Unlocking Business Potential: 10 Key Strategies for Tech-Driven Growth with Mike Lavista

Tim Van Mieghem: Welcome to Shocking Profit, everybody. I am so excited about today's guest. A good friend of mine, Mike La Vista is the founder and CEO of Caxi Interactive and it's an outcome based technology solutions provider. He guides companies in designing, evolving and repairing critical software systems and in my world, an IT firm on steroids. And you also might see Mike on stage jamming with Rock City 7 on um, his podcast the Digital Transformist, or in the bookstore with his book Superpowered 7 Leadership. Superpowers, technology executives and CEOs uh, can use to grow a more engaged, tech driven and profitable organization. AI, cybersecurity, ERP, CRMs, automation. There is so much going on that can crater or boost to business today and Mike's going to help us navigate this new world.

Narrator: You're listening to the Shocking Profit podcast, a show for business owners and leaders who are interested in finding new ways to claim and create value in their companies. Shocking Profit is a practical and endlessly fascinating study of how to effectively run a company and build wealth. Host Tim Van Megham has decades worth of business battle scars from working in the trenches with business leaders. He is here to share his experience to make your journey a bit less treacherous, a lot more profitable. Shockingly profitable. Um, now here's your host.

Tim Van Mieghem: Please join me in welcoming Mike La Vista. Hey, Mike.

Mike La Vista: Tim. Well, thanks for having me. It's such a pleasure. And I feel like everyone should get the honor and privilege of getting introduced by Tim Van Meegan. That, that made me sound like

Tim Van Mieghem: you are a superstar.

Mike La Vista: You don't mind? I'm, I'm just going to rewind that. I'm play that for my wife.

Tim Van Mieghem: Good. Yeah. There are times when I get introduced and I'm like, I wish my mom was here because she's the one who'd believe it. I absolutely love it. You know, Mike, I want to start with something I think we have in common and that's a passion for the idea of creativity over capital. And uh, I think it applies in all areas of business. And honestly, I don't often hear that when I talk to it, uh, leaders, professionals in the IT field. What does that mean to you? How does that show up in your practice?

Mike La Vista: So, and I think the reason why we connect on that is it really is, um, it's really about how do you actually create a lot of value for a company. And I feel like, you know, in a way I don't blame a lot of technology leaders and in a way that, um, I wasn't planning on it, but to go back to my book Um, a lot of what I talk about is, you know, it gets put in a box sometimes to sort of like check these boxes, do these, do these things that sort of the things that everyone's always done and approach it from a really a non value creating point of view. But really, you know, how do we, you know, best case scenario, how do we maximize costs or you know, minimize costs. And I feel like that puts them in uh, a position where they're not bringing ideas to the table. They're really just executing on, on old playbooks and maybe even outdated playbooks. And so when I, you know, uh, when we bring our ideas to a company, what we're looking for is um, you know, in a way like I want them to cleanse their palate. You know, when you're at the fancy restaurant and they give you the little sorbet and you kind of start fresh with your palate and you say okay listen, forget your ideas you've brought to the table about for example with you like with operations or you know, with us around, you know, your technology, a lot of times they'll come to us and in their head they're like, okay, you're going to help us minimize our spend on Office 360 which sure and is so boring and deliver delivers no value. So my, my idea is get that sorbet, cleanse your palate. Let's just talk as two business people or whatever the team is, however many business people and let's hear about what your problems are and like really like where, when you, when if you map out your whole organization. That's one of the things we do early on in discovery is there's usually three or four hotspots around technology that are just like you're living with. It's almost like you're walking around with a rock in your shoe and you just get used to the fact that oh yeah, I can't, I can't, we can't run because we have a rock in our shoe. And that's just, that's just how the world is for us. And you know, so okay, so let's, let's hear about what the real issues are and then we're going to solve them. Right? And I think also there's a risk with it or technology where you've got a uh, it uh hammer and everything's an it nail. You're going to go, everything has an IT approach to it. And I would almost say most of the time the problem isn't the technology or even the people. It's like, hey, you designed this great process 2, 3, 5, 10 years ago. And now that we look at how people are doing it, every single person does it differently, and no one's doing the actual process. So if we just did the process, you'd probably increase, you know, output, you know, whatever the percentage, you know, would be. And so sometimes the answer isn't technology, and we have to approach the problems as problem solvers and not technologists, if that makes sense.

