In this episode of Sales Talk for CEOs, Alice Heiman talks with Gavi Wolf, CEO and Founder of IndieWalls, about how he scaled a creative business, turning an art marketplace into a commercial art consultancy serving major brands. Gavi discusses founder‑led sales, when and how he realized it was time to build a sales leadership function, and the hard lesson about motivating and compensating a high‑performing sales team.
Action Items for CEOs & Founders:
- Reflect on your sales origin story: are you still doing the selling when you should be building?
- Audit your compensation plan: does your sales team see a clear path to making meaningful income?
- Ask: “Who will lead sales in 12 months?” and build the candidate profile now.
- Design one memorable, brand‑aligned experience for your top prospects that speaks to your culture and differentiates you.
Watch below or on our YouTube channel
Rapid‑fire picks
Book: Unreasonable Hospitality by Will Guidara.
Podcast: Freakonomics with Stephen Dubner.
CEO Advice: If you want top sales talent, they need to see a clear path to earning real money. Show them others are winning, give them a comp plan they can believe in and the right people will come and perform.
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Transcript
Alice Heiman: Welcome to Sales Talk for CEOs. Today, I’m gonna talk with a CEO of a very innovative company, but maybe not innovative in the way you are typically thinking of when you hear that word. But you know how some buildings, some spaces—outdoor or indoor, some places—just have these really magical qualities?
They kind of just suck you in and you feel different there, right? You feel like you belong. You feel like the environment is really just more collaborative and full of energy, and it’s because of the art in the space. A lot of people don’t realize that, but having art indoors or outdoors in our spaces can make us feel differently.
And it’s really so much more important than just, “Oh, we gotta cover the walls with something.” It’s really about bringing people in, engaging them, making them think differently, more collaboratively, and getting new ideas. So this is what the CEO of this company, Indie Walls, that I’m interviewing today is gonna talk to us about—how they built this innovative company, how they make art work in the world, and how they started this company.
So welcome to the show, Gavi.
Gavi Wolf: Thanks, Alice. I’m excited to be here.
Alice Heiman: Alright, well, let’s just take a minute because I probably didn’t perfectly explain what Indie Walls does, but why don’t you tell everyone what Indie Walls does, who they do it for, and what the kind of results that brings us?
Gavi Wolf: Totally. So Indie Walls is traditionally called a commercial art consultancy, so that really means that we help all different types of commercial buyers purchase the artwork for their spaces.
And we really like to think of ourselves as kind of the nexus of a triumvirate. There’s artists—the creatives—there’s businesses, and then there’s a physical thing coming out of that. And that could be lots of different things. It could be an original piece of work (I’m showing some behind me), a printed piece of work that is framed.
It could be a large hanging sculptural installation, and we do that for all different types of clients. We do that for LinkedIn, for Amazon, for Hilton Hotels, for Virgin Voyages—all different types, all different types of artwork. But if there’s an artist involved and a business involved and something physical is coming out of it, we want to be there to help.
Alice Heiman: Now, I have been lucky enough to see some of your projects in person, but of course everyone should follow Indie Walls ’cause they’re always posting the most amazing projects that they’ve done, I think. But you literally transform environments. And I just want to stay on this for a minute and talk about how you did that.
Right. And a lot of these are built from scratch, so maybe easier in that respect, but there’s many that you absolutely reform, right, and reshape and bring into this amazing space that they end up having. And so, I just want to have you tell everybody a little bit about that, ’cause it truly is such an interesting process.
Gavi Wolf: Hmm. Yeah. I mean, a lot of times—we say this often—it could be with a new property or a renovated property. You bring on an architect and an interior designer, and you spend a tremendous amount of money getting them involved and helping them come up with a narrative, and there’s a sense of place. Maybe you’re taking over an old paper mill and reconstructing it and making it into a hotel, and so there’s all this historical information. Or maybe it’s in a very—you know, we did a hotel a little while ago. It was on the corner of 24th Street and Seventh. The theme was 24/7—being up 24/7 in New York City. So you come up with this whole theme and concept, and you try and pull that through in the design of the space, but it’s sometimes hard to really get that through the carpets or the wall vinyls or the lighting.
