With over 20 years of experience as a serial marketing measurement technology entrepreneur, Kristin Luck’s management consulting firm, ScaleHouse, focuses on nontraditional growth strategies for data driven marketing technology firms and market research companies.
She understands first-hand the demands and distractions faced by business owners and led and consulted for many high growth businesses in the US., Latin America, Europe, and Asia Pacific in almost every capacity.
She brings a perspective to growth that transcends sales and marketing and skilled at optimizing efforts and calibrating teams for growth that’s both immediate and sustainable while ensuring your company’s valuation is maximized.
Kristin is a founder focused on helping fellow founders and executive teams scale and monetize their businesses.
She is also a licensed investment banker and knows what deals look like from both sides of the table after participating in both acquisitions and exits from $30M to $250M with over 20 years of experience scaling companies quickly while driving high valuations.
In 2000, she co-founded OTX, an online research business that was named the fastest growing research firm in the world in 2002 and 2003 and was subsequently acquired by Zelnick Media & Pilot Group and again by Ipsos in 2007.
Kristin then founded Forefront Consulting Group, a research technology firm that was acquired by Decipher. Decipher was acquired by FocusVision in 2014 after seven consecutive years of triple percentage growth.
She has advised and consulted for high growth brands, including Voxpopme, Annik (acquired by Capgemini), Dstillery, Kelton (acquired by Material), SameSurf, Remesh and Forsta (acquired by Press Ganey).
What you will learn
- Learn how AI can aid in business growth by leveraging synthetic data for better accuracy and reliability in market research.
- Understand the importance of tracking data to improve business performance and optimize for sale.
- Learn how to distill important data points to make informed business decisions.
- Understand the value of recurring revenue models.
- Discover the importance of planning for a business sale.
Transcript
Jeff Bullas
00:00:17 – 00:01:02
Hi everyone and welcome to the Jeff Bullas show, and today I have with me, Kristin Luck. Now, Kristin sometimes hangs out in Athens in Greece. Other times she hangs out in Oregon, but a little bit about Kristin before we get in and have a chat.
With over 20 years of experience as a serial marketing measurement technology entrepreneur Kristin’s management consulting firm, ScaleHouse, focuses on nontraditional growth strategies for data driven marketing technology firms and market research companies.
Jeff Bullas
00:01:02 – 00:01:45
She understands first-hand the demands and distractions faced by business owners and led and consulted for many high growth businesses in the US., Latin America, Europe, and Asia Pacific in almost every capacity.
She brings a perspective to growth that transcends sales and marketing and is skilled at optimizing efforts and calibrating teams for growth that’s both immediate and sustainable while ensuring your company’s valuation is maximized.
Kristin is a founder focused on helping fellow Founders and Executive teams scale and monetize their businesses.
She is also a licensed investment banker and knows what deals look like from both sides of the table after participating in both acquisitions and exits from $30M to $250M with over 20 years of experience scaling companies quickly while driving high valuations.
Jeff Bullas
00:01:45 – 00:02:23
So obviously, Kristin ‘s very good at math. So with over 20 years of experience skating companies quickly while driving high valuations in 2000, she found her OTX an online research business that was named the fastest growing research firm in the world in 22,002 and 2003 and was subject acquired by Zonic Media and Pilot Group and again by Ipsos in 2007. So welcome to the show, Kristin , it’s an absolute joy to have you here and I look forward to finding out how you got to where you are today and what you’ve learned along the way. And um thank you very much for being on the show.
Kristin Luck
00:02:23 – 00:02:24
Thanks for having me.
Jeff Bullas
00:02:25 – 00:02:43
So Kristin , um I had a quick look at, you know, um done some research on it, which I should do if I’m going to actually sound intelligent and that’s difficult for me sometimes, but I’ll do my best. You, uh, did an APR degree originally in Oregon University. Is that correct?
Kristin Luck
00:02:43 – 00:03:21
I did, yeah, I majored in journalism, uh, with, uh, uh, a focus on public relations and I, I minored in exercise and movement science, which is sort of an odd mix of, of degrees. But, um, yeah. Yeah. And it’s, it’s funny that you, that you, uh, you naturally assumed I was good at math because I was, you know, not my college roommate this last weekend and he reminded me that we had met in a business math course, which was basically like math for dummies, uh because I had not tested into precalculus and as a
Kristin Luck
00:03:21 – 00:03:42
turns out, I’m just not great at theoretical math. I’m really good at statistics and, and math. That’s actually practical and makes sense. Which is funny because I do financial modeling and math every day now. But I would not say that most people that knew me in high school or even university would say I was good at math.
Jeff Bullas
00:03:42 – 00:03:49
Well, ok, you, I think you maybe excel at math, but that matters rather than. Ok.
Kristin Luck
00:03:50 – 00:03:50
Yeah.
Jeff Bullas
00:03:51 – 00:04:20
So, because I did calculus in my last two years of high school as well and I sucked at calculus and I’m going, what am I going to use this for? Nothing. Nothing. Yep. Zero. So, I, yeah, but I could, I did win some mental math competitions when I was in grade five. So there, you go. I was, yeah, I think I came second in my class and my dad said to me, why didn’t you come first? And I said, oh, my God.
Kristin Luck
00:04:20 – 00:04:22
Yeah. I think you might have the same father.
Jeff Bullas
00:04:23 – 00:04:25
Sorry. The same father.
Kristin Luck
00:04:27 – 00:04:38
Yeah. So, mine was a spelling bee. You know, I was really into the spelling bee still. I am. Uh, it was the same sort of thing. Like there was no second place in my, in my ass the first or worst.
Jeff Bullas
00:04:39 – 00:05:06
Yeah. Yeah. Well, I actually spelling was also one of my, because I read a lot, I was able to spell fairly well. So, um, but there you go. We’ve got two commonalities here. Math and spelling. There you go. Well, simple math. Let’s keep it that way. So, now you’re doing pr and you’re doing dancing, right? Ok. It’s, it’s maybe the same thing almost isn’t. So, in pr you got to do a bit of dancing. Really? Isn’t it to make?
