Drill to Detail - Drill to Detail Ep.121 'How Partnerships Power the Data Analytics Ecosystem' featuring Special Guest Eleanor Thompson

Episode Date: March 12, 2025

Mark Rittman is joined on this episode by Branchworks CEO Eleanor Thompson to talk about partner programs, partner portals and the role partnerships play in making data analytics initiatives a success.Branchworks homepage : Activating Partnerships for Revenue GrowthCastorDoc case studyEleanor Thompson LinkedIn Profile

Left for your question here, but why are all partner portals so terrible? Oh, they really are. So hello and welcome to the Drill to Detail podcast, sponsored by Ripman Analytics and I'm your host, Mark Ripman. So I'm really pleased to be joined today by Eleanor Thompson, founder and CEO of Branchworks. So welcome to the show, Eleanor. Hi, thanks so much for having me. So Eleanor, so I know you quite well. I've obviously worked with you in various kinds of guises over the last few years in

the kind of modern data stack industry. But tell us a bit about, first of all, tell us what you do at Branchworks. Yeah, absolutely. So Branchworks is a specialist partnerships consultancy. So what that essentially means is that we help companies collaborate with other companies so they can reach a wider market together

and generate more revenue. So we help companies in a variety of ways through consulting, through fractional services, and soon through training and development as well. Okay, so how did you get into doing this then? What was your route into the industry and into doing what you're doing at Branchworks? Wow, so I've been in partnerships for most of my career.

Started off in a tech reseller doing, you know, cold calling, you know, cold calling, selling anything that I possibly could at a tech reseller and was fortunate enough to come up with a partnership opportunity there. And I got to move into a partnerships role, managing their partnership with a very big vendor. And that really kicked off my partnerships career, to be honest. You know, I've gone from various companies of different sizes, all the way from, you

know, a real small startup all the way up to Microsoft and everything in between, and got into the data space, probably about six years ago now, and when I was fortunate enough to go and go and work at 5Tran. And so what's the, I suppose, what's the, what's the rationale really for what you're doing at Branchworks and why did you want to go self-employed and start a business in this area? Great question. So, I mean, partnerships are really, really important for companies that are wanting to scale, particularly in the tech space. And I think even more important in the data space, but we can, we can go into that in a bit. But I think, you know, I've seen the problems that companies have faced

when they're much bigger with partnerships, and I really wanted to help companies to scale with partnerships from an early stage and prevent some of the problems that I've seen much further down the line. I could always see, oh, if only if it had been built this way initially, or if only we'd done things a little bit differently earlier on, we could have prevented a lot of these problems now. So really, Branchworks came out of me seeing a need in the market

and really wanting to help as many organizations as possible to leverage partnerships for growth. Okay, okay. So I first encountered you really, I think when you were at 5Tran and you struck me as the, I wouldn't say scary person, but you were the one who actually, out of all the partner managers that I used to work with

and different kind of vendor partners at the time, you were the one that actually kind of, I suppose, knew what you were doing. And you knew, I suppose, what the role of kind of consultancies would be, playing a role as partners to 5Tran. And you would know what the role of 5Tran would be in that kind of world as well.

And so, I mean, so let's really, and I suppose a lot of people maybe who don't work in a consultancy or don't work for a vendor, don't actually understand what the partnership sort of need is for and why partnerships exist between sort of vendors and companies like my own. So maybe let's just take a start really by, why do vendors such as FiveTran or DBT Labs,

all the kind of companies that we typically know in this kind of vendor space, why do they start partner programs? What's the partner rationale behind it? And at what stage in their development does this make sense? Yeah, so essentially partnerships help organizations to generate more revenue,

but they do that through a number of ways. If you think about collaborating with other companies, if you're collaborating with a consultancy, that consultancy is gonna be able to offer another layer of expertise that you can't potentially offer as your organization. They're going to be able to provide services for your customers in a way that you might not be able to offer or not

want to offer. They're probably going to be based in markets that you might not have presence in. They might have language capabilities that you don't have capabilities in. Like, you know, partners should really, when you come together, you should be better together and provide a new offering to market. And that will help organizations to expand. So rather than just trying to go to market on your own and do everything independently, you get the opportunity to work with so many other companies.

