BIZ/DEV
David Baxter has over fifteen years of experience in designing, building, and advising startups and businesses, drawing crucial insights from interactions with leaders across the greater Raleigh area. His deep passion, knowledge, and uncompromising honesty have been instrumental in launching numerous companies. In the podcast BIZ/DEV, David, along with Gary Voigt, an award-winning Creative Director, explore current tech trends and their influence on startups, entrepreneurship, software development, and culture, integrating perspectives gained from local business leaders to enrich their discussions.
BIZ/DEV
For the Love of Iceberg w/ Taft Love | Ep. 104
In this podcast episode, David and Gary speak with Taft Love, Founder of Iceberg RevOps and sales/marketing enthusiast alike. They discuss all things social, the future of sales and how to tell the future..if that's even a thing…
Links:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/taft-love/
https://www.linkedin.com/company/iceberg-revops/
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David Baxter has been designing, building, and advising startups and businesses for over ten years. His passion, knowledge, and brutal honesty have helped dozens of companies get their start.
In Biz/Dev, David and award-winning Creative Director Gary Voigt talk about current events and how they affect the world of startups, entrepreneurship, software development, and culture.
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Hi everyone, welcome to the biz dev Podcast, the podcast about developing your business. I'm David Baxter, your host and I am joined as per usual by Gary voice. Who's looking a little gray today. Did you use a little touch of MIT touch a gray for men today? Looking?
Gary:Can see yes, I added the gray.
David:Yeah, you added it. More distinguished with
Gary:it. I'm just way too handsome just too young.
David:Is that what you need to rough yourself up a little bit? That's fair. That's not fair enough. And everybody here mortals. Yeah. More importantly, I am joined by actually it almost, if you're looking at the YouTube, he's kind of like my twin. This is very interesting. I'm joined by Taft love. Who is the founder of iceberg rev ops. Welcome to the show. Taft. How are you?
Taft:Hey, I'm well. Thanks for having me. Guys. This is this is exciting.
David:Good deal. Now. I love the name. Iceberg rev ops and I'm going to ask you more questions about that a little bit. But I love that I just
Gary:I thought you're gonna say you love the name. Taft Taft love. That's a good name. That's an easy thing. It's you got a record deal without even having a record man.
Taft:My dad my whole life said I should be a doctor. And I just left him so disappointed.
David:Dr. Love, you know, I actually know a guy. At my old church. His name was Dr. Bible. No way. Yeah, seriously, that's his actual name. He totally didn't make it up. I've met him and his doctor Bible. Like, come on. Now. If there was ever a calling, that was it. So you are in charge of Rev ops and sales and all sorts of goodies. So I have a really dumb question to ask you. Sure. What's the difference in marketing and sales?
Taft:Oh, man, that line is getting blurred more and more every day? I'd say. I'd say sales is customer facing and One to One. Marketing is customer facing and generally one to many, even if there's some some merging of customers information and outreach. So that's how I think about it one to one versus one to many.
David:Okay, so if you are doing an activity, so any sort of activity that is targeted to multiple people that is most likely marketing, and if it is one on one, most likely that is sales. Okay. All right. That's a simple explanation. I'll take that. I like that. Because we've had several people who were into marketing on the show. Yeah, I think you're the first person correct me if I'm wrong, Gary, that has said they are a sales focused person. So Right. I think that's right.
Gary:There might have been one or two others. But yeah, it's definitely more marketing and sales. So
David:almost everybody is that's, that's, that's where they chose. So how do you what, tell me more about iceberg? And let's, we'll I'll just spin off from there.
Taft:Yeah. So it iceberg, we're solving a very specific problem. There are companies that graduate from founder selling to have dedicated sales and marketing programs. But they're not yet big enough or haven't taken enough funding or whatever, they don't have sufficient revenue and capital to hire a qualified in house team to manage their operations. So think sales and marketing ops. So we solve for that gap. We are a high quality, qualified senior team that you can get a piece of, versus trying to hire an under qualified team for for the same price.
David:So you are not an individual, like a fractional kind of person. You're a team that someone hires, you specifically focused on startups. Is that right?
