On the Edge

Stephen Brown (00:01.39)
Welcome to On The Edge brought to you by Elite Sales Edge with your host, Stephen Brown. In the series, Getting to Know Your CXOs, we'll be diving deep into conversations with various C -level executives. We'll explore the formidable challenges they encounter, the critical decisions they make, and the lessons that have left a lasting impact on them. Sit back and prepare to gain some insightful knowledge from the leaders who shape the business world.

Stephen Brown (00:38.862)
Welcome to On the Edge. I'm your host, Stephen Brown, and I'm here with another episode of Getting to Know Your CXOs. Today our guest is Doug Kahn. Doug is a highly accomplished business operations executive with over 30 years of hands -on leadership experience in the technology industry. His experience spans across operations, engineering, customer support, and IT. Doug has a proven track record of leading large -scale restructuring and operational transformations to achieve world -class business results.

His core competencies include leading and restructuring global teams, motivating them to achieve peak performance, exceeding customer expectations, and competitive benchmarking. With a career that's seen him rise through the ranks to EVP and C -suite levels, Doug has demonstrated his ability to deliver top business results in both traditional and outsourced environments. He possesses a broad international experience and has worked extensively with end users, OEMs, ODMs,

contract manufacturers, distribution partners, component and module suppliers, as well as contact centers. His diverse background covers various business models and sectors such as retail consumer electronics, automotive, enterprise servers and storage markets, and software licensing. Doug's leadership is marked by his ability to successfully navigate complex business landscapes, whether in large multinationals, small companies, startups, or private equity.

His strategic vision and hands -on approach have consistently led to the successful delivery of business objectives, making him a respected figure in the technology industry. Doug, welcome to the show. Thanks, Steve. Happy to be here. Well, we're so glad that you're able to take some time out of your day to meet with us. This series is titled Getting to Know Your CXOs. So I've been interviewing lots of folks at your level, CEOs, XOs, OOs, MOs.

letting folks get some insight into how C levels actually think, you know, and, some authentic conversation around that. So, so with that Doug, let's jump right into it. So you're a brand new COO day one, you're walking into the door. What advice would you have for him or her? That's that COO walking into that new role. What are the things that they should be thinking about so that they're successful over that first 30 to 60 days?

Stephen Brown (03:06.798)
That's a great question, Steve. I would say the top, I don't mean to be facetious here, but the top three most important things that you should do as a new COO or CXO, listen, listen, listen. I think it's super important when you first walk into one of these opportunities that you listen to your team, you listen to your customers, you listen to your vendors. And from that,

You collect that information, process what you're hearing, triangulate, because you need to develop an accurate point of view in terms of your company performance, the industry that you're in, how you're competing against the competition. And from there, you start to develop some credibility with those constituencies. And you can develop a action plan.

which is fact -based and accurate in terms of the steps you need to take. So I would say the most important thing you can do in those first 30 days is listen. You know, Doug, I wouldn't consider that facetious at all. I've interviewed numerous sea levels, and I can tell you that is the single common thread I've heard from all of them.

It's not only listen, but they want, they want unvarnished commentary. They don't want it, you know, they don't want it filtered. They want to know what's going on. What's the issues, what's working, what's not working. How can I help give it to me straight? You know, cause if you get cleaned up, polished feedback, how can you really help? But I agree. I think listening is, it's, it has resounded as basically the core theme.

throughout this series, so I appreciate that. You mentioned getting close with your team. I think team is extremely important. Can you share with the audience your philosophy or methodology when you set out to build a team around you? So I guess I'd say a couple things. First of all, when you are first either promoted or hired into a C -level job, you have a very short runway.

Stephen Brown (05:30.702)
You know, you don't have six months to figure things out to come up with the plan and you know 12 months to implement a lot of eyes are on you both internally externally the board, you know the the board members and so you need to very quickly Get up to speed, you know through you know what I mentioned before listening to the various constituencies putting together a a viable action plan

And you pretty much should think about it as you essentially have one shot to do that. You have one chance. You don't get any mulligans in those jobs. You basically have to get it right the first time. And that's really the best way to do it. Now, what I would say in terms of the team itself, most people who are either, again, promoted into or hired into a C -level job,

have experience in the industry and in companies similar to the one that you're currently in. My suggestion, and what I've tried to do, is to, first of all, take all the names out of the boxes in terms of the organization, OK? And just put down on paper an organization structure that's industry standard for the business that you're in and the industry that you're in.

