From Generalist to Specialist: The Ultimate Guide to Vertical Focus

Brandi Starr [00:00:35]:
Hello, hello, hello, and welcome to another episode of Revenue Rehab. I am your host, Brandi star, and we have another amazing episode for you today. I am joined by Corey Quinn. Corey has 17 years of agency experience, including a Scorpion CMO, where he helped grow revenue from 20 million to 150 million in just six years. He just published his best selling book, anyone? Not everyone. A proven system for agencies to escape founder led sales. And today, he helps digital agency founders scale revenue and profits with deep specialization. Corey, welcome to Revenue rehab.

Brandi Starr [00:01:20]:
Your session begins now.

Corey Quinn [00:01:23]:
Hi, Brandi. I'm super excited to be here with you.

Brandi Starr [00:01:27]:
I am excited to have you. You've got an impressive background, so I know we will have a great discussion today. But before we dive into that, I like to break the ice with a little wusa moment that I call buzzword banishment. So what overused word would you like to get rid of forever?

Corey Quinn [00:01:49]:
Gosh, you know what? We just got to stop using the word viral. Okay? So I, along my agency career, I worked at a company called Science, and science was also an incubator, and they incubated a company called Dollar Shave Club. Dollar shave Club got on the map because they made a YouTube video that guess what? Went viral, right? And they kind of put this concept of virality into the common language. This was about ten years ago, 15 years ago, and they were a massive success. They went from unknown to known. They eventually sold their business to Unilever for a billion dollars. And ever since, everyone's using this term viral. And I'll tell you, the beef I have with this word is that there are a, uh, there's a lot of focus.

Corey Quinn [00:02:42]:
Brands obviously want their message or their, uh, you know, their. Their. Their brand, if you, for lack of better term, to go, to go viral. The challenge is that, uh, there is no scientific method that produces. Reliably produces virality or something catching on. And so as a result of that, uh, that desire to get the benefits of. Of. Of your message spreading quickly through, let's call it virality or being viral, I think it takes your eye off the ball as a brand manager, as a CEO, as a CMO or a CRO, on what really matters.

Corey Quinn [00:03:15]:
What I believe, what really matters is your customers and clients that you're serving and that's where you should focus your content, not on some concept of virality.

Brandi Starr [00:03:25]:
Yes. I was gonna say, if I had a dollar for every time I heard some CEO CMO somebody else, that was like, okay, we gotta figure out how to go viral. I think my bank account would be totally viral with dollars.

Corey Quinn [00:03:40]:
It would close.

Brandi Starr [00:03:41]:
It is. Yes. I'm like, and I would very much love that. But it is always. It's the most random things that catch on, and, you know, and it's also not always good. You know, there are definitely ways that I have seen companies go viral, and, you know, not that it's been bad for them, but it's a been unimpactful, you know? And so, yes, I am with you. I am definitely annoyed by the consistent desire to go viral or calling something viral just because they got a few extra clicks and likes. And I'm like, you know, your 500 followers is not viral.

Corey Quinn [00:04:26]:
That's right.

Brandi Starr [00:04:28]:
So now that we've gotten that off our chest, tell me, what brings you to revenue rehab?

Corey Quinn [00:04:35]:
So I am super passionate about the fact that. And so I work, as you mentioned, in the domain of agency, founders. And agencies are effectively service based businesses. But this also applies to SaaS, which is that founders who get stuck in this sales role because they lack clear definition of a vertical market or a vertical focus for their business. A lot of businesses, a lot of agencies that I know of that I work with, want to build a business that operates independent of the founder. That is a big goal, especially if you want to sell one day or maybe just to more cash flow the business. But unfortunately, the typical route an agency founder goes is they start an agency and they start saying yes to everybody. They say yes to the local businesses and whoever they can get business from.

Corey Quinn [00:05:33]:
And while saying yes gets them in business, it also prevents them from building a company that they could truly scale. So that's why I'm here. I'm excited to have this conversation with you and share with your audience some of the principles and ideas, concepts that I've learned over the years to help you to escape founder led sales.

