“What were you doing in this maze?” Scaling with Ali Adler and Jan Chmura

Ali Adler and Jan Chmura from Sealed join Jordan to discuss what it takes to scale and when to automate parts of a workflow.
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Show notes

Ali Adler, VP of Marketing, and Jan Chmura, CRM Project Manager, both from Sealed, broke Microsoft Excel.

Seriously. They maxed out the formula input tab with too many characters for the formula they needed. 

At 15 people, their Excel sheet did the job. But when it came time to scale, it just wasn’t enough. 

That’s where RevOps Therapist and CEO of Greaser Consulting, Jordan Greaser came in. 

Together, these three discuss what it takes to scale, setting up the world’s most complicated trigger map, and when to automate parts of a workflow.

Jordan  00:00

Hi, everyone, this is Jordan, the owner and CEO of Greaser Consulting. On this call, we have Ali and Jan with us, two great individuals from Sealed. We’ll let them tell you all about it whenever you hop into the actual podcast, but on this call, we’re talking about sort of scaling, building systems that can scale. We actually get into a lot of different things. In this call, we talk a little bit about iteration; we talk a little bit about just the early stages of a company and some of the challenges that these two faced. So we get into a little bit of their story which I had an opportunity to just to walk alongside them. They’re fantastic. And I love spending time with them. I hope you hear that in the conversation today. Lean in; enjoy; we’ll kick it on over.

Intro Jingle

Say you want some clarity in sales and marketing and SEP? Well, we have just the remedy: our podcast, RevOps Therapy. Yeah.

Jordan  01:09

Hi, everyone. This is Jordan, and I have two guests with me today, Big Al and Jan. Why don’t you two go ahead and introduce yourselves? We’ll start with Big Al.

Ali  01:18

Hey, Jordan. Hi, everyone. I’m Big Al; that’s what they call me at work. It’s a joke. My name is actually Ali. I’m the VP of Marketing at Sealed. Sealed makes homes more comfortable and efficient with upgrades like insulation, HVAC, and smart tech; we can reduce a home’s energy use by up to 50% and take a home completely off of fossil fuels. So we’re on a mission to stop energy waste and electrify every home. I’ve been at the company for six, a little over six and a half years, one of the very early team members, joined pre-seed. We’ve grown very significantly since then. And yeah, happy to be here.

Jan  02:05

Hey everyone, I’m Jan, also from Sealed. I’m a CRM Project Manager. I’ve been with the company now nearing three years next month. I’ve worked very closely with Ali throughout that time, and have also experienced that sort of growth and a lot of learning on my end. So happy to be here, Jordan.

Jordan  02:27

Thank you both for coming. And I can say this sincerely: like this, the Sealed Team is just, there’s some of my favorite people on the planet to work with. It’s always a lot of fun. There’s always some good jokes. And also some interesting conversations that come out of things which will probably, you’ll, you’ll read through that today as you listen. When I first met this crew, this is how different the world was. I remember, I was getting ready to work with Ali on this project. And we got an introduction. I’m like, Ali, listen, I’m going to be traveling. I’m gonna be calling you from Singapore. Like, is that a problem? Is there any issue, like this is before everyone’s just working from everywhere. And Ali’s, like, “why are you calling me from Singapore? Like, is this gonna be weird? What’s, you know, what’s going on?” And I’m like, “listen, it’s just a work trip. Don’t worry about it.” And that was like, that was like my first conversation with Ali. So I’m thinking this is okay; this is getting off on a good, good foot. But with that being said, the project is sort of what the conversation we’re having today is just around this idea of, of scaling, like building systems that scale and sort of forecasting growth. And so I really wanted to bring, like these two on the call today just to talk through that because, I mean, they, they really went to town. What were you on at the time, Ali, like you were on like Zapier or something? Like what was the system previously?

Ali  03:55

Yeah, so at the time, let’s say like this was when we worked together, that was in 2019. So it was three years ago; Jan I think, had just just just joined the company from…

Jordan  04:08

From like civil engineering no less, then he’s coming in as sales ops or something.

