Episode 18: How Tech Start-Ups Leverage Thought Leadership

00:33
Madison Riddell
Welcome to another episode of Marketing Moves. I'm your host, Madison Riddell, President of VividFront. Today we're delving into an energizing entrepreneurial story with a spotlight on a wildly successful brand builder, leader, and marketer. Gerald Hetrick is a serial doer. For two decades, he has been making waves in Cleveland's startup community, following a pattern of found scale, exit, repeat. Gerald's entrepreneurial repertoire includes founding and selling Vox mobile, exited to Stratix able, exited to Bullhorn, along with serving on several boards, as well as his recent role as an EOS implementer. Today, Gerald is the CEO of a new venture with a compelling go to market strategy. Docket, formerly Bezlio, is a frontline operations platform built for mid market manufacturers to streamline operations, analyze shopfold data, and boost productivity.

01:29
Madison Riddell
At the intersection of a legacy industry with deep roots regionally manufacturing, and what many consider the future of commerce, SaaS Docket is well positioned to dominate their category. Worth noting, I am slightly biased, as our agency has worked with Gerald and his team to relaunch the brand over the last eight months or so. I'm looking forward to shedding light on Gerald's talents and tricks of the trade with all of you, from hopefully a slightly different angle than he might be used to. Gerald, thanks so much for being here.

01:58
Gerald Hetrick
Thanks for having me.

01:59
Madison Riddell
Awesome.

02:00
Gerald Hetrick
I'm pumped.

02:01
Madison Riddell
All right, so, Gerald, you've been on a ton of podcasts. I listened to your most recent episode, which you recorded here with Lay of the land, another local podcast. And no surprise, the primary focus is always your entrepreneurial story, which is very impressive. And we'll cover it. We'll kind of start there to give some context. But I want to have the goal of exposing a different angle of you today, which is your marketing and branding prowess. I don't want to inflate your ego too much at the start of the.

02:29
Gerald Hetrick
Can'T get much bigger with the intro.

02:30
Madison Riddell
Like that, but I would consider you a unicorn in a couple of ways. In the startup community, I think you obviously have the traditional startup founder qualities. You have a high appetite for risk. You're a problem solver, you have financial acumen, all those things that you need. But in addition to that, I think you have a big emphasis on leadership, which is rare to me as a startup founder. And you also have a badass approach to marketing. So to me, that's like the trifecta, and I really want to talk about that a lot. But as a backdrop, let's just start with your background first. Take us through Vox mobile. Juneau.

03:06
Gerald Hetrick
Wow. Okay, so those are a lot of really nice adjectives in that intro about me. Not sure how many of those are true, but I appreciate it, and thanks for having me. Thanks for coming. I was in this room here recently doing other podcasts, although I was in the other chair, so the aesthetics are different.

03:20
Madison Riddell
This morning. We'll see which ones.

03:21
Gerald Hetrick
You're good. Yeah, right. So, wow. The past 25 years or so, I've been a blur here in Cleveland. I was interviewing a couple of potential sales role candidates for Docket yesterday, and they were asking about my story, and I was telling the story and telling it a couple of different ways.

03:36
Madison Riddell
Fresh.

03:36
Gerald Hetrick
Yeah. Well, I'm not sure if I'm sad about how much time has gone by or if I'm excited because it gives me the propulsion or the context to do the next things a little bit better, but it's been a fun ride. So, yeah, I mean, I've spent most of my career, well, literally all of my career supporting building, living inside of kind of entrepreneurial or growth oriented businesses here in Cleveland. I didn't spend much time in college. I was at John Carroll for just a brief period of time, graduated from Cleveland public schools, and I immediately went to work in my early teenage years, and my first, you know, I was at MCPC when they were founded and got to see a lot of great people do great things there. Helped to build a couple of the technology practices there.

04:16
Gerald Hetrick
But my first real kind of true, take the risk, write the checks part of entrepreneurship was Vox Mobile. I was invited by Chris Snyder. Chris was the COO and CTO at MCPC. I worked there. I was invited by him to kind of co-found and launch Vox. And so went through the whole process of building a business plan and acquiring some of the assets outside of from MCPC and started this super risky but exciting endeavor that was Vox. And I spent ten years there kind of full time operating that business as COO, hired incredible people, met incredible people. We did wonderful things. We built a really strong business, learned a lot of tough lessons, and had a lot of great times after about ten years. I left, moved to a board role, and went and co-founded what was then called Employee Stream.

05:08
Gerald Hetrick
Okay, so employee Stream was the brainchild of a guy named Aaron Grossman and a partner of his inside of his business, Rob Sable. So they were executives at a large regional staffing agency called Talent Launch. They had this notion that they could improve the candidate experience by giving them tools during the onboarding process. They built a couple prototypes of the product, got themselves as customers, a few other folks to say yes, and then brought me in to launch it and commercialize it.

05:35
Madison Riddell
And what year was that? Was this before the big HR tech boom, or were you guys in the thick of that?

05:40
Gerald Hetrick
That was late 2016, early 2017. So I think we're kind of in the thick of it. Although we did go to. I went to HR tech, the actual conference in Vegas the next year, and realized how much were not an HR tech company. We were much more of a kind of a candidate experience company inside of a niche ecosystem, like staffing. So anyway, did that for five years. We had a wonderful opportunity to exit to Bullhorn. Bullhorn is a private equity backed, the leader in applicant tracking systems and other technologies inside of the domestic staffing space, as well as Europe and some other places. Wonderful organization, great company. They acquired us almost two years ago now, which is just crazy to think.

06:16
Madison Riddell
It feels like only two years ago.

