Randy Weakly - CTO at ImageSource

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:00) Hello, my friends. Today we are talking to Randy, the CTO at ImageSource, and we discuss how to get your team bought in during times of transition, the culture challenges that can surface with a global engineering organization, and why you should try to learn something new from every person you work with. All of this right here, right now on the Modern CTO Podcast. Here we go. This is the Modern CTO Podcast.

(Randy at 00:00:37) Hello. Hello. Hey, Joel. How are you?

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:40) Hey, Randy. I am doing good. I'm excited to be talking with you today, man.

(Randy at 00:00:44) Hey, well, thanks for inviting me onto the show. This is quite an honor for me. Thank you.

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:50) Are you in Colorado right now?

(Randy at 00:00:52) Yes, sir, I am.

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:53) Tell me about the weather.

(Randy at 00:00:55) Well, we had a bit of a cold snap earlier in this week, and we were down in single digits for a couple days. But the sun's out, and it's back up in the fifties, I think, today. And the weekend looks great. So typical Colorado weather.

(Joel Beasley at 00:01:10) I love it. I love it. Yeah. My wife and I were looking to move out to the Texas area. We actually designed our search based off of multiple different weather maps of weather patterns and humidity. And we saw this nice area. Of course, weather doesn't care about the state lines that we draw, right? We saw this nice area around Texas, southern Utah, Colorado area where it's the weather that we want. Because we're here in Florida. It's about 92 degrees, and it's been that way for about twelve months, it feels like.

(Randy at 00:01:43) Wow. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It's great. Here we have about 300 days of sunshine, so that's something I really like. And I think, you know, my company's based out of Washington. So that's a big difference. Leaving here, 300 days of sunshine, going there, almost the opposite. But beautiful out there, you know, just a different type of beautiful, I guess.

(Joel Beasley at 00:02:08) Yeah. Every place has its own thing. I, for me, I like the sunshine because I'm from the Sunshine State. I just want the less humidity and a little bit cooler. Like, I want some seasons, right? And especially as we—it wasn't as big of a deal with me, but now that I have kids, it's harder to travel with little ones. And so rather than traveling to go get the weather, it's like maybe we relocate our home base to go get the weather. But yeah, this isn't a meteorology podcast, though.

(Randy at 00:02:39) Right. Right. Yeah. Well, good luck with that. That's exciting.

(Joel Beasley at 00:02:42) Thanks. I'll let you know where we end up. I actually spend a lot of time out in the Boulder area, and I know you're a little bit south of that. But I was geeking out, though, with the production team before the show because we saw that, you know, earlier on in your career, you got to work on some of the old space shuttle navigation systems and things like that. Could you tell me a little bit about what you were working on?

(Randy at 00:03:02) Yeah, sure. So this was back in really an exciting time for the space program. This was after the shuttle disaster, and it was return to flight. So there was a huge push back in the late '80s to bring on new aerospace engineers, new engineers to gear up for the return to flight. So me and 200-some of my closest new college grads got hired on by Rockwell Space Operations to really fill out what they needed in terms of the resources to make that happen. So we got on just about a year before we actually launched STS-26, I believe. And it was just the most fun time ever. We had just a really young group of engineers, most of us right out of college. Now we did have a lot of senior folks that came over from the previous maintenance contract for the shuttle. So they were our mentors, and they were super cool people. And it was just an amazing group. And after launches, the astronauts would come to Johnson Space Center, and there'd be this big party, and we could go meet them and talk to them. And so that was fantastic. And so I worked in the intact abort group. So if something goes wrong, we can return back to the Cape or we can go across the ocean somewhere in Europe or Africa. So that was really cool. And Steve Nagel was one of the champions of the shuttle abort. You know, after the disaster, he was one of the leaders in trying to come up with better, safer mechanisms for crew safety. So he was kind of our hero, and we got to talk to him pretty frequently. So that was a super exciting time.

(Joel Beasley at 00:04:48) And then how did that prepare you at all for transitioning into software? Was it a natural transition? Or how did that go?

(Randy at 00:04:55) You bet. So everything we did back in the day, we did on mainframes, but it was all software. So running simulations on shuttle missions and preparing the, we call them initialization loads. So the shuttle flies itself essentially, but it uses a big set of parameters to do that. And so before the launch, we would spend about a year and go through, I don't know how many, hundreds and hundreds of simulations. And our task was just to prepare the launch software so that it knew where these abort boundaries were and when it was safe to return to the launch site and when they needed to press across the ocean. So it was just working on computers. And it was mainframe, so it was a little different. And we programmed it. Fortran was our simulation language. But it really got me geeking on the whole concept of what you could do with software. And at one point, we brought on a data visualization package. And you can imagine back in the late '80s, this was pretty rudimentary. But for the first time, we took some of the output from the simulation and fed it into a 3D model of the shuttle, and we could actually see in 3D what was going on when an engine would fail. And nobody had seen that. We just saw the plots and the charts and stuff like that. So that really got me excited about going, you know, in a little different direction than the space program. And yeah. So I just started canvassing Colorado with my resume, trying to get a job in software development.

(Joel Beasley at 00:06:30) That's amazing. Yeah. Such a large advancement. And because when you were first describing it, my mind automatically was just picturing the 3D illustrations. And then you went on to describe that, oh, and then at some point, we got this new illustrative package. Right? It's like, oh, that's right. And then I was thinking, what on earth were they looking at before they were looking at a 3D model? And you said graphs. And I said, whoa. You guys doing all of that work. And the visual interaction you get with it is just some plot data.

