How to Scale Operations Without Hiring More People

Speaker A: Let's attack this thing relentlessly and heavily now. Right? Let's not wait. Let's not wait until we realize we're behind. Let's get that effort in right now.

Speaker B: Hey, Nick, I'm super excited to have you join me for this episode of Coffee with Closers.

Speaker A: Great. It's great to be here.

Speaker B: Sam, you're famous on LinkedIn and obviously we were introduced through some mutual friends and we're connected today. And I see that you're tremendously active on LinkedIn, producing a ton of content. I was looking through your resume. You worked at big organization like Amazon and now decided to start your own consultancy about a five year so ago. So I'm just curious to hear about your entrepreneur journey. What prompted you to want to start a consultancy?

Speaker A: Sam? I always wanted to run my own company. I've been wanting to do it for years and years. My problem was that I didn't really know what I wanted to be when I grew up.

Speaker B: Right.

Speaker A: I'm still not entirely sure even now. And it could have been anything in reality. And about five, six years ago, I step back and said, okay, I had the opportunity to go do my own thing and I was like, two questions. What am I good at? And, um, what do I really enjoy doing? And answering those two questions basically was the formation of Silverdale and what we see today. And the company's really built up around the things that I enjoy and the things that I've been very good at over the last. I keep saying 30 years of work experience, but actually it's a little bit more than that now. I probably should update that number a wee bit, but we'll just call it 30. Just between friends.

Speaker B: So that 30 years of work in helping companies standardize, simplify, organize so they can operate efficiently. I'm assuming, is that kind of where your core competency is?

Speaker A: Yeah, absolutely. In fact, I started working at the age of 16. I left school with very few qualifications and my first job was in a video recorder factory. So that ages me for your audience. They'll figure that out how old I actually am. M But my first job was on that production line and I got fired from there after only three months for being a disruptive influence on the production line. And part of that was about trying to make improvements and seeing that my role was really adding no value to the overall process. And for speaking up and pointing it out to the management, I got fired. And basically that's been my entire career all the way through. Thankfully, for some more enlightened companies who decided to embrace that and uh, point me in the right direction and do things. And I'm very used to the physical world so things like warehousing, distribution, production, it really is my kind of core background. And then I moved into consulting which got me a great experience across lots of different companies, lots of different issues. Is a really great way of flexing that muscle. And then of course spent five years working at Amazon and that helped me to really take those skills and really learn about scaling. Was the kind of big lesson from my Amazon days. Scaling things from nothing to hundreds of millions of dollars. It was quite the challenge and, and of course then left there, worked for a third party logistics company again physical logistics as well as ERP work. And then I worked for a startup where we implemented an ERP which was Odoo and got so frustrated with it that when I decided to do my own thing, decided hey, I'm going to do this, I'm going to do ERP implementations, but I'm going to do it my way, I'm going to do it the right way. And that's how Silverdale came to be.

Speaker B: Yeah, I'm curious to learn about that 16 year old experience of getting fired after 3, 3 months because you were a disruptor. So what was some of the ideas that you brought to the table that the management thought was stupid?

Speaker A: The thing was, so I was on the production line and it was a U shaped production line and anyone who knows Lean or production knows that's the best way of doing it. And I was at the end of the U and my job was to take those video recorders, they'll come down the line and I had to put some jig on it and then I had to twiddle some knobs and make a specific shape on the oscilloscope. As you can tell, I really knew what I was doing and what I figured out is what I was actually doing was fixing something that somebody further along the production line had messed up.

Speaker B: Right?

