Each week, we interview proven leaders from our network, to learn from their experiences, and share their Talent Attraction and Candidate Experience stories with you.

• Our mission is to promote the accomplishments of our guests
• Highlight the companies where they work and the services, and products that they offer
• Share success stories from their experiences and, most importantly
• Provide strategies for job seekers and advice to talent seeking to accelerate their careers.
  

Today’s guest is Paul Franke, Chief Revenue Officer at Moreland Connect. His career began in consulting at Accenture, and then evolved in Sales and Business Development at one of the largest software product companies in the world, Software AG.  Paul then parlayed that experience into customer strategy leadership within a start-up medical equipment business focused on radiation therapy for oncology. 

Paul shared many great insights including:

• His pursuit of a career in counter-terrorism after 9/11
• Playing pivotal role in startup View Ray, leveraging MRI-linear accelerator tech for cancer treatment.
• Execution and problem-solving skills (“getting things done”) are more valuable than having a perfect background.
• The value of a well curated personal network and the importance of being transparent and vulnerable when reaching out; most people are willing to help!

CRO Paul Franke and the Power of the Personal Network

[00:00:00] Ron Laneve: Hello and welcome to Episode 32 of the Bell Falls Search Focus on Talent podcast. I’m your host, Ron Laneve. Each week we share the career stories of tech experts and marketing mavens, operational gurus, and sales leaders to illustrate how they’ve navigated the non linear career path.

[00:00:18] Ron Laneve: I had the privilege of originally meeting today’s guest almost 20 years ago when we recruited him to join our rapidly growing consulting firm. He began his career in consulting at Accenture and then he evolved into a sales and business development executive at one of the largest software product companies in the world.

[00:00:35] Ron Laneve: He then parlayed that experience into customer strategy leadership within a startup medical equipment business focused on radiation therapy for oncology. Please welcome my good friend, Paul Franke, Chief Revenue Officer at Moreland Connect. Paul, thanks for being here. 

[00:00:53] Paul Franke: Hey, Ron, thanks for having me. 

[00:00:54] Ron Laneve: So to kick things off, Paul, as we talked about and to set this up, after I’ve interviewed a few dozen people across technology and marketing and sales and e commerce and coaching, what’s been the most fascinating thing to me is following their career journeys and the fact that they’ve mostly been nonlinear whether they haven’t been in one industry, their whole career, or they haven’t followed one path within a certain company, or they’ve completely changed direction.

[00:01:23] Ron Laneve: I’d say, you, you fall in that category pretty squarely with, with the experiences that you’ve had. So can you talk about those changes in your career journey and really focus on the how and the why were they serendipitous, were they intentional, complete flukes, what what drove you to get to where you are today?

[00:01:44] Paul Franke: Sure. Saying my career path is nonlinear is certainly an understatement. It’s been circuitous path for sure. For me, a little bit of it is variety is a spice of life, like I’m always interested in things, I like making changes and reinventing sometimes. So my career story starts at Accenture, as you said. I went to Villanova and my first job out of college was Anderson consulting which then became Accenture. I’m feeling pretty good about myself, right? I got this business degree and I’m going to do business consulting at this cool consulting firm. I mean they have ads on television man. I mean they’re big So and I get to pick where I start and I’m a Cleveland kid right grew up in Cleveland. So great Okay, I was going to school in Philadelphia, I get to go back home. Started in the Cleveland office at Accenture go through first week of onboarding, the usual stuff.

[00:02:43] Paul Franke: Then we start training and the training is how to program. And some of us are like looking around, is this what we do here? Like I thought we were going to be like business consulting. We’re going to be programmers? What about like the business strategy consultant? Yeah. And we do that too. If you want to go back to get your MBA from like Harvard or a prestigious school like that.

[00:03:12] Paul Franke: Otherwise this is IT consulting buddy. I was there for a while and I would do it over again in a heartbeat. Absolutely. A hundred percent. It taught me what working hard actually means, 40 hour work week. That’s a joke. Minimum 80 hours a week, minimum.