Kristin Luck
00:05:08 – 00:05:59
Yeah. I mean, exercise and movement science is more about physiology. Originally. When I went to university I had these grand plans of being an orthopedic surgeon. So I was pre-med my first two years of university and then I, yeah, I made it through Cadaver lab. I did all the, you know, things, organic chemistry passed that, you know. And then I ended up doing just a one week internship at a hospital in the emergency room. And I think I made it halfway through the first evening when, and I just was like, this is not for me. I have no, you know, no issues with studying anatomy or physiology or, but the minute I see someone in pain or, uh, or just really uncomfortable that was just more than I could tolerate. So then I switched majors. I went into marketing, you know,
Jeff Bullas
00:06:00 – 00:06:25
as you do as you do. Yeah. Well, you know, pain versus marketing might be very closely related. But um so now you have moved into more investment areas. So, and you’re also doing a lot more analysis sort of work. What’s your main focus today? And what and how did you get there from pr or, you know, marketing, how did you get there from
Kristin Luck
00:06:25 – 00:07:05
Pr I’ve had a very uh circuitous career and I think that if you look at every role that I’ve had in isolation, it probably doesn’t make a whole lot of sense for a lot of folks, which I think is pretty typical of what I would call a portfolio career. So I haven’t stayed in the, I basically stayed somewhat in the same sector, but I’ve moved around a lot in terms of my roles within that sector. So I’ve always been interested in data and analytics. I love the storytelling aspect of data. And I think that’s why my journalism background has been really useful to me throughout my
Kristin Luck
00:07:05 – 00:07:48
career because it’s not just about looking at data and, and for data’s sake, it’s about what’s the story that that data tells you that can be really transformational, not for, for a lot of businesses. Uh And so to have that as a superpower, I think it’s been really fundamental to my ability to move around, to gravitate toward things that interest me. So I, you know, I started out my career in a full service research company called Lieberman at the, at the time, it’s now called Material Plus. Uh And then after that ended up at, at Nielsen, I, I was really excited about online research and really
Kristin Luck
00:07:48 – 00:08:30
thought online was where the whole research industry was headed. And I think one of the things that’s really defined my career is that if I’m really excited about something, then I sort of gravitate naturally to that. And I’m going to do whatever I can in order to, to, to focus on that, that interest and whether that means switching jobs or starting a new company, I think letting that sort of be my North star. Like, what am I really passionate about? And because if you’re excited about something as you know, you’re excited and you’re passionate and engaged with something you’ll put in any hours that you need in order to make that dream or that vision a reality. And so
Kristin Luck
00:08:31 – 00:09:19
I, you know, I, I knew online research was going that way, I somehow bs my way into a job at Nielsen to build their first online research platform, which was a real feat, having never done online research, nor having built a research platform at that point. Uh And II, I ran an online division there for a couple of years before realizing that Nielsen for all its greatness is not a great place to run a tech startup. And so another woman that worked at Nielsen, she and I left and, and started OTX, which was one of the first online research businesses and just hit the.com boom perfectly. And um you know, scaling and selling that company within three years is a very, very fast growth trajectory. You know, I was in my early thirties at that time. So,
Jeff Bullas
00:09:20 – 00:09:53
yeah, so that’s interesting that you mentioned that um something you’re really curious about, you follow that almost naturally. And that reminds me of uh Joseph Campbell, what he said about, uh he said as humans, we actually don’t have a purpose. But what we do have is following our bliss. That’s where your purpose is and following your bliss is basically following your curiosity that it is your passion about. So it sounds like you’ve been pretty true to that sort of cooling.
Kristin Luck
00:09:54 – 00:10:35
Absolutely. Absolutely. And I, I think too, like I’m a, I’m a curious person by nature and a lifelong learner. I, I never think that I’ve learned everything that there is and there’s, there’s no place for me to go to, you know, I feel like I reinvent myself kind of every 5 to 10 years. So, you know, I started, like I said, I started out in the full service side of the business and then I sort of gravitated to more of the tech side of the business. And then after I sold my last tech company in 2014, I had to make a decision like what, you know, I really felt like I was too young not to work anymore. I was in a pretty enviable financial position where I really didn’t have to work. But I, I,
Kristin Luck
00:10:35 – 00:11:25
I get a lot of passion and joy out of work. And so I spent some time really thinking about if I could spend my days doing whatever I wanted, what, what would that be? Uh And, and the intersection of also where I could make money because I still still wanted to continue working and making money. And for me, it was, it was, could I use all of the, all of the hard knocks or lessons that I had learned myself as an entrepreneur to help other founders have the same sort of success that I had and to also avoid a lot of the pitfalls along the way because as you and I have talked about previously, you look at someone’s linkedin profile or their Wikipedia page and everything is roses and sunshine. They see all the late nights and all the times you,
Kristin Luck
00:11:26 – 00:11:54
you know, pride yourself to sleep and, you know, you ruined relationships or, you know, all of these things that happen along a founder’s journey to scaling and, and selling. And so I can help people avoid some of those mistakes and get them to that end game faster. Like to me that that’s the most valuable, like most rewarding work that I could do. And so that’s, that’s what I focused on the first couple of years of my consulting practice. And then it just sort of naturally
Kristin Luck
00:11:55 – 00:12:19
led me to doing more pre M and optimization work. So helping companies really understand what are the different levers that you can pull to help maximize your valuation when you go out for sale. And then as an extension of that, I ended up getting my investment banking license so that I can do M and A um I can do M and A in the, in the sector that I work in. So I buy and sell, buy and sell companies now globally.
Jeff Bullas
00:12:20 – 00:12:30
So is that your primary focus today? Is it more buying and selling from companies? In other words, adding value um And then helping them to be acquired is that your main focus today?
Kristin Luck
00:12:30 – 00:12:52
I would say my main, my main focus is working with companies that are probably 12 to 36 months away from selling and helping them to get over that last, you know, that last hurdle to really help them understand how to position themselves for a potential sale and, and then, you know, ideally, service the banker through that sale process.
Jeff Bullas
00:12:53 – 00:13:24
Yeah, something interesting that you mentioned um at the beginning in terms of you trying to see the story and the noise. In other words, what’s the story behind the data? Um That’s very interesting. So basically, we’re trying to find the signal in the noise. And what story is that telling us what is the truth behind the data that is hidden in that noise? Um So, and that comes down to, I suppose as humans, we are actually pattern recognition machines.
Kristin Luck
00:13:25 – 00:13:26
Absolutely.
Jeff Bullas
00:13:26 – 00:14:15
And on top of that there is, but we live in a world where there is so much information and so much data that the job and our natural ability today is getting harder to recognize because there’s so much noise. So um I’d be fascinated in how you make sense of the noise? How do you find the story and the noise um is I helping you with that? I’d be, I’m quite curious about that because my curiosity that’s turned into a compulsion is the intersection of A I and humanity. So I’m interested in what you think about A I and your, does it help you make sense of the noise and how do you use it?
Kristin Luck
00:14:16 – 00:14:51
Yeah. Well, I’ll start with your first question about how do you cut through the clutter and I think a lot of it is just discernment and experience, look looking at data and also knowing what potential buyers value in companies also helps kind of distill down the number of data points that you need to be looking at. I think we’re, we’re really fortunate now because we live in a time. Unlike when I sold my first company, we didn’t have access to a lot of data about the company. I didn’t, I couldn’t tell you
Kristin Luck
00:14:52 – 00:15:25
how my sales and marketing team performed from a data driven standpoint. I couldn’t tell you what my average client conversion rates were. I didn’t have that data available readily. And now there’s so much data that we can use, not only to tune our own business growth, but also to really optimize the company when it is time to sell. And so I think having an understanding of all the different levers that you can pull to maximize evaluation is key and it’s all, it’s all, it’s all data driven. So,
Jeff Bullas
00:15:25 – 00:16:09
yeah, yeah. Before it was, the data was hidden in the spreadsheets that were very hard to analyze. But you can quickly, even today, there’s tools that actually allow you to measure what’s the traffic of the website globally, they’re not necessarily terribly accurate, but they give you a pretty good guide. Um Then you can go and like you said, conversion rates. OK. So what’s your conversion rate? Is it 2% or 20%? Is it 0.02? So, um and then I suppose that matters when someone says, well, I want to buy this company because the conversion rate is off the charts, obviously I got a great product. Um Then you get the other questions are gonna be asked, how can I scale this as well.
