Sam Donaghey
Welcome to the Fast Slow Motion podcast where we teach you how to build a business you love while enjoying your life. I’m your host, Sam Donaghey, and I’m also joined today by Fast Slow Motion’s Director of Growth, Michael Johnson. Michael, as always, it’s great to see you today.

Michael Johnson
It’s great to see you as always, Sam.

Sam Donaghey
Well, in today’s episode, this is one that you’re not going to want to miss. We’re diving into a topic that impacts every business leader, sales forecasting and growth planning. So whether you’re a founder, a sales executive, or you’re just trying to set realistic business goals, this conversation is going to provide actionable insights to help you scale without stress.

Joining us today is Lindsay Rios, a fractional revenue leader, an expert in sales forecasting, growth strategy, and revenue operations. She’s worked across industries from SaaS to marketing to AI, and she’s known for her no-nonsense approach to building realistic, data-driven revenue strategies. Lindsay, it’s awesome to have you here today.

Lindsay Rios
It’s fantastic to be here.

Michael Johnson
Lindsay, thanks for joining us. I first came across

on LinkedIn.

You had this viral two million plus impressions post, maybe more than that by now, who knows? Talking about forecasting and it really resonated with a lot of people. And so I dove in and became really interested with your work and really about that post specifically. What do you think made that really hit a nerve with your audience?

Lindsay Rios
Well, although it was about forecasting and kind of a little bit more of what not to do, which leads so many businesses into trouble, it also had, I think, a double message in there, which was the fact that so many of us are just tired of losing our jobs from failed businesses. And the economy for the last couple of years is just…

It’s been just the worst, right? And so if you haven’t personally been affected by it yourself, your spouse probably has, your sister, your, know, and so, you know, there was, I think, a double message there and that probably was what kind of really seemed to hit for a lot of people. But also what I learned more and more is it was very opinionated, right? I mean, it had an opinion and those types of posts.

for better or worse are the ones that seem to resonate with someone.

Michael Johnson
Absolutely, you know the the opinion you shared in that you really highlighted how the the flaw with top-down approach to forecasting and well Can you break down why that is so much of a flaw and why businesses should be thinking about setting revenue goals?

Lindsay Rios
Right.

Yeah, well, the thing is, that it’s kind of the more natural, easy way for our brains to operate if we think, well, if we are supposed to do said number for revenue, let’s just call it 10 million, you know, this year, because that’s what’s good, quote unquote, right? For a long time, there’s been a playbook, especially with startups about like at minimum doubling your ARR year over year, right? And in the glory days, it was four or five X-ing it, you know, things like that.

And so you just go by saying, well, that’s what we’re supposed to do. So now we’re gonna go top-down or backwards engineer what we have to do kind of per quarter or per day now in order to hit the 10 million. Instead of saying, based on how our business operates right now, what can we actually hit by the end of the year?

And so when you kind of throw a dart and say that’s what we’re supposed to do and then try to create a strategy and a forecast that makes it so that it happens, you can make it. You can make whatever you want, you know? But is it actually going to happen? Very unlikely, right? And then, you we wonder why so many startups really just fail.

Michael Johnson
Yeah, do you find that when folks get in that situation, know, you’re fractional and you work with a lot of different companies, you find when folks get in that situation, they find themselves to do things that are maybe different than their original mission to cover the gap or different than they would have would have intended to do otherwise just to fill that gap to hit that mark.

Lindsay Rios
Yeah, that’s a really excellent point in question. Yes, that’s when you really start to see one, you start to see so many pivots constantly. You we always talk kind of say, you see this in job descriptions, even to this day for working at early stage. If you don’t like working in an ever changing environment, this isn’t for you. And part of it’s like, why does it have to be so ever changing? Maybe it shouldn’t be that extreme. The fun of startups is it’s fast moving. You can make big impact.

Michael Johnson
Yeah.

Lindsay Rios
Like you can find that you’ve found some wonderful product market fit somewhere and soar. That should be fun and ever-changing. But having to constantly pivot your strategy because you’re not getting to where you need to get, that’s not actually a good thing. We shouldn’t be prideful in that, I think. So to your point, I think, yeah, you start seeing a lot of pivots. You also see a lot of wackadoodle things because you’re like, well, you know, like, I mean, and I’ve been in those conversations, know, someone saying, well, why don’t we just double our ACV?