[00:03:32] Paul Franke: So you’re, working with people your own age, out of town, working hard, playing hard going through the trenches, so to speak, those bonds that get formed, never go away. And you’ll see the one common theme in my career journey has been leveraging that network. Every single step I’ve made in my career has been with that same group of people that I worked with my first job out of college, except for some things I did for the government.

[00:04:03] Paul Franke: I figured out I don’t want to stare at a computer screen all the time. That’s not my thing. So I start looking for what’s, what is next? What am I going to do next?

[00:04:13] Paul Franke: I’m looking at law school and I’m looking at, going back to get my MBA and 911 happens. I’m watching intelligence professionals come on television and talk about terror organizations and how they formed and where they are and what their objectives are. I’m fascinated and I’m feeling this compulsion to make a difference somehow. So I say, okay, I’m going to go back to school and not get my MBA. I’m going to go get my master’s in international affairs. I go back to school, American University in DC. I study Arabic. I go overseas. I spend time in Beirut. I spend time in the Bekaa Valley in Syria. I see the Hezbollah training camps and I get recruited and offered positions to do counter terrorism intelligence analysis for the CIA and also offered the same position from FBI. Life happens and I end up back home, married with kids back in Cleveland, back in technology, which is where you and I first met.

[00:05:20] Paul Franke: Interesting journey. so now I’m back in technology and it was Xteric, then Brulant, then Rosetta and I’m doing project management, not really enjoying myself. I get a call from one of my first managers at Accenture. He wants me to come to a large software company and do channel partner sales. With the technology that I had first worked with at Accenture. Arnold Huffman respect a great deal. Taught me a lot of things. This is going to be great. Go work for Arnold again.

[00:05:59] Paul Franke: Now I’m at a multi billion dollar software company doing channel partner sales. managing the global system integrators and getting them to include our technology in their solutions ultimately. That eventually evolves into, at some point I become an individual contributor. I’m carrying a bag. I’m 100 percent in control of my own destiny. it’s a little terrifying, but I make the jump and was fortunate enough to have success in that role. I went to a chairman’s club several years in a row. They send me to European business school to do, leadership training and get promoted to a regional vice president.

[00:06:42] Paul Franke: And now I’m, now I have to build a team. I inherit some guys and I make some changes and now I’m bringing some people that I trust onto my team. Who do you think I reach out to? I’m the guys that I first worked with at Accenture. 

[00:06:58] Paul Franke: So I was at that company for 10 years. They start doing some silly things with companies they’re purchasing that really don’t make any sense with our technology stack and I don’t like the direction. Plus I’ve been there for 10 years. Like I’m looking for what’s next. Surprise somebody from Accenture that I first worked with reaches out. He’s now at a medical device company called View Ray and tells me about this technology and my mind is blown. So this is an MRI machine combined with a linear accelerator for radiation cancer treatment. The combination of those two technologies enables you to have very tight margins when you irradiate a tumor with an ablative dose and has gating technology. So it enables you to do things like treat a tumor next to a beating heart. Every time the heart beats, the tumor moves outside the treatment zone, the beam shuts off.

[00:07:57] Paul Franke: So the beam is turning on and off as the heart is beating. Incredible outcomes for patients. Patients that were sent home to be made comfortable. I’m sorry you were untreatable. They find our technology. Three months later, they’re cancer free.

[00:08:15] Ron Laneve: Yeah. Very cool. That’d be a lot more fulfilling than selling software.

[00:08:19] Paul Franke: That’ll make you jump out of bed in the morning. 60 hospitals around the world, purchase this technology and are treating patients. But it was a startup and they ran into cashflow issues and had to go through chapter 11 and chapter 7 bankruptcy. It was ultimately purchased by a billionaire who was treated and cured of cancer on the system. A lot of us felt it would be immoral for this technology to go away. so thank goodness it will live on. 

[00:08:49] Ron Laneve: What was that transition like from selling software to selling You know, I’ll just say broadly a medical device, let alone something as highly specialized and mission driven as that.

[00:09:03] Paul Franke: I’ll throw you an even more of a curve ball was not even selling this. I just spent 10 years in a commercial role selling, and now I go to a medical device company, an industry I’ve never been in. And it’s an operations management role. Like I had a global team that I was leading that was taking our customers from, presale to planning, design, construction, install, training, get the first patient.

