Sean Lane 0:06
Sean, Hey everyone, welcome to operations, the show where we look under the hood of companies in hyper growth. My name is Sean Lane. One of the things that I love about rev Ops is that the work is never done, and I'm not just talking about fixing internal processes or challenges. Rev Ops is about anticipating what your go to market teams will need next, or even more challenging, what entire markets might need next. Our guest today leads her company with that exact mindset. Jenny gartua is the CEO of go nimbly, a 60 person rev ops agency for mid market and enterprise. SaaS, companies with an amazing roster of clients that includes companies like Zendesk, Twilio, snowflake, intercom and others. Jen and her team at Go nibli help companies to solve whatever is getting in the way of their growth. And when you spend your days advising companies on how to operate more effectively. It might be easy to think that you've seen it all, but not Jen. In our conversation, we unpack the buzz word of go to market efficiency together and what that actually means for some of her big name clients. She admits to us that she has real world use cases where AI SDRs are actually working and why? Despite all of go nimbly success, she doesn't really focus on innovating internally within their business to start though, since everyone is saying that times have changed and go to market efficiency is the name of the game, let's demystify that concept a little bit. How does Jen define go to market efficiency.

Jen Igartua 1:42
I'll tell a little bit of a story as to like, why I think it's important now, and I think that will kind of solidify the way that I'm thinking about it. So when we were doing work go nibbly started about 10 years ago, right? We didn't have a word for rev ops. We called it unify the business stack the work. I would say it hasn't changed that drastically, but because money's dried up and interest rates are up and yada yada, the work that we were doing when money was flowing was a lot around, okay, we're doubling revenue, we'll just double the sales team. And so it was like, onboard them. It was a lot around, like, okay, lead routing and making sure that that's still working, and onboard eight reps and activity tracking, and just very focused on volume and very focused on onboarding more and more people. What I'm seeing is a shift is, and I actually think this is good for operators, is we're shifting into really thinking about how we're getting the most out of every rep, how we're really looking at their carry capacity. Can we increase that? Can we really look at where we're losing conversion in that. We talked about that five years ago, but people weren't doing it because it was just cheaper to hire a new AE. Give them 250 they'll bring in a million rinse and repeat. And we had, you know, a case where every SaaS company was doing well. They were buying each other's tech, and we were like, in this kind of whirlwind of great we're moving money around in a spreadsheet between each other, and that's changed. And I think the opportunity now is for operators to be true operators, which is, go, look at this, go to market machine, and figure out where is it inefficient, and go fix that. And so it actually allows us to be a lot smarter.

Sean Lane 3:20
I think everyone has kind of turned the page on kind of that older way of doing things versus kind of the more current way of doing things. But I think knowing that that environment has changed and then actually acting differently are two different things. And so is that tricky for you all? When you go into companies and you're kind of telling that story, but maybe the folks who you're partnering with or working with haven't actually figured out how to work in the new environment yet, even if they kind of conceptually believe it to be true,

Jen Igartua 3:49
it's not that it's super easy, but actually it's easier than trying to convince somebody that what they're doing isn't smart. Because I think even though there's maybe, like, a moment of I don't know how to do that, or I don't know how to get rid of my old ways. It's coming top down, and people want to do this work. And so I'm not finding there's as much friction now, there's a learning curve, there's a bunch of tech debt, there's a bunch of, you know, work to get there. But no, I'm not finding pushback like nobody's saying no, we really shouldn't fix, you know, a lead conversion issue. No one's Yeah, it's easy.

Sean Lane 4:27
So I'm 100% with you on the fact that I think this is like, a positive thing for ops folks, right? I think that the work we do is more important than ever. I also think there's a lot of opportunity for us to inject some creativity into the way we solve these problems, especially with some of the tools that are now available to us that weren't before. And so obviously everyone, like immediately jumps to AI when they think about that conversation. Like, what are you excited about that your team is doing, or you're seeing ops folks doing to kind of leverage AI to kind of thrive in this new more. Fashion environment. Okay, a

