Building an Award-Winning Project Controls Business - Dale Foong

Speaker A: Data doesn't have value. Information asymmetry, uh, has value. It's what you do with the data and that gives you a competitive advantage. We always see that there's this path to climb. Sometimes you've got to stop on the mountain, turn around and enjoy the view.

Speaker B: Dalefung chased Insight, fell into complex corners of industry, project controls and quietly built Moire into an award winning consultancy.

Speaker A: Building up that cash reserve and leave the rest in the business and so growth then becomes expensive. Understand where do you want to end up if you want a lifestyle business but realize that it's going to be harder to scale up?

Speaker B: Uh, most founders chase revenue. Dale Fung chased Insight. He moved from South Africa to the uk, fell into one of the most complex corners of industry, project controls, and quietly built Moire into an award winning consultancy working with organizations like TFL and Rolls Royce. But here's the twist. Most companies already have the data, they just don't have clarity. Today we are going to unpack what actually turns data into decisions and what founders get wrong when scaling. Dale, welcome to the show. Great to have you here today.

Speaker A: Yeah, thank you very much, Zemak. It's a great pleasure and uh, honor to be on the show.

Speaker B: Thank you Dave. Let's start off with the first one. You fell into project controls. What did that actually cost you?

Speaker A: What did it cost me? Wow. Probably a career as I don't know, uh, because I didn't really consider anything. I think most professionals in project controls, when I've spoken to quite a few fall into the space. There was no sort of route into project controls. I came to the UK in 2007 and I didn't know if I was going to be here for two weeks, two years and it's almost 20. So I just set out to travel a bit, earn a bit of money and when I decided I wanted to stay a bit longer, I was very fortunate to work in a company where I became friends with people in the project controls profession and I was quite interested in what they were doing and when the opportunity came up, I joined them and the rest is history, so to speak.

Speaker B: Understood. And I need to ask, what did you give up without realizing that initial journey of yours?

Speaker A: Geez, that's a very, very tough question. You know, when I set out I back home, my, my background, my, my folks have always been entrepreneurs and I always saw myself as an entrepreneur one day, owning my own business, being my own boss, but coming to a foreign country, not having connections, not having the network and not knowing how to necessarily Go out on your own and start on your own. I think that's probably the opportunity cost. If I was back home, I probably would have, uh, potentially either fallen into the family business or started my own thing. So that probably the cost. But I mean, you know, fast forward a few years and I've managed to. So it has eventually come around.

Speaker B: Interesting. And how did you go about making those connections? Right. I mean, someone coming to a new country, it's really tough and challenging.

Speaker A: I was lucky in the first instance. A lot of South Africans were in the UK and in London, so I had quite a few friends already here. And at the time, it was just before the 2009 recession, so there was an abundance of opportunities, so it wasn't difficult to get work. Um, I think for me in those early stages, the two key elements were probably joining a rugby club and meeting other people. I have lots of friends now, very close friends that I played rugby with and, you know, go around to their places and, uh, be invited to my wedding, et cetera, and vice versa. But also people at work, and I think that's probably a topic you may or may not want to touch on is this was pre Covid, right, where we had to spend five days a week in the office. And you ended up going for those Friday drinks and building those relationships and talking to people in the organization that you wouldn' ordinarily work with day to day in building those bonds. So much so that we started going and doing events together, like, you know, the London Duathlon in Richmond park and the three peaks challenge, etc. Etc. So a lot of friends were built through work as well, which helped me with my network in terms of building, you know, various connections which I still am in touch with today.

Speaker B: Fantastic. Did you complete the Three Peaks Challenge?

Speaker A: So I would say that I did, but at the time I was training for the, the lond Half Marathon. I didn't want to injure myself, so I was a driver.

Speaker B: So you did complete it in a way.

Speaker A: Exactly. That's why I said I would say that I did. But yeah, I was making teas for them on the way down and making sure that, you know, they got their rest while I was driving and they were sleeping.

Speaker B: Understood South Africa to the uk. Talk to me. What belief did you have to kill first?