And this is where the name of Branchworks comes in, but it allows you to branch out into new spaces. And different customers will come to different types of company. You know, the customer that goes to the vendor directly might not be the same as the customer that goes to a boutique consultancy in their region that speaks their language. You know, it's going to really expand your reach, but it's also going to expand your expertise. It's going to possibly speed up your deal cycle as well,

because you might have these consultancies might have great relationships with customers already. So they're going to be able to get in there. They're going to already have trust built. They're already going to have paperwork commercials in place. So that might speed up your deal cycle. You know, these companies can also help with customer success and customer management. already going to have paperwork commercials in place that might speed up your deal cycle. These companies can also help with customer success and customer management. There's so many benefits to working with partners over and above just additional leads, which absolutely

is there. But there's more to it than just that. Okay. So at what point in a vendor's lifecycle would the partner program become relevant? Okay, so if you're a product startup and you're maybe sort of like half a dozen people or whatever and you're in that kind of, I suppose, in that phase when you're trying to find product market fit, is that the point at which you get partners? I mean, what point in the lifecycle does it make sense really? I'm glad you said product market fit, because actually I recommend that people have product market fit before they go to market with, with partners. So there's a couple of things that I normally say. I say have product market fit at least 15 paying customers and around three sales.

People once you've got those three things, that's a good opportunity to start thinking about partners. Before then, you don't know enough to educate your partners appropriately. Because if you don't have product market fit and you don't have paying customers, you have no success stories, and you also have no salespeople, then you're not going to be able to build

education for your partners. You're not going to be able to give them success stories. They're going to be figuring it out as at the same time as you. And in order to set partners up for success, you already need to have those things figured out. Right. Okay. And so why don't vendors just do it all themselves? I mean, I've worked in a startup before, product startup, and, you know, I suppose the period at which they had a lot of kind of success and a lot of kind of direct contact with customers was when they had their own say professional services team. So, but, so why don't vendors try and do this all themselves anyway?

And, and, you know, is there a reason why is there a kind of a, is it impossible or is it doesn't make sense? What, why is that? Some vendors will, some vendors will try and do it all themselves. It really depends on, you depends on what their investors recommend. I know a lot of vendors who are targeted purely on their software sales and therefore having professional services added on just isn't really a benefit for them and they prefer for their partners to deliver that.

They will kind of want to narrow their focus, really, really focus on their software sales and have the partners do it for them. Also it allows them, I think it expands their value as an organization as well. There's only so much that one company can do. And if you think about our space, if we now think about the data space specifically, these technologies need to be integrated with

other technologies in order to be successful and a consultancy can support with that. If a big vendor does all of their professional services themselves, then either they have to go and train themselves in so many other technologies for the integration or then they don't offer that and these vendors are then having the software plus the professional services, and none of them are talking to one another. So it gets really complex, especially in a space like ours,

where all of these technologies have to come together in order to work. It's much more straightforward for the customer and for the vendors to allow consultancies that are trained in many different technologies to be a kind of one-stop services shop for customers. Right, okay. And I think one thing we have to be careful about here

is I suppose mixing up, I suppose, tech partners and I suppose services partners. So again, if you were, maybe back in your days at 5Tran or when you advised people, how do you describe the distinction between tech and services partners and why are they different and why they're both needed? Yeah, so there's actually so many different types of partners.

So I won't list them all out now because there's no need. But you know, at my company, we kind of we break it down into about eight partner types and four partner models. So if anyone wants to find out what they are, they can reach out to me. But there are there's differences between them all. But if we just look at the, you know, services and technology for now, you've got a couple of different types of technology. So you've got your complementary technology. So technologies that you might integrate with. So, if you took a 5Tran and a DBT, for example,

and then you've got your tech marketplaces and kind of warehouse solutions. So, you've got the AWS, the Googles, the Microsofts of the world that have then these big tech market players. So, you can probably segment tech partners into two different types there, because you would work with them differently that's the reason that you segment them differently. So you've got complementary technologies and they are great and you might pass leads back

and forth from one another but it's not as big of a commercial arrangement there's less you know, co marketing, training, training and enablement going back and forth. Largely, you're focused on your own technologies, and you build integrations for one another, but it's more of a product style partnership than anything else. Then when you look at services organizations, they're providing professional services and consulting for all of those technologies. Okay, okay. So if we took the particular partner space ecosystem around the modern data stack, maybe over the last five, 10 years or so. So when I first got into this area, it was,

