Matt Verlaque, COO at SaaS Academy, on Enhancing Team Performance Through Healthy Conflict and Feedback

Matt, welcome to the show.

Matt Verlaque 00:00:47

Aydin, how’s it going, man? Thanks for having me on.

Aydin Mirzaee 00:00:49

Yeah, very excited to do this. And in particular, you know, we have a lot of operators who come on the show all the time, and a lot of them are from a tech background. And, you know, you’re obviously from a tech background, too, but that’s not where you started. You were a firefighter for a while, right?

Matt Verlaque 00:01:05

Yeah, I kind of accidentally started my first software company, and I was ten years in the fire department. I was an officer in charge of a company of firefighters. And, yeah, my shift partner opened a crossfit gym, like, as a side job, and I was kind of like a secret nerd. So I started building them a website. We started doing some marketing automation stuff, and one thing led to another, and, yeah, it ended up being a company that we went full time on in 2017. So it was a kind of an accidental journey.

Aydin Mirzaee 00:01:29

Wow. I love it. And, you know, one of the things that we were chatting about even before we dove in was just like, the differences between management and leadership in the world of, like, if you’re a firefighter or police officer, and then you obviously also lived a lot in the world of tech. And tech businesses, commonalities are the exact same, or their differences. Like, what’s your thought process on that?

Matt Verlaque 00:01:53

I think most people treat them differently, but I think the elite leaders in tech will apply a lot of the principles that are more commonplace in, you know, public, public service industries. And that’s an interesting one to think about. You know, like, a couple of things that come to mind. The best officers in the fire department have a very big training focus, a very big coaching focus. Like, if you think about it, it’s a physical job, so it’s also very, very difficult to physically do the job of the people who you’re supposed to be supervising because you literally can only hold so many things at once or be in one place at a time in a software company. It’s really, really easy to be an accidental micromanager and go jump in and write some code that someone’s supposed to be working on, or go tweak the marketing campaign, or you know, go be that person that’s touching everyone’s stuff because it’s all inside the cute little computer. And so, you know, I think like the fact that in the fire department there’s a very prescriptive compartmentalization of roles and responsibilities that are relatively pre planned in a lot of places. Being able to adapt that and know that your job is not to cross the line, your job is to make the people that work for you better and to be the best versions of them.

Matt Verlaque 00:02:56

But those are traits that we see in the best leaders in tech too.

Aydin Mirzaee 00:02:58

Yeah, that’s super interesting. There’s actually a physical limit, so it’s harder to become a micromanager in that kind of a world. Yeah, that’s super interesting. How did they do that when you were there? How did you do that? How did you try and make your team the best versions of themselves?

Matt Verlaque 00:03:13

Yeah, it’s interesting because you come out of the fire academy and it’s like, you know, the basics, the parallels, like maybe you’ve learned JavaScript, vanilla JavaScript, you’ve never built anything, you just like know how to sling some semicolons, right? And so you’ve got these basic competencies, but then when you hit the company, you really have to learn how to do it in real life with the stressors of people who actually need your help and sitting next to someone who might have been doing it for 30 years and they’ve figured out all sorts of stuff you don’t know yet. And so the way that I look at training as an officer in charge in that environment, it’s almost like sports, honestly, right, where you can have a bunch of all stars that don’t like each other and have a really bad team, or you can have a bunch of average to above average players who are super cohesive and know what each other’s doing, and you can have an exceptional team. And so the group dynamic in that environment is very, very similar to a sports team. And so the big outcomes for me as a leader is to get everyone on the same page where we know what we’re doing. If we’re presented with a certain scenario, everyone knows what the company is doing and then what their role within that operation is before the stressful moment happens. Because you step off the fire truck, you’ve got 5 seconds to make a decision and then you get to figure out if it’s right or not later. And so, yeah, it’s a lot of almost choreography, I think, in a certain sense, where, you know, the officer in charge is sitting in the right front seat, and the person behind him is pulling the hose line, and the person next to him is pushing the hose so that guy can move around the building. Like, everyone’s got a job that’s pre assigned, and so it lets the really elite companies, they make it look easy because everyone knows what you’re doing.

Matt Verlaque 00:04:42

There’s, like, seven or eight different things that you might have to do and probably pretty good at those seven or eight things.

Aydin Mirzaee 00:04:46

Yeah. So one of the things that whenever we’ve had a guest hear from the military, for example, we’ve always talked about after action reviews, is one of the core elements that they have in order to make the processes better. Is that something that you had there as well? Is that common, like, after every job or major?

Matt Verlaque 00:05:04

Yeah, 100%. So we would do it two ways. For, like, a major fire, there’d be a full, formal, written after action report, but also after any fire, we would do what we would call a tailboard critique, where we just sit on the back of the fire truck and talk about how it went, maybe walk back through the house again. And because it’s fascinating, like, you can’t see anything in a house fire. Like, it’s just literally, like, closing your eyes most of the time. And so to walk back through after and being like, oh, that was the thing that I felt with my glove. Oh, that was a couch. Why is it over on that side of the room? It’s almost like being blind and then getting your eyes turned back on.

Matt Verlaque 00:05:34

And so that experience of building the mental connection between what you felt with your hands when you couldn’t see and then go back and see what it was you were feeling, like, that’s really valuable. Especially, like, fire prevention is getting a lot better, so people are going to less fires. So it’s like being a sales guy. But imagine you only get one demo every other month. You really got to be good at closing that deal. And also, it’s going to be more stressful because it’s not like you’re getting five demos a day.

