Podcast appearances and mentions of chris okay

In this episode of the Building Texas Business Podcast, I sit down with Jacob Robinson, the founder of Dig World, a construction-themed amusement park. Jacob's journey from owning a commercial cleaning business to launching a theme park was inspired by his son Pierce's courage in overcoming a severe illness. Jacob shares how this personal experience drove him to create a space where families can make lasting memories by operating real construction equipment. We also explore Jacob's unexpected invitation to appear on Shark Tank, which initially seemed too good to be true. Jacob describes the rigorous preparation process for the show and how securing a deal with Robert Herjavec provided significant exposure and credibility for Dig World. This experience sparked interest in franchise opportunities nationwide, propelling the business forward. However, Jacob's path has not been without challenges. He reflects on the operational setbacks faced during Dig World's grand opening and the importance of resilience in entrepreneurship. Jacob emphasizes learning from these failures and the need to be patient and ready for success. Throughout the episode, Jacob discusses his leadership evolution, focusing on servant leadership and building a passionate, customer-focused team. He highlights the importance of creating a culture of trust and creativity to ensure a safe and memorable experience for all visitors. Jacob remains committed to expanding DigWorld while offering an affordable alternative to traditional family outings. SHOW HIGHLIGHTS I discussed Jacob Robinson's inspiring journey from running a commercial cleaning company to founding Dig World, a construction-themed amusement park inspired by his son Pierce's battle with a severe illness. Jacob shared the story of how an unexpected email invitation led to his appearance on Shark Tank, which resulted in a significant deal with Robert Herjavec and propelled Dig World into the national spotlight. We explored the challenges faced during Dig World's opening day, highlighting the operational setbacks that resulted in temporary closure and how these experiences taught valuable lessons about patience and readiness. Jacob explained the development of custom technology to enhance safety and functionality in the park's machinery, ensuring a secure and manageable experience for visitors operating real construction equipment. We discussed the importance of building a passionate and customer-focused team, emphasizing a culture of creativity and care that enhances the visitor experience and supports the company's mission. Jacob described his evolution from a fear-driven leadership style to one centered on servant leadership, focusing on resilience and motivating his team positively through setbacks. As Dig World plans for expansion, Jacob remains committed to offering an affordable, enriching alternative to traditional family outings, while also contemplating new mascots and improvements to machinery safety. LINKSShow Notes Previous Episodes About BoyarMiller About Dig World GUESTS Jacob RobinsonAbout Jacob TRANSCRIPT (AI transcript provided as supporting material and may contain errors) Chris: Jacob, I want to welcome you to Building Texas Business. Thanks for taking time to come on the podcast. Jacob: No, thank you. I'm so honored to be here. Chris: So we can see from behind you. You know Dig World's your company. Take a minute to tell the listeners what Dig World is. What do you do? What are you known for? Jacob: Yeah, great question. So we are a construction theme park where we allow kids and adults to operate real construction equipment. So we let them drive real skid steers, real excavators, real UTVs would take you up and boom lifts, the whole deal. And the only thing is you need to be three years old or older. And so we truly are a fun family theme park, but we allow you to operate real construction equipment. Chris: Wow, I mean, that's amazing Real construction equipment. I can't wait to get into more of the details behind that, but first I have to ask you what was the inspiration to start a company like this? Jacob: Yeah, it's crazy. You don't wake up with a dream every day to start a construction theme park. Chris: Yeah, maybe a construction theme park, but not one where a three-year-old can operate. That's right. Jacob: That's fair? That's fair? Well, no. So we, my wife and I, were blessed. We have three amazing kids. We have nine-year-old, a five-year-old and almost a two-year-old, and so life is good and hectic right now. But my nine-year-old son, pierce, was born in 2015, a happy, healthy baby boy, and life progressed just normally and just fine. And then, in 2017, one morning on a Saturday morning, my wife found him in his crib unconscious and after rushing him to the hospital, we learned that he had contracted bacterial meningitis. We weren't sure if he was going to make it through the weekend, but the Lord had different plans. He was in a coma 12 days and we were in the hospital 75 days. And when we left the hospital, pierce left with a whole host of issues he's nonverbal, he's epileptic, he's deaf in both ears, you know, wheelchair and mental capacity of call it maybe a one-year-old, but but he is a happy little boy and, as I was telling somebody else, you know Pierce sees the world the way that we should all see the world. He doesn't see your skin color. He doesn't see your income. He doesn't see what car you drive. As long as you hang out with them, you've, we could bring people together. You know, you conceptually always understand that life is short, but when you're faced with something like that, you really understand that life is short and precious and so you want to bring people together and create memories and have good times and not just look up and say, man, all I did was work for 40, 50 years. And here I am, and so we had this idea. You know, as I told somebody, we're pretty good arrogant Texans. We thought we could build a theme park. It couldn't be that hard, right. And man, we were wrong and we'll get into that, I'm sure, at some point in the show. But Pierce's always loved construction equipment garbage trucks, dump trucks, really thinking that whole, everything in that category. And so we said, hey, we really think we could build a theme park where kids could actually come and operate real construction equipment. And for the listeners out there, some of you may be thinking, oh, this must be some toned down version. No, these are real. These are 3027s, these are 305s, these are 243 skid steers, and so these are the real deal that we have re-engineered to where it's safe, but these are the real deal that you get to operate the park. So that's how we got started. Pierce is the inspiration behind the park, the inspiration behind really a lot of things that I do in life, and bringing people together to create memories that last a lifetime. Chris: My gosh, I mean what? I mean? That's a mic drop story, jacob. I mean, you know, blessings to you and Pierce and your whole family. I hope to get the chance to meet him one day. Yes, he's the coolest member of our family. So, yes, that is amazing. So, wow. I love the inspiration and the story and this whole idea of bringing people and families together for those memories. So were you in the construction business when you started this, or what? Jacob: were you doing? I would say yes and no. I had a commercial cleaning company. I started in 2015. That was my job. We just recently sold that business and where we started that business was in the construction cleaning space. So anytime a general contractor would go and build a big building or a hotel or an office building, we would come in, we would work for the general contractor and we would do the final clean on that building. So I was kind of in the construction space. We, you know we answered to GCs all day, but I am not a construction guy by trade. I was an ag major at Texas A&M, so I was a janitor turned theme park guy. So it's been a very interesting career, as you can ask my CPA wife from all the meandering roads that we've taken. Chris: Yeah, so you know we're on inspiration. So then let's yeah, let's kind of dig into what a lot of entrepreneurs and business owners you know face is that first step right Of actually getting the courage to, to chase that dream. So let's take us back to that. What was that like? You know what were, you know what were the first steps like, what were the feelings? Like? How'd you convince that CPA wife that you know CPA wife that this wasn't quite as crazy as it sounded? Jacob: Yes, I'm not sure, when we crossed that line that the craziness went out the window. We may have been there for a couple of years, but I would say to those entrepreneurs out there it's easy to say and it's cliche to say, but everybody sees the end of the story, everybody sees Dig World. Now We've been open, we're on Shark Tank, we're franchising. You know everybody's going ah, great idea. Listen, that was not the case when we first started. We went back and counted. I had roughly 248 pitch meetings where they told me no, that I was crazy, it was never going to work. Nobody's ever going to come to this, nobody's. You know, it's not safe All these kinds of things. And so 248, it's a lot of meetings. It's a lot of meetings. It's a lot of no's. It's a lot of no's. To keep coming home and go, no, it was a good meeting. It was a good meeting. What did they give you? Money? Not at all, quite the opposite, but it was a good meeting, right? And so to those entrepreneurs out there that you, you, if you're pounding your head against the pavement and going, man, if one more person tells me no, hey, I've been there with you, I know what that's like. Keep pressing on, keep going. If you have the vision and you have the conviction behind it, I promise you, at some point you are going to find somebody that believes in your vision for no other reason than you've just been at it for so long and you've got conviction behind it that somebody will take a flyer on you. But it was difficult. It was difficult. We started in 2019, and then COVID hit right, and so we told people not only were we the crazy theme park people running around asking people to invest, but then we were the crazy people saying hey, listen, not only are we going to build it, we're going to get a whole bunch of people together. And that messaging wasn't going over very well during COVID, and so you know, we had all of these factors that were not going in our favor. And then, finally, in 21, in 2021, we had a first couple of people start to say yes, and then Domino's started to fall, and then we opened in March of 2022. And, frankly, that was an epic failure, too, that we can talk about as well, but it was a long journey. It was a long journey, and so my encouragement to those that are out there, either on that journey or those that are at the beginning of that journey is take a step, just take a step. Right, do something. Just call somebody and say your dream out loud, right? Call somebody and say hey, listen, I'm going to let a three-year-old drive a skid steer. Right, and the more you start to say it out loud, the better that muscle is going to become being flexed. And then, all of a sudden, you're going to be the confident person that walks in the room and goes no, yeah, of course we're going to put a three-year-old on skid steer. We're going to let them drive an excavator. We're going to have birthday parties here, and then, hey, guess what they? But that theme of just take the step, just do it just go for it. Chris: No one's ever going to believe it as much as you do, so you got to have that passion and belief and eventually you will find someone to get behind you, and then it's on you to deliver. Right, that's right, that's right, that's exactly right. So I do want to get to the story on the opening, but I have to ask you mentioned it earlier, so how did the Shark Tank thing come about? How did you, how'd you wind up on Shark Tank? Let's talk a little bit about that experience and what that was like. Jacob: Yeah, an amazing experience, you know, it just was fantastic all around. An exhausting experience nonetheless, but it was a fantastic experience. You know, we were very blessed. One day I was sitting at my computer and we got an email to our info account and said hey, would you consider being on season 16 of Shark Tank? And clearly we thought it was a joke, right, and clearly thought something was going to be hacked if I responded to it. Chris: Don't click the attachment right, that's right, that's right. Jacob: All of a sudden our bank account gets hacked. But it was actually one of the producers. She had seen us on Instagram and said, hey, listen, would you be interested? Let's learn more about your business, see if it checks a lot of these boxes. And then that started the whole process. And the process is rigorous and it's long, and your fate hangs in the hands of people that you never get to see or talk to. And you know it goes from one lawyer to another lawyer. None of those lawyers have talked to each other, and so the whole process is very interesting. And then you know the show is true. It's true to form. The only thing scripted about the show is the very beginning pitch that you give, and other than that, it's a free for all. The Sharks don't know about your business, they don't have a flyer on your business, they haven't been given any information. It's truly a live pitch pitching again when I'm like, hey, no, hold on, we got the park open, I don't need to pitch anybody again. Plenty of people have told me no, I don't need, you know, five people on national television to blast me and tell me no. But so when we got there, we did the pitch and we were very blessed it went well. We secured a deal from Robert Herjavec, the tech entrepreneur on the show. He's one of the staple sharks and it's just been a great experience and once there's one of those things that you look up and you really have to sit in the fact that it's one of those once in a lifetime crazy things. And even yesterday I was driving to the grocery store and I sat there and I was like man, this really happened. That's crazy and just trying to enjoy those moments. Chris: Well, and it has to be. I mean, it's great that it worked out and you got, you know, some additional investment from a very seasoned person, but just the notoriety of being on right Open, you know, a lot of eyes to you and had to, you know, you know, increase traction and interest in what you were doing. Jacob: Totally. I think, from even, just you know, foot traffic to the park here in Katy. That that's been tremendous. But then even, obviously, you know we went on the show to sell franchises. That that's our next big hurdle is selling franchises across the country and we have been flooded with requests of franchises to bring people, you know, bring a park to their location, their city. Talking to potential franchisees, it really just just totally gasoline on the fire. Chris: Yeah. So let's go back to the opening. You said March 2022. One of the things I like to talk to people about is let's talk about a failure that you've encountered and most people will tell you can do a whole show on them, right. Literally, I was going to say you don't have enough time on this, but you know you shared that. I guess the opening didn't go so well or something around that. So let's talk about what were some of the failures around that. What did you learn that made you better going forward? Jacob: That's right. You know, I tell people one day when I'm, when I give it, when I give a speech one day at a theme park conference, I'm going to be able to tell people I'm one of the very few theme park operators in the world that has opened a theme park and closed it the same day because it went so poorly. And so you know, I do have that badge of honor with me. So we opened the park too soon and that was a hundred percent my fault, right you too soon, and that was 100% my fault, right? You're trying to you build in these parameters in your head. We got to open this date. We got to do this. You know people are waiting and I really wanted it to be open that Thursday of spring break back in 2022. Could I have waited 48 hours more and would that have fixed our problems? Yes, did I? No, and I think a lot of it was. You know, we had been at this for four years. At this point, we were exhausted and here was the finish line. The finish line was on Thursday and we could do this and everybody's gonna love it. Tickets were sold out there. There was plenty of buzz. You know we were being interviewed from broadcaster. You know I was on NPR and we're doing this interview in this country and all over the US, and there was so much media attention. We had helicopters circling over the park doing filming, getting ready for the opening, and when we opened, man, it was an epic disaster, and the reason it was is I pushed the grand opening. All of our machines were not ready. We had not put on our technology of all the machines, not that we were letting people operate those machines, but we did not have enough time built in to put a computer on this machine, and then this machine, and then this machine. And so what happened is we opened the park to hundreds and hundreds of people and we didn't have that many machines going, and so those hundreds and hundreds of people waited in line for hours and it was just disastrous. And people were angry at me, rightfully so. People wanted to tell me what they thought about me, and rightfully so. The amount of refunds that we issued that day were it was probably dollar for dollar, we probably made $0 that day or just lost money, and so we had to shut the park down. So so I go on, and we, you know we were open. We were going to be open that Thursday, friday, saturday, sunday, and I just canceled everything and said hey, I'm so sorry, we're not going to be open, we'll refund you your tickets or you can come back whenever you want. And, man, people were so mad at us. They were so mad at us. The news was doing coverage about how Dig World closed in less than 24 hours and it was a disaster, an epic failure. And so you know you go home that night and something you had been working for four years, there was no, nothing good about it. There wasn't even. There was no silver lining, like you could be, like well, but no, it was terrible and kids left crying. I mean, just like I said, just terrible. And my wife will tell you that, looking back on that night, she goes hey, I thought I lost you mentally that night, like I thought you were so down in the dumps that night that I didn't know where we were going to go from here. And yeah, I remember the next day waking up, I was trying to, I was going to take my son on a walk and I remember getting halfway out of the neighborhood and having to turn around, got to go back into the office. We've got to go on the offensive here and really try to say hey, listen, we're sorry, let's own the mistake right. Hey, we opened too soon, please come back. And so I think you look at it right and it just was one of those epic failures, and we've had many more along the way, right? Advert Hello friends, this is Chris Hanslick, your Building Texas business host. Did you know that Boyer Miller, the producer of this podcast, is a business law firm that works with entrepreneurs, corporations and business leaders? Our team of attorneys serve as strategic partners to businesses by providing legal guidance to organizations of all sizes. Get to know the firm at boyermillercom, and thanks for listening to the show. Jacob: I was thinking of just trying to figure out how to run a theme park, and we've never run a theme park, but that was one. That's an easy recall when somebody asked me to talk about failure. Chris: Right, like you almost were there right Reliving it that day. Jacob: Oh man yes. Chris: Well, the lesson, though, in that you found the positive and I think it's true in so many different circumstances. We're all going to make mistakes, right, we've made them in the past. One thing certain we're going to make them again in the future, it's owning it right, be this, taking ownership of it, and then kind of committing to do better. I think when you do that, you know what, more times than not, what comes from that is grace. You know people grace to you, and I think that's what it seems like what you've experienced. Right, you owned it, so we're going to do better. The community gave you grace, and when you open back up, they came. Jacob: I think don't pass the blame, Even honestly, even if it's not really your blame, right? People want somebody to stand up and say, hey, it's on me, and I think we don't see that a lot of times in leadership throughout you know, whatever. But people willing to say, hey, that was on me, I'm gonna raise my hand, that was on me. And then the key is forgetting quickly and moving on right and not dwelling which, whatever you do, operate out of imagination, not memory. Right, Don't go back there, sit in those failures operate out of imagination, not memory. Chris: That's a good one. I haven't heard that one before I'm writing it down. Jacob: I would like to take credit for it, but somebody much smarter than me said it, so yeah, right. Chris: So I want to talk a little bit about technology and innovation because, I mean, I know these are, you know, big machinery used out in the construction. There's nothing really innovative about them, but it seems to me that using them in your theme park has to have some innovation and technology to make them safe, as you've described them. So you know, tell us about that. How did you come up with it or did you, or where did you find it? Jacob: it? Yeah, great question. So, yes, yes, all of the above. I know I did not come up with it, I'm not smart enough to write code, but we partnered with an engineer and we said hey, listen, this is what we want to do. We believe this can happen. And what we did, in simplistic terms, we built our own computer to put onto the back of the machine. That goes into its wiring to override a lot of the functionality of it. And so when we call it dig world mode, when the computer's in dig world mode, it is safe. The excavators are stationary, they can't go forward and backwards, they only go certain degrees to the right and left and up and down. Our skid steers are heavily governed, the hydraulics and a lot of functionalities are disengaged. We have kill switches and then we can flip the computer back to normal mode and it's a normal functioning machine. And so really, coming alongside a bright engineering team and building this technology that's our technology and putting it on these machines is really outside the box kind of stuff. And finding somebody that wanted to dream alongside with us was the key to success there. And he's still dreaming alongside with us. I mean he had made a technology upgrade this past week. That's one of those things you look at and you go why didn't we do that three years ago? That makes things a lot, you know not safer, they were very safe it makes it simpler for our team to utilize, and so we're always improving. I think that's the other thing. You know you hear it all the time as an entrepreneur, but as a business owner, one of the things that's very easy to do is get stuck in a rut and go well, we've always done it that way, right? I had a call with my business partner this morning and he's newer to the team and he said well, why are we doing that? And I was like well, honestly, I don't know if we've ever asked that question. I think we've just done it and let's try something new here. And knowing that you don't always have the right answers, and your teammate you may have a high school kid that works for you, like I do that comes to you and goes hey, why, why aren't we doing it like this? Could we do it like this? And you go it's a genius idea, let's do it that way. Yeah, and being okay and putting your pride aside and saying let's change and adapt. Chris: Right. So you're clearly kind of in the entertainment business. Let's talk about building a team right, because I think I mean clearly you've got an internal team there, I guess in the office that's got to run the company, some creativity around it, but then you have another team, that's, you know, customer facing. How have you gone about building kind of each of those teams to try to maximize the company's success? Jacob: Yeah, it's a great question, Thank you. I would say, yeah, our two teams I'd almost kind of say like our corporate team. Right, our corporate team is the X's and O's business focus. How do we grow the franchises? How do we optimize the P&L? And really the key to success there is not to overstate cliches, but like go hire somebody smarter than you and go hire somebody that is great at your weaknesses and then give them the reins to run it. I don't go in your lane, you know how to run it. I trust you explicitly. I've given you the keys of the kingdom because if not, if I'm just going to micromanage you, then why would I even have you on my team? That's demeaning to you. I'm going to end up doing the work anyways because I'm a control freak. So I'm going to go hire somebody that really knows what they're doing and say go, do it right. Or my business partner he oversees a lot of different things, but one of them is the marketing, and today he said hey, listen, do we want to spend here? Do you want to spend here? I think the answer is here. Yep, let's go there right, if you think that's interview going. Hey, this is what we sleep and breathe here. We love the customer, we love that people are here. We're going to love on them and we're going to make memories. Can you do that? And that's what I'm going to hire and fire against. If I see you out there and you're not loving on customers and you're not creating memories that last a lifetime, we're going to ask you to leave. But that's what you know from the beginning. We're going to hire and fire against. Do we love people and are we serving them well? And if we do those things, we're going to build a culture that people start to talk about. And every team meeting that we have, I kick off of hey, today we're going to love people and today we're going to think outside the box, and I know you had, you know, a long week at school. I'm asking you from nine to five today to dig deep and love on people because and when you really frame it up, we get to be a part of something so special and so unique. We get to really be a part of this kid or this family's memory bank, and hopefully in a good way. Right, there are going to be hundreds and hundreds of kids for the rest of their lives that are able to say man, when I was five I had my birthday party at this place called Dig World and I got to drive a real excavator. They're gonna tell that story for their whole life. We get to be a part of that. How humbling is that. And so when you really can set the picture for these kids, what we're doing here is not just a job. We're not here today to collect tickets and put you on a machine and say thank you for coming. We are ingraining ourselves into your memory bank, and when we can take that on in the privilege of that, then, man, we can really sky's the limit. Chris: Yeah, well, I could see if you get that light bulb to go off and kind of in any employee, right, it changes the whole dynamic, the mindset and luckily those high school kids I got to believe they're learning great life skills to have to deal with people on the fly. And that's what we do every day. Right, we're dealing with people as we as they come to us, and so that's exactly right. Jacob: And get to teaching that, hey, the customer's not always right Sometimes. You know we can stand our ground every now and then too, and so really, yeah, how do we handle conflict with each other? How do we handle conflict with a customer? You know those are skills that are in an online day and age are becoming less and less, so how do we actually stand in front of another human being and say, hey, listen, I know you're frustrated, let's figure out how we can work through this kind of deal. So hopefully we're teaching them things that can go far beyond Dig World. Chris: Yes, for sure. So we're here in Texas. You started this business here. Tell me some of the things that you found, or have found, to be advantageous about being a Texas-based business. Jacob: Oh man, so many, one. Obviously. Just the people right, the people buy in and they love it. They love supporting the business, they love supporting what we're trying to do here. And so, culturally, it's amazing to be here in Texas. We were fortunate when we started we had a partnership with Texas A&M, my alma mater and so I'm a little biased there but really getting their buy-in, and a university that saw what we were trying to do and said, hey, listen, let's go capture the next generation of construction workers and teach them about Texas A&M. Yes, but let's also teach them about this great industry of construction. And then really, just the flexibility of Texas. You know there's not many states you can just go out and, for the first and foremost, be like, hey, listen, we're going to start a theme park and it's going to let kids operate construction equipment, right, the flexibility and you know we went through the whole rigmarole and everything with insurance and the filings, but really the adaptability of the state and going, yeah, that sounds great, let's do that. And then everybody behind it. It's just, it's been amazing. Chris: That's great. So I'd like to talk about leadership, and you know you're clearly, as a founder and CEO, leader, but how do you think those leadership qualities have developed over time and how would you describe your leadership style? Jacob: Yeah, I tell people a lot of times I think there's two versions of Jacob as the leader. There is pre-Pierce getting sick and then there's post-Pierce getting sick. Not that the goals have changed. The goals are still. Listen, you're running a business. You got to make money and you got to keep the doors open right At the end of the day. That's the name of the game. But mindset around those have changed. The intensity around that has changed and the bigger picture around that has changed. So, for example, pre Pierce getting sick and our cleaning business, we lose a contract. I'm pretty frustrated. I'm probably a little panicky. We're getting a little desperate on how do we replace that contract. I'm driving the team harder. What are we selling? I'm micromanaging more because I'm feeling nervous and anxious. Right, post Pierce getting sick, the intensity is not gone, but the priorities are going hey, we lost the contract, okay, let's go home, let's reset. Tomorrow, we'll find another one. There's another one out there, let's go find another one. Right, and motivating the team that way, instead of fear-based whether it be my fear or the fear I'm instilling rather than going hey, we'll be fine, we're gonna keep doing what we're doing. We're gonna keep doing the X's and O's of the business and it will be there. And so I think, when failure of a grand opening and a grand closing comes, you go. Okay, listen, today was not a good day, today was a terrible day. However, I'm still here, my family's still here, and tomorrow we're going to figure out how we survive this and we're going to pick up and we're going to go to work tomorrow and we're going to figure it out, and then I think, at the end of the day, I'm a servant leader. I hope our high school kids see me doing things that I asked them to do. I hope they see me cleaning the bathrooms. I hope they see me doing this, not to manipulate them to saying, hey, you know, oh, jacob's doing it, I should go do it. No, I want you to see that we're all in this together, right, and I believe in it this much that I'm going to get in here with you and I'm not going do at that point is they go? Yeah, I'll go clean the bathrooms, right, and hey, jacob asked me to do it, I'll go do it because I know he would do it right, rather than the dictator style leadership or the authoritarian style leadership. So I think for me it's coming alongside them, servant leadership, getting in the trenches, dealing with the disgruntled customers and not just making them deal with it, all of those kinds of things, I think. Build in the goodwill with the team and they see somebody that wants to link arms with you, and then what it allows me to do is come alongside them on those times where I either have to discipline or I have to recorrect or reposition, and they go. Ok, I know. But I know at the end of the day, he loves me. I know at the end of the day, it's the best, even if he's firing me. You know at the end that you, moving on, I'm still going to be in your corner, and so I think I view my leadership in those two ways. Chris: I like that. I can identify with it as well, feel the same way. To me the servant leadership is so valuable, right? Your employees have to believe not only they've seen you do it, not that you will do it, they've seen you do it right, and that when you ask them to do it it's important and so that's great. You know, just thinking about the obviously a lot of stuff going on in our world and in any kind of different ways. But you know economically, you know legislatively, what are some of the headwinds, given all that that you kind of see facing dig world as you're kind of looking out over the next 30, 60, 90, 120 days, year, kind of yeah, yeah. Jacob: It's a great question. I would answer it two ways. One you know, as we look at the economics of our park and people coming to our park, you know what we feel like is we sit in that middle or probably lower to middle ground of your discretionary spending as a family, meaning. Meaning, as I compare it to a Disney right, and when the economy goes down a little bit or people are a little worried or nervous, the Disney vacation may go on the back burner. Right, because that's a significant financial investment into that. It's a great experience, but it's significant. Where we fall is on the lower end of that category, hopefully delivering the same memories and experiences and fun and joy, but the price point is significantly cheaper than that. So we feel in good times and in rougher times we hope to be a resource that allows those families to still create memories in that regard. Externally, as we look to grow franchises, the ups and downs of the economy can sway different investors. They can sway how they want to hold their money, what they want to do with their money, what they don't want to do with their money. Now my sales pitch to those individuals are hey, you could take your money and put it over here, or you could take your money and put it over here and you could kind of be in control of it, but you also can create something that's bigger than you for your community, for your family, things like that. So it it will be interesting to see what the next probably call it 120 days have in store for us as far as how we're received on the investment side. But right now, our focus on this phase one is how do we get five franchises across the finish line, and right now, praise the Lord, we're very close to hitting that number. And then we got to get them open and we have to produce right. Chris: At the end of the day, you have to produce and I understand you have two open now or the second one's about to open. Dallas will be open by the end of this year. That's correct. Okay, that's great. So I gotta ask. I mean, you're talking about disney, made me think. Do you have some kind of mascot or anybody like in a big suit when you show up at dig world? You know? Jacob: so. But he said I literally got off a phone call earlier we are, we've honed it into kind of two mascots that we want, and so that will be released soon once the debate can be decided within our team of which way we're going. Chris: Okay very good. So let's just kind of turn to a little more casual side. Yeah, you said you and Katie went to A&M. I'm taking those two data points and making an assumption you're a born and raised Texan, it's a great question. Jacob: It's a great assumption, but no, I am a son of a healthcare executive, and so I was born in Alabama, raised all over Texas, graduated high school in South Carolina, then came to A&M, met my wife, who is a Houstonian, who's a Katie girl and much smarter than I am, and so she had a real job after college, and so I followed her here and I've been here ever since. Chris: Okay, Great story. So just talking about Texas, you know you all have a favorite spot. You like to go within the state to get away, maybe vacation time. Jacob: Yeah, you know it's funny whenever, within the state, melissa and I we love to head over to San Antonio. We love the Hill Country side. We like a couple of the resorts there. That's our, our getaway. And then I think you know when we're getting away. Now we've got young kids. Grandparents and cousins and nephews live in waco and so we head over to waco. We spend a lot of time there. But if melissa and I are just getting away and staying in the state, we're gonna head probably over to san antonio very good. Chris: That leads me to the next question then do you prefer tex-mex or barbecue? Jacob: oh man, that's. Oh man, see that one. That's a tricky question because we'd have to be like specific in the subcategory right. Like'd have, we'd have to like pit two against each other. Chris: I hear you. Everyone says that that's the hardest question saved for last. Jacob: Oh, my goodness, I'm going to have to go barbecue. I'm going to have to go barbecue. Chris: All right, all right. I love how you're going to break it down, though, cause I'm the same way. You know. It's like. Well, I don't know, it depends, I mean it depends it just. Jacob: You know, on Friday night this weekend I had Tex-Mex. On Saturday I had barbecue. So you know like it literally is, but I'd have to go barbecue. Chris: All right, very good. Well, jacob, thank you again for taking time to come on the podcast. I mean your story, obviously from the start of it with Pierce, was amazing, but just such a creative, unique thing that you've created. And you know, just wish you the best of success, thank you. Thank you, honored to be here today. Thank you for taking time Special Guest: Jacob Robinson.

En este episodio, mis entrevistados son Laura Sofía Montoya Gómez y Carlos Alberto Montoya Correa. Carlos es arquitecto egresado de la Universidad Nacional sede Medellín. Experto en planificación, gestión y ejecución de proyectos de desarrollo urbano con énfasis en viviendas económicas en tratamientos de expansión urbana, consolidación, mejoramiento de barrios, renovación urbana y en zonas con restricciones geotécnicas. Ha participado como gestor en la ejecución de más de 50.000 viviendas económicas desde el sector público, en proyectos de cooperación internacional, de aplicación de políticas nacionales y de ejecución local en varias ciudades de Colombia (Bogotá, Medellín, Armenia, Bucaramanga, Rionegro y Bello). Ha sido docente en la Facultad de Arquitectura Universidad Nacional sede Medellín y ha participado de publicaciones colectivas de carácter técnico.Sofia es arquitecta egresada de la Universidad Pontificia Bolivariana. Magíster en Arquitectura, Crítica y Proyecto de la misma institución donde actualmente también es docente en el área de Taller de Proyectos. Ha participado durante más de 13 años de varias colectividades en la ciudad de Medellín, donde ha podido desarrollar proyectos de investigación en el área del patrimonio urbano-arquitectónico que han sido publicados mediante recursos financiados a través de los estímulos de la Secretaría de Cultura Ciudadana. Es cofundadora de la Corporación Proyecto NN, organización sin ánimo de lucro que acompaña procesos comunitarios y promueve la educación y la dignificación de los espacios de encuentro populares.Notas del EpisodioQue esta pasando en MedellinEl encaricimiento de la ciudadEl turismo sexual y el pueblo moralistaLa gentrificacion de Pablo EscobarLa construccion y venta de vivienda paisaResentimiento y el dios dineroLas mascaras del gobierno“No se puede morir del exito”El derecho a la ciudad y viviendaTareaProyecto NN - Sitio Web - InstagramTranscripcion en Espanol (English Below)Chris: [00:00:00] Bienvenida Sofía, bienvenido Carlos al podcast El Fin del Turismo. Muchas gracias por estar conmigo hoy para platicar de este tema, pues si, tan complejo. Me gustaría preguntarles en dónde se encuentran hoy y como se ve el mundo para cada uno de ustedes allá.Sofia: Bueno, estamos aquí en la ciudad de Medellín. Estamos juntos en mi casa, Carlos es mi padre, y bueno, decidimos juntarnos para tener como una conversación más fluida, desde aquí, desde mi casa en el centro de la ciudad, que es un centro, pues además, bastante particular. Pues Medellín es una ciudad montañosa que queda en los Andes. Es un valle. Y digamos que el centro de la ciudad tiene, pues, unas dinámicas muy distintas a muchos centros de otras ciudades. Carlos: Es una ciudad muy estrecha [00:01:00] y tiene en el costado oriental y occidental un par de montañas llenas de barrios. Aquí mismo por la ventana se ve toda las montañas urbanizadas y en el centro está, digamos la metrópoli, lo que pudiéramos llamar una ciudad más tradicional, mientras arriba son barriadas o comunas populares. Hoy en día, muy populares para cierto turismo.¿ Y usted dónde está? Chris: Pues yo llevando en Oaxaca, en la capital de Oaxaca, México también en un valle un poco mas amplio geográficamente que Medellín . Conozco Medellín porque andaba como turista hace 15 años quizás allá. Y pues empezando toda la [00:02:00] investigación para este episodio, encontre como muchos Entonces me gustaría leer unas citas de esos artículos para los oyentes que quizás no conocen Medellín, no saben qué está pasando allá, según los medios masivos. Entonces, primero este, Nomad List. "Nomad List es una plataforma que publica su ranking de los destinos más populares para trabajar de forma remota. Colocó a Medellín en segundo lugar, el año pasado entre 157 ciudades de Latinoamérica." El próximo dice que "en la colonia de Manila de Medellín hay alquileres a corto plazo cuyos propietarios ganan más de cinco millones de pesos colombianos por mes o alrededor de $1,000 estadounidenses."El próximo decía que "aunque no se llevó [00:03:00] a cabo, el presidente local dijo en ese momento 'que prohibiría los alquileres a corto plazo en la ciudad como medida para prevenir el abuso y la explotacion sexual infantil. En esa búsqueda por encontrar una solución a ese flagelo, Guitierrez, el presidente local se reunió con representantes de la plataforma de Airbnb para llegar a un acuerdo.Desde entonces se ha trabajado de común acuerdo con las partes en conjunto para evitar medidas extremas, pero si establecer acciones que permiten prevenir este delito en la ciudad" Siguiendo, "en tanto, el número de apartmentos anunciados en Airbnb, la popular empresa de alquiler de propiedades vacacionales, subió de 8 mil en octubre de 2022 a 14 mil a [00:04:00] finales de 2023, según datos recabados por AirDNA."Y finalmente, "los datos recientes dice que Medellín recibe 1.7 millones de visitantes extranjeros a una urbe de 2 millones y medio de habitantes." Entonces, me gustaría empezar preguntándoles a ustedes dos sobre la gentrificación en Medellín. Yo encontré otro artículo sobre el tema. Y quizás se se exhibe, expone un poco de lo que está pasando allá y dice que "Wilson y Felipe, ambos se reservaron sus nombres reales. Son dueños, cada uno, de un bar cafetería en Manila en El Poblado, una de las zonas más turísticas de mayor actividad económica. Los dos vecinos son de los pocos que quedan en su [00:05:00] cuadra, porque prácticamente todas las casas de la zona se transformaron en restaurantes, pequeños hoteles y hostales, escuelas de español o viviendas para alquileres cortas a través de aplicaciones como Airbnb, que toman los extranjeros y que en parte son la causa del sobrecosto en los precios de la vivienda para los habitantes tradicionales. Entre 2022 y 2023, los arriendos crecieron entre 50 y 100%.Este barrio cambió demasiado, dice Wilson, era familiar y vea, se volvió tierra de viciosos y jíbaros que atiende a domicilio. Toda esa 'gentrificación' como le dicen, es a raíz de los inversionistas extranjeros y se encareció todo. Carlos, tú has trabajado para empresas estatales en Medellín y Bogotá, la Empresa de Desarrollo Urbano. y [00:06:00] sofia, tú has trabajado en el Proyecto NN ahí en Medellín. Entonces quizás podrían ofrecernos una idea de lo que ha sucedido en Medellín en los últimos años y las últimas décadas en términos de gentrificación y qué papel tiene que desempeñar el turismo y los turistas en ello. Carlos: Pues yo, yo percibo esta situación como supremamente novedosa y reciente. Vale decir que Medellín en los 90 era una ciudad a donde no venía nadie. Es decir, la situación de violencia urbana. Toda esta crisis que desató el narcotráfico en la ciudad nos tenía marginados del resto del mundo. Era una ciudad bastante poco atractiva por lo violenta y de inversiones relativamente paralizadas.[00:07:00] Sofia: Fue la ciudad más violenta del mundo. Carlos: SíSofia: En cierto momento Carlos: Y necesitó de una estrategia de atención entre la presidencia de la república y la alcaldía local que ustedes en México le llaman "presedencia local" para encontrar alternativos de futuro. Se llamaban los seminarios de muchas conversaciones.Entonces, lo primero que quiero enseñar es que es un hecho muy nuevo, y muy reciente. Nosotros para ver un extranjero, era un futbolista que venían a los dos clubes. De resto aquí no venía a nadie. Ver rostros chinos o japoneses o alemanes eran, eso es muy sui géneris. Y el paisa, la cultura antioqueña es una cultura supremamente hospitalaria.La gente acá desborda de amabilidad. Es una cosa muy curiosa. El solo hecho de sentir a una persona de otra [00:08:00] región, no necesariamente extranjero, puede ser de otra región colombiana. El antioqueño desarrolla un, unas habilidades y unas formas de relación, muy amenas, muy atractivas. El antioqueño es una persona muy conversadora, muy dicharachero, y es muy abierto. Es muy tranquilo en las relaciones, diría eso en principio. Entonces sí, si sentimos, realmente se siente abrumadora la presencia de extranjeros, porque es notoria. Aquí mismo nosotros vivimos aquí. Yo vivo en un par de cuadritos donde los hoteles pequeños proliferan en dos cuadras han, se han desarrollado en los últimos tres años.cinco, seis, siete hoteles, y la presencia del extranjero, es notoria. Y como le digo en un principio, era muy bienvenida, porque el extranjero, pues trae monedas con un [00:09:00] cambio muy fuerte y también aquí, el país es de una mentalidad comercial y negociante extrema. Aquí el negocio se ve pa vender un hueco, pues hacemos otro hueco.Es decir, la gente aquí es supremamente ingeniosa en la forma de establecer negocios. Sofia: Si, y, y creo que la ciudad hizo un esfuerzo institucional por cambiar también la narrativa. Pues porque, como lo dice Carlos, estuvo muy estigmatizada, pues somos la ciudad de Pablo Escobar. Cierto.Eso es una carga como simbólica muy fuerte. Y entonces se ha hecho pues un un esfuerzo, por mostrar otras cosas que también somos. Creo que el reggaetón tiene mucho que ver como con la visibilidad de la ciudad también. Cierto, porque digamos que el reggaetón no solamente pues han salido grandes estrellas, grandes cantantes pues como de de aquí de Medellín, sino [00:10:00] que el reggaetón pues como muchas otras géneros musicales, pues como que en salsa o, o bueno enaltece, pues esas figuras como el narcotráfico de bueno, como cierta estética también. Y entonces es muy atractivo para muchos extranjeros venir a conocer la ciudad del reggaetón.Y esa era una cosa que estaba pasando, digamos, de una manera más orgánica y más lenta antes de la pandemia. Con la pandemia se corta y luego de la pandemia, si se desbordó. O sea, ocurre como un fenómeno desbordado. También me imagino, pues como por esas ansias de mucha gente de viajar y de pues, de haber estado como paralizada en sus lugares, y la ciudad realmente no estaba preparada.O sea, yo creo que todo ese esfuerzo institucional que se hizo, no se midió tampoco, como hasta, hasta dónde podía llegar, cierto? Porque, si bien es cierto que la ciudad es supremamente hospitalaria y acogedora, digamos que el clima es una de las cosas que también [00:11:00] a muchos extranjeros les llama la atención. Es un clima muy ideal, cierto? Un eterno verano. Pues, obviamente también hay unas estructuras, que ofrecen cosas. Hay mucha droga, hay mucha prostitución, cierto? Es una ciudad como también para un turismo que no deja tantas cosas buenas. Además, bueno, tú sabrás y tendrás del conocimiento, el turismo así no sea, pues, este turismo como de drogas y de prostitución y de fiesta desbordada. El turismo es un fenómeno que tiende como a arrasar, cierto? Es un fenómeno que encarece, entonces. Sí, creo que en en un principio, es una ciudad que un poco quería que esto sucediera, pero en este momento no sabe muy bien cómo manejar. Carlos: Si también hubo un momento en que cuando la ciudad empezó a despegar, hubo cierto turismo académico, porque la ciudad empezó a ser muy sonora en cuanto a ciertas transformaciones [00:12:00] urbanísticas. Esta es una ciudad que tiene una empresa de servicios públicos muy poderosa. Nosotros tenemos en Medellín, la alcaldía es la dueña de una especie de multinacional criolla que le vende servicios públicos y energía eléctrica. Le vende energía eléctrica a Panamá, a Ecuador y le brinda servicios públicos a unos 90 municipios en Colombia. Entonces, la ciudad tiene una capacidad de inversión social realmente notoria.Y entonces la ciudad empezó a hacer eventos académicos para mostrar. Por ejemplo, Bogotá, que es la capital de Colombia, tiene 8,000,000 de habitantes. No ha podido construir un metro. Chris: Wow.Carlos: Y el metro de Medellín está cumpliendo 30 años. Lo que quería señalar es que se desarrolló una forma de turismo muy curiosa. Y es que aquí vienen extranjeros a visitar barrios populares, a meterse en [00:13:00] Moravia o en lo que aquí llamamos Comuna 13, en un hecho muy curioso por lo menos porque pues ir a un barrio popular donde, donde no hay servicios cómodos, donde no hay locaciones, donde pues, a ver como el espectáculo popular. No sé, es una cosa muy, muy curiosa y es increíblemente desbordado.Es decir, hay lugares donde no cabe la gente físicamente y siguen yendo, o sea allá, son, todo eso es incómodo. Pero la gente sigue yendo, no se como a que, pero siguen llegando. Sofia: Es una pregunta que nos hacemos constantemente, pues, de hecho, varios amigos siempre me dicen como, es que, a qué vienen? A qué vienen aquí?Pues no entendemos a qué vienen, tal vez porque uno tiene naturalizado. No sé, pues todo lo que pasa aquí, pero uno sigue sin entender, Carlos: Pero, diría, el turismo está asociado como a los centros de negocios, a los centros [00:14:00] históricos, a los centros culturales, pero que los barrios populares se volviesen un objetivo turístico.Entonces, al principio, un turismo como institucional y académico. Aquí se hicieron eventos donde llegaron 2 mil estudiantes, de universidades de todo Colombia, de Ecuador, y de países vecinos, a ver lo que estaba pasando en Medellín. Pero de ese turismo muy institucional, académico de centros de estudio, de aulas, se transfirió, a un deseo de conocer los barrios populares y entonces el turista, el otro turista, perdóneme que hable así de, el que viene un poquitico maliciosamente a buscar como huellas del narcotráfico, o consumo, o redes de prostitución, se pega ahí y hay en estos momentos una acción entre Manila como sitio receptor de turismo y [00:15:00] Comuna 13, como sitio. Como Manila se controla, en ese acuerdo, en ese pacto entre empresarios del turismo y presidencia local, se hace unos pactos de control. Entonces el turista ya no trae las niñas al barrio Manila, sino que van a buscarlos en la Comuna 13. O sea, pero sigue siendo el barrio popular un centro de atracción de turismo inusitado de unas escalas tremendas y hay una avidez, nos hago mucho realmente de qué pues realmente pero, pero está mezclado el turismo tradicional, el turismo popular y el turismo como académico si pudiéramos decir se entremezclan. Están ahí todos mezclados. Desbordando, desbordando la ciudad, encareciendo mucho. Se siente verdaderamente. Sofia: Es que en este momento, Medellín es la ciudad más costosa de Colombia. O sea, por encima de Bogotá.Chris: [00:16:00] Mm.Sofia: Que eso nunca había pasado. Siempre, pues, para alguien de Medellín ir a Bogotá era más costoso. Carlos: No, y un empleo, por ejemplo, mira, yo tuve el mismo cargo, se puede decir el mismo cargo, en Medellín y en Bogotá. Y por el solo hecho de estar en Bogotá, la asignación salarial, es más del doble. Entonces, Bogotá pues es la capital, eso mismo ha de pasar en todos los países del mundo. Pero yo mencioné que es una ciudad estrecha, tiene mucha posibilidad de crecimiento y de oferta habitacional. Al llegar este turismo, prácticamente copó todo el interés de los empresarios y ya, construir viviendas económicas aquí no le interesa nadie.Chris: Y pues me gustaría llegar profundizando esa última noción o esta consecuencia del turismo, de la despojo, perdón en la ciudad, pero primero, me gustaría abrir un [00:17:00] poco de esos temas de la imagen de Medellín que quizás se da a los turistas extranjeros, como mencionaste Sofia, como mencionaste Carlos, de la prostitución y también el narcotráfico, una nota de la investigación que hice dice que recientemente el alcalde Guitierrez anunció que el ciere de 150 propiedades que en su mayoría están vinculados a la plataforma que habrían sido utilizadas para fines de turismo sexual y explotación de niños, niñas y adolescentes en la capital antioqueña. Ahora, en primer lugar, tiene a recapitular los imaginarios coloniales de violación o coerción. En segundo lugar, puede implicar a menores de edad. En tercer lugar, los servicios que prestan a las trabajadores sexuales en un lugar determinado pueden ocultar fácilmente la presencia de crimen [00:18:00] organizado, Dadas las complejidades y contradicciones presentes en el tema de turismo sexual, en un campo de trabajo en el que muchos están tratando de superar prejuicios y criminalizacion. ¿Cómo ven ustedes dos estos temas en en este momento? Sofia: Pues a ver, lo primero que yo quisiera decir es que las redes de prostitución pues, o de trabajo sexual o de trata, pues, como de personas no iniciaron por la movida turística. O sea, esta ciudad siempre ha sido un lugar donde el trabajo sexual ha sido, como uno de los rubros de la economía, incluso, pues, en la época del narcotráfico. O sea, siempre ha sido así. Pues, como que las paisas tienen fama de ser mujeres bonitas. De bueno, tanto dinero que se ha movido en esta ciudad también, digamos que viene amarrado, pues como con ese tipo de actividades. [00:19:00] Entonces simplemente yo creo que el boom del turismo simplemente encuentra una estructura vieja que está que funciona muy bien. Es una estructura que ya existía. Lo mismo pues que lo de las drogas. O sea, lo que pasa es que aquí las drogas, tal vez en los 90s, no se consumían tanto en la misma ciudad, porque todas se exportaban, pero la estructura está y pues simplemente el turismo se pega de esa estructura. Entonces, aquí la gente, pues es como también muy moralista y a todo el mundo le parece horrible que un gringo ande con una muchachita, pero esa muchachita ha andado con los mismos países de aquí toda la vida. Que les parece terrible, es que está sucediendo en los barrios tradicionalmente ricos de la ciudad. Y eso es lo que les molesta, porque prostitución, pues nosotros, que siempre hemos vive en el centro, siempre ha estado, siempre ha existido y esa dinámica no es nueva. Entonces, digamos que me parece que el paisa bueno, todo lo que hemos dicho, lindo del [00:20:00] paísa, pero también es muy moralista y se escandaliza, pues solamente cuando están al lado de su casa. Carlos: Claro, pero además de que eran estructuras de negocios ilícitos asociados entre sí, es decir, narcotráfico y todas estas otras patologías sociales. A ello, el turismo, lo que hizo fue darle una manifestación inmobiliaria porque antes, claro, pero en los barrios ricos no. Sofia: O muy, o muy puntualmente, pues, o muy, muy escondido.Carlos: Muy escondido, cierto?Pero, pero como se vio una fuente de negocio, como yo puedo arrendar y obtener, como dijiste, 2 mil doscientos dólares en arrendamientos, pues la visión de negocio y mercantilistas del paisa que la tiene por naturaleza, se embarca y entonces se asoció la droga y estos negocios, estas patologías sociales ilícitas a una versión [00:21:00] inmobiliaria.Y ahí sí, la versión inmobiliaria tiene efectos en la economía de los arrendamientos, en la economía de varios de prestigio. Y entonces ya eso se vuelveSofia: Molesto. Carlos: Una problemática de otra índole. Sofia: Molesto y visible. Pero lo que yo quiero anotar es, por ejemplo, en la época los 90, en El Poblado, había fincas gigantes donde eran, pues como burdeles y pues los narcotraficantes iban allá y se encerraban, pero como estaba encerradito todo el mundo sabía que allí sucedían ese tipo de cosas. Llegaban, veían a las chicas llegar, o sea, como toda la dinámica, pero como sucedía ahí puntualmente. Pues, cierto, como en la época, no pasaba nada. Carlos: En esa época, los narcos trajeron a todos los artistas importantes, de habla hispana. Todos los artistas, no quiero decir ningún nombre, algunos ya están difuntos, pero los artistas más importantes estuvieron haciendo shows en esas casas campestres donde [00:22:00] obviamente en el entretenimiento del narco, pues están desafortunadamente, las niñas bonitas paisas que Sofia: Pero entonces, claro, esto era como puntualmente y era como una actividad que hacían los narcos, ya cuando sucede esto, pues es que ya es en tu mismo edificio, en el barrio que has habitado toda la vida.Y entonces ahí, si se vuelve como muy abierto, como muy escandaloso, pues para esta sociedad que es como tan moralista. Yo, por ejemplo, no creo que eso sea una patología social. O sea, yo creo que pues finalmente, así como hay hombres que entregan su cuerpo y se vuelven sicarios y pueden sufrir, pues su cuerpo está expuesto a que les pase cosas horribles.Pues hay mujeres que también encuentran en su cuerpo, pues una manera de sobrevivir y creo que, finalmente es una expresión como de la desigualdad, cierto?, y de la oportunidad. O sea, hay muchas mujeres y yo las conozco que que estudiaron una [00:23:00] carrera, o sea que no es que tengan tampoco necesidades, pues como vitales y deciden elegir ese camino porque es muy rentable, cierto?Y esta es una ciudad que lo permite. Entonces, por ejemplo, no, no lo veo desde ese punto de vista tan moralista. Lo que sí es cierto es que precisamente por esa moral, como tan católica que tenemos todavía en esta ciudad, no hay mecanismo de control porque el único mecanismo de control es, decir que está mal, criminalizarlo y no se pasa de ahí, y no creo que pronto vayamos a pasar de ahí. Entonces, pues yo no veo, que eso, primero ni vaya a seguir sucediendo, creo que va a seguir sucediendo. Ni tampoco veo que haya como una actitud desde la institucionalidad más inteligente.Carlos: Sí, las medidas del alcalde son más, más que todo anuncios para calmar el alboroto de la élite.Sofia: Es que eso no tiene efecto. Carlos: No tiene efecto de nada. Chris: Gracias. Gracias, Sofía [00:24:00] y Carlos por sacar esas contradicciones que están ahí dentro de las dinámicas en Medellín. Pues más allá del turismo sexual y a veces junto con ello, es el turismo de drogas o narcos. Y un artículo de mi investigación dice que. Un comerciante en Medellin cuenta que algunos habitantes de La Comuna la promocionan como la "cuna" de Escobar para atraer más clientes.Es más rentable, dice. Aquí compran camisetas de él, eh, ave María, todo lo alusivo a Pablo se vende mucho, dice el hombre que por seguridad, pide no ser citado. Y es que, pese a que la zona luce pacificada por el turismo, el control sigue en manos de los combos. El comerciante afirma que ahí operan bandas pequeñas [00:25:00] como Los del Uno, Los de Dos, Los Pirusos y Los Negros.Ellos cobran cuota por negocio chuzo al aire libre y hasta parqueadero. Aquí no se abre un local sin su permiso. Y también pasa con los cuentos Airbnb que están empezando a abrir.Ahora, una colega investigadora que trabaja junto a activistas en Colombia, me dijo hace un año aproximadamente que los carteles de narcotráfico en Medellin habían comenzado a utilizar Airbnb como una forma de lavar dinero.Seguramente esto ha sido así desde hace mucho tiempo en el sector de inmobiliario normal, pero este simbolizaría una conexión directa, entre el crimen organizado, el turismo y la crisis de la vivienda. Entonces, ¿Qué piensan ustedes sobre la posibilidad de que los narcos, ya sea en [00:26:00] Medellin o la Ciudad de México, sean en secreto propietarios de Airbnb?Sofia: Pues, bueno, frente a la primera pregunta o parte de la pregunta de lo de Pablo Escobar, pues es innegable, pues, que es una figura demasiado importante y no solamente, pues, como figura particular él, sino porque es un estereotipo de lo que somos. Yo no diría que los colombianos, pero no me siento pues como para hablar por todo el territorio nacional, pero si es un estereotipo de lo que es un paisa. Y por eso, pues muchas personas dirán horrible, no me quiero identificar con esta persona, pero así lo digan, pues tenemos mucho de él, pues así como él tiene mucho de nosotros, pues es que tenemos una cultura que es compartida. Y finalmente, pues uno tiene tíos, amigos, pues que parece que tienen algunas, características de Pablo Escobar. Es un es un personaje pues que es muy cercano, para [00:27:00] nosotros. Y así la ciudad intente, digamos, desde la élite, desde lo institucional, rechazarlo, es algo que es imposible, es imposible pues como negarlo. Carlos: Sí, por ejemplo, en Comuna 13, parte del show o del evento turístico, es hacer muchas alusiones a la figura de Pablo Escobar. Entonces, está el tipo que tiene una fisionomía igualitica, como si fuera un actor, un doble y una serie de eventos cuando Escobar no tiene nada que ver ni con la violencia urbana que tuvo Comuna 13, pero es una forma en que la mentaría popular ve que explotar la figura de Escobar, pues es muy rentable para cierto turismo extranjero que todavía quiere circular versiones, relatos, que ya son [00:28:00] completamente míticos o legendarios porque son totalmente inventos, para traer clientes.Sofia: Sí, y y además, uno se pone a pensar porque es que mucha gente se ofende. Osea, incluso pues me ha tocado presenciar momentos en que alguien se ofende porque un turista o un extranjero dice como "uy, yo vine porque es la ciudad de Pablo Escobar y me emociona y quiero una camiseta," cierto? Pero es como, no sé si uno va y visita la ciudad de Al Capone. Pues es como lo mismo, simplemente es como un mito. Es una figura, cierto? Pues los criminales también han sido igual de atractivos que los personajes que son buenos, incluso, pues yo creería que los personajes malvados son los que son más atractivos. Entonces, claro, aquí hay mucha, mucho resentimiento pues ante esa figura, pues porque todavía hay familiares de las víctimas, o sea, es una historia demasiado reciente, pero para el extranjero es simplemente una historia más, una historia de lo que ven en las películas. Y yo siento que muchas [00:29:00] personas que se, que se ven atraídas como por esa figura tienen como una noción del asunto muy infantil.Pues creen que realmente es un personaje de una película, cierto? No entienden que realmente pues que esta ciudad explotó en bombas. No lo conciben y pues yo que no estoy tan adulta a mí me tocó. O sea, es una cosa que es demasiado reciente y todavía esta sociedad está muy traumatizada por eso.Entonces, por eso es que hay tanto recelo, pero al mismo tiempo, es una oportunidad de negocio porque vende demasiado. Carlos: Mira, nosotros vivimos aquí, pues en el centro de la ciudad y mi señora y yo, estaban ellos muy chiquitos. En la noche, contábamos las bombas, una, dos, siete, ocho, porque yo no sé si conoces la canción de La Noche De Chicago... de Mirta Castellanos.Bueno, una canción que narra el enfrentamiento [00:30:00] de los gángsters en Estados Unidos contra la policía. Eso fue una masacre tremenda entre ambos bandos. Aquí vivimos eso, pero no era con ametralladoras, era con bombas. Pues, es decir, este tipo voló un edificio en Bogotá, el edificio del DAS.Voló un avión de pasaderos civiles en el aire, o sea, un un personaje real. Y eso suena como fantástico, que eso no es realidad, pero eso es realidad. Esta ciudad estuvo marcada por escombros de todas esas detonaciones, además de que las masacres juveniles solo para crear caos. Pues estar un grupo de muchachos departiendo en en una discoteca y llegar grupos de sicarios solo por el solo hecho de que al otro día en las noticias, haya pavor en toda la ciudadanía porque se pensaba ganar esa guerra de esa manera. Sofia: Terrorismo pues, [00:31:00] entonces, como cerrando un poco, pues para nosotros todavía es una historia dolorosa. Pero si uno también, como se pone en el papel de alguien que está en otro país y tiene otra realidad, pues claro que es una historia supremamente atractiva.Y fuera de eso, puedes ir a la ciudad que fue la ciudad más peligrosa del mundo, pero ya sabes que no te va a pasar nada. Pues, okey, digamos, hay cierta seguridad, porque realmente aquí los turistas están cuidados y no están cuidados por la policía. Están cuidados porque las estructuras criminales, como ya lo dijiste, enlazando con la segunda parte, las estructuras criminales ya dieron la orden que a los turistas no les puede pasar nada porque están vinculados directamente a su negocio. Entonces es por esto que tenemos un gringo, pues que pena decirlo así, pero, así le decimos nosotros, un gringo, en un barrio popular y es más fácil que le pase algo a uno que es de la misma ciudad que a ellos. No les va a pasar nada, por qué? Porque son fuente de dinero y porque si los matan o si les pasa algo malo, van a dejar de venir.Carlos: El negocio [00:32:00] se daña. Sofia: Exactamente, es como, no sé si sabes pues, pero aquí a la, a los expendios de droga se les dice plazas. Y no hay lugar en la ciudad más seguro que una plaza, porque es que en una plaza a ti nadie te va a robar. porque pues está totalmente controlado y no le vas a dañar el negocio a los que tienen el negocio.Entonces, obviamente es muy atractivo y aunque uno podría decir que gente tan boba o lo que sea o no entienden la historia, no están interesados en la historia, pues es que es una historia que realmente es muy atractiva. Pues porque aquí él contó un par de cosas, un par de titulares, pero todo lo que tiene que ver con los narcotraficantes de nuestra región es bastante fantástica.Pues es, y por eso es que le han hecho series a Pablo Escobar, porque es que realmente es un personaje, pues muy interesante, muy interesante y con unas historias, pues que, que son cinematográficas. Entonces, como no se va a sentir el mundo atraído hacia eso. Carlos: El tipo vivió una película en carne propia continua, pues [00:33:00] todo, la cárcel, las escapadas, los negocios que montó, la estrategia de llevar la coca en aviones.Sofia: Y entonces asociado a lo que decías, pues que esta estrategia, pues como inmobiliaria o está de vínculo con los Airbnbs, pues claro a mí no me parece extraño, es que estas estructuras son supremamente inteligentes. Van adelante, claro. Y donde vaya mucho dinero siempre va a estar detrás pues, bueno, ¿Cómo lavamos dinero? Es que nos entra tanto dinero que tenemos que lavarlo. No lo vamos a lavar vendiendo empanadas. Vamos a lavarlo con algo que genere mucho dinero. Entonces, siempre, pues es que aquí han lavado plata con todo lo que uno se imagine y siempre han tenido casas, negocios, las farmacias, por ejemplo. Carlos: Y y Chris, la actividad inmobiliaria. Ya cuando yo estudiaba, obviamente, yo tengo 68 años. O sea hace 35 años que estudiaba la zona de prestigio de El Poblado [00:34:00] era toda de casas campestres a las cuales se ingresaba por rieles, o sea. Sofia: Por un camino de piedra. Carlos: Si, sin una infraestructura urbana. Y en 30 años, el paisaje es lleno de torres, absolutamente lleno de torres, saturado. Lavado, aquí no hay una economía como para que mucha gente pudiente desarrollara no, no. Eso solamente se explica porque, pero era el negocio formal. Sí, y ese "negocio" entre comillas, no, no ocasionaba la molestia como ahora la, la gentrificación, antes , por el contrario, toda la élite valorizó sus fincas para en ella desarrollar torres, se llenaron de dinero, con dinero que era con seguridad absoluta en un porcentaje muy alto finanzas para lavar.Sofia: De negocios ilícitos. Y el crecimiento de esta ciudad y sí, porque es un crecimiento demasiado [00:35:00] rápido. Pues a ti te, te debió haber tocado El Poblado ya totalmente lleno de torres pues. Pero lo que quiero decir es que acá no hay una economía tan grande como para que eso sucediera tan rápido. Entonces, pues es obvio, o sea, ahora nos parece como "uy podrían ser dueños de Airbnb." y yo diría, quién más? Quién más va a ser dueño en esta ciudad de ese negocio? Quiénes son capaces de comprar edificios enteros? O sea, quiénes tienen el dinero para invertir? Carlos: Y para recuperarlo contra rentas cortas, es decir que me parece que es una inversión de mucho riesgo. Porque cualquier evento. Sofia: Pues la misma pandemia. Carlos: Lo lo puede tirar al suelo, cierto? Quién puede arriesgar eso? El narco.Sofia: Es que mira que aquí tradicionalmente en la ciudad, acá les llamamos "panaderías paracas." Pues y son panaderías que venden el peor pan. O sea, nadie compra. Pero funcionan 24 horas. Carlos: Y son super [00:36:00] lujosas, o sea lo que son muy bien establecidas.Sofia: Y son negocios que nunca tienen clientes y venden un pan horrible y nadie les compra, pero siempre están ahí en las mejores esquinas.Carlos: Abiertas todo el tiempo. Sofia: Y además, tienen ligado como que eso lo inauguró Pablo Escobar, pues como un sistema de vigilancia. Entonces, en la época de Pablo escobar, eran los taxistas, cierto? Había como una red de taxis asociados y todavía creo que eso funciona. Pues y quiénes van a esas panaderías? Es decir, o sea, siempre siempre el narcotráfico, claro, tiene que tener negocios legales, pa poder, pues, si pa [00:37:00] poder. Chris: Órale, pues qué fuerte y todo y supongo que debajo de todo, hay como más evidencia más capas de crimen organizado, no solo narcos, pero también el estado. Pienso como en una corporación de nivel mundial que se llama Blackstone, que ya ha pasado en lugares como Barcelona y otros ciudades en donde, [00:38:00] eh, se compran un edificio, se desplazan toda la gente, o sea, todos los residentes adentro y se convierte todo en Airbnb. O sea cada depa es un Airbnb ya, como 30, 50, 100, lo que sea, y se emplean, negocios tras negocios, tras negocios para, por ejemplo, los sistemas de organizar reservaciones, de la limpieza. Pero todos los trabajadores, todos los negocios no son parte de Blackstone. Son como empleado como freelance, no? Entonces ni hay ninguna cara vista en ese dinámica que está sacando, desplazando a la gente de sus edificios.Sofia: No, yo iba a decir que de pronto aquí no, no, no es tan visible aún eso como de comprar edificios ya habitados, pero sí de construirlos. O sea, ya si se están [00:39:00] construyendo muchos edificios totalmente de Airbnb con inversiones extranjeras o locales, porque hay un personaje, pues aquí que que está como abanderado de ese tema y que dice que va, va a llenar todo Airbnb y que le parece bien.Pues yo siento que está empezando a suceder. Está empezando a suceder. Chris: Gracias, Sofía. Y pues, los efectos de turismo [00:40:00] excesivo, el sobreturismo y la gentrificacion en Medellin parece que han llegado muy rápido y fuerte. Sin embargo, los últimos años han surgido cuentas en las redes sociales criticando al turista, al nómada digital o al gringo, por lo que está sucediendo. ¿Es eso lo que ustedes todos también ven allá y están de acuerdo con la evaluación?Sofia: Pues, a ver, resentimiento. Mm, no me parece que sea muy visible. O sea, me parece que hay como mucho escándalo, moralista. Pero pues, a a ver hubo como una pequeña marcha en el alrededor del Parque Lleras en contra pues del Airbnb, en contra de la explotación sexual infantil, pero no es muy masivo. O sea, ahí sí siento que culturalmente somos. O sea, aunque el paísa puede ser muy [00:41:00] beligerante como en sus palabras, como que parece muy bravo y furioso, realmente somos muy sumisos y sumisos ante el Dios Dinero. Entonces, mientras haya negocio, se acepta, se moverá, cierto? Y entonces, este efecto, pues como que de hecho, pues en en otras conversaciones hemos dicho bueno, yo no lo llamaría gentrificación.Pues lo llamaríamos turistificación porque es una cosa que se está generando desde el turismo específicamente porque la gentrificación habla más desde un desplazamiento de un grupo social a otro, pero no necesariamente se refiere al turista. Y claro que hay un efecto porque en este momento hay una burbuja inmobiliaria.Están muy costosos los arriendo en Medellín, el costo de la vida está altísimo. Y eso digamos que aunque se concentra en el sur, en El Poblado y en Laureles, pues en el occidente, eso tiene una onda expansiva, pues que afecta como el resto de la ciudad y realmente los arriendos se han encarecido, digamos de lo más costoso a lo que era pues como más barato. Y si nos afecta a todos, [00:42:00] pero yo no veo a nadie ni organizándose, no? Carlos: Ni siquiera la relación que estableciste en una pregunta anterior con la oferta de vivienda. Porque, digamos una cosa es que algunos edificios obsoletos o que se desarrollen nuevos edificaciones para atender turistas, pero supuestamente la oferta de vivienda tradicional de la ciudad debería continuar, pero no ha sido así.O sea, la situación se ha agravado porque ya te mencioné. Esta es una ciudad muy estrecha y es una ciudad que no tiene suelo de expansión. No tiene para dónde crecer. Entonces, cuando este tema llega al tema inmobiliario, uno pensaba que iba a haber una reacción, no necesariamente resentimiento, sino una reacción social. Sofia: Por lo menos de exigencia pues ante las autoridades, pues, que tomen conciencia en el asunto. Carlos: O institucionales, o de los gremios, pero no. Porque finalmente hay [00:43:00] negocio y el negocio opaca todo en la cultura y en la mentalidad nuestra. Yo creo que, que todavía una respuesta ante la crisis, yo creo que la crisis va a seguir acentuándose. Va a seguir manifestandose y acentuándose, y que una reacción o una respuesta empresarial, institucional. Sofia: O ciudadana... Carlos: Exactamente, todavía no, se ve muy clara.Sofia: Sí, porque si uno, si puede decir bueno, "hay gente que no le gustan los turistas," pero no es una cosa generalizada, porque de nuevo, si hay como un espíritu como hospitalario o si el turista te trata bien a ti, porque lo vas a tratar mal. O sea, yo no he visto, pues, que en un negocio alguien vaya a tratar mal a un turista que no le quiera vender. No, eso no sucede. Pues, entonces no creo que esté sucediendo algo así. Pues, creo que, la situación, digamos, económica y social, estaba muy densa, pues está como muy [00:44:00] fuerte aquí en la ciudad y la gente simplemente está intentando sobrevivir.Carlos: Y digamos, el malestar que se presentó en Manila y sus alrededores es porque ciertos eventos de drogadiccion y prostitución era muy visibles. Cuando se logra el pacto de ocultar, pues todos tranquilos, porque la gente aquí es muy mojigata. Esto es una una sociedad simplemente conservadora, "católica" entre comillas y con que la cosa no se vea, pues está bien. Sofia: Yo también quería anotar que, que claro que han habido como unas pequeñas manifestaciones en El Poblado, cierto?, de residentes que se han visto afectados. Pero eso no tiene eco en toda la ciudad porque es que eso finalmente gente rica que está molesta porque ya no puede vivir en el arrendamiento, en el barrio que vivió toda la vida, sino que le toca desplazarse a otro menos cómodo.Pero no es como que se vayan a quedar sin posibilidad de vivir en la ciudad, por ejemplo. Me parece que no es como algo tan crítico. Y eso no va a tener eco en la [00:45:00] ciudad porque un montón de niños ricos se quedaron sin poder pagar su apartamento, pues, o el apartamento que quieren o en el barrio que quieren.Simplemente claro está desplazando un poco, entonces hay nuevas zonas. Eso si se llama gentrificación, estos barrios más tradicionales, más populares están siendo ocupados por estas personas de clase alta de nuestra ciudad que han sido desplazadas por la gente de clase alta del mundo, cierto?Y entonces esta gente que habitaba en esos barrios tradicionales, pues le toca coger para la ladera, cierto? Para los barrios populares. Y bueno, y digamos que esa es la incomodidad. Pero yo no siento que sea algo generalizado.O sin mucha fuerza, o por lo menos no con una llamada clara a la [00:46:00] acción. Chris: Vale, vale, pues muchas gracias, Sofía, Carlos. Entonces, si no hay tanta resistencia en las calles, me gustaría preguntarles de las acciones del gobierno de Medellin. Entonces, en mi investigación para el episodio, yo leí algunos artículos que ofrecen los siguientes datos:Ahora, "Medellin tiene un déficit de más de 50,000 viviendas según Viva, según la empresa de vivienda de la gobernación de Antioquia."Ahora, "Juan Camilo Vargas, director de Asohost, el [00:47:00] gremio de esta actividad en Colombia dice que el 40% de sus operaciones se concentra en Medellín y que el negocio no es ilegal. Entonces un alcalde no puede pasar por encima de una norma nacional."Ahora "Y aunque no ha tomado medidas concretas, el alcalde Gutiérrez también ha enviado señales de posibles restricciones para el negocio de los hospedajes cortos. En la ciudad más de 1700 lugares operan sin licencia según el sistema de información turística."Y finalmente "No vamos a acabar con las plataformas, pero si habrá regulaciones, dijo el mandatorio ante el consejo el 4 de marzo." Dice "No puede ser que en tres años hayan aumentado tanto los arriendos [00:48:00] o que la vida de nuestras familias se vuelve imposible por las rentas cortas."Entonces, pues el gobierno local habla de adoptar una postura dura contra el tráfico sexual relacionado con el turismo y la crisis de vivienda. Y dadas las fallas en Barcelona para enfrentar las consecuencias del turismo, incluso después de que su alcalde fue elegido por hacer exactamente eso, ¿Qué esperanza cree que existe a nivel gubernamental en Medellin? Sofia: No, claro esto una, pues, qué pena decirlo. Pero Chris, es que nosotros tenemos un alcalde que se cree Batman. Pues que anda en un helicóptero diciendo que va a perseguir el mismo a los ladrones, pero es toda una fachada y digamos que nuestra sociedad compra eso. Pero pues se cerraron tres apartamentos, tres edificios, o sea, se cerraron unos cuantos negocios.Eso sale en la primera plana. [00:49:00] Pero pues yo, yo tengo gente cercana que ha invertido en Airbnb. Y no han tenido ningún problema. No les han hecho ningún requerimiento. Nunca les han visitado la policía. Claro, creo que depende mucho como del administrador de la propiedad, no admitir lo que se supone que en la plataforma no está admitido, cierto? Que tengamos esta persona cercana que que está, pues como inversionista de un Airbnb, si dice nosotros no admitimos nada de eso. Y las veces que hemos tenido intentos de que alguien entre a alguien, se llama la policía, y claramente de una se expulsa a la persona. Bueno, digamos que si hay un procedimiento, pero ni siquiera a esa persona, la policía se lo va a llevar.O sea, a mí me ocurrió una cosa una vez, y es que yo estaba en una portería de una unidad en El Poblado y entró un extranjero con dos niños pequeños, con dos niños de 10 años. Y yo pensé que eran [00:50:00] sus hijos, pues como yo pensé que eran sus sus hijos adoptivos pues, pues, como que, bueno, simplemente yo vi a entrar un un hombre con dos niños, pero sí me llamó la atención como estaban vestidos los niños.Y le pregunté el portero, como esos son los, pues como que estaba confundida si me llamó la atención en la manera en que estaban vestidos. Y el portero me dijo no es que estos gringos vienen a hacer eso en ese apartamento y yo, pero ¿Por qué no estamos llamando a la policía? Y él me decía "es que los tienen que coger con las manos en la masa."O sea, no hay, un procedimiento tampoco para hacerle frente a esto. Y es una cosa que muchas veces sucede, pero no hay herramientas institucionales para que deje de suceder porque finalmente ellos están protegidos porque están en el interior de un apartamento, porque el dueño del apartamento está de acuerdo. Bueno, digamos que es toda una cadena. Entonces realmente es difícil del desuno de vista legal. lo que creo es que nuestro alcalde y muchos otros que hemos tenido son maravillosos haciendo anuncios, [00:51:00] cierto? Siendo portadas de periódico. Carlos: Aunque, aunque hay anuncios en el aeropuerto ahí, pues tú te bajas de un vuelo internacional y en el pasillo vas a encontrar... Sofia: Si, que que no, que no se admite esto, pero igual siempre vas a poder acceder a ello.O sea claro, y son muy buenos haciendo anuncios, así como han hecho anuncios de muchas cosas. Pues como se va a acabar la criminalidad, o sea, van a pasar muchas cosas, pero en el cotidiano, pues uno ve que eso no es cierto. O sea, uno se va para el Lleras y uno sigue viendo pues, toda la dinámica cierto?. Qué era muy escandaloso, Chris, y que creo que ya dejó de pasar, que es que uno se iba para el para el Lleras. Pues que no sé si estás ubicado en El Poblado, como en el mejor dicho, es como el centro del turismo, en el barrio de El Poblado, y uno veía niñas indígenas que bailaban por monedas, cierto?. Y era como, ya ni siquiera era [00:52:00] necesariamente, es que ellas fueran prostitutas, sino no que estaban, digamos, haciendo algo que la gente consideraba muy indigno y que eran niñas y que eran indígenas. Al lado de todas las, cierto? Trabajadores sexuales que se estaban, digamos, ofreciendo sus servicios. Y eso fue lo que más, alarmó a la gente, como, porque tenemos estas niñas indígenas, y entonces, bueno, la actitud fue, se van de aquí, ya no pueden estar, le quitamos las niñas a los papás. Bueno, un montón de acciones que uno sabe desde adentro que no van a tener absolutamente ningún efecto y que es posible que esas niñas la vayan a pasar todavía peor de lo que ya la pasan, cierto?, bueno, como que yo la verdad no creo que vayan a cerrar Airbnb. No creo que vayan a prohibir el Airbnb en Medellín. Carlos: Pues yo veo muchas construcciones para adelante. Y tengo compañeros o amigos ex alumnos arquitectos que dicen que los negocios que les están entrando es diseñar y construir [00:53:00] Airbnb.Sofia: Si. Y fuera de eso, pues, porque es que esos anuncios son muy fáciles de decir. Pues incluso yo he visto que en otras ciudades han empezado a regular. Que hay zonas de la ciudad que no se admiten los Airbnbs o que, digamos tienen un tiempo, mínimo, o sea que son 30 días mínimo, entonces son estancias cortas, pero de un mínimo, o sea, no es, voy a pasar el fin de semana en Medellín y me voy a des cualquiera, sino vengo a trabajar. Pero eso ni siquiera ha sucedido.O sea, no hay una mínima regulación, entonces, pareciera de pronto, si se leen los titulares pareciera pero hasta ahora no ha pasado nada concreto. Carlos: Y hay muchos enterramientos, por ejemplo, de que el presidente local, fue financiado por todo este sector inmobiliario y pongámosle raya, relacionado con el turismo. Entonces él, él no tiene capacidad moral de controlarlos. Chris: Pues justo me encontré una cita del arquitecto Joseph Bohigas, [00:54:00] y el dice que "en la segunda ciudad de Colombia, aún hay tiempo para evitar las imágenes que se repiten hoy en Barcelona," que "Medellín no puede morir de éxito." Carlos: Pues él nos lanzó esa frase porque acordáte que te mencioné que hubo un turismo académico muy fuerte y una, pues pretendía cierta hermandad entre Medellín y Barcelona. Pues eso no tiene nada de hermanos, pero la academia va para todo. Entonces, toda esta oleada de arquitectos y urbanistas de Barcelona estuvieron aquí, asesorando a las alcaldías, a los gobernadores durante unos 10 años seguidos. Todos los arquitectos importantes de Barcelona tuvieron aquí y el vino. Y él nos dijo esa frase por ahí en el 2007. Estaba en alcaldía terminando Fajardo cuando el dijo ojo que una ciudad puede morir del éxito. Entonces desarrolle la idea y [00:55:00] más o menos decía pues la gentrificación, el encarecimiento, la turistificacion fueron cosas que no, que él anunció.Claro, esta es una ciudad sin mar. La gente viene a montañas y la vegetación. Tú sales de Medellín a dos horas y estás como en una selva. No es una selva, es un bosque tropical tremendo, muy atractivo. Yo creo que ese es un atractivo que la ciudad también ayuda a traer mucha gente, es decir, Santa Fe, Antioquia, Guatape, Jardín, son municipios relativamente cercanos, muy, muy atractivos para el que viene realmente a descansar, cierto? Entonces yo creo que esto podría ser una oportunidad. Esta situación de gentrificación, turistificación, encarecimiento, actividad inmobiliaria, que de, que está abandonando la vivienda, digamos para el, para el residente. Podría ser la oportunidad para que ese morir del éxito pudiera ser confrontado [00:56:00] mediante políticas.A eso requiere mucho liderazgo de la alcaldía, mucho. Actualmente yo no veo la alcaldía con comprensión estratégica de lo que puede estar pasando y de cómo esto pueda grabarse mucho. Sofia: Sí, sí, gracias, Carlos. Para terminar nuestra conversación, me gustaría preguntarte Sofía sobre el proyecto que nos pusimos en contacto. El Proyecto NN, me encantaría que pudieras explicarnos qué es el Proyecto NN y qué hacen ustedes ahí en Medellin? El Proyecto NN es una corporación sin ánimo de lucro, pues que está interesada por apoyar procesos como de organizaciones culturales o sociales, digamos en zonas periférica de la ciudad, aunque también hemos trabajado o nos interesa mucho también la parte, digamos pedagógica o la parte de [00:57:00] formación en temas relacionados con patrimonio, con urbanismo, cierto? Como con, cultura en general. Sofia: Somos varios arquitectos que hacemos parte, pues de la organización y todos somos profesores universitarios. Entonces, bueno, tenemos como ese interés por la pedagogía y digamos que ese cruce de la pedagogía y la dignidad espacial, y el interés por los espacios de encuentro, digamos comunitarios, pues nos ha llevado apoyar estos procesos, a encontrar mecanismos o idear proyectos para dignificar esos espacios donde la gente se encuentra, donde la gente se encuentra generalmente a compartir, pero también a aprender y a buscar como salidas para gestionar la propia vida, cierto?, digamos, para superar esa desigualdad que muchas veces también tiene que ver con la desigualdad en la oferta de oportunidades, precisamente, incluso desde la, desde la educación. Y pues, porque, aunque supuestamente en Colombia, la educación es un derecho, pues realmente no se [00:58:00] cumple cierto?. Y vinculado un poquito como a esta idea de la vivienda, pues también se supone que en Colombia, la vivienda digna es un derecho, y eso es algo que vemos que no se cumple.Y, pues, ahorita mencionábamos un poquito como la conformación de la ciudad, y podemos decir que, pues esos lugares en donde la vivienda digna no se cumple, pues se da sobre todo en las laderas, cierto? En la parte alta de la montaña. Y es allí donde estamos trabajando, donde vemos precisamente que hay un tipo de urbanización, pues como muy precaria, donde los servicios básicos no están cubiertos y donde un espacio comunitario, pues cubre realmente muchas de las necesidades de las personas, cierto?Incluso, pues , como espacio de socialización, cierto? Como espacio de encontrar pares, cierto? Para enfrentar, pues, esa situación. Entonces, bueno, eso es lo que hacemos desde el Proyecto NN y bueno, y digamos que intentamos [00:59:00] reflexionar teóricamente, pues, este asunto del derecho de la ciudad y el derecho de la vivienda, pero también estamos intentando, pues, como adelantar proyectos que tengan que ver transversalmente con este asunto. Ahora en compañía de Carlos, pues que Carlos ahorita les, te contará un poco. Pero Carlos, pues es un experto en mejoramiento integral de barrios, bueno, en todas estas intervenciones que se puedan hacer en estos, en estos lugares de la ciudad, estamos, liderando un proceso de formación, pero también un proceso constructivo, si puedes llamarse así, de prevención de riesgos y desastres.Pues, porque en estos barrios el derecho a la ciudad es eso cierto? Esta gente bueno, viven unas condiciones precarias, pero además, están arriesgando sus vidas, cierto?, porque, no tienen las condiciones urbanas, pues, para que su vivienda sea una vivienda segura.Y entonces estamos encontrando y a [01:00:00] mecanismos, pues, para transmitir algunos conocimientos técnicos y pues, para mejorar esas condiciones de vida. Entonces, digamos que, pues para nosotros el derecho a la ciudad tiene que ver también con esto, cierto? De, bueno, el estado no lo puede resolver. Pero entonces, como comunitariamente encontramos alternativas para mejorar estas condiciones. Carlos: Yo agregaría que para mí, por lo menos en la experiencia profesional que he tenido, literalmente el derecho de la ciudad es derecho a la vivienda. Yo no concibo ni siquiera la ciudad sin oferta de vivienda, sin vivienda. La ciudad es un lugar para vivir fundamentalmente y dentro de estas estrategias de gestionar la vivienda.Pues, pues, vos, sabes, Chris que Colombia y Medellín es una ciudad muy, muy determinada por por el desplazamiento desde las regiones. Es una ciudad que recibe población migrante expulsada por fenómenos [01:01:00] violentos, por buscar oportunidades, por la misma atractividad de la ciudad, porque es una ciudad que se mueve, que mueve la economía.Entonces, precisamente el sector inmobiliario, digamos entretenido con Airbnb, la alcaldía que no sabe para donde mirar y la gente llegando desde las regiones expulsada de muchas formas, se ubica en unas laderas muy, muy inhóspitas, de muy difícil adiestramiento, de muy difícil urbanización. Entonces vemos que allí, desde la formación, desde la capacitación, desde la pedagogía, de, pero siempre llevando a la práctica con la red de monitoreo de puntos críticos en un barrio, con la identificación del que es un punto crítico, con los factores de riesgo del barrio. Estamos tejiendo con ellos y el lugar de reunión, la sede de Somos Por [01:02:00] Naturaleza y el Proyecto NN, ahí nos encontramos construyendo con la gente conocimiento, oportunidades, posibilidades. En eso estamos. Chris: Orale, pues suena un proyecto increíble, necesario y muy hermoso. Entonces, gracias a ustedes dos y también en el nombre de nuestros oyentes, me gustaría agradecerles a ambos por estar dispuestos a hablar conmigo sobre estos temas hoy. Igual fue muy revelador para mí y espero que poco a poco se sigan construyendo la derecha a la ciudad, a la vivienda, y la solidaridad, con la gente ahí en Medellin. Entonces, ¿Cómo podrían nuestros oyentes seguir a sus trabajos, compañeros? Sofia: Ah, bueno, nos pueden seguir en en Instagram, @ProyectoNN. Ahí intentamos compartir, pues, como parte del proceso de los proyectos [01:03:00] que que tenemos en curso y bueno, próximamente también vamos a actualizar la página www.proyectonn.com Y bueno, por ahí pueden ver como, como las cosas que estamos haciendo y adelantando. Y pues también, muchas gracias a ti por la invitación.Siempre son temas muy bacanos como de conversar, reflexionar, chévere.Carlos: Así que a la gente de Oaxaca y a usted Chris que se interesaron en estas conversaciones, pues muchas gracias.Chris: Gracias, Sofía. Gracias Carlos. Bonito día.English TranscriptionChris: [00:00:00] Welcome Sofia, welcome Carlos to the podcast The End of Tourism. Thank you very much for being with me today to talk about this very complex topic. I would like to ask you where you are today and what the world looks like for each of you there.Sofia: Well, we are here in the city of Medellin. We are together in my house, Carlos is my father, and well, we decided to get together to have a more fluid conversation, from here, from my house in the center of the city, which is a very particular center. Well, Medellin is a mountainous city that is in the Andes. It is a valley. And let's say that the center of the city has, well, very different dynamics to many centers of other cities.Carlos: It is a very narrow city [00:01:00] and on the eastern and western sides there are a couple of mountains full of neighborhoods. Right here, through the window, you can see all the urbanized mountains and in the center is, let's say, the metropolis, what we could call a more traditional city, while up there are neighborhoods or popular communes. Nowadays, they are very popular for certain types of tourism.And where are you?Chris: Well, I was in Oaxaca, the capital of Oaxaca, Mexico, also in a valley that is a bit larger geographically than Medellín. I know Medellín because I was there as a tourist maybe 15 years ago. And so, starting all the [00:02:00] research for this episode, I found how many... So I would like to read some quotes from those articles for the listeners who may not know Medellín, don't know what's going on there, according to the mass media.So, first up is Nomad List. "Nomad List is a platform that publishes its ranking of the most popular destinations for working remotely. It placed Medellin in second place last year out of 157 cities in Latin America."The next one says that"In the Manila neighborhood of Medellin, there are short-term rentals whose owners earn more than five million Colombian pesos per month or about $1,000 US."The next one said that"Although it was not carried out [00:03:00] , the local president said at the time 'that he would ban short-term rentals in the city as a measure to prevent child sexual abuse and exploitation. In that search to find a solution to this scourge, Guitierrez, the local president, met with representatives of the Airbnb platform to reach an agreement.Since then, the parties have worked together in agreement to avoid extreme measures, but to establish actions that allow preventing this crime in the city."Continuing, "Meanwhile, the number of apartments listed on Airbnb, the popular vacation rental company, rose from 8,000 in October 2022 to 14,000 at [00:04:00] the end of 2023, according to data collected by AirDNA."And finally, "recent data says that Medellín receives 1.7 million foreign visitors to a city of 2.5 million inhabitants."So, I'd like to start by asking you two about gentrification in Medellin. I found another article on the subject. And maybe if you show it, it exposes a little bit of what's going on there and says that"Wilson and Felipe, both of whom withheld their real names, each own a café-bar in Manila in El Poblado, one of the most touristic areas with the greatest economic activity. The two neighbors are among the few left on their [00:05:00] block, because practically all the houses in the area have been transformed into restaurants, small hotels and hostels, Spanish schools, or short-term rentals through apps like Airbnb, which are taken over by foreigners and are partly the cause of the high cost of housing for traditional residents. Between 2022 and 2023, rents grew between 50 and 100%.This neighborhood has changed a lot, says Wilson. It was a family-oriented neighborhood, and you see, it became a land of drug addicts and drug dealers who provide home delivery. All this 'gentrification', as they say, is due to foreign investors and everything became more expensive. Carlos, you have worked for state-owned companies in Medellín and Bogotá, the Urban Development Company. And [00:06:00] Sofia, you have worked on the NN Project there in Medellín. So perhaps you could give us an idea of what has happened in Medellín in recent years and decades in terms of gentrification and what role tourism and tourists have to play in it.Carlos: Well, I perceive this situation as extremely new and recent.It is worth saying that Medellin in the 90s was a city where nobody came. That is to say, the situation of urban violence. All this crisis that drug trafficking unleashed in the city had us marginalized from the rest of the world. It was a rather unattractive city due to its violence and relatively paralyzed investments. [00:07:00] Sofia: It was the most violent city in the world.Carlos: YesSofia: At some pointCarlos: And it required a strategy of attention between the presidency of the republic and the local mayor's office, which you in Mexico call "local presidency" to find alternatives for the future. They were called the seminars of many conversations.So, the first thing I want to show is that it is a very new and recent fact. For us, to see a foreigner, it was a footballer who came to the two clubs. Otherwise, nobody came here. Seeing Chinese or Japanese or German faces was very unique.And the paisa, the Antioquian culture is a supremely hospitable culture.People here are overflowing with kindness. It's a very curious thing. The mere fact of feeling a person from another [00:08:00] region, not necessarily a foreigner, can be from another Colombian region. The Antioquian develops skills and ways of relating, very pleasant, very attractive. The Antioquian is a very talkative person, very talkative, and is very open. He is very calm in relationships, I would say that at first. So yes, we do feel, the presence of foreigners really feels overwhelming, because it is noticeable. We live here. I live in a couple of small blocks where small hotels have proliferated in two blocks, they have been developed in the last three years.Five, six, seven hotels, and the presence of foreigners is noticeable. And as I said at the beginning, it was very welcome, because foreigners bring coins with a very high exchange rate and here, the country has an extremely commercial and business mentality. Here, the business is seen to be selling a space, so we make another space.I mean, people here are extremely resourceful in the way they do business.Sofia: Yes, and I think the city made an institutional effort to change the narrative as well. Because, as Carlos says, it was very stigmatized, because we are the city of Pablo Escobar. True.That is a very strong symbolic burden. And so an effort has been made to show other things that we are as well. I think that reggaeton has a lot to do with the visibility of the city as well. True, because let's say that reggaeton has not only produced great stars, great singers, like from here in Medellin, but [00:10:00] that reggaeton, like many other musical genres, like in salsa or, well, it exalts, well, those figures like drug trafficking, well, like a certain aesthetic as well. And so it is very attractive for many foreigners to come and get to know the city of reggaeton.And that was something that was happening, let's say, in a more organic and slower way before the pandemic. With the pandemic, it was cut off and after the pandemic, it overflowed. In other words, it happens as an overflow phenomenon. I also imagine, well, because of the desire of many people to travel and, well, to have been paralyzed in their places, and the city really wasn't prepared.I mean, I think that all that institutional effort that was made was not measured either, as to how far it could go, right? Because, although it is true that the city is extremely hospitable and welcoming, let's say that the climate is one of the things that also [00:11:00] attracts the attention of many foreigners. It is a very ideal climate, right? An eternal summer. Well, obviously there are also some structures that offer things. There are a lot of drugs, there is a lot of prostitution, right? It is a city that is also for a tourism that does not leave many good things. Also, well, you will know and you will have the knowledge, tourism even if it is not, well, this tourism of drugs and prostitution and unbridled partying. Tourism is a phenomenon that tends to be devastating, right? It is a phenomenon that makes it more expensive, then. Yes, I think that at first, it is a city that kind of wanted this to happen, but at this moment it does not know very well how to handle it.Carlos: Yes, there was also a time when the city began to take off, there was some academic tourism, because the city began to be very loud in terms of certain urban transformations [00:12:00] . This is a city that has a very powerful public services company.In Medellin, the mayor's office is the owner of a kind of local multinational that sells public services and electricity. It sells electricity to Panama and Ecuador and provides public services to some 90 municipalities in Colombia. So, the city has a really notable capacity for social investment.And then the city started to hold academic events to show off. For example, Bogota, which is the capital of Colombia, has 8,000,000 inhabitants. It has not been able to build a subway.Chris: Wow.Carlos: And the Medellin metro is celebrating its 30th anniversary. What I wanted to point out is that a very curious form of tourism has developed. And that is that foreigners come here to visit popular neighborhoods, to get into [00:13:00] Moravia, or what we call Comuna 13 here, is a very curious fact, at least because you go to a popular neighborhood where there are no comfortable services, where there are no venues, where you can see the popular show. I don't know, it's a very, very curious thing and it's incredibly overwhelming.That is to say, there are places where there is no room for people physically and they keep going, that is, there, they are, all of that is uncomfortable. But people keep going , I don't know why, but they keep coming.Sofia: It's a question we ask ourselves constantly, in fact, several friends always ask me, like, what are you here for? Why do you come here?Well, we don't understand what they're coming for, maybe because one has become naturalized. I don't know, well, everything that happens here, but one stil

