On today's show, we got Jacki Leahy here with active. Activate the magic, which I'm going to just interrupt the whole intro there and say, I think that is a bad ass company name. And I love the hell out of it because I am so sick and tired of companies doing something that has to do with their industry or whatever generic with their name. So applaud there for sure. But today we're going to be speaking about RevOps and I know you're all thinking, what the hell is that? And how, what does that mean for me as a business owner? We'll get into that, but first we want to hear from Jacki and how she got involved and how she's even getting and running her own business in the Rev Ops world. So without me fumbling around even more, so why don't you tell us your story?

Jacki Leahy:
2:08

Hello? Yes. Jacki Leahy and I'm actually a former kindergarten teacher. What?

Stoy Hall, CFP®:
2:14

Where?

Jacki Leahy:
2:15

And Phoenix, Arizona and in Bushwick, Brooklyn.

Stoy Hall, CFP®:
2:18

Oh, those are complete opposites.

Jacki Leahy:
2:20

Those are different places. Yes. Okay. And I pivoted to tech in 2015. I wanted to get into the tech startup world. So I started as a BDR that's business development representative. That is the entry level. Sales, grind, terrible, like cold calling, cold emailing please don't make me job for not a lot of money. And so I was 33 and I had a master's degree and like ready to take over the world. And all of my peers were like 22, 23 and just is it happy hour yet? So it's the same thing. That was quite the just juxtaposition but eventually just absolutely ended up loving cold outbound started leading sales teams. And at my third startup, I was hired number 10 and the first lady, thank you. And I was hired to build the business development program. And over the course of. That somebody had to figure out the back end of salesforce. Somebody had to figure out how to connect all the tools that we're using to do the thing in a programmatic way. And. That is my origin story.

Stoy Hall, CFP®:
3:36

Just, an old first lady in the tech world, cause old and tech is, anything above 27, it seems like

Jacki Leahy:
3:43

go

Stoy Hall, CFP®:
3:46

ahead and put me in retirement and it's fine. That's awesome. When you came from being a kindergartner into tech, what was the major jump for you, like more emotionally? What really allowed you to do that?

Jacki Leahy:
4:01

Yeah I had a couple of career and iterations between I was a personal banker and a real estate agent and help my family business. So lots of things, but really. The compelling reason why I wanted to get into tech was. It looked like fun, it looked like they were figuring things out that had not been figured out before. Since then, I've found the books 0 to 1 by Peter Thiel and yeah, we're creating something out of nothing. And there's. Like the thing that I kept got getting frustrated about was like, I had teaching, I figured it out. I had the lesson plans already, like boring, no. No, I wanna go figure something else out. And with real estate I was like, oh, I know how to do this now. I, ISEO up my website and I pay Zillow and I have the, I have, okay, I figured it out now what? Great and so I saw the tech startup world as oh, there's no possible way to have it all figured out. Yeah. And that's why I think I absolutely fell in love with salesforce and basically, I call it the HVAC and plumbing behind revenue teams. That's marketing sales and customer success in the B2B world, the business world. But it's not unique. To be so if you're an entrepreneur and you need to figure out how to get your website up and oh, if someone wants to enter the email, where is it? Where does the email go? Like, where does it go? What data are you capturing? What are you enriching with? How are you reaching out to them? So not just the messaging, but like the actual how, not the what, not the why, but the how, oh, that is just.

Stoy Hall, CFP®:
5:52

Yummy. And that is why you started your own business as a consultant in that realm. Right?

Jacki Leahy:
5:57

Yeah, exactly. So I've been on the consulting side of RevOp since 2020. And I started my own agency about a year and a half ago. And so we're a team of about 10 now. We're just super curious and obsessed with figuring things out. I like to say tech stack is my love language. So now we. We fractionally companies on a month to month basis. So we're super technical and in the Salesforce and HubSpot ecosystems.

Stoy Hall, CFP®:
6:29

What have you found since one starting your own agency? Because being a business owner, there's a lot of issues. It sucks, but it's very fulfilling all at the same time. What have you found both personally and having your own business and then exactly being the fractional side of things? What have you found is the hardest issue or the weakest spot within companies?

