Accelerating Growth with a Commercial Center of Excellence | Zachary Nippert

Anderson Williams: Welcome to Bigger. Stronger. Faster. the podcast exploring how Shore Capital Partners brings billion-dollar resources to the lower- middle market space. In this episode, I talk with Zachary Nippert, the Chief Commercial Officer, and head of the Sales Center of Excellence at Shore Capital, where he helps portfolio companies drive organic growth.

He shares his background in global advertising, marketing and tech entrepreneurship, helping grow a company from the early startup days through exit to private equity, at which point Zack had grown into President and Chief Revenue Officer roles himself. He describes how these experiences as an operator set him up for his role within the Centers of Excellence at Shore and working specifically with smaller companies and founders in the Shore portfolio.

Through his Center of Excellence cohort, Zack is bringing together commercial leaders across the portfolio to connect as peers, learn from experts, discuss vendors invest in their own professional growth and develop strategies for building and developing their sales process and teams.

Zack Nippert: I am Zachary Nippert, the Chief Commercial Officer at Shore Capital. I lead our commercial excellence function, which is part of the larger Center of Excellence team. My focus is really working with our portfolio companies to drive organic growth through the lens of sales and commercial strategy.

Anderson Williams: And what’d you do before Shore and what made Shore kind of the right career move for you?

Zack Nippert: My career journey is an interesting one, I guess you could say. It actually started 20 years ago at Leo Burnett working in global advertising. Actually, my current office looks into my old office. So, where it all began to where it is today went full circle for me.

From there, I moved to New York and worked for Omnicom and climbed the ladder there. Still part of global advertising actually worked on Madison Avenue, so I can say I was a Mad Man for

Anderson Williams: uh, nice.

Zack Nippert: a moment of time.

Anderson Williams: Yeah.

Zack Nippert: It’s actually the last agency left on Madison Avenue in in New York.

And then in 2010 I got the entrepreneurial itch. I’ve always been very entrepreneurial, even as a kid, and I joined my first tech startup, which became really a pivot moment in my career. And then over the next 10 years working for that company, I went from leading their East coast operations to becoming the Chief Revenue Officer and ultimately becoming the President of the company before we successfully exited to private equity as part of a larger kind of roll up play that they were working on.

And that’s really where I was first exposed to private equity through the course of a three-year earnout. It really showed me a lot about m and a and kind of best practices of a private equity firm. And then after that exit, during COVID, I wanted a, a new challenge. And so I joined a venture backed company where I

had a lot of success, but ultimately I was kind of missing that structure, that private equity kind of gave me in my last role, and I knew that there was a lot of opportunity out there to kind of lead private equity backed companies, or even a mentor told me that there were newer opportunities coming out from private equity firms left and right, like the ones here at Shore where you could be an expert in your field and help portfolio companies grow.

And that’s really what excited me. And then I got the opportunity to join.

Anderson Williams: I’m curious, just as you think about that entrepreneurial side of you and your experience having been an operator, share a little bit about how that helps you connect to the microcap space in particular, where so many of our partners are founder partners or their family run businesses. These are not businesses that win Shore partners with them have already scaled for the most part.

Talk a little bit about how that experience has informed the way you approach working in this space.

Zack Nippert: Yeah, I think that’s one of the things that drew me to Shore when I learned about the opportunity was to be able to work with founders ’cause I had worked with them in the past and got to see how they operated, where their blind spots were, but also what made them great and so passionate about the companies that they created. And while I was very early into my startup, I worked very closely with the founder and it was his baby, but it also became my baby ’cause we built it kind of together from the ground up.

And you can see that again, while I wasn’t the founder, I became very attached to the company, to the people and when we sold, although it was great financially and a great experience overall that I learned a lot from, you kind of miss that piece. And now that I get to work with these founders and we buy a lot of companies here at at Shore, I can resonate with how they’re feeling emotionally. And I think it allows me to connect with them, you know, in a different way, letting them know that this is the right thing to accelerate their company.

And that’s ultimately why we sold the company I was at, because we knew that we needed a next level of growth that was right, not only for our employees, but for our clients as well to be able to provide them the products and services that the market was headed towards.

Anderson Williams: So, I think it’s interesting that not only the experience from an entrepreneur and being early in a company, and going back to what you said about relationships, is every relationship matter when you’re starting with zero relationships, right?

Zack Nippert: Yeah.