In this episode of the Building Texas Business Podcast, I spoke with James Dieter, Chairman and CEO of Principle Health Systems. James shared his journey from orthopedic and interventional pain specialist to healthcare entrepreneur. Motivated by inefficiencies he witnessed firsthand, he created a more efficient healthcare model focused on mobile diagnostic services. Principle Health Systems has now conducted over 3.2 million mobile lab tests in 2024, demonstrating the success of his patient-centered approach. James opened up about leadership challenges and the importance of self-awareness when managing strengths and weaknesses as a CEO. By redefining Principle Health's mission, vision, and core values, his team created a unified direction that improved employee satisfaction and strengthened company identity. His insights on strategic partnerships showed how the right team can transform an organization. We explored their innovative "daily DON" program, an AI tool that helps Directors of Nursing prioritize patient care in long-term facilities. This technology enhances clinical decision-making while serving as a distinctive marketing asset for the company. James also discussed the Texas healthcare landscape, including Medicare conditions and reimbursement rates. Throughout our conversation, James shared practical advice on informed risk-taking and learning from setbacks. His experience navigating the healthcare industry offers valuable lessons for leaders and entrepreneurs looking to make an impact in this complex field. SHOW HIGHLIGHTS I explore James Dieter's journey from an orthopedic and interventional pain specialist to a leader in healthcare entrepreneurship, emphasizing his efforts to address inefficiencies in the healthcare system through mobile diagnostic services. We discuss the transformation of Principle Health Systems, highlighting its achievement of conducting over 3.2 million mobile lab tests in 2024, with a focus on patient-centric care. James shares insights on balancing strengths and weaknesses as a CEO, stressing the importance of self-awareness and strategic partnerships in building a thriving organizational culture. We delve into the development of a strong company culture at Principle Health Systems, driven by redefining mission, vision, and core values, which has enhanced employee satisfaction and strengthened company identity. The episode covers the innovative "daily DON" program, an AI-driven tool that aids Directors of Nursing in prioritizing patient care, which has been recognized for its impact on clinical decision-making and marketing. We examine the challenges and opportunities in the Texas healthcare landscape, including favorable Medicare conditions and low reimbursement rates, alongside the growing role of AI in insurance claims processing. James reflects on leadership and problem-solving, emphasizing the need for quick decision-making, informed risk-taking, and learning from setbacks to drive business growth and sustainability. LINKSShow Notes Previous Episodes About BoyarMiller About Principle Health Systems GUESTS James DieterAbout James TRANSCRIPT (AI transcript provided as supporting material and may contain errors) Chris: James, welcome to Building Texas Business. Thanks for taking the time to come on the show. James: Glad to be here. Thanks so much for having me. Chris: Yeah. So let's start at the beginning. Just tell us a little bit about your company and what it does and what it's known for. James: Yeah, so Principle Health Systems has evolved over the years. When we started out we really had multiple directions. We were going in just as a healthcare services company. So a little background on me. I started out in orthopedics and interventional pain. I was really just dedicated to practice inpatient, outpatient and surgery. So going through that for my first decade of work, I saw a lot of inefficiencies in the healthcare, outpatient and surgery. So going through that for my first decade of work saw a lot of inefficiencies in the healthcare services sector, specifically in the Southeast region of Houston where I worked. So I wanted to build a better system right. Our lab results took too long to get back. Our pharmaceuticals weren't in stock at the pharmacies we'd send our patients to. Mri results took too long and started to, through my entrepreneurship journey, go out and started to build little sectors of where I could have influence really over my own practice to have a better outcome and through that over time started over 20 businesses in the first 10 years Just had numerous pharmacies, laboratories, diagnostic facilities, did three surgery centers. I was involved in one large hospital system and then got to a point where I said, hey, let's wrap this thing together, let's put it together. I want to have really just one source solution where we could come in and work with physicians and provide a host of different services. That went fairly well. The service level was outstanding. The most difficult aspect for us was really the payers actually having reimbursements without being contracted with certain individuals. From there, we really, about six, seven years ago, found a niche and that was called long-term care. So we define long-term care as skilled nursing facilities, assisted living facilities and home health facilities and we provide laboratory and diagnostic services to those guys. So, in-house, you call it your house if you live in a skilled nursing facility or assisted living facility, or at home, but we provide mobile diagnostic services. So we go out and we offer labs, x-rays, ultrasounds, echocardiograms and ekgs in the home. So you bring it to the patient. Bring it to the patient, that's right. That's right. And last year, 2024, we performed over 3.2 million lab tests mobile. So, with a large amount of those being for stat tests, right? So tens of thousands of stat tests per month where somebody needs something in four to six hours and we get us turned around for them. Chris: Okay, so it sounds like the inspiration for you was maybe frustration born out of frustration, for sure, and a gap in our healthcare delivery service, so he's shedding more light on that. I mean, you've mentioned this entrepreneurial journey. I mean most physicians and doctors don't have that. So what was it for you that you kind of took frustration and turned it into action? James: Yeah, I mean just a matter of you know, I'd have a patient that was really suffering right, specifically on the interventional pain side. This is not uncommon. You have a patient who's in a very bad position and you're already jumping through hoops with insurance companies. So it might take three to four weeks to get something approved. And then you're in, then you set them up for surgery. Well, you, the assumption is okay, we're going to have the lab work back, we're going to have the MRI back in time, and then it just wasn't happening. So you're pushing off surgery, you're pushing off procedures and just over time it's just a great deal of frustration. At the end of the day, the mission was always to help the patient, and if it's all about the patient, we've got to do something different here. And that was the biggest frustration for us was just the delays and turnaround times on the imaging and laboratory specifically, but then also getting medications, you know, sending patients out and having sometimes three, four, five phone calls come back up. The pharmacy didn't have my medication, the pharmacy didn't have my medication, the pharmacy didn't have my medication. So that's when we started opening up our own pharmacies back then as well. Chris: So just there, right, you said we. Who did you partner with? How did you go about finding a business partner? If that's the case, going about setting up a business, because you don't just turn on a switch right. There's planning, there's financing. Entrepreneurs in any industry, in all industries, go through that when they're starting a business. Let's talk a little bit about that journey in the beginning, of how you got it going and some of the lessons learned in that process. James: Lots of lessons learned in that process. You know, speaking of that, we call it chewing glass, right, okay, I? heard that one. So much of it's just a grind right and just figuring it out. But as far as partnering goes, I've had numerous partners in different individual business units over the years. When I formed Principle Health Systems in March of 2016, I had to get really specific on who am I going to allow on the bus, who do I really want to partner with on the bus? So I pulled away from certain partners, left goes, let go of certain businesses and then brought some together. So, in total, I believe we started out with there were three of us on day one that we brought in, you know. But I had different skill sets, right. I mean, I was trying to always try to be very honest with myself about where are my weaknesses right. I'm I would say I'm highly visionary. I like to think big. I like to have that 50,000 foot view of where we're going, set goals, set mission, set vision. Big culture guy. I love to talk about culture and instill culture throughout the organization. Chris: We'll get to that in a minute. James: Cool yeah, but just frankly, I would say weaknesses are on details, right. So I've just always been someone who likes to move forward and not analyze every aspect of it. So partnering with some people that were strong in an analytics and detail side of the business was really important for me, and I still have some just phenomenal business partners today in that regard. Chris: That's great. You touched on two things that I think are very common, some of which when we're advising clients. The first is choosing your partners right and being clear about expectations, documenting what the deal is on the front end and making sure you know that where everyone's going and what the roles are. The second is understanding, especially when you're the leader, your weaknesses in hiring around that, because you can't do it all and you're not going to be good at everything, and so I think everyone that I've met that's been successful has that self-awareness Right. How did you go about getting comfortable letting go of some of those job responsibilities and whether it was a good hire or a partner that you chose. James: That's a tough one. I mean, some of it was truly difficult to let go of. And then other pieces. You know you tend to be good at what I would say you tend to enjoy what you're good at. Sure, yeah, and that's one of the so to really convince yourself like, let's go spend more time at what we're good at, more time at what we enjoy, I would say I didn't focus so much on letting go as focused I wasn't spending so much time focused on what I'm not good at as what I was good at right. So it was just a matter of, by virtue, of spending more time on what I enjoy, doing less and less of what I don't enjoy. And that was easier for me to let go. It was almost to to to let it slip to let it slip away rather than to give it away and know that because you weren't giving it attention. Chris: someone needed to Right. James: Right. And then you know, obviously just helping to build folks up I mean, we have right now an unbelievable director of human resources who was in project management at one point and just understanding the value of different people in the organization that you already have built trust and rapport and you believe in them. and then to find, hey, I really think they'd be good at this and then move them into these roles to fill gaps was so important and just finding, really analyzing the people that are around you to understand what are they great at and what might else they do from where they are today, that could be a greater opportunity and bring greater value to the company and organization. Chris: Yeah, so you touched on culture, let's go ahead and go there. Anybody you talk to at a CEO, entrepreneur, business owner, leader will say, right, culture's king. We believe it a hundred percent. We talk about that constantly around here. It's just part of our DNA. We believe it 100%. We talk about that constantly around here. It's just part of our DNA. So everyone goes about it differently. Let's talk about how you have gone about building the culture at Principal Health. How would you describe it first? And then, how have you gone about building it and nurturing it? James: Yeah, so great question. I mean, starting out, I couldn't tell you when we started the organization what was our mission, what were our core values. I couldn't even tell you what they were. There was something we came up with. I think two of us came up with one day, in a couple hours, some marketing stuff yeah marketing stuff. We hung it on the wall, just like you would expect right from most organizations to do most organizations do. And we had a phenomenal, you know, I would say the top 20 people in the organization just had a great relationship together and I would say that we thought culture was very strong. Four years in we polled the entire company and it was pretty, pretty terrible. I mean, it was like a 60% satisfaction, maybe even in the fifties, and we were kind of horrified like wow, we thought we had this great culture and everybody loved this company and it was. You know what it was. Well, I decided a couple of months later I did an offsite. So we did a two day offsite and kind of big hotel room, you know, or I guess I said conference room, with these big windows overlooking clear lake, and you know it know, the whole idea was like let's think big, and we brought in just management. So I think there was 46 managers at that time in the organization and we all came in the room we said, hey, we're here for two days to figure out three things Our mission, our vision and our core values. And we're going to sit together and this isn't going to be the C-suite telling everybody what we're about as a company. We as a people, as a community, are going to discuss what is this company? Who are we Not? What are we? Who are we? Chris: And what do you want to? James: be Exactly, and we did come up with a BHAG. We ended up throwing in a BHAG as well there. But where do we want to go? Classic Jim Collins. So we did get through that two-day period and we came out with a really strong mission, vision, core values. Our mission is to improve patient outcomes and experiences. Relatively simple, very difficult to do in healthcare. We decided our core values would be URPHS Principle Health System the acronym I should say is URPHS. Understand the mission, respect everyone. Patients are our purpose, happy to help and step up. So and we talk about simple, right, exactly, I would believe at this point, 90% of any you know we're approaching, I think, right, right, 500 employees today. I would think 90% of those folks could tell you that and not just tell you what they are, but give you examples of how they've done those things. We live culture. We no longer talk about it. We did that in the beginning. Now we live it. It's brought up in every management meeting. It's brought up in all the leadership training sessions, all the offsites and it's kind of what I call the North Star. So we look at culture as the direction. If you're not sure about a decision that you're going to make in any regard. I want you to think about the North Star. Is it in alignment with, are you walking towards, the culture, are you walking towards the mission of this company? And that helps to drive behaviors so important. Chris: I mean, that is the true key to the kingdom. I think the word I would use is it sounds like your culture has become institutionalized. Right, it starts out where it is you as the culture cop or maybe the C-suite, and getting it deeper in the organization. But once you've done that and everyone knows it and everyone lives it and everyone can hold each other accountable to it, then you've got a true directional tool To your point. I think the more you can tie behaviors to those values that's when they become real the more you can tie behaviors to those values. That's when they become real. And so when you're praising people because whatever they did connects with these two of our six or whatever number is of our values, it becomes real to them and they know how to repeat it A hundred percent. James: Yeah, I'm fairly unapologetic about the culture, so I would say it's even unusual Some of the things I'll say when I'm in management meetings or even when I do a quarterly coffee and conversation. So I meet with the entire company. It's usually takes six or seven sessions, but I go company wide, we bring the big groups and I'll sit down with the entire company for an hour every quarter and what I'll typically say when it comes to culture is that it's up to you to you know we can't police it from management. It's up to the people to police the culture. So one of our core values is respect everyone. So if there's someone who's not respecting everyone, I expect that the people of the company will kick that person out, go after them, make sure they don't work here, and I'll literally look out and I regularly look out across when I'm talking to the whole team. Chris: And I tell them. James: If you really can't say that you're here for the patient, if you can't say that you're really here to serve our mission, I was like I really don't want you here. I was like I prefer you to quit. I was like we will replace you and I would prefer to go without somebody for a short period of time. I'm unapologetic about it. We truly believe it. That's what we're about above all things. The rest of it, because at the end of the day, in our business, if we do a really great job treating patients, everything else will follow. Yeah, the doctors want to work with us, the facilities want to spend time with us, the payers will respect us. It's really about the patients. So we put patients first. Everything else comes next and if you can't get behind that, we don't want you. Chris: Yeah, I think that's a great point. Some of the words we use here, right. We're passionate about our mission and our values, which means they resonate in our heart and our gut. Right, we just it's in our fiber. If they don't resonate with you, it's really okay, because it means it's not the right organization for you, right there's a different organization out there that you're going to be happier with, you'll connect with and we'll go find someone that connects with us. Happier with you will connect with and we'll go find someone that connects with us, because they're going to be the better performer, the self-policer, the self-motivator. They're going to be the ones that connect with for us, similar to patient care, client service, right and mutual respect amongst everyone. So I agree with you it's okay to tell people if you don't connect with this. Actually, I use it in interviews when I'm interviewing someone. Here's who we are, we're very clear about it. And if you don't connect, it doesn't make you a bad person 100% doesn't. It just means it's in the right organization for you and there's a gazillion other organizations. Advert Hello friends, this is Chris Hanslick, your Building Texas business host. You're a Building Texas business host. Did you know that Boyer Miller, the producer of this podcast, is a business law firm that works with entrepreneurs, corporations and business leaders? Our team of attorneys serve as strategic partners to businesses by providing legal guidance to organizations of all sizes. Get to know the firm at boyermillercom and thanks for listening to the show. James: There's another team, there's another team that'll work just well for you. Yeah, totally. Chris: No, let's switch a little bit because I want to get back into kind of the business I'm always interested to ask about, like innovations and technologies I mean no-transcript. James: Yeah, I mean, you know, obviously, with the increased levels of compute, you know, now you have the large language models, you have artificial intelligence and that has already made an impact for us. So I would say that we are the next 18 months are going to be very interesting, but we are already using automation from AI that is changing the way we do things and I can give you one example in particular. Well, two really good examples. One in the back office, we have a team of I believe it's three ladies total. Still we had three ladies that would handle all of our facility invoicing right and it's very complex. We have the decipher between patient to patient each day who's part A, who's part B and how we do the billing, and some of it gets billed to facilities. Some of it's billed to without getting too much in the weeds. Some of it gets billed into the insurance company and we've been able to quadruple our volume with still having the same amount of people and not have to scale payroll because of implementing automation techniques through AI that help to decipher where those go. These get scanned in and it all gets brought up. Still have a little bit of a you know, a people component to it. But, just you know, we would be sitting here with and one division. It's just a great example, because that one division would probably be 10, 11 people, yeah, and the cost increase Exactly. Chris: That's an amazing statistic. James: So that is kind of a back office area that we're really focused on going. Where else can we, where else can we look at the bringing in this technology to help as we continue to scale, so that we don't have to just keep hiring bodies? which is you know, from a real estate perspective even difficult. So we're, you know, we're, we've been tapped out on space for two years and we're it's been very challenging. Where do you just put you know, where do you keep putting people Right? So, but on the I guess I'd say on the actual business, well, that's the back office on the front of the house. We've got a program. We call it the daily DON. So, right, so it's a DON is a director of nursing. A lot of the facilities we work within, you know, skilled nursing facilities, assisted living facilities, they have someone who really oversees the house. They're the clinical expert in there that makes sure that all the patients are taken care of. That's called the DON. So we have a form that's. Thousands of these go out every morning to all of our facilities and it's an AI program that picks out the most important things that happened the prior day. So here's, you know, bobby Sue had a stat test performed at X time and here's the result. Here's a critical result or whatever is most important. They kind of have a clinical mind and says, hey, this is where we think you should pay attention to your patients today. These people are trending in the wrong direction. These people if they're doing just fine, they're at the bottom of the page. The things that are most important are highlighted at the top of the page, but it's really helping us provide better healthcare diagnostics for our providers so that they can treat the patients better. So it's right, in line with our mission, but it's really just automation and again, it would take an army of people to do this. Chris: Yeah, that's really cool stuff. I have to believe that is also, if not already, will become a huge marketing tool. Oh, it's a big marketing tool. Right, people are worried about the family mergers they're putting in there, where they're really going to get care, because, you already know this, your industry doesn't have a great reputation as a whole. No for sure. James: And so the more you can say no, this is what we do to make sure we're taking care of your loved one, yeah, so there's a huge journal publication called McKnight's and it is the, you know, the premier publication for the long-term care space and you know, all over the country, the daily DON. We actually won a bronze medal this year against thousands of applicants for innovation. So it was actually yeah, we were awarded. Chris: I guess that was 2024, but last year yeah, close enough, yeah, so let's talk a little bit just about, you know, being in Texas, being a business, primarily in Texas. What are some of the advantages that you have experienced being here, not just in Houston, but taking advantage being in Texas? For us is related to the Medicare Advantage plan, right so? James: or, excuse me, the MAC right so? Different Medicare has Medicare administrative plans and they actually carry out Medicare's will in an area. Texas has a MAC that is somewhat more favorable than the rest of the country. Now there's a few states that share that, but just in general, for us, from a standpoint of clarity they're a little bit more clear. There's a lot of bureaucracy that goes on in just getting paid, so this might be surprising to people outside of health care, but today I believe we are paid on 61% of the business we do and we're actually probably one of the really high end. We've run studies on this and we're we are, better reimbursed than most companies out there in our space, and so we still, you know, roughly four out of 10 patients that we treat, we get paid $0. Chris: It's just fascinating to me that it's that poor it is very poor. James: However, we are in one of the more favorable areas, so I can only imagine if you don't have a lot of clarity and guidance on how to bill, it just becomes more and more challenging for you. Chris: Yeah, this may be one of those, but I'm just interested as you kind of look out going forward, what are some of the challenges or headwinds you see maybe coming at your industry? Some of the challenges or headwinds you see maybe coming at your industry, lots of changes going on in Washington right now will have an effect, I'm sure, on your business but maybe also affect what goes on at the state level. James: So one thing you're kind of worried about as you kind of look out, I would say just one of the concerns, and I mean I think again, everybody likes to point the finger to the big bad guys and I really look at them more as a partner than they're not a, you know, an adversary to us or more of a partner. But the insurance companies have become more active in utilizing ai to to identify discrepancies within chart notes to deny claims. So that's something where, you know, recently went to, one of the conferences I attended was for health care payers and they have booths set up, you know, trying to sell to the health insurance companies of how to use artificial intelligence to identify the to not pay. They're already not paying much and you know they're now. In reality, the reason they are not paying is because the notes are lacking in something. So, rather than paying a person to go and evaluate each note, which is very expensive, you think about the health insurance companies if they have to hire thousands of people to evaluate the charts, or they can use AI programs to evaluate the charts it's going to save them money and hopefully that money gets passed on to the consumer. So I actually don't think it's a long-term a bad thing, but I do expect in the meantime it's going to just decrease even further, decrease the amount of claims that get paid. Chris: Right, it sounds like it would be incumbent upon companies like you to kind of push back a little more in the short term. James: to be able to take advantage of those efficiencies later. Absolutely yeah, and I look at it from our perspective. We're in a really good spot. We're pretty developed to where we can handle those kinds of headwinds. Chris: So let's switch again a little bit. Just talk about leadership. How would you describe your leadership style? How do you think it's evolved over the past, you know, 12 to 15 years since you've kind of been moving forward with this company? James: Yeah, I mean. So starting out with a group, I think, start with five people and 500 folks. So leadership looks very differently as business scales. And, to start right, I mean I used to take out the trash and do the accounting. I mean I've worked every job in the company personally and in the beginning, worked with a lot of people who were for lack of a better, better word incompetent at what they did, and today, having been able to develop people and hire and bring in and partner with incredible people that are, frankly, better than I am, a lot of things it allows me to go and do what I'm really good at and, from a leadership perspective, I've probably, if I've, believed in you from the beginning. I've always given you. I'm not a micromanager. I don't believe you can't really grow a large company if you're watching over everything going on. So you have to truly, just, I would say, collaborate with those around you and I guess, if I had to define it who I am, I try to be a great collaborator, right. I try to really help, provide as many resources for the people around me as possible so that they can be successful. Chris: That's good. Let's talk about problem solving right. Especially where you are today and probably have been in your role, probably more of what you do is facing issues, and how are we going to work through this and solve an issue, solve a problem? What have you found to be the most effective way to kind of get the information you need to make those informed decisions that you believe would be in the best interest of the company? James: Yeah, I mean. So again, that's something that over time, has become, I would say, much more of a process, right? So now we have data analytics and we have incredible CFO that's been coming in and able to provide information. There. We have all these additional resources, from accountants to lawyers, to folks. We sit down. I like to surround myself with the right group. We try to sit in a room with the right people at the right time and analyze all the information, but very quickly. I do not like the old analysis paralysis. That's not us at all. I move very quick, I like to make decisions very fast and I don't look in the rear view mirror very often. I'm always looking out the front window and just moving forward. So when there's challenges that are hitting us, it's just a relatively. Let's get as much information as we can today, let's analyze it and let's go. Chris: Yeah, I love that because I agree, I think, the idea that stagnation will kill the company right, and so I think you try to get as much information as you can, knowing it's never going to be perfect. But I think the key then is, I agree with the mindset of kind of move quick. To me, the next piece of that is to evaluate the decision as it's implemented, because then you're continuing to learn and gather information. If you're doing that so that you can adjust right, Because the plan goes out the window as soon as you start to act right, so some people will act and then ignore, and I think that's a mistake. I think if you act, continue to analyze and then align behind what you've learned, it may not be a pivot, it may just be a tweak, but you've got to keep moving. James: I totally agree and you really touched on a great point that I like to speak about. Often and it plays a little bit in the culture. I tell people, guys, we've got to make mistakes here. If we're not making mistakes, we're trying nothing new. So I hesitate to say I encourage mistakes, but to some extent I think I did in my last meeting ask for mistakes directly. So the idea here is that it's okay to make mistakes, it's not okay to make the same mistake over and over again. But if we're not trying, we're not growing. If we're not growing, we're dying. So we've got to continue to move forward. And the culture is that if you are focused and I mentioned that North Star earlier but if you're heading towards the North Star and you make a mistake, you're okay, there's no problem If you're doing something new and you're trying something for the good of the company and the good of the patient, that's okay. Let's learn from it. Let's learn from it, let's change course and let's keep moving. Chris: Yeah, that's right. Comfort and complacency aren't good, and I think that that freedom to take risk as long as it's an informed risk, as long as it aligns with our mission and values, is the type of risk you want to encourage your people to be doing and learn from it 100%. So that's good. People always learn from setbacks. So let's talk about a failure or setback you've experienced, and I know there's probably two or three examples from yesterday. James: No, but yeah, I mean, where do we start here? Chris: But what was it you know, and how did you learn from it, and how did it make you better? How did it improve you or the company, whatever the example may be? James: Yeah. I think geez, you know, this is only a tough question because I have so many. Chris: Yeah, I think geez, this is only a tough question because I have so many. You're not alone in it. A lot of guests say the same thing and I can identify with that. James: Yeah, so. I think for one this just comes to mind somewhat early on in our business we had just one massive customer. We had a great deal of revenue concentration in one customer who ultimately had a bankruptcy and put us in a really bad financial position when we lost out on. You know they were way behind on paying their bills and you know such and such. You've heard the story. Chris: Oh sure. So not only did you not get paid. If you were that beholden to them, you didn't have a lot of other things coming in Correct. James: Correct, correct. And just to learn from that example of not letting yourself get too far out over your skis for one, but also just to diversify, not just the customer base. We were actually diversified in our revenue and how we were paid, but it was all one customer. So you've got to diversify your revenue base and your customer base and not have too much concentration. That was a really early on lesson that just comes to mind. That, I feel like, was still one of the most painful. I think I laid off 40 or 50 people that day and it was just a tremendous. That one scarred me pretty bad. Chris: Layoffs are never easy. Those are ones you'll remember. James: Yeah, that one still haunts me, so again I've. Which mistake would you like to talk about? Chris: we could do a whole show. Yeah, you really could, but yeah so kind of you know, bringing this more to a close, any advice you would share with our listeners, entrepreneurs and business owners out there that you know, if there's one thing you're if you're thinking about, if you've just started the journey or you're thinking about it, here's one or two things that you would kind of want to pass along. James: Yeah, I mean I just, you know, from an entrepreneurial standpoint, I had a one of my, one of my father's good friends when I was a young kid, you know, probably high school. He told me at one point he said, hey, your business really isn't going to fail unless it runs out of time or money. And just kind of keep that in the back of your head, because I can think of at least six or seven times that we were done, you know, and I had to sit there and go well, hold on, you know, we haven't completely, we're not completely done because we haven't run out of time or money. And that was how, you know, I spoke about chewing glass earlier. I think you know one of my buddies, he's a new entrepreneur. I always I tell him ready, shoot, aim. You know, at some point you can analyze all the data. And if you do analyze all the data, you're probably never going to start Right, because the odds are of starting a new business are challenging. Chris: For sure, as everyone says, it's not for the faint of heart. James: It For sure, as everyone says, it's not for the faint of heart. It's not for the faint of heart. And everyone will run into a lot of problems and challenges. And that's why because if it was easy, everybody would do this Correct, and so just I would. Just it might sound a little silly, but just don't give up. I mean, if it's something you believe in, if it's really a great cause, if your heart's in it, just keep your head down and push on, because you will be successful. Chris: That's great, and perseverance and grit is what it takes if you're going to be a true entrepreneur 100%. But the ready shoot aim is kind of like you were saying earlier, in decision making, at some point you got to make a decision, absolutely you got to go. James: Yeah, I see that as just a big mistake that folks are making over and over again is sitting around just waiting and by the time they actually make the decision, the opportunities passed. Chris: yeah well, let's, we're going to close with some more fun stuff. Talk a little bit more about texas, any favorite vacation spots within the state. James: Things you like to do in your spare time you know we have a little piece of land up in west texas so we're out in the lakey area okay it's kind of kind of over there by Garner State Park for those that know the river and just absolutely love. We go out there probably every month. You know I have two boys and a little girl so I spend a lot of time out there. The family makes it out there every now and then, but I definitely try to grab a boy and go out there every month. How fun is that? We just go and shoot guns and hang out and, you know, take the kids and their friends over to the Garner State Park, dance and do all that kind of stuff. Chris: God's country over there. James: It is God's country. It's fantastic. That was my favorite place. Chris: It's just beautiful out there, yeah, so any like books or anything that you've read lately that you might pass on to a listener as something to go spend some time reading or learning from. Reading or learning from. James: Jeez, you know I'm actually doing 10 books with my kids right now, so there's nothing new and exciting, but they're all you know. I've got them reading Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, so that was the book they read last week. They're reading a book a week, so this week they're on the Five Dysfunctions of a Team Peter Lencioni. Chris: Yeah. James: So those are kind of what's going on. That's what's on my mind at the minute. I like it At the moment, yeah. Chris: And teaching them young. James: I love that, yeah, I mean well, they're 15, 13, not too young. Chris: Right. James: But kind of when I was reading those books and trying to. So a bunch of oldies but goodies. Yeah, we're going through right now. Chris: We're doing Rich Dad, poor Dad world from that perspective. Last question do you prefer tex-mex or barbecue? James: barbecue, all right, yeah I guess you can't go out to lakey and and not have barbecue in that area or on the road trip to and from no, I mean I it's. Chris: That's a tough question I always save it for last and everyone says the same thing. It's a trick question what's yours? People turn that on me and I think I it's a tough one that they. You know, once it's turned on me and I think it's a tough one Once it's turned on me, I realize how unfair it is. Yeah, I think my answer has always been I love barbecue, but my go-to is probably Tex-Mex more than barbecue. James: So if I was going to say Tex-Mex with a margarita, that might go above barbecue For sure, but if it's just food, it's barbecue Okay. Chris: Yeah, because it's hard to have Tex-Mex without a margarita. James: Yeah. Chris: And then, of course, you have places now, especially here in Houston, I'm sure, other places where they're combining, you know, like the brisket into the Tex-Mex. James: so brisket, burritos or tacos, and that, to me, is probably the penultimate, it's fantastic. Chris: Yeah, there really is. It's challenging when it comes to healthcare. So, James, this has been great man. I really appreciate you coming on and sharing your story. It's pretty fascinating, and congratulations for all the success and what I know will be successful in the future. James: Awesome, thanks so much for having me, Chris: you bet. And there we have it another great episode. Don't forget to check out the show notes at boyermillercom forward slash podcast and you can find out more about all the ways our firm can help you at boyermillercom. That's it for this episode. Have a great week and we'll talk to you next time. Special Guest: James Dieter.