Speaker A: Wow. I think because South Africa has been quite heavily influenced by the UK over the years anyway, there weren't too many sort of preconceived ideas or beliefs, um, that I had to kill. The UK lived up to everything I'd heard and said. The thing that struck me most though was when I arrived was how old the buildings were. Because South Africa is a fairly young country, right? And you look at the architecture in the UK and you just realize what history this country has. And that struck me as one of the first things. My journey though in the UK started off in a little town called Southport. And so my first introduction to the UK was Southport. And but then when I moved to London, that's a very, very different beast. And so you recognize how London is actually a global village within itself that isn't actually England or the UK got its own culture, its own vibe, and it's multicultured. I'm sure you know, the likes of your Sydney's and your Tokyo's and, you know, New York's are the same. So it was quite an interesting, I guess, step into the UK and seeing that contrast between what is England versus what is London?

Speaker B: Totally get that one. And muar right. What did you see in this industry that others ignored?

Speaker A: When I looked at project controls as a profession is I looked at it through the lens where I was learning. And along the way I had fantastic mentors and coaches that helped me in my career and provided me with, uh, fantastic opportunities. And so it wasn't so much that I saw things that others didn't, I was learning along the way. And as I moved to other organizations to broaden my perspectives and experiences, I recognized that different industries experienced the same or similar challenges. Regardless of what size of organization you are, the type of projects that you'd be working on. What struck me though was that the biggest skill required in the profession wasn't, you know, whether or not you could analyze the schedule or the costs or control the baseline. It was actually the ability to communicate, to tell the story, to translate the information that you're seeing into meaningful decision insight. And along my journey, I was very fortunate to meet quite a few people and one of two or three of them were quite interested in this thing called data analytics. And so I sort of ventured into that and lent into that and through that and over the few years, data analytics has become AI and the rest is it history. We all talk about ChatGPT and Claude and LLMs and everything like that now.

Speaker B: Got it for the listeners out here, the founders, right, project controls, just explain it in layman's language for them, what it does it mean and where it plays a pivotal part.

Speaker A: Project control is an interesting profession because you don't actually control projects as a project controller. And it's also an interesting profession because you rarely go and tell your accountant how to do their job or your engineer how to do their job, or a doctor how to do their job. But in the project environment, you'll be surprised at how many people go and tell project controls how to do their job. But project controls is a broad discipline. It exists to largely service, as I say, the decision making on projects to support project managers. And they do that by working with project planners or schedulers, if you're in the US Working with risk managers, working with cost managers, commercial managers, understanding the requirements of what is required to be delivered in terms of the scope, working with engineers and bringing all that information together to support the, uh, project manager's decision making. I, uh, liken it to two things. One is the golf caddy to the golf player. So looking at the lie, which club should you use here, you know, all that type of thing. Or potentially a co driver in a rally car to the driver going, slow down now, there's a sharp turn coming up and a hard left, you know, so it's just that sort of the critical friend, as we like to call it.

Speaker B: Yeah, got it. So well explained. Thank you for that. And, uh, Dr. Me, when did you realize this was no longer a career, but a business?

Speaker A: Interesting. It wasn't actually a realization. My hand was almost forced in a sense. So my career trajectory has taken me through a few companies. My early career was in defense, then moved into rail. But along the way I was very fortunate. Simakai with my co founder, uh, on a podcast we have Project Chatter. We actually became quite well known in terms of talking about project controls and the profession. And it's now widened. But as a result, we built something out of nothing. And along the journey, my now former business partner Ollie came along and said, oh, I recognize what you've done there. We went for a few drinks in the pub, as you do, and shared his vision. And he said, why don't you come and join me? So I said, okay, this is what I want to bring. After a couple of visits to the pub, the rest was history. We said, let's go on this journey. And we looked at project controls controls, the traditional stuff that project controllers do, which I've just explained is the bread and butter. But we realized that with technology coming in, with advanced data analytics, with the likes of, you know, your LLMs, what could be achieved as the technology evolves. And fortunately, as almost adopting the startup mentality, we were able to push the boundaries and test and we allowed, we allowed ourselves to fail to see how far we could push the profession. So it's not so much that I started up necessarily. It was Ali sort of approaching me going, come, let's do something different. So I've got to give a lot of credit to him.

