Brian Walsh - CEO at CodeScience

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:00) Hello, my friends. Today we are talking to Brian, the CEO at CodeScience, and we discuss how being an entrepreneur starts with the belief that you can make a difference in the world, what they've learned by launching their fourth annual State of the AppExchange Partners report, and how constraints breed creativity. All of this right here, right now on the Modern CTO Podcast. Here we go. This is the Modern CTO Podcast.

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:38) Hello, hello.

(Brian at 00:00:39) Hey, Joel. How are you?

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:41) Oh man, you got a haircut.

(Brian at 00:00:43) I did. It's another casualty of COVID.

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:46) You had some crazy long hair in your show prep picture, like in your bio picture. And we said, "Oh man, this guy's going to be crazy. This is going to be so much fun."

(Brian at 00:00:56) I promise I'm still crazy. It's just we had to trim it. You know, at almost 50 years old, having a man bun was really not—it just was not a good look. It was so evident that I was already married.

(Joel Beasley at 00:01:10) Oh man. Yeah, I agree with you on that, though. Like, 50 is when the man bun has to go.

(Brian at 00:01:17) I think it should start a little bit earlier.

(Joel Beasley at 00:01:21) Dude, this is exciting. I'm super pumped up. You know, when we were doing our prep, I got to watch for the first time a video of a whale exploding. Can you tell me a little bit about that?

(Brian at 00:01:35) Well, I think it's one of my favorite news stories ever. I mean, to me it is—you know, Daniel Levin, his father actually wrote the entire script for it. It was in Oregon, right before Thanksgiving. A whale had beached itself on the beach and died, and the only way that they knew to get rid of it was to plant sticks of dynamite around it and try to blow it into small enough pieces for seagulls to eat it.

(Brian at 00:02:02) And so the Department of Transportation came out to plan all of it. They backed up all the people to watch it, news cameras rolling, and it just exploded everywhere. And there was blubber flying through the air. And I think, as a newscast, it's one of the top probably two or three ever done, any segment. It is fabulous. So every year, right at the beginning of November, they bring it back out and send it around. It's fantastic.

(Joel Beasley at 00:02:26) I love it. I love that they were like, "All right, we're going to blow up this whale. Let's videotape it," right? Because you didn't videotape everything back then.

(Brian at 00:02:35) No. They did it like—and it wasn't live, so they edited it back together. But my favorite is like, you've got these really old couples that brought their little beach chairs out and they're all sitting. And you see a state trooper who's like, "Let's move back." And you hear the audio rolling, and then people, like, the thump, thump, thump, thump, thump as the blubber's landing on the beach, and these old people are running for their lives. It was unreal.

(Joel Beasley at 00:02:59) Okay. I love it. And it's like hard to stop watching when you first watch it. It's just like, "Is that really happening? How does that happen again?" But then we noticed it, because we saw it on your Twitter, and we looked at your Twitter handle, and it's The Party Cow. And I was like, there's got to be a good story there.

(Brian at 00:03:16) There is indeed. The first is a lesson: when you're in your twenties and you're picking social media handles, be really, really careful. Really, really think ahead. You never think that they're going to last, but unfortunately they do. I'll give you the very short version of it. I come from—you know, I was raised as a very conservative child, conservative family. My father was in the Navy, admiral in the Navy. And he called me one day to say, "Hey, were you—did you go to some big party in the desert?" And I was like, "I'm not sure what you're talking about." He said, "This party in the desert, everyone wears costumes, I have no idea." And he kept going on and on, and I kept acting innocent. He said, "Yeah, it's called Burning Man." And I'm like, "Dad, I'm not sure." And he said, "Well, before you lie to me—well, one question: were you dressed as a cow in the desert?" And I was like, "This is really getting weird." So, "Well, before you lie to me anymore, go pick up Time magazine and give me a callback."

(Brian at 00:04:17) And Time had done a photo exposé of Burning Man, and I was there in a full cow costume standing there with a bottle of water, just staring out in the middle of nowhere, as one does. And yeah, so that sort of picked up this handle of The Party Cow, and now it's gone everywhere for me.

(Joel Beasley at 00:04:35) I love that. I want to get a—I'm going to keep that as my desktop. Hunt it down, and it'll be my—it'll make me smile every time I see it. That's a great story. So with your dad being in the armed forces, and then obviously there's some discipline there, right? Because my father was in the Air Force, so I know what that's like—making your bed and whatnot. But when did you get introduced to technology? Did he bring tech home from his work, or no?

(Brian at 00:05:02) I mean, it was always around, but my second grade birthday—which, who knows what year that is—but my second grade birthday, we got an Atari 800XL. And that was like the family present, but he brought that in for us to learn how to program. And we had the old cassette drive, which would actually record onto cassette tapes all of the programs you would make. And so we were learning BASIC and learning how to move blocks on the screen. He had actually, in his master's, done missile defense system, but it was all on punch cards. And so he still had a shoe box of punch cards, and it was like this lesson of, "We've gone from here to look how modern this is," which was this Atari with a tape drive. And that's where it started, computers for me, and it's always been there.

(Joel Beasley at 00:05:49) Oh, so then you get into it young age. And then did you decide to go to college for, like, engineering? Or how did that progress?

(Brian at 00:05:58) I was much geekier than somebody would go to college for computer engineering. I was a tuba major and a math major.

(Joel Beasley at 00:06:05) That says it all. Tuba major. We're done. Interview over.

(Brian at 00:06:08) I mean, right there. Like, glasses, tuba, the whole thing. And never finished college. Went out and got—you know, I was working some engineering jobs for a public school system doing a variety of things. And then for a nonprofit, I was director of operations. And part of what we did was, right outside New York City, we merged together multiple nonprofits under one umbrella organization. And this is back in the nineties. And the way that we made it work was I started leveraging the internet way back then. And so we built a member management system on SQL Server. Well, it was Access database and then moved to SQL Server with an Access front end. And then it was a LAN connection. I mean, it was crazy stuff. I had no background in this, just sort of figured it out. And that was in the nineties. And then as I was leaving that organization, got a couple of contracts doing it. I was like, "Wow, I'm really good at this. I didn't realize that." And then in '99, moved to San Francisco right at the top of the bubble and really just started exploring that and started following my passion. And so I worked through that, when I ended up at a startup that was fully funded by Diageo, which is the largest liquor company in the world.

(Brian at 00:07:26) And it's a recommendation I have for anyone: you get all of the benefits of working for a liquor company, but you still work at a startup. It was outrageous. And then we sold that back to Diageo, founded another company actually in the podcasting and video casting space called Castfire. You know, we powered all of the early stuff from when Weblogs Inc. came into AOL, did all CBS Mobile, Major League Soccer, all that. Sold that one, and then I ended up at my current company, which is CodeScience.

(Joel Beasley at 00:07:58) And so what does CodeScience do?

(Brian at 00:08:00) So we are a professional services company. We're what's called product development outsourcing, so PDO. A lot of other places call it outsource product development or OPD, but within the Salesforce ecosystem, PDO. And we focus on helping companies bring products to market on the AppExchange. So we sort of chose, out of the world of all the different infrastructures and PaaS providers that are out there, we really centered in on this marketplace at Salesforce as where we thought had the best distribution and outcomes for companies, combined with really interesting technology. And so over the past 12 years, we've built just over 300 products for the AppExchange, so about 10% of the total AppExchange. And worked with everybody from two-person startup to the Fortune 5.

