Language Interpretation in Critical Situations with Brian Singer, CIO/CTO of Propio

(Intro Narrator at 00:00:03) Hello, my friends. Today, Joel is talking to Brian, CIO and CTO at Propio, and they discuss the importance of having language translation and interpretation services readily available in healthcare and legal environments, how Propio offers on-demand interpreters in hundreds of languages, and how better collaboration and more transparency will empower your employees. All of this right here, right now, on the Modern CTO Podcast.

(Brian at 00:00:36) Here we go.

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:37) This is the Modern CTO Podcast. Well, dude, I am so excited. My team prepped me on Propio, and the moment I heard it, I was like, well, obviously that needs to exist in the world. Can you give me a brief description of what it is?

(Brian at 00:00:57) Yeah, we're a language service company. So it's interesting because until you get involved with language services, you don't necessarily even know that companies like us exist. Essentially, we're a communication provider for mostly healthcare entities where a patient comes in and English is not their primary language. And so by using our service, we connect to interpreters in real time. We can do it over the phone as a direct dial, but mostly we allocate most of our resources towards our app. And via audio or video, you can request an interpreter in real time in over 300 languages, and all medically trained as well as some being legally trained as well, and then have that real time translation to make sure that a provider is getting all the information through to their patient in their natural language.

(Joel Beasley at 00:01:46) So are hospitals your customers?

(Brian at 00:01:48) Hospitals, provider networks, medical systems, you name it, even some just individual family practices.

(Joel Beasley at 00:01:57) Oh, nice. Have you guys integrated with any sort of call management software? So somebody calls me up, they have super broken English, and I can click some buttons that I can get someone on the line to help?

(Brian at 00:02:06) We actually, so there's a couple of things that we do. One of which is we're backboned by Twilio. So there's a huge help there with the overall network quality. That's a benefit of ours. Originally, when Propio started, they had their own SIP network, so they were doing all this telephony by themselves. We're implementing now some of the additional quality controls that allows both the clients, so provider in that case, as well as the interpreter or sometimes even a third party's end, like a family member, to give real time feedback on the overall quality. One component as well that we're implementing is more of a real time analytical feedback system that tells participants in the call about their network quality. For example, if they're in the hospital system, hey, move the cart around and get a better Wi-Fi signal, or telling an interpreter to make sure that they're not on Wi-Fi and they're hardwired in to get the optimal bandwidth and video performance. So it's a continuous quality improvement. My day is mostly data.

(Joel Beasley at 00:03:10) You know,

(Brian at 00:03:10) it's just around quality. Right before this, I was pulling stats on length of calls and which channels had any particular difficulties in terms of fulfillment and things like that. And so we're using that data as output that drives essentially the input to our backlog for continuous improvement. It's an interesting world. When you're audio and video, it's a totally different dynamic than normal software development.

(Joel Beasley at 00:03:33) Oh, yeah. A long time ago, I did legal software for remote depositions. So you would bring in all these different parties, and then you could present documents, and it'll all be transcribed. But dealing with the multiple video feeds, oh, there are so many little things that go into it.

(Brian at 00:03:50) Yep. Especially in a lot of what we do. For example, things as basic as having additional apps open, too many tabs open in your browser, all that degrades video quality because no matter what you think as an end user, that's all consuming, one, CPU and memory. Two, it's consuming bandwidth because even though you might think they're dormant, they're still communicating via the backend. So when you're trying to have high resolution, 1080p video quality, anything is going to degrade it. So there's a lot of additional effort. Even with using a partner like Twilio, there's a ton of additional software engineering effort to make sure that you're always choosing the best route, optimizing the video performance, dealing with codecs and resolutions, even configurations such as the screen size or the video size within the window in our app versus what an interpreter might want to see in terms of full screen. All that impacts our ability to produce a high bar of quality for the real time interpretation.

(Joel Beasley at 00:04:50) And then what does your team look like?