Jeff Bullas
00:16:09 – 00:16:21
So what are some of the top metrics you’re looking for when you go looking for a company to work for? What’s some of the key data points that you are looking for?
Kristin Luck
00:16:21 – 00:16:50
Yeah, um you know, varies by the company because the services company is gonna have different, different metrics or different things that you’re looking for than tech companies. Well, just based on how, how they’re valued. I mean, obviously, like the one of the first things I look at is, are, are they actually tracking and, and do they have an understanding of their own business performance? And you would be surprised at how many pretty large companies have literally no clue what is going on.
Kristin Luck
00:16:51 – 00:17:20
You know, I’ve worked with companies that were, you know, 3030 to 60 million in revenue and we’re gonna sell for 4 to 5 times that and had literally done, we’re working off of Excel spreadsheets internally, not using the AC RM system. Oh my gosh. If you’re listening to this and you’re not using the AC RM system, please get one immediately. They’re magical, you know, in terms of, of tracking things but just it, it is interesting to me that
Kristin Luck
00:17:21 – 00:17:51
Many founders will rely on a lot of qualitative feedback or feelings that they have about things instead of really looking at the data. So for instance, I’ve gone into uh engagements before where obviously you don’t want to have a high percentage of customer turn, customer turn is not a good thing. It’s not good for tech companies. It’s not good for services companies. Obviously, you want to retain clients for as long as you can and you ideally want them to grow, that’s the easiest way to scale.
Kristin Luck
00:17:51 – 00:18:24
And I can’t even tell you how many engagements I’ve gone into where I’ve asked them like, well, so how are, how are your turn rates and like, oh yeah, clients love us. They always come back no issues with ch you know, and then I’ll go in and actually pull the data and it’s like, you know, they’re losing 30 to 40% of their clients year over year or they don’t know, they don’t have a, any kind of recurring revenue and, and, and they’re surprised by that because they’re just anecdotally at what is happening in the business instead of really digging down into the, into the data,
Jeff Bullas
00:18:24 – 00:18:26
into the mass that matters
Kristin Luck
00:18:27 – 00:19:00
into the mass that matters. And, you know, like I said, I’m, I’m no financial whiz kid. This is all basic math. A matter of understanding what to look for. What are the financial ratios that you need to pay attention to what you know, like turn rates is just one of them. What is your average revenue per headcount? How does that compare with other companies in your sector or your size? There are just so many different things that you can look at that will tell the story of your, your company and its ability to, to scale. Uh
Jeff Bullas
00:19:01 – 00:19:53
Yeah, it’s, it’s very interesting and uh I, I think over the last 20 years, we’ve seen the evolution, a rapid evolution of business because the digital world has just changed the way we play. We can work remotely, we can build teams remotely, we can hire from Hungary or the Philippines or we’ve got software that manages that we can monitor employees. I have a certain take on that, but that’s another thing. But um so uh but one thing I wanted to just have a chat around because you mentioned churn rates. So, one of the things that’s happened over the last 10 years especially is we moved, a lot of companies are moved into subscription models as opposed to one off um product sales.
Jeff Bullas
00:19:53 – 00:20:28
So I’ve been involved with the company for quite a long time since it was founded about 12 or 13 years ago. And we’ve moved from product one off project sales, which has a churn rate that’s measurable. And then we’ve moved now to a subscription model, um which is an interesting year area as in it’s in the creative area. So it’s called Creative as a service. And we’re seeing all sorts of subscription models emerge. I’d be interested in what your take is on the um you know, the rise and emergence of subscription models in the business world.
Kristin Luck
00:20:29 – 00:21:02
Yeah, it’s, it’s interesting. I love this topic actually because I think that there was this huge push towards subscription models because services companies started seeing tech companies getting these big outsized evaluations. And, and if you’re in that sort of m and a world, a lot of what you hear, if you’re working with private equity companies, a lot of you’re talking to pe firms or investors. A lot of people say, oh my gosh, it has to have recurring revenue, recurring revenue, recurring revenue, you know, that subscription revenue,
Jeff Bullas
00:21:02 – 00:21:04
predictable, predictable revenue.
Kristin Luck
00:21:04 – 00:21:32
Yeah. And I, I get it to a certain extent. Of course, like when you’re doing project based revenue, there’s more volatility in the business because you don’t necessarily know when your next project is coming. Maybe you do have some, some syndicated projects or some longitudinal projects that are happening, but it is less predictable revenue. However, uh I think that there’s now a lot of pushback happening on the subscription models because people are oversubscribed.
Kristin Luck
00:21:32 – 00:22:17
When I started my first company, it was back in 2000 there in the sector that I worked in. There were two or three platforms. That was it, that was the maximum number of licenses you could have and people licensed one platform and that, that was it. Now, there’s a license for almost everything. And I think the subscriptions have gotten overwhelming for a lot of buyers. I, you know, I’ve heard that Proctor and Gamble hired somebody internally literally just to get rid of the subscriptions that they have and so I think that we’re starting to see some pushback on those subscription models. And I, I don’t think that’s necessarily a bad thing because I think from an investment in M and a perspective,
Kristin Luck
00:22:18 – 00:22:41
we’re looking at either recurring or recurring revenue. And those are two different things, but they’re very similar in nature. So recurring revenue is subscription based, someone signing a contract, they’re signing up for a specific period of time and they’re contractually obligated to pay you for that service or that product within that period of time. Recurring revenue is you are getting
Kristin Luck
00:22:41 – 00:23:17
work from the same client over and over and over and over again. But it’s not because they’re contractually obligated. It’s because they love you, they love you, they love the service, they’re loyal to it. You’re, you know, you’re doing great work for them. And because of that you’re sustaining that relationship over time. And I would say that those two revenue models are of equal value. If you can find a company that’s got a sticky model where clients love the people there and the services and they’re coming back again and again and again, I’ve seen that drive equally high valuations as a subscription model, recurring, recurring revenue model.
Jeff Bullas
00:23:18 – 00:23:39
Yeah. Yeah, the subscription models. And uh one of the reasons we was on the board for this company for quite a while was that we moved to a subscription model to improve the potential sale. Um you know, numbers because we’re talking 10 X 20 X 30 X type numbers with subscription models. So
Kristin Luck
00:23:39 – 00:24:15
I, I also think too that it’s, it’s interesting because I used to, I used to get a fair number of emails from research companies that were services based and they would reach out and say like we really need to, we know we have to develop a product, we have to, we have to develop a tech platform or a product. And can you help us ID? You know what that would be, which of course I would never do because, you know, if I had a great idea for an amazing tech product, I would just build it myself. I wouldn’t be giving it out for free to somebody else. But uh at the same time, I think if you’re in a services based business, you don’t always understand that once you start developing a tech platform, you’re never done.