Tim Van Mieghem: I want to say alleluia. Can I get an amen? It's so good, because the, uh, I think about a project that we're, uh, we'll. We'll be collaborating on, uh, very soon, where, you know, we go in to look at the operation, uh, we look at the company from an operational perspective, and, you know, the, we find workarounds. In other words, the system as it's designed or being used doesn't, doesn't actually enable, make it easy to serve the customer. So the, the workers are heroic and dedicated and they figure out a way that despite the system, despite what the resources are, they serve the customer as well as they can. In walking into a client, uh, that, uh, is a healthcare provider, and we, walking through the process and there was this a lady who was, uh, she was doing the register. She would register patients as they walked in. She had four screens. And of course we asked the question, you know, is this, is this for March Madness? A couple of the screens so you can see the games? And she's. No, no. I have four different systems and screens I have to go into to register a patient. Rather than, you know, toggling all around, I just set up four screens so I could attack them.

Mike La Vista: Yeah. And, and that's not uncommon. And that's, that's that rock in the shoe situation where it's, they just get used to the fact that that's how this works. And so if you imagine, let's say this lady is going to go, I always like to. Instead of the hit by the bus, you win the lottery. So she wins the lottery. Someone new comes in. All right, I'm going to train you on our system, right? And imagine that person sitting down and going, why are there four screens here? You know, and you just get used to it. In fact, as a sidebar, one of my favorite things is I feel like new employees, like less than a month. They're your best source of ideas because they've come from somewhere else and they're, they're sort of the emperor's new clothes guys who can go why in the world are we doing it this way? And when you get used to it, you know, you don't. You stop thinking about solutions. You just think about, you know, the how do I optimize the workaround? Which is just a crazy, you know.

Tim Van Mieghem: Absolutely. Yeah, yeah. There's so many benefits to it. And I think, you know, first, understanding where those workarounds occur and the different things, uh, is the starting point. You have to be aware first. Uh, and it brings up a couple thoughts. One basic one is something that we say a lot, which is go to Gemba, which is the, uh, you know, lean Japanese term for go to where the work is done. Simply walk through the process, just out of curiosity, not judgment, just to see what's going on. It's amazing what you learn. Also makes me think of, uh, on your website, you have something called a systems check. Uh, I'd love to hear, especially for business owners, if they click on that or go down that path, what is what. What kind of things do they learn? What. What are you raising, uh, up their awareness about in that, you know, uh,

Mike La Vista: I never thought of it this way, but it's a go to Gemba journey. It's. The idea is when we encounter a company, we want to do a diagnosis of how you operate, um, sort of in an agnostic way. We're not coming with a point of view to your point, strictly out of curiosity, because, honestly, sometimes you may have innovated something really interesting we should keep. But I want to have our team go through and document what you do from a technology point of view. And this is something I feel like your group does with an operational task, and no one really ever does with technology. Like, have you ever had someone walk through. For example, we did this recently where, um, sales team walk through how you use your current systems to create a new order. Right?

Tim Van Mieghem: Yeah.

Mike La Vista: And in your head, as the CEO, you're probably thinking, we just create an order. What's the big deal? I don't. I don't understand why that would even be that. Why is that a problem? And we watched five people do the same operation, five completely, including one in the same way, right?

Tim Van Mieghem: Yes.

Mike La Vista: And one of them involved. Um, by the time the person was done, I think they had just under 20 tabs open in their browsers because, you know to. Well, okay, so when I do this, I gotta look up the part, but the part doesn't exist. I gotta go to our vendor for that. And then, um, I then have to look up shipping. That's another system. And so on and so on and so on. And then the one person's like, but don't you know that our ERP does the shipping lookup on its own? And they go, it does. And then somebody wait, you do it that way. And so just like, uh, it's one of those things where, you know, we're, we're expecting to go on this long journey and literally 90 seconds out of the gate we found two giant stoppers. Right. And so as a, as a CEO, wouldn't it be great to see like a value stream map of how your team uses your systems visually? And often we're, it's almost always the case we find four or five real hotspots where either it's a highly manual process, which means sure, manual has a cost to it, but also mistakes have an even bigger cost. So if you're four screens, that means someone had to type, copy, paste something places and the likelihood that an extra zero, the wrong two products look the same, but maybe not. And all those things kind of cascade through and then you end up at the other end of uh, the line where you shoot, shipped, um, you know, 10x the wrong product to the wrong person kind of thing.

