Behind the CXO Title: Nick Sherrard on Engineering the Win-Win-Win

Anderson Williams: Welcome to Bigger. Stronger. Faster. the podcast exploring how Shore Capital Partners brings billion-dollar resources to the lower middle market. In this episode, I talk with Nick Sherrard, Chief of Staff at Thermal Shipping Solutions and a member of the Shore Capital CXO Fellows program. Nick came to the program after an internship at a Shore Capital portfolio company showed him just how quickly he could make a measurable difference in a microcap business, even as an intern. 

Nick talks about what it means to be Chief of Staff in a fast-growing, family-founded company, where one day he’s walking a factory floor and the next he’s on the phone with a large pharma customer. An engineer by training, he shares how thinking in inputs, outputs, and bottlenecks helps him find and fix the root causes behind recurring fire drills and why driving change without authority comes down to making sure every solution is what he calls a win-win-win. 

He also describes the role of the CXO cohort, part joint therapy and part best practice sharing, because nobody else in his company or in any company is living the same highs and lows as the CXO.  

Finally, Nick shares the best advice he’s ever gotten, which he’s never lived more fully than in the past year: Don’t confuse urgency with importance. This job is a marathon and not a sprint  

Welcome, Nick. To get us started, will you just introduce yourself and give us your name and tell us what you do and where you do it?  

Nick Sherrard: Sure. Thanks for having me.  

Anderson Williams: Yeah.  

Nick Sherrard: Uh, Nick Sherrard, I’m the Chief of Staff at Thermal Shipping Solutions. We are a final mile cold chain packaging company. 

So if you’re shipping medicine or food to your doorstep, we help companies do that safely.  

Anderson Williams: So tell me a little bit about your background before joining the CXO program, which we’re gonna get into, but what did you do before you came into this program and then to TSS?  

Nick Sherrard: Sure. I came to TSS through the CXO program, obviously, and I came to the CXO program, like many others do, through an MBA program. 

Prior to my full-time MBA, I was actually in a Chief of Staff role at another privately held company in a totally different industry and a totally different market size. It was a kind of a middle market environment and private equity down in Atlanta. And, um, I loved what I was doing there, but I realized I had a lot of runway to learn, and I was looking for a program with a little bit more structure and, uh, and part of that thought an MBA would be a good avenue to study what was out there, all the different avenues to go learn how to be a better operator, and through that came across Shore and the CXO program and actually interned with one of Shore’s portfolio companies. 

Anderson Williams: Oh, really?  

Nick Sherrard: And, uh, that cemented it in my mind that I wanted to be here full time, and fortunately, sounds like the team agreed. So here I am.  

Anderson Williams: So tell me about that. Tell me about the internship and maybe what you were looking for coming out of business school that you thought, “Yeah, that’s the right opportunity for me.” 

I, I assume you had multiple options you were looking at, but was there something you were specifically looking for or something that particularly resonated in that internship that said this was the thing you should do?  

Nick Sherrard: Yeah, great question. A lot of things went well in that internship for me. I think one of the biggest impacts that I noticed was that I was able to make a difference in three months. 

I mean, the speed, the cycle time by which you can create impact in these companies is much faster than in some of the other areas that you might be able to go work after an MBA. Not to mention the attribution of that work is a lot cleaner. If I were to go work at a giant company, you know, who’s to say if I actually had an impact on this giant initiative that we were working on? 

But at this summer internship where I came in with very little experience, no industry experience, and candidly limited operating experience, in a matter of months, I was able to look back at what I had done and feel pretty confident that I was part of the team and was able to build something pretty exciting. 

Anderson Williams: This is not one of the Shore Capital playbook, kinda typical, highly acquisitive growth companies. Talk a little bit about the direction of TSS and what growth looks like.  

Nick Sherrard: Yeah. Well, we’re fortunate that we’re positioned in an end market that’s growing really quickly. So the cold chain, final mile healthcare space is exploding. 

You can think about all the commercials you see about GLP-1 programs, and during COVID, meal kit companies were booming as well, so we’ve benefited from a lot of those tailwinds. Accompanied with that, we’ve got a great product. So we’re not really having to reinvent the wheel, whereas many people are coming into the space and trying to come up with the next great cold chain solution. 

