The Inbound Revolution 2.0: Purpose-Driven Profits with Dan Tyre

(upbeat music) (laughing) That way everybody knows it's me. If I don't boom when I got, I had a buddy, Alan Plunkett, who won $20 because he told everybody else in the Zoom that I was gonna pop in and I was gonna boom. And I did and he's, okay, pay up. I'm like, what's going on here? And they're like, Alan, just punk this. I'm like, what does that mean? He bet a $5 piece that you come in and boom. And I'm doing it again. So there we go. - That's your trademark you got me booing as well. - Awesome. - It's great to see you, Rania. - You're excited. We're recording, right? This is being recorded. - This is being recorded. Thank you so much for sharing time with us and all of our listeners on the disrupted leader podcast where we are talking about genuine human stories on how to make the world a better place. And who better than Dan, the man himself, who is also the founder of, is it Angel? - Higher Angel. This is my investment company. Last 10 years we invest in scale up companies, primarily women and people of color because when you look at the statistics, they're underserved and it's harder for them to generate capital to grow. And I'm like, that's crazy. That I've started as a really an experiment to understand if I enjoyed and provided valuable advice. Because if you ask my kids, they're like, okay, don't talk to anybody, Dan. But it turns out entrepreneurs a little bit of direction, turns out that I've had a little bit of a track record of helping companies grow. And it turns out I really like working with founders and founding teams to create new business models that are socially responsible, help create employment and meet customer needs. - Oh, the world needs more of you, Dan. And I have a couple of follow-up questions there, Dan. - Let's go. - What was your driver when it came to helping founders and entrepreneurs start to think about purpose-driven leadership? - That's a really good question. Like I've had five successful startups, but the most successful is HubSpot. And HubSpot was unique for a couple of different reasons. Number one, it was always mission-driven from the very first day, right? Even before we didn't have our stated mission, we'd be like, all right, let's figure out what IBM and Oracle would do and do the exact opposite. Because back in 2007, business had this shady reputation where it was only about making money, right? And sometimes, especially in the sales organization, people would, it wouldn't be the most ethical or moral as it related to the business path. And both Brian, Haligan and Darmesh Shada, co-founders of HubSpot were decidedly different. As young entrepreneurs at the time, they're like, we wanna start socially responsible businesses that help people. And I'm like, oh, that's great, so do I. And over time, that created the inbound revolution, started with inbound marketing, and helped millions of small businesses understand how to generate business and growth by creating helpful content, attracting people to your website, and then people would drop their contact information to the sales organization we'll call. Over the last 17 years, HubSpot's now 17 years old, it morphed into the inbound organization, right? Which is the book I wrote in 2018. It was all about the leadership principles regarding modern day growth, right? And the leadership principles are basic, but should be repeated. Number one, you have to treat people like human beings. Why don't you just read it? I don't. Okay. Okay, most of your audiences, yeah, of course. And the 10% of your audience, okay, and that's not our industry. And that's both disappointing, as well as a gentle reminder that it's 2024. The human beings are just trying to get through their lives, right? They got a lot of things going on. The modern world is hard. The most luxurious, we have all of these things, right? But you're 100% right. It's really hard to navigate. And there are challenges that this generation faces that previous generations have never had to face, right? Ever, right? Social media, the anxiety of being in everybody's life, all those kind of things. And treating people like human beings is a very good foundation. At the last inbound conference, which is the event that HubSpot holds in 2023, Reese Witherspoon was there. The famous US actress. And she was talking about the secret of her success, right? And she said, her mama taught her in the very early stage that you decide what you want to do. And then you tell people what you're going to do and then you do it, which I thought was great. I repeated that multiple times because that's the human experience. And just honoring people, right? Where they're at, understand that everybody has bad days, understand that any kind of blaming or finger pointing in the nose, totally useless, it's not good for you, it's not good for them. And helping humans is like a good kind of step in the right direction. So number one, treating people like human beings. Number two, and you're really good at this, helping before selling, right? The second part of the inbound organization is, let's just try to help everybody. And I was at meetings at HubSpot where Darmess and Brian and Mark Robert and Mike Olpe and Dave Stack would all be saying, all right, do we want to help our customers? Do we want to help our prospects? Do we want to help our partners? What is the pecking order? And we spend hours talking about how there should be certain things that we would do to help everybody, certain things we would do to help customers, certain things to help partners. But it turns out that helping before selling is a foundation for a growth strategy in 2024. Would you agree with that? I would definitely agree with that. I think helping is, it's more than selling. It's selling and servicing and it's all being, it's the 316. Our friend Daniel Panck, who wrote, "To sell is human." If you haven't, if you haven't read that book, it's worthwhile. He's a researcher. I'm a