But then you pull artwork into it. And the artwork tells the story in a very literal way. So in the 24/7 property, they had all different nods in terms of clocks and calendars. They also got a little bit cheeky and put in a lot of pills—the idea of kind of staying up all night and what you would have to do to do that in New York City—and kind of how you tell that story through the artwork.
And it’s really bringing in these creatives who have concepts and ideas, pulling that through the whole narrative that you’ve already put so much effort, energy into through the artwork.
Alice Heiman: Yeah. You walk into that world and feel that world, right, versus just walking into a lobby. It’s like, “Oh, this is called 24/7,” but then there’s nothing else that really intrigues me here.
Instead, you walk into the world of 24/7 and you’re instantly engaged in it, right?
Gavi Wolf: Totally.
Alice Heiman: And you feel like a part of it, and that’s just such a different feeling. And I know what you did on campuses like LinkedIn and Amazon too is made spaces where people want to—they want to be in those spaces, they want to hang out, they want to mingle, they want to meet people there.
“Oh hey, meet me in the lobby with the big, beautiful tapestry. I’ll see you there,” you know, and they refer to the art that way. And I think sometimes we overlook the power of art, you know, to really bring people together and make them have a feeling of belonging, right, in that space.
Gavi Wolf: Totally. Yeah. I mean, I would say Amazon’s a great example. We actually did the artwork for—they took over the old Lord & Taylor Building in New York City. So it was an old, you know, textile-type of property and we created what’s called the Birdcage. And it’s this space where people can sit and congregate.
And it’s wrapped in these incredible hand-woven giant ropes. They’re like fishing-type rope, or boating-type rope, I should say. And the rope is meant to be a nod to both being Lord & Taylor building, but it’s also supposed to look like ethernet cable. And so that combination of tech and textiles and bringing those two stories together—and there’s often, people might think, well, not everybody knows that story. It’s written up in different places, but Walt Disney used to say, people can feel perfection. And so even if they don’t see it exactly all the time, the fact that it surrounds them, like you were saying, they enter into a space and it’s all about that, it’s all about that story. It just feels more engaging. It’s why people like being in really beautiful places, even without knowing exactly why it is.
Alice Heiman: Yeah. All right. One more story before I take you back to the beginning when you founded this company, but your company worked on a project in my town, which was amazing—our renowned hospital. Yes. And I got to have a complete tour of that where, you know, just amazing installation. Right. So thinking about especially the children’s unit, how to weave the art into everything. So it was not just on the walls, but in the walls and in spaces, and made in a way that would just bring joy in a place where there isn’t a lot of joy sometimes, right?
Yes. Defining these little spaces with these different art forms there for the kids and the parents and the nurses, right—for everyone to enjoy. That was a real treat. So I might have to put those pictures up again now that I’m saying that so I can share. But that was really fun to have a project right in my own backyard that I got to go see while I was working with your company.
That was really fun. Yeah. Alright, so Gavi, let’s talk about—okay, two crazy guys have this idea to do an art company. Like, are you an artist? How did this start?
Gavi Wolf: Yeah, so I would say I’m more of an entrepreneur than an artist. I did have a darkroom in my basement when I was a kid, and I liked the sort of maker part, the sort of chemistry part, of artwork.
So that was part of where my head was at. But in reality, the way that the company started was different. I saw artwork in a cafe on campus, and I really liked it. This woman—actually Alice as well—her name was Alice Malbeck. That was the artist and the artwork’s really beautiful. I could not buy the artwork though because she wanted me to give her cash and I don’t think I could take out enough money out of an ATM at that point.
She didn’t take credit card. I was like, I don’t have a checkbook, so I couldn’t buy it. And I thought, oh, it’d be cool if we could bring all of this online and kind of become a network for artists and coffee shops and cafes to come together and put the artwork up for sale and have it all be online and people could snap a QR code and buy the artwork out of those spaces.
