One of the most ubiquitous problems in business is the quirky relationship between growth and profitability. Too often, the stream of profit slows down as a company starts to grow and its expenses increase. Kathy Wagner of Kaseya has managed to strike a balance for the the IT and security company, growing profitably—and even acquiring its biggest competitor.
Wagner joins Jack McCullough to share how she has managed this sustainable growth while keeping company culture protected at every step of the way. She shares the power of taking on a consultative role with your team, why she advocates for returning to the office and the value hiring from within.
Listen by clicking below. The Q&A, lightly edited and trimmed for clarity, follows.
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Listen to the podcast here
I’m excited about our guest, Kathy Wagner, from Kaseya. Kathy, welcome to the show.
Thanks. It’s great to be here.
I’ve been looking forward to it. For the two percent or three percent of my readers who might not be familiar with your company, can you give us a 10,000-foot overview?
Kaseya has a platform called IT Complete. What that means is that we have a purpose-built platform to service our customers, who are typically MSPs and IT professionals who service small businesses internally. Our whole premise is that for those what we call multifunction IT pros, we have a full kit to allow them to service businesses in the communities as well as businesses they may work for directly. What does that mean?
It means that perhaps you’re a small dental office or maybe you have one or two dental offices and you don’t have the ability to keep an IT professional on staff full time. However, like any business nowadays, it’s becoming more and more essential to your business to have IT applications, connectivity, online services, making appointments and things like that. Our customers are the guys that those small businesses outsource their IT needs to or alternatively, it’s a small business that has one to two or maybe three people that do IT internally.
Our kit is purpose-built for those types of people who are doing what we call the multifunction IT pro role. If you work at Citibank, they might have 100 people who do backup and another 100 people who do email. Our customers are the guys who have to switch between resetting a password for maybe a hygienist who can’t get into our app, backing up something if the system goes down and taking care of the security needs through email security of all of the small businesses in the country and around the world.
You certainly are impacting a whole lot of the business community with that business model. It’s great. We’ll return to that later, but I want to get a little background on yourself. Can you tell us where did you grow up?
I was born and raised in the great state of New Jersey.
You’re in Florida now.
I moved to Florida in 1996. I’ve spent about half my life in New Jersey and the other half in Florida.
When you were a kid, if I can ask, what was your first job?
I was a bingo waitress at the Catholic school that I went to. Everybody volunteered as part of the school and my dad used to work bingo. He used to hand out the cards and sell stampers, chips and all of that. My dad was a firm believer that young people should work. He would bring me there and my job would be walking up and down the aisles and bringing coffee and snacks to the bingo players so they didn’t have to get up while they were playing their games.
That’s a first, a bingo waitress.
I think I was only seven or eight years old when I started.
That was legal in New Jersey at that time.
It wasn’t for pay. You brought somebody a cup of coffee and they might give you a $0.10 tip or something like that.
I know you went to college at Florida Atlantic University and you studied accounting and then as I understand it, you immediately got your MBA as well. At a young age, what was intriguing to Kathy Wagner about accounting and business?
I wanted to be a lawyer. When I started college, I was thinking of being pre-law, but I went into the basic business track. The very first year, I took an accounting class. I was talking to the teacher, I was doing very well in it, and she was like, “Did you ever think about being a CPA?” I was like, “No, I want to be a lawyer.” She was like, “Do you know there’s one lawyer for every seven people in the state? You’re not going to be able to get a job and there’s this big shortage of CPAs.” I listened to her. I went and researched it later and she was right. I decided to take a closer look at it because, coming from a poorer family with a strong work ethic, I was like, “I have to be able to get a good job; I have to make money.” I wound up becoming a CPA.
You worked at Arthur Andersen and Ernst & Young before starting in a corporate role, but what were the big things you learned in public accounting that set you up well for your first job at Citrix?
The face of public accounting has changed a lot post-Sarbanes Oxley. Let me start by saying that. I think that the folks that came up when I came up, pre-Sarbanes Oxley, got a much better learning experience in the public accounting arena. Now, because of all the new rules, there’s a lot less the public accountants can do, which has slowed the learning somewhat. When I was starting out, number one, you learned about work ethic. You learned how to dress up for a job, be cordial with your customers and act professionally. The firms were good back in those days at teaching those skills. We learned how to do a lot of things because, in those days, you were allowed to do for your customers.
