The Secret Sauce of Sustainable Growth & Strategic Partnerships with Mike Wallen of Keywords Studios

June 14, 2024

The Secret Sauce of Sustainable Growth & Strategic Partnerships with Mike Wallen of Keywords Studios

Join us as we dive into the secrets of driving business growth with Mike Wallen, Chief Commercial Officer at Keywords Studios. With over 29 years of experience, Mike's career has been a fascinating journey from recruiter and agent to VP at Lakshya Digital, and now Global Business Development Director at Keywords. His key insight? Understanding the fundamental importance of client-centric leadership. Since joining Keywords, Mike has played a pivotal role in scaling the company by 500% across 70 studios in over 25 countries.

Tune in to learn more about his approach to business development, the importance of culture and values in scaling companies, and the innovative strategies that propelled Keywords Studios to the forefront of the game industry.

🎧 Here’s a glimpse of what you’ll learn:

Mike's Journey from Recruiter to Gaming Industry Leader
The Art of Recruiting: Building Relationships and Solving Problems
Navigating Acquisitions and Strategies for Exponential Growth
The Secret Sauce to Strategic Partnerships and Client-Centric Growth

Resources Mentioned in this episode:

Sponsor for this episode...

This episode is brought to you by Here’s Waldo Recruiting, a boutique recruitment firm specializing in the video game industry that prioritizes quality over quantity and values transparency, communication, and diversity. We partner with companies, creatives, and programmers to understand the why behind their needs and provide a white-glove experience that ensures a win-win outcome. The industry evolves. The market changes. But at Here’s Waldo Recruiting, our commitment to happy candidates and clients does not. We understand that searching for the best and brightest talent can be overwhelming, so let our customer-first staff of professionals do the leg work for you by heading over to hereswaldorecruiting.com.

Welcome to the Here's Waldo Podcast, where we sit down with top visionaries and creatives in the video game industry. Together, we'll unravel their journeys and learn more about the path they're forging ahead. Now, let's get started with the show.

Episode Transcript

Lizzie Mintus: I'm Lizzie Mintus, founder and CEO of Here's Waldo Recruiting, a boutique video game recruitment firm. This is the Here's Waldo Podcast. In every episode, we dive deep into conversations with creatives, founders, and executives about what it takes to be successful. You can expect to hear valuable lessons from their journey and get a glimpse into the future of the industry.

This episode is brought to you by Here's Waldo Recruiting, a boutique recruitment firm for the game industry. We value quality over quantity, transparency, communication, and diversity. We partner with companies, creatives, and programmers to understand the why behind their needs. Before introducing today's guest, I want to give a thank you to David Stelzer, now at Xsolla, for introducing us. Thanks, David. You're the best and you know everybody.

Today we have Mike Wallen with us. Mike is a 29 year veteran of the game industry, initially working on the business side as a recruiter and agent before moving to the services side as the vice president of Lakshya Digital, the largest games company in India. And he is currently serving as the chief commercial officer for Keyword Studios. Let's get started. Thank you for being on, Mike.

Mike Wallen: Thank you for having me, Lizzie. I really appreciate it.

Lizzie Mintus: Yeah. For any of our listeners who are not familiar, can you share a little bit more about Keywords?

Mike Wallen: Sure. So, Keyword Studios is often known by the studios within our organization. Keywords is 25 years old as a company. As the name denotes, we started as a localization firm. And around 2009, the company hired their first CEO, Andrew Day. And the idea was born to bring service companies together so that they could offer more than just localization. They could offer additional services along the game development lifecycle.

Andrew ultimately took the company public in 2013 and used the money raised to start acquired studios. Again, most folks know Keywords from, perhaps Volta in Canada, which is a tremendous concept art house. Or they might know High Voltage Software in Chicago. You know, very well known for Unreal co-development , and many more, to date something to the effect of 60 different studios under the umbrella.

But really Keywords is a solution providing organization. The idea being that if someone has a problem with games, with entertainment, and they need help solving it, they can make one phone call and somewhere within the universe of Keywords, we're going to be able to help them solve their problem.

Lizzie Mintus: One stop shop. Congrats on all of the growth too.

Mike Wallen: Thank you. Thank you.

Lizzie Mintus: Yeah. What games are you most well known for contributing to?

