Keith Davies - CTO at AGDATA

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:00) Hello, my friends. Today we are talking to Keith Davies, the CTO of AGDATA, and we discuss building company culture from the ground up, obsessing on the customer and not on the competition, and solving problems that have a multiplier effect for your team. All of this right here, right now on the Modern CTO Podcast. Here we go. This is the Modern CTO Podcast.

(Keith Davies at 00:00:35) Hi there.

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:36) How are you, my friend?

(Keith Davies at 00:00:37) Good. How are you?

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:38) Fantastic. It's a beautiful day. Where are you calling in from?

(Keith Davies at 00:00:42) Charlotte.

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:43) Charlotte? Come on.

(Keith Davies at 00:00:45) It's a good place. It's a little overcast here.

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:49) Nice. Nice. I love that mountainous area.

(Keith Davies at 00:00:53) Yeah. It's nice. Some good hiking.

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:55) Yes. It is. We go up to, let's see, we usually go up to like Blairsville, Georgia, and then there's an area where all the states come together.

(Keith Davies at 00:01:06) Okay.

(Joel Beasley at 00:01:06) And then we do some hiking up in there. It's a lot of fun.

(Keith Davies at 00:01:09) Yeah. There's some nice hiking around Asheville, which is maybe an hour and a half northwest of Charlotte.

(Joel Beasley at 00:01:16) Nice. Nice. So I'm curious to know, can you tell me a little bit about AGDATA?

(Keith Davies at 00:01:22) Yeah. So AGDATA is really a company that's been around for over 30 years. We, you know, like a lot of companies, we started by working very closely with some of our customers, which are tier one manufacturers in the agricultural space. And, you know, as you start out as a startup company, you're building exactly what that customer needs. And then as you start to grow your base of customers, you realize that you're building the same thing multiple times. And so you go from this idea of how do I build a solution just for this customer to how do I start to build products where I can sell the same solution to multiple different customers? And then after you've started to do that, then you realize, well, I could actually build a platform. And I can start to bring all of the data together, and I can start to analyze different trends in the industry, and I can provide higher value-added services and product offerings to customers. And so over the course of really the last, let's say, five years, we've made that journey from being a company that's very focused on creating specialized solutions to customers, to creating products, to creating platforms. And so where we are now is that we've got a data platform, and, you know, that runs in the cloud. We have analytics that we deliver on top of that. And so that's from a technical perspective, that's our solution. From a business perspective, what AGDATA does is, you could think of it similar to airline loyalty programs. And so, you know, if you're flying on American Airlines, the more you fly, the better access to seats you have, the more you can get your bags checked for free. In the agricultural industry, the more products you buy from a manufacturer, the more cash you get back from that same manufacturer at the end of the season. And so what AGDATA, at AGDATA, what we do is we're really the ones that are working with the entire supply chain, and we're collecting all of those point-of-sale transactions. So the way that it works is that when a manufacturer sells the product to a distributor, what they're doing is, their distributor buys the product, we keep track of the sales that take place. A distributor then sells it to a retailer. So you might have a distributor in the northeast, you might have multiple retailers in North Carolina, and those retailers are selling the products to an end grower. And so this is how the farmer gets things like fungicides and pesticides and fertilizers to actually grow the crop. So we keep track of all the inventory. We keep track of all the point-of-sale transactions. And at the end of the year, we tell the manufacturers who they owe and how much they owe.

(Joel Beasley at 00:04:32) That's amazing. As we're sitting here talking about this, I was thinking to myself, I'm like, man, you know, I know somebody who was talking to me about this. And so I pull up my email, I'm like, Daniel Heckman. Like, Daniel Heckman.

(Keith Davies at 00:04:47) Yes. That's right.

(Joel Beasley at 00:04:48) He referred. That's how we ended up connecting with him.

(Keith Davies at 00:04:51) Exactly. That's right.

(Joel Beasley at 00:04:53) I've shared this story on the show before because I thought it was so interesting when he was describing how the disconnect happens and that the incentives are a way to connect data back—

(Keith Davies at 00:05:04) Right.

(Joel Beasley at 00:05:04) To who purchased it because they just sell them to these big warehouses that then resell them. And I was like, oh, I couldn't even think about that. And when he started sharing with me the size of the business, AGDATA and everything, I was like, that's a big business just connecting their lost customers to them.

(Keith Davies at 00:05:21) That's right. Absolutely. And so, you know, we're collecting, you know, billions of dollars worth of point-of-sale transactions from all the way through the agricultural sector.

(Joel Beasley at 00:05:34) So let's talk about Dan. Yeah. So have you known him a while?

(Keith Davies at 00:05:39) No. So I first met Dan when, before I interviewed with AGDATA. So I've been here almost exactly a year. And I came from General Electric where I was, I started as one of the CTOs there. And Dan was, was with our CEO, Heffty Provost in California. I met the two of them for coffee, and we just started talking. And, you know, there's a lot of parallels between what GE and a lot of other companies are doing from a data and analytics perspective and what AGDATA are doing. And so I thought it was a pretty neat opportunity, something that really interested me, but that's how the conversation started.

