Hello. Welcome to the growth workshop podcast with myself, Matt Best and Jonny Adams. Today, we're joined by Matt Milligan from Uhubs and Uhubs are a capability platform. They help you assess and benchmark and measure on a long term basis the capabilities of your sales organization. So Matt, thank you so much for joining us today on the Growth Workshop Podcast. It's fantastic to have you here. Jonny and I were talking just this morning about what interesting questions we could ask our guests.
And the question today is, if you could choose two people to be on your personal board of advisors, who would they be and why? And these people could be people who have now passed these could be people who are celebrities. You don't know who would those two people be for you?
So I'm gonna go with is a little bit cliche. I've read quite a few of his books and recently re engaged with some of his content. And he's just got so many, so much wisdom. Tony Robbins, love the guy's energy, just love like the back story. I think he's feeding like 30 million people a year. He's known as kind of like a coach to the rich and famous and very big in that kind of self help world, which, if that's
your cup of tea, that's your cup of tea. But if you kind of look between the fluff, the guy's just full of wisdom, and he's so cool, headed and calm, and he runs 120 businesses now, and he feeds 30 million people a year. So I think just spending 30 minutes with that guy, you're gonna get a lot of value. So
that would definitely be be number one. The second one's bit of a niche one, but I played a lot of golf growing up, so I played a bit of professional golf, and one of my mentors growing up was a guy called Rob watts, who was my golf coach. And Rob and I still stay in touch today. He's a legendary guy, but the coolest head out of anyone I've ever met business sport. So he coaches the England golf team. He does a lot of
work. He was Darren Clark's coach. The guy is so good with psychology and performance psychology, and I'd benefit probably more from him. Never actually told him this until now, yeah, but just in terms of, you know, things like creating containers around your emotions and being able to develop a high performance mindset resilience. You know, he taught me a lot from a young age. So gotta get Rob in there.
I love that. I think if people see when we ask that question, whenever we get a response, you know, the first or second, one of my eyebrows go like that, and depending on the first I'm like, oh, that's an interesting one. I reckon you could have a pretty good night out with Tony Robbins and Rob.
Nice. I think that's when you're talking about golf coaches. I was thinking about it in the context of the full swing on on Netflix. Yeah, you look at some of those. I forget the name of the player, but one of the players was talking about not having a coach, and the impact, and then just actually the importance of that. We obviously talk a lot about the importance of coaching, yeah, working with leadership teams and and that everybody needs to, you know, everybody needs a coach, but how
impactful a coach can be? And I think, like so many times, leaders are saying, well, I don't need to, you know, I'm not the very best of that. How could I possibly be a good coach in that context? It's just kind of recognizing, right? I'm sure Rob wasn't the greatest of probably not as good as Dan Clark when he
was coaching him. So that's okay. It's the other things outside of it, like you said, like containerizing your your thoughts and controlling yourself talk when you stood over a part on the 18th green on the last day and thinking, this needs to go in for me to be able to pay my mortgage.
Exactly. Yeah, it's huge, and I'm sure we'll dive a bit deeper into that. But like the world of professional sport, I think there is so much crossover between business, and I think business can learn so much about performance and high performance from the world of sport, but it's also things.
It's not any mindset and the psychology side of things. It's things about structure and process and routine, you know, and the importance of your pre shop routine and nailing that down and that like there's so much that we could go into but, but I've learned, I reckon I've learned, hands down more on the golf course about business and life than I have in any lecture theater or event.
I'm snipping that and sharing it with my wife.
Okay, well, let's get into the meat of it. Matt, so I mean, we've known each other for a number of years now. You know SBR? Well, you know a lot of the colleagues at SBR, and I love your background in your career, and now what you're doing at Uhubs, it's fantastic for the audience out there that are listening to today. If you could share a little bit about
the story or journey, maybe even like the founders story. As you are a founder yourself, you and your co founder are building, and have been building, a fantastic piece of technology that we all advocate for. SBR, so yeah, tell the audience a little bit about you.
Yeah, I'll try and keep it brief and not too much of a backstory. But grew up in a, you know, really loving home, South African parents. So kind of first generation immigrant, if you like, grew up in a very competitive household, sport mad. My dad was a former rugby player, yes, but sport fanatic from a very young age. But was always, always kind of hustling, always, you know, scheming, selling things from a young age. So my first job was at 13, was Caddying at
Sunningdale Golf Club. We get 25 quid for 18 holes as a junior. And then I remember, I think my second job was Caddying in the group behind Ant and Dec in the ITV golf day. And I was just there, like 13 I was like, This is amazing. And I get paid for this, and I love golf. So that was great.