Mike Wallen: Most games that were most well known for contributing to good question. Well, there's a little game out of North Carolina called Fortnite. We were involved with that through our High Voltage Software relationship, The Assassin's Creed franchise through our studios in the UK. Let's see, certainly Sea of Thieves Forza, I'm trying to think of some of the really big names that would stand out. Harry Potter, of course and. We've got Warp Cart Racing. That was an interesting one through the Apple Arcade. That was a special relationship between Electro Square and Apple that was really, really interesting and exciting. Call of Duty, certainly through our GNET studio down in Los Angeles. That's, you know, to name a few. I'm certainly leaving out quite a few, but there are some good names in there.

Lizzie Mintus: Yeah, that's huge. I want to talk about your career path. You started out in the industry as a recruiter. I would love to hear the story about how you ended up in recruiting because I think a lot of people don't intend to, but it's kind of this meant to be a role.

Mike Wallen: No, you're absolutely right. It's a sordid tale. I was looking for an opportunity in sales and marketing, and I had actually interviewed with a recruiting firm. A friend of mine had called me and said, this is a really tremendous job. Mike, I think you'd be great at it. And so I went in and interviewed with all of the recruiters. And I really wasn't sure I liked anyone very much. It was, it was interesting. So I interviewed them all. I wasn't really sure.

And then my next interview was with the local Major League Baseball team in San Diego. And it was in their, you know, sales and marketing group there, ticket sales events for the San Diego Padres. And I'm like, why not do that? This is going to be fun. And this was back in, for those of you that can remember this, this was back in the days when the big deal was made when Roseanne Barr sang the national anthem at Padre game, very infamously. So people weren't very big fans of the San Diego Padres. So it was a really tough year to try and sell tickets and sponsorship to the Padres. So after a year of doing that, I called my friend back up and I said, Hey, is that recruiting thing still working out? And he said, yeah, it really is. And I went back and interviewed and surprisingly after a year of struggling in baseball, recruiting looked really good all of a sudden I thought, wow, this might not be such a bad deal after all.

I didn't know exactly what to expect. Again, I didn't step into recruiting to recruit in games. I actually stepped into recruiting purely from the understanding of it being a job that matches my skills. So when I started, they said, well, what do you want to recruit him? And my friend that had convinced me to come on board was in their first ever video game space. And I liked video games. I mean, I really liked video games at the time. And I said, well, can I do what Dave's doing? And they said, sure. So I joined their company, but he and I had the only two video game desks in the entire company. The company was management recruiters, which is a very big recruiting firm, a bit of what I would call the McDonald's of recruiting from a franchise basis. So a very structured process. And here we were two guys with a video game desk that no one in the entire company had. And I think my second week, instead of doing the training that I was supposed to do, I went to E3. And that was an education in and of itself, going to E3 was this was, I mean, again, E3 goes back, the really good E3s go back many years, but those were, those were big shows, big screens, big shows, big displays.

Mike Wallen: And I kind of knew the first day of E3, I wanted to be in games. I wanted to stay in games.

Lizzie Mintus: Fun. And so were you smiling and dialing? Were you finding your own clients? What was it like?

Mike Wallen: Well, okay, so we're going to talk about my age a little here. So yes, I was smiling and dialing because this was really kind of free internet, pre email, let's just say.

People would fax me their resumes and they would send VHS tapes, the artists for some reason I'm creative and I'm colorblind and I had a way with artists. I don't know why. But yeah I remember to this day when you sat down at MRI. They literally gave you one resume. I sat down on my desk, there was nothing on it but a phone, and they gave me one resume, and can I mention someone's name? Do we mind? They gave me Brian Hughes's resume, who was an engineer for, at the time, a company called Sierra Online, which is up in Northern California. Yeah. And from Brian Hughes, that one name, I built a desk.

And it's like, you call Brian, you start networking, you get to know him, what's he looking for? What companies is he interested in? Then you go to research companies, start calling them. You know. I'm sure if there's anyone that understands this story, it's you.

At first, it was all about networking and then it became more about having a network and then also now starting to solve problems. But yeah, it was challenging in the beginning. Literally started with one resume.

Lizzie Mintus: Yeah.

Mike Wallen: So it was, it was fun times. Yes. Smiling and dialing. I have a tendency to talk. They would track the amount of minutes worth being on the phone. And I never seemed to get enough minutes each day on the phone, but I averaged a lot of minutes per phone call.

So every time I was on the phone, I maximized my effort. It was the good old days.

Lizzie Mintus: Yeah. And you were Rookie of the Year. I saw we have very similar backgrounds. I was in the President's Club at the agency that I was at. Got an all inclusive Mexico trip.

So what was Rookie of the Year? It sounds like your method worked.

