Change Management

1. What do you actually do? How are you helping the organizations that you invest in?

   • Looking specifically within the sales development space.

2. Let’s define private equity vs. venture capital funding. What do you do that’s different, and what remains similar?

3. No matter how you define it, you get brought in to make change. What are some of the biggest challenges you face when dealing with enacting that change? How do you overcome them?

4. What does your process look like? What are you bringing to the table for each of your engagements?

   • What levers are you typically pulling to help your investments grow?

   • What goals do you have?

5. What usually needs to change? Are there some top initiatives that always seem to crop up with the companies you invest in?

   • Aka, what are companies usually not doing well enough that might be a barrier to future growth?

   • How can someone listening use this to unlock growth within their own company?

Top 3 Takeaways

📈 “It’s about shared vision and goals.”

Josh’s approach to change management is one of the most empathetic and efficient methods we’ve seen. His (and Bregal Sagemount’s) goal is to triple their money in three years. To do that, he has to make operational tweaks across the organization. And to do that, he taps into the goals of the individuals responsible for those operations.

Once he and the individual operators are aligned (I want to triple our investment, you want to buy a house in 2 years), it becomes a lot easier to work with one another. Framing every change as a step toward that person’s desired outcome makes that change a lot more palatable.

This is how Josh often frames the concept of change:

“I’ll say, look, guys, I’m here today to help you get better, but I’m going to teach you things that you’re going to use not just here, but at every single company that you go to from now on, and you’re going to be successful and you’re going to make a ton of money. How does that sound?”

Sounds pretty good to us.

✨ The catalyst is usually a new hire – so adopt that mindset.

Change isn’t something that comes up organically all that often. People are usually so deep in their day-to-day that adopting a macro view takes a back seat. You know, the whole ‘forest for the trees’ saying.

Forcing yourself out of that mindset and into one where you’re able to recognize opportunity can make a huge impact. The story Josh told about auditing your inbound conversion rates is a great example – it’s something that an SDR manager deals with daily and has the data available to see where incremental change can be made.

Every month or quarter you should be asking yourself “what if we converted our inbound leads by 25% more? What’s the impact down the funnel?” Use that consistency to build momentum and elevate those small tweaks into larger-scale initiatives.

💡 “Choose what you want to work on really carefully”

A useful exercise when figuring out an order of operations for change is by leveraging an impact/effort matrix:

It’s nearly impossible to earn buy-in if you start with tasks that have long-term payoffs. It’s similarly difficult if you start with tasks that ask for a lot upfront.

That’s why Josh recommends that when enacting change, you look for high impact – low effort tasks – the low-hanging fruit.

And once you do that and earn buy-in, you can start to work on the high effort – high impact stuff.

It’s akin to the idea of taking a macro goal and breaking it down into more digestible micro goals. The momentum you build by accomplishing the micro goals makes accomplishing the macro goal more realistic. If you want to make widespread change, you have to build that momentum internally with some quick and easy wins first.