Brandi Starr [00:05:55]:
Awesome. And so I also believe in setting intentions. It gives us focus, it gives us purpose, and most important, it gives our audience an understanding of what they should expect from our episode today. So what is your intention? What's your best hope for what people will take away from listening in?

Corey Quinn [00:06:16]:
My best hope is that the listeners come to realize that the perceived risks of taking becoming a specialist in a vertical market are much lower than what people typically think of. And in fact, the upside of being a vertical market specialist is massive, especially when compared to the potential downsides.

Brandi Starr [00:06:42]:
Okay. And so I want to, my first question is, I want to connect the two, because you talked about the challenges of founder led sales, and then you shifted to talk about the risk and reward of verticalization. How do those two things go together?

Corey Quinn [00:07:01]:
So there are three reasons that I've discovered over the years and really studying this topic for a while now that cause founders to really get stuck in that founder led role. Okay. The first one is that they lack a clear focus on a vertical market. Okay. And I'll give you a quick, quick story. So there's a guy, the agency founder, his name is Mike. Okay. Mike is a great guy.

Corey Quinn [00:07:24]:
I met him, I've interviewed him on my podcast. And his story is he started his agency as a generalist, very similar to what I said a couple minutes ago around. He started his agency by just saying yes to everybody. He said yes to the local agency, the local dentist. He even built a website for the local ice cream truck guy. Right. And while he was in love with being in business and building this company, pretty soon he became frustrated and kind of fed up with the business that he built. See, the challenge was, you remember him telling me that he would go into sales meetings, and I have to remember, okay, what does this prospect want? Do they want leads? Do they want clients? Do they want patients? Do they want cases? Or is it a furniture store? And, you know, this led to his lack of ability as a founder to really create a process, a true sales process that's repeatable.

Corey Quinn [00:08:19]:
It's not dependent on him, because every deal that they did was custom. So that's, number one is where they have a lack of focus. And as a result of that, every sale is custom and bespoke, which pulls the founder back into the sales role. That's number one. Number two is when the agency has watery positioning. Now, most agency buyers are not sophisticated buyers necessarily. Right now, as a result of that, an agency buyer, someone who would hire an agency doesn't have, doesnt really understand how to differentiate or think about you differently than your competition. Theyre just not sophisticated in your world enough.

Corey Quinn [00:09:04]:
And as a result of that, you end up competing on price. You end up losing the deals to lesser agencies. So I have another story to illustrate. This agency founder, his name is Tom. Hes the CEO, co founder of this agency. The other founder is an attorney. Okay? Their first client was the attorney, the co founders attorneys law firm. And they were massively successful.

Corey Quinn [00:09:29]:
They grew up from zero to $16 million in revenue in a very short period of time. A lot of success. Tom came to me because he was frustrated by the fact that they were unable to close more attorney clients. They were just not happening, no matter what they would do. Of course, I went to his website, and on his website, at the headline, it was marketing for local businesses. Nowhere on this site was anything about the expertise and the specialization around the fact that, hey, they were founded by a lawyer and a law firm and that they had this specialization. So as a result of that, that what I call watery positioning, not clearly communicating to your target market that, hey, we're built for you. You're losing a lot of opportunities.

Corey Quinn [00:10:11]:
And again, as a result of that, you go back, you become dependent on the founder. And the third one is when you have a founder that has a great network. This isn't a bad thing. It's a good thing when the founder has a great network. But what happens is, I'll tell you what happened to me when I worked at an agency with a fantastic founder. He was the ex CEO of MySpace. Now, MySpace, for your young listeners, is like Facebook today, but it was popular back in 2005 to 2008, and they made money through advertisers. As the CEO of MySpace, he knew a lot of advertisers.

Corey Quinn [00:10:48]:
He left MySpace, started an agency. And as a result of that, those relationships, we grew the agency really well. However, his network was finite, and we became dependent on him and his network to grow the agency. Sure, we tried doing cold calls and cold LinkedIn and cold email and all that stuff, but nothing worked as well as just depending on his network. So that put him in a role where we were completely dependent on him. So if you have a situation agency that have lack of a clear definition of a vertical market, number one. Number two, if you have watery positioning, and then number three, if you have a founder who you've become reliant on their network, you're effectively having a situation where the founder is absolutely stuck in that sales role. And the way out of that is to become a vertical market specialist.