little like disgruntled about Daniel because he's a super nice guy, but he's not a sales guy. And he's got a best-selling sales book to sell is human. I'm like, how did you work that out? If I decided to write a book on, I don't know, gorillas. I don't know anything about gorillas, but it would be a bestseller, maybe if Daniel wrote it. Anyway, it's a great researcher. He's this sales stuff. Every person in the world does this at every step of the way. And I'm like, okay, and he said, you've got to figure out whether you're buying or selling, which I thought was smart. And then, if somebody called you and said, I want to sell you something, how would you feel, Ronnie? No, so interested. I don't know. That's something that's sold to me. Exactly. No one does. Somebody called you and said, Ronnie, I want to help you get more podcast listeners. I'll be like, you're, I need all the help I can get. (laughing) You'd be like, how do you know I need podcast listeners? Oh, we listened to your last three podcasts. This is a great story. My buddy Rohan, who runs an AI company called Classico. When he first met me, he's a tire. I just read every single one of your blog articles for HubSpot. And I'm like, no, you didn't. He said, yes, I did. I read all 137. I'm like, what does that would say? It's like the 20, 28 questions to ask and to just cover a call. And he's actually just 26. But yeah, this is what you did. And he did. He knew Molly. He knew Molly was going to say, I did. I'm like, okay, that is amazing. Helping before selling is very human. It's the way in which we endure and get on somebody's radar screen, build trust and is very helpful for the modern growth process. The third thing is the richest are in the niches. Yes. Then you've heard me say that a few times, right? Yes. What does that mean? What is the rich? Pick one thing and do it really well. Specializing it don't do anything but that one thing. Yes. And why do you do that in 2024? Because it's so noisy out there and there's this really saturated startup entrepreneurship space. And so if you have that one thing, you're really good at. You can really stand out in that really noisy space. That's a hundred percent right. And if you're authentic and you know it like the back of your hand and you build a community, a flywheel of such where people understand what you're all about, gravitate to that, feel part of that community. Then once you get a certain economies of scale, then you can move to the next each head that you have. The fourth part of an embedded organization is that your sales process is your only competitive advantage. And I don't know if you're old enough to remember buying a product just because it had a certain feature. Do you ever remember buying something because it like had a different color or it had a certain product feature and so you were going to make a product decision based on a particular feature that someone had? Probably the last phone I bought it in 2018 because it was red, not that I like the color red, but that line of phones, the red ones, part of their profit was going out to charity. - Okay. - I was going to drive work. - Okay, that's awesome. Now everybody has red phones, right? In 2024, there are 44 places that you can get red phones. And that's the way it works in the modern era because product development moves so quickly. If a certain manufacturer has a specific product that is superior, everybody else will have it in six months. In the old days, it took you three years to figure out how to engineer it, how to install it, how to update it. And so people make product decisions based on features that doesn't work anymore. I have a photo of question to that. How do you think that's going to impact something like the CRM, like HubSpot? Yeah. In the AI revolution. I was just talking about that. I was in Finland this morning at 4.30 in the morning. Not physically, but doing a scale-up program. What do we call it? The B2B SAS sales blueprint. And we were talking about growth. And we were talking about how things moved very quickly in the AI age. And the fifth component of the inbound organization is that your sales process is your competitive advantage. Because everything is all the same, right? It's how you sell not what you sell. Because everybody's going to have the same kind of product features, right? But if you choose the right company that understands you as an individual who understands your trajectory, who treats you like a human being, who helps you, who gives you a special dispensation for the partnership that you provide, then you'll stick around with that company for a long time. Because why? Do you want to move to another CRM there, Ron? Why? Because it's such a headache. Such a pain in the butt. So whenever you find, and this is a big miskinet, executives of companies and people I work with, they all feel like they provide exceptional customer service. But when you actually do the service, when you actually talk with the customers, they're not quite as thrilled as the executives would like you to think. Yeah. And I was just going to echo what you're saying because it used to always be about your business needs to be customer centric. We're doing an initiative. I'm doing an initiative with our team. I'm like, customer centric is, oh, we want to be human centric. Okay. That's right. B to 8. In 2014, I was talking about B to 8. And people would be like, what is that? Right. H to human to human. Yeah. Amazing. And so the last part is developing the data that clearly shows that you are doing that good job. Yeah. And play NPS, ENPS, there's NPS, which is a seminal part of gathering the right data, ensure that you're focusing on the right thing, that you're applying the five steps of the rebound organization to be successful and that you're being socially responsible as you do that. And ESG has gotten a little bit of a bad reputation the first time it's gone out. It was never talked about before three or four years ago. And then in the global