Henry Svendblad - CTO at Company Nurse

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:00) Hello, my friends. Today we are talking to Henry, the CTO at Company Nurse, and we discuss the importance of having a coach to reach your maximum potential, ways to make yourself available to customers as a CTO, and the dynamics that go into building a highly productive team. All of this right here, right now on the Modern CTO Podcast. Here we go. This is the Modern CTO Podcast.

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:34) Henry, did you look at that bike on your wall? You a biker?

(Henry at 00:00:38) I am. I'm an ex-professional mountain biker, avid cyclist, but now just for fun.

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:45) Just for fun. What made you switch from pro to hobby?

(Henry at 00:00:50) My body more than anything. I had several pretty bad breaks and crashes, and after six or seven years of working with a coach, my body just said, you know, let's not do this anymore.

(Joel Beasley at 00:01:06) Going through that process of doing something difficult and not wanting to give up and continuing, did that prepare you for your current role?

(Henry at 00:01:16) I think, well, interestingly enough, I think a lot of what I learned in professional racing prepared me for as an executive. You know, I think, for one, I talk about the importance of having a coach to keep you honest, which leads into having a plan, which obviously you should have a business coach, you should have a business plan, and then the discipline, right? One of the key things, and I don't know if we need to keep this PG-13, but one of the key things my coach used to say is the number one rule is FTP: Follow the effing plan. That's the number one rule, right? And so when, with your business, obviously you want to have a business plan. Obviously nothing always goes to plan, but you've got to follow the plan. And then finally it's looking at the results, right? So how are we doing? Did we finish last place or are we winning? How do we keep this up? And that happens every day in business, just winning deals and, you know, hiring the right person or hiring the wrong person.

(Joel Beasley at 00:02:17) Yeah, no, for 100%. Are you going to write a book about going from cycling to IT management?

(Henry at 00:02:25) I don't know that anybody's ever done that. I don't know that that sounds like a book I'd want to read, but maybe.

(Joel Beasley at 00:02:30) Have you ever come across Sandy Metz? She's an author.

(Henry at 00:02:33) I have not.

(Joel Beasley at 00:02:34) Okay. She authors, well, last time—I'm getting old—ten years ago, she was authoring books in Ruby on testing and things like that. And her analogies and examples that she would use were always into biking. You could just tell she was really into road biking.

(Henry at 00:02:51) Oh, really? Yeah. I'll have to take—what was her name? Sandy Metz?

(Joel Beasley at 00:02:54) Yeah. Sandy Metz.

(Henry at 00:02:56) I'll have to take a look at that.

(Joel Beasley at 00:02:57) Yeah. And so now you're just doing it as a hobby and on the weekends or every once in a while? Any of your family get into it?

(Henry at 00:03:06) I've become a weekend warrior. I have influenced most of my family to buy bikes, whether or not they're actually using them as often as I do. I think the biggest difference now is I used to spend 20 hours a week, say, training, and then probably 20 hours a week recovering and doing other things. Now I might spend 10 or 12 hours a week, but it's all for fun. It's all, you know, just smaller, shorter rides, always stop to take pictures and smell the roses, as they say, and just really just enjoy it, taking the scenery in. During COVID last year, did a couple of trips to Colorado, the high mountains, and that was pretty spectacular. So hopefully I'll return there in the summer.

(Joel Beasley at 00:03:47) So with all this fitness, this outdoor activity, how did you get into technology?

(Henry at 00:03:53) Good question. So I think it started back in high school. So I'll date myself a little bit. Back when I was in high school, I was the first and only kid at the time that was actually doing my term papers on a word processor. So my mom bought me an IBM PC XT, had a couple of floppies that you had to flip, and I just learned how to use that. And I took those skills to my first job, which was actually in finance. So I started as a financial analyst, actually a derivatives trader. So I got all my securities licenses. I just got turned off from the nature of that industry and what I was seeing. Decided to go become a financial analyst at a company. But all along, I found that people were relying on me, or the things that were making me shine were my technology skills, Excel skills, you know, putting a computer together, figuring out, knowing how it worked. A lot of that was also probably because I was using—you know, we'd buy a nice computer for finance in my first company, and I'd stay after hours because it was a much better computer to play games on than anything that I could afford at home. So, you know, I was in the office 10, 12 hours a day because two or three hours of that was playing games after hours. I don't play any games anymore, but I think that understanding how to push the performance of a computer and how to run programs on it, et cetera, just kind of led me down this path. And, you know, I walked into the dark side of IT shortly after.

(Joel Beasley at 00:05:24) What type of games were you playing back then?

(Henry at 00:05:27) Gosh. Back then, it was Wing Commander. I don't know if that rings a bell. I think there's some newer versions of that, but it was pretty intense. You know, it was hours and hours of trying to get to the next level.

(Joel Beasley at 00:05:38) Yeah. I was playing a variety of games. I think one of the first games I ever played on the computer was Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego.

(Henry at 00:05:46) Oh, I had that. Yep. Yep.

(Joel Beasley at 00:05:48) And you could hear the grinding of the disc and it reading.

(Henry at 00:05:52) The disc. Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:05:52) It wasn't even the three. We didn't have the three yet. We had the five—or I don't know what the size was, but it was bigger than the three. And, hey, put that thing in there, take it out of this paper sleeve, and here it goes crunching away.

(Henry at 00:06:05) Sure.

(Joel Beasley at 00:06:06) So is this your first podcast?

(Henry at 00:06:09) It isn't. So I've done a few. Recently, I—one of our key vendor relationships with a company called Genesys, and they have a Take a Moment leadership podcast, which I did about three, four months ago.

(Joel Beasley at 00:06:24) And is it—how do you find it? Do you know? Is it Genesis or Take a Moment?