Jen Igartua 5:01
bunch of stuff here. So one, I do think that there is a shift right now for operators where we're allowed to be more creative, like you're saying, and I think we can adopt a lot of thinking from growth marketers, where we should be testing a lot. And I'll go into the tools and AI piece, because I think it's really relevant at any part of the funnel. But if we look at expansions, or top of funnel, etc, I think lead scoring is dead, for example, the way that we were doing it. And it's finally dead. And it's been, I've been trying to kill it for, you know, more than 10 years, and we're finally here. And I mean it in the sense of, like, here's a propensity model, and here you go. It's, you know, score zero to 100 get at them. We now do have the tools and technology, and it's not just AI, it's a lot of it is just automation. It's automation and data manipulation. It's not always, we call it AI, but it's not always AI, and we have an opportunity now to shift and change the way that we think about something like lead scoring, because we can do it in a scalable way. I can create 25 models that are running for 25 different plays. So for example, I could say, Okay, I've got one play for multiple departments using our product, but they're not on the enterprise level, even if that's only 15 people right. Now, I can actually create a play for that and teach the team how to do that, like, how to do that follow up. And again, that's much more efficient. I think the reason we weren't doing it because we didn't have the technology that allowed us to do that, and it didn't. We couldn't do it at scale. And again, we were busy just saying, pour more money into it. And so, like, what's been different about it? Man, I hate that I mentioned clay so much. There's such like a popular girl at the prom, but they're like an easy example. I couldn't do the data manipulation and orchestration in mass the way that I can now with a tool like clay, because I would have to do it in a Salesforce system or Marketo or HubSpot, or even worse, in a data warehouse. And as an operator, I couldn't move quickly in that space. So I think that's the shift is now, whether you call it go to market engineer, which is like the hot new thing, or you just say it's the operations work, in my opinion, just good marketing, yeah, frankly, it's, it's what we should have been doing all along, and we're doing it now. And to me, it's the ability now to say, okay, great. I'm going to be able to pull out data, massage it and push it back in a really easy way. And yeah, within that, I can use AI. I can go scrape your website and ask AI, you know what you do. I can go look at all your LinkedIn posts and have it summarized and tell me what you know. You think I could do all that. But the concept is still, can I normalize data and put it in the hands of the people that need to action it? And so the ethos hasn't changed.

Sean Lane 7:47
The ethos hasn't changed. Jen's telling us that right now, the opportunity for operators is to be true. Operators, yes, we have new tools available to us, but the problems we're solving aren't all that different, so it's really our approach, and the means we take to the ends are the things that can change. And as she points out, we should be testing things like our friends in growth marketing do. We should be running experiments. And so if I pull that thread, at what point do the design choices and upstream work by ops stop, and the work of our end users begin. Is it at the point of personalization for our prospects, or should AI and ops handle that too? I'm

Jen Igartua 8:32
gonna get on my soapbox. We used to have marketing own automated sequences. We just called it marketing, and we did personalize things. At that point. We had dynamic content, but like we personalized. We knew your industry, and we gave you the industry use case. We knew your role, and we and now we can just, we can do it in a more interesting way, or we can do it much more personalized. But the concept, again, is still the same. Is like relevant message to you, and I think the pendulum swung too far, so I'll give you an example. So at Zendesk, they were one of our first customers. We had a fake SDR that we would send emails from. We had a fake LinkedIn profile, and we had and we sent them through Eloqua, and it was like anybody incoming, if they were not a high enough threshold to send to an actual individual. We I forgot her name. I should really call her, and we used to send emails from her, and she would book the meeting, and there was personalization, and at the point of booking, you would talk to an AE. And so we were doing that. And then the pendulum swung to sequences, and giving that to the sales reps, which, in my opinion, was a mistake, and then we gave them the ability to mass email. I don't think it's a mistake to give them the ability to email faster and personalize, etc, but when it became the thing, when I got a lead and I dropped down, added sequence, press save and like, let that go, like, what are we doing? We just gave them work that we knew how to automate. And so we swung really far. R A great you know, SDR, was probably customizing every email, but it wasn't happening. We all get the emails and putting where I went to school and asked me if I knew Jordan is not personalization. And then now we're like, in a place where I hope we're good, the pendulum is going to swing towards the middle, like, can we get to a point where we're saying, Yeah, that's not the job of an SDR, we can move it to a place of how much of this is marketing, and marketing should own those touches. And you know, I don't really care where it sits or who deploys it, but we're saying this is an automated way of messaging to the customer. And at what point do we figure out when we should hand off to an individual? And that's always been the question is, When are they sales ready? And so I don't want sales reps sending emails all day, right? I want them doing the thing a human can do, which is pick up the phone and call and go have meaningful moments. So I do think we're swinging that way.