Aydin Mirzaee 00:05:59

Yeah, super high pressure. And so one of the things that I know some teams, like executive teams, that want to build stronger bonds in between the members. I mean, they practice a lot of different things, but one of which is this idea of giving each other feedback. And, you know, sometimes even doing that in a group setting is there anything like that, where you give each other feedback.

Matt Verlaque 00:06:21

Yeah, probably too much in that setting. The running joke is that the firehouse kitchen table is the place where there’s no rules, you know, so anyone can pretty much say whatever needs to be said when you’re sitting at the kitchen table. So you gotta be ready for that conversation. But even within technology companies now, like, that’s actually one of the biggest differences in that setting. You have so many type a personalities that sometimes you’re like, all right, guys, enough feedback. I got the message. You told me. It’s like 100 times.

Matt Verlaque 00:06:49

I got it. And sometimes in tech or in SAS, it’s like you have to work very deliberately and diligently to create an environment where someone will give you the feedback that you so desperately want. So it’s almost like different ends of the spectrum.

Aydin Mirzaee 00:07:03

In that case, yeah, it’s super interesting. Do you have to work at getting people to, or did you have to work at getting the team to be more cohesive? Or you just spend so much time proximity in high intensity situations that it just naturally happens.

Matt Verlaque 00:07:20

It goes one of two ways. Naturally, right. You’ll either become very cohesive or become literally not cohesive at all. Whatever was going to happen, the stress just makes it happen more and faster. But, you know, it was interesting. Like, and this is just an interesting leadership situation, which, you know, has parallels and software companies, but we’re anywhere is. I got promoted pretty early in my career, and so I was actually, like, by years of service, I was the second most junior person in the firehouse when I got promoted to lieutenant. And so I was like, showed up.

Matt Verlaque 00:07:48

And to some of these guys who had decades on the job, I’m like a kid, and they’ll look at me and be like, all right, dude, I know you got all this energy, but don’t come in here trying to change everything. That’s day one. You’re like, all right, I got some work to do, and so it can be a tough crowd sometimes, but I. That specific one was really interesting because even as a junior guy, like, I think the work that we did together started to speak for itself, and the guys saw me advocate for them, and we did some really quality training and ran some good calls. And by the time I left, because I left that assignment to start my first software company, by the time I left, we were tight, but it took work. You know, it would have been easier to come in and sit on the couch and just let it be mediocre, but that’s just not who I am.

Aydin Mirzaee 00:08:27

You know, that is such a tough situation to walk into when, again, in that kind of a situation. And that’s what you hear on day one. And how did you turn that around? Or what do you do in a situation like that? Because that happens all the time, right? People get promoted. You end up managing people more experienced than you and better than you in a variety of ways. What do you tell to someone who’s in that situation right now?

Matt Verlaque 00:08:50

It goes, for me, at least, I’m sure there’s a lot of right answers to the question. But for me, it starts with, what is your leadership philosophy? Right. And so my leadership philosophy is that when I lead a team, my job is to make everyone on that team to be the best versions of themselves and the team itself as an organism, to be as performant as possible. And so the way that I responded to that instant was very minimal. I was just like, all right, sounds good, and we’ll figure it out because there’s nothing you can say. It’s like watching people have a political debate. No one’s ever going to get their mind changed on Twitter. It’s not going to happen.

Matt Verlaque 00:09:25

And in that situation, you’re not going to have some comeback that is going to make someone say, oh, you know what? I changed my mind. I trust you change everything. It’s not a thing. It’s got to be slow rolled over time. And so being someone who leans into servant leadership, the way to earn the trust of the people around me was to put myself into positions where they would see me do what’s right for them and do what’s right for the company and start to have some success. And then success breeds trust, and trust breeds excellence in everything. So it’s just, you can’t rush it.

Aydin Mirzaee 00:09:54

Yeah, it’s a process. It takes time.

Matt Verlaque 00:09:55

Can’t, like, make a steak by, you know, turning the oven up, you’re going to burn it. Right. You got to let it do its thing.

Aydin Mirzaee 00:10:00

Yeah. I mean, I love the philosophy of, like, you’re in there to make everybody the best versions of themselves. If someone’s in that situation and thinking, well, how am I going to make these people who are already better than I am the best versions of themselves? Like, am I capable of doing that? What does that person do? What would you advise them to do?

Matt Verlaque 00:10:19

Yeah, you got to look outside. Just the skillset. Right. So there’s buckets of what I would consider competence. Right. So there’s the individual contributor of confidence. Maybe I’m really good at writing code or really good at putting up a ladder, you know, or whatever example you want to use. But then there’s also the how are we showing up interpersonally? How are we showing up as a team player? How are we showing up as an informal leader? Right.

Matt Verlaque 00:10:38

Is this person who’s so good at their role teaching everything they know to the people who are not yet as good? Right. Are they willing to embrace some vulnerability by stepping out in front of people and leading a class or teaching something? Right, because I’m a big fan of just teaching and coaching. I mean, I’m running a coaching company, right? It comes with a territory. So if you have people who are excellent at their jobs and they hoard that knowledge, you’ve not yet led them to be the best version of themselves. Right? Like we’ve got to share the expertise and so there’s always levels to that game.