Taft:Yeah. And by startups, I don't necessarily mean like software tech companies. But yes, early stage companies. We have companies in the education, space and training, you know, services, but the common thread is that they're growing, have their first customer facing program and aren't yet ready to hire someone like us in house full time, spin the half a million a year, and it would take to replace us with all full time hires.
David:So what size of a company is ready? Like if a lot of our audience is new founders thinking of founding right that kind of stage? They're clearly probably not in the market to hire a company like you. But what is a company? Who is what size? Are they revenue wise, generally speaking?
Taft:Yeah. So so when we internally talk about sort of our perfect customer, we say 50 to 250 employees. That's the that's the range where where you're really in our strike zone, we go a little smaller, a little bigger, but that range is our sweet spot.
David:Now, why is headcount the kicker as opposed to revenue,
Taft:headcount is the kicker more than revenue because As we have some, we have some SAS companies that have totally different revenue profiles than services companies. And so, you know, they're 10 person SAS companies with five times the revenue of similarly sized services company. So revenue in our world doesn't speak to needs as well, usually as headcount.
David:Okay, yeah, that makes sense. A friend of mine runs a services company, a shout out to Bob, who he's got 200 plus employees, right? And then, but his revenue is way smaller than physically larger companies, because of just what you were saying some companies are revenue is much higher, even though they don't have as many headcount. So you want that higher headcount? What does that bring to the table? What does that check what boxes to check?
Taft:And to make sure I understand the question, would we ask the question again, I want to make sure I understand it. Sure.
David:So what is it about having 8090 People that says, These guys are ready for us, as opposed to, you know, I'm a smaller company of about 35 or 15, even right, you're going down? And I need this? I think I need this, why would you say no, you're probably not really ready for us.
Taft:A couple reasons. One is, with size comes complexity. Usually in your go to market systems, your CRM and your marketing automation, things like that. Ignoring the edge cases where it's a really small company with highly complex marketing systems, things like that, as a general rule, the more people who are involved in your go to market strategy, the more complex it becomes the more sales reps you have the more complex your reporting and lead routing and territory building projects become. And so, just generally speaking, once you get to that 50 person, company, as a general rule, at least in tech, where I come from, about 20% of a company is usually sales. And so 50 person company, you got 10 People in sales across, you know, sales, development and sales reps and management. And that tends to be about the size where crowdsourcing the your systems and your enablement becomes pretty unwieldy. Small smaller than that, you know, it's, it's fine to crowdsource a lot of stuff, you're usually in more simple systems, you have a HubSpot CRM, that you don't need to be a rocket surgeon to admin and, you know, before you need to pay us to come in and really make things all work together, all of your systems talk to each other properly. Like it makes no sense to spend that money.
David:So you if I had a company that has 10 sales guys, what you're talking about here, what I mean, that sounds like I've got a pretty good my company's 13 people total, right? Yeah. So what small company? So to me, though, to say I got 10 sales, guys. Yeah. And they're, they're inadequate in some regard that I need to bring in a whole nother service in, like, what is what do you bring in that those 10? guys or gals don't have?
Taft:Yeah, so we're not competitive with the salespeople themselves? What we're doing is helping you answer questions like, hey, now that I've got, let's say, your sales team is 10, which means usually like, five sales reps, you know, a few sales reps, a couple people qualifying leads or doing outbound for you some leadership. So your whole sales program is 10 people. What you start running into is questions like, why is this guy always outperforming that guy, even though they're sort of activity metrics look the same. I don't understand what, what other metrics do I need to understand what the hell's going on inside my inside my team or, you know what, it's time to start thinking about breaking up territories, because my sales reps are stepping on each other's toes now that we have five or six of them and sometimes calling the same company on the same day because our lead routing stops or we do outbound and, and we don't have clear cut territories represented in our system. We need help thinking through how to operationalize these things that we know are sort of the next step in terms of, of Team maturity. And that's where we come in. So they bring us in to be the Think back office, a strong back office for a sales program as you grow.
