EP. 038 - Lambros Photios - Story of How To A Digital Product Consultancy Business - Station Five

Speaker A: Because if you're not building a business that's capable of being sold, you're not

Speaker B: building a good business.

Speaker A: You're not building a good business. Yeah, you're building a business around yourself, which is in a business. Um, and the second thing that stood out to me was just saying creative that the author did, which was he wrote. He wrote the message he wanted to get across in a narrative style, as in he created a fake individual who was going through a problem that was very relatable to my own and actually spoke about this person who had created a business and was doing 10 different things with a team of five and how he was spread so thin the staff didn't have any one function. Um, and I was just thinking the whole time, like, shit, this is exactly what I've done.

Speaker B: What is up, everyone? This is Ronnie, your host of the Ronnie oh Sony Show. My number one goal in this show is to bring you some of the most amazing and accomplished individuals in the business world to share with you some real raw and authentic business insights. We sit down and talk in a casual setting, nothing too serious yet. We unpack some of the most incredible ideas and concepts and best practices. So please sit back, relax and enjoy the show. Oh, and don't forget to share the love. Like, share and subscribe. Gracias, amigos. What is up, everyone? And welcome to another episode of Ronnie Asani Show. Joining me today is Lambros Forios.

Speaker A: Met you. Nailed that. Perfect. Uh, thanks for having me.

Speaker B: CEO, uh, and founder of Station 5, which is a digital product consultancy company. And today we're going to talk about a bunch of things. Um, I guess we can start with what made you start or what made you create, Ah, Station Five.

Speaker A: Definitely Just immaturity, nothing else.

Speaker B: I like that.

Speaker A: Um, why did I start? I got bored at uni, actually. So I went down the path of, you know, the conventional. Like, I'm Greek, I'm going to follow the ideas of my Greek parents. And that meant a degree. Uh, but a double degree, because a single degree just, Just doesn't cut.

Speaker B: It wasn't good enough.

Speaker A: Not good enough. Yeah, it wasn't medicine and it wasn't law, so it was. You'd better do a double degree.

Speaker B: Yeah, I feel you, man. I'm Egyptian. So if you see most of the Egyptians in Australia, you gotta be either an accountant or an engineer or a pharmacist or something like that. Maybe lawyer every now and then. Yeah, yeah.

Speaker A: Sorry for the ambitious ones.

Speaker B: Yeah. Um, anyway, so going back to.

Speaker A: So I did the, you know, I Went engineering as. As you just guessed. Um, um, I also coupled that with some commerce and had six years ahead of me of just enjoyment factor. Pure enjoyment factor. Uh, yeah. Living the life, living the dream, really. I found myself reducing 24 contact hours to two because I just couldn't stand it. Right. And about three years in, decided I didn't want to. Didn't want to pursue that.

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker A: Um, I didn't leave uni. I didn't drop out. I still kept it there as like a backup plan, but my mentality was, let's go try something else. And so pretty much what had been happening was while I was at uni, I was looking into other areas. I was looking into software. It intrigued me. It intrigued me when I was 14. Um, so what I did was when I was 19, I started doing some software consulting work just for fun on the side while at uni. And two, three years later, when I was a couple of years into my degree, started a business, um, as I said, seemed like a good idea to do at the time. I needed to hire people. It was really a means to an end because the consulting work was starting to, I guess, escalate in terms of workload. And coupled with the double degree at uni, it was effectively a means to an end to make sure I could fulfill the projects. So it wasn't something that was well thought out. There was no business plan. There was no SWOT analysis. It was, let's start.

Speaker B: No research, no talking to anyone.

Speaker A: Sweet FA man. Sweet FA man.

Speaker B: That's, that's, that's the way to go. Sometimes you just, you, you, you feel like you have a calling and you know that's what you want to do and you just, you just do it. You don't let any second thoughts or anyone to talk you out of it. You just know that this is what I want to do and I, um, you know, I'm just going to do it.

Speaker A: I think, um, you know, I think interestingly for me, because I totally agree. I think interestingly for me, though, what probably differed was that I started it because I was a bit directionless. I think when you're at uni and you're in your early 20s, like, there's this expectation that you need to know what you're going to do with the rest of your life and your degree dictates that you choose that. At 18, that's just how life gets set out. And I wasn't sure what path I was on, so I started this degree. Um, wasn't sure what I was doing there. So I started this business and to be honest, the calling part wasn't, still wasn't there at the very start. It was, it was something that actually came two, three years into running the business.

Speaker B: Um, once you started making good money, you're like, yep, that's my calling.

Speaker A: I mean I'm pretty sure over the first like four years it was, you know, it's pretty break even.

Speaker B: Okay.

