20 - Scaling Through Uncertainty: How Brandon Spear Built Adaptable Companies in Uncertain Times

Did you feel comfortable in the direction or leadership enough to embrace the uncertainty? I got asked that question a lot by my parents, saying, what exactly are you thinking? I'd seen it firsthand, albeit pre World Wide Web, using tools like Veronica and Archie, things that people don't remember. You have to be maniacal about customer feedback and listening to it. Like you really have to hear what your customers are telling you. If you know there's an exit coming and you're likely to be bought by a strategic buyer, particularly if they're public, you're probably not prepared. I'm super excited to welcome today's guest, Brandon Spear, to the show. Brandon's career spans three decades, four continents, and multiple successful exits. He was there at the founding of the first commercial Internet service provider in South Africa. And he spent nearly a decade at Quadrum, where he turned around a struggling African startup to get to a 211% CAGR before helping sell the company. And. And for the past 11 years, he's been leading Trevipay, first as COO and then President and now CEO. During his time with the company, Trevipay has doubled in size, it's built a global leadership team, and most recently was carved out from World Fuel Services by private equity firm Corsair Capital. Throughout his career, Brandon has led Global teams of 550 plus people across emerging markets, navigated to the 2008 financial crisis, and he's been through multiple acquisitions on both sides of the table. I'm super excited to welcome Brandon to the pod. Brandon, welcome to the show. Thanks for having me, Jeff. It's good to be here. Awesome. So I wanted to start early on in your career, you were involved in a few different early stage high risk ventures. What drew you to that style of business early on in your career? You know, I got asked that question actually a lot, a lot by my parents at the time saying, what exactly are you thinking? What are you doing? And so a lot of it had to do with the individuals that were starting the businesses in that situation. It happened to be people I'd gone to university with and done engineering with and had always admired and always thought that they were going to be successful no matter what they did. And so a lot of it was about the people and just kind of taking the view that these individuals were super smart and that there was something to do, they were going to figure it out. So a lot of it was less about perhaps the opportunity or the space, but more the people. People, yeah. And what were those things? When you think back to the qualitative aspects of these leaders, what were those things that really inspired you or give you confidence that we don't know where I'm going, but I have confidence that I'm following in the right footsteps? Yeah, they were just very driven and very capable of articulating a message and being really clear. Back then, I really had no idea about. And sometimes it's really useful when you're younger. Right. You don't know what you don't know because you can kind of see all the pitfalls and all the potential blocks in the road. But these individuals were just very smart, very articulate, really good leaders, really passionate about what they were doing and could tell the story. And I think that was. And part of that was pitching to me and selling to me to get them to join, to get to join. And so I just kind of loved that element of it is that they were really good at describing what problems we were going to solve. Did you feel like when you started at those companies that you were comfortable in the direction or you were comfortable in the leadership enough to embrace the uncertainty? How did you approach your entrepreneurial mindset early on in your career? Yeah, yeah. So, you know, so I was definitely comfortable in the individuals. And it started there. And then obviously at the time, starting an Internet service provider. I had been exposed to the Internet when I was at university, kind of back in the day, when really the Internet, particularly in a place like South Africa, which is where I grew up, was only accessible in universities. And so I had seen it and I'd seen it firsthand, albeit this is pre. The World Wide Web. And so we were using all of these other tools like Veronica and Archie and things that people probably don't even remember. But I'd seen what it could become. So I was drawn to the individuals and I thought that the technology at the time was going to make a big difference. So, you know, so. But it first was the people who drew me. Like, if. If some individuals I didn't know had said, hey, we're starting this isp, come and join us. I'm not sure I would have. It was the people first and foremost that drew me to it. So it was a combination of people and having. Having passion and conviction about the industry. Exactly. Knowing that, or at least thinking that those two combined were going to be transformational. Yeah, they were going to be transformational in some fashion. And obviously no one had any sense of how transformational. I do, by the way, remember the very first time I saw a web browser, and it was Netscape 1.0. The very first time I saw it and the very first time you could visually experience the Internet, I