Ali  04:13

He was an intern. And, I mean, we were, I don’t know 15 people then I think, maybe fewer. We were really small. We were using a system called Podio, which is owned by Citrix. And they like bought it; it was a small CRM they had bought, and I’m pretty sure they hadn’t made any updates to the system since they bought it. Sorry, Citrix, if you did, but it was functional. Like it worked well for like a small team who just needed something that tracked like the most basic information, but it was like a single object system not, not complicated at all. And then for any like automated communications, I was using Zapier; I had 285 zaps, or something like that running in the background on any given day. And that would automate sending out like all marketing, like comms and sales sequences, through Gmail, in the background connected with Podio. That was how it was set up.

Jordan  05:27

Yeah, I remember, you know, like day one, we plug in, and we’re getting ready to do this. And you’re like, “Hey, listen, I’m gonna send you sort of a mind map flowchart of like, how everything works.” And listen, I’ve been doing this for a while. And I was like, “Okay, I generally know where this is going to go, okay, MQL here, this…” I opened this thing up. And it was like, I was on a massive screen, and I had to zoom in. And then like, I had to, like, drag the picture all around, just to see the whole thing. And I’m like, “Okay, this girl is out of her mind. And we’re gonna somehow boil this into like a HubSpot/Outreach, like, whatever. Okay, here we go.” 

Ali  06:09

And well I think what I had done was I had detailed every single step of the entire journey, like the entire flow down to like every single if/then branch logic of how I wanted things to work.

Jordan  06:21

And Jan, you had to just, you know, we’ll get into some of the guts of this in a second, but like, didn’t you have… I seem to remember you and like some Excel sheet, there was like, thousands of lines long where you were like, like, there was information that got stuck somewhere before we could put it like, like, what in the world were you doing in this maze? And again, like, what, three months earlier? You were doing, like, design drafts for architecture or something? I don’t know. Anyway…

Jan  06:49

Yeah. So that’s, that’s kind of how it happened. I joined Sealed that summer, as an intern, after reaching out to a few people on LinkedIn and being ghosted a couple of times; I finally got a hit, and somebody, you know, connected me to Ali. And within a couple of weeks, I was, I was on the team and I was processing usage. So I was a part of a team that was kind of processing data for our sales staff. And, you know, I was showing up early, trying to get noticed, trying to get some additional responsibilities, what have you. And one day I showed up early to the office, and Ali’s sitting there in the in the conference room; she calls me in, and she’s like, “listen, we need somebody to kind of help us out with this project. We’re doing a big system migration. And we need all of our data translated.” So I was like, “okay, I can take this on; she seems to think I can do it.” Mind you, I wasn’t someone who was in like finance courses; I wasn’t taking Excel classes, anything like that. So I kind of jumped in. And it got very complicated very, very quickly. So as Ali said, we were moving from Podio, which is one object to Salesforce, where we were creating multiple objects. And we had to translate all of our data to be acceptable by, by the system. And then one achievement I hit while, while doing that process was maxing out the formula input tab in Excel. So there were too many characters for whatever formula I had built to actually run. And we ended up kind of shifting gears at that point and taking a different approach. But that was my, my intro into the system.

Ali  08:24

Yeah, it was an if statement, index match, long index match formula; he had to make like a layered, a layered if statement index match. I think that spreadsheet probably ended up having like 300, like, formula columns, that all culminated in data output. So it was really, really complicated, because we look as we were changing the way we ran the process to align with, like, a more complicated number of steps and data tracking, and we had to translate all of the data to map to that. 