And typically, again, most C -level people have worked at a few different companies. If you've worked at a mature company, a large -scale mature company in your industry, when you move into a new company, whether it's a large company or a small company, the structure of the organization can be industry standard. Now, you can scale that, obviously, to meet the requirements of the business.

But fundamentally, the structure of the organization, to the best of your ability, should be industry standard. So what I generally do is I kind of put an org structure, a generic org structure, an industry standard org structure on a whiteboard. And then what you try to do is take the team, the list of people, and start putting them back in the boxes. I've done this in pretty much every company I've come into.

Stephen Brown (07:47.694)
And what you'll find is there are some individuals who fit really nicely in the box. They have the skill set, you know, they have the interest, the desire to do that role. And it may require, you know, them changing roles. It may or may not. And then what you generally tend to find is there are boxes that are empty because you just don't have the skill set on the team. And you also find that you have team members who don't fit into a box very neatly. And so you need to reconcile that, you know, if there are team members who do have skills and they can be retrained,

to perform a certain function that's needed, great. But that's not always the case, and then you have to make some decisions about how to work with those team members. And conversely, you're going to have empty boxes where you just don't have the skill set. And those are the ones where you have to go out and fill from outside. When you're looking for people on your team, whether that's an internal hire or something you're going to have to go get externally,

What in your mind are the key attributes you look for in people that are going to be on your leadership team? There's obviously a set of objective criteria that you use for hiring. In other words, you're hiring for a senior level person. Maybe it's a vice president, could be a senior director, could be a senior vice president role, something like that. You want to make sure, first of all, that there's a high level of confidence that they can do the job.

So that's kind of job one. And typically, you can get a pretty good indication on that just from the resume itself, right? But the second thing is you want to find somebody who's really excited about the role. Maybe they love the sector that you're in, the products that you're producing. It may be a...

maturity level of the business they've never done before. So say for example, somebody's never done a startup and you're in a startup and you're hiring for that and they have a burning desire to do a startup. You want people that, I think the word passion is probably overused a lot, but you really do want somebody who really is enthused about the work that's being done and the contribution that they're gonna be able to make. So there's some very tangible objective criteria. And then those are, there's some that's.

Stephen Brown (10:02.414)
you know, not quite as tangible that you have to really just get a read on when you go through the interview interview process. Yeah. Yeah. Interviewing. It's funny. I was watching this another podcast actually about hiring and the guy started it out. He goes, everybody thinks they're good at hiring. I got news for you. You're not. It's really hard. Really, really hard.

And getting the right people on your team is critical. And I think focusing in on those key attributes, definition of the role, are they going to mix with the team? Do you have the right mix of personalities on the team? One of the other folks I was talking to, we were, we kind of got to chuckle out of, you know, well, what happens if you got a bunch of high D type A's filling the team? It's like, man, that might be problematic because, you know, type A's tend to...

gravitate towards other type A's and we're all excited and we're all going 100 miles an hour, but nobody asked, hey, what about this? So having a good balance across that team of, you know, different viewpoints I think is key as well. Yeah. Yeah, I agree. You know, there's there's another aspect of this that I'll just throw in and

A lot of this is just based on my Silicon Valley heritage and I spent most of my career in Silicon Valley and tech companies. And one of the things that I learned early on in my career is diversity is super important. I say that because what happens when you have a diverse team, teams from different backgrounds, different countries, different experiences.

is when that team gets together, what you find is very different points of view on how to approach problems. And as a result, what tends to happen is you tend to get a more optimal outcome because each of those views sort of build on each other. People sort of can challenge each other. And you end up with a much more optimal outcome than if everybody's from the same university, the same background, the same point of view. You get a single.

Stephen Brown (12:18.798)
You sort of get a single track in terms of how do you approach a problem? And in most cases, it's not the optimal one. So again, I think diversity, obviously it's a big emphasis in a lot of companies today. I find it very, very important for what I think are the right reasons, because it's good for business. Most people that I've ever known want to show up and do a good job. They want to matter.

they want to contribute. And if you're if you're getting to know the individual, what do they bring to the table? And something I used to and I still use it. It's how do I build a team that's almost like a challenge network? Because I want to be able to put things in front of the team that go, hey, wait a minute, man, that is what are you crazy? You know, or like, hey, that works. But what about this? But at the end of the day, good teams, they're healthy debate. It's great. Varying opinions you want.

