Demandware’s Partnership Legend Tom Griffin Reveals How to Build Real Leverage – Not Logo Soup

Tom Griffin – the man who ran global sales & partnerships at Demandware through its $3B exit and now President at Passport – pulls back the curtain on:

• Why Demandware’s partner ecosystem became legendary (and how to copy it)
• The 4 types of partnerships most founders confuse – and which ones actually drive revenue
• The expensive mistakes he’s made (and seen) building go-to-market from zero
• How to de-risk global supply chains in the middle of tariff chaos
• Where AI and agentic commerce are hitting cross-border logistics first
• Building a truly global culture when your company is multinational from day one
• Bonus: untold stories from the 2025 Demandware reunion

If you’re a founder, CRO, head of alliances, or trying to scale internationally in 2026, this episode is pure rocket fuel.

Listen now and steal the playbook that turned a commerce platform into a billion-dollar outcome… twice.

#eCommerce #Partnerships #GoToMarket #GlobalTrade #Demandware #Startups

Rosenstein Group: martech & ecommerce executive search

Rosenstein Group is the only martech-specialist exectutive search firm. For over 20 years, we've been matching leadership talent in sales, marketing and customer success to pioneering startups in ecommerce, supply chain and sales enablement, and for digital agencies.

Our experience with recruiting e-commerce technology leaders for companies like SAP Hybris and Demandware has established us as an authoritative and trusted liaison for startups seeking their first sales leader, and scale-ups on their way to IPO.

Visit RosensteinGroup.com to find out more.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:03

Welcome to Mar Talks, the number one podcast for e-commerce and marketing applications. Mar Talks is devoted to covering the latest technology developments that drive the global commerce ecosystem from advertising to last mile. Enjoy all of our content at Rosenstein Group.com slash Mar Talks-Podcast.

SPEAKER_02 0:28

Welcome to Mar Talks. I'm your host, Daryl Rosenstein. Mar Talks is where we discuss contemporary issues in the internet economy. And today we're joined by a man that has been with a number of extremely successful commerce startups through IPS, including Demandware and Sterling Commerce. I've known him long enough now to know that he's dangerous when it comes to building alliances. So very happy today to introduce you to Tom Griffin. Welcome to the show, Tom.

SPEAKER_01 1:02

Thanks, Daryl. It's great to be here. Appreciate the generous introduction. It's amazing how many of these introductions always begin with how long somebody has known me. I guess I'm uh at that point in my career.

SPEAKER_02 1:14

I like approaching being ancient. Yeah. You're embracing it. I like it. Well, you know, I like the fact that, you know, it's good to have tenure in the decades. Mm-hmm. There you go. Well, Tom, you know, the reason I I begged and pleaded with you to join me here online is because you did perhaps the best job that I have ever seen any head of alliances do in getting folks lined up to assist Demandware in helping your clients be more successful. You certainly did a great job with Sterling and Yantra as well. I don't want to degrade that, or but I want to unpack whatever lessons we can, first and foremost, uh, for all of these alliances folks and startup founders out there who are uh gnashing their teeth. How do I build alliances?

SPEAKER_01 2:07

Sure. Great topic. Love talking about it. And it's been part of my career both before those organizations and after, even in my current company Passport. We have a really phenomenal partner ecosystem, you know, in particular with the 3PL or third-party logistics industry. And they're incredibly important partners of ours and actually responsible for a lot of our customer acquisitions. So yeah, it's I think something that's always been part of organizations that I've been attracted to, whether I've been responsible for running that function directly or just currently in a role where I'm running the go-to-market, but a lot of our go-to-market is through and with partners.

SPEAKER_02 2:51

Well, when we're talking about the early days when you first start going out to a community and you haven't had many successful implementations or go live yet. You've just got your your handful of marquee accounts or lighthouse accounts, as we call them. What's the guy in your seat do?

