How to Hire in a fast growing GTM environment
Outline Summary
Intro
Purpose: Condense a dynamic conversation with Theo Pavlich, Go-to-Market (GTM) Operations Director at ADA, focusing on RevOps talent, hiring philosophies, and practical interview tactics during rapid scale.
Theme: Curiosity and adaptability trump rigid, tool-specific prerequisites; diverse backgrounds often fuel GTM excellence.
Center
Theo Pavlich synthesizes core beliefs about RevOps talent, hiring philosophy, and practical interviewing in fast-growing SAS environments.
Core thesis on hiring
Curiosity is the defining trait: a hunger to learn about RevOps, tools, and technology.
Prior tool-specific experience is less important than teachability and potential to grow.
Unconventional backgrounds (e.g., theater) can yield unique system-thinking and problem-solving strengths.
Resume gaps or layoffs are not disqualifiers; curiosity and adaptability matter more than perfect trajectories.
Roles and definition of RevOps
RevOps evolves as GTM tools proliferate; the title matters less than the capability to connect sales, marketing, and customer success.
People with sales, marketing, or demand-gen backgrounds contribute critical user perspectives for systems that actually work.
Hard skills vs. soft skills
No single hard skill is non-negotiable at the entry level; basic tech literacy and curiosity are prioritized.
At senior levels, familiarity with CRM, marketing automation, sales engagement, and revenue intelligence tools is valuable, but willingness to learn new platforms is essential.
Tool familiarity is less important than landscape awareness and adaptability to switching tools as market needs shift.
Interview approach and questions
Seek evidence of excitement about systems and problem-solving, not just product knowledge.
For specialists: ask about unconventional tool use to reveal resourcefulness and improvisation.
Troubleshooting questions reveal problem-solving workflows (where to start, collaboration vs. solo actions, learning from mistakes).
Strategy questions probe RevOps thinking, cross-functional impact, and openness to new projects.
Assessing adaptability and tool strategy
Evaluate how a candidate would handle a blank slate: do they optimize with existing tools before buying new ones?
Explore attitudes toward tool creep, integration, onboarding, and enabling teams to avoid cognitive overload.
Test creativity through lightweight, time-boxed assignments (e.g., building a go-to-market tool in a sandbox).
Lean Scale methodology (examples)
Architects vs. systems engineers: two profiles
Practical tests include access to real tools (e.g., Bolt) to gauge go-to-market product ideation.
Emphasis on humility, collaborative problem-solving, and willingness to bail out of ineffective tools.
Personal journey and lessons
The speaker’s path from Excel-obsessed seventh grader to theater to RevOps illustrates transferable skills: systems thinking, process optimization, and the ability to turn messy data into tidy operations.
The value of proactive outreach to align culture and role expectations with organizational needs.
Outro
Takeaway: Hire for curiosity, teachability, and cross-functional empathy; empower unconventional candidates to translate diverse experiences into scalable GTM operations.
Connection: Theo can be reached on LinkedIn or via ADA’s site for those seeking RevOps insights or collaboration.
Closing thought: The talent crunch underscores the power of broadened search criteria and deliberate testing of adaptability over static credentials.
Curiosity
Drives lifelong learning and tool-agnostic problem-solving
Adaptability
Navigates rapid GTM shifts and tool changes
Systems mindset
Ensures end-to-end efficiency and user-friendly designs
Humility
Encourages learning from mistakes and seeking help
Cross-functional empathy
Builds tools and processes that support sales, marketing, and CS
Final Words
The discussion highlights that unconventional hires, when guided by rigorous assessment, can outperform traditional profiles in RevOps.
Full Transcript
[Music] Today's guest is someone who excels at turning complex go to market motions into streamline success. Theo Pavlich is the director of go to market operations at ADA with over seven years of B2B expertise in marketing and revenue operations. Theo and I have crossed paths at some of the fastest growing companies in SAS and they have always been the one to push the boundaries of what ops can do during a hypers scale phase. Theo, one of the hardest aspects of growing a RevOps team, I think, is finding the talent. Approximately 63% of B2B companies have created a plan to create a RevOps function or already have it in place. Yet, the talent pool is so slim given the expectations, the depth and breath of experience needed for somebody to fit the role and be successful. So, what I think sometimes we end up needing to do is go a little bit outside of the resume, go outside of the conventional background that you might be looking for or expecting, and you're going to have to find those diamonds in the rough to bring on to your RevOps team, and you're going to have to look for those tangential skills that they can bring into the team. So, I'm just curious. I'd love to kick off with when you're looking to bring someone on your RevOps team, what are you looking for and how do you identify good talent? Yeah, I mean, it's a hard question and I think my shortest answer is curiosity. You know, if it's someone who has an innate curiosity about RevOps, about tools, about technology, they can we can figure the rest of it out. You know, I'm not looking for specific tooling. I'm not looking for a specific background. I've worked at places before and I've seen a lot of different hiring ideology of you have to have this perfect amount of experience in these perfect companies with the exact same background. Like somehow you're going to find someone to hire who has actually already worked at your company and done exactly perfectly and that's that's the only person you're going to hire magically. And I just first of all not realistic. Um but the other thing is you know I personally come from an unconventional background. I worked in theater for a dozen years before I came into marketing operations and revops. And I will die on the hill that that unconventional background is what helps me succeed constantly. Um, and when I'm looking at hiring the resume, you know, I think there are a lot of people who look at a resume and they look for all kinds of reasons to not hire someone. Um, because something isn't perfect or because there's gaps in the resume and it's 2025. If you have managed to make it to 2025 without some weird gap in your resume or something, you know, a a layoff n three months after you started at the company or something like