How to Go From CTO to CEO with Robbie Morrison, CEO at Velosio

(Intro Narrator at 00:00:00) Today, we're talking to Robbie Morrison, CEO at Velosio, about his journey from CTO to CEO. You're listening to Joel Beasley, Modern CTO.

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:16) So when the opportunity came up to have a conversation with you about your transition from CTO to CEO, I thought that would make a really good conversation because I see it happening in the marketplace, and I was hoping you could just tell me a little bit about it.

(Robbie Morrison at 00:00:31) Yeah, sure. So we should say that I started my career as an entrepreneur. I was a technology entrepreneur for many years and then sold some businesses and joined another organization as a director and was promoted into the CTO role, which I held for the better part of twelve years in the CTO space before moving into a COO role and becoming the CEO. And as the CTO, I'd say that's where my passion lies in technology—how you make technology a business impact. So I spent a lot of time there, loved it. But transitioning back to being the head decision maker, I guess, is the right way to say it, as the CEO was a pretty natural transition for me since I had done it, albeit at smaller scales. I had done it in my own organizations before.

(Joel Beasley at 00:01:36) What did you learn from being a CTO that helped you be a good CEO?

(Robbie Morrison at 00:01:41) Just because technology's cool doesn't mean it'll make you money. You need to, as a CTO, be able to bridge the gap between technology and business outcomes. And if you don't bridge the gap between technology and business outcomes, then you probably shouldn't be investing in that technology. As a CEO, the job's all about return on the investment, especially when you're private equity-owned as we are. It's about returning the equity back to the company, returning your equity holders a profit. And I think the CTO job was a great reminder of how important that is and how everything that we do needs to return an investment to the key stakeholders of the business.

(Joel Beasley at 00:02:33) What was happening in your life when you were thinking, you know what? I am ready to make this move.

(Robbie Morrison at 00:02:41) Man, that's a—there's a lot of things. So I took the move while we were transitioning from our previous private equity owners to our new private equity owners. Of course, there's never a time when you're ready to take on more work, but the CEO job is a little harder than the CTO job. There's a lot more mouths to feed and families to take care of when you've got the whole company over just a portion of the company, or even in the COO world where I still had most of the company. On the personal side, there were just a lot of conversations with my wife about what that would mean for my engagement at home and the fact that I would have even more time away. So we had a lot of conversations along those lines. But really, I'd say from the business side, it was about how do I take this organization, which is a technology organization—Velosio helps others see the value in the technology that they're investing in—and how do I help our company to see the maximum returns that we can see for our shareholders and for our clients to see the maximum returns for them? I think it was a very natural transition for me, but it was a thoughtful transition.

(Joel Beasley at 00:04:12) What was the previous company? You said it was called Solugenix or something?

(Robbie Morrison at 00:04:15) Well, so I started my business many, many years ago, and I sold my ERP company to an organization called Solugenix. And I ran the ERP division at Solugenix for a while and then got the opportunity to be promoted to the CTO for all of Solugenix. And then Solugenix and we decided to split back out the ERP division, and we sold that to a company called the SBS Group. SBS Group, and I stayed the CTO. That company, SBS Group, joined with an organization called Socius and formed Velosio. Velosio was a merger of two organizations that were both powerhouses in our industry, our Dynamics implementation, ERP industry, and formed a large organization that became an even bigger powerhouse.

(Joel Beasley at 00:05:28) Let's talk about culture. Right? So a lot of CTOs are out there and they're running the culture within their teams. Does it change at all? If so, how, going from CTO to CEO?

(Joel Beasley at 00:05:40) Do you think about culture differently now?

(Robbie Morrison at 00:05:43) You know, I think about culture all the time, and I think I always have. So as a CTO, I think that I was very focused on having a culture that was both innovative, but also was a fun place to work and a place that empowered the teammates to try and be innovative and to take risks—to take measured risks that would be beneficial to the organization. As the CEO, I think that just gets amplified. To me, especially in a professional services organization, but really in almost any organization, your primary asset is your employees. And the employees that make up a great company are very rare, and you have to protect them. And the best way to do that is to have a culture that people want to be part of and people want to associate with. So as a CEO, I guess it's just become a bigger percent of my job than it was as the CTO and the COO. It's something that I spend a lot of brain cycles on. And I'd say the difference is that as a CTO, you're primarily working with business experts and technology experts, the intersection between business and technology. So it's a fairly unified set of skills that you're managing and working with.