Sean Lane 10:53
One of the reasons I love talking to people like you is you have such a advantage in terms of the number of data points that you get exposed to just based on the sheer number of clients that you all work with, right? And so you get to see more business models, more use cases than someone who works inside of a single company and only knows what their company is up to, right? So what are you seeing right now? Like, what are some examples of use cases or clients that you feel like are doing this well and have kind of successfully shifted into this go to market efficiency world in a creative way.

Jen Igartua 11:24
Yeah, I'm so lucky. I get to work with, like, the most incredible companies, like I said, Zendesk, my client, Twilio, was my first one. We're working with snowflake and intercom, and just these really incredible companies that are innovative, that are, like, pushing the boundary. And I'll say, I also learn things, and I'm proven wrong often. I won't say who's doing this, but the aisdr thing is working for some and it upsets me that it's working. It really upsets me that it's working because I didn't want it to work. I don't want, you know, a world where robots are talking to robots, but automating and conversational like through email, especially where there's back and forth to book a meeting, is working in a fully automated way. We're doing it in pockets. And so there is, you know, AI is changing the way that we book meetings, at least,

Sean Lane 12:15
is that hard as the leader of a services firm, when, like, I feel like ops people need to have strong opinions loosely held, right? So like, you clearly have your own perspective on this, but you might not be the right perspective for some of your clients. Like, is that hard to kind of balance that?

Jen Igartua 12:31
I mean, I am a stubborn person, so, like, it is, I do hate being wrong. So yeah, it's, it's like there's an ego thing for it, but I also have a big ethos that what go nimbly does, and I don't focus a lot on innovating internally. I don't focus on changing the way services companies run. I think that we've been doing this for hundreds of years, maybe 1000s. Services has a way that it works, and I lean on that and I innovate with our customers. So I want customers. It's why I chase the logos that I chase. I want customers that are willing to take risks and give me those stories and those insights. So it's hard, and it's also what I'm trying to do.

Sean Lane 13:10
You have to admit it's a pretty impressive roster of logos that Jen and her team tout as their customers. And I think her comment on internal versus external innovation is a fascinating one. She said it straight out, she doesn't really focus on innovating internally. There's not much to be gained for an established services business there. Instead, she's putting all of those calories into innovating in partnership with her clients, which, if you're a go nimbly customer, has to be music to your ears. More on that innovation stuff in a bit, I wanted to know what else is she seeing in the market. From her unique vantage point,

Jen Igartua 13:49
there is one trend, and it's not that fun, but it is something I'm seeing, which is, we've been pitching people to clean up their data forever, and I have lost more deals around data cleanup than I can name, and now I'm winning them. And I think it's two reasons. I think, one, a like, you can't use AI without data that you trust, and so we need, you know, data to be clean. I'll give a dumb example. If there's two duplicate records, AI is probably just going to grab one, and you're not going to get the insights you need, right? So we need to get it really cleaned up. So we're doing a lot more because of that. And then two, because AI has made it cheaper to clean up data. So like, what used to be a million dollar client is much easier. Now I can say, great, go get all accounts. Go get the industry. If I need that industry broken down. I don't know, say that you're banking, but you want to know if it's like a regional bank or a national bank or whatever, I can actually tell AI, go to the website and come back and with 95% confidence, tell me of what kind of bank it is, and that used to be data analyst, crazy amounts of work, and it's cheap now, and we can get data points we never got before, which is really fun, like I can go to your website, check your pricing page and tell you whether or not that company has a usage base. Model that's a huge interesting thing for companies I don't know, like a CPQ tool or a billing tool to know that and segment and message on that. So we're doing a lot more, which, AI is helping us get hard to find data points and normalize things in a much cheaper way. So we're doing a lot more of that work, which then leads to more interesting messaging and marketing and segmentation in place. I also

