In this episode of the Sales Hacker Podcast, we have Seamus Ruiz-Earle, CEO at Carabiner Group, who cut his teeth on Salesforce at the tender age of 17 and became the youngest Trailblazer in Salesforce history. Join us for an educational conversation about why you haven’t started thinking about RevOps early enough and how to remedy that.
If you missed episode #200, check it out here: From AE to CEO: Entrepreneurial Life Lessons with Asad Zaman
What You’ll Learn
- Finding and retaining talent as a former solopreneur
- Teaching Salesforce to middle schoolers
- Taking a long-term view on building your business
- The biggest mistakes companies make about RevOps
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Show Agenda and Timestamps
- About Seamus Ruiz-Earle & Carabiner Group [1:49]
- Teenaged Seamus’s career calling [7:49]
- The role of revenue operations today [15:58]
- Finding and retaining talent [22:08]
- Why whole-person education matters more than college [28:39]
- Paying it forward [34:18]
- Sam’s Corner [35:31]
About Seamus Ruiz-Earle & Carabiner Group [1:49]
Sam Jacobs: Welcome to the Sales Hacker Podcast. Today on the show, we’re excited to have Seamus Ruiz-Earle. Seamus is the founder and CEO of Carabiner Group. Seamus oversees the firm’s executive functions, bringing experience across a variety of industries and organizations. From financial institutions to education startups, his diverse skill sets facilitate the allocation of firm resources to best serve their clients.
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Without further ado, let’s listen to my conversation with Seamus Ruiz-Earle.
Sam Jacobs: Seamus, tell us about your baseball card. What does your company do?
Seamus Ruiz-Earle: We provide fractional revenue operation services to companies of all shapes and sizes. We provide the tactical hands-on keyboard skillset to ensure that your Salesforce systems, HubSpot systems, and all associated technologies are running with the strategic blueprinting and frame working that you need to continue to scale and be most efficient as you achieve whatever goals you’re trying to in your business.
Carabiner Group grew out of the pandemic actually as a stuck in the house project that eventually realized that we were hitting the market in a interesting way, providing those fractional resources when talent wasn’t available. So, from a supply and demand perspective to your point, we very naturally shifted to a fractional model and the market responded. Over the last 15 months or so, we’ve scaled from me as a solopreneur up to 25 employees now full-time. One of our secret sauces is alternative talent. Effectively, we’re not just looking for the traditional backgrounds. So, as someone who was young and had to work pretty hard to get their first gig, the ageism thing works both ways.
We are entirely focused now on “sending the elevator back down,” in terms of training up junior talent. To a degree, we’re starting quite early. As in, next month or the month after, I’m actually starting to teach middle schoolers Salesforce at a local middle school with the concept that, hey, it’s going to be five years or more until they’re ready to hit the workforce in a full-time capacity, but we all know Salesforce isn’t going anywhere. It is about as ubiquitous as their computer literacy courses, so why not throw Salesforce in there as well?
Teenaged Seamus’s career calling [7:49]
Sam Jacobs: Walk us through your backstory.
Seamus Ruiz-Earle: When I was 16, that summer was coming up, I was trying to find an internship and I effectively started cold calling investment banks. I found a boutique investment bank in San Francisco who had a very specific need. The CFO took my call and was impressed by my initiative and said, “Hey, there are laws about you touching our finances, but have you ever heard of Salesforce?”
Fundamentally, it was very much a trial by fire situation. I had six months in my college dorm room to learn Salesforce before the internship would begin. And so, I spent that time, Netflix on one screen, Salesforce Trailhead on the other, trying to learn as much as I could. I loved it. Ultimately I embraced the Salesforce consulting in a much more developed way.
I ended up lining up my dream job with Deloitte, and lo and behold, March of 2020, the pandemic hit. I was sent back home from college and Deloitte postponed my start date by nine months. I figured, why not double down on the consulting thing, see if I can make something of it? That’s the foundation of where we’re at today.
The role of revenue operations today [15:58]
Sam Jacobs: Let’s talk about revenue operations and why you think it’s so important today.
Seamus Ruiz-Earle: The brutal truth about revenue operations is that, despite experiencing the renaissance between probably 2019 and now, it has existed in another name, termed operations for decades. It’s always had some level of importance for teams across multiple different disciplines and multiple different industries. But traditionally, now, as we start to place the role of operations in a critical function related to revenue and the fact that folks are recognizing that revenue in general, is what is the most important part about growing a business. We’re seeing a broader shift towards a predisposition to focus on what the systems that are in place that can enable them to succeed. Focusing, not just on the end goal, but the steps that are going to get them to that point.