Mike Wallen: Well, yes. So I was Rookie of the Year. The interesting thing is out of the San Diego office, the San Diego office three years in a row had Rookies of the Year, which was really kind of prestigious. So there was something about the water, I guess, in San Diego. And it's funny. I also won a trip.

My first trip was to Hawaii, but my second trip was to Mexico. The good thing about the firm that I worked for at the beginning was that they had at least enough of a process that I understood the building blocks of recruiting. So I needed to make certain that I look for candidates. I make sure I look for jobs and then make sure I try to put them together.

We used to talk about a nine way matrix at the time, three jobs for three candidates. If they fit, you have nine different opportunities. And that was something that you strive for because it gave you the highest probability of success. And so it was really about trying to find that. But more and more, I started realizing that it was about the people that I was talking to.

One of my very, very, very good friends in the industry was one of the first people I placed. And as a result of developing a relationship with him, I have to believe, during the course of my career as a recruiter, even agent, and then even beyond into Keywords and Lakshya, he'd hired probably close to 50 people from me as a recruiter and we continue to do business. So I learned very quickly that, and this has been duplicated as Keywords. I had to get away from being transactional. At first it was very transactional. I'll be honest.

At first it was very transactional because I just wanted to make a living. I needed the job and I needed it to be successful, but the more I realized that I could solve problems for him. I mean, Glenn Scofield, a tremendous friend of mine, the more I could start solving problems for him consistently, the better our relationship was and the more work that we did together. And so, it reminded me very much of the process that we've been going through in the early days from Keywords where everything started transactions and it's just had to grow as you start to identify people's problems.

Lizzie Mintus: Yeah. That's what it's all about. I always think about that too. I worked at Nordstrom. That was my job before recruiting, but they always taught us, figure out how you can go above and beyond to delight this person. And I always did that. And I still do that. And I've hired someone seven years ago and I just helped build out a small team now, like everything comes back around and I'm sure we'll work together for years and years to come. And that's one of the most special parts about gaming.

Mike Wallen: That's a company that has a tremendous attention to customer centricity. Nordstrom's world class for their attention to detail with the customer and going beyond. You know, I know this through my daughter. But one day she worked at Nordstrom for a while and then went to Nike, both very similar like that.

So I'm not surprised that the type of recruiting that you do resonates with that because. It's about the customer first, then let's look at the problem.

Lizzie Mintus: Yes. It's about telling someone the job is not right for them, or the shirt does not look good on them because that's the truth. And that's the right thing to do, but you build a better relationship. And people are shocked when you tell them that, because most people are like, Oh yeah, buy the shirt. Yeah. Take the job.

Mike Wallen: Yeah, they're expecting you to tell them what's beneficial for you. Not what's actually beneficial. I used to have a saying. I didn't use that saying. I still say it, but often I would tell people there's truth and there's reality, but they rarely coexist, unfortunately. And so you've got to be able to tell the truth when maybe it's not convenient.

Lizzie Mintus: Yeah. Tell me about starting your own firm. Bloodhound Search. That's such a good name.

Mike Wallen: Well, that came out of a difficult time. The firm that I was working for, I was experiencing some difficulties. At the time, I was probably what you would consider to be their only asset. I was the only recruiter. There were founders and there was myself. And they were looking for ways to save money. And so the idea was, we'll cut your commission. We need to cut your commission. And I couldn't understand that at first, because to me, I only earned a commission if I was successful. If I was successful, the company was successful. So the idea of cutting an asset or a revenue generating employees commission, it didn't make sense to me.

And so when I went in and talked with them about that, the comment was made to me. Consider it a negative incentive to do more. And I know that because I actually wrote that on a piece of paper. Then I typed it up and that was on the wall of my office three months later when I started my own firm. And I started it solely because I just didn't like the idea of somebody that made rules against what I should be doing.

I probably didn't start at the best time. If you look back at history, I started Bloodhound Search on September 1st, 2001, 10 days before the twin towers came down. All of a sudden there was a tremendous amount of anxiety in the United States and in travel. So it wasn't the greatest time, but games have always been very resilient. And the gaming industry has always been a great industry to be involved in when people are looking for something to buoy their spirits. And so, it was probably the best time for me to start it because I didn't start it when everything was just flying and it was super easy. There was still work to be done.

Lizzie Mintus: Yeah. And I think that there's always a lot of opportunity when things are bad, just, we'll call it bad. And it forces you to do things that you wouldn't have had to do otherwise. And then you're much more resilient in the long run, even if you're having a hard time initially.