But at the end of the day, a good team will go, okay, all right, we've hammered this out. Here's what we're going to do. You know, the person that's responsible for making the decisions is okay, this is what we're going to do. But then everybody turns and makes that happen. They go and execute. You know, it's kind of the old agree and commit. No problem. You can disagree and you can commit, but you can't agree and not commit. Yeah. That's so key. I want to switch gears on you a little bit. We've

both had, and a lot of basically anybody who's been a leadership position over the past four to five years, got to lead through an unprecedented time. There was no playbook to say, hey, basically you're trying to grow your business and we're gonna throw a global pandemic right in the middle of that for you. So leading is challenging enough. She had the global pandemic do it. So the question that I have for you is like, what advice would you have for the COO?

when they're making tough decisions, do you have a process around making tough decisions when they come, when they get in front of you?

Stephen Brown (14:26.382)
I don't know that I have a formulaic process for making tough decisions, but what I'll say is I just finished a really interesting book. There's a book that was published recently. It's a biography of Jeff Bezos, the Amazon founder. He has an interesting way of looking at decision making, which I've now tried to adopt and I probably have sort of subconsciously over the years. But basically what he says is all decisions,

can be categorized into two categories. There are decisions that are reversible, and then there are decisions that are not reversible. Most decisions, vast majority of decisions are reversible. And so what he's basically saying is, for most decisions, collect all the information you possibly can that's germane to that decision. Make the decision quickly, okay? Make the decision quickly.

move forward, monitor the progress. If it's the wrong direction, then you can mid -course correct because it's reversible. The decisions that are not reversible, obviously those ones you want to take a little bit more time and make sure that you make the right decision because you only get one chance to do it. But it's an interesting way, I think, to think about decisions because, again, the majority of decisions that you're going to reach in your life, that you're going to make in your life, are reversible.

And so there's no sense in spending hours and hours ruminating over whether you should do this or not do that. Get the most information you can, make the decision, move on, and then, you know, kind of monitor the outcome. So that's, that's kind of what I would recommend. Yeah. I mean, that, that's pretty interesting if you think about it in this context, because then what, what that creates downstream for lack of a better description is you're really putting.

that decision -making power into the hands of the people that are closest to the customer and closest to where the decision needs to be made. And they're going to make those decisions. Because you've set as a C level, you've set directions. It's a good book. It's well worth reading. It's sort of his philosophies on a number of different things. And obviously, the guy's been pretty successful. Yeah, he's figured a few things out. Yeah. Well, I'd say let me, there's a topic. It's...

Stephen Brown (16:52.718)
on everybody's mind, very hot topic right now. And we could probably do an entire episode on just this topic, but I'd love to get your take on AI and how business leaders should be thinking about it and just your view on AI as it comes into business. Well, I think anybody you ask that question of is going to tell you it's going to be transformational. I don't think there's any doubt about it. It's probably the, the,

is and will continue to be the most impactful technology development perhaps of our lifetime. One of the interesting things that I saw recently is an interview with Sam Altman, who obviously is one of the founders of OpenAI. One of the trends that he's observed over the last, I don't know, year, year and a half, two years, is fairly obvious with

with AI, which is that you can do more, you can increase the productivity at a company with fewer employees. I mean, I think that's pretty obvious. And with the direction things are going, one of the predictions he's made is there will soon be one person billion dollar companies. Okay, and just think about that. You have one individual running a company that's doing a billion dollars.

in revenue or maybe it's a billion dollars in market cap, either way, that's pretty astonishing. And I believe that. I think that will happen. And what I think is most interesting about AI is, and there's a few different flavors of AI, as I think most people know, I think the most interesting flavor is generative AI.

This is sort of the ability to actually create new content through the use of these models. And you can see where that could be used already in a number of different use cases in business. Just for example, you mentioned in the intro that I've spent a lot of time managing customer support and contact centers. That's an area where you really could...

Stephen Brown (19:16.846)
deploy AI because for a lot of things, the questions and the issues that come in are very solvable if the pieces can be put together and you can replicate the way a human being would solve a problem in many cases. Now, not every case, but certainly, you know, level one, level two types of issues that come into a contact center, I think a lot of that can be automated through generative AI.

