George Jagodzinski (00:00):

Have you ever used an app or a product and wondered why it's such a pain to upgrade it, downgrade it, add users, or change your payment methods? Then you may have been a victim of a bad quote-to-cash experience. No, we're not a law firm that can help you, but today, we break down the quote-to-cash space. We explain how to spell CPQ, while also shining some light behind the scenes, because behind all those bad consumer experiences, I guarantee, there are customer success teams, finance teams, sales product, basically the entire organization behind the scenes, just as frustrated as you. The quote-to-cash space is very complicated, but it's also the lifeblood of many organizations.

(00:37):

Today, we're cutting through all this with John Garvens, consultant, architect, Revenue Cloud expert, and Salesforce career coach. He's worked on some of the most complicated quote-to-cash implementations out there, both inside and outside of Salesforce. He explains the space as, "Just sell stuff and get money." Sounds simple. We explore how to avoid building a Rube Goldberg machine and why slowing down might actually save your company millions.

(01:01):

Plus, we talk burnout, Brazilian jiu-jitsu, and how to build a consulting career without torching your sanity. Please welcome John. Welcome to Evolving Industry, a no-BS podcast about business leaders who are successfully weaving technology into their company's DNA to forge a better path forward. If you're looking to actually move the ball forward, rather than spinning around in a tornado of buzzwords, you're in the right place. I'm your host, George Jagodzinski. John, thanks so much for being here.

John Garvens (01:45):

Thanks for having me.

George Jagodzinski (01:47):

So today, we're going to talk quote-to-cash, CPQ, some other stuff, but what I figured we'd start with is, let's explain what the heck quote-to-cash is. I don't know about you, but as consultants and platforms, we talk our own language a lot of the time, and I don't know that there's many people out there that are going home from work being like, "Man, I've got such a quote-to-cash problem. It's really bothering me." So maybe if you could give a little overview of, "How do you explain quote-to-cash?"

John Garvens (02:15):

I explain quote-to-cash in four words, and it's taken me years of consulting to distill it into its very essence to figure out what that is, and that is sell stuff, get money. That's it.

George Jagodzinski (02:28):

I love that.

John Garvens (02:29):

Sell stuff. What do you sell? How do you sell it? How does it relate to one another? What are you allowed to and not allowed to sell together?

(02:35):

How do you price those things and apply discounts? How do you apply pricing and discounts within the structure of a larger group of products that are sold together as a bundle, and then presents all that on a document, and set an offer, and you ensure, and then generate an order and an invoice, and then you pull payments, and you apply the payments to the invoice, and all this other stuff that happens? Sell stuff, get money. Businesses are trying to do both of those things. If you're doing one but not the other, you're going to have problems.

George Jagodzinski (03:01):

Totally agree. And then, how do you explain CPQ? Is it a subset of quote-to-cash? Is it a different thing? Is that-

John Garvens (03:08):

Yeah, I think of it as the, that is the front half. That's our sell stuff. Selling stuff is net new sales. A customer wants to buy from us for the first time. CPQ is all about configure price quote.

(03:20):

Some people may know that, some people might not. At the end of the day, what the business cares about for that sale is generating a nice, beautiful document that shows the customer, "Wow, it's totally worth it to spend a million dollars with this company." All of the other pieces, the configuration and the pricing and stuff. That leads up to that quote document, but at the end of the day, the customer is paying for that document that looks really pretty to get that signature so you can book the deal, and then start your order-to-cash process. That order is, both functionally and technically, is the handshake and the linchpin between to sell stuff, get money equation.

George Jagodzinski (03:56):

In my mind, when I think quote-to-cash, just because I've actually pictured this literally, is you're at a SaaS company, and they're having issues with a churn, or they're having retention issues, they're having conversion problems, and at the same time, you've got a sales team that's complaining like, "I have to jump through so many hoops to do an upgrade or do a new sale. I'd rather be doing this with paper. This is BS. This is such a pain in the butt. How do you expect me to hit my numbers?"

(04:23):

Well, at the same time you've got like a ops team, or RevOps team, that they're underwater, keeping a million plates spinning, wishing that they could help the sales teams and the customer success teams, but it's just such a cluster, and they find it impossible to understand how things can look better. When you're walking into a quote-to-cash situation, what are the pain points that you're seeing?

