Kyle Uebelhor: Hi everybody, and welcome back again to Alexander Group’s executive sessions and podcast recordings on value creation. Delighted to have you back today in this series of value creation stories that we have been able to tell. And I’m delighted today to have Parthiv Amin from Sloan to join me today to talk about the next level of value creation, growth, and specifically thinking about profitable growth. That is, how do you grow an organization profitably with the same or less? You know, through the series, we’ve learned about organic growth. We’ve learned about innovation, we’ve learned about M&A. This profitable growth session is really to dig into a wonderful organization that Parthiv leads that has really done an amazing job in a very complex go-to-market strategy. Parthiv, let’s just launch into it. Why don’t you tell us a little bit about Sloan and your role within Sloan and, and kind of how you think about growing the business.
Parthiv Amin: Good afternoon Kyle. It’s always a pleasure to talk to Kyle. Kyle is my hero and he’s done a great job. Kyle and the team has done a great job for us. And some of the things I’m going to talk about is something that I learned from Kyle, to be honest, you know? So I’ll be sharing some of those learnings from Kyle and Alexander Group. So it’s my pleasure, Kyle, just to introduce myself quickly. I’ve been with Sloan 11 years. Sloan is the 120 year old company established in 1906. Privately held fourth generation company that’s running the business and we do one thing. We focus on commercial restrooms around the world, but obviously more US centric than the rest of the world commercial restrooms. And you go, what does Sloan do? So gentlemen, on this podcast, we’re listening. You see it every time when you go in the bathroom, you’re staring at it and you’re flushing it with your hand. And sometimes you see your reflection in that. Our product, that’s the Sloan flush valve. That’s one of the products we make along with hand washing. If you’ve been to O’Hare airport, if you go to any bathroom in O’Hare airport or many airports, Dallas, you will see our products everywhere in the world and you wash your hands with our product in the sink system. That’s what we do, ladies. You know, flush valves also where you see the ones with the handle, that’s the one you kick. I know you ladies don’t touch it, but that’s something you kick. I recommend you kick it very hard because the more you break, the more parts I sell. So thank you very much for breaking them all the time. No, I’m just joking. Guys, don’t break them, please. You know, they’re very, very durable. They’re very strong. You can kick them. It won’t break. But anyway, that’s what we do. So now you can know. Now, since you’ve seen what Sloan does, you will not be able to unsee it. So every time you see a Sloan valve, you might be thinking of Kyle or myself now.
Kyle Uebelhor: Yeah. That’s right. And I wanted to have you join us for a couple of reasons because flush valves are an extremely product oriented company that’s, you know, like you said, over a century old, but the journey you’ve been on, the journey you’ve taken your team on has been this migration to being more customer centric and, and you’ve done it kind of with a fixed amount of resource in a very complex channel. Why don’t you speak a little bit about just the channel itself and all the players that are involved and how you’ve begun to think about organizing yourselves and your teams around those value chain participants, those really important players that are in the system.
Parthiv Amin: Yeah. Excellent question. Traditionally, Sloan was focused on our transactional customer, which is wholesalers and contractors and others, people who actually buy from us, physically buy from us. What we did when I came in, what we did was looked at the whole value stream of where customers buy and decisions are made, not just buy, decisions are made. So as Kyle said, the value chain participants, VC, we abbreviate that in our conversation. So how do we go upstream and downstream, both upstream towards people who specify those are project developers, architects, interior designers, plumbing engineers to that degree. And general contractors, also people who drive the specification and drive the value creation upfront in upstream. And obviously the transaction piece, the contractors who install it wholesalers that purchase it are also very important value chain participants. And then going further down to facilities and service side of the business, once we install the products, how do we maintain the product life cycle and maximize that? And that’s focusing on further downstream, at the facilities level, at the facilities operations leaders and maintenance leaders and those things. So looking at the entire value chain, participants from specifiers, architects, designers, product project developers, all the way to facilities and everyone in between.
