Line of Sight: How Transparency in the Workplace Builds Aligned Teams – With Martin Gourdeau

Have you ever asked a question at work and once you got the answer, wished you hadn’t?

If so, you might not be the right fit on Martin Gourdeau’s team. He doesn’t do performative transparency in the workplace; it’s a true core value. Martin is the CEO of Vacation Tracker, a fully remote SaaS company with a team distributed across seven countries. He finds that being clear and candid about the status of a business is an effective method for building trust in teams, as well as driving performance.

“There's a way to be transparent and not doomy-gloomy. You can be factual, keep your heads up, stay positive, and have trust and confidence in the plan.”

–      Martin Gourdeau

Key Takeaways:

• True transparency can align people with purpose and improve outcomes.
• Leaders should be able to state the consequences of not meeting a goal.
• Being transparent helps organizations retain the people who are the best fit.
• If you want to introduce transparency in the workplace, start small.
• Invite tough questions. If you don’t know the answer, be sure to follow up.
• Teams can be held accountable for performance, but anything specific to one person is off-limits.

Timestamps:

00:31 Meet Martin, CEO of Vacation Tracker

01:33 Transparency & Energy Management at Vacation Tracker

03:51 Vacation Tracker’s Vacation Policy

04:55 Martin’s Intro to True Transparency at Work

11:57 Transparency Reveals Misalignment on Teams

15:23 Building & Maintaining Transparency

18:07 What Not to Share

20:26 How to Introduce More Transparency at Work

22:49 Transparency & Leadership Qualities

27:18 Getting Clear on Objectives & Priorities

28:27 How Transparency Translates Across Cultures

31:04 What’s Next for Vacation Tracker

32:52 Tacos to Share

Key Topics Discussed:

Amazing Teams, Una Japundza, Martin Gourdeau, transparency in the workplace, company core values, building trust in teams, workplace communication

Mentions:

Website: https://vacationtracker.io/

LinkedIn: https://ca.linkedin.com/in/mgourdeau

Transcript

Una Japundza

Welcome everyone to the Amazing Teams podcast, where we talk about all things that make work better. Today I'm joined by Martin Gourdeau, CEO of Vacation Tracker.

Martin came into Vacation Tracker about 10 months ago to help scale a bootstrap, fully remote SaaS company across six countries. Before that, he spent four years at Workleap, most recently as president and general manager, where he helped lead a major rebrand and ran their performance product. Today we're going to talk about something he's thought about a lot in his career. How being radically transparent about business reality, including money and hard decisions, changes the culture you end up with. Martin, thank you so much for being here.

Martin Gourdeau

Thanks, Una.

Una Japundza

So tell me more about 10 months into your new role, what are you focused on at Vacation Tracker?

Martin Gourdeau

Yes, coming up to almost a year now and I mean, the focus is on growth. It's a business that, we're about 20 people. We're doing pretty well, to be honest. But the reason of me coming on board was really to accelerate growth, which is something I've done a few times in my career. So today we're about, we're approaching like 3 million AR, about 2,000 paying customers. We have customers in...

I think just over 100 countries. So it's a super incredible sandbox to play in. But yeah, all focus on growing businesses.

Una Japundza

Starting without transparency, right? You guys share your prof, your revenue numbers, your customers, everything. Was that the case before you joined, or did you open up that playbook?

Martin Gourdeau

It was quite transparent before. In terms of values and how we run a business, I was already quite aligned with the two co-founders, Lav and Slobodan. I think it's not necessarily a question for vacationers to be more transparent. It's more about what to share. What I'm trying to change a little bit more is talking about our position in the market, our strategy, our playbook, why it makes sense from a business perspective.

Una Japundza

Mm-hmm.

Martin Gourdeau

Which was maybe a little bit less shared before. I think maybe the team was more focused on internally how we could do better as us, a team, and how to run the business better, which is great. I'm just trying to open up like the horizons a bit more to, you know, like a very open conversation about our position in the market versus our competitors and our ideal customer profile and stuff like that.

