Jason Moore: Selling SaaS into Healthcare

How do you start a company? When do you know it's time to ask for help? And why do early stage founders ignore the needs of operational excellence? These are just a few of the topics I covered with entrepreneur and successful tech founder Jason Moore.

Jason was a co-founder of Stratasan, a healthcare tech platform that helps hospitals learn where to grow revenue. Stratasan was acquired by Syntellis in 2022, which in turn was acquired by Roper Technologies in 2023.

Key takeaways:

• The transition from being a CEO, who needs to do everything, to one who can turn over responsibility to better managers.

• What it's like to make 500 cold calls and why it's worth the effort.

• Why quality of conversations is more important than the where your opportunity sits in the sales pipeline.

• Being able to work through ambiguity is the most important attribute for entrepreneurial success

• Advice to his 23 year-old self: Push through the hard times and keep people close; don't lose your focus on them.  

Transcript

Tom Noser (00:00):
How do you start a company? When do you know it's time to ask for help? And why do early stage founders ignore the needs of operational excellence? These are some of the questions I ask entrepreneur and successful tech founder Jason Moore. Jason is the founder of Stratasan, a healthcare tech platform that helps hospitals learn where to grow revenue. Stratasan was acquired by Syntellis in 2022. Jason talks about the transition from being a CEO, who needs to do everything, to one who can turn over responsibility to better managers, what it's like to make 500 cold calls and why it's worth the effort, and why quality of conversations is more important than the stage your opportunity is in, in the sales pipeline on this episode of the Fortune's Path Podcast.

(00:54)
Jason, it's so good to see you. Thank you for coming.

Jason Moore (00:58):
Yeah, good to see you again, Tom. Thanks for having me.

Tom Noser (01:01):
Yeah, absolutely. So, you have quite a bit of experience selling SaaS into healthcare, that's correct?

Jason Moore (01:09):
Yeah, that's correct. About 15 years.

Tom Noser (01:12):
15 years? And what advice would you have for somebody who is just starting down that road?

Jason Moore (01:20):
SaaS in general, sales is a long road. It does not start quickly for anyone, that's for sure. So SaaS sales is really something that you have to be prepared to play a longer game. There's a lot of sales roles that can have probably quicker wins than SaaS, but just the business model in general, it takes some time to ramp up and then you add the industry of healthcare to that, it's going to be a slow process at the beginning. Even if you're with a really successful company with good product market fit, it's going to take some time, because healthcare, for good reason, takes a really long time to make decisions, because wrong decisions in healthcare can be very detrimental in a lot of ways. So I think that's my first bit of advice for software sales in healthcare is to have patience.

Tom Noser (02:15):
Did you start out as a salesperson in your career? What was the first job you ever had?

Jason Moore (02:20):
It was always client facing. The first job I ever had was also the last job I ever... Or the first job I had, post-college, was the last job I had prior to starting my own companies. It was a good experience to know that I probably was never going to be a very good employee, so I might as well start a company, but I was a sales engineer, so basically a sales assistant for a aluminum die casting company that was a tier one supplier to the automotive world. That was a long time ago. That lasted about 14 months. And then I helped start a SaaS company in Atlanta, Georgia, in the year 2000, right when the bubble burst, right when no one had any faith in hosting anything and we were selling into the education space, so K-12 school districts. So that was a tough row to hoe then. So I was really client facing in the sense of sales and customer support and retention, but we were only three people.

Tom Noser (03:21):
What's the worst market, education or healthcare?

Jason Moore (03:25):
They both have their pros and cons for sure. Actually they're pretty similar, in the sense of the pros are once you get in and if you are delivering quality product, you pretty much stay in. Retention can be... You do have to do your job and deliver the value that you said, but retention can be pretty high. The cons are slow decision processes. I would say the pro healthcare over K-12 education is just budget. There's just much more budget in healthcare than there is in education at this point, for the type of stuff that we were doing.

Tom Noser (04:07):
Is there more autonomy in decision making?

Jason Moore (04:13):
Oh, that's tough. I think that is determined case-by-case, like entity-to-entity, and usually by size. So in healthcare, if you're working with a multi-state national health system, there's not a whole lot of autonomy there, in the sense that there's a lot of approval processes. But if you're working with a small urgent care clinic or even an urgent care that has 50 plus locations, there can be a lot of autonomy in decision making. Same with school districts. A small school district, director of technology or director of maintenance or whoever we were selling to, they had their budget and if they stayed within it, there was some autonomy there. Now, there was no scoping out a budget with education. There can be money found in healthcare, but education you fit within the budget or you don't.

Tom Noser (05:05):
Interesting. So you had, a little bit ago, you mentioned that you discovered that you weren't going to make a particularly good employee. What was the origin of that discovery?

Jason Moore (05:19):
I was a brash mid-20s, thought I knew a whole lot more than I did. I just really liked solving problems and I was in a pretty large organization for my role and experience, in the sense that I grew up in a small town. So, my big companies were not necessarily big companies, what I thought were big companies. And when you identify things that really could be done better and there's really no sense in not making it better other than; well, that's just not how we do it, that was entirely frustrating to me and I just felt like it was going to be a better track for me to go maybe a different route and maybe prove to see if I could do it a little bit better.

Tom Noser (06:12):
So how did you start that first business? Did you have a client first? Did you have friends first? Did you have an idea first? How'd you start that first business?

