Enhancing Your Own Leadership with Dave O’Reilly, COO at CivicPlus

(Intro Narrator at 00:00:00) Today, we're talking to Dave from CivicPlus about leveraging technology for local governments and fine-tuning the perspective of a leader. You're listening to Joel Beasley, Modern CTO.

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:17) Dave.

(Dave at 00:00:18) Nice to meet you.

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:20) Yes. Yes. Well, this is it, man. We just hang out.

(Dave at 00:00:22) Cool.

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:23) I did have a question for you because five minutes ago, I was on Twitter, right? And I had seen something about, like, our local governments are now banning TikTok on the government devices, so they can't get TikTok on it. And I was looking a little bit about what you guys do. I understand that you do some technology between the local governments and the citizens. Is that correct?

(Dave at 00:00:47) Yeah. Part of what we do, which is relevant to what you're talking about, is we do a lot of archiving with our product, ArchiveSocial. And there's a legislative requirement that when a city or county official tweets—and that can be, you know, anyone from a member of the police force to actually an elected official—we've got to be able to prove what was actually tweeted or what was actually put on social media, and we capture it within a millisecond. So even if you edit it afterwards, there's an audit trail. One of the things we're working on is a version of that for TikTok because more and more cities and counties are using TikTok to communicate with the younger constituents. So interesting that they're talking about potentially banning it. I read on CNN the other day that there was a potential there because there were potential security concerns about the ownership of the business. So yeah, interesting.

(Joel Beasley at 00:01:49) No, I think several states have done it now, like at the state level, not at the federal level. But when you're working with these local governments, is the legislative requirement to archive tweets and things like that—type of social content—is that coming from the federal level, the state level, or the local level? Where's that legislative?

(Dave at 00:02:08) That's a really good question. I mean, the Sunshine Laws exist at the state level, I believe, although I couldn't say for certain that it's not driven down from federal. And there isn't a requirement to necessarily archive it, but there is a requirement to be able to show it, right? So some people use Facebook's own or Twitter's own kind of archiving capabilities. But what often happens there is, you know, data can go missing. So somebody could say your elected official said X, Y, Z, and they can't prove that that's not the case. So that's why, you know, ArchiveSocial exists as a product. It's kind of a step above the standard archiving that's available.

(Joel Beasley at 00:02:52) So that's your customers, then—local governments?

(Dave at 00:02:55) Local governments, counties. We do have federal customers as well. So the White House is actually a large customer of ours for the National Archive for Social Media. So we capture all of that and make sure that the integrity of that data is maintained and that it's, you know, discoverable in the short term and long into the future.

(Joel Beasley at 00:03:14) So you're like a Wayback Machine for social media for the government.

(Dave at 00:03:17) That's really—I like that description. We're going to use that in our marketing moving forward.

(Joel Beasley at 00:03:21) That's cool. I'll send you an invoice. We'll be good.

(Dave at 00:03:23) Yeah. Have you copyrighted the term or—no? Good. I'm glad to hear it. Yeah. I like that, though. Wayback. Yeah. No. That one's a good one for sure.

(Joel Beasley at 00:03:34) Yeah. Alright. So that's your main customer. How did you get involved with this? Were you working in the government and then you found CivicPlus, or how did that happen?

(Dave at 00:03:43) Yeah. Good question. No, I wasn't working in the government, and I didn't even work in government technology. I was the CEO of a business based out of Hamburg in Germany, focused on industrial automation and machine learning, kind of diagnostics of maintenance failures and reliability and predictive analytics on when something was about to go wrong. And I sold that business to a large corporate conglomerate, was running one of their divisions when I got approached by a recruiter about this role. And, you know, what attracted me to it was in the arena where you're working for a private company or where you're working for a company that's listed on the stock exchange, as I was at the time, there's a lot of unnatural acts that you do in order to, you know, keep share price where it is, keep value where it is, or in the private sector to just return profits to the bottom line. And what was interesting about this is you could do all those things—like work, earn money, have a good career—but also do something that touched society, right? That made a difference to people in society. And I mentioned at the start, Joel, I'm in the process of building a house, in the process of building a house on a barrier island, actually, which makes it even more interesting. And through that process, I got a lot of exposure to town hall, to city, to planning, to the inner workings of local government, and the call came from the recruiter around the same time. And I was like, hey, you know, I can use my skills here? And instead of just feeling like I'm feeding the machine, I might actually in some small way make a difference as well. So that's how I ended up here.