(Joel Beasley at 00:06:23) So where are you located then?

(Keith Davies at 00:06:25) So we're based in Charlotte.

(Joel Beasley at 00:06:27) So you're not in Tampa?

(Keith Davies at 00:06:29) No. No. So Dan is in Tampa, and Dan came up, you know, on a weekly basis.

(Joel Beasley at 00:06:37) Oh, that's awesome. Yeah. Okay. Cool. Yeah. Because like—

(Joel Beasley at 00:06:39) Yeah. I know we said Charlotte earlier, but I'm like, maybe sometimes people say that they're where their headquarters are, and they're actually somewhere else.

(Keith Davies at 00:06:48) Or—

(Joel Beasley at 00:06:48) They're visiting. All right. So help me fill in this picture I got. I have you working at GE as a CTO, which is just a baller role as far as street cred goes. Right?

(Keith Davies at 00:07:02) Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:07:03) You don't really get bigger than that.

(Keith Davies at 00:07:05) That's right.

(Joel Beasley at 00:07:05) The lead technologist at a massive engineering company. And you're in Intelligent Platforms over there, what, four or five years?

(Keith Davies at 00:07:14) Right.

(Joel Beasley at 00:07:15) And so then why AGDATA? Like, what was the hook? Like, what drew you there?

(Keith Davies at 00:07:20) Yeah. You know, one of the things I think that really interested me and so my background is before GE, I was at ABB. And ABB is sort of the European equivalent of GE, so another large conglomerate. And, you know, when I was at those large companies, I really had a strong desire to get back to smaller companies where, you know, you can really focus on building great products, innovating for customers. And so that was part of it. The other part of it was really the mission, which is how can we really help the agricultural industry? How can we help to make our customers more efficient in their operations? And at the end of the day, there's a much larger mission, which our customers are after, which is how do we feed the world? And so if there are some little things that we can do for that broader vision and that broader objective, then I think it's pretty exciting. And I think the final thing would be if you think about the agricultural industry, you know, it hasn't been historically on the leading tip of technology. And so now what you're starting to see in the agricultural sector is a lot of businesses starting to digitize, and so they're starting to think about data and analytics. They're starting to think about how can they bring disparate data stores together. How can they start to mine that information to gain new insights into their business. And so that problem just really excited me, and there were a lot of parallels to some of the things we've worked on at GE.

(Joel Beasley at 00:08:58) So the other day, I'm driving, and I'm in Florida. And so there's cow pastures everywhere.

(Keith Davies at 00:09:04) Right.

(Joel Beasley at 00:09:04) Right? And I just had this, like, daydream. I was like, I wonder if any of those cows have sensors inside their stomachs. Do you think that's a thing?

(Keith Davies at 00:09:15) So it's interesting with cattle. And so, you know, many cattle now have ear tags, and those ear tags have sensors in them, and you can follow the path of the cattle around, you know, around the farm. And you can really what you can do is you can start to gauge whether that cattle are healthy or not. And so an interesting thing that we did at GE was that we had a product, and it was in our monitoring and diagnostics product line where we monitored cows and we went up head to head against farmers. And the objective was to be able to see who can identify a sick cow first, our software or the farmer, the cowboy? And, you know, of course, and this was something that we continually run into in every single domain. The cowboy will say, well, of course, I can just look at the at the cattle, the cow, and determine whether it's healthy or not. I can put my hand on it and I can just tell. And, you know, and so what we did is we leveraged these sensor readings and we were able to look at how much is a cow migrating. Is it in amongst the rest of the herd? How much is it drinking? How much is it eating? How much is it sleeping? And cows are just like people. Right? When they're sick, they don't want to be around other people. They don't want to eat. They don't want to drink. And so we ran the first trial, and we were able to predict that these cattle were actually sick, and we were able to predict that much earlier than the cowboy. And so then the feedback was, okay, well, that was luck. Anybody could do it the first time. And so what we did was we ran a second more in-depth trial, and we won the second time as well. And so, you know, that's, you know, I mentioned that story because I think what you're starting to see in the agricultural industry and the animal health industry is a lot of sensor enabling cattle. You can sensor enable your dog, for example. You can basically put a Fitbit on your dog and you can see—

(Joel Beasley at 00:11:32) What about my wife? You're moving around in those patterns, honey.

(Keith Davies at 00:11:37) That's right. You know, you can really start to see what's happening with both, you know, as they call production animals, which are cattle, or companion animals, your cats and dogs.

(Joel Beasley at 00:11:50) So let's talk a little bit about technology, teams, leadership. I want to bring some context to the conversation. Right? Because it's different when someone's leading 10,000 people versus 10 people, things like that. So what is your current team size? What's the structure of, you know, your office of the CTO type deal within your current organization?