SPEAKER_01 3:13

Well, that's an open-ended question. So let's try to break it down in a couple of places. I think the the scenario you laid out was maybe we're early days and we're just starting to implement our own customers ourselves, right? And this is a great example of like, I guess, know your limitations. I've been part of organizations where from day one, it's like, hey, let's have systems integrators or design firms deploy our product. It's like, okay, cool. Do we know how to deploy it? No. Like, do we have any best practices written down? No. Do we have any training? No. Well, are we even successful doing it? Well, we're trying to figure it out. Well, okay, you know, the odds of a third party being successful doing that are pretty low. So let's not have that expectation. Let's develop our own internal capabilities and enablement to the point where we can really have that ecosystem. And therefore, let's turn our attentions to maybe other ways in which we can partner and get benefit and leverage out of having partners that aren't that particular one. And that's actually something we did in the early days at demand where we actually developed partnerships with organizations that at the time were what were called full service e-commerce entities, right? I think um so a lot of this conversation, you and I are going to be like in the e-commerce way back machine here. But uh I think that I live there. Yeah, if you remember back when we were, you know, sort of 2006, 2007. Don't forget, we're not that many years removed from the the bubble, right? The first e-com bubble bursting. A lot of brands in particular still viewed e-commerce as a channel and actually not even that important of a channel. They were very concerned about channel conflict with their retail distribution. You know, they were wholesalers fundamentally as companies. So not only were they worried about channel conflict, they didn't have the internal capabilities to engage a consumer and ship an individual unit to them. So there was this whole ecosystem of full service providers who provided logistics, call center order management, fulfillment, returns management. And we became the ecom platform inside those offerings. And it was a way to get tremendous leverage out of a partner ecosystem. And it was sort of an alignment of what are we capable of right now to what kind of partner makes sense. And then later on, as our direct sales engine picked up a ton of momentum and we were winning a lot more deals directly, and we'd matured our professional services capabilities, like we really knew how to do this well and could teach somebody else and actually built out a whole enablement function. That's when we were then able to build that ecosystem that then took over and ultimately wound up doing like 80 plus percent of our uh implementations.

SPEAKER_02 6:09

80% of your implementations that's fantastic. That's a great number. Yeah. What percent of the what do you think in the latter days before the the Salesforce acquisition was the percentage of sales that were achieved through partners?

SPEAKER_01 6:25

I think in terms of the percent, and I, you know, these are round numbers, right? In the terms of percent of the implementations that were primed by partners, it was north of 80%, somewhere between 80 to 90. And then we also got certain percent, probably 20, 30 percent of our deals, you know, were sourced by leads or introductions from our partner ecosystem. Outstanding. Yeah, and these are substantial deals, these are million-dollar plus deals. Some of them certainly were. I think the average was a little bit less than that, but don't forget, for a SaaS solution to have an average ACV that's you know multiple six figures is you know significant, right? It's certainly above the averages for uh enterprise SaaS solutions.

SPEAKER_02 7:11

Indeed. Well, you have to actually be good at standing up your solution with your own professional services team before you can even approach a partner to say, hey, would you implement our solutions for us?

SPEAKER_01 7:27

That's kind of lesson one, correct? Well, uh yes. I mean, and that may be from the sort of collection of obvious things, right? You know, yeah. I think I think the point more is that take a moment, self-assess, right? There's a lot of different types of partners and different ways you can get leverage out of partners. And particularly like you were asking in the early days, figure out what you're capable of, where you're going to get leverage, and then align kind of the right types of organizations to the realistic kind of right needs for you as an entity, right? Don't expect you can partner with everybody for everything.

SPEAKER_02 8:05

I know you have to develop a methodology for showing that partner how much revenue and how many people and how much time it's going to take them to implement your solution. And I know that even with that, if you're dealing with a specialized digital agency, and let's say, for instance, you have one of the solutions within the mock ecosystem, and you want one of the premier partners to work with you, you've got four or five other solutions competitors that are ahead of you in the line that are already working with that partner. So displacing them requires a pretty damn sophisticated model and set of use cases and business cases in order to justify that partner pulling resources from another one of their solutions partners to work with you. How have you dealt with that? Can you give us a particular example of where you did that and how it worked out?