Anderson Williams: But that’s with a customer or a vendor or whoever it might be. And then I also think, as you were describing, I couldn’t help but think about my own experience as well, of the relationship you have to the company. It’s a different relationship when you’re in there early and you’re, it may not be technically your baby, but you’re raising it from those early days, and I think that’s something that unless you’ve been in that experience, it’s really hard to understand that founder position and then what that founder goes through when they decide to take on a partner like Shore.

Zack Nippert: Yeah, and I think having that experience and being part of an executive team in a microcap company, one that’s growing, that has all these major ambitions that they want to accomplish, just lets you have a totally different perspective that you’re not gonna get in a larger company, and that you’re also not gonna learn through an MBA program or anything else. Because it’s really learning on the job and you know, you have to be a person that loves challenges and that you love solving problems, and I think that’s what made me

a great fit for not only, you know, a sales leadership role, but also an entrepreneurial role is that I love challenges. I love solving problems.

Anderson Williams: Will you just describe for the audience what the Centers of Excellence are, and then specifically what yours is and how yours works?

Zack Nippert: A Center of Excellence is essentially a structured way to bring together best practices, tools, frameworks. And best in class experts in their own disciplines. So here at Shore, as part of the COE, as we call it, we have all of these different leaders from a marketing leader that runs his cohort to M&A, to technology, HR, and data.

We have a lot. Sorry for those that I, that I missed.

Um, but we have a lot of different leaders and teams within that that become really incredible resources for our portfolio companies and their teams, where they’re just so busy doing the day to day that we’re able to help them see things through a different lens, help them relieve some of that stress and pressure by putting in best in class processes, strategy, technology, or pairing them up with vendors.

Essentially, we’re put in place to help them go faster with less risk, as Justin [Ishbia] likes to say.

Anderson Williams: And what does the Commercial Excellence cover? Give us a sense that’s a term. You’ve mentioned sales Commercial Excellence. Who are you working with and what does that look like for your particular COE?

Zack Nippert: Yeah, it’s an exciting role that I get to have here.

I get to work with all of our commercial leaders, whether it be a Chief Commercial Officer, a VP of Sales, a Chief Revenue Officer, whoever the commercial leader is in that company, I have a cohort, as we call it, so I get to meet with them virtually once a month or once every other month in a setting that allows them to collaborate as peers, but also bring in guest speakers.

I introduce new frameworks and different ways of thinking about things, or even demo days where we bring in different vendors that may or may not be a good fit for some, but at least expose them maybe to an idea or maybe it is a great fit and they want to work with that vendor going forward.

As part of that group, I also get to put things on our LMS [Learning

Management System] and you know, send them different frameworks and ways to think about things. And I like to send articles just because again, like I said earlier, they don’t always get to look outside of their world because they’re focused on the day-to-day.

Anderson Williams: And how does that work? Shore invests in a lot of different types of companies, from food and beverage, to healthcare, to business services, to industrials.

How does it the same or different as you think about those sales leaders, those commercial leaders across those different verticals?

Zack Nippert: At the end of the day, it kind of all comes back to B2B selling in a lot of ways. I don’t so much work in the B2C businesses. I do from time to time, but really that’s our marketing cohort ’cause it’s all about driving leads and kind of that customer experience.

So, I’m working with primarily the B2B leaders. And yes, it does vary from, you know, business services to industrials to healthcare. Especially healthcare with a lot of the rules and regulations that apply there, but really all of the principles remain the same in terms of the things that you need to put in place from a foundational standpoint.

And then the different motions in terms of how do we get more pipeline, how do we manage that pipeline? How do we make sure they have a great experience when they’re working with us? How are our account management teams focused on the retention of those customers and the new products or services they may be looking for from us?

One of the things that I kind of boil it down to is I’m starting this COE with inside Shore is that it really breaks down into three buckets. So, you’ve gotta have the right people in the right seats with the right mindset, and you give them the tools to also hire other A players and the ability to train and develop, you know, their employees.

The second bucket is strategy and alignment. We believe very much strategy is key here at Shore and the great work that Michael Ham’s team does in terms of putting strategies in place in the first year with a lot of our portfolio companies and then doing refreshes. I like to go in and then double down on that from a commercial perspective and go to market perspective, helping them make sure that they have the right strategies and process in place, and that everybody’s aligned from a managerial perspective so, that when they have that alignment and strategy, again, they’re able to fully embrace what’s ahead.