John Garvens (04:47):

The pain points are you could probably distill them into three big buckets, where, "We're wasting time, we're wasting energy, we're wasting money." Most of it, unintentional. "We are spending entirely too much time on this process. It takes too long to create a quote. It's taking my reps the entire week, and by the time they go through all the approvals, which by the way, we're handling an email inbox, is not in a clear, thoughtful, methodical, strategic way."

(05:15):

It's just back and forth in inboxes, sending PDFs of version 27 of a document to try to get approval from somebody. And our tool is either, is probably Excel or some homegrown thing, and that doesn't really work anymore. And there are a number of those sorts of things, the energy that that consumes, not only in the energy to do the work, to produce the document that I need to send to the customer, but also just the mental drain and the emotional drain from inefficient processes that don't need to be that way. And people can see, at this point, we've all used software enough, that we know what it could be, and we know what it is, and we become quite quickly dissatisfied with the way it is when we know, "Why can't I just click a button and this thing happens? Why can't I get this done on my own?"

(06:09):

"I don't need an approval for this. It's a 10% discount. This is allowed. Why do I still have to go through this whole arduous thing?" And then the money. The money expressing itself has opportunities that are missed, like renewals, and upsells, and cross-sells, and all of these things, because the new rep didn't know they could cross-sell these products.

(06:29):

"The existing rep, eh, they didn't care too much about this renewal." It's going to take work to resell or to upsell them on a new product, and it's not going to be worth their commission check, or those that are auto-renew, and, "Why am I spending time on a ... They're going to keep renewing this. No one attrits from our company. They love us so much. Wouldn't that be nice?"

(06:53):

And so we just need to automatically renew this stuff, but we have to manually go through it every time, or it could be data is incorrect. It's inputted wrong. The rep puts in whatever number they feel like it, or maybe they misremember what they're supposed to do intentionally or otherwise. And so now, our pricing is off, or discountings don't follow what the conventions are. And then you have the additional complications of sales, selling things that the product management team didn't actually make, and the compliance team saying, "You're not allowed to sell that there," and the finance team saying, "How do you expect us to recognize revenue for this and to account for all of it?," and the legal team saying, "None of you ran this by me."

(07:43):

"What do you do it here?" And then, the marketing team's going, "Well, but it's already on the website," and here, we have a problem.

George Jagodzinski (07:51):

And why is this process in place? Well, because it's always been in place.

John Garvens (07:54):

Right, right. It's that parable of cutting the ends off of the roast, and then you eventually trace it back several generations, and you realize that when the great-great-grandparents moved to the United States, they had a very small oven, and the roast didn't fit unless you cut the ends off, but then, everybody following that was taught that, "Well, you just cut the ends off the roast because that's what grandma and grandpa did." And here we are, 100 years later with a nice, big LG oven that's got a computer inside of it, and it washes my clothes too, and I don't need to cut the ends off the roast, but I still do because well, that's the way I was taught to do it.

George Jagodzinski (08:31):

I didn't know that story, and I love it, because I'm also obsessed with cooking traditions that make no sense anymore, so I'm surprised I didn't know what it meant. That's solid.

John Garvens (08:38):

Yeah, I think it's more of a fictionalized, metaphorical sort of a thing, but it applies everywhere, is you teach this person how to do the thing based on what you learned, and then they pass it on, and it becomes this game of generational telephone, and you see that in software, you see that in life. Why do people do this? Why do we all wear pants instead of everybody wearing a muumuu? I don't know, because somebody, a long time ago, thought pants were a good idea, and now, that's what we wear.

George Jagodzinski (09:08):

And muumuu sounds more comfortable. So shifting-

John Garvens (09:11):

I won't tell you what I wear at home.

George Jagodzinski (09:14):

And then shifting gears a little bit, why quote-to-cash for you? Why do you love it?

John Garvens (09:20):

I have grown to tolerate it. Quote-to-cash started as a happy accident. I was a Salesforce administrator, and I had started a tinker around. This was before I knew that SteelBrick CPQ, which became Salesforce CPQ existed. I started a tinker around with quotes in a sandbox, the standard quote.