Speaker A: So I was actually fixing their mistake and making sure it didn't escape to the customer. So every time I found one of these videos, video recorders that I had to fix, I would shout across the production line at ah, whoever it was that made the mistake and I would shout at them, say hey, I'm fixing your mistake for you or hey, I found another one of your mistakes. That's five today, right? So eventually my team leader was like, hey, you got to stop shouting across the production line. Okay, this is not good. You can't be shouting across the line and disrupting people and telling they've made mistakes. Right. So I just didn't see the point of it. Right. If this person did their job right, I didn't need to be here. Uh, and so to me, it just didn't seem to. It didn't work. But eventually I didn't stop shooting across the production line. And eventually they had enough and said, okay, that's enough. Right? Off you go. Leave it alone. Right. Don't be disruptive. And. And yeah, I still have that letter being a disruptive influence on the production line, and that's really been my entire career from that point. Being a disruptive influence, maybe the delivery

Speaker B: could have been better. Right. But overall, what your intention and your approach could have is actually definitely good. Right. Because you don't want people who just put up with the same task all the time and not necessarily proactively looking at what could be done different or better to improve the process. I think. Yeah.

Speaker A: I guess on my perspective, that, uh, seeing something that makes no sense, seeing something that adds no value back in the day, hey, I was 16. I didn't know anything, right? And, um, I didn't know about things like Lean and production and Six Sigma and all those great things. I knew nothing of any of that. I didn't have the words, the vocabulary, the. The experience to be able to formulate a proposal. And here is a time and motion study of why this is better than this. I didn't have all that thing in my toolbox at the time, so all I had really was just my brass neck, if you like, and being able to stick it out and say, hey, I think this is wrong. And it's one of the things that I think I get away with as well. Even today, working in the US with my Scottish accent does give me a little bit of leeway, I think, with our clients, because I can be quite brash and quite upfront. But quite frankly, we get things done because of that, right? We, yeah, we tend to be a little bit, in fact, our brand. When we were working on the Silverdale brand, the consultant we were working at came, uh, to the conclusion that, in fact, Silverdale, our brand, really is confident to the point of arrogant. And I think that's a really good description of our brand, quite frankly.

Speaker B: Yeah, some leaders do prefer that instead of sugarcoating and trying to, like, make it all politically, uh, correct in terms of how you deliver it. Right. They just want you to just straight up tell them, hey, here's your operational problem. If you keep doing this, is how it's gonna, it's gonna affect your bottom line. It's gonna have quality assurance issues, all kinds of issues. You gotta fix this and this is how you do it. They rather not have you sugarcoat it and you tell them that. Right. I think one thing Elon Musk said that I like a lot about, he said he wanted people to try and fail and not be afraid of penalty because that encourage innovation. And if you just tell people if you're going to be penalized because you made a mistake, then that means people want to stay in the color between the lines and not ever want to go outside the line because they're afraid of what would happen if I, uh, if they did something outside of the norm. But I think that's the kind of the innovative leadership that we want in our generation. Because you don't want people. Because instead of calling you out and say, hey, we don't want you here, because you're calling out every. They could probably have trained you and coached you and said, here's how I think we could handle it. I'm happy that you're finding these mistakes. Right? But there is a way better way to handle it, right? Maybe you can have, at the end of the day there's a call where we say, hey, how many mistakes did we find? Where was that mistake? Can we get to the root cause of why it keeps happening and is there a way to fix that as opposed to maybe just calling out right in the middle of a production line? So that's what I feel like. I think Even at age 16, you're able to recognize this is a problem that need to be addressed and it should have been addressed much earlier in the production line and not when it get to you. And then it could avoid a lot of other, other mistakes. But I'm happy to hear that. But I also saw a recent post you posted. You mentioned some of the leaders that had the biggest influence, influence on you personally and even on Silverdale as a company. And you know, three people are Ray, Ray Odal, Ray. Ray Dalio. I think it was Jeff Bezos and Grant Cardone. And I was surprised about Grant Cardone. Obviously, uh, some people have some very strong opinion about him. But Ray Dalio, I haven't read all his books, but I was introduced to him through, by reading Tony Robbins book about. I think it was money management or something like that. That's how I even heard of Ray Dalio. And I've actually watched a lot of his YouTube videos by economy and everything else. But can you tell us a little bit about why those three names became the lead people that you consider as really great leaders to emulate.