(Henry at 00:06:29) Genesys Take a Moment podcast. It's on, you know, all the typical streaming services. But, yeah, Take a Moment podcast. It's profiling leaders in technology and obviously with a focus on customer experience, which is when you run a contact center or even as a CTO—customer, to me, the user experience, whether it's a customer experience, whether it's your employees' experience, that's really where I like to say I focus my time: how do we create these amazing experiences while you're using technology? So I've been in the contact center space on and off for 20-plus years, starting with really my first—the company I was talking about after I moved out of finance. I worked for a healthcare company in Boston, and we had our first sort of contact center experience. I had to set up a hunt group for a support team in an old Mitel platform. And since then, I've, like I said, on and off, been at companies—large Fortune companies with hundreds of agents, maybe thousands of agents, and then small organizations. Company Nurse is kind of in the middle. We're a dedicated contact center. We have about 60 agents now, or had at our peak. We've cut back a little bit on contractors because of COVID, and I can talk a little bit about that. But Genesys is kind of this gem in the contact center space. They're still privately held. They, recently—well, I would say recently, about a year and a half ago—they brought on a new CEO, Tony Bates. That name is pretty familiar in technology. He was one of the guys behind Skype that sold Skype to Microsoft. And so he's now at Genesys. And it's interesting to know that companies like Uber, Microsoft, Apple all rely on Genesys technology behind the scenes. And so we did a bake-off with a few different providers when I joined Company Nurse looking for a platform that could take our organization to the next level, and we ended up with Genesys.

(Joel Beasley at 00:08:27) Right. Well, what's a bake-off?

(Henry at 00:08:30) Well, we had, you know, we had three vendors that we looked at at the same time, right? Kicked the tires a little bit, had trials, had the entire contact center management team take a look at each of the contenders and then come back and say, all right, which one do we like? Which one do we want to keep?

(Joel Beasley at 00:08:48) Nice. You get to try all the cookies.

(Henry at 00:08:49) Like a race.

(Joel Beasley at 00:08:50) Yeah.

(Henry at 00:08:50) It's like a race for vendors, back to the mountain biking.

(Joel Beasley at 00:08:55) I was asking because there's a venture group that will do these contests. And it's actually pretty interesting. There was one last year where it was a water park, right? I don't think they're doing well. No. Sorry. I shouldn't have gone there. But they had—here's the cool thing. Here's the cool thing. They made these wrist RFID tags, and so the contest they held, there was a prize and it was, you know, anyone could build a team and join and then compete, and you went and then you pitched and you showed what you built and your features and your prototype, and then they picked one to go with and let that grow. And to me that was interesting because there's vendors on the market that already do it, but they're so expensive that it's actually cheaper to hold a contest and have people figure out how to put it together and then just inject money to fund those talented people than it is to—you get a company out of it too, right?

(Henry at 00:09:48) Absolutely. Yeah. We, at my previous organization, we had a dedicated innovation team. And one of the things that we did on a yearly basis was—and I'm sure you've heard the term hackathon, right? Where you just, you know, for a week or for some short period of time, you get all these bright minds and you say, okay, these are challenges that either we don't have the time to do or we haven't figured out how to solve. Throw them up on a wall and let's figure out if we can solve one of them. And I think Facebook and other companies do these hackathons all the time. Twilio, I think, does. And so we're not doing that here at Company Nurse, but certainly something that I think applies to the analogy or the example that you just shared.

(Joel Beasley at 00:10:30) Yeah. It sounds like a smart move with Genesys getting the Bates guy, the Skype guy, because you're in communications. If you get that person on board, all of a sudden you've got a big name and they're growing. So that sounds pretty cool. When you did the bake-off and you looked at these other three, why did you choose them?

(Henry at 00:10:48) Good question. So a few reasons. So I had my preference, but ultimately we put—I put out a survey to all the participants in this bake-off in terms of the leadership team, the contact center management team. And we looked at it across several dimensions, right? What's the best fit for the organization? Who do we like from a feature perspective? Who do we think is going to do a better job of implementation? The reason I wanted to go down the Genesys path, and I think at the end of the day we were able to test it and prove this out, was they were an all-in-one solution, right? So you hear a lot in technology: best of breed versus all-in-one. With contact center, you've got a couple of key pieces. Obviously, there's the bread and butter, the automatic call distribution and interactive voice response. Everybody does that and does that pretty well. Genesys is built on an AWS microservices architecture. That was exciting to me from a technology perspective because I know how scalable that can be. They were also one of the few that were willing to put some HIPAA security protections in the form of a business associate agreement in place. And then they had a workforce management, or what they call workforce engagement management system, that allows us to schedule staff, do quality management. So reviewing their calls and all of that is integrated in one system. When we looked at the other vendors, again, it was best of breed. So it was, well, it's this vendor, Five9, in one case. Great product, but they're really just focused on the contact center. If you want to manage your workforce, if you want the workforce management component, you're looking at implementing a second solution. And then for your business lines, you're looking at implementing a third solution. So now you're managing three vendor relationships instead of just one. And in my experience, sometimes when you have vendors that integrate or don't integrate, there's a lot of, well, these guys are doing this and now therefore we can't do that. With Genesys, we have the one neck to choke, as we like to say in IT, instead of three.

(Joel Beasley at 00:12:52) Well, I think it's important that you're thinking that way. So you're making life easier for yourself and that's going to free up your time and make it more scalable as a business because, you know, it's your responsibility to put Company Nurse in a good position, right?

(Henry at 00:13:08) Exactly. Exactly.

(Joel Beasley at 00:13:10) How do you explain to friends when you're out at dinner, couples or new people, kids' birthday parties—how do you explain what you do?