I remember getting the 10-K from this one client, it was the last year’s 10-K with a bunch of Post-its. I pulled out my giant computer and started typing footnotes. We were able to write technical memos and research issues, as well as the nuts and bolts of how a bank rec worked and things like that. My experience in public accounting was very good. I learned a whole lot to prepare myself for my first role at Citrix, which was the assistant corporate controller, where I was in charge of writing the SEC filings, the MD&As, the press releases, as well as handling all the complex accounting and those types of items. I felt very prepared for that coming out of public accounting.
I was in public accounting in the 1980s, and then, in my first job, I was the controller for the company. The things that you described are considered an independence problem, and you can’t do that for your client. There was a time when what they were doing was considered good customer service. No one said that what they were doing was an independence issue. That wasn’t even on our minds. We were all trying to work collaboratively to get the numbers right. It’s a very different game.
That’s exactly what my experience was.
I’m going to put you on the spot because the most common question I get asked by people who are early in their accounting finance career is: Which credential is better for being a CFO, CPA or MBA?
I would definitely say get both if you can. I think in a lot of the states now in order to get your CPA, you have to do the extra 30 hours or so. You might as well get the extra couple of classes and get the MBA. I do think if you had to pick one, that the MBA is probably the better one to get, but I would strongly suggest you get both.
Here’s the reason, and I don’t know if this is what you’re thinking I’m going to say, but you’re going to have a lot of advisors, auditors coming in, and your chief accounting officer. They’re going to give you the most conservative treatment every time. You want to be able to push back and say, “I’m looking at this business outcome. How do I get there?” If you don’t have the accounting chops to push back in those situations because you don’t know, it’s an advantage that you can’t press.
Both of us did that differently. I worked five or seven years before going back, and you did it immediately. To me, any credential is a good credential, and it shows your commitment to your craft and your intellectual curiosity and these are things that employers value. You left public accounting and joined Citrix. Tell us a little about what you learned at Citrix, lessons learned and some of the challenges you faced over the years.
Citrix was a great run. When I started there, it was maybe around $300 million or so in revenue. We scaled that up to $3.3 billion, spun 20 percent of it off, and then scaled it back up to $3 billion and countless acquisitions. I want to say 60-plus acquisitions over my tenure. There were periods more intensely acquisitive than others, but lots of acquisitions. From my perspective, I like to fix things and problem-solve. Those are the things that get me excited. I got the opportunity to do a lot of the work around scaling the organization, which presents a lot of challenges but it presents a lot of opportunities for growth and learning. One of the biggest projects I took on, and I started doing this when we were over $1 billion company, was moving to a shared services model.
It was one of those things where we’re in 40 countries and I have 40 controllers, and everybody’s doing everything fine. They’re getting the bills paid, getting the people paid, collecting the cash, but we want to automate it. I now have 40 people from 40 countries trying to agree on one process to automate it because you can’t automate it in 40 different ways. That was when I was like, “This is not going to work. We cannot do a distributed model.” We started organizing by function, every function had like one leader and then we had one decision maker and we looked at all the different processes, took the best of all those processes and we were able to say, “We’re going to reconcile one way. We’re going to pay the bills this way. We’re going to do everything one way.”
Each person’s breadth was reduced, but their depth was increased. We reorganized and saved a couple hundred million dollars doing that. I was able to take a big chunk of that money and put that into building a procurement organization because back in those days, we were truly an on-prem model. The margins were fantastic. You are selling maybe a disc, and maybe eventually you’re delivering a key. You don’t have a cost of goods sold. You do for the services and things like that, but the margins are fantastic in that model, which we’ve moved away from in favor of SaaS models.
Cost discipline was not a key focus item. As we started to grow and move into the SaaS environment, the margins of the business started to change. It became important for us to start monitoring everything we were buying. I took some of the savings that I got from reorganizing the entire back office into the COE and built out a procurement organization that saved a couple hundred million more. That was a project that kept on giving.
It’s interesting because particularly I’ve observed with tech. I worked in tech companies, but none that were even close to as big as Citrix. Often, cost management, cost discipline or whatever phrase we put to it, it’s an afterthought. The financial people don’t want to kill the entrepreneurial spirit that people go out and get stuff done, and the company grows. On the other end, you can’t ignore it. How do you balance that a little bit? You don’t want to change the culture, but it’s your job to bring discipline to certain processes.
