Kevin Evans - CTO at ActiveOps

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:00) Hello, my friends. Today we are talking to Kevin, the CTO at ActiveOps, and we discuss how ActiveOps technology allows organizations to increase productivity and employee happiness, how to optimize underperforming teams, and the advantage of being able to double down on your strengths and lean on others for their expertise. 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) Kevin.

(Kevin at 00:00:40) Good afternoon, I think, if I've got the time conversion right.

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:43) Yeah. What time is it over there? Evening?

(Kevin at 00:00:45) Just coming up on 5:00.

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:47) Nice. How'd your day go?

(Kevin at 00:00:49) It's, you know, it's gone. That's a good start. It'll soon be Christmas. It's like all the others at the moment. It's, you know, you used to talk to people and say, "Hi, how are you doing? What have you been up to?" People say, "I've been out. I've done this." We have a complete lockdown still, so nobody leaves. Nobody leaves the house. The bars are shut. The restaurants are shut. The stores are shut unless they sell food. So actually, the kind of "How have you been? What's happening?" conversations are pretty routine for us right now. It's, "Yep, stayed in, didn't leave, haven't left the house for seven months."

(Joel Beasley at 00:01:22) Dude, come hang out in Florida.

(Kevin at 00:01:23) Well, we're not allowed in. So we're allowed to leave the UK, but we're not allowed into the States at the moment.

(Joel Beasley at 00:01:30) Oh, really? So it's completely shut down right now?

(Kevin at 00:01:32) Yeah, absolutely. So I actually spent a lot of time in Florida. I fly planes for a hobby. So I fly out of St. Augustine and out of Sebastian, which is sort of directly across from you guys from the East Coast. And yeah, I can't do any of that. Can't come over there for fun. Can't come for work. Nothing. So looking forward to the borders reopening a bit and being able to travel.

(Joel Beasley at 00:01:53) Do you have a house here in Florida?

(Kevin at 00:01:55) No, no, no. Just an itinerant wanderer. I turn up and rent. There's a flight school out of Sebastian that I know quite well, and they rent a house out. So I rent that and stay for a few weeks at a time and fly up and down Florida and over the Keys and over the Everglades, which is a dismal flight. It sounds really amazing until you fly over and there's nothing but swamp and crocodile.

(Joel Beasley at 00:02:16) Welcome to Florida.

(Kevin at 00:02:17) Exactly. Well, you're thinking if I have to land, do you think I can land on the crocodile? No, no. If I land, I'm food.

(Joel Beasley at 00:02:25) Yeah, every lake that possibly exists, there's alligators. We treat it as there is an alligator in it. That's the default mode. There is an alligator in there. And if there's not, it's kind of a surprise.

(Kevin at 00:02:36) Yeah, yeah. It's kind of weird for us. We don't really have anything. The most dangerous wildlife we have is cars. Nothing is going to chew your leg off or chew an arm off. So it's kind of weird the first time you visit Florida and you're like, "Wow, there are gators on the side of the freeway, the side of the ponds, the sides of the pool, the hotel pool." Wow. I should stop staying at these rat-infested motels.

(Joel Beasley at 00:03:00) Well, they actually stopped painting the pools green. There used to be a trend in the eighties and the nineties where they would paint them dark.

(Kevin at 00:03:09) Oh, good. So they camouflage.

(Joel Beasley at 00:03:11) Yeah. So they camouflage. And what happens is gators get in there and you can't see them in there. And—

(Kevin at 00:03:16) Why would you want to spoil the surprise, right?

(Joel Beasley at 00:03:19) This is the gator podcast now. Well, you can come visit. We got plenty of gators. And when I read that you like to fly planes and that you fly your plane over Florida, I was like, how good is this workforce management business if this guy has a jet that can make it from the UK to Florida just to fly around?

(Kevin at 00:03:36) Well, it is a bucket list thing. I don't have a jet, but it is a bucket list thing to fly from here to the States. Actually, there's a big aviation flying thing that happens up in Oshkosh, Wisconsin every summer.

(Joel Beasley at 00:03:46) Mm-hmm.

(Kevin at 00:03:46) And there are people who fly across. That's like a bucket list thing. So in a small prop aircraft, that's an awful lot of time over an awful lot of nothing. But you have to kind of go up and across Iceland and Reykjavik and into the top of and sort of through down right down through the very cold snowy bits of Canada and then sort of into the country that way. So yeah, that's on the bucket list. But yeah, that's like a three stopovers kind of "hope they've got fuel, otherwise you're camping in the Arctic for a month" situation.

(Joel Beasley at 00:04:17) That's not fun. More polar bears than gators.

(Kevin at 00:04:21) Yeah, exactly. And they blend in pretty well too. Not so much in the green pools, but in the white snow.

(Joel Beasley at 00:04:27) So why are you not building technology for pilot stuff? Is that just your hobby?

(Kevin at 00:04:33) Yeah. So I've had a couple of hobbies that I've turned into jobs. I scuba dive and I turned that into a job for a little while and thought it should be great, you know. They say a man who enjoys his job will never work another day in his life. And actually, that's not true. What happens there is a man who enjoys his job and makes it his job finds he has no hobbies, because suddenly the hobby has to pay the mortgage. So I kind of, I don't know, at some point in the future it'd be nice to do something aviation-y. And there's definitely some groundbreaking stuff happening there with electronic aviation and automatic navigation. A lot of the drone stuff that's happening is really changing the way airspace works. So there's a ton of stuff there that appeals to the techie in me. And there's definitely a techie overlap with pilots and with scuba diving. There seems to be an awful lot of techies who like flying or diving or both. But I sort of made a conscious decision that I fly for fun. I don't want to fly for a living. I don't want to fly jets full of passengers around. I'm quite comfortable just doing it as a hobby. So that's pretty much close enough for that. But the workforce management stuff is almost as exciting. I mean, the view is not quite as good, but—

(Joel Beasley at 00:05:38) I don't even know what workforce management is, but I was excited for you to tell me about it. But before we get into that though, I want to know, you hold a PhD in AI and information security.

(Kevin at 00:05:49) Hold yet. Not hold—working.

(Joel Beasley at 00:05:51) Oh, not hold.

(Kevin at 00:05:51) No, working on. So I'm a number of years in. It turns out the hard thing about getting a PhD is not the PhD at all. It's finding time to do a PhD part-time. And I apologize to all the PhD students out there who did it full-time and found it really difficult. But the motivational challenge around doing something part-time outside of work where you come back and it's complicated—you need to sit down and there's an hour of just thinking time to catch back up on where you were the last time you sat down at it, and trying to squeeze that around a busy job and multiple time zones. And we have an office in Adelaide and an office in Dallas, and so my day is kind of a 26-hour day. Trying to fit study stuff around that is probably the hardest bit. Yeah. That was—I guess I've made a career out of being a generalist. I'm good at lots of stuff. I'm not great at, you know, I'm not terrible at most of it, but I'm good at a range of stuff rather than great at specifics. And I just wanted to be expert in something. So you know what? I just want to be the world's leading authority on one thing, however narrow, however thin a sliver of thing that is. And so that was sort of the original motivation for the PhD. So my research question was whether it's possible to continuously authenticate a person with the cadence and keystroke rhythm, as well as application usage rhythm, that they engage with on the computer. So the idea is if you're working in sort of a secure environment—police, government, whatever—and somebody comes in and they sit down, and every morning they come in and they run a report and they open up the P&L, and they do some stuff on the online banking, and then they type some stuff. And one day they come in and they just use all those applications very differently, and their typing cadence is a little bit off. Maybe that's the time that the supervisor should just wander over and check and see if they're alright. Are they under duress? Are they being leveraged for some kind of nefarious purpose? Or, you know, could be perfectly legit. Could just be that they've received an email from the CFO saying, "Hey, I need some stuff." But it might not be. And if we can predict that in real time and intercede before they do something bad—data loss prevention is great, but actually the biggest risk of any sort of data loss thing is the squishy bit behind the keyboard. If we can identify that the squishy bit behind the keyboard is currently a data loss risk that they might not necessarily flag until after the data loss has happened, we could probably prevent it. And it turns out it pretty much is true. It is possible, so you can do it. The challenge and the AI bit and the complexity comes in, it's pretty easy to artificially poison that same sample set. So if you come in in the morning and run the thing that you know you're going to do fraudulently once a day and then twice a day and then three times a day. So it needs to work out an anti-poisoning algorithm that isn't so strict it stops you doing anything, but equally isn't so lax that it's easy to fake. So that was the PhD theory, at least, anyway. So hopefully maybe not this year with COVID, but hopefully next, to get that finished and Doctor Kevin.