Speaker A: Yeah, absolutely. Jeff Bezos. Obviously, my time at Amazon was really influential for me. And when I joined Amazon Back in 20, I was one of 120,000 employees at, um, that point at Amazon.

Speaker B: Right.

Speaker A: So the company was still fairly small in those days. Right. And back in those days, Jeff was still very hands on with a lot of business decisions. And when I joined, we were getting ready for the Kindle launch. So that was quite a big time. And it was one of the kind of pet projects for Jeff. And I had the privilege of being in some of those calls of listening to the leadership team and figuring out, uh, how this thing was going to launch. And my role was to be involved in the reverse logistics part business. And I was fairly new in the company at the time. And, um, I asked a very naive question when it came to, hey, uh, when do we need all these things in place to handle it? And I just heard this voice on the end of the phone saying, yesterday. I said, oh, okay, my deadline was yesterday. You're already late. Okay, fine. And so it gave me that kind of sense of, okay, so we gotta go fast. Right? I came from the consulting world where you're used to analyzing, presenting, encouraging, getting a deal, then getting a project plan and taking weeks or months to actually do something. Yet Jeff was very clear about this, is we gotta get going. And you're already just always be thinking that you're already late, okay, you're already late to the party, you gotta catch up, go faster, right? And that, uh, and also his obsession on the long term and customer obsession. I think the things I really took from Jeff, I had the privilege of being in a few different meetings with him and a few projects that we were running, and those things just really stuck. I always thought Jeff's one of these people, I think, who is probably the evidence for time travel, right. I think he's been to the future, right. And he knows what it looks like and that's how he was able to make some of the decisions he makes. Right. I was always convinced of that, that he would be, he would be evidence of that at some point. So that, that, that's Jeff. And then I think the Ray Dalio, his book Principles, which is the one that I have, in fact, it's sitting right back there. The book I always dive into. It's not a, that book for me is not a book you read from COVID to cover, right? That's not really what it's about, I don't think. Certainly not for me. And it's not how I use it. I dive into that book. It's a series of principles that Ray used to build his business and to run his business. And those are really great for me. They're really great. Kind of concise snippets of here's what it is, here's what you can do with it, and here's the difference it makes. And I use some of those a lot of the time. I kind of make up my own vocabulary as well to a certain degree, kind of using some of the ways that. That Ray did. Uh, and I find it hugely beneficial to be able to do that. Ray has his principles that we in Silverdale, we kind of call them tenants that we talk about. Our internal tenets are how we hire and promote people, et cetera. But things like we know the customer is not always right. Even things like, it's never too late to do the right thing. We communicate bad news just as fast as good news. Those sorts of things help to form us as individuals, but also how we as a company perform because of it. So Ray's, I think, distinctive writing style on those principles is a really great way of me organizing in my head. And that's a book I go back to regularly. And then you said the surprise kind of Grant Cardone, I have to say, the first time I picked up that book, his book 10X, I picked it up and I read the first. I don't know, probably first few pages, I'm like, oh, my God, this is awful. There's no way I'm going to read this.

Speaker B: Okay.