Sean Lane 15:24
feel like getting that data foundation in place, certainly, you know, tees you up to do more interesting things with AI, like you said, but it's also giving people a little bit more of a clear path to anything that has to do with product usage, right? Which I feel like is also, like, kind of been something that people have always said is important, but to your point, have never actually made the full investments in or just like, maybe a smaller subset of companies have. And so, like, I can't tell you how many conversations every week I have where they're like, we know what we really need is a great health score. So yeah, what you actually need is the data about how your customers use your product to inform that health score, right? And so how do you all attack that when you see people who have that particular problem? Because now you know there are more creative ways to potentially solve it, but you still need to get all that plumbing in place before you do anything else. Yeah, you

Jen Igartua 16:14
do when it comes to plg. And I don't focus just on like, how do I get free trials converted? Yeah, it's okay if you don't have a plg flow like that. Any product company has an expansion flow where you can leverage product data. So like, this is sometimes when people hear plg, they tune out because they're like, Oh, we're not a product led company. And it's like, well, you have a bunch of data, and you're expanding. If you're only expanding at renewal, you're expanding too late. And so there's use cases for everybody. The way that I think about it is there's that data collection piece, and it's not just product data, because you should be mixing and matching. People are actually pretty good at that. Most of your tools do that for you. You're collecting product usage. You're also collecting what websites are visiting. You have third party data, like the tools do this so that you have that, then it's about actually changing that into signals. So how am I transforming data into signals that matter? And a lot of that is and or criteria, and grouping these things. And when we test that out, if somebody doesn't have this infrastructure in place before we run and we try to do it, I like to do list upload plays with, like, some SDRs, and just like, let's see if this really does convert higher than anything else. And let's get the a couple of wins, then everybody's on board. Then I have a whole organization saying, Yep, let's do this at scale. And then I can go say, well, it's going to cost you 100 grand to go fix these systems in a way so I can do this, you know, much more automated. I work with mid market and enterprise level companies. They, most of them, Have the plumbing, frankly, like they have, you know, product collecting, collecting all these data points, and they may not have it in the right data model. They may have hundreds of fields on the account record and the contact record, and I got to go tell them. They got to put it somewhere else. Typically, I've got the plumbing. And I'll tell an interesting kind of I wish I could take credit, but the folks at intercom are very smart. They do a lot. They're like, they push themselves on design thinking and really getting in the shoes of their customers. And they have a whole play, for example, about customers who have a decrease in their CSAT score, which is like, what intercom should help you? They should help you have really high customer satisfaction. And so they're seeing that decreasing, and then they're seeing an increase in the number of seats. So that starts to tell you, and conversations that starts to tell you like, okay, so their team is blowing up. Their company's doing really well, but their customers are feeling the pain of that. Well, isn't that such an easy pitch for me to be like, Hey, Sean, I noticed your team grew by 25% this year, and you had over 6000 conversations last quarter, but your CSAT score is decreasing. That sounds very similar. To fill in the blank of a company in your industry. Do you want to have a chat about how they used AI fin to solve this problem? I'm taking that call and, you know, use those actual data points, right? So, like, it's not just like I saw your CSAT decreasing and your conversations increasing, it's like it decreased by three points and, you know, increased by 25% like, you need that raw, you know, kind of number, because then you're giving your customer insights. So how do you create those plays across the board? So that's one play multiple at the same department, your champion user got deactivated. Like you have all that stuff, and that's what I mean that I think is the big change right now is we can do this stuff in pockets. Now I can run that play for 25 people, and it's still worth it, because if you create that infrastructure, you can, you know, and it'll run forever, but like, it used to be where we would be, like, we're not going to do that for 10 people. Now we can. I also

Sean Lane 19:35
think that in that scenario, there was probably a smart strategic ops person who is looking for those particular signals, or looking for opportunities for upgrade, expansion, net retention, whatever, yep, who then connected those dots, right? And so for the ops people listening to this like, to your point, maybe they've got the plumbing in place, but they're not really doing. Doing much with the product usage data, or they haven't kind of codified a play like the one you just described. Like, help them. How do they go from, hey, you've got this treasure trove of data, to actually doing something that is going to drive business outcomes for your company?