(Joel Beasley at 00:05:21) Was it frustrating coming from this advanced technology, AI factory into government work? I mean, government's notorious for being really slow to adopt technology.

(Dave at 00:05:33) Yeah. I mean, frustrating, I guess, certainly a different pace, right? Certainly a different expectation of what good and great looks like because, you know, a lot of these smaller government entities, particularly, are working with paper. They're working with institutional knowledge that maybe somebody in the office has had over the past, you know, 20 or 30 years of service. Therefore, any move towards technology is a big move for them. Whereas in the consumer and industrial manufacturing, where it's all about high quality, high pace, you know, high output, high uptime, there's been a much longer journey on the technology curve. So in some ways, customers are easier to please. In other ways, getting them over that user adoption bump is more difficult, right? Because there isn't necessarily that natural affinity and comfort with technology. Now that's changing. COVID, you know, actually helped our business a lot, albeit it was a terrible thing that we all had to go through. It meant that serving constituents in town hall was not doable. And you had to continue to service those citizens, but you couldn't do it in person. So the adoption of technology increased significantly during that time. The other thing that happened is people retired out, right? They were maybe 30 years in town hall, decided that working from home was for them or wasn't for them and decided that they would retire out of it. And that meant there's a whole breed of new blood in local government and counties that is way more technology-native and has higher expectations of what technology can do for them.

(Joel Beasley at 00:07:20) I spent most of my life in Sarasota County in Florida.

(Dave at 00:07:24) Yeah. Just south of me.

(Joel Beasley at 00:07:25) Oh, okay. Where are you?

(Dave at 00:07:26) I'm in Redington Shores, which is, yeah, about 45 minutes from Tampa on the Gulf of Mexico.

(Joel Beasley at 00:07:32) Yeah. Yeah. So yeah, I grew up there, spent our whole lives there. And right before I left, one of my friends I used to work with, Christian, he became one of the, you know, five people that, like, ran the county, right? And it was so fascinating to see that happen, and I got to go see the other people there. And it was crazy because it was, like, a bunch of 85-year-olds. I love you guys, by the way, if you're listening. They don't listen to podcasts. Are you kidding me? I know. And then Christian, right? Like, it's easy. And, like, he went in there, and he made, like, progress, and it was really cool. But to the credit of the older people, they were pretty accepting of everything. Yeah, right? They kind of saw it. So they weren't, like, huge roadblockers. Obviously, there's always the tension of doing something new that happens with every age group across the board, but I was actually really surprised that the older people were really cool with some of the newer technologies coming in. And I have one technology that I'm curious about. I know you mentioned that you do the social archiving. Do you do anything with the voting?

(Dave at 00:08:39) Not directly. So our systems are, from a securities and controls perspective—our websites are considered adjunct systems to voting because people access voting information through the websites, you know, where the polling stations are, whether their records are up to date, et cetera. So we have to kind of wrap them in the same security blanket, if you like, that you would actual voting data, but we don't get involved specifically with voting and capturing votes.

(Joel Beasley at 00:09:13) Will you please? Because I think it's insane that I can't pick up my phone and, like, enter in my driver's license or some sort of unique identifier. If it's, like, good enough for me to open a bank account, shouldn't I be able to vote with it, right? And then I want to just be able to cast my vote. Like, why go to a voting place?

(Dave at 00:09:29) I can't disagree with you. I'm probably closer in age with you than most of the people who'd say no to that. It's, you know, I think the social impact you'd have by making voting more accessible would be huge. I think that's probably part of the reason why it's so difficult, right? So it'll take time, but I'm confident with the spinning of the earth we'll get there. Because I agree—you can verify someone's identity in, you know, fingerprint technology, face technology, geolocation, driving license. There's a bunch of different things that you could cross-section to verify someone's identity. So it's an interesting thought.

