14. The First 100 Days as CEO of Charlotte’s IntelliSite w/ Ken Mills

In this episode of Marketing Behind the Curtain, we sit down with Ken Mills, CEO of IntelliSite, to get a look at the transition of leadership at this growing tech company. We’ll also touch on:

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Transcript of Episode

Ken: [00:00:01] I’m a big fan of giving people the autonomy to make decisions, hire great people, uniting coined the term. I think Steve Jobs talks about a lot, right? Hire great people and kind of get out of the way. I try to do that as much as possible.

Intro: [00:00:13] You’re listening to the Marketing Behind the Curtain podcast where we pull back the curtain on the people, processes and technologies leading marketers are using to fuel growth within their organizations. Let’s get into the show.

Devin: [00:00:35] Welcome to Marketing Behind the curtain, where we take a look at the hard work that happens behind the scenes on the marketing front, but a shiny outward face on all types of organizations. I’m your host them and kill you with Method Savvy or a consultancy that helps ambitious leaders find better ways to grow their business.

Devin: [00:00:51] I’m here with Ken Mills of IntelliSite, who’s looking at a fantastic view of downtown Charlotte. Uptown Charlotte is the proper Charlotte vernacular. But I can appreciate you joining us. Want to do a quick intro for yourself.

Ken: [00:01:06] Yeah, we don’t have a downtown in Charlotte. We got rid of that years ago and decided to upgrade to an uptown. So what, a few cities in the country that does that. So I’m Ken Mills and the CEO of IntelliSite has been the CEO for about one hundred days or so as part of a private equity expansion into the company. And I’m very excited to be here.

Devin: [00:01:25] Yeah, I think uptown is far more positive. So, you know, let’s let’s roll with that. I appreciate you joining us. And I’m excited to bring kind of the perspective of a CEO and also a new CEO and kind of the role marketing plays in the organization into this conversation. And we always take a look at the things that happen behind the scenes from a marketing perspective. But I think you have kind of a unique view here with kind of fresh eyes on an organization and coming in from a leadership role. How have your first 100 days or so gone and just kind of assessing what’s going on from a marketing front, how the brand known, what assets you have? What what is that kind of overview process look like from somebody who’s overseeing not only marketing, but a number of other things within the organization?

Ken: [00:02:14] It’s been, one, an exciting hundred days, but an interesting hundred days to start in this role with the whole COVID-19 challenges and opportunities that’s presented. But one thing that’s really interesting is as we look to make the announcement of me coming into the role and the investment we receive from private equity, you had a very dated website, wasn’t really telling the story was actually somewhat confusing when customers went to our website to see what exactly we did or what we didn’t do. And so we had to rush in that kind of a free 30 day window to kind of redo our whole entire brand website messaging and what we do, what we don’t do kind of framework. So that when we did the press release of the investment, we did the announcement of the CEO. We announced some other new leaders within the organization when people hit our intel, said that that website, they actually got to something that represented what we do, what we want to do, where we want to go. So that was really interesting from a marketing perspective is quickly kind of coalesce around an image, coalesce around a quick message, and then match that to a Web presence that was representative of the company where we wanted to go. So that was a fun first 30 days, actually pre-starting the job and then from starting the job, you know, we really just jumped into how we create a brand book, how we create brand guidelines, how do we balance between internal and external resources, how do we use some agencies to help us scale and respond quicker? Some of the things that we need to do are hiring tech writers and all kinds of different resources to kind of bulk up the content and the quality of what we put out as a company was pretty, pretty exciting over the last hundred days.

Devin: [00:03:55] Yeah, it sounds like it’s been busy if we go back to kind of entering the organization and you mentioned that kind of pre 30 days. There’s obviously a lot of logistical things in terms of technology and who are the people that are going to help you get the stuff done. But, you know, coming in new to an organization like that and understanding the organization’s capabilities and their offerings and even things is as kind of big picture as mission vision values that kind of bleed into brand as somebody coming in with fresh eyes. Like how how do you get yourself kind of up to speed and be able to think, you know, with the marketing team and from a brand perspective to be able to inject those things as a as a new voice?