Jen Igartua 20:15
Yeah. Okay, so this is one of those where sometimes the pinnacle, or the way people talk about this feels so far from where you are that it's demotivating. And you want to be like, Okay, well, I want this machine learning AI to identify these expansions and send these and nobody's doing it like that. And if they are telling you that they're doing it like that, either introduce them to me or they're lying. And so you know, it's not that I actually have found, if we were to create a little pyramid where that's at the top, the bottom is conversations with your sales team. So like first things, first, go talk to sales and CS and find out who do they want to talk to. What are use cases that you're seeing, what's kind of a interview them about the last three customers they spoke. And your human brain is so good, you'll come up with five or six use cases. And guess what? Those, even when we start doing the more fancy analytics, end up performing really well, because they're the low hanging fruit, the stuff you know, all the ones that I sort of mentioned, you know, your customer just, you know, understand what gaps and what you're solving, and try to identify in product usage, what it tells you, and you're going to do really well there. Then you can get into places like, okay, great. I'm going to do some, like, basic regression analysis and figure out, like, what features you know, are people using that always end up going to the higher tier. I'm not saying that that stuff's not smart and important. I'm just saying you don't have to even go there to get value. And then once you come up with some of those theories, it's that growth marketing mindset I was talking about, some of them are going to fail. And so how do you set up the organization to say, Hey, I'm testing out five. I expect two to fail. But let's go and try to run these plays for six weeks, and then we should deprecate and, like, create new ones all the time. And you do need, like, the machine to identify and send that alert over to sales. Sure you need good buy in to say, Great. What's the play? How are you converting those and tracking it? I'm not suggesting it's super simple, but you can do one or two in a more manual way to get the win.

Sean Lane 22:14
I hope you're taking notes, because Jen is literally handing out plays that you can go run at your companies right now, and she's breaking down the building blocks to get there. You need your product usage, plumbing in place. You need clean data, and then you need a spark of creativity to help come up with the plays that you want to test, leveraging the data that and the humans that you have available to you. And don't discount what she said about folks being too intimidated to even get started. I know that that happens to me. There's so many tools available, so much noise about all of this supposed cutting edge work that people are doing, it can be tough to even know where to begin, so folks fall back on processes and strategies that they know. But Jen says, just ship it, and she's not really focused on her own internal innovation at go nimbly, right? So I wondered how she came to land on this way of thinking, and how she instills it in her team.

Jen Igartua 23:14
This is gonna get a little nerdy about services, so I apologize, but I'm really passionate about it, so maybe it'll be interesting. I made a lot of mistakes early on building an agency where I was very focused on, like, changing the way that we did business. So whether that's like packaging up and it being like, what if we did it in points instead of hours, and what if we automated the I don't know if we gave our clients a portal where they could check the hour billing and understand so that they were never shocked, and all this kind of stuff. And it's like I spent a lot of money trying to do these, like innovative, if you're listening this, I do it in hand quotes, because it's not very innovative type of work to make our services better. And it turns out that actually what I need to do is hire really incredible people define frameworks that they can play within, and hire great project managers that are communicating so often that like nobody wants to log in and see how their hours are pacing. This isn't an at&t phone bill, and I was just focused in the wrong space. I read a very nerdy book called Managing a professional services firm, which anyone that wants to run an agency should read. And you know, it talks about like this is all really well defined. Scaling an agency is a science, and you can follow a playbook that's already existed. And in my opinion, it's not the place where we need to innovate. The only thing I would say is there's some talk and pressure about, hey, any company, any agency, that doesn't adopt AI, will be left behind. I think it's a little bit of fear mongering right now, and I do think that that's going to be true in a while. But right now. So it's not coming up in my sales cycles. I'm not like, getting asked, like, Hey, how are you guys internally using AI? It's much more interesting to say how we're doing it with our customers. How are we implementing AI to help sales and marketing teams at our customers? And it's also, I don't think there's that much lift right now. I think we're still kind of early. Our team has access to AI. They have Gong which has AI in it, I give them all superhuman like I'm giving them the tools to be really productive. But that's the big thing I'm doing, is I'm saying, Let me I don't need to go build my own AI right now. I need to go figure out how to use the stuff we already have and get our employees really focused on being customer obsessed and diving really deep into their customers processes.

Sean Lane 25:41
I do think that that's probably incredibly attractive to the folks that you're hiring right, and quite freeing and empowering right when they come and they're on your team, and it's really all about being innovative for your clients, right, instead of having to worry about like, the internal process or the new, next level thing, I agree with you that I think a lot of the like, fear mongering to use your word around AI and services, like, is probably a little over hyped. It is a little anxiety inducing though. Like, how do you think that will change? Not even so much from, like, again, internally how your team works, but like, how your clients view the work, right? It's like, well, I could just go and ask chat GPT how to do this in Salesforce, right? What like? How do you think about that balance in the future?