SPEAKER_01 9:10

Well, I think the point you're making, which is a great one, is when you're trying to build these relationships, you're not selling in a vacuum. You're always out competing for time, attention, focus from these entities. And there's always it's it's interesting that when you build a product or you're launching a product, you would always spend an enormous amount of time thinking about things like what's my UVP, right? What's my unique value proposition, right? Why is this customer going to buy from me? Why am I better than the competition? How do I articulate my unique value proposition in such a way that I'm going to win? And if you can't answer those questions successfully, you're not going to get funding, you're not going to be successful, right? These are like kind of obvious foundational things that like anybody would be doing, right? It's so rare that people apply those same practices to a partner ecosystem. And think to themselves like, do I have a UVP for this partner or this partner ecosystem or this category of partners, right? In fact, many times organizations almost think about it, particularly, you know, senior leadership will think about it almost in reverse, like, hey, I need something. We need something. And we're not able to do it ourselves, whether it's like fill the top of the funnel or some complimentary piece of technology we don't want to build, or you know, an implementation. So, yeah, let's get a partner to do it. Yeah, let's get some partners to do that thing, right? Because that'll solve our problem. Okay, cool. Why? What's in it for them? Like, what's the UVP to them of partnering with you? And if you can't articulate that and you don't know it, and you can't be very crisp with them about why they're gonna, you know, either make a lot of money, or this is gonna be good margin revenue, better margin revenue than you're making today, or it's gonna help you access customers, or something that's of value to them, then yeah, you're just noise, like you were saying. You're just noise kind of knocking on the door saying, hey, pay attention to me.

SPEAKER_02 11:14

Well, you said you took some agencies that were full service and you transitioned them into more specialized units as a result of partnering with you at Demandware, for instance, which was very much of a platform play. You joined Passport. Can you tell us a little bit about what Passport does?

SPEAKER_01 11:34

Sure. So I guess at our kind of most simple, what we do in our mission statement is we help brands reach their global potential. So this is primarily today US D2C brands, although we have just opened up in the UK and we're now helping brands located in the UK also reach their global potential. But the majority of the business to date has been helping U.S. brands expand and successfully engage, sell, ship, and build relationships with consumers outside the US. And we do that by bringing together kind of three key elements you need to be successful. We bring the technology that helps these brands have a great experience and really engage these consumers successfully. We bring the shipping or the logistics itself. We are the carrier, and we could talk a little bit more about that and the importance of that. And we bring the expertise, right? Both in terms of all of the expertise around product and financial compliance, you know, tax and duty management and product restrictions and product compliance, and the expertise around global. Like how do you optimize for global growth and engaging consumers outside the US?

SPEAKER_02 12:54

You've helped some pretty established plans like Road and Carpe and Gore up scale globally that were just in the United States. What was the biggest challenge that they weren't really aware of as they wanted to expand into new countries?