Was there any type of, like, countries of people or so, was it Americans when they came over, you'd get the best tips. Or was it like the Brits were the worst?
You know, the Brits are the worst, allergic to tips. But I was obviously young at the time, and I was jumping on the train to Sunningdale, so I would I became quite proficient at bunking the train, and the one day I rocked up, and course, was packed. Caddy Shack was empty, and Vince comes up to me at 8am and he goes, Milligan, it's your lucky day. I go, well, where's that? Vince? And he goes, just had a cancelation. One of the caddies is sick, so you've got an adult rate for 36
holes with a buggy. And it was American guys, so I'm just there. Oh my god, this is amazing. So all I did was drive the buggy around for 36 holes in a glorious summer day. And instead of getting the 25 I'm trying to remember now, I think the adult rate was 60. So I got 120 cash, and then he gave me 100 quid tip in 50 pound notes. And at 13 years of age, like
this is like the most money I've ever held. And the ticket lady at Sunningdale, pretty sure she knew that I used to bunk the train, but that day, I rocked up to her with a big smile on my face, and I put down a 50 pound note. I said, I'll have a first class seat.
I love it.
So that was like the, you know, the introduction, really, I guess, to sales, and you're constantly selling your services. And, you know, you're, you're approaching members and pitching them, if you can walk their dog for five pounds. So you just pick up little things. And then obviously, being in
that environment, you get to learn. Because most of the members are, by default, successful, you know, in the business world, and you're just there as a sponge for four hours a day, absorbing all this information about these guys, talking about deals that they're closing and how it works. And I just became fascinated with that side of it. So that was the kind of first, I guess, where my passion for for business and sales and deals came about. I found it exciting.
And then, you know, the time that we spent together and the mutual clients that we've got between Uhubs and SBR, one thing that I love working with you and the team loves working with you is because you have a consultative background. So, so you once at EY, if I'm not mistaken, yeah, what's the type of role you were doing there?
Terrible employee.
That's why you're your own boss now, right?
So roundabout way, ended up went at South Africa, and then came back to the UK, and my mom was sat me down, and she was like, you have to get a proper job by this point. So that's how I managed to get into EY. Was through a bit of a connection through the golf course, one of the partners at EY and I managed to work my ass off and get through the assessment process to get in. Started off in tax, in the
reading office, and lasted about a week. Completely hated it, but managed to network with a consulting partner, which sounded more interesting. So I ended up kind of it was really awkward, but I fired my manager after a week, I had to go up to her, and I prepared a little speech down. I was like, I'm changing my internship, and I'm not going to be in tax anymore. And she was like, What do you mean? I was like, I've networked with the partner over there, and he's going to send me to the BBC
to do a consulting project. And she was like, what? So that was the end of my tax career, last of the week. And then went into went into consulting, and, yeah, ended up at an E wise transformation team. So doing strategy consulting, spent a lot of time on go to market. So I think one of the early projects I did was a CRM Salesforce implementation, a big energy
company. So that was like nine months of just brutal 100 hour weeks with meeting rooms with no natural light, trying to migrate, you know, they were running off some really old sebul system onto onto Salesforce, cloud based system. So look like really great education, I guess. And the UI network was really valuable. But then I got into the startup side of things, because I still had this kind of hunger to build
businesses. And lots of my mates were building companies. So that started the idea for something called the EY Startup network. So that was just like an initiative that I set up side of desk, and I went to one of the partners I was working with, guy called Mark Hutchinson, who's now an investor in you hubs. And I said, Mark, I got this idea. I think there's a huge opportunity for EY to tap into startups and use them in the projects that
we're running. And that was kind of like a business idea born, I guess so. Mark said, All right, I'll protect you. You've got six months. So that meant I could get off chargeable work for six months to try and build this thing. And yeah, and then we ended up building an internal venture, if you like. So I've built the startup network, and then they actually hired an external partner to come in from the US, a guy called Rich Gould,
is a big mentor of mine. And we grew. We turned what was the startup network into something much bigger, which was e wise, fast growth platform, and that's their service offering for scale ups in in Europe. So so that then gave me this business, and I seconded to E. By seven because they had to get me off the books, basically because it wasn't technically chargeable. So, yeah, that was the consulting side of things. Pretty unorthodox journey, I think.
