128 - What Founders Get Wrong About Tech Projects (and How to Avoid It)

Speaker A: G' day everybody, and welcome back to the Scale HQ podcast. Sorry I've been a little bit vacant lately. Uh, been a bit busy, um, building something for 2026. That's very exciting. More details to come on that later. But today, today I'm talking with Josh and Damo from Never Normal and I'm talking about technology. And you're going to want to listen because most digital projects that you undertake are not going to blow up because of the technology. They blow up because you make the wrong call before the technology even shows up. I think it usually sounds kind of like this. You know, you buy a shiny new system, then you try to bend the whole business around the system. You've got maybe no clear plan, no proper team, no real definition of actually what success even looks like in the technology deployment or the business. You know, uh, what that initiative looks like. And when you're small, you can get away with that. But once you're like 5 mil, 7 mil, 10 mil, 15 mil, it starts to get really expensive. If you get that wrong, get the wrong partner, get the wrong platform, get the wrong sequence of things, and all of a sudden you're bleeding time, you're bleeding cash, you're bleeding, uh, momentum. And that's why I invited Josh and Damo to come in today. They run Never Normal, which is kind of like a digital broker, like a digital consultancy and digital broker for scaling businesses. And they're not about plugging software. That's not what they do. They are, uh, there to make help founders make better calls on where technology can, how and where technology should enable their goals. And they think about both people and process and technology, not just technology. So in this episode we are unpacking why most digital mistakes actually start with a lack of vision and not bad technology, their three step process that they've got to cut through the chaos and get a right plan in place, how to build a lean digital team, um, without wasting headcount. And when the custom tech, like, when does custom technology like building your own proprietary system, when does that actually become a benefit and a moat and when does it actually become like a hand grenade in due diligence if you're going to sell your business at some point. So if you're trying to scale with less drama and more clarity, this episode is going to be worth your time. Let's get into it.

Speaker B: Welcome to the Scale HQ podcast.

Speaker A: I am Sean Steele and I'm a growth mentor, digital nomad, a massive metal

Speaker C: head and the founder of Scale hq.

Speaker A: And you, more importantly, are a Founder, uh, of a seven or eight figure services business who is finally ready to get serious about scaling up or securing, uh, a step back from your business or a life changing exit in the next three to five years. And if that's you, then you are in the right place. Because with over a hundred million in revenue growth across my last four companies and many acquisitions under my belt, I have spent my whole career figuring out what makes businesses more valuable, scalable and sellable. And I've learned a couple of things and I'm thrilled to have an opportunity to share those with you today. So welcome to your A4 nightly dose of practical strategy, founder success stories and expert deep dives to help you only get a return on all that sacrifice that you've made in your business. Welcome to the show. Let's dive right in. Okay, well, welcome back everybody. For those listening, uh, today I have Josh and Damo or Damien. Damien. Damo, Damien, whatever you like. Whatever I like. You can call me Sean Obinorno if you like. That is my uh, handle on Facebook. A client called me that today. I was like, oh, he must be with me on Facebook. Look, story for another day. Um, Josh and Damien, you guys run, uh, never normal. We got introduced, uh, you know, relatively recently I guess, you know, maybe three months, six months ago. You guys ah, are um, tell me if I describe um, this in the right way, but I guess the way I think about you, you're sort of a digital growth and strategy kind of outfit. You work on digital transformation, you're working with companies to really figure out if they're trying to grow and they're trying to scale. Ultimately whatever they're trying to tackle, they're going to end up with these challenging intersections of like what role does technology play, what role do the people play as part of that and what part is the process? And this kind of always challenging intersection of where does technology fit into this plan? How do we enable the success of the business goals? But thinking deeply about the sort of digital component of that, um, I guess that's the way I think about what you do. Is that a fair. Do you want to Do I miss anything material, anyone? Um, update me on that one.

Speaker B: Yeah, that's pretty good. Josh, do you want to tackle it first and then maybe I'll. But I think you did a pretty good job there.

Speaker C: Bang on, I would say. Bang on. Yeah, it's exactly right. Yeah, we um, we really kind of serve scaling businesses. So founders, execs, any brand leaders who are really struggling with the, the digital complexity of Growth and we really support them to kind of get where they want to be, kind of real, help them realize their vision, help them realize the organization's vision. Um, I mean the reality is that running a business is hard enough as it is. And so us being able to kind of help them take them out of the day to day to really give them better oversight over what is happening in the landscape and what's happening in the business is just.

Speaker B: Yeah, and, and I suppose to that Josh as well, or, or Sean really is like it's the overwhelm of the decisions around digital. Um, there's just so many decisions that need to be made in that space. Um, you know, I've run my own business before as well, I know the pain, but also for clients. So I think we're really trying to hit that sort of middle tier companies to help them just make some smart decisions. That's pretty much why we're here.

Speaker A: Well, I guess for the audience as a case in point, you know, I had a client um, recently who I've been working with for many years and you know, we're always establishing their big bets. Their big bets are the sort of two or three things they're going to double down on that are going to create competitive advantage in the medium term. And so where are those places where they're really going to invest in medium term stuff that may not be short term payoff but actually will deliver a lot of competitive advantage over time. And of course it's pretty hard to get away from like what's the role of technology in this? And do we have the right technology? Do we have the right team to execute on that between leaders and technical enablement? Because most of those big bets usually have in some way shape or form at least 70% of those probably have some technical element to them. And some founders are very capable technically and some have got absolutely zero experience, um, technically. And they hack them their ways around. And so sometimes you need some support to figure out how does that actually work. And so we had a client recently doing you know, sort of circa 10 million on the way to, you know, sort of 20 to 30. And that's where this engagement sort of arose. Uh, you guys worked with them to uh, look at what is the roadmap, what is this actually going to imply? What does it mean for team? What does it mean for technology? Do they have the right stack, have they got the right partners? How do we actually get these? How do we break it down into like key work packages and then make sure they're actually going to be able to execute on it because we've thought about all of those things. And so that's um, I guess a bit of context for the audience. Um, what I'd like to start though with is like, why Never Normal? Um, so you guys have both done a lot of stuff, uh, in your careers and Never Normal is a relatively kind of new operation. Like first of all, why does it exist? Why did you build this business?