that. I am so happy for your life experience. Congratulations. That's amazing. Um, you might be a unicorn though. Like that's just the reality of you know what the last 20 25 years have looked like. That's a hard thing to achieve. Um, and I think, you know, if that's what you're looking for, I'm very happy for you. That's not what I'm looking for when I'm hiring. You know, I'm looking for first and foremost curiosity and a desire to learn. You know, I'm not looking for the specific tools that I'm using. I'm not looking for the exact, you know, setup. And you know, if you have already done exactly what I'm doing in my organization, that doesn't tell me that you already know how to do it because frankly, you could have done a really bad job at it. I don't know. But also, I mean, for me, if I were doing the same thing over and over again, I'd get bored with that. So, you know, I what I would um what what is important to me is more that you have that curiosity and that you're excited about the possibilities. And you know, there are hard some hard skills that I look for. But, you know, more than anything, just that that teachability, that desire to learn, whether it's me teaching and helping or you going off and teaching yourself, um, you know, that's going to make a much bigger difference in success, I feel, and I've seen happen. Yeah. Yeah. And I think in a lot of ways, just definitionally, like we're looking for people who can adapt in a market where it's constantly changing. So sometimes maybe seeing something on the resume of like, oh, I've done ops, ops, ops, ops, ops. like maybe actually it's good to see a little bit of diversity in their background because it means that hey they can be kind of successful in multiple environments not just this single thing and when you come onto this team it's likely things are going to change and you're going to have to be able to do that. Yeah. And I think, you know, I would back up to and say that the role of RevO ops, it's not a new role, but it's something that's growing really fast as the market grows really fast for RevOps tools. And, you know, I think there's a definitional, you know, we we could do ourselves harm by getting stuck in like the def defining RevOps as having a title that says RevOps. I think there's a lot of people who have uh revops experience or go to market ops experience who don't have that title first of all or you know have the skills for it but have never even considered doing it because they don't know it's a role and I have been doing either go to market or marketing operations for a little over seven years and I've only had that in the title of the job I'm doing for maybe four, three or four years, something like that. Um, you know, I had titles like I had one title that was really cool. I might have taken the job just because of the title. It was uh digital librarian and information architect. I was like, I don't know what that is, but that sounds awesome. Um, and I was like, I sure, I have no further questions. I probably could have asked like a couple more questions. Um, but I was it was marketing operations was what it was. You know, I had a title where it was digital marketing specialist and what I actually did in practice was handled their whole partardot instance. That's marketing operations, you know. So, I've had personally experiences where I was doing RevOps work without a RevOps title. So, that's one thing. The other thing is, you know, there have been times where, you know, I was doing work that maybe was not revops, but it helped inform me and has helped inform me today. You know, I think if you have sales experience, you're going to be a lot more sympathetic to what a salesperson needs from a sales ops perspective. You know, I think often um in the RevOps world, we can set up these perfect systems that speak with each other. so well and they are flawless in their design and we're not thinking about the user who's actually going to use it and they're, you know, maybe a pain in the ass for that person. Um, you know, if you have that background as a sales rep or a BDR, you're going to have more insight into what that experience is to set up a system that works well for them. If you have background doing you know content marketing or social media marketing demand genen especially you're going to have more insight on marketing operations you know all those background experiences are going to help you set up a system that works well for the team like and so I think also backtracking a little bit and being a little more open-minded about how we define a revops role or revop shops experience is also key. Yeah, I think so too. I think so too. And a lot of I have a real eclectic background of go to market roles. I was also in a strategy role at a hospital and that was kind of like my random one before professional experience. I worked in restaurants. I worked six years in a restaurant. So did like serving, bartending, bus boy, you name it. Like I did all the roles and probably using a point of sale system too. Absolutely. It was called Aloha. It was amazing and we moved to another one and it ruined my entire life and I just wanted Aloha back. It felt like somebody ripped like Salesforce or HubSpot out of my hands and I just wanted to go back. Um and yeah, and all of it is it's like systems thinking, process thinking. How do we set things up to be more efficient and more effective? And then how do we plan to have the right resources in the right places at the right time? Like all of that is pretty much the same across different things. So you might not, like you said, you might not see the title, but you can see the work and you can see, okay, you've done this, you don't even know you're doing it. Like it's a little bit of a Mr. Miyagi type of like moment. You don't even realize you're practicing karate, but that's what you've actually been doing for the past 10 years. And here, let me show you how we can like specialize that and apply it to this context. Um, exactly. Wax on, wax off Salesforce. That's it. That's it. Are there I I'm curious, what are some of those things? Like, are there any non-negotiable I I'll call them hard skills. They could be tech skills, but hey, even if it's not revops proper, go to market proper, what are some non-negotiable like you need to be able to do XYZ? I mean, at the IC level, the specialist level, entry level, whatever you want to call it, I don't I hard skills that you know would very clearly be defined on a resume. I don't think so. Honestly, if I can see if I can look at a resume and see that you've had some curiosity, you've you know, you need to use how to know how to use a computer. Um, y we can go as basic as that. I mean, yeah, I think like some level of tech literacy. Um, especially like I work at a remote