Episode 301:
Joe Healy, Chief Growth Officer at Fintua, explains why the pursuit of more leads often distracts companies from what actually drives revenue growth. He shares how trust, customer understanding, and relationship building create stronger commercial outcomes than traditional pipeline thinking. He also highlights the importance of diagnosing customer challenges before presenting solutions. The discussion reveals why human trust remains one of the few sustainable competitive advantages left in business.
“The human trust and discernment component is the only true competitive advantage left from a selling perspective. Growth starts with understanding, and everything else, sales, scale, and strategy, flows from that.” – Joe Healy
In this episode, Joe shares practical lessons from years of growth leadership and explains why companies often overvalue pipeline volume while undervaluing customer understanding. He discusses trust-based selling, qualification discipline, buyer readiness, relationship building, and the role of human connection in an AI-driven world. The conversation provides actionable insights for executives looking to improve win rates, strengthen customer relationships, and create sustainable revenue growth.
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[Transcript]
[00:00:05] Steve MacDonald: Welcome, everyone to the C-Suite Sales and Marketing Perspectives podcast. I’m Steve MacDonald, your host, and today we have on Joe Healy. Now, Joe, you’re going to talk a lot about what we do in the pipeline that we need to be doing much more often. Even to the point where more leads, sometimes we feel like the more and more leads we can get into our pipeline, the better.
[00:00:28] Steve MacDonald: But it doesn’t allow us to do the kinds of things that we’re going to be talking about in building relationships, because we all know that B2B is a relationship-based business. Nobody disagrees on that. But it’s what you do as a result of that, and what we’re going to talk about is absolutely brilliant.
[00:00:47] Steve MacDonald: I mean, and you come at this from a tremendous number of different perspectives. You’ve been a Chief Growth Officer, you’ve been a Chief Commercial Officer, a Chief Strategy Officer, an EVP of Business Development, a Director of Partnerships, and a Strategic Partnerships. So you’ve looked at the success criteria, right?
[00:01:00] Steve MacDonald: And lived with it, and how you grow that pipeline from so many different angles. So I’m excited to get into this. I think it’s phenomenal that you were on the cyclist team for Ireland and competed internationally. I would just love to turn it over if you do not mind, and could you expand on your background a little bit before we dig in here?
[00:01:31] Joe Healy: Absolutely, Steve. Thanks very much for having me on your podcast today. It’s great to get the opportunity to talk about a topic I’m passionate about. Yeah, that was my first calling, being an Irish international cyclist. I was racing bicycles from the time I was 11 or 12 years old because my father was an Irish international cyclist, a two-time Olympian, and an Irish national champion.
[00:01:53] Joe Healy: So obviously it was in the blood, and when you grow up around bicycles, it’s a natural evolution. I thoroughly enjoyed my time, lived in France for a while, raced in the US, and raced all over continental Europe. But at some point in everybody’s evolution, you have to look at how good you are. To be quite honest, I crashed far too much to be good at cycling.
[00:02:13] Joe Healy: So it wasn’t that good for my health. So yeah, I was very proud to get to represent Ireland on the bike and wear the green jersey overseas. But now at Fintua, I get to represent Ireland again and wear the green jersey in business, which I’m very proud of, too.
[00:02:30] Steve MacDonald: You know, I never thought about this, but I’d love to ask you a question about competing internationally like that, at that kind of level athletically. What did you learn that you actually take forward into your business career? Is there some kind of overlap there?
[00:02:48] Joe Healy: Yeah. Yeah, there is definitely.
[00:02:50] Joe Healy: Discipline, and always show up. Always do what you say you’re going to do. You know, if it’s training, everybody sees race day, and that’s where you’re performing in front of lots of people. Nobody sees the hard hours, the six or seven hours you’re doing in the mountains on your own, midweek and through the winter.
[00:03:06] Joe Healy: Similarly, in business, everybody sees your wins and your big partnerships and your big opportunities that you close, but nobody sees the discipline in the journey and the sales cycle that you’ve meticulously taken a client through. So I would say it’s just dedication to, I say this to the team, I say this to my kids, but my mantra there would be, keep doing the right thing all the time and good things will happen.
[00:03:33] Joe Healy: In any given scenario or situation, the vast majority of the time, people do know what the right thing is, and just do it. And if you do, then it’s got a compounding effect and you will end up with the results.
[00:03:46] Steve MacDonald: I love that because we have to know about what are the right things to do internally for the company, for the employees.