And then what's the bridge between there to now Uhubs? Like, when did you start Uhubs? And maybe even a little bit about what Uhubs is, just for those that are not entirely sure, be great.
Yeah, happily. So we'll comment to UHubs in a sec. But I think the journey of how we got there was many of our customer base in that fast growth environment were VC or private equity backed businesses. We're talking here sort of 2015, onwards. So we were starting to enter that kind of SaaS boom. So we were doing a lot of work with B to B software companies, particularly helping them scale into the US and doing their legal, doing their corporate finance advisory, and
then doing go to market transformation as well. And the biggest challenge for pretty much every CEO that we were working with at the time was I've hired a bunch of salespeople because my investors have told me I have to, and only 15, 20% of them are hitting target. So I was like, This is nuts, because I'm watching the investors pour their money into these businesses, hire these teams when the existing teams, you know, only a handful of them are hitting target, and so the
capacity model is just completely off. And I'm watching these businesses kind of crash and burn because they're hiring way too quickly and they have no ability to enable, you know, predictable performance across the team. So I sort of Lent into that problem. I was like, this is like a massive problem for these businesses. And around about that time, I met my co founder, Ash, who was the first marketing director at just eat.
So ash had taken a bit of time out, done some engine investing, and have written a book, and I got ash to do a couple of speaking slots at UI for the start of network. And mentor found, you know, found a mentoring and ash took this problem to ash. And I said, you know, seeing this crazy problem in the market with sales teams. And he pitched back to me his philosophy around his book, which is called the unfair
advantage. And he says, You know, I think a really big part of this is skill development, because you think about the sales career is not professionalized in the way many other careers are. He says, there's a massive opportunity for you know us to help sales professionals understand their unfair advantages and how they can become more competent and and that led us down this path of this vision of creating a
business that could help solve this problem. A few pivots along the way in terms of how we've got there, but the visions always stayed the same. It's about turning potential into performance. You know, it's about helping people realize their potential. Long way of saying but what we do at you hubs is is exactly that, like we specialize in helping people realize their potential, and we do that through assessing and
benchmarking capabilities of teams. So helping Chief Revenue officers, chief sales officers, answer the question, what does good look like in my organization? Because fundamentally that if you can't answer that question, then you cannot hire the right profile. You definitely cannot replicate or get close to good if you don't actually understand what it looks like in the first place. So we see that as you know, the core problem that needs to be solved.
And it's really, really helpful that you know, hearing your your founder story in the background and the journey that you've been on. I'm not a founder, right? And I think that there's a bone within me that I really want to be one day, and I don't know whoever I will be, but it strikes me as quite a lonely environment. And maybe that's why you've got a co founder in ash. But I would imagine that there are elements that are really challenging to you as a founder, being
vulnerable, and vulnerability is a really important part. Could you describe a really vulnerable moment that you have had as a founder over the number of years?
Yeah, totally hands down. The standout example of this, and it's front of mind because I was talking about it over dinner last night with with my co founder and our partners, we got off to a really good start with the business early days. 2022 we got some really good traction. We were building out this amazing vision for, you know, assess the world's sales capability, and the VC market was still pretty hot back then.
So we were, you know, burning cash. We were, you know, we'd raised some money prior to that, but we had attracted the interest of some big, big VCs in here and the US. So we went on a fundraising process, which started in September 2022, we had six months of runway, which is pretty normal for a startup. So six months of cash left to sustain the business, if you like. And we went out to the US. We did a brief sort of tour of
duty over there. We came back with a term sheet, which is an offer of investment from a VC. And then we met with heaps more in Europe. And the market was still running hot in the summer of 2022 so we ended up, within about three weeks, we had three term sheets, which and we were like, Oh, this is amazing. Like, great, you know. And these were significant offers for us at the time. So, you know, we're talking multiple millions here of investment, two to 3 million. And it was a kind of crazy,
crazy turn of events. So what? Then happened, if you cast your mind back to q4 2022, was the software mark. Well, the software markets, the global markets, tanked, the bubble popped, the bubble burst, and overnight, one of the investors pulled the term sheet, and they were like, we're we're not sure about the market environment. We're holding off valuations of tumbling. We're out. So we're okay, fine. So then it was two of them, and we'd already started sort of initial due
diligence with both of those investment firms. And one of them, we did a tech audit, so they even got access to our code base and saw what we had built so far as a v1 then turned around to us and said, Ah, we're out, because one of our portfolio companies is pivoting into your space. And we were like, Ah, well, you've literally, we've literally just opened up the hood and taken you through everything that we
built. So yeah, that wasn't great. And then the worst bit about all of this was that the third VC then found out through the market that they were the only horse in the race, so they had us over a barrel. Yeah. And by this point. So the process is starting, say, August, three term sheets in September, and this basically was capitulating as around in October, and then it was like week by week, just everything got worse and worse.