I suppose the companies, the vendors were relatively small and immature. And I suppose the way in which they approached partnerships was maybe equally sort of immaturity, but maybe sort of talk us through, in your experience, how has the partner ecosystem in the modern data stack changed over the time that you've been involved with it really? Oh, it's still transforming. I think there's definitely way more technologies now

than there was before. You know, when I first started, you know, a consultancy could offer maybe three technologies. They could offer, you know, an integration, a data warehouse, and a BI tool, and be done with it. And that would be enough for their customer base. Now there's so many new technologies,

like that are plugging into this modern data stack that consultancies and you know services organizations are having to partner with way more technologies in order to offer a full solution to customers. I think that there will be some acquisitions in this space I imagine to start bringing some of these organizations together but all of these technologies are talking to each other much better now as well. There was a time where if you had a certain integration tool, then that meant that you had to have a certain transformation tool or a certain data warehouse or BI tool. Now a lot of these technologies, they all integrate with one another. So it's very much a pick and mix solution for customers. And that makes consultancies even more

important now because customers are unsure of what to do. So these consultancy services organizations are really needing to to act as an advisory as well as an implementation and support partner. Okay, okay. I mean, my experience, my observation of it really was that, so when when when I remember when we first partnered with FireTran, for example, and look back at the day, and yeah, a partnership was was often based on not who you know, but certainly

it was more based on I suppose, relationships and, and everybody partnered with everybody, really. But what I particularly noticed, especially when everybody started to get funding and the companies used to start scaling up, was that the demands of the vendor were getting more, such the point that you'd be expecting us to invest more in our own training and capabilities. And really for a small consultancy like ours at the time, you had to start picking your sides.

You couldn't partner with everybody because you couldn't really bring in enough revenue to make yourself relevant at more than one or two sort of partners really. And so I suppose it was more like the maturing of this and you had to, both sides had to kind of really start to think about who you partner with and how you can deliver value for each side

as opposed to everybody partnering with everybody and there being no real value to it at all. I mean, from the other side, when you were sitting at the Fivetran side, for example, was that part of your strategy? Was it your observation as well? Yeah, I think it was important to focus on partners that fit what we call an ideal partner profile. The same way that you would have an ideal customer profile, there's something called an IPP, which is your ideal partner profile. This has become even more important now as partner ecosystems are growing. And I think it's important for both sides to look at, you know.

Vendors have to define an IPP because there's a lot to offer out there and they want to focus on and invest in the right partners. But I really advise consultancies to do the same back. Like, is this a product that your customers are asking for? Is this a vendor that you want to work with that offers you value? That, you know, is the amount that they're asking for in terms of resource relative to the amount of revenue that that kind of partner is going to allow for you to bring in.

I think it's really important for companies to ask themselves these questions on both sides because it is a collaboration. That's what I think a lot of people forget when it comes to partnerships, especially when companies are being pushed for more and more revenue growth, as more funding comes into this space. Partnerships are still a collaboration, they should be a relationship that should be beneficial for both sides. So really asking yourself, you know, is this a value to us? Is this partnership something that is going to work and allow us to both meet our goals? Or is it not? And if it's not, then you don't have to partner. Yeah, exactly. What do you think about, I mean, I think also the other thing I've noticed in the last few years is that as you've had acquisitions in the market, and as you've had, I suppose, you know, further investment and so on, it's been, it's not so easy to partner

with, there are certain groupings of partners you can work with. And for example, if you know, further investment and so on. It's been, it's not so easy to partner with, there are certain groupings of partners you can work with. And, for example, if you're, I don't know, partnering quite heavily with Google, it's difficult to then partner with, say, dbt labs, because there's a competition, there's competition there over the semantic layer, for example. Or, you know, I mean, are you finding that's kind of, there's kind of balkanization going on, or certainly groupings of partners that are more logical to work with together than others? Yes, and you'll probably be able to answer that question better than I can from a technical standpoint, but I do see more of the bigger vendors now starting to create some solutions that compete with their own ISV, independent software vendor technology partners, which I do think is going to be a problem.