Jason Moore (06:19):
Yeah, I'm not much of an idea guy, so I'm more of an operator and two friends of mine from college, I was living in Cincinnati with that job, and they kept trying to get me to come back to move to Atlanta and my mantra became basically; well, I'll move back there when we start a company together. So there was really no rhyme or reason. I remember I was driving back from Dayton to Cincinnati from a client and it was I think a particularly frustrating day. And the guy had called me on my drive back and once again said, "So when are you going to move back down to Atlanta?" I said, "Same answer." He goes, "Well, that's why I was calling." I go, "Well, do you have a business model or something on what you're wanting to start?"

(07:09)
So the entirety of the business model was legitimately like a paragraph and a half and he sent it to my email that I got when I got home, I read it and I called my boss that night and said, "Hey, how long do you need to get somebody in the market and for me to train?" And he wasn't very happy that I was leaving, but I stayed on for eight weeks or so. And about eight weeks later, I bought a car in a Walmart parking lot, because I had a company car at the time, so I didn't own a car. So I bought a car and literally the next day I moved to Atlanta with basically all of my earthly possessions in a little car and slept on couches for a little while. And we started this company, we didn't know what we were doing, but we were young and dumb and without really responsibility, so we were able to pull it off.

Tom Noser (07:59):
Do you recommend that? I have some critiques about very young founders, young CEOs. I think it's just not an awesome idea to give people with no experience a lot of responsibility, but some people seem to think it's a fantastic idea. What's your thought on age, experience in starting a business?

Jason Moore (08:26):
I would have a hard time investing in a company that was made up of the three people that founded our first one, that's for sure, if that lines up with what you're saying. One of my biggest weaknesses I think is I've never had big company experience. There are a lot of lessons to be learned with that type of experience. So really I had that job for a small bit and then started my first company and I've done that since then. So I do think that there were times where I was weaker as a leader and as a visionary or whatever you want to call that, because I didn't have more corporate type experience.

(09:09)
Starting a company, do I recommend it at a young age without experience? Sure. Do it when you don't have... I have five children and a wife, I certainly wouldn't recommend to do it now with the way I did it several years ago, several decades ago. But yeah, I think it's really good experience. I remember the first time I heard that there was an entrepreneur major at a college. I thought that was the most ridiculous idea ever, in the sense that I didn't really understand what the curriculum would be. Was there just a cold calling class that all you did was just get hung up on for a semester? If you could get hung up on 500 times within a month and a half, then-

Tom Noser (09:58):
You get an A.

Jason Moore (09:59):
... you would get an A. I feel like I went to that class. But now, I do... My son actually is at UT, Knoxville, now and he's a business major with a focus on entrepreneurship and I read through his curriculum and we talk about it a lot. And there are lots of things to learn, but honestly it's like parenthood. Until you have kids, you don't know and until you try it, you don't have to be the founder, you don't have to be the one risking at all, but until you're that first five employee, I just don't think you can gain that experience without that.

Tom Noser (10:40):
Let's talk a little bit about product market fit. That description of the first five employees takes me to that topic. So that first business with those three guys, was it successful?

Jason Moore (10:54):
We ran it for 10 years, we bootstrapped it. So yeah, it wasn't a big monetary success. It's counted as an exit, but I certainly had to go to work that same night. It wasn't a break, but it was successful. We learned a ton. We had a lot of really happy customers throughout the country and so yeah, it was successful, but it wasn't a monetary success by... It's still running.

Tom Noser (11:24):
That sounds like a huge success.

Jason Moore (11:26):
Yeah, it was. I think there weren't any glowing articles written about it, but yeah, we bootstrapped it. We did not know what we were doing and we learned a ton. We really kept the client at the forefront at all times. So I think that kept us alive for a long time. And it definitely led to a really good learning experience.

Tom Noser (11:49):
There've been a lot of glowing articles written about FTX and it's a catastrophe.

Jason Moore (11:53):
No doubt. I still have funds tied up in that.

Tom Noser (11:56):
My definition of a success for a business isn't that it makes a shit ton of money for the founders or the investors. It's that it provides a good life for the people who are involved in that business. I think that... Anyway, that's my idea of success. So how did you get to product market fit in that business?

Jason Moore (12:24):
So this is a... In the first one?

Tom Noser (12:26):
Yeah.

Jason Moore (12:27):
It was a long time ago. So this was in 2000, 2001, really early stage. I'm not even sure if SaaS was a coined term yet by Salesforce.

Tom Noser (12:37):
Yeah, it wasn't.

Jason Moore (12:37):
We were active server pages, hosted application, whatever you want to call it. So, I think product market fit was actually a little easier back then, because what we were doing, and we did this a few times decently successfully, is we would go into a place and look for paper processes. And if you can take that paper process and make it electronic and then also just host it for them, which we were doing, that was where it was. So as long as we were able to zoom out far enough to not make it specific to Tom's particular process, but also not far enough out where you-

Tom Noser (13:21):
Didn't recognize it.

Jason Moore (13:23):
... Tom then had to change your process to fit ours, getting in there, that was what we did. We built a platform that had a lot of tech debt, a whole lot of configuration tabs in it that became a Frankenstein to maintain over time. Our technical founder, he had a really good sense at the beginning to make everything a configuration instead of customization. So even though it became this Frankenstein monster, it did work. It took a little bit of time to set people up and when I say a little bit of time, it really wasn't that much. We were fortunate that he had that mindset of; don't make that a customization. We're going to make it a configuration. It did get a little messy and ugly, but it allowed for us to scale to some degree.

Tom Noser (14:24):
Do you think those early technical decisions can have an outsized downstream impact?