Ken: [00:04:37] Yeah, it is actually a pretty exciting. I was very fortunate to actually partner with the private equity firm to do the due diligence and actual acquisition of this company. So I had about four months of insider knowledge of what’s going on before actually  taking the seat. So I didn’t really come in truly as completely fresh on on day one without knowing what we what we do and what we’re about. But I didn’t have the reins. I didn’t have the ability to make changes until day one officially. Right. So it was one of those things that how to kind of set the culture up and set the structure up so that as we officially make the transition to kind of 2.0, as we call it internally, how to what can we what do we focus on? How do we get there and how we bring on the right people? So we in the same hundred days, we made an acquisition, we changed our marketing organization. We brought in an outsourced marketing organization. We launched new products. We brought the. Two brands together. I mean, we did a ton, a ton of marketing, heavy lifting, so it’s been it’s been fun. We have a lot to do.

Devin: [00:05:40] Yeah. I mean, it sounds like you guys are accomplishing a huge amount of stuff in a short period of time. But, you know, in an industry like yours, I know things kind of move quickly and maybe you want to touch quickly on just Intellisite and kind of what the the company does and how the space is changing there. And we can get a little bit into the people that you’ve brought on here recently and kind of how you’re operating. But I think the you have the space that you guys are in, you can’t kind of sit back and wait to see where things go. I imagine it’s fairly fast moving.

Ken: [00:06:10] It is. It is. So we focus on IOT, AI, computer vision and what we call smart and safe communities solutions. So if you think about Iot that you have at home, whether that’s a smart device, a camera or smart bridge or whatever you might have today that you’re in your home, that is providing data connecting to some cloud service, we do that on an industrial scale. We do that at the enterprise scale. So across the major cities, across major enterprises, major utilities, things like that, where they’re trying to operationalize machine data and sensor data to make meaningful decisions to either operate more efficiently or reduce risk or respond more quickly on the name of adding profit or saving cost. And then you both add on top of that with artificial intelligence and computer vision to provide much richer sensors like we with our own bodies. Right. You have your feel and sound and touch and vision. You’re bringing all those senses together from a machine perspective is what we do for customers to kind of bring that information into real into real time, into kind of real life, as we call it, with a human touch that they can really make decisions around. So that’s what it is, right? That space has changed dramatically, ton of investment players, tons of ways to do it. And we have to kind of cut through all that noise, hopefully with our marketing and our strategy to get to the buyers and decision-makers that are looking for what we do, which is, you know, I mean, I feel like, you know, any time you’re in one of these kind of emerging spaces with AI and machine learning, and I feel like everybody in every industry is trying to attack those terms onto what they do.

Devin: [00:07:49] And it just creates a really, really noisy space. And because of that, you know, you want to get those terms in there, if it’s if it’s what you’re doing. But at the same time, as soon as you bring them in, you’re just in kind of a sea of sameness, of a whole bunch of kind of aspirational companies there. So there’s a lot of noise to cut through and clutter to kind of organize through it.

Ken: [00:08:12] Absolutely. And that’s something we’re still kind of working through, if we’re honest. Right. We still have to find the right balance. You know, we things like instead of saying smart cities use of our communities to try to have a different term, that that can be searched and tagged and brought up. Right. Because if you look at smart cities, you’ll find literally a million companies doing something related. And so we kind of wanted to kind of branch off just to just sidestep to the left to say, hey, yes, smart cities are important, but it’s really about the community, which could be a number of cities or a county or state or even a country. So it’s not always just about a single city.

Devin: [00:08:52] Yeah, I think that’s a that’s a good point when you’re kind of using new language or, you know, creating kind of new spaces to work in there. Can you define the space that you’re existing in? And, you know, it’s tough to do and it has pros and cons because you’re the only one talking about it. But that’s that’s both the upside and downside. There’s a lot of search volume for something you maybe created last week.

Ken: [00:09:12] Yeah, yeah, we’ll see how goes it will come back in a year and see see if it worked out, but yeah, it’s about finding your niche. You don’t want to be the number one player in a market that doesn’t exist. That’s not a great tagline. But you don’t want to be number one thousand either. So finding that find that balance is important for us.

Devin: [00:09:35] Yeah. Well, talk to me a little bit about the people on the team and kind of how you think about resourcing marketing overall. It sounds like that’s changed significantly in the past couple of days, but maybe where you came from and what the deal looks like, even if you’re not quite there yet.