So that was the original idea, and I called up my friend Ari, who’s great at selling and getting in front of people. And I was like, how about we build out this company together? I’ll build out the operations, you’ll do the selling, get the cafes, get the artists, move that forward. And he said, great. He was kind of down for anything.
So we started building that out. I think we got into like 35—
Alice Heiman: You were still in college now, right? The two of you?
Gavi Wolf: I was still in college, yeah.
Gavi Wolf: Yes, I—he had graduated from undergrad, was doing his masters, so he was a little more flexible with time. I graduated a little early actually from college. So I graduated a semester early, but stayed on campus and started it just during that process.
And we started rolling with that and we were off and on again. At the beginning I wasn’t so sure if it’s what I wanted to do, but then things started to move a little bit better. I thought they did at the time—they didn’t. But really, artwork does not sell out of coffee shops at all. It’s not a good business. Don’t do it. But we started to realize there was more of an opportunity in commercial spaces and in hotels. They started coming to us, and that was really where we realized the money and opportunity was.
Alice Heiman: Okay, interesting. So you said they started coming to us, because I always want to know where did you get your first clients? How did that work, right? And, you know, founder-led sales, the two of you were the ones doing everything, right?
Gavi Wolf: Yes.
Alice Heiman: So, how did they find you? How did they come to you, your first customers?
Gavi Wolf: Yeah, so, okay, so the first customers, when we were in the cafe and putting work up, we had a couple of crazy people who bought artwork off of the walls without speaking to anybody.
We had one $5,000 artwork that somebody snapped QR code, put a credit card in and purchased, and we drove it to her house in a minivan. That never happened except for that one time. But we did the Andaz on Fifth Avenue, actually, in New York. My business partner would go around, was trying to speak to everybody, and he was like, “Can I put artwork up for sale in your public space, and do you want to rent it? Do you want to sell it?” They were like, “We don’t want to do either of those things, but we have $30,000 for the suites in our hotel for photography there. Can you figure that out?” And we said, “Whatever you want us to do for $30,000, we will do.” So that was kind of how that began—that realization that, oh, there was this opportunity, and that was kind of the first real customer who was willing to pay us for the artwork, a decent amount of money. And so then we started realizing, okay, hotels need artwork.
Alice Heiman: So it was an actual hotel and he literally just walked in there and said, “Can I put some art on your walls?” And they were like, “No, but we need some art in our rooms.”
Gavi Wolf: Yes. Well, one of the greatest stories, I would say: he was very good at that type of thing and he went to—at the time it was called the Trump Soho. They have changed the name at this point, but the Trump Soho—Ari biked over there. He would bike around town just looking for places to go to for artwork. He lived in Manhattan and so he was biking around.
He had tried to get in touch with the general manager of the Trump Soho, and they would not—he wouldn’t respond to him, so he biked over, locked his bike up, like in the elevator, in the—the land—whatever, some spot near the hotel, went in, said, “Can I speak to the general manager?” They said, “No.” Okay. He walked out, and some guy came over to him and was like, “You can’t lock your bike here.” Now, if that had been me at the time, I would’ve been so freaked out. I would’ve been like, I’m so sorry I locked the bike; and a client—they’re annoyed. But he recognized the person as the general manager who was yelling at him not to put the bike there.
And he’s like, “Are you the general manager here?” And the guy’s like, “Yeah.” And we actually got artwork into the Trump Soho from that interaction. So just really always trying to figure out a way to get in and kind of engage with people.
Alice Heiman: Oh my gosh, I love it. All right, so those first ones—somebody just happened to buy a piece of art off the wall, okay, never happened again. And then Ari just went around talking to people and figuring out what they needed. Because, I mean, so entrepreneurial, like, we want to put art in your—oh, you don’t want that? Okay, we’ll do this and figure out what people need. I love it. All right, so then, you know, the business grew. You know, how did you get a consistent flow of leads and, you know, who was buying from you?