(09:39):

You can't really do anything with it, but you can generate a pretty terrible-looking document with the really old original quote. And then, I had got a new job, and as part of the new job, we were rolling out sales, service, community, which became experience, and CPQ, and NetSuite, and four other products, which was entirely too much to roll out at once. I was very heavily involved in the CPQ implementation. A partner was implementing, but I was working side by side, and really learning as we went how to put this thing together and what this was. That gave me enough experience.

(10:17):

I joked that I could spell CPQ, so I got a job as a senior consultant doing CPQ implementations. Having done only one CPQ implementation and really having only a year and a half of administration experience under my belt, I'm now senior CPQ consultant. My timing was very fortuitous in that way, but the company that I worked for did CPQ. It was simplest, and that's what reduce CPQ. Everybody here does CPQ.

(10:45):

The actual extension of that expertise is the order-to-cash piece, and now you're thinking in terms of quote-to-cash, and then people started thinking in terms of revenue operations, which existed. I mean, revenue operations exist in any organization that generates revenue, but it's not, hasn't historically been a disciplined area of study with consistent practices, best and worst practices and all of this other than just, "Well, make as much money as possible." Great. How can we start to codify this into a structured way of thinking about the generation of revenue to operationalize, and then systematize it using various tools and things like this? The paychecks were good, and the people were smart, and I was getting, at the time, travel a lot. I was in my late 20's, traveling a lot as a consultant early-

George Jagodzinski (11:41):

Back when it was fun.

John Garvens (11:41):

... early '30s, back when it was still fun, in the before times. I became passionate about it through the development of skill, competence, expertise, et cetera, which is the opposite of what we're taught of, follow your passion, which is well-intended, but misguided and generally terrible advice. Instead, get really good at something. Get world-class at something, and your passion will sprout from that skill.

George Jagodzinski (12:07):

I think I love it. I get it. I'd say I'd tolerate it because it is a mess of a solution space, but here's what I love about it. I'm curious if this resonates with you, but in the quote-to-cash space, and you mentioned a lot of it in what you were talking about before, man, it touches everyone, finance, legal, revenue, and they're all annoyed that they're not being productive, because they're bogged down with all this nonsense. That moment, where you can get that many people aligned, and that many people kind of enjoying their job a little bit better, like, dude, that, I love.

John Garvens (12:38):

Yeah. I like thinking in general, and quote-to-cash is a difficult and complex process to learn, and the tooling that accompanies the process is also difficult and complex to learn. So as somebody who likes to learn and work on hard things for long periods of time, quote-to-cash is a phenomenal fit. I've learned so much about how businesses work. I've worked with companies where I thought, "How is that a product?"

(13:07):

"And you make how much money selling this thing? Wow, this is insane." You learn a lot about business, and through that, the broader world, and technology, and geopolitics, and history, and all sorts of other things in different industries. So consulting, as a general career area plus quote-to-cash, being closely associated with what those companies actually sell and how they sell it, and the mechanics of that is really at the core of business. The first manager I had at that consulting firm, the first consulting firm, he referred to quote-to-cash as the circulatory system of the business.

(13:50):

I mean, it's the heart and the blood. The cash flows through those veins, and arteries, and all over the place, and how does that work? It's a core system. Functioning or non-functioning is either highly beneficial or detrimental to the business, and all companies hire people to do all sorts of different jobs, and those jobs are important for different reasons, but if the revenue shuts off, we got big problems. And so it's a mission-critical business process, so there's stakes.

(14:21):

I like the stakes of it, I like the complexity of thought. And this sort of a career, also, I like to hang out with smart people, hopefully smarter people than me, which isn't a tall bar, but these people flock to consulting, they flock to quote-to-cash, and I have on the non-quote-to-cash side, I have amazing conversations about all sorts of eclectic topics with my Revenue Cloud friends, because we're interested in all sorts of things. So maybe it's something that attracts those neurodivergent groups of people.

George Jagodzinski (14:50):

That's interesting, that it could be a magnet for that. I know early days of me getting into it, one thing that was a happy surprise is just learning about how different ways that different people pay for things throughout the world. In South America, there's a Boleto, which is like this ticket thing that you take to a local store.

John Garvens (15:07):

Oh.

