Creating a solution as a team, managing managers, and tailoring your coaching to the individual with Ed Porter (Fractional CRO at Blue Chip CRO)

Callan Harrington 00:01
You're listening to That Worked, a show that breaks down the careers of top founders and executives and pulls out those key items that led to their success. I'm your host, Callan Harrington, founder of Flashgrowth, and I couldn't be more excited that you're here.

Callan Harrington 00:21
Today, we have Ed Porter. So, I've been fortunate to know Ed for a really long time. In my eyes, Ed is a pioneer in the inside sales field, one of the best community builders that I've ever seen, and has started his own company. He's done a ton of stuff in this space. So, I'm really excited to break that down. Welcome to the podcast, Ed.

Ed Porter 00:44
Yeah, thank you. It’s nice to see our paths collide in a similar fashion, and a lot of the same beliefs that we’ve grown to talk about years ago when we first started knowing each other to where we are today. So, I love that it’s coming around full circle, and we get to do a lot more of this stuff together.

Callan Harrington 01:04
I completely agree, and I'm super excited about it. So, in your own words, why don't you tell us what you're doing now?

Ed Porter 01:12
Yeah, right now, I’ve got my own company, Blue Chip CRO. I’m a fractional Chief Revenue Officer for companies, usually less than 20 million in revenue, that are looking at growth. And looking at growth may sound like a no-brainer, but not everybody is looking to grow, or at least at the speed to grow when you consider investing, what you’re willing to invest, and, more importantly, what you’re willing to change. So, that’s something that I’ve learned, and I’ve been doing that for the past three years. I’ve spent my career really on all sides of the revenue organization—from sales, marketing, to customer success and customer experience. And now I’m trying to take a lot of that and apply it to growing and aspiring companies.

Callan Harrington 01:58
I love that. And do you mind diving in on that a little bit when you say, because this is interesting, and it's very timely with the market right now, where not everything is about top-line growth. So much of it now is about strong unit economics, right? A year ago, VCs were going out and essentially saying, "Grow at all costs." Now it's, "We want you to grow, but we want profitable growth." What does that mean to you?

Ed Porter 02:28
Yeah, so this has been very near and dear to me because my first job was in an outsourced contact center. I took the job when I was 19 years old, and I was in college. It was a part-time job for me, answering phones, and then I worked my way up through management and through several levels of management. Well, in the outsourced contact center industry, your number one metric is profit margin. So, I was pretty laser-focused on profit. Then, when I went to the next company, which was a technology startup, it was the complete opposite—everything was about top-line revenue. It was like, "Well, what about the cost? How much are we paying for the lead? What does customer acquisition cost look like?"

Ed Porter 03:08
So then, I went to a company that was a literal product company. Again, we were back to gross margin, and everything was about reselling products—buying at cost A, marking it up, and selling at cost B. I’ve been fortunate in those two big areas where it didn’t matter what your top line was; it really mattered what your bottom line was. But then, being in the world, even when I left that company and went to Smart Harbor, where we both spent some time, and then have been working with companies for the past three years, it’s been very much about sales at all costs.

Ed Porter 03:47
I look at that as a bit of a catch-22 because, on one end, when companies raise money, they’re raising money to spend on something in the future. You see this with a lot of companies doing layoffs, unfortunately, and sometimes it’s bad management, but other times it’s just the detriment of raising money and growing really quick because you can’t sustain the growth. So now, we’re trailing back to what you said about how to really look at this from a profitability perspective. When you start seeing valuations taper down—there were cases last year where people were raising money at 100x valuation, like, "Holy crap, with no money, no revenue!" So a lot of it is hindsight, but I think hindsight is telling us now that there has to be some kind of plan, a contingency plan for profitability.

Ed Porter 04:35
I’m glad to see it finally come full circle. I’m starting to hear a lot more VCs wanting to see NRR (Net Revenue Retention) numbers on pitch decks, and they’re really wanting to see lifetime value, the CAC (Customer Acquisition Cost) to LTV (Lifetime Value) ratio. They’re critical about that so that founders can start thinking about it because it does have to do with profitability. You’re getting customer renewals, if you will, and then how you’re reinvesting that money back into building a better, streamlined, operationally sound business. So, I’m starting to see that at least being thought of more in the seed rounds. Maybe not so much pre-seed yet, but in the seed rounds, and certainly in the Series A rounds, it’s very much about, "What’s your CAC to LTV?" That was maybe more of a checklist in the past. Now it’s like, "Give me an action plan around it. What worked? What didn’t? What are you going to do differently?"