Jordan  09:01

So let’s talk about this. Right, like, that’s why we’re here is I think we’ve, I think we’ve adequately set the scene, that Ali, the monster you created, even at 15 people was just like, like, the most massive complicated whatever, but it worked, right? Like, I’m not beating on it. It worked, but it needed to scale. So like, walk me through your process, Ali, as you’re like, I’ve got this system that like, we’re already we’re breaking, you know, Microsoft Excel’s formula line, just to get some of this stuff going in the logic of the background of what you had running. And now we’re trying to build something that’s going to scale even larger into this, like complicated process that you have like, what…

Ali  09:44

Well, the thing that, the thing is that what Jan was working on, it sounds like we were making things more complicated. And in some ways we were because the way that Podio was set up was that it was a thing that was like it was all flat. It basically just it assumed that every single customer journey is just like linear and exactly the same. You need the same pieces of information for every single lead. Every single lead is new; there’s never any like revival or reactivation. Like it was like the most simple linear, and that’s fine if your business is primarily, you know, like new lead through a funnel, new customer. But if you… as you grow your business, things become more complicated, and processes become more detailed. And the problem was that that single object system that we had, it wasn’t scalable. The reason we had to actually think… makes things more complicated, quote, unquote complicated was that actually, the simpler system was not scalable, because it it didn’t allow it, it’s like, imagine, if you were tracking everything associated with every customer on just like one long, one long web page, you just have to keep scrolling down and seeing every field that every team and every person was looking at. And there was no way to bifurcate that into different processes for different parts of the business. So so what we were doing was we were saying, “Okay, this, this top of funnel is gonna live on this object, this middle of funnel is going to live on this next object, this bottom of funnel is going to live on the next object, this next part of the bottom of funnel is going to have three different child objects. They’re all associated with different parts of the process that have their own processes and their own data points that need to be tracked, that are used actually, like much more simple and user friendly for the individual user, because they’re not dealing with any of the things that anyone else who came before them had to touch.” So it was actually, like the whole thing was be about designing the system to be scalable. My goal with this whole project was to take a system that was working barely at that point for 15 people and get it to work for us for the next five years.

Jordan  11:51

So that’s, I think the important thing that you’re saying, and correct me if I’m wrong, Jan or Ali here is like, the goal of building a scalable system is that there might be complicated things going on in the background, but to the like, to the customer receiving, or the or the rep acting on, like, that’s really simple, right? Like my day’s really simple, right? So Ali, you may not know this, but I haven’t done it recently, but for a while every person that got hired at Greaser Consulting, I’d show them the trigger mapping sheet that we created. Yeah, I’d be like, listen, like, “if you can do this, like if you could figure this out, like, I’ll let you go do…” I was like, “listen, like if you can even make sense of half of this, like, I’ll let you do triggers for somebody else.” Right? Like, that was like the test. Okay.

Ali  12:41

Of my… you used my logic that I wrote?

Jordan  12:45

I pulled them up, say, like, “decipher this for me, tell me what this means.” Oh, yeah. I mean, that’s it. That was like, How about it, Jan? I mean, that was that was the, that’s the test. Right? Like, can you understand? Can you keep up with Ali? Right? Like, that’s, that’s a challenge for all of us in Ali’s orbit. And I mean, it’s in the best possible way, like, can we keep up? Anyway, that being said…

Ali  13:11

Did you ever fire someone because they couldn’t figure it out?

Jordan  13:16

No, I just didn’t let him do triggers, like no, you’re not allowed. That’s right. You’re stuck forever and RevOps School. Right. The, the thing I want to talk to you about those, one of the themes that you and I talked a lot about early on there when we were building this was, but what about automation fatigue, right? Of like, we want to build a scalable system that like the rep can just plug in and do the work. But we don’t want to make them dumb. Right? And Jan, I’m sure like, you might even have some data here, because you’re doing CRM work, and you’re working on the back end of this stuff. But like when you’re building a scalable system, give me your thoughts now, since you built this thing, and you’ve even adjusted it since of trying to build something that’s like really easy to follow, but also doesn’t make you stupid, so that you miss, like, the natural things you should do as a salesperson, right? 

Jan  14:13

Sure. Yeah. And that’s something I think we think about a lot. And you know, no matter how much automation you try to build into a system, how user-friendly you try to make it, you can’t really get away from, from manual input, especially when it’s something to do with sales, or with service, there always needs to be a little bit, at least a little bit of that human input. So trying to find that balance. Something that stands out to me is like something that’s unacceptable, is having users input things into the same piece of information into multiple places. So that’s like I think your lowest hanging fruit things that you want to kind of try to get out of the way early, but the results of calls for example, or something similar to that, that’s something that you just can’t escape in terms of that, that manual input from the salesperson; we need to be able to kind of discern how an event went, and how to move forward from that.