06:17
Gerald Hetrick
To me in knowing you. The last then, you know, in the last two years, I've done a lot of things. I've joined some boards. I've done a lot of coaching and consulting of other local entrepreneurs. I bought an EOS franchise to kind of formalize how I was going to approach my side gig consulting, and then was again invited in by the investors and leadership team at Bezlio to kind of help them refresh and relaunch Bezlio. Bezlio was a great local startup that was struggling a bit with traction. They had everything they needed, had a giant market a problem, and some really talented people, and I think they just needed some fresh perspective on how to do it. And so we've spent, as you know, because you guys have been the wonderful partners for us, we've spent much of the last year relaunching that business.

07:02
Gerald Hetrick
Super happy to have it launched as Docket, I think, last week.

07:06
Madison Riddell
Now, now we can talk about it.

07:08
Gerald Hetrick
Yeah, right. So it's funny, were recruiting people and recruiting customers, and all along the way, weren't talking about the brand or what the end goal was. And so now we're out in the open. And so, yeah, I guess that's a compressed version of my story. And I'm sorry if it's watered down or if it's not energetic. I just did it so much yesterday.

07:25
Madison Riddell
That, please, it's perfect. I mean, a million ways that we can go with that backing up just a little bit. It seems like there's a pattern of what your interests are. You're looking to kind of go into either legacy industries or maybe industries that need to be shaken up a little bit with tech. Why is that the pattern for you? Why tech?

07:41
Gerald Hetrick
It was accidental. I had no idea what I was going to do in my senior year of high school. I was fairly good at school and so I had opportunities at different colleges and I had opportunities at jobs, but I was just kind of super open minded that I'll just go where the world takes me type thing. And I got hired inside of a company called Dre Business Products, which was one of the companies that made up MCPC in the late nineties. And I got hired inside of the computer technology lab to move boxes in and out in like a 30 day summer job.

08:11
Madison Riddell
Wow.

08:12
Gerald Hetrick
Literally. My high school girlfriend's father hired me because I needed a job for a couple of weeks and it was like a temporary thing. And as I was the first time I'd ever. Computers, like 1997. So I didn't really know much about computers. I never really used one. And then they were short people and they're like, hey, can you help us build these computers? And so I was putting memory cards in them and doing all this stuff and I'm like, oh, I kind of like this. And then started playing with software and I quickly realized I had an acumen for all things technology. Fell in love with the notion of being part of a big changing industry, which was tech. And so my career just ended up there.

08:44
Madison Riddell
Okay.

08:45
Gerald Hetrick
The attraction of legacy businesses is just that I've realized I'm obsessed with growth. I just love building things. Whether it was with me and my daughters opening Lego kits and trying to build them faster than they think they should be built, or I just like, yeah, I just like to go fast and I like to build stuff and I like a challenge and yeah, my last Vox mobile was a mobile technology management company serving all sorts of industries. But were really kind of at the forefront of mobility, being a tech revolution inside of businesses and able employment was the market. We made the market for onboarding inside of staffing, and Bezlio was all about selling great shop for operations, software to manufacturing. I just, I love it.

09:32
Gerald Hetrick
I love the notion that we can make a big difference, that we can actually affect real users, that people can do their job better, maybe enjoy their job a little bit more with technology that they haven't seen before.

09:41
Madison Riddell
I love that mantra, and I think it's manifested itself a lot into the docket brand, which we're going to spend a ton of time on. But thinking about able for a minute and looking through that marketing lens, what were your priorities there? What were you doing to drive an impact at?

09:57
Gerald Hetrick
Well, I have two kind of core ways. I operate themes and how I operate. And if you listen to me on other podcasts, you probably heard me say these, because the first is, I dream really big, but operate very practically. And so, of course, I want to put a billboard on the moon and I want to build a next unicorn company, but I want to operate really practically. And given some of the capital constraints we have in the midwest, I want to be super pragmatic about where we invest. And so I've always wanted to invest in brand and marketing in a very specific kind of iterative way. And so at Abel, we did that and we could talk more about the story. And then the second one is, we've got to go really fast before we can slow down for strategy.

10:36
Gerald Hetrick
So I like to lean into activity, do a bunch of different things, figure out where you might have some leverage and invest in that leverage. And so I mashed those two things together. So at Abel, we came out of the gates and just said, listen, let's spend the first year doing nothing but trying to acquire customers. Like it's going to be imperfect.

10:50
Madison Riddell
You left the brand as is?

10:51
Gerald Hetrick
Yeah, left the brand as is. We did a little quick refresh with another local agency here. This is seven years ago now, but mostly just left it as is. Go talk to as many customers or as many potential buyers as possible, get as much feedback as possible, sell some good deals, sell some bad deals, take it on the chin a little bit, but just do a bunch of stuff. And then once we kind of found the opportunities for leverage, and in that case, it was that there needed to be a premium brand that cared about candidate experience on the front end of staffing operations. Then we decided to kind of invest in that leverage. And for us at Able, it was brand. I mean, we spent a lot of time and energy coming transitioning from the employee stream brand to the able brand.

11:30
Gerald Hetrick
We wanted to know not just our revenue growth to be the reason why people saw us as this great growth organization, but also this emergence of great brand. And so after about a year and a half, two years into customer acquisition is when we started thinking about brand. And so we relaunched our entire go to market strategy on the back of strong strategic marketing know, pure all out activity. And we had some wonderful people. Andre Malletti led sales for us there. I hired a guy named Sean Gaines who was our CMO and we all kind of believed in the same notion, that brand could be a differentiator. And ultimately I think that the evolution of our brand there and the projection of us is much larger than were because of that was one of the reasons why we got a lot of interest for exit.