Speaker B: All right, how many founders are there right now in the business?

Speaker A: So right now there are zero founders because we've been fully acquired.

Speaker B: Congratulations.

Speaker A: Thank you very much. But Oli Wade, the original founder, he, he founded this in 2013. Um, and I joined him about just over four years ago. So when we rebranded, we consider ourselves sort of a co, ah, founders of this rebrand because we headed in a different direction. So it was kind of the two of us that set the journey of MOVAR as it is today. So yeah, it's been a great partnership between the two of us.

Speaker B: And talk to me, what broke first when you started building your own team?

Speaker A: What broke first? Geez, there's a lot of things that broke. Um, I can't remember what broke first. You know, when you, when you bootstrapping and you building from the ground up, there's a lot of things you realize that you should have done after it becomes a problem. And things like when you, your back office, for example, right in the early days, it's like, what can I afford? Not, you know, it's a necessity. But then when you start growing and you realize how important that back office is, that hr, ah, the IT support, accounting support, the payroll, all of those things, when you're just doing it on your own versus now having to have a team of people do it makes such a big difference. So it's not that it necessarily broke, it's the realization that you need to do things differently along the journey as you're scaling up.

Speaker B: Got it. What kind of cost did that have on you personally?

Speaker A: The fact that you miss opportunities because what happens is it diverts your attention to these burning platforms right in the background. And so because you've not set yourself up in a way that you should have originally because you didn't know that you should have, you now are focusing your attention and your energy on these burning platforms that aren't necessarily value add, they things that you should have had always. And so the cost is potentially those opportunities to grow people, to grow offerings to clients, to grow the business, et cetera, et cetera. So I think it just takes your capacity away.

Speaker B: What kind of top one or two tips you can give listeners in pretty much in the agency space?

Speaker A: I'd say if you're starting out, depends on where you are in your journey. But if you're starting out, consider building up that cash reserve. As a founder, uh, you probably want to be taking out as little as possible to sustain your lifestyle and leave the rest in the business so you can grow quickly, organically, if you're bootstrapping. But if you, if you want a lifestyle business, which a lot of people start out as having, that hamstrings you, right? Because you've, you're taking a lot of your cash out, your profits out, because you want to live a certain lifestyle that's actually not conducive to growth. And so growth then becomes expensive, and you then start looking at growth debt in terms of loans and things like that, or potentially giving away some of your equity because you want someone to inject some cash for you. So what I'd say in the early stages is, understand where do you want to end up? If you want a lifestyle business, have that lifestyle business. But realize that it's going to be harder to scale up unless you give away something in the future because you may not have those cash reserves.

Speaker B: And talk to me, was there a, uh, point in that journey where you almost walked away and what stopped you?

Speaker A: Well, almost walked away. The reason I pause on this is because the way you feel and what you'll actually do often contradict each other. There's been plenty of points along the journey where I go, yeah, it's easy to just throw the towel and I'll walk away because I just don't want to deal with these stresses and these headaches, and I can just go and find a comfy job and not worry about all of these things. But would I actually ever have done it? No, is the real answer. Because the overriding feeling I had and have is this responsibility and accountability to the team that have invested their faith in my vision, their faith in what we want to achieve collectively. And we can't be preaching as leaders how it's all about the collective and how we're in this together. But then walk away from that team, from that unit, because it'll fall apart. And so there's a certain responsibility that almost pins you to going, you got to have a lot of grit and determination. You got to have a lot about you to be successful. And if you're not cut out for that, and not everyone is, then seriously consider whether or not you actually want to step into building your own business, because it's not for everyone. So, yes, there were times that I felt that way. Would I ever do it? Probably not. What are the reasons the Reasons were varied. It depended everything from cash flow headaches to, you know, potential staff grievances or whatever the case might be. All these hidden things behind the business.

