Ken Haigh - Empowering Non-Profit Organizations With World-Class Tech & Focusing on Outcomes

(Intro Narrator at 00:00:00) Hello, my friends. Today, Joel is talking to Ken, the CTO and COO at Omatic, and they discuss how Omatic is empowering nonprofit organizations with world-class technology, why companies are leading with their mission and culture when competing for the best new recruits, and learning to let go of how something gets done to focus on the outcome. All of this right here, right now, on the Modern CTO podcast.

(Ken at 00:00:29) Here we go.

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:30) This is the Modern CTO podcast. But what got you into technology?

(Ken at 00:00:44) Sure. Yeah. I was a computer science major. I actually got my master's at Georgia Tech. And after I left Georgia Tech, I went to a company. I actually was a software engineer for the very first WYSIWYG word processor. It was called MePro. It was acquired by Lotus. I worked at Lotus Development Corporation. And, you know, of course, we named it later to Lotus WordPro. But after IBM had acquired Lotus, I went and left and started a company called SynchroLogic, and I was an architect and engineering manager there. It was late nineties, early 2000s. And we actually did data synchronization for mobile devices. So we were way ahead of the curve a little bit on that. I was at a company called SynchroLogic, I think I mentioned. And, you know, we were a survivor of that dot-com bubble, which was pretty rough. But, you know, eventually we were acquired. We changed our name to IntelliSync, and then we sold that company to Nokia in 2006.

(Joel Beasley at 00:01:46) Oh, that's amazing. And then is that when you got involved with Omatic?

(Ken at 00:01:51) You know, at that point, I moved to Charleston and I actually worked at a company called Blackbaud, which, oh yeah, where I was the director of software development for the CRM products. And I did that for about four years. Blackbaud, of course, is the leading provider of software and services for nonprofit organizations. And, you know, after that, I was there for four years, and then I did two more startup companies. One was called PeopleMatter, and I was the CTO there and the COO. And we sold that to Snagajob. And then there's another company I started, which was called Radioactive, which did software and services for business execution. And then, you know, I've landed at Omatic Software as a CTO and kind of wear a lot of hats here.

(Joel Beasley at 00:02:34) Oh, but you're very entrepreneurial as well.

(Ken at 00:02:37) Yes. Yeah, I've had a couple of successful exits.

(Joel Beasley at 00:02:40) Oh, I love it. See, there we go. This is great. So do you know Marybeth Westmoreland?

(Ken at 00:02:45) I do. Very well. She's a very, very good friend of mine.

(Joel Beasley at 00:02:48) Oh, is she?

(Ken at 00:02:49) Oh, yes. She used to live right around the corner from me. Yeah. We live in the same neighborhood.

(Joel Beasley at 00:02:53) Oh, small world. Yeah. I met her through another guy who knew her named Peter. He was the CTO of TaxSlayer. And so I met Peter, then he introduced me to Marybeth, and then she came on the podcast and gave just some awesome leadership insight and advice. And, yeah, it was really, really cool getting to meet all of these people. So you go ahead.

(Ken at 00:03:14) Yeah. Obviously, we're really good friends. You know, of course, she's at Amazon now.

(Joel Beasley at 00:03:17) Oh, she is? Man, Amazon just keeps getting some really great people. Who else went to Amazon? Oh, so David Spitsky was the first employee of Alexa, and then he just went over to Amazon Web Services. Yeah. Cool. All right. So then why Omatic? Why didn't you found another company?

(Ken at 00:03:37) Yeah. I wanted to get back into the nonprofit space. You know, I love working with companies that are focused on a mission and love to be able to help them to succeed in their mission. So, you know, really, we can do that here at Omatic through our integration platform. You know, our goal is to help them accelerate that mission impact by connecting their systems together. So it was a good opportunity, good growth opportunity, and something I was passionate about.

(Joel Beasley at 00:04:07) Give me some hard stuff that I can chew on and understand. Connecting systems, data for nonprofits. But do you have a specific case study or example of something that you've done for a nonprofit?

