Google's "Wolverine" to CEO (PandaDoc's CEO Keith Rabkin)

0:00Google spent years studying what actually separates great managers from the rest and out of thousands they ranked just 25 people a year as elite my guess today was one of them our team was blocked back on the Gmail team which was my first time ever leading a team inside Google inside Gmail high visibility and nothing was moving so what actually separated the leader who broke through I've had multiple people tell me that my spirit animal is a wolverine meaning I don't stop I never give up that mindset didn't just win awards at Google it carried key from Google manager to Adobe to CEO of Panda Doc scaling the company past 100 million in a hair or this is the wolverine mindset playbook it's time to lead the team welcome back to lead the team I'm your host Ben Fanink in this conversation that you're going to hear is meant challenge inspire and ripple out it's not just a podcast it's a positive movement to build better leaders and you can help by taking just 10 seconds to rate and follow on Apple Spotify

1:03and YouTube and drop a quick review over on Apple this helps more bold leaders discover the show and keeps the mission alive enjoy you've won the great manager award at Google back in the day and that was an award given to the 25 people in a company literally of geniuses what was the specific human trait that you had that others lacked honestly this is one of the biggest honors in my career it's given to 25 people a year I think they only did it for eight years or so and I still don't know exactly how I got it but I think and I'm not sure if it's really a human trait but I've had multiple people tell me that my spirit animal is a wolverine meaning I don't stop I never give up and you know as I think back on my career that wasn't something that I always had but I kind of developed over time and through perseverance and

2:06what that led to and I think maybe helped with my great manager award is that anytime my team had us a problem I wouldn't stop until I helped them be successful and my job is to make my team successful and so I go after that with determination and I think that helped them trust me and come to me knowing that I always had their back and was always going to do everything in my power to help them get what they needed which ultimately made our team so what what's on your your mount rush more of Google achievements where the that really demonstrated the wolverine spirit animal I mean there were just times where our team was blocked you know back on the gmail team which was my first time ever leading a team on the gmail yeah it was it was back on the gmail team and my team was the operations part of gmail we had customers who had this one very significant problem which I

3:09can't speak to in detail but the engineers didn't want to work on it and we ended up creating a program in gmail where we made it really exciting for some of the engineers to work on these customer facing problems they loved working on the product roadmap they always loved that but how could we swing them to this and we came up with this really unique angle so we kind of like went around instead of just a direct confrontation like make it appealing and that worked out really well that's you know one of the best things that ever happens to one of my well see you unleash the internal desire of another group to help you what you're trying to do I mean a lot of companies like that's how I get things done right well that teams the engineering they're not doing what I want them to do so I'm gonna tell my manager to tell their managers manager and it's gonna come back down the other side and put the fear of god in them until they do it that wasn't your approach

4:11I yeah I always like to think through how you motivate other people and sometimes it's referring back to the vision like you align on the vision of the company or the team they're on and can you make what you're trying to do part of their vision or do you just understand their incentives what they really care about and that was what we did in the Gmail frame we tried to turn it around from something that seemed like an ask we were making towards something that they wanted to do man that's so good so mental know for the leaders here inside the Google machine you're working with all these geniuses changing the world and it go and and the trade that really sets you apart there was the Wolverine and then it'd be able to unlock the motivation of others it wasn't like the best idea so I mean I guess maybe one other thing would be humility um like I firmly believe that I don't have the right answers all the time and I rely on my team who is closest to the problem to tell me what they need and part of my job is to coax it out of them and to ask tough questions

5:15and pressure test whether it's what they really need or whether it's something that's just going to make their life easier um but I think a big part of it is the humility of just knowing that my team is what makes me successful it's not me is it possible that the traits of the very traits that make someone a great manager actually can make them a bad CEO because you've got the luxury of having both experiences I I sure hope not but I don't think so either um and the reason I don't think so I'll go back to my Google time again Google did a ton of research on the best performing managers and they called it project oxygen and it's definitely worth looking up if we have the time it's things like people who empower their team they show concern for the team success they make decisions they're good communicators and they have a clear vision that they collaborate with others on and when I think about those things those are things that I think a great