Ed Porter 05:30
Now, it’s being challenged a lot more because it comes from a profitability and sustainability perspective.

Callan Harrington 05:37
Yeah, no, I agree, and I'm seeing it. I’m seeing it quite a bit, actually. You kind of kicked it off there, but let’s look at how did you get here? Where did this all start?

Ed Porter 05:48
I’ll go back to school. There were two things that really happened in school, and I didn’t really know it at the time, but one, every teacher on every report card, up until when they stopped doing report cards, said, "Ed socializes too much." So, it was always a negative. I was always getting in trouble for talking too much. And, you know, once you got old enough where cliques got established, I was never really in a clique, but I had friends in all of them. So, I’ve always considered myself a real social person, an outgoing person. That kind of, I guess, kick-started a little bit about who I am and what I want to be.

Ed Porter 06:26
When you start thinking about business, I don’t know very many businesses that don’t interact with people. So, that kind of helped, like, "Okay, I want to be in a position where I’m interacting with people. I enjoy it, I like it, and I want to be there."

Ed Porter 06:39
The second part was, when I got to high school, I didn’t know what I wanted to do, but I knew I wanted to have my own business. I just didn’t know what I wanted it to be. And even today, I’ll still say I don’t know that I’m going to do this forever, but I was intrigued by business. I liked the understanding of consuming, purchasing, selling goods, having that whole commerce side of things. So, I knew I wanted to have a business at some point.

Ed Porter 07:02
I used to always think, when I was in high school, I didn’t know what I was going to do, so I’ll go to college, I’ll get a degree, and I’ll figure it out then. And I did, and I got my degree, and I still didn’t figure it out. But I was working full-time while going to school in the outsourced call center, and what I loved about that was I got to work with different clients, selling different products and services. And then, more importantly, I got to work with a lot of different people, both on the client side, as well as my own team and employees.

Ed Porter 07:30
Call centers are definitely a revolving door.

Callan Harrington 07:32
Can we dive into that? I don’t mean to interrupt you, but I want to zero back real quick because you said something that a lot of people don’t. I say this all the time about insurance—people ask, "Why do you like working in insurance?" I actually love the whole thing. But you said something specific that I want to dig into. I never realized that you were doing that while you were in college. I think that’s excellent. And then, you said you were enjoying selling, so you enjoyed being in this call center role. Is that correct?

Ed Porter 08:00
Oh yeah. At the time, again, I started off just part-time while I was going to school full-time, and then when I first got an opportunity to become a supervisor and lead a team, it was full-time work. So, I kind of had to make a decision, and I wound up dropping to part-time in school but continued working full-time. I was a supervisor and led a small team of 12 people. Then I got promoted to a manager and led a team of 35 or 40 people. And then I took on another account and had another 100 on top of that. So, it kept growing. This was all by the time I was 26 or 27 years old. I had almost 1,100 people, about 1,000 people rolling up to me across a couple of different sites.

Callan Harrington 08:42
What was that like at the time?

Ed Porter 08:44
I didn’t know any different, so at the time, I loved it. I loved being in a position where the things that I was doing were impactful or had risk. I like risk. I think conservative play isn’t for me. I’m a gambler as well—not degenerate, but I am a gambler. So, evaluating risk is something I like in business. Working with that many people at different levels, you really learn a lot about how to engage people. It’s not about show and tell. I can’t get on the phone with 1,000 people and have them listen to a call and model it—that just doesn’t work at that point. You’ve got to work through leaders who work through leaders who work through leaders. So, the whole scope of your job changes. For me, it was very much intriguing. The days were not the same—every day was different. And I got to learn at each different level how to work with the team beneath me, not at the show and tell level.