(Joel Beasley at 00:08:47) Man, I'm not surprised at all because I got to meet Parker Harris and some other executives over at Salesforce, and the energy and the culture and their events—everything they do—it's just phenomenal. It's like a megachurch type thing for software and for Salesforce. It's a really cool community, and so I was really pumped up to talk to you. So you've made 300 apps for the Salesforce app ecosystem.

(Brian at 00:09:19) Yeah. It's a really unique platform. You know, you're talking about events and the energy and the culture they bring. We used to always joke that they're an event company that also sells technology, right? That was their thing. That's how they got to market. And that's, I think, why it's been so interesting to watch some of the pivots in this whole ecosystem around COVID, because we lose that major channel for how we connect with customers and developers and partners and everybody else. But yeah, it's been a really awesome place to actually learn so much. We work across all the industries, across business apps, and so you get such a perspective on the problems that are being solved and how people innovate, how they build products. And I think the biggest education for me is how people go to market with it. Like, how do you actually align to such an amazing organization like Salesforce? How do you defend your space? How do you work through channel conflict? How do you leverage that sales and marketing team? How do you do channel sales at scale? It's been a fantastic education.

(Joel Beasley at 00:10:19) Yeah. Like, how do you work with them so that they're not building the same features that you're building?

(Brian at 00:10:25) It's a great question. I think the reality is, at a certain point, you probably run into channel conflict. And it could be through what they do organically in building, or it can be through their acquisitions. You know, they've acquired companies like Steelbrick to become CPQ. They've acquired companies across the spectrum where there were other existing partners already in there, a thriving ecosystem. So, you know, my most interesting one is with the Steelbrick acquisition. You look at Apttus, who was the leader within the CPQ space. I think Apttus has only grown faster and larger since that acquisition, even though they're competing with Salesforce. And part of what happens when Salesforce makes an acquisition is they put so much marketing and sales behind it. They can really create an industry. They can create a space for people to have an understanding: what is CPQ?

(Brian at 00:11:18) The other side is Apttus has done a tremendous job of focusing at what they're amazing at, which is truly top-end enterprise CPQ. And the Steelbrick acquisition really came in and said, "Hey, we are mid-market," and they're growing into the enterprise. But Apttus, I think, has been able to focus on that. "I'm going to focus on the hardest CPQ cases." Right? Being able to say an MRI is made up of a million different parts. How do I sell that? Configure it, quote it, and negotiate on that? And so I think that there is this space where it doesn't really matter if there's direct overlap between functionality. It's finding your space to be successful and being really true to that.

(Joel Beasley at 00:11:58) I like how you think about it. And so when you started at CodeScience, you began as a solutions architect and you worked your way all the way up to CEO, right? How'd you do that?

(Brian at 00:12:09) Well, that's a little crazy one as well. So we had sold Castfire, and my best friend had founded this company called CodeScience. It was my best friend from high school, actually. He was an Army brat, I was a Navy brat. Our lockers were three away. We didn't know anybody else. And we kept in touch through the years. And so he had moved to San Francisco, and after we sold it, he said, "Look, you love building B2B software. You love building for the enterprise, all of this. This is what we do." And at that point, I really hadn't built on Salesforce at all. We were a customer of Salesforce. We used it as a CRM for our sales practice. But this idea of building—and I fell in love with two sides of it.

(Brian at 00:12:50) One, I think constraints actually bring out creativity. Right? Like, you think the Sistine Chapel, and I always come back to, would it be as beautiful if it were just a flat canvas? But those constraints brought out this extra layer of creativity of how do we actually capture that. And I think, in certain ways, that's what the AppExchange can do for us as engineers, as creators, is I operate within some of these constraints of multi-tenancy, of security, of their domain, their choices on technology stack. And it was really fun to get pushed as technologists into creating new solutions. And the second side was, I think where it really started landing for me for the very first time was that distribution was as important, if not more important, than building product. That building product is what we're doing, but it's for a reason of actually being commercially successful. And watching the platform, watching the AppExchange take so many companies so quickly to success just blew my mind. And then it was an area that I said, "Hey, I want to spend a lot of time here." So I haven't gone back to my own product company, but I've actually spent here working with—I don't even know—200 and some product companies and those leaders on building their products and their visions. And it's been, I think, the best experience of my career.

(Joel Beasley at 00:14:13) I think distribution is the hardest problem for, like, any business, right? I mean, product—I used to come from, well, I mean, I did come from the product world. And so I would say like, "Oh, that's the most important thing. Having a great product, great product, great product," right? But if you have sales, if you figured out distribution, then you have cash to make the product great. If you didn't figure that out, you're just burning cash on making the product. And so, you know, I sat down with one of my investors at a VC firm, and he had just said that simple phrase, you know, just discussing how when you have cash, you can solve any problem. Every problem can be solved with money. But you have to first get the money. And so when you're worrying or stressing or planning in startup phase or even at enterprise, it's like, let's first get the sales right, and then everything stems from that.

(Brian at 00:15:04) Yeah. And I think, you know, there's story after story of success in that way. I look at Talkdesk, which is a unicorn now, on its way probably to IPO or acquisition. But they launched at TechCrunch Disrupt. And essentially what they said was, "Hey, we can leverage Twilio to build like a PBX on demand so you could just spin up a call center." And they leveraged Salesforce for that. Because what they figured out with Salesforce, that's Service Cloud, and that's where you do customer service. And what does every call center need? A phone system. So they've got their call center software in the cloud, but the rest of it's sitting in some closet or under a desk of how they make phone calls. And so they merged those two together so that every time you added a seat, you automatically had a new phone number. It was provisioned, and they could just start calling and using it. And they leveraged that into literally taking off. Like, you look at their growth curve, it is up and to the right, way out there.

(Brian at 00:16:02) All because they said, hey, if we build our product right for distribution, in this case with Salesforce, it's limitless. And they're just crushing it. And they only continue to grow through COVID because they were perfectly situated as people have to move remote. So I can use Salesforce remotely.

(Brian at 00:16:18) How come I can't use my PBX? And here is something I can literally turn on a PBX in minutes. So distribution is where it's all at.

(Joel Beasley at 00:16:26) So with 300 apps in the store, how do you decide what apps to build?

(Brian at 00:16:32) So that's an interesting one. It's not really our choice, right? We're professional services, and we work closely with Salesforce of understanding the negative space that exists, right? I think the overt term for that is white space that exists, and I prefer negative space. And what's the gap, the functional gap within their platform? So we understand that really, really clearly how you build, but also what are the gaps that are there so you're not rebuilding what already exists. And generally speaking, when ISVs, when SaaS companies are coming and saying, I want to build with Salesforce, I think this is an ecosystem I could be a part of, we essentially partner in what's the problem that you're trying to solve, who are you solving it for, and this is how you solve it on Salesforce. That last piece is where we really specialize, and the top two pieces are where we collaborate and partner with that company. So if they're coming in to do a new type of contract lifecycle management, CLM, right, well, let's identify what needs to be done on the platform, who you're doing it for.