Tim Van Mieghem: Absolutely.

Mike La Vista: Which always happened. So I feel like our systems check is really a, it's a standalone, uh, you know, service product where when we're done, you see where you could probably benefit, uh, to optimize your systems. And honestly, as I said when we started, a lot of times it could just be, hey, guess. And this happened to another client recently, um, of all the way people do things, Charlie's just really good. So if we did nothing else, just standardize on Charlie, that was not bad. Right. And because you don't really examine, um, how that's going, I always like to, as a crazy analogy, I always think about with a restaurant, um, do restaurants ever audit how each individual server is doing the process? And I waited tables in college, so that's like a thing that I remember. They don't really train you on like how to do it. Everyone's got their own style and it could be, you know, this with this one person. And here I'm going to shout out to Farhad at the for, uh, seasons from the 90s who just every day doubled everyone's tips and his process was great. And so I subbed uh with him for a while just to learn what he did. And it was almost like my intro to process engineering because everything had these little touch points that were just so much better than everybody else's and it was like, oh, wow, I can really learn from that. And I don't think anyone takes the time to examine their own processes because it's like the, how do I change, uh, the car and a tire when we're going 100 miles an hour?

Tim Van Mieghem: Right.

Mike La Vista: That's, I think that's where we're at a lot of the time.

Tim Van Mieghem: I, I, I want to build on that a little bit too, Mike, because, you know, sometimes when people hear stories like this, and I, I, I, I have one I share a lot too, that it's tempting to think, oh, that, that's crazy, that wouldn't happen with me. Or they, they, how could they let that happen? Um, I, I've seen in, in factories. Uh, there's a chocolate factory which always, uh, makes me think of Lucille Ball, and I smile. But there was one lady who was, uh, packing chocolate, uh, bars into boxes with 19 guys on the line. And when the plant manager was taking us on a tour and he pointed her out and he was really proud, really proud of her and genuine, and it was wonderful. And he said, see Lucy here? She packs twice as many boxes as all the guys here. And he was calling her out. And what it became clear to me is he didn't consider it his job. It didn't even enter that he could start telling, he could have a standard approach. You know, two things came out of that. One is her effective approach was largely irrelevant because she was one out of 20 people doing it.

Mike La Vista: Yeah.

Tim Van Mieghem: And the, and the second was, uh, the plant manager didn't see that as something he had the authority of the right or the charge to do. And I, and I'm sure there's very good reasons why that happened, but it's why that systems check and going back to Gemba, walking through the process, uh, is so powerful. And when, when, uh, the CEO sits in on a mapping process, uh, if they can avoid anything other than a question, that would be a very good thing because they, like I tend to do, to try to solve problems which can, uh, be distracting. Um, you know, one piece too that I think about, uh, is the number of times I've run into somebody and they're implementing a new ERP system. Here's a loaded question. But how, what would, how impactful would it be that before somebody makes a decision to invest the capex that they talk with somebody like you, what would you help them? What have you seen? What have you walked? Uh, and if you have any examples of where maybe the, the system wasn't actually the problem.

Mike La Vista: Yeah, I'd Almost say the system is almost usually not the problem. And you know what? I, when I look at, um, it's funny, a lot of times we'll talk to someone and they'll say like, um, um, hey listen, this all sounds great, but like, we're just starting in your erp, uh, re implementation process, um, let's get together after that and we can talk about what this is. And I'm like, wow, that is like, I would love to save you so much time and hassle and pain and money and energy and all that kind of stuff. Because if we iron out what you need to do now, I almost find most of the time the problem isn't the erp and probably what you have is fine in a way. They're all fine. And if we can just look at how you're using what you have, uh, probably what happened was there's this one thing you'd love to do that you can't figure out how to do in your new system. And salesperson from ERP2 says, hey, we have this new module that does that. Great, let's embark on a $2 million two year reimplementation plan where during that two years everyone's distracted and we have our eye off the ball and we've got a data conversion problem. And how many times, uh, have we all heard stories where at the end of the two years you go, you know what, forget this, we're going back to the original one. Uh, it's not, it's not more than 50%, but it's maybe it's close to the third. Right? It's high enough like that if you really just were to take a deep breath and step back and say, okay, what are we actually trying to do with these systems? Like one of the ones we saw one time was the problem was that the current system was way too restrictive. Right? And so tell me if this is something that resonates for anybody. It's too restrictive. And the issue was people had been allowed to make custom fields in the ERP, uh, since the beginning and so on. A new, what was it? A new customer, I think. So to set up a new customer, it had gotten to the point where sales wanted these 22 fields, marketing wanted these 19 fields, credit one of these. And so to fill out a new customer, it was like this crazy mind boggling array of things to fill out. And it turned out that they just been living with, you know, all these, uh, quote unquote requirements for all this time and that some, that for a lot of them they couldn't remember who asked for them and why. And I remember one of them was like, oh, didn't Jerry want that back a few years ago? Jerry's no longer with the company. Didn't Jerry want that? Oh, yeah.