Parthiv Amin: And one of the things we have done is we segmented each of those VCPs, because there’s so many of them and we are a very large company, but only that size and only so much bandwidth. Right. And we are a privately held company. So unlike your private publicly traded company where you have infinite resources, we don’t have infinite resources, so we have to maximize the resources we have. And we created a whole supply organization to participate in the old VCP. And the way we did it was we segmented them based on multiple parameters, not just revenue or size of the customer, but multiple parameters. And that that essentially is our secret sauce, I would say, but we were able to segment it along each of the VC and focusing laser focus on those segmented customers and winning, winning more and specifying more. The more we specify, we learn more, we win. And that’s been our journey and obviously and working throughout the entire value chain participants.
Kyle Uebelhor: And I found when working with you, this wasn’t just a, you know, because traditionally you’ve sold through channel, you’ve got distribution partners. That’s sort of the traditional way or through through other large wholesalers. But you found that it’s not just a sales organization that has that value chain that they have to be responsible for. I love what you guys have done bringing in marketing, customer service, analytics, product development. They all kind of rally around this concept of VCP. Maybe talk to us a little bit about how you keep everyone rowing in the same direction. I think that’s a tough thing to do when you’ve got both complex external and a lot of internal constituencies. How does everyone stay coordinated?
Parthiv Amin: Yeah, it’s a great question. I mean one of the things we did was we combined sales and marketing to one organization. So that’s my role is CSM as Kyle introduced myself, and Alexander Group has talked about that in their conferences, they’ve talked about how the world has changed from, you know, separate groups to combined groups as a CRO. In some cases, they call them CRO, same, similar type roles. So that’s one of the things we did. We brought all under one umbrella because having those disparate organizations, not disparate, I should say, having two separate organizations has different competitive tension. By putting it under one umbrella, we still create a competitive tension, but we call it positive competitive tension. You know, sales and marketing, for example, if you look at those two functions and customer experience team, there’s another group, third stool of our leg, third leg of our stool, I should say, sorry, they form the foundation of this organization, this, this part of my organization. All of them are equally important. There is a competitive tension because each has its own parameters. They’re getting measured by the KPIs and driving it. But the end of the day, the goal is the same. How do we drive top line market share growth and EBITDA, right? All those three elements. So that’s the that’s the one that brings them together.
Parthiv Amin: But within each area, they have their own KPIs. That drives a little bit of that, what we call positive competitive tension, which has been very important because they challenge each other, whether it’s from forecasting, when you’re putting a forecast together and budgets together all the way through the execution of forecasts and generation of revenue and obviously margin and EBITDA that goes with that. So that’s, that’s what has brought that together in a. In a large nutshell, as you take the start unpeeling the onion, you can see the elements within it. So we, we tried a lot of the KPIs together for marketing folks, for example, product managers, they are very, very integral part of our organization. They are many gems in my organization because they have to deal with all the function. We have become much more customer centric, but this product is still important because we are manufacturer, we sell products, you know, very little services. We do sell services, but mostly products. So the PLM product line managers have become an integral part of that GM. They own the PNL of that product categories they own and all elements of PNL, but they have also competitive tension with the sales organization because sales organization is going to try to drive the top line and market share growth, right? So that’s, that’s where some of the because they are PLM is also looking for margin and profitability at the same time, right? So that’s the, the yin and the yang, the pull and the push that takes place.
Parthiv Amin: The third leg of the stool is CX Customer Experience Group, which one of my team leader she leads and she leads also part of that group is also revenue ops. We start with sales op. We learn from Alexander Group and then we evolved into revenue ops function has gotten bigger and we’ve grown that team also dramatically. So those are the third element of third leg of that is how do we maximize the customer experience. Each of the VCPs have different needs, very different distinct needs. Right. And understanding that and what creates that delightful experience is different for each one of them. For designers, she’s different. She’s looking for aesthetics. She’s looking for beautiful things in front of them very quickly. From a contractor he’s looking for, how do I get installed and get I get out of the site as quickly as possible and service the least. Understanding each of the VCPs delightful needs, that’s what the CX team focuses on with the revenue ops team’s help. So those are the three pieces that drives that.
