Going Remote w/ Mike Anderson CTO at Tealium

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:01) Here we go. This is the Modern CTO Podcast.

(Mike Herrick at 00:00:13) Hi, Joel. How are you?

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:15) Dude, I love talking to you. It's great.

(Mike Herrick at 00:00:19) I like the beard. When did that start?

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:24) February? So I'm almost eight weeks into it now.

(Mike Herrick at 00:00:28) Any reason? Because I'm growing the beard. I shaved the beard off for a long time. I'm growing the beard now working from home, so I want to go back into the office looking like Tom Hanks from Castaway.

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:41) Yeah, I love it. You look great. I love the beard.

(Mike Herrick at 00:00:45) Yeah, I'm not cutting anything during this social quarantine period.

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:52) We're going to come out looking like cavemen. Like, my beard's down to here.

(Mike Herrick at 00:00:57) That is exactly it. Hopefully it'll be in time for Halloween. I'll be able to dye the beard and go as a member of ZZ Top or something like that, you know?

(Joel Beasley at 00:01:07) So you're at home today?

(Mike Herrick at 00:01:08) I'm at home. Yeah. We've been at home for maybe about two and a half—I mean, this is maybe week three. We actually jumped on it a little bit early, before the recommendations. We did an encourage to work from home, and I just officially today, we've told everybody the office is now officially closed.

(Joel Beasley at 00:01:32) Oh, so what's happening? I wanted to do this special impromptu episode because I was supposed to be out there. I think Thursday and Friday were the days we were supposed to be doing our thing out there, and so we couldn't. Thank God we've got awesome products like Zoom, and we can connect like this. But how did it kind of play out from your perspective?

(Mike Herrick at 00:01:55) Well, the first thing that we did was—we do four user conferences every year. We do one in San Diego. We call these our Digital Velocity conferences. We do one in San Diego, we do one in London, we do one in Tokyo, and we do one down in Sydney. Our San Diego one is the next one coming up. It's in May. And around early February, when this kind of started coming out and people were starting to talk about canceling events, and you had the Adobes and the Domos and people like that that decided their technology events were going virtual, that was when we first started to look at it. We made the decision and said we're going to cancel our San Diego event, we're going to cancel our London event. So that was May and June, respectively.

(Mike Herrick at 00:02:48) We don't know if we're going to do Australia and Tokyo yet, but those have always been traditionally more in the September, October, November timeframe. So those are tentative now, but San Diego and London we're going to do as virtual events, which is pretty consistent with what most of the tech companies are doing. But that was the first exercise, and really it was boiling down to registrants that were paying the registration fee, sponsors, speakers. They were all saying, you know, hey, what do we do if we're going to cancel? Do we get our budget back? Yada yada yada, all that stuff. And so that caused us to look at it, and that was really the first decision that we made—that we were going to cancel or pivot our conferences into a virtual conference rather than a live conference.

(Mike Herrick at 00:03:25) And then it just kind of kept rolling that we saw, you know, it's probably a good idea to encourage working from home. We want everybody to think that if you feel like you have to work from home, first off, if you're feeling at all under the weather, be safe rather than sorry and just work from home. So we started to encourage that. And then it was, you know, really I would say three weeks ago that our CEO has been very connected to this and he said, listen, we're going to heavily encourage people to work from home. Figure it out. You know, my directive was figure it out. Figure out how to keep—I mean, I have a global team, but I run the engineering team, which is predominantly in San Diego.

(Mike Herrick at 00:04:01) So we did some quick dancing to try to figure out what to do. I've watched a lot of webinars, started reading some books around this, and we've migrated pretty smoothly. I feel actually really good about it.

(Joel Beasley at 00:04:48) Yeah. And you know what? So I sent out a newsletter essentially to everybody asking them what they're experiencing—what's going on, what are the big questions. And I'd say a large percentage of the responses were, well, our company has been prepared for this because we're mostly remote anyways. Or the other interesting one I heard a lot was other parts of the business were pulling heavily on the CTOs to say, how do we take our part of the business and do what you guys already do? Because they were already okay with working remote. So a lot of CTOs told me they were coaching and working with the other department heads on how to get their employees remote.

(Mike Herrick at 00:05:31) And so there's an irony there. So I have the product team, and I have the engineering team, and I have the customer success team under my responsibility. The sales team is always largely globally distributed. Our marketing team is primarily based in San Diego, but we have marketing resources in region. Engineering and product are really those two big teams that were mostly in San Diego.

(Mike Herrick at 00:06:00) So we're launching a second engineering team now in a different location, but we were—the engineering and product teams, which you would mostly think would have been more of the remote performers because it's hard to find good engineers in one concentrated geo area—those were the two teams that I was really worried about. When I went to my other teams and said, how are you guys doing, they said, oh, we're fine. We're used to running remote. We already are global teams. And so it was pretty easy because the team that I worry about were engineers, and these are tech savvy, gadget-friendly people anyways. So it's been a really easy transition.