(Keith Davies at 00:12:12) Yeah. So we're 60 people right now.

(Joel Beasley at 00:12:14) Okay.

(Keith Davies at 00:12:15) Within those 60 people, we're organized around scrum teams, so very much an agile shop. We have development managers leading the scrum teams. The scrum teams are comprised of developers and QA team members. We have a leader of the quality organization who is putting in place best practices, new processes and techniques that we can use to apply automated testing and increase our validation of the software. But, you know, we're a pretty flat organization. And so one of the things, you know, when I was at ABB, I had a team of 650 people. At GE, a team of over 300 people. And, you know, one of the things here that I really wanted to do was to determine how can we take the money that we have within engineering and really invest it so that we're getting as much output as possible. And so I've really reduced the number. I only have two development managers. I've really tried to flatten the organization out as much as possible. I would say just one of the things that that requires is you've really got to have top talent in the positions. And so that model only works when you're able to provide direction to the teams and the teams are then able to figure it out themselves. And so what we've spent a lot of time on is making sure that we can attract top talent with our mission and the technology that we're using, the products that we're building. And we've really worked with a number of both internal recruiters and external recruiters to find top software development talent within the Charlotte area and even from beyond.

(Joel Beasley at 00:14:12) Give me a shout out real quick. What technology stack do you use? Who do you look for?

(Keith Davies at 00:14:17) So we're based on the Microsoft stack. So, you know, in terms of the cloud, we're building in Azure. In terms of, you know, we're using ASP.NET Bootstrap, we're using Angular, SQL Server as a back end. And so those are really, we're using MicroStrategy as a reporting and analytics package to visualize trends that we're seeing. But those are the primary technologies that we're using. What I would say is, you know, we're absolutely interested in anyone that's using those technologies and that's interested in solving big problems. At the same time, I think we're also interested in people that understand how to architect and understand how to design because it's one thing to do the implementation, but we're building pretty complex systems that have a number of other systems that they integrate with. And so I'm actually interviewing someone today for a role where there it's an architect role, but it's really focused in two areas. One is working internally to see how do we put the various pieces together within AGDATA to build this product? But it's also being able to talk about that overall solution with our customer so that we're able to create a trusted advisor relationship with them. And so people that are able to really people that are able to build complex software with the art of making it simple, I think is a very unique skill set, and that's something else we're looking for.

(Joel Beasley at 00:15:54) All right. So this is perfect. I love this is why I like doing the podcast this way. So you're interviewing someone today for an architect position?

(Keith Davies at 00:16:00) That's right.

(Joel Beasley at 00:16:01) All right. Let's dive a little deeper into that. Sure. So this call is going to be amazing because it's also going to prepare you more for the interview. Tell me about what that person could do to win you over.

(Keith Davies at 00:16:15) So one of the things would be the ability to have worked on architecting and designing complex software systems. Systems that involve multiple feeds coming into this system. And so there's the ability to be able to ingest data, cleanse data, transform it, and store it in a canonical model is important to us so that we can run analytics on top of that. So that's one thing, just being able to work on these complicated systems. I think another one is the ability to really be a mentor, be a teacher.

(Keith Davies at 00:16:51) So, you know, it's the world of software, and that model that I described where we've got a pretty flat organization, it really requires the ability to communicate well. And so I'm looking for somebody that can take that design and really whiteboard it, but also work closely with software developers to be able to communicate how that architecture works, what they need to do as we write our stories to be able to implement that. And then finally, there's the piece that I mentioned where there's also an external component. And so I'm looking for someone that is very comfortable talking with customers, communicating architecture, but not just talking about our piece, but talking about it more from a systems level perspective.

(Keith Davies at 00:17:41) So talking about how our solution fits in the broader ecosystem that that customer has.

(Joel Beasley at 00:17:48) I love it. So you need this person to not only be able to design, build, deploy architecture, but also have that professional ability to communicate with outside customers about architecture and the systems design as a whole. So you can show them off, right? Like, this is our team. This is someone who's articulate and magnetic, a leader. And they are also the person that's actually doing the work.

(Joel Beasley at 00:18:11) Exactly. Yeah. So so often in the smaller companies, that's how you become more valuable in the smaller companies. That's right. It's easier to become more valuable in a smaller company than it is in a larger company, because in the larger company, they have the resources to split the roles in such an isolated way. But at your company, to be a valuable team player, you have to not only be able to contribute technically, but contribute on the professional skill side of things too.

(Keith Davies at 00:18:36) Absolutely. You know, it's interesting. One of the things that I've observed working for both large and small companies is large companies want to be small companies. They want to act like a small company. And so what I mean by that is a large company will often try to figure out, how do we become more agile? How do we become more dynamic in the marketplace? How do we get closer to our customers? And small companies always think, how do I get big? And so what are the ideas that I can work on that are going to resonate in the marketplace? And so it's kind of an interesting dynamic that, you know, when you're in a large or a small company, there's a couple things: really understanding your customers, understanding the problems that they're encountering, obsessing on your customers rather than your competition, and just the fact that design matters, style matters, the user experience that your customers have matter. Those are, for me, some of the things that regardless of the size of the company, really cut across and really differentiate your software.