Gavi Wolf: Yeah. So I would say at the beginning it was—we tried to bring on other salespeople, but really it was primarily just a founder-led sales situation, which was great in the sense that Ari was very good at selling. Was harder in the sense that really he was the only person who could sell. He kind of ran the sales team, which was somewhat of a struggle.
So we really focused on that. He built it up, though, at the beginning, really like networking, I would say. I didn’t fully comprehend this at the beginning until I started taking over, but trade shows were just a tremendous, uh, driver of pipeline for us. Go to a trade show, meet some people, talk to them, build further relationships year after year, and did a lot more of that.
And at the beginning it was just hotels trying to get—do the guest rooms, the public spaces. There’s a huge network of designers who design hotels and hotel owners and the brands. They’re all franchises. So you’re connecting with the brand managers and they’re feeding you to different properties. And so at the beginning it was really just building up that pipeline and that network.
And it was, you know, kind of a classic—the founder is the person who sells, and that’s kind of how it happens at the beginning.
Alice Heiman: Yeah. And remind me, what year did you guys start the company?
Gavi Wolf: So we started in 2011. And it was really building up from there. It took a while to kind of figure out that we needed to—I mean, it took probably two years before we even realized we were not doing the selling artwork out of cafes, and we were not renting artwork. We were actually selling it to the properties.
And then it took, you know, several more years before we really had a good client base through these sort of sales channels.
Alice Heiman: Yeah. So where was the point where you were like, okay, look, the two of us cannot do everything anymore. We’re gonna have to start to hire some people. And I’m sure you wanted to hire salespeople. So kind of talk about how you started building your team and especially the sales team.
Gavi Wolf: Yeah, so actually for a while I thought we were going to build a tech—we were a tech platform at first, and we had this matching method, kind of algorithm, kind of like Spotify for artwork.
And you’d do the open calls and there was a whole methodology to it, and I thought that would really get customers. We actually had an investor who was like, “Just hire a sales team.” And I was like, “No, we don’t need a sales team. Like, if it’s a great product, people will just use it and they’ll keep coming back to it.”
I was definitely wrong. We needed a really good sales team and, but still we were doing a good enough job that we were able to get more and more customers. Really, the thing that transitioned us was kind of a—we were forced in that my co-founder, Ari, decided to move abroad, and when he decided to move abroad, I realized, okay, we need to reconfigure this whole thing.
I was like, “You can’t do sales from abroad. We need to figure out how we’re gonna run this thing.” And I knew I could do a bunch of the selling. I was comfortable doing selling and figuring it out, but the thing about him—he was incredibly good at selling—he didn’t exactly know how to build out a sales organization, and I think I was not nearly as good at selling, but understood much more deeply what it meant to build out the people to build a sales organization.
So I think that was a very painful learning lesson, but also a blessing in disguise, in that it forced us to say—it forced me to say, okay, I need to go find more salespeople that we trust. And listen, we hired a bunch of people. I had a lot, a bunch of—over time, you know, different people were like, okay, this is not working, this is working.
And finally, we figured out, okay, what type of people really do well selling this type of product and how do they do it well? And that was sort of the evolution over the years.
Alice Heiman: Yeah. And there was a point too, not too long ago where Ari couldn’t really run sales from afar—he couldn’t do sales from afar, but he also couldn’t even run sales from afar.
And all of a sudden, this is where I came into the picture and met you, it’s like, oh, I have to be the sales leader now.
Gavi Wolf: Yes.
Alice Heiman: And, of course, you hadn’t been—you’d been doing sales with Ari, right, in conjunction, but not leading a sales team and certainly not completely in charge of sales. Oh my gosh. Now I’m the one who has to drive revenue for this company, right?
Gavi Wolf: Yes.
Alice Heiman: So tell us, that was what, like a couple of years ago—how long ago was that now? Maybe three?