Jason Moore (14:31):
Oh, a hundred... It's probably downstream to scaling, it's more important than the side of the business that I would run, which would be the go to market stuff. You obviously have to get to go to market to survive, but if you fast-forward to Stratasan, my last company, my co-founder Brian Dailey, he's the reason we were able to get to a nine figure exit and it was those early decisions. Now he would say that... He gives me a lot of credit just for saying, "I trust you and just do what you're doing," because we were writing in... And he wanted to write something in Python, because he thought it was interesting and it was brand new basically, but it was the right decision and he wasn't just willy-nilly doing it, but it was an experiment. So we took that experiment and it really, really worked. He's not a bleeding edge technologist, but he is also not the lagger. So it was really a good balance and those decisions even early on, but even midterm and even late, made it where we were a desirable target.

Tom Noser (15:46):
Just talk about Stratasan. So, tell me about the origin of that company. Where'd the idea of it come from?

Jason Moore (15:52):
I was still with the company in Atlanta, but I'd moved to Nashville about seven years prior for personal reasons. And when I was starting, I put together a little advisory group. So, I had decided that I wanted to move on from the other company and get to something that was more Nashville based, so I could get more in the community, which was very nascent at the time. And there were three industries in Nashville, healthcare being the number one. There's publishing and there's music. I can't sing or play any instruments. I didn't even know that book publishing was still a thing. And then there was this healthcare thing that I knew nothing about. Literally, I'd never worked in healthcare before I started Stratasan.

(16:41)
I started networking, going to healthcare events and really meeting people. And Nashville is an unbelievable community for that, for a nobody like me that isn't from town and doesn't know anything. But there were just a lot of open people to really be willing to share what they know and share what they've learned. So I ended up cobbling together these four or five, what I would consider, advisory board members for whatever company I was going to launch. And one of them, well actually all of them, I'd been gathering ideas. I bet I had 52 different concepts on the whiteboard, all other people's ideas, because once again, I didn't know the industry and we had narrowed it down to this one particular idea, which ended up becoming Stratasan. And really strangely, Tom, the 12-year journey, we really were still delivering what we generally had set as our north star at the very beginning. We didn't know what form it would take and what it would exactly look like, but we actually stayed on that course. We did not have to pivot off of that the whole time.

Tom Noser (17:53):
If you were going to say that problem on that whiteboard, those 52 different problems that you're thinking about solving, first tell me what the problem you chose was, and then talk to me about how you chose that problem to solve.

Jason Moore (18:06):
Basically what we did, and remember this was not today, this is 12, 13, 14 years ago, data was going to be growing in accessibility. We knew that. And as much as people get excited about that concept, it's not necessarily a good thing to have more and more data. So how would we aggregate that data and curate that data into slices of data that we could then build applications on top of. Very specifically though, we wanted to focus on top line growth, so growth of patients, growth of patient capturement, repeat satisfaction scores, instead of the downside, the cost-cutting. So we were really wanting to focus on growth measures. So, we wanted to take all of the data out there, including all the way down to our own customers' de-identified patient data, mesh that all up and build scalable applications on top of that.

Tom Noser (19:07):
It's interesting. That does feel like some good decisions early on. I'll explain a little bit why I think so. Most of the successful healthcare businesses that I know are focused on cost-cutting. And so if you're focusing on top line revenue growth, that feels like a differentiator. Was it?

Jason Moore (19:29):
It was a story that not a lot of people were telling. There were players. There were certainly people that were doing this type of thing, but it wasn't their focus and typically the people that were doing it were really behemoths and this wasn't their main point. So that was advantageous, but it also, there were roadblocks to it too, or at least speed bumps, because there wasn't always budget carved out for it. So sometimes it had to be new money, it didn't always have to be new money, but many times we had to educate, like; no, there is a reason that you want to spend money on this, because it's going to help you grow your business or industry or whatever.

Tom Noser (20:11):
How did you discover who your internal champions were going to be? So I'm assuming that this sale required somebody to be a true believer on the inside, is that correct?

Jason Moore (20:20):
Definitely. At the time, it was a combination of either strategic planning, so that was really the people that were targeted with really understanding their markets, either end market growth or going out into new markets and market expansion. At the time, the strategic planners were a lot of times losing budget and being merged with marketing. And that was actually, it caused some ripples, but I think in the end it really helped us, because marketing would have more budget.

(20:58)
The strategic planners, many times would become the marketing lead, so this was really important to them. Other times the strategic planning, the lead strategic planner or the champion would get dismissed and the marketing person would be over the top of that. Sometimes that would hurt in the sense of; yeah, we need to just spend more, buy more billboards or whatever it may be. Other times it's like; actually we need you all, because you're going to keep us from having to hire a four or five person strategic planning team. Your software would do much of that, so we can keep one strategic planner or two strategic data analysts, whatever it may be, and your software is going to empower us to have that function without having the bodies.

Tom Noser (21:44):
Marketing and healthcare I believe is different than marketing in just about any other business, if you're talking about healthcare providers. Was there an education process of getting them to understand that it's not so much where the billboard is as it is where the doctors are?

Jason Moore (22:04):
Yes, there was always an education to that and we really took the stance that our client for that particular scenario or something similar, they were smarter than we were. We didn't know your market as well as you did by any stretch, and it is a combination. And luckily, I think we had some helpful tools for both of those aspects, Tom, in the sense of where your patients are located is critically important, because where they're located is where they're probably going to see the physician. It's going to be decently geographically tied. And because that really is the hub of referrals upstream to your larger, higher acuity services, so you really had to work the trail up and down. It wasn't about marketing your hospital's name as much as it was attracting physician referrals and creating those relationships with them and making sure they're healthy.

Tom Noser (23:11):
We're going to try and go back 12 years to that time when you were looking at the whiteboard with the 56 ideas on it, do you remember what decision criteria you used to land on Stratasan's strategy?