(Randy at 00:06:59) Oh, yeah. Yeah. Roll, pitch, and yaw, you know, just trying to make sense of what that looks like, you know, translate that into some type of reality. So, yeah, seeing that for the first time was a kick.

(Joel Beasley at 00:07:11) And then was there a number of different software projects you worked on until you got to ImageSource? How did you end up at ImageSource?

(Randy at 00:07:19) Yeah. I did. So I ended up moving to Colorado with GTE Government Systems, working on an artificial intelligence program written in Ada. So it was a very interesting piece of software. And I didn't spend a lot of time there because that was part of internal research and development that we did, and that contract went away. And so I moved only a year or so after joining that team, but very interesting early AI. And so then I went to a number of different places. I worked at MCI on their video conferencing system. This was back in the day where you used multiple phone lines to do video conferencing, and then muxing and demuxing the signals and whatnot. And then from there, I went to a small company that did content management. We were acquired. That company was acquired. I ended up at Oracle for a while. And then I've been here at ImageSource for the last seven-plus years. So pretty exciting. Yeah. It's been a great ride.

(Joel Beasley at 00:08:17) What's the story of you meeting the executive team at ImageSource?

(Randy at 00:08:22) Yeah. So back when we were at a company called Optika, they were a company here out of Colorado Springs, a small company. We had about 150 people, a great company. We had some really good software. And back in the mid-'90s, we were kind of leading edge for the Windows platform. So I think we really had some good stuff. And we had a number of resellers that sold our products. And so ImageSource was one of those companies that resold and implemented and deployed—basically a systems integrator for our software. And so we got to know them. They ended up becoming our best partner. They sold the most. They were great to work with. And so our product progressed. And then we got bought by Oracle and we retooled everything. So we had been a Microsoft-based shop and Oracle's all Java. And so we retooled our product and it really just didn't fit with our traditional customer base. And so ImageSource decided to go a little different way and build their own stuff. Again, a Microsoft-based product, a little more suited for the SMB space. And so they got it a certain ways down the road. Things were coming together, looking good. And they thought, we probably need to bring somebody on to help us make that transition from a systems integrator into a real software ISV. And, you know, that's a tough transition, right? Culture eats strategy for breakfast. So trying to pivot like that, it's hard. So I came on, I helped them with that, and we've been very successful in transforming. We're now, I don't know, 99.9% just our stuff. So it's been a really fun transition for us.

(Joel Beasley at 00:10:11) Looking back on it, why were you successful at that transition?

(Randy at 00:10:16) Well, I really think there was a top-to-bottom desire to do it. It wasn't just, you know, the CEO's plan. Everybody was bought into it. So changing a culture, that's what it requires. It requires everybody to really catch the vision for where you want to go and have people that can communicate that vision effectively and really rally the team. And our CEO is great, Terry Sutherland. He really did a great job doing that. And when I got on board, I really didn't have to fight it. It was more about just education and, hey, you know, based on my experience, this works out pretty well if we change this process to work this way. So, yeah, it was just a real good team effort to do it. And we didn't have any dissension, you know, "we've always done it this way, we're not going to change." So it went pretty smooth, actually.

(Joel Beasley at 00:11:10) And so after the transition, what's the main problem you solve? What's the product or service behind that solution?

(Randy at 00:11:17) Right, so we have an enterprise content management platform. So we help companies evaluate what they do from a business process perspective, and it could be anything. And we do a lot of state and local government. So permit processing or gun permit processing, to healthcare, to financial services, to high-tech manufacturing, to higher ed. But we work with companies to help them evaluate their current processes and figure out ways to basically transform those into a digital type of process. So it's taking paper and turning that into digital assets, taking their workflow that had been physical, carrying things around or interoffice mail, and turning those into electronic processes. And then applying layers of automation on top of that, intelligent routing for exception handling. We have analytics. So you want to keep track of what's going on, identify bottlenecks, measure how successful you're being. So we provide that kind of a platform. And then our services folks, they've got 26 years of experience helping customers make that transition from, you know, the paper and physical world into a more digital type of business process.

(Joel Beasley at 00:12:35) So when your customers come in or when you approach the market, is it more of a digital transformation consultant or somebody they're seeing the RPA-type tool and they're like, "I want that tool." How do you go to market with having such a wide array of services?

(Randy at 00:12:51) Yeah. That's a great question. And that's a challenge because you're selling almost a toolkit. And that's really hard to get a prospective customer to catch that vision. And how do you paint a complete enough picture of what you could do for them to solve their pain? Because, you know, like I say, nobody wants a quarter-inch drill. They want a quarter-inch hole. And so—

(Joel Beasley at 00:13:09) I have not heard that.

(Randy at 00:13:11) Yeah. So it—and it's so true. Nobody wants a toolkit. They just want you to solve their business pain. And so, like I said, we've got some folks because of the history integrating many different types of software. They didn't just sell my software, they sold Oracle, they sold IBM, they sold Kofax and some of the other products, Liquid Office. So they had a really broad perspective on what was available technology-wise to solve customers' problems. And so they would walk in, they would do, we have what's called an ecosystem. You'd be surprised how many customers don't really understand how they do business. And so we help them understand that. And then we look for ways that we can improve upon that. And our services guys at this point, you know, they're experts with our platform. And so they really can make that transition for them to say, "We see you doing this. We can make it look like this."