The news headlines were getting worse and worse. The valuation our term sheet kept dropping, and then the investor kept adding all of these crazy terms that, like, I've been around the startup world quite a bit with my previous world, you know, role never even heard of some of this stuff, right? So it was like mandatory board seats plus an observer. So then you've got two people on our board, which is not standard at that stage.
We basically ended up getting all the way to November, and we had gone from like having an amazing business that was growing and a huge opportunity, but then you've taken three or four months out of your business. So growth has gone like this because with we were founder led sales, so we're busy doing DD with investors. We're not spending the focus on sales like we should be. So then your business is going down and
you're running out of money. So we ended up in a situation where we basically had a month's runway and one awful term sheet on the table, and despair, really. And coupled with, you know, ashes, had some family emergencies at the time, so I was basically, like, on my own, grappling with the situation and fate, staring into oblivion. And, yeah, we had like, 15 employees at the time, and I was thinking, this is, you know, this is existential. Yeah, that was the difficult moment for sure.
Yeah, lessons learned, though. Like, what was that one lesson learned from that? I mean, we could make our assumptions as we're listening, but what's the one thing that you would do differently moving forward?
Well, I think the big takeaway is that the business only dies if you if it sounds stupid to say that actually, because there are things out of your control, for sure, but most of startups die when the founder gives up. I do genuinely believe that, because, like, even as bad as things were there, I could have easily just jacked it in. Be like, you know what we're done? Like, let's just wrap it up and, you know,
take, take a break and go to the next one. The mindset, yeah, just, just bite down on the gum shield and be like, this is just a problem that has to be solved. What's, what's an essential solution? So, you know, in that instance, I ended up going and getting the train up to Sheffield, going to our previous lead investor, and organized an in person meeting, and I put, I printed out the term sheet, all these awful terms, and I put it on the table, so a board member at the time, and I said, we've
been in the market for four months. Huge distraction fundraising. We've been through hell with this investment around this is the best offer we've got. Do you want to protect your investment? And then they went through the thing and they came back like a day later, called me, the CEO called me, and he was like, don't take that deal. We'll give you some money. All
Well, that journey itself, it'd be good to dig into right. maybe some of the successes and the challenges you've got, because I'm sure there's a few.
Have we got enough time for them?
That laugh just tells me there's a few in there. My background. And I was thinking about this this morning, as I knew we were meeting you, and I when I was 18, I wasn't too sure what I wanted to do. I was fortunate enough to be given the opportunity to become a European licensed coach. And we were taught by a international coach at the time. So I thought, You know what, I'm going to be the next England football coach, right? Absolutely buzzing for
it. And I've got a philosophy around coaching. You know, the output of the one nil victory or the two one loss is not, you know, there's a byproduct of the inputs that go into the team. And when I was coaching an 11 aside team, you had to go through transitioning the team throughout the game. Yeah, talk about transitions. Now you had to move from a 442, formation to a five back, five, etc, three in the middle and two up front. Here we go, getting right into the detail. But I was used to
look at the team and break them down into components. So that person would be really skillful, or that person would be a great person who was great at heading. Is that? How you see, you know, a sales function, do you break them down into different functions? Or how does that work in your head? You know, UHubs?
Yeah, totally. So there's a really good book by a guy called Jim Collins called Good to Great. So one of. The key principles of successful or endearing, enduring rather businesses, is he talks about, you have to figure out how to get the right people on the bus and get them sitting in the right seats. So, you know, to use a football analogy, we talk about something similar, but we say, figure out how you get the right players on the pitch and get them in the right positions.