Brandi Starr [00:11:42]:
Okay. And that, that definitely helps to clarify for me. And I think, you know, I know your background is agency, but I know, I feel like this covers any b2b service, completely organization.

Corey Quinn [00:11:56]:
Even tech, even SaaS.

Brandi Starr [00:11:58]:
Yeah. And that is good. That's a good point as well, because we do see that a lot in tech, wherever it starts with the founder. And we do have a number of listeners that are in that startup environment where it is sas tech as well. As those that are leading b2b service organizations as well. One of the things I kind of feel is that I'd love to hear your two cent on is, is this a, just a step in the maturity cycle in that, you know, when you're starting, it starts off founder led. You get to a point where you have to make that shift, and it is what it is, or is your position more so that we should start off, you know, sort of start where you're trying to head, which is with this more, you know, vertical focus? I mean, obviously, I believe we should start with solid positioning like that, you know, so I won't, I won't debate that one. Sure.

Brandi Starr [00:13:04]:
But, you know, starting with the leading, with the founder not being, you know, vertical, see where you get traction. Like, I could argue both sides of either start one way and grow into it, or, you know, start the other. And so I'd love your perspective there before I shift in how we, you know, make this change.

Corey Quinn [00:13:27]:
Sure. Absolutely. So what I'll share with you, what I've found is that many agencies will start off, as we've been discussing, as a generalist, and it's just a natural way to get into business, saying, yes, brings the revenue, and the revenue allows you to bring on employees and have profit and all those great things. And so the vast majority of the cases of successful agencies that will start off as a generalist and over time, build up a business with a lot of different clients doing a lot of different things, and you become, you get to that decision plan where, you know, the chaos in the business forces you to make a decision to specialize or not. The exception to that is when you have a founder who grew up in a household, let's say, of plumbers or of attorneys, and they were already predisposed to a vertical market where they understood the dynamics and the language and the sort of how that industry works because they have family who are, they grew up in that environment. And I guess another one, another exception would be if they were an employee at a company. I'll give you an example. Someone I interviewed on my podcast is he has a very successful, like, $30 to $40 million agency targeting pharmaceutical.

Corey Quinn [00:14:46]:
In the pharmaceutical industry. Well, he used to be an executive over at Pfizer, at the, in the, in the exec, in the pharmaceutical company hiring the agencies. So he already knew the buyer because he was the buyer. And that was, that was an exception where someone started off as a vertical specialist.

Brandi Starr [00:15:05]:
Okay. And that, that does help as well. So I want to talk about what are the risk here? So, you know, there is, you know, there's always a lot of times in order to get people to make a change or push for a change that they've got to understand, like, what they're really losing. And so, you know, where do you see what's the business impact of solely relying on founder led sales?

Corey Quinn [00:15:37]:
So I'll start by saying that founder led sales is inherently not bad. It becomes a problem when the agency founder, or any business founder wants to no longer be dependent on for sales. Right? In other words, to have a sales team, have a sales leader, sales people who are able to execute on that, and the founder is not 100% involved in that motion. I've met many agency founders who are involved in the sales process. They love working directly with the clients. They're more of a boutique. It's more for the agency founder who wants to scale and grow, potentially sell their agency one day. And so I would say the risk of being, let's call it, stuck in this boundary led role when you don't want to be there is that you're unable to transfer that responsibility to other salespeople without potentially, without doing a vertical specialization.

Corey Quinn [00:16:35]:
So it really becomes a big limiter on your growth for your agency.

Brandi Starr [00:16:43]:
Okay. And here's sort of the tough question. If I think about my audience, you know, we are primarily those that are leading revenue teams, so heads of marketing, CROs, so not so much the founders. And a lot of times what I see happen, and I'm in a number of CMO communities and, you know, I see the, the rants and complaints about some of the challenges that you're talking about, where the founder is, you know, hands and everything, especially sales. And how does a marketing leader who recognizes some of the challenges that you're articulating, how do they help their founder, you know, make this sort of shift or recognize the need for the shift? Because a lot of times it's like, you know, I, it's like, I get it. Like, I totally get it, and I agree, but I'm not a founder.

