Adapting from SaaS to Services with Mission Cloud's Dina Otero

Sean Lane 0:05 Hey everyone, welcome to operations, the show where we look under the hood of companies in hyper growth. My name is Sean lane. People often asked me what to look for when they're hiring for operations roles at their companies. And my most consistent answer is you want to find people who are adaptively. Excellent. Now, I've talked about this concept on the show before but being adaptively excellent essentially means you can be dropped into a brand new situation. Use your past experience and the context of this new situation, to figure out what will work best in this new environment and ultimately thrive there. The best operators I know have always exhibited adaptive excellence. And today's guest is a perfect example of that. Our guest today is Dina Otero, VP of demand generation at Mission cloud, after a decade of working in SAS at companies like confirm it. Now foresta and a primo Dena made the jump last year to mission cloud and AWS premier tier managed services provider, not only the Dena have to transition from her SAS background into services, but over the course of career she's also managed to grow from starting off in marketing operations roles to ultimately leading all of demand gen. Again, talk about adaptive excellence. In our conversation, we explore which SAS lessons she was able to combine with some creativity and bring with her in a new services business model. We're talking about how to run marketing within a competitive partner ecosystem like AWS is, and why she says her background and marketing operations is the single most important factor in her careers growth. To start though, I asked her to take me back to when she just joined mission cloud in late 2023. After having primarily worked in SAS businesses, what was that transition into services like for her? And what did she learn along the way? Dina Otero 1:57 I actually started my career in professional services, technically, my very first job out of college, I was working in New York City I did when I was in school, I had a bunch of internships at media companies. So I did NBC at Showtime, I think I did L'Oreal for a period of time, that it was really cool. So being fresh graduate in New York, I was like, Oh, I'm going to be in media or fashion, because that's the cool thing to do. And it did not go that way at all, it was extremely difficult. Those are very difficult industries to break into. And so you know, I basically took interviews wherever I got them. And at that point, my first job out of college was at a professional service firm called Max penneth. They've been acquired since then. So that company doesn't exist anymore. But they are basically accounting services. And so that was kind of like my very, very first insight into what professional services could look like, being a fresh graduate, the whole industry was new to me, marketing out of the classroom was new to me. So I really was just trying to get hands on experience wherever I could. The nice thing about it was we were such a small team that I really had a chance to be involved in a lot of different things. The company went through a pretty massive rebrand at that time. So I got a chance to be involved in branding, new website development, messaging, advertising, and then just my day to day job, which was email marketing and managing our CMS system. And that's kind of how I got into digital marketing. But after a couple of years, I realized that that was not necessarily the industry that I wanted to stay in. And so I was, you know, I did the what early 20 folks do, I was trying to find myself and decide where I wanted my career to go. So that you know, I hopped around a little bit few years after that, to see what that and then I don't know, maybe like four or five years into my work life. I got into SAS and it was like I found it like it just kind of clicked that that was where I wanted to be. I worked for a company called confirm it for nine years. That was my first SAS organization. They are customer feedback management. Again, they've also been acquired since then. So that company name does not exist anymore, but the functionality and the company, foundation still exists. And so I started there in marketing operations because I had so much digital marketing experience that I was basically brought on board to elevate our marketing automation platform and our CRM system and then kind of get like email marketing more of overarching like strategy where it wasn't just ad hoc sense. This is where marketing automation was really starting to blow up. So Marketo was our big was our big tool and it was really getting that implemented. And over time, my my role just evolved beyond you know, marketing operations into more demand gen. And that's that's been basically how I got into SAS and through SAS for, I would say 1314 years, and just most recently, I moved back into services. And so I currently work with a company called Mission cloud. So this is where the bridge between SAS and services really ties in nicely. Because even though on paper, they are different industries, the way that we go to market is actually quite similar. So we are a premier tier AWS partner. So we are 100% focused on AWS. So that means we're cloud experts, we our cloud services, managed services, as well as professional services. And so because all of our work is AWS related, while that is not