(Joel Beasley at 00:14:12) I like that. So is digital transformation a foot in the door these days?

(Randy at 00:14:20) It is, especially, you know, we're all kind of sick of talking about COVID, but we've been doing this type of digital transformation for 20-some years. And so we were really pretty well positioned when this hit to help customers adapt and change their workforce from, you know, in person and big offices to now working from home in a safe environment for their data.

(Joel Beasley at 00:14:45) Yeah. I like that you mentioned the COVID thing because, you know, we get people pitch us all the time, you know, to come on the podcast. We get the infinite email box of pitches, and it seems like for the past six months straight, every pitch is like, "COVID's done this." And I was like, when I saw your PR team didn't—they actually sent over some pretty interesting topics of conversation, so shout out to them. But other pitch people, and one of the things I was talking about with the team, I was saying, I just don't want COVID on the topic list anymore because I'm just hearing about it.

(Randy at 00:15:20) I know. Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:15:21) Like, think about it, Randy. When you turn on your media, it's just—it's burnt out. I'm burnt out on COVID.

(Randy at 00:15:30) It is. It is. Personally and professionally, right? It's just pervasive every day. You're just—something about COVID. But that's the reality. And it was a huge impact to businesses. And so yeah. And who knows what this is going to look like six months, twelve months from now?

(Joel Beasley at 00:15:48) I know. So my favorite ones: "How do you continue to innovate through COVID?"

(Randy at 00:15:53) Right.

(Joel Beasley at 00:15:54) I said we should rewrite it and just start replacing COVID with the 2020 flu season.

(Randy at 00:16:00) That's right. Yeah. Yeah. Well, again, the answer to that, right, is necessity is the mother of invention. So I think there's been a lot of cool innovation because of COVID.

(Joel Beasley at 00:16:13) There really has. To their credit, there is a lot of interesting things that have happened. A colleague—I can't remember what it was right now, but he did this long blog post about two months after COVID about how he literally worked with the entire engineering team at the college to transition, I think it was 10 or 20,000 students within a couple weeks from them going to in-person classes to them being 100% online. And I put it on the list for later next year. I was like, I want to talk to that guy about what actually went down on the battlefield going through that process.

(Randy at 00:16:59) Right. Oh my gosh. How much stress that would be trying to do that? You know, it just has to be done. There's just no way to continue to function and such an important part of our society.

(Joel Beasley at 00:17:14) And with people digitizing their workflows or looking at being more strict on cost and also having to work remote, did that uptick your business a little bit? Did it increase it?

(Randy at 00:17:26) It did. So our existing customers, they were all already pretty well positioned in terms of just the technology itself. But we did see, to your point about the school system, a number of our customers having to react very quickly now to huge increases in what they had to do. So government agencies that we work with that now had to facilitate workers comp and help with businesses, financial help and unemployment. And so we service a lot of those types of customers in the Pacific Northwest especially, and they were scrambling.

(Randy at 00:18:07) So not really just from a technical perspective, but just how do we handle this increased volume? That was great. Our services guys are well positioned to help them. And so we were able to make some changes for them and scale them out very quickly. But yeah, we have seen a lot more interest in technologies that will facilitate these remote workforces and very interesting.

(Randy at 00:18:33) So as COVID unfolded, we were surprised, I guess, as many companies were, how much about their business they really didn't understand. And so that was good and bad. But one of the things that was particularly interesting to us is that, I mentioned we have a very broad set of customers. Some of them have HIPAA compliance that they have to meet, PII, PCI, ITAR. So a lot of different regulations around the data and the data they process.

(Randy at 00:19:09) And so in 2019, their employees came in, they had a very comfortable, safe environment. They didn't have randos walking behind them or people looking through windows or whatever. Well, now they send all these people home. And how do you still enable your remote workforce with everything they need, but keep control and keep your data safe and keep other people's data safe? So we have some great technologies for data loss prevention.

(Randy at 00:19:37) And so that was something was a big topic with our existing customers and new customers.

(Joel Beasley at 00:19:43) So you've got these different, I guess, for lack of a better term, either products or business units type deal where you have the document imaging, some data privacy, some RPA. So you as the technology leader over there, how are the teams structured? How do you structure that organization? Is it by product? Is it, do you have cross product teams with certain layers abstracted?

(Joel Beasley at 00:20:09) I know the design of the teams is dictated by the business model almost, but I'm just curious what yours looks like.

(Randy at 00:20:18) Right. Well, so we have a core team, we call them, and they're responsible for the primary platform. And we really want to move to microservices, functions as a service, things like that. That's ultimately where we want to go. We're not there yet.

(Randy at 00:20:36) So our core is a bit monolithic, but then we have other teams that build on top of that. So whether they're building a full end user product or they're building a module that augments our workflow, we have different teams that will pick up those modules. And then they just add into our suite of tools that you can choose from to do whatever you need for your business.

(Joel Beasley at 00:21:02) Nice. And do you get to interact in the sales process or with some existing customers of yours? How much time do you get to spend with your customers?

