The world’s economies aren’t going to recover anytime soon. There’s more risk – and opportunity – than ever before. How can a business pivot, survive and thrive? Based on the very newest material in the 2nd edition of From Impossible to Inevitable , Aaron Ross dives into the surprisingly few big levers that ignite – or stifle – growth. Based on lessons learned from some of the worlds fastest growing companies, including:
How to create predictable, scalable sales revenue
The three types of leads
How $3bn investor Sagemount triples company valuations in three years
How Twilio nailed a billion-dollar niche
3 uncommon practices of hypergrowth CMOs
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Hey, everyone. It's Aaron Ross from Predictable Revenue, and I'm here to talk about the playbook to reignite growth. Now if you haven't heard of me or my work that started really at predict this whole predictable revenue idea and method started at salesforce dot com, when Salesforce was about a hundred and fifty people.
I'd had a business fail, and one reason was I knew that I didn't know enough about sales. I went to salesforce dot com to learn how to build a sales team and ended up creating an outbound sales process and sales system that helped them drive almost double the growth, right, an extra hundred million dollars in a few years.
I ended up writing a book about it called Predictable Revenue, and then a sequel that came out recently called From Impossible to Inevitable. Now if I went back this year, in January, I moved from Los Angeles to Edinburgh. Really love the city. It's really for family reasons.
I think there's a lot of business opportunity here and I've really enjoyed meeting people here, but it was mostly to grow the family up here. And we got nine kids, you know, who doesn't? But it's been we really love the city. I'm excited to meet more people here in Edinburgh, in the UK, and around Europe.
And now there are, you know, lockdowns was opened up and now it's not Interesting year, which actually brings us to, you know, our playbook to reignite growth. Right? There's these five things I'll go over, and it's kind of a mix of both books plus some new stuff.
And this first idea of a blank page, specialize in sales, re nailing or nailing a niche, creating predictable pipeline, and the United States. So, like, obviously, it's been a bit of an interesting year. Word for it. Really had to pick one word that's unpredictable.
That's gonna be the word for next year as well. No one knows what's happening here, up, down, left, right. But reminded with great disruption comes great opportunity. My life, I don't know there's ever been a greater disruption, right? Rare problems, more pain across the world.
And now this year, there's really been more creativity, more entrepreneurial activity, which we may or may not see. It'll probably be years before we see the real result of that, the second order effect, but it's true. You know, not every business and jobs, they're not a lot of the current ones will will not make it, but it doesn't mean that the people behind them and the teams can be can't be recreated in a new way.
And a lot of businesses will make it and become stronger. A lot will be, you know, be similar. I have a business myself. Right? We've got about sixty people. We do out different kinds of outbound sales services. We're mostly in North America, a couple in the UK.
And like everyone else, we're adapting, right, conserving cash, re adjusting our products, look at new things, tightening the team. So I'm a I'm a practitioner here, not just a teacher, an observer. And just remember that as you keep investing in yourself to like, how do you how do you learn?
How do you adapt? How do you help your business adapt? Investing in your business to make it stronger. You can come out of this better on the other side. Again, whether your business and job is the same or whether you the business is recreated or the job is recreated.
So I think that's really this mindset, this blank page to start with, which is like we've never had this opportunity to really recreate how we work and when we work and where we work like we have now. Do you wanna be virtual? I mean, everyone is mostly now, but as things go back to loosen up in the next coming years, Some people are gonna wanna stay virtual and some will wanna go back to an office and some might wanna do twenty eighty or eighty twenty.
That's something for you to decide. And so you really have this blank page to redesign. What do you want your work or your business to look like? What do you want your life and balance or lack of balance to look like? And with every problem here is an opportunity.
So one recommendation is if you're really struggling with a horrible problem, list out what are the worst parts of that problem and maybe the business is going under or it might be a personal problem. And then find what is the opportunity here in this problem.
Because that's what entrepreneurs do. They take problems and they turn them into opportunities. So that is the frame here. And again, if your business is still struggling or you see even maybe more opportunities than ever, this is an opportunity. Challenges are what can help power you to make the changes you need to make to make your business better.
So let's talk about the first one. So this point two second point is specializing in sales. I start with this because this is really for b to b companies. Although the principles apply to any company, just happens to be in business to business with salespeople, the problems are so common.