All the credit to the founding family, they came up with a few, and they’re phenomenal, and now we’re just pouring gas on the fire and letting it go. So I found that most of what we’re emphasizing over the next couple of years is getting really laser-focused on what is our go-to-market strategy, like, where specifically do we want to win, and what’s our message there, and how do we build the infrastructure to support the growth that we think that’s gonna bring us. 

Anderson Williams: And what does that look like for you? I’m gonna back ourselves into a conversation about the CXO program, but you’re the Chief of Staff in that environment. What does being a Chief of Staff in a microcap company, stepping in as part of this investment into a family-run business, what’s the day-to-day look like for you? 

Nick Sherrard: I’m sure an answer you’ve gotten many times on your conversations, but it changes from day to day. There are some days where I will fly out to a factory and walk around to try to understand what’s driving quality differences between this factory and that factory. There are other times when I’m on the phone with a large pharma company talking about our quality programs and how they’re, uh, as sound as they are, and we’re doing a lot of great things there. 

And then other times I’m knee-deep in Excel and PowerPoint trying to explain why we’ve seen margins trend a certain way on a very niche product line. So it, it totally depends.  

Anderson Williams: Pretty good variety.

How does being a part of the CXO program and a part of the cohort of CXOs play into that now? How do you interact with the CXOs while you’re doing all of those other things? How do you lean on CXOs?

Give somebody who’s listening just a sense of what that system of support looks like for you.

Nick Sherrard: Sure. I think there’s two ways that the program has really benefited me, even in just the first year that I’ve been here. The first is all of the programming. Your team does a great job with all of the structured learning and documentation and content that we get every quarter or every month and, and every year.

And then the second piece, which I think is where you’re going, is, like, the interactions with the other CXOs in the program, and this is critical for us. I mean, at least for me, this is somewhat of a unique role. I think everybody wants to believe that their job is unique, but I really believe this is one of the more unique roles, and you can’t find solace in other folks in your company.

You can’t explain the tension that you’re feeling in your role because nobody else in your company is experiencing something similar. Not that they don’t wanna connect with you, but the problems that you’re dealing with aren’t relevant to your CEO necessarily. They’re not relevant to your sales team or your operations team.

They’re certainly not relevant to the folks at Shore. It’s very difficult to find that. So what I’ve found happens to me is that my wife at home is, is hearing a lot about my role, and-

Anderson Williams: She’s like, “Don’t you have CXOs to talk to about this?”

Nick Sherrard: Yeah, exactly. So I think that’s what started to really be sort of a pressure outlet for me, is I’ve been able to…

I work at the Shore office in Chicago from time to time, and so do a few of the other CXOs whose platforms are coming off the ground. And I’ve been able to walk over to a few of the offices and, you know, just open the door and chat about, like, what crazy call happened that day or what blew up that day or went really well that day, and how we both kind of are figuring it out as we go in, in a constructive way.

So it’s joint therapy and also some best practice sharing.

Anderson Williams: For sure. Is there an example, without divulging too much information, of, like, one of those conversations where you’re like, “I can only go talk to another CXO about this particular thing. They’re the only ones who would understand”?

Nick Sherrard: Yeah. One of my sort of star standout moments from the first year that I’ve had at TSS was getting to develop a new capability.

It doesn’t matter a ton what it is, but it took a lot of effort to get this thing coordinated, standing up all the different third parties to support it, and then convincing somebody to pay us for it, which we did. And we were able to get the program off the ground, and then when it came time to launch the program, a lot of things caught on fire, and it almost blew up, and we saved it.

But I went to the CXO that I am talking about here twice. The first time I was like, “I just had the best day ever. I closed this opportunity. It’s gonna represent, you know, blank against our budget,” and that was super exciting. And then a month later, it’s like, “Eh, it’s gone.” “It totally went away, and we’re gonna try to save it.”

But there’s really nobody else that would appreciate the highs and lows of that kind of rollercoaster.

Anderson Williams: You’ve had other work. You’ve had other jobs. You’re obviously– You’ve got a ton of education. You’ve had internships. You’ve had all these other things. What’s something you’ve learned this year that you just couldn’t have learned anywhere else?

Nick Sherrard: It feels really good for somebody to say you’re doing a good job, and you get numb to that in a lot of A-type personality workplaces where it’s super feedback rich, where every day somebody’s either telling you, “You misspelled something in the footnote,” or, “Looks good. Thanks.” And it’s just a little dopamine kick every day.