was like, oh, yeah, this was a smart decision. Where were you? Do you remember? Set the scene there. Yeah, I totally remember. And by the way, one of the very first things that was accessible on the Internet was the Library of Congress, believe it or not, the US Library of Congress had actually published, had put a list of all of their books and they had certain books, excerpts from certain books on the, on the World Wide Web at the time. And I remember going, it's amazing that I'm sitting here in South Africa and accessing books digitally in a library on the other side of the world. When you got to remember, my university experience was using microfiche to go and find a publication in a physical library. So it was like, oh, wow. Yeah, this is definitely going to be transformational. Wow, that's awesome. That's a pivotal moment in anyone in your life. I'm sure that you kind of look back and think, wow, you knew something was changing at that point. Yeah, for sure. And this was like 1992 or 1993. So it was obviously a long time ago and the Internet still had a lot of maturing to do, but it was. You could see it, you could see what it could become. Yeah. So we're getting into the next phase of the business where, you know, the, obviously the Internet bubble was. There was a bubble, it burst. The economy around the world changes. You decided to join Quadram in 2002 and at that point set the stage. It wasn't doing so well, but you saw an opportunity there. What, what, what forced you or what was the conviction or was the impetus to join a struggling business with the goal turning around? Yeah, so at the time, and most of my history prior to then had been really more on providing the network access. So obviously being an isp, connecting people to the Internet and over time that it evolved into a software, series of software businesses that I had run at the Internet at Internet Solutions. And then it seemed like a natural progression to what had started occurring during the late 1990s and early 2000s was the proliferation of marketplaces. And that was the sort of thing du jour. And Quadrum happened to be a marketplace, a procurement marketplace for the mining industry. South Africa is a very mining centric economy. There's a lot of the industry that's based around it. And so I thought, well, this would be an interesting combination between something where South Africa is a meaningful global player and yet you're participating in this sort of new iteration of how the economy might evolve. And so those two elements of it is what drew me to the business. Because usually when South Africa is doing anything, it's like a half a percent or a quarter percent of the global economy, but with respect to mining, it's much more meaningful. And so that's why I was interested in it and why I thought I could be impactful in the business. And so what was it about this company specifically? How did you see opportunity in a company that was, for lack of a better term, struggling? Joining a struggling company, you really have to be sure and have that strong conviction that you can turn around. What was it about this business that you knew that aligned with your skill set or what was the opportunity that you saw outside of just the. The structural environment with the business in South Africa? Yes. So the main thing that I saw there was that there was a real need to digitize many of these processes. So procurement up until that point was very paper centric, very manual. Took a long time to issue RFPs, run RFPs, collect all the results, do all the purchasing that happened. And so it seemed clear that there was a real opportunity. What seemed to be missing was just the right focus on solving the customer needs. Specifically the general market seemed like it was well placed for a new solution. But the specific implementation and why I joined Quadram at the time was it felt like that could use some revamping and some just more focus on the client. A lot of it, if I've learned anything over this, is when you're early in a business, you have to be maniacal about customer feedback and listening to it. You really have to hear what your customers are telling you. And if you don't and don't sort of adapt and pivot and adjust, then shame on you for not using that to make the business better. And so after some really early conversations, it became evident to me that that's probably what had been happening. That my predecessor in the business had just been very closed off to, hey, this is how we're going to do things and you better like it versus hey, tell us what's not working and we'll see if we can fix it. Right. And so that's what drew me to it is I felt like I could be impactful and it wouldn't take a whole lot to actually like. It was not rocket science to piece together the things that I did there. Yeah, wow, that's that. It's amazing how this is, we're talking about 22, 23 years ago. Digitization and bringing technology and systems to systematize processes and automate them to enable your team to delight customers and provide better service and listen to them. It's still things that we're talking about today. Right. We're going to get to trivia pay in a second. But it's amazing that the problems that you're citing. We work with a lot of companies to do just that. Bring the processes, eliminate