Brand building from the ground up: Utilities, B2B, and the power of starting fresh

Read the episode transcript:

Gabriel: Welcome to today’s episode. You know, Holly, in a lot of the conversations that we’ve been having… we’ve been talking to FedEx, we’ve been talking to Lyft, we’ve been talking to Nike… and one of the things that we hear a lot is, “Oh well, that’s great for them. I’m not a Nike. I’m not a Lyft. I don’t have those big massive budgets. I work for this seemingly large organization revenue wise, but I just don’t have that level of awareness.”

So this episode is for those people, is for the majority of brand leads, of the people that are enabling brands out there in categories that people have maybe never heard of, but are still very large and very present. And that’s a little bit of what we’re doing today in talking to David. So welcome David Pendery to the Brand Enabled podcast.

David: Thanks, it’s great to be here.

Holly: David, great to see you. I think David is one of the most interesting conversations to have and I’m eager for everyone to hear him sort of unpack his experiences because he also doesn’t necessarily fit the classic profile of a marketer who’s been at the marketing machine kind of chipping away at it and then found themselves in a CMO role. David actually came up through a comms background. Someone who sits outside of the larger marketing arena might say, “What’s the difference?” Well, we all know the nuances and the differences.

I think that’s a really fun place to start, David, is if you talk to us a little bit about how that first 20 years of your career then shifted into being suddenly now responsible for the addition of brand and advertising, and what that meant for you. Yeah, just enlighten us as to what that nuanced difference was for you.

David: For sure. Yeah. You know, I never thought I’d end up in marketing or wanted to be in marketing. If you would’ve asked me, you know, 20 years ago, if I wanted to be a CMO, I would have said, “Hell no.” I had no interest.

Holly: Wait, we have got to know why!

David: I came up, like you said, as a comms person and I was very much a purist. It was all about earned media. It was about reputation. It was about all these things that… you know, you can’t pay for the results that I’m delivering and my team is delivering. There was this kind of thought amongst sort of comms purists that there’s this wall between the paid side and the earned side or the owned side. And so I just didn’t ever think that I would want to “sell my soul” to the sales side of the organization, right? That was the very poor line of thinking that I had way back then.

It really was an accident that I ended up going down the path that I did. I was enjoying my comms role. I was working for one of the largest healthcare companies in the world doing comms for the CEO. And there was a big leadership shakeup, didn’t work out the way I had hoped it would.

Gabriel: That was at United, right? That was at United Health Group.

David: Yeah, massive company up in Minnesota, in the Twin Cities. And the CEO of United Healthcare ended up leaving the organization. And I had seen this job posted with Xcel Energy, but it was director of marketing, advertising, sponsorships, and communications. And as I read through the job description, there’s so little on communications I was like, “Oh yeah, I can’t, I don’t think I can do that job. I don’t have the experience. I don’t have the credibility to do that. Seems cool. Seems like it’d be fun.” But, you know, I completely discounted it.

Well, as it turns out, the United Healthcare CEO is on the board at Xcel. And I had stayed in touch with some of the leadership there and was like, “You know, I need to make a change. This isn’t working for me.” And they brought me over to Xcel Energy, which is a publicly traded public utility based in Minneapolis, serving eight states. And I suddenly found myself doing comms, but also marketing and advertising and corporate sponsorships and partnerships, and all those kinds of things. And I really liked it, which was crazy.

I had no idea that I could embrace that type of role. I think at the same time, the lines between all these different functions within marketing were also changing quite a bit. So I think it was kind of the perfect storm of the role, me stumbling into this, and just the media landscape changing that made it work.

Gabriel: So David, a lot of people who would be in that situation would see that, apply to that role, and then be told, “God, I love your commerce background, but we really need someone who has these two other pieces as well.” Why did they give you the job? If you only had one leg of the stool?

David: Well, I think what it came down to is they needed to tell a better story. They were really focused on “How do we make our customers like us more and want to engage with us?” And if you think about it, who loves their utility company? You’ve got to pay them every month for something that you can’t see, you can’t touch, you can’t feel. You have no choice in who you go with. And they just want to change perception.

Gabriel: And then the price goes up the next year.

David: Right, exactly. So it’s the opposite, not only do they not like you, they probably dislike you quite a bit. But they’re really focused. They’re huge into renewables. They’re the number one wind energy producer and provider in the US. Really focused on energy efficiency. And part of their mission was to try and get people to adopt more energy efficiency programs. Which is also a unique part of marketing and advertising, where you’re basically doing all these campaigns and programs to get people to use less of the product that you sell. Which again was just very strange.

