Kevin Kane, CEO at Dassian - Redefining Change Management

(Intro Narrator at 00:00:03) Hello, my friends. Today, Joel is talking to Kevin, the CEO at Dassian, and they discuss how modern organizations are redefining change management, Dassian's systems integration tooling, and the power of reflecting on and learning from your career path and life choices. All of this right here, right now, on the Modern CTO podcast.

(Intro Narrator at 00:00:30) Here we go.

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:31) This is the Modern CTO podcast.

(Kevin at 00:00:39) Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Good, good, good opening.

(Kevin at 00:00:41) So as I grew up, my educational background, I had no time to do all the fun things, but, you know, double majored in mathematics, industrial engineering, and a minor in computer science. And in my era when I was there, you know, the computer was just emerging to gain significance, right? So programming in a number of different languages, really wasn't aware of where it would go, but I've actually been able to leverage that throughout my career in the technical background. But you can imagine in a five-year journey of having two majors, technical majors and a minor, pretty hard to get a lot of free electives to do some of the fun things, which I'm now picking up. You know, going into music theory or some of the other areas that I wish I could have more studies in, but that's okay. You learn how to learn as part of your, you know, the upbringing.

(Joel Beasley at 00:01:31) You go to school, you major in mathematics, you have, you know, engineering, all of this. Where did you land your first job?

(Kevin at 00:01:39) So I was recruited straight out of school. Went to school up in Buffalo, and then the Navy was looking for a bunch of industrial engineers. And really, it was part of the business side. They wanted the engineer technical mindset to be able to do a better job of cost analysis, budget preparations, being able to really have a more definitive process, you know, following the federal government side. There are a lot of estimates on major military equipment and other assets that were way off and creating a lot of consternation from the budget providers and others and said, "Hey, we need smart engineers to come in and find them, and they'll bring the technology with them," which actually I found myself doing of even back in '87 when I graduated, bringing that technical background to greatly simplify a lot of processes that they thought only mainframes or other technologies could do. But, you know, great opportunity. Wasn't exactly planned or where I'd intend to do, but, you know, found the excitement, moved to Washington, DC, big city. You know, a chance to be part of, you know, kind of the nerve center of the federal government and never looked back and have shaped that into the career, including all the way up to where I am today, all with more of a technology bend to the business process and, again, federal government and federal contracting.

(Joel Beasley at 00:03:00) So are you guys doing federal contracting today?

(Kevin at 00:03:04) Yeah, yeah. The current business that I run, I've been there for five years, Dassian. Our mission statement, our focus—and it's been mine for the last twenty-three years—is how do we extend SAP to make it much simpler, automated, streamlined inside of SAP for those people, those contractors that do business with the government? It's highly regulated, various rules that we've all learned, and basically exploiting our business knowledge that we have on how to do the contracting and really reduce that high bar entry. And when I look at things today, I get even more excited where, you know, the amount of money going into infrastructure through our federal government is, you know, in the trillions of dollars. And all that's going to come through is federal contracts and a lot of new market players there. And a lot of them have that, and, you know, my career has been vetted through SAP and focused on building that out. A lot of them have SAP as their platform for an ERP system and are very, very pleasantly pleased to see if they can go adapt Dassian and pivot their business into a new business model and being able to take advantage and work on a lot of these federally funded type contracts, you know, without having to go build it themselves or to add, you know, other customizations into their whole system landscape.

(Joel Beasley at 00:04:19) That's pretty neat. I like the name. At first, when I saw the name, the first time I saw it, I was like, "Do they make jets?" Like, it's a really cool name. For some reason, it sounded like you make jets. And then I had found out that you guys do this work with SAP, and I was like, "Oh, that's pretty interesting." I was curious, did you pick the name? How did you get involved with Dassian?

(Kevin at 00:04:38) Great, great, great name. So I'll give you the name first and then my relationship to Dassian. So the founders of Dassian and the genesis of the name was back in the early—or excuse me, in the late nineties—and they were looking for the right name. The truth is the four founders, it was their first name. So there was a Dan. Well, he's the "Da" in Dassian. There were two Simons. They're the "Ss." And the guy that created the name, he picked three letters for himself. His name is Ian. You know, that's the truth. We're not the water. We're not a Coca-Cola product. That's Dasani, and we've been referred to that. But, you know, they've been part of my experience. As I grew up working for SAP, focused on the government contracting vertical, had done some work in their development group when they had large industry verticals. Then we moved over and said, "Continue doing this, but as a services group, do it basically as custom builds." And what I needed there was, I brought my business knowledge, but I needed a technical arm and ran into these guys from Dassian that were fantastic technical architects, and they had the SAP technology skills and paired them up with my team that was growing. They were more of the functional architects. And, collectively, we did a lot of wonderful solutions. Dassian was also in the forefront. As we hit about 2006 with Dassian, we realized that custom solutions don't scale. They don't scale for the customers. They're hard to maintain, and they're all one-offs. And this is predating and maybe just the cusp of where we are today with cloud, SaaS, and standardized. Dassian made a pivot in 2006 to build configurable solutions as standard package out of the box inside of SAP that could support most of the customers we did and move away from that customization and really improve that standardization and, quite candidly, where we are today with the market is everyone is looking for, even on their ERP platforms, "How do I go standard? How do I go SaaS? How do I take advantage of some of these new digital technologies and get there faster?" And we've been extremely well-positioned and, you know, actually, the market's voting with its wallet by bringing more and more customers to us. Because that's what it's clamoring for with this, you know, the current technology revolution we're all part of.