Gary:I have a question about, I guess, the strategy when it comes to social media, I'm sure social media marketing it, it's huge, and it's growing, but it's also changing very quickly. And the strategy around using social media marketing is changing based on you know, different algorithms and the way things kind of flip flop. Right now it seems like unless you have a you know, a short video, no one sees your stuff. So I was curious to get your take on how often you use social media, how much of a marketing driver? Is it? And where do you see it going in the near future?
Taft:Oh, man, that's a big question. So I'll tell you from our iceberg, we're really leaning really hard into social and video. We're also leaning out of the idea that you need perfect attribution for everything. And so we're getting more and more comfortable with the idea that that it's going to be really hard to get really, really tight understanding of what's driving what in our in our top of funnel, especially as we move more and more into social. So what I can tell you as we're, we're focused on on capitalizing on short attention spans. In the in the form of lots of short videos that speak to very specific problems we think people are having we make a bet and say we think people in this industry, this size company with this title are feeling this pain. And we create a short video that that anybody can sit through where we don't lose people's attention and try to try to convince them really quickly that we might have an answer to the problem that we suspect they're feeling. I don't know yet how well it's gonna work. But that's sort of the theory where we're operating under right now. Our CEO, a guy named Brad, who I hired last year, is sort of driving this initiative. And so a lot of our time is spent actually leaning into exactly this, like social media and videos. And the other element at play here is, I think a lot of companies struggle with this, because attribution is really hard in this world, you know, people call it like, dark social, and, and you really can't tie efforts to outcomes really easily across social. And it's something we're getting comfortable with, because we believe the future is less and less easy to attribute in your CRM, and you get a clean report saying this business came from that thing you did?
Gary:Yeah. And it seems like just even the way social media platforms are getting their analytics and then displaying it back to you is different now to the the way they're serving up the content to the users is different. And that seems to be changing rapidly as well. So that, you know, the attribution is off. Another question I had based on social media and the videos, the push in using AI tools for marketing. Every company now has like an easy to use, like especially Canva, Adobe just launched their competitor to Canva. And there's more and more tools every day coming out with like, just pick a background, pick a topic, write two or three words, a base on the topic, and here's a video for you to push out. Yeah, find those tools are going to become more important, or do you think those tools are going to become like the overuse, amateur hour type tools versus highly polished like professional stuff?
Taft:I think yes to both, I think they're gonna become more important because they will contribute to the noise. And I think the signal to noise ratio is about to go even crazier than it's been for the last decade with outbound email automation and stuff like that. I think we're, we're gonna see social experience the same thing, email as a channel did over the last decade. So my guess here is that, that yes, it will be incredibly important because it is likely to become the low quality Super Easy channel for pushing crap out into the world, which and the reason I say that's important is because I think people who do a better job of leveraging it or who stick to stick to meat and potatoes, building great content are gonna stand out even more than than they have in the past.
Gary:It's funny right now, it seems like you can have AI bots send marketing emails out to people who will use an AI bot to read the marketing emails, and then a separate filter an AI bot to respond to those emails or put them in your trash. It's like, robots talking to robots. No one's seen anything.
Taft:Yeah, I think this is we'll have to hit an equilibrium equilibrium at some point. But I think we've got some, like I said, Signal to Noise. Real, real big shift coming and and I think it's going to be for a little while more and more important to build real quality to break through the noise more so than even five years ago.
Gary:One more question about social media. This is about engagement because the new engagement is huge in social media in order to get seen. One of the questions David asked about the size companies in the headcount made me think of, do you guys offer stripe Add a GS to the larger companies to have like the people that actually work for the company to interact and exchange and, and kind of boost posts through social media, make sure that their personal channel or at least their work channel, like LinkedIn, is engaging with other posts throughout other members of that, you know, corporation to help drive its performance.