Jason Moore (23:27):
Honestly, I actually didn't like this idea. I didn't like this idea as the final one. It was in the final three. And not being from healthcare, I just couldn't believe that what we were trying to pull off wasn't really being done in a meaningful way. So I just didn't know how good the opportunity was. I knew it was a valid idea or I felt like it was a valid idea, but I just didn't know how much we could compete. So we ended up launching two companies, one of those didn't last. You don't know the name of that one. Actually, I tried to tell somebody the name of it a couple of weeks ago and I fumbled around five different versions and I really actually don't remember what the company's name was.

(24:18)
It was one of those things where, okay, there's not a paper process here, like my previous company, but there are processes here that are not perfectly ubiquitous, but they're needed across whether you're a small hospital, maybe not a critical access, but if you're serving a rural community all the way up to the largest national providers in the country, there is a need here.

What excited me is if we were able to get a partnership or partnerships with some of the larger players, how could we learn from them, build into our tools some of their brains and know-how of this particular industry and provide a tool down to someone who could never afford all of the people that the larger systems had, but could use tools and SaaS-based, more efficient software to make some of the better decisions for those rural communities. So, there was some thought process there.

Tom Noser (25:23):
Was that your go-to-market about we need essentially a launch partner, somebody who's big and can give us a lot of intellectual, give us good advice, help us steer the product in the right direction, but we should go to market, our initial customers ought to be smaller or less complex organizations. Is that a reasonable summary?

Jason Moore (25:45):
Yeah, so my thought, my idea of go-to-market was what you said at the end, which was; hey, let's go to smaller markets and prove ourself, prove our worth, maybe get a mid-tier at some point. And that's not how it happened. And if the reverse wouldn't have happened, we wouldn't have survived. There's no way. We could not have survived long enough doing what I thought was the right go-to-market strategy. About two to three months after our original seed funding, I had a huge lucky bounce, had met somebody that had just been hired as the lead strategic planning department head from one national player to another and she was moved up in the slightly smaller national player. And because of that relationship, we ended up getting an RFP, we won an RFP up against the behemoths. It was the absolute behemoths. And I remember she called me one day, I just tried to build a relationship with her a little bit, and she goes, "Hey, I'm getting ready to put this out to RFP. I wanted to know if you would see it. You're not going to be able to answer it, you're not going to be able to do what it is. I just thought it might be helpful for you as you roadmap out what your software is going to do. It may be helpful for you to see what a national system like us are looking for."

Tom Noser (27:18):
What a favor.

Jason Moore (27:19):
Oh my gosh, I was jazzed. So this was a, I don't know, Thursday or Friday, the way I tell the story, it's a Thursday or Friday. I'm not sure if that's true. But I read through the RFP all weekend and really, it didn't take me all weekend, but it took me all weekend to think through; I actually think we can do this. She had built the RFP in a meaningful way where it was not going to launch for nine months, because they had it... Their only vendor for these services had been the vendor since inception of the company, which was 15 years [inaudible 00:27:57]. So she knew she had to build some lead time in if they were going to do a vendor change.

(28:01)
So I read through it and I really did, I'm like; we can absolutely build 85% of what's in this RFP, 100% of the critical things in the next nine months. That's absolutely true. And I gave myself pep talks all weekend about, I'm going to call her Monday and very sheepishly say, "Hey, I know you weren't planning... I was not planning on making this call and I know that wasn't your intent." And so I was going to call her Monday and Monday morning came and Monday went and I just couldn't get the nerve to call her. And Tuesday I was going to do it. Wednesday I finally call her and I said, "Hey, I think, if you don't mind, and there is zero pressure, and I understand that this is going to be more work on your RFP committee, but do you mind if we reply to the RFP? I'll be 100% transparent and honest on the things that we have, which is very, very little, the things that I know we can do in the next six months and the things that we'll need to wait, if that's okay" And she goes, "I will agree to let you fill out the RFP and submit it, but I want you to know that we are not selecting." I said, "Great."

Tom Noser (29:19):
Okay.

Jason Moore (29:19):
"But if you'll review it and let us know exactly... If you give us the node, then that'll help us." And I believed her. I thought we had a 0% chance of winning the RFP for reasons. And yada, yada, yada, we end up winning the RFP. We tried to get a three-year deal. I remember her boss's reply to us asking for a three-year deal was, "Why would we sign a three-year deal with a company that hasn't been in existence for a year yet?" I was like, "That's a good question. So how about two?" And we ended up getting a two-year deal with them. And that was actually what launched us off into really, once again, learning from people that really knew this industry, and tell us what they really truly needed. And were also good enough partners to know that we couldn't build a custom platform just for them. So it was a really, really... That set us off onto the path that we were and it fast-forwarded everything. Once again, I think if that wouldn't have happened, this massive lucky bounce, if that wouldn't have happened or if we wouldn't have gotten another large player like that early, my go-to-market strategy of going small and then building, I don't think we could have survived long enough to do it.

Tom Noser (30:40):
One of my favorite questions to ask, I'll ask you now, is can you actually sell software when it's ready, or are we always selling software before it's ready?

Jason Moore (30:54):
You absolutely have to sell it before it's ready, because honestly, without selling it, you don't know if it's ready or not. You got to get it in someone else's hands, you have to have it in someone's hands that can also turn it off. It's going to teach you so many lessons. But when you're selling that software, I think the key is being very transparent. These things are going to work and these things, we don't know if they're going to work, and these things aren't going to work. So, there are going to be features or capabilities in each of those buckets. And is that okay with you, the buyer, to know that there are things in those buckets? That middle bucket is the hardest one, with the ones that might work, because if you built it well, the ones that work will work, the ones that you know don't work, well, that's an easy one.