Kristin Luck
00:24:16 – 00:24:44
You’re never, you’re always in development and the, the sort of the internal ethos or the, the, the way that the business runs has to support that. And if you don’t inherently come from that tech background and have that knowledge base and that stick to that has to come with that tech platform development, you’re not going to be successful and I’ve seen it almost bring services companies down to their knees.
Jeff Bullas
00:24:45 – 00:25:36
Yeah, that’s a very interesting comment because um and leading to that is that you used to compete with two or three companies. Now with the rise of the web, digital social media, everyone can work anywhere. We know we are now competing globally, not with someone around the corner, even in the next city. You are competing globally. And it is just mind boggling. And um the thing about it too is that when a start up starts, it’s entering two races. Number one is a market share race and the other one is a tech arms race. You so quite often it’s the one that can last the longest that develop the product, the fastest gets an MVP and let you know, minimal viable product in as quickly as possible, see what works and it’s just iteration after iteration
Jeff Bullas
00:25:37 – 00:25:57
and it, it’s, it’s tiring just watching it without even I just, I thought about building it going. I know what this is gonna look like. It’s gonna be tiring, it’s gonna be exhausting, but you gotta go with a nine and that’s why I think a lot of tech founders today are tech people, a lot of start ups. Um So uh
Kristin Luck
00:25:58 – 00:26:23
yeah, you definitely have to have the intestinal fortitude for it because it’s not, it’s not a light lift. And particularly now to your point, there’s, there’s so much clutter, you know. So it’s not just about having an amazing product, but it’s also like, how is it really differentiated and how are you gonna, how are you gonna communicate that to your prospective buyers that you can cut through that clutter? And I think a lot of times
Kristin Luck
00:26:23 – 00:27:14
people invest so much in that platform development or that tech development and they don’t leave any money aside for, well, how am I gonna actually break into the market and sell this? How am I gonna? And we often underestimate the amount of friction that we’re gonna get when we go out to market, you know, we could have my last company, we had a tech product that was more robust, had more functionality uh was cheaper uh than all of our competitors. But when we first went out to market, it was incredibly difficult to unseat the folks that were already licensing competitive platforms because they were so deeply integrated in the operations of those companies that to rip them out was kind of like ripping out your insides. And so we had to get very creative in terms of
Kristin Luck
00:27:15 – 00:27:27
how we would transition people off of one platform and on to another and the level of support that that required and the amount of time that would require, it was really a different model than what I think we had considered when we first talked about going out to market with that.
Jeff Bullas
00:27:28 – 00:27:54
Yeah. Well, this is stickiness and they also the, how hard it is to remove something you only have to watch what’s happened in the last few, last week with crowd strike, how deep it’s woven into global systems and networks. And I think, uh, Crowdstrike is actually just a, just a, but a major security firm that is used for web hosting, um, such as,
Kristin Luck
00:27:55 – 00:28:18
and I said, unless you’re Southwest Airlines and then you’re the only ones not impacted. I think there was a joke that they were running off like a Commodore 64 in a warehouse somewhere. But they actually are sort of notorious for the fact that they have not updated their, their technical systems for years and years and they are the one airline that literally experienced no disruption during
Jeff Bullas
00:28:20 – 00:28:24
I have the story. So the weakness became their strength.
Kristin Luck
00:28:25 – 00:28:25
Absolutely.
Jeff Bullas
00:28:26 – 00:28:48
Yeah. Thank God for a Commodore 64 from the 19 eighties. Yeah. Um, so let’s get back to A I um, are you in, are you using a I at all or, uh, you know, researching it, investigating it. Um I’d be interested in where you are with A I and some of your thoughts around it.
Kristin Luck
00:28:48 – 00:29:32
Yeah, I’m not, I wouldn’t say that I’m using it for investment bank purposes. I definitely have used it for, for sales and sales and marketing purposes. And I have been looking quite a bit because I am working primarily in the data and research sector. One of the things that I have been looking at pretty closely is synthetic data, which I think is super interesting. So uh and which I think is controversial now for a lot of people, but which I think has some real promise, not necessarily as a means of completely replacing primary research data, but certainly in terms of Aug augmenting it and adding more reliability and predictability to it.
Kristin Luck
00:29:32 – 00:30:24
I I think unfortunately, the research industry for years and years and years, we’ve been reliant on survey data and that means we need to, to interview people. But the problem is because we’ve had so much downward pricing pressure on, on panels. So consumer panels or research respondents, what has happened is that the quality of the surveys has gone down significantly. So we don’t want to encourage people to take the survey anymore. And yet we still want them to take a 45 minute survey on online automotive parts, you know, and that survey was designed in the 19 seventies and then slapped up online and someone called it an online survey. It’s just that the survey has not evolved. So, yeah, and we’re competing with every other piece of content on the internet for people’s eyes and, and attention
Kristin Luck
00:30:24 – 00:31:01
and So what happens is you get these long surveys, we’re not sending people, we’re not, you know, it’s hard to keep them engaged and yet we expect to get really great results. I think what synthetic data offers us is almost like normative databases were back in the 19 nineties where if you couldn’t get enough respondents in for a particular survey or to um for a particular study, you could actually use that database and weight data according to what the norm was. And I kind of see synthetic data as that to a certain um uh extent which is
Kristin Luck
00:31:02 – 00:31:39
you can use it to amplify. If you can’t get a big enough sample site, you can use it to amplify the, you know, the remaining folks that you’re missing and whether that’s because you just can’t find those people or maybe you’re an emerging market or you’re looking for a very small defined sample set does allow you to, to provide more predictability to data that you might not be able to in in other scenarios. So I think, I think there’s some promise there. I think there’s, there’s a lot of buzz about it right now within the marketing world and certainly within the market research world and a lot of debate and where it ends up remains to be seen, but I’m bullish on it.
Jeff Bullas
00:31:39 – 00:32:21
Right. Yeah, because the challenge too is with using other people’s data is that leads to little things called copyright. Um And I think there’s so many copyright cases before the courts in America that it’s almost overwhelming. So New York Times amongst many others. I think the news is doing it as well. They’re going, you’re using our data to train your machines. So you want us to give that for free and then you want to charge people money to use your platform, which is one of the big challenges with even us giving our personal information to Facebook that monetizes us. Yeah. So, so let’s
Kristin Luck
00:32:21 – 00:32:22
blinked an eye at it.
Jeff Bullas
00:32:23 – 00:32:24
Sorry, what
Kristin Luck
00:32:24 – 00:32:29
I said that’s been going on for years and no one blinks an eye for many, many years about it.
Jeff Bullas
00:32:29 – 00:33:15
It’s one of my ranting platform pictures. It’s like, and then they use the algorithms to create hate and sell more advertising. It’s like um all done by Neuroscience developed from gambling machines in Las Vegas. Anyway, that’s another story. We’re not gonna go there, but I’m intrigued by your business model. Could you describe what that looks like? And then how do you go about acquiring opportunities and there about um selling and building them up and then selling them? Can you give us a bit of an insight into a thumbnail sketch of what your business does on a day by day or month, by month basis?