Sure, no problem. That’s super easy to do. Why not, right? And unless you’ve had usually enough experience to know that that does not work that way, you don’t know to push back and be like, that’s a terrible strategy and that won’t work out for us.

Sam Donaghey
why do you think pivoting happens so often at the moment? Is it because of the market conditions currently?

Lindsay Rios
I mean, even when the market was good, you see these pivots a lot. think, again, because of the way strategy is often done, it’s always this, we’re supposed to do it like this, or the board says it’s better to hit these numbers. And so the game becomes, do anything we can to hit those numbers.

and you get maybe a quarter in and see, uh-oh, I don’t think we’re anywhere near hitting the 10 mil. Just keep using that number as the example. So we got to do something radical to get there. And you have these war room meetings and quarterly strategy sessions. You shouldn’t be recreating your strategy every quarter.

You do it if it’s absolutely necessary, but it should not be your normal thing. And all that really tells me, and in my opinion also tells a board is you don’t understand your business, right? And so we have seen a huge shift of it’s no longer growth at all costs. Lots more about let’s be profitable, let’s stay bootstrapped and not be reliant on VC and PE funding, things like that.

And I think you’re seeing a little less of these major pivots in that way, but we still have a lot of struggling businesses, right? And so just because of that, you’re going to see people constantly in fear, pivoting around trying to find the success.

Sam Donaghey
Lindsay, I don’t know much about forecasting, I’d imagine it’s hard if you don’t have a lot of data. So what are some ways leaders can improve their forecasting when they don’t have much of that to rely on?

Lindsay Rios
Yeah, I mean, that’s a really good point. And it’s part of why being in the startup world is really hard because when you first start, you don’t have data. So you use a lot of kind of data that other people have given to you as a guidance of what you probably should be aiming for. That’s kind of all you can really do at that point is as similar industry and maybe product and size and stage and all that stuff.

what’s supposedly best practice, right? What’s conversion rates supposed to be for win rates and average sales cycle with our contract values. Like what should those be? But I think the other thing is not enough companies early on create a great.

system to know how to get those accurate data points from their own motions. So you see like things like RevOps being focused on way too late in companies. And so when you do get data, I see actually have a good friend who did a post on this just this week with sales leaders really failing at and founders failing at forecasting purely because they think they know what their win rates are from their pipeline.

but it’s very, like, you know, napkin math, and it’s really, it’s wildly inaccurate. I see that constantly as a fractional leader when I’m talking to CEOs, and I’m like, so what are your conversion rates like? And the way I hear them calculate, I have one who’s like, well, I just go by off of the amount of Calendly meetings that get booked, and then what actually wins. And I’m like, no. Like, that’s not actually a win rate that you can use for true forecasting. So when you don’t have the data, again, use some best practice,

Michael Johnson
Mm-hmm.

Yeah.

Lindsay Rios
Also, you have to be so sure about making it so that the data you are getting is actually reliable. And then there’s that good old gut and intuition, right, that you got to use in the early days. So you have to give yourself more space than ever is the other thing. I think we forget about that part. I think we also don’t get taught that, honestly, of how much of a buffer you should create for yourself in forecasting. And so that way…

Sam Donaghey
Ahem.

Lindsay Rios
you have that room for error, especially if you are reporting to a board, right?

Michael Johnson
Yeah, you know, one common

thing that we hear a lot is the concept, it’s like the Jim Collins concept of firing a bunch of bullets and then firing the cannonball once you find the right, once you’re accurate. And it seems to what you’re talking about, creating space. mean, how can leaders effectively create a culture or create an organization where there is that room for figuring out the right move, especially early on? Because founders, if you’re a startup,

To your point, you don’t have the data. So what have you seen be successful as far as people finding that space and trying a bunch of different things to find what works?