(31:49)
That middle one, which is like, "Hey, I know this is important to you and we think that the way that we've designed it based on your recommendation or whatever it maybe is going to work, but is it going to work with one of your locations and then when you add 50, is that going to break? Just the variances between different clients, is it going to work?" So that middle bucket is really, I think, where you earn your keep on being really open-minded, really wide-eyed, ears open, and working with your product and development teams, so be reactive and proactive at the same time. You can't stay in reactive mode very long or that's also going to kill you.

Tom Noser (32:26):
Let's take a company that was in a situation you're describing like Stratasan. Let's say they've been in business for four years, they've been through some renewal cycles, they've landed a couple of good-sized fish. Should they still sell that way, or do you need to mature into a different model?

Jason Moore (32:45):
Both. I don't like that answer-

Tom Noser (32:48):
That's all right. Tell me why, why both?

Jason Moore (32:50):
No, I think both. I think if you have one product, if you will, that's solving one particular thing, if you have four years in and you're still selling it like that particular version, then you're just building an avalanche of tech debt at some point that's going to just crash and burn. But if you're also not able to continue to scale and innovate on that particular product, your retention rates are going to be so low or they're going to be in danger of being low, that new sales are probably not going to be able to make up for your retention numbers being too low.

(33:37)
So you have to get solid in your application. I think that's really where building multiple applications, don't get too crazy, but systematically adding on cross-sell opportunities, letting one product mature while still innovating some, and then really looking at other jobs to be done, if you're Clayton Christensen, we were big on jobs to be done and you always had to balance; is this particular new thought or thought that's getting louder, is this something that needs to be a feature in an existing application, or is this actually a new application? And there are reasons for either one of those decisions to be made. And once again, having a strong product and technical team to help the salespeople calm down a little bit and; hey, I know there's dollars out there, but we need to think through how we execute on this. A feature may be able to be built in X number of sprints and a whole new application is X number of sprints times 10, but the benefits for the patients on that very well could outweigh the other benefits.

Tom Noser (34:53):
You were a CEO of Stratasan?

Jason Moore (34:56):
Yes.

Tom Noser (34:56):
What would you describe was your most important job? What was the most important thing for you to do as CEO of Stratasan?

Jason Moore (35:00):
It changes over time. Obviously the first several years it was revenue driving. So, the first, I don't know, five or six years, I would say, almost every dollar that came in was something that I had sold or pretty heavily involved in, maybe four years that's probably true. But it was time for me to pass those Legos off, to get somebody in that could do that better than I could, because as the company was growing... So sales and product were the early things, so we didn't have a product management team, so I was product management working with the co-founder and CTO, who was an unbelievable talent. So that, and then in the end I was basically vision setter and culture cultivator. Now our COO was my right-hand person and she was really the catalyst three years prior to acquisition to really start formulating our true operations, getting away from founders habits into more organizational discipline.

(36:17)
And that was the first time I saw operations be a good example of operations. Before, founders are good at getting off zero or successful founders are good at getting off zero and those habits that we have and then also influence other people to have are great. Getting the zero to one or 3 million or the first 20 customers, getting to 20 people and those things really start becoming the thing that's going to break you over time. And once again, about 2019, early 2020, when we moved, once again, our first real COO into that spot, that's when we got to be a real company, if you will, really scaling and really executing in ways that we wouldn't have if I were still meddling on a daily basis.

Tom Noser (37:16):
Is that a hard transition? Did you resist giving any of that authority up to a COO?

Jason Moore (37:20):
100%. It's virtually impossible. The only reason I would've said I couldn't do it, I was always willing, I always wanted to do it, but willing and then able are two different things. It's hard and you have to just fully trust. From the very beginning, our co-founder and CTO, our relationship was we didn't know each other prior and we had so much trust in each other. It was just an incredible gift to have each other. And then when... And I had a relationship like that with several people. We had a really good bonded team, and when she moved into the COO spot, that was when, she had been with us for four or five years prior to this, just in various roles, so I already had a high, high level of trust with her. So it was easier to hand those things off, to pass those off. And there were a lot of times when you do hand those things off, sometimes they don't work out and you get-

Tom Noser (38:32):
You get them back.

Jason Moore (38:32):
... more resistant. But then when you do get those little wins, it's really easier to continue to flow that towards someone else.

Tom Noser (38:41):
Interesting. So tell me a little bit about what you're doing now. You're no longer with Stratasan and you're doing something else now. What are you working on?

Jason Moore (38:52):
Actually that COO and me, post exit, we started an advisory firm called DNA Partners and we work with growth stage companies. Lo and behold, we really like doing that and we mainly focus on go-to-market with companies and also operational maturity. So her focus is on that operational maturity, mine's on go-to-market and we have some really fun clients. Talking to entrepreneurs is about as fun as it gets really and also can be very painful. When we're on these conversations or calls, they're typically set weekly calls that they bring the agenda and we have frameworks that we're picking and choosing from, and we'll add to the agenda at times, but it's really; what are you struggling with as a founder, CEO, operator, whatever it may be? Many times it's go-to-market, because revenue generation is the key and it's so difficult. So that's a big part of it.

(39:58)
But also I think, at least for me, early stage founders don't give enough credit to all the true operational things that aren't taking as... They don't need the front seat right at the beginning, because you just need to figure it out. But man, it's really hard to navigate that in the right rhythm, to add the right amount of operations at the right time. If you add it too late, you may be broken too much to fix it. If you add it too early, then you're going to stifle any innovation that can happen. So you really have to get good at rhythmically introducing more and more operational discipline over those founders habits. So blending that is a lot of fun. And being on those calls, I can feel the excitement, I can feel the pain and stress. And so a lot of those, they can be exhausting, but they're also super exhilarating.