(Randy at 00:21:13) Yeah, absolutely. And that is one of the parts of my job I enjoy the most is working directly with our customers. And, of course, that's been really a bummer for 2020, right, as we don't get that face time. And I think a lot of our customers are scrambling. So even getting them on a Zoom conference and stuff like that is probably a little more challenging than it would normally be. But yeah, we spend a lot of time talking to our customers. And that's one of the other things that drew me to the small, back to the small company environment is that we can go out and talk to a customer. We can come up with some great ideas to solve some new problems for them. And we can come back and in a couple of months, we can release a new module that bolts right onto our platform and that becomes part of our product going forward.

(Randy at 00:22:01) So we're very nimble. And that is exciting when you can talk to a customer, hear some pain, and then you come back to them a couple months later and say, we've got something to solve that pain for you.

(Joel Beasley at 00:22:12) I like it. Right? And you get to know them and you get to understand them. What are some of the trends? What's the biggest trend you're seeing right now across the customers?

(Randy at 00:22:21) Well, aside from just the scrambling, right? The very tactical, how do we maintain business continuity through these weird situations? We're seeing a lot of analytics, needs for analytics and understanding what's going on in my business. And that's not really something new, but I think it's maybe it's COVID again, but it's trying to understand what this means now that I've sent all my people home. And you hear a lot in the news about, oh, this is going to be permanent for us because we just saw big spikes in productivity.

(Randy at 00:22:58) Maybe that's true. It's such a soft metric. And so I'd be very interested to understand more about how they're measuring that. Maybe you've got some perspectives because you talk to some really sharp people. But that's just really hard for me to get my head around.

(Randy at 00:23:14) I'm kind of a more in person person. So I like being in the office. I like the collaboration of being with my team and talking things over and sitting on the whiteboard or talking with customers on the whiteboard. So, yeah. So analytics has been kind of an uptick for us.

(Randy at 00:23:30) And then the process of customer engagement and even employee engagement, now not physical, now out, you know, electronics. So we have a web form product. And so being able to collect information from new customers, customers, employees, whatnot through web interfaces, through mobile devices and things like that, you know, better than throwing a PDF form or something like that up on your website. So those are probably the two biggest areas that we're seeing. That and, to your earlier point, managed services.

(Randy at 00:24:01) Helping customers scale their system, manage their system, take the burden off of just the mundane managing the care and feeding of my line of business systems.

(Joel Beasley at 00:24:12) Yeah. And actually I have a question that we can cut it if we don't like it, but I'm just curious to know because it just popped into my head. So I'm curious at your level of business. Can you give me a quick idea of the employee count at ImageSource?

(Randy at 00:24:27) Yeah. We're around a hundred employees.

(Joel Beasley at 00:24:30) Okay. So I'm just curious at that stage, which there are going to be more companies than not at that stage. Right? Because that's how the market works. When you're involved in the presales process with a customer, right, I'm sure you're coming in there for expert advice, is it like, how does that work from a sales perspective?

(Joel Beasley at 00:24:50) Do you close them like a sales close, or are you working with another sales executive and you provide information and they close? Do you get involved in the finance of the deal? I'm just curious from a business perspective at your level.

(Randy at 00:25:03) Yeah. Well, great question. It's more of the latter. So we have sales executives. They would curate and cultivate the prospect until we get to a point where it makes sense to get in front of them and show them some real technology.

(Randy at 00:25:19) And so I do get involved when they're especially when they're complicated, or maybe they've got some touch points with, you know, Salesforce or ERP systems or whatever. And so we'll configure a system up and, you know, ours is a platform, many toolkit type of functionality. So we'll build out something that will resonate with them. We don't want to have to force them through that mental exercise of leaping from that toolkit to how you're going to solve my pain. So we want to show them as much as we can.

(Randy at 00:25:50) And so I typically will do that. I often do demos and then I'll very often meet with the IT group. A lot of times the business, always the IT group, they have questions about security and scalability and compliance and things like that. So, yeah. But I don't get involved in the any pricing, licensing, negotiations, closing paperwork, things like that, which is nice.

(Joel Beasley at 00:26:15) Do you think that the experience of being at this level in business has made you a better customer when purchasing?

(Randy at 00:26:23) Oh, absolutely. Absolutely. So when we go into competitive situations, and me, I've worked at about eight different companies. One of the things that I and this sometimes our salespeople don't really like this, but I like to show the customer or the prospect the tools that they would be using and really how easy it is to build what I'm showing them. You take a lot of the other products and they'll come in, they'll have some very, very slick demos and nice glossies.

(Randy at 00:26:52) But if you ask them, can you show me what it took to put together this demo? That's problematic. And a lot of their salespeople can't do it. And if they have a good SE that can come in and help them, it's very, very complicated. So having been on the selling side, when I go to buy something, I'm not satisfied if you're going to show me your standard marketing demo.

(Randy at 00:27:17) I want you to open the bonnet, show me what's under the hood, show me how you're going to configure these things. If there's some extensibility capabilities you've got built in, I want to see what those look like. So, yeah, that's really, that's changed my perspective when I go to buy things.

(Joel Beasley at 00:27:37) Yeah. I recently we bought a new system. And when my team, they wanted to buy it. Right? So I said, okay.

(Joel Beasley at 00:27:45) Let's discuss the metrics that are important to the business and how this will help us achieve our goals. They had all that covered. And then the price, we could do the price. And then there were four or five technical things that would make or break the deal. Right?

(Joel Beasley at 00:28:00) And so we went into a sales meeting, and then the salesperson just started pitching, you know, because they have to be prepared and take the control because I bet most people don't know. They just sit there and watch the presentation. Right? And I was just like, I apologize. I don't mean to interrupt you, but I have these four very specific questions.