company. If you can't use a if you can't use a Google Meet or Zoom, we're going to have some issues. But um right you know I beyond what I would expect for anyone working at a remote company you know when it comes to hard skills it's hard for me to say there's any single thing that I would eliminate someone from contention for not having um you know what I'm going to look for again I I keep using the word curiosity but you know do you have some tools on your resume that you've used before. Um, do you kind of am I able to glean that you have a knack for picking up new tools? You know, are you someone are you a stat head when it comes to sports and you've got your own like super intense spreadsheet set up where you track what you know Killian Mbappé has done this year or are you you know someone who's self-taught Python because you wanted to scrape some websites and get some information like you know I don't know what there there's so many different things that it could be and so many different ways that you can demonstrate ate that kind of interest and and not just interest in but that ability to pick up a new skill. Um, and I think that's something that I would definitely expect to see demonstrated somehow. Um, but there's no single tool for a specialist. you know, when it comes to someone for a more experienced role, you know, if I, you know, were bringing on underneath me a sales ops role and a marketing ops role and I was really expecting to be able to hand off a lot of that technical uh stuff to those roles. I would look to see if you have some experience with the basics. Have you worked with a CRM, any CRM? Have you worked with a marketing automations platform, a sales engagement? um revenue intelligence tooling. Do you have some experience with one of them? Because you know what I'm not going to look for is a specific one. If you've got five years of experience with Marquetto and I'm a HubSpot shop, you'll be able to figure it out as long as you want to. If if I have someone who says I've got five years with Marquetto and I don't want to learn any other tools, like that is a hard no for me. Um, but the thing is like in the last year, I love the uh Chief Martekch uh they make that landscape of all of the marketing tools and they just came out with the 2025 one. I'm going to share my screen and show it to you because it's Yeah, what is this? Oh man, like and this is just marketing tech, right? This isn't even getting into the sales ops side of things. and and according to their data, there's been over 15,000 there over 15,000 tools in all of these pixels into 50 different categories. You know, that's 1,200 new tools since last year, which is about three new tools a day. So, if you don't have experience with this one pixel right here, um, that's okay because probably that pixel will be, you know, out of and not really our something we need anymore anyway because there's 25 new pixels around it, right? So for me, if you've got a specific tool that that I'm going to be using at my company and you don't have that experience, are you willing to learn? Are you willing to try it? What I'm looking for is that you have experience with the general landscape of it. Maybe you've seen this image. Maybe you're going to mention this image in the interview. Um, you know, I love that they release it every year and I've been tracking it since 2018. and it's just ins it's insanity. 15,000 tools just for marketing tech. Um, so no, there's not a specific tool that would be a deal breakaker for me in any role so much as a familiarity, you know, like I said with the management or more experienced roles. A familiarity with the landscape, a familiarity with what you, you know, the basic tools that any organization is going to need and and that adaptability. you know, I would be really excited to hear you talk about like, yeah, no, my company had been using X tool for five years and I realized that while it was the best tool out there when we got it, it wasn't anymore. You know, I was hired for a role once specifically to move the company from Parot or from HubSpot onto Partardott. And you know, three years earlier that would have been the right decision. But I got in there and I started doing the research and I was like, this is a terrible decision for for this company, for where we are and also for where those two tools are right now. We're better off staying on HubSpot. And so so we did. So I was hired to bring on Parardot. And I ended up not doing that. But, you know, whatever. I think they were I think they would rather have not just moved on to partardot just because. So that kind of adaptability is definitely something I look for. No, I think that's a good point. I think looking looking for have you moved from new tools. What's your diversity of tools that you're comfortable with? Like maybe it's more volume because you're right like hey I'm a hyper specialist on this one pixel. Great. that pixel might be irrelevant a year from now and there might be something next year that doesn't even exist right now that we're going to have to implement and that's going to be the right decision. So are you the type of person who can be adaptable, learn it, implement it and you know the reality is like we we do this at le all all the time like leans we manage the entire go market tech stack. So yeah, a lot of it is Salesforce HubSpot, but maybe that's 20 30% of the work where then it's also the engagement platforms, the automation platforms, and all these other tools. And then then the orchestration piece of it is like how do you make them all connect like great if you have an amazing Marquetto instance spun up, but none of that is feeding downstream to the sales team. It's like who cares? So I think getting that skill set to where you're adaptable and comfortable learning new tools super important like you said 100%. And I you know to your point of filtering it down you know I I worked for a company where I got in there and there was a huge tension between the sales and marketing team and I couldn't figure out why for a little while and then I saw what we were passing on to them from the marketing side of things. I was like, "Yeah, I would hate us, too." Cuz we were giving them literally everyone who filled out a form, any form on the website, including subscribing to the blog. You know, there's so much of just seeing the whole picture that if you're able to have that skill to see the whole picture and see how it's affecting everyone on the team and like when I say the team, I mean the go to market team, not just operations or or your little bubble of it. Mhm. Like that's so much more key than, you know, having 20 years of experience with gone. Like great, that's not going to save us, right? And then what happens if we move to something else the next