It came down to no one would explore any of those options if they didn’t trust the company, if they didn’t like the company. And so I think what sort of tipped the scales for me… in addition to having a great contact, which I’m not discounting at all… but I think what got them to actually take a chance on me was the fact that they needed a storyteller. And really that’s what I brought to the table – being able to tell great stories that connected with audiences, regardless of whether it was customers or employees or investors or partners or whatever.

Gabriel: When you come into a role like that as a leader, how do you go about evaluating the quality of the work, the quality of the people, in those functions that maybe you hadn’t had responsibility for?

David: That’s hard, right? Because the imposter syndrome was big at the time. I was fortunate that I inherited some really great leaders. I also had a long runway to build some of my team around me.

One of the first things we had to do was our agency relationship was coming up for renewal. And so we had to go through that whole process. As a public utility, they’re very formal in terms of how that process works. So we have a very formal RFP process, managed by an outside party who kind of helped identify agencies and shepherd that whole process.

Through that, I also got to see how the team stepped up and who was able to really understand and own the brand and the messaging and help with this evolution that the company wanted to go through – through this process of selecting a new agency. So that helped quite a bit. And it was a pretty accelerated process. I think it was only three or four months into the role there where I was in LA shooting TV spots with the new agency and a big-name director, and actor, and all this kind of stuff with this whole new campaign.

Holly: So there was really nowhere for people to hide

David: No, because I would ask questions, right? And that’s the thing – I’m a very curious person. And it’s not that I don’t trust people… in fact, I absolutely trust my team unless they give me a reason not to… but it’s really more of curiosity. So again, through this process, because I didn’t know how things were “supposed to be done” or the traditional way of doing things, I asked a lot of questions to challenge things just because I didn’t know any better.

I think you can learn a lot about a person and their capabilities and their skills by how they talk about what they do and how they engage in those kinds of questions when someone just says, “Well, hey, why do we do that?” Or “Why is this important?” Or “What does this really mean?” Or “Why are you focused on this metric versus that metric?” Or “What have we done and why is that the right way or the wrong way?” You know what I mean? And so just asking a lot of questions not only helps educate me, but it also builds those relationships with the team.

I was fortunate that for the vast majority of team was solid, and I got to bring in some incredibly talented leaders as well.

Gabriel: Can you remember any like…

Holly: I was going to say David told us that he recently just published his leadership philosophy. And this is actually an interesting place to pause for a moment on leadership style because of what you just said in terms of that beginner mindset when we come in new into a role.

Asking questions and having the excuse of newness is such a gift, because you’re in that curiosity mode. But we find often that leaders lose that at some point. At six months, a year into the role, some leaders stop asking questions. They start making assumptions, and it starts becoming more directives.

How do you keep that mindset? We’ve got a ton of more questions for you about your role there, but from a leadership standpoint, David, how did you keep that mindset going? Because what often happens in the first few weeks of being new on the job starts to fade, and yet that’s the most powerful tool we have – staying open-minded, curious, and asking questions.

David: 100 %. You know, when I started my career 25, whatever, years ago, it was very different, right? What you were told was – as an employee, you have to figure out how to work with your boss. You have to learn how to manage up, you have to learn their communication style, their working style, and you have to adapt as an employee to your leader. And I’ve never really understood that or really bought into that philosophy.

I always felt that it was my responsibility as the leader to understand my team and to get to know them. You can only do that if you stay curious and if you ask questions, and you get to know them, and their styles, and their passions, and all of that.

You mentioned leadership philosophy. I went through this exercise… actually through a summit with World 50, with Grand 50… where the speaker was saying, “What are your leadership values? Not your philosophy, not your approach, but what are those things that you hold dear that are just non-negotiable to how you show up as a leader?” And we kind of went through this whole process of thinking about it. And for me, it was really trust, transparency, and humility.

I think it all starts with trust. As I said, I trust my team 100 % until and unless they give me a reason not to. I have to earn their trust as a leader, but they don’t have to earn mine. Transparency, you know, I try and share as much information as I can and keep people involved in the process. But I think what’s really served me well is the humility. Like, I know I’m not the smartest person in the room. I don’t want to be the smartest person in the room. And I think those leaders who stop asking questions, who lose that curiosity, fall into that trap of thinking they have to have the answers all the time.They always have to know which way to go. They always have to know what the best path is. And I just don’t believe that.

