awesome. Well, nice to meet you and everybody online where I got to today. Well, I moved to Utah originally to play baseball at the University of Utah. So physically, that's what got me out to Utah from California. I'm a Bay Area native. I went to school at the University of Utah and graduated in finance and thought originally, I wanted to go into consulting. So I started doing consulting for a couple years and realized that I kind of wanted to pivot. And the reason for that really is I enjoyed consulting. I enjoyed the gaining the skill set there, but I really wanted to see and implement a process from start to finish and not really handed off to another team to go do and I wanted to own holistically solving problems. So after consulting, I decided I wanted to get into Tech, and that's when I made a transition into Thio. Vivint Smart home did a lot of analytics there, and sales operations and things of that nature really got to see ah, wide variety of problems, uh, not problems with just, you know, challenges that we could go tackle and got to work on a lot of them So it was really fun. And then I got approached by Qualtrics and have now entered the SAS space. That was about four years ago. I made the jump to Qualtrics, wanted to get into SAS and so came over in sales operations and have been within the operations realm, uh, to my current position, which is CEO of global sales. And so it kind of see holistic and to end sales operations, processes strategy, forecasting all of that good stuff. So that is really what helped me get where I waas. There were experiences along the way that really helped shape it, I think one of which would be early on, kind of seeing in consulting that I wanted Thio own things and end. The second thing was I as you can tell, I have a beard that's a total east of the time, was a little frowned upon and consulting And I just didn't wanna wear a suit every day and shave every day. And so it kind of that experience let me want to go somewhere where I felt like I could be myself fully who I am, and tech seems to be very accepting that tech industry in general, very inviting for people to be authentically who they are. And so that was something for me. That was a big reason why I wanted to go into Tech originally. And I think you know, there's there's a lot of other experiences, but those are two big ones that stand out to me and getting to where I am.

Yeah, so I'll start with the priorities in my role. Right now, One of our big things is to have an accurate forecast for new sales and new business. And so forecasting whether that's rolling out a global methodology of forecasting or getting a right number at the end of the quarter, just for those that we're learning about forecasting. And what that means is that you you know you have certain revenue or sales targets are zehr quarterly, But some people do monthly or annually forecasting is really looking into the future and saying where you're gonna end up and being accurate with that. So you're looking at a lot of pipeline metrics and things of that nature, and it's important to know where you're gonna be in the future. And so that would be one that that would be big. The second would be improving processes. So a lot of times in a fast growing company process is something that is, you know, you're on an airplane flying in the air, and you're just kind of duct taping things together to keep it going because you're just going so fast and focusing on processes and things that are scalable for 10 years. Down the down the line are some things that I look at so that could be in our CRM sales force. It could be in a variety of different areas, but tryingto think about 10 years down the line and build a stable foundation and processes that will last all you know throughout time and that can be automated. So that that would be that would be the third. Prior to that, they would be automated. Much things I can. A lot of people here I know you're mentoring. Students here are in school, probably learning a lot of data science skills and automation skills crucial, crucial in tech to be able to automate things on DSO. So we work on that as well Would be a big, big part of my job. My weekly hours, um are they range? And it's a It's a variety. I currently work with a C. R. O. Who lives in Sydney, Australia, and my nights or his mornings, and so sometimes I, you know, will take a longer lunch for a few hours, and I'm working from home right now on guy. Spend time with my family and then I log on a little bit later. If I'm not having any meetings with our C R. O in Australia, sometimes it's with Europe. So I'm I'm up earlier and end earlier. But my general philosophy on weekly hours for anyone that's one of my direct reports is for them to custom design their tailored work schedule that makes them happiest and most productive. So for some people, that's like 6 a.m. to 3 p.m. And they want to be done, and that's great. And others it's, you know, I like to sleep in, and I'm more of a 9 30 start and I'll go till seven or something of that nature. So my philosophy on weekly