SAS, it's still very technology focused, that really bridges the two spaces together, if you will. Sean Lane 5:53 Interesting. And so as you came into this more services oriented business, you've got, you know, a decade worth of SAS under your belt coming into it. And you said that there's similarities to how you're going to market like, what did you bring with you from the SAS world into this services business, Dina Otero 6:11 I would say the biggest thing I've brought was our ABM framework. So and, and the marketing tech stack that b2b SaaS companies tend to have from a marketing standpoint. So one big thing that I learned during my like SAS career is technology companies are powered on technology, meaning every team, but I'm going to focus on marketing, because that's where my focus is, and the go to market teams, I should say, we really leverage a lot of marketing tech across the different funnel, meaning technology to help us generate inbound volume, inbound leads, prospecting, build awareness, but also the tracking and the automation, and the moving of prospects through a funnel, if you will, to get them back to sales to get them to become a customer, then what happens once customer success is managing them having visibility into the lifecycle of these individual accounts. And companies really can bring like a holistic view on how things are going and progressing and where companies could potentially be getting stuck. So that also helps from an efficiency standpoint. And just obviously, that ties up to company objectives to make sure acquisition costs are reasonable, the lifetime value of the customer is there. And these are kind of like things that you don't unpaper don't necessarily seem like they connect, but they really do. Sean Lane 7:37 I guess it shouldn't surprise us that Dena was able to quickly apply her SAS experience and a services business model techstack decisions ABM campaigns makes total sense. Where I imagine things start to diverge a bit, though, is in her last few points about acquisition costs and lifetime value. margins in SAS versus services, businesses are very different, you have great healthy margins in software, and those tend to be much smaller in services. You can't just run a SAS marketing playbook in a services setting and apply that same budget and type of thinking. It has to shift, right? It's Dina Otero 8:15 still shifting, to be totally honest, because even within services in itself, managed service versus professional services are also different margins and have different benefits. And so it's like time to value and time to revenue, if you will, are very different between the two. And so it's, you almost have to treat them as like if I was to kind of tap into that SAS mindset, you basically are treating them as two simple, completely different product lines. And you have to measure them that way. And then plan them that way. So when we are doing our planning for the year, and for the quarters, we are breaking up our initiatives for what are we doing to generate professional service, pipeline and revenue? And then what are we doing to generate manage services, pipeline and revenue? Sean Lane 9:00 Can you make that real for folks like when you think about breaking it down into those different lines, right, professional services and managed services? Does that then mean that there are different people on your team who are responsible for ah, does that mean that you categorize your campaigns in a certain way? Like how do you actually run your business recognizing that, look, guys, our expectations for what we do in each of these funnels and the yield required have to be very, very different. Yeah. Dina Otero 9:26 So we don't have dedicated resources for each of it. You know, everyone is trained and onboarding, understanding both. And then there's obviously when you say both, there's all these different underlining services that roll up to that. Professional Services is more in depth, because there's so project based, if you will, that there's a lot of different areas that people can go but we have the ones that we tend to focus on the most for multiple reasons. One, the margins are better. Our success rates are better. The in house expertise we have, but also trends. So obviously generative AI projects right now have skyrocketed, and those fall under professional services. So people come to us a lot of times where they have an idea. They're looking to see if we can create some kind of proof of concept or implemented into production. And it's great because it basically gives our customers or our prospective customers an opportunity to do like a consultative meeting with our technical experts on all the different ways that an AI model or large language model can support their gender bi projects or something, and then what objectives are they trying to get out of it? But sorry, going back to your question, so we don't have dedicated resources for each everyone is familiar with both. But when we break up our campaigns, and any kind of initiatives, yes, we tend to focus on this is going to be a focus for managed services versus this is going to be a focus on professional services. And then when we go the professional service route, it's usually very topic specific. So generative AI, again, like I said, that tends to be a really big one lately. But even beyond general AI, there's data and analytics projects, and modernization projects. So all of those