Trey Connell - CTO at ePublishing

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:00) Hello, my friends. Today we are talking to Trey Connell, the CTO at ePublishing, and we discuss what it looks like rebuilding your product from the ground up, using journaling as a tool for productivity, and how to recognize rock star employees in a remote work environment. All of this right here, right now on the Modern CTO podcast. Here we go. This is the Modern CTO podcast.

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:33) There he is.

(Trey Connell at 00:00:36) Hey, man. How are you?

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:37) Good. Man of the hour. We didn't do video last time we did this, did we?

(Trey Connell at 00:00:41) No, you're right. We didn't. And you're rocking the beard now. I like it.

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:45) Yeah, the COVID beard. It just comes and goes. People keep asking me what's the plan for the beard? And I was like, I don't know. Let's just see until I don't like it anymore.

(Trey Connell at 00:00:57) Right. Very cool. Yeah, I've got the COVID hair thing going still, letting my wife give me a haircut every now and then, so that's been fun.

(Joel Beasley at 00:01:08) Because you guys are always remote, right?

(Trey Connell at 00:01:11) Always remote. Yeah. So we were—of course, my wife went into an office every day until March, and so she's been at home. And now we're doing the virtual school thing with the kids too, so everybody's at home.

(Joel Beasley at 00:01:24) Oh, man. How old are they?

(Trey Connell at 00:01:26) We got an 11-year-old and a 7-year-old.

(Joel Beasley at 00:01:29) So they're right in the prime school age.

(Trey Connell at 00:01:31) Yeah. And the 11-year-old does pretty good. The 7-year-old, you've got to keep him on task. It's a little bit of a challenge, but we're a week in so far, and so far so good. So we'll see how it goes.

(Joel Beasley at 00:01:46) Hey, do you know that your episode that we did is one of our all-time most popular episodes?

(Trey Connell at 00:01:51) Is it really?

(Joel Beasley at 00:01:52) I think I told you that. We interact a little bit on Twitter because I saw you had some other posts, but it's been a year or two since we talked. It's amazing how fast time goes by. But I think it was because we were talking about work from home depression. Looking at the analytics and the listen stats, it just, for some reason, got into iTunes popularity for being a popular episode. And so it's always at the top of the list.

(Trey Connell at 00:02:21) Oh, wow. Yeah, that was definitely—and still continues to be, I guess, even more so now, right, with so many more people at home than before. And also, everybody has their family at home, which is a lovely thing, but it can work on you a little bit from time to time.

(Joel Beasley at 00:02:43) Yeah. Also, because you're a great leader, and you gave some really good insight and advice on that episode.

(Trey Connell at 00:02:49) I'm glad to hear that went well.

(Joel Beasley at 00:02:51) Yeah. I got some questions too. One question that I got was about, you mentioned that you did this awards at the end of the month thing. And the question from some other leaders was, how do you keep it from getting stale?

(Trey Connell at 00:03:07) In fact, I just—you know, so we do it on the first day of every month. So I just sent that out about an hour ago, actually, for our August rock star, as we call them. And I think, really, it's more making sure that you're constantly reminding people because it's so easy for people to get caught up in the day-to-day in their jobs and what they're doing in their tasks and goals. And sometimes you can easily forget to do those kinds of things and to reach out and brag on others that you're working with and your peers. And so I think it's simply just reminding people throughout the month, you know, hey, don't forget to get those nominations in. And we had in July—we set a record for the number of nominations that we had. And that was a challenge that I put out to everyone. I wanted to see the most nominations that we've ever had. And they answered the call for sure. So I think it's just keeping it front and center is the main thing and keeping it top of mind for everybody.

(Joel Beasley at 00:04:11) Can you give me a brief overview of the awards system and how it works?

(Trey Connell at 00:04:16) Yeah. So, essentially, it's just open to everyone to go and nominate anyone they work with or work alongside or even know about—anything that they would consider going above and beyond. And sometimes it's not even completely work related. It could be something that they're doing outside of work, either philanthropy or volunteering in the community. Just anything that we want to make sure that we recognize people for excellence. And so those nominations come in throughout the month. And then at the end of the month, or the first day of the following month, I review all of those. And sometimes we have one. Sometimes I can't even make a decision, and we have two or three rock stars if we had a particularly good month like that. And then we just reward those folks with an email out to the crew, let everybody know with all the nominees and then who won. And then, of course, we have a little financial incentive as well in the form of an Amazon gift card that we give out each month.

(Joel Beasley at 00:05:21) How do you collect the data? How do you collect it and manage the nominations? Is it Slack messages, emails? Do you have a spreadsheet or a system?

(Trey Connell at 00:05:29) We actually were using Podio for the longest time. We had a form set up in there where people would submit their nominations, and we've moved over to Google Sites and Google Forms. And so we just have a form set up there with just a few fields to make it really easy, really quick. And they can just submit that. And, of course, I'll receive an email. And then at the end of the month, I can go back and review all those and make a decision.

(Joel Beasley at 00:05:54) And how many people participate in that? Like, how large is the group?

(Trey Connell at 00:05:57) There's about 30 people who are eligible and participate. And in a given month, I'd say we probably get anywhere from six to eight nominations. And there's always plenty to choose from. And like I said, it makes my job really difficult sometimes, which I love. I mean, that was sort of the challenge back in July. I told them, make my job hard, make this difficult, and they did. So that's what we do every month.

(Joel Beasley at 00:06:25) Who won?

(Trey Connell at 00:06:27) This month, I just awarded about an hour ago to a lady named Kelly here who heads up our—we just built, and she's almost single-handedly developed our new product, which is an InDesign plug-in called Duet. And so she just rolled that out to our first customer using it in the last couple of weeks. And talk about above and beyond—I mean, she literally set up a—because this was rolling out to a newspaper group. And so, of course, they're doing all their production work and so forth at night. And as they rolled out this product, she literally set up a hotline via GoToMeeting where their newsrooms could contact her throughout the night for any assistance and support they needed to switch over from their previous system to Duet. And I mean, that one was actually an easy decision as far as awarding that rock star. She really did go above and beyond.

(Joel Beasley at 00:07:29) That's pretty cool. Yeah. To take the product, get that out to market, and then also to be able to think of the support and the deployment. It's like you have a very well-rounded executive over there.

(Trey Connell at 00:07:42) Yes. She brings a—she's been with us about a year now. She brings a lot of experience and expertise in that industry. And so she's leveraged that and created a whole new product and revenue stream for us, which is amazing, especially in 2020.

(Joel Beasley at 00:07:58) I know. That's what you want. You want to empower people to come in and build new revenue streams and take care of customers so we can get more people to join the crew and spread the culture farther. So what else is new at ePublishing? You've got Duet just launched, an InDesign plug-in. What else do you have going on?

(Trey Connell at 00:08:17) Just continuing—you know, we talked before, we had our flagship CMS, or enterprise publishing system, ePublishing. And also Ellington CMS, our newspaper side of that, a CMS built for newspapers, newsrooms. So those are still going. The biggest thing for 2020 is we just rolled out to production as well a complete from-the-ground-up rebuild of ePublishing. So we took what we built about 15 years ago or so and sort of iterated on, burned it to the ground and rebuilt it in modern frameworks and technologies that we wanted to use. So that's now rolled out. It was in beta—we put it out to our customers in beta for a few months, and now we've turned it on in production. We've left the old system up in place where they can use them side by side as they get acquainted with the new product and so forth. We'll sunset the old products by the end of the year, but we're not in a big hurry. You know, there's so much going on just in general. We're not trying to put any pressure on us or our customers to have to cut over when they're not ready. So we just slowly rolled that out. And we also have come to market with a product we call Reader Intelligence, which is essentially a behavioral data reporting system, visualization system for all of our customers' customers, where anything that's happening with their customers on their websites, all that data is fed into this system, and they can go and glean intelligence out of that through metrics and analytics, as well as a customer data platform that they can use to then make that data actionable and market back to their customers on the websites through segmentation and stuff like that. So that's relatively new, and we just kicked the tires on that in the last, I don't know, four months or so.

(Joel Beasley at 00:10:12) Nice. The redesign is a big undertaking, right?