the manual workload to allow the company to focus on what they're trying to do. And you had that insight 22 years ago. Yeah. And it's one of those things that when you learn a lesson like that really early in your career, it stays with you, you know, really and truly stays with you. And you. And you can kind of see how just with a subtle shift in direction, like, I really didn't do anything radical. It was. It was a subtle shift in direction, listening to the customer feedback, making the case. We were an American company making the case with the. With the stakeholders in the US that we needed to rebuild some of the software that was more localized for a South African context. Like, once we got that stuff right, it was remarkable how, you know, how quickly the business turned around. Wow. So you turn the business around, but then we get into a global financial crisis in 2008, when you're elevated to the COO role, how did you navigate that crisis? How did you have the clarity to know what decisions to make, to pivot or to restructure so that way you can return to growth? Yeah. It's one of. You'll go through stages like this in your career where it's really fun when businesses are growing and it's all about growth and it's all about adding more people, spending more money to kind of keep up with the pace. And then you run into something like the 2008 situation where the wheels fell off. Most of the global economy, all kinds of elements of our customers were in disarray. And it was a really painful time because we had to go through a fairly sizable reduction in force at the time. It's one of, again, like, one of the least fun things you can ever do is when you have to deal with something like that. But again, I think the lesson I learned during that is you have to be decisive and you have to be quick because there's nothing worse, particularly for a team, than having some sort of lingering kind of axe hanging over their heads. And so what we did is we made the changes we needed to make. We went through the rough. We needed to go through and then said to the team, we're done now. Everybody who's here is here to stay for the foreseeable future. We're done. Let's focus on how we now shift and help our customers deal with this crisis. Because by the way, if we do a good job now at a time of crisis, we're going to be so well positioned for when this starts to turn. And it took about a year, a year and a half or so for it to start to come out of the doldrums. But when it did, again, it was sort of remarkable to see how much the business accelerated right after that because we'd been so supportive of them during a pretty challenging time. Yeah. And so when it comes to rifts, obviously this is just the hardest thing for, for most executives to the hardest decisions they have to make. How do you approach that from a. How do you know what's the right amount of expenses to cut? Do you tend to cut deeper than you need to? What's the risk reward in that approach? I know it's a super sensitive and painful topic to talk about, but love your perspective on it. Yeah. So a lot of it ultimately ends up being connected with your board and your board's view on risk and the financial strength of the company at the point in time, how much cash do you have on hand, how drastic of a cut you have to make? So I've always been in the fortunate position and I've always described it this way. Are you cutting fat? Are you cutting muscle? Are you cutting to the bone? And when you make the transition from cutting fat, which is when you're in a high growth world, you invariably have fat in the business because you are optimizing for something else. You're optimizing for growth that is relatively easy to get at because you've invested ahead of when the revenues are going to come. When you start cutting muscle, that is a very different conversation because then you know that the cuts that you're going to make if the business turns around again are going to have slowed you down. They're going to have impaired your ability to react when the business recovers. And so you have to have that very frank conversation with the board and talk through where do we draw the line here? And depending on the financial strength of the company, you might find yourself where you have to cut muscle. Because if you're a startup and have venture funding and you have a burn rate that you're going to run out of cash in six months, well, you're probably going to have to cut deeper than you would like. But we were in the fortunate position that the business was profitable. We had a cash reserve and so we ended up only having to take out what had been provisioning headcount, head of planning for growth. And so we really cut fat. We didn't have to cut muscle, fortunately. Got it. Yeah, it's a good position to be in. So to our listeners who are looking at their balance sheet and looking at their income statement and burn from their cash flow statement, making sure that you understand the financial strength of your business and the risks associated with that. So it seems like you were well positioned to absorb the downturn in preparation for future acceleration. Right? Yeah, we fortunately were and we also, we were fortunate that we were serving an industry that recovered relatively quickly afterwards. So the mining industry had a