[00:03:53] Steve MacDonald: But we always have our North Star on the customer, right? And what’s the right thing to do for the customer, right? So you talk about knowing the customer as the foundation for everything, and I’d love to hear your personal philosophy on that.
[00:04:11] Joe Healy: Yeah, very much knowing the customer, because if you know the customer, typically you learn to like the customer, and then the customer likes you. Because if you’ve really worked hard at that piece and you’re genuine, and you’re not faking it, as a consequence of that, then you end up with a rock-solid relationship.
[00:04:28] Joe Healy: And then, on the back of that relationship, you then build trust, and trust underpins absolutely everything. If you have the trust of a buyer, then you are 80% of the way there. You know, you just need to close the delta on the commercials, and you’re pretty much set. So I see it always as my job being, with a partner, with a client, with a prospect, whatever it might be.
[00:04:50] Joe Healy: My job is really to know their business, know their role within their business, and know what works and what doesn’t work, and why maybe it doesn’t. So that’s really important as well. Have they tried to solve it? Why didn’t they solve it? Why didn’t they try? You know, what’s the appetite level like?
[00:05:05] Joe Healy: It’s critical. And, you know, I suppose when I think of my mindset and what changed it, when you graduate, and you come out, and you’re all gung ho, and you want to move into sales, and you’re thinking, “This is it. This is the career for me.” Like a lot of people, I thought selling was about how, once you have a great product or service, you just convince customers to buy it.
[00:05:22] Joe Healy: So you have a really good slick pitch, and then you deliver on all the takeaways, and that’s it. Your job is done. But the moment I understood that deeply understanding the customer has to come first, everything shifted then. And of course, it took losing a lot of deals for that realization to hit home.
[00:05:39] Joe Healy: So for me nowadays, and our team, I talk about it a lot, it’s not about pitching anymore. Obviously, that’s a component of it. But before that, you have to almost triage the deal. You have to diagnose what the issues are. And to do that, you have to see the world through the customer’s lens: understand their pressures, KPIs, who they’re answerable to, and their processes.
[00:06:00] Joe Healy: What is success for them, and what’s stopping them from delivering upon that success? So you’re not really pitching to them anymore. You’re now creating value with them. We did a workshop with a partner recently in Amsterdam, and a team and I, along with a couple of people from the product and tax technology teams, were on site for a day.
[00:06:26] Joe Healy: And it became apparent very quickly that we had a perfect tool for this partner, but there were going to be major bandwidth issues because their internal processes had a lot of manual steps that didn’t become apparent initially in the sales cycle. It was only by going on site, getting to know the stakeholders really well, understanding exactly what their challenges were, their processes, and getting under the hood of their engine that we were able to diagnose the problem.
[00:06:58] Joe Healy: And once we diagnosed that, we understood then that there was a middleware required to make the software tick for them. So that realization of really looking at it from the customer’s point of view is the ultimate. We now make a point of listening to all the experts in the field, whether they are partners, clients, members of our own technology team, or our tax team, and that really defines how we operate.
[00:07:24] Joe Healy: So, talking to customers, mapping their workflows, understanding the human and the business context, that allows us then to make sure that we have a solution that’s going to deliver, because it’s not an out-of-the-box, one-size-fits-all. No two firms are going to be the same. No two corporates are going to be the same.
[00:07:41] Joe Healy: So we really need to understand what they’re dealing with and then, as I said, diagnose that and work from there.
[00:07:47] Steve MacDonald: That’s almost like, to your biking analogy, the discipline that we don’t always do because, you know, we have more data on our customers than ever, right? We’re swimming in data.
[00:07:59] Steve MacDonald: We’ve got NPS surveys, and we’re talking to customers in the sales process all the time. Customer Success, they’re talking, right? Like, we’re talking, we understand, we know. But what’s interesting about what you’re saying there is that a lot of companies, I feel, use the go-to-market motion of the sales and customer success motions to replace deep customer understanding.
[00:08:30] Steve MacDonald: And if you even think about it this way, customer success, some of their biggest KPIs are cross-sell and upsell, right? And if you’re learning within a pitch environment, if you’re learning just within an environment that’s selling, not going on site that you’re talking about, not spending the time to really understand, to have the dinners, have the conversations.
[00:08:56] Steve MacDonald: You even talked about a taxi ride to the airport and how you learned so much and the relationship built so greatly. It’s almost like, to your biking analogy, that’s the getting up at 5:00 in the morning when everybody else is in bed, going out into the mountains and being on your bike, right?