George Jagodzinski (15:07):

And there's just so many unique ways, and it's an interesting way to kind of explore the globe, just looking, as you help companies expand.

John Garvens (15:15):

Yeah, Ecommerce or even pricing methodology. I mean, some businesses are very simple. Price times quantity gets you the total. Boy, that's easy. That's nice. Then, they went and hired somebody with an MBA from an Ivy League university, who spent five years at McKinsey, and all of a sudden, we need a new pricing strategy, and now the pricing is like 100 different inputs, and it's like a Rube Goldberg machine.

George Jagodzinski (15:38):

Oh, yeah.

John Garvens (15:39):

The pricing matrix is this Rube Goldberg machine, and it used to be $10 times 10 units is $100, and now you go through all this other stuff in there that, "This is the perfect pricing strategy. Look at my fancy MBA from Harvard, look at my resume that says McKinsey," and then at the end, you end up with $100 for 10 units.

George Jagodzinski (15:59):

And if you got a wonky Rube Goldberg cash-to-quote system, it'll take you several months just to roll out pricing changes, right, which is yet another reason to improve things.

John Garvens (16:11):

Right.

George Jagodzinski (16:11):

Evolving Industry is brought to you by Intevity. We bring order to chaos wherever people, process, and technology converge. Our culture drives our solutions, and we are solution-obsessed. We see every challenge as an opportunity, every partner as a collaborator, and every project has a chance to share our values and commitment to excellence. Give us a shout.

(16:29):

We'd love to hear your challenges and turn them into opportunities. Find out more at intevity.com. Now, back to the show. So next topic I wanted to cover was it feels like right now, we're like in this renaissance of quote-to-cash. There seems to be a ton of investment and acquisitions going into it, and there was even an announcement today, which we could talk about. First, what do you think is prompting all of this investment right now into it?

John Garvens (16:59):

There's a lecture given, an ad hoc lecture, unofficial. I was giving a training on CPQ to a Big 4 consulting firm to prep their consultants to go be architects one week later after just learning how this project worked. And he went into this, not really a history lesson, so much as a satellite view of the world of quote-to-cash, and what was happening. What he pointed out at the time, and this would've been, say, five to seven years ago, I don't know the exact timeline, he showed how this quote-to-cash space is the battleground between these back office systems that are trying to work their way to the front office, and these front office systems that are trying to work their way to the back office. So you have Oracle, SAP, and others, trying to work their way to the front office through acquisitions of companies like BigMachines and CallidusCloud in the case of SAP.

(17:53):

And then, on the other side, you have companies like Salesforce and HubSpot, and now ServiceNow, which is the acquisition that you had just mentioned, Salesforce buying SteelBrick, and then Cacheflow being bought by HubSpot. We have Logik.io, the announcement being made today, that they have plans to be acquired by ServiceNow. So all roads, I guess, lead back to Oracle, and so the circle is complete. You have front office going to the back office, back office going to the front office, and all of that, it's like the passage is through quote-to-cash. That's how you connect the dots between those two systems.

(18:34):

I thought that was an insightful and very macro view of everything, but what we have now is the actual tactics of, "Okay, if this is the strategy, is to use quote-to-cash, to go from back to front, front to back, et cetera, then how are we going to do it?" And we're going to do that. It takes a long time to develop software in general, and develop a quote-to-cash software. Because of the nature of the complexity and difficulty of quote-to-cash, it will take a long time to develop these products to a point that they're useful to a large enterprise or a business of any level of complexity. So everybody's placing their bets.

(19:12):

The rumor mill was that Salesforce originally tried to buy Apttus, but it was either too expensive or whatever. To my knowledge, Salesforce still uses Apttus to generate its quotes, but it's moving over to the new one, Revenue Cloud. They ended up buying SteelBrick. So then, Apttus was hanging out out there, and they ended up buying Conga, and then rebranded Apttus to Conga, and then you have all this other stuff happening. So these companies with money are looking around, trying to buy stuff.

