Patrick Osterhaus - CTO at Protera

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:00) Hello, my friends. Today we are talking to Patrick, the CTO at Protera, and we discuss the path to becoming a successful entrepreneur, how to always keep the focus on bringing value to the customer, and what it takes to promote change within an organization. All of this right here, right now on the Modern CTO Podcast.

(Patrick at 00:00:20) Here we go.

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:21) This is the Modern CTO Podcast.

(Patrick at 00:00:32) Hello. Hello. Hey, Joel. It's a very nice office setup you got.

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:37) Yeah. Check it out. This is fake.

(Patrick at 00:00:40) It looks good. I was looking at a wall like that in the wood, but it looks real as can be.

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:46) I know. Jake made it, our producer. It's actually foam. It's like foam with wallpaper on it.

(Patrick at 00:00:53) It looks great. And I've been reading your book.

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:56) Oh, yeah?

(Patrick at 00:00:56) The one with the lion. Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:58) What do you think so far?

(Patrick at 00:00:59) Kindle. It's very good. And, you know, I was going to say this in our discussion. When I heard the first time I heard CTO, I was like, what is that? And I Googled it, and there was nothing. So, thankfully, you have a book now to describe what the role is and how you can get advice if you're told you could be a CTO someday. So, yeah, I think you did a great service to help everyone.

(Joel Beasley at 00:01:23) Thank you. When I saw—I've done a Google search for CTO books before I wrote it and there was like nothing. So there were two or three books, but they were written like a long time ago and they were not very good. And so I was like, all right, let's just try to rather than try to be an expert on the topic. I was more so like, let's just share what I know and be as real about it. But it was interesting. I learned a lot from writing it because people expect two different things, like half the world expects instructions, right? And then the other half of the world likes stories and understanding. So what happened was it got like five stars and was doing really well because it was just selling within like referrals and people, but then it got popular enough on Amazon that people were buying it to try to understand the CTO role from like they're just interested in learning, and they were upset that it wasn't written that way. So it's like making software or building a product or a company, like, your first iteration of it, it's out there and you kind of like hate it a little bit.

(Patrick at 00:02:28) Well, and that's a good sign because you grew so much since then. And you know how to improve it. It's interesting because the first time I looked at it, my first question is, you know, this role, everything I could find was comparing CTO versus CIO. That was the only information I really could discover. So the fact, you know, that you took the sole focus on what a CTO is and what the job entails and how to be successful on it, that's, you know, I think a unique position, unique view.

(Joel Beasley at 00:02:55) Yeah. And then it's also—

(Patrick at 00:02:56) Helping a lot of people.

(Joel Beasley at 00:02:57) Yeah. And then it's also changed because I can't remember how many interviews I had done before the book released. I think it was like 50, but we're close to like 300, 400 now. I think like 230 or something have been released and I have learned so much more. So I was trying to figure out like how to structure the next book and all of that. But I see you. Look at all that music. You're in your music room.

(Patrick at 00:03:21) It's probably best described as my kids' music room. My kids are really big into music and I've always liked the idea of music. I love music, but to learn it, so I'm starting to take lessons myself, but I'm an amateur. I don't even know if that qualifies.

(Joel Beasley at 00:03:37) So who's into it? Which kids?

(Patrick at 00:03:39) My son. My son is 15 now. So he's been into it probably 10 years. Started with piano, got into guitar, and drums. So, you know, he's that natural curiosity bleeds into both my kids. My daughter's more into singing. So when the whole COVID thing started, I had to take over the room because it was a nice, you know, sequestered in the basement. I can close off the doors and they can't hear me. I can't hear them. So yeah. But it's been a problem because they have to schedule their music time. But it's been nice because it's a nice distraction during the day, you know, to get a few minutes. You can try to learn something. So one of the things I want to ask you about, what is the typical CTO look like? Is it typically a developer that they come from that source? Or are you seeing that change over time where it's not the case? Or because I'm curious about how I came into being in the role and if it's a typical path or if it's a little atypical. And I can describe a little—

(Joel Beasley at 00:04:33) About the company.

(Patrick at 00:04:35) Yeah. Yeah. Absolutely. I think it's a little funny because I'll get there, and I'll try to make a concise version. But I started comp sci in college. Went to University of Iowa where I grew up. My first job offer I got at Motorola in Chicago. And I think you have a lot of connections at the Chicago—

(Joel Beasley at 00:04:54) I do.

(Patrick at 00:04:55) The Motorola Mobility, I think. I was looking at your profile. And so we probably have some common groups that we worked with, but I worked within the very first group of Motorola's, they called the RNSG group. And that group actually was the very first group that was experimenting with digital. So at the time, you probably don't know this company. It's probably before you start working, but it was a company called Nextel. And their big thing was you click the button. It was like a walkie talkie, but it was—

(Joel Beasley at 00:05:23) Are you kidding me? Nextel?

(Patrick at 00:05:24) I grew up—

(Joel Beasley at 00:05:25) You remember Nextel? Come on. That was like the phone—we got cell phones in high school. That's like when people started getting like, when phones started hitting the market really big for consumers.

(Patrick at 00:05:34) Okay. Good. Good. So you remember the terms. That group actually literally came from the group. I—it was a small group, about 15 people. I was in factory support. The group, if I remember correctly, was called IDEN, Integrated Data Enhanced Network. And the big idea then was they're trying to compress the data, and they're having a lot of problems with the sampling being very choppy. This is back in 90, 94. So that's how I got exposed to the data center idea, supporting computer systems, and got exposed to an application. At the time, it was red hot, white hot even, in the market called SAP. It's a very large multinational, you know, application, actually, largest ERP in the world, competes with Microsoft and Oracle. So at that time, learned large computer systems. Had the opportunity then to get a job at SAP itself, and I worked there for two years. Had really great experience getting mentorship from ProPitel. He's actually still been, moving up in SAP still there. Very grateful for all the things I've learned about just, you know, becoming a technical consultant and what's important with working with large enterprises. Because really that was essentially my first, you know, interaction with Motorola supporting customer systems and then going out and recommending how to build systems and upgrading and such. It was quite a different challenge. So I think that was one of the big things looking back. Just grateful. Being grateful is that mentoring, having people that help you and guide you, not just the textbook guidance. And today, you have Google and you can look on the Internet to get advice. Back then, that didn't exist. But just the fact that you have someone guiding you who's saying, you know, I found this to be successful and, you know, showing you the path essentially, showing the shortcuts. That then in '98—so I started the company 22 years ago, and it was coming up to our 22nd anniversary in October '98. You know, it said put up the signpost, they say, started the company, just, you know, had a natural interest. And, you know, I've always been interested about this idea of doing business. And I figured at the time, I wasn't married yet, didn't have children. I thought this is the time. If any time in my life, this is the time to try it. So gave it a try, '98. Started just doing computer consulting for the first year or two. Fell into, over time, started doing a full cycle implementations for three companies: Kohler Company, which does the fixtures up in Wisconsin. You know, they have a lot of sinks and bathroom, appliances, all this. A good, good, great company. Been around for over a hundred years. Kimberly Clark, which the Kleenex people, and then Rockwell Automation, which same company that did all the great stuff in the sixties and seventies with NASA and, you know, the Apollo programs. So worked with them in up to 2005. So that was the base of the first 10 years of the business. I'm sorry. 2008. Around that year I had a chance encounter with a guy I met in my very first job, and his name is Dean Andrinopoulos. He is now our CEO. And he asked, hey, you interested in doing business together? He just recently sold a company at that time to IBM and was looking to get back in the market just a couple years after that happened. So we started out just doing technical consulting. So I should mention, I hired my first employee over those first 10 years, and it was basically the three of us. Him, myself, my wife for the first 10 years is, you know, trying to keep the lights on, just trying to keep busy, doing consulting for those three companies. Totally grateful for that. So just keeping, you know, the company profitable and keep it possible for the future. So in 2008, had the chance to, you know, join up with Dean. He's still our CEO as a partner, and we then focused on managed services. And at that time, you know, we wanted to see how we could expand off just technical consulting and go into managed services, taking care of computer systems. This is pre-cloud. So at that time, we actually bought our own hardware, had servers. You know, at the time, these were about $30,000 to install a sizable SAP system. Frankly, it's sort of a funny story. The very first time I heard about VMware, and this is, you know, this is the frank, you know, real story is, we're doing a migration for a company, and I got an image of a VMDK image. I had no idea what it even was. I had, like, literally, at the time Google existed, found out that this is an image and, you know, you can import this file to build a system. So that was our first foray learning VMware. And, you know, we supported that system through this POC, moved them into our data centers, and we continued that business for the next three years. So always, you know, one of the things that Dean and myself always been very important to us is bootstrapping it. So we've always built it as we could, you know, as we could prove that we could get into a new area of the business to expand it, you know, so it's all been organic. So that's been, you know, literally the first, you know, until about 2011, at which time—and I should mention we had some, two, you know, the hiring is a big, big concern always, you know, growing the business. What's the next resource? Where should you budget and spend the money, capital allocation in that? And so we focused our first actual executive that we hired to build our teams around sales. And I'm a technical person, so seeing that part of the business was very new to me. Understanding, okay. You know, you've got to invest in the sales part before you can build the delivery part. So our first key executive hires were around sales with Sam, and he's still with our company. And also then with our technical solutions in the pre-sales part with Carl. So that was about almost 10 years ago that they joined, and we just continued to innovate and, you know, build that managed service in the hosting business. So then getting into 2011, that was probably one of the biggest transformation moments, and that was when AWS was introduced to us by SAP themselves. And at that time, the idea was SAP was looking at the cloud providers that they could basically certify their application to go into the cloud. And that was a big, big transition and still is. It's one of our biggest areas that we help customers with is the complexity of moving those applications in a public cloud. So we were introduced and invited to help write technical documentation and do the testing around moving these systems and what that idea of, you know, hybrid cloud, integrating their existing on-premise environments to these cloud environments. So that took a good six months and that really started the transformation of our company to go from this on-premise world into cloud. And that's where we've been really since the last decade. So that's last 10 years we've been moving companies in the private to public cloud from on-premise as well as, you know, around that journey in 2014, we saw this need for doing it a better way. You know, like, the big moment was we have two experts. They go out on a customer site. It takes them a week to assess it and then start moving these systems, and we quickly saw that, you know, it's just not going to scale. So that's where, you know, the necessity is the mother of invention, you know, that phrase that, hey, we've got to do something different. And that's where the idea of development came in. That first, it was with scripting, and then it was, you know, there's a better way. Let's look at some Java ways that we could, the programming integrate, maybe create an application to do this, and that's where we started to build the dev team. So that's the full circle is that's when I got introduced the idea of being a CTO because at that time, the role was building new technologies, taking what's existing in the market and making it special for the SAP customers themselves and creating things if they didn't exist, looking at how we could do that ourselves. And so that was really where I was introduced back into the idea of doing development. I did it in college, did a little bit my first job, but it was almost 20 years later. So I think it's a little atypical path because then, you know, the CTO idea, that's when I was saying when I had to Google what the CTO role is because I was like, I'm not sure what this role is that I'm performing. And come to find out it's, you know, that role of innovation, building product, continually, you know, basically being the spokesperson or evangelist for the technology in your company, that really is all parts of that CTO role. So that's sort of the long story of how I got to the role and, you know, learning about it.

(Joel Beasley at 00:13:33) Yeah. And you're exactly right. Like, there's, our, you know, earlier I was like, well, it's really hard and nuanced, but if I do take like a step back, those items you mentioned are very, very common within the CTO role. But I always like to take the opportunity to pull people away from the title because what—because here's the trap you get into. Right? You get into, what is the, you search for the information on what's the responsibilities of this role. Right? But what you don't get in those responses back is a detailed breakdown of the different stages of that role. Because what you're going to be doing as a CTO when you have 10 people is different than when you're at 10,000 people. And so you've got this moving target and you've got all these people, this entire spectrum of people searching for this one answer and then for many of those people or for at least a portion of them, what they're going to get back is off, isn't necessarily aligned with where they're at currently.

(Joel Beasley at 00:14:43) Right? So then if they tried to go implement these roles and they were trying to do things that a CTO at maybe 10,000 people are doing, right, when they have 10 people, they might be completely off, spinning their wheels. So I always try to bring the opportunity, or I always try to use it as an opportunity to bring it back to—I guess I could come up with a better definition. I'll work on this outside of the podcast, outside of this conversation, but it would be—

(Patrick at 00:15:09) It's in a new book?

(Joel Beasley at 00:15:10) Yeah, it's in a new book. You would have to do it on principles, right? You would have to say that there's principles to it, and then one of those things would have to be understanding what the organization needs today and then being able to fill that in. So I would say a good CTO would even be able to identify there's a lack of sales and install a salesperson on the sales side of the organization. For me, when you were saying that, man, I identified so closely with you, Patrick, because my previous experience was building contract applications. So I'd build something for two or three years, sell it, and make good money and have a team, but I never operationally ran a business. And when I did, when I've been doing it, not understanding what an expert in sales looks like, what a pipeline looks like, what the whole world of sales—not understanding how that looks done, like a day-to-day thing, was the thing I would go back 10 years and tell myself. I'd say, go find someone who loves technology the way you love technology. Find that person in the sales world.

(Joel Beasley at 00:16:18) Find the salesperson who obsesses and loves best practices in sales and reads all the books and understands and just really cares, and that's like they're driven to do their sales thing. Because now, my business is still small. You know, we're under 15 people. But there is nothing stopping us from getting into, like, billion-dollar, huge organization, because what it is is these basic principles. You lay a solid foundation, and then you create an environment where it can grow. And as long as you're limited by your market cap—so as long as you're in a place where the market cap is there, you're aware of your market opportunity—then you can just keep growing that system.