(Joel Beasley at 00:08:42) Doctor Kevin. I love that. I will call you Doctor Kevin too. No last name. I'm just going to call you Doctor Kevin.

(Kevin at 00:08:49) It works for Prince, works for Madonna, works for the Queen. I've, you know—

(Joel Beasley at 00:08:53) There you go. Doctor Queen.

(Kevin at 00:08:57) Doctor Queen. I mean, that's—yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:08:59) There you go. I was at RSA, I think, three years ago. And there were some tools that were similar to what you mentioned. Have you talked to these other companies that are actually selling these technologies?

(Kevin at 00:09:10) Yeah. So there's a few of those. And actually my girlfriend's CTO at her place is relatively new, and he actually worked for a company that did a very similar thing. So there's definitely, particularly the keystroke cadence and the mouse cadence, that's a reasonably well-established bit. The sort of extension of that domain knowledge that I wanted to do, and have hopefully succeeded in doing that'll get me through a PhD viva, is if you can also use application tracking without having to write the application in such a way that it knows it's being tracked, if that makes sense. So kind of like an application insights or Google Analytics type thing that will sit as an independent, application-independent framework in front of the application and kind of learn people's click-through and paths through Windows-based, web forms-based, et cetera, applications and provide that as an additional artificial biometric.

(Joel Beasley at 00:10:00) That's pretty neat.

(Kevin at 00:10:01) I mean, yeah. You never know. Watch this space. If you end up on a desert island somewhere with $100 billion in the bank, you know it worked.

(Joel Beasley at 00:10:08) It worked. It worked. You know, earlier you mentioned that you were a generalist, right?

(Kevin at 00:10:13) Yep.

(Joel Beasley at 00:10:13) And I was wondering, have you ever considered that you've become an expert in an area that is similar, maybe like communication or relationships?

(Kevin at 00:10:26) I'm not sure that I would necessarily profess to expert, but I think a long time ago I had a friend, Jen, and her job title was Specialist Generalist. And actually the notion of a specialist generalist within—I think it was either IBM or Deloitte at the time, forget which one—but their very notion of this specialist generalist role was somebody who could communicate the various aspects of technology, particularly to people outside of IT, and were technical enough to understand them. So that specialist generalist thing was a specialism in its own sense, and it is around that communication and that engagement. And I do self-deprecatingly joke about the fact that we're all techies. We all, given a choice, would sit in a darkened room with patchouli burning and write printer drivers for a living. But every now and again, you have to talk to other humans. There are definitely ends of that spectrum of happiness with the communication side of it and ends of the spectrum. I had an old friend and the humans thing, that was actually a word-for-word quote. He said he learned to write printer drivers and he did that for a job because he didn't want to deal with humans. Not people or other people—humans. Like, the whole species, not interested. And there is definitely that really hardcore dev end of the spectrum and indeed infrastructure and all the other disciplines. And then there's the, I guess, the more fluffy, friendly, approachable, communicative end of the same skill spectrum. And yeah, I would say being a generalist means you have to be able to survive in that end of the line, whatever you want to call it, because if you can't, it just turns out that you're the guy who isn't very good at most of the things. So that would be me.

(Joel Beasley at 00:12:00) Yeah. And it can be frustrating too. I'd say one thing that I think that you've done very well is the self-awareness that you are a generalist. And the reason why I say that is because I've met people before who I think would be better if they realized that they were generalists. And then also for myself personally, it was something that I think I'm a generalist. And it's hard. It's hard for me to accept because my mom is a cheerleader and my dad was an engineer, right? And growing up, I love what my dad did and I wanted to be as bright of an engineer as he is. But he is Mensa-level smart, right? And I have that 50% cheerleader in me. So—

(Kevin at 00:12:43) Yep. It's hard learning. It is hard saying, you know what? Actually, I don't know. I'm not the best at this. I'm not the brightest one in the room. I do bring value, but I don't bring it by knowing the thing better than any other people around this table. And I think all of us who've made any sort of progression in any career really are inherently quite smart people and capable people. So you want to be the smartest and most capable around the room from time to time. And I think you said on one of your other podcasts, everyone wants it to be their project. Everyone wants to own it, and they want to be the flag bearer. And actually, we can't all be that. And it is tough getting to that point of being able to say, actually, it's not a weakness to say I don't know this as well as someone else does. I have experts who know this inside out and back to front, and I am not one of them. And I had another friend, a chap called Doug from Microsoft, and he wrote some of the core MS-DOS TCP/IP stack, and it's still there now, and you know, the old DOS shells kicking around. He said his realization early on was that he was a great developer, but he was a great developer surrounded by amazing, world-class developers. And he could either be the bottom of that pond or he could move to a slightly different one and then become a more general, sort of skilled branch. So yeah, it's definitely been challenging, I would say, to sort of come up with that. You don't want to not know. And in particular in tech where everyone expects us to know everything, you know, from Auntie Mabel who wants us to fix her printer to the guy that you bump into at a networking event.

(Kevin at 00:14:14) He says, oh, you know, this is what I do, and everybody's expected to know all of the names of all of the things, of all of the technologies, of all of these startups that have existed for eleven minutes and the JavaScript framework that they invented in their second, third, and ninth minutes. And we're all supposed to know all of them. It's tough saying, actually, I don't know.

(Joel Beasley at 00:14:32) Well, you're supposed to have, yeah, twenty-five years of experience in something that's been out for five. Yeah.

(Kevin at 00:14:38) Yeah. I traded Visual Studio for Excel and Outlook a while ago, so it's a little easier now to say, sorry, I'd get it. I'm up to date, but I'm not expert. And I think the sort of generalist approach has definitely helped with that because it still feels like I'm good at something.

(Joel Beasley at 00:14:53) I think knowing yourself and doubling down on who you are and what your strengths are is something that's actually pretty rare. And the reason why I like to point it out is because I see people get really far, and it's not necessarily because they're the best at one thing, like one popular technology or one specific concept you can go learn. They're the best at being themselves because they know who they are and they play to that. And they grow and explore in those areas. And then they get known for that and they build relationships.

(Joel Beasley at 00:15:23) And then relationships are everything because the most interesting thing I have found in the past couple years doing this podcast with relationships would be the trust factor. The fact that, like, I have a history of building software teams, so I know the five or six people that I would call if I need something done right the first time and we could just run with it. And building up that took two decades, you know. And so trust was something that I didn't necessarily see. The trust in relationships where you could pick someone up and they're on the board of a company, and they need someone to help turn around the specific thing. And they can call you and you might be able to help or direct them to the one person who you know would come through. And then that helps your reputation. It's just, it's fascinating. It's like we're a bunch of different, like, networked computer systems working together.

(Kevin at 00:16:14) Well, and you're absolutely right. And it's, yeah, I think it's funny because that cross-disciplinary thing of the CFO reaching out to CTO to say I have a problem and can you help me? There is no admission of lack of knowledge there. It's actually, I'm the CFO and I'm not supposed to know your world. But actually, building up that network of people where somebody says, can you help, and being able to say, well, I could, but actually I know a guy who'd be better, or I know a lady who just blows us out of the water. You know, it's that comfort to be able to say, actually, the value I bring is being able to put the right person in the right place. And sometimes that right person isn't me.

(Joel Beasley at 00:16:48) Well, often it's not.

