The Evolution of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion in the Corporate World

Jul 13

Featuring Sohpie M. Piliouras, Chief Operating Officer and Corporate Secretary of the Minority Corporate Counsel Association (MCCA)

Sophia M. Piliouras is the Chief Operating Officer and Corporate Secretary of the Minority Corporate Counsel Association (MCCA), the preeminent advisor on diversity, equity, and inclusion to C-suites across corporate America. Ms. Piliouras’ longstanding commitment to racial and gender equity goes hand in hand with her belief that leaders become changemakers when they strive to always do better. By consistently advocating for sustainable DEI strategies and modeling effective allyship, she empowers today’s leaders to take action beyond the status quo.

Here’s a glimpse of what you’ll learn:

Diversity has evolved from being a feel-good programming issue to being embedded in business strategy and operational efficiency.
The need to strike a balance between discussions on the trauma caused by the pandemic and moving forward with diversity and inclusion actions.
Companies benefit when diversity is included in recruitment, compensation reviews, performance evaluations, and promotion.
Despite the challenges, there are public figures and leaders invested in promoting the mission and vision of diversity and inclusion.
Diverse attorneys might not be given tools to succeed in their roles, such as appropriate training and feedback.
A focus on automating various aspects of communication with members, marketing campaigns, invoicing, and project management can increase efficiency and reduce errors.
The importance of sustainability in corporate America including addressing through ESG strategies.
Women leaving the workforce in droves during the pandemic and the difficulty of re-entry for those who have been out for more than three or four years.
The value of diversity should not be the first thing cut from budgets in times of economic hardship.
Gen Z has grown up with discussions on equity, inclusion, and diversity; hence the hope for a more diverse and inclusive workforce.

In this episode…

Research consistently shows that diverse teams lead to increased profitability and better overall business performance. The speaker emphasizes the need for incorporating diversity and inclusion in recruitment, promotion, performance evaluation, and compensation reviews to create a sustainable, inclusive future. So why is DEI the first thing cut from budgets during economic hardships?

In this episode of The Kennedy Events Podcast, Sophia Piliouras joins host Paige Buck to dive deep into the evolution of diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) in the corporate world. This thought-provoking discussion highlights the importance of genuine expertise in DEI initiatives and the challenges faced in achieving true diversity and inclusion in today's society. Piliouras, an experienced professional with a background in law and DEI, shares her insights, experiences, and passion for creating positive change in the corporate landscape.

Listen to the full episode of The Kennedy Events Podcast featuring Sophia Piliouras to gain a deeper understanding of the challenges and opportunities in driving diversity, equity, and inclusion in the corporate world.

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Resources Mentioned in this episode

Sponsor for this episode…

This episode is brought to you by Kennedy Events.

Kennedy Events creates stress-free conferences and events, providing expert management and design for all your corporate event needs—from in-person to hybrid and virtual events.

To learn more about our services, visit our website at www.kennedyevents.com and schedule a consultation today to find out how we can guide you in making your event successful.

Transcript

Paige Buck [00:00:03]:

Welcome to the Kennedy Events Podcast. I'm your host Paige Buck. Past guests include Julie Liu of AvePoint, Alyssa Glassman of Recharge, and Anna Nicholson of Yahoo. And today I am delighted to have David Eronica, Head of Growth marketing at Yellow Brick Data where he sits at the intersection of demand gen and sales development. He is focused on all things pipeline generation, combining broad brand awareness tactics with a highly targeted prospecting approach to bring Yellowbrick to as many customers as possible. Before Yellow Brick, David worked at venture-backed startups Parsley, which was acquired by WordPress, VIP, and Splash event marketing software as well as a bootstrap tech-enabled services company agency. And before we dive in with David, today's episode is brought to you by Kennedy Events. Kennedy Events creates stress-free conferences and events providing expert management and design for all your corporate event needs from in-person to hybrid and virtual and you can learn more about us@kennedyvents.com. So hello David, thanks for being here.

David Aronica [00:01:09]:

Hey, happy to be here.

Paige Buck [00:01:10]:

Good to see you. I'm super curious to hear what you okay with, this is a big scary question. This is the most scary question I'll ask. Your ideology about sales and marketing, what you've learned from the companies you've been at so far, and how you're applying them to your new-ish job at Yellowbrick.