(Robbie Morrison at 00:07:17) When you move over to the CEO role, you've got a lot of different types of employees. Employees that maybe technology has nothing to do with how they made it to this spot in their career, that technology is just something they have to use, not something they want to use. And then there's different personalities when you start talking about a person that's in the accounting department compared to the person that's developing code or the person that's out selling that code. And you've got to really make sure that a culture is inclusive of all of those different types of people, the different roles inside of an organization. When you're the CEO, it's important to not have blinders and just stay where you came from in the technologist space and not account for the other people.

(Joel Beasley at 00:08:17) Who should not become a CEO? Like, what's a sign? There's a CTO out there and they're not ready for it.

(Robbie Morrison at 00:08:24) A person that's currently a CTO that probably shouldn't move into the CEO role is someone that wants to continue to play with technology and let that be their driving factor. If what brings you to work every day is being able to play with the latest, the coolest thing and be able to really innovate around the coolest technology, you're gonna lose some of that when you become the CEO. You're not gonna be able to get your hands as dirty. You've gotta move up the chain in how much you're spending your time with the technology, and it won't be as much.

(Robbie Morrison at 00:09:12) I'd say the other—and I see this in fewer and fewer CTOs these days—but, you know, CTOs that really want to be in the dark room and left alone and just working with technology and not out there in front of the team, in front of the market, talking about why their business is successful and why this new technology is important. You know, being a CTO of a technology company, I need to be out there talking about technology like I am with you, but I also need to be in front of our employees talking about what we're doing as a business and where we're going. If you're not comfortable being out there and doing that, the CEO role is very outward-facing. And, you know, while inward is important, it's a lot more outward than some CTOs I've met maybe want to be. But as I said, that's less and less over the years.

(Joel Beasley at 00:10:14) Well, I gotta be honest. I was hoping for something more divisive. I was hoping you'd say something like, if you own an Android, that's how you know.

(Robbie Morrison at 00:10:22) That's it. That's what I meant to say. If you own an Android, you shouldn't be a—or maybe I should say it the other way. If you own an Apple and you're not out there playing on this—

(Joel Beasley at 00:10:32) Oh, no. There's technical difficulties now on the podcast.

(Robbie Morrison at 00:10:36) No, I have an Apple, so I'm okay.

(Joel Beasley at 00:10:39) I want to talk a little bit more about Velosio. Because we learned a little bit about you, your background, CTO to CEO, your story. But what does Velosio do specifically? And try to give me—not a super—like, you can give me the super high-level view to start, but really explain it to me.

(Intro Narrator at 00:10:56) So I'll start with—

(Robbie Morrison at 00:10:57) A high-level view: we enable technology to impact our clients' businesses. But what does that mean? We primarily—our heritage has been an ERP implementer. Some of our businesses came from implementing Great Plains. Some of our businesses came from implementing Solomon. You know, I came from implementing a product that was called Axapta. All of those have been collapsed into what's called now Dynamics 365. So we do Dynamics 365 primarily. We also do NetSuite as part of our business, and we really revolve around Dynamics 365 and NetSuite traditionally.

(Robbie Morrison at 00:11:43) Over the last few years, I've moved us—back in the CTO role and then CTO and COO role—I moved us into what I like to consider a data-first organization where we really look at it from the underpinnings of what's valuable to our customers. Our customers use applications to collect data and to store that data in a database of some sort. And where the real value that we provide to the customers is letting them have actionable insights of that data that they've captured through their different operational measures. Being able to make a decision quicker than their competitors that then allows them to corner a market or to be able to go into a market that maybe they wouldn't have went into if they hadn't have been able to see the data and the insights of the data that they had.

(Joel Beasley at 00:12:38) That's pretty interesting. So it's part software, part strategy?

(Robbie Morrison at 00:12:44) Yeah. I would say that Velosio traditionally has been about the software implementation, but, you know, software implementations are only—and it's hard to say this because that's where I came from—have, in my opinion, limited value. Where it's really valuable is when you have a business partner that can help you realize the value in your organizational data, the ability to understand how you compete in the market, how you—a lot of things now are about getting products. You know, the tariffs are a real part of what's going on in the global economy right now. How do you get products and how do you then turn those products around as quickly as possible so that your lead time and hold times are minimized and you maximize your profits?

(Robbie Morrison at 00:13:35) That's using data to drive business outcomes and helping through a business consulting approach. So I'd say that Velosio is able to provide that business consulting along with the software and data that we help to implement and capture. And we really do that specifically. If I was giving you an elevator pitch, I would say that we bring the capabilities of the Fortune 500 to the mid-market space. We are able to bring applications that traditionally have been too expensive, too costly for a mid-market company to a price point and deliver in a mechanism that allows those mid-market organizations to see value in a quick ROI or a quick time to value, as we like to say, when helping our customers implement and use these applications.