Speaker A: It was, it was a painful start. Yeah, yeah. I think if anyone's glamorizing the first three years of running a business, no comment.

Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, yeah. It works out differently for, for different businesses and different people. Excuse me. So if you're a startup and you raise a lot of money, um, in two, three years time you can, you could be making a killing. But then sometimes, you know, even big companies take a lot of time to start making like income or any type of profit.

Speaker A: So it depends what game you're playing as well. Right. Like are you playing a lifestyle profit or are you playing a growth game?

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker A: And if you're a typical like Silicon Valley startup or the growth businesses that you hear of, the reality is you're probably not going to profit for a while. Like Netflix started in 97. Still not profitable. Uber still not profitable.

Speaker B: Uber's not profitable. I know that. Yeah.

Speaker A: Um, like these businesses maybe intentionally. Well, I think that, yeah, they're targeting market share though. Right. Like if your game is growth and your, your game is reach, then if you're pulling money out then you're losing opportunity because that money could be spent increasing your reach. 100% payday comes eventually. Right. But play the long game I guess is the mentality with growth.

Speaker B: Yeah, well, the founder, um, he exited, right. And I think he exited with $1 billion M. So he personally as an individual, he made a lot of money. Yeah, yeah. But as a company they, yeah, they choose to reap like re dump every single dollar they earned into like you said, expanding the market and um, or the market share anyway, going back to station, uh, five, so two, three, four years in the business and um, so you were hustling kind of doing that next to anything else or studying or you had finished studying at that point.

Speaker A: Yeah. So like the abridged version of the story because uh, I don't want to bore everyone with five to six years worth of storytelling, but effectively, yeah, two, three years into running. So start off the business while at uni, within two years AFR Fastarter grew it quite quick. While at uni I was literally pouring everything into it. Um, so grew it fast. We're still at uni at this point. Finished off uni, decided not to pursue the career. It seemed like I was onto something here. Um, so kept going, grew the business more, got to about 14 staff, decided, hey, I'm going to start diversifying. I'm going to start doing design, product ideation, um, product conceptualization, software testing, m. The whole kid and caboodle.

Speaker B: Yep.

Speaker A: Right. Like, if I can do this software thing well and I can grow it to an afr fast starter in two years, what can I do in four or five years after this when I start to diversify my offering?

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker A: And it was at that point that I probably made the biggest mistake I made, which was trying to diversify too early on.

Speaker B: Trying to do everything.

Speaker A: Trying to do everything. Um, so for the next two, three years, things plateaued. So it grew really fast, then plateaued hard plateau and then.

Speaker B: Sucks, doesn't it?

Speaker A: It sucks. And that's really where the, you know, that's really where kind of you, you forced. Where I was forced to reflect on. Why have I gone down this path? What am I doing with my life? Why did I decide not to pursue what the outcome of my university degree could have been? Why am I doing this? And then I read this book here, starts with why. Um, which got me a few answers. Um, and from there I realized that the business that I built Station 5 into was not something that I wanted to be running. It was not something that I went back to my why. And I realized my why was not aligned with what Station 5 was. Uh, and it was kind of this, this glass shattering moment because at that point we had 15, 16 staff in the business running full time, plus contractors. Like, it was, it was, it wasn't something you can just turn around and say, you know, I don't want to do this anymore.

Speaker B: Yep.

Speaker A: But I didn't want to do this anymore. And so that all came to, I guess, a bit of a halt at the tail end of 2019. And at that point we kind of reduced down to about 10 staff. It wasn't intentional. It was when you're doing something, you really, for me personally, I won't speak for everyone, when I was doing something that I really didn't want to be doing, it became very clear very quickly that things just don't go very well. Um, you don't put in the same energy, the same love, because you just don't really care that much for it. And you kind of fast forward, um, two, three months and from December 2019 through to February 2020. As we all know, everything with COVID started happening and at that point we'll force to let go of a couple of staff. We're down to about eight. We had a distributed team, we had four in Australia, four in the Philippines. And that's where it was, you know, due to obviously just the label and how things were. There was this interesting period where for a couple of two to three months, I had the opportunity, a rare opportunity to I guess reframe what I wanted to be doing, where I wanted the business to go. What is it that I want?

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker A: And why did I originally start the business? Like, there was a drive here or a hobby or a passion for building software. There was something about it that really excited me. And at that point it was pretty much a line in the sands moment where it was, I need to change what the business does. At that point it was, I need to go back to grassroots because that's what inspired me at the start. And I want to build out software for other people, but I want to be building cool projects. I want to be building things where it's bringing something innovative to the table where we're actually making a difference or

Speaker B: you make an impact.