Jacki Leahy:
6:51

Within companies people think they know what they want and then they tell a Salesforce consultant what they want and the very technical, incredible consultants, then you go build them what they say they want. And then they show them what they want. And it's This isn't what I want, right? And so I think there's just such a cavern between what people think that they want and what will actually be useful and practical. I think that's really people think they're paying us for our technical chops, but it's really we're not giving you solutions. We're giving you problems with your solution.

Stoy Hall, CFP®:
7:35

Yeah, can you give us like an example of something that's relatively common in that space? I know I have a lot of my own, but what it will give us an example of someone saying, Hey, this is exactly what I want them thinking that and then poking all the holes in it and going, no, this is truly what you want.

Jacki Leahy:
7:52

Yeah people really want oh, you know what? We need a price calculator. Okay. We need a super intricate way method to automatically let our prospects use a calculator and enter in all these things and do this custom package. But here's the thing it's going to be super complicated. Nobody's going to be able to use it. And guess what's going to happen in 6 weeks? You're ahead of sales. It's going to want to change the pricing structure. So you just spent 15 grand on shelfware.

Stoy Hall, CFP®:
8:33

Yeah, I find that a lot, even with my own CRM. And in, in my industry, it's a conundrum, right? We can't really use HubSpot or Salesforce to the degree at which we want to, because the. Integrations with all the other tools aren't great when you're in the small sector, right? Your Schwab's and stuff. That's totally different size, but for everyone's smaller and small businesses, like in our industry, it just doesn't work. And then you end up not using half of it, right? Paid 15, 000 to use a quarter of what you needed to do, but like other businesses and companies should be using those types of platforms. Can you speak on how a full system really would work and save time? Because I feel like a lot of people like have this hopes and dreams and then they need to learn it, but then they revert back to what they're comfortable with, which is tin and pad or Excel sheet or something like that. Can you talk to us about what a whole platform would look like and what it does for the team?

Jacki Leahy:
9:37

If there was 1 whole platform, I would love that. Yes. Yeah. And here's the thing. If you're. The big platform, like the 1 platform concept, I end up hating because it's usually like a 1 company's doing well. And then they acquire all the adjacent tools and they try to make it all 1 platform. And it's this Frankenstein behemoth that doesn't actually care about their end user anymore. And so I have a personal gripe with those on platforms. I will say, I love sort of the scrappy tools that punch above their weight. So HubSpot is actually fantastic chef's kiss. I'll have a, I have a link for you, but if you want, you can get the professional hub for a 100 bucks a month. That is 800 bucks a month. It gives you everything you need website. Landing pages forms drips campaigns, automations it gives you everything so you can really grow into it. But even. If you just there's a free version, and then there's a 30 buck a dollar a month version, and it works really well with other tools, which is cool. Salesforce doesn't really like to work with other tools easily and it's tough to configure. I like to call HubSpot, like Fisher Price CRM, because it just works. You just click around and it's you're making it's like, when I was a little kid, and I was like, pretending to be a chef. It's oh, here's the soup. Here's the pancakes. It just works. You don't have to think about all the stuff. You just a couple of clicks and someone fills out your calendly link and all of a sudden they're in your CRM. I feel like I'm just now. Getting into rabbit holes, but yeah, I love solutions that play well with others and are super reasonable price wise. And really care about the end user like us.

