How do we assemble all the marketing Avengers all in one place? So people want to come work with us because of the caliber of talent that we have.
So recruiting, I would say like offers, pricing, packaging, that was like a big thing. I focused on then it was talent and then it was identifying the people on the team that were really strong operationally and giving them clarity on where we needed to focus to actually scale. That said, we grew so fast that things started to break. That's what happened.
And that's funny because both Chris and I really hate the growth at all costs mentality, but we fell into growth at all costs because of all of those factors that I just explained and dealt with the same consequences and repercussions. 2022, 2023, we're challenging. The B2B SaaS ecosystem started to erode collapse if I'm being dramatic and we had a pivot. We had to lower pricing.
We had a delivery model for those higher pricing. So that cut into our operating margins. We had clients that were just going out of business or running out of money that impacted retention greatly. People wanted to keep working with us, but we're like, I literally can't pay you because we're in survival mode right now.
And then we had to test and pivot. We started unbundling services, Chris, the forever visionary, forever innovator was trying to rethink our category positioning or our offering. So we tried lots of different things over the course of that time period, which I think was needed. Another byproduct of that, though, was creating a lot of confusion in the market about who we were, what we did.
I've taken sales calls at Refine Labs the whole time. Sometimes we've had help. Sometimes it's only that period was when I'd start a sales call and this is how most of them would start. I love Refine Labs.
I love the podcast. I love Chris. Buh-buh-buh-blah. So what do you guys do?
What do you actually do? I was like, uh-oh, okay, here we go. So taking over, this was a very intentional decision to let Chris effectively start a new venture focused on some of the new patterns that he was seeing in GoToMarket. So that's really what Pissetto was all about, right?
Let's get really clear and focused about what Refine Labs is. Let's split off a new venture that can be focused on what Chris does best, which is identifying new patterns, innovating off of that, continuing to explore new concepts and further define them. And let's treat Refine Labs for what it is, a demand generation agency. And so as I've taken over, I've really focused on clarity on continuing to adjust pricing and packaging to meet our customers' needs.
I'm curious, stepping into the CEO role. Has it been a shock to the system in any way? Has it been surprising at all differences from what you would expect? Or is it just felt like a natural extension of a lot of the work that you were doing already?
So I think some additional context on this. Chris and I had a unique leadership style in running the business when I first joined. I would say from 2020 to 2022, we very much were acting like co-leaders of the company and we were also leveraging each other's strengths. So for example, I always managed the senior leadership team directly.
And Chris and I, although it would evolve and change, we effectively divided and conquered on all of the key responsibilities that a typical CEO and maybe a COO would have. And so from an internal perspective, I don't think that was the perception externally, but from an internal perspective, we were always acting in that way. And then in the beginning of 2023, when things were particularly difficult, we had a big layoff in December of 2022, which was difficult. I would say beginning of that 2023 period, I started to take on a lot more CEO-like responsibilities internally.
Chris was really going down this path of experimenting with what has now become piscetto at that time. And over the course of 2023, him and I were discussing about how we were going to play this out and what it would look like. And so I would say for the majority of last year, I was doing the role in many ways from an internal perspective. And so when the external announcement went out in January, it was exciting and fun and had a lot of really kind messages of congratulations, et cetera.
But for me, in January, it didn't feel that different. It felt like over the course of 2023, when I personally was undergoing some of those adjustments and that adjustment period, including trying to really figure out who can I identify on the team that can start to take on the COO and the operational stuff that I'm doing. So I can create more space for focusing on some other things that are also important. And so diving in a little bit into the, I'm going to call it agency operations.
I don't even know if that's a real term, but I'll use it to describe the thing that you have been doing. And this is something that I learned as well. I was on the agency side for seven years and you start out, you're like, I'm good at this. I think X, I'm going to go and be a consultant for that skill set.
In the beginning, that's okay. And then as you start to add an ad, like, well, I built this really complex thing. Actually is a business of itself to run and make sure that we are delivering equality, service, and a repeatable way and that it scales and you really touched already on a lot of those points. But I don't think there's a lot of playbooks.