Ken: [00:09:52] Yeah, so marketing has always been super important to me. I mean, it was actually my undergrad. So I have a real interest in how we bring to market and talk to our customers and our partners. So it’s always been something that I’ve focused on in my last role previous to come in and tell us, like I also led a marketing organization as part of the broader business that I was responsible for. So it always has reported to me, essentially, and then part of my primary duties moving to the CEO role, it’s been a little bit different. We rolled our marketing organization both internally and our external partners into our chief revenue officer. So he’s got a lot of great experience, things like Domino’s who comes from Microsoft and Dell and has a lot of good knowledge in that space. So we’ve brought our our market organization, our sales organization together so that they’re really working side by side to grow the business from both branding and execution. So they see the market organization as a place that sits under our chief revenue officer office.

Devin: [00:10:52] Awesome. Yeah.

Devin: [00:10:53] If we talk a little bit about process, because you brought up that the chief revenue officer role, which I think is a great addition to a corporate structure, we for a long time have worked with a lot of folks on kind of marketing and sales alignment and unified goals. And how do you make sure that marketing isn’t running towards a goal that sales doesn’t really want to follow up on? How have you thought about that role and kind of aligning those teams and you mentioned in the past marketing rolled up to you.

Devin: [00:11:24] So is that is that different than kind of your past experience?

Ken: [00:11:27] It is. It is. So I think to your point, I often sat in a much larger company than I am now. And you sit in marketing meetings and they have an entirely different agenda of what success is for a trade show or webinar or a campaign. Then what the sales team has from a success perspective, and it’s often very simple, right? Sales measure, success or revenue. But marketing isn’t always directly aligned in my experience and some of the larger companies I’ve worked in. So when I came to IntelliSite, I wanted to change that and make sure that marketing was 100 percent aligned to revenue, because in a smaller company, although we’re not a startup, but we’re still very focused on growth and revenue and profitability, not having any activity that doesn’t align our revenue is not a good activity. So what we did is we structured marketing to be completely aligned to revenue and completely aligned to enabling the sales organization to execute on the revenue target. And if that if they’re not doing that, if they’re whatever they’re building, writing, publishing, driving doesn’t help that, then it’s not that is the rule we have gotten.

Devin: [00:12:33] And how do you think about those two teams kind of flowing together? Because marketing I’ve always thought of as kind of the input and sales being the output on the the revenue side, right? Yeah. The further you get away from the output, the Mercader the picture gets. Right. So how does how is that come together a little bit or how are you guys thinking about making sure that marketing activities do align to ultimately those revenue generating activities?

Ken: [00:12:58] Yeah, it’s been great to really connect the team. So we connected and calls. We connect them on chat, we connect them in the projects. So just just last night, our team in Mexico reached out and said, hey, we have this big banking opportunity. Our collateral doesn’t really speak to the banking opportunities. Specifically, what can we do? And the marketing team was on that that channel. They jumped in and said, here’s what we can do. Here’s here’s how we can position it. Our product team jumped in and said, here’s how our products fit, specifically in the financial use cases, whether it be a branch, an ATM, a data center, corporate center.

Ken: [00:13:33] Here’s the products that are best suited. Here’s the outcomes that we typically see. Here’s what some other customers have done in financial services with our products. And so we were very quickly able to kind of coalesce around this need to build a cohesive talk track for this customer to solve their problems and speak to them the way they want to be spoken to. And by integrating sales and marketing together and also having the product team being closely aligned, we’re able to, within 12 hours provide everything the sales team needed to go out and have a successful presentation.

Devin: [00:14:04] That’s that’s awesome. And there are a number of things that happen there that were kind of productive from the sounds of things that. Our experience in working with a lot of sales and marketing teams that are often not aligned, don’t do but sales, just identifying the fact that, hey, there may be an opportunity for marketing to help, which is right to start is is a is a big step for a lot of sales teams and then marketing being able to kind of quickly say, well, here’s what we could do to adapt something that maybe is already run through an approval process or whatever else. So it sounds like there’s a lot of good proactive thinking there that ultimately is just good from an attitude and a thinking kind of point of view, a way of approaching problem-solving. But do you guys have processes to make that happen? Is that part of something you made intentional efforts around or. We have, yeah. Talk us through that a little bit. I think there’s there’s a proactivity and kind of nimbleness to what you just described there that oftentimes isn’t is the case, especially when different teams like that have to come together.