pretty big downturn. There was a significant drop off in construction and some of the other things that, you know, fueled the extractive industries. But it returned, major industry returned relatively quickly. And so, you know, our customers got back on track within about a year. Right. So a couple years later, you're back on track, you're humming along and, and you exit. You sold the company to Ariba in 2011. How do you prepare a company for sale? It was, yeah, it was the first time I'd been through that process, kind of really on the, on the inside of, of, you know, being a part of four or five people that were actively involved in the sale. It was, it was really a challenging process because we were a private business, Ariba was public. And so the, the standard of what was expected from a diligence point of view was just way above and beyond anything we'd actually anticipated. Everything from, you know, having to prepare contract registers for every client. We had, we had onboarded and we built a network. So we'd built a network of buyers and suppliers and we had about 100,000 participants on the network. And you can imagine just the level of effort to get 100,000 contracts in a data room so that they could be reviewed. So, yeah, it was a massive, massive task. I was probably also not prepared for the level of scrutiny that would be required around cyber. And even then 2011, this is a long time ago, but even then, just being careful with customer data, PII and banking information, other information like that, the level of scrutiny that we had to go through was significant. So I think my advice for your listeners is if you can, you should try to get ahead of that. Like if you know that there's an exit that's coming and you know that you're likely to be bought by a strategic. The level of diligence you're going to go through for a strategic buyer, particularly if they public, you're probably not prepared for. It's going to be significant. And if you bought by another financial investor or a private equity investor, there'll still be a ton of diligence, but it's not going to be as severe as if you're being bought by a public company. Got it. And just taking back to that decision to entertain and exit, what brought you to that point? What had the board thinking, okay, now's the right time to. Yeah, it was one of those things where the company was growing really aggressively and very fast. We were in some ways looking for what the next strategic thing was like how do we take the business to the next level. And Ariba was a perfect partner because we were focused. So how we generally described it is we were focused on blue collar procurement, meaning a lot of the purchasing that happens that supports physical assets, so maintenance of assets and consumables around physical assets. And we were predominantly based in the southern hemisphere and Ariba did procurement mainly of white collar assets, things that support people. And we're in the northern hemisphere. So you kind of look at those two things and you go, well, this seems like an absolutely perfect marriage. We've got geographic synergies, we've got actual spend synergies. And so it was a relatively short list of what we could potentially do. And they just seemed like the perfect fit. Awesome. And the timing, how did you decide on the timing? It was just the timing was more a function of where Ariba was at. So we weren't necessarily actively looking to sell the company, but they had come out of the 2008 financial crisis really strongly and they were also looking for the next thing. How did they bulk up and create more scale? And so it was sort of both businesses finding each other at exactly the right time. Hey everyone, I want to take a moment to talk about how we at Pro Seer are simplifying accounting and finance for entrepreneurs. Through our outsourced accounting, fractional CFO services, proactive tax planning and accounting software implementations, we cut out unnecessary complexity for business owners and entrepreneurs. Our approach provides real time insights, practical tax strategies and a clear roadmap to help our clients grow their businesses. If you'd like to learn more, feel free to book a free consultation with me by visiting Proseer Co. That's P R O S E. Now back to the show. You take some time and in 2014 you join where your current. Your current company at Trevupay. You've been there 11 years longer than anywhere else in your career. What's kept you engaged and what are you still solving there? Yeah, so the. So the interesting thing was when I joined the company in 2014, they were a part of a much bigger public business. They'd been acquired in 2012. And I was brought in really as the. As the coo firstly to learn the business because most of my background is in software and this is a payments and software business. And so I kind of needed to learn elements of the business before I took over running it. So I was in the COO position for a year learning the company, and then I took over running it in the summer of 2015. And what I loved about it was we've gone through these various stages of our evolution where my first objective when I joined the company was to figure out how to get it to grow, because it had been private for a long time and had been really operated as a lifestyle business. And as a