596: Build product innovation into your company – with Phil Burks

Most entrepreneurs don't set out to build a global company. They set out to solve one problem. And Phil Burke set out to help a client manage their two way radio network. And then he ended up writing the software himself to do this in his bedroom on a DOS computer. And that was 1989. Today, the Genesis Group has offices in Tyler, Texas and London, serving some of the world's largest public safety communications networks. Along the way, Phil has started multiple companies across very different industries and became a trustee at his alma mater, letourneau University, where he now guides an R and D initiative designed to train the next generation of engineering innovators. That's not a bad track record for someone who started by writing code in his bedroom. I wanted to find out how a person builds innovation into their companies not as a buzzword, but as a practice. And the answer is more practical than you might expect. As a reminder, if you're listening and would rather watch our discussion, simply go to our YouTube channel. Search for product mastery now on YouTube. We'll jump in right after this. How can you unlock your full potential as a product manager? We're sharing the product management insights you need. They are based on the seven research backed knowledge areas for product mastery. You'll learn to create products customers love, enhance your influence and elevate your career. Welcome to Product Mastery now hosted by Dr. Chad McAllister, Product Management professor, practitioner and your guide, Phil. Thank you so much for joining us. Hey Chad, it's great to be with you. Thanks for the invite. I am glad we have the opportunity to talk and hear about how you think about innovation. I wanted to start kind of with that first company experience. You graduated from Letourneau University in 1974 and a few years later you were starting companies and you wrote the, what you call the Genesis, the original Genesis software yourself in your bedroom. What was that problem that you were solving and how did you uncover it? Well, Chad, I tell people I'm fundamentally lazy. And as a lazy person, I work hard to be lazy. And if I have to do something more than once, I'm going to find a tool of some sort to help me do it easier, faster. So I can be lazy. And the problem was that I owned a tower company and two way radio communications networks. If you ever remember the name Nextel, where they had this nationwide push to talk that was similar to that and we predated Nextel and I had to do these repetitive tasks every month, which I hated doing. So I thought there's got to be a better way. And so I Started writing software, teaching myself how to write software to solve that problem so I didn't have to do things every month manually. I could just simply click a button and make a few changes as necessary for invoicing changes. But it worked very good. Right. So uncovered the problem that you were encountering yourself and addressing that. And this turned into a lot more over time. Was there something that happened that told you this was going to be more than just a one product company? Yeah, well, I go back to the very first customer that I had, the very first customer was a friend of mine and he had a similar company to me and he says, what are you doing for this invoicing? And I said, well, I'm created my own solution. He goes, tell me about it. Told him about it. He goes, well, I want to buy that. Well, I'm thinking, oh well crud. Now I have to make this thing work. And the first thing that you do for your own, you know, the personality, it knows you and you can work around all the problems and make it work. But then if you're going to sell it to somebody else, you really do have to, you have to write a manual for them to understand how to work it. And so I had to create all of those things because I thought, well, I'm going to have to support this. And I don't want to do calls every day, month when people, when customers use this again, I'm lazy. So I wanted to make sure it kind of runs on its own. And so, and then as I started trying to find a way to put more customers on these two way radio networks, I started looking at the analysis of the data. How many customers do I have on the system? How many customers could I fit on the system? And if I did a tiered pricing. So all of this data and remind, just as a reminder, this is in 1989, so this is quite a long time ago. And I'm taking the data that comes out of the system and building very early Lotus 1, 2, 3 spreadsheets, predating Excel and then turn that into software where it would autonomously do it each month for me. So I could just look at the numbers to say, how am I doing? Where's my sweet spot of users and numbers? And that turned into other products. So it kind of organically grew from a single product, just an invoicing and CRM or database solution, to data analytics. Easy Bill was the first one and it got to EasyTrack, which was the other pieces and the easy save and again all pointed back to the Fact, I just didn't want to do repetitive tasks manually. Yep, make it simple. Who was using your software? There was a thing that were called smrs Special Specialized Mobile Radio. That was an FCC term. And it was we who were entrepreneurs that owned these towers and these trunking systems is what they were called Motorola