(Joel Beasley at 00:19:43) Obsessing on your customers over your competition. That's quotable. Give me a couple of ways that I could actually do that. How could I obsess on my customers over my competition?

(Keith Davies at 00:19:54) Well, one of the things that we do is we really try to understand what are the problems that our customers are facing. What is it that they're trying to do? And so you need to put yourself in the personas that you're representing with your software. So, you know, our software is used quite frequently by sales leaders and sales reps, and we try to put ourselves in the position of our customer to understand at the end of the day what's going to make our customer and that specific persona successful. And so we obsess on how do we make our customers, you know, how do they achieve their quotas, how do they exceed their quotas, how do they become just a shining example within that company? And so we think about that, and that's how we try to design our software. That's how we try to design the user experience.

(Joel Beasley at 00:20:51) I love it. Now let's talk about how they could lose you really fast, right? Like, what are some things, and you know, obviously not too extreme, but what are some things that sort of strike you as red flags?

(Keith Davies at 00:21:04) For this interview, you mean?

(Joel Beasley at 00:21:05) Yeah.

(Keith Davies at 00:21:06) Yeah. And so, you know, I would say what I'm absolutely not looking for—and this is sort of, you know, I grew up as a software developer, so I absolutely understand the stereotype—but, you know, I'm not looking for a developer that wants to stay in his office for eight hours a day and sit behind the computer for eight hours writing code or building diagrams. This is, you know, our world is, and especially so because we're a flat organization, it's really important that you can communicate and that you can—the way that we go fast is by being able to take ideas and push them out to the entire team very quickly and to be able to take what's in one person's head and distribute that and disseminate that across the entire team. So I'm looking for somebody that is a great communicator. And so the lack of being able to communicate, the lack of a desire to want to talk to people—that would be one way to lose me quickly. Another way would be just a lack of technical depth. And so I think one of the things that I found is that there are a lot of people that will talk about data and analytics at a 50,000 foot level, right? You can sort of flip through the yellow pages or take a drive down the road and see any number of companies that will claim to be a data and analytics company. And so it's a very popular buzzword. And so in this role, it's important that you can drill down successive layers from there to actually be able to implement and architect a solution. And so, you know, to do that, you need to have run into some pain points. You need to have failed in the past and you learn from those failures. You also need to be able to convey a real understanding of a variety of different technologies. So that's another thing I've been looking for.

(Joel Beasley at 00:23:03) Nice. Do you have any favorite questions? How do you prepare for an interview?

(Keith Davies at 00:23:08) Yeah. You know, I like to ask a lot of open-ended questions. And so, you know, I'll always start by talking about our vision as a company, where we're going in engineering, and how this role fits in with all of that so that when I'm interviewing a candidate, they understand that they're part of a much larger and broader vision and that we've linked everything together. So there's no questions about how does this role—is it strategic to where we're going? It's absolutely strategic. So that's kind of the first part is just to frame it in the right context. And then from there, I'll kind of talk through, you know, I'll dive into what that individual's, that candidate's current responsibilities and assignments are and talk through what are they working on, how does that relate to the opportunity that we have. And just ask open-ended questions so I can get them to start to talk about what do they do as part of their normal routine, what are some of the pain points that they've run into. Just, you know, one question that I always ask, and you get surprisingly honest answers on it, is if I were to talk to your manager and I would ask them for three positive things about you, as well as three things that they would say that you need to work on, you know, this could have come up during your last performance review, what would they say? And it's amazing the type of very honest answers you get on the part around what are the things that they would ask you to improve.

(Joel Beasley at 00:24:44) Oh, are you asking me? Do I have to do this? Now, here's the thing though. As I'm thinking about it, I'm good with the positive, right? Because everyone's usually pretty aware of the things that they're really great at.

(Keith Davies at 00:24:59) Right.

(Joel Beasley at 00:24:59) But the thing I would have to say is the negative things that I have on my list are all on my radar. So it's not like I'm pulling them out of thinking about them right now. Like, when I think of them, they're not hard to come by because I've been thinking about them. And I'm always trying to improve. And I don't think I have three things that I'm pulling out of the dusty attic.

(Keith Davies at 00:25:26) Right. Right.

(Joel Beasley at 00:25:27) Right. I always have this set of things and I'm like, I need to be improving here, I need to be improving there, and I get better at them. I actually carry around—I'm a crazy person—this is goals, like a sheet. And so when I come up with something I want to hit, a goal I want to hit—you see, this is our sales plan. I'll tell you it's far more effective having a sales plan on a piece of paper that's always in your pocket than it is to be on some corporate slide deck somewhere that you never see it again after typing it up.

(Keith Davies at 00:25:58) Absolutely.