And then the third bucket is sales process and enablement. I think that’s where there’s a lot of opportunity for our portfolio companies is to make sure the sales process is documented, it’s consistent, what’s working, what’s not working, where are our revenue sources coming from, and then the tactics or strategies that are driving those and listing them out so we know what’s working and what’s converting more revenue against a tactic in that channel.

Anderson Williams: So, as you talk about talent, as you talk about strategy, as you talk about process, will you also provide some context for a listener who might not be familiar with the type of growth that’s expected during a roughly five-year hold period at Shore, and the related pressures on that talent strategy and process triumvirate that you’ve described.

Zack Nippert: Yeah, Shore back companies are expected to grow quickly, often doubling or tripling their revenue in the first couple of years. A lot of that comes from M&A, but a lot of it’s going to come from organic growth too, and, and, and, and I’m here to help that organic growth engine kick into full gear and be just as dominant as our M&A engine.

From a revenue standpoint, having sat in that seat before as a Chief Revenue Officer, it’s a ton of pressure when you’re expected to hit those kind of numbers on the Chief Revenue Officer ’cause at the end of the day, it’s their job to put the right team in place, put the right strategy and process to be able to drive that pipeline and hit those numbers.

And what I’d like to think about, what I’m trying to help them enable to do is be a revenue accelerator for them. Again, like we said earlier, helping them go faster with less risk.

Anderson Williams: I gotta believe that when you think about your cohort, that you’ve probably got a range of companies where you’ve got someone who’s in their first six months or even year, and then some leaders who are four or five years down the line are actually scaling or at scale.

But talk about some of that peer relationship and learning that happens as a result of the cohort.

Zack Nippert: Yeah, I was very clear with my cohort for the people that were already part of it when I joined, and then I make it clear to the new people that I don’t know everything, right? I know a lot of things over my 20-year career, and I want to help them and then figure it out based on the experiences that I’ve had.

But if I don’t know something, I’ll tap into our entire cohort or into the investment team and say, “Hey, we’re trying to solve this challenge.” You know? Have you ever seen anybody approach it in this way? I also have a large personal peer group outside of Shore that I can lean on when I’m trying to solve different challenges, and that’s incredibly helpful when you know, it’s something that I might not have looked at before, but I get to learn from these people as well in their expertise.

A lot of them have worked in their specific industry for their entire career, whether it be food and beverage or healthcare, and I get to learn about different ways to think about things. I think what they like about me is I came from. SaaS and tech world and global advertising, working with some of the biggest brands in the world.

So if I can help them understand how some of the biggest brands in the world think, and the motions that they go through, and how we can apply that to a microcap environment, I mean, that’s meeting them where they are and helping them take that playbook from these Fortune 500 companies and say, these are the things that we need to start doing if we’re gonna go be that one day.

Anderson Williams: Well, you bring up something interesting that I think is important about the partners that Shore chooses and who choose Shore as a true partnership is that these are people who have run excellent businesses. They are experts in their particular customer, their particular product, and so forth. So, talk a little bit about what challenges you see, what is a real world or a couple of real-world examples for someone who’s out there, who’s running a great business, maybe they’re considering taking on a private equity partner.

What does it look like on the other side of that? And what type of challenges are real to this next phase of growth or scale for a company that might choose to partner with private equity?

Zack Nippert: I’m gonna answer that in two ways. The first way is a lot of the companies that we buy don’t have a sales leader in place. It’s typically the founder that’s out there doing the selling. They know the business better than anybody. They have the passion; they have the story. They’re able to go drive as much business as they have time for. And a lot of these people, and especially the companies we’re looking at, are very healthy businesses.

They have strong revenue; they have good EBITDA. They might not have the great process that we would expect, but you know, that’s what we’re here to be a partner to them for, right? Is to help them put processes in place, hire roles that they don’t have to be able to scale, which is kind of their next chapter.

And a lot of the founders have taken it as far as they can for as long as they can and they’re looking for that next chapter of growth for one reason or another. And that’s again, what is kind of exciting to me ’cause I’ve been in that seat before and now I get to help them explain and. See what that next chapter is gonna look like.

Now enter a revenue leader into a business that really never had one before, right? And in a microcap business, you know, sales leaders are often faced with challenges of then building a team for the first time, finding a players, you know, process and putting up strategy and process in place that makes sense for that business at that time, growing the pipeline from the ground up, often with limited resources.