(Henry at 00:13:17) Well, one, I obviously—I say I'm in technology. I'm a technologist. But I think we touched on a little bit, and what it is, it's creating amazing experiences for—whether it's results or experiences for the people that work at a company, the customers that you have, and then the results that you're able to get from that. If you have happy employees because they're happy with the technology they use every day, that's an important piece. They're going to be happier when they're talking to customers on the phone. We actually had some, interestingly enough, we had a couple of people that we were interviewing during the time that we were about to upgrade to Genesys, and they were actually asking, what system am I going to be using? Because if I'm going to be using some old technology that I literally have to, you know, rotary dial, I don't want to work here. People want to work at a company that has cool technology that delivers great experiences. So, you know, long story short, I work and create opportunities for others to build their career. That's become more of a focus for me as I've gotten older, that it's not just about the company results, but how do we create opportunities for people to really expand their career? And hopefully we can keep them, but if not, they can go someplace else and do even more amazing things.

(Joel Beasley at 00:14:30) And when did you figure out that coaching was important?

(Henry at 00:14:34) Well, I think a lot of it came from mountain biking. So I wanted to be the best that I could be, and, you know, the people that I saw that were doing really well had great coaches. So I went out to find the best coach and the best coaching team, and I think I did. And, you know, unfortunately, after seven years of that, it sort of wore me out. I used to sign up for my coach a year at a time because I knew that if I did it month to month, I might have that one bad month where I just said, I'm done with this. But I think that led me to it. And in our business, we work with a strategic coaching company that helps us with our—so they've set up a framework for the way we manage our leadership team and our objectives. But they also help us with our quarterly planning, our annual planning. And it's just really important, right?

(Henry at 00:15:24) You have somebody that's coming from the outside, so a lot of the politics don't come into play and some of the personality stuff that sometimes happens between leadership teams. And we just have sort of this objective outside view of how we're doing as an organization and whether or not we're actually meeting the commitments that we set every quarter.

(Joel Beasley at 00:15:42) And did that happen before you were at the company?

(Henry at 00:15:45) It did. Yeah. So that's actually part of what led me to Company Nurse. Our CEO, Paul Pinsfeld, through probably some of the same ways that I ended up with a mountain bike coach, he realized, "Hey, companies that I see they're doing well have one thing in common, right?" And especially smaller companies as they're trying to grow, they've got an external coach that's helping them and helping them advance. And so about a year and a half before I joined, they put this framework in with our coach. Our coach, it's a company called Petra Coach, highly recommend Petra Coach. They follow the Rockefeller Habits if anybody's read the book. And so, you know, back then, even before I joined and they started this daily process of daily standups, which are very common in IT. So I've, for the last, I don't know, longer than I can remember, five, six years, we've been doing daily scrum. Sometimes, in this case at Company Nurse, I have two daily scrums. So every day we're meeting with the development team, but then now we're also doing that as a leadership team. When we put that in place, a few people just said, you know, "This isn't for me. Too much accountability, too much transparency." You know, the company was ready to grow, ready to move to the next level. And so that's how I ended up here.

(Joel Beasley at 00:17:11) Yeah. I noticed that a lot. People discussing the maturity of a company. A lot of the startup group, the group that's in there initially with the chaos and figuring out what works and how to make money and the amount of flexibility that you have to have to go through that process doesn't often mix well with the accountability at a later-stage growth company.

(Henry at 00:17:33) True. True. I've seen that. I've seen that a couple times for sure.

(Joel Beasley at 00:17:37) So are you guys scaling up pretty fast? Where are you at?

(Henry at 00:17:40) We are. We are. So we were double-digit scaling. We're looking at 20% growth prior to COVID. And we were really preparing for a blockbuster year in 2020. We had made some big changes to our sourcing strategy. So we had eliminated some contractor relationships and had signed some big deals, and then COVID happened in March. And I should share that about 50% of our business comes from K through 12 schools. And so you can imagine, and by the way, we're a usage-based business. So if the phone doesn't ring, we don't get paid. And so beginning of March, as soon as we went into full lockdown, we saw our call volumes drop by about 50%. And so, you know, the first thing was, "Okay, we need to act." And I think that's another thing that, to go back to kind of the mountain biking analogy: you know, when you're in the middle of a race and you have a flat tire or something goes wrong or you crash, you're right back on the bike, right?

So we reached out to our customers and we just asked, "How can we help?" And we had one customer that raised their hand, a utility company in California, and they said, "You know, our employees are pretty freaked out coming to work, but we have to keep them at work because we run a utility, right?" And so they said, "Can we have our employees call you every day at a reduced cost, so less than what we normally would charge, so that your nurses can walk them through COVID symptoms?" And we said, "Sure." I mean, we've got 50% excess capacity now, more or less, in our contact center. Let's go ahead and do that. But at the same time, I realized that in order for us to really make a dent in COVID, and by the way, we had assigned in sort of an internal pledge that we're going to help a million employees return to work safely. We weren't going to be able to do that if they were calling us on the phone, right? We could take, you know, a couple hundred calls a day maybe. And so we started working on a solution to address this COVID challenge, and that is how to return employees to work safely. And that's now turned into a digital companion, health screening companion, that's being used by over 20,000 users a day. We've completed over 750,000 health screens since we launched, and that's now parlaying into a very healthy subscription business.

So instead of being down 50%, which is what we were looking at in March, we ended the year down less than 20%, which all things considering what could have happened due to COVID was actually a real success. And now with schools coming back, we also for years we've had the seasonality in our business because we were so focused on schools. We started targeting enterprises, enterprises with critical workers that had to work, and then also upselling them with our existing business. And that, you know, we're now seeing the schools come back. So we're looking at 40% potential growth this year as a result of that.

(Joel Beasley at 00:20:49) Nice. Well, good job on the adjustment and the difficult time. That's why I love the concept of having really great people, because when you get backed into the corner or you get punched in the face by something unseen, you have the ability to recoup and accelerate from there. That's, like, that's the only option for me in my mind.