Aydin Mirzaee 00:11:05

Yeah, yeah. That’s a good reframing of how to be able to help everybody show up as the best version of themselves. So you’re at SAS Academy today, you had an Exos run a software company and now you’re helping a lot of other companies do the same. One of the questions that we always like to start the podcast off with, and we just jumped into the conversation here, is typically what we ask is what’s a mistake that you recently made or something that really stuck with you? But I wanted to do a different version of that question with you, which is you could choose to use a personal mistake or given that you work at a coaching company and literally on a day to day basis, you talk with CEO’s founders and help coach them, what is one of the common mistakes that you end up seeing in your role?

Matt Verlaque 00:11:51

Cool. Good question. Probably the most common mistake that also has the most material impact on a business. And this is especially true early days, but it permeates all the way through regardless of stage, is I think that there’s a strong relationship between pricing and like a founders self worth, sometimes relationship with money. And so I think that I see a lot of, especially like first time bootstrapped founders will just be very hesitant to charge what they’re worth. And so a lot of the exercises that we will run through is around and this works better for some platforms than others, but around calculating an ROI analysis of how the software is going to impact. And again, we’re only b, two b. We only coach b, two b.

Matt Verlaque 00:12:35

So it’s a lot tougher in a consumer app like for selling to businesses, theres usually an upside. And if you cant figure out what the upside is then thats probably the first thing to tackle. But assuming theres an upside and you can figure out how to talk about it and quantify it, then use that to back into the pricing. Ive seen it time and time again. I was talking with a founder right before this call. We started working together. They were charging like $15 a month, and now theyre selling a dollar 500 a month b two b team plan. And theyre closing deals left and right because it was almost like they were charging so little that nobody would take them seriously.

Matt Verlaque 00:13:05

And they actually were delivering massive results for these businesses. And so its like this reframe of people get nervous, like, is it going to be good enough? What if I have a bug? I can’t ask for that much money. I’m not this big company. Reasons, reasons, reasons, reasons. But at the end of the day, getting the price point, at least directionally, right, unlocks so many things where if you’re criminally undercharging, it’s just, it’s so difficult to make the economics of any type of customer acquisition or hiring plan. It just won’t work. And so I think just introducing the first pricing plan to reality, that usually exposes the viability of the model and then overcoming whatever the psychological boundaries are between getting the price where it needs to be, that’s probably one of the most common ones.

Aydin Mirzaee 00:13:47

Trey, that’s super interesting. And I wonder if there is a meta lesson there around something internally that says that maybe I can’t charge as much. Do you think this is just a matter of people not knowing intellectually how they should price, or is it something deeper? Potentially?

Matt Verlaque 00:14:04

I think it’s fear. And I look, I had that fear. I launched with a low price and then realized, because math, that I had to, and I doubled it like four months into the game with my first company. You know, like, I’ve walked this walk. And so I think we all have our own issues with money. You know, I’m probably from how we all grew up or whatever everyone’s individual story is, right? But I think it’s just, especially for first time founders, it’s just fear. It’s fear of making the ask. Noah Kagan just had that book, Million Dollar Weekend come out.

Matt Verlaque 00:14:30

I was listening to him and Tim Ferriss in the car yesterday, and Noah does this thing where he’s like, just go ask someone for a dollar, or just go ask for a 10% discount on your cup of coffee. Right? And, like, that’s the same thing that I’m talking about. It’s just the fear of being like, Aydin, can I have a dollar? Like, you’d probably venmo me a dollar if I asked you. Seriously, right? Like, cool. Maybe, maybe not. I don’t know. Maybe tell me not to. But being able to make the ask, and so it’s that muscle applied to a different setting.

Matt Verlaque 00:14:53

It’s the same thing, though. I think fear is probably the foundation for all of it.

Aydin Mirzaee 00:14:56

Yeah, it is very interesting. And for those that don’t know the experiment, I think he says, basically go to a coffee shop and ask for a 10% discount. It sounds frightening to me.

Matt Verlaque 00:15:09

I will say you said that one, right. And then the other one was, ask someone to be on your board of advisors and just say, I need you to venmo me a dollar to lock in your spot. And it’s just like, people just lock up, they’ll ask for the favor, but not ask for the dollar. It’s like, it’s just a dollar. It’s so funny. Yeah.

Aydin Mirzaee 00:15:23

It’s an excellent experiment. So in your role today, one of the things that you often talk about is building systems so that you can kind of have something that you call an unbreakable business. If you’re running a team, if you’re running a company today and you want to learn something from that, like, what is an unbreakable business to you? Like, how do you know if you have one? Or if your business is breakable? How might you define that?

Matt Verlaque 00:15:50

Yeah, so this one, the context really matters because a very early business, it needs to be breakable. What I mean is that your first pass at however you think you’re going to solve a problem, the solution might change. The problem might change, the founders might like, everything might change. So having an unbreakable business, if you’ve got $4,000 in monthly recurring revenue, is probably a bug, not a feature. But the context that I apply this to is businesses who are at least over a million dollars in recurring revenue and who want to be able to scale into the eight figure range. At that point. Theres books about this. Its relatively well known as you scale from seven to eight figures.

Matt Verlaque 00:16:26

A lot of the time, the people that got you there wont be the people who can get you the next stage. The systems that got you there, they used to deliver all this beautiful positivity and solutions, and now theyre literally just damaging the business. Thats the frame that I use when Im thinking about this is how do you make the operations of the business unbreakable? As you start to scale, you’ve got initial product market fit. So I just want to give the context first. I think it’s important.