Trunking Systems. That Joe the plumber, Bob the air conditioning guy, he would buy the two way radios from Motorola, pay us the airtime usage to use our network and he would use the system. My customer for the software was other entrepreneurs like me. Well, then I mentioned Nextel just a little while ago. Nextel comes along. The guys that started it were friends of mine and then they started growing it to where they had. They started with one that they bought out of Houston and then it went from there to they finally at the top owned about 4,500 of these systems. They also ran into the same situation. So they ended up buying the software, the easy build software and easy save and all of the tools that I had written for my own use. But for their 4,000 radio systems, well now it had to really work. So you know, it had to work on a huge platform. So there was a lot more effort that went into it to make it where it was flawless for them to work every month on this large amount of customers and send out invoices in a huge way. And Chad, you'll appreciate this from the innovation and entrepreneur standpoint, you always wonder, am I doing this right? And I remember getting off the elevator on the third floor of the office building where Nextel was, the doors open. And I should tell you that in the software I put little sounds because this is DOS and so we don't have any confirmations of what's going on. And I was doing support and I wanted to be able over the phone to be able to hear when it came back to the main menu. So I put a little bleep in there and when it went to a different menu and bloop. And so I walked off the elevator and I heard this bleep, bloop, bloop, bloop. I just stood there and smiled and said it works, it works. Your system is in use. Yes, very good. Well, how did that expand? Right, so Nextel was the had a relationship there. They were growing rapidly. They needed this capability too to manage all these two way radio systems. How did that go to the next customer? Well, I guess word of mouth and I did some trade shows. It was really funny. I remember an early trade show where I had a very busy Booth and it's a one man show and my wife was there, so she kind of ran interference a little bit. But my voice was getting tired. So I thought, well, the next time I do this show, I got a way to do this. So I actually got a little microphone I clipped on and put an amplifier on my back so that as I'm looking at the screen and talking to the screen and showing one person, five other people behind me could hear it again, solving a problem just because I'm lazy. So those customers would buy the software and we ended up. Motorola owned networks like these around the world. So I became the de facto standard for them and got to travel the world from all over Latin America, Asia, had a few in Europe that we installed. And it just grew organically. I guess. We never really did much in the way of advertising, just worked the relationships more than we did. The advertising became the gold standard, if you would. If we could call it that way. There was really only one competition and he was not dos, they were UNIX based. So it was much more complex when most everything was Windows. Excuse me, this is pre Windows. DOS based computers in those days. But that's kind of how we grew it. Yeah. So around this time frame, I had graduated from college in electrical engineering in 1987. So we both have a few years behind us here. Young whoopersniper. Yep. And Motorola was one of the highly desirable companies to go work for. And some of my classmates did. And I went down a different path. But I had the great pleasure a few years ago of being able to train all their product managers on product innovation worldwide. So I think an awful lot of the Motorola company because of those connections. So it sounds like you've had a good career there helping them. And that led to other things. I am a little bit curious. So you got customers, word of mouth, trade shows. Some of these are outside the US now you have them all over the US and outside the country too. And you're in Tyler, Texas. I've been through Tyler. Not long. From Longview, which I know more about because that's where Laturnal University is. I have some connections with. This is not a tech hotbed. How has that kind of hit your work? Has it caused any limitations? Has it been helpful? I'll call it helpful, yeah. Let's look at it from several aspects. Employment. We do have students that have worked for us over the years from letourneau. Again, not far down the road, like you say. We have students from ut, Tyler, University of Texas at Tyler that have come to work for us. We now have them from all over the United States that have worked for us. We've got several missionary kids that have worked for us. God's just provided the right people. So they love coming to Tyler, Texas because it's not the rush, rush and the cutthroat of a Dallas or a Silicon Valley or an Austin. The quality of life is so much better. And as I tell people all the time, Chad, what we do we could do from anywhere. We literally can, as long as there's broadband. Pre Covid it was a little tougher. I'll give you an example. It's really interesting story that I put into my book. We had an install for the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia that you mentioned that was about to happen and it was going to happen in October of 