(Joel Beasley at 00:10:12) The best argument I heard against it, because I've been bringing this up for a couple years because I think it's silly that it's not something that we can do, is the people that don't have access to the technology. But at the same time, now there's a counterargument. The counterargument, A, is now the government will give you a cell phone, by the way. Like, if you want one, they will give you a cell phone. And then, B, you can still have the voting locations open. Yeah. Like, it doesn't have to be one or the other. Like, you can let all the current voting exist and also allow people to vote from their phone.

(Dave at 00:10:44) Yeah. No, I'd—I mean, the hybrid model would probably be the only model you could do, right? It's—and I think people have a—and this is changing all the time as we evolve—but people have a natural inclination to trust something they can touch, feel, and verify, right, versus bits and bytes. So I think you'd probably find people, even that are tech-savvy, wanting to go to a polling station and cast their vote in person and put it in a box and know that it's done versus did it go, didn't it? You know, so I think it depends. Yeah. But it's a good point.

(Joel Beasley at 00:11:20) So that's my vote. I want to do that. If you can do that, I would be very grateful.

(Dave at 00:11:25) I hate to disappoint you, but I can't make you that promise. We'll work on maybe some other aspects in or around there, but probably won't pivot into voting anytime soon.

(Joel Beasley at 00:11:35) It's okay. My job as an interviewer is to find the boundaries. So, yeah. Yeah. What other products? You have the social archiving. Do you have 10 products? Is it a lot? Can you tell me about that?

(Dave at 00:11:46) Yeah. I mean, we have about 10 products. I mean, the easiest way to describe it is everything that is required in the running of a local city or county, we have a system that contributes there. That can be anything from the Clerk product, which helps people run meetings and keep minutes of meetings and make sure that that is discoverable after the fact. How did you get to this decision? Who was involved? Who was present at the meeting? We have a recreation product that helps folks run recreation centers, you know, with swim lanes, tennis courts, camping sites, et cetera. All of that needs software. We have a permits and licensing product that helps cities manage that process of, you know, my neighbor's fence is too tall, or I want to build an outhouse. Can I do that? We have a codification product that keeps track of all the local codes that are in place within a municipality or county, and that can be things like, you know, the maximum height of a fence or the minimum height above sea level that you need to be in a flood zone. All those sorts of things is managed within that software. And we have a product called CivicReady, which is about mass notification. So in an emergency, you know, a mass shooting event, a hurricane, how do I reliably and effectively inform my residents that there's a problem and they need to take action? So that's obviously, you know, a pretty important product for our users. And then we have multiple websites products dependent upon the size of the county or city that we're serving—about 6,500 different cities using those products. We have two products based around accessibility and transparency. So is my website and is the information that I'm putting up on my website ADA-compliant, right? Can somebody of 12th-grade reading knowledge read this? Can all the pictures be described using an audio file? Is it accessible to those folks who aren't as blessed as most of us and can read and understand information? And a product focused on freedom of information. So I can go to my town hall and say, I want to know what was said on this data or how this decision was made. We have a product that will allow that to be managed by the lawyer's confidential information to be redacted, and then that data to be fed back to the person who's requested the information.

(Joel Beasley at 00:14:19) Do you have a DMV product?

(Dave at 00:14:21) We do not.

(Joel Beasley at 00:14:22) We do not.

(Dave at 00:14:22) The DMV is always the example that everyone gives in terms of how can we do better, right? And I think having been through it as a foreigner moving to this country, I tend to agree it's a less-than-perfect process, but they're working on it. I mean, I saw the application of some technology when I was there, and eventually, having sat there for three hours, got my driving license. So, very nice.

(Joel Beasley at 00:14:46) What's your goal? Is your goal to have a path, like, directly to citizenship or just to work here for a while?

(Dave at 00:14:53) We're green card holders. I think citizenship is something I want to do. Dual, you know, dual nationality anyway. I feel voting is something that people fought very hard to secure for us, and you should do it where you have the opportunity. And as you probably gathered in the first 20 minutes here, I tend to have opinions, and I feel like if you're expressing opinions but not taking the action to kind of impact the things you have opinions about, then it makes your opinion a little bit less weighty. So we've got to have your green card for a certain period, but we'll move towards dual residency at that point.

(Joel Beasley at 00:15:30) So I'm 34 right now, and I started having kids, like, 27, 28. So I didn't really have a preference before. I was really focused on technology and business and not business at the level where politics came into it a whole lot. But then I started having kids, and so I had to start getting involved with, like, the school stuff. And at that point, that's when I started voting. So now I'll vote in all elections. I'll vote. But I definitely do have preferences as well, you know.