(Joel Beasley at 00:16:56) But it sounds like when you were describing those first 10 years, it sounds like if you could have gone back and talked to yourself, you would have got that salesperson a lot faster.

(Patrick at 00:17:06) Absolutely. Because you see it from that tactical viewpoint, and I think that's, you know, it's the hang-up not just for CTOs. It's human growth in general, because you don't know what you don't know. And so I think it's very important, especially in product, that you look for the flaws, you look for critical feedback, and you seek that out. You want to understand what doesn't work for people, especially—you always want to have opportunities and learn, that frank feedback on how you can improve. And not just yourself, but also for products and development.

(Patrick at 00:17:39) But yeah, do you see, talking to CTOs, that one path—it was a struggle for me, and I see that in just professional development around with IT people especially—that they want to know everything themselves and are not willing to give away ownership of those other pieces? And, you know, while they grow and to understand they have to give that up to be able to get to that next level. And I see that working with IT people, especially. Maybe it's not in other disciplines.

(Joel Beasley at 00:18:09) I'm getting goosebumps right now. That's for me, that's my personal—that's the thing I'm very self-aware of. My big, big issue that I'm always paying attention to is not trying to understand 100% of everything. Because I think also my consulting work that I'd done, basically, you know, for those 10 years, essentially going into a business, completely wrapping my mind around how it works, and then building them applications to serve them better—I had this need to wrap my mind around all the details because what I was doing and getting paid for was very important and detail-oriented.

(Patrick at 00:18:44) Um—

(Joel Beasley at 00:18:45) Yeah. So what I noticed now is I'm always just hyper-aware of that, like letting go of things, delegating. And what I found—the trick is there—because it wasn't working for me for a while. I just kept cycling through people and not being able to do it. You have to find the person you trust. And then once you—because when you find that person for the first time, when you find them, you feel okay. You don't worry about it.

(Joel Beasley at 00:19:15) You're just like, they're going to hit that goal, and they go for it. And so it took me—it took me 10 hires to find my salesperson. Three, almost three years and 10 hires. Yeah.

(Patrick at 00:19:30) Yeah. And it's, you know, it's one of the things that we think a lot about is how to measure. I mean, KPIs are very important. You know, what are the KPIs? You could—in sales, it could be very simple because it's about closing.

(Patrick at 00:19:40) You could measure it that way. But it's also when the KPIs aren't being met, how can you help guide resources? And those are conversations, you know, I had even this week with our team. And it's a different answer for different resources. Some might need more guidance.

(Patrick at 00:19:55) Some might need more accountability, more check-ins to make sure that they're doing what they're supposed to be doing. And that's sort of the magic of the managing of the people part, which I'm still learning. So—

(Joel Beasley at 00:20:07) How do you guys track—how do you track your business processes? Like, the routines that occur that you know are responsible for generating revenue or delivering on the revenue generated?

(Patrick at 00:20:19) Yeah. You know, the business process monitoring, that idea. So defining the business process, first of all, is obviously very important, making sure that people are trained and understand it. And it's hard. I mean, I really underestimate how hard it is to change people's behavior.

(Joel Beasley at 00:20:35) Right.

(Patrick at 00:20:36) It's extremely hard. Because even when people know it's the right thing to do—and the great irony is, you know, the experts are the hardest, because they know it so well, a process that they usually can do it much faster than when you try to automate it. And so trying to give an automated tool that can be replicated, do it a thousand times, and it'll be vastly improving the process in the future—it's extremely hard to give a tool and give it to the expert first. I've found it's actually better to build a tool with an expert, understand that business process, and then give it to someone seeing it for the first time to actually be able to test it and implement it and start getting, you know, the groundwork laid within the team to start using it. Because the people with new eyes are seeing it for the first time. They're not going to question it.

(Patrick at 00:21:23) Obviously, it has to be designed properly in the first place. So I'm sort of jumping ahead, but my conclusion—and I'm not saying it's the best answer. It's not the right answer. But the best answer I've come up with so far is actually putting that in the software, because it actually forces the method to be done and to be followed. And that's where one of the moments—and I might say this and it might be a very simple observation, but it really hit me.

(Patrick at 00:21:47) The very first time, you know, building software—well, I should say first time, but the first time it hit me, was we really struggled on this feature, and it took us probably two months in design. It looked very simple when we got into it, and we just kept getting this rabbit hole. It kept getting more complicated. And it was a little discouraging because, you know, at the time, it's like, is it even worth building this? You know, maybe we should just move on.

(Patrick at 00:22:09) And then it hit me that this very, very complicated feature is going to be a button, and that problem is only fixed once. You create the button, and then it's fixed permanently. And then it really hit me—the power of, you know, building these—the software, what it is. You know? And the software is literally, it's taking this, encapsulating this expert knowledge from people in different disciplines, you know, and in this case, it's on migrations to cloud, and capturing that from a person that's done it.

(Patrick at 00:22:37) Collectively, the team working on it has had over a hundred years in this area, you know, for cloud migrations. They've been doing it for decades, you know, before cloud. Capturing that, putting in the software, and now this becomes something that everyone can apply and use. And that's when it really hit me—that power of what software really is. It's the encapsulation of that intelligence and, you know, being able to pull that virtual expert anytime, you know, in the software.

(Patrick at 00:23:01) So that's when it really, really hit me, the power. You know? As Marc Andreessen said, what, probably 10 years ago, software's eating the world. It really started to—I started to understand the power, really what's possible there. So yeah.

(Patrick at 00:23:13) That got me more excited. Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:23:15) Yeah. And it reminds me of kind of what we're talking about with the business processes. So there's creating a new business process, which has to be done. Normally, it's done manually at first before it's automated. And then that's a process you go through.

(Joel Beasley at 00:23:31) Okay. I'm going to—you have to go the scientific way of, I'm going to try 10 things to solve this problem. I'm going to try one or two things. I'm going to test the results, find the best solution, and then run that. And then once we've confirmed that this is, you know, good enough to solve the problem, move forward—then we can begin to automate it and refine it. But going through those stages with the team, well, first of all, it's very difficult. It's not for a regular employee or an individual contributor, often.

(Patrick at 00:24:00) Right.

(Joel Beasley at 00:24:00) It's usually a very special type person that understands it's going to be very difficult. There's going to be a lot of changes. It's going to be uncomfortable. You're going to put time into something, and then you're going to feel like it was useless, and then you're going to get a little bit better and learn, and then you're finally going to—boom—get the result, and you're going to feel fantastic after a lot of difficulty. And then you're going to figure out how to automate that, refine that, and then you're going to hand it off like it's your child. You're sitting and you say goodbye, go off into the world, and then you're going to start all over again.

(Joel Beasley at 00:24:27) And those are the most valuable people. Those are the most valuable people.

(Patrick at 00:24:31) Yeah. That's interesting. Yeah. The observation. And I think part of the struggle you may encounter—I've seen this—is that when you're trying to build a business process, maybe someone doesn't have the full view of that process, or maybe they do, but they don't see how it integrates with other processes.

(Patrick at 00:24:46) So having—you had this analogy in the book where you try to—the object-oriented approach to problem-solving, where you try to, you know, keep it separate, keep it simple, and it only interacts with its neighbor. And it's sort of that—to build a business process that can rely upon the next piece and keep it simple, but still have it where it can be integrated into a larger whole. And to see—to have people that can see those big pictures—I don't think it's an IQ necessarily, or people that can't think in that level. It's just I don't think people get exposed to thinking that way in general. It was interesting.

(Patrick at 00:25:24) There was a comment when a gentleman I worked with in the past, and we were doing demos. And one of the things that I struggled a lot—and I don't have an answer for it yet, but we sort of just through maturity in three years, we got past the problem. And that was when you have an idea how the software is going to look and how it should be presented, you know, when you demo and we want to just present the idea. And it was a big challenge because we were trying to describe there's this missing piece. We're trying to describe how it works.

(Patrick at 00:25:54) And I felt really strongly that I should have some way to be able to prototype it. Just because over the years, I so many times wanted to become a Java stack programmer so I could get in there and help the team. But I keep reminding myself that's not the right idea. Right? Yeah. I've got to hire those people and, you know, keep focusing on the design piece. But still, going back to the prototyping, it's been a big challenge.

(Patrick at 00:26:14) And the saying I heard, which I think is very true, is people have lost the capability for imagination, where they can't visualize it. They literally have to see the screen painted to be able to understand what you're describing. And I think that abstraction, when you're building software and application—now you're connecting these pieces together—I think it's the same application here for this business process, where people just can't see the value of putting these things together. And I think there's another thing related to it and how people think, and that is there's a natural—I think people naturally always think, you know, this opportunity cost idea. Maybe they don't understand the term, the economic term, that if you're doing something, you can't do something else.

(Patrick at 00:26:55) But I think people sort of naturally think that way. And where I'm going with it is there's always this bargaining. Like, okay, you want to have this way where you're going to automate a sales order to go through some logic and automatically update this team or do some notification. But there's always this bargaining of, is that really the most important thing we should be focusing on?

(Patrick at 00:27:14) And I think there's a lot of internal strife even on that piece of prioritization. And I think our team, myself—I should say, lack of leadership in the area in the past—I didn't do a great job on prioritization. You know, understanding here's the story points. This is the cost of this to do that now, do this immediately. And that's something I think our team has become a lot better on.

(Patrick at 00:27:35) And we just had a meeting this morning going through the story points for the next sprint, prioritization. And it's like, you know, if we're going to move this one up five story points, we're going to have to, you know, take these other ones down. And so I think that's just the understanding and the people understanding—the team members understanding the prioritization and honoring that and seeing the big picture. I think that's a challenge.

(Joel Beasley at 00:27:59) Yeah. The way—the best way I have found to prioritize is distance to revenue. That's the best way. So how far away is what I'm doing? How far away is this project?

(Joel Beasley at 00:28:14) Or what's the result of this project? Like, what's the value of having done this? Like, let's say it's done and we have that item. What's that one bullet point? And then how close is that to revenue?

(Joel Beasley at 00:28:25) Yeah. Because you can have—it's so, so easy to come up with ideas. It's so easy to think of things. Your customers will backlog you for infinity with ideas, and then they have different ones, you know, more popular than others. But the one thing I found to be so true after doing it right and wrong is that the sales have to come first.

(Joel Beasley at 00:28:48) The sales have to come first, because that's conversion of your idea into marketplace value. And it's the most important thing.

(Patrick at 00:28:57) Absolutely. So there's a saying—I'll say it and I always think of this when that term comes up—and you know Buck Rogers from that term. But our salesperson Sam says, "Without bucks, there's no Buck Rogers." And, you know, if you can't—you don't bring in sales, you can't pay for the technical resources, the Buck Rogers, to do the work. So it is—is the question, is it harder to sell the service or harder to deliver the service? And that's a very good debate. Or build the service, but, same idea.

(Patrick at 00:29:25) So yeah, it's a never-ending quest for us to get the right answer. If I can ask you, how do you measure the—if there's tangible revenue, is that customer request that, you know, will turn into sales, or is it you have a good feel that that's going to translate into new purchases? Is that something that you can quantify?

(Joel Beasley at 00:29:43) Yes. So it depends. It's very context specific. So you can get more or less creative with it. And so I watch myself try to get creative and beat my own system. Right? Because you could say, "Alright. Well, you know, these customers, they need this feature and they're our top customers. They make up a large portion of our revenue, and this is something that the decision maker specifically needs and it feels like they might move away if they can't get this because they don't just want this feature because it's Tuesday. They want this feature because it's impacting their operations." And so it's really more about the exercise of creating a team that can think about value and justify it. And so they're like, "Alright, here's what I've prioritized," and then I just want to train them to—I'm not gonna give them the answer. Show me the priority list based off of the principles that we have and the training that you have here. Now stand behind why this is number one.

(Patrick at 00:30:49) Right.

(Joel Beasley at 00:30:49) And then I put it on them, so I get my team to really always be thinking about value because my job is to create an autonomous organization that can scale without my existence. Right? So if I die, my family still has money and all of this type of stuff. Very important to me.

(Patrick at 00:31:04) Yeah. Absolutely.

(Joel Beasley at 00:31:05) Yeah. That's what I'm in the process of thinking about.

(Patrick at 00:31:08) Yeah. And building the dev teams, do you have opinions on size, how many members, and then creating the basically replicating that group with the same roles?

(Joel Beasley at 00:31:17) Yeah. So Team Topology is a book, and it's one of my favorite books on the structure and organization of teams. Have you come across that one yet?

(Patrick at 00:31:26) I have not. I'll look it up.

(Joel Beasley at 00:31:28) Yeah. So I'm not quoting that.

(Patrick at 00:31:29) So eight to ten? Is that about the size?

(Joel Beasley at 00:31:33) Well, do you mean per direct report? Per leader?

(Patrick at 00:31:38) If you're looking at the team and have them work on different applications or—I'm not sure how the work would be distributed—but is that the team size roughly, you know, eight to ten to twelve people? Is that what you've seen yourself to be valuable?

(Joel Beasley at 00:31:53) Well, the way I do it, my rule of thumb is one to five. So I'll have one person managing five people.

(Patrick at 00:31:59) Okay.

(Joel Beasley at 00:31:59) And then I'll let it spread out from there. So I break it up like that. I found it to be very useful because the human, the team member—and earlier, I was wrong. By the way, I had said that person that can do that processing that I described, creating and editing and deploying them and delegating them, that I said that they were the most valuable. That's probably the wrong word. They're very valuable, but what I meant was that they're the most rare. The least amount of people are willing to do that, spend their time doing that. So I just wanted to clarify that.