(Brian at 00:17:34) Let's identify who already exists. Hey, it's a really mature space. You have Apttus. You have Conga. You have SpringCM, which was acquired by DocuSign. So let's find the gap, and then we're going to teach you how to build that. We'll build the first version for you alongside you, and then we'll transfer that back to you. We'll teach you how to do it. I think that part of our success has been never following that constant pull to be a product company ourselves, never to actually convert ourselves from being professional services into SaaS, even though it's core to us as understanding SaaS business. So to answer your question, we never actually decide what to build because it's not our problem that we're solving. We partner with the entrepreneur that wants to solve that problem, that wants to pick the space, and we help enable them to get there.

(Joel Beasley at 00:18:27) Oh, that's really cool. Yeah. So what is the thing that you were most excited about today?

(Brian at 00:18:35) So last week, we launched our fourth annual State of the AppExchange report. So a bunch of years back, what we recognized were there are no real reports, sort of third-party analyst type reports, about this ecosystem. And it's an ecosystem that's on its way to being a billion-dollar business unit. Massive, right? IPOs have happened out of it. The amount of investment that goes into it is just stunning. And yet there weren't these great reports that sort of wrapped it all the way up to say, hey, how does this exist as a channel? What are the technologies that are using there? How are ISVs leveraging that platform? How are investors investing? What are the outcomes? And so this is our fourth one, bringing it out. And it's been really awesome to see how much people are really embracing it and loving it.

(Joel Beasley at 00:19:23) What's the big takeaway from that, or at least the part that you found most interesting in this year's report?

(Brian at 00:19:30) I think, you know, we all have to admit 2020's been a dumpster fire, and it's been challenging. And so I think this year was to really look at the ecosystem during this time of change and the struggle. And I think three main themes arrived for us. And it drew out of a framework that we saw early, probably in the March timeframe, which were there were three classifications of companies. There were those that were surviving, right? They were serving, let's say, retail business, brick-and-mortar business, right? They were serving travel industry, et cetera. You're doing anything you can to survive for when that business comes back. There was another segment that was figuring out how to adapt, right? We don't really know what's going on with our forecast. We can't tell if it's going to be a good year or bad year. We're adapting as much as possible. We're learning how to sell without events. How do we do customer service, et cetera? And then you have this category that were thriving. You know, we know the names out there, right? Zoom and Slack and Salesforce, right? These major companies that were thriving through this. And so we really wanted to study those three areas and break it down.

(Brian at 00:20:41) And so one of the great themes that arrived was out of those groups who were thriving. It's what we call the great separation. Those groups who were positioned correctly for solving today's problems, but also had the runway of money to invest and had the courage to invest when everybody else was pulling back, have just blown past the competition and really created this gigantic separation in there. And I think what we discovered in it, beyond, you know, I'll say that I love Zoom and I love Slack and I love the telemedicine ones, Amwell and MDLive and Teladoc, there's a whole bunch in that space. But they seem perfectly positioned, almost luckily positioned for how we all operate in a pandemic, right? Nobody had two years to prepare for this. They were just positioned for that. But there was another class of companies that leveraged the moment, and they repackaged what they had to really solve the issues that were pressing companies today.

(Brian at 00:21:46) And so what we really thought about was how they took existing technology, packaged it together, and positioned it not as digital transformation and how to get ahead of your competitors, but business continuity. How do you keep the lights on? And I think there were three main stories that came out of that. So the first was a company called nCino. So if you don't know nCino, they're a bank operating system. They help banks originate loans. It's their core function of what they do. They do so much more than that. They IPO'd actually in, I think, July or August of this year, massive IPO. But what they recognized early on in COVID was these community banks that they support didn't have any ability to run their business. They couldn't actually originate a loan because it was so paper-based. They couldn't go into the bank to run the bank. And the challenge for nCino was we have a solution that does that, but it takes a year to roll out. It takes six months or nine months or twelve months to actually deploy the product because you're talking core functionality for businesses and as a CIO. So they built a version of their product that worked with the SBA program for PPP loans.

(Brian at 00:22:59) And they got it to market in weeks, and it allowed a bank to roll it out in two days or four days to go live. And they're working across SBA PPP APIs that are being built in production. It was crazy. But in a matter of less than three months, they processed 10% of that $500 billion fund. And that right there was really saying, hey, I know we're about digital transformation, but how do you keep the lights on? Because then you're essential. You have to buy that product. And that's what happened for them, and that powered them through their IPO, and they continue to thrive through it. The second big story that we uncovered was a startup called Skedulo, and they do field service enablement, right? Mobile apps for your team in the field, which obviously that could really get hampered. Nobody was in the field. We're all at home. But over the previous twelve months, they'd been trying to add to that solution. So they were looking at scheduling and dispatch. They were looking at appointment setting, et cetera. And Matt Fairhurst, who I think is an awesome CEO, worked with his team to package that together. Again, business continuity.

(Brian at 00:24:08) Companies need to do COVID testing at scale, and they have no infrastructure. And they took this brilliant idea and executed on it, and they leaned in and they invested heavily. They ended up powering all of the NBA, MLB, NFL, City of New York, City of Berkeley. The list goes on and on. I have a feeling when you look in the future, you'll probably end up doing the vaccine and how we actually distribute the vaccine with the appointment. And the thing was they just took what existed already in their stack, repositioned it as business continuity. It was stunning to sort of see that pivot execution, the outcome. And again, they're on the same boat. We're all working remote for the first time. We're all trying to figure this out. That was one of the really big themes that came out of it. So we call it the great separation. The second big area for us was that group that is in adapt. And talking to a bunch of CEOs in that space, for a lot, what happened was they had no confidence in their forecasting. They had no confidence in their sales pipeline.

(Brian at 00:25:12) Nobody knew what was going to happen. We also didn't know how to sell digitally. We didn't know how to build trust for an enterprise software sale when you can't meet the person. All of the process and marketing, everything had, you know, sort of in-person portions of it. And so everybody sort of pulled back. And we expected to see in our report that people actually were having a problem with attrition. You know, customers churning out. This is SaaS, and there's nothing more important than keeping your churn low, right? That's just the death knell when you start getting high churn. And it came back to see that that was not the case. In fact, attrition didn't even make the top five list of issues that they were facing. And what that uncovered for us is that their AppExchange ecosystem built on top of Salesforce is so resilient. There's this resiliency in that market that allowed companies the runway to really adapt, to find out how do I work within this environment? How do I get back onto a growth curve?

(Brian at 00:26:11) And it's been an awesome piece to just recognize that part of it is Salesforce has such a trusted name out there, right? We trust Salesforce. We know that they're going to do a lot of the right moves in there. Two, it's a system of record. You know, systems of record are really hard to pull out. That is the core of your business, and so you can't just do that. So there's a piece of that. But I also think that, again, Salesforce's leadership around remaining relevant and relevant with our customers has just enabled companies that are still trying to figure out how to ride their coattails. So the example I would give you, again, goes back to thrive.