Speaker C: Yeah, good question. Um, it really like my background particularly is in kind of service design and customer experience, strategy and design, but always a focus on the technology side. And I spent, I would say most of my career was born on fixing the problems that other consultancies or people had had mistake. So we'd come in and we'd be like, oh, we just built the CRM or we're investing in this huge piece of technology transformation. It's like no one's actually done the due diligence to take a step back, look at the business holistically, look at like the people involved, the processes, like the business goals or anything like that. And so we would kind of almost come back in and take, I would say, uh, an experience or a people first approach to what that technology is trying to solve. Is it the right technology if you're investing in a huge piece of enterprise tech stack and you've paid millions of dollars for it, or if you even paid like thousands of dollars for something, who's going to run it, who's going to grow it, who's going to enable it? Like, are you trying to use this to reach uh, a better customer base? You trying to use this to operationalize leads coming through the business, like what's the actual reason for it? And so Never Normal was really born out of that idea that we can go into the business and support the business and not necessarily support the platform and really help them. Kind of look at the complexity that's in market of. There's so many different technologies out there. There's so many different like growing, whether it's like AI or whether it's kind of Iot stuff or whether it's just like CRM. So it's like, how do we actually get in there and play the role of the business and help them make decisions and you take like a purpose, a people first approach to that as well. Yeah.

Speaker A: Um, okay, so let me start by asking you though, um, why never Normally it's a relatively new business. Why does it exist in the first place? Like I understand a bit of you've already Told us a little bit about like who you're kind of working with and the stuff that you're working on and um, and so on. Why, why this business? Yeah, yeah.

Speaker C: Well I've um, you know, I've got about 15 to 20 years kind of in the tech digital space. I've started small businesses myself and a lot of my career, as I kind of progressed into more kind of consulting and large scale businesses, was really cleaning up the mess that other people had made by implementing the wrong tech or making the wrong decisions around where they were putting their money. Um, and we'd always kind of be brought in and we would take a step back to say like basically look at the people behind the solution, look at the processes, look at the business. Where do you want to go? Um, how are you kind of going to enable this technology? And because I've got, like I said, I've got a service design kind of, uh, CX customer experience background, we kind of always take that approach of like, well the technology is one thing, it is a tool, is a really an enabler of your strategy, your business strategy and your customer strategy and your growth strategy. And so never. Norman was really born out of the desire to help the business make better decisions from the inside out. And so we would be able to come in, look at the business kind of across all verticals, um, from sales to marketing to finance. Really make sure that we are making the right decision in the right order and then kind um, of go to market to find the right partners.

Speaker B: And I suppose like what Josh said is like, how do we get upstream and make better decisions ultimately, you know, whoever's the furthest up, um, the decision can influence that if we can partner with businesses. Um, you know, I've run similar to Josh, run sort of large scale, sort of delivery teams. So I think if we can get up the top and actually bring the right people in at the right time and the right sequence, you know, maybe we can make a difference. And particularly the middle tier of business that scaling business, um, yeah, suits Josh and I to a T because we can add a lot of heavy, heavy weight to businesses without sort of, um, yeah, it's, it's where we can be most natural but also make the most impact. So that, that's kind of something that drives.

Speaker A: I'm sure there's no one, uh, I'm sure there's no one listening today who hasn't made some major errors in deploying technology, deployed the wrong stuff, deployed it, you know, without any support. I certainly, I'm One of those people. And I've seen some uh, I remember you know, one of the, one of the first businesses that I bought 30, uh, $5 million revenue business. And um, we knew we needed to change the CRM because it was like a legacy on premise version and it wasn't being upgraded, blah blah blah. And so we brought in a, you know, a big consulting firm to do the work. And of course then immediately we got the junior burgers on the job and they changed every five seconds and we could never get anything done. And it was, this is like a half a million doll. It wasn't, you know, it wasn't a tiny project. And um, and we ended up, uh, we ended up getting it back on track but only by deploying some people to really like we end up having to change partners midstream. Uh, so that was a bit of an error and eventually we got there but it was, it was long and drawn out. One of the things that I've always noticed is actually, you know, if I think about your example, um, I remember actually when I was in study group, study ah, group had built their own proprietary um, CRM, um, so. And the 80% of study groups business worldwide was the same. It was taking international students, putting them through a foundation year or maybe two years. It was all international student base, passing them onto a university. That was the model. But we were in a division that was brand new. We'd bought vocational colleges that were B2C that were not being delivered by agents. They were entirely different kinds of students. Totally different course structures, totally different course lengths, different support needs, different everything. And we uh, we wanted to use um, Salesforce. And the technical answer was no, we've got this system. You need to make this system work for you. But of course therefore was an internal development team. You couldn't get anything done quickly. Nothing that we wanted to do was something that they were used. We needed like digital contracts and you know, contact center telephony and all this other stuff that they're just. Their CRM wasn't built for that. And so this um, this lack of desire to go back to what's the real objective here? What's the long term, what's the implication of doing it one way or doing it the other way? Therefore, what role should technology play as opposed to let's start with the technology and just say, well that's what we've decided and therefore we're going to go down that path. It was a. Created a lot of heartache I'd say, and money lost. Yeah.

Speaker B: Look, the reality is Sean, like most of the platforms, uh, will not solve, will not solve all your problems. And that, and that's even I think in the last few years we've seen some rapid increase in the platform's capabilities. So they're starting to, you know, Salesforce for example, starting to absorb a, ah, lot more capabilities within the core. But it, it's still not going to solve everything. Um, but it still may be a really good solution for your scaling business because it might be the best enterprise grade platform you have. But uh, with that becomes exactly to your point. Well what, what's actually the decisions we need to make? How are we going to unlock growth using the platform? We're constrained by some things, but actually is this a people thing? Is it a process thing? I think the challenge with an enterprise platform comes an enterprise team, you know, finding the right partner. Uh, so that's, that's so the platform is one thing, but actually then finding the right partner who can actually unlock it for you secrets thing are the right thing. Um, the amount we're currently working with a client, uh, right now and just we're getting some perspectives from different digital partners and also the platform specialists themselves. And, and there's still um, you know, there's still quite a lot of workings out that we need to actually go through to unlock maybe the right solution or the right sequencing of particular, you know, products within the platform. So it's um.

Speaker A: Can I ask you. It's not easy. Maybe, maybe you can give me an example. But uh, so should we design a process that suits the customer experience? Josh, given this is your background, um, and then, or like should we be designing the process to suit the system or should we be getting the system to suit the process? Like how, how do we think about that? And maybe give me an example of like maybe you go, maybe it's maybe it depends. But maybe give an example of like what would influence your decision around that.