(Robbie Morrison at 00:14:41) And that's been a journey because if you think traditionally about on-prem software, which is where all of us that have been in this a while grew up, you had to have large servers and data farms to be able to do what you can now do at a very small cost in the public cloud. And so we've been able to ride that public cloud wave and enable our mid-market customers in a way that we couldn't have twenty years ago.

(Joel Beasley at 00:15:13) Microsoft's been investing a lot into AI. They run Dynamics, right, which is something that's very ingrained in your business. Have you seen any interesting advancements in that technology?

(Robbie Morrison at 00:15:26) Daily. I think—yeah. I'm sure you talk to a lot of CTOs and AI is the hot topic now. I mean, I've got business news on my TV on the wall behind me, or beside me, and it's always about AI. Just before we started this, the president and the CEO of NVIDIA were talking about a new opening of trade with another country in the UAE or with the UAE. Everything's about AI now because that's what's driving so much innovation. You asked specifically, have I seen something cool? Yeah. I think it really comes down to agents, and agents is a hot topic right now, but agents is taking all of this generative AI that's been the hot topic for the last year, year and a half, maybe two years now, and really enabling that to drive business value, enabling it to drive efficiencies that traditionally hadn't been available. And, you know, when you think about an agent, it's basically a software that acts like an employee. It's a software that goes beyond just a workflow and goes to a decision-making capability. I think the thing that's really the journey that we're on right now is how does the UI, the UX of an application transform from menus and needing to know where to go and click on an application button to be able to do something with your application, or needing to know how to format a report like somebody wants it, to being able to just interface with an agent. People think of them as chatbots, but it's really more than that.

(Robbie Morrison at 00:17:18) Interface with an agent in a natural way, and right now, it's mainly through a keyboard and typing questions or typing requests into an agent. But then moving that even further along to where I can just interface verbally with my application and my business and get true business value out of that interface. I think that as we transition from the old UX to more of the agent-based UIs or agent-based interfacing, I think it's gonna open up a ton of possibilities and a ton of efficiencies. One of the things I love to say, and I say this way more often than I need to, is I feel like we're in our era of innovation like we were back in the Industrial Revolution. In the Industrial Revolution, you had manual laborers doing manual labor that was backbreaking and hard.

(Robbie Morrison at 00:18:20) And you can only drive so much GDP from an economy based on the labor that was in that economy. Then the Industrial Revolution came along, and you were able to use steam engines and different mechanisms for mechanical power to amplify what a human could do with their muscles. Now we're in that information era, that informational industrial revolution with AI, and it's enabling us as information workers or knowledge workers to be able to do a lot more than our brains could do by themselves, just like a lot more than the muscles of the manual laborers could do pre-Industrial Revolution. And I think that that journey is going to do the same thing to the gross domestic products of many countries. And I'm just excited to be part of that journey and see it through.

(Robbie Morrison at 00:19:22) And as we talked about our kids, be able to see our kids benefit from that.

(Joel Beasley at 00:19:28) No, you're spawning all sorts of big ideas in my head, like, what comes next? Right? We go from manual labor. We do the body, then we do the brain, and then what?

(Joel Beasley at 00:19:36) The soul? Like, what comes next?

(Robbie Morrison at 00:19:39) Yeah. What's that called? The singularity? We're going to all become part of the whole. Unless we already are.

(Robbie Morrison at 00:19:47) Assimilated. Yeah. So I hope it's not the soul. I kind of want to keep my soul, but I would like to keep mine.

(Joel Beasley at 00:19:53) Yeah.

(Robbie Morrison at 00:19:54) Yeah. But, you know, that is a great question. You know, what is next? It took the Industrial Revolution a really long time to play out, and there were winners and losers in the Industrial Revolution. We'll see over the course of many more years, but I think this one's moving faster than anything I've seen. I got to live through a lot of neat innovations in technology. I don't remember being around for the first computers, but I remember when client-server became a big deal. I remember when the Internet became a big deal, and then I remember when the cloud became a big deal. And now I remember living through AI taking all those technologies—those desktops becoming a network, becoming part of this wide area network in the Internet, storing their data and their applications in the cloud, and now being able to use those transitions to enable a generative AI revolution that wouldn't have been possible without them. Whatever next is is going to build upon the generative AI, the AI boom now.