I think there’s no ownership of good ideas. If you’re in the room, if you’re at the table, you need to lean in and occupy that chair. I think that’s an Amazon saying that they would talk about. You have to occupy that chair and have a perspective. So I want to have talented, smart, diverse experience and perspectives and things like that on my team because I want to continue to learn.

So that’s just kind of how I operate. I don’t really know any other way to do it. And that allows me to, I think, keep that curious spark. With the added benefit that it allows members of your team to kind of step up and shine and share their expertise as well. People love those kinds of opportunities.

Holly: Well said.

Okay, so you’re only a few weeks into this new role and you find yourself in LA, big-time director, well-known actor. How’d you get there? How did you get this company that had not done any storytelling probably before you arrived… or they had not been successful in that… How did you get them to agree to go all the way to that level of quality and investment? Because that’s a real challenge sometimes. And a company, if it doesn’t live and die by its brand, sometimes those resources are shortchanged.

David: For sure, yeah, so it was fortunate that they had resources, right? I walked into an organization that had a really solid budget because they did a lot of really great sports marketing. So they had the Xcel Energy Center in Minneapolis, where the Minnesota Wild Play, or St. Paul rather, they did sponsorships with the Rockies and the Broncos and the Vikings and a lot of different sports teams. But they had been fairly conservative in their advertising and marketing, kind of what you would expect to see from an electricity and gas company.

It wasn’t bad, but I wouldn’t say it was like the most creative, the most exciting, the most off-the-wall stuff. Again, because I didn’t know any different, I went through this agency process, found a phenomenal agency out of Minneapolis called Yamamoto that I brought on board. And we decided we were going to pitch this idea that was completely different than what you would expect. It was super creative. It was trying to make this thing that you can’t see – electricity, natural gas – something that you could feel and touch and experience through this process.

I did not think there was any possibility that the leadership team would go for it. But I wanted to use the fact that, “Hey, I’m new to this, I’m new to the industry, maybe this is a good idea, maybe it’s total garbage, I don’t know, but let’s give it a shot.” And I was very fortunate that the leadership, for better or for worse, understood the value of marketing, but didn’t really have time for it either. So they were like, “As long as legal’s cool with it, like whatever, it’ll work or it won’t. If it doesn’t work, we’ll do something different.”

So we ended up going with this campaign that was delivering energy in a box. So we had this delivery guy who would show up with a glowing red box – that was their brand color – they were “delivering the energy to businesses and to homes”. Very different, very kind of out there sort of campaign idea, but the idea was just to make it more real and more relatable to consumers.

I remember sitting down with my boss, who was the corporate secretary at the time, and finally I’m like, “Okay, I’m going to LA next week. These are the final scripts. This is the stuff we’re shooting next week.” And she’s like, “Wait a minute. Are you sure this is a good idea? Like, do you really think this is their direction?” I’m like, “It’s too late now. We’ve hired the director. We’ve hired the actor. We’ve scoured the locations. We’re going.” So this is what we’re going to do. And I remember getting on the plane and going out there thinking, “Well, this might be the last trip I take for this company. This might totally bomb.”

And it was so overwhelming being there, having never been on a set and doing big-budget advertising before. I got so swept up in the experience. Thankfully the team involved did a phenomenal job and the creative really, really resonated. We did the TV stuff and then activated that across print and digital and everything else. And it was our campaign for a couple of years there. That went really well.

Gabriel: When you think about making some of those big bold bets in a company like Xcel, you know, in the world of utilities, how do you start to think about measurement and metrics? Especially from the brand side, but metrics that then have credibility in the boardroom.

David: For sure. Well, you know, one of the things we tracked was kind of brand reputation. You can do brand surveys. You can do all that kind of stuff. And the idea really was, “Do people think about us?” And you’re going from they don’t think about us at all, because they’re on autopay and they don’t even remember who their energy company is. “Do they know who we are?” And then, is it positive or negative when they think about us? So that was actually important because that was something that was set by the board, by the leadership, that they wanted to track. So very fortunate as a marketer that they cared about brand in that way.

At the same time, they were really focused on that energy efficiency piece and getting people to sign up for those energy efficiency programs. And we had tons of metrics around that participation. Whether it was smart thermostats, or LED light bulbs, or different saver switch type programs that they offered. And we were able to track the participation in those programs before, during, and after the campaign ran to see if we were having any sort of impact on the participation. We could track, “How did you hear about it?” and we had all those different things that you would do with campaigns with landing pages and stuff to see how people got to these programs and finally decided to pull the trigger. It had a really solid impact on participation, which was the number one thing.