Ali  15:11

Yeah, on that, you know, like Jordan, some of the things we automated when we launched the system, we unautomated them, like a few months later, because it, basically my point of view on this is, it depends on what kind of business you have, and the amount of throughput you have. If you’re a B2B, and it’s like a high-touch sale, very customized, low volume, high-value deals, you don’t want to automate too much. We’re B2C; we have a high-volume funnel. And it’s, you know, essentially at certain parts of the funnel, like if we weren’t to automate it, like the SDR stages of our funnel, if we weren’t to automate it, it would just like, be such a waste of time for people to be trying to customize, you know, customized conversations that they just don’t, they don’t need to be customized at that stage, you don’t, like we can automate any personalizations that need to be done. Where that, so we had set everything up, when we first built the system, we set things up to have a lot of automated enrollment, a lot of automated triggers all the way through SDR and AE. And we ended up rolling back a lot of the automations at the AE step. Because once you get to that stage where things are much more personalized, and it’s, it’s a custom, it’s a constant process based off of the knowledge of the, of the salesperson and of the relationship and what needs to happen next; the automations just completely broke down. Like people were getting emails that didn’t make sense for them or like they were people were getting enrolled in sequences; the salesperson, like, didn’t know. So they would send a double email because they weren’t customizing their own email. And it, just, in that, it didn’t make, it, it makes sense and wrote a lot of…

Jordan  16:53

Do you feel that, like, some of that was wasted work? Or do you feel that like, “No, we had to understand the system of what we were building. And this is just part of the process, like you build and you iterate, like, that’s just the way it is.” Or was it wasted?

Ali  17:11

I don’t know if we wasted work; I think if I were to do it all over again, I probably would have for the ones we ended up rolling back, if I were doing do it all over again, in hindsight and or if I had to go and build a whole new operating system, I would start with a not automated. And I would start with basically letting things be more manual and seeing the behavior of the users and seeing what ends up being like very redundant and time-consuming and letting people complain about that. And then automating it rather than the other way around, rather than like assuming it should be automated. Because the other thing too, that happened there was like, like I said, like AEs didn’t even know that some of these sequences existed. And like it was almost like because we had automated, they didn’t even know what was built and available for them. And so like I would have, I would have given them more power over utilizing the assets. And then seeing how they use it.

Jordan  18:07

We’ll talk about a lot less technical situation. But my, my dad told me about this concept years ago; he talks about it all the time, like this is like his go-to story, like when you think about building things, and I don’t even know if this is true. Okay, I’m just gonna tell you, but he would talk all the time about certain places at Penn State. Where I lived is close to Penn State. And he would talk about how, at first, they didn’t, they didn’t just build the sidewalks. Like they didn’t pour the cement; they didn’t put the concrete down for the sidewalks. They allowed the students for two years to walk and get muddy, and all the students were mad and upset and whatever. But what they found is all the walking, like the natural walking paths. And then they went back later. And then they built the concrete around this walk, like natural walking paths. And now if you ever walk around Penn State, there’s like almost never a situation, which you’ve seen this everywhere, right? Where there’s like a sidewalk, and then there’s this like brown trail off to the side because no one’s actually using it. Right. And so that’s his like, that’s his big thing of like, let people use it first and then build. And so I’m hearing some of that in what you’re saying. Is there like, is there a danger in your mind to that? Like, do you have to at least pour some concrete, because you were talking about how you’re high volume? And this is just a mess, right? Like if we just let it alone?

Ali  19:28

That’s not true, though. Our brown paths, like our dirt paths, were Podio and Zapier and manual emails from SDRs through like, our dirt paths had been worn before this system that that the system we worked on together; like we all were automated a little bit I think at certain parts of the funnel when we built that system, but we already, it was like we poured concrete into paths that like people didn’t use as much but they were still there from the from the dirt day. 