are very topic specific and fallen under the professional services umbrella. We're Sean Lane 11:15 talking about these as if they're like, you know, two completely different species. But I'm like a firm believer that if you have kind of these foundational building blocks of how you think about marketing, or how you think about demand gen, or how you think about kind of the needs of the business, like regardless of the environment that you're dropped into, you're going to try to apply those. And now what you're doing is you're kind of learning a new set of constraints that are on you for how you kind of deliver that. Am I thinking about that the right way? Is that Yeah, how you're kind of seeing, okay, look like a lot of this stuff is actually still helpful to me, I just have to apply it in a different way. Oh, absolutely. Dina Otero 11:49 So going back to ABN, the concept of it is exactly the same. It doesn't matter what industry, you're in even services versus SAS, if you go into financial service company or health services. I mean, you can always implement ABM frameworks for each one. Now, how you execute on them or the different orchestrations might play out a little bit differently based on the companies you're reaching out to, obviously, regulations, you have to factor that in. But the umbrella of the ABM idea can be implemented anywhere. And so that was something that I brought to mission cloud in a couple of different ways. So we have the intent component that really plays a large role in the account selection. We again, because we are 100%, AWS focused, our customers, our AWS customers, for the most part. Now, there are also tons of examples where there are companies coming to us because they're migrating off of a different cloud service, or they were just never on a cloud. They're, you know, on premise data centers, things like that. And now they're moving into the cloud. So we do a lot of those migration projects. But putting those aside, when you think about current AWS customers, I mean, that's our Tam. So when you look at that, I mean, there's hundreds and 1000s of customers, so it's impossible to go after everybody at a given time. So how do you prioritize, and that's where intent signals and intent data comes in. And so just like I've done in other organizations, you know, we have keywords and activities that we basically flag when something is surging, to recognize that there might be a want or a need for this particular company. And from there, again, because we are while we are services, the execution is actually quite similar. We have an internal business development team, we call them cloud advisors, but it's the same, it's the same concept. So they will run their outreach, and they try to be as personalized as they can. They have a lot of industry experience, they work with our AES. So if there are specific accounts that the teams are going after, together, there's usually like some kind of history that they try to include. And the more specific the more personalized they are, usually the better the responses. So again, that concept is not necessarily new. It's just how it's executed. And the alignment internally changes based on how each company is set up. Sean Lane 14:16 This type of target account approach within a specific ecosystem is fascinating to me. And I promise we're going to come back to what it means to sell within the AWS ecosystem a little later. But if you're an ops and you're listening to this, I imagine you are just awestruck as I am by Dina's clearly operational approach to the marketing work she does. So therefore, it should come as no surprise to you that she worked in marketing operations prior to becoming a VP of demand yet, but that's not a typical career transition in my experience. So I wondered, does she feel that her ops experience was as impactful to her current role as it comes across to me? Dina Otero 14:56 I think it has been single handedly the most important thing that I've done, that's gotten me to where I am. And here's why. So a lot of leaders want people who are data driven. But it's so easy to be data driven, when you're just focusing on vanity metrics. When I say vanity metrics, I mean, you can go as simple as email performance, or click through rates on your ads and things like that. But when I had the background of diving into raw data and trying to make it something digestible for my CMO at the time, implementing like a BI tool, so our entire marketing team can visualize the performance of channels that they owned, all of that really gave me a massive, massive foot forward on understanding things that even if I wasn't personally responsible for it, so Google ads is a great example, when I was in marketing ops, I didn't know paid search. And so you know, that was kind of managed by our web team. But because I was running reports for them and trying to create dashboards to allow them to understand the performance, I then had to understand what the numbers meant and what was good and what was bad. And basically what the different numbers meant. So I when I put it in a dashboard, they were easily able to digest it, and then act on it. So that's the big thing. It's not just understanding numbers and digesting it, but then also taking those numbers and making them actionable. That I think has been really important for me in order to do what I needed to do on the demand side to then make my numbers and be actionable on