Stakeholder Capitalism + ESG - Uncovering Hidden Enterprise Value with Renee Cullinan

**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're joined by Renee Cullinan, founder of Stop Meeting Like This, and a long time business colleague of mine. Today, we'll be covering three main topics. First, the catalyst behind founding Stop Meeting Like This. Second, how does the evolving world of ESG and stakeholder capitalism shape the future of business? And third, what are the return on investment criteria and metrics that will highlight the value of ESG programming? Renee, please take a moment to give a brief background of your journey to becoming a guest on the Metrics Measure Up podcast.

**Renee Cullinan** (1:14)
Sure, Ray, and thanks so much for having me. This is a lot of fun. Yeah, so the journey is I started my career as a sales engineer in tech, which is such a great early in career job because you have so much visibility into the business from the sales side to the technical side, to the product management side, etc.
So I'd love that job, but over time moved into product marketing and management for several tech startups that were acquired by IBM and Microsoft. And Ray, in that transition, something very interesting started to become clear to me, which is in sales, the success metrics for a role or a professional are super clear, right? You, of all people, know that. And when I moved into roles that were more in product management, marketing, etc., people would start to complain about how much sales people would get paid. And I would always say that, hey, listen, first of all, sales is a hard job. And second of all, it's a vulnerable one because people can see exactly how well you're performing, how productive you are. And what I observed is that most other roles, the performance metrics are highly nebulous. It's hard to tell. And so I got very interested in how leaders can evaluate and increase organizational effectiveness. And that journey led me into consulting, in which I developed a specialty around that. And then within that is a specialty around collaborative effectiveness, which was the basis for Stop Meeting Like This.

**Ray Rike** (2:33)
Okay. So as a former sales professional and leader of go-to-market teams, I love metrics. I love increasing operational efficiency, which drives faster revenue growth. But Renee, you talked about stop meeting like this. So how did the concept of founding a company that really helped large organizations decrease the negative impact of meetings and emails to business productivity? How did you come up with that concept as your launching point?

**Renee Cullinan** (3:04)
Well, what we started to notice is a sort of a strange market dynamic inside of companies that didn't make sense. So if you think about it, your knowledge workers, thank your UI designers, your managers, your sales operations folks, they're highly compensated, hard to find, hard to retain people, and yet they are the least instrumented class of workers really in the world. I mean, as a senior executive, you would probably have an easier time assessing the output of your car mechanic or your travel agent over your direct reports or the teams beneath them. That's because those people spend the bulk of time in meetings and in e-mail, which makes sense. Their jobs are to drive work forward. That can either be a very effective use of their time and a great way to create value or it can be a total time suck and soul suck along the way. The answer is it's usually both, but you can't really tease them apart. You can't really drive operational efficiency of maybe your scarcest resource, which is the time and attention of your high-end knowledge workers and the price, if I can take a minute to quantify it, is huge. Imagine that you have a senior executive who spends five hours a day or call it 25 hours a week in meetings, which seems reasonable.
If you assume that, that's 1200 hours, give or take a year. We've done a ton of research on this and we can tell you that, on average, about 32 percent of meeting time is wasted, which is huge. Let's just say that's roughly 400 hours over the course of a year, which translates to six to 10 weeks, depending on what a work week looks like. That is a massive inefficiency. If you multiply that by everybody in your company, it's an outrageous waste of your top talents, and that's the problem they set out to solve.