day? Um, I'm I'm curious. So, okay, you get a maybe it looks like an unconventional resume. I don't know, maybe they're a BDR for a little bit. Um, but they like to set up their own tools. Maybe you kind of check out that they have some hobbies. When you get into the interview process, so somebody refers somebody to you, they think it might be a good fit. You're in the interview. How do you sus all that out? Like what questions are you asking? What are you what are you looking for during that time to make a quick judgment as to whether this person's going to make it in the role or not? Yeah. I I think for any role, one of the things that I'm trying to see is that you're excited about systems, which yeah, I know this is an audience of RevOps people, so hopefully who wouldn't be so excited about all these tools. Um, but you know, there's that that's my baseline something I want to get in any interview is see that you're excited about systems. You don't need to be excited even about like what my company is selling. Like personally I work at a deep tech company. We uh we are creating a hypervisor that sits right above the Linux kernel. That is a level of deep tech that like I don't expect a revops person to come in and understand that immediately or even be excited about that. I'm excited about it because we're doing some really cool stuff. But you don't need to be. What I need you to be excited about is systems, right? and being excited about how we're going to set this up and how we're going to support selling a product that maybe you understand like which is maybe maybe controversial but that's just me. No, I actually don't I I don't think that's too controversial. And I I can share like in my tech experience, I worked for a fraud prevention company that focused on leveraging history on an email address to make a fraud detection decision. And I had no clue that that was even an industry before I got into that company. And it was like one of the best experiences of my life. And I started it, I gained some passion for it as I went along. And then after that, I worked for an R&D tax uh credit platform that was helping companies automate R&D tax filings and collections. And I thought that was really cool. Didn't even know that was a thing when I got into that company, too. So, I think it's I always was passionate about their passion. like, hey, the founder seems really passionate about this, so I'm I'm excited and I want to like help them see their vision and mission through, but I'm really passionate about making sure this company operates really efficiently and can grow and achieve the goals that they that they set in front of them. Really, really passionate about that. And I think it's okay like I think you kind of get the passion for the product along the journey even if it's not there right at the start. Yeah, exactly. And so if you have that that excitement about systems, everything else can come in. Um, beyond that, like questions I would ask, again, I'd break it down by like early career versus more experience. You know, for someone who's applying for a specialist role for me, I'm going to ask something like, "Tell me about a time you used a tool in an unconventional way." Not necessarily because I want them to come in and start doing some really wild stuff with HubSpot or anything like that, but that tells me that you're someone who's going to experiment and maybe try and make it work with what you have. Like I'm at an early stage startup. I don't have the budget to go out and buy everything right now. You know, I we're buying what we need and making it work with those things that we don't need it yet, right? And so, you know, if you have that ha have a story about something that you've done that maybe wasn't how this tool I once used a Excel spreadsheet to make a a a grid because I wanted to make one of those um what are they called? Portrait walls and I was trying to measure it out and it was driving me crazy and I used an Excel spreadsheet as as the way to like figure out how it was going to be spaced out. Is that what Excel is use is meant for? No. Did it work? Maybe some my mother thinks my portrait wall is okay. Um, but I think it looks great. So, there we go. Um, or maybe it's called a gallery wall, whatever. You know, the thing where there's a bunch of pictures all next to each other that Oh, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Because measuring, we have it at home with our family photos and measuring out all of that is an absolute nightmare. So, and then like where it hangs and does it hang the right way because some of them hang on a cable, some of them have the hooks, whatever. Yep. So, yeah, I used I used an Excel spreadsheet to literally make all the grids of like I think it was like, you know, for every six square inches or something like that. Um, only an ops person would do that, by the way. That's very uh I It's I got Yeah. No, my best friend had some words for that one. They were like, "This is insanity." but it worked and that's what matters. Um, so you know, something like that. Have you used a tool in an unconventional way? Because it tells me that you're going to make it work with what you have. I'm sure someone has invented something where you could pay to make one of those walls work if they haven't. You know, this is your cue. Whoever's listening and wants to go build that. Um, but I'm going to do it for free with the spreadsheet. Um, another thing I would want to know, you know, so much about ops once you get the system set up is is keeping them running, troubleshooting, helping support the team using them. So, another question I would ask would be to talk about a time where you, you know, talk about the last time that you were troubleshooting an issue and what steps you took because that helps me think hear how you think through things. You know, is your first step to go to Google? Is your first step to, you know, talk to the person who's having the problem and try and figure out, you know, how they triggered it? Is your first step to go and try and do it yourself and break it and then see it? Like, I don't necessarily have an opinion on what what the right order of steps are, but that's going to help me see how that person thinks through a problem and troubleshoots those problems. Right? I think if you're in an early career revops role, those two things are key is that that again curiosity and and having a way to think through troubleshooting for someone who's applying for a more experienced role, a manager role, whatever. Um, I think the one of the questions I would really be curious about is, you know, what's a RevOps project or, you know, initiative that you haven't done before that you're curious about that's something you want to do at some point. Not necessarily because