(Ken at 00:04:22) Yeah. You can, you know, just to kind of, maybe it would help if I go back and maybe discuss some of the differences between nonprofits and for-profits and then specifically talk about some of the integration needs. Would that be helpful?

(Joel Beasley at 00:04:34) Sure.

(Ken at 00:04:35) Yep. So, you know, I want to be kind of careful with generalizations. You know, so I want to provide a caveat just because I have some clients that are very well funded. They run great operations. They have incredible technologists there. And, you know, sometimes there are large universities, hospitals, maybe a large institution with sort of a million-dollar annual budget. You know, I'd like to think, you know, but for a large portion of them, they have some kind of unique challenges. Right? They can't adopt the technology. You know, I believe technology is an enabler to help them, and making sure it's integrated into their organizational strategy is important. But, you know, for some of them, they can't. And that's because they exist because they have to pursue a mission. So they're not just motivated by profit. They're actually trying to do good in the world. And so their governance is a little different. You know, it can be more program-driven. The structure of their staff or administration is different. They have a unique set of corporate law and regulations that are unique for nonprofits. And so, you know, unlike a for-profit that, you know, they have, they can't reinvest. They have to reinvest their money basically into the mission. And they can't pass those profits on. And so it creates some challenges. You know, in particular, there's some challenges with money. They have limited access to capital. Often they face restrictions on how that money is spent. They might get a restricted gift to, you know, that's given by a donor to a certain program. They might receive a grant that restricts a certain percentage that is used for administration. And so these restrictions can make it really difficult for a nonprofit to invest in technology and other products. You know, donors demand transparency and accountability, how they're spent. You know, they want all that money to go to a cause. And so the funding sources, the policy decision, you know, conditions can change quickly. It can affect organizational priorities, a lot of uncertainty. And so, you know, with your company, you or my company, we could charge more. We can have a service that you can lock people into, but they can't do that. So it creates a lot of challenges of money, which in turn creates challenges for staffing. They're kind of like a small business. So you're having to wear a lot of hats because there's challenges with money. You'll see an executive director will often have program and management responsibilities, have to be the chief fundraiser. You know, I deal with office managers that are often responsible for finances, HR, technology, facilities. They don't have a tech background. You know, hopefully, they might have an IT manager. And so then it creates this challenge for time. And so they have very limited staff resources. They're constantly fundraising. They have a lack of investment in administrative systems. And so, you know, I was talking to a director of development yesterday who didn't even have time to make an investment in having the staff trained on a system because they're so focused on fundraising. And so technology just gets in the way for them. And they're, you know, of course, you know, driven to achieve their mission, and they have very limited resources often. The measures of success are often very unreachable. You know, and depending on the cause, you know, they can't just go home. You know, like a food bank manager. If you've got a line around the other corner, you know, you're going to have to serve the folks. And so it can leave the burnout and so they have high turnover. So, you know, given they have staffing challenges, they have these challenges with money and time. The other thing that's kind of interesting about them is with a nonprofit, you actually have multiple constituencies. So, like, if I'm, like, for my company, I typically just have one or two buying personas for a customer. But, you know, we have a very well-worn customer journey. But it's a little bit more complex for a nonprofit. You know, they have, you know, they might have donors. You have volunteers. I have supporters. I have visitors to a museum. You know, major gift donors. I kind of event registrants. I deal with students, alumni from higher ed, grateful patients if I'm over in healthcare, and so on. So it creates a lot of multiple paths of engagement, which often requires, you know, more systems of engagement from a technology perspective. And so, you know, ultimately, it has a great impact on their ability to execute on a technology strategy. You know, they have more systems that they need. They can't integrate. They don't have the technical expertise to manage those. And even if they did have that expertise, they don't have a lot of time, and then they can't spend a lot of money. And so that's really where our product kind of comes into play. And the irony is that they're rolling in data. And they've got data all over the place that they're collecting, and they can't drive insight. So with our product in particular, it helps be able to connect their system of engagement to the CRM system. We can help, you know, clean that data up along the way, make sure it's not duplicated. And so as a result, if you have good data, I can do such a better job of interacting. You know, so much of nonprofits is relationships. And so I want to make sure that all my interactions with all the different types of constituencies is going to be a good one. It's going to be positive. I have good insight, you know. And if I could communicate well and have that relationship, you know, I'm more likely to retain them as a donor. I can ask for more money. And then, you know, we can really help if we can automate a lot of these processes. It helps them from an operational efficiency standpoint. So that's what our product does.