2001. We all know what happened in September of 2001 and obviously we didn't go. So we thought we still want this sale, they still want it installed. How are we going to do this? Fortunately, back in those days Tyler did have enough technology that we had DSL lines and dsl, they also had them in the Kingdom. So we, I think at that time, come to think of it, we had a cable based broadband. It wasn't all that broad, but we had it. And we had them take two DSL lines and combine them together in the Kingdom and then we worked for like two weeks off hours where myself and one of my business partners at the time, our coders, we installed it, we shipped everything over the modems, installed it and trained it by using notepad on the desktop and saying all right, now look over here and do this, watch my mouse. And we move the mouse over and they can see what was going on. They had Windows 3.1. I think it's the time. But again finding, having a problem and finding a solution for it to say in the worst of times, how can we make this work? And in Tyler, Texas you could do that as well as you could Dallas, Austin, Oshkosh, it doesn't matter where you physically are and especially now where we have a room full of our support technicians that are online with government computers all around the world, 247 from there. And then we have an off, we have an affiliate in Melbourne that handles that part of the world and then the London as you mentioned, that handles that part of the world. So it really doesn't matter. But it's where we want to live and have a quality of life and plug back into the community. Yep, East Texas, not a bad place. It's not all flat either. And there's lots of pine trees, which surprises me. Lots. I'm impressed. Lots of pine trees, lots of water and fishing. Yep. Yeah. So yeah, 911 happened. That certainly shut down travel for a while as I recall. I might be getting my standards mixed up. The DSL lines I think were 56 kilobits per second. I think they were 56 megabits like we're used to or gigabits like we're used to now. And so you put two of those lines together, sure beat the 300 baud modem that I'm sure you used at one time too. I did. It's a funny story about that. One of my customers was Barbados Business Machines in Barbados. And I remember again I put this story in there. I could not get a file to load and I was getting frustrated on a dial up modem and I literally put my hand on the modem and said, God, you are in control of all bits. Please get this to go through. And sure enough, it did. That was a good prayer. Very good. I want to get your thoughts more specifically on innovation because as the Genesis company grew, it grew to over 30 software products. Since you have created companies in multiple places, not just software, but drones and audio, visual systems and real estate and the like, how do you think about innovation in business right across these kind of diverse industries? Great question, Chad. And I as I've been thinking about that because I knew you were going to ask that I really struggled with how do I do that? And I'm going to say that I struggle with that answer because it's intuitive Now I don't mean that in bragging way, it just happens I think of things differently and I think it's probably because I'm left handed which means I've had to think about the world differently all of my life. How to make something work differently because it's built for a right handed world. And for your listeners to know, I had the privilege of sitting under Chad as he talked about innovation mastery not long ago. And I took away two big strong things for those and savor the surprises was one thing that you said. And you know, I'm sure somebody whoever invented the paperclip said there's got to be a better way than all all these stupid staples we're putting into things or whatever. And I think that's what we do. We should, as you well put, use our facilities God gave us in the proportions. Two ears, one mouth, listen twice as much as you talk. Yeah. Listen for those opportunities. Yeah. And I do like that phrase. I have to give credit to Nathan Furr, who's been on the podcast a couple of times that I got savor the surprise from. But I think of it kind of like in terms that you do. It's just more often like there should be a better way. Why hasn't this been solved yet? Right. Yep. It's an opportunity here. You mentioned that workshop. That was something that I was invited to letourneau University to facilitate a one day innovation workshop. Something you shared struck me because we were doing some exercises along the way and I asked everyone to take their idea and kind of apply an innovation process to that. And you shared your takeaway from that is that you were applying that to the actual organization of Genesis as if Genesis is the product. Right. So kind of more in the how do we recreate an organization through an innovation lens. Can you share a little bit more of your thinking about that? Because I don't know if everyone thinks in those terms that innovation applies in a lot of places. Certainly products and services and even processes, but to an organization as well. Yeah. And this is not original to me, but I don't know if it was Ray Kroc that said it, but to build the people and they will build the company. And so we take that philosophy literally. We work to turn new employees into the best that they can be. As an