(Brian at 00:04:53) So I have, it depends on what time of the day is, what hat I'm wearing, but I am technically the CTO. That's, like, in writing. But I'm the chief information officer. I'm the CSO. I'm a product manager, software development manager, you know, coffee evangelist, you name it. But the majority of my team is split up across software engineering, IT operations, and architecture. So all very lean. That was one amazing thing when I joined the company. It's been a bootstrap type of initiative, very startup culture even though the company's been around since 1998. And so it's very lean staff, and we work in frugal metrics around prioritization. And that's been a huge benefit in terms of getting the right investment, hiring the right resources, not just quantity of resources, and then also having good conversations with my peers at the executive level and our CEO around what we should be doing, not what we think we should be doing. So it's roughly a 20-person organization right now. I've got about eight open positions that I'm looking to recruit for and hire through the end of the year.

(Joel Beasley at 00:06:02) Let's give them some promotion. What are you looking for?

(Brian at 00:06:05) So mostly software engineering. You know, one thing that I've been doing myself, I've been the compliance leader too. So I'm dealing with all the HIPAA compliance and SOC 2 and being a healthcare entity and having to do BAAs with most of our customers. They all require assessments, questionnaires, audits. So I do a lot of that work myself. So I'm hiring a compliance person, need an additional quality assurance engineer, about four senior software engineers, and then we're looking for another system admin, another network admin, and an information security engineer.

(Joel Beasley at 00:06:40) Do you have on propio.com? Is it propio.com?

(Brian at 00:06:44) The software engineers are out there. The others, it's about that time where the job descriptions are already in the hands of our HR department, and they're approving all the reqs to get them published out. But they will very shortly be on propio-ls.com. Anybody who's watching, please, you know, LinkedIn me, hit me up if you want to come work on a great opportunity in terms of changing people's lives and bridging that communication gap globally. It's a great opportunity to work in this environment.

(Joel Beasley at 00:07:13) Yeah. You're over at Amazon with crazy high performers, and you choose to leave that to go do this. Like, why?

(Brian at 00:07:21) I get asked that, I don't know, five times a day. So the long story but short is I didn't want to leave. I was with AWS. I'd been in this role before. It was certainly a career goal, but it wasn't necessarily the right fit for me. And I went back to AWS because I like the scale, I like the speed. And the folks at Propio had been reaching out to me several times, which I politely declined. And they were super persistent though, and they just said, "Hey, you know, just talk to Marco." Marco is our CEO. So I scrabble and put together a resume and just, you know, I have my own business. And while I was working with AWS, I'd done a few jobs with some private equity firms around due diligence in terms of investments, which was a blast, honestly. So I just thought about it as, hey, you know, I can help them. Maybe I just help them as an adviser. Maybe I just can contribute in some way. And then I talked to Marco, and everything changes. You know? Marco and I both came into the conversation with our ammunition, our cheat sheet of here's all the questions I'm going to ask you. And I don't think either one of us actually got to any one of our actual questions. It was just open dialogue. We were just talking about the business, business sense, our passions around technological growth and solving problems for people, which was the one main common denominator. It wasn't all about scale. It wasn't all about technology investment for technology's sake. It wasn't a talking head. It was we need to work together because this is a huge problem in our industry, especially in the healthcare environment. And we've got this technology that is almost over the finish line, and we need someone to come in who has that scalability and strategic capability, not just from a technical sense, but also a business mind and push this forward. And so going into that conversation and just wanting to talk to someone, you know, about potential of maybe consulting or doing a couple of things on the side turned into almost a two-hour conversation and hanging up and realizing I want to work with this guy. You know, super smart, scrappy, and he knew exactly where he wanted to go. And a lot of times, most companies don't necessarily know that. They aspire, but they don't have that vision. They don't have that path to get there. And Marco knew exactly where he wanted to go, and he knew exactly what his gaps were in terms of being able to get there. And 11 months now, I'm almost here a year, a year and, like, three weeks, and it's been exactly what we talked about. Of course, you know, there's obstacles along the way. Nothing fun and worth doing comes easily, but it's exactly what we talked about over a year ago in that initial conversation. So that's why I came. Marco ended up being the person that I wanted to work with. I wanted to work side by side with him, and I felt like there was value, and that's important. If I can contribute and be valuable to the company, I think it's a win-win.