(Joel Beasley at 00:09:53) So how do you sell it? Is it a time-saving thing? Is it donor retention?

(Ken at 00:10:00) Yeah. You know, when you look at the ROI, both those things you just mentioned are really important to the ROI of the system. You know, I would say that, you know, with this automation and having good, complete, current data and that accurate 360-degree picture of a constituent, they can actually are able to raise more money. Right? So they can ask for more money because they have better insight, you know, whether through some kind of wealth ratings. But also, certainly retention is important, certainly time savings. And that's really the ROI for the product.

(Joel Beasley at 00:10:31) Now is Omatic itself a charitable organization?

(Ken at 00:10:35) We're a for-profit company that serves specifically social good organizations.

(Joel Beasley at 00:10:41) I like it. So I am actually the president of a 501(c)(3), and I have very limited experience with it. We basically, my mom passed away and we took her life insurance money. She left us between the three of the siblings, she left us $25,000 collectively. And we were like, well, we could go on a trip together and remember her. We could do something. And at the same time, my wife was pregnant with our first kid. And I said, you know what we could do? We could do children's books. Right? And then we could do a foundation and then print these children's books up and, uh, that way our kids will remember, like our grandma. Right? And so we went and did that. Right? And after it was all done, it cost us, I don't know, six or $7,000 to do it all. You know, we hired this great designer that was like a Disney artist and everything. And we did two books. One's called Princess Physicist. Uh, it's a princess who gets stuck in a tower, but instead of a man coming to save her, she finds a book on physics under the bed and uses physics to get herself out.

(Ken at 00:11:44) That's cool.

(Joel Beasley at 00:11:45) And then Back to the Moon, which is a little brother and sister who want to go to the moon and to encourage space travel. So we did these two books and we had all this money left over and then we were like, what do we do? And that's when we came up with the foundation idea and printed like, I think, ten, fifteen thousand books and then just went and gave them away everywhere. Which was our first mistake because then we didn't have any money to continue it.

(Ken at 00:12:09) Right. Well you got to get out there and start fundraising, right?

(Joel Beasley at 00:12:13) That's right. But then we found this cool software called like Anedot, which I think you probably integrate with, right? But they do charitable donations online. They have a really nice user interface and we ended up using them and then selling through Shopify and so people would buy them on the website. And then that generated enough money to put in another batch of orders to keep it going. But through all of that, and the reason why I bring this up and I'm talking so much about it is I got to trying to deliver the books to the nonprofits. I understand deeply what you're talking about.

(Ken at 00:12:51) Mhmm.

(Joel Beasley at 00:12:52) Because I would meet with them and try to set up a time to give them books or go to, and then I got to meet with some of the people that were running these nonprofits. Specifically one was called Alpha House of Tampa. They do housing for homeless pregnant women. Right? And I was like, well, that's perfect for the children's books. Right? So, man, they're on such a shoestring budget and so many people doing so many different things. And from the outside, it looks like an amazing operation. And then getting to meet all the people working themselves to the bone inside to make it reality. It gave me a lot of respect for these organizations and how hard they work.

(Ken at 00:13:28) Yeah. Very hard. Yeah. They're wearing a lot of hats, like you said, you know, limited budgets. They're constantly, you know, focused on pursuing that mission. And so some of the operational items get deprioritized, which is unfortunate. I do believe, though, that technology can be a big enabler to help them be successful. So sometimes it's catching that vision.