(Joel Beasley at 00:06:46) So one thing I tend to be a pretty positive person. I spend a lot of time in the area of self-improvement and trying to grow, largely because there's a huge part of my life where I didn't, and then I figured out if you focus on this stuff and you work at it, you can actually improve your quality of life. And I think a lot of people in the past five, ten years have found it easy to get away from the news because we have all of these streaming services. We can just pay, we don't have commercials, it's great. And so we've kind of gotten off that news cycle.

(Joel Beasley at 00:07:25) But then when the epidemic is happening, it's so easy to slip right back into that 24/7 and get that fear feed coming at you. And so how do you approach keeping the team positive when that's a new thing to contend with?

(Mike Herrick at 00:07:42) So the first thing that we went through was—well, first let me back up and say, as a remote person, I mean, and you'd imagine, I'm fairly talkative when it comes to the conversations that we have, even in any sort of group setting. I've realized that being remote creates an unlevel playing field. And when you have these meetings where you have eight people sitting in a conference room and one or two people that are remote on a Zoom, it's an unfair communication playing field. And so immediately the first thing I decided was to be that one guy that's remote when there's a room of seven other people in the room—and you're a guy like me that wants to talk a lot, this is torture. So my new policy on this is if anybody, if any single person is remote in a meeting, we're all remote.

(Mike Herrick at 00:08:43) We're not going to work in conference rooms and have 90% of the people in a conference room and one person remote. We're all going to work from our desks, and we're all going to be on Zoom or whatever, Google Hangout, whatever we choose to use. So I want to do that to uplevel the playing field so that everybody has the communication and somebody could be like, hey, you know, I want to talk, I want to talk. So I'm introducing that. That's going to be something that is just a policy of mine going forward.

(Mike Herrick at 00:09:13) In these times, I try to make sure that we spend the first five or maybe ten minutes of every meeting now just socializing. You know, I want to talk to people about how they're doing. I want to tell them interesting stories. I'm constantly trying to think about funny stories—even if I have to embellish to make them funny—to get my employees laughing. You know, my latest one is—I woke, and this is kind of a very true story. I don't have to embellish this. I woke up yesterday with what I thought was an incredible fever. I was burning up all over, and I thought, oh, man, I've got it. I've got the virus. I don't know how, but I've got the virus.

(Mike Herrick at 00:09:53) Then I realized one of my dogs had stepped on the power button to my electric mattress pad cover, and I had just been heated up in bed. And so I woke up sweaty thinking I had a massive fever, and it turns out I was just being overheated out of my bed. But I'm trying to be human around that, and I'm trying to lighten people up. We've created a whole slew of Slack channels around just tips channels for parents with kids that are having to homeschool, people with pets, entertainment, books, movies, things like that.

(Mike Herrick at 00:10:34) We created all these, and we're just trying to get this sort of social exchange where I've now—I've seen pictures of, I mean, I've been in the office with all these people for years. Never seen their animals. Never seen their kids. Now I'm inundated with pictures of my employees' pets and their kids, and I'm telling them to embrace it. And if your dog barks in the background, awesome. See if you can get him in the screen. And if your kids come in and ask you a question, introduce her, introduce him to us, whatever it is. But I'm trying to get people to embrace that we're doing the right thing by this social separation, and kids and snacking and maybe even a late afternoon rosé go along for the ride in all of this.

(Joel Beasley at 00:11:25) Yeah, it's amazing how it's allowing us to be a little more human, which is pretty interesting. It's just life is beautiful in that way because with great—you know, it's the equal and opposite thing. There's bad and then there's good. And so I've just spent a lot of time training myself to figure out what's the opportunity here. Like, for example, our sales stuff, right? Because we sell something that is leadership training. And so we were looking at that, and we were saying, alright, well, what do we do? And I said, well, look, companies like Zoom are growing massively. There's companies that are in healthcare that are doing the best they've ever done. I was like, our solution is a valid solution in the market.

(Joel Beasley at 00:12:13) When people aren't doing fierce stuff and their company is growing, they like our solution. You guys are our customer. It's a useful thing. And so we just need to redirect our attention to just focusing on those accounts. Let's make sure our new outreach is the people who are profiting and growing over these next four months, and we don't even have a problem. And that's all perspective, because I could equally have said, no one's going to buy. Let's just curl up and die. And it's like, absolutely not.

(Mike Herrick at 00:12:41) Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:12:41) There are people out there, and you just have to focus on those. And the same for your business. Somebody's going to be doing really well, and there's going to be markets for you that open up that didn't exist before.

(Mike Herrick at 00:12:50) Yeah, that's exactly right. And the other thing too is just based on the training and the education and the service you guys provide—which again, like you said, we are a customer—now you've got companies that may not be strongly rooted in how to manage people remote and how to have difficult conversations with them remote. So you've got a whole new line of content that's focused around the remote, you know, now it's remote leader bits—or the social distance leader, right? I mean, there's a whole new line of content that you guys can provide. And I agree. I'm, you know, I'm probably naturally, or I'll say historically more of a negative person, but I've been—this last year and a half—I've been trying to be much more positive. And quite honestly, this being more human and not feeling—I mean, I've been doing Tealium. I just hit my twelve-year anniversary with Tealium.

(Joel Beasley at 00:14:00) Oh.