Speaker C: I think like every good philosophical question, there's only more questions. Um, I think because it's a super interesting. Right. It's like well personally I've always been in the favor of the experience and that is the, I think the customer experience is important, right? They are essentially paying for the service. And so if we want to grow we need more customers, paying more money more often. Um, really growth also comes from bottom line, which is the people inside of the business, so the employees and like how do we make things easier for them? How do we make their jobs easier? Those two things shouldn't necessarily be conflicting. Um, but there's also the argument of like do you build custom technology or do you buy out of the box? You normally people would favor out of the box because it's a little bit cheaper of course, but you don't get all of the features that you might need as you were talking. But if you buy custom then you need a team to run it. That salary count, that's, you know, where's that going to go?

Speaker A: Um, what are you doing at Never Normal? This is a new business. So are you building technology custom uh, in the backend or are you using off the shelf tools or what's your personal roadmap for you guys?

Speaker C: Yeah, like I, and this, and this is another interesting thing that's happening in the market which is the growth of SaaS products is exponential. Right. AI I think has given everyone all the, the ability to access the world's information from a laptop in the middle of nowhere, has given people real remit to build their own thing. So there are so many small, tiny little SaaS products solving potentially large problems for businesses. So I think my, my take really is like there's so many out of the box solutions out there. Like we are using predominantly out of the box stuff.

Speaker B: Yeah. Even when for a business our size. Yeah we out of the box is probably where we're going to start. Um, certainly haven't gone to custom because the affordability of platforms these days, um, you know it's something that everyone can access so that's kind of cool. At our size of a business there's no need to go and build customers um, for us and you know, don't, you know, we don't want to talk about AI because everyone's talking about it but it's obviously influencing everything right. At our level, um, for, you know, for rather than having a full suite team, you know we, we can drive a lot of output if, if you know we can do heavy, heavy hitting strategy and actually have the right tools around us to actually you know, really push through. Um, like for us it's about decision making at the C suite level. That's what we want to influence and help. But also we don't, you know, Maybe our business 10 years ago was a 15, 20 person business. Uh, today we're sort of surrounded by fractional team and different verticals of specialists. So that's kind of cool that that's something that's really, you know, it's popped out since um, you know the industry sort of you know shaped up when you know, you can work from anywhere. So, so that's kind of cool as well.

Speaker C: What's the.

Speaker A: Let's, let's jump into the house. And what I hear is, um, I mean, ultimately you guys are consulting to help a business figure out how do I bring this business objective to life? And you're. So you're delving into what does that mean for people and process and technology. How do we get a plan, how do we get the right execution capability in so that we do that. But you have real depth in the technical side so that you can help them evaluate which technologies, which people, all that stuff so they can put it together and actually get moving. Sometimes you rent in yourselves or you rent in other fractionals to play a part, part in that team if they need augmenting. So you can, you've kind of got a whole suite there. What, what is the process that you go through to diagnose the issue and get to the point where you can go, this is what you need to do. This is the plan. Do you have like a sequence of really simple steps that I, and I don't mean like all 37 steps or how many. I'm sure there are lots of stuff, but like, what's the framework that you use to help? Because, you know, a founder listening, uh, today, if they could mentally go, actually, if I did this myself, I could probably actually help myself answer maybe some difficult questions, uh, that I might be wrestling with or, uh, whether I'm with the right system or whether I've got the right team, like, what process do you go through?

Speaker B: Yeah, maybe I'll kick it off, Josh, but then you can.

Speaker C: Please do.

Speaker B: Yeah, I think, I mean, the, the first ingredient we really need to understand is the vision or the direction for the business. So it's, it's great when we walk in and there's a, there's clarity of what, what, what this business wants to do. Obviously, if there isn't there, we, we can certainly help to sort of unpick that. And I work with some businesses one on one to do that. But, you know, if there's, if there's clarity on the vision and maybe the direction that the business owner wants to take it, whether that's scale the business exit, whatever that is, that's really important for us because, you know, uh, are we trying to drive growth, enable growth? Like, what are we trying to understand and what are we trying to unlock here? Um, so, yeah, and then our process is, I mean, happy. Maybe you jump in, Josh, around sort of, I suppose that first piece, um, it's really just about understanding. So some form of discovery. Uh, but we've got a pretty, pretty simple simplistic model, um, that we can sort of unpack over. You know, could be as little as um, three sessions over three to four weeks. You know, we can get a pretty clear diagnostic on a business. Um, but yeah, maybe. Josh, you want to jump in?

Speaker C: Yeah, yeah, totally. I think like never normal as a company by design is, is streamlined and minimalist. Like it's not our desire to be a large scale consulting. Like to your, to your point earlier, Sean, like for someone to come in and charge half a million dollars. Um, it's, it's. That doesn't need to happen anymore. So we, yeah, our process is super simple. Like as Damo said, like we have three, three clear steps over four to six weeks depending on the complexity of the business or the complexity of the problem or the lack of information available. But we had hoped to come in and really unpack everything from the founder vision, the business goals, like really understanding, like the customer goals as well. What does the customer want out of the business? What are you selling? How are you selling it? Where are your growth targets linked to? Like how are you actually growing? Understand, um, the people, the org chart, understand the processes, um, and then understand the technology underlying all of that to see where we are. Um, we'll then kind of move forward into kind of what would be, what does an ideal future look like for you? Like if we're looking five years in the future, 10 years in the future, what does that look like? And that then enables us to kind of work backwards to. Well, if we want to go from A to B to C to D, like how are we going to get there and what's going to help us get there? And um, and the ultimate, the ultimate question throughout that is like, is it technology or are there, are there symptoms of deeper issues in the business? Um, and for us to come through and recommend. We very rarely would come through and recommend a. You just, you just need a CRM and see you later. Goodbye. Um, it'll be like, yeah, sure, that's going to help you. But what does your sales process look like? How's your sales team structured? Um, how are you going to reach those growth targets? What are you really advertising or marketing things that your customers really want? Like how's your online booking funnel looking? There's breakages in your guest checkout. Have you looked at those? And so that's where we tap into our market, where we can go. Well, you actually, we've got this really great, you know, go to market CMO who can come in and just kind of build you a strategy or a sales guy who's going to come in or a product chief product officer who's going to come in. Um, and so we can do that pretty simply over that four weeks. And by the end of that four weeks we've got something that is going to build enough momentum for us to kind of move forward and start to kind of really delve into detail beyond that. Um, but I think, I think it's also working pretty closely with the founder through that process as well, which I think Damo, I'll hand over to you to talk about kind of your pillars and gears. Um, but it's really kind of understanding where their heads at and how they want to be involved in the business.