(Kevin at 00:16:49) Yeah. Most of the time. Certainly, my boss would argue.

(Joel Beasley at 00:16:55) You're fun. You're fun. How did you even meet the team there? It's that ActiveOps is the name. Am I saying that correctly?

(Kevin at 00:17:02) It is, and you are. So actually, I was looking at potentially buying some of the software from them in a previous role. So, you mentioned earlier sort of the workforce management and what even is that. So we're one of those companies, and again, there's a lot of those out there, but one of those companies where until you're the person buying that service in your business, you don't necessarily even know that the problem exists, let alone that a solution's out there for it. And I often say, you know, the hardest challenge that we have for marketing is if you know what question to ask, it's easy to Google for it. And then it's easy to be in the top five or the top three or the top one for a Google result. If people don't know what question to ask because they can't frame the problem, that's a much harder process to educate. You have to try and persuade them somehow to look for the right thing to find us.

(Kevin at 00:17:45) But I had a challenge around managing workload and people and deadlines would come in. And as the CIO in my last role, some of the sort of internal production stuff sat with me. So, actually, I'd been looking for a solution to try and do that, and I happened upon ActiveOps and sort of read through the stuff and thought, this is quite interesting, and this sounds like it has legs, and there's an untapped market for this. Oh, and they're looking for a CTO. So I was kind of a convenient break in the previous role where I'd kind of done what I wanted to do, and we were talking about what's the next agenda, and is that agenda a me agenda, or is that someone else's agenda? Do I help to transition and bring someone else in? So I gave the guys at ActiveOps a call. It was about 7 p.m. UK time. I got an email back about 8:30 p.m. UK time saying, can you interview at 6 a.m.? And pretty much went from there. So, yeah, I haven't really looked back.

(Joel Beasley at 00:18:36) How do you help me frame this problem? I guess, I'm going to ask you a couple questions. So the first one I have as you were talking was, at what stage of a company does this problem emerge?

(Kevin at 00:18:48) So we would, well, I guess we would say that we help to solve problems at an organizational level that the company is probably already solving well at a team level. So if you're a team of five or six people and you report into a team leader or a boss, any description, the chances are that that team leader is going to know each of the people in the team well enough to say, hey, Joel's going to be on paternal leave next week, and we're going to have somebody else come in. Can somebody cover a couple of hours? Sure. And at the sort of five or six people level, that works pretty well. So it's easy to plan for capacity. It's easy to plan for coverage, and you also get a feel for where the skills and the talent within the team are, given different types of challenges. So if I come out to, for example, a bank's mortgage payments team, within those small bubbles of five, six, seven people with a team leader, then I'll know who's best at residential mortgages, who's best at commercial mortgages, who's best at dealing with the problem ones, the underwriting referrals, and so on.

(Kevin at 00:19:47) And so we're good as people at dealing with that, and it's, I say it's just, and I want to downplay it at all, it's a human management trait that good managers are good at, is giving the right people the right work and managing capacity without burning people out. Scale it up from five people to 10,000 people and that really all goes right out the window. So if you're a big bank, for example, or a big insurance company or a big health care provider, you've probably got at any given point, we think about 15 to 20% of your workforce is probably comparatively idle. And I have to be slightly careful saying that because nobody wants to admit that their team is not working hard, but there isn't enough work for the team to do. And Parkinson's law states that the work will expand to fit the available volume of time. So they might look busy, but actually they're not being as productive as they would if there were more work coming in. At the same time as that, you've probably got 20% of your team is being bolstered by temps and by paying overtime. So you're spending a ton of money to get a whole bunch of people who are utterly miserable, tearing their hair out, trying to keep up with a workload that is just unsustainable. And that gift is in your gift to fix. You've got capacity in the organization that can do it. But the last thing you want to do, and, you know, again, the old software adage of adding software developers to a late software project makes it later, the same thing happens across most industries. If you're already stretched and you're already working overtime and you've got people pulling long shifts and doubles and paying them extra time and bringing in temp, the last thing they want is a bunch of people thrown into that mix that don't know what they're doing. So our niche, niche for the Americans listening, our niche is bringing in. I was told by one of my staff, don't use your weird English words, use American.

(Joel Beasley at 00:21:24) Use them all. It's going to sell the episode.

(Kevin at 00:21:27) So our niche is, it is moving the work to the people and the people to the work and helping managers to do that at an organizational scale in time so that you can plan at an organizational capacity level and typically say 15 to 20% of your operations cost reduced. But the nice thing about ActiveOps is we're a, I like to call it, we're a carrot company or a stick company. So we're not interested in coming around beating people and saying you need to work harder, you need to work harder, I need more from you. We're all about actually, if we give you these often very repetitive pieces of work to do, if we give you a variety of often very repetitive pieces of work, that's better than just one repetitive thing that you do all the time. If we don't ask you to suddenly abandon your Thursday evening bridge club, again, very, very British, poker club for the Americans. If we don't get you to just abandon that at the last minute, you get your life kind of back and it becomes plannable and it becomes controllable. And these are often quite junior workers. It's not blue collar like factory work, but it's transactional repetitive call center-y type environments who are junior enough that they often don't have control over their own hours. They don't get to set their own working patterns and practices.

(Kevin at 00:22:37) So we sort of pride ourselves on being, it's about making it a better place to work and at the same time, saving the employer money without cutting jobs. We're not a job cutting business. We're about, actually, you're already spending enough money in all likelihood to do the things you want to do. And if we can give you that latent capacity back, you can either do more with the same spend. You can reinvest that money into training and onboarding, into transformation efforts, transformation projects, and so on. So that's sort of the niche that we sit in, and then the software that we sell enables a variety of things to do that from kind of desktop gathering agents that work out where you're spending time. So we can target RPA efforts, or you can target RPA efforts through business process modeling through to capacity planning and long-term planning for do I need to hire more people, or do I need to invest in training? Those two are both at the short when I'm stuck in that world, they both have the same solution, which is I just don't have enough hours. My people are either not working efficiently enough because they're not well trained, or I just don't have enough people.

(Kevin at 00:23:37) But the solutions are really different. One is a temporary shortage that I need to train for, and one is a long-term shortage I need to hire for. And the worst case is that you get that wrong and you hire and then discover that once everyone's competent, you need to lay people off.

(Joel Beasley at 00:23:50) Did you say, and I'm sorry, I'm going to latch on to this weird thing. Did you say that you have software that can sit on like the client and identify opportunities for RPA, for automation?

(Kevin at 00:24:06) Yeah. So we, one of our products, WorkIQ, it sits on the desktop. We're looking at where are you spending your time. So we can tell you that, for example, your mortgage applications team spend 40% of their time in mortgage processing applications, but they might spend 35% of their time in credit referencing applications. So if you can automate the process of jumping out of one application into another application, do the credit search, get the credit search results, come back, switch in. If you can automate that, a couple of things happen. One, you get some savings there in terms of the time taken. Two, you get a little bit more control over the process. There's less likelihood of human error where people doing copy and paste between applications, for example. But also in terms of the way we work with RPA projects within the customer, knowing that that 35% of the time is spent on something that's actually inherently very automatable. I've already done the work to get the customer record up. Now I have to open another window and rekey it all. That's prime RPA candidate time. So we can work with an RPA project. We're not an RPA vendor, but we work, play nicely with the Blue Prisms and the UiPaths to identify candidates for these are the sweet spots.

(Kevin at 00:25:10) If you can automate something that takes ten minutes once a month, who cares? You know, your $90,000 bot implementation is going to save you $1.50 a month. Well done, you. But if you can, if you can identify something that takes thirty-five seconds five times every hour for 10,000 people, that's a really big saving. That's a good thing to go at. So that's where you want to be investing your time.

(Joel Beasley at 00:25:32) What type of questions, ultimately, after they frame the problem and they start typing things into Google, right? What type of questions are leading people to you?

(Kevin at 00:25:42) That's probably more a marketing question, but...

(Joel Beasley at 00:25:46) Generalist. Come on.