(Trey Connell at 00:10:16) It really was. It's been about two years in the making. We started with sort of the underpinnings with a full-on GraphQL API that we used, not only for ourselves, but also for our customers, gave them full access to it. So they have access to their data and their content through that and can integrate anything they wish through that API. And then we ate our own dog food, so to speak, by using that API and built our new application, built in React, to communicate with that API, which ultimately talks to the relational databases we have sitting at the bottom of the stack. But so, yeah, it's been a couple of years really in the making. And so we're excited to finally have that see the light of day.

(Joel Beasley at 00:10:58) What's the big one or two takeaways from that whole entire process, whether they're about people or technical stuff, probably more about people?

(Trey Connell at 00:11:08) I think the big takeaway for me and really what I've enjoyed most about the project is we were able to put ourselves in a position, and being a small company and very services-based as we are, we were finally able to sort of draw a line in the sand and establish a true product team that their core and only focus was that product and carrying out that vision and rebuild. And we didn't—we were able to keep people from being pulled in different directions and being so interrupt-driven like we are and most people are every day. We were really able to focus. And so I think that was probably the main reason that it's been successful, and we've been able to do such a monumental amount of work in a relatively short period of time.

(Joel Beasley at 00:11:58) Have you gotten to do any M&A stuff in the past couple years?

(Trey Connell at 00:12:02) Yeah. The Reader Intelligence product was an acquisition, and we've got some other things in the mix that we're still kind of in the exploratory phases on. But yeah, we actually have been able to dip our toes in that water and try to grow through acquisition. It's definitely been—even back with Ellington CMS, we acquired them back in 2012. You know, it's always been a part of our strategy—growth through acquisition. So we look for opportunities all the time.

(Joel Beasley at 00:12:34) What's the big takeaway that makes a successful acquisition?

(Trey Connell at 00:12:39) Due diligence. And being—and not just looking at everything, no matter what state it's in, both financially and technologically. Being able to step back and go, you know what? This is not for us. And really being strategic and thoughtful about what you want to take on, making sure those companies and their products are in a position where you can succeed with them versus just buying for the sake of buying. That's the big thing. It's just being methodical and thoughtful about it.

(Joel Beasley at 00:13:13) So what about you as a professional, as a human? What are you into these days?

(Trey Connell at 00:13:18) You know, it's really just been from a professional standpoint, it's really just been sort of wrangling all these products because they're not only stand-alone products that we're offering. Ultimately, we have a vision for how those are all going to fit together in one product ecosystem that will start—now that we have things launched and out in the wild—that'll be 2021, is bringing it all together in sort of a cohesive product offering across the board. So, professionally, that's really where I'm focused. How do we do that? What does that look like? What are our next steps there? As a human, it's probably like everybody else, just trying to play the hand we've been dealt and trying to keep things as normal as possible. You know, I went last night, and I'm super excited right now as goofy as it sounds. But I'm super excited right now because my daughter's fall softball is gonna happen. You know, we missed out on that in the spring, and so they've opened that back up. So I went and drafted our team last night for fall softball. So now I'm ready to go. I'm ready to start contacting parents and start practices and moving along. And I think last time we talked about running is still a big thing. Still enjoying that. And that's been especially during COVID-19 and all that, running has been a great outlet to get out and pound on the pavement for an hour here and there and just kind of get away from stuff. So running is still big.

(Joel Beasley at 00:14:53) What type of shoes do you like right now?

(Trey Connell at 00:14:56) Brooks Ghost 12s and Ghost 13s. I rotate a couple pair.

(Joel Beasley at 00:15:00) I've got to write that down. I'm on the whole On brand right now. Have you seen those things?

(Trey Connell at 00:15:06) Uh-huh. Yeah. I'm in a big Facebook group called the I Love to Run community, and they, you know, there's, as you can imagine, constant discussions about shoes and apparel and socks and hydration vests and anything you want to know. Everybody's out there discussing it. And so while I haven't tried that brand, I see a lot of people talking about it.

(Joel Beasley at 00:15:30) Yeah. I tried the compression socks. I did not like them. I didn't understand the benefit. I was like, this makes my feet hurt. I tried different sizes and everything.

(Trey Connell at 00:15:41) I've never tried the socks. I use the Balega socks, and those are great. Mainly just trying to avoid blisters. But yeah, the only I do every now and then on a particularly hard week, I'll sit around. You'll catch me in some compression sleeves for my lower legs, just trying to keep shin splints and stuff like that at bay, but I haven't tried the socks yet. That does sound like a terrible idea.

(Joel Beasley at 00:16:10) It was, and they're very expensive. So I bought some, and I bought like three different sizes, like styles of compression. And like, none of them are—I'm a fan of zero of them so far. And then the one socks that I love, I'd gotten from like Dick's Sporting Goods, but they stopped carrying it, and there was like no external branding on the existing socks. So I've been trying to hunt down these socks forever, and I've—

(Trey Connell at 00:16:37) Right. Failed. And it's funny. It's like once you find something that you're comfortable in that doesn't make you sore that, you know, you can—and whether it's shorts, you know, shoes, whatever, when you find a brand or a style that you like, I mean, you kind of want to hoard them, you know, just because I know people who will go out. They find a particular even year of shoe, you know, like, oh, I like the Ghost Nines, and they've gone and bought like eight pair of them. You know, so they'll just have them forever. So yeah, it's funny. I've noticed that, and I'll lump myself into that as well. I mean, runners are very particular about what they want to wear and how they want to run.

(Joel Beasley at 00:17:17) I saw you were promoting this virtual race for ALS. How does a virtual race work?

(Trey Connell at 00:17:23) Yeah. We had originally set that up to be—a close family friend of ours who suffers from MS and then was about a year ago, a little over a year now, diagnosed with ALS as well. And so suffice to say that, you know, he's had a very tough time, and so we wanted to raise some money for him and his family to pay for treatments and so forth and equipment, you know, medical equipment and things. He's a small business owner here in the local area, an entrepreneur. He's been here for, you know, twenty-five years in business, and so he needed some help. And so we originally set it up as, you know, just a regular in-person physical race. And then, again, coronavirus, you know, happened, and so we had to convert over to a virtual race. Luckily, there's—you know, we use RunSignup. You know, there's luckily several sites that have adapted to that now where, you know, it's easy to set up a virtual race, and then all we had to do is worry about sourcing, you know, finishing medals and, you know, things like that.

(Joel Beasley at 00:18:25) Do—like, how do you race? Like, what is the—does everyone put a cam up and like have a treadmill?

(Trey Connell at 00:18:33) Some people do it on a treadmill, and it's really just about, you know—of course, like with ours, it was a benefit race. Right? So, you know, there was a 5K.

(Joel Beasley at 00:18:42) Oh, so it's already done. You're saying what? So it's like, it's already done. Oh, okay.

(Trey Connell at 00:18:46) Yes. And so when we set it up, though, it was really—you know, people go on and they donate or they purchase a—you know, they sign up for the race. And as far as like, did you run the 5K? Did you walk the 5K? You know, did you only go two miles instead of 3.1? You know, it didn't really matter. Again, it's a benefit race. It was all just to help, you know, this gentleman and his family. And, but in general, my wife, or my daughter and I, have been running a lot of these virtual races together this summer. It keeps her motivated because, of course, you know, you go sign up, you pay your $30 or whatever, and you get your medal in the mail. And so what we would do is, you know, I would just have a drawer and I'd put—any races we'd sign up for, I'd put our medals in a drawer. And it's like, okay, we'll go run that 5K, you know, Saturday morning or whatever, and she and I would go out to run. And, you know, we'd come back. Like, okay, here's your medal. You know, so she'd have to earn those. And so that's been a really neat way for she and I to get out and run together and keep active during the summer, and, you know, we'll continue it into the fall. We have one coming up that'll be virtual as well at the end of September. We got a half marathon we're tackling at the end of October, actually, two of them. And so far, the half marathons are actually going to be in person, though. We'll see if that changes. But right now, they're still planning to have it, you know, in person. So—

(Joel Beasley at 00:20:07) Nice. Well, it's cool that you have that like education system set up where you're just putting in the work and getting the reward, and you're like withholding the medal. That's just—I try to—it sounds silly because my kids are like three and almost two, but it's like from there, I want their core, their lowest level of programming, right, to understand these basic concepts of like negotiations because they're always happening all the time. Some people are just far less aware than other people. Risk, reward, you get this if you do that, and just sort of like, I want to prepare them as much as possible. At the same time, it's funny because that like instinct of wanting to protect comes up. And then I'm like—like, last night, I was trying to teach her to—she always—she knows how to use the remote to an extent, but she, you know, cries help when she needs to change the show or an ad or something like that.