Again, revenue is important in a publicly traded company, but people have to pay their energy bills regardless. So we couldn’t really track it on revenue at a company like this. We had to focus it really on participation in these programs. As a publicly traded company/public utility, the public utilities commissions in the state where they did business required them to offer and to show participation. So because these were the governing bodies who determined what they could charge their customers, they wanted to make sure that they were delivering what those governing bodies demanded. And that participation was critical for that.

Gabriel: What I love about that is, so often we try in brand and marketing to try and align measurement with something that we can actually influence, which is actually some type of behavior change that’s driven through the communication or the experience or the touchpoints we have. Your story feels like you had that level of alignment, which in many ways is a precondition to success.

David: Yeah, I would completely agree. Going back to my comms background, I always had this belief that if you’re going to put out a communication, whatever the form, whoever the audience, you should understand up front what is it that you want the receiver of that information to do, or to think, or to feel as a result of receiving that. The same goes for advertising, marketing, you have it. You want them to sign up. You want them to feel like they like your company. You want them to believe in the company’s mission.

We were able to say upfront, there’s an element of we want them to feel like we’re a trustworthy company, like we have their back, like we are a good community partner. And because all those things were important… and that’s kind of pure brand before you even get to kind of the sales and revenue piece… I think that also sort of shaped my approach to marketing overall. I’m very much a full funnel marketer. I’m not just a demand guy, I’m not just a brand guy, I’m not just a product guy. I truly believe that that full funnel approach is critical to any company’s success.

Holly: I think that there’s an interesting lesson maybe in there, David, when a company doesn’t have a lot of permission to be engaging with their customers, there’s not already a sticky relationship. They’ve kind of got a set it and forget it type approach to energy and gas. And I think the thing is that what you found in that mechanism, that energy program that you invited them to, was a value for them in their lives. And I think brands forget that a lot. It’s like, “Hey, join our… follow us on Instagram… download this… read this.” And it’s more about them and what they’re providing.

You found a way to actually build something together in partnership with your customers to say, “We’re going to teach you how to do this more responsibly, efficiently. You’re going to save money. You’re going to do right by the environment.” And maybe there’s a lesson there for other brands. Like, what if Canva, for example, started publishing to individual, high-growth users the efficiency that they were driving in their lives or what their presentations were achieving for them and sort of a benchmark or a look back.

I think a lot of brands forget that in order to build a relationship, you have to be helpful and useful first. Was that some of the thinking that went into that program? Tell us how you sort of landed on that?

David: Yeah, for sure. I mean, we wanted people to care and to believe that we cared. And so it really was very much about the relationship and trying to forge a connection, where it was a sort of set it and forget it kind of relationship. And so again, the vast majority of our efforts were brand focused.

I mean, yes, we want to get signups for these programs and that’s how we measured, but we were required to talk about energy efficiency, we were required to talk about safety, we were required to talk about all these different things. We just felt that if we could better engage with our customers… more than just throw stuff at them about, you know, “Less energy, good” kind of thing. Everyone says that.

Any utility company anywhere in the country looks and sounds the same. You could swap… In fact, we even did this exercise when we were going through the creative. We looked at probably 10 or 12 different comparable energy companies around the country, looked at their creative and, for fun, chopped off the head and the tail so you couldn’t tell who it was – you couldn’t tell who the logo was. No one could tell the difference between any of them. Because they didn’t have anything to say, because they didn’t care. I mean, they didn’t have to.

My assumption, I wasn’t there… but you know, we wanted to care, and we wanted our customers to care, and we wanted to forge that more emotional connection with them. That again, we know, that emotional connection to a brand is why people line up at midnight to get the new iPhone, right? Or collect their Air Jordans. Or pick whatever brand you want. People are fanatical about it because they have that emotional connection. They believe it and they love it, and feel like that brand is doing something for them – making them feel good, or giving them latest technology, or somehow benefiting them in some way. And we kind of aspired to have that relationship.

Gabriel: So I think that’s a great pivot point, David, because I think we’re going to spend most of our conversation talking about CSG because that’s where you spent most of…

David: Almost 10 years.

Gabriel: Yeah, almost 10 years. In this case, you weren’t sponsored in, you didn’t have a relationship with someone, like you truly came in through a cold call, you’ve come in to a category that’s completely different, you’ve inherited a team. What do you do in those first 60 to 90 days? Did you have a playbook? Did you have a plan and strategy for what you learned from Xcel?