Speaker A: Make an impact. And, you know, we're a consultancy. Like, over the previous four or five years, I'd learned how to, you know, service clients well and be a good service operator in that respect. And that went a long way. And I wanted to put those skills to good use to empower other people to be able to do, you know, to be able to run innovative businesses, innovative tech product businesses. Um, and I kind of looked at everything during COVID and I worked out through just general analysis. Like we had previously. Station 5 back in the day had serviced the likes of Qantas AMP Capital, ey, um, Anz Bank. Like, we'd worked with all the big, the big hitters and that was great. But during COVID their innovation budgets came right down to zero, which meant companies like us weren't employed. And also, you know, I think that if they're not doing innovative things, we're not going to get in to do, you know, we're not going to get in to do the grassroots things that they're always doing.

Speaker B: You'll be more maintaining and servicing rather than innovating.

Speaker A: Correct?

Speaker B: Yeah, yeah.

Speaker A: And like, I could have kept the team size at four here, four over in the Philippines, but that's kind of where I, you know, said not really going to work, not really what I want out of this business. It was about creating new ideas and enterprise right now, just because of how the world, the way the world is, is not going to allow that. But what I did notice was that through keeping on the AFR every day like everyone probably was, because what else is that? During COVID right, um, I noticed there was still a tremendous amount going into venture capital. And what I noticed, what I realized off that and also just analysis of GFC and what happened during the financial crisis was startup funding generally spikes during these periods. It's when UID start like a lot of the startups, like your Netflixes, um, and Ubers and those sorts of companies.

Speaker B: Instagram was um, born I think in 2009 in the middle of the GFC.

Speaker A: Yeah, um, like it's crazy, um, when you look at the startups, they may have existed prior to gfc, but it's a lot of the time that acts as a catalyst, people start to think about maybe this wasn't the right way to do things and that's why we're in this position right now. Maybe this is an archaic concept that had to die. And that's where I think innovation does really well. And so what I tried to work out is using the previous five years of running Station 5, how can I leverage the mechanisms or the methodologies of how I did things back then for enterprise into an environment that works for startup for a startup, but also cost competitively. And that's when I reframe the whole business. So from the period of April last year to maybe June, kept the team size in sydney consistent at 4. We repurposed all of the people in Sydney to be project managers. And what we did was we effectively said the developers in the Philippines are only going to work full time for a client. In other words, when we service startups, we will compile a team of local project manager here in Sydney and offshore developers. Uh, so if you think about agency world with software, you'd obviously be very familiar with how this works. Locally you've got the local agency comes with a cost, generally cost out of the market, when it will price out of the market when it comes to engagement with startups or ability to be engaged by startups. Flip side, you've got the pure offshore agency. Different time zone, often a different language. There's too much up for interpretation, some communication barriers.

Speaker B: Correct, stuff like that.

Speaker A: Yeah, exactly. Um, and a lot of the time you don't know the quality of the developer you're getting over there either are you getting a junior with one or two years or are you getting someone who's got 10 plus years of experience.

Speaker B: Yep.

Speaker A: So what I wanted to do was to standardize all of that. How can we get the senior guys over in the Philippines, partner them with the local guys in Sydney and make it so that our clients, startup clients who are non technical founders, can speak with someone local in Sydney, even though it's via Zoom. Just being able to speak with someone in your own native tongue to both of you and to be able to talk about things like business rules and commercials in a way that's logical to a founder, not in a way where you need to translate it or put it through a pre processor just so that a software developer understands what the hell you're talking about.

Speaker B: Yep.

Speaker A: So they're that conduit. They're like your Scrum Master. If anyone, if you guys are familiar with Scrum Masters are on the flip side, there's the developers. And so what this project manager ultimately is, is just that conduit between non technical founder and developers. That was my vision for this is how we can do it. M. And uniquely we're not going to make it so that developers are working on three projects. Developers are full time working on your project. Project managers, no. Developers, yes. Because you don't want to pay full time for every local project manager. But an offshore full time developer is affordable for a startup that's maybe done a seed capital raise or a Series A M. So I started offering that April 2020. MHM. Trialed it with two customers. One took on three developers, the other one took on the other one. So now I'd set up my team. The four devs in the Philippines were fully utilized. Those first two clients signed up for two months only. Um, and the project managers were well underutilized to say the least. Fast forward 12 months later, um, to April this year. Um, actually I'll just fast forward to let's say June this year. Um, like now, like now this month. This month. Um, 38 team members.

Speaker B: Wow.

Speaker A: So four in Sydney still and the rest the other 34 all in the Philippines.

Speaker B: That is an insane level of growth.

Speaker A: It's solid growth.

Speaker B: Yeah. That's huge. Wow. Congrats first of all.

Speaker A: Yeah, thanks.

