Scale Smarter with Global Talent and AI for SMBs with David Nilssen

This has been generated by AI and optimized by a human. 

[00:00:00] David Nilssen: A lot of automation tools coupled with AI is making it easy for us to sort of shotgun blast a large group of people, but our belief is that AI is really powerful, but only when it’s paired with human judgment along the way. 

[00:00:26] Lee Brumbaugh: Welcome, everyone. My name is Lee Brimble, CEO of Sales Xceleration and host of Sales Against the Odd. Thank you again for joining us today. I am joined by David Nilssen, who is the CEO of Doxa Talent, which has helped scale companies up their teams by leveraging talent across the world. David has scaled to over eight hundred employees without an office space.

He also helped co-found Guidant Financial, which has helped over thirty thousand entrepreneurials secure funding to start a business. David sits on numerous boards and brings a very in-depth knowledge of AI to the perspective as well. David, 

[00:01:02] Lee Brumbaugh: thank you so much for joining us today

[00:01:04] David Nilssen: Yeah, I’m glad to be here. Thanks for having me on. 

[00:01:07] Lee Brumbaugh: So just to get us started, David, tell us a little bit about the story with, Doxa Talent. what inspired you to launch the company? Give us a little background of what you’re doing now in the space and kind of how you got started.

[00:01:18] David Nilssen: maybe I’ll start there. DOXA is a, global outsourcing organization. We’ve got about 1,000 people now between the Philippines, Kenya, Colombia, and Vietnam, and we effectively help, domestic organizations, primarily here in the US, uh, to build extensions of their own team, centers of excellence in other places around the world, helping them to reduce their, expenses, add some scalability, even improve culture, which we can talk a little bit about later if you’d like to. the founding story is actually kind of interesting, and it’s actually connected to Guidant Financial, which you, you briefly mentioned in the, introduction. But, you know, I was in the, uh, small business financing space for over 20 years. I’m still a shareholder in that business today, but I, I left the organization to be able to start DOXA. And part of that is because we saw a huge need in the market. Guidant was started out of the Seattle, Washington area, although now it is, uh, a fully remote organization as well. And we started leveraging global talent in 2015 as a response to the $15 minimum wage that originated out of that area. 

[00:02:18] David Nilssen: in doing that, though, we found a lot of things about the industry that we didn’t like.

[00:02:21] David Nilssen: The fact that the industry had really won on the backs of workers for years, paying them low wages, not providing them benefits, not really investing in their careers. And as a result of that, you’ve got an industry where, yes, you can find cheap labor, but turnover rates are somewhere in the 60% on average, and lots of challenges with that.

[00:02:37] David Nilssen: So we started to make some significant investments at Guidant, which were investing in, their learning and development, making sure that, uh, we were providing them a fair wage and, and really embracing them as part of our culture so that they didn’t feel like the outsourced team, amongst a lot of other things.

[00:02:54] David Nilssen: And long story short, we saw some significant benefits there. And next thing I know, I’ve got people calling me because my board is telling the 

[00:03:00] David Nilssen: people that they’re advising some of the stuff that we’re doing. And we started to sense that there was something there and that there was probably room for a conscious solution to make it to market. And inevitably, when COVID happened, the world got flattened. People all wor- realized that they could work remotely. We decided to, take that opportunity and jump with two feet in and, and productize what we had built at Guidant and make that available to Main Street American small businesses 

[00:03:22] Lee Brumbaugh: a lot of, of the business owners that are listening today have probably thought about outsourcing to the Philippines. But it’s exactly what you said, right? That the retention, I, I’ve, tried it with clients.

[00:03:31] Lee Brumbaugh: The retention can be challenging, you know, integrating to the culture, those types of things. So how have you, you know, improved the mousetrap? Like, what makes DOXA special of retaining talent, embedding into the culture? What’s distinctively different there?