Speaker A: And then I started listening to it on Audible as an audiobook, and because Grant actually does narration, it suddenly comes to life. The book that seemed rather weird on paper, actually, when you hear Grant talking in, uh, his own words, it's a very different experience now that I have to say that 10x audible that I have, I probably listened to it 20 times. I probably should buy it again from them. I feel like I owe Audible some money for it, but it's on my constant playlist. And it. For me, people love or hate Grant Cardone, right? And I'm one of these people. I love his. The way he works and I love his thinking, I love his enthusiasm, love all the things about him. But that. That particular thing really helps me with. Everything's going to take 10 times more effort than you expect it to, right? So I just know when my team say, hey, we can get that done by next week. In my mind, I'm thinking the only way we're going to get this done by is by adding resource now. Right? Let's attack this thing relentlessly and heavily now. Right? Let's not wait. Let's not wait until we realize we're behind. Let's get that effort in right now. And that's something that. Here at Silverdale, it's a challenge for us. And it's a challenge. I think it's a challenge in every company, quite frankly, is tasks, planning, getting things done tends to. It's like a gas, right? It fills the space you give it. And so if you give yourself a week to do something, guess what? It's going to take a week. And one of the things that we're learning relearning is about shrinking the space you give these tasks. And what we do is we end up getting much better results quicker or failing faster and then try it again. Right. One or the other. And that's one of the things I really took from Grant and the 10X, especially his 10X books. But those books, I think have been very influential with Principles by Ray Dalio and 10x by Grant Cardone. But the other book, I would say, just as we're talking about books that I would absolutely recommend to people is the Checklist Manifesto as well. That book, again, is. Is a, uh, really great read and with really great actionable insights in it as well, which we apply every day in our company from that book. I like learning stuff. I like learning from other people. And I love implementing and putting these things in place. And it really helps us to be a better company as well as me as a leader becoming better as well.

Speaker B: Yeah. I think the Check. Check List Manifesto was written by a surgeon.

Speaker A: That's right, yeah.

Speaker B: Uh, he. I think he was an Indian surgeon that wrote it. And it's pretty much operational playbook for anybody that's trying to systematize their business on how they go about doing it. He talks about how pilots still uses. Even after thousands of flights up and in and out of airports, they still use the Checklist every time they do it because they never want to skip a step. Because you just never know. Right. You can easily make a mistake. But going back to what you said about Amazon, I know one of the. One of the things that Amazon also has is the day one mentality, that every day is as if it's your first day and never getting super comfortable in the size and size and capability of a massive organization like Amazon, which I think is definitely one of their key advantages as an organization because they're always thinking first principles. They're always thinking about, how would we do it if we were to do this for the first time? And I think even just the amount of innovation, uh, like some of the things that you're talking about, even Kindle, I never saw Amazon in the early days as a company that makes products of its own, Kindle definitely being one of them. And even now, they have so many more. Right. They have, uh, their own cameras and everything else that I invented. Even if you go to the Amazon Fresh stores, they have very expensive. These cards that are like. I would say it's like 3,500 to $5,000 each of those cards, because they are electronic marvels. They have scanners, you know, display screen, weighing machine all loaded up, where you push it and just scan it, put it in. It's already connected to your Amazon account, and you just drive, walk right out. Like, you don't do anything. Which is incredible innovation that company has come up with because of that principle of just day one mentality.

Speaker A: Yeah, that plays really well with the. Both the Amazon experience that you just described, but also I would say with Grant Cardone and the 10X as well, just kind of really makes challenges you to think about. Like, you are not constrained by the norms, by the rules that are traditionally put in place by your industry. Right. So you don't have to do the same things in the same way as everybody else in the same industry as you. Why are you taking these things as rules? Right. You should not be constrained by that. And that's been really important for us here at Silverdale is not being constrained by where we work with, uh, Odoo. We're an Odoo partner, but we're not constrained by the way that other Odoo partners work. Right. We don't work in the same way. We don't play by the same rules. We tried it for the first six months and quite frankly, it was a disaster. And so we decided that we can be confident enough that we don't have to play by the same rules as everybody else. We're not playing the same game as everybody else, quite frankly. I think that's one of the things that endears us to a lot of our clients, right. Is we do come with a very fresh approach to doing what we're doing. And that can be quite frequently, in fact, is after they've had a bad experience elsewhere, and then coming to us with a very different way of doing things is very Appealing for them.

Speaker B: Yeah. Um, a couple of books come to mind that I think you might find it interesting based on your interest on topics. One is Benjamin Hardy's book the 10x is easier than 2x. Definitely a book. If you like 10x by Grant Cardone, I think you will find that. And then also I think the other book is the Infinite Game. The same guy that wrote the book, the, uh, start with why. So I, uh, think those are probably some books that maybe worth finding. Find interesting.

