In this episode of Careers in Finance, we have an insightful conversation with Bill Dillmeier, exploring his unique career journey in finance. Bill shares his intentional path into finance, starting from a young age, influenced by his entrepreneurial grandfather. He discusses his educational background, early entrepreneurial ventures, and the pivotal role of mentorship in shaping his career.

The conversation delves into Bill’s experiences at Vanguard and Morgan Stanley, his transition into mortgage banking, and the importance of finding balance in a fast-paced career. Last but not least, Bill touches on something we often don’t think about: the evolution of our professional passion.

Transcript

Meeyeon (00:14)
Hi, everyone, and welcome back to another episode of our FinPod podcast. Today, we are looking at Careers in Finance with none other than Bill Demeyer. Bill, welcome.

Bill Dillmeier (00:27)
Thank you so much. Happy to be here.

Meeyeon (00:30)
I am just so thrilled to have you on because not only do I think that our audience is going to have so much to learn from you, but I personally feel like I have so much to learn from you. And I’m really excited today to be sitting down and talking with you.

Bill Dillmeier (00:43)
No, I’m as well and it’s been an amazing career that I’m sure we’re gonna be able to unpack over our time together and it’s a little bit atypical in places.

Meeyeon (00:52)
Which is the best story because honestly, kind of like, like I went to school for finance and then I got an investment banking job or something very traditional right away. It’s very linear and like a very traditional path, but those traditional paths, there’s only so, there’s so very few of those spots to start with. And at the end of the day, it is everything else that is less linear that I find to be the most interesting,

because it allows people to relate the most. Because such a small pocket dues, written note kind of right from when they graduate, this is exactly what I’m gonna do. And I’m gonna do it for the rest of my career. The vast majority don’t have that right away. For example, I think the, when I started off in investment banking as a fresh undergrad, I have one friend who is still at the bank to this day. And granted, he’s a managing director now.

But like, guess what? He is one amongst maybe like 20 or 30 of us that I knew. And so those stories, of course, are super interesting, but I love everything in and around it. Anything that is kind of like a permutation combination of it. And so that said, I always like to open up this conversation with what is your career in finance kind of origin story? Did you go to school for it? Did you…

kind of find yourself in an accidental path was very intentional. Like tell us where it all kind of started for you.

Bill Dillmeier (02:24)
No, great question. So for me, it was very intentional. I always knew from a young age that I wanted to be in finance. My grandfather was an entrepreneur. He started the family business back in the 30s, ran it until the day he passed away. And from there, there was always this…

tendency for me to drift towards finance. I will say though that I did have a brief conversation with my father, perhaps one of the most awkward conversations with my father when I told him I wanted to be an art history major. That was about a five minute conversation. But aside from that, it’s always been finance. And

Meeyeon (03:03)
I had a friend that was an Art History major and today, he is a corporate securities lawyer at Sidley Austin, a great law firm. But I find art history majors are very analytical.

Bill Dillmeier (03:19)
Yes, I mean, there’s a lot to the aesthetic, but then there’s also the provenance that goes with the picture and being ready to get in and do a lot of research. So it’s not all just, you know, memorizing history. There’s a lot of nuance that you have to be able to bring to it. And especially when you start to try to price art and the subjectiveness of it as well.

Meeyeon (03:42)
And then so after that awkward conversation with your father, where did you decide to go?

What kind of came from there?

Bill Dillmeier (03:50)
So I went to actually a small all-business college in Massachusetts, just outside of Worcester. It’s called Nichols College. But the great part was it was an all-business curriculum, and they actually required incoming freshmen to have a laptop computer. This was actually one of the first colleges in America

that was doing this. So they revamped the entire curriculum around that. So you would bring your laptop to class and you had sort of a knockoff version of Excel and a knockoff version of Word and you would do all of your presentations and all of your coursework online.

And the great part, what it was, was division three. So I got to walk on, play some lacrosse, played some soccer. Actually, I started one of my first companies while I was still in college. I was actually selling custom silkscreen t-shirts door to door. Yeah.