[00:03:45] David Nilssen: Yeah. So I think there’s a couple things that I’ll just highlight, and there’s lots, uh, around this, but I think the first starts with our conscious outsourcing model. And so that is starting with the very basic stuff. It’s are we paying them a fair market wage? Are we providing them with, upgraded healthcare outside of maybe the socialized medicine that’s available to them today?we’ve become a, uh, fully remote environment, which is very unique in the outsourcing space. And my assumption there was, well, our clients are expected to work with these people, from a remote, experience, right? So we better be best in class in the way that we, we deal in that environment as well.

[00:04:18] David Nilssen: And what that has actually done is given our team members on average about three hours a day back, which is about thirty plus days per year that they’re not spending in public transportation. Instead, you know, with their families, uh, getting some rest, investing in their hobbies, things of that nature. And then we’ve got a full learning and development team that’s helping to level these people up as they’re continuing to work in these different roles. And that’s im-important because I used to say that the outsourcing industry is where careers went to go and die because they were really just treated as this outsourced entity.

[00:04:47] David Nilssen: And so the second piece of that, though, is making sure that we’re training our clients and helping them think about what are the best, in-class practices for engaging these workers and making them feel part of the team and helping them understand what their real role is and how it connects to the broader,outcome for that, particular organization. And then we’ve made some significant investments in infrastructure. So you will find very few companies who are supporting mid-market, uh, organizations or even small businesses that are SOC 2 compliant. In a world like today, where data and security is such a, a big issue and, and companies like us who process lots of types of information, personally identifiable information, we support lots of accountants and CPAs and healthcare companies and things like that. It’s really important that the data and security practices are at the highest level, and we’ve made some significant investments there?

[00:05:33] David Nilssen: which gives us a, a real advantage. And then the final thing I’ll just say is that we’ve been on the sort of leading edge of AI. We know that that is changing our landscape and the entire talent landscape, uh, on a daily basis.

[00:05:44] David Nilssen: And so, we’ve made some significant investments there to make sure that, that we are staying ahead of the curve versus lagging. 

[00:05:50] Lee Brumbaugh: makes sense. So as you’re training, so you’re giving people the right offering where they want to stick, you’re giving them training, you’re integrating them in the culture. How do you manage and make sure… How do you have, the client relationship side of that?

[00:06:01] Lee Brumbaugh: How do you make sure that these people are doing what they’re delivering, they’re embedding into the culture? Like, How do you make sure that they’re delivering?

[00:06:07] David Nilssen: Yeah. great question. I mean, I think it starts, obviously before we even sign an agreement, we’re really trying to understand, you know, who the client is, what’s important to them, what are their values, and ultimately, what are the outcomes that they’re looking for from this particular type of work that we would, help them with. And then we’re actually going out and finding people that are specifically suited to perform that work. Now, a lot of the outsourcing industry does what we call recycled talent, right? So Lee, you had this person, they didn’t really work out for you, so I put them on my bench, and then I try to redeploy them somewhere else because it’s a fast way for me to get a butt in seat and start to build. that’s actually not our practice. We go out and individually recruit for every role that we fill to make sure that we’re finding someone specifically tailored to suit your needs. And then the final piece of that is that we have a team of, of professionals internally that work directly with the VIP and another one that works directly with the client.

[00:06:56] David Nilssen: And the VIP is what we call our internal, team members that work with our clients. Those team members have a dedicated HR business partner that works with them on a daily basis to make sure that, you know, the work that we’ve been contracted to do is actually getting done. The second piece of that, though, is that we’re doing, uh, calls with our clients on a regular basis to, to also sort of reconcile their expectations against the work that’s being done so we can continue to improve that over time.

[00:07:18] David Nilssen: So it’s a collaboration. you know, these workers, unlike a lot of the outsourcing industry, have a direct relationship with the client too, so they’re getting feedback in many different, forms. And we just continue to work with the client to make sure that, we’re getting better over time

[00:07:31] Lee Brumbaugh: So a lot of our owners, of course, hence the title Sales Against the Odds, are listening from a growth perspective. Though, though we know that the landscaping of sales has shifted, right? It’s not just send a bunch of emails activity. You know, everything from account management to better relationships, expanding within your existing base.

[00:07:48] Lee Brumbaugh: So how have some of the roles that you’re talking about, how do they impact sales? what are you seeing as far as how you can utilize somebody that is overseas, that’s bought in, in a way that they can meaningfully impact, you know, the sales organization engine of the companies you’re serving?

