2 mental shifts that helped Unify grow 24x in 2024 (1)

Hey there, Austin here 👋

Welcome to The Pipeline—the newsletter to help scale your revenue team’s creativity.

We're 2 years into building Unify and we've grown to a 34-person team. So far in the journey, I’ve relied on founder friends and mentors to help me see around corners.

Stepping into the founder seat is strange because for the first time, it's not obvious who your boss is. No one is directly accountable for leveling me up.

I feel accountable to our board, investors, customers and team, but its different.

I still want to grow. And see plenty of gaps in myself where I want to be a better leader and founder.

30 days ago, I went to a dinner hosted by Titan and realized something important: I could really benefit from having a trusted mentor to work through Founder-specific problems with. Someone who is always in my corner and invested in knowing how I see the world, where my blind spots are, and how to call those out to me proactively.

In this newsletter, I'm sharing the 3 areas that I’m excited to work on with my executive coach.

📒 GTM Playbook

I hired an executive coach. Here's why.

3 reasons why I brought on an exec coach to help me scale Unify to $10M+ ARR

I like to think that I have a good pulse on where my strengths lie as a founder. At both Unify and Ramp, I've been fortunate to hone my product and growth skills.

But as Unify has scaled to mid-7-figures of ARR, and the team has scaled past 30 people, I've found myself in new territory. And I really need a few skills that aren't as well practiced.

Here are 3 specific areas that I'll touch on below:

1/ Difficult conversations

2/ Motivating larger teams

3/ Refining a strong co-founder relationship

Every founder will have different reasons for working with a coach. Yours might be different from mine, but hopefully mine at least get your gears turning.

Let's dive in.

Reason 1: Difficult conversations

As a Founder, I have a ton of difficult conversations.

I grew up feeling like I often pushed back against my parents in some ways. This influenced how I perceived the world when I got into my first job. As a result, I've never felt shy about voicing my opinion or pushing up against authority if I felt it would help the team or company in some way.

As a Founder, I admittedly feel that I have room to grow in having difficult conversations. I find that I struggle to get intellectual work done when there's an emotional problem looming. I find it challenging to tackle both intellectual and emotional problems simultaneously.

There are tactical parts of difficult conversations that aren't as intuitive to me:

1/ How my tone should be when having the conversation

2/ What to say to make everyone feel heard and understood

3/ How to be direct, but not de-motivating

Handling difficult conversations is something I'm excited to work on with my coach.

Reason 2: Motivating the team

Motivating the team is easier when you're in the early days of a startup (less than 10 people). The team is close. And you're all in the trenches together. You know what each person is working on.

And every team member can see their work's direct impact on growth.

Motivating a team of 34 people is very different though. I have to motivate in a one-to-many approach. I find myself needing to repeat the same things over and over again.

Some ways that I currently communicate with the Unify team:

1/ All hands

2/ Joining as many team meetings as I can

3/ Having specific time blocks where the product team can get feedback from me

4/ Always reading and giving feedback on weekly team update emails

5/ Being intentional about eating meals with everyone

But I'm finding that my current approaches aren't enough. Myself and Connor got feedback from our team that they'd like more clarity on product roadmap and prioritization decisions. It's good feedback for both of us.

I know that I need to be investing in how I message and communicate with our team. I'm excited to work with my coach to hone this skill.

Reason 3: Co-founder relationship

Connor and I complement each other well as founders - I'm incredibly grateful to be building Unify with him. Something that Jake Saper said to me when we started Unify stuck with me. He said: "besides your significant other, your Co-Founder is your next most important relationship. You need to nurture it."

As we've scaled over the past 2 years, our roles and responsibilities at the company have shifted. I'm increasingly focused on external priorities—growth, sales, fundraising—while Connor drives product and engineering.

But how we balance responsibilities across the company will naturally evolve over time. With my exec coach, I plan to be intentional about this.

To maximize the possible outcome at Unify, it’s important that Connor and I cover each other’s weaknesses and amplify each other’s strengths.

Final thoughts

I'm only 2 sessions in with my coach, but I'm excited about some of the progress and insights I've already uncovered.

I'm still growing as a person and a founder, and having a coach is a clear accelerant. Hope this is helpful, excited to share more about this journey.

WHAT’S NEW AT UNIFY

Champion tracking: your highest converting signal 🔥

When a customer you sold to changes jobs, it's your opportunity to pounce. Unify will notify you the minute one of your former champions moves jobs.

Don't let existing relationships go cold. Here's how to set up champion tracking with Unify in 2 minutes:

1/ Enable champion tracking in settings.

2/ Upload your list or filter your CRM data to previous champions. Unify will automatically monitor their job changes and mark them with a crown for easy identification (Garrett shows this in the walkthrough below).

3/ ‍Create a play that triggers when a champion changes roles.

4/ Build a sequence specifically for previous champions.

5/ Book qualified meetings.

By automating outbound to job-changing champions, you can quickly re-engage healthy relationships.

Check out the full walkthrough here.

BEFORE YOU GO…

Thanks for reading as always.

Hope this was helpful. Next week I'm considering diving into my executive coach vetting process. Let me know if that's interesting?

If you have any questions, just reply to this email.

Thanks a ton,

Austin

PS: If you want to use Unify to drive more pipeline in 2025, get in touch here.