David Aronica [00:01:30]:

Yeah, I think it's like we're all on the same team I think is the basic place to start at. I think leaving your ego at the door in terms of who's getting credit for what is an important place to start when you're thinking about bridging that or just like how you're going to work with people on either side of the revenue team. I think that's also why it's like teams are calling it revenue versus sales or marketing. We all have our domains and functions anyway. But yeah, I think when I was an SDR starting my career, I was always very intrigued to learn from marketing. I think it was just something I was always interested in. I think because of that I also just got to work with some amazing marketing leaders. I was always looking and maybe just because I was interested, but to see how these teams collaborated together and what we could do and how we could capitalize on the things that marketing was producing in our SDR role, in my role as an SDR and then leading those teams. So I think that it's being on the same team and kind of having an open mind around how you can get the best outcomes is really important.

Paige Buck [00:02:40]:

So if having no ego or at least trying daily to leave that ego at the door and picking it up on your way back out is part of the success, part of a necessary component, what else makes or breaks successful collaboration?

David Aronica [00:02:57]:

Yeah, I think having an idea of what the end-user experience is, even if you're talking about something internally. If we're thinking about it from a marketing approach. I think you and I have talked about marketing, putting something together that we think is really impactful. Maybe we're working it with our product marketing team on a new product launch or a new persona that we want to test out messaging with. How we then roll that out to people on the front lines, like Your sales development reps or AES or Even solutions engineers that might be Talking with Your Middle state, your mid-funnel customers, how they're actually going to use this asset or research or call script that you Might be putting together or helping them put together, is really important. So I think it's not just about user experience, from thinking about that, from how your customers are interacting with your brand or your product, but then your stakeholders internally and that's your sales team in a lot of ways. So I think just having that and maybe that's the enablement component of it and thinking about that, even if it's like a small asset to get the most bang for your buck out of what you're creating and what you're trying to do?

Paige Buck [00:04:15]:

Where are there huge risks of breakdowns between I mean, we can think of these as one team. One team. But nevertheless, they see different things. They're focused on different things. What are the big breakdowns that you see? And yeah, I'll stop there.

David Aronica [00:04:33]:

I think sometimes it's like a problem of what is the team incentive. I think this is like maybe a cop out answer, maybe not. Sometimes you have the teams that are simply misaligned from a metric perspective or what is the driver of how this team makes money, right? And that could lead to really awkward conversations or things where if a marketing team is completely based on generating marketing qualified leads MQLs well, that's one thing that we can absolutely control in terms of attracting who we think. And then lead scoring and getting people to take some kind of journey through our website or, like, journey through our brand in some kind of way or download a product or something. And then you have an SDR that is very much completely gold on generating opportunities. There might be this breakdown in terms of what is actually a qualified opportunity and what is a lead, right? And I think that is kind of like always that's like with the root of a lot of the push and pill between marketing and sales of well, we're generating these people that are aware or they've at least taken some kind of action, they know something about us, but are they the buyers? And I think just being really clear about what we're trying to do and who we're trying to attract at every stage of that journey or experience for them can help break down some of those silos. But I think that's where leadership just stepping in and setting kind of the tone of this is what we're trying to do at each of these stages. This is what is success. And then just being really clear to people is some way to solve that.

Paige Buck [00:06:15]:

Do you have an opportunity to see market leaders in this? Imagine one of the reasons I love having conversations like this on this podcast is it lets me get to know how other teams function when that's opaque to most people in the day to day. How do you learn what the best teams are doing and where they're focusing their energy or aligning their team?

David Aronica [00:06:42]:

You mean like my peers? Yeah.

Paige Buck [00:06:44]:

How do you get a chance to even learn what your peers are doing?

David Aronica [00:06:48]:

Yeah, I mean pretty grassroots in a pretty grassroots way. I don't hesitate to reach out to people either. That either one. Just like staying in touch with people and building a network through individuals I've either met at events or at smaller group dinners or even just like out socially and then maybe serendipitously meeting people that work in this field generally and then also just very proactively too. I think I'm kind of shameless about reaching out to people on LinkedIn and even in some ways just saying like, hey, I don't necessarily have any way to pay you back for this right now, but if you wouldn't mind spending 2030 minutes, I would love to pick your brain. That has been a strategy and a tactic that has worked almost 100% of the time. Sometimes I am able to return the favor in some kind of way, but I think it's kind of part of the tactic as I'm just kind of upfront about that. I'm not sure if there's anything you will get out of this, but I do this a lot with aspiring SDR leaders. So maybe that makes you feel good that I'm paying it forward somewhere else. I just reach out to a lot of people. I like to consume a lot of blogs and books and podcasts.