(Joel Beasley at 00:10:28) Well, yeah. I mean, we spend so much of our lives at work. The people that you're, whether you realize it or not, you're choosing to spend your time around these people.

(Brian at 00:10:37) Exactly.

(Joel Beasley at 00:10:38) Because it is a choice. And so you get to choose who you spend your time with, and so there's a huge benefit to being around somebody that you really click with and someone who has a vision to where they're going. I completely resonate with you when you say a lot of people don't necessarily know where they're going. I would 100% agree. Of all the travel I've gotten to do and all the different companies I've gotten to see, I'd say it's more often than not, you can ask the question, how does what you're doing connect to revenue? And you'll get blank stares, or you could say, you know, what's the future? And then you'll get a list of pipeline features. And I'm like, no, no, no. Like, what's, where are you going? Like, what's the future? And they're like, shut up. Look at the JIRA board or whatever.

(Brian at 00:11:17) Yeah, no, I'm glad you brought that up because, you know, one of the first things I did with Marco was to help the organization understand where resources were being invested and ask that question exactly. How does what we're doing tie back to a return on investment? Do we actually know that this prioritized feature or deprecating a third-party tool in favor of something homegrown is going to provide the value that we think it will? Like, where's the data from the current state against the forecasted state? And then how are we going to measure that? And that ended up turning into, one, it was very difficult at first, right, because it was so used to small shop, do the next thing on my mind. But then it ended up being this amazing collaboration between Marco and I and the additional folks at the leadership level around, we got all these ideas in the backlog, but what really matters? What's really going to differentiate us from our competitors? And what features or, you know, infrastructure or network investments or scalability tasks that we had in our backlog are really going to move that dial towards lowering the operational expense, scaling our business out to where onboarding new clients is more turnkey and therefore almost creating free revenue streams because there's no additional effort from our business folks or our technology folks to actually do anything to get new clients. And it was an eye-opening, amazing exercise. None of us like long meetings. That was a long meeting, but we came out of it with a very direct approach in terms of this is what we're going to work on moving forward. And the best part about that is we all agreed there was some pain and a little bit of negotiation for sure. But it allowed us to then, two weeks later, have a discussion about a new feature and go back to the table and say, "Hey, we prioritize all this. And we said that this particular feature was going to be a highest revenue generator for us to invest software engineering resources. Tell me how this new feature that you're asking about is going to either have higher revenue or the same." And we walked and did a whiteboarding session around the math around the problem, and we came out and go, "Great. Let's deprioritize what we're going to work on. Let's work on this." We've since delivered that. Now we're back to the original. And so it just set that level playing field around our opportunities to work together and make better overall business decisions, not just for a feature's sake or not just for the technology's sake. And that was a game changer in terms of working altogether as an executive leadership team. And like I said, it's been amazing. This is the best leadership team I've worked with. We gel. We all have the same goals in mind. And, you know, getting that vision and strategy down and actually having objectives and results that we drive to for each of our individuals that tie back to specific company goals has been a game changer. And unblurring those lines between what is it that I do that adds value back to the business, to your point before.

(Joel Beasley at 00:14:29) Oh, yeah. Now you've always had really good leadership. Actually, one of your, from our interview that we did when you were at Datalink, one of the quotes that you talked about, it actually ended up in the book that's about to come out.

(Brian at 00:14:42) Oh, nice.

(Joel Beasley at 00:14:43) You're talking about change isn't easy. I think that's what it is. Culture and change. I'd ask you something, and your response was so good. When we were looking through, we had, you know, probably a thousand clips because we take a couple clips from every show, and we were like, how do we narrow this down to the 20 we're going to include in a book? And then I saw yours. We're like, that's the one. We need to put him in there. So I'll let you know when that comes out.

(Brian at 00:15:05) Oh, that's fantastic. I love it.

(Joel Beasley at 00:15:07) Yeah. So all right. I'm curious. My team told me they said, you gotta ask him what the difference between translation and interpretation is.