Tom Noser (40:55):
Do you give advice down to the individual deal level? Will they come to you and they're like, "Well, we've got this in front of this decision maker, it's stalled out, we're not quite sure why it stalled. Can you help us get this one? We promised the board we're going to bring it in this quarter," blah, blah, blah. Do you get involved in that level?

Jason Moore (41:11):
That's not as common, but yeah, definitely. Because the thing is, is many times founders have never done that. Scar tissue, in the sense of like, "Yeah, we're definitely going to close this quarter." "Oh, great. So it's already in procurement." Like, "Oh, well, what's that?" [inaudible 00:41:36]. That's out. Let's go ahead and move that to the next quarter, because that's not going to happen. Things like if you back it up even from there, the founder who's not a salesperson is more of a technical, or an academic, or healthcare experience and has never really sold, but they're selling things, because they know it well enough, but they don't know what a sales discipline is.

(42:05)
One example is we were helping a company with their really first go go-to-market effort beyond the founder. The founder had done a great job. He'd sold I think 6 or 700,000 of ARR on his application. So he was doing something right, but his job description for his first sales hire was basically a higher level person than our last chief revenue officer was when we sold for nine figures. And I'm like, "This is not what you need. You need to get somebody with a shovel in their hand digging a ditch. You don't need another city planner that's telling you where to possibly dig a ditch." And so really reframing that stuff. If he would've gone down that path, that would've been a minimum of six months of heartache. They would've over hired at least by double on salary alone. So that was probably, hopefully, it was a 5 to $1.5 million mistake avoided and probably 6 to 18 months of trying to backtrack out of it. So, those are really fun to do.

Tom Noser (43:11):
To help somebody, because some of that, it's very simple advice, but as you say, it's worth quite a lot and it really comes more from experience of having done that before. It's interesting. So do you get down also to a level of sales operations? So if they're saying, "Well, we make 75 calls a day, we want to start changing 100 outbound calls a day per rep, and we've got the scoreboard up in the bullpen where everybody can see all the numbers up in the TV and we're giving away all that crap." Do you get into that level of detail with them, or what are your opinions on that sort of a sales culture?

Jason Moore (43:50):
You need discipline in a sales culture, period. And I was never a good sales person, because it was never my only job. It was never my exclusive job. And so I've never had the discipline or the rigor that a really good sales professional has. We don't get into the coaching of a rep, if you will, but we definitely get into the believability of KPIs. If you say that each deal is going to take 50 outreaches, well let's walk through that. Let's walk through that philosophically and then let's actually use that in real numbers. And what they find is that 50 outreaches to one deal is ridiculously too low, and it's probably going to be more like 500 outreaches to get to X number of actual conversations to get to X number of demos, which gets to X number of pilots, if you do pilots, and which gets X number of closed deals.

(44:57)
So the reality of those, that's the type of conversation we're having more. So what those stages look like and how long those stages are going to take on a consistent basis. And then once... There's a pipeline, which is the objective, where it is in the, hopefully you have a buying process pipeline, not a selling process pipeline. And then there's the forecast piece of it, and the forecast is where it is in the pipeline and also how you feel about the deal. It can be anywhere in a buying or selling process, but you can still have a feel for the deal. And early stage, anything sub 3 million probably, you don't have enough data for your pipeline to be accurately weighted.

Tom Noser (45:48):
Sure.

Jason Moore (45:49):
There's just not enough and you don't abandon the pipeline, but you have to include your forecast into your metrics, and that should say true forever, but early stage, your forecast is, I'm going to make up arbitrary numbers, 80% of the importance, and your pipeline is 20. Now later, when you're at 50 million in rev and you have a full team of salespeople and sales engineers and separate BDRs and functions, your pipeline is-

Tom Noser (46:22):
... pretty important.

Jason Moore (46:23):
... 80% the truth, 90% the truth and your forecast is the flavor. At early stage, if I ask that founder; is this deal going to close this quarter, in a real honest conversation, that means way more than what stage it's at in the pipeline. We're going to keep working it through the pipeline, but how do you feel? And that's really important early on, and I think that's missed a lot by non-operating investors, is, well, what's the pipeline saying? What's the spreadsheet saying? It's like, that's good. It's cute-

Tom Noser (46:57):
It's cute.

Jason Moore (46:58):
... but what are we going to do? And blending that is really important.

Tom Noser (47:05):
It's a bit like when you're developing a product and you make revenue estimates and you're like, "Oh, well there's this many people in the world and if we charge them each $2, we'll be rich."

Jason Moore (47:15):
Rich.

Tom Noser (47:17):
Was there ever a time in any of these companies where you were afraid you weren't going to be able to make payroll?

Jason Moore (47:24):
Oh, yeah.

Tom Noser (47:27):
I only have to pay myself and my wife, and she's very understanding.

Jason Moore (47:32):
No, I had two liens on my house, a lien on my house twice to make payroll. One was questionable. That was stressful. The second one was not as... The second one was just literally a cashflow timing basis. The money was legitimately coming and I think I had that [inaudible 00:47:54] lockout for nine days or something like that. The first one was-

Tom Noser (48:00):
A little tougher?

Jason Moore (48:01):
... that house was at risk.

Tom Noser (48:04):
How did you... Talk to me a little bit about that story, how you dealt with that, how you communicated with the people you loved about what was going on, what you told yourself.