(Mike Herrick at 00:14:01) And that's a big chunk of my life dedicated to this.

(Joel Beasley at 00:14:06) It's like a kid.

(Mike Herrick at 00:14:08) Yes. And 12 is not a good age for a kid either. That's a difficult time. But the idea is, you know, I don't want to always feel like I have to go into the office five days a week. And I spend a lot of my time when I'm in the office communicating with people and coaching and helping them vet ideas and helping them grow and expand their careers. I'm actually very much looking forward to this forced initiative because I'd love to be working from home one to two, maybe even three days a week in the future and to know that I know how to do it.

(Joel Beasley at 00:14:50) And I'm optimistic about the economy too, because we are growing 30% a month, right? There's nothing wrong with the underlying nature of the economy. It's all psychology and fear of uncertainty. People are scared of the uncertainty. But that's not—we don't have an actual bottom-line problem in our economy. Those are two very, very different things. So I'm looking at this, I'm like, look, some people are going to freak out for a couple months. People are going to put pauses on stuff. And that's how people have been. They're like, oh, we're just going to put a pause on this because we need to put a pause. And then what's going to happen is everything's going to work out.

(Joel Beasley at 00:15:22) Yeah. The government's going to—I mean, we're all in this together. There's a reason why they open up and they do the stimulus efforts and stuff, and they're doing it in every single country in the world. It's because we all need the economy to do well. And so it's just going to be a little bit of fear. And I'm watching—I'm pretty familiar with China because my sister lived there for five years. And so I've been watching China a lot. And, dude, they're all posting articles about how their life's back to normal, and they're fishing in ponds, and they're so glad the thing's over, and there's no new cases. And they're all joyful over there. And I was like, alright, well, that was a two-month thing. As long as the rest of the world's not like, hold my beer, you know?

(Mike Herrick at 00:16:13) Right. Can I have a sip, you know?

(Joel Beasley at 00:16:18) It launches to you. Four months, two months, three months. You know? I don't like that.

(Mike Herrick at 00:16:23) Yeah. Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:16:25) Yeah. But I think everybody wants to get back to better, you know?

(Mike Herrick at 00:16:29) You know, I think they do, but I think the other side of it is we're challenging people to be more innovative in other areas. I mean, washing your hands is not a bad thing. We're probably a little bit—you have those people that you look at that are saying, oh, man, you're a germophobe, you always wash your hands. Now he's the cool kid, and it's like, oh, okay, yeah, it's not a bad idea.

(Mike Herrick at 00:16:55) Hygiene is a good thing. And, you know, the other thing is we definitely have an exercise challenge here, I think probably worldwide, but predominantly in the US. And I see that home gym equipment and dumbbells and things like that are becoming—it's a hot market for that right now. And people are looking at in-home exercise systems. So there's just good stuff going on.

(Mike Herrick at 00:17:25) You know, the internet companies are living up to the challenge. I haven't seen the internet breakdown that people were worried that Netflix was gonna cause. I mean, I think we're working on new skills, and I think it's good for us.

(Joel Beasley at 00:17:43) Yeah. Like, the Peloton came out with special offers and all, you know, I found I use this one guy's workout—Jeremy Ethier, I think is how you say his name. He's a YouTube guy. And I normally do his, like, gym workouts.

(Joel Beasley at 00:17:56) And he's put a special, like, at-home one for people that don't have full gym equipment. And then, like, the group that I'm a part of—I don't use Facebook much at all, but I do go check this workout group that I'm a part of. And everyone's posting their different pictures, and it's really fueled—like, in our Slack channel, we're sharing memes, we're talking. It's really—it's odd how the forced, like—we were forced to go distributed and we're coming closer together. It's unbelievable.

(Mike Herrick at 00:18:27) Yeah, it really is. And my employee and my team leaders have been pretty fantastic so far. I'm really lucky. They've, you know, just seeing—it's odd because I'll walk around the office with people, but you just don't get to see the human side of people because you say hi or bye. But when you see somebody write a post and talk about how this movie is really great and people that are interested in this should watch it, people are just—we feel like we're in it together, and it's a great—being a facilitator of that is a great feeling for me.

(Joel Beasley at 00:19:11) What are you guys noticing with, like, your customers? How are your customers responding? Are they, like—is everyone still holding or are people communicating and saying we're gonna put holds on stuff? Like, what are you noticing as far as how other companies are reacting with their budgets?

(Mike Herrick at 00:19:26) It's definitely a mixed bag. You know, when you get into the airlines and the cruise lines and the hotels, they are definitely, okay, hold on, hold on. We need to slow down. But we know that this is gonna swing back and, you know, I mean, if you ask me, I think cruise lines is maybe taking a little bit of a devastating blow. I think that one's gonna take a long time to get back. I think that the shorter that this goes on—I mean, honestly, if I was an airline and I was a hotel, I would be doing so much marketing for social separation and being conscientious to be at home because the more time that goes on with this, the better that people get doing virtual meetings and doing remote.