(Brian at 00:26:55) You've probably seen the television commercials for Work.com that are out there, right? Salesforce helping companies go back to work or Salesforce helping students go back to university. That software product itself was built in, I think, it went to release to partners in about eight weeks and release GA in about ten to twelve weeks. So from the very idea, hey, we need to help businesses, again, business continuity, how do you bring your workers back to work, from idea to release in less than three months? And, you know, it would have been crazy to think Benioff could pick up the phone and call Marriott and say, hey, let's talk about selling Sales Cloud. Here we are in a global recession. Your business is falling apart. Let's sell more Sales Cloud seats. But could we reposition what's already at Salesforce into business continuity? How do you bring your employees back into your hotels to do it? And I think that process of constantly being present for those 160,000 customers, right, of being relevant, allows this ecosystem to adapt and to start getting stronger and better. And so we just see this ultimate resiliency in here. And that doesn't address those who are in survive, who are truly struggling. But I think two-thirds of this ecosystem really haven't seen a downward trend through all the challenges this year.

(Joel Beasley at 00:28:19) Yeah. We've definitely seen an upward trend. Like, just look at our numbers, and I think a lot of it was due to all the conferences closing. So that opened up a lot of time and a lot of budget for people to do, you know, media, like podcast-type stuff.

(Brian at 00:28:34) That's awesome. Like, at what point did you realize that this was a moment that you would thrive rather than, like, become really difficult to survive?

(Joel Beasley at 00:28:43) So we started the podcast three years ago, and then we started taking some of the content and licensing it for a leadership platform. And so companies are using it for their leadership training programs. And then we had built that up, and that was growing, and then COVID happened, and we lost half of our revenue like overnight. People just called up and were like, we can't do leadership anymore because they were getting calls from their executive teams, like freeze all cash, every—this was like right in the chaos of it, right? And so we're just like, whoa, what do we do? And so we had people that had wanted to do advertising or come on the podcast before as paid opportunities, and we had just said no for the previous two years just building up the audience. And then we said, we have no choice. We have to do this. And we started, built a sales deck and started, you know, reaching out to people and formed a sales process and did all of that. And then it just started growing.

(Joel Beasley at 00:29:42) And it was like month over month over month over month, and now we're just hiring more sales. We're hiring about a salesperson every month. And then just this past week, we're dealing with delivery, right? So now we've got so many sales, we have a delivery problem. And that's why that thing that Tom had said to me was on my mind. I was like, this is the greatest thing ever because we can hire somebody to help with delivery, right?

(Brian at 00:30:03) Exactly. But, I mean, like, you positioned, again, yourself as if you're an enterprise marketer selling to this, you've lost all of your main channels of being in person. So for me to continue to generate leads as an enterprise marketer, I need an avenue like Modern CTO so that I can connect with my audience. You were the business continuity for them to hit their number. You are. It's not past tense. It still is.

(Joel Beasley at 00:30:30) Thanks for the perspective. I just really like talking to people like you and talking about technology, and then we started to see all this stuff happen, like people were moving across the world and working for leaders because they heard a story about something they did and then they sent them an email and then they ended up forming a company or just becoming like a lead engineer or a marketer. And so I saw this whole community happening without there actually being like, you know, like a Slack community or anything like that. I just saw this whole community forming. And I said, this is really, really great. This needs to go from, like, fun project to business so we can keep doing it.

(Brian at 00:31:08) So how do you foster that community without taking advantage of that community? Like, how do you still make it this really healthy environment where people are invested and own it themselves?

(Joel Beasley at 00:31:19) So I think that at the root of the people that listen to the show, they are the people who want to grow and improve. Like, that's why they start listening, and then they stay because it's fun. One of my favorite reviews was somebody who said, one of our earliest iTunes reviews was, I started playing this podcast so I could fall asleep, big mistake. And I was like, yes, yes. So, yeah. So how do we do the community? Well, we just, no pre-roll or mid-roll ads. We don't do that. So, like, when we have sponsors, we have them on the show. We talk about, you know, their product and what they do. And basically, we found the format of the show and the things that people care about happen to just fit nicely with sponsorships. So we'll do things like episode release date because we're booked up like six months in advance. So we'll do, if people want to come on sooner, we'll do a sponsorship package, things like that.

(Joel Beasley at 00:32:17) So we wanted to do it in the least sleazy way possible. I mean, my background is not sales, my friend. My background is product engineering. So I hate the used car sales. And that's such an immature thing for me.

(Joel Beasley at 00:32:32) Now that I understand sales and how businesses work, I'm like, oh, it's not like that at all.

(Brian at 00:32:36) Right? It's about how can I help you and let's work together. So that was a maturity that I went through over the past couple years.

(Brian at 00:32:43) But I mean, we should be honest, though. That's the good side of sales. There is still sleazy sales.

(Joel Beasley at 00:32:47) There is still sleazy sales. Yeah.

(Brian at 00:32:49) But, like, again, that positioning—and I applaud you because we went through the same thing of just seeing our forecast go away. And well, we never lost revenue. It was sort of like, hey, will it go away? And it takes a lot of courage to say we gotta keep going, and I know that we can figure it out.

(Brian at 00:33:07) So I applaud you guys for really pushing through that and iterating to find this new beast for yourself.

(Joel Beasley at 00:33:12) All right. Yeah. You can never give up. That's, like, rule number one. You don't give up.

(Joel Beasley at 00:33:16) And people ask why businesses fail. They're like, oh, money, people, talent. I said, no. It's because they gave up. Because I would be working as a janitor at Walmart still trying to save my money and eating on food stamps, trying to make this thing work.

(Joel Beasley at 00:33:29) If you just decide that you're not going to give up and you decide that you're going to do everything, then, you know, being thrifty or just figuring out how to—all these little problems and how to overcome them, they just happen. They just fall in line because you just refuse to move. You know?

(Brian at 00:33:45) Well, and I think that, you know, if we pull it back to your engineering days, it existed there for us as well. Like, I'm not gonna give up. I'm gonna find a way for this to scale. I'm gonna find a way to actually transcribe that many videos. Or I'm gonna find a way to whatever that challenge is. What we do as technologists is not easy. And many times, we hit our head over and over and over until we figure out how to turn just enough to get through.

(Brian at 00:34:10) And it's that perseverance and that belief. It can work. I know it can work. I just don't know what it is right this second.

(Joel Beasley at 00:34:16) Belief is so powerful, my friend. Indeed. Like, it drives the world. Every action people take is rooted in belief. And I had heard this person discuss this chain of events, like, it starts as a thought, and then it will ruminate.

(Joel Beasley at 00:34:29) And he had this really articulate way of describing how it ultimately ends in action and then your life. And when I heard that chain of events, I was like, that is just so right. It all starts with what you're thinking about.

(Brian at 00:34:41) Well, I think for any entrepreneur that begins, it starts with this belief that the world can be different. Right? I can align a group of people and build something that can change the world. And when you're early stage, nobody else believes you. Right?

(Brian at 00:34:58) You've gotta prove it. And the only thing that's standing there to get you out of bed every day is that nugget of belief, that core idea of I see something different in the world that other people don't see. And I think that hardest part about being an entrepreneur is every day rallying a group of people to also have that belief before it's real, before what you've created actually exists.

(Joel Beasley at 00:35:21) That's why when it comes down to your foundation and your energy and your health and your own personal habits and, you know, making sure your family life is good, all of these things put you in a position so you can wake up and do, as Elon Musk says, stare into the abyss and eat glass.