Taft:Yeah, two answers to this from from a purely iceberg standpoint, that's outside of sort of the scope of what we do. So if a company comes to us and says, we're doing a big social media push, what should we do? Our answer is going to be narrowly focused on how do you set up the systems in the background to enable them to do whatever the strategy is they want to they want to use as a go to market strategy. So I think they would lean more on like a marketing agency to help them decide the what should they be pushing out into the world. But I think what we're seeing and will continue to see is this idea that the companies that make their employees and their customers, the heroes of whatever message they're sending out, are going to be the winners. I think having a significant social media following is going to be a huge advantage to people who are out job seeking in the coming years, I think companies are, who 510 years ago, very uncomfortable with the idea of their employees building their own personal brand, the smart companies, I think are going to be seeking those people and hoping to leverage their brand as an extension of the company's brand. I think I think that's what we're gonna see happen. So, so yes, I think the smart companies are going to be the ones really leaning on their their employees to, to amplify the message without doing the bullshit, like, copy and paste this company line that we're all sending out. And you see the same message from 100 Different people at the company. And it's just like a bad commercial. Those are, those are the companies that will be in the past. And those are the dinosaurs, the ones hiring, social media personalities are sort of the next the next phase of social media marketing, I think.
David:So that's interesting. See, I had a whole line of questions. And we're gonna go now you got me excited. All right, so doesn't a company who is doing exactly what you said they hire those social media savvy people who have their own brands? For lack of a better term? Aren't they opening a huge can for that company? Because now they might say something that you don't want associated with your brand? I mean, we see that all the time. So you're saying that's the future? Doesn't that open? Make Coca Cola? Or let's say Bud Light, for instance?
Gary:Does that make recent example them?
David:Scared? I mean, I would think if I were Bud Light, or Coca Cola, or any of these, that I have, I'm not very scared to bring on another round of this.
Taft:I would challenge that what I just explained is similar to the bud light thing, because the bud light thing was a marketing tape
David:promotion. Yes, you're right, though, just flipped that just a little bit that, that the person who is has extreme views, regardless of what they are, or maybe they're not even all that extreme, they're just extreme for your audience. Right. And that's, that's a very important thing. If your employee, just a random, you know, developer, sales guy, whatever, he's got half a million followers, and he says something that your brand just finds a pourraient. It has nothing to do with your job, right? He's not doing or she's not doing anything. That she's not doing anything for your company, she's out on her own. But bam, she drops a bomb. Now what?
Taft:So, I would say that, that you have, first of all, it can happen, it can happen whether or not you pursue this strategy because a lot of companies have people they don't even realize how big followings or some other thing they're doing and can bring heat. But I would say in this scenario where you saw this person because they have half a million followers to sort of amplify your brand, and then they came in and dropped some bomb and and just like ruined your your messaging or shined a light in a way you don't want on your brand. I would say you've probably failed in in due diligence there because I would want to know what did they do to build that half million followers? There's there's a there's some responsibility on the part of the company to to look at that. And And furthermore, I think as this becomes if I'm right about this, and a few years from now, we see companies seeking these, these people as employees who can really amplify their their message in a more organic way. I'd say. Just like a company who hires a spokesperson on social media, like you should know who they are before you hire them. I don't think it's that different. And so it would just be like hiring Kim Kardashian to to pump your message for a brand that's totally unrelated to her and sours your audience on you. Like that's a lack of due diligence.
David:But it's interesting. I've I find, I'm just I'm pushing on this, because I find it very interesting. Yeah. So let's say you bring on a stellar coder. And they have a unluckily, this might be a large following in the coding space. Okay, go with me for just let's just say the half
Gary:d&d enthusiast or something. What
David:they have, they have an audience that they've built up, which is tangential, but maybe related to why you hired them, right? This person is a stellar coder. They've written a bunch of stuff on JavaScript, and they have a following. What's interesting to me is 10 years ago, that person would be known for that. And that's the only thing they would care about, they wouldn't feel the need to do anything else. But nowadays, people once they reach a certain level, they feel they have a quote, platform. And therefore now I'm going to say something that I've been talking JavaScript for 10 years, right building up my following, but now I'm going to talk about Uganda and whatever, right just totally out of nowhere. And I just got caught flat footed because now and you see this with actors and stuff all the time. Yeah, it's like it used to be my job was to go and act. And I had no idea what you know, Charleston, Heston's, Charleston essence, I'm going way back there on purpose. I have no idea what his personal beliefs are for most of his career, right? Nowadays, you can't have you can't separate the two, they are one in the same. And in particular, I just read that Gen Z chooses products based on whether or not they agree with them. So they want that. It's just really interesting. It seems like man, I can see both ways, right? You're gonna get potentially stuck in a very odd position, because suddenly, you've got Uganda calling you on the phone. Because you there you have said something demeaning to their president. I have no idea of that President. I'm just using them as a random example. Please don't call me no hate mail. But you say something inflammatory. They don't like it. Now you've got an entire country mad at you. Because your developer guy went off the rails. Right? That I think
Gary:I think we're a little bit in a different tangent. I'm sure there's gonna be you know, contracts and hiring and stuff like that for social media and
David:getting news and stuff. Just taking musts just taking the wind out of this. Here's what happens. Gary doesn't like when asked a question because it makes me look more intelligent. And he feels less. So he has to put me down.