Join host Carol Pankow in this thought-provoking episode of Manager Minute as she sits down with VR fiscal powerhouses Katie Marchesano, Chris Merritt, Allison Flanagan, and Sarah Clardy. Together, they unpack the pressing fiscal issues shaping the vocational rehabilitation (VR) landscape, including: ·  Navigating fiscal forecasting challenges · Addressing technology gaps · Strengthening collaboration between program and fiscal teams The conversation highlights the vital role of policies, training, and institutional knowledge in sustaining VR programs while anticipating future shifts, such as technological advancements, fiscal constraints, and potential WIOA reauthorization. Don't miss this episode, packed with actionable insights and expert reflections to keep VR programs thriving!   Listen Here   Full Transcript:   {Music} Katie: I'm really excited for that tool to be shared, and I think it's going to be a really helpful tool for the agencies.   Carol: This job takes constant attention to detail in what is happening. It is always going to be work.   Chris: More people are going to be reaching out asking for fiscal forecasting and understanding how to look at this program in the future.   Allison: One of the things that pops in my mind that might happen over the next three years is reauthorization of WIOA.   Sarah: I think we're going to see some new resources, hopefully in the technology world develop, that will assist our agencies so that their focus can remain on the customers where it belongs.   Intro Voice: Manager Minute brought to you by the VRTAC for Quality Management, Conversations powered by VR, one manager at a time, one minute at a time. Here is your host Carol Pankow.   Carol: Well, welcome to the manager minute. Joining me in the studio today are my colleagues Katie Marchesano, Chris Merritt, Allison Flanagan and Sarah Clardy. So this might be a little bit of calamity for our listeners, but we're going to do it. So how y'all doing today?   Sarah: Great   Chris: Great.   Allison: Good.   Katie: Wonderful.   Carol: Awesome to hear it. Well, we have had quite a journey on the QM for the past four years. The fiscal focus was a new aspect of the grant, and we are so grateful to then Commissioner Mark Schultz for realizing that TA in this area was an essential element to the work. And since we're in this final year of the grant, we wanted to have a chance to visit together, share our insights with the listeners into the whole fiscal picture across the VR program, and discuss our perceptions and perspectives. So buckle up, folks, and we're going to dig in. So I want to start with how you each found your way to VR. And I'm going to start with Chris to talk about your journey into VR.   Chris: Well thanks, Carol. Mine's a little bit different than most people. I did not start in VR. I have a very different background. All fiscal for the most part. But I came to work at a fiscal state unit and learned about VR there. Loved it, loved it, loved it. And then was kind of asked to be part of this Ta team and couldn't say no because it's just an incredible program and it's a little complicated. So being able to help the states understand it better is what brought me to this team.   Carol: Well, not you, and you're being modest now. Tell them about like a little bit more of your background because you have an interesting educational background and all of that.   Chris: Yeah, I do. So I'm an environmental engineer by trade. Worked in that field for a while. Learned that sampling sludge was not a cool thing to be doing. So went to work for a small business that was just starting on Department of Defense World. Loved all the fiscal part of that. Went back to school and got my MBA and have been doing fiscal stuff ever since. So yeah, it's a long road that brought me here, but I'm happy I took it.   Carol: Yeah, we're glad you're here. How about you, Miss Allison?   Allison: Well, it's kind of hard to believe that I have over 30 years in this VR journey, and it actually started out in the field as a VR technician, and I just fell in love with the mission and purpose of VR. So I quickly changed my direction to be a VR counselor, and then that evolved to other promotions and positions throughout the year, where I ended up being director of both Kentucky Blind Agency and then moved to Florida as the General Agency Director. And when the VR TKM opportunity came about, I was ready for a change, especially after being a director through the pandemic and through the implementation of WIOA. I was looking forward to just a new opportunity, new learning areas, so this has been a great jump for me. I've enjoyed it very much.   Carol: Why don't you tell them too about your other gig with NRLI a little bit. We'll make a plug there.   Allison: Yeah. So part of the VRTAC-QM is the National Rehabilitation Leadership Institute through San Diego State University. I have the honor of continuing Fred McFarland's legacy, who began this program about 25 years ago. And it is a program that is building the future leaders in the vocational rehabilitation field. And it's been a joy to see these leaders be promoted throughout their careers. Being stepping up, having an interest at that national level, the issues that are facing VR. So it is definitely a part of my job with QM that I hold near and dear to my heart.   Carol: Yeah, it's good stuff, I love it NRLI of our favorite things to participate in when we get to do training. So Katie, over to you next.   Katie: Well, my journey with VR started when my brother was receiving VR services, and he actually is who inspired me to go and get my bachelor's degree in psychology and work in social services. That led me to Department of Workforce Services, where I spent 13 years in various roles and capacities, which ultimately led me back to VR.   Carol: Awesome sauce. And last but not least, Sarah Clardy.   Sarah: So I started out about 24 years ago out of college. I was working in banking full time and going to school full time, and had an opportunity to come on with a state and Missouri vocational rehabilitation, had an opening for an assistant director of accounting and procurement. They had some systems and processes that were a little out of whack and needed some help with reorganizing pretty much the whole accounting structure. So I came over at that time and started in with Missouri, and then spent 20 years there and got to spend half of that time in the field directly with our field staff and counselors and really take this program to heart, and then had an opportunity four years ago to join the VRTAC-QM. I had said for a long time we needed technical assistance in the fiscal realm for years and years. I was thrilled that Mark Schultz saw the vision and made it happen.   Carol: Good stuff. Well, now we're going to enter the danger zone because I have some questions for you all. Not exactly sure how this is going to go, but we are going to do our best. So y'all jump in when you want. So what has been your biggest realization or aha moment since you started with the QM. And Allison, I'm going to have you kick us off and then other folks can jump in.   Allison: Honestly, Carol, there's been a lot of those aha moments for me over the last, you know, almost three years with the Technical Assistance Center since my experience in VR started in the field and I was a counselor, kind of the program side is where my comfort level is or my knowledge and experience. So when I joined the fiscal team there, definitely there was a lot of those aha moments, mainly a lot of the things that I did not know or did not realize even as a director when I came over. So one of those aha's is the director. Even though I received these beautiful monthly budget reports for my fiscal staff, even though I had a leadership team that we reviewed budgets with, understanding the fiscal requirements in and out, the uniform grant guidance and all the regulations. And, EDGAR, all of that, I think, is critical for any director or their leadership team to have knowledge of. And that was definitely one of my aha moments. And one of those things I go back, wow, if I could go back and be a director, I would be a lot smarter after being on the technical assistance side. And like I said, there's been a lot of those aha moments. I could share tons of them, but a couple other ones that jump out is just that critical need for that program side of the House and the fiscal side of the House, to always be communicating and always making sure they're checking with each other. On whether it's a new implementation, whether it's expenses, contracts, doesn't matter. There needs to be that collaboration happening at that level. And then probably the technology challenges is another one of those constant aha moments in the year that we're in and how reliant we are on technology. I am still amazed that there is not technology out there that will do what VR needs it to do, right off the shelf.   Carol: Amen, sister. You said it all. No, but I'm sure there's people that want to say some more.   Chris: I found it interesting when I came over that not every single, not a single state has it right. I thought that there would be more that are fully knowledgeable and are running with it and doing all the great things they are doing, the great things. They just don't have 100% right.   Carol: You are making me laugh with this because I'm just going to say I have to jump in on that. Sarah and I right away, in the beginning, anytime we had met with RSA we learned something new, we're like, uh, I gotta call back to Minnesota, tell them, because we realized, like, hey, we thought we were sort of doing it right, but we all realized things. We went, uh, yeah, we had a little slight misstep on that.   Katie: I would agree with that. Like, we came from a state that was in an intensive agreement. And, you know, I was like, man, we really got it wrong. But then, you know, it's a huge learning curve and there's a lot of people that are putting in their best effort, and they're still just a few things that aren't quite right.   Chris: Absolutely.   Katie: Another realization that I had was we have this table of contents for a grant management manual that we send out to agencies. And when I received it in Wyoming, I was intimidated by all the things that needed to be included. But my aha moment was when you break that down into individual items and you really look at it, it's things that are already in place, the policies and procedures that you're already working on. It's just finding a way to get that on paper and put it into some sort of policy and procedure and internal control. So realizing that states have the capacity to do that, just figuring out how was an aha moment for me.   Sarah: You know, when I came in, I was thinking back to 2017 and RSA came out with guidance on, I'm going to say it, Period of Performance. And it dominated our whole agency for a good nine months, trying to understand the guidance, looking at systems. We had to do a whole overhaul with the way we looked at obligations, just we spent a massive amount of time and effort to right size our systems, internal controls and all of that because prior to performance sets the beat for all of financial within a VR program. So coming into the QM, I really assumed that more agencies knew of Period of Performance and had gone through at least similar steps, or at least had internal conversations. And what I found was completely the opposite. Somehow a lot of folks missed the memo and that work hadn't been done. And of course, we've been running Fred Flintstone style, trying to help agencies get up to snuff. So that's the piece. I think that's been the most interesting. I think for me.   Carol: I think along that same vein for me was really that realization states are more different than I thought because I figured we all had the same information. We all kind of operated sort of the same. You might have your own internal systems, but I remember, Sarah, you and I talking that first year just going like, oh my gosh, everybody is organized so completely differently. They approach their work so completely differently. There isn't just one size fits all. Like, hey, you should do it this way. And like, everybody can do that. Uh uh, it is like having an IPE for how the fiscal is managed. Individualized we need to give very individualized TA. So what do you guys view as the number one challenge facing our programs nationwide? And Sarah, I'm going to have you start us with that.   Sarah: Okay? I'm going to say it I think Allison said it earlier. We are lacking in the technology space. I think a couple of things we have, the pendulum has swung to the other direction and before it was spend, spend, spend, a lot of agencies made adjustments so that they were increasing their spending. The large carryover balances weren't so large. Now my concern is how are we looking at our finances to see if we can still sustain that. And in order to get accurate projections and for leadership teams to have the conversations about where they stand financially, we have to have technology systems in place that are reliable, are tracking period of performance, can provide those fiscal calculations in terms of where we stand on all of the different requirements, so that we have a constant pulse on where do we stand as an agency. And I liken it to being in private industry and a CEO knowing at all times how much does it cost to make the widget? How many widgets are we making and what amount of time? All of those kinds of things. And I feel like in that space right now, we have agencies that are trying to figure that out, and we have some that are in a very delicate position, and it can cause a lot of catastrophe and crisis if that's not solidified. So really, it goes back to having reliable technology that will take care of all of that. And that includes our CMS, our Case Management Systems space. A lot of our vendors are struggling in that Period of Performance area, and we're not there yet. We have a lot more work to do.   Carol: Well, it's like a $4 billion industry, you know, and I feel like we're still using an abacus or something in some cases for tracking the money. It is the most insane thing I have ever seen.   Allison: And, you know, related to that technology challenge, though, is knowing that, that challenge is there, knowing that the technology is not correct. I think what adds to the complexity of that is the fiscal staff or the just the staff within the VR agency. They lack the fiscal knowledge enough to know if their system is working correctly or not, or know how to go in and make the adaptations needed to assist them. And that's a challenge within itself.   Chris: And I will piggyback right on that, because the thing I think that we've struggled with is we have lost so much institutional knowledge that people don't stay in jobs like they used to. And so if these policies and procedures are not written down, you get new people coming in, they don't know what they don't know. And if the technology is not working right, they don't know that that's not something that they can handle. So it's a lack of that long time knowledge that used to be in this program.   Katie: Yeah, Chris, that is exactly where I was going as well, is the loss of staff and institutional knowledge is huge, and it really highlights the importance of getting policies and procedures in place and not waiting till that person has their foot out the door and is ready to head out to make sure that you're getting that in writing. You know, succession planning and really building up success in the team.   Carol: I think for me, one of the things I see, because I love that whole organizational structure and non-delegable responsibilities, I love that area. I think one of the biggest challenges facing the program is the whole shift in how things are organized between if you're in a designated state unit within a designated state agency, and that centralization we have seen of all the fiscal functions along with IT and HR and all of it, but I feel like VR has lost control. And so as these services are centralized, and not that they can't be, but that they get centralized to a point that the VR program has lost complete input control direction. I mean, you've got directors being told you can't spend anything over $5. It has to go through 40 layers. You can't hire anybody. Staff cannot travel to go see customers like all of that. If we can't fix this structure of how things are put into play in each of these states, I really see kind of the demise of the program. As we see things get buried, the program gets buried down within these big agencies. The lack of control ends up leading to problems with them and being able to carry out the mission. And it's really hard to get a handle on that. And I know Congress has given, you know, this leeway so that states can organize like they want. But boy, the way they're organized right now, it's pretty tough.   Allison: It's a double edged sword when you think about it, because you're probably like me Carol, as former directors, we wanted more money going into the consumer services. We wanted it going to support our customers. We wanted to find ways to reduce any kind of administrative type expenses so that that money can go there when the centralized functions were really being pushed at the state levels. In my mind at first, I will say this, at first I saw, yes, this is a benefit because we're going to have these shared services, we're going to be able to spend more of our funds on our customers. And I still somewhat agree with that approach because it is a cost savings. But what has to happen, though, is that balance, what you talked about, the balance where VR still has control over the decisions or they are included in those decisions and the restrictions that have been put in place has to be lifted. But I do see the benefits of those shared services as long as the structure gets set up right.   Carol: Right. And that's been few and far between.   Allison: That needs a national model.   Carol: It does. And that's been a problem. I mean, if there's anything anyone can work on, little congressional assistance in that or whatever, you know, getting some of that rewritten, how that looks.   Sarah: Well, and I came from an agency that was able to retain an entire unit of 13-ish folks when all of those consolidations were occurring because within our Department of Education, our commissioner understood the complexities of our award and knew that if all of those positions rolled up to a department level, they weren't going to be able to support the program and were able to coordinate with our state leadership. And it served the program very, very well. So I think we have a little bit to be desired still in that space to get agencies the support that they need 100%.   Carol: So what has been your favorite thing to work on or accomplishment in your role? And Katie, I'm going to kick that to you to start us off.   Katie: Well, I've really enjoyed my role here with the QM. There's a lot of things that I enjoy, but the task that I've enjoyed the most is really having the ability to dig into the new uniform grant guidance that went into effect October 1st of 2020. For one of the things that I did while doing that was I took the old uniform grant guidance and the new ones and did a side by side where all of the things that were taken out were redlined and all of the things that were added were highlighted, and I'm really excited for that tool to be shared with the agencies right now. That's with RSA to get the stamp of approval, but I've used that tool already to help update all of our things on the website and all the tools that we're sharing with everyone, and I think it's going to be a really helpful tool for the agencies.   Carol: I love that tool, Katie, so much because even when we were down doing to last week and some of the just the nuance pieces that came out, when you're reading it and you go, okay, that language did change. Like there is a slightly nuanced variance to this that I hadn't completely grasped until you see it in the red and the yellow, and it all highlighted up. I mean, it was pretty nice.   Katie: Yeah, they did a lot of plain language changes, which is really evident when you look at the side by side.   Chris: I'll jump in here and tell you what my favorite thing is. And it's when we were working with a state intensively and, you know, we've been working with them for a long time, and you get to know them really well and you understand their environment and how things work, and they come to you and say something really profound, like, I was watching this training the other day and they got this wrong, and they got this wrong and they got this wrong. It is like a proud parent moment. When you go, they understand what the program is supposed to be doing, and they understand when other people not necessarily are getting it wrong, but mostly they're able to recognize what's not absolutely correct. And it just makes you feel like, oh, we have come so far.   Carol: It's like fly, little bird, you're flying.   Chris: Yes.   Allison: That's probably one of my favorite parts too, Chris, is the state work that we've done and how you get to know these state people. There's so many amazing VR staff across the country, and their hearts are all in the right place, and they want to do good. That's what I've enjoyed is getting to know these people better, broadening my network as well because I learn from them. But just being that resource I do like, I'm one of those weird people that likes digging into the laws and regs and finding where is that gray, vague area that we can interpret a little better. So part of the TA work, you know, really digging into some of the laws and some regulatory guidance I've enjoyed as well.   Carol: I have a story I love to share. I was having a breakdown probably a year ago, Sarah's laughing at me, I had a breakdown. You know, you're providing TA to state you're so ingrained with them, especially when they have a corrective action plan, you feel like you're part of them. I always say we, you know, when we're talking because I feel like I'm part of their team and we've been working on a particular piece of it, and nothing that we sent in was anything RSA wanted. All I knew was that this was not what they wanted, but we couldn't exactly figure out what they wanted. And it was driving me crazy. And I'd called Sarah and I said, I think I have to quit being a TA provider because I suck at this. I'm not able to help them. I haven't been able to figure this out. I am done, and I went to bed that night. I actually was on site with another state and I woke up at two in the morning and I do my best thinking as I'm sleeping. It's so weird. I've done it my whole career. I wake up in the middle of the night and have an idea. I woke up at two in the morning. I'm like, oh, I know what they're talking about. And I got up and I typed, I typed for like three hours and then got up for the day and got ready for the other state. But exactly what was needed was that, I mean, when we ended up meeting with the state and then they met with RSA, and that was the thing. It was the thing that was needed to get accomplished. And I felt super proud that we could kind of like, figure it out. It took a while. I almost quit, but, we got there in the end.   Sarah: You know, being in the final year of the grant, everybody's asking the question, what comes next? And of course we don't know what comes next. But I think my favorite part is looking back and building the relationships. So kind of touching on what all of you all have said. Relationships are important to me. Building the trust we are learning alongside of them just like they are. I always say there's no top of the mountain that any of us are ever going to reach when we've arrived. It's a daily learning process, but the program financially is so complex and trying to take those federal requirements And each of the state's requirements, which we've acknowledged already are all different, and bring that together in the center. And there's never been a resource to help agencies get down in the weeds, look at their systems, look at their processes, and help them navigate through that. And so just having something to offer and having directors send an SOS text at 9:00 at night, or we've talked to directors who have been in tears or excited because something really great has happened, and they want to share the success. It's all of that. Just being able to provide that valuable resource and support them along the way has been very rewarding for me. I know, and you all, but especially I think for the States.   Carol: So if you had a crystal ball, what would you predict regarding the financial state of the VR program over the next three years? And Chris, you get to start us on that lovely prediction.   Chris: Okay. Well, since I don't have a crystal ball, I think Sarah touched on this a little bit earlier. So for several years, the message from RSA and from Congress has been to spend, spend, spend. And so there's been a lot of changes in all the agencies to be able to spend more, to spend quicker, to do everything quicker and faster. And I think the spending is catching up. And I think that it might go too far. Like Sarah mentioned, the pendulum is going the other way, and I don't think the fiscal forecasting is robust enough to be able to predict when it's going to get hard. And since most directors do not come from a fiscal background, most directors come with the VR heart that you know is what a counselor has, paying attention to that. Fiscal forecasting is going to be a critical, critical point. And I know that most states are not doing it right. So that's my prediction. More people are going to be reaching out asking for fiscal forecasting and understanding how to look at this program in the future.   Sarah: And I think to tack on to that, I think we're going to see new technology and new resources emerge that will assist our agencies. Again, like Carol said earlier, some days it feels like we have our big chief tablet out and we're still doing things old school. And I think the only direction to go is up. So I think we're going to see some new resources, hopefully in the technology world develop, that will assist our agencies so that their focus can remain on the customers where it belongs.   Allison: And I would have to say ditto to both of that, especially the fiscal forecasting and the pendulum swinging the other way. And a lot of states considering order selection or going into order selection. But one of the things that pops in my mind that might happen over the next three years is reauthorization of WIOA. I know the discussions are happening with Congress right now, and if that implementation happens, you know, what's it going to look like? Because ten years ago when WIOA was passed, it was a huge impact on VR. And it still is. I mean, we're still challenged with trying to get everything implemented, trying to spend the minimum of our 15% on Pre-ETS. There's just so many things that we're still working on through. So very interested to see where that's going to go.   Carol: And I definitely think like nothing ever stays the same. So we always think like we're going to get to the place and it's just going to be even flow, like it's all going to be cool. We don't really have to pay a lot of attention, and I don't think that's ever going to be the state of the VR program. Like it's going to constantly need people paying attention. Whether the pendulum is one way and we have loads of money or it's the other way and we have no money now, like we have to somehow try to like even this out with the fiscal forecasting and all the things you're doing. But if you think you're going to get to the place where like, oh, I've reached it, Nirvana, it's all great. That's never going to be like this job takes constant attention to detail and what is happening. And so it is always going to be work. It's going to take a lot of effort from a lot of people. And as all the new people keep coming and going, figuring that out for the team so that you can sustain the practices and things that you have that help you to understand what's going on.   Katie: Yeah, I would just agree with everything that everyone already said. One of the big pushes that was brought up at CSAVR, is technology, and I think it is going to be interesting to see what kind of technology is introduced in the next three years that's going to help assist our programs.   Carol: So what is your best piece of advice for our listeners? And I'll let anybody open that one up.   Allison: I'm going to say you need to have a deep bench of leaders who are adverse in the financial requirements, maybe incorporating fiscal training for all staff on an annual basis, whether that's just refreshers or making sure new folks being hired understand all the requirements. But fiscal needs to be part of your ongoing training with staff. It's just critical.   Carol: I'd say, for directors coming in, I know the tendency is to want to be like, I have to know everything. I'm the director, I need to know all things. And even when you don't know the things, you pretend, you know the things. Don't pretend you know the things you don't know. Like you need to be humble and figure it out and learn and be willing to learn. For a lot of folks that are growing up in the VR system, having that sort of physical part of your brain, it may not be completely there. You're like, I went into VR because I didn't want to do math, and now you're in charge of, you know, $300 million in a program. And so you've got to just continue to learn and chip away and figure out how you can gain that really strong understanding, because you cannot just hand that off to some other group and think someone's managing that for you, because the buck really does stop with you in the end. As far as the responsibility over the control and allocation of the VR funds. So please keep learning, as Allison said, and be open and be humble when you don't know things and ask.   Sarah: There's a song by the Beatles called With a Little Help from My Friends. Everybody needs a Little help from time to time. And I know over the years we've worked with most of the agencies, but there are some that we haven't, and I've always assumed they're good. They don't need us. They're fine. It's not always necessarily the case. So acknowledging if I pick up a phone and call a peer or a fellow director, or hopefully the TAC continued to exist beyond this grant cycle. Reaching out and asking for help is okay, and it's encouraged.   Katie: Yeah, mine will be through the lens of policy and procedure. That's where I keep hitting. That's my passion on this QM team. We have a ton of resources available, and if you're struggling, you're looking at that table of contents saying, I can't do this. Reach out, give us a call. We can help you with prompting questions just to get the thought process going. And you can do it. It's going to be okay.   Chris: Ok, my piece of advice is to make connections. And I think everybody has kind of said that in their own way. But make those connections so that you have people you can reach out to and ask questions of whether it's us at the TA center, other states, other fiscal people. You need to be able to ask, how do you do this? What do you think of this idea that I have? How would you handle this? I mean, being able to have that connection and that type of conversation is critical 100%.   Carol: Well, I sure appreciate you all. And while we're still around, all our listeners can still connect with us. And we do have a QM fiscal email address. I will spell out for you. It is QM f I s c a l at v r t a c-qm.org. So qmfiscal@vrtac-qm.org. So please do reach out. We still are around for a little while and we can be your phone a friend. So thanks for joining me today guys I really appreciate it.   Chris: Thank you Carol. This was great.   Allison: Thanks for having Us.   Sarah: Thank you.   Katie: Thanks.   {Music} Outro Voice: Conversations powered by VR, one manager at a time, one minute at a time, brought to you by the VR TAC for Quality Management. Catch all of our podcast episodes by subscribing on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts or wherever you listen to podcasts. Thanks for listening!

n this episode of the Building Texas Business Podcast, we dive into the entrepreneurial journey of Summer Craig, founder of Craig Group, a strategic consulting firm. Summer shares how a vacation epiphany led her to start a business while caring for a newborn. Her firm now partners with private equity-backed companies, helping middle-market businesses transition from startups to structured entities ready for expansion. We explore the early challenges of entrepreneurship, including securing initial revenue from clients like Gulf States Toyota. Summer discusses how the COVID-19 pandemic unexpectedly fueled growth in the middle market and healthcare sectors. She emphasizes the importance of building high-quality teams through strategic hiring, focusing on complementary skills and an ownership mentality. Craig Group stands out with its hands-on approach and a patent-pending software platform for sales and marketing forecasting. Summer highlights the significance of creating a flexible work environment that prioritizes excellence and authentic client relationships. Her innovative approach to consulting demonstrates how companies can adapt and thrive in challenging business landscapes. The conversation reveals the delicate balance of cost-saving strategies and necessary investments. Summer shares insights into maintaining a remote work culture built on trust and continuous improvement. We learn about the power of problem-solving, client feedback, and the determination required to transform business challenges into opportunities. SHOW HIGHLIGHTS Summer Craig, founder of Craig Group, shares her entrepreneurial journey that started with an epiphany during a vacation while caring for her newborn. Craig Group focuses on strategic consulting for private equity-backed middle-market companies, helping them transition from successful startups to structured entities. The early days of the business involved securing foundational clients like Gulf States Toyota, with initial revenues critical for startup success. Summer discusses the positive impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on business growth, particularly in the middle market and healthcare sectors. Strategic hiring decisions and fostering a company culture of complementary skills and flexible work environments are highlighted as key to building high-quality teams. Craig Group differentiates itself with a hands-on, results-driven approach and a patent-pending software platform that enhances sales and marketing forecasting. Building trust with elite clients through effective communication and personal interactions is emphasized as crucial for maintaining successful business relationships. The episode underscores the importance of collecting client feedback to ensure service excellence and continuous improvement. Summer uses her passion for mountain climbing as a metaphor for her entrepreneurial journey, highlighting the determination and vision required to navigate business challenges. The conversation concludes with reflections on the importance of strategic growth consulting and the ongoing journey of team building and client success. LINKSShow Notes Previous Episodes About BoyarMiller About Craig Group GUESTS Summer CraigAbout Summer TRANSCRIPT (AI transcript provided as supporting material and may contain errors) Chris: In this episode you will meet Summer Craig, founder and CEO of Craig Group. Summer's passion for excellence has helped fuel her company's growth, and she and her team's authentic approach to delivering for clients has formed relationships built on trust. Summer, I want to welcome you to Building Texas Business. Thanks for taking the time to come on the podcast. Summer: Thanks for having me. I'm glad to be here. Chris: So I know there's a lot for us to talk about. I want to start with giving you the opportunity to tell the audience who your company is and what are you known for. Summer: Yeah, absolutely. First of all, I love your podcast. I love what you're doing, telling people's stories, so I'm glad to be here. Chris: Thank you. Summer: Yeah, my story is a unique one, very interesting. It actually started with an actual epiphany that I had. I had a true, you know, entrepreneurial lightning strike moment. That that moment was sitting in Frisco, colorado, on vacation, while rocking my three month old third child, which is never the time that you should start a company. But I but that was my I had an epiphany, and the epiphany really was this that I was always going to work very hard, I was going to outwork the people around me, I was going to outwork my peers and I was in a fantastic role, fantastic job. But I had the epiphany that if I was going to always work that hard, no matter what, I could create more value for myself and for the economy by starting my own firm. And I knew that I needed to start my own firm because of that that, if I'm going to always do this, why not build something instead of working for someone else and creating value for somebody else? So that was the epiphany, and it was a true anxiety ridden, sweat inducing moment when I knew that I was going to start a company, you know, despite having a newborn third child. But fast forward. And you know, we're five and a half years later, and you know, we have a firm of 32 people and it turns out the Epiphany was the right way to go for me, that's a really unique story. Chris: And I'm sure your husband thought it was part of brain fog, but you proved him wrong. Summer: Yeah, actually he's been nothing. I think he said okay, sure, you know a little bit, maybe a little more, thinking like oh, we'll see what, we'll see what actually happens here. Chris: Okay, so. So it sounds like the inspiration for you was I want to do this for myself and build something that's mine. Tell us what it is that you've built. Summer: Yeah, absolutely. So what we've built is we built a strategic consulting firm. So we consult with sponsor-backed typically private equity-backed portfolio companies. We really focus on the middle market, lower middle market. What we do with those companies is we come in at different phases in the hold period even pre, even in LOI and we support top line organic growth. So we've built a system of tools and a system of really smart people and a platform that creates a formulaic way to streamline processes, streamline people, streamline technology for growth in these companies. The solution is really right size for companies that have been really successful but haven't really worked on their operations and growth. So they're selling whatever they're selling widgets, whatever it is but have they truly really looked and said is there anybody else I could sell to? Could I be doing something better? Could I be faster, could I do this more cheaply? They haven't really had to do that, but when the PE sponsors come in, you definitely do have to do that and what we're finding is that in a lot of in-house and PE there is a trend of hiring operating partners, which is a newer trend. So some have expertise on top line growth, but for the most part, that expertise is not in-house. So the PE firms need to go outside of their doors to get support to help these firms grow. Chris: So it sounds like you take a company that's almost been successful, despite themselves. That's right and help them systemize that that's right, so that they can maybe leverage it for more success. Summer: Well, yeah, and I mean I hope some of my clients are listening, but many are in Texas and I'll say it's so impressive, a lot of industrial manufacturing it unbelievably successful, either family businesses or entrepreneur-led businesses. But you're right, they haven't really had to. I'm using, you know, using air quotes here, but try that hard because they've had a great product right they've had a great story. the entrepreneur, the founder, had a really great connected network right, so that gets you to a certain amount of growth. But then when you have, you know, pe dollars coming in who are betting on you, there's a growth mandate and the growth mandate that that activity to grow is not the same as what it takes to start a business, so growth is harder and it takes more structure, and that's exactly right. We come in and say, man, this is awesome, how can we take what's awesome, do more of what's awesome, and let's try to reduce some of the risk that you have in the business, probably because nothing's repeatable, nothing's written down, maybe there's no technology supporting system, so we help them build that structure. Chris: And it helps them go to scale. Summer: That's exactly right. Chris: So let me take you back to the beginning, right after the epiphany. What were some of the first things you remember doing to kind of start the business? And, as you said, you build this thing of your own. What were some of those basic building blocks and things you did? Summer: Yeah, Well, for me personally, it was. The first thing was, you know, pray, look for guidance and then talk to people. So I spoke to a lot of people in my network just saying, hey, I've got this crazy idea, I want to build a firm. And the initial idea, while still very similar to what we do, was really around looking at sales and marketing and being able to tie the two together and prove ROI. So that's the crux of what we do right is show your work, show that this works. And I have a long career of traditional marketing. Marketing and marketing has always struggled to tie themselves to results. And that was really, you know, the core idea, you know, back when I originally founded it. But at the time I was working for Gulf States Toyota best people in the world and I'll never work for another company again. That was the, I think I topped out working for them and being, you know, affiliated with the Friedkin family. They are just salt of the earth. So I was very lucky. At the time when I had my epiphany, I said, well, wouldn't this be great if I built my business plan and I started my company but I already had a client? Wouldn't that just make me feel better? Chris: For those of you listening, it's the ideal thing to do. Summer: It really is the ideal and I think, as an entrepreneur especially somebody that I wanted to do something, but it does mitigate some risk when you first file that paperwork and you know you've got some revenue coming in. So I was lucky enough to have Gulf States Toyota before I actually quit my job, they had agreed to hire my firm, which at the time was me, and we had a great relationship and we ended up entering into a contract where I was consulting with them and I was able to do that the day I officially opened, you know, opened Craig Group and opened my doors, and I think that gave me just a little bit of peace, knowing that there was revenue coming in while I was building all the structure that you have to do, which, honestly, is quite painful. Chris: Right, it's very painful. It's always more work than you even can think. Right, absolutely. Summer: And if you've not done it before, which? Who has? That's something, that's a skill set that you know. I mean, I guess you know lawyers do it all the time. You probably do it all the time, right, setting up entities. But if you I just had this, I you know, probably should have advised, got more advice, but I definitely was able to say, oh well, I can do this, I can. And what state do you incorporate and why, and what do you do, and who do you bring in, and is it all those questions? As an entrepreneur, you have to just do it. Chris: We advise on those issues all the time. I was in a conversation yesterday with someone on the same issues and always tell people look, because as the entrepreneur, the other thing you're doing at the very beginning is trying to save every penny you can, and people will maybe try to do it themselves on the legal side, and I try to counsel people. It's an investment in your business, not an expense, and but try, you have to keep it manageable you're exactly right, exactly right. Summer: And luckily I was at that juncture. It was a small enough entity where I was able to get by with it. I don't cannot today with. I have, you know, a wonderful legal team, but that time, you know, just as an entrepreneur, it's really a pain, it's overwhelming, just to figure out how do I, how do I get you know, a wonderful legal team. But that time, you know, just as an entrepreneur, it's really a pain, it's overwhelming, just to figure out how do I, how do I get you know, get started. But again, I was lucky that I had a client and so I had revenue coming in. It really enabled me to get a lot of things done because you didn't have to worry so much about that. And I remember thinking my first goal was, oh, you know, back half of the year, six months, if I could just, you know, make my salary back right, thinking like, oh, I'll just replace my income. Well, that I quickly got client two, client three, and that I blew past that goal. It was amazing. It was a little bit of a you know it, who you know. I really talked to people and got advice and those ended up being some of my clients eventually, when people that I was asking for advice. So that was great. But it was such a funny little goal, which was okay, because if I can do that, then it's like, okay, I've done something that hasn't been a detriment to my family. I'm adding to the family kitty. Well, we realized like, oh wait, now I can. There's more here. Chris: So I was just thinking as you were answering that question. You said it's been just over five years. Summer: So, given the calendar, that means you started in 2019 and then the world went upside down. Chris: So let's talk about, I mean, every business that starts out. It's going to face some headwinds and obviously this was a pretty big one. But just walk us through some of the challenges you faced and how you managed through that, given that you just had this new business. Summer: Absolutely Well, of course, like you know we. Business. Absolutely Well, of course, like you know we. I was just looking at right before COVID so COVID was in March and February I was just looking at expanding and getting some more office space because I'm hiring people. I was looking at leases. So that was hilarious, right, because the minute COVID hit, you know you don't sign the you don't sign the lease, which was great that we hadn't signed it yet, so that was just a fortuitous that was a God thing, but I will say there's a few good things that came out of COVID. In general, COVID was very good for Craig Group and here's why it was good for Craig Group. I think that middle market businesses that I was working with and we also work with healthcare companies as well, especially healthcare technology, B2B and B2C healthcare I think that what COVID brought to us was that people always did, but then they had to go and find your business online Right, and probably on their phone Right. So if you were not ready with a digital presence and for sales and marketing, so if somebody could not seamlessly buy something from you online or if they couldn't research your product online, you were toast in COVID. Chris: Very true yeah. Summer: And even B2B industrial manufacturing businesses that never cared a day in their life about their website. All of a sudden they need their spec sheets to be posted online because they can't drive over and drop them off in person right? They're not going to trade shows, right? So website, but not just the website, really the content, the interaction. And then how good is your email response? How good is your team on the phone? How good are they at working those leads that just got spotlighted? And on the healthcare side, as you can imagine, about COVID, people are scared to death. At that time, telehealth was nascent. Chris: Right. Summer: Pretty terrible still, kind of, and they realized we have to invest here. Patients don't know how to get in touch with us. Everybody's scared. People aren't coming into the doctor's office or the hospital because everyone's afraid that they're going to get COVID. So the messaging opportunity for what we do, which is growth, really about growth. We no longer had to convince our clients you need to take action, because before pre-COVID, and even either at the same time of COVID, there was also this shift with the markets too. Around PE also said oh wait, this has been like really good times and I actually need to start building organic growth instead of just buying another company and doing roll-ups. So this happened very right after COVID. So those two things we did not. We stopped having to tell people. People would ask us why are you doing growth support? We don't need that, right, and nobody says that now, right, no, there's no argument. So COVID, plus what was happening in kind of the deal-making PE market, which we can, that's another. That was another big change for us, but it just helped people say, oh my gosh, we need help. We need help right now. And that was a huge. It was a huge growth time for us. So we grew significantly in 2020 and 2021. Chris: Stars aligned, it sounds like. Summer: Stars aligned and again, it was just one of those who would have. There would have been no way to know. Chris: Forecast, foresee or plan no way. Summer: The only way that I was able to do is I said we were able to kind of make hay, which was okay. We have a door here, so how can I be really good about scaling in a smart way? So I didn't hire tons of people, I hired slowly. I never wanted to have layoff right, so I was able to say I have an opportunity, let's scale slowly. Due to that growth, we're also bootstrapped. So we were able to fund our whole company out of revenue which, especially at that time, I wasn't going to go fundraise. It was just so we were just. We're really lucky that we were able to build something, grow, but grow in a. We weren't growing too fast that we were getting out over our skis. We were able to service our clients, grow, you know, as needed. Then it ended up being a good time for us to kind of get our feet under us about who we are as a firm. Chris: It's a great segue when you talk about the growth you were seeing from the client revenue side forced you to start building your team. Yes, so let's talk about how you went about. One setting the strategy of not growing too fast, because you can fail when you do that, but really focusing on making sure you're making the right hires and adding to your team in the right way. Summer: Yeah Well, I'll say I don't always make the right hires and I've made so many mistakes. If you said that, we'd know you're lying, yeah if there was a thing that I think I could always do better at, it was being even better at hiring. I mean, to me it's the hardest thing that I think we do as business leaders, as CEOs and entrepreneurs. So that is something that I think you just get better at, but you still fail. So that's hard. I have no secret. I have a few things I've learned on that side, but I will say, on the growth side too. Before that, as a person, I'm just a fiscally conservative person in general, so I think some entrepreneurs can get especially more kind of visionary and I think I for sure hold the vision, but I'm very conservative. But that helped us. I think I've had to almost pull myself off of that, so I almost can be too conservative, right. So that's something that I've had to learn about myself, which is I need a counterweight to say you know, do this. But at that time it worked. It was a good way to scale. So I am conservative there, but I did realize in terms of people, if I was really going to grow and we have this value prop about growing with sponsored backed businesses. I myself while I am married to somebody that works in PE and I know a lot about PE. I never myself worked inside the doors of PE and I really had to have that in my firm in order to just have that credibility, you know, just to. Okay got it right and so I did decide very early on. We're growing, we're having a lot of success. I knew that I had to have somebody else at a partnership level that was going to be able to move us to the next level, and it had to be somebody that did not have my skills. Chris: Hello friends, this is Chris Hanslick, your Building Texas business host. Did you know that Boyer Miller, the producer of this podcast, is a business law firm that works with entrepreneurs, corporations and business leaders? Our team of attorneys serve as strategic partners to businesses by providing legal guidance to organizations of all sizes. Get to know the firm at boyermillercom, and thanks for listening to the show. Summer: So I needed somebody that was very, you know, has a different background than me, had a different skill set than me, and so that was, you know, really a game-changing hire. So we brought on at that time Libby Covington. And again, she comes out of private equity, she was in-house at Cap street but also worked at law firms and then had also operated in-house with the Doggett family, so we had a lot in common in that sense. But I knew what she brought and what I brought were going to be complimentary to the market and that was ended up being true. You know that that was. But it was hard right, deciding to bring in, you know, somebody. It's really hard. Chris: You make it sound really easy. Summer: It's not. Chris: Because a lot of people entrepreneurs, maybe just humans in general we tend, you know people that we're like, so you tend to hire people like you Absolutely. Instead of doing. What you should be doing is what you did. And how do you hire someone that fills you out right the other side of the skill sets that you don't have to make the strong team. So you know, kudos to you for seeing that, and I know of Libby from her days at Cap Street. So so then you bring Libby on and there's 30 other people you've hired in a few years. Summer: That's right, that's right. Well, I have, you know, tricia Eaton. She started with me. She was actually my first employee, trisha Eaton, she started with me, she was actually my first employee. She now is in an operations role for me. She's been with me since day one. You can do anything. She's the person that can do anything. You just give her a problem and she just goes and solves it. So she has just been my right-hand woman and I couldn't do this without her. So we had her, we had Libby and then, quickly, we had to hire some subject matter experts. So me and Libby cannot keep delivering all the work. Patricia can't deliver all the work. So we really had to go and fill out the teams and I focused on hiring high-margin employees. So where could I bill and where could I charge for their expertise? Sure, right. And then if there was employees where we didn't really use them that much or it was really low margin, we would usually go with consultants. So I had a bench of 1099s. And we still do. We've less. So now we still do. And again, that was another way where we scaled more slowly. So it didn't, you know, have to get ahead of ourselves on building. When was it the right to have the full-time versus the part-time. That was also a benefit of COVID. So I think COVID and I'm seeing this today too it really, I think, enabled people to work the way that was better for them, like there was a new definition of work. Chris: For sure. Yeah, and it's being talked about every day. Summer: Of course, and especially in your industry too, in law firms with a very kind of traditional track, and I think there's people that say I want to work and do really good work, but I can't work in this way, and whether it was in the office or not, but even if it was maybe I want to do great work, but I need to do it 30 hours a week because I'm taking care of my aging mother or I want this lifestyle. I will make less money, but I need to work this much time from this location. So we leaned in hard on that Huge value prop for us. So I think that was one of my successes of being able to hire really great talent, because I was able to align with the times, because it was what it was but also to truly say I want your best work. I don't care if you need to live in Miami, right, I don't care. If you're telling me I really have to work 30 hours a week because I have personal responsibilities, I'm like great, give me your best 30 hours a week. To me that's better than any you know 40 plus hours a week person. That isn't maybe the best. Chris: Sure. Summer: Right. So I, we scaled that, we scaled through that way, we also would. We have a and we still do this today. We bring people on and we do a 60 day trial, and so and it's written, it's papered up and it says if this isn't a fit fit, we're going to separate fast. Chris: Yeah, there's a lot of value in that and it does help the saying of hire slow, fire fast, absolutely. So you get a test run at it. Summer: That's right, and sometimes you can't hire slow. Sometimes I wish I could. I've got I don't know four roles we're hiring right now and I need them to be filled yesterday. Chris: Right. Summer: But at least we've learned that we do have to have a trial period and we have to be eyes wide open about it. You know we're and I. Just part of our culture and it's part of our values is we do excellent work. So excellence is part of our culture. But also, if you can't meet that excellence, you will be let go, like we fire people, and it's not a scary thing, it's just. You know we're, we just have no tolerance. You know, and what we talked about we something we say in houses we don't have. Just you know we're, we just have no tolerance. You know, and what we talked about we something we say in house is we don't have middle managers. You know we don't have that. You're, you're, everyone's in the spotlight. It's that ownership mentality that's right and everybody's like that, so everyone's in the spotlight. There's no middle, you know. So you years, I mean there's been lots of not home runs you know, it's been you know there's hills and valleys there with hiring. Chris: Well, that's good for people to hear. Right, You're not always going to get it right. There's ups and downs, just like in life. But if you're, if you have a mission, like like Craig group does and like our firm does, then you know what your why is. And if something veers off from that, then you stay true to the why and then make those hard decisions. Summer: Yeah, and it always is. It's always hard. It's the hardest thing we do. Chris: No doubt. I want to talk a little bit about innovation, because clearly what your company's doing is innovative and for PE firms. But just in your space, how do you go about fostering innovation amongst your team and encouraging it within the company? Summer: Yeah, I mean, I think that it is who we are. Honestly, it has to do with every single person that we hire. Again, even going back to that, we don't have any middle managers mindset, which is there's no medium, there's no mediocrity, we're always how could you have done better? How could we have done something faster? Wait, what tools did we not use this time? So those questions are asked. Every engagement we have, I'll say we're doing something pretty different. We do have a few competitors out there not very many, but we do something unique. I mean, we are consultants, we do consult, but we're certainly not a consulting firm typically. You know, we're not an Accenture right, because? Why? Because our people actually get in and then they actually do the work, Not that we don't do at Accenture, but that's our model, it is what we do. So we're boots on the ground, so we actually do the work. So we're not an agency, but we do some agency work right. So and then on the technology side, we have a software platform. It's patent pending. It's all about forecasting and how do we get better at forecasting sales and marketing? And if we can forecast better, we can then make action and take action more quickly. And so those are the three things we do. And again, we have some competitors, but what we do as a company inherently is pretty innovative, Like we're doing something a little different, Like the skill set is a little different. We move faster, you know. We have a different, you know. So we are doing something different. I think everybody at the firm knows that and they're aware of it, it's just ingrained in your culture, it's just who they are. Chris: They know it, and I've been to your website so I'll tell you it absolutely comes across from your website, which I know is part of the thought that went into design of the website. Right, you show up different Yep, so it seems like that's part of when you're hiring these people you're looking for someone that can fit that. Summer: That's exactly right that DNA that innovative mindset. It's right and something that Libby and I talk about all the time and again, I fail on it. Sometimes I succeed, but we hire and we've really landed on this for Craig Group is we have to hire for people that just figure it out? They just get it done. It's like I don't really care what they're, you know exactly what they know or what they've done. It's like can you solve this problem? Just you know, almost like if you just did a business school case and put it in front of them and said solve it. Chris: Well, I'm curious because I've been reading a lot about this lately and we have some internal debate about it in our recruiting process. Summer: Do you do any kind of role play as part of your process to put them in the position or challenge them to see how they problem solve. You know, we don't do it formally and I think maybe we also thought about doing it formally like a formal case. We do it in an informal way, which is here's a situation that we're in Usually, it's a real, it's a real client situation and we say hey, what do you think about this? And let them, you know, talk it through. Right so we do it as part of our interview process, but we certainly don't have it formalized and I think maybe we should. Chris: I feel like there's a lot of value in it. I've heard people a lot smarter than me talk on it, and you know the question is and it is the question of does that scare a candidate away? And my answer that is well, if it does, and maybe we learned something early on we should have won't find out till a year later. Absolutely. I'm kind of at a mindset. It seems like a good idea. Summer: I think it's great. I would agree wholeheartedly. If somebody's scared of any kind of testing, then that's probably not a good. It's probably not a good choice. Chris: It was not going to be the person that says let me prove to you I can do this, I'll figure this out, right. So just interesting. You know people's mindsets on that so that always leads me, maybe, into the culture of Craig Group. How would you describe it and what are some of the things that you believe you're doing that help foster and allow it to grow? Summer: yeah, yeah, I'd say that our culture again, we you know excellence in our work is really the number one pillar. We have a thing on our on our mission also. This is no bs. What we mean by that is we show up authentically. We're real, we're real people, we're real humans. We have, you know, everybody that I work with either is caretaking for somebody else in their family, whether it be aging parents, children. They're passionate about volunteering and they're doing that. So we are whole humans and whole people and so I believe in like I don't want to if somebody shows up in an inauthentic way, it's like I'm fine, everything's fine, and I have no tolerance. So we have this real culture of authenticity, excellence, absolute excellence in client delivery. So everybody shows up with that. It's our culture, because we talk about it in hiring, we talk about it in our all-hands monthly meetings, we talk about it in the way we behave, which is we meet people where they are today. So it's okay in Craig group to be very authentically who you are. So that's just how I am, that's how I run the company, so, so we have an authentic culture. But what that also means is everyone at the company we're on, we're remote. We do have a lot of people in Houston, but we are remote. But that does require people to communicate with each other, which is are you okay, all right, picking up the phone and saying because you, if we're all going to have no bs and we're going to work hard, you have to know what your team how, what is your team okay? Chris: what's going on in their life? Summer: yeah, might impact their ability to deliver excellence 100, which is like tell me, do you need help? Chris: my follow-up question was going to be you sounded like a remote company. So, yeah, creating the, the connectivity of that culture, especially at that level that you're trying to achieve, has got to be challenging because you're not in person. Summer: It's so hard, it's so hard and again, I think it's. You know, we have a cameras on culture, you know, and everyone's cameras are on. I mean, I spend, we are all on. You know, video calls all day. Which pros and cons. Chris: Right. Summer: But I think that everyone's leaned into that. There know we can't be grumpy about that. We're not, you know, and everyone's also required to do really good work. But part from a training standpoint, and I think we're getting better at this, I think we can keep getting better. We're not perfect, but working asynchronously, which is what remote work is Right. Not everybody knows how to do that. Like you can't assume that everybody just knows how to work asynchronously. It's a skill set. Knowing when to do async work versus when do you need to have an in-person meeting, knowing when those workflows that is not something that I think you can just know. Chris: Sure. Summer: And so we definitely have an expectation that everyone works really efficiently asynchronously, and I love asynchronous work. Personally, I think it's way more efficient than getting in a big meeting full of people all at the same time and wasting everybody's time. But there is also this time to get everybody in the meeting and you know, sit together. But we are doing better at training people about asynchronous expectations. So we use you know, very technology heavy, very tool heavy. So we use a tool. There's a tool called Loom. It's a video tool. Basically, you can explain something really quickly on your own time and then send it to people so then they can go figure out what you're trying to explain to them. even if you couldn't meet in person. We use project management software. Basecamp is the one we use. Other people use Asana, so we use Basecamp, and all of our work is asynchronously matched. And so I think that culture though one thing that does it, we move really fast. So the culture is again with the excellence and you can move fast with async work. Sometimes it slows you down, sure, because you need to just pick up the phone Instead of you know, so you can. And that's a lot of times where I get into things Is, hey, let's stop doing this Call like call each other, you know somebody's not understanding, right, but our culture is really, we move really fast. Our clients have extremely, extremely high expectations. I mean our clients are you know? PE firms. They're, you know, there's no tolerance. Chris: And they're worried about the ROI and they want the growth yesterday. Yes. Summer: Yesterday and they, you know. So we work under that pressure with all of our clients high intensity, high growth. So we're high intensity, high. You know that we match our clients. We're yeah, that's what, that's who we are, and I think it works really well with a remote team. I think we've been able to hire people that want that, that high intensity work. If you don't want it, you can tell and it doesn't work with that. Chris: It shows up real quick, it shows up. Yeah, so you were talking about, you know, your base clients, the PE firms. Let's talk about what are some of the things you found to be successful for you and your company to kind of build and maintain those relationships so that you keep them and you get more. Summer: Yeah, absolutely so. I think it's challenging to, I think, sell anything which we're selling a service, right, but I think it's challenging to sell into. I don't want to put them all in the same basket. So not all PE or independent sponsors are sponsored, because they're not all created equal, right, so that's. I can say that but it is a tight group of people. It's a it's tight knit. It's a small group. I think it's an it's elite. Most people that have those roles are very well educated. They have great experience. I think you really have to be trustworthy, like they are not going to pull in a partner that has not been vetted. You know that, had that, that hasn't really been like. You know this is the real deal. So those relationships are really hard-earned. You know those are not easy to come by. I will say me and Libby both have our own sets of networks. That was enabled, sort of the catalyst. But the only reason why that's been able, we've had success, is because we've had to prove it. And when we prove it, you know, we then can build onto the next one and the next one. And I mean our model would be that we become a partner with the firm and that they bring us in on multiple portfolio companies and that's what happens, right. But it's hard. It's not something that you don't. You know we're not selling. You know something that's not high value, high stakes, and we really are a partner. We're not a, you know, a vendor and that takes a lot of trust. We have to spend a lot of time. Chris: Yeah, it's funny because I can totally relate. Our mindset here at the firm is the same. We want to be as we say this all the time the legal partner to our clients, an extension of the C-suite, not a vendor, not a commodity, but an actual value-added partner. Summer: Yes, that's exactly right. And it's hard to get there. You don't just say that and you know you're like oh, I want to be your growth partner. I want to be a member of your management team. It's like OK, prove it. Chris: Right. Summer: Right, and so I think that we do that. I think our team consistently delivers best in class results and best in class work. We're also right sized for the lower middle market and middle market, and I think that's what needs to happen. We can't you know it's not Bain, right? No, and they can't, they couldn't, they can't do it anyways Right, but we're also not, you know, your sister's brother that's going to help you with sales and marketing. That you know out of their garage. So I think we're right size and for our size, like for where we are in the market, I think we're an absolute best in class option and we've had to prove it and prove it and that's also why we have best in class talent, because we've proven it and proven it. But it's definitely been. You know it's a hard fought. It's hard fought. Chris: You know every single win is a hard you're only as good as the last one, that's right. Summer: I mean it's dig and ditches hard. You know, it's like we have to say. I mean we're making sure that every time we deliver the work product, the trust and then also the ability to immediately implement our plan, and that's one of we really stake our hats on that, like we don't just give you a here's some really great ideas that you can't implement, nor do you have the money to go hire the team to do it. So we really just hang our hat on, let's roll, let's go, and it's like ready to go, and so that's hard, it's hard work. You know this is tough and so that's exactly right We've got. You know we need that to be so good that the firm, the CEO of the port co and the firm are going to say man, that was really worth it. What would we do without that team? How would we, where would we be right now without that team? Chris: Where else can we use them? Summer: And that's what they. You know it's like we can't. We have to. You know, we have to keep. I think we can always get better. Chris: The results would suggest that. But to your point, the last word you just said right was if you don't have the mindset of continuing to, how can we improve? You're going to get left behind. Summer: That's right, and I think, a lot of my core team. You know one of my senior strategists, Macy Allen. I think every time she works on something, she comes up with another innovative idea about. You know what, if we would have done this or wait this tool, can we try out this tool? We're really leaned into that technology and AI in our work, but I think that what works so well is the answer is yes. Bring it in, let's try it, let's test it no-transcript and just your leadership style. Chris: How would you describe that and how do you think it's evolved since you started this five years ago? Summer: Yeah, well, I mean, I think it definitely has evolved, you know, I think that also going from having you know two people to this very large team. We're very flat organization so we don't have lots of hierarchy. So most people directly report to me probably too many, which is something we're working on. But I think I've got a very straightforward management style so there's really not a lot of dancing around things. There's not a lot of confusion. If I'm telling you something, it's probably going to be very clear. I also give feedback continuously. I believe in spot feedback so we don't wait and write it down and wait for the quarter end to go back and like report. I think that's just tiresome. So everyone is encouraged to give spot feedback both you know, positive and negative and do it in that moment. Sometimes I will do it in our project management tool and say spot feedback and just put it. And that way if it's written. Sometimes they can have some time to react. Chris: Right. Summer: As opposed to kind of. Chris: I like how you signpost it though. Yeah, I say spot feedback. Summer: Like prepare thyself. You are getting feedback. Yeah, and I put it and I just say it, and I think that I lead with kindness, always, always. I think that truth without kindness is cruelty and that's a direct quote from my husband, jason Craig, one of his themes and I think that being kind to people, even when you're frustrated and is, is the only way to be. So lead with kindness, but also tell the truth, which is this you know this went well, this didn't go well, you know, but it's not. It's not about you as a human. You know this isn't a. You know we're not making a personal judgment about you, but this work product, you know, wasn't what it needed to be or whatever it is. But I tend to give feedback. You know, again, it's rapid, it's in this, it's like I lead. You know, very, you know, crisply in the moment I've had to get even more efficient with that, with a lot of people you know, and I don't see all the things, and so I definitely try to speak to every a lot of people to get you know other people's opinions on work product. So I talked to a lot of people. I talked to clients ask for feedback and then go and manage my employees. That are what I heard from clients. So yeah, I think I'm a management style again. I think I get a lot of feedback, a lot information, but crisp, kind, but really Christmas and some compassion right, always, always. Chris: So that's something you mentioned. I don't think a lot of people think to do or they think to. They think about it but they're scared to do it, and that's get feedback from your clients. Summer: Yeah. Chris: Right, it's the most valuable feedback you can get because you're really trying to serve the clients. But if you're not delivering what they want in the way they want it, you're missing the mark. Right, you can work hard and you can believe it's excellent, but if they don't believe it's excellent, hard and you can believe it's excellent, but if they don't believe it's excellent. So anything you do this kind of systemize that, or is that just you know periodic check-ins with your clients, or I don't like that. Summer: You know people will disagree with me on that and there's a whole theory in marketing around, you know, net promoter scores, which is it's just a survey, essentially that we're just not big enough for that. Like I need to be able to call all my CEOs which I do and can, and I get feedback and write it down. I mean, you know, and I talked to all of my CEOs at least every other week and I asked them all every time, you know, and sometimes they would say I don't even know, go talk to the other team and I do which is great, because if the CEO doesn't know if if anything's good or bad, that's great. Chris: That means there's no problem excellent. Summer: But no, I do it continuously. I see that as really one of my roles in sort of steering the ship is talking and saying you know what's, you know and I want everything. I want silly stuff, little bitty, you know things. I got some of that last week. It was a really super small thing, but that you know it matters. That's right. You know I don't, you know I want all the things. So I just try to have a relationship that's very trustworthy. It's informal in the sense that we can talk. I want that kind of relationship. I don't need it to be something that's this big thing. Chris: You don't need an email saying click the button and fail the survey. Summer: I really hate it. I really do I mean again somebody's going to quote me on that in a few years when we do that and send the email but I just no thanks, We'll ask directly? Chris: I don't. I'm not in favor of them either, and I don't know that you get the most authentic feedback. Yeah, right now, at some point, if you're so big, maybe you don't have a choice. Summer: But yeah never lose the personal yeah, that's right, that's right. Chris: Summer, this has been such a fun conversation. I want to just end on a few lighter notes. Okay, what was your first job growing up? Summer: oh, lifeguard, life lifeguard. Out at pecan grove, country club, out in richmond texas, which might have been my most favorite job I've ever had. I still like love it taught because you had to wear. Chris: You got to wear a bathing suit. You were the most tan you ever did. I was the most tan. Summer: I also love to swim. I love teaching swim lessons and I was a swimmer, and it was just it was great very good. Native texan native texan born in odessa, texas. Yeah, native native Texan Lived in Oklahoma, lived in Illinois, but I'm back in Texas. Chris: Okay, so do you prefer Tex-Mex or barbecue? Summer: Tex-Mex, all right yeah. Chris: I usually ask people this question, but you have three young kids so I don't know. But if you could take a 30-day sabbatical, where'd you go and what'd you do? Summer: Yeah, my husband and I, even though we live in the flattest part of Texas I think that's under sea level we really love to mountain climb. So we're hikers and climbers. We try to take a pretty big trip every year or so if we can. We did a really big trip this summer. It would be a no-brainer. I mean we would go and climb a really big mountain. Aconcagua in South America has been on his list. I can't quite get it on mine because it's a 30-day trip and I can't. I've got a 11-year-old, a nine-year-old and a five-year-old and I can't quite do that. But if I could wave a magic wand and I could be gone for 30 days, I would go climb Aconcagua and spend time in South America. Chris: How cool. That's a good one. Well, thanks again for taking the time. Love your story. Congratulations on the success that you've already achieved and that I know that's in your future. Summer: Thanks, Chris, appreciate having me on. Special Guest: Summer Craig.