(19:41):

The one I don't really know about yet is Microsoft, because you have Microsoft Dynamics and that whole ERP space, and you got other companies with ERPs like Sage or this, that, and the other thing, or NetSuite, and they have some CRM capabilities, but do they really have a quote-to-cash system? I don't know. And maybe there's some more acquisitions that are possibly going to happen, but in talking with my friends today about M&A in general, I had mentioned M&A is usually just a dog and pony show. Company A enters agreement to buy company B, later they do another press release, because people apparently love reading press releases, and okay, company A has acquired company B, and now Company B, three months later, has rebranded, and it is now a company A company. And everything on the outside, the websites look the same, they've merged all that stuff, this, that, the other thing, but they're two completely different companies still.

(20:39):

They're two tech stacks, they don't talk to each other. It's on paper only that these two things work together.

George Jagodzinski (20:47):

Yeah, there's some duct tape behind the scenes, holding a couple things together.

John Garvens (20:50):

Yeah. Well, it's probably, I'm not married, but I assume it's kind of like a marriage. Like, okay, at the very beginning of a marriage, these two people are now legally bound to each other, and over time the lives interweave, and they start to line up, and then fast-forward to 20, 30, 40 years of marriage, those lives are deeply embedded together. And now, okay, there's a whole system that has spun up around this relationship, and that's probably what happens, in a sense, with these corporations as well. But on day one, in year one, year one of marriage, everybody says is the hardest. I bet year one post-acquisition is the hardest too, for the leadership involved.

George Jagodzinski (21:25):

Oh, yeah.

John Garvens (21:26):

I think that's kind of what's happening. Everybody's clamoring for a quote-to-cash solution of some kind so they can hang in the game too. It's similar to how Microsoft bought Skype, and then you had Salesforce. It's like, "Ah, shit, we got to compete with teams." Salesforce bought Slack, and they're still trying to justify that massive overspend on this company, but I have created multiple WordSpaces, so I'm not anti-Slack, I'm just anti how companies use Slack to substitute for clearly defined business processes.

George Jagodzinski (21:55):

Yep. Yeah. I see that as well. So let's pick on Salesforce a little bit. The steel brand-

John Garvens (22:01):

One of my favorites.

George Jagodzinski (22:02):

I mean, how long ago? That was a long time ago, right? 2015?

John Garvens (22:06):

December 2015 was the acquisition of SteelBrick. SteelBrick was founded, I think, for my research ... I was researching this for a video that I'm going to make, coming up on just what I see happening now. I think it was 2009. Bought in 2015, and for a little bit, innovation continued, new functions rolled out, et cetera, but for the last half decade, some people say last two to three years, I'm looking at it, going, "It's been almost since the acquisition."

(22:34):

It's like five-plus years of no significant enhancements to the CPQ product, known issues in 2016 or known issues in 2025. So, I mean, 10 years. You still have this bug, this bug, this bug. Okay. Or incomplete solutions is another piece. So either blatant bugs, incomplete solutions, et cetera, we just know they're not going to get fixed, at this point.

(22:59):

It's like people wanting or logging an idea in the IdeaExchange. You just, "Oh, it's 10-year-old idea. Yeah, that's never going out." Then, nothing happens for a long time, and then there was a rumor. Then, you had Salesforce building, which is kind of like couple fits and starts, and then you have this subscription management.

(23:16):

Everybody's excited, "Oh, subscription management. New product." Already dead. Probably a couple customers on it, but those will move over to the new Revenue Cloud product, and the Revenue Cloud product is still very early on. It has developed faster than I thought.

(23:30):

I've not seen more investment in quote-to-cash from Salesforce since the acquisition of SteelBrick for, I believe, $280 million, somewhere in that neighborhood, and that's exciting. When my Revenue Cloud friends and I first started learning about this new product, we were really excited and hopeful, because, oh, we've been Oliver Twist. We've been an orphan. "Please, sir, can I have some more enhancements and upgrades?" No, apparently not.

(24:00):

But then, we get really excited. And so now, we oscillate between cautiously optimistic about its future and deeply frustrated about its presence, trying to be understanding and compassionate, that developing software takes a tremendous amount of time, energy, and money, and that human patience doesn't have the staying power it needs to accept those timelines and these whatevers, but it'll get better. I mean, Salesforce, as long as Salesforce doesn't quit the project, we'll be fine, and we'll have a solid quote-to-cash project. If the roadmap becomes what the roadmap claims it will become, it'll be a damn good product.