(Joel Beasley at 00:13:50) And how did you first find out about Omatic?

(Ken at 00:13:56) You know, I knew people in my network that had worked here. They took a couple passes at me. I'll be honest with you. The CEO, Dan Kim, you know, we had a relationship and he tried previously to pull me on board when I had my own company. And the second time, he convinced me. And I'm really glad I made the switch.

(Joel Beasley at 00:14:18) And so how is the suite of tools built? Help me understand. Is this a consultative concept where you are patching proprietary systems together or you have a suite of integrations and you use those or a little bit of both? How does that actually happen?

(Ken at 00:14:33) Yeah. We would be considered what's called an integration software as a service or maybe an ISaaS or maybe even iPaaS technology. So it's really, it's in the cloud. It connects, you know, cloud systems together. Our wrinkle on it, because of some of the challenge that we talked about, just they don't have a lot of time, they don't have a large stack to be able to build their own integration.

(Ken at 00:14:57) And so we kind of have prebuilt—we call them formulas—for a lot of the common business flows that they tend to have. They're going to have to process a lot of gift entry for these systems. And you talked about some of the online systems. You now have a lot of great online fundraising systems. With COVID, a lot of stuff went online. There's a lot of peer-to-peer type giving that happens.

(Ken at 00:15:19) You know, they're collecting all sorts of information. People are updating their contact information. So we facilitate a lot of those flows and have kind of pre-thought some of the challenges that you probably don't realize occur within nonprofit organizations. Like, you know, how things get—how you soft credit someone if you're a solicitor or whatever. How to make sure that the data lands in such a way that it's going to be linked up correctly so that you can provide the right recognition.

(Joel Beasley at 00:15:49) What did you call that? Soft credits? What's that?

(Ken at 00:15:51) Soft credits. Yeah. It's just, you know, sometimes—a hard credit is when I give money to someone, I get the hard credit. But you can also get a soft credit on behalf of someone else. Like, you have a foundation, right? So we have a foundation, and I get soft credits at my university anytime that foundation gives. That would be a good example. Or, you know, if it gives to the university on my behalf.

(Joel Beasley at 00:16:19) Oh, interesting. Do you have any good real-life examples of problems that you guys have solved for customers?

(Ken at 00:16:26) Yeah. You know, there's a couple big problems with data entry. So you can imagine if people are updating their contact information, and sometimes it comes in like all caps. Sometimes the name is misspelled. We work very hard to try to make sure that we don't create a duplicate record. So it would be nothing more embarrassing if somebody keyed something in wrong and you actually—if I want to acknowledge somebody and I get two letters, right, for some activity, or the name is spelled wrong, we're going to help to make sure that we can transform and clean up that data on the way in. Also, make sure that we're not going to create duplicates in their system of record. Does that make sense?

(Joel Beasley at 00:17:10) Yeah. Yeah. No, it's completely—that's useful, right? Because then you're not, you know—duplicate records are the worst because getting double emailed about donations, that's frustrating.

(Ken at 00:17:21) Well, it's embarrassing, right? And it's all about relationships, and they want to make sure people want to feel appreciated. And so you don't really want to have a bad experience for a supporter.

(Joel Beasley at 00:17:32) And so you've got a whole team of engineers that's helping build out this technology?

(Ken at 00:17:39) Yes. Yeah. They're, you know, probably—I want to say we're in the twenty to thirty range. I need to go look, actually, probably at this point from a team perspective. We're growing pretty quick. Yeah, they're a great team. What I love about, you know, working here—some of them are really—they care about the customer and the mission impact. And that's why a lot of us have come to join here. You know, it's interesting. It's gotten hard to recruit these days. I don't know if you talk to other CTOs, if you're talking to people. The last couple months, something really interesting has happened. What happened is everybody went hybrid or they went 100% remote because we've kind of learned new ways to work. And so everybody is now competing nationally for talent. So it was great at first, but now what's happened is that all the wages have kind of flattened across the board. The cost of switching jobs is so low now that, you know, it's really easy to—it's really hard, I should say. It's harder to retain folks. You know, I call it like the great flattening has occurred basically. It's really over the last couple months. Someone I heard say that, you know, the war for talent is no longer about compensation as a result, but it's about culture. You know, I would say probably culture is probably overused sometimes, that word. It's probably lost a little meaning. But I'm not even sure if that's exactly right. I'm not sure if it's really all about culture. I would say, you know, there's this—you ever heard this word, there's a Japanese word called ikigai? You ever heard that term before?