(Joel Beasley at 00:25:59) But we track it. You can see here week over week. We have dates on the week over week over week.

(Keith Davies at 00:26:04) Right.

(Joel Beasley at 00:26:05) And we are tracking our meetings, and we are increasing our meetings from three a week to 20 a week, and right now we're at 11. So in week three, we went from—we started out three meetings a week. In week one, we had seven meetings, went back down to three, then we hit 11, and now we're on track for 12.

(Keith Davies at 00:26:23) So—

(Joel Beasley at 00:26:23) Yeah. And every week, we highlighted the change that we made from learning over that week over week and then how it impacted us, and we track a number of smaller metrics. But just because right now, I'm in the founding of a company phase. We have 11 people. So this is the nastiest, hardest problem at the company, which means the founder gets to be dealing with it.

(Keith Davies at 00:26:45) Right. Right.

(Joel Beasley at 00:26:46) So I always carry this stuff around with me, whatever I'm working on in my life currently.

(Keith Davies at 00:26:52) Yeah. And it's interesting you say that because there's, I think, a great parallel to software, where, you know, every two weeks we get together and we go through our sprint plans, and we have something very similar to the chart that you just referenced, where we're showing how do we actually get this software product out on time. And we're tracking that on an every-two-week basis. And where you have it in your pocket, we have it up on monitors so that everyone is able to see how we're progressing to that. And so, you know, it's the idea that if this is really something we care about, let's make sure we've got it really visible to everyone and it's top of mind at every point in time.

(Joel Beasley at 00:27:32) That's so important. You know, I was reading something in some smart book, and they were talking about how everybody implements metrics, but then the leader doesn't live there.

(Keith Davies at 00:27:44) Right.

(Joel Beasley at 00:27:45) And the metrics don't get hit week over week or followed unless the leader lives there, because everyone looks at—if you don't have it up as the leader, if you don't care about it and look at it all the time every day, then your team will just stop.

(Keith Davies at 00:27:59) Yeah. I think that's so true. And, you know, we've got a meeting that we have on a weekly basis with the engineering team and the product management team to go and track how we're trending towards our release. It's exactly that reason. It's got to be, you know, I think this is one of those things, as you said, that you've got to really push from the top down.

(Joel Beasley at 00:28:19) Yeah. My mind has been so blown in this experience of running this company that your team is like 100% a mirror of you.

(Keith Davies at 00:28:33) Right. Right.

(Joel Beasley at 00:28:33) And you could not convince me—you could have the most successful person pay them to come in my room and tell me differently. With the number of books I've consumed and people I've talked to and just experiences I've had, that right now is something that's very solidified for me. So when you're having team problems, I first look at the leader.

(Keith Davies at 00:28:54) Yeah. You know, and it's interesting, as I've worked at a number of small companies and larger companies, I think one of the things—and I've worked at startups as well—you know, I think one of the things is that at a smaller company, one of the things that's so important is figuring out how to manage your time and prioritize your time. Because there's always new things coming in that are competing for, you know, the next hour of your time or the next day of your time. And you've really got to think about it's not only what are the top things, but what are the things that you need to solve in order to make other people more productive as well so that you have this multiplier effect. And I think, you know, for me, kind of coming back to a small company after GE, after ABB, it's been something that's been pretty refreshing because, you know, having sort of that prioritized list, and you know, I've got a list on my board that I can see, which is very similar to the list that you carry in your pocket, which is just, you know, I know what I've got to get done. And I think, you know, for us, it's a way of just staying on track, staying on point, staying really focused. I think you've got that advantage with the smaller company.

(Joel Beasley at 00:30:08) So one of the things that you do for time management, if I heard you correctly, because you said it so fast and it was really good, is you identify things that can have the multiplier effect. Can you tell me about that again?

(Keith Davies at 00:30:23) Yeah. You know, I think as we're getting a number of requests coming in from a variety of sources for our time, what I try to look at are, what are the things that I can solve so that my teams or other teams then have enough information to go out and execute on something. And so the reason for that is while I might work on something that's just assigned to me, I can get it done. If I can solve something that my team can work on, then you get this multiplier effect because the entire team is then enabled to work on something that's a top priority task.

(Joel Beasley at 00:31:02) So you have a lot of—I really like you as a leader, by the way.

(Keith Davies at 00:31:05) Thanks.

(Joel Beasley at 00:31:06) I do a lot of these calls. I meet a lot of people. And you're like a knowledge cow. Right? You've got a lot of it. Cows on the mind, right?

(Keith Davies at 00:31:15) That's right.

(Joel Beasley at 00:31:15) So maybe you have some skill or insight. When you were at GE, how could you apply some of the smaller company stuff to what you were doing in a larger organization? Or could you not, and that's why you moved?