Stoy Hall, CFP®:
11:33

How many being in the tech world, there's probably a hundred solutions per thing. How does a business owner really narrow down what they need or what's best for them when there is so many different options that do similar things, do different things? What kind of process would you go through in figuring out a tech stack? Yeah,

Jacki Leahy:
11:53

1st of all, it's the theory of constraints. If you look at your entire business it was. Like, a model T Ford production, like line. Don't worry about. Wrenching the rivets if the big problem is actually getting the doors on. So if you map how a customer would find out about you, learn about you. Select you really map out how that happens and. Okay, what is actually the biggest constraint here and solve for that? So don't worry about your conversion. Rates if over here, if you can't actually close anybody, right? So really figure out where the biggest where the holdup is because here's the thing story. Once you solve for that. You're going to have a whole different set of problems. You don't know what's going to be the biggest constraint after you solve this biggest constraint. I think that's the biggest thing. And sometimes the solution is not technical. Sometimes all the time, a tool isn't actually going to solve the problem. Buying, putting your credit card in and charging it for a tool is not actually going to solve it. Of course. And I'll leave it at that complete

Stoy Hall, CFP®:
13:27

right? I talked to everyone about this and I think this is what you're alluding to is everything and nothing will be perfect all at the same time. You can't have the perfect system and processes and all of that. You'll never really achieve perfection in business ownership and sales. It's just not there because things change so often. Yeah, tech changes buying buyers change all of these things change. And so what you're saying is attack the big thing, the bigger issue. And once that's done, then something else changes and you've got to adapt to that. So every business owner out there, you're never going to be perfect. Things are never going to be the way they, you want them to in be okay with that live that way. But I will put this caveat be transparent with your end user or clients as well and let them know. Hey, we're working on things. We're growing and adapting. What do you want to hear? What do you want to know? What do you want to see? And we're going to make those things come to light as much as possible because ultimately, all we want to do as clients or business owners is. We just want to build relationships ultimately. And if we can build a relationship with you, we're both on board with knowing, Hey, we've got to work through some of these issues. We're going to be okay. It's when you don't communicate and things start to go South. That's when you lose it.

Jacki Leahy:
14:41

Amen. Preach, preach.

Stoy Hall, CFP®:
14:47

So as someone is going through this right now, they're thinking, oh crap. I have this issue. I want to go through this tech. I don't have time. I don't know where to think. How do you come in your business, come in with your team to Help them get through that because right now business owners going. I don't have time to figure this out. I'm just going to just deal with it, right? And I know that when they don't have time that means they don't implement it correctly either Right, then we are in a vicious cycle. So how do you deal with that?

Jacki Leahy:
15:19

If you're at the point where you really? need and can afford External help, so we help companies on a fractional month to month basis, starting at about 4 hours a week for 4000 a month. And. But if that's. Out of reach, right? I recommend joining conversations with other people who are struggling with the same things. So I do have a free community called the cauldron into dash, the dash cauldron dot com. We have a community with people talking all about this stuff and a monthly zoom where we have a topic of the month. This month Max Cohen is talking about inbound physics. So how to apply the attracting delight, engage flywheel, but in real life, of course, the tech stack that goes along that and just joining the conversations of other people. Who are trying to figure this out to because even just following those conversations, I learned so much, just like osmosis,

Stoy Hall, CFP®:
16:22

you get to

Jacki Leahy:
16:22

know the gossip, right? The tech gossip, like actually skip us on a click up is where is that? It's Oh, that would have been good to know

Stoy Hall, CFP®:
16:31

that I didn't waste already hours of my life trying to figure that out. Oops. Yeah. I also think those types of communities make you understand that like you're not in it. And this thing called life alone, right? Ultimately, that's what we have podcasts for. That's why we want to talk. That's why we all have businesses is ultimately, you're not in this thing alone. You're not as unique as you think you are. Like we all are going through a lot of the same shit issues on repeat. So why not be part of a community that you can trust that says, Hey, yeah. At ClickUps where it's at, not a sauna, but I already, I just started with them and I'm knee deep in it. Yeah. Those types of things that they can help you.

Jacki Leahy:
17:08

Yeah, been there. This is what you need to do. 100 percent and also know that nobody's got it figured out. That's the big secret. I went to the Gartner chief sales officer convention conference last year. And I was talking to huge companies and guess what their Salesforce or their data is. Messy. Nobody's got it figured out. So it's just celebrate where you are, like, take the pressure off. Nobody knows what they're doing. We're all figuring this out. And if anybody tries to make you feel dumb for asking a question, they're just insecure. That's

Stoy Hall, CFP®:
17:45

that I agree.