SPEAKER_01 13:12

Yeah, I mean, actually, you mentioned a couple of our most successful customers, and I wouldn't say it was a challenge. Let me speak a little more broadly about kind of the market challenge, right, that we see. I think the number one challenge, I guess, or misconception, if you will, right, about going international is this is hard. I'm gonna take a crawl, walk, run approach to this. And first of all, okay, they are right, it's hard, or at least it's complex. There's a lot of moving parts that you have to figure out and do well to be successful. But there's an enormous number of people that say, Oh, we're gonna crawl, walk, run, right? And I hate that metaphor. And honestly, I bet if you could go and pull like a bunch of one-year-olds and say, hey, if you could skip that whole crawling thing and just start here where you're now walking, would you have? And I'm sure they all would say, Yeah, yeah, the crawling thing is no fun. I much prefer the walking thing, right? And that's a lot of what we're able to do at Passport is help brands go from what they've traditionally done around international. And the traditional sort of approach a lot of brands have taken has been well, I have traffic coming from these other countries, and I get inquiries from consumers in these other countries about buying my product. So I've made the product available to be sold. Okay, well, but the experience isn't very good, right? The consumer is transacting in US dollars, there's not a lot of clarity around taxes, maybe frequently like taxes will be showing up in cart, right? Which, you know, us as US consumers, we're used to that experience. If I'm a consumer in the UK or EU, when I see a price, I expect that price to be tax inclusive. And when I get to the cart and all of a sudden you're adding 20% of that, I'm like, whoa, and surprises in cart equal abandoned shopping carts. That's bad, right? Brands don't set good delivery expectations. The delivery, you know, the shipping is too expensive, it's not very effective. There's not clarity of whether this is what's called DDP or DDU or taxes paid or not. Is the consumer on the hook for paying the tax? I could go on forever, but basically, like it's a bad experience, and conversion is low, and they get complaints, and frequently the brand may not have done a very good job of like figuring out duties and taxes. So they're on the hook for some of it, and the margin is lower on these orders. So they're that's the crawl phase, it's not fun. And the brand sort of gets this impression of like, uh, this is really hard, and it's not very profitable, and my conversion rate is low. So, yeah, let's let's not do this anymore. Let's not invest anymore in it, let's just ignore it. Fine, people can order, but you know, and then they just stall there. And I think the misconception is you don't have to do that, you don't have to endure that phase. What we can do with Passport as an example is we can start you in the walk phase, if you will, in that metaphor, right? We can set you up with a good international experience, you know, it's local currency, tax-inclusive pricing, other optimizations to drive higher conversion, complete clarity around duty and tax, cost-effective shipping, clarity on delivery timelines, good shipping experience. And for the brand, we can put you in a position where you're profitable. And when you add in the fact that actually the advertising costs are lower in these countries, like your meta-Google cost for the same amount of traffic acquisition could be 30% lower, maybe you're more profitable. That's a misconception. And I think getting through that process and convincing people that, hey, this doesn't have to be painful or difficult. You can actually start at this much more productive, profitable place, let us help you get there, is probably the most common misconception.

SPEAKER_02 17:11

Why did you decide to also be a carrier?

SPEAKER_01 17:14

Well, the shipping and logistics are a critically important part of the customer experience. Amazon knows this, right? So your ability to make a delivery promise, fulfill a delivery promise, provide great tracking throughout the experience is like even more important with international than a domestic shipment. And our ability to both ensure that quality and have control over it, versus sort of outsource it to a third party or white label some third party, we believed, and and I think we've shown is critical to having a complete solution for a customer and their ability to engage with us and know that like we're accountable for everything. And that control also helps us optimize our network continuously. So, like as an example, last year there was a Canada Post strike. But fine, we'll just reroute around Canada Post and use some of our other last mile carriers to the customer. They don't have to think about this. But because we because we control the network, we're able to do that.

SPEAKER_02 18:17

So when you've got a situation today where right now, I mean, it's obviously it's impacting importers, where particularly the de minimis shipments, there's now being subject to taxation. There's going to be reciprocity enacted in many EU and global destinations. How are you managing that?

SPEAKER_01 18:40

So, yeah, great point. Obviously, very topical. We're now 48 hours into the end, I guess, of the end of the U.S. de minimis. I believe the EU has already announced their intention to do away with the de minimis, but I think it's like for 2028, it's a couple of years out. Haven't heard what the UK is going to do, but I think to your point, it's entirely possible that we're going to be moving over the next couple of years into a world with lower or eliminated de minimises, which obviously has impact on cross-border shipping. The good news is, at least from a passport perspective, is we had already started with an offering for our customers to help them move inventory out of the US into these other countries and set up fulfillment in these other countries. Because if your product has a fair amount of margin in the good, and you're going to be exposed now to duties, regardless of like whether you were above or below the de minimist, then you're much better off economically bringing inventory into a fulfillment location into one of these countries, whether it's into the US, which a lot of people are looking at right now, or ultimately maybe into the UK, EU, or some of these other countries or regions, paying your duties on your cogs or your cost of goods, right, which is a fraction of your retail or purchase price if you've got good margin in your product, which a lot of D2C brands do. And that's a that's going to be a material difference for you. So we launched earlier this year what we call our in-country enablement offerings that are all about helping brands set up fulfillment inventory locations outside the US to serve these markets. And there's there's a whole lot of financial benefits for them, obviously, the reduced duties costs, but also faster shipping, lower cost shipping when that's a you know a domestic or or nearby shipping solution.