Mike Wallen: It was always hard in recruiting to look at it and realize that in a down industrial economy, you focused on finding the best quality candidate for a company because there were so many candidates that were available at the time. So the companies only wanted to hire the very best. So you had to focus that way.

And then as the economy would shift and swing back up, very similar to where we're at right now, where we're seeing the starts of an upswing. When you see things swing up, then you now focus on the very best opportunities for those candidates that are going to be looking for the next big challenge.

It wasn't hard to realize that you could be successful going down and coming back up. It's just, it took an understanding that you are benefiting people both ways.

Lizzie Mintus: It's true. It's really rewarding. You get to help build out teams and you get to see what they create and you get to help people with their dream jobs. There's always some interesting stories and people do very strange things. I'm sure that you have some good ones.

Mike Wallen: I would share one. It kind of led to a number of things. But again, this was in the smiling and dialing days. I contacted a small company down in Dallas called Id. And at the time, this was telephones and voicemail. So there wasn't anybody email or anything like that. And if you called on the direct line at Id, whether this is Id whatever it might be. And then if you're a recruiter, we F and hate you hang up now. And I'm like, Oh boy. But with my personality, I'm like, okay, I have to work with these guys now. I like this. I have to.

Lizzie Mintus: Challenge accepted.

Mike Wallen: Yeah, exactly. Exactly. And so I was fortunate to spend a little bit of time figuring out how to get hold of the right person there. I won't tell you that I spent evenings working the phones, trying to figure out how their phone system works. I won't say that. But ultimately it came to pass that they did. They needed someone to give artistically. And I didn't know it at the time. I know it obviously now and subsequently thereafter, but my time was far less valuable than theirs was. So it actually saved them money. Having someone like me go look for an artist rather than having the senior art talent, they're looking for people. They were much better. You know, they were far better off doing that.

Lizzie Mintus: Yes, yes, yes. I've talked with so many executives. They're like, Oh, I'm recruiting. I'm on LinkedIn. I'm like, No, let's talk about your genius zone. Do you cut your own hair? Do you fix your own car? Do you do your own taxes? No, hopefully no to all of those things, right? Unless it's something you really enjoy, but that's not the highest and best use of your time.

Mike Wallen: I was so fast forward real quick. It's funny, I had this exact conversation. So the first CEO at Keywords was a guy by the name of Andrew Day. Tremendous guy. I really liked him a lot. He took the company public. And when they bought Lakshya, I had a sit down meeting with him in Montreal and we got to talking and he asked me to join the global business development team. And I did. And then spring the following year, we're at GDC and he's running the global business development team.

Keywords wasn't very big. We were probably several hundred people and I think 24 million in revenue, something like that. But Andrew was running the company. He was CEO. We're a publicly traded company and he's also running the global business development team. And I remember having breakfast with him at GDC.

I said, you are the most expensive BD guy we have . Yeah, you need to go do something else and let us do this. Go find more companies for us to buy and let us do this. It was funny. But it was his baby though. That was the other thing. It was his baby. Yeah. It was his blood, sweat, and tears that were in it. And he was never going to get that far from what grew the company. So I can understand people thinking, Oh, I'm going to do the recruiting on this. I'm going to go ahead and do all of this. And you're right. You're absolutely right there. I didn't know it at the time, but Kevin Cloud's time was way more valuable spent working on Quake and the art and Quake Arena, rather than going out and looking for art talent. He could review talent that someone like me went out and hunted up. And that's a far better use of his time. I didn't know that at the time.

I thought I was just a tremendous recruiter. It was a little while afterwards that I realized that one of us was smarter than the other. I think it was him.

Lizzie Mintus: Yeah. Okay. So and then you ended up going to lock shot and I would love to hear about building your career because your CCO now. What is that transition?

I know Keywords acquired Lakshya. How did you move your way up? How did you get into your entry role?

Mike Wallen: So the interesting thing is I owe a lot to individuals along the way. So first was a recruiting client named Dave Warhol at Real Time Associates down in Los Angeles. Actually I just ran into Dave at our party at GDC. Dave referred me to this art studio. He had hired a couple of people from me and he referred me to this art studio he'd been working with. They were looking for a head of global business development in the United States. So I called these guys up and I thought I would help them. And the more I'm listening to what they're looking for, I'm like, yeah, I can do all that.

And then I started thinking about it. I'm going, okay, so let me get this right. I can recruit for someone and I call them up and they're saying, well, we want a bigger art staff, let's say. But we can't hire any more artists. We want more art, but we can't hire any more artists. We're going to outsource it.

