Pierce Ujjainwalla, Knak Co-founder & CEO, on Growth and Culture

In our ongoing series of conversations on growth and culture, last week I caught up with ,Pierce Ujjainwalla, the co-founder and CEO of Knak. Knak enables enterprise marketing teams to create emails and landing pages, codelessly. Over 10,000 marketers at companies such Citrix, Dish Network, and Triumph Motorcycles have used Knak to build hundreds of thousands of emails, seamlessly integrating them into marketing automation platforms such as Marketo, Eloqua, Salesforce, Adobe Campaign, and Responsys.

Founded in 2015 and having grown completely through bootstrapping, Knak has some impressive metrics:

• • Customers: Annualized revenue growth over 178% over the last 3 years with gross retention over 99%

• • Product: 4.9 stars on ,Capterra, 4.7 stars on ,G2

• • Culture: ,5-star rating on Glassdoor; 100% CEO approval rating; eNPS 72

Prior to founding Knak, Pierce previously launched Revenue Pulse, a marketing operations consultancy that is still running profitably. Through our conversation, it became clear how much Pierce learned from his experience with Revenue Pulse, and how he applied those learnings across both companies.

Pierce has done a stellar job founding and growing Revenue Pulse and Knak, and has some great insights on how critical a strong, positive culture and reinforcement of values is to company growth. I learned a lot from our conversation, and am confident you will too. Enjoy!

https://youtu.be/DgmwYPgzdMc

,Let’s start at the beginning. You previously founded Revenue Pulse, which is a service business. How did you identify the opportunity for Knak, a product business, and what led you to pursue it while you were still running Revenue Pulse?

• • In Revenue Pulse’s Marketo consultancy work with large enterprise marketers, it became clear that they needed help creating emails and landing pages.

• • We would have developers prepare these for our clients but it was a repetitive process that we realized could be templatized.

• • Knak was borne out of our desire to better use our human capital to contribute something that continually gets better over time.

,As you know, we are having a series of conversations on culture, and how culture can infuse team engagement, product quality, customer satisfaction and retention, and ultimately company growth. How do you define culture?

• • Culture is like the operating system of your company.

• • It is that underlying layer of how people act, what they do, how they treat each other, how they treat partners, how they treat customers and how they build products.

• • Pierce learned the hard way that if you don’t have a good culture, it is hard to do anything else well.

,Let’s double click on that. I mentioned a loose thesis on culture leading to great products that lead to great customers leading to great growth. You mentioned that you have some pillars that are very similar. Why don’t you talk about those pillars and how you came to the realization of what those are?

• • At his first company, Revenue Pulse, they were laser focused on customers. Their customers loved them as shown by their off-the-charts NPS and customer referrals, but internally he felt they were very broken.

• • Pierce believes that they were over-focusing on the customer perspective without looking at how everyone on the team was doing. No one asked, “are we working well together as a team?”

• • They got by without any real culture at Revenue Pulse but it eventually caught up to them. He realized he needed to take a step back. Going into Knak Pierce did not want to make that same mistake. He focused on culture, leading him to develop his four key pillars: culture; customers; product; growth.

,Was there a specific trigger at Revenue Pulse that made you realize you really needed to focus on culture?

• • When you are starting a business, culture does not make you money on day one of the business.

• • Pierce realized that they had no culture at Revenue Pulse and it was turning into a company that he didn’t want to be a part of.

• • There were different subcultures starting to happen that he did not agree with and there were one or two bad apples that were driving those but it was hard to keep them accountable because there was no playbook for Pierce to point to to say that what they were doing was not OK according to their core values.

,I have heard you talk about the importance of being clear on values in the company. When and how did you put together Purpose, Mission, Vision and Values at Revenue Pulse, and when did you end up putting them in place at Knak?

• • At Revenue Pulse, it took 7 years to put them in place and years 5 and 6 were very difficult because they took that long.

• • At Knak, they did it in our second year. It takes time to know what your company’s values are going to be. They needed to build a bit of a team to have experiences together that helped really solidify the values. They were eight people at the time; they went around the table and talked about things that defined Knak as a company, and translated those into the company’s values.

• • It was not a fun experience at Revenue Pulse and Pierce didn’t want to do that again. He wanted a positive experience for everyone at the company. He felt that having the corporate why, having the values, having the mission, was something to do much earlier on.

,We have already quoted some stats for the strength of the culture as graded by the employees at Knak. How about at Revenue Pulse? And now that you have gone through the culture change, would you say that there is a stronger, better culture?

• • Yes, 100%.

• • The biggest difference is that there is one culture and not a bunch of subcultures. It is one culture across the entire company.

• • A lesson at Revenue Pulse is that one bad apple can spoil the barrel. At the time, Pierce did not want to take action on that bad apple. He knew in his gut that the individual was negatively impacting the culture at Revenue Pulse but Pierce let it be because he did not want to have to deal with the implication or have the tough discussions. But at the end of the day, the discussions get harder and the damage gets bigger so that is a key learning – you have to protect your culture and it is not always easy to do it.

,On that note, what do you think held you back – was it conflict avoidance? Was it that this individual was driving revenue and you would be sacrificing revenue for growth?

• • Pierce was stretched really thin and that by letting that individual go, he would have more issues to deal with on top of everything else.

• • Pierce believed that the customers would suffer and Pierce ultimately kept the individual to keep Revenue Pulse’s customers happy.

• • Again, this was a case of being too focused on customers, and not realizing enough that customer satisfaction is tied to your culture.

,So you make the move and part ways with the individual. What was it like afterwards for the company, for the culture, for your customers?

• • There was almost an immediate improvement. Things became easy again and they went back into their flow state.

