Welcome to Startup Life: Unscripted, a newsletter by The Nudge Group, where we feature candid conversations with startup operators about their career journeys and experiences. If you received this email as a forward, you can subscribe right here.

Charting the Course from Hollywood to Startups: In Conversation with Lance Hodgson

Welcome back to Startup Life: Unscripted! Today, we have the pleasure of introducing Lance Hodgson, an innovative leader currently working as the VP of Revenue at Sitemate, a dynamic tech startup reshaping the construction industry with smart solutions.

Lance's intriguing career path has seen him traverse diverse industries, from the dazzling lights of Hollywood to the exciting hustle and bustle of the startup world in Los Angeles and Sydney. With over five years under his belt at Sitemate, Lance has been instrumental in the company's impressive growth, propelling it from a 5-person team to a booming 60-member workforce.

Join us as we delve into this super interesting conversation with Lance about his extraordinary journey from Hollywood to the heart of the tech startup scene. If you're curious about the behind-the-scenes operations of a fast-growing startup, or you're a budding entrepreneur hungry for insights from a seasoned pro, this is an interview you won't want to miss!

Key interview takeaways:

🎬 Lance's journey from Hollywood to VP of Revenue at Sitemate demonstrates the versatility and broad application of marketing skills. His roles in strategic sourcing and marketing paved the way for his success in the startup world.

💡 A pivotal moment in Lance's career was stepping into the sales function when the company didn't have a sales team. By tackling leads and booking demos for the CEO, he got to understand the customer's needs better and de-risked the initial revenue generation.

🎉 The most rewarding aspect of his role is solving problems for their customers. He thrives on the diversity of his job, with a balance between management and hands-on tasks in marketing and go-to-market operations.

🔭 Looking ahead, Lance sees numerous opportunities for growth and innovation in GTM roles, though he emphasises the importance of mastering the fundamentals. He encourages startups to solve for basic internal processes, documentation, and tooling before sprinting towards innovation.

🚀 Lance's career advice for aspiring revenue leaders: Gain exposure to as much of the GTM funnel as possible and don't shy away from getting your hands dirty. Broad experience and a deep understanding of how different parts of the funnel interact are crucial for leadership roles in this space.

Hey Lance, it's great to have you here. You've had a super interesting career, working in roles for major Hollywood studios as well as fast-growing startups in Los Angeles & Sydney. Could you share a bit about your journey and how you ended up as VP of Revenue at Sitemate?

I got my break from the then Director of Strategic Sourcing at CBS Studios who I met on university campus (I did my degree in the US). She gave me an internship in strategic sourcing, with a focus on marketing spend.

Even though it was an internship, it still feels like my biggest career break. Once I got my foot in the door in Hollywood, it was relatively easy to transition to a dedicated marketing internship at Sony Pictures Entertainment as Hollywood is a ‘small world’.

After a couple of years in Hollywood, I was looking for jobs and open to a number of marketing avenues when I found a cool job description for a job at a startup in Santa Monica. I liked that they asked questions about why I wanted to work for this type of company (a startup), it felt like there was something other than a resume factoring into the decision.

This was my first taste of the startup scene, and I was super lucky to work with a crazy talented team of proper entrepreneurs there and IMO a good size for a person's first exposure to the startup scene - about 40 people.

After a year or so in this job, I moved back to Australia and got a job as one of the first employees at a software startup going through the startup accelerator program Startmate. I wanted to build a marketing playbook from the ground-up. I worked with that company and had an overall great experience and plenty of learnings for about 18 months, before joining Sitemate as the first go-to-market (GTM) hire.

Sitemate (then Construction Cloud before rebranding) had actually gone through the same Startmate cohort so there was some familiarity there already. I’ve been at Sitemate for over 5 years now, from a 5-person team to a 60-person team and counting. The last 5 years have been special.

Your role as VP of Revenue involves managing many different elements, from marketing to GTM operations and engineering. Can you give us a glimpse into a typical day in your role?

Yeah it’s pretty broad scope, which is really enjoyable and interesting. I probably end up splitting my day about 50/50 at the moment between execution and management/support.

So I make sure that the revenue teams projects are moving and unblocked, and then support the team and company by chipping in with projects and tasks myself. These projects can be anything GTM related, from marketing website work to Salesforce configuration.

This type of player-manager role really suits me, and I think it’s really important at startups of our size (~60 people). Not many meetings, mostly async comms via tools like Trello, so it’s pretty work-filled which is awesome.

You've mentioned that you help companies grow by deciding which growth levers to pull. Can you share an instance where you made a significant decision that led to notable growth for Sitemate?

In my experience, there has been no single ‘hack’ or single change or single thought which leads to massive growth or change in isolation. Every improvement is incremental. It’s about making continuously solid decisions in terms of which levers to continue to pull and which levers to leave alone.

I think I have decent instincts on which levers companies have a good shot of success with, and then it’s just about making logical decisions guided by good process from there.