(Joel Beasley at 00:28:20) And then they tried to open up the demo version, and they weren't as familiar with the demo version as they were with their own account. So they ended up exiting the demo version, going into their own account, and actually answering my questions. It was a thirty minute call, and they closed a big deal, and it was really great for them. Right?

(Joel Beasley at 00:28:37) Before having... My background is I built software, large scale software systems. And so I'd get one customer and I'd work with them for a year, one to three years. And so I while I would call myself an entrepreneur then, I didn't ever run a sales team, like a B2B sales team. So I had no experience in that until the past two or three years here.

(Joel Beasley at 00:29:00) And so now that I've gotten to see how a sales team operates and how everything works, I feel like that's made me a much better customer than I was before. And it gives me sort of the leeway to know that I'm not being rude, that I'm actually helping us all get to the point we want to get to quicker. And I think that more often than not, less experienced people, you know, which are listening to show to get more experience, they will be polite and sit there for the half hour with the three questions they have, watch the person not answer anything or hope the whole demo. And then at the end, they're out of time and they want to get their three questions answered. So I kind of want to like public service announcement that.

(Joel Beasley at 00:29:41) Right?

(Randy at 00:29:41) Absolutely. That is a great point. Yeah, you should never be embarrassed in a demo to ask questions. And, you know, like they always say, there's no stupid question, right? You don't know the software.

(Randy at 00:29:53) You don't know what's going on under the hood. So it makes perfect sense to ask those questions. You know, if they can't answer it, you know, then maybe that's fine. They have to go pull in a technical resource. That shouldn't be necessarily a red flag, but whatever answer they come back with should be a pretty good one.

(Joel Beasley at 00:30:11) I love it. And I also heard so I had this great VP of sales Jaime, and the one of the meetings I was in with him, he the meeting was kind of over at twelve minutes into a half hour meeting. Right? Because we got the questions answered. But there was this weird tension in the room that the meeting should continue for the half hour it's scheduled.

(Joel Beasley at 00:30:31) Right? That law of the task will take the amount of time allotted.

(Randy at 00:30:35) Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:30:36) Yeah. And I think it was like a Drucker thing. But he exited with this beautiful line, like, okay. We have all of our questions answered. There's sixteen minutes left back in your hour or, you know, in your half hour.

(Joel Beasley at 00:30:48) Enjoy that, and we'll talk soon. And I was like, woah. Just watching him how he exited the call and did that so cleanly was I don't know. I learned more by just watching people. Right?

(Joel Beasley at 00:31:02) Do something because then I can monkey see monkey do it. You know?

(Randy at 00:31:06) Oh, yeah. Yeah. It's, you know, any craft where you've got a real artisan, you know, a salesperson, a technologist or whatever. Yeah. You can learn so much just watching people.

(Randy at 00:31:19) It's awesome.

(Joel Beasley at 00:31:20) I love it. Yeah. Watching your team, watching your kids, whatever it is.

(Randy at 00:31:25) Yeah. Absolutely.

(Joel Beasley at 00:31:26) Yeah. Absolutely. I you earlier were alluding to a little bit of privacy and security. It looks like you do some stuff over there. And I was just curious if you have any tips for people that have made the transition to the work from home on dealing with their security.

(Randy at 00:31:45) Yeah. That's a big question. And, you know, it spans whatever, you know, network security, access to your line of business systems from over a VPN, things like that to, you know, what are your employees looking at on the screen and who's walking behind them through the kitchen or the home office or whatever. So, you know, there are, I think there are some pretty cheap things, you know, you can get those little privacy screens on your laptops and things like that. But it, and again, it depends on the level of regulations that you're under.

(Randy at 00:32:21) You know, HIPAA's pretty serious stuff, and they've got a lot of things you can and can't do. And so you've got to take that very, very serious and make decisions about, do I need a technology that's going to help me protect this information? Other information, if you're processing customer complaints or something like that, you're probably fine. So it really comes down, I think, to the type of information that you're processing, or that your remote workers are processing at home in their home office or their kitchen. And, you know, if you don't know, like you said, I mean, reach out and get some expert advice from people in the industry.

(Randy at 00:33:02) Vendor. You know, listen to some podcasts. I'm sure there's some great stuff out there about what's prudent for your industry. But, yeah, that's a great question. And like I said, that was one of the revelations that the whole COVID thing revealed to us and our customers.

(Randy at 00:33:22) Wow. Yeah. I guess we should be, we should be concerned about that and make sure we're doing what's needed there.

(Joel Beasley at 00:33:29) Do you have any favorite brands for the privacy screens?

(Randy at 00:33:33) I actually don't. I don't use them. I'm six one, so it's hard for me to get my laptop out on the airplane. But we've got one of the sales gals that I travel with. She's a sweet petite thing.

(Randy at 00:33:47) And so she works all the time on her computer on the plane, and so she's got this privacy screen. And when we're doing demos with customers, I look over, I can't see a thing on her machine.

(Joel Beasley at 00:33:56) Oh, nice. Yeah. I actually the other day, I was talking to someone, and yeah, I was giving them our information, right? And their phone was just black, and I was standing right next to him.