(Mike Herrick at 00:20:20) I mean, I was just on a two-hour sales meeting this morning, and we had—we probably had 35 people on the meeting all over Zoom. The more time that goes on with us figuring out the virtualized nature of this, the less I'm gonna travel to go on-site to see my prospects and to see my customers because it's just gonna be so easy to pop on a Zoom and do it with them. And so if I were an airline, I'd be spending my money on social, you know, social distancing and trying to get them to be conscientious because I wanna get—I wanna get the business back. I think that business travelers, I don't know what the percentage is, but I think business travel will see a longer-term reduction by a certain percentage. I don't know.

(Mike Herrick at 00:21:05) I don't think it's 50. I don't think it's 80. But I think it's gonna be five to 10 at least. And that's gonna hurt the—that's gonna hurt the hotels. It's gonna hurt the airlines.

(Mike Herrick at 00:21:17) But then on the other side, you know, there are companies that are immediate companies, obviously, doing very, very well. Some of the, you know, grocery chains, things like that, they're doing more home delivery, restaurants. They're having to be more innovative about it. I have companies that are very big e-commerce, you know, multi-brand companies and also have big store presence. They're kind of doubling down. They're realizing that the future for them is gonna be e-commerce. And so they're thinking about letting their point of sales, you know, geolocations fall by the wayside gradually while they strengthen their e-commerce chops. And that's—those are great things for me. Those are great things for Tealium.

(Joel Beasley at 00:22:08) Oh, that's right. I didn't think about—yeah. I've seen a lot of the in-store companies. I read one case study in China about a makeup company that shuttered, you know, shut a bunch of, like, a thousand-plus of its locations, and then increased its sales by 200% just by focusing all its energy on social media.

(Mike Herrick at 00:22:26) Yeah. Yeah. No, it's—that's exactly true. And I mean, from a margin perspective, it's significant. And so with that, just with that, I, you know, I think that one of the big conversations I just had this morning was the largest use case for a very large financial services insurance type company. The word is digital adoption. Right? They wanna know how many people are calling into their call centers so they can deflect that to digital adoption. And that's—it's brilliant. It's the right strategy for them to do because that stuff has a lot of cost.

(Mike Herrick at 00:23:02) But that's their focus now. In companies now in 2020, into 2021, it's the digital adoption is gonna be a very popular phrase with a lot of companies out there.

(Joel Beasley at 00:23:14) Digital adoption?

(Mike Herrick at 00:23:15) Yeah. Yeah. I mean, how do I get—how do I get people for the Wells Fargos and the Bank of Americas? If I can reduce the number of people going into my physical locations down by 10% and to get those people doing it over a mobile app or over the website, it's huge gains for them. And now in the context of privacy and, you know, and some of these kind of—I don't wanna say—I'm looking for a word, but just around sort of the disease and disease exchange, those are positive things to have fewer people going to their branches.

(Joel Beasley at 00:23:52) Yeah. I actually had to go in because, like, they don't let you mobile deposit certain size checks. You have to go in. And when I went in, they said, yeah, because of this, we actually just today increased the business mobile deposit to—I think it was, like, 25 or $50,000 a day.

(Joel Beasley at 00:24:11) Nice. And I was like, oh, that's amazing. Because before it was, like, five or 10. And I was like, that's so much better because now I don't have to come in. I can just do exactly what I'm doing with the other checks. And so I thought that was a pretty good move. I think that's something that's really smart. But there's really not a reason to go into a bank location anymore.

(Mike Herrick at 00:24:31) You know, maybe for notary services, something like that, you gotta sign something over for your account or things like that. But, yeah, it's going to become the exception case. I, by the way, just to interject, I love the high roller plug that you just did there. Right? That was awesome. Like, yeah, you know, I have to go—I have to go in to branches because there's only a random thing to link it to the amount of checks that you can cash on.

(Joel Beasley at 00:25:02) Right?

(Mike Herrick at 00:25:03) So I have to go in. Love it. Love it. You know?

(Joel Beasley at 00:25:06) I love it. It's—I scripted that last night, too. No, no. I was with my wife, though, and I was like, I guess we gotta go in.

(Mike Herrick at 00:25:18) Yeah. No. And, you know what it's gonna be? It's the reality is, is when you get into these services organizations and understanding what customers want, the idea is that I'm gonna do some of the mundane stuff like balance checks and verify bill pay and verify my, you know, verify the last cleared payments and credit card bills. I'm gonna do all that stuff online because that's really mundane.

(Mike Herrick at 00:25:45) When I do go into the bank, it's because I need something. And now we're back to, you know, what the US is, which is really a services—you know, we're a services industry. And so the idea is that now when I walk in that door, I want them to—I want those people behind the counter to know really why I'm there, what I was doing on my mobile app, what I was doing on the website, or even in the call center before I came in there. I must be there for a reason, and now I have the ability to get a rich and relevant customer experience from that person. And that's, you know, that's a nice place to be. It's got that human effect, and it's got that human value effect to it. So I—there's a lot of opportunity for people that want to look on the bright side of things and say, hey, this is where we're going. I can embrace it and make it better.

(Joel Beasley at 00:26:42) Yeah. We actually got two new leads that came in this week because they're global companies and their leadership conference that they were doing—they were taking everybody to one place for leadership conference—got canceled.