(Trey Connell at 00:21:03) Right.

(Joel Beasley at 00:21:04) And so I used her favorite thing—popsicles right now, like these fruit popsicles. And so I was like, okay, I'm not going to do it for you, but I'll show you how. And she's like, no. And I was like, alright. Well, if you learn how, I'll give you a fruit popsicle. And she goes, ah! She jumped up, ran over, and she was like in education mode. Like, teach me now how to use this remote so I can do my thing and get that popsicle.

(Trey Connell at 00:21:26) That's awesome.

(Joel Beasley at 00:21:27) Yeah. It's just amazing how programmable the kids are. It's like we're just little organic computers.

(Trey Connell at 00:21:36) Yeah. And I think, you know, my daughter, like I said, she's 11, and she's just also now getting to the point where, like, some of the runs and things that we do, not only does she get the reward of the medal and, you know, race bib or whatever happened to come with that particular race, but, you know, it's also a pride thing. You know, we're getting to the point where, you know, she's actually wanting to go and carry, you know, a device where she can, you know, have a GPS and measure her own, you know, run. And I'll catch her like, you know, looking back, going, okay. You know, when we go run this 5K, Dad, I want to try to set a PR. You know, I want to try to beat my best time. You know? And so now it's starting to—I'm starting to see where she's actually getting motivated by, you know, just the achievement and setting goals, which is big. So I've enjoyed kind of watching her move from, oh, I'll just get the, you know, the reward to also, you know, the run being the reward. So that's pretty neat.

(Joel Beasley at 00:22:33) Does she have like a Fitbit or like a Whoop strap or something?

(Trey Connell at 00:22:36) She's got an old iPhone 6 that I let her use almost like a—I'm going to date myself. It's almost like an iPod, right, at this point. But, and so she straps that to her arm, you know, and away she goes.

(Joel Beasley at 00:22:53) But when those—one iPods came out, they like looked exactly like iPhones. Like, the first iPods didn't, but then the second ones came out. You could barely distinguish—as an—because they were just too thin. But alright. So I saw the Neuralink update, I think like last Friday. Did you catch the highlight reel of that?

(Trey Connell at 00:23:13) I have not yet, honestly. I literally have it on my—I know it sounds ridiculous. I literally have it on my to-do list. In fact, one of our guys at work, one of our front-end developers was talking about it. And I remember what I was in the middle of, and I was like, oh, that sounds amazing. Like, I've got to go check that out. But I haven't had a chance to go check it out yet.

(Joel Beasley at 00:23:32) There's like—when it was live-streaming, my producer Jake sent it to me because he knows like how much I love Elon Musk and the advancement of science and technology. And I clicked play to start watching the live stream, then I had the kids crawling all over me. I was like, I just can't enjoy this.

(Trey Connell at 00:23:47) Right.

(Joel Beasley at 00:23:47) And so I just put it down, and I said, okay, I'll wait till tomorrow morning because it's Saturday morning. I work on—I go to the office in the mornings to get one thing done on the weekends. And so I was like, when I go in Saturday, I will watch like someone's recap. And so somebody made this like seven-minute like highlight recap of the presentation. But, man, they've got these pigs. Right? I won't ruin it for y'all, but I'll make you more interested in it. They've got these pigs, and they put the Neuralinks inside the pigs.

(Trey Connell at 00:24:17) Wow.

(Joel Beasley at 00:24:18) And it's crazy. And the amount of things that they can detect from putting these implants inside of your brain is phenomenal. I'm not going to like list them all out because I'm going to butcher it for real. But it was—it's just—it's so exciting. My first thought was like, when this gets more commercialized in the very near future, it's going to—so quickly—like, the moment they make a developer kit that you can get as like a non-medical professional—

(Trey Connell at 00:24:48) Right.

(Joel Beasley at 00:24:48) People are just going to be going crazy with—if you just stream me that data, like, the things we could figure out—like, there's going to be an entire app marketplace around Neuralink, and you're going to be able to build apps, like, probably for addiction. Like, here's the anti-addiction app, and it will just fire electronic pulses in your brain for the anti-addiction ones because they measured, you know, a thousand people with addictions, got all of their brain scans, found isolated—you know, we're just going to build this tree of knowledge around the electronic impulses firing off in our brain, and we're going to end up being able to decode them, read them, write them. It's like the future is pretty exciting.

(Trey Connell at 00:25:28) It's pretty amazing how far they're—and how fast they're coming with those kinds of things. You know, it feels like yesterday, we were excited about the fact that, you know, we have Alexa, and we have, you know, wearables. You know, like, I can wear this watch all day and go and look at all my data about how I slept and, you know, what my blood pressure was and what my pulse ox is. And, you know, I wear a Garmin when I run and, like, I nerd out over all that. You know, just going back and looking at my week and kind of whether I do anything with it or not, you know, remains to be seen. But, you know, I enjoy going back and looking at it. So to have access to that kind of data, it just feels like it's coming really, really quickly. It certainly—I didn't see it coming. That's for sure. So I'm super interested to go check it out.

(Joel Beasley at 00:26:10) Have you gotten into the sleep tracking yet?

(Trey Connell at 00:26:12) You know, I tried, and it's more annoying to me than anything. You know, it's—for some reason I just can't get comfortable with a watch on or anything or any kind of device like that at nighttime. I feel like I've worn this thing all day. Like I said, I've sort of pored over this data all day and from time to time, and it's like, alright. I just need to detach for tonight. You know? So I figure if I'm not getting enough sleep, my body will tell me.

(Joel Beasley at 00:26:41) Yeah. I tried the—I was looking at the Oura Ring thing more recently, but I just didn't pull the trigger. I've looked at it like a couple of times, and I was just like, I've gone so far down the sleep analysis path. I found this one called Sleep Cycle where you just put it like next to your bed. It just runs on your phone and listens to you while you sleep. And I got a lot of data, and basically, I just figured out through two or three years of messing with sleep that the thing that matters the most is going to bed at the same time every night. Like, you can wake up in like a variance of an hour or so, but like, going to sleep at that same time. And then I, of course, like, have a routine before bed. So like, I have a routine leading up. So that whole hour leading up to me actually getting into bed is fixed. The time that I go to bed is fixed, and then it is just incredibly consistent. And if I miss that from like a flight or something that's happened, it knocks me out for like two or three days.

(Trey Connell at 00:27:38) Yeah. That's—every now and then, the mornings are the most important to me. You know, I have to be up 4:30 to five, you know, every morning. If I, you know, sleep in, as my wife likes to make fun of me when I say it, you know, till 6:30 or maybe even seven, you know, on like Saturday or whatever, I just feel wrong, you know, all day and probably the next. You know, just—I have to have that routine, you know, embedded at a certain time, and then up at a certain time. Otherwise, I feel just out of whack.

(Joel Beasley at 00:28:09) Yeah. I go to bed at like 9:30.

(Trey Connell at 00:28:12) Oh, yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:28:13) And I get like plenty of—I think I get like eight to nine, eight to nine hours of sleep. So I typically wake up at like 5:30 or 6:30 and, depending on the day. But it was funny because my kids were starting to stay up later as they got older. And so I went—we went to their—my wife and I went to their school, and we're like, cut them out of nap time. Right? Because we want them like to be in bed. And because if they're getting a two-hour nap during the day, they can stay up till ten. But if they don't get that nap, they're in bed at 7:38, and that's what we need. You know?

(Trey Connell at 00:28:48) Yeah. We've been really lucky there because we have the same thing. Both kids are extremely trustworthy, though, and responsible, and we won't go to sleep until they go to sleep, or at least go down for bed. But, yeah, totally. I'm in the bed probably by nine at the latest sometimes, and we'll let them stay—especially during the summertime. You know, now that we're back in school, it's a little different. But during the summer, you know, we'd let them stay up till ten or so. So I'd find myself just kind of laying there. It's like, alright. Y'all need to go to sleep. Yeah. So that—so that Dad can go to sleep. So but, yeah, they always—I always beat the kids to bed. There's no doubt.