Jordan  19:59

The dirt day? The dirty days. So let’s, let’s get a little personal here. I don’t know if you’ll answer this or not. But, but and I’ll get you too, Jan. I’m actually very curious about this. But Ali, when you were building this thing, I just remember, it’s a very pivotal part for Sealed. It was kind of like a make-or-break moment in a lot of ways of what you are up to. It was a very important part of your career. Like, did, did you cry at all? Were there any points? 

Ali  20:33

You know the answer to that. I’ll answer it. Yes, I cried.

Jordan  20:37

Where they were like, were there points where you thought like, yeah, I could have caught you sometimes crying? But were there points where you thought like, this actually isn’t possible?

Ali  20:46

It wasn’t really that I felt like building this system was impossible. Like, I knew it was possible. But like, you know, at that time, I had no full time staff.

Jordan  20:59

You only had Jan.

Ali  21:01

I had Jan, the awesome, like, super intern.

Jordan  21:04

Hey Jan, they can’t see the video. So don’t be flexing the muscles, nobody can see it.

Ali  21:13

You know, I just, it wasn’t that I thought what I wanted to build, or what I thought we needed to build wasn’t possible to build; I knew it was totally possible to build. It was more just being you know, I was, I was running marketing; I was building all of our operations, back end systems. I was, I was doing like, five jobs. And you know, that’s standard at that stage of a startup. And there are definitely days where it’s not really a question in your mind of like, is this possible? You know, it’s possible or maybe I knew it was possible, it was more of like, “do I have it in me to keep going on this like very aggressive timeline? These very ambitious, these very ambitious goals, we had to like to stand this whole thing up within like, you know, four months, or five months.” Like it was such a, it was a fast project, a huge project. On top of a number of other things, I was also in the middle of rebranding the company at the same time. 

Jordan  22:18

Oh, no big deal. That’s just putting some paint colors together. Now Ali, like, wants to hit me, right?

Ali  22:28

Yeah, so I think it was more like, there were definitely moments during that period of time, where it was more like, “Can I, can I keep going? Can I get through this more than it was ‘is it possible?’”

Jordan  22:43

And what about you, Jan? Like you, listen, in the history of humanity here, has anybody gotten more just thrown in the fire than our buddy Jan of like, the well of the project go? Like, give me your perspective on the side of this ability. Because I think that’s important for anybody listening that like, like, maybe you’re coming from the outside, or you’re early into this stuff. Like, you know, Ali’s been in it. She, she used to work in, like, correct me if I’m wrong, but like a startup incubator, right, like, so like, like Ali’s got this in the brain. But then, you know, there’s folks, Jan actually, you and I are pretty similar, like, we’re coming from a different background. And then all of a sudden, we’re just thrown in the middle of this tech thing, or this ops thing. So like, just walk me through sort of your journey of overcoming while you’re, you’re building this thing out.

Jan  23:38

So for me, it was, it was definitely a welcome fire to be thrown into. Because, you know, my entire goal for that summer was to get a position at an early-stage startup with good leadership where, you know, I could kind of be recognized and maybe thrown into a project or get a little bit more responsibility, because obviously, the goal there over the period of three months over that summer was to just get as much experience as I can get, learn as much as I can learn, and then you know, what I thought was going to be me moving on once the summer was over. And luckily, I also didn’t have everything kind of on my head, in terms of the system and, and everything else; my responsibility was solely to focus on the data and the translation. Luckily, Ali had also put together the wireframe of what that data was, was going to look like. So my job was really to take that background, and then just kind of apply it and make sure that we have a finished product there. So I was chipping away at it. It turned into you know, longer days for me and whatever else but everything that’s come from it since then has been really rewarding. So I’m very glad that, that I was put on that project originally that that in terms of learnings, I mean, And I got to learn a ton about actually, you know, the process of project mapping and planning, making sure that we have enough resources. And then kind of when, when things go wrong and things aren’t exactly going to plan, kind of being being able to reset your feet and, and tackle the problem from from another angle. So I was very lucky to experience at least that that process.