Speaker A: Yeah.

Speaker B: So. So clearly you mentioned some of the things in terms of, hey, we're not playing by the same rules. We want to completely change the way we approach problems. And that is reflected in so many things that you're doing for sure, because you've been at this company building for the last five or so years and building this, this organization, obviously investing a lot of energy into to marketing. And here we are, we're doing this podcast, you're producing a ton of content. Can you tell us a little bit about your mindset and approach overall from a marketing standpoint, how you're tackling that?

Speaker A: Yeah. So marketing, you got me started on a subject now some ru. Who's our marketing? Uh, manager is. Every time someone talks to me about marketing, you just see my eyes just rolling into the back of my head. Right. Because I've spent so much money on marketing over the last five years. This is not funny. And. And it was all completely wasted, in my opinion.

Speaker B: Right.

Speaker A: The marketing industry, to me, the traditional marketing industry is, I think, just hampered with the way the industry does things and what your, what your competitors doing and how they voice themselves, and you just become very bland. And you could take a logo of one company, put it on a competitor, and it would look exactly the same. You would never know the difference. Right? And that sort of marketing was what we were getting for the last few years. Now, over the last, I would say six, nine months, we're really making this our own now. For example, right now, our number one marketing goal right now is to break through obscurity. Okay? That's our number one goal right now. So many times we're talking to clients who are coming to us having tried to implement an ERP for the last two, three, four years or whatever it might be. And then they come to us and they're like, man, I wish we'd found you three years ago.

Speaker C: Right?

Speaker A: Or, man, I wish I'd known about Silverdale two years ago. We were here, right? And our issue is obscurity. People don't know we're here, right. Never mind being able to buy from us, you can't buy from someone you don't know. Right. So our number one marketing goal right now is breaking through obscurity. And our tactic to do that is that we're doing a thousand unique posts over 100 days. So that's 10 posts a day on LinkedIn for 100 days, where I was just checking this morning, we're 45% of the way through on that. Uh, so we're going to keep going, right? And it's amazing. In fact, the reaction we're having is now we speak to potential clients who say, oh yeah, I've seen some of your posts on LinkedIn, right? Or yeah, ah, I saw your post about this or I saw your post about this. Right. And so we're starting to see the impact of that in the conversations we're having and what it's also doing because we set ourselves the goal of having a thousand unique posts as well. So we're not repeating any of the content that we're sharing is it's really forcing us to think hard about what we know, our methods and what we do. It's really helping to define more about our products and services because now we're actually having to tell people about them in different ways and in different means and in different terminology with different graphics. And it's really interesting how much that helps to really hone the messaging and the product and the services that we have. And that's, as I say, we're 45% of the way through our first goal. Our next goal after that is going to be reducing the number of posts. However, increasing the depth of those posts. That's our next marketing campaign is going to be really about depth. Okay, so, and thought leadership and establishing. Now we've got breakthrough, the obscurity barrier. Now what we have to do is, is now break through the subject matter expert. The trusted advisor ceiling is now what we've got to break through. And you can only do that through very detailed, very long form content. So that's what we're going to be doing next. So I'm not giving anything away there. It's that strategy I think can work for a lot of companies. There's no point, no one can buy from you if they don't know about you. So get through the obscurity first. And then as I say, we're about to move on to the next phase, which is about establishing thought leadership.

Speaker B: Yeah, I really love it. And I think you were taking to heart the 10x model. So you're not doing typical. Just one day. One day. One post a day. You went all in and 10 posts a day, which is a big time commitment and obviously a lot more resources required. What's your system in place in terms of making sure that you're not spending time every day? Is there any sort of like a scheduled time of the week that you're just focused on content creation? How are you able to get that many pieces out so fast?

