Gary Walter Jr - Scaling and Selling a Family Run Data Business - Ep.201

Ep.201: Alex (@aebridgeman) is joined by Gary Walter Jr. (@GaryWalter).

My guest on this episode is Gary Walter, Jr, who took over running Infutor, a consumer identity data business, as CEO after his father passed. Infutor took on investment from Norwest Venture Partners and experienced rapid growth before selling to Verisk for $250m in 2022. Today he advises other data companies and CEOs, with specialties in data and sales orgs.

Gary and I talk about building great sales teams and go-to-market strategies, developing effective 5 year plans, and empowering your team.

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Links:

Verisk

Invest Like the Best: Brad Jacobs

Topics:

(00:00:00) - Intro

(00:03:39) - Gary’s intellectual curiosity

(00:06:35) - Gary’s career in data and the state of Infutor

(00:15:20) - Learnings from Gary’s father

(00:18:59) - Hiring an executive team

(00:21:21) - Empowering your team

(00:23:38) - Finding your zone of genius

(00:26:28) - Building a sales-driven culture

(00:31:12) - Creating an effective strategic plan

(00:32:50) - Handling disagreements

(00:34:26) - Finding inspiration in others

(00:37:25) - The sales strategy is more important than data being proprietary

(00:40:32) - Synching product priorities

(00:43:25) - The emotional side of selling a company

(00:45:30) - How CEOs can effectively approach selling the company