them. So how this all kind of happened, was, again, when I was at confirm it, I was there for nine years, because I started in operations. And you know, I kind of just organically started to take on more responsibilities, because during that time, that's a pretty long time. So companies changed, we were growing, we had a little bit of a restructure at the time. And so as like people came and went, I basically would like volunteer to help out with Field Marketing and email marketing when we were in between resources. And I guess I did a pretty good job, but then they just kind of became my responsibility. And so my role evolved from operations to more of a demand gen. And then by the time I left, I was a senior director demand gen. Sean Lane 17:18 And so one of the things I've said this on the show before, first of all, I think like future CMOS future CROs are all going to come from ops, right? And so like, I think you are a phenomenal example of that for folks. One of the things that I think ops folks can struggle with in that transition. And I'm curious if you ran into this, something I've certainly struggled with is, when you know, all the details, when you know how everything is built, when you do make it to being the VP of demand gen. It feels like it's kind of a blessing and a curse, right? Because it's like, you have to operate at an altitude that is above that. But you also are like, man, like this is wrong. Like they're just this is not the way it's supposed to work. So how have you figured out kind of the right balance of leveraging that ops background without it kind of becoming a hindrance on the new job that you actually have to do now? Dina Otero 18:11 It's so funny, you mentioned this, I was just having this conversation yesterday with my CMO. Because it is it is 100% a blessing and a curse, because I can easily get caught up in the weeds because I know it and I know where it is. And it's finding that black box and you're just like, Oh, I'm going to start digging into this. But I remind myself, if I give myself basically, depending on how much free time I have, like in that moment, I'll give myself say 1015 minutes, dig into this, if you find something quickly use it if not step away, and let the people whose job and responsibility it is to then continue where you left off. But I will say it's also helped me spark really good questions and conversations with my team, where not only do I challenge them a little bit to think beyond where and how things were set up before but like, how do we kind of turn the clock and start start again? Like, I always like to ask if we were to rip this apart and start over? Would you do it the same exact way and more than nine times out of 10? The answer is no. Because hindsight, you know, I could say the same thing for all the things that I've implemented like you learn from experience. So it's basically that's what I tried to do I try not to lose myself too much in the back end of all these sources, but I will allow myself like a few minutes to just try to figure out the answer myself. But delegation, at this point is something that I constantly have to remind myself to do. Sean Lane 19:41 This episode is brought to you by a sender. You know how critical it is to have predictability in your business metric. The qualification methodology is often the secret sauce that helps today's sales leaders call the ball accurately and repeatedly. If you want your reps to qualified better check out a sender by the team at force management tender offers a medic certification for your team all online. There are options to combine instructor led training and customization for your company. Check it out today at a sender.co/ops. Okay, back to Deena. Before the break, Dina was explaining to us her transition from her primarily SAS background into leading demand gen at a services business called Mission cloud. I promised that we would get more into the details of this business, particularly their position within the AWS ecosystem. So here we are. Everyone always preaches the idea of focus and finding the center of the target for your ICP. But it takes discipline to pull this off. Now, obviously, working within the AWS ecosystem feels like a pretty good bet as we sit here in 2024. But that positioning in the market must have so many other ripple effects internally on your go to market efforts. And if you haven't worked in a business that lives inside of an ecosystem like this before, that might be pretty foreign. So I asked Dina, what does it mean to be a premier tier AWS partner? And how does it impact how she runs marketing at Mission cloud? Dina Otero 21:10 So the premier tier is beat is the top tier that the AWS ecosystem offers. So that in itself is really quite an incredible feat. So you know, we are not exclusive, it's us and a few other partners that have this tier, but it is, it's, it really makes us stand out. Now, that being said, AWS has hundreds, if not 1000s, of partners, and they basically rank them at different levels. And so like I said, this one is is the top level, and it's really incredible to be grouped with companies like the Accenture is in the slums of the world, because you know, we're not as big as them, but we are operating at that level. And that really makes working for a company like mission cloud and a company with AWS really outstanding. It also pushes us to because we're not as big as these other really large consulting