(Joel Beasley at 00:34:08) And I was like, what screen is that? And he told me, I wrote it down. I don't remember right now, but it's amazing how your eyes will just naturally go to their screen. Like, you could have the best intention. It's like a subconscious automated process that happens when someone's standing next to you. It's the same interface you're familiar with. You know everything about it, and you just watch them type in your information, maybe for accuracy. It just kind of happens. And I saw it, and I was like, these privacy screens have gotten so much better over the last decade.

(Randy at 00:34:39) Oh, yeah. I haven't seen one on the phone, but that's a great idea.

(Joel Beasley at 00:34:44) Yeah. Because you're always standing next to people. And so, earlier you mentioned this AI related programming language. What was it called, Ada?

(Randy at 00:34:53) Oh, Ada. Yeah. It's actually Lady Ada, one of the very early, maybe the first programming language. I'm not sure. But it's a bit obscure at this point, but it lent itself well to building artificial intelligence engines, or at least it did. Now there are way better tools out there, I'm sure. But that was what my team was building back in the late eighties, early nineties.

(Joel Beasley at 00:35:21) So what's your perspective on AI today? What's going on there?

(Randy at 00:35:25) Yeah, that's a really interesting question. And let me caveat this by, I am just an AI student. I am by no means an expert. It is an enormous topic. We deal with AI and I've got some great, super smart geeks on my team that just talk about this stuff day in, day out.

(Randy at 00:35:45) But I mostly talk to our customers about AI because it's hyped out there right now. The last ten years, there's been an explosion in the democratization of the tools that are available to build at scale. So there's a lot of talking about it and customers have questions. Well, how do I use this? And this gets back to kind of our core competency, which is to hear a customer's problem and then figure out a way to use a platform to solve that using technology.

(Randy at 00:36:19) I think—so I got an analogy. Many years ago, I like woodworking. I used to watch this show on TV where this guy would make beautiful furniture using nineteenth century tools, right? So he'd have these axes and hand planes and hand drills and stuff that he was using.

(Randy at 00:36:39) And he could crank out the most beautiful piece of furniture. And so I'd get my car, I'd drive down to Home Depot, and I'd be looking at these tools. And my gosh, they're all sciency and engineered and cut precision cuts and stuff. And buy all these tools and take them back. I still couldn't make furniture. You really, even if you have a great tool or set of tools, you still have to have the knowledge to build something.

(Randy at 00:37:06) And I think right now that's the big gap. We've got this huge hype. There's been great strides in what people are doing with artificial intelligence. Customers are salivating to use this to impact their business, but they don't know how. And I think that's really going to be the next evolution of AI, is figuring out how we take business data and we really use these tools that have been developed in large industries.

(Randy at 00:37:42) There's pockets of AI that are doing fantastic things right now. But I just don't think we've really got to the point where we can really effectively use them in the enterprise.

(Joel Beasley at 00:37:55) I like that analogy. That's actually the second time I've heard about that guy. I don't know his name.

(Randy at 00:37:59) Oh, really?

(Joel Beasley at 00:38:00) But that's the second reference to this guy. The other person was a comedian or something. I heard talk about it on another show, and he was like, yeah, just wake up, eat lunch, and watch this guy make furniture. He described it just like you did.

(Randy at 00:38:13) Yeah. Yeah. It's fascinating. It's the craftsman, right?

(Randy at 00:38:16) Anybody who is a craftsman at what they do, it's fun to watch them.

(Joel Beasley at 00:38:21) Yeah. Passionate people who are in the zone doing what they—there's something very attractive about that. And you sort of want to help them and help push them along and give them opportunity.

(Randy at 00:38:33) Right. Right. Absolutely.

(Joel Beasley at 00:38:35) What was your first craft that you mastered that you got really excited about?

(Randy at 00:38:40) Gosh. Let's see. Probably music. So I've played guitar since I was ten. Been in and out of rock bands and stuff most of my life.

(Randy at 00:38:51) Not so much lately, but yeah, it's been a really lifelong hobby for me. And that's been great.

(Joel Beasley at 00:39:01) Oh, amazing. Yeah. We're big music fans over here. Our producer, Jake, like, whenever he's on his call, he's got his 18 stack amps behind him and for his—I think he's more into metal type stuff. And then our associate producer, the way we actually found him, he submitted for an internship, and he was doing these live sessions out of his house.

(Joel Beasley at 00:39:26) He was recording them and doing the audio engineering on them, and he just put up the YouTube videos on his portfolio. And it was so cool because you could see someone's work and you could understand the quality of it. And so, yeah, big music people. I've played guitar for about seven years now. I played saxophone a lot in middle through high school band.

(Joel Beasley at 00:39:48) So that was my first introduction, and then a little bit of piano. But yeah, I found that the music can allow me to get into a flow state. I can get into a flow state programming, writing code, doing all sorts of things from writing. But for some reason, writing, I always kind of connect to work, right?

(Joel Beasley at 00:40:07) Programming, I connect to work. But the music is a nice outlet. It's a way for me to get into a flow, relaxed state where it just feels like the universe is just kind of going through me, right?

(Randy at 00:40:15) Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:40:16) And once you have those skills, you can just kind of sit down and play.

(Randy at 00:40:21) Yeah. Oh, yeah. I agree. It's a great outlet anytime. And I think it actually taught me something, too, in my teens.

(Randy at 00:40:28) I had different bands that I was in. Some were what we call cover bands. They just play other people's music. Some were original bands. And I worked with some really talented musicians. And then we would have a session, they'd go home, and I'd try some of my own stuff.