[00:09:36] Paul Franke: And I led, their strategy, strategic programs for a bit. It’s a startup, right? So you’ve got to wear lots of different hats. Yeah. That transition. What I mean, I fell back on my Accenture experience. If one thing that Accenture teaches you to do is I call it bulldog things. Grab on to the bone and shake the hell out of it until you get to a solution.

[00:10:03] Paul Franke: Yep. And they’re, they’re very good at teaching you how to manage a project and so really it was just go back to that kind of pedigree and training and figure out how you make this operations role work. 

[00:10:18] Ron Laneve: And you and I’ve heard that story more times than we could possibly count with all the people we know that have been through that journey. So now you’re at a company called Moreland Connect, the Chief Revenue Officer. What is Moreland Connect? What do you guys do? And how’d you find yourself into that role? 

[00:10:35] Paul Franke: I’ll start with how I found myself into that role. Surprise, again, common theme. The person I first worked with at Accenture, who I also hired onto my team when I was at Software AG, is a partner now at Moreland Connect. So I leveraged that network again. Now I’m I’m working for him as Chief Revenue Officer. And this is really an exciting opportunity for me.

[00:11:04] Paul Franke: We are taking Moreland Connect to the next phase and really building the company out in terms of growth. We’re a custom software development firm. We develop custom solutions for all kinds of industries, true custom software. Everything from a custom ERP system that we wrote for an electronics recycler to a solution that we built in collaboration with a startup that came out of University Hospital Ventures, patient monitoring and alerting for labor and delivery wards. To have safer, better outcomes for mother and baby. I learned something why we partnered with this firm to build this solution. The maternal mortality rates in the United States are three times higher than they are In other developed countries, in some cases, six times higher. And you think, how is that possible to have, right? The best healthcare system in the world. But it’s it’s a function of not having actionable intelligence at the fingertips of clinicians.

[00:12:20] Paul Franke: And that’s what this Solution does. I love the intersection. I talked about my experience at V Ray and the intersection of technology and healthcare, applying technology to save lives. When we’re doing things at Moreland Connect like that, that are literally saving lives, again, my feet fly out of bed.

[00:12:39] Paul Franke: You cannot turn around without people saying generative AI. A. I. Has become a very umbrella term. Obviously, what is new is generative A. I. Now that it’s in front of everybody’s face, the opportunity for us that Moreland Connect to help companies figure out how do we leverage this technology across the enterprise? We couldn’t be more excited about. Of course with the Accenture theme, I keep mentioning a hundred times. I’ll just give you a piece of data.

[00:13:17] Paul Franke: Accenture just released their Q1 earnings. In the earnings, there’s a note. They have $600 million of generative AI bookings in Q1, so they’re on track to do $2.4 billion of generative AI work. Accenture is focused on, fortune 500 companies. I don’t know how many, multiple billions of dollars in the middle market, because the middle market is going to have to leverage these generative AI technologies as well. And the very large system integrators out there and consulting firms. Are not going to touch that market. That’s where firms like Moreland connect have a just massive opportunity. And so we are really excited about engaging with our customers and prospects, helping them really figure that out. 

[00:14:11] Ron Laneve: Custom technology solution companies or custom software development companies, I could rattle off 20 just off the tip of my tongue, what’s your secret sauce? What’s the thing that makes you guys different than anyone else. 

[00:14:22] Paul Franke: We don’t do Offshore. We have 20 developers In a room sitting next to each other. They’re not working remote. They like that. We have built a culture in which the people enjoy working with each other so much that they want to sit next to each other.

[00:14:39] Paul Franke: And we also don’t have pure project managers. We don’t have an extra layer between the customer and who’s actually going to develop the software. We like that model because nothing gets lost in translation. Because we spend a lot of time listening to the customer, making sure the requirements are gathered correctly, and the person gathering that is the same person that’s going to actually write the code, and he’s also sitting next to other developers, so they are collaborating together. That model for us, that is absolutely part of our secret sauce. We get lots of we call them salvage projects where somebody tried to either do something offshore or do something where there were too many layers in between the customer and who was developing the code and we get it and they, the customers, spent money and they haven’t been delivered what they were promised. We’ll take that project and resurrect it because we’ll go make sure we got the requirements, and then that person is the same one who’s developing the solution. And he’s also sitting in a room with 20 other developers, which is a force multiplier. It just makes every, the whole process more efficient. 