(Joel Beasley at 00:06:58) That's pretty interesting. Are you guys public or private?

(Kevin at 00:07:01) No, we're all privately held and had a lot of outside investors showing a lot of interest in us right now, but we still remain privately held for now.

(Joel Beasley at 00:07:12) Very interesting. Yeah, there's a lot of money out there. I subscribe to a couple, like, different, you know, sites that track funding and venture capital trends. And, man, the amount of money being deployed right now at the corporate level. But it's typically in the larger companies. The companies are, like, $10 million plus. It's not a ton of money in the smaller companies. But if you're over $10 million, I've been seeing a lot of action happening.

(Kevin at 00:07:35) We're in that range. We're over the $10 million hurdle. And I would say right now, I probably don't go by a week where I don't have at least interest levels expressed from three or four different. And it's beyond the venture capitalist side. It's more the private equity side. You know, we've been sustainable growth and profitability there. And because we're hooked into the SAP platform, we're hooked into the next generation technologies, we're also pretty selective about who we're looking for as an investor and where we want to go. And I'm glad that my board includes two of the founding members with myself. We want to make sure we find the right partner that understands our business, our mission, our focus, that we're extremely committed to our customers as we've carved out our niche. And we actually see a lot of growth in there, but at the same time, want to make sure that we do find the right investor that's going to share our values. They want to propel us forward and meet the needs of our customers.

(Joel Beasley at 00:08:33) Yeah. You want the relationship to be good and everybody be on the same page.

(Kevin at 00:08:37) Yes, yeah. And so, I'm sure you can appreciate that there is—I would agree with you too that I'd say the trend line has gone up almost exponentially in the last six or twelve months. So there is a lot of undeployed capital on the sidelines. And seeing a lot of people wanting to do that, and you're right, the bar entry is at least a $10 million size, and we've been that way for a number of years and larger. But, and also been profitable on top of it and starting to—we've moved, you know, beyond the early adopter phase and going into more of the early majority of customers, which is great because we're seeing that exponential customer acquisition and growth in the business. And at the same time, having the right infusion of the right investor that appreciates our business strategy and can, you know, complement that. And there's a lot of different partners in the investor community, and I'm sure we'll find the right one. But in the meantime, we're also enjoying, you know, executing the play that we set off and, you know, quite candidly, we've all been bootstrapped to this point, self-funded, and generating the right amount of cash that we can put back in the business to help it grow.

(Joel Beasley at 00:09:50) Very cool. I don't want to put you on the spot, but I have a question about, like, the product. Can you give me—I know it looks like you have a number of product lines—but can you give me, like, a concrete example of a customer, they have a problem, why they buy your product, and, like, the solution?

(Kevin at 00:10:08) Sure, sure. I think, thinking of a couple that are there, we have to break our product down to do it. But reality is we have one large continuous all the way from receiving an RFP and how you would bid that all the way through contract close on every element in between. A lot of these are very regulated processes because of the way the US federal government does business. The cool thing is we do it all inside of one platform, an end-to-end digital platform that really has a single digital thread. When we look at a lot of, you know, it's almost like a radiologist can read an X-ray and know what problems are. We've gotten to the point here where I can look at a systems architecture or landscape, your business systems, and I can see where the problems are. What we're trying to do is create the business transformation, because it's one architecture, one single logon. The CISO gets very, very pleased because there's fewer penetration points, a lot simpler from an IT security side, which is paramount to do business with the government. But it's a complete digital thread where the information flows from pricing and estimating into the current contract with an award, goes through execution and all the way through closeout at the end and many other functions in between. All inside your SAP landscape optimized there, no additional infrastructure, same level of security, high security you get, and the ability to use all of the new digital technologies that SAP is bringing for new UIs, new capabilities to really simplify, not only standardized, but then go simplify the user experience, making it much nicer for them. And now, actually, us working with the Microsoft team and a lot of the digital IoT technologies on their platform to really create those next generation type solutions that really transform businesses.

(Joel Beasley at 00:12:03) Yeah. I explored doing some government contract work once. And when I saw the process, I was like, "Nope, next, I'll go do something." Like, I'd have to specialize here. I'd have to have a full-time staff member that understands this to execute it.

(Kevin at 00:12:20) Or you could call me.

(Joel Beasley at 00:12:21) Or I could call you guys. Help me understand this a little bit better. All right. So I'm trying to simplify it down a little bit for me. Government contracting, RFP, lifecycle management built on top of SAP. So I have to have SAP in order to use your solution, right?

(Kevin at 00:12:36) That's correct. And actually a small area built inside of SAP. With tongue in cheek, we refer to us as a bolt-in versus a bolt-on. But, yeah, all inside the SAP core product. We extend the core inside of SAP.

(Joel Beasley at 00:12:49) Yep. Do you have any non-government customers?

(Kevin at 00:12:53) We do. We also—I think our industries, there's adjacent industries that tend to be more in the projectized industries, building the impossible, like engineering construction type companies, picking up automotive type companies, oil and gas companies. Shell Oil is one of our customers, right, where they manage very, very complex long-term asset builds and projects and contracts and still don't really want to litter their ERP core system with outside bolt-ons or custom code. They'd rather do it all inside, and we do it seamlessly. So we feed off that digital core all inside of SAP, and that allows them to realize a lot of value.