Ken: [00:15:06] Yeah, I’m sure you’ve heard this before, but we moved off a email as our primary communication internally. So most of our emails, I wouldn’t say a hundred percent, although that would be a goal. But the vast majority of our emails where they’re internal don’t exist. They’re all handled on our collaboration platform. So like a lot of companies, we’ve we’ve gone all in on teams and the Microsoft integration of the services across the Teams platform. So we have a sales chat, marketing chat, all those things that are connected.

Ken: [00:15:40] And then we have a an intake form that’s directly connected into the chat. So when when our sales team in Mexico in this example said, hey, do we have something like this? The answer was no, not exactly. But we can we can make it immediately. The market organization created a task in our intake platform built into teams, which then flows right into the process of which marketing people need to be involved as a branding or is it graphics or is it just one thing one person can do doesn’t need approvals from the sales teams need approval from me, and that all kind of gets mapped out right. And then we can get to people to start executing. And so one thing that’s really unique, I think that we’ve been able to find is a great, great balance between an external marketing organization as well as our internal market organization. So we’ve created Intel site emails for the external team there on the marketing mailers. They’re treated just like our company employees are, although obviously not employees. But they’re they’re treated from a collaboration perspective, a respect perspective and kind of working together environment perspective as as part of the team as equals. And I think that really speeds up the ability to respond and respond effectively.

Devin: [00:16:57] Yeah. I mean, I think you’re you’re describing something that a lot of people have kind of gone through in the recent past and kind of moving away from email and finding themselves and other teams or slack or whatever the collaboration platform is.

Devin: [00:17:09] And we’ve had a similar experience where much of our communication is moved to slack and we’ve got multiple clients that we’re working with directly through channels in the same way that you describe. And I think you could probably talk a lot of that collaboration up to a kind of positive coming out of this experience rather than a negative where things get lost in the inbox or misaligned on priorities. And don’t allow for that kind of quick turn or collaborative effort that you described.

Ken: [00:17:38] Well, it doesn’t mean things will get lost or get crazy, you know, or or does it mean the marketing team doesn’t come to me and say which priority is the top priority? You always have to prioritize this. Number one, which one really is number one. So, you know, we definitely have to have those regular touchpoints and meetings to say, no, no, this really is the priority.

Ken: [00:17:59] This is second, third, and we need to be flexible. And we’re very fortunate to hire a culture of people that are very intentional about their work. What I what I like to really ask for the team is to really own their business and own their role.

Ken: [00:18:15] Kind of extreme ownership is a term I use a lot. And we have a lot of good folks on the team that buy into that extreme ownership and they really just take it and run it.

Devin: [00:18:22] I love what is the kind of process Cadence look like for you guys? Because I again, have kind of gone through a similar experience with moving back and obviously so much being kind of video oriented now and having everybody in the office.

Devin: [00:18:36] But what is it? You basically walked into this role and having to adjust not only to the new role, but how everybody manages everything. So what is the cadence from your perspective and down through the crew and into kind of these different parts of the organization, kind of look like now to one to able to keep people on track and prioritized well, but also just make sure everybody is doing OK and keeping up with what they’re supposed to keep up with you having again, one of the big benefits of platforms like Slack and Teams is that you can just drop an encouraging word in the chat to everybody.

Ken: [00:19:10] Right. So you can. Where we live, I think you’re in the Carolinas as well. Schools are really kind of starting up in earnest and and a lot of schools are virtual or they’re going back some virtual, some not. And, you know, whatever your views are, there’s there’s never a perfect answer there. And so parents are dealing with just so much violence. Even though the summer was hard, balancing school and stuff can be a lot harder. So, you know, just posting things like pictures of of how are you managing your day and how you staying on track? I would say motivating connected those kinds of things. Those libration tools are super important, but we do formalize the cadence around the marketing team internally and externally on a regular basis to talk to priorities. Then they bring it to the S.R.O. to talk to priorities. And then I have a meeting with them every Friday to talk through everything that’s going on and where we’re at and what may be adjusted or changed from my perspective. So we kind of have a waterfall flow, much like engineering. So we’ve approached marketing a lot of the same ways we approach our software development side of the business. And I think by using that kind of cadence and project approach, it’s been very effective.

Devin: [00:20:22] So I think we’ve got kind of a unique opportunity with you having a background in marketing and kind of understanding some of the nuts and bolts.

