Jason Harper of Ready Signal on hiring for attitude before experience

Jason Harper

Hi Etgar, thank you for having me. I'm great.

Jason Harper

Sure, happy to. I think the main thing is, today I'm a husband and father, married for 20 years now, and I have two children, 12 and 15, a boy and a girl, and I'm really enjoying all of them and their journeys and all of our journeys together. My path to founding my company, Ready Signal, has been quite the journey. It started back in the late 1990s, when I finished school. I got into economics and econometric analysis. I'm an economist by training, and I worked for a variety of companies for a long period of time. I was one of the earlier employees at GoDaddy back in the day. That was super fun. Then I transitioned to a more regular career. I worked for some advertising agencies, spent a lot of time with an Omnicom agency, Organic. That was a formative period, lots of great learning there. They allowed me to explore anything I wanted with data and analytics. This was around 2007 to 2012, give or take.

A lot of the tools and things we use today, we didn't have, so we had to make them ourselves, which was fun. I did that, and eventually found myself at Ford, running an analytics group there. Then I decided to quit and start a consulting company, to focus on AI, machine learning, and business intelligence. Quitting a job as an executive at an automotive company really made no sense, so it was hard to do. It took me three tries to actually walk in and follow through with my resignation. I started the consulting company, grew it, and sold it in 2023 to a PE-backed strategic acquirer, OneMagnify. We're part of their platform now, as the AI and analytics arm of them. Along the way I spun out Ready Signal, a software company that is basically an AI economist, as you mentioned. That's where I am today. I'm running Ready Signal, and I still work for and support OneMagnify and RXA at OneMagnify, my consulting team there. And I'm writing a parenting book, because of course, why not write a book.

Jason Harper

From a marketing perspective, it's really driven by what stage I'm at. It's very different when I think about where my consulting company is, which is now part of a global team. What we're driving there is thought-leadership type metrics: are we getting in front of people, are we getting keynote addresses, are we getting audiences to webinars that show us clearly reaching a broad audience as thought leaders. When I think about my Ready Signal role, the reality is everything's driving sales. We need awareness, we need folks to understand that you can use external data to improve your models, and fortunately or unfortunately, with the tariffs and everything going on right now, it's exposed a lot of companies to the importance of external market factors, and Ready Signal solves that. So we're taking the approach of, great, people are aware, but I need sales calls. I'm looking at very tactical things. I'm very much in early-stage startup founder mode, even though we're, I don't know, six years old now. But who am I calling, who am I reaching. I'm looking for very specific things: how many emails are sent, how many calls are made, how many meetings are booked. It's very tactical, probably short-sighted admittedly, but I want to sell.

Jason Harper

Well, number one, our number one metric is cash. It's very black and white, there's no way to make that up. When we're selling software as a service, do people buy, I can just look at our bank account. Our goal is to get to cash-flow break-even as a company, and our marketing and sales efforts, if I group those two things together, are designed to drive that. When I back that up a step, I know the activities that lead me to that outcome, which are meetings booked.

06:12 How many calls am I personally on? We're a small company, 15 people give or take, maybe 20. I'm very active in that role, so I see whether my calendar is full with sales calls. There's a difference between a networking call and a sales call. When someone else books the meeting and invites me to the call, that's a pretty good signal that it's a sales call, not just a networking call. When I see we're talking to so-and-so, it's tempting to think, amazing, but really it's just them getting to know each other, networking, which is good and healthy for the organization, for the folks on the team, but it's not a sales call. So it's sometimes hard to tell what's true sales and marketing activity for the organization that's organic, versus investing a little bit, as you mentioned, in a pay-to-play environment where you drop 50k and you're the keynote speaker, which is the example you used, and man, I wish I had 50k to drop on that, I'd totally do it. But we have partnerships with organizations. We just did a webinar at [name unclear] a couple weeks ago. Those are meaningful for us. So tracking those very specific activities that are difficult to tell a story around is where it's very black and white.

Jason Harper

Well, it's not even limited to the marketing team, these qualities. We need to make sure these folks bring, I guess the three metrics I look for with anybody are attitude, effort, and competence, in that order. When I bring in someone who's going to focus on marketing and building the organization from that lens, they need to bring a positive attitude. They need to be someone we want to spend time with, who wants to spend time with us, who's eager to learn. It doesn't come to the table with, "I know everything, do it my way, I've been doing this for any number of years."

No, we need people who come in with, "I have this background, but I need to learn Ready Signal, I need to learn what we're doing, and I'm going to be part of a team." So it's that attitude, and then the effort. You know, we're a startup, we've been at this for a little while, but we're functioning very much like a startup, so you've got to work a lot, and when you're working, you've got to be really efficient with it. About six months ago we required everyone to be back in the office, because we want people who want to work with each other and be around each other, and are also willing to physically come and do that, which requires work: people have to get up early, some of them have to get their kids off to school and organize their life to get into the office.