agencies. I think it also pushes us to think more innovatively, basically, we don't have unlimited budget, we don't have unlimited resources. So how can we do more with a limited amount of time and money. And that is kind of when we start to get the most creative, and think of ways to really tap into our in house talent. So one example, I'm going to give us a shout out to our product marketing manager. We basically created a, I say we but he really created a podcast on AI using AI. So yeah, it's really impressive, you should check it out. It's called Mission generate, I will. So basically the two folks who who run it are generative AI expert, who is Dr. Ryan Reese. He's our chief data and AI officer. He's the primary speaker. And then the host is our Product Marketing Manager, Casey. But they are not actually doing what we're doing where you know, they're there in person having a conversation they recorded, they edit, what they did is they created a language model based on their real voices, they'll basically have a specific topic about generative AI in one way or another. But then they'll use AI technology to produce the episode. It's a really fascinating and so and it's been a huge hit. It's just a way to showcase how it's not that it's replacing them. They needed to record their voices, they needed to record their tones. So it's just augmenting the human component. And using AI to kind of finish it off. It's very cool. Sean Lane 23:45 That's fascinating. But I think for you as a brand, what I think you're saying is this, then is one of those creative ways that you separate yourselves within this ecosystem is that is that kind of the punch line of the podcast? Dina Otero 24:01 Exactly. And we didn't have to purchase any new functionality or new tools. It was all built in house on AWS, bedrock and other services. So things that we already had access to, it just required some time to kind of get it built. But now you know now they've I believe they run episodes once a week, so they've got the model to to make it very scalable. Sean Lane 24:23 That's amazing. I should just do that. Dina Otero 24:25 Yeah, why are we talking to people crazy? No, because then every single guest you have would have to do the voice recording. Because you're you have new guests each time that would be a little bit of that might not save you time. But Sean Lane 24:39 to your point, though it serves its purpose of being unique IP stands out, it furthers the brand like it's all of these great things inside of this very specific ecosystem that you all are trying to stick out within. And so as the person who's responsible for creating demand inside of that ecosystem, like what does that look like? Right? You So when I would think about kind of the different go to market motions you might have in a traditional business, like a direct model, and then maybe in a channel or affiliate model, and it seems like the vast, vast majority of your business is coming through that channel or affiliate or referral model, right? And so what does that look like from a marketing leaders perspective to say, Okay, this is our primary focus as a go to market motion, how does that impact the way you you build out your demand gen plans? Dina Otero 25:27 Yeah, I think that might be my biggest hurdle, not because it's not feasible it is, it's just because there are so many unique AWS services, that it's very easy to over complicate things or confuse people if you try to push names and resources and examples of everything that they can do. So instead of focusing on like selling a different service, we focus on selling what those services can do. So again, kind of like the art of the possible, then that's when like, we enable our solution architects and our expert, our technical experts to then say, okay, these are then the different services that would be fed into this component to do what you want to do. Because again, I should know this number off the top of my head, but I don't but again, like AWS has hundreds of services. So if we try to sell every single one individually, or even as a bundle, it would get very confusing, very overwhelming very quickly, there are a few that tend to come up very frequently, again, depending on what the service or project is. So like for general AI, again, I keep using this as an example, just because it's the most common one bedrock, Amazon bedrock is, is usually always used, it's kind of the foundation of their AI functionality. Sage maker is another one. But again, we don't really call them out specifically, at least upfront, until we start talking about different use cases or in case studies when we when we share success stories of our customers. That's where we will highlight what services were used for them to receive the results that they did. Sean Lane 27:06 Okay, so a few challenges that Dena and her team have to navigate one, the sheer number of AWS partners that they have to distinguish themselves from and to the volume of AWS products that they have to offer services for. But the other dynamic that I was curious about here is that any partner ecosystem like this, you have to market your company, not just to your end buyers, but to the company itself, whose ecosystem you're in. And their case, AWS, you have to manage your reputation with them, you have to want to be someone they want to work with, you have to be a company they can trust with their customers success. And Dina said that