The Growth Formula

Posted on by ryanallis

The Growth Formula by Ryan Allis

Written February 17, 2020 in Miami, Florida

The intention of this article is to help entrepreneurs who are focused on growing their company’s sales — by implementing a simple formula called The Growth Formula. This formula is for companies that have already established product/market fit, already have paying customers, and are now ready to scale up through digital marketing, inbound sales, and outbound sales.

There’s a simple formula I use when I’m helping companies grow…

I’ve used this formula to:

  • Grow iContact to $50 million in annual revenue and 70,000 paying customers[blank_space height=’3em’]
  • Grow Hive to $3.5M+ in annual revenue run rate and 3,200 paying customers[blank_space height=’3em’]
  • Help the growth-oriented CEOs I coach like Derek Johnson of Tatango, Brandon Bornancin of Seamless.ai, and CC Puan of GreenPacket accelerate their company’s sales.

I call it, The Growth Formula.[blank_space height=’3em’]

I’ve shared this formula with the CEOs I consult with — and have seen really good sales results — often seeing sales growth above 100% in the year after implementation.[blank_space height=’3em’]

The Growth Formula is a simple framework for growing your business using digital marketing, inbound sales, and outbound sales efforts.[blank_space height=’3em’]

Most companies never take off and pass the $5M in sales mark because they rely only on customer word-of-mouth and the sales efforts of the CEO, who then gets exhausted and burnt out. That’s a formula for disaster and slow growth.[blank_space height=’3em’]

Implementing the three elements of The Growth Formula will help you rapidly scale your company by building a scientific and scalable system of lead generation through digital marketing, inbound sales, and outbound sales efforts.[blank_space height=’3em’]

If you take the time to truly understand this formula — AND actually implement it in your business — your company’s sales will take off — and instead of growing sales at 20% per year you can grow at 100% per year or higher.[blank_space height=’3em’]

What is The Growth Formula?[blank_space height=’3em’]

So what’s the formula for sales growth? Let’s get to it.[blank_space height=’3em’]

The Growth Formula has three components.[blank_space height=’3em’]

In shorthand notation, the formula is shown as:[blank_space height=’3em’]

G(f) = SA + IS + OS[blank_space height=’3em’]

Here’s what this means:[blank_space height=’3em’]

Growth is a function of = Scalable Advertising + Inbound Sales + Outbound Sales[blank_space height=’3em’]

[blank_space height=’2em’]

Understanding each of the three areas in depth is critical to accelerating the growth of your company. Let’s break down each component.

If you want to win, implementing all three of these disciplines properly is absolutely essential. And I know you want your business to win… so let’s dive in.

Here we go…

Step 1: Scalable Advertising – Growing Rapidly By Investing in Profitable Ad Spend

The first part of The Growth Formula is Scalable Advertising.

Growth is a function of = Scalable Advertising + Inbound Sales + Outbound Sales

Regardless of whether you’re a B2B company (selling to businesses) or B2C company (selling to consumers), the foundational element to growth is scalable advertising. Without it, your lead volume will never be high enough to get past $5M in annual sales — a common place that many companies plateau at.

I call it “Scalable Advertising” because it is profitable advertising that is done with absolute rigor, clear tracking, and an analytical mind. When you advertise with rigor and tracking set up properly, you can know immediately if a campaign is profitable or not.

Many CEOs I talk to don’t understand how to scale their advertising. They either don’t advertise their products and services at all, or if they do, they throw money at Facebook ads or agencies without clarity on what they can afford to acquire a customer.

So here’s how you figure out how much you can spend to acquire a customer.

There are two key elements you must know to set the foundation for scientific advertising:[blank_space height=’3em’]

  1. Lifetime Value (LTV) = How much a customer spends with you during the lifetime of them being a customer.[blank_space height=’3em’]
  2. Maximum Customer Acquisition Cost (Max CAC) = How much you’re willing to spend to acquire an incremental customer up front. This should be a percentage of your lifetime value, roughly between 5% and 33% of your total lifetime revenue from the client, depending on how fast you want to grow and your profit margins.[blank_space height=’3em’]

How to Calculate Your Company’s Lifetime Value (LTV)[blank_space height=’2em’]

Here are three examples so you can learn how to calculate your own company’s lifetime value (LTV):[blank_space height=’3em’]

Example 1: Subscription Business ($50/Mo.)[blank_space height=’3em’]

For example, if you run a subscription business in which customers pay you $50 per month and on average stay around for 12 months before cancelling, then you have a Lifetime Value (LTV) of $600.  Knowing that you make $600 in sales from an average customer — you can then decide how much of that amount you’d be willing to spend to acquire a customer up front. Depending on your margins and how fast you want to grow, you may choose to spend as much as $200 up front in advertising costs to acquire a new customer.