Ali  25:25

Jan was a champ. And he, he like he, I like vividly remember being on the like being on the phone with him like very late at night on like a Saturday getting ready to launch this thing. And like he was like working Saturday nights with me.

Jordan  25:38

Ali’s like “I don’t care what LinkedIn posts about hustle culture. Jan, we gotta get this done. You’re an intern; give me your soul. Let’s get this rolling. 

Ali  25:48

We don’t do that anymore, but at the time.

Jordan  25:51

Yeah. There’s seasons for everything. Right. Like there’s you can’t sustain that long term. But there are certain seasons where like things you just have to focus. But yeah, I was I was gonna tell you, you know, you thought you were moving on but little did you know, that secretly Sealed was holding elections in the background and you got voted president. You are Mr. Jan for president there for a bit. And then, yeah.

Jan  26:15

Yeah. A little weeks’ thing, things were going very well. My name was being thrown around the 20-person office pretty frequently there. People got to know me, household name. But yeah, little did I know, I thought I was leaving. But you know, we built a system, and we needed somebody to manage it. So I ended up staying behind and throughout my last year of school, you know, continued working with, with Sealed full time.

Jordan  26:40

So we only have time for like one more question. But I think it’s important to ask, you know, obviously COVID affected everybody differently, in part of your business is like, you’re sending people out to check out homes, evaluate them, give, and I might be messing this up, so correct me if I’m wrong, right. But they’re gonna give a quote on like, how do we get this thing, eco-friendly and whatever. And then suddenly, like, this is your business model to go out and make like do the remodels, get the businesses eco-friendly, all these things. And like we can’t send people into, into the homes. So like, we spent a lot of the time today talking about like, building out this like customer journey that the sales reps can follow, and then the customer’s on the other side. But just talk to me for a minute about you build a scalable system, right? But then like, what happens whenever the core of your business like you’re like, what you just built, and I’m not saying it was a bad system, but like, there’s now this other area over here that like you’re not even allowed to participate anymore? So like, how do you go about tackling that problem?

Ali  27:48

It was really… we changed, we changed our customer journey in response to COVID. So it was kind of funny; we had prior to COVID, we were our sales journey was like 80% remote. So you could, you know, you, you could get to the point where we’d given you sort of like a preliminary estimate, and then we’d send someone out to the home to verify everything and you, and then you’d move forward from there. And we do our preliminary estimate just based off of like rough, rough, a rough like measurement of what the size of the house was. When we had put, we had started to build a form, a tool to gather the data we needed remotely in order to scope the projects much more accurately, remotely, prior to COVID. And we had kind of shelved it because it just, things were working; it wasn’t a huge priority. And then when it, in February of 2021 things, early February, I remember we were meeting as a leadership team to talk about our risk mitigation strategy for COVID. And one of the things on our list was if we do end up in a situation where we’re in lockdown, and we can’t go to homes, we’ll sort of like take this thing off the shelf, this virtual home visit tool that we have started working on and we’ll take it off the shelf and we’ll sort of like brush it up, clean it up and we’ll use that, so we ended up when we did go into lockdown, we did that. Jan worked on that project too; Jan was responsible for that project too. And we went live within like two or three days of going into lockdown with this virtual, what we called like our virtual verification tool where you could you know, the homeowner would go around the house and gather additional information, take pictures and that enables us to put together a scope with with very high accuracy without ever stepping foot in the home. So we ended up actually changing our customer journey, and we did make modifications in Salesforce, and you know in our customer journey in the in our systems to match it to match this new journey and that’s still part of our process now to this day. Hey, this, this, you know, we’re gonna, we’ll put together a scope for homeowner without ever having to set foot in the home. But it was very much in response. And, you know, we we had to make a lot of edits to the system in response to it especially like, once that turned out to end up being like a more permanent change the following fall, we had to do a big update project, a really big update project on the system, which was like a four-month overhaul of…

Jordan  30:27

You like those four months sprints, don’t you?