I think there are a few books and things out there about running service businesses, but I think people just sort of discover it. They're like, Oh, I got to run this thing. What was that learning process like for you, kind of figuring that out? It's really hard running a service business is hard.
People should think carefully before they sign up for it. So there are a couple, I think key challenges. I'll talk a little bit about, I think this was in Q3, Q4 of 2021. We had so the tail end of the COVID boom year of 2021, our customer acquisition was out of control.
I literally couldn't hire fast enough to meet the demand that we had. It was insane. At one point, we were signing contracts that didn't have start dates until 90 days away because I just didn't have a team available to assign to them and people were still signing up and waiting basically for their turn to work with us. And we were bumping up our prices.
We were signing all sorts of companies, big and small, relatively straightforward, very complex businesses with massive budgets. We had this initial hypothesis on capacity planning, which is every team should manage four to five customers. And that would allow us to achieve our target margins, target revenue efficiency metrics. I started getting a lot of feedback in Q3 of 2021 from all of the teams that everyone was feeling burnt out.
The workload was unsustainable. They weren't sure what changes they could make to make it sustainable. And that was when I raised the red flag to Chris and I was like, we are headed for the iceberg. If we do not make a change, everyone on the team is feeling this.
This is not one or two people. This is the broad sentiment. We have to address this and we have to make a change. And so we did an exploration of the problem.
We effectively came to realize that we were treating all of our customers the same when they were not. And that was the first time we actually segmented our customers across tiers and assigned a different set of resources to them. And we could no longer rely on just like, well, every team gets four to five customers. It was like, no, that doesn't work.
We need to reflect the nuances of the different segments. We need to realize that maybe, you know, in the tier one segment, sure, they can have four to five customers. If they have a tier three client, they can only manage two. And that also forced us to rethink our pricing and packaging.
We had to charge those tier three clients more than the tier one. So that was a defining moment in our operations. We segmented the customer base and we made a plan and presented it back to the team of how over a two month period we were going to reassign accounts to load balance everybody's book of business appropriately. That was challenging because we had to continue to delay net new revenue in order to prioritize not burning out the team.
And we still haven't figured this out completely because the market drove our prices down. And in many ways, we still have an expensive delivery model. And so it has been an ongoing constant effort of how are we repackaging and pricing? How are we designing what the delivery experience is like?
How many people are on every type of account? But I think that story kind of illustrates the challenge that we had. What I'm proud of is what we did, though, is we prioritize the health of the team ahead of net new revenue acquisition, which I don't think happens in every context. So we were willing to delay revenue growth because we realize that this was so important to solve.
And I think for any agency owner, you have to put your team before the customer because your team is the product. It is the customer experience. If they're burnt out, if they're not set up for success, if they're not equipped, your customer will know they will feel it. And that's the prevalent theme that I see in agencies that have an opportunity to improve, they consistently prioritize the customer and are not making that connection.
And that's what leads to that negative reputation you alluded to about agencies that they're me grinders, that they don't care about their people. That was my trepidation in joining an agency. And I mean, I was lucky. I ended up somewhere great, but also took that approach.
I think more and more are starting to figure that out. But yeah, it's a scary thing to where 50, 60 billion hours a week and be burnt out and not have a management that has your back. It isn't sustainable. I'm curious the access of segmentation for the client base was just based on company size.
Like was that the defining thing between the different tiers or were there other factors that influenced how much support needed? It's a good question. I think there was a correlation with company size, but it really came down to a few factors and more about the dynamic of the actual product mix and the total ad budget we managed. So I think where we distinctly saw an account taking significantly more hours to serve was if their total monthly ad budget was significantly higher.
Managing 50K per month is very different than a million per month, just in terms of tasks to be completed, jobs to be done, hours needed to dedicate to it. And then the additional layer is there are some companies that have one target market, one customer segment and one product offering. So I need to market this one product to this one segment and I need to get that exactly right. There's another type of company that actually has a suite of products, three, four, five, six, seven different solutions.
And maybe they sell into SMB and mid market and enterprise. That's actually like five companies in one company, even if their ad budget is relatively small, right? Even if that ad budget is a hundred K and not a million, there's a lot more complexity in that. And it's not like we just take the one strategy and use that strategy for all your product lines and all your customer segments.