Kristin Luck
00:33:15 – 00:33:57
Yeah, I know consulting is always a black box for a lot of folks consultancies get a get a, get a lot of hate because of it. Uh, my, what I do on a daily basis kind of varies by client. But for the most part, I’m either working on turnarounds. Um, so helping people understand what’s, why isn’t their business growing. And that again is generally you can find that in, in the data, um, to a certain extent, some of it is obviously behavioral and that’s the hardest to change. Um You know, if you’ve studied behavioral science at all, I was fortunate because my, my stepmother is a uh was a lifelong behavioral researcher, like an actual academic researcher and
Kristin Luck
00:33:57 – 00:34:41
taught me a lot about, about behavioral change and how, how challenging it is. And I, I think it’s the same with businesses. You know, if you’ve got fundamentally unhealthy behaviors driving the business, it becomes very hard to, very hard to scale it and those can manifest themselves in lots of, lots of different, different ways. Um The, you know, the other uh the other uh types of projects I tend to work on a lot of, like I mentioned before, pre M and A optimization, which is a lot of working with executive teams to help them. Understand, hey, here are all the different levers you can pull and it, it, it might be that you, you don’t want to pull those levers. Like I had a, a conversation with a CEO uh late last year where
Kristin Luck
00:34:42 – 00:35:21
I had put together recommendations. And one of the recommendations was based on how to get their revenue per headcount up. And of course, if you want to drive revenue per headcount, there’s two different ways you can do that. You can either bring more revenue in and not hire more people or you can continue to do the same amount of revenue and let some people go. And you often see this in companies that are heading toward an M and A event that all of a sudden they’ll do a round of layoffs or they’ll start downsizing because they’re trying to ramp up their profitability and the revenue per headcount before they go into the market. And um this particular CEO was,
Kristin Luck
00:35:21 – 00:35:59
I was really struggling with that aspect of it. And she said, I now understand why people, why it’s so, so uh um tempting for founders to downsize or to try to get more productivity out of their employees during that period of time. She was, but she just didn’t, she didn’t feel good about it. And ultimately, she didn’t want to, she didn’t want to do it. And so there were other things that we focused on. Yeah, but I do, I do think that a lot of the work that I’m doing is how we are using data and all of these different elements to, to really ultimately drive the growth of the business.
Jeff Bullas
00:35:59 – 00:36:06
Right. So, in consulting quite often it’s very time intensive and it’s very hard to scale you. It’s
Kristin Luck
00:36:07 – 00:36:07
me.
Jeff Bullas
00:36:07 – 00:36:09
Yeah. So, how do you scale?
Kristin Luck
00:36:10 – 00:36:56
Yeah, you don’t, I mean, for me it’s, uh, you know, the work that I’m doing now is not like the work I was doing earlier on in my career. I’m not trying to build a, you know, a mckenzie type consulting company and sell it. I’m, you know, I, I think I’ve had, well, maybe not my last exit, but close to my last exit. Uh, I, I never started doing consulting work with the idea that I was going to scale the business and sell it because I can’t, I can’t be, be scaled. And it’s, it’s very tough to, it’s very tough to even mentor or bring somebody up within the consulting business because so mu so much of it is just based on your experience of doing it, screwing it up or having it go really well and then learning from,
Kristin Luck
00:36:56 – 00:37:39
from those mistakes, you know, it’s like the school of hard knocks. And once I, I don’t know about you, but like for me, I learned the best when I really mucked something up. So once I’ve done it, once I’ve mucked it up, once the chances are super low that I’m ever gonna do that again. And so, but I do feel oftentimes you see these really young kids going into consulting without actually ever having any experience running a business. Uh and I think having, having that business experience, having gone through the tr, you know, work through the trenches and, and gone through all the ups and downs. That’s where the real value lies in, in hiring a consultant, like myself and that’s what my clients are paying for.
Jeff Bullas
00:37:40 – 00:37:44
So it sounds to me like you’re a little bit choosy these days.
Kristin Luck
00:37:44 – 00:38:20
I am choosy. Very choosy. Yeah, I mean, I have to, I have to be excited about the company and I have to feel like there’s a real opportunity for me to make an impact. I don’t want to do work where I can’t be impactful or where I feel that the CEO of the executive team is going to be fighting me on every recommendation that’s not fun for them and it’s not fun for me. And so getting, you know, kind of getting to know a firm and, and also being excited about the product or service that they’re selling and feeling like, hey, there’s a real opportunity for them here. That’s really important to me.
Jeff Bullas
00:38:21 – 00:38:25
Do you have a choosiness index checklist?
Kristin Luck
00:38:25 – 00:39:11
Uh I wouldn’t say I have a checklist. It is funny though. I did, I did um for a period of time and I’ve stopped doing this now because it’s always backfired on me. I, I did have, I would call it like a pain and suffering tax. So if it’s a, but I wasn’t that interested in or I felt like the CEO was kind of gonna kind of be a pain in the ass. I would just put what I thought was kind of an insane markup on it thinking like nobody’s ever going to pay me that much money to do this engagement, you know, and every time Jack, every time they would come back, not even blink, they just, yep. Looks great. Let’s get rolling. I’m like, seriously, like, no, like I’ve gotta do it.
Jeff Bullas
00:39:11 – 00:39:26
Yeah. Sometimes they’re going well, ok, I really don’t like you. I’m gonna double the price and they don’t blink and go. Oh, shit, I shouldn’t have done that. Um, um, and I have, I have, you know, one of my filters or models is I don’t work for assholes. Um,
Kristin Luck
00:39:26 – 00:39:36
I’m, I’m of that same. I’ve dealt with plenty of them in my career and, you know, I think I’m at a point where I don’t have to anymore.
Jeff Bullas
00:39:38 – 00:39:58
Well, that’s, that is actually, that’s true. Wealth, isn’t it? We don’t actually have to work with those sorts of people and you can pick and choose and as bliss and you can follow your curiosity until it becomes a compulsion that just gets you up every morning. Oh, shit. I’m just going to write about a I today. I’m going to read about it. Um,
Jeff Bullas
00:39:59 – 00:40:43
But the reason I asked you about checklists was that, uh Charlie Munger who we mentioned before in our little, you know, chat before we hit record, which I had trouble finding because Zoom’s changed its settings. Um So uh Charlie Munger said one of his superpowers is checklist and he has uh wait for this. I don’t know if. So the book I just read is Poor Charlie’s Almanac, which is Poor Charlie, the billionaire as in tongue in cheek. Poor Charlie obviously. Uh and he just died three months short of 100 last year, which is a shame. But um poor Charles Jarman, he mentions that he has 90 to 100 different mental models he uses for assessing a company for acquisition.
Jeff Bullas
00:40:44 – 00:41:17
So it’s not just about the math, it’s about the psychology because he realizes that businesses are like humans, they actually are run on different psychological models, whether it’s envy, greed, um pain, you know, the list goes on. Um So do you use any checklists in what you do? And do you have any mental models that you just go to to make sense of who you’re looking at? In other words, your businesses you’re looking at?