David: I kind of repeated a lot of the same things. Again, I relied on curiosity and I relied on that “I don’t know what I don’t know” kind of thing. But it was also a little bit of a different environment too, because the entire marketing and communications team was only eight people. I think I had three roles on my team. I had a marketing ops person, I had an events person, I had, I think, a content role that I was able to hire. But we didn’t even know if those were the right roles – they just were placeholders.

I had to just kind of figure out, “What did people know about this company? Did they know about the company? What did they think about the company?” And so I, again, just was really, really curious and spent a lot of time with our customers and with our internal stakeholders as well. And I think one of the big things for me was, I was talking to our head of sales in Asia Pacific at the time… one of our top guys out in Asia Pacific.. and he said, “Yeah, when I call on a customer, I don’t use the name CSG. I use the name of the company that CSG acquired because people know that company, they don’t know CSG.” Of course, as a marketer, that’s like a knife through your heart, right? Because it’s like, “Oh my god, you can’t do that. That acquisition happened four years ago. What are you doing?” But clearly they didn’t feel like there was any sort of brand equity that they could leverage and that was kind of a pivotal moment for me.

I really saw what we were dealing with, which was not kind of any native brand perception – there was just no brand perception at all. Which is actually a much better place to start from, because you can be whatever you want. And so we kind of took that route of “What’s the real essence of who we are and how do we want that to come across?” So it was a very organic, inside-out process that we were able to go through, because there wasn’t any negative ground we had to make up. We were basically starting from a clean slate.

Holly: And why was that important?

Gabriel: But had you been… Sorry, go on, Holly.

Holly: Yeah, just curious. There are a lot of reasons companies do that when they either decide to infuse more into the sub-brands or the parent brand needs to become something. What was that catalyst? What was the objective?

David: It was industry diversification and growth. So for the first 40 or so years of the company’s history, they didn’t really grow. The vast majority of their income came from three big customers. And the mantra was just, you know, don’t do anything to mess up those relationships and anything additional is gravy. That’s an oversimplification, but there really wasn’t any growth for 40 years. It took them 40 years to get to a billion dollars in revenue. And so, you know, it was just a unique experience to kind of go through.

They knew they had to diversify. They knew they had to grow and do something different, but they also knew they didn’t have any credibility in these new markets. They knew Telco is very close to cable. They wanted to get into more retail, healthcare, pharmaceutical, financial services, all these industries that you kind of have to have some street cred to get into. And they knew they wouldn’t be able to do that with just products alone.

The other piece too was, you know, they were really thinking years ahead about the entire customer life cycle from kind of post-acquisition through onboarding support, revenue management, and even offboarding, and how all these different platforms could come together. But they knew they would never be able to sell them together if there wasn’t a more universal value proposition that they could bring to market.

So that was kind of part of the mission as well – how do we bring these well-known but very, very niche products to a bigger audience to allow us to diversify and grow and stay relevant?

Holly: And how did your comms background come into play? Were you thinking about… not that that was in the background for you at this point, it was still very much additive to what you’re doing… how important was it for you to be engaging the analyst community and to be engaging the press as vehicles or mouthpieces for your message? How did that come into play?

David: Yeah, I mean the comms background as a storyteller and messaging and making sure that we’re not a “me too”, like that served me really, really well. But you mentioned the analyst community and that was something that was really so incredibly helpful for us because we had established really great relationships with analysts at Gartner, and Forrester, and other analyst firms around the world. And we were able to leverage those relationships to test what we wanted to roll out.

So we would put messaging in front of them. We would have them review website wireframes and kind of give us that industry perspective, because it was really, really hard for us to get out of our own way sometimes.

We’ve been doing the same thing the same way for 40 years. You know, we needed someone to be like, “Yeah, no, that just doesn’t cut it,” or “That’s not really what customers care about. We know you think that’s super important. Your customers aren’t going to care about that. So maybe take this angle.” So we were able to use those analyst relationships to really help refine positioning, and creative, and the overall customer experience that we wanted to deliver through our marketing programs before and while these campaigns were in market.

Gabriel: See, that’s such an interesting story and it can seem like such a small thing, but it’s really rare to hear someone do what you did. It’s a B2B example of thinking about co-creation. Because, you know, a lot of consumer brands talk about customer co-creation through the lens of a customer or someone who has seen this for the first time.

And I saw that, from a brand architecture standpoint, you kind of navigated this way of combining the CSG with the product or acquired companies in quite a clean way. Can you talk a bit about that and how you decide what gets won at that level and what doesn’t?