(Dave at 00:15:58) Yeah. No. I think that makes a lot of sense.

(Joel Beasley at 00:16:00) To change topics, I'm curious about, you know, you said you sold that company, you're a CEO. Why not go start another company? What was your thought pattern there?

(Dave at 00:16:08) Yeah, interesting one. I mean, I was president of the division that I was running. So I sold the company that I was CEO of—I didn't found it, I took over from the founder—to this conglomerate, and they made me president of a division that was really, really exciting.

(Dave at 00:16:22) It took a while for me to convince myself that I could be number, you know, a COO reporting to the CEO versus the CEO, because in the last ten years or so, that's mainly what I've done. But I've got a great CEO, and we complement each other's skill sets really well. So I get to bring some of the experience that I've had at scale. He brings a ton of insight and financial insight and knowledge that I don't have, frankly. So I felt through the interview process that I was the yin to his yang, or the other way around, right? And that this could work, and this could work well. I think in future, possibly another CEO role is on the cards, but we've got time for that yet.

(Joel Beasley at 00:17:09) That's exciting. Yeah, I always like people who are at the top running business, because I have found that the only way to lead people is to raise the bar for yourself and expect more of yourself. I don't think you can expect—I think it's weird to expect more from others if you're not pushing yourself. How do you grow yourself? Like, what's some of the tough things that you're doing?

(Dave at 00:17:30) That's a really good question. I mean, I think this is tangential to the last question and the one you just asked. I think it's important to surround yourself with people you can learn from, right? And life gets pretty—depending on the type of person you are, not everyone's the same. The world would be boring if that was the case. But for me, life gets pretty boring pretty quickly if I can't learn from the people who are around me. And that's immediately obvious with the leadership team that we have at CP. I can learn from each and every one of them, and I hope that I can impart some knowledge to them as well. I've never actually—it is true—I've never not had sales and marketing roll up to me until this role that I'm in right now. So I've had to go a lot deeper on technology, measurement of technology, in terms of: Are we building the right things? And are we building them in the right way? And are we delivering them to the market in the right way? So I've had to go much, much deeper on that. That's been where I've been pushing myself hard to learn more. Recently did a what's called a Pragmatic Marketing course, but it's actually, despite the name, focused on product development. And how do you understand the market needs, and how do you generate the correct products to meet those problems that exist in the market? And of course, then how do you validate that you've built the right thing? So that's been an area of development for me, and I've thoroughly enjoyed it because it's not something I had to put a lot of thought into in the past versus, you know, top-line revenue. How do we—are we meeting the market need would be where I would focus, versus how did we come up with the products and are they of the right quality? That was like a leading input to the lagging output, right, which is revenue.

(Joel Beasley at 00:19:24) So you talked about, you know, understanding market needs, generating the correct products, validating them. Can you tell me a little bit about some of the points that stuck with you after taking that?

(Dave at 00:19:34) Yeah, I mean, one of the biggest points was the needs of the many versus the needs of the few, right? And what often happens in businesses is a sales guy will come in and say, "Hey, I've got this deal. I'm good. I can get it over the line. It's a big deal. I'm going to do my number. All I need is this feature or function," right? And in a lot of businesses, it's very, very tempting to say, "Sure, we'll build that for you." And you become a kind of a production house for the needs of that one customer or the needs of that one salesperson. And what we focused on in the course was, you know, what does the market need? What's the problem we're trying to address, and how applicable is it to—and to what size of market—so that you're building something that can be delivered multiple times to multiple different users and deliver value to each of those consuming entities? So it's a change in focus from the micro to the macro. And I think oftentimes you'll validate your own biases if you want to build something, right? I think this is a really—

(Joel Beasley at 00:20:38) Of course.

(Dave at 00:20:39) Yeah, so I think this is a really good idea. This red button that does X, Y, and Z—we should go build one of those, right? Versus what does the red—instead of deciding on a red button, decide what problem you're trying to solve. And we talked a lot about how you describe that to engineering. You know, typically solution managers will come in and say, "I need a red button," and engineering will go and build a red button versus, "Hey, I'm trying to find a way to automatically open a door when somebody has their hands full," for example. That's a different thing. A red button might not be the best solution to that problem, right? So I think giving the folks who are building more say on how you solve the problem brings those two orgs closer together.