Speaker B: Got it. You said your folks were entrepreneurs, right? How did that shape you as a business person?

Speaker A: Yeah, hugely, hugely. Um, you know, I was very, very fortunate from a young age, you know, talking early teens, where my folks would bring me into business discussions and I would just be sitting there and it might be with a book or something else, you know, potentially doing my homework. Inverted commas. But through osmosis, I'd be listening in and hearing the conversations they'd be having. And through that, you recognize, you know, what types of conversations you do have at that level as a business owner and where you need to be standing up for what you want versus where you'd potentially negotiate, you know, allow yourself a bit more flexibility, I guess. The other aspect that was really important because my folks were in retail is the ability to talk to customers and clients because no two people are the same. And even though it was over a shop counter, right, you're talking to every different person and individual coming in differently. You understand, oh, this person's gonna get cigarettes in a newspaper, that person's gonna come in, they want their lotto ticket, whatever the case might be. And so you're learning personalities and how to speak to them and what makes them tick, and you're building relationships. I think that was really, really important, um, for me growing up in that environment.

Speaker B: Excellent. And, Dale, you've won a lot of awards. Go on, tell us what kind of awards you have won so far.

Speaker A: Yeah, we've been very fortunate. I'll give you a couple of highlights. So, a couple of years ago, 2024, we won the Global Innovation Award at the Project Controls Expo. The Project Controls Expo is an amazing event. It's held at Wembley and the awards is in the Sir Bobby Moore, uh, room. Um, and the Global Innovation Award we won was for the digital PMO that we implemented with our clients in partnership with 7 Trend Water, which is one of the major water companies in the uk. And we were really able to push the boundaries in terms of what we did there. Um, and we still continue to support them in other ways, which is fantastic. So it's a fantastic relationship. Um, but we're really, really privileged, punching way above our weight as an SME, to win that on a global stage, you know, what many consider the largest award ceremony. And then earlier this year, before we were acquired, so we're still in SME, we were very fortunate we actually made the UK top 100 SMEs, so all SMEs, any business, any industry, and we didn't know where we came, but when the results were released, we came 14th and actually the number one construction consultancy in the UK as an SME. So, yeah, just a couple of highlights, but that's not me you say you've won, it's the team, it's the effort that we put in together, it's the hard work, the hard yards that everyone has put in. So, yeah, very, very privileged.

Speaker B: And how important it is for businesses, you know, to win awards, because a lot of them, I think, I think 80, 90% don't even bother looking at awards for various reasons. So how important it is, I think

Speaker A: it's important for a couple of reasons, because, you know, we don't celebrate our, uh, successes enough, particularly when you are building businesses. The thing that struck me particularly when I went to the SME Business Awards, is everyone there spoke about the hard grind, the long hours and how awesome it was just for one night to dress up. Because, uh, you know, when you're building an SME business, you know, you typically in rags, drags you, all that type of thing. And we often climb this. You often climb this mountain, right? And myself and Ollie, we used to say along the journey is that we always see that there's this path to climb. We're always looking upwards, but sometimes you've got to stop on the mountain, turn around and enjoy the view, not only for yourself and for your own sanity to realize how far you've come, but also for the team to celebrate those successes. And entering for rewards is part of that, part of that recognition, part of your hard work. Um, and it's really, really important that you don't just do that for yourself, but for the team, because it is the teamwork.

Speaker B: Got it. And leaving awards alone, when it comes to movar, what decisions look stupid at particular point in time, but actually paid off.

Speaker A: There were so many that, you know, let's try this, let's try that. And then they paid off. Uh, probably. Maybe not stupid, but probably ones where we had never done it before. It's not stupid, it's more like we don't know if it's going to work or not. So we worked with a client a couple of years back and this was the year before we won the Innovation Award. We were a finalist with them and it was, I think, the first year we were dipping our toe into data analytics and we said, look, we can come along and do all these things for you, but yet it hadn't been done before. Right. So this was basically taking lots of project data from schedule data, cost data, commercial data, risk data, all sorts of different data, bringing it together, visualizing it with 3D model, all within Power BI. And I was like, uh, nah, you crazy. You can't do that. You need specialist software. You know, you need this, you need that. You're going to have to pay for licenses, the worksheet. No, we'll do it. We'd never done it before and we had one person in the team.