(Henry at 00:21:11) Yeah. So the one thing that I learned, and we won't talk too much about the goriness of this crash, but I had a pretty bad fall from preparing for a race. And the reason that I fell was I came up to a drop, and I've done this, you know, dozens of times maybe in races, but I just came up to it and as I was warming up, I kind of hesitated and I went over the bars, fell on my face. And the moral of that story is: hesitation equals devastation, not only in mountain bike racing and training, but also in business, right? We could have hesitated. A lot of businesses hesitated, right? They're like, "Oh, well, this is going to pass. This is going to be two, three months. We'll just keep going. You know, we'll try to keep people working in the office somehow." Obviously, that didn't happen. They had to go to lockdown. We were already remote. So for us, we didn't skip a beat, but we were also able, because we weren't so focused on trying to get our employees working remotely productively because they already were, we were focused on building these solutions for our customers.

(Joel Beasley at 00:22:12) And so who are your customers? You said some K through 12, but also some businesses. Like, what exactly are you guys doing over there?

(Henry at 00:22:20) Yeah. So what we do is we're in this interesting niche that sits between healthcare and insurance and the workers' compensation industry. So in the U.S., organizations are required to have insurance for workplace injuries. And what we do is we help, we lessen the pain of workers' comp, and that's obviously there's a little bit of playing on words. We lessen the pain for the employee. So let's say you're walking in the office and a roof tile falls on you. You've got a gash on your head. Maybe you've got a, you know, you need stitches. What you do in our case, you call us, and immediately, instead of being upset with your company because you just got injured at work, you're talking to a compassionate nurse. So it flips the dynamic a little bit in terms of the employee feeling like they're being cared for.

Then the nurse, ideally, if it's not a very deep cut, they can, you know, typically if it's a head injury there, they need to be seen. But if it's something else, we can send that employee back to work with ice, ibuprofen, depending on the injury. Or if they do need to see a doctor, we can make sure that they go to the right point of care. So we have a database that we maintain of all the clinics in the U.S. that accept these type of workplace injuries, and we can make sure that we're sending that employee to the right place of care. We also have, through some integrations with partners, we can get them a Lyft or Uber ride, and we'll take them to their appointment, bring them back to work. So now you don't have two employees that are leaving the office to take somebody else to work, that could result in another potential liability for the company. And then on the back side of that, we also lessen the pain for the employer because we're now, one of the requirements of workers' compensation is, depending on the state, you have to file all these state forms. So we capture all the information. We deliver those forms to the employer and to all the parties down the chain. So the employer, the third-party administrator that may be administering that case if it turns into a case that needs to be administered, the insurance company that needs to know that this was a claim so that they can adjudicate the claim. So all along the line, we lessen the pain for everyone in the chain.

(Joel Beasley at 00:24:29) And how did you meet the executive team over there?

(Henry at 00:24:33) So through a mutual friend, I met Paul Pinsfeld, our CEO. I actually started as a contractor, which I've done consulting on and off for probably ten, fifteen years. And, you know, I think it's sometimes, if you're not able to do that, we sometimes, and I know I have made the wrong decision about joining a company because, you know, for example, when I moved back to Arizona before everybody could work remotely, my wife wanted to move back. We were living in Boston. That's another story. She wanted to get out of the cold. And so I took kind of the first job that I could, because, you know, you need a job, and those typically lead to, you know, less than satisfactory work experience. And so now I'm very cautious about where I might go, but at the same time, Company Nurse is also very careful about who they let into this inner circle of leadership. And so we dated for a while, you know, maybe three to six months. And then I was fortunate that they asked me to come on full-time.

(Joel Beasley at 00:25:35) Oh, nice. Nice. And what's the future looking like over there? Like, Elon Musk get-up. Like, where's Company Nurse in ten years?

(Henry at 00:25:43) That's a great segue. So we, because of this digital screening solution that we've built and that we now have 20,000-plus daily users, we're actually taking a version of that concept to all of our 60,000 client locations, which account for millions of covered lives. And we're going to offer a free version of that solution so that all of our clients can return their employees to work safely. But we're also adding kind of a twist to that, and that is we want to become this digital health and safety companion for employees.

So think about this. Work has changed forever because of COVID. Companies are more focused on the health of their employees. It used to be if you're sick, you show up to work and you'd see people in meetings. "Oh, don't, you know, I've got a cold." Imagine, first, imagine being back in an office. That's difficult enough right now. But then imagine you're in an office and somebody next to you is sick. Nobody wants somebody sick, even though it may not be COVID. So the idea is to create this sort of orchestration engine with a tool that people can check in every day. So if I'm an HR or risk manager and there's a COVID outbreak at one of our factories or locations, I can send out a message immediately through SMS to all my employees. They can click on a link and they can immediately see what's going on if they need to start. You know, we're helping companies with testing management. So we have very large productions, for example, in movie studios where people have to be tested every day, right, in order for things to continue. Or if you think of, like, you know, the White House, right, people have to be tested every day. So how do you manage that process? We're helping companies manage that through our software, and we hope this digital health and safety companion can help them get access to all these resources. Companies spend a lot of money on employee assistance programs and telemedicine and all these other benefits, but they're so difficult and disparate, and so many disparate places to find them. We want to become that one-stop shop for our clients and then obviously expand beyond that.

(Joel Beasley at 00:27:52) Have you encountered any engineering challenges doing this?

(Henry at 00:27:56) Oh, there's always engineering challenges. I think the interesting thing is, at the end of the day, we're relying on the plain old telephone network or system, POTS lines. And surprisingly enough, you know, when you send a text message, it's going through to Verizon or T-Mobile. They've got outages all the time. So when you're relying on that text messaging as a core capability, you realize that, you know, there are some challenges there. So we've, you know, we're working with companies like Twilio to figure out, how do we intercept any error codes and then use other means to still deliver those messages? That's one key challenge. Scalability is always a challenge. So when you're working at scale, when you've got 20,000 daily users, you need to make sure that you're, for us, we're a SaaS-first, cloud-first company, heavily invested in AWS. So we're just looking at, how do we set things up so that we can auto-scale? How do we set things up so that we don't have any scalability or performance issues as we grow the service?