Lindsay Rios
Well, I think one of the things to know your space and kind of margin of error is having a handful of ways to forecast and seeing how much space you end up with every result from that model, so to speak. So one thing that I talk about is it’s not that top-down, is it something you shouldn’t ever do?

it’s that it can’t be the only thing or the main way that you’re doing it. So like having multiple ways of forecasting and it could be from your own life, just a model, some sort of model you use with win rates and basically probabilities, right? With as much data as you could guess. Even within that kind of framework, there’s lots of ways to do it. So just if I broke it down a little more, if I have a pipeline and I have…

five stages in the pipeline, right? Like discovery scheduled as number one and then maybe demo and whatever, right? Until closed one. I could do it where I could get a good, I’m gonna give a good guesstimate of what we’ve been doing and what’s standard for the likelihood of something closing if it’s just in stage one by said timeline. Let’s just say by the end of the quarter. I could just apply it to every deal that I have in.

my stage one pipeline at the top of the quarter. And I could say, this is probably what I’ll close, just based off of what’s in stage one. That’s one way you could do it. You could also do it where you go, I’m going to apply the probability of things closing per stage. So whatever is in discovery schedule, whatever is in demo schedule, those are all different probabilities. I’ll do all of those and see what that number looks like.

You might then also do a little bit of overall. There’s X amount of revenue in the pipeline. We tend to close this much by this time. So you can have a couple ways and see what all of the numbers end up being. If they’re all really, really close, cool. Maybe your margin of error isn’t going to be as grand. If they’re really large, one, you should probably dig in there. And two, maybe your forecast is going to be pretty big.

If you have actual sales reps, which is my favorite, when you can really start giving yourself some good data, then you also can include what their forecasts are going to be, which is a whole thing of a huge culture you have to build on proper forecasting even for that.

but they’re your boots on the ground. So like you can model all you want out of a pipeline. But then again, also the danger with using your data if you have a lot of it is it’s only going to give you an idea of what could happen based on past behavior. Well, we all experienced 2022 and 2023 where…

We weren’t doing past behavior anymore all of a sudden, So you have your boots on the ground, people saying, well, I know that we used to do a 30 % win rate from discovery schedule, but I’m not getting that anymore, right? So like when I was at the organization I was at during that time, we weren’t actually losing deals more. It’s not that our win rate overall went down more, but it did decrease within the quarter because our sales cycles started extending.

Michael Johnson
Yeah. Yeah.

Sam Donaghey
you

Lindsay Rios
because of what was going on in the economy. Way more decision makers were getting involved, more redlining, right? Way more hesitancy from our prospects. So effectively, if I’m looking at just the snapshot of that quarter, our win rate did go down. And I would have never known that if I had, I do this game with my AEs called Name That Forecast, where they’re giving me a forecast a few times in a quarter.

Michael Johnson
Mmm.

Yeah.

Lindsay Rios
and we were about halfway through and we were forecasting 10K of MRR less than where we had started. And I was like, whoa, what’s happening? Let’s talk about it. when you have them too, now I used them as like a, know, when I’d come to my leadership, I’d say, okay, Lindsay, wait, we just kind of started labeling it. So was like, Lindsay forecast is about this to this. And I usually gave myself about 5K of MRR of a buffer. And that was me using my models with past data, things like that.

A forecast looks like this. They’re usually about, when we first started, were only about 80 % accurate. So I would take that into account, right? And then we’d have one more version. so I’d always kind of say, we’re probably gonna land between here and here.

Once we started working on the AE forecasting, they actually got to be about 90 to 95 % accurate with their own forecast too. So again, now I can get my margin to be even smaller and we could be a little bit more accurate. there’s lots of inputs. It can get a little scary, but once you get them, just using them as a good frame of reference of like, we’re probably gonna be between here and here. Now, if you’re giving yourself like a $50,000 buffer,

Michael Johnson
Yeah.

Yeah.

Lindsay Rios
That’s just, that’s silly. That’s dumb. But don’t be afraid to say, honestly, we might be 15K up or down, but here’s exactly why.

Michael Johnson
so there’s someone in the audience, Lindsay, right now that’s like clenching with what you said because there’s like uncertainty in the forecast, you know? So how do you get leaders to become comfortable with that margin of error with uncertainty in the forecast?

Lindsay Rios
Right.