Una Japundza

It's fun because we had Lav on the podcast, feels like forever ago, probably a couple of years ago. So it's fun to hear, okay, changing of the guards, new person in. And before we go into transparency, I wanted to ask you, speaking of your positioning, your tagline on your LinkedIn profile, it says, time off is a performance strategy, not a reward. Tell me more about, unpack that for me and for our listeners. What do you mean by that?

Martin Gourdeau

Yeah.

So if you look at the product that we sell today, it could be interpreted in a very tactical way of, we basically simplify lease management for SMBs. And that's exactly what we do if you look at it at a first level. And then we're going to kind of reconnect to the reason that, drawing me to join the business is the more aspirational aspect of it, which is, it's a bit more strategic, I think, for businesses as well, is with everything going on in the market and all these new tools that are coming out.

 We can all feel this augmented need to perform better and to do more. And it's kind of funny because everyone's talking about AI that replaced us and you know, everything I've been seeing up to now is for me anyways, I'm just working more and the people on the team are just working more because the bar keeps on raising and these expectations of using all these tools and delivering 10X more than before. So that pulls on people's energy, right? And energy management becomes a thing that's very important. And that's how this circles back to the timeline. I think SMBs in particular are under tremendous pressure right now to deliver more with less. And that takes a toll on teams' energy levels. And we're at the forefront of helping manage that.

Una Japundza

Curious, what is the vacation policy at a company that helps others with their leave management? What's your guys' vacation policy, at Vacation Tracker? I'm just curious now.

Martin Gourdeau

It's a question. First time I think someone asked me that. So, I've worked in many companies that had like the unlimited that are not really unlimited vacations. I really appreciate the approach. We basically have a flat policy. So everyone has the same number of days. It's quite generous. I think it's 20 days, so 20 days for everyone.

Plus, obviously, spent holidays, and we've slowed down the business during like Christmas and stuff like that. But we went with a very easy to manage, low overhead. I think that was the intent. It's like a very low overhead, very easy to manage policy, which is 20 days a year for everyone. You could be straight out of school and I have the same policy as the guy that's straight out of school. So it's very fair for everyone. And yeah, it's actually pretty great.

Una Japundza

Nice. So it's worked out for you guys. You're not changing it in your new role. You're like, this works. Let's keep it. Okay, now onto the transparency. When did this become a thing that you believe in? That transparency is how you want to run businesses.

Martin Gourdeau

No, let's change it. Yeah.

Yeah, and I just want to be clear about the type of transparency that I'm talking about here is really like the business reality. And like you said in your introduction, it's more about business metrics and how the business is run and the objectives and how people relate to that and teams relate to that. So I think when you talk about radical transparency, it could be interpreted in many different ways. It could be in performance management. It could be in a bunch of various ways.

But the one I'm talking about today is really with regards to what's going on in the business, in the market reality, like you said, profitability, the concept of people that drive revenue and objectives and how the business is to be run in relationship with those numbers. And it's something that I was always exposed to in to various degrees in my previous experiences, specifically thinking of more early on in my career.

I started working out of school at this very small company, a service company of about 20 people. And it was basically like a complete black box. All I knew was I had to do my job and I had to negotiate my salary and I had no idea if the business was profitable or not. I had no idea who owned the business, what the cap table was, what their ambitions were. So it's very hard to be aligned, right? Your head’s down, and you just do your day-to-day thing. 

And then in first big experience, not big experience, but in a larger company was at Electronic Arts. And this was around 2005-ish, 2005, 2006. And we’re creating this new studio, which was awesome because I saw the creation of a new culture. I was like in the first 15 or 20 employees and then we scaled up to about 800 people over five years.

It was a small, even at 800, we were a small part of a much bigger business, right? Even back then, I don't know what the heck that was now, but back then it was 10,000 employees, publicly listed, publicly traded. So it's very big business. And the first year or so I was exposed to this awesome culture that we created in Montreal Studio. We basically created our own culture. It was very creative and high performance, hardworking.