(Brian at 00:35:39) That's right. I mean, it is—any type of leadership role, I think, is challenging, but especially a business leadership. I'm sure you guys, when all of a sudden revenue goes in half, you're like, hey, I've got salaries to pay. I've got my own mortgage to pay.

(Brian at 00:35:55) Right? There's this responsibility, but the confidence, the belief—hey, we can gather and we can do this. It's really inspiring.

(Joel Beasley at 00:36:02) Yeah. That's fine, you know, to get into little culture stuff, you know, surrounding yourself with the right people. As you mentioned, when you're starting, virtually everybody thinks you're going to fail. And then, oh, a year goes by, two years goes by, three years—you're beating it. Now, it's funny though, because you'll hit year three—like, we're in year three and we tripled revenue the first year, doubled revenue the second year, and we're gonna double revenue the third year. But we're in year three and what I realized is it's who you're talking to.

(Joel Beasley at 00:36:31) It's the person who you—because when I talk to founders or people who are well taken care of, they take care of themselves and they're optimistic, it's almost always positive with a little bit of insight. But 80% of the people out there are going to be naysayers. So I realized even at three years, when you're past that 99% of businesses fail in the first two years, they don't react any differently. They're like, well, you're only in year three. It's like, what are you talking about?

(Joel Beasley at 00:36:57) No. Past the mark.

(Brian at 00:36:58) Get to year three.

(Joel Beasley at 00:36:59) Yes. I thought Fundbean would open up and the bank system would just become my best—I was wrong there. They want businesses to be in business for twenty years. But it definitely made me feel good to beat the statistics.

(Brian at 00:37:12) It does. It is this path of—we create these milestones where, like, if we only get there, then we know the rest is gonna get easy.

(Joel Beasley at 00:37:23) And we kinda know it's a lie.

(Brian at 00:37:26) But we lie to ourselves to get us through it. Right? Like, we go—I think that is the awesome part about what we do at CodeScience working with entrepreneurs. We're just constantly at all levels of the spectrum. Companies that are IPO-ing, they already found product market fit, they're kicking ass, and they know what they're doing.

(Brian at 00:37:43) They have systems. To people, you know, I know that entrepreneur yesterday is like, you know, every seed round is a million dollars these days, but it's a million, $1,200,000 seed round. But he was like, you know, there's four of us, and here's our plan, and here's what we're doing. And it was just the energy, the passion, the belief. And, like, you know, if you look at it from my perspective, seeing so many different products over so many different companies, like, I could list out everything that can possibly go wrong. And yet none of that really matters because it's the path for them to find how to make it right.

(Brian at 00:38:16) God, it's awesome. It's so energizing and fires you up.

(Joel Beasley at 00:38:19) It is. I'm really excited right now. So I wanna talk about your culture at the company because you get to work with these entrepreneurs and because you get to solve these problems and you get fresh new projects coming in. And connected back to what we were talking about, how it's so important to surround yourself with people who have a common belief, but can also challenge things, but, you know, rally and move forward through difficult moments. How do you approach culture at CodeScience?

(Brian at 00:38:43) So I mean, I think that especially as a CEO, but more broadly as any type of leader, you have two things that you're essentially doing at the same time. Right? So as an entrepreneur or CEO, we're saying, hey, I've gotta build this product. And so in the case of professional services, it's, you know, assemble people who can build world-class products that are scalable, that understand—and go out and sell it.

(Brian at 00:39:03) So that's our product, and we're building that. But at the exact same time, I'm building another product, which is what is this organization that can do that core function. Right? And whether I'm building a technology product or a professional services company, a bakery, whatever it is, those things don't happen on their own. Those things happen by a group of people who are aligned, who have a shared vision, who understand how to make decisions, they understand how they're working together, the values that they operate.

(Brian at 00:39:35) And I think that as leaders, that is actually, especially as you grow, that becomes more and more predominantly what you're actually working on. You're building an organization that is capable of the product that you're bringing into the world. You know? So if you're Stewart at Slack, he's no longer product managing. He has insights, and he's a product person to come from, but he's really building an organization that is capable of building that product and bringing it out and bringing it to life.

(Brian at 00:40:06) And I think that the three core building blocks of that are your corporate priorities. How do you prioritize as an organization? The values for which you won't go beyond. These are the tent poles. Right?

(Brian at 00:40:20) These values are statements that we won't go against. And then lastly, it's the culture, which is everything that sits in the middle of that. It's that whole playing field. Because a really powerful organization is one where people prioritize and make decisions and live with values even when the leader's not in the room. And I think, ultimately, that's what culture is.

(Brian at 00:40:44) Is how do we bring our values to life? How do we prioritize? How do we communicate? What's the language that we use? How do we treat each other?

(Brian at 00:40:53) And the culture is undoubtedly the most powerful asset or detractor for your organization. You know, when we look at some of the struggles that companies have had over time, we can easily point back to culture. That the culture allowed things to happen that shouldn't have. Culture allowed people to treat each other like that. The culture allowed for misogyny.

(Brian at 00:41:15) Those are cultural issues. Those are not rules and process issues. That is culture. And so for us as an organization, I think the predominant things that we work with as a leadership team when working on the business, not in it, is what is our culture? What are our values?

(Brian at 00:41:30) Do we live them every day? Are we making our decisions both on our priorities and our values?

(Joel Beasley at 00:41:36) What are your values? And, like, you don't have to list all of them, but, like, the top two.

(Brian at 00:41:41) So we, a couple years back, really transformed them from being individual words to statements that we could remember. So things like, um, focus curiosity. Right? With this belief that we always have to be curious. We're technologists.

(Brian at 00:41:56) We're innovators. But also, that one is driven from we're professional services. And so we're on somebody else's dime. And so we have to focus that curiosity to really serve the partners that we're working with. Make your mom proud.

(Brian at 00:42:11) Blatantly stole from box.com, Aaron Levie. We had one tagline which said, make your mom proud unless she's Cruella de Vil, because we don't wanna make her proud. But that one is really rooted in—again, there's a whole bucket list of things that we can't enumerate. So when you're in that area that you can't enumerate, would my mom be proud?

(Brian at 00:42:34) And it's funny how much that drives a lot of our conversations in there. Inclusivity breeds diversity and is everyone's responsibility. In this year of such social injustice and racial tension and all of the events that we've gone through and the struggles, this recognition that even if we hire a diverse workforce, if we're not inclusive in how we speak to people, in how we think, in our process, in our culture, you will not stay diverse. And so we need to work on the way we speak, on the way we address, on the way we believe to be inclusive. And I also think that that one is a competitive advantage.

(Brian at 00:43:20) Because I'll hire against any company that isn't gonna hire predominantly women or hire a majority of women. Right? That just—I love it. And I also think that when we are bringing something to life, we're building product in the world. We need to have everyone's influence on that, different points of view.

(Brian at 00:43:38) How much safer would Uber have been had they've had women and underrepresented minorities in their design groups on those first versions? And so we just really, really believe that. And it's wonderful to see all of these pieces come to life for us.

(Joel Beasley at 00:43:57) No, that's interesting. What prompted the change? When were you like, we need to change from a single word to a statement?

(Brian at 00:44:04) So it's been a multiyear process. So I think, you know, I became CEO four years ago, and the first one was actually the priorities list, which I was heavily influenced by Danny Meyer from Union Square Hospitality of all things. Right? He runs restaurant groups. And he used to talk about front of the house and back of the house.