(Brian at 00:15:17) Yeah. So great question. I'll add another one. There's a difference between translation and localization too. So translation is more document translation or dictating, like us talking to each other and then, you know, machine learning or AI algorithm running in the background and translating in real time to another language. We do translation services. We have a document translation arm working with us. We have a software platform that does that. It's a decent book of business. Interpretation is live, and that is just like you would see in a UN council, right? You've got all these representatives from all across the globe. Someone is speaking at the pulpit in one language, and the folks that do not speak that language fluently have headphones on and are listening to open interpretation in real time. And that's the main book of our business. So that would be over the phone.

(Brian at 00:16:12) Literally, we have 1-800 numbers that some of our clients call, and they'd use an IVR system that we've built to select the right language and then the right localization of said language or right dialect. And then we do video ones, so real time. The third component of that is localization, and localization is more that specific dialect range. So good example—I mean, even in the US, so we can use the US as an example, we all use different dialects in the United States.

(Brian at 00:16:41) Right? The Northeast has their own, Midwesterners have our own, West Coast, Southern, and that's more localization. So it's, you know, using common terms but getting more specific to a region-based dialect. And that's a bigger component mostly in our translation book of business because written word is harder, especially when it comes to specific regions and countries. So the localization component exacerbates that problem. Right? Because you're not just doing, you know, English to German. You're doing English to multiple dialects of German. And so that, you know, that tree structure, that maze becomes even more complicated.

(Joel Beasley at 00:17:25) Now is this—by the way, I love that we started talking about localization because I don't know if you know this, but I'll go off topic here for a second.

(Brian at 00:17:34) It's alright.

(Joel Beasley at 00:17:34) About a year ago, we sold everything we had, bought an RV, and traveled around the US for like seven to ten months. Yeah. And so when you're talking about the different dialects, oh yeah. Very, very different.

(Brian at 00:17:46) Yeah. And I guess we're kind of selfish when we think about that. Right? We don't think of us having different dialects, but it's fact. You know, it's part of my previous experience in having done international technology with Amazon opened my eyes to that. You know, it's the same concept of every country has provinces or states even though to us it's just a country. Each one of those provinces and states has different slang, different dialect. And it becomes even more complicated when you're doing that in written word from a translation perspective. It's pretty amazing because one, certain what we would consider generic terms don't translate well into other languages.

(Brian at 00:18:27) I went through that specifically when I was with Amazon my first time. We were trying to translate "resolved" as a term that we would send back to people who open cases in our system. And I had to get on the phone with editors because I had to explain to them what I meant by "resolved" because that word, for example, didn't translate directly into German. And I said, "Well, it's been satisfactorily closed, you know?" Like, okay, we can work with that. But we take things for granted that when you start to expand globally, you realize it's a lot more complicated than just speaking English and thinking that there's just a normal distinct translation to that in another language. It's pretty amazing.

(Joel Beasley at 00:19:10) Yeah. Definitely. Language is fascinating. We're all making these weird noises with our mouth, and there's hundreds of them, and they're everywhere. Now when I saw your product, I thought, wow, that's super exciting. And I'll tell you why, because I have personal experience with this. Very little, but still some. Couple years ago, I'd seen some company doing something in, I think it was China, and I wanted to either buy them, try to buy them, or partner with them. Right? So I look them up. Well, they don't speak English fluently. I was watching some of the clips. I was trying to find clips of them online and things like that. And so I was like, alright. So I went on Upwork, tried to find a translator, and it was this whole mess. And, ultimately, I just ended up not pursuing it. And it was exactly that. The translator I did find was a college individual who doesn't have business experience. They didn't know any of these terms—

(Brian at 00:20:07) Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:20:08) You know, necessarily well enough to translate. So I heard your service, and I was like, well, that's so cool because you had something on your website, and Adam Sage had told me something about they're specifically skilled in health care language and terms, or they're specifically skilled in business language and terms. And that is so cool, man.