SPEAKER_02 20:38

Yeah, are you actually provided the warehousing facilities themselves or the fulfillment systems? We partner for those things.

SPEAKER_01 20:47

We have a partner ecosystem. We're not in the business of running warehouses. So we have great partners there and we'll help our customers select and get up and running in our partner facilities, but we'll manage the entire process for them, including being their importer of record and potentially their merchant of record as well. And what that allows a brand to do is to take advantage of being in-country without having to set up an entity in that country and expose yourself to tax nexus in those countries. So it is a way to very quickly expand and have in-country operations without having to expand your entity setup, create new entities, create potential tax risk or tax nexus.

SPEAKER_02 21:37

I mean, we've got a pretty comprehensive set of enablements that you provide any brand that's looking to go international from the actual technology to localize that experience to the cart processing being appropriate, the appropriate taxes being collected, the appropriate reporting being collected, the ability to Sell internationally without having to set up operations in another country. I mean, uh, that's kind of taking out all the roadblocks.

SPEAKER_01 22:09

I can think about it. Well, we're we're trying to live up to that mission statement I mentioned, which was to help a brand reach their global potential. And if you go back maybe a year, a year and a half ago, what we were seeing was we had helped a number of brands be so successful with international through cross-border shipping that they just made the decision themselves of, hey, I'm gonna start putting inventory in these countries because I built, you know, a really big market now in some of these key regions. And for us, that was great, but ultimately they were kind of leaving us or leaving us for those countries, right? And they would say, hey, thank you for helping me be so successful. I'm now gonna like stop cross-border shipping into these countries and set up inventory. And we realized that to really fulfill that mission statement of reaching your global potential, we had to help them with that next step, which was when you've sort of been so successful with maybe a cross-border shipping strategy, then you want to take advantage of in-country. And that's only accelerated now with the new tariff and duty environment. You know, that's just accelerated what was already there in terms of once you reach a certain scale, it just made sense. And then there's obviously some product categories like cookware. We work with some cookware brands where they just started by locating their inventorian countries because it, you know, it's a big box and it just makes sense to fulfill locally.

SPEAKER_02 23:38

I think about you know, my kitchen, and uh most of the stuff that I have is from over there, but uh your help builds go there.

SPEAKER_01 23:47

There's there's some great US brands, you know, made in Hexclad, uh, and others that you should look into. Great products. I'll take a look.

SPEAKER_02 23:56

I'm I'm taking a look at Hexclad. I'm taking a look at Hex Clad. We'll see about that. I I have a tendency to burn things, so anything that makes it easier to recover from that, so I'm all about it. Let's talk about Tom Griffin. Let's talk about what got you here. I'm fascinated by alliances. I'm always I've always thought that it's an area that you don't think about until, like you said, you have a problem you can't solve internally, which is not the way you're supposed to set up alliances. What was it that that initially drew you into the alliance game?

SPEAKER_01 24:31

Interesting question. So that this is going way, way back in my career. And we could do that as much as I have loved it, I'll have to admit that maybe my initial thinking of why was flawed. So so that's I'll give you that preface to the story. So I began my career in sales and was doing sales for several years and enjoying it. And actually, then at the same time, I was uh pursuing my MBA in the evenings. And it's so, as you know, that's a long process, that's like a four-year process. So, you know, spent all of those years carrying a quick.

SPEAKER_02 25:08

Not if you have enough cereal box tops. I mean, if you have enough of them, that can really cut some time off.