Speaker B: Um, it just speaks to going back to the roots of what you want to be doing and not chasing a dollar because it's kind of like shiny in front of you. Um, you had a choice of continuing to focus on the big fish, the big clients that were not wanting to innovate. But when you have an opportunity to work with a big client versus a Small client. Most people will want to take the big client. Um, in your case, you're like, no, I want to focus on innovating. I want to work with clients regardless of the size of the company that will get us to work on things, that will help us help them innovate and work on cool things. But then you grew, uh, way much faster than you would have grown over the last 12 months had you stayed with your initial focus, right?

Speaker A: Yeah, absolutely.

Speaker B: That's insane.

Speaker A: Yeah, it was a bit crazy. I mean, look, the last, yeah, 14 or so months has been. Yeah, it's been a roller coaster. Um, there have been a lot of big milestones along, along the way. You know, getting those first four developers signed up to me was just like, this is great. It's Covid. I've had to let go of a. I don't have to let go of anyone else. That was such a good feeling. Like, letting go of people due to Covid was so painful. Um, being able to say to the staff, your jobs are secure, was to me, as someone who'd been building it up for the prior five years, um, just saying that really warmed my heart, to be honest. Um, and then for the next, you know, 14 odd months, being able to see developers over in the Philippines, for instance, who were losing their jobs, seeing the same happen here, um, and being able to say, hey, we're actually growing now, like where we are in a period where we're hiring people fast, um, and being able to offer people jobs when they were concerned about being able to put food on the table, um, for their families, um, was. It was a really kind of. It's probably been, I guess, for me, the most fulfilling part of this whole journey.

Speaker B: I was just going to say it's such a rewarding thing to know that you help other people find or put food on the table and have that security more than the money itself that it generates for you.

Speaker A: Yeah, absolutely. I think, um, that's definitely been probably one of the strongest fuels that I've had. That's just catalyzed my continued eagerness to wake up every Monday at the crack of dawn and keep doing this.

Speaker B: That's awesome. Um, I want to quickly go to your. You were touching earlier on, um, this idea that in crisis, in a global crisis, whether it's from a pandemic or from a financial crisis, like back in, ah, 2008, 2009 with the GFC, there's a spike of all these different startups that eventually become like global companies. Right. What do you think? Because I was just thinking about it when you were talking about it. I was like, what actually leads to that? Is it just a dump of investments from, you know, venture capitalists or anyone else, um, into startups? Or is it also perhaps something else, Something on a society slash, maybe lifestyle or psychological level? Is it that when there's a crisis and everyone takes a step back and reflect and you know, for example in the pandemic, we had a lot of time on our hands. We were just sitting at home thinking about things. Maybe that's one of the main reasons, um, a lot of startups were born over the last 12 months. Because people are sitting at home thinking, okay, why are we not doing that?

Speaker A: Yeah, good question. Haven't thought about this one.

Speaker B: Um, I'm just kind of thinking out loud.

Speaker A: Yeah.

Speaker B: Not expecting.

Speaker A: I'll think, I'll think out loud back. Um, so I think that I'll speak for myself. I mean I'm not saying that I'm running like a Netflix size or a business that's on scale for that. But you know, I, I started this new model and I'm not going to glamorize it. Like the period from February to April, May 2020 was, was havoc. Um, everyone wants to hear about the growth from April through till like April to April because that was the biggest growth spurt um, that I've ever experienced in a business. Um, everyone's eager to hear about that. There was a three month gap in there where things were absolutely terrible. Um, you know, I just let go of two staff members who had been extremely loyal to the business. I, um, was worried I'd have to let go of the other, the other seven or eight. And you know, there's a certain period of like. So I think, I think there's a few things, I think definitely things like this make you think. Um, but, but I think you also need to be in the right headspace for that. I think for me personally though, it was, you know, I was definitely kind of battling um, like mental health myself. I've always been someone who's just battled a bit with depression, but it was during this period it was really tough.

Speaker B: I think most people did, including myself. Yeah, um, uh, we're not gonna jump into depression now. Cause that's not like the, we can come back to that if you like the main topic. I, um, guess I wanted to cover today. But um, depression is one of those things that kind of creep in.

Speaker A: Yeah. Very slowly and even when you realize it's there.

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker A: You can't do anything about It.

Speaker B: Yeah. So for anyone struggling with it, um, uh, our hearts out to you and, you know, we hope, um, you. You fight it. Because I think it's one thing that, um, most people. I don't want to put a number because I don't know. But most people have battled with it at some point anyway. So going back to what, what you're

Speaker A: just saying, so I'm struggling at this point. It'd been about two months of just, you know, doing that. I'm, um, like, running the spreadsheets, the simulations of how screwed I was, and the Australian government definitely helped with making me slightly less screwed, but I was still pretty screwed. And, you know, I. I kind of laid everything out and I thought every day I was back on the spreadsheets, back on the zero, checking the numbers. Um, and it very, very, like the numbers didn't change. Like it was plotting a very, very poor outcome. And, um, you know, on top of all of that, it was just, you know, clients going out the door. So it was like not only the, you know, the existing clients left and you've had to let go of staff. They were more still going. Um, There was one day we lost our three biggest accounts in one day. Just gone. One same day. I think it was a Thursday.