Paige Buck [00:08:06]:

What are your favorite blogs and books and podcasts?

David Aronica [00:08:10]:

I think one thing that one podcast I've recently gotten into because we started to work with this company called Refinelabs, which is a marketing agency, demand agency based out of Boston. They're all over and they're working with companies similar to Yellow Brick and their podcast is amazing. And they also have a private community called the Vault, which is access to resources, intellectual property that they created. So that's kind of like a pretty niche community I've gotten into recently, or at least access to recently. And Saster is always something that I'm reading and keeping up on as well as I like First Round Capital a lot. Unusual ventures I think also put it out. A lot of really great content. So people in the VC world and just other blogs that are even people in the marketing and the agency space as well.

Paige Buck [00:09:11]:

What are you listing for it now? What are some of the biggest pain points you're trying to solve for that, you would be like, call somebody up and say, help me out. How are you solving this?

David Aronica [00:09:22]:

Yeah, I mean, yellow brick is a company that I only recently joined almost four months ago, and this was my first foray into the data warehouse space, which is definitely the most technically complex product that I've worked with so far. So who we're marketing to is a new persona. For me, I think I've spent really the majority marketing and selling into marketers. This last company was more of an It consulting firm, so that was maybe starting to bridge this gap. So some of the things that I'm really starting to learn a lot more about is like the persona itself and what either data warehouse architects, the users of our product, what they care about, so we can start to speak to them in a really educated way. I think that's really important because I think it's easy to be really off base with these personas as well. So that for me, has been the biggest point of education and trying to learn about the customer and to do that in a way that I can bring that some light on the tactics that we're and the strategies we're trying to deploy going forward.

Paige Buck [00:10:41]:

Yeah, that's awesome. It's interesting when you move into a space where understanding that client is just more opaque to you. I don't know what you look like, I don't know what drives you, I don't know what coffee you drink. I don't know what gets you out of bed in the morning. Yeah, interesting. I feel that challenge because, like you, I feel like I'm mostly selling to people where the Ven diagram between them and us is a pretty strong overlap. So I'm going to get you pretty deeply on some level, and then I'm just trying to fill in around the edges. I get how that's a real challenge.

David Aronica [00:11:22]:

And I think we always try to do that in terms of like, all right, well, how can I relate to this so that I can try to think about this in any kind of strategic way? Right. That has been difficult. Right. Because I am not in any way a data engineer even remotely. Right. But I am in a lot of ways an end user to the products that are being created. When I say products, even reports or workloads data that I need to do my job on a daily basis and make decisions and interpret. So that's been one way I'm trying to put myself. If it's not directly in their shoes, I at least understand the outcomes and the outputs that are important to the business. When we're thinking about what that persona is actually producing and driving forward. And I think that has helped. In a place where you can't directly relate, you still have business interactions or personal interactions with these people that are in all of our companies or a lot of our companies. So that's a way to try to take that a little bit of a step away but still relate in some way.

Paige Buck [00:12:42]:

Yeah. You mentioned you are an end user of other products and tools or generating reports. Are there tools that your teams use that help them move the ball forward? I'm thinking of things like Gong or.

David Aronica [00:12:56]:

Yeah, we have like every under the sun. I mean, we're trying to actually consolidate a bit.

Paige Buck [00:13:01]:

I think that jumping your tech stack too tall.

David Aronica [00:13:05]:

Yeah, Gong is absolutely one of the gong is such a cool product. I think in this educational period, right in joining yellow Brick, I was like, I just want to get on to calls and listen to how customers are talking about their pain points and then also how we pitch our solution. And we're all in that motion, and we're all kind of very excited about this next phase that we're trying to take yellow Brick through. And to not have to load eight people onto a call because we can all just watch the Gong later is incredibly important. It is like a really critical part, I think, of any marketers journey. And I think if you're not doing those things and you're not listening to those calls, it's probably the lowest hanging fruit in terms of what you can do to inform your strategy or what you might need to do to improve on your messaging or so forth, if that's something you need to improve. So Gong is in there. I mean, we use a lot of tools from the SDR perspective. From outreach is our main kind of sales engagement platform. We also use LinkedIn, Sales Navigator and Orum, which is this power dialer. So we are at Yellow Brick primarily cold calling. So the SDRs spend the vast majority of their time calling through lists and trying to get live conversations on the phone. So that product Orum is really useful for us. And on the operations side, we're pretty married to zoom info. So we have zoom info and we just kind of brought in their Operations OS product.

