With decades of experience scaling revenue, leading global sales teams, and advising companies from startup to public scale, Tom Venable brings a pragmatic, results-oriented perspective to MESA founders. His career spans SaaS, e-commerce, and advanced manufacturing, including executive leadership roles at publicly traded companies and work with major partners like Microsoft, HP, and P&G. Through his consulting practice, Sales MacGyver, Tom helps organizations rethink how they drive growth—often by doing more with what they already have.
Tell us a little about your background, Tom.
I was born and raised here in the Twin Cities. I went to school at the University of Minnesota and earned my degree in economics. Minnesota’s home to me, and that’s part of why I care about helping build strong companies in this region.
Professionally, I’ve spent four decades working with CEOs and business leaders to drive revenue growth and improve performance. My experience spans startups, private companies, and publicly traded organizations, with a focus on sales strategy, go-to-market execution, and scaling teams.
Earlier in my career, I held executive roles at several software and SaaS companies, including Digital River, where I led the effort to secure Microsoft as a major customer—ultimately driving a significant portion of the company’s revenue. Throughout my career, I’ve helped companies grow revenue, build high-performing sales organizations, and navigate complex global markets.
My philosophy working with clients is simple: the best results often come from thinking differently, staying scrappy, and making the most of the tools you already have.
Tell us about a time when someone’s advice made a big impact on how you approach business.
One piece of advice that stuck with me early on was to treat everyone like your customer.
That doesn’t just mean the people buying your product. It’s your colleagues, your partners, your team—anyone you interact with, really. If you approach every relationship with that mindset, you show up differently. You listen more closely, you communicate more clearly, and you take ownership of outcomes.
It also reinforced something I’ve seen repeatedly in business: success comes down to execution and relationships. You can have a great strategy, but if you’re not aligned with the people around you or you’re not delivering value in every interaction, it won’t translate into results.
How long have you been a MESA Mentor and what made you get involved?
I’ve been mentoring with MESA for about a year now. Aric Bandy, a MESA mentor and former client of mine, told me about the organization, and it sounded like a great way to pay it forward. Mentoring is a way to give back. The software industry has been very good to me. I’ve benefited from a lot of experience—both successes and mistakes—and mentoring is an opportunity to pass some of that along.
I was drawn to MESA because of its focus on helping founders build meaningful, scalable software businesses here in Minnesota. That’s important to me. There’s a good entrepreneurial base here, but a lot of tax and regulatory challenges, too. Building a company is incredibly hard, and having access to experienced operators for advice can make a real difference.
How would you describe your mentoring style, Tom?
On the personal side, part of my background includes close to 30 years of coaching youth and varsity high school football. In coaching, as in mentoring, there can be big things you need to work on, but sometimes it’s about making small adjustments.
So, what’s important to me is understanding what a mentee really needs. Just like I would approach my sales and customer relationships, I take a diagnostic approach. I want to understand the situation, identify where the opportunity or friction is, and then coach and support to the best outcome.
Mentoring is not about telling someone, “Here’s how you start a company.” My goal is to help founders think more clearly and make better decisions, not tell them what to do.
Where do early-stage founders tend to be overly optimistic—or underestimate complexity?
Entrepreneurs are excited about their product and don’t realize that not everyone will see it the same way they do. There’s often an assumption that once the product is ready, growth will automatically follow. So, they tend to underinvest in marketing, communications, and sales.
In reality, building a repeatable, scalable sales engine is one of the hardest parts of the business. Founders tend to underestimate how much structure and discipline it takes.
What should founders prioritize earlier than they typically do?
Identifying and building a repeatable go-to-market strategy should start much earlier. That means building your go-to-market strategy as you’re building the product. A big part of that is getting feedback, and honest feedback—not from friends and family, but from potential customers. This helps you get very clear on who your ideal customer is, what problem you’re solving for them, and how best to reach and convert them.
What do you think separates the startups that gain traction from those that stall?
I think product-market fit is incredibly important. That’s number one, and it’s really what we’ve been talking about. You don’t want to build a solution looking for a problem to solve. You want to deliver something that provides true value to a real-world need.
Number two is raising the right amount of capital without giving away too much personal equity—and that’s tricky calculus. Many times, startups will err too far to one side, thinking they can do this on their own and don’t need capital to grow, and that can have very personal, familial consequences. On the other hand, giving away too much can mean losing control to a venture capitalist or investor who wants to do things differently. It’s a delicate balance between raising capital to scale and an individual’s personal life and equity.
What motivates you to keep mentoring, Tom?
You know, I really love coaching and mentoring. I get great satisfaction out of watching people get better and grow. And I enjoy solving problems and helping people get unstuck. When you see a founder shift their thinking or make a decision that changes the trajectory of their business, that’s rewarding.