The first thing is growing profitably is super important. I think we’ve seen it with all the big layoffs in some of the big tech companies. The days of getting giant valuations on companies that are losing money like crazy but show big, top-line growth is probably over for now, especially as the cost of capital increased. How do you do it without killing the culture? I always take a consultative approach. I focus less on what they’re asking for and turn the question into, “What are you trying to achieve? What’s the outcome?” A lot of times, folks will come and say, “I need 10 more people to do this. I need $3 million to get a system for this. I’m going to be out of compliance with my product if I don’t have this.”
I try to step away from that ask and not get caught up in the emotional aspect of the ask and say, “Why don’t you tell me a little bit about what you’re trying to achieve and what outcome you’re trying to get?” If I know I don’t have a budget hanging around to get 20 people for XYZ’s project, then it’s like, “Let’s think about how we can do this, and then we can have a conversation about the business outcome. Who else needs to be involved or did they even think about a business case? What is the company going to yield out of this? Was it going to save costs? Is it going to increase revenue? Is it going to reduce risk?” All of those types of things. I found you could be the CF-No and be like, “Absolutely not,” and you can alienate everybody, or you can learn a lot about the business and what’s going on in the business by taking those requests and starting to ask some basic questions.
Did you say CF-No?
Yes.
I can’t prove it, but I believe that I invented that phrase in 1984.
You might have. I heard it in a commercial.
When I started public speaking, I started sharing the story and it’s since it’s taken off. I know that’s a coincidence, but I had a boss who said no to everything. I was an intern. I was 19 or 20 years old or something like that. Anything, no matter what you asked, was always no, even things changing the brand of coffee because it was genetically programmed to say no. I started calling the guy the CF-No behind his back.
One day, he called me in. He always called people by their last names like, “McCullough, I understand you’ve been calling me the CF-No.” I’m thinking, ‘My career is over. My parents are going to kill me. I’m going to lose this job and my future.’ He said, “I want you to know it’s the finest compliment I’ve ever received in my career. You’re going to go far, kid.” I was like, “What the heck?” I came to find out later that he was spelling “no” as “know” and he thought the moniker was a tribute to his extraordinary knowledge. Of course, I had to let him think that.
I had another boss who never said no. He never said anything, and I struggled with that. He was the CFO at one point and head of finance. I’d worked with him for a while, and I was always his number two in command. People would leave conversations and be like, “He said I could have this.” He never said no, but he never said yes.
You moved to Kaseya after the run of a lifetime and you joined in May 2021. Dumb question because it’s a wonderful company, but what was it about the opportunity that you found compelling?
This is a super easy question to answer. I met Fred, our CEO, and he had such clarity of vision and purpose for the company that I was on the phone with him for an hour or so. I have been interviewing with a lot of companies. I got off the phone and my husband said, “What do they do?” In that short conversation, I was able to clearly articulate exactly what they did and what the vision was. It is important to know your purpose and who your customer is and be laser-focused on it.
I think too many companies try to be too many things, too many people or customers and they lose focus. It was that clarity of vision that I was like, “I think that out of all the different opportunities I was looking at, I want to go there.” That’s more than half the battle, knowing who and what you are and what you’re serving and what your purpose is. Fred has that in spades.
This is Fred Voccola. I’m always curious to explore that dynamic because, like some people have said, CFOs are almost like deputy CEOs. A lot of research suggests it’s the most important relationship among the C-Suites. How would you describe your professional relationship with Fred?
Fred and I get along well. We talk a lot and that’s very consultative. Fred’s a visionary and my job is to work with the leadership team and figure out ways to make the things that he envisions reality. As a company, we definitely have a lot of financial discipline. We do grow profitably. Too many companies allow profitability to get away. I do a lot of talks for folks who are thinking about selling their businesses. I always tell people, “Once profitability gets away from you, it’s super hard to get it back.”
On the flip side, you can always spend more. That’s the easy part. That’s our philosophy of growing the company. We’re always thoughtful about that. He’s very focused on profit and EBITDA. That makes it easier. As our management team, I do consider myself a business partner to the entire management team, mostly our president, chief product officer, chief marketing officer and a couple of others. I try to take that consultative approach with my peers as well as with Fred.
That’s a healthy relationship, to say the least. It’s remarkable how many CFOs tell me that they joined the company largely because of the person in charge, that relationship, the excitement for their vision and the chance to build something great with the right person. I want to talk to you a little bit about the company. I realized they were established before you joined, but you’ve had the opportunity to nurture and create a team. What’s your philosophy for building a world-class finance and accounting team in the modern environment?