In this episode of the Building Texas Business Podcast, I speak with Amyn Bandali, CEO of Ivy Kids Systems. Amyn shares the story behind Ivy Kids, a premier childcare and education provider founded by his parents. He reflects on how their move to Pearland, Texas, and the challenges they faced finding quality childcare led to the establishment of their first school. Since then, the family business has grown to 20 locations, with 16 more under development. We discuss the decision to franchise the business, the importance of building a culture of empowerment within teams, and Amyn's philosophy on leadership. He explains how empowering employees with autonomy, transparency, and responsibility has been key to Ivy Kids' success. Amyn also talks about navigating challenges, including the impact of the pandemic, which required the business to pivot toward virtual programs and innovative approaches to childcare. The conversation highlights the critical role of early childhood education in shaping lifelong success, the importance of continuous innovation, and how technology like coding and robotics is being integrated into Ivy Kids' curriculum. Amyn also shares insights into managing a franchise system and the value of fostering strategic relationships and learning from setbacks. This episode is filled with practical lessons for entrepreneurs and leaders who aspire to create sustainable growth and a strong company culture. SHOW HIGHLIGHTS Amyn Bandali is the CEO of Ivy Kids Systems, a premier childcare brand founded by his parents in Pearland, Texas, offering education from infants to pre-K and afterschool programs. The company was inspired by the founders' personal experience of struggling to find high-quality childcare when they first moved to the United States from Canada. Amyn joined the business in 2015 and initiated the franchising strategy, growing from 5 corporate locations to 20 total locations with 16 more under development. The company emphasizes a culture of empowerment, focusing on giving employees autonomy, transparency, and timely feedback while understanding the "why" behind strategic initiatives. During the COVID-19 pandemic, Ivy Kids pivoted to online learning and alternative programs, generating a million dollars in revenue for franchisees despite significant enrollment drops. The company is innovating its curriculum by incorporating coding, robotics, digital parent assessments, and classroom camera access to enhance early childhood education. Amyn's leadership style prioritizes empowering team members, setting clear visions, and allowing individuals to develop their own key performance indicators (KPIs). The company values continuous learning, participating in franchise associations, mastermind groups, and local business networks to share best practices. Amyn learned a critical leadership lesson during the pandemic about truly empowering his team by trusting them during challenging times. The company's educational philosophy is grounded in research showing the critical importance of early childhood learning in a child's development. LINKSShow Notes Previous Episodes About BoyarMiller About Ivy Kids Systems GUESTS Amyn BandaliAbout Amyn TRANSCRIPT (AI transcript provided as supporting material and may contain errors) Chris: Amyn, I want to welcome you to Building Texas Business. Thanks for agreeing to come on the show. Amyn: Yeah, thank you for having me, Chris. Happy to be here. Chris: So you're the CEO of Ivy Kids Systems. Tell the listeners what Ivy Kids is. What do you do? What are you known for? Amyn: Yeah. So Ivy Kids, we are a premier childcare brand, not just a daycare where parents just come in to pick up and drop off. You know, we provide education and that's from the infant level, so as young as two months old, all the way to our pre-K program, which is five and six year olds. And then we also have an afterschool program as well, where parents pick up and drop off from elementary school. The kids come in for homework help. And we're next year celebrating our 20th anniversary. Chris: Congratulations. That is amazing. Amyn: Yes. So what was the inspiration to get into this primary childcare, education, afterschool learning? Where did that emanate from? Amyn: Yeah. So, you know, a little bit about our history. So Ivy Kids was actually founded by my parents, Allen and Layla. You know, we had moved from Canada to the States or to Houston in 1995, and we lived in Pearland. So, as you're probably aware with Pearland, it experienced massive growth during that time. You know, 518 had one stoplight. Now it's a six-lane highway, it feels like. But you know, my parents, you know, with my brother and I being young children, they found out very hard time finding high quality care for us. You know, we would be in the daycare system, mom and pop childcare, quote unquote, you know, prestigious childcare program, and it was, you know, observation, where there was no learning going on, or my brother and I would, you know, be picked up and we'd have a bump or a bruise, and nobody would be able to point out why. Amyn: My parents being engineers and also having a history of entrepreneurship from their parents and their grandparents, you know, they thought about this industry and they thought, hey, we can do a better job of running high quality schools. So I like to say they reversed engineered the childcare. You know, they put a lot of thought, time and thinking, and over that course of 10 years from when we moved to Pearland, to 2005, we opened our first school, and that was in the Pearland area, and it did really well. So from that, we grew from that one corporate location to then five corporate locations. And then when I joined the business in 2015, and I can talk about the reasons why, but that was when we decided to franchise our brand. And, you know, today we are at 20 locations. We actually just opened our 20th location about a month ago and we have 16 under development right now throughout Texas and the Southeast United States. Chris: And, just curious, I mean, the 20 that exists in the 16 under development, how many of those are franchise versus corporate owned? Amyn: Yeah. So we still own all of the corporate locations today. We are at five corporate locations and we are at 15 franchise locations. You know, I think one of the things that shows maybe a strong brand and, you know, happy franchisees is folks opening their second or third locations. And even though we opened our first school in 2017, you know, that's been one of the great things to see. As a franchisor, you know, seeing folks open their second or third location, looking for sites for that. And that's kind of where we are right now in the evolution of the business, which is really exciting to see. Chris: That sounds exciting. So you're going back to the beginning in listening to the story you were telling about your parents. Yeah. It sounds like a very common entrepreneurial inspirational moment where they see a gap and figure out a way to fill that gap or need, right? And in this case, you know, quality childcare. Amyn: Yeah, absolutely. You know, they saw a lot of great things about this business, which really stand today. And it's, you know, if you do right by that family, you do right by that child, you know, you're having that parent for 10 years from when they're infant to that afterschool program. You know, they saw that childcare is a need, not a want. You know, if you have a dual income family, you have to put your child somewhere where, you know, they'll feel safe where they're learning. And from that they saw a need in building their first Ivy Kids to, well, there's so much research out there about the importance of education at an early age that then, you know, catapults a child into future learning, future success, as opposed to not getting that in the early ages. Chris: And the kind of the downward trajectory of the backing cause. Amyn: Yeah. I mean, there's some amazing studies. There was one that was done about eight years ago by Harvard University that basically said 95 percent of who you are is from the first five years that you were born. You know, everything from what your passions are to your ability to learn. So much of that comes from those first five years. And then if you think about, hey, what is the best return on investment then for my education? It's not necessarily those prestigious universities that does have a high rate of return, but the best ROI actually that a family can spend, that a government could spend is that first five years and getting that part right. Chris: Right. You know, if you're doing that, then you are truly building that foundation. And I think that's one of the drivers for why, you know, why families make a decision. You know, they're looking for, they're seeing the benefits, they're understanding more and more of, you know, the link between high quality learning and how their child is going to do. And they're making a smarter decision now with where they're choosing to enroll their child. Chris: So let's go a little bit, so we understand your parents' inspiration. You alluded to this, but I don't understand what drew you into the business. What were you doing before and what was it that caused you to leave that to step in and kind of take over? Amyn: Yeah. So by the time we had opened our first school, I was in, you know, college or close to college and seeing the business up front, you know, seeing the ability to build your own path, create your own destiny, working in the business from everything, from us assembling the furniture when we were opening our first school, actually laying the grass and the sod down in order for us to get our CEO inspection passed, you know, I was just so enthralled by it. I was so excited about it. The ability of owning something and really charting your destiny. And that really didn't leave me. You know, in college, I also took a job. It was with Student Agencies, which is a business run by undergrads and I did sales there. And that also really excited me too. Amyn: And then, you know, I kind of went the route that a lot of students at Cornell did for undergraduate business, which was pursue finance, look at the business consulting route or the investment banking route. And, you know, I learned a lot going down that path, but I missed being in that small business, you know, really building something that was my own working with a dynamic team and a small team. And, you know, I think building some of that foundation, this amazing opportunity came that was presented by my dad to say, hey, let's franchise the business. You know, we've got something great going. This would be an amazing opportunity for other like-minded people to open their own locations and thrive. Amyn: And I just thought, man, this marries what I did earlier. I've got a bit of foundation for working at larger organizations. You know, maybe there's something there and it turned out to be a good decision. Chris: Very good. That's a great, I love the story and how you were able to, I think it's important. You got an education and you got real world experience outside of that, right? To then bring that into and maybe help professionalize a little bit the company, especially as it was launching into being a franchisor. Amyn: Yeah. So you mentioned, you know, working with the team, let's talk a little bit about, you know, some of the ups and downs that you've experienced and maybe you saw your parents early on experience and building the team around you so that the company can achieve that success. Because if I know anything about hiring, it's an imperfect thing, right? Is that part science, part art? But you do your best to get it right. So tell me, let's talk a little bit about those experiences, you know, what you've learned from that. Amyn: Yeah. I mean, I think, you know, going into small business entrepreneurship, there's very much a feeling of working in the business, you know, being so kind of head down and focusing on, hey, how do we survive today? And, you know, I think when you're joining or launching a new business, which really was the franchising part of our business was a brand new business, you are really thinking in that lens and that mindset. And I always feel like hiring, building an infrastructure, it just allows you to think more long term and that just prolongs the lifespan of your business too. So I think making those right strategic hires as soon as we have that capital, thinking ahead about, hey, where do we want to be in the next 5, 10 years and investing in those people and really giving them the freedom and empowerment, you know, to expand their careers, expand their responsibilities as you're seeing them master their role. Amyn: I think that really helped, you know. So one book that I read early on about a year or two after I joined the business was Traction by Gina Wickman. Sure. You know, the entrepreneurial operating system. I mean, that's something that we do today. And I think that was foundational in how I look at people, helping the assistant. Hey, do we have the right people in the right seats? And then are we creating a culture of empowerment? You know, I think about what attracted me to Ivy Kids and starting this franchising part of the business. And it was this idea of taking ownership, having accountability, you know, maybe having a little bit too much rope. Chris: Right. Right. Amyn: And I just think, hey, at a size that we are, those are probably the people that I'm going to be attracting to. And how can I create that where if I were in their shoes, I'd want to be a part of this business. And I think some of that where, hey, there's alignment on goals, but hey, you have the empowerment and you have the ability to achieve it and how you achieve it and how you get to that final product is up to you. You know, I always feel like that allows you to really grow people, especially when you're smaller, maybe you have that limited capital base, you know, and now you can start thinking strategically about your business and then your business can really grow. Chris: So I love that term culture of empowerment. Let's talk about culture. You know, everyone agrees culture is king, right? And every book you read and each strategy, you know, all those clichés. What have you done to kind of foster and build this culture of empowerment within Ivy Kids? Amyn: You know, I think of myself as a generalist. And I think of myself as, hey, I am not the best person in any department. And I think as you grow as a leader, that is just what naturally happens. You know, you have to build a team of people that are smarter, more experienced. I would say better than you in each of these divisions in each of these areas. Amyn: So I think just thinking, hey, if I'm growing or if the business is growing, I have to increase the skill sets of everything around me and I have to play more of that generalist mindset. And with that, it's let me bring these people on and have and let them be the experts in the subject matter experts of what they're doing now. Amyn: Alignment and vision and where we are and ensuring that, hey, prove to me that you can do this job is still very important. Sure. You know, We still need to have check-ins and make sure that, hey, are we all marching in that direction and where we want to go as a company. But at the end of the day, I do think that people are more passionate if they feel a sense of ownership, if they can look back and see, "Oh, I or my team accomplished this." I'm getting praise for those kinds of things. You know, one of the things that we do, we have quarterly town halls and we do shout outs, and it's a thing that I love. We just had ours on Friday. And, you know, the team gives each other shout outs, but I think when people are empowered and we are able to showcase, you did a great job and this is why, and this is what your team is doing, is getting the company moving forward, is amazing. And that might be harder to create that visibility as a company grows. But it is something that I like to keep on the forefront of my mind because empowering people, it's just like this flywheel of positivity, right? Chris: Right. Amyn: It just, it's like the snowball or flywheel effect. It just grows upon itself. You know, the shout outs that you mentioned, I don't think it can be overstated, the value in just simple recognition. Private recognition is great, but the public recognition amongst someone's peers, I mean, it doesn't replace cash rewards, but some people value it as much or more, right? And I think that you would take the time to do that in a thoughtful way, and I can see where that would inspire your people to do more, right? Or, well, gosh, your coworker got it. I'm going to do something so that the next quarter I get it. And it just, to your point, that flywheel effect, it just creates this atmosphere and culture of wanting to achieve and be successful. ADVERT Hello friends. This is Chris Hanslick, your Building Texas Business host. Did you know that Boyer Miller, the producer of this podcast, is a business law firm that works with entrepreneurs, corporations, and business leaders? Our team of attorneys serve as strategic partners to businesses by providing legal guidance to organizations of all sizes. Get to know the BoyerMiller.com and thanks for listening to the show. Amyn: The other thing I heard you say is there's a key piece of autonomy to create the culture of empowerment within Ivy Kids and giving your people the autonomy to go do what they do, what they've been hired to do without being micromanaged. Chris: Yeah, that's exactly right. Amyn: I mean, I always think back to when I first started out, you know, in my career, you know, as an investment banking analyst, you know, you're spending 80, a hundred hours a week, you're working on these pitch decks. You're grinding until 2 a.m. You're working on this project and now all of a sudden you have this package, you deliver it to your managing director and then they go to a meeting and you never hear back. You come up from the dungeon, right? Chris: Exactly. Amyn: And I always was like, hey, you know what, I wonder what that client thought or if that what I did had an effect. And you know, that's that part where I'm like, well, am I doing that as a leader? And am I these blockages? You know, because people want to learn and people want to be in those meetings. I think everybody wants to be in that meeting and see where their work is leading to. And I just always think, hey, if I were working for me when I was starting off, would I have liked myself as a boss? Chris: Right. Amyn: And that also means, hey, clear vision of where that person is heading. What am I doing right? And what am I not doing well? You know, I think feedback transparency, you know, I really try and instill that criticism is not a negative word, you know, problems are not bad. You know, problems are just identifications of what we can all do better. Chris: Right. Amyn: I like hearing problems to not, you know, and that could be a, you know, what we're doing and just what's going on within the organization. You know, what the way I would phrase what I just heard you say is about, it's about mindset, right? You can view someone's performance from a positive mindset or a negative mindset and say, look, okay, this didn't go well, but that's a learning moment. Let's find the learning as opposed to chastise and criticize and beat someone down. Chris: Yeah, right. And I think, you know, same situations handled, you know, one versus the other can encourage and empower someone to want to do better or discourage them to, you know, put their tail between their legs and maybe leave, even leave your organization when it's not someone you necessarily want to leave. Amyn: Yeah, and this is a thing that comes over time. It comes with empowerment. It comes with, you know, celebrating that publicly. It comes with a culture of positivity. You know, it is also something that I feel like is so important when you are owning a small business, when you're opening a business is separating yourself and your identity and ego in some ways from your business. Chris: Right. Amyn: You know, it's something that I, you know, try and share with our franchisees when they're opening a school and they're having a quality assurance visit or their first, maybe, you know, not ideal interaction with the parent. I mean, there's a real personal feeling there. It's easier said than done, right? Chris: It is. Amyn: But I, to your point, very important to do. So let's kind of dive into some of those subjects because you start the franchise part of the business, I think you said 2017. So it seems to me you're getting it off the ground. It's going well. And then a global pandemic hit. So let's talk about managing through kind of uncertainty, economic downturn, especially when your business is predicated on kids coming into a public, basically facility and gathering together when that wasn't going on. Amyn: Yeah. I mean, I remember March of 2020, I think our average school enrollment was about 200 children. And I think it went to 40 in two weeks, so very stressful period as you can imagine. You know, and one thing that I learned from the pandemic or from our team and in business is you can really pivot on a dime. You know, and I think that's something that I've taken from me too is we went to online learning, you know, for two, three hours every day we were able to orient the company in that direction. You know, it ended up generating a million dollars of revenue for our franchisees, which was a benefit. You know, we were able to do things like private kindergarten. We were able to do a virtual program for elementary school children. They were able to come in our schools and do the virtual learning from the elementary teacher at our schools, and everybody was separated apart. Chris: Wow. Amyn: So we were able to come up with revenue-generating ideas. We weren't able to make up entirely for the lost revenue due to COVID. But we were able to do some really amazing things and stay in really close communication with our franchisees. Yeah. Because as you know, each city, each state had their own requirements. Chris: Right. Amyn: I think I learned a lot from that, that, hey, if you've got a long-term goal, a long-term plan and things change within your business, that doesn't mean you don't change your goal. You know, you can orient things, you can turn things on a dime. And, you know, although things have returned to normal and in many respects, right? Or pre-COVID, I think the learnings from that have helped our innovation and just saying, hey, let's push a little bit more. Let's try a little bit more. Chris: I love it because I think the lesson there is despite what comes at you, whether it was in your control or not, there's always opportunity. Amyn: So again, it goes back to mindset. I thank you. Okay, get the team, you or your team together and go, okay, where are the opportunities out of this that we probably wouldn't have seen before? And I think, like you said, you see so many people, especially in your industry. Now that kids are back in your facilities, it doesn't take away the opportunities for online learning you can do. Chris: Right. Amyn: And it's just added revenue. Chris: Yeah, that's right. You know, I think, you know, a franchisee, they open and they think, oh man, you know, these problems are just centered around me and oh my gosh, I'm opening a business. And it's luckily now you're around 20 years of experience of us operating, but also imagine those franchisees that had that same feeling and they opened during 2020, 2021, right? Amyn: Where we had to do everything virtual. So, you know, I think, you know, a business owner, you have to be an optimist. You have to look for, hey, what are ways that either I could turn this around or generate some revenue. Growth mindset is just so important. Chris: Yeah, so true. So you mentioned innovation. What are some of the things that you have done or that you may be doing now to kind of foster innovative ideas, innovative thoughts within your team that you can then implement with your franchisees, etc.? Amyn: You know, I think so much of that comes from our goals and seeing, hey, what can we continue to do to further differentiate ourselves as being the leading provider of early childhood education? Right. I mean, you look at our curriculum, you know, we have a lot of, you know, mom and pops that are great, you know, and in varying levels of quality and large franchise organizations too. Right. And what you find is there has not been a great deal of innovation in the curriculum space and in education, you know, so really it's us thinking at things differently, like, hey, just because everybody else is doing the same thing. Chris: Right. Amyn: That grounded in the research of today? Right. Does that relate to the teachers of today? What children need to learn in order to be successful in the elementary school, middle schools in the communities that they're in today. I think just always trying to understand the why, you know, I think why is one of the most important questions that you can ask. And that's really what I do in the meetings is understand, hey, why are we doing this? How are we doing this? You know, I think that generates a lot of thought within our team. Then once we have those strategic tools in place, we have those systems in place. Okay, then what is our cadence to see how we're executing on it and seeing how we're going within that? Amyn: So I always think goal setting at the year, understanding what those rocks are each quarter, but then, hey, just because it's a status quo does not mean that's good enough. You know, so even in our curriculum, implementing coding and robotics, parent assessments that are digital. So you can see every, you know, every month, every two months, exactly what your child's doing in the classroom. Camera access. So as a parent, you can see exactly what's going on in your child's classroom. You know, those are not just tried and true things. Those are things that came from great communication with our parents, a team that is, you know, flexible, forthinking about what they would want to see as a parent and then great execution. Chris: Wow. That's great. So you mentioned robotics. I've got to ask, what are you doing or kind of what's on the horizon as it relates to your curriculum and your delivery of this, your childcare and child education, early childhood education as it relates to AI? Amyn: Yeah, I think that's a great question. You know, I think tools like AI are amazing. You know, there's so much that you can do in regards to communication, idea generation. You know, I think for us is just, hey, when it comes to technology, you know, how do we ensure that children today are well-equipped for their technological future? So when we talk about coding and robotics, it's not just sitting in a computer and coding, you know, for it. It's even from that two or three-year-old level of doing logic puzzles, if-then statements. If I take a certain input and I am bringing code puzzles to it, what do those outputs look like? So it's a great way of them to manipulate in a coding language, but not also spending time in the computer and being in front of a screen too, which also which shows you know, a negative impact due to research for that young and FNH, right? We're making steps towards that direction. We are not diving full ahead, you know, to me, it's one thing to be first in an area, but I'd rather do it best, right? And I'd rather do it where, you know, we're not just testing things on children, but we are providing something that is impactful. That's based on research that we know we can implement really well. And I think you're going to continue to see growth in that area, too. You know, other things is just back to a naturalistic component, having things like gardens in our schools, you know, teaching children, hey, the food does not just come from H-E-B. It comes from the ground, and this is why. So, you know, I think innovation is a big part of it. Chris: That's great stuff. I mean, I can imagine parents get excited about hearing about that fundamental learning that their kids are going to get to experience with you. Amyn: Yeah, absolutely. Building strategic relationships, you know, partnerships and things that you have, you know, obviously relationships with franchisees, but other key, you know, advisors or relationships you have. Let's talk in the context of the value you've seen in that, how you think that's helped grow the business and how you lean on those, you know, from time to time to get you through to the next stage, if you will. Chris: Yeah. I mean, I think you always want to be around people that are adding to your skill set and have exceptional talents in those skill sets. You know, I think about continual learning. Luckily, in franchising, it's an amazing model and way for people to share best practices. You know, the IFA International Franchise Association has amazing resources, especially for emerging franchisors. They have great conferences and that's a great way to share ideas. Amyn: You know, I'm part of a mastermind group of franchisors, 50 to 100 units. And just learning and seeing what best practices that they do. You know, they advocate a lot for transparency within a franchise system. Franchisees sharing what their P&Ls look like. What's going well, what's not going well in the business. And franchisees learning from each other and sharing best practices. You know, that's something that is important. We're implementing more in our business with benchmarking and KPIs and performance groups. Even being part of a local community, you know, I'm part of a Vistage group here in Houston. Chris: That sounds like an amazing asset. Amyn: Yeah, I think that is an amazing asset, going and meeting people in person, seeing their businesses, touring their locations. You know, I think sometimes being an entrepreneur, being a CEO can be a very isolating experience. Chris: For sure. Amyn: You know, all the fingers are pointing at you and all the hard questions come to you too. So being able to learn from others. I mean, learning from mistakes is great. Then you're not making them and they're less costly. So I'm always about trying to learn from other people. Chris: You alluded to one of my favorite questions there. So I always, I like to ask a guest, cause I do, we do learn from mistakes and it is nice if you can learn from someone else's, but has there been a setback or something you would describe, you know, a mistake or, you know, again, learning moment, like I mentioned earlier you've encountered? And let's talk about what that was, but what did you do to overcome it? What was the learning and how did it make you better? Amyn: You know, I think the learning that I encountered is not stepping into the business. And I think my idea of being a generalist came from mistakes, you know, being young and eager, wanting to jump in, hey, I can write this operations manual because I've spent time in the business or, you know, hey, use this marketing plan or this idea because it worked for me. You know, I think the big one was COVID early on. Oh my gosh, I was seeing the business totally transform. I felt the need to be in this. I need to be a wartime, you know, CEO or senior member. I need to be here. I need to be calling the franchisees. And really, our team had great ideas and approaches and they were thinking about the business and their fears around the business in a similar way that I was. Chris: Right. Amyn: Yeah. And the moment I snapped out of it was, hey, this training is great. I mean, but think about X, Y, and Z that the franchisee is going through. And I had my operations person tell me that. And I think it was a, oh my gosh, I've sucked myself into this business. Yes, there was a big change, but I talk about empowering my people. That also means not just when moments are good, but when moments are bad as well. So I think that goes both ways and people and relationships strengthen sometimes when you're giving someone the rope when the business is not going that well. Chris: Right. But I mean, that's powerful. I can certainly see how that was an aha moment for you. And again, for your people, right? That you trusted them enough in those times had to go a long way. Amyn: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, you know, it's kind of like war stories during COVID or the up and down, but, you know, having a kind of a business history and having institutional knowledge, I mean, those are amazing tenants. You know, a franchisee joins, they have now someone on the operations team that's been with you for 20 years. But you're also incorporating, you know, newer people who are excited about the culture that we're trying to build. That's really important. Chris: Yeah. Well, I think you've talked around this, but just to kind of crystallize it, I do want to ask, how would you describe your leadership style and how do you think that's changed or evolved over time? Amyn: That's a really good question. I mean, I would say I like to empower people, you know, I like to set goals and a vision. You know, we have a vision of where we want to be as a company, and I want to understand what people think and how they see us getting there. And I want us, and I'd like to see that individual develop KPIs. What they think are the right metrics. And I want to understand the rationale behind that. And then we'll get together and figure out alignment there. But I like to see how people think. I like to see thinking. I want a demonstration of why they are getting to that problem or what their reasoning is around that problem. Chris: That makes sense. Amyn: Then we check in and I let them do it. I always think about how I, you know, if I was the low man on the totem pole, how empowered would I feel? You know, what are my responsibilities? And I think that attracts, you know, passionate people. Chris: Yeah. Amyn: And that's what I want to see. I want to see passion because I'm giving that responsibility. You know, as you were talking, it made me think. You know, we talked about learning from bad experiences or, you know, maybe learning, seeing something and going, okay, I experienced this, but I don't want to repeat that. And I can't help but think you learned so much as an early analyst and how you were treated. Chris: Yes. Amyn: You go, if I'm ever in a position of leadership, I'm not going to do these things. And it probably serves as a good reminder and a guidepost for you. Chris: Yeah. Amyn: To say, no, you know, remember what I didn't like, and let's do the opposite. Chris: Right. Amyn: Yeah, you learn a lot from great managers and you learn a lot from not so great managers. Yeah. And, you know, I think I had a lot of those on my bucket list and I think a lot of just reflection too. I mean, you know, I really try and take feedback and I really try and understand. Hey, you know, I mean, I've made a lot of mistakes and I think it's just, hey, let me try not to make that same mistake a second time. Chris: Right? Amyn: But you know, the sad truth is you're going to make some more, as will I, and the goal is trying to make the same one twice, right? Chris: That's right. I mean, this has been great. What an exciting business you have going. I want to, before we wrap up, I just always like to ask a few, you know, maybe less serious questions. What was your first job outside of Ivy schools? Amyn: My first job was a company called Student Agencies, in college. I sold ad space on the maps that you'd see around the Ithaca campus and these brochures. And I also helped with marketing promotions. A promotion I actually dressed up in a mascot outfit was a big light bulb because it was for an entrepreneurship idea competition. Chris: That's great. Amyn: So, I was a light bulb for a few weeks around campus. Talk about humility, right? Chris: That's right. And if you sold ad space for a brochure, I have to believe you got used to hearing the word no. Amyn: Oh man, yeah. No is common. No is very common. Chris: Okay, so, grew up in Pearland, you know, Texan as you can get, so do you prefer Tex-Mex or barbecue? Amyn: Oh, Tex-Mex for sure. Chris: Something you missed when you were up in Ithaca, I guess. Amyn: Oh, man, yeah. You didn't see much Tex-Mex over there. Chris: Well, I mean, this has been a great conversation. Congratulations on the success of the family business and where you've taken it, you know, since joining and the franchise side of things. Really appreciate you sharing that story with us and wish you the best success in the future. Amyn: All right. Thank you so much, Chris. I enjoyed it. Special Guest: Amyn Bandali.

In this episode of Building Texas Business, I chat with Renee Morris, Chief Curl Officer at Uncle Funky's Daughter. We explore her path from management consultant to leading a national hair care brand. Renee shares her approach to maintaining business control by relying on personal savings and family support rather than external investors. She discusses forming partnerships with major retailers like Target and Walgreens while building a creative team to drive innovation. I learned how she tackles recruitment challenges and ensures brand visibility at a national level. Looking ahead, Renee explains her vision to expand into skincare and education, and serving communities of color in new ways. SHOW HIGHLIGHTS Renee Morris discusses her journey from management consultant to Chief Curl Officer at Uncle Funky's Daughter, emphasizing her desire to balance career ambitions with family life. We explore Renee's decision to purchase an existing company rather than starting from scratch, leveraging her experience in sales and marketing strategy within the consumer products sector. Renee highlights the importance of having a financial safety net when transitioning to entrepreneurship, sharing her personal experience of not drawing a salary for years and relying on her husband's support. We talk about Renee's strategic decision to avoid third-party investors to maintain control over her business, focusing on conservative growth and solving customer problems. Renee explains her approach to forming strategic partnerships with major retailers like Target and Walgreens, discussing the role of distributors in helping small brands enter national markets. We discuss the challenges of recruiting and nurturing talent, emphasizing the importance of fostering a collaborative environment that encourages innovation and creative thinking. Renee outlines her vision for expanding the brand into adjacent areas such as skincare and education, aiming to serve the community of color more broadly. We explore Renee's leadership style, focusing on adaptability and learning from failures as she considers new business ventures. Renee shares personal insights from her early career and hiring experiences, emphasizing the importance of trusting one's instincts during the recruitment process. We examine the role of social media and influencers in maintaining customer confidence and visibility during brand transitions, particularly when changes are made to product packaging. LINKSShow Notes Previous Episodes About BoyarMiller About Uncle Funky's Daughter GUESTS Renee MorrisAbout Renee TRANSCRIPT (AI transcript provided as supporting material and may contain errors) Chris: In this episode you will meet Renee Morris, chief Curl Officer at Uncle Funky's Daughter. Renee shares her passion for helping curly girls solve their hair problems with unique and innovative natural hair products. Renee, I want to thank you for coming on Building Texas Business. It's so glad, happy to have you as a guest. Renee: Thank you, I'm excited to be here. Chris: Okay, so you won the award so far for having the coolest and, I would say, funky, but that would be. Renee: Play on words Right. Chris: But as far as a name for a company, uncle Funky's Daughter, yes. Okay, tell us what is your company known for and what do you do? Renee: So Uncle Funky's Daughter is a hair products company. We're based here in Houston, texas. I bought the company, so the parent company is Rotenmore's Consumer Group. But I bought the brand Uncle Funky's Daughter 10 years ago from a husband and wife team. So Uncle Funky's Daughter curates natural hair products for women, men and children who choose to wear their hair naturally, and so that's shampoos, conditioners, curl definers, moisturizers, stylers, finishers. Shampoos, conditioners, curl definers, moisturizers, stylers, finishers you name it, we make it. We also have a thermal protection line for women who want to blow dry and style their hair with heat, and we're distributed nationally Target, walgreens, kroger, cvs, heb, locally, so you name it, other than Walmart, we're there. Chris: Beauty Easy to find, easy to find, easy to find well, I have to ask this because I have daughters. I mean Sephora or Ulta. Renee: No, Sephora or Ulta. Yet we've been working that line. We can talk about that as part of this deep dive, but we've been working that line and but no land in Sephora or Ulta just yet okay, very good. Chris: So how did you find your way into the hair care product world? Because you didn't start there. Renee: No, I am a former management consultant 20 years management consulting, advising clients multi-billion dollar companies on how to drive revenue growth and through sales and marketing. And I was a mother of three kids. At the time my son was probably three or four, my daughters were two and I was flying back and forth between Houston and New York for a client. And I had this realization that I didn't want to do that as a mom. I needed to be home, but I still wanted to be a career person. So I knew I am not built to be a stay-at-home mother. That is not who I am, and COVID taught me that with isolation. And so what I started deciding was I wanted to figure out what I wanted to do next and I realized I had some options. Right, it's that fork in the road that you go through. You start to look inwardly every time you have that fork in the road and I did that and I said okay, your option A is to go find a company based in Houston and be a VP or senior VP of some operation. Option B is you find a small company and you're like a big fish in a small pond kind of thing. Option C is you just go do your own thing. And after I kind of went through it, I realized I worked for the Coca-Colas, like in GE Capitals of the world, in my past. I didn't want to go work for a big company. I didn't think I wanted to work for a small company because of my personality style, right, um. And so I decided I wanted to go buy something and then or have my own company. And so then the question becomes do you build or do you buy my? I'm a management consultant by heart, so it's always go buy something. Why? Because I can take it, I can fix it and I can grow it. And so then it became all right, well, what are you going to go buy? And so, like most people out there, they're thinking about buying a company. I started reaching out to brokers, I started doing some networking, calling attorneys, people that work on deals, that kind of stuff, just putting my name out there, and I got all the things that you normally get when you're looking to buy a company the gym, the dry cleaner, the storage facility, the gas station, all the things that I didn't want to buy because I didn't have a passion for them. And so, also, for background, my consulting experience in sales and marketing strategy has been predominantly in consumer products. So I know consumer products, I know revenue growth, I know marketing strategy. So I was like okay, so I kept looking and I used this hair product called Uncle Funky's Daughter. I found it when I first moved here in 2000. Like all curly girls out there back then, that was almost 20 years ago, my goodness. But 15 years ago back then there weren't a lot of natural hair products out there for women of color and women of curly hair with curly hair specifically. And so I googled when I first moved here natural hair products, curly hair, houston and Uncle Funky Stoddard came up. I've never heard of this company right. So I go to rice village and buy this product and I start using it. Extra butter, start using it. And for those out there that are, you know, african American descent, you know thick, curly hair, we do this thing called two strand twists to what. I love it. Two strand twist. Chris: Okay. Renee: So, you take your hair and you twist it in like instead, instead of braiding it, you put it in twists, and there are single twists all over my head right. So that's how I would style my hair wear it, rock a two strand twist. Those out there will understand that, look it up and then Google it and then and so that worked on my hair really well. And so, again, for those with tight, curly hair, finding the right hair product that works for your hair is tough. It is not easy, as you know. One of your team members, courtney, was talking about. She's gone through all the products Because you go through this product journey trying to find something that works for you right. So found Extra Butter, worked, loved it, and then I would stop using it while I'm traveling because I would forget it right at home sure. I would go back to some other competitive brand and it didn't work for my hair. So I'm like, okay, uncle Funky's daughter is the only thing that works for my hair. So I go in to get my Uncle Funky's daughter one day, after I, you know, had braids and wash them out. And yada, yada, yada. I'm going in, I'm getting my extra butter and this guy behind the counter who I bought hair products from for the past at this point, five years, says yeah, my wife and I are going through a divorce and I'm like, oh, so I do have an MBA right. I'm not some, you know, trying to sound like a shark, but my MBA said distressed asset might be willing to sell stress asset might be willing to sell. Like literally, that is the voice that went in my head. And so I was like, oh really. So I stood there in that store and I just chatted with him for hours and about the company, you know what, you know personally what he was going through, because divorce, you know, for those that may have gone through it, can be an emotional, you know troubling time. So I was a listening ear. But as I'm listening, I'm also thinking about like, okay, what's the story behind the brand? Is this going to resonate? And I'm also watching people come in and out, right. And so I said, well, if you guys are you guys thinking about selling it? And he gives me a story about you know what's happening with the sell and cell and I said, well, if you're ever thinking about selling it, let me know. So I walk out, I Google, because you know this is horrible to say, but divorces are public right right. Chris: Is it filed in state court? Renee: it's a public record so I'm figuring out what's happening with the divorce and I find out that the company is in receivership. And for those who don't know, because I did not know at the time what a receivership was, a receivership happens when a divorce is happening and the husband and wife aren't operating, behaving appropriately. Chris: Well, they can't agree on the direction of the company and it can be not in a divorce. But basically, owners cannot agree and a court may appoint a receiver to run the company. Renee: Exactly. Thank you, that's why you're the attorney and a court may appoint a receiver to run the company Exactly. Chris: Thank you. That's why you're the attorney. Renee: Have a little experience with that yes, so the judge had appointed this guy to be the receiver. I reached out to the gentleman and I said I'm interested in the sale of Uncle Funky's daughter, if that so happens to be the case. And so the one thing I did learn and you can probably expound on this is oftentimes in a divorce, when the receiver comes in, at that point that receiver is really thinking about how to get rid of this asset. And so those are all the things that I learned during this process, and I was like, okay, so he wants to sell because he wants to get paid and he knows nothing about this business. Chris: He was, you know no offense, no emotional tie to it, for sure no emotional tie. Renee: He's an older white gentleman who knows nothing about black hair products and so I was like, okay, so he doesn't know, he doesn't have an appreciation for the value of the company. And so I reached out and I said, okay, here's a number. You wouldn't believe the number I gave him and he counted with some minor you, some minor adjustment, and we bought this company for less than $100,000. And they had a revenue at the time. When I saw their tax returns, I think it was maybe a million or so that they claimed in revenue. At some point they said, but at least for sure I think our first year of revenue was probably around and it was a partial year. Probably a quarter million dollars is what revenue they generated, and so we really, if you talk about a multiple of sales, we bought it on a tremendous it's a heck of a deal the deal. Okay, I can't find those deals these days. If anybody has one of those deals, you come let me know and so. So that's how we ended up buying this company ten years ago and shortly thereafter, target comes knocking at the door and says, hey, we were having this discussion with the owners about, you know, potentially launching. Would you be interested? And I'm like, absolutely. And it was because they were going through this divorce that they couldn't get over the finish line, right? And so shortly after we buy, we're launching in target. But before I did that, one of the first things I did was because, if you ever, if any, it's probably so old you can't find it. But the label. When I first bought the company, when I was buying it, it was this woman's face with a big afro on the front and it had a cute little 70s vibe on it and it was in this white hdpe bottle which, by the way, those aren't recyclable. So I said first, we need to change this, we got to change the packaging, we got to upgrade the label, we need to make it universally appealing to all curly girls, because if I look at a woman with a big afro, I think tight, curly hair like mine right and our products work across the spectrum from wavy, like Courtney, to really tight, like Renee, and that wasn't representative on the label okay so we redesigned the label, changed the bottle from an HDPE bottle to a PET bottle, which is recyclable, and then just upgraded this packaging to what I consider a sleeker new look. Chris: Very good, Great story, Thank you. So back up a little bit, share a little bit, because so you go from big corporate consulting job some comfort in there probably. You mentioned travel and you did mention the mom aspect playing a role. But let's talk a little bit about actually getting the courage to take that leap out of the big corporate role into. I'm going to buy something that's all on me now to either make it or break it. Yeah, that had to be scary. Renee: It was, and I am fortunate in that. You're right. I had comfort. We have financial security. I had a husband who was, who still is, who's a senior executive in medical devices has nothing to do with anything about consumer products, but you know, we have the luxury for him to say I can carry this load, financial load, and I think that's the big mix, right? I tell people all the time if you're going to take that leap, you got to make sure you've got cash flow, because for not only for your, you know, for the company, but for you personally, right? Because there were several years where my husband called my business a hobby Because I was contributing nothing to the financial plan. Chris: In fact, you were probably taken away. Yeah, I was taken away. Renee: So every year I mean. So I wasn't drawing a salary. I didn't draw a salary for a couple of years after I, I didn't draw a salary until our tax accountant said you have to draw a salary because we're changing you from whatever tax to an S-corp. And I was like oh, wow, really Okay. So what am I going to pay myself? Okay, and then he goes Well, you have, and it has to be reasonable. So for probably three or four years after I bought the company, I didn't draw a salary. I was paying my employees but I wasn't paying myself. And so I think and I say all that to say yes, it takes a leap, but it also takes the ability and the willingness to take that financial hit Right. So were there things that we probably wanted to do as a family that we didn't do? Probably so. Chris: Yeah. Renee: Because I'm growing this brand and was there times I went to my husband like I need another thirty thousand dollars? Probably so. And because one of the things I specifically had chosen is I did not want, and I currently still don't want, to pull in private equity, vc any type of third party investor funding. That is a personal decision I've made and it's because I am a former accountant and I'm extremely financially conservative and I also don't want different incentives to help influence how I run my business, different incentives to help influence how I run my business, and what I mean by that is I personally just didn't want to have a PE company saying you need to do these three things because your multi, your EBITDA needs to look like this and your revenue growth needs to look like that. Right, so I could have we could have easily grown really fast, like a lot of brands do, and grown themselves out of business, or, but I chose the path to grow really conservatively Now, and so I think I say all that to say I think, yes, financially speaking, having the bandwidth to be able to float yourself and your company for a while is critical, and so don't take the leap if you're still, if you're at your job today, living paycheck to paycheck right, you have to have a cushion. Your job today, living paycheck to paycheck right, you have to have a cushion. So what that means is, maybe if you're trying to start the company, then you're running your business while you're living paycheck to paycheck and oh, by the way, you gotta stop living paycheck to paycheck because you got to start to build that cushion, right. So some of the you got to make sacrifices and I think that's the hard thing. Not everyone's willing to make the financial sacrifice that it takes to really run and grow a business without third party support. Now, in today's world, you can go get bc capital funding and you know money is flowing, or at least it was, you know but there, but there's sacrifices, but there's sacrifices with that, and so, yeah, that's great advice, you know. Chris: The other thing that you mentioned, as you were evaluating companies is one of my favorite words when it comes to business is passion. You passed on a ton of things because you weren't passionate about it. Renee: Yeah. Chris: You found something you were passionate about, and I think that's a lesson for people too, right Is? It's not easy to do. As you mentioned. Sacrifices have to be made. So if you're not really passionate about that decision to go be an entrepreneur, start your own business. It's going to be tough. Renee: Yeah, it's going to be tough, and so, because I have to wake up every day, I my passion is really helping people solve problems, and I do that through hair, because hair is a problem in the curly hair community. How do I maintain frizz? How do I keep it under control? How do I keep it healthy so it doesn't break? How do I keep it healthy so it can grow? How do I stop the scalp irritation? There's so many problems that happen in hair and so I what I think about. Like literally yesterday I was with my marketing team and we're talking about a campaign for the next month for products etc. Or really November, and I said, OK, what problem are we helping her solve? And that's literally the way I think about stuff what problem are we helping her solve? Because if we're not helping her solve a problem, then I don't have anything to talk about. Chris: Ok, Right, yeah, it's not going to move off the shelf. Renee: It's not going to move off the shelf thing to talk about. Chris: Okay, right, yeah, it's not going to move off the shelf. It's not going to move off the shelf. So another thing that you kind of alluded to, you went through somewhat. It sounds like a kind of transforming the business that you took over, right? You mentioned the product label and packaging. Let's talk. What else did you, you know, in taking that business over, did you find yourself having to change, and how did you go about making those decisions? Are either prioritizing them and you know we can't do it all- at once yeah, so what walk? us through some of the learning you went through that well, you know what's interesting is. Renee: So it wasn't much of a transformation, but it was. If you think about learning from a marketing standpoint, if you're going to buy a business, especially a consumer product company, and you buy it in today's world where we're so used to knowing who the owner is the first people don't like change. So one of the first things I had to do was convince our current customers that nothing had changed other than the label. The minute your package changes and it looks different, they're like the formulas have changed, it's not the same be the same. It's not the same product. So the first thing I had to do was convince them that this is the same product. In fact, I brought back discontinued SKUs that the receiver had stopped selling because they were slow moving. **Chris: How did you go about convincing the existing customer base? Nothing changed. Renee: So news articles, facebook articles, facebook social ads, like having live conversations, going live on social media all of those were things that I had to go in and dispute or Dubuque being like I was the person respond. There was no team, it was me and one other person. The first person I hired was a social media person. Okay, wasn't a warehouse person, it was a social media person because I knew being the being in the face of the customer was so important. So being live and answering questions online, answering the phone and people would call they will go. I heard that this wasn't the same formula. No, ma'am, it's the same formula. And actually having those, it was me having those live, one-on-one conversations. And so I think really touching the customer and being personal with her was the key to our success in in gaining that confidence. And we also you know this was early in the days of influencers we also had to partner with people to be able to talk about. Like it's the same stuff, guys, this is the bottle. This is the old bottle. This is the new bottle. This is both sides of my hair, no change. Chris: Okay, okay, very smart to especially, like you said, I mean so many people now the social media influencers have such impact on what products get picked up in the mainstream. Advert Hello friends, this is Chris Hanslick, your Building Texas business host. Did you know that Boyer Miller, the producer of this podcast, is a business law firm that works with entrepreneurs, corporations and business leaders? Our team of attorneys serve as strategic partners to businesses by providing legal guidance to organizations of all sizes. Get to know the firm at boyermillercom, and thanks for listening to the show. Chris:So let's move forward a little bit. Part of changing things new products. There's a level. You mentioned your marketing meeting yesterday. What do you do within the company to help kind of foster innovation and inspire your people to be innovative about the products? Renee: That's a tough one because it's hard. Here's the challenge that we have as a small company. As a small company, it's hard for me to afford to pay me like the equivalent of a me right. The woman or a man with the MBA in marketing who's got, you know, 10 years at Coca-Cola. I am oftentimes recruiting talent, that's learning and I'm teaching, as they, you know, grow up in our company and so innovation is really. You know, I'm usually in that meeting asking the provocative question Like do these assets, does this story come together like cohesively, what problems are we helping them solve? Like, I am there helping them think through and push their thinking a little bit forward. We'll sit and we just do brainstorming with, you know, little toys in the room and stuff to play with, but it's really just helping them kind of. All right, just toss some ideas out there. Let's just throw like what is this, what does this mean? What's her brand voice? What does she sound like? What does she look like? Like asking those questions to help them just kind of think outside of the box. Now, if she looks like this, so what kind of tone is she going to have? All right, so what would she say then? Okay, so let's talk about, like how then that manifests itself and how it shows up creatively, and so just helping them kind of drill down to the so what is really kind of the role I like to play. It's the role I'm playing right now because I'm looking for a marketing director. Chris: Okay, yeah, anybody listening out there. Renee: Anybody listening out there? Submit resumes. Chris: So you talked about some major players as partners that you have right, yeah. Target and Walgreens and CVS, et cetera. So let's talk a little bit about that. How did you go about? You kind of you told a little bit about Target, but what have you done and what have you found to be successful? And maybe strategies that weren't successful in forming those relationships, but maybe, even more importantly, fostering and maintaining those relationships. Renee: So forming on the forming side retailers. For those who may or may not know the space, they want to come to you in one of two ways either direct or indirect through a distributor. For a small brand like mine, it's usually hey, I don't want to service direct, I want you to go through a distributor. And usually it's because when you first launch, you're going to be in a handful of their stores not full distribution is what they call it so not in all 1700 Target stores, but I think we started out in a hundred and so we had to go through a third-party distributor, and so that distributor then opened the door to other national retailers for us. So if you're thinking about launching into a national retail partner and you're a small company like mine, your best route to market is finding a distributor that represents your category in a national retailer. So whether that's peanut butter, hair products, lotions, flat tires, whatever, so you have to go and find that distributor. So that was step one. Once we got that relationship, our job is to grow it by driving traffic through the stores and getting that sell through. If it's not generating units per store per week, it gets pulled right. So one person wisely said a retail shelf space is like real estate. Once you buy your home, you don't want to lose it to foreclosure. So once you've got that slot, my job is to defend those two slots. And when I say we're national retailers, we're not like a P&G where P&G dominates the shelf. We've got sometimes two slots, sometimes four, but we're not, we don't have 10. So our slots are really important for us at a retailer and so for me, maintaining the relationship comes back to driving the traffic to the store. But, more importantly, supply chain. So when I talked about growing too fast for some brands and having measured growth, it was very important for me because I understood I came from a consulting company, although I did did sales and marketing most of what we did as an organization was supply chain. I wasn't the supply chain person, but I like to say I knew enough to be dangerous when I bought Uncle Plunky's daughter. So because I understood supply chain, I knew that not, we could not risk. We needed to have safety stock, we need to have inventory levels that look like x, and so that's why I did what I called measured growth. And so you know the distributor may come to me and go. I can get you into Kroger, walmart. Nope, we're going to do one retailer a year, one big guy a year, because I need to make sure I can scale, I need to make sure my contract manufacturers can scale, I need to make sure my team knows what to do and they know how to execute and fulfill the requirements of that specific retailer and so that we are successful. So that was the way that we grew and that's kind of the way we've continued to grow. Chris: That's so smart, that discipline right. It's easier said than done, because you just start a company and you go a couple years not making any money, or what you do make you put back in the company and then you got all these great opportunities. Come at you once. Renee: It's easy to say yes yes, yes, yes and yes, but you can't fulfill those promises, no one will come back. And there are horror stories where brands have been like yes, I'll go into Target, walmart, kroger, heb, cvs and Walgreens all at the same time and they can't meet the demand or they launch and they don't have enough awareness in the consumer market to be able to support and drive the traffic in all of those stores. So you really have to focus on how you're going to grow, where you're going to grow, and how you're going to drive traffic into these markets and into those stores. Chris: I mean any details you can put behind that, just as some examples to make it a little more tangible of things that you did, things that you thought about. Okay, we have to get this right to kind of prove that we can go to the next level. Renee: Yes. So for Target we did a lot of in-store events, so we took Target. So imagine if I was doing replicating this across like five different retailers. But for Target back in the day, for social media was much more organic and less pay-per-play than it is now, right, so we would do like it's a 10-day countdown. You know, to Target we're launching in 10, 9, 8, like on social media, it was like running ads. Then we did a find us in the Target, so we would do these fun games on social media and our followers would have to find us in their local Target and if they found us and they won a gift card, so we were doing anything we could. We would do in-store events where we would just have a table popped up where you can try products, give away products, get coupons, you name it. We were doing it. Gotcha, we were doing events outside the store. Inside the store. I was rogue because I didn't have permission from Target to do this. I mean because that would have cost me tens of thousand dollars, right, Target, I hope you're not listening and so we would literally just grab a camera and kind of come in and we would kind of sneak our little basket through the store down the hall and we would sit in there and the manager would come like, oh, we're just doing some footage, and I would say I just launched and I'm really trying to help my business and they would get it because you know, their local store manager, and so they would allow us to do like a little bit of a, a little bit of a pop-up shop kind of thing, and they would allow it. Now, today they probably wouldn't allow it because we're probably a lot more disciplined, but 15 years ago, 10 years ago, they would allow it and so, yeah, so those are the things that we had to do. So imagine if I was doing that for sally, for walmart, for kro, all in the same year, and I'm still trying to drive the traffic right, because we were still a small brand. Chris: Sure. Renee: I still call us a small brand because you know, if I go to you and I say, have you heard of Uncle Funky's Daughter? And your answer is no, then I'm a small brand, right. If I say you cause, everybody's heard of Clorox, coca-cola, pepsi, all the things, right, lacroix, you name it, they've heard of it, they haven't heard of Uncle Funky's Daughter. And so we're still in constant mode of brand awareness, and so trying to build that brand awareness and drive demand in every retail shelf at the same time would have been a daunting task for a brand like ours. Chris: Sure, do you still have the Rice Village? No, okay, shut that down we shut it down. Renee: I shut it down when I bought the company. That was the condition of the acquisition, because the day that I went and discovered who the owner was of the brand and I was sitting there chatting up the guy, in about a four hour period that I was there, maybe three people walked into that door okay so that you know, my brain said all right, that's a like a revenue killer. I'm not, you're not driving revenue right you need to focus on driving traffic on the retail shelf, and so are. We have no physical retail store now. Will we once again one day, maybe in a different format? Right, because now you, my friends? Other people have said you guys should open up a salon, and I'm like so maybe we'll open up a salon where the products are available and featured, but a retail store exclusively focused on our products will not be in a timeline. Chris: Okay. So there's an example right of an idea from friends. Maybe you thought about it, of branching out from what's core to your business. So far you've said no because you haven't done it. Maybe it's still out there. Why have you not done that? And I guess what could you counsel some listeners if they're faced with that? Or maybe they've done it and trying to make it work Again. That's another danger point, right Before you kind of branch into something different. Renee: So there are two things what I think about. Again. I always go from management consultant first right when I think about my business. I don't think about it personally, right, I think about it objectively. So I can go deep in my vertical or I can go wide horizontally, and I can do both. And so right now, where we are as a brand, honestly, is we need to go deeper in R&D and innovation. So we have not had an opportunity to launch a new product since COVID, and so we're in the process of developing a new product, so that's my primary focus. A new product line so we're developing a new product line, so that's my front focus. New product line so we're developing a new product line, so that's my front focus. Then, as I start to think about adjacency, about how do we take our core and expand and pivot beyond. Do you go to Skin next and stay in consumer products and go into Skin? Do you go in the two places that I'm more actively looking at Skin is out there as a product extension, but that's still core to Uncle Funky's Daughter. Do you go and do you buy another small company within Rote Morris Consumer Group and now you build a portfolio of brands? Because that's, really what I wanted to do when I started Rote Morris Consumer Group. My vision is to have a portfolio of consumer goods brands that meet the needs of the community of color, whether it's beauty, so for beauty. So that could be hair, that could be skin, it could be makeup, it could be a variety of different things that help her solve her problems every day. So that's really the vision. And then I bought this building a couple years ago and we have this wonderful, amazing space, and so and I open up this space I'm looking around. What are we gonna do with the rest of this space? We have this whole first floor, we have a whole second floor that's unoccupied, and even before I bought the building, this idea of building talent and a pipeline of funky junkies is what we call our followers funky junkies yeah that's what we call our followers, our customers. But how do you start to build not only a pipeline of loyal customers but a pipeline of loyal users? And so I started thinking about what if you actually had a trade school? What if you actually started? What if you were the next Paul Mitchell for African-American hair products, right when there's a Paul Mitchell school and you're teaching natural hair instead of you know other treatments that they do, and those exist outside of Texas. There's one that exists in Houston, but not focused on natural hair, but focused on beauty school. And so for those people out there who choose to have a different path in life and not go to college, but they're looking for a vocation or trade school and they want to be a hairstylist or barber, do you create a space for them to be able to do that? So that's the second adjacency. And then the third adjacency is then do you go the other end? So I know how to do hair, I'm learning how to do hair, I've got hair products, I'm doing hair on the other side and that's where the salon comes in. So in all both ends of the spectrum, I am a deep analytical person, so it's understanding what's happening in the market. So in the salon side, you look and you have to figure out and this is for anyone right. You never take a leap in adjacencies just because you think you have the money, the capability, the resources, whatever. You have to understand what's happening in the market because you're not smarter than the whole market. You might be smarter than a couple people in the market, but not the whole market. And so when I look at the hair salon space, I knew of several people in the Houston market that had launched salons and they had failed. They had failed within a three-year cycle and they had failed because the type of offering service offering that they wanted to provide was challenging. And that's the same service offering that we would need to provide as a brand. Chris: Right. Renee: And resources and talent. Going back to this other end of the pipeline I was talking about, in the supply chain, those can be sometimes challenging resources to recruit and retain in a salon side, and so when I do the analysis, it's looking at the risk versus reward. How am I smarter than the next person? How do I learn from those failures and ensure that I can recruit talent where I'm not? I don't have a high degree of turnover. I can create brand consistency. I can create service levels that meet the needs of not only what I want to offer, but what our customers expect. I need to exceed it, and so, because I haven't gotten that magic formula yet, we're leaving the salon right here in the marketplace. Chris: It's still on the drawing board right. Still on the drawing board, I like. I like it well, as it should be, until you figure it out, right? Yeah well, so let's turn a little bit and talk a little more about you yeah in leadership. How would you describe your leadership style? How do you think that's changed or evolved in the last 10 years? Renee: so I am a type a, hardcore type a. I am a driver and I know that about myself. But I also know that one of my weaknesses as a leader is I don't micromanage. What I have learned to evolve because of my consulting background, right In a consulting world you know 20 plus years is how I was trained. I'm a former salesperson. You just go get it done right, you know. So that is that's kind of like my bread and butter, and you have a team of type A's that are pretty much driven just like you are. So when you guys have a clear plan and you've got the end goal, all you're doing is managing the type A's to make sure that they get to the goal right at a very high level. No one needs to. You set meetings to review the spreadsheet and the spreadshe's done right. Fast forward to Uncle Funky's daughter. You set meetings to review the spreadsheet and it's like, oh, I wasn't sure what I wanted to do, what you wanted me to do, so it requires much more. What I'm learning is it requires me to evolve my leadership style from one that's hands off, that's a little bit more hands-on, to make sure that my team understands where the bar of excellence is what our customers want from us, what the implications are when we miss deadlines, what the implications are if we ship the wrong product to the wrong customer, and so showing them and teaching them is where I've kind of learned. That's where my role is as a leader, really helping them really understand the implications of behaviors. And so I've evolved to from a leader that's I'm still. I still tell my team hey, I don't micromanage. If I have to, if I know it before you do, that's probably a problem, and so so they understand that, and so I think I'm still evolving my leadership style to adapt to a smaller company with a different team that thinks differently from the type A consultants with the MBAs that I'm used to working with, to the ones who you know maybe they don't have the MBA or maybe they're going to get it, or maybe they have a desire to get there, and so it really has required. It's a growth opportunity for me that I'm still learning to grow in, to be able to shift my mental mindset away from I got a team of driven people to I got a team that needs to be inspired, you know. Chris: Yeah, that's great. So what have you done to try to help you in the hiring process? Make sure you're making the best decision you can make about who you're bringing on your team? Renee: You know it's the hire slow, fire quick. Chris: Yes, another easier said than done. Renee: Easier said than done and that's where I am right now. Even in this open marketing director job that I'm looking for, it's really making sure I've gone through I go through so many, I go through all the resumes. My assistant will filter out the trash. But once she's filtered out the trash, I'm looking at those resumes going okay, is this someone who's going to? Because I'll openly say the reason I'm looking for a marketing director. I'll tell you this story. So I hire this person and she's from Adidas. She comes from Adidas background in marketing and she's Under Armour in marketing and she was in Latin America director of Latin America markets and she's just moved from Houston. So I'm thinking I've got a Latina because it's part of my demographic. That's awesome. She's got this global brand experience that's awesome. All in athleisure but transferable skills. It's marketing. She quits three months later, found another job in athleisure. So I interviewed, interviewed and found this one and this woman, you know, sold me on. I mean we had multiple conversations. I was like you know, sold me on. I mean, we had multiple conversations. I was like you know, hey. Chris: I'm really concerned about whether or not you know you can migrate from big company to this small company Cause it is a very valid concern. Renee: It's a big change. Right, you don't have a team. Your team is a team of three, not a team of 20. Right, and so your role really changes. And so she. You know, she convinced me that, but the lesson learned was that you know my spidey senses. I didn't listen to them. Like my spidey senses said, she may not stay. Like there were little things that happened along the way you get enamored with all the other stuff. Right, but I was so hungry to have a big company, someone to come in to show my team other than me, for them to hear it from someone other than me that this is what marketing looks like, Right, this is the marketing discipline that we need to have. And so she came in. She brought some marketing discipline. She heard that, you know she brought some value in the three months, but it was. It's been really a painful learning process, right, because now I'm short of marketing director, I'm stepping in, yeah, yeah. Chris: Well, what you alluded to there, right, is just the cost hard cost and soft cost when you make a bad hiring decision yeah Because you know you're having to fill the role or someone else. Renee: Yep, so that distracts, you, it's me right now. Chris: It distracts you from doing your full-time else. Yep, so that distracts you. It's me right now. It distracts you from doing your full-time job. Yep, you're now spending time going through resumes and going to be interviewing and you wasted, if you will, all the time on the one that only lasted three months. Yeah, so there's a lot of cost there. There's a lot of cost there. Renee: And then you're sitting there and knowing I've got to restart this whole process, I've got to try to maintain the momentum within my team this is the second marketing person they've had in the past year so and so how do you start to just kind of manage through that and so, instead of and when you get burned, that one time, as I'm looking at resumes, I'm looking at people with deep experience in a particular industry and I'm going oh nope. Chris: Learn, that is, that there's that bias creep right you're. You have to not let yourself penalize these people you've never met, just as they might look the same on paper yeah, as the one bad actor in the group. Renee: Yeah, and so you and you're right, and so I'm going well, and I'm having these conversations and then yeah, so it's just. Yeah, I think that's like one hiring, firing, hiring slow, firing quick. Chris: Sometimes, even when you hire slow, you still get I tell people it's part science, it's part art and it's the more process I think you can put in place and follow the better. But you're never going to be 100 right and I think figuring out the characteristics that work in your organization is something that you can incorporate into your hiring process and know that this is the kind of background traits, characteristics that thrive here. Renee: Yeah, and even and I would also say, listening to that, you know, those spidey senses that are coming with those thoughts creep in like, and they were coming like there were things, there were triggers that happened through the hiring process. Then I was like I'm not sure she's going to be a good fit. Like you know, for example, she called and said hey, can I work from home? I was like no, you cannot work from home. So that was like that was. Oh, renee, we're gonna do a whole episode on work from home. Oh yeah, oh yeah. And so those were the triggers of like, okay, she might not be the good fit. And when those were the when that happens to you, you got to listen to it and like and be okay with backing out. But I didn't listen to the trigger because we were so far down in the negotiation and I should have just said, you know, I don't think this is going to work out Right, and rescinded the offer. But I had already extended the offer, right, and I didn't want to have egg on my face. Chris:Sure. Renee: So I mean I, what I should have done is just let my ego go, rescinded the offer and continue to look. Chris: Yeah, or at least be upfront about this is starting to give me concerns. Here's why. Renee: Yeah. But I you know you know it's which I did that I did that okay, she covered it up she covered that up. She told me exactly what I wanted to hear, but still the those doubts were in my head and I should have listened to my gut. And that gut is a powerful thing. You know that, maxwell Galt, maxwell Galt Gladwell, it's a powerful thing. And if, when you listen to it, you're usually right, 100%. Yeah, 100%. Chris: Renee, this has been a fascinating conversation. Just to wrap it up, I have a few just personal things. I always like to ask yeah, what was your first job as a kid? Renee: Newspaper. I was a newspaper girl. You had a newspaper route? Yes, Absolutely I did. I'll be darned. My sister got up in the morning and helped me through my newspapers. Chris: You're not the first guest. That was their first job it was fairly common. Renee: You had to make me dig deep for that one. Chris: Okay, you made me dig deeper on this one. Sometimes people say this is the hardest question. Yeah, do you prefer Tex-Mex or barbecue? Renee: Barbecue no sauce Seasoned, very well seasoned, no hesitation. Chris: No, no hesitation and the woman knows what she wants. Yes, right. Renee: Don't bring me brisket with sauce on it. No. Chris: No sauce Extra seasoned. Renee: I want seasoned brisket, the moist kind. Okay, and, by the way, I'm not a Texan, but I moved to Texas and now I've been here 15 years and now it's like brisket barbecue. It's the only thing that I eat. Chris: I eat it's the only thing I want to eat. I might die of a heart attack, but it's the only thing I want to eat. I love it All right. So because you have four kids and I know your life's running crazy, this will be more of a fantasy. Renee: Yeah, if you could take. Chris: If you could take a 30 day sabbatical, where would you go? What would you do? Renee: Oh, I would be somewhere, probably in South Africa, in the, probably on a safari. I would tour safaris. I would go South Africa, kenya. I want to see the migration of animals. I would do that. Chris: I love it. Renee: That's where I would be. Chris: Renee, thank you so much for being on. This has been just a pleasure getting to know you and hear your story. Renee: Thank you. This is awesome. I listened to NPR how I built this. So this is like my. I feel like I'm excited. I've kind of done the NPR check. I like the how I built this check. Do you listen to that? Chris: I do, I do, I love it. I love that analogy. Renee: Yeah, it's great. Chris: Thanks again. Renee: Thanks for doing this. Special Guest: Renee Morris.

