PartnerScore CEO Dave Ward answers questions work, life and his experiences with PartnerScore.

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Q What does a typical day look like for you as CEO at PartnerScore?

A My typical day really starts with getting the kids ready and off to school after nursery. Then I usually start my day kind of 830 and it's pretty diverse my day. I’m involved in all aspects of the business, so I've built the platform essentially and I know in depth, how the platform works, so I'm involved in making sure that the operations of the platform work.

I try to spend about 30% of my time, at least with customers and prospects and try to really understand them and how it [the platform] works and how it helps them meet their goals. It's a really important part of the business and it's changing again now, as we've successfully built the platform - we now want to scale it.

So, we're looking for investment, so I'm spending a little bit more of my day now with investors and the investment community trying to understand what it would take to get it to the next level.

Q How do you balance work and personal life as a business owner?

Q That's a good question. I mean, I've got two kids that are both under five, so life is really hectic. My wife also has a big role at a tech company, so between the two of us, we have a constant juggling act, trying to run business and personal time and make sure we've got everything with the kids sorted and school nursery, etc..

Having a structure in place helps me. So, I still set out my day, my kind of 8.30 to 5.30 and I try to keep as much as I can within that time frame. Working from home has been another huge benefit for us and for being able to start a business during this stage of life with young kids, we have been able to connect with partners, suppliers, customers.

We've been able to connect with them globally on video without so much travel. So, it's been a real benefit actually. I think we've seen that come out of the pandemic, one of the few positive things out of the pandemic, but that works well for us. And I think, being able to work remotely and not spend so much time traveling has been a huge help for us.

Q What have been some of your biggest learning experiences since founding PartnerScore?

A I think since starting PartnerScore, the opportunity I've had to connect with various different professionals and companies within the partnership space has been, a huge, huge learning experience. When you found a business, you're always trying to connect with more and more of the industry, so that you can really understand the needs within that industry and I think, the learning experience that you get from that is huge.

What we see in the partnership space is that the partnerships are becoming more complex and I think one of the big things that I've learned really is that complexity is not slowing down. If anything, teams are getting larger, more complex, processes are becoming more complex and actually keeping track of those relationships is something that's really difficult to do.

Q Where do you see your business in five and ten years?

A So, PartnerScore in five years’ time or ten years’ time. We have a plan to for PartnerScore in the next five years - what we would like to do is to get it established within the information technology community. We think PartnerScore is a great fit to be the measure of partner performance,within the partnership community.

So our ambition for it, is to be a de facto measurement for the partner experience and our goal is to get that embedded into the information technology space. From there, we would like to grow it out. So different industries. We could go into the various different industries, automotive and deeper into FinTech. There's industrial automation, there's lots of other industries in which it could be relevant for, so we can see one path for it to grow there.

Then the other really exciting piece is that everyone's looking to employ AI into decision making and we think that the PartnerScore dataset, which is all about the humans within a partnership, can really help AI tools and decision-making tools, to make better decisions. Because if you don't have the context of what people think and feel about working with the partnership, it's really hard to use AI to make decisions purely off of financial metrics or engagement metrics which consist of usage of product, accessing portals, etc..

So, we think that you need to have the human element within that decision making framework and the same will apply for AI tools. So, we think there’s a really, really exciting journey to be had for PartnerScore within the next five or ten years.

Q What advice would you give to somebody starting their own business?

A So, in starting out afresh, my experience, particularly with building businesses within corporates, has always been to test and learn and to start with an MVP you know, Minimum Viable Products - really understand your users and make sure that you've got a need there in the market to solve and make sure that somebody will want to pay to solve that need and start there and make sure that you've got that piece ticked off before you invest in, the other aspects of building out a full product or building out a lot of spend in marketing.

We've spent a lot of time getting the product right before we're looking to invest to scale it and I would say initially you're going to when you first start out, spend 80% of your time with your customers and with your potential prospects and make sure that you've got that understanding nailed.