example, we have probably more Scrum masters at Genesys than most any other company per capita. We have Scrum product owners. We work on helping them to think out of the box. While we don't officially do this like I think Google did it for a long time where they. What was it idea Friday was that something like that where you had a day where you had no at the 20% rule, which was yeah, basically a day a week work on a project of your choice. We put the environment there to try to help them to be creative so that when they are working on the products that we have, they're doing a hang on, what if type things. And we encourage a thing that I love to call chif that they need to be chiff in what they do. And chiff C H I F F stands for clever. Be clever, Be high quality, Be innovative, make it functional, but make it fun. CHIF C H I F F. So everything that they do and how we treat our employees, how we build software, how we write our ads, how we do our personnel manual, all of those things, they have to be chiff. And so we encourage them to think that way in all that they do. Okay. Yeah. So there's some built in predisposition towards thinking differently, which is kind of innovative spirit that we need. It is. And one other thing that we do in there too, Chad, is we actually ask them to get engaged in more than just work. We have a thing called Genesis Gives Back and Beyond business and it is an official arm of our company. We have a person that runs this where you and I both know, because we've grown up in a household where giving was kind of second nature. That's just what we did. Some of these that are coming with us, some of the Gen Z ers and what are we now? Alphas. That they have never experienced. It's never been modeled for them. So we give them. We start with a simple thing we know. It makes us happy. It gives us that internal that really works. And of course that parlays into other parts of your work life as well. But we actually start them on let's say a meals on wheels route. It's a low impact. It's 15, 20 minutes out of their day once a month. And then we ask them to step up into something a little bit harder. Like we'll do gift bags for at risk kids who are taking. Taken out of family lives for certain reasons by cps. And we go a little bit harder. We have different levels where people are comfortable, but we want them to get a little bit uncomfortable in their giving so that they can experience that stretch a little bit and it absolutely translates into their daily work life and innovation. Yeah, I love that. It reminds me of a story, Dave Ramsey, the money guru, on how to get out of debt and manage your finances. Well, he shared that he bought this bad debt company, $10 million of personal bad debt. So people who had debt, they weren't paying $10 million on the books, he bought it for pennies on the dollar. And then he tells all his employees, we're going to call these employees about, call these people about their debt. And no one wants to do this because who wants to try to get money back from. It's a terrible thing. And it's just a little bit before Christmas. He says, you're going to call them, you're going to tell them their debt is forgiven, that they don't have to pay that anymore. And people just had. He talks about how what a great experience that was for the employees to be able to give that gift and not. It moved me when I heard that too, like that that's such a great thing for a company to do. Okay, I want to get back to Letournal a little bit. So Letournal University. It was founded by R.G. letourneau. And he was famous for a number of reasons, but one was he had hundreds, literally hundreds of paths for really big machines, big mining equipment, big construction equipment and those patents. And that work really laid the foundation for what today is Komatsu and Caterpillar Komatsu more directly in terms of company purchases here. And when you read books about him and when read his writings, he talks about what made his ideas work, was running into what didn't work right. He discovered what didn't work and he iterated on that until he figured out what would work right. Kind of an engineering discipline, I think. How has. You're from letourneau University. How has that kind of influenced the way you think about what you do and innovation? Oh, thank you for teeing that up. I actually, this is not a book pitch, but I wrote a book about it. It's called how to Eat a Failure Sandwich and that it's about 25 or 30 stories about how I have failed in life. I mean, people look and say success and they don't see the duck paddling below the water and all the failure that went into it. I am told a story about rg and I was, I mentioned this at. I had the pleasure of speaking at commencement at Letourneau in 2025. And I mentioned the story and nobody's contradicted it, so I don't know if it's true or not, but the story is told that RG had a machine and if he had an enhancement for it, he would get out there and weld it up. And then at night or in the evening, he would take it down to what we used to call salt flats, the flats, not soft flats, just to the flats. And he would test that machine and if it failed, he would have it cut up with a torch in small enough pieces that nobody could see the failure of that thing that he tried. By morning it was done. And so while I don't know that I've done that, I like to show people failure so