Meeyeon (04:42)
My gosh.

So like an entrepreneur from the very beginning.

Bill Dillmeier (04:48)
Yes, yeah. And it was this very sort of classic kind of thing. I found a printer in the state of Maine who printed what I needed for say $3 a unit. And then after dinner, load up a backpack and start going door to door, seeing your friends and selling shirts for $12. And that’s actually how I sort of bootstrapped part of my way through college.

Meeyeon (05:10)
My gosh, that’s amazing. And then like when you got towards the end of college, did you already have like a path in mind? You sound like you were a planner.

Bill Dillmeier (05:22)
Would say I was a bit of a planner, was very purposeful. Knew it was going to be in finance. So after college in Massachusetts, I came back to the Philadelphia area where I had grown up and went to work for the Vanguard Group, the mutual fund company.

It was a tremendous experience. And most people know Vanguard for their mutual funds. I was there actually when they were building what was called Vanguard Brokerage. And there were probably about 25 to 30 of us in a traditional phone queue, but it was very much of an offset from the philosophy of Mr. Bogle, who was the grandfather of mutual funds.

And we did this purely from a competitive advantage. We knew Fidelity had a brokerage arm. We knew Schwab was having a brokerage arm. So Vanguard built this almost begrudgingly to go ahead and give customers an outlet. So I was able to go get my Series 7, spend some time on the phones working with customers, then actually went and did a lot of back office work. So I was actually in charge of…

corporate actions, so rights, warrants, mergers, acquisitions. So actually I had a small team of folks who would actually reach out to our customers and get their decision of, did you want to attend to your shares during this acquisition or how many rights did you want to potentially exercise from this mutual fund that you owned?

Meeyeon (06:51)
And did you find that, so I find it really interesting that your college experience sounds like so forward thinking. And even today, like, I don’t really think, well, maybe today is different, but when I went to university, let’s say like 2008, nine, the whole like idea of everything kind of being laptop based, learning how to do presentation, learning how to do data analysis, like working with Excel, PowerPoint, that was not really embedded into the curriculum.

You’d kind of get a taste of it in certain courses like economics or one of those like, it’s not the right word to say like HR courses, but like people management courses, you’d have an opportunity to practice there. But it sounds like from the very beginning, you were very well prepared with the types of skills that you would need to succeed in an actual job, you learn very like applied skills.

Bill Dillmeier (07:45)
Yes, very much, and that was part of the ethos of the college when they revamped the curriculum. mean, we really only had, say, five or six majors. You you’re an accounting major, you’re a finance major, you’re an econ major.

Like it was very straightforward, even like a general business major. So for us, was a way to kind of work with people who were like-minded in peers and be able to go ahead and exchange ideas. And it was definitely purposeful in the intent of how they had done that. And you were talking about me being sort of a planner, one of my first jobs.

I was actually still in high school. I was the assistant to the director of budgeting and planning for like an international plastics company and just picked up an early version of a spreadsheet program one day and then just started playing with it. And I will tell you that I sort of stretched my qualifications during the job interview and was able to, you know, go ahead, but I learned a ton and

Jim is still one of my mentors today. I spoke to him just a few months ago. He, you know, and I look back on my career early and he’s like, Bill, you had a special skill when I met you. And it’s just a way to continue to go ahead and hone it along the way.

Meeyeon (09:06)
My God. And you also, like at the very beginning of your career, you also got a taste of people management, like from the get go.

Bill Dillmeier (09:14)
Yes, from the beginning. There were a lot of virtual teams, but it was even a better experience because I had to continue to seek volunteers, motivate these people, work through a list of customers that needed to be contacted on a relatively short notice to then be able to go ahead and turn around their responses.

Meeyeon (09:37)
The topic that I’m going to touch on throughout is like the one that you hit about mentorship. For me personally, I think mentorship is probably the most…

It can be the most pivotal part of someone’s career. It’s not like a make or break, but it can really throw you into the stratosphere. It can really, really amplify someone’s potential when they meet the right people at the right time. For me, I’ve been very lucky that right out of university, had an internship at a pension fund and I started there, but I also met amazing mentors and I still keep in touch with them today.