Okay, so as a recruiter, I'm lost. I can't help it. But all of a sudden, huh, what if I was recruiting and I represented this art outsourcing house? Nobody could turn me down. So I took the job of looking for a business development manager for them and I introduced them to two people and I said, and I would consider doing it for you.

Again, long story short, they offered me a contract as opposed to the job. They offered me a contract while I was head hunting. And I found that I really liked doing BD for the art studio a lot. And so, again, fast forward that the studio was Lakshya in India has grown into three studios now, but Momvendra Shukla and Dib Choudhury were the two that ran it. And I started working very closely with them. Next thing I know, we've grown into over 300 people. We're doing really well and Keywords buys us in 2014. I was in San Diego. I get a phone call and said, Hey, we just sold the company to Keywords. I don't even know who Keywords is. I'm like, Oh, okay. Cool. Good. What does that mean? Yeah. And I went to Montreal the next week and met with Andrew Day and All of a sudden started rapidly learning about Keywords and realized that Keywords had a very, very small sales team. And they were effectively tasked with cross selling similar services, localization, QA, localization, QA, and now art.

So I was getting the hang of that mostly just working with art selling for Luxa and at the first GDC got to know Andrew Day a lot better and realized that his job of CEO was a lot bigger and he was constantly, the first four years I was with Keywords, we bought eight companies each year. So, I mean, just the function of, yeah, just whiplash. In the first three years, we grew a hundred percent a year. We went from 24 to 50, 50 to 100. 100 to 200 million four years in a row. It was just light speed growth.

And going through that, there were these constant vacuums of need for people to step up and assume more responsibility. There were a number of people, a number of the senior leaders in Keyword's executive staff right now were running teams and orgs, 6, 7, 8, 9 years ago, and just continued to grow their skillset as the company grew.

I became head of Global Business Development in 2016, and that grew until 2020. And we really started to look at larger scale strategic partnerships. More of the solutions provide it. I'm kind of jumping a little bit forward here, but more solution providing where we can sit down with a major partner, talk not about, this transaction or that transaction, but really talk about what are the pains you see one, two, three, four years from now as a company, how might we be able to step in and help you with that there?

And now it's really coming into fruition. You see a lot of companies, Looking at what we call kind of a fixed cost of variable cost transition, where maybe they've right sized themselves a little bit in the last year. Maybe they've been forced to do more with less without making it sound like a sales pitch. Keywords were almost a perfect answer for someone when they would say, we've got to do more with less. It's like, let's figure that out. But I became the Chief Revenue Officer in 2020, and as we started cycling through, Chief Revenue Officer isn't really a moniker, real well known in Europe. It has a tendency to mean a little bit more like Chief Financial Officer. And if you know me, I'm almost allergic to spreadsheets. So that probably wasn't a good call. And the relationship that I have with clients and the responsibilities that I have to clients really lends itself more to the role that I now have, which is chief commercial officer.

So part of it was working with a tremendous group at Lakshya and being introduced to Keyword Studios by Malvendra and by Andrew Day and then growing that. All of us just running really hard and as we would say at the time, bleeding Keywords blue, really going through that. And then now coming out to what I kind of call our Keywords 2. 0, which is the next hockey stick growth for us, being technology driven.

In the beginning Keywords was acquiring studios and growing and we went from several hundred to 13,000. No question, we're going to continue to grow, but I don't think you're going to see Keywords grow another 13,000 to get to the same size. Technology is so much more a part of our solutioning now that it's going to allow us to provide solutions. And we're already providing solutions that are technology driven, and not so headcount driven. So, you know, we will continue to press forward on that too. But that's a little bit of the story of how I ended up here.

Lizzie Mintus: Congrats. That's a lot of saying yes, taking leaps. I want to double click on the growth because you, so Keywords, when, You were acquired with several hundred people and now you're 13,000?

Mike Wallen: Yeah.

Lizzie Mintus: Ish. Okay.

Mike Wallen: Well, no, no, no. I want to say 600 to 1,000, something like that sounds right in 2014. 2014.

Lizzie Mintus: Wow.

Mike Wallen: And around 24 million in revenue. And then 24 to 50, 50 to 100. I mean, and it's a publicly traded company, so all this information is out there. But for most of us, we barely saw it because we were just running so hard.

Lizzie Mintus: Yeah. So a lot of companies go through this hockey stick growth, but not that many are able to navigate it successfully. I think, especially lately, we've seen so many companies who've hockey stick and they're out over their skis and it doesn't work. So what would you say some key learnings are that you've experienced throughout that growth? How can you do it in a way that works?