consequence, it was sort of growing relatively modestly, slightly more than the inflation rate, but really not growing very fast at all. And so had to get the growth engine going. And then as we did that, we ended up diverging from our parent company where we were selling into other markets that didn't necessarily fit who owned us. This Worldview Fuel Services. Yeah, correct. So when I joined the business, about half of our. More than half of our revenue came from fuel cards. And so World Fuel had bought the business looking to embed Fuel cards as part of their offering. As the name probably tells you, they were a fuel logistics and distribution business. And that element of the business was really hard to grow because we had major competitors. We had WEX and Fleetcore, now CorePay, major competitors in that space. And so it was very difficult to grow the fuel card business. So I ended up directing the business more towards manufacturing and retail and some of the other industries that we're in today. And as a consequence, we just diverged away from our parent because we were selling more into those industries. The fuel card business wasn't really growing. And so that resulted in the next phase of the business, which is we got carved out by private equity in 2019 during the next fund crisis that we all had to go through in 2020 with the pandemic. So that process started in 2019 and concluded in 2020. And that's kind of what's kept me engaged is, you know, the first piece was figuring out how to grow the second Piece Being private equity owned is like, how do you scale this? Like how do you turn this into a really big business? And that those sort of various phases are always different and challenging and really entertaining. Wow. So a lot of our listeners are founder based companies that have exits out in the distance on their mind. Being private equity owned is kind of a concept that a lot of people are talking about. What are the, some of the things that you think, some you think founders should think about before they go the pros and the cons of being of getting yourself in an agreement with private equity? I think the very first thing is it's really important. So particularly if you're a founder and you have a controlling decision over who you actually end up partnering with, it's really important to make sure there's a good cultural alignment with the private equity firm. Not all PE firms are made the same and it depends on what you're looking for from the private equity firm. So generally the bigger the firms, the more deals they do and so the more they tend to operate on a playbook basis where they will basically show up and say, we've got to do these 10 things and you have to decide if that's right for you. Like for certain stages of a business and for certain types of businesses that might be entirely appropriate. For a business like ours, which was a relatively complex business, that was not the right fit. Like we needed somebody that would be more customized in their approach on how they dealt with us. And so we ended up with a smaller firm that does fewer deals, that generally does more complex deals. And as a consequence we're better geared towards where we were in our evolution as a company. So I think like figuring that piece out super important because you know, if you've been the boss and you've been running the show and you go sell 50% of the company to someone, you know, you need to know that you can work with them. You need to know that, that they are going to support you in the right way. Yep, that makes sense. All right, so let's talk more about payments. Yeah, Fintech and payments have been just a, just a major talking point for venture capitalists for markets over the past 10, 15 years. It's a, the landscape's evolved materially over this time with additional technology, services, different products. What are the biggest shifts you're seeing right now in the landscape and how are you approaching it for Trevipay? So yeah, so the interesting thing is, and you know you touched on this a little while ago, is that the portion of the market that we serve, which is helping suppliers offer trade credit to their clients, to trade Trade receivables for B2B is remarkably undigital still. Like, it's one of those portions of the back office that has gotten neglected. Now, what happened during the pandemic is that digitization of business processes got a massive shot in the arm, a massive boost, and there was a big acceleration. And so we've seen that flow through into our business, flow through into new customer acquisition and so on. But that digitization trend is still massive and it's enormous. And B2B is still really behind where consumer is in terms of how much of these things are done online or done digitally. So that's still a pretty major trend in our space. I think the other obvious one is cyber and fraud has kind of gone through the roof. As more and more customer interactions happen online, there's more and more risk for fraud. And particularly when you're offering credit to a customer, the scope and the skill of the bad actors has really gotten pretty amazing. And it's all been supplemented by things like AI. So, you know, so there's an arms race that's basically happening right now between the good actors and the bad actors, trying to figure out