(Brian at 00:44:23) So if you go to restaurants at all, which I don't know if you've ever really experienced working—right? Back of the house, the cooks, working in the back, nobody ever sees them. Front of the house are the servers, the maitre d, etcetera. And you'd see them come to that thing to pick up food, and they'd be fighting and yelling at each other.

(Brian at 00:44:41) Right? This is hot. This is cold. You got the thing wrong. And then they'd have to go out and give magnificent service to their customers.

(Brian at 00:44:48) And they just couldn't make that gap. You can't turn it on and off like that. And what he wrote in his book Setting the Table was, I had to actually prioritize our team first so that I could prioritize our customers next. And that just really hit home that our top priority were our employees. And two were our clients, three were our partners, four were our vendors, and then our ownership.

(Brian at 00:45:14) So if we satisfy all of them in the correct order, then we can create the most value for us as ownership. And, you know, thankfully, that has worked well for us. It makes really hard decisions sometimes. You know, if you're ever faced with firing a client, but they're abusive to your employees—yep.

(Brian at 00:45:34) Better to say ahead of time where your priority is than when you're looking at the pile of money that's on the other side of that decision.

(Joel Beasley at 00:45:40) Well, or you just make the mistake enough and you understand that that pile of money, you don't want it.

(Brian at 00:45:48) Exactly. Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:45:48) You can either be very intelligent, have much better foresight than me, or, like, for what I did, I just made the mistake a bunch. And I'm just like, guys, we disqualify people in our sales process all the time. We're like, that is going—nope. There's no way we're gonna make that person happy.

(Joel Beasley at 00:46:03) Let's not even go there. And they're like, we gotta hit our number. I was like, look, you don't wanna make that quick sale. Just—you're gonna hate yourself in two months.

(Brian at 00:46:14) I mean, it's sort of like, you know, you see that person walking down with scrapes and scars. You're like, wow. You've learned a lot.

(Joel Beasley at 00:46:21) Yep. Oh, yeah.

(Brian at 00:46:23) Yeah. But if they're all perfect, you're like, I don't know if you've learned anything. You look great, though. Um, the value ones to your question, you know, I have been such a fan with what Marc has done at Salesforce, really driving those values and trust.

(Brian at 00:46:39) Right? Innovation and doing it. But what I found was it felt like an eighties cubicle. Here's the poster that hangs with the one with the mountain climber trying to go off, you know, perseverance. And our culture is one of really laughing.

(Brian at 00:46:54) You know, one of the things of our culture that we identify is we love to belly laugh. Right? We just love to break down and laugh. We love to wear costumes. We make our new hires who come and join on our Monday calls wear a costume.

(Brian at 00:47:08) I'll put a costume on with them, and we do it. We have costume parties. It's everything. And so it was like, how do we represent that fun in this? And we found that, you know, what was better for us was to have a statement that you could remember, that you could hang on to.

(Brian at 00:47:24) So that was the next one. And then the third one, which has been the hardest, is how do you articulate your culture? How do you actually describe who you are without talking about policies, without talking about process, without talking about your clients? How do you define just how we exist and work with each other and love with each other? And, you know, it's statements like we've always been a remote company for twelve years.

(Brian at 00:47:45) So, you know, transition for COVID wasn't as dramatic for us, but we had to deal with kids being home and spouses being home and schooling your child next to you. But, you know, for us, it's cameras always on. Right? Like, if we were recording a podcast back in the day, we would do a phone call, boom, we'd hang up. I'd never see you. But here I am on Zoom seeing you, and the amount of information that we can transfer beyond just our words, it's magnificent. Oh, wow. It's been a long process.

(Brian at 00:48:16) And I think the reason it's important, my last note on that, is as you grow, you're going to change. It's inevitable. Growth is change. But in articulating those things around your value and your culture and your priority, I think what you're saying is we can change all we want except for these areas. These are what are really important to who we are. And as you grow, let's hold those in mind for ourselves.

(Joel Beasley at 00:48:41) Yeah, I saw your picture made it around our company Slack. We like to laugh too. And there was a picture of you. We didn't have the cow picture, but we had you wearing, like, you were like a bottle of sauce, and it was like Code Science secret sauce.

(Brian at 00:48:59) So we do, because we're a remote company, every year we would do what we call All Hands. And we'd fly the company in, and we would, you know, have one night, like the welcome thing is a costume party. It's really funny. But my wife, who runs marketing for us and used to be in the event industry, decided that every morning when we would do the welcome to everybody and here's the day and what's going on, whoever that leader that was speaking would wear the most ridiculous costumes. Just ridiculous.

(Brian at 00:49:28) So, like, you know, my best friend, Mike Witherspoon, and I—he was our president and founder of the company—one day they made us actually be the two-person horse costume. I'm walking down, and unfortunately, I was the ass. And it was just unfortunate, and I'm scarred. My COO, who hates costumes—I'm talking, he hates costumes—but he knows he has to do it. So we're in Atlanta, Georgia, and we dress him up in a gigantic, like, college mascot peach. Like, the big furry peach with the little hat on top.

(Brian at 00:50:04) And it just brings out such a playfulness. It brings out so much. It's fantastic.

(Joel Beasley at 00:50:08) It does. You get those different energy about you. I mean, because we just had Halloween recently. Right? And so my wife, for the first year, like, our kids are big enough, we can walk them around and do stuff now.

(Brian at 00:50:20) How old are they?

(Joel Beasley at 00:50:21) Aria is a little over three, and Lachlan, our son, is 1.5.

(Brian at 00:50:26) Oh, such a great age.

(Joel Beasley at 00:50:28) Yes. Yep. It's fun, rewarding, and incredibly difficult. It's like a nice blend of all of those things.

(Brian at 00:50:36) Yeah. Yeah. Are you sleeping yet?

(Joel Beasley at 00:50:39) Yes. I actually sleep right now in the guest room because they're at the stage where they go to bed for an hour or two, and then they want to sleep with mommy. And so I can't sleep and I have to wake up. So, at first, I started migrating to the guest room, and then I was like, alright, I'm just going to sleep in here. Might as well just go right to bed in here. And now we were just talking with friends last weekend about how they got their children to stop doing that, and so now we're going to try that.

(Brian at 00:51:12) Yeah. Good luck. Yeah. I've got an almost 10-year-old and 7-year-old, and there are times they still come down and climb in to say hello. They're a lot bigger, but yeah, it's a good challenge.

(Joel Beasley at 00:51:25) I'll tell you what, though, I do run in there for morning cuddle sessions. She's like, oh, if they're up, they want to cuddle. Go in there, and they're just like, I love you, Daddy. I'm like, you guys are so sweet right now. You get this blissful, like, twenty minutes with them. Then breakfast happens, and then you go in the up-down cycle—up-down cycle—until bed. Yeah.

(Brian at 00:51:46) Yeah. No, man, you can't ever give up on those moments. Like, that for us, it's like Saturday or Sunday morning. Both boys come in. We've ended up adding a TV in the room so we could get more of it. And nobody could agree on shows, so now we just put on some movie. And it's just being physically close to each other, having that moment, laughing. What a way to either, you know—it's what I look for.