(Joel Beasley at 00:28:56) Nice. Are you pretty pumped up about this?

(Henry at 00:28:59) I'm pretty pumped up about it. Hopefully it comes across. I mean, this, you know, for us, like I said, we started with this internal goal where we wanted to help a million employees return to work safely. We're closing in on a million health screens. We're still somewhat far of our goal, but, you know, in the new, I don't know if you're familiar with the term BHAG?

(Joel Beasley at 00:29:19) No.

(Henry at 00:29:19) BHAG. And I should know who came up with it first, but it's a Big Hairy Audacious Goal.

(Joel Beasley at 00:29:27) Oh, right.

(Henry at 00:29:27) Yeah. It's supposed to be something that scares you. And so our Big Hairy Audacious Goal is we want to have a positive influence on at least 15% of all workplace injuries. And with this pitch that, you know, we now have, in this prototype that we built and the product that we have, some of the people in industry that we're talking to have actually come back and said, "Well, that actually seems like you're batting too low. Like, you could have a positive impact on 25% of all workplace injuries." So maybe that'll be our new BHAG.

(Joel Beasley at 00:29:57) You ever hook up with any companies like Gusto?

(Henry at 00:30:00) No. Not familiar with Gusto.

(Joel Beasley at 00:30:02) Okay. So Gusto is amazing. They're a payroll system. So, like, that's how I run my company payroll. And they have all of the integrations. So I can get my healthcare in there. I can get everything that I could possibly need to run my business is inside of that Gusto as far as employees and HR, things of that nature. And if there was, like, a Company Nurse box that described this to me, that would be something I would click.

(Henry at 00:30:32) Interesting. Yeah. So we use Bamboo, BambooHR, which probably competes with Gusto. I'll have to take a look at Gusto, but that's part of the idea is that we don't want to become an HR system. We don't want to become an electronic health record or a case management system. But one of the things that's lacking, and maybe this isn't lacking in Gusto, but a lot of these systems, first of all, they're disparate systems. So Gusto might be one system, and they probably have a mobile app. Well, they want you to download their mobile app. Well, most employees don't want to download yet, you know, we're operating under app fatigue. You know, the more I look at my phone, I see apps are getting uninstalled because I'm not using them, but I downloaded them once. Now I'll be damned if I download yet another app that's going to do something. And then the other thing is there's somewhat of a distrust in, and just what you're going to do with my data in general, right? Even as an employee, do I really want to download this employment app on my personal device?

(Henry at 00:31:28) How do I know they're not tracking where I am through GPS coordinates or what I'm saying or what I'm doing? And so we've designed the system to be a web-friendly or mobile-friendly web front end. It's still an app, but it's not a downloadable app. It's enabled through text messaging, and we want to go wide, not super deep. We're going to go deep in the areas that we operate, but we just want to go wide.

(Henry at 00:31:50) So Gusto would be a potential integration opportunity. We could say, hey, there's a lot of employee information in Gusto, but your employee assistance program, which if you're not familiar with that, lots of companies have EAP programs that help employees with financial challenges and divorce. And, you know, you name it. If they have an issue, they can call and be taken care of. We view our product the same.

(Henry at 00:32:14) It's an employee benefit. Right? You get hurt at work. We want to make sure that you know how to call us. And in today's world, it's becoming increasingly difficult because there aren't, you know, we can't put a poster up in a cafeteria when everybody's working remote or in the field.

(Henry at 00:32:28) And so this is where a technology like this comes into play. So, yeah, very excited about it.

(Joel Beasley at 00:32:33) Yeah. There's a couple of those small business payroll providers that have emerged, but of all of them, I like Gusto the most just because, there's, like, Square Payroll too. You know, there's a couple of them. But the thing that's so easy for me, and we've got just under 15 people, so we're not huge. But there's a lot of companies that size.

(Joel Beasley at 00:32:52) Right? That's where I can go and look for the alert me of new benefits. Like, as the company grows, new benefits become available or as they grow and add new benefits. And so it allows me just, like, one click. Like, we can do health insurance in, like, a click or two.

(Henry at 00:33:10) Sure. Sure.

(Joel Beasley at 00:33:11) You know, all the different rewards as far as how long they've worked here, time off policies, basically everything that's with the humans and the employment side of things. And, but I agree with not building a mobile app. And the reason why is because I don't like downloading more apps. And my new thought on this is that there has to be an app reason. Like, for example, we did a leadership company, and we built an amazing leadership web application because everyone just does it, sends them a link in the email.

(Joel Beasley at 00:33:46) They click it. They watch the video. They do something, perform some sort of action.

(Henry at 00:33:50) You don't

(Joel Beasley at 00:33:50) need an app. Like, why would you need an app for that?

(Henry at 00:33:53) There's

(Joel Beasley at 00:33:53) no technological need. It would actually hinder things. It would actually get less engagement if you force someone to download an app first. Why don't you just make everything super mobile friendly? You don't have the processing power.

(Joel Beasley at 00:34:05) It's not like it's a video game in the browser. Right? It's a video game that's three minutes. So I really am functionally inclined to build something based on its needs. And if you don't need the app, then don't build the app.

(Joel Beasley at 00:34:19) Because so many people will build it, and they don't have their business model first and they're a startup. And they're like, we have to have the app. And it's like, no. You have to have the business case. You have to have someone with the pain that's willing to pay for it.

(Henry at 00:34:30) Yeah. I won't mention where, but I worked at another company where we had an app, and some of the leadership team loved it. And I had the unfortunate job of actually having to report how many people actually used the app, and it was tiny, like 100 users. Right? We here we have a service that's being used by 20,000 plus daily, and we don't even have an app.

(Henry at 00:34:53) Right? It's a mobile-friendly site, and we're relying, if we had an app, it might make notifications easier, but we know that we just need to make it easy. There's a lot of distress right now in employers. There's just distress in general. And, you know, we want it to be, I get a text message.