(Joel Beasley at 00:13:37) Does SAP have an official app store, or how do they do that?

(Kevin at 00:13:41) They do. They have an app store. We have a go-to-market relationship with them. We have a partnership with Microsoft as well. You know, a lot of the—it's a little different because what we're doing is selling a very large solution for a government contractor. Probably 30 to 50% of your business processes would be regulated, driven by Dassian. A lot of our clients that put in SAP actually refer a bit more of the Dassian solution because it's so pervasive and so many things they have to do, much like your experience of realizing if you're really going to pursue federal business, you'd have to have specialists in the organization. So we're able to, you know, realize quite a bit of that, but still help you leverage that core SAP investment and get even greater value out of it.

(Joel Beasley at 00:14:31) Do people ever come to you needing the solution that don't have SAP, and then you sell them the solution, like, with SAP?

(Kevin at 00:14:37) Oh, yeah, yeah. Yep, yeah. We see it. You know, we refer to those as net-new opportunities, and we see a lot of that as well. As far as we can tell, that combination of the SAP and the breadth, and, obviously, they're a platform that we build on, and they're continuing to invest in technologies like the new UI capability. They separated the front end from the back end. And my team has really done a lot of differentiation and a lot of beyond cool things, things that really drive business value just with simplified screens all from that user experience level. But we're able to go in there to a net-new client and demonstrate because their technologies are going in the breadth of the platform. And we take those technologies, convert them into solutions, which is really monetizing the platform and showing the value for the customers. They look at this, and the user community many times was used to more of an ERP mainframe-looking environment and have to pause and say, "Are you sure that's an ERP system?" Because it is a modern UI, modern look and feel, you know, kind of a very simplified low-code, no-code. And because of that, we see a lot of net-new type clients that have no SAP footprint looking to entrust that because it's scalable. It is an out-of-the-box type solution.

(Kevin at 00:15:59) It does all the niche work, but beyond some of the other localized solutions, you've got the power of SAP that's putting in, you know, billion dollars plus of R&D into these technologies. And this is why I love where we're at as a, you know, a part of being a solution provider. We can convert those technologies into value without having to create them. It's really, really, you know, a wonderful time to be where we're at right now of being this digital solutions provider and having all these technologies at our fingertips and converting those into business value.

(Joel Beasley at 00:16:32) Have you guys had any trouble with, as the SAP versions change or does SAP, like, give you release notes? And are they really good about that so you can make sure that your system stays stable?

(Kevin at 00:16:43) Yeah. Yep. Great, great question. So SAP right now has come back to at least an annual release. We monitor it. We certify all of our solutions through SAP. So it goes through a process. So we, you know, one is to make sure that the code line is perfect. There's no backdoors. It does what it has done functionally. And our development teams are also collaborating to make sure that we don't know what's in the release till the release comes, but we have a good idea of what they're looking at in terms of release notes and their product road maps and have our teams exchanging that to make sure that we're in harmony overall. But regardless, almost as soon as they come out with their annual general availability of their what's now called the S/4HANA release and which usually comes out sometime in the third quarter. Within a couple months of that, we're already retooling our environment, doing our internal test, and giving our customers the assurance, all certified by SAP, that that solution and the latest release works so that, you know, they have the agility to stay up to speed and leverage all the new features and functions and know that Dassian is just as secure with them in that new release.

(Joel Beasley at 00:17:55) Nice. Nice. Yeah. I had some questions written down earlier about like different sales objections, but I really like you. And I'm curious from a CEO perspective, I want to talk about some leadership stuff and then we can circle back to sales objections. Is that cool?

(Kevin at 00:18:08) Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Let's let's go.

(Joel Beasley at 00:18:10) So I'm curious, it's kind of open ended, but I'm curious about, you know, your thoughts on, like, your personal approach to leadership. Like, how do you approach leadership?

(Kevin at 00:18:20) Oh, that's that's fantastic. So I appreciate that. Leadership goes into who you are, and you've gotta be authentic. It's your moral character. I score very high on the belief side. The organization that I've created here at Dassian, I believe this goes well for niche small businesses and mission oriented. Remember, I understand my background, grew up through the military civil service. And, you know, what an organization to appreciate is really mission critical. And there's, you know, a lot of leadership books about technology and disruption that I've placed in that. And my entire organization, it doesn't matter who you are, whether you're part of my sales team, my development team, my services team, my executive team. Right? We all share the customer centricity is all part of our values. Right? Matter of fact, my value statement is hopefully eloquent but also simplified as we put our customers' needs and the business's needs ahead of our own personal objections. Or hopefully, what we do is we align all three of them very well. And you have to, you know, we're required that because the markets we serve in, because the complexity and what brings me a lot of joy as a leader is when I talk frequently to my customer base, and they speak of Dassian as a huge strategic supplier. I am north of the standard that you mentioned earlier in terms of size. But, you know, I'm using the same sense of companies that, you know, fetch valuations that are measured in the trillions of dollars and show up in that same sentence with them as far as strategic business importance goes. And I think that says a lot to what we've created here, but you, you know, really believe in that. And that's a big part of our success is we've had to create that mission critical organization. And everything we do in our leadership actions, we have monthly ops calls or excuse me, weekly ops calls where we give kudos and everything is done along our values line, our mission, our vision statement, you know, to make sure that we're living that and hold each other accountable for that.

