Speaker 1Welcome to Top Line, the podcast for the best founders, operators, and investors in B2B tech. Every week, AJ Bruno, Asad Zaman, and me, Sam Jacobs, will break down what's important for you to know to be the most well-informed professionals in the market.
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Speaker 3Hey, friends. Welcome to Top Line Spotlight. You know Top Line Spotlight. It's our weekly segment where we get to talk to one of our great guests. Today, we have the absolute best. Best guests in the world. He is known as, apparently, by some LLMs, as the best Top Line co-host in the entire world. One and only, Sam Jacobs. Sam's been pointing to himself for the last 30 seconds. I think that's what actually- What up, my peoples? I feel like, Sam, you just wake up in the morning, and you're like, yep, this is me. I am him.
Speaker 4I'm the man with the plan.
Speaker 3Sam, this segment is all about you, and what is one challenge, business challenge, that you have conquered, you've taken down in the last, what, 12 months, 24 months? What are we doing on this? 24. 24 months.
Speaker 424 months. Who does that?
Speaker 324 months. Yeah, I'm going to open up the horizon here. There is 24 months. This is my show now, actually. I can teach you the questions.
Speaker 4Don't do a shout out now. No. You've asked the question. Now I should start answering it?
Speaker 3I think that's how this works, isn't it? This is how this works.
Speaker 4You should say, amateurs. First, you say, who are you? I say, I'm Sam Jacobs, CEO of Pavilion. You say, before we get started, tell us about Pavilion. That's how these introductions work. We assume everyone knows. I'm AJ Bruno.
Speaker 3I'm AJ Bruno. I am the CEO of QuotaPath. You have Austin Zaman, CEO of Sales Talent Agency, and Sam Jacobs, CEO of Pavilion. Sam, welcome to the show. How are you doing, Sam?
Speaker 4Thank you very much. I'm happy to be here.
Speaker 3Yeah. We're happy to have you, Sam. Sam, can you first tell our listeners a little bit about Pavilion?
Speaker 4Yeah, I sure can. Pavilion is the world's leading go-to-market community for operators. We're 10,000 people all over the world, and our mission is to help operating executives within go-to-market unlock and achieve their professional potential. What does that mean? It means that the world is constantly changing in go-to-market, and the jobs are not stable. And so we've created a community and an educational institution called Pavilion University, whose job it is to equip you as a sales leader, a marketing leader, a customer success leader with the education and insights you need, with the peers that you need, of whom you can ask questions and solve difficult problems, and the experiences you need to lead the best and most fulfilling operating professional life that you can. That is what we do. Sam? Yeah. You're launching Pavilion Gold, or have launched Pavilion Gold? I am. Yeah, we are. We are launching Pavilion Gold. We can talk about that if you want. That is our elite membership tier. It is invitation only. It is for operators, current operators, from 50 million in ARR up to a billion, and sometimes north of a billion. And that is a membership tier that sits on top of the 10,000 people that are all over the world, and it includes notable operators like Kyle Norton. The CRO of Owner.com. Ashley Gregg, the CRO of Xero. Nick Warswick, the CRO of Upside. Keith Pierce, the CMO of Gainsight. Gaurav Agarwal, the CRO of ClickUp. And many more. If you're interested in learning more, feel free to drop me a line. But it's invitation only. You've got to go through an interview process. No CEOs. No service providers. Yeah. No consulting. Revenue Collective. If you're going to be a fractional, you can't have been a fractional for more than six months. You have to be an in-between fractional. Pursuing the next big opportunity. You can be a consultant and advisor rather than fractional, probably, then, right? No, you can't really be a consultant and advisor. Not professionally. You can be an advisor because you left Databricks, or you left OpenAI. I love this. But this is for operators. This is for people in role. I love it. Sam, what was really interesting was seeing you build this community out, and the speed at which it increased. Like, before we go into the chat, Sam, I wanted to ask you a couple of questions. So I'm going to start with you. I'm going to start with you. Yeah. Everybody could join. And and then we moved away from just focusing on go to market executives and we let in CEOs and we let in. And then we were thinking about building operations collective for up for CFOs and COOs. And we just got so diffuse in our focus. And that was, you know, and we are unpacking. There was the impact of some of those decisions years later, and I think we will work our way through them. And we've and now I would say now it's that the main membership is more of an educational institution than it is a private club. And and so the trick is, can you build a private club on top of the educational institution? Can you build Harvard while every while many people are taking, you know, Harvard online? But can you still make it so that there is a Harvard and that is what's driving the brand halo of the Harvard online?