Jacki Leahy:
17:47

And send them to me. I'll

Stoy Hall, CFP®:
17:48

beat them up. Hey, I love how no one knows. No one has their shit together. I don't know a single person that has their actual shit together at all, like at all.

Jacki Leahy:
17:58

And if they do they're playing small.

Stoy Hall, CFP®:
18:01

Absolutely. Correct. Or you just don't know they're out there because they disappeared like they don't, they've got it so together that I don't want to deal with people. I'm out. I am, I'm gone. That's what I see. But most of us are just trying to figure this thing out in life. Ultimately. Now let's dive in a little bit into your business ownership, right? Because it's, you're relatively young in that. Those prospects, what has been the most difficult thing of being a startup use that lightly in this space in getting people to understand that they need to hire a consultant for this role. And I say that because it's not like them buying a piece of software. It's not like they get the instant gratification because it takes work. And not only does it take work to help on the front end, they also then have to implement it over time. So what's been the most difficult thing of getting people to understand that value or has it been difficult?

Jacki Leahy:
19:00

Yeah, I love the way you talk about it because service selling services and delivering services as a company is a struggle, right? It's so different than having a product that people can buy. That you can deliver like productizing service and delivering it any attempting to scale even just replicate. It's a lot of hand choosing. People on both sides, so on the talent side and also on the client side what I'm building is. Is new and different on the market. And so a lot of it is just educating or just evangelizing. Hey, there's a new way to do this. And this is what I'm building. I'm building what I would have murdered to have had when I was an accidental admin in house, right? 6 years ago. Slash when I was first coming on the consulting side what the type of the agency company that I would have loved to have joined back then. It's, we're not selling billable hours the traditional Salesforce consulting shop. You buy a bucket of hours and you whittle down that those hours you have a schedule. Statement of work a scoped project and here's the thing with in rebels and I think in startups and entrepreneur this world things move so fast that it doesn't make sense to because you get 4 days into the project and all of a sudden you have to like, renegotiate scope. No, right? Hey, you are not purchasing. We're not doing a statement of work. We're not doing a scope project. You're also not buying billable hours. What you're purchasing is bandwidth. What you're purchasing is a reserved spot in our hearts and minds, right? So not, yeah, it's about 4 hours of bandwidth, but that could look like we're walking our dogs. We're in the shower. We're like, really. Embedded in your world and really taking on your point of view and solutioning for you. All the time, so selling that is a lot. That's like. And the cool thing is that we're doing month to month. Which is unheard of in our world, right? You got to do a year contract or 6 months 3 month minimum agreement. I relish the gauntlet of, yeah, you can cancel literally you can cancel because it has us on the hook to deliver impact and not just on paper impact, but Visceral they can feel it because that invoice is coming and either they want to pay it or they don't. And it also has the client. On the hook to deliver feedback, so if we're not hitting the spot you got to tell us. What what's wrong what we're doing bad. What can we get better at what. How to do it better, because if they don't, they're going to have a real. Uncomfortable conversation in 2 weeks, right? I think it's really when you're in a 3 month engagement that friction that social nobody wants to tell somebody else that they're doing a bad job. Especially if they're nice we're all nice and they're nice people. It's not like. Nobody wants to be like, you suck. And the only reason that I'm still talking to you once a week is because we're locked into this contract. That's the worst. Like that. Oh, that's like hearing. The only reason that I'm married to you is because I signed something and I'm like no. No.

Stoy Hall, CFP®:
22:40

There's that's you caring for people over money, right? The whole contract locking people in is only about money. It's not for their purpose or Your protection really any of that. It's literally comes down to money That's what no one talks about. If I just didn't pay, I, most companies are not going to come sue you for the rest of it now, if it was a huge contract, probably, but like

Jacki Leahy:
23:04

mostly whatever, if I had in house lot, sure.