But again, there was no financial context to what we were doing, right? And funny anecdote, one of the first trips that I did to our headquarters in California, I don't remember if it was the first one or second trip that I did, but pretty early on, maybe a year in, the much closer year was maybe 100 people.

They had a technical role at the time, it was my first time managing a team, so my first management experience. And I was managing my team aligned with the culture that we built in Montreal, right? Which was making great games, the highest quality possible, and trying to produce the next big hit.

So I get flown into headquarters for this centralization alignment meeting thing with maybe 15 or 20 people that had the same role as me in a bunch of studios and we have all these workshops and it's super interesting. And at a certain point, the CFO, the global CFO of EA, I don't remember his name, but super cool guy, he asked to have like 30 minutes with our team. And I found it kind of odd, because he was operating, he was basically running the business from a financial perspective. And so he walks in the room and does like a quick introduction and then he asks us what business we're in. So everyone's kind of shyly raising their hand like, video games, and then some people say like entertainment, and he's like, No, no, like just shutting everyone down, everyone gives these ideas and he's like...

I'm always going to remember this quote. He's like, We're in the business of making money and video games is the vehicle we chose to do so. And I remember the cold shower that rained upon the entire room. And he was basically speaking on behalf of the global leadership team and it being a public company that worked for its children.

I remember the metaphorical slap in the face of like coming from this local studio that you were working with these artists that were super passionate about the craft and video games and then you get this kind of reality check from a very high-level person. Then he went around the room and explained all various responsibilities of each studio, how they were contributing to this objective.

I remember when we got to Montreal, I don't remember the exact words, but it was something like, we opened your studio so you can provide 80% of the quality for 60% of the cost. It was basically a low-cost location and they wanted decent quality. And that was the expectation. I had never heard of that at the local studio. And I was like, why? Why is this not shared in our day to day? Cause like, it's very important and it's aligned with the business.

It's that moment on, I remember so clearly because it really kind of marked me. And I understood of like, okay, you might not be aligned with this, but this is where the company's going. And this is our reason of being in the company. Many, many things made a lot of sense because we were working at a level locally in Montreal under the general manager basically, which I had a great relationship with.

Una Japundza

Mm-hmm.

Martin Gourdeau

But he was running the studio the best way he thought to extract the most out of the people. There's this abstraction layer between the public company financial objectives and the culture that he tried to create locally. And it was my first experience where I saw the disconnect there and I could reconcile all these decisions that were being taken at the studio level to be aligned, obviously, with the corporate level.

And I think, you know, all these like dots starting to connect after that. I could have been in a position where I was super passionate about video games and this was like way too, you know,  profit-oriented and you could interpret that however you will.

Una Japundza

Mm-hmm.

Martin Gourdeau

I decided to buy in and I was like, okay, this is the company I just work for, this is their objective, this is what we're going through right now, we need to get the share price back up and this is the reality. And there are consequences and the CFO didn't just drop this coal, there was a context to it. It had nothing to do with how much we could borrow to make better gains and it was this big wheel in motion and he explained the whole thing in 20 minutes and it was just so enlightening.

Una Japundza

Of course.

Martin Gourdeau

I came back to Montreal in a completely different mindset and it helped me do my job. I understand my position in the machine of Montreal and its position in the machine of EA as a whole. And that was really a defining moment and I tried to embrace that from that point on.

And even I could see from that point on people in this studio that...in the Montreal studio that were not aligned with this philosophy and they were trying to build 100% quality games at 80% of the cost, right? And there was like a disconnect in the day to day and you could actually see that disconnect because that was never communicated. So yeah, it was just like a kind of a short glimpse of my experience that was like the moment where I realized that was important basically.

Una Japundza

Now, some people might say being that transparent, I don't want to do it when things are bad, or I don't want to do it when I feel like it will affect people negatively. What the CFO shared could have landed on someone, This is ridiculous. It wasn't the business I thought I was in, and I'm out. Right? So I think some people in leadership will be wary of or leery of sharing that because, like, well, what if it's bad? Or what if we're having a bad financial year and now people are gonna start looking for a new job? How do you just, how do you think about that when it's like–

Martin Gourdeau

Of course.