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Aydin Mirzaee 00:17:41

Yeah, so that’s very interesting. And we’ve definitely talked about this idea of, you know, the people that got you here won’t necessarily get you there. And a lot of times people have certain stage of company that they’re really good at, they haven’t seen the next stage. And so there’s a variety of reasons for that. But what’s interesting is you’re saying that even the systems, like, even the systems that got you there and were great are actually maybe now holding you back. Is there like an example or a story that you can think about of a system that used to work that no longer works?

Matt Verlaque 00:18:12

Yup. Team meetings. That’s the one I always reach for, because it’s like everyone hopefully does some iteration of a team call. So there’s three kind of phases that I think about. The first phase is the kitchen table phase. So if everyone can hang out in the kitchen, or could hypothetically hang out in the kitchen, if you’re remote, you probably don’t need a ton of structure. When you first started your company, it was probably you and a couple people, and you all knew everything, because there’s only a couple people, right? And so for someone like me, who’s a big nerd, the risk I run at that stage is overbuilding systems that don’t need to exist yet, which I’ve gotten better at over time. So, like, that’s the first stage.

Matt Verlaque 00:18:46

The second stage is when you have a true team of leaders, probably somewhere between six to twelve people in the company. And so at that point, you need to at least have a single team meeting with some structure around it. And so the damage that we’ll see is like assuming that everyone, when you were two or three people, assuming that all twelve people would have the same degree of context, that becomes damaging, because if you don’t realize that that’s like an anti pattern, you’re going to get frustrated with the person. Like, man, why doesn’t Aydin know this stuff? Like, what? Is he not paying attention? And you don’t realize that there’s so many exponentially more communication pathways between a team of twelve versus a team of three, there’s not possible to absorb that degree of context. So usually between eight and twelve people, we need to have some type of system. We call it a weekly sync. We’ve got a framework that we use for with a template, etcetera. And then it breaks again once you get into 15 to 20 and up, because once you have all of those people running teams, then you need to start doing team meetings and then a leadership meeting.

Matt Verlaque 00:19:41

And so that way. And you need to. My opinion is that we do the team meetings first and then the leadership meetings. So, like, the people on the front lines, you pull issues up, solve them, pass the solutions back down. So any one of these cadences applied to the wrong stage of company is going to be a pain in the butt. But especially if you got 20 people on a team and you’re mad at them because they don’t have as much context as it was when the three of you were sitting in your kitchen table a year ago. You could fire someone because you think they can’t hang and not realize that it’s actually your fault as the leader, that you don’t have the right systems to equip them to do their jobs, which is like, it’s crazy when you think about it.

Aydin Mirzaee 00:20:16

Yeah, this is super interesting. I also think that in addition, even if you have great systems, there’s this element of information overload. Right?

Matt Verlaque 00:20:24

Yeah.

Aydin Mirzaee 00:20:25

You shouldn’t even want for everybody to know every single thing as well, because. Yeah, it just becomes really hard when that happens. There’s almost like, you don’t know what signal and what’s noise. When everything is communicated, then, you know, how do you know what you should really pay attention to and not. And so I love that structure that you’re suggesting, though, that there’s almost like orchestration of when you have a larger organization, you have to think about, well, when do people have their team meetings and how do they interact with one another? Like you said, you prefer for the team meetings to happen first and then the leadership meeting to happen after that. So one can flow to the other. What about one on ones? Like, how do you think about how, I guess from a temporal perspective, like, when should it fit.

Matt Verlaque 00:21:11

Yeah. So my opinion on one on ones has evolved over the past couple of years. You know, I used to really want to do them weekly. I love the idea of a weekly touch point. And then what I found is that, regrettably, my calendar has limits to it. Well, they have limits that if I don’t respect them, then I have trouble with the fam. Right. Nobody wants that.

Matt Verlaque 00:21:29

I got to have the balance in life. And so I was doing 30 minutes weekly one on ones with all of my direct reports. And what I found is that it actually was not that valuable because in the 30 minutes, I couldn’t get past the transactional types of conversations to get into what I call the real, the real types of actually high yield conversations you need to have. And so I edited them. And I love Matt Mushari and everything he’s put out. I’ve read his curriculum that he’s put out online, front to back. Dude’s super generous with his expertise. And so I pulled a bunch of questions from there that I actually used for the format.

Matt Verlaque 00:22:03

So, full credit to him and his team. But I do every other week for a full hour on the one on one, and we review wins. We do a quick review on goals. We do a 35 minutes block on what we just call the discussion list, which it’s up to the direct report to. Like, they get first crack at all these sections. So, like, I want them to be pulling coaching topics and questions from me. And then I’ll bring some stuff if I need to. And then feedback is the last ten minutes.

Matt Verlaque 00:22:25

It goes in both directions. And they have to tell me feedback first. So I’m the receiver of the feedback before I’m the giver of the feedback, which is great because it lets me model how one should receive feedback. If you’re a leader and you’re getting super defensive when your team is giving you constructive feedback, you’re ruining the psychological safety. They need to give you the feedback and you’re not going to get it anymore. It’s what’s one thing I did in the past two weeks that you loved and what’s one thing I could do to get to the next level? So we answer those questions, it’s mandatory. I encourage them to nitpick me and just like, oh, like, I don’t have anything. Like, tell me I had some broccoli in my teeth.

