Jason Azocar, Founder and CEO of HubSearch, joins the show to share his interpretation of the HubSpot talent shortage. We look at the opportunity in front of partners through three lenses: putting your best foot forward before hiring, best practices for facilitating a candidate through the hiring process, and the importance of sustainable onboarding plans and talent retention strategies. Pre-hiring, we talk about where and how to source, the going market rates for HubSpot talent, and how to position your company as a great place to work. For the hiring process, we unpack the full candidate experience and how to balance speed vs. quality of the process. Lastly, after a hire has been made, we discuss strategies for onboarding, growing, and keeping top talent, how partners should be thinking about balance, and how to grow a People Ops function.

This week, Matt Bolian and Brendan Tolleson, cofounders of RevPartners, rejoin the show. When we last checked in with the RevPartners team, they were the fastest HubSpot solutions partner ever to reach the Diamond tier. Now, about a year later, they return to the podcast as the fastest ever to reach the Elite tier. They offer actionable insights, frameworks, and the specific steps they took to reach the Elite tier of HubSpot’s partner program in under 16 months. First, we discuss scaling operations. Do they do anything *unique* or against the grain operationally? How do they sell? How do they define their service offering? Second, we discuss scaling people ops. How has their org chart evolved? How did they identify the right headcount needs and priorities? And how do they recruit the right people—and keep their top talent? And third, we discuss scaling demand. Does RevPartners have a traditional sales org? And how has their approach to content creation and marketing helped spark their growth?

John Heritage, President of Evenbound, joins to highlight, and then digs deeper into, the learning and development focus of his agency's culture. We start with its origin built on both his personal and professional experiences before moving to how he positions these learning initiatives around both HubSpot, and its growing, changing, expanding platform, as well as his team’s productivity—in other words, how does his team balance KPIs like utilization rate and billable hours with dedicating time for learning and development? We then discuss how he and the team operationalize. Specifically, how he infuses competition and camaraderie, how he ensures accountability from the team, and how he thinks about prescribing certifications and education based on role or function versus creating space for folks’ personal interest. Lastly, we talk about the ROI, where he shares the tangible, noticeable results with his clients the work his team delivers.

Steve Whittington, President of Roadmap, joins the show to talk about the oftentimes *unspoken* aspect of systems implementation—the ripple effect and impact a new CRM can have on an organization's culture. Steve talks about how he views and defines the culture change that comes with a new CRM platform, the differences at the individual-level and company-level, and whether it's a change in mindset, behaviors, accountability, responsibility—or all of the above. He then shares how his team implements that culture change in support of a new CRM platform—and if there are any particular tools, functions, or capabilities that seem to spark a culture change more than others. We wrap with his recommendations for other partners and services providers on how to account for the culture change and how to ensure its factored in appropriately into client engagements, front-line user training, and more.

Today, we have Michelle O'Keeffe, CEO of Engaging.io, on to discuss how she and her team dispel the notion that HubSpot's CRM platform isn't customizable, extensible, or powerful enough for enterprise-level businesses. She first calls out that while that notion is swiftly waning, she still highlights the fundamental differences between platforms when comparing HubSpot to other CRM platform options in the market—and how HubSpot's single codebase and crafted platform vs. cobbled-together competitors is such a key differentiator and key value proposition. Michelle outlines the considerations and notable items that she helps surface in her sales process to help prospects level-set and accurately weigh their options when selecting the right CRM—stacking up HubSpot up against things that rhyme with *Kalesforce* and *Kynamics*.

Amber Kemmis, Chief Operating Officer at Revenue River, joins us to talk about senior leadership—specifically, why they're important and others should be thinking about and planning their own tier of senior leaders. Amber starts by sharing where senior leaders fall in her org chart and their primary roles and functions. She then shares her interpretation of the talent market and why its so hard to discover senior-level talent in 2022. We wrap with her tips, tactics, and recommendations for finding senior talent in today's talent ecosystem.

Steve Galligan and Joseph Mohay, CEO and CRO of Integrated Digital Strategies (IDS), join the show to discuss IDS's target niche—franchises. We star with IDS's history and their pursuit of franchises, and whether the business was built with this niche in mind or if it was a discovery over time. We then pivot to the engagements themselves, including what these services offerings entail, the typical buyer's journey for franchise prospects and clients, and the biggest or most unique considerations to factor in when offering services and solutions for franchises. Lastly, we wrap with how this manifests in their operations and processes. They share their approach for handling, working with, and providing value for franchisors AND each individual franchisee—and how they've structured their org chart and teams to enable engagement with these clients.

This episode, we have Doug Wendt, founder and president of Wendt Partners on the show. Doug discusses the growth and globalization of his distributed team and the methods he used for growth—including full-time employees, contractors, freelancers, and services providers. We talk about how partners should think about marketplaces for securing freelance and contract help and his thoughts and the pros + cons of staffing firms. We also discuss the advantages (and disadvantages) of professional employer organization (or PEOs) and employer of record services (or EOR).

Conrad Saam, the President and Founder of Mockingbird Marketing, joins the show to talk about his commitment to transparency and clarity on salary—specifically, what that looks like and how it's reported and communicated to employees and candidates. He digs into the history, the process, how he established baselines, and why it's been so valuable for the firm. We wrap by discussing how compensation transparency has changed over time as his team grows both in size and in depth of knowledge—and how it's changed as his org chart becomes more complex and incorporates more specialized functions.

Connor Jeffers, Founder and CEO of Aptitude 8 who joins the show to talk about solutions architecture. We start with his definition of solutions architecture and how it compares to other technical roles like systems administrators, RevOps professionals, developers, and sales engineers. We talk about solutions architect development and how to raise the bar for technical expertise and systems design—and whether these folks are primarily homegrown or sought externally. Lastly, we wrap with A8 Labs and the recent acquisition of Appchemist. Should more partners be thinking more about HubSpot's app ecosystem?