work hours with my team, which is a you know, a lot of people, is generally to custom design that that makes them most productive.you have to adjust. So, you know, obviously you don't just kind of continue forward thinking things. They're gonna be the exact same, right? I think sometimes people get so set in their plan that they just want to keep going and act like Cove. It isn't there. Right? In reality, you have to adjust, and you have to look at incoming factors. And, you know, where is co vid hitting the general population the most Probably more small and medium business and not large business. And you could take that into consideration when forecasting or planning or, um, doing things of that nature, right? And so I think you just have to adjust. You have to take it in from a weekly work hours perspective. With Koven, we wheel out our entire our company, our entire company, to go remote until January. And that was just thankful to the leadership team that Qualtrics that they made that decision early on. I remember coming in the work in March and midday, having a big company, all hands and our CEO Ryan Smith saying, Hey, everybody, you have the you need, you know, go work from home. We're gonna do this remote thing and it's gonna be until January 1st, and we'll kind of decide what's happening at that point in time. But, you know, you have the freedom to work from home. Until then, we'll use Zoom will use videoconferencing like this and eso quick, decisive decisions. I think our key way also had to cancel our X four event, which is a large Qualtrics event where we have, you know, Obama came and spoke last time in Oprah. Things of this nature way to kind of call it off, and it was a couple weeks away is a tough decision. So, um, you know, you have to make those tough decisions in those times, but you have to kind of face reality and understand. You know, covert wasn't going away and we made the right decision, but, you know, you gotta adjust.

Yeah, I think some challenges in a job like mine would be fun challenges that I enjoy. So strategy is really exciting. And, um, what I've noticed is sometimes a lot of people want to get into strategy right out of their undergrad that they want to come in and make the big decisions for the whole company. In reality, it's really difficult to do that. You kind of need to know all the nitty gritty details of the business is and how you make one change here. It affects it over here, and there's ripple effects and things like that. So my my suggestion would be to kind of come in and get your hands dirty and learn that stuff. But I've been doing that for a while, and now that I'm there, I kind of know the challenge the challenges would be. You know how you continue to reinvent yourself as a company and how you go grow fast and keep up high growth rates. And, you know, every year you're making new decisions strategically that will allow you to go do so. I'm thinking, what you know what you think is gonna be the best plan for the next year. Um, you know, I think approaches Thio, tackle big challenges, just break them down into small small tidbits and just bite off, you know, a bit of a time and, uh, you know, you'll get there. It takes takes time. But I think sometimes people see big challenges or big obstacles and just get almost paralyzed from from the challenge and just kind of look at it and go, Whoa, that looks intense. You know, I don't even know where to begin. And there's this paralysis that can sometimes happen when in reality, it's okay. This is the goal. Here is where we want to get there in order to get there. We break it down into these 30 steps on how to get there. Let's start it. Step one, and let's figure out that challenge this week and just keep going. So I think that's a big, big part toe. Have success in large challenges, eyes just to break them down, think through them thoughtfully, and then when you get to the end, you have this holistic plan that's a good strategy that's laid out for an upcoming year or multiple years down the road and is pretty effectiveYeah, So I think one it would be a former role was we were migrating a CRM, which is a customer relationship. Management tools like Salesforce were migrating to salesforce from an older CRM is kind of outdated. And it's really painful because, you know, you have to switch your whole, uh, tool that your whole company utilizes your call center. Utilize it your sales reps utilize it. Every data input they put in goes into salesforce or a crm Um and, you know, migrating that over. There is so many different departments that are affected by that. People that pull data have queries based off of an old CRM. They have to rewrite every query, uh, to the new CRM, right? I mean, we're talking. That is like a small example of things financial reporting, all of that stuff. So that's an example where it's a huge Messi problem and you've got to break it down and the really small goals and go accomplish those things to get over there. But that would be one that, to me, stands out, is a huge, huge challenge about face in my career. Okay,