Una Japundza

What kind of things are you not really necessarily excited to share?

Martin Gourdeau

Yeah, and I think that was one of those things, right? I don't think that was the ideal message that the CFO wanted to pass along. But he made the decision to treat us like adults, basically. And this is the context of the business. This is the reality we operate in. This is our reality now. This is what I need from you, from each studio. I guess, I mean, it depends on your personality type and where you're at and when you want, but to get back to your question, I think...

Una Japundza

Exactly.

 Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Martin Gourdeau

If you hear that message and it doesn't resonate at all, or you're shocked or offended by it, it's actually better that maybe you find something else, like another opportunity where you can engage and you're to be fully on board. Because if you stay and you're disconnected from the business reality, like the fact that you don't like it doesn't change the fact that that's the situation, right? So putting this shield and, and 

Una Japundza

Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Martin Gourdeau

It could seem like protecting you from that reality. The thing is in the day to day, that's how the business will be run. So in the day to day, there's going to be these friction points that are going to be like constant and kind of painful. And it's not going to be fun for you as an employee that's misaligned and it's not going to be fun for the business.

Una Japundza

Mm.

Yeah.

Martin Gourdeau

And then it's probably gonna lead to some kind of performance conversation. And it's probably best for both parties if that relationship ends there. If you're deeply misaligned with where the business is and what it's trying to achieve at that point in time, it's probably best for both parties to just move on. Sometimes it's a difficult conversation to have 

Una Japundza

Yeah, exactly.

Martin Gourdeau

But you have to own where your business is. Pretending that it's in a better situation is not a service framework.

Una Japundza

If you can transport yourself back to that conversation with the CFO, could you feel your peers having that reaction of, I had no idea and I don't necessarily want to be part of it?

Martin Gourdeau

It was very mixed. I think some people, like I remember the LA studio, were closer to where HQ was in San Francisco, I think it still is, and they were spending more time there. So they were closer to that reality. think they probably heard that message before, so there was basically no reaction.

And then you could feel geographically, the furthest you were away from each other, the shot was a little bit bigger, you know, which is kind of funny. But I think, yeah, it varied quite a bit. I think almost everyone was on board at the end of that talk. There was a lot of questions and lot of, you know, pushing back. And the CFO was really okay with it. He was just answering very clearly to the questions.

Yeah, it was an honest and open, refreshing conversation. When he said it at first, obviously it was a bit of a slap, and yeah, a bit of a shock. I think that's actually what he wanted, to provoke, right? With this little, asking the room what business we're in and all that. There is a bit of theater there, but the message definitely landed.

Una Japundza

Yeah, shock.

Mm-hmm. So now since then, you've obviously led teams, you've led companies, you're running a company right now. What are some of the behaviors and things that you do in your day-to-day job across those roles to maintain that transparency and build that transparency? Do you have quarterly all-hands where you share the financials? Do you have things you do every week? What are the practices that you might have to continue building that transparency with your teams. 

Martin Gourdeau

Yeah. It depends on the business. Right now, you should try to work a smaller team, which is great because I can over communicate and everyone knows everything almost, which is pretty awesome. So I think almost every week I communicate these core metrics for growth of the business, like MR, churn, stuff like that. Then every month, yeah, there's an all-hands with everyone. 

We just have the same version as that weekly communication, but we just go a bit more in depth. We look at our objectives for the year, where we're at, and there's like this Q&A session where anyone can ask anything, basically. I think you just have to adapt to the business that you're in, If you're in a bigger business like Workleap, no, the weekly thing obviously doesn't work. I was doing monthly, yeah, monthly town halls with about 450 people. And we have the special guests. Let's say product comes in or marketing comes in and presents some big thing that they can choose they're working on.