Speaker A: Yeah, so there's really two things we do there. One is, as a business, we are heavily mechanized. And what I mean by mechanized is that we figure out how to do something once, we figure out how to do it twice, and then we figure out how to automate it and scale it. Right. That's what we do. Right. So we might take two hours to create the first post, but then we spend four hours creating the second one, six hours creating the third one. The reason why is because we're actually learning how to automate the damn thing.

Speaker B: Right.

Speaker A: So that we don't have to spend any time again in the future. So certainly the graphics creation in terms of the, the wording that we're creating, we do also are using a lot of AI tools as part of that. And we don't just throwing things at ChatGPT saying, Give me 10 posts. Right? Any idiot can do that. Right. But we've actually spent the last year training our own, our own patch of ChatGPT in Silverdale. Our clients, our products, our services, our projects, our task, our tickets. And what we're doing now is we're actually using that to help inform us of what, uh, our themes should be of our posts. And it really helps us to speed up that process as well as getting that uniqueness in what we do. A big part of what we do is, as I say, that heavily mechanized way of doing things is incredibly important for us. And I think the. What's also very interesting is you say that 10 posts a day, and I won't tell you what our marketing manager said the first day we went through this, where, bless him, he wanted to do one post every couple of days and take our time with it. And I'm like, no, we're going to do it 10 posts a day, five days a week. Don't want to do it till you've got thousands unique posts. And the look on his face, you can just see it as if, how on earth are we going to ever do this? It's just not. It's just nobody does this. You can't do it right. And he was on his own as well. He's one person, right? He's just. You see this? Look, I am, um, never going to be able to do this right. This is all, all I'm going to be doing all day, every day. And what was interesting is that day, right? The challenge was, it was midway through the day. So I said, okay, today I'm going to let you do five. Go. Don't think about it, don't overthink it. Just do five posts today, just get it done right. And then tomorrow come in, do the same on 10. And it used to take him a whole day. Now he can do it in probably less than an hour. He's able to do those posts. So it's amazing. Once you start doing something, you commit to doing something and then commit to figuring out how to do it better and quicker. That's the next stage. And that's really what sets, I think, people apart. So again, it's very, very indicative of the way that we work, the way that I work, the way the rest of my team and the rest of the company works around this mechanization of things that, you know, what most companies do in a year, we do in a month. What most people do in a month, we do in a week. What people do in a week, we do in a day. What people do in a day, we do in an hour. Right? That's what we've got to figure out. And that's what we're constantly so striving for.

Speaker B: Yeah, I know the former Microsoft founder, he said the same thing. Right. If you, most people underestimate what they can do in, in, in a year. Overestimate. Right. Like in what they can accomplish in 10 or something like that. I'm paraphrasing it, but that's definitely the case. I think you mentioned earlier to your tasks, if you give it a week, then your tasks tend to stretch. Right. Like you said, gas. Or if you just constrain and say, hey, you got two hours to get it done, figure it out how to do it, people will actually try to find a way to solve that, that time constraint. Yeah, I think constraint is usually a big push toward innovation and improvements. Right. Because if you have a specific constraint, you kind of have to figure out how do you overcome that. So your business is all around helping organization with operation, efficiency and how to improve their business. Right. The top line and obviously bottom line, what are some big challenges that you've seen businesses have that you oftentimes come to them and that they've just been putting aside and never been able to solve for.

