Feedback

CF: What does your day-to-day role look like?

WT: There are probably three things that are part of my job. One is, “Who do we have as customers today and how are we taking care of our existing business?” I think a lot of companies, when they start to decrease their focus somewhere, lose sight of “Who got you here to begin with?” So there was this piece, that is what we are doing with the existing base of customers. And that means partnerships with customers and partners and the sales teams. So there’s a lot going on there.

The second piece that I spend a lot of time on is, “What would you fix?” When you ask people for suggestions, they don’t always like to look in their own business and say, “Here’s what we’re doing wrong.” But if you say to people, “If I could fix a problem, what would it be?” Suddenly, everybody’s giving you ideas. A partner is telling you what they could do better. The sales team’s telling you what to do better. And then I have what I call P1 and P2 lists. Everything goes on the list. Everything doesn’t go on the list for today. And that’s probably the hardest part, because when your portfolio is wide, there are big things in every bucket. We should keep doing them, but maybe a little better than we do them today. And then there’s this bucket of wasted time. What are the things that are taking your time that are not about serving the customer? How do we fix it? Is it that we need to automate? Is it that we need to give you training? Is it that you need digital platforms? What is it that is in your way?