(Joel Beasley at 00:21:27) What do you call the person that's like head of product or head of engineering?

(Dave at 00:21:31) We have an SVP of Research and Development, but typically the two personas I spoke of there would be a solution director or a solution manager talking to a product owner, the product owner being the engineering person responsible for the product.

(Joel Beasley at 00:21:47) And what do you look for when you're—let's narrow it down to talk about an SVP of Research and Development. What qualities would they have if you were hiring that position? What would you be looking for?

(Dave at 00:22:00) That's a really good question. I think in that position, curiosity and leadership qualities from a perspective of wanting to lead, not manage, right? I think for me, the difference between somebody who can manage a process and someone who can lead people is a marked difference. And it really is not telling people where to go, but having them follow where you're going, having them understand why you're going there. And I think it's very easy to confuse those and to get caught up in KPIs, get caught up in data, but really focus on the outputs. Yeah, data is one way you measure an output, but if the sales of your company are healthy, the retention of your company is healthy, your customers' opinions of you are satisfactory or good, then the natural conclusion one would come to is you're building good product and you're selling it and delivering it in the right way, right? So I think that's, for me, the—there's that management mindset and then there's a leadership mindset, and I tend to look for the latter. I'm not a big believer—no, what I want my leaders to be in everything is metric-driven. It's more about here's the outcomes we're trying to achieve, and yes, there are metrics associated to those, but I trust you on how you can get there. I'm not going to tell you how. I want you to figure out that path, because that's what you're empowered to do.

(Joel Beasley at 00:23:28) Yeah, a few years ago, somebody—I think it was the CTO of Williams Sonoma—he was talking about an outcome-based approach and how to do that. And he had made some suggestion that ultimately resulted in me going to my team members and essentially saying, "Here's the outcome I want, and then figure out how to get there and what the KPIs are along the way, and then bring them to me." And that changed everything for me, because once I had them figuring out what the KPIs are, then I could kind of coach them on the KPIs. If they were good, it would be, you know, thumbs up. But if they needed some work, I would sort of help them on it. But then they were involved in the entire process. And then if they don't hit their KPIs, you know, it's on them because they created them. It was not something that was, you know, messaging that came down from above and a command, you know. It was a project that they're working on.

(Dave at 00:24:19) Completely agree. I mean, it's even for me—that goes as far as time management, right? It's like, I want this particular outcome. How you manage your time is up to you, as long as this is the outcome that you deliver, versus my best employee is the one who does twelve hours a day, right? That's not necessarily true. And oftentimes, oftentimes the converse is true.

(Joel Beasley at 00:24:39) I actively try to get them not to work twelve hours a day. Yeah, I'm a founder and this is my, you know, third, fourth company. And I know that you can do that, and I know how ineffective it is.

(Dave at 00:24:53) Completely agree. Completely agree. And I think the other thing that we touched on there that's interesting is KPIs, right? If you can—if you say, "I need to measure this," then people will start by deciding what's measurable and working from there, right? Versus, "I need you to maximize the revenue of the business or the output of your function. Let's maximize that, and the rest will come, and we'll measure it based on the outcome versus whether it's specifically measurable that what you did impacted that outcome." So it's a different way, as I say, different way of leading. And there's all sorts of generational opinions on what the best way is, right? And you see it working across generations of leaders in different ways with the different applications, and I don't know that there's one perfect outcome, but I know that if people feel empowered, they'll drive a better outcome for you.

(Joel Beasley at 00:25:51) Oh, absolutely. It's heavily influenced by the culture of the organization. One more point I want to add to the KPIs: So I was nervous at first a few years ago, thinking that if we had these people come up with the KPIs and then held them to the KPIs, that they might feel like they're being monitored, you know, type deal. But obviously we're monitoring the outcome. But one of the things I found is it didn't happen. It didn't play out that way. It actually played out in a completely opposite way. By them coming up with the KPIs, by establishing the KPIs towards the outcome, that gave them the bar and the metric in which to feel successful. So they weren't just like working at random. They had this very specific thing that they were going towards, and they would feel successful when they hit it. And for me, from the business side, I'm like, I don't really care as long as we have good culture and sales is happening and the salespeople are hitting their number—just, you know, share what's working. But to the point of not feeling monitored, I think a lot of newer leaders might be scared to do that, because I was.