(Randy at 00:40:45) And what I realized was I'm not all that creative on my own and I need a muse. And so I need somebody to work with. But once I have somebody to work with, man, we just do some really good stuff. And so having that knowledge about myself, when I got into software, I just try not to do that stuff by myself. It's always more fun and much more productive, at least for me, to grab somebody and sit at a whiteboard and hash through stuff.

(Randy at 00:41:15) I just seem to come up with better stuff that way.

(Joel Beasley at 00:41:20) Always. I mean, that's the one thing. There's great energy when we do Zoom calls and things like this. But the one thing I noticed is that there is a slight difference because when you're in person, you can leave almost tingling with the energy from the conversation. And it's here and it's present and there's great energy, but there's just this physical thing that happens when you're in the same room with somebody.

(Joel Beasley at 00:41:45) And when technology can figure out how to replicate that at a distance, then that'll be a huge leap for us.

(Randy at 00:41:53) Oh, absolutely. And I'm kind of an introvert. So, you know, some of the things that COVID has imposed upon us personally and professionally, yeah, I haven't had really a problem with because, you know, I'm more introverted. But, man, I miss the conferences. I miss going and geeking out with a thousand of my fellow developers, whether it's Gartner or Microsoft or Open World or whatever it is. I really miss that.

(Randy at 00:42:18) So, yeah, I'm looking forward to the day when we can all get back together and geek out on new technology.

(Joel Beasley at 00:42:26) Me too. And that might be a subtle change to how we work. We might collaborate digitally and work sort of in our own environments, and then there will just be more conferences and maybe some even new unique ways that you get back together and do community.

(Randy at 00:42:47) That's true. That's true.

(Joel Beasley at 00:42:49) Everything changes. I love it. So I'm always curious to know, what is the best leadership advice you've ever received?

(Randy at 00:42:58) Oh, gosh. Let's see. Leadership advice. Well, I don't know if I have a clever statement or phrase. I just, I've had really good bosses and I've had bosses that weren't quite as good.

(Randy at 00:43:17) I've never really had a bad boss, which maybe that's amazing. But I've just been able to learn different things from every single boss I've had. And so maybe that's it. I mean, you can learn from anybody, I think. And being open to that and, you know, honesty, integrity, kind of the standard staples of being a good leader.

(Randy at 00:43:41) But, yeah, I think open door policies. One of the CEOs at one of my former companies, he had an open door policy. He actually didn't even have a door on his office because he believed so much in open door. So, yeah, I don't have a magic silver bullet.

(Joel Beasley at 00:44:05) No. What are some of the things that you're learning right now as a leader?

(Randy at 00:44:10) Well, so I have offshore teams and I think the cultural barrier is something that you have to understand, and it's different for each of the cultures. Now especially, with remote workforces, I'm getting a lot more spam. You probably are too. Hey, we've got great teams in, pick a country in the world, right? And I'm getting more and more of those.

(Randy at 00:44:41) And so I think every country that you're going to work with is going to have a different set of pros and cons, and you really have to adapt to that. So I'm working with a team in India right now. My core team is in Vietnam. And I'm really refreshing my skills, I guess, at understanding how to most effectively work with different cultures. So that's been a pretty big deal the last few months.

(Joel Beasley at 00:45:11) And is that something you're sharing and discussing with your direct reports?

(Randy at 00:45:18) Yes. Actually, I'm sharing with my boss and some of my peers. And, yes, to an extent my direct reports, but mostly just getting advice from other people. And I've got a lot of colleagues that have remote teams, talking to them about what works best for them. And I'm finding if they don't have a team in India or they don't have a team in South America, then the advice that they give you might be helpful, but maybe not.

(Joel Beasley at 00:45:54) Yeah. It's an interesting topic of conversation. When you start working with outsource development teams, how do you transfer, or do you transfer the culture? How do you do culture when you haven't met, I guess, and you have different—I'm just using the word culture too much. Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:46:16) You have different traditions and social dynamics. Right? There's a better word. And so that sounds like an area where you just have to do it and get the experience and make the mistakes.

(Randy at 00:46:29) I think so. And I think that's going to be—maybe we'll see more podcasts, more people talking about how they've been successful leading teams in different areas of the world. But, you know, I think that's going to be a topic where we're going to see more activity around. Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:46:45) So what's on your mind lately, other than that? You've got the outsourcing development. I saw that you guys have had 15x revenue growth. That sounds pretty cool.

(Randy at 00:46:56) Yeah. Yeah. We've done really good. And, you know, part of that is that transition that I mentioned, moving from selling other people's products to building our own and selling our own. So I think right now we have a very broad platform, and we've built over the last just a couple years some really great, I'd call them kind of vertical solutions on top of that platform.

(Randy at 00:47:23) One of them we've even patented. And I think that's probably going to be a focus going forward, is to work closely with customers to see if there are opportunities for us to build out solutions that we can then replicate to other customers based on our core competency, our core platform. So we're pretty excited about it, and we've got several things in the works right now that are pretty cool.

(Joel Beasley at 00:47:53) Have you done any divestitures, spin outs, or acquisitions there?

(Randy at 00:47:59) No. No. Not yet. But, absolutely—well, I take that back. We did an IP acquisition, a small one, but not like a company acquisition. But, absolutely, I've been through several acquisitions, and I think that's a great way to bring on a whole new set of talent, whole new set of perspectives, customers. And, yeah, that's a good way to do it if you can.