George Jagodzinski (24:43):

Yeah, I'm hopeful for it. I mean, if I find it interesting that we're looking at a decade ago, it was a SteelBrick acquisition, I remember a few years prior to that, just assuming like, "When is Salesforce going to buy something in this space?," because I was working in this space, and it was so fragmented, and then fits and starts, fits and starts, but now, it seems like there's a real investment and a real focus on it. While you're out seeing other players, like you said, like ServiceNow is making some moves, HubSpot's making a lot of moves here, I mean, one thing I think might be leading you to it, because I've been doing quote-to-cash for, geez, I think 15 years at this point. I remember early days when you would tell someone, talk about subscription management, they would think of things like the boxes, like subscribing to a box, and they're like, "That's a fad that's going to go away." Right?

(25:28):

And then, big companies would talk about subscription, but it took them so long to actually embed those things into their organizations, and combine that with-

John Garvens (25:38):

[inaudible 00:25:38].

George Jagodzinski (25:38):

Yeah. Everyone talks about the office of the CFO seems to be the last one that's modernizing. So you now have all these-

John Garvens (25:46):

That's surprising.

George Jagodzinski (25:47):

Yeah, totally. I mean, it's kind of makes sense, right? And so now, I think it's the convergence of you now have real subscriptions baked into things. The example I like to always talk about is ... This is not a commercial for Buderus, but I have a Buderus boiler.

(26:01):

And I don't know, I think they've been making boilers to a hunk of metal for probably a couple hundred years, but now they have subscriptions baked into their entire HVAC service, right?

John Garvens (26:12):

Really?

George Jagodzinski (26:13):

Yeah, and I think there's tons of those examples where-

John Garvens (26:15):

That's the least exciting subscription I've ever heard of.

George Jagodzinski (26:18):

It is-

John Garvens (26:19):

But I like it.

George Jagodzinski (26:21):

Well, I'm a data guy, and I like to look at how much oil I'm burning, so ...

John Garvens (26:25):

Oh, okay.

George Jagodzinski (26:25):

I'll tell you, it gets exciting with oil prices in New England, that's for damn sure. But I think it's this convergence of multiple things, where now, there's real movement in this space that's going on right now. And when we're talking to clients, they're like, some of them are on old Salesforce CPQ, or they've got a mixture of Zuora, or Aria, or insert platform name here, and they're like, "Should I be replatforming right now? Should I be going to Salesforce?" People who are making decisions right now, if we were to give them any advice as far as what to think about and what to factor into their decisions, what do you say?

John Garvens (27:03):

Slow down. There's going to be the tendency to rush to make a decision, and it's going to be justified and rationalized with probably a couple of common things. The first to market sort of the bias, "Oh, we've got to be a first mover," "We can't be a lagger," "We can't be behind," "We got to get this to stay relevant, to stay up-to-date." The business fundamentals don't change all that much. You got to make money, you got to make more than you spend.

(27:32):

Your competitors are in just as bad a spot as you are, and it would probably benefit more companies to slow down a little bit in their decision-making. Granted, there are some companies that think entirely too slowly about these things and take five years to make a decision about it. So I don't take five years. Maybe you target one to two years to make the decision about which, "Okay, are we going to replatform or not? I mean, do we even need to think about a new product?"

(28:01):

So the CPQ end of sale is a big thing. Let's take that as an example. Okay, you're on Salesforce CPQ, so that's my main squeeze and what I know, and Salesforce is over here saying, "Hey, we got this new product. Let's cut you over." "Do you need to cut over?"

(28:14):

"Well, it's end of sale. It's end of sale. We got to ..." Oh, no, it's end of sale, folks. It is not end of life. End of sale, end of support, end of life.

(28:25):

There's your timeline. My prediction, hopefully this video ages well, my prediction is that Salesforce CPQ will be on for the next decade, and it won't be off, they're not going to turn those servers off and completely shut it down until 2035, because you have six to 7,000 customers on it. You have six to 7,000, and this is just one product. And let's say that you get 10% to cut over year over year, that's 700 customers cutting over year over year for the next 10 years, which I think is generous, because are there 700 project teams of talent available to cut over?

George Jagodzinski (29:03):

Definitely.