Speaker B: Was it an email? Was it a call?

Speaker A: It was. All three were emails. I remember them being incredibly insensitive, like,

Speaker B: short, hey, sorry, we're done. Or like, trying to, you know, be a bit sympathetic.

Speaker A: No, it was the longer form. We're going to be done. And by the way, here's how we're going to close off all the commercials so we don't have to pay you anything else.

Speaker B: Wow.

Speaker A: Yeah.

Speaker B: That's cold.

Speaker A: It was cold. It was a dark Thursday. Yeah, it was sunny out, but it wasn't. It wasn't sunny at all. Um, anyway, so for a couple of months, yeah, it was. It was rough. And I remember there was one day, you know, I did the usual, what I assume a lot of people did during COVID go for a walk, came back, went like, went to the supermarket because I was the only bloody place you could go get like a. Get like a, um, drink, walk back. And I remember that I had like three books on my bookshelf at M Home and I never read them. And one of them was called Built to Sell. Um, and I thought this, this is an interesting. You know why I picked it up, man, I. Shit. You notice apologies for language. So, yeah, um, I picked this book up because it was the shortest of the three.

Speaker B: You're not a book reader like me. You like to get your knowledge from, I guess, listening to a book like audio, um, or even watching a podcast or blogs or stuff like that.

Speaker A: Love video form. Like, love that you do this in video. Like, it's, um. Yeah, I think I've definitely been more of a visual person and also practical. So, like, how can I learn on the job kind of thing. Yep. Um, but, you know, I picked up this book, Built to Sell, and I thought, I'll give this a read. And I thought, I don't want to sell my business, but I'll just see what he has to say. And I was in a dark place, so I thought, why not? I read the first three pages and I was hooked. Like, this book was not about building a business to sell the business, as the name insinuates. The book was written in a way where it's. There are two things that really stood out to me and captured me in the first three pages. The first was that it outright said, this book is not here to tell you how to sell your business. It's going to teach you how to. How to build a business that is capable of being sold. Sold. Sorry. Because if you're not building a business that's capable of being sold, you're not building a good. Not building a good business. Yeah, you're building a business around yourself, which is in a business m. Um. And the second thing that stood out to me was just saying creative that the author did, which was he wrote. He wrote the message he wanted to get across in a narrative style. As in he created a fake individual who was going through a problem that was very relatable to my own and actually spoke about this person who had created a business and was doing 10 different things with a team of five and how he was spread so thin, the staff didn't have any one function. Um, and I was just thinking the whole time, like, shit, this is exactly what I've done. And, um, you know, that's a fictional character. That's the fictional character. Yeah. But it perfectly describes like it was a nonfiction book for all intents and purposes, but it was, it was written in a narrative style so that you could, I assume, to create that relatability. And it just, you know, I think

Speaker B: it's a very, um, I guess like you said, creative too, because most business books and, um, you know, self education books and um, marketing books or any book in the business world, they mostly talk about existing people and, you know, icons and successful entrepreneurs and people that you may idolize or people that you really look up to. And uh, may maybe in the back of your head you think, oh, but they got lucky with X or someone helped them or these are all the reasons it worked for them, but it hasn't worked for me. And creating a fictional character maybe is a very interesting way or a smart way of doing it because you wouldn't have that mental, um, block or limited belief.

Speaker A: Yeah, absolutely. Um, and it did, like subconsciously I was relating that character back to myself. It's the first book I've ever read and to end in one day.

Speaker B: Wow.

Speaker A: Uh, did not stand up that whole time.

Speaker B: I'm gonna check it out.

Speaker A: Check it out. Um, Built to Sell. Great book. And that night I sat down, I'd just finished the book. Took me four or five hours and I started going back to the original Station 5 business model and reframing the whole thing and working out what is going to A work during COVID and B, work for this industry. I really want to service, which is startups also trying to kind of, I guess cultivate all that information I had around. You know, this is, um, you know, this is venture capital. This is where venture capital is going at the moment. Startups are going to be booming over the next few years. I like, I want to work with startups because I love creating these new ideas and being pivotal in that. How can I create something for that? And that's. That catalyzed it and it was really just kind of harnessing all this information that I had in. To be honest, what was a pretty, pretty painful, um, couple of months, um, into a business model that I formed up in about a week, um, and then started. Started working on.