And I'm interested to see. I saw out of Snowflake Summit last year, I saw a few companies getting up and presenting an expansion of their offerings that then competed with some of their partner ecosystem. I can see why this would be a challenge for consultancies. But I think then it really comes back to that ideal partner profile. Which partners are going to be of value to you and your customers,

and allow you to meet your goals. That doesn't mean to say that you can't work with competing offerings, but if they're all asking an incredible amount of time and resource and energy from you, from a training, certification, marketing standpoint, then you have to make your bets somewhere. Yeah, okay. So where do partnership programs between say vendors and consultancies, where can it go wrong? What can happen where it doesn't deliver as good as you'd expect? Or, you know, what are some of the pitfalls really in

partnering with your vendor? Yeah, so one of the things that one of the first things that Branchworks do as an organization when we go in is an initial discovery. You've actually been a part of one of my discovery processes before. I've interviewed you on behalf of one of my clients before. We go in and we actually speak to partners and we go in and say what's working and what isn't working and what would you like to see from a partner program and I think this gets missed a lot of the time you know vendors create a partner program without partners in mind they do it with themselves in mind and they go okay what do we have to offer what do we want from our

partners here's our requirements here's our, and here's a bunch of benefits that we're going to chuck over to our partners that are probably copying someone else. But they don't take the time to actually go and ask partners what they want to see, what is going to be of value to them. And I think that's really, really important. So actually going and asking partners how they want to work with you, what incentivizes them? You wouldn't believe the amount of times people say to me like, oh, partners aren't bringing us revenue, or partners aren't really incentivized by X, what do you suggest?

And my response normally is, have you asked them? Like, have you gone and asked them what they would like to see? So I think actually spending time with your partners and finding out what is important to them is so valuable and somewhere that I see vendors falling down and it's so simple actually. But I think quite often it's very easy

to just build something quickly and then take it to market and hope that people like it rather than doing the upfront research. So I see that as one thing, not having an ideal partner profile, that's again, super important because you could then just end up with a ton of partners that don't actually allow you to meet your goals

and vice versa. Not doing appropriate discovery, initially going and having a proper conversation about what it means to partner, you know, what good partnership looks like for both of you, what good communication and collaboration looks like, you know, how you can support one another to grow. It's wild to me how many people partner with after just one conversation, an initial conversation, sign a contract and then hope for the best. Doesn't work, this is a relationship.

It's really important that we are finding out what each other's goals are. Are we aligned to that? How are we gonna partner? How are we gonna collaborate? How are we gonna go to market together? What's our joint value proposition? You know, these things can often get skipped

and it's on both parties to ensure that it happens. So, Eleanor, what's your view on, I suppose, things like certifications and partner fees and so on? Okay, so taking examples, you've got maybe Google's partner scheme is incredibly sort of, I suppose, asking of what you do to get things like, for education, they make sure you've got certifications

and things like that. Other partnership schemes don't do that at all. Some make you pay, some don't. What's your view on kind of how you qualify partners in and fees and requirements for partner levels? Yes, so I think on, it depends on the size of the partner. So I think with, I get asked when is the best time to start a certification program from a vendor perspective?

And my answer is always when your partners are asking for it. So don't create a certification program too early because it's a lot of work to keep it up. And that's where some of the fees come in. You know, it's a lot of work to maintain, to do all the operational tracking in the background to ensure that your partners, do you certify an individual or do you certify the company? Do you certify them for a year from the date that they did it or does everyone certification expire at the same time? There's a lot of operational back end stuff that organizations need to think of when launching a certification program. So I always say, don't do it until your partners are asking for it. a lot of operational back-end stuff that organizations need to think of when launching a certification

program. So I always say don't do it until your partners are asking for it. And then when you do, you know, start slow, don't come out with a 100-hour course as your first certification program, you know, scale it out nicely. But I think when the fees come into place it's because these certification programs require a lot of management and I agree in having a fee in some partner programs but I don't always agree in maybe utilizing it. You know, before I've said, I recommended that companies, once they get to the right size, do put a, I guess, nominal fee in their partner program,

but really showcase what they're paying for. You know, this includes your certifications, or includes a certain utilization on a demo account, or like, actually make it valuable. If partners are gonna pay to be a partner with a partner program, what do they get in return for that? Or if they bring a certain amount of revenue to you,

do they get it back? Like maybe that's a good way to do it. I don't believe in charging fees in partner programs for the sake of it, just because you're a big organization that can. I think that if you're gonna charge, there needs to be a ton of value in return. Left field question here,