(Brian at 00:20:26) Yeah. No. It's a big differentiator from us and our competitors as well because when we look to go and respond to RFPs, that's a specific ask because these conversations are highly technical in terms of medical terminology. So we have a rigorous onboarding process where we do mock interviews with potential interpreters that we're going to use, and we vet them in terms of their ability, one, to speak clearly and be presentable as well. You know? But at the same time, you know, understand the medical terminology to be able to effectively communicate because this is critical conversation. This is not you and I just chitchatting. Right? This is somebody in a medical situation. We tend not to be in emergency situations just because we don't want to put ourselves as a potential bottleneck in saving someone's lives.

(Brian at 00:21:18) I will say this, though, as a caveat: our tablets are in emergency rooms in certain hospital systems, though. And so if you're not a primary English speaker and someone's trying to explain to you your own care, it's very important, especially in this day and age where with COVID and a pandemic, paying attention to specific steps and dosages of drugs or understanding exactly what your doctor is telling you is a diagnosis—it's important to be able to understand that and comprehend exactly what's happening, whether it's a serious condition or not. Right? You want to maintain your health. And that puts us in a position of hosting a platform that connects people to bridge that gap and give the patient confidence that they understand exactly what they need to do to take care of themselves.

(Brian at 00:22:00) And another component of that that was important for us was additional family in the room. And this is an entirely virtual process. It's almost a full telehealth solution. And being an older patient who wants a son or a daughter or a sibling on the call, we have that capability. We can add additional participants. We can add up to four additional participants to a call or video so that not just you as the patient, but multiple people are hearing direct from the provider through the interpreter exactly what's happening. And that also gives that sense of calm and ease back to patients as well because it's not just a one-to-one situation. We open it up and allow for them to share that conversation with family members so that everybody's aware of what's going on. So it's a care system. It's really like a coordinated care platform, and that means a lot. It means a lot to me. It means a lot to be able to use my experience and technology background to actually build software that helps people.

(Joel Beasley at 00:23:19) Now is this something that I can just go on there and use? Or do I have to be—

(Brian at 00:23:24) It is contracted, so you do have to have a username and password. We do lots of pilots all the time. We have discussed opening it up for anyone and doing basically a fee-for-service-by-the-minute charge so that, you know, frankly, if you or I were traveling abroad, we had a medical situation, or we're just looking to have someone live to take our menu and order our food at a dinner, it's all capable of doing that. There's nothing stopping us. We have no country restrictions or anything like that. So it's definitely another revenue stream that we have considered. We just haven't turned that switch on yet.

(Joel Beasley at 00:24:03) That's my favorite play. Platform plays are my favorite thing in the world because, you know, you get somebody in a call center who constantly gets—you get a development team in a call center, constantly getting people that speak broken English, and they would love to just build something for their call center to patch in someone. And that would be so cool. I vote for that even though I have no voting power.

(Brian at 00:24:26) No. Trust me. Well, it's just like any experience when you've got to—when you need to ask for help. It's the most frustrating thing all of us have to deal with, especially as an engineer. I want to solve my own problems. I don't want to have to call anybody. And if I do have to reach out for support, I want knowledge articles. I want a chat. I want something that's easy for me to deal with. I certainly don't want to call anybody on the phone. It's like the last resort. So I totally agree with you. And part of our 24/7 culture is to make as many people available to serve specific regions of the globe in their natural language, which is, you know, for example, why we have a high number of call centers out in the Philippines. Right? They're a heavy English-speaking population. They're on the other end of the time zone that we are. So, you know, US-based companies can cover a single day through US-based resources as well as Philippine resources.

(Brian at 00:25:12) But it's not just broken English. It's also connections and quality. The telephony is always a barrier. The network backbone is always a barrier. We're an AWS shop. So we're fully dispersed across multiple regions and multiple AZs in the US, which gives us a lot higher quality bar and allows us to leverage the edge compute services for external regions—even for, for example, a lot of our remote staff, remote interpreters and the like are on AWS Workspaces. So we're, you know, basically creating that own family concentric type of infrastructure that allows us to close those gaps and raise a higher bar for our quality. All things are on the table right now. And to your point, we've made a conscious effort to build a platform and not necessarily have it be a provider that requests for a medical interpreter.