Speaker B: Oh yeah, yeah. I mean really the pillar. There's a couple of frames, I suppose Sean, that might provide a bit of context for the listeners. So, you know, the, you know, different frames you look at is the pillars of the business. So you know, is this a, uh, marketing, a sales or you know, a product, uh, challenge or perhaps we're looking at, you know, it's operations, it's people or it's finance. You know, is there, is there something that we need to unlock across those, that, that starts to. We've got technology issues in all of those. We've also got people issues in all those pillars. And so we can kind of frame that is this business in a driving growth phase where we actually need to get more demand. We need to, we need to get more customers. More customers like so. So therefore we can really focus on the marketing, sales and the product side. Um, if it's a, it's a, if it's a business that's maybe has too many leads, you know, wouldn't it be lovely if all business was like that? But we've now we've really got to focus on our systems, our people, our processes to unlock that. And there's again, there's other tools for that. So, um, a growing business will naturally move through these phases as it grows. And that's what's kind of cool. I mean it's dissolving this decision for today. But let's, let's not um, kid ourselves to saying there won't be more problems down the road. But if we've got a clear roadmap, we can kind of like, well, let's, let's solve this one, let's unlock the growth for next one and let's, let's Also, just acknowledge there's going to be lots of problems along the way. Um, that's part of a growing business. Um, you know, growing is a good thing, I suppose.

Speaker A: What do you do if, like, the issue is the, um, if the issue is the founder, like, I, uh, don't know.

Speaker B: Well, that's a delicate one.

Speaker A: That's probably like a vision, their inability to articulate it to anyone or their, you know, they're kind of. They're throwing darts at stuff because they're a bit sort of like a, like a squirrel. Distracted squirrel. And they just keep changing their mind every 25 seconds and adding this and then changing that. And how do you manage that if you, if you find that problem?

Speaker B: M. Well, I mean, the first one is, well, what. What does the founder want? Right? I mean, the reality is something's, um, something's in the way. Um, so if we can understand what the vision is and maybe where the business is going, you know, the reality is if, if it's a, like, let's, you know, if it's a business that wants to double in size, like, well, what does that business look and operate? Like what, what. You know, once we start to paint the picture of that future state, like Josh mentioned, we start to actually, you know, kind of remove ourselves from the bit for the. That's really good for the founder to see that they're only one piece in that. And maybe they need to reframe their role in the business. Maybe it's, you know, do they want to scale and exit? Do they want to scale and bring in a team? There's that point at which they need to sort of start to think about not only what do they want for the business, but what's their role in the business. That's a cool. That's. That's a, That's a good reality. But I mean, our process helps. We're not really there to suppose coach and mentor the, the founder, but certainly how can we reframe the problem? So maybe they can see their role in it. Yeah, mostly that comes to, you know, uh, and then if I'm in there, I can try and help unlock that. But, um, you know, I'm working with a client at the moment in a fractional role, and I suppose I'm there to try and unlock those things. And when I see it, I suppose, given my experience, I feel confident enough to say, keep reminding them that maybe this is the area we need to unlock for you. Right. So bringing your choice.

Speaker A: Give me an example of, like, I'm keen to Hear some sort of stories. Right? Like, um, can you give an example of a project that you've worked on that's either just failed, like you've been called in because it's failed, or you've been part of and actually it hasn't worked. And like, what's gone wrong? I'm trying to get, I guess, getting some insight as to like, what are the things that typically derail these, uh, ambitions, Whether it's something that you've started or it's something that you've had to pick up.

Speaker B: I mean, I've seen a lot of failed projects in government, but it's probably not going to help your, um. Yeah, um, and that's, that's more complex than that, but. Yeah, I know. Josh, what do you think?

Speaker C: Yeah, look, I think, I think we, I mean, we've recently been brought in to help a founder who's growing a SaaS. A B2B SaaS business. Okay. I wouldn't, I wouldn't say it's at, ah, failure, but they, they've kind of realized that they've invested quite a lot of money, money into building a product with no real kind of vision of what they want to be or how they want to be involved in it. No real. For what the product wants to be in the future. And so, you know.

Speaker A: And what's the consequence of that? Like, what are you finding is happening as a result?

Speaker C: Yeah, I mean, I mean the consequence of that is like, money. Money and time is just going right, and you've got, you've got a founder who's also got another business. So that's also putting strain on that other business to kind of get this done. They're in a world where they don't really truly understand what's, what's happening and why it's happening. And so I think, like, I think we've been brought in a position where we have given. We've kind of pulled it away and given direction and given clarity, helped them make a few decisions. And you know, to Damon's point, he's been. And I think this is good because our process really, it asks more questions to them as well. So it's like, well, what do you actually. What kind of founder do you want to be? What kind of business do you want this to be? Uh, who's your customer? Like, it's stuff like that. And then they can. They kind of like start to take themselves through the mental gymnastics of thinking through kind of what the future looks like. Obviously we try and only work with good people and so if they're a good introspective person, then this one's interesting

Speaker B: actually, because even so, technically from like if you look at the investment outlay and what this founder has got, you know, we'd probably say, yeah, it's fine. Right? But is fine going to actually launch this SaaS product into the market and actually scale and grow? But I'm not sure. So is it our job to poo poo what's, what's actually been built? Probably not, but can we bring a lens to say, well actually. And again, this comes back to that vision. If, if it's, is this gonna compete on a, on a, on a global scale? Is it just Australian market SaaS product? Uh, and this is in the allied health space. So it's pretty competitive and there's some big players already who have poured millions of dollars in. It's like just bringing that perspective around, just talking about millions of dollars. You know, the particular founder is still thinking in the tens of thousands. It's like, no, no, this is a