Corey Quinn [00:17:44]:
So first off, I love, I love this because I don't get to talk to professional marketers often enough. This is exciting for me. So the real argument, the business case for, um, for, for taking a vertical specialization is churn. If you are, if you are suffering from churn, that is not acceptable. It's probably because you have too much variability in your product or your service. You're not delivering on the promises that you had in the sales process. So once you've established that. Hey, we have a churn problem.

Corey Quinn [00:18:16]:
Um, potentially the sales are coming in through the founder, but are still not keeping keeping those. Then the way to make the argument for vertical specialization is by doing more of a quantitative analysis of the total addressable market in a specific vertical market that you have some wins in. So, for example, let's say that you have a book of business that spans a number of different vertical markets. In other words, your clients are in our attorneys and their plumbers and their manufacturing companies, variety of different ones. You want to take more of a quantitative approach, look at your book of business and look for which segment of your client base is outperforms. So, for instance, where do we get the most relative to the other, all the verticals in our book of Business? Where do we get the most revenue? Where do we retain the best? Where's our profit coming from? Use that as a data point. Then you also want to take a qualitative analysis, and you want to ask the people who run the business, that is the executive team, the CEO, you as the marketing leader, or the revenue leader. You want to ask the client success teams, who do you like working with, by the way? Client success teams typically like working with people that are successful.

Corey Quinn [00:19:30]:
So you're going to get some signal there about who your product is really a good fit for. And you want to make sure things like a vertical market aligns with the future. You know, the product roadmap and the vision of the founder, making sure that all those are aligned. And then the last step you want to do is you want to do sort of a market validation. You want to look at what is. If we were to focus on plumbers, for example, as an example, that may or may not work for this audience. But let's just go with it. Let's say you wanted to target plumbers.

Corey Quinn [00:19:57]:
Okay, well, how many plumber plumbing businesses are there in the United States today? Well, it turns out there's about 157,000 of them. What if we were able to, as a result of focusing, we captured 1% of the market, and our annual revenue, perennial per plumbing client, is $10,000, as an example. But you'd have a $15.7 million business just by getting 1% of the available market. And by the way, you have the extra benefit of building a product or a service around a specific buyer, which means you're going to be much more process driven, much more efficient, and that increases your profitability and your retention at the same time.

Brandi Starr [00:20:36]:
Okay. And that, that definitely helps, because sometimes it really is, you know, how do we put the narrative forward that, you know, yields the change?

Corey Quinn [00:20:48]:
Sure, yeah.

Brandi Starr [00:20:50]:
Oh, no, go ahead. If you had another point, I would.

Corey Quinn [00:20:52]:
Just say, you know, look, I mean, I think in my experience in influencing senior leaders, the companies I've worked at, while the data is good, like, you need to have the data to be able to steer this conversation. Say, look, if we did this, this is our upside. We do some sensitivity analysis around that, those, those, those numbers. But the, the sell is in the um, is in the emotion, selling them on the big vision of having a business that is not dependent on them, that they could, um, that it runs independently of them, um, that they would therefore, as a result, improve the potential value by an acquirer, potentially, if that's part of the vision, so on and so forth. Whatever really juices the emotions of the founder, you have to pitch it in such a way that aligns with that, so that they get excited and they want to lean in.

Brandi Starr [00:21:43]:
Okay. And so I want to shift topics just a little bit because I do know that you've got a formula that you believe is the approach to escape founder led sales and, you know, become a vertical market specialist. And, you know, everybody loves a good formula or methodology. So I want to hear that. Tell me your three parts in how do we solve this problem?

Corey Quinn [00:22:09]:
Absolutely. I'll start by saying that the area where people get this wrong is they think it's a marketing tactic problem. They don't have the right viral video or they don't have the right email sequence, and they haven't done, you know, they haven't done this marketing tactic. And I think that thats really shallow thinking. I approach it from a much deeper perspective. If you think of an iceberg, the marketing is above the waterline. The marketing taxes, whats below the waterline are what really matters. And by the way, what moved the iceberg is not the wind at the top of the above the iceberg.