In this episode of the Building Texas Business Podcast, I interview Kelly Young, CEO of the Coalition for the Homeless in Houston. We explore how Houston has become a national model for reducing homelessness through data-driven strategies and collaborative efforts. Kelly shares insights on effective nonprofit leadership, emphasizing the importance of building solid and accountable teams and fostering diverse thinking. We discuss the critical need for sustainable funding in homeless response systems, moving away from reliance on sporadic disaster funding. Throughout our conversation, we delve into Houston's successes and the ongoing challenges in addressing homelessness. -- SHOW HIGHLIGHTS Chris introduces Kelly Young, CEO of the Coalition for the Homeless in Houston, discussing the organization's role in coordinating the Way Home system. Kelly describes her journey from providing direct services to adopting a systems-thinking approach, emphasizing the importance of data-driven strategies and compliance in managing federal funds. We discuss the structure of the Coalition, including key departments like finance, compliance, outreach, landlord engagement, and housing, as well as its unique position working between city and county governments. Kelly shares insights on building strong, accountable teams in nonprofit leadership, balancing visionary goals with improvisational strategies, and fostering an environment where diverse thinking thrives. We explore the significance of clear communication, especially for introverted thinkers, and the importance of acknowledging mistakes openly to build trust and strengthen teams. Kelly highlights the critical need for sustainable homeless response system funding, discussing the inadequacies of relying on sporadic disaster funding and the necessity of evolving data to better serve those still on the streets. We delve into the business rationale for investing in homeless response systems, emphasizing that it's a financially sound decision that ultimately reduces costs on public health and other services. Kelly explains the success of Houston's model for reducing homelessness, including the collaborative efforts among for-profit, non-profit, and public entities, and the innovative use of disaster funds from Hurricane Harvey and COVID. We address the importance of community engagement and understanding how systems work, as well as addressing severe mental illness and substance abuse issues more effectively. Kelly shares leadership lessons learned through experience, including the importance of passion, data integrity, personal and professional integrity in communication, and fostering a culture of risk-taking and growth. LINKSShow Notes Previous Episodes About BoyarMiller About CFTHhouston GUESTS Kelly YoungAbout Kelly TRANSCRIPT (AI transcript provided as supporting material and may contain errors) Chris: In this episode, you will meet Kelly Young, CEO of the Coalition for the Homeless in Houston. Kelly shares several great tips for leaders, including the value of direct communication. She also sheds light on the homeless response system and why Houston is leading the country in reducing homelessness in our community. Kelly, I want to thank you for taking the time to come on Building Texas Business. It's great to see you. Kelly: Lovely to see you and thank you for inviting me. Chris: So you are the CEO of the Coalition for the Homeless in Houston, and so a little bit different guest than normal, but not outside the box for us. Tell us what the Coalition for the Homeless is and what it does. So. Kelly: I like to think of the Coalition for the Homeless is and what it does. So I like to think of the Coalition for the Homeless as a coordinating body over what we call the Way Home, which is a collective of for-profit or non-profit and public entities that come together to resolve the issue of homelessness. Chris: Very good. So how did you get involved in the homeless response system, how long have you been involved and what really inspired you to do this? Kelly: I've actually been interested in helping people figure out better lives for themselves since I was like 12. I mean, I was what was called a people tutor when I was in a middle school, where I actually helped individuals with physical disabilities learn sports. And then I did some tutoring in high school and then I started working in a shelter for abused kids and I worked with kids who were coming out of psychiatric units. Then I worked in domestic and sexual violence. So I think I was always on a path to be a part of something that helped make other people's lives easier for them to be successful. When you do a lot of that direct work, you see the individual impact and the individual failures. When you get to do it on a systems level, you get to decide whether a system will be helpful in helping someone or whether it's setting up people for failure. So I've been in the Way Home system for about 12 years as an individual agency that helped provide direct services. But I'm actually a systems thinker by nature and so I kept going well, why doesn't this work and why doesn't this work? And the whole system here works. My job was to help it work better. So you know, like with any system or any business, you're constantly thinking about the future and what needs to change and what's going to be different coming up, and so I got the perfect opportunity to come in at a time when there is a major shift in many of the pillars of how the work is done, and I get to help design what that's going to look like, and that, to me, is the purpose of work. Chris: Love it. That's great. So, just to give our listeners maybe some context, let's just talk about the size of the organization, the coalition itself and maybe then, and maybe then, the system, participants and members, so they get an idea of what it is, that the organization is that you're running, as well as a system that you're trying to help manage and, as you said, get better and be more successful. Kelly: Well, I think, like any business, we are well-structured in terms of having enough staff to do the things that are core to our business model, and a couple of those things is we have a heavy compliance and finance department. We are nonprofits, are tax status not our business model, and we think of finance and compliance as sort of the heart of the organization. It pumps the blood through because we manage and help support almost 23 million to $40 million with a federal funding which requires us to follow lots of rules and regulation and make sure it's done correctly, not just for us, but also for our partners. We will provide certain types of services if we think that from a systems perspective, it makes sense to have an overlay. So we have an outreach team, we have a landlord engagement team and I can go more into depth about that when I talk about the system and then we have a housing team and those are really to bolster the system, not to replace the system in those jobs. And then we have this second largest department, which is really our data. We're a data-driven organization. 12 years ago, the coalition made a major shift, which was to use data to drive the construct of how the community actually resolves homelessness or deals with homelessness in the community and in that data. What we did was build out our 100 partners who have to agree to be a part of the database and include all that information but also follow some of our guidelines around standards, so that we can bring more and more money in from the federal government but also provide much better services and a quicker response to somebody who falls into homelessness. Chris: Okay, so, and at the coalition, what is it? Roughly 80-ish, I think, employees. Kelly: Yes, we're at 80. And I think we're also unique because we sit between the county and the city. We are trying to manage both of their expectations around homelessness. So sometimes people think of us as quasi-government. We are not. We are a nonprofit. But we sit there so that we can meter both sides what the county and the city wants and they don't have to be trying to work that through. So we always find the best solution for both Harris County, montgomery County and Fort Bend, and then the city of Houston Very good. Chris: So yeah, let's talk a little bit about the system. You know some people may be aware I think you know a lot aren't but just the success of Houston and how Houston has become the model for the country on addressing homelessness, reducing homelessness in our community. You know a lot's been written, most recently about the Houston Chronicle a little over a year ago, new York Times. You know you've been involved and interviewed in those things. Share a little bit for people to kind of understand how successful Houston's been to date. And of course, we can talk more later about the challenges we still face. Kelly: Yeah, I mean, I think one of the things and again, any good business person or anybody who's looking to innovate understands that you first have to know the problem you have and then understand how you want to solve that problem, and for what I think the system did really well over the last 12 years is to build out the right system mechanisms and then the right interventions to use our money to the fullest extent. So what most people don't understand is that for the homeless response system which we oversee, that is mainly funded by federal dollars and so we are under federal guidelines on how we do that, which means we actually cannot interact or help somebody until they are currently on the street and in that then we have to be able to place them in other places, including permanent supportive housing, which is for somebody with a documented disability who's been on the street for a long time. They still will pay part of their rent out of their disability dollars, but we give them a subsidized apartment and appointments to kind of get off the street and going again. I think the other piece that people don't understand is that we only have two systems. We only have rapid rehousing or permanent supportive housing. So our options are very limited, which means you have to be incredibly smart and innovative about how you engage not only the community, the people who need the service, but then the service delivery when we have taken advantage of, which I think is true in Houston. Why I love this city so much is we take disasters and turn them into determination, and so we took both the Hurricane Harvey and COVID and use those additional dollars to build out enough of a safety net, but then also a permanent place for people to live, that we were able to move over the last 11 years, 30,000 people off the street. We reduced homelessness by 60% and I know people are like, well, but I see people on the street, Absolutely, but you don't see the ones we placed in the housing and who moved on with their lives because they're gone. They're doing their lives. Chris: The thing people I think should know is and you can share some details but you know and we know from the research and the data that A lot of what's at the streetlight, those aren't homeless people. Kelly: Right. We also have an issue with people living below the poverty line. So United Way points out and rightfully so, that 40% of the individuals in Houston are $400 away from catastrophe and that means we have a lot of people living on the edge. So if you're unable to get a job or you're unable to work full time, you might see people who are out panhandling to get a job, or you're unable to work full-time, you might see people who are out panhandling. There's also people who take advantage of people who are in those situations and use that as their own mechanism to make money, because they actually place people there and then collect some of their money so that they could go stay in their shelter. So it's an interesting world when you actually find out what's going on in your street corners. Chris: Right, right. Well, I love that Obviously very close to this issue and the system, and so I think it's great to be able to tout the success we're having, as well as you know the challenges we face. You know people talk about the goal of ending homelessness and I love the kind of the phrase that's been adopted is making it rare, brief and non-reoccurring, because, as you said, so many people are living right on the edge. People are going to something's going to happen, people are going to end up homeless, but the question is is there a system there that can rapidly get them into housing and the supportive services they need to recorrect? Kelly: Yeah, absolutely, and I think the important piece of this is looking at equilibrium. So what you want, I don't need to have a lot of additional dollars that are sitting there waiting to do something. I need just-in-time dollars. I need to know that if a downturn has happened in the economy, if there's something happening on the street, return you know, in terms of people falling more readily into homelessness, rents have gone up something else has happened. I want to be able to bolster that very quickly so I can move those individuals off the street within 30 to 45 days. That reduces not only the trauma on that individual but it reduces the trauma on the community and as a community member myself I mean, I live in Midtown, so I often see a lot of individuals I've known for a long time to be on the street and you know what I don't want people to do is to get to the point where they don't care about those individuals anymore because it's disrupting their community. So equilibrium not only benefits the individual, who is facing a really difficult time, and moving them on quickly so it's a blip in their life, not an extension of their life and then also for the community to be able to stay in that caring and compassionate place so that they'll get involved and stay involved in the work of our unhoused neighbors and friends and, quite honestly, brothers and sisters. Chris: So let's turn the page a little bit and talk about you know you came into this organization at the beginning of 2024. Let's talk about what it's like to, you know, step in as a CEO, a new CEO into an organization and some of the how you approach that from a mindset, because I would think you know some of our listeners may find themselves there, may be experiencing it as well. So what was the mindset you kind of took in to make it a smooth transition and so that one you could honor what's been, what was being done by the you know, maybe previous CEO, but you know, make a smooth transition and find a way to put your own mark on the organization moving forward. Kelly: I think one of the best things people can do is first lie to themselves and then tell their truth. The lie you tell yourself is that you know everything's going to change and you list it out and you ready yourself for that. Intellectually, I do think where you probably need to tell your truth is that change is complicated and hard. I think sometimes, when you're in a leadership role, you want to reframe things for other people so that it's easy for them to understand and maybe to jump on board, but you yourself know it's difficult. I mean when you know the financial picture is going to change, the model is going to change, the people are going to change, and those were all true for us. That list sounds great and easy, but it is a constant attention to each small move that you're making and what the long-term impact is. I always describe strategy as visionary and improvisational and I think that's a good balance and that's how I've been able to translate what I think needs to happen in an organization. I mean, obviously you're listening, you know the pillars have sort of changed. You're listening to other people, you're absorbing other people, but I also come in and I'm really clear about how I work and what my accomplishment looks like and how success looks to me, and I drive that home in every single meeting. So people learn to trust that what I'm saying is true. When I make a mistake, I tell everybody straight up. I'm you know it's not falling on my sword. I just think it's important to model that. I think one thing is, for some of us who are more introverted thinkers, one of the hardest things to learn to do is how to over-commun messaging to people. Chris: Because I do so much of it in my head, I have to remember to actually put words to it well, and I mean yeah, go ahead obviously not the right, but I mean I can relate to that because you not only that, there's so many things going on in your brain, right, and you're you like. I just completed this, I got to get to the next thing and it's finding that time to either stop and slow down and communicate before you move on or, you know, remember at some point you need to stop and let people know what's going on through those ears. Advert Hello friends, this is Chris Hanslick, your Building Texas business host. Did you know that Boyer Miller, the producer of this podcast, is a business law firm that works with entrepreneurs, corporations and business leaders? Our team of attorneys serve as strategic partners to businesses by providing legal guidance to organizations of all sizes. Get to know the firm at boyermillercom and thanks for listening to the show. Kelly: Yeah, I always call it the Kelly Young madness or the Kelly Young magic, because it's like some people are good at waiting to see what's going to happen. Other people are like I have no idea what she's doing and we're just going to hope this all works out. And it's my responsibility as a leader to alleviate both of those misunderstandings. Right, because I need people engaged in the process. I'm a big believer that right buck stops with me. I'm going to make the final decision, but very rarely is the final decision my decision. It's everybody else's input. I'll take the accountability, I'll be the one who pushes it through. But if I don't have the buy-in from the group and they can't be settled in some agreement, especially when you're changing from something that has run successfully for a very long time and all the conditions changed and change and you have to let people know it's not, we're not changing because you did something wrong. We're changing because it's time to move forward. That kind of reframing I think is extremely helpful and that stuff. You should know what you're going to say and how you're going to lay that out to your team before you start day one. Chris: Very good. So, speaking of team obviously you just said this in one of your responses that is, while the buck stops with you, you make the final decision. It's rarely your decision. That's because you have a team around you, right, and you're relying on them and you're pushing them, all those things. So let's talk about building a solid team around you. What are some of the things that you look for? Again, this isn't your first time to be CEO of an organization, so I know you've built teams more than once. Let's talk a little bit about that. What are some of the things you look for in the hiring process, in the evaluation of the people that you have when you take over? I think there's a lot that could be learned from that. Kelly: I'm one of those people. I'm a little super nerdy this way and I learned a decision-making model a long time ago called the seven hats, and the idea behind it is that each person at the table wears a different hat, and so you have somebody who's the white hat, which is the emotional and red hat, and they're the naysayer. And as much as I'd rather have everybody just do what I want and like me and do all that. I also know that's a terrible way to run anything, so I work really hard at actually having very different ways of thinking at a leadership level. Sometimes that causes more conflict or contrast in the way we resolve an issue, but I expect people to come and learn professional communication skills, and if you can't, you should go back to school or learn a YouTube. I don't care, because the purpose should be. I need you to be here for what we're here for. I don't like a lot of internal nonsense. I don't like us spending a bunch of time on stuff that doesn't matter, because the kind of work I've always done meant somebody did not get out of a domestic violence situation because we were spending time arguing about who left the coffee pot on. You know I walk past somebody who's on the street who needs to get housed. I don't want to sitting around arguing because somebody thought somebody was rude one day. Like that just can't be in the workplace. I get why it is, but I want people who come ready to do work and actually can define what work means to them. The second thing is always happens in this field. I just want to help people and that to me, is the death nail answer, because my answer, my question back to you is going to be what does that mean and how does that look? Because you wanting to help people doesn't have very much to do with actually serving people. Those are two very different concepts. So I also am very clear about the environment that I want at work and you have a choice Don't sign up and then come in and want to change it, add to it, make it better. But I'm not going to adjust what I think has to happen in an organization to go to the next level, because I typically have taken jobs where I'm right in the middle of a major change and I do know what needs to be functionally happening on a regular basis to make that shift. Chris: So you know that's very insightful and you know the core of what I think you're saying. If you boil it down, is it comes back to very clear, direct communication, setting expectations, et cetera, and then holding people accountable. All of that then leads to culture when you're building these teams. If you think about what you've done in the last nine months at the coalition, how would you describe the culture that you're striving for, that you feel like you have? You know, growing there. Kelly: I have a speech I used to call the mean speech I never thought it was mean, but somebody had called it where I lay out what I learned over the time of my working, in the time that I made some really serious mistakes, and what I learned from those and how they need to interpret that into their new work environment. And so with that, I think what happens in the culture is they actually see me living the story I told and I bring it up over and over again in different pieces. I think storytelling is important for that reason, but I show them what I did that didn't work, so that they have a clear understanding of what I learned from what I didn't do or what I did wrong. So they understand that this is a learning environment, that part of your responsibility is to be curious and to want to understand how to do things better or differently. If you come in and you say to me well, you know, I just need the training and I need this, you will not last well in my organizations, because I expect that you're more interested than that. You have to want to care about data. Data is most important, particularly in nonprofits, because you are telling the future of how most federal dollars are going to be spent in your case notes or in your reports. I talk a lot about gossip and that you can't stop it, but you have a personal and professional integrity line in how you communicate account. You know, for me I run it this way, which is every single dollar that comes in here is somebody else's dollar and somebody else's money, and so there's very little room to make major mistakes or to waste, because that's your money that you're wasting. And if we cannot do it the best, if we cannot show up in ways that people expect, then we should give that money to somebody else. And I tell people don't be miserable. If you don't like working here, you don't like the here, you don't like the work, you don't like the commute, you don't like any of that stuff, oh my gosh, why are you spending your life doing something you don't like Like? Go be happy. Chris: That's so true, right? I mean I think we talk about it. I know in our organization is, if you don't connect with our mission and our passion, it's okay. You know it doesn't make you a bad person, it just means there's a different organization for you where you're going to be happier. And then you should go find that, because we want the people that if they connect with that mission and passion of our organization, then they're going to be living their best self, which opens them up to serve our clients and each other to their fullest potential. Right. Kelly: And I also think we try to be very or I've always tried to be. I'm not interested in telling you how to do your job because you don't want kelly young's opinion of how to do your job. You want your own opinion. I hired somebody who's smart and talented and knows how to do that and you don't want my limited vision of that. But when people also say, well, I don't like to be micromanaged, I'm like, well, I'd be interested in why people feel like they have to micromanage you. So if you are showing up to work and over-communicating and letting people know, I shouldn't have to do that, but I will if you're not able to do that, because I still need to know what's happening. So I often turn some of those things that people say back on them, just so a little self-awareness, and help them understand, because you will not like working for a CEO who will say, who will call you and be like, why does this number not match this number? And it's not because I don't trust you, it's that I need the number to make sense, because I'm about to go tell a bunch of people this number. So it's interesting. I actually really love building culture. I think I do a good job of creating enough openness that people feel like they can participate if they choose to. Chris: Well, you know, one of the things I think has been written a lot about and it's hard, it's a hard skill for some leaders to get to, but you learn so much by, rather than telling is asking questions. And you know, like you said, turn it around on them and ask the questions and then, a lot of times, as they are forced to answer those questions, they realize where to go. Kelly: Yeah, and it's funny because there's a new book out by the gentleman who wrote Sapiens and his new book is called Nexus and I heard him in an interview and I thought this was really interesting because I do think this is an issue with the workplace and maybe some generational conflict. He talks about information and not that. This is new. Talks about information and not. This is new. But information is not truth and part of the problem is that we tend to try to over inform and over educate to get to truth and neither one of those things will actually get you there, because truth is costly, it takes time, it takes energy and I do think we're in an overload of informing people as though that will change or grow somebody's understanding, when really all it did was add more information, not deeper truth. So, you know, I just find that a fascinating and I thought about it in terms of work we do, because I think one of the things the coalition has always done has been a truth teller and in that truth telling right now we're in huge inundation of information because we're going through a lot of change. How do we settle back into our truth? Chris: Interesting, yeah, okay, so you mentioned this and what I can't wait to hear more about. May not have time on this podcast, but your mean speech. You talked about the mistakes and sharing mistakes you made in the learning. And you know, I don't know if you listened to one of these before, but I love asking people you know, tell us about a setback, a mistake you made, but then how you learn from it. Right, and I think you know to your point, when you share those stories with the people in your organization, it humanizes you and allows for that culture of learning, take risk and it's okay to fail, because that's how we learn and get better. So let's you know, can you share an example that either comes out of the mean speech or something else? You know a Kelly Young mistake and how it made Kelly Young better? Kelly: Yeah, and this one was interesting and I think it sort of aligns in particular with people who work directly with people and I was a very benevolent leader at one point. So this is much more of a self-awareness mistake than an actual business mistake, but I think it's important and I was. It's all about, you know, serving, you know, women. Everybody had on their desk, on their computers what did I do today to end domestic or sexual violence? And I was all gung-ho and and I, you know, I was there for the work and, as I said, and we got a new CEO and I thought that I should have been tapped for the CEO position and nobody asked me. And so I was very self-righteous in my understanding of, first of all, well, if you don't let anybody know you're interested, they probably won't ask you. But second of all, just because you've done this job doesn't mean you're actually ready to do that job. And so I was awful. I mean I was awful for about six weeks and I made everybody hear my pain and how hard it was on me and all this kind of stuff. The hardest lesson to learn in all that was that for all my bravado and my great messaging and whatnot, I really wasn't there for the mission in that moment. I was really there for my ego. And if we are not self-aware enough to understand when you are using ego to sell people on a version of yourself that you think will make them like you better or follow you better, but it's not true because you haven't done enough self-work, I spent six weeks wasting time, I mean, and I find I left, I went and found a different job and that was the best thing for me to do. But in that one moment when you realize that you are a liar to yourself and to other people and you decide you're not going to do that anymore Best moment of my professional career, because I never made a decision ever again around benevolence or around pretending that rhetoric was more important than what I really could show up and do. So I didn't like that and I hate sharing that story because it sounds awful. I sound like a horrible human being, but I think most of us have that moment. Chris: What a powerful story. No, I mean I think to your point. I mean it doesn't make you powerful, think to your point. I mean it doesn't make you powerful, a horrible person. But that's a difficult thing for us as humans to face right, to really look in the mirror that deeply and call ourselves out and, more importantly then, actually do what it takes to change. Kelly: Yeah, and for me, what I learned is that if I really want to lead, lead it is not pretending you can't play at leading, it is a commitment. It's hard, it's lonely, it's complex and you have to build in ways where your mind just stops thinking, because I'm a little bit of an overthinker and you have to do that self-awareness all the time. You're in check, all the time when you're a leader. Chris: Yeah, everyone's watching, right. So that's, I mean, I think, to your point where basically you can't fake it. It's because so many people are watching every move, whether it's internal to your organization or external partners, you'll get exposed really fast. Kelly: Right, and then you lose their trust so they won't show up for you when you need them to and at the end of the day, whatever it is that you because I think about innovators and I have a gentleman I know who helped work on some incubation around medical devices. Well, some people are like, oh well, you work with homeless and it must be so rewarding. I'm like I actually think it'd be pretty cool to make medical devices that make people's lives better. I don't have that talent, but you know. So it doesn't really matter what is at the center of your passion and your mission. I worry when we tell people you know you fake it till you make it, because in leadership you really can't do that. You need to sit down and learn it. You need to know your truth. It goes back to that. You can inform me about all these things about being a leader, but until I know the truth about being a leader, I'm going to waste time and I'm a hyper efficiency person. So for me it's like if I can do it in two steps, I'd rather do that than 15. So I really don't faking. It would be way too easy for me to just practice all the time, so I have to not allow myself some of those, those things, cause I yeah, I'd rather be out riding my bike, only because it's only because it's been a long week. Chris: I get you, I get you. You need that release too. Finding a way to you know release as a leader is equally as important. Yes absolutely so. Let's turn the conversation back around to homelessness Talk a little bit. You know, maybe, where we are, but what the future looks like. You've mentioned a couple of times, you know, facing new challenges in this world of homeless response. Let's talk a little bit about that. I know we have, you know, world Homeless Day coming up. You know, share a little bit about that, but I just wanted you know our listeners to know a little bit about you know, maybe, how they can get involved and how they can help in this issue. Kelly: Yeah, I think you know. I think we have done such an incredible job of getting people into some type of permanent solution, so we're in decent shape there. But it was, as the Chronicle said, it's duct tape and determination. When you have to rely on funding that comes from disasters or pandemics, that is a terrible planning model and not very fiscally sound. So I think a couple of things for us. One is broadening our perspective in this phase we're kind of calling it phase four, and I think it's important to realize that systems should always have phases or pivot points, because systems die when they don't read themselves and make sure they're on the right track is kind of an overhaul of our data. What is our data telling us, but what is it, more importantly, not telling us? What do we need to know about who is still on the street? What do we need to know about our funding sources and what's available? We know that we're gonna run out of funding because of COVID by 2025. I'm going to make the argument over and over again that we are not. Homelessness used to be able to be resolved by people coming together and kind of helping a family or helping an individual. We've had so many other systems end up feeding people into homelessness, that we actually need a system response, and that includes system funding, which typically aligns with some type of consistent, regular money that's funding the system, so we never have to be out of balance again, and that's one of the things we're working on. The second is we've actually been going out and doing community mapping to help people understand community is not given, it's built. So if you want a different kind of community that you live in, you're going to have to get engaged and that's one of the ways that you can volunteer. So maybe you have a church, that you're in a neighborhood that people get fed, but the food containers and stuff get left all over the street or there's whatever. Well, you could complain about the trash, or you could complain the city doesn't pick up the trash, or you all could start a walking group. Everybody needs exercise, so you have choices in how you decide to engage in your community. I do think becoming much more aware and understanding how the system works and doesn't work resolves a lot of people's frustration about seeing somebody on the street. We also have to have much better interventions for individuals who are severely mentally ill and have substance use issues. We have housed a lot of people who apartments and appointments works really well, for we have some individuals who just cannot make good decisions to care for themselves, and we're going to have to address that and I think that's one of those things where people don't understand you said this earlier right now the way the homeless response system is set up. Chris: The federal dollars are all housing, coming from the housing side, and yet what we face and what you know, you and and your team know that we face is a very severe mental illness issue and kind of what's the hardest to serve, yet no dollars from the mental health side of the equation. Kelly: Right and certainly not at the level it needs to be in. Including residential care, additional beds and substance use is even far worse funded and I understand people are like, well, I don't want to. You know that's. People just need to figure out how to get their lives together, I agree. But you're making a choice then. You're either deciding we're not going to help somebody so they'll get where you want them to go, or you'll leave them on the street so they won't go where they're going to go. So you know again, these are choices that we are making. I am so happy to live in a city and a county that is as generous as it is. I mean, houston is one of the, I think, premier cities for the purpose of the fact that people actually care, kind, friendly, smart, innovative. I think the other piece for us is really having to get more upstream. That 40% scares me. That is devastating to a system you want to right-size or actually shrink Like. I don't want you to have me on a call 10 years from now and I've grown the homeless response system by three sizes Like somebody should fire me. That's not-. Chris: Work yourself out of a job. Kelly: Right, exactly, and so right-sizing ours, with the right amount of funding and then really pushing upstream to figure out how healthcare doesn't release people back onto the street with serious illnesses. Re-entry that's dealt with. Somebody who's hit a hard time can quickly get rehoused because we're helping for a few months. That's just being good neighbors, right. So I think that's pretty easy for people. We have a lot of work ahead of us, but I have the world's smartest team and the people who built this system and have watched over it the last 12 years. We're only gonna figure out the right and have watched over it the last 12 years. You know we're only going to figure out the right and the best path with the resources and the influence we have coming forward. Chris: Very good. Yeah, I think the future is very bright with the right people. So you know this is, you know, fundamentally, it's a business podcast and one of the things that you know, some of the data that I love to share is I always tell people, you know, when it comes to this homeless response and taking care of our neighbors who have fallen on this, you know, unfortunate time, there's a compassionate side, you know, which is, you know, obvious. But there's also a business side and some people you know connect on that and just share the numbers on the cost it takes to, you know, house someone on an annual basis versus if they're left on the street and use our public health system, et cetera. Because to me, if business owners are listening and thinking about this, the investment in the homeless response system is a no-brainer. Kelly: Right when we look at the numbers and I'm going to add for inflation, because we'll probably be in a recession next year is what I understand. Of course, they say that every year and I'm like, really at some point you know we're either or we're not, I don't know. No reason to even use the R word, right? Can we come up with something else, because this feels like a whole new thing. But I think you know you're talking about to house somebody and to make sure that they have access to the current systems that they need. Through their appointments and I always stress this they do not get to live for free, there is no free housing. They have to pay a percentage of their income or their benefits 30%, like the rest of us, and so for that it's $19,000 to $25,000 a year, not an overextensive amount of money you can go up to, depending on how often somebody uses other services up to $250,000 for them to stay on the street, and the reason for that is that every time you call the police on them, you have to count that money. Every time they go into an emergency room, you have to count all of that money. It's not to say they won't use those services, but they'll use them appropriately, which right sizes the dollars in the systems. So, right now, all this money. People are saying, well, we don't have the money. I'm like we do, we're systems. So right now, all this money. People are saying, well, we don't have the money. Chris: I'm like we do, we're just it's in the wrong bucket. Kelly: That's right. And if we moved it over and we agreed to just pay this for the next three years? I mean, if you're willing to pay a hundred dollars a month for charity, why are you not willing to pay one percent on your beer or your vaping? You don't even see that and get it to the point where you see the reduction in the rest of your costs and then you actually feel the relief on the tax end. You know, because you're not paying more and more on those parts of it. Wayne Young with the mental health services demonstrates that from a diversion point, for people with severe mental health to get into care is a one to $5 save. So it's $1 for him to do. It costs $5 for them to stay on the street, so economically it makes no sense. It's not cheaper. You're avoiding the problem instead of solving it and from any good business standpoint that's not what you do. You define the problem, you solve the problem. Chris: Right To summarize right I mean support the housing homeless response system. It's roughly $19,000 to $25,000 a year to do it and help us move people into housing and off the street. Leave them on the street. You're looking at annual cost of $100,000 to $250,000 to our system. Kelly: Right. And just the burnout rate of everybody trying to solve that and the trauma and the individual. I'm always going to add compassion to the dollars. But if you actually really care about that individual instead of just want them off the individual, I'm always going to add compassion to the dollars. But you know, if you actually really care about that individual instead of just want them off the street, I don't actually even care. You can have either of those opinions, doesn't matter to me. But it's going to be cheaper, more efficient, more effective if you buy into the response system and ensure that we have the right interventions for those people and don't have to wait till something terrible happens to be able to do this again. Chris: And ultimately all of that will make our community better and stronger. Kelly: Absolutely, absolutely. When you look at the best player on a team, you also have to look at the one who's struggling. And you bring up the one who's struggling. You spend less time on the one who's already figured it all out. But if you're in a team, you're in a community, you're looking at who's struggling and how do we get them to some level of consistency in their lives or whatever. Otherwise, we're always going to have to play down to that denominator. Chris: Kelly, this has been a fascinating conversation. Thank you Really appreciated your thoughts and sharing those with our listeners. I want to turn it to a little bit more of a fun, lighter side before we wrap up. Excellent, what was your? You may have said this earlier, cause you mentioned something when you were a teenager. What was your first job? Kelly: My first job was working at an ice cream store called Farrell's. I grew up in the Pacific Northwest and every time it was somebody's birthday you had to bang out the drum. You had to slide it over your head and bang out the drum, and they get this big thing called the zoo, which was like 150 scoops of ice cream and you had to wear this horrifying outfit with one of those straw hats that never sits on my head Cause I'm a little pointed, I think, and I you learn very quickly and this is why I love anybody who's ever done food service and was successful in it and why I have an affinity for them. You learn very quickly how difficult it is to run restaurants on margin, but also nobody wanted to do that and had to do it every single time. So that was my first real paying job that I got to check. Chris: Gotcha, yeah, and I knew you weren't from Texas and grew up in the Northwest, but you've been here long enough to be able to answer this question. Do you prefer Tex-Mex or barbecue? Kelly: Well, that's a good question. That's hard to decide, that's hard to define. I probably eat Tex-Mex more often, but I prefer barbecue, okay. Chris: Unique answer. Kelly: Yeah, I like it. That's an and yes answer. That's an improv technique. Very politically motivated or correct answer I just don't go to barbecue as much, but if I really sat down and thought about it, I prefer it. I just don't, for whatever reason, don't get there, which seems weird. Chris: Very good. Well, kelly. Thanks again for taking the time. This has been a great conversation. I'm looking forward to getting this out on all the social media. I hope people will listen and learn more about what is going on in our homeless response system. Kelly: Oh well, thank you so much for having me. I mean, I would do anything for you. I think you're amazing, so appreciate your time this morning. All right, talk with you later. Special Guest: Kelly Young.

In this episode of Building Texas Business, I learned valuable lessons from Patrick Terry, founder of the popular Austin-based restaurant chain P Terry's Burger Stand. Patrick explains how the company's success has been centered around its commitment to natural ingredients, competitive pricing, and exceptional customer and employee care. We explored the challenges of maintaining price discipline amidst rising costs and inflation, including during the COVID-19 pandemic. Patrick also shared insights from his origin story, hiring practices that bring on passionate individuals, and the importance of company culture. He also touched on the strategic considerations that underpin P Terry's expansion plans into new markets like Houston and the employee support programs in place. SHOW HIGHLIGHTS I discussed the inception of P Terry's Burger Stand in 2005 with founder Patrick Terry, focusing on their strategy of using high-quality, natural ingredients at competitive prices to differentiate from fast food giants like McDonald's and Starbucks. Patrick emphasized the importance of customer feedback and employee well-being in ensuring operational efficiency and customer satisfaction, without relying heavily on marketing or advertising. We explored the challenges of maintaining pricing discipline amidst inflation and supply chain disruptions, particularly during the COVID-19 pandemic, and how P Terry's managed to outperform competitors with consistent pricing strategies. Patrick shared the origin story of P Terry's, highlighting their commitment to quality food and a strategic hiring process that prioritizes employees' passion for the restaurant business. The unique approach to food preparation at P Terry's through their own commissary was discussed, showcasing how it helps maintain quality and cost control, along with their plans for expansion into Houston. We delved into the significance of company culture and employee care, including P Terry's innovative non-interest loan program for staff in financial need, as a means to foster loyalty and engagement. Patrick recounted the emotional journey of running the business, his brief hiatus from leadership in 2019, and the decision to reengage with renewed vigor, underscoring the importance of leadership in maintaining company culture. The strategic expansion from Austin to San Antonio and the considerations involved, such as logistical feasibility and location selection based on cost and accessibility, were discussed. We highlighted the balance between choosing affordable locations and ensuring they are accessible to customers, using demographic trends and growth areas to inform business decisions. Patrick shared personal anecdotes, including his early entrepreneurial ventures and the cultural philosophy at P Terry's, emphasizing the importance of setting high standards and leading by example. LINKSShow Notes Previous Episodes About BoyarMiller About P.Terry's GUESTS Patrick TerryAbout Patrick TRANSCRIPT (AI transcript provided as supporting material and may contain errors) Chris: In this episode you will meet Patrick Terry, founder and owner of P Terry's Burger Stand. Patrick attributes the success of P Terry's to two fundamental strategies First, work hard and listen to your customer. And second, take care of your people and they will take care of your customer. Patrick, I want to thank you for coming on Texas building Texas business and it's just a pleasure to have you on as a guest. Patrick: Well, thanks, I'm honored to be here. I really am. Chris: So I think the first place to start is for you just to tell us, those that don't know of P Terry's, what is P Terry's and kind of. What are you known for? Patrick: Well, so my wife and I started P Terry's 2005. So we'll be celebrating our 20th anniversary next month, next year, and the idea behind it we sell we're a quick service hamburger stand, and the idea behind it was if we were going to compete with, you know, the giants in the industry the McDonald's and the Burger Kings and the Jack in the Boxes and the Chick-fil-A's you know everybody. You know we're going to have to find a way to be different and you know I talk about so often. People want to get into business and they find a retail store or a restaurant or a concept that they like and they go across the street and pretty much do the same thing as the guy that they liked. And when you do that, all you've done in a best case scenario, is you take half his business. It's pretty hard to take all of his business. If you're going to do the same thing, then you're going up against the fact that he's established. Clearly he's doing okay because you liked it and he's there. And so I think that's the biggest mistake new business owners and entrepreneurs make is they like a yogurt stand and they go across the street and they do the same yogurt stand. And so, all that said we were going to be different, and where we were going to be different was that we were going to offer the quality beef and the food that we serve is really that of an upscale restaurant, to be honest and we were going to do it through a drive-thru and a dine-in at a fast food restaurant, but we weren't. Because of that, we weren't, of course, able to charge any more than the fast food guy across the street, so what we were trying to do was make ourselves bulletproof. We were going to offer a quality product that you couldn't get at a fast food restaurant at a price that was the same as the guy across the street that wasn't serving that quality food. And obviously, if you're able to pull that off, it's a huge advantage. And by doing so what we did, we established right away that we were going to look for a fair profit, and that was what it was going to be. And so if I could sell an order of French fries and I might be able to get $2.50 for that order of French fries, I looked at the cost and I'm thinking well, actually, my overall cost of goods, I only have to sell those franchise at $2.15. We have very low overhead. We have a small office with a G&A under 6% and we work hard and we work smart and we don't spend money on marketing or advertising. We don't have that luxury. We don't pay, of course, any franchise fees because we own the business. And so we were able to pull it off. And so we serve a black Angus, all natural beef, and what that means is it's antibiotic free, it's hormone free, it's a vegetarian fed, it's a pure beef. I mean it really is a great product. We serve the same thing with a hormone-free chicken. And you know, our buns don't have high fructose corn syrup. Our potatoes come from Idaho and they're fresh and they're cooked in a canola oil which doesn't have any hydrogenated oils. I mean, we literally just went down the line and said, okay, this is what we're going to do. Now we're going to have to make it work and by keeping our costs down and, frankly, working really hard, really hard with a lot of smart people, we were able to pull it off. We opened up our 34th store two weeks ago in Cibolo, outside of San Antonio, and, as you know, we're on our way to Houston. We have our first Houston location in Richmond I believe it is in October, and we're going to have five. We plan for five Houston locations. One of the other things that we do that makes this unique is that we have our own commissary. We cook we do a lot of cooking and for our restaurants ourselves, so we bake our own banana bread, we bake our own cookies from scratch, we make our own veggie burgers from scratch. We take chicken breast all chicken breast, boneless, skinless breast and we actually grind it into a patty for a chicken burger and for our chicken bites. And all that's done in the commissary by our own staff. We share the offices, share a space with the commissary, and every morning three or four trucks go out and deliver that product to the stands, and so we're able to keep our costs down by doing that as well. We pretty much just take charge of everything we do, yeah and that's what separated us. Chris: Well, it sounds like what I'm hearing is a very focused, you know thought into what you wanted this business to be and I guess what you didn't want it to be. So you know what I heard you talk about is, you know, obviously very cost conscious, so that you could be profitable, but also singular, focused on this. You know premium quality food at a lower price point and you know really it sounds like in the beginning, very focused on what profit margins would look like, what your cost of goods would be. Before you even opened a store it seems like. Patrick: Yeah, and I don't want to make it sound like we're smarter than we are, because a lot of that stuff just you know fortunately just works itself out. Now where it got tricky is when COVID hit and the supply chain issues and the inflation that we've seen and where we've benefited from that is by having always done what we've done in the last 19 years and everyone's read about. You know the McDonald's Big Mac combo meal. It's for $16 in Idaho and you know McDonald's are great operators. So I got nothing bad to say. But every time you take a price increase if you're not looking over your shoulder when you do that if you're not conscious of? am I really doing everything I can before I go up on this price? Patrick: way I can make this a nickel instead of a diamond. Unless you've done that from the start, you find yourself taking price increases to cover up mistakes or issues of the day, and it becomes this band-aid that's very hard to take off, right. Chris: We've seen that in your industry right, where the classic pass it on to the consumer, and then in the fast food wars just over the recent months, the consumers rebelling. Patrick: Absolutely, absolutely. And so when you know Starbucks and McDonald's show, you know negative comp store sales, last quarter, for the first time since you know COVID hit, we were up 8% in our compor sales. And because, frankly, when you take our strategy and you stick with it and the hard part is sticking with it it's really easy to look around and go, man, that guy over there he's getting six bucks for that burger and I'm only getting five. I could probably go up a quarter and that's the illusion, right, you get into that game and there's a mind game and if you're able to keep pushing that off and, trust me, it's a hell of a lot easier going up a quarter. When you're able to pull that off, then you don't go down that rabbit hole and find yourself in a situation where so many of our competitors have found themselves. I mean, I look around and see what similar pricing is, I mean what similar menu items are and what the pricing of our competitors are, and I'm astounded. I mean there are some of our competitors are 20 percent higher than we are on their menu, and you know we're all serving food out of a drive-thru and so it's a dangerous game. It really is. And so I think that I think you've hit on it exactly the way it is, it's a discipline and it's every day. Chris: Yeah, well, that's what Jim Collins talks about in Good to Great. You know, discipline, people with disciplined thought and disciplined action is how you get from good to great. Yeah, so let me, let me take you back, cause I mean I love the thought that went into to the concept from the beginning, but what inspired you to, in 2005, open up a hamburger stand? Patrick: Well, thank you for asking. It's almost embarrassing, I apparently. When I finally did it, a score of my friends contacted me to remind me how much I had been boring them for so many years that I had always wanted to open up a hamburger stand. And do not ask me where that came from. I have no idea, other than to say that I love the idea of serving a hamburger, french fries and a milkshake. I just, I just think that's glorious and I know that's probably way over the top, but there's something so satisfying and it's probably because it's my favorite meal that I just can't get past it. So I had always wanted to do it and I had a particular location that I had in mind and I lost it five years earlier and it sat empty for five years and finally it became available, and so that's when we opened up at Lamar and Barton Springs in Austin. Chris: I love that. Well, I mean. So, like, like any good entrepreneur, in my view, you followed your passion, your favorite meal, something that you have a passion about doing. Patrick: Let me tell you, if you don't love this business, you better not get in it, because it is consuming, it's all consuming. And so you know I look around. When I used to, you know, when I would hire somebody, I would remind them that if they didn't really love the restaurant business or what we do every day, you are not going to be happy, and if you do love it, you're going to be very happy, because we're drinking out of a fire hose here pretty much every day. Chris: Let's talk a little bit about hiring, because I think that's really regardless of the industry, really regardless of the industry. I mean, companies are made of people and you've got to get the right people to help, you know, maybe bring your vision to light, your strategies to life. What have you done over the years to make sure that you are making that right hire decision? I assume it's evolved over time and I think there's at least a couple of pieces. I'd love to maybe hear how it was starting out, but oh, yeah, it was. I know that coming out of COVID it had to be even more challenging, because people wouldn't even come to work. Patrick: Right. Well, when we first opened, the first day we opened, my wife Kathy was there and she had no restaurant experience. I had some and I put her through it. It was. You know, it was very difficult, and she likes to tell the story that she looked around the very first day and realized that there was no way we were going to do this by ourselves. And so the first three years we were in the stands every day. I mean, I worked every day, morning to night, and by doing that I got to know, obviously, everything that it took to run the stand, every position. But I also got to see the people that were there and I was able to separate the ones that were working out and the ones that weren't. And I was not a good hire at first. There is this you know, boy, it's easy to take what you think is the simple route and just put a body in place and, man, if it's the wrong body, everyone's miserable, and so it took me a while. I just had a certain, but I was not going to give in. I had a certain level of employee or stand or team member that I was, that I had envisioned, and so I wasn't going to lower the bar. And so the first three years were really difficult because a lot of people you bring in had other unfortunately had other fast food experience and they brought a lot of bad habits with them. And so you know, it's one of those deals when you hire somebody, frankly, they either have to be scared of you or they have to like you, and I'm not the guy that they're going to be scared of. That's just not the role I want to play. It's not the business I want to run. We're not always going to agree, but my hope is that we like and respect each other and respect each other. The other thing is what we learned being there every day is we learned so? Many of our employees' lives are completely different than mine. You know I've been around for a long time. I had some money in the bank. You know I had a college education, I had a career before this, so it's really easy to live in your bubble and not recognize it, and so I tell this story a lot. We had an employee, vinny and this was 18 years ago and, by the way, I'm proud to say Vinny still works for us, as do a lot of those people in those first few years. They're still with us and Vinny's truck broke down and I had worked all day and I didn't want to do his job that night, so I convinced him just to get in a cab and I would pay for the cab. And then when Vinny got there, I said what's going on with the truck? And he said well, it's going to cost $150 to get fixed and I don't have $150. So I handed him $150 and I said pay me when you can, because I need you here and I need your truck fixed Now if I'm in a corporate office, then he probably loses his job because he didn't show up. Right, right, I don't answer the phone, we don't have that conversation. So then I've lost an employee that I've had for 18 years. But, more importantly, I understand the position they're in, and so the very first thing we did from that is we created a non-interest loan program for all of our employees. So if you walk in to my office right now or you don't even have to do that you tell your manager, and the manager is going to make a phone call and you say I'm behind in my rent or I have a, you know, whatever it is, you're going to get a loan, and if it's under, if it's five hundred dollars or under, we don't even ask, we just you get it. If it's more than that, we want to know what's going on, you know. And so what we did is we made hiring easier. This is a really hard thing to do every day. The last thing I need to do is make it more difficult. So so we started by taking care of our people better than most, and they told their friends, they told their relatives, and so they understood that this is a two-way street and I'm going to take care of you, but you have to take care of me and, of course, the way you take care of me is you take care of the customer. Advert: Hello friends, this is Chris Hanslick, your Building Texas business host. Did you know that Boyer Miller, the producer of this podcast, is a business law firm that works with entrepreneurs, corporations and business leaders? Our team of attorneys serve as strategic partners to businesses by providing legal guidance to organizations of all sizes. Get to know the firm at boyMillercom. And thanks for listening to the show. Chris: That's great. I mean the idea and I think it's true in any organization. If the people that work for you think that you genuinely care about them as a person, not just that they get the job done, you're going to create loyalty and engagement with that employee. Naturally, hearing your story leads me to the question about culture. Let's talk about that. How would you describe the culture at P Terry's? Obviously, the fundamental philosophy you just described, I would assume, is some of the foundational elements of the culture that you're trying to build or have built. So what can you share about that? Patrick: Well, I'll tell you the obvious. You and your listeners already know this culture is the most important thing. There's nothing even close to second when it comes to running your business. The culture that you establish speaks for who you are, not only to your employees, but to your customers. Speaks for who you are, not only to your employees, but to your customers. There's nothing more important. I can't even think of number two. I'll tell you an interesting story very quickly. I hope it's real. I had a person call me and want to visit with me about the business, and they had a very successful online clothing company and they were about to open up stores for the first time. Everything they had always sold was online, and he asked me what it took to open the store and take care of the employees for the very first time. Right, this is all of a sudden. It's not a click, it's a conversation, and I probably talked for 15 or 20 minutes about everything we do every day for our employees. I thought I really thought his head was going to explode. I mean, he. It was so beyond the realm for him. And I get it right. This is like, and what I was trying to explain to him was you're, you may be selling the same item, but you've got an entirely different business model now. I mean, now you have, for the very first time, you have a person representing you selling that product to someone. And boy, you better get that right. And so that's really what it boils down to is understanding what we do every day and what our people do, and the culture has to be led by me. You know, I read a great line a couple of weeks ago. Somebody said to the person running the company, what's your job? And he said my job is to be right. And so when you accept that as your job and, by the way, I don't do it by myself, oh my Lord, not even close right, I mean, I've got all. I got these people around me that are just terrific, and but I certainly go to them and we certainly talk about everything. But the first thing that this has to be established is I'm here and I answer my phone and if, if you're in the hospital, I need to be there and make sure everything's okay. If you have a family member that has an issue, if there's something I can do, I got to do it. And then you have to understand everyone has to understand that there's a bar set and no one goes below the bar, and I can never go below the bar, obviously, and so it's really for me and for P Terry's, it's really by example, and if you know, dogs and kids can spot a phony a mile away. And so if you're not sincere in what you're trying to do and what you believe in and I've had some people that work for me that I could tell immediately you know you're faking it and you know you just don't feel the same way the rest of us do, and nobody wants to be in that position. So you're not happy here and I'm not happy with you here, so let's just shake hands and walk away from each other. So there's a lot of that going on, but the culture and what we do every day, the first thing we do is we just take care of our people and then we count on them to take care of the customer. Chris: Yeah, Some of what you're saying there I've heard others speak to. We certainly have that philosophy here in the business we run in this firm and that is we say we hire and fire from culture. Right, you have to know what the culture is. You have to look for the people the best you can through interview processes and hire from culture. More importantly, when you figure out someone's, you know you set the standard and you can't go below it. But if you see someone that's consistently going below it or faking it, then you've got to move fast and they need to be out of the organization. And it doesn't have to be harsh to your point. Chris: They're not happy, no one's happy. They're going to be happier somewhere else that has a different set of standards that connect with them. But you've established your standards. You've tied behavior that you can demonstrate is consistent with that that comes from the top down, and then everyone can be on the same page. Patrick: And it has to be. It's almost like, you know, being in the middle of an orchestra. You know we're all playing the song and we've all got a part to play, and if one of us, you know, drops the violin, it's not going to feel sound the same. Yeah, so true. Chris: So you know, reading up on, you know the goings on at P Terry's. I want to kind of turn the conversation a little bit to the last maybe I guess it's been four or five years you did something that is not easy for a founder to do in 2019. You decided to step down as CEO of you know, your proverbial baby let's talk about that. Obviously not the first time an entrepreneur has done that and kind of handed reins over. What led to that decision and how was it for you to kind of transition out of the CEO role? Patrick: Well, if it's okay, I want to step back a couple more years before that and talk about something that it really doesn't make the papers very often. That, and talk about something that it really doesn't make the papers very often. We had at one point I had just kind of hit a wall. I was exhausted. I was working with a kind of a person that I had next to me that was, you know, my right hand man. It was just it was. We had been going at such a pace for so long. You know, my wife and I have funded, had funded this business all by ourselves. The entire time we borrowed money but we didn't have any other investors, so everything kind of fell on us every day and the idea came up that maybe we should sell because this is just exhausting. And we did a dog and pony show and had a half a dozen legitimate buyers and we got a wonderful offer. You know, as I said to the person when I turned him down, you offered me enough money to go live on an island and I've got two little girls. I don't get to live on an island even if I wanted to. So I appreciate the offer very much and I think what I was doing when I did it, and it was sincere, I wasn't trying to waste anybody's time. But I think after the offer came in and my wife and I both agreed that we didn't want to do that. This is not how we wanted our legacy to end. I think I was looking for validation. I had never been validated for the work I had done, other than you know that the we were allowed to expand. Our business was good, our customers were very appreciative, but from an industry standpoint, I didn't know what we had created. I really didn't. I'm not the guy that I'm terrible at networking. I don't go to. I don't go to meetings, I don't go to conventions, I just I really it's not my deal, I really just work. And so I got that validation and then I made a decision that the next decision we made was do we want to leave Central Texas? You know the Austin area, and I had never done that. And so I thought well, I got some great advice one time that I don't want to learn something that somebody else has already learned, that I don't want to learn something that somebody else has already learned, and so I chose to bring somebody in with the experience of having done that, and Todd came in. Todd Korver came in. He had a great resume, same moral compass that we have here, a really good guy. And what I was finding was that, no matter what, I'm still here, and there are certain things that I'm just comfortable with, that, if I'm going to be alive and still owning the business, that it's important to me that we do every day. And so it wasn't that Todd did a bad job. It's just that I looked around and said, you know, there's stuff going on that I think we can do a little differently. Maybe we can do it better. I don't know, because I don't have all the answers, but I think I'm more comfortable in the front seat than I am in the back. The departure was amicable, he's a good guy. He's got a great job here in Austin. He's going to do very well there. But I just found that if I'm going to be in the office every day, you know I might as well do what I really want to do, and so that led to me coming back, and so, you know, I think it also gave me a new energy that I hadn't had because Todd did some heavy lifting for four years, and so we kind of have come back with the vengeance. We got the idea four days after Christmas that maybe we should really take a serious look at serving chicken bites. We compete against everybody in the business and Chick-fil-A is, you know, the leader, and so a lot of our customers had told us hey, the only fight in our family. You know, my kid wants a chicken bite at Chick-fil-A and I want a hamburger or a chicken burger from P Terry's. And so, you know, the 29th of December we had this conversation and the 16th of March they were for sale in our stores. We made them out of our own kitchen and we created them and, you know, worked on sauces and stuff, and so we've really been going very fast at that. But that you know, and I found that I'm just much more happier if I'm going to, if I'm going to be around, if it's going to still be my company. I'm just happier being the guy that's running it. Chris: I understand. Well, it had to be difficult, especially so it sounds like you stepped out of the CEO seat but stayed, I guess, involved in the company. That had to be challenging, right, it was one thing if you kind of, like you said, go to some Island or just complete a separate business, but and I, you know, I did my best. Patrick: I didn't think it was fair to, you know, be in Todd's office every day pounding the desk, going why aren't we doing this, why can't you do this? I, you know, I let him run the company because that was the only fair thing to do, but I was in the office next door and so you know, you're right, I'm not on an island and so, yeah, at some point it just was like easier for me just to do it. Chris: So let's let's talk a little bit about the expansion. You mentioned that you had expanded beyond kind of the Austin area into kind of San Antonio. You just mentioned a store in that area your plans to come to Houston you mentioned just a minute ago, and ultimately five stores, what? I want to talk about maybe have you share, is kind of what goes into that thinking of the strategy, of when it's right to kind of take those steps which I would assume are, you know, somewhat trepidatious. Patrick: Yo, absolutely, and what we found is that we were interested to see in the challenge. Absolutely, and what we found is that we were interested to see in the challenge. And you know we really had established ourselves in central Texas. We have a lot of stores here, you know we're. I mean I have there's Lamar Boulevard in Austin. I have three stores on Lamar Boulevard, you know, and about three miles apart. So we're pretty inundated and I just wanted to see, I believe that our concept traveled outside of Austin. I believe that our concept really works most places and I wanted to see what we could do. And so San Antonio made the most sense because of our commissary and our delivery, so we can be in San Antonio in just over an hour. And that made it. And, by the way, we just went down, you know, i-35 and we opened a store in Kyle and one in San Marcus and one in New Braunfels and then into San Antonio and so so from a logistics standpoint it made sense, but it was really kind of a challenge. Now, I don't, you know, there is something I truly believe in and you know I have to tell you real quickly, I spoke at a UT, at the MBA program, one time it was a wonderful class, and the professor called me after the class and he said I got to tell you the students loved it and I thank you for coming. And I said well, I appreciate that. And he said but I got to tell you I'm probably not going to be inviting you back. And I said totally fine, can you ask, can you tell me why? And he said well, there's nowhere on the syllabus that just says work hard and listen to your customers. And I said okay, well, I get it, cause that's, frankly, all I know to do, to the God's honest truth is that's all I need, that's all I know what to do. And so you know we take. What I was getting to is, at some point you take a leap of faith and you've listened to the people around you and at some point, obviously, you're the one that has to make the final decision. And then you, just you know, you trust your experience over all these years and you know you make the jump. You just make the jump. Chris: So I guess just you know, since I live in Houston, what was it about Houston that makes you think that you know again the concept travels? Why the first location in Richmond? What are some of the things there that you know, you and your team see and are excited about that you and your team see and are excited about. Patrick: So we picked that part of Houston because we could drive from Austin again for our commissary until at some point we will hopefully have a satellite commissary in Houston. But a lot of it is the loops are of interest. There's a lot of growth there, there's a lot of room for expansion and, frankly, when you get in the middle of all of your fair city it gets very expensive. So you kind of go to the loops because the land is cheaper and the leases are cheaper. So there's definitely some of that. I'm just being very honest about it. I mean, there's some great locations but I can't spend $300,000 a year on a ground lease, you know it doesn't, I think it's a well. Chris: the transparency is what we're after here, and I think, again, kind of for a listener to go look, you may have some great ideas, but be smart about that expansion. It goes back to the first thing you said. You've been mindful in this business of controlling cost, and obviously I can speak to it. You're picking locations where the population's growing, so that's not a bad thing either. Right, your demographics must line up with the things that you know makes a store successful. Patrick: And at the same time and I've got a competitor across the street from me, across the highway from me, in San Marcos, and you know he picked a really bad location and my assumption is he picked it because it was cheap. So you know there's a balance here, right? You know you got the land for $60,000 a year and the reason is because nobody can get to it, so you got to be careful about that. You know, I had a friend of mine come to me. He and his wife came to me years ago and said I think we're going to get into the restaurant business. And I said why? And he said, well, we're going to sell, I think we're going to sell sandwiches. And I said what are you going to do that? And he said, well, people have to eat. And I said yeah, but they don't have to eat at your restaurant. And unfortunately, you know there is. You know, you just have to look at this stuff so realistically. And that balance of, yeah, I'd love to be in that location, but it's a wonderful location, but it costs me so much. All I'm going to do is sell burgers and, you know, not make any money, that's right, I get to pay the landlord to sell burgers, right? Yeah, that's exactly what it is. That boy, that's a tough. That's a tough way to spend your day. Chris: Well, patrick, thank you so much for sharing the story and the ups and downs, but I'm looking forward to having a burger once you get here you said you did it in Austin, obviously, and it is as good as you described. I want to turn a little bit to just a little personal side of things. Obviously, you've said a couple of times you just know how to work hard. What was your first job, even as a kid? Patrick: So I had a lemonade, a Kool-Aid, stand in front of my, in front of our house I was probably five or six and my dad was, and my parents were always there and always had suggestions and my dad came up to me and he said you need to put the because we lived in West Texas. I grew up in Abilene and you think your summers are hot, so my dad said you need to put the temperature on the. On your poster and and I said so I wrote it's 102, kool-aid, five cents. And you know the car stopped and it was such a great idea and so I always had that influence. I said that was my probably my first inroad. I remember in seventh grade I started selling candy bars there was no you know, costco or Walmart or anything back then or Sam's to the grocery store and buy a little six-pack of Hershey's. My mom would go and take me and I started selling so many candy bars at the 10.30 break that I was messing up the senior store at noon and the superintendent called me in and told me to stop. So that's funny, all right. Chris: So this is a question I ask everyone, and I'm incredibly intrigued to get your answer, because you're the self-described hamburger guy. Right, I got to know do you prefer Tex-Mex or barbecue? Patrick: Oh, I'll go to Tex-Mex all day, okay. Chris: I'll go to Tex-Mex. Patrick: And I love barbecue, don't get me wrong. But I got to tell you if I can have chicken enchiladas with the verde sauce and a side of rice and beans. I am doing just fine. Chris: Okay, so it's your second favorite meal. Patrick: it sounds like yeah, absolutely, my poor children. I'll tell you this real quick. I know you want to wind it down. My daughter is 16 now and when she was 10, she went on a water ski camp and she spent the day. And she got in the car and she said I said what'd you have for lunch? And she said they served these submarine sandwiches. And I said, oh, what'd you get? And she said a meatball sandwich. And I said, oh, that's great. And I said you don't seem like you're in a good mood. And she said I didn't know those existed because my poor children eat P Terry's every day. So that's, you know, that's it's a family deal. I love it. Chris: It reminds me of the story of you know, it was in a movie a while back right when the parents try to tell convince the kids that yogurt was vanilla ice cream exactly. Patrick, thanks again. Really enjoyed meeting you and hearing your story. Congratulations on the success and best of luck as you expand and move into the Houston market. Patrick: I appreciate it Well. I'd love to meet you one day and grab a burger. Chris: Let's do it, in fact, let's stay in touch on when that Richmond store is open, and I'll be there. Patrick: Absolutely, absolutely, and I'll even buy. Chris: What do you think? That's a heck of a deal. Very good, well, thanks again. Patrick: Thank you, I enjoyed it very much.