David: Yeah, oh gosh, everybody thinks… whether it’s a department internally, or a product or a feature… everyone thinks they need a logo and a brand, right? They’ll say, “Well, we need a brand.” They really mean they want a logo or a color or whatever. And so yeah, we did a lot of research on kind of brand affinity of the different product brands that we had.

One of the things that really helped was, because we did business in over a hundred countries around the world, I sat down with our IP lead in legal and said, “Hey, you know, what’s our trademark environment look like?” And he said, “Well, you know, some of the stuff, it’s kind of generic names, it’s really hard. But we own CSG everywhere. So we’re good.” I said, “Okay, so how do I ensure that things are okay?” He’s like, “Well, as long as you put CSG in front of anything, you’re fine. Because then, as long as it’s always CSG blank, we’re protected.” So that became kind of, okay, we’re going to go with this kind of master branded approach or parent brand approach and say, “Okay, it’s going to be CSG X.”

And then it came down to what we call our flagship platforms. What’s the premier software platform in each of the business units that is sort of the lead cell? So the revenue management platform, or the billing platform, or the the payments platform, the CX platform that we had, and we kind of built that around those.

We had a few different, more evocative names. Ascendon was a software platform. It was our first kind of big cloud push that CSG had. That was named before I came in and it was kind of a big thing. But then they had some other software that the names didn’t exactly roll off your tongue. Advanced Conversion Platform, right? Kind of a generic name known as ACP, but how do you brand that? And so we did another evocative name for a CX platform. We ended up calling it exponent with an X, X-P-O-N-E-N-T.

But it’s really expensive and really complicated to build a brand from nothing. And my budgets weren’t that big. So we decided, and I kind of made the recommendation and got the leadership team to buy into, we’re going to stop going that route. If we feel like CSG is how we protect all of our IP, we’re just going to go with plain language names – CSG revenue management, CSG quote and order, CSG customer engagement, CSG whatever. Because then we’re continuing to build equity in the CSG brand, which is still important. But we’re also not having to spend as much time explaining what these platforms actually do. So that’s kind of the reason behind that.

Holly: Would you say David, that was a conscious choice? In a way that was really an outside-in approach in that you’re thinking about the complexity that you as a company would deal with, but ultimately it’s about the complexity that your customers have to sort through. When we get real cute with names and, you know, sort of a new taxonomy runs rampant through a portfolio, it can end up wreaking havoc on the customer’s buying experience, right? Where it’s like, wait, was this the cloud or the “ex-pon-node” to… what was that cute word you guys came up with? Did you have other kind of aha moments like that where you thought this is just better for the customer? Like, this is what they want.

David: 100%. Again, because we were trying to bring multiple products into accounts where maybe they only had ACP or they only had Ascendon or Single View or one of the platforms, and now we’re trying to sell a CX product into it. If we showed up with a completely different name and look and feel and it was different, that was just a lousy customer experience. They’d be like, “Are you guys the same company? Are you different companies? Am I going to get the same kind of support that I’m used to?” Like all that kind of stuff played into it.

The feedback we got was we want this one CSG, and that was kind of our approach that we wanted to go with as well. And so yeah, it was designed in large part to make it easier for our customers to understand and wrap their heads around. And again, a big part for me was the investment piece. I got to build the CSG brand all the time because it was attached to everything. And I didn’t have to spend as much time or energy explaining what the products do because, you know, CSG payments, well, it probably has something to do with collecting payments, right?

Holly: Just a wild guess, yeah.

David: You know what I mean? And that made it super easy.

In addition to the customer feedback, the feedback from our sales team, and our go-to-market team, and our solution engineers drove a lot of that as well. They said, “Look, I’m not having to spend as much time selling CSG, or who we are, or what we do and why they should care, because things are just easier to understand.” And that was kind of the final, like, “Okay, this is the right way to go.”

Gabriel: As we kind of get close to the end, I wanted to go back to something Holly asked you earlier around leadership that relates to this idea that you went from having a team of eight to leading with a team of 60 and how you evolved as a leader and manager. How did you learn those new skills? Cause it’s very different now, right? In terms of, how do I organize a structure now of 60 people?

Where do you learn those things? There isn’t necessarily a textbook. How much of it was you? How much of it was learning from mentors? How did you go about that growth in skillset?

David: Yeah, it was a lot of trial and error and learning.