12:11
Madison Riddell
That's the power of digital. We talk about that all the time, especially for startups to create that surround sound and look larger than life. And if you pick the right niche or the right targeting, you can saturate a group and make it look like.

12:22
Gerald Hetrick
It'S just the COVID I mean, of course we're going to have sales development and we're going to have people doing outbound prospecting and all that stuff. But if you can create this cover, this umbrella of brand projection, it's a great help.

12:34
Madison Riddell
First impression. Yeah, helps you guys for sure. So you said you guys shifted from that activity based focus to strong marketing. What to you was strong marketing?

12:43
Gerald Hetrick
I mean, more targeted messaging. The goal wasn't just to say more things about us, it was to actually have tangible outcomes. And so for us it was driving the order size up.

12:52
Madison Riddell
Okay.

12:53
Gerald Hetrick
We were raising a lot of venture money and we needed to chase down higher valuations and create returns for people at leverage points that were bigger than we had before. And so we needed to sell deals. We went from selling deals at $10,000 a year to 100 plus thousand dollars a year. So to do that we had to get more larger potential buyers. We had to target the buyer personas in a more sophisticated way such that we could compress those sales cycles and not just have someone knock on a door and build a great relationship by having some beers with someone, but actually trying to position, find all of the constituents to the buying process inside of the companies and solve their problems at once. And marketing helped us do that.

13:29
Gerald Hetrick
So we built messaging aimed at multiple buy points and targeted those in a specific way. And then we thought of all the channels, you know me now, I still about activity, right? Let's do more. Every time we send a proposal, like how do I get a little bit more of that? How do I get a little bit more of that? But be more targeted, be more thoughtful about not like, selling them a solution to some symptom of a problem, but finding the real problem they have. Balancing satisfying the SEO engines with also not being too buzzworthy and saying real things.

14:02
Madison Riddell
SEO guy.

14:02
Gerald Hetrick
Yeah, that was a big goal of ours, which is like, how do we deliver messaging that resonates towards their real problems and then make sure our solutions could solve those problems.

14:15
Madison Riddell
Right.

14:15
Gerald Hetrick
And then just tell that story over and over again in a couple of different ways. So that would land.

14:19
Madison Riddell
Well, I think on the marketing side, shifting audiences is just kind of part of the job, part of the course. You're usually testing a couple of audiences, a couple of different types of messaging, different creative, until you find the sweet spot. But I do think, and I can speak from both perspectives, because I kind of sit at that intersection in our own organization between marketing and sales. I think it's a little more tricky on the sales front to just shift your perspective on who the buyer Persona is. So what was that relationship between marketing and sales? Did you have both in house or did you outsource?

14:46
Gerald Hetrick
We outsourced a lot of marketing work, a lot of the marketing operations. We in sourced all the strategic decision making.

14:54
Madison Riddell
Okay.

14:54
Gerald Hetrick
And that was in direct partnership with our sales approach as well. So the go to market strategy was weaved together really tightly. Good. Now, that's mostly by nature of just how the size were. It would have, of course, had some natural bifurcation that would have happened over time, but we had strong strategic thinkers that were in line with how we should go to market at that point. I think there was probably much like sales and operations and product and engineering. I think sales and marketing ultimately creates. There's some sort of wall that lands there. Our job as leaders. Yeah, our job as leaders is probably to try to knock that down as much as possible.

15:34
Gerald Hetrick
But at Abel, we either didn't get to that point based on stage, or we just didn't have the major problem based on the people we had around the table.

15:41
Madison Riddell
Got it. That makes sense.

15:44
Gerald Hetrick
It wasn't at all rainbows and unicorns.

15:46
Madison Riddell
That's what I'm going to next. What are the challenges? Why'd you leave? Or why'd you exit?

15:50
Gerald Hetrick
One of the most important things in the math equation of how big you can build a company and what kind of outcome you can have for the shareholders and employees is market size. I love the staffing industry. In my EOS world, I have three staffing clients. Right now. I'm on the board of a technology company that sells the staffing agencies. Some of the people that I admire the most work at Bullhorn, either former employees at able or people that I met along the way there. I love that industry. But the reality is it's just small. It's a small kind of boxed in space. And if you look at the history of technology entrance and the technology exits there, unless you're going to have a platform that you can solve major end to end problems with.

16:34
Gerald Hetrick
I needed to be really pragmatic about what our exit opportunities were. And so I knew that there was probably only a couple of places we could land. And I knew the right thing for our. I predicted, and then I hoped the right thing for our employees, our shareholders and our customers, probably, in that order, to be honest, was that to have us go land at a larger platform that had already built the end to end credibility and it would be the right landing spot. So it wasn't easy. I mean, people know the story. We had a term sheet to raise a lot of money before the exit, and we balanced both those things. And it wasn't just my decision.

17:09
Gerald Hetrick
We have quite a bit of board debate and quite a bit of strategic leader debate about it, but that was the right place to go for us to grow the business. Three, four, five, x. What it was, were going to need a bigger market, which means were going to need a bigger pivot, which means were going to leave where we had made our hay behind. And I just didn't think were really prepared to do that.

17:29
Madison Riddell
Was it hard for you to let go and move on from that?

17:32
Gerald Hetrick
Dave Loman, who was my great friend, another local kind of entrepreneurial success story, he was our fractional CFO. He told me, I don't know, we sat in a room and did diligence for 90 days straight, 60 days straight, him and I. And it was during COVID so everyone was remote except for he and I went to limelight every day in Ohio City and just pounded away diligence files. And he told me one day, I think were having a beer at town hall. He's like, you're going to miss this. I'm like, you're insane, man. What do you mean I'm going to miss this? I can't wait for this to be done. At this point. He's like, you're going to miss it. You're going to feel lost. And I just didn't believe that, but it was 100% true.