In this role, the cycle time on feedback is much slower and richer when it actually hits. And I don’t think I realized how much that personally affected me. And to the converse, when you’re told, “Hey, you blew this up and this is not a good situation,” how deeply that affects you personally. And so I think I’ve, one, acknowledged that, and two, learned how to become a little bit more resilient, particularly when you’re interfacing with folks who, you know, maybe come knives out right off Jump Street, like customers or, or vendors even.

And you’re used to somebody who has a very similar background to you who, you know, walks and talks like you and knows the skills you have and don’t have, and they’re usually fairly easy to work with, to this customer who’s never worked with you, and they have the expectation that your company’s gonna deliver, and if it doesn’t, it’s you personally that messed them up.

And, you know, to be able to sit across the table from that and take accountability is a very new skill, and I don’t think I knew about myself enough how much that would be a learning opportunity for me.

Anderson Williams: Yeah. It’s a great example, and I can’t help but think about how connected that is to the microcap space.

And I don’t think you can have the kind of impact that you’re talking about without having the inverse of being exposed to the intensity on the other side.

Nick Sherrard: Right. And that’s also just looking at your personal experience. It adds a whole other layer of complexity when you think about the personalities you work with.

Anderson Williams: Yeah.

Nick Sherrard: And how they’re riding that roller coaster with you. And what do you say to the person next to you when things go really well or really poorly, and it’s not like a big company that you’re gonna go work on a new project with a new team next week. You’re in it with that person for the full five years, and.

Anderson Williams: Yeah.

Nick Sherrard: The intensity is there, but you’ve gotta make sure you’re taking care of each other.

Anderson Williams: I used to describe my experience being an entrepreneur as like being out on a precipice by yourself, and you feel every shift in the wind, every shift in the light, every shift in the humidity. You feel everything, and everything’s more acute, you know?

I think that’s an important thing to recognize about this experience and about why the CXO program is so important is that despite being private equity-backed, despite being a twenty-year-old company like TSS, that all of this is still sort of new and entrepreneurial.

Nick Sherrard: It is, and there’s different chapters to a company’s trajectory, right?

Where while a lot of what we’re doing we’ve been doing for some time, particularly now, there’s a lot of new things that we’re doing. And so there’s maybe a solid foundation over here. To use your tree analogy, we have a tree trunk, and it’s pretty solid, but in order to get where we want to go, we have to go out on a limb.

Anderson Williams: Yeah.

Nick Sherrard: And trying to bring a few people with me out on that limb, but it’s certainly stretching for myself and a lot of people.

Anderson Williams: We talked about the network and the peer support from the CXO program. You referenced the programming side of things. For somebody listening who’s not familiar with the CXO program, will you go back to that and just say more about what you’re doing and the types of things you’re discussing in those quarterly in-persons in particular?

Nick Sherrard: Yeah. They’re great, so plug for the training team here. Um, but they typically will zero in on a single topic for each of the quarterly events. So it could be communication, it could be coordinating with your board, and they’ll bring in speakers from a few different stakeholder groups that you might interact with.

It could be an investor from a deal team, it could be a board member, um, and then a great operator who maybe has lived a great example of that topic. And we’ll have a combination of sort of speaker sessions married with breakout groups and then usually some kind of interactive case study component.

And the takeaway for me every single time with these is that I am not as good as I thought I was at this topic. I mean, we always know to stay humble and everything, but you’re like, “Oh my gosh, the ceiling is so much higher than I originally thought when I walked in the door.”

Anderson Williams: Yeah. Well, I mean, I think I don’t know if that’s by design necessarily. But I mean, I think that is the key to learning, right?

Like, you’re in this position at the stage of your career, at the stage of this company. You’re, like you mentioned, CXOs have been successful. You’re all smart, you’re all talented, you’ve all got strong early careers, but you’re also all stepping into something that’s totally unique and totally new. And if it doesn’t humble you some, there’s probably a problem.

Nick Sherrard: Right. You’ll find out really quickly that you don’t have all the answers. Like, within the first month, you’re gonna fall on your face, and you’ll realize pretty quickly the playbook you were running before isn’t gonna work anymore. And then that second quarter, you come into that training event and you’re like, “Okay, I’m taking great notes now because-

I know I need it.” And it’s fun, too, because you get to see how other people in your cohort are addressing similar problems, and you’ll usually walk away with just as much, if not more, from your peers as you would from the lecture.