(Mike Herrick at 00:26:56) Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:26:56) They're like, well, now we have this budget. What do we do? And I was like, we can help with that.

(Mike Herrick at 00:27:02) Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Write me a big check. I can cash it because I go in the bank.

(Mike Herrick at 00:27:06) Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:27:07) I can go to the bank. Yeah. I can take it into the bank. Yeah. Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:27:11) Now I can mobile deposit because they've looked at the limit.

(Mike Herrick at 00:27:13) Yeah. Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:27:14) That's so funny. Showing up at the bank. Dude, I love talking to you. This is—

(Mike Herrick at 00:27:21) Yeah. We gotta do this more often. It's—I'm pumped up. I'm energized now. This is—it's good. It is definitely good. I was looking forward to you guys coming out to San Diego, and we'll definitely have to reschedule that. But yeah, I do. I look forward to—I always look forward to chatting with you.

(Joel Beasley at 00:27:37) Yeah. It was interesting. So I—it was leading up to it. Right? Everybody knew about the stuff, and I was talking with my parents. So my brother and stepmom are both physicians, and they're like, yeah, we're, you know—this was a couple weeks ago. They're like, yeah, you should be fine. We'll give you a steroid shot or something to help with your immune system, and you'll be able to travel and all this stuff. And then as it got closer, you know, I booked—other—we've got just so you know, we've got, like, five customers within two hours of you.

(Mike Herrick at 00:28:04) Nice.

(Joel Beasley at 00:28:04) I don't know if I've ever told you that, but if you haven't met these guys too, Brad Sosa from AVI Systems, super cool guy.

(Mike Herrick at 00:28:12) I know Brad. Yep.

(Joel Beasley at 00:28:14) Oh, you know Brad? Yeah. Oh, dude. They're a Leaderbit customer.

(Mike Herrick at 00:28:17) That's awesome. That's awesome.

(Joel Beasley at 00:28:19) Yeah. And then Darren from Animal Logic's pretty cool too. They make some of the cool movies, children's animated movies. But slowly, everybody was like, well, you know, we're thinking about closing the office or something. We're like, okay. And, like, what do you—are you sure you wanna come? And for me, it was awkward because I was like, you know, I don't wanna—I really wanna see everybody, but I saw everyone kinda retracting. I was like, you know what? Let's not go. And then as it got closer, I have family in the government, and they were like, oh, there's probably gonna be some airport closures. That's possible. And I was like, oh, I don't wanna go and get stuck over there. And then in two days, everybody just shut down. And California was like, we're not doing anything. And I was like, I'm so glad I didn't go over there.

(Joel Beasley at 00:29:07) And I'm so glad that everything worked out the way it did because I would not wanna be stuck over there. Right?

(Mike Herrick at 00:29:15) It's not bad. I mean, it's not bad to be here. But, you know, the reality is is you would have been—you would have been one of the ones that we would have kinda slow played or been very, like, I don't wanna tell Joel no because, you know, honestly, it would be really good to see him. Like, immediately, I could go and say, sales guys, quit bugging me. I'm not talking to you guys at all. Right? So there's the easy chopping block of people that it's like, I don't wanna see these people anyways, and so I'm gonna tell them I'm not meeting with anybody. Yours was one that we kinda waited, and I even remember dealing with your EA on it thinking, like, yeah, you know, it's—I'm thinking about—I'm thinking about saying that this is not a good idea, but let's keep it open for now. And then it was, we'll still do it if you guys really wanna come out here, but maybe it'd be better if we postponed it.

(Mike Herrick at 00:30:07) So yeah, I was definitely looking forward to you coming out. Well, and we'll do it again.

(Joel Beasley at 00:30:12) Oh, yeah.

(Mike Herrick at 00:30:12) But you're that kind of personality. It's like, yeah, you know what? If someone's telling you no, not to come out, it's a definite no because it means there's absolutely no option to have you come out.

(Joel Beasley at 00:30:25) Oh, yeah. And I—it's just—I love the, um, and the reason why I talk about it right now with you is because I always like to—you know, you've got your internal state. You're like, I think—I think I was like, I think Mike's being nice. I don't know if he wants to say—and I was like, but I also don't know. And it's like this area. And I'm like, I can't wait till we get to talk to, like, validate that we're both intelligently, like, emotionally on the same wavelength. And it's just kinda like, we're cool with whatever. But yeah, it's just also, if you were, like, an average person and—I would've been like, no, we're not going. But I really like you. So, like, dude, you gotta see Mike. Right?

(Mike Herrick at 00:31:04) Yeah. Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:31:05) But I think it'll—I think back half of the year, everything will be chill, and we'll all get to get—and we've—we've had, like, you know, 70 of your people are going through Leaderbit stuff. And we see all their responses and engagements and, like, Fabiana and our coaches and our—I was like, oh, we're so—I can't wait to meet all these people in person. By the way, Fabiana has said, and this is no bullshit, 100% true, she said that you as one of our clients have some of the best leaders period. Like, she likes the responses she shows me. We do analysis of the challenge entries, reflective responses. And she shows me them and she's like—shows me how they think and why she highlighted certain ones for me, because we need to know, like, how people are responding to our content. That's how we improve our content. And I look at some of the responses from some of your leaders. Dude, you have a seriously good batch of people over there.