(Joel Beasley at 00:52:10) Oh, yeah. We did our first family trip to Texas a few weeks ago, where it was my first break since I'd started the company. Wow. Yeah. And with us all together, and just being with them for like five, four or five days straight, it was just unbelievable. I felt so connected. We felt like we grouped and gelled together. And then ever since we took that trip, it's been, I don't know, I think like a month or so, we've just been way more intentional about hanging out. We've all just been a lot closer, and now we're going to take another trip here up to Atlanta, Georgia area for Thanksgiving to see some family. And I just, I'm looking forward to it. So it was this nice growth in myself where I'm really connecting with my family.

(Joel Beasley at 00:52:57) Now it's hard when they're very young and they're infants and they're just crying and you don't talk to them. You don't really have a relationship with them. They don't—

(Brian at 00:53:02) Have language yet.

(Joel Beasley at 00:53:04) Yeah. But now Aria is forming, you know, multi-word sentences and telling me how she feels and, you know, coming and talking to me. And so it's just like, it's a whole—yeah, I felt kind of bad at first. I guess, like, any dads that have, like, new kids, like, I felt kind of bad because I didn't feel as connected as I think I should. Right? Yeah. I see other people, and then I realized that it just kind of takes some time. Like most things in life. Right?

(Brian at 00:53:27) It takes it. I, you know, my finding has always been the more you invest in, the more you get out of it. Right? And that time for you to spend on that trip created that bond and that trust and that connection to then go to the next step. And my experience has just been the more that you put in, the more it keeps pulling out. And I also think for you as, you know, a leader and having a platform, it's important for you to share that and to show that because it gives others permission. Right? It gives others permission and courage to say, I'm going to try it, even though maybe it's challenging for me. When we went into COVID and kids are all at home and parents and stuff, one of the first things I did was put a desk right next to mine for my 9-year-old. And I would have him on all the Zoom calls, and he was working on his schoolwork.

(Brian at 00:54:19) And I would introduce him. Here's my co-CEO. But the whole goal of that was, one, very personal. Boy, this is a scary time. We don't know what the hell is going on. It's scary outside our windows, but I want to be connected with you. I want you to know that I'm here. And two, I wanted to give the world permission to do the same. Business is different, and your kids are going to come in, and it's okay. You don't have to apologize. And I think it's awesome for you to talk about it in this podcast. Boy, I took a break, and I connected with my 1.5-year-old. I didn't feel like I had that connection before. That's pretty awesome, dude.

(Joel Beasley at 00:54:51) Yeah. It's important for all of us to be, like, real, raw, and open. Like, I didn't understand it until I started, a year and a half or two years into the podcast, I started getting requests, like, come speak at companies or events. And then after the talks, there would be listeners there that would walk up to me and talk, and they'd ask me about, like, oh, you know, how's Lachlan? Because when he was first born, he was in the NICU. Right. And so they would ask me these questions about, like, my family, my life. And I was like, this is amazing. Right? Well, at first I was like, this is really weird. And I was like, no, this is exactly what should be happening. This is amazing. This is really great. And I became a fan of it. But then getting to know all of these people and building these relationships has just become this amazing thing, and realizing that just creating an environment where we're not on stage right now. Right? There's not an audience of 5,000 people, like, with blinding lights. It's just you and I, like, hanging out and talking and being open. It's never, like, the prepared statement. Right? The media-trained statement or whatever it is that we come in with that ends up being useful to the audience.

(Joel Beasley at 00:55:55) People just will hear it in their own certain way, in their own certain context, and they'll be like, wow, that was really useful and it helped me through some stuff. So one of the ways we judge our success is I've got this album in my phone called Positive. And every time I get a LinkedIn message or an email, I screenshot it, put it in the album, and then share it in our Slack channel. I've got four or 500 of these built up, and it's just people saying thank you and just trying to communicate that out and share it with the team.

(Brian at 00:56:23) That is really, really cool. I think, you know, you talk about culture, that's part of your culture. Your part of your culture is to share acknowledgment. Part of your culture is to remind each other of the good that you're doing, so it gives you the energy to fight through some of the more challenging things. I think that's a wonderful thing that you keep re-instilling into your organization and just reminding people, hey, we're doing something bigger than just doing a podcast. We're actually helping people discover something about themselves or about their business or whatever those things are that you see over and over. That's really cool that you can bring that to life for your employees.

(Joel Beasley at 00:57:02) Yeah. And I saw in your culture, like, I didn't know you were remote, but I do now. But on your About page, you had this picture with a bunch of people from the team, but you were in a recording studio. And we were like, what are you doing in the recording studio?

(Brian at 00:57:19) So, again, these All Hands events, we sort of go over the top because it's the only time that we're ever together physically. You know, like, this year will be really bizarre because we have employees that we hired almost a year ago who have never met another soul in our company in person. And so when we would bring it together, boy, it's a celebration. And we do really wacky things. Again, Molly being an event planner, she's got all the tricks of the trade. So that year was in Nashville, Tennessee. And we went to a recording studio in Nashville, and they brought in three singer-songwriters. We broke the company into three groups and actually wrote songs about what it's like to be a good scientist. And then we performed them live and recorded them.

(Brian at 00:58:06) They're in the recording studio, and then we all hung out. I mean, it was unreal. It was unreal. And it was hilarious. Like, we got these taglines out of it. Like, one of the singing taglines was something about, you know, how we, because we're a work-from-home company, you can wear pink bunny slippers everywhere. And so we started giving out pink bunny slippers. Right? Like, it was, like, let's bring this to life. Let's have fun with it. And so we often, when we're doing our recruiting each year, we try to take a picture of here's the company and then hold a spot. This could be you. You could be here with us. You could actually be on this journey with us. You can add to it. And so that's why that picture's there for the recording studio.

(Joel Beasley at 00:58:47) I love it. I love how the pink bunny slippers became, like, an inside thing. You know what? What you remind me of, and what the culture is from our conversation here, you're reminding me of a time, like, when I was around the age of 18, when I was hanging out, I had this group of friends and we'd hang out, we'd play Halo. You know, we'd work during the day, but we're all kind of single 18-year-old people. So we had our jobs, we had our interests, and then we'd come together at night and, like, play video games and just mess around and, like, just having, like, a close group of friends.

(Joel Beasley at 00:59:18) And the way you're describing that, you know, we would make the inside jokes and all of that. That kind of gets lost. It gets lost. And I would say more often than not in the companies with the red tape and the bureaucracy and the putting on different, you know, faces and being out of sync with who you are offline type deal. But I love that you guys aren't just, like, nudging into it. I'd say our company, we're, like, 25% into it, and you guys are, like, 150% into it. And you're inspiring me to, like, see another successful company. Right? That, and you're saying it's okay and, like, it's working for you. And so now I can be more comfortable in increasing that from 25 to 50%.

(Brian at 01:00:01) Well, I think, again, for me, it is—there is nothing more important for what we do when we're working on the company is to focus on it. But the outcomes is where it proves it. Right? Our attrition every year is less than 4%. So in a highly competitive space, you know, we've worked on some of the biggest and hardest products. We build Salesforce products that they take to market. I mean, we are constantly fighting off recruiters. We don't actually fight off recruiters. We focus on how do we make it a better place for our humans to succeed. And, you know, when you have that low of attrition, that becomes your secret.