Speaker B: That's amazing. Now for anyone who is starting a business or has a business that is a B2B like yourself or like mine, um, um, and they want to grow it. What you've just shared is, is really insightful and has a lot of value. And I'm interested to get your thoughts on how you were driving the sales and the lead generation part. Were you like knocking on the door?

Speaker A: Were you with a new model? Yeah, yeah. Or even the older model model was really painful.

Speaker B: Um, um.

Speaker A: I cannot tell you the amount of time, like the amount of time I wrote, I spent writing proposals and putting together cool pitch decks that went abyss. I'm not sure if they were even opened with people who you met for. Like met four or five times over six months. Um, and you just thought, yep, this time it's going to be time. This time it's going to be the time. Never was, um, very heavily driven by referrals. Now, um, I always say to people like, what we do is we really just provide you with a software development team. We are the execution team for software. For software.

Speaker B: Yep.

Speaker A: And so there's two sides to that. There's one side which is working with startups obviously to um, to build out their tech products. So they've got a new idea, they want to get it to market. They may have someone, some technical advisor, but they don't have the execution team to actually build it out. They've gone and found the designer and all that sort of thing, but they just need someone actually build it. That's like, that's how we entered the market. That's still our bread and butter. Um, the other side of the channel, partners, which is something we recently introduced about three, four months ago and has been amazing, was reaching out to all the designers, the marketing agencies, those sorts of companies and saying, hey, you don't offer software development. Um, we can offer it to you, here's the cost. You can mark it up. We've seen people mark it up this much. Um, I kid you not, I've seen people mark up our services like 40, 50%. Like we were built to, we priced to service startups. Um, so we go through to marketing and other creative agencies and it's, we can offer software development to you to on sale as and white label it under your own umbrella and we don't, we don't need the credit for what's going on.

Speaker B: It's a growing model in a lot of different services. Not just um, software development but definitely in software development. I've seen it, um, I've heard about it a few times and um, kind of interested to know if you're on the shorter end or the longer end being the, the person who's providing the service. If you scale and you go volume then obviously having all these different referral partners is a huge thing. They just keep driving more business and you have to really focus on getting the customer. You just have to fulfill, you know, this cop or the requirements.

Speaker A: Yeah, I think, um, yeah, it's interesting. I think, I think for us it's, it's really about, yeah, it's, it's more a volume game that I'm going for. Um, it's niching down, it's being known for one thing and, and I feel when you do that not only do people recognize you for that one thing and be willing to refer you, um, but, and it makes you memorable as well. You're not that guy who does five things 80% well. You're that person who just does one thing and dominates at it. Um, but then on the other side, it's, um, it's something that if I came to you and I was like, hey, man, like, we're gonna like, let's work together. Let's, you know, let's do development with you guys, don't even worry about Publishing Station 5. Like, put under your own umbrella. We'll just be a back office. Um, I'm never gonna compete with you. Like, I'm not gonna go try and do creative work. Like, that's not my game. My game is to scale this. Like, I've scaled it from the 4 to 38 now over the last 14 months. Like, my game is not to start offering, you know, digital consulting or design. My game is, how can I, how can I take what I've done now in building to 38 and multiply that by 10?

Speaker B: Yep.

Speaker A: How can I keep growing this?

Speaker B: Yep, yep. And that's, and that's very smart. Um, every time you try to spread yourself out, it gets more complex and, um, there's, there's an exponential curve almost to doing the same thing over and over and getting better at it than trying to do ten things, um, and get better at them all at the same time.

Speaker A: Yeah, absolutely. It also makes things easier for me. Like, I'm always coming back to your question about sales. Like, it's always the same message consistently. I have. And anyone I send this to knows what I'm sending them. I have a preset email, which is literally, here's what we do, here's why we do it in this unique way that probably seems a bit far fetched. Here's the pricing, here's how quickly we can mobilize a team. Here's our minimum contract duration or how long you need to work with us. Here's how we support you after. Because ultimately, if you're committing to a team, you need to make sure you've got support there if something goes wrong after. Because it does with software. And here's some, here's some previous projects we've done that you may have heard of that have been in the AFR since, Since COVID is like emerging startups.

Speaker B: Yep.

Speaker A: If it works for you, great. If not, that's all good too.

Speaker B: Amazing. We might talk about partnership after this podcast.

Speaker A: Yeah, absolutely.

Speaker B: Um, cool. Now, so, yeah, quickly back to the question around sales. So referral and, um, referral, whether it's from people who have been a direct client or from partners that have, you know, that do things that kind of overlap or maybe in other areas, but their clients would be your clients. So these are two main channels that you.

Speaker A: Um, yeah, I think we've had like one lead on our website in 14 months.