18:08
Gerald Hetrick
90 days after the exit was probably one of my worst mental places. I felt like my purpose, I was so heads down to build able. There wasn't anything I was extremely attracted to. I was taking someone else's role at Bullhorn. So I had to tell them that I didn't want to stay. Just didn't. I missed it, you know, getting into Docket and finding the opportunity to build again was obviously kind of super important to me.

18:34
Madison Riddell
How'd you end up there?

18:35
Gerald Hetrick
So Abel and Docket, or Bezlio at the time, have a lot of overlapping investors. So you're familiar with the jumpstarts of the world locally and north coast ventures. Those folks are all investors at Bezlio. So weren't part of the same cohort. We launched about the same time when I was open with the community that I was looking for the next thing to do. Some of those folks convinced me to go spend some time with Brian Ellis and see what the business had. And I fell in love.

19:03
Madison Riddell
What did you think about shifting from HR to manufacturing? Did you have any experience in manufacturing?

19:08
Gerald Hetrick
No, not at know. I have a big ego and so I tend to think, oh, sure, I can figure that out. I'll be smart about that. Brian invited me to do some shop floor tours, and I did some others just kind of on my own. People I knew and I'm like, wow, this is cool. People are making real stuff. This is awesome. And I figured that Brian Ellis and his brother Adam had founded the business. They're like long term manufacturing people. They had all the contacts and expertise. If I could help put an apparatus of business around that, then my lack of experience probably wasn't going to shine through as a problem too far.

19:45
Madison Riddell
Explain a little bit about the gap in the market and what Docket solving. I gave a little intro, but for those who are less familiar with the space, what's the opportunity for Docket?

19:54
Gerald Hetrick
Yeah, so we're very specific that we want to sell to mid market manufacturers. And middle markets, obviously can be a huge segment, depending on how you identify it. We look at it, things between one and ten plants, and maybe five to 500 million in revenue make to order manufacturing. So people that are making stuff in custom quantities and custom orders.

20:14
Madison Riddell
What's an example of that?

20:15
Gerald Hetrick
We have manufacturer that makes chairs. We have people who make heating elements for semiconductors and commercial plumbing appliances. It's not like a chemical factory that makes the same thing, the same quantity every day. And the factory just kind of runs in linear fashion.

20:29
Madison Riddell
So it's a more complex.

20:30
Gerald Hetrick
Yeah, it's more complex, more discreet. There's a lot of shifting. We've got to change this machine to make this and we got to move this people here to do this and we're receiving this different quantity. So there's a lot of ins and outs and there's a constant movement of inventory levels and sales order priority and whatnot. We wanted to sell in the mid market and mostly because we see this big trend around hear buzzwords around industry 4.0. And this has moved to automation and technology driven decision making inside of manufacturing plants. That's expensive to do that stuff. And so most mid market manufacturers can't afford the millions of dollars investment to go make these massive changes.

21:10
Gerald Hetrick
And so we set out to say, how can we be at a price point that people can afford, give rapid value, so rapid consumption of value as one of our differentiator, meaning they buy our platform and it doesn't take a year to deploy and help them incrementally move towards an industry 4.0 position. And so we looked and said the shop floor has been mostly forgotten in middle market. There's very little user centric software. So there's a lot of.

21:36
Madison Riddell
Or software at all.

21:38
Gerald Hetrick
Or software at all, sure. But there's digital work instruction products and there's ERP tools that are built for the front office and there's mobile screens to those. But the reality is, from our perspective, very little product work has been done to say, what does the industrial worker need to make their jobs better? How can it not be friction to them, but actually to create relief in how they do their job and give them a satisfaction of doing a better job? And so that's what we're doing. Our product is all about the industrial worker inside of manufacturing shop floors, knowing exactly what they should do at all times, knowing exactly how to do that, getting through it in a fast and more efficient way, and doing it with tools that aren't burdensome, but actually are joy to use? We do that more specifically.

22:19
Gerald Hetrick
It's a very dynamic workflow product that's taking data from the ERP and helping create priority around what needs to be done when, and then giving the users really clear instructions on how to do that.

22:30
Madison Riddell
And it sounds like from everything you're saying, you're taking an audience first approach. And when you guys are thinking about audience, are you thinking about that end user on the shop floor? Are you thinking about decision makers and the C suite? Are you trying to balance both?

22:42
Gerald Hetrick
It's super tricky, right? Because the C suite and decision makers, and frankly it are the buyers, so they're going to make the buying decisions. Shop for users are not typically, and maybe unfortunately, are not going to be involved in the buying process. But we want to make sure that our brand promise is that their lives will better, that when they go to work, they will do a better job and they'll feel more satisfied by it. And then in doing that, we will give the original buyers of the application data and feedback and satisfaction that the shop floors were operating just a bit more efficiently. Right. So it is tricky. As you know, we're not marketing. It's hard to go market to shop floor workers. They're not online buying software. So we have to make sure we're staying true to that.

23:25
Gerald Hetrick
We're building user centric software, but we're selling to the front office.

23:28
Madison Riddell
And I think messaging and positioning was really important in our partnership. What we worked on so far, when we started working together, it was just Bezlio. We didn't have a new brand name yet, we didn't have any messaging, no identity. I think you were still kind of learning and understanding the business so that we could learn from you. And I think when you talk about Abel, you just jumped right into activity. You started selling, you tried to get as much traction as possible. It's kind of the opposite, I think, of what happened with Bezlio to Docket type of journey. And we really started with branding first, before we built a website, before we built go to market, before you did a ton of sales activity. Right?