(Robbie Morrison at 00:21:09) Of course, we've got what's called general AI next, when the AIs are us and the AIs can communicate with us just as naturally as me and you are communicating. We're not far from that. And there's a lot of things that will change in our society.

(Joel Beasley at 00:21:30) Have you talked to Grok yet?

(Robbie Morrison at 00:21:31) I have.

(Joel Beasley at 00:21:33) Voice Grok, though?

(Robbie Morrison at 00:21:34) Yeah. Yeah. I have. It is crazy.

(Joel Beasley at 00:21:37) That is weirdly good.

(Robbie Morrison at 00:21:41) Yeah. And what was it a year ago when the Google engineer came out and—I forget, he was in the news saying that, you know, we've created a general intelligence, and I feel for this person. I think he called it a person, and he was talking to early versions of Grok. And I got to tell you, it's crazy.

(Joel Beasley at 00:22:04) Okay. So I want to talk about the survey you guys are running. Velosio is running a survey, and I've got a couple different things I want to do. The first thing is I want to discuss the two big questions on the survey. Right? And so you're asking people, what's your biggest challenge as a technology leader right now, and then you're also asking, what's your biggest challenge when it comes to implementing AI in your organization? But before I go through each one of those with you, I just wanted to know, like, what assumptions—you haven't run the survey yet. You know the space. You're serving the clients. You have a good idea. Like, what are your assumptions about what the survey results will be?

(Robbie Morrison at 00:22:43) I'd say most of our clients that we interface with to help them with the AI journey—most are coming in and having trouble with their data accuracy and silos. The silos, with the right implementation of an AI engine, become less important. But when they're in silos, then having a unified security mechanism—that means your data is not given out. Your payroll data doesn't go to your associates. The associate can't go and ask, you know, how much does my boss make? What is my latest performance review without them being granted access? That all becomes very important when you have data silos and you don't have a unified security mechanism around it. So my assumption is that it will come back in data and data cleanliness and data governance will be the biggest challenge. But I could be wrong on that because I also find that many CIOs and business leaders don't understand the importance of that aspect of their data until they actually get into the journey.

(Joel Beasley at 00:23:59) Or until they have a problem.

(Robbie Morrison at 00:24:01) Yeah. Until that associate asks for something they shouldn't be able to see and they get it.

(Joel Beasley at 00:24:09) Yeah. Yeah. Rogue Grok. Yeah. What about—what is your assumption? What would you bet money on for, like, what the top answer is going to be when it comes to implementing AI in your organization?

(Robbie Morrison at 00:24:23) So I think when they look at what's the biggest challenge to implementing AI, it's probably two things. But I'd say first, it's going to be, you know, where can AI benefit my organization? Where can I implement AI and get the most rapid return on the investment of implementing it? And then, once that's understood, once you come to that conclusion through those business conversations, I would assume that the next is going to be creating those security mechanisms for the data and how do I actually create those across my different silos of information. I would assume that is going to be what our survey will come back and kind of have—maybe not a fifty-fifty split on them, but it'll have a split on what their biggest challenges is: understanding where to implement AI and where AI can be impactful from a business standpoint to then, okay, I figured that out. Now how do I do that with data governance and data compliance in my organization specifically?

(Joel Beasley at 00:25:36) And does Velosio do that or do you have partners that do it? How do you handle that side of that?

(Robbie Morrison at 00:25:40) Whole thing. We, as I said, try to be the organization that can come in and give you a Fortune 100, Fortune 50 experience at the mid-market space. So I do believe that Velosio can do all of that consulting and that hand-holding through the journey with our clients. We also have partners that can do some validations around that and do some audits to make sure that everything's going to be correct at the end. But we also are able to do it just—if the clients need third-party validation, that's available.

(Joel Beasley at 00:26:21) I want to talk a little bit about resilience. That's one of my favorite topics. But before I get too deep into it, I'm curious your thoughts. You watch business news. You're a CEO. You've got CEO friends. We're entrepreneurs. We're all trying to keep a pulse. I'm calling people, hey, what are you seeing? Hey, what are you seeing? As far as the market goes, you were professional and lived through the 2008, like, multiple crashes. Right? You were in your career. Like, I was not. I was just—my career was born out of the real estate crash of '08 because I built a real estate efficiency software.

(Robbie Morrison at 00:26:58) Oh, cool. Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:26:59) And that was, like, my first thing that I did. And so that's where I entered the market. You've seen tough times in the markets. I've seen maybe the '08 crash, like, at the end and then COVID. Where do you think we are right now?