On this episode, my guest is Sean P. Smith, an Assistant Professor in the Department of Culture Studies at Tilburg University in the Netherlands. Much of his research has focused on the relationship between social media and tourism, and how colonial histories shape today's ideologies and visual cultures of travel. The inequalities that result from many forms of tourism development, he argues, are intimately linked with how tourists create content for Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube, and the ways tourists frame themselves in landscapes and alongside local residents often replay colonial hierarchies.Show Notes: Why Study Instagram?The Pre-tour Narrative (Edward Bruner, Raul Salazar)The Habitus of Tourism (or How We Got Here)The Promontory Witness (or that photo)The Logic of InfluenceEmptying the Landscape (John Urry)The Techno-Generational DivideMedia EcologyOther Horizons in OmanHomework:Sean P. Smith - Tilburg UniversitySean P. Smith: Twitter / X | Instagram | Google Scholar (Articles)Transcript:Chris: [00:00:00] Welcome, Sean, to the pod. Thank you so much for being willing to join us to speak about your work. Sean: Thanks very much for having me. Chris: My pleasure. I'm curious, Sean where you're speaking from today and, and how the world is, how the world might be housing you there. Sean: Well, it's very rainy and dark. I'm in the Southern Netherlands, an area called North Brebant, where I just moved less than a month ago.So, in many places of moving around, if so, getting used to this one. Chris: Sean, I found out about your work from one of the pod's listeners who sent in a link to one of your academic articles entitled, Instagram Abroad, Performance, Consumption, and Colonial Narrative in Tourism. Now, I've been ruminating on the effect that social media has on tourism, spectacle, surveillance, and cultures of disposability for a long time now.So I'm really excited to speak with you today. And [00:01:00] likewise parts of the podcast are shared via Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, so there's always this sense of kind of feeding the machine. unaware and perhaps more aware each time. And so first then, I'm curious why focus on Instagram in the context of critical tourism studies? What makes it different from say Facebook or Twitter?Sean: Yeah, that's a really good question Chris. I think with Instagram, in many contexts around the world, certainly not universally, but it's the social media platform that is most readily identified with not just tourism, but the way that people represent themselves engaging in tourism. It's very image driven.Of course, people do write captions, they do engage in other forms of storytelling, but nowadays it's mostly pictures and especially reels, arguably in the last few years. And for a long time, this [00:02:00] has been could almost say the dream work of tourism going back 200, maybe longer years. So even though today, I think you can find forms of tourism well represented TikTok to varying degrees on Facebook.Instagram, at least in many of the places where I've conducted research, is the place that one goes to both learn about places to travel and also to show how oneself travels.Chris: And I'm kind of imagining that we're more or less in the same age range, but I'm curious if on your travels, you mentioned just briefly that you had also spent time backpacking as a younger person and I'm curious if Instagram existed at the time and also if this dream work was evident to you in your travels.Sean: It was. I think I was relatively young when I got my first [00:03:00] smartphone, but certainly not as young as people nowadays. I must have been maybe 22 or 23. So I did have some years of traveling before I think Instagram really reshaped the way that tourism is done, not just for people that actually use this app, but regardless of whether or not anyone's ever downloaded it on their phone, I think Instagram has had a significant impact on the way that tourism is done. So when I first got a smartphone, I was in a period of my life where I was able to travel quite frequently and that was something that I was really pursuing at the time. And Instagram was a way that I was able to engage in a long running interest in photography, but also kind of a diary of where I had been, but certainly one that was legible and sort of visible to other people.And it was through that, you could say "performance" of travel that began to think a bit more critically about this app and other social media [00:04:00] platforms as well. And the way that it was reshaping tourism destinations. Chris: Mm. Mm. Yeah, you mention in your work this notion of the pre tour narrative.And I'm wondering if we could unpack that a little bit for our listeners and what part Instagram plays in this pre tour narrative. Sean: Yeah, I'm very happy to point that out, because I think this is, this is an important way to think about tourism, and that particular phrase I'm drawing on the work of Edward Bruner, who was an American anthropologist.And that's also been picked up in other realms to be identified as what other people have called tourism imaginaries, such as in the work of Raúl Salazar. So what this concept of the pre-tour narrative describes is that before people travel to a particular destination, they are exposed to [00:05:00] various forms of representation.And oftentimes this is very image based or narrative based. So we would see this maybe thinking back in the era before social media, images encountered in magazines and films, perhaps novels, other forms of storytelling, such as just talking with people who have been to places that one wants to travel.However, in social media, as it's become more integral to the way that people conduct their everyday lives, let alone traveling. It's become the dominant engine for the way that the pre tour narrative is formed. Many people who use Instagram as a space to learn about places to travel, they will encounter images of these of these places on this app or and not just sort of the way that it's portrayed, but what people do in these spaces, the people that live [00:06:00] in the places they're going to visit. So, this process of the formation of a pre tour narrative has really always been a part of tourism. But I think it perhaps it's if not accelerated, then certainly taken a bit of a different form with the advent of social media.Chris: So on some level, it's not just the question of what you're going to go see, but also how you're going to see it, how you're going to stand in front of that tower or restaurant and see, experience, what's there. Sean: Yeah, that's a really good way to put it. Chris: And I know it's a little early in the interview, but I'd like to jump into the heart of the matter and your critiques, if we can. You know, you wrote this incredible article Landscapes for Likes, capitalizing on travel with Instagram. And, in that article, you wrote that, deep breath, "Instagram's networked architecture and affordances produce three [00:07:00] outcomes that circulate and magnify utterances about travel to a degree impossible in pre-networked media.One, a mediated travel habitus hegemonically informs prevailing aesthetic norms. Two, the scalability of embodied performances entrench the motif's narrative underpinnings. And three, the monetizable market of Instagram encourages neoliberal notions of the branded self." Now that's a beautiful mouthful. And so I'm wondering, if you might be willing and able to flesh out these three outcomes for our listeners. Sean: No, that's brilliant. And it's nice to talk about these things, perhaps when they're written that can be quite a bit denser.So maybe we can start with the first idea, this mediated travel habitus. And with the word habitus, I'm trying on the work of [00:08:00] the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, who theorizes he's talking about class and culture and ways that people display their belonging within a particular class.And the reason that I'm looking to Bordeaux here is tourism and travel, really, it's important to look at this as a practice that has been connected to what Bordeaux might call the pursuit of distinction, to the search for an acquisition of cultural goods. You know, we might think of cultural goods as being a painting or a taste and a particular kind of music, clothes, certain way of speaking even. And when one amasses certain, certain cultural goods, and they're recognized as being part of the upper classes, being marks of somebody who is [00:09:00] sophisticated, somebody who is typically from a fairly privileged financial background, these cultural goods are desirable.So, this background I think is important because tourism from its modern beginnings in the 18th century has been obtaining these experiences and often physical artifacts that can be a way of claiming a certain social status. So, maybe you've discussed this in other podcasts already, but, when the Grand Tour began in the 1600s, but really took off in the 1700s there was this process in which the aristocratic men, young men, were sent on a tour around Europe, and they would go to capitals like Paris, later Vienna, and then especially places like Rome, and, where they could encounter the remnants of the Roman Empire and classical learning. [00:10:00] And this was meant to do a few things in the first sense. It was meant to introduce them other parts of the world, to certain historical understandings. They could refine their Latin. They could get better at French and then they could go home and be recognized as a sophisticated member of the aristocracy. And this practice really became quite popular up until about the turn of the 19th century, when it stopped briefly because of wars on the European continent, and then after the Napoleonic Wars ended, it basically exploded. So when we think about over tourism now in 2023, this was, you know, 1815, 1820s, and this was a period where all of a sudden there were more tourists than ever before.And what that meant is this practice, which had only been done [00:11:00] by the wealthiest classes, was now something that the middle classes could engage in and that produced a kind of anxiety, where how was one able to become a distinguished or sophisticated traveller. How was one able to obtain the cultural goods provided by travel if everyone was doing it?So, the habitus of tourism, the kind of implicitly learned practices and sensibilities that developed during the Grand Tour experienced this period of challenge where people had to look for a way to find distinction by other means. And I think this beginning led to this friction where now you see people who are trying to go places that no other tourists go, trying to take pictures that no other tourists have taken, trying to be the only person in a picture of a [00:12:00] famous place. So this way of understanding how to be a tourist has become enshrined in the kinds of images that we see in a space like, like Instagram to the extent where I think these images are circulating the ideologies of tourism. The scalability refers to, in social media studies, the way in which a single image can achieve a degree of circulation that is not really possible in pre-networked media. So, by networked media, we can think of platforms like Instagram. We can think of Twitter, anything where the possibility of likes and retweets or reposts achieves a degree of visibility what we might call going viral.So what I was writing about in that article was this particular composition called the "promontory witness" where you have typically one [00:13:00] person who's standing on a promontory or we can say the edge of a cliff the top of a building, in front of a waterfall and they're looking really, really small as compared to the vast scale of nature.And people see these images and they understand through the mediation, the widespread circulation of these images, that this means something important about travel. This is what I mean by the mediated habitus of travel, that taking an image like this and being a person in a promontory witness image has a particular value. It is a way of claiming distinction, again, in Rodrigo's terms. And by taking a promontory witness image, one is able to circulate that image on Instagram in a very different way than before the social media platform existed. So, you know, we think about images circulated in tourism before Instagram.It would either be, say, in a family photo album. That people used to have projectors. [00:14:00] People used to maybe send holiday pictures to family and friends, basically whoever they could, you know, show it to, but this is a really, really small circulation, unless somebody was able to get an image in a magazine or some sort of formal publication. But what really shifts with scalable social media is that somebody can take an image and there really is the potential to go viral.I think in Instagram, the potential to have an image seen by a really significant number of people is less than on a platform like Tik Tok. But there remains the possibility if I post a promontory witness image and I put a geo tag in a place that is particularly trendy at this, at this moment and I put the right hashtags that thousands of people can witness this image and because of that possibility, I think there's a degree of enlistment, a degree of interest in [00:15:00] participating in this trend because taking a promontory witness picture is going to have much more possibility of going viral of leveraging these architectures, these scalable architectures.Much more so than if it just take, if I take another image that isn't so popular on a platform like Instagram. Chris: Thank you. Thank you, Sean. Yeah. So there's, there's a lot in there I'm going to come back to in just a little bit. But I wanted to just finish off this one last part because you kind of, you know, mentioned it a little bit.The monetizable market of Instagram that encourages neoliberal notions of the brand itself. And, you know, I pulled this, this other sentence from one of your articles where you write that "as a banal mediator of travel and tourism, Instagram can encourage tourists to imagine themselves as a capital generating brand." Sean: It's really a comment on the attention economy structure of social media platforms, [00:16:00] where I want people to see my pictures and I want to get likes.And I say that very much as being somebody who continues to study social media and tourism from a critical angle. When I post something I'm always aware of how it's going to be received. Some part of me, even when I'm very aware of the issues with thinking this way potentially is I always want it to gain more visibility.If I post something and it has less likes than something I posted previously, this will likely incur some degree of thinking, what did I do wrong? What could I have done differently? You know, maybe I'm just produced such interesting content. And what I think is really taking place there is that we're constantly thinking about ways to achieve visibility in a way that is not dissimilar to the kind of negotiation that celebrities and [00:17:00] other public figures have to go through when managing their, what we might in today's terms, call their brand, where because there is always this metric of how popular one is or how visible one is in the form of likes or in the form of reposts or retweets or what have you it's means that we develop a way of always orienting towards this possible public. We're always thinking about the people that are going to see whatever kind of thing we say online, and we, I think much of the time, are hoping that it's going to be received.If not, you know, people are going to like it, if it is going to maybe change the way that people think about something, if it's going to influence them in some way. And Instagram, of course, is like other social media platforms, is monetizable in the sense that when one gets a lot of followers, you know, if I continually create fantastic travel content and I get tens of thousands or more followers, then [00:18:00] that means that I am able to start making money from it. I'm going to be paid by different companies to come and stay at a resort or go on some sort of guided tour and take an image or make a reel of this experience and post it on Instagram, talk about how great it was, and then tag the company.And that's a way of them bringing in business. This is how advertising works. So, people become advertisers. But even before that influencer level, I think those of us who are not influencers, and I am certainly not, there's a degree to which we are participating in this logic because even if we don't have any designs of becoming influencers, we still want our posts to be liked and this ultimately influences not just posts we make, but the kind of traveling we do and the kind of relationship we have with the places to which we travel.Hmm. Chris: Well [00:19:00] contentious at the very least. But thank you for that, Sean, for being able to flesh that out for us. And I'd like to return back to this notion of the promontory witness, and you know, because even before Instagram I remember seeing in my backpacking years, these same photos, right?The photo of the person, of their back to the camera facing the open horizon, you know, whether it be a cliff face or a desert or whatever it is, and spreading their hands or arms and, just this kind of emanating freedom, I guess.But you also mentioned that this kind of perspective, if you want to call it that, manufactures emptiness because there's nobody else in the photo, and this is so much a part of the kind of sometimes they're Instagram reels, or sometimes they're photos of people, what it looks like when people are at tourist destinations, actually taking the [00:20:00] photo in front of the Eiffel Tower, or the Great Wall, or the Leaning Tower of Pisa, or whatever, and there's actually hundreds.And thousands of people taking the same photo or trying to, and everyone wants to have that photo without anyone else in it. And so, just a little preamble to the question again, in Landscapes for Likes, you write that "this manufacturing of emptiness privileges tourists as the sole consumers of a landscape, and with its residents hidden from view, a landscape is voided of its human and temporal context. Thus abstracted, place is relevant as little but a visual commodity." And then just another quote that I think brings a little something else to the picture is that "the promontory witness motif scrubs the landscape of the tourist destination of any sign of human habitation, but that of the tourist, singularly pictured in a position of mastery that confers [00:21:00] possession over the destination." And so there seems to be a kind of shared understanding in critical tourism studies that modern and especially social media based travel photography emphasizes empty spaces, of course, minus the Instagram user, the person photographing question. And so I'm curious, why is identifying the emptying of the landscape so important for our understanding?What does it do to us as photo viewers? Sean: Yeah, that's an excellent question and I think I'm very, I'm very interested in this composition, which the lone tourist and the landscape, which, mean, other people before me have pointed to, and at least John Urry.And I think there are two things happening here. For one, it's the kind of picture that's due to the mediation of what we can think of as a travel habitus, due to the way that [00:22:00] people have learned about how to do tourism and to represent themselves doing tourism and the most sophisticated way or in the way that is the most likely to gain them social distinction. They take these images because they've seen these images before and they're attractive images as well. Maybe they're attractive because we have, through seeing so many pictures like them, we've been taught or sort of subconsciously imbibed the aesthetics as being something that we value and are attracted to.One degree of what's of what's taking place. And to another extent, when it comes to this notion of possessing something of being the only person that that goes there, this kind of image of the tourist being the only person in a landscape or in front of some sort of cultural monument is , a way of [00:23:00] claiming a symbolic status, which links back to this ideology of getting off the beaten track. So, I imagine if you're experience backpacking and my own there's a real interest in getting off the beaten path, of going to places that aren't touristy, of being a traveler and not a tourist. And part of the way that the success in getting off the beaten track is signified is being the only person in a photograph.You know, we as backpackers or tourists don't want to be associated with other tourists. And there's very little better way to represent not being another tourist than being the only person in a particular image.Chris: Yeah, it [00:24:00] makes you wonder. And putting together the research for this episode, I came to this, this kind of possibility, question, consternation, And it arose in this way. And so the, the next question, which kind of relates to the last one is, do you think there might be, or is a connection here between the emptying of the photo of humans or locals and the emptying of places of humans and locals, and that is in the context of the gentrification of local people and culture in tourist destinations. Sean: Yeah, yeah, absolutely. It's a very good point. I think especially because gentrification is aesthetically produced through a kind of emptiness or a kind of minimalism. And this gentrified neighborhood is not something that is crowded. It is not some place that there are a lot of wayward signs, [00:25:00] wayward, quote unquote.It is a space which is typically designed according to what might be understood as a globalized regime of clean lines and interesting fonts and a lot of white space. So thinking about the way that that works and everything from upmarket coffee shops to designing neighborhoods that are meant to attract capital on upper middle class consumers and residents.I think that does link quite persuasively with this desire to be the only person within this landscape. I mean, what ultimately is taking place in both processes is that, no matter where somebody is going and taking a promontory witness picture, there are people who live there. There's people who've always lived there and been a part, in many ways, of the land that is being made into a landscape.And by not including [00:26:00] them, within these pictures or in processes of gentrification, actually through state-sanctioned programs or other forms of state-sanctioned investment, local residents are being pushed out to make way for different people, the tourist in this case. There is a process of erasure and, and often what can be conceived as really a very colonial process of taking over, taking over a space and privileging the owners of capital, who in this case, typically are tourists.And of course, it's a little bit different when you're taking a picture versus when you're taking a picture in a place that is not considered part of the Global North. But tourists typically have a lot more privilege and financial resources than local residents.And when they're not in these images, but the places in which they are are included, then at least when we're seeing pictures of it, how [00:27:00] do we imagine who, who controls the space? How do we imagine who has a right to this space? It would be the person in the photograph, the tourist, rather than the people who actually live, work, and, and shape these landscapes.Okay. Chris: Since Instagram tends to be the go to medium for these images and for images in general, as far as social media is concerned, do you think that Instagram then is a tool and driver of gentrification? Could we say that with a sense of coherence? Sean: I think it's as much a tool as, as many other tools and it is very easily leveraged to that end by actors who are seeking to mobilize processes of gentrification. And then I think this is pretty well documented for instance, in Yoo Jung oh's article Instagaze, Aesthetic Representation and Contested Transformation of Woljeong, South Korea.Well, she was [00:28:00] writing about Jeju Island in South Korea, and how once tourists started to take particular forms of images often of being one person in a beach, then different interests were able to move in and realize the value of this image and find ways to capitalize on all of the tourists that wanted to come and take that same image. So what that led to was the beach front where, this is largely a fishing community and other sort of small scale, more artisanal economies, was remade into cafes and restaurants and guest houses in a process that.I think it can be widely recognized in tourism development around the world. But what the author, Yu Jung Oh, is saying, is showing there, is that this was largely motivated by the ability to take this image, that [00:29:00] a tourist could go and purchase a coffee or something, and they would be able to take that image for their Instagram. So there's a really clear linkage there and I think that linkage can be made in many other places as well. But I think in that sense, Instagram and social media is, is can be leveraged for gentrification as, as many other tools can be and are being.Chris: Thank you, Sean. And so, know, for the rest of our time together, I'd like to kind of lean on you a little bit for your personal opinion. I know that sometimes working in and living in academic worlds that's kind of something to be left the doorstep before you walk in. But you know, you mentioned this notion of networked media and pre networked media and kind of social media falling into this wider term of networked media and since these mediums have only come to exist, in terms of Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, [00:30:00] we're talking 15 years at the most, and then the extension or prototypes of those existing in the previous 10. So about 25 years, maybe. And I'm curious in this regard you know, I imagine that you're about my age, maybe a little bit younger so I'm curious if you have a lived memory of how things were before social media and perhaps even before the internet, what do you think we might be losing by virtue of not being able to remember the world without social media Sean: yeah, great question. Definitely. Yeah. Yeah, very good question. Very, of course, fraught. So I guess for context, I was born in 1988. And. So I, got a cell phone at 16, and again, I got a smartphone and Instagram and WhatsApp. So I'm really in two minds about this. And in the first sense, I think it's important to be aware of [00:31:00] how with any new technology there's a great deal of anxiety and resistance and what might be called panic. And this isn't just social media or it's not just television, but we can go all the way back to radio, to novels.People were worried about that, to the written word back in the ancient Greek era. People were concerned that when we start writing things down, this is going to make it very difficult to remember things, and we're going to be less successful orators and our reasoning will be diluted because we start writing things down.So there's always this kind of fear of new technology, and part of me wants to recognize that this is just another one of those periods in which some sort of transformative technology comes along and many of [00:32:00] the generation who can remember what it was like beforehand is going to feel varying degrees of nostalgia for that period.That said, it's also difficult to not, at the same time, say that something really significant has, has, has happened, to not feel, I mean, honestly, I do certainly feel nostalgia for periods before social media. Some of the things which I think have been changed is the interest in finding ways to represent oneself, traveling. And this isn't to say that whenever one goes somewhere, one is always sort of seeing it as if from the viewfinder or, well, it wouldn't really be a viewfinder of a camera so much as, you know, one's phone screen.But that leads to. In being very interested in taking images that would be successful within the attention economies of a platform like Instagram, it can be difficult to [00:33:00] not see the world as if from the perspective of what would make a good picture for Instagram. There's a lot of different people who've come up with critiques of this process.I mean, if you think about it in terms of spectacle, you know, like Guy DuBord's idea that we're no longer, and he was writing in the 60s, you know, that we are seeing relationships, not between people, but between people and images. And so some sort of fundamental human connection is being lost because all we're doing is just relating to images and using images to relate to other people.I'm not so sure about universalizing that idea, but the ubiquity of social media and the Challenges to not somehow be on one of these platforms, in some even practical way does mean, I think, that there are significant influences in tourism as much as anything. Chris: Yeah, my my phone died the other day, abruptly. [00:34:00] And you know, I still have this computer that thankfully allows me to have this interview with you. And I can still access Facebook and Twitter, but for whatever reason, I can't access Instagram. And you know, it's been a few days and I'm really loving it.And then this morning I realized that I had planned to upload a post for the podcast. And then I was just like, okay, well, my best recourse of action is to just stay calm and wait, right? Yeah, and it's a big question, and I think it's something that, I wonder if young people, say people born, you know, 2000 or after would be able to answer with, with any, without having lived in a time without social media, for example. And so this kind of like brings us a little bit towards the towards theme of media ecology, which, you know, we talked about just very briefly before we started our interview here and I had taken Andrew McLuhan's Understanding Media [00:35:00] Intensive last year.He was also on the pod in the, in season three and just generally speaking for our listeners media ecology, within media ecology, the focus is on the medium and not just the message. It's a way of taking to task the context of our technology and not just the content.And so this manufacturing of emptiness of people and places as brands and I'm curious, isn't this to a large extent, also contingent on our tools, on the limits and architecture of the camera, for example? You know, do we stop with Instagram or do we look at all social media and later all tools? Because these media exist within each other, right?Instagram is a medium within the internet, I suppose, and then the internet is a medium within the phone. Maybe you could make that argument. It's not to say, if we didn't have these things, if we didn't have Instagram, if we didn't have [00:36:00] social media, would the promontory witness just disappear? I don't think it's as easy as that. But Would it be as intensely magnified in our time? Sean: So yes, I think the question of magnification is really what sits at the heart of social media because if we're looking at the medium of Instagram, then we have to think about photography and which was invented in the 1840s.And then if we think about photography, we have to think about painting the way that landscape has been represented in many different cultures, both in painting in the Western, Chinese and many other traditions, but then also in poetry and literature. So with all of these things, there's a precedent.And I think if you look at something like the Promontory Witness, this composition and this the visual formation of having one person immersed within a landscape or standing at some edge of a cliff, that's been around for [00:37:00] 200 years at least. You can see some in the later 1700s that look like this, but then the desire to be the only person in a particular place to have gotten off of the beaten track and be the distinguished traveler, that's also been around for, for a very long time. So that's why I think I'm hesitant to sort of pin the blame on Instagram.And I think my thinking around this has taken a bit of it, not exactly a turn, but it's changed a bit. So I think there's a real tendency to look at platforms like Instagram as only being spaces in which processes of gentrification can gain momentum, or only be spaces where one is almost disciplined into being a neoliberal subject who, is working sort of subconsciously thinking about how to brand oneself all the time, specifically in places of tourism, you know, that it's a way that people [00:38:00] only think about the pictures. They only want to go take a picture in these places. They don't actually want to have any experiences in this place or relationships with the people there. And I think that really exists. That is absolutely one dimension of what takes place with social media platforms. But as many people I've spoken to say, social media is a double edged sword. And where that's really been driven home to me has been where I've been conducting research for the past almost two years now. Sometimes they're in person, other times digitally, in Oman, a country in the Arabian peninsula where I was interested initially because it was becoming more popular as an international tourism destination. So, I went there after the pandemic expecting to meet all these people who were experiencing the problematics of international tourism as we know well, I think from your podcast among other, among other spaces.And there's some of that, absolutely. But what I also found was that, in the past few [00:39:00] years, people who are living in Oman, and this is both Omanis, people who have citizenship and then also residents, so there's about 40 percent of the country is made up of people who don't have citizenship in Oman, like many other Gulf countries.And in the past few years, I mean, we're talking five years, maximum ten years, there's been this surge of interest in nature, or we can say is the non human or even the more than human environment and what's can be understood as domestic nature tourism, I think, like many places around the world, domestic nature tourism in Oman became was very popularized during the pandemic when people could not travel abroad. But what this meant is that people saw these images on Instagram and Instagram is really most popular app in Oman, next to WhatsApp, and that introduced them to parts of the country that they'd never [00:40:00] interacted with before.And Oman is this incredibly various and fascinating environment where there's mountains that are, you know, over 3, 000 meters higher, what is that 10, 000 feet you know, all of this coastline and with coral reefs and these waddies or slot canyons. And people began to engage with the environments in a very different way to go on hiking trips, to go on canyoning trips and social media was this massive part of that. You know, this is where people learned about this possibility, this is where people met people to introduce them, to take them safely into these spaces. They'd never been on a hike before. You know, Instagram is where they're going to meet somebody to go out into nature with.And it's not to say that this doesn't have problems associated with it, and everything I suppose related with tourism does, but I think it also represents a case where Instagram, in this sense, was a way that people are actively connecting to nature, and in a place [00:41:00] where, you know, Instagram existed and was widely used before nature tourism was a thing.And I think this kind of flips the narrative a bit where in Western Europe, where I'm sitting right now, for instance, there's been this long time practice of nature tourism, you know, going back to, again, the 1900s. You know, people started climbing Alps in the 1850s and so forth. And then Instagram comes along and everybody's saying, oh, people just want to climb the mountain to take a picture. you know, they don't actually care about nature. Well, in Oman, people weren't really, not that many people were climbing mountains, before the ability to take a picture existed. So, there's a bit of a different trajectory in which people began to relate to a particular space and to the kinds of experiences that one can have engaging in nature tourism.So in that sense to go back to your to your question about what do we essentially do with this platform? [00:42:00] And how do we address the problematics? I don't think that I mean, I think that Instagram will not be the most popular platform forever, certainly, but social media, or this kind of connected media, barring some kind of unforeseen complication. I mean, looking at you, AI. But this sort of communication is here to stay probably. So, can we find ways in which this space is can be generative of community could be generative of care and ethical forms of travel? What might that look like? And what kind of imagery might be associated with it?Chris: I'm curious in that regard, Oman to me is someone who's never been and probably, you know extremely ignorant to any of the nation's culture or history. I imagine modernity to be something of a recent arrival in that place, relatively speaking, correct me if I'm wrong, of course. And I guess what I'm curious about in the context of your research and most [00:43:00] recent research is if you've seen the conflicts that might arise in terms of traditional hospitality? What it means to be in a place, as opposed to a landscape, what it means to be a host, as opposed to, I guess a landlord, in the Airbnb sense of the word and perhaps also what it means to be a traveler as opposed to a tourist within the context of these new economic dynamics in Oman and if Instagram has anything to do with that? Sean: No, that's, that's a wonderful question. It's one I really appreciate as I continue to work there and spend time with people who've been incredibly generous showing me around and introducing me to what their life is like as people who participate in tourism. I mean, the first thing I would say is the Oman, the Arabian peninsula and really Arabic speaking cultures generally is hospitality is one of the most fundamentally [00:44:00] important things in social relationships. In what it means to be a part of this culture, one is hospitable to guests, to friends, to family members. It's almost difficult to understate how integral this is. I mean, it is, in many cultures, hospitality is big, but it's very big in this space.And so I think it's a particularly well suited question to, you know, how is tourism and how is social media impacting this code of conduct and, you know this really wonderful practice that I think, you know, the rest of the world can stand to learn a lot from.So, to your question about sort of where my mind sits in this span of development. Oil was discovered in the 1960s and kind of transformative effect as it has everywhere. And in this time, there was a great degree of urbanization. People could get services rather than relying on culture, trading, which comes from a pre oil economy.[00:45:00] Now, you see, I think, a couple things. For one thing, cultures of hospitality, I think, were already being disturbed by the way that neoliberal capitalism tends to work, not just in Oman, but anywhere around the world. It encourages people to find ways to profit themselves and to think as individual agents rather than as being part of a community, having responsibilities to the humans, but also nonhumans to the land as well as to one's family.So that process is already in it's already taking place before tourism began to take root. And I think there are some spaces in which tourism is developing in such a way that it's very profit oriented. And where people are incentivized to privilege [00:46:00] their own gains over those of others.However, there are other ways I think in which people who, say we're living in the city, are meeting people who live in fairly remote areas, under the auspices of tourism. Because they're engaging in tourism, they're meeting people who are living in these spaces and often chatting with them or sharing a meal or sharing coffee or something like this.Sometimes these people who are living in places that are becoming tourism destinations are part of the industry and sometimes people are not, but as it stands now, it seems as very much a preservation of hospitality within this, this particular context. As with anything, I think the question of tourism is to what extent this will become commodified or not, like how do we make money off of this culture of hospitality?How do we turn it into a tourist product? You know, we can sell Oman as being it's hospitable, come meet the locals. But in the way that people continue [00:47:00] to practice it, both people who are living in Oman and being domestic tourists and also people who are seeing tourists come to where they live in ways that they haven't before. To me, it still seems like it's very robustly in place.Chris: Good to hear. And I very much look forward to the publication of your research. Hopefully it'll see the light of day soon, perhaps. Sean: I hope so. Yeah. Things are in process for sure. Chris: Okay. Well, I'd like to thank you, Sean, on behalf of our listeners for joining us today. And you know, this leads me of course, to the question of how might they be able to get in touch with you or follow your work. And if that includes an Instagram handle. Sean: Yeah, that's, that's fine. So I I recently started another Instagram account. I had my own account and stopped posting about 2019.And then I got interested in it again. I opened a new account, which is sort of more research facing. So yeah, if people wanna check that [00:48:00] out, it's @SPSMITHS, so S-P-S-M-I-T-H-S or email spSmith@tilburguniversity.edu. So always pleased to hear ideas and of course things that I've missed because of course I have so much to learn in this space.So I would really look forward to feedback and ideas. Hmm. Chris: Well, I'll make sure all of that's on the End of Tourism website and the podcast page when the interview launches and as well as the other authors, researchers and works that you mentioned earlier on. So once again, it's been amazing, Sean, thank you so much for being able to really flesh these complex ideas out for us and we'll see what happens, right?Sean: Absolutely. Thanks very much for the invitation. And as always, I'll look forward to continue listening. This is such an excellent project. Chris: Thank you, Sean.This episode and others like it are created and made possible by the generosity of Substack subcribers like yourself. Similarly, I have subsidized the work of the pod with my own time and money. This is a labour of love and lineage that requires the support of others. Please consider offering a gift in return, whether that include upgrading to paid subscription, making a one-time donation, sharing the podcast among your people or being willing to reach out and assist in production (as others have). Thank you. Bless. Peace. Get full access to ⌘ Chris Christou ⌘ at chrischristou.substack.com/subscribe

Listeners welcome back to the pod - today we will dive deep into the life of one of the most influential figures in the cruise line and maritime world. Our guest is a titan of the cruise line industry, a visionary entrepreneur, and a lifelong champion of global tourism his name is Manfredi Lefebvre d'Ovidio.  Manfredi has transformed his family business into a global leader in luxury cruising. Under his leadership, Silversea Cruises expanded its company offering travel experiences across all seven continents around the world. In a strategic partnership with Royal Caribbean Manfredi orchestrated the sale of a ⅔ stake in Silversea for a whopping $1 billion in 2018. This strategic partnership not only elevated Silversea's brand but also marked one of the most significant deals in the cruise industry's history. And lastly, Manfredi is the Chairman of The Heritage Group which is a private equity company that acquired 85% of one of the biggest luxury travel companies in the world Abercrombie & Kent - whose founder Geoffrey Kent was on the podcast just last month.  Today we are going to dive into the life and mind of Manfredi Lefebvre d'Ovidio.    00:12: Who is Manfredi Lefebvre d'Ovidio? 03:42: Manfredi's Recommended Books      05:56: Manfredi's Starts a Cruise Line 13:01: How this Billion-Dollar Founder Spends his Time 15:05: The Biggest Challenge Manfredi Experienced was September 11, 2001.  18:56: Manfredi Takes Over the Family Business 21:18: Manfredi Pioneers the Luxury Cruise Industry.  24:39: Why Manfredi Loves Being an Entrepreneur 26:13: Manfredi's Career Chapters 29:59: Manfredi Orchestrated the Most Significant Deal in the Cruise Industry.  32:47: Manfredi & Geoffrey Kent Built the First Expedition Cruise Ship 34:59: Manfredi's Daily Routine 37:13: Advice Manfredi Would Give His Younger Self 37:58: Things to Look for in Executives and Partners When You Bring Them On  40:25: What is Manfredi Most Proud Of?   Contact Info: https://www.manfredilefebvre.com/ https://heritagemonaco.com/ https://www.silversea.com/ Transcript:   [00:00:12] Chris: Listeners, welcome back to the podcast today, and we will dive deep into the life of one of the most influential figures in the cruise line and maritime world. Our guest today is a Titan in the cruise line industry, a visionary entrepreneur, a lifelong champion of global tourism, and his name is Manfredi LaFavre D'Ovidio. Manfredi has transformed his family business into a global leader in luxury cruising. Under his leadership, Silver Sea Cruises expanded its company, offering travel experiences across all seven continents around the world. In a strategic partnership with Royal Caribbean, Manfredi orchestrated the sale of a two third stake in Silversea for a whopping 1 billion in 2018. This strategic partnership not only elevated Silversea's brand, but also marked. One of the most significant deals in the cruise industry's history. And lastly, Manfredi is the chairman of the heritage group, which is a private equity company that acquired 85 percent of one of the biggest luxury travel companies in the world, Abercrombie and Kent, whose founder was actually on the podcast last month. So if you haven't listened to that interview yet, make sure you check it out. And today we're going to dive into the life and mind of Manfredi. Listeners, welcome to the show. Manfredi, welcome to the show. How are you doing today? [00:01:34] Manfredi: Not too bad. Not too bad. Can I add something to what you said? [00:01:38] Chris: Please do. Add or take away. Whatever you like. [00:01:41] Manfredi: Well, what happened is that as soon as I did my deal with Royal Caribbean, I did buy, uh, Abercrombie Kent, which recently I brought up to 100 percent shareholding, and I sold to Royal Caribbean subsequently one further that I owned, uh, in, uh, Silver Sea in exchange of Royal Caribbean shares and acquired another cruise line, which is called Crystal Cruises. [00:02:04] Chris: Ah, I did actually read about that. Forgive me for not putting that in there. [00:02:08] Manfredi: No, so it's just, the story goes on. And before Silver Sea, we had another cruise line, which was called Sydmar. Okay. [00:02:17] Chris: Was Sid, was Smar the one created by your father or was Silver Sea created by your father? Uh, [00:02:23] Manfredi: Sid Smar was acquired by my father with me because I was working with him at the time. And we bought, uh, the Cruise Line, which was one of the first cruise lines ever. And, uh, Sid Bar built the first free purposely built cruise ships, which were built in Italian shipyard fi can and LA in France. [00:02:42] Chris: Great. So that [00:02:42] Manfredi: was the beginning. Then we got an offer we couldn't refuse. We sold Smar. And we started Silversea together with my father, which I took over shortly after. [00:02:52] Chris: And that was in the 90s, correct? [00:02:54] Manfredi: That was, uh, we started in 92, we acquired in 86, Sidmar, sold it in 89, started in 92, uh, 91, Silversea, and, uh, we're ordering the ships, and then we started operating in 94. [00:03:10] Chris: Incredible. [00:03:12] Manfredi: So, and then in 2018, uh, we, I sold to Royal Caribbean and I bought in 2000, uh, actually was in 2019. The negotiation started earlier 2019. I bought Abercrombie & Kent. [00:03:27] Chris: That's right. Incredible. Um, so Manfredi, I was told by a mentor of mine a long time ago that the, uh, difference between a wealthy person and the average person is the information that we put in between the two ears that we have. and what we choose to do with it. And I hear you're an avid reader, so if it's okay with you, I'd like to ask about what you're reading right now and some of the more impactful, uh, books of your life. [00:03:59] Manfredi: Yeah, I tend to read two, three books in parallel. So now I'm reading the Silk Roads, number one, the old Silk Road and the new Silk Road. Then there is a new book which was written about the oil industry and the energy markets, which is very interesting. I don't remember now the exact title. And then, you know, other things which went back in time. An interesting View of the history of the United States of America, which is unconventional view. Ah, [00:04:34] Chris: do [00:04:34] Manfredi: you [00:04:34] Chris: know who, do you know who the author of that book was? [00:04:38] Manfredi: I can let you know. [00:04:39] Chris: Okay. [00:04:40] Manfredi: Um, it was recommended to me and I bought it and it's quite interesting. [00:04:44] Chris: Do you have two or three books that were the most impactful in your life? [00:04:50] Manfredi: Yeah, you know, but probably I'm, I, I had once, um, hepatitis, so I was stuck in bed for a long time and I managed to read all of War and Peace, the whole story. It's a massive book. In today's world, it's very difficult to read at all. [00:05:10] Chris: Yeah. Okay. Anything else, any others? [00:05:17] Manfredi: Oh, this is the one that comes to my mind immediately. The other ones are, you know, I try to always read something which will leave me something, uh, in knowledge. [00:05:27] Chris: Yeah. [00:05:28] Manfredi: A book that I loved was, uh, A Hundred Years of Solitude. [00:05:33] Chris: I've heard of that one. [00:05:35] Manfredi: There's a life in this village in Colombia, which goes through the civil wars in the country. It's quite interesting. [00:05:42] Chris: Nice. Um, so I kind of want to start this off about, uh, going back to your, your past and your childhood. And I'm curious about the first moment that you realized you had a passion for ships and cruise lines. Uh, do you remember that moment? [00:06:03] Manfredi: I can, uh, reconnected because when I was 14, my father told us, uh, he was We're going on a cruise. Now it's 14, it's uh, what is it, 56 years ago. It was really at the beginning. Nobody knew about cruises. And, uh, he, because his friend had his cruise line, which was called Sidmar, and so we went to all the way to Mexico, Los Angeles, took the cruise down the Mexico coast, and, uh, that was the first impact with, uh, uh, cruising. But I've been involved in shipping all my life, because my father was a ship owner, a professor of university of maritime law, and a lawyer, and he was always involved with shipping. So it's been all our lives that we've been involved with ships, we had yachts, and so on. We had shipping companies, we had ferry companies, we had all sorts of things. But that was a crucial moment because we sold this company, where I subsequently went to work. When I was 18. And then, uh, you know, we, we bought it. So it was a chapter here. You know, you go on a cruise and you work for them and then you buy them. Yeah. And then you see them. I hear your father was quite a, an interesting figure and he was a lawyer and he actually helped create the maritime law in Italy. [00:07:24] Chris: , and then You, you, did he start the cruise line, , the very first cruise line venture that you guys owned, or did he acquire it and then continue to run it and it became the family business? [00:07:39] Manfredi: He, we acquired it. [00:07:41] Chris: Okay. [00:07:42] Manfredi: And then, and when we acquired it, we built the new ships. And then they were so beautiful and were so, so innovative that we got a very good offer and we sold it. And then we started SilverSea. SilverSea is the first one that we started. In the past, you know, I had worked in other businesses. My father, with his, uh, partners had bought a big shipping company, which was listed on the UK Stock Exchange, which owned ships. It owned a very large, uh, Ship broker company and, uh, insurance broker company called Clarkson. It owned Maritime Insurance company. So he was always, uh, involved in that. He even had a fleet of tankers in Saudi Arabia at the beginning of the seventies. [00:08:26] Chris: Oh really? can you share about your father's influence on you? You know, as a young man, I could imagine, and a boy growing up, I could imagine, uh, a father who, I think about the influence my father had on me. Right. And I can imagine you and your father had a cruise lines. He is part of the maritime industry, um, or he was at least getting involved in cruise lines at the time. , How did that have an effect on you as a young man? [00:08:55] Manfredi: I mean, that's, uh, fundamental. He was an extraordinary person, an extraordinary father. And, uh, he was lucky he had a wife who always, uh, put him on a, uh, how do you say it when you put somebody on a pedestal? Pedestal for us. So we always had, and because he was working all the time, he was traveling a lot, working, and he would, his Sundays were because he would take Saturday to work always. On the Sundays, his vacation, his day was to pass the day working in our playroom. So he had a desk. His children were playing around and he was there working. And that was his, uh, his Sunday. So, uh, you know, it's an example of, uh, dedication to passion, to work dedication. And, uh, but he was still very present to us because he was a symbol. for us. So, uh, we always looked up to him. And then he would sometimes take one of the children. For example, he, when he had some, uh, launch of a new ship, would take one children with him. And so he created some moments for us, which he was pretty much always linked his life with his business, but he involved us. So he got us very much attached. And especially my two sisters, they were deeply in love with him and the same with me. I mean, I adored him. And, uh, when I was, um, uh, 18, he said, Okay, you go to university, you will have a desk in the office next to mine. You can listen to all my phone calls, join all my meetings, read all my papers. Asked me every question, and any day in the week, Saturday, Sunday, during the week, and so that I did, and then he would send me to his businesses. He had many businesses in various countries, Mexico, England, etc, etc. So I would go three months in his businesses. And then come back and study and go on with the university and then work with him. And, uh, so it was a very tight relationship. [00:11:10] Chris: What do you think was the most impactful lesson that you learned from your father? [00:11:16] Manfredi: You know, the most is to be very respectful of the others. He was, uh, the most, uh, Curtis person you can imagine with everybody, and it wasn't linked to the fact if you had anything to exchange with somebody, uh, somebody who was relevant for his business or for any other reason. He would be the same with anybody from the lowest level and, uh, business community or the people working for him in service to the highest level. It was true that everybody with extreme kindness and courtesy. And, uh, and would always be, uh, responding to anybody. So, it was this kind of attitude. Very humble, simple, very successful man. Uh, an incredible brain, but very humble and simple. [00:12:06] Chris: So let's switch to the roles that you play in your life now. So you're the chairman of the heritage group, which, uh, a heritage groups, a private equity group in a travel and tourism sector. Um, you're the chairman and orbital solutions, Monaco co chairman. And I guess you said, uh, are you no longer chairman at Amber Cromby Kent, or are you still co chair there? [00:12:27] Manfredi: No, I'm, uh, I'm the chairman. Geoffrey. sold me the steak, and he is the co chairman. I don't know what his exact title is. He's the founder chairman, let's say. Okay. He's not actively involved in the running of the business. He's very involved in everything, which is the product. [00:12:49] Chris: . And then you're a member of the board of Bucksense Incorporated, vice chairman of Monaco Chamber of Shipping, um, member of the executive community of World Tourism and Travel Council, and member of the board of SKULD Skold. Is that what that's pronounced? Skold? Skold. The maritime school in maritime insurance company based in Oslo. So I'm, I'm curious with all those, those titles and accolades, where do you spend the most of your time? [00:13:18] Manfredi: Well, first of all, they evolved, you know, some are gone and there's some new ones. [00:13:22] Chris: Okay. [00:13:23] Manfredi: And I spend most of the time, reality, I divide myself between three things. One is where I have the most relevant business opportunity where I focus a lot. [00:13:35] Chris: Okay. [00:13:35] Manfredi: Was like, I try to make sure that that things they are done well and they get my support. I, I cultivate very, uh, mature and capable management and then, and want them to, to, to drive, but I'm there to help them and to know everything which is going on. In any case, that's the first thing, which is very important. The second thing is whenever there's something which is not going that well, it happens to follow my laps. Because this is what happens with owners, you know. So there I dedicate with the team and to solve whatever there are some problems and something which is not going as I would wish to solve it. And the third thing is the things which give me satisfaction. So there are a number of things which give me satisfaction and I dedicate myself to. So now I've been recently appointed by the Sovereign Military Order of Malta. as ambassador to UNESCO and for charity and philanthropy, which is something which is not going to earn me a cent. It's going to cost me, but it gives me satisfaction. I use my capabilities, my relationships, my, uh, dedication to, um, better cause. So it's a mixed, I have the freedom of choice. [00:14:51] Chris: That's good. I was going to ask, , you mentioned about, you know, if there's ever a problem in the business, it comes to you, it comes to your desk. [00:15:00] Manfredi: I didn't mention the new businesses. Of course, I mean, new investment. I follow also. [00:15:04] Chris: Yeah. Did you share with us maybe one of the biggest challenges that you've had in your career when it came across your table, , and how you decided to handle it? [00:15:17] Manfredi: Oh, there's a very clear example. September 11th. I was in a bank negotiating the refinancing of the financing. It's a new ships. And in the bank, they tell me, they come, somebody rushing in, come, come and watch on the television. So there, we were on television, in the bank, because CTF financing for the company. And we saw what happened. So you can imagine from that moment on, what can happen to the travel business. [00:15:51] Chris: Yeah. [00:15:52] Manfredi: The world shrinks. Every place which has a Muslim religion or Arab language, Is disappears from the world. You cannot go there. It's a small world and uh, uh, people don't wanna travel. If they want on a plane, they will look if there's anybody who looks suspicious. And, uh, actually for some time, planes were suspended. So that was a very tough time and you have to hold the company together. And, uh, going through, uh, you know, all sorts of difficulties. You dedicate your time there and, uh, and succeeded. And then, the cruise industry recovers very fast, so it bounced back. But for some time, it was tough. [00:16:39] Chris: How long was that time period? [00:16:42] Manfredi: There is, I think that you can, the turning point was when President No. 43 went on the aircraft carrier. [00:16:51] Chris: Okay. [00:16:52] Manfredi: It was like a liberating moment. [00:16:54] Chris: Ah, okay. [00:16:55] Manfredi: Confidence came back. It was like a fantastic case of how to rebuild confidence in the consumers. [00:17:06] Chris: And, , what are, what are some of the ways that you held the company together, at least the, the morale of the company together during that time? [00:17:20] Manfredi: You know, they, they, they have to see that you're on top of everything and you can find the solutions. And I think that my people were quite confident. I had additional resources of my own, which I could put in to support the company. But I was trying to have the company support itself as much as it could by itself. But I had good relationships, and I got some incredible, uh, support by people. Um, really incredible support by people based on their trust and confidence. [00:17:54] Chris: What do you think was harder on the cruise line industry, uh, 9 11 or COVID? [00:18:00] Manfredi: 9 11. [00:18:01] Chris: Yeah? How come? [00:18:04] Manfredi: Well, 9 11 was, uh, wasn't only a travel space. And during COVID, most of the businesses were still going well, if you think about it. Some businesses actually had an incredible success. During the electrical container business. Well, during 9 11, it was simply the world was paralyzed. And the governments did not find a way to intervene to support the businesses. It was very, very tough. [00:18:34] Chris: , I guess that makes sense. , so okay, let's shift gears a little bit and, and we talked about your father and his impact on your life. , can you tell us a bit about when you took the company over, , what was that moment like for you and what were some of the decisions leading up to that that made you guys decide it was time? [00:18:56] Manfredi: Well, the decision was because we made a family partition. So I got, uh, in the division of the family assets, I got that business, like several things. And how it felt, well, you know, I had already been working with it. So it wasn't something new. And we always been very close. So I was participating to everything. It became my baby, only mine. And, uh, of course it, it was, uh, it, I must say that, uh, that choice or that moment, the fact of taking over, so it changed my life. Because from being the son of a wealthy man with many businesses, taking care of them together with him, suddenly I had something that was mine and I had to grow. And so I identified myself a lot with that company, with that product, with that success. And it became, after all, today became my legacy. [00:19:53] Chris: I am [00:19:54] Manfredi: especially that I'm not the only the son of a wealthy man from a family which has because we are a family which with 200 years of industrial history. [00:20:05] Chris: Oh, really? [00:20:06] Manfredi: Yes. [00:20:07] Chris: I didn't know that. [00:20:08] Manfredi: It started in, uh, in Italy and, uh, at the beginning of the 19th century with paper industry, banking, a number of things. So I'm not only that, I'm, uh, and I'm not only the son of a very successful man. I had my thing and I did it successfully and I've become an expert in the field. , so which allowed me. When there was another opportunity to buy to, which was during the, at the end of COVID, the beginning of the Ukraine war, to buy crystal cruises, to do it with great confidence, because I, I knew all the levers of the business, I knew the people to choose to bring on board, I knew where to go to get support for the generating the revenue, etc, etc, to restructure the ships. So, I could do it very well because I had full confidence of my knowledge of that industry, and the people had confidence on my knowledge of the industry, so they give me a lot of credit. [00:21:06] Chris: A friend of ours, Mr. Geoffrey Kent, , told me to, that you pioneered the industry, , the luxury area in both normal and expedition. So I'd love to learn more about how you did that and your strategies behind it. [00:21:18] Manfredi: How we did that was, we had, Sittmer was a typical cruise line. At the beginning of the cruise lines, they were transatlantic operators. And when the transatlantic routes, uh, became dry, no more passengers because people were flying, and from Europe there was no more migration to the U.S or to Australia or to South America, those ships needed to have a new employment, and they were converted into cruise ships. So that was the, uh, the beginning of that industry. So when we bought it, we bought it in an industry which was at its beginnings. And we built these two ships, three ships, which were the first ones to be built purposely. So that was, uh, uh, the, the, really the moment in which, uh, we dedicated to that great, , vision, because it was my father's vision that that could have been a great industry and had a great future. And then so on. And then we bought into, uh, then we developed Silver Sea. And I remember when we asked my father, Daddy, what, what is it you? really wish for. And he was 92, I think. And he said, Oh, I wish that Silver Sea will have 12 ships. And I think that we had six, maybe. It was impossible for him to see 12 ships. [00:22:34] Chris: Yeah. [00:22:34] Manfredi: But it was part of the, of really the, the passion that he had and that he gave me, this passion of, uh, and, uh, looking forward always. Not making a calculation of what you're going to make out of it and how it's related to your life, but the project, the vision, what you're building was quite, uh, driving. [00:22:59] Chris: And how many ships do you guys have now? [00:23:02] Manfredi: No, now we just started again. So we have two ships. Now we have to grow it. We start a new chapter. You see what you do when you turn 70. Some people retire. [00:23:11] Chris: Yeah. [00:23:12] Manfredi: Not in my family. [00:23:13] Chris: You start another business. [00:23:15] Manfredi: You start another business. In our case, we started more businesses because we started . We bought Abercrombie & Kent, which we're growing very fast and very much. [00:23:25] Chris: Yeah. [00:23:25] Manfredi: And then we bought again, the cruise line that we have other businesses also, which we run. So it's, uh, it's simply the fact that, uh, what is it that you, that you gives you enjoyment? And, uh, is it to play golf or is it to have, uh, in the morning, wake up and think of the things that you're doing, the projects that you have, how you can accomplish things. And, uh, so in our case, that is because of my father, who started when he was a, who started when he was very young and at 92, he was, he lived until 98. So he was still, uh, when he was at 98, he would do, still the first thing he would ask me is how are the ships going? And so it's part of that. My, the first Lefebvre, the guy in the, uh, at the beginning of the 19th century. He died when he was 84, which for those times, that's a very old age. Because he got pneumonia coming back from the board of his shipping company. So it's in the DNA of the family to work, uh, until you, you go. And it's not a question you already have the money to live well. It's a question of money as an instrument of freedom and to, realize yourself, to to achieve the satisfactions that you're looking for. In my case, I give myself a lot of other satisfactions. But the number one. is to be an entrepreneur! [00:24:54] Chris: That's most important to you to, to be known for as an entrepreneur. [00:24:59] Manfredi: Not to be known to know myself, that I am, I wake up in the morning and I'm busy. I have a lot of things which, uh, interest me. [00:25:09] Chris: Yeah I have a lot of things which I do, which interests other people. If I wasn't an entrepreneur, I wouldn't be here with you. It's very true. So [00:25:16] Manfredi: it's a very strong connection with the living world instead of going into the. Sleeping world. [00:25:24] Chris: I'm curious if you weren't in the shipping business or anything related maritime, , what business do you think you would be in [00:25:33] Manfredi: investment banking? [00:25:35] Chris: Yeah. How come [00:25:37] Manfredi: I always liked it a lot, but investment banking, private equity. investing in businesses, selling businesses, advising people, uh, working on. I, I worked when my father sent me around. Uh, he sent me also to some investment banks for some time to learn, to learn how that work, that will work. I don't know [00:26:02] Chris: if you know, but, , on our podcast, we're interviewing founders, a hundred founders of a billion dollar companies. And I always ask each guest the same question. , and it is, if you're going to break your career into chapters, what chapters would they be? And what would you name them? [00:26:23] Manfredi: A chapter is number one is, uh, the chapter in which I was a golden boy. Which means I was, uh, living, uh, a very, uh, prosperous youth with a daddy who adored me and wouldn't deny me almost anything. [00:26:40] Chris: Okay. [00:26:40] Manfredi: So understanding this, I, uh, I kept and I developed a strong, uh, uh, desire of accomplishing by myself. [00:26:48] Chris: Okay. [00:26:49] Manfredi: That was the first part. Then the second part was, uh, being like, uh, uh, a stamp on my father's back. Okay. Following him everywhere and, uh, listening to him, et cetera, and working together with him. What [00:27:02] Chris: Were the ages for chapter two? [00:27:05] Manfredi: Yeah, you can say, you know, from when I started working with him when I was 19. So let's say 20. Okay. And 20 a decade. Then I started to have diversified investments. Then, uh, that's another age. And then there was the age, which I took over the, the Silver Sea. [00:27:29] Chris: How old were you then? Became [00:27:30] Manfredi: my baby. [00:27:31] Chris: How old were you then when you took over? Silver Sea? [00:27:35] Manfredi: We're talking about a year, 2000. So I was, uh, 47. Nice. [00:27:40] Chris: And any more chapters after Silver Sea? [00:27:44] Manfredi: Yes. It's a new chapter, which is the continuation in a way of Silver Sea, which is, uh, which is happening now. But now my chapter is entrepreneur, but my enterprise is The family wealth. I see myself as somebody who is, uh, administrating the family wealth, not only to increase it, or first of all, keep it as it is and possibly increase it, but also to make it such that it is well transmitted to new generations. So my following, and so this requires a number of choices, which are different in your, in your relationship with the business of themselves, because I was permanently on top of the business. Now I want to, uh, support the manager to grow so that they can deal independently for me, benefit from my presence, but eventually one day they can, the company can go by itself. Yeah. So I joined the company that way, and that's all I'm trying to do it. So I'm trying to diversify risk, enhance liquidity very much so that the liquidity is always there for the family. So it's a different vision. When you're an entrepreneur, you're 47 and you take risks, you want to expand, you have to grow, you have to make, you have to make a jump in the size of your business. You have to go from four ships to actually work two ships to 12, 14, 16 ships. Yeah. So the company is a hundred percent yours. You don't have a public markets, you have to compete with credit, you have to do this and that. So it's a, you know, I had to finance my ships, I had to fly to China because that was the best market. So you'll find always the solutions to get the things to function. But that's when you're the full entrepreneur, then now it's a, it's a much more stable approach. Yeah. [00:29:45] Chris: Makes sense. , your partnership with Royal Caribbean, it was marked as one of the more significant deals in the cruises history, uh, the cruise industry's history. can you tell us a little bit about the unfolding of that partnership? [00:30:01] Manfredi: Well, it was easy. I mean, it was, uh, it wasn't easy. I mean, it was a simple process. I was, I wanted to build more ships, so I decided to open the equity of my company to investors. I informed my competitors that I was doing it, so not to have gossips all the time around. And then, uh, someone from Royal Caribbean, uh, came and said, could we be your investor? They said, I thought about it and I said, why not? And then at a certain point in the process, it evolved from then buying the majority. And so that's, I did. And I had a, a, so a, a stake in the role in the company. But then Covid came and Covid made clear everything first, all that the company had to be absorbed into Royal Caribbean. Mm-Hmm. because of the financial situation. 'cause it was, uh, was not easy for cruise lines and uh, um, and because, uh. And when you are the full disponent of a business, then you can't learn and being somebody who just participates. Yeah. And so it was a good way. We find a great deal, great deal for them, great deal for me. And uh, I got a big chunk of Royal Caribbean shares, which I'm happy to have. And so that's how it evolved. And I could start, I could buy a Abercrombie & Kent and start my own business. [00:31:28] Chris: , was that a pivotable moment in your life? [00:31:30] Manfredi: Sure. I mean, you know, you, you decide that you don't want to be, uh, what was I saying? Sixty six year old retired person with all the banks calling you to invest your money and private equity funds and all of these people asking you to underwrite their funds. But having a very easy life. Uh, very comfortable and deciding now to challenge yourself and to do something new, which excites you every moment, which is exactly the opposite direction, no? You have a capital event. Capital events don't happen many times in the life of an individual. [00:32:10] Chris: Yep. [00:32:11] Manfredi: So it happens. At that point, you have to make a decision. Are you going to go into a new world, which is the world of the person who is either entirely or half retired? Yep. Or you'll find a way to go back into the world of being active in the colony. That's what I decided. I [00:32:33] Chris: think it was a good choice. , Geoffrey also told me, , to ask you about how you became his partner on the MS Explorer, um, which was the first expedition ship that was ever built. [00:32:47] Manfredi: Well, yeah, I mean, it was fantastic. Um, so Geoffrey had this company that he had developed, you know, Geoffrey, as you and your followers know, is a fantastic and unique person. And he wanted to go and send a ship to the Antarctic to propose, to offer to his guests, his clients, the opportunity to go and see the Antarctic. But he wasn't a ship owner. So, we were launch, starting to launch SilverSea at the time. And, uh, we were approached by his consultants, who were going to do the management of this ship, which is a company called V Ships, which is one of the major service companies in the shipping world. And they introduced us, so we made a partnership there, which lasted for two, three years. And then he kept it on his own, but by then we were good friends. And we became even more friends because, uh, then, uh, I, I was next to him and, uh, he was the chairman of WTDC, and I was like his right hand there. And then we developed all the segments for Abercrombie Kent doing services to the cruise industry. He started with us. So Abercrombie & Kent does a lot of the best quality, um, uh, pre post or excursions for cruise industries, part of its business. So that we did together and we became great friends and we always try to do something together. But he did some deals with other people in the meantime on the equity. And then one day, he told me, why don't you buy Abercrombie & Kent? And so that's what we did. And we still work together and, uh, we're, we're going tomorrow. We're flying on, uh, to one of the crystal ships. [00:34:39] Chris: Yeah. [00:34:41] Manfredi: We say two days on it and then we fly back. , so we were always, uh, we do a lot of things together. I mean, [00:34:48] Chris: nice. I'm curious on, you know, and I'm sure this is a hard question to answer, but, , I would imagine for most entrepreneurs, their day to day is very different. , I would imagine yours is similar. , do you have any regular structure you like to keep in your days, even though. You have a thousand things that are thrown at you every single day and you have to change up as much as possible. Some people, for example, you know, have the same waking time every day or the same sleep time or, , the same diet or, , All different types of things. Are there, are there any consistencies or daily rituals that you have in your life? [00:35:25] Manfredi: The daily ritual is a weekly ritual, which is doing the Luggage, so I'm always traveling. Yeah. What is a recurrent? I come back from a trip. I start packing That's the most Methodic thing I do all the time. [00:35:45] Chris: Pack. Pack and unpack. [00:35:47] Manfredi: Pack and unpack, pack and unpack. And then schedule from assistant, assistant, I have to do this, this, this, this, this. Work on the planning, work on how I'm gonna do this. I can fit, fit the meetings. That's the most thing. Um, I try to, if I can, to swim during the day, but uh, as I travel all the time, it's very difficult. [00:36:10] Chris: , what about, I'm curious about, you know, entrepreneurs, a lot of it depends on the entrepreneur. Some people sleep very little, , some people sleep, , a lot and then work hard throughout the day. How about yourself? Are you a heavy sleeper? Are you a light sleeper? Are you getting six, seven hours a night every night on the same time or is it fluctuate? [00:36:30] Manfredi: No, I'm basically going, trying to take six, seven hours every night, trying not to go to sleep too late. This morning I woke up at 6. 30. Yesterday I went to bed at 11. 30. It was seven hours. It was a very tiring day, so I was tired. Uh, but it can be six, it can be seven. Rarely goes above seven, unfortunately. I would like to have more sleep if I could. And, um, but it's normally very regular hours. [00:37:01] Chris: , any advice that you would give yourself, , your younger self that you didn't know when you were younger, say at the age of 20 or 30, that you know now that you wish you knew. [00:37:13] Manfredi: You know, and anything which is not real estate. Already built in the state business number one thing to look at is the people you're going to be working with as partners as executives, because that makes or breaks or fixes anything. So whenever you choose to deal with the wrong partners or whenever you, uh, appoint or go into a business without having the right person. You're going to have some problems. [00:37:45] Chris: Yeah. What are some things that you look for in a partnership or an executive when you, when you bring them on? [00:37:52] Manfredi: They have to be, first of all, they have to be trustworthy. They have to be honest, trustworthy. They have to be hardworking people. And if they're hardworking people competent, they can make a lot of money. [00:38:05] Chris: I'm not stingy. So you pay them well, [00:38:07] Manfredi: yes, they may. They, they have good incentives. [00:38:11] Chris: Have you ever noticed any, any, any ways that you identify individuals like that? You, you mentioned trustworthy, hardworking, is it through reputation that you hear from other people? Oh, this individual's trustworthy. Uh, he or she has built, you know, this business, or is it personal experience? Do you want to meet with them, get to know them really well, sit down with them, how they interact with you? [00:38:35] Manfredi: Well, you know, now the last, uh, oh, it's, what is it? 25 years more, 30 years. As I've been in the same business, it's much easier because I, I know the people that I'm going to retain, or I'm gonna promote, I'm going to delegate to. So it's, it's quite easy because 30 years since, uh, we started, uh, SilverSea Cruises now it's, uh, the same market. So the CEO of Abercrombie and Kent Travel Group, which includes Abercrombie and Kent. And Crystal Cruz is a person who has been working with me for 14 years. [00:39:13] Chris: Yeah. [00:39:14] Manfredi: She joined Silversea, and then when she was extremely young, now she's still very young, but she's in her beginning of her 40s, and she's the CEO of the group. I know her inside out, she knows me inside out. So just full trust, a hardworking person, work ethics are extremely strong. That's fundamental because mine are extremely strong. So I can't deal when people tell me balance of life. Balance of life is, is not compatible to be running a competitive business. [00:39:50] Chris: How many hours a day do you say you work from from the time you wake up to the time you go to sleep? [00:39:55] Manfredi: Yes, basically I work that seven, what is it called, seven days a week, , although I work always that it is divided between days in which I work more and days in which I work less. So there are some days in which I work less because it's a Sunday or it's a vacation. So I will be working less, but I will always be working. It doesn't, I think it never happens a day in which I don't take care of something. [00:40:25] Chris: what would you say you're most proud of? [00:40:27] Manfredi: Most [00:40:27] Chris: proud of my [00:40:30] Manfredi: friends, my friends. I am very proud of the fact that I have great friends with a strong friendship. And I tell myself there's something right that you can do if you have friends of such good quality that are so attached to you and you're so attached to them. [00:40:52] Chris: I think that's a fantastic answer. And a lot of people would probably want to know a little bit more about that. , When I would imagine trustworthy, , is something that's important when you look for friends. But what are some other things that when you look for friends or friendships that are important for you? [00:41:13] Manfredi: Well, you know, the first of all, there's a generosity in the relationship. [00:41:16] Chris: Yeah. [00:41:18] Manfredi: If the, if the relationships are transactional, there's something which compromises the friendship. So it's just, there can be transaction with friends, but that must not be the basis of a friendship. So trustworthy, uh, based on the sentiment of friendship, the, the interest of seeing each other because of what puts you together, that both have, uh, memories or of a present or of things that interest you, that you're interested in talking to them, uh, sharing with them. So this is, uh, the basic thing. [00:41:59] Chris: I think that's a great way to wrap up the interview Manfredi. , one more question. What else do you want to do? Say in the next 10 years of your life, what are your goals? [00:42:09] Manfredi: Is that there are three things in parallel. One thing I want to have this, Abercrombie & Kent travel group grow and, uh, become very interesting and I do fantastic things. It's such a beautiful business that we enjoy every moment of it. The second thing is. Organize the rest of the world and, and also Abercrombie & Kent ownership in such a way that it can survive me well. And the third thing is, besides doing these things, is enjoying many things that I like. I like to travel, I like to read. Uh, I like to be with my friends. And, uh, so. And I like to do things which are not only tied to a monetary benefit. You know, having been successful from a financial point of view has to buy you, first of all, freedom of choice. Freedom of choice is how you spend your time. So how I spend my time is important. And And spending it, developing the business that we have created, is a satisfaction. Spending it, organizing the wealth, in a way that it can then be at the benefit of the persons I love is a satisfaction. Doing other things, cultivating myself, traveling the world, visiting the world, etc., is a satisfaction. Having the freedom to dedicate part of the time to this without Having to be obliged by other things and having the substantial means to do it is part of the freedom of choice that success gives you. [00:43:45] Chris: Well said. Manfredi, I want to thank you so much for the interview and thank you for sharing your time and your wisdom with our listeners. I love how you wrap that up, talking about the freedom of choice and relationships in your life. So Thank you so much. We're, , honored to have you on the podcast and, we'll see you next time on the show. [00:44:05] Manfredi: Thank you so much. Bye bye. Ciao.  

