May 2024 Member Spotlight – Mike Pastor, Vice President Operations, Duarte, Inc.
A conversation with Shannon Minifie, Box of Crayons
Shaping subscription offers and teaching the machine how to train the Duarte experience
After the Annual Business Retreat, I had a chance to catch up with Mike Pastor at Duarte to chat about how to shape a subscription offer, and whether GenAI can catch up to what’s human about Duarte’s approach.
SM: Mike, I remember you have a great story about how you came to be working with Duarte. Can you share your journey with me for the benefit of those members who haven’t had the pleasure of meeting you?
MP: Sure, yeah. Years ago I worked for theme parks—LEGOLAND here in California—and I really loved it, but when I found myself still there 20 years on, I started wanting to do something on my own. I had participated in some leadership training in the business and was really enjoying that and so when I saw the opening for a Duarte facilitator, I thought: maybe I’ll throw my hat in the ring. I ended up getting the job, and so I basically started moonlighting: I’d take days off to do workshops for Duarte, found myself taking advantage of any time off I could get to facilitate more with them. I loved it. I loved the material, I loved delivering.
And things were starting to change at the parks. I was becoming less interested in what I was doing there (it was becoming more about dollars and less and less about creating great experiences for people), and I found myself praying for “what’s the next step?” … and then HR from Duarte tapped me to be the Director of Ops, and I found myself in that role full-time right before COVID hit.
SM: That timing is impeccable. I mean, the training industry took a hit with COVID, too, but theme parks …
MP: Yes, the timing worked out for sure.
SM: I also love that even though it seems like such a deviation from your past life working in Ops at theme parks, there’s this nice thread, or through line, around wanting to be a part of creating and delivering great experiences.
MP: Totally. At Duarte we’re teaching people communication but it’s helping them to shape an experience for the people they’re communicating with. We explore (and teach people to answer) questions like: what makes a story engaging and interesting? What are the principles of a story that will make it compelling?
SM: Can you share, for those who don’t know, a bit more about the work Duarte does?
MP: Sure. So, Duarte was founded as a communications agency 36 years ago, and these days we have an Agency side and an Academy side. Durate does three things: (1) helps craft communication; (2) helps design that message (in PPT or Keynote, etc); (3) helps people deliver that message (presenting, public speaking). On the agency side, we do these three things FOR our clients—and on the Academy side we teach people how to do this themselves. So the business is a mix of product & consulting. I think we’re unique at the ISA because the work on the Agency side ends up creating new ideas that can then be turned into training on the Academy side—new products and new books, etc.
SM: How has your role evolved since you joined, and what’s the most interesting challenge you’re grappling with these days?
MP: When I first joined I oversaw Ops and the Delivery team. Then I moved into a VP role, overseeing Ops for both the Agency and the Academy, including accounting and IT, contracting for both sides. I’m the GM of the Academy side of the business now, and that role oversees everything above and it now encompasses Sales leadership.
SM: So I imagine it’ll be difficult to nail down just one challenge, Mike.
MP: Ha! Indeed. Well, since taking over the sales side, the things most on my mind are: how to shape and land more multi-year deals—basically, how to move into a subscription model? As well, I’m thinking about how to use AI in the business not only operationally (which we already do a bit now, embedded in some of our systems and softwares), but also as part of our product. What I think about is: how do we keep our product that’s been evergreen for so long relevant to these enterprise buyers who need it in a more unique way.
SM: And you think having the product become AI-enabled might help evolve it in that way?
MP: Yes, and I want to get ahead of it. Really, it’s a time to market concern—
SM: Microsoft’s Co-pilot already exists, and while that’s not a direct competitor, I imagine it’s concerning—
MP: —yes, and it’s about articulating what’s a differentiator, too. Duarte understands the essentials of engaging an audience well: how to include empathy, create contrast to make things interesting. I don’t think that the LLM can include those elements, not yet.
SM: The more I learn about what GenAI can do, the more confused I am about what its potential but also its limitations really are. I have a colleague whose spouse is an English professor and she was telling me how you can still test students even with the advent of Chat GPT because close reading—the techniques and levels of analysis across language and symbol and technique; I could go on but I won’t—is something the LLMs just can’t do yet.
But then I shared this with a friend who leads enterprise applications of GenAI for one of the biggest companies in Canada and she was like, “oh no. The LLMs could do that easily. You’d just have to feed it a few examples and then it will know.” That’s probably a little simplistic (how many examples, and how good would the close reading really be?), but it’s also probably basically accurate.
MP: Exactly. And so I want to get ahead of it because maybe someone else will beat us to teaching the machine [LLM] how to do those “human” things that are part of what we do.
SM: You mentioned you’ve been thinking about subscription models as well. Consistent and recurring revenue is such a challenge in this business—I’d be lying if I said we haven’t also thought a lot about this. I read Robbie Kellerman Baxter’s book a few years ago, and we’ve revised our product strategy in a way that moves us in that direction—one that gets us closer to the concept of access than ownership, which is how RKB describes the shift—but it’s really hard to nail down that exactly right offer that’s a real “forever transaction.” I also think it’s a lot more complicated to create that kind of loyalty in B2B sales—so many of the examples of membership or subscription models are consumer products.
MP: Yeah, I’ve been thinking about the access piece a lot. Specifically, when and how do people need our learning to be accessible to them? I think what we do in some ways lends itself more to this “on demand” access model than some other offers. So we’re exploring things like, if our clients use an LMS, could we include video-based learning on there that’s ready for them when they need it. Nancy, our CEO is always focused on what’s next!
SM: Just readily accessible to people, when they need to put together a presentation—
MP: Exactly.
SM: What are the other big changes you’re seeing in the market in the past year or so (disruptors, shifts in buyer expectations, changes in customer needs, in how you’re going to market, needing to position)?
MP: People want a full learning experience, but they’re no longer willing to do the 8 hours, or even half-day, or 2-hour session. They want it in 5 seconds—basically in TikTok sounds bites. And that’s not what Duarte does. We know what people need, and the time it takes, to learn this stuff—and we have designed the best way for it—but it’s always longer than the time people want to spend on it.
Basically, that’s the refrain we’re hearing: that no one has time. But it makes me wonder: are people prioritizing their time on the right things? Plus this whole TikTok trend, the attention economy … there’s this conflation of entertainment and learning as being delivered in the same way, and it’s just not effective.
SM: Any of your friends at the ISA would agree with you, I’d think.
MP: Yes, indeed! It’s one of the reasons I love being a member. Having some camaraderie, people who understand what these challenges are. I’m a member of a number of “RAFT” groups – small groups with folks who lead different areas of their business – and just hearing ideas from other members has helped us to revamp our products, implement new systems, and find improved ways of working. It’s nice to know other people are facing similar challenges and trying to answer similar questions. Having a community of people to think through things with has been really invaluable.