Speaker A: One of the biggest challenges that we see is companies, organizations that are trying to operate without processes. And processes can be as elaborate or as simple as you want them to be, but as long as they're somewhere, then you can start improving those processes. And you'd be surprised that the number of companies that we speak to who are like, oh, I want to implement an erp. Okay, why? Why do you want to implement an erp? Oh, because we need to get much better at operating our process and getting our work done. Great. Can you show me your processes? Okay. And no, I can't. Okay. Can you at least describe your process to me then? If you can't show it to me, can you describe it at least? And then maybe we start here and sometimes we might do this and oh, but actually we do that sometimes too. And it's always really surprising to me how people can't really think logically about A to B and the steps in between. Folks really struggle with that and they see an implementation of an ERP system as some sort of kind of magic bullet to fix all the process issues. Right. And quite frankly, the opposite couldn't be truer. Right. An ERP built and um imposed on an organization with bad processes is just going to make things work. Okay. Because any ERP in the world doesn't matter, whether it's Odoo or SAP or anything else, doesn't matter. If you try and put an ERP system on top of an organization without, um, or with poor business processes, it's just going to make things worse because the ERP assumes that you have processes that you're working to. And you're just going to get very frustrated when the system doesn't do the things it's expecting you to do in the way it's expecting you to do it. And so I'm always very surprised that a lot of our work isn't really technical. Right. We're not, we're not a technology company in reality. Okay. We're a business process and people and change management company first, and then we're a technology business. The technology itself predominantly is already there. Right. What we've got to figure out is how do we integrate your business with that technology, not the other way around, which is what a lot of people try and do. But really implementing and integrating your business with the ERP is the way you've got to think of this. And it's always a big surprise, the number of folks that can't even Describe their business.

Speaker B: Yeah. I'm also just curious to learn from you, like some of the surprises that you ran into of companies that have poor processes. No tech, technology, but revenue wise, just like bursting with money. We've seen companies that are doing several hundred million in revenue with no CRM. They were operating out of Excel spreadsheet. And uh, we were able to get in there and implement a CRM which like you said, the change management was hard because people are not used to a process and they don't want to be accountable. But somehow they've still managed to be making money without any of that. But I'm just curious if you ran into some organization where you're like, man, how the heck these guys make money because they still have such amazing business that they're just sitting on cash even though they have no technology, no process or anything that that is actually that somebody would call is thought out.

Speaker A: Yeah. I have to say we, we have got a few clients who were in that position, I would say.

Speaker B: Right.

Speaker A: And you go in and you think how on earth do you do what you do? I just don't know how you even ship this number of products every day or you deal with this number of customers every day. And what's interesting is you normally find and those. I don't know what you find, but certainly my experience, what I found is it's normally down to a very small number of individuals who act as that central control, who get things done. Right. And not just the knowledge is concentrated in those individuals, but the actual work and the thinking is also concentrated in those individuals. And I try and tell business owners and C suite people in those types of companies that it's a huge risk. Right. Take that one individual out of the business and uh, you really sure you could continue doing what you're doing.

Speaker B: Right.

Speaker A: And if companies really want to grow and scale and be there for the long term, you've got to invest in these types of tools and systems and processes to really create a long term company, not just a short term company that makes cash.

Speaker B: Yeah. The one company that I'm thinking of that was doing almost 200 million in revenue, they were an electronic component manufacturer and they had almost all top five of the auto manufacturers in the world that use this particular component in their cars. So they technically only have five, five customers. So they didn't really need a CRM. Um, but we were just like dumbfounded when we heard that they were operating out of Excel spreadsheet and they had all these POs that they would track on Excel sheets and they had all these RFPs. It was just a mad thing. But what I realized is you don't need a CRM M if you have people willing to buy your stuff. But having a CRM gives a lot more uh, efficiency to the organization. And also like you said, the institutional knowledge is in the handful of people. If one of them were to take, take another job or get hit by a bus, the whole organization is going to suffer. Because nobody knows, only Mary knows in production when that unit of thousand parts that were supposed to be shipped out, but nobody else actually have any idea. Right. So. Or even just forecasting capacity or anything because you have no idea what's in the sales pipeline that's coming in that needs to be produced in whatever, whatever schedule. Yeah. Some interesting challenges that uh, you solve for. Obviously you've seen some of these success stories. Are there any interesting stories you might be able to share of how you were able to implement a technology and how that improved that company's entire profitability and operational efficiency?