24:01
Gerald Hetrick
Yeah, 100%. It's literally been a different story. So at Able, it was fresh. We didn't have a lot of feedback. We didn't know much about what were going to be or how were going to operate as a company. It was a hunch and a great founding vision. And we're like, let's just go, just get feedback. The beautiful thing around Docket is that Bezlio spent five years and then 15 ish before that. The same group of people selling to these same customers, mid market manufacturing. So it's been this accidental, incredible product story. There's all the feedback we could need. When were thinking about exactly how we would build the product, we didn't need to go test it with a bunch of customers. There was years of feedback.

24:40
Gerald Hetrick
And Bezlio had 50, 60, 70 customers already with their original product that was somewhat similar, although a little bit more just mobile screen focused. And so I decided to invest in people. So we brought in, put together a team of been there, done that, entrepreneurial leaders product. And so I haven't built this product in a garage. We built it with real professional product. Engineering and brand. And so we said we're going to launch, kind of surprise the market with there's this new entrant, and we're going to launch with a powerful brand.

25:11
Madison Riddell
And I think we did just that. For sure.

25:12
Gerald Hetrick
I think so, yeah.

25:13
Madison Riddell
We can share the details of that if we want to. But I think it sounds like your takeaways from Abel on. Eventually, you got to that place where you were ready to rip the brand down to the studs, build a little bit more of a digital ecosystem. You got to jump a couple of steps ahead because of Bezlio's foundation.

25:27
Gerald Hetrick
Yeah, but there's fear in both approaches. I mean, this one, I effectively spent a year without not doing any customer acquisition.

25:35
Madison Riddell
With investing a lot.

25:38
Gerald Hetrick
We'Ve certainly talked to a lot of customers, and we got five or six really early adopters to the platform, but we have not in earnest and at scale started acquiring customers. But that will change in the next couple.

25:51
Madison Riddell
Now, if we're good at our job.

25:52
Gerald Hetrick
Right.

25:53
Madison Riddell
And you guys recently raised 4.5 million. Right. Where does that investment go?

25:57
Gerald Hetrick
It went into the things we talked about went into product, it went into brand, and it went into team. So we've kind of built the apparatus of what should be a great growth story, and we will raise money again next year. I mean, we'll be back out do a fundraise. I think there's some people here helping me build a pitch deck, actually.

26:12
Madison Riddell
Oh, yeah. Nice.

26:13
Gerald Hetrick
So we'll be back out to do.

26:15
Madison Riddell
Things I don't even know about.

26:16
Gerald Hetrick
Right? Yeah, we'll be back out to raise. We have a great cap table. Incredible investors today that are excited about the journey, and I think we'll have opportunity. And then there's some folks that I've done business with previously in the venture world that I'd love to be part of the opportunity. And then there's some other funds that I think are kind of great targets for us. So we'll be out looking for capital to really kind of accelerate growth in the next couple of months here.

26:40
Madison Riddell
Get some gasoline on fire. Yeah. How are you guys approaching product development moving forward? Obviously, you've made some changes. We know internal lingo. There was gen one and now gen two. Right?

26:51
Gerald Hetrick
Yeah.

26:51
Madison Riddell
How's the product going to evolve? Are you guys keeping that at the forefront?

26:54
Gerald Hetrick
Yeah. So we're going to be a product company. You can be sales led, you can be product led. You can be a mixture of both. I think it certainly will be a mixture of both because we will take some risks on the sales side and for Dominic and Peter, my product engineer leaders, when you hear this, I'm sorry, but we will take some risks on the sales side and we'll probably.

27:11
Madison Riddell
What's sales if no risk?

27:12
Gerald Hetrick
Yeah, but we're going to try really hard not to starve the platform, meaning that we don't want to be overrun with customer issues such that we can never focus on platform. We have a very robust and ambitious roadmap for 2024. We're going to bring features around analytics and insights, we're going to bring features around reporting, we're going to bring features around, the opportunity to dynamically edit workflows. I mean, we're going to do some really exciting things that we think are going to be very beneficial to customers. And so we are investing in those things. And we have very talented engineering team. We've invested in products already and we're out telling people what that roadmap is.

27:57
Gerald Hetrick
So we'll continue to do that, but we'll also be nimble and a little reserve the opportunity to shift priorities a little bit on the fly here as we do get more customer feedback.

28:05
Madison Riddell
Yeah, that makes sense to me. So from a marketing strategy perspective, obviously I know what the plan is to go to market, but can you share with the listeners what the marketing priorities are going to be? What channels are you guys going to lean into? How is it going to support the sales team?

28:19
Gerald Hetrick
Yeah, I think I said earlier, brand is a differentiator, really. I think creating brand that underscores your promise of value and then being true to that is important. So for me, we will continue to do a lot of thought leadership creation towards the brand. We believe there's a massive problem. We've heard from others there's a massive problem, but we do have to educate some potential buyers about that problem. And so we're going to do a lot of thought leadership. That's traditional blogs and podcasts and webinars and whatnot. And we're going to try to get ourselves into as many channels as possible because we've kind of been a hidden company for the past two years and we don't know all those channels. We're not in the mix of all of the right LinkedIn groups or going all the right conferences.

29:04
Gerald Hetrick
So there'll be a lot of that just to get the brand out there, position ourselves as a solution to a growing problem, define the problem and just do a lot of thought leadership. So I think we're going to do some market making activities. That's we'll invest heavily there and then just frankly, demand generation. We'll have salespeople that are prospecting, prospecting. But we need marketing to support that with being in front of people when they want to make a decision, getting messaging out there over and over again, giving avenues for lead generation. We'll do that again, I think a lot. In partnership with VividFront, we'll do a lot of that this year as well. I've been really interested lately in the notion of velocity versus quality on the marketing front.