Paige Buck [00:14:52]:

Or is that something else?

David Aronica [00:14:54]:

We have salesforce. Their CRM. Zoom info is kind of like our data layer that's underneath everything in salesforce. And this new product we brought on just helps us enrich, clean and keep that data as fresh as we possibly can. And then of course, we use Yellow Bricks data warehouse to take all the data from all of these different places and then to get the most insights. And I utilize Tableau as our bi tool, which is someone listening to this might be like, wow, I haven't heard that name in a long time. Or there's a lot of other interesting.

Paige Buck [00:15:31]:

But what is it? What is tableau?

David Aronica [00:15:33]:

It's a data visualization tool in terms of taking all these different sources and then you can use Tableau to match that data up in ways to then present the most useful information. Like Salesforce is not great about different types of reports, but it's like it has all the data you need, but then you usually need to match it up with something in HubSpot or something in zoom info that you might not have exposed on the front end of Salesforce or something in Outreach. And so you can take all of that and then just getting these things.

Paige Buck [00:16:10]:

To talk to one another. But also I really understand that because in HubSpot, I'm like, in theory you have all of these data points. We're way a fraction of what you guys are trying to do and in theory you have all of these data points. Why can't you forecast this or why can't you give me this one, make these two pieces of data, talk to one another and give me something I want?

David Aronica [00:16:33]:

Yeah, you usually need it from somewhere else. People just like go into spreadsheets. There's nothing wrong with that. Frankly, I think there's so many times when we're banging our heads against the wall trying to figure out the best way to do something when ultimately we probably could have spent the last 15 minutes just pulling up a spreadsheet and doing it that way. It might not be the most scalable solution and we might have to rebuild that the next time we get together, whatever conversation that we're having. But it's something that I got to keep on going back to, especially the past couple of months in working with our COO, Jason and Mark Fields, who's our SVP of Sales. Sometimes it's just like, you know what, the thing that we're going to do is not going to be the most scalable solution right now, but it is going to get our job done today. And I think in some ways you start kind of shaking like, man, are we going to regret this in a couple of months. But I think as long as you're kind of like eyes open about it, getting something done now versus trying to have the most perfect scalable foolproof solution, I don't know, that's better for me at least.

Paige Buck [00:17:41]:

Oh, I really feel that because you can also put a lot of effort into the scalable full time solution only to find in 18 months that it no longer suits you. You accounted for all of the components and then you're like, well, that was a lot of effort expended or like.

David Aronica [00:17:58]:

Are we going to use this process again or am I just trying to get an answer to something? I think that's a really important way to think about it too, is like if you're just trying to understand something for this moment in time and to get an answer or to indicate something, that a path you may go down. Maybe you don't need to lay all the pipes to have this perfect infrastructure to your data. I guess that's very specifically on the infrastructure of your data part of it. But if it is something you're going to always be going back to, then, yeah, maybe we should actually really do this right out of the gate. So I guess knowing what you're trying to solve is critical.

Paige Buck [00:18:34]:

Well, I think too, I wonder if some of that is like, let me just mock this up in a spreadsheet now to solve the now problem, and if I find myself going back to it, then at least I have a straw man for what I'm looking to build.

David Aronica [00:18:47]:

I mean, I had that conversation today.

Paige Buck [00:18:49]:

Yes, that's great. How, if at all, are you employing new tools like Chat GPT and Generative AI?

David Aronica [00:19:00]:

Yeah, I usually have Chat GPT up in one of my tabs. I find it extremely useful to get quick answers. I think it's what I'm using it for. And there's so much good information out there on LinkedIn or elsewhere of how to use it in a really impactful way to get the answers or get the best outcome from it. And I think the more that you practice with it, the better the outcomes are in terms of how to prompt it, giving it things to read. But that's like setting the tone for your conversation and then being really clear about what you're trying to get out of it. I find it incredibly, incredibly useful. Either in meetings, I will usually say, hey, I got this from Chat GBT, or sometimes I won't because I just needed a quick answer to something. So, yeah, I find it really helpful as a place. Also you have writer's block from trying to write up a series of emails even for a nurture campaign or tweets or LinkedIn posts or taking this blog post that it was long form and condensing it into maybe other areas that I want to present to this persona, giving it some of those things ahead of time and saying, hey, this is what these product leaders may care about. This is what our engineering leaders may care about. Now, can you read this thing and parse out the pieces that you think are most important? It's amazing.