Kristin Luck
00:41:17 – 00:41:42
I mean, I do, I do have a checklist of things that I look for in a company just in terms of the types of data that they’re collecting and or looking at because that gives me a pretty good read early on as to how, how mature the business really is. And uh how, what kind of lift is kind of in, in front of me from a data standpoint. Uh
Kristin Luck
00:41:43 – 00:42:19
I would say that I probably have more mental models around personality and the types of questions that I ask people that can be illuminating and, and also to see how they’re spending their money. So, like one of the things that I always ask about and kind of look for is how much companies are spending on Pr which is funny because, you know, I, I majored in journalism with a focus on pr but pr to me is, and I’m sure I’m gonna get a lot of hate from all the pr folks out there about this. But I do think a lot of firms pr is just an, it’s an, it’s an ego Stroker. It’s not,
Kristin Luck
00:42:19 – 00:42:57
I think that there’s very specific times in a company’s life cycle when pr can be very useful, but that’s not where most companies are on a day to day basis. And a lot of times I’ll go into an engagement and I just see a lot of money being wasted on things that make the executive team feel good about themselves or make that, you know, that are ego strokers. And if I see a lot of that is kind of a red flag that it’s going to be very hard for me to move the needle there because it’s a very ego driven company and they’re not open to learning or understanding new ways of doing things.
Jeff Bullas
00:42:58 – 00:43:12
That’s very interesting. In other words, you’re not using so much mass, you’re using more psychological mental models to make a decision. One mental model is the asshole index, right? So that,
Kristin Luck
00:43:13 – 00:43:14
yeah.
Jeff Bullas
00:43:14 – 00:43:27
Yeah. Then you’ve got like, then the other one is, look at me, look at me, in other words, if it’s about ego and those people have ego are very hard to educate and teach, aren’t they?
Kristin Luck
00:43:28 – 00:44:01
They are. And also going back to my earlier comments about behavioral change, they’re the ones least likely to, to change because the minute that ego stroking stops, they feel like less of a person or that they’re not getting enough attention. It’s like the same reason that people spend so much money on trade shows when trade shows are literally the worst converting marketing channel. I know it’s a boondoggle and now I’m gonna get hate mail from all that conference. Uh
Jeff Bullas
00:44:02 – 00:44:04
Yeah, it’s like, look at the size of my stand,
Kristin Luck
00:44:04 – 00:44:25
right? And I think that there are right ways and wrong ways of, you know, I’ve written a conference playbook. There are right ways and wrong ways of working conferences and how you can improve your conversion rates. But at the end of the day, I think a lot of people and this is just human nature. We go to a conference, we see 1000 people there and we’re like, oh my God, everyone is here. No, everyone is
Kristin Luck
00:44:25 – 00:45:17
not there, there’s only 1000 people out of 100 and $80 billion industry are there. And that is like Monia and the more conferences you go to, the more you see the same people over and over and over again and the more your, you know, sort of sales funnel gets narrower and narrower and narrower because you’ve already talked to those people multiple times. So, um, things like that are kind of, you know, once, once I start looking at, at, at a company closely and like looking at their activity online and how they’re talking about themselves and where they’re spending their money. Those are really good indicators to me of what’s actually going on and whether the company from my perspective is capable of uh pivoting, turning around or optimizing for, for scale.
Jeff Bullas
00:45:18 – 00:45:50
Yeah. And that’s, and optimizing the scale is a very big deal, its own right is how can I scale this and that for me, I actually didn’t get into consulting because I went, I can’t scale myself. I’m not going to get up at 6 a.m. to do an international Zoom call with a client. Um, yeah, I’m just going, I’m not going to do this, I’m going to do it another way because it just wasn’t my gig and, and quite often in digital as with any business, it’s a long game and clients want results next week
Kristin Luck
00:45:51 – 00:46:23
they do. Yeah, I think that, you know, and that’s a, that’s a challenge too. I, I always, I always try to educate people on long game versus short short game strategies because there’s, there’s both, both of those, those are important. But one does take more, some do, do take more time. For instance, I was having a conversation earlier today with a prospective client about just about content marketing. And I think content marketing is a great example of a long game strategy. It is a long game
Kristin Luck
00:46:23 – 00:47:01
and people just give up on it way too early and say like, oh, it’s not working, you know, oh, I tried it. I did a post and only two people liked it. Ok. Well, I’ve got news for you. Like, I’ve got tens of thousands of followers on linkedin and sometimes I make a post and it only gets two likes to have I given up on it. Of course not, it just wasn’t resonating and I use that information to improve my next post and the next one, maybe I’ll have thousands of likes. It doesn’t have anything to do with me personally. It has to do with the content or who was online that day. There’s a million different factors that go into it. But I think people
Kristin Luck
00:47:01 – 00:47:28
they, you know, they, they get one piece of bad feedback or one negative comment or not enough likes on something and they’re just like, oh, it’s not working. I’m, I’m done with it or I’ve had clients come back to me where I’ve put together, you know, like, hey, here’s a five step plan for how we’re gonna get you to that next level. And then usually at that point, I’m moving into a lighter touch engagement where I’m just checking in with them a couple of times a month. I’m looking at the data and we’re having a conversation about it.
Kristin Luck
00:47:29 – 00:47:59
But I’ve had people come back and say like, well, you know, I implemented your plan and it didn’t work. And I’m like, OK, well, let’s unpack that from a data perspective and it comes down to it and it’s like, OK, well, I gave you 10 things to do and you did four of them and that’s why it’s not working because they all work in collaboration in unison with each other. So really cherry pick out the ones that you like that are easy and of course, you’re not going to get that same strategic lift from it.
Jeff Bullas
00:48:00 – 00:48:14
No. Yeah, it took me a while, but I realized that as I wrote as I shared content and I’m big on content marketing, big on content marketing. When for the term content marketing is actually created,
Kristin Luck
00:48:15 – 00:48:18
we know it was content marketing, we were still doing it.
Jeff Bullas
00:48:19 – 00:49:06
I just wrote what I was curious about, you know, it was really interesting going a little reflecting on and just happened to be four or five years later, I suddenly found I had tens of thousands of links and had articles linking from the New York Times and I went, uh, overnight success. Absolutely. Yeah. So, yeah. But it’s for me when I started the blog in 2009 and is still running today and got the podcast running. Now for me, the older I get and the less time I have the longer the game I’m playing, which is weird. But that’s the sort of way it works. Yeah. But just going back to mental models, you maybe have 20 or 30 mental models already that are, maybe not even written down.
Kristin Luck
00:49:07 – 00:49:10
Right. Yeah, for sure. For sure. I do
Jeff Bullas
00:49:11 – 00:49:43
Charlie Munger mentions that many and I’ve tried to find them using A I and research and, uh, I’ve unearthed about 12 or 15. Um, but I, I really like, um, his two big things were checklists and his mental models and, uh, he says, and he uses the analogy of, uh, well, an airline pilot as before he goes through these enormous checklists before taking off. And guess what? Unless you’re Boeing, you don’t kill many people. Right.
Kristin Luck
00:49:44 – 00:49:46
Oh, poor Boeing. Oh,
Jeff Bullas
00:49:46 – 00:49:46
poor Boeing
Kristin Luck
00:49:48 – 00:49:52
might just fall off, you know, actually happy in Oregon.