(Mike Herrick at 00:32:00) That's, you know, it's really good to hear. I kind of knew that because I—there's a lot of passion with a lot of our staff, but I get a lot of my managers that are sending me posts from, uh, from new employees that are going through. And, yeah. And honestly, the Leaderbit stuff is starting to be a little bit infectious here. People are—more and more people want to do it.

(Mike Herrick at 00:32:29) And they're not just these little one, two, three word answers. People are literally spending time, and spending more time than we had normally anticipated when we were talking about this. And I think it's fantastic. And now it's just kind of a staple. And honestly, my team was excited to meet you and to give feedback on stuff because they have a lot of ideas.

(Mike Herrick at 00:32:56) I mean, there's gonna be a lot of ideas coming your way. We probably should continue that because I think my team has a lot of recommendations on things that Leaderbits could do for them.

(Joel Beasley at 00:33:08) Yeah. Just so you know, very important, the feedback we've gotten from you has directed the product 100%. You as a customer, with all of our top customers, you're incredibly important to us because you really get to choose to do business with the people that you like. And we actually looked at our 2018, 2019 customer list, and we picked not just the customers that made us the most money, but the customers that we like doing business with the most. And we said, okay, let's take the top 10 customers, the ones we want 100 more of. And then we've changed all of our marketing, outreach, and everything this past couple months at the beginning of the year to focus on essentially founders like you, Darren, Brad. This profile we put together of these people, it's the way you think.

(Joel Beasley at 00:34:06) We looked at your LinkedIn profiles and your biographies because we're trying to really identify the human. We want more humans that are like you guys.

(Mike Herrick at 00:34:14) Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:34:14) Because you're the best customers to work with. And so I thought that I thought you should know that.

(Mike Herrick at 00:34:20) No, it's, I think every company should go through an exercise like that where they identify their ideal customer profile. I mean, we bounce that term around internally. We call it the ICP, but it's the ideal customer profile. And you know, there may be some verticals that you are very aligned with and some verticals that you aren't so much, but personal preference and just overall happiness is definitely a reason to work with somebody.

(Joel Beasley at 00:34:51) So let's do a quick recap. Right? You had a lot of people in person at your office. You also had remote teams, but you guys made the transition pretty smoothly, right?

(Mike Herrick at 00:35:00) I feel really, really good about it, and I've seen just an amazing adoption.

(Joel Beasley at 00:35:08) Connecting on Slack, getting to know people's dogs, kids, pictures, socially coming together digitally. We actually, quick tip that we found. We found that Zoom was better than Slack for coming together because of the way the faces are organized on the screen and the connection quality. Have you guys found that?

(Mike Herrick at 00:35:27) You know, it's funny you bring that up because I installed the Zoom plugin on Slack, and it's really neat. You can just push slash Zoom.

(Joel Beasley at 00:35:36) Oh, really? There's a plugin?

(Mike Herrick at 00:35:37) There's a Zoom plugin for it, and it's really, really good. And you just do slash Zoom and you hit enter. And you go into a channel or you go in with a group of people and push slash Zoom, and it gives them all the information with your Zoom credentials right then and there. And I did have some people on my team that said, you know, you could just do slash call and do a Slack call. But I found that the stability of Zoom and just the, for lack of a better word, the intimacy of Zoom is better.

(Mike Herrick at 00:36:10) And so we're using that. But we do, we still balance. There's some people where we use Hangouts. There's some people where we do Slack calls. What I find is that it's more like, if I want to do something one-to-one, Slack call works pretty well. I still do have some reliability issues. Hangout works pretty well for that, but Zoom has kind of been, Zoom is one of, gonna be one of those vendors that really helps carry us through this.

(Joel Beasley at 00:36:36) Yeah. Have I introduced you to Harry yet?

(Mike Herrick at 00:36:39) I don't think so.

(Joel Beasley at 00:36:40) We need to find, I'm gonna actively put in the back of my mind an excuse to talk with Harry some more, have him back on again this year, because you guys personality-wise would really hit it off. Harry is a pretty cool dude. And then so you've kept your team positive. You've communicated a lot. Everybody knows that they're job safe. The company's gonna do well. Things are gonna continue to improve?

(Mike Herrick at 00:37:06) They do. In fact, I think that we're a, we pioneered some of this customer data platform industry, and we're very well funded. We've got a thousand customers. We're a well-capitalized business, but we've started a movement on understanding customer data and the value of that. We've seen a lot of these other small companies come into our industry and try to do some of the things that we do. Not a great time to be a startup right now, you know.

(Mike Herrick at 00:37:44) If you're not well funded, this is not a really great time to raise VC in my opinion. And so I do think that we'll...

(Joel Beasley at 00:37:53) Definitely not. Everybody clammed up 100%. We were just about to close a round. Literally, we were thirty days away from closing a round, and everyone was just, like, whoop, pulled back. And I said, this is why we focused the back half of last year on becoming breakeven and not growing too much. Because we're at breakeven right now, which I think is amazing for your first two years in business, right?