Speaker B: Okay.

Speaker A: It didn't eventuate because our website still hasn't been updated with what our new model is.

Speaker B: Yep.

Speaker A: Um, but you know, it's, it's all referrals as far as I'm concerned.

Speaker B: Cool. Sounds good. Now I wanted to ask you, um, at the beginning of the episode, are you, obviously you're a technical person to have started back in the day doing software?

Speaker A: Yeah, I was originally a software developer. Okay.

Speaker B: What, what, um, what did you, were you a front end developer, a backend developer? Or were you focusing on what kind of languages, what technology and.

Speaker A: Yeah, yeah. Um, when I first started up doing contracting work, it was pure front end development. Um, over time I transitioned into doing back end as well and then did full stack. Um, I started doing database design, fell in love with database design and architecture. Um, I then moved into evolutionary computation, which is a subset of artificial intelligence. So everyone thinks of machine learning when they think of AI. AI is a kind of tree of different types of artificial intelligence. Machine learning is the one that gets the most traction. Evolutionary computation was one that stood out to me. I spent a bit of time researching and doing some work in that space which is effectively really beneficial for things like route optimization and financial forecasting, but nothing else.

Speaker B: Not going to lie, I don't know much about it. I know quite a bit about machine learning and data and uh, different AI technologies. But, um, haven't heard about evolutionary computation. It's a lot of fun.

Speaker A: Yeah, um, that's what, that's what ticks me off. But, you know, that's just me.

Speaker B: Sorry, I can't talk to you about that much.

Speaker A: And then at that point I decided it'd be time to, you know, at that point it was, the agency was starting to kind of take over my time, so I moved away from doing software development.

Speaker B: Cool. Yeah, like most businesses, um, and business owners, they get their hands dirty and they, they do all the technical work and they kind of start to eventually step outside and let other people execute and they just kind of lead the, the big picture. Yeah, yeah.

Speaker A: I don't know if I agree with it. I know I did things that way.

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker A: At the very start. I know you don't agree.

Speaker B: If, if that's should be, if that should be what most people Do I

Speaker A: don't think that,

Speaker B: no, because I don't necessarily agree or disagree. I just think it's an interesting perspective.

Speaker A: Um, I don't think they should be executing who the founder.

Speaker B: Yeah, they should step away and let

Speaker A: other people not even step away. Why are they even in that pool in the first place? Like, I did it for two, three years. Like I am the biggest hypocrite. But I'm telling you based on how I saw things transform, if I were to start this business all over again from the ground up, I would not touch software, I would not touch the product.

Speaker B: So you would still start a software company without doing anything related to learning and actually developing?

Speaker A: I think it's one thing to have an awareness of like emerging technology, like knowing the industry and where it's going and being able to sit down with people and communicate that you have an awareness. Like, how can I find a good software developer for you if I don't know what the hell is going on in the industry? Um, but at the same time, why should I? If I'm working on the tools, then I'm not out there growing the business. Like, how much is my business capped if I'm still writing software? Like go Back to station five, two, three years ago. Mhm. Like when we were, you know, 14, 15 staff and we'd plateaued.

Speaker B: Yep.

Speaker A: At that point I was writing software still. M. Who's running the team if I'm writing software, like for that time, what is, like what is the opportunity cost if for that time I'm writing software instead of managing the team?

Speaker B: Correct. 100%. I just think that's personally my view that, um, a lot of the times it starts that way and sometimes it has to because there's just no one, there's no, you don't have money to pay someone else. Um, otherwise you'll be in the negative. So what you end up doing is you start a restaurant, you are the chef, you're the cleaner, you're the accountant, you are everything. And then eventually as you start to make money, you start to say, okay, well what's the one thing that's consuming most of my time? Okay, it's the cooking. Okay, let me get a chef. Or it's the cleaning, so let me get a cleaner. Um, but you know, some people start companies and they have a lot of money to start with, and you know, they start right away with having all the right resources in the right place. Um, But I guess 90% of the time it's, it's not like that um, the reason most people start a business is they want to make more money because they don't have a lot of it. Uh, um, besides obviously the passion for, for the trade and so most of the time they don't have the resources. But you're right, you have to uh, the, the final I guess destination is, is for you to focus on the big picture and not be, not get your hands dirty so that you can focus on growing. Yeah.