6:18CEO does and so to me that intersection between those traits in what makes a good manager also makes a good CEO and I'm definitely keeping them top of mind stepping into this yeah I really like that for leaders to think about because there are plenty of traits that can help you get stuff done as a manager but they may not be the ones that the world's top CEOs follow uh you know to get things done on a sustainable uh level and I um I just think it's really cool that that you see so much alignment between the principles you learn as a great manager at Google and what you're like the foundation of how you're leading Panda doc today yeah them you know interestingly the most impactful CEO like presentation I had was from Mark McLaughlin he's the former CEO of Palo Alto Networks and he said the CEO's job is three things it's to set the vision get the right people in the room and on the problems and then empower those people and clear the road locks and so if

7:22you go back to the project project oxygen ideas that I mentioned they really line up very nicely with those things so I'm I try to lean into those as much as I can and then I'm keeping marks advice top of mind uh good for you as I prepare and I love that and I think that first when you said like have a vision uh and I think a lot of managers run around I'm curious about you a Panda doc at what you've seen a lot of managers don't believe it's their job to have a vision for their team feel like the CEO has the vision I just need to make sure we're following that thing and it really miss me to me really misses an opportunity do you do you ask your managers to have that vision is that something that you think is important or is it more about just getting it sort of getting an alignment with the CEOs well I think you need to have vision for the company you must have a vision and a lot of companies have a vision statement but then how do you turn that vision statement into something more like a three-year vision and then you know the job that we do

8:24is we work with the executive team and the finance team to turn that three-year vision into a one-year vision including a financial plan and so when you have this like cascade you have your top very aspirational vision then you have a three-year vision of what your product and business will look like and then you have the one-year plan and everything is laddering up and then within that you know your team's developing okay ours and annual plans to tie into I do think it's helpful for each function to have a vision I don't know if it needs to be at the manager level but our sales team here has a vision our marketing team has a vision and I think it's been really helpful to create an identity yes and to outline people with how we want those teams to offer. I love that really it really puts the onus on them to be thinking bigger for their own teams and verticals inside the organization to make things happen I think get that alignment now before we get back to I'll say to more present-day stuff you were for Adobe for a long time which is

9:29another icon you like iconic brand and you left the safety of the Adobe brand of that Adobe document cloud to join the challenger you know at a pentadoc was there a moment of identity crisis when you went from the giant to the underdog or yet to be honest to be honest absolutely not okay and you first off I loved my three years at Adobe and I learned so much I mean it was a master class in marketing it was a master class in sales and how to use the channel effectively and then amazing PLG and software so I learned a ton but I have no regrets I had no identity crisis I love the challenge and I love being the underdogs and I've got a saying with a couple members of my team here like it's no fun when the fish are jumping in the boat you know like if you could just swap me out and put somebody else in and the business is going to be successful then what am I

10:30actually accomplishing like I want to be in a business where I drive it or my team drives it and so that's been been really fun working for a company where I can see an inflection in the numbers I can see a change and I know it's because of my team and the work I do rather than a company not to say it's on full autopilot but like Adobe has such a great name brand that they're going to come no matter what you do and so I love knowing that I can be the driver of that change so just play back for me like when you wake up and go to work when you're at debut versus when you wake up and go to work now and like pentadoc clear how was your mindset different when the fish are jumping in the boat versus when you know you know you got to get on the water and make it happen yeah I mean you're you're figuring out how you can harvest more um so adobe.com is a website juggernaut that brings in millions hundreds of millions of visitors a year and you've got to figure out how you can drive small changes those small changes take those large numbers and turn