Speaker A: big game with big players. I find often that founders, uh, maybe embarking on their first one think it's going to be a one off investment, then they're going to have a thing and then it's just going to be, they're just going to have it. You're like, no, no, this is a never ending bucket. Yeah. One of the other things I'm thinking about as you're talking is, uh, the, what we're talking about is not investing the time in understanding what success looks like. Because this is, I think probably the one most important part of the transformation of every founder, uh, that I mentor that succeeds is I'm pushing them to get really clear about the strategy, about the vision, the purpose, the values, the positioning, the strategy, what we're going to invest in. Then what does success look like this year? The execution plan that's aligned to the strategy. What does success look like this year then? What does it look like on a quarterly basis? Then what does it look like on a monthly basis? And how does that feed through into individual success profiles? And we call them success profiles for a reason, because they are supposed to explain to an individual this is what success looks like for you. It's not a job description full of a list of tasks and saying, here's 25 tasks you're accountable for. It's like, no, no, this is actually what success looks like on a monthly. And uh, on a weekly or monthly basis, if you're doing these things, I know you'll Be successful. Here's your big deliver rules for the year. Here's the attitude and the characteristics I wanted you to show up with. Here's the skills that I want you to show up and here's the experience I want you to get. This is all about um, clarity and what you're hearing, I think through your um, most recent example and um, is uh, I think about uh, there's a parallel um, skill set here that I teach to founders around delegation, which might seem like a kind of disconnect here, but the old school principle, um, of delegation is tight, loose, tight. Like how do you avoid micromanaging? You avoid micromanaging by using tight, loose, tight. Tight is really clear on the what, the why and the when. So what is it that I want you to do? Why do I want you to do it? When do I want you to get done by and what does success look like? And then give them the room on the how. That's the loose bit in the middle. That's where they get some empowerment. And then the last part of the tide is how is it going to be measured, followed up, reported on, discussed, like, what's that sort of accountability rhythm look like? And in the absence of doing the work work up front, what founders do is go send somebody a uh, two line message, hey, can you get blah, blah, blah done? And the person's going, what, what? Okay. And now because you haven't actually spent any time on the tight up front, uh, you're having to ask them questions every five seconds. How's that going? And they don't really know what success looks like. So they're just guessing and they're trying to protect and avoid getting in trouble and whatever it's like. That is a terrible strategy for wasting time and creating chaos and creating discomfort. And in every circumstance, and particularly in a digital project, uh, getting the clarity around what success look like is going to save a huge amount of time in the how, which in this case is the roadmap is the technology enablement, is the people enablements, the process enablement to bring that to life. So, um, you could be using ChatGPT. If you're not sure what questions to ask yourself, you could be using ChatGPT, you could be chatting to guys like Davo and Josh. You're going to bring a lot of experience that an AI tool doesn't have and perspective, um, to ask the right questions. But actually that's where the upfront investment goes to.

Speaker B: I mean if, if you're going to grow a business, you, technology is Going to enable it. Right. It's systems and process that actually unlock the growth in the business. If you're going to scale beyond a certain size, if it's a, ah, you know, larger people, business systems processes are things that, you know, how you delegate. Exactly. You can't do. You know, a lot of founders wear a lot of hats. How do we, how do we remove some of them? I think that your sort of analogy there, Sean, speaks to that. It's like delegation's one, but bring in the right capability. Actually sort of working through that. It's great, you know. So I think if a business has that, it's much easier to work on the tech side because we just, it's like how do we unlock this for you? You know, um, and then how do we sequence it? Um, secondly. And then let's get to work, you know, solve the next problem. I think that's kind of cool with your, with the model that you're working with founders. So uh, yeah.

Speaker A: What something that founders don't really think about or don't know that if they did know or they did think about would make your job in making them successful much easier. What don't they do or what are they missing or what's the stuff that you commonly see that actually founders inadvertently create chaos or problems or slowness or extra costs or wasted time themselves beyond clarity. Any other kind of particular behaviors or why they should be thinking?

Speaker C: Good question, Oz.

Speaker B: Um, you know what's really hard in the tech space is also like, uh, understanding. Like you go to one. Let's say we did an example. We've gone out to market for a digital partner, uh, for a particular solution. We've actually got three vastly different budgets, one ranging from a million dollars all the way down to 200,000. So in fairness to founders and business, actually finding the right solution on the technical side is incredibly frustrating and hard. Um, so it's like. And I think that makes you second guess like doing stuff yourself. What budget do I set for this? What's. So I think that's something. I don't know. It's a challenge of the world we're living in right now, just with the complexity and the amount of decisions that need to be rain around. That's kind of why we existed and was like maybe we could sort of jump up the line. But then maybe. So I suppose it's surrounding yourself with that sort of um, the right advisors in that space. Not necessarily a plug for us, but you know, having technology or technology or strategy inside the business, it's probably a good idea. If you're not someone that is really confident in that space, having someone close to you that's on your side that's maybe not ah, an external vendor or partner, um, that's not sort of doesn't have an end game in mind which is a platform. A platform sort of, you know, percentage play or sort of delivery is probably not a bad idea at this point in time because choosing the wrong platform or choose making the wrong decision probably has downstream sort of consequence on budgets and things. So I always like to say strategy inside production, you can either build inside but you can also take it out. So that gives you the option and flexibility. Um, a lot of founders maybe don't have that right circle of trust around them. So that's probably, yeah it probably goes to some of your uh, approach as well which is, which is really cool. Um, I think, I think that, I don't know Josh, if there's anything on your side.

Speaker C: Yeah, yeah, yeah. I think to piggyback off you, I'm going to like to move slow, to move fast when it comes to technology decisions. It is really easy to get wrapped up in the media and the news that you know, technology is moving so fast that you have to be like at the forefront of it. There is a certain element of yeah, of course you've got to keep innovating from that perspective but if you are making significant investment in the wrong platform that does have, that does have downside consequences down the line but it's, it's, it's easier than ever to have platforms around you quite cheaply that will do a lot of good work. So I think I would say don't, don't be scared to invest in cheaper technology for now that will uh, get, move us with momentum just to kind of get 20%, 30%, 40% of what you need to whilst you're still doing the strategy work on the side, like to be able to build momentum and to be able to build progress and not worry too much about perfection of what that looks like. I think if you do that I think it's quite hard to really mess up down the line. I think it's when you would make, if you make a large scale enterprise investment for a first piece of tech, you're basically stuck with that for the next 10 years. But if you're m making small incremental decisions along the way. Yeah, yeah.