(Patrick at 00:32:32) Do you have any shared, I'll call it shared resources that are over teams, like UI designer? Would you have a UI designer in each team and back end in each team or a tester in each team? Or do you have roles that would cross over the teams?

(Joel Beasley at 00:32:45) Great question. So it's all based on—I look at the business and I let the business tell me what to do. So if you're a services business, I would probably see in a services business where the small teams are like the client's experience is essentially interacting with this group of five people, right—an account manager, engineer, something like that. So if you have something more like that, you'd probably have your team structured in that way. If you're a product company and you just have one, you're Uber, you're gonna have your team structured differently.

(Patrick at 00:33:17) More on features?

(Joel Beasley at 00:33:18) Yeah. Yeah. Features, services, and yes.

(Patrick at 00:33:21) Have the team members float to different groups over time to get cross-training and such. Yeah. I've heard about the models of the big companies.

(Patrick at 00:33:27) That's great.

(Joel Beasley at 00:33:28) Well, they do that to retain—they do that to reduce recruiting costs and keep their people inside the ecosystem. I mean, it's a smart business move.

(Patrick at 00:33:35) It is. Yeah. And people like it. I mean, talking to people that have been exposed to it. So it's a good model because if you're that size.

(Joel Beasley at 00:33:42) People like to—yeah. I know. Right? When I'm at 5,000 people, we can have this conversation.

(Joel Beasley at 00:33:49) We'll—

(Patrick at 00:33:49) We'll do part two.

(Joel Beasley at 00:33:50) Part two. Yeah. We'll do it sooner than that, though. I'm sure you're a pretty great guy. I really enjoy the way that you think.

(Patrick at 00:33:57) Well, and so I'll ask the question. So do you think the CTO—if someone came to you and said, "I wanna be CTO," do you have feelings of there's obviously things I have to learn, but do you think there's characteristics in that person that they would need or they won't be happy in that job or they won't be successful? Do you think—

(Joel Beasley at 00:34:13) Yeah. Okay. So you—

(Patrick at 00:34:14) Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:34:14) Yeah. So general rules of thumb, things I'm looking for in people that are CTOs. I'd say desire and persistence are probably the two prerequisites to having success. Right? Because you have to want to do this, and then you have to continue to do it when it gets difficult.

(Patrick at 00:34:34) Absolutely.

(Joel Beasley at 00:34:35) Those are, I would say, foundational elements that are required in order to do it. Then after that, if we're gonna go into more skill-based stuff, I would say immediately begin working—even if you think you are great at communication, immediately begin working on communication. Because everything that you want to do in life, you're going to have to communicate to other people to get it done, whether that's to get money for it or to get them to actually execute on it. So getting your ideas from that crazy floaty space up in your head, right, our imagination out into a vision and then instructions and executables, and how do you communicate? How do you convert your thoughts into things that other people can understand and take action on? That's a hard thing to do.

(Patrick at 00:35:27) Well, you said a word that really triggered, and that was the creativity part of the job. And I would—you know, creativity slash that endless curiosity. You know, just being curious period. I think that's a big part to the job or to make you successful in the role at least. You know, because it's IT in general. I guess you could argue that it's every day there's—you gotta continue to learn or else you're gonna be obsolete. And I think it's even hyper focused in the CTO role because you're trying to stay on the future, not even what's current. What's it gonna be two years from now? What's it gonna look like? And so that natural curiosity, it's not a job. It's that, you know, you're doing it regardless of the role.

(Joel Beasley at 00:36:06) Yeah. And as hard as we could make it seem. Right? Because you have to have good focus. You have to have discipline. You have to have curiosity. You have to have some sort of ability to contribute early or have some sort of deeper level knowledge, and you have to have at least mastered one area. Right?

(Patrick at 00:36:20) And that's one of the other things I wanted to mention about that you're becoming an expert, SME essentially. And you said there's a lot of different types of CTOs where you think of a CFO. They literally have a book that you learn how to do accounting. You know? There is a right way to do accounting. And in IT is not like that in general, but even the CTO, you could argue might not be IT, might be more in science, you know, where you have to be close to an expert if not expert in a specific area to be successful.

(Joel Beasley at 00:36:52) Yeah. I was actually surprised because we have a CFO—not a full-time one, just contract. And I was talking with him and he was like, "Oh, yeah. You know," he kept referencing his license. And I was like, "What?" He's like, "Oh, it's like a doctor. It's a very real thing. And these standards, these accounting things cross the entire economy." Right? So gap accounting is gap accounting. Right? It's not—

(Patrick at 00:37:15) Yep.

(Joel Beasley at 00:37:15) It's not this way in engineering. There's a million different ways to do it.

(Patrick at 00:37:27) Yeah. And the one area in IT is security. Because security has a right way. They have the certifications, and you're either compliant or not. And that's because those are usually our toughest calls, I would say, from a standpoint of—because we're used to giving customers options of how we can do a migration, how, you know, how you do an install, how best to lay out the design. That taps into that creativity part in IT. Yet security, there's clearly a right and wrong way to do it. There's options, but that's been our hardest meetings, I would say, with customers where, you know, there's a specific way they want it done. And even when we usually defer as the customer option, you know, the security team says, "No. It has to be exactly compliant to this." And it really hit me that that is one area. Sort of the exception in IT that there's clearly, you know, you could say law of how to do it. So it describes why that is so difficult. There's—

(Patrick at 00:38:11) You gotta do it the one right way.

(Joel Beasley at 00:38:25) Yeah. And there's a couple popular—there's the OWASP, and there's a couple different frameworks out there. I actually talked to this really interesting guy yesterday from a company called SecurityScorecard. And so what they do is—I always like to see, what are you gonna be doing? What's the crazy big vision far out? And the crazy big vision far out is essentially they're gonna be like the Credit Karma or the credit scoring of security. They're a large company today, but they basically give you this—you could put in any company name, and it'll tell you their security. So the idea is that, you know, you have your own security, but you also wanna understand your vendors that you use and their security trust.

(Joel Beasley at 00:39:04) Yeah. Yep.

(Patrick at 00:39:05) Yeah. It completely, I can completely see the need for it, and it makes a lot of sense. I see similar, you know, even within your security profile of your—you know, they talk about digital money someday. You will have a security profile of yourself, and who you know, if you wanna transfer money, it'll be the exchange between those two security trusts, you could say. So it's a big area, and I also think, you know, just trust within online communities. You know, both my children—my daughter is twelve. My son's fifteen. Just my daughter's on social media, and it's, you know, just the etiquette, I would say. I'm being nice, but just, you know, how—the social trust, and that's pretty low or pretty much anything could be said to anyone. And so I think that's gonna be something they talk about regulation in the future. That's one of the things that this Netflix show referenced earlier talked about.

(Joel Beasley at 00:40:01) What was the title of it?

(Patrick at 00:40:03) I can't remember. I apologize. It just came out in the last day.

(Joel Beasley at 00:40:07) Okay. So if I search social media, social engineering, Netflix—it was a documentary or story or—

(Patrick at 00:40:12) It's a documentary. Yeah. They go into the, you know, the phrase you probably heard, but it's very true, and they explore it. It's basically, if the service is free, you're the product. Yeah. So they explore that and, you know, it focuses primarily on the social media aspect, which, you know—people use their phones for more than that. I myself don't use a lot of social media, but I certainly am on the Internet a lot. Not only for job, but just, you know, you're gonna buy something, you do a lot of research on there. So I don't think they really explore that part as much, but it's very thought-provoking.

(Joel Beasley at 00:40:45) Did you buy your Tesla on the Internet? Or did you go to a dealership? Or—

(Patrick at 00:40:50) No. It's a funny story, actually. I've been following them since 2008, I think. There was a Inc. Magazine. I actually still kept it, coincidentally. So I knew about the company really early on, and I didn't get—I bought a used one in 2013. And I found a person on the Internet. They actually—he scraped the website of Tesla, and it was just went live. So I signed up to be notified when things hit this price point. And it was, like, forty percent of the original price. The car had a lot of miles on it, but when they started reselling the cars, they had this unlimited warranty, essentially. So the car had 60,000 miles, but the warranty was gonna be 250,000 miles. So, you know, even if the battery—there's a lot of—this is in 2013, there was still a lot of questions about the battery, which it proved to be nonsense. It was good. The cars have been flawless, actually, and the car was on sale for eight minutes is my point. The guy had a ticker. It hit my qualifications. So I never—I didn't even see the car, but it was like buying something sight unseen. And, yeah, I had that car for two years, and I put in the order for the three, which is the, you know, the big mass seller, biggest seller now. Very successful. I pre-ordered that the day, you know, in 2016 when they announced it. So I've had that now for two years, and it's amazing car. The amazing thing about the technology, you know, you can go into all the renewable energy part to it and all the great things. But I think one of the things that you don't hear anything about, people just don't talk about enough is just the simplified model of an electric car. So there's no maintenance. So all the cars—all electric cars I've owned, I got one for my wife now, so the two, and I traded the first one. So there's three total. Out of all those cars, I've done zero maintenance. The cost of ownership on the maintenance side is zero. So even the tires have not worn out yet.

(Joel Beasley at 00:42:49) There's—yeah. Because there's no oil change maintenance.

(Patrick at 00:42:51) Yeah. And that's, I think, when when people understand that model, the cost of ownership is completely different. And the fact is, you know, it's a lot cheaper to charge your car instead of getting gas. It'll be a really big boon. And it's—I think that comes out word of mouth when you talk to someone, talk to your neighbor. It's like, "Yeah. And I never go to the dealership." You know, I talked to colleagues, and they're like, "Oh, I gotta take my car in for service." And I don't say anything, but I'm like, "Gosh. I don't miss that at all." I don't miss going to gas station. It's just a different paradigm, different way. And when someone either does a test drive and they get an experience in it, this is clearly a better way to do it. And that's—tying it back to our job. That's, I'd say, you know, building products, building the software. I have a real more appreciation for brands actually now. It's actually, you know, you're building—if you think of a brand, you think of an iPhone, how many thousands of people have worked on that phone to build this thing that creates value. And I really—I have a lot more appreciation for that now when you try to do that yourself and, you know, be a part of a team that does that. So, you know, I really appreciate those companies that are pushing the envelope.

(Joel Beasley at 00:43:57) So are you guys building software? Do you have a product, or do you customize it? Like, what are you doing right now with software?

(Patrick at 00:44:05) So yeah, our product originally started back in 2014 as a bunch of scripts and how we could automate it on an operating system level. And basically, just very simply describing, we would copy a database and move it to another location. So that's where it started, and then we could upgrade it. You could say we'll upgrade the operating system and database at the same time we move to cloud. And now it's this transformation, iteration, I should say, the improvement over time. It's an internet application.

(Patrick at 00:44:34) The customer can go on the internet, register themselves, and they can do an assessment. So there's quite a few cloud tools out there that can look at assessing a data center. So we do that piece, and we integrate with third-party products that do that. But we try to simplify, and we try to focus especially on this SAP space, because SAP, largest enterprise application in the world, and there's over a hundred thousand customers just in North America alone.

(Patrick at 00:45:01) So it's a very big space, and moving all those systems on-premise to the cloud is going to be a big effort for companies in the next at least decade, maybe two. So that's what we focus on, is that transformation. So doing an assessment, helping them move the data, and doing transformations at the same time. That's been really our main focus for the last six years. And then the part we've been focusing on the last two has been around the ops piece.

(Patrick at 00:45:29) Again, specific for SAP systems. So looking at the performance. These systems are used for payroll, they're used for order management, they're used for logistics. For example, Fitch Ratings, which is, once you hear this name, you'll hear it on when you hear news. If you think of Moody's, they do S&P review, like debt rating of a company. Fitch Ratings does it for countries.

(Patrick at 00:45:53) So you hear Venezuela's debt's been downgraded. We did their migration, their SAP systems moving into cloud. That was actually our very first big, big one we did, and we did, we moved it to AWS, Amazon Web Services. We upgraded their, it was an Oracle database, into what SAP has, this new technology called HANA introduced about five years ago, in-memory. And also we upgraded and changed the operating system. So we did all that concurrently.

(Patrick at 00:46:21) So we're trying to simplify that process. And it's not just coming up with a better answer, but it's more of using the tools that the vendors have provided and integrating that and making it simple. Making it a simple, very clearly understood path. That's been really our focus. And it, because the cloud transformations are just incredibly complicated to understand all that has to move, project management pieces of it, all those.

(Patrick at 00:46:47) So we're trying to really focus on having a full answer for that piece.

(Joel Beasley at 00:46:51) So what is your normal customer or, like, average customer? What do they look like, and how do they find you?

(Patrick at 00:46:58) Great question. So we try to focus in the SMB space. That's where we, you know, for a company between $250 million up to a billion dollars, that's that would be our focus. These are larger companies. SAP calls this small to midsize business, but up to a billion dollars.

(Patrick at 00:47:17) So these companies running SAP as their core application, oftentimes they'll have a lot of other servers. And now, you know, they're getting more into the serverless world. So a lot of the DevOps piece, they want to go to cloud because they want to activate that and integrate it with their existing applications. So that's about the size. So typically, to move systems, we see the customer will have, let's say, 50 servers up to 500 servers.