(Kevin at 00:25:48) Yeah. I know. Well, I'm racking my brains. I'm trying to not get to marketing because a techie podcast, and I don't like lying to techies. We focus on banks, insurance companies, big regulated industries. So HIPAA compliant industries, financial services industries. Most of our leads actually, it's preferred to say, come from word of mouth historically. So we would have a senior leader from one bank would go to another or a senior leader from an insurance payer would go to another. The bit that we're seeing a tremendous amount of traction on at the moment is more employee welfare and employee well-being. So that same gathering information that tells you that we can say RPA this piece of your job, it also tells us that, actually, you're working from five in the morning till ten at night because you might take two or three hours off in the middle of the day to go look after the kids, but that's an unsustainable workload. And we should be, as an employer, or your employer should be, and we can help them do that. We should be stepping in to say, actually, this is not sustainable. We need, we want to give you the flexibility, but we don't want you working 5 a.m. till 10 p.m. every day to try and cover a workload that actually we're obviously just throwing too much at you for. So employee performance, employee well, employee performance monitoring, employee well-being metrics and monitoring that for us is a really big kind of COVID-driven shift as everyone's started to, you know, shift to working from home.

(Kevin at 00:27:04) The old ways of just looking out across the floor to see who's in don't work anymore. It used to be that you'd turn up in the office, and there was always, you know, the lady in the corner that gets there at six in the morning and turns the lights on. And you could see that she was always there, and now you can't see that she's always there. So that's sort of driving a lot of stuff towards us. But we very specifically focus on that enterprise market because in order to be able to see all of that stuff on the desktop, we can also see the crown jewels. So it's an, we're a SaaS vendor and we're an on-prem vendor, and that product is on-prem for the simple reason that if we can see your screen to see you doing a credit check, we could also or we can also see who you're credit checking, so we don't want anything to do with that data. It stays inside the firewall. It's your data. It's sovereign to you. And we certainly don't want it pushing up into, you know, our cloud.

(Joel Beasley at 00:27:52) I was having this conversation with, her name's Bina. She was the director of, like, AI Institute for Deloitte.

(Kevin at 00:28:00) Yeah. For Deloitte. Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:28:01) Yeah. And we're talking about AI ethics. And she gave this example of a jet engine. Like, if you're trying to predict failure on a jet engine components, what sort of AI ethics could you imagine happened. And I couldn't, I couldn't guess, but she told me something along the lines of, like, the pilots and them using the engines, like, going too fast or their acceleration and how they're driving the jet.

(Joel Beasley at 00:28:26) And should that data, when they go and they find that, that that actually has an impact on the engine usage, which can then help predict the failure of the engine, does that information roll up to, and should that be a part of a pilot's review process? And that creates this ethical question. And for me, I was blown away because I didn't see that perspective at all, right?

(Joel Beasley at 00:28:49) In all fairness, I didn't run the test and do the data to come up with it. If I had, I would have been like, should we? I would have scratched my head. But you mentioned, you know, you can see how they're working and maybe if they're getting burnt out.

(Joel Beasley at 00:29:03) But have you ever had to consider, have you ever found anything so interesting that you've had to consult your ethics on it?

(Kevin at 00:29:14) We've been, again, I think it's probably worth just caveating all of this with we very much approach from the outset of we're a carrot, not a stick company. You can use it as a stick. I mean, you know, I'd be lying if I said you couldn't take the 15% saving that we found and say, actually, I could just fire 15% of the people and you could. Touch wood, most of our clients don't.

(Kevin at 00:29:34) They realize that there's more value in finding those people that have got capacity and using it to train and retain rather than hire and fire and replace later on with the extra cost that brings with it. But we very much go into this from the outset of you should be using this data for good. You know, the source data is there. You can do with it as you wish. But we actually have a whole methodology that we teach about how to use it to be a nice employer and to work with your employees rather than, you know, that sort of Hawthorne effect of beating someone with a stick.

(Kevin at 00:30:02) But can we see some of that stuff? Yeah, absolutely. So I mean, if you look at it on an individual level, can we see that, you know, Jake spent four hours on Facebook yesterday? Yes.

(Kevin at 00:30:12) We absolutely can. The interesting thing about that is do we care, or do you care as an employer? And the answer to that, we would say is, well, that really depends. If you gave Jake four hours of work yesterday and Jake did that in four hours and you gave him nothing else, then what's the harm in him spending the rest of the day on Facebook? If there was no other work to do, man, you've lost nothing.

(Kevin at 00:30:31) If you gave him eight hours of work and he did it in four, well, that's interesting. So how did he do that? Is he doing it better than someone else? In which case, can I capture that learning and can I change the process and get everyone else to do it that quickly? That would be cool.

(Kevin at 00:30:43) Or did he do a terrible job and he just clicked the button a hundred times a minute and thought, let's get the work out the way, I'm back on Facebook, in which case it's an interview without coffee. So there are definitely data stories that you can draw from that. But what I mean when I say that we're a carrot company is our message would be actually the fact that somebody is on Facebook is not necessarily indicative of a problem with that person. It could be indicative of high performance, in which case they're bored and you should try and challenge them more. It could be indicative of low performance and a quality issue, in which case that is a problem with that person.

(Kevin at 00:31:14) Or it could just be that actually you aren't feeding enough work into that team and they are running out of work and have the capacity to absorb more. So give them more to do. So we would strongly encourage people down that route. But we've definitely seen, I guess, not ethical challenges so much. But we saw, for example, with one customer that the time between, for the techie to some extent that's listening to this, I guess, except possibly our own marketing team.

(Kevin at 00:31:38) The Windows event log that we're looking at and watching things kind of minimize and pop up and focus and blur and so on. The time between a minimize event on one application and a focus event on the next field of another is dead time. So if I minimize Outlook to switch to Excel, the time it takes Outlook to disappear off my screen, Excel to focus, draw, focus to cell, that's dead time. So we've seen some interesting stats come out. One particular customer, 11% of their entire workforce's day was spent doing this application switching because their infrastructure was so creaky and old that it takes forever to minimize a modern application, which pages a lot and then maximize another one, which pages a lot again, and then focus on screen and that, you know, lousy old graphics card from 2004 struggles to draw a modern UI.

(Kevin at 00:32:27) So 11% of 8,000 users in that particular instance, that's an awful lot of man hours when you add that up to a cost. And when you use that to make a compelling argument that actually we're long overdue an infrastructure refresh, and it's not just that we'd like new kit, and it's not just that we would like to run some sort of modern operating system because we're a bank. Wouldn't that be nice? But it's not just that. It's actually this is costing us money.

(Kevin at 00:32:52) Sorry, that's a bit of a soapboxy one of mine there because we get hauled across the coals because we supply banks. We have to answer all these security questions. And then the last bit is always and our normal browser is IE 10. What?

(Kevin at 00:33:02) Yeah. So but yes, we do see, you know, some of those really interesting stories come out where it's actually, we can justify an infrastructure refresh or we can justify that actually these people who perhaps didn't appear to be working very hard when we look at that objectively, it's because there just wasn't any work. Give them more work. They're bored. You know, they're browsing Internet because they're bored, not because they're lazy.

(Kevin at 00:33:23) So we certainly do have that. There are, I guess, some of the more interesting ethical challenges that we get into are we can see from performance, for example, that your performance increases and people's performance will. You give them more to do, and they will stretch to adapt to the increased demand. So their performance will go up, and eventually, their performance plateaus. And if the workload continues to go up, then at some point, they're gonna find this stressful enough that they're gonna do something about it, whether it's just kind of reduce their output and reduce their efforts, or they're gonna need an intervention because they're gonna be off sick or whatever.

(Kevin at 00:33:55) So we can see some of that data and develop some of those patterns. And on an individual basis, it's kind of good because we can drive interventions and say this person's performance has peaked. You cannot just keep throwing more work at them. There is a finite capacity that each person could do when you've reached it here. I guess the counterargument to that from an ethical point of view is if you started comparing that and, again, we don't do it, but the raw data is available.