Gary:Yes. You discussing a developer with a large following. Getting a phone call from the president of Uganda makes you look intelligent? Yep. You just don't. I just wanted to get back on track. Since we only have I'm gonna take you for a little while we want to interview him. Now, David's thoughts
David:off my soapbox fight. You don't appreciate my intellect. I won't do a hard turn. So iceberg is your company. You are the founder, but not the CEO, which is entirely different question though. Yeah. Tell me about that story. It's, according to LinkedIn, you're a little over five years old. Yeah. So tell me about your story. How you got started in
Taft:that? Yeah, it's it's really a little over six years old. We're five years into being a real big boy company. But it started with me working like early mornings, usually with East Coast companies when I was living in California. And I didn't have a kid or a wife and was who's a doctor, by the way. So I got there Dad. The I had extra time, I wanted to hustle. I started just doing ops work because my career had taken me in this weird direction where I was doing sales and operations and figured out I was pretty good at it helping companies implement systems and figure out how they should work together. And I started doing it as a consulting gig. And it grew and grew and then I made the decision at some point to hire somebody to help me sort of keep all the trains running on time. And so I could take on a little more work and then it became a company and I started hiring consultants and early on contractors to to do jobs, you know that I SPECT out and eventually decided to do like a W two in house all state all onshore team, hired the best people I could get charged a lot of money versus trying to figure out how to scale it with just volume and cheap labor. And that really worked well in the market. And it's it continued to grow. Somewhere around a million and a half and revenue. I figured out like Hey, I might not actually be a very good CEO. I'm a good architect in systems. I'm good at dealing with customers. I'm good at tapping my network to find new business. I am not Good at financial discipline at this level, I'm not good at some of the some of the rigor that that a good CEO or CEO needs to have. And so last year hired Brad who has really transformed the company in terms of process and rigor, sort of cleans up my masters, I'm charging in a direction with an idea. And so that, that brings us to today, really.
David:So what is your job now for iceberg?
Taft:It's really two parts. It's grow the business, so assist with marketing and sales, and I'm on all the sales calls. And then be sort of an executive, an executive presence with clients who have more complex projects need somebody a little more senior, I do gut checks with with a lot of the consultants who, who, you know, need to make sure they're moving in the right direction. But my ultimate goal is to sort of be further and further outside of the business while Brad takes it over. But right now, yeah, I'm, I'm sort of executive sponsor slash growth.
David:Okay. So you are describing the true side hustle. Yeah. Which is really interesting. Some most of the people we've spoken to when they when I asked them this question, but how they got started. It's they made the plunge at some point, right. And they had an idea, which was usually had nothing to do with their real job. And they create that idea and jump it. Or they completely split with their current company, and you did the classic side, hustle, you're doing it, you've got a job, you're growing that? So did you have what we call the slog, which is, I mean, every company has it, but it's gotta be different for you. The slog is when you create a company, and no one cares, the process of getting your name out there to the point where you are getting your own gravity, where people are now calling you, as opposed to you yelling at that, right. Yeah. So some point, every company kind of crosses that, or they fail, because they have to at some point, but how was that for you? Or did it not exist? Because it was always a side gig.