but why are all partner portals so terrible? Oh, they really are. I mean, there are some newer ones coming out, which I hope will make that experience much nicer. I would love someone, and I'm really happy to throw this idea out because I have no preference. I really don't want to create this myself so if someone else wants to take this idea and pick it up please do. But I would love to

see these partner portals be in one interface. Like I think for you as a consultancy it would be amazing if you could come into one interface that all of the partner portals are integrated with and almost kind of single sign on into all of them from there. Because I can imagine how tough it is for you as a consultancy if you partner with several technologies to log into all of these partner portals that aren't particularly user friendly and to log all of your deals separately

or to do your training on them. Like can imagine it being very very difficult. There are some new platforms coming out some of which I work with and really enjoy working with that I'm hoping will solve this problem because it it does need to change for sure. They do and you put your details in and then they disappear after a couple of years. So a new one details in and then they disappear after a couple of years. So a new one comes out and that just it's a kind of seven circles of hell really, these partner portals and maybe something like Crossbeam, which obviously is about managing your partner relationships. Maybe something like that

where there's some commonality there, but they do seem to be a kind of a whole you put your data into never comes out again. And they're all completely different and they disappear after a couple of a whole you put your data into never comes out of again. And and they're all completely different and they disappear after a couple of years and you always forget the passwords. So and also impossible to find as well. So but they are there is a there is a particular space in hell reserved for partners or for software. Another left field question. So it's not as much partnerships. What about I suppose evangelists really out

in this sort of space? I mean, think about again, I don't know, Fivetran, DBT, all those kinds of companies there. You know, you've got partners that are evangelizing your software, but what about, you know, individual people and enabling those people who probably maybe aren't necessarily a proper partner,

but want to be out there kind of, you know, getting experience with the technology and evangelizing it. Is that a related topic you think that's interesting? Yeah, I mean, for me, it comes under one of those eight partner types I mentioned earlier, it would come under more of an affiliate style partnership, really. And that's where we would put, you know, influences, for example, you know, and people might not consider themselves influencers in the in the data space, they might call themselves more evangelists. But I think there's so much

merit in having those types of partnerships for sure, it might not look as structured as a part it would with, you know, a consultancy, because in a consultancy, you might have training, and you might have marketing, and you know, you might work their sales teams, you might have training and you might have marketing and you know, you might work with their sales teams, you might have partner advisory councils, all of these different things. But when it comes to, you know, with an affiliate or an evangelist style partner, I think as long as you're rewarding them in a way that makes sense for them, you know, again, it goes back to the question,

find out what incentivizes them, how they want to be rewarded. And a lot of the time they're very, very product focused. They're not going to talk about something that they don't like talking about. They probably won't be that bothered about the referral fee. That doesn't mean you don't offer it. I think referral fees are a fantastic way of showing gratitude,

but they don't really incentivize behavior. Okay, so referral fees. So it's interesting to bring that up because it's, so I think if you were a customer and you're looking at the relationship between partners, sorry, between vendors and say consultancies, you would kind of, you know, the question sometimes comes up,

what's in it for the consultancy and is the advice that they're giving, I suppose objective advice, or is it influenced by things that the things that the partner is getting that isn't necessarily disclosing? How does that really work and is that the case now and what's your view about I suppose the degree of disclosure that consultancies should make and the way they get rewarded for these partnerships? Yeah so they've actually done a ton of studies on referral fees more recently.

Partnership leaders are a fantastic body that do a lot of research in this space. And they found a really, really small percentage of partners said that the referral fee incentivized them. And that's why I think, you know, I use the analogy of it's a little bit like, it's a thank you for holding open the door. You don't hold open the door for someone because they say thank you, because you're a nice person and because that is a polite thing to do.

But if they don't say thank you, you do notice. So I always say that a referral fee is like the thank you in that sense. It's important to do if it's not there. A lot of companies notice it, but it's not why they do the behavior. So if customers are ever worried about it, those referral fees are never big enough to drive behavior. You know, even if a company came to me now, as a partnerships consultancy, if one of those partner portals that you are talking about,

that you clearly love so much, was to come to me and say, Hey, we'll give you a 30% referral fee if you recommend our product. I am not going to put the reputation of my consultancy on the line for a 30% referral fee on a product. And I know that you wouldn't do the same either. So that's why I say that referral fees rarely ever incentivize and drive behavior. And therefore it shouldn't be a concern for customers, but they are a way to show gratitude and to say thank you for the opportunity. And I think that's important to do in order to maintain a good relationship with the partner.