29:50
Madison Riddell
Curious where you lean.

29:51
Gerald Hetrick
Yeah. Not to not have great quality, but to do more, to do it faster, to not always have the most perfect curated LinkedIn posts, but to just go faster a bit. And so I'm sure there's a place for Google Ads and to try to constantly be manipulating the algorithms, but I also think there's like, let's just do a lot. I think there's kind of this convergence in consumer product marketing and b, two b marketing that I think we should lean into a bit. I'm just starting to kind of push and see the feedback of all the folks involved in marketing with us around. I saw something the other day like, we would do two LinkedIn posts a week and I said, well, what if we did ten a day? What if we just went faster?

30:36
Gerald Hetrick
And sure, maybe we'll miss a period in the right place and maybe we'll say something a little controversial, but shouldn't we want our customers to believe that we're at the forefront of the thought leadership in this world? And also, shouldn't we try to capture the mind share as much as possible? So lots to figure out there. That's more of the experimental stuff. But I think we'll do a lot of traditional thought leadership, traditional demand generation, and then maybe start to test velocity a little bit more.

30:59
Madison Riddell
I think the brand voice is certainly powerful. Like, we're making big claims. We came out of the gates with really punchy messaging, which is probably new to the space a little bit foreign taglines, know what's next, do it right. Like confident, powerful, simple, short name, same thing. We had a lot of name storming to land on that one. But I think the position that you guys are taking is definitely unique in the space. And I love what you're talking about, the intersection of perfection and progress. I think we go through a lot of that on the agency side, trying to coach clients because everyone needs something a little bit different. But if you let perfection be the enemy of progress and you spend too much time highly tailoring the brand, it actually starts to become inauthentic and you.

31:40
Gerald Hetrick
Can'T reach that and you're paralyzed. If you overthink it, you just become paralyzed and you might not make a decision.

31:47
Madison Riddell
Right. And testing, so powerful. We know that if we don't get enough quantity, enough statistical significance of who's interacting with content, if there's one post a month, you're never going to understand what works and what resonates. So I think quantity is good.

32:02
Gerald Hetrick
Yeah, we just did some work building out our core values and I know VividFront's really big on core values as well. Building out our core values. And it's not just about, I've been thinking a lot about this. It's not just about the people we hire, but it's about the partners we partner with and the approach we take to things. And we need to go fast and our customers need to know that about us. We're unapologetically a startup. We're not trying to hide the fact. Hopefully we'll put a billboard on a building downtown in ten years. But right now we're a startup. I mean, we're in the annex of a little build. We might be able to work that out, right? Yeah, we want to go fast and we want our customers to know we're going fast for their benefit. That's the whole point.

32:42
Madison Riddell
Yeah, totally agree. You guys have worked with, or you in general have worked with a bunch of marketers in house outsource. Obviously you're working with us and I'm putting you in the hot seat a little bit. But I want you to share completely openly what are the experiences you've had. Pros and cons of in source versus outsource, what do you think about agencies versus in house?

33:00
Gerald Hetrick
Okay, so I think I shared with you when we first met, I don't know. I don't know, maybe a year or so ago that I had a fairly healthy disrespect for marketing agencies. Not my favorite challenge salesperson. And I stole that phrase healthy disrespect from my buddy Chris Snyder because he and I have gone back and forth over the years about what to in source versus what to outsource, what's core versus context? I did not expect to take an agency route here at Docket. I expected to hire one internal marketing generalist and then backfill that with as much fractional resourcing as we could. Mostly because I just generally don't believe that the early stages, marketing agencies were really committed to understanding you enough to have the context to help you make decisions.

33:44
Gerald Hetrick
Like, if I just need a piece of creative made sure, if I need a one pager, made sure. But I liked you guys a lot. I thought you're fairly authentic. I loved the fact that we're here in Cleveland and fighting for the same benefits and the same ecosystem. And I thought, well, let's give it a shot. Let's see. Because you guys, when we first did the pitches, it just came across really genuine and it wasn't like, here's their package and you have to fit in this and we're going to nickel and dime you beyond that. So the experience with VividFront has been unique in that it feels like you guys are part of our team. I mean, we're in slack together, we're openly solving problems together. It felt like a super collaborative process and building the brand.

34:21
Gerald Hetrick
When we talk about how big we are, we talk about the names of people at VividFront that work on our stuff. I mean, you guys are hopefully stopping by for a drink at our holiday party. It feels like there's connection there. Now. A lot of that's because we're in Cleveland. It's a small ecosystem. You guys are trying to make headway there. I think we're a good opportunity for success. We've all been committed to the partnership. So that said, I've also had tremendous experience in sourcing some of these incredible. I was fortunate enough to hire an incredible CMO at able and he did wonderful things for us. We paused our brand refresh before we hired him and then he came in and kind of led us and probably iterated it 20% in a better, more progress oriented direction.

35:07
Gerald Hetrick
So I think there's pros and cons of both. When we are a much larger, scalable engine, we might need less of the day to day super partnership and more like just run these operations perfectly for right now. It's been great.

35:21
Madison Riddell
Yeah, we always say that eventually we want our startups to grow so big that you have to fire us and bring some. We do one little part and they're running strategy. I think that's how our model scales.

35:30
Gerald Hetrick
Well, I mean, that's the beauty. As a professional service provider, you should do that. The people who don't believe that are the ones that get lost. Because if you make me be so dependent on you that you can never leave, well, that just creates resentment along the way. It never works. It never works. And overall, people forget why this relationship started and your people will change and our people will change and it'll just become a challenge?