(Joel Beasley at 00:48:28) Yeah. I saw that you had a little bit of experience with the M&A at Oracle, some of the due diligence M&A process at Oracle.

(Randy at 00:48:36) Yeah. Yeah. So we were acquired, and then immediately they came to us and they said, okay, hypothetically speaking, if you could buy another software company that would complement what you just brought to Oracle, what would that be? So, yeah, we did a number of acquisitions the first couple years that we were there.

(Randy at 00:48:54) I kind of enjoyed some of that and so was put on a couple of other acquisitions as a due diligence lead, just taking a look at the technology they were thinking about buying and making sure it would fit and align with what Oracle wanted to do.

(Joel Beasley at 00:49:11) What's the most important part that you've learned of the M&A process that you've been a part of?

(Randy at 00:49:17) Oh, well, so there are scans that we would run against the prospective company's software. And it was always surprising what those scans would reveal. And so those things would identify, you know, open source libraries, code snippets, other commercial products, things like that. And we would very often find things that the—I honestly believe the company didn't even know they had. And you've been in development, right?

(Randy at 00:49:54) And it's what happens. You need to do something, you run out, you do a quick search. Oh, I found this really cool little library on GitHub. Oh, it's MIT. That's great.

(Randy at 00:50:02) I'll grab it. I'll dump it in, and, you know, boom, it's in the build. Without really thinking about, oh, I guess we probably should document that. And then, you know, that needs to be disclosed. And they're going to find that when they do a code scan.

(Randy at 00:50:15) And so that was really an interesting part of it. And we spent the majority of our time, I think, in due diligence talking about what we found in the scans, what they had in their software that they may or may not have known about, and whether or not components need to be remediated because of a copyleft or licensing that Oracle didn't really care for.

(Joel Beasley at 00:50:43) Excellent. This is great, man. I've got one more question to wrap up here. I'm curious. What's the stated long term mission at ImageSource?

(Randy at 00:50:57) Well, I think our goal is to service our customers the best we can. Everybody says, oh, we've got great service. And when I came on board at ImageSource, I asked similar questions during the interview process. I said, well, what do you guys think your strength is? Is it your technology, your people, whatever?

(Randy at 00:51:19) And they said, we really think it's our customer service. And okay, yeah. So I get on board and they weren't kidding. You know, from the top down, ImageSource, I believe, puts more effort, more skin in the game when it comes to customer success. We've, you know, when we've been upside down on a couple deals and, you know, our CEO and our CIO, they're just like, we need to make it happen.

(Randy at 00:51:46) We need to make this customer successful, and this is gonna hurt, but it needs to be done. And so I think that's—and to me, that's very important to have that kind of approach to business. So whatever we do technology-wise, that's fine. I think it just, you know, if we can do it and service our customers and we've got fantastic customer satisfaction ratings, you know, that's the kind of place I want to work.

(Joel Beasley at 00:52:10) Yeah. Me too. You want to work with people that have similar values and want to come through for the customer and deliver high quality.

(Randy at 00:52:17) Absolutely.

(Joel Beasley at 00:52:18) I love it. Randy, we did it, my friend. We made a podcast. How do you feel?

(Randy at 00:52:22) It was great. Great. Thank you so much. I, you know, to be honest, I'm more of an audiobook person. You know?

(Randy at 00:52:30) I travel to Seattle a lot or used to. So I do a business book every trip. And so I, you know, I do a book a month or more. And so I don't do a lot of podcasts. And so when this came up and I was like, yeah, it sounds pretty cool. Yeah, let's do that. And then I go out and I look and I'm like, oh my goodness, you had the CTO of Google, like a couple of weeks ago, Marcus East.

(Joel Beasley at 00:52:51) And I said, listen. Yeah. He's awesome.

(Randy at 00:52:53) Yeah. Oh, he's awesome. Brilliant guy. And just so likable. Right? I mean, I'd love to just sit down and pick his brain for an hour, but, honestly, I was intimidated. You know, because, yeah, I've had some kind of interesting jobs, but man, you've had some really great people and your shows are fantastic and they're just they're really, really engaging. I really like them. So I appreciate it. Another big fan, man.

(Joel Beasley at 00:53:18) Thank you. Thank you. Yeah. I just try to—we just try to focus. It's just two people. Like, the conversations I'd be having at lunch. And it's hard too when it gets bigger because then, you know, some people actually won't come on because they're nervous. And I'm like, don't think about it. Just it's gonna be you and me. We're just gonna hang out. We're just gonna talk for a little bit, and we're gonna see where it goes, and there's nothing too rigid. And the goal is we're coming from a genuine place because we want to help, you know, the next—the next generation of these technology leaders who are listening to get them the best habits that they can grow in their careers and prosper and do well, and then they can pay it forward to the next generation. All we're just doing is just talking about our experience and hanging out.

(Randy at 00:53:59) Right. It's so great and such good value. I mean, I've listened to about half a dozen of your podcasts now, and I'm gonna keep listening. They're really, really good. Easy to listen to too. I really appreciate the opportunity to get to come on your show and chat with you.

(Joel Beasley at 00:54:17) Awesome. Thanks. Thanks, Randy. We'll talk soon.

(Randy at 00:54:19) Okay, Joel. Thank you.

(Joel Beasley at 00:54:23) 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'd 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.