how you can identify if someone is a real company, if they are the actual representative of the company. All of these things have just gotten so much easier to spoof with AI these days. So AI is obviously a massive trend. There's all the new different payment modalities like stablecoins, which I think are going to pretty materially change international money flows and the speed of international money flows. And so all of our clients are dealing with these challenges. How do I digitize these processes? I'm acquiring more customers online. How do I prevent it, avoid fraud? How do I not miss out on this AI? Boom. How do I, you know, what's my strategy for international payments? So there's lots and lots of stuff that our customers are dealing with. And it doesn't look like the pace is going to slow down. I mean, it looks like things are accelerating. Yeah, yeah. So those are all great points. And so being the leader of a payments company that needs to make sure that you can provide the funding in the way that your clients need it and to support the payback in the manner that supports your balance sheet. How are you approaching doing your diligence on stablecoins on different determining if the borrower is actually a person or if it's a positive, if they're going to be paying back, how Are you approaching this new world we're living in? Yeah. So the main thing for us is, is that you have to, much like you would do with any product organization, you have to have a lot of parallel experiments happening at the same time, you have to learn from them and you have to fail fast if you're going to fail. There's nothing really again, that's that radically different about a product approach. You're trying to evaluate where you should place your bets. And the best way to do that is run a bunch of parallel experiments and then decide based on feedback that you see, based upon what you hear from the market and so on. But in broad terms, I would categorize us as leaning aggressively into AI. It's something that any business, I think all businesses are going to be transformed in some shape or fashion. And businesses that are about digitizing processes need to be more aggressive than anyone else, in my opinion, in terms of leaning into AI. Because if you don't, then somebody is going to eat your lunch. That's just what's going to happen. And so we have been, you know, on the AI bandwagon for over a year, year and a half or so we've built. And let me back up one second. The one thing that I think everyone should consider is in the world of AI, where does what becomes your moat? What becomes the thing that differentiates you from somebody else that can just deploy an agent and have it trained using the same LLMs as everyone else is using? I think the conclusion we've come to is that there's two things in our world that are really relevant. The first is we've hooked up a network of hundreds of thousands of participants. And that's hard to do. Like actually creating the connectivity between all the systems and the platforms is hard to do. The second thing is we've got 20 plus years of data history. And so if you think about what is valuable in an AI centric world, your data and your ability to train your agents on things that you've seen so effectively being able to back test your data becomes the most valuable thing because no one else has it. And so you can use it to train agents that can be smarter than a generic agent that doesn't have the specific experience that we've acquired that we've seen. So to give you a practical example, when we underwrite a customer and give them a credit line, we have this history of this customer performed well and then suddenly they went bad. And so what were the conditions under which, what should we have been watching for what were the early warning signs that we should have picked up on? And so we've got all of this history that you can put into an agent that allows the agent to make more informed decisions. But you have to know the outcome. It's not useful to just know the input data. You have to know what the result was. And for that you need a history. Right, That's a great point. And I think when you mentioned your moat, this is really, it's going to be really hard for new companies to get up to scale and establish moats compared to establishment, to establish companies that are adopting AI for that reason. Right. You mentioned the data and the history is so vital and valuable. And are you seeing that as an advantage in the competitive landscape where you're competing and you're able to keep costs low because you know how to look, how to spot fraud risks better because you've seen it before? You know how to underwrite new clients better because you've seen them so many over the last 20 some odd years. Does that give you a competitive advantage? It definitely does. So I would also, if I take one step back, I'd say that building scale in B2B is really hard because it takes longer. It's just a more complex environment and you have many more personalities and influences and participants in the process than you do in a consumer landscape. And you have to find a way to embed all those different stakeholders into the process flows. And so my experience, having been in B2B most of my career, is that it's just hard. It takes a long time. So what ends up