Speaker A: What I'm hearing there is it kind of goes back to my earlier question around, you know, do you design the customer journey first? Or do you purchase the right system and then you kind of design a process that seems to suit the system. And so what I like about that is what I'm hearing is that's a very customer journey first model. So let's say, you know, there's a certain part of like data we've got to move in a certain way or workflow automation we've got to put in place. There might be 10 different tools that can do that. Do they need to be the tool that does everything? Well the benefit of having these tools kind of having the sort of business first journey first orientation means there's probably lots of different potential tools that you could use to do that component. But actually you're not completely reliant on that. Um, and I do find this challenging. I haven't, I don't know how many people are, I don't know how many people you see doing this anymore. I have a client, uh, it's a good, you know, good sized medium business, probably circa 30 million that has a, um, completely proprietary system. Everything like, uh-huh. It's their own, like it takes all the information, they build their own website, it takes all the information on the website, does all the marketing automation or CRM, all the payments, all the E commerce or the community. They've got a community model, they've got a social, um, like, you know, like a kind of social community. They've got like almost every system you can possibly think of other than zero. Um, is theirs totally proprietary, run with an offshore team that they built up over years in a low cost country, um, with a CTO in Australia and um, that piece of technology. And of course as that business gets to scale, it's incredible what they can do with this business, with this, you know, they have entire control over the data structure, entire control over the workflow automations obviously requires a very clever cto, uh, who's built this from the ground up and then obviously added developers, um, you know, just built the starting blocks. But how many people do you see doing that anymore? Because I guess when you, when you, in the starting point, you see, actually I saw it, I had another client, um, in the early days who built a $3 million EBITDA, uh, education business in five years and then sold for 20 mil. And they started with Zoho, uh, like different Zoho, you know, different components of Zoho Suite and a few other bits and pieces. But then quietly in the background they built their own system to slowly take over bits that they weren't satisfied with and so their core thing that took in client information, populated courses on their website, had real time enrollment, sort of dash all that stuff internally was all inside their proprietary system and they actually built it very efficiently with one developer. Um, and so it was a real investment. And the owners were not technical owners, um, they were like finance people. So they're smart enough in terms of detail, but they weren't like technical people. And actually it was an incredible enabler of uh, efficiency in their business. And so I'm just wondering about this, you know, off the shelf versus build it your own. And I guess some of the, the pros and cons, like what do you see as the pros of that? Um, if you're in a sub $10 million business and where would you say to a client absolutely don't do that as a terrible idea?

Speaker C: Yeah, it's a good question. I think, I mean I think a lot of it is who, who's running the business. Like your example there of like a CTO has the capability and the knowledge and the experience to be able to manage the production of custom piece of tech. And you're right. And uh, I don't, don't know the business inside out, but they're building features exactly to what they need and they have no, what we call like feature bloat. There aren't. They're not paying for stuff they don't use. Right. That's a perfect example of where that's probably the right solution for them. Um, I would say otherwise, like the founder mindset of well is like, are you building technical IP that you're going to exit from in the future? Like what's happening with that? Like, or are you just going to grow and grow and grow in this and then dispose of it? I, um, would say most, I think that that level of CTOE kind of start found is pretty rare. I feel like everyone's looking for a CTO co founder because to get that, that kind of level is really rare. So I think most people buy off the shelf for that particular reason. And I think for 90% of people that's the right way to go because it's not just the outright build and truly understanding what you need to build and what people are buying from you and how they're buying from you. Again, back to the customer journey, like do we know that inside out that we're building the right capability? Um, I think most people out of the box is the right way. And I think that to what we're talking about earlier, there's an element of Using off the shelf tooling as like an mvp, as a poc, right? Like you can do that. That's going to get you to 2, 3, 4, 5 mil, but to your other client. And then they're building customer IP in the background like, because they've, they've understood where the, where the, where the breakages are, uh, where the water's leaking out of the, the pipes and they've kind of be able to build their own IP and they've got enough knowledge at that point to be able to build off the shelf and manage that themselves. So yeah, I think those are rare. Uh, I'd say those are rare.

Speaker A: But the other thing is, uh, and one of your questions up front that you sound like you're asking founders and you've mentioned numerous times in this podcast is, um, what's the future plan for this business? Because if you intend to privately hold this business and do nothing else, then there's limited downside in a. So let's take our own time, build it the way that we want. And okay, notwithstanding, subject to how well you do that and who you've got leading it and how high cost the developers are and all the rest, then maybe you could have done it materially cheaper, uh, with um, off the shelf products and put stuff together and used third party workflow tools or whatever. Um, but actually if you think about at some point I might like to exit, you have to go beyond the founder and the internal business and put yourself in the buyer's shoes. And if I think about, you know, when I'm doing due diligence on a business, what are the things that I'm looking at? Well, there's three questions I'm asking, asking and answering. One, should I buy it? Which is going to be based on the growth potential, how much? I think I can grow it. Number two is how much should I pay for it? And that's going to be based on what's the likely sustainable either earnings or revenue in this business. And that'll tell me how much I should pay. And then third is why shouldn't I buy it? And I'm going to go through a big old list of reasons not to buy it. And I'm going to go through all the people stuff and all the legal stuff and the tax stuff and the accounting stuff and the, and the technical stuff. And so when I might see a great business and they go, oh, by the way, we've got everything completely proprietary built and our, uh, team are in, I don't know, Vietnam or whatever and I'm thinking I'm going to absorb this business into my business where everything's off the shelf and I've got an IT team who wouldn't have a clue about custom code. And, uh, how am I going to maintain this thing if that CTO leaves Now? I've actually got a really big consideration around the risk profile that's being created by the technology. So, yes, it might be efficient, maybe it's way more efficient than the rest of the market. But what's the. Everything that we start has a maintenance cost. So if I start is that maintenance cost is getting bigger in terms of how much I'm going to have to do to then keep that thing in place. Uh, and that seems like a quite big risk that maybe doesn't get thought about by families.

Speaker C: I was going to ask a question on the flip side of that, genuine question to you, like, do you ever see that as like internal IP that gives you a unique selling difference or a unique difference to the business?

Speaker A: It does, it does. And so what it does is I would say some buyers will think that's amazing. Uh, object to, am I going to get to keep that founder in place? Am I going to be able to keep the CTO in place? How well is it architected? How secure is it? How ultimately, uh, how can I reduce my risk that if those two people leave, that I'm not left with something that I can't edit, manage, whatever. That's the question that I have to resolve. If I could get comfort around that, then I might stay in. But some people will just see that at face value and go, you'll just lose some buyers. Because I'll go, I just don't want to deal with any proprietary system. It's like just too hard for me. So I just won't even be in the game. So you will lose some buyers. But on the flip side, if it's driving twice the average profitability than the rest of the industry, then it's also an advantage. So the risk.

Speaker C: Yeah, yeah, well, um, yeah, I think there's also a thing of like managing cash flow. Is that right? If you're buying subscription rather than off the shelves or building custom, then you're kind of managing cash going out of the business, um, as well. Because you're having to do like quite large, way upfront investment into a thing and then you have to invest people to build and to manage the thing and then grow the thing. It becomes a bit of a beast.

Speaker B: And just understanding the flexibility of that proprietary system for, you know, how nimble is it to. Yeah, exactly. Because it can't stay the same forever. So is it going to move with the market and how hard is that going to do or are you going to have to, you know, rip apart out and replace it later?