(Kevin at 00:34:19) If you started doing that across the team, then you could probably draw parallels around who is able to absorb peaks and troughs better. And actually, in the event of some layoff type situation, then maybe I wanna keep the people who absorb better. So there are definitely, you know, there are definitely ways you could use that, which would cross into not quite what we intended.

(Joel Beasley at 00:34:40) That's fascinating. There's a lot of PE firms who would buy that.

(Kevin at 00:34:43) Yeah, yeah. We've got an investor who is one.

(Joel Beasley at 00:34:48) There you go. That sounds like a mega tool for M&A, you know. Seriously, that sounds like a huge business line.

(Kevin at 00:34:57) Yeah, yeah. All of those environments where you've got this very short, very intense kind of, I just, you know, I don't know if you saw the news about the Goldman Sachs junior investors who are working ninety-five hour weeks and so on in the news this week in the UK. And, you know, the people saying I can't keep doing ninety-five hours. And said, well, we're really busy. And we'll, yeah.

(Kevin at 00:35:17) But I still can't keep doing ninety-five hours a week. It's just not sustainable. I can do it for one week. I could probably do it for two, maybe even three. But by the time you talk about six months, nah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:35:26) I saw the headline on LinkedIn that said Goldman Sachs bankers burning out. I didn't even need to read the article. I've talked to these types of people before. I know them, right?

(Joel Beasley at 00:35:35) They have this big moment and they quit and they go. And we have one of them in our Elevate community. So, which I saw your thing came through today.

(Kevin at 00:35:47) Yeah. I've seen that.

(Joel Beasley at 00:35:48) Yeah. So I'm gonna give a good recommendation to the team, be like, this guy is awesome. But, yeah.

(Kevin at 00:35:53) We should

(Joel Beasley at 00:35:53) definitely let him in. Yeah, I've heard that story a number of times from some really bright people, especially in technology. They said that they were working on Wall Street, you know, building these companies or doing a number of different investment style tasks. And it was just chaotic at the rate that they move.

(Joel Beasley at 00:36:12) They burn out so fast and then they just wanted something that was more manageable, so they could have some quality of life.

(Kevin at 00:36:19) Yeah. And it's funny how many, you know, successful people in the tech industry have not necessarily, we talk about burnout as though it's like some finite thing where people kind of switch off. But actually, there's a bunch of people I know that have reached the point where they just actually, you know what? I'm kind of, you know, I've made just about enough money. I don't wanna retire.

(Kevin at 00:36:38) I don't wanna do nothing, but I don't wanna do this anymore. I don't wanna do the stretching thing. And again, you know, back to that carrot thing for us, it's, you know, that we see it in tech because we're in that industry, and it's very aggressive in the places where it does exist in tech. And, you know, we've all been through it. But it happens in every role, you know, whether you're in a mortgage processing team and you're doing a thousand mortgage payments a day and you can only possibly do 800 without that stretching into your evenings, and suddenly you realize that for six months you haven't seen your own kids despite, you know, working from home right now.

(Kevin at 00:37:08) It's that that process happens in every job. And if we can help with one or two of those to stop that happening, then, you know, that's a win for us. But we're also, as a business, we try really, really, really hard to make sure that our own people are putting in sustainable efforts and sustainable hours, which given they spread all around the world is an interesting challenge.

(Joel Beasley at 00:37:28) So I think people that are better at communication demand a premium as far as being a team member. Because as an entrepreneur, I found one of the most valuable things is if I can find someone who's a high performer, who knows when they're overloaded, who can say, because a lot of people are pleasers, right? They want to figure out a way to come through. They wanna be able to say yes and do it.

(Joel Beasley at 00:37:52) But then, they'll drop balls and things like that. So to have somebody who can say, hey, and I learned this early on when I had clients for software development projects because they would have all these ideas and I would constantly have to go back and communicate to them and show them a list of everything they've asked and prices next to each list and then let them prioritize it, right? Like the managing up, I think that's what it would be, how it would appear in a company.

(Kevin at 00:38:17) I think that's a really difficult thing to do in any role. But again, I think tech has an I could describe it as an unhealthy bravado, and I think there is. There's this unhealthy kind of machismo around, you know, we can do this. We can do this. We can do this, another hundred hours, and, you know, we can shower at the hotel next door to the office and come right back.

(Kevin at 00:38:38) And it's fun and it's a buzz and, you know, I did it in my first project that I cut my teeth on was bringing in the euro and doing the year 2000 stuff at the same time. And, you know, there was a deadline, right? You know, the Deutsche mark, I was working for a German bank at the time. The Deutsche mark had to go away.

(Kevin at 00:38:52) So there was a deadline and we pulled those hours, but it's not something that I would wanna go back to now. And I'm not, you know, I'm not so old I'm walking with a frame, but I genuinely I couldn't do that anymore. And I do think there is that image within tech that sometime that it's not okay to say, actually, I cannot do all of the things you're asking me to. My bucket is full.

(Kevin at 00:39:13) You have to take something out, and you're absolutely right. That communication ability to say that in a not confrontational way so it doesn't come across as petulant. It's rare and incredibly so in most jobs, but more so, I think, in tech because we do learn, we do sort of lean towards that. Yeah. There's a big autistic community, for example, in tech where actually communication is even harder than normal.

(Kevin at 00:39:36) And because of that natural bent to that more autistic end of the spectrum, the communication is that much more rare and that much more challenging. And it's that confidence thing again of saying I can't do this. And it's not necessarily because of ability. Sometimes it's capacity and that's absolutely your that's your boss's fault. That's your boss's problem.

(Kevin at 00:39:53) Push it up the chain. But learning to have the confidence, you know, I think comes too late in our sort of professional education.

(Joel Beasley at 00:40:01) Well, it's also they need, we're monkey see monkey do people, right? We need to see someone actually get, let us know that's an option because what happens, and I've thought about this a lot. What happens is I get overloaded. And the realization of me being overloaded is an emotional response.

(Kevin at 00:40:21) Mhmm.

(Joel Beasley at 00:40:21) And so, what I've learned to do is to separate the conversation from the moment of realization. So I realize and I say, okay. This is not the time to talk about this. Yep. With the time to what I need to do right now is to get myself back to baseline, you know.

(Kevin at 00:40:41) Yep.

(Joel Beasley at 00:40:41) Do some things that make me happy, figure out how to get into a good place. Then, once I'm in that good place, figure out how to make a change in the future to the system, so that I don't run into this again. And then, plan when I'm going to give that time. When I'm going to have that time to have that discussion. And that process of disconnecting the two.

(Joel Beasley at 00:41:02) Because before, there was a time, you know, I'm never shy to admit that I was not a great person at one point, right? There was a time when I would just

(Kevin at 00:41:09) be, either was I. March 22nd, for example. Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:41:15) You know, you would just, you would, the emotional response would give you the confidence to do it. That's the problem. It gives you that jolt to do it.

(Kevin at 00:41:25) And you're tired. And again, I think, you know, it's as, you know, Goldman's an example that's outside the tech space. So it's by far not just us, but as techies, you know, we do stretch and we enjoy it. You know, most of the techies that are the same culprits for working all these hours are the same people who develop for a hobby as well as a job. And, you know, we play around with computers in an evening or we'll read a, you know, an article or listen to a podcast or whatever.

(Kevin at 00:41:50) So the natural tendency is to just absorb more because it feels like it's okay because it's stuff that you kind of enjoy until eventually you're almost at that breaking point. And then it's I can't cope anymore. And that is that emotional trigger that it's an emotional stop rather than a logical, you know, sort of an intellectual point of saying, oh, this is going to be a problem. It's I'm done. I'm broken.

(Kevin at 00:42:13) And you're absolutely right. It's really important to step out of that and, yeah, not react inappropriately, which isn't to say you can't, you know, again, hopefully, you got a good enough relationship with your boss, your manager, your director, your VP, whatever. But, you know, you can go and vent to them a little bit, but there's a difference in venting to them and venting at them.