SPEAKER_01 25:15

Yeah, so long story short, because I think a lot of my answers have been long here, finished my MBA, and I have this thought, which admittedly, I think in retrospect was an completely errant thought, which was well, now I have an MBA. I need to do something more strategic than being a salesperson. Complete underappreciation for the importance of sales in a B2B organization. But so uh the company I was with offered me a role that had uh kind of a strong alliances, and there's a couple of other things in there. And I've what I've always liked to do is alliances, but also kind of new market development and other things. I've always in my roles, what I've liked to do is yes, I'll build and manage the alliance and channel ecosystems, but there's also other things, whether it's like international expansion or new verticals that direct sales just aren't good at. So let me let me do those things. And that was what this initial role was about, and that just sort of set me on this path. Where'd you grow up? Florida. Florida. Where in Florida? Mostly the Tampa St. Pete area. For those who know me, they know that uh I am still a lifelong Tampa Bay Bucks fan. And yeah, despite living in New England for 30 something years, but I'm more of a bandwagon Pats fan.

SPEAKER_02 26:39

Yeah, it's pretty easy to be a bandwagon Pats fan. I mean, Tom and Tom and Bill did some great work. And those uh, you know, uh, I remember when Grogan was on his butt in the Super Bowl, and I was thinking it can't get worse than this, and it didn't. It got a lot better. Uh, got spoiled, and then Tom comes down to Tampa Bay. It's like, of course, of course.

SPEAKER_01 27:01

Wasn't that I hate to do this to the host, but wasn't that Tony Eason or something? Was it wasn't that his name? The guy in 85 got annihilated by the Bears.

SPEAKER_02 27:10

It was Tony in the first half, yeah. In the second half, it was Steve. They were not I didn't even watch the second half of that. They campaigned, they it was a campaign, it was a campaign. It's like, yeah, let's just let's just rip the scab right off. Yeah, it was kind of a gaping wound for many years, but I think we can get over it. Yeah, so when you were growing up in Florida, I know uh down there in Tampa, I was assuming it's very close to Disney World. Were you thinking about being joining uh the cast and being ticker, or you know, what were you thinking of becoming?

SPEAKER_01 27:42

Uh no, I always assumed I'd be a lawyer when I grew up. At some point, things just went a different direction.

SPEAKER_02 27:49

Why on earth would you want to be a lawyer?

SPEAKER_01 27:52

I don't know. I uh was a liberal arts guy, history major in college, enjoyed arguing, and somehow just thought it seemed like a good career path. But I think that's before my eyes were sort of open to the vast sort of opportunities out there that don't sort of reconcile to just these one-name professions, you know, doctor, lawyer, right? You know.

SPEAKER_02 28:18

Yeah. I think about kids that are in school right now looking at the emergence of a new category within software, the AI revolution. And and we read every day about those entry-level jobs being eliminated by some form or another of AR automation. When it comes to sales, creating relationships, building relationships with people is always gonna require a person in the loop. How they get there may be automated, but it's still gonna require a person in the loop. So I'm gonna ask you if you were a kid who's in college today, would you recommend pursuing a career in enterprise software sales? Absolutely.

SPEAKER_01 29:04

I think sales is still a very viable, as you're saying, you know, I agree with you. It's a very viable path, it's a very necessary path. I think it's it's relationships, but it's also about helping organizations understand each other and you know, done well. It's about sort of aligning interests. I would recommend, though, that if you're going to pursue that path, you get really smart really fast about the AI enablement that is available to make you way more productive as an enterprise salesperson. There is so much great enablement out there. So certainly our our goal or our thinking right now isn't like, oh, we can replace reps with AI. Quite the quite the opposite. It's it's how can we make them way more productive, right, than they have been in the past, you know, through AI.

SPEAKER_02 29:54

There's a new tool every day, and I've well had to start limiting how many heights I use. It's like I'm gonna need an AI to manage my AIs in short time. And Chatty isn't uh, I don't think she's really up for that yet. I don't think she's really up for that yet. Well, I do like in this podcast, since uh I am I am your host, to occasionally put folks on the spot and ask them if they've ever actually made a mistake in their career, and very few people have, or at least admit having done so. And uh I was just curious if it ever screwed up.