(Dave at 00:27:00) It's interesting. We've had a new leader join our business through an acquisition recently, and he used the term, "Look, we're measuring you so that we can catch you being successful," right? It's not about measuring you to catch you when you're not successful. It's like, if we all agree the KPIs and we're all marching in the same direction, then we can celebrate your successes. I like that phrase. I'd not heard it said that way, but it's very similar to what you said. It's—I personally, and I think most people prefer to know whether they're successful versus going to sleep wondering, you know, I know I worked hard today, but did I do the right things? You know, does the person who I report to or the company—do they view what I've just done as a net contributor of value? And I think KPIs help you to say, "Yeah, you know what? Absolutely. Here's your contribution. Here's why it matters."

(Joel Beasley at 00:27:52) I love that. I'm going to steal that. I'm going to share it a bunch. I will absolutely give you and your team member's credit.

(Dave at 00:28:00) I'll use Wayback, and you can use that one.

(Joel Beasley at 00:28:04) It's a nice exchange, right?

(Dave at 00:28:05) It's an exchange. Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:28:06) Yeah. So the culture there—can you describe what it's like to work at CivicPlus?

(Dave at 00:28:12) Yeah, it's interesting. I got asked this question over the last few days, and it is a Midwest-founded company that has grown to become an international business. So it's come through a huge amount of change and a huge amount of dilution of the core founding culture. But what stayed consistent is the focus on team, on the core values, on being a team player, being innovative, being open, being open-minded, to look after, you know, your colleagues. And then the other thing that's an underlying current is what I said to you at the start as to why I joined—was everybody there wants to make a difference, right? Everybody there kind of cares about the customers, the outcomes. And even as we've gone from, you know, Midwest U.S. to having West Coast, East Coast offices, and now offices in Copenhagen and London and Sydney, that changes the culture, right? It changes the people who have input on the overarching culture. But we've not missed a beat. I mean, there's been enough overlap in ideals, overlapping kind of just a generally morality-led way of getting after business, that everybody felt comfortable and just kind of came along for the ride, you know. I think the most interesting change recently is we had a big change in demographic where we have a lot of SDRs—so a lot of younger folks that came into the business—and the work-life balance question came up more often. And it was uncomfortable at times, right? Like, "Why are you sending email whilst on vacation? You know, you're making everyone else feel that they should be working whilst they're on vacation." And it definitely changed the culture and opened the eyes of people who've been maybe in business a little longer and thought, you know, thought differently about it. But the overall productivity output wasn't negatively impacted, right? Just everyone felt better about it. So we're putting a lot more focus on that work-life balance part recently, and it's, you know, we're not perfect—there are people who work late—but in the main, there is a general acceptance that if you can look after you, you'll do more for the company. So I'm not sure that got right down to the culture there, but it's certainly how I think about it.

(Joel Beasley at 00:30:40) No, it sounds a lot like us. In all of my interviews, I tell people that if you don't have the bandwidth to pour into your personal relationships, whether it's your spouse or your friends or your community or your church, whatever it may be—if you're not maintaining that part of your life outside of your work life, then you're going to be less effective at your work life.

(Dave at 00:30:58) True. Absolutely true.

(Joel Beasley at 00:31:00) Let's take the opportunity. Are you hiring right now?

(Dave at 00:31:03) We are hiring. We are watching the markets really closely, and, you know, there's obviously a lot of change in the cost of doing business, in the cost of hiring folks. We've grown significantly. I mean, I joined and we had 280 employees. We now have 950 members. So we've grown significantly through acquisition, but we are hiring, and we're always hiring, and we're always looking for good talent—for everything from the folks who design and implement our websites to the engineers that develop the various software products that we have in our business, you know, financial analysts, business people. The list goes on. It's, you know, we're very lucky. Yes, the economy is on a difficult trajectory, but gov tech is strong. You know, local governments and counties are very, very well funded, largely thanks to the last two administrations, actually, which means that the investment in technology is going to continue, the need to continue to leverage technology. So that means we can continue to hire and contribute.