(Joel Beasley at 00:20:19) That's why I like asking leadership questions to CEOs because, they're never shy. They're always direct and I really enjoy it too. So I'm curious, what's the most like, if we're going to get deep and, like, open up a little bit, what's the most impactful leadership lesson that you've learned personally?

(Kevin at 00:20:38) That that's a great one. I'll I'll tell you early in my career, and, ironically, it doesn't come from technology, but it comes into the mission critical nature. Working my way through college, it's a personal experience. I worked in a hospital as an orderly. The nurses didn't have the strength to do CPR, and I think it was below the age of 18. I'm not sure if it was legal, but when you came home to tell your folks, I saved someone's life today. Right? And that's I think that's bubbled into my personal passion and leadership style, which is, hey. You know, things that we're doing and now using technology as that lever are going to impact and make lives simpler and better for everyone. Right? And that focus on the customers. But, you know, it's gone from there. I've run 100 person plus organizations nearing that size here at Dassian and others and really enjoy that of making a difference in their lives and your customers' lives. But that you know, when when I get asked that question, hopefully, it doesn't generate too much surprise. And I've had a number close second amazing experiences, but I can't really rate anything higher than saving someone's life overall. But it just creates a, you know, an out of body type experience on yourself and where you try to go with everything else. And hopefully that works. This is a technology call, and I do believe in the technology side. But, you know, have a lot of reverence for the first responders and people that are on the front lines and doing that type of work, which has really helped me to create that energy and enthusiasm of really that mission critical type organization.

(Joel Beasley at 00:22:11) That's crazy. You got to save somebody's life.

(Kevin at 00:22:13) Yeah. At at age 17 or 18. Yeah. Yeah. It was it was, you know, hallmark of my career. And I don't, don't get me wrong. I've had a number of really, really personally rewarding experiences in my business career, you know, post my college education. But, but that's one that as I get asked that question often, you know, I can't deny it. That's my authenticity. I have to point back to that experience.

(Joel Beasley at 00:22:37) Yeah. When I was 13, I saved somebody from drowning. So they fell, they were walking near a pool and you know that little thing where you put the pool thermometer in the little basket?

(Kevin at 00:22:51) Yes.

(Joel Beasley at 00:22:52) And they stepped on that wrong and they fell and it broke their leg in half and they were hanging upside down in the pool and they couldn't do a sit up to get up. And I was the only person there and I was like, woah. And, you know, got them out.

(Kevin at 00:23:06) Yeah. Yeah. And that it I think there is something that's in the nurturing side in our experiences. There's you know, a lot of us get called to lead. But, you know, as as a leader, you have to be authentic. You've gotta be able to care for your employees, care for your customers, and everyone that's connected to leadership. And in the case of technology, there's so many different ecosystems and partners and others that are there. But it's those early experiences, you know, those are formative years that you and I had that almost compel us into these areas. And, you know, I don't know that we intended to do that. You probably didn't intend to be there, but it was your natural instincts that said, you know, this is what I need to go do, and you did it. And, you know, it's it creates a wonderful background, you know, that need to accomplish things. As a CEO, you know, my my job is to establish the right leadership, the right culture, build the right team, protect that maniacally, and then to grow and nurture that as we go forward. And, you know, really proud of what my team's accomplished and, you know, take a lot of pride in doing that. It's as I say, people that wanna be the CEO, it is the greatest job in the world, and at times, it could be the loneliest job in the world as well. But, you know, it's, you know, and and maybe indirectly, I'm saving some lives as well as part of it.

(Joel Beasley at 00:24:23) Yeah. Yeah. Man, you brought I haven't thought about that in a long time. Wow. You brought up some, some old memories. I think one of the interesting things as you were talking was, when you experience something like that, I was thinking about like the pressures at work being a CEO. I have never felt something more physiologically intense than the adrenaline that I felt like when that was happening. And I couldn't sleep. I was sick to my stomach. It was just like adrenaline, adrenaline, adrenaline. And, um, as you were describing it and talking about it, I was thinking, even on my worst day as a CEO, I haven't ever felt like that much of a response. That was like such an intense human moment, I guess, to say.

(Kevin at 00:25:07) Oh, absolutely. It it's it's one of those things that had an impact in your life and especially early in the years. And, you know, it it's a call to lead because of that, because the passion that you know, don't don't get me wrong, the intensity is there. Right? And, you know, it gives you new respect when you think of our folks that are in the military that are in harm's way. Right? I was in a civil service, so the equivalent of shore duty.

(Joel Beasley at 00:25:33) Tell me what that is. What is the civil service?