[00:16:01] Ron Laneve: And I think you’ll, you can do a better job at describing this than I can, but from my understanding, and I think the the maternity example is a good example, it’s not just software. It’s mobile devices. It’s some IOT it’s integration of software with physical devices and components to build a total solution for your clients along the way in a lot of cases, is that correct?

[00:16:26] Ron Laneve: Yeah, 

[00:16:26] Paul Franke: that, that’s absolutely, that is absolutely correct. Our guys get excited with the harder projects. Like they, they want the hard things to solve. And oftentimes our sweet spot is. It’s a company that is using some products off the shelf and it does, 70 percent of what they need.

[00:16:46] Paul Franke: We build the other 30 percent and integrate it together with what they’re already using, or they want something very specific because it’s going to be a different differentiator for them. And it’s, it’s a hard problem to solve. It’s. It’s device device integration, it’s, IoT related, it’s robotic prosthetic limb that you have to get right because someone is literally going to use it to try to walk.

[00:17:12] Paul Franke: Yep. Or it’s, we have a solution that manages all of the salt plowed trucks, the whole entire fleet for the state of Ohio. And it’s integrated into the systems that are running the. The plow and the salt bed and the spreader and the GPS and a camera, right? All of that technology together.

[00:17:35] Paul Franke: We’re tying, we’re embedding hard we’re embedding code in all of those pieces of hardware to compile a solution so that they can manage the entire fleet. They know where all the trucks are. They know where they should be based on incoming weather patterns. They’re making sure. They’re not dumping excess salt because the guys want to get home early at the end.

[00:17:57] Ron Laneve: Very cool. All right. Thanks for that. Let’s transition into, a couple different cohorts that I like to talk about, so first is, college students or those entering the workforce soon. Guess is we’re probably going to leverage some of the Accenture learnings, but and some of the hard work learnings.

[00:18:15] Ron Laneve: But what advice would you give that group around, what they should focus on while they’re still in school could be an area of of a type of major, a class to study, thing to add to their degree before they leave. Could be soft skills, et cetera. What would you give that group first in terms of advice around how to best prepare themselves for the world they’re about to walk into?

[00:18:40] Paul Franke: Yeah. I guess one thing is I see a lot of college students get really they have a lot of anxiety around, am I studying the right thing? For the rest of that, I’m going to leverage for the rest of my life. And unless you want to be a, yes, there are careers where you need very specific education. You want to be a doctor or you want to be a lawyer or you want to be a rocket scientist.

[00:19:14] Paul Franke: But so many, I’ve seen this so many times, you could be an art major, you could be a history major, an English major, and do something in, in your career entirely different from what you studied. What I think makes, I guess two things. One is, figure out what type of person you are, and what type of organization you’re in.

[00:19:46] Paul Franke: You best fit. And so what I mean by that, there’s a book called barbarians to bureaucrats by Lawrence Miller. And it talks about like the stages of corporate life and different types of people are suited for different types of companies. depending on the stage that they’re in. And I’ll just take the opposite ends of that spectrum to illustrate the point.

[00:20:13] Paul Franke: Make a small startup company where almost nothing is defined. There’s no processes. There’s no bureaucracy, everything’s on fire, everything’s important you have to define almost everything yourself and wear lots of hats. Certain types of people like that. Certain types of people hate that. Do not want to be exposed to that at all.

[00:20:40] Paul Franke: The other end of the spectrum is A $10 billion company. That’s very bureaucratic. All the processes are defined. It’s very structured. Some people love that and need that. It’s very safe and some people don’t want to deal with that at all. They don’t like the big company. They don’t like the bureaucracy.

[00:21:07] Paul Franke: Okay, great. Like figure out which of those people you are and don’t be afraid about trying something that is not. What? It’s not your education. There’s a former president. I won’t say who it was in case their political affiliation kind of taints the message. But this president said the highest leaders in government and in business, you know what they’re really good at?