Speaker A: Um, I'm only going to speak for agencies right now because I think that like I know product businesses and I know there are different types of businesses out there and they all different in terms of like what are the ways of streamlining or bootstrapping. So you don't need to get, you know, so you don't need a bucket load of cash to get started. Um, I think a lot of businesses you can get off the ground with minimal capital. I think when it comes to service based businesses like agencies, um, the way that I, if I were to start again that I would start is focus on getting the transaction in the door first. Uh, and have the team pre equipped ready to go. As in standby. Yeah, kind of. Um, like I wouldn't want someone to quit their day job and come and back me until I'm ready and I'm not going to pay them until I'm ready. But in terms of going out there, getting on LinkedIn, hustling your way to finding like three or four people who could potentially help with the job and then bringing in the account and then making sure that you know you the right person is doing the job based on, based on that research and hustle that you've done, there's no reason that doesn't work.

Speaker B: Yep.

Speaker A: For some reason we want to take on those first two, three jobs because we want the cash. M. But what you miss is that in taking on those first two, three jobs there is a huge sunk cost which is your time where you could have been closing deals. 4, 5, 6, 7, 8 and that's gone.

Speaker B: Yep. And with the rise of the gig economy and you have a lot of platforms that can help you find people and LinkedIn is a great place for that. But um, there's ton of freelance platforms so if you want to start a service based business, you're right. You can find people who are willing to jump on an opportunity when it presents itself. So you go and get the account, get the client. Once that's in, then you have a bunch of people who are willing to, whether they have a full time job and they're willing to spend another four or five hours a day to, to execute on your project. Or someone who's a part timer and has an extra um, 20 hours a week to, to, to provide. Or someone who's just looking for a job.

Speaker A: But Ronnie, like even like look at my business model now, right? Uh, like if, if you come to Station 5 as a client and you say I need a software developer, I need a team of three software developers. 50% of the time I get the question, do you have the software developers? Like who do you have? Who's ready?

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker A: And I say no, we hire them like full time. Our gig is if you approach us, we will build a team for you. If that team was pre employed, I'd be burning cash.

Speaker B: Exactly.

Speaker A: That's not my game. So like when someone comes in the door, I quite literally say I don't have the people for your job yet. But what I can say is that I ran a software development business for the greater part of five, six years and, and my process of finding kick ass developers is tight. And I've got a full time general manager over in the Philippines who is literally proactively recruiting and running tech tests and things like that. So we have a constant database on who we know is good. And then as soon as you come in the door, we will take the cream of the crop for you and they will have seven plus years of experience. They'll have a bachelor's, they'll have a master's or a PhD. Like they will be as good as they get because we know how to screen them and we ran them through technical tests and all that sort of thing. And culturally they're a good fit because we have culture tests as well. Like we have a very thorough process for us. If you're coming to us, you're not paying for an outcome. You're not paying for a product to get built. You're paying for time and the fact that the candidates are the best at the game. M. That's it.

Speaker B: Yep, yep.

Speaker A: But I don't have a team. Like if you said to me, lambros, start again, it's whether there's cash in the bank or not. Like I'm not going to be burning capital for the developers who I haven't hired yet. Because you haven't come in the door yet.

Speaker B: Yeah. What you, you want to make sure that every person on Your books is 100% utilized. Every resource is utilized. If, if you can give me resources tomorrow, that means you have, you're paying for uh, someone, someone's time who's, you know, that you're not utilizing, basically. So, um, cool. Um, we're running out of time, but we still got a few minutes, so I just wanted to kind of COVID a few other things that you personally wanted to. You know, coming in today felt like you want to share or anything else that we haven't covered that you thought might be interesting to discuss or, um,

Speaker A: I don't know, Greek food?

Speaker B: I love Greek food, but.

Speaker A: But not the purpose of the podcast, unfortunately. Um, I think. I think. Look, it's. I think there's nothing easy about starting a business. I think people glamorize it. I think if people are glamorizing it, they probably haven't been through the hardship, which I can tell from what you've said, you've been through it as well. And it's, um, you know, like, it's a. It's a tough journey, and there's a lot of. I think the biggest, like, the toughest part of the journey is. Is not even the external factors. It's the self realization. Like, it's going down the path of realizing, you know, here's who I am, here's what I want to do, um, and here's how I need to adapt. And also acknowledging that, you know, you don't need to have imposter syndrome. You don't need to, like anyone else who's ever done it, ever was not more equipped than you are. Like, physiologically, they are biologically still human. They have one brain. They just put in the time, the blood, sweat, and tears, and it's so easy to get caught up in. I heard about this business they're doing so well and leave behind the fact that they've been doing it for two decades.

Speaker B: Yep.

Speaker A: Um, I think we put this enormous amount of pressure on ourselves, and I think people need to just get started, start learning. Um, the best. The best lessons, unfortunately, are learned out there. Um, and, you know, it's. It's not about. I don't think it's about starting up. I think people just need to start, like, start somewhere and not be afraid to. Yeah.

Speaker B: Great message by Lambros. Thank you so much, man. Appreciate your time. It was incredible.

Speaker A: Thanks, Ronnie.