Jason Moore (48:14):
Earlier you asked; would you recommend that? No. This particular one, no. But go try it without experience, yeah, sure, that's fine. I wouldn't recommend that. It worked out, but there were enough signs. I'm not actually... I know on the heels of what I just said, it's going to be hard to believe that I'm not actually a very risky person. I don't really follow a playbook, if you will, but the way I talked to my loved ones was walk through where my logical sense was on it, knowing that it wasn't 100% factual.

The second one was as 100% as you can get, but you worked through the ambiguity. Steve Case, the founder of AOL, also [inaudible 00:49:12], his whole tour of not the coast, but entrepreneurial hubs throughout the country, decade long, his number one attribute for entrepreneurial success, it's not your upbringing, it's not your brains, it's not anything. It's how good are you with ambiguity? Can you deal with ambiguity? How do you deal with it? Do you make fear-based decisions? Do you make whatever it may be? Or can you handle that and just stay true to course? And I was fortunate to have that particular quality, I think.

Tom Noser (49:50):
Being able to deal with ambiguity?

Jason Moore (49:52):
Yeah.

Tom Noser (49:53):
Do you feel that that extends to the rest of your life at all? Outside of business, do you feel like there's the ability to recognize that the ground under is may be not quite as firm as we think?

Jason Moore (50:04):
Man, I have five kids, so yeah.

Tom Noser (50:05):
Yeah.

Jason Moore (50:10):
I'm in quicksand at all times. My children range from 19 down to 7, so we're dealing with sophomore and college stuff, living three hours, three plus hours away from home and first grade stuff and some of the stuff all in between. So yeah, I think that the ambiguity has definitely shaped more than just the professional entrepreneurial side for sure.

Tom Noser (50:39):
So having an entrepreneurial father who has had a significant liquidity event, as they say, how do you think that's affected your kids?

Jason Moore (50:52):
So my oldest son, he's 19 and he's hyper curious with it. Actually, he told me the other day, I really was questioning; are you just trying to butter me up? Because he told me he wanted to get a cold calling job.

Tom Noser (51:12):
You've obviously spoken with admiration about cold calling.

Jason Moore (51:15):
Cold calling is the lifeblood, man. It's the lifeblood. It's the hardest... I think it might be the hardest job. It's just debilitating. But he said that, and I was like, "Oh, okay. Do you mean that? Because it's not going to be fun." And cold calling is different today. It's not just phone based. So he's hyper curious about it and he doesn't know anything. And so I balance, we talk about entrepreneurship quite a bit. Actually, my three oldest, 14, 16, and 19, there are conversations around entrepreneurship, almost... It's not just business talk. It's really about how you approach things and whether it's...

(51:58)
Actually, my 19-year-old called me the other day with an issue with his roommates. He lives off campus. There's four college boys living there, and I find out there's problems. It's messy or whatever. And he was asking me, he was like, "What do I do about this?" And honestly, I didn't totally make it a management conversation. I'm like, "You have to, one, if you take Brene Brown, be direct, because directness and honesty is kindness. So don't hide it, don't stifle it, because if you stifle it, you're just going to get mad and then explode at some point. So, wait until all's good and then bring it up and have a conversation about it, instead of a directive or instead of a fight, have a conversation about it." Because honestly, all of us have grown up with our parents cleaning up for us more than they should have. I did as well. I was guilty. So, honestly, come to find out that a Wendy's bag doesn't go away by itself. And there may be a general just lack of awareness, and that's the same with employees and employers, your manager and a direct reporter. Sometimes it's simply just a lack of awareness or not recognizing what the issue is. And if you just go with a bullheaded combat, it's probably not going to work out.

Tom Noser (53:39):
I feel like managing employees can be a little bit like, or managing customers for the same thing, can be a little bit like raising kids in the sense that I want all of them to be able to flourish without me, so I should be teaching them independence and not dependence. So I grew up in an entrepreneurial family, and my father had a successful company for many years. And so I can speak to it from the son's standpoint. And so the advice I would give is share as much of the dirt with them as you can. And they need to understand there's a high, at least this isn't true of all businesses, but I think of many businesses, there's a high degree of luck involved, and you have to put yourself in the opportunity to be lucky. So you're still responsible for... No one is going to come to you and give it to you.

(54:40)
Alec Baldwin talks about the show business commission. He said he knew friends when he was a young starving actor who seemed to be waiting around for the show business commission to bring them into the business. It's the same thing with the entrepreneurship commission. There is no one who's going to come to you and say, "We're going to bring you the business," but you can be in the field doing all the work and still fail, in the sense of how other people define failure in that you never get rich. So anyway, that's my unsolicited advice is to... I probably share maybe too much dirt with my kids, because they'll sometimes walk away like, "Man, he really sounds bummed."

Jason Moore (55:21):
Actually, I'm a pretty positive person, but I share a lot of dirt. I don't shy away from money talks, I never have, when we were super broke. And when our third child was born, we were qualified. It wasn't a lot of fun, but it was fun. I look back on that, and it was super fun times. And you said something... Oh, so one of my favorite sayings is, "People going to people." And whether that's kids, clients, investors, employees, employers, friends, people going to people, and when people do people, if you're super shocked and it throws you off kilter, that's on you. And people are going to people is not just negative. People also do amazing things, amazingly wonderful things for this world. But the goods come with the bad. I'm going to disappoint you at some point. The more we interact, I'm going to disappoint you at some point. I'm not setting out to, I didn't write a note today saying, "I'm..." I'm not sure when, but I just know that I'm going to and I know that that's going to happen. So going through life like that is really, really critically important to do that. People talk about how hard it is to raise money. Well, you're damn right, it's hard to raise money, because guess what?