I spoke to one actually this morning. His name is Kevin. Hi, Kevin, if you’re listening. But they’ve known me since I was 18, which is wild to think today I’m in my 30s. But they really helped me start my first kind of my first, certainly my first real job in asset management and helped me move on to the Southside investment banking. And so the power of a mentor is such an important topic that I want to touch on.

And I want to touch on it as we go through your journey from Vanguard to where you are today, a founder of your own company, Aperture. There’s a lot that happened in between, and I would love for you to just take us through the whole journey.

Bill Dillmeier (10:57)
Correct.

Sure, and I can’t agree with you more about the importance of a mentor. I mean, for me, I’ve had the same mentor probably for past 15 years. He’s been super pivotal. We’ll get to him in my career. And he’s the one that really helped me stretch and made me think about different ways to look at numbers, presentations. And…

Right now, I’m actually giving back a lot as well. So I’m actually mentoring startups here in Seattle. There’s an accelerator that just formed earlier this year. And I’m actually taking the first class through a number of different exercises, doing one-on-ones with some of the founders to really continue to give back. Because I think that’s where, like you said, you get so much more career acceleration from finding the right mentor at the right time.

Meeyeon (11:51)
And one quick sidebar, I know I said at the very beginning, I was like, I know that our listeners have so much to learn from you and me personally as well. But one of the reasons why, like apart from like just meeting you right away and feeling that I was just thinking, okay, obviously from his LinkedIn profile, can see that he’s giving back. Like, and he’s got a ton of experience, but to see that he’s actually giving back to the community locally is so, it’s kind of what CFI is all about in a very different way, but

the continuous learning aspect and being a lifelong learner and then being a teacher is just so, I think it’s just so admirable. And I just wanted to throw that in there.

Bill Dillmeier (12:32)
No, I completely agree. It is all about lifelong learning and there’s actually a book, it’s actually a parable, it’s actually called The Go Giver Principle.

Meeyeon (12:41)
The Go Giver.

Bill Dillmeier (12:42)
Yes, and really it’s about that principle of giving more than you’re taking and always be thinking about how you can help someone else before you help yourself. And it’s kind of a, you can call it karma or the universe working with you, but as you put more out, it comes back to you and being able to go ahead and, you know,

touch one person who can introduce you to someone and be able to unlock that next door. So it’s a great philosophy to begin to draw from.

Meeyeon (13:16)
Okay, so then from, I wanna go back into your journey, from Vanguard, from Vanguard to Aperture, so many chapters in between.

Bill Dillmeier (13:21)
From Vanguard.

Yes, so from Vanguard, I went to work for Morgan Stanley Institutional Mutual Fund. So I was actually working for a boutique mutual fund company. A number of very smart individuals from Wharton really enjoyed sitting around and talking about money and investing. And one day someone said, well, why don’t you put literally your money where your mouth is and start managing my money? And then they started building and they had pension funds. They had high net worth

individuals, so they were building quite a portfolio. And they ultimately realized that they were getting too big and needed to scale. So they picked up the phone and called Morgan Stanley and said, we’re ready to sell ourselves. And the deal was done within two weeks. But my role was to actually come in and work for the president of the mutual fund company. I was doing advisory work on

board reporting, the state of mutual funds, and how to continue to go ahead and help the company be more streamlined and much more effective. But most of my work was around board reporting. So really had two different lenses. The first lens was who has the same investment philosophy as us and what are their returns? So if you’re an actively managed equity fund,

Who has that same doctrine and are they getting better returns than us, which then kind of calls into account the effectiveness of the efficacy of the portfolio manager. The other side of that was who in the institutional space charges the same that we do for fees. And it’s a way to actually compare and contrast fees. So if I’m an actively managed bond fund, for example,

Do I need 37 basis points? Do I need 50 basis points? And really it was a way for portfolio managers to continue to look at how much they’re charging. Are they charging too much? Or in some cases, they’re charging too little and can actually raise fees across the board. And for me, I sat down one day with Morningstar and was just going through each of the funds, reading the investment philosophy, reaching out to the team to get prospectuses and then begin to say, okay,

This is how it’s similar, this is how it’s not similar because some of the investment theories that this boutique was following were a little narrow. It was like we only buy investment grade bonds but not the lowest tranche. But we can also buy bonds that are in Asia.

