OREANDA-NEWS. July 21, 2015. Among the many things Pegasus Sustainability’s CEO Mark Hope has learned over the last 30 years is how not to run a business.

And when you talk to him, it’s pretty clear that all those takeaways have become his secret to success today. Hope’s free-thinking and no-nonsense approach to business has helped turn his ideas into solutions that really work.

Having started in 2012 with some seed money and two employees, Pegasus Sustainability Solutions has evolved into a thriving business that provides sustainability, environmental, and waste management solutions to clients in industrial, commercial, and life sciences organizations. With its 34 employees, Pegasus is deeply rooted in its unconventional business philosophy: Don’t keep looking behind you to see where you’re going.

Hope recently stopped by Salesforce headquarters in downtown San Francisco to talk about why every small business with a bank account should have a CRM (customer relationship management) system. Aside from good ideas, Hope dished out some nuggets of advice to small businesses starting out: Root your business decisions in insights, not assumptions.

Oh, and don’t bother writing up that five-year business plan they taught you how to make in business school, he says — plans like that never pan out in this rapidly changing world.

Salesforce: Tell us a little more about your company and how you got started.

Mark: We did a research project for my previous company, an environmental services company down in Houston, and they asked us to determine things we could try to do to make the company a more modern, 21st-century company (in terms of environmental services). So we did a lot of work and made a presentation; at the end, they said they were so impressed by our ideas, but said, “We think this company will make a mess of it, because we have so much momentum and corporate culture embedded in our DNA.” So they gave us seed capital to start a new company to implement all these new ideas.

SF: So what were those new ideas all about?

Mark: The essence is to harvest demand for industrial services and interact with those customers in a very intimate way, then create opportunities from the inbound calls, then match the opportunities with one of our partners … and we do it in a way where customer feels they had a positive, intimate well-organized interaction.  

SF: What were some of the pain points you faced starting out, and how did you overcome them?

Mark: We always had a good grasp of the demand side of the business—we’ve done a great job of identifying customers who need these services and capturing them. But the problem has been building an effective fulfillment system, so trying to get vendors to do the work at a cost-effective price and for us to monetize the opportunity. That’s the back half of our business, and that’s been our biggest challenge.

SF: So when did you start using Salesforce?

Mark: I think within three days of incorporating our company we had a Salesforce license. One of my principles we adhered to from the beginning is we wanted systems robust and scalable and flexible from the very beginning. As someone who has been a corporate executive since the beginning of my career, I was always struggling with legacy systems and not being able to get data in a meaningful way, or evaluate business in a meaningful way.

The most exciting thing about contemporary marketing is almost everything is measurable -- you can measure interactions with customers, you can measure opens and clicks -- and so we didn’t want to create a business with a measureable front end and then everything fell apart in the back end. So we use Salesforce for every part of our business -- we use accounting in Salesforce, we do order management in Salesforce, and CRM in Salesforce.

People ask me sometimes about adoption, but at our company, adoption is easy -- you can’t work here if you’re not using [Salesforce], because that’s the only thing we have.

SF: What would you say to a small business owner who thinks Salesforce is hard to use, complicated, or just too expensive?

Mark: Like anything in life, you have to learn how to do something. But once you learn how to do it, it adds a tremendous amount of value because it gives visibility to all your actions. You can easily monitor, manage, and report on all the things you are doing. I think one problem is when I talk to people about Salesforce, they think it’s a sales tool. What I tell them is that it’s really a platform that you can build any business process you use on a day-to-day basis.

SF: Speaking of learning, how did you learn about Salesforce?

Mark: I’ve been familiar with it almost since you started. I worked for Coca-Cola for many years, and we were dabbling with CRM systems then. Other companies I worked for used other CRM systems so I’ve been familiar with what CRM systems are out there. But I knew Salesforce, being cloud-based, from the beginning was a superior solution to something like Microsoft Dynamics where you had to bring a bunch of software into play.

We decided right away we would start with Salesforce.

SF: You’ve used plenty of other CRMs. Why did you chose Salesforce?

Mark: I was at Coca-Cola when we tried to do an SAP experiment, and it was a calamity -- the worst experience of my career. We had SAP, we had Oracle, and 8 or 10 legacy systems running on different platforms, and none of them were connected. We had all these smart guys that their entire job was to pull data from various things and match it up so they had to come up with some sort of relational field. But if you had a question, it would take 10 days for someone to grind out the answer. So it’s like driving you car by looking in the rearview mirror -- you were constantly looking backwards to see where you were going.

At Pegasus, I wanted a system that the real data -- all the data, the accounting data, the opportunity data, the order data, pricing data, cost data -- was in real time and you could see it right now. If you build a system that’s easy to use, and straightforward, and helpful, and people don’t have to sync and do other silly things, then they’re more likely to use it.

 

SF: What do you think are two signs a small business needs a CRM?

Mark: If they have a bank account, they need a CRM.

Honestly, it’s so fundamental to how you’re going to do business. If you’re going to do business with someone else, you need to keep track of that person. You need to keep track of who they are, where they are, who they’ve talked to, what you’ve said to them, what proposals you’ve sent them. If you don’t have a CRM, where do you keep track of that? Open up a Google contact window and paste crap in there? So I think from the very beginning — from the day you start your company, from the day you open a bank account — you should get a CRM.

If you walk in the morning and say, “What did we do yesterday?” and you can’t answer that question by pulling up a dashboard or a screen, then you have a problem.

 

SF: Business has changed so much over the years; tell us more about your philosophy for running a small business.

Mark: I believe everything should be grounded in an insight. You should know something before you do something. You start with a question: How can we grow, or why is that happening, or why isn’t this happening? Then you try to gain the insight. You should be able to rapidly move to the data and see if the data supports your hypothesis, and then you should test your assumption to see how it works. And all of that should be done without having to bring in a bunch of IT guys to pull different data from different places.

Even if you go to business school, they teach you about a business plan, and the plan tells you, “For the next five years, this is what I am going to do.” But it’s crazy -- it’s like writing a life plan. I mean, you don’t know what’s going to happen to you in 25 years: who you are going to meet? What opportunities are going to come up? Are you going to get sick? Are you going to have children? All those things that influence what you do haven’t happened to you yet, and the same is true for business.

Contemporary thinking around business planning is to create a map -- this is what I know about the landscape, and here’s how I think I am going to compete. Then you move in that direction and reiterate the things that work and stop the things that don’t. You keep learning and changing. Having the tools to do that allows you to be very graphic, so you’re not just making assumptions.

For the first time in my career, I can see — from the very beginning of a customer interaction to the very end — everything that happened to them.

 

SF: How should people think about Salesforce?

Mark: It’s a business platform, and it can do everything you want it to do. You can bring in 100 people and ask them to describe their business process, to draw it up there on the wall. Ask them: How do you find customers? How do you engage? How do you sell to them? How do you invoice them? And every single thing they draw up on that wall, you can implement in Salesforce in a week. There’s no other tool I know of in the world that could do that.