Speaker B: Yeah, no one says anything about those. Right. They think you have a big team. It's hilarious.

Speaker A: Exactly. But we had a client that was willing to take the leap with us, trust us with it and work with us to achieve great things. And that was really, really important. And we managed to, as I say, become a finalist in the Global Innovation Award. We didn't win it that first year, but when we set out, I still remember, we're like, geez, can we do this or not? Is this a stupid decision? Right. There's others around being rad with Org design and things like that which aren't stupid necessarily that come to mind, but again, trying to be playful and do something different with the organization so that you can offer the market and the people that work with you.

Speaker B: Let's talk about the merger. I mean, the acquisition, if you want to call it. What does that mean for Muar today and how are you operating differently?

Speaker A: Wow. So it's early days, it's been a couple of months. What does it mean for movar? Look, we weren't in the market and we were having lots of fun, barring the cash flow headaches. But, you know, we'd been fairly successful being bootstrapped. And Reply came along. They're a technology company, a massive global technology company that has amazing partnerships with big labels, Amazon, Microsoft, Google, Nvidia, uh, OpenAI, et cetera. And the space we operate in. We felt that it was absolutely a huge opportunity, not just for the construction sector, which we mainly, uh, live and work in, to give them all of this technology that they could then now use to deliver projects with better outcomes, safer, um, on time, on budget, dare we say it, but also internally for our team and our staff, giving them more opportunities to grow, giving them better benefits and giving them more access to learning and developing in their career. As an entrepreneur and being bootstrapped, you are very constrained in terms of where you spend your money, um, on whether it's growing the business, the individuals and Often you don't. It doesn't afford you the ability to give the team everything that they deserve. So it's been, uh, an amazing integration. We're still not complete yet, but we, we're still integrating with them. But yes, we've been very, very warmly welcomed and the team's received it.

Speaker B: What are your top three values within the business?

Speaker A: We actually have five. It neatly spells out the word ideal. We talk about it in every interview we have, every partner interaction, every client interaction. I is for integrity, the foundation of our values. If you don't have integrity, you have nothing. What is your individual pr, Your invisible pr, Right? What are people saying about you when you're not around? That is predicated on what you do when you are around and the integrity you show. The D is for drive. What motivates you? How do you motivate others? Are we achieving our goals? Are we setting them ambitiously enough, not that they're so far out of reach, but that we can change and push boundaries? The ease for empathy, and we look at that through three lenses. One is when you wake up every morning and that person staring back at you in the mirror, empathy for yourself. How are you feeling? You know, empathize with yourself. Two, the more traditional sense, the people you work with, how are they feeling? What's going through their minds? You know, are they okay? And then the third lens, because we are a services based organization, is can we empathize with a client with their problems? What problems do they actually have and how can we help them solve it? The A is for adaptability. If anyone says the world isn't changing, they just got to put on the news channel. But it's not just about being adaptable. It's about having the right tools in the tool belt or toolkit and knowing which one to use in that situation. And so learning, development and skills are really, really important to remain adaptable. And then loyalty is the thing that binds us together. No single individual is greater than the team. And that L is really, really important to bring it all together.

Speaker B: Amazing. Why do most companies collect data but never use it?

Speaker A: You know, there's this fallacy that data has value, right? Data doesn't have value. Information asymmetry, uh, has value, right? It's what you do with the data and how you act upon the information that the data gives you that gives you a competitive advantage. The fact that you've collected lots and lots of data is meaningless. So I think the biggest challenge between having lots of data and then having information asymmetry is Knowing what to do with that data, and that's probably the biggest challenge, is people don't know what to do with it.

Speaker B: Absolutely. And if I look at movar, if you take away all the tech, what's the real product you sell?