And it was like trying to go ahead and find that was actually pretty challenging at times, but it was a tremendous experience to work with some amazing fund managers and really look at mutual funds as a business.

Meeyeon (16:16)
And when you went from Vanguard to kind of Morgan Stanley, were you very kind of like intentional about those moves? And were you always kind of building towards kind of, guess, where you are today at Aperture? Or was it more so like the network that you had and kind of like the mentorship that you received and the opportunities that were available at the time that just kind of seemed to align?

Bill Dillmeier (16:33)
It was always…

Actually, it was very much of a ladder. had a strong network at Vanguard and as people sort of you were talking like in your starting class in investment bank as my starting class continued to mature their career, it was a natural progression to go from retail to institutional. So they reached out to me and said, hey, we have an amazing opportunity here.

Morgan Stanley Institutional, you should come check it out. And it was a great way just to kind of up level my game, see that next layer. But I knew I was always laddering towards something bigger. And I was very much enjoying the financial services momentum at the time. There was so much free capital coming into the market, so much great economic tailwinds that were happening. And you had the best place to be, was honestly in the market.

Meeyeon (17:34)
And then from then, you have several other steps that you took to be where you are today. And they’re similar, but they’re quite different from where you started. For example, like right now, for me, I’ve never quite understood like the go-to-market space. It’s not my area of expertise, but you’ve also dabbled in like audit, like there’s so many other facets of it.

Bill Dillmeier (18:01)
Thank you.

Meeyeon (18:02)
Take us through the next step after Morgan Stanley.

Bill Dillmeier (18:06)
Sure. After Morgan Stanley, actually, I spent a good bit of time in mortgage banking. So I actually used to call Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers. I was building mortgage-backed securities and then trading them forward. So on a monthly basis, I delivered about a billion dollars a month into the open market.

Meeyeon (18:25)
And that’s when it was the dawn of MBS.

Bill Dillmeier (18:29)
Exactly. This is the late 90s, early 2000s when the market was, times were still great. There was a lot of flow, a lot of demand. I mean, was at times you have to catch yourself. You’re 20 something and you’re like…

Meeyeon (18:37)
So yeah, times are still good.

Bill Dillmeier (18:51)
Hey, this is Bill. Can I get a bid on 50 million Fannie Mae six and a half March delivery? And you’re just in and out. But that’s what you just kind of, that was what you did to be able to go ahead and keep the engine moving. But my job was strictly to move as many mortgages that were available for sale into a pool, tie them to a security, and then deliver that security out to the market.

Meeyeon (19:19)
And at any, this is gonna be a more broad question, but, and I kind of already know the answer,

been any, have you taken any like intentional pauses during your career where you’ve decided like okay like I kind of want to pivot, I want to switch directions and yeah I’m just gonna take a break and just figure out a new path? Or has it always been one connection to the next connection and then going forward?

Bill Dillmeier (19:47)
No, actually I would say that there was definitely a pause. I did some independent consulting on my own. I was actually working and commuting to a job in Portland, Oregon, which is about four hours south from here. So every other week I was on the train to Portland. I was out Monday, back Friday, and then I did the off week working here in Seattle. And after doing that for a number of years, I had that sort

of weird feeling of when I was here I wanted to be there and when I was there I wanted to be here and so I took a pause to basically go ahead and say I’d like to be a solopreneur for a little bit and continue to explore some new options. So I was working but at same time I was working much more for my own schedule but it was definitely a pause that I needed just to kind of take it all in and think about what that next ladder was going to be.