[00:08:05] David Nilssen: Man, there’s lots of different use cases that we’ve supported. So I’ll just, I’ll just give you a, a handful, and if you want to go deeper on any of these, I’m happy 

[00:08:11] David Nilssen: to do that. But, you know, one is just simply outbound outreach through LinkedIn, right? I mean, that’s one of the greatest places to connect with people who, uh, potentially meet your ICP and start a conversation with them that isn’t, you know, just random text or email. we’ve seen some great success with that with some of our, our B2C, organizations and B2B companies just reaching out to people that meet their ICP and, starting that conversation. another one is very simple, which is sort of up the upper funnel, where we’re supporting clients in building websites.

[00:08:39] David Nilssen: Now, because of the technology that’s available, you can stand up a website in literally, a day. so content being created, leveraging a lot of the content you’ve created historically. You can connect, uh, different tools like, Claude to Vercel and, Resend and, you know, lots of different tools that help you for next to nothing stand up a website. We’ve created lead magnets. in fact, we just created one at Doxa that, effectively someone could go to our website now and type in sort of the things that they need done, and it’ll actually help suggest to them what 

[00:09:10] David Nilssen: that role could look like and the approximate cost and things of that nature.

[00:09:13] David Nilssen: Now I’ve got an interactive lead magnet versus just gated content sitting behind a PDF. we’ve got, uh, lead enrichment tools that we’ve helped clients build where, you know, they say, “This is what our ICP looks like. Now I’ve gotten this random inquiry on the web. Now I need to enrich that to make sure that I know who are the key contacts within the organization that play the critical roles that are the buying influences inside of our, our sales motion.”

[00:09:33] David Nilssen: And So you know, those are some of the examples of ways that we do that. We’ve even got just SDRs that when leads come in off the site, we’ll call down on our clients’, uh, potential leads and, and help them try and gauge those into, booked calls for their senior closers. So lots of different ways that you can do that though

[00:09:50] Lee Brumbaugh: So I love the, the outbound. Let’s go to the outbound and the SDR side, right? Because ultimately these people that are doing it have to understand that, that client’s, you know, their hooks, their value propositions in those areas. How do you make sure that when they’re embedding to somebody that can follow up on a lead or engage from a LinkedIn perspective to provide value and insight, how do you get them up to speed to understand that company?

[00:10:14] Lee Brumbaugh: what’s some of the, the secrets there? ‘Cause I think that not only from if, not only from that, but if even you’re, you’re hiring your own SDR, like It also goes to scaling quickly and more efficiently of hiring and onboarding as well.

[00:10:25] David Nilssen: Yeah. So I mean, the, the way that we, we deal with this is similar to the way that you would deal with it in your own organization. So, when we’re working with a client, there are certain parts of the onboarding process that we take care of, right? The things that are directly related to the employment side, which is, you know, did they sign the right agreements?

[00:10:41] David Nilssen: Did we get them set up on the right systems? Has their computer been provisioned correctly? are they aware of the employee handbook? Things of that nature. But then there’s the on-the-job training. We actually engage our clients in that because, you know, we’re not an expert in every single one of these companies’ businesses, and we need to make sure that these people who are full-time and dedicated to that company are actually engaged in learning the same way that you would they would onboard a, particular employee in their own business.

[00:11:05] David Nilssen: So the subject matter expertise, doing ride-alongs with other people that are playing in that role today, making sure that, you know, they’re going through the same sort of classroom training schedule that you would put anybody through within that organization, uh, and even going as far as the role-playing, right? And then on an ongoing basis, we’ve agreed to the metrics that measure success, and oftentimes the client is actually giving ex- us access to the reports that help us track the daily activity. Sometimes they’re managing that directly. But that’s all things that we decide, uh, again, prior to signing the agreement to make sure that the relationship is built in a way that, that works for the client but also is, uh, scalable for us.

[00:11:42] Lee Brumbaugh: you collaborate on of the training portion, understanding your company, clear KPIs and metrics that you can maintain, integrating with that sales team, albeit probably even some relationship-building on that standpoint.