this dual audience was not something she necessarily anticipated coming into her new role. Dina Otero 27:51 That was something I did not realize when I first joined, which is not a bad thing. But it was just very unique. Because when I joined, it was like, you know, when you do your new employee onboarding, and whatever, I didn't onboard the submission class, I basically onboard it to AWS to so I just hit my six month mark, and I'm finally starting to realize or like to get a grasp on how AWS really, really operates. Because it is you need to learn to companies, because we are working with them so much. So we aligned with them so much. But then you also need to market to two companies. So yes, I am marketing to end users and prospective customers. But I'm also marketing to AWS. And while we have a partner marketing team, they and they do an incredible job establishing and continuing to build that relationship. But AWS also wants to see how is your demand gen team performing, because obviously, they will immediately you know, they will get the benefit of us being successful. So they want to know what we're doing and how we're doing it. So not only can they kind of forecast what kind of results they'll get from Mission cloud, but also what can they replicate themselves. So it's very unique, in the sense that to customers. And to company, you basically work for two companies. But it's also really, really cool. And it's been humbling, but a really nice challenge, because it's not the same thing. And I feel kind of like rejuvenated to have this like new experience, because it lets me think outside the box and like a little bit differently that I have been the last Gosh, 10 plus years. It Sean Lane 29:29 is super interesting. And if I think back to the example you gave before of like, you know, okay, we have to plan our demand gen efforts distinctly between professional services and managed services. I would imagine in the broader marketing organization. You also have to think about those two customer groups a little differently as well. You said you know, you've got your team, there's a partner marketing team, can you can you help make real for folks like, what does that look like internally to say okay, you all are going to focus on the end company. You all are going to focus on our AWS relationship, like, how does that actually get managed and become real within the Dina Otero 30:06 team? Yes, our partner marketing team is heavily focused on again, marketing to our partner. So in this case, AWS. Now we also have in alliances, Team channel and alliances. So the way that team is set up is we have essentially resources for every segment, meaning our three main segments that we sell to our startup, SMB, and enterprise. And so we have an alliance manager, tied to each one of those segments. And so that team is also responsible for it is a little bit of marketing, but it's more also its sales like but not sales in the traditional sense. It's, again, selling mission cloud, to AWS. So building up that relationship, establishing more trust, getting more FaceTime with people and district managers and leaders and executives in each of their respective segments. And then they're also heavily involved with our events. And so because they are essentially our first point of contact, if there's like a new person at AWS that wants to meet with us, it usually gets funneled through the Alliance team first, and then they'll loop in the right people on the mission side. So the Alliance team is almost the bridge between is almost like the sellers, if you will of mission cloud and AWS, the sellers of the relationship. And then our partner marketing team is basically the bridge of AWS and mission cloud marketing. It's fascinating. And then we also have content and product marketing, and demand gen, of course, and we all kind of share that responsibility of end user and AWS activities. Cool. Sean Lane 31:41 I'm like literally drawing the spectrum here of like, and I get it, I totally get it like this is the liaison between this and this. i It all makes sense to me. Yeah. What I would imagine probably gets to add to your complication question, right? Before, right? What I would imagine gets hairy, is with all of those different folks on that spectrum, aligning folks around the outcomes that are the most important that are measurable, right, because like sometimes partner stuff can be kind of hand wavy, and like, yeah, they like us, they trust us like, but there's it's hard to actually then translate that into real results. Right? Show me pipeline, show me revenue that's coming from these relationships and the work that you're doing. Now, for you guys. It's everything, right? Because it's all coming through this ecosystem. So how do you keep folks kind of aligned around? Okay, these are the outcomes across all of these different partner marketing internal folks like, how do you keep folks focused on like, these are the measurable Northstar outcomes that we're trying to get to. So Dina Otero 32:40 luckily, there are very specific outcomes that we have to hit. And that comes with the premier tier level that we have. So every level has basically its own objectives that need to be hit in order to maintain that status. So a lot of that comes from partner which needed opportunities. And so that's basically the overarching number of everything that mission cloud is generating for AWS. But then taking that one step