I'm going to turn around and say, I promise you can do that at this organization. Because maybe you will, maybe you won't. But if you have that like that question gives me some insight into the kinds of projects you're excited about. It gives me some insight into how you think about RevOps. You know, maybe it's a project that I don't even think of as RevOps, but like I said, like it's such a a vast in description. Like there's so many things that can fit in that bucket. Um, so it would definitely give me some insight into like what that person is excited about and how they're thinking about RevOps. And then another question I would have is what's a RevOps tool that you haven't used but you're interested in? Um, you know, similar kind of vibe to that question, but it also tells me that you're paying attention to the market. Like, you know, I put that absurd image up and that's just marketing tech. There are so many tools out there. Are you keeping up to date with it? are you trying to track? Are there tools that you're excited about that you haven't used? Or, you know, it also, you know, maybe you'll talk about how you learned about the tool. Maybe it'll tell me that you've got, you know, a community that you're plugged into. And so, for me, those are kind of the questions I would ask at the manager level. Those make a ton of sense. And I think it's planting those things to see like are you thinking outside of thinking of your role as just a box? I focus on Salesforce. I just do this. It's no, I'm like intellectually curious just about these other things that are out on the market and and wanting to do things that maybe I haven't even had a chance to do. One of the things we do at Lean Scale, you know, we we're looking for we usually look for two type of profiles. We're looking for what we call architects. They're a little bit more like strategic. they work on engagements um like the face of lean scale and then we have systems engineers and uh they're managing all the technical aspects of of the systems and one of the things that we put in the interview process for the systems engineer side is we give them access to lovable or bolt and we say build a go to market product for us we do have some standards like you have to have already had certifications on salesforce HubSpot and a few other to like get entry level. But beyond that, because we're faced with tools all the time, we need to test like you have some level of creativity and some level of I can learn how to do something that I don't know how to do right now and I can do it relatively quickly. So we give them access to Level Bolt and then we say, "Hey, build a go to market tool. Can be anything, anything you want. Um there's no right answers, no wrong answers. We just want to see like what you're curious about and see what it looks like when you build something. time box it to a couple hours. Don't spend too much time on it. We're not looking for you to like build us free products or anything, but we just want to see like what are you interested in and what do you what type of creativity do you have? Um, so I think yeah, sometimes it's tough to see that exactly, but you know, you're bringing them into a role that's going to be dynamic. So you have to know like, can you be adaptable and can you get that out in the interview early on? Yeah, I love that idea. I think that's fantastic. Um, you know, I I've also hired for more specialized roles, web designers and and more technical side of revops and that there are some things that I would have to look for just like, you know, with the last last role I hired for was for a website designer, for example, and and we did some tests just, you know, do you know the basics? Do you actually have the skills that are on your resume? Um, and yeah, you there are some roles like a lot of what I'm talking about, it's for roles where I can teach you the rest of it as long as you have that curiosity to teach or to learn. But there's some things where there's some more specialized roles where you do have to make sure that. No, for sure. For sure. But even like, okay, here's the bare minimum. I still need to test that you can take it from here to there. Yeah. Yeah. Theo, this has been really awesome just going through it and I think a lot of people are having a tough time knowing like where to find talent, exactly what they should be looking for. There's also a talent crunch and not a lot of accessibility to these type of roles. So, I think finding those unconventional hires is is really important and then seeing, okay, maybe you're unconventional, but I still need to make sure that you can take it from here to there where I'm going to need you and then be able to adapt beyond that. Um, I think everything you laid out has been really, really helpful. I'm curious. I always love diving into this part after you've taught us something really awesome. Um, would love for you to share. I know a little bit about your background, but for those who are listening, would love to hear like how you got into the roles that you're doing now. Um, you mentioned a theater background a little bit, but what does that look like and what were some of those like defining moments that led you to the type of work you're working on today? Yeah. No, like the way I always put it is that I fell into go to market operations sideways. Like I truly tripped into this world. Um, and I'm glad I did. It's like the perfect thing for how my brain works. A little bit technical, a little bit creative. Um, a little bit of that problem solving like give me a puzzle, I'm going to solve it. You know, I think uh I when I interviewed for uh one of my LA my not my current but my last position before this, uh what I specifically said is I love to make your mess tidy. Give me your messy CRM. Give me your messy data. I'm going to make it so nice. Um, and like honestly I I will say like 80% of my career is thanks to this. When I was in seventh grade, I had an Excel class, which I didn't realize how insane that was at the time. It was just and it wasn't it wasn't a like sorry it wasn't a special or something. It was a required course for everyone in my school and we really like got into it. We got into formulas. We got into, you know, some of the more technical aspects of Excel and it's one of those things that at the time it was just a class that I was assigned to take and I didn't think anything of it. It has helped me so much throughout my career because, you know, when you're getting deeper into Excel, it's also teaching you about logic. um you know thinking logically for you know coding it it really is an intro to coding in many ways. It also you know the skills I learned just not even talking about the soft skills but like tech the technical Excel skills I learned I am still using those