Devin: [00:20:29] But sitting in the CEO seat, one of the things that often comes up in talking to marketing folks, particularly folks who are at the director, VP and CMO level, is understanding what the CEO wants to hear from the marketing team, like how do they communicate? So you mentioned that Friday meeting. What what are you looking for to hear from that team of folks? And how do you know if they’re if they’re doing well or not from a non marketers? See?

Ken: [00:20:56] Yeah, well, we begin by integrating sales and marketing together. There’s a hundred percent accountability. Right? It’s it’s if marketing create something sales is not using, they can’t point at each other. It’s the same organization. Figure it out. So let’s not create content for content sake. Let’s not ask marketing to do things that aren’t actually actually going to use. So let’s get out of the quantity conversation of X number of things per quarter X number of launches per whatever. Let’s focus on what is the quality things we need to do that actually get us to our revenue and profitability goals and everything else we we we ignore. So oftentimes you do have to have that conversation in those prior to meetings, like is this necessary or not? Where are we at with this priority that’s really going to help us get to our goals and how do we accelerate that work and how to really push some other things back. So what I want to hear from the team on a Friday is how they’ve already done that themselves. And they just need that extra level of, hey, is this what the CEO wants? Because I’m going to hold them accountable. So it’s OK for them to get that kind of final check box that says this is the right thing, but I’m expecting them to come with the plan, come with where they are in the steps and what their recommendations are. Right. I mean, that’s why they’re there. They’re great at their job and they know what they’re doing. And I don’t always need to get in the way.

Devin: [00:22:20] Right. So it’s kind of on track. Off track in terms of your point of view, tell me that you guys know what you’re doing and you’re approaching the right things. And just let me give you a give you a sign off, assuming we’re all good.

Ken: [00:22:34] Yeah, exactly. And and I think it’s about the quality people and the kind of quality of output that you kind of build that trust. And my marketing team has done a really good job of building that trust. And I have a lot of confidence in what they’re doing. It doesn’t mean we don’t tweak things here and there every now and again right now working on new video launch. And they did a great job. And I really I like the messaging the company to look more like this. So we kind of tweaked it a bit. But we tweaked one thing out of an entire video that they did on their own. And I think you’re having that confidence they’re going to deliver 90 percent of the solution or a lot of cases. One hundred percent solution makes me feel a lot better.

Devin: [00:23:15] Yeah, I like the on track, off track and a signoff perspective. And I remember really early in my career, I had somebody much older than me tell me that the the more experienced people you talk to, you like, the higher up they are in the organization, the shorter you need to expect the responses to be. So by the time you’re asking CEOs questions, you need to allow them to be able to respond with either yes or no, such as much as you are going to get out of emails for them. And if you have, I’ve definitely found that to be true over time. It’s like put them in a position.

Ken: [00:23:47] You have my team. Give me a hard time all the time about that. For years I brought a lot of the leadership team that I had in my previous organization over, and they have a little inside joke. They make fun of me all the time is if you get more than a couple sentences in an email, they’re shocked.

Ken: [00:24:05] So I’m very bulleted. Here’s what I want. One, two, three. Thank you very much.

Ken: [00:24:12] They crack up about all the time, so I don’t write the emails of the soldier at a time that I’ve worked with folks on the biz dev of things, and particularly when you don’t if you’re trying to sell into somewhere. But if you start a conversation with someone, you have to be even more diligent with the language that you’re using and the fact that you’re making.

Devin: [00:24:31] And my challenge to the folks in that role, as always, you need to write an email that can be responded to with a wire and then and then. So that’s that’s it. If you’re asking for anything more like your email is not direct enough. So be clear about what you want. By the time you move up, if somebody actually read that email, they’re not right. Do you have a more substantial back than a line and then to make it easier?

Ken: [00:24:52] Yeah, yeah. It’s totally true. It’s really true. And I think there’s another thing I like about the collaboration tools. Right. To have that Quick Real-Time conversation, as opposed to maybe seven emails with 50 people on copy. Nobody’s it because there’s 50 people on the email. So you’ve got to get a lot more intentional when you’re talking to people one on one or in a group of people saying, hey, Mike, I need X or Beatrice, I need Y or whatever.

Devin: [00:25:19] Yeah, well, you’ve talked a little bit about communication tools and some of the technology you’re using there, but you guys obviously a kind of forward thinking technology company overall. From a marketing perspective, is there tech that you’ve leaned on? Are there things that maybe from your past experience you’ve kind of brought over or knowing that there’s kind of another layer between you and the teams at this point or you kind of letting them make decisions around how to build structure and find ways for marketing and sales to have kind of a unified view of the world.