Speaker A: How do I know that the.

Speaker B: That's really hard. That's really hard.

Speaker A: How do I know that the cto hasn't left three Easter eggs in there that mean in 12 months time after he's received his earn out, but the whole thing's going to blow up and you know, I'm going to lose all my data and that.

Speaker B: I think that's the biggest, that's the biggest concern. Like if I was a founder or leader of a business now that's where that technology sort of anxiety comes in I suppose because, and like, yeah, I think Josh gave a good example of the SaaS partner. It's like a non technical founder, uh, who's running a SaaS platform is putting a lot of faith in a partner, uh, to deliver that work. So either, ah, I'm going to build a capability inside and I'm going to own it and I'm going to own sort of, you know, have a walk. I still might outsource some development, that's fine but, but I'm going to own an IP everything because, because maybe having a partner outside, I don't know, um, maybe that's a risk as well. Yeah, I'll just go and start their own, you know. So, uh, yeah, and I was thinking of that proprietary one. Can we just make it into a SaaS product? Maybe that's the second bit.

Speaker C: We had a client earlier this year, you know, national franchise, 50 mil a year, 60 mil a year. And they, they've done exactly the same. Right. They had a subscription fee for a particular product which was doing quite a lot of the back end grunt work of booking, um, and sales and it probably was costing them 300k a year and they, they're kind of like, okay, well we could build this custom and it would only cost us maybe 300 grand to build it custom. And we're like, well yeah it will. But then you've got to have the team to manage it and then you've got to build it, grow it, maintain it. You need a contact center. It's like, it's not easy building product. This is like a potentially a million dollar investment. Yeah, um, yeah, we, we kind of came in and we spoke to all their franchises and we kind of helped them make some really big decisions around that, I think the biggest one we did, which was we found them a digital partner after like a big vendor search and really veered them away from some small fry, uh, kind of partners who we didn't think were going to kind of come in and really be able to battle both with the founders and with the complexity of the work to be done and just gave them like the immediate peace of mind. I think we had a conversation with ah, that that founder at the end of. And he was like, slammed his fist on, he was like, yep, 10 hours, we're definitely going with them. They are amazing. I've never seen anyone like them done

Speaker B: M. And they weren't the cheapest. Yeah, exactly.

Speaker C: And they weren't the cheapest which is awesome. But they were definitely the best. Yeah.

Speaker A: What, what about um, talk to me about what skill sets. Like if you think about a business that is, let's say they're just, they're kind of hitting the 10 million stage, they want to grow to 30. Um, every founder is going to have a particular amount of money they can afford for their kind of technical team. Let's say they want to have a small technical team and they want to have, I don't know, four people with enough diversity and skill sets to kind of help their business get to the next stage. And it seems to me, I guess I'm hearing, given the advent of AI and how much code it's able to sort of support, you know, you've got, you know, developers, maybe there's less and less junior developers and more and more, you know, more senior guys are being helped with AI and their kind of code building. But then given how much is moving it seems I'm hearing more founders get ah, a data analyst sitting alongside somebody with, you know, maybe a really core developer, A uh, good analyst. Like I'm thinking about like if you only had a team of four and you were trying to get more sophisticated around your reporting, your ability to improve, you know, automations and workflows. If you don't have a team of four and that could be a mix of onshore or offshore. And I know this is a really hard question but like what, what are the, maybe the core skill sets you would think about and where do you think actually it makes a lot of sense to look at offshore capability and what stuff would you, if you were the founder probably want to keep onshore and close to you?

Speaker C: Yeah, yeah, it's, yeah, it's really, it's not a, it's not an easy answer by any means. If I think, if I Think of it as a quadrant of like, on the far right you've got, got very, very technical people. And um, on the far left you've got kind of more business focused people. And then you've got thinkers and then doers. And you really need to weigh up, like, where are your gaps in your team? If you're like quite top heavy, like SLT heavy, like senior leadership heavy, do you just need more doers to operationalize things that happen in the business, or do you need more strategic thinkers who are very technical? Because you are working with technical systems to really own what the technical roadmap looks like. And I think that will give you a good gauge of like, where you fill in the gaps. I would say as a, as a rule of thumb, I think, I think at that point you're probably looking at more doers. Like I would say if you know, you're going from 10 to 30, for instance, you know where we're going to go, how we're going to get there. And you need more people, boots on the ground for just, just getting stuff done. Um, but you just, you can't necessarily shy away from the fact you need someone to control the doing. And that's where I think the onshore, offshore question becomes interesting. Because offshore doers, I think, I think, are really good at the moment because, you know, they're in a different time zone. They're not necessarily with you. They're not, they're not feeling your pain, they're not feeling the pain of the business, or they're not seeing kind of the potentials of the business and they're not feeling the passion behind the business versus having thinkers kind of more kind of sitting inside with you, more connected.

Speaker B: But also just think about it as a capability. Sorry to jump in there, Sean, but yeah, just think about the capability you're building. Don't think about the task that you're asking them to do. Some founders are going, oh, I want these things to be done. It's like, yeah, cool. You bring someone in, allow them to build you a capability that's actually going to grow your business. That's the question you need to ask. Don't tell them. Give them the task list. You know, bring them in and say, build me a capability that's going to take us to the moon. Like tech, tech is going to take them. It's, I mean, not all digital leaders will do that. Um, but if you know what you want, it's like unlock growth in these areas. Here it is constrain them a little bit. Which means they'll probably get a mix of both. Right. They'll have to get a mix of some doers and to Josh's point, some A players in there that, that actually with some smarts like that's the best team, um, for an inside capability.

Speaker C: Yeah, I think that's right. I think the mistake made is like getting someone in. Yeah. With a task list and if they're not the right person, they'll just start getting to work on a task list with no real understanding of. And maybe to your, your point, Sean, your success profile of like, you know, where are we going? Why, why am I asking you to do this kind of questions. Um, even the most, even the most technically sounded senior people I've worked with, their mindset is just doing or their mindset is task orientated. And so to give them a, you know, to say do A, B, C, D, they're like, I can get all of that technically done, which is great. But it's like, well actually is that helping us?

Speaker A: He's going to give them the guidance.

Speaker C: Yeah, yeah.