John Garvens (29:03):

You might want to cut over right now, but you won't be able to. There's not the talent for it, and a lot of the talent in the space is burned out, and they don't want to grind forever when I started this consulting journey. I mean, my Salesforce journey basically started 10 years ago. I worked my ass off over the last 10 years, and I don't know that I want to do all of that grinding again and live on the road for three weeks at a time, and spend more time in a year in a hotel room than my own apartment. I don't know that I want to do that again, or just the endless, okay, you're trying to juggle four or five projects at the same time.

(29:41):

They're all difficult and complicated. They're all stressful, this, that, the other thing. People are really, especially since the pandemic, really thinking about work-life balance again, rather than work-life integration, where, "I'm just going to integrate work into every pocket of time that I have," that's not, "Okay, I got to feed my kids, but I can work in between bites. Okay, great." That's not a way to live so-

George Jagodzinski (30:03):

Yeah. I want to dig into that next, but I guess first, I'll agree with you. I'll put a stake in that. I'd say a decade minimum sounds about right, and I'll call out to our AI-

John Garvens (30:13):

The end of life.

George Jagodzinski (30:14):

Yeah. Yeah.

John Garvens (30:15):

Yeah.

George Jagodzinski (30:16):

I'll call out to our AI overlords to remind us in 10 years to see if that's the case, but I-

John Garvens (30:21):

Well, that'd be fun.

George Jagodzinski (30:22):

I've got plenty of clients that are on 30, 40, 50-year-old systems that are still humming along, right? And so I think 10 more years seems reasonable to me, especially with your math, and then, the talent question, for sure. And I agree with the slowdown because nine times out of 10, it's like, "Let's look at our processes." Like, "Let's redesign those to be simpler. Are we even using the technology that we have in the right ways?

(30:48):

Let's rethink the experience, both of our employees and the customer, and look for interesting ways to make that experience better." It doesn't have to be a replatform necessarily. Now, sometimes-

John Garvens (30:59):

And, "What do we want our business to become over the next five to 10 years?," the even higher-level question. Companies are, even if we were going to cut over from product A to product B right now, well, we implemented product A five years ago, and we didn't have subscriptions then. Now, we want to start to incorporate consumption model products. So we're doing business differently than we were five years ago. So we can't just copy and paste what we have, and all these projects are going to take a lot more time, energy, and money than people think.

George Jagodzinski (31:29):

Yeah.

John Garvens (31:30):

That's how the world works.

George Jagodzinski (31:32):

Yeah, and even in an M&A world, there's different strategies that they need to realize. And to your point, on year one, they're not going to be fully integrated. Does integrated really need to be one platform to rule them all? I like to use the idea of being highly aligned and loosely coupled, as you're pulling together multiple systems together, and I've seen success with that. But now, let me poke into your intentional living, because you've been burnt out at times. I would imagine most people listening have been burnt out at least once.

John Garvens (32:02):

I keep doing it to myself. I'm trying really hard this time around to not do it because I'd have to quit my own company.

George Jagodzinski (32:08):

So what'd you figure out?

John Garvens (32:09):

Thinking in terms of like resource planning has ... But resource planning for one. I want to get myself right first before I worry about adding complexity. And for me, I've found that being honest with myself about how much time I can truly commit to things is helpful in the prioritization. So, in my case, as a company of one consultant, and I also have a jiu-jitsu school.

(32:34):

Because of this, I can't just work consulting all day, all night. I have class from 6:00 to 8:00, Monday through Friday, and I have to be there to teach. I'm the teacher. I started the place. I have the administrative time around there, so okay, I'm going to need five hours a week for that, some weeks 15 or 20 hours because we're tearing down a wall, and we're going to paint all weekend and all this other stuff.

(33:00):

So that needs to flex. And then, with the consulting business, I've thought about it like a combination of limited time and limited money. So how much is enough for me to live the life I want to live? I worked for A CEO once. He essentially said, "Figure out what you want your life to look like."

(33:22):

Like, "How much money do you need to live the life you want to live?," and then do that, and then do everything else. An author I like, it says, "The happiest people he's seen are the people who basically have a job, they check the box, they make their money, and then they spend their life outside of that, following their passions and doing this other stuff." And I'm trying to take a similar approach, where if I charge 250 an hour and bill 20 hours a week, that's about a quarter million dollars in revenue, and that's enough. It's the Kurt Vonnegut story. I don't know if you heard that one.