(Henry at 00:35:09) I click on a link and in two seconds or five seconds, I'm able to do what I need to do and go about my day. And in our case, we actually use the app. We have customers that are using the app to protect the health and safety of their employees, of kids in school. We've got schools where we put up posters with QR codes. As families are coming in, they're taking a picture of the QR code. They're immediately taken to this web service.

(Henry at 00:35:33) In literally ten seconds, they show a green pass to the person that's going to take their temperature. So it feels great to know, hey, we're helping schools get back to business now. A lot of schools have been closed, but we've had special ed schools that have been open all throughout the pandemic, and they've been operating thanks to our software in part.

(Joel Beasley at 00:35:50) Yeah. Some schools didn't close down at all, too. Yeah. It's like a highly regional decision. But I am curious.

(Joel Beasley at 00:35:59) I've got some questions here. So we have a community. Sure. Sure. I'll give you some background context.

(Joel Beasley at 00:36:03) So we have a community. It's called Elevate. Right? And it's a community of technology leaders.

(Henry at 00:36:08) I just joined by the way.

(Joel Beasley at 00:36:09) What? Did you? Yes. Yes. That's awesome.

(Joel Beasley at 00:36:12) Okay. So we've got

(Henry at 00:36:13) I haven't participated yet. So you'll have to school me on what it is and why I should be excited, but I did, I got the pitch and I thought this is great. I'd like to be a part of it.

(Joel Beasley at 00:36:21) Dude, it is cool. Like, it's a dream. It's exactly what we wanted. We've got a couple 100 people in it now, and it's pretty amazing. But so we've got questions, questions that come up.

(Joel Beasley at 00:36:33) And there's no right or wrong answers. Just your thoughts on the topic, if that's cool.

(Henry at 00:36:38) Cool.

(Joel Beasley at 00:36:38) Okay. So what's your advice for CTOs that are in a high-stress stage of growth, and they don't know when to stop working every day?

(Henry at 00:36:49) So been there, probably feel like I'm there a little bit. So this is a little bit of me sort of preaching what I do. I think it's important to recognize your role as a leader is not doing the work. Although a lot of us do have direct responsibility, but it's really about the dynamics of building a team, a highly productive team. And how do you do that?

(Henry at 00:37:15) Right. And so what I find, like when we launched this product, here we were. We're facing a 50% shortage in our call volume. That looks pretty scary. Obviously, you're thinking of, you know, are we going to have to lay people off?

(Henry at 00:37:33) We didn't, which is great. But what we, even under that circumstance, we still made some hiring decisions because we needed to have the team to be able to support the 20,000 users that we have. And one of the things that I'm a big fan of is global outsourcing. And I don't mean outsource everything, but there are definitely, look at, you know, I would say look at what you're doing. Like, literally, if you're feeling stressed, look at where you're spending your time on a daily, weekly basis and then ask yourself, is this something that would be better done by a developer overseas or onshore?

(Henry at 00:38:10) Would it be better done by another person on my team? How do I make the case? Because my time is valuable. And if I'm stressed out, there's probably a lot of stuff that I'm doing day to day that could be pushed to a more appropriate place in the organization. Now if somebody said, well, I'm the only one that can do it, then that's a problem.

(Henry at 00:38:31) Right? You shouldn't be in a situation where you are the glue that keeps it all together.

(Joel Beasley at 00:38:37) That is true. I fully agree with that. Tips for dealing with a shoestring budget.

(Henry at 00:38:45) Well, global outsourcing, virtual assistance. I'm a, we're, I've spent a lot of time in The Philippines. I worked for a company where we had a captive center, several 100 people in Manila. I'm a big, like I said, big fan. You can find some amazing resources in places like The Philippines, Central America, South America, and, you know, you're talking about $12 an hour, $6 an hour, places like Upwork.

(Henry at 00:39:13) So, you know, one example is, hey. You need a logo for your company or you need some research done. Yeah. Sure. You could do it yourself and spend all night doing it or you could farm it out to one of these places like Upwork.

(Henry at 00:39:29) They'll find you someone in some cases, like, if you're trying to build a logo, you actually have people competing for your business and getting you to kind of a final logo. You guys have a very cool Modern CTO logo, but, you know, I'm guessing somebody did that internally. You could

(Joel Beasley at 00:39:43) No. From Upwork.

(Henry at 00:39:45) Oh, Upwork. Yeah. So you know what I'm talking about. Yeah. Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:39:48) Yeah. No. I mean, well, I met this guy, Yuri, on Upwork. He did several years ago, maybe five or seven years ago, and we've just been working together ever since. And we do a lot of work together and a lot of projects and, yeah, just fantastic relationship.

(Joel Beasley at 00:40:04) I'm like a top user of Upwork. Like, you can go and click on the profile and see they rate you as a provider, like, how much money you've spent on Upwork and things like that. And when I see those numbers, I'm like, woah. Because I've been a customer of theirs, I think, for at least ten years, you know.

(Henry at 00:40:21) So this is resonating with you, obviously. I mean, that's a huge advantage. I think the other thing is you need to figure out a way to build, you know, back in the day, we were doing waterfall development and everything took six months plus. Right? Now you have to figure out how to build solutions that can go to market in sixty days or less and figure out a way.

(Henry at 00:40:47) And so what we've done is we've turned to more of a subscription model, right? So low cost per employee per month, but, you know, the subscription revenue just keeps growing. And once you have it and our churn is almost non-existent. So, you know, we were able to within sixty days build a product and start to build that pipeline that was essentially paying for the development and the support resources that we needed to put in place to maintain it.

(Joel Beasley at 00:41:18) You seem to have a strong background in sales. How did you get that experience?

(Henry at 00:41:24) Well, I do and I don't. I guess I've never really been a salesperson per se, but I've always, I forget who it was sometime in my career. I worked for a fantastic organization and we had a great sales leader. And he asked people, who here in the company thinks that they're in sales? And of course, you know, a few people raise their hand and he says, no, you're all in sales.