Tim Van Mieghem: And.

Mike La Vista: And that was like the stopper for, you know, for, uh, onboarding a new customer. And so you think about, um, you know, just removing the blockers. I think we ended up. The recommendation was something like, um, it looks like you only really need. And you probably come with them right now in your head, the 20 things that you need to kick off a new customer. And the others can come later. And marketing, we don't, we don't have to know how you heard about us, how big your market is, what you're playing. Uh, that can come later. It shouldn't be a blocker to setting up a customer. And they were going to go to a new system because it had fewer fields and they didn't realize the reason. You have so many fields because of you. You're the one that put it there. And that was going to be, um, I don't know, whatever. However, those take a year plus two years to implement that. It's really just. Let's work with what you have. The work with what you have is almost always the solution, to be honest.

Tim Van Mieghem: At least one thing I think about on that is at least to start with.

Mike La Vista: At least to start with.

Tim Van Mieghem: Yeah. And actually for two reasons. One is you solve a lot of the issues, right? You relieve the pain, the symptoms by fixing the processes, how you actually interact with the system. The other is it de. Risks the implementation of a future system.

Mike La Vista: Right? Yeah. Because if you don't. Because the other thing, we've joked about this in the past. If you just re. Implement your bad process on a new system, you accelerate and exacerbate the chaos because that's what's going to happen. You're. You've now, you know, industrialized your dysfunction. We don't want to do that. And you know, uh, to steal one of your ideas. I think the, um, the idea that, you know, a company comes to you and says, you know, we're running out of capacity, we need to, you know, build a new warehouse. And it turns out that you're already 40% under capacity. Do that work first. Because here's what we'd love to do. We'd love to see you build another two, three, four warehouses on this new system so that we can grow as efficiently as possible as opposed to needing to add eight new warehouses.

Tim Van Mieghem: That's Right, right. You know that's right.

Mike La Vista: And I think that it's. And I think the thing for, um, a CEO to think about and a team to think about is this, um, work is annoying work because it's, it's, it's thinking work, it's problem solving work. And buying an ERP is just executional work. And if you're a fan of this book, do you know this book? Thinking, um, fast and thinking slow. I've, um, not read it, so it's really great. I'll explain it. The, the title. Almost here. You don't need to read it. Here's, here's the whole thing. It's, it's Kahneman and Tversky. It's this famous social science book. And if you think about it, there are certain things that your, your brain knows how to do, you know, you know, two plus two four. Like, uh, I, I gave us an easy one.

Tim Van Mieghem: Right?

Mike La Vista: Or like, you know, uh, 10 times 11, you know, but like, things you can, you can do pretty quickly.

Tim Van Mieghem: Or driving.

Mike La Vista: Right, right. Or driving, uh, opening a door. You know, how many times you just walk upstairs, you find yourself in a room because your body's on autopilot. Right. Those are what they call System one.

Tim Van Mieghem: Thinking.

Mike La Vista: It's really straightforward. And so for me, straightforward task. Oh, we have a problem. Buy new RP. Good, I'm out. I'm done. System two, thinking is, um, square root of 2165. Right. And, um, if you had to do it, I remember doing this in college, it has something to do with the sum of a series or something. If you had to do it by hand, it's like this whole, whole thing. And it's hard and odd. Ah. And even, like people who are math phobes right now are going, oh, God, the panic.