[00:09:13] Steve MacDonald: The companies that do that, that have the discipline to do that. Is that the lesson you’re kind of saying here, that you’ve got to do the hard work? You’ve got to put in the time. You’ve got to…
[00:09:22] Joe Healy: Absolutely. Go the extra mile. And it’s the human component. You know, that taxi story is a really powerful one.
[00:09:30] Joe Healy: We had our annual Elevate conference in March. One of my partners, I was taking them back to the airport for their flight back to Europe, and he had the opportunity. You know, the company was going to organize a taxi, and I said, “No. He’s flying back from my city, I’ll take him back.”
[00:09:47] Joe Healy: And then that gave the director and me three hours in the car, another two hours in the city having lunch, and then another half an hour taking him to the airport and saying goodbye. And I would say, at the end of that day, I went from having a great relationship with a partner to having a great relationship with a partner who’s now a friend.
[00:10:09] Joe Healy: So that’s how powerful that is. And we collaborate. We had a great working relationship, but now it’s just gone to another tier, another level entirely.
[00:10:18] Steve MacDonald: It’s, you know, we’ve heard this so much. People do business with other people they like, they know, and they trust, right? But we tend to think, and believe me, I’m a two-time SaaS founder, I get the inclination to say, “Once they know what our product does, oh my gosh, the floodgates are going to open, right?
[00:10:42] Steve MacDonald: You know, it’s just going to be amazing. They have no idea what we could do for them.” But it’s really not about that. In fact, what we do for them comes after, do they know us? Do they trust us? And I wanted to ask you a question on this.
[00:11:00] Steve MacDonald: I’m talking to a lot of CROs. They’re saying, “Steve, I’m buying more plane tickets than I have in a long time. I’m getting out, and I’m talking to customers, I’m talking to our prospects, I’m getting face to face, I’m creating the executive relationships because that’s what we need to do,” right?
[00:11:06] Steve MacDonald: And so that interpersonal relationship is what you were talking about there, right? Getting in that taxi ride. I don’t think you did six hours of pitch, right?
[00:11:34] Joe Healy: Definitely. There was no, I purposefully, I think the first 30 minutes of the journey were me talking about Ireland and the trip we were on, because obviously I was driving, so I was talking about where we were going to be passing through. And then the next maybe 20 minutes, maybe even 10, were about business.
[00:11:53] Joe Healy: And everything thereafter was about likes, dislikes, passions, activities, family, friends, kids, parents, you name it, all of that good stuff. So I’d say that in the entire six hours of that day, about 10 minutes were about work. Everything else was really getting to know and solidifying relationships and friendships.
[00:12:13] Joe Healy: And then, you know, that creates a bond that will allow us, for many years to come, to work really well together and to really speak openly and honestly. When things are working well, communicate that. When things are not working well, communicate that too so we can solve the problem.
[00:12:28] Joe Healy: To me, that is the foundation for success in business, success in marriage, success in friendship, you name it. That’s what it’s all about. Really understanding each other and really understanding exactly what drives people. From there, you can start solving problems.
[00:12:44] Steve MacDonald: So I’ve got two questions, and I’m going to ask them at once so I don’t forget.
[00:12:50] Steve MacDonald: But then you can choose which one you want to answer first. So the first one is: how do you tie that relationship-building to actual revenue? Like booked revenue, NRR, right? Net Recurring Revenue. Actually, I’ll ask that one first. Like, you know, how do we connect the dots there?
[00:13:10] Joe Healy: Yeah. So traditionally, everything is about the pipeline, and the more deals in that pipeline, you know, the more likely you are to win. It’s a numbers game.
[00:13:19] Joe Healy: It annoys me slightly when I hear that, when I hear sales is a numbers game, because I don’t believe it is. I believe I need to understand the pain point for someone taking time out of their day to speak to me or a member of the sales team at Fintua. And they’re busy people.
[00:13:37] Joe Healy: They’re all busy people. We work in the indirect tax compliance space. Nobody has any time. Everybody’s dealing with skeleton staff and is under-resourced. So we need to ensure that we use our time wisely. And so, for me, the key is to uncover the pain point and the true buying intent.
[00:13:57] Joe Healy: So the number of times, and it happens way more often than people will admit, you can have a really great conversation with somebody. You can identify their pain point, and they have a real problem, and you’ve validated that pain point. There’s no two ways about it. But for whatever reason, the timing isn’t there.