This really is the foundation for creating a team that can succeed first and scale after. So what I'd to say is salespeople shouldn't prospect at least much. They don't like to do it. They aren't very good at it. And even if they can do it well, they can't sustain it.
Answer is another way to think about it is what if you had a sports team? The way most sales managers approach teams today is they're not prospecting enough. Like, everyone to prospect and everyone sign deals. It's like telling a sports team, everyone should attack and everyone should defend.
And really what the the right answer, the right model is you've got attackers, defenders, midfield, and goalie. Right? Everyone's got their specialty. People can do more fewer things better. This way to describe it. Yeah. So four core roles we describe are like this outbound prospecting, inbound lead response, new business signing, right, salespeople typically, and customer success or account management.
That's always the the four, but the principle is focus. It's people doing fewer things better. So that is what you would take because these four roles may or may not fit exactly what you do. Right? You can start to think about your sales team or customer facing teams as Lego blocks to make it easier to add, to expand, and scale.
And the bottom line is when you break your team apart and you design it this way from the ground up to be more modular, like object oriented programming, if that helps in a different way, you get better insights into what's working, what's not.
It is easier to scale it, and you create this farm team system or or talent garden to grow people up through your ranks. And then the bottom line is if you don't specialize or go far enough, you're going to struggle. So couple common questions get all the time. One, too small.
I'm just one person or two people. Well, you can start by specializing your time by blocking that time on your calendar. And usually, if you have two people in sales, one is a junior person doing a lead gen of some sort, inbound, outbound, and the other is a salesperson or AE.
The other is, like, we don't we don't want relationships and service suffer. I want my salespeople to be maintain their relationship from the very beginning to the end. Sounds good in theory, but in practice, it means salespeople are treating some customers really well and others are ignoring.
When you design this the right way, prospects and customers, wherever your your your customer base is at their step, they're gonna get great service, whether they're a lead, whether they're a customer, whether they're about to sign a deal. Because you got people who are dedicated to getting them what they need at that at that moment.
Alright. Let's move on. Number three, nailing in niche. Really, this is the idea of systematizing market message fit. Right? If you have had a company that's dependent on relationships or brand, kind of fuzzy stuff, which is great, by the way, But it's it's you love that word-of-mouth, but the curse is it makes it harder to grow, to create predictable growth, to pay for growth and drive growth.
You become dependent on it. So one challenge is a lot of companies are just have an overflow of great things they can do. Right? This is Oracle, obviously a little extreme, tons of products. You might be a services company, tons of, you know, all kinds of different services, or maybe you have a product with so many features.
But the overwhelm and noise is what we're fighting here. It's really focus. Because if you're trying to explain to a prospect what you do and you're saying here's everything we can do, we can do everything, it's confusing. So your job is really to hone in on that key signal.
If you remove the clutter, what's the signal that you can broadcast that's gonna appeal to the right the right kind of customer and to the need they have, the thing that they need you the most for? So you have to watch out how your content is more likely to confuse your prospects, which might be sales emails, it might be videos, it might be proposals.
You're never perfect, but it's more likely it's often confusing your prospects and sometimes even confusing your own people depending on how you know, like an extreme example of Oracle, you just can't know all the products. It's impossible. That's easy. So it makes it the burden on the company that much more important to say how do we make it as simple as possible for our people to communicate to our prospects.
Because whenever people are confused, they're gonna say no. Right? Now prospect may not say it's too expensive or maybe they may not say they're confused, but they what the words might be are, like, later, send me information, don't budget. Usually, it's not always.
A lot of times, it's just they they may not really understand what you do, or they may not understand the value or the differentiation to their other alternatives. The the thing we're really working with here, we call the arc of attention. And the idea is that on this right side, this this green is the high trust.
It's people willing to give you a bunch of attention to figure you out. Word-of-mouth. Right? Referrals. People like, sure. I'll I'll talk to you for half hour to kinda understand what you do and work through all the scenarios and come up with a plan.
But when you start to do paid growth, like outbound prospecting, outbound marketing to new audiences who don't know you well on this left slide, then there's no trust. They're only gonna give you a fraction of a second or a few seconds or some just tiny window of attention.
And you have to basically have a signal that's so clear and and specific that's gonna fit into that little window in order to engage them. It's like a new skill you need to develop. And an easy place to start is thinking, hey. Where can you be? Where have you been?