Matt Verlaque 00:22:59

Tell me something. You gotta give me something, right? And then I’ll do the same for them. And so that’s the structure, but we do it once every other week. Full hour, don’t cancel them. Like pretty non negotiable. And I’ll tell you like, the depth of conversations that I’ve had and the subsequent performance and cultural improvements for key team members that have happened secondary to this format of one on ones. It exceeded my wildest expectation. I can think of a couple of people, I’m not going to name them by name, obviously, but a couple of people on my team who.

Matt Verlaque 00:23:29

They are different humans, right? At least within the work context, after switching to this format and really putting some effort into it. So it’s worth the squeeze.

Aydin Mirzaee 00:23:37

Yeah, super interesting. I’d love to just dig into the various sections. So you start with some wins and then you talk about the goals and then the progress towards the goals. And then theres an issue section and that can be based on whatever you discussed, maybe related to the goals that you just finished discussing, or it can be something outside of that. And thats the bulk of the conversation, which then also may lead to some action items for the next time around.

Matt Verlaque 00:24:03

Got it.

Aydin Mirzaee 00:24:04

And how often is the discussion related to that top goal versus things that are brought up from other circumstances?

Matt Verlaque 00:24:12

I would say probably so it’s interesting to give a little context on why it’s probably about 25% of the time related to a top goal in the one on one. But we also review the goals in our team calls on weekly syncs every Monday. So like there’s a kind of a better forum for that kind of stuff, which is the team meeting. We work in public as much as we can. So that said, if there’s something that’s unresolved, yes, we’ll tackle it on the one on one. But what I’ve found is in the context of that like issues list or discussions list, the most valuable thing there’s really two is a the team member bringing things to you that they’re blocked on, or especially that you’re inadvertently blocking them on. Right. To get that resolved real time on the call.

Matt Verlaque 00:24:53

And then the second is just how should I handle this situation? Or here’s how I handle the situation and it didn’t go as planned. Can you coach me on it? What do you think? Or reviewing work product, just like things that they need from you. Because the nice thing about having this space is you can usually do the work instead of leaving with homework. I don’t love having a bunch of action items. I like having a bunch of resolved issues, ideally. And so between the team call where we have space to work on that stuff, and then the one on ones to handle things that might not be appropriate for the team call. Usually we can get stuff done real time as best we can.

Aydin Mirzaee 00:25:27

Yeah. So that’s super interesting. So it’s largely anything that your direct reports can come up with, which is great. It will likely be related to things that will help resolve something that’s blocking them, and that’s kind of like, ends up being the encourage thing. And part of the reason you don’t spend as much time on the goals is because that happens in the team meeting. So if we were to kind of break it apart. So the company’s team meetings say happen, do they happen on a Monday? Is that how it works?

Matt Verlaque 00:25:54

Yeah. So the team calls happen. Monday is Tuesday’s leadership day. That’s generally how we run it.

Aydin Mirzaee 00:25:58

And then when are one on ones or is that sporadic?

Matt Verlaque 00:26:01

Just sporadic throughout the rest of the week.

Aydin Mirzaee 00:26:03

Okay, got it. Got it. And then. So let’s talk about the structure of the team meeting then. So for the team meeting, what is that all about?

Matt Verlaque 00:26:10

It’s heavily Eos inspired. Right. We’re all standing on the shoulder giants here. But at the end of the day, we start with wins. I do wins in the beginning, at every meeting. I just think as entrepreneurs and type A personalities, we’re so bad at recognizing the good. We’re always just looking for the next problem. So sometimes, like, forcing people to put the rear view mirror up for a second, be like, oh, actually we did pretty good at this thing.

Matt Verlaque 00:26:30

Like, it’s a helpful exercise.

Aydin Mirzaee 00:26:31

I agree. I agree.

Matt Verlaque 00:26:32

Yeah. So we start with wins. To kick it off, we do a quick data review. And that’s KPI’s and metrics related to the context of whichever call that we’re in. We do goal reviews, which is the team goals that we were talking about before. Same kind of thing. We do issues list. That’s usually the meeting.

Matt Verlaque 00:26:48

It’s pretty straightforward.

Aydin Mirzaee 00:26:49

Got it. And then do you ever exchange feedback during that meeting as well for the team members?

Matt Verlaque 00:26:54

Well, not usually. As a group, we do the feedback in the one on ones. And then also what we do. I don’t do this on a timeline. As a leadership team, we do it usually every six months. We call it a strengths and weaknesses exercise where well actually go through. And in a small group, like five or six people, well write down. So, like, someone’s in the hot seat.

Matt Verlaque 00:27:11

Right. So, like, if you’re sitting in the hot seat, we would all write down the thing that we love most, or Aydin’s biggest strength, and then Aydin’s biggest opportunity for improvement and then I. We all go around and say the strength, and we all go around and say the improvement, and the only thing you can say is thank you, and you just have to internalize it. And then at the end of that, we basically make a commitment that’s like, here’s the one thing I’m going to work on, leveling up personally based on the feedback you just gave me. So we’ll do that usually twice a year.

Aydin Mirzaee 00:27:37

Oh, I love that. And is that usually like an off site y type thing where everybody gets together?

Matt Verlaque 00:27:42

Yeah, yeah. We’ll do it in, like, the annual kickoff with the whole company. Or we might do it with the leadership team. We might just set up a couple hours on Zoom and just do it together whenever we need to.