pandemic, when it was so hard to hire people were like, maybe we should lean into diversity and social responsibility and things like that. And then as soon as we went to the next phase, everybody forgot about it, except the company that are socially responsible as a authentic ways of doing that. And obviously, they'll always have a huge competitive advantage. And what are some ways young founders or young entrepreneurs can be socially responsible? Because a lot of the time you think social responsibility, ah, that's for big corpse. But how can a young founder or start up be socially responsible? What did that question? One of the things that I learned from millennials or Gen Z or Gen X, which really, first of all, makes me feel old, but second of all, makes me feel blessed that I had an opportunity to work with young adults. Because this is the first generation where there's five generations in the workforce, right? A 22-year-old could actually be working with a 65-year-old. And that's never happened in entire history of business, right? I heard a speaker talk about that. And I'm like, that's interesting, right? And like, who's the last time you had a conversation with an 80-year-old? An 80-year-old? I'm like my dad. Okay, your dad. But other than somebody in your family, do you interact with people that are 70 and above? Where I live is my daughter called her grandmaville. So when I woke my dog, my friends are real senior citizens working their dogs are very nice. Very inspiring, yeah. Yeah, incredible. And it's an attribute of the modern era, right? Where you can actually work with those people. Now, if you're 65 years old, you have much different values, experience, understanding, vocabulary, then somebody who just rolled out a college out of university, right? And one of the challenges of the modern era that we talk about that makes it difficult is that you have all these generations that have to mix together that have to understand how to communicate, who have to work together to make sure that we're accomplishing the goal. So cycle back to your question. How to young entrepreneurs and founders be social-responsible? You start with a mission, right? And in the Inbound Organization book that we wrote, Todd Hockenberry, the best co-author in the history of books, we talk about the M-Spot. And the M-Spot is a one-page document. You can go inboundorganization.com, just a Google Inbound Organization, you've got a Todd's website. It's a one-page document and the M stands for mission. And your mission doesn't change that often, maybe once every 10 years, right? The HubSpot mission is to help millions of small businesses grow better. The tire angel mission is to grow great leaders and great companies. And that's our mantra. That's what we want to do. That is the thing that sets us apart from everyone else. And that's why we spent a lot of time effort and money to do that. The second thing is who you serve. That's the S in M-Spot. And that is either your partners or your employees or your customers or your public company stakeholders. But you have to define who you serve in a way that all your employees understand and can make good decisions around it. The P in M-Spot are plays. And this is a real challenge for lots of startups because there's a lot of things to do in any startup. And we want you to define the three to five most important things that have to be accomplished for success for that particular year. And you write them out so that everybody in the organization knows it. The T's are the targets. That's how you level set know if you're at target, ahead of target or behind target. And then the O's, perhaps the most important are the omissions. The O's are the things that are important that you're going to get to, but just not this year. And by definition, the challenge with a lot of entrepreneurs is they chase the shiny object where they can't stay focused on the top priorities. And in M-Spot is a simple way of number one, communicating to everybody what your mission who you serve, what your plays, your targets, and your emissions are. And number two, to make sure that everybody internalizes it. Number three, so that it's easier for them to use good judgment to make decisions. And we found in the first 10 years that I was spotting it, the entire angel. It's a great way to have everybody stand. I love that. I love that. I'm as you were talking. I'm like, oh, I haven't updated or done it. I'm spotted in a while. Maybe it's time to go back to the door and board. Yeah. Everybody in the room and everybody knows the mission. Right? I was just doing this this morning and I went around the room and said, what's the mission? What's the mission? And the CEO, everybody knows the mission because he sends out an email all of the, every Monday, which is a beautiful thing. Every Monday, he sends out an email that says this is, or values and this is our statement. And this is what we want you to internalize. And he thinks that everybody understands at the top of like the top of their head. And what we found out is that they get it, but they don't get it the way in which he gets it. And there needs to be a little bit of work around reinforcing that at every company meeting. And that just makes sense. That's just in a busy world as you were talking about. That's one of the challenges that people have, right? What information that they hang on to. And as we scaled up spot and entire age, we look at our end spot consistently to make sure that we reinforce all of the great values that we have. Yeah. And why is the, why are the emissions important? Because there's a million things to do. And like everybody's, we have to do this, we have to do this, we have to do this. My buddy Brian Halligan is the best at this. And not only is he a great founder, very low ego, a people smart and an incredible recruiter. But he was the best at say, you know what, there's four things we've got to do. We're only going to do two of them. And very rarely in my life, have