(Brian at 00:26:06) We have other opportunities here where it could be, like you said, we have legal experts. So you could be in a legal situation where you're speaking with a paralegal or a lawyer. They can request our services as well. And we have interpreters that are versed and qualified and certified in legal terminology, but it really could be for use for anything. We're a communication platform. We use technology to bridge communication gaps, simple as that. We just happen to, right now, serve interpretation services, but there's no stopping us from opening it up for other use cases.

(Joel Beasley at 00:26:53) You've got a huge TAM. Large potential market there for you. For sure. That's exciting, man.

(Brian at 00:26:59) It's really exciting. I love what we're doing here. It's wonderful to build tech for tech's sake, and it's great to learn all that stuff. But when you do something that actually you can see the impact, you can feel the impact, it means a lot more. And that's always been something that I've wanted to achieve. That's why anytime, you know, my last decade, it's been Amazon or health care because I know technology is a big player in the health care market. It is the biggest opportunity for a technical solution, especially when it comes to just data aggregation and data sharing. And what we do, you don't realize it's billions of dollars in this industry to be able to help, you know, hospital systems and others in this value-based care.

(Joel Beasley at 00:27:48) My brother and stepmom are physicians.

(Brian at 00:27:50) Oh.

(Joel Beasley at 00:27:50) So—

(Brian at 00:27:51) Great. Put them in touch with us. Let's get them on our platform.

(Joel Beasley at 00:27:55) Right? Yeah. And my brother works for a larger health care system, and then my stepmom, she was the county emergency room person in one of the counties in Florida—

(Brian at 00:28:06) Okay.

(Joel Beasley at 00:28:07) For twenty years before she opened up her own bariatrics business, which is doing crazy well too. I was like, you nailed it. Way to go from being an employee to being an entrepreneur. She did a really great job.

(Brian at 00:28:19) That's awesome.

(Joel Beasley at 00:28:19) And I've been to the emergency room when I was a kid, you know, where she was working, and I've—man, so many different languages. Emergency room's for anybody. Right? So—

(Brian at 00:28:30) Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:28:30) You get someone in there and, you know, Spanish typically pretty easy because there's a bunch of people that will speak Spanish, but you get some, you know, less common language in there. You need to be able to communicate with them to some degree.

(Brian at 00:28:40) Yeah. 100%. We actually—the other one that we do, we do American Sign Language. And that's been—again, telehealth platforms don't offer that. A lot of hospital systems don't offer that. So us having, you know, ASL-certified interpreters available, that's a game changer for us. One other cool component that we have too, and it's related to hospital systems, we have this interpreter rewards program that we built out in Q4 of last year. So I don't know if you know this, but most hospital systems are required to have interpreters on staff, and it's not something that you can bill for. It's against the Americans with Disabilities Act. And so if you have it, you can provide it. And those interpreters are not always staffed to be able to be fully utilized.

(Brian at 00:29:21) So a couple of our clients actually helped us build this rewards program where it's a partnership where we onboard the health system and we allow them to use our platform that if they make a call or a video request, we'll immediately attempt to route them to their own interpreter first so that they're leveraging the staff that you're paying salaries for. If they're not available, then we'll service that call with Propio's interpreters. At the same time, however, if the opposite is true, we have another client that is requesting interpretive services and Propio can't fulfill it, we make their—that hospital system's interpretive staff—available so that their day is more balanced and they actually have more on their plate and schedule. So it's a mutual benefit in that model to where, you know, a hospital system can always route to their own interpreter if they're available, but, also, we can keep their interpreters busy and, you know, close that kind of salary gap. So it's cost beneficial on both sides of the agreement there. So and that's been—that's been a big win for us. We have three people on board on that already.

(Joel Beasley at 00:30:36) Nice. Dude, that is super exciting. Because you gave me such good leadership advice, not to put you on the spot. But I'm going to put you on the spot, and you can handle it. As we start to wrap up, I had in my notes, I was like, do not leave without asking Brian about what he's currently learning as a leader.