09:18 Building on that, then it becomes a question of competence: how can you demonstrate to us that you have the skills to deliver what we need you to deliver? And quite frankly, if you check those first two boxes and show the ability to gain the competence, I tend to give folks a lot of runway to learn on the job, because when I have folks who have the attitude and the effort, I can trust them, and when I have that level of trust, that's a huge business asset for me that I can really lean on. Then that competence, I do believe, can catch up very rapidly.

Jason Harper

Yeah, I don't know that I have it figured out. I've been managing and hiring people for 25 or 26 years now, and I've been involved in some level of compensation for that quarter century. It's a long time, and I don't know that I still have it quite figured out. The best compensation structures are where you have aligned incentives, where you can say, okay, we need you to accomplish this, and that's worth this to the business, therefore I can pay you if you're able to accomplish this. If you can come up with those structures... From a sales perspective, on a sales team, it's pretty easy, easily measurable: here are the results, you get paid more when you hit your results. It gets much softer when you're thinking about marketing, when you're asking about some of those softer metrics. For me, I rely heavily on my startup experience, those first years.

When you're building a team, let's say 20 or fewer people, I think equity in that type of compensation, where generally speaking everyone's aligned and we all want this thing to be successful. I do give out equity. I think I had probably over 30 folks when I sold my first company, out of a team of 60, who had some equity. That worked really well for me, and I think people enjoyed it. So when I'm looking at the marketing roles specifically, I think that's important. I think competitive salary is also important, and I guess it depends on the level of the role too. If you're looking for a more senior, marketing-leader type role, I think you have to pay for that. If you're at a point where you're hiring folks to lead marketing, you need to be willing to treat that as an all-in bet, not something you should be half in on.

And I can say this: I hired a CMO for my consulting company, a friend who was looking for his next gig. We worked it out, and I think we paid him probably half of, certainly probably a quarter of, what he felt he was worth. The results were awful. It was more of a promise of the equity play, like, we'll get to the compensation as we grow as an organization. He came in and took a pretty huge salary hit, and then it just, basically, I think he was here for about 9 months, and then we both agreed this isn't working. It affected the whole relationship too. So I've learned that from a marketing-leader perspective, my experience is that it's an all-in situation, an investment, and it doesn't just require their own compensation. There are budgets involved, this is a commitment. You don't want to hire someone for marketing without a pretty solid commitment to the tools they're going to need to actually execute their job.

Jason Harper

I don't fully have this one answered. I think part of my issue here is spending most of my career in marketing, in advertising agencies, so I'm very critical, and I feel like I can do this myself, so it's hard for me to extend that to folks who don't. From a fractional-CMO type of role, I'm not interested in that, I already have that, that's me, part of my time goes toward that. I'm sure there are folks who are highly capable, it probably adds a ton of value, and it probably helps that they have multiple customers or clients and partners to draw from, but I don't have much interest in it myself, admitting that's probably a problem I have.

Jason Harper

There's a lot, it's hard to get to just one, so I'll give you a few, you can edit this down later if you want to focus on one. The resources we're talking about, you can make mistakes there, mistaken expectations of when I bring in this person, then this is going to happen, and it takes a lot longer than you expect.

15:27 My expectations are commonly wrong when I bring in marketing, even ad agencies. When I bring them in, the expectations I have are very high, and they're very infrequently met, probably never. I think understanding exactly how much it costs, the financial commitment to supporting these endeavors. And I think, and this probably sounds hypocritical, I also don't make changes fast enough when I see things aren't working.

15:57 I stay committed to a path I don't believe is going to work out, pouring more money and resources behind something that's a failed effort, being too optimistic. I generally hang on to things a little too long. But if you set up your marketing, from a human perspective, from a campaign perspective, from a strategy perspective, the way you started this conversation, with concrete KPIs, the more solid the measurements you put in place, and setting your expectations for what your return on investment is for marketing, with those measurable KPIs set up out of the gate with the people you're bringing in to lead it, and then sticking to it: hey, we're not meeting expectations, we're measuring these things, you're doing these activities, we're not achieving these things, and having the discipline to go through that exercise, which I don't have. I'm a ready-fire- aim person. I was talking to a buddy this morning about that, from an investment we're making, which I'm totally ready-fire-aim about. But having the discipline to go through the exercise to establish those KPIs with the folks you're expecting to deliver them, and then having the commitment, if it's not working, to make the change.