lower than there's the marketing qualified opportunities that get generated through mission cloud marketing team that also go up to the get rolled up into AWS. So and this kind of an I'm going to overcomplicate things a little bit here, but we also last summer signed an SCA strategic collaboration agreement. And with that, it's basically like an investment from AWS into mission cloud. And it was a really amazing stepping stone for us to further our relationship with them. And so as part of that agreement, there were then additional KPIs and objectives that were added to our responsibilities to them keep us accountable. So the next thing is, all of this information internally at Mission cloud is transparent. Everybody knows what those targets are. And so collectively, we all work together to make sure that we're hitting those numbers on a quarterly but more importantly, annual basis to maintain our status. And quite frankly, our business relies on it. So if we don't hit them, we risk losing, not losing the relationship, but we risk losing the status. And that is not something that anybody wants to do. Sean Lane 34:21 I mean, I think as I'm sure high pressure as that is like, I think that's awesome that you all have this very clear thing. It's like okay, you have to originate this most business, we have to manage as much business and that's the thing that enables us to be successful this year, next year future years, right is being in that smaller cohort of folks that have achieved this status, because that's how the business will continue to thrive. Before we go at the end of each show, we're going to ask each guest the same lightning round of questions ready Oh, here we go. Best book you've read in the last six months. Oh, atomic habits. Nice. Did you have you picked one up yet? I'm Dina Otero 35:09 still working on a few. So there was one story in there that really kind of resonated with me because I'm terrible at this. So basically, one of the things is, there's always people who are saying, like, I'm gonna start going to the gym five times a week or going, you know, I want to lose 30 pounds or whatever it might be. In the book, there was a story about, you go to the gym every day, for two weeks, you don't actually work out, you just get up, drive to the gym, walk in, sit in the lobby for five minutes, and then leave. You do that for two weeks. But really, what happens is, once you're there, it's getting there. That's the hard part. That's always the hardest part. It's getting out of this mindset of like, you have to go big immediately to like, make an impact and making small habits. So five minutes every day for two weeks. And then all of a sudden, you're like, Oh, why am I not at the gym right now. And then your five minutes in the lobby becomes, okay, I'm gonna put on my sneakers and whatever, go for a run, or I'm gonna go lift some weights or I'm gonna whatever whatever your your exercise preferences are. But that one, I think, really, really stuck out with me a little bit. Sean Lane 36:12 I love it. All right, next one favorite part about working in ops. Funny Dina Otero 36:16 enough, I think it's it's being able to troubleshoot and connect the dots like there's something really gratifying about having a problem and then figuring out the solution. And that I think is my favorite part. Sean Lane 36:27 Flipside least favorite part about working at ops, data management? Simple, someone who impacted you get into the job you have today. So Dina Otero 36:39 my Director of Marketing at confirm it was really kind of my mentor and how she was it was because of her that got me like moving out of evolving from operations more into demand, Jen, she's just an amazing leader. She was. She was definitely a big mentor for me earlier in my career, and I would definitely put her as the person who got me to where I am today. Sean Lane 37:00 That's awesome. All right. Last one, one piece of advice for people who want to have your job someday, Dina Otero 37:05 don't be afraid to speak up and volunteer for things that may not be necessarily your job. I talked a little bit about that earlier in this conversation about how you know, people were leaving, or you know, there were different transitions of resources and things needed to get done. But we didn't have a dedicated person to own that. And I just said, I'll do it. Was I an event expert? No. But I eventually became really good at events and my events were on budget, and we were getting ROI. And so it you know, I started owning North America events and then that evolved into owning other things. So I think volunteering and speaking up when something is available, or even if it's not available to try or shadow someone, I think is probably the best advice I would give someone. Sean Lane 37:57 Thanks so much to Dina for joining us on this week's episode of operations. If you liked what you heard, make sure you're subscribed to our show so you get new episodes in your feed every other Friday. Also, if you learned something from Dina today or from any of our episodes, make sure you leave a review on Apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. Lastly, special shout out to Rachel Platt Miller and Kathleen Schindler over at Ascender for being our new sponsor on this week's episode, really excited to be partnering with all of you folks over at a center and force management. Alright, thanks so much for listening. We'll see you next time.