Ken: [00:25:48] Yeah, so we have internal/external digital transformation team in our organization. So we have someone named Chris Schmidt who owns our internal digital transformation and digitization of all of our tools and technology and solutions to make sure that from the basic blocking and tackling, we’re not paying for the same thing three different times. Like no offense to Dropbox, but why we’re paying for Dropbox if we have Office 365, that’s the same exact thing. So making sure that we’re not duplicating the spend and the effort that we’re putting into our organization, also making sure that we have the right tools that really move the company forward. And we’re connecting all the organizations effectively. And then we also that same organization works with our external digital transformation team, which takes our solutions and offers and then takes those customers and helps them transform their business using the technology and software that we develop. So having that interlock really is really important in that digital transformation team led by Michael Knight and my team. And he does a great job and we’ve got to work together for 15 plus years. And he brings a tremendous wealth of knowledge and the technology leadership space. So be able to connect those dots is really important. So they work together with the marketing team, the sales team, to understand what tools we need, what tools or gaps we have. So right now we’re doing a whole new ERP. We’re doing a whole new customer management platform. We’re doing a whole new device management platform at the same time, as well as we use tools like base camp. Our marketing team really likes base camp. So they take the team’s interaction, which is better for the people and me, and they roll that into a base camp work work plan that they execute on. And then they kind of bring the final result back into our Team SharePoint platform. So those are some of the technologies that we use and that sort of thing we’re thinking about.

Devin: [00:27:39] I know we talked a little bit about kind of the aligned teams and marketing to be producing content that sales wouldn’t use. But what about kind of from the technology perspective, are there are metrics that you’re looking for there, things that you dashboard it or you have to touch on every Friday, that, again, there’s a long way to go from creating a piece of content to a piece of revenue, kind of making it into the system. So are there other touch points that that you’ve looked to align around that are leading indicators to that, that revenue kind of realizing itself?

Ken: [00:28:08] Yet this may not be the marketing answer, because I said now truly in this answer, but it’s all revenue and profitability, all the metrics I care about. I could care less how many people look at a piece of content, how can we get our website or how many people showed up at a webinar? I don’t that doesn’t really matter to me. What I care about is did any of that work translate to profitable revenue and allow us to hit our target? That’s all I care about. So on the on the Friday conversation, when I meet with my leadership team, is all the things we’re doing, are they driving the revenue results that you need? Are they enabling you to drive the revenue results we need? That’s all I care about. So I don’t have one person shows up the a webinar or 50. It doesn’t matter as long as that one person drives the opportunity that justifies the time invested.

Devin: [00:28:57] So I think it’s really good for marketers to hear that from a CEO. Sometimes I think they marketers get all kinds of data points all the time and sometimes it’s good to be proud of like we did a. But that may not be the thing to carry upstream. So I think it’s good to have folks in the marketing line of work here that what’s important to the CEO may not be those things, but how they impact kind of revenue overall. I guess the the one challenger that I put in play and kind of thinking about that is, you know, especially being new to the organization, something that you did on day ninety nine of your one hundred. You may not yet be showing itself in the revenue yet. So how do you think about just the whether it’s the sales process and knowing that it’s going to take a while for this stuff to cycle through to just work that may be happening on the front end or what’s coming up? I mean, you’re still just hearing about the amount of change that you guys have made. There’s a lot of things kind of happening there, which I’m sure is leading to peaks and valleys throughout. So is there anything that you look at in terms of just like normalization or the health of of just how things are going? Or is that a lot of the trust and confidence that you’re touching on before?

Ken: [00:30:14] Yeah, it’s definitely trust and confidence in the team, given the team the the the support to go do what they need to do, give them the investment tools they need to go do what they do. And then the flip side of that is they get held accountable for the results of the things that they did. Right. So we’re we’re into a full plus full quarter of the new organization structure. So now we have some metrics of what these things do. They drive more revenue that they bring to the pipeline as the profitability trending. What’s it look like going into Q4, the rest of Q4 and the next fiscal year as we’re calendar of this company? So those are things that that we’re starting to really be able to measure in a tangible, tangible way. But I’m a big fan of give people the autonomy to make decisions, hire great people. Guiding coined the term. I think Steve Jobs talks about a lot. Right. Hire great people and kind of get out of the way. I try to do that as much as as much as possible. The downside for those folks is the kind of talk through that is when you’re given all that flexibility and the all the accountability comes with it. So if you don’t want the accountability, be careful what flexibility you ask for.