Where can you be a big fish in a small pond? And when we say niche, we're not thinking small. You can have a big vision. We're really thinking about being focused. And it's easier to make the pond smaller than the fish bigger, which means easier to be more specific in your targeting and in your messaging than it is to redo your product and your business model.
Now we've had a lot of companies this year that have had to do both. Right? It's been a little bit of a different year. But in general, that's the place you can start is taking what you've got and thinking where in what conditions to what kinds of customers have I been in nice to have where they didn't really need us?
And how is that different from the situations or customers where we've been in need to have? Right? Because it's easy to forget how much work it is to evaluate and buy and implement things. So it's not a need to have at least in b two b if they can't make an impulse purchase.
And you need to be focused on who needs you because it's gonna take a lot of energy for them to get through this whole process. And if they don't need you, at some point, they're it's just gonna drop off their list, especially when they have to take it.
If it's an app where they have to take this and get justification to the CFO or CEO. Right? So it takes if you put yourself in their shoes, remember, wow. It takes a lot of effort. How can I make it easier for my customers to wanna buy me?
How do make it easier for them? And that really starts with where do they need me? So I actually personally went through this. It's been a while. It's been a few years, but I left Salesforce in two thousand six. And I spent a few years it was like I was in a venture capital firm for a year kinda figuring out what I wanna do.
And I realized, wow. You know, I don't I don't know what I wanna do, but I know I don't wanna raise money and start a software company at that point. But I and I I know that I wanna make as much money as I want doing what I love.
So I kind of experimented with some things. I did this thing called unique genius, helping people, you know, find passion and make money from that as individuals, individual coaching. I wrote this book CEO Flow, Turn Your Employees into Mini CEOs. But when it came down and I got married in two thousand eleven right?
Because that was only nine not even nine not even nine years ago. Actually, yeah, just had our ninth anniversary this year. So, yes, I did go from zero to nine kids. It's actually about seven years. I still have all the the gray hairs from that.
But in twenty eleven, I got married, had to make money because we had a baby in the way. We had two kids from my wife's first marriage and a baby coming. And for me, in order to make more money to support a family, I went back to, well, what was my was my main niche?
So if you look at this, and this is from the predictable revenue book, right, what are the customers and this is where you go back to your prior customers, or if you don't really have as many, your your belief in the customers who would.
Who where would you make the most money? Where where have you made the most money and have the highest likelihood of winning? This is an indication of need. It's an indication of your ability to deliver value. And that led me to tripling down on outbound prospecting, writing the predictable revenue book and then later the impossible book with Jason Lemkin, which is more of a growth book.
It's like an entrepreneur's book. And yet it's all around creating predictable growth, creating predictable revenue in different ways. So that was my niche, and I I resisted that for a while. A different story, write about in the book. So for you in your business, just going back, where have you had the sort of what kind of customers the most money with the biggest need and refocusing there.
And I think this is going back to speaking the customer's language. You know? Like, what do they want? Like, they don't really care what you do, like, if you're an accountant. They only care what about the results that you can get them, like staying tax compliant or saving saving money on taxes.
And we get so obsessed with our features and functions. So this is Aurora. Actually, now she's seventeen. But when she was younger, we'd have to go she, of course, wanted to for donuts all the time. And I'd say, donuts? No. I we don't wanna do that.
It's like, not good for you. No. Can't do it. She smart smart girl. Probably, she liked to hear she was early into business. And at one point, she said, hey, dad. Well, you know, when you go get donuts, those are some of my happiest times.
I'm gonna remember these memories forever. Alright? Speaking my language. And so how can you flip the the script and speak the language of your customer? Things that they care about. One example from a company in the States, company was selling into financial organizations and asking, hey.
Who's in charge of receivables? These places are kinda complex and just wasn't getting the the the response rate that we wanted. They were a client. So it got changed through some interviews and other things too. Well, who handles patient cash? And this is the language of the customer, and it immediately got a better response rate and indication because it didn't sound like everyone else, and it was their internal jargon, right, speaking their language.
So that's kinda a lot of your trick there. And nailing a niche is one step that is required before you can create predictable pipeline, especially paid pipeline where you're investing in marketing or sales to drive new growth that you're not getting from organic growth and word-of-mouth.