(Patrick at 00:47:45) And so we've got to manage the movement of those and, you know, make sure that happens timely without risk and, you know, manage it and communicate with their team very clearly of how it's going to be done and cost effectively, I should say. So that's been the focus. The big focus now is then taking that operations piece and simplifying and making the data, I heard the term and I like it, it's a good description, surfacing the data. So taking the data that all the operational aspects, you know, the performance of the system itself, and then getting into the part that you mentioned on business processes.

(Patrick at 00:48:19) So these companies, very critical processes of, you know, sales order entry. How long does it take to enter an order? How long does it take for their HR to be processed, their payroll every week? So those are metrics that we'll track, and then we actually can show that through our application so they can see it real time and track it over time. So as you said, you know, it does understand that full process and being different. That's been the challenge.

(Patrick at 00:48:45) So we want to give flexibility and prioritization to customers, say, hey, we want you to build this next. That's been our new challenge. Because a lot of what we built, I'd say for the first four years of the application has been more homegrown. Okay, we anticipate this is what customer wants. And then it's been a whole next level when getting in the customer's hands and they say, this is the thing we want to show. I'll describe a real simple example of that. So we built a screen that shows CPU, memory, and disk utilization over the app and the performance of the application itself. So we correlate that and design that and, you know, show that to a few customers.

(Patrick at 00:49:23) And then one customer at the insight, you know, it'd be really interesting if you could show me that data, but plot not only the system that's receiving the data, we call it the ERP system, the enterprise resource planning system, show me the BW system, the analytics system, and the exchange of data and how it helps performance correlates between the two. And so that's been just really nice, seeing it from the customer view and asking those or getting that feedback on how to build new features and extending it. So that's been a great value.

(Patrick at 00:49:50) So when I asked the question, that's where I was, that was the reason I was asking the question about the revenue-generating features, because that's where we clearly see these are now customer-requested features instead of ones that we think customers want. So that's where we've been focusing now.

(Joel Beasley at 00:50:07) When that person suggested that, right, to me, I would have found an appropriate way to ask how much they would pay for it.

(Patrick at 00:50:16) Right.

(Joel Beasley at 00:50:17) Because everybody will say things are cool, but the real test comes with, all right, well, now hand me the money to go build it.

(Patrick at 00:50:25) How much value is it going to give you? How much money will it save you? Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:50:28) Because you might find out that they're only willing to pay a dollar ninety-nine a month for something that's going to cost you $50,000 to deploy, build, deploy, and maintain. And even if you sold it to all your customers, that wouldn't be useful. So you just have to find, because you have to, it's so weird because like you hear it, but you just have to build to what the marketplace is demanding and what they're willing to put out cash for.

(Joel Beasley at 00:50:58) And I used to be reluctant or, like, slightly resistant to that when I was earlier on in my product days because I'm like, it's the craft of the product, and I'm listening to all my product people and reading all the product books and understanding the engineering and the quality of the code. I'm like, it's all about that. And then I'm like, oh, that's a luxury. It can be all about that, but you can only have the time to focus on that if money is coming in from whatever value you're selling into the marketplace.

(Joel Beasley at 00:51:26) And then it becomes like this fun game of, like, how much more useful can I be to the customer? Because then we can get more money. And then that's when culture kicks in. And the only reason why we want more money is because we want to invite more people to this party because we're having a pretty great party over here doing what we're doing. Right?

(Patrick at 00:51:45) Absolutely. Yeah, absolutely. That's the, to measure that financial aspect to the features is incredibly hard, but that's essential to know where to prioritize. So that's been very hugely valuable because that hasn't happened till very recently in our product. Because, you know, they take an idea about taking those experts and putting in the software. That's really been our guidance because we've been doing this exact type of work for over twenty years. That's really been our guidance for the first five years of the product, and now we're transitioning more. And we're giving, I should mention there's two big parts. One was the application primarily has been an internal tool up until the last year, and it's been originally, it was just a private application that was behind our firewall, and now we've built it where it's SaaS. So it's one application.

(Patrick at 00:52:37) Customers ask if they can get it private, but we haven't had to do that yet. So, and the reason I bring this up is that it's an interesting world because we have this SaaS application, yet it integrates back into their company's networks. And so there's parts as an agent the work is performed as. And I think that's a really interesting space where things are going to go, you know, with the serverless world and how some of these services could be performed. You know, in the past, it's had to be a server and you put it in your data center or now you can put it in the cloud.

(Patrick at 00:53:10) But now actually abstracting even that, now it's going to be this service that's in the cloud. I think that's hugely interesting of where, what's the limits or where can we take that? So that's where we're exploring, you know, for the software to have something that's ubiquitous and, you know, it's available. This could be a little intimidating for software companies to hear, but it's hard to consume this idea, but you'd pay them, you know, a few cents every time it's called, you know, that world. And does that make sense as a model?

(Joel Beasley at 00:53:38) Well, I mean, that's like the whole cloud world. Right?

(Patrick at 00:53:41) Yeah. Yeah. I mean, for calling, for APIs, I should say, to qualify, but absolutely on demand.

(Joel Beasley at 00:53:47) I think the whole world is moving to that.

(Patrick at 00:53:50) The subscription based. Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:53:51) Yeah. Or subscription or use-based because what it seems to be, like, if you try to take a macro, I get weird. I ask questions like, what are the humans building, and things like that. But if you take a step back...

(Patrick at 00:54:05) We, we software people, yeah. This will, humans will operate this. I think outsiders hearing that is funny. Sometimes I, yeah, I agree. But yeah, the subscription-based, the utility-based model where you pay as you use. You see that?

(Joel Beasley at 00:54:19) Yeah. Margins tend to consolidate. Right? Like, things become service, and then it's a race for price to the bottom. And then that just becomes like the standard, and people stop reinventing over there, and then enough times pass, and then someone, some new technology happens, and then someone goes and disrupts that already consolidated market with some new value. It's like this interesting cycle that the market goes through.

(Patrick at 00:54:47) Yeah. Uber. You know, there's an interesting, Peter Diamandis, he came out with a new book this year, and he made the point about Uber. You know, the ride-sharing applications, they already say they're already going to be supplanted by autonomous driving, the taxis. They already know that. You know, so really it's been a few years where they're going to have a market. They know it's going to be supplanted by autonomous, you know, taxis.

(Patrick at 00:55:13) And you think of that, of how fast the rate of innovation's happening now. It's, is quite startling. Yeah. Keep the perspective of how fast we have to innovate.

(Joel Beasley at 00:55:22) Look at in China there. I was reading about the different, already existing autonomous taxi services. Apparently, in Shanghai, you can just get one. They have an app. You press the button, the car comes and picks you up. And I think they had, the article I was reading, it was either a thousand or ten thousand of them had currently deployed today. And then they had like, I think it was like a few million by 2025 was like one company's goal. Because there's, you know, they have their own manufacturers. They have their whole own everything over there.

(Joel Beasley at 00:55:54) But then you look at Tesla, and Tesla, I think that they have, you know, the one vision of Musk said on one of his interviews, he's like, imagine that you're in your car, you pull up, you're in your garage, you're not going to need the car the rest of the night, and then your car goes and runs taxiing for other people. Right? And then you get money from your car.

(Patrick at 00:56:18) Yeah. And the, you know, I'll say it's probably considered a crazy statement. Yeah. This is a person that looks like he's going to get to Mars. Right? So...

(Joel Beasley at 00:56:28) Definitely.

(Patrick at 00:56:28) He has some interesting views that, so far, he's been pretty true to delivering what he says, even these crazy thoughts. I think one of the craziest thoughts, if it can come true, will totally upend, and that is, you know, he's saying you buy a car today, it's going to appreciate over time, that you will actually make money off that by running it out. And that's going to upend how autos, you know, been priced for the last over a hundred years. Right? There's no depreciation. So we'll see.

(Joel Beasley at 00:56:54) Well, all the major car companies, like next year, I think, all the major car companies are coming out with, like, electronic versions of, without changing. Like, there's going to be an electric Ford pickup truck, and it's going to look exactly like a Ford pickup truck. And, you know, just like another year newer. It's not going to be like what they were doing in the past, making the electric cars look all ugly. Right? They're, they're just, they know that electric is where the world's going. And...

(Patrick at 00:57:22) I, you know, it's another point, and I think, you know, I really appreciate the move, taking, you know, having a company that wasn't based as a software company and becoming a software company and the challenge in that. And I think, you know, the DNA of being a software company, at the end of the day, you know, they do make cars. At the end of the day, it seems that they're more of a software-based, at least how they develop, agile-based. They're doing the releases over time and, you know, the over-the-air. Whereas it's going to be a hard transition, I think, for the auto manufacturers to become software companies, and that's clearly what's becoming a differentiator.

(Patrick at 00:57:56) You know, looking at autonomous driving software is what enables that. So I think it's going to be hard. It's going to be a hard road. But I think GM did a big investment with Rivian. I think they're part-owning, if I remember correctly. So they're, they're, seems like they're obviously up to the wearing, you know, aware of their shortfalls and trying to bridge them. But I think that's going to be a big one.

(Joel Beasley at 00:58:16) Yeah. It seems like I heard GM did that, but they, I think they also, is GM Corvette? I'm not, like, a huge...

(Patrick at 00:58:23) Yep.

(Joel Beasley at 00:58:23) All right.

(Patrick at 00:58:24) Yep. Chevy. Yep.

(Joel Beasley at 00:58:25) They took their Corvette team, which is technically like a separate brand. It's like the Corvette, the way they were explaining it to me is like this Corvette team that makes those cars are kind of separate entirely from the rest of the inside the group. But they took the, like, best designers from those teams and put them on their electric line. And then I had the CTO of Ford on when the whole COVID thing happened because they're talking about how they did the, um, started making the ventilators. Right? When that was a big deal.

(Patrick at 00:58:54) That's amazing.

(Joel Beasley at 00:58:54) Yeah. And he told me about the new, like, Mustang that's coming out that's electric. And then they also Mach-E,

(Patrick at 00:59:02) I think it's called.

(Joel Beasley at 00:59:03) Yeah. Yeah. And they also have all these other ones, but I saw inside of it. I think they had a big wake-up call. I think the whole industry had this big wake-up call of what I think happened is I think they drove a Tesla because when you drive the Tesla for the first time, you're like, oh my goodness, this is like a piece of Apple hardware on the road or something. It's just beautiful and amazing.

(Patrick at 00:59:28) When they released it, it's like driving an iPad.

(Joel Beasley at 00:59:30) That's what they said? Yeah. That's what it feels like.

(Patrick at 00:59:32) Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It's quite, it's a big transition. It's, so, yeah, the good news is it's gonna be good for consumers. You know, I think it will drive prices of cars down because they're already getting economies of scale that's starting to come in. And, obviously, you know, there's a lot of very talented people at Tesla, and they're starting to cross-pollinate. They're going to other companies, and they're taking a lot of best practices. You know? And in the past, I don't know if it's still the case, but a lot of those early patents were open-sourced so anyone can use them. I don't know if that's still the case. Probably some of the newer things aren't. But

(Joel Beasley at 01:00:08) they want to sell their batteries. That's, like,

(Patrick at 01:00:11) the perfect size. Yep. And possibly the sensor, the AI, it's gonna be interesting.

(Joel Beasley at 01:00:19) Yeah. That's where they have the big advantage is the more data you have. And they've been collecting data. They probably have the most data. Right? I don't think there's an electric car company that has more driving data than Tesla.

(Patrick at 01:00:31) Probably, yeah. I don't know about Waymo and how they record it. And frankly, I haven't heard a lot about Waymo. The Google is part of Google. They were, you know, they're probably the closest, second recording data, you know, back and mapping it. But I haven't heard much about them lately. So I agree. I think they have a clear lead there. And they're currently doing a whole rewrite of the code base. Supposedly, they're gonna release it in Q4. So

(Joel Beasley at 01:00:56) Yeah. I saw that news article. I saw that, and then I saw Microsoft Underwater Data Centers, those two things recently. And I was like, whoa.

(Patrick at 01:01:04) Yeah. The interesting thing about the data center, I thought the most striking, you know, because certainly it's great from a PR perspective, and everyone's like, why would you do that? But the most interesting observation out of that whole article I took out of it was the human factor that it's forcing no one could touch the server. That's what they said is one of the best. Because I'm like, why would you do that? And certainly, there's safer places in the world to put a data center, but, you know, that was one of the biggest conclusions they said is that the uptimes they found in servers, I don't know if it's the average mean uptime for all the systems there, were better because the human factor was minimized. You couldn't have someone go over and trip over a cable in the bottom of the ocean. So I thought that was the most interesting insight on that article. I also saw, I can't remember the source, but they talked about it. It's a matter of time before they put data centers in space. So or at least assemblance of a data center maybe as much of a smaller model. But you start thinking of, you know, the latency issues. And if we start having, you know, places on the moon, it might make sense because you want to have that compute closer to you. So it's an interesting thought.

(Joel Beasley at 01:02:12) That is true because isn't it, like, plus 100 plus or minus 100 if you're on, like, the shadow part of the

(Patrick at 01:02:19) Yeah. The latency. Yes. At the dark side. Yeah. And you probably know about Starlink that the latency is supposedly, it's under 100 milliseconds, and I think maybe it's better. And then I think the bandwidth is 100 megabit, which is just amazing. There's a lot of people, colleagues I have that they could use as a backup. You know? They're in not remote areas, but areas that just their broadband's not good. So that could be incredibly promising.

(Joel Beasley at 01:02:44) Oh, I'm very excited about that. I was actually surprised. We were, you know, every once in a while, everyone gets excited about a SpaceX launch. And then I thought the other day, I was like, how many SpaceX launches are, they're happening a lot. They're happening, like, way more frequently than I had thought. Did you see the new

(Patrick at 01:03:06) the new launch? The new, you gotta take a look at it. It literally looks like a water tower launching up, and it doesn't even from the perspective of space, it looks very, very large. You know, the largest new space rocket. I forget the name of it. I think

(Joel Beasley at 01:03:23) it's like the Starhopper or something.