(Keith Davies at 00:31:34) No. We—so what we did was we started with this initiative called FastWorks and it was really based around this whole concept of fail fast. And what brought it in was that GE had found that over years and, you know, kind of Jack Welch had this view when he was CEO that, you know, you want to be able to try something and if it doesn't work, that's fine. You've learned something and move on. But the company got away from that a little bit. And so FastWorks was really to bring that back, and it was a whole methodology around what are the ideas that we want to start with. So what's a hypothesis that we have in the marketplace, and how can we go and test this in the market. So who would be good customers to talk to that will either validate or invalidate this hypothesis? And if it's validated—and the hypothesis would be around where do we want to go, where is there an opportunity in the marketplace to win, to build a product that we can then scale—and so we would then go out and test this hypothesis. And if it resonated, then we would actually start to build it out. But in order to test the hypothesis, we only needed a prototype, something to give the customer an appreciation for the solution we wanted to build.

(Keith Davies at 00:32:52) And so it wasn't a big investment, but we would gain really valuable feedback. And so we started to run this. We started to run it in a variety of different industries across the company, and we had FastWorks coaches that would really help different teams to be able to run this so that we could scale this FastWorks concept across GE. And for us, it really was a way of, you know, what I talked about earlier is how do you take a large company and act like a small company? Because if you're a small company, if you're a startup, you've got to be able to test a number of hypotheses in the market quickly, or else you may go out of business.

(Keith Davies at 00:33:31) And—

(Joel Beasley at 00:33:32) Tell me about it. Yeah.

(Keith Davies at 00:33:34) And so this was kind of an approach that we use for that purpose.

(Joel Beasley at 00:33:38) It's amazing. So with the podcast, we had people they were asking about like, how do we get these little bits of advice to our managers and get them to improve and grow? And I was like, I don't know. But they kept asking, and so I said, I don't know, let's build this basic product that built in like ten days, deployed it to some people who had asked for it.

(Joel Beasley at 00:33:59) We came up with this concept of like leadership challenges. Just do one thing to improve as a leader every week, and here's a leadership challenge.

(Keith Davies at 00:34:06) Right.

(Joel Beasley at 00:34:06) But then, and we got customers and I was like wow, I was actually really surprised. And within—I never made a sale before. So I YouTubed sales videos.

(Keith Davies at 00:34:17) Right.

(Joel Beasley at 00:34:17) And within three months I sold $100,000 in annual recurring revenue. Right?

(Keith Davies at 00:34:21) Nice.

(Joel Beasley at 00:34:22) I was like, cool. I was like, well, I can make a sale. So then I went and raised venture capital and all this stuff, and now we're growing. But the amount of testing, even on a granular area, like who's the purchaser of this product? Why are they purchasing? How do they want to be charged?

(Keith Davies at 00:34:40) You know.

(Joel Beasley at 00:34:41) Who are my, like, who are the competitors? And based on looking at their advertising, I can tell the area of the market that they found to be fruitful because they're, you know, they're all—if you look at 20 of them, they're all saying the same two or three things.

(Keith Davies at 00:34:54) Right. Right.

(Joel Beasley at 00:34:55) And so I kind of leverage that looking at competitors' advertising to find out what they've already learned by being in business for ten years.

(Keith Davies at 00:35:01) Sure.

(Joel Beasley at 00:35:02) But it's amazing at how fine that line is when you start to really focus in on it. You could give a business that's just as simple as leadership training 20 or 30 different business models.

(Keith Davies at 00:35:15) Right.

(Joel Beasley at 00:35:16) And it's like which one's converting the best? Which ones, you know, and so that's what this whole thing is about. We know why people buy. We know how they're buying. It's just like which is the most scalable model to put money into an approach to market fully.

(Keith Davies at 00:35:30) Yeah. Absolutely. Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:35:32) So we're failing fast.

(Keith Davies at 00:35:35) You know, it's funny. There was almost this culture around failing is a bad thing, and failing is only really a bad thing if it's something you don't learn from. And I think part of what FastWorks did was really embrace that idea that you actually gain so much insight from failing that it's how you're going to build your successes because you start to learn about, you know, you learn about where customers are in their journey, what they're looking for at that point in time. And you might have an idea that is a great idea but it's the wrong time for it. And so you start to think about this journey. Where is a customer today? What's the journey and path that they want to be on over the next couple years? And how do you build kind of a roadmap that parallels that so that you can provide them something today? But customers really want a vendor that's going to be a partner, that's going to work with them on solutions that enable them to go all the way with them on that journey. And so you can only really get there if you have a great understanding about their challenges, where they are today, the market dynamics.

(Keith Davies at 00:36:50) And so we've really, as we tried to put together our hypotheses around different types of solutions, we tried to incorporate all those different factors.

(Joel Beasley at 00:37:01) You know what gave me a lot of confidence in this area? Because I know the buzzword is fail fast. But what I latched onto, because I'm a big nerd, I watch like the Cosmos series, like I like all that type of stuff.

(Keith Davies at 00:37:13) Right.