Jen Igartua 26:25
If I thought that that's the reason why companies hired me, I'd be scared. But it's not. They're not hiring it because they don't know how to do it themselves. It's because they don't have the bandwidth, because they don't even know how to ask that question, and because they want to know how other companies have done it before, and a lot of the work that we're doing is really tough architecture that AI can't You're not popping in and saying, How do I increase the conversion of my upsells in renewals at my company? Chatgpt Go help me. Like, if I was selling something very commoditized, I think maybe I'd be more scared. But I'm selling business transformation. I hate saying that. It's like very it's like, so cliche, but I am selling like, hey, let's transform your whole team. Let's take you on a journey. There's a lot of enablement, there's a lot of stakeholder management, and frankly, like, if the client was asking me, Hey, how do I change this report filter? Yeah, I'm gonna leave that on that now. Yeah, but that's a very more, frankly, too expensive to be kind of case managers. Watching

Sean Lane 27:33
how this thinking evolves in both products and services businesses is gonna be super interesting in the next few years, but I buy Jen's response for two reasons. One, because she understands her customers really well, and two, she's incredibly confident in the value that her team provides. If either of those weren't true to her point, she'd probably be in trouble. And you have to admire a CEO who simultaneously sets this crystal clear direction for her organization, while at the same time being so well versed in the nitty gritty details of the newest trends that are impacting her team and her customers, she doesn't have to be as in the know as she is running a 60 person agency. So I wanted to know how she stays so plugged in? Well,

Jen Igartua 28:21
I think I'm just curious about it, like I'm passionate about building an agency, and I'm also passionate about go to market efficiency at SAS companies. And so in some ways, I'm probably just I'm curious, and I'm getting in. And then the other thing is, we've created, I don't know a rhythm around sharing these stories. So every week on our all hands, somebody pops on and tells a story, and I interview them. And so I'm getting a sense of like, okay, why did you do it that way, and what's going on and what was hard about it? So I'm staying on top of it there while having a I don't want to get looped in, like, the moment I get wrapped into a project. I'm like, also, I'm not that good. I'm not that good anymore. Don't put me in your systems, I can give you a sense of like, Hey, here's where the industry's going. Here are the interesting projects. Here's what everybody else is doing it. But if you put me in a position right now to integrate product and Salesforce, I'm gonna do it like I did it 10 years ago, and it's not gonna be that great. And so I also just like, I'm lucky that I've hired some really incredible architects.

Sean Lane 29:19
You just exposed. The whole reason why this show exists is to, like, keep me, keep me in the loop on what's going on. Honestly.

Jen Igartua 29:25
Yeah, interviewing people is, like, such a huge leg up. It's why I'm podcast curious, but I don't want to do the work.

Sean Lane 29:34
But you guys are also gonna start sharing some stories on a broader scale, right? You're gonna have a conference. I'm gonna have a

Jen Igartua 29:40
conference. So scary, so exciting. I wrote this in my vision, 2025 I wrote it in 2020 and it was like, Where is this like? Before I wrote it in January, 2020 I did not know, and I had on there that I wanted to do a conference. I didn't know we wouldn't have events for years. And I. I just had a it was pretty simple. It was like, I want to go have a conference where revenue operators and go to market leaders are really eager to go. That's like, creative and blends, like, the two worlds that I love. Like, I make board games, right? And I I go to conferences for board games that are really exciting and really fun. I really love comedy. My boys a stand up comic. I'm at comedy shows, like, multiple times a week. And like, how do I create a conference where it's not like, boring, but also like, you're there to do business and meet people, so it's also like, you're not going to go see a circus act. So like, I'm really trying to blend those two worlds. And I think the fact that I know about how to run game conferences, I think it's giving me a little bit of, like a an interesting leg up. So it's called Rev fest. It's June 10. It's at House of, yes, if you know it in Brooklyn, which is like, it's like a nightclub. It's like a really cool event space. And I'm kind of mixing and matching both really incredible operators. You heard all our clients that I kind of talked about. So it's like putting them on stage, plus having a couple comedians and some things that make it real fun, and a free tattoo bar, like a real tattoo bar, if you want to go get tatted up, it's basically just me trying to get tattoos for free. And I think expensive awesome. Find

Sean Lane 31:14
ways to embed it in your life. I love it. Well, we'll have to put a link for the conference in the show notes so folks can can check it out. And first one was, it would be exciting, yeah, the beginning of a new tradition for you.