Corey Quinn [00:22:45]:
Its the currents underneath the iceberg. So when it comes to whats underneath the water, there's three things. Number one, you want to get deep focus. What I mean by deep focus is you want to identify a vertical market that meets all the criteria that we talked about. You have focus. You have a strategy around creating a massive action plan that helps you to create a durable advantage. And then the third one, which is key, is you want to identify a vertical market that you have empathy for. Most businesses, most CEO's, CROs and cmos, they look at a spreadsheet of different verticals or different industries and they say, well, this is the biggest one.

Corey Quinn [00:23:22]:
This is ours because that's the biggest one and has the most spend or whatever that is. Quantitative measures. There needs to be a level of empathy and care for that industry today I believe in order to be successful. So that's what I call deep focus, identifying who that vertical is, making a high quality decision based on client data and so on and so forth. Step number one. Number two is you need to create empathic messaging, okay? The way you do that is by doing client interviews. You want to do buyers journey interviews. You want to understand of the clients that you have today that are in that vertical market.

Corey Quinn [00:23:58]:
You want to understand how and why they bought from you. What were the things that caused them to switch from their old provider and come to you. You want to understand at a deep level what those attributes are, what they care about. That's number one. Number two is you want to do competitive research. You want to look at who from our buyers perspective, our vertical market buyer's perspective, who are we being compared to? And as a result of the client interviews and the competitive analysis, you could do a positioning for that vertical market and the output of that is an empathic marketing strategy, I should say messaging strategy that speaks directly to the pains and the challenges of your specific vertical buyer. Only then, once you have the focus and you are able to communicate at a very deep level, empathic level to your target audience, that's when you can start to do marketing campaigns. Based on my research, there are 27 different marketing, sales, sales and marketing tactics that you could do at the vertical level.

Corey Quinn [00:25:01]:
I don't recommend that you do 27 concurrently, but you choose four to five over a long period of time to establish your credibility, your visibility and your trust and your believability in that vertical market over a long enough period of time and you'll begin to see the success that comes through the specialization. Now the big question is, well, what about founder led sales? Where does that come in? Well, as a result of focusing in on vertical market, you have a repetitive sales process, which is a good thing. You improve things like you know how to close the deal better because you do it. You sell the same thing to the same person over and over and over. You begin to build a repeatable sales process that does not require the founders judgment or experience and it becomes a much more efficient sale from a marketing perspective. It becomes much more. It's much easier to know exactly what to do. In fact, it simplifies everything you know, which conferences to go to, which associations to join, which PPC keywords to bid on, which articles to write, which webinars to host.

Corey Quinn [00:26:05]:
Everything becomes crystal clear about exactly where you need to spend your marketing dollars and your sales focus. And the last piece, which is really important in escaping founder led sales, you increase the trust with the buyer because your sales team and everything that they experience, every touch point they have with your brand, speaks their language. You have a ton of proof, proof points and evidence that you're an expert in that world, and you become ultimately very believable at that point. You're no longer required in the sales role. You can go focus on whatever you want to focus on.

Brandi Starr [00:26:39]:
I love that. And the fact that, you know, I think this message, in terms of the three steps, I think it's valuable even if you aren't in a situation where you have founder led sales, because listening to it, I definitely see some really strong places where we all, even if we're at larger organizations where there's not a founder, so to speak, really thinking about, do we have that deep focus in who our target audience is? Like, who are we talking to? And I love the who do we have empathy for? Because that does really change how we're able to lean into that. Not just who can we sell to, but, like, who do we really want to be selling to? Like, whose lives do we want to be making better, easier, whatever that is. And then I also liked your point number two, around empathetic messaging. And I'd like to go a little deeper there for a second, because many people, so when you talk about uncovering the pain points, what do they really care about? All those sorts of things. Many marketers, I would say, would argue that they do, that they have Personas or ICP profiles. They're talking to their customers, they're hearing these sorts of things. So I would agree that everyone is doing a little bit of this to a certain extent.