Mike Wallen: I think that's a really good question.

I think there's three answers in there. The first one is, the early days. The early days, how we were able to do it was that we acted like a family. And, it sounds cliche. But if you went to some of the early, early Keywords parties at GDC. You'd understand we used to call it the Andrew Day Hugging Tour. He would literally be hugging everybody at the party. There might have been 150 people at the party. I mean, you saw our event just recently at GDC. Definitely more than 150. But in the early days of very much, it was family and we all kind of shared the whole idea. You know, Andrew called everyone key wordians. We were all key wordians and it was just, it was almost like we all were just challenging everybody. We were going to do this together because we kind of felt small, almost. Like a skunk works type of thing.

Then we had an area in the middle where we were CEO-less. We had co CEOs at the time. Andrew had taken a leave of absence before he retired. And John Hawken at the time, our COO, had joined together to run the company while there was a search going on for our current CEO. And so during that time we started almost reflecting on our growth and looking back and seeing how fast we've grown.

Did we have foundations and systems in place? In some areas there that we were looking at it going, we're softer there than we needed to be. Or, as you said, maybe perhaps we were a little bit over our skis. We talk a lot about building the house. If the foundation isn't solid, it doesn't matter how many floors we're building. It's only going to get worse if you add more floors.

And then along comes our new CEO, Bertrand Bodson, a very different CEO than Andrew Day. And yet at the same time, very much the same right off the bat, really grasped the one Keywords mentality, but actually even kind of reflected that outwardly. So everyone was really, I think everyone that's at Keyword is really proud to be at Keywords. Bertrand kind of gave it a definition, the one Keywords mentality.

But then the second piece of that for Bertrand was really saying, here's how we're going to go and do again what we just have done and how we're going to do it. In fact, I was just on an executive call this morning and, might sound cliche, but it's kind of exciting to listen to 11 of the people that you've grown up through this business with, all talking about how are we going to take this to the next level.

And almost to a person for a The key to us is our clients. I'm going back to your Nordstrom comment. For us, we have to look at our clients first and find out what is it that they need from us? What is it that we need to be doing? How can we do better? How can we be faster? How can we be bigger? All of a sudden we realized that is the focus for us. And to hear these people that have been doing this for a while, all come together. And so Bertrand has taken that and said, Now we can add technology to our solution and take that farther.

The learnings first in the beginning were, I think, family, the learnings in the middle work, take stock and make sure the foundation was there. And then for us right now, the learnings even right now are that, works smarter. Our technology driven solutions or something that we never really implemented. We have the last three or four years and in the last two years have been significant for us and will continue to be significant.

But in the early days, it was just to go as fast as possible. And so we kind of had a progression. We were just in a client call. Oh, gosh, two weeks ago. And they asked the same question, but in a different way. They're like, well, what's the secret sauce?

Actual quote, what's the secret sauce? You're this, 60 plus studio, 70 plus location company that does 9-10 different service lines. What is the secret sauce to this? And given that, in our current environment, we've seen situations where there have been some groups that have gathered companies and studios and IPs, and it hasn't worked as well as they'd hoped. And how is it that, you know, Keywords are hung in there the way they have, and how is it that they've grown and they've prospered and they continue to grow?

For us again, it goes back to that, when we started, I was fortunate enough to be involved in some of the due diligence on some of the earlier acquisitions.

Our first level of whether or not we want to acquire someone is, you want to be involved with that guy? You want to be involved with that girl? I mean, do they fit with us? Do we fit with them?

Lizzie Mintus: Yeah.

Mike Wallen: I remember having one meeting with a studio, and Andrew and I took them to dinner. It was probably the fourth time we've done that. We had a great time at dinner and we came away and he goes, what do you think? And I said, there's no way they're going to be a partner with us. And he says, I agree. And we love these guys, but we just knew they weren't going to fit with the rest of our order. And so for us, it was about chemistry, just an acquisition right off the bat, understanding what we're trying to accomplish. And it's like, I had a friend that used to say, do you want to be in a foxhole with that person at two o'clock in the morning? That's kind of the first sniff test. And then it's how do we integrate them? We have a chief shared services officer team at Keywords.

It's an unusual title, but it goes with a gentleman that has been with Keywords for 10, 12 years. He's seen the progression, and one of his biggest roles is integrating new studios and integrating our existing studios, so that they take advantage of the strength of the Keywords landscape.

Lizzie Mintus: Yeah. What a big job.