(Joel Beasley at 00:19:13) Uh, no.

(Ken at 00:19:14) No. Yeah. And so it means a reason for being, or it's a concept of having sort of direction or purpose in life. And, you know, working here, especially for me, is the intersection of ikigai. It's what I love to do. It's what I'm good at. It's what the world needs, and it's what I can get paid for. Right? And so if you kind of hit that, you know, you're ultimately going to retain people. You know, people long for purpose. They need a reason to get out of bed. That's ikigai. And so what I love about my team here is that we have that, right? We have—because of the nature of the work that we do, we get to use cutting-edge technology. We can pay them to be able to help these incredible organizations pursue their missions. And, you know, so it's needed by the world to make the world a better place. And, you know, we're good at it. So it really is a good team, and I really love the people I work with.

(Joel Beasley at 00:20:12) Yeah. I like that concept. I haven't thought about it much, what you were discussing with the great flattening. It makes sense though. Everyone's remote, then it becomes flat, and then people can switch easier too because they can just plug their systems right in. I mean, I wrote software for seventeen years. Like, if you want to move projects, it's not much harder to move projects outside of a company than it is within a company. Like, you can just set up your environment and go.

(Ken at 00:20:40) Yeah. It's crazy. You know, you put your resignation notice in. I'm in my home office. I unplug, right? I send my computer in the mail. I get a new computer in the mail. I'm in my same office, and I start working on Monday in my new job. Yeah, that's what happens today.

(Joel Beasley at 00:20:57) And you're exactly right too. Like, I get the salary thing there. And I think it'll fluctuate based off of where they're at in their career too. But once you get to the top of a pay grade for a position, then it's really about who you're spending your time with and how those people behave, right? Because the work is the work.

(Ken at 00:21:19) And I'll tell you too, with some of the even younger generations, they want to make a difference in life, right? They want to pursue their passions. They want to pursue making the world a better place. And that message resonates so well. They're looking for purpose. They're longing for purpose. And so it's important that what they do matters. And so it's great that we can provide that automatically.

(Joel Beasley at 00:21:43) Do you think that the generation before didn't have that or just wasn't as connected with technology so we didn't see it, or was it not there?

(Ken at 00:21:51) Yeah. That's a good question. It seems like it shifted, I guess. You know, I've been doing this now probably—what, how long?—over thirty years. I can't even tell. Thirty years, I guess. Yeah. It's shifted a little bit. There was a little bit more of a focus—and again, this is a generalization—but a little bit more of a focus on making a profit and making it big and being a part of a unicorn and all that. And so there's a little bit of a shift, I would say.

(Joel Beasley at 00:22:17) That is true. Yeah. What about before that? Go back to like your dad and stuff. What was it like then?

(Ken at 00:22:23) Oh, my dad worked for the government. He told me to be an entrepreneur. Oh, that's hilarious. He thought, can't work for yourself. That's what he always told me.

(Joel Beasley at 00:22:36) Oh, man. But you guys have a good mission, so you must be helping those people get to their sweet spot in life.

(Ken at 00:22:45) Yeah. Actually, we have a company goal. So we use objectives and key results here. But our overall goal—we have a target mission impact index that we track. So we got a number, you know, that we're shooting for this year of how much mission impact that we're going to do. And that's based off of some of the ROI calculations that we talked about earlier.

