Clay, RevOps, and building with community
From Consulting to Chaos
Some careers look linear, but Pawel Nical’s wasn’t. He started in the structured world of BCG, where slides are clean and problems follow frameworks. The real shift happened when he jumped into a fast growing scaleup and met the messy reality of revenue operations before the term even existed. Fifty sellers, twelve regions, no systems, no alignment, and nobody connecting the dots. So he became the person who did.
Accidentally Becoming a RevOps Leader
When Pawel moved to a smaller seed stage SaaS company, he found the perfect environment to build something from scratch. Four salespeople, four marketers, zero infrastructure. He built the early engine, called it growth management, and only later realized it was full stack RevOps. Over the next years he built the team to nine people, supported multiple funding rounds, and helped the company grow into a four hundred person business that was eventually acquired.
The Leap Into Solopreneurship
Most people stay after an exit. Pawel left. He felt he could help more than one company at a time and wanted the freedom to work closer to strategy. But the first year was brutal. No recurring revenue. No brand. No predictable pipeline. He tried advisory, tried running a lead gen agency, shut it down, pivoted repeatedly and seriously considered going back to a job. What saved him was something very simple. He stayed in the game long enough.
What Clicked
Slowly his network started to recognize him. His content began to resonate. Inbound requests arrived. And the Clay community he launched in Warsaw began to explode. Suddenly he wasn’t a struggling advisor. He was the guy founders called when their revenue engine broke down. His business scaled past thirty thousand dollars a month, powered by reputation instead of outbound grind.
The Way He Explains RevOps
Pawel has a talent for stripping complex ideas down to their core. His definition of RevOps is almost deceptively simple. It connects strategy to execution. That’s the job. It aligns sales, marketing and customer success. It builds the systems, processes, data and workflows that allow a company to grow intentionally instead of accidentally. He keeps repeating one warning. If you bury RevOps under sales or marketing, you kill its purpose. The mission is to break silos, not reinforce them.
Why Founders Need RevOps Early
Founders often think RevOps is something they’ll “get to later”. Pawel argues the opposite. Early RevOps thinking saves you years of pain. It forces you to understand your ICP instead of chasing everyone. It keeps your customer journey connected instead of fractured across three teams. It prevents the classic mistake where growth becomes a series of random tactics instead of a coordinated system. RevOps isn’t about hiring a big team. It’s a mindset the founder needs long before they hire anyone.
The Birth of the RevTech Accelerator
After helping dozens of companies, Pawel noticed a gap. There were accelerators for product builders, but nothing for the people operating revenue. Nothing for RevOps pros, go to market operators, or solo advisors trying to level up. So he built one. A hybrid of one to one mentorship, a small peer group, workflow building, and access to top tools like Clay, Heyreach and Twain. Limited seats, high touch, intentionally personal. More dojo than classroom.
Building Community Through Clay
His work around Clay is a story of its own. Clay Club Warsaw started as twenty five people in a small room and is now one of the most active GTM communities in Europe. The events attract operators from across the region, and the format creates the kind of conversations that don’t happen in big conferences. Pawel says it shaped him as much as any job. It gave him direction, confidence and a clearer idea of the kind of leader he wants to be.
The Philosophy Behind it All
What Pawel teaches mirrors the path he took. Build systems before you scale. Align teams early. Stop guessing your ICP. Think about the entire customer journey, not just acquisition. Treat RevOps as a strategic engine, not an operational patch. And no matter how rough the early months are, stay in the game long enough for the compounding effects to kick in.
He still calls his journey early. But the truth is simple. Pawel Nical has quietly become one of the operators defining how European SaaS companies grow. And the next wave of RevOps leaders will likely come from the rooms he is building now.