One of the things that we like to do at Kaseya aligns very much with how I’ve always thought about it, is we like to grow our own. What does that mean? That means that we like to take less experienced candidates and provide them with training and a support system so they can grow into roles. Also, we like to promote from within. It’s a big cultural aspect of our business.
There are some roles where, especially in my groups, I need experienced folks, but a lot of times when I’m looking for somebody, maybe a chief accounting officer or I’m looking for a head of finance, I’ll want to hire what I call a step-up candidate. That person is right below the role I’m looking to hire at their current company, and maybe that person is ready to be promoted, but at their current company, the guy in the seat isn’t leaving anytime soon, or there’s not a business need for a promotion. I look for those types of folks to hire into the org.
What I find is that they’re still close enough to whatever it was they were doing that they know how to do it, and then I give them an opportunity to manage it as well, depending on the level of the role. Something that we focus on is giving people that chance to be a first-time chief accounting officer, HR, legal person and the person that was right below that person at their other company. That’s something we take pride in. Sometimes, we’ll hire a seasoned person that already sat in the seat, depending on what it is. In general, we have that scrappy culture where we want those people who are willing to fight to get to the next level, and it builds that tenacity throughout the team.
The other thing that I look for in team members is boundaryless behavior. I can’t tell you how many times I sit in an interview and there’s always the obligatory, “Do you have any questions for me?” at the end. And they’re like, “What are the top five things you need from me? What would you call success in my first 90 days?”
I always answer that like, “I know what the top five things I need from this role are, that’s in the job description. The value is going to come when you tell me about the 20 things I didn’t know I needed and you’re going to fix for me or jump in and work on.” Those are the things that have value. When somebody in my team was like, “This is broken over here. Nobody seems to own it.” Or “So and so won’t do it.” I have the philosophy that you don’t have to just color in the lines of your job description. Let’s go fix that problem.
I know on the debate of working from home versus back to the office, you’ve made the commitment to have everybody back at the office for a lot of reasons.
It flies right into the face of how we think about hiring. If you’re going to hire folks that are going to step up into their role or you’re going to give people their first-time opportunity to be a manager or seller, and you’re going to grow your own, I think growth and learning are much more accelerated when people are in the office together. Our sales floor is purpose-built to keep early career sellers going and allow them to quickly move up in their careers. We set up the physical space where there’s a manager that sits at the head of the table and the eight reps they supervise sit at the table and that manager’s there when they need help. They can raise their hand or call them over.
We also have other supporting characters going around the floors. For example, our IT complete platform has over 40 modules in it. One seller is never going to be an expert in all 40 modules. If they’re on the phone with a customer who needs some additional information to close that sale, we have product specialists, customer success engineers or solution engineers who are co-located with them, and they can call them over and get help.
Sometimes, they’ll be like, “Why do I have to be here?” I’m like, “If you weren’t here and you had to hang up the phone when you have that customer on the line to go find somebody on Zoom, Teams or a cell phone to answer a question when you could have called the person over, who knows if the guy’s going to pick up the phone again?” We try to not only tell people they have to be in the office, but we tell them why it makes sense, why it helps their career and why it helps them achieve their objective. In the case I gave, that would be to sell more because they’re sellers and they’re paid on commissions. That’s why we like the in-the-office culture. I think it fits in with what we try to do from a people perspective in growing our own and promoting from within.
You’re a very powerful company within your industry, but you also have a lot of formidable competition. That must be a constant challenge for any company that works in an industry like that. How do you continue to be the market leader in your space and fend off all the companies that’d like to be you?
We’re competitively positioned very well. IT is complete. Our platform is complete. I don’t think any other vendor has a platform that can compete with ours from a completeness perspective, then we solve basic problems for our customers. One is vendor fatigue. You could get a lot of different point solutions from 15, 16 or 17 different vendors. If you’re a small business, you probably don’t have a procurement department to manage all those vendor relationships. We don’t have to make all of our money on one or two items. We have 40 things to sell you. We’re willing to sell at a lower price to get more of your wallet share so we can compete on price as well. Those are two of the bigger things we do to compete.
I have to ask you one question. It’s a little off-subject, but I’m a Boston Celtics fan. I was born and raised in New England. At some point, I noticed that the stadium became the Kaseya Center and you are now the host of the Miami Heat. I’m fascinated by what went into that decision because, if I have my facts right, it was a $117 million decision. How do you make the decision to sponsor a sports stadium like that?