Tim Van Mieghem: I got the sweating.

Mike La Vista: And, uh, that system, too. That's. I have to figure this out. So the challenge of, okay, guys, we're going to do the difficult work of together as a leadership team, and whatever team we're talking about, we're going to get together, we're going to think through these difficult problems that have plagued us for a long time. That is difficult. Annoying. System two, work. And the payoff is you solve it once and for all. And so the, the downside is it's a little tricky and thorny, but that maybe takes, I don't know, four to eight weeks, and you've got some answers you can move forward with as opposed to. And that's difficult work. And then the rest is easier as opposed to, you're going to do this more seemingly transactional, um, m. Change. Erps. But what you've just signed up for is 50 or 100 of those system two problems. Because then you get into it and you say, okay, how do we configure this module? Oh, we haven't thought of that. How are we going to do this? And it just blossoms, right? Exactly. So I really feel like, like it's, it's advice. Everybody knows. Um, there's another book you don't need to read. Just read the title. Um, it's a strategy in the Fat Smoker. Everyone knows you shouldn't eat too much, you shouldn't smoke. And there's a lot of fat smokers out there. You know, just do the stuff. It's. Do it up front. It's so much easier. And uh, you know, we do. We always, you know, take our own medicine. Maybe not, but that is the advice that I think that works.

Tim Van Mieghem: I love it. So, uh, I think there's a couple of additional topics, uh, that we, uh, we got to talk about AI. And I know we could spend eight shows just on this one topic. But for. I'll speak for myself and I think a lot of CEOs are out there like that, especially the ones who are potentially part of the silver tsunami here coming in the next, next, uh, time period. Um, like it, it can be overwhelming. Um, we hear lots of stories of it, uh, being tremendously helpful in areas where it's highly distracting create. It can cause problems. So, uh, how does a CEO today just start thinking about this?

Mike La Vista: Okay, so I'm gonna start with what I think you shouldn't do. And I've experienced this a bunch lately. So I was talking to a CEO of a. I mean it might be a Fortune 100, but it's a big company that we've all heard of and interacted with. And he was saying he was so happy that he had this idea. He told his team of direct reports. He told his team to come up with three AI ideas every week for him. And let's say that that team is 10. So every week this company, this big company, has 30 new AI ideas times 50 weeks. That's a lot of ideas. And I'm not sure where they're going. And how do you even, I mean, what, what do you even do with that information? Right? And so I think that the, the best. I think the healthiest way for a CEO to approach AI is really to think about it as. Take a deep breath. It's just the new technology. It's just the new thing that came along. I saw this thing the other day where someone said, uh, had this idea, I'm going to go look at GDP growth over the last 30, 40 years and I'm going to try to spot where the computer came in or when this automation came in or the Internet and all these things. And you sort of intuitively you sort of expect like a bump, you know, computers, Internet, whatever. And no, it's just this GDP does that. And it's because it takes a while for these things to get absorbed into the economy and our thinking and how we work. And AI is just the newest one of those. It's a really good idea. I don't think it's a 2x the GDP idea. Uh, the current thing. Right. And so got to go back to the basics and we're going to say the same thing five different ways today. Come up with the problems you're trying to solve in the business and then let's see if AI is a part of that. It might be, it might not be. Um, it could be a contributor, it could be a driver, it could not even be applicable at all. And so really. And so the danger is to come at uh, the problem and say, well, give me some AI solutions. A quote that we're ah, a study we're quoting a lot lately has been this one from MIT. Late last year MIT found that something like 92% of AI initiatives aren't delivering any kind of ROI. And the gut reaction is oh, AI is overhyped and it's dumb and it's

Tim Van Mieghem: not going to be right.

Mike La Vista: And the problem is people are doing let's do 10 AI ideas a week and as opposed to you know, let's solve 10 problems a week. And so you end up with these kind of goofy like toys, these AI toys that don't really do anything.

Tim Van Mieghem: So, so they're disjointed.

Mike La Vista: Yeah. And so really just focus on like it's just another, it's the current new thing. There will be the, you know, we'll be this, this'll be quantum computing in a few years. It'll be whatever's next. It's just, you have to absorb it into the, you know, the, the gestalt as just a new idea and figure out how we're going to use.

Tim Van Mieghem: Makes so much sense and it makes me think, you know, just uh, relating it back to operations.