But the common denominator was at the end of meeting, whoever presented, I was always one of the presenters, but if I had product or sales or whoever with me present, we would all stay at the end for a very open Q&A where I would invite the whole company to ask any questions.

And actually invite the hard ones, right? Because those are the good questions that you want to ask because chances are, if you're hesitant to ask a difficult question, there's a bunch of other people that have the same question that are scared to ask it, right? Yeah, we had built this incredible culture of quite open transparency of where the business is at, what the reality is, what the challenges are. Sometimes you have tough questions of like, if you don't achieve X, like what are the consequences?

Una Japundza

Mm-hmm.

Martin Gourdeau

I would just answer very bluntly, like these are the consequences and there's a way to be transparent and not, you know, doomy gloomy. You can be factual and keep your heads up and stay positive and have trust and confidence in the plan. But if a question is asked, I'll answer it.

I always tell everyone, don't ask the question if you don't want the answer. People at first didn't understand and then they kind of got it after a few questions that they didn't really want the answer to. I would have got a bunch of positive feedback after those town halls. But yeah, I think you have to adapt to the size of the business and the reality of it.

Una Japundza

I'm sure it was refreshing.

What are the things that are off limits? Are there any that you just don't share? Not you, but the company shouldn't. Maybe salaries or I don't know, bonuses. Like what are the things you're like, you know what? This is just private.

Martin Gourdeau

Well, anything that's specific to a person, I think is off limits when it comes to the personal side of it. If it's the person's performance in the business and the impact of that, obviously I would not point out a person by name and, you know...

Una Japundza

Mm-hmm. 

Martin Gourdeau

shine a light on their lack of performance and the effect on the business in a town hall, that would not make any sense at all. A team, I think, a team should be accountable in front of the whole company in terms of the performance and their effects. In terms of information sharing, mean, down to people's salary, I would not go with a team that's like, I know some companies explored wide open salary, super open policies. To me, that's infringing on–

Una Japundza

Yeah, absolutely. 

Una Japundza

Open comp.

Martin Gourdeau

–your personal information and you know, it's just, it's yeah, I wouldn't say disrespectful, but it's just, it's not for me to share that information. I think if people wanna talk about it openly, they can do it. But your revenue, your personal revenue has an impact on like you and your family and to me that's personal information. But anything other than that, yeah, is like free game basically.

Una Japundza

What do you think most leaders get wrong about being transparent and building that sort of culture?

Martin Gourdeau

I think it's the purpose. It's not being transparent just to be transparent. It's why. Like why are you sharing this information? I started doing it just to get the most, to give them the context and treat everyone...I don't like having filtered information. I like to have all the information. So that's how I treat people. And it's not like a... You have to be very careful not to go into like this building a culture guru kind of situation, where you're transparent just to be transparent, to be trendy kind of thing.

I started doing it purely for performance reasons. And I found that if you hire the right people and you give them all the information, they perform better. So it's a very performance oriented strategy.

Una Japundza

Mm-hmm. And let's say someone hasn't shared a lot of information with their team. You know, they could be Vacation Tracker-size or bigger. Maybe they've shared revenue, but nothing else. Where would you recommend someone starts? Because I feel like a show up and throw-up approach probably would not be best. Let me tell you everything. Where, how should a person start? 

Martin Gourdeau

No. Start small and let people ask questions. I would always open the floor and say, is there something you've never asked that you think is off limits? The worst case is I'll say it's off limits, but ask the question. It doesn't cost anything to ask a question. So I actually try to find out what people want to know, because that's always interesting to me.

And if you do it in a proactive way, don't go for like this big reveal, right? Go for small things and the effects of those small things on the business versus some big revelation of information that's never been shared. Then people are trying to figure out, why now? Why are you sharing this big thing now? And then they'll try to fill in the blank on their own. I found that, yeah, that's, that has a tendency to happen.

That’s a common theme with any kind of information sharing, If there's anything you don't share, people will fill in the void. It's like physics, there's a vacuum, the vacuum will get filled. It's the same thing with information. So yeah, if you do a big reveal, if you do a big reveal, make sure it's attached to like a big event or some big thing that's going on. Don't do a big reveal just for the sake of being transparent. So start small, basically.