So, I mean, the thing that sucks is that if what you’re forecasting isn’t what you’re hoping for and what your targets are really, then your job there is now we got to get to work as a go-to-market team, not just the sales leader, it’s not just their job, right? On what do think we can do to make up this gap, right? And that’s why forecasting is so important because the point of forecasting is that it’s foreshadowing, right? It’s way before. So you should have enough time to hopefully intentionally change what you’re forecasting.

Michael Johnson
Duh.

Lindsay Rios
But if you cannot do much about it, most second or equally as important thing to just know is just know why it’s going to probably be the way it’s going to be. I think there’s just so much fear about, just can’t hit that number, therefore I fail. No.

This goes actually to a thing I preach a lot out there too about with CEOs, they’re so afraid to go to the board to say, we’re only going to do this number, right? Or this is how we ended up doing last quarter. Instead of it actually, here’s how I put it. Boards.

don’t care as much about you doing these textbook unicorn numbers. They care more about you understanding how your business operates. And people don’t want to invest in you and give you money when you can’t clearly show that I understand our business. So don’t be so afraid if you’re in this position of like, I have a really big margin of error in my forecast, as long as you can explain why.

Sam Donaghey
you

Michael Johnson
Yeah. And that goes back to, talked about that, the method of, think you said it was a Name That Forecast of capturing the forecast, snapshots along the way in between forecast periods and measuring that against what you had previously forecasted. You know, the traditional approach is you’re looking at lagging indicators and you’re projecting it forward. Right. And so what you’re talking about is capturing in the moment snapshot data that could maybe trail up or trail down and tells you about

Lindsay Rios
Yeah. Yeah.

Michael Johnson
the accuracy of that forecast before that forecast period ends. So, I mean, that’s a powerful tool. mean, how have you seen, how drastically have you seen plans change? What have you seen happen with that approach that helps you versus a traditional just kind of lagging indicator approach?

Lindsay Rios
Yeah,

well again, think that if you, first it goes all the way back to the way that pipeline gets managed in the organization period. So none of this, I will have to say, none of this will ever work if you don’t have a really good pipeline management culture already. When I’m working with really early stage companies and founders, half the time is just kind of,

educating on what should and shouldn’t be in a pipeline and why. And so you got to get through that already. And then if you’ve got sales teams, you need to align every single person now on going about it the same way. That’s really tough. Most organizations truly don’t do pipeline management well.

Michael Johnson
Mmm.

Lindsay Rios
They use the approach of do something because I said so, too, right? And they get AEs in the habit of just updating their pipeline, again, because it’s just something you should do, not because they’re actually doing it as a part of their normal selling motion and know why it’s good for them. So just for a moment, we’ll assume that it’s the most beautiful pipeline management ever.

Michael Johnson
Yup.

Lindsay Rios
Now, you know, we can talk about the fact that the forecasting itself is now another muscle to build on top of that because the problem with when you have AEs forecasting, same thing with sales leaders, when we’re not taught how to forecast ahead of time, most of us are not, we’re all just learning by doing.

We tend to have happy ears. We tend to overinflate it. I’m pretty sure this is gonna close. Here’s my commit. There’s not a good scientific version of what commit or most likely or best case means. Define it however you need to in your org. Just make sure everyone’s operating from the same definitions. That way, I’ll go back to kind of the same example when I had forecasted a certain number at the top of my quarter. I’ll never forget it, because it was Q1, 2023.

And everyone was forecasting a certain way and I even knew I’m like, well, we had been doing the Name That Forecast for a couple quarters now. So I was like, yeah, you guys are about 85%, right? You you give me 85 % or you give me, you overinflate about 15 % of what you think you’re going to do. We seem to be kind of right on the money.

of what we were supposed to hit for that quarter. That actually just scares me. You don’t wanna be right on the money. You wanna be over the money. guess you wanna know for certain. So, okay, but when we did it about, we did it, I had them do it at the top of the month, because we were a quarterly business. it’s the top of the, a whole month had gone by. We do a Name That Forecast, and like I said, we actually were now, from my 80s forecasting, 10K of MRR less.

Michael Johnson
Yeah.

Lindsay Rios
That is when the economy started to really affect us. And so we decided to figure out, is there anything we can do to make up for it between now and the rest of the quarter? So they give us a chance. And I put in place a strategy. All of the GTM team was aware of it and supportive of it. The AEs had their jobs. The SDRs had their jobs. We turned it into a SPIF too, because it’s always fun to give some incentive.