Gavi Wolf: Yeah, I think that was about three years ago. And yeah, and I got in touch with you, Alice, during that transitional moment, and you were really instrumental in kind of helping me along in that process, in that transitional moment of me really just trying to figure out one, yes, what does it mean to personally sell, to be out there, then two, what does it mean to coach a sales team and to build a sales organization?
And even for the sales team, they were trying to figure out, okay, there’s this person who wasn’t selling, who’s now my new manager and we’re trying to figure this thing out. And I think at first they were nervous about it, but then over time, between myself, between coaches like yourself—I have a professional coach as well who I work with—I really figured out what this meant and how to do it well.
And yeah, that was about three years ago, and it’s, you know, I would say we hit a peak right towards the end of Ari’s tenure at the company. And then when he left, things slowed down quite tremendously. And now we’re back up to beyond where we were back then.
Alice Heiman: Yeah, amazing. I mean, you guys have done such a good job, and watching you become a sales leader was awesome. But also you realizing, hey, I’m a CEO now too and I have another job to do. I need a sales leader. And talking through that with you and the thinking around it, and you found somebody really fantastic.
So let’s talk about—because a lot of people struggle to find good sales leaders, right? That’s just a problem every CEO—from the beginning when they’re first trying to get their very first sales leader to 20 years later. It’s tough.
So let’s talk about how you found—first of all, you said, “Okay, I’m ready. We need to hire a sales leader.” What was that like? And then how you found this person?
Gavi Wolf: Yeah, so I definitely realized I couldn’t be the one leading the sales team and managing the company. My job is really find good people, figure out where we’re going, and spend the most time with the most important customers.
Those are my three things that I focus on. Managing a sales team is very distracting. They’re amazing and have lots of personalities, so it’s always—it’s a lot of time and energy. So I knew I needed somebody in the role, but I also knew from early on, somebody who’s incredible at sales is not the best sales leader because I knew that from Ari.
He was probably the most gifted salesperson I’ve ever worked with, but struggled with leading the sales team. And so I knew the best salespeople on our team should not be the sales leaders. And it actually happened to be that our HR manager—we hired somebody new—she understood our industry very deeply.
She worked in it for a long time. Incredibly capable and smart, and she came in in a different role, but our HR manager was like, “You know, I think that Natalie might be your director of sales.” And I was like, “Oh, interesting.” So she went along for a little while, maybe she was with us for like a year, and I realized this person really knew—the most important thing was she understood our customers incredibly deeply and knew what our customers really needed and knew how to interact with them.
And she had enough charisma and confidence to be able to move a sales team in the right direction. But she could listen to a conversation and say, “This is how you should have handled this differently. This is how you should be speaking about it. This is how you should engage with the customer.” Good at creating territory plans, good at creating structure.
So that was really what we needed.
Alice Heiman: She was very process oriented because of the type of work she was already doing, right?
Gavi Wolf: Yes.
Alice Heiman: And truly, sales leadership is project management. I mean, you are managing these people to get these projects done, which are called sales, you know?
Gavi Wolf: Yes, yes, totally. A hundred percent. And you know, it’s funny, you actually introduced us to territory planning, which we still use today. The team does their territory plan every quarter, it’s great. We use a very similar structure to what you set us up with. And yeah, it is really holding people accountable, having a really good intuition of what they need, and knowing what’s going to work, and pushing them, constantly pushing them towards what they need to focus on, what they don’t.
Because salespeople are a little bit like entrepreneurs—they’re like myself—always looking at this shiny thing and that shiny thing and excited about the next thing. They’re all over the place. So you need somebody who’s very clear-minded to focus them all the time.
Alice Heiman: That is so true, and especially I think in your industry because it is a shiny-object industry.
There’s so many cool things all the time, right? And so many great artists you can talk to and you could do a this and you could do a that, right?
Gavi Wolf: Totally.
Alice Heiman: So I completely get it. And your salespeople are—they’re highly creative.
Gavi Wolf: Totally.
Alice Heiman: Because of the industry, not like so much in tech. We don’t have that high creativity as much running as your salespeople do, and I think it’s fascinating, because I guess it’s like a salesperson who also has to have some engineering knowledge, right?