Una Japundza

That's a really good point of people will guess. Maybe they're gonna start rumors, people are gonna fill in the missing pieces. It's kind of like culture, if you're not intentional about it, it will just emerge. There's no point in which a company doesn't have a culture. Same thing with information. If you don't share it, people are gonna start guessing. What's happening to Martin? Is he leaving? Is this right? Then that's no good.

Martin Gourdeau

Exactly.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It's so funny because I think it's like a human personality or trait that you always assume the worst, or almost the worst. So when there's an information vacuum, your brain goes in all these directions. You try to prepare for the worst. I think it's probably a survival thing. Almost every time that I have an information vacuum on my end and it gets filled, it's always better than what I expected.

I think that concept can relieve a lot of stress of any kind of information sharing. The person probably assumes something worse is gonna happen. The communication itself is probably gonna come as a relief.

Una Japundza

Mm-hmm. Do you feel like leading this way by sharing everything has made you a better leader? And the reason I ask is, I feel like when you're being open with people and sharing everything from the business strategy and how they fit in, you kinda gotta have your stuff together, right? You have to have it thought through. Otherwise, people are gonna be like, Well, Martin says the business is not doing well and he has no idea what to do next. That is not reassuring, right? But if you're being transparent, like, hey guys, we're tanking and I'm at a loss. Any ideas, let me know, right?

Martin Gourdeau

No, I mean, that's kind of your job in any kind of leadership role, you need to have at least some kind of plan. If you're completely clueless, to be frank, you probably shouldn't be in that role. It's a spot for me, if you have actually no idea what you're doing. But it's a good point. I think, so to answer your question, yes, because once you start communicating in a more open way–One, the way you do it, you can't communicate clearly if it's not clear in your head. So it forces you to be structured and in your head of where the business is at, what our challenges are, what the priorities of those challenges are, what we can do to address those challenges.

So yes, it for sure helps you to be a better leader and to make better decisions. I remember, especially at Workleap, because we were a bigger team and especially in person, although we didn't do the Q&A in person, but we did these gatherings. I think they still do today, but once or twice a year, we did these gatherings and you're on a stage in front of 450 people. I mean, your thoughts better be clear. You can't have all your notes at home. I'd have some notes lying around and you have a reference point, but presenting where the business is at and what our biggest challenges are and what the consequences of–

Una Japundza

Yeah.

Martin Gourdeau

–those challenges are in front of a couple hundred people, you really have to get your shit together. Basically and everything has to be very structured in your head. It's kind of a forcing function of clear thinking. So yes.

Una Japundza

And you know what? Now that I'm–as you were speaking, I don't think you have to have the answer as a leader. Correct me if I'm wrong. Sometimes it's okay to also ask people for help. Like I remember listening to Cotopaxi, you know Cotopaxi, the outdoor retail company, the colorful stuff. I remember listening to their founder talk about 2020 and how no one was going anywhere, let alone buying a backpack to go hiking, right? Things just went bad, right? They were like a month away from just going out of business.

Martin Gourdeau

Of course. 

Yeah.

Una Japundza

He presented to the whole company and said, Hey guys, it's pretty bad out there. If anyone has any ideas, let's go, let's brainstorm. And someone came up with those colorful masks that people were wearing for a while that said Do Good. They sold so many because there was such a shortage of masks. He really kept the company afloat until people started traveling again. So he was open and he was like, All comers, ideas, let's go, all hands on deck. So you don't have to always be like, know what to do next, because sometimes you just don't, right?

Martin Gourdeau

Yeah. 

Of course.

Yeah, yeah. I mean, that's a very extreme example, right? There was a big event and it's the one exception to what I said earlier of like, if you have no idea what you're doing, you probably shouldn't be in that seat. I think, for example, everything that happened during COVID, I mean, it just muted a bunch of businesses and I think a lot of people had no idea how to react to it. It's a once in a lifetime thing. To me, that's an exception. But to get back to your point, yeah, I mean, there's a bunch of like...