(Kevin at 00:25:36) Yes. Civil service means you're working side by side with the military, but you're not in uniform. So you're you're a civilian there. You're you know, I was a buyer for the government or what they call a contracting officer or doing various work or policymaker, which is extremely important. But, you know, when you weren't I was not in the military itself. I was working for the defense department. But, you know, when it's called to deploy, you didn't do it. And, actually, a lot of pride that I've taken is I can recall a lot of the organizations I led tend to be super high performing teams. I think at one point, I was running a services team when I met the Dassian guys. And they liken my team, and they took affectionate to it really as being the the green berets or special operations. Right? The people that could do the unthinkable. And, you know, have a lot of respect for for everyone there. But also realize when you create that type of culture, that type of huge mission centricity, the type of person that thrives in that environment works, you know, works best in that type of environment, then they're attracted to it. And that's not for everybody. Right? I mean, everybody's got their own calling, and you're trying to balance work, life, family needs, and everything else. But, you know, working in that mission critical organization, which is really where the military are. Right? They especially when they're on a mission, they have to be highly focused, dedicated to the mission and that, you know, whatever branch of service you're in. And I got to experience that getting to know a lot of them, but to realize. And some of the stories or the experiences they tell, you know, generate that level of respect. Some guys are in Vietnam or other places just telling me things, you know, just over coffee in the morning or whatever it may be of what they've done. And so, wow, I've been this rising star and because I worked really hard, but, you know, I didn't have a piece of shrapnel go through my helmet in the jungle in Vietnam. And thought, well, that's pretty impactful too that they've been through it. You know, generate a lot of respect for people that live in those mission critical type industries.

(Joel Beasley at 00:27:35) Yes. And it's it's always interesting. Like, you know, you have we all have, like, our our intense or difficult moments in life, but then every once in a while, like, I'll hear, I'll be watching, like, a Tony Robbins event or something. And someone will stand up and say something, and my jaw hits the floor. And I'm like, whatever the worst thing that's ever happened to me, like, pales in comparison to what I won't share any of them because they're pretty pretty hard. But, yeah, it just, if you watch the Tony Robbins documentary on Netflix, you'll hear some of them. But, I just was, like, blown away, and it puts it in perspective. And I think that's one of the things as I'm sort of unwrapping here while while we're talking. I think that's one of the things that does make a good leader is if your bar for difficulty, like if it's really, really high, like when whenever you see the Navy SEALs like, you know, I think Jocko or you see like the David Goggins and they come and they're talking, it's like, you know, they're putting their life on the line literally for work historically, like when they did their serving. So anything they do now, anything that they like nothing's ever going to be like that difficult.

(Kevin at 00:28:43) And what we can learn from leaders, though, is it depends on how you judge your business. That if you're truly gonna operate that mission critical segment, you know, life is a series of experiences, and you grow through your experiences. And that's where, you know, you and I both shared a lot of moments where we were cast without knowing. And it's it's not even by rank. Right? Nobody gave you the rank of lifesaver. You're at the right place at the right time and good for that person when you're 13. It puts you in these roles where, you know, that adrenaline that's created is something you wanna recreate and hopefully to do positive things, not only for yourself, the people that you lead, the customers, your your listeners. Right? And I view it the same way for myself too. Right? How do I support my customers? But it is an intense standard or nearly intense standard to run that mission critical type area, which, you know, my case, if my systems fail, it looks like fraud in the eyes of customers. They miss out on revenues. Businesses suffer. People's lives are harmed from there. Right? Hopefully, no one dies because of it. But, you know, there are things that are radically changed. And at the same time, with the way digital technology is going, it's it's kind of a paradox because technology is revamping the experience and creating a lot of business value and transforming and simplifying a lot of businesses. That's part of my industrial engineering career. And what we're doing is, you know, we're disrupting a lot of businesses, which hopefully will create newer and more higher skilled jobs because the technology is handling more and more of it. But, nevertheless, you know, it creates a bunch of resistance at certain levels of the customer because it's gonna create change. And that's that's just the nature of where we are right now. We're we're in the fourth industrial revolution, you know, driven by, you know, all the digital technology that we have. And it like I said, it you know, you also have to carry the empathy for people coming through there and appreciate the change that's going on in those organizations because of the disruption caused by your technology.

(Joel Beasley at 00:30:48) Was that Steve Case's book where he talks about the fourth is that his name? Where he talks about the fourth industrial revolution?

(Kevin at 00:30:54) There's a lot published by it, but really the last two industrial revolutions are more of the digital technology revolution. This one being largely enabled by the Internet of Things capability, cloud, 5G, and all the technologies that are around us and realizing that right now, innovations are occurring at light speed. We're seeing them every day, and we're going through this. Gase was one, but there's a lot of publications on this.

(Kevin at 00:31:21) And we're seeing it now where a lot of my customers and really the business leaders are redefining even IT to be really business transformation and looking for something more. And business transformation means either enabling new business models or greatly simplifying their operating models. Right? So how do I get value out of the investment to where I'm going? And it's really these enabling technologies, and it's taken someone like Adasian that's converting these technologies into real business value and solutions for them.

(Kevin at 00:31:53) The sad part is it streamlines operations, which is what it's intended to go do. But what it's going to do is really allow that worker to be much, much smarter, which is why, I guess, it's classified as, even though it's technology driven, another industrial revolution.

(Joel Beasley at 00:32:10) Yeah. You know, one of the first projects that I worked on would shrink an accounting team's size. Right? So I would go in, we would implement it, and the two or three people that were excited and wanted to learn and wanted to help, they would be the ones that had the jobs there and the rest of them. But the positive, I see it—I've kind of looked at it in both ways.