Right? So predictable lead generation is really your key. It's these three types you need to understand that are all different. Kinda like if we have three princesses at home. Right? We've got the classic little girl princess. We've got the grandpa princess. And last but not least, the big brother princess.
Now they're all great. They all have their pros and cons. They're just different. And likewise, you've got these seeds net the spears. Again, one of the foundational ideas in the predictable revenue book and impossible book. I have heard so many people think, wow.
This really helped me understand the differences between here. So seeds are word-of-mouth. Right? Relationship based. Great. Love them. Hard to grow. Nets would be marketing, casting a wide net, inbound. Quantity, you get lots of leads over quality. Usually, some are a good fit, but most are not.
And outbound prospecting be spears, having a targeted approach, usually the human, which could be for customers, for partners, or marketing opportunities. Fewer, better. This is about quality over quantity. And they're all important. What you start with is usually always word-of-mouth with seeds. And then depending on the business, usually focus you might focus on contact marketing first if you're a services company or outbound prospecting first if you're a product company, but there's lots of exceptions.
So at some point, you have one all three, but each one can be it's a project to get it up and running and working the way you want. I'm gonna talk about outbound because that's really specialty track record. If the idea of outbound is new, you consider there's lots of companies have grown up through inbound word-of-mouth.
All these companies have had tremendous growth through word-of-mouth. But did you realize they all have outbound prospecting teams too? Even like SurveyMonkey, HubSpot, you know, companies who are known for inbound marketing. HubSpot and Marketo have outbound teams. Box, Slack, Salesforce. I mean, Facebook has an outbound team.
So outbound is a real thing. Most companies have some version of it at some point whether you start early or late. But I think outbound gets so much there's so much fascination with email templates, rightly so. Really the thing that is the important thing is the dashboards.
Right? The metrics. What's working and what's not. If I'm driving our family car, and this was the the one back in the States and I miss it, couldn't bring it. If driving the car and I and my gas gauge is off, my speedometer is off, my maps are off, I'm in trouble.
I'm not gonna get to where I wanna go the right way. And if you're outbound I mean, if you're you're say if your revenue dashboards are off, true. But in outbound, there's especially amount an amount of subjectivity and problems that people struggle with because there's a lot of judgment calls, and it's hard to create consistency in the pipeline metrics to get people to be consistently entering things the right way.
And if you don't have consistent metrics, you're not gonna be able to really know what's working and be able to create predictable revenue. I think the main if you're doing outbound, some of you aren't, But if you are, the main the number one metric you need to focus on is this number three, number of qualified audited opportunities, or you can just call it checked of audits.
Too strong a word. Basically means, I don't it's not important how many demos you set up or how many meetings you get. How many of those go to a salesperson and how many of those are accepted as, you know, meet the minimum criteria?
That's the number that you need to check and you need to gauge. Now at some point, you develop an outbound funnel. Any lead generation system has a funnel. They're all like, the funnel for marketing is different than for outbound, different from customer success slash, you know, word-of-mouth.
This is an example outbound funnel for a company called Zohra. You know, yours might be look yours might look different. They're a little tend to be a little more enterprise And so the numbers aren't ones you want to copy, but the idea is you need to have step what step leads to the next step to the next step in conversion rates and have some sort of consistency or predictability in order to have confidence in being able to say, if we spend x, then we'll get y.
If we hire two prospectors, then we'll get y revenue at some point. And if we hire two prospectors, what are the things they need to do to generate the results we expect? That's the beauty of the predictable lead generation. Right? Predictable lead generation is what will drive predictable revenue.
So I would say there's been some a lot of learnings over the years. I've done a lot of assessments of outbound teams or sales teams. And so if you're struggling, if you have a a sales team or outbound team that is doing a lot of outbound prospecting or outbound effort, here are three things that usually people do wrong.
First is you need to make sure you completely separate if you have the inbound SDRs, these inbound sales development reps that are responding to marketing leads. That job is completely separate from outbound prospecting. There are two completely different jobs and mindsets. That's one.
Outbound SDRs, so outbound prospectors, really should not support more than four ish, maybe five salespeople because then they get spread too thin. Right? They lose focus. And this last one, don't pay for meetings. Don't pay for demos. You pay for, again, there's a meeting, there's a demo, the salesperson requalifies it, they accept it.