Speaker 3Sam, I don't think I've ever told you this, but I first found out through. About Revenue Collective when my current director of AI ops, Brandon Smith, he was running sales ops at the time. He got declined from his application process because he wasn't like he didn't meet the qualifications of the executive branch, but he met the associates. So he actually joined the associates. And I remember thinking about that. And I had FOMO immediately from that, like what community doesn't qualifies you at that level? And then I heard your name at one of our customers, Michael. CEO, I'll think of his name and he's like, oh, you should meet Sam Jacobs. I was like, well, I heard he doesn't like CEOs, so I don't think I'm welcome. But that changed. And so there's this beautiful thing, as I would say, there's this beautiful thing where you have, on one hand, this qualification, this really tight knit community. But on the other hand, you have this opportunity to welcome a greater group of people and being able to merge those two things. It feels like there's been some decisions in there that have been conflictive. Are there any is there anything that stands out? You're talking about this of like mistakes. Are there any mistakes specific to that that stand out to you that you're like?
Speaker 4Yeah, I mean, we we we made it so that you could sign up online without talking to anybody and we let in so anybody can join. That's the single biggest mistake we've made.
Speaker 5How do you go about so you recognize you do it, you do it for some logical reason, you believe it's a good thing to do, you do it, it plays out. And then. And then walk us through the moment you realize, oh, no, this was a mistake and how you then think about correcting it. And usually the thing that I'm most interested in is what type of patience do you have to deploy in fixing it? Because you can't just like, can you just immediately change it? Are you facing it through? How does that work?
Speaker 4No, I tried to do that in 2022. You know, I was much, much more reactive in 2022. And as a leader and that really cost us and we'd raise money. And so it was Laura would come back LG and she and she wanted to pursue teams, corporate memberships. And so we built out a big sales team to drive teams. And of course, the whole point of Pavilion is we're not going to sell to you. You know, you're not going to sell to each other. But all of the SDRs that we hired were just prospecting into the membership. So we did that. And then we built out a big educational team that was somewhat slow moving. And all of a sudden, our cost structure became so bloated. And it's why McKinsey says that. It's much easier for a low growth company that's profitable to find and discover growth than it is for a high growth, unprofitable business to find its way to profitability. And I'm quite proud that we did reverse course and find our way back to profitability. But exactly your point, Austin, the thing that, you know, that emerged was like, I have to slow down to, you know, slow is smooth and smooth is fast. And that fixing, quote unquote, fixing this will be a generational, not generational. It'll be five years. It's going to take. Three to five years to fix because we want to preserve. There's still a good part of it, which is that there can be a pavilion for everybody. We do want everybody to take zero school. We do want everybody to take CMO school. We do want everybody to have P&L fluency, but we do need to. And we do want to roll out programs for people that maybe are not the very best of the best so that they can have a valuable membership where they have connection with people and they feel connected to this bigger thing at the same time that we need our Birkin bag. You know, we need to get the Birkin bag. Back and we need, you know, the Philip Patek, Patek, Philip, whatever. Like we need the thing at the top. We need the Black American Express card because that brand halo is what gives value to, in some ways, the platinum and the gold card. And so that's what that's what I'm building with gold. And, you know, the beautiful thing I will just to finish the beautiful thing is like, thank frickin God that nothing has changed. Thank God that it's still that the. You know, the genitals of the founders and CEOs are still the ones that are played with. It's still investors and founders that are thought of as the most celebrated heroes of all of these stories. And it is still true that the operating executive. So even even the CMOs and CROs of large organizations, aside from, you know, Chris Degnan or Ron Jabrisko. But aside from like a handful of CROs and CMOs, they still feel like they're under pressure. They still feel like they're being asked to do things that are. Very, very difficult to accomplish. There's still an opportunity.
Speaker 5And they don't get any recognition for the wins. Like I get actually really off by all of these because we are in this moment where there are these companies that are accelerating at a pace that we've never seen before. And when they're announcing their fundraisers and all of these things, not once is somebody saying, you know, kudos to the CRO who took this company from like a million to like 50 million in three years. Like that required some sleepless nights and some amazing execution over a long period. Of time. Kudos. Like you don't hear it as much. You see a lot of like, I want to thank my CTO or my this or my that, but you don't get it for the CROs.