Taft:It did exist but but in a different way, then then I think people who take the plunge and and it's their sole source of revenue. I could flex on, on how much money I take. So that that helped even out some of the ups and downs. A couple years in a row, we'd have a bad winter. And I started thinking maybe this thing isn't a thing. And there's no there there and I'm I'm about to have to shut down and then q1 would roll around and we'd start getting calls again. And I mean, still, we still were small enough. We still feel some of that. But so I guess I had many slogs along the way. But the ability to just not take a paycheck for a while to make sure the company stays healthy, and not materially impact my life was was really nice. But this is a situation where the stars aligned if I had to do over again, I'm not sure I'd try that again. Because there are a lot of there are a lot of risks you add to the business by not being fully fully in it.
David:So if you were well, I don't want to get ahead of our classic question, but if you were doing this again, you're saying the side hustle, not necessarily the way to do it. You'd rather take the plunge? Yeah, I
Taft:think what I would have done is kept at a true side hustle where it's just me making a little extra cash and pocketing it all or taking the plunge I think this like hedge I did that worked and I'm happy it did. And I was very lucky. I'm not convinced that I could do it again and have the same result.
Gary:So now that you have gone through it with David was just about to get to, um, from your experience, what are three pieces of advice that you would give to a new entrepreneur or someone taking a side hustle to a business?
Taft:I think it's I think this is sort of situation agnostic, whether it's whether you're a side hustle or taking the plunge and doing your own business. So some things I think every founder should do. First of all, is talk to customers I even in some of our clients, I see an unwillingness or lack of discipline that is going out and talking to customers prospects deals, you lose, just talk to people about whatever problem you're trying to solve until you you understand it really really well. The next is not everything needs to scale. So coming from from an ops background Then and being an ops agency, this is something people don't expect to hear from me. But not everything needs to be a really tight process that scales as your small and growing. It's okay to do things one off and figure out what works before you try to solidify process and add rigor to everything. And then my last one, this is like a personal one. I don't know how valuable this will be to businesses, but But in thinking about this question, stop using so many damn acronyms. Just say what things are, it doesn't make you sound any smarter. You know, just just stop with the acronyms. They were not the military. They don't save that much time.
Gary:Yeah, corporate jargon is the first and most immediate way that you can give away that you don't know what you're talking about.
Taft:under percent.
Gary:Yeah, those are good pieces of advice. And they don't have to be specific to a side hustle or to your career or whatever the personal ones are usually the better ones. Anyways, so nice. Now, if anybody wants to learn more about you or your business iceberg, where should they get in touch with you? What are the places they can reach out and learn more about your company?
Taft:Yeah, there are two. So first is LinkedIn. I'm, I'm easy to get ahold of on LinkedIn. There are no more Taft loves. So go, go find me on LinkedIn, ta F, T, L O V E, shoot me a request and make sure you mentioned the podcast otherwise, I'm I'm gonna assume when you're one of the million AI, lead generation company bots. And the other way is go to go to the website. It's iceberg, ice, the ERG ops o p s.com. And you can do a couple of things there. You can you can request contact and we'll we'll hop on a call with you. Or you can book an hour of my time totally free just to sit and workshop and operational problem you have. We do this for free for companies that that just need a hand thinking through op strategy. It's it's sometimes valuable for people and we love it because most of the time when people do that, they end up hiring us. So I hope you do it.
Gary:Nice. And we'll put those links in the show notes too. So thanks.
David:Man, this was a lot of fun. I am still a little offended by my tangent being being railroaded. And I Gary, I'm still a little salty. But outside of that,
Gary:our editor, some CGI tears, dripping
David:rudeness, aside from his rudeness, I really enjoyed having you on. Thank you so very much for taking the time. And yeah, I guess that's it, man. Thanks so much.
Taft:Yeah, I'll see you at mom's house next week.
Gary:Yeah, you too do look like you could be related for sure. Now, if anybody had any questions or comments for us or the podcast, you can leave the comments below this video or you can email us at Hello at the big pixel dotnet or reach out on any one of our social media channels. And don't bring up the Uganda situation.
David:One time at one time. One time. Thanks again, everybody. We will talk to you next week.