In this episode of Building Texas Business, I sit down with Chantell Preston, CEO of Facilities Management Group. She takes us through her journey of transforming the healthcare industry - from an unexpected start managing facilities to founding Mentis Neuro Rehabilitation. Chantell's strategic moves in positioning her company through the pandemic era offer key leadership lessons. We discuss her transition in fostering trust and respect amongst staff, vital for a positive culture, especially in difficult times. Her reflections on setbacks emphasize emotional readiness for both failures and leadership burdens. Wrapping up on a lighter note of future dreams, from travel adventures to family time, Chantell offers a well-rounded portrait of an impactful leader. SHOW HIGHLIGHTS Chantell Preston shares her unexpected entry into the healthcare industry and how it led to her role in developing numerous healthcare facilities across Texas. We discuss Chantell's experience founding and successfully exiting Mentis Neuro Rehabilitation, a company focused on traumatic brain injury patients. Chantell explains her strategic decisions and leadership style transformation during the COVID-19 pandemic, emphasizing the shift from an authoritarian to a collaborative approach. We explore the importance of trust, respect, and open communication in maintaining a positive team culture, especially during challenging times. Chantell recounts the lessons learned from entrepreneurial setbacks, including the emotional toll of difficult business decisions and the significance of building strong relationships. We discuss the tactical choices made to support frontline workers and expand service lines during the COVID-19 pandemic. Chantell reflects on her evolution from a closed-off, authoritative leader to a compassionate and empathetic one, inspired by her business partner's example. We talk about the challenges and liberation of breaking societal norms as a female leader and the importance of achieving work-life integration. Chantell shares her personal dreams of travel and family time, highlighting the difficulty of balancing a busy work schedule with personal aspirations. We discuss the advice Chantell gives to young entrepreneurs, emphasizing the importance of focus, having a supportive team, and being ready to pivot when necessary. LINKSShow Notes Previous Episodes About BoyarMiller About Facilities Management Group GUESTS Chantell PrestonAbout Chantell TRANSCRIPT (AI transcript provided as supporting material and may contain errors) Chris: In this episode, you will meet Chantell Preston, CEO of Facilities Management Group. Chantell is a self-described risk taker who emphasizes the importance of establishing trust and respect in building a strong company culture. Chantell, I want to thank you for coming on Building Texas Business. I appreciate you taking the time. Chantell: Thanks, Chris. I appreciate you inviting me to come on. Chris: So let's just kick this off by telling us a little bit about Facilities Management Group, the company you're currently CEO of. Chantell: Sure, so Facilities Management Group. We're really a platform company. We own and operate healthcare facilities throughout Texas. Initially, when I took it on, we had a hospital in Las Vegas, but we divested that and sold that to a local system there, and so now our main facilities are here in the Texas market. Chris: Okay, and I know this isn't your first venture in the healthcare space Tell us a little bit about how you got involved or found yourself being an executive in the healthcare industry. Chantell: Sure, it's kind of an interesting story, chris. I don't think any of us know when we graduate from college where we're going to end up in life, and I can truly tell you I never thought it would be health care. So you know, straight out of school I got a great opportunity to go to work for a small company that was developing ambulatory surgery centers. Didn't know anything about ambulatory surgery centers but I knew the folks that were in the organization. So took the leap of faith and I just wanted to learn every aspect. I felt like if? How could I go out and sell things if I didn't realize or understand how they were operated? So took the opportunity to really dive into the health care and learn both the development aspect as well as the operational aspect. Best thing I ever did. From there just kind of soared, I became very niched in regards to building healthcare facilities. I've built over 65 hospitals in my career, whether they're LTACs, rehabs, full acute care hospitals, linear accelerators. So I just kind of found a niche. I really enjoyed watching something from concept to operations. However, I got to a certain point in my life I decided I didn't want to be a consultant forever. So my previous partner and I started a company called Atlantic Health Group. We were going to be a surgery center company. We realized the market was saturated at that point, so we started a company called Mentis Neuro Rehabilitation. Mentis was assisted living rehabilitation for traumatic brain injury patients. To be honest, we really didn't know much about it when we started. We built an amazing team to operate the company for us and then we realized how much need there was for traumatic brain injury patients, so we continued down that path. I continued to build facilities to generate revenue, to build Mentus, so we didn't have to raise huge capital. So we bootstrapped everything together and we took Mentus from concept to exit in 2015. Chris: Wow. Chantell: So we exited the mid-market. And then comes back to what are you going to do with your life from there? So I really stayed for about a year and realized that just my heart wasn't in it anymore. Things changed. We built such an amazing culture, so really focused on what was the next phase of my life. That's when I ended up taking over facilities management group. One of my partners that was operating the entity got ill and so I stepped up and said I'll take over, and that's when we really developed Facilities Management Group. At that point, we had a lot of individual facilities running independently of each other and we wanted to build a platform company that we could have some synergistic services across all facilities. So that was 2018. And so that was a great ride. I learned a lot. Six months after I took over, covid hit so you can only imagine what happens with the hospital industry when that happens? Chris: Yeah, I'm sure there's. We'll get into that because there has to be a lot of good stories there, but I can't help but notice that, as you told, that is, you talked about being thrown in cold, knowing nothing about the industry healthcare that is but then you found yourself evaluating opportunities for surgical centers and then the mental health, brain injury type of facilities that you mentioned. I want to talk about what type of processes did you go through, and or with your partners, to evaluate the opportunities when you're like, okay, what's next or what else can we do? What are some of the things that you found to be valuable and useful in going through that process, as well as maybe some of the things you wish you hadn't done? Chantell: Sure, Great question, chris. You know, as we all go through our career, we, you know, we try to evaluate things. Everybody looks at things very differently and you know you probably say I'm a calculated risk taker. So, again, I wanted to be able to find a path where, you know, my number one was I wanted to help people. You know, I think most of us get into health care because we have this naivety that we really, you know we can make a change in the world, and I think we do, just maybe different than what we anticipate when we go in. So I think it's really about when I would look at each of the opportunities that came up. You know, again started at a small company and I wanted to learn as much as I could, and then I got recruited from there. Once I found a niche for myself, I didn't really have to go looking for jobs. People would come to me, but then it was like, okay, I learned some hard knocks at the same time as to going to work for folks, because they throw a lot of money at you or they say, oh, we're going to create this amazing environment, and then you get in and you realize this is not really a productive place for me to be and in those situations you just try to take, learn everything you can, you know, gain as much experience and knowledge, because I look at everything as a stepping stone to the next place. So when we, you know, when we started Atlantic, it was kind of an interesting scenario because I had a ton of development partners that I had already established that I was working for as an independent consultant. I didn't really want to be a consultant forever. I wanted to build something, I wanted to have some security. So I actually talked my partner, my business partner, into leaving his organization because he had a skill set that I didn't have. So he was really more around the finance side of things, operationally, and I was really more the development aspect. And so you know, and I was really more the development aspect, and so you know, I think it's really important when people look at their careers, a everything in life is a stepping stone to the next thing. I mean, you have to look at it that way. What can I get out of this particular situation to advance my overall objectives later? Chris: Sure. Chantell: But also who you're getting in bed with and I speak a lot to entrepreneurs. It's really important to pick your partners wisely. And when you say your partners, you know I tell people it's like a marriage. Oh well, we're best friends. We're never going to, you know, get sideways with each other. Well, it is important that when you're going into a partnership, you know even a company is what's it going to look like if we got divorced? I look at everything as it's kind of like a marriage. Chris: No, no, Look, I advise clients all the time into the same thing. You know, be careful, Don't do 50-50 unless you have a good deadline provision. But it is they are. I can attest from being on the litigation side of these things. They are truly business divorces when they go south, and we always tell people it's better to invest up front to getting your documents right. You don't want to think you and your best friends could ever go south, but there's a reason. There's a bunch of law firms and lawyers that stay busy because that's what happens. Chantell: Right, and I was fortunate not to go through that. To be honest, it was just, I was very cognizant and I think when I was younger I didn't realize the value I brought. So I felt like safety was in numbers, right, and sometimes we create an environment around us because it makes us feel protected and then at the end of the day you go, wait a minute, what about me? And so you know again, lessons learned. You know, we also have a tendency, you know, adhd. We're all entrepreneurs. We like to do lots of different things. You know a few mistakes that we made along the way was we started getting into things that we didn't know too much about, because it was the shiny penny oh this is great, let's go do this and then, oh my God, we would either lose a ton of money. You know a lot of headaches. We didn't stay focused on our core business and it kind of school of hard knocks a little bit. It took us a little bit of time to realize that, hey, we need to solely focus on, you know, our core business, mentis, and let's stop messing around with all this other stuff that seems like it's fun and exciting. Let's stay focused on our core business until we reach. You know what we were hoping to accomplish. Chris: That's great advice. The discipline of staying focused on your core and what you do best can't be overstated. So many people lose their way because of the distractions, and you're right. They end up costing more money than you expected and taking more of your time away, and it takes it away from your core, so then it suffers. Chantell: That's right, and people don't realize. You know, time is the one thing we'll never get back in life, and so if you're looking and focusing your attention on something else, what are you losing at your core business? And I see a lot of entrepreneurs and a lot of people oh, I want to go do this and this. Again, we did it Not successful, but we did it. And so now, when I'm looking at things and where do I want to go next, it's where do I want to spend my time, knowing that if I spread myself too thin or too many things, I won't be as successful as I want to be. Chris: Yeah, that's great advice. I hope people are taking notes on that. So let's go back. You kind of left us a minute ago taking over the reins at FMG, right before COVID hits. Obviously, you have to manage through that in the healthcare space. Take us back to that time. What were some of the things that you learned, having to manage through such an uncertain period of time? Chantell: When I took over FMG there was a couple things that identified very quickly. Again, they were all running as independent facilities and there was no collaboration and really the culture there was no culture. You know, in my previous organization with Mentis and a lot of the companies I've been involved with, culture was huge. You know, you wanted people to want to be there and fortunately we were able to quickly build a culture that we felt and it was actually proven true through COVID that people wanted to be there. You know I was very visible in our facilities. I wanted people to know me, I wanted to hear what they had to say. As a new CEO coming in, you know, tell me how can we help you do your job more effectively? How can we help you be happier? You know, looking at things in a different perspective, other than you need to be here nine to five every day, do exactly what we want, right? You know, when COVID hit, the uncertainty of everything I mean we were. Some of my facilities were emergency rooms at the time, some of them were hospitals. You know we had limited staff, we had limited services. You know, when COVID hit it was really interesting because with the unknown of nobody really understanding the magnitude of what was happening. It was decisions on a day to day basis. Right, you know, everything was a crisis every single day. It was a very time for me, as a leader, to figure out how could I continue to hold on to this culture that we had built so we didn't lose staff, right? So, but also giving our staff the ability to take a break every once in a while, even though we didn't really have folks to fill in for them, in for them. So it was a time that we really had to bond together. And again, me being in our facilities during that time, even though I really couldn't do much to help, but at least showing my face, saying hey, I'm here with you and I'm standing beside you, especially on some of those hard decisions, I think made a big difference for our success. Chris: Yeah, you raised an interesting point there because first of all, I mean I it's been four years and maybe the memories start to fade but health care frontline workers, right, that was ground zero for the response. So I can only imagine the taxing environment for your employees. Most CEOs can be there shoulder to shoulder with their employees and maybe actually get in, you know, step in on the manufacturing line or pick up something and help out in the shop, and if you're not a licensed physician or a PA or a nurse, you can't right, you couldn't do the work, you could just be there to encourage them. Chantell: That had to be a challenge. You know you're right, because we just want to jump in and help and but there was a lot of things that what I could do and again you know, spirits high, helping clean, I mean there was, you know, again it wasn't above anybody. We had to kind of all throw hands in, all hands on deck, to help out in any aspect. And so we did what we could to try to motivate and try to help give people some breaks and give them the resources that they needed, and that was a big thing. That we did was just trying to get the resources that they needed, and so it was a trying time, but again we came across. You know, as a CEO, I wanted to be able to expand our service lines because we knew what was coming. And you know, after we got kind of settled in and we realized this was going to be a longer, a longer path than we thought, we converted all of our ERs into hospitals so we could provide additional service lines. So there was things that we could do on the strategic and on the management side where we weren't necessarily in the trenches, but yet it provided our staff some amazing resources that they needed. Chris: So you talked about culture and how important it is. It doesn't have to necessarily be at FMG, but just in your role as a leader. What are some of the things that you have done to try to build that positive, sounds like collegial team environment type of culture at the various organizations you've been? I mean, is it kind of the same playbook every time, or you know? If so, what is it? And if it's changed, how do you adapt? Funny question I'm just going to. I'll give you a quick story. You know? If so, what is it? And if it's changed? Chantell: how do you adapt? Funny question. I'm just going to give you a quick story. You know there's a lot of people that have been with me for the last 10, over 10 years, so they've seen me kind of develop as a better leader as I've gotten a little bit older. So in my old days, I have to tell you I was probably very authoritarian, very dictatorship it's my way, no way. And leadership, it's my way, no way. And then, as I've gotten a little bit older and through you know my role at FMG I realized I can't continue to lead like this. This is not how to get the most productivity out of my staff, and so I changed a lot in regards to how to build a culture. And so now you know people will tell you these are the four principles I use authenticity, I want to build trust and respect. You know again, you know I'm going to be very direct with individuals. I don't beat around the bush and I think anybody that knows me knows that. Collaboration I want people to have the ability to have a say. I want them to take ownership. You know used to as my way. You know we're going to do things my way. Now it's let talk about it Because, in today's world, I want my staff members they're there for a reason and that's to come together in a path or a process that everyone feels like is going to be beneficial to the organization. Now, it doesn't mean I won't give them my thoughts, but again, that collaboration and that belonging, I want them to feel like they're part of the team. Whether you and I both know, in an organization everyone's valuable and I want everyone to realize how valuable each member is and where they fit within that organization. Authenticity, trust, collaboration yeah, those are communication too, you know. Chris: Oh, for sure. Chantell: We used to be like we wouldn't tell anybody anything, you know, just say here's our goals, to go do them. Now we really talk about why you know and really have those hard conversations about this is you know the company. And when we went through COVID I know everybody's tired of hearing the COVID stories, but when we went through COVID, you know we would tell them hey, this is why we're doing this. And it wasn't just oh, they're causing us all these headaches. You know they're pushing stuff down. No, it was. We're doing it because of X, y and Z, and that made people appreciate it a little bit more, versus us just shoving things down. Chris: Yeah. Chantell: And so I think communication is a big one as well. Chris: Couldn't agree more. I mean, I think you know, at the end of the day, all those things sound really good and are important, but if you're not communicating effectively, it won't matter. That's right. So, something that occurred to me, I want you to talk a little bit about being innovative, because I know for sure at FMG, because I just know enough about the story that in the middle of all that y'all did some pretty innovative things that other competitors of yours weren't doing. That required some really quick on the fly decisions to get some innovative things going. So tell us about that. It helped the patients and it helped your facility. Chantell: Sure, you know, one of the perks of dealing with a smaller organization is we can make quick decisions. So when all of this was happening, you know we did have to get innovative in regards to how we were running tests, how we were treating the patients, what we were doing when we couldn't find patients higher level of care. So there was a lot of innovation that we did, you know, whether it was streamlining our processes, whether it was, you know, the equipment that we were bringing in to try to mitigate certain things. I mean, there was a lot of stuff that we did that if we weren't going through that time, we probably wouldn't have been forced to do so quickly, if that makes sense. And so there was some stuff that we tried to do in regards to you know, I'm trying to think of some specifics. A lot of it's around the labs and the testing side of making sure that our patients are being treated in-house versus having to send things out. I mean, we just tried to do everything we could to control our own destiny. Advert Hello friends, this is Chris Hanslik, your Building Texas business host. Did you know that Boyer Miller, the producer of this podcast, is a business law firm that works with entrepreneurs, corporations and business leaders? Our team of attorneys serve as strategic partners to businesses by providing legal guidance to organizations of all sizes. Get to know the firm at boyermiller.com, and thanks for listening to the show. Chris: Well, for example, I know one of the things you did was very quickly developed an app so patients could schedule an appointment that you didn't have before. Chantell: Yeah, that's correct. We tried to do some things so people would mitigate being around other, you know, possibly infected COVID people. So, yes, we did do some things to try to limit exposure during that time, just because, again, we didn't know what was going to happen long-term. Chris: So I guess one thing that people may not know about you that we want to talk about is, in addition to this professional you know journey you've described, you do a lot and have done and continue to do a lot where you advise other entrepreneurs. I want to ask you a little bit what are some of the kind of the key nuggets of advice that you tend to provide, and maybe what are some of the mistakes you see young entrepreneurs making that you try to correct before what still can be corrected, I guess Sure, it's kind of interesting. Chantell: The world has changed a lot in regards to entrepreneurship. You know, in our day it was just work your ass off. You know 24-7 and just try to climb the ladder. You know now, with some things that have happened, you know, with technology, sometimes they have this misperception that it's just going to be easy, it's going to be rainbows and unicorns all the time. It's not. There was many nights we'd sit at the bar going, holy shit, how are we going to make payroll? So I mean again, I think it's bringing that true realism back into their world of hey, you're not going to go get a CPT code for a device that doesn't exist in six months. It just doesn't work like that. And I think sometimes these young entrepreneurs are given almost bad counsel because they think that things are just so easy. Well, so-and-so did it, so I can do it. I see that a lot. I do get the opportunity to speak to some of the entrepreneurship classes up at UT and I do probably focus more on the negatives versus the positives, because I've always learned more from my failures and my successes. Some of the things of hey look, be focused. You know you don't have to have everything figured out, but have a pretty good path of where you're headed. You know, and surround yourself with the folks that are going to build you up, not break you down. You know, as an investor as well. I look at who's the team. If you've got a good jockey, I'm going to go ahead and support you. Having that right team in place is so critical and you want it to be more than just one individual. You know you want to make sure if they get hit by a bus, somebody else is right there ready to take the company. So I think that there's just little things that you know. I would probably give some insight to the entrepreneurs of you know, again, you're going to have good times and bad times. The bad times will come and go. But again, being willing to pivot If something's not working, don't wait too long to pivot or to reevaluate maybe certain aspects of the organization. Chris: Okay, so you brought it up, but I was going to. You said you learn more from your failures than successes, so tell us a story it's story time now, chantel a failure or setback that you've encountered, experience that you survived because you're sitting here today, and what that learning was and how it made you better. Chantell: So we talked a little bit earlier about how we got a little bit outside of our wheelhouse of oh, let's go do some different things, because we, you know, have been very successful at what we were doing. We were trying to purchase a hospital group out of bankruptcy. We thought, oh, how hard can this be? We can run organizations, we can run ASCs. Why can't we do this? It was a very eye-opening experience because when we got in there, we hadn't really had a path forward as to what we were going to do or how we were going to do it. It was just like, oh, we'll figure it out as we go. We also didn't think about other things that could come in and really impact us that we couldn't control. So we had purchased, we were in the process of purchasing this group, they were in bankruptcy, and then we had a flood. Well, we had just finished remodeling a hospital here in town. The flood came in. It flooded the hospital. At that point we were kind of at a place where there was not much more we could do. It was a horrible time to have to tell all those individuals that worked so hard with us that we were going to have to let them all go and you know lessons learned. You know there was positives in there because I remember the day we were getting ready to tell these poor individuals we were going to fire them the night before. You know we probably drank too much and you know it was a very emotional situation because I'd worked hand in hand with these individuals for so long. Chris: Sure. Chantell: And I remember having to tell them in tears I mean, you know, I know we're not supposed to be emotional, but these are these people's livelihoods. I was emotional, I you know I was not in a great place and I remember, after that happened, one of the the janitors came up to me and she said don't worry, chantel, we're going to be okay. But are you going to be okay? Chris: Oh, wow. Chantell: And I realized, you know, even through this failure, we had built such great relationships with these individuals and made them feel valued in so many ways that you know again, that's probably a really good example of learning myself of how important it is for relationships you know and building that trust as a leader. Chris: Well, to what to point you made just a minute ago. There is emotion in business. For sure, people try to carve it out and maybe for decades that's been the mentality, but it's ignored the reality that there's emotion in business and you're affecting people's lives when you are hiring them and when you're firing them. So you know people that lose sight of that are missing the boat, and I think how you manage the emotion in the business is one thing, but don't make the mistake of thinking it's not there. Chantell: No for sure, and you know, again, my old days I would have never showed, you know, a whole lot of emotion. I will tell you, though, being authentic with people just builds more trust. And look, some people say I'm very challenging to work with. You know, because I'm very specific, I'm very direct, but you know where you stand with me at all times, you know, and I had a situation last year where I had to let someone go, and it was. I mean, I really love this person as an individual, but this just wasn't the right place for them, and I tried very hard to mentor, to get him to that place, and I just couldn't, and it was very emotional to have to say, hey look, this is not, you know, the best place for you. The greatest return was six months later. They contacted me and said thank you so much. The best thing you ever did was have that conversation, and now I found a place where I love I'm being respected, and so, again, I think we all have emotion. It's as you mentioned, it's how you use it. It's okay for people to realize that you're human. I mean you know I'm human, I mean, and so I have emotions, and there's people I like and, again, you are impacting their lives and they're impacting yours. Chris: For sure, and I mean I have a number of stories similar to the one you just shared, where you run into an employment situation that's not working. You, knowing that it's not working, have to make a decision, expend a ton of emotional energy over it, worried about it. My experience has been, I think I can say, almost every time, despite that hard conversation, that person ends up in a better place because it's where they were meant to be. And we say this all the time. We're not trying to be the largest organization. We just want to be the best for those that fit with our mission and what we're passionate about and our values. And doesn't mean we're right for everybody and that doesn't make people a bad person. Chantell: That's right. Chris: There there's another organization where they're going to fit. Chantell: And and, and she did say to me she goes thank you, because I always knew where I stood with you and thank you for always being very direct. You know and that's the other thing people hide from those conversations. I'd rather have those conversations, you know, leading up to it. Look, here's the expectations. Let's talk about how you can get there, and I'm always happy to mentor and advise, but at some point you have to say, hey, look, this just isn't the right place. Chris: Right. Chantell: And so, and that's OK too. Chris: So let's talk a little bit about as you built these companies. You've had to have key stakeholders and relationships with them that are part of the success, that's vendors, customers. Let's talk about what are some of the things that you've learned that have helped to kind of build, nurture and grow those types of strategic relationships, if you will. Chantell: Sure, most of the people that I still work with, I've worked with for many years and I think you know I tell people all the time my integrity is the only thing that I really is mine in this world. My kids have everything else, but my integrity is mine. I think it's really being fair with people. You know I'm loyal to a fault, but I'm also again, I don't want to say high maintenance, but I have great expectations of people as well. And so if you look at a lot of the vendors, you know, again, they've been with me forever because I'm very loyal to them, I'm very fair, I'm very direct and they're good to me. Chris: Right. Chantell: You know, and I think as I've gotten older I had never realized the importance of relationships and how you have to be very intentional with giving and taking Right Right. But I also know with my vendors, they do a great job for me. I'm going to, I want to give them out to everybody else. I mean, I'm going to drive business their direction. And so I think that you know, with the stakeholders, a lot of people make a mistake of. You know everyone's got to win. You know that's just the reality. There's an abundance for everyone in life. You know, one of my best friends is a direct competitor of us. We laugh all the time. We can't be friends in public, but we can be friends behind closed door. But there's an abundance for everyone in life and so if you treat people like that and you're fair, I think you know you win, everyone wins. Chris: Everyone wins, and that's the thing I think finding the way where everyone can win, sure, and there's the value in kind of reciprocity, right, when someone does treat you well, that you obviously should treat them well in return. But have that be a lesson how you should be treating others that you're coming into contact with, right, absolutely, absolutely. So you mentioned this earlier because I like to talk about leadership style and you've kind of alluded to some of your evolution. Any more you can share kind of on how you view your style, how you feel like it's evolved and maybe some of the things that have helped you make those steps to kind of grow from the command and control to the more collaborative leader. Chantell: I think self-awareness, I think when we're younger, we think we're invincible and we do no wrong. I think self-awareness, I think when we're younger, we think we're invincible and we do no wrong. I think self-awareness has been critical for me, just for personal growth, right. So I also realized, you know, I wasn't getting the most out of the people and I realized that how I came in impacted everybody around me, if that makes sense. Chris: Sure. Chantell: So when I walk in and I'm closed off, everyone's going to scatter. If I walk in and I'm in a great mood and I say hello to everybody, your energy that you put out, you get back. And so I think, as I've gone through my career path, I've realized that, getting more and really I had a great partner, business partner, that he would talk to everyone. I wondered how he got anything done some days because he was just the most jovial guy that loved everyone and he would sit and listen to people for hours and I used to say I don't know how you do this. Isn't this driving you crazy? You know, I just I want, I don't want to know what time it is, I want to know, yeah, I want to know what time it is. I don't want to know how to build the clock. And I realized how much everyone respected him because he not only cared about them on the job, he cared about the whole person. Right, and people felt that. And I finally asked him one day. I said can you teach me how to be like that? Because I want people to realize I do care. I may not come across and show it, and so I that's how I kind of evolved, of taking that time and realizing ten minutes out of my day of sitting down and really focusing and being present with people, how much more they wanted to be there, how much more productive they were, and so it's really again being the leader that you have to establish boundaries. I'm not saying you, you know, let everybody circumvent their ladder, but having the ability to really show how much you care for those individuals and also what's going to put them in a position to be a better employee, right, right. And look, I went through a big thing with my team about working from home. Okay, I hate working from home, ok. Chris: I hate working from home. I'm just going to tell you that I like the collaboration. I like everyone in the office. You know that you're in good company. There was literally an article in the online Houston Business Journal this morning about that topic and how everything is swinging back to five days a week in the office. Chantell: That's right, and it was a big fight in my office about that and I finally said, okay, let's compromise, because I realized that some of them were driving an hour both ways, okay. So Mondays and Fridays we have home days. Tuesday, wednesday, thursday, we're all in the office. So again, I met them where they wanted to be and how could they be most effective. And I realized, having that time at home, where they didn't have 5,000 people walking in their offices every day, they were more productive. And so again it's you know. You know you asked me a specific question about how I've changed. I mean, I've really come, you know, 180 in regards to who I was many years ago versus how I am now. Chris: Well, and what I hear you saying is there was an evolution and development in your leadership style that started to focus on and demonstrate humility and empathy, absolutely, you know, going back to kind of the work remote thing. I think those things, what you've got going on, can be successful because you have to start with why are we here? It's the why around the company, and we have to all agree that the company has to survive in order for any of us to have any benefits. That's right, right and so what's that going to take? And then where can there be some compromise around? You can't sacrifice productivity and you can't sacrifice delivery of services or you won't have the business. Right and right. It's really to me, getting clear around that, communicating, that we talk about communication with clarity and really everyone understanding the why absolutely, and I'll just we'll talk about the elephant in the room also being female, I mean. Chantell: So in my younger days I thought in order for me to gain respect, I had to be that authoritative bitch. You know. Basically Because that's what society told me, you know in order for me to be able to play in a man's world, I had to really be that person. You know, as my career, and I got to a point where I didn't need anybody's approval or permission. You know, I realized, got to a point where I didn't need anybody's approval or permission I realized, wait a minute, I can be my authentic self. I can be compassionate, I can be empathetic and I can still be a damn good leader at the same time. Chris: That had to be liberating. Chantell: It was very liberating, and I try to instill this with a lot of the women that I talk to now. It's okay to be who we are. Let's use our innate qualities that make us such great individuals in our professional lives. You know, and I mean again, people say I'm aggressive. That's okay, I'll take it and I can be, but it enables me to also utilize what I need to build the culture and the team that I want, and so I think that's also been, you know, the last 30 years. It's also changed a lot, you know, as a society, but that's also breaking the societal norms of, oh, I have to be a certain way in order to be a good leader. I don't think that's true anymore. Chris: I agree with you Again. I think there's been an evolution in how we think about business, corporate America, whatever. And again I go back to as long as we realize that there are certain fundamentals that, no matter what is going on, we have to do for the business to survive. Then we can look on the fringes and go okay, where can we make maybe some things a little more accommodating. Chantell: Exactly so. Chris: I like to talk about those a little bit. So what are some of the strategies that you've employed to kind of and you mentioned being a mom, being a leader, being an entrepreneur to help, not necessarily balance, but be successful in both your business and personal life? Chantell: Great question. Here's my theory behind that. There's no such thing as balance. Chris: That's why I didn't use the word. Chantell: I call it work-life integration. I can't say I've figured it all out, chris. I'll just be honest and I think it's being very intentional with your time. I used to let a lot of people control my time, meaning, you know, I was always willing to meet whenever they were available. I was willing to move around things because it was important to them. I've now really been intentional about taking control back of my own time, and that's time for myself in the mornings, that's time for my kids, but that's time for work too, and so I think we all have to establish boundaries. Because I used to work 24 seven. I'd be at dinner. I mean, my five-year-old used to say mom, please put the phone down, and I would thought I was that important that I had to respond to that email, right. That second, because that's how important I was. It's not true, and I think that really establishing you know we also try to get through our entire things to do list every day what are the top three priorities I really need to get done today? Okay, let's focus on those. First, because we all know once everybody starts coming to the office, you're going to get blindsided 5,000 different ways. So really prioritizing maybe three items that I need to get done that day and then all the rest of it's great if I do, but if I don't, it's okay to walk out of there at 4.30 to go to my kids' game, right. And so I'm really trying to be intentional with my time. I'm not going to say I'm successful all the time. Chris: You know, but I've really tried with that. You have to keep in mind no one's perfect right, but I think, if you have, those intentions, that thoughtfulness about how you're going to approach your day, and I totally agree with the work-life integration. I think that's a much better way to think about it than balance, I mean. Chantell: I've learned you can have it all. You just can't have it all at the same time. So, everything in life is about a give and take. It's about you know you're sacrificing something for something else. And so it's again where are you in your life, what's important to you? I mean, I waited late in life to have children, you know, and now I'm going to enjoy my kids. So again, doesn't mean I'm sacrificing my professional, but I do amazing conversation. Chris: I really appreciate it. I want to kind of turn to some less business topics that I like to cover with all my guests. So what was your first job? Chantell: My first job. I worked at Mount Asia when I was in high school. I loved scooping ice cream and I loved hosting birthday parties for small kids. Chris: Okay, so that was it. I was going to ask what Mount Asia was. It's that golf off I-10. Chantell: So yes, that was it. I was going to ask what Mountasia was. It's that golf off I-10. Chris: So, yes, that was my first job. I love it. Do you prefer Tex-Mex or barbecue? Chantell: Tex-Mex, of course. Chris: All right. And if you could take a sabbatical for 30 days, where would you go? What would you do? Chantell: Oh gosh, A sabbatical for 30 days. Chris: Does that exist I? Chantell: don't know. I think I would really just like to travel the world. You know, I spent so much time working I would never take more than two days off at a time. I never got to see a lot of the world, and so I think it would probably just grab my kids and just embrace a great trip with my family. Chris: That sounds great. Yeah, pick a spot and go enjoy it Absolutely. Very good. Well, again, this has been great. Thank you for taking the time to share your story Lots. Special Guest: Chantell Preston.

In this episode of Building Texas Business, I chat with Mike Snavely, CEO of Phunware. Mike details Phunware's evolution from a mobile development agency into a thriving SaaS company delivering high-ROI apps to hotels and healthcare providers. Hear how shifting culture from rigid control to empowering autonomous teams with accountability revived success. Key strategic maneuvers included trimming the workforce judiciously and securing capital patiently. Timely decisions breathe new life into businesses' surfaces repeatedly. We delve into crafting a trusting, candid culture. Difficult conversations are promptly addressed and failures learned foster innovation and resilience. I share that I founded such an environment at a former startup. Mike's unique hobby of creatively mapping dream destinations blends work wisdom with life's pleasures, crafting an episode uplifting attendees' strategies and spirits. SHOW HIGHLIGHTS Mike Snavely explains the evolution of Phunware from a mobile solution development agency to a SaaS company that specializes in customized mobile apps for hotels and healthcare institutions. We discuss the strategic decisions and cultural shifts necessary during the transition to new leadership at Phunware, including capital injection and reshaping the balance sheet for growth. Mike highlights the move from a command-and-control culture to one that champions autonomy and accountability, emphasizing the importance of empowering team leaders. We explore the significance of building a leadership team grounded in trust, accountability, autonomy, and candor, and how these principles contribute to a positive organizational culture. Mike shares his personal career journey, detailing his long-standing experience in mobile technology and his eventual rise to the CEO position at Phunware. We examine how Phunware fosters a culture of appreciation and collaboration through a Slack channel called Momentum, which recognizes and celebrates employee contributions. Mike talks about balancing professional obligations with personal passions, including the importance of prioritizing family and maintaining a positive trajectory in both areas. We discuss the importance of in-person engagement for building and maintaining key relationships with stakeholders, despite the trend toward virtual interactions. Mike reflects on past experiences and learnings, including the value of having prompt and honest conversations to avoid delays in decision-making and mitigate potential failures. We delve into Mike's hobby of pinning dream travel destinations on Google Maps and how this practice turns travel planning into an immersive and memorable adventure. LINKSShow Notes Previous Episodes About BoyarMiller About Phunware GUESTS Mike SnavelyAbout Mike TRANSCRIPT (AI transcript provided as supporting material and may contain errors) Chris: In today's episode, you will meet Mike Snavely, ceo of Funware. In building and maintaining key relationships with your stakeholders, mike shares his opinions on why there is no substitute for being in person to engage on a human level. Mike, I want to welcome you to Building Texas Business and thank you for taking time to come on the show with me. Glad to be here. Thanks for the invitation. So, as the CEO of Funware, let's start by just orienting the listeners to what is Funware and tell us what the company's known for. Mike: Sure so. Funware is a 15-year-old publicly traded company based in Austin, Texas. We build mobile experiences that help hotels and healthcare institutions engage their guests and patients while they're on premises in ways that drive satisfaction and monetization. Chris: Very interesting. So you said the company started I guess in the early 2000s. Mike: Then it would have been in 2009. The company started. It was private for the first 11 or so years of its existence and then we went public via SPAC transaction in 2000. I believe it was 20. Chris: Okay, and it sounds like a fairly niched focus for the company. How did it come to be that the company, I guess, was so focused on kind of those two industries and providing that type of, I guess, service to those customers? Mike: Well, originally it wasn't. So over 15 years, you might imagine, there's been an evolution in the focus of the company, and so the company in 2009 was really more of a mobile solution development agency. So some of the biggest brands you know in the world really selected Funware back in the timeframe to build some of their first mobile apps in the app store. So companies like Fox, the NFL, the Sochi Olympics, wwe, a number of airports and so on were spending a lot of money to build their first mobile application and then to develop their first mobile audience. For lots of reasons and that was two years after the iPhone was introduced. It was actually before the iPad was introduced and so obviously there's a lot of evolution of consumer expectations when it comes to engaging on mobile, and those brands were spending a lot of money in the early comes to engaging on mobile, and those brands were spending a lot of money in the early days to build their first mobile presences. That's evolved over time, and so agencies are really not, they really don't drive the valuation that a SaaS company does, and so we've, over time, evolved into becoming a SaaS company. So we license our technologies. We'll essentially build an app, configuring it for the customer, launch it into the app store and then generate license fees off that app for as long as it exists and is available for download. That's a much better valuation model because typically when our customers get involved with us they stick around. Our retention rate is very high because we drive a positive ROI. So we've kind of followed the evolution of mobile from really high investment work for hire, boutique agency-like development all the way through today where we charge between 50 and $150,000 a year for a given property, whether it's a hotel or a hospital, to have their own mobile app in the app store, to have their own brand in front of their users or guests and then ultimately to develop that one-on-one relationship with that guest or patient in a way that drives repeat business and satisfaction and additional monetization. Chris: That's fascinating. Now you mentioned retention rate. What do you which obviously is very important for success of a company, especially like yours what do you attribute that successful retention rate to? Mike: Well, we do good work and I can make available to you a list and you could even put it in the podcast if you'd like of the apps that we build, or some of the apps that we build. They're beautiful apps. So, number one, we do really high-quality work that all of our customers are proud to have their name on. And then, number two, we drive ROI, plain and simple. For a dollar they put into our solutions, they get between $5 and $50 back, depending on who they are and the specifics of their business. And you know, if I could give you a machine that would, you put a dollar bill in, you get a five or a 50 back out. You would say how many dollar bills can I put in there? Chris: Yeah, no, no, kidding, right Well. I mean, but fundamentally, you mentioned at least you know two fundamental things that is key to customer retention. That's one provide good service. If you're in the service industry, it starts with providing good service and I think an outcome of that is your customer sees a valuable return on the investment for your service. Those are not unique to software but for any kind of service type business right, exactly, that's right. Let's talk a little bit about your. So you're the CEO. The company was founded by others than yourself. How did you come, I guess, to work at Funware and I know just a little bit that you've had this is like your second stint there but give us a little background on your connection to the company and how it was you became the CEO. Mike: Yeah, sure enough. So I've really made a career of pursuing technology trends. So I'm kind of an old guy so I've been in business for a long time. But I started off in offline marketing technologies, sending out snail mail and running telephone centers. Then I evolved into social marketing with a startup in Austin, texas. I then got into mobile and I've been in mobile really kind of on and off ever since. Mobile's a big deal because you've got a device that knows who you are and knows where you are, you tell it all your secrets. It really is an indispensable. It's become an indispensable tool. And so I've really made kind of a career over the last shoot 15 years at this point in mobile. And so I was originally with my first stint in mobile was with a little mobile application development boutique in Austin called Mutual Mobile. That was 2008, 9, 10, 11 timeframe Did something else and then I was recruited to come to Funware by somebody who had worked for me at Mutual Mobile and I said look, we're building out this platform company. We're very interested in having somebody who can really help to drive revenues. Would you be interested in joining? So that in 14, I joined Funware for the first time and I came to run the software business. So I was responsible for all revenues for the software business of Funware from 14 through 16 or so, got to know the company, got to really understand the technologies Actually, a number of the people who were there then are still with the company. Then I went off, worked at a Silicon Valley startup and did a couple of other things, couple of other things. And then, when the founding CEO left in 23, they hired a guy that I had worked with at Mutual Mobile back in the day as the new CEO and he said look, mike, I know that you're great at building businesses on the revenue side. Would you like to come and be my CRO, as I'm CEO of Funware? And he said I'll make it worth your while. So I said no a couple of times and then eventually I said yes. Well, this was September of last year that I rejoined the company and 30 days in the board said look, you know, what we really need is somebody with sales DNA at CEO. Let's try that again. Easy for me to say CEO role. So, mike, would you like to step in as CEO? So I actually I had a buddy who brought me back to be a CRO and then wound up taking this job. We're still friends, we still talk all the time and he was very supportive of that move. But a long story short, I think that the company for a time kind of lost its way in the simple fact of selling, servicing accounts and driving revenues, and that's something I've had the good fortune to develop pretty good skill at, and so now I'm the CEO and I'm going to tell you I think the E in CEO stands for extra. Everything about it is extra, but it really is the best job I've ever had and I'm really enjoying it. I still spend a lot of time working with customers, selling, identifying strategic partnerships and that kind of thing, because I enjoy it, I feel like I'm good at it and it's absolutely critical to positioning the company for growth and valuation, which is exactly my job. Chris: There you go, so let's talk a little bit about that. What are some of the things that you do to build and maintain relationships with those partners, customers, strategic relationships that you think someone listening might learn? Mike: from. Well, it's funny, there's been a real trend away from in-person, and so you and I are meeting today on Zoom. Our business, funware, is essentially 100% virtual at this point, and what I find is there's no substitute for hopping on a plane and going to see somebody, breaking bread with them, getting to know them as a person, understanding what it is they're trying to accomplish, what their hopes and dreams are, what their fears are. Once you get to that point and really just kind of understanding them as a person, and then exposing yourself as a person and say, look, you know, this is what I'm trying to accomplish, mr and Ms, partner or prospect, and really kind of, you know, engaging on a human level, which you know is a whole lot easier for sitting across the desk from somebody, and that's that to me, is is where I spend a lot of my time. I do invest a lot of time in in person, you know, spending time with customers, prospects, partners and the rest of it, and I really just don't think there's much of a substitute for that. Chris: Couldn't agree more. I think that's how, really, until the pandemic, it's how business got done in person. I don't think anything's changed here. I think, especially these days, I think it says so much more that you take the time to do that when you could otherwise, yeah, do a Teams or Zoom call or whatever, and just the human interaction I mean. As humans, I think we're meant to be together, right and interact, and I think that just fosters the relationship. So great advice there. Keeping on that kind of theme you've come back in not in an easy economic time, so let's talk a little bit about managing through kind of some economic uncertain, rising interest rates and all the stuff that's out there in the news. Let's talk about kind of what are some of the things you've done to stay focused and keep your people focused on driving the business forward? Mike: Sure enough. Well, there are some benefits and some drawbacks to being a public and trading company. Of course One is access to the capital markets. That's a benefit, and we certainly have the ability to draw capital out of the markets in ways that don't require us to be as susceptible to excuse me, the interest rate environment, but that doesn't mean that our customers aren't susceptible to that environment. And so we've had to do some things. Selling into hospitality and healthcare, I mean, we're typically selling into pretty big organizations and they have a little bit of a buffer, I suppose, from the ebbs and flows of the economy, particularly when you look at luxury hospitality. I mean, COVID aside, luxury hospitality has really been on a growth tear because of the generation of a lot of wealth on the part of a lot of people and they're wanting to spend it on high-quality experiences. But that doesn't mean that we don't have to be creative from time to time when it comes to pricing a deal or generating terms that are acceptable to the customer. They can digest, they can maybe capitalize the expense as opposed to turning into an OPEX expense and that kind of thing, and certainly we've had to be creative there. When I first took on the CEO role. The company was having a little bit of financial trouble and you could read in our public filings all about it. But, long story short, we were having problems with access to capital and I had to work with my CFO and others you know capital partners to really inject some capital into the company from the market in ways that allowed us, you know, the ability to move forward without paying a lot of interest, frankly. So we were able to kind of reshape the balance sheet in a way that puts us in a great spot for growth today Smaller companies I can only imagine what it must be like if you're dealing with debt financing, distinct from capital financing, and what some of the challenges there must be. We had to make some hard decisions in connection with the recapitalization of the company that had to do with people, in large part because that's our number one expense and those are hard things to do, and I spent many a sleepless night, you know, because I had to do some of those things. But the fact of the matter is that most companies don't cut fast enough and they don't cut deep enough because of those reasons, and it feels terrible, but preserving the company and giving ourselves the ability to go forward and thrive is really kind of the job for the shareholders. Chris: Yeah, and yeah, I agree. I think, regardless of the size of the company, making those people decisions are extremely difficult because, again, we went back to in person and it's human and these people have been with you typically and but it's what they say, right, it is when you have to make the hard cuts, you have to cut muscle and those can be challenging decisions. On the flip side of that, sure, as you come into the CEO role, you are either have or still in the process of building your team. What are some of the things that you do? Processes maybe you've created to help you identify the right people to surround yourself with to further the mission and strategies of the company. Mike: Well, there are two non-delegable duties that the CEO has, in my belief. Number one it's setting the strategy of the company. So we're going to be a SaaS company serving these markets, we're going to drive toward these margins, we're going to deliver in this way, and these are the things that are important for the strategy of the business. Number two is the culture of the business, and so I can't hire somebody to give me a culture. I've got to work with the company to create the culture that we want, and so I'll give you a little bit of a story there. So I have a lot of respect for the fellows who founded the company, a lot of respect for them, because they built something that I now have the good fortune to run and take to the next level. But there was a lot of. They were literally army guys, and there was a lot of army DNA in the company. Now that there's nothing wrong with that, there's nothing at all wrong with that, and the company was successful for a number of years, but and the culture that was built was one of command and control, because that's what the army is Right. Chris: Well, it's not. I'll just interrupt it. That's also not atypical of kind of startup mentality. Right, it's dominant kind of leadership. Got to get it done, got to get this off the ground. Mike: Yep, dominant leadership plus the military background equaled very much a command and control structure, a bit of a cult of personality around the founding CEO, and all of that, you know, paid great dividends. For a long time, I could not be any more different from the founding CEO. I'm not an army guy, you know. And so one of the first things I did when I took on the job is I said look, you know, you know if you're the vice president of sales or you're the vice president of, you know of product or delivery or deployments or whatever it is. You're the CEO of your own business and I'm not going to tell you what to do. I'm going to give you an objective and I'm going to give you the flexibility and the support to go and achieve that objective. You need people. You get people. You need investment. You get investment. But your accountability is to go and run your portion of the business as if you were the CEO. I'm not going to micromanage the decisions at all. I'm going to empower you to do the right thing number one for the customer, because then that ultimately becomes the right thing for the company over many observations and so that was a transition that some people are still working through. Frankly, in leadership roles within the company. It's sometimes people get comfortable being told what to do and we just we don't do that anymore. And you know a couple of people have left as a result of that. They did not have that comfort and that's okay because it's not the right job for them anymore. But most people have really embraced the opportunity of agency and empowerment and the ability to kind of run their own part of the business. ADVERT Hello friends, this is Chris Hanslick, your Building Texas business host. Did you know that Boyer Miller, the producer of this podcast, is a business law firm that works with entrepreneurs, corporations and business leaders? Our team of attorneys serve as strategic partners to businesses by providing legal guidance to organizations of all sizes. Get to know the firm at boyermillercom. And thanks for listening to the show. Chris: Yeah, I mean, there's a lot to unpack there, but clearly what you're talking about in my terms are giving people autonomy, but with accountability, which I think is the right way to go. However, organizations evolve over time, just like people. So I think we talk about command and control in the early days. That, for most companies, may make sense, but where this company is now and size and scale, you couldn't do that because there's too much going on and you have to then hire the right people, and the people that work for the company in the first few years may not work, you know, 10 years, 15 years later, because different skill sets needed, right, so it sounds like you've got your hands around that pretty well. Mike: Well, you know, it's always a work in progress, and so one of the one of the accelerants to adopting a new cultural tone is bringing in people, you know right. So I brought in a couple of guys and they are both guys, I'm afraid, who I had worked with a number of times in the past, who I knew kind of got the way that we wanted to run the railroad and who are are the kind of guys who just roll up their sleeves every day and make the most of the day. And, you know, those guys are not only in leadership roles within the company but they're also, you know, setting a tone for the others they work with most closely day to day, and I absolutely think it's working. Chris: That's great. So kind of sum that conversation up for us how would you define the culture of Funware today? Mike: I'd say that we're kind of a restart up, but with all the good elements of a startup, and what I mean by that is that we had a revenue profile that grew, grew and then it kind of dropped off. For some reason I wasn't here, and we're in the process of growing back up and we're getting in the right people who are interested in not only doing great work and serving the customers really well and building a terrific product, but also ones who are embracing the autonomy and the accountability that we're providing to them, and I couldn't be any more pleased with the reception that I'm getting. Chris: Anything special that you've kind of put in place to kind of help foster that type of culture so that you can perpetuate it and see it grow. Mike: Well, we tend to recognize the behaviors that we're looking for, and here's what I mean by that. So you know, somebody will just do a thing right and they'll do it. They'll achieve an accomplishment, whatever that accomplishment may be, and we'll talk. We've got a Slack channel. Slack is a tool we use all day long, every day, and we have a Slack channel called Momentum, and the Momentum channel is really about recognizing the contributions that a person makes, and the deal is that if you put something in Momentum, you've got to recognize somebody else. So you say, hey, a great thing happened, you got to recognize somebody else. So you say, hey, a great thing happened. And I want to thank Bob over here for his contribution to the thing, because Bob, you know, contributed in a way that if he hadn't done that, you know we might not have gotten the outcome that we're looking for. You know that that's something that you see traffic in every single day, that's great. Chris: We obviously I can relate to that we do something similar here at the firm Every single day. That's great, I can relate to that. We do something similar here at the firm, not necessarily on a specific channel, but it's kind of become part of our culture to. We call them core value kudos and it's about recognizing other people not yourself, obviously in efforts that they made and tying them to our mission and values, so that the behaviors and the values marry up right. And then people. It makes it tangible that I want to thank or, you know, congratulate someone for doing X, Y and Z which demonstrated this value in action. Mike: That's terrific. Yeah, I've been in companies that have done that. I think that's something that I may need to reincorporate into my bag of tricks there, for sure that have done that. I think that's something that I may need to reincorporate into my bag of tricks there for sure. Chris: So you know along those lines your software company. I always am interested to know what are you doing to kind of promote or foster creativity and innovation within the company? Mike: Well, some of the things that you know it's interesting, I'm going to I'll give you maybe a little bit longer answer you might be looking for, but there is, and it's really important to kind of separate the day-to-day from the long-term vision. And what I mean by that is that I'm, let's say, a developer and today I have to fix a bug, and I just have to fix the bug because the bug exists and it's in the way of something happening and it's not my favorite part of the job, I'm quite confident of that. Not my favorite part of the job, I'm quite confident of that. Not my favorite part of the job to fix a bug. But there is some long range stuff that I'm really excited about. A big part of what we do is indoor wayfinding and hyperlocal marketing offers, and there are lots and lots of innovations that we're looking at right now, and so we identify people who are interested in innovation. We put together both formal processes for them to say, okay, you're on the R&D team and you're going to be doing this work, but we also give them informal opportunities. Hey, look, I want you to go to Denver to our customer with Gaylord Rockies and I want you to actually go into the physical space that we're trying to map, and I want you to help me figure out a better way to do it. And so that's two things. It's number one, solving a strategic problem for the business, but it's also kind of getting them out of their, since we're all virtual, it's getting them out of their own office, sending them to Denver, take an extra day, engage the customer, do great work, but also enjoy yourself a little bit. So we try to give people an opportunity to get out of the context within which they're working sitting in my home office squashing bugs and get out into the real world where our solutions are deployed in ways that are not only sort of fun but also problem solving. Chris: So you've been in some leadership roles throughout your career, obviously CEO now. How would you describe your leadership style and how do you think it's evolved over the last few years? Mike: Well, I try to work with people. I try to work as best I can. You can't always do that right, but you can absolutely make the investment of time to get to know them, and so I walk into this job. I've got a CFO that I just met very recently, and I had a chief legal officer that I met just recently, and I had a chief operating officer that I had known actually for some time and one of those guys wound up leaving that I had known actually for some time and you know, one of those guys wound up leaving. But you know the other two guys that I had just met. I made it a real point of going to where they were, sitting down with them breaking bread, understanding who they are, what they were trying to accomplish, why they were at the company in the first place and all the rest of it, because it was important for me to understand whether I could trust and whether it was appropriate to invest in these guys. Right and absolutely it was. By the way, I had a couple of gaps in my leadership team and what I did was find people that I'd worked with in the past and I said, look, are you willing to come and work for me again, and the answer in every case was absolutely so, and that's not because I'm the greatest guy in the world or because I gave him a zillion dollars or anything like that. It's because we have, over the years, established a working cadence that's founded on this idea of trust and accountability, autonomy of action and really candor of discussion. There's nothing that the leadership team and I don't discuss in detail and with candor. We're not afraid to tell our truths to each other. We've created what I think is a safe space for us to really talk about what's on our mind and what concerns or challenges we have, or if somebody is all wet, you know, and and that kind of. That kind of culture. The executive table, I think, filters down to the rest of the business in ways that help support the culture we're trying to build. Chris: Yeah, and I was gonna say it sounds like it's a culture of safety to have the hard conversations, but that those conversations are done in a respectful way. Mike: Yeah. Chris: I don't know if there's no better way to do it Right, and it's okay to fail. Mike: And I got to tell you, I used to race, I used to race cars a long time ago and you know, if you don't crash, you're not driving fast enough and so it's okay. It's okay to crash every once in a while because that means you're pushing the envelope, You're trying to get, you know, you're trying to get to the edge of the performance envelope and that's positive. Chris: Yeah, no, let's talk about that, cause I I there. There's always learning, and so I think there's. You know, when you have setbacks or failures, you can learn from them and it can make you better. Don't let it define you. So can you give us an example of more than not the car racing, because crashing is easy to understand as a failure, but in the business world, as a leader something that you felt a failure of yours, a bad decision, a setback that you absolutely grew from, and it's made you better today. Mike: Yeah, sure enough, I think that my greatest learnings are not being decisive enough and not acting quickly enough. And so you know, let's say, for example, I'll give you the example of last company I worked for before. Well, yes, I'll give you that example. So I was working at an AI video startup in Madison, Wisconsin. It was essentially a unit of a publicly traded company that I won't name, but your viewers can certainly look it up. And, long story short, that company is now bankrupt and I don't fault any of the. I don't fault the CEO of that company, which was not me, by the way, in that, but I fault myself. Yeah, exactly, it wasn't me. I didn't bankrupt the company. This was a guy I had worked with before were pretty small, and so what I said was I need this much to make this happen. I was given about half that much and I didn't adequately reset the expectations on how long it was going to take to get that thing done, slash. I should have had probably more pointed discussion about is this worth doing at all, and I didn't do that. And the long story short is that company is now bankrupt for lots of reasons, but the thing that I that my not being as aggressive as I felt like I should have been was a contributor to that. I think it was a small contributor, but you know all that to say that it didn't help. Chris: And so I kind of trace it. I would say the learning for you is kind of having the hard conversations faster right and that's the kind of culture that's terrifically important for me. Mike: So that informs the culture I'm building at Funware, which is like, if this ain't going to work, I just need you to tell me, and I might disagree and I might argue with you, but I will absolutely hear you. I might argue with you, but I will absolutely hear you. It's going to be super important for us to just trust each other enough to be able to have the discussion about you know, without fear. I guess is where I'm coming from. Chris: I understand that, so let's talk a little bit about you know these are important jobs that you've held over the last few years, and as is the current one. I don't like using the term work-life balance, but how do you? Manage work and personal life to try to keep them both going in a positive direction. Mike: Well, I spend a lot of time with my kids. I really, yeah, my daughter. So I'm here in Ohio, I'm spending time with my father and mother, but my daughter came along, my older daughter came along, she's out of school already. I'm going to go next week pick up my younger daughter in boarding school in Colorado, drive her down to Big Bend, where she has never been, and then, you know, spend time with her over the summer. So I mean, it's really about being deliberate about that and working from anywhere, candidly, in my opinion, helps. There's no expectation. I'm going to the office, I'm going to be there during the business day on Monday through Friday, and what I kind of joke is that I mean, I work a lot, no question about it, but I work around my life as opposed to work, as opposed to planning my life around my work, to planning my life around my work. So I might work, you know, 60 hours a week, but that's not going to be five times 12. That's going to be, you know, kind of eight-ish times seven. I'll work every day a little bit, but I'm certainly going to put my kids first and that's just the way it is. Chris: Well, I can identify with that. I think everyone has to find their own way and each job and role requires different things. In different stages of life require different things. So I think that's what people you know should stay focused on, individually as well as the companies to try to make sure you have good people. You don't want to lose them for those types of reasons. People you don't want to lose them for those types of reasons. Yeah, so, mike, this has been a great conversation. Before we wrap up, I just want to kind of get a little bit more less or a little less serious about things. Tell us what was your first job as a kid? Mike: It'd be funny, you should ask. So I'm back in rural Ohio where I grew up. Right now, at my parents' house, as I mentioned earlier, my first job was was am I allowed to say shit on your podcast? Of course, the texas my first, my first job was shoveling hog shit. Chris: Shoveling hog shit for minimum wage and I was nothing that wants to make you go to college and get a degree than that right. Mike: well, the funny thing is that I wound up raising hogs to pay for college. So it was fine to shovel the hog shit, but I was like, if I was fine to shovel the hog shit, but I was like, if I'm going to shovel the hog shit, I'm going to do it for more than $3.35 an hour. I'm going to do it in exchange for a college education. So that's not exactly that way, but that's a big part of how I kind of got off the farm and moving ahead. Chris: I love that, okay, well, yeah, obviously, as we now know, you're from Ohio, but you spent enough time in Texas for me to ask you this question Do you prefer Tex-Mex or barbecue? Mike: I love Tex-Mex. I would eat Tex-Mex every day of the week All right. And sometimes I do. I do love barbecue, but the thing is that the best barbecue is something I don't want to wait in line for and I don't want to drive a long ways. If I happen to be by La Barbecue or Franklin's a little bit over their great barbecue a little bit overhyped, or if I want a great barbecue, I'll just treat it as a destination thing. I'll go down to Lockhart or something like that, but I can get absolutely terrific Tex-Mex around the corner from my house every day of the week. Chris: Yes, it was one good thing. You know, I think we living in Texas both are abundant right. Mike: But you're right. Chris: The marquee barbecue, you know, is tucked away in some places. All right, so my last thing is if you could do a 30 day sabbatical, where would you go? What would you do? Mike: Well, I got a bunch of customers who have really beautiful beach resorts so I might go to one of those. Chris: You might go break bread with them there. Mike: Break bread with the customers at the most beautiful resorts in the world. That would be one thing I might do. There are a lot of places around the world that I'd love to see, so I've got a Google Maps layer that has little flags. There are probably 800 flags on that map and I add some every week. Places that I like to go around the world. Sometimes they're restaurants that I read about. Sometimes they're beautiful. You know natural features, like you know mountain ranges, the Painted Mountains in the Andes, or you know beautiful lake I've never been to Crater Lake, things like that so what I'd probably do is find 30 days worth of those pins in an area that I can consume within that 30-day period and I'd just go knock it out. Chris: I love that. I like the concept of keeping track of the pins. Yep. Mike: And there's too many on the map that you know I'll be dead and gone before I get to see all of them. But you know, it is kind of a it's a memory bank for things that have caught my interest and that I do want to experience at some point, if I can pull it off. Chris: Love it. Love it Well, mike, thanks so much for taking the time to be a guest on the show. Really enjoyed hearing your story, and the things y'all are doing at Funware sound really fun, exciting and innovative. Mike: Thanks a lot. Special Guest: Mike Snavely.