Meeyeon (20:46)
Yeah, and like, it’s, I always kind of bring this topic up because I think now more than ever, people are generally fast paced. And I think a lot of it is just because there is so much more information available at everyone’s fingertips. And so it makes, for example, like job opportunities, it makes it a lot easier for people to get educated on what a job is, what the role is, what the qualifications are, and as well to be prepared to be able to go

Bill Dillmeier (21:03)
Yes.

Meeyeon (21:16)
and introduce yourself for that role. So everything is hyper competitive and it makes it very difficult to take everything in. And so a lot of, think our subscriber base at CFI find that, know, when you’re in a career in finance, it’s like you have to constantly be on it, on it, on it. And when you do that, kind of makes people always ask the question, it’s like, how do you balance your life?

Bill Dillmeier (21:36)
Right.

Meeyeon (21:45)
For you, have you ever found yourself too immersed in work? Because it’s very clear to me that you are a highly ambitious, entrepreneurial, self-starting person and from a very young age. And as you kind of have that kind of energy naturally, I find that those people generally are very successful, but also you have to make room for other parts of your life too.

And it’s always a question that I get from people, is just, so like, this person has all of this, this amazing resume and great experience professionally, but how do they balance? Like, how do they balance their life?

Bill Dillmeier (22:29)
Now that’s such a great question and it’s something that I think so many professionals grapple with no matter where they are in their career, whether you’re early, mid or even in that later stage. For me, yes, I did find myself in that position. I was working

for Bill Gates for a time. He owned a media company here in Seattle. And we used to compete head to head with Getty Images in the stock photography market. But we had offices around the world. So I could wake up at 7, talk to my team in Europe. Late afternoon comes, guess what? My Asia Pac team is now online. And

the CFO who I worked closely with used to travel the world and at times asked me to work the time zone he was in. So if he was in China, I was working the night shift or, you know, 10 p.m. Seattle time is roughly 5 a.m. London time.

Meeyeon (23:24)
My gosh, it’s like, Bill travel with me,

Bill Dillmeier (23:26)
Trust me, tried to, yes, cut that short so that we didn’t have to work all of that. And that’s where it did become a little bit overwhelming. And for me, the outlet for me is the virtue of living here in the Pacific Northwest. You can get out and hike

at any time, almost all year round. So for me, getting out into nature, seeing things in there, very common element. And for me, bringing my camera. Like I like to use my camera to be able to slow down and capture like moments and seconds, because it’s just you and the frame that you’re taking at that second. And it’s a way to be able to go ahead and have that pause and that built-in moment to say, I’m here, I’m present.

And sometimes you actually have to set your breathing as well, like when you’re taking that picture so that you’re not too herky-jerky.

Meeyeon (24:16)
with us.

And so a passion of yours is photography.

Bill Dillmeier (24:22)
Correct.

Meeyeon (24:24)
And I guess like the compliment of like your personal passion is what would you say is your passion professionally today? Is it the same thing as it was when you were back at Vanguard or has it kind of transformed as you’ve grown over time?

Bill Dillmeier (24:40)
It’s definitely transformed over time. Right now,

I think I’m doing some of the best work in my entire career right now because of what I’ve been able to go ahead and build over that story arc from Vanguard. So right now it is about working with really either venture capital backed, VC backed, I’m sorry, PE backed startups to be able to go ahead and build that next generation of company. mean, to some degree, like from a kind of a soundbite perspective, like I think

myself as almost like a strategic growth architect so I can come in and then talk about how do we achieve strategic growth. There’s the financial way, there’s go to market, there’s customer success, there’s a lot of different levers that you can pull along the way and how can I be just a part of that team to be able to drive the architecture.

Meeyeon (25:36)
Did you, but like, where did you get that type of knowledge?