Brandi Starr [00:28:17]:
But when you said create empathetic messaging, that hit me a little bit differently as not just understanding these things and trying to write for these things or, you know, video, whatever the format is for the messaging. And so I'd love to hear more of your thoughts around, like, the distinction of empathetic messaging.

Corey Quinn [00:28:40]:
Yes, I love this. Such a great question. So I'll give you an example first, and I'll unpack it, because it is really the key to success here in marketing. There's this concept of a point of view. Typically, the point of view is about your business and the point of view on the market. I'm going to share a point of view about this business owner. His name is Luke Agebrotten. His company is called Phaser marketing.

Corey Quinn [00:29:06]:
And his deep focus is in the construction industry. And the interesting thing about the construction industry is that they have a five to one or five to two problem, meaning for every five people who are leaving the construction industry because they're aging out or whatnot, only two people are coming back in. Right. So there's this massive gap in the amount of available workers in the construction industry. Well, because this is a area of focus for his business is focused on the construction industry, he has done something really smart, which is he's a effectively, from an identity perspective, no long, no longer just in the industry of digital marketing, he is now in the construction industry. And as a result of having that identity as being part of that community, he has done things like starting a nonprofit organization. He raises money that it's for a scholarship for kids who are leaving high school and going directly into the trades. He's also speaking on stages, talking about the.

Corey Quinn [00:30:09]:
About the opportunities in the blue collar sector and about the jobs in construction and how it's actually a really wonderful career path, despite what popular belief might be, may or may not be. And so by having a point of view, his point of view is that careers in the trades or the construction industry is a fantastic. Is a fantastic career path. Now, he just doesn't talk about that. He has a scholarship. Right. He's behaving in a way that's in alignment with the interests of the industry. And that is so much more powerful than someone just using construction terms on their landing page.

Brandi Starr [00:30:50]:
And I think that, to me, is where you are truly putting yourself in the buyer's shoes. And I love that example because it is so much more than how do we just write this copy or write this blog or whatever to speak to this industry or to speak to this buyer. But it is, what I'm hearing is more, how do we speak as this buyer? How do we immerse ourselves in what they care about? And I think that's a really important distinction as well. The last question that I want to ask is something that comes up quite often, which is when you have an organization that has historically been very founder led, the founder is the face that there is some concern or hesitation when you move away from that, in the perception of how that impacts the business. You know, where it's like people can, you know, the market can start to speculate, like, is something wrong? Is this person on their way out? You know, there's some of these things that, you know, can often feel quite silly, but can impact businesses. Like, I've seen it happen. And so is that ever a concern or something that you, you know, see people having to mitigate?

Corey Quinn [00:32:23]:
Yes, I think it's a really important point because there are those cases where you have brands that are companies that are successful because they built it around the founder. Right. They, they are the face of the business. They're the personality that the influencer. And so the challenge becomes, yeah, I want to, I want to be able to go start something else and not the same time and impact this current business. In fact, I want to grow my current business. And so the where, where I've seen success in this transition is, I'll give you an example. One is a company called SAS Academy.

Corey Quinn [00:32:55]:
It's by Dan Martell was the face of that for many, many years. And very recently, he's no longer involved in the day to day. And what he did, and he's successfully exited the day to day, he still has the business, it's still growing. What he has done over a long period of time is that he has replaced himself as a day to day person in that role in that business. And then he brought in senior executive leadership to effectively deliver the same promises to the clients that he was delivering when he was the only guy, let's say, once upon a time, a long time ago, and being able to, again, over a long period of time, be able to replace him and begin to build up the brand. SAS Academy, not Dan Martell, as the, as the resource that delivers on the promise of the, of the business. And so I guess the short answer for that, based on that example, is clients care about, ultimately they care about getting the result for their business, for whatever they're hiring you for. Or one.

Corey Quinn [00:33:57]:
Number two is you need to do, over a long period of time, recondition the market that it's not the founder, but it's the brand that's delivering on the promise.