It doesn't work that way. So I'd say those were the two biggest factors that effectively classified a customer as like a tier one versus a tier three, thinking tier one more simple, tier three more complex. There was a general correlation with tier three customers being overall larger companies, more employees, higher revenue, but not always the case, interestingly enough. I mean, my background was more of an hourly billing model.
It just made sense for the type of work that we did, which was primarily, you know, systems, configuration, IT like products. For your pricing and packaging, it was more like a monthly retainer model. Generally, it's preferred people don't like the idea of just trading hours for dollars because there's a limit to how far you can scale. But the flip side, I guess, what you talked about is you may end up in a package with a client that starts just sucking you dry in terms of hours.
Yes. Do you set limits on that? How do you put boundaries to make sure that doesn't happen? I mean, we considered hourly or usage-based pricing multiple times over the course of the last few years.
We challenged our business model at many junctures and thought, should we go in this direction? Like it would be easier, you know, I'm using air quotes to charge that way so that we're not underwater with certain clients, right? What we kept coming back to, though, was we didn't want to be hired for the hours that we spent. We wanted to be hired for the impact that we would have.
So we kept coming back to our flat pricing, although there are some tears, like, you know, the 27K a month packages for a 50K ad budget, you're spending a million bucks a month, you're going to pay us more than 27K. But we'll put that custom pricing together for you. What it came down to then was in order to ensure that we don't over deliver or erode our margins, we need to be really intentional with the service design, as well as the sales process and how we are communicating what to expect, what they're going to get, how you actually draft your scopes of work so that if you run into an issue, you have sort of agreed upon documentation to come back to to reset expectations. But the most important thing is aligning in the sales process.
So there's no confusion, right? I like to tell people, I'm like, I'm not a great sales rep. I open my sales calls being like, I'm not here to convince you to hire us. The purpose of this call is for us to have an initial conversation and evaluate if we think there's a potential fit for a partnership and then we'll keep talking.
And I actually will bring things up to almost talk people out of hiring us. If I see a potential yellow flag or a red flag, people with low ACVs, oh, our product costs $4,000 a month. I'm like, yo, I can get you more customers to pay you $4,000 a month. But if you're paying us our retainer and 50k per month ad budget, your customer acquisition cost is going to be unsustainable.
Is that something you want to sign up for? Do you have a ton of VCP money that you're willing to just spend for a period of time to grow and figure out how to write size later? Like, if so, cool. We'll help you.
If not, I'm not sure we're the right partner, right? When you're on the hook for delivering those bad projects or projects with bad fit clients and you experience the pain of that you get way more motivated to filter people out front versus just selling like a SaaS product that's like air, like whatever, if you don't succeed with it, maybe you don't care if you're the salesperson. But when you're also having to deliver and fulfill that, you feel it way closer to home. Absolutely.
And then, but honestly, that approach serves me well. I create trust pretty quickly. People don't think I'm trying to oversell or convince them. And then for those where it does make sense, we're able to go through effectively like a due diligence process.
I don't need it. It's like not even a sales process, right? It's like, okay, let's take each of these steps that I've defined that will help us both evaluate that this is going to be a good fit for both sides. I've found the same.
It's way better. It's consultative. You're not pitching anybody on anything and people really want to work with you coming out the other end. You've mentioned a few times and I agree with it so much that in a service business, the people are the product and the challenge that I have seen, you know, you start an agency and maybe you have a few rock stars, like a Sydney or Sam or an Ashley or an Anderson, I know, and then it becomes hard to like clone them.
No matter what process you put in place, there's an unevenness sometimes or not. Everybody has the same methodology. And so then you have this unevenness in the service delivery. You know, not everyone gets the identical experience.
How did you tackle that? Or did you figure out how to clone people and really keep that consistent? Yeah. It's a great question.