Anderson Williams: Yeah. And as part of that, just something that we haven’t mentioned yet, is that some of those folks are in companies that are two, three, four years, five years ahead of you.

And so they know a little bit about where the company’s going. So it’s not just their experience, it’s also, to some degree, the evolution of the company that’s still ahead of you as well.

Nick Sherrard: Oh, yeah. And there’s always a knowing look when you’re commiserating over a coffee and you’re like, “Well, I’m working on the sales commission structure,” and someone will give you a knowing frown like, “You got this. It’s gonna be bumpy, but you know, been there, done that, and you’re gonna figure it out.”

Anderson Williams: Yeah. When you think about the experience so far and you think about somebody who may be listening to this who’s in business school, coming out of business school, thinking about this kind of opportunity, what bits of advice might you offer someone to think through in terms of making sure this is the right opportunity for them or anything else?

But what advice would you offer someone listening who’s thinking, “Well, that sounds kind of cool”?

Nick Sherrard: I think that there are a lot of ways you can look at what you wanna do after business school. I grouped the world into kind of three buckets. You could be an investor, an advisor, or an operator, and they’re all exciting, but they’re not tailored for the same person.

And if you know pretty early on that you want to be an operator, that you want to kind of live in and breathe the same business for quite a while and all the ups and downs that come with it and build the relationships with that team and truly roll your sleeves up and build, then this is a great program to consider.

There are other great ways to learn how to become an operator that have pros and cons. We already mentioned one of the defining features of the CXO program is that it is in the microcap space. There are great leadership development programs at scale corporations. And by the way, there’s private equity that’s larger than microcap.

So just to say I wanna work in a private equity-backed company doesn’t necessarily shoehorn you into a CXO program. So I would encourage people who are thinking about it to not only say, “Oh, I wanna be an operator, but why do I wanna be an operator in the microcap space and why PE-backed?” And then if you wanna go a step further, why these industries that Shore is investing in?

Anderson Williams: When you think about how you answered those questions, I’m curious what you knew about private equity before and what you’ve learned about microcap and Shore’s specific variant of private equity since you’ve been a part of it. Any insights on things you’ve learned about Shore’s approach or about this flavor of private equity?

Nick Sherrard: I’ve been privileged enough to work at two private equity firms now, both incredible, and the teams are wicked smart, and I get smarter every day just by being around them. But I’ve been consistently impressed at Shore’s sort of system as the star mindset. We’re in a hyper-growth microcap space that lacks systems in many cases.

That’s very different than what you would find in another private equity firm that’s playing in more mature companies. That type of value driver for microcap is lost on the ears of a billion-dollar corporation. They’ve already got a system. You’re not gonna create a ton of value by trying to go reevaluate that.

So it’s just fundamentally different value creators. And I’m a process person. I love shaping processes, and I’m, I’m an engineer by education, and so I was drawn to places where I was going to develop systems and processes, and I think Shore is phenomenal at that. The other thing that I observed is what I’m being advised to do from our investors, our deal team, is being practiced within the firm itself.

So classic example of what I have to answer to every week is this “are we winning” dashboard, where every single, not only does the company, but every department has got to have a few KPIs that if they’re green, we won, and if they’re red, then we should have a hard conversation about what we need to change.

If you walk around the Shore office, you’ll find an are we winning dashboard on the wall. So there’s an element of practicing what you preach and consistency and authenticity that I think is really exciting to be a part of.

Anderson Williams: Yeah. I think it’s interesting to hear you talk about your engineering background.

How have you wrestled with what I expect of an engineering mind who does like structure? Microcap is like you described it. It’s people have hustled and worked really hard and built great businesses, but there’s not usually a lot of repeatable process. There’s not usually a lot that’s ready for scale.

You mentioned choosing to go be an operator, and this is not just being an operator, but in this space, it’s also being a builder. And I’m just– any thoughts on how that engineering learning or preparation or mindset has either helped or been a source of frustration in this first year?

Nick Sherrard: It’s helped immensely.

Truthfully, it’s been a big source of excitement for me to get to see the things that I, I have been a part of building relative to where we started as a team, which was at a great place, by the way, all the credit to the founders. But I think about the world through inputs and outputs and process management throughout it, and the inputs don’t necessarily have to be giant engines like the ones at the Caterpillar factory I had a chance to work at once upon a time.