Brandi Starr [00:34:05]:
Yeah. And I think that is an important piece is having more of that Runway where it's not just, you know, all of a sudden you don't see this person anymore, that you start to elevate, whether it's other faces or just more of the brand itself. And so talking about our challenges is just the first step. And nothing changes if nothing changes. And so in traditional therapy, the therapist gives the client some homework. But here at revenue rehab, we like to flip that on its head and ask you to give us homework. So for those people listening, you know, and this message really resonates with them, whether, you know, because I think the core of the message really is around vertical market specialization and helps with founder led sales. But I think it has an application in a lot of places.

Brandi Starr [00:34:59]:
And so if this approach really resonates with the listener, what's their first thing? What's their one thing that they should do next? In trying to figure out how to.

Corey Quinn [00:35:10]:
Solve this challenge, I would encourage you to take a stab, if you will, at figuring out if you were going to specialize in a vertical market, which one would be the best one for you. And the way to do it is, first off, to have an attitude of play and curiosity. Not that this is serious or you're going to make these changes, but just be curious. And I would recommend that you go into your book of business and group your clients based on industry and then look at things like where do we get the best revenue? Which segment is the best, stays with us the longest, where do we get the most profits from? And maybe ask around the office. Maybe some of the leaders in the organization say, who do you, when you think about our client base, if you think of them through the lens of industries or vertical markets, which ones do you love to work with? Like what should we go get more of? And then maybe do some market validation, do some searches on Google or find some research reports about market sizing and figure out like, okay, if were going to focus on this area hypothetically, and we were successful in closing, lets say 3% of the market, how much revenue would that be? Right. Just going down that road, my experience unlocks a lot of awareness and ideas for CROs and cmos in this concept of taking a vertical market specialization.

Brandi Starr [00:36:31]:
Okay, yeah, no, I like that. Especially proceeding with curiosity, which sometimes is hard to do just because we always have so many things that we've got to be doing that, making that space to just go through the exercise of, you know, I like that you said that you're not committing to making a change or do doing anything, just exploring. What does that look like? And I know I definitely find in our business, when we do some of those thought exercises, especially when we do it collectively around getting curious, that is where we have made some of the most impactful changes in the business is like, what if, you know, if we were to think about this, what does that look like? And sometimes it comes up like, yeah, that was fun, but this is definitely not something we should do. And other times it becomes this, you know, OMG, like how did we never think to do this before? Like, you know, this is such a game changer.

Corey Quinn [00:37:33]:
Yes.

Brandi Starr [00:37:33]:
And I think that that is a great opportunity. And, you know, even for those listening, if vertical specialization isn't the direction, like pick something and proceed with that curiosity. To examine and kind of challenge the norm, I think gets us, you know, so much further in our organizations and our goals and all those sorts of things.

Corey Quinn [00:37:57]:
Yeah.

Brandi Starr [00:37:58]:
Awesome. Well, Corey, I have enjoyed our discussion, but that's our time for today. But before we go, tell our audience how they connect with, can connect with you. Definitely give the shameless plug for the book. It sounds like one that lots of folks need to grab a copy of.

Corey Quinn [00:38:18]:
Thank you, Brandy. So the name of the book is anyone, not everyone. And it will take you through the exact process we talked about today, about the three steps. So if this message, if this concept is interesting, you want to lean in on this, I recommend that you go to anyone, not everyone.com. and then for your listeners, Brandy, they can download the audiobook version that you could otherwise get on Kindle or, I'm sorry, on audible. You can get that for free today, right now by going to anyone, not everyone.com, you can get access to it immediately.

Brandi Starr [00:38:55]:
Awesome. Well, we will make sure to link to that in the show notes. So wherever you are listening or watching this podcast, check the show notes to get that audible download. And Corey, thank you so much for joining me. I have truly enjoyed our discussion.

Corey Quinn [00:39:12]:
Been fun. Thank you so much, Brandy, you are welcome.

Brandi Starr [00:39:15]:
And thanks, everyone, for joining me. I hope you have enjoyed my discussion. Can't believe we're at the end. Until next time.