(Joel Beasley at 00:29:26) Yeah. My daughter has tucked me in to sleep before. I'm just like, hey.

(Trey Connell at 00:29:29) Right. My 11-year-old has done that. She's watching like, Dad, you don't have to come tuck me in. Good night. She's like—she's almost like patting me on the head. You know?

(Joel Beasley at 00:29:39) Yeah. Yeah. She does it. And she also loves—she does like the Hue system. So she'll walk up. She'll be like, lights, lights, and I'll pull out my phone, and she'll like change the Hue lighting to like the nighttime lighting. And then she'll be like, sleep, Dada, and like pat me on the head. I'll be like—I'm like, it's only 6:00. We're not doing that yet. We're having dinner right now.

(Trey Connell at 00:29:59) That's so cute.

(Joel Beasley at 00:30:00) Sleep, Dada. I was like, no, I'm not going to sleep.

(Trey Connell at 00:30:02) That's awesome. Yep. I know the feeling.

(Joel Beasley at 00:30:07) Other cool things, I was actually pretty excited that the SpaceX was going to do their double launch. They were going to have two rockets go off in one day, but then like the weather didn't happen. But the whole Starlink system going up, are you following any of that?

(Trey Connell at 00:30:24) We watched the SpaceX launch. How long ago has that been now? What, a month ago? A few weeks ago? Anyway, when they went up to space station, and that was awesome because I'd begun to wonder if my kids were going to get to see something that cool, and when that was going to happen and all that.

(Trey Connell at 00:30:45) And of course, growing up like we did, NASA was NASA, and spaceships were, you know, it wasn't happening every day, but you got to witness and experience all that growing up and so forth. And then we just kind of went through that sort of dead period with space and space exploration and so forth. And so it's really cool. I really enjoyed sitting with them. Of course, they were just like, amazed. Right? It's just not something they had seen before except on old videos online and so forth, which is not the same. But yeah, so that was a great experience, getting just getting to share that with them and watch their little faces light up.

(Joel Beasley at 00:31:28) Yeah. That was a big lull. Right? Because I remember watching space shuttles go up in elementary school and then just didn't hear much happening. I remember the one, it's funny because you remember days that have like large emotional impacts.

(Joel Beasley at 00:31:43) Mhmm. It's like a weird thing on how memory works. But I remember the one shuttle exploding because like the teachers rushed up, turned off the TV, and like every, it was just like a weird moment in time. But I'm very excited that when the government started using private sector companies, it showed the world that like this is an industry. It doesn't have to be done by a government. And then you started to see Bezos and Branson and Musk and, you know, obviously Musk, but like all of those people getting into the private space industry.

(Joel Beasley at 00:32:24) And if we have more of those companies, what that means is like we're doing better at monetizing space and further colonizing the universe. And I'm pro interplanetary species.

(Trey Connell at 00:32:36) Right. Yeah. It's been, yeah. And again, growing up like we did, it was everything was the government, and you just didn't see any private companies even attempting those kinds of technological advancements, much less trying to monetize it or commercialize it. And so yeah, we're just in a new era now where, and you're right. I mean, the more companies jumping on that, the more leaders and people like Bezos and so forth that jump in, the faster it's going to go. So it's a neat time to be in.

(Joel Beasley at 00:33:12) Maybe soon in the ePublishing rocket.

(Trey Connell at 00:33:16) I might be on that one.

(Joel Beasley at 00:33:17) Yeah.

(Trey Connell at 00:33:18) There's been, yeah. You hear jokes sort of from time to time. I think many people would not be opposed to being on that first colonization of some planet at this point. You know, little vacation from Earth might be just what the doctor ordered sometimes.

(Joel Beasley at 00:33:38) Yeah. I was actually strongly considering like putting a micro satellite into orbit. It's $10,000 a pound. I think it would cost, I don't know, like 30 to $50,000 to have a little satellite running up there in low Earth orbit.

(Trey Connell at 00:33:54) Oh, wow.

(Joel Beasley at 00:33:55) And you could probably get it for that. If we can't, we'll edit this part of the conversation out.

(Trey Connell at 00:34:01) It's like the price of a Toyota. It's not bad.

(Joel Beasley at 00:34:04) Right? But like for a marketing stunt, I was like, that could be a pretty cool, you know, that's how SpaceX got started. It was like a marketing stunt, essentially. He wanted to do, you know about that story?

(Trey Connell at 00:34:15) No. No.

(Joel Beasley at 00:34:16) So he wanted to encourage space travel after he made his money from the sale of his company, Musk. He wanted to encourage space travel. And so what he did was he went around trying to buy like an ICBM, like a rocket. He was like going to Russia and like talking to the Russians about buying rockets because what he wanted to do was he wanted to put this like little plant inside of the rocket, shoot it to Mars, and then have a camera take a picture of the little green plant on the red Mars. And he goes, it'd be like a superlative, and it would encourage space travel. It would show people that this is possible, and like that, it will just, people respond to that. People respond to these types of acts, and he wanted to be interplanetary species. So in the process of trying to do that one act, he learned all the metrics and the finances and the holdups around actually, the cost of space travel. And he was like, well, if we just reduce the cost of space travel, and then that's how the whole SpaceX concept was born because he just saw that you could just build a reusable engine, and that was the majority cost of the launch. And so like, let's build reusable engines and put rockets into space.

(Joel Beasley at 00:35:28) And now they've done, like they're doing launches constantly. I think they've been like 24, 25 Starlink launches just this year, putting those little satellites into orbit. Yeah.

(Trey Connell at 00:35:39) I did not know that story. That's very cool.

(Joel Beasley at 00:35:41) Yeah. Elon Musk, man. I think I have his book. There it is right next to mine. Elon Musk. That guy, Ashlee Vance, wrote his like biography, and it was really, really good.

(Trey Connell at 00:35:54) That's very cool. Yeah. We do seem to just have, and it's nice to see new leaders emerge, especially in the areas of technology and so forth. You know, we lost some good ones in the past, and, you know, Steve Jobs obviously comes to mind and people like that. And so yeah, we've got a new line of thought leaders that are doing such amazing things. It's really cool.

(Joel Beasley at 00:36:22) I'm excited to see, like, because you know, Bezos and Branson, those guys are like much older than us. I'm excited that like in our lifetimes, we're going to see a whole another layer of people coming up and doing really great things and pushing us forward. I just want the Neuralinks to advance long enough. Like, I'm looking at my estimated expiration and when we have the technology to persist. And I just hope that we get the persistence tech layer before my expiration time.

(Trey Connell at 00:36:57) Right.

(Joel Beasley at 00:36:58) Yeah.

(Trey Connell at 00:36:59) I wonder if there's, you know, and again, I haven't delved into it yet, but have you seen any kind of like negative pushback or feedback around Neuralink, from people who are like, oh, god, you're going to implant things in my brain?

(Joel Beasley at 00:37:18) A hundred percent. I mean, there was, you know, back in the not too distant past, there was those companies that were like bombing AI startups or whatever it was, or maybe that was a movie I saw.

(Trey Connell at 00:37:31) It was probably true.

(Joel Beasley at 00:37:33) It was probably, yeah. Or it was a movie based on that, but there are always going to be people who, what are they called? They're called Luddites. Right? There's always going to be people that are like anti-technology, anti-progress. The reason I get, so I have contained my excitement to technologies that have a legitimate business purpose today. So Neuralink is very exciting to me as a consumer when it gets to that point ten, fifteen years, however long it takes. But the reason I'm able to get excited about that is because they're solving problems today, like with people with paralysis, you know, restoring limb function, these types of medical things that are just unsolved problems. Right? Like, he was specifically talking about like spinal cord is essentially, you've got wires and the wires are broken and you could just hop the wire and do that with Neuralink.

(Joel Beasley at 00:38:26) And I was like, that's unbelievable. You could restore complete limb functions for people, for paraplegics. Right? Like, because it has those roots in a commercially viable business model today, it'll just grow and expand. And then the debates will happen. But the good thing about humans is if you're like the frog in the boiling water, right? Like, it'll happen so slowly, but also really fast. So like we will, like people will start to argue over like specific apps. Right? Like, oh, you shouldn't have this app that lets you, you know, connect to this or be smarter in this way or have an advantage over this person because this poor group of people can't afford Neuralink, and that would give you an unfair advantage.