And like speaking to CROs every day, you know, particularly the ones that are new to role. That's kind of like priority number one. You know, once you've done your your Tam and ICP definition, it's like, then what the hell have I inherited here? You know, how do we figure out we how we optimize that team? So, so, yes, absolutely. And then you think about how you you break that down so you have an organization that you inherit
often, in particularly private equity businesses, right? How do you then understand, Okay, where is everybody, what levels are we talking about, and what characteristics, attributes, capabilities that they possess, once you've got that initial baseline, the next step we find is then you can start thinking about role definition, because then once you understand what you're working with, you can start to think about, okay, in order for us to get to the number that we need to hit in
the next 1224, months, we're going to need x percent to come from new business. We're going to need x percent to come from expansion. We're going to need to maintain this NRR to get there. So then you start thinking about specialism. So that might be new business sales roles, so you might have an account executive or even an outbound so I think a big part of going on that journey is step one, like baseline, what you have? Step two, start thinking about that operating model and
that role definition. And then step three, once you understand what good looks like in each of those roles and where those because every organization, I mean, otherwise you wouldn't be around as an organization has pockets of excellence, has pockets of brilliance, that wow, there's something really working there. You know, like this rep has smashed out the park for eight quarters in a row. What the hell is it? Yeah, these reps
are doing, yeah, that the others that the others aren't. And I'll just carry out that with an important point, I think, which is not to say that there's one profile for success, and it's not to say that we're trying to create a cookie cutter factory of undiverse teams. I think everyone has superpowers, and everyone has unique superpowers. And some sales people are amazing prospectors, and they're just pipeline machines, and
they've always got amazing pipeline coverage. Others are a little bit more lone wolfy and are, you know, a bit more Maverick, and they're just really good closes. So, but what it's about is, it's about identifying what are those macro
behaviors that are working across the board? Because if you don't directionally understand that, then, then you're lost, you know, then, like we're talking about, you can't go back, and you can't hire the right capability, and then you can't run performance management effectively, and you definitely can't invest in the right enablement and training and resources that focuses on building capability in the right areas.
Just going to ask, because I think one thing I find really interesting there, Matt, is you talk about looking at what you've got right now in the team. Because some people were thinking, Well, you might have 80% rubbish, 20% good. So is there an argument actually, for not building around what's currently there, but instead building around what the future should look like, how does I mean, of course, one informs the
other in different directions. Or what have you seen working with the businesses that you work with as the as a sort of good balance? Or is there no such thing, and it just really depends on where the business is?
It's a great question, really good question. And we haven't even come on to talk about AI yet, because AI fundamentally rethinks this for every single organization, is the viewpoint that I'm forming. But just to park that for a second, I think something that is really important is benchmarking organizations can tend to be very insular. Most of the ones that we've had the pleasure of working with would
probably admit that in the beginning. So this is where the power of being able to actually benchmark externally as well as internally, is really, really important. And our bigger vision as a business at you hubs is we want to create a global standard for sales capability. We want people to take their Uhubs profile with them on their career journey in a number of different organizations that they work at, and that becomes the de facto standard for how you assess the true capabilities
of someone. So that goes to say that we're building a pretty sizable benchmarking data set as we go on this journey of building the business and being able to where we start now, which is focusing very heavily on private equity backed B to B
businesses. Mostly means that we can go really deep on the profiles that are working for other organizations that have similar deal sizes, similar sales cycle lengths, are selling to similar industry verticals, and then you can start borrowing those insights and ideas for your own organization.
I think that's fascinating. And so many organizations are looking out there for Okay, well, what are our competitors? Still not even what our competitors doing. But
what does good look like? Jonny, you and I were talking at a recent an event recently focused in a particular area of financial services, and talking actually about some of the things or I was sharing with some of that group, some of the learnings that I'd had from a technology background when it came to client engagement and measuring customer satisfaction, of which, you know, tech firms have tended to be quite towards a sort of front, you know, bleeding edge of that when it
comes to sort of compared to other industries. And, you know, there's an experienced group of leaders in this room, and a lot of light bulbs firing off around the room being like, I hadn't
thought about that, or we don't really look at that. And I think, like, that's an interesting perspective, as well as taking this, okay, what are sales that like in in a in a SaaS world, versus what a sales look like in a consulting world versus what a sales look like in a, you know, B to C versus B to B. There's so much of that complexity like so I guess there's, it's probably not one benchmark. It's a range of benchmarks that come together that can inform the direction.
Totally, yeah, and the lines are getting massively blurred. I've got a chief revenue officer of 100 million ARR software business that we're working with at the moment. His big emphasis right now is hiring management consultants. He's an ex consultant himself. He's an ex McKinsey guy, but he is recognized that in the current
environment, they're selling bigger ticket items. He's found that the ramp time is shorter if he brings in management consultants and up skills them on the commercial skill set, rather than trying to take commercial sales people and upskill them on the consulting solution sale skill set, which is super interesting, I think.
Matt, let's take a pause right there, and to everyone listening, join us for part two as we continue this conversation.