[00:21:38] Paul Franke: They’re really good at getting things done. There are lots of really smart people. That can describe to you in deep, in excruciating detail, what the problem is, what the problem is. What’s more valuable is the person that can just fix it. The person that can just get stuff done. The person that is the bulldog grabs a hold of the bone and shakes the hell out of it until they find a solution.

[00:22:12] Paul Franke: That’s the most valuable person. And I don’t care what your background is. You can do almost anything you want. 

[00:22:19] Ron Laneve: Yeah. It’s funny, Mike. I think the greatest compliment I ever received in my career was probably when I was on the job after two weeks for my first boss, Manuel Glinius at NetGenix, and he introduced me to somebody.

[00:22:33] Ron Laneve: He goes, that’s Ron Laniv. He gets things done. And 

[00:22:35] Paul Franke: that 

[00:22:35] Ron Laneve: was it. And I was like, holy cow, that’s really cool. That’s, especially when you’re right out of college, that’s a big deal when the CEO says that, but it’s always stuck with me. And that’s Something I try to live by. So I appreciate that.

[00:22:48] Ron Laneve: I appreciate that a lot. And I get it. Yeah, no, I love that. How about for experienced talent people who’ve been in the workforce, 10, 15, 20 plus years, who are thinking about their next move, who might be already in transition and trying to find their next position. You’ve interviewed lots of people.

[00:23:07] Ron Laneve: I’m sure you’ve hired lots of people. You just recently went through, your own transition. To Tomorrowland Connect when you were least expecting it, I think can be frustrating, especially in the market we’re in right now, where you gotta, to use your analogy, you have to be a bulldog to find your next thing.

[00:23:26] Ron Laneve: What advice would you give that? That cohort of people as they’re going through this process and, honestly, a lot of people are saying what’s wrong with me when, and nothing is, but it’s just the state we’re in. 

[00:23:38] Paul Franke: Yeah, having actually lived it the company that I was working for went bankrupt. And when you’re in bankruptcy, guess what this severance that you’re entitled to, you’ll get zip, go get in line with all the other creditors. I needed a job and the only thing that, that was valuable in terms of the tactical task of finding what is next was just talking to people in my network. I haven’t talked to people in 10 years. Don’t be afraid. To pick up the phone or find a way, to get in touch, go find them on LinkedIn and say, Hey, would love to catch up with you. Don’t be afraid to have people like to be asked for help. Most people, it’s most people, it’s part of most people’s Yeah. 

[00:24:34] Ron Laneve: And not only asked, but are willing to help too. 

[00:24:37] Paul Franke: Absolutely. I was talking to everybody. I was literally talking to neighbors. I was talking to family members. I was talking to former colleagues. I was talking to people I went to grade school with. Literally everyone you can think of, even if you haven’t talked to that person in 20 years. Try it. Every other activity, a dead end. That was the real one that bore. Those don’t have to be a conversation where somebody feels pressure of any kind.

[00:25:11] Paul Franke: Hey, you know what? This is the situation that I’m in and I’m looking for what’s next. The cool thing about this time right now is that I get to reach out to people that I haven’t talked to in a long time. Sometimes it’s just a nice conversation and catch up. In some cases it’s a nice conversation and catch up.

[00:25:32] Paul Franke: Someone said, Oh, you know what? You should talk to so and or I think I’ve got an idea of an opportunity I think you’d be interested in. Let me make the referral for you, but there’s no pressure. At the end of this conversation, it’s just Hey, it was, this was great to catch up, haven’t talked to you in 20 years. I literally took somebody out to lunch. I hadn’t talked to in 20 years. It was fun and she felt no pressure

[00:25:57] Ron Laneve: I’ll say it’s easier for us because we are used to talking a lot and talking to people and you’re a sales role, right? You’re comfortable doing that. There’s a lot of people that I’d say are more on the introverted side, who don’t want to reach out and ask someone to lunch and. They feel like it’s just not their thing. And I’m going to ask you for what you think your advice should be for that group of people. I’d like to know what your advice is for that group of people, but I’m going to give you my two cents before that, while you think about it, because I think you led into it, but I think it’s.