[00:14:17] Joe Healy: So for me, in any kind of conversation, there are little telltales like energy. You know, somebody’s going through the motions. They’re very interested, but they just don’t have the enthusiasm because they know they’re not going to buy anything at the end. I’m not saying they’re kicking tires, not for one moment.
[00:14:32] Joe Healy: No. But just like that, it could be deferred due to bandwidth, budget, or competing priorities, such as ERP implementation rollouts. That’s one that we come across a lot. And they’re all genuine, you know, and they’re objections of sorts, but they’re literally the person that you’re dealing with telling you the complexity of their day-to-day and how they’d love to solve the problem that you can solve.
[00:14:54] Joe Healy: However, there’s no way they’re going to be able to prioritize that at this given moment in time because it’s just not high enough on their agenda. So in those moments, our job is not to push harder. Our job is to stay close, keep adding insight, and keep talking about the cost and process improvements.
[00:15:13] Joe Healy: Keep sending them updates on legislation, sending them updates on the technology. You know, there could be mandates that have been introduced so that when their readiness arrives, and when they get to the point where it is on the agenda, it is now a priority, that I’m going to be the first call that they make.
[00:15:32] Joe Healy: And I’m already kind of, as I described it earlier in percentages, I’d like to think that I’m 80% of the way there because they’ve already seen my solution. I’ve already spent the time and effort to get to know and understand them, and I haven’t tried to hard-sell them. I despise hard selling.
[00:15:47] Joe Healy: I’ve never done it. I don’t believe there’s any value in it. You just upset people. No means no.
[00:15:54] Steve MacDonald: Right. So that leads perfectly into the second question I had. What you’re talking about is spending a lot of time with a client before they’re typically BANT qualified, right? Where they’ve said, “I’ve allocated budget, I’ve got a timeline to make the decision,” right?
[00:16:14] Steve MacDonald: You know, so that’s where most sales teams want to spend the majority of their time, right? Because they’re compensated on short-term quota attainment, right? And you go to board meetings and everything, and nobody says, “Hey, how much time are you spending on people that really aren’t ready to buy?”
[00:16:29] Steve MacDonald: Nobody says that. So how do you justify spending time on deals and opportunities that are on your ABM target list but aren’t ready to buy now?
[00:16:47] Joe Healy: Yeah. So I touched on it there, and I could sum it up by saying the objective is to rule out deals. So actually, you’re dealing with a busy person, you’re a busy person, and you have to value your own time too.
[00:17:00] Joe Healy: Because at the end of the quarter, it’s pointless talking about all the great conversations you’ve had if you still have no deals converted. And very easily, you could be a busy fool, and you could have a phenomenal number of deals in your pipeline, and your conversion date keeps getting pushed out.
[00:17:17] Joe Healy: “I can’t commit this quarter, but I’m assured that they can commit Q3.” At some point in time, you just have to rule them out. You know, you keep them warm, you stay close, as I described, but you work on the deals whereby you have validated their pain points, you’ve diagnosed the problem, you have the cure, you have the solution.
[00:17:38] Joe Healy: They have the budget, they have the bandwidth, they have everything that you need for them to have. And from there, it’s all about making sure you’ve built that relationship, gained their trust, and added value in every conversation, so you can start selling and closing.
[00:17:55] Steve MacDonald: And you know, you mentioned earlier that building that relationship and building trust is the true competitive advantage. And if others are focused on the very end of the buyer’s journey, the ones that have raised their hands and said, “I’m in the buying motion, I’m ready to buy,” and there’s a feeding frenzy that’s happening there.
[00:18:13] Steve MacDonald: And by the way, they’re going to put, on average, four to five vendors on their shortlist. And, you know, you’re either going to be on there, or you’re not. And even if you’re on there, usually the top one or two are the ones that win. So getting in early and building that trust, like when we connect it to revenue, if we look at the big studies that have come out, building that trust early and doing it right, ruling the ones out, right, that you don’t think are going to be the good opportunities, the ones that fit the mold for all the reasons you just talked about, that really ensures your day one presence.
[00:18:51] Steve MacDonald: And if you don’t do that, then you’re not going to win the deal. Now that’s impact. That’s revenue impact right there.
[00:18:58] Joe Healy: Yeah, absolutely. And, you know, you referenced it earlier, and I could not agree more. It’s 100% right. People buy from people they like, know, and trust. People buy from people first. So sometimes that supersedes the technology that you’re selling, or whatever it is, the service you’re selling, whatever you’re doing, because if the person I’m selling to doesn’t fully trust me, I might have the best solution on the planet, or maybe they don’t even like me.