(Brian at 00:30:52) Oh, man. Every place is a new learning opportunity. Okay? And one thing that I've learned here more so is better collaboration and more transparency provides empowerment and autonomy. Let me go into that a little bit. So when you're in a startup culture or when you come into an organization where people are doers, there tends to be isolated information sharing because you get a task and you just want to solve problems. And I love that. Don't get me wrong. I think that's amazing. I'm very much in the same. But at the same time, you run into the risk of becoming a single point of failure and/or a bottleneck because now you or my peers are trying to solve every problem, and you're not empowering or giving autonomy to your direct reports and developing them in their careers so that they can take a certain percentage of your work off your plate. Because ultimate goal is when you hire someone, they should be taking some work off your plate. Right? And then giving you time back.

(Brian at 00:32:07) And so here, more so, it was I had so much to do, and I immediately jumped in and was like, okay. This is what I'm going to do. You know, I basically conducted my own micro due diligence post-hire and put together a plan. I shared that with some people, but to be candid, I didn't share it with everybody, and that caused some constraints. And some of the folks on my team weren't as clear on what we were trying to achieve. And so I took a step back, and Marco gave me really good advice. You've got to bring your guys in more. And a part of it was, well, doing some reflection, I go, well, I shouldn't have needed to bring them in because, you know, you're paying me to make those decisions. Right? But on the flip, it's not just allow social cohesion as we called it at Amazon to where it's a democratic vote and everybody has to say yes in order to go that direction. It's more of walk your team through what your thought process is.

(Brian at 00:32:59) And that's been a big differentiator since he and I had that conversation. Most everything now is, yes, I might go off into my ether and come up with an idea or strategy, but then it's immediately met with, hey, in my next one-on-ones or my next directs meeting, walk them through the business problem that I'm trying to solve and share my thought process with them. And that actually is opening it up into others being able to give more objective feedback and feeling more confident to give objective feedback, and me hearing positions that I didn't necessarily think of, and then being able to tweak it and making it a better process, better mechanism, a better idea or strategy. To me, that's something that I may have done in other places, but I wasn't doing very well here, and it's something that we all have to take into account.

(Brian at 00:33:50) Just because you have some certain title doesn't mean you're the only decision maker. It doesn't mean you're the only one who can create. It doesn't mean that you're the only one that can solve problems or come up with ideas. You can actually just set a little opportunity for others when you're explaining your thought process around some of the things that you're trying to accomplish. So that was, for me here, that's been probably the most pertinent leadership advice that I had to give myself.

(Joel Beasley at 00:34:18) Well, I love it, man. I always enjoy talking to you. Is there anything that we want to get out there to the world that we haven't already discussed?

(Brian at 00:34:27) Oh, man. I want people to leave this conversation understanding the importance of language services. You know, to our point around the earlier conversation, most people are aware of translation and localization services. Amazon and Google, they've been doing that type of stuff for a long time. We're about using a platform to provide real human interactions.

(Brian at 00:34:49) Now, are we thinking about what to do with those types of interactions from a technical perspective? Absolutely, because that's plentiful data that we can certainly redact anything from a PHI perspective and start to build some sentiment analysis across many languages. That's an important component of what we're trying to do. But the reality of it is, you know, this is a global economy. This is a global environment.

(Brian at 00:35:14) I think the pandemic really taught us about the need for virtual and remote services, and it closes that gap that we think exists being far from other people, from other cultures. And so this is a real need. You know, we're a very diverse country. To your point around, you know, Florida, the southern areas are very much hotbeds for immigrant population who don't necessarily speak English proficiently, and they need to be able to get the same quality of care that you or I get. And so this is a service that means something in the medical space, and it's going to continue to mean something in the medical space as this global economy grows more and more.

(Joel Beasley at 00:35:56) We're not just a US-based company.

(Brian at 00:35:56) We want to open this up for opportunities across the globe. So that would mean, you know, German to English type of translation or Mandarin to English type translations. And so that's the most important thing. This is a necessity. I don't even think of it as a luxury. It's an absolute necessity. If you really care about people and you're focused on their quality of life and quality of care, this is a service that you absolutely need to adopt.

(Joel Beasley at 00:36:25) 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.