Bill Dillmeier (25:43)
That’s a great question. So for me, we’re going to kind of circle back to mentors. So when I was at Corpus, I was the first finance hire of a turnaround expert CFO. And this is when we were going through a true digital transformation. So we were going from film negatives to digital imagery. And how do you then begin to bridge getting images on the web

in a high-velocity, low-cost manner? And I was running global FP&A trying to be able to go ahead and do almost like a classic brick and mortar to the web type of business model. And through that, I learned a lot about myself, how to do business internationally. But one day, my mentor and CFO came to me and is like,

Bill, I want you to be a little bit more immersed in the business. You now run global sales operations. So in addition to, you know, thinking financially, now it’s okay. You now have a team in London, Paris, Milan, and Dusseldorf in Europe. And now you also have folks in six countries in Asia. And you’re now thinking about sales comp, how much the quota is going to be for your territories. How do you think about

gaining market share, account planning? So that was really one of those first forays into looking at the lens of the business, not just as the finance guy, but thinking about it much more as an operator and then coming at it and saying, if you don’t understand cash flow, you don’t understand the lifeblood of the business. And being embedded was that first step to kind of getting to where I am now.

Meeyeon (27:34)
And it’s a very, very different thing to be like, you know, working at a financial institution in capital markets to then be in finance or a finance role at a company, especially from like an operator perspective. It’s so different. But it’s like, it’s also complimentary in the sense that at least for me, I found that what I do today, I guess, is actually like very intimately related to what I did in investment banking because I was in capital markets and we’re creating courses for things and modeling valuations and capital market securities.

Bill Dillmeier (27:46)
Yeah.

Meeyeon (28:05)
But I found that what I always tell others that I learned from my first kind of role, and it’s been a very formative experience, is the work ethic. That’s what I really took away from my first few years on the sell Side, is that it taught me very quickly what professionalism was. There was a very high bar that needed to be met every day. And did I meet it every day? No, probably, especially not in the beginning.

But I certainly tried my best, but it gave me that, okay, like, I would never be able to do this again. I don’t know how I did it back then, but okay, like 5 a.m. I’m up, I’ve already had my coffee. I’m gonna go to the gym when they pull open the trailer, exercise, take a full shower, get ready, be at my desk by 7 a.m., listen to morning calls, our overnight Asian desk, and all this kind of stuff. And that kind of…

very early on set the tone of like what does hard work really mean and that really helped me throughout my career.

Bill Dillmeier (29:09)
Yeah.

Meeyeon (29:09)
For me, it’s so interesting to see how people that start off at financial institutions end up at such different places, but are all so like high achieving and successful in very different ways. It’s like a completely different place where you started, but it’s just like that work ethic that carries you forward.

Bill Dillmeier (29:32)
Exactly, and that’s really what it comes down to is, you know, some people are born with that work ethic. Sometimes you have to kind of develop it like a muscle. But those early formative years, like you said, getting up at five, having that discipline is really what it takes to give you that endurance. Because I always tell people, if you think about it this way, you’re…

We’re all athletes, you know, whether we’re a professional tennis player or we work in finance. You have a finite amount of energy every day when you wake up. How do you go ahead and optimize that energy to get the greatest degree of impact in your day is really the most important thing. And focusing on the right things is something that you learn over time and you learn that you may hear something in the past or in the ether, but it might not

take hold and you have to be ready to go ahead and separate that noise to continue to focus and drive.

Meeyeon (30:29)
And what you’re describing is exactly what you do in a strategic role today, like helping companies scale up and strategically drive their growth. That is exactly what we’re describing as an athlete there.

Bill Dillmeier (30:41)
Exactly, I mean there’s always the know, you’ll say like the shiny penny or there’s always a founder who’s like well I want to do this and this and we’re like why don’t we get thing number one perfected before we think about thing number two and limiting what my friend would always say is the amount of surface area that you’re trying to cover and making sure that you’re very direct and intentional with that surface area.