Kyle Uebelhor: No, it makes it makes perfect sense. And without getting into the exact numbers. I know you guys have grown quite well grown profitably over the last seven, well, for quite a long time, but my experience over the past 12 years with you, you haven’t had to add a whole lot of extra headcount, have you? You haven’t done it with a ton of extra air quote bodies, but you’ve been able to be thinking of, of a smart deployment structure based off that VCP alignment. In other words as you’ve been thoughtful about where you go with your investments, you’re able to give clarity of focus and provide people that purpose and that, I love it, the creative tension, the creative competition between everyone. So talk to us a little bit about how you make those decisions on when to make an investment. How do you know where to go next within that realm of the idea of profitable growth?
Parthiv Amin: Yeah, absolutely. And as I said earlier, we are a privately held company. We’re a good sized company, but, you know, and you have limited resources and everyone in every function in the organization has grown tremendously over the last ten years, both from top line and bottom line, even greater, everybody wants the resources, right? Because everybody has needs that they want to meet. And obviously we are the tip of the spear sales and marketing. So we are defining the needs. And then everybody has to meet, everybody’s looking from the same pool of people, resources they’re looking for. So one of the things that we focused on in sales and marketing function is focused a lot on data analytics. So we built a data analytics things where we invested in more people. We didn’t have any. And we invested to create a whole organization for that, both domestically and offshore. We have a company in India also. And so we added a global competency center, we call it GCC in India, where we added data analytics team. As you guys probably know, people are very, very expensive. And so we’ve added resources in both fronts, and we also use some contract work, but those are the two primary. And data analytics has become very, very important for us. So as we look at the entire VCP, as we said, we broke it down into segmentation.
Parthiv Amin: The team was an integral part of it, helping us define that along with the sales and marketing organization, but also where we looked at from data, who specify and where we win. We’ve done a tremendous amount of work in our world, what we call basis of design. If you’re in a building products industry, you would know that term you would make more sense where basis of design, where designers design this product in a job and an application or a project basis of design becomes very critical. We have done tremendous analytics on basis of design and finding out what are the attributes, characteristics that makes us win basis design with these customers. And we rifle shot that very, very well. So we know how to on a given project. If you’re doing an airport project, what are the attributes the designer is looking for to be on the basis of design, and we approach the customer with those attributes and we win a lot. When we win that, we win a lot. All the way through the transactional process. Also, because that becomes the anchor point for the customer and the designer’s end customer, which is the project developer that becomes the anchor point, and they stick to that anchor point most of the time. So we’ve focused a lot of analytics on that. So that has allowed us to be much more efficient with the same group of people. And we’ve added resources also, obviously, over the years as we have grown tremendously and VCP expansion has grown. So we have to add resources also, but we can focus them on the right place and find out why someone does not specify and what are the attributes, and how do we need to go attack them, and the strategy to go attack them and win those customers? That’s been a huge piece of our success. The other piece of success on the profitability side is understanding revenue and price, right? Easiest way to get $1 to your bottom line is by getting price right and price is not just by increasing price. Right. You have to be competitive. You have to be competitive. But what are the nuances in pricing that you can look at from what values the designer has different than the contractor has, and trying to get those values throughout the value chain all the way to the transactional customer and putting all that together plus ten, plus ten, plus ten, you know, few pennies here and there also adds up. We’ve got a river of nickels, adds up to a lot of money over the years, you know, so that’s the other thing we’ve focused a lot on is getting price in the market strategically and providing that value so that we can take that ROI and then invest in people or tools, or in this case, analytics tools and people like that.
Kyle Uebelhor: That’s definitely not a cost plus model anymore. You’re actually being very strategic with your pricing structure and that pricing structure team are they a part of your revenue operations team or do they, are they a standalone part of the team?