Example 2: B2B With Large Contract Sizes ($75,000) 

As another example, if you sell to businesses and your average Annual Contract Value (ACV) is $75,000 and your customers stay 2 years on average before cancelling, then you have a Lifetime Value (LTV) of $150,000. Depending on your margins and how fast you want to grow, you may choose to spend as much as $50,000 up front in advertising costs to acquire a new customer.

Example 3: Consumer Retail
As a last example, if you sell retail products to consumers and the average order is $65 and an average customer purchases 3 times in a year, then you know you will make $195 in sales from a single customer in a year. Depending on your margins and how fast you want to grow, you may choose to spend as much as $65 up front in advertising costs to acquire a new customer.

If you operate a subscription business, tracking customer retention is easy. You simply use a tool like BareMetrics (or the subscription tracking tool within Stripe) to track your paying subscribers, MRR, and ARR.

Once you’re successfully tracking customer retention, you can estimate the lifespan of each customer using this formula:

Customer Lifespan = 1 / Churn

If for example your customers cancel their accounts at a rate of 3% per month, then the number of months of life of an average customer (their lifespan) is:

Customer Lifespan = 1 / 0.03 = 33.3 months

Once you know your customer lifespan, you can multiply it by the average amount you earn per customer per month to calculate the lifetime value (LTV) of your customer (as I wrote about in the section on Scalable Advertising).

The whole science of Customer Retention revolves around how to increase the Lifetime Value of your customer.

Lifetime Value = Average Revenue Per Customer x Lifespan

So for iContact, we had $50 per month for 36 months on average and generated an LTV of $1650.

To increase your LTV, you work on increasing Average Revenue Per Customer (through cross-selling and upselling) and on Customer Lifespan by improving customer retention (through providing a great product/service to your customer and working to anticipate their upcoming needs).

Once you know how much a customer is worth to you, you can decide on how much you’re willing to spend to acquire a new customer. This is called your Maximum Customer Acquisition Cost (Max CAC).

So, if you have a business, take a few minutes now to calculate your Max CAC.

What To Do As a Venture Backed Company?

Venture-backed companies, or those with lots of cash in the bank, who want to grow at 100%+ per year often will spend 25-35% of the lifetime value of their customers up front in customer acquisition costs across channels like Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Google Adwords, Google Display Network, YouTube, affiliate marketing, radio, television, and direct mail. They will either hire an in-house team or an external agency (we recommend Magic or Hive Digital) to manage their advertising campaigns.

For a SaaS company focused on growth, we recommend spending about 1/3rd of total customer lifetime value upfront on sales and marketing to acquire the customer.

While investing in customer growth like this eats up cash up front (and requires a healthy balance sheet), these companies are purchasing an ever-growing annuity stream of revenue–and these companies are usually valued as a multiple of their revenues. At the end of the day, growth is what matters for venture-backed companies — and a company growing at 100% per year will be valued 4x higher than a company growing at 50% per year.

What To Do As a Non-Venture Backed Company?

If your company isn’t venture-backed (99% of companies aren’t) and you’re managing cash closely and don’t have a huge buffer to fall back on, start by setting your Maximum Customer Acquisition Cost (Max CAC) at around 10% of the lifetime value of an average customer, and then building up as you go.

  • If for example you get an average of $150 per month for 30 months from your customers before they cancel, then you have a lifetime value of $4500 and you can spend around $450 in upfront advertising costs to get an incremental new customer — while still maintaining a healthy cash balance.
  • If for example you get an average of $100,000 per year for two years from your customers before they cancel, then you have a lifetime value of $200,000 and you can spend around $20,000 in upfront advertising costs to get an incremental new customer – while still maintaining a healthy cash balance.

Over time, as your sales grow (assuming your prices are high enough and you’ve built in enough margin for your company), you’ll start to build up a larger and larger cash balance in your business.