11:35them into real revenue and it's meaningful but um you know it's probably going to be successful with or without me right like I left I would say adobe didn't miss a beat on the stuff I was working on there there might be some other areas of the business that are going through some challenging times and then a pentadoc it's like you're you're hunting for survival every day you people are ready to eat your lunch like they're going to go to competitors if we don't figure it out and so the fact that we have been able to inflict our growth to be more efficient in driving that growth and to continue to build great team satisfied our customers uh has been extremely rewarding so maybe that maybe a little more stressful in some ways oh for sure that gives you your age and your innovation edge for all that for all I'm on it if there's no stress like it's

12:36there's no challenge or less of a challenge it's hard to grow yeah I mean I think it's what do you want out of a job you know some people they want the title some people want the money some people want the lifestyle some people want the challenge some people want the scope you have to figure out what mix of those are most important to you and you know for me that challenge and working with great people and knowing that the success that happens is because of my team's hard work is the most important thing to me it's got to be so satisfied I've worked in corporate like I worked for Honeywell and some bigger organizations and with my own company growing it it's a completely different feeling like I'm way more engaged I'm way more creative and it's completely unintentional but it's like the situation you're in just calls on different parts of you to to grow and I mean the growth like your growth trajectory I I suspect since you joined Panda doc has been

13:38probably incredible learning right in terms of yeah I have learned so much in three years but it's it's been amazing and I'm definitely better for you and your rise there has been like a rocket ship in terms of your personal success you were you came in as what chief revenue officer president and now CEO and in my research I noticed some an interesting nuance that the founder is now the C.P.O. right the chief product officer so what is it like to having your founder and former boss I guess being a director part for lack of a better word how does that go yeah I'm still figuring out to be honest but I do think I'm really lucky and because over the past three years Makita who's the founder he and I have established this incredible relationship and it's built on trust he you know he took a little while to trust me but then over time he knew

14:46he could trust me and knew I would do the right thing and I think that's been really important in this evolution of my roles but it's funny because he and I actually disagree a lot but we work to persuade each other and channel each other in the right direction and I think that makes us better there's sometimes where I'm absolutely wrong and I love that he proves me wrong and then I know we're on the right path and then there's other times where I know I'm right and I'm able to shift him into that direction so that's been great um you know I think stepping in I was a little bit tentative about it but I realized quickly like you just got to grab it go take the role and uh he's been really respectful of my dispersion making and giving me the room as well are you looking to increase sales, grow your brand and share your leadership message then check out our business podcast program each week more people listen to podcasts that have Netflix accounts spend one third of the US population listens to podcasts regularly

15:48so your customers and team are already listening to podcasts it should be yours discover our five step profitable podcast framework and what results you can expect for your company by setting up a 20-minute call with my team at binleads.com slash schedule that's binleads.com slash schedule yeah the good news is your CEO the even better news is I'm your direct report you're like how does this work buddy yeah but I love that it's not like you know it's worked out well if you guys have we're able to balance ideas of you know off of each other uh in terms of who gets the final call on a big decision who is it it's me all right and if we disagree then and he firmly disagrees then we will eventually it's a significant magnitude we would take it to the port but we haven't had anything like that um and again that's what I mean by

16:49he's been really respectful that is cool of me he's like this is your decision yeah like if that works out like it like it seems like it is it is really a great thing because you've got someone that's all in entirely passionate and wise and experienced that's on your team ideally he's a huge asset that is so cool so can you share was there like the first hardest conversation how did you get remembered yeah I mean I would say let me start by saying like he does a visionary like many great founders he has some of these ideas that sometimes I don't always get them and then three months later I realized how pressing and T was and that he saw something that like I couldn't figure out one of those ideas was a way we're manifesting the way we're changing how companies drive agreements in an in an age of AI and that's really what like

17:53Arthur B. Eurovision is how do we change the way companies create sign and understand agreements we want to be the place where every SMB in the world can do that in a frictionless way and this hard conversation came about though because I felt like we were being a little too cautious in shipping and waiting for the product to be perfect because Makita has this vision he knows exactly what he wants to look at look like and so I started pushing him on moving faster and he's been really good at taking that feedback if we cares about the outcome and he knows the outcome is so important to our customers he wants that to happen yeah I love that and I'm glad the leaders can really hear that because in this and this time and age that we're in with AI and how things are shifting so fast it is helpful to have people that are more of your peers that push back and you listen and you may have these difficult conversations versus hey I'm the leader on here