[00:19:23] Joe Healy: That could be a possibility. I could have the best solution by far. I could have really had the best price point. But if they don’t like me, don’t trust me, I’m not selling there. And if I skip steps and rush people through the process without fully understanding their motivations, drivers, pain points, and the challenges they’re experiencing, it can be hard to uncover the full breadth of the problem.
[00:19:50] Joe Healy: So in conversation number one, they’re talking about a specific issue they have. And I suppose the temptation for a salesperson is to jump in and start selling to that one point without fully diagnosing all the issues. So if they took their time and had the prospect elaborate on that, they’re most likely to uncover four or five other sub-issues stemming from that one issue, and maybe two or three other major issues they would never have uncovered if they jumped in too soon.
[00:20:22] Joe Healy: The real differentiator is trust. And there’s only one way that you can tip that in your favor, and that’s to make sure that you’re early in the process, you’re listening, you’re talking, you don’t overpromise, you don’t create patterns whereby you’re kind of giving a false impression of yourself.
[00:20:40] Joe Healy: You don’t start selling too soon, pitching. You have to understand their world inside out. And you have to be truthful, even when it’s not convenient. So I actually have a great story about that. One of our greatest and first partners, and they’re now friends as well.
[00:20:57] Joe Healy: This is going to be a common theme in this conversation. But a big German tax company, I’m not sure if I can name-drop on this, so I won’t. But they came to us. We identified them fairly early in the evolution of our software. And we didn’t have the full country coverage we have now at that time, and we didn’t have the full feature stack we have now.
[00:21:17] Joe Healy: But I had the opportunity to pitch to them, and in that kind of discovery phase, I identified that they tried to build their own tech, and they had failed at a huge cost. They understood our evolution because I was very transparent. I had the opportunity to future sell, or, as I called it, to play the actual stakes we had.
[00:21:39] Joe Healy: So I pulled back the curtain and let them see behind it, let them see the state of evolution of the platform. We showed them absolutely everything we had at that moment. We showed them our product roadmap. It was a risk. I can acknowledge that in hindsight. But it was a risk I was prepared to take because I felt I really got to know the guys.
[00:21:56] Joe Healy: I really knew their motivations and their drivers, and I knew that our software was perfect for them if they were going to be patient. I realized that our software was perfect for them. Yes, they were going to be patient. So we just went on a journey together then. And then they became almost like a de facto member of our product council, where I didn’t quite have a seat but was a conduit.
[00:22:24] Joe Healy: And they influenced a lot of the dashboards, analytics, and features that we had within the tool because they were able to give us a different perspective, and that was phenomenal. A phenomenal opportunity. And that was born out of really understanding, honesty, trust, and relationship building.
[00:22:45] Steve MacDonald: And you know what that says to me? We talk a lot in the B2B world about our brand being a trust mark. If you ever took a marketing 101 class, it’s like brand equals a trust mark, right? And the experience with the brand is the number one thing that people take away about the brand, right?
[00:23:07] Steve MacDonald: They can hear something, they can read something, but when they interact with the brand, they interact with you. That’s the most indelible experience that they have. And so this process of building trust, this process of being very open and transparent, is a window into what they should expect when they actually sign on and become a customer of the brand, right?
[00:23:34] Steve MacDonald: And so customer experience. McKinsey did a big study of 400 different companies, B2C, B2B, highly profitable companies, and they found that the number one differentiator in the marketplace was customer experience. And we tend to think about the customer experience only after they become customers. But they’re thinking, “If I become a customer, what’s that experience going to be like?”
[00:24:02] Steve MacDonald: Right? So we have to create not only trust, but we have to create trust in the experience that they’re getting before they’re a customer. It is going to be equal to, if not greater than, the experience they’re going to get as a customer, right? I think we forget that. I think we forget. So, would you find that incredibly true?
[00:24:21] Joe Healy: I find that to be incredibly true. And what you want to do in an ideal world is, over time, through the sales cycle, make sure that you’re creating a pattern of reliability. You want people to join this call, fully expectant that I’m going to learn something here today.
[00:24:37] Joe Healy: I’m going to deal with somebody that I can depend on, that they’ll remember. Then, when it comes to buying time, who made things simpler for them? Who understood their world? Who told the truth throughout the process? Because we can all consult AI now and validate what Joe Healy is saying. You know, is he talking out of his backside, or is this the truth?