Your salespeople absolutely have to love art, you know, understand art, and understand the bigger picture of art and what art does to an environment to really be able to sell. And also, interestingly, people might not know this, but it’s an extremely complex sale—what you do—because, as you mentioned earlier, there’s a lot of people involved in this.
There’s artists, there’s people who own the buildings, there’s people who manage the buildings, whether they’re commercial buildings or hospitality, right? Then there’s, so there’s owners and property managers and the artists and the designers, right?
Gavi Wolf: Yes. Brands, yeah.
Alice Heiman: As a salesperson, you have to have relationships with all of these people.
Gavi Wolf: Yeah.
Alice Heiman: And you have to orchestrate them all coming together to make a decision. And the brands, right? So if you’re a Marriott brand, for example, you know, the brand’s not going to dictate exactly what you have to do, but they’re giving you guidelines you better follow or you won’t be part of their brand anymore.
So just so many elements there, making it complex, and it’s really fun to watch. But some of these deals can take a really long time.
Gavi Wolf: Yes, yes. The deals can take a very long time. It is very complex. We actually, for a little while, had tried out independent reps. So for people that don’t know, an independent rep is somebody who is not employed by us. They just rep multiple different things. They’ll rep a carpet line and a furniture line and a tile line, and they’ll rep an art line as well.
So they’re not fully committed to you, but you don’t have to pay them salary. You just pay them commission, which seems amazing in theory. It really does not work, particularly because of how complex of a sale it was. And like you said, I’ve realized that the people that we hire need to have a really deep understanding of who we are, what we do, how to do it well.
They also need to be passionate about the arts. One of our—the salespeople on our team was previously a curator on our team, and I could just tell she had a lot of charisma. People really engaged with her well, and she’s been an incredible salesperson.
Alice Heiman: Yeah. So much passion around the art, but around the selling too, right? It’s like she’s really delivering something these people need, and I love that.
One of the other things that your team does, and because it is a complex, long sales cycle, right? This relationship building is so important, ’cause you’ve got to stay with these people for a long time until their next project, right? And especially with the designers, right? You’ve got to stay with those designers and get to know them and be there when they need you, right?
And so because of that, your lead generation is super interesting and what I love about your lead generation is that it’s so creative. And I’m constantly telling my clients, be more creative in your lead generation. Cold outreach is just not very creative and it’s not doing the trick. So like, why do it anymore? There are so many other things, but I want you to share some of the things you do for lead generation.
You mentioned trade shows, and of course your trade shows are a lot more fun because they’re art and fun stuff, but some of the really creative things you’ve done to really stay in front of the right people so that when they’re ready to buy, they remember you.
Gavi Wolf: Yes. Okay. I’ll speak about two recent ones that are two of my favorites. So again, we—the people that we are engaging with—are highly creative and they’re interior designers. They’re constantly coming after them. My wife is in tech and she works in marketing and in sales. The people that they’re selling to do not have super high expectations from a creative standpoint.
For us, people are like, you can’t take me out to any restaurant except for these five new restaurants that are recently designed and very cool. So we have to be very creative. One thing that I did that was fun is, most of our clients are in New York City, in the tri-state area. We have clients all over the country, but more in New York City. I live in New Jersey, so I was like, the clients that I know that live in New Jersey, we’re gonna do a hangout in my backyard.
So I hired a private chef. It was a barbecue. I told ’em to bring their family members and their kids—just five of our clients. But they brought their families, and they all came. My family was there. There was incredible food, ’cause again, it was a private chef. He did everything and choreographed the music, figured out exactly what everything was gonna be, brought in plants—really made it like an elevated sort of restaurant-level experience, but at home with people’s families. And I think that people loved it. They loved it personally. They loved it on social media. It was just a very warm way to bring people in and really creating that hospitality that they look to design, I’m trying to reflect back to them. I know what great hospitality and great design is, and that’s why I can do a really good job on your project. I know that level and how—
Alice Heiman: Yes, because you’re showing them that you really know them, the hospitality business. I’m not going to tell you about it.