(Joel Beasley at 00:23:05) That's pretty interesting. How do you—is it in a spreadsheet? Is it up on a wall? Where is it at?

(Ken at 00:23:10) Yeah. It's online, of course. You know, a lot of the stuff that we do now has to be online. But, yeah, we have a running total that gets updated. And it's really heavily dependent upon, you know, the more transactions and the more records that we can process really ultimately drive that number up.

(Joel Beasley at 00:23:26) Nice. And that's pretty motivating for the team there, isn't it?

(Ken at 00:23:28) Yep. Absolutely.

(Joel Beasley at 00:23:30) So I want to talk a little bit about leadership. I want to hear what your personal style is or what your personal approach to leadership is.

(Ken at 00:23:39) Yeah. You know, I would say it would tend to be a little bit more servant leadership. I will tell you that I adjust my leadership style depending on the person and depending upon the circumstance, right? So there are times when it requires me to be a little bit more of a facilitator, right? And to sometimes get out of the way and kind of help let them succeed. And especially with people who are just high motivation, you know, they have high ability, you tend to get out of their way and let them make a difference. In some cases, there are some opportunities where you need to be more in a supporting role. You need to be a little more oriented in training because as they're developing and they're growing in their career. So I'm going to invest a lot in those folks and do a lot of mentorship with folks in the organization. And then sometimes, you know, it has to be a little bit more directing when someone could be at—something could be at harm. So if the company's at harm, you know, if there's a security issue, if someone's career could be in jeopardy, you tend to be a little bit more directing. And so I'll vary my style depending upon that. But, you know, I have a core set of values that I'm going to be trying to be very consistent with. You know, we actually, when I got here—and I've been here about a year and a half—we actually adopted modern agile as our values, interestingly enough. So, you know, keeping safety a prerequisite. You know, we're going to experiment and learn rapidly, deliver value continuously, and we want to make people awesome. And all that's going to really drive customer impact. And so we try very hard to kind of live out those values and try to encourage others to live out their values.

(Joel Beasley at 00:25:26) I like that. And so when new engineers come into the team, like younger engineers, like the next generation, do you meet with them? Do you talk with them?

(Ken at 00:25:37) Absolutely. Yeah. Absolutely. Sometimes even in the recruiting process, I'll get involved. I'm actually, you know, right now the head of talent too. It's one of my responsibilities. So, you know, HR reports through me. But, yeah, I like to meet with everybody who comes on the team, especially now that we're so disconnected. Not everybody's back to the office, and we're also spread all over the place now. Actually, multiple time zones. And so I'll meet with folks to talk with them, see how they're doing. I do regular check-ins as well.

(Joel Beasley at 00:26:16) Nice. Nice. Yeah. We were mostly in the office before COVID. Now we're all over the country because we doubled our employees through the past year, but no one's coming in the office except for me. I'm here in the studio. So, but one of the things that we are having trouble with is really understanding the leadership capabilities of our different people, especially when you can't be around them all the time, right? And so we were trying to figure out, like, alright, how do we better understand where they're at today so that we can use them to their fullest potential and then train them. Because as you were saying, everybody's a little bit different. They all need a little bit of a different focus, and they all have different strengths and weaknesses. And so I went out on a journey to try to figure this out. And, yeah, I found all these different leadership assessment things. Have you had any luck with any of them?

(Ken at 00:27:06) Yeah. You know, I refer to what's called Leadership for Results is what we're using. You know, we have an executive coach that we use here that we roll out. And then also we use other processes from a talent management perspective to kind of make sure we look for people and attract the right folks upfront, making sure that they're kind of aligned with the values that we have here. And then you have to be intent—I mean, ultimately, like everything, you have to be intentional, right? So every quarter, you kind of need to make sure that with every single person in the organization, you know, what are you doing to help them? What kind of goals are we setting for them to be able to grow in their career? Especially when you have folks that are earlier in their career, they're looking for career paths. They're looking for opportunities to grow. And so you have to be able to provide those as a manager. And so we review—we review everybody in the organization. We're looking to see what the plan is to kind of help, you know, take them to the next level to be able to achieve their dreams here at Omatic if they'll stay.