[00:26:31] Ron Laneve: Being vulnerable and being transparent. Allowing yourself to just put yourself out there and say, Hey, here’s my situation. Can you help me? Or do you got any ideas? And as opposed to, Hey, I need something really bad. Can you help me or not? And just being, Hey, can you have a conversation with me? What do you do? 

[00:26:50] Paul Franke: Honestly, I don’t think I would add anything to that. I think that’s. 100%, 100 100 correct. I totally agree with that. Just the, bearing your soul a little bit, just being totally honest and transparent.

[00:27:02] Paul Franke: Talk to that person like you would talk to your spouse. Like you don’t have to hide anything. This is what, this is the situation. I’m talking to a lot of people about it. The other thing is there are certain people that are force multipliers. It’s a networking exercise and you’re going to have conversations that go nowhere. You’re going to have conversations with people like yourself that have a big network of people. The leverage, those are the conversations you’re going to get the most out of because they just have a broader reach, right? They have more things more opportunities that they can identify because they know more people and they stay connected to more people. 

[00:27:47] Ron Laneve: Yep. All right. The bonus question I’ve been asking people lately is about AI, right? So here’s the bonus question. I’m not going to ask you to theorize and what you think AI is going to be and where it’s going to go.

[00:28:00] Ron Laneve: What’s your AI stack. And what tools or tool would you, if you’re willing to give them up, would you suggest to other people that you might’ve used to change the way you do things? 

[00:28:13] Paul Franke: We have been developing a a framework for companies to leverage to figure out how to let, how to deploy generative AI tools across their enterprise, just for not use case specific, right?

[00:28:37] Paul Franke: Not to drive a particular competitive advantage, but to make the entire workforce more productive. So there are studies out there that say. Yes, use case specific applications of generative AI will provide competitive advantage and will have, a large global economic impact for sure. The bigger impact actually is just going to be making everyone in the workforce more productive.

[00:29:11] Paul Franke: You will have a larger global economic impact by making just a horizontal usage. Of generative AI tools. If you are a Google user, look at Gemini. If you’re a Microsoft user, look at Copilot. It’s essentially right. Chat GPT embedded into, word and PowerPoint and outlook and teams.

[00:29:42] Paul Franke: And you you have a team’s call and you have to summarize it and create, actions. You don’t have to do any of that stuff anymore. Just ask the pilot to do it. And in a second, it’s there like those kinds of just everyday. Productivity tools, I think, are going to have a huge impact and Every company is going to have to do it.

[00:30:10] Ron Laneve: Do you, Paul, have a tool or tools that you have leaned on specifically, right? Descript for me, using this tool called Descript for making these videos and using AI to change The transcripts and the and editing has been huge. I just got off a call the guy earlier. I think it was cast magic and he was telling me that he talks.

[00:30:30] Ron Laneve: He walks to work. He takes voice notes that entire walk by the time he gets to work cast magic has taken the transcript of his voice recordings turned it into. Again, turn it into a transcript. Has it queued up for Instagram and LinkedIn posts and is like content that he can begin to reutilize just by taking use of that time.

[00:30:53] Ron Laneve: Are you using anything like that? I’m boring. Okay. No, I 

[00:30:57] Paul Franke: mean, like we’re I’m a Microsoft user, right? And so I’m using co pilot to make all of those tasks and all in word and Excel and PowerPoint and teams, right? Make all of that. Faster and more efficient. Do I do have to, in a sales and marketing role, you do have to create imagery and sometimes, and so I was using Dolly, but I paid for a chat GPT for now.

[00:31:23] Paul Franke: And so it’s just, it’s right in there. I can ask it to create anything. And it’s unbelievable what it creates. It’s unique. It’s not, combining, it’s not combining different pieces of artwork. It is completely new. No one’s ever seen it. No one’s ever created it. And it’s exactly what I asked for.

[00:31:45] Ron Laneve: Yeah. Yeah. Cool. Paul, thanks a lot. It’s good to see you again. Thanks for sharing your thoughts. And appreciate your time. Thank you, Ron. It’s been fun. All right, for sure. Next time we get together, I want to hear a couple of riffs on one of those guitars in the background. That’s fair. All right.

[00:32:02] Ron Laneve: Talk to you soon. Take care.

April 25, 2024