(Joel Beasley at 00:39:10) And there's always going to be people that are going to do that, but you know, enough time will pass. A generation of humans will come and go, and then it'll just, it'll be okay. Progress is pretty interesting. I'm talking too much. I get excited about this stuff.

(Trey Connell at 00:39:29) Oh, you're right. I mean, and you're dead on. I mean, it's, there's always fallout, pushback, negativity, and then eventually it just sort of seems to silence itself. It just takes a long time. But all those concerns and worries and all that trepidation over that newfangled technology that's going to take over the planets or whatever, eventually it just kind of goes away, I think, to be replaced by the next concern for whatever other advancement comes in. So, but yeah, we haven't seen it ever hold anything up or stop any advancement so far since basically the beginning. So I don't have any doubt that things will continue to progress and move forward.

(Joel Beasley at 00:40:13) So I want to talk to you a little bit about journaling. How do you organize your thoughts? What process do you use? What tools do you use?

(Trey Connell at 00:40:21) The biggest one that I've been on, it's actually sitting right here. This is, it's called a Best Self Journal. Mhmm. And I don't receive anything for that. You just asked, and it happens to be sitting right there. But the idea is sort of twofold. You know, I like to do everything in one place as far as journaling and organization. So I kind of find that to be the best mix. You know? And what I mean by that is it allows me to, as part of that morning routine, I open that thing up, almost, you know, get a cup of coffee, and I sit down and open that up first thing. And, you know, I time block my day. You know, and I look at those big boulders that I have to get done. And then also, it includes space in there, for you can basically use it however you wish, but I use it for like stream of consciousness. Right? So I just write without any particular purpose, without any particular goal. I just sit down and at least fill up a page. And sometimes great things come out of that. Sometimes I'll never look at that page again. It's just there.

(Trey Connell at 00:41:22) But that is just for any, you know, it really, I find that that just sort of is part of my energy in the morning is getting those thoughts out, and it just sort of, it's one of those things that helps light a fire in the morning and help me be productive throughout the rest of the day. But yeah, that's the main tool I use now. And then for anything like—

(Joel Beasley at 00:41:44) It?

(Trey Connell at 00:41:44) Yep. That's it. Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:41:46) Oh, so it's actually called the Best, it's like the brand?

(Trey Connell at 00:41:49) Yeah. Best Self is the brand, and then yeah, it's the Self Journal.

(Joel Beasley at 00:41:53) Nice. We've never done this before. We never shared like a screen on the podcast. But we were talking about in our production meeting, we're like, how could we do that? Because people are bringing up things, we're mentioning things, like fact checking, and we have two people. Like, we have Jake and Adam that listen to this call and like take notes in real time. And so we were trying to figure out like, how could we do this in like a non-interruptive way. And what we came up with is like, we're going to actually have to build an app for Zoom. Like, Zoom has a whole developer SDK thing, so we're going to have to actually build it because like right now, how is your screen formatted? Like, you and I are in small boxes now instead of big boxes, right?

(Trey Connell at 00:42:35) Right. Exactly.

(Joel Beasley at 00:42:35) And the screen's really large. So what we want is we want you and I to stay like one half of the screen, like on top of each other, like really big, and then have this screen over here, right, where we can show stuff. But when something's not being shown, it's just like the logo or something simple.

(Trey Connell at 00:42:51) Gotcha. Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:42:53) Yeah, that.

(Trey Connell at 00:42:54) Yeah. That sounds great. Yeah. Because we do, I mean, we use Zoom at work as well, and so that is kind of, especially when you get ten or twelve people in a meeting and you just got this comic strip, you know, people moving around at the top while you're trying to share and present and discuss and so forth. So that'd be super cool.

(Joel Beasley at 00:43:11) Yeah. Zoom's crushing it too. You see this? This is, we got Harry's notes coming up.

(Trey Connell at 00:43:17) Yeah. Zoom is, it's kind of bizarre. You know that? And it's now become like, you know, if you're going to meet with someone online, you're going to Zoom. You know, my kids are on Zoom meetings all day, every day with school. We use them for church. I mean, and then, of course, we switched. We went with it as well at work. You know, we were using and we still do use Google Meet. We were using GoToMeeting a little bit, but we full on embraced Zoom. It's like, well, everybody else is doing it. You know? So—

(Joel Beasley at 00:43:47) Yeah. It became, it became like the, oh, man. I'm not great with parts of speech, but it's like a verb. Right? Like, let's Zoom?

(Trey Connell at 00:43:54) Right. Exactly. Is that what a verb is?

(Joel Beasley at 00:43:55) Yeah.

(Trey Connell at 00:43:56) Yeah. As my daughter says it every day, like, yeah. Zoom today at three, you know, for my social studies class or whatever. Like, okay. You know? Just like you don't search anymore. You Google, right, or whatever. So—

(Joel Beasley at 00:44:07) That's right.

(Trey Connell at 00:44:08) Yeah. Zoom has become a verb. You're right.

(Joel Beasley at 00:44:11) I, when I interviewed Harry last year, I was like, this guy's so bright. And then I saw their IPO, and so I bought some of their stock. And then it's gone crazy. And then they had an earnings call yesterday, and it was like thousand plus percent increase or whatever. I don't know the exact number. I know that there is some number. There was a bunch of numbers that they report. You know, it's like not just all. But some of them were up like hundreds of percent, and then their stock price jumped like 30% last night—

(Trey Connell at 00:44:41) Wow.

(Joel Beasley at 00:44:41) After that earnings call. And I was, I'm just, I'm a very happy Zoom shareholder now.

(Trey Connell at 00:44:46) Right. I'll tell you what's impressive about Zoom really is, you know, they've had their fair share of challenges, you know, when all of a sudden they became their success, and all of a sudden they became this big thing. And then they had technology challenges. They had security challenges. You know? But they responded like super fast. Right? Like, they were able to shore it up and get things back on track really quickly. And that was pretty impressive to watch, you know, even from an end user. And again, you know, seeing these concerns and challenges from everywhere from schools to business use to churches, you know, personal use of church and things like that, you kind of, you're seeing all these things, and it felt like a month later, boom, they were good to go. You know, they just kind of figured it out. So that was pretty cool.

(Joel Beasley at 00:45:32) Yeah. I wasn't sure how to bring that up on the interview because they did handle it super well. I followed them for a long time before I had them on the show, and then it's amazing because Eric will be up at like 10:00 at night, their CEO, and he'll be tweeting responses to people for service, and it's like actually him. He's been doing that since day one. Wow.

(Joel Beasley at 00:45:52)
And yeah, and so I just saw the passion that they really care. And then when I met Harry and them, I was like, you guys are just a rockstar team. But I wanna bring up the security questions because they handled it so well. But I was like, where do we put that in the interview? Because they don't want him to come on and be like, "Hey, Harry, what's going on? Yeah, so how did you crush the security issue?" Because nobody wants—like, first of all, you know, he's the CTO, so it's like one of the many things on their plate, right? And they hired a CISO—I can't even say it right now—information security officer. But he's just a really great guy, and so I just figured I'd ask him. And if you have questions you want me to ask, I will. But I figured I'll blame it all on Trey. "Trey from ePublishing wants to know about your security." But I figured I would just go with something along the lines of asking him what the journey has been like this year because there's so many things—from the security to them becoming just the most important company for how we work. And that's such an unexpected—like, imagine this, Trey. Imagine the coronavirus hits and all of a sudden, everyone in the world is talking about ePublishing because the service you do is so critical. And now you're getting hundreds of thousands of new users every day, and you're just scaling out of control. And like, all of a sudden, everything you're doing is under the microscope of the entire planet Earth. That's crazy.

(Trey Connell at 00:47:27)
It's very crazy. Yeah. That's why I say it was interesting and just really neat to watch, at least from afar, how they handled all of those challenges. And yeah, being under that kind of microscope, especially when it comes to security—it's one thing if, "Oh, you know, Zoom's down today, too much traffic, too many users, whatever." That's kind of a pain. But you know, when you had people showing up in meetings they weren't supposed to be in, it's like, "Oh, wait a minute." But they seem to handle it so professionally and just expedited all of that. Really, I was very surprised, and it's pretty cool.