(Mike Herrick at 00:38:17) Absolutely. Absolutely.

(Joel Beasley at 00:38:19) And so we weren't dependent on the investor capital, so we got to set better terms and do it slower or at the speed we wanted. So the fact that everything clammed up and they're being transparent and everything with us, we're like, everybody stopped. But the fact that we put the company in that position and we worked really hard in October, November, December to get us there. But yeah, I'm so glad we took that step back and did that.

(Mike Herrick at 00:38:46) You gotta raise money when you don't need it. And you never know when something, I mean, nobody expected this, but you never know when something like this is gonna pop in. And so there are gonna be, I mean, I'm keeping my eye on some of these small companies that are doing some pretty cool innovative things because I think there's gonna be some fire sales coming in. There have to be. So in that sense, you know, we feel really good. I mean, we're conscientious about, we're doing a double and triple check on some expenditures that we do to make sure that we need them right now. You know, stuff that we had planned to do right now that could certainly wait for 60 days.

(Mike Herrick at 00:39:31) You know, those things we're just looking at. We're just trying to be conscientious. I wouldn't say that we're necessarily slowing down our hiring plan, but again, our CEO has gotten into the loop to make sure that he's, he's just now approving every hire and every job listing we do just so he can stay in touch with it and keep an eye on it. So...

(Joel Beasley at 00:39:52) It's more attention. You just put more attention in certain places. Also, watch the talent because what's going to happen is these startups are gonna fire sale or crumble up, and you're gonna want that extra cash to pull some of that top talent at a more reasonable rate.

(Mike Herrick at 00:40:06) They're all things that, you know, it's all opportunity for us to think innovatively around, whether it be getting new talent, whether it be acquiring somebody, or whether it be just following prudent business practices to make sure that we're covered. We've got enough money in the bank to last for the next two years, so we can certainly ride this out very, very comfortably. So I feel good. But you know, again, the culture and the passion and the sentiment of my employees is a new thing that I'm spending a lot more extra time on.

(Mike Herrick at 00:40:52) I'm doing a lot more one-on-ones, and I'm, you know, again, I'm just trying to be more of a person with my employees. And that works well for me. I think I'm a fairly likable guy.

(Joel Beasley at 00:41:05) You are. You definitely are. That's why when we were like, who do we have on? Like, definitely Mike. We should definitely have him. What sort of advice or insight would you have for, let's say, CTOs that are maybe a bit, let's go on one side of the spectrum here. Let's say some newer CTOs. Maybe they've got a hundred plus people at their company. They're going through this, and they're looking for someone who's got some more experience.

(Joel Beasley at 00:41:34) You know, where should they be focused? What should they be doing right now?

(Mike Herrick at 00:41:39) I think there's the positivity theme. I think you have to look at what the positives are of this. You know, I'm staying focused on the idea that I get to be in my house. I get to spend a little bit more time with my dogs during the day. I'm looking at the future, maybe three months or six months down the line where maybe I will be able to work from home one, two, maybe even three days a week, maybe even a week at a time.

(Mike Herrick at 00:42:13) You know, if I have contractors or things like that that are coming in, I'm not gonna feel like, I really wanna be here in case they need me, but I just have to be in the office. So I'm really looking forward to establishing that technique and that skill of being able to work remote if I need to. That's one of them. I think the other thing is just, you know, it sounds obvious, but this concept of staying human. You know, don't get pissed off at your employees because a dog barks in the background.

(Mike Herrick at 00:42:45) That stuff happens. Don't be pissed off because somebody's kid runs and asks their mom or dad a question about if they could have a juice box. That's life, right? And so embrace it, you know. And I think that's important. I think there are times where being on video is an important mandate to say, look, we wanna see each other and we wanna do it, but don't use it as a technique to say, hey, I wanna make sure you're getting up and taking a shower and dressing for work. If someone says, look, I gotta go off camera for a couple minutes, let them. It's, you know, I mean, it's, it comes with the territory. And so I think to try to put yourself in other people's shoes to understand what they're going through.

(Mike Herrick at 00:43:35) You know, I've got a great office that's nice and quiet here. I'm lucky. I'm blessed. I look at people and I see them. They're on their dining room tables because they don't have places like this to work.

(Mike Herrick at 00:43:46) One of my guys, he's like, I have to work in my spare bedroom, and there wasn't enough room for me to set up a desk. So he panned over to the left. The mattress was propped up against the wall just so he could work in there. And it's like, you know, man, I'm lucky, and I need to understand that not everybody is so lucky about that stuff. So you just gotta be compassionate, and you just gotta realize that everybody's got their jam, and you gotta kinda let them have it.

(Joel Beasley at 00:44:13) And and to add to that, those people that do that, that's a story. That's a memory. And in 10 years, when they do have their office at home and things like that, they're gonna remember, like, without struggle, there's no greatness without struggle. It just doesn't exist.

(Joel Beasley at 00:44:32) And we're all at different points. But man, I love how articulate you are. I think that is some amazing insight and advice. Anything else you wanna get out there to the world?