In this episode of Building Texas Business, I welcomed Jen Sudduth, CEO of Sudduth Search, for an insightful discussion on her journey in the executive search industry. Jen shared her story of transitioning from Taylor Winfield to launching her boutique firm focused on transformative growth companies. I learned how Sudduth Search crafts a supportive work culture that prioritizes both productivity and well-being. Our dialogue also uncovered nuances around balancing work responsibilities with life's pleasures. As we wrapped up, Jen reflected on life lessons from mentorship to her commitment to the Special Olympics community SHOW HIGHLIGHTS Jen Sudduth shares her transition from Taylor Winfield to founding Sudduth Search, focusing on middle market private equity and emphasizing the need for leaders who can drive change. We explore the importance of having a business and marketing strategy before starting a venture, as well as considering when to hire based on company growth and values alignment. Strategies for maintaining work-life balance in recruitment are discussed, including setting boundaries and fostering a culture that supports employee well-being alongside business success. The episode delves into the comprehensive selection process for executive search, particularly for pivotal roles such as CFOs, and the role of retained search firms in this process. Jen reflects on the role of empathy in leadership and the importance of mentorship, drawing from her own experiences and her involvement with the Special Olympics. Personal joys, such as a preference for Tex-Mex cuisine and planning for sabbatical destinations like Maine and Santa Fe, are shared as part of achieving a joyful living. The conversation covers the initial opportunistic hiring during COVID and the shift towards a more strategic hiring approach to raise the team's overall expertise. Chris and Jen discuss the benefits of leaving a company the right way, honoring agreements, and how transparency can lead to unexpected opportunities. Jen advises on the importance of planning for success, not just the startup phase, by having operational projections and growth strategies in place. The episode also touches on Jen's past experience as Director of Talent at a consultancy, highlighting how internal hiring insights can improve external recruitment advice. LINKSShow Notes Previous Episodes About BoyarMiller About Sudduth search GUESTS Jen SudduthAbout Jen TRANSCRIPT (AI transcript provided as supporting material and may contain errors) Chris: In today's episode, you will meet Jen Sudduth, co-founder and CEO of Sudduth Search, a boutique executive search firm. Jen's advice to aspiring entrepreneurs is to be intentional and purposeful in your business planning, and don't forget to plan for success. Okay, jen, first off, welcome to Building Texas Business. Thanks for being here. Jen: Thank you. Chris: So I'm excited to have this conversation with you today. I want to start by just allowing you to introduce yourself and tell us what your company, Sudduth Search, is known for. Jen: Sure. So we are a seven-person boutique executive search firm, but I think what we do is a little bit unique. We work with the middle market private equity. Probably 75% of our clients are private equity backed. The other are public, private you name it individually owned, it doesn't matter. I think the common denominator with all of them is that all of the companies are going through some sort of transformation, and most of the time that's growth. It could have been that they raised capital. That's a trigger to bring us in and go and replace some of your leadership team. Could be some of our bigger companies going through some sort of culture change. We did 10 positions for a Blackstone-backed company and basically they wanted to pull from outside of their industry and they didn't know how to do that, and so we helped them come up with a concept of how to do that completely, you know, changed their recruiting processes from how they were doing them before, and then they brought in a whole new culture and that's what they wanted. They wanted a different culture than they had before. So it's just, it doesn't matter what the trigger is, but it's usually some sort of change, transformation. You need a leader that can drive that change right. You need someone that is fearless. A lot of times that can come in, and they're you. You know they can make things happen. Right and that's where we play most of the time. Chris: Well, what I find interesting about that is how laser focused it is what inspired you to kind of start a search firm that was so focused on that kind of niche industry. Jen: So I've actually done it for over 20 years and the firm I was with before was called Taylor Winfield. I only bring that up because a lot of people know Taylor Winfield. I started with Taylor Winfield and kind of worked my way up and that's what they focused on. They were more. You know that was 2000, so there was a lot of venture money out there, there was Silicon Valley and they worked a lot in California we did. I was just a lowly junior recruiter back then and that's where I learned the business and that's where I kind of learned that world. And it's not for everyone, both as a candidate and as a recruiter, because sometimes candidates will go well, what are they going to sell? Am I going to still have a job? I'm like, well, you're really not, you're not right for this, because that's not the mentality that we look for in a candidate. But so that's how I got my start and that's how I learned it. And then when I started this up my practice five years ago, I kind of I don't do a whole lot of venture. I have a few here and there. Usually they're a little bit more mature as a company. I think. As I've aged I'm not as patient with the venture. I think they've got a great thing going. But it's just a different world and I think sometimes those, the people that are willing to go and do something really earlier stage, are not the same people that I'm looking for the middle market series, b series, c type folks. So so that's how I had got into. It was really that's kind of what I've done my whole career. Chris: Gotcha. Well, I know that you started this company Suddeth Search around five years ago. Jen: Exactly. Chris: So you had to make some decision to leave and just start fresh on your own. Let's talk about that a little bit. What drove that decision? Jen: So the company that I worked for was actually owned by and I don't usually say this, so you're getting new information here by my stepmother, connie Adair, and I bring that up because she's fully retired now. She's been retired for about two years. But she brought me into the business, not as a multi-generational business. I had to earn my keep, earn my way Right, just like everyone else. She was very big on treating me like everyone else. Chris: The benefit for you that she did that. Jen: Absolutely and I learned from the best. She was really known as one of the best in the industry so I kind of got to see that world and that process. But she sold to private equity and it was a private equity roll up. Like some of them, it didn't go really well. The integration piece was a little rough. Chris: Not unique in that regard, right and I got no benefit from it. Jen: To be quite honest. I stuck around to try to support her and she did well. And then she got another bite of the apple and I tried for two years. I wasn't a big company person and I realized if I can make this kind of money for someone else, I should be doing it for myself. And so I kind of did it because I could, and she fully supported me. She knew that retirement was on the horizon and so when I told her she said you know, I think you should go for it. So that's what I did. Chris: That's great. Well, I mean good to have that encouragement for someone that you were close with but considered to be a trusted mentor Absolutely. So got to be a little bit trepidatious to just start out on your own, even though you know what you're doing and you, I think you can't do that unless you have confidence that it's going to work and confidence that it will work isn't a guarantee that it will Absolutely. But you know what were some of the things you did to kind of set yourself up in those early days of starting your own company, to try to pave the path towards success. Jen: So I will start with the fact that I had a very strict non-compete. I did not get any clients from the company or from her, and I am a devout follower of non-competes. Chris: Well, it's funny, you say that you bring that, yeah, you know, now we devise people, I mean literally every day, on both sides of those, and right because because they exist and obviously you know there's a lot of buzz recently because the ftc came out with the rule to ban them, uh, which is, you know, probably not going to take effect because lawsuits have already been filed to challenge it. Jen: But it's going to be interesting to see how that plays out yeah in the next, over the next few years, I think yeah, and not to say I don't think some non-competes go overboard. I have heard some ludicrous non-competes as I'm interviewing, so sure, I do think a lot of them go overboard. I think the fdc is in the is moving in the right direction with some of them, because I think they're a little too restrictive. Chris: But that's not your question yeah, and even as the rule's written, it doesn't apply to executives, so it wouldn't change your world. Jen: It wouldn't, and I'd been there a long time. Everything I got was under their umbrella. So what I did do was I planned for a long time. I've owned businesses before and so I had a business plan, I had a marketing plan, I had a strategy. The other advantage I had was that I had been I've been asked to be on the board of ACG and so that was a. I knew that was going to be great PR. It's gonna be great relationships there. That's how I met Steve Kasten here at the Boyer Miller and a few others, and so I knew that was coming. But it was pretty far out. You know my tenure had just started. Didn't know I was gonna be president, but I knew that was gonna be on the. I'd have a lot of visibility. So that helped quite a bit. I think that was one factor. Fun story unrelated to your question the day before I quit, the day before my last day, I gave like four months notice and they knew I was leaving. I was unwinding. I had some really big searches, so I was unwinding those and finishing those up for clients, kind of on the bench, but just doing that. So the day of the last day of employment I get a call from that client that I just mentioned wanted to change their culture Blackstone Back Company. He said I got 10 searches for you, jim. I said, well, I can't do them, I'm leaving, today is my last day. And he's well, I'm not doing it without you. And so I called the company and I said here's what's happening. Would you, would we, can we do a fee split? Didn't know that was coming, but that was really great cash flow. And they said yes, and so we worked out a fee split. I continued I worked with that client and then they brought in their team, but it was great cash flow right out of the gates. And and then they brought in their team, but it was great cash flow right out of the gates. And then I developed brand new clients from that point on. But I knew the industry. I think the industry knew me. Chris: So even if it wasn't somebody, I'd worked before, I had a plan and I went after those people. That's a really cool story to hear and there's a lesson. There's probably many lessons, but one that just struck me right between the eyes is the lesson in leaving the right way, when you leave a company versus leaving the wrong way and you just laid out a roadmap for the listeners. If you're thinking about leaving, you left the right way, honoring your agreements, and then, with the transparency to get the slug of business for your new business, for your new company, because you went to them and said here's the deal, because you've done everything else right. It's good to hear that. I guess they could have not honored that, but they did the right thing in my mind too, yeah, by saying yeah, it'd be fair to share this and, by the way, we should. Customer comes first. That's what they want. Let's make them happy. Jen: So customer comes first. That's what they want. Let's make them happy. So, yeah, and I completely agree and I try to tell people and I know there's exceptions, I know there's bosses that are just difficult and if they know you're even looking there, you're gone. I know that happens, but I think majority of the time people are reasonable and if you come to them and sometimes I'll have friends come to me and say I'm thinking about making a change- Grass is greener Right and I'm like I know they're in a great situation. I'm like have you had a really difficult conversation with your boss before you leave, before you start thinking about? Have you told them that you're unhappy You've been there? Chris: 14 years or you've been there seven years. Jen: Have you talked about it? And usually the answer is no, and so I try to encourage them to say go talk to them first and then if it's still you know, in a month you still feel like it's just not fulfilling then talk about leaving. Yeah, but you need to give them a chance. Chris: It's great advice. People unfortunately right. It's kind of human nature to avoid the difficult, uncomfortable conversation, or at least I'll say this, the ones we perceive have it that they're going to be difficult or uncomfortable. And to your point, I think, a lot of times if you actually have the courage to go have it, they usually aren't as difficult or uncomfortable as you work them up in your mind to be. Jen: Absolutely. Chris: And you know I can speak. You know as well as you can. If you give your employer, where you've been otherwise happy for a while, the chance to have that conversation most people if there's a tweak or two that would keep you there, it's probably going to save the company a ton of money. To consider that. Jen: And it might benefit the company. Talk to them about. You know I'd really like to do more sales. You know I'd really like to take on bigger projects. You know what We've been looking for someone that wants to take on bigger projects. You just never know what the company needs. Chris: So we can go back. You mentioned, and just for the listeners ACG Association of Corporate Growth. Jen: Yes. Chris: Indice Group industry in the kind of M&A, a lot of private equity. So sounds like part of that marketing plan was to plug yourself in to the right kind of networking system where you would meet people and build relationships. Jen: That's correct. Yeah, yeah, and I eventually was asked to be president I don't know if you know that and so it was a lot of it was a lot of visibility as well. That's half the battle. Chris: Yes. Jen: Because there's a lot of top of mind search firms out there. Yeah, getting top of mind and helping them see that. I understand private equity, I understand what their challenges are. I understand what they're trying to achieve. I understand how capital's raised. You know I've got the knowledge base to be able to convey that to candidates and to help find the right one that's going to fit that. So I think that helped a lot and it's it was educational for me. You know, going to conferences, hearing panels speak. I know a lot about a lot or a little about a lot. Chris: Let me rephrase that I shouldn't admit that, but it's true, but it does. Jen: It's real educational to hear those conversations and to hear what's happening in the market. You know from your peers that are in the organization. Chris: A couple other takeaways from what you said. That I hope people listening caught is that you had a plan before you did this right, absolutely. You sat down and put it to paper a business plan, a marketing plan, a strategy. Look, I think those are so important and can be overlooked. When people say, look, I'm just going to go chase this dream, that's great because you need the inspiration, but you also need some substance behind it, because if you eventually do go to and most will go to a bank or an investor or something, they're going to be asking about that. So you better be prepared. Jen: Absolutely. Chris: So one of the things and you and I were talking about this, I guess before we got the recording going, and that is you know about this, I guess before we got the recording going, and that is you know, you now have seven employees. Let's talk a little bit about you know. I think there's a few conversations. One is what was it that triggered you each time to make the decision Now it's time to take on an employee or another employee, because those are big investments and then how did you go about making sure they were the right fit? Jen: Yeah. So it was growth that predicated the need. That was the part I didn't plan was when am I going to hire what? You know what? At what point do we need to bring on another person? At what point do we need to bring on a junior person, et cetera, et cetera. I didn't plan that piece of it and I probably should have, but it was really just my bandwidth and being able to do what I needed to do. You know, we were super busy during COVID, which sounds really strange, but I had some. I had that one big client that was still going. I had just so, if you think about I had been in business for about a year and so that year I had been really busy doing marketing and business development and getting out there and making relationships, and so it just it paid off and I think a lot of those people one of my biggest clients I don't know if you know Dave Marchese, he'd be a good guest. Let's do it. He called me out of the blue in the middle of COVID and we had met like five years prior, but he had seen my posts and my marketing and my emails and so he said I can't go out. I'm not going to go out and interview five interview candidates, but we're in the or excuse me search firms because we're in the middle of COVID. So what you got Jen, and so I took it on, and we've probably done 15 different positions over three or four years. Wow, so he's one of our biggest clients. So there that, I think the prior relationships definitely helped us make it. You asked about employees, though. Chris: Yes, well, before we go there. Yeah, one of the things you so interesting. You said I didn't plan for growth. Yeah, probably should have. Jen: Yeah. Chris: So, looking back, what do you think you could have done in that regard that you might offer as advice to someone that you know is maybe about to do something similar that you did five years ago? You know, what have you learned? Looking back, to say I would have, if I was going to do it again, I would plan for growth in this way. Jen: Plan for success. I think I was so focused on how am I going to get there that I didn't say if, when I get there, if when I get there, how am I going to get to the next level? I never did that. I never said, okay, I can handle 12 searches, or whatever it is, at different in different phases. So if I get 14, what do I do? At what point do I, you know? Do I need to start hiring when I get to 9 searches, whatever it? So maybe it was a revenue. I think I should have projected and said, because I've been in the business a while, I know how many searches I can do by myself or with a team, and so I think that would have been very helpful to do kind of like an FB&A analysis, but on the operational side. Chris: Right, Very helpful, that's very helpful. Okay, so now let's go back to kind of set a search. You starting to decide I've hit the point, I can't do this all, I've got to bring someone on. Yeah, you know how did you go about sourcing. I know obviously you've probably had a lot of contacts, but you know just the whole process of how you interviewed to make sure they were going to be a good fit for your company. Jen: So my first hire, I got really lucky because she was a neighbor, a friend who got laid off during COVID and so we brought her on just to do some of this data pushing type stuff. She made phone calls, cold calls, she's fearless, and then she grew into being a really good recruiter. After that first hire it was, oh my God, I can't handle this. I just need a body that can help do, a professional person that can do all this. After that hire I was much more purposeful. After that it was we want experience. We want, you know, degree Now she was degreed. But we want degreed individuals that understand the business world, that understand you know degree Now she was degreed. But we want degreed individuals that understand the business world, that understand, you know. I think every time I made another hire I kind of elevated my expectations. Chris: Right. Jen: And not to say the first hire was. She was a phenomenal employee, but I think every time after that I was much more purposeful about how I, who I wanted to hire and what my expectations of them were. Chris: Yeah, that makes sense to me and you're right, it's not a condemnation of the earlier hires. It's if you're doing things right, I believe you're always learning and your processes can always get better, and it doesn't mean you didn't make bad hires before, but you can get more intentionality around the decisions you're making and I think that's part of growth and when you're a one person show or two because my husband did join me about six months in it's harder to attract talent you know, Now we're about to make an offer to a pretty senior person and we had a really good slate of people that were interested, that were like, yeah, I want to join a boutique firm, I want to do what you're doing. Jen: So it changes too. Advert: Hello friends, this is Chris Hanslick, your Building Texas business host. Did you know that Boyer Miller, the producer of this podcast, is a business law firm that works with entrepreneurs, corporations and business leaders? Our team of attorneys serve as strategic partners to businesses by providing legal guidance to organizations of all sizes. Get to know the firm at boyermillercom. And thanks for listening to the show. Well, that's validating. So you've gone through this process of sourcing people for your company, right, and what have you? What has that process and the learning? Jen: through that done to help you better advise your clients or vet candidates for them. What else about that I'm actually gonna go back to. So I took about five years. I left the executive search world and went to a consultancy and they I was director of talent. We tripled in size in about five years time and then they sold to Accenture about two years after I left. When I left, I think oil and gas was zero. The barrel, the barrel. Chris: I remember that yeah. Jen: So they made a strong comeback and then eventually sold. But being on the inside like that was the best education I could get, because it was. This is what happens when you make a really bad hire. This is what happens to the entire company when you make a really good hire. And we weren't huge I think we ended up being about a hundred but but it was really helpful to me to see. I also learned you know really short tenures on people's resume. There's a reason you know, I know there's reasons that people have to leave jobs absolutely there's good reasons, but when it's over and over and over, and then you hire that person because you're desperate for a data manager or whatever it is. You're desperate for that skill. You're going to find out why they can't stay in a job longer. I learned a lot being on the inside, you know, and I think that job is really what taught me kind of the hard knocks of making a mishire. Chris: Right. Well, I think you're to your point, right, it's if you look there are red flags, pay attention to them, and I know from our we're not perfect either in this business that I have, and you know sometimes you can convince yourself to overlook a red flag here or there, and more times than not you shouldn't. Right, there's exceptions to every rule, but we don't want to run a business based on exceptions necessarily You've got to be purposeful about those hires is really what it taught me. Jen: You know very purposeful. Chris: So just to kind of come back to Sutter's search a little bit so you have seven, about to have eight, and you talked about doing a search for a client where it was a culture change. Let's talk about culture at Sutter Search. What are you, as the kind of co-founder and CEO, doing to try to cultivate a culture? How would you describe it? And what are you doing to kind of, you know, foster it and breathe life into it? Jen: Yeah, it's hard with seven people, eight people, you know, to kind of create that, because you're like oh, we're just eight people, but they need it. Employees need training, they need to be developed, they need to evolve, they need to expand and grow, and so we actually started EOS at the beginning of this year. Are you familiar with entrepreneurial operating system? Chris: Yes. Jen: I think I don't know if Allie was the one that told me about it, but you know I've heard a lot of business owners that have done it, and so we actually started it and I think it's been evolutionary and I'm not selling it, I don't sell anything they do but it has really helped us be very purposeful about what we're doing for our employees, and so my one of our other managing directors is. She's in charge of kind of the HR and training, and so we have a weekly training every single week and it's sometimes it's heavier than others, but we have a weekly training every week and one of the employees actually gives it, so they have to go out and learn themselves and then they come and teach the rest of us. I try to. I'm a big advocate in the old school headhunting world is just dog eat, dog work, and so when I started my firm I was like I don't want to be that way. We're not working 12-hour days, we're not working both coasts, we're going to have a great and I hate to use the words work-life balance because I know it's overused. Chris: That's right. Jen: But we are, we're going to edit that part out. I'm kidding it is overused, but I think in some aspects it's important because you're a better employee if you take your vacation, if you didn't have to work until 9 pm the night before, if your managing director isn't calling you at 6 in the morning because she happens to be on the East Coast that is not the culture that we have. I'm always telling them you're going on vacation. Who's taking your emails? You're going on vacation. Who's taking your emails? You're going on vacation. Who's taking your calls? Did you put your out of? We require out of office messages to be turned on and I'm just, I'm always preaching that. I really think it's important to separate yourself and give your brain a break, because what we do is very, it's very repetitive, it's very. You know you may, if you have ten searches, that you have four candidates at least on what we usually have a hundred, but you have four finalists going through to offer yeah you think about the ups and downs every single day. Chris: It's a lot well, I mean, to your point, what you're doing, I mean, has to be stressful because you're affecting people's lives. Absolutely right, you got four candidates and or maybe see this as a great opportunity and are very hopeful, and you got a, a client, that needs to fill a hole and every day they don't have that whole field, they're losing money. So I can get that yeah to your point, the work-life balance and we could do a whole podcast on that. But I think what my experience has shown, or at least what I feel like I've learned through that, is our work-life balance is different at different times of our career. So it's hard to institutionalize that when everyone's at different stages. We try to use the term more like professional development. Developing our people to be great professionals means you tend to your business, but you tend to you have a life as well and you got to figure out how to manage both in a healthy way, knowing that the way it works for me now is totally different than it was 15 years ago right and that's okay because everything changes and we have new employees here that are going through totally different life stuff than I go through now. but how do we help give them the tools, the training to manage that and still be successful both in the office and in their personal life? Jen: Yeah, and we do we have different? Everybody kind of has a different work methodology. I shouldn't say hours, it's more like hours, you know a 20-something. They like to kind of work late in the day and have their workouts in the morning or whatever. Like everybody's kind of different. And then Hazel and I are about the same age and we like to not be disturbed until 8.30 or something. You know, like we like to go do our thing in the morning and work out and whatever. Read the paper and everybody's a little different, but we are very understanding of each other's different lifestyles. Right To your point. Chris: The key there comes to communication right. Yeah absolutely Absolutely, and so do you have. What is it that you're using as such to make sure those conversations are happening? Yeah, so that people understand how each other works differently, but together you can work for success. Jen: Yeah, we talk about it when they're hired. I say I'm not going to track your hours unless your productivity is not working Right, and then we're going to talk about it. Do you have too of a workload? Or, let's be honest, are you not working enough? You know, because last week you didn't have very many searches. This week you've got a lot. So if I need you to work till six, you gotta admit that last week you didn't have to. And they're very honest with me. A lot of times they'll say, hey, not going to be online until 10 or so, but I'm going to be working late or whatever. Or I stayed up for four hours last night sourcing. So you know I'll be available on phone but I'm not online. Perfectly okay, and we're very flexible that way. It's a little hard sometimes. You know, I'm always like are you working? I'm on the back of my brain and then I have to call myself and go. Of course they are, it's not producing. Chris: So that comes down to two fundamentals no matter what industry, communication, yeah, and what you're willing to do is have what some people might feel like is the harder conversation or uncomfortable conversation, but you approach it with kind of support and transparency. Jen: Yeah. Chris: The other thing. It comes down to productivity. Jen: Yeah, right. Chris: Absolutely. If we're running a business, we're running a for-profit business. We have to be productive to make the business go. So you can't lose sight of that. Some people, I fear at times the extracurriculars overweigh what we do to make our money and what is our. You go into the. This is what fuels our economic engine. We can't lose sight of that. It won't matter how many out-of policies or things we do, we won't have a business to support it. Jen: So it's finding a balance there, right? Yeah, I'd say the common denominator with all my employees is they thrive on success. They thrive on accomplishing things. They're not going to just shut things off if they're not done and they haven't accomplished what they set out to accomplish. They're very driven that way. That's a common denominator. Chris: Very good. So a little bit about your business. So you were saying you know, middle market focused, we're kind of approaching mid-year 2024, which is like just blows my mind that we're, you know, that far into the year already. But you know there are businesses out there that either use services like yourself or maybe contemplating that, and I know, at least in your world there's at least two different ways to go about it Retain, searches or kind of the contingency model. Can you just share maybe a little bit about what each is, the differences, pros and cons, and maybe flow into what a company should consider going one versus the other? Jen: Yeah. So I want to make it clear that I am not pro or con. Either way, I think there's a contingency, there's absolutely a place for it. I have several friends that are in the contingency recruiting world and they say I will never be in the retained world. So there is a place for it and I think if you have a large number of hires, you have a position or a company that is attractive to candidates and you want to get all the resumes you can get and then choose because they want to come to you, that's great. You can use contingency. What we do is a consultancy. So if you're a middle market working with a middle market firm right now, it's a downhole tool. Cfo position this position is critical that they get it right because they have big plans. I'm not going to tell you what those big plans are. They're private equity backed and they have big plans and it's going to happen, but if they don't have a financial expert that can devote time and devote, then it's not going to happen. And so it's critical, and in that situation you absolutely need to find the best person that you can find, and you need to interview a lot of people to make sure that you are choosing the right person, and so that's what we're doing. That's where we come in, and it doesn't have to be a CFO role. We can do. We do VPs and we do directors sure directors but we're going to look at 150 people that we know could do this job, and then we're going to reach out to every one of them and then we're going to interview 20 or 30. I'm going to interview half of those and then I'm going to present and rank the top. So it's not like we're going out and finding five people that are qualified and handing them to you. We're going out and finding 10 times that many maybe not 10 times, but a lot more than that and then finding you the best and ranking those for you to interview. So if it's a critical hire for your company to succeed, I would absolutely recommend retained, because they should be a retained firm, should be a consultancy, they should help you find that person. Chris: So that's really helpful, and hearing you describe it makes the difference very clear for me. I hope for the listeners and what I hear is you're doing a lot more upfront work on the retained side and I guess, as a consumer of these services, you should expect that your retained firm will do a lot more upfront work and vetting the best clients to bring to you. Jen: Yeah, absolutely. And the other thing I think that's important for my clients to know is our database is completely open. Our kimono is open. Is that a bad thing to say? Chris: No, we don't have video, so we're good. Jen: They can see everything we're doing, when we're doing, how we're doing. It's not a we'll talk to you in a month or two and we'll give you three great people. There's no magic thing that happens like that. It's a database they can go in. They can be like ooh, I know that guy and not going to work. Chris: Right, whatever reason, work right, whatever reason. So through, I guess, an online portal that you give them access to. Jen: okay and so it's a process to get to the fine. We meet once a week and I say here's why we chose, here's why we interview these people. What do you think? And a lot of times I'll say you know what? That company doesn't hire well, or they might be an acquisition on the horizon with that company. We can't talk to their people, so we have weekly conversations that get us closer and closer to the best person. And so it's a process, it's a very thorough process that gets us there. But that's 15, 30 minutes a week from our client, that's it. Chris: Okay, Well, they have to be invested, especially in these that are so critical. The positions to fill the client has to be invested. That's right and I like the somewhat. Maybe it's not. It sounds innovative to me that you are creating that opportunity for them to vet and see what's going on whenever they want. Right, but have those weekly check-ins. You know, it sounds like a kind of a white glove service, if you will. Jen: Yeah, and I think a lot of times people are scared, overtained. They're like what if it doesn't? What if you don't find someone? I'm like never happened in the history of 23 years, because we're talking to you and if we're not finding the right people, we're going to pivot, we're going to merge, we're going to figure out why is that happening. Is it the company reputation? Is it our pitch? Is it the way we're describing it? I mean, we're going after the wrong people. We will figure it out. We always fill the positions. Chris: Right Always, because you're invested in it. Right, right, it's not which. Jen: Because it's and it's not a. Here's three resumes, let me know. Chris: Right. Jen: That's not how it works. I got it. Chris: That makes sense. So a little bit, I just want to ask you're obviously, you know, leading this company. What, what would you or how would you describe your leadership style and how would you say that maybe has evolved over time based on your experience? Jen: So I would describe my leadership style as real. It's too real. I like to be pretty open with my employees and I have weekly calls with almost all of them I shouldn't say almost all of them. My fellow managing director we talk almost every day, so I don't have a weekly calls with almost all of them, I shouldn't say almost all of them. My fellow managing director we talk almost every day, so I don't have a weekly call with her. But the others, who I may not speak with, I have weekly calls. We talk about what's happening, what's going well, what is their workload like? I ask them what was the most challenging? Because we all work remote, so that's the other thing. We don't see each other every day right and I'll say what was the most challenging thing and what are you most proud of. And sometimes I had no idea. They're like oh well, I met that candidate at that event. I went to one of my. One of my employees told me that I'm like, I had no idea. Like you went to this networking event and happened to meet the right guy. So you know, just things like that. I try to have the communication very open yeah and they can tell me listen, I'm just not feeling well today or I'm mentally having some issues with home. I'm not going to tell you what it is, but I just need to sit back and I'm like, take the time, whatever you need to do. So I like to think I'm a pretty real manager. Chris: Yeah Well, it sounds like there's a lot of empathy that comes across in those calls, so they feel safe. Yeah, empathy, that comes across in those calls so they feel safe, and I think that's an important thing for a leader to be able to show empathy so that people will be more open and responsive, at whatever level your leadership is in the organization, is an important quality. It's interesting too, I think, that you asked about challenges, because I find it to be helpful to if you're kind of forced to reflect on what was really good about the last week and maybe what was a challenge, because we learn from both. Right, well, that's really good. Anything that you mentioned your stepmother earlier as a mentor, any learning from her that you kind of feel like you're implementing today and kind of carrying on some of the things you learned along the way from her Well, she is my free consultant, so you know, so I call her all the time. Jen: I'm like, okay, more free. Chris: Don't let her listen, she might start charging. Jen: She's fully retired, so she's like no problem. No, I think, being a peer to your clients and telling them no, sometimes you know she's not a yes man and I think I learned that, that you know you've got to push back. When you know, because of your 20 years experience, that something's wrong, you have to call the elephant in the room yeah and you have to say you, you may not skip this recruiting. You know, a lot of times my clients will get very excited about a candidate and they're like, well, can you just come see me tomorrow? And I'm like, no, he cannot because that's too fast for the candidate. They need time to process. You look too eager. I had one client that said it. He said I'm not coming to the first date with a diamond ring. You cannot come to the first date with a diamond ring, you have to let the process happen. But she was always very good about not being a yes man and I've learned that works and it pays off to help your clients be successful. Chris: It's funny that works and it pays off for to help your clients be successful. It's funny that reminds me there's an analogy that applies in all kinds of situations. But it's the cake right. So, just like you were saying, don't be too fast. Yeah, you can have all the right ingredients, mix it up, put it in the oven. If you pull it out too quick, it's going to flop yeah right. So you got to let the process, trust the process, let the process play out, and that applies in so many different aspects of business yeah, and these are humans that we're dealing with. Jen: These are people and they weren't thinking about a job change most likely. Chris: So you've got to let that change management process happen in their head, you know, let them go through that as well so good point to make and we'll repeat it that for what you're doing with these targeted executive searches, most likely the right person was not looking. The ones that are looking there could be one of those red flags there, Not always right, not always, but yeah. So, jen, this has been a fun conversation. Congratulations on your success, thank you. I want to ask you just a few things to wrap up. Yep, so obviously you've been in the search world, or executive search world, for you said 20 plus years. What was your first job? Jen: I remember you asked somebody else this, so I actually worked at a daycare for intellectually disabled kids and adults. Not that fun story that you wanted to hear, but it was fun. I absolutely loved it. I worked every summer. 0:36:20 - Chris: There had to be a lot of life lessons learned in that. Jen: Very challenging. These were kids that were not accepted at other daycares, even for special needs kids. And so I made $4.25 an hour. I was just telling this story because now I'm the chairman of the board for Special Olympics. Chris: Are you really? Jen: I am, and so they asked me my why, and I was like well, I did this for about five years, six years, all through college. I did summer camps and stuff, and so that population has a very soft spot in my heart. Chris: I love how that's come full circle in your life to be able to be doing what you're doing with Special Olympics. As an aside and maybe a plug, isn't Houston hosting the Special Olympics? Jen: next year, next year, I did not tell you that you didn't, but I just know we are right at rice, and is it 2025? Yeah, so that's a big deal, so huge those. Chris: Any listeners in houston, be on the lookout to go support that, what a great cause thank you, appreciate that all right. So my favorite question tex-mex or barbecue? Jen: tex-mex. I'm not a barbecue fan. My husband loves it, but I don't. Chris: Well, you know, you had no problem answering that question. Jen: Some people struggle so I love that In Texas only probably Right. Chris: So another question I get travel ideas from. So if you could do a 30-day sabbatical, where would you go and what would you do? Jen: Maine. Chris: Maine. Jen: We. If you could do a 30-day sabbatical, where would you go and what would you do? Maine, maine. We went to Maine last year. Oh my God, it's beautiful. We're empty nesters and so we're doing two-week working vacations. We just got back from Santa Fe and then we're hoping the next spring we're going to do Maine. Chris: Good for you. Yeah, I like that, kenny. Jen: Bunk or somewhere around there. Chris: Okay Well, you didn't let me finish a sentence, oh sorry, no, so I know you meant it right. Some people have to think about it. Jen: Oh, I knew. Yeah. Well, we're thinking about where we want to go now, so we've got a whole list. Chris: That's a fun process to go through. Yeah, it is so well, jen. Thanks again for coming. Special Guest: Jen Sudduth.

In this episode of Building Texas Business, we delve into the remarkable journey of Jason Hayes and his family's business, Top Coat Fabrication. Despite the tumultuous nature of the markets, they managed to emerge as an industrial leader, a testament to their resilience and adaptability. He shares Top Coat's blueprint for navigating change while excelling in oil, gas, and petrochemicals. Intentional culture-building through staff gatherings and challenges instilled trust and community, cornerstones of Top Coat's prosperity. In conclusion, his journey to company president wove together personal learning, workplace achievements, nurturing customer bonds, and proactive growth to create the powerhouse that Top Coat is today. SHOW HIGHLIGHTS Jason Hayes discusses the transformation of Top Coat Fabrication from its sandblasting roots to becoming an influential player in the oil, gas, and petrochemical industries. We explore Jason's early involvement with the family business, starting straight out of high school and eventually becoming president, as he emphasizes the value of hands-on experience. Jason shares how Top Coat navigated the challenges of the oil industry's downturns and how strategic diversification into fabrication opened new opportunities in the petrochemical sector. Jason and I delve into the pivotal moment in 2010 when Jason embraced intentional leadership and continuous learning, transforming his personal and professional outlook. Jason highlights the cultural shift within Top Coat, illustrating how he cultivates a positive work environment through team-building exercises and weekly staff meetings. We discuss the significance of building strong customer relationships, with Jason explaining his personal approach to post-project follow-ups and the search for honest feedback. Jason reflects on the importance of networking and trusted advisors, detailing how open communication within the leadership team is essential for resolving conflicts and fostering growth. We delve into Jason's leadership style, his efforts to understand team members' goals, and his commitment to maintaining a balance between work and family life. Jason explains the importance of hiring for culture fit, noting that while skills are necessary, alignment with the company's ethos is crucial for long-term success. Personal anecdotes are shared, including Jason's love for Tex-Mex, his first job experiences, and his aspirations to travel more with his family. LINKSShow Notes Previous Episodes About BoyarMiller About Top Coat Fabrication GUESTS Jason HayesAbout Jason TRANSCRIPT (AI transcript provided as supporting material and may contain errors) Chris: In this episode, you will meet Jason Hayes, president of Top Coat Fabrication. Jason is the second generation of leadership in a family-owned business and tells how he went from hope to learning to be more intentional about growth. Jason I want to welcome you to. Building Texas Business. Thanks for taking time to come on the show. Absolutely Glad to be here. So I think the best place to start is just tell us a little bit about Topcoat. What is the business and what? Jason: does it do? Okay, we're an industrial fabricator, so we fabricate oil and gas and petrochemical equipment, a lot of welding, piping, structural steel, pressure vessels pretty much anything you see when you drive by chemical plants. That's the type of stuff that we fabricate. Chris: Okay, and y'all been in business. Now for what? 40 plus years, 40 plus years. Jason: This is our 44th year. I think it started in 1980. Okay, yes, it started as a sandblasting and painting company, and that's how they got the name Top Coat. Chris: Oh, okay, that makes sense. And so started by your father, I believe. Mom and dad, okay, still 100% owners. Very good, so what was the I guess, the inspiration that had them start Top Coat to begin with? Jason: I think honestly, if I remember the story right, my dad was working for a contractor down in Freeport and I don't remember the whole story but he didn't get treated right so he got let go or whatever happened. So he decided he was going to start his own thing. So he did they and they started this blasting and painting and it just kind of took off. His work ethic combined with everything else and industry in our area, so there was a lot of oil and gas in our area at that time. Mobile had a big shore base down there, so his contacts led to him doing some blasting painting for mobile and then they asked him if he could do some work offshore on their platforms, because they have platforms out there. So that that led to that part of the business and it just kind of started growing a little bit from there so it's interesting. Chris: So many people that I've talked to have you know unique stories, but there's a there, there's some that have a common theme that it's kind of, out of that hardship or disappointment or something, they decide to go on their own and do it their own way. It sounds like that was the case for your dad. Jason: Yeah, absolutely. I don't know exactly what drove it, you know, but yeah, that's what led to it. Chris: Tell us a little bit then you know how did that lead to. You know what the company is today as it relates to you know the focus and the mission and the purpose of the company. How has those early days influenced where you are today, some 44 years later? Jason: Well, let me give you a little bit of history about that. So when he started working offshore for Mobile at some point, he was just doing sandblasting and painting, well, on a project. They had asked him if he had any welders or knew any welders, because they needed some welding done out there. So he said yes, as a matter of fact, I do so. Welders because they needed some welding done out there. So he said, yes, matter of fact, I do so that he started hiring welders and doing construction on the platforms as well. So the offshore oil and gas was our bread and butter for many years, 20 plus years at least. So that even when I came on board in 98, that was our biggest business was oil and gas offshore construction. We'd send crews to the platforms and do maintenance and platform installations, platform removals, kind of everything in between. So that was great. The downside was, you know, when oil and gas is great, it's great, but it's dead, very cyclical too, right Big time. So we had a lot of struggles and I didn't see any other struggles that they saw. My mom and dad went through so many downturns that it was everything they could do to survive, but they did Well. Then, after the BP spill, macondo incident. Then the government really cracked down on offshore industry. So pretty much all the platforms we used to work on started coming out of the water. So all the stuff that we used to do existed no more. So that's when we really had to decide and make a big pivot in the business and say you know what we've been doing? A little bit of fabrication that supports the oil and gas, the offshore let's, let's focus on that. We have the knowledge base, we had some experience in it. Let's let's focus on that. So we literally changed the name to top coat fabrication and we didn't do anything off-site anymore. We focused strictly on fabrication and we would ship our stuff, you know, kind of all over. So it opened another big door to us for the petrochemical industry, because down in our area, you know, we've had Dow Chemical, all these chemical plants right in our back door. But it was almost like we swore we'll never work for the plants, we'll never work in the plants, just because it has that stigma of okay, once you get in, you know your foot in Dow, you know it's, it can be great. But then they people say they own you or you know whatever, and so we never did. Well then now with just the fabrication, that's when we started reaching out to these chemical plants and started really digging in and started doing a lot of work for them. So, and then, another big blessing was not too long after that, we got approached by a big company that had property next to us, had a, a facility, and then they wanted to buy our facility for an expansion. So we were on the water, we were on the intercoastal canal because we had crew boats coming in and out. We did a lot of dock services, so none of that existed anymore. So this was just a huge place that we didn't need, so that we used that to actually buy a piece of property, built a brand new shop where we're at now, a brand new facility. We built it the way we wanted. That was, you know, based on fabrication. So that's where we still are. Chris: Okay, that's great. So you know, I guess, a good lesson in the adage of don't put all your eggs in one basket. Yeah, y'all learned to diversify pretty quickly, right? Yes, yeah, exactly. Jason: So now you know we still do oil and gas work, but it's fabrication. We do a lot of stuff for West Texas oil and gas and we ship our stuff out there. We do a ton for the petrochemical industry right in our back door. We're getting into commercial building fabrication now not the buildings themselves but the structural components that go into them. We're looking into the offshore wind generation, solar, anywhere. We can do our fabrication in different industries for that exact reason to diversify. Chris: It's a good lesson right for people out there that you know. Start a business, maybe with that one big customer, that focus. It can be good when times are good, but you got to think about you know what. If this goes away, what else do we have? That is a compliment to it. It's a big liability yeah, if you don't, yeah, it ain't no different than what you were saying if, if you got too far in with someone like Dow, that'd be no different than you know, kind of that singular focus. So let's talk a little bit. How did you get involved and kind of come up through the business? Because you're now the president, I definitely want to talk a little bit once I hear kind of the back story about at some point there was a transition in leadership, so I definitely want to dive into that. Sure. Jason: So right out of high school I worked for Topcoat for the summer between high school and college and I went off to college that next semester. I went to Texas A&M. I was in mechanical engineering program. I wasn't ready for college, so I was there for two semesters and then they suggested that I leave. So I left. After that I came home and started working in 98 at some point and started at the bottom, started as a helper. The summer before college I was just a weed eater. We had this huge facility on the shore basin. I literally just weeded it all summer pretty much. So then when I came back I was a helper, just doing whatever you know in the shop around the facility. At one point we also made a realization or my dad did, because I had nothing to do with management then, but he made a realization that we needed somebody that would take care of the safety. We always had good safety records and good practices, but we needed somebody that could take charge of the program. Right? So I got volunteered to be the safety man. There you go. So I did that for a few years. They call that voluntold. Chris: Yes. Jason: I was being polite, you're exactly right. So I did that for a couple years and then I don't remember how the transition it was kind of a slow transition into just kind of taking more of the reins of the management. So at some point I can't tell you when, but he named me as the general manager. Okay, so he was the president, I was the general manager and then so I had, you know, a couple of people that kind of reported directly to me and then all the work happened underneath them. So that, and that was the case for a pretty good while. And I mean I'll be brutally honest that I was not into leadership back then. I wanted to be the top dog, right, I wanted to be the guy in charge, but leadership as I understand it now was not in my repertoire. Chris: Yeah, well, I mean, it's easy to want to be the guy, yeah, but there's a lot that goes with it that not everyone understands. Right To do it, the right way To do it right? Yeah, I knew nothing about leading people. Well, what have you done to try to help educate yourself, get some experience to become a better leader? Jason: I think it started with a desire wanting to be better. When you hit that point in 2010, I hit a really low point in my life. That's when I turned my life over to God and became a Christian. It just really changed the way I was thinking. So that kind of led me into leading my family and at some point, you know, I started reading books, I started learning more, listening to podcasts, and that just literally flowed into work. Okay, there's a realization. Okay, now I need to be a better leader at work. And what does that look like? So I started going to conferences, reading books, listening, just consuming as much content as I could, yeah, and then just slowly started putting things into practice at work, which was awkward, you know, at times when you try to bring some new thought processes and stuff to the team where it's never been before. You know, this is the way we've always done it type of mentality, and I was the same way. Chris: So it's a struggle, it's a beautiful story. It's an easy trap to fall into, right For people. Well, we were just doing it this way, because we've always done it that way. That is a eventually that becomes a death sentence for a company because no one will. Eventually that becomes a death sentence for a company because no one will innovate or think differently. And so I definitely applaud you for coming to that point. And you know, and as you know, now it's a, it's an everyday. You know you got to keep learning and keep growing, yeah for sure. So let's go back to the kind of the transition, because at some point you become president I don't know what your dad's title is now, but you kind of take over the reins. Let's talk about how did that decision kind of come about? And then how did y'all manage through the transition where you became kind of the. Jason: It was gradually happening already, so my dad is still the CEO now and he was like saying he was the president back then and it was just I, I probably just. It was a combination of me taking more and taking more initiative and him being able to release more right. So there wasn't anything set like, okay, I'm going to give you more, I need you to take more. Chris: It was just kind of I started pulling and he started giving well the given parts, probably the hardest of those two, oh, I'm sure'm sure, allowing himself to let go and trust. How did y'all manage the communication within the company? Did you just let it happen by kind of osmosis? The actual? Jason: leadership just happened. So I've worked really closely with most of my leadership team for gosh I guess 16 or 17 years now several of them and so it just happened. We started really clicking together, growing. A lot of us have the same kind of mentality we want to get better personally, we want to get better in the business. We're, all you know, looking at the big picture type of thing. But the actual transition from me to GM to president, I didn't even know about it. So we have a staff meeting every Monday with the entire company. We have breakfast and I typically show some type of motivational video, tell the whole staff a few things that might be going on within the business. And in one of those meetings my mom shows up. And my mom, she just doesn't. She's never been involved in the business since I've been there. She's part owner but never been involved in it, and so she's. So you know, I said hi to her before I'm going to the meeting and I didn't think anything about it. Well, during that meeting my dad gets up and says okay, I want to announce that jason is now the president of the business and I'm he. I don't think he said this, but he was stepping up to the ceo. So it was like a we both kind of moved up okay. But he mentioned, you know, that he just that he just wanted to. He knew I was passionate about it, I was passionate about the business, passionate about the people, and he knew I wanted to take it to new places. So he named me president. So nobody knew, not me, not anybody else, it just happened one day oh, we don't. So it was a cool honor and you know it didn't change much. It didn't change much because the structure was already there. Yeah, it was just a matter of a title really then. But I think I started taking it even more serious then. Chris: Makes sense. So I guess we talk about as it exists today. Then you're still working with your dad, but more the responsibility for the day-to-day falls on you, Right? Yes, definitely. Jason: He's there almost every day. I mean he's there every day that he's around. If he's not, you know, gone out of town or something, he's there. He's typically in his shorts and flip flops or you know shorts and shoes and fishing shirt. But he is there, which is great to have him. I'm honored to be able to work with him. He still lets me pretty much do what I want. I mean trusts me. Chris: So one of the things I noticed in getting ready to meet you today was on your website, the company's website. You're very big on your people and your culture, so let's talk a little bit about how you would describe the culture at Top Coat and what are some of the things you think you've done to help kind of build to get to that type of culture. Jason: The culture is amazing at Top Coat and that's my passion. My passion is the culture. That's one of the biggest things I think spend most time thinking about. One of the first things I did was start having a just a like a weekly meeting with my, the leadership team. We started doing that, I would bet, six or eight years ago, Just a weekly meeting. We didn't really have any structure, I just wanted us to meet, put our heads together and talk about things going on. So that was the first thing I started. And then, after that, we started the full staff meetings. After we moved to our new place, we actually had a place we could meet, but we started having our full staff meetings once a week too, and we kind of used that as a transition. I don't remember how it came about, but we started doing a type of physical challenge where every Monday after our staff meeting, we'd have some kind of challenge where it would be, we'd do push-ups, we'd do dead hangs. We've done just about everything you could imagine. Some of them are physical, some of them are not, but we do that and it's we literally make the people pay. If you want to play five bucks, Everybody puts in five bucks and wants to do it. Winner takes all, unless it's a team sport. You know, we've done tug of war, We've done dodgeball tournaments and little things like that. It just creates like maybe 15, 20 minutes of fun and there's trash talking from all the you know, the audience and everything else. But it's that's just a tiny layer that just it just adds a little bit of fun into the workday. It makes it a little more human, right? Yes, and that's one of the biggest things my dad fought me on at the very beginning was doing these. You know his mentality was you know, think about what that's costing the company. You know you have this entire crew shut down for 30 minutes additional. What do you think that's costing us? And I wrapped my head around it and I thought about it and I understood. But at the same time I tried to make him understand. I think it's way more valuable to spend that time and spend that money on this time, because I think overall it's going to be well worth it. Chris: Yeah, kudos to you for that, because it's easy to look at the black and white and ensure there's a cost to that. But I think you're right when you evaluate it holistically. If you're creating engagement and fostering that environment where everyone kind of knows each other better and feels more like a team, I think the returns are exponential. Right, you can't necessarily put dollars on it, but you probably can't look at lack of turnover, maybe better productivity once they're back at work. So I think to your point it was it's a wise investment to making your people yeah, I agree, and I mean to this day. Jason: If you look on our LinkedIn page or Facebook, when I put up videos of the challenge that we do, that's even on LinkedIn. Those are the posts that get so many comments, so many shares. It's people connect with it and so many people say, man, I wish we did that at our place, or I wish my company would do stuff like that. And it's like it's those little things that people I don't know if they don't think about them or they just don't think it's worth it, but for us it's been kind of a game changer. Advert Hello friends, this is Chris Hanslick, your Building Texas business host. Did you know that Boyer Miller, the producer of this podcast, is a business law firm that works with entrepreneurs, corporations and business leaders? Our team of attorneys serve as strategic partners to businesses by providing legal guidance to organizations of all sizes. Get to know the firm at boyermillercom. And thanks for listening to the show. Chris: So one of the things you mentioned kind of as the company's evolved is, you know this diversification into fabrication and doing other lines of business. What are some of the things you do as the president of the company to kind of create those relationships with the new customers, new vendors, and maintain those strong relationships? Jason: We have a sales team that does a lot of the actual interaction. But most of our customers I'll know their name, I'll know their contact information and I'm the one that reaches out to them personally. For if we're going to do it, then let's say we sponsor a lot of golf tournaments, you know skeet shooting teams for fundraisers and that sort of thing, and I'm the one that normally reaches out to the people and ask them if they want to you know, participate with us. We had an industry night a couple of weeks ago and I call all the what the customers that I know and have the contact information. I'm the one that calls them and I also do customer follow-ups. With every project that we do that ships out, I do a customer follow-up call with everyone. I call them personally, just as me, thanking them, number one for their business and then number two just seeing if there's anything we can do to improve that I love. Chris: And I'll tell you we tried here and we're not consistent with it. Love, and I'll tell you we tried here and we were not consistent with it, but that kind of what I would call customer survey, satisfaction survey. So you've got it baked into your routine to do it on every order. Jason: That's amazing, I learned that from Mattress Mac. Okay, we bought some furniture from him and I think twice now, and every time sometime afterwards he calls personally and just thanks us for his business. Oh we darn. Chris: Yeah, Well, I think it's a great lesson for people you know that are listening to this and have their own business. That personal touch and that follow-up can go so far in creating that customer loyalty Right. So that's amazing. I guess you report back to your people on what you learned from that so that's amazing. Jason: I guess you report back to your people what you learned from that. Yeah, so we have a Teams, our Teams folder that we open up every day or every week in our leadership meeting and I keep the spreadsheets in there so we review it every week. Any ones that I call, you know, I'll be honest, I'll let them build up, because our project coordinator sends me. Every time we ship one out, he sends me the contact, you know, until I know what the project was, who the contact name is and so forth. And I will, all honesty, I let them build up because sometimes I'll procrastinate doing it, you know, because I'm like, oh, it's one more thing I gotta do, right, right. But then after I do, let's say, just the day before yesterday I called six, six clients and every time I do it I'm so glad that I did because I feel better, I'm sure you know, I feel better because I let them know, number one I that I them. Number two we're trying to ask them if there's anything that we can do to improve and be better. We want to know and I don't think. I think it's so uncommon that people don't people say they want feedback. But I think they want the five-star rating Right. They don't want the honesty, they just want okay, how many five stars can we get? Chris: Yeah, they want the high google rating, right right which it feels good to get that. Jason: But we're not going to get any better if, especially if there's a client that's not happy about something, some most of them aren't going to come and just out and tell us, hey, so and so went wrong. But if I ask, is there anything we could do to better, that's when they're going to say, as a matter of fact, there is. Yeah, I haven't got that yet, but we will sure you will. I mean, that's the point, that's what I want. Chris: I think that's great. You know, sitting here thinking I need to do more of that. You know that, as I told you before we came on, I learned from all the guests and I've at least learned that from you today. I think that's wise advice. Jason: And it has to come from the top. If my project coordinator is talking to the clients, you know 24 seven7. It's not going to be the same Right. Chris: That's right. So let's talk a little bit. I mean, it's been up and down in the economy the last few years. What have you experienced at Top Coat kind of as it relates to the last four or five years and kind of the you know turbulent environment, and what are some of the things you've done to kind of manage through? Jason: that We've stayed pretty steady the last several years. Now. Last year ended up being our best year in history revenue-wise. Revenue and profit-wise. Several stars aligned for that, some great projects from some longtime customers. But the few years before that we were okay, we were steady, right, and that's. I think that's one thing that Vistage taught me is to be proactive. I'd sit back for years and say, man, I hope this company grows, I hope this company grows. And then, with you know, the Vistage group and just everything that I've been involved in so far with that has just really taught me that you have to be intentional, you have to, we have to make it happen. So we going to grow, how are we going to make this happen? So that's where the big focus is now. I mean we since I've been there, you know, 26 years we've had some horrible years. I mean when we first take great story, when we first built our new facility beautiful shop, beautiful, everything we had no work, zero. We got down, I believe seven people in the company completely, and I remember just like it was. Yesterday we're having my staff meeting, so it's a small group, but I'm kind of telling them look, we literally had 75 grand in the bank and we said this is all the money we had left. We had all this money from selling our property, but we'd spent on this new facility and we had some money, but it had just dwindled down to nothing because the work had died, and so that was in 16, I think 2016, 2017. Okay, so I'm telling the whole team look, guys, I don't know what we're going to do. We're going to figure this out, but I really don't know what I do, what we're going to do. And then, literally during that meeting, our phone, our office phone, rang. There was nobody in the office, so I turned around and I answered the phone. Quick, five-minute conversation. It was a guy driving by our facility. He was an inspector for Chevron, phillips and Sweeney and he said I'm leaving the shop and I'm the inspector and I can't stand Something along the lines of I can't stand working with these guys. They keep lying to me, I need to find another shop and I've just been driving by your place. I want to see if I can come talk to you about doing some fabrication work for us. That led to us doing $2 million to $3 million a year for them almost every year since. Oh, wow, and so that was. It was like that was. Since I've been in the business, that was the lowest point that I felt, because I was really feeling that pressure of what am I going to do? What am I going to do? And there was no strategy to this. It was like it was a God moment of having him drive by all this stuff at the same time by having a new facility help? yes, absolutely if we had not been there, he never would have driven by our place, because where we were before nobody drove by right, so nobody knew so so that's it. Chris: I mean well, that's an incredible deal. So 2016 is seven employees, $75,000 in the bank. How did you end 2023? How many employees and what was your revenue? Jason: 2023,. We had $22 million in revenue and for most of the year we were probably around close to 100 employees. Wow. Chris: That's an amazing turnaround, congratulations. Appreciate it yeah, congratulations, appreciate it. So, yeah, I like what you said earlier, when it was you were hoping to grow and you've learned to go think about how to grow and be intentional, because that otherwise you hear there's another cliche hope's not a strategy, right? So sounds like you mentioned vistage, so you're a vistage member, that sounds like, and other vistage members, including myself. I know how valuable it can be to grow as a leader, but then how you think about your business. Jason: Sure, absolutely yeah. And, like I was telling you earlier, the network that you meet the people, the different people in every area of business yourself for legal, whether it's taxes, insurance, whatever has to do with business. There's people that I'm connected with, literally one-on-one, that I can call, I can sit down with. Most of them will just meet me for lunch. If I need to bounce an idea off of them. That's the biggest thing. Chris: Something I tell people that have businesses all the time is you've got to build a solid network of trusted advisors that you can reach out to, whether it's a banker, insurance person, accountant, lawyer, another entrepreneur or business owner right, that you can just reach out to, because even when you're having a bad day and maybe they can you know, hey, I've been there before, so you'll feel, because a lot of times you feel alone. What are some of the things I guess, as you've evolved as a leader that you've found to kind of whether it's a particular book or conference you go to that have really been valuable to you to kind of grow as a leader? Jason: I can't think of a specific book, but I think, the mentality of giving your people the tools that they need to do what they have inside their head. You know, I think so many times I've learned that even our leadership team at work they have so many ideas and great ways to do different things, but they don't always let them out. So I think creating number one, creating a safe place, like our leadership meetings that we have every Wednesday morning, that's a safe place. Whether it's a conflict that we have, whether it's an issue that they've been holding in, whatever it may be, that is the place where we draw those things out and we squash them or whatever we need to do. To me, that's probably been the biggest thing. Chris: It's a hard thing to do, but you're so right that safe place where people feel like they can share without being judged or criticized is unique, I think, but so important. Jason: And it's so simple, but we're all humans, especially at work. Yeah, and it's so simple, but we're all humans, especially at work. I'm sure we all swallow a whole lot more at work than we do anywhere else, because maybe we're afraid of our job, we're afraid of whatever. But I think it's been really good for us. We've solved so many issues just because we've created the structure for it. Chris: So one of the things I like to ask folks that come on is can you tell us a setback you've encountered in your professional life? Maybe it's your personal life, but something that sets you back. But you learned so much and you grew from it that you're better off because of it today. Man. Jason: I know there's plenty of them. Chris: That's what most people say. Jason: Yeah, there's plenty of them. Chris: I'm just trying to think what would come to mind, maybe something right after you kind of took over being either general manager or president at Topco, maybe something in those early days. Jason: I think one of the real struggles is it's not a moment but learning the business finances. You know I struggle a lot with okay, we need this piece of equipment to get better, we should just go buy it. Well, my dad has the finances and the history of the accounting behind it and I've struggled because he and I butted heads quite a bit on things I think would be a good investment and things he thinks wouldn't be a good investment. So that's become something we both had to work on. Really, I mean, I lean on him a lot for his knowledge and different things when we're purchasing, making big purchases or expanding our facility, whatever we're doing. But I think having those conversations was probably some of the toughest things we've had to do. Gotcha, and it's just like anything else, it's just like with the leadership team. It's creating a space that we can have those. I mean, he and I have worked together for literally 26 years, so we work well together and we communicate fine together. But it's me getting up the courage to ask those questions too. That's been a struggle. Chris: So what I hear you saying in that and I think it's a natural struggle for people in leadership because, like you said, from day one, you wanted to be the top dog. Sure, it's having the humility to ask your father or mentor someone that you don't know or don't know enough, right. Sure, so that takes a lot of humility, yeah, for you, and I think it's also a blessing that you have the courage to use it. Jason: Is you have a built-in, you know, advisor, mentor, right there, you know, letting you grow and being there to kind of guide you along the way yeah, and I don't utilize them as much as I should, but every time we have a conversation like this, it reminds me how much I should I, how much I do and should you know, put more value in that another thing that you mentioned was mentioned was y'all can butt heads. Chris: So what have y'all done? Because I guarantee I've had other people that have done what you've done on the show, that have taken over a family business. I guarantee there's people who are going to listen to this, that are doing that or see that in their future when you get to that place of how will you and your dad communicate on big issues. If you all kind of got it agreed upon, let's do this in private and really hash it out and not let other people see what's going on. I mean, is that something that's one that you all kind of have a practice of doing? If so, how does that work? Jason: Yeah, definitely. I mean, he's in our leadership meeting. He sits in our leadership meetings pretty much every week. He's pretty quiet, you know, off to the side, he's just mainly listening, but there's plenty of times where I'll you know if I have an issue with something he said, or vice versa. He'll either come to my office and shut the. I always, I constantly, have to remind myself that this is his baby. This whole company is. I've had a lot to do with the growth and where we're at in you know the current state, but at the end of the day, this is his and he. He created it and I'm just a part of it. Yeah, so I have to constantly remind myself of that. And then he I mean, he tells me multiple times that you know I'm doing a good job of running it. So he's constantly having to remind himself that he gave me the authority and the power to run it. But it's definitely a team effort. Chris: I think it would have to be. The other thing that comes to mind again