happening is you have to get a little bit lucky with some anchor tenants. Like, you have to build scale, at least in an industry or with a client that you can parlay into other things. But it's incredibly difficult to build scale. You have to have really deep pockets and have very patient investors. If you're going to try to build scale in a more widespread way, it just takes a long time. So to your point, we end up being advantaged because of the scale we've built, because of the data we have and because of the network of customers we've managed to hook up? Yeah, that makes sense. Let's talk about leadership a bit. You've built leadership teams throughout your career. You've hired multiple C suite executives, specifically at trevipay. How do you know when the right time is to bring in someone at that executive level of leadership? When do you know you need that person versus hiring someone that might be able to, to grow into that or other scenarios where hiring that person might. You have that question? Yeah. I mean, it's a super challenging thing to get right because you almost always get the timing wrong. You're either late or you're early. You almost never get it exactly right. And one of the things that I try to do is that at the beginning of every year, and I sort of tend to do this over the holiday period in December, at the beginning of every year, I really want to set a theme for what the year is all about. And what, what, what is it that are the most important priorities for the year that has helped me in the past? Figuring out whether the timing is right for new executives. Yeah. Because as part of that process, like if you identify, for example, you know what, we really have to double down on keeping pace with feedback from the market on features for our product. And if you don't have a CPO or you maybe have a CPO and a CTO combined in a single role, like that might be the right time to say, okay, well, if I'm making that a priority, how is it going to become a priority unless I actually dedicate high level thinking brain power to work on this? The other phrase that I was given this advice a long time ago in my career, but I think it's invaluable, is when you hire high level people, you need to recognize that they're not necessarily going to be working in the business. You want them working on the business. You want them thinking about how you make the business better. Better, not like in the weeds up to their eyeballs, you know, doing the day to day. And at some point you have to make that transition with your leaders and either the individuals who you started the company with have grown and are capable of that, or you have to make the tough choice of recognizing, well, you know what, this person actually isn't going to be capable of making that transition. I'm going to have to go outside. Yeah, but it's, it's hard to get it right. Like it's, there's so many variables in there. But I found that annual process of what's the theme for the year? If you do that, it'll help guide you as to. Okay, if I really am prioritizing this, I probably need to put talent behind it. That makes sense. So we talked about the people side of it. When is the right time to invest in process and technology for my business, we become the accounting and finance departments for companies, allowing them to scale with systems and processes and allowing them to focus on their business. There's probably a right time for companies to focus on this area once they have product market fit or they have other things going on. How do you approach that for businesses of different scales and how have you approached it throughout your career? Yeah, I mean, it's also, it's so similar to the question you just asked on the people one, which is, what point in time are you big enough to have, like, if you use your example, your own accounting platform and to do this stuff yourself versus partnering on it or outsourcing it, I think it is all connected back with what are your priorities and again, what is going to enable you to scale more effectively. And so, for example, many times in my career when you start up, you will outsource customer support. You just, you just will because it's something that you don't necessarily want it. It's going to be headcount intensive in all likelihood. And it's, you know, you're not going to have the infrastructure around it to train people and get them certified and all the other things that have to happen to run a good customer support organization. So you'll often start with outsourcing and then at a point in time that'll become an expensive option. And so you'll, you'll say, okay, now that I've got 40 people in customer support and clearly my product is working, do I want to insource or outsource that again? And so you kind of go through these cycles of what the business needs. But again, I think it all ultimately has to be connected back with what is the priority. So if you've got enough product market fit and the board is challenging you and says, you know what, we need to see more of revenue flowing through to ebitda, then you might say, okay, well, my priority this year is how do I create more efficient support organization? And that will then catalyze that conversation. So it's all obviously interconnected. There's never a right or a wrong time. It's more about