Parthiv Amin: Yeah, they are standalone a part of the team. They’re part of the marketing organization, but they report directly to me in this because I am passionate about price. They’ve done this a little bit before and this analytics team is so they, they do not report to sales nor they do report direct to marketing. As I said, there’s a competitive tension between the two. They provide an independent view, but they are extension of our revenue ops. But just technically they report directly to me, but they’re part of the revenue ops team.
Kyle Uebelhor: Okay. Okay. That makes that makes a ton of sense. I guess partly what, what is if you think about this in the go forward strategy, obviously we’re all immersed in what AI could do for us. And again, there’s a ton of research out there. Alexander Group included, has spent the better part of the last two years. We have a lot of research papers coming forward. We know that the jobs are changing. How has AI affected your team so far in this environment, knowing you still have to deliver? It’s beyond smoke and mirrors at this point in time, but the ROI is not always there. Is there anything that you have learned from this AI journey that’s now amongst us for your overall value creation story that’s meaningful?
Parthiv Amin: Yeah. So I mean, people conflate AI with LLM, large language models and so forth, right? I mean, then there’s the whole conversation I’m sure Kyle can have.
Kyle Uebelhor: There’s an entire separate podcast series on this.
Parthiv Amin: Yeah, I listen to podcast number six, I guess, you know, but no, so we’ve done LLM work, this data analytics team that I thought was super bright team that does that. We’ve been doing LLM work for a while and this body and the pricing, all the stuff I talked about is all done through LLM models that we’ve created ourselves, right? So the precursor to AI in a sense. So we don’t have the tools yet. We’re are building those. But we created all these modeling that we just talked about through modeling that has been a hugely impactful for us. You know, and we’re seeing some of the customers are beginning to use these AI models to do certain things procurement perspective or from design perspective. Very, very, very, very nascent stage of it. But we see, you know, huge impact code automation, for example, is another area that’s some of the work is taking place. So those things are coming. It has not quite proliferated in our industry building products industries typically. I don’t want to be pejorative about it, but it’s a little bit lagging behind a lot of the other industries that are in the works with obviously, you know, but it’s evolving and it’s developing and we see a great path, right? And that’s why we built this team to take from LLM to AI models and building that ourselves. You know.
Kyle Uebelhor: I like where you’re going. And this, to be honest with you. You’re very similar, you’re more similar than different than a lot of organizations out there. Yes, there are people who have gone to advanced agentic AI and there are opportunities out there. But at the end of the day, you still have a story to tell to other value chain participants that need to have that connectivity appropriately back to an individual. And you’re still making these individual level decisions. Just need to do it a little bit faster, a little bit smarter, perhaps a little bit more quickly or efficiently. And that’s where these tools are coming into play. But I think we have not yet seen the tool replace the people in its entirety. Certain jobs, yes, will probably be disintermediated eventually, but right now we’re seeing that it’s a leverageable tool that many people are finding great advantages of for profitability.
Parthiv Amin: Yeah. For example, the designers, their times are very valuable. They’re basically like, they’re like attorneys and doctors billable hours essentially. So they are very, very focused on getting maximum billing out. So one of the things that we have just developed and launched recently, we have a tool that’s called configurator. You can design basically a part of the restroom right on our tool in 3D, and you can configure it the way you want it. The designers would like it. We added an AI tool to that where instead of the designer prompting every single thing by answering a few questions, I’m designing an airport, dismisses traffic. Is there, you know, those certain parameters, six parameters, and pretty much within those parameters, they can get a bunch of options for designs immediately to choose from. So they’ve taken away the prompt and all that stuff. A lot of tools that are out there prompt. So what we have focused on is reducing the prompts and giving them something based on their mood. My mood is darker color, you know, he understands that. And based on the data analytics that we have over the years, we’re able to serve that up to them very quickly so that then they can go and refine it again.