(Joel Beasley at 00:32:13) And do you have like a dedicated acquisition team? Is it a core part of your business model now for growth, or is it just you and your CEO scanning companies?

(Dave at 00:32:22) No, we have a dedicated team—small team of two very, very experienced M&A professionals. And then we have our own investors who bought a majority share in our business about just over a year ago. And they obviously have huge M&A teams. So we look at the—we look at it very much like we talked about problems, right?

(Dave at 00:32:43) We looked at it as where could we expand our TAM, our total addressable market, or what products would help us expand our TAM or increase stickiness with our customers. And then we use that to overlay on the known companies that are there, and that kind of gives you a discovery list. Right? I have these six companies that might meet this need, and then you can narrow that down to see who may be open to a conversation or who do you have to continue to develop over the coming years.

(Joel Beasley at 00:33:12) At your previous company, were you involved in a lot of M&A?

(Dave at 00:33:16) Yeah. Yeah. We did a lot of M&A at my last business as well. So I have, you know, relatively good depth there. It's an interesting world actually because it's like when you decide to buy a car, you'll go out and you'll say I need a functional vehicle that will get me from point A to point B and I'd like air conditioning, I'd like this, I'd like that.

(Dave at 00:33:39) Typically, you'll end up with one you really like the look of, and you'll find a reason for that to be the one that you buy. And I think companies are often like that. You have a sound hypothesis. You have a sound financial model for doing it, but the softer things around the edges—and we touched on culture—is often the thing that takes it over the line. This is gonna be a good fit for us, a good fit for me in the consumer purchase model, right? But it's not just financial health. It's not just metrics that drive those buying decisions. There's other things like who the leadership are and how that culture will integrate that drive those decisions.

(Joel Beasley at 00:34:15) Oh, absolutely. Because, you know, if one company is 10% more profitable but has a 40% chance of the culture clashing and it dropping out, then you take the one that has a better culture match, right?

(Dave at 00:34:28) Yeah, exactly. Exactly. Hit the nail on the head.

(Joel Beasley at 00:34:31) Yeah. People are tough. People is the hardest part about business.

(Dave at 00:34:34) No doubt. Yeah. And I mean, every day somebody will surprise you in leadership, right? You'll either get more out of someone or less out of someone or a reaction you weren't expecting. But I mean, going back to our everybody being the same would be boring, it's true in business too. You need diversity, you need diversity of thought so that you can make the best decisions and keep the business moving forward.

(Joel Beasley at 00:34:59) 100%. In fact, that's like the recipe for success. If everybody's thinking the exact same way, you're gonna get a very vanilla product. And I find that, you know, for me personally, I obviously have a smaller company, and I haven't really run businesses more than a hundred people. So I have found that there's a lot of natural diversity just in the interviewing process. Right? And that, for me, I haven't had to seek it out much because I know it's a large part of public conversation, but I just personally haven't had to seek it out much. The candidates that come tend to naturally be diverse, and then I look heavily for culture fit more around, you know, work ethic and life view and then ability to perform the job. So, yeah, that's what I'm looking for when hiring.

(Dave at 00:35:48) Yeah. I agree. I mean, you gotta hire the best candidates possible. I think it's important to have a diverse slate. Sometimes it happens naturally. Actually, I ran a business in South Florida not too far from Sarasota, and we got a lot of diversity just naturally. And in this business, we have to try a little bit harder. And the acquisitions helped us, right? The East and West Coast aspects helped us. The Midwest was not as naturally diverse as the other parts of the country just from a function of pure geographics, and you have to work harder at that and make sure that you've got representation from different cultures and backgrounds. And of course, I grew up in Europe. I've run businesses in Europe. So that tends to give you an element of diverse thinking that might not necessarily exist in a pure US-focused business.

(Joel Beasley at 00:36:39) Yeah. Like, you come to my town. It's like farming town. Everyone grew up being a farmer. Yeah.

(Dave at 00:36:43) Yeah. Exactly.

(Joel Beasley at 00:36:44) It doesn't matter what your skin color is or what your gender is. Everyone grew up farmer. And then, you know, you want a diverse team. You want some farmers, you want some city people, you know, you want some military brats. You want some people that have traveled to 20 different countries. You know, you get a lot of different people. Musicians. I love musicians for some reason because, well, we make audio, so we tend to hire a lot of musicians.