Still didn’t matter. It wasn’t enough time. was a lot of external things that we couldn’t control. So we ended up putting 10K under. But because to your point that I had those snapshots and I had records of like the different things and what we saw happening.

Sam Donaghey
you

Michael Johnson
Right.

Lindsay Rios
I always do a retro at the end of every quarter and part of the retro is here’s how we forecasted at the start. This is why here’s what happened that Name That Forecast number two, this we saw an issue. Here’s what we tried to do. This is still what happened. So again, I can now go to my CEO has all the information he can to go to the board and say like, this is what happened. Economy is now affecting us. This is how we’re going to actually adjust now for Q2.

and give ourselves more of a buffer because we have some uncertainty happening. We can’t control it right now. That’s what you can do to say, I understand my business, I don’t know exactly what’s gonna happen, but I am going to prepare for uncertainty here. Versus like, but we figured it out, no problem, we’re gonna do these things and it’s gonna be just fine for Q2. No.

Sam Donaghey
Lindsay, I’ve heard that forecasting involves input from different teams, sales, marketing, customer success. How do you get everyone aligned and working together on a forecast that makes sense?

Lindsay Rios
It’s a lot of work. It’s a lot of work. But I think again, when you go back to the approach of like doing bottom-up, and I have to credit the CEO and founder that I was working with at the time of this kind of example I’ve been using.

Michael Johnson
Yeah.

Lindsay Rios
while he tried to top-down us sometimes and we would even be like, what are you doing? We know that we don’t do this. It was really the time where he ended up coming to each of us, leaders of each department saying, I really just want you to come back and at our next offsite and just say what you think is actually possible so that we can build our model again, realistically. And that was marketing, the one leading marketing saying, what do you think you can really help deliver in terms of the amount of deals created?

We had, everyone has to know what their main inputs are, basically. What are you being accountable for, for your main inputs into the holistic business model? We agreed that marketing was responsible for deals created. And a lot of times people think that should be sales, but when we’re needing marketing to help us have intentional growth in our pipeline.

then that was the metric that we ultimately decided was best for them. And mine was more about the revenue that comes from those deals created and then customer success with retention. So everyone comes in saying, here’s what I realistically think we can do for my main inputs that I’m responsible for. Here’s why. And then here’s what I think we’ll do to get to the numbers. Everyone has a piece now that goes together within the holistic forecasting of the company. And there’s no like,

Well, someone always find a way, but less likely to have the finger pointing if everyone knows very clearly, this is what I own. Now the strategies together, they overlap, right? And they have to work together in order for those things to be successful. But I think it’s not done enough in companies where there’s very clear boundaries of like, ultimately you are responsible for this part of the model.

Michael Johnson
Mm-hmm.

Yeah, you’re talking about a concept that we see a lot of what we do with building on Salesforce and HubSpot. It’s really taking that, taking the visibility that the organization needs and breaking it down into smaller components and distributing that throughout different teams and the organization. And so our theory is, and it seems like you’re saying that by doing that,

we’re going to increase the productivity, increase the performance actually of each component of that larger plan because they know what they need to own and they can own it and they can execute it.

Lindsay Rios
Yep. 100%.

Michael Johnson
So another challenge we see, Lindsay, is getting folks to use CRMs properly with that, right? And I’m sure you see that a lot working with different companies that you see. And I bet it seems like you’ve still, you work with companies that maybe still use Excel. Why do you think that is? Why do you think there’s a hesitancy sometimes to use a CRM and how do you help teams shift to manage and use a system effectively?

Lindsay Rios
Huh.

So the reputation of CRM usage in hygiene tends to be a lot of unnecessary busy work.

and you know, administrative woes and blocking me from just doing my job. That’s the bad reputation that has. And that really is just a symptom of the way that organizations have implemented their CRMs. Now, it’s no small thing to say, it’s not easy. And the larger you grow as an organization, the harder and harder it’s gonna be. So, there’s reason for it. That being said.

Michael Johnson
Absolutely.

Lindsay Rios
This kind of goes back to me also talking about reps with the pipeline and being taught, why would you even care about using it as a tool versus being a blocker and being told, do that because I said so? So.