Mike La Vista: Yeah.

Tim Van Mieghem: You know, when the system's not doing what the whole process is not make, it doesn't make it easy to serve the customer People develop workarounds right all the time. And when that happens, for a long period of time, taking that step back, doing that value stream map, going to Gemba and uh, walking through allows you to, to understand what is happening today. Ah, and here's the term that keeps popping into my head. It's to then reverse engineer the process. You, in a sense, you start over and you say let's forget about all the little what, what stuff. If we think purely about here's the demand and here's the customer, what we have to deliver to them and then design that process. And when I think about reverse engineering, it's look at that pace of, of the solution and the service we provide and having each step in that operation, uh, be it uh, uh, aligned with that time, that cadence, it is amazing how dramatic the improvements are. And adding in what AI is, is another tool that's an aspect of that. It's beautiful.

Mike La Vista: And I think thinking about things, uh, AI does well and doesn't do well. We've got a talk on that. And um, evaluating a system and where the pain points are is something AI can do pretty well. And in a way, um, kind of without emotion and without trouble. It can just approach it and say this operation seems like it could be 150% faster if we just did X, Y and Z. That's a pretty straightforward way. I think the ideation of what are the possible solutions. I think the human in the loop idea of a human should still pick the way forward probably, but like you know, finding some ideas, it's really, it's just a new part of the toolbox. That's really all it is.

Tim Van Mieghem: It's a sober, thoughtful way of thinking about it. Mike, uh, before I go into the last, uh, final kind of question, I wanted to how do people engage with you, find you uh, and start a conversation?

Mike La Vista: Um, you know, I think we're all out there on LinkedIn and pretty findable on LinkedIn. Um, if you want to hear about what the company is up to, uh, we're@c a x y.com caxi.com and uh, a lot of our offerings and some of our video and kind of our thought work and stuff is there. So there's actually a lot of free things you can pick up and run with if you're uh, an able bodied, interested, curious person.

Tim Van Mieghem: I love it. And is there a way to find out where uh, City Rec 7 is going to be playing next?

Mike La Vista: Uh, you know, so as a member of a dad band, um, we're so bad at Promotion. So I think it's actually our Facebook page to Facebook Rock City 7. And you'll, you'll find uh, all you need to know.

Tim Van Mieghem: Yeah, thank you. Perfect, perfect. So uh, uh, and I, I actually have two more questions. The, the, the next one, it's equally as emotional I think and top of mind is cybersecurity to, to A.I. kind of the, this is now on the flip side, the risk side. Uh, yeah, go ahead.

Mike La Vista: So, so ideas on. So I think the main thing we hear about on um, security for AI is that there are a number of different risks happening at the same time right now in your company almost certainly. And one of them is this is a really exciting and fun technology. Right. Um, you get to talk to um, this incredibly smart uh, AI agent that can go research and find answers for you, all that kind of stuff. And the problem is almost all the time people are operating especially in mid M. I feel like when we talk to like much bigger companies they've implemented security protocols and guardrails and all this kind of stuff. But mid market companies you probably have people on your team right now talking to ChatGPT and uploading you know, uh, sales data from last quarter to do stuff on it that shouldn't be in the personal chatgpt. And also we'll get to the security leak risks of that. So you know, people are experimenting with, I feel like almost every company that's happening on the side. The second is if you're using your personal account you actually do have to go through some steps to turn off the capability for your chats to be used as training material. And so um, we have a guide I think we're going to put on the website about how to just go do that. So that may be a free resource that's like here's how to go turn off the, you know, the training stuff and ChatGPT and Claude and all the other kind of stuff. So that, that's like a, that's a step one. You don't want people uploading your P and L and playing around with stuff because um, it's uh, it's the likelihood that it could be trained is possible. Not all of us have the secret for Coca Cola in our, in our back pocket. But there are things that are happening that you would prefer not get out there. And um, the other one is get yourself an enterprise account and approach it like it's an enterprise tool for your organization. We're going to use together. There's ways to set that up. Uh, we actually have a uh, you set me up for. We also have a service on how to implement those kind of tools, uh, at scale in a company, um, to make sure that they're safe. But I think the upside is that people are experimenting and this is a tool, uh, AI, the LLMs, these Claude and ChatGPT are tools that are about experimentation. And I think you do want people to go try in a way. You know, if I can go back on my story from this uh, big company, you do want people to try 100 things so that you come up with the one or two or three that work. Um, I think that if that was the kernel of what he was getting at, maybe I can take back my throwing him under the bus. But I think that what you want is experimentation, you just want it to be done safely. Um, and I think that's a real risk right now. And I think the other bigger cybersecurity issue for um, uh, for mid market companies, especially around AI, is that uh, the arms race around um, uh, cyber attacks and hacking escalates all the time. And AI made it easier. And so now it's funny, uh, um, we've talked to some of the big security groups about this and uh, some of the things that are happening are like the ability to get a customized text message that is a phishing attempt to get into your systems. That sounds like, oh, that does sound like my, my VP texting me and I, and I could mistake him for that or an email. It's not the, you know, the Nigerian prince stuff was a form that went to everybody. Now it's tailored to. You gotta um, really be careful and like education around that is really important. And of course updating your systems. It's not uncommon for us to come in and find out that you know, someone is, you know, 20 updates behind, uh, you know, the current, you know.