to this day. It was truly a wild class. I don't even remember the teacher's name but like thank you to that person because I have made a career based on this one seventh grade class I took. Like I said, I I worked in theater for about a dozen years, and theater's really fun. Pay not so great. Um, it's not as much as tech. I'm surprised. Yeah. No, certainly not. So, one of the ways I was like making ends meet was that every artist out there needs a a website these days. And I had people who would pay me to make a little Squarespace or, you know, something website. And I learned a lot from that. You know, I learned stuff that I I use today. You know, I was learning about SEO basics. I was learning about HTML. Well, I I learned a lot of HTML back on MySpace, which if you don't know what that is, I wasn't going to share that, but yeah, that's where I learned it, too. I mean, I think if you're a a person of a certain age who knows how to do HTML, there is a like 90% chance it came from MySpace. Uh, may may it rest in peace. Uh, but you know, I miss Tom. I learned Say it again. I said I missed Tom, but that's okay. Tom Tom was a good one. Tom did it right. Um but yeah so you know I learned those basics uh and ended up parlaying that into you know getting into first you know like I mentioned um the digital marketing specialist roles right and and what happened was you know it actually started with Excel someone was trying to do an audit of their website and they were just too frustrated by their Excel spreadsheets and they knew who from it was actually someone I knew from social media and they knew from jokes I used to make about Excel that I knew how to use it, right? And they hired me to do this contractor position of auditing their website just because they dumb memes I was posting about Excel online honestly. And you know, I was still working in theater at the time and I ended up parlaying that contractor job into like it was two years that I was doing just like side work for them while I was working in theater. And then COVID hit and one of the byproducts of COVID was that all the in-person theater shut down and suddenly I needed a full-time job and I ended up getting into this digital marketing specialist role where I was, you know, they said, "Do you know what partardot is?" And I said, I don't even know how to pronounce that because half the company called it Parardot and half of them called it Parardo. Um, so you know, I still I still am not sure which one is correct. I think it's partardott. I struggle with it too. I think it's partardott, but I run into a lot of partardos as well. Yeah. Uh, I think it matters less and less every day, right? Um but so you know they gave me the system, they gave me access and I didn't break anything and I started learning about it and like within months I was the person that people went to with questions about the tool, right? And like that just grew from there. Um you know I the next role I was in I was able to learn about Drupal which that is a beast of its own. um you know and then I think I had three roles in a row where I was doing marketing operations work and I didn't realize it and then I was realized someone said something near the end of the third role and I was like oh that's what I want to be doing like all of the parts of my job that I love are the operations you know go to market operations the tooling all that kind of stuff the parts of my job that I don't love That's the actual marketing that I wasn't I could do okay but it wasn't my passion right and you know where I got my current role from you know I I know that I love systems I know that you know I can work with any you know product I'll be happy I can work with any mark you know go to market tool and I'm going to be happy um I'm going to make it work because even if it's a tool I hate that's a challenge that's something that it's exciting for me to try and figure out. And so the next step for me was you know looking at a company which had a culture that I admire. So like my current role I started way before this company needed a go to market operations person and I said that I sent an email to the CEO because I just all three co-founders I super admire. They're just all amazing women, super smart, and they're doing amazing things. And, you know, they want to build a culture that is really valuable and um welcoming to a diverse group of people. And like you don't see that a lot in tech. You see a lot of people who say that, but you don't see a lot of people who do that, you know? And so I I sent an email to the CEO and I said, 'Look, I know that you don't need me yet, but here's what I can do for you and here's why this is the role I want with this company specifically. And thankfully, she did not think I was insane because like it was a long email. It really could have gone either way. It could have gone towards like, wow, this is kind of stalkery. Please leave me alone and never talk to me again. Um, but she says to this day it's the single best pitch she's ever received. So, it worked out. But she shares a lot of the beliefs uh around talent acquisition that I have that like those hard skills, you know, so many of them especially on the go to market side can be taught. you know, it's the soft skills, it's the curiosity, it's the adaptability, it's that desire to learn or at least to be teachable that makes such a huge difference. And so, you know, I I I have I joke like 80% of my career is thanks to that Excel website, 15% is thanks to the technical theater background. And just, you know, that is a world where you always have to just make it work with what you have. you know, someone hands you like a light bulb, a power extension cable, and three strings and is like, "Okay, make a set out of this." You're like, "Sure, I guess I'll figure it out." Um, and you will. Uh, because you have to. And like that is a huge part of how I approach work in general and any sort of challenge is like you know can I before I look at bringing on new tools I'm always looking at like can I do what I need to do with what is already available to me um because I have definitely witnessed that like tool creep that can happen where you bring on point solution after point solution and so many of them have overlap and suddenly you have like five different tools that all do like roughly the same thing but in slightly different ways. Do you know the average the average number of tools for a series A or B company on the go to market? Oh god. It's over 30. Oh my god, that's so many. So some ask that usually they're like market tools. Just the go to market side. Yeah. Not not the tools your engineering team's using, people ops or finance, like literally just go to market like CRM, sales outreach, marketing tools, customer success management