2021 and Q1 of 2022 was when we had our hiring spree, probably like over that period of time, hired 100 people. One of the consistent things that came up in the interview process was the sense of imposter syndrome from highly skilled experienced demand marketers, just like I see Sam, I see Sydney, Ashley, I see these people on LinkedIn. I don't know if I'm good enough to be here. Like, am I going to be able to succeed in this job?
Right? Now, yes, you need a baseline of hard skills and experience to be effective in this job, right? And we very intentionally qualify for that in our recruiting process. And then we had a pretty strong process whereby we would have, obviously, like conversation interviews, technical interviews and presentation interviews to be able to check off all of the boxes, again, for both sides.
And also to make sure that we always recruited people that had in-house experience, not agency experience. So I always was so intentional of like, this is going to be really different from what you're used to. Here's how it's going to be different. These demand marketers in many cases never had to think about developing things like account management skills or executive communication skills.
But for all the ones that we've hired and many others, they were excited to develop those. And a lot of people viewed coming to Refine Labs as, this is how I'm going to get my marketing MBA. I'm going to come in here. I'm going to work here for a few years.
I'm going to work with a bunch of different companies. I'm going to figure out for myself what works and what doesn't work. And so we weren't perfect on hiring, but we really had a process to bring in awesome people. This might have been my favorite thing about building this company is the talent density that we had and continue to have is unmatched from any company that I've been on boarding.
Enablement is crucial. And then I think leadership. So Judy, Sheriff, Evan Hughes on our team have been here since the beginning. And they've always led and managed our team of directors of demand gen.
So I would say onboarding enablement and like consistent leadership and a good recruiting process is how you mitigate the risk there. But what I'll say is all of our directors go through this beautiful professional development arc. And it's so awesome to see, right? Like I'm okay if you join us and I know that in two years, you're going to be so much better than where you are today.
But that's actually something I personally get a lot of satisfaction about. How do you create the conditions for people to be in a professional setting and truly accelerate their career growth in a meaningful way? Mistakes get made. Customers might be let down or upset here and there.
That's okay. There are solutions to those things. With that onboarding process, did you have like a formal playbook or learning path? Like something documented that you put people through to have them come out with a sort of consistent sort of delivery model?
Or was it learning through osmosis, body system, shadowing? How did that work? All of those things. We have robust documentation, which effectively also kind of became the vault in many ways.
We always paired people up for mentorship and buddy programs. We would have new hires sit in on active client meetings because like to see it is to know it and to learn it. So we did all of those things. And one of the biggest challenges with the service based business is it's almost impossible to stand on that tightrope of being perfectly staffed and like having supply and demand each other.
Like you're almost never there. Two few people and then you're disappointed in clients. We have too many people and all of a sudden your margins are underwater. And when I was on the agency, I had a full set of period of time where people would voluntarily reduce their hours.
So we didn't have to lay people off. That was okay. But it's like, it's just such a thin razor's edge that you're walking all the time. How did you manage that?
Yeah, it's so hard. The first exposure was not enough people. So that was our first problem in 2021 when the demand exceeded the supply. It was a race to recruit and onboard.
At the time we had enough leverage. I couldn't believe it when I'd be on a sales call and I'd be like, our next available start date is a 90 days, but we're first come for serve. Send me the contract. I want to start in 90 days.
Okay. Almost couldn't believe it, but it happened a lot. So I think when we didn't have enough supply, it was like, okay, how are we managing the expectations of customers? How are we staggering start dates?
I also came up with what I called. I said, you know, you're going to start in 90 days. However, we have a pre onboarding process that I'm going to enroll you in because I needed to keep them warm for 90 days, right? So we would send them information.
We would have them start to do some of the setup. We would, you know, engage them with the vault. We had all these different things that we did in an effort to kind of keep them engaged over that period of time, then coming into 2022, probably like Q2, 22 is when we started seeing churn spike because of the impact of the kind of macro economic conditions. And then that's when my supply exceeded the demand.
And that sucks. And we're bootstrapped. We don't have lots of money in the bank. And so we would hold off as long as we could.
We did two layoffs in 2022 though, one in July and one in December. And coming into 2023, we did our best to cut what we thought was needed in 22, but we knew that it might not have been enough. So in 2023, I just took a very different approach because of the damage to the culture that those two layoffs created. We were always transparent, but I was the most transparent we had ever been with, like literally telling people, like, here's the roadmap.