(Joel Beasley at 00:48:12)
Yeah. It shows that they had their infrastructure in place.

(Trey Connell at 00:48:15)
Yes.

(Joel Beasley at 00:48:15)
And really solid because for them to deploy such large security changes so quickly, you can't do that without already having a way to do it.

(Trey Connell at 00:48:25)
Right. Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:48:26)
Yeah. It's hard to figure out new things. New processes—that's what I'm learning as my business grows. Getting new people to do new things or new processes, it's not easy. It just really isn't. It's one thing—I guess my experience from managing engineers is okay because we're working on this project and you know how to work projects. But when you're doing the higher level business stuff of actually creating new processes and trying them and taking a scientific approach and testing them and then getting the people to make slight—you know, they'll make the changes, but you still have to go through, like, "Okay, we gotta make some changes." Yeah. It's hard to change your routines as a person. I don't care if they're personal routines or professional routines. It's hard to do it.

(Trey Connell at 00:49:08)
Yeah. And a lot of times—you know, we talked about acquisitions earlier—I think processes and going in and evaluating processes or lack thereof is almost as important, if not more important, than evaluating the technology position of a company or its offerings or what have you. A lot of times, technology is going to be technology, right? It's probably gonna be several years old. I'm sure you could look at pretty much anything and immediately identify three to five things that you wanna revamp, rebuild, redesign, upgrade, and so forth. But if the people and the processes aren't in place, or at least to a degree where you feel like you can bring it home—you know, you can take it to the next level—then that's a nonstarter, in my opinion. That's when you're able to say no and should. But yeah, processes are absolutely key. I think sometimes more than the technology.

(Joel Beasley at 00:50:07)
How do you track—we use a spreadsheet over here. We start tracking all the processes by department, like, not on an incredibly granular level, but on a "here's a process that we know connects back to revenue." That's how you know it's important, right? So it's like, how close is this process to revenue? And then we grouped all these processes by department, and then what we're going through and doing is we're just every month picking one or two processes to just improve. Like, let's just refine our sales process a little bit. Let's make it 10% easier for salespeople to work here. Let's make it just slightly better email outreach, slightly better this, and then we just focus on each of these core processes, and it really pays off. It's like all of these small little things done well make the biggest impact versus big swings all the time.

(Trey Connell at 00:50:57)
Yeah. We do the same thing. We track everything. We have a few large spreadsheets floating around that we keep updated. So when we—for example, we have key metrics that we track in those spreadsheets for when we build new websites, right, or deploy our new product, Continuum, the new publishing product. When we just started that for Duet, we're tracking, "Okay, here were the steps we need to take or that we thought we needed to take and what we did." Now let's identify what are those key metrics we wanna start tracking ongoing as we bring more customers onto that product. And we do the same thing. It's just spreadsheets. Some of them rather large, but it's constantly—every time we go through the process, we look at it and see if it's successful. A lot of times what was successful a year ago is no longer successful. The environment changes, customers change, needs change. And so we're constantly looking to adapt and revisit those processes whenever we can. And that's not only just processes supporting onboarding and revenue activities. It's also customer service. It's customer support, after-hour support. It's help desk. It's everything that goes into being a technology company and supporting customers. We just last week, in fact, uncovered a large hole in our help desk software. Nothing wrong with the software, but it was just a gap in our coverage in a certain scenario that we hadn't encountered before, but we didn't have the coverage that we needed in a particular situation. And so we were able to recognize that pretty quickly and then go fix that immediately to where we had that coverage. So I think it's just constantly analyzing and revisiting those processes too because things are gonna change outside of even our company, outside of our technology that we need to adapt to. So just constantly keeping our eye on that ball.

(Joel Beasley at 00:52:53)
Yeah. I definitely put customer success and support under revenue-generating activity because—

(Trey Connell at 00:52:58)
That's true. Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:53:00)
Most of your business is often referral business or—you know, some of the best deals that close the fastest are referral deals when somebody will say, "Look, I've tried everything under the sun. This is the product that works. Go do this." And if you trust that person professionally and in the recommendation, you're just gonna go through that process. And if everything goes smooth, you're gonna execute, and it'll be a quick sale because it's hard because our brains constantly are forgetting that the reason why people buy is to solve a problem, right? They're buying to solve a problem so they can move on and do something else in their life.

(Trey Connell at 00:53:35)
Right.

(Joel Beasley at 00:53:36)
Right?

(Trey Connell at 00:53:36)
Yes. Absolutely.

(Joel Beasley at 00:53:37)
Right? So it's interesting to always bring yourself back to, you know, what is this problem that I'm solving, and let's be the best solution to this problem so that whether they like us or not as people, we'll have the best tool.

(Trey Connell at 00:53:53)
Yeah. I think sometimes, yeah, it's not even—like you say, those things are revenue-related for sure. Probably margin-related is more appropriate that I think people sometimes spend too much time on. You know, you can sit—like, for example, in our case, I mean, I can sit and look at the steps that we take and what kind of margin we can make on designing, building, and launching a website, right? And that's great if I can make some margin there. It's great if I can increase that margin over time after new learnings. But as I say, I mean, if I don't provide great customer service ongoing, it's not gonna matter what that margin was, right? Because that customer is not gonna be a customer for very long. So while we do look at things like margin, you will not hear us talk about it around the shop basically at all. It's just not a measure of success that we use around ePublishing, talking around the water cooler about what margin we made on that last deal. No.

(Joel Beasley at 00:54:50)
It's like a compass, you know, or it's like something you do with planning. It's like, if we're gonna go into this line of business, we wanna do it well. In order to do it well, we need great people and the best resources to execute on this project. To that, our requirement is cash. To get cash, requirement's margin. So like, let's pick where we're gonna spend our time based off of—yeah, that's like a piece of the pie. I'm curious. You've been at ePublishing like twenty years, right?

(Trey Connell at 00:55:19)
Today is twenty years.

(Joel Beasley at 00:55:24)
What? Congratulations. Yeah. This is exciting.

(Trey Connell at 00:55:26)
Yeah. It's—I thought I was gonna get away with it. You know, that's the other thing we do each month is announce anniversaries. And we have for certain, like, one year, three years, five years, ten years, and so forth. We do little rewards, bonuses, and things. And so, anyway, we had a really cool September because we had one of our lead developers who's just been killing it for us—he's been here a year today. One of our lead project managers, actually our senior project manager who leads up all of our builds and onboarding a new customer, she's been here one year. And then we have one of our back-end developers who's actually responsible for that GraphQL API that I mentioned, almost single-handedly over the last couple of years. He's been here ten years this month. So that was really fun to announce to the crew, and so I did that. And then, you know, lo and behold, someone came later on and sent an email and said, "Oh, by the way, Trey's old." And so I've been catching quite a bit of ribbing this morning as I'm watching my emails come through. People—I think someone sent me a picture of like Gandalf at a laptop. That's great. Thanks.

(Joel Beasley at 00:56:43)
Nice. They're showing you some love, giving you some interesting memes.

(Trey Connell at 00:56:46)
Right. Yeah. I'm excited to—it's been exciting to kind of, as I've watched, like, "Whoo, I can see twenty coming," and to now finally reach that. You know, it's important, but it's important to me too from—I think the biggest advantage to that is in hiring and in having people stay on long-term with us to have examples. And it's not just me. Like I said, we had another one of our leaders past ten years. I have another two or three that have been over fifteen. So, you know, to have that strong longevity and loyalty, that base, that means a lot when new potential employees and so forth are evaluating ePublishing and whether that's a company they wanna come work for and be a part of. And you know, I think that speaks volumes about us to have so many people that have been here for such a long time. And yeah, it says a lot about our company.

(Joel Beasley at 00:57:48)
Yeah. It says a lot about the leadership there. It says you guys have good leaders that care. And it's amazing when you rattle off these people—you know, ten, fifteen years, you've been there twenty. Obviously, you guys are crushing it on the culture side of things.