Jason Harper

Yeah, bridging that gap. I think those expectations are sometimes articulated in a way that sounds very similar, so often, before things get going, everybody kind of agrees, but they're really not in agreement. What the founder is looking for, there's a gap there from what the team is expecting and planning to do. I'll draw from when I was working in advertising, working with clients, on large branding campaigns. Everyone agreed up front: yes, branding, awareness, reach, frequency metrics, making sure we're meeting our audience, whatever, it's very much an upper-funnel type play. Then, after these campaigns go live, it becomes, how many leads did we get. So the KPI we talked about, awareness, opinion, consideration, these standard things, and we're launching big campaigns for things like cars, and it's immediately, how many leads. So from the client, as the founder, I saw myself doing that with our poor ad agencies, we turned to a few ad agencies with me during the week, like, "yeah, yeah, yeah, where's all my, how come we're not getting sales, how come no one's calling us, where's our lead flow, how come no one."

Because at the end of the day, in a startup world, we have needs, and it's sales. If we've proven, if we believe we have product-market fit, then why don't we have more customers, and we're doing these marketing efforts to build awareness, to generate leads, so I can get business opportunities and more customers. So I think that gap in expectations, both sides need to think about it ahead of time, and understand some self-awareness with this. As a founder, I recognize I have unrealistic expectations, but as a founder, I don't care that they're unreal, we all need to accept that. And as the marketing team or agency, you understand that you have half as much time as you were told you have, unless it's, you're killing it and you're in a hockey-stick curve and have all sorts of room to be inefficient, which I think is very few and far between. The reality is, as a marketer working with entrepreneurs, you probably have less budget and less time to show results. So as a rule of thumb, if they say you have, this is a six-month thing, great, you should show your worth in 2 to 3 months. Be prepared to make sure you're communicating to the founder, to the folks, what's going on.

Jason Harper

When I talk to that potential incoming marketing-leader person, what I want to convey, how I know they're the one, is whether they're articulating an understanding of where we're at right now in the business and where we need to be, which in our case is, we want to be significantly cash-flow positive within a year. That's what I need my leadership team and my strategic partners helping me charge toward. From a marketer's perspective, understanding that our timelines are shorter, I'm not trying to build brand awareness that's going to help 50 years from now, we need more tactical marketing work, though we do need to build for the future too. So someone who can hold both of these things in balance, who can understand where we're at now and where we're going, and can articulate back to me those, yeah, the role of the marketer is like the role of everyone in the company, we need to get to cash flow, and then get to cash-flow positive within a year. So I'd like to hear very specific, concrete things that demonstrate their understanding of the position I'm in as the founder.

Jason Harper

I don't know. My financial advisor told me I'm collecting K-1s like baseball cards, so I probably need to think through my strategy a little more. This morning I just, apparently, bought a bar with a buddy down in Florida, so I can't really say no to things.

Jason Harper

I'll go back to one of my previous answers. When I talk to folks, when I'm making investment decisions, I was honestly just joking with my buddy this morning about my due-diligence process, it's sort of like, well, that's a great idea, I'm in, what are we doing again, sure, cool. It's not, it's more about the people I'm talking to and what I'm looking for: attitude, effort, competence, in that order. I'll walk through this, since it's fresh in my mind. I typically make about an investment a month right now. I can't say I can't say no to great opportunities, and I'm trying to spread what I'm doing around too. As the founder of Ready Signal, I'm putting a lot of cash personally behind that, because I believe in it, that's an AI tech company, so I'm pretty heavy into that, and I make some other investments there. But when I'm looking at investments outside of that, it's in healthcare, other industries, where I don't have a lot of technical expertise. I don't even drink alcohol, so I don't know why I'm buying a bar.

But I'm looking for folks who have that: how are we marketing this, how is this going to continue to grow, how are those things going. I'm looking for people who, when I talk to them, I believe what they're saying, I trust them, it looks to me like they're going to put in a lot of work and effort. I invested in a CPG analytics company in January, and in talking to the founder and CEO, it's like, on paper I look like I could do what he's doing, but when I talk to him, this guy's freaking great, he's the real version of me, this is neat. Between his attitude, his effort, how much he's working, the team's working, you just see it and you feel it when you talk to these folks. For me, at the stage of investing I'm doing here, seed and angel-type things, it's very much a conversation with the founder and maybe some folks on the team, to get that attitude and effort. I'm looking for competence too, because I'm obviously not going to be in a position to train folks, since I'm the investor. When I'm looking at the larger Series A deals, I'm typically along for the ride with other groups, and relying on them to do their research.

Jason Harper

That's where I help. I got involved with a friend, he makes clean-energy smoothies, and he's a very smart guy, very smart at making the product, but I felt there was some help I could give. When I'm working with the smaller, very-early-stage companies, I'll absolutely sit and listen and hear what the challenges are, and then connect people. A lot of what I do for those companies is leverage my network and say, oh, you should talk to so-and-so, or, I have a friend who's on Shark Tank, you should talk to him, that's a cool thing, let me connect you to them. It's not so much that I'm in there telling anybody what to do, it's more that I find really smart people who I think could really help them, who are willing to help, and try to make those connections. And then, I'm on the board of several companies too. When I take those seats, I can get a bit more hands-on, more prescriptive with techniques and things, and I do tend to drift more toward the sales side of marketing, because that's where I think most of the days are spent, on sales. I do get very hands-on, where folks invite me into that role.

Jason Harper

There isn't one, I guess. I'd want to know what the ROI is on that spend. If you're getting $4 back for every dollar you put in, spend whatever you want. So my questions would be more about what you're getting for those allocations. Are you spending 50% of your budget on customer acquisition and not acquiring customers? That's where I'd be looking, if that makes sense.

Jason Harper

If we take, for example, referrals: how do I know about this opportunity? I'm much less likely to invest in something if it isn't someone else recommending it, so I do have a bit of a filter there. Second, when I do get involved in these companies, if they're a couple degrees separated from me, where I don't know the founding team personally, I read the deck, I look at what market they're going after, and then I start to question things. I like to poke holes in some of the assumptions being made, ask some questions, and see what type of answers I get.

You see a lot in decks, "this is a 17 trillion dollar market" and stuff, and it's like, really, let's dial that back a little, does it really pencil out when I bring things into a bit more focus. I look at who else is invested, what stage this is at, are we growing or shrinking, do we have product-market fit, would I like to invest in companies with customers who have choice. So if P&G is a customer of yours, that's a pretty good signal to me. But if you don't have any customers, that makes me a little more nervous, unless I have some other things that are really getting my attention. For that level of betting, I'd bet that on myself instead, I have plenty of ideas of my own.

Jason Harper

I thought about this one. I think, at some level, we see this, I grew up in southeast Michigan, I live in Ann Arbor, Michigan, and Detroit sort of dominated my culture growing up. I grew up in Dearborn, for those who know where that is relative to Detroit. In Detroit there's this sort of concept of hustle, and we talk about it and use it, and I have a lot of friends who always have a side hustle. I did this myself for years, I started a company with some friends called areacode rentals.com, which no one's ever heard of, because we did it as a side hustle for two years, and it was just a giant waste of time. So while folks can get started on the side, my experience, at least for me and my friends and everyone I know personally, is that starting a company requires 100%.

For me, I probably started maybe two or three companies over the years on the side. They were my side hustle, and none of them went anywhere. It was maybe fun, but a giant waste of time and resources. For me, when I quit the job at Ford, I was all in. I had no safety net, my wife was a stay-at-home mom, I had two kids, a dog. It was either going to work, or I was moving in with the in-laws. There was no other option, and for me that was a motivation I needed, where failure was simply not an option. To start my company I refinanced my house and took out some cash, and got a couple of investors to give me some loans. I had nine months of cash reserves, that was it. So that pressure, for me... that misconception, I think, is the side hustle. I don't know anyone for whom it worked, though I know a lot of people who have those side hustles. And I play guitar, that's my hobby.

Jason Harper

You have a lot less cash than you think you do. I mean it. I thought I had two years saved up, I had nine months. It took a lot longer.

Jason Harper

Maybe. Why did I do that. I have a great answer to that, I need to think. I should have thought through what I just said there. The reality is, when I look back on it, when I talk to some folks, it really makes no sense. I had a great job, a great team, and a pretty cushy lifestyle. I was in much better shape than I am today. But when I looked at the next 10 to 15 years, I guess it was like, I had some runway I should try to take, or I could just coast it out and be fine, and it was a great job, I loved Ford, I drive an F-150 today, and I grew up in Dearborn, which is close by. It's kind of a dream job, and when I was looking at it, I guess... I was sitting there thinking about the reasons not to leave my job. It was a good job, all the things I said, very well paid, really good work-life balance, and I felt like, if I leave this, it's going to be really hard, if not impossible, to get this again, because this is a dream job.

A friend of mine was the CMO of a very large clothing company, a big brand, and he reached out and said, hey, why don't you be our chief analytics officer. I said, I'm good, I'm good. He said, why don't you talk to these folks. So I said, alright, sure, I'll have the conversation. I talked to them, and it really was this realization, listening to them, that the job was effectively across the street, nearby. I remember sitting in my office, probably around July or August, the summer before I quit, and it was like, well, I got off the phone with them, and they're super happy, and I'm like, that actually sounds like a pretty good gig, that's fine, it's not really enough for me to want to leave Ford for, but it seems fine. And it was this realization that I could probably go get another job, that probably is there for me, and I think it was like taking that constraint off the table and looking at what it could mean for me and my family if it did pay off. The downside risk, probably more than I recognized or wanted to recognize, but the upside was there. Once I cleared that anchor I had placed artificially, that's what really enabled me to, to quote my business school professor [name unclear] Stacy Jackson, "look before you leap, but still leap."

Jason Harper

Thank you, Etgar, this was great, I really enjoyed the conversation, really appreciate it.