And at that point, the sales accepted metric, whatever you wanna call that, so many terms for it, is what you what the bulk of the comp is based on that and or some revenue as revenue as well. And when you do this, you can see dramatic jumps in pipeline generation.
Right? So companies like Mobi might ten x their meetings to qualified meetings. Camberton is a company that went from basically failing at outbound to generate a million in the first year and then looking to multiply it. And Acquia, a few years ago, was a forty million dollar company, all inbound, and helped them build an outbound team.
After six months of experimenting, getting it down, saw the data, and they said, well, we're gonna hire forty prospectors. And they were able to add several tens of millions of revenue in a few years and help them go public. And, eventually, they were, I think, just last year, sold to Vista for a billion dollars.
And so this is that value of predictable pipeline. So we talked about these five assets, you know, the the new mindset, that blank page, specialize in sales, which usually means adding more roles, nailing a niche, like who needs you the most, creating predictive predictable pipeline.
Make sure that it's not just a side project, whatever that content marketing or outbound. Like, you need someone whose name is on that and they're accountable for that because that is what will drive your your pipeline, your that's your revenue. The last one with the USA market, it's when are you gonna enter it, not if.
So this is where you can find me, a I r at predictable revenue dot com. Usually, most if you're an entrepreneur, recommend the impossible book to start with. Right? It's the growth bible. And last one, assessments, looking at the United States, trying to get your head straight, just reach out.
We can talk. We do a lot of consults and just help education on the best way to grow your company, especially through outbound prospecting. Just wanna thank you very much and love to get a chance here to answer some questions. Crack an opening from Aaron Ross, who is someone I've wanted to get at TuringFest for a long time.
I mean, Aaron literally wrote the book, as I mentioned earlier, for enterprise sales in Silicon Valley. And yeah, we tried to get him a few years ago. He wasn't available. But since then, he's on our doorstep. So we're going bring him back in now and have a bit of a chat and a couple of questions.
Anybody who wants to send in any questions, just do that through the app and, we'll we'll see if we can get to that. Aaron, first up, thanks very much. Great to great to have you here and, cool cool talk on on on a subject that I think, well, you tell me.
It seems to me sometimes in Europe, we don't talk about sales enough, and America is much more focused on it. You've you've made the you've made the move across the pond. It's been a funny year maybe for meeting companies, but how do you how do you see that, the difference maybe between European and and US approach when it comes to sales?
So great. Yeah, I think even in the States a lot of people have a bad taste in their mouth around the word sales. There's a lot of implication legacy behavior and baggage around the word that implies manipulation. Yet, sales actually can be the thing that powers the growth of your company.
It doesn't have to be something that could be at least a bad taste in your mouth. It can be and should be an incredibly precious and valuable skill that you equip yourself with and your team with that will help you make a success a business successful.
As a sales is the life skill. If you want to accomplish anything in life whether you wanna get a promotion, start a nonprofit, start a company, then you need to have the skill of selling. Yeah. No. Totally agree. The outbound, in particular, which kind of companies do you think outbound does and doesn't work for?
And particularly if we're talking about I'm thinking about the audience at TuringFest. Generally, the companies that attend are we're talking about companies up to about two fifty people, typically. Quite a lot of them being companies with ten, twenty five people. Who does does outbound work best for?
Where is it maybe not the right thing? Well yeah let's start with where it works best and works best when you've got let's say you're a b2b company selling a product or something that's easily explained has relatively concrete parameters with an average you say customer value of at least ten thousand pounds and up.
And you've got probably at least half a million to a million in revenue and up. So, that's some signs that you need to be doing it and it's really a huge missed opportunity to not do it. On the flip side, the companies that should not do it would typically be smaller companies, agencies, services companies where you're doing a lot of different things, you have a very broad portfolio of services, you have smaller customers if they're not worth as much money.
And if you here's a good sign if it takes you more than you know ten or twenty thirty seconds to explain what you do and have someone say, I get it, Then it's not a good fit. At least not yet. Now I will say any company can use it to go find partners or to get marketing opportunities.
So think about if you're it's the same process. If you're going to go out and identify the top one hundred podcasts in your space, and go ask them to see if you can be interviewed by them. Same principle. Yeah, no, agreed. It's, it's kind of like getting getting speakers for a conference.