(Trey Connell at 00:58:03)
Yeah. I like to think so. You know, we've got—and I think this year has really taught us even more about ourselves, you know, in terms of just being human and everybody slowing down and I think being a little more—even more attentive to each other and kind and so forth. So I think, if anything, it's just made us better, you know, through the challenges that we and everyone has had this year. So like I said, I'm really excited to see where we're going from here. We're finally at a point where I feel like we're kind of cresting that hill of, you know, becoming more, I would call it, more product-centric than service-based in many ways. And so that's gonna be a really exciting 2021 to glue all of that together and go that direction. So it'll be a new frontier for us and a new approach to life from a company standpoint. So it's gonna be really exciting.

(Joel Beasley at 00:59:01)
Yeah. You get better margins on product, but service lets you understand the market. That's like something I didn't understand because my previous roles were just building platforms with large engineering teams and never—and then like selling them off or just doing it as contract work. But actually being the CEO and operating a business, it's like you want the product, but the only way you can finance yourself spending time with the customers long enough to really figure out what product's going to be right is by having some service-related business on the front end, spending time with them, delivering them value, understanding them. And then that's why I think some of the most successful startups are startups that spin out of larger companies. So you get these bright people, and they see this problem happening over and over and over, and they know that there's budget to solve the problem, and then they spin it out. And—I mean, this is like, you know, Zoom being one of them. Eric's story was he was upset that—he was working at GoToMeeting. He was like the head engineer at GoToMeeting. Did you know that?

(Trey Connell at 01:00:01)
I didn't realize that. Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 01:00:02)
Yeah. I think it—I think it was that brand. I'm pretty sure it was, but he was seeing these new technologies and these new method—or Webex. He was at Webex. He was seeing these new technologies come out, and he was telling his team, like, "Hey, we gotta switch." And like, "No, we've already invested. We're so invested in this other technology. We're so invested in this other package, but yeah, another startup's gonna come around and eat our lunch with this better technology." And they're like, "No, we're not doing it." And so he left and got money to start a competitor, and he started Zoom. And he just did exactly that. He ate all of our lunches with that. It's just you're in the position, you see it, you know it needs to be done. I mean, obviously, it's been like ten, eleven, twelve years for him to get his victory lap, but that's no time at all, right?

(Trey Connell at 01:00:49)
It's really not. No. So yeah. Yeah. I had no idea that he came from Webex.

(Trey Connell at 01:00:54) That's pretty cool. And you see that all the time. I mean, it does feel like everyone we talk about in, especially in technology, but, you know, it's like, oh, they used to be at Google, they used to be Apple, they used to be at Microsoft.

(Trey Connell at 01:01:06) You know, they seem to be in these larger companies sometimes, and then sometimes, like you say, you know, just forming direct competitors, you know, to those companies when they spin out. So, yeah, it does seem to be an innovation path that's pretty common.

(Joel Beasley at 01:01:20) Yeah. It's definitely an area that I lack experience in because, like, I didn't work in large companies. Like, I was a vendor to large companies, and you kind of get a taste for it, but you don't actually have to live out the grind. Right?

(Trey Connell at 01:01:35) Right.

(Joel Beasley at 01:01:35) Like, I'll interact with them and I hear them talking about the stories and everything like that. And I, you know, still know how to run the teams and build out large teams and all that stuff. But, like, one thing I played with in my head a while was, like, why don't I just go work at, like, a really large company as, like, a VP of engineering or, like, a CTO of, like, the United States, you know, US part of their company and get some larger enterprise experience. And then I was like, nah.

(Trey Connell at 01:02:04) Yeah. Right.

(Joel Beasley at 01:02:06) Nah. I like the fact that, like, you know, I own the company. We have scale. Like, I just like that I'm always learning and that I have control. I'm, like, a big fan of, like, being in control of my own destiny.

(Trey Connell at 01:02:21) Absolutely. Yeah. That's one of the things, you know, I'd be lying if I said otherwise. It's one of the things I love about ePublishing as well. You know?

(Trey Connell at 01:02:31) Not that I want us to stay small or, you know, obviously, I want us to grow and continue to grow. But at the same time, yeah, I did the Fortune 500 company thing for a couple of years, you know, twenty years ago, and it's not for me. Yeah. I like things where, you know—and I, of course, have, you know, friends and people I know, contacts that work for companies like that, and it's the same story all the time. They get frustrated because, you know, it's like trying to turn the Titanic around, you know, in the ocean, and we just don't have that problem at ePublishing.

(Trey Connell at 01:03:07) Small businesses typically don't have that problem. We can move. We can go down a path for two months, decide that was the wrong way, burn it to the ground, and, you know, go a different direction. You know? And we're, having that agility is really important to me.

(Trey Connell at 01:03:22) Being able to figure things out on the fly and then be able to move and groove according to what you're learning in real time is a big deal. You know, I don't want to get two years down the road, and then as you say, you know, then the excuse becomes, no, we're too heavily invested. You know, we're in it now. We're going to stick to it.

(Trey Connell at 01:03:40) And I don't envy that position for people who have to be there.

(Joel Beasley at 01:03:45) Yeah. It's like you know you need to turn right now, and then you can't.

(Trey Connell at 01:03:50) Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 01:03:50) That's the most frustrating thing. It's like, what am I even doing? Like, I'm waking up all day. It's like, I've got to sit here and wait three months for this to go through. Like, this is the thing that needs to happen in the next order of operations—

(Trey Connell at 01:04:02) Yeah. For us.

(Joel Beasley at 01:04:03) —to make progress. Yeah. But I find that companies that still have their founders have that a lot less. They have a lot less trouble when a company still has its founder. I think the biggest problems happen when, like, you start rotating CEOs and it's board controlled and there's no, like, connection. There's no, like, soul in the company anymore.

(Joel Beasley at 01:04:21) There's no, like, leadership in, like, a genuine way. Like, I've seen CEOs hired, like, salary CEOs hired that are genuine, and then I've seen some that are disingenuous. But, like, when you have that—and I don't even know how to articulate it better than that word—but when you have that, like, connection with what you're doing and you really care, then the companies seem to all be on the same team. And it's like when the parents aren't home and that person doesn't care, it's like all this internal chaos happens, and that sucks up all the energy within the organization.

(Trey Connell at 01:04:55) Yeah. And, you know, a lot of times those leadership positions are filled by people who they don't necessarily have the passion for what that company is doing or that particular set of products, you know, is meant to do or to serve. It's more just about whether it's a stock price, you know, or, you know, whether it's just the, you know, I must meet these key goals in, you know, the next fiscal year. You know, that's the other thing that we don't have to deal with. You know, our CEO and owner, you know, Tom's in the middle of the product vision, you know, daily.

(Trey Connell at 01:05:29) You know, he's not just letting it run itself. He's literally pointing the direction, you know, from a vision standpoint. And like you said, he's been doing that since the beginning, obviously. And so when you have a CEO or at the very tip top of the food chain for a company that's that involved, that's that invested, that's that passionate, I mean, that just permeates throughout the entire company, and people are going to latch on to that and love working there.

(Trey Connell at 01:05:57) You know, it's a big deal. No one wants to have the absentee landlord, you know, CEO when you're trying to get things done and trying to innovate and do great things for your customers.

(Joel Beasley at 01:06:08) Yeah. You've got to think about Trey's retirement.

(Trey Connell at 01:06:13) Yep. What's this retirement you speak of?

(Joel Beasley at 01:06:17) No. I do—it's the future. Like, I mean, I don't think I'll—I don't know. I don't know if I'll ever retire. I just like what I do, but there's definitely something to be said for, like, doing different projects.

(Joel Beasley at 01:06:31) Like, there's—like, you could get a job as a CTO of a Fortune 500 company. Like, that would be, like, if you take a generalized professional view, some people would say it's a step up. That might not be a step up for you and your view because of the lifestyle and the culture that you want. Right? But you could say, like, you going out and starting something, you going out to, like, Fortune 500 or, like, a just a larger thing or maybe, like, a fast growing startup.

(Joel Beasley at 01:06:59) You know, that's right around the size you are. So, like, the next challenge for you. Right? And you want to make sure that, like, as you go and you complete these challenges and these missions that you're, like, getting something longer term out of them for your investment in them. And, you know, most people from the research I've done, they make the most amount of their money in their career in their fifties.