I saw another article recently that talked about various different careers that are going to be affected. Obviously, customer support is one. But one of the other ones that was mentioned is mathematicians. You don't necessarily need a brilliant PhD figuring out a math, a solution to a complex math problem when generative AI can do that for you. And you can start to think about lots of other careers like that.

where this kind of technology, you know, it may not replace 100 % of the people in the career, but it's going to make a huge impact. And so I think, you know, if I were a college student today, or if I was, you know, getting ready to go to college and thinking about a career, I would think about a couple things. First of all, you know, where is it that I can...

contribute if I understand AI and how to deploy AI, how can I make a contribution? And so whether that's in software engineering or whether that's in some other technical area, that's one thing. But the flip side is what careers are going to be impacted by AI? And those are careers you probably want to steer away from. Because 10 years from now, 15 years from now, who knows?

the demand for those careers are going to be a whole lot less than they are today. Yeah, it is. I agree. It is paradigm shift. It's just going to evolve, I think, so many different groups from whether it's in marketing, sales, operations. There's going to be different flows, in my opinion, across all of those where AI is just going to have such an impact. no question about it. It's going to affect probably most

Stephen Brown (21:33.934)
Certainly, you know, the, you know, the fields where, you know, the white collar field, I would say the most transformational technology in our lifetime that I've seen. So this is my favorite question coming up. You know, you've been with some companies, you've started some companies. We actually worked together at a company for a while, which was an excellent experience with you. And now you've started, you've co -founded.

consulting company for to help to do business turnarounds without, you know, let me explain it. I'd love for you to tell me about what was your passion behind that. And then if you could just share with the audience, you know, a couple of learnings that stuck out for you over your career. Sure, sure. Happy to. Yeah. So, so we formed Newport Partners last year, late 2023. There's three of us.

We are all former C -level executives and we've worked together in a company, we've worked obviously in different companies. And in many of those experiences, it's been situations where we've needed to turn the company around. There was some performance issue, the company was not growing, the company wasn't profitable, could be any number of different things. And we've done this, large companies, startups, NASDAQ companies.

private equity companies. And so we have experience being parachuted into situations as an employee of those companies, running one of the functions in the company and transforming that company to take it to a level where the performance is greatly improved. And so, you know,

The three of us have, you know, we've all been doing this for a long time. We've been in the technology telecom industry for over 30 years, each of us. And we, you know, we decided that what we would do is form a consultancy that's focused on doing just that. So our thesis was that there are a lot of companies and we're talking, you know, more or less, you know, mid cap companies. So say with a, you know, a market cap of

Stephen Brown (23:52.142)
you know, a billion or two billion in revenue kind of in that in that same range, somewhere in there, not, you know, not necessarily, you know, Fortune 10 companies, but, you know, companies in that range. And there's a lot of companies, the New York Stock Exchange and the NASDAQ combined, there's over a thousand companies that kind of fall into the category we're looking at, which is, you know, up to two billion in sales, technology or telecom companies. And it turns out that

Something like 75, 80 % of those companies are basically stuck. They're not growing. Okay? And they've been stuck for some period of time. And only a small percentage of companies in that population actually exit from that. So they either, you know, execute their way out of it and start to grow again. And for that, there's only, you know, like less than 10%. Or they have some other kind of an exit. Either they get acquired or they go bankrupt.

So we kind of saw this opportunity of companies that we're super familiar with, you know, kind of that business. We felt we could get our arms around companies of that size and we could really help them turn things around. So that's really what we do. You know, we go into these companies, we do a very, you know, quick assessment of the problem. And again, a lot of it is listening and formulate an action plan for them. We call it a blueprint.

And then what we can do, we can either turn that over to the leadership to go execute, or we can assist with executing. We can act as advisors and to help them through the transformation. So that's kind of what we've done here. Awesome. That sounds exciting. I know for starting a new business, I've done this myself here recently, and there's a big difference. Find out pretty quickly.

come from a company of a couple of thousand people and hey, we're gonna go meet this customer. You know, who's putting that PowerPoint together? I am. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, we don't have any admin support. We don't have any staff. Right now, it's the three of us. However, what we have done is we've put in place a number of partnerships. So for example, when we go into a client and they need help,

Stephen Brown (26:11.79)
You know, like one of the situations that we actually find fairly often is the client has done some acquisitions and they have, you know, maybe three or four or five or more companies that, you know, basically now are all operating under the umbrella of the parent company, but they're all operating independently. And so they need to pull it all together under, you know, under a single system. So, you know, system consolidation. So we have a company that we work with that, you know, one company is an expert in doing Microsoft dynamics.

both ERP and CRM implementations. Another one is expert in doing NetSuite implementation. So depending upon what platform the company wants, we can help with that through the use of partners. We have another partner who does digital marketing. So if that's a skill set or a service that's needed, we have a company that's really, really good at that. And we have several other companies that we partnered with. So...