Tim Van Mieghem: Yes.

Mike La Vista: Um, there are an article came out a couple of days ago. There's, there's something about like everyone's panicking about, you know, um, you know, don't get on the WI fi at the airport because you're going to get hacked. So I was reading up on that and it's like, well sure, ah, that's an exploit for iOS version 18, but we're on 26 right now. So just like update your phones. Some people haven't. Right. So there's a couple of different vectors where that plays a factor. But uh, cyber is only going to get more difficult.

Tim Van Mieghem: Absolutely. Uh, final question, Mike. If you had five minutes with an executive, you know what, name the setting you Got. You got a few minutes, uh, waiting for the, uh, the flight, uh, what. And start a conversation. What would be the one or two questions you'd ask to help, you know, find if there's something worth pursuing or, uh, and finding the idea that, uh, that would be meaningful for them to consider?

Mike La Vista: Yeah. So I, I really come back to this idea that when you scale or as you scaled, did your people costs match it linearly? So you grew 30% last year, you had 30% headcount. You doubled last year. Did you double your headcount? And if that's what's happening, it's probably a symptom of a lot of things not being efficient. And what we've. And the story would be you didn't scale, you just doubled. And so what you want to see is from a technology and an operations point of view, and probably lots of other points of view, um, you know, a 30% growth in top line could potentially double your bottom line if you're doing things the right way. Right. And here's the thing. I think that if we were at the airport, in your head, are you just planning on hiring more people for the scale? Because if you're. This is the whole. The phrase used to be, we're gonna throw money at the problem, now we're throwing people at the problem. And people are tough to find, tough to keep, tough to train. And I'm not saying I'm not one of those, let's fire everybody guys. What I want is the story. I like that I've been telling a little bit. I saw this thing about IKEA customer service, found that they will Design, uh, an AI chatbot that got rid of the 55% of the level one, um, questions. And when they figured out, well, what's the other 45%? A lot of it had to do with sort of like interior design. What goes with what kind of question. So they spent a couple weeks training their customer service agents on that to the tune of a billion dollars in new revenue.

Tim Van Mieghem: And so, uh, uh, they didn't fire anybody. They added.

Mike La Vista: Right.

Tim Van Mieghem: Yeah.

Mike La Vista: So let's really think about, you know, if you, if in your head scale, if the thing you don't like about scaling means all more people, then that's probably a time for a conversation with someone like Tim and maybe even me.

Tim Van Mieghem: Amen. Amen. Uh, I love it, Mike. What a powerful way to wrap up this episode. Thank you, Mike.

Mike La Vista: A pleasure, Tim.

Tim Van Mieghem: Yeah, of course. It always is. It always is. And, and for everyone out there, you can connect with Mike on LinkedIn like you said or Caxi C-A-Y.com we'll drop, uh, the link in the show notes and as always, visit shockingprofit.com for past episodes resources and more strategies to boost your bottom line without losing your mind. Be sure to tune in for our next Shocking Profit episode. In the meantime, please tell your friends about us. If you have a question, a challenge, or a life hack, reach out to us at Elwood at shockingprofit.

Narrator: Com.

Tim Van Mieghem: And remember, everyone, focus on what matters to shock your profit. See you next time.