Jeff Bullas
00:49:54 – 00:50:13
Oh, let’s, let’s use, um, you know, uh, some, some, some glue and some, uh, white tape to stick the door on. Ok. Right. But anyway, but anyway, it’s, um, yeah, that was raised because I just watched a video about, uh, Senator inquiry, uh, skewering. Uh, the CEO was bored last night. That’s all, that’s where that came from. But
Kristin Luck
00:50:14 – 00:50:15
look at it now.
Jeff Bullas
00:50:17 – 00:51:03
So um maybe a couple of last questions because I realize that you’ve got to go and save a few companies. Um um Number one, what are some of the biggest lessons you’ve learned as an entrepreneur? You know, you’ve, you’ve started two tech start ups sold and exited. Now you’re working with other people to, to, to provide that wisdom and experience and wisdom is very different to information. Um You’ve gained a lot of wisdom over the years by trying, failing, getting up again and obviously succeeding as well. So what are some of the big lessons that you’d like to share with um people that either want to start a business or in a business or want to exit a business because you’re doing all three of those.
Kristin Luck
00:51:04 – 00:51:37
Um I would say probably like that, one of the more important things that I learned that I try to impart on people is it’s, it’s important to understand who your competition is and to, and to be aware of what they’re doing, but just be aware and then move on and do what you’re gonna do with your business. I feel like so many founders just get so obsessed with like, what’s the competition doing and looking at their website all the time and what products are they building and how much money have they raised and it doesn’t really matter at the end of the day
Kristin Luck
00:51:37 – 00:52:29
and I was building my company. Yeah, I was aware of who, who I was competing against but didn’t change my product road map. It didn’t, it didn’t change where I was going and it didn’t change how far and fast I was out, outpacing them. And so I wasn’t really worried if I saw them copying something I was doing or because I knew they were still six months to a year behind me. I think it’s good to have an awareness of your competitive set, but it’s also important to be true to your vision for the company and not to get, not to get off track or to get to get waylaid by what someone else appears to be doing, which again, all goes back to perception. Uh many times what things look like are not actually what is going on inside the company.
Kristin Luck
00:52:29 – 00:52:58
And we just assume that, oh, well, I thought that they posted this on linkedin. And so I know that they’re doing this and this and not actually, you don’t know. I mean, there were, there were things that I talked about in my, in my last company. I remember I was just using this example earlier today where mobile research was coming and it was a big thing, everybody was talking about it, but nobody really owned that space in terms of the conversation and content marketing. And so I was like, well, it’s gonna be me, I’m gonna talk about mobile research and best practices and how to do it.
Kristin Luck
00:52:59 – 00:53:33
And at that time, we couldn’t even do a mobile survey on my platform. But I also knew that the research industry kind of moves at this very glacial pace. And that by the time somebody was actually willing to buy a mobile survey, I would have that capability. So I just started talking about it 668 months before I could even do it. And then of course, our competitors thought that we were like light years ahead of where they were. But truthfully we were probably in the, in the same place. We just started owning that, that conversation in that space. So I say like, don’t, don’t get distracted by it like it’s good to be informed but don’t, don’t get distracted.
Jeff Bullas
00:53:34 – 00:54:24
Yeah, that’s very interesting because the reality is I think because humans create businesses, businesses almost become their own species really because they are a collection of humans doing stuff and it has its own culture. So for me, it reminds me talking about, don’t keep looking at others all the time just and, and it comes down to what, who we want to be as humans, which we’ve talked about before, which was I just follow my curiosity. I’m very organic by the sounds of it. In other words, I do what interests me and out of that comes abundance. So and the thing, it comes back to is interesting too, for me, a reflection as we’ve been talking is that as humans we want, we look at and aspire to be a pirate and you wanted to be, you know, the dragon, right?
Kristin Luck
00:54:25 – 00:54:36
Not the dragon. I just wanted to be Pete. I wanted to ride on the dragon. That was my whole. Yeah, that’s my childhood goal. Overalls that had the stripes on them. Like I was a train conductor. I was into it.
Jeff Bullas
00:54:37 – 00:55:10
Yeah. Well, I wanted to be Jesse James the Gun Selena because I thought they were very cool. So um but I, I’ve moved away from violence in the last few years. But um I think as humans, we get to a point if we acquire wisdom is that when I grow up, I wanna be me, not anyone else. And I think as a species and I think, and I’ll put business into the species. We have multinational global companies now that are just a species that didn’t exist before. And I’m talking about, you know, business species.
Jeff Bullas
00:55:10 – 00:55:44
Um but I think when you’re building a company, you’re going, I want this business to be an extension of me. It works for me, not we work for it and don’t get distracted by everyone else around you because you will bring your own particular uniqueness to it just like you brought mobile research to the game. So that’s what I love about being an entrepreneur. Number one, it’s a creative endeavor. It’s not just about making money. And if you get that core right, then the rest seems to follow. Don’t you think
Kristin Luck
00:55:48 – 00:56:05
I would? I would also say, you know, if we, if we, you know, we, if I’m giving another example of like, I think I, I an important thing to sort of keep in mind and obviously, like we talked about things you to keep an eye on as you’re scaling a business. But I would say when you’re
Kristin Luck
00:56:06 – 00:56:37
to think something to think about as you consider an eventual exit, whether that’s in a year or 10 years is to, to plan for it. And I feel like a lot of people don’t plan for that. They build this business because they love it and they wanna run it. And then one day they’re like, oh my God, I’m so tired of running this business where I’m exhausted from scaling it and I don’t wanna do it anymore. I wanna sell it. And that’s a horrible place to be. You wanna be very uh um
Kristin Luck
00:56:37 – 00:56:53
you want to be very pragmatic and judicious about preparing for a business sale and, and prepare for it. And to have an idea of who, who would be your ideal acquirer and how are you going to maximize your valuation and to give yourself the time to do that? You know, I always tell people
Kristin Luck
00:56:54 – 00:57:23
The best time to think about selling is when you’ve scaled it to a certain point and you still have a little fire in your belly for the business. Like, maybe you don’t love it as much as you did on day one, but you’re not exhausted from it. Uh, too often. What I see happen is that founders just run out of steam. They’re tired, they don’t want to do it anymore. They want to retire and they’ve spent 1015 years in some cases building a business and then they don’t, they don’t want to put in another 2 to 3 years of optimizing it
Kristin Luck
00:57:23 – 00:57:55
and, or there’s, they don’t really want to have an earn out or have to go on with the company afterwards, which is just reality. I mean, oftentimes when you sell there is going to be a 2 to 3 year earn out where you’re transitioning the company over to the owner. And I think a lot of folks don’t, don’t realize that. And so they come in and they’re like, they’re already exhausted. They’re kind of done with it. And, and now I’m like, and then I have to be the one to say, like, guess what, like, I know you want to go have boat drinks as soon as the deal closes. But you’ve actually got another 2 to 3 years before that.
Jeff Bullas
00:57:55 – 00:58:00
Yeah. So it’s not pina Coladas. It’s, it’s about, it’s about golden handcuffs.