I think like, I mean, I remember, I mean, I’ll never stop having this battle a little bit. There’s always this, it gets to a point where each department ends up having tools that they love more and feel more productive in, and it doesn’t often end up being the CRM. So it’s a constant like reeducation that you’re gonna have to have in an org about why a CRM is so important. And.

there’s a tiny bit at the end of the day of you just gotta do it. Like there is still a small percentage of that kind of discussion point, I think. Like it’s our jobs, we gotta do it. But the rest of it should be more about teaching whoever you are, if you’re the sales leader, if you’re the marketing leader, whoever you are, teaching your teams about why actually each individual contributor actually should want.

to use the CRM to the fullest, like how it actually enables them personally and meets their personal goals instead of up above, because no one gives a hoot that Lindsay needs you to do it. But if it helps teach you and helps you get to your quota or above it, and you see that now, then you’re going do it yourself. The other part I’ll say to that too is then, RevOps is never ending. You have to always be looking at how you can improve the usage of the CRM. know, little things like one quarter,

I had an OKR for my RevOps manager to literally see how many clicks it took to do an entire like sales cycle.

And like kind of just guess and like, is it reasonable? Could we be making that better? Cause there’s the fine line between things that you really need to get out of your CRM to get really powerful data and making those fields required and all that stuff.

Michael Johnson
Yeah.

Mm-hmm.

Lindsay Rios
And then are you asking for way too much and way too many steps and making it noisy, right? The amount of times you hear a sales rep just be like, I just want to open this deal and it takes me, you know, 5,000 steps, right? So it’s a balancing act. It’s really an art to be honest. But if you’re constantly auditing and getting feedback from the people that you’re asking to input into the CRM, like how can we make this better?

Michael Johnson
Yeah.

break.

Lindsay Rios
you’re gonna start seeing, I think, a lot different attitude, but it’s a little bit of a, have to gain a little trust before, and ask people to just do something before they see the results. And I’m going through it right now with one of my fractional clients where they haven’t been using a CRM, they’ve been using an Excel sheet. And he knows, he’s like, I know it’ll be better, but right now he’s like, ugh, just, I don’t wanna do it, right?

Michael Johnson
Yeah. There’s so much baggage with the CRM

sometimes, especially if they’ve had a bad experience. know, one thing that I say this a lot, but I’m stealing it. Those that write the plan don’t fight the plan. You know, and you talked about how the feedback aspect of that from the end user actually helps develop, in theory, helps develop a better overall product and you get better usage. mean, do you see that in the real world? Do see the teams that have involved the sales team, for example?

in the design of CRM have a better overall output.

Lindsay Rios
Yeah, absolutely. And I

just from a…

strategic, you know, suggestion, being iterative as much as possible versus big giant projects and only like changing things in the CRM when you feel like it’s quote unquote perfect is another really good tip to help with that because when you make really big changes in the software that people are using to people don’t like that. It’s part of why I never update my phone.

Like I use my photo in a certain way. I use my computers. It’s second nature for me. And if I, update it, you’re going to mess with what’s become second nature for me. I don’t like that. So if you’re iterative and then involving people too, and what that

Michael Johnson
Yeah.

Lindsay Rios
iteration is now they’re excited for the change because they’re like, this is going to make it better instead of one day surprising everybody. my God. I had a director of sales like 10 years ago who just loved tinkering in Salesforce. And that would be, I know he was doing something because then it would be the next time I was trying to close one an opportunity and then something would happen and I would yell at him in his office. And I was like, stop messing with Salesforce or at tell me at a time. He’d be giddy. He’d be like, do you like that? I said, no, I don’t like it.

Michael Johnson
Right.

Lindsay Rios
So don’t do that, right? Involve people more, but also try not to make them be huge changes, because now we got to figure out how to drive the car all over again. We thought we did.

Michael Johnson
Yeah.

Absolutely,

absolutely. You know, one thing you’ve talked about that we’ve heard is the fact that you have to slow down sometimes to scale. Talk a little bit about that, because that’s a counterintuitive concept, I think, to lot of folks that may be listening. Can you explain why that is?

Lindsay Rios
Mm.