So we've talked all about the benefits for vendors, the benefits for partners in partnership schemes. What's in it for the customer though? Why, how do customers benefit out there being a good and healthy partner ecosystem around the vendors they work with? Yeah, so I think it goes back to what I was saying earlier about, you know,

technologies, now there being so many technologies. And if there are so many technologies from a customer perspective, they're out there. Look at, you only have to walk into Big Data London or any one of those big conferences. You know, I'm going to Big Data and AI World next week. I'm looking at the vendor list. And I think if I'm a customer coming into this room, how do I know where to start? How do I know how to bring these technologies together to solve the problem that I'm walking in with. Because it's very rare that you walk in

and one technology can solve all of your problems. You're probably gonna need a couple together, especially in this space. And being able to go to a consultancy and say, okay, here's our problem. Can you help us solve this? And the consultancy going, okay, yeah, you've already got this technology. So we recommend this technology and this technology

and let's integrate them together. We're going to wrap around a service offering for you. And then you just have to work with us as the consultancy and we're going to support you to roll out this project. Rather than the customer having to go to several different technologies to go and find out, try and find out what's going to work for them, what's not going to work for them, and then work with them all separately and then try and do their own services in-house. Like that's, it's really complex to do it that way. And it's not impossible, you know, not everyone uses consultancies,

but I think it's really powerful in our space for customers to be able to do that, because these companies are better together and you're getting that joint value upfront rather than having to bring it together yourself. Okay, so let's end up things, we're talking about branchworks, the business, okay. So you made the big jump to start Branchworks works. You obviously working at a partner before. So, we've talked about why you did it, but how's that really gone? Impression I get is that offering consultancy advice on partnership schemes is a new area, isn't it? So, how has it been, I suppose, blazing the trial in this area? And I suppose, how has the first year worked out for you really in doing this? Yeah, you know, it's been a journey, as I'm sure you know.

You know, starting any company is a journey in itself. And I think, you know, it took me a while to figure out what that offering should look like. And actually, we're still refining that offering. Initially, it was very, very bespoke. You know, I kind of knew the problems that needed fixing in the market. But actually, what that looked like from a services perspective was a little bit more bespoke and therefore more difficult to manage for me initially than it is now. Now we have a really, really good idea of what works and what doesn't work, which means

we're able to package our offerings a little bit differently. We're launching two new offerings. So we have Branchworks Consulting, Branchworks Fractional, and we will be launching Branchworks Academy in the next few months as well. And that really allows us to provide an end to end partnerships as a service solution for organizations and allow organizations to grow with partners, no matter what stage they're at, because partnerships resources are good, partnership resources are tough to come by. And yet growing with partners is really important. And a lot of companies will say,

well, we want to see the ROI of this before we invest full time. So actually bringing in a company like ours does allow you to do that, either through consultancy or through a fractional resource, or even training some of your team internally. So I think we've been able to really refine what works in the market, which has been incredible. We've got to work with some really, really awesome clients

in this time as well, and see some great results from the work that we've been able to deliver. So I think it's as building a company is and will journey and will continue to be, but we're growing the team. You know, I've been fortunate enough to be. But we're growing the team. I've been fortunate enough to be able to hire some people over the last few months that we can now place into clients on a fractional basis, offer different kinds of advisory. And we're now expanding our own partnerships too. We don't offer partner marketing, for example,

but we have a partner that does. There's lots of different ways in which we're growing. And now that we have our own product market fit, and we have our own paying customers, now we can start partnering ourselves, and that really allows us to grow. So it's been incredible, and I'm really grateful for all of the support I've had along the way.

And I know that you were one of those people initially that I had a conversation about what it would mean to grow this company. And I'm really grateful for, for people like yourself that supported me, especially in the early stages, and I know we'll continue to do so. I mean, it strikes me, the marketing for your business and the very much the persona of your business is based around you, and kind of your drive and your your kind of insights and so on that really, what what gave you that inspiration? What gave you the kind of your business is based around you and kind of your drive and your your kind of insights and so on that really, what gave you that inspiration? What gave you the kind of the drive to do this really? Because you struck me as probably a fairly switched on business woman really. Where did that come from? Yeah, it's funny you say that because and thank you, I really do appreciate that. I would say it was a little bit accidental, in that I didn't really have a deep desire to start a company when I was younger.