Speaker 4People don't like they still don't like sales and marketing people very much, at least not. Well, it depends. It depends. I think technical
Speaker 5founders find them hard to come to
Speaker 4terms with. But I will say to the answer the question, the first question, which is, you know, what's what's the how did I solve whatever the challenge was and that the fundamental answer to the question, which is to the question. Is to the point is of taking a longer term view. And there was a moment, actually, I don't know if it was this year, but it was in the last six to nine months when, you know, the board said, what do you want to do with this thing? And I realized that I hadn't answered that question for anybody. It doesn't mean, you know, do I want to sell it? I do. It just should be clear. I am trying to generate, you know, massive, massive wealth. I'm not on a yacht and I should be. So that's part of the goal. But really, the point is, like, where are we taking the business? And so what I did was I built a three year vision that. That specifically articulates this is what I want to do. This is when I want to do it. These are the pieces that will go into it. We'd never had like a three year vision with a coupled financial plan. I presented that to the company two weeks ago, and I feel much better because I just know this is where we're going. It's going to take some time. It takes time to build these things in the right way, particularly clubs. You know, cool clubs take some time to build. And it's really easy
Speaker 5to like if you if you. Reduce this, if you get too fast with things, we saw this with Soho House, right? When they tried to grow too quickly and expand too much, it didn't feel as exclusive.
Speaker 4The good, the beautiful thing, because one of the questions I was going to ask in the last episode, though, is can a can a club that was once cool ever become cool again? And the answer, I think, is yes. And I think Soho House is a good example of that. I know people that are really excited about their Soho House memberships, and it's because you just make the restaurant great, like you make the restaurant. Great. People want to go there. It doesn't matter.
Speaker 5In London, it got to it got really crowded. And London has a lot of private clubs. It's probably the place where you have the most private clubs there. And so people really appreciate that type of experience. And the Soho House did become really large and very open to people. But then they opened a second location and that one is like as exclusive as it gets, meaning like some of your most famous people in the world can't get in for two months. And so that became shiny again. So it was very cool. It didn't even take a long time. It took like, let's open this thing, make it extra exclusive and everybody will want to be there and we do cool things over there and there's a cool event and some cool artist is there and everybody wants to be around that thing. And so, yeah, clubs can get cool.
Speaker 3They opened the one in Austin, and I remember the build up to it. It was like two years waitlist. But just more recently, I've there was a text thread where they're talking about getting out of it. So I definitely think it's like a city by city situation. And I mean, Sam, that's kind of one of the. Challenges I was curious about. You have all of these demographics and cities and different areas and you have to localize pavilion in them, right? Yeah. How do you like do you have you've had GM's in the past? You have them now. Is that how do you manage that process?
Speaker 4And we have a team, we have a team, we invest in chapter operations and chapter enablement. We treat them, we try to equip them with marketing materials. You know, last week we sent them all a little stand that they can say pavilion event that they can take. To a happy hour. We run automations for them. It's a team that we directly invest in. And that again, that was like a realization, like it's not an afterthought. They are the heart and soul of pavilion and we want to make them great.
Speaker 3Yeah, well, we are running out of time, Sam. And from the desks of the amateurs of Austin and myself, we had a professional guest on today. Sam, this has been great. This is Top Line Spotlight from your host, AJ Bruno, CEO of Quota Path. Asad Zaman, CEO of Sales Talent Agency. And of course, Sam Jacobs. Sam, I will say.
Speaker 4Before we go, I will say, if you're interested in Pavilion Gold, holla at your boy. Ryan Burke, if you're out there, I think you could be a good candidate. We're not going to let everybody in, but if you think that you qualify, please do let me know. You can reach out to me. You can find me online.
Speaker 3Great. Thanks, Dan.
Speaker 1Bye, everyone. Thanks for listening to Top Line. New episodes come out every Sunday. If you like what you heard today, subscribe so you never miss an episode, leave a five-star review, and share it with your friends. Don't forget to join our Top Line Slack channel to connect with us and discuss the topics we cover with other listeners. Click the link in the show notes. Lastly, if you're interested in joining Pavilion, you can learn more about membership at joinpavilion.com forward slash membership. Thanks again for listening.
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