I’m just going to show you with my actions that I understand hospitality. I love that. And I saw those pictures when you posted them. I was so jealous.
Gavi Wolf: Yes. My other favorite one—so there’s a big trade show that happens in New York. And it’s hard for us to do a booth because we don’t have a product per se that we’re selling.
We sell the ability to find the right artist, so we don’t love to put up artwork at the trade show. Instead, we host an event just before the trade show. The trade show starts in the afternoon on a Sunday, so we host a breakfast in the morning, and we actually follow up with people in advance—the customers we want—we’ll do it like 60 people, and we ask them for their shoe size and a design for a shoe that they’d really like.
And then we do something called Art and Sole. And so they come to the breakfast in advance, they get to eat, drink a little bit, and we set up all these racks, these beautiful canvas bags; we put their shoes—there’s kind of an unveiling—and they put the shoes on in the location.
And then they walk to the show with their new shoes on that are made by a custom artist, and it’s really such a fun, engaging experience. And they walk the whole show with these custom-designed Nike Air Force Ones. Everybody’s like, “Oh, where’d you get those shoes?” And they’re like, “Oh, I got them with Indie Walls.” And so it markets to them individually, they feel special. It’s amazing at the show ’cause they’re talking about it, and it speaks really to that creativity. And we do numerous different things while we’re there to kind of enhance that idea of creativity and thinking creatively.
Alice Heiman: Yeah. I mean, who doesn’t want to come to a breakfast with food and beverage and creative sneakers, right?
Gavi Wolf: Yeah, exactly. That are custom made for you in advance. The artist who did them is there painting shoes on site. It’s just a very, again, a very, very creative experience. Not my idea—team members’ ideas—but yeah.
Alice Heiman: And I’m sure if they went the year before, they want to come again, right?
Gavi Wolf: Yes.
Alice Heiman: And that’s exactly what you want! These people can and will buy from you, and they’re experiencing this with you, which I think just really makes the bond stronger because they’re like, “Oh, these people believe what we believe. They’re fun, they’re interested, they know what we want, and they engage us. We want to do business with them.”
And if they’re like this before we do business with them, they’ll probably be like this while we’re doing business with them.
Gavi Wolf: Yes, exactly.
Alice Heiman: Yeah. Oh my gosh. Well, so much fun. So here you are now, CEO, and you have a head of sales. And how many salespeople do you have now?
Gavi Wolf: We have four. Looking for a fifth, but four right now. Four plus sales leader.
Alice Heiman: Okay. Very good. And sales are up again, you said—back to, yeah, that’s just wonderful. Love to hear that.
Well, gosh, I—before we wrap up, just want to ask you a couple of more questions, but I so appreciate your time in sharing your stories. And I think people think, well, it’s easy to be creative when you’re in a creative business like art, but I think everyone can be creative. But you do have to stretch yourself a little and think about it. But all of you out there who want more creative ideas, just follow Gavi because he posts the stuff all the time, plus the beautiful artwork that they install in these, you know, commercial facilities as well as in the hotels, so—very good.
Alright, so three questions, Gavi, really quick. And the first one is, what’s a book that you think every CEO should read?
Gavi Wolf: Hmm. So one of my favorite books is Unreasonable Hospitality, by Will Guidara. And I love it. One of our core values is Make it Magical. We came up with that after reading the book, and it speaks to this same idea—the idea of going totally above and beyond for people. And people so appreciate it. If you remember something about them—somebody has a kid—we don’t just send them a gift, but we send them something that’s very art-related, you know, a custom child’s book from an artist that we know.
And just trying to be really, really thoughtful all the time about who people are and what they do. And that’s really what the book Unreasonable Hospitality is all about.