Devin: [00:31:24] Yeah, well, I think that that’s a it’s a it’s a great opportunity for the right people to be kind of giving them the tools that they need to be successful and then getting out of the way. And, you know, it is is hugely empowering to some and not for others in the job of management leadership.

Devin: [00:31:43] A lot of the time it’s just making good choices around who those people are coming in and out of the organization. So I think that makes a ton of sense. What we’ve we’ve talked about people process and technology here. And you guys have obviously changed a lot in one hundred days or so. But, you know, in that period of time, we always like to kind of wrap up by talking about a time where things maybe didn’t go according to plan or you hit a bump in the road and maybe the the back end of the process or, you know, kind of trying to move fast and break things to a blog post being published before it should or at the website come crashing down. Or there needs to be trade anecdotes out there about people ending up with things blowing up if you have any power. So anything like that happen in the first three months or so that you got?

Ken: [00:32:30] Oh, yeah, we were talking before we went live. Right. We had a couple good ones. I mean, one of the the downsides. But as you drive people to be a players and execute extreme volatility, sometimes they can kind of go too far, too fast and kind of get ahead of this or get ahead of the group as a whole sometimes. And and we had a launch that we were launching this PR announcement of a partnership we had that that’s pretty important to our business. And the first take on the press release wasn’t really quite. The message I wanted to send from our perspective was great from their perspective, which I’m sure they appreciated. But we wanted to kind of have a bit more of a balanced press release that that kind of showed the value of the partnership both ways. And I sent some feedback here. So things have changed, but somebody missed that feedback and they just took the original one and put it out there. And so I get on LinkedIn and Twitter and look what happened. I don’t even I haven’t even seen the final copy of the changes I asked. And we’re already posting it. And it turned out that none of the changes I’ve asked for in there. So we had to reel it back and hope no one saw it and and correct it and put it back out there. Right. So you’re minor, minor bump in the road and I’ll take those bumps in the road over someone who is not proactive, who isn’t taking ownership, who isn’t excited about their debt. So but it was kind of funny to pull out my LinkedIn, as I do every day. And I look for news articles that are appropriate and and what what kind of things are going on from our company perspective, this is something that I absolutely do not expect to see that. So so that was that was a great example of the process, did not did not work. But again, the people were great. They responded, fixed it. We were up and running with the right now.

Ken: [00:34:11] Within a day or so, so no harm, no foul, I think that’s a that’s an awesome take away from a CEO perspective to the marketing team is surprise your CEO on LinkedIn?

Ken: [00:34:22] Yeah, yeah. That’s that is one hundred percent true that that was a lot. So that’s a very good lesson. No, no, no, no. News should be new news to your CEO. That’s 100 percent true.

Devin: [00:34:37] Awesome. Awesome. Well, I appreciate your your time and kind of sharing the CEO perspective with us. And, you know, is there a place to kind of keep up with with what you guys are doing? It sounds like a lot of changing. You guys are producing a lot of content and kind of you know, you mentioned a video that’s coming out.

Devin: [00:34:52] So any any place that we can do to kind of keep up with you personally or with Intelsat overall and just make sure that we’re keeping up with what the next hundred days have in store for you guys.

Ken: [00:35:03] Yeah, I mean, we’re on all the obvious social channels, but LinkedIn is probably the best one, right? That’s where we most of things get launched first. So if you follow Intelsat on LinkedIn, follow me on LinkedIn.

Ken: [00:35:14] You’ll see all the things that that we’re doing rather quickly, that we like Twitter. You can go there as well @IntelliSiteIoT or @otherken as there was already a can on Twitter. So I chose to be the other can on Twitter. So, you know, those are the places you can find. So it’s about IntelliSite or what I’m doing.

Devin: [00:35:32] Well, Ken, thanks for joining us. Appreciate your insight here and looking forward to seeing what the next hundred days brings for you guys.

Ken: [00:35:38] Thanks for your time. Thanks for opportunity. Have a great day.

Outro: [00:35:42] You’ve been listening to marketing behind the curtain to ensure that you never miss an episode, subscribed to the show in your favorite podcast player. Thanks so much for listening. Until next time.