(Patrick at 01:03:24) Yeah. This yeah. They code-named it BFR. That's not the real name. But

(Joel Beasley at 01:03:30) I know. I love that name.

(Patrick at 01:03:31) Yeah. They couldn't go to press with that, but you gotta see the video of it. It is truly impressive because you can tell this thing is just a massive, you know, massive mass, an object to go up in space. I think it goes up about a mile and comes down, but it's truly impressive. And, you know, in that same day when they did that launch, they actually had another rocket launch that became routine to launch the Starlink satellites, as a matter of fact. And you're right. It's just become routine, which is a good sign. It's becoming reliable and low risk, and that's what we need for continuous innovation. So

(Joel Beasley at 01:04:07) So that Starhopper, I'm looking at it right now. Actually, hold a second. We're on, we're on

(Patrick at 01:04:12) called Starhopper? I thought it was another name. It's part of

(Joel Beasley at 01:04:16) Is that it? Here. I'm sharing my screen.

(Patrick at 01:04:19) No. It's, let me get it here. Here it is. It's, uh, Starship.

(Joel Beasley at 01:04:23) Starship. Alright. So SpaceX.

(Patrick at 01:04:25) Starship, and let's get the

(Joel Beasley at 01:04:28) Oh my goodness.

(Patrick at 01:04:30) You gotta see the real test, though.

(Joel Beasley at 01:04:33) Is this thing built?

(Patrick at 01:04:34) Funny. I happened upon this, and now I can't find it when I'm legitimately looking for it.

(Joel Beasley at 01:04:37) Look at this. Here. Can you see my screen? Is this it?

(Patrick at 01:04:40) Yep. That's it.

(Joel Beasley at 01:04:41) That looks ridiculous. It looks like an adult toy.

(Patrick at 01:04:46) If you just go on YouTube, it's Starship SN6 Flight Test. It happened a little over a week ago. You swear it's Photoshop. You cannot believe this is a real thing.

(Joel Beasley at 01:04:58) 100 and here it is. There it is.

(Patrick at 01:05:01) A minute. Yeah. Of autopilot. Put that one up. Yeah. And no one's talking about it. That's the amazing thing. And when it initially launches, there's horizontal rockets keeping it, you know, so it doesn't tip over.

(Joel Beasley at 01:05:16) Look at that.

(Patrick at 01:05:17) Doesn't look real.

(Joel Beasley at 01:05:18) It looks fake because of the size of it. Like, because the engine size looks, oh, I see the rockets. I see the side runs.

(Patrick at 01:05:25) Yeah. And you can see pictures of it. They actually have people welding it pre-launch to put in perspective. But even from afar, you can just in the perspective, you see the cranes behind it, how big that thing is. And, you know, so they're gonna, they supposedly they're gonna do, I think, a test where it's gonna go suborbital. I think that's coming up in the next, they want to do it in Q4. But yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 01:05:47) That doesn't even look the same as the, uh, renderings when you look at the light.

(Patrick at 01:05:51) They don't have the nose cone on it. Very good point. And I think the fairings might not be on the bottom. But yeah. It literally looks like I think it reminds me like a water tower.

(Joel Beasley at 01:06:01) It does. It does look like a water tower.

(Patrick at 01:06:02) That go up. I'm like, oh, someone Photoshopped it, you know, as a joke, and no. It's real. So amazing. Amazing. And the most amazing thing on this, when the ship gets built, I think the estimated cost is $2 million, which, you know, you think of the rockets that were flown back three years ago. I think the average cost was $500 million for a rocket they've been building for two decades. So it is, you know, the innovation happening there is just tremendous.

(Joel Beasley at 01:06:31) I'm excited. And you know what? There's the thing I like about Elon Musk, and my friend's like, oh, it's so hard to be an Elon Musk or whatever it is. The thing I like about him is that he made his money. Like, there are so many wealthy Silicon Valley people. Right? Or just people that have made, generated wealth over time.

(Patrick at 01:06:51) Right. But the

(Joel Beasley at 01:06:52) thing that makes him interesting is he didn't stop. He's like, well, now what can we do? Like, what can I do with this now? So I'm like

(Patrick at 01:07:01) And he bet the farm each time. He put all his money in.

(Joel Beasley at 01:07:04) He always went 110% every single chance he had, and that's like such a, the way for, like, being number one. Right?

(Patrick at 01:07:14) And, you know, if you're thinking about investing, you know, in the company, he's got his own skin in the game. And I think that's the, you know, it's one of the, I think, biggest indicators to investors, you know, if the person's putting all their assets in it, they're obviously invested with you, and that's a great sign.

(Joel Beasley at 01:07:32) Oh, yeah. I bought a lot of Tesla stock pretty early at different points, and I did it because I read, uh, Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and Richard Branson. I read, like, their life stories because I was interested in how these billionaires think and which parts of their personalities I like, you know, from each of them so I can create my own self and own version of what I think success looks like. But yeah. They all keep going. They just, they don't stop and that's why I'm always asking myself, like, you know, what's the next thing you can do? Or whenever I want to give up, I just I refuse to let myself do it.

(Patrick at 01:08:17) And that aspiration, that end goal, which is obviously, they must be constantly updating it, but the thing that's the really compelling goal to get to.

(Joel Beasley at 01:08:27) Yeah. Like, the one thing I've heard from a lot of different successful people about, like, regret and things of that nature, is they always get their goal. Almost always the situations that get their goal and they're like, it should have been a bigger goal. It should have been a harder goal because then it would have taken me longer. And then you find people that achieve their goals and they're lost because they don't know how to set new goals. And that's why you get, like, the celebrities that kill themselves and things like that. They get depressed and lost and they don't have anything they're going after. But this is a good topic of conversation. So, like, what's your goal right now with Protera?

(Patrick at 01:09:06) You know, it's, thank you for asking me because it's, you know, part of it is continuing to innovate faster, you know, that innovation cycle because we're getting a lot of great feature requests from customers, and now it's a matter how fast can we do it. And, you know, it's a competitive market everywhere and trying to stay on top of that is a number one goal. And then, you know, that's an internal goal. But the outside goal is, you know, to help customers on the journey. You know, trying to keep that view of their side and keeping it a very clear path going forward for how they get to cloud, how can they best manage it. And that's what we've been doing for years, but it's that challenge of how can we scale that to hit more opportunities, more customers, and help them more. That's where I think the grand challenge is. You know, it's like, okay. We do it for, we've done, you know, two or three dozen of these migrations, these type. How can we get it to 300? And it forces you, like, you just said nicely about you have to have a very big audacious goal, this goal that, you know, let's not do it. Just how can we scale at three, but how can you scale 100 times and as, you know, I like Peter Diamandis. I've read a lot of his books. He talks about exponential thinking. You know, to do this really crazy goal, you just gotta think differently. You can't, it's not a matter of just training people differently. Obviously, people are a huge factor and they will continue to be, but there has to be better tools and a better method. And so, you know, that's where it gets exciting because every day is, you know, you try to figure out how can we do it better and how can we iterate on that. And then part of it's the process and how can we get smarter a better process or, you know, if there's better tools out there to do it better. So that's what keeps me focused at least now. And I should also say, you know, that's from a CTO role is that, but also just from a business perspective, you know, customer satisfaction. Just never to lose sight of that piece. That's, you know, it's really easy for me to get really locked in my little world and get, you know, geek out and, like, the tech. It's a very important piece, but, you know, I naturally, in the business world, I'm more employee-centric. You know, like, being a tech person, you know, I was on support a lot. I always, like, I wanted to have a company where when people are on vacation, they weren't called, and we're trying to make that life on the weekends much easier, you know, less of a strain, and that still is a big focus. And Dean, my business partner, has helped me understand, you know, having that other perspective, the additional perspective, not other, but the additional. They're both very, very important. Essentially important is that the customer focus, that customer SAT piece. And that's something that my natural tendency is more employee internally focused in the IT and the technology, but it's the customer SAT. And we built a great team. You know? I think it's one piece. We haven't really talked about that. But to be aware of your weaknesses, you know, naturally, you're always gonna tend to go to your strengths, and mine is more tech, more I'll have software fix it. And that's where I'm even more focused on that. Okay. Here's a problem business process. We can put in software and improve it. But also keep that focus on the customer always that, you know, that's at the end of the day, that's why we're in business is to keep the value for customers. And so that's where I constantly remind myself of those. So those are the big goals.

(Joel Beasley at 01:12:29) Of course. So that 300 goal, that's like an integer-based goal that you guys are trying to hit?

(Patrick at 01:12:34) Yeah. It is. It's, the interesting thing too I love about our company is that we're cloud-agnostic. So there's some partners that really focus on if you're gonna do cloud, you have to go with AWS or you have to go to Azure. And I love the perspective that we try to stay cloud-agnostic because if a customer truly has a place they want to run, they can, you know, they can choose. And so the indirect answer there, what I'm going to is that we have goals for each cloud. And every cloud provider obviously has goals that they want us to work towards. So those numbers would be for each cloud specifically.

(Joel Beasley at 01:13:10) Nice.

(Patrick at 01:13:11) Yep. Yep. To grow it and keep our company exciting, good place to work at. So

(Joel Beasley at 01:13:17) That's what you want. Right? Because you gotta

(Patrick at 01:13:19) Absolutely. Spend

(Joel Beasley at 01:13:20) So much time here. It's gotta be at least a fun place to work. And then I think another interesting thing is changing the organization to keep yourself interested, right? Like allowing the organization to move in a different direction because your interest lies in a different direction too.

(Joel Beasley at 01:13:41) Like, I think it's really important to be on fire and excited about what you're doing. So I've had to make a number of changes with the podcast because, you know, around a hundred episodes, I was like, this is amazing. And then 150 and then 200. And I was like, how do I keep it interesting and how do I keep myself really excited about doing this? And definitely not the person to hide stuff away. Like, I tend to deal with stuff as quickly as possible.

(Joel Beasley at 01:14:10) Like, the moment I'm not interested, it's like, oh, this is a huge problem. How do we fix this? And then we found — yes. Yeah. It's like structuring topics for the show, finding amazing guests like you, right? Like getting really, really into the content. And now we're starting to build resources.

(Joel Beasley at 01:14:29) So this is something I don't think I've talked about this yet.

(Patrick at 01:14:31) I noticed you had an application, right, for training teams, and that's more for IT teams, developer teams. Is that right?

(Joel Beasley at 01:14:38) Software, yeah. So we did LeaderBits, leadership development for technologists, and we have a number of customers on it. But what happened was we took a B2B sales model. Oh, so yeah, you're a founder. You'll appreciate this.

(Joel Beasley at 01:14:51) So we started to get in, get some early traction, and then we found out that our sales process is like nine months, right? But the deal size is like $30,000 to $50,000, but it'd take like nine months.

(Patrick at 01:15:04) Right. Which is typical. That's our sales cycle — six to 12 months.

(Joel Beasley at 01:15:08) Yeah.

(Patrick at 01:15:09) Right?

(Joel Beasley at 01:15:09) So we weren't prepared for that financially. So people love the product. The product's made, the product's out there, it's being serviced, we have customers. But what happened was when, like, summer of last year, we looked at our cash and we said, we can't support this. We don't have enough runway. Like, the product's working.

(Joel Beasley at 01:15:27) Customers are happy. We signed, like, household names and things like that. Like, we just don't have enough runway to let these, you know, next months go by. And that was partly getting like the team dialed in and everything. But then we found that people wanted to do paid advertising for the podcast because we were booked up so much in advance. So we said, all right, well, let's start doing — let's stop ignoring the money and telling them no and start being like, okay. And that worked out. Like, wait.

(Joel Beasley at 01:15:56) Then the revenue within three months overtook the revenue of the leadership thing. And so then we're just like, more salespeople. Just keep adding more salespeople until it doesn't work.

(Patrick at 01:16:06) And, you know, repurposing what you built. You know, that application, it looks like it could be used for training across the board. So, you know, even if you truly think there's not a market there or you don't want to support that sales cycle, which is quite different, quite lengthy, all that software you could reuse. I know you know that. So, but I liked your point about rework because that's something, another lesson I learned sort of the hard way because, you know, I was talking to our dev team, or director of development, and, you know, we had an item that we didn't do proper design at the beginning.

(Patrick at 01:16:46) And about two months after we released it, we figured out we have to redo it. And so, you know, we're talking — as dev meetings go — is like, here's the feature. Do you understand it? And, you know, he said, I just want you to be aware that, you know, the developers are probably going to take this hard because, you know, they spent a lot of time on this, and we're going to have to rework it. The redo is not going to go over nicely.

(Patrick at 01:17:08) And he can — you explain? You know, it's even a question of leadership because they're like, you know, if we're designing this stuff, working hard, are we even on the right path here? You know, are you taking us to the right place? And I didn't even think of it from that perspective. I'm like, yeah.

(Patrick at 01:17:20) That is a great lesson for me to learn, first of all. It's stayed with me a long time. So we've done, I think, a fairly good job of making sure the development is going to be permanent, I'll say, to our very best in design, so we have to rework it. But it sounds like with that app you've already built, it probably can be retranslated to another learning app, you know, for something, so you can use it again and capture the investment you did previously.