• • Due to the nature of consulting, clients can get attached to consultants/account managers, so they had to navigate some of those customer situations, but overall customers were very understanding – a lot more than Pierce expected. Everyone moved on.

• • Overall, Pierce thought it would be worse than it was to let the individual go. It turned out much better than Pierce expected and he is thrilled that he made the change. One of the things that allowed Pierce to make the decision was bringing on someone in to help Pierce so that he had more capacity. The benefits he thought that were there to keep the individual did not outweigh the cons.

,How do you set goals for the company and your team to rally around, both for the long and short term?

The company’s pillars and related metrics at Knak are:

• • Culture – eNPS

• • Customers – NPS & Logo Churn

• • Product – NPS & Logo Churn

• • Growth – ARR target

• • Growth is the last pillar because it is driven by the other pillars. This thinking is relatively new at Knak. The weekly team meeting used to be focused on growth and finance numbers but team feedback was that there was more to running the business than simply ARR status.

• • The structure of Knak’s Tuesday All Hands meetings (30+ staff) is that they go into breakout rooms with 7-8 people in each and go through stories from everyone on the team. Everyone in the breakout room shares stories about culture, customers, product and/or growth and the group leader from each breakout group presents updates to the entire company. Group leaders change every meeting.

• • In the NHL, a few teams (for example, the Calgary Flames with a fireman helmet) identify the team’s most valuable player after each game. Knak does something similar called a “Knakolade”. The person that received it last meeting gives it out at the next meeting to the person that best represents the company’s core values. This recognition process helps to reinforce the values since they talk about them every week.

• • Stories help to get to know everyone better. Recognition and acknowledgement is key, and everyone gets practice speaking in front of the whole team.

• • People are great about volunteering to be the leader of the group. It goes back to the culture – everyone wants to contribute and give to peers. “Be positive” is one of Knak’s values.

,How do you instil the culture in new hires, especially given today’s increasingly remote nature of work?

• • More than half of Knak was already working remotely spread out across Canada prior to COVID.

• • Everyone is a steward for the culture. Culture gets passed through to other people. There are very strict screening to make sure hires are a cultural fit.

• • Knak’s HR lead is involved in getting people on board. She does a one-on-one with every new hire and makes sure they are pointed to all the right resources for culture.

• • Pre-COVID, the whole company was getting together in person twice per year. These took place in Ottawa as strategy sessions with a lot of non-work activities for people to get to know each other better.

,What kind of screening and filtering do you use from the perspective of culture in addition to their experience, performance and attitude?

• • They do a lot of interviews. A lot of people don’t get selected and they are very ruthless. There is an original screening interview in which they look mostly for culture fit and then there are four other interviews after the initial one where the candidate meets different members of the team. Until recently, Pierce was involved with all hires but now other hiring managers know the culture well enough that they can judge fit without Pierce being involved.

• • Knak gets a lot of great referrals from existing employees.

• • eNPS was 100 for a long time, and Pierce came to realize that that was not a good thing. No one wanted to say anything bad because they did not want to be the one to take the score down. There were some negative effects on people because they felt pressure that everyone else was loving everything and they were not. They now encourage the team not to give 10s because they want reality, while still being positive and constructive.

,Once people are in their roles, how do you – on an ongoing basis – assess cultural fit (more qualitative or subjective) vs performance (more quantitative or objective)?

• • Reviews are conducted twice per year: a smaller one mid-year and a big one at the end of year. The structure of the reviews is above all else on company performance, then team performance, then personal performance. There is the performance element but they also score people on the 4 pillars culture, customer, product and growth.

• • Even though some people have fewer opportunities to touch the different pillars, people’s performance is reviewed against them. The reviews use Bamboo HR to perform peer reviews, manager reviews, and a self-assessment.

• • The performance is reviewed against both the pillars and deliverables. Issues are generally addressed before review time. Using ongoing continuous feedback, they don’t wait for reviews. It is better not to have surprises after 6 months.

,When you look back over the last 5-6 years with Knak, and even before that the time with Revenue Pulse, what are some of challenges that you have had to overcome to get to where you are, and how much did your company culture help or hinder your ability to get through those challenges?

• • Having a strong culture helped the company get through COVID. Because they had a tight culture and team, they were another support group for employees to get through the challenging time.

• • The cohesive culture helped them adapt more quickly to the new reality, and it was easier to communicate and stay aligned on what they were doing.

,Have you seen your culture inhibit or hold up your growth in any way?

• • Making sure there is a culture fit holds up hiring for sure, but the end result is “pay now to gain later”.

,What have you come to see as the connection between great culture and growth? Is there an inherent connection?

• • Having a good culture means your people are happier and feel connected and feel invested.

• • At the end of the day, they want to come to work and care about what they are doing.

• • Growth will happen as a result. Growth is at the bottom of Knak’s four pillars because the other ones come first.

,What would be your top takeaways for startup and scale-up CEOs/Founders who want to build and maintain a great culture?

• • Although on paper it may seem hard to connect culture with growth, there is 100% a connection.

• • Building a culture is not just about writing your core values on a piece of paper. You and the whole company are responsible for holding people accountable to the culture, and it is an ongoing process. It governs everything that you do. It requires time, effort and commitment but the value of what it creates in the end is worth every minute.

• • It takes continuous positive reinforcement to get people to think about them and remember them. Over time, if you can do that in an enjoyable, fun way, then it can have a huge powerful impact on the business.

,Closing out, what do you see as the next major milestones for Knak and what is top of mind for you?

• • Pierce is most looking forward to bringing the team together in person: they have more than doubled the headcount since they last saw one another and he is looking forward to meeting everyone in person.