Kind Folks Finish First - Sam Jacobs, Founder and CEO Pavilion

**Ray Rike** (0:00)
Hello, I'm Ray Reich, founder and CEO of RevOp Squared, and your host of the Metrics that Measure Up podcast. We talked to a wide variety of B2B, SaaS, and Cloud thought leaders, executives, investors, and people just like you to discuss the metrics and benchmarks they use to make metrics informed decisions. Now on to today's show. Welcome to today's episode of the Metrics It Measure Up podcast. Today, we are joined by Sam Jacobs, founder and CEO of Pavilion, and most recently, bestselling author of the book, Kind Folks Finish First. And equally important, Sam, the first two-time guest here on the Metrics It Measure Up podcast.

**Sam Jacobs** (0:55)
This is, well, I didn't realize that Ray, that's amazing. Thank you so much for having me.

**Ray Rike** (0:59)
We're looking forward to it. We're going to talk about four main topics from the book, Kind Folks Finish First with Sam. The first is the power of failure. Second, understanding what you stand for and why it's so important. Third, the concept of getting by giving. And fourth, a core value that Sam talks about, not only in the book, but with his company, Pavilion, listen closely and act quickly. So Sam, can you take a moment to give a brief background of your journey to becoming a guest on the Metrics It Measure Up podcast?

**Sam Jacobs** (1:30)
Yeah, of course. And again, thanks so much for having me. So I'm the CEO and founder of a company called Pavilion. My background is I've been here in New York since 2003 So just about 20 years building venture capital back companies. And from 2010 to 2018, I was in leadership positions as a VP Sales and Chief Revenue Officer. And over that time, largely because I needed a support group to help me solve difficult business challenges, I started this company called Pavilion. It was then called Revenue Collective. It's now called Pavilion. And it was the culmination of a lot of my experience, a lot of my work, a lot of my frustration, that led me to starting the company and then led me to focus on it full time. Really, the inflection point, which is the beginning point of my book, was Friday the 13th of October 2017 And really, I worked one more place after that period. That was the day that I got fired from my second to last job. And then I began working full time on Pavilion four years ago in December of 2018 And since then, it's been a wild ride and a lot has happened. All of it, or almost all of it, I can't think of really that many negative things. And it's also exceeded my wildest dreams. And it coincided with a shift in mindset that I employed really beginning about five years ago in a rest stop on the New Jersey Turnpike when I was with my wife and my dog Walter. So the book is about that journey. The book is about building this company, which is now valued at close to $200 million.
We raised $25 million last year. We serve 10,000 members all over the world. And all of this started not as any ambitious world conquering scheme, but as a dinner club amongst friends here in New York City, who are also leading sales organizations to help them and help each other work together to succeed and realize our professional potential. And that's what the book's about. And that's what my company's about.

**Ray Rike** (3:19)
Well, Pavilion is an amazing business and entity. And we'll talk a little bit more about that later. But I want to talk about Sam Jacobs' own personal journey. I'm going to double click on that. I don't know if it's fateful, but a maybe fortunate day, Friday the 13th on 2017 And then I read the first four words in Chapter 1 of your book. They hit me like a freight train. And that was The Power of Failure. Can you share a little bit more about that day, your story and why the power of failure is how you opened the book?

**Sam Jacobs** (3:53)
Absolutely. So that day, we were driving down the New Jersey Turnpike. We were going to a friend's wedding who got married on Friday the 13th so that I guess he was a budget conscious wedding. An auspicious day to get married. And I was using my phone as the GPS because this is pre the ubiquity of Apple CarPlay. And I had Waze on. And then I got a little notification as we're driving down and it's an email from my then CEO. And anytime you get an email from your CEO, you always get a little bit of a flutter in your heart. And we pulled over to a rest stop. And we let Walter use the restroom and I used the restroom and got a hamburger from Roy Rogers. But I read the email and the email is one of those very terse emails that says, hey, I didn't realize you'd be out today. Can you come in Monday morning first thing? And when a person that is well known to come into the office at 10.3 or 11 is asking you to come into the office around 8:30 a.m., you know, something is afoot. And I knew immediately because unfortunately or fortunately, this was now yet another company. This was three out of four companies that I would be fired from over the course of the eight years from 2010 to 2018 I realized what was happening and it was a point of resolution. I decided in that moment to not use this as an opportunity to wallow in self-pity, not use this as an opportunity to lick my wounds and feel sorry for myself, but to use it as an opportunity to change the inflection and the course of my life and of my career. I call it the power of failure because the point that I make is really one of mindset that I had considered myself a failure, and as a consequence of considering myself a failure, I was a failure. When you think about life transactionally, when you think about brief moments where you either win or you lose, you lose in that specific moment, then you can think about victory and defeat very transactionally, very binary. But if you think about your life as unfolding over a period of decades and especially your career, which of course it does hopefully, assuming you're in good health, if you think about your life unfolding over a period of decades, then all of those failures are not really failures, they're learning, they're wisdom, they're experience. I've been through so many different things that at the time felt like knives through the heart.