(Joel Beasley at 01:17:47) Yeah. And we're always learning, right? So I would say the most amazing things came out of that. And where we're at right now is we're like, let's continue to push the podcast forward. And then we have specific revenue markers we're looking at. And we said, all right, well, when we get to this point, which today we think will be about March next year — so we think about March next year, we'll have enough cash to build a team, two or three salespeople, and sustain the eight-month sales cycle, because it's a great product and people love it.

(Joel Beasley at 01:18:20) And it's really, really useful. For — I mean, it was built out of people requesting it from — they were like, oh, I heard this advice from this leader. Like, how do I get my team to take action on it? And then we're like, I don't know. Let's figure it out, you know?

(Patrick at 01:18:36) Yeah. And what about putting them on YouTube even? Is that something that the broadcast — put it on podcast, put it in multiple formats? Is that something that you could do in the future?

(Joel Beasley at 01:18:46) So we actually, yeah, this goes on YouTube.

(Patrick at 01:18:49) Oh, it does. Good. Awesome. I've been — I've only looked on the podcast because I've heard the terms. That's to me — it's funny — and that's excellent because I have to look. I've only looked at searching through the podcast on iOS.

(Patrick at 01:19:01) The funny thing is, I remember the very day that Google bought YouTube, and I thought that is the stupidest thing ever. That no one's going to — you know, no one wants to see other people sing. Because at the time, there's a big copyright issue, which it's gotten improved over time. But the idea that, you know, they're going to have all these original creators, it just to me, I just couldn't comprehend that. And to exacerbate or extend that even further, there's four founders of YouTube. One of them went to the school.

(Patrick at 01:19:31) It's probably five miles from my house, very interestingly. So, but yeah. And that's how I probably — I probably watch more YouTube now to get information than I do watching TV or any, you know, any source of information, like streaming it. So...

(Joel Beasley at 01:19:45) Me too.

(Patrick at 01:19:45) Amazing how — yeah, it's just amazing how any how-to you do now. You don't go to the Internet to read an article. You watch the how-to. And that's part of what this — the documentary is called Social Dilemma. That's the one. It came out, I think, this week.

(Patrick at 01:19:59) It played at Sundance, it said. But that's what they go into, is the references. So just organically, people that are interested in tech are going to find your show. Won't call it podcast, but the show on YouTube. That's excellent.

(Joel Beasley at 01:20:12) Yeah. We actually — we didn't do it. It started out as we just put the streams up, and then we're like, no, because it would just be two faces statically on the screen. So then we made a push to take our most popular episodes based off of our, you know, listening analytics and use that as the prioritization. And we'd actually go in there and edit the episode where there'd be this interesting part up at the front, and then it's going back and forth between the speaker faces as they're talking. And then we had, you know, a role assigned to the company to put out one episode a week of that.

(Joel Beasley at 01:20:46) Because for me personally, I love the Joe Rogan podcast, but I have never listened to it through the podcast app. I just go — I watch them on YouTube.

(Patrick at 01:20:55) Right.

(Joel Beasley at 01:20:55) Yeah. It's great.

(Patrick at 01:20:57) Yeah. It's true. Same. Yeah. That's so — that's great.

(Patrick at 01:21:01) I'll check them out there. I've been only watching on podcast. So yeah, listening.

(Joel Beasley at 01:21:05) Yeah. Well...

(Patrick at 01:21:06) Which I do — it's funny. I do have an appreciation, though. I didn't listen to a lot of podcasts, but I find myself when I do have downtime at work where I'm doing email or, you know, doing some of the design, I'll put them on to listen to. So that's actually how I've listened to most of yours. So it's great to hear that it's now on YouTube.

(Joel Beasley at 01:21:23) Oh, did you like any of them?

(Patrick at 01:21:25) Absolutely. I mean, to me, it's like I said, when I heard the role I was transitioning into and what it covered, I didn't really understand, um, you know, I didn't know if it was a role of a CIO. And so, uh, discussion — you know, Dean and I were talking about, you know, what I should be focusing upon. He said, well, the role that really you should gravitate into is as a CTO. And so that's when I started looking at what is — what's that? I mean?

(Patrick at 01:21:52) What's that role? Because my definition or, you know, the responsibilities I had up to that time were as a consultant and, you know, application manager and then infrastructure manager. So more on the IT, per se, piece. So that path was probably maybe natural to a CIO where you understand the process, understand the systems and the compliance in that aspect — the CTO. So I wish all this information existed, you know, when I was identified that that's the next piece.

(Joel Beasley at 01:22:20) Why don't you tell me real quick — because I do this a lot. I don't think I've ever done it on the podcast. But why don't you tell me real quick the size of the company and how many people you have in engineering, and then I'll give you my thoughts?

(Patrick at 01:22:32) Absolutely. So as mentioned, 22 years in. We are based in Chicago. So our exec team is — reports through here, although we haven't, like I said, been in the office for the last, well, six months now, been in our basements or in our kitchens around around the country. We have offices in Europe. So we have a large service center in Athens, Greece. So Dean, my business partner, is Greek. He grew up there. So we've had a really great tie to start the business, start an office there, and that's been since 2013.

(Patrick at 01:23:10) We've had our largest service center in Greece. And then a few years ago, we've also opened a service center in India. And a great team over there. We're building great resources, you know, in India and in Greece. So we're still, you know, adding to the team. We're right now for employees, about 120, going — we'll probably get to 150 this year. You know, we're hiring aggressively in all regions.

(Patrick at 01:23:36) Again, our focus is around SAP space, yet we're seeing more and more interest for non-SAP systems. So doing the migrations in whole, even data center moves. So one of our biggest customers we just moved is a company called Ingevity. They are a chemical manufacturer on the East Coast, and moved them to the Azure cloud. So that was over 600 servers.

(Patrick at 01:24:01) So it's a quite lengthy project. Not lengthy project, but large project just from a size perspective. And then we did another migration for Tidewater, which is a very interesting — they do offshore drilling, which is — that whole industry has been really challenged the last few years with the price of oil. So a lot of innovation on, uh, putting all of their applications — well, digitizing everything, digitizing the business processes and making everything paperless. So they've done cost savings the last five years over $665 million with all the consolidation and improvements in IT.

(Patrick at 01:24:36) So those have been areas we've been focusing upon. So we continue to focus on, like I said, the SAP space, but also managed service and hosting in the cloud and managing SAP and those other applications as best as can be done.

(Joel Beasley at 01:24:49) And then what are the...

(Patrick at 01:24:50) Next sensor.

(Joel Beasley at 01:24:51) What, like, if you take your schedule, imagine it as a pie chart, and you slice it up into three slices, what are the biggest three slices — biggest three ways you spend your time on a daily basis?

(Patrick at 01:25:03) Yeah. The one slice I don't spend enough time on, I would love to just, you know, snap my fingers and spend more time on, is the design, because that's where it's the investment in the future. So that, you know, the new features, talk to the dev team. Our dev team is located in Greece, so it's the time shift. So the morning starts there. And first few hours going through the sprints, going through features, in the — you know, we have two-week sprints. So we're right now on a monthly release schedule. So we do those two sprints, and we're always planning out, you know, two weeks in advance. So this morning, we're actually planning out the next release — will it be for November?

(Joel Beasley at 01:25:41) So that's where you want to spend your time, but where are the three areas you spend your time?

(Patrick at 01:25:45) So the other area is around, I would say, customer exec management. So things where really large customers — so helping bridge process where it's exactly, like you mentioned, about business processes. Things that — escalations, a large part — we have a few very large migrations right now going on. And it's funny, it's like, it's Pareto's Law. It's like, you know, the 20% that affects 80% of the problems, right? That's what we have when we do these migrations. It's not the core systems.

(Patrick at 01:26:09) That is challenging, but we've baked that well enough that's become very risk-free and proceduralized. The problem we have, and we spend the vast amount of intellectual energy on, I think, is the remote sites. So they're — we're commonly taking sites from a company. Some companies, they'll have — for whatever reason, they're going to carve out a piece of their business. Company we're working with now is a health care manufacturer. So they're going to carve out a part of their business, you know, specific product lines and such, and they're going to build a new business off that. The challenge is if you need the pie chart of all the applications, if you think of the concentric circles, you're going to hit every circle.

(Patrick at 01:27:02) So we have the complexity where we have to take every app, but they might only use a piece of the app, but you still have to bring everything over. And then it's all the networking and all the technologies, the desktops and such. We basically have to retrofit those sites to work in the new system, new landscape, new company. So that's where — that's a — so it's — think of it as like the new business services that we first, we have to figure out manually how to do it, and then how do we build the processes, and then, ultimately, how can we put it in software. So it's sort of like that's the next set of problems focusing on now.

(Patrick at 01:27:36) So that's been a large portion of my, like, last two months is that piece. So that deals from the design side. And then, you know, part of it is, you know, some of the business admin piece, just, you know, being, you know, an owner in the company, just making sure customer set for all customers is where it needs to be, helping the team. You know, I'm another resource. You know, I've worked with both teams, the delivery team, so the SAP management team executive or the application team and infrastructure team.

(Patrick at 01:28:06) So helping if there's, you know — we have a new kind of connection we need. For example, we're instituting a new way we do automation and FlexBridge. How are we going to build the server that's going to connect to all these secure customer locations? So how do we best do that? Make sure it's secure and compliant and don't break rules along the way.

(Patrick at 01:28:27) So focusing on those pieces. So I'd say that's a good 25% of the other effort. And then the other piece is around sales. So I'd say it's probably the other 25% is helping assist presales, doing demos of the solution, assisting, you know, doing demonstrations of who the company is. So at this point, it's around those four areas.

(Patrick at 01:28:49) But I would love if I could spend more time on the design just to, you know, that's where I think my natural abilities lie. And I think that's an area where I can move the needle the most. But it's, you know, you don't get your way, I guess, right? You've got to focus on other areas of the business that are vitally important also.

(Joel Beasley at 01:29:04) It depends, though, right? Like, yeah. So I'm a big fan of, like, there's always going to be some things that you're going to have to do that you don't want to do, right?

(Joel Beasley at 01:29:13) So we have to get that fairy tale out of our head that it's always going to be perfect. But that being aside, that doesn't mean that we can't optimize it for a more palatable situation, right? So I always think that the company needs you to do the thing that—they either do two things. One, the things that no one else can do because you're an owner. So that's like a default role. Like, you have to do the most difficult things that either are unknown or people don't know how to do. It's, Elon Musk says it's staring into the abyss and eating glass, right?

(Joel Beasley at 01:29:47) He's never getting to work on what he wants. He's always working on the biggest problem. So you've got that as like part of your portfolio—the things I don't want to do. That's going to take up, you know, a third of your time. And you've got like, you know, the sales, the business admin, all of these types of things. And then you have the things that you want to do, and then you have the things that like, you want to do, but you know you're good at them.

(Joel Beasley at 01:30:08) Like, you know you're skilled at them. You know that like when you're doing that, you can get into your flow. Like, you're on fire when you're doing that. The company definitely needs you to be doing that because, yeah, you're an owner. And no one is going to care and have as much passion as the owner who's on fire about what they're doing, right? Because anything's possible, right, at that point in time.

(Patrick at 01:30:30) True. So true. And yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 01:30:32) So if I—

(Patrick at 01:30:33) You add to that just the iteration part of it. Like, it's an exponential factor. So, you know, if you think of the curve, the fact that you have to get to that higher part of the curve to get to the next higher part—and that's where it gets a little, I'll say, even frustrating where you know you've got to be spending time in that piece and you're not. You get frustrated with yourself. I have. You know, you've got to make time to make sure you follow that. I'm sorry to interrupt you.

(Joel Beasley at 01:30:56) No, no, no. Please. This is your episode, my friend.

(Joel Beasley at 01:31:00) What I do—so I got this advice from one of my investors and shout out to Andy. We were sitting down having a difficult conversation once, like two years ago. And we put a recurring event in my phone that triggers once every three months. And it, like, in the evening, it triggers and it says, "Revisit Andy's list." And there's notes in my calendar event, and it asks me, am I happy about what I'm doing and how I'm spending my time?

(Joel Beasley at 01:31:29) Am I on fire about it? Am I being the best version of myself for the company? Things like that. And it basically just has these reflective questions that I ask myself. And inevitably, every three months when that ticks up, I'm learning something new by asking those questions over and over. And I would say the—what I hear from you, and I definitely don't want to be like giving advice or anything. I just, like, as from human to human, like, what comes—

(Patrick at 01:31:56) Always open to feedback.

(Joel Beasley at 01:31:58) That's—

(Patrick at 01:31:58) That's one of my, yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 01:31:59) It sounds like, it sounds like when you were talking about, like, the customer executive management, like, remote site thing that was taking up a lot of your time, it sounded like that would be the lowest-hanging fruit for you to find, like, an expert. Like, go find, like, an author in that area or somebody that you, like, really respect, and then hire them. I mean, look, you're at 120 employees. You can—you've got funds to hire people. You know what I'm saying? You and I both know that, right?

(Joel Beasley at 01:32:25) So it's just about the focus and making it your mission and making it that thing that's on your to-do list every day when you wake up. Like, for me right now, it's a marketer. I'm waking up every day. I have three or four interviews this week. I'm just going to keep interviewing people and learning until I find the person that I validate as an expert, but I also want to spend time with, because that's that person I'll end up being able to trust better. And so, just spending time finding the person that you trust in that area so that you can put someone there, know it's getting done well, not have to think about it too much, and then go spend the time doing what you want to do, right? And go spend the time doing more design. And then, and then get this—

(Joel Beasley at 01:33:01) You want to kick it up a notch and put a cherry on top? Go hire, like, the best designer to work with you on design and learn from them as you're getting to do the thing you love. You're getting to learn from, like, somebody you massively respect or like an author. And that's a dream. For me down here at ten, fifteen employees, that's what I'm looking forward to.