Ed Porter 09:37
So, it was when I left the contact center, and it was through people that I knew at the contact center that started up a contact center recording software company, that I made a big change. When I went there, I was like, "Oh, so this is what nine-to-five is like." That was a shock to the system because I never really worked a nine-to-five job. I did, and it was a breather, but I did miss a lot of the hustle and bustle at the time. You know, it sucked always being on back then, but I missed it. And there was a lot going on, a lot of activity, a lot of plates spinning. So, I enjoyed it at the time, and that absolutely molded me for who I am as a manager—interacting with people, clients, and employees—and really setting the tone for every other job since then that I’ve worked in.

Callan Harrington 10:25
So, you’re 26 years old, and you’ve got 1,000 people, multiple managers. Some people go their whole careers and don’t have to manage managers, and there’s nothing wrong with that—it’s just sometimes it’s not necessary. You experienced this at 26 years old. What did you do to make that an effective process, and what were the challenges that you had as you’re learning this for the first time?

Ed Porter 10:48
Yeah, so that journey along the way… I was probably 20 or 21 when I had my first team, when I was a supervisor directly managing individual contributors. Then I was probably 22 or 23 when I got promoted and had three supervisors underneath me. It was still a small enough team. But what I started to learn—and again, we all learn best through failure—was that I can’t be the doer. I can’t be the one working with the agents directly. Every once in a while, sure, to model a correct behavior to a supervisor, but in general, I can’t be the one listening to calls and making sure everybody’s doing what they should. So, it was through a supervisor on my team who told me, "Hey, you need to back off a little bit." We had some words, but ultimately, he was spot on.

Callan Harrington 11:33
Can you zero in on that? Can you talk about that exact situation, what led to it, and what happened?

Ed Porter 11:38
Yeah, what I got real granular with was listening to calls. On the sales side, it was relatively new to us, so we had to be on—we were measured on conversion. The client didn’t care as much, but I was more critical of our conversion performance than the client was. I wanted every call to be perfect. We ran through some scripts… well, it got to a point where I started writing like, "This is what needs to be said in the opening; this is what needs to be said in the closing." And I went word for word, printed it, and taped it up on everybody’s cubes. This is what I wanted, and I was listening to calls, going right to the agent to coach them, and completely bypassing the supervisors in a lot of these things.

Ed Porter 12:20
That was the point where one supervisor had a conversation with me to say, "We want to be on board, but I feel like you’re just bypassing us altogether." It was after I printed everything out, posted it on the monitors, and then sent an email out to the supervisors that night saying, "Hey, when you guys come in in the morning, this is what I did here." It was more of just an FYI, "Here’s what I did." Then they came in and saw it. Later that week, the supervisor came into my office to chat about something and said, "Do you have a minute?" So, we had this conversation, and that’s when he said, "That was a little abrupt. It would have been nice to be involved in the decision or at least the problem."

Ed Porter 13:04
I kind of remember my response—it was very much like, "I don’t have time. We don’t have time to sit and wait and talk about it. We’ve just got to go into action." It was very much like, exactly like you said, the expectation is so high, it’s like you just got to go. But it took that supervisor—and what I’m thankful for is that the supervisor said it because there are plenty of people where maybe you don’t have great trust or credibility in your boss, where it’s really tough to go to your boss and say, "You know, either you screwed up or I didn’t agree with this." His tactfulness behind it was great, so I was appreciative of that.

Ed Porter 13:40
But when he first brought it up, of course, it was a defensive mechanism. Again, I’m in my 20s—I know everything at this point. So, it was met with a lot of defensive reaction. "Well, I had to do it. I didn’t have time. I had to get it done, and it was now." It probably took me through the weekend into the next week—let’s call it a week, maybe a week and a half—after that conversation, where I started to understand. I stopped being pissed and started to get more inquisitive. So, I brought him in maybe a week or two later, probably, and said… where I started to reflect, to say, "Thank you for that. I didn’t realize it until yesterday, but this was really helpful. Now I’m curious. How would you have done it? How should I have done it? What would have been a better solution? Thinking about speed being of the essence, how could I have done this quicker?" We just started brainstorming, and even as we were talking, he could see my point better, and I could see his point better.