Once I kind of got past that initial hiccup with my boss and we finally were connecting and all that, we were in a lead team meeting one time and she made a comment off-handed (we were talking about succession planning and stuff like that), she’s like, “No one’s going to want my job, because my job’s crazy and all that.” I remember I sent her an IM and I’m like, “Well, I might want your job someday.” And I was kind of being silly and like a smart ass because that’s just kind of how I am. But I was also kind of like, “Well, I dig this place and who knows what the future would be.” She took that very seriously and was like, “Okay, well, let’s figure out what you need to do in order to do this.” And so she allowed me to kind of start to build the team. I got involved with World 50… which is how Holly, you and I obviously met, through our connections there. I went through some different leadership training programs.

But I think the biggest thing was I was given the authority and the encouragement to build a great team. And so I figured out, “What can I not do? What do I really feel that I’m lacking and how do I bring in really great complementary skill sets into the team?” And that was really… I actually think I’m a mediocre marketer, but I think my superpower is leading and building and developing teams. Like that’s what I’m massively passionate about, and it’s because of this experience at CSG where I was able to build the most talented, high-performing group of really, really good people around me. So I learned from everybody I hired.

I hired people with more experience, with more diverse experience. I really focused on skill and diversity of skill and background, and then allowed my leaders to lead. And I allowed people to really do the job that they were hired to do. And I built a culture where it was never okay to say that’s not my job. It was never this like hard and fast line between departments. We always talk about how we always would get all up in each other’s business and you don’t take it personally. You know what I mean?

I go back to what we were talking about before where everyone has a seat at the table. I think by doing that, I was able to kind of figure out where we needed the right people in the right seats on the bus. And look, I screwed up a lot. Like I hired a Head of Demand Gen, didn’t work out. I hired a Head of Analyst Relations when our former head left, didn’t work out for a whole bunch of reasons. You make those mistakes. We always felt that our organization should be living and breathing thing. We didn’t want to just react to sales when they would change things, but we would just be focused on the business and what does the business need, and taking a good honest hard look at ourselves and say, “Are we resourced to deliver on the business goals that we have? And do we have the skills on the team to do that?”

All of us – me, my leadership team – we all had to be comfortable saying, “Hey, we don’t have what we need. None of us as leaders have what we need. We need to find that and bring those skills into the team.” And that kind of comes back to that idea of humility, that I really appreciate my team having, that if you need to bring in someone different, someone better, someone with different experience, then that’s what you do for the good of the team. And that’s how we were able to build something pretty magical.

Gabriel: What did you learn through those hires that didn’t work out that you were then able to course correct?

David: I think sometimes that, you know, when… The two roles in particular that didn’t work were areas that I was less comfortable with at the time, I think. And so I got very distracted by someone who said all the right things and it was very impressive like, “Oh my God, they know their stuff.” But then they maybe show up and they just, you know, ran into some of the same traps that I did in terms of, you know, they were kind of a bull in the china shop, where they weren’t able to really affect change the way it needed to be done, the CSG way. Everyone talks about, you know, it’s the CSG way or the Xcel way, every company has their way of doing things. And I learned how much that approach really, really mattered. The way you show up is oftentimes even more important than what you do when you get there, if that makes sense.

Holly: What do you think you’re going to take into your next chapter, David?

David: Definitely the curiosity, I think. I’m exploring opportunities that are very different from what I’ve done in the past because I want to try something new. I want to do something different. I think it’s going to be, again, a real passion for people and teams and helping people achieve results they never thought possible.

I think if I can be in an environment where people believe in marketing communications, leadership believes in it, resources it appropriately, and allows us to create and be creative and curious… That’s going to be what I hope to find – a place where I can build something really cool once again.

Holly: Well those principles, values, they’ll take you through any industry, right? Whether you go back to utility, you’re in telco, or next you’re in, who knows, Labubus. It could run the gamut, but a great set of principles, great set of learnings there too. And I really appreciate what you said about humility. I think that with a dose of humility and curiosity, we can step into really any role in any environment and create the kind of culture that you did. So well done to you.

David: And have a little fun along the way too. If you’re not enjoying it, like what the hell’s the point, right? You know, it’s no point in being miserable every day. You spend so much time with your team and at work, like you gotta have some fun along the way as well.

Holly: Yeah, no joke.

Gabriel: Beautifully said, Holly. A couple of final rapid questions, David, just to finish this off. From a decision-making standpoint, are you more consensus? Or more decision made in a more of a… I hate this word, but go with the sentiment… more of a dictatorial style?

David: More consensus, unless we can’t get there. I will tell my team like, “Y’all need to figure it out if this is your responsibility, but if you bring it to me and I have to make the decision, I’ll make the decision. You may not like it.”