Paige Buck [00:20:30]:

I heard an agency owner say that she was using it to it's not the copy she'll necessarily use on her website, but she's using it to refine her thinking. Can you give me three reasons why a company would need our services? Now refine that. Now refine that. So it sounds like you're really getting two things out of it. You're getting practice with engaging with it, which we're all going to need.

David Aronica [00:20:55]:

Yeah, that's for sure.

Paige Buck [00:20:58]:

And then you're also getting real output. That's useful and time-saving now.

David Aronica [00:21:03]:

Yeah. And some of the things that it spits out are horrible and some of the things that it spits out are fantastic. But I think that comes with the practice of, like, if you're getting horrible outcomes from it, maybe you are. The problem maybe you're not actually giving it enough information to get something that's useful. So I think these tools are not perfect. Right. And I think Jack GT does a good job of telling you what the downfalls are. I think if you're not starting to integrate those types of tools into just like your day to day, you probably should at least consider it because I think it just supercharges us. It makes us a lot better. I don't think these tools are going to, in any crazy Dystopian way, start replacing creatives or even marketers or both, or any role, really, but I think you can find ways to be a lot more effective if you are using them.

Paige Buck [00:22:06]:

Yeah, I think after the initial freakout, we're all kind of taking a pause. They're not going to take over tomorrow anyway.

David Aronica [00:22:14]:

Probably not.

Paige Buck [00:22:15]:

Probably not. Fingers crossed. Who are some of the people you most admire in this field, and who are you? You talked about how you go about learning from folks, but who do you get the most out of?

David Aronica [00:22:30]:

Yeah, man, to name names, I think I'm going to probably end up naming people that I worked with and have spent a lot of time with. And when you say this field, I mean, I guess we're talking about marketing, but I might expand a little bit.

Paige Buck [00:22:47]:

Beyond.

David Aronica [00:22:49]:

I think, going back where to start. I mean, I'll start in kind of the marketing realm, and at Splash, I got to work with a woman named Amy Holtzman, who's now the CMO at Check. She would be awesome to have on this podcast, but she is someone who I think really taught me a lot about before I even knew what the term demand generation was, I was managing the team at Splash. I was really excited about learning more about marketing, and she was someone that was always incredibly thoughtful about helping me understand, as the SDR leader, the importance of the programs and the campaigns that she was running and educating. Me in a way that I could be really confident in presenting things to my team if she or someone from her team couldn't be there. So she really took me under her wing and it made me feel like a part of the marketing team. And I think because of that, we had a really good relationship in terms of our marketing and sales alignment. Someone else I really admire, and there's so many people in my career that I could probably point to. But the CEO of Parsley, Sachine Camdar, just in terms of his patience and how methodical he was in Parsley's strategy. It always felt like he was five steps ahead, and he just knew where he wanted to be and the vision that he painted for the company, and he just always kind of stayed at it. And I think it's really easy to get distracted or get off base in terms of why do we exist what is the value that we serve to our customers and then even to this day knew what he was trying to do. And I think because of that, he was just such an awesome leader to work for. And he also gave me a huge opportunity to go from being an SDR to managing that team and building that team with him and without someone kind of taking a chance on like I was only 23, 24 when we started to build that team. He definitely helped me set off on a massive career trajectory, so a lot to thank him for. And he was also just I just admire the way that he leads in a very humble and clear way. And I'm now working back with someone who at Mark Fields, who's SVP of Sales at Yellow Brick. We worked together for three and a half ish years at Splash. And he's in terms of rigor and work ethic, I think he is someone that I really admire in terms of even today, he is in the trenches in our sales process, and he's not leading from kind of sitting. On the throne as the SVP, but he's leading from the front, taking discovery calls, learning as much as you can about how our customers are going to use our cloud offering and what their pain points are, and to see the way that he's kind of just jumping in and getting his hands dirty. I admire that mentality and I think there's like no job too small maybe is a good way to put it in terms of just being owning the results. And that's not just like from analyzing a spreadsheet and saying, this is what we need to do, but owning it by being that close to the customer. I think that's the best type of leadership that you can display to your team.