[00:24:59] Joe Healy: So that goes back to that story I told. I decided, I took the decision to tell the truth even when it wasn’t convenient, and it paid dividends, massive dividends in the end. So this firm in Germany has been a partner now for four years, and through our collaborations, we’re now working with some of the largest corporations in Germany, and the relationship is going from strength to strength.
[00:25:24] Steve MacDonald: Wow. I have to ask. We’ve had so many conversations, we’ve covered so much territory here, but our poor human brains can only take in about two or three things max at a time. So if there was one takeaway that you wanted the C-suite executives who are going to be consuming this podcast to take away from our conversation, what’s the most important thing you’d want them to remember?
[00:25:49] Joe Healy: The most important thing, I suppose, leveraging what we’ve just been talking about, Steve, and given the current landscape. And I suppose there’s a certain irony in what I’m about to say here about the key takeaway, in that we’re living in a world of AI. And at Fintua, we fully and wholeheartedly embrace AI to really enhance and accelerate the work we do and the software we develop because it’s very fact-based.
[00:26:21] Joe Healy: So we have to really be careful how we marry our AI technology and automation with the real-world preparation and filing of VAT returns. And we’re getting bombarded daily. Does your portfolio contain AI stocks? Is your job going to be replaced in the morning with AI?
[00:26:39] Joe Healy: You know, are we safe with AI if the Pentagon is using it? All the rest of it. So it’s AI, AI everywhere. But if there were one key takeaway from me, following the theme of our discussion here today and your podcast, I would say that the human trust and discernment component is the only true competitive advantage left from a sales perspective.
[00:27:00] Joe Healy: So, for me, growth starts with understanding. Everything else, sales, scale, strategy, flows from that. So if I understand my customer and I’ve built that trust with them on a human level, when you do build that trust, you actually earn the permission to grow together. I’m not sure if you’ve ever heard of Simon Sinek’s podcast or read his book, The Infinite Game.
[00:27:27] Joe Healy: So I’m a big fan of the long game as part of the infinite game, and it focuses on leading with that infinite mindset. So, you know, I suppose the best analogy to describe it is that while finite games have known players and fixed rules, that’s your football. But business, for me, is absolutely an infinite game with unknown players and shifting rules, where the goal, I suppose, is to keep playing and not just to win.
[00:27:52] Joe Healy: You just have to keep playing. Stay in the game. And especially now, in the world we live in today, with AI as the predominant topic and the geopolitical atmosphere we’re in, the sands are shifting beneath our feet all the time. So right now, it’s more important than ever that we play that infinite game.
[00:28:11] Joe Healy: And for me, one of the best ways to do that is building that trust, building those relationships on a human level, because we’re a long way from AI being able to operate on a human level, in my opinion. Because, as we know, as humans, there are a lot of layers to us, and it’s not always black and white.
[00:28:29] Joe Healy: There’s a component in the middle there that’s gray. And as humans, we spend a lot of time in that gray area. And that’s where relationships are built.
[00:28:37] Steve MacDonald: I have to tell you, the whole mission of this podcast is to bring different perspectives from different C-suite executives from all over the C-suite, all over the world, together to talk about how we grow our B2B businesses, and how those shifting sands beneath us impact us, and what we should be thinking about.
[00:28:57] Steve MacDonald: What should we be doing? And everything that we talked about here today, we could have had this conversation 20 years ago, right? The fundamentals of building trust and understanding your customer have never changed. But we’ve had a lot of shiny objects. We’ve had a lot of automation, we’ve had a lot of data, and we’ve gotten really busy.
[00:29:18] Steve MacDonald: But when it comes right back to it, the fundamentals of building competitive advantage haven’t changed. And I would actually say those competitive advantages have gotten even greater when other companies are relying on AI, technology, tech stacks, and automation to build those relationships.
[00:29:43] Steve MacDonald: And so I kind of feel like, after we’ve had our conversation here, that the opportunity for creating this kind of competitive advantage is greater, almost, than it’s ever been.
[00:29:52] Joe Healy: Yeah. I think you’re absolutely right. It’s more important now than ever. You’re totally right in what you say.
[00:29:59] Joe Healy: Twenty, thirty, forty, fifty years ago, that’s the beauty of Instagram. You know, in our industry, you end up following different gurus from different time periods. And yeah, you listen to some of the old stuff, and the wisdom from guys in the ’40s and ’50s, you know, it can be transferred to today in the click of a finger.
[00:30:20] Steve MacDonald: I just want to say thank you. Thank you for coming on. Thank you for sharing. I do really appreciate your time here today.
[00:30:27] Joe Healy: You’re very welcome, Steve. It was my pleasure.