(Joel Beasley at 01:07:21) They're going to make the most. They're going to—like, what they're going to make in their fifties is going to trump, like, what they made in their thirties and their forties, just based on the financial data that I reviewed. But—

(Trey Connell at 01:07:32) Especially in leadership positions, that makes total sense. You know, you're just building upon that wealth of experience and knowledge and, you know, you should, you know, be commanding more and benefiting more from all of that work, you know, that you put in in your thirties and forties.

(Joel Beasley at 01:07:45) Yeah. It's amazing how, like, for me, one of my investors was talking to me and he said, "Joel," like, he just sold another one of his companies, this investor, and he said, "Joel, I want you to remember that it's so important to pay yourself first." Because, you know, he'll see the company finances and, like, me not taking money or taking money at different times and, like, obviously, way less than what I should be, you know, making. And he's like, "I just want you to know, like, it's important to pay yourself and, like, pay yourself first. So that way, like, you're always in a good position because you're the head of the company."

(Joel Beasley at 01:08:24) And if you're not in a good position and you're not thinking straight, that's not good for the company. And so it's just interesting to hear, you know, someone with much more experience than me who's also an investor in the company come to me after selling his company and just saying, "Hey. Here's some of the takeaways, you know, that I think would be valuable to you." And I was like, "Yeah. That is definitely good stuff."

(Joel Beasley at 01:08:48) And then I just put it in a plan and take action on it.

(Trey Connell at 01:08:51) Yeah. How's your—are you working on the second book now? Or—

(Joel Beasley at 01:08:57) Yeah. So we're working on the second book. We're calling it Tech Titans.

(Trey Connell at 01:09:00) Okay.

(Joel Beasley at 01:09:00) And what we've—the layout we have for that is the chapters will be organized by topics, like culture, right, like different, like hiring, different types of systems. So we've got these, like, 15 recurring topics. And then what we did was we picked, like, the best insight and advice from all these different guests per topic. So you go into culture, and there's, like, four or five CTOs on these different concepts within culture. And then the last chapter or the last section of that chapter is me, like, summarizing it and bringing it all together.

(Joel Beasley at 01:09:36) So it's kind of, like, partly quotes of them giving insight on topics and then a summary of me bringing it together with, like, a little story. And we figured that you could definitely read through it front to back, but I think it'll be adopted most widely by people buying it as, like, a reference book. Yeah. So it's like, okay. I'm dealing with some culture issues.

(Joel Beasley at 01:09:57) This month, let's open up the—let's dust off the book, open up the culture section, and see what's going on there.

(Trey Connell at 01:10:02) That sounds great. I'll definitely be on the lookout for that. I've been wondering, you know, if you were working on it and kind of how that was going. So that's really cool.

(Joel Beasley at 01:10:09) We are. We started the leadership company. We raised some money. We put it out there. We kind of—like we had some issues with it, not the technology, just, like, the business learnings.

(Joel Beasley at 01:10:20) And in that process, needing revenue, we ended up selling sponsorships on the podcast, and then the sponsorship podcast revenue, after a few months, outgrew, took over, and was making more than the leadership company. And so leadership company was, like, costing 80% and making 20%, and the podcasting was making 80% and costing 20%—margin story. Right? So we just said, let's shift all of our sales resources to podcast, and now we're growing. We have, like, seven people.

(Joel Beasley at 01:10:53) I don't know. Jake, correct me if I'm wrong, but we're hiring more salespeople, and we think that—because this part of the interview will be cut off, it was just me talking—we think that the podcast can generate around $3.6 million a year, and right now we're under $1 million a year. So we are going to try to grow it all the way up to $3.6 million a year and run into all the issues you run into there.

(Joel Beasley at 01:11:18) Right? That'd be about, like, 12 salespeople. And then after that, what we plan on doing is, like, going to other properties, like other technology podcasts or other technology blogs and newsletters, and letting us be the sales team for them because a lot of them are just independent owners or they may be, like, have one part-time person.

(Trey Connell at 01:11:40) Mm-hmm.

(Joel Beasley at 01:11:40) And we have, like, a full super professional sales process. So we're—you know, do revenue share. You know, they make 40%, and they just get their 60%, and they don't have to deal with interface with the customers. And then we just essentially become like a media agency so that our current customers, they're buying podcast advertising awareness in the tech space. Right?

(Trey Connell at 01:12:03) Right.

(Joel Beasley at 01:12:03) And so, you know, next year, we could either, like, the only product we have is, like, we'll sell them, "Come back on the podcast again." Right?

(Trey Connell at 01:12:11) Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 01:12:12) But now we can say, okay, we can put you in this newsletter, that program, this TV show, and we can have more things for them to buy to keep it fresh every year, and we just keep building our book of business. So we've kind of learned this customer. We've learned their problem. That's what I'm saying, like, with our service business.

(Joel Beasley at 01:12:29) Through this whole podcasting thing, we've even considered building, like, reporting is really difficult. So someone comes on the show and they want stats, but we did, like, 10 Facebook posts, Twitter posts, LinkedIn posts, you know, and they got all these views, likes, and comments, but, like, there's no tools that allow us to pull it back together and share it with the people. Like, you can—there are tools that look like you could do that, but they're not really. Like, that's the most frustrating thing in the world, isn't it? Like, when you're looking for a tool and all their sales pages, like, it looks like they can do it.

(Joel Beasley at 01:12:59) It looks like they're solving the problem. Right?

(Trey Connell at 01:13:01) Open it up, you're just like, nope.

(Joel Beasley at 01:13:06) Yeah. Been there. Seen that.

(Joel Beasley at 01:13:08) Yeah.

(Trey Connell at 01:13:08) Well, that's awesome. I mean, it's just so cool that, you know, I got an email from you guys. And, of course, I know you're still around, but just to see the success that you've had and how you've been able to—I felt like, you know, podcasts have taken off, like, you know, as you know. I mean, it's just such an incredible movement in podcasts, and it feels like I don't know if I have my timing correct, but it felt like you were kind of up on the beginnings of the resurrection of that.

(Trey Connell at 01:13:33) You know, podcasts were big many years ago, and then they sort of died. And then all of a sudden, they exploded again, and it feels like you were kind of on the front lines of that, you know, back a couple years ago or whatever.

(Joel Beasley at 01:13:44) Yeah. We came in at, like, the perfect timing. Right? Like, it just kind of happened, and I just worked my face off doing all those episodes. And then we created a supply and demand issue where people wanted to come on, but we are booked up six months in advance.

(Joel Beasley at 01:14:01) And then we said, all right, well, let's do different slots of time, and we will allow some slots to be premium, and then people can pay to not wait six months. And then we got some customers, learned, and then we figured out how to do, like, outreach and our market size. And that's how we figured out the size of our—like, what the podcast can make. And then we're like, well, now that we have sales infrastructure and we know this customer, why not just sell other podcasts? And because my biggest concern, Trey, especially when talking about, like, family and retirement type stuff, I always think, like, really long term, is how do I make it so that the business is profitable and continues to provide money for my family if I die tomorrow?

(Joel Beasley at 01:14:45) And that's, like, really important to me. So, like, my family will be fine because my wife owns her little company that she just started, and it's growing, but I want to—like, I want to think about it like that. And the way I can do that is by selling other media that's not just coming on the podcast.

(Trey Connell at 01:15:03) Right. No. That's great. That's really cool how that sort of evolved out of the podcast like that. It is. So congrats, man. You're killing it. That's awesome.

(Joel Beasley at 01:15:13) Thank you. All right. Well, we'll wrap up. This is exciting. Any introductions that you need, you just let me know, and I'll gladly hook it up. And then we'll connect again next year because you're awesome. It's always great having you.

(Trey Connell at 01:15:24) Hey, man. I appreciate it. Hope you have a great one, and thanks for having me on.

(Joel Beasley at 01:15:27) Thank you so much. See you, Trey.

(Trey Connell at 01:15:29) All right. Bye, Joel.

(Joel Beasley at 01:15:32) Thank you so much for listening. And if you found this episode useful, please share it with a friend or colleague who you think would get value from it. And if you have topics that you would like to hear discussed on the podcast, either add me on LinkedIn or send me an email: [email protected]. Every time I get an email or LinkedIn message, it absolutely makes my day and inspires me to keep going.