(Robbie Morrison at 00:27:14) Yeah. I think that we're—I wouldn't say that it's a foregone conclusion we're going to have a recession and hopefully not a crash. But I don't think it's a foregone conclusion, but I think that we're starting to get the sediment that will lead to that. You know, as individuals stop having confidence, you start having a self-fulfilling prophecy, and there's some worry in that. Yeah. I also lived through the—you know, I was working in the banking industry in '08. I was doing a project, a technology project for one of the banks that was foreclosed on, one of the first big banks out in California that had the Secret Service come in and close them down. It was an interesting experience. But coming out of that experience, I recognize that technology is an enabler of both a business in an upward market and a downward market. You know, when you're in a downward market, it's about driving the maximum efficiency out of the investments you've made and out of the people that you have. And, you know, if a market turns down, that's many times the place where technology and our technical chops can help a business to survive.

(Robbie Morrison at 00:28:44) It's a whole lot easier to drive efficiencies if you have the good underpinning in your technology base. And then if you're on an upward momentum and you're growing like gangbusters, sometimes that's not the easiest time to implement new software or to get advantages from the software. You're just trying to get your orders out the door or get your stuff done. So technology I see is an enabler no matter what the macro economy is doing. Of course, it matters what the micro business economy is doing, but, you know, not what the macro is doing. And I think when we look at the uncertainty right now in at least the U.S. macroeconomic economy, and you just heard today that the Japanese economy is, you know, pulling back what they believe their growth is going to be. It's—we need technology as much as ever, maybe more than ever to help us understand how to react to these uncertain times and how to profit from these uncertain times.

(Joel Beasley at 00:29:58) And the scope's pretty narrow too because most of the people look at, like, now to five years, you know, or so when they're talking. No one—you know this to be true because no one's—it's not a regular every-night conversation on these business channels about the fertility rate.

(Robbie Morrison at 00:30:14) Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:30:15) It's like, if you look at it, if you start playing this game on a fifty to a hundred year scale, you're like, oh my goodness. We have way bigger problems. Way bigger problems. Because what do you think that's going to do to asset prices? There's just going to be—it's going to be ridiculous.

(Robbie Morrison at 00:30:30) Talk about fertility rates and talk about birth rates in some of the world's most established economies. I could go into that rabbit hole for a long time. I was in Denmark, what was it, twelve years ago, and there was an advertisement on TV, and they kept advertising to do it for Denmark. And they just wanted to, you know, you needed to be creating babies for the health of Denmark. That's so true. If we want to talk about a ten-year span or maybe a thirty-year span, we got a lot bigger problems.

(Joel Beasley at 00:31:05) Yeah. Oh, yeah. I mean, look, my parents, they all had seven, eight siblings.

(Robbie Morrison at 00:31:10) Yep.

(Joel Beasley at 00:31:11) All of their siblings had three or four kids. Most of their kids had no kids or one kid. I am the exception with three. Like, people are like, that's a lot of kids. I was like, not really. Talked to my buddy, Michael. He's got six.

(Robbie Morrison at 00:31:25) Yeah. And the replacement is what? Two point four? Two point three? Two point four kids? So if a husband and wife don't have two something, you're not replacing the populace. And if you don't have the populace being replaced, you know, where do we go from there? Maybe we have longer lifespans and then our replacement is lessened, but it's still, you know, at some point—

(Joel Beasley at 00:31:50) The math on that too to even see how much that would replace. Yeah.

(Robbie Morrison at 00:31:55) Yeah. It doesn't replace. It delays. So unless you have an infinite lifespan or something, then yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:32:01) Singularity. We're getting there.

(Robbie Morrison at 00:32:03) Right. Yep.

(Joel Beasley at 00:32:05) Now I know I did have a note in here from the prep call that you wanted to talk about crisis management around COVID. Did you have any good insight that you pulled specifically from going through COVID as the COO that you want to share?

(Robbie Morrison at 00:32:18) COVID was a time where people were reinvesting in technology as much as ever because it enabled them to work from home. And if you weren't in an office, you needed technology at your house to be able to connect back to your coworkers. I think that's just another example of how technology enables efficiencies and enables workers through no matter what's happening in the economy. I think it's a great litmus test to how bad it can get, you know, when everything stops in COVID. There was plenty of industries, the restaurant industry, that in the early days, you didn't think were going to survive, that they transitioned to the takeout orders and to the home delivery.