(Dave at 00:37:08) And musicians and developers often share a lot of traits, right? We have a lot of our development team are key musicians, so I think the way they think, the way creative people think, can fit a number of different professional applications.

(Joel Beasley at 00:37:24) Do you do any music at all?

(Dave at 00:37:26) I do not. I sing badly sometimes after too many gins but, it's not. I'd love to though. I would love to play music and it's one of those things I'll do someday, right? But I'm not creative. Can't pretend to be, at least not in the musical sense.

(Joel Beasley at 00:37:45) So your outlet is fitness then?

(Dave at 00:37:48) Yeah. Fitness, tennis mainly.

(Joel Beasley at 00:37:50) Okay.

(Dave at 00:37:50) Family. Yeah, we all play tennis, my wife, my son, and I, so we spend a lot of time in that arena. And then fitness and golf is the other outlet.

(Joel Beasley at 00:38:02) What's the call to action? I want to be aware of the time. I know you have a hard stop.

(Dave at 00:38:05) Yeah. I mean, I think for resident users or professional users alike, hitting the civicplus.com website is a great resource to learn more about the business. And I think from a GovTech perspective, thinking about whether your residents trust you, how you can build that trust for residents, how you can open up those communication channels, but control those communication channels as well, which is important. All those things are how we found a direct correlation between the availability of good and robust technology and how much residents trust their local government. That's a statistically proven fact that if I can get access and I can use technology to interact with my local government, I will in turn trust them. So I think that was interesting for me because it's not somewhere your mind would naturally go in terms of why I trust or why I don't trust, but it's vitally important for people to be able to access vital services, and that's what CivicPlus provides. So I would say civicplus.com is probably the best resource.

(Joel Beasley at 00:39:14) I buy that. And the reason why is because if you go to submit a Freedom of Information Act and it's like, here's 20 paper forms and here's 18 loops you have to jump through, it's all of a sudden like, what are you hiding? Yeah.

(Dave at 00:39:24) But if

(Joel Beasley at 00:39:24) you have a good system set up to deliver it, then it's like you're like, oh, okay. You get your answer. You exercised your freedom of information and you move on. Right?

(Dave at 00:39:34) Exactly. And most people in government and most people accessing government services are doing so because they want to achieve something. Right? They don't necessarily want to engage in a conversation. They wanna get a transaction completed much like banking. I want to achieve a transaction. Right? I wanna transfer some money. I wanna take some money out, whatever it is you wanna do with the bank. You don't necessarily wanna engage in a two-way conversation, but that doesn't mean to say you don't trust them and you don't need some form of relationship there, and I think technology when built right allows people to get done what they want to get done and discover the information that is important to them, whether that's something as kind of deep as a Freedom of Information Act request or something as simple as what hours is my town hall open, right? Or Wednesday, when's the Christmas parade happening? So it's a wide and varied plethora of services that people wanna access and you gotta make them all fit for purpose.

(Joel Beasley at 00:40:32) I love that smart people like you are out there doing that because I don't think about it until I show up at the permit office. You know? And just to know that you're spending your days making that easier for the rest of us, thank you.

(Dave at 00:40:46) You're more than welcome. I mean, it's a long journey, right? As we said at the start, it's this technology evolution that of course started ten years ago, but really was accelerated during the pandemic and now it's like look at all the stuff we could do with this and, you know, adversity breeds invention. That's been proven time and time again and I think the recent adversity we've all faced has been a wonderful opportunity for innovation and for hardening the technology that already existed and kind of making it more robust and consumable.

(Joel Beasley at 00:41:23) I fully agree. I mean, the pandemic, you saw some people completely crashed, and then other people figured out how to find the opportunity in the chaos.

(Dave at 00:41:34) It's important. Yeah. Keep innovating.

(Joel Beasley at 00:41:37) Thank you so much for listening. And if you found this episode useful, please share it with a friend or colleague who you think would get value from it. And if you have topics that you'd like to hear discussed on the podcast, either add me on LinkedIn or send me an email [email protected]. Every time I get an email or LinkedIn message, it absolutely makes my day and inspires me to keep going.