35:54
Madison Riddell
Well, I think just to serve back the compliment. I wasn't fishing for compliments, but I'm glad we got one. I think that from the agency side, we have tons of different client relationships, and most of them are really fantastic. Some don't pan out, and I think the reason some don't work and we can't have that synergy is because they don't have somebody at the helm who understands their values marketing to the degree that you guys do. I think from the day that we engaged, you brought in your entire team. Like, everybody was part of the name storm. Everybody was part of going through messaging, poking holes in one another's approach in a healthy way. From day one, it wasn't a siloed effort. It wasn't just us sitting down with the CEO who doesn't know anything about.

36:32
Gerald Hetrick
I mean, I don't know anything about marketing. You do. So I had to bring. We got Greg Gordz and John Carpenter, and we've got some wonderful people in our team that I wanted. So one of the other reasons for the rebrand was that none of us were here when the brand Bezlio was created. It's a wonderful, beautiful brand, and they did a great job. But that was a long time ago, and if I want to build a startup and ask people to give me a bunch of years of their life towards an endeavor that's going to make people lots of money, and I want to build passion around it, I need them to be emotionally connected. Buy in customers are at the forefront of the brand, but I wanted my employees to be proud of it.

37:05
Gerald Hetrick
Before I came over here, we opened our first box of swag and looked at the t-shirts that had the docket brand on it. That was pretty badass. It was a pretty fun moment. So I needed the team to be bought in. And so I think I actually liked one of the names better than Docket, if I remember correctly.

37:20
Madison Riddell
I won't flex who came up with Docket, but someone really smart.

37:24
Gerald Hetrick
Yeah. Anyway, I think it's all partnership right now.

37:28
Madison Riddell
Yeah, agreed. So I think that dovetails really well into the EOS side of things, because you're talking about core values, we're talking about cultural alignment for us. As I'm running through our core values in our head, you guys perfectly align with them. Entrepreneurial spirit is a big one for us. So that's why we have a lot of startup clients fostering flow. So figuring out what's flow state for us versus what's flow state for you, let's not disrupt that. Like, you guys focus on what you do best. Let us focus on what we do best. Team first. We're going at this from a team perspective, leading with empathy. Those are where we start and end. Did you guys develop your values? Have you landed on them?

37:59
Gerald Hetrick
We did, yeah. So you want to hear? Yeah.

38:01
Madison Riddell
This is my first intro.

38:02
Gerald Hetrick
Yeah. And it's funny because I just did an EOS session the other day. Great people, and they have the table stakes, values, the typical honesty and integrity. And you just saw when I went through the room and we talked about them a bit, were going to refresh them. We talked about a bit. You could just see how it frankly just kind of falls a little flat. And so when I share with them where we landed on our values and how it isn't just kind of buzzwords, you could see aha moments, which was exciting because when we did it was aha moments. So first is we're force multipliers. So you have to make everyone else around you better. You have to show up. Making people around you better, that is a requirement to be part of our world. It's partners, employees, whatnot.

38:40
Gerald Hetrick
You have to deliver outsized value in ways beyond just money. We're obsessed with growth, and that's kind of an obvious one in entrepreneurship, but it means we grow with intention. So it isn't just big, chaotic move forward just for the sake of moving forward. It's unapologetically accelerative but intentional about growth. Like we're going to move forward at all cases. If you're joining us, if you're partnering with us, it's about growth, about progress. And the third is we are premium. We deliver premium products, premium experiences, premium services. And one of the beauties of the way you do this in the EOS world isn't an individual value, that's a differentiator, because plenty of people are obsessed with growth. It's the combination of all three together that differentiate you.

39:22
Gerald Hetrick
So we are a group of people attempting to deliver the best products and the most premium experiences while growing a business in a responsible but fast way and making everyone else around us is better. Not just the person sitting across me, but everyone part of the story better. It feels big and bold, and it probably could not more highlight what I've wanted from a team in my journey. So it feels great.

39:47
Madison Riddell
Wow. I love that. I think those really resonate. I agree. They're not hallmarks, stickers on the wall. And you talked about seeking partners. Obviously, you seek to grow a team that has those values. I think some of those could also trickle into customers. Believe it or not, that's the kind of impact that you guys are looking to drive with these mid market manufacturers is they have to be able to grow and they have to have a positive impact and have a premium product that they're putting together. So I think there's some.

40:13
Gerald Hetrick
We did this exercise at Abel in which we shout out to Alan Brenner, who's a brilliant mind locally, is a board member investor in a lot of companies here, and he really taught us to think about selling to sophisticated buyers. There are people who won't buy our solution, not because they don't need it, because they don't really want it, they don't really want to change. They don't really want to grow. And that's okay. And it's okay to not fight those battles. Greg Gorts, who leads go to market for us at docket. He's been very intentional about who the first, we call them beta customers are looking through our customer list, talking to leads that come in. Who are the first people that will really get this and it will actually have meaningful value for them. They want to grow.

40:53
Gerald Hetrick
They want to deliver something premium. So I didn't even realize, you just said it like it is. We've been accidentally, or maybe not accidentally, but seeking, subconsciously seeking our initial customers that meet those same behavior points. Same values.

41:09
Madison Riddell
Yeah, I love that. Are you guys fully implemented on EOS?

41:14
Gerald Hetrick
Fully implemented is an interesting term. Yes, we're through our implementation. We're into the running quarterlies, but we have a lot to learn.

41:20
Madison Riddell
Okay, cool. Are you self implementing for those listening? He's an EOS implementer newly since the summer, right?

