Services operations

Toni Pavlovich

January 28, 2021 by

Toni is a results-oriented, culture-first kind of leader who started her career as an F117A Stealth Fighter avionics engineer but now spends her days navigating the world of enterprise software. She currently leads Splunk’s Professional Services and Sales organization, a $200+ million P&L with more than 850 sales, services and partner delivery professionals in more than 20 countries. Toni has experience across nearly every aspect of a business and the customer journey, whether that’s technical pre-sales, sales, professional services, global support, mission critical services or customer success management. When she’s not busy building, mentoring and managing her teams, Toni can usually be found competing at any number of sports or volunteering at the Longboat Key Turtle Watch.

Why are you so passionate about helping people-based businesses?

I started my career in engineering and product sales, but spent the majority of my time as a leader in people-based businesses. People are the heart and soul of any company, and there is nothing more amazing than creating a culture and environment where high performing teams are learning and growing, providing huge value to customers, and feeling accomplished but challenged. That’s a sweet spot for me, and results in great talent and a thriving business.

You manage teams on five continents. What advice would you give to founders looking to expand internationally on managing a truly global team culture?

This is too hard to summarize in a few sentences but I’ll start with a big one: think and act globally, but with a local lens. By that I mean leaders have to be clear on overall objectives and direction, while being thoughtful and respectful of the culture, language and diverse needs of local employees and customers. Too many U.S.-based leaders come at it with a U.S.centric mindset. Be conscious of what you say, what policies you put in place and what actions you take. Even small things like creating flex meeting times that respect time zone differences can make a big impact.

How has the cloud changed things when it comes to meeting the needs and demands of enterprise customers?

As customers move from perpetual or on-premise to cloud technologies, their expectations of vendors have shifted alongside. They now expect a regular cadence of new features, seamless updates, instant fixes, proactive pushes, even telemetry. If expectations aren’t met, they feel much more empowered to leave and find a new vendor. This means companies have to get the right services to customers, at the right time, with the right resources to speed customer adoption; it’s imperative that they’re getting value every step of the way so they renew and expand. However, that takes sales, services, support and product teams working together, which means everyone now owns customer success. Not one particular group.

As a vocal advocate for women in Science, Technology, Engineering and Math (STEM), what do you think companies can do differently to help women excel in technology organizations?

Making progress in this area takes real work, not just talk, and it can’t just be owned by HR. It needs to be infused throughout the company as a business imperative and treated as importantly as other drivers for success. It requires leadership and holding everyone accountable. A good place to start is to benchmark where you are currently and be realistic but set aggressive goals. Collect the data, use it as a foundation, measure your progress and communicate how you’re doing. Be purposeful in creating a diverse pipeline of candidates and ensure you are creating a culture that is inclusive.

Ryan Denehy

January 25, 2021 by

Ryan is a serial entrepreneur, investor and hands-on advisor who has started three companies, and is now the founder and CEO of Electric, a IT solutions company with more than 20,000 end users and 400 customers. He started his first venture-backed company, a digital ad network called Banquet and his second company, Swarm, a retail analytics company for SMBs, a few years later. Both began with a services-based model but over time transitioned to managed services and eventually pure software, and both had successful exits to publicly traded companies (USA TODAY/Gannett and Groupon). That journey has given Ryan broad experience in all aspects of revenue strategy and proven his ability to craft a vision, build the team, and get the job done.

What do you love about leading and growing people-based businesses?

People-centric approaches (versus software) give founders an edge when it comes to speed. A smart services team can form a hypothesis, create a solution, bring it to market, and iterate and improve it, and within weeks have a seven-figure commercial business unit up and running. That is significantly different than what happens with software-driven companies, and is a unique competitive advantage if managed correctly.

You founded and successfully grew businesses focused on managed services, including Electric AI and SWARM Mobile. What is the biggest mistake companies make when expanding into managed services?

The hardest thing about expanding into productized services is figuring out the division of labor in the value chain. It’s easy to chase big dollars and do it all, but sometimes (well, often) less is more. At SWARM, we ultimately decided to focus our efforts on integration and software and pushed a lot of the commodity field work to channel partners. At Electric, we’ve been really clear about what our humans should do versus someone else’s. This focus has been key to scaling.

What advice would you give founders as they move from the initial start up phase into scale mode?

The best advice I can give is to look at your business objectives 12-18 months from now, and then look at the team that you have today. How confident are you that each leader can own their part of that new number and get the job done in 12 months (not today)? The biggest danger with a scaling business is hitting a wall and it’s entirely avoidable if you look far enough into the future and assess your team on tomorrow rather than today.

Gloria Ramchandani

January 21, 2021 by

Gloria is an entrepreneur and proven leader delivering technology-based solutions for over 10 years. Her expertise is in leading digital transformations for customers across industries – companies such as Coca Cola, Stryker, Google Cloud, BCBS, and US Bank. She is currently the Director of Product at Copado, a DevOps platform company, where she is responsible for new product development and increasing customer engagement with existing products. Prior to this, Gloria held roles at Airwatch by VMware, Appirio, and 7Summits. Additionally, she is an advocate for Women in Technology, specifically in the Salesforce ecosystem where she is heavily involved with many user groups and organizations such as GDI (Girls Develop IT).

Why are you so passionate about helping people-based businesses?

I have worked for many product and services companies during my career. In a product- driven company, you find yourself immersed in a product, spending your time analyzing each feature and how to make that thing better. In a services-driven company, your attention is more on helping a business or people, constantly asking yourself “How can I make my customer more successful?” I love being able to fully immerse myself in another company’s business problems, culture, and technology. It provides such a diverse outlook on how different businesses are run, and making others successful is a feeling that can’t be replaced.

What is a common mistake companies make when it comes to implementing DevOps?

The biggest mistake I see companies make when it comes to DevOps is not including “Plan” or “Monitor” as a part of the process. These are key parts of the DevOps lifecycle. Successful planning means being very clear about the business value of your feature requests and how you will measure it, which helps prioritize your development accordingly. It also involves understanding what you have been able to accomplish in the past and being able to look at dependencies between features. You can’t do planning in isolation. You have to be able to measure and monitor to inform your planning process with real-time analytics.

Many services companies get to a point where they consider productizing assets. What is one piece of advice you have for companies considering this route?

Productizing assets means treating them as a true product and revenue stream. Begin to think about how you can measure revenue for those assets, whether that is in the form of hours saved or new services sold as a result. Keep an inventory of your productized assets as you would for a product and measure how often those are being used across customers. Use data such as asset usage, number of installs, and number of demos or trials, to see how things are trending and to make investment decisions.

You have formally and informally helped a number of organizations establish diversity initiatives, in particular around women in technology. What advice would you give a company just getting started with their program?

Companies that are more diverse attract better talent and create a lasting culture. Research shows they also generate more revenue. When it comes to women in technology, start with giving them a seat at the table. I have spent most of my career in a male dominated industry, and the most successful diversity initiatives I’ve seen start at the grassroots level and are supported by the leadership team. My advice would be to start small by setting an attainable goal and establish a baseline of data. What can you measure today? What can you measure in the future and how do you define success?