Gabriel: Okay. Are you a plan A or a plan B person?

David: Plan C, Plan D, Plan E. Very iterative.

Gabriel: Over your career, is there a ritual that you do every morning that sets you up for the day? Or a ritual that you do at the beginning of the week that sets you up for the week?

David: Two things are super important for me. One, I got into meditation, which I love. Every single morning I start with meditation. And then I got really, really into fitness during COVID. And I bought a Peloton and I’m a absolute freak. Like fanatical, like fanboy, I’ve got the bike, I’ve got the tread, I’ve got the rower. Like I have done more than 3000 rides, I’m like completely addicted.

Holly: What’s screen handle? I’ll look for you on there and compete on the leaderboard.

David: It’s the crazy poet.

Holly: The crazy poet. Alright everybody, next time you’re on the Peloton, if you see the crazy poet, that’s the one to beat on the leaderboard.

David: Look me up, I love it. I’m a musician and so I love the music-based workouts. But it changed my life. It absolutely changed my life. I found that I’m a better leader, I’m a better husband, I’m a better employee if I feel good. You know, I lost a ton of weight, started eating better and everything else, but the health focus made a huge, huge difference and that’s a non-negotiable for me.

Gabriel: I don’t know if any of you have seen the Netflix documentary that Jonah Hill recently did about his therapist called “Stutz”. And that’s what he talks about.

David: I haven’t seen it, but I’ve seen it on Netflix.

Gabriel: What’s amazing about it is like he’s incredibly practical. And that’s the first thing he does, he talks about your life force. The number one thing you do to start feeling better today, it’s at the base of the pillar, is exercise. The second one is relationships. And I can’t remember what’s at the top of the base… purpose, I think, but I could be wrong.

My final question. What is one thing that you’d love to go back and say to a former boss that you weren’t able to in that moment? And it can be either something where you had to bite your tongue or… you know, we always have these things where we were, “God, if only I could have gone and said that. If only I’d thought of this to say that back then.”

David: There are so many things I wish I could redo. It’s horrible. I would probably say thank you. I think I have been given so many opportunities by so many phenomenal leaders along the way in my career that I think sometimes you take that for granted, right? You think you’ve just earned a role or you think it should just be yours. Or you’re like, “I worked really hard” and all this, but none of us would be where we are without… I mean, you’ve got to have the skill, you’ve got to have the drive, you’ve got to have all that, but I think without leaders in your corner who are really… what’s that saying? Like, you’re not a leader until you develop the next set of leaders, the next generation of leaders.

There are people who took a chance on me. And, you know, I don’t know that I’ve always shown enough gratitude for those opportunities that they’ve given me. But it’s changed my life, it’s given me an amazing career and an amazing life, and provided for my family, and everything. And so… Yeah, I think I would say I’d do better at saying thank you.

Holly: David, now’s your chance, give them a shout-out. Give someone a shout-out right here, right now.

David: Oh, I’ve got three, okay, three people. Ed Maddox at IHS was phenomenal. He kind of got me into my first really big global comms leadership role. Just before that, David Levy and Michelle Russo at Discovery Channel. Like I learned how to be a great comms person and a critical thinker from them. And then most recently at CSG, Liz Bauer, who hired me and was my leader the entire time I was there. She was a Chief Experience Officer at CSG, close personal friend of mine.

Now, she’s the one who really took a chance on me, really gave me the opportunity to grow and sort of thrust me into this marketing world in a new way that completely changed the trajectory of my career and my life, and I owe a lot to her.

Gabriel: Holly, that was a genius idea. That’s a new tradition. I wish we’d done that from the first episode, but we’re to do it for everyone now. Three people to give gratitude with. What a wonderful sentiment.

Holly: I love that. David, it says a lot about you that when Gabe gave you the wide open playing field to go back and say something that you’d never said before, you chose the positive. I was like, “Oh, what a juicy question.”

David: Well, I mean, could have said like, you know, I could have unleashed the profanity or something here, but I didn’t know that that would be all that appropriate. There are moments for that too, but no.

Holly: No, good for you for spreading gratitude and recognizing people. That’s David Pendery, everyone. This is who you want to follow. That’s very cool.

Well, David, this is exciting. We’re going to be waiting with bated breath to watch your new chapter begin. We’ve got to have you back on once you’ve got some new stories to tell. And we’ve so enjoyed this conversation and learned from it as well. Thank you so much.

David: Thank you so much for having me. It’s been a pleasure.

Gabriel: David, thank you so much.