(Joel Beasley at 00:28:11) Nice. Nice. That's actually really interesting. I was curious, like, if you were to design the perfect leadership program, what would the most important thing be?

(Ken at 00:28:21) Yeah. That's a good question. You know, I think there's probably a lot of good frameworks out there. I'm not sure if any of them are perfect. But ultimately, I think it's going to be tailored to the individual. I think you're really going to have to ultimately be able to assess people's skills and their competencies. There are some things that are just very hard to change, and you shouldn't try to change the hard things to change, right? You want to help them be able to maximize where their particular strengths are because, you know, there's a lot of effective leaders and they come from—they have a lot of different backgrounds, a lot of different skills and competencies. And so it's helping them kind of maximize those, helping them kind of realize those and grow as a leader. We like—I like leadership at all levels. So we make leadership training available to a large portion of the organization. And it's really helping them to be able to act in a very uncertain world, right? And to be able to go forward. You want to make sure that we have the right safety nets along the way so we don't blow our leg off. But, you know, I think it really—I think it has to be individually tailored. Good leadership programs individually tailor to people's strengths.

(Joel Beasley at 00:29:30) I like that. And this is what the Leadership for Results does?

(Ken at 00:29:33) That's one aspect that it highlights.

(Joel Beasley at 00:29:37) Oh, interesting. Well, I didn't find anything, so I went out and hired an organizational psychologist and built something.

(Ken at 00:29:45) Yeah, we, it comes from our, we have a coach that we use.

(Joel Beasley at 00:29:49) Oh, that's awesome. That's awesome. Really? Do you recommend them? Are they full-time or?

(Ken at 00:29:55) Yeah, they're full-time.

(Joel Beasley at 00:29:56) Yeah. Man, I've been so interested in learning about what these, you know, how the coaches work and what they're doing and what their problems are and what they're experiencing. Because, you know, that's the root of this podcast is raising up the next generation of leaders. And the more smart people I can connect with on growing leaders, the better, right?

(Ken at 00:30:15) Yeah. What you find eventually is you'll create a network or a tribe of folks over time. I have people here who work with me at three different companies.

(Joel Beasley at 00:30:25) That is super important.

(Ken at 00:30:27) Yeah. And so, yeah, it's a speed of trust, right? We've come to learn each other and understand what the expectations and what the standards that we have to operate at are. And so it just makes things go a lot faster. So it's great to have, it's great to work with people that I really enjoy being around and do an incredible job.

(Joel Beasley at 00:30:48) Well, you get to success faster too. You've got me thinking a lot in this interview, Ken, because that's one of the reasons why I keep doing better and better with each subsequent company is I keep finding great people on every—

(Ken at 00:31:04) Well, yeah, that's the idea. I mean, ultimately, you've got to have people. If you want to be operationally excellent at anything, you've got to have operationally excellent people.

(Joel Beasley at 00:31:14) So what's the most impactful leadership lesson that you've ever learned?

(Ken at 00:31:19) You know, I would say early on, I used to, I have an opinion on everything. I'll be honest with you. I have very particular ways. I tend to want to control things. And I had to learn to let go of that because that's not helpful all the time. It's not going to help people grow. Sometimes I'm wrong, right? And so I think that what's most important for me, I had to eventually let go of how we do something and really start to focus more on the outcome. So when I become more outcome-based, like, this is the outcome we're trying to achieve. You know, here's, let me help you or let me get out of the way for that. But if this is the outcome that we kind of agree upon, if we agree upon outcomes, then your team is going to be much more successful.

(Joel Beasley at 00:32:06) I like that. Outcome-driven.