It is. First, when most startups begin at the early stages when everyone's pretty scrappy and maybe they've only raised a small amount of money or they're going on founder cash or early customers, you tend to get the CEO or the or the fact one of the founders being the salesperson.
Where where do you think the tipping point is where it's like, okay. This is a sign that we need to invest in sales, that we need to hire our first salesperson? Yeah. Well, I'm just a tipping point. I mean, basically, I think the more common problem is that the CEO is doing sales and wants to get out of the job too soon.
So again, there's so many variety, generally you want to at least make sure the CEO or founder, co founders, someone who's involved in selling from the very beginning, have the hands on experience. And then say, once they're too busy, right? And I think the next step isn't so much hiring a salesperson.
So, me focus on the companies, the people that have not hired salespeople and managed them before. Like, if they've hired and built a sales team, they probably know what to do, but if you haven't the most common mistake is either hiring someone too experienced.
So let's say that you hire a sales manager or a senior like salesperson and they fail and there's several reasons for that. One of which is it's hard for founders CEOs who haven't built a sales team and done this to have realistic expectations on how long it takes like the kind of person they need and how long it takes for them to ramp up.
Yeah. So what we what I recommend is first hire a junior salesperson if this is your first time. Take over some of the lower value things you don't want to do like appointment setting or responding to leads or proposals and then get that into a rhythm before you then look to either promote them into a sales role or hire a salesperson.
Yeah, got it. A question that's come in from one of our delegates, Hilary Roberts, who's actually a former speaker as well. She has a question about your point that your content often confuses your prospects and your own people which I think is I've definitely come across that I've definitely made that mistake And her question is about models or examples on product positioning in small sales teams.
Who should own it? How do we think about setting up team for success, to find the strongest positioning for our product? Yeah. Yeah. It's a really good question. I don't I can't think of like the person, but I think what the team has to realize is it's just human nature is that we always think about ourselves.
This isn't bad it's just realization that we're constantly thinking about ourselves and it takes practice and reminders to get out of our own perspective and to come at it from the perspective of a customer. So as a team you're being you're say okay ninety eight percent chance our collateral, our website, our material is not very customer clear and let's pick someone on the team to help champion a way to get clear to kind of get into the customer mindset and get some feedback, get some interviews,
do some tests to kind of gauge how to make it clearer and how to usually reduce the clutter, like have fewer options to make it simpler for a prospect or customer to get into the conversation with you. Yeah. We have April Dunford is going to be speaking at the conference in a few weeks.
Yeah, great. Yeah, she's fantastic and also wrote a fantastic book. But she was on Twitter, I think yesterday, She was talking about that startups focus too much on personas but not enough on segmentation. And that personas are maybe more useful at different stages but maybe earlier on segmenting your market accurately is probably more important.
Yeah. I would say what I'm guessing is because I've seen companies who are earlier stage, let's say maybe under a million or two in revenue, then they have very detailed personas. Like our buyer, they shop at this website and they take get this newspaper or they have these apps on their phone.
And it's more detailed than is needed. And I would agree if this is what she meant, I would agree that it's more important to look at the segments, which is how many of them of our customers and prospects are small business or in the UK or in the financial services industry.
And like those types, like the categories of customer. That is more important than just having detailed personas if I had to choose one over the other. There's There's another question that's come in from Melinda Matthews at CodePlan asking about yeah, it's an interesting question about third party companies doing outbound calls.
What what's your view? Can that I mean, I guess that's also part of what you guys do. Right? We yeah. We do do that for the United States. Yeah. You know, like everything else, like outsourcing, a lot of people it's worked great like software outsourcing a lot of people do it and it works great a lot of people tried it and it's failed completely.
So it's the the process of having some kind of education, picking the right partner, realizing it's not about just writing a check you need to really still build the relationship and invest with that partner if you want to be successful. And you know again whether you if your if your plan for a software product is not a viable plan, it doesn't matter matter whether you outsource it or do it in house, it's not gonna work.
Same thing if your company is not at the right stage with the right product, you know, your meetings. So half of it is picking the right partner and then being able to deliver and a lot of companies that can't and half is kind of your own internal knowledge and expectations and realizing you're gonna have to be ready for as a company.