Kristin Luck
00:58:00 – 00:58:22
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I think, you know, I think it’s good to have an understanding of what your ultimate goal is for the business. I think we live in this, or I guess, I think it’s becoming less, uh less of a thing now. But for a long time, it was all about this start up Huzz culture, you know, like you just gotta work, work, work, work, work, you know, and, and you got to tell your company and
Kristin Luck
00:58:23 – 00:58:48
There was a really interesting podcast I listened to one time and I think it was on Masters of Scale. I’m pretty sure it was. But uh it was all about the difference between, you know, growth companies and Phoenix companies and Phoenix companies. This idea is like fiat for instance, which was run for years and years by one family. And there was never a uh an intention of selling that business when they started it, it was a family,
Kristin Luck
00:58:48 – 00:59:27
no family owned business and there’s nothing wrong with that. Like not everybody wants to scale and grow business. Lots of folks are happy running a 2 to $3 million business. It creates a great lifestyle for them. They’re never gonna scale and there’s no purpose for them scaling other people go in very intentionally looking, looking for that big exit. You know, they want to create something that scales and they want to have a big AAA exit. So it’s just, I feel like sometimes people get pressured into that, into that scale and into that big exit. When it’s really not inherently in their DNA because it, it takes a very different type of person to scale a business than to start one.
Jeff Bullas
00:59:28 – 00:59:30
It looks sexy from the outside.
Kristin Luck
00:59:31 – 00:59:34
Yeah. It doesn’t feel so sexy when you’re doing it
Jeff Bullas
00:59:34 – 01:00:23
on the side. I know. So, um, I’ve got more than about two que, I just want one more before we hit the big question which I raised before we hit the go button. Um, you must come across a lot of companies that you go into and they want, you want, they want to be prepared for sale in, you know, a year or two or three. And I’m sure you must come across this all the time in that processes either don’t exist, aren’t recorded because that’s what gives you freedom as an entrepreneur is having robust processes. How many, how many companies do you see that have correct processes and how much time is spent in preparing the facade? Is it actually documenting them or putting them in place?
Kristin Luck
01:00:24 – 01:01:05
I would say probably 60% of the companies that I work with have poor documentation or, or are in a situation where they are very reliant on one or two people. Yes. And again, that kind of goes back to behavioral change a lot of times. That’s very intentional because people have control issues or trust issues and they want to keep things very close to the chest and that’s problematic when you want to exit. Uh So some of it is changing, changing those behaviors and coming up with healthier systems that are scalable within a company.
Kristin Luck
01:01:05 – 01:01:32
And part of it is, you know, I’ve got a, you know, pretty robust list of like, hey, here’s all the things that are going to come up, they’re going to ask for due diligence that you should be prepared to provide so that you can start creating all that documentation. Now, when you go to sell, it doesn’t feel like my first sale, which was like a full body cavity exam every day. It was, it was the worst. I remember getting this list. And I’m like,
Kristin Luck
01:01:34 – 01:02:07
you know, and at that point, we had to put it all in a binder. It wasn’t, you didn’t have an online data room at that point. Now the rooms are online, you just upload everything. It’s a lot easier. But at the time it was a binder. I remember sitting in this conference room at night, like I felt like my eyes were bleeding, like putting together like documentation. And I was like, ah, well, we’ve never used that documentation before. Why do I have to create it now? Well, I mean, I should have had it. That’s the sign of a mature business. But we just, we scaled and grew so quickly, we just never put those things in place. But now I look back and I think, yeah,
Kristin Luck
01:02:08 – 01:02:40
and I, I and I say this to a lot of members because I’ll get a lot of people that will say like, well, you know, I mean, I built the business to 30 million. Like, well, I do, I don’t need AC RM and I was like, yeah, you got to 30 million in spite of what you did. Not because of what you did, your business could be if you just done it correctly the first time, like, from the beginning, like, I look at my first business and I’m like, oh, my God, like, if I knew then what I know now my business would have been, I mean, and it was a big business wrestle that it would have been exponentially larger, for sure.
Jeff Bullas
01:02:42 – 01:03:16
Yeah, I think it was George Lucas who said, not only do you fall in love with what you do, but the process of the doing and making of it, which is true. And I, for me, that really resonated with going for me, like we’re, we’re digital media production. So I actually enjoy the journey of discovering information, putting it together, learning from that, then putting it to market, checking to see if it works. What works. What doesn’t I, I actually quite like the journey. But anyway, um, so last question,
Jeff Bullas
01:03:20 – 01:03:27
if, what would you do every day if you weren’t being paid for it, what would Kristin do?
Kristin Luck
01:03:29 – 01:03:58
I would, I, well, I live, uh, when I’m not in Athens, Greece, I live in Bend Oregon and I have 60 acres here and, uh, if I could do whatever I wanted to do and didn’t, didn’t have to get paid for it. I would run an animal sanctuary. I love animals. Um, I have a particular soft spot for dogs and donkeys. And, uh, yeah, I’d probably run like a dog and Donkey sanctuary out here.
Jeff Bullas
01:03:59 – 01:04:02
There’s a, there’s a, there’s a certain ring to that dog and Donkey sanctuary.
Kristin Luck
01:04:03 – 01:04:03
Yeah.
Jeff Bullas
01:04:03 – 01:04:04
Have
Kristin Luck
01:04:04 – 01:04:04
you,
Jeff Bullas
01:04:04 – 01:04:06
Have you registered for that domain?
Kristin Luck
01:04:06 – 01:04:42
I haven’t, but I’m gonna, I’m gonna look at it as soon as we get off here. I just said, you know, II, I grew up on a farm and I’m, um, you know, a big animal lover. I’ve always had a soft spot for, for animals and, um, and animal welfare. It’s been a AAA passion I think throughout, you know, throughout my personal life I never had kids. And so the dogs have always been my, my Children and, uh, I think if I had to spend my days doing anything, that’s, that’s what it would be. Yeah, I got a lot, I got it. I get a lot of personal pleasure out of that. Yeah,
Jeff Bullas
01:04:43 – 01:04:50
great. That’s, um, there you go. Now, would anyone know that from your social media profile? Maybe not. But
Kristin Luck
01:04:51 – 01:05:15
no, I mean, if you follow me on Instagram, you’d probably see a lot of dogs. I had, I had four and now I have 31 of mine. Um, my oldest dog unfortunately passed away about two years ago. But, um, uh, I have three dogs and I, yeah, I’m sure I’ll be collecting another one in, you know, in no time. I have a very hard time saying no to a rescue in need of a rescue dog.
Jeff Bullas
01:05:15 – 01:06:05
Yeah. I’ve heard of that. Yeah. So Kristin , thank you very much for sharing your journey and your passion and it shines through and it’s been an absolute blast. And uh what would I do if I didn’t get paid for it? I’d be doing this because for me, it’s about having quality conversations quite often. One on one which is what I really love doing. And uh quite often it’s a dinner party with a few friends, and end up having the most honest conversations. And apart from walking to Westminster Abbey and feeling a deep sense of joy and connection to world history and architecture and beauty. Um, that brings me a lot of joy doing this. And thank you very much for sharing your ideas um and your heart and soul and mine with us today. It’s been an absolute pleasure. Thank you very much.
Kristin Luck
01:06:05 – 01:06:07
Thanks for having me. Yeah.