(Joel Beasley at 00:37:14) Is the scientific method. Like, wow, has that been around for a while, and that is exactly what we're talking about. It's like let's take 10 things that we think may work. Let's—like, a scientist doesn't sit there and like beat themselves up all day. Oh, I'm failing, I'm failing, I'm failing. Like, what's the next batch? What's the next hypothesis? What can I test? What can I measure? What can I improve? And so I take an unemotional—and it's incredibly hard—look at it like that. It's like, hey, I've got, we've got 10 ideas. Let's not attach to it. That's like, that's so 1990s to attach to your idea. It's like, let's not attach to it because we want to make money and change the world. Like, let's just put them out there and put money at each of them to see which one works.

(Keith Davies at 00:37:56) Yeah. Yeah. That's right. You can't, you know, if you get too attached to it, I think there's a tendency to try that idea and to stick with it and say, well, if I give it another month, it's going to pay off. Where instead of, you know, calling it what it is and saying, you know, this—again, it might be a great idea, just not the right point in time, and just moving on to the next thing.

(Joel Beasley at 00:38:17) I know. It's so hard, though, because you love them. You love your ideas.

(Keith Davies at 00:38:20) That's right.

(Joel Beasley at 00:38:21) But if you love them, you've got to let them go.

(Keith Davies at 00:38:24) Exactly.

(Joel Beasley at 00:38:26) Oh, man. Okay. So what—when you have, you have 60 people in technology, not, or 60 all of AGDATA?

(Keith Davies at 00:38:34) No. 60 people in technology. We're a company of about 300 people.

(Joel Beasley at 00:38:38) About 300 people. So what's going to stand—like, right now you have your teaming of probably four or five people, right, that report directly to you, and then you have it kind of structured. I know it's flat. I know it's flat, but nonetheless, as flat as it may be, there's still some structure there.

(Keith Davies at 00:38:56) Absolutely.

(Joel Beasley at 00:38:57) What, like, what stands out to you as somebody that you want to invest in? Because we all have like, there will always be ten, five, ten people, but there's always two people in the back of your mind that like stand out. And I'm sure like their names pop in your head. But like, what are their qualities that make you want to invest into them?

(Keith Davies at 00:39:14) Yeah. So it's really interesting question. And so for me, one of the things that I really think about are people that are capable of being drivers. By driver, what I mean is someone that can take a topic. It could be, you know, we've been working on our go-to-market. How do we define standard offerings that we can take to, we can pitch to customers, and so that's on the sales side. But also on the engineering side, how do we implement those offerings? And so we need to have standardization around it so we can scale. And so it could be somebody that's responsible for driving that type of an initiative. It could be somebody that's responsible for driving a component of our product. It could be someone that's responsible for driving the overall release. But you've got to be able to take a challenge and decompose that into what needs to happen in order to be successful. You need to then be able to communicate and work with other people because very rarely is something, is it something where you're the only one involved in getting this piece of work done. You need to work with other people. You need to be able to communicate the problem. You need to articulate what is the, what's the responsibility that everyone else has in order to achieve that objective. So I really look for a lot of those people that can drive and execute because for us, that's, that's again how we scale as a business, and that's one of the ways that we can run a flat organization by having people that can just drive initiatives and tasks to completion.

(Joel Beasley at 00:40:52) So I'm going to give you a hypothetical. I'm really going to use you as a resource as much as I can while I have you. Alright. Let's say—because I get lots—we have a big audience. We get lots of questions all the time. And I'm going to kind of share a little—I'm just going to kind of go with it. So I got this question. Person came into a company, like, they were newer in the company, but they were a senior leader. And they were—the people on their team weren't where they needed them to be. Right? Like, he came in, he inherited a team, and so what this individual did was they were just a little bit shy about not like wanting to get rid of people or anything like that. But at the same time, they knew they had a team that wasn't capable to execute the vision of the leadership, which means it's like, it's very hard to change behavior. Right. It's way easier to find people with the behaviors you already need. So my sort of advice was, I think it's pretty clear that you need to adjust the people on your team based off of the data I was given in the conversation.

(Keith Davies at 00:42:00) Right.

(Joel Beasley at 00:42:00) But then they started asking about like, how do you do that effectively? How do you do that without killing morale and things like that? What comes to your mind as I'm talking about this?

(Keith Davies at 00:42:11) Yeah. You know, I think what's important is to—you know, sometimes we kind of look at the broader organization and say, you know what? We don't have any of the right people, and it could just be that you need to bring in some leadership to help create the culture that you're looking for. And so one of the first things I do is really assess that at the leadership level positions. Do we have the right people to drive the behavior, the culture that we want in the organization? And I think that because that relates back to the overall vision and strategy that you're trying to drive as a company. Then from there, you know, I would say sometimes it could be that you have the right players. You don't have the right manager or the right coach to be able to bring that out of them. So that's kind of the first layer I look at. And then from there, I'll look to see, you know, once I've had that leadership person in place, how's the team reacting to it? So that's a lot of it.