Alice Heiman: You know what, I got to see Will Guidara in September in DC. I was at a conference with Pavilion, and he spoke and I was just like mesmerized by him. He’s a very good speaker as well, and the book is fantastic so I do recommend everyone to read it. But it’s so funny because one of my very best friends in the whole wide world—one of her good friends is best friends with Will Guidara. And I knew she knew him, and I’m texting her—she’s a James Beard Award-winning chef—I’m like, “I’m watching Will Guidara.” She’s like, “Oh my gosh, tell him I said hi, and I’m with another friend and—get a picture and send it to us.” And so it was so fun because when I walked up to him afterwards, it was like, “Oh, you know my friends Jennifer Bushman and blah, blah, blah.” And he’s like, “Oh my gosh.” It was like big hug, it was like we already knew each other, right?
Gavi Wolf: Yes, yes, yes.
Alice Heiman: So that was super fun. But anyway, a little side story there.
Gavi Wolf: No, he’s special.
Alice Heiman: Yeah, very special. Next one is, what’s a podcast you listen to because it makes you think differently?
Gavi Wolf: Yeah. Been one of my favorite podcasts forever—basically, I think it was what got me into listening to podcasts—Freakonomics, with Stephen Dubner, and I actually just got to see him in person this past week. And I actually got to be on—they have like a sister podcast called Economics of Everyday Things, and I got to be on that. They did one on art and hotels.
Just a podcast that I think is very—that’s the whole book of Freakonomics, just trying to think about things from a different perspective and a different angle, and things are not often what they seem, and I think that’s often true. Things are not what they seem.
Alice Heiman: Yeah, I do love that one as well. Alright, and last one is, what does every CEO need to know to win in this market?
Gavi Wolf: I think for a long time we tried to either not pay sales commissions or tried to find really kind of newbie salespeople. And what we realized over time was what you really want is you want your sales team to see that they can make money, and you want to be able to hire a sales team that is hungry for that and sees the path for that.
So I even have a friend, and I’m always like, you need to hire a sales team that has a commission structure, and that commission structure can make them a lot of money if they do an incredibly good job. And once people start to see that—once a sales team sees that and they can see, oh, this other person on your team is making X amount, I could make that much—that’s what gets the absolute best people, and that’s really a flywheel. And so I think that was something that took me a long time to realize, and maybe it’s obvious to most other people, but to me that is critical: finding amazing people because they know that they can be really successful in working with you.
Alice Heiman: I think that is so true—setting them up for success. And that does require you to have a compensation plan that they can easily understand
Gavi Wolf: Yes.
Alice Heiman: And make money, right, doing it.
Gavi Wolf: Yes.
Alice Heiman: But I think it’s also what you were saying is, get seasoned people who know what they’re doing and come to you because they see you’ve set them up for success and they’ll be able to make a good living, right?
Gavi Wolf: Yes.
Alice Heiman: Because yeah, love young people and maybe they can learn on some other different sales, but we have to think about our customer and who they are and who they want to interface with.
Gavi Wolf: Yes.
Alice Heiman: And they need somebody who has the passion and the drive and the knowledge, right?
Gavi Wolf: Yes.
Alice Heiman: To help them, not somebody who’s just there to sell them something.
Gavi Wolf: Totally. And listen, not to say that we never hire people who are new at selling—that’s, we’ve definitely done that before and there have been successes there, but you just have to have something that—even new people, if they’re really good, they want to know that they can win. That’s right. You have to set them up for success in that regard.
Alice Heiman: Absolutely. Well, gosh, thank you so much. So fun to talk with you. Always so fun to follow you and see what your company’s doing—the amazing art that you have placed all over the country. I just love it when I go to a hotel that I know Indie Walls did the art and the installation and everything, and it’s like, oh, I like to take a picture and, you know, send it.
Because it’s really fun to know that you did that, and so many beautiful hotels that you’ve done around the country. So thank you so much.
Gavi Wolf: Thanks, Alice. I really appreciate it. Thanks for having me on the podcast. It’s a blast. You’re amazing. I’ve always appreciated working with you, and I appreciate being here.
Alice Heiman: Thank you.
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