And so for example, you know, one of the, of the things that my first software company did was a, that this company in Portland, Oregon is called JAMA software. They make requirements management software. That was their sole focus. We had a small professional services arm by definition, just to support our customers, but we knew that wasn’t our bread and butter. We knew that we didn’t want to continue to stretch out of our Gartner quadrant. Like we were trying to be very deliberate about building a tool that would compete

with IBM’s product called Doors. And that’s all we did. And we never wavered from that. And when I was there, we were able to get from 8 million to over 20 million in a year and half in ARR, predominantly through Fortune 1000 companies and a dedicated sales staff

and continue to grow the business and hone it. And earlier this year, the company sold for $1.2 billion to a private equity firm in San Francisco.

Meeyeon (32:12)
What would you say in your role today? What is your favorite part of your role?

Bill Dillmeier (32:12)
But it’s…

Gosh. For me, it’s the diversity of sort of waking up every day and knowing that you could be doing three, four different things and it’s an opportunity to learn. And it could be, you could be thinking about how to go ahead and build a go-to-market motion

that is effective and meets the needs of the company to. Okay, I need you to build a sensitivity analysis for the next 36 months based on these inputs and then be able to turn that around and get back to the investors because it’s budget season. So for me, if you’re not evolving and changing every day, it gets really boring.

Meeyeon (33:08)
And then with your, when you describe the different ways that a company can grow, there’s go to market, customer service, and a couple others you listed. And of those, there a particular topic that like most excites you, that you most liked kind of work in?

Bill Dillmeier (33:28)
For me, it’s going to market. So, as you know, there’s always that sort of healthy friction between finance and sales. And don’t get me wrong, I love salespeople. So the first thing that I’ll usually say to a CRO is, I want to make you the richest man in the building.

But to get you there, it’s going to have to come at efficient growth. I’m not going to buy my revenue. I’m not going to pay your sales team extra because if not, you create this very vicious sort of cycle between a dollar of revenue comes in and it goes back out in sales commissions. And with that happening, you don’t get a chance to invest into the business.

Meeyeon (34:07)
And for our listeners that don’t know what GTM Go To Market is, what is Go To Market?

Bill Dillmeier (34:12)
So Go To Market is sort of the flow in which leads would come into the funnel from marketing. Those leads would then be distilled down into say qualified leads.

And then those leads are then taken over by a sales team to be able to go through a sales process. So you’ll hear in, know, Salesforce will probably give you like a seven stage funnel to be able to help your customer go on that journey and building the efficiency between how many leads do I bring in to how many customers actually close one in. Salesforce is really the essence of Go To Market. So you have to be as much listening to what is

from a marketing perspective to how well is my sales team equipped to be able to go ahead and close a deal. And you rely on some really key players in that process, sales enablement, sales trainers, to be able to go ahead and keep your sales team sharp to help them work the customer through the funnel to deliver that optimum amount of value to working with a marketing team to help them understand customer preferences, use data from your close

lost reasons. Like you’ll find probably you know at least a third of your customers are not going to go on that journey with you. What can you glean from that to then be able to be a better marketer to then be able to drive that process to be a little bit more efficient.

Meeyeon (35:42)
And this, your current role is very much what we would say is kind like an individual contributor in the sense that you’re an entrepreneur, but you have managed teams very early on. And what has been your favorite type of role? have you really enjoyed the aspect of being an individual contributor to a team? I remember in capital markets, like we were all, we were all on a desk, like a fixed income desk, but I would always say like, okay, we have ahead of the desk.

But he’s like the ultimate leader of individual contributors. There’s very little people management. And so I found that generally people in finance typically thrive on individual contributor type of work. And when I see someone that has that personality of, I’m a strong individual contributor, I’m very self-motivated, but I also like people.

And I really enjoy managing them. I always love to get an understanding of which one do you like more? And like, how did you, how did you actually come about like building that muscle of people development, people management, because being an entrepreneur means that you are not only a great manager of people ultimately, but you have, you’re a manager of growth, you’re a manager of yourself. And there’s so many aspects that go into it.

Bill Dillmeier (37:05)
No, that’s a super thoughtful question. Being an individual contributor, I think, gives you the opportunity to learn the process from end to end and become a domain expert. And for me, if I were to have staff, I would be able to give them the greatest degree of insight and the nuances to the role.