Jen Igartua 31:25
Yeah, turns out another job that I signed, yeah, but it's been fun.

Sean Lane 31:38
Before we go, at the end of each show, we're gonna ask each guest the same lightning round of questions. Ready? Here we go. Best book you've read in the last six months?

Jen Igartua 31:47
Ooh, okay, I read, oh my god. What was it called? It's a fiction book. Oh, crap. Well, I'll just explain it, and then maybe somebody can find it. It's a story about a Pakistani family in Brooklyn, and their story. I think it's called, like, woman is power or something like that. But if everybody here is on a business kick, I will say Brave New Work is a book I'm reading by chapter by chapter, but it talks about how to, like, create a company by breaking down like, all the pillars, from like compensation to meetings to strategy. So if you want to get nerdy, you can watch that one

Sean Lane 32:25
favorite part about working in ops.

Jen Igartua 32:28
I think I would say going live like, I love, like, the actual deployment, and being like, it's here we did it. So like taking it to the finish line and actually seeing something

Sean Lane 32:39
through that's awesome. I am surprised. I don't think anyone's ever said that just going live. I like that. Though

Jen Igartua 32:46
the best feeling to be like, Ah, it's there. People could see it.

Sean Lane 32:50
Flip Side. Least favorite part about working in OPS,

Jen Igartua 32:54
I think it's the pressure of like, not being able to balance the fires to actual important and strategic work. And I think it's a bigger issue that we have where our attention spans, our human brains, are not very good and not very practiced at doing deep work these days. And what that means is that the shiny object of someone pinging you and saying, Hey, can you create this thing real quick? We're leaning towards that too much. And I think that, like that, friction is a very annoying and very real part of being in an ops team. You got to keep the machine running, and it means you deprioritize all the cool stuff we

Sean Lane 33:33
could do. A whole episode just on that, just on that, along someone who impacted you, getting to the job you have today, there

Jen Igartua 33:39
is a gentleman named Shane Sardi. I grew up next to him. I babysat his kids, and he got me the job at Blue Wolf, my first ever job, and he even negotiated a better salary for me on my behalf when we started. That's

Sean Lane 33:55
amazing.

Jen Igartua 33:56
And it was I actually thought I wanted to become a jewelry designer, and I went into that hated it, and I was packing my car up and moving to New York, and he called me and he's like, Hey, you want a job at Blue Wolf? And I was like, okay, yeah, I need to leave what I'm doing. And that really spearheaded my career.

Sean Lane 34:15
That's amazing. I feel like the blue wolf mafia is very much. Oh yeah, it's big. Yeah. Last one, one piece of advice for people who want to have your job someday, ooh,

Jen Igartua 34:27
oh, are you sure that's a fair answer? I really, I really love it. Anybody that

wants to build an agency, I would say, if you're starting at zero and you want to hire or, like, get your first customer is like, say it out loud to people. Tell people what you're great at, and what will happen is someone will hear in the grapevine that somebody's looking for an expert in the thing, that you're there, and you'll get that phone call. And so start talking about it.

Sean Lane 34:59
You. Thanks so much to Jen for joining us on this week's episode of operations. As we talked about in the show, Jen and her team at go ni are running their first conference. It's rev fest. It's on June 10. It's at the house of yes in Brooklyn. You should go and check it out if you're a rev ops leader, if you're a go to market leader, this is going to be very much worth your time. You can check it out by looking@revfest.go nimbly.com. That's revfest.go. Nimbly.com. If you, like we heard today, make sure you're subscribed to our show so you get a new episode in your feed every other Friday. Also, if you've learned something from Jen today or from any of our guests, make sure you leave a six star review on Apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts, six star reviews only. All right, that's gonna do it for me. Thanks so much for listening. We'll see you next

Unknown Speaker 35:47
time.