Aydin Mirzaee 00:27:51

I love it. Is that super uncomfortable to get feedback from other people while watching them say it?

Matt Verlaque 00:27:57

100%. And it’s funny because when you said the question you were going to ask that you pivoted from about the mistake that I made that comes from that exercise. Right?

Aydin Mirzaee 00:28:06

Let’s talk about it. Yeah. What was the mistake?

Matt Verlaque 00:28:08

Oh, I touch stuff too much. Right. Love the work that I do so much that I don’t work through my team enough. And so I’ve really taken some massive steps the past few months to correct that. You know, where I’ll just. I’ll be all up in the team meetings, I’ll be all up in everything. And, like, then I’m sad because I’m spending 6 hours a day on zoom, and I’m like, I’m the boss. I did it to myself.

Matt Verlaque 00:28:29

Who am I going to look at? It’s my fault, you know, but, yeah, I had three or four people on the leadership team that are literally just like, just work through us. Like, we got. You. Just lead us and let us do the stuff. We got this. And I was like, damn, you guys are right.

Aydin Mirzaee 00:28:41

Well, that’s a very positive way for them to say it. Is that how they said it?

Matt Verlaque 00:28:45

Yeah. It wasn’t like, stop touching my toys. Get out of my room. But, you know, it was. It was cool.

Aydin Mirzaee 00:28:49

Just thinking back to that moment, was that a right away you understood and the next day you changed? Or, you know, it took you a few days or a week to really think about it. How did that play out?

Matt Verlaque 00:29:00

Here’s the secret. Everyone knows it might not have been the first time I’d gotten that feedback from people that work on my team. So it probably wasn’t too much of a surprise to Matt Verlak three months.

Aydin Mirzaee 00:29:09

Ago when he heard that again, yeah, super interesting. And I love that you do the feedback thing on everyone on one, too. Like, is there always stuff that you. Because I suppose you could also give positive feedback, too. It doesn’t have to be.

Matt Verlaque 00:29:21

Yeah, it’s both. We require both.

Aydin Mirzaee 00:29:23

Okay. And how does that play out in real life? Like, is there always something that someone can say, I wish that you did this, but you’re not?

Matt Verlaque 00:29:33

So, yeah, I love this question. Right? So when someone new comes onto the team, the first couple times, they’ll be like, oh, there’s nothing. Everything’s great. And so, like, the first time they do that, I’m like, look, I’ll give you a pass, but you got to bring something next time. And then next time they come, they’ll be like, oh, I thought about this every day for two weeks. I still don’t know anything. And, like, at that point, I’ll just start beating myself up, right? We’re all self critical. So I’ll be like, well, I actually don’t like the way I showed up on our call when I said this instead of that or I missed this deadline or whatever.

Matt Verlaque 00:30:01

The thing about it is, people don’t want to, I don’t know, be an asshole. Can I say that on this podcast? I don’t know. They don’t want to.

Aydin Mirzaee 00:30:08

Yeah, of course.

Matt Verlaque 00:30:08

Cool. People don’t want to be assholes, right? And they feel like. Because we’re conditioned to feel like giving feedback is, like, being rude. And so I think that, you know, reframing that for people where they truly believe that critical feedback is a gift and the fact that they’re willing to get past their own discomfort to deliver the feedback, it’s the biggest sign of respect in the world, right? That they can go do this because it’s super uncomfortable to do that. And so I just find that I have to give people permission and then also not waver on the expectations. And a lot of time, it’ll be small. But, like, as leaders, everything we say is through the megaphone. Everything we do is under the microscope, right? We all know that.

Matt Verlaque 00:30:45

And so it might be like, oh, you look like you were pissed off on this team call, but, like, to me, that’s a big deal. Maybe I skipped lunch and I was hungry, but no one wants to talk to a, you know, c whatever, cxo coo, whatever it is who looks like they’re angry all the time. And there’s probably something that went unsaid in that meeting because I skipped lunch. Feedback put time on my calendar to eat. So I don’t look pissed off on a call. These little things that the giver of the feedback might think are minutiae and being rude, they might be huge unlocks. Like, what if that one thing that that one person got scared to say because I looked annoyed was something that I really needed to know. Right.

Matt Verlaque 00:31:18

Like, there’s a butterfly effect to this whole thing. So I love the feedback.

Aydin Mirzaee 00:31:22

Yeah. And I guess, like, by doing this, the other thing that gets unlocked is, you know, you’re just building more trust. And so maybe now it’s small stuff. Like, hey, you look kind of angry on that call. But then something else that would have never been said because you hadn’t built the trust will now also get said because you just have a way to do that.

Matt Verlaque 00:31:41

That’s exactly why we do it, man. Right? Because I want them to warm up on the little stuff, and what always happens is they’ll be like, well, I didn’t really have anything big. This is a small thing. But the next week, you’ll be like, oh, this one’s really small. But then you say, we get to feedback. And when they say, boom, when they come right out and they’re not like, oh, it’s small, then you know you’re getting the real stuff. Right. And the only reason they show up that way is because you’ve done a few reps on, like, all your spreadsheet looks stupid or whatever.

Matt Verlaque 00:32:07

Little stuff.