(Joel Beasley at 01:33:20) I want all this money and all this growth so when we're at 100, 150 people, I can go around and hire all the people that I respect and learn from them and become masters at, like, different areas. And while also making sure that the business has everything that it needs. But that's one of the beautiful parts about being an owner. Like, you've got a CTO at a company with 120 people that was not an owner and was just an employee—they cannot have the fun and do the things that you're able to do right now. You put in that ten years with you and your wife so that you can do this type of stuff.

(Patrick at 01:33:50) Yeah. Yeah. No, it's a very good point, and that's very well-received advice. And that's where we're hiring—we're interviewing, I should say—similar to where you're doing the marketing side. I'm looking with the team for that role.

(Patrick at 01:34:03) It's going to take some time, but same discovery, right? Looking for the right person. But, and it's—I've gotten similar advice from—we hired a key resource, Alan. I have to give a shout out myself to him. He told me similarly that I should spend more time on the design piece because that's a unique area where I can contribute. So, and that's well-received advice, and I will take it.

(Joel Beasley at 01:34:29) Yeah. I love it because, like, 99% of the time when I'm going out there and, like, looking for advice or getting insight, I already kind of know the answer. I just want to validate it and hear it from other people that don't have, like, a dog in the race so I can make sure, like, objectively, it's a good move.

(Patrick at 01:34:45) Yep. And also, yeah, it is the second objective. And also, just I find myself—when you describe a problem or describe something, period, you learn a lot about it yourself. Like, it's like when going through the verbalization, like, describing it, you learn a lot even, you know, when you have to articulate and describe the issue. So just, I think that in itself, even aside from getting the feedback from the other person, but talking through it because you can sort of formulate—

(Patrick at 01:35:15) Maybe it's how our brains work, getting into development where you've got to conceptualize and break things down into simpler pieces. It helps us problem solve, I guess.

(Joel Beasley at 01:35:23) Yeah. That's what we actually found with the show too. So when we look for guests and, you know, we have this pitch list meeting where people, like, our team pitches us people we're going to talk about. One of the items that's part of that formula of, like, ranking that pitch list is whether or not they have content online. Because we have found time and time again, people who are required to constantly translate their thoughts into written—you're doing it already because you have your business partners and everything like that, and you have to do it, right?

(Joel Beasley at 01:35:54) But other people that will, like, write and share blog posts and things like that and do articles—they have that skill. It's just a higher skill. They just have a—like, they're just better. They've spent time at it. It's like one of the indicators. It's not all that matters, but—

(Patrick at 01:36:12) No, it's a—I think it is a good indicator. Absolutely, that you can build content and be able to write. That's a skill within IT, within technical people, if they can formulate and communicate their ideas clearly, not just verbally, but also to document it and write it down.

(Joel Beasley at 01:36:27) Yeah. Like, my one of my favorite plays is finding authors I respect on a subject and then contacting them. And either, I'd say nine times out of ten, I don't end up working directly with them, but they know the person. They know who I need better than I know who I need because they just get that same stuff all day, and they understand. They have their network, and they're like, you need to go to that person for 100 different reasons, but that's the person you want. So that's, like, a go-to.

(Joel Beasley at 01:36:56) I've never shared that before, either, but it's, like, one of my favorite strategies to do. Because when you can read their stuff and you know how they think, you can qualify them as an expert without ever even talking to them.

(Patrick at 01:37:10) Sure. Well, you said it in your book—writing the book—that basically you're getting that person's experience or life experience in that area, which is, yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 01:37:20) I feel like when some people left, like, a bad review, they're like, "It's not worth $9.99 or whatever." And their justification was the length of the book. And I'm like, that's not a bug. That's a feature. Like, me consolidating it down to just these few points—

(Joel Beasley at 01:37:37) If I took ten years of experience and consolidated it down to a three-hour read, that should cost more than a twenty-hour read.

(Patrick at 01:37:46) Well, and I also think people's attention span is that short now. I think having a shorter book is much better, more appreciated. It's going to get a wider acceptance.

(Joel Beasley at 01:37:55) Right? Because most people, they'll read the book and they'll do a reading session and then kind of put it down. So if you can get through, like, 80% of it in a reading session, then boom.

(Patrick at 01:38:06) Yeah. It was probably about anyway, so the review.

(Joel Beasley at 01:38:11) Dude, Patrick, this is great, man. I'm going to—we've got to have you back next year. I want—because I want to, like, follow up with, you know—

(Patrick at 01:38:19) I'll tell you about how I spend my time.

(Joel Beasley at 01:38:22) It better be design. You better be in a design studio.

(Patrick at 01:38:24) I'll bring graphics.

(Joel Beasley at 01:38:26) Yeah. It should look like, instead of a music studio, it should look like a design studio.

(Patrick at 01:38:29) Yeah. It's funny because next time, I'll have all the—all the shows. Yeah. The Social Dilemma. That's the one I couldn't remember.

(Patrick at 01:38:35) It's interesting, you know? It's, uh, has some good points in it. I think you probably had all the same thoughts when you've seen it, but it's always interesting to see the current state of, you know, what we do.

(Joel Beasley at 01:38:48) Yes. Yeah. I know. It's, uh, this is great, man. I really enjoy you.

(Joel Beasley at 01:38:52) I see, this is the thing. Before with the podcast, I'd be like, "This is great. I'll be in Chicago in two months. Let's get lunch then." But I can't—I haven't been able to do that.

(Patrick at 01:39:01) Right. So who knows when it's going to get back to normal? That's the big question, right?

(Joel Beasley at 01:39:05) Yeah. We're thinking that when it does get back to normal, probably with the vaccine and stuff, we're thinking that we're going to try to push the show in the direction of, like, having people come here, like, flying them down. And maybe not every episode, but we want—I've gotten to do, like, two or three in person in my life, and it's really great. And so we were thinking, all right, that would be, like, a next level for us is we'll fly people down, do the show with them here in the studio. And we'll—because we have—this is like a 3,000-square-foot studio here.

(Joel Beasley at 01:39:42) So we're going to end up, like, decorating it and putting cool—like, I kind of want to make, like, a little—get a bunch of old technology and, like, new technology and kind of, like, have a little show and tell going on out there.

(Patrick at 01:39:50) You've got a good start already. Yeah. I like your decorating. I have an idea. Yeah.

(Patrick at 01:39:54) So out of your book, you have these problems, you know, things you have to know as a CTO or problems. But it could be quite interesting where you had a forum where, you know, you could do it virtually at least. You have this problem. You can see how different people react with the same kind of issue, you know—morale issue in a person, blah, blah, blah. And you actually just see how, because, you know, bringing all those experiences together could be quite interesting as a teaching tool. And, you know, we all have different perspectives, different cultures.

(Patrick at 01:40:21) That's one thing we didn't talk about a lot, and I think a lot about, and it's not so much maybe the CTO role, but as a business owner, is the culture and, you know, what you build in the company and what naturally gets created. I think that's a really interesting topic, so for future discussion.

(Joel Beasley at 01:40:38) Yeah. Definitely. I actually just made a note of it. Um, yeah. Well, sweet.

(Joel Beasley at 01:40:44) I don't know. I don't even understand my notes. You ever do that? You make a note?

(Patrick at 01:40:48) I do, too much.

(Joel Beasley at 01:40:49) My mind says "problem, different people react, same type of issue." I don't know what I was saying there. But—

(Patrick at 01:40:54) So yeah. Like, for example, you know, you brought up in the book, do you build it yourself? Do you partner? You know, that's something we—early on, we had a, so one of the features we had was to build a project plan. You know, put a project plan integration into the software. And we were working on this, and right when Alan, who I just gave a shout out to, joined the team, he said, "Why would you build this? There's so many other features that are going to be unique to the product. Just get something. If there's a product already that equally does what you want, just integrate that. You know, put that in the software, you know, partner with it."

(Patrick at 01:41:33) You know? So that was a big insight. And it's interesting to see, you know, real-life examples of how people react to that and what happened.

(Joel Beasley at 01:41:40) That's actually really good feedback. We're working on right now—we haven't really talked about it yet—but this thing called the Index. So what we did was we took all, like, every time people give good insight, we mark it in our notes because, you know, Jake and Adam are listening, and we make these, like, little clips. And we were using those clips for LeaderBits, right?

(Joel Beasley at 01:42:00) And putting, like, leadership challenges behind them. But then we were thinking, while that's on hold, let's do, like, a premium thing, call it Index. And we took all these clips. They don't have challenges behind them, right? Because that's, like, unique to LeaderBits. But it's just, like, the two or three minutes of advice from different people on different topics. And we've come up with, like, 20 different categories—hiring, to all of these, you know, difficult conversations. And then you can go into that category and see all the clips and insights from all the past guests. So there's, like, thousands of these things. So if you want to know about, you know, hiring, you can go there and you can see, oh, NASA does it like this, you know, different companies do it like that.

(Joel Beasley at 01:42:39) Or here's three things to think about. Try to get people some context around how to think about problems. But what you just said about how people react to different types of issues, I think that would fit in. I think there's a place for that in the index. Because if we're under culture, we were talking about doing an FAQ. Like, people ask a question, but being able to track that and say, alright, culture, there was bad culture, and then this is what happened, or they went and tried this. And these sort of little stories—how different people react with the same type of issue—I think that'd be really valuable.

(Patrick at 01:43:12) And it's like, you know, again, you mentioned in the book about how you test software. You model it, you test it iteratively. And it's not only your variable's different. Here's different actions, and it's performed in different places by different people. And it's interesting.

(Patrick at 01:43:26) It's almost like taking a scientific approach to how you'd apply this problem that a CTO could see. It's interesting.

(Joel Beasley at 01:43:33) Yeah, that scientific methodology lab. It's given us a lot. It's how we're bouncing light around the planet right now talking to each other.

(Patrick at 01:43:40) Right, right. There's things that do work and things that don't work. And maybe there's many things that work, but it'd be interesting because I think in the forum where it's interactive, I think it'd be quite interesting instead of reading it.

(Joel Beasley at 01:43:53) That's really good feedback. Yeah, I wanna—I was actually thinking about on the second book using the second book to promote this living—and now I'm calling it a living index, thanks to you. So it's like, it's gotta be this index where people can come and experience around these ideas and hear what great people say. And it's almost very similar to LeaderBits, but it's—you know what's interesting? It's like, it's all kinda blending together. You got my mind thinking, Patrick.

(Patrick at 01:44:25) I have a term for that. Maybe I heard it from somewhere. I call them converging goals or converging ideas, where that's where it's beautiful, where you can knock off a bunch of things at the same—same idea, same solution. And that's where in the early days when you're, you know, it's like you have two developers, and it's like, okay, I can get this feature, and it's gonna take them a month to get it. And then so you're looking at, okay, maybe there's this one feature that's gonna knock off four things, so we'll do that first. And those are things—thankfully, those are distant memories. But, you know, I do appreciate the thinking when it's that situation and taking the lesson. Let's say, don't forget the lesson learned.

(Joel Beasley at 01:45:04) Yeah, no, this is good. Yeah, it helps with our objective because we don't want people to repeat the same mistakes. We don't want people to have to wait for an educational institution to print another textbook or wait for an author to go through their year or two long editing cycle. What I want is I wanna get as close to the metal as possible. Like, you know, I talked to the Zoom CTO or CIO Harry about their transition through COVID, you know, right as it was all happening. And it's like, let's take some of his advice and extract that out and push that out to everybody as quickly as possible, you know, so they can get it within essentially real time, within hours of him giving some insight on a specific topic, right? You can have that versus waiting for that longer cycle.

(Patrick at 01:45:53) It's needed. I mean, the cycle—I mean, the—you know, our—you know, Illinois shut down, was it like the second week in March? And that next Monday, we had a tremendous uptick in just virtual desktop usage from our customers needing it. They had to build it, you know, within hours. So you're right. That information needs to be timely, especially in our role.

(Joel Beasley at 01:46:17) Boom. Alright, best piece. Let's wrap it up with the best piece of leadership advice you ever got.

(Patrick at 01:46:22) Leadership advice. Interesting. I'd say, you know, the one thing—we had interns always come in and they ask general advice. I'll say this first, and I think I never heard anyone say it, but it was an observation I learned in my first job: if you're looking at the clock, that's not the job for you. And I've never—I've never since that first job ever—you lose track of time. And that's, you know, I think that's—if I could give anyone good advice, that's my—that's, I think, the best advice I could give to anyone starting a career is that if you're looking at the clock trying to figure out how much day's left, you gotta get out of that work. And maybe it's not the career, maybe it's not the place to work, but I think that observation has helped me a lot. And so I shared that with the interns, and I gotta follow up with them. So we'll see if it served them well. Best leadership advice? My gosh. I gotta think through that. It's like there's so many ideas that have been shared with me. What's the very best one? My gosh. I mean, I don't know if it's something I've learned, but I just would say, you know, it's part of it is just being your true self and be honest. And I think, you know, being forthright with people. And specifically for the leadership, for CTO, I mean, there's—you have to have these requirements already. You know, natural curiosity, be ambitious, have that somewhat business capabilities, right? I would consider myself not a strong business person. I don't have the aptitude. I'm much more in the creative, more technology geek side. But I partnered with a person that is really strong in the business side. So that overcame my weakness. So I'd say, you know, I'd say the best advice is try to be self-critical, learn about yourself as much as you can. I think that's a great attribute of getting older. I think it's probably the only thing about—better about getting older is that you learn a lot about yourself. And, you know, I'd say if those people—you know, I'm almost 50 now. When you get in your forties, if you haven't learned a lot about yourself, then you're not being very self-introspective. And then, you know—and then, you know, so to be a good leader, you really have to understand—maybe this is the advice here—is that, you know, you gotta build that team, and that team has to be well balanced. You have to complement your weaknesses. You have strengths to cover those weaknesses. Let your strengths, you know, naturally resonate, and make sure that, you know, the team can, you know, know clear direction in where they're going and try to keep them, you know, on task and focused and hopefully can have a little fun or a lot of fun while you're doing it. So I don't know. Maybe that's not a bullet point one statement, but that's, I think, at least that's what resonates in my mind if I was gonna say this is what I see as important and what I try to start my day with and I interact with team members. That's what I try to, you know, give them the impression that's what I'm thinking of at least.