18:53everyone it's job here is to say yes and get on board with whatever I say and having these different lenses is really important but I think most people would acknowledge yes I get it but they rarely see an example of how to do it do you guys have these conversations over coffee text a cocktail like where how do these things play out we yeah we have the conversation probably every week you know we check in in our one-on-ones we talk about them in every board meeting and then Makita is a victim of in-person meeting so luckily he looks fairly close and we're able to get together over coffee or food and talk through them a lot of people think that being promoted to the CEO role is like the ultimate one and yes it is a huge one but the seat of the CEO is famously lonely what is the most difficult conversation or decision I guess you've had to make

19:55since taking over and and in having that I guess maybe realizing hey there's no one to delegate this to I've got to do this myself no yeah so it's funny because when I took the job to BCRO at Pandadock I had no aspirations to be CEO here I had no intention of it like I wanted to be CRO and yeah the journey has been what the journey has been and I'm incredibly honored by the trust that Makita Sergei our other co-founder and the board have put in me I guess this like difficult decision was that a board meeting we had my first board meeting as CEO and I can't share the exact details of the conversation but I had to change the short-term direction towards that three-year vision we agreed on the three-year vision but there was something that I noticed in the data and through talking to the team and so I pushed for us

20:57in that board meeting to be more focused and you know it was tough because I went in telling Makita and Sergei the two co-founders that I was going to do it and you know I think I did in a very respectful way but we I think we've all aligned on this being a great outcome and working it through the board of which they're members so that was probably the most difficult thing I had to do. What out of the gate? What was the so coming from CRO CRO I think Elisters might find it interesting what have you found that you've had to sort of kill off in terms of your old CRO mindset or the metrics you provide or focus on versus had to sort of be reborn as the CCO. Yeah I mean I don't know if I would call it kill off but I would say compartmentalize is probably a good you know I still care a lot about revenue I still care a lot about the growth

21:58numbers I'm trying to let the team drive more of it without me and the part that's really important for me now is to make sure the product and the engineering org and the designers know me know that I'm all in for this long-term vision and that I don't have favorites just because I came from the revenue team doesn't mean like that's my favorite team and you guys are this new team that just falls under my umbrella like these are all teams that I want to be successful and care about and particularly for that R&D function it's the forward long-term thinking and making sure we pursue that strategy of becoming that frictionless place for agreements to happen. I've read about a controversial move that you that you made earlier in your career where you eliminated essentially one of the foundational roles of the company known as the SDR of the these sales development routes and I think and you're and you're in charge of sales and top top level growth a lot of the

23:02piece of sales I don't know if they would go all in on that normally because I could backfire when you're changing and eliminating the people that were responsible for helping you get the results you need that you need to get you made this move and literally that the company was able to in fact check me but you're able to increase the price of what you're selling like four 5X. 5X. Okay, 5X. Which sounds crazy? Like, I think it actually happened. Walk us through that and was that decision you made? I'm really curious if it was like a gut decision based on what you'd seen, or what did you notice? That the traditional sales model was just not working. Yeah, so first off, this was an incredibly hard decision because it impacted a team of people and you know those people meant well but I had a responsibility to the business

24:04and to the rest of the team members to ensure they were successful. And so I didn't take it lightly but you know how did I come to this although I do have a lot of gut feelings this started with the data and not just data but conversations. Looking at the data we saw that we had these MQLs that were making it to S1 but the S1s weren't closing and you know I'm a big fan of breaking down pipeline so you've got the pipeline qualification and you've got the like the close of the pipeline you've got the size and what we were seeing is that throughout these things either the SDRs didn't understand what would close and so we would have dropage there or things that went through would then get dropped and not close or would close at a lower win rate and so we were able to see that and align the leads with the closing. So moving a ease to full cycle because Canada is a fairly high