(Ken at 00:32:08) Yeah. So, you know, this has been a thing for us here. You know, we really don't want to just focus on the activity. We really want to focus on the outcomes. And, you know, we do that with our goal setting especially. You know, first, when we set goals here, they used to be activity-driven. It's not about getting the thing done. It's about the customer outcome that you're driving. So that's been a pretty big culture shift for us over time.

(Joel Beasley at 00:32:31) What's the outcome for this interview? Do we have people who are going to go sign up for Omatic?

(Ken at 00:32:35) That's a good question. The marketing team probably has a number of outcomes for this. They'll probably reuse this content to be able to generate leads. I do have outcomes because I want to get the word about how great of a place Omatic is. So my outcomes would be, you know, the number of people who probably interact with this such that it would increase our funnel of candidates since we're hiring.

(Joel Beasley at 00:32:58) So how do people find out more about the jobs you're hiring, your company, your culture? Where do they go?

(Ken at 00:33:02) Just go right to our website, omaticsoftware.com.

(Joel Beasley at 00:33:07) Cool. Can we talk a little bit about some personal stuff? I'm just curious. What's the family like? What's your home life like?

(Ken at 00:33:12) Yeah, I'm about three months away from empty nesting. So, oh man, I'm almost there. I've got two sons and a daughter. And my oldest son has graduated. He actually is a software engineer. Actually, he's a DevOps engineer. So he got his job, and he's doing really well in that. My other son is in school, and he's a mechanical engineer. He's set to graduate. And then my daughter's about to go to college, incredibly sharp student. You know, I anticipate she'll be very successful. So I'm nearly there. You know, I've already moved to my retirement spot here in Charleston. So I can't wait to, you know, well, you know, of course, I spend a lot of time with my wife, but we get to spend even more time together.

(Joel Beasley at 00:34:00) Yeah. It'll be a whole different dynamic. You're going to get an RV and just travel the country?

(Ken at 00:34:04) I'm not sure about that. I don't know if I love the drive. We do a lot of staycations here.

(Joel Beasley at 00:34:10) Okay. All right. Yeah. That's, and you're in a beautiful place too, by the way. That's, and there's a lot of good food there. Actually, I have one of our team members is located there too. She's awesome.

(Ken at 00:34:21) Yeah. Yeah, yeah. Eating and drinking is our sport here in Charleston.

(Joel Beasley at 00:34:25) Yes. What type of technology are the kids into these days?

(Ken at 00:34:32) My children?

(Joel Beasley at 00:34:34) Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

(Ken at 00:34:34) Chris is, you know, he's working on a project, but he's using AWS. You know, they're actually doing a big project to migrate folks over into the cloud. So he's helping with that transition over to AWS.

(Joel Beasley at 00:34:48) Oh, nice. So he didn't come work for dad?

(Ken at 00:34:51) You know, he did an internship with me. And so he actually did a lot of work on that platform, which probably got him the job.

(Joel Beasley at 00:34:59) Nice. Nice.

(Ken at 00:35:00) There you go. Yeah. You know, when he was a little guy, I had him on, we would do summer projects. And he had a, I would put him on Unity. You know what Unity is?

(Joel Beasley at 00:35:11) Uh-huh. Yeah.

(Ken at 00:35:12) Which is the gaming platform. So he built his little 3D game. And so he, you know, he learned Python early on. He learned Java pretty early on, JavaScript. No, actually, Node. So, yeah, he was proficient in high school before he went to college, and he, of course, got his computer science degree.

(Joel Beasley at 00:35:29) Nice. You did a good job. It's so important to build these structures around these. I'll tell you what, I'm a new parent because my kids are four and two, right? But in the past four years, I'd say my maturity level has just skyrocketed, and I have such a great understanding of human behavior by watching it start from the beginning.

(Ken at 00:35:48) You know, you talk about leadership, I've learned a lot about leadership just trying to raise the kids, right? You learn along the way what it takes as a parent, and you can apply all of those lessons into the workplace for sure.

(Joel Beasley at 00:36:04) Thank you so much for listening. And if you found this episode useful, please share it with a friend or colleague that 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.