that they can say, oh, it's okay to fail, right? Well, yeah, it's okay to fail. I didn't think it was when I was younger, Chad, and it wasn't until I started understanding RG's life that while he was wildly successful, and this is a man that gave 90% of his income back to God and kept 10% for himself, he was horribly failure ridden in a lot of things. And you read that in his book and in his life. And I thought, oh, it's okay. In fact, it's a part of growth and it's part of innovation. Keep trying stuff until you find something that works. What's the old. What's Edison's statement on that? I've found 10,000 ways it won't work. Yeah. To not make a light bulb. Right, right, right. Yeah. If we're doing something new, as we talked a little bit in the innovation workshop, this is new. There's going to be learning involved. Just by nature, we're doing something new and we're not going to figure it out. Right. At first we have to take those, have those failures, make those mistakes and then learn from them. And that failure quite possibly keeps you from a bigger failure later on. Right, right. I mean, I tell the story about how we had a massive failure in a product that we had back in the dial up modem days where we were going to provide technology to a bunch of Pakistanis and we went over to Pakistan to demonstrate this product and the product allowed VoIP calling before VoIP was a thing, before Vantage, before Skype, before this platform that we're on. And the company failed and closed down. This product had 128 bit encryption and allowed VoIP conversations with encryption. So our guys went over there and they opened up. The product was called Ida and the company was idatel. Opened up idatel Pakistan. The locals said, hey, would you like to meet the guys that are backing our company? They said, okay. Rode on a train for like 18 hours, pulled off on the side, brought out a phone line, tested the little IDA box and waited for their business partners to show up. Guys come on horseback, big cloud of dust. They tie off their horses, make test calls, and they said, we want a container load of these. Well, I wasn't on the trip, but they called me and said, figure out how to get a container. I don't know how many of these devices will fit in a container. I don't know what the cost ended up. It was $10 million that I needed to make this happen. Couldn't come up with a $10 million company failed. That was all happening in 2000. We did not learn until September 11, 2001, that the word Taliban did not mean guys on horseback. Nomads. That's what that was. They were Taliban. So failure saved us. Yes, yes. I think you're having some divine protection there from. I'll call it that. Yes, 100%. Yep. You are currently a trustee at Letourneau University and now guiding the R.G. laternal Research and Development Initiative. Tell us briefly, what does that look like and why does that work matter to you? Well, to put it in the innovation terminology, working innovation in a university setting is sluggish. It takes a long time to get things done. I have a metaphor that I use for it and I not going to use it here because it's probably not appropriate but it just takes a long time to get things done. So RGRD for RG letourneur Research and Development was formed outside of the university by the board of trustees and it's its own separate corporation. It's a not for profit corporation outside but there are board members that are common between both trustees that are board members on RGRD. And we have about 20 or 25 projects on our plate that Dr. Alan Clipperton is managing that we can say we can be agile, we can put resources behind it, money, time. We have industrial relationships that Alan has curated over time with Yaskawa and others that we can take say a senior design project idea and, and say hang on, this actually could have legs to it and breathe life into it versus if you do that in the university setting it's never going to happen just because it's sluggish. It's going to go to 10 committees before it goes anywhere. But here we can make it happen. And we also have formed a scholarship and we said let's get the ideas. So we took high schoolers and said we put out the word, give us a video, pitch your idea for a business and the winner will get a four year scholarship and mentorship. And your goal is going to be to create your company with your idea by the time you get out of Letourney University. And so we get the chance to mentor, come alongside. We have awarded it to our first one and we have fellows which are the other 13 or so that applied that we're going to get together as a cohort and have guys like you come in Chad and speak to them and give them what does innovation look like? How can I take my idea from zero to a thousand miles an hour? How can I do that safely and tell them the things that are not necessarily in their curriculum that they have over here and inside the university. But that's, it's just to get, be agile and get things done quicker. It's not that unique. It's unique in a Christian university. I believe that this is done but some of the larger universities, Stanford and others have done something like this. But we are unique in the fact that we're Going to do this in a kingdom setting where it's for the good of not just money, but also for the kingdom of God. Very good. Yeah, I like the. And I'm eager to be part of that opportunity because