[00:11:55] Lee Brumbaugh: What are some of the areas when you see go the other direction where it doesn’t work well what are some of the low-hanging gaps that you typically see of, you know, this person may struggle to be successful because they don’t have X or Y?

[00:12:06] David Nilssen: Yeah. We try to filter for a lot of this in the, what I would call the, the sales and acquisition side of our business, right? Which is, 

[00:12:13] David Nilssen: do they have the same sort of values as us? So one of the things that’s really important to us is that these people are viewed as an extension of their team and they’re integrated in that, that they’re not just the outsourcing group, that they’re looking for cheap labor. if that’s the primary driver of this, we’re probably not the greatest, because we provide a lot of benefits to our, team members, right? The second is, do they have a clear job description? Which sounds like table stakes, but you’d be surprised how many companies, uh, send us a job description that clearly was not well thought through and where they’ve tried to stuff the kitchen sink into that, and we’re now unicorn hunting versus someone specifically tailored to do a role within the organization. the third, and this is probably the one that’s the most complex to work through, is a lot of companies that come to us are fully centralized organizations. They all work out of the same office in Dallas, Texas, let’s say. And they come to us and say, “Well, we’d like to build a remote team,” but they don’t have any management expertise in managing remote professionals.

[00:13:06] David Nilssen: They’re still working in that model of manage by site versus manage by objective, and it’s time for dollars versus, uh, dollars for outcomes, right? And so there’s some of those nuances that are really challenging for them to work in. And the other one that I would say is that sometimes people come to us and they’ll say, “Hey, I just wanna start with one person.” And I always encourage people to start with three to five. And the reason I do that is because if you invest in one person, it will become a tax on your time. It’s not a large enough investment that you’re actually making a strategic bet in a new capability. 

[00:13:37] David Nilssen: and because of that, it ends up actually creating a tax on the hiring manager’s time. And inevitably, I’ve seen those fizzle out more than when somebody says, “No, look, this is a capability that we have to develop to stay competitive in the future. We need to make an explicit investment now.” those people tend to do much better 

[00:13:53] Lee Brumbaugh: and I will say, I mean, we work in the SMB space, so typically it’s like, “Well, we can afford the one. We budget to the one.” but you’re right. Then the owner’s involved with the process of, of onboarding. You know, everybody from operations, you got to meet the whole team.

[00:14:05] Lee Brumbaugh: Like, It is a very inefficient way to do it if you’re getting three people up to speed. That doesn’t make a lot of sense from a, just from a efficiency standpoint

[00:14:12] David Nilssen: I’ll give an example. So, you know, look, we don’t hide our net revenue retention numbers, right? And this is the… For those of your listeners that aren’t familiar with net revenue retention, this is one of the greatest leading indicators for SaaS companies on whether or not they’re, considered to be doing well.

[00:14:25] David Nilssen: And it’s, you know, for every dollar that you spent with me as a customer last year, how many dollars did you spend with me this year? And that sort of helps me understand, right? So if I have 100% net revenue retention, it just means I’m flat, right? You spent a dollar with me last year, I retained 100%, you spent a dollar with me this year. For our clients who have 10 or more people in, uh, that they’ve subscribed to from our organization, they grow on average last year at 115%. So we saw 15% natural growth just with those existing clients who had 10% or more, and that’s because they’ve invested in this capability, and they see this as, a really important component of their growth strategy as an organization. Those who had less than three actually shrank with us. It was a 93%, net revenue retention, which, you know, of and of itself is not bad, but it definitely shows that when people make an intentional and explicit investment and they invest as if it is a, strategy that they have to succeed in versus a, “Let’s try one and we’ll see if it works,” it’s a very different posture that you go into that relationship with

[00:15:25] Lee Brumbaugh: Most companies don’t have the bandwidth to build a high functioning sales department to allow them to meet the revenue targets with Sales Xceleration they don’t have to. Our experienced fractional sales leaders consult and implement your sales strategy, infrastructure management, and team development.