Una Japundza

Exactly. Exactly. 

Yes, for sure.

Martin Gourdeau

During these Q&As that I've done throughout my career, where someone asks a really tough question, you're completely blindsided, or it's a very specific metric, and I don't know, the answer is I don't know, and I'll get back to you. I'll look into it, I agree it's important, I don't know the answer, I'll get back to you. I do these like a follow-up process and share the question and the answer to the entire company.

It's okay. Sometimes you actually don't know the answer. Even with some research, if it's a metric, you can look up the metric. If it's a more strategic decision or question and you just don't have an answer yet, maybe the answer is, don't have an answer yet. You give a timeline as to when it's going to be important to have an answer. Don't hold yourself accountable to that question.

Una Japundza

Mm-hmm. Yeah. 

Martin Gourdeau

But yeah, no one has all the answers, right? And it's okay. Part of building that trust of you not bullshitting basically in those Q&As is actually saying you don't have the answer when you don't have the answer.

Una Japundza

Yeah, yeah.

Una Japundza

How do you get clear on the objectives and the priorities? Do you have to kind of think in the dark? Do you write? Do you go for a walk? How do you get clear. 

Martin Gourdeau

In the day to day, it's really blocking some time to actually work. It's easy in positions like this, it's easy to have like a fully-booked calendar and back to back every day, and doing meetings, and making decisions, you can get kind of lost in that. Like, why did I decide this again? You lose context. You stop seeing the forest.

So we have blocking time. Never having a full day of back-to-back meetings, I think, is quite important. That's in the day-to-day. And then having these rituals, right? Because again, that forcing function that I talked about earlier, if you know you have a monthly meeting, all hands, okay, take a step back. What were our objectives? We're six months in the year. We just had one this week, actually. We're almost like six months in the year. The next one is gonna be first week of July. It's gonna be the halfway mark of the year.

This is where we stand on our financial objectives, strategic objectives, this is where we're at. It kind of forces you, having those rituals be very, very clear as to where we're at, what the priorities are, and how the business is running.

Una Japundza

Mm-hmm. How have you worked with people from all over the world? You still do. How does sharing this information land on different cultures? And any kind of insights you have of like, okay, if you're working with a diverse team, not every country or not every culture is used to knowing exactly how much the company is making in top line and bottom line.

Martin Gourdeau

Yeah, yeah, that's a good point. I think the end result is usually the same, meaning that when you walk through the why with those various people from different cultures, they'll understand the purpose of sharing that information, and they'll eventually buy it, and hopefully, if you hire the right person, it is a good culture fit.

It's something that you can size for and test in the interview process, I think. But yeah, some cultures have different reactions to knowing these numbers and how much money the business is actually making. I think most of the time, it's just, again, it's just refreshing.

You have these questions of mostly, I think, in European cultures, I think, the bottom line is not shared very often, like how much actual money we're making. So you might get these like very kind of first reaction questions of like, well, where does this money go? And always like, you know, is that just like profit? Is that dividends? And it's like, well, it could be, but no, we choose to reinvest in our growth.

And if you have any ideas, we’re constantly looking for growth levers. If you have ideas, we have money, and we're in a very lucky position to have money to invest in our growth. We choose to spend the money this way, right? And in another more lifestyle business, it could be, yeah, we take out like 20% in dividends a year and go for our shoulders and maybe we'll have a profit sharing or it depends on the context of that business, right? But again, it's just a healthy conversation to have. And yeah.

Una Japundza

Mm-hmm.

Martin Gourdeau

It varies with the cultures, but usually it's quite refreshing. 

Una Japundza

Exactly. I mean, I don't think I can't imagine anyone saying, My goodness, I don't want to know all this information. Don't share this with me, right? Why would you not want to know?