(Henry at 00:41:47) If you don't know what we do and how to sell our product, then, you know, then this isn't the right company for you. And so I've always felt that my value as a CTO is heightened by spending time in front of customers selling our product. So I don't have a quota. I don't get paid a commission. But if I'm not listening to what they have to say, the feedback on the features or whatever, I'm not going to be as effective in my role.

(Joel Beasley at 00:42:15) So how do you do that? Do you jump on, like, second or third calls? I don't know what your pipeline looks like. For us, we've got, you know, first, second, third calls. Or do you schedule time to talk with existing? How do you actually tactically, if someone's listening to you like, yeah, that's great. I hear that all the time in all the books, spend time with your customers. But what does that actually look like for you?

(Henry at 00:42:34) So what it looks like for me is making myself available and accessible to the VP of business development, the client service managers, the account executive. You know, when they say, hey, I need help to me. Again, I don't think anybody's more important, but those are the conversations that I want to be a part of. So of course I'm not going to be on the first pitch of a demo, but if it's a big enough deal, I might be. Or if it's a complicated new feature that we're rolling out and maybe the account executive doesn't understand it yet and asks for my help, absolutely I'll be there.

(Henry at 00:43:11) Right? So it's just that old expression of I know where my bread's buttered and I know how we get paid and it starts with sales.

(Joel Beasley at 00:43:21) I love it because it was a hard lesson for me to learn. Another question from the community. How can tech leaders and CTOs be better at getting CEOs to believe in investing in technology?

(Henry at 00:43:39) That's a tough one. So I've had the, I guess, I'll say, the fortune of reporting into the CFO or, you know, or someone else down the chain on the finance side. And I think that's always a challenge. So I think the important thing is make sure that if you are a CTO, you want to be reporting to the CEO. Hopefully, you're lucky enough that you work with a CEO that's visionary.

(Henry at 00:44:09) And so a lot of times, it's understanding how to communicate with the CEO. What are the hot buttons? Right? What are the things that get them excited? So they're not going to want to hear, hey, it's going to take six months and a couple million dollars and we got to hire 20 people.

(Henry at 00:44:22) It's, you know, build me the skateboard that's going to turn into the Tesla, but I want that skateboard to generate revenue. So how do we crawl, walk, and then run? And so I've, part of my understanding and learning is, you know, you might have this big concept in mind building a Tesla, but you might get further if you start with really explaining how you're going to build that skateboard that's going to turn into that Tesla.

(Joel Beasley at 00:44:49) That comes back to the earlier conversation of time to revenue. Like, from idea to revenue has to be relatively short. Exactly. And then you can get people involved.

(Henry at 00:44:59) Or and it may not be revenue. Right? It might be cost savings. So you can't say, well, you know, we're going to put this in place, and a year from now, we're going to start to see ROI. No.

(Henry at 00:45:07) You know, like when we went live with Genesys, we had a four-month payback. We had a 289% ROI measured by an independent research organization. And it was interestingly enough, it wasn't necessarily the advantages of the system or the improvements that we saw in sort of handle time. Although we saw those, it was the reporting. It was the ability to hold our employees accountable and for them to hold each other accountable.

(Henry at 00:45:34) And in some ways back to the RACI analogy, you know, we created this digital scorecard for our agents and they became competitive, almost too competitive with each other. Right? They wanted to be faster. They wanted to be better. They wanted to have higher quality ratings.

(Henry at 00:45:47) And most of the benefit we saw in the deployment of the system wasn't great technology. All that is there. It was the behavioral change in the employees and how that drove performance.

(Joel Beasley at 00:46:00) We want to be number one. Right?

(Henry at 00:46:02) Right. Yeah. Absolutely. Nobody likes to come second. Second place is first loser.

(Henry at 00:46:06) Right?

(Joel Beasley at 00:46:09) You know, you've said like six or seven things, like little isms on this conversation that I haven't heard before ever and I'm loving them. I'm, like, writing them down. Like, this is great.

(Henry at 00:46:19) Hesitation equals devastation. Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:46:21) Yeah. I love that one, knowing where your bread is buttered. These are great. This is fantastic. I love meeting people like you.

(Joel Beasley at 00:46:29) Tips for hiring. Okay. How do you find, attract, retain top talent? How do you get those good special people, man?

(Henry at 00:46:36) Well, so I think I've made, you know, we've all made bad hiring decisions. You learn a lot more about a bad hire than you do from a good hire. For me personally, I am not impressed with certifications and qualifications and, of course, all those things are important. Right? You have to have the chops.

(Henry at 00:46:58) But first and foremost, it's fit from a culture perspective. So knowing the culture of this company, knowing our values is, how can I probe this candidate to really understand if they're going to fit our culture? And each culture is different. Right? So Facebook has their culture.

(Henry at 00:47:18) We have our culture. So are they a culture fit? Do they have the raw intelligence? And again, it's hard to measure intelligence, but you can tell when you speak to somebody. Is this somebody that's bright, that's got it, that's providing you with some interesting discussion, or am I just not getting that intelligence?

(Henry at 00:47:37) I would much rather take an entry level Java developer and teach them how to become a Salesforce architect than go pay $200,000 plus a year for a Salesforce architect that doesn't fit our culture but has all the certifications, as an example.

(Joel Beasley at 00:47:55) Yeah. So you just start finding the right questions to ask for the culture fit. And what's the culture like over there?

(Henry at 00:48:02) Well, obviously high performance. So we are very focused on our core values. So I want to share them with you because I think they're important. It'll get you a sense of understanding our culture. So we talked about nurses.

(Henry at 00:48:15) So one of the values that's probably dearest to me and that I feel strongly about is compassion for everyone. So a lot of companies have one word values. We talk about compassion for everyone, and that's important for us because if our nurses don't show compassion for the employees that they're talking to, that's going to turn into a bad situation. But it's also about somebody who needs to be out because they had somebody in their family pass away or they're having a difficult childbirth, or whatever the case might be. Family needs to come first.

