Yo T, you got hot backup? A Case of Partner GTM Trauma

This week at #catalyst23 we announced that were going to start building out loud ?? with the community at Partnership Leaders and beyond. Part of that journey is the PingPilot?builders ( Chris Buehler Tom McGeehon ) and our partners sharing our stories of where we come from, why we build, and why we chose our partners.

For as long as I can remember, I had the latest tech and enterprise partnerships in my life and they shaped me in profound and traumatic ways.

Born in '82, I was lucky to have access to computers and internet before anyone else I knew. That's because I got to(had to) hang out at my Dad's office after school.

There were server racks, PLC’s, valves, sensors and cable all over the place and lots of MS-DOS games to play. The engineers were always building cool prototypes that I'd tinker with and get shooed off.

I heard the term “hot backup” at least once a day from either my dad or the engineers. In a factory, it's a term for redundancy to make sure things never go down from a loss of a data source.

"Yo T, you got hot backup?" -Dad before soccer or lacrosse practice

Turns out, it's also a good analogy for having an extra granola bar in your bag, so you don’t get hangry.?

Uh Dad, I'm not sure I know what partnership means?

Dad was the exclusive distributor for Siemens Energy & Automation. Let's just say Allen-Bradley(competitor) was a bad word in our house - for real, that's how hardcore he flew the Siemens flag.

Until the feeling from Siemens wasn't mutual - getting a legal notice that he was being forced to be bought by a national Electrical distributor. Siemens, teaming up with their new muscle, squeezed him down to a 6 figure offer - a fraction of the value of the business. Dad declined, litigated and lost, and doubled down on the other vendors they rep'd to rebuild. It was the beginning of the end. The electrical distributor had many of the same vendors and the business never recovered.

But it was more than a business. This was a dream. Part of his identity.

It was where I fell in love with tech.

Now I get it

I followed the footsteps and headed to Purdue Engineering. Mid year, there was a job fair for Juniors and Seniors, but my Frosh brain thought I should go. I enjoy application way more than theory, so I wanted to see what applying my Purdue Education would look like.

After visiting all the booths and they gave the spiel, I asked them what a starting salary was for a Purdue Engineer. Disappointment is an understatement. The highest paying gig was for the Navy as a nuclear engineer...on a submarine! And for that, my friend, you make $85K a year!

I dropped out at the end of the year and went to work on Dad's new venture, distributing a new-fangled technology, cellular phones. It was the beginning of my experience marketing, selling, and servicing a recurring revenue model - in other words, Go To Market.

We were the first dealers for Voicestream (became T-Mobile), introducing GSM technology to the market. It was great. MDF programs, tickets, trips. Voicestream and T-mobile were genuine partners. We broke bread together, had fun together.

The carriers looked for well connected and respected entrepreneurs in the market to build the brand and grow market share together.

The biz was growing footprint, but not fast enough, and Dad decided to acquire a regional business that focused more on B2B, with brands like Nextel and Sprint, doing much bigger corporate deals. We again were the marketers, salespeople and service centers.

It was a fun time and where I found my passion for wireless, unified communications, selling subscriptions and working with a partner.

Wait, nope. I lost it.

If you don't remember, Nextel and Sprint merged together in 2005. It didn't take long for this new mashup of leadership to forget about the partnership deals they had made.

It started with AT&T opening corporate stores in the next plaza, but they would still "let us" have the repair business, while they would have better phone prices than they would give us and national media budgets to promote them.

But the nail in the coffin is burned into my mind as the antithesis of partnership. Dad was working in one of the B2B stores that day and a long time customer came in to buy a new Sprint phone for one of his employees. He checked out and everything seemed normal until the guy didn't leave the parking lot. He popped the car door back open and came back in. Dad thought "maybe he wants to get some accessories or forgot his keys".

Sprint had just called him on the very phone that he just bought and told him that if he took the phone back in and returned it, they would ship him the same one for free the next day.

There's only one reason you do that. So you don't have to pay your partner the split on the deal.

The customer and dad had a long silence. Dad knew. The customer knew. Awkward all around. But, in the moment, what are you going to do? They cut the channel as blatently as possible. It was a non-recoverable blow to the partnership.

The carriers built their subscription bases on entrepreneur's personal brands, and, in the end, shareholders reaped the benefits of the reduced cost of cutting the channel once the infrastructure was in place.

All that said, at 41, I genuinely get it. Don't agree with it, but I get it.

Fast Fail Forward

"Treat people as if they were what they ought to be and you help them become what they are capable of being"

Over the course of the next 20 years:

• Partnered with 700 manufacturers selling direct to consumer via a partner subscription model similar to Costco
• Founded product companies with partners - contract manufacturers - (Modern Smart Leather sofas, Solid Surface Countertops),
• Managed partnerships with MSFT, LinkedIn, Lowes, Home Depot...
• Built 3 SaaS companies all around partnerships and channel disruption

There's a theme. I vowed to be the channel disruptor, not the disrupted.

But disruption does NOT always mean cutting the channel. Technology can disrupt while preserving the ecosystem's equity.

I'm still bullish that the world needs more partnerships. Partners make you more resilient. More reliable. More scalable.

But those partnerships need to be more equitable for all the participants in the value chain.

As the saying goes, if you want to go fast, go alone.

If you want to go far, partner up.

It's the "hot backup" for your GTM.