Ed Porter 14:43
I can’t remember the details of what actually was done, but I kind of committed and said, "Would it be okay to call on you next time if I’m getting into this mode of solution-solving? Can I bring you in and work on it? Let’s partner on this together." After that, I started to have more of a conscious reaction instead of a default response. It was more about thinking through, pausing, debriefing, reflecting, and working through what’s the best way to do it. That helped shape a lot of my management experience. Not to say that I didn’t screw up any other time after that, but I think the one thing that I’ve started, that I pride myself on today, that I learned at a relatively young age—both in physical age as well as in management experience—was being able to enroll, the art of enrollment, enrolling your team and your people in the process, being part of the decision-making, being part of the problem identification, solution solving, brainstorming. It’s not about consensus, but it is about getting the best idea to go do right away. I’m better, I’m stronger with more people, and there are people closer to that line.

Ed Porter 15:53
As I got higher up, it seemed ridiculous that I was making decisions that were impacting the front line when I was the farthest removed. So, I needed to go way down the line. It takes more time, and I would rather take a little bit more time to fix a problem than to create chaos and go up and down, up and down. This is where I’ve subscribed to what hockey stick growth really means. There’s a reason the stick is very wide and very long, and then it shoots up because it takes time to figure out, iterate, brainstorm, and maybe even test. Once you figure it out, now you can grow quicker.

Ed Porter 16:32
So, that shaped a lot of my management experience, from that supervisor telling me to back off. Now, it was about getting my mind in the right place—who my customer is, and my customer is those supervisors at that point. How do I get them to be better leaders to their teams? How do I engage them in the process? That experience was very helpful.

Callan Harrington 17:00
I love that story. I think in hearing that, I hear a couple of things. I think probably one of the big things that weren’t overtly said in there was that you at least created an environment that was safe enough for them to come to you, which I think is huge, right? I definitely know what you’re saying in those early parts as a new manager—you just want to perform, right? You just want to execute. You just want to make sure that you’re blowing everybody’s numbers out of the water. It’s easy to get caught up in that. You don’t burn out as easily because you’re so young, whereas now it’s like, okay, you’re going to burn out within a couple of years if you keep doing that. But I think that’s an excellent lesson.

Callan Harrington 17:58
What I’m hearing is if you really want to build something impactful as a leader, you have to build consensus with the team. Not to say there aren’t times where you’re going to probably have to make a decision in a vacuum—because sometimes you do—but if you build that consensus and build that together, then as a result, you’re going to have a much more sustainable practice moving forward because you have that buy-in, and you have that compatibility, which I think is excellent. Is that essentially right? Do I have that right?

Ed Porter 18:33
The only thing I would change slightly about that is there’s a difference between consensus and feedback. Consensus is the next step when you’re starting down this enrollment process. On one end, it’s engaging everybody to be part of the solution—how do we figure out what the problem is? Let’s peel this onion back. Groupthink is detrimental but also beneficial; there’s a line somewhere. So, it’s engaging the group. Now, once we’ve figured that out, we can start brainstorming the solution. Then, it’s about consensus. I look at consensus in terms of a mutual agreement to move forward. So, I think that’s what starts the enrollment process. You don’t have to agree with it—I don’t need to gain your consensus—but I want to gain your support in it.

Ed Porter 19:20
So that would be the small change—consensus doesn’t have to be a requirement towards enrollment, but it certainly has to be part of the process.

Callan Harrington 19:32
Okay, so you’ve got the feedback, the discovery phase on what’s going on, brainstorming for the solution phase, and then alignment, right? We’re not saying we all agree, but this is the way we’re moving forward, and I do need your support on this. So, it’s kind of a three-step process, if I’m hearing you.

Ed Porter 19:52
Yeah, there you go. Yep.

Callan Harrington 19:54
Cool. Now, that makes sense, especially with the bigger team. Not everyone’s going to agree, but if you don’t have that support, and you’ve got a lone wolf—someone who’s just going to do their own thing no matter what—it makes it really tricky. I don’t think that team can perform at its highest level with that, in my opinion.

Ed Porter 20:14
Yeah, you’re right. The lone wolf… I’m glad you talked about the lone wolf because we both read The Challenger Sale, and that was my first exposure to the lone wolf profile and what it is. It is hard when the team is isolated, and that’s often what happens. Being able to manage that person or those people… I learned that maybe about 10 years ago, so pretty recently. I read the book and then started to learn how to manage that person and those people. It’s tough because this is also what framed my… I’ve posted about this in the past, but management isn’t a one-size-fits-all approach. How I manage Callan isn’t the same way that I manage Ed or that I manage Joe—that’s just not how it works. So, it’s trying to understand how each person wants to be managed and then how you can deviate from person to person to try and garner the same result.