Here's the runway. If we don't hit X, Y and Z, we're going to have too many designers or too many X. And we're going to have to make a change, right? And so although we had different folks either leave voluntarily or if we had to kind of manage people out, we were doing it in a very different way of like, boom, you come into work and like you're shocked with a layoff and it was like, hey, I can pay you until the end of May, but I don't think I can pay you after.
So you should probably start to look for other work, right? The other thing that we did in 2023 was sell whatever we could to bring revenue into the business. So we did a lot of experiments and sold a lot of random things to generate revenue in the short term as to try to like buy us more time. So there are no easy answers to this.
I would always rather operate with more demand than supply. Did you find that operating with that kind of radical transparency? Did that at least help? You know, the people felt that they were aware and mitigate a bit of that anxiety?
You know, I think it helps, but I think it also hurt. I think it helped because people knew where they stood, but then it hurt because then there was this sort of perpetual state of anxiety that is very typical for companies to kind of keep at the leadership level and only expose the broader company to in those kind of like shock layoff days. So I don't know, to be honest, I was personally really drawn to saying, we just can't do a third layoff and blind side the team. So I'm going to take this approach and I know that it has downsides.
I know that it's not the perfect approach, but I think that this approach will help us rebuild trust over the long run. I would say the culture from summer 22 towards, I would say like Q3, 23, like a year and a few months was really challenging, but we persevered. And I think the benefit of that approach anyway is reestablished trust with the team and leadership that we were going to do everything that we could to prevent what happened in 2022, even though maybe it makes people feel a little uncomfortable. I mean, speaking of someone who's been an agency employee, I've never been an agency owner, but I would rather know the role adults here, right?
I think he can plan and I don't know. I think the trust part, even if everything isn't Rosie all the time, if you feel that you know where you stand and you know where the company stands clear is kind at the end of the day, even if it's disappointing. Just thinking a little bit about, as you alluded to, you know, Chris being the kind of visionary and the innovator and always thinking of new things, has the core philosophy core approach changed at all over the past four or five years? The core of the strategy and the philosophy has remained the same.
The ways that it has evolved has been additive, right? Additive strategies, additive tactics, additive measurement approaches, but the core of it hasn't changed. I get this question a lot from people because they're like, the LinkedIn, you know, echo chamber, like everybody says demand creation, demand capture, like these are like old concepts, like this isn't new. Everybody's talking about this, but I'm like, okay, I'm like, I literally talked to seven to 10 companies a week.
And I can tell you confidently that 80% of the B2B companies out there are not doing any of it at all. And so I'm like, I get it. I get it. We're in this echo chamber.
I get it. We've been saying the same thing for four to five years. The problem is still there. The market opportunity is still there just because it's been discussed a lot.
Doesn't mean it's been adopted widely. And so this is what I like to remind people of. I'm like, you know that you're doing your job well in branding and positioning your company and telling your story when you start to get sick of telling your story. And that actually means you're not quite done yet.
You need to keep telling it. And this is where I think Chris and I take a different approach, you know, one of the things that kind of I was drawn to Chris was his like visionary spirit, his innovative spirit, his desire to create new things, develop new language for concepts. And I love that. It's exciting.
It's cool. Like it's fun. It's inspiring. I lean more on the direct blunt clear.
Like, let's just be clear. Let's be specific. Let's explain things. Let's not get too caught up on some of the language or this.
Right. I'm not saying my approach is right or better. I'm just saying it's how I operate, right? It's how I see the world.
It's how I communicate. And so relative to where Refine Labs is in its journey, it is an established business now. And what's most important is actually operational excellence, actually making a huge dent in the number, the percentage of B2B companies that are actually shifting their strategies and their execution tactics. That's the game now for Refine Labs.
So now, if you look at Pissetto, Chris's new venture, he's back in the exploration, innovation, seeing things, describing patterns, coming to new conclusions. That's his happy place, right? That's his zone of genius. But Pissetto is a three person startup that has a desire to be a software company, right?