SPEAKER_01 30:37

Oh, many times, of course. I read a quote the other day that I loved, and I I'm I'm not gonna get this right, so I'm gonna misquote, right? But it was it was Roger Federer, I think, and he was asking the question like, what percent of points do you think I won? Like over the course of my career. And I forget the exact number, but it was something like 53% or like 55% or something. So, like one of the greats, one of the all-time greats, lost more than 40 something percent of the points that he played, right? And so, of course, yeah, massive mistakes have been made. Uh, so many, hard to count, hard to think of just one. I guess I'll think of one example that's kind of a mistake not that long ago, really, in sort of leadership style, right? Which was um I came, I came into a new role and like I came in with all this like vigor and enthusiasm, and like I know the way, and follow me, and you know, thought I was doing amazing. And then a couple months in, you know, sat down with the CEO and he said, you know, kind of people think you're a jerk. Fortunately, uh, he was a great leader, and I'm always willing to learn. So spent some time working on that, actually got a coach, leadership coach, and worked on my style, and think I'm hopefully much better at that than I used to be due to that work, right? Better listener, you know, a leader that doesn't think leading is about giving direction. It's about sort of helping other people be successful. And how do we get there? It doesn't mean I have to be nice all the time because I'm not. I can still be impatient and difficult, but there's trust, right? There's trust in the relationship that I don't think I was building before that. So I guess that's a a mistake in style or assumption of kind of what it and and that one of all the mistakes I've made have been many, is actually the one that stuck with me the most, I guess, in terms of something I've tried to work on and think about regularly on a day-to-day basis. Well, learning to be a servant leader is is kudos. Yeah. I'm not sure I'm there yet. Maybe I'm I'm in transition from jerk leader to servant leader somewhere, somewhere on the continuum, right? I'm sure if you polled my current team, I'm not sure I'd score 10 out of 10 on servant leader, but hopefully I'm not at the jerk leader side anymore. I'm I'm growing. I'm I'm it's a journey.

SPEAKER_02 33:04

The comment box has not been overflowing as much as it was in the beginning. That's a you know, that's progress. That's progress when the when they don't get when they don't look askance at you when you walk into the meetings anymore. That's uh Terence, yeah. Yeah, that's that's always an improvement. I you but you touched on something fundamental in leadership, which is you have to your your role as a leader is to enable. That's what leadership is. It's enablement. It's not I've got all the answers and this is where to go. It's about finding people that know things you don't and aligning them towards an objective that you share and giving them whatever resource they don't have to complement what they do have in order to achieve that objective. And a lot of startup founders they learn that lesson the hard way with a bunch of turnover from smart guys like you that aren't feeling like they're being supported and achieving whatever they want to support. So I commend you, uh I commend your boss too for having that real conversation with you and for being open and honest.

SPEAKER_01 34:13

We need more of that. Yeah, it I think it's helped me, you know, when I see that in other people, particularly people on my team who, when I see how they're sort of managing their teams, I can say, hey, look, I've been you, right? And he try to give you a little advice.

SPEAKER_02 34:28

And now they're like, Wow, you know, you you actually made some improvements. So uh I'm listening. I'm listening. Well, is there anything that you would like to leave us with today, Tom?

SPEAKER_01 34:40

It was great to reconnect with you. It's uh wonderful working with you over the years, uh, hopefully we will continue to do so. And thank you for inviting me to this forum. And thanks for uh putting me in the Wayback Machine and reminiscing about times old and times current. Sure. If you've enjoyed the conversation and you want to talk more, whether it's alliances, international uh commerce, cross-border, I'm on LinkedIn. I can be found. Feel free to reach out to me.

SPEAKER_02 35:13

How do people find you other than LinkedIn?

SPEAKER_01 35:16

Tom.griffin at passportglobal.com.

SPEAKER_02 35:19

Tom.griffin at passportglobal.com. Yep. And I am Daryl at Rosenstein Group. Tom, thanks for joining us. It's been an absolute pleasure.

SPEAKER_01 35:30

Thanks, Daryl. Appreciate it.

SPEAKER_00 35:34

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