Yeah, and even when people know that that’s what they need to do, it’s really hard when you’re doing it still. So I can’t say enough how often that tends to be what I do as a fractional leader these days, right? I come in, usually it’s with businesses, they’re at an inflection point, they have some big changes they need to do, they don’t know how to do it, they don’t wanna risk figuring it out on their own. And when I come in, part of why it’s so hard and scary is there’s a lot of stuff we kinda gotta either fix or set a foundation for. You cannot scale.

when you don’t have a foundation to scale from, essentially. So, or not very well, I should say. So, one of my clients that I’m with, I’ve started in November, and the first thing that we had to do is like, we don’t have any sales process, no. Like it’s all in everyone’s heads. There’s definitely processes happening. Everyone was following them, but they were all a little different.

You know getting that aligned because we can’t really there’s no way to forecast for the business farewell right now and that’s one thing they need help with so like

Things like that, so that we can implement one process that any person could come in and do and develop some KPIs and data to forecast with. We’re changing CRMs. That’s a big deal, right? Like that slows us down from actually even getting the data to forecast, but we had to. This is a very industry

tool that should be used versus what they were using before.

So, you know, that and the big thing they wanted me to help with is creating some outbound sales strategy. They’ve never done it before. Well, we’re gonna start outbounding until we’ve got any of these other things figured out. And they know all that. But they started getting really antsy the last couple of weeks of like, even though we set our basically our OKRs for the quarter to just get the foundations done, there was nothing in our plans and strategy to actually see any results or even executing the strategy. We know that.

but it’s been a little bit and they’re like, oh my God, when are we gonna start doing this stuff? just to help everyone feel a bit better, I ended up finally showing them the strategy that we’ll really start doing in Q2, which is actually very close now. And I got a CFO to smile, which I feel like would go on my LinkedIn, like CFO smiling, you know, point.

Michael Johnson
Nice.

Yeah, because it’s

typically the chief frowning officer, right?

Lindsay Rios
Absolutely. He got very excited. I was like, well, I’ve done it. I can quit today for today, you know, so, but it’s hard, right? Cause you’re, you’re, slowing down so that you can build all of these things so that you can really do a good job later. ⁓ in terms of scaling, in terms of having data that’s accurate, right? To forecast and you like all of these things. And, ⁓ it’s a scary place to be when you’re at a point in your business that you.

Michael Johnson
That’s awesome.

Lindsay Rios
probably really, really, really need to get some money pretty quick.

Michael Johnson
Yeah. Yeah. You’ve so you’ve worked across SaaS and marketing, AI, lighting design, even cannabis. Do you see some of the same forecasting and growth challenges showing up across all industries?

Lindsay Rios
Right.

Yep, absolutely. That was the thing. think you and I were chatting when I told this story, but when I started working with the lighting design company, when I first spoke with them, I was not an obvious choice coming. Most of my background is very early stage startup, no matter what.

And, but I heard the main problems they were having. And so I was just kind of like, well, and the guy had actually asked or kind of alluded to, I’m a little worried it’s not going to be a good fit for you you don’t maybe want to enjoy it, things like that. And I literally was like, well, are people a bunch of jerks over there? He was like, no. I’m like, okay. And I said, I don’t mean this to be offensive, but the problems I’m hearing that you guys have, they’re not unique.

And he was like, that’s true. That’s a fair point. Would it be nice that they found a really great fractional leader that also came from that industry? That would probably have been cherry on top, but it’s a really specific industry. And then you might find someone, but they might not be a very good fractional leader. So, you know.

Michael Johnson
Yeah, but do you think

that the breadth of experience across industries is actually a benefit? Because you’ve seen patterns across different businesses and you’ve seen what works and what doesn’t.

Lindsay Rios
Yeah, I do think actually it’s really nice. It was part of one of the reasons why I was excited about building a fractional business was that it only accelerated my ability to have a lot of industry experiences. I can’t say that there’s too many things that really are unique. I know we like to think that our businesses are unique, but, and of course they are, right? I mean, in their own ways, but.

Michael Johnson
very special.

Lindsay Rios
Yeah, but to answer

your other question, any of the same struggles with how can we forecast, they all come from the same problems that we’ve been talking about.