(Henry at 00:48:47) And so it's that compassion, truly believing in the compassion for your employees and for others. We've talked about—you hear a lot of companies, or you hear a lot, "Well, this person really goes the extra two miles." One of our core values is go the extra two miles. And so we're always going above and beyond. We do that for customers.

(Henry at 00:49:07) So one of the things that differentiates us from our competition is we hear it all the time: "Well, they won't do that," or "They're going to charge me extra for that. They're going to charge me extra for that." And of course, we like to make money too, but we really do go the extra two miles and come up with creative solutions, which leads me to another core value, which is driven to find solutions. And you can tell from this COVID screening solution that we created that we were really driven to find a solution for our customers because we're listening to them.

(Henry at 00:49:37) The one that obviously is very important to me is do the right thing. That seems obvious. The golden rule—actually, I heard of somebody taught me or talked to me about the platinum rule. So the golden rule is treat others like you want to be treated. Well, the platinum rule is treat others the way they want to be treated.

(Henry at 00:49:56) Right? So really think about how do people want to be treated and then treat them that way. And then the one that I need to work on the most is working together to work it out. So sometimes I have the tendency of going to a cocoon and just figure it out on my own, like the analogy or the question that you're asking about, "I'm working all hours. I'm crazy."

(Henry at 00:50:16) Sometimes I do have the tendency of going into that cocoon instead of working with the team to figure things out. So that, I mean, that is our culture. But if you don't know those values and live those values daily, you're not going to fit in this company. You're not going to last. And the beauty of it is, we've got these—this isn't just—any one of our executives will walk you through these values.

(Henry at 00:50:44) And when we have issues with employees or when we have issues with each other or on projects, we always tie it back to the values to find the solution.

(Joel Beasley at 00:50:54) I love it. Don't cocoon. That's like, don't cocoon.

(Henry at 00:50:57) Don't cocoon.

(Joel Beasley at 00:50:58) You cocooned up in a dark place. Get out there, get some people involved.

(Henry at 00:51:02) Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:51:02) Have some conversations. So as we start to wrap up here, I'm curious, what are you learning? You're obviously reading leadership books. You're into that stuff. What are you learning right now as a leader?

(Henry at 00:51:16) I'm trying to look for some of my books here. So I really am enjoying—there's a gentleman by the name of Chip Conley, and I'm going to butcher the name of the organization that he runs. But basically, he was hired by Airbnb to be the mentor to their CEO. So he was the CEO of Joie de Vivre, which was a very successful hotel company, sold to one of the big hotel conglomerates. Obviously didn't need the money, but he was hired knowing nothing about technology to be the mentor for an incredibly successful entrepreneur. Airbnb, billion dollar company, obviously.

(Henry at 00:51:55) And it's interesting as I'm getting to—I'm going to be 50 in March. So, and of course now I've dated myself as a CTO. I think that's one of the challenges that sometimes people are looking for. "I want a CTO in their thirties, somebody that can get in here and code and hold all these developers accountable." If your CTO is coding, you may be doing things wrong.

(Henry at 00:52:17) But yeah. So Chip Conley has a few books, and I like it because it's embracing the fact that I'm going to be 50 and that I may not have the technical skills that I had when I was 20 or 30, but I have the experience and the know-how in terms of how to get things done and how to overcome obstacles and why companies do some of the things that they do, right? And why it's important to do some of the things that we do in development and other things. So I think that's really helped me.

(Joel Beasley at 00:52:52) And he has a couple books out. I just looked them up. He's got one out, Wisdom at Work. That looks like his—

(Henry at 00:52:57) Wisdom at Work. Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:52:59) Have you read that one?

(Henry at 00:53:00) Yes. Yes. That was exactly the one I was thinking about.

(Joel Beasley at 00:53:04) Nice. Yeah. He's pretty easy to find online if you Google him. I even spelled his name wrong, but it corrected.

(Henry at 00:53:09) I found you. Let's see. There—I'm reading some stuff about AI. I think there's a book—I don't know if it was Elon or Bill Gates that recommended it—but one of their top books about our last invention and how AI, the good and the bad that can come from AI.

(Henry at 00:53:31) You can probably look it up and—

(Joel Beasley at 00:53:33) Mm-hmm.

(Henry at 00:53:35) We're—I'm pretty excited. I'm pretty excited about where some of the things that we're able to do, working with Genesys. And of course, there's this whole thing about, "Well, is it really AI if it's not learning?" Well, most of the AI today is machine learning. But because we have such a repetitive process, there's some really exciting stuff that we're working on with Genesys.

(Henry at 00:53:56) Some of it, obviously, I can't talk about. But to take all this unstructured data for these repetitive conversations that we have and start mining that for possibilities, what we can do with it—whether we can predict that somebody's being truthful or not, or whether we can provide our constituents down the path with some additional insight based on some of the things that we're able to pick up.

(Joel Beasley at 00:54:21) My producer just messaged us. He said it's James Barrat, Our Final Invention.

(Henry at 00:54:27) Our Final Invention.

(Joel Beasley at 00:54:29) Yeah. That's the book. So you guys are working on some super secret—you're building the future over there. When I asked you about Elon Musk, you just used that for talking about your app thing. But you guys are really doing some cool stuff under the hood over there.

(Henry at 00:54:43) We are.

(Joel Beasley at 00:54:44) I wouldn't expect anything less. This has been a fantastic conversation, Henry. I really appreciate you taking the time to come and talk with me. We made a podcast. How do you feel?

(Henry at 00:54:53) I love it. Thank you so much for the opportunity. Appreciate it.

(Joel Beasley at 00:54:56) Talk soon, buddy.

(Henry at 00:54:57) Take care.

(Joel Beasley at 00:55:00) 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.