25:11velocity business or deal cycles or between 30 and 60 days meant that we could compress the tide because we would have a single qualification call. We'd have a better customer experience because we didn't hand them to someone else. We didn't have any loss of information and transforming of what the SDR nodes were to the AE and then the AE knew what would close so they would be able to disqualify deals early that didn't go there. You could say that ultimately we could have done better training of our SDRs but I think this resulted in a really efficient machine that's been really good for PandaDoc and our customers. How does this relate to the leading through the T philosophy that you've really honed? Yeah so we don't agree with it. Like I said before I definitely didn't invent it. We've been a culture code at PandaDoc before I got here and Sean knew who's the CEO of Adobe is probably the one that I saw. He used it first and talked about and the T is

26:12in any leadership role you cover a broad spectrum of things and you have to understand it at least a surface level of debt but you've got to understand everything at a surface level and then every once in a while you've got to go deep and that's where the cross section of the T comes in and you go all the way down into the nitty-gritty details and you understand it and you hopefully solve it and then you pull back up and you go scan across the T to figure out where you go down next and you know when I first got here sales performance was the area that I dove in on first. I own marketing and CX as well but sales was the one that appeared like it needed the most structure and so you know scans quickly across to understand all the functions and then realize that was the area I needed to go deep on from the numbers and then I went all the way deep working with revops working with the sales leaders talking to the AE's talking to SERs to figure out what we were going to do. Well what did you say those managers were sitting there thinking

27:13this is just an excuse for micro management like if he's got like I want to like the chief revenue officer is going to use the T on me he's going to get up in my business and I mean there's got to be a little bit of that because you're diving in deep and they're going to feel that. I'll use another framework but I think going back to what Mark said if there's three things I'm supposed to do setting the vision getting the right people and removing the blockers this is about removing the blockers and if I don't understand what the blockers are then I can't remove them so I've got to go all the way deep to remove the blockers but then I know I can't stay deep all the time because there's other things where I have to remove the blockers so I'll come back up and move on and I'm just I try to always be transparent but this is the thing I'm focused on solving right now once we solve it I'm out of your hair like and I think most of my team knows that I do want to empower them and if I'm stealing ownership I'm not giving them the agency

28:16so I want to give them agency I want to drive accountability it's only when that blocker really needs to be cleared and it's not that I've got to go in deep to get out of really really good to communicate it if you're going to use the t-structure explain when someone's getting the t on their the t-part all their organization I think it leaders really I think about that though and setting the expectation that they're going to be areas where they've got to be able to go deep and not just stage strategic I think that's a real like when I hear leaders say well I'm just trying to stage strategic like you're way missing some opportunities yeah you have to be able to go deep selectively on that and man did you get good results with that one I mean 5x of a price for for doing a lot of the same type of work pretty much pretty much every dimension so the qualification raid and pipeline generation is up the close raid is up and ACVs are up so it's been a really good

29:16change that's the power now you've been quoted in fact check me on this but saying that nobody cares about document workflow is that is that somewhat of accurate it's somewhat accurate so I would say it's accurate in the abstract okay so nobody cares about like what happens with their documents like from a process standpoint but they very much care about the pain that occurs when you lack good document workflow and again I think that's where Panda doc really differentiates itself a lot of people think we're a simple eSignature tool but we're much more than that we're an agreement workflow platform and so we try to make sure that we're differentiated by making workflows really easy so businesses can concentrate on the things that matter to their financial results and doing the work that they love like nobody loves working on like clicking a document and making sure it's routed to the right person or downloading the right

30:21document and then signing it and re-uploading it or making sure it's got the right approval is like that's just not something that's fun or exciting you automate that so I can get my sales quotes out so that I can change a quote without having to go through like seven layers of deal desk that I can get a contract edited to match the counter party much faster those are the things I care about I just don't want to deal with all the redlining and like download re-upload back and forth multiple times and that's where Panda doc stands out so I try to try to say nobody actually cares about the flow itself but when you make the flow work they suddenly realize what a painful experience they have yeah what we do is we solve a problem people have and people don't say I have a workflow problem or a paper flow problem one of the things I was looking at with Panda doc I think it's so cool is the level of detail it can provide a sales leader who's trying to track all