It could be information flow between the sales team and the operations team, and that information’s got to go through certain steps to be refined and polished in order for the consumer of that information to use it for something. And if you’re able to break down these otherwise ambiguous or, you know, monumentous tasks into bite-sized pieces, you know, process steps, not only does it make it clear where you need to invest or fill the gaps, like this is the part that we’re missing, it helps you think about it through the lens of bottlenecks and how to overcome anything that’s slowing down the operation.

Because when you’re scaling at the pace that we’re scaling at, you’re gonna find a new bottleneck every day. And if you don’t think about your business as a process, you’re never going to be able to stay on top of how the bottleneck moves around your operation.

Anderson Williams: Yeah, that’s really, really insightful. With that in mind, it may be obvious, maybe not to somebody listening, but CXOs are often the youngest executive in the room.

And I’m curious, when you see those kinds of patterns, how do you relate to the other team members, executives, founders, and others who have different experience than you, but you’ve been brought in for a reason? Talk about what it’s like being the youngest executive in the room and how you create the space to do that well.

Nick Sherrard: Everybody’s going to have their own style in this situation, and I’ve got one that I’m working with, but others may find their own. But what I consistently go back to is that it’s got to make sense for everybody involved. You’re not able to mandate anything because, A, no one probably reports to you directly, and B, you don’t have enough experience to justify why that is the right solution.

And so if you can instead say, “I don’t know what the perfect solution is. Here’s a problem. If this were true, it would make your life easier, it would make the business more successful, and it would save me a whole heck of a lot of time,” that’s how you get things done. It’s by making sure that it’s a win-win-win.

As soon as you’re saying, “This is the way it’s got to be because I said so,” at worst or even, and this is common, “This is the way it’s got to be because the budget says so, and we have to grow the business, and we can’t grow the business without this,” well, they’re not going to do it. In particular, they might not do it for the right reason.

If you were to implement a CRM and have adoption goals, for example, they might retroactively log things just to get you off their back, but they’re not viewing it as a way to make their life easier. So when you’re thinking about engineering a process, I do think you’ve got to pitch the value to the people who are using the process.

And that’s what we would do in an engineering environment too. If you’re in a manufacturing space and you’re looking at changing the equipment, oftentimes you talk to the people who use the equipment of what they’re looking for to get out of it. And in theory, it should improve the process and make their life better, safer, less monotonous.

You know, everybody can win.

Anderson Williams: And how in that process do you think about and build credibility, especially in an industry that is not your background? What have you had to do in this first year to learn what thermal shipping solutions is as a business, what its competition is doing, where its growth is going, and those kinds of things that, like, you’d never been in this space before.

And you may have an opinion, but you’re working with founders and teams that have been doing this twenty years and so forth. Just any thoughts on how you build that content knowledge and that content credibility?

Nick Sherrard: Sure. And to add a layer of complexity to it, we sell into highly regulated, complex healthcare industries.

So absent that, it’s already hard enough, but now I’m having to convince a pharmacist in charge operating a specialty pharmacy that our packaging is going to get their drugs to their customers safely. So it’s a remarkably challenging task. I mean, there’s the standard playbooks of like, yeah, get all the Google alerts and find your publications in your space and, you know, earmark them for Saturday morning over a coffee just so you can stay sharp on things.

But what I have found to be the most effective is get very, very close with your sales team. They’re going to be incentivized to know these things like the back of their hand, because if they don’t, it’s gonna be a lot more difficult for them to earn their commission. So if you’ve got this team that are programmed to be experts at this, learn from them.

And so I’ve started to create a feedback loop where I’ve asked the team every time they hear something that might be relevant to document it, and we’re building this repository of competitive intel. And this is not a new concept, but you can’t do it alone. You won’t be able to keep up. There’s too much going on, and might as well lean on the people who are out there every single day living it.

Anderson Williams: I love that. It’s a great example and something that, like, you don’t need to overthink it. Look around you and see who has the knowledge that you want and go make that connection, right? Like- Right. As you think about how you have grown and evolved undoubtedly over this first year, what would you say makes a CXO successful?

You’ve still got more years in your journey, but you’ve had a great start in this first year. Why?

Nick Sherrard: I like to think, and again, every single company is going to have a different requirement for a CXO. So the matchmaking process that Shore runs is like a well-oiled machine, and you have to trust that you’re gonna get placed in a company that’s gonna suit what you’re able to bring to the table.