There’s nothing worse than coming into a team and not really having a playbook or a reference point to be able to jump into. So growing your skills as an individual contributor and then bringing on a team is that great one-two combination because you get to do mentoring, you get to do a lot of knowledge transfer and so much of that unwritten process that goes on within the organization. Being an IC in a finance role,

Really, one of the biggest things that I would encourage everyone to think about is how do you be a better business partner. So I very much say that I’ve worked for the head of sales, the head of marketing, the head of product. Those people contribute to my performance review every year. Those people determine, you know, how I stand in the organization when I get promoted or compensated and really understanding how to be…

influential and have executive presence as if it were is as much of an important skill as being a team leader. So you have to be ready to play, you know, a little bit of, if you’re thinking about in terms of tennis, you have to ready to play singles and doubles depending on the audience that you’re working with.

Meeyeon (38:39)
That analogy. And then one of the things that I like to open up is

if you could give Bill 10 years ago a piece of advice, what would it be? And what would it be and why? Like, what would you like to give anyone who’s listening today a piece of advice or a nugget sound bite of encouragement? What would it be?

Bill Dillmeier (39:09)
Always keep exploring, always be a lifelong learner and what you’re doing today will not get you to tomorrow. So you have to be ready to push yourself to be able to learn new skills. I mean, look at the emergence of AI and if you’re not at least dabbling in AI, you’re going to be falling behind. There’s already…

Meeyeon (39:24)
So yeah.

Bill Dillmeier (39:30)
GPTs that are out there that are doing finance work where you could load an income statement balance sheet and it’ll give you rudimentary mock-ups that you can just fill in commentary for. And the technology is just going to continue to get better. embrace it. And I would always say don’t ever turn down an opportunity to stretch yourself in a new project.

Meeyeon (39:55)
And we both value mentorship, I think so much. And I hope that, you know, as much as I mentor people today, my mentees, I think, are people that I’ve typically worked for me, which are kind of more out of university, a couple of years in the workforce. But I know how important that was to me when I was younger. But for those of us that are listening that don’t necessarily have a mentor right now, but again, you touched on

the advent of ChatGPT and AI, it might sort of be the ultimate mentor in weird ways. For those that don’t have a bill in their network, what would you say to them to keep them moving forward and just give them any type of encouragement and motivation?

Bill Dillmeier (40:44)
Gosh, you are correct, there are a lot of online tools, but you know.

People want, or I honestly flattered when someone comes to me and says, will you be my mentor? Like, I think of it as an honor and a privilege. So if you’re in a company and you don’t think you have a mentor, if you were to ask somebody, there’s a 99% chance that they’re going to say yes, because they know the importance of giving back. They probably had a mentor and it can start super informally. It doesn’t have to be some type of rigid program, but as simple as…

Hey, can we go have coffee for 20 minutes to at least, you know, have those nuggets and talk to as many different people across different disciplines? Like some of the greatest knowledge I’ve had has come from like talk to like the head of business intelligence and thinking about how they’re seeing data and allowing me to test drive ideas on, hey, can I get a data set that does this? And that is, you know, a way to continue to foster mentorships. People want to talk about themselves. So just always look for that opportunity.

Meeyeon (41:51)
My gosh, that is the perfect way to close our podcast. I can’t think of a more encouraging way. And honestly, anyone that is listening today, like if you for some reason feel like you are kind of like lacking that real mentorship that you think would help you make the next step, you know, take a chance just as Bill was saying. It’s like whoever you are surrounded by, whether you’re in school or whether you are currently starting your first job,

there’s always that person in the seat next to you, reach out, have quick coffees. Like that’s how careers, not in finance, but in any field, that’s how careers begin. And so if, if I can also say, give one piece of advice as well, it’s always be as, as Bill said, be open. Like that’s as brief as I can be is like be open to new opportunities, be open to new conversations, be open to trying out new ways to build your network.

And so with that, that is a close on our Careers in Finance interview with Bill today. And I hope that everyone has enjoyed this podcast and I will see you all next time very soon.