Unlike big companies, they don’t have the brand recognition. So, when you’re trying to reach out to people, they’re like, I’ve never heard of this company before. So, you have to do a lot through content creation, through having really nice pitch decks or products and services that just solve a problem that maybe big companies can’t solve and explaining it in that way.

And I think that’s what cuts through in that personal touch that a lot of companies will prefer to work with smaller and boutique types of companies because they know they’re gonna get a different level of service. So how do we exploit that and explain it in a very different way? So that’s again, where I can help these revenue leaders and where the COE as a whole across all the different discipline areas can help these leaders.

Anderson Williams: When you think about your cohort and you think about some of the challenges you’ve laid out, you think about your own journey, what are some of the stories and anecdotes that just really anchor the opportunity here to be a part of a Commercial Excellence Center of Excellence?

Zack Nippert: I mean, there’s some really exciting things going on in the commercial cohort right now.

Some of the things that I’m developing, I just launched Minimum Operating Standards, and what Minimum Operating Standards are, are the set of things that we expect a portfolio company to do before they exit, we call it becoming exit ready.

And then the way that I’ve designed the Commercial Center of Excellence is those nine Minimum Operating Standards actually ladder up to a larger commercial excellence system that we’ve put in place. You know, a few projects that I think about that I’ve been working on recently. I’ve been helping one portfolio company rethink the way that they hire salespeople. So, I introduced them to a way and a process of getting more quality.

Candidates in a pipeline without having an executive recruiter in place, because you might hire the executive recruiter for your sales leader, but not always for the salespeople in the organization because you’re gonna pay 20, 30%. And I’ve had a lot of fun with that.

I also just wrapped up a two day go to market strategy session with our Marketing Center of Excellence, and we had a great go to market mapping. We looked at value proposition creation, and by the end of it, we had a strategy that they all aligned to from a commercial perspective.

And then last is last week I actually just kicked off a sales training bootcamp where I created the whole curriculum and I’m working with a portfolio company where they have two new sales reps in place, and these are very junior reps that need to kind of know the basics of sales and how to approach customers in two ways. One, new customers that are coming in for the first time that need to be addressed in one way and others where we’re trying to rekindle relationships with lapsed customers that went away from the business.

So designed this curriculum. We actually did an upfront assessment, where we’re able to look at their strengths in different lenses, and then I built a curriculum around that and paired with their needs. So, very customized approach to helping these salespeople get into a rhythm very quickly so that we’re not waiting 90 days for them to get up to speed, but they’re able to take some of these tangible items very quickly and build that pipeline.

Anderson Williams: So, you’re still pretty early in the development of your Center of Excellence. How do you see it growing and evolving over the next couple of years?

Zack Nippert: I’m almost eight months in and just getting started over the next couple of years. I see the Commercial COE becoming a must-have resource for every portfolio company and their sales leaders.

We’re gonna have an extensive library of playbooks. We’re gonna introduce more formalized coaching and strategy sessions and workshops, and one of the things I’m really excited about is creating KPIs and benchmarking tools so that our companies can measure their success against what other top performers are doing.

I have two really big aspirations for Shore, and the commercial excellence function that I’m developing here. First, I want us to be the premier private equity firm that top sales talent wants to go to. They seek out Shore capital companies because they know that we have a best-in-class commercial excellence system, but we have unmatched opportunities to be able to give them within those portfolio companies that they’re driving.

 The second is that I want Shore Capital to be known for the best organic growth in the entire private equity industry. One that is repeatable and scalable, and I know those are two big aspirations, but the thing that I believe is it’s going to happen, and I’m excited to lead the way with what I think are some of the best people in the industry by my side.

Anderson Williams: If you enjoyed this episode, be sure and check out our other Bigger. Stronger. Faster. episodes as well as our Microcap Moments in Everyday Hero series at www.Shorecp.university/podcasts or anywhere you get your podcast. This podcast was produced by Shore Capital Partners with Story and Narration by Anderson Williams. Recording and editing by Austin Johnson. Editing by Reel Audiobooks. Sound design, mixing, and mastering by Mark Galup of Reel Audiobooks.

Special thanks to Zachary Nippert.

This podcast is the property of Shore Capital Partners, LLC. None of the content herein is investment advice, an offer of investment advisory services, nor a recommendation or offer relating to any security. See the terms of use page on the Shore Capital website for other important information.