Paige Buck [00:26:34]:

You said something I thought was really powerful in there because you said the words rigor and focus. And I'm curious how you distinguish rigor and focus from just like hustle and Grind.

David Aronica [00:26:50]:

I think hustle and Grind, you can be the person that's like completing the most Asana tasks, you can have the most emails, you can do the most cold calls. Right. I think rigor and focus is always asking the question, how does this link back up to our strategy? And if it doesn't, and if it's not something that if it's something that's now distracting you or setting you off on a different course, then you're doing your team a failure. Right. I think that's like the major difference. I think people can hustle. I think hard work is like a basic component of what you need to do to be successful. But I think it's actually way harder to know what not to work on and what not to spend your time on and to just force yourself to prioritize and focus on the things that are truly most important. I think that's emotion of leadership. I think great leadership does that incredibly well in terms of providing context to the people on your team, people that work directly for you, but in a way that they can then communicate that to the people that work for them. And I think if you're doing that well and you're providing that context and leading people with, like, these are the most important priorities and why, so that they can figure out what to do with that information, then they're not just going to be ramming their heads into a wall, trying to outwork their peers, but it's going to be what I'm working on today, the most important thing that I can be working on for the purpose of the business. And I think that is where we want everybody to be asking that question every single day. I think that's the true difference between rigor and focus and this hustle kind of mentality.

Paige Buck [00:28:29]:

Yeah, there's a couple of things you hit on there that I think are also really big. One is that idea of alignment toward the bigger goal and even just, I mean, I've seen some organizations just, well, not being clear on that goal or maybe there's a disconnect between where leadership is going and what everybody's doing day to day. So you are just being like, well I got it done, I got 1000 Nissana tasks checked off. Yeah.

David Aronica [00:28:57]:

And appliance there was that time. I mean, I think someone I would also throw into that list before was two people. I mean, Marcus Olsen who's the CEO at client C, and Patricio Pace who's the VP of operations and getting to work with the two of them was probably the best not to belittle anything else that happened before that because I loved all these opportunities. But working with them was just so insanely fun because we were growing so fast at this. Late 2020 into 2021 was a huge year and then we were kind of at that place that we were like everyone felt like we were working incredibly hard but it was unclear if we were all working on the right things at the right times and what was the most important thing. And it really took us kind of like growing up or realizing we are now leading an actual company that deserves way better leadership than what we are giving the company right now. And I think Marcus really took that at the helm. And it was a lot of us trying to figure out what to do, kind of in a day to day basis, because I don't think any of us had been that exposed to that kind of growth and then had that level of responsibility, and we made a lot of mistakes. But I think Marcus was always really good about kind of owning that as a CEO and then setting that direction and tone and I think that was critical. I'm not sure if we did it incredibly well, frankly. But I think we had a feeling that around what we wanted to do, but I think we learned a lot about communication and leadership through that. And he gave us the ability to fail and I'll always really admire him for that because I think you can't really grow unless you're in a safe place to take risks, knowing that you might fail. And that I think unlocked a lot of learnings for myself and then for everybody who was on that ride.

Paige Buck [00:31:01]:

Yeah. So if you've got that if you've got that, like, the safety and the structure that enables you to take risks, do you have any examples of, like, I don't know, fun, crazy risks you've taken with either, and maybe that's skydiving? I don't know, fun, crazy risks you've taken and ones that whether they've gone exceedingly well or failed and what you learned from that.

David Aronica [00:31:24]:

Yeah, I think one of the things that we saw early at Ply and C, it was not necessarily early at client C is like lifecycle as a company, but when we started to we were primarily working with VC firms at Bay based in the Silicon Valley area and then started to expand into Boston. I was living in Denver at the time and they had started to really catch fire working with the biotech and life science companies that this segment of VCs were specifically investing in and creating. And so we really doubled down on that as a growth strategy and I think that was extremely intentional. And the risk that we took is that we kind of put all of our eggs into that basket. And so we really got close with a couple of the firms that we were working with and we utilized that relationship and then also the way that they were forming these companies from the onset, basically spinning them out of the VC directly into forming them as a company. And we were uniquely set up as an It consulting firm to help them do that kind of on a consistent basis. And then we financially incentivized them to do that by giving them a steep discount as they were getting up and running. And we were able to build a model that we could recoup the cost from that within the first, easily within the first six months, but then significantly over the next twelve to so forth.