Ed Porter 21:05
That’s the same with the lone wolf. There are plenty of times where I don’t know if I want to change the lone wolf because they probably won’t change. I’m going to do what I can to support that person, make sure the performance is there, and then I’m okay letting them go—not letting them go like getting rid of them, but letting them go like, "Do your own thing. If you’re going to hunt, go hunt. We just need it to be closed at the end of the day." Or, "We have goals that you’ve got to hit, so as long as you hit them, tell me how I can support you." Often, in that engagement, certain things start to improve.

Callan Harrington 21:42
Do you have any specific examples that you could remember of managing or your first experience with a lone wolf?

Ed Porter 21:47
Yes, my first was… I wasn’t managing this person directly, but it was somewhat matrixed, where it was an indirect report of mine. So, it was with the software company. What I was tasked with doing there, after I worked at the contact center company, was building the channel division. So, the company sold software direct to end-user contact centers. What we were trying to do was sell through value-added resellers or VARs—reselling the product. Inevitably, when I came in, it was the direct sales reps that reported up to a different VP, and I was trying to help work with them to start these plans on what VARs we were going to attack and how we were going to evaluate it, work with them, and improve sales.

Ed Porter 22:28
There was one of the sales reps who was absolutely the lone wolf. He was the whale hunter. He brought in a great deal of revenue for the company. That’s just kind of how he operated. There were parts of it where he would bring me in on some partner deals, and I didn’t really want to be in the deal as much as I wanted to be like, "Tell me who the partner is. Let me go work with them. You go work the deal. Let me go find out who the CEO of the company is or the president, and then let’s go talk there."

Ed Porter 22:58
That was tough, and that was when I learned a lot about how I worked with him, which was different from how I worked with some of the others. I had another person on the team who was extremely engaged and was like, "Here’s a list of partners. Let’s divide and conquer. Here’s what I want to do." She was all about it. He was very much closed off, wouldn’t share a lot of information, wasn’t great at CRM, and so that became a challenge to me. I would say I just kept complaining instead of trying to find ways to work with the guy. I kept a good relationship with him, but I don’t have the… I didn’t have at the time, and even to this day, I never really found a great way to work with him to try and get what I wanted.

Ed Porter 23:38
When I left the company, I reflected on that experience. There were two points in that software company where there were some challenging times. One of those was that I couldn’t get anything going with this guy, and I wondered, "Was that me?" My reflection on that was, it was me because I was trying to say, "What can I get out of him?" instead of, "How can I help you?" It was a different method where I was trying to pull stuff from him, like, "Give me the partner list. When were your last conversations? Here’s what I’m going to do." It was more about how he could appease me, and lone wolves certainly don’t respond to that. They think of it as micromanagement, like, "Get out of my cookie jar." Those are the wrong buttons to push, and that’s ultimately why I don’t think it worked very productively in working with him and his territory. It was very much about me—it was all about what I could get from him, not the other way around. Whereas with the others, because I had what I considered better productive relationships, it felt more give-and-take, where I was willing to do a lot more for those people because they were helping me out too. But it was very much selfishly driven.

Callan Harrington 25:00
Yeah, you know, in hearing that, I think one of the things that… and it spells this out in the book The Challenger Sale, but until you experience it, it’s tough. The challenge is, the lone wolf is typically productive. They typically are hitting pretty consistent numbers. The outcome… yeah, exactly. They may not be hitting the inputs, but for whatever reason, they’re closing deals, or they’ve got the outcome locked and loaded. What do you do? Do you argue about the semantics, or do you just say, "Go, do you"?

Ed Porter 25:30
Yeah, and I’m curious about this. It’s stuff that I’ve wondered—is the lone wolf just somebody who responds to a different type of coaching, right? They may never be the most engaged team player, but they’re okay with that. They know if they don’t hit their main quota and they don’t hit their activity goal, it’s going to be hard to justify. You’ve kind of got to hit one or the other. Quotas, obviously, at the end of the day, are what’s most important. I used to be on the opposite side of this, but if somebody’s a good culture fit and they’re not hitting the exact activity numbers that we expect, but they’re hitting quota every time, they’re probably doing something a little bit different that we need to figure out and give to the rest of the team, right?