(Mike Herrick at 00:44:47) No. You know, we're gonna get through this. I think we have to look at the greater good. I think as company leaders, you have to look at your company and your employees as a whole and do things for their benefit. And I think just as humans and as Americans, we have to look at the country as a whole.

(Mike Herrick at 00:45:09) And you know, if you're still going out to bars, if you're still going out to the beach, you know, you're kind of being an ass. And I think it's time to drop a little of the narcissism and realize that, you know, the faster we make this go away is by working together. And you know, I look at people that are going out and still out in public, and I think, you know, if we had the tests and things like that, it'd be a much different story. But for every day that they're out there goofing off, it's two days that I gotta be cooped up in this place.

(Mike Herrick at 00:45:48) And I think it's just, I think it's fairly selfish, these people that are still going out. So I think this is a good time. I think as just humans, this has taught me I need to be more selfless. And I think that's what we need to do more of.

(Joel Beasley at 00:46:06) Yeah. I was pretty resistant to it at first because I like the gym. And I was like, damn it, I wanna go to the gym. But then I was like, you know what? I'm gonna figure it out. Like, let's find these YouTube home workout videos. And I was on the phone last night, so a friend I made 10 years ago, it's always interesting, the friends you know way back then, they turn into people today. He's our county commissioner, right?

(Mike Herrick at 00:46:29) Yeah. Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:46:29) He's actually, yeah. And so I was on the phone with him last night, and we live in what's, every other year, we win best beach in the United States, right? And it's spring break right now. Okay? And all the kids are out of school that live in a beach town.

(Joel Beasley at 00:46:45) And so what's happening is they're flooding the beach having parties because it's their spring break. And I was on the phone with him last night, and he's like, well, we had this interesting issue of trying to close the beach because it's never closed in history, so there's no gates. And we live in a beach town where there's tens and tens of miles of beach and hundreds of these little beach accesses, and they don't have gates. And what can you do?

(Joel Beasley at 00:47:11) So they partnered with the construction side of the government. And last night, they dropped these cement construction barriers. They had trucks just dropping these cement construction barriers up and down the coastline to keep everyone out, to keep all the cars out of the parking lots because they don't have gates on these accesses. And he goes, the frustrating part about that is now all the kids that will still ignore that, they will park in residential areas. And so what they had to do is they had to staff the lifeguards because if people drown, it's a government issue, right?

(Mike Herrick at 00:47:46) Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:47:46) So they're still staffing the lifeguards, but with a red, no swim flag. If you're out in the water, staffing lifeguards, and cement barriering everything, and then just dealing with the complaints from the residents of people parking. And he's like, that's all you can do because you really can't put a swarm of cops out there. That gets a whole different mess. And so I was like, wow.

(Joel Beasley at 00:48:08) It's such an interesting issue to have because everything you do, there's a reaction. But yeah, I'm excited for this to be over too, and I'm also excited for the increase. It got everyone who was uncomfortable or on the edge with remote work understanding that with the right KPIs in place, with the right business indicators in place, you can let people work remotely from home and things get done.

(Mike Herrick at 00:48:32) Yeah. No. And now that you are remote, people are thinking more about those KPIs and those efficiency indicators. And now there's, I'm seeing a surge in some of my teams to say, you know, not only do I want my remote people to be efficient, but I want to put these five initiatives in place that will allow me to measure some of the efficiency. And so I think that's a smart way to go about it.

(Mike Herrick at 00:48:58) I always think the companies need to look at their efficiency metrics and what I call reinspect the factory. But this is a good opportunity for us to do that.

(Joel Beasley at 00:49:10) Dude, this is great. Well, I'll let you get, we, I know I already talked over your time that you had scheduled with us, but I'll let you get the back half of this seven minutes left in the hour to do a new hit workout or something.

(Mike Herrick at 00:49:22) There you go.

(Joel Beasley at 00:49:22) But man, this is fantastic, and I always enjoy talking with you. And then we'll plan end of the year or something. We'll come back out or as soon as, we'll just wait until it's all.

(Mike Herrick at 00:49:34) Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And let's talk about, why don't you guys think about some geo-regional leader bits groups? Maybe let's do a virtual kind of summit with some of your leader bits customers here in the area.

(Mike Herrick at 00:49:50) Yeah. Let's do stuff like that.

(Joel Beasley at 00:49:52) All right. Awesome. Yeah. We'll think about how to do that, and maybe we'll get, yeah, we'll get some of your customers together, some of your leaders together, and we could just do some, we'll find a cool way to do some remote stuff.

(Mike Herrick at 00:50:01) Yeah. We'll just do a town hall kind of thing.

(Joel Beasley at 00:50:04) Done. See? Yeah. That's why, yes, that's why you're mic'd.

(Joel Beasley at 00:50:08) All right, buddy. Thank you so much. We're gonna edit this up, and I think we're gonna put it out this afternoon.

(Mike Herrick at 00:50:13) Send me the link. Stay safe. Stay clean. Wash your hands. Be good. Talk soon.

(Joel Beasley at 00:50:17) Talk soon, buddy. Bye bye.