Sam Jacobs: What do you think the biggest mistake companies make around this broad concept of revenue operations is?
Seamus Ruiz-Earle: Not thinking about it early enough. So, particularly because the barriers to entry now are low on enterprise grade platforms, Salesforce has recognized the threat that something like HubSpot CRM, for example, posed to them and started to provide a low cost $25 a month option.
Folks have to recognize that the foundation that they begin with will make a critical difference as they go through the various stages of the growth from precede, all the way up to post-IPO, each implication from your go-to market strategy, from your CRM, from your market automation tools. All of those pieces, every time you switch, every time you move from one platform to another, that’s time lost, that’s efficiency lost, and ultimately that’s money lost, if not money spent.
So, I’d say, the biggest risk is not recognizing the value of having a revenue operations resource. It doesn’t have to be a formalized consulting engagement, but someone who you can go to and rely on to give you the proper advice at the proper time, to ensure you miss the potholes as you’re scaling up.
Finding and retaining talent [22:08]
Sam Jacobs: How do you get talent? Because part of your business strategy must therefore be that you have some insight into how to either retain great talent or train talent.
Seamus Ruiz-Earle: There’s a predisposition in general to think that you need people who have done it before. The world is evolving at a rate where you’re never going to find the person who knows everything about every tool that has been released on the market in the last 14 months.
You have to boil down to, what is going to make your team member successful? In our case, what we’ve boiled it down to is high EQ, high emotional efficiency. We can teach technical skills. EQ is something that in general has to be amassed over time. That’s why we hire people who have non-traditional backgrounds.
Every person’s experience gives them certain skill sets that they can apply regardless of industry. All you have to do is go and look for those outliers and give them a fair shake. If your employer took a chance on you and invested in you and trained you and put in blood, sweat, and tears in developing your talent base, that doesn’t mean that you’re going to have unflagging loyalty. But that’s a major retention play that a lot of folks may not focus on.
Why whole-person education matters more than college [28:39]
Sam Jacobs: I could hazard a guess that embedded within all of this perspective is a point of view on the current state of secondary education. Do you have a point of view on the utility of college in the modern world?
Seamus Ruiz-Earle: A lot more pragmatism needs to take place on both the side of the instructors and the side of the students. There’s a lot of folks who go into higher ed with an expectation that they will come out of it with the skill sets that they need to be successful in a modern economy. That is a false expectation. It is much more likely that they will have book knowledge of these things, but fail to have any practical experience that employers will actually find valuable.
For me, the best way that I can advise people to counter that is, to look pragmatically at the world and identify the tools that are industry agnostic. That’s what I did with Salesforce. It’s the most ubiquitous tool that high schoolers and college students will have never heard of until after they graduate and realize that it’s everywhere and marketable. I invested in that, and that’s what has enabled me to succeed in my career thus far.
Paying it forward [34:18]
Sam Jacobs: Before we go, we like to pay it forward a little bit. Somebody that has had a big impact on you that you think should have an impact on others, who comes to mind?
Seamus Ruiz-Earle: Charlie Chaplin and the soliloquy he gives at the end of the Great Dictator. I’d suggest that folks go out there and search up that speech. I think it has a lot to say about who and what we need more of in the world today.
Sam Jacobs: Seamus, what’s the best way for folks to get in touch?
Seamus Ruiz-Earle: Via LinkedIn, I’m always open to connecting with more folks.
Sam’s Corner [35:31]
Sam Jacobs: Hey, everybody, Sam’s Corner. Really loved that conversation with Seamus Ruiz-Earle, the founder and CEO of Carabiner Group. Just shows what you can accomplish when you put your mind to it. Fundamentally, if you’re going to build a consulting firm that offers some functional expertise that often is accomplished by full-time employees, then you have to have a point of view on, why are you going to be able to get that functional expertise if there’s a shortage in the talent market?
Seamus has a well-defined point of view on that, which is that they’re going to invest in teaching people Salesforce as early as possible. Many times the thing that separates winners and losers is the short-term versus long-term orientation. You can tell that Seamus is taking a long-term view on building his business, which is outstanding.
Don’t miss episode 202!
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