[00:15:42] Lee Brumbaugh: Discover how we deploy these proven sales solutions to address your sales challenges. By going to our website, filling out the contact form, we’d love to hear from you.

[00:15:54] Lee Brumbaugh: you made a note These are areas that, we constantly question on the SMB space, right? It’s like we need more top of funnel, we need more leads. It’s, we know it’s a common problem. People listen to this podcast just, just for that area.

[00:16:06] Lee Brumbaugh: You mentioned obviously SDRs grabbing website leads and those types of things, but you also mentioned the outbound leads and LinkedIn, and we know that’s been, you know, something that’s, grown in the marketplace, whether it’s either taking the CEO’s, LinkedIn profile and utilizing or doing themselves.

[00:16:22] Lee Brumbaugh: there is an art to providing insight or an education or something. LinkedIn was formed to build relationships. We forget that sometimes, that LinkedIn was not built to set meetings, it was form relationships. So how have you seen some of these people you’ve instilled and put in these positions be good at using LinkedIn to provide insight, education, relationship-building, from the companies they, they work with?

[00:16:44] David Nilssen: I wanna double down on this. So LinkedIn was built on this premise of, of creating a human connection in a digital space. But we both know that it’s gotten super noisy, and that’s because a lot of automation tools coupled with?

[00:16:57] David Nilssen: AI is making it easy for us to sort of shotgun blast a large group of people. But our belief, uh, is that AI is really powerful, but only when it’s paired with human judgment along the way, right? So while there’s lots of tools out there, PhantomBuster, Drippify, uh, who will allow you to sort of automate your LinkedIn outreach, I mean, I can tell you right away when I, go into my messages on LinkedIn, I can see right away that 99.9% of those were just sent as an automated message.

[00:17:25] David Nilssen: It has nothing unique about me or anything that is, sort of relationship oriented. It’s just, here’s what I have to offer or some silly question to try and gauge. So what we’re training our people on is first, to develop a relationship, you also have to sort of provide a bit, right? So they’re going in and actually making some comments on, these particular profiles.

[00:17:46] David Nilssen: They’re, readings through some of the content that they’ve produced and trying to acknowledge something that’s interesting but relevant to the conversation they’re trying to engage in. and we do use AI, there’s no question about that. But, the AI is there as a way to sort of help, frame it in a more clear and succinct way, but ultimately the individual needs to, actually read through that.

[00:18:06] David Nilssen: And so, so we’ve had a much greater success because we have a human in the loop strategy- it’s AI plus machine, not just AI itself. And I think it makes a big difference

[00:18:16] Lee Brumbaugh: utilizing the resources, I mean, I, I think what we’re trying to say, whether it’s a salesperson or SDR, what- whatever method you’re going, we wanna understand the customers better, we wanna understand their customer journey so that when we do engage with the customer, it’s relevant.

[00:18:30] Lee Brumbaugh: we step back, I wanna look at sales 10 to 15 years ago, and we were just guessing, right? We have this need, we provide these services, features, and benefits. Do you have that need? Now we should be able to understand the insights of where our customers are at and meet them halfway so that we’re engaging them in a more meaningful way.

[00:18:46] Lee Brumbaugh: That’s where I think AI and the human connection can really be gold, but it’s getting missed, like you said, that noise It’s going the other direction. It’s getting noisier and noisier. So when you can make a difference there, I think it is impactful. It’s well put

[00:18:58] David Nilssen: no question about it. I mean, I think that’s one of the big things that people miss today when it comes to their AI strategy is that there, you know, there seems to be two extremes. “I don’t really like AI because it’s not personal,” or, “I love AI and I use it for absolutely everything, and in fact, I don’t actually review what goes out in my own name or on behalf of our organization.”

[00:19:16] David Nilssen: And I think there’s real risk in both of those things. There’s a lot of AI slop out there, is what I call that, where it’s just fully automated and you can tell there’s just no perspective. It doesn’t have that sort of human connection. I think we gotta be able to blend the two in order for it to really work for us. 

[00:19:30] Lee Brumbaugh: we’ve talked about this, but I know you’ve sat on boards, you’ve been involved in AI projects at a very high level. We’ve talked about what AI can do from a preparation standpoint, education standpoint. Where else are you finding as you look at evaluating talent, finding good talent, where else are you finding that AI is fitting within your businesses?