31:23their own sales agreements when I work for G HL some of the organizations and sales man I would have loved to have a tool and frankly today I would love to have a tool that could tell me what's going on with that agreement where it's being circulated or what's happening because otherwise you're not going to have this ability of it it's so great running Panda doc on Panda doc because we can go in and ask it for the status of any deal and where the agreement is and it'll tell you and you know we launched an AI co-pilot inside that helps you get these answers even at the end of the year you know one of the reps was working on deal at the very last minute she's based in Poland all the sales execs were out she sent me the deal I'm able to ask the AI to give me a summary of the terms and how it's different from other terms that we signed and I can send it out

32:24or the one that I really love is at the end of the month you've got tons of proposals out that you're trying to get signed and as a sales leader you only have so much time you can spend which one's the right one to go out what are most people do they go after the papers but what we're able to see is the level of engagement and how many times it can open how many people have looked at it what page they've looked at and so for our sales leadership we can zero in on the ones that we think are closest to getting done because we see a lot of engagement yeah you can really focus your yeah help your team prioritize if you're gonna if you're following a document that hasn't been opened in 60 days and you're hoping that's going to close yeah it's a long shot man yeah look at the ones that are hot they're getting the engagement you can focus on as I thought those are like cool feature now bring it back to what y'all are doing is an overall business you guys are just cross 150 million ARR or I'm sure plus what's all that's okay that's big

33:25you're that puts you and for the listeners because I was looking a lot about a lot of this you're in the top like one to two percent of software organizations you know based on this having this kind of ARR you guys are in the elite um and they've got grows big growth dreams and so from a CEO standpoint beyond this you got to protect what you have but also you're probably thinking I'm wondering about like what do you need to break next or what do you need to disrupt inside your own organization to get to 500 or to get these bigger growth numbers and I'm thinking like what how are you thinking about protection versus disruption in your organization and what kind of advice might you have there I would say we're we're not too focused on protection I mean we even had a hundred plus million that's that's small in a very big category every small business

34:33in the US and many overseas can benefit from Panadoc so we've got to play offense and we've got to make sure that they know where a solution that exists there were a solution that solves their problem and then we've got to do the execution to make sure that we hit those from a you've got a market perspective and the execution from a product and engineering perspective that we have a differentiated solution that evolves in a time a very fast change if we continue to just say well we have the best agreement workflow solution on the market and we just need to make it incrementally better someone's going to come out and leapfrog us I do think workflow itself gives a fairly decent mode but it's not enough and we've got to be a little bit paranoid about that and try to dramatically reinvent what this looks like in the age of AI yeah so what is it going to look like in the age of AI I mean we're just getting started I like to remind the

35:33listeners like it hasn't really been as big as it is I mean it's a GPT came out like two years ago right in a very public way in a very public way and we've got a long ways to go what's going to happen yeah so I tend to think for us at Panadoc we're using AI to solve high friction but high frequency tasks so what are the things that are really painful but you do them a lot and it's things like organizing the documents that you have it's things like negotiating every new document that you need to send out we want AI to solve those things and so those are the first places we're deploying it and in many ways you can imagine that AI will make or give small businesses access to superpowers that they never had and that's what we want with you man with our what's the so a couple of fun

36:34questions uh citizen's out on here what's the one document in your life personal professional that changed everything when you signed it I got a picture I got a cheat a little first my marriage license so you know getting married was it a game changer you need to say that one for sure yes my kids and family are really important to me and the second would be my employment letter at Google it changed my life in so many ways I formed incredibly deep friendships there I worked there for a decade it was still pretty early it was 2007 so I mean Google was like 16,000 people at that time and I learned so much and that shaped how I lead teams today what's happening what's going to happen with Google I am so impressed by what I so impressed by what they did with the new Gemini release I really thought they were in trouble for a while and they just pulled it out I mean the Sundarth credible leader they have the best world class