Transitioning from VP of Marketing to VP of Revenue must have been quite a shift. How has your background in marketing informed your approach to revenue and business operations?

It wasn’t a huge role shift for me, because I’d been largely doing that role with the title of VP of Marketing.

I’d naturally inherited a number of GTM functions outside of marketing due to the large amount of context I had accumulated over the previous few years. For example, I did the configuration/buildout of Salesforce when we changed CRMs, as well as most of the GTM tooling and integrations, and this was all initially under the guise of ‘marketing’.

It was a cognitive shift for me though, and something I am still working on/through. I’m revenue/performance/outcome focused anyway, it’s always the lens I looked at marketing through, but there is definitely still a slightly different lens you need to use and always have front of mind.

I’m still most strong in a couple of functions including marketing, but I am levelling up in the other areas.

Marketing is such a strong background because it’s so multi-faceted, it’s about

• Messaging and framing

• Data and metrics

• Systems and processes

• Creativity, etc.

All of these things translate really well to revenue roles.

Global startup job opportunities:

• 🛠️ Senior Tech Engineer - Managing Projects

• 📚 Chief of Staff - FinTech

• ⌨️ Fullstack Developer - C#, WPF, ASP.Net, SQL, Azure

• 💡 Business Development Manager - B2B

• 📊 Accountant

• 🎨 Brand Marketing Manager - HealthTech

You were the first GTM hire at Sitemate and were instrumental in the company's rebranding and initial revenue traction. Can you walk us through this process and the challenges you faced?

There have been so many challenges, but none of them ever felt existential because they have all felt like ‘good problems/good challenges’.

Probably the most non-normal and impactful part of the Sitemate GTM journey was that we didn’t have a sales team for a long time. We had strong lead flow and no sales team, so I just jumped into calling our leads and booked demos for the CEO.

We double teamed the funnel like this for 2-3 years (SDR > AE) until we had a really solid foundation for a proper GTM team build out. It was a great way to de-risk the first ~1M ARR as we didn’t have to rely on anyone except ourselves. I think lots of companies pull away from this model too quickly. You learn so much staying close to prospects, and it’s hard to not get good at something you do for 2-3 years when you also have deep context about product, market, competition etc.

The biggest challenge we faced was getting v1 of the sales team working. We tried and failed a couple of times, so we just did it ourselves for longer. And then the playbook and expectations became so clear because we had done it for so long that it was so much easier to understand what good looked like. And then it worked.

What would you say is the most challenging aspect of your role as VP of Revenue? And on the flip side, what do you find most rewarding?

Most challenging is probably just prioritisation.

It’s a multi-dimensional role and is naturally broad scoped with multiple functions, multiple regions (we have GTM teams in Australia, the UK and North America) etc, so prioritisation is critical and something which can never be perfect - so it will always be a challenge.

Most rewarding is solving the problem for our customers.

Given your extensive experience in marketing, GTM, and revenue operations, where do you see the most exciting opportunities for growth and innovation in these areas?

Lots of exciting opportunities via tooling, integrations, AI etc., it’s a super exciting time to be in GTM roles.

I do think that the fundamentals/basics is where most companies still drop the ball though, they invest in ‘innovation’ without solving for basic internal processes, documentation, tooling etc.

They sprint in a weird direction when they could just walk more accurately in the direction they are going and make much more progress.

Finally, for those who aspire to a similar career path in revenue operations and leadership, what advice would you give them? Are there certain skills or experiences they should prioritise?

I think get exposure to as much of the GTM funnel as possible. The strongest GTM thinkers I have worked with all have experience in different parts of the funnel.

Even if you are a marketer with a good instinct for sales, it really helps to do the role or get on the phone or be properly involved in sales to validate your instincts and thoughts.

Vice versa, lots of sales people think they know how to do marketing, but have never actually done it.

It’s easier and more respected to talk from experience rather than from theory.

I think sometimes it can feel like you are making horizontal moves because you aren’t going as deep on a single role/function, but if you are thinking about a 10, 15, 20 year career, then 2-3 years in a different part of the funnel is a small investment to deeply understanding another core part of the GTM funnel.

To be a full funnel GTM thinker or leader, knowing how the pipes fit together is more important than knowing what runs through the pipes.

I also gravitate towards player-manager type leaders, so I think get your hands dirty as much as possible, especially early in your career. Try to build the processes, tooling, workflows etc., put your hand up to take projects on and improve processes, rather than complain about them.

Be a do-er.

Give It A Nudge

On one of our recent episodes, we sat down with Jess Walker, the Community and Programs Manager at AirTree, who spills the beans on her amazing 10-year journey in the startup scene! Check out the video and don’t forget to hit that subscribe button!

And that's a wrap! We hope you've enjoyed this edition as much as we loved putting it together. Stay curious, keep learning, and above all, enjoy the rollercoaster ride that is Startup Life. Catch you in the next one! 👋 Not subscribed yet? Do it here and don't miss out! Subscribe Now.