[00:19:49] David Nilssen: AI is really part of every aspect of our business. I mean, even on the recruiting front, we, we might process, you know, five to seven thousand job applications in a given month. And unless we had a, legion of sourcers out there, you know, AI, is really what we use to help us, you know, make sure that we’re filtering down based on the job requirements we have and the resumes that are being presented.

[00:20:09] David Nilssen: And so that’s a, a great example of one of the use cases. AI plays a huge role in our sourcing efforts. it also plays a great role in our, uh, data and analytics and in some of our finance, work that we do to make sure that, it can process unstructured data so much faster than any human being can.

[00:20:25] David Nilssen: And as long as, you know, we’re making sure that the, the results are passing the sniff test, it can be extremely helpful within the organization. From a marketing perspective, we use it to optimize our site. In fact, we had our team put up a website. We’re doing a, a handful of AIs in, in outsourcing events across six different cities in July, and we put up a, a website in a very short period of time. It was secured and SEO optimized based on some of the work that we’re doing inside of AI. That would have taken, uh, days, if not weeks, had I used an individual to produce that. But instead, we had a, a simple AI engineer internally that put that together. This is someone that’s got, like, one or two years of experience, but they’ve been trained in a lot of the, the most modern technology, so they can move at such a faster clip than an, you know, an engineer that’s been doing this for ten-plus years. So, I mean, that was a long way of saying every part of our organization now is embracing, AI as a part of our strategy 

[00:21:18] Lee Brumbaugh: when you’re looking at the clients you’re serving, where are you seeing them adapt more quickly, and where do you think the SMB community is still behind from an AI utilization standpoint?

[00:21:27] David Nilssen: Well, I would actually say it’s more likely the latter than, than the first. I think unfortunately, organizations are getting busier and busier because they’re, they’re layering on a bunch of different tools, but that activity doesn’t necessarily translate into a strategy. And so this is some of the work that I’m doing right now with the AI Officer Institute, is trying to help people zoom out and say, “Hey, look, how are we going to use AI as a strategy before we start choosing the tools?”

[00:21:49] David Nilssen: Because at the end of the day, AI, while it’s very exciting, a lot of the basic blocking and tackling that has been true about business since, you know, the very, very beginning, right? Do you have great workflows? Do you have great data? And then you think about what technology is gonna help, sort of accelerate that.

[00:22:06] David Nilssen: But if you’ve got bad systems and bad data, guess what? The AI is just gonna make that, uh, worse. It just amplifies that. And so we’re spending a lot of time trying to help invest in leaders because I think leading AI is very different than just leading people, and we’ve all been trained to manage people, but now we’re looking at managing, you know, effectively agents and people simultaneously. and then thinking about, is the business ready to scale leveraging AI, or do we need to go back and rethink some of those, process and systems, uh, before implementing too quickly? 

[00:22:35] Lee Brumbaugh: we’re in the same vein. We, um, introduced a AI readiness package for sales because we had all these productivity partners and we do, you know, with 200 plus advisors, we vet them very seriously before they come into the community. And so for us, what we’re finding is organizations were just taking the tools, and you’ve got five or six tools.

[00:22:55] Lee Brumbaugh: The sales team’s frustrated because they don’t know which tools to use. There’s no synergy amongst it. It’s not feeding your CRM. So rather than just start introducing the tools, we said, “Take this, you know, 40 to 50 questions that spits out of, do you have a coaching issue? Do you have a lead generation top of the funnel issue?

[00:23:13] Lee Brumbaugh: And which are the priorities, and how does that fit into your overall strategy? And which are the partners that will help you kind of get there?” So, for us, it’s like it doesn’t matter which partner we choose, we’re just trying to point out in your sales organization, where are your biggest gaps?

