We are excited to welcome Dave Shanker as our guest for this episode. Dave is the CEO and Founder of David Shanker Consulting.

Dave’s journey

Dave’s career spans more than thirty years, and he has mostly been involved with market research, running different market research agencies. He has also been involved in startups and has had a family business along the way.

Dave’s leadership style

People have often told Dave that he is authentic and that he wears his heart on his sleeve, so what you see is what you get. And he communicates a lot, he cares, and he gets invested in employees, clients, and the business.

Winning

Dave wants to win, and he wants his team to win just as much.

What makes people scared

Early in his career, Dave learned that not knowing is what makes people scared. And if people don’t know, they will make assumptions, and they will probably be wrong.

Building trust and credibility

You need to be very forthright, upfront, and candid with your employees, over time, to build trust and credibility.

Moving an organization to the next level

Dave believes that putting together a combination of caring, being passionate about a business, and getting invested in the employees, the clients, and the business, starts a good foundation for building a culture change and moving an organization to the next level.

Communication

Dave has always sent out weekly emails to his entire company, telling everyone what he has been doing. However, he knew that he needed to change from typing emails to doing video. So one day, he made a video and spoke for five minutes, and he was blown away by the response he got.

Lightspeed

Dave joined Lightspeed at an interesting time. He had a challenge from day one there in working out how to bring the three different business units together. The fun part of it for him was looking across the three sales teams and thinking about ways to get them working together so that one plus one plus one would equal ten. They were successful because the sales teams all saw the benefits of working together.

The start

Dave started with the employees. He spent many hours talking to the employees one-on-one.

One truth

The one truth that Dave found was that you can't get to where you are going unless you know where you are. And for him, the way to do that was to talk to his employees.

Customers

After talking to the employees, he started talking to his customers because frequent communication is necessary to get your customers to buy-in.

Points of resistance

Some of the points of resistance that he ran into were around sharing customers, doubts about whether or not his commission would get paid, and whether someone else would manage to deliver as efficiently as he could.

Driving growth

Through the change, they did not drive growth equally across the three different business units. Because of the things Dave put in place, however, they managed to drive growth in two of the three business units. And they realized some substantial wins in how they went about the day-to-day of the business.

After Lightspeed

After Lightspeed, Dave went to a B2B media company called Ensemble IQ and had to do some heavy lifting there. He approached it in the same way as he approached Lightspeed, by thinking about what they could do at the back end to create efficiencies and become seamless, to have one operations team delivering across everything. Although the people at Ensemble IQ were very resistant to change, he still managed to do it fairly quickly.

Centralization

For the most part, Dave likes centralization across shared services, no matter which stage the company is at.

The companies that Dave prefers working with

Dave enjoys working with companies with challenges in figuring out how to sell into the market they would like to get into. And with companies that are struggling to get to the next level.

Account planning

Dave leans towards keeping things simple with account planning. For him,