Speaker A: So we talk a lot about next practice. So a lot of people have got what's good practice, what's best practice, and we uh, go, well, what's next practice? Where is the uh, puck going? And that's where we need to skate to so that whatever we're doing for our clients today is future proofing the environment. What that means for us though is in the space we operate, you get a lot of point solutions. And there's nothing wrong with point solutions. They solve a particular problem, but more often than not they create further problems because you have to configure this damn thing, you have to change your processes, people have to be trained. So it's quite disruptive to an organization. So what do we do with @Movar? We actually go in and try and deeply assess and understand what that organization is trying to overcome and what are the options for a solution that doesn't create further problems. Part of that solution could be some point solutions, but ultimately we give clients the ability to make rather than buy because there's a lot of products out there that come and promise, you know, one stop shop, you know, this can do it all. Sadly, there isn't such a thing. And so the reason being is every organization is different. And so you need to tailor, uh, whatever you're doing in terms of your solution to your organization. And I think, you know, a lot of clients are realizing that some other consultancies which should shall not be named, they come with off the shelf solutions and they try and plug it in and then it finds problems and oh, we need to add an extra 20 people. Yeah, it's not the way we operate. We don't have 20 people. If I look at projects and project delivery, which is obviously the domain we work in, I believe that one of the biggest friction points in delivery are, uh, the way we set up our commercials, our contracts in the supply chain. It's not necessarily a space that we work in, we touch those areas, but I do believe that there are technical solutions that could potentially unlock those friction points. Now you take for example, and yes, there'll be far more technical considerations than we have time to discuss on this episode, but if you take a contract, a commercial contract, and you potentially look at a blockchain technology that could be back to back with that Contract which has the right transparency and payment mechanisms in place. If we have a company or government organization that's brave enough to test this out, we might actually realize that we've got technology that's been around for a few years before AI inverted commas that we haven't yet tapped into. And so that's probably one where you go, we haven't cracked that one yet. Because as we're looking at the technology that's available to us as mobile, we're expanding beyond project controls and pmo. And that's the exciting piece. There's a lot we haven't cracked yet.

Speaker B: Yes. Yeah, there was a person we interviewed on our show where he has something within the procurement space and they reduce it into, I think, a few days, given all the challenges they have. Obviously it's using AI, as you guessed right, so, and talk to me, with the acquisition in place, what would double your business in 12 months?

Speaker A: That's a really interesting question. We're doing very, very well at this stage. You know, not to blow smoke up our own pipes, but, um, we do. We're doing very, very well. What would double that? I think the market is changing and the ability for us to showcase the advances of technology to the client base and lower the adoption barrier would double it. Because the construction industry is way behind other industries. We are always the slowest to adopt, whatever the reasons might be. And if we can give people, decision makers in those organizations an ability to. Not to provide them with any fear and doubt, but that technology actually has a large part to play in achieving what they need to achieve on their projects. And that we are well placed because of all of the various technology we have at our disposal. Now as part of reply, that would probably double our revenue. So it's always been showcasing and then delivering. That's that integrity. But, you know, do what you say you're going to do. Don't just try and flog a dead horse. I don't think it's necessary a story. I think it's showing seeing is believing and it's going out there and being bold and saying, hey, look, you know, let's show you what we've done for you. You haven't asked. There's actually a lot of things and maybe this is a, uh, great bit of insight for your listeners. There's a lot that we do at MOVAR where we haven't been asked for something. We just go and create it and then show client and go, we've done this for you. As an example, last year we were Quite interested in showcasing how you could use a rag model. So retrieval augmented generation with an LLM on a knowledge base using knowledge graphs, et cetera. And so what we did was on open source information, we picked two or three clients and we just collected all of the information that was available in the public domain, created that knowledge library, created that orchestration level and went, here you go, play around. And they asked it all sorts of questions and asked it for decisions and this. And then they went, wow, this is amazing. Can you do that with all of our internal information? So, uh, yeah. So there's an example.

Speaker B: Got it. And where does mobile look completely different in three years time?