(Joel Beasley at 01:49:23) Boom. Mic drop. That was amazing. That was good.

(Patrick at 01:49:26) The longest answer. I apologize. I'm not good at short statements. Something I could work on.

(Joel Beasley at 01:49:32) You know what the best—

(Patrick at 01:49:33) Hire someone that has good short statements.

(Joel Beasley at 01:49:37) Come be a scribe at Protera. No. The best answers are the real answers. It doesn't need to be short and quippy. It just needs to be you.

(Patrick at 01:49:47) Yeah. And that's it. It's something I really value, and that's something I wanted to bring to this session is that I want it to be original. And not to say it's right. I'm just saying that I want it to be, you know—I didn't wanna—because I think my path might be a little nontraditional as a CTO or as a developer. You know, I wanna be a developer, but I know I can't spend time there. And so my—you know, the thing that—being a business owner, you think you have to have an MBA. You think there's a right way to do it. And as long as you can understand there's other people that you can have help you, you can complement where you cannot naturally do it well. And I think that's something I don't—I don't hear that enough, actually. I mean, to me the other—the other thing, my path's been atypical, you know, is twenty-two years in. You know, where you read a lot of these success stories and it's, you know, people see, oh, in four years, I gotta be at this point. And it's not been my path, and I don't think that's—it's like white lightning when that happens. It's so rare, and that's what we as humans like to focus on. That, oh, look, you know, that's—you know, Facebook was built and had a billion users within ten years or whatever this crazy thing was that, you know, which is impossible to replicate. But it's the, you know, it's the journey of just every day looking to become a little better in yourself and your team and helping others and, you know, have an honest approach to that, trying to look for the long term, wanting to be here for the long term, not having that—I'm gonna be in business for three years—because that mentality is probably gonna—you're probably gonna do a lot wrong, you know, with partners and, you know, employees even if you have that really short-term mentality that you're gonna get in and get rich and get out. It's that, you know, building it slowly but correct and, you know, if you wanna bootstrap, which I don't know how common that is for the people you talk to, but that's been—I'm a little more financially conservative, and so is my business partner, so that's been the right path for us up to now. So that's important to me. And I think there's people like me out there that that is their path, and I want at least—I wanna say that, you know, that path is legit too, and it works. And it's, you know, it might not be as common. You don't hear that as much, but the slow and steady and, you know, conservative path does work still. It takes you a lot longer. Yeah. So but that said, we're on the exponential curve, and the growth we've experienced in the last two years has probably—I haven't looked at the numbers, but it probably has supplanted the first 20, right? And that's the exciting part is now we're finally in that startup mode. And it's the exciting part. You think of these next chapters in your life. You know, I'm almost 50, and I'm more excited about our business and our future than ever. And that's, you know, that's a gift. It's a gift thanks to the people I work with and, you know, how things have happened. And some of it's chance. Luck is a big part of it. You know, you can plan as much as you can, but events happen as they do. And so anyway—

(Joel Beasley at 01:52:31) I was never a lucky person. I never saw myself as a lucky person. I really felt like I experienced luck until I started working very, very hard. And it really is like—it's—I love clichés because they're true. If you need some truth, go look at what people hate hearing. Usually that's the truth, and it's usually a cliché, and you can usually bet your dollar on that. That's real, right?

(Patrick at 01:52:58) It's real, right?

(Joel Beasley at 01:52:59) Yeah, it's the truth. But it's a weird process too about like paths and journeys and becoming something because it's almost like as much as I hate on the get rich quick people type deal, that sparkle or that idea of financial independence, that idea of this stuff can get a lazy person to do work for a short period of time. And then what happens is you kinda like—you'll do work—for sure for me. Like, I'd have an idea, work for a short period of time, kinda give up on it. Have an idea—this was when I was like, you know, 11. I kind of figured it out around 18, but I have this idea, I give up. And it's like, it's like fireworks. It's like sizzle, right? Oh, I'm gonna be rich. Oh, it's gonna be great. But then you run out of energy from that. But then the big change that happened in me is I realized at one point that like, I have to make myself better in order to work harder longer because I'm so frustrated with all my failed attempts that like, I need to have the success now. Like, I've tried so many times and I can't just give up. That'd be like the worst thing. And so clearly this is going to take way longer than I thought, but the next thirty years goes by anyways. And I would rather just do—and but then what happens is, so you convince yourself to do something difficult and like work a little bit harder and then you feel good. And you're just like, oh, this is how life works. I do difficult things and I get a reward. Like, I do this thing. I push myself. I grow. I go farther than I think I can. And I get this little hit, this little reward. And then it becomes, like, well, how far can I go? Right? Because it's only difficult—it's like lifting weight. Like, it's only painful, like, or hardly, right when you're doing it, right?

(Patrick at 01:54:44) Right.

(Joel Beasley at 01:54:44) And then you just kinda have to get over that hump and push yourself and then you start reading like other people and how they're doing it and you're like, whoa, it's not that hard to become the top 1%. You just have to do the hardest things in the world all the time and push yourself every day. And then you're like, okay, yeah. From here, I see it now after incrementally having done that for the better part of a decade. But if I were to go back and try to talk to myself and explain it, it's just like—I wasn't mature enough. I didn't understand.

(Patrick at 01:55:18) Yeah. Absolutely. Keep going and, you know, to try to apply, like, a really an example. I'm trying to think in my mind. You know, think of the app that you've already built. And there's so many things—you know, there was an amazing quote about a month ago. It was from Jim Cramer from Smart Money. What is his show? Fast Money, I think? You know? And I rarely watch it, but it happened that day. And he had a segment on how retail is changing because of COVID, and he said the comment was—and he was quoting an analyst—he said five years of technological advancements happening in three months. And where I'm going is that things are changing so quickly in our field that who knows what is the next need. And just being—you just gotta be there when it happens is really important and being aware of where the opportunity is gonna pop. And who knows? These things you've already built, they may have another second life for this next opportunity, and you're uniquely positioned for it. There's another—there's a quote I listen to. I hear this a lot. I think about a lot, and it's funny. You know, Bruce Springsteen—they, you know, obviously, he's probably favorite singer for many people, and he's been around longevity forever. And he said, you know, he didn't get a lot of awards for his career. And I think he ultimately got like an American Music Award or something or Grammy. And he said, I guess if you stick around long enough, you get one of these. And it's always stuck with me because it's like, you know, you can go out for that. And this guy, you know, in looking back at 1900s, you know, for music, he's gonna be one of the top musicians, right? But even he felt like he was sort of underappreciated, and he didn't make enough of a mark. And he, you know, his message was just keep going. You know? And so I think a lot about that because it's like I feel a responsibility to our team that their success and that the product is successful aside from the financial part, but more just that I—they get their moment in the sun, you know, because you work a lot on something and you want it to be successful.

(Patrick at 01:57:18) You want it to be creating value. And so that's the end goal. When I said customer satisfaction, I would even turn that into the internal use for the team so the team can see that all this hard work, this design, it went to something that really created value for people. So that's something I sort of lock in my brain and, you know, sometimes that comes out when you think that, gosh, where are we going and how long is it going to take to get there? I think those are thoughts that creep in your mind from time to time.

(Joel Beasley at 01:57:47) Yeah. And you're in a great position too because you have the ability to say, here's what I want. Here's the direction I want the company to go. And you can place people strategically within your organization to know that if you do that, you will get that result down the road. But at the same time, getting to spend the bulk of your day-to-day life doing something that you're very excited about.

(Joel Beasley at 01:58:10) And, you know, who knows, maybe you hire that person and then you go spend time in design and you do that for two years full time. And all of a sudden, now you're really interested in some other part of the business or maybe a new product line, or your interest will likely change because that's just how humans work. And then, you know, it's just being aware of that and that self-awareness. Oh, it's so huge. It's so important.

(Patrick at 01:58:35) Yep. And having people honestly give you feedback, give you good feedback.

(Joel Beasley at 01:58:39) Yep.

(Patrick at 01:58:39) Without sugarcoating it, it's important.

(Joel Beasley at 01:58:41) Oh, yeah.

(Patrick at 01:58:42) To get to the next level, you know, to really improve yourself. And that's another conversation because I was having a conversation about an individual that just didn't seem to be willing to change. And I was trying to figure out this key, how to unlock it. And the observation was, you know, there's a lot of people don't want to change. That's most people are like that.

(Patrick at 01:59:06) The people that want to improve, look at how they can improve their character and how they work is probably more of a rare attribute than more common. And so that helped me understand the situation better and, you know, set my expectations more properly.

(Joel Beasley at 01:59:25) Oh, yeah. That was a frustrating lesson for me the day I realized that. The most compressed way to say it would be, I can take someone who's running and point them in the right direction, but I can't get someone to run. Like, it's near impossible to get someone to run. But if you have someone who's running, you can point them in the right direction.

(Joel Beasley at 01:59:45) Right?

(Patrick at 01:59:46) Yeah. And another comment that blew my mind on that realm is, you know, having these concerns, talking about a resource that we want to help improve. And the comment was made, they probably have the same opinion of what you think. You know, they are as certain as you know they need a change. They are as certain that there's no problem. And that really blew my mind thinking of that because, to me, it was so obvious this was the problem. It's clear. You know, why aren't you figuring this out?

(Patrick at 02:00:18) And so that really blew my mind to think of it from that realm. I know it sounds a little obvious, but think of that when you have something really heated and you're really passionate about the answer. And just you can pause and say, the person I'm talking to probably feels as strong against it, whatever. And it's not going to be, so I don't know. I think of that too. Hopefully.

(Joel Beasley at 02:00:39) Is that person still there?

(Patrick at 02:00:41) They are. Yeah. They are. Yeah. They are.

(Patrick at 02:00:43) And, you know, the thing is, the fault's probably more in me than them, actually. And it's something I have to, I've grown into learning more about because if you learn about Abraham Lincoln, they said he actually would take his most bitter rival, and he would put him on his team because he wanted to have that different views and opinions in his cabinet. And there's a very good book on it. I didn't read it, but I think there's a very acclaimed book in the last ten years about that topic where he assembled people that were vehemently against his ideas. And he, because he thought the best ideas would come from that because they weren't all seeing the same answer.

(Patrick at 02:01:21) So I've tried to look at that view that we all have a semblance of being right. We all have a semblance of being wrong, and it's the more aspirational idea of let's improve it in some way. Let's work as a team. So I try to remind myself of that. So but thank you, Joel, for the opportunity. It's been, I've learned a lot. It's been an awesome exchange. Rarely get to talk like this, so I really have appreciated the exchange of ideas.

(Joel Beasley at 02:01:52) No. I'm so great. I'm so glad you let the episode keep going. I think we just beat our record for longest episode, so you win that.

(Patrick at 02:01:59) Wow. Yeah. You probably, you know, just trim out all the stuff that took me five minutes to spend three seconds.

(Joel Beasley at 02:02:04) Never. That's the best part, my friend.

(Patrick at 02:02:07) Wow. Yeah. Good. I hope it's helpful.

(Joel Beasley at 02:02:09) I hope it resonates. Yeah. I've been trying to encourage people to go longer because an hour, I noticed, like, in the interview, I get the person will open up fully right at around an hour. Right? And then that's when it's over, and it's like, no. Because media-trained people, well, we'll talk about this next time. But, yeah.

(Patrick at 02:02:30) Yeah. No. I very much appreciate the chance to exchange the ideas with you and also just the forum in general. And, you know, I'm definitely going to, I've been listening to podcasts. I read your book. I'm very excited to check out your YouTube because that's typically how I consume all the information. And, you know, just thank you for sharing this because I wish I had this resource when I learned this is the role I should be doing, and it didn't exist. And I think it's just a great guidance and service to helping build this next generation of leaders. And, you know, it's sorely needed. We need our competitive edge, you know, to be able to succeed and, you know, keep technology working for people, improving people's lives.

(Joel Beasley at 02:03:14) Oh, that was so, thank you so much, my friend.

(Patrick at 02:03:16) Thank you again, Joel. And thank you, Jake. I know you're on mute, but thank you for the advice to getting this set up. And Jameisena is still there. She helped get it all set up from our side.

(Joel Beasley at 02:03:24) Thank you.

(Patrick at 02:03:24) She is an amazing marketing resource, so she may have good advice who to talk to.

(Joel Beasley at 02:03:29) Well, she helped get you on here. So, like, clearly, she knows what she's doing.

(Patrick at 02:03:33) She, yeah. She knows how to network and make things happen, but our company's been transformed with her being here. So I can't say enough great things about her.

(Joel Beasley at 02:03:43) Excellent. Thank you so much. Have a great day. Thank you, guys.

(Joel Beasley at 02:03:47) Bye.

(Patrick at 02:03:47) Bye-bye.

(Joel Beasley at 02:03:50) 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.