We are hiring at an accelerated rate. We saw it as an opportunity to get our name out there and help with recruiting. We saw an extremely large increase in traffic to our website and an influx of resumes. When we did the deal, it continued. Their customers have name recognition. I met with a customer in our Miami office. He’s like, “Now when I go pitch to my dentist, I say I have Graphis, the email software powered by Kaseya.” He was from Wisconsin or somewhere. He was like, “They know what it is because you guys have the stadium.” It gives that name recognition.
Miami is our home turf, and when the FTX guys went belly up, it was an opportunity that presented itself in addition to helping with recruiting and name recognition and allows us, when we bring people to our headquarters, to take them to a game and give them an experience that they may never have as a small business.
If you’re a big enterprise and you spend hundreds of thousands of dollars with companies, you’re going to get a lot of perks. A lot of our customers, they’re small businesses, maybe they spend $10,000 with us and we’ll take ’em to a game when they come down to visit. There are many reasons why we did it. Finally, a chunk of that money goes to a program called Peace and Prosperity, which is a local program for Miami-Dade County to end gun violence in the streets. There’s that piece of it, too. It’s a multifaceted deal with a lot of reasons to do it.
It’s wonderful to work for a company that’s able to make that type of impact. Since you’ve been at Kaseya, have you done a lot of acquisitions? You mentioned you’ve done a lot at Citrix.
No, we’ve done a lot of acquisitions at Kaseya. The most notable one is Datto. We had the opportunity to buy our biggest competitor and take a public company private. That was a super exciting transformational acquisition to work on. We’ve done a lot of smaller ones. We bought a company called Vonahi. That one I love. It’s the automation of pen testing. It sits very well in how we think about M&A because our customers are small businesses and labor’s a problem, labor’s expensive, especially nowadays, and pen tests are expensive and they’re labor intensive.
This was an opportunity to buy a company that had automated that to make something accessible to our customer base, in this case, network penetration testing that might not have been accessible to small businesses at all because of the barrier of entry of cost and labor intensity. We look at those types of acquisitions to add to our IT complete stack to make it more complete. Vonahi was one that fits well into how we think about it.
The one thing that’s underrated about an acquisition is the cultural aspect, and here you are buying your biggest competitor. What is your experience? Is that a a fair statement that the cultural thing is as difficult as the other aspects and what have you learned from that?
Culture has to be a part of a deal. When we look at our acquisitions, we like to keep the leaders or the founders of those acquisitions as part of our management team. Those intellectual assets, especially in software, make a lot of sense to retain. We also want to find folks who are going to be able to work within our company and be a cultural fit. Some of the things I always consider is, “What’s their customer service orientation?” Things aren’t good or bad, but they’re different. If you can’t agree on what customer service looks like, your customer centricity or if you had a dollar, to spend it on another bell and whistle that maybe 1 percent of the customers are going to use or to spend it on an account manager that’s the frontline decision maker that’s servicing your customer—if you have those fundamental disagreements, it’s going to be hard to come together cohesively and make your acquisition successful.
One of the things we look at is to make sure folks are going to be a cultural fit. We’re very upfront about what it’s like to work at Kaseya, what the expectations are and make sure that the folks that we’re acquiring understand that. The other thing we do is keep the brand names of the companies we acquire. There are many companies that acquire a company and then they immediately get rid of the top people and change the name. You paid for all that. It’s like buying a car and changing out the engine or taking the front seat out right away.
You devalued that asset by stripping it down and you paid all that money for it. You haven’t even gotten it off the lot yet and it may not be worth as much as what you bought. We approach it that way. We look at the culture. We make sure that the companies that we’re going to acquire not only have a technology fit, but they also have a cultural fit.
We try to create an environment that allows the entrepreneurs we’re acquiring to remain entrepreneurial while working within the bigger company. We keep the names of the companies we acquire—sometimes we say Powered By Kaseya or By Kaseya—and go from there, and it’s been a very successful way of doing these things.
In some ways, it’s the best of all worlds because they can keep that entrepreneurial spirit, that philosophy and everything’s done, but it’s financial stability. I’ve worked in startups and it’s distracting when you don’t know if you’re going to have enough money in the bank for payroll 60 days out. If that’s a given, then you can focus on solving your technological problem. When we spoke before you mentioned the three Ps, Planning, Predicting and Profits. I’d love to dive into that a little bit, get your philosophy on how the three Ps make you a more effective leader.