Speaker A: Uh, and I guess that also comes down to, as you said, if you're thinking about kind of thinkers and doers and technical and business as your quadrant, then there's probably also a question there of what role does the founder want to play, what skill set do they have and where do they, you know, how much can they actually guide they're doing? For example, like, do they need a layer in between them? You know, some founders are quite technical and some are completely, you know, have no idea whatsoever as to kind of what needs to be done. And so it's um, subject to the size and Yeah, I think, I think this is where uh, what I'm liking seeing a shift in is the use of fractionals to help internal capabilities. So what I really like in scaling businesses is where you've got a quality doer who's got the capacity and the sort of orientation to grow. But they're probably quickly going to outgrow the founder's knowledge in that area. And so they're going to need some senior, uh, they're going to need some mentoring and some guidance. The question is, does that mean I need now to go and get a permanent role the next. Yeah, let's say I've got a marketer and I'm a founder who's actually a bit crap at marketing. All right, well I could hire a marketing manager and then they're going to want to hire some team or they can use externals or I can hire a Great. We've got heaps of video work to do. So I'm going to hire a video person but actually I still need some marketing strategy guidelines, you know, content planning, campaigns, whatever. Well, why can't I bring in a fractional CMO to actually grow the capability of my video person? Um, and it helps me as a founder, ah, someone taking some accountability for driving things ahead and getting momentum but also skilling up my team. I think this complement of, I think one of the things I see sometimes is that uh, particularly with CFOs is like somebody, people can jump to CFO way too quickly and they're super high cost. Um, but actually fractional CFOs can uh, be amazing because many of them are willing to work to build your internal team capability until at some point you're ready for a finance manager or a finance control or a finance director or some other level on the way up. Um, so I imagine that you know, in you know, having a fractional CTO or someone, a fractional program manager who can help get stuff done and it has that technical capability to guide maybe some internal doers that might be um, that might be suitable, could be a really nice blend for founders on the

Speaker B: way up and definitely for a scaling business that's a great, it's a really great way of getting some, you know, big capability in, um, but obviously at a, maybe a manageable rate. So again, how do you keep in step with the change in the growth of the business? You know you can't, you're not going to go invest straight away. Um, it's the same with digital. It's like just unlock, how do you unlock growth along that journey, you know, and that's a really good way to do it. Um, but people are key, people are key definitely in uh, any growing business, um, having those right, the right leaders around you that want to, that are on the journey as well, I think that's, that's key.

Speaker A: So I think guys, I, um, I mean the, the hard thing about um, chatting to people who work on as broad challenges as you guys do is like where, where do we go? Because I've got so many questions about AI and you know, a thousand other things. So I'm sure we'll have a follow up as we probably get much deeper uh, um, into that. But from today, if, if a founder kind of only remembered or took away one thing from this episode, what would you want that to be? Each of you individually?

Speaker C: For me it's try and resist the urge to look at technology as the solution or as the final solution. Look at, find the problem first. Spend more time doing that than you would in just kind of looking at the, that the technology is that particular solution. And I think once you do that, I think it will give you better clarity on where the problems lie and in what order you could potentially solve them to get incremental movement or start building kind of real momentum before you start making those kind of big scale kind of investments.

Speaker A: Yeah, I like that. So don't, don't start with a bit of technology and be dazzled by the bright lights.

Speaker C: And it's hard right where everyone, everything AI is solving all of our problems all the time. It's like, oh great. I mean, you know, we're hearing all the time like the first billion dollar businesses solo founded billion dollar businesses right around the corner because of AI. I think everyone's desperate to be that one person.

Speaker B: Uh, for me it's probably like, you know, I think I mentioned it earlier but like find, find your growing pains. Like I think any growing business is going to have pains. I um, think it's about, we spoke a little bit about, uh, you know, is it a, are we driving growth or are we enabling growth? So find first find out where the pains are, find out where these growing pains are and solve for that and just unlock growth sort of one step at a time. So, but you really need to step back on the business and look at, you know, where are my growing pains? You know, and, and again that could be a tech problem. But actually most cases is like to Josh's point, it's, it's probably a people first systems process thing. Technology should always be enable. But think about if, if you were just to go, where are my growing pains? Across my business, you probably, it's probably, you know, in, in creating more leads and creating more demand, those sorts of things. Um, and that's where technology can really play a role. But um, you first need to know it, need to know the bit the pain is first.

Speaker A: Yeah, uh, yeah, it's almost like, uh, you know, I think the hardest question for anyone is deciding what you want because there's always so many things and you know, you think, well if I decide on that, then I'm also cutting myself off from doing these things. So that's where all the courage is required. But that's the job of the founder. Uh, so to your point, it's like, okay, well what are my most important goals? Like I might have a list of 10 things I want to do this year, but actually what's the most important one. And what are the things that are going to prevent me from actually being able to achieve that? Okay, now let's work backwards from that to, uh, to Josh, your question, which is, is that if I'm clear on where the most important goal is and the most likely things to derail that, are they people problems, are they process problems, or are they technology problems, or are they mix of all three? How do I then start to wrestle through how to solve for that? Um, but don't start with the worst thing sounds like could be the tail wagging the dog. You've seen a great system. You think that's going to, you know, you want to generate more leads. You've seen some latest AI will do all the lead generation for you, Everything will be amazing, and the leads will be falling from the sky. Well, maybe. But actually, maybe you've got a proposition problem, or you've got a crap offer,

Speaker B: or you're why are they buying in the first place?

Speaker A: Or your positioning's unclear where you've got no lead magnets, or you've got, like, all these foundational things that actually might be bigger, um, than the technology used to get there. And then once that's. I think, yeah, I like the idea of you guys saying that technology needs to be an enabler. So what I really take away from this conversation today. Excuse me. Is to spend time getting clarity on where you want to go, what's most important, what's likely to get in the way. So you can then analyze what kind of problem it is. And at some point in time, technology is going to play some kind of a role in that. But maybe you don't need to take change technology. Maybe you can improve what you've got, or you can engineer the process so it works better with the technology, or it could be a number of things, but actually work through it from the top of that funnel to the bottom. Don't start with the bottom and let the tower work.

Speaker C: A dog.

Speaker A: Maybe we should name this episode.

Speaker B: Sounds like a good. Yeah, Sounds like a plan. Sure. Yeah. Yeah.

Speaker A: Awesome, guys. Thank you so much for your time. I really enjoyed, uh, talking to you, and I'd like to, you know, um, I'd like to get into some more concrete things and more concrete examples as we sort of roll forward. So I'm sure we'll have another conversation where we, uh, dig into probably some of the biggest challenges for businesses today. Uh, but thanks again for your time, and I look forward to our next chat.

Speaker C: Thanks, Sean. Great job.

Speaker B: Thanks, Sean.

Speaker A: Thanks, fellas. Cheers. Bye.