I seen a scene? You're executive say, you know what, there's a lot of things going on, but we're only going to do the two things that, because it's going to kill us if we do for. And he had this great feel of understanding how to really understand the limits that the team could do. And that served very well gone from zero to 2.4 billion dollars or less. Yeah. And he had a really, really good. He spot on sort of statement that he would repeatedly say, which is keep your eye on the bull, keep your eye on the bull ignore the crowd. And that is just that rings in my head. It's great. I don't know you've met him multiple times. He's a big Ryan F. Ann as we all are. Halligan was a seminal in that I work with him before I'm spot. So he was a lot at the group networks and he was a damn good vice president of sales. He kept me from getting fired because his boss hated my guts for some reason. I'm not really sure. I don't really understand it. I was a top performer and I'm fairly likeable. But like this guy had it out for me. And Brian's job was to make sure that I didn't get fired. Then he did a very fine job. And so I knew him a lot. And I we like did some amazing deals and had a lot of fun. And then when they started up spot, he asked me to join as the first sales person, which I was happy to do and took my entrepreneur career from being very good to incredible. And I learned so much. Right? I don't want to turn this into the Brian Halligan show, but he taught me not to be a know it all, which maybe I was a little bit in the early days of my career to a learn it all. And. Learning. Mm-hmm. And I've adopted that because everything that I learned before, I don't know, 2019 is now our kick. And we've constantly got to focus on the things that allow us to better understand our employees. This is a good one, Aranya. What's more important, your employees are your customers? My employees. Why? Because the happy employees will result in happy customers. Unhappy employees will have no customers. Exactly right. That's used to be very controversial. It's always used to be customer first. And it's not like that anymore. Dar Meshah, the other co-founder of HubSpot talks about what is culture and culture is the operating system for your employees. And very important to make sure that you're leaning into that, to make sure that you are putting the right programs in place. HubSpot has a great culture code. It talks about best practices of creating a culture of a company that people want to work with. And it works. Some of the things that founders can do to be socially responsible at the very beginning define your mission. Number two, what is Google call, we'll do no evil. Which in the early stages, I think they were right. In the last few years, I think they need to reread that statement. And I'd like to believe, because we all use Google on a regular basis, that they understand the important role that they play in society, right, in the future. And number three, treat your employees with respect and understand that their work is just a subset of all they do as a human being. For make sure that you're helping people and anybody can help people, right? In the first world, we should have great gratitude for everything we have. I think I spent five weeks at India this year working with people that are in the third world and no indoor plumbing, no housing the way we understand it, no transportation, not really on the internet and substance kind of existence. And being able to come back and brush your teeth, turn on the hot water, boil some eggs, access to modern day supermarket, amazing. And having high gratitude for being able to participate in that being in the first world, going to the third world, coming back to the first world is it was amazing experience that I feel blessed to be where I am today with all of incredible privilege and luxury that I've come to expect. Yeah, that it's so easy to just take for granted because we're so comfortable and vulnerable kind of thing. And because to your previous point, it's hard. The modern world is hard, right? And we got to find ways, first of all, to enjoy it, right? Second of all, to celebrate. Third of all, go back to your, our point about being a human, right? And human beings are fun. I like hanging out with humans. I don't know why, but at the diversity, the common thread, the purpose, the fact that there's just a lot of different reasons. And I like that you use the term common because I find there's more common between humans than separate than what separates us. But somehow it's become about separation rather than unity. I think we need the final thing. Yeah, it's because people want to build on that fear. They're trying to drive a common agenda. And the reality is, like, we're all the same. Everybody comes from the same foundation, want to love their kids, build their community, to provide for their family. And it's all about love, which is an Amy tyrosum, right? You should have Amy on the podcast because everything I learn from that, I learned from my incredible wife, just celebrated my 31th wedding anniversary, which was amazing. Oh, nice. I know. Thank you very much. And incredible. Yeah. Super. Thank you, Dan. We are right on time. I know time is precious. And it's been a second time we've done this. So I appreciate your time. I appreciate your words of wisdom. And I really look forward to sharing this with all of our listeners and how Philly continues spreading your positivity and great advice on how startups and entrepreneurs can find that purpose and that mission to have a soul behind what they're doing. Amazing. Amazing. I'm a huge fan, right? If you don't know Ron, you should listen to her all the time, bringing great stuff to the universe and an incredible personal story yourself. I'm happy to be on your podcast anytime that you'd like. And dan tire.com or dan tire gmail.com. Happy to help your listeners. Yeah. Super. Thank you, Dan. Have a beautiful day. All right. Bye. Yeah. [MUSIC PLAYING]