[00:23:26] Lee Brumbaugh: If you don’t start there, we found it was problematic. So 

[00:23:29] David Nilssen: no question about that. I, I agree wholeheartedly that that’s the case. And I think the other thing too is that, we also have to think about, uh, where AI lives because there’s a difference between testing and iterating, right? we should encourage that within the organization. We want people to have an AI-first mindset. But when we strike gold, when we realize there’s a real specific use case here, then the question is how do we bring that into the enterprise level controls? Do you have good governance and oversight and data structure and things like that? And I think that’s where small business and even the mid-market is really struggling right now because, they’re trying to, they’re trying to move quickly to the tools, but they’re finding theirselves busier, but now they end up with even more unstructured data and, lack of consistency in terms of workflows and input implementation that creates more tech debt long term.

[00:24:12] David Nilssen: So there’s a lot that needs to be done in the short term to help companies get caught up, uh, and actually, uh, ahead of the curve when it comes to AI adoption 

[00:24:19] Lee Brumbaugh: Yeah, and obviously, what can you do with it too? Like, So much of, of where sales have gone is, land and expand, right? So if you have a, for example, a scoring system, every company, if, you’re a SaaS company or if you’re a service company, you should understand your existing customer base, where there’s expansion opportunities, and really be scoring in real time of what that relationship looks like.

[00:24:40] Lee Brumbaugh: where is the opportunity? And so those are the types of things that you can act upon. It’s if you’re running data to just run data, that’s one thing. If you’re running data because, okay, I’ve now found these are the 12 accounts that we may have some risk in our business or 12 accounts that we can land and expand with this new offering that, that fits their needs, like those are the things you can actually implement change off of.

[00:25:01] Lee Brumbaugh: So do you have an overarching strategy of what you can actually do with the data?” 

[00:25:05] David Nilssen: Yeah, that’s exactly right. 

[00:25:06] Lee Brumbaugh: So let’s switch gears a little bit on… I, I want to talk about Guidant, and primarily because, your company that you founded helps so many organizations with growth and startups.

[00:25:15] Lee Brumbaugh: I would love to hear about kind of that journey and that spectrum, but, we’re gonna have a lot of startup-type companies that listen to this podcast. What, what have you seen? What are the best companies, that you’ve seen are really prepared to need the funds to be able to grow with and execute?

[00:25:30] Lee Brumbaugh: So love to see some of your insights from, from that perspective.

[00:25:33] David Nilssen: let me clarify. So Guidant Financial, although we can help provide capital to existing businesses, about 95% of it is for startup companies, like either new businesses, new franchisees, or the acquisition of a business. So it’s when the entrepreneur is either physically taking ownership or activating that organization is where the super majority of our work is done. And we are, hyper-focused on small business, which I would define as total capital requirements to either start or buy that business are under a million dollars. So 

[00:26:00] David Nilssen: for that reason, though, the super majority of our work is done across really two primary funding vehicles. And although we have access to some others, there’s really two primary ones, and then a third that I would recommend everybody think about or at least evaluate as part of a funding strategy.

[00:26:15] David Nilssen: So when you’re in that small business environment, and about 60% of these are franchisees, so they’re brick and mortar Main Street American small businesses. The primary vehicle that we help people with is the ROBS arrangements or the rollovers for business startups, and that’s where people are, are leveraging their existing retirement assets and making a investment in a business without taking a taxable distribution or incurring a penalty.

[00:26:37] David Nilssen: So for example, if I have, you know, half a million dollars in an IRA or 401, I can actually invest, all or a portion of that into a small business, without taking on, uh, debt or having to pay taxes on that. So it’s like, just like you bought stock in Microsoft, you know, you send money to Microsoft.

[00:26:53] David Nilssen: In exchange, you get to hold shares as collateral for that investment. The same thing is happening here, except for it’s in your own privately held enterprise. So that is the main way that we’ve helped people do that. And over the years, we’ve helped approximately 35,000 people put about $8 billion into small businesses across the US. We also help to broker SBA loans. So, 

[00:27:12] David Nilssen: you know, there’s lots and lots of lenders across the country. The question is which one’s gonna be best for that particular business owner and, you know, what, which banks wanna consume the types of, loans that this particular individual needs. And that’s our job is to sort of help them work through that and make sure they put their best foot forward when approaching the bank for capital. The third aspect that I think is worth people contemplating, and some are philosophically, okay with this, others, you know, prefer not to, but, home equity lines of credit. You know, a HELOC is one of the cheapest forms of financing out there for people that have great home equity or willing to, use the, the assets of that home versus, whether they go out and get a loan from a bank or they wanna, you know, use their own retirement assets or even their own cash. that’s another one that I think is definitely worth, uh, looking up. It’s not one that we actually work with ourselves. 