We always say we need to plan for everything and then predicting is even more difficult because everything changes very quickly in technology and business, especially here at Kaseya. We’re a very dynamic company growing quickly. An opportunity like the Kaseya Center pops up. That’s a big deal and, “Let’s figure out how we’re going to be able to do that. Can we do it? Can we afford it? How do we negotiate it? Find time to do it. What else is going to wait while we’re going off and doing that?” You have to predict as much as you can and try to build time and resources into the system where if an opportunity presents itself, you’re going to be able to grab that, then we talk about profitability.
Growing profitable is very important. It’s one of the things where we’re always looking at our profitability margin and making those tweaks where it’s unfettered growth without profitability is not going to make us a more valuable company and it’s not a good way to run. We talked about hiring. We are hiring a lot of people and when you look at Kaseya’s history, you’re not going to find those big layoffs that you find at many other tech companies because they got over-exuberant, hired too many people and then they laid off like, “We hired 1,000 too many people,” and they have layoffs. As people evaluate companies they want to work for, they should look at that.
One of my favorite parts of this. I like to ask our guests for a fun fact or something about them that people might find surprising. What’s your fun fact?
I am a total motorhead. I love cars. My husband and I love fast cars and old cars. We like to build monster trucks in our driveway. One time, we built a monster truck and my husband had a crane delivered to the house and dropped this giant Lincoln big block engine into this big F-250 truck that he had jacked up where I needed a ladder to get into it. He painted it in his buddy’s paint booth. He had a shop. Everything from building these crazy cars to having a ‘06 Corvette. I have AMG Benz, the go-fast stuff. His latest purchase is a giant jacked-up Jeep Rubicon. We love cars and that kind of stuff.
When you say you built them, you’re not speaking metaphorically.
No, it was mostly him. I’m very supportive of it like, “Why are you buying that?” Secretly, I’m like, “That’s awesome.”
I can imagine your neighbors must have been thrilled to see a crane delivered.
We had a move from there. It was funny. When we first came to Florida, we lived in a country club where his parents had a home and a monster truck. They made us park it by the dumpster behind the clubhouse so that nobody could see it and we used to take our golf cart down to be able to drive the truck out and eventually one of the security guards there bought that truck. Some of it is super fun. Not all of it is high brow and expensive but fun builds that we enjoy for a while and then we sell them and move on to something new.
I mentioned I live in Massachusetts and it’s very rare that monster trucks come up here, perhaps not their audience. I did get dragged going to one a few years ago against my will. I have to say it was more fun than I imagined. For some reason, it’s not caught on in New England very much. Was it in New Jersey in your youth or is this something you picked up in Florida?
He built it in New Jersey and we moved it down to Florida with us. I think that was the timeframe. It was funny, when we got married, my gift was a Cobra with a stick shift and it was the first year they had the 4.6 liter engine with the overhead cam. They were pumping more air into a smaller engine at the time for it. I had a black GT Mustang and he bought me this white Cobra. I used to switch them out when I drove to work. I was working at Anderson at the time and people were always like, “Did you paint your car?” because they looked similar enough. “Wasn’t your car black yesterday?” I’d be like, “Yes, we painted it white,” and then the next day, we’d come in and I have a white one and people were like, “What are you doing with this car?” That was my wedding present. It had a racing clutch in it. I used to get to work and my leg would buckle. It would be tired from that stiff clutch.
You like messing with people then it sounds like.
Why not? Life is too short. You got to have a little fun.
It’s one of the few joys I have in life at this point. I want to conclude this. You’ve had a fantastic career and I want to get any advice you can give to the next generation of financial leaders.
This is advice I always give people. I think the best thing you can do is when you come into a role, 1) People are like, “How can I get promoted?” I’m like, “The very first thing I want you to do is kill the role you got.” 2) I identify problems and solve them. 3) Don’t say no to anything. If somebody asks you to do something, turn it into an opportunity to make an impression. I think if you do those things, as you said before, intellectual curiosity will give you a good foundation to get promoted and eventually become a leader.
This was a lot of fun and, I’m sure, informative for the readers. I know you have a lot going on. Thank you for making the time to be available and I’d love to give you the final word if you have one.
Thanks for having me. I enjoyed the conversation. It was great getting the opportunity to do this episode.