(Joel Beasley at 00:32:32) And at first, sort of my initial reaction was like, oh, man. People are losing their jobs. The second thing is, okay. Well, the world is evolving and moving forward. And now this company is going to have extra cash.

(Joel Beasley at 00:32:43) And as a business owner, we typically roll our cash back in to grow the business. So it's like those jobs are going away, but now I can maybe hire designers and care more about the look of my product, or I can hire these people and care more about the customer experience of the product. It's not like that money is just going away. It's going to be reallocated into more jobs just in a different area.

(Kevin at 00:33:04) Yep. You're spot on. You're exactly there. And that's kind of the way I've been able to rationalize it internally. And this is nothing more than society and technology forcing advancement.

(Kevin at 00:33:14) I don't know. It's eliminating jobs. It's creating a higher skill level of capability and jobs. And there's a lot of publications the analysts have produced of saying the shape of IT is moving away from the more transactional, keep the lights on, into much more of a strategic enabler. Because of that, the shape of those folks and even the business network of the business users is getting to be—because of technologies and because of solution providers like Dasean.

(Kevin at 00:33:41) And our secret sauce to developing is we do it together with our customer base to form the industry standards. They're able to take a lot of cost on the business, transform, and reinvest that cash that they saved into other areas that are going to force them to invest and stay—remain competitive or even beyond competitive as well.

(Joel Beasley at 00:34:02) Yeah. I had this conversation. So my father-in-law, he's a great man, like, the best grandfather. I look up to him, I want to be a grandfather like him, you know, he's so good. He's a truck driver like UPS.

(Joel Beasley at 00:34:13) He's been doing it for thirty years. He drives the big semi trucks. And we'll sit down and have similar conversation multiple times, but at family dinners, and he'll ask me how automation's going. Right? Because I've known him for about seven years now.

(Joel Beasley at 00:34:27) And, you know, I update him on the Tesla and, like, when the first deliveries happened with the semi trucks and all of that. And, um, you know, his mindset is that it'll never be there. It'll never be good enough. He just doesn't think it's going to happen. And I'm like showing him over seven years.

(Joel Beasley at 00:34:44) I'm like, look, I'm like, look, it is happening. I mean, they made an autonomous delivery. This is occurring today. Here's a map of all the autonomous vehicles out there. And it's kind of feels like a head in the sand thing.

(Joel Beasley at 00:34:57) And do you see, like, customers, are they putting their head in the sand? Or are they up and loving it? Or does that not really come into play with your product? Is it not that controversial?

(Kevin at 00:35:09) Oh, yeah. I think it's controversial for positive things. So we're hitting on a thread here of change management. And as I've grown up as a partner in other organizations driving these far end of the spectrum of business transformations, there's a lot of elements that go into change. And as much as I grew up a technologist and could make the digital technology stand on its head if you want, you can't subtract the human element from it.

(Kevin at 00:35:36) And I think it's almost like the politician's credo that we see where—and I heard this earlier, and it's empirical data. But 25% of the people are going to go with you and, you know, how to get elected. 25% of people are going to love your message. 25% of the people are going to hate your message no matter what. The success is influencing that other 50%.

(Kevin at 00:35:57) And, I mean, change is hard. It's difficult. You know, I think in order to go do it, the successful ones are realizing you have to—when you look at a transformation, you can't run it as just the old traditional technology bake off. You know, here's a 150, 200 business system requirements. That is part of it.

(Kevin at 00:36:21) But you've got to look at it for something bigger as can I really transform my organization? And you can't look at it in a vacuum. Right? How do I improve my end-to-end business processing and not just optimize one function? So how do I go drive the whole?

(Kevin at 00:36:37) And it gets all the way down into their leadership and how they do it. And, again, the number one element of change management—I forget the individual, but you had an individual in your podcast. She was fantastic. I'll apologize. I didn't write her name down.

(Kevin at 00:36:50) But talking about the importance of change, and I just, you know, want a footnote with that too that, you know, digital business transformation is not going to get there unless you have a very, very strong, authentic change leadership program, which starts with a ton of communication, authenticity, much like you talked about leadership. You know, those are common elements that are there, and people are going to be people. And you're taking the individuals that are either in fear that if I adopt this, do I end up, like you mentioned, the accounting solution you did where only two or three people were there? You know, they've—entire departments have been built up and calcified over these brittle architectures that have been created. And as they look to change to something that's standardized and simplified, and they realize there's an investment that has to be a return that comes from it, people start to figure it out and are doing it.

(Kevin at 00:37:45) And what I'm seeing now are the modern day organizations that are driving this are even really redefining IT and creating organizations, and that becomes more of a business transformation organization and redefining the role of the CIO and others to actually be much more accountable to say the chief operating officer to really make sure that, hey. I don't want to make this investment just to keep the lights on better, cheaper, and to do more of a managed service, but I really want a strategic transformation where the business can be operating much more efficiently. And all that is fantastic, but I see a lot of really underestimating the power of people. And much like your experience where you did find two or three people that get it, there's always some portion of it that really lean into it or excited to see what it could be. And there's an equal or larger diametrically opposed force without the right coaching or the right communications that can find every reason in the world to not change then end up changing.

(Kevin at 00:38:46) And we face that in a positive way every day with things. And it's really largely a leadership question. It's how do you view things and how do you look at a transformation event. And then, again, not forgetting the power of that communication at all levels of the organization and the examples that the leadership must do. It's, in my opinion, doing a lot of these and a lot of them right now because we're in that transformational revolution.