And sort of they're focusing on tech enabled services right now. So just like the early days of Refine Labs, when that was true for the category that we're in now, it's just a different approach is needed, given the stage that we're at, right? So it's recognizing that. And I think it's just, and that was, I think where Chris and I finally came to a conclusion that this was the right decision and that we could divide and conquer in this way to make both companies successful.
That makes perfect sense. And I think that's also a good lead into probably the last question we'll have time for around making a dent in the market and actually shifting people to these new practices and the vaults, which is sort of the way I think of it as kind of like your productized IP library, where you have all your best practices. I've had an account there to kind of broaden the access to that, which I think is a really exciting opportunity. Maybe you just tell us a little bit about that.
I really got a lot of value out of the resources there and you recently announced a partnership with Aspire Ship to kind of broaden the access to that, which I think is a really exciting opportunity. Maybe you just tell us a little bit about that. Yeah. I'm really excited about this.
So we've known Corey at Aspire Ship for a long time. He used to be a refined labs customer. He hired us back in early 2021 to grow their business and have really developed a great friendship with him. Their platform is awesome and they were initially anchoring on sales and customer success courses, actually films the customer success course with Corey, given my background and experience.
And their whole mission is so noble, right? They're here to like upskill and reseal the workforce. So people that maybe came from education or manufacturing or other industries could kind of break into B.D. SaaS if that was what they wanted to do.
And this was a vehicle with which they could build their skills and get their first job. So Corey approached me in the beginning of this year and said, I've been wanting to build a marketing course and I can't think of a better partner to do it within refined labs. And I think this is an opportunity, you know, he's like, what's your plan for the vault? I think there's an opportunity here for us to create another avenue where we can leverage all this amazing content you've created in a different context to broaden and extend the impact.
And they were clear financial incentives for everybody for a Spireship for refined labs. And it's actually totally free to be marketers if they go through this application process and get approved. And so it was a no brainer to me. I think that the vault started as a content and information product at one point last year, we thought maybe the vault would be the foundational for this go to market software analytics that Chris has visions for at Paseto.
And so when he decided he was going to separate that entity, it was an opportunity to be like, what is the long term plan for the vault then if that's not it anymore? And really lean into content, education and community. And so my goal is you can still buy an account to the vault, right? And we'll still monetize it in that way, although I actually significantly lowered pricing to make it more accessible to people.
But this is how we'll actually be able to extend our impact, right? I know that if we can get thousands of B to B marketers to go through this course that we're effectively educating and training, like the next generation of CMOs on how to think about marketing. And that's honestly, that was one of the main reasons I teamed up with Chris to begin with was we had both been personally burned by growth at all costs, by mismanagement of go-to-market strategies at companies. And we wanted to be a part of that change, right?
So I think what I'm most excited about is a spy ship and this partnership gives us the ability to broaden the impact in a way beyond just hiring us as your agency. Not everybody's going to hire us as their agency. And that's fine. Additionally, to the point we were talking about earlier, if we can really generate a high margin revenue stream for the vault, it allows us to weather some of those inevitable bad quarters or storms that come and keep our team intact.
That's super exciting. And again, you know, have first-hand experience with the resources there, just super valuable, being able to access that for free. Hope people take advantage of it. Best way to access that, if people are interested, they just go through the Refine Labs website.
Just go to the Refine Labs website. You'll actually see a banner on the website for the next couple of months. Click here to learn more about the Aspire ship. You can fill out a quick form to request information and then we'll send you all the details to get started.
Super easy. Just go to Refine Labs. Amazing. That's very exciting.
And yeah, making such a pleasure again, sitting down with you. Super interesting conversation. Thank you for coming on the show. Thank you for having me.
I really appreciate it. Hey, everyone. I want to invite you over to the RevOps FM substak community, where you can sign up to get rough transcripts, show notes, longer form articles and other bonus content. Just head over to RevOps.fm slash subscribe to get free access.
I'd also love to know what you thought of the episode and your suggestions for topics you want to learn about. Feel free to leave a comment on substak or send me an email at Justin at RevOps.fm. Thanks for listening.