Martin Gourdeau

I mean, yeah, I don't see the context where that happens. I don't want to know. Maybe you feel super anxious and you don't want to know like, we're borderline profitable. You don't want to know if we're in the red. Maybe the very anxious personality thing, but yeah. Again, communicating what's the plan if we do go in the red and we have a backup, we have this, you know, cash cushion and it's good for X amount of months and we have runway.

Una Japundza

Exactly. Exactly.

Una Japundza

Yeah.

Martin Gourdeau

Communication is usually the answer to all of those things.

Una Japundza

Exactly. What are you focused on next at Vacation Tracker? What does the next six months or seven months of the year look like strategically for you guys?

Martin Gourdeau

Yeah, well, it's kind of what I talked about just now that's our actual position, right? We're a profitable bootstrap business, focuses on growth, so finding growth levers. We're playing around quite a bit with everything, kind of integrating in AI workflows right now. So for example, we built this entity server that, for example, the cloud can connect to. And you can play around with the data in the H2 tracker from your cloud workspace.

For example, this morning I woke up, I had a schedule task and it goes through all my meetings in the week and says if there's anyone missing and what I could do to mitigate those people that are off or any national holidays in countries that we operate in. It reads my emails, it's connected to all my tools, including the Houston tracker.

This whole headless software movement is very high potential. I think it's very early on, I don’t think many people have adopted it yet. But it's one of the growth levers that we identify. And there's many others. I mentioned early on in our talk, energy management. So we're building all these tools for better energy management. I think next week we're launching team lead views for energy states of people in their teams. So you'll be able to see energy trends for people in your teams and projections in time.

So if you have like important projects coming up, you can start planning your operations with regards to, if you have a key person that hasn't taken vacation in nine months, there's a flag there, right? So we're trying to get closer to the flow of work and ultimately providing more value for our customers.

Una Japundza

Mm-hmm.

That's super fun. Well, Martin, we always end the podcast the same way, which is in Hey Taco, everyone has five tacos to give to someone every day to say thank you and appreciate them. So my question to you is, you have five tacos. Who would you like to give them to today and why?

Martin Gourdeau

You’re putting me on the spot.

Una Japundza

Exactly.[There’s probably a person or people that have already popped into your mind, just me asking that question. By the way, you can give one person all your five tacos if they really knocked it out of park. You can distribute them as you see fit, but five is all you got.

Martin Gourdeau

Okay, so people I work with.

Una Japundza

It doesn't matter. It could be your spouse. It could be your parents. It could be your neighbor for, you know, taking out your trash can last night when you forgot. It could be anyone.

Martin Gourdeau

Wow.

Um, okay. So in that case, I have to give my first taco to my wife. My wife works in HR and she just started a new position, but she was a performance coach for executives. She had started her own business and she ran that for a few years. And I feel like she provided free service to me as my performance coach. She helped quite a bit in everything that's managing people and growing a business. Because it's her expertise, it's what she does. So that's one for sure.

I would give–it's very timely but I would give a taco to our salesperson Daniela, who absolutely exploded the last month in terms of her sales figures. She just did a great job and helps the business a lot. She's a great person to work with, full of energy and full of drive. So that's two tacos. I would give a taco each to the two co-founders of the business.

They're great to work with. I've known them for a long time and, you know, there wasn't too much risk in terms of aligning me, walking into the business because I knew the guys before. But they're even cooler to work with than I expected. And I know it's not easy to do the transition that they did, especially Lav that, you know, sat down from CEO. But yeah, they're just incredible people to work with and ready to do anything to take the business to the next level.

And my last taco we've split to the whole team. Our team does an incredible job. We have people in seven countries, I think. We're fully distributed and even with that set up, we actually have a pretty cool culture and it's just a great place to work. And yeah, it's a shared taco. 

Una Japundza

You see, I mean, though those were some meaty tacos that you came up with on the spot, you see. So those were great. Well, Martin, thank you for coming on the podcast and for sharing what you believe about transparency and telling us more about Vacation Tracker. I appreciate it.

Martin Gourdeau

Thanks for watching, it was a pleasure.