Mike Wallen: Yeah, yeah. I think I said yes, it was a much smaller job, but it's much bigger now.

Lizzie Mintus: That's greatI want to hear about strategic partnerships that you've worked on throughout your career. What is the key? What is the secret sauce to building a foundation to build a strategic partnership and then continuing on to nourish that strategic partnership?

Mike Wallen: Well, that's a great question. If you and I put that book together, we're going to sell millions of copies.

Honestly, it's funny because probably three years ago, it was around December 1st, 2022, I think I got asked to make a list of our top 25 strategic partners that, you know, are strategic for the next year. And so I put this list together and I won't mention who was at the top of the list, but I mentioned who was at the top list for me.

And I got a bunch of pushback and they said, well, we're not doing very much work with them right now. What do you mean they're strategic partners? I said, exactly. They're one of the biggest gaming companies in the world. And we do almost no business with them. For us, it is strategic for us to be partners with them. And so it was really interesting that when people say strategic partnerships, a lot of times I'm, I always look to. What do you really mean by that? So I'll give you kind of, what Bertrand and I and John Hawk are seeing or what we all think about when we're talking about strategic partnerships.

For us, the key to strategic partnerships is mutual respect and mutual need. We have major partners that we do a significant amount of business with, but perhaps we aren't strategic to them. We're necessary to them, but we're not strategic. We have major partners that we are strategic with. That's where we spend a significant amount of time making certain that what they need from us, the kind of solution they need from us, we make certain that we understand everything about them that we can so that we understand what's driving their need. And so when the two of us respect each other, it was funny.

I was looking over the notes that I took in one of the talks recently and the term outsourcer was used a lot. Bertrand, our CEO, really is not a big fan of the term and neither am I. Not that it necessarily has a negative connotation, but it really doesn't define the relationship very well. I think he was ahead of his time. Chris Wren, the owner of the XDS Summit in Vancouver. I think Chris was ahead of his time when he started using the term external development. And maybe he wasn't the first person to use it, but he certainly has really put that out there into the universe and really given it a big spotlight. And when you start thinking about external development, you start thinking about extension development. You start thinking about partners that are an extension of your internal. When we think about strategic partnerships, that's how we think. We think about someone that's saying, how can you help us solve our problem?

Lizzie Mintus: Yes.

Mike Wallen: Keyword Keywords has the ability to solve most any problem in games. There's some, we can't, but we understand that I'm not saying we could solve everything. But for us, the most important thing is, how do we go about solving that for everyone? It's going to be a little bit different and we want to make certain that we meet our partners at their need and beyond. And so for us, it's having a structure of people that know how to. Really help diagnose what that need might be. We have a business development team that is paired up with a solutions architect. And I like to say, it's probably not nice to say, but I love having a business development person handcuffed, if you will, to a solutions architect, a subject matter expert.

Because when they sit down with a partner, that's where you really get tremendous value because you have this understanding and this business empathy, if you will, in sales matched up with this business intelligence in solutions architecture. And we can sit down and not only help to define solutions, we can help open up pathways to potential solutions to problems that weren't seen yet.

It's really popular to say being able to see around corners right now. I'm not certain we can't quite see around corners, but that's when you put those kinds of people together. And so that type of approach to servicing is what allows Keywords to be much more strategic and develop those partnerships by taking their problems that much more seriously, almost owning their problems as if they were our own.

Lizzie Mintus: Yeah. That makes sense. Same thing with recruiting, right? I want to work with a company that has a need, but thinks of me as an external partner. They don't have so many vendors. They're not like, oh, let me just go for the cheapest option, right? That's not really going to give you the quality that you need. So you want to find someone that sees what you do and values you.

Mike Wallen: Yeah. Look at your brand. You would absolutely not want the Here's Waldo brand tarnished by not doing a good job. You certainly wouldn't want it tarnished or you wouldn't want it disrespected by someone who said, Oh, you're just a recruiter. It's like, I'll help. But it's when somebody calls you up and said, Hey, I really need your help. What do you need from me? Used to be famous for saying, Andrew would say, we're arm and arm. We're shoulder to shoulder with you on the problem right there.

We're going to face it together.

Lizzie Mintus: Yeah.

Mike Wallen: Same with you. I can only imagine it because when you have a partner like that, you can almost anticipate what they're going to ask in the interview process. So you're so much more effective finding candidates for them. I'm sure.