(Joel Beasley at 00:42:33) Yeah, that's true. Yeah. I was gonna ask what you do to sort of get your mind off it, and then I instantly went to flying planes.

(Kevin at 00:42:39) And I was like, I hope he's not

(Joel Beasley at 00:42:40) getting in that plane angry.

(Kevin at 00:42:41) No. No. No. No. No.

(Kevin at 00:42:43) So I fly planes and I shoot rifles. Both of those are not great for when you're angry. Now I would say over the last couple of years, I have definitely learned a few tricks around segmenting my own time. So I do put time in the diary, but it's just blocked out in the diary and it says do not disturb. And, you know, if people really desperately need to book something, then they can.

(Kevin at 00:43:04) They generally don't because they can see that I'm busy doing something, and actually they're busy doing something might just be cooking. It's, you know, I'll just take a couple of hours and I'll go and make a meal that I'm gonna reheat later. And I'm at the cooker and I'm switched off. So cooking for me is a good switch off thing. I'm thinking about it.

(Kevin at 00:43:19) It doesn't mean I don't get emotionally invested in the cooking and occasionally throw a perfectly good meal in the bin just because I screwed something up in a very small way that no one would ever notice. But, you know, it's I know. But yeah, the cooking for me is a good switch off thing, but there's a couple of those. I think the key thing is to just block out time. And actually, I've been talking to my management team recently about you just need to put something in the diary because if you let other people fill it for you, they're only taking an hour of your week. They don't realize that it's the only hour of the week that you had spare. I think that's been probably the biggest thing for me is just the me time matters. When I, you know, I sound too Southern California when I say that, but it is. You do need time that's just for you.

(Joel Beasley at 00:44:01) Yeah. That white space. I know that feeling. When you have that white space chunk that, like, no one ever really schedules in and you're looking forward to it and then someone schedules on it, you're like, what are you doing? Yeah.

(Kevin at 00:44:11) Damn you.

(Joel Beasley at 00:44:12) So I've just learned to just put a recurring block on the calendar and just say, you know, nope.

(Kevin at 00:44:18) Yeah. Outlook's focus time is amazing. It says, hey, it doesn't seem like you have enough time. Would you like to book some focus time? And you say yes. And suddenly, it books you, like, nine hours a day of just leave me alone every day for, like, the next twenty three months. It's amazing. Suddenly, nobody can get any diary at all and your life gets way simpler. It's not quite that much, but it's quite aggressive at reserving time for you, actually. And it's been really good because, actually, I turned it on and kind of thought I'll try it for a week. And people still message saying, hey, I can see you've got focus time. Can I get a slot? It's important. But they ask now if they can get that slot rather than just filling up a gap. So—

(Joel Beasley at 00:44:55) And that means something. Yeah. It's a different situation when that happens because it's giving you the choice. Yep. You can determine how bad you need it that day.

(Kevin at 00:45:04) Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. And how much do you like the person that's asking?

(Joel Beasley at 00:45:08) If it's marketing, you'd be like, I've seen you guys on Facebook a lot. And they're like, that's our job. Alright.

(Kevin at 00:45:15) That does come up. Like, what about marketing? Like, you know, they're on social media for a living. Well, that's fine. You can tag that as work.

(Joel Beasley at 00:45:22) Yeah. What is Active Operations Management Method?

(Kevin at 00:45:29) So that's the carrot in a nutshell. And Neil and Richard, our two co-founders, would shudder to hear me describe it at that. But Active Operations Management is the method that goes with the tools. So historically, ActiveOps actually was a consulting company. Neil and Richard came from a consulting background, and they came up with this method, which was about managing—you know, manage differently, manage better, whatever you wanna call it. But it was about enabling people to do this kind of load sharing, load balancing, planning as an organization, and all of the things that we take for granted. As a techie, it's very similar to kind of agile scrum that we would see. You have daily stand ups and you have loading meetings and you have planning and you have retrospectives. So we have different names for those artifacts, and they work slightly differently because they're in operations environments. But it's very much about getting some of that rigor of giving people control, making them plan, holding them account to a plan, understanding that when plans vary or when things diverge from plan, there are probably reasons. So let me understand what those were, take those into account for learnings for the next ones, and sort of move on.

(Kevin at 00:46:28) So that was really where the company started. And like all good consultancy companies, the consultancy sometimes came with a spreadsheet. And the spreadsheet became an application, which became a cloud-based SaaS thing, which became a modern PaaS, Azure-based SaaS platform now. So the AOM, the Active Ops Management bit, is about enabling managers who often are given no training. And if you think about dev, you know, we went through the same process. It used to be that everyone did this big waterfall process, and we had PRINCE2 came along. And then we gradually transitioned to that's the exception, not the norm, and Scrum Masters in a team—it's an understood generalized language, and people move from role to role, and you get somebody who comes in as a Scrum Master, and you know what they can do from the previous role. And we've actually sort of been lucky enough to see that happen with AOM too. So if you go to, for example, Australia and you wanna get a job at—if I'm allowed to name the customers, so I won't—but if you wanna get a job at a large Australian bank, there are four of them and three of them use us. So if you wanna work in those three, actually, you'd be expected to come in if you're going in as an experienced hire team leader. You'd be expected to go in there with an Active Ops credential showing similar to a Scrum Master that you would know how to run it, and you'll see that appear on job descriptions and job adverts. So it's sort of, I guess, Scrum for ops people.

(Joel Beasley at 00:47:47) That's pretty neat. That's cool that you guys have branded it that way, where you've actually become something that appears in resumes, job descriptions.

(Kevin at 00:47:56) We just have to work out and monetize that now. It's like CompuServe and GIFs. Go around and start randomly suing people for using the word.

(Joel Beasley at 00:48:06) That's not the official business model. No.

(Kevin at 00:48:09) I should clarify that I have not had sign off from legal for that.

(Joel Beasley at 00:48:15) When they hear this, they're gonna be like, we're going to IPO soon. We're gonna edit that out.

(Kevin at 00:48:19) Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:48:21) Are you guys really gonna IPO soon? Is that something that's happening?

(Kevin at 00:48:24) Well, so I don't know what I'm allowed to say to that. So the public announcement from the stock exchange went out a week or so ago. So the intention is yes. I can't say much more, obviously, because of the rules going down that—

(Joel Beasley at 00:48:38) Yeah. Yeah.

(Kevin at 00:48:39) But yeah. So we are working on it right now. And assuming that all goes to plan, our potential IPO will be completed real soon now in software terms.

(Joel Beasley at 00:48:47) All according to the press release, the official press release.

(Kevin at 00:48:51) Absolutely. Yeah. And the funny thing is we're allowed to talk about this much more freely outside of the States. The US investment legislation is so much stricter that actually we've been able to keep our UK and Australia and South Africa and India and Ireland and so on—we've got employees in all those places—we're able to talk to them about what's happening and time scales. In the US, we're like, yeah, you can Google it. You can Google it. So it's a little odd, but yeah, we're excited about that as a next stage in the process.

(Joel Beasley at 00:49:21) Well, can we talk about what you feel like the long-term vision for ActiveOps is?

(Kevin at 00:49:27) Sure. So I guess we've transitioned over the last three years. Well, three to five years, probably. We've transitioned over that sort of hump of we were originally a consultancy company that had some software, and now we're a software company that does some consultancy. And the method is still really strong in there. So we don't wanna lose any of that. But that's seen a real fundamental shift in the way that we operate and, frankly, it's still going on. I'm sure everybody listening to this is sitting there thinking, wow, if it was that simple, you know, we'd have to do it at the company. It certainly was not that simple. And we've still got people for whom that's a really significant shift. You know, they wanted to be consultants and they enjoyed it. And, actually, we're saying, well, that's now the sideline, not the mainline and vice versa. So that's been really the driver for the last three to five years. We've replatformed the products. So Work, our previous core product, has become ControlIQ, and it's a modern Azure-native platform-as-a-service application that does all the cool stuff that you can do with the cloud that you couldn't before. So we can scale and we can move things dynamically, geographically. We can traffic manage to get you to a point of presence that's still local and still complies with all the relevant data protection legislation in your area. So that's sort of the up to now bit.