(Kevin at 00:39:12) That's one area that I think industry as a whole can do a—is going to have to do a much better job if they're really going to realize the value of a true digital business transformation.

(Joel Beasley at 00:39:22) I think as a society or even larger as a race, as a collection of people, we're transitioning because when I was talking about my father-in-law, he grew up in a time when you learned one trade and that would be the trade you would do forever. And you would get your gold watch and retire and you'd dedicate to the company. And that was how things happened. That was the expectation that was set, but what's happened is no single person raised their hand and said, this is the way it's going to be. Just as a people, we changed.

(Joel Beasley at 00:39:58) And now there's this new standard of, you will likely learn multiple trades over the course of your lifetime, and the things will change and trades will come in and out because some may get automated. And now we're just setting this new standard. And I think the generation coming up right now, they're going to be cool with that, but there's like a thirty year gap of people who are like, if you imagine a spectrum and a gradient, there's a thirty year gradient of people who are across the board and we just have to, you know, give some grace and some love as we transition through that.

(Kevin at 00:40:31) Absolutely. Right. If you grew up in that accounting department for thirty years and you just did one facet of accounting that's about to be automated, it's a—I have empathy. That would be a natural event. And you're absolutely right that with digital technology and the change today and us being on this forefront where innovations are there, the adaptability has to be there.

(Kevin at 00:40:54) And the one coaching I would say for that is I do this a lot myself and have routinely gone through a lot of jobs, is actually using Jobs. Right? And his commencement address that Steve Jobs talked about, connecting the dots looking backwards, where he said even his calligraphy class in college was what, you know, built kind of the standard for Apple, right, their differentiation. And a lot of times, it pays to figure out I have no idea. I wasn't planned on how I got to become the CEO of Dasean.

(Kevin at 00:41:24) But as you look backwards, you see that all of your experiences led to it, and it helps you to be able to predict the future and look forward more and lean into that change. I always took an approach even when I was going through of routinely moving into different departments, different jobs, because I felt after about two years, I knew as much as the guy who'd been there thirty years. But if I could learn the adjacent department more and more, you'd accrete the skills, even in the technology side. I've worked in run leadership and development and services, in sales and operations. And then you figure out where do you go from there.

(Kevin at 00:42:02) You know, all of a sudden it becomes time to become the CEO and to go define your market, your customers, your culture, and the next standard from there. So it's, you know, I would hope people do a lot of reflecting which will help them hopefully cope with the change and be able to make that. And usually for me, I've been fortunate. There's always been a signal that it was time to move into the next role and to move forward. And, you know, obviously, those that are able to keep up with the technology side will have an advantage, and don't fear it and can leverage it.

(Kevin at 00:42:32) And I hope the generation that you and I might be half a generation apart, but as technology is a mainstay, you know, I'm a grandfather as well, and my two year old can be teaching my mother things—hopefully, she's not listening—on how to use her iPhone. And it's pretty amazing, right, to just the, you know, the natural skill set because they grew up with it. And, hopefully, that means the adaptability from for that generation will be there as well.

(Joel Beasley at 00:42:59) Oh, yeah. I have a 2.5 year old and almost four year old, and they could understand all the gestures needed to get to the content they wanted to watch before they could form sentences.

(Kevin at 00:43:10) Exactly. Exactly. That's where my two year old granddaughter, two years and one month now, is doing that. It's just—it's a pleasure to watch, and it's amazing for me to look at this and see that the natural adaptation of the technology where she gets it. And, which says, I think we're okay because the disruption that the technology creates should be within that generation provided they're exposed to it.

(Kevin at 00:43:36) And, again, that's a bit of a social question as well. Do they have that environment that's exposing them to the technology early that's going to be a critical element to their success of the future? Because technology's not going away. If anything, it's driving these transformations.

(Intro Narrator at 00:43:52) Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:43:53) My favorite thing, and then we'll do sales objections. But my favorite thing that I've gotten my kids—so Amazon makes a tablet and it's for kids. And so it's just an Android operating system, but you can put it into kid mode and there's a kid app store and there's games and there's puzzles and it's complete safe zone. They can't get out of that mode or the app themselves. And it was like, I think it was less than $100, but it's been—I go watch her and I see the things that she's doing and I'm blown away.

(Joel Beasley at 00:44:25) She's learning so much on problem solving, words, everything. And so I really enjoy handing the kids—they get the tablet for like an hour every night before bed and they get to use it.

(Kevin at 00:44:39) Well, we all have that obligation there to be a teacher, as a learner, right? And we have that to our families, to our community. I think of my experiences besides another college experience was I was actually teaching at both ends of the spectrum. One was at a school for the handicapped where I met my wife, so a lot of great things happened there. You know, teaching an 18 year old how to do single digit arithmetic on his fingers, which was a great accomplishment for him.

(Kevin at 00:45:05) And at the same time, I did a two week program of teaching the more gifted kids how to do programming through turtle graphics or logo graphics. And these were, you know, kids in second grade. They were doing much more advanced computing type skills. And same thing, very, very thankful. But I think part of it is we all have our own obligations to be a learner, but also to give back and to be a teacher in our families, in our communities, in our businesses, and others that we do.