Parthiv Amin: What we’re trying to do is minimize every value chain participants time that they have to spend with us. The less they spend with us, the more time they spend with something else, or they can have a higher profitable billing hours. Likelihood of them coming back to us becomes higher because we made them more profitable in their own business, right? Of course they are selecting our products selfishly. We want to sell our products, no question about that. But that’s one example where we are beginning to see it’s very, very nascent stage yet. So we cannot see a full impact of it today. But, you know, in years, from time from now, I think we’ll have a better answer on how that’s impacting them as well as us. And, and these tools, I think, are going to emerge very rapidly. I mean, as you guys know, it’s emerging, so changing so fast. You know, the cost is going down to, to, to build those tools also, you know.
Kyle Uebelhor: That’s right, that’s right. I think that what’s, what’s been I’ve been fascinated by is just the, the capabilities of the human prompters, the people who are out there who understand what the tools can do. It’s been pretty fascinating. You know, I always learn so much with our time together. I appreciate just the insights that you provide. The real life examples. I’m going to wrap us up with one last question here. I’m going to ask you to take out your crystal ball and under the notion of what are the next innovations? What are the next things on profitable growth? What’s the next six months look like for you in this world that’s changing so fast? What are the things that are going to be the drivers that will consistently be there for you as you think about driving profitable growth at Sloan?
Parthiv Amin: Yeah. Excellent question. And this is something we grapple with every day, right? I don’t have a crystal ball to disappoint you, but you know, I mean, all of us do the same, right? Everyone listening on this podcast are all very bright people. And you know, they make the best judgment every day. We see. I mean, we live in a very volatile market, right? You don’t have to look that far. I was overseas a few weeks ago and I was stuck overseas. I couldn’t get back home because of Middle East war that took place, right? Yeah. And to find an innovative way to get back home. I was in Asia, you know, so it was challenging. But anyway we all have to innovate every single day. And I think the biggest thing that we started very slow and we’re still in a nascent stage is really understanding the value creation of revenue ops to driving efficiency and effectiveness of my sales organization and marketing organization. Also sales organization, sales guys are the most expensive, right? Because they’re on the road, they travel, they spend, you know, which is what they’re supposed to do. And, you know, as you guys, everyone knows in this call. So it’s about how do I drive more from them? The revenue ops, we’re seeing great initial success, for example, sales preparedness, right? My sales team spent a lot of time preparing to go see a customer, for example right? That takes away from calling on the customer because they’re in their office doing desktop research or whatever. We brought all that into revenue ops, and the revenue ops team is doing a fantastic job of preparing even much more professional information deck and so forth for sales organization to go have that before they even walk in. Right. So understand all the projects they’re working, all those different things. They have to go through a bunch of places to find that. My team goes out there and produces it internal teams, revenue ops, and gives it to the sales team. And they have this ready made stuff before they walk in. Right. I’ve come late to the realization of how important that is. But now my team leader who leads that and we are hooked on it because our sales organization’s hooked on to it. Like now they’re on like a crack cocaine pipeline, you know, because they are so used to it now. Like they, I think they will, they will shatter if they didn’t have that preparation done for them ahead of time, you know? So sorry.
Kyle Uebelhor: No, no. That’s great. If you’re providing value That has a connection to the sales team. So it’s a win win across the board. That’s I agree with you. I think you I’m glad you landed on the value creation that originates with revenue operations and how they are absolutely to drive efficiency and effectiveness. The studies we have found, you know, is that one rev ops person adds just a tremendous amount both to the EBITDA, but just to the top line growth capability for your org. It is a really, really an important piece. So I will tell you, as I said, always such a great time to learn from you Parthiv. Thank you for joining us today. And thank all of you for listening in to this this next session of our value creation podcast. I look forward to hearing and seeing you again. And thanks so much all day. Have a great rest of your day.
Parthiv Amin: Thank you, Kyle.
Kyle Uebelhor: Thanks.