Sam Donaghey
Lindsay, the theme of this podcast, as you know, is building a business you love while enjoying your life. A lot of leaders feel like they have to pick one or the other. So do you think better forecasting and planning is actually going to help leaders enjoy their work?

Lindsay Rios
Yeah, because if you can know your business and forecast accurately then.

You can build a healthy and sustain a healthy business, right? If you have a health business, you can keep people employed and yourself, right? And you very graciously highlighted a quote unquote viral post I have, know, Michael, but actually the post that I’ve had that I that’s really actually taken off is one where I’m just taking a walk and I had this thought and it’s literally me reminding people that they deserve to love their job because you deserve to be happy in your life. Miserable jobs can really ruin

in our lives and we don’t get encouraged enough to stand in that ground to say like I deserve to love what I do and it’s a bit of a novel concept still we’ve really been taught for a long time and generations before like you go to work you just do your job there’s nothing about loving your job that should matter it’s just to provide for yourself or your family well things are different now and guess what you absolutely deserve to love your job and

when we need survival jobs because we’re all going to need it at some point. You should deserve to get the things that are on your non-negotiable list and just stick to it. And that’s the post that has resonated more than anything I’ve ever put out there.

Michael Johnson
Well, Lindsay, there may be some leaders listening to this right now that maybe don’t love their job right now because they’re struggling with forecasting. So maybe you can help them out. What are three things they can do today to improve their approach to forecasting?

Lindsay Rios
you

if you are in a place to have data, then let’s audit that data. Let’s make sure that it is in fact accurate. And you still might not know. There’s a lot of resources out there, right? So like that’s out there. Or you can ask me, just find me on LinkedIn. Be like, this a good way to get win rates? And I’ll be like, absolutely not. Or, yep, you’re great, right? So audit your data. If you don’t have any data, then you’re gonna need to use some best practice data like we talked about earlier.

Build yourself a couple ways of forecasting. Call it three. And then every time you wanna forecast, see what the end output is of all of those and just start using that as your kind of margin of error. But the most important thing too is understanding why do you think you’re gonna end up that way.

So knowing like this is why we’re gonna end up with this, because these are the sorts of deals in our pipeline. We actually have one giant one, but that would sway our data. took it out. Be able to tell the story of why you’re gonna get to those outputs. So that’d be number two. And number three, don’t be so afraid of not hitting the numbers, again, as much as just.

being able to explain why and what you’re gonna do about something. And that fear is hard and you’re gonna always fight it. So find yourself a mentor. If you have the financial ability, get yourself a coach, right? Or follow a few people on LinkedIn if that’s somewhere that you consume information that talk about this kind of stuff to just keep it kind of ever present in front of you because the fear part is scary and hard and so you need the people, your community.

and your gang, so to speak, to kind of keep you feeling okay and get rid of that imposter crap and things like that.

Michael Johnson
Yeah, I love that. So audit your data, multiple ways of forecasting, then figure out if you miss the forecast, they’ll just say, well, figure out why, and then sharpen your forecasting tool set to get better the next time. That’s awesome. Thank you for that.

Sam Donaghey
Well, look guys, as we wrap up, always like to ask our guests for a quote or a piece of advice that’s inspired them. So Lindsay, is there a quote that you’d like to leave with our listeners today?

Lindsay Rios
It’s by the wonderful Meryl Streep. And she says, there are some days when I myself think I’m overrated. And then she has a nice long pause. And then she says, but not today.

Michael Johnson
Nice.

Sam Donaghey
Well, Lindsay, thank you so much for joining us today.

Lindsay Rios
Thank you for having me.

Sam Donaghey
Absolutely. Well, look, that wraps up today’s episode of the Fast Slow Motion podcast. A big thank you to Lindsay Rios for sharing her insights on forecasting, scaling and sales strategy. And if you’d like to connect with Lindsay, we will also leave a link to her LinkedIn profile in the show notes. So don’t forget to subscribe to the podcast on your favorite podcast platform and you can explore past episodes at fastslowmotion.com slash podcast.

And if you’ve got any topics that you’d like us to cover or questions about what we’ve already discussed, you can reach out to us at fastslowmotion.com slash podcastfeedback.