[00:28:00] Lee Brumbaugh: that makes sense. And, and as you, as you go, I mean, there’s so many different ways to get your entrepreneurial journey, and it sounds like you’re finding the best way to maximize that in a way that serves the client. So that’s great

[00:28:10] David Nilssen: there’s a real, uh, gap in terms of access to credit for smaller businesses. And so that’s the role that Guidant specifically fills, is making sure that those people that want to either start or buy a small business have the opportunity to do that. And so we put together those services.

[00:28:23] David Nilssen: And then we also provide tax and accounting, 401k administration, and payroll services, to, uh, many of our clients as well. 

[00:28:30] Lee Brumbaugh: So kind of last question here. So as you know, SMB owners, let’s say you’re a $4 million company. I ask, often ask this question, but you’re a $4 million company. You’ve been stuck at 4 million for the last three years. You’re looking at that next level. Anything that stands out to you as how do you get past that ceiling?

[00:28:45] Lee Brumbaugh: Anything that, that you’ve seen would be just maybe that one insight that, that would be that next level for, for the growth engine?

[00:28:54] David Nilssen: so the first part is I would look at the market, right? Is the market large enough to sustain a business that could grow within it, right? and do we have, product market fit? I mean, getting to $4 million is great.

[00:29:04] David Nilssen: I mean, very few small businesses get over a million dollars, so that’s exciting. The question is, is the market actually ripe for a business to grow significantly within it? If the answer is yes, then I would start to look at internally, do we have the right product set? Do we have the right leadership? Do we have the right strategy? And my guess is, that there’s a leadership gap there that needs to be filled. And, and it’s probably why organizations like yours are doing so well, right? Because growing a company from 1 million to 5 million takes a certain set of people, and moving from 5 to 10 or 5 to 50 is a, a dramatically different skill set.

[00:29:39] David Nilssen: And so either they need to invest alongside those leaders or they need to replace them altogether. And unfortunately, the reality is companies outgrow people, but people outgrow companies as well. And so as we move through some of those different layers, I think leadership is probably the first place that I would look. and that is directly tied to your strategy as well because the, you know, whatever your strategy is, your leaders are the ones that have to execute against that 

[00:30:01] Lee Brumbaugh: which where I think it’s such an exciting world, and I love it, kind of what, what you’re saying around Doxa too. But, you know, from our standpoint, you know, it’s… And it’s not always the fractional sales. Sales is oftentimes where you, you bridge that next gap. But whether it’s fractional marketing, fractional CFO, in today’s world, you really can make that next level investment with that resource of that individual that can position you for growth without having to do that 3 to $400,000 price tag and really put a lot of strain on your company.

[00:30:28] Lee Brumbaugh: So I, I think it’s exciting whether you’re using opportunities for like a fractional VP of sales through Sales Xceleration, looking at a Doxa. Like, there’s so many ways that you can be creative that can help you grow without having to put on that, that level of risk that would’ve been there, you know, 15, 20 years ago

[00:30:44] David Nilssen: there’s a certain scale at which you need that full-time executive in the business. But the reality is, I think people often jump to that too quickly, and they end up spending a lot of resources on an individual but then constrain them from a budgeting standpoint. And so I think what you’re saying is exactly right.

[00:31:00] David Nilssen: I think the fractional executive is a really exciting way for people to grow. and I think a lot of people are still unaware of even that, that possibility. 

[00:31:09] Lee Brumbaugh: Well, David, this has been great as always. I, I appreciate the time. Thank you everybody for joining another episode of Sales Against the Odds. Please tune in in a couple weeks where we’ll sit down with another thought leader on how to help grow your business. Thanks everyone.