It's really, it's the three of us, we're kind of the pointy end of the ship, but we have a lot of partners who can do pretty much anything. And you mentioned AI, we have a partner who does AI application development. So they basically custom development. So, depending upon the use case and the workflow that the company's looking to automate, we have a company that can do that. So that's kind of how we operate. It's a leveraged model.

That's great. Well, I mean, you're bringing, you know, best in class to the table for these clients. You know, you've been there. You're not going to waste a lot of time. It's like, you know, hey, we know how to help. We've got the right people to help you do this. And I'm sure it's a breath of fresh air for a lot of companies. Yeah. You know, the thing that we found is the three of us, our backgrounds are operations, you know, are operating. We've run companies and.

One of the things that differentiates Newport Partners from sort of traditional consulting companies is that most of those consulting companies have professional consultants. They've been doing consulting for all or at least most of their careers. Very few of them have 30 years of experience running company. So we have a lot of credibility when we step into a company because immediately people understand, yeah, well these guys have a track record when they...

Stephen Brown (28:31.79)
you know, when they talk to us about problems, they understand at a pretty deep level what we're facing. And so, you know, we can build a relationship and rapport and credibility really, really quickly. And I think, you know, probably probably to a greater extent than a traditional, you know, consultancy. OK, so one last question for you, Doug, over the last, I don't.

probably 10 to 15 years, the profession that I've spent most of my time in sales has gone through quite the transformation. Internet democratized information, customers are very sophisticated today. There's peer reviews, social networking, trade shows, there's lots of stuff out there. I'd be interested in your view or what you could share with the audience. If you're a modern salesperson today,

And when you get to the point where you're meeting with the CEO or CTO or COO, depending on the situation, what's your advice for that salesperson? I guess my, my primary piece of advice would be don't try to sell, which may sound a little counterintuitive, but what I appreciate and maybe conversely don't appreciate in a salesperson, what I appreciate is someone who is serves more as an advisor.

Generally, unless they just happen to just hit it right, hit me on the right day for something I just happen to need at that moment, I generally ignore those. What I prefer is a salesperson who acts more like a trusted advisor, you know, who kind of helps me think through problems that matter to me, you know. So I would say, first of all, try to understand what it is that C level person that you're quote unquote selling to, what matters to them.

You know, what makes a difference? Is it if it's a, if it's, you know, head of operations or, you know, a COO kind of job, is it, you know, is there a supply chain, you know, improvement they're looking for? Is there procurement or are they looking to optimize delivery or whatever it might be? And try to serve as an advisor where you can help them with the problem that they care about or the problems that they care about.

Stephen Brown (30:51.342)
And it may be that they can use the service or the goods that you're trying to sell. It may be, or it may not be, and that's okay too. You want to develop that relationship. So for me, the best salespeople are ones who've developed a relationship and provide me with either information or assistance for doing my job better. And there's a lot of ways salespeople can do that. One of the examples I can give you is when I was with a technology company, I spent a few years in Europe.

and I ran their procurement as a large telecom company. And they had about a little over a billion and a half, I think, of spend, US dollars in spend. And so we made connected devices and sold them into the telecom market. And there was one salesperson in particular who sold, you know,

a number of different components to this company, displays, memory, microprocessors, et cetera. And he would come, he was based in London and I was based in Amsterdam, and he would come to town, meet with me about once a month, and he would share with me the state of the industry. And so, you know, what's going on with pricing? What's going on with supply? What's going on with the technology? What are the technology roadmaps, et cetera? And yes, he was selling for sure.

but he was educating me. And so every time I met, I was happy to meet with a guy. I was happy to go out to lunch with the guy. Every time he met with me, I learned something that helped me with my business and my career and my job. And so I look forward to those meetings. And I think that's what you want to do as a salesperson trying to sell throughout the company, but with your interaction with the C -level person, you want to develop a rapport where you're actually helping them.

And it's indirect, it could be indirect. You're helping them in their job, in their industry, in their career, in their business, and they look forward to the meetings. So if you can do that as a salesperson, you're gonna win every day. Well, Doug, that's all the questions I have for you today. Thank you so much for joining us on the edge. And...

Stephen Brown (33:07.438)
participating and are getting to know your CXOs. I'm sure there's a lot of valuable information people are gonna pull out of this conversation and your insight. So thank you again for your time and we'll see you next time. Thank you, Steve. Great to be here.