Aydin Mirzaee 00:32:07

Yeah, I love this. And this is a stuff when people talk about doing continuous feedback, this is what continuous feedback is, right? So this is 100 x better than once a year, 360 review type stuff that people are struggling to remember what to say. And, yeah, this is it.

Matt Verlaque 00:32:25

Our team hates doing performance reviews because, like, we didn’t learn anything. We do it every two weeks. And I’m like, all right, that’s probably good. And so now we’re trying to innovate the performance review process so people see value in it because they’re like, literally, we talk about everything that we talked about in the review every single time we do a one on one. Like, why are we even doing this? It’s a cool sign to see people saying that.

Aydin Mirzaee 00:32:44

Yeah, yeah, this is great. Matt, I did want to also ask you about just quarterly planning, because I hear that you guys, I mean, you spend, like, a three or four hour call doing quarterly planning. How does that work? How do you do quarterly planning?

Matt Verlaque 00:32:58

Totally. So it’s one of the things that I’m most proud of, honestly, because, dude, you tell someone you spend 4 hours on zoom, they’ll look at you like you just stepped off the mothership, right? They’re like, that’s not like, the worst thing ever. I never want to do that. I’ll do multiple sessions of this. I’ll facilitate them with different teams every single quarter. So, like, this is a big part of what I do. And so again, no surprise, we start off with wins on the quarter and what went well. But we’ve got a opening exercise.

Matt Verlaque 00:33:22

We start off, we answer four questions with a kickoff. So what’s the best news from the quarter? What are the things that are working? What are the things that are not working? And then what are your expectations for the time together? And so I’ll put on music. Like, I’m DJ in this joint. Like, I’m facilitating pretty hard, right? And so we’ll put on music. We got a shared doc. Everyone fills it out. So we go through that and kind of get aligned. We do a annual plan reviews.

Matt Verlaque 00:33:43

Like, how are we doing versus our annual plans. We do the exec planning first before we do this in the team. So if there’s any, like, messages, I actually like to assign emotions to quarters. Right. So, like, if we’re coming off a bad quarter, the emotion might be like, turn around, stay conservative, no big bets. Let’s get back on plan. If we crush the quarter, then it’s cool, we got surplus. We’re going to innovate.

Matt Verlaque 00:34:02

Let’s, you know, throw some chips on the table. It’s different vibe. And so I try to explicitly communicate that outwardly. And then basically we sit down and again, super eos inspired, right? We’ll have everyone populate a key issues list. Just anything they think needs to be worked on within the team, we’ll go through. And then what I do while they’re doing that is I’ll look at, I’ll find the trends, and so I’ll pluck different things out, and I’ll build, like, an ordered list of everything everyone’s been talking about. And I’ll rank them. Like, I’ll stack rank, prioritize them based on impact of the business.

Matt Verlaque 00:34:33

And so then I’ll put that list back in front of them and be like, does anyone feel like you’re not being heard? If we go through my list here, and usually, you know, I’ve done it a lot of times now, usually I’ll catch everything, and then we will just time box it. We’ll discuss each of those things on the key issues list. And, like, out of those are what our quarterly rocks or okrs are born from. They’re born out of those discussions. And so when this goes well, we can leave this meeting with the quarterly rocks for the upcoming quarter, already identified, already given to somebody, and everyone knows what we’re attacking for the following quarter. Again, it’s like, I’d rather just be together and do the work than hang out for an hour because that’s what feels normal. And then everyone’s going back and doing homework and writing all their own little stuff, and then we bring it all back and nothing makes sense. And it’s super disjointed.

Matt Verlaque 00:35:17

It’s actually faster and better for team cohesion to just do it live. As long as you can run a Zoom meeting that doesn’t feel like, you know, punching yourself in the face, you’d be in a good spot.

Aydin Mirzaee 00:35:27

Yeah, that’s great. I mean, it’s very much a workshop. It doesn’t sound like a meeting. This is an actual workshop.

Matt Verlaque 00:35:32

Probably a better word for it, actually. Yeah, it’s a workshop, for sure. We’re co creating the plan.

Aydin Mirzaee 00:35:35

And then how does the executive stuff then work in? So if the teams are coming, so the executive goal setting happens first, and then how does that merge with what the teams are working on?

Matt Verlaque 00:35:48

Yeah, so my philosophy on this is executives should set only a few goals and they should be very high level. So it should be like, company vision stuff. It should be big strategic initiatives, it should be revenue and it should be profit. And that’s generally where it should stop. And that doesn’t mean that there’s like, yes, we might have, like, Johnny’s our chief revenue officer, so we oversees sales and marketing. Like, yes, he’s, at the end of the day, going to be accountable with the directors of those departments for all the rest of how that actually happens. But we do that with those teams. If you don’t plan the fight, you fight the plan.

Matt Verlaque 00:36:25

We keep it loose, but we know we need to grow from here to here. We have a high degree of context. We’re pretty sure we know the 80 20 of how it’s going to go and what the plan is. Then we bring that goalpost into the teams. We do revenue planning together. Sales and marketing are a unit of. We do the quarterly planning together. And so, like, that’s the one where this pertains most directly.

Aydin Mirzaee 00:36:46

Right.

Matt Verlaque 00:36:46

So we’ll bring the growth goals. We do all of our programs as a team, right. We’ve got, like, three different programs. Each one has a director, so we’ll do them as a team. That drives retention goals and so, like, we bring these and then the directors know what success looks like, but they build the plan on how we get there or throw the flag. And they might be like, Matt, johnny, like, you guys are insane to, I don’t know how we’re going to do this. Or if you want that goal, here’s what it’ll take. I need money, people, initiatives, whatever.