Speaker A: Yeah, absolutely. We've got several examples, I would say, where the technology, when we engage with clients a lot, especially clients who come to us after either a failed implementation or an implementation that just didn't get over the line or they're halfway through, what we tend to find is the conversations that we start with the owner, the CEO, the CFO of the company is they spend half of their day just talking about the technology. Right. That's what they're spending their time talking about is where is this? How does this work? Where is this button? What does this do? Why is it not working? Why, where is this order? Where is this product? Where they spend half their time talking about where is this technology not working correctly for me? Right. And it's interesting that when we go back to that client and we, we're not really a project business, we're, we're going to stick with our clients for the long term. We, we try and make ourselves a long term resource for our clients. And what's interesting is after we've done an implementation or a reimplementation as it might be six or 12 months later, we then have conversations with the CEO or the founder of the company now where the conversations are different, different Right now the conversations are about, ah, uh, now I really want to go to sell my products in Canada. How can I do that in my current system? How is my system going to let me do that? Or I want to start selling into Europe. Can Odoo handle multicurrency? And how do I do that, right? And oh, I'm going to be going out and acquiring another company. How do I get them into my odoo as well? And how do I get consolidated financials across my businesses? Is the conversations really change because the technology is, allows you to do more, better things, Right. And it's really great for us to see after a year, 18 months of working with a client that the conversations aren't about how do I fix the thing, it's more about how can this thing help me do this right and get to the next level and go to the next territory. And we've got, we're working with a client right now who is really on a really strong growth trajectory and now we're working with them about how they're going to launch their products in the UK and then how they're going to launch those products in Asia as well. And how are we going to work with them on just not just the erp, but also, hey, what do we need to be thinking about from a business perspective? How do we manage logistics and supply chain and manufacturing and vendor, manufacturer? How do we track all this stuff globally? And it's helping those companies become really global enterprises, Right? And the technology becomes an enabler, right? As opposed to an inhibitor, which if you're trying to do it on Excel or something else, then good luck to you, right? It's going to be inhibiting pretty quickly. But that getting to that point where your ERP enables you to do more and to make different decisions and quite frankly, in a lot of cases, stop talking about it, right? Stop talking about the technology, go start talking to your clients and let's talk about products and sales, right?

Speaker B: Yeah. It's funny because I'm laughing as you're explaining some of those things. This similar conversation we also have because we tell customers, technology is not the strategy, technology is just an enabler. You better have a big picture strategy, what you're trying to accomplish, what's the outcome we're going for? Would this technology enable me to get to that outcome? Right? And then it's just a matter of configuring it to accomplish that. We can certainly have a long conversation around this topic and I certainly enjoyed our discussion here. But in closing, what my question to you would be, obviously, Nick, going back, you said 30 plus years of in the industry, having been through so many things, got fired at age 16 from a job, all these experience that you've have, what's one advice would you give the younger Nick Foley on, um, all the things that you've learned.

Speaker A: I think the one piece of advice would be to be more confident, right? And trust. Trust your gut more and be a little bit more confident. And don't worry about making waves. Okay. And that might sound a bit weird given the conversation about what happened when I was 16, but there are been some times where you're like, I'm going to hold back and not say something and then you just kick yourself three months later when, ah, uh, damn it, it happened. Or I knew that was going to happen. Right. Or my gut was telling me that was going to be true. And you don't trust yourself to actually stand up and say, whoa, I think we've got a problem here. And so I think the advice would be, yeah, be more confident. Speak up. Uh, don't put up with it. Right. That's not what we're here for. Awesome.

Speaker B: Uh, what a great way to end our conversation. Thank you so much for joining me today and sharing some of your life lesson and wisdom.

Speaker A: Okay, thank you, Sam. I really appreciate it.

Speaker C: This episode of Coffee with Closers is brought to you by one IMS M A uh, leading digital marketing agency helping businesses win new customers. To request a free marketing roll a lie audit, please visit oneims m. Com. If you enjoyed this video, please share it. To make sure you never miss an episode, please subscribe.