(Kevin at 00:45:33) And that's all part of the leadership credo as well.

(Joel Beasley at 00:45:36) Yes. I fully agree. All right. Now I like this section of sales objections because I get good feedback from the audience. Because typically if people are looking for your type of solution, these are the questions they have on their mind and they can get some answers and some insight before they reach out doing their presales research.

(Joel Beasley at 00:45:56) So what are the top two or three sales objections that you guys get and then how do you handle them?

(Kevin at 00:46:02) Yeah. So I think the number one objection comes back into the change management side. So one is that if the company is looking for a digital business transformation is to help them understand what that means and what that entails. And, you know, I think that maybe that's an overused term at times. So they want to make sure if you're simply looking to swap out, you know, one tire in your car, then you're not looking for a new car.

(Kevin at 00:46:33) So you're not looking transformative and, you know, even beginning to have a discussion of, you know, that being an electric vehicle versus gas powered is completely offline. And I think that analogy applies to us. So in those objections, to make sure when we hear it more often is, you know, digital business transformation, be prepared for what we're going to interject, and especially in the markets that I serve, is transforming, you know, 30 to 50% of your business processes. And the number one objection usually comes for how do you do that, and the whole change management that we talked exhaustively about is, you know, how do you build that type of program?

(Kevin at 00:47:12) How do you do that evaluation, especially after 25 years or 30 years of very calcified, like 10 million lines of custom code that did the moral equivalent of what Dassian does, and a brittle architecture, and then organizations that are solidified around departmental structures, no shortage of spreadsheets. That is daunting to people to think about that you could do away with all that and go standard, which again forces me to say change management by far eclipses everything when you get into that type of conversation. You know, the other—

(Joel Beasley at 00:47:50) Do you just break it up piece by piece? Like, how do you handle that?

(Intro Narrator at 00:47:53) Do you have a—

(Joel Beasley at 00:47:54) Good integration team? Or—

(Kevin at 00:47:55) Yeah, you need a great integration team, but I also, you know, the overused cliche is in order to go do that, you've got to really look at the entire end-to-end solution. You know, a lot of them break things up by value streams, and there's benchmarking organizations. And even that tends to kind of limit where the technology could go in the transformation because you're still trying to put it in a box. And we have a lot of solutions that jump even the traditional mega value streams, like order to cash or purchase to pay, and go across both of those.

(Kevin at 00:48:26) So, you know, in this case here, the whole really is greater than the sum of the parts. You know, to go do a Dassian evaluation is to look at where things are going. But yet we see things branded as a digital transformation to just change out, you know, one myopic piece, if you may, of where they're going. And they still want to leave in their sacred cows or favorite systems or whatever, which greatly limits the amount of transformative agenda that you can have coming out of this. We can still work there, but it's, you know, where are you on that transformation continuum, and how ready are you, and are the executives?

(Kevin at 00:49:00) Obviously, with that, depending on how far reaching it is, you know, cost becomes an issue as an objection to that if you're really going to truly transform everything. Not saying it has to take a, you know, amount of time, but there is more time than simply swapping out, you know, one feature function for another. Right? And again, it depends on where you're at. Right?

(Kevin at 00:49:23) So if you're doing a full up end-to-end business transformation across the whole organization, and, you know, we've heard an example from SAP—one of their actually, one of the founding clients that drove SAP created 30 different instances of SAP, and their transformation is to consolidate that into one. IT-wise, that's daunting. But think of what's going underneath it: how do you harmonize 30 different instances means probably 30 different ways of doing business across the entire spectrum of ERP process. And to get that into a more common standard area of an organization that's, you know, over $100 billion of size at worldwide operations is, you know, pretty tall transformative agenda to get things done.

(Kevin at 00:50:09) And obviously, that's not going to be a small price tag or even a short time frame to do that. But they're doing that because they believe that they need to get to a standard platform so that they can grow with all the new technologies that are there. And if they can control the environment to be standard, you know, really betting on where Moore's Law and where things are, is new technology is going to be there. And if they're standard, they're going to be able to go further and faster than, you know, leveraging with their current brittle and, you know, multidimensional tape architectures.

(Joel Beasley at 00:50:42) Nice. Nice. If people want to learn more, how do they find out? How do they learn more about Dassian?

(Kevin at 00:50:46) We have a lot of opportunities. One is I'm happy to have one-on-one conversations with their team about my experiences across any and all industries. We actually have now formed our guidance group and happy to bring in customers and prospects, kind of birds of a feather, because I really believe, and that's a key point to us driving industry solutions to go shape it, is we want to hear from them and to have a voice to make sure we're covering the entire waterfront of what they need to go do. And, you know, quite honestly, we learn as much as we create. Right?

(Kevin at 00:51:18) As creators, we can go innovate, but we work with our customers. And as you reach down into those people that are transformative in the business, they have some great ideas. So it's us trying to unlock them and to realize those with our technologies as well. And that's really how I grew up building industry solutions, how to do that, and would encourage, you know, people on the podcast—you can reach out under dassian.com. There's a lot of areas there. Just ask to talk to me. I'm happy to have this conversation with teams as well. Right? That's, you know, we're pleased to grow just the thought leaders there in this community and be able to, again, try to productize that and to make that something that's really going to make this industry and adjacent industries better as a whole.

(Joel Beasley at 00:52:07) 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.