tools, all these other points. The average is 30. And and I get how it happens. I've seen it happen. I've been part of the problem before. You know, sometimes you're just like, especially if you're in a position where budget's not a question. You just got to get it done. you're like, "Well, I could maybe figure it out with what I have available or I could give this person $15 a month and I'll definitely figure it out." Right? And that can be an approach that has that works for people. Personally, you know, I think particularly with HubSpot and like, forgive me for becoming a walking HubSpot advertisement, but they're just always coming out with new things to the extent that I can't keep up with all of the new features that they're rolling out every day, it feels like. And so, one of the first things I do when someone asks me like, "Hey, can we do this?" and I'm not sure is I go and ask see if HubSpot can do it because half the time they can, right? Sometimes they want more money for it. No, they're absolutely killing it. HubSpot's doing an incredible job. And I think when you were asking earlier, like do you pronounce it partardott or partardo? I think it's pronounced HubSpot. That's what you should be bringing in marketing automation CRM like they're doing an amazing job. And it's it's fascinating to me because like I said that first role that I came into the world um it was a part tool the parard dot shop and that was kind of peak at the time. This was like right before Salesforce acquired it or right after I can't remember. Um and that was that was the top tool. And when I was interviewing or when I was working at that company that was looking to move from HubSpot to partardot, I did you know the initial calls with uh Salesforce and nothing had changed. It was exactly the same as when I had left that previous company like three years earlier, right? Meanwhile, HubSpot had come out with, you know, 50 new tools that morning, right? And just like that I this is a little exaggeration but um you know that to me like in this industry with so with you know with that image again like there's so many point solutions the creep can be so difficult and then you end up with you know if you don't have you know a tools matrix or something you end up with that thing where you're you're paying $10 a month for some tool. tool that you don't even have the login to anymore because the person who had that login left two years ago, right? And you know there that that creep of tools of cost can really add up. Um, and I think it's something that like it's part of why I'm when I was talking about the questions I would ask, you know, I'm curious to know how people have solved problems with what's available to them because I think that will tell me a lot about are you the person who's going to go and find the next tool, which is a valuable role if that's something that you have the budget and you know this that's what your company's looking for, or are you the person who's going to figure out, can we do it with our current budget? Can we do it with our current tooling first? Um, and for me personally, I'm more interested in the latter. I'm more interested if you're going to, you know, I'm not saying don't buy a tool that you got to you got to buy tools. That's this that's what this com this role is. But think about what you already have available before you shell out the credit card number again, right? No. Well, and I think it's about I think it's about being resourceful and being intentional. And it's not just the cost of the it's not just the monthly cost. There's an operational cost. There's a cognitive load cost to switching between different tools or knowing what's doing what. There's also like potential interference. Like you bring in tools but they're not integrated well. It could degrade what you're doing over here. So it's so much more than just the like monetary cost. It it creates a lot of operational complexity every tool you bring on. Yeah, exactly. And we're pretty early stage right now when it comes, you know, like I said, when I started in this role, they 100% did not need me yet. Um and and and we all came into that eyes open. You know, the way I presented it is like I'll I'll do all of those random tasks you need done. I'll help with the general operations work, whatever. And once we start needing go to market operations, which is where we are now, then I start taking that role on more. Right? So now I'm really starting to get into that and, you know, thinking about what tools do we actually need? Because I, you know, I have I can do pretty much anything. I could I could we're at a blank slate kind of place right now. We have HubSpot, but other than that, I could add in any tool I want right now, which is almost like a little overwhelming. Like there's so many options. Um, but one of the things I'm thinking about is like, how do I make sure we're getting the tools we actually need right now and that they'll serve us, you know, so we aren't changing tools every six months? Because that's another thing I've seen where it's like you get a tool for one reason or another it doesn't work out. How many times is that because the integration wasn't set up well or you know the onboarding and the you know enablement for the team wasn't good. You know there's so many different reasons why a tool doesn't work out. And so making sure when I bring on a tool that we're doing it the right way is also something like you know that's going to save with that cognitive load in the long term because if my team knows how to use it properly if my team is set up for success that tool is going to be way more valuable. Absolutely. And we've seen that time and time again. I mean Lean Scale doesn't get called in when things are nice and tidy like you put it. We we get called in when it's a mess. So normally it's like uh oh it's Frankenstein of tools that are stacked onto each other. They need to switch to something else. Um and it's a huge it's a huge cost. Not just like time and people or needing to bring in teams like us to do it but also the enablement and learning. It slows your team down. There there's a lot of cost. So, you have to be pretty intentional about like, all right, am I going am I going to stay with HubSpot? And do I see like, hey, can we at least get like a few years out of this choice I'm making? Um, if you're bringing on the big complex ones, especially like CPQ, my outreach solution, uh, marketing automation, like those big core ones, make sure that you're bringing in the right ones because if you have to switch those later, it's just a huge pain in the ass. like you're gonna have to you're gonna have to train the whole team again and then like change documentation and you don't even know what you don't know sometimes when you're like