So, like, I can’t do or don’t do scaled M&A for add-ons. There are companies that do that, and their CXO is gonna be kind of a VP of M&A type role. So fundamentally changes the what based on where you’re going. For sort of the general purpose Chief of Staff role that I find myself in, I think of myself in an aspirational sense, I’d like to be like a libero on a volleyball team, where I’m probably the shortest on the team.

I stand out. I don’t look like the rest of the team. I don’t have as much experience, and I’m wearing a bright colored jersey, and everyone’s pointing at me and saying, “That’s the, the short guy.” But my job is to fill in. So if I see someone on my team commit to something and now there’s an opening or a gap that I need to go backfill, I’ll run over there and try to fill it.

And, um, you know, I’ll try to be the first line of defense for returning a serve or making sure that nothing hits the floor while my team does what they do best. And as you do that, I think you start to learn a little bit more about where the gaps appear more frequently. So in our organization, we had really solid coverage on a few corners of the court.

A few of the departments, we hired experts, and they were gonna build something that I could not come close to building. But there was a real big gap on the commercial side of the business. And could Shore go out and hire someone ten times smarter than me to go build the commercial function of the future?

Absolutely. But I think my role as Chief of Staff in the first year was to go make sure, one, no balls hit the floor and try to move that corner of the business in the right direction. And ultimately, if it makes sense to start repositioning where the libero goes so that we can continue to be the best team possible, I’m always open to that.

Anderson Williams: Yeah, great analogy. And just to play back what I heard that I think is an important distinction, one is stepping up and stepping in wherever the team needs it. So that means that you’re staying aware of the dynamics on the team, you’re staying aware of the dynamics of the business at all time, and you’re recognizing where you need to step in.

So that’s one thing, and I think that’s probably a pretty natural thing. I think the other thing that’s important to recognize, though, is that you haven’t just stepped in to fill gaps. You’ve also stepped in to build that next commercial business side, right? How were you able to balance both the gap filling and the prospective growth kind of work?

Nick Sherrard: The short answer is it got a lot easier as we built out the rest of the management team, and I could take my eye off certain things. I was spending a lot of time with our operations and with our, our engineering teams, and now we’ve got phenomenal leaders there, and I, I’m happy to spend time elsewhere.

So that was the first piece, is it sort of opened up my bandwidth to go commit a little bit more. The second thing, I, as I was filling gaps, started keeping a log of fire drills that popped up. And I was looking for patterns within those because it was self-serving, because every time a fire- That’s an

Anderson Williams: engineer for you right there, is all I can say.

Nick Sherrard: Well, as I saw that I’ve spent the last seven Friday nights solving the same problem, I think there’s an opportunity here to spend a little bit of time addressing the root cause. And when I looked at the areas that consistently produced fire drills, it was on our commercial side of the house. It was a lot of account management.

It was a lot of, you know, hot deals that we were chasing. And all the credit to the sales team, they’re incredible, but they were swamped. They were doing all kinds of things in, you know, outside of business hours over the weekend because they genuinely cared and they wanted to close the deals. And I, as a process person, was like, “Maybe I can save them a Thursday night or a Friday night if I was able to get this put in place.”

And that created that sort of win-win-win environment where it’s like, “Hey, we could have better pipeline discipline and more pipeline predictability for sort of the, you know, Shore management team world,” but also, “Hey, sales team, how would you like to earn as much, if not more, commission with lower stress and in fewer hours?

Why don’t we go build out our, let’s call it the CRM, but sort of our whole go-to-market function?”

Anderson Williams: Yeah. I was gonna ask you how you convinced people who already know how to sell this really well to make the kind of changes you’re proposing, but you just mentioned more pay with less work and more efficiency and so forth.

So that’s the answer, but how does that conversation go when you have this idea or this plan that you’re taking as a new person to the industry and a young person on the team to some seasoned veterans who are like, “Listen, I know what I’m doing. We don’t need to change this”? Have you had that kind of challenge or conversation?

If so, how did you approach it?

Nick Sherrard: I’m fortunate in that our most senior salesperson is so willing to try new things.

Anderson Williams: That’s awesome.

Nick Sherrard: And I think that’s a bit of a unique dynamic, but I continuously go back to if you can’t make the case that it’s a win-win-win, then you’re probably not making the right case, or fundamentally incentives are not aligned.