Lizzie Mintus: It is. And then eventually when you get really deep in your partnership and you've worked together for a while, just like what you said, you anticipate their needs ahead of time. You're like, hey, I found this person and I know that you're going to have this based on your head count. And that's the most fulfilling when you can get to that level, but it takes some TLC.

Mike Wallen: It takes some TLC. It takes putting them ahead of yourself. Our CEO Bertrand is big in saying servant leadership, and there's a reason for it. You have to be willing to put your client's needs ahead of your own because that's the only way you're going to truly understand what they need.

Lizzie Mintus: Absolutely. Okay. I have one final question before I ask it, I want to point people to Keywordstudios.com. I love that you have a common thread in your career. You have people you hired that then you hired for and you've worked through throughout your career. But what person has made the biggest impact on your career? And is there a memorable piece of advice that they've given you?

Mike Wallen: Probably. It's a great question because it's been a long career. It's been a fun career, and it's been colorful. One person, probably, is our first CEO. Keywords. I can go back a little bit farther, but even in the recruiting days at least in the beginning, it was so individual. You know, you really were just surviving. But when I came to Keywords and I started working with Andrew, that was the first time I really saw what I can only imagine it's like to be a professional athlete. Now we weren't athletes like that. I'm probably on this athlete thing because I watched Michael Jordan's last dance just recently. And I loved watching how the team interacted with each other. I mean, absolute no filters, absolute no rules. Everything was just about what's going to be best for the team. It doesn't matter how I speak to you. It doesn't matter anything like that. Whatever is going to make us all better.

And when I first came to Keywords and I started working for Andrew, And I realized that this was a guy, that's all he wanted. He wanted Keywords to win. He just wanted Keywords to win because if Keywords won, everyone that worked with Keywords would win. We were all, the company had gone public. So everyone had stock. So if the stock did good, we did good. It was all great. And we were sitting at that booth at Sears in San Francisco. And again, it sounded cliche, but Andrew said, all I do is focus on the client. That's all I do. All I do is focus on the client because I can't get it wrong if I focus on the client. I mean, it was so simple and he actually said that. He says, all I do is focus on the client. I can't get it wrong if I focus on the client and I've taken that and I continue to take it. And the good news for me is that, Bertrand believes that John believes that, our board believes that. But I am very, very, very client centric and it's probably because a lot of the clients are old friends of mine now.

I talked to my daughters and I talked to them about their jobs and it means the same in their job. If you put your client first, if it's about them and in our industry, I don't know the number of times I've heard partners like Matt Booty, like Laura Stir at Amazon just set it at GDC. It has to be about the player. It has to be about the player. That's their client. That was probably seeing someone that so passionately believed in the concept of Keywords before it was Keywords, it was really easy to follow him. And having him said that, I think that we continue to take that legacy forward. So I would, I'd probably have to say that would be it.

Lizzie Mintus: Super inspiring. If you do look at all of the top companies, I mean, look at Amazon. Love them or hate them. It's always about the customer and they're always doing the right thing. They take my return after I'm too late for it. They do all these nice things for me. Someone answers right away. I can go to Whole Foods to drop off my return. Everything is just really easy and I am taken care of and I love it. And having worked in sales, I love to be taken care of and I, I will not not be taken care of. I mean, I really don't appreciate bad service anywhere I go. It's really important to me because it's not hard.

Like, hey, how are you doing? How's your day? Tell me about you. How can I help you?

Mike Wallen: That's the key. You're absolutely right. And you know, your Nordstrom background, your success with Here's Waldo, what you're talking about, it's not hard to care about someone else. It's that much more. But you gravitate to those places. You will pay a little more. You will drive a little farther. You will, you will, you will go to those places as opposed to, Oh, I'll go over here. It's cheaper, but they treat me like crap. I'm not going to do that.

Lizzie Mintus: That's really important. I love that. And I love to provide that to people. We've been talking to Mike Wallen, who's chief commercial officer at Keywords Studios. Mike, where can people go to work for Keywords, work with Keywords, find out more about you and Keywords.

Mike Wallen: I would recommend they go to Keywordstudios.com. We'll be at GamesCon. I'm hoping that they see this come out on LinkedIn through your posts. I follow those consistently so definitely keep an eye on this podcast because this is a great place to get your information, but Keywordstudios. com will give you a lot of information to get ahold of us.

Lizzie Mintus: Thank you, Mike.

Mike Wallen: Thank you so much, Lizzie. Have a great day.

Thanks so much for listening to the show this week. To catch all the latest from Here's Waldo, you can follow us on LinkedIn. Be sure to click subscribe to get future episodes. We'll see you next time.

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