41:26
Gerald Hetrick
Yeah, I'm an EOS implementer. I have a very small practice, six or seven clients. It's not a full time gig for me at all. It's meant to keep me sharp, and I will starve mentally if I can't have my hands in other things. I need to be out in front of and meet other businesses and see other stuff. I do that always anyway. This just helps me formalize how I do it and box in how I do it such that I'm not meandering through a bunch of different experiences. No, but I'm not. I wanted to participate in the process in a pure way. And so Chris Snyder is doing our implementation. He's a local, you know, hundreds and hundreds of sessions under his belt, and so he's doing our implementation. He exhibits those values as well, which is important.

42:05
Madison Riddell
To me, you guys worked together.

42:06
Gerald Hetrick
Long time, co founded business together. He's been a mentor of mine for many years. And so I sit in the room with the team, going through the. Flipping through a leadership team manual from the EOS leadership team manual, just like everyone else does.

42:20
Madison Riddell
Well, you talked about a couple of times having a big ego, but I think if you're doing that, you're stripping it back and you're really leveling.

42:27
Gerald Hetrick
Yeah, but it's hard. Yeah, come on. Everyone who knows me, who's listening this probably rolled their eyes a couple of times. Yeah, no, it's hard. I have a huge ego. I just do. I was having breakfast with a friend the other day, talking about. He had this fight with his wife. His wife called him controlling. And he said, do you think I'm controlling? I said, yeah, of course you're controlling. Yes, you're building business. Got to be a mirror. You've got, like, four businesses you're building, and, yes, you're controlling. Is it to a detriment? Possibly. That's where you have to figure out how to pull back on it. But it's hard to decide. I mean, you know how much ego it takes to say, I'm going to go build a business that doesn't exist right now and try to create a comey that doesn't exist.

43:08
Gerald Hetrick
Yeah, that's a controlling, egotistical thing. And maybe it's just me finding the place for those bad parts of me to live. Or maybe it's like, that's what you need to kind of build stuff. But I'm working hard on it all the time. But, yeah, I have a big ego and certainly need to be checked often.

43:24
Madison Riddell
Well, I'm a big self awareness valuer. That's like, my core values. I had to pick one for me, separate from our Vivid values. And I think self awareness personally is obviously important. If you're going to develop a team and all those things, self awareness on the business is important. You got to be able to look at it with eyes wide open. So I think whether you think it's a flaw or not, it's good that you're self aware.

43:45
Gerald Hetrick
Yes. I think what you said is wonderful because you can have an ego and you can believe you're great, but walking around with a superiority complex and projecting that on everyone else is different.

43:52
Madison Riddell
That's a narcissist.

43:53
Gerald Hetrick
That's a narcissist. Right. And that's unhealthy. I think the businesses we build here in Cleveland have that midwestern grit, spirit, that usually isn't the truth.

44:02
Madison Riddell
Totally agree. Well, we're going to round out. I think that there's a lot to take away from this episode about obviously being an entrepreneur, about leaning into brand and marketing, about the SaaS space, the manufacturing space, talent and culture. To me, culture drives revenue, and I think you're leaning on that. What is next for docket? How are you planning to build and scale the culture? How are you planning to build and scale the product? What's the vision?

44:27
Gerald Hetrick
We have built product. We have built and released brand. We have done a bunch of testing. We have gotten early customers, and now it's time to go to market. I mean, we are running a full fledged recruiting process to add selling talent, quota carrying salespeople. We're carefully thinking about how we'll add customer success. Folks, we have a product roadmap that we're really excited about for next year. We've formalized our CTO to join us full time in January, which is nice. Phenomenal win and the business is ready to be out there. We've pulled back the curtain time to scale and we're managing ourselves against high expectations from a performance perspective. Got great premium people ready to deliver on that. And away we go. The docket is no longer hiding behind the curtain for everyone to figure out what it is.

45:13
Gerald Hetrick
We're out and we're ready to go.

45:14
Madison Riddell
Do you have an exit strategy in mind or are you just rolling with the punch?

45:17
Gerald Hetrick
Build a big special business. That's the exit strategy. I mean, of course we talk at a board level about the possibilities, but I'm asking people to give me four to seven to ten years of their precious time. And we're going to be extremely open minded, eyes wide open about the opportunities. And we're going to try to build a big, special business. That's the goal. And maybe, listen, it's a startup, and startups inherently have huge risks. So maybe it doesn't work, but we're going to have done it and feel like we did it the right way. And there wasn't any secret. We were super transparent. We'll look for opportunities and be opportunistic when we need to. But right now it's just heads down. Build a big, special business, deliver from the brand, promise.

45:51
Gerald Hetrick
Give employees a great place to live and have really super happy customers.

45:54
Madison Riddell
Know what's next? Do it right.

45:55
Gerald Hetrick
That's right.

45:56
Madison Riddell
All right, well, I look forward to having you back soon in our new studio and we can start to share a case study on how all the marketing's working and all the good results and we can cheers and all those good things. But as we wrap up, can you just let our listeners know where they can find you if they want to connect on the EOS side where they can find docket?

46:12
Gerald Hetrick
Yeah, I mean, LinkedIn. So Gerald Hetrick on LinkedIn, usedocket.com. I was super excited to find out.

46:19
Madison Riddell
Big domain guy.

46:20
Gerald Hetrick
Yeah, big domain guy, I do own a lot of domains, usedocket.com. You can send me an email at gerald@usedocket.com. And I'm always on LinkedIn and can probably find me at many local pubs multiple times a month.

46:34
Madison Riddell
Favorite one? Leave us with your favorite.

46:36
Gerald Hetrick
Masthead Brewing company.

46:37
Madison Riddell
All right, I think I knew that. Thanks so much, Gerald.

46:39
Gerald Hetrick
Thank you.

46:40
Madison Riddell
Thanks, guys.