Accelerating Your Growth As You Build Up Your Cash Balance

As you build up your cash balance, if you want to continue to accelerate your growth you can:

  1. Slowly begin to increase your Maximum Customer Acquisition Cost (Max CAC), and begin using your higher cash balance to invest in faster growth.
  2. Take on capital from sources of non-dilutive revenue-based financing companies like ClearBanc or Indie.vc for additional capital
  3. Take on a long-term loan from a bank or through a loan marketplace like Fundera or Lendio.
  4. Use your higher revenue growth rates to explore raising a round of venture capital funding (usually you’ll need at least $1M+ in ARR and 50%+ annual growth rates to catch the eyes of most venture investors).

Calculating Your Actual Customer Acquisition Cost

Once you know your desired Maximum Customer Acquisition Cost (Max CAC), start by doing a test yourself (or via an agency) of some advertising campaigns and be sure you spend enough of a test budget to be able to acquire at least 2-3 customers so you can determine what your actual Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC) is. You’ll need to allocate a test budget large enough to actually get a tracked paying customer from advertising to be able to calculate your CAC.

You’ll want to establish what your:

  • Lead Acquisition Cost (LAC) – the cost to get someone to fill out either an interest form, book a demo, download a lead magnet, join your email list, or start a free trial.
  • Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC) – the cost in advertising spend of an incremental new paying customer. As long as your CAC is lower than your Max CAC, you’re in business and it’s time to scale!

For example, let’s say you spend a $10,000 test budget across Facebook Ads and Google Adwords to determine what your actual LAC and CAC is. From this $10k spend, let’s say you get 50 leads and 5 new customers. This means:

Ad Spend: $10,000

Lead Acquisition Cost (LAC): $200

Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC): $2000

Let’s say you sell a B2B product that costs $12,000. Now, you’ve discovered a way to spend $2,000 to get $12,000 in up front sales. Most business owners would spend $2k to get $12k in revenue, especially knowing that you can upsell and cross-sell that customer on other products and services. You’ve found a scalable campaign!

You can calculate your Lead Acquisition Cost in a matter of a few days and you can usually calculate your Customer Acquisition Cost in a month or two (it depends on how long your sales cycle is).

Once you find a scalable advertising channel, ramp up the spend by about 20% per week, continuing to track the LAC and CAC each week.

Don’t Give Up On the First Few Tries – The Holy Grail is Finding a Profitable Scalable Channel

Be sure to not give up if you don’t find a profitable channel in the first try. It can often take trying multiple agencies, multiple ad networks, many weeks ensuring tracking is working correctly, many landing pages, and many offers to get a profitable and scalable model working. Once you get it working however, you’ve discovered a major source of leads and revenue growth that will substantially increase the value of your company.

Even brand marketing these days is done scientifically, based on the lift in awareness and purchases within zip codes and viewing areas. If a company spends $500,000 on a brand campaign in Miami, they track the change in sales from the area (in-store or online) and are able to pretty closely tie spend to results.

At iContact, the year before we sold the company to Vocus, we were able to spend $2 million per month in mostly online advertising to acquire 4,000 new customers per month at a $500 Customer Acquisition Cost. Those customers paid us an average of $1,650 over their lifetime — and using this method we reached 70,000 paying customers and sold the company for $169 million.

Step 2: Inbound Sales – Building an Automated Inbound Sales System That Turns Your Leads Into Paying Customers

The second part of The Growth Formula is Inbound Sales (IS).

Growth is a function of = Scalable Advertising + Inbound Sales + Outbound Sales

You’ve now spent money to get valuable leads — yet the biggest cause of companies not growing is that they don’t follow-up with the leads they have. The large majority of sales happen after the 3rd follow-up.

Inbound sales involves reaching out to leads that have already come in the door from paid advertising, social media, word-of-mouth and search engine optimization through both automated methods (retargeting, drip campaigns) and non-automated methods (calls from sales development reps).

Once you get lots of inbound leads in the door from scalable advertising, it’s time to build an automated follow-up system (using your CRM system like Hubspot, Salesforce, Ontraport, etc.) is key.

I recommend putting all your leads on a 180-day nurturing campaign (sending a piece of automated valuable content to them automatically every 5 days for the first month after they enter your pipeline, and then every 10 days after that). Taking a week or two to develop this content if you don’t already have it is very worthwhile.