reconnecting it to other things. So yeah, you do have to be intentional especially with you. You have such a blank slate which is like a beautiful place to be in um for someone like you and I like that's just so nice. Exactly. Yeah. I mean, and one of the things, you know, sorry to like track back to those questions I was talking about. One of the things about like asking about telling about troubleshooting, talking about a tool you haven't used and that kind of thing is that ability to say I don't know or I haven't done this yet or you know just like that level of humility I think is something that's hard to find in RevOps sometimes. Um because it's it's scary to say I don't know. It's scary to say I messed up. And you know, I actually had an experience recently. We brought on a tool to trial and it ended up being a disaster. Like I didn't ask the right questions. Also, they didn't they weren't totally honest with how far along the tool was and how ready it was for for production. So, it was I'm not going to name names, but anyway, that happens. Then you need and people count on us to know what's going to work or not work. And there's some like level of experimentation, but I've been burned. I've been burned in the past, too. Yeah. Exact. Everyone who's done this for a little while has being able to say, "I got this wrong. Let's bail out now." Because we hadn't signed like an annual contract with them yet. Like if I hadn't had the humility to be to admit my mistake and and just back up, get out of that, we would have signed a contract for a year with this tool that wasn't going to serve us. And you know, that's part of those questions, too, is seeing if you have that ability to say like, I don't know, or you know, with troubleshooting, are you the one who broke it? you know, that's okay as long as you, you know, you say, "Okay, we're going to fix this." Now, if you break it and you, you know, brush it under the rug, then that's not going to work. But, so that that humility is like that's something that comes to me from theater, like in in theater, something a lot of people don't know, there's this thing at the end of a lot of rehearsals called notes. And what that is is the director gets up and tells you in front of all of your peers all the way you messed up that night and all of the things you did wrong. Quick way to build thick skin. I I I joke with some of my theater friends like that truly like plus side built a thick skin. downside. I sometimes don't recognize when people are giving that like indirect like the compliment sandwich or something like I just need you to tell me what I did wrong so I can fix it. Um, but truly like that's that's one of the reasons why I'm always so interested in people from different backgrounds, from different, you know, maybe recering or coming from somewhere else because you never know what kind of unique experiences they have that's going to, you know, in my case, like what that has resulted in is if I mess up, I'm not going to sit and wallow in it. I'm going to figure out how to fix it. uh like that is just something that was drilled into me from my theater background and because of that you know with this tool that we signed on for that was a disaster I was like wow that sucks let's find the right tool instead no I love that I think there's a lot of humbling moments in ops um you know one ironically so one of the core values we have internally at lean scale is humility um because if you don't have it you're going to have a tough ride going through this, especially when we do this in a lot of diverse settings, like you're going to be thrown in onto missions where, you know, you don't know what you don't know quite yet. Um, you got a team you can lean on and can help you, but there's going to be some there's going to be some casualties. So, you have to be able to like check your ego at the door and go through it and ask for help. Um, because a lot of these it's a team sport and so if you're trying to play hero ball, like it's pretty tough to actually be successful in the long run. Um, yeah. No, and I think it's it's tough. We're we're we're looking for people who are so dynamic. We're looking for people who have the right level of like life experience, soft skills, aptitude to learn the hard skills, at least showing that, and then make sure that, hey, they're willing to roll up their sleeves and like hop in the trenches and then keep building, too. Um it's not an easy task, but everything you shared has been so helpful for me. Um thinking about I'm I'm hiring these roles all the time. So I think this mindset, some of the interview questions you laid out, um where to find some of these unconventional hires has been like really illuminating and I know that this is going to be really helpful for anybody listening as well. Um, any final thoughts before we wrap up? And what's the best way to get in touch with you if people are listening and want to get connected? Yeah. Um, I mean, my final thought would be if you see someone with theater on their resume, you should absolutely hire them because they can probably make you a million dollars out of a ball of twine and some rubber bands. So, there you go. Um, I'm on LinkedIn. Uh, I think it's just Theo Pavlich at the end afterwards. Um, and yeah, I I don't do much of the social media these days other than LinkedIn. Um, it's a little too much for me, but you can always get in touch with me at ADA. It's just theoadera.dev. Um, and love to talk about ops, love to talk about all these systems that we get to play with. So, yeah. And if you're looking for a type one micro hypervisor that sits below the Linux kernel, talk to Adera. We'll put a sign up link in the video so people can go directly there. Um, no, Theo, thank you so much again. This was a ton of fun. I appreciate all the work we've done in the past and I'm really really excited to see what you do next and just continue to follow your career and as you go, of course, we'd love to have you back for more topics. Yeah. Thank you so much for having me. I really enjoyed the conversation. I'm looking forward to hearing more about what people have to I very curious to see what people have to say about some of the things because I know a lot of us we want you to have all the skills but I don't know I think sometimes you can learn it. Yeah. I think my favorite part was you had to have worked at our company already before. That's the level of spec specificity we're looking for. I have literally seen basically that that wasn't actually saying that. Like I wish I were making that up, but I'm only slightly exaggerating. Amazing. Well, thanks again. Hope you enjoy the rest of the day and we'll see you next time, Theo. Thank you. Awesome. Thank you. [Music]
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