Speaker A: Wow, that's a big question because. Because we operate in the tech space. The answer is probably no one truly knows in my mind, where will we be? I'd love to see us operating genuinely in adding to what we're doing now, robotics as a, as an option. Because I believe that robotics have a huge part to play on construction sites. Not necessarily to take jobs, but to reduce health and safety risks, to reduce injury and stress and all those types of things. And we know that there's a shortage of good skilled labour and there's a big portfolio to be delivered for the UK government. And so I think robotics is a really big opportunity for the industry to take advantage of and we can do that. So that's a big space. I see. The other one that I'm really excited about and this is predicated on the technology being developed that is, you know, sort of commercial grade is quantum computing. Now imagine the ability to simulate scenarios on projects before you've deliver, delivered them. You end up with this playbook that you know what needs to happen before it's happened. So those are two spaces where I'd love for us to be in three years time.

Speaker B: And in terms of consultants, what belief do consultants hold that quietly kills their business?

Speaker A: I think that they know everything. We've all seen the very confident consultant walk in. I've been a client my, you know, and I promised myself when I got into consulting I would not be that type of consultant. I need two planners. Uh, and next thing you've got 20. Yeah, I think that's probably the biggest thing is that I've seen consultants that they just know everything. And for me, the best consultants, and this is with a client hat on, because I've been a client, the best consultants are those that don't come with all of the answers but come with the right questions.

Speaker B: Uh, just flipping it back to founders, right, in your opinion what blind spots keeps founders stuck between the 1 million to 10 million mark.

Speaker A: It's probably mentality, right, is we talk about this a lot internally. What got us here isn't going to get us there. Right. So we can't continue doing the same. I think it's attributed to Einstein trying to do the same thing over and over. Inspecting a different result is insanity. So I think it's that ability to realize that you got to keep evolving, you got to keep growing and you've got to keep trying different things because you'll hit that ceiling where you've exhausted everything. And then there's also a point in time where you actually realize that you don't have all of the answers. And then when potentially is it the right time to get someone else that thinks differently to you, whether that's a non exec director, whether it's someone that you hire in your business to challenge your thinking. Right. Because often because you the sole person that's been driving this business. When I was very lucky, it wasn't just me, I had a business partner. But you're the only two people driving this and driving this vision. You go, no one else sees it, no one else sees it. And then when successful, you're like yes, we did it. You know, and then you almost fall into this self belief that you have this all of the answers, but you don't. And sometimes it feels like you need to have all of the answers, but you don't. And so it's that ability to allow others and grow into a leader that leads leaders, not a leader that leads doers. Because ultimately to grow, you need others in your organization to lead as well.

Speaker B: Let me ask you this way. What kind of questions exposes a founder's real bottleneck instant according to you?

Speaker A: Wow. I did it today actually with founder colleague of mine, she was like, oh, it sounds like uh, your little five year old child. I always find the five whys are really good. I've got this problem. Why? Well, because of this. Well, why? Because of this. Just ask why five times. And quite often, more often than not, you actually get to the root cause and then you're able to fix it. Because the first why is usually quite

Speaker B: surface level and you get to the emotions. Right?

Speaker A: Absolutely.

Speaker B: Coaching technique. Yes.

Speaker A: And I think that's really, really important.

Speaker B: Good. And what's kind of the one decision every founder listening should make? Let's say this quarter?

Speaker A: Let me try and be specific and distill it. If you're thinking about a technology perspective, we can't assume that we can boil the ocean when it comes to our business. We view our business as an ocean. Right. We're not going to boil the ocean. We're not going to be able to drastically change it by doing one thing. But Pareto analysis. What is that 20% I can tweak of my business that will have an 80% impact. What if and you've just mentioned that there if we accept that predominantly a lot of our challenges come from behaviors by us as individuals but if we also accept that behaviors aren't the people people aren't their behaviors behaviors are a symptom of the environment that people find themselves in is what can I do now to impact that environment whether that be technology or other that will allow my business to thrive in the next 90 days?

Speaker B: Well said. Yeah. It's a very powerful coaching technique. Right. Change the environment where you operate or you want change. Absolutely. Dale, let's wrap this apart for today. It's great having you. Thank you very much.