In theory, if the business is doing better, the team members should be doing better, and if you can paint a picture of why this change is going to accomplish that for both sides, it should be easy. And if it doesn’t seem to be going that way, well, then the question is which one of those broke down? There were several other opportunities across the business where I was building new quality systems, and they did not take off, and people were like, “This is adding to my plate.

I don’t think this is helping me solve the problem, and we’re still having the same issues we were before.” And it’s like, well, I did not solve the right problem or I did not communicate what problem I was trying to solve and it didn’t work. So definitely learned a few examples of how to and to not do that.

Anderson Williams: I love this conversation so much, and it’s because I’m hearing you describe that what are really difficult and potentially frustrating situations, humbling situations in maybe not the most comfortable way, but you’re describing it as an, a proper engineer. And it’s just matter of fact, objective. Like, it’s so good to hear just the, “Yeah, this didn’t take off like I wanted to, so I clearly didn’t do this or I do clearly didn’t communicate that.”

And that’s the mindset you have to take because you’re describing the objectivity of someone who is running informed experiments to try to make the company better. There’s not necessarily an absolute roadmap for all of the things that you’re doing, and in most cases, there’s not any roadmap for the things that you’re doing.

So you kind of have to be resilient, I suspect, in this role. You kind of have to have that kind of objectivity.

Nick Sherrard: Oh, absolutely. And I feel pretty strongly that it actually is well received by the team. If someone says, “Hey, your idea is terrible. This is not the way we should solve it at all,” you’re like, “Great.

I actually don’t want to go implement this if it’s gonna not get used, so tell me how I should be thinking about this differently.” And we’re in a unique situation in the microcap space where we’ve got the benefit of perspective. We’re not in a silo. If I was at a large company, I might fall in love with my project only to find out it’s the shiny object pet project of some senior leader who’s politicking their way up the chain, and it’ll get killed because of some budget problem later on.

Where we sit in the microcap space, I can see across the organization, and I can see how the problems here influence the problems there down the line two or three months from now. And it’s easy for me to let go of any kind of ego on how we solve things because I’m gonna be the one putting out the fire if we don’t solve it anyways.

So I’d just love to get a good fire hose here, however you wanna do it.

Anderson Williams: And it plays directly back to your description of what Shore says is system is the star. I hadn’t thought about it, but that’s a beautiful message for an engineer.

Nick Sherrard: It is. Yeah, it’s one of the things that drew me in for sure.

Anderson Williams: So before we wrap up, what’s the best piece of advice you’ve ever gotten?

Nick Sherrard: This is a bit of a platitude. I’m sure everybody has heard this, but I haven’t lived it to the extent that I’ve lived it this last year. Don’t confuse urgency with importance, and this is true both for work and for personal life as well. I think the structure of jobs I’ve had in the past necessarily imposed some kind of prioritization where you couldn’t totally neglect something because someone would come asking for it.

Within the four walls of TSS or CXO role, it’s really easy to forget what the board members expected from you because they’re not talking to you every single day. You’re putting out fires and all of a sudden you’re working on the board deck again, and you’re like, “Oh no, we haven’t touched priorities two, three, four, and I wasted a month chasing my tail on these projects that really were just fire drills.”

And then to zoom out a little bit, this is a marathon and not a sprint, and this job is full of urgency. But if you’re not thinking about all of the other areas of your life that you need to nurture to create sort of a sustainable environment, and you’re just giving the leftovers to those things, you’ll burn out.

You won’t bring your creative self to work every day, and finding that personal time for family is, or, or whatever hobbies you have is, is critical.

Anderson Williams: If you enjoyed this episode, be sure and check out our other Bigger. Stronger. Faster. episodes as well as our Microcap Moments and Everyday Heroes series at www.shorecp.university/podcasts or anywhere you get your podcasts. There, you will also find our newest series, Raw Talent.

This podcast was produced by Shore Capital Partners and recorded in the Andrew Malone Podcast Studio with story and narration by Anderson Williams. Story, recording, and editing by Austin Johnson. Editing by Reel Audiobooks. Sound design, mixing, and mastering by Mark Galup of Reel Audiobooks.

Special thanks to Nick Sherrard.

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 related to any security. See the Terms of Use page on the Shore Capital website for other important information