But we do it but there's a lot of companies I don't know, it's a very busy space. There's a lot of companies that make it's easy to make a lot of claims, so and anyone can claim anything on the Internet. So make sure you either ask for referrals or go with people you trust as a starting point.
Yeah, even the highest officials in the lands. On the question of something I've heard you talk about in the past, How do you juggling having a large family and growing a business. And I think this is something that like, I've got two kids and earlier this year, juggling having two kids at home and working at home and all that kind of stuff.
A lot of people have had that challenge. You've got how many kids? Nine. Nine. Yeah, we have nine kids. Some are older, some are younger. So so yeah, just in general, it feels like the world is moving towards we're trying to all achieve a bit more balance than we maybe had before.
One of the outcomes of twenty twenty perhaps, thoughts on that? How does that work for you? You know, all I could say is that I use the word juggle versus balance. I think balance implies some sort of like stability and you know there's a little bit this, a little bit that.
And my life is mostly I wouldn't say it's chaos but it's just constant recreation like calendars and schedules like when school is in or out or trips so it's a lot and I do especially have young kids at home when you're working like I mean I even especially of course a baby under a year but even like kids up to like eight nine ten eleven twelve they deserve they need and deserve a lot of attention the best you could do.
So I think for me it's been really fulfilling having a big family. It's been very challenging in a lot of ways time, energy, money, but worth it. So, think what I've done is with my wife is we've had the belief that we wanted to have more like another another we didn't have a plan it just couldn't happen this way.
But we always felt like the need to do let's make the decision that feels right for the family first whether it's have the baby or adopted we four or nine are adopted we'll go on the vacation and let's figure out the money afterwards.
And it's worked it's been the main motivator mentioned for me to grow my income but it's not for the faint of heart. So I don't really have any advice other than you know life goes by fast if you have kids it's very easy to get in the mode of being really busy and you know focus on your stuff and you do need your own time.
I need my time that's one of my challenges is not blocking enough time just for myself but ultimately what really matters is not how much money you make it's what do you do with it and what do you do with your family. Yeah. Right.
So, it's are you You know, for me, I work so that I can make money for the family. Also enjoy a lot of what I do. So, I do it for myself, I do it for the family. Have Work is work time, family's family time.
That might be like the one thing one last bit is I use my calendar as much as I can sort of block out what's family time versus work time versus me time versus like a date time with my wife which has not happened very much this year.
Yeah, tell me about it. Okay, Aaron, I think we're gonna wrap it there. Did one quick final question. Mike Malone has also relocated his family from the US to Edinburgh this year in August. Yeah. So he was wondering how you've connected with local business community while COVID's going on.
Because you had to go to the code base earlier in the year back in February, feels like a century ago, to meet a few companies. Have have you still been able to connect with people? Yeah. You know, I met through this guy named Dan Martell.
I think he saw me going, and he, you know, he introduced me to Colin Hewitt. I'm sure a lot of you, if you're in Edinburgh, know him from FloatApp. Maybe he's on right now. And through him, met Mark Hogarth, met you, Brian, a few other people.
So, I was kinda like the friends are friends thing. Yeah. But I feel like on LinkedIn, I've had a lot of people on LinkedIn say hi. So LinkedIn would be a great place. I don't know, MetaShare is a new thing, Discover. So there's there's a lot of people and I found a lot of friendly people here.
So I don't think it's a problem to meet people if you just step out. Lately I haven't had much energy to go out and actually meet people but I was doing a weekly walk with Colin and then got off track there. So I got it back, get back on that.
Cool. Okay, we're gonna we're gonna wrap it up. Thanks so much. That's that's great, Aaron. Great to have you on. Thanks for the talk as well. And, your talk will be that's gonna be live on the on the site for anyone any delegates who wanna go check it out again, if there's any bits you wanna recap.
But, Aaron, thanks very much, and we'll we'll see you soon. So we're going to take a quick break now, folks. We're back on at three o'clock with, Stuart from Current Health, what is, to my mind, probably Scotland's hottest start up right now. In the break, grab coffees, whatever.
We've also got a bunch of partners that are eager to hang out. That's, Amazon, Current Health, Deliveroo, and our buddies at Mailchimp, are all online. So go see them. There's a few of us there as well that we'll have a shout out for later on.