(Kevin at 00:50:27) A lot of that really has been done with the intention of enabling sort of the next bit. And everyone talks about AI as being the inevitable sort of drive behind products, but there's a couple of big shifts that we see coming. One of those is AI, and by AI, what we're talking about specifically is the ability to take, for example, that data about where's a good RPA tool. Actually, if I can take that data automatically and I can produce and sort that data automatically and predict the outcomes in a kind of digital twinning type model, and say, if we change this, what would happen? So embedding some of that digital twinning operations change prediction modeling in there with AI. The second is planning. So people are really good at planning for events that they know are coming. And in many cases, in the industries that we service, the historic data isn't a good predictor of that necessarily. So for example, you've bought a company or there's a presidential proclamation or a budget announcement in the UK, and people suddenly wanna do more things. So for example, here we get tax relief on pension contributions, 401(k)s for the Americans in the audience. So you put money into your 401(k). You'll have paid income tax on that at source, but what you've paid on the income, you get back. So effectively you're not taxed on your pension contributions or your 401(k) contribution. They've just announced that they're starting a whole independent assessment through the government as to whether or not that should continue or whether it should be capped and whether or not they should launch it. So suddenly you read that in the news, and there's a whole ton of investment suddenly into pensions because people wanna put the money in while the tax relief still exists. So those things are good at people-based planning. You know, they know that kind of stuff's coming, and they read the newspaper, and they go, oh, we're gonna be busy. Whereas if you did some sort of predictive model based off historical trends, there is nothing special about the March 23rd for pensions data. So there is definitely a human knowledge that we don't wanna lose, but the majority of the year, perhaps 200 and—yeah, the 250 working days, perhaps 245 of those days are gonna be fairly vanilla and based on seasonal historic trends that we can identify and we can use to automatically plan, certainly better than a new team leader would. So as soon as somebody gains some experience and they've been in the job for a while, they'll get this sort of gut feel for it, and they're good at planning, and they know their team and so on. But if you are newly promoted or you come across from a different team and you don't know the environment and so on, we should be able to plan and predict for that. So there's sort of an AI planning prediction element in there as well. So that's sort of the two real drivers for AI for us.

(Kevin at 00:53:18) Integration into the broader business, that's a big thing that's happening everywhere. You know, techies have got a seat at the table that we didn't have ten years ago. People are consulting the sort of the organization of the CTO when we buy stuff now. So there's an enterprise architecture agenda that perhaps was completely—well, not just perhaps, it was completely absent certainly ten years ago and even five. Our buyer is typically in the COO's org rather than the CTO's org. So they almost had latitude to just go and buy what they liked, and actually, increasingly, we're seeing that that's, well, okay, but where does this fit into our roadmap as a large American bank, for example, for the next three years, five years, and beyond? So much more of an API-led integration and the replatforming has been done with a React-based front end than a transactional API underneath to sort of enable that. So that's sort of the business as usual bits.

(Kevin at 00:54:12) I think the probably the most exciting thing for us is expanding that footprint horizontally. So we're very specific at the moment about repeatable transactional work. If you do a mortgage process and it takes you ten minutes, then we can say, well, you should be able to do six of those in an hour. And therefore, if I have 360 of those, I know I'm gonna need a certain number of people and a certain number of hours. What we don't currently cater for is the more flexible types of work like case working, which was sort of dipping toes into the market of, or development legal, et cetera, where actually the amount of work is not necessarily predictable based on the amount of work done on a different task. Everything we do is different every time. So knowing that I spent five minutes fixing a bug yesterday doesn't mean that the next bug will only take five minutes, but there are probably still predictive bits that we can do around that. So they're sort of the, I guess, the major strings. Obviously, the IPO that we shouldn't mention is gonna change some of the direction that we go and that's sort of the extra publicity off the back of that. And I guess we'll see what happens with the end of COVID. So we've done quite well out of the COVID outbreak, and it sounds like a horrible thing to say for a global pandemic that's cost a lot of time and, you know, money and lives and so on. But it actually, from us, it's driven home the message that being in control of the work that your workforce is doing is really important. And if they're at home and you can be in control of that, then maybe it doesn't matter so much that they're at home. So we've seen companies adopt working from home and adopt our products as a way of enabling that. As we talk to them, we're seeing that most of them don't plan to go back to an office-based environment, certainly not completely, and in some cases, not at all. So we'll see how that sort of transitions in terms of their changing needs and the extra bits of information that they're after through the coming years. But it's gonna be a fairly exciting time.

(Kevin at 00:55:50) And, obviously, we're in a lot of regulated markets, so the regulations and legislation keep changing. So we're constantly changing to keep up with us. Yeah. I know. Well, you know, it keeps some people busy. I know Jason that I trust, for example. So he's Frisco-based, and we're just down the road in Dallas. But, you know, we do a lot of stuff with HIPAA-regulated associations and so on. So all of the stuff that he talked about in terms of it's a question of trust for the access to customers and access to capital, and we're absolutely positioning ourselves at the trust end of the market rather than the cheap end of the market. So we'll see if that pays off too.

(Joel Beasley at 00:56:28) Now, do you actually know him? Like, have you hung out with them?

(Kevin at 00:56:31) No, not yet. Actually, so one of the guys that works with me out in Dallas has met him and they've had drinks. So I think that the plan is that next time I get out to Dallas, we'll try and get together and go see each other. But again, we're not allowed in at the moment, so yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:56:45) So I want to talk a little bit about leadership. I saw something fun in your bio, right?

(Kevin at 00:56:51) Uh-oh.

(Joel Beasley at 00:56:51) And yeah, I know, right? So we're going to do this right now. It says that one of your favorite things is finding underperforming teams that the company views as an obstacle and transforming them into a key driver of business success. And when I talked about that in our team prep meeting for this episode, I was like, is that a politically correct way to say you fire everybody?

(Kevin at 00:57:13) Well, I—

(Joel Beasley at 00:57:13) Fire the team?

(Kevin at 00:57:14) No, no, not normally. Actually, I mean, I've had a very lucky career, I guess, in that sense, in that nobody likes firing people or doing redundancies, and it goes with the job. And sometimes that is what ends up happening and, you know, I'd be lying if I said that I've never had to lose anybody. But actually, for the most part, I think—and again, I'm aware it's a techie audience. There's probably people who are going to be sitting there thinking, oh, I totally get that, and they'll be equally people going, this guy has no idea what he's talking about. I think most techies want to do the right thing. I think the challenge that most underperforming tech teams have is that they're not being used right rather than that they're not the right people.

(Kevin at 00:57:55) And sometimes that's actually, I've got people who just don't have the right skills and I'm not prepared to make time for them to learn new ones because we're busy and we're up against it, and I've got all these deadlines. And what do you mean I've got to make time for training? That's ridiculous. I just need them to work harder. So sometimes it's that kind of, actually, you know, fundamentally there is a skill gap here where people are working very hard and very inefficiently because they're unqualified or incapable of doing the stuff. And we can fix that without necessarily replacing the people, but we have to take the time to fix it. So that's kind of the first thing. The second thing is that from the business side of it, it's a very strange world that we inhabit as tech. We sit around this C-level table as CTOs and we sit around the operations table, and we actually hold an awful lot of the business in our hands, and yet nobody really understands it outside of tech. And so the analogy—I was discussing this actually a couple of months back in a board meeting at ActiveOps.

(Kevin at 00:58:52) If someone in finance talks about the difference between accounts receivable and accounts payable, everyone outside of finance kind of gets that. They don't necessarily know how they would record that on a finance system. They don't necessarily know which ledgers they're looking at and so on, but they get that difference between accounts receivable and accounts payable. If somebody talks about bookkeeping, we understand that bookkeeping is different than financial accounting or management accounting. They're very similar. There's overlap and there's touchpoints between them, but it's a different role. If I'm hiring a bookkeeper, I wouldn't expect, for example, a management accountant to apply and vice versa. When you're looking at tech, that same understanding really isn't there around the rest of the table. They look at us and, you know, there's fifty, sixty techies doing tech. There's not that real understanding of, well, actually, these guys do development and these guys do this—and I should clarify when I say guys, I mean guys and girls.