Jan  30:31

From my experience on on the virtual verification process, because I was really close to that it came obviously COVID came as a huge surprise to everybody. And then this project came as a surprise to me too. Again, from my position, I was really lucky that leadership had already discussed this, mapped it, planned it. But like Ali said, I think it was a Thursday that we left the office ended up not coming back. And I think by Tuesday morning, we were live with this new process. And actually, Zapier was was pretty instrumental, which is kind of funny. It’s an agile tool. Yeah. So it allowed us to pretty quickly put this put this product together, you know, over basically a weekend and, and it’s funny that now to this day, we still that’s that’s still in our customer journey. And I think it brought us closer to kind of, you know, the product that that we’ve been trying to put out there from the start.

Jordan  31:32

It’s, I think it’s important what you’re saying there, like you mentioned Zapier, like there’s there’s nothing wrong with simple solution sometimes, right? Like, sometimes, like you want to build a scalable system and make no mistake, like what these two folks have been involved in has been nothing short of extraordinary, with a ton of, ton of complicated process on the background. However, like there’s still room for pieces of like, this can be really simple right here. I’m just gonna end this way and saying that when I when, when like pandemic was in full throw, I was actually thinking about Sealed quite a bit. I had three thoughts. Number one, oh, man, like this would be difficult right now, you know, this would be a hard challenge. Number two, they got Ali; she’s gonna figure it out. And number three, if she doesn’t, blame Jan. So like, that was my, that was like my whole thought process.

Ali  32:28

Anyway, the pandemic was not horrible for our business; it was actually good for our business because people were home. And they were experiencing all the problems that, you know, people experienced, that bring them to us all the symptoms of energy waste, like drafty rooms and rooms that are too hot in the summer, people were feeling them; people were using rooms that they never had to use, like people were turning that room they never used because it was uncomfortable into their home office and then saying, “Well, I’m really uncomfortable, and I have to sit here all day.” So it was a good thing, we were able to figure out a process that could work for that period of time, because we ended up growing the business very rapidly since then.

Jan  33:08

Right. It also forced us to take that leap into scoping work remotely, which is something that the team was discussing for a while. But what we had at that point had worked. So you know, we weren’t pressured into changing it. But when COVID came around, it forced us to take that leap. And it showed how successful that could be. 

Ali  33:27

Yeah, the last thing I’ll say on that to Jordan is like what you’re saying about simple solutions. I think like what a lot of what we talked about today is like, you know, doing things in phases, where you sort of like you build and you observe, and then you build and then you observe. And that’s not to say you shouldn’t like keep, you end up, you do a lot of little building and a lot of adaptation in the middle. But like we went through a phase of the business where we had the simplest system and the simplest, simplest solution possible. We started to outgrow it. We took what we had; we learned from it, we adapted it. And then we, we learned again. And now we’re now we’re continuing to build on that from there. And like that the process for the virtual verification that Jan was just talking about, again, we rolled it out within four days. Initially, it was like very, like a bootstrapped version initially, just to get some data from the field, see how it works, see how customers responded, see how salespeople responded. And then once we got some data on how it was working, what was working, what wasn’t working, then we we iterated from there. But you know, like going and then, and then we started to build like a more complicated custom solution for that. Once we had been in, in field for a while and we actually knew how it worked and how it needed to work.

Jordan  34:37

Well, crew, I’m with you. I think your team, like the Sealed crew in general is just going to continue to do well. And I’ve appreciated along the way, I think we’ve had a couple opportunities to work together, and I always look forward to jumping in and chatting with both of you. And Jan, I like, I beat on you a little bit. But you know, I guess I’ll say this publicly. You’re a pretty good guy. too, but anyway…

Jan  35:02

And I appreciate it. I would expect nothing less from you.

Jordan  35:05

We’ll have the post-production folks cut that out though; I don’t, I don’t want that in. Everybody, thanks for coming in. Thanks for listening in, and we’ll catch you in the next episode. See ya.

35:17

Hot dog. That was a great episode. Thanks for listening. If you want to learn more about Greaser Consulting or any information you heard on today’s episode, visit us online at www.greaserconsulting.com. Be sure to click the Follow button and the bell icon to be notified on the latest here at RevOps Therapy. Thanks and see you real soon.

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