Ed Porter 26:10
But with the lone wolf in particular, I think if they’re a bad culture fit or just aren’t aligning with the rest of the team, that’s where it gets really tough. That’s a really challenging situation.

Ed Porter 26:24
Yeah, I’d even say the lone wolf that’s a bad culture fit, even if they’re killing the number, still needs to be examined to see if they’re doing more harm than good. They might be a great role model that the team wants to look up to, but if they’re not accessible, that’s a problem. And when you start looking at the indirect results, like turnover, that’s the slow killer. I learned this wholeheartedly in the contact center space. The reason why it hurts so bad is it doesn’t show up on the P&L. You don’t know how much is actually being attributed. You can guesstimate. Even today, there’s still data out there that says you can 3x somebody’s salary or 1.5x, depending on the recruitment, but that’s all conjecture. Most people don’t really know what it costs to replace someone, especially when you look at opportunity costs of delayed pipeline and things like that.

Ed Porter 27:14
So, there’s a line where even somebody knocking it out of the park still needs to be examined. They could be doing more harm than good. They could be a great role model that the team wants to look up to, but if they’re not accessible, that’s a problem. It even makes you question when they’re just meeting their goal and they’re a lone wolf and not a great culture fit. You may need to make some changes, and it’s tough to make those changes.

Callan Harrington 27:40
It is. It is. It’s super difficult, especially when they’re kind of like, "Well, they’re hitting the numbers, so what do we do?" I want to go back to something you mentioned when you went to this company and your first nine-to-five. Why was that so challenging for you? In the environment before, there was always something on fire, and now there wasn’t. What do you do?

Ed Porter 28:03
Yeah, it kind of got to that point where it was nice to have a break, but the other part was that it was new. So, I was being onboarded, where you’re not living on your calendar, things aren’t always going. You come in, and you’re not really sure what to do. So, as I started to get onboarded, it was just different to say, "Oh, well, everyone’s done at five. All right, I guess I’ll go home." It was kind of one of those things where, "Where’s everybody?" and nobody’s there. It was a different experience to get used to.

Ed Porter 28:32
The other thing, to compare and contrast, is the company I was working for before was headquartered in Utah, and I’m in Ohio, so they were on Mountain Time. My client was located in Kansas, in Central Time, and I was on Eastern Time. So, that also played into it, where six o’clock, seven o’clock, I’m getting emails and phone calls because it’s still four and five o’clock in those time zones. Part of that was there too.

Ed Porter 28:58
In an outsourced contact center, people are your product. As sad as that sounds, I need people on the phone in a productive state, servicing customers, in order to get revenue. It’s very much about looking live and saying, "How am I doing? Current day, current hour." All the data is there. When I went to the software company, it was all Salesforce pipeline dashboards and reports. Because it was a channel sale, not much changed every day. I didn’t need to look at a certain report every couple of hours. So, it was that shift of being on-demand, where we’re at today, making real-time changes, compared to, "Okay, well, I’m going to look at this weekly and start to say, what changed?"

Ed Porter 29:39
There was a lot of shift, too, of not being on all the time and looking at where we’re at right now. Those are a couple of the big ones.

Callan Harrington 29:50
Yep, and I understand that. I understand that. Personally, I almost need to be in a chaotic environment, or at least I believe that I do because when I’m not in it, I get bored really fast, and I just start looking for it. If I start looking for something and there’s not something I can take on, it becomes that. That becomes a bigger challenge, and I become very unhappy in those environments.

Callan Harrington 30:15
So, I want to fast forward a little bit. Why the decision to go out on your own?

Ed Porter 30:21
Yeah, so interestingly enough, I love telling this story. You and I both worked with somebody in the past, Shelly Stotzer. Shelly is a career counselor, so I engaged her years before even going to Smart Harbor and wanted to go through the path of "What do I want to do when I grow up?" We evaluated a lot of different things. One of those was the solopreneur route. What came from that was, "This probably isn’t a good fit for you," for a couple of reasons. One is, while it can be hectic, it’s often short-lived. When you’re working with clients, it’s recommendations, and then they go execute.