(Keith Davies at 00:43:24) You know, one of the things that we did is we went through, and I did this at GE as well. We went through culture. And so we defined, you know, what is the culture that we want to put in place as an organization? And which is how do we treat each other? How do we reward good performance? How do we set goals and how do we work towards those goals? You know? And so one of the things that I've always looked at and kind of taken a lot of good pieces from is, you know, Netflix have published their culture. It's on SlideShare. And they go through a number of different aspects of very broad-based culture. And so, you know, what I've always used is I've used that as an example to say, here's what one company has done for their culture. We are not that company, and we're not going to replicate that culture. But it's something that kind of gets the thoughts going in terms of what do we want our culture to be? And so I've never said this is our culture. I've always used that collective team to be able to get together, work together, and define it. And I think having, bringing everybody together to define that culture is something where you get this, you get everyone on board. You get everyone on the train moving in the right direction. And I think that's another topic of how do you start to achieve the vision that you're looking for at a company level. You know, you've got to be able to get everyone pointed in the same direction, and culture is something that's helped me do that. So I've—I've kind of, just to summarize, I kind of think of it in two ways. You've got to get the leadership, but you've also got to create this from the bottom up, groundswell around the mission that we're on. And for me, culture's helped there.

(Joel Beasley at 00:45:25) When are you writing your book?

(Keith Davies at 00:45:28) I'll let you know.

(Joel Beasley at 00:45:31) I want to include some of this advice. So I've gone around and, you know, I've done hundreds of these interviews with technology leaders all over the world. I want to include some of these tidbits that you've given me. And so we're putting together this book called The Greatest Technology—well, we're not sure of the title, but it's either going to be like Habits and Patterns of the Greatest Technology Leaders on the Planet, or Everything But Code. A couple ideas for the title of it. But essentially, it's going to include, you know, different pieces of advice in different areas like culture, hiring, you know, engineering leadership from NASA, Microsoft, you know, AGDATA, you. So is it—we'll put that. That's cool. Right? We'll include—

(Keith Davies at 00:46:09) That'd be fantastic.

(Joel Beasley at 00:46:10) Shout out. It's cool that we label you one of the greatest technology leaders in the world. Thanks. Is that okay?

(Keith Davies at 00:46:16) That sounds absolutely okay.

(Joel Beasley at 00:46:16) Alright. Cool. We'll send a copy of the book to your family as well.

(Keith Davies at 00:46:18) Good.

(Joel Beasley at 00:46:21) No. I just thought it would be a cool project. So we're sitting here looking at all the advice that we have and all the content and everything that we have. And I was like, you know what'd be cool? Like a book that breaks it all down by category so that people can just see some really refined advice. Yeah. It's a bestseller. Right? It's like a nice—it's a nice reference book.

(Keith Davies at 00:46:42) Exactly.

(Joel Beasley at 00:46:43) Yeah. Okay. You brought me in the audience, like, I would say level 10 value.

(Keith Davies at 00:46:50) Excellent. I'm glad. I really enjoyed it.

(Joel Beasley at 00:46:52) Yes. I'm definitely going to put you on the list of when I'm up in the Carolinas, if I stop through your way, I'm going to come by the office and say hello and shake your hand.

(Keith Davies at 00:46:59) Yeah. Definitely. That'd be great.

(Joel Beasley at 00:47:01) Yeah.

(Keith Davies at 00:47:01) Looking forward to it.

(Joel Beasley at 00:47:02) Good luck with your interview. Maybe that architect this afternoon is the person you're looking for.

(Keith Davies at 00:47:07) Yeah. I hope so. We actually went to dinner on Friday, so I'm pretty hopeful.

(Joel Beasley at 00:47:11) Oh, this is part two?

(Keith Davies at 00:47:13) Yeah. This is part two. This is part two.

(Joel Beasley at 00:47:14) Oh, the second date.

(Keith Davies at 00:47:15) Team. Yeah. Exactly.

(Joel Beasley at 00:47:16) Yeah. Okay. Yeah. See how this individual does. Very cool. Now, do you usually do that? Was this like a referral from a friend or—

(Keith Davies at 00:47:25) No. So they've actually got another offer. And so this is where I wanted to really sit down, spend some time with them, get to know them at a more personal level and talk about where we're going as a company. And so we did that on Friday. We talked for about 90 minutes. And then this is part two to meet the rest of the team.

(Joel Beasley at 00:47:47) Nice. Well, I've look, I would work for you. I think you're a fantastic leader.

(Keith Davies at 00:47:51) Thank you. Yes. Good luck with everything you're doing. I really enjoyed the forty-five minutes.

(Keith Davies at 00:47:57) And I'm sure you're gonna be wildly successful too.

(Joel Beasley at 00:48:00) Oh, I appreciate the kind words. Alright. Have a fantastic day, Keith.

(Keith Davies at 00:48:04) Thanks. You too. Take care. Bye-bye.