(Robbie Morrison at 00:33:12) And I don't know about you where you live in Nashville exactly, but, you know, I see all over the place where plenty of those restaurants that used to have seats for people to come in and sit have transitioned and stayed transitioned to delivery because they found it more profitable and more efficient for them. You don't have all the wait staff. You don't have all the additional overhead that you need if you just are delivering. So COVID was another example of how transitioning and using technology can enable a business to thrive no matter what's going on around them.

(Joel Beasley at 00:33:47) Yeah. One of my favorite transition stories from that era is Chuck E. Cheese. Right? Because they were, like, shut down. They are the germiest place you can go right now. Anyway, they created a pizza chain.

(Robbie Morrison at 00:34:02) Yep.

(Joel Beasley at 00:34:03) Do you know about this? Yes. That was unbelievable.

(Robbie Morrison at 00:34:05) Yeah. Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:34:07) Not that great, but it was a great business move. Yeah.

(Robbie Morrison at 00:34:10) And, you know, if you looked at Chuck E. Cheese there for a while, it was—I didn't—it was—I don't know day to day if they were going to be able to survive. They were trying to get loans based off their points and, you know, all these other things, and it was not—but they made it through some innovation. And that, you know—

(Joel Beasley at 00:34:30) Looking pretty scared. Yeah.

(Robbie Morrison at 00:34:34) Yeah. That's true. I think that's a, you know, for your listeners, as CTOs, being able to innovate around technology to drive business outcomes. That's the primary job of the CTO, in my opinion, being able to look at technology and see how it can impact the business. And that's a good CTO does that in their sleep. And, you know, not every idea is going to be correct, but being able to fail fast and iterate is key. And I think COVID showed that as much as anything.

(Joel Beasley at 00:35:10) Absolutely. I want to talk about having uncomfortable conversations. That's something you have to do regularly as a CEO, more so than a CTO, I'm sure, just because of the variety of them and all of that. Do you have any tips for handling tough conversations?

(Robbie Morrison at 00:35:26) Yeah. I wish there was a silver bullet to that one. I would say that tough conversations are not fun for anybody, the person giving them or the person receiving them. But the biggest thing I talk to my team about is if there's an uncomfortable conversation needed, just be authentic and honest and try to be a human when having them and have them as quickly as possible because, you know, there's the old adage that good news doesn't improve with age. A hard conversation doesn't get easier if you wait.

(Robbie Morrison at 00:35:58) You should have it, you know, as soon as the emotions calm down, but as soon as you're able to. That's something that as you move up in management, you know, CTO is a very high level position. So most CTOs would already know this. But, you know, as you move up in your career and move into higher and higher management level roles, having tough conversations becomes more and more of what you have to do on a day-to-day basis. You have to make decisions that are important for the whole and right for the whole, but may not be right for an individual or maybe even a department.

(Robbie Morrison at 00:36:39) And that weighs on your heart, your soul, that you know you're doing it for the greater good, and you have to do it as quickly as possible.

(Joel Beasley at 00:36:52) To summarize, have them quickly. Is that what you're saying?

(Robbie Morrison at 00:36:55) Yeah. To summarize, have them quickly and be a human when you're having them. That doesn't mean to soften the message overly. It doesn't mean to empathize when it's not in your nature to empathize with the situation happening. But remember that the people on the other end are a human being too, and they deserve to be treated with respect when you're having a hard conversation.

(Joel Beasley at 00:37:23) All right. People want to learn more about your company and the services. Where can they go? What should they do?

(Robbie Morrison at 00:37:29) Yeah. They can reach us at www.velosio, that's as on my shirt, V-E-L-O-S-I-O, dot com. There we go.

(Joel Beasley at 00:37:39) Velosio.com. Robbie, we made a podcast. How do you feel?

(Robbie Morrison at 00:37:43) I feel great. Thank you for having me on today.

(Joel Beasley at 00:37:46) The most frustrating thing for me, Josh, is when I call support and I can't understand them. Yeah, man. I hate that. That's why I like US Cloud. Not only is it better, faster support, but all the engineers are US-based engineers, and it's also a lot cheaper.

(Joel Beasley at 00:38:00) 94% of US Cloud's clients report saving a third or more when switching from Microsoft Unified Support to US Cloud. So now you'll just have to figure out what to do with all that extra money. If it were me, I'm responsible, so I'd reallocate the money to improve my team. Josh, what would you do?

(Intro Narrator at 00:38:17) I'd probably just buy more guitars.

(Joel Beasley at 00:38:19) More guitars. Visit uscloud.com to book a call and figure out how much your team can save. 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.