George Jagodzinski (33:52):

Oh, yeah. Yeah.

John Garvens (33:54):

That's enough for me to live in a 25,000 person town in Northwest Illinois. Now, I'm starting to think in terms of other things I want to do, which is creating online courses around RevOps, and Revenue Cloud, and even CPQ because it's going to be here for a while. Whether Salesforce admits it or not is a whole separate question, or writing a book or blog posts, or creating more podcast material, or stuff like this, that's going to require time. So where's the time going to come from? Is it going to come from my jiu-jitsu school?

(34:23):

Is it going to come from consulting? Is it going to come from my personal life, which I want to make sure that I have? Some weeks I'm wildly off, like Dreamforce week. I'm way over ... I don't bill any hours, but I'm using all this time over here, and then some weeks, I'm doing tons of hours, and some weeks I barely ...

(34:39):

There have been weeks I haven't billed at all in recent months, but it's fine, because manage your cash flow well and have a pile of savings, and then you ride out those storms.

George Jagodzinski (34:50):

Totally.

John Garvens (34:51):

It's not so stressful.

George Jagodzinski (34:52):

We could talk forever about all of these topics, but something fun I like to end on is you did talk about one, so I'm curious if it's going to be the same, but in your life, in your career, what's the best advice you've ever received?

John Garvens (35:05):

The first one that pops into my head right now is my dad telling me, "Nothing's ever as good or as bad as it seems," which I think in the current state of employment and business, with lots of layoffs and lots of chaos in the quote-to-cash space, or geopolitically throughout the world right now, things are never as good or as bad as they seem helps me kind of keep a moderate view of things. On the consulting side, the best advice I had early on was, "Say no a lot," and, "Never talk about technology and discovery." That was a good one.

George Jagodzinski (35:39):

Interesting. I love all of those.

John Garvens (35:40):

"Keep the focus on the business and the process." Some advice that I give people is that, "If you want someone to ignore you, you give them advice."

George Jagodzinski (35:48):

I love that one. That one's really good as well. But the good and the bad one, I think a lot of people sometimes hear the one, "It's never as bad as it seems," but the good and the bad, I love, because there's highs and lows, and you got to balance out the highs and lows. That's-

John Garvens (36:00):

Right.

George Jagodzinski (36:00):

Right.

John Garvens (36:02):

And it's like, let's pick on AI, in general, and Agentforce specifically. Nothing's ever as good or as bad as it seems, and some companies are really good at marketing, and they get around to making software sometimes when they feel like ... It's like, "I'm going to market and sell the software, and then when it's convenient and I've proven there's enough market, then I'll develop it, and hopefully launch it," although NFT Cloud anyone, Salesforce Genie anyone, Net Zero Cloud. My hope is that Revenue Cloud doesn't follow a similar fate and that the development continues, and I wonder how much of that was just, "Okay, we're going to spin up a page on the website that says NFT Cloud and see what happens." Right?

(36:42):

I now wonder if there was ever even a team of people hired for NFT Cloud, or if it was just, "We're going to make a webpage and see what happens and see if people buy it."

George Jagodzinski (36:50):

Well, hey, we could solve all of our quote-to-cash problems with digital transformation and AI, and let-

John Garvens (36:57):

Agentforce will do it all. Done.

George Jagodzinski (36:59):

Well, on that note, John, thanks so much for being here. I really appreciate it. This was fun.

John Garvens (37:04):

Yeah, thanks for having me.

George Jagodzinski (37:06):

Thanks for listening to Evolving Industry. For more, subscribe and follow us on your favorite podcast platform, and pretty please, drop us a review. We'd really appreciate it. If you're watching or listening on YouTube, hit that subscribe button and smash the bell button for notifications. If you know someone who's pushing the limits to evolve their business, reach out to the show at evolvingindustry@intevity.com, or reach out to me, George Jagodzinski on LinkedIn.

(37:29):

I love speaking with people, getting the hard work done. The business environment's always changing, and you're either keeping up or going extinct. We'll catch you next time. And until then, keep evolving.