Stoy Hall, CFP®:
23:11

Just go month. It's fine. Everyone understands that

Jacki Leahy:
23:15

it's not anyway,

Stoy Hall, CFP®:
23:17

it really is almost every contract and I know attorneys out there that would agree to that too. They're like, if people really wanted to break it, they. They can and they will. There's just no there really isn't much to do about it. And as a good customer service business, you really wouldn't fight it either. Like you just would be like, okay, let's finish out this month. And then maybe I'll never have you as a client again, but

Jacki Leahy:
23:41

I'm going to get some feedback. That's going to be super freaking valuable.

Stoy Hall, CFP®:
23:44

Absolutely. Absolutely. Back end stuff. So on the back end of everything that's going on, what do you. Rebecca, what do you suggest that people build in their backend since you've been in all those roles. Now they're not hiring you for this. They're not doing any of that, but like, how should people build their admin system or team to really help enhance without having to hire someone else and go through all of that stuff, like how should they build that.

Jacki Leahy:
24:20

I would go for MVP, minimum viable solution. Cause anything you build. You have no idea what's going to happen in 3 months or 6 months or a year. It is. Super tempting to go down rabbit holes and build, that video game age of empires you build a whole city and but who knows if anybody's actually going to move into that city. You're not going to you don't know if you're getting residents or not. So really building the plane as you're flying it, which feels super. Nauseating, but that's what you do and also just accept that. That's what everybody's doing. And, I would say go with things that play well together, like Stripe. It's just easy. It works with HubSpot. It's easy. Calendly's easy. So just use the tools that are simple and work with other things. I think a lot of times people are tempted to be like this one's only 1099, not 39 to nine. And then it's yeah, but you're going to whack your head against the wall. Oh, I don't want to go with HubSpot or Salesforce because they're the, it's yeah, but nothing, it's almost Oh, I'm not going to get a, Oh, it's like the people who don't want an iPhone. It's yeah, but it just works.

Stoy Hall, CFP®:
25:40

Hey, I don't want an iPhone. I'm one of those people. Yeah. Don't,

Jacki Leahy:
25:47

but you probably have your own ecosystem, right? So if you've got the Android and you get the whole ecosystem, you're not going to be like this is the best of this, and this is the best of this. It's yeah. I think unless you really love misery,

Stoy Hall, CFP®:
25:58

Hey, the iPhones are the ones that finally came back around and getting, USB C chargers, and doing all the universal stuff. So don't get me started with all of that.

Jacki Leahy:
26:07

I I will happily get you started because I wish everyone would just have an iPhone. So I could put little hardies over messages

Stoy Hall, CFP®:
26:16

here for a selfish reasons. I just want to put some emojis on stuff.

Jacki Leahy:
26:21

I don't think that's selfish. I am saving the world. Every emoji reaction that I leave is making someone's day. Bye. So therefore, mandatory

Stoy Hall, CFP®:
26:31

iPhones, please. Apple would love you. All right, as we get to the end of this, what is a couple things, one thing that you want to leave all our listeners with that they can take that next step forward in their business and getting it, being more efficient. So that way they're, the revenue can grow.

Jacki Leahy:
26:59

Babe, you are sitting on a pile of gold. You are like, I don't, you are. And so it really is just about activating. That's why I call it, it's like activating the magic. Ev, you've, everything you need, you already have. Everything that you have is all, it's all that you need. And so you are not solving for any sort of. Personal incompetent you're good enough that's not. Your worthiness is not on the table at all. So like actually get that and step into action because the world is

Stoy Hall, CFP®:
27:41

yours. As Jacki said, the world is your oyster. You are the magic. Just do it. Just do it.

Jacki Leahy:
27:46

Just, you just get to twirl the wand a little bit. That's all

Stoy Hall, CFP®:
27:50

I appreciate you and I appreciate that. Everyone go to activate magic.com and obviously this will be an all in the descriptions. Just follow just. Activate and go ahead and communicate. You have your community, the cauldron. We have our community at no BS. Just start talking because there's a lot of people out there that are in the same, very similar boat as you.

Jacki Leahy:
28:13

Yeah. Here was

Black Mammoth:
28:15

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