exactly where you are and what your priorities are and what feedback you're getting from your board on what you need to be doing next that makes sense. So looking at your career overall, from founding one of South Africa's first ISPs to leading Trevipay today, is there one thing and one decision that you made that you look back on, you say, that's the best decision I made. The best decision I ever made was starting that first company. And I'll tell you why, because it's rare in your career where you can be doing something that is so leading edge that you get invited into conversations that you probably have no business being in. So I'll give you an example of what I mean. I had some defining moments when I was in like my early 20s where we were selling the Internet to some of the largest companies in South Africa and we were in boardrooms with CIOs of these massive businesses, talking to them about firewalls and talking to them about email. And that exposed me in a way that I would never, I don't see if I made any other choice in my career, I would have been on a much sort of more gradual growth curve of being exposed to those types of conversations. And so even if that company had failed, by the way, if that company hadn't worked out, the stuff I learned in those meetings, like I remember being a 23 year old when a CIO from a big company said to me, you know, well, what's your SLA on the firewall? I had no idea what an SLA was. I'd never even heard of an sla. And so, you know, there are, there are times like that where you go, yeah, man, I am fortunate to be in a position where I can participate in these meetings and get this level of experience because otherwise it would have just taken a lot longer. And so, yeah, it was that first one and then that kind of set the tone once you've done something like that once and then sort of sets the tone for what you do the rest of your career. You just got to get started. Do you have time for a couple rapid fire questions? All right, sure. What's one technology trend in payments you're most excited about today? I think the stablecoins one. So I think that that looks like it's going to absolutely transform what's going to happen for international payments. Why do you say that? Well, I think it has the promise because it's obviously cryptocurrency based, but it's pegged to fiat currency. It has the promise of being same day all the auditability that you want and yet be an order of magnitude less expensive because you don't have all of the correspondent banking roles that are in the way. I think it's going to transform international banks. Got it. What's one book or resource you find yourself recommending to founders most? So one of the books that I love the most is called the Innovator's Dilemma. It's a really interesting book around even if you're top of the mountain and have built the best product, if you don't continue to innovate. Like if I think about what's happening right now with AI, like we're in a really great spot as a company right now, but if we don't lean into and embrace AI, we may not be in five years time. And it's the one downside of being in a tech business is that the base operating platform for technology evolves and you have to too. And if you don't, you're likely to be supplanted by someone else. So I love that book because it's old now, by the way, so there's stories in there of people who are leading the charge on the original disk manufacturing processes. So it's an old book, but I think there's a lot of truths in there still. Awesome. Lastly, what's the most undervalued leadership skill in scaling a company? I think the most undervalued leadership skill is how to build trust with your team. It's one of those things that it's a combination of empathy, it's a combination of walking the talk. It's a combination of a variety of things. But I honestly think that for leadership teams, executive teams, to function well, they have to be high levels of trust amongst the team. And as a leader or as a CEO or a founder, you can set the tone on that. You can set the tone on what you value there. And that then makes its way into hiring decisions, makes its way into how you conduct meetings, makes its way into how you hold each other accountable. But I think trust is foundational for a leadership team. That's great. Brandon. Where can people find you if they want to learn more about you or Trevipay yes, I'm on LinkedIn so Brandon Speer on LinkedIn, you should be able to find me on LinkedIn and then obviously on Trevipay www.trevipay.com my emails and other information is all on the website there. So if anyone wants to reach out or connect, please feel free to do so. Awesome. Brandon, thank you so much for your time today. I appreciate it. It was a real pleasure. It was good chatting with you. Thanks for tuning in to 5 to 50. If you found today's episode helpful, be sure to subscribe, leave a review, and share with other business owners looking to grow. Do you have a question or a topic you'd like us to cover? Connect with us on LinkedIn or reach out to us at Proseer, where we're empowering entrepreneurs with real time, actionable insights and financial infrastructure through Smarter Accounting, Tax and financial strategies. Let's keep this conversation going. Together we'll help our businesses thrive. Talk to you soon.