37:40engineering talent so it's really incredible yeah you just don't really know what they're working on over there until it just appears and Gemini is yeah it was a huge lead we'll see what comes next if you had to lead a team through a crisis tomorrow and you couldn't use any data or analytics what is the first sentence you would say to them I have confidence in you and that's definitely what I would say you know and I'd follow it up with we built an incredible team you know how to do it and I'll be there in the trenches with you to figure it out I have heard or read you like hiring people that have a chip on their shoulder what is the one word you hear in interview that makes you immediately know that they're one to hire I was thinking about this because I've been redoing some of my interview questions but I look for the word persevere or something like I stuck with it that's not one word but persevere is a great word because it just signals the ability to

38:46get through things and find ways around problems or solve things and I think that grit and with like when you've got a chip on your shoulder is incredible sounds like a Wolverine to me or maybe that comes up in your area people are just going to be saying it all goes together yeah that's spirit animals a Wolverine AI and so 12 months from now a lot of these are going to change with AI why I'd be doing 10% of a panda docs users work or 90% and they'll be off to do other things we're aiming for 90% and I would say 18 months 18 months maybe not 12 months we want to be a be close to 90 what about if you had to look at your whole panda doc workforce today the ones on the inside how much of their jobs would you say are going to change in the next 12 months in terms of what their daily work is going to be like yeah I mean we're seeing it already there's a

39:49lot of work that's been changing from using cursor and cloud code on the engineering side to changing how we run our go to market using AI tools as well as tools that we're building in house and it's all designed to make us more productive like our goal is to not shrink our head count but to invest less and still grow the business at a faster rate than that head count growth which we're doing but I think the more we can deflect that growth rate through using AI to make our small productive the better we're going to be and that's where we've been investing our AI tooling also a document workflows that panda doc is so famous for revenue operations what's the one vertical skill on the tee that you master that has nothing to do with business I've mastered making a spatchcock chicken it is that is like the one thing I'm really good at I can't cook a lot of food great but I make a mean spatch yeah what is that you cut the

40:56the backbone of chicken and you like fold it open yes butterfly okay so it cooks much quicker much more evenly and you did on the grill it gets like really crispy skin and it's moist inside it's well that is a useful skill my friend and it's in print it's visually impressive I think comes out yeah I would I uh I would say everybody who tries it is a fan so that's that's the one thing that's the one vertical skill I'll brag about you've said and uh and you can fact check me on this but I believe it's repetition it doesn't spoil a prayer it is a saying that you're known for what's the one sentence that you've repeated most to your team in the last 30 days since you've taken ever see yeah well first off this is another one that I borrowed from the old boss and he would say at all the time and I love it so I think it's really important I mean a lot of times people need to hear the message multiple times before it really sinks in but the one

42:02sentence that I'm repeating is that what we're developing for Pandadok with this frictionless agreement platform is a game changer and is exactly what our customers need at the exact moment when they need it and so Pandadok is ready to fire on all cylinders to go get there yeah that's so that's such a good reminder it's like a like a mantra that people can infuse into their day when they're responding to an email or they're trying to prioritize their to-do list it's like is this making it is this adding more friction or is this adding less friction Keith says less friction or friction less actually frictionless power yeah what's your parting thought to our listeners today Keith I don't know that I have a parting thought more than thanking you for having me on just fellas always fun to kind of reminisce about how I got to where I am and it's very thankful for it and thankful for you to allow me to share it with your listeners. It's been a fun one I really

43:03enjoyed diving into the Google foundation and also seeing you know it's been fun to hear how you build a channel that's so successful you know through your eyes and I can't wait to see what Pandadok does next but it sounds like big things are ahead thanks Keith thank you thanks want to boost your productivity and decision making get vital insights from each episode delivered directly to your inbox a great resource whether you've listened to the episode or not go to bidfanning.com slash insight