Ed Porter 30:58
What came out on my profile was that I like to be in it—I like to be in it, executing and seeing the fruits of my labor. So, that was kind of the theory: "This isn’t a route for you." Fast forward, here I am, three years later, solopreneur. But the irony in all of that was, after Smart Harbor and the acquisition, I didn’t really know what I was going to do. Going back to one of the things that I’ve loved about what I’ve done over the years is networking and building good relationships with people. So, it started off with somebody calling and saying, "Hey, I could use your help with some things." I was like, "Yeah, I could do this on a short-term basis." It started from there. Before I knew it, I was probably nine months into it. I had one steady client and three others that just came up. Now, I find myself just talking to people and having a short-term need, and we go into it.

Ed Porter 31:48
So, a lot of it over the past three years has been continuously iterating. What is it I want to do? It was only about a year ago that I was like, "This whole fractional world, fractional something, is a thing." So, I started marketing myself as a fractional Chief Revenue Officer. That took a year and a half to conceptualize and think about. Hell, I didn’t know how to price. You and I started talking in the beginning, like, "How do we price these things?" I was like, "I have no idea. You price your own hourly engagement. What hourly rate?" I didn’t know.

Ed Porter 32:24
So, this was very much just a culmination of things. Where I’ve kind of rested my laurels on right now—why I think I’ve been enjoying it for the past three years—is that I’m able to set a calendar on what is now my most precious commodity, which is time. Now I can be intentional about what time I spend where. There are times when I’ve bitten off too much, and I’m way too busy. Then there are other times when I don’t have enough in the pipeline, and I’ve got too much free time. So, there’s a peak and valley there, but it has just kind of materialized. I never really thought I was going to do this. I had a profile and an expert tell me this wasn’t a great fit. Am I going to do this forever? Maybe not, but I really like the opportunities it’s providing me now, where I can do some other things. I’ve dabbled in investing, and I’ve sat on an advisory board in the past. These are some different areas, and I’m trying to drive some other income sources other than just one. So, that’s advantageous.

Ed Porter 33:26
I had an opportunity to go take another full-time job last year, and I did for a short period of time. Ultimately, the board and I wanted to grow faster than some of the leadership, and it just didn’t work out. So, I’m going to evaluate opportunities, and we’ll see where things go, but I’m enjoying where I’m at right now.

Callan Harrington 33:51
I love it. I love it. All right, last thing to leave our listeners on here, and in particular, I want to zero in on—if you could have that conversation with that new manager when you were a new manager, what would you tell that person today?

Ed Porter 34:07
Yeah, I think the one thing that I would probably have to tell my younger self… but then I would also need to tell my younger self, "I’m going to be on you every day until you start recognizing it," is that the people you manage—it’s about them, it’s not about you. If you keep going into that, it really helps reframe what’s the role of a manager. A manager’s role very closely resembles that of a counselor. The epitome of being a counselor is recognizing that the truth is in the question and getting the person to recognize their truth. That’s how you spark the art of enrollment. So, this whole concept of how you manage teams—it’s about the questions you ask to get them to go down the journey and then for them to recognize. People are always more critical of themselves than they are with other people. How do you get them into that process? I would have started that at a younger age.

Ed Porter 35:00
Now, if you’re a philosophy person, you could think, "Well, if you told your younger self that, you never would have made those mistakes, so would you have gone the same path, or would you have gone a totally different path?" So now it’s the Matrix—blue pill or red pill, right? But that’s what I would tell myself. When you get to that point of managing people—small team, big team, multiple levels, it doesn’t really matter—it is about them, and it’s about how do you meet them where they’re at and work together to build that process of improvement. That was the hardest thing for me to learn, and I’d tell myself that.

Callan Harrington 35:48
I love that. I think it’s excellent advice—the three-stage process, networking, and all the things you’ve mentioned today were excellent. Honestly, it was exciting for me because we’ve never really dived into each other’s full careers, so hearing your career story was enlightening. I appreciate you being on the show; this was a ton of fun, Ed.

Ed Porter 36:15
Yeah, definitely. Thanks, man. Appreciate it.

Callan Harrington 36:18
Absolutely. All right, everybody, thank you.