Tom Noser (56:44):
People really like money.

Jason Moore (56:45):
And no, it's not about a Nashville no. And no, it's not because investors are jerks, but you need to truly show that you can earn that, because guess what else is hard? Everything else. Committing a customer, your first customer for sure, but even your 20th and 30th and 40th customer, none of them are easy. Now, you may have a playbook that you can follow, that guides you and makes it somewhat easier, but customer 100 is also hard. It's really, really hard. Third investor, really, really hard. Maybe not as hard as number one, because number one's there and there's some signal, but still hard. "Well, why is that important? It's only $1 million." Do you realize what you just said? I hear so many entrepreneurs signing a deal, let's say with HCA, "We're going to save them all this money or make them all this money. And it's only 1,500,000. What's 1,500,000 to HCA?" I know exactly what it is.

Tom Noser (57:46):
It's a million.

Jason Moore (57:48):
It's $1.5 million. That's a lot of money.

Tom Noser (57:51):
That's right.

Jason Moore (57:53):
And I think those are the things where perspective is so key.

Tom Noser (57:56):
I like that a lot. So I want to go back to your comments about cold calling and ask you a scenario. So, let's say you got a cold call and somebody said to you that they were a management consultant and they wanted to know whether or not you were happy in your work. Are you happy? How would you react to that sort of an opening?

Jason Moore (58:23):
Well, if I were in the mood to have a conversation, what I would say, when somebody asks me, "I am super happy." I'm in this professional nirvana right now, which is, it's an unfair question to ask me today, but most of the time. I stayed pretty happy through some rocky times or whatever, because I really enjoyed the people around me. So that was key, is keeping people around you that you enjoy being around, professionally and personally. And I don't mind blending those two things either. So yeah, are you happy or am I happy with my current career path? For sure. But that doesn't mean I don't need help. So whatever you're pitching, let's hear it.

Tom Noser (59:13):
Oh, wow. Okay, now I got to figure out what I'm pitching. I think that for me, my management consultancy is about trying to help people be happy. And there are a lot of reasons why we're not. Some of those are personal. A lot of it has to do with; I don't know what I want. I don't know what I'm trying to achieve. I think I know, but I don't really know. And so there's no right or wrong answer to that of am I happy or not? Sometimes I'm happy, because I'm in denial. I don't understand the impact my activities are having on those around me, on whether or not I'm creating good conditions for others in the business, or for my investors, or for my customers. I'm happy just because I'm stupid. And other times people are unhappy, because they're unable to appreciate what they have. So it's like, "Well, take a look at your customer list. You have some amazing customers on here. Why are you so discouraged? You're closing three million deals in nine months. Do you have any idea how fast that is?" Your ambition can kill you and kill the people around you if you're unhappy for the wrong reasons. So anyway, that's the thing.

Jason Moore (01:00:30):
That latter part is a scarcity mindset versus abundance mindset. And there are people that appear to be very scarce, but seem to have a lot of happiness in abundance and that the opposite is true. Yeah, and look, I'm not perfectly happy, but I think professionally I kind of am, and I can actually define it for you. It hit me about a month ago, because of the DNA Partner stuff and some other stuff that I have going on, I've worked with Fulcrum Equity Partners in Atlanta, it's just a side or a part-time gig. And I have... So a lot of people retire.

Tom Noser (01:01:14):
Sure.

Jason Moore (01:01:14):
And you can see them debilitate physically and emotionally and psychologically. So I have all of the brain firing going on right now with virtually none of the stress.

Tom Noser (01:01:23):
Nice.

Jason Moore (01:01:24):
And it's a really crazy... I don't actually have to go do the work. I get to talk to these entrepreneurs and hear the problems and relive them. But when that call's over-

Tom Noser (01:01:34):
You're done.

Jason Moore (01:01:36):
... I don't have a shovel in my hands. [inaudible 01:01:39]. But yeah, it's a nice setup. And I think that that was what I identified as very high connectivity, but very, very low stressful activity.

Tom Noser (01:01:55):
Do you think you could have articulated that vision of happiness 10 years ago?

Jason Moore (01:02:01):
Nah. That particular vision wasn't a reality. And I was happy. At the time, I had a shovel and we were digging together, and eventually I was just, not to beat the analogy up too much, but then managing people with shovels and maybe making sure just people had the shovels and all the things, and now it's just a different reality. So, that's it.

Tom Noser (01:02:24):
So, one last question to close out, if you could go back in time and give advice to your 23-year-old self, what would you tell him?

Jason Moore (01:02:35):
Push through the hard times, because there are going to be hard times. Don't lose focus of people around you. I think that's probably number one, is the people around you are the reason that things are happening, whether that be once again on your work side, but more importantly on your personal side, just make sure you're not losing that connectivity. All of it's hard. It's really hard. Push through it and keep the people close.

Tom Noser (01:03:06):
Jason, it was a lot of fun. I really appreciate you being on, man.

Jason Moore (01:03:09):
Yeah, man, I enjoyed it, Tom. Thanks again for the invite.

Tom Noser (01:03:22):
The Fortune's Path Podcast is a production of Fortune's Path. We work with technology leaders to address the root causes that prevent rapid growth, fractional product management, product leadership coaching, competitive intelligence. Find your genius with Fortune's Path. Special thanks to Jason Moore for being our guest. Music and editing of the Fortune's Path Podcast are by my son, Ted Noser. Look for the Fortune's Path book from Advantage Books on fortunespath.com. I'm Tom Noser. Thanks for listening, and I hope we meet along Fortune's Path.