Matt Verlaque 00:37:13

But we want to draw that healthy conflict out, those discussions out because what I’ve seen happen in unhealthy organizations, you put the goal in front of someone and it’s crazy and nobody says anything. And then they’re like, oh, I knew that was never going to work. Worst possible words anyone could ever utter in a team, right? I knew that was doomed from day one. Say something. Right. So like, we’re allergic to that. And so we just, we keep the exact stuff high level. The teams plan the work and then it’s their plan, not my plan because I don’t run marketing.

Matt Verlaque 00:37:45

Right. I facilitate this meeting. They go do the plan and they get to stand tall for the results. And usually they crush.

Aydin Mirzaee 00:37:52

Amazing. I love it. Like, that’s a really good way to do it. So, Matt, before I ask our rapid fire questions, you guys are writing a new book. Do you want to tell us about it?

Matt Verlaque 00:38:01

Yeah, for sure. Im super excited about it. So, yeah, its called software as a science. And basically the gist here is for people listening who started a software company. Youve got to do like a whole bunch of crazy stuff in the beginning to get it working. You try 15 things, 14 of them dont work. And its sporadic, almost like manic kind of trying things to figure out whats going to hit. What I find is that weve seen this with hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of companies weve coached is that people will usually bump into their first revenue plateau somewhere between like 15 and 25k in revenue because all of a sudden all of those crazy things that you were trying to get, your initial traction, the rate of change, it’s just like we were talking about earlier, things that work at a certain stage become damaging at another stage.

Matt Verlaque 00:38:46

We change too fast and we don’t have a methodical approach to the way that we’re growing companies. And so this is what we coach on inside of SaaS Academy. But were finally putting it out into the world of the fact that once you hit preliminary product market fit, youre doing low five figures in monthly revenue. At that point, your business can become a math problem. And the value proposition and the way you help your customers is the art. But a recurring revenue business. At the end of the day, like Robert Smith says all the time, hes like software is like chicken. 80% of its the same every single time.

Matt Verlaque 00:39:18

And I think we can agree hes probably done pretty good for himself with Vista. Right. And so we have a specific formula that we use. We’ve got a specific thinking model and an hourglass. And so we’re finally like letting the stuff outside of the coaching environment and teaching people like here’s how to do the math to find your growth ceiling and here’s the order of operations and how you should fix different things. And there’s only three levers that you can pull to break through the plateau and reset where your business is going to stop growing. Yeah, we’re just open sourcing ros basically and put it out to the world. So it’s going to be really cool to see.

Aydin Mirzaee 00:39:47

Yeah, super exciting for it to read that and when it comes out let us know and we’ll definitely promote it as well.

Matt Verlaque 00:39:53

Amazing.

Aydin Mirzaee 00:39:54

So Matt, a couple of rapid fire questions. What do you wish managers and leaders.

Matt Verlaque 00:39:59

Would stop doing under prioritizing? It’s probably the same question if you ask me the inverse or the same answer, but I wish managers and leaders would stop under indexing on the fact that they need to invest in the people, not necessarily in the work. I think that’s the biggest mistake that a new leader can make is it’s like, oh, I’m just going to do this work more and everyone’s going to watch me do my work and they’re going to do the work too. And I’m just going to magically have this great team. Like if you’re not blocking in your calendar at least 2 hours a week per direct report, just for direct leadership and management activity, you’re not supporting your people as well as you need to be. Like, I might be opinionated, but I think it’s the truth. And so yeah, I think that we need to stop neglecting our teams.

Aydin Mirzaee 00:40:39

And is there any piece of management advice that you’ve heard that you maybe disagree with? Hmm.

Matt Verlaque 00:40:46

You know, I don’t know where I’ve heard this and it might come from my days in the fire department, but I think that sometimes you can have a belief that you have to be better than everyone on your team, like at the skill that you’re managing. Right. You’ve got to be the best at x, whatever. X is the best marketer if you’re running marketing, the best you know, closer if you’re running sales or the best, you know, hose puller. If you’re running a fire company, whatever, you don’t, you have to be the best leader and the best coach and the person who can bring out greatness in the people around you. And what I’ve found is that because I used to believe this, like, I was like, oh, I need to be world class at every skill that everyone on my team has. It’s exhausting and also impossible, right? And so, like, what I found is I’m happiest when I’m the dumbest guy in the room. Like, I’m happiest when everyone around me is better than me at everything they’re doing.

Matt Verlaque 00:41:32

Because then I’ve hired good people and I have an incredible team because they can outperform me. And that’s the whole idea. Like, I’m lucky they let me show up.

Aydin Mirzaee 00:41:38

Still, that’s great advice and a great place to end it. Matt, thank you so much for doing this.

Matt Verlaque 00:41:44

I appreciate it. Aydin, it’s a great chat. Thanks, man.

Aydin Mirzaee 00:41:46

And that’s it for today. Thank you so much for tuning into this episode of the Supermanagers podcast. You can find the show notes and transcript at www.Fellow.app supermanagers. If you like the content content, be sure to rate, review and subscribe so you can get notified when we post the next episode. And please tell your friends and Fellow managers about it. It’d be awesome if you could help us spread the word about the show. See you next time.