(Kevin at 00:59:42) But, you know, these folks do development, and these folks do a different type of development in a completely different language and framework, and they don't necessarily have any overlap between those two things. And these folks do support, and they're doing a completely different thing again. And the skill sets are different, and the timing is different. So I think a lot of the challenge with those underperforming teams is unrealistic expectations or a lack of adequate understanding of how to phrase the questions. And I guess that sort of flips into my third and final bit, which is if you prescribe solutions to a techie, you're going to get the solution you prescribed, which may not be the right solution for the problem that you had in the first place.

(Kevin at 01:00:21) And that's no different again than going into a garage and saying, "Hey, I want you to change my brake pads." They'll change your brake pads. If that wasn't why they were squealing, they're still going to squeal afterwards, and you've just bought new brake pads. Well done you. And I think there's a real challenge around—historically, people would get very tied up in defining solutions within their business because that's what they do in their own areas, and then they transferred that to, I'm going to prescribe solutions to the tech team and only just going to build this solution rather than that sort of partnership thing of I'm going to describe a problem, and let's work together to come up with suggestions. So I've been quite lucky. I have had to fire some people. But for the most part, I've been able to keep the vast majority of the people, invest a bit of time into them, invest a bit of time into helping the rest of the business know how to work with them and get the most out of it. And then sometimes that still means, actually, there's just not enough of them and we need to spend some more money. But a lot of the time it's, oh, I didn't realize I was asking the wrong question. And actually, now I'm asking the right questions, I'm getting better answers.

(Joel Beasley at 01:01:22) I like that analogy you used. And I think one of the interesting things that's happening is, well, if we go to the accounting one, we all have finances in our personal lives. And as technology continues to grow, we have more technology in our personal lives. So as time goes on, it'll just become a more mature part of the organization. And the people, the executives, will have more understanding of them. The analogies will become greater and then it'll just have a—it'll grow and mature, right? So that's something to look forward to.

(Kevin at 01:01:58) Yeah. And I think we have a role to play in that as technologists and particularly leadership technologists. I mean, being a—your Deloitte guest, she talked about the humans for AI program and encouraging people to gain just a basic literacy in AI. It is strange when you think about the pervasiveness of tech. You know, we have online banking, and our cars are mostly electronic now unless you got some classic. The majority of your car these days is not mechanics. It's electronics. You know, there's a really pervasive electronics. People use APIs to send money between accounts, and they don't see it as an API. They just think, oh, I'm sending money to so and so.

(Kevin at 01:02:36) You know, I put their ACH number in and money goes somewhere. And actually, underneath that, there's some incredibly complex tech that people don't see. I can't think of another environment where that's the case. If you think about finance, people understand the complexity of running a budget, even if it's just because, actually, they have to make sure there's enough cash in their pocket to pay when they get to the checkout. But they understand that process of doing that, and there isn't really a tech analogy. A lot of what we do is closed boxes where people kind of put trust in the fact that an input will come in and an output will come out, and they don't have any visibility of what's inside. And I think there is a real C-level, SVP, EVP, whatever it is, sort of imperative on us to share some of that knowledge with the business so that people understand not necessarily how to do the thing in the box, but at least what the thing in the box is doing.

(Joel Beasley at 01:03:22) Yes. Dude, this is great. Alright. So I want to start to wrap up here. And the thing I want to ask you is what you are learning right now as a leader?

(Kevin at 01:03:33) There's a lot. So it's a really different environment for me personally compared to most of the other businesses I've been in. I've been one of a number of senior people within the business that sort of wear the tech hat in different respects. Whereas at ActiveOps, I am both the least expert in what we do, but also the only expert in how we do it around the board table. So that's a really significant shift for me. Everyone else knows absolutely the answer to what does a customer use this for or why is this important? And I am acutely out of my depth for that world, which isn't a terrible thing, and it's good to learn new stuff. But I've never worked in that operations environment of running an operations management team in the back office of a bank or an insurance company and so on. So definitely learning both the specifics of how our customers use the products, but also that generic thing around being the guy that runs the tech in a company where the other people around the table run the why is a really different environment to be in. So that's been challenging and enjoyable and frustrating and agonizing in equal measure, I think.

(Kevin at 01:04:43) Some of the enjoyable is it's definitely—it's really good sitting around the table from peers who are experts in their field and getting to learn some of that. And back to what we talked about earlier around, you know, the sort of admitting that you don't know in front of people who do the same thing is hard, but cross-discipline, it's a little easier. So that's been really good. The flip side to that is it's also really hard to explain why some things aren't just easy. You know, I just want this button or I just want this report. And I'm like, yeah, yeah. When you say just, it doesn't mean just. Like, it's not a two-second thing that somebody just presses a magic button that delivers code and tests it and writes automation tests and, you know, there's more to this. So that's been, I guess, knowledge that I would say I've taken for granted for probably the last couple of years, and it's only really in the last six months or so that I've realized that back to that imperative for the C-level people to kind of communicate out the what's inside the box.

(Kevin at 01:05:38) I'd sort of taken for granted the fact that they would understand the what's inside the box, and actually there's no reason they should any more than I understand what's inside the boxes in their areas. So there's, I guess, a bit of a kicking myself realization that there's no reason I should have made that assumption. There's no reason whatsoever that it was a safe bet that they would understand some of that stuff. So that's been challenging. We're a really global but a really small business for our pre-global spread. So we're based in Australia, and we're based in India, and we're based in South Africa, and we're based in the UK and in Ireland and in New York and in Dallas. And there's about 180 of us in total. So for a 180-person company, we are very, very widely spread, which means all of the challenges of distributed teams. We've got kind of tenfold because some of those teams are small enough that, you know, two people being on leave at the same time or one person's on leave and one's off sick and suddenly there's no team there because their counterparts are in a different time zone. So that's been really—personally I'd say rewarding, actually, is probably the biggest word for that in the sense that I've been able to build this kind of global function with people all around the world and take into account all the weird cultural things like alligators living on somebody's backyard or, you know, we've got an office in Texas where apparently it snowed for a while and people's pipes burst because, you know, they're not used to cold weather.

(Kevin at 01:06:59) And actually, compared to here, that cold weather is not unusual, and New York is not unusual. So it's been quite difficult, or not difficult. It's been quite—it's not entertaining that people's houses have flooded, but it's been quite entertaining learning that, you know, those things are so very different in different places that it affects people fundamentally quite differently. And the Australians, you know, they have a 55 Celsius, 110 degree Fahrenheit afternoon, and they think nothing of it. Here, we would all be hiding, like, you know, running baths of water and trying to sit inside it and hide because nobody does air conditioning. So the cultural sides of different countries and especially when you think that particularly Australia, South Africa, the UK, Ireland, and the States, we all nominally speak English, but it's not quite the same English. You know, if you ask a Brit, you guys speak American, not English. It's not the same thing at all, and there are some phrases that just do not work. And some of the culture references and idioms don't translate at all. So that's been quite—and continues to be as we add people in each of those regions. There's a really interesting onboarding effect where they join a global team and suddenly discover that, you know, just references to what was on TV as a kid, they don't translate. And, you know, the slightly ruder ones that you get when you're talking within the team, they don't translate either, and people are left sort of slightly baffled. So that's been a really unique learning curve for me in the sense of how do you run a team where people work very differently, respond very differently, different legislative pay, holiday entitlements, and so on and so forth.

(Joel Beasley at 01:08:38) Thank you so much for listening. And if you found this episode useful, please share it with a friend or colleague who you think would get value from it. And if you have topics that you would like to hear discussed on the podcast, either add me on LinkedIn or send me an email, [email protected]. Every time I get an email or LinkedIn message, it absolutely makes my day and inspires me to keep going.