(Brian at 01:00:39) Right? Because everything that you learn as a group, all the process and all the promotions and the structures and what we learn when we work with clients, those lessons, the relationships, they compound interest constantly. And if you're constantly turning over because somebody's looking for a better place to work, somebody's looking for a better manager, somebody's looking for just something different, you know, you're constantly fighting this up to the bottom. You know, this art that I have on my wall here of the mountain climber climbing up. Right? We're all just climbing these mountains trying to hit our goals constantly. But, man, having attrition of employees, it's like putting a huge bag of weights on your back and still trying to climb that mountain. It just makes it harder. And I think these are the investments that pay off. One, for business.

(Brian at 01:01:28) But two, we're humans, man. Why would you want to live a miserable life? Have fun. Enjoy the people you work with. Be able to bring your whole self to work, not just your business self. You know, the popular pieces that are out there right now that people will talk about where the CEO says, hey, when you come to work, we work, and the one mission we have is the business mission, and that's it. And I just don't think that's a humane thing to do. I don't think that's how you bring the best out of people. I don't think that's how, you know, I don't think that's how we as humans are intended to live.

(Brian at 01:02:00) So I encourage you, lean in, man. The more you put into that, the more it's going to pay off.

(Joel Beasley at 01:02:06) I like that. I like the way you think. So what are you learning as we start to wrap up here? What are you learning, like, as a leader right now?

(Brian at 01:02:17) Constantly. This year, Mike Wolfe, who's the SVP of the AppExchange at Salesforce, he and I, through COVID, had weekly calls. And we have this ongoing joke because it seemed like for a while, every two weeks, there was some big new thing we had to learn how to manage through. Right? Like, it was a global pandemic, and then it's social injustice, and then it's racial tension, and then it's police brutality.

(Brian at 01:02:42) And it's literally just layering on top. And, you know, the political climate that we're in and the divisiveness of it. And our job as leaders and management, again, we can't separate ourselves out and say, hey, leave that outside the door. When you're on this Zoom call, that doesn't exist. Like, that's a bullshit construct.

(Brian at 01:03:03) And I think that's been the biggest lesson of this is, like, where do we have to actually invest and how is that different than it used to be? How do we have to enable our people? How do we have to think of our job as leaders as bigger than just the company we run, but also the ecosystem that we exist in? You know, we're part of an App Exchange ecosystem. These are thousands of ISVs.

(Brian at 01:03:29) It is Salesforce itself. Our job is to support each other. The communities that our employees live in. We're a remote company, so I can't say our community. It's 27 states and all the communities they live in, and what's our role and responsibility in that. And that's the biggest area for leadership for me now is our roles and responsibilities are much greater than I realized twelve months ago.

(Brian at 01:03:54) And the opportunity for impact is so much greater. And therefore, for me, the outcomes will be so much greater as well. And so we spend a lot of time. I personally spend a lot of time with my exec coach and just really studying the organization to say, how do we really take responsibility for that? And where is it appropriate for us? Where is it appropriate to say, sorry, that's too much.

(Brian at 01:04:17) Right? Because we can't do everything. So lots of lessons we didn't expect to learn or I didn't expect to learn this year.

(Joel Beasley at 01:04:24) So you guys are growing? Are you hiring? I think there's a lot of people that are like, I want to go work with them.

(Brian at 01:04:30) We are. We have pivoted into that thrive mode. We went to the adapt, and I'm very fortunate that we worked with some really significant companies that really leveraged us, like Salesforce building work.com and being part of that build, working with Encino, et cetera. You know, those companies really helped us as we went through our adapt phase. But I think we have 20 job openings right now as we're hiring into our Q1 and what we expect to just be back to a super growth '21. And I feel very fortunate because I know that so many people are not in that space.

(Brian at 01:05:08) And so I encourage, if you know Salesforce especially, if you're a technologist, come work with us. It's fantastic. We're solving really hard problems, but we try to do it in a way that's super fun. So it's codescience.com/careers if there's anybody out there that may fit that bill.

(Joel Beasley at 01:05:25) Excellent. Yeah. We'll put it in the show notes too so people can find it. And then your customers. I'm sure there's some of your customers that use you through Salesforce listening. Is there anything we can do or any call to action there?

(Brian at 01:05:39) Well, I think that, honestly, as we talked before, leveraging Salesforce, the App Exchange, the marketplace for both technology and distribution is a way for you to achieve outsized returns. And if that is something that you think your company is looking to do, then I'd really encourage you to reach out again, codescience.com, because you're the type of organizations that we work with, that we partner with to bring products and ideas to life. And again, it's all about commercial success. This isn't your own internal usage of Salesforce. We're not looking at implementing Sales Cloud or helping you with your DevOps of your org.

(Brian at 01:06:13) It is how do you leverage it for commercial success? How do you digitally transform your existing business to be a software business? How do you take your software business and integrate with Salesforce and then really leverage it for more of a licensed sales? And that's where we excel.

(Joel Beasley at 01:06:28) So if I were a CTO and I knew we were going to be building a product that was going to be like a consumer-based product on Salesforce platform, I would want to talk to you guys?

(Brian at 01:06:40) 100%. We've worked, again, we've worked with, there's a couple of different types of ways to do it. Right? You can be a feature of Salesforce, and I think of companies like DocuSign. Right?

(Brian at 01:06:52) Electronic signature. They enhance Salesforce. Right? They make it so that a person in a sales role can sell or get to close their deal or service role can get a work order going. But there's also another side where you can OEM and resell Salesforce, and it becomes your operating system.

(Brian at 01:07:11) So Encino that just IPO'd is an OEM of Salesforce. Veeva that IPO'd. FinancialForce. I mean, there's probably 50 different amazing, huge companies that fully leverage Salesforce as an OEM. And that's really our specialty when we get into it is how do you actually use Salesforce as your technology stack and bring it out? So if you're a CTO that's looking at that, you know, maybe you've heard about replatforming, those are the conversations that we would love to have with you.

(Joel Beasley at 01:07:42) It's cool. I had no idea that Salesforce did that OEM concept. I thought they just had the App Store and you could just go into Salesforce, and that was their only model.

(Brian at 01:07:51) Yeah. It goes back in the day, probably fifteen years ago, with a guy by the name of Ron Huddleston who brought that idea from Oracle into Salesforce and helped transform it to how do we actually power your entire application, how can you resell Salesforce. And you get all of the same tools that Salesforce uses to build their products.

(Joel Beasley at 01:08:11) Oh, this is great. This is a fantastic conversation. We made a podcast. How do you feel?

(Brian at 01:08:18) I love this. I had no idea what we were gonna be covering. I knew some of the topics in here, but we've literally went all over the board for it. So this has been a blast. I really appreciate it.

(Joel Beasley at 01:08:27) No. It's an absolute pleasure. And thank you so much for supporting the podcast, and thank you so much. You have a great day.

(Brian at 01:08:34) Cool. Thanks, man. Cheers.

(Joel Beasley at 01:08:36) Talk soon, Brian. 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].

(Joel Beasley at 01:08:56) Every time I get an email or LinkedIn message, it absolutely makes my day and inspires me to keep going.