Paige Buck [00:32:55]:

You had like a theory of change for your company that was like, we can discount this now because the lifetime value of the client is going to pay off.

David Aronica [00:33:03]:

We basically thought about it like customer acquisition cost, you could never do that really from an accounting practices, but that was how we thought about it was like we'll use that discount as kind of like the way to think about that. And the learning from that was like by not diversifying our portfolio, that put us in some really painful situations at times. And I think the learning for me was like going all in on one strategy is likely not the move ever and at least having some kind of way to diversify your portfolio especially from a revenue based perspective in these economic times especially is very important. And so while that was really innovative and it helped us grow significantly, I think we would look back on that and say we should do that and be focusing and generating partnerships in other industries and figuring out how we can maybe go up market and not just working with these startup companies. Or think about how do we expand our channel partnerships and resellers or whatever it could have been. Right? And so I think that was hard in some ways because we were only spending resources that we felt could have a direct impact on revenue but I think it was part of a learning experience and also just a growth experience for that for that company.

Paige Buck [00:34:37]:

Yeah. Some awesome lessons in the struggle too right?

David Aronica [00:34:44]:

Yeah, for sure.

Paige Buck [00:34:46]:

So I'll give you final question. You were talking about how you worry about being able to pay it back when you go and ask somebody for their time but that you talk to junior folks in your industry or SDRs on the rise all the time. What's the number one thing you would want somebody who came to you for advice or experience or input? I don't know know about the industry and the challenges right now.

David Aronica [00:35:15]:

I think the thing that is always like someone I used to work with is coming to me and they're asking about advice for what they should do next. And I think what I've been telling people a lot recently is go with the company or the person that you think you're going to learn the most from and don't overthink the part of like, well, if I take this job. Am I going to be able to do the VP of Sales track or the VP of Marketing track or am I ever going to be able to become a product manager down the line? Because I think we overthink like well the next job has to be on that track. If it doesn't get me to that thing then why should I take this or how is it going to get me there? And I think that is where I'm trying to don't worry too much about the thing that is five years, ten years ahead of you. Worry about the thing that is in front of you and the experience and lean on the side of the experience and the learning that you're going to get instead of how does this help me hit my five to ten year plan because shit changes and you might get laid off because tech is just in shambles right? Or you might decide that you don't actually like doing this thing. And so I think we get very caught up in thinking of this grand vision for what we believe our careers are going to be, and then we might lose a great opportunity to work with some really exciting people, even though you might not understand the product or the market that it's in. So, yeah, I think it's like, don't overthink your career as a whole. Just think about what can you get out of the position that you're in, the people that you're working with, or people you might want to work with, and you can always correct the course, if that's even what you want to do.

Paige Buck [00:37:04]:

I think that's brilliant advice. Thank you. That's awesome. And we'll say thank you.

David Aronica [00:37:11]:

Cool.

Paige Buck [00:37:11]:

I have had so much fun talking to David Eronica, head of Growth Marketing at Yellowbrick Data. David, where can people find you?

David Aronica [00:37:20]:

Yeah, on LinkedIn is probably the easiest. I think it's probably easy to find the backslash davidaronica. Or just at davidaronica@yellowbrick.com or at Gmail, if you want to hit me.

Paige Buck [00:37:33]:

Up personally, don't offer that. Don't offer that. That's dangerous.

David Aronica [00:37:37]:

It is all good.

Paige Buck [00:37:39]:

We'll put the ones you want to link in our show notes and people can find you there. Thanks so much for your time today.

David Aronica [00:37:46]:

Yeah, thank you.

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PAIGE BUCK

Paige Buck is the co-owner of Kennedy Events, a large-scale event management company based in San Francisco, Los Angeles, and New York City. Our team creates stress-free conferences and events with a positive impact, which allows our clients to resonate with their audience. Kennedy Events specializes in producing flawless product launches, award ceremonies, fundraisers, and multi-day conferences while keeping our eye on retention and engagement goals.

About Kennedy Events

Kennedy Events began with one goal in mind—to produce high-level corporate events with just as much strategy as style. Maggie founded the company in 2000, found her match in Paige, and in 2011 the two became official partners. Since then, these two resourceful and brilliant creatives have pooled their strengths to build one one of the most the most sought after corporate event companies in San Francisco, New York, and Los Angeles.