Also be sure to turn on retargeting advertising across Facebook, Instagram, and the Google Display Network so that your brand becomes omnipresent (seen everywhere) at a very low cost for those who have already visited your web site.

I recommend using a 180-day (maximum number of days available) Facebook, Instagram, and Google Display Network retargeting campaign so they see your brand everywhere (for a very low cost) while they are considering whether to do business with you. You can show your ads across mobile and web to every single website visitor and email subscriber you have for a very low cost (usually around $3 per 1000 ad impressions). Retargeting is a very low cost way of increasing your visitor to sale conversion ratio.

At iContact we built up a 50 person sales team by 2011. On our sales team, we had about:

  • 20 Sales Development Reps (who vetted the leads that were coming in for 15-day free trials)
  • 15 Sales Executives (who closed the deals)
  • 20 Account Managers (who managed the revenue once it was closed)

We were selling both our regular product iContact (that cost $10 to $699 per month) and a premium product called “iContact Enterprise” that cost from about $1,000 to $25,000 per month depending on how many emails you sent.

Between 2007 and 2011, under the great leadership of our SVP of Sales Kevin Fitzgerald and Director of Sales Eric Sternkopf, due to our inbound sales team we grew the revenues of the iContact Enterprise product from $0 to $20 million.

At the time, we didn’t use Outbound Sales at all. We just used inbound sales. We simply waited for leads to come in via our paid advertising channels — and then followed up with those leads. We would have done even better had we used outbound sales at the time.

The Steps to Automating Inbound Sales

  1. Get your leads coming into a CRM system like HubSpot, Salesforce, or Ontraport
  2. Create an automated 180 day follow-up sequence to build rapport and credibility with your leads, sending high-quality content automatically every 5-10 days. Include information about your business and your products and services with each message.
  3. Turn on an omnipresence retargeting campaign. Use retargeting on Facebook and Google Display Network to show ads to your web site visitors and to your leads to create the impression that your brand is everywhere online and to re-engage them in the sales cycle with additional reports, downloads, lead magnets, and more.
  4. Have your Sales Development Reps (SDRs) follow-up immediately (ideally within 1 hour) for every ead that comes in. The companies that grow are the companies that follow-up with every single lead within 60 minutes of it coming in (during business hours). The companies that don’t are the ones that take 3 days to reply. Speed wins. Create the rule that any leads that come in that day must be followed-up with before the day is over.
  5. Use SMS and WhatsApp when possible. When a lead comes in, if you’ve collected the mobile phone number of the lead, have your Sales Development Rep (SDR) immediately send a personal 1:1 text message to the lead to engage them immediately. If what you’re selling usually requires a phone call, have the SDR offer to get on the phone with them right then. Speed and personal connection wins.

Part 3: Outbound Sales – Creating a Growing Pipeline of Vetted Leads for $10K+ Deals

The third component of The Growth Formula is Outbound Sales (OS).

Growth is a function of = Scalable Advertising + Inbound Sales + Outbound Sales

While inbound sales involves reaching out to leads that have already come in the door, outbound sales involves generating new leads through cold prospecting (usually via 1:1 customized emails, FedEx packages, or by telephone).

Outbound Sales is mostly applicable to B2B companies with products or services that cost at least $10,000 annually (the economics simply don’t work with lower cost products). If you sell a product to consumers that is less than $10k, this section isn’t that relevant for you — and I recommend focusing primarily on Scalable Advertising (SA) and Inbound Sales (IS) and then skipping down to the section below on Customer Retention.

If you sell a product or services to businesses that is $10k or higher, this section is critical, so keep reading.

In my experience I’ve found that outbound sales works well for B2B sales where the annual contract value is $10k or higher. It works even better where the annual contract value is $25k or higher — as then there is enough margin to cover the cost of making the sale.

So how do you implement outbound sales? Well, you can build an in-house team or you can bring on a sales development agency that will do it for you and simply set up meetings on the calendars of your sales people.

I recommend outsourcing your outbound sales efforts for at least a year to get it going quickly without having to bring on additional SDRs in-house.

For outbound sales, I recommend using a company called RevenueAccelerator based in Vancouver, Canada. I’ve used them personally for my clients and they do a really great job. They charge a monthly retainer fee plus a per meeting cost. They only make money if they are sending you vetted meetings.