I love help people learn more about innovation and college students certainly too. It sounds very exciting. The opportunity to, like you said, it's separate from the university, but has access to university resources like senior design students. And when they're working on a senior design project, if there's something there that could be spun out and commercialized, now there's a way to do that. And I think even as a student, as an undergrad, I had really good research opportunities that were, were kind of rare as an undergrad and I valued those enormously. And the idea of being able to work on something that has the potential of actually going out into the world, that's super exciting, I think, and kind of elevates that senior design process that they do have there to knowing that's a possibility even. So excited about that. Excited about the new innovation program we put in place and that student who's going to get mentoring and hopefully build a business and just by virtue of that student doing that is going to be influencing so many others to kind of be entrepreneurial minded, right? Absolutely through that. So that's exciting. We do like an innovation quote. I asked you to bring one success quote Innovation quote. Before we get to that, I just do want to remind listeners, in addition to teaching university courses, I occasionally get to help businesses. One of the core ways I do that is for organizations that want their people to learn more about innovation. We do this in a virtual setting over, over the course of nine sessions, usually meeting once a week for about 35 minutes. And there's some pre training that participants do and then we discuss those concepts, how they apply. That thing is called the Rapid Product Mastery Experience, the RPM Experience. You can find out more about that simply by going to productmasterynow.com, the website, same name as the podcast that you're listening to and you'll see information on that. I love helping product managers, product innovators, get better at their craft. And this is a great way to do that inside organizations as well. Phil, what do you have for us for a quote and what does it mean to you? Well, my quote, in fact, I had to pull it up here because I have about 10 that I usually roll around. But I really like this one. When I have had the chance to visit with the kids that are in business classes and I get the lovely opportunity to mentor. These days, it's work hard to be lazy. Work hard at being lazy. And when you do that, you will innovate. There's no choice because you're going to want to be able to spend time doing whatever else you want to do. And when you are lazy, you will innovate to do that and do it with a chip mindset to be clever, high quality, innovative, functional and fun. I'm glad you worked Shift back in there as well. Right. Clever, high quality, innovative, functional and fun. You got it. So that's good. It ties together many of the themes that you have shared. How can people find out more about what you have done? You mentioned a book along the way too. I wrote down the titles. You're talking about how to Eat a Failure Sandwich. That's right. Where should we go? Well, you can get that on Amazon. I did the audible on it as well, which is funny story. I never had listened to it. So I was listening to it on the way to Mississippi and I fell asleep, so I had to stop listening to it. This is not a good sales pitch, Phil. It's not a good sales pitch. I know. It was your material. I get it. Yeah. I mean, I already knew the stories. Right. There's philburks.com and that really was designed as a. To support up the book a little bit, to give some picture resources and the rest of the. Instead of reprinting a book with an epilogue or additional updates, you just put that on the website. So philburks.com you've got genesisworld.com or ebons, you can look at that. There's a lot of our websites that are out there. But I love the philburks.com because I have a chance in there to tell my story a little bit more than just what's in the book about how I've said there's only four smart things that I've ever said and I get into those four smart things. I've given you number four. And you can go to philburks.com and see what the rest are. Okay. And that's Burks, as in B U R K S. So phil with1l.burks.com. that's exactly right. Excellent. Okay, Phil, very nice talking with you. You've had a long, successful career, starting in the early days of writing software in your bedroom on a DOS computer and turning that into quite an empire of successful capabilities for customers, clients that you served. And now you're continuing to. To give back and helping kind of the next generation of innovators through your work at the Latourne University and appreciate that as well. Thanks for taking time with us. God bless the glory. Amen. That's great. Glad we could talk some about all these things and listeners. If you want to find the written show notes of everything we just discussed, including the links that were just shared, Simply go to productmasterynow.com598 as always everyone, keep innovating. Thank you for listening to Product Mastery now, where product leaders and managers gain Product Mastery through practical knowledge, influence and confidence. By listening, you are becoming a product master, creating products customers love. Find additional resources@productmasterynow.com keep innovating.