You know, I wasn't one of those people who was always going to be an entrepreneur. I really, really liked working within organizations and having people around me. And, you know, I felt very fortunate to be in an organization like 5Tran and I loved it so much, but I just saw a need in the market and I a problem that I could, I could help fix and my desire to want to fix the problem was greater than my desire to be comfortable, I guess. So I just, I really went for it. And now I don't regret it whatsoever. I've learned so much from doing it and continue to learn so much from doing it. I think the point you mentioned about the company being, you know, built around me, that won't continue forever. I am going to start moving into a little bit more of a strategic role. I'll still be delivering some of the consultancy,

but I am, I'm gonna to be bringing on board more people, growing the team so that it's not just me going into these organizations, but it's people that have been trained by me that I can place into organizations with the safety, knowing that, you know, they've been trained well, they're also managed by us and can really support that scale of us as well. Because I'm one person, I can't help as many people as I want to, unless I do that. So you must have thought about the time when you were at 5Tran about product versus services. Okay, so you've made the fatal mistake, same as me, thinking, you know, going into services, which is great fun. And, you know, I love that personal contact and the one to one sort of interaction. But did you ever think about maybe doing what you're doing

maybe as products? And do you think about maybe how AI might help with what you're doing in the future? I mean, certainly we're thinking about that. So maybe a better way of putting it is, how are you going to scale? And is product and AI part of that thinking? AI definitely is.

I'm starting to see new ways in which I can bring AI into some of the things that we do today. Transparently, I'm looking at it more from a partnership perspective right now than I am building internally. For example, if I think about training, enablement, education, I have the capability to build out certification curriculums for my clients. What I don't have the capacity to do, but unfortunately neither do they, is building the content for those certifications. So I build the curriculum, but then I'm going to need someone to actually come in and record the content or write the content. But now there's AI solutions out there that can support the creation of that, be it through video AI tools or there's a tool that I recently saw that can take your cool recordings or your documentation, everything that you have related to your product and you can dump

it all in the AI tool and it along with your curriculum that I've built, and then it will build your training content for you. And that is amazing. So I am partnering with organizations like that, that will be able to provide a tremendous amount of value to my clients. I haven't thought about building a product internally yet, but that's not to say I won't one day. Right now, you know, expanding Right now, expanding into the fractional and the academy side of things,

we're building an online training school at the moment. And that's enough work for me right now. Yeah, maybe one day. I think AI can absolutely support what we do, but it is more from a partnership's perspective than an internal product. Okay, and last question in this topic. So right back at the start, you made the comment about you normally go on podcasts, or you talk to people outside of, I suppose, the data space. So have you found that who your audience is and who you market to and who you sell to has changed over the time that you've been running the business really? Yeah, so I used to, I used to think I needed to target partnerships, professionals, and

you know, reach out to partnerships for people. And I do end up being on partnerships podcasts more than anything, to be honest. And that's not a bad thing. But the people that are listening to partnerships podcasts are partnerships professionals who are, you know, maybe getting a few additional tips or, you know, just sanity checking some things that they're already doing. I think the amazing thing about having the opportunity to be on a podcast like this, which I'm really grateful for, is that we get to speak about something that maybe your audience haven't known about before or haven't had the opportunity to learn about before. And as Branchworks really focuses heavily on this data and AI space, it's wonderful to have the opportunity to do that. So yeah, it's very different audiences. But when it comes to,

you know, reaching out to prospective clients, I find that partnerships professionals, some of them are very, very grateful to bring me in for additional resource. More often than not, I'm speaking to, you know, revenue people in the sales organization that are wanting to to expand their reach. And that means I end up speaking to people that are maybe a little bit different to what I targeted originally. OK, OK. So how do people find out more about Branchworks then? Oh, so you can either find me on LinkedIn, Eleanor Thompson, or we have a company page on there, or you can head over to branchworks.io.

I will also be at all of the big conferences this year, via Snowflake, Databricks, Big Data London, wherever you are in the world. I'm sure I will be at a conference near you, but please reach out and I would love to chat further. Okay, Eleanor, it's been fantastic speaking to you. Thank you very much and best of luck in the future with Branchworks.

Thank you so much, I really love this. you