How to Do Outbound Sales Prospecting

Let’s say you sell accounting audit services with an Average Contract Value (ACV) of $50k per year to companies with $10M to $200M per year in sales in the United States and that the decision maker you are selling to is the CFO and Controller.

With this example, your Sales Development Representatives (or your outsourced agency like RevenueAccelerator) would:

  1. Go on ZoomInfo, Uplead, or Seamless, all sources of contact information for B2B sales leads.
  2. Create a list of the prospects who fit the criteria of the people you are targeting. For example, all the CFOs and Controllers in the USA at companies with $10M to $200M in sales yields 43,267 results on Uplead.
  3. Download this list of leads (or a smaller portion of the list you want to start with). The cost per lead usually ranges from $0.05 to $0.50 per lead depending on how many you buy at once. Seamless also offers an unlimited plan. Only download the leads you actually plan to reach out to within 72 hours. Never let lead data go stale.
  4. Use a tool like YAMM, Reply.io, Outreach, or Hubspot (or your email inbox for slower speed) to send a customized 1:1 email to each prospect, demonstrating that they have spent time to research the person (via LinkedIn) and the company (via the web site).
  5. Using the above tools, one Sales Development Rep (SDR) can send out around 100 of these customized 1:1 emails per day (or as many as 200 if they are partnered with a data research associate who writes the custom text that goes out to each lead). You can also follow the same strategy using LinkedIn InMail and Linkedin Sales Navigator. Be sure that you have entry-level SDRs sending out these messages (at $50k or so compensation packages) and not $150k per year sales executives — or the economics won’t work.
  6. The goal of these 1:1 messages should to be to demonstrate you’ve done real research on the company and get the person to reply. Then, your SDR can build a relationship and set up a Zoom Meeting or Demo with for your Sales Executive.
  7. If you don’t want to do this in-house, we recommend using a sales development agency like Revenue Accelerator out of Vancouver, Canada to do this for your company on a retainer + per meeting cost.

Why Outsource Outbound Sales?

Here are a few reasons we recommend outsourcing your Outbound Sales to a company that specializes in the field like Revenue Accelerator:

  1. You’ll need licenses to tools like ZoomInfo, Uplead, or Seamless.
  2. You’ll need to hire a Sales Development Rep (SDR) or two in-house, which can cost around $50k to $60k per year per rep.
  3. You’ll need to know how to set up your outbound reachout tool (YAMM, Reply.io, Outreach, or Hubspot) and set up separate domain names for email so you aren’t reaching out from your main domain.
  4. Getting the lead acquisition, lead research, and lead messaging right (body content/subject lines) often takes 6+ months to learn to do right — and that’s if you know what you’re doing.

What we find to be easier is to let the experts like RevenueAccelerator take care of the outbound sales up until the point where they generate the vetted and booked meeting.

Once the meeting is booked by the Outbound Sales Agency, it then goes onto the calendar of your in-house Sales Executive (who is generally very appreciative to be getting high-quality vetted meetings showing up on his or her calendar). You could also do these calls yourself in the beginning if your company is small, however to properly scale up your sales system you’ll need to build out both your lead generation processes and the size of your sales team.

In Summary – All The Steps in Review

In review, there are three key parts to growth for most businesses:

Growth is a function of = Scalable Advertising + Inbound Sales + Outbound Sales

In shorthand notation, the formula is shown as:

G(f) = SA + IS + OS

Here are all the steps to applying this formula to your business in review:

Step 1: Setting Up Your Scalable Advertising Campaigns to Generate Tens of Thousands of Leads

  1. Calculate Your Lifetime Value (LTV)
  2. Calculate Your Maximum Customer Acquisition Cost (Max CAC) – 5% to 33% of your LTV, depending on your margins and how fast you want to grow.
  3. Put a test budget to work to calculate how much it costs to acquire a lead (Lead Acquisition Cost or LAC) and how much it costs to acquire a customer (Customer Acquisition Cost or CAC).
  4. If your CAC is lower than your Max CAC, scale up the campaign until you are acquiring as many customers as your can.
  5. If you can’t figure out how to do this in-house, try an agency like Magic or Hive Digital.

Step 2: Automating Inbound Sales to Close Your Leads

  1. Get your leads coming into a CRM system like HubSpot, Salesforce, or Ontraport
  2. Create an automated 180 day follow-up sequence to build rapport and credibility with your leads, sending high-quality content automatically every 5-10 days. Include information about your business and your products and services with each message.
  3. Turn on an omnipresence retargeting campaign. Use retargeting on Facebook and Google Display Network to show ads to your web site visitors and to your leads to create the impression that your brand is everywhere online and to re-engage them in the sales cycle with additional reports, downloads, lead magnets, and more.
  4. Have your Sales Development Reps (SDRs) follow-up immediately (ideally within 1 hour) for every ead that comes in. The companies that grow are the companies that follow-up with every single lead within 60 minutes of it coming in (during business hours). The companies that don’t are the ones that take 3 days to reply. Speed wins. Create the rule that any leads that come in that day must be followed-up with before the day is over.
  5. Use SMS and WhatsApp when possible. When a lead comes in, if you’ve collected the mobile phone number of the lead, have your Sales Development Rep (SDR) immediately send a personal 1:1 text message to the lead to engage them immediately. If what you’re selling usually requires a phone call, have the SDR offer to get on the phone with them right then. Speed and personal connection wins.

Step 3: Scaling Outbound Sales (Just for B2B companies with $10K+ Customer Value)

  1. Go on ZoomInfo, Uplead, or Seamless, all sources of contact information for B2B sales leads.
  2. Create a list of the prospects who fit the criteria of the people you are targeting. For example, all the CFOs and Controllers in the USA at companies with $10M to $200M in sales yields 43,267 results on Uplead.
  3. Download this list of leads (or a smaller portion of the list you want to start with). The cost per lead usually ranges from $0.05 to $0.50 per lead depending on how many you buy at once. Seamless also offers an unlimited plan. Only download the leads you actually plan to reach out to within 72 hours. Never let lead data go stale.
  4. Use a tool like YAMM, Reply.io, Outreach, or Hubspot (or your email inbox for slower speed) to send a customized 1:1 email to each prospect, demonstrating that they have spent time to research the person (via LinkedIn) and the company (via the web site).
  5. Using the above tools, one Sales Development Rep (SDR) can send out around 100 of these customized 1:1 emails per day (or as many as 200 if they are partnered with a data research associate who writes the custom text that goes out to each lead). You can also follow the same strategy using LinkedIn InMail and Linkedin Sales Navigator. Be sure that you have entry-level SDRs sending out these messages (at $50k or so compensation packages) and not $150k per year sales executives — or the economics won’t work.
  6. The goal of these 1:1 messages should to be to demonstrate you’ve done real research on the company and get the person to reply. Then, your SDR can build a relationship and set up a Zoom Meeting or Demo with for your Sales Executive.
  7. If you don’t want to do this in-house, we recommend using a sales development agency like Revenue Accelerator out of Vancouver, Canada to do this for your company on a retainer + per meeting cost.

Author Bio: Ryan Allis is creating a global community of entrepreneur leaders committed to personal growth and business growth. Through Hive, he has built a community of over 3,200 leaders in 130 countries committed to creating a better world. He was previously CEO and co-founder of iContact from 2003-2012 and led the company from 300 employees, 70,000 customers, and $50M in annual sales and a sale for $170 million to Vocus (NASDAQ: VOCS). He is a three time INC 500® CEO (2008, 2009, 2010). Ryan was named as the Ernst and Young Entrepreneur of the Year for the Carolinas in 2010. Ryan is an Emeritus Member of the UN Foundation Global Entrepreneur Council and served as National Co-Chair of Technology for Obama during the 2012 U.S. Presidential Election. Ryan is the author of the entrepreneurship book Zero to One Million and writes and speaks often on creating a better world through leadership and business. Ryan has completed the Robbins-Madanes Coaching Certification, the Landmark Curriculum for Living, The Art of Living Curriculum, the Ascension Leadership Academy, the Singularity University Executive Program, a ten-day Vipassana, and the EO/MIT Entrepreneurial Masters Program, and has completed a number of Shamanic plant medicine experiences. He studied Economics at the University of North Carolina and holds an MBA from Harvard Business School where he was Co-President of the HBS Social Enterprise Club and a fellow of the Harvard Graduate School Leadership Institute.