Creating a Metrics Centric Culture - Jay Topper, Chief Customer Officer, Fabric

**Ray Wright** (0:00)
Hello, I'm Ray Wright, Founder and CEO of BenchMarket, and your host of the Metrics that Measure Up podcast. We talked to a wide variety of the top B2B SaaS and Cloud thought leaders, CEOs, executives, investors, and people just like you to discuss the metrics and benchmarks they use to make metrics informed and benchmark validated decisions. Now, on to today's show.
Welcome to today's episode of the Metrics that Measure Up podcast. Today, I am joined by Jay Topper, the Chief Customer Officer at Fabric. We'll be covering three primary topics with Jay today. First, how to build a metrics culture. Second, the value of enterprise education and uplifting on metrics. And third, how to maximize the business impact of metrics and the three key pillars of accuracy, relevancy and presentation. Jay, would you take a moment to give a brief overview of your background to become a good guest here on the Metrics That Measure Up podcast?

**Jay Topper** (1:13)
I will, Ray, and thanks for having me. I know we share a passion with metrics and it's a pleasure and honor to be with you today. I've had two careers before this one. I started out in the United States military. I was in the United States Coast Guard and Army, the first part of my life. From there, starting around the mid 90s, I became a CIO and for the last 27 years of my career, I've been a C-something, Chief Digital Officer, Chief Operations Officer, CIO in an assortment of retailers and B2B businesses.
Then most recently, I've become a Chief Customer Officer for Software as a Service Platform. So this is my third career, is the way I look at it, that we're actually enabling other companies. And so I'm on the other side of the fence now bringing some of that customer expertise into the platform ecosystem.

**Ray Wright** (2:10)
Well, the only constant in life is change. And someone told me that the number of times people change careers is five. So you've still got two to go, Jay.

**Jay Topper** (2:20)
Yeah. Well, I think I've had some mini changes within those as well, different industries and different branches of service. So I might be at my five, I'm not sure.

**Ray Wright** (2:30)
Well, we were introduced by the CEO of Fabric, Mike Mikucci, who I've known since I actually hired him at Netscape back in 1996 And I know that makes me really old, but the context was interesting. And it was about an article he did, Replatforming Your Outcomes, Metrics That Matter. And Mike kind of introduced us through that post. So here's my question. Why are you so focused on the use of metrics in business?

**Jay Topper** (3:00)
Yes, and I am for sure. I don't know that there's a greater passion in business that I have. It started back in my roots in the commercial world. So in 1996, 97, when I first entered the business world, it was as a chief information officer for a company that by now is the world's largest manufacturer and designer of solutions for Broadway and television. They do lighting, audio, scenery, etc. And I was really ignorant there. I didn't know anything. I was coming out of the United States Coast Guard in an operational role. I'd been at sea for many tours of duty and I just couldn't be more ignorant. And so I had to learn the ability to measure a business and understand what was going on in a business from the ground up. My first role was putting in an ERP. I didn't know what an ERP was. I mentioned to you before, I didn't know what an accounts receivable was.
You don't pay attention to those much on ships in the Coast Guard. So fortunately, I was enabled the opportunity to be super curious and ask a lot of questions. So I built my knowledge of the business from the ground up. And as I've progressed through different companies throughout my career, I've brought that ethos with me because I found that there's a lot of people in companies, there's a lot of information and reports flying everywhere. But just the base understanding of the business and what you're trying to do is sometimes missing. So I've tried to simplify it everywhere I've gone, and then build it back up across a broad audience throughout the company, to try to bring that passion for metrics, not just in the people and the individual functions, but really across the entire enterprise. And I haven't lost that even to this day.

**Ray Wright** (4:48)
One of the things that I've seen in startup land, right, is as a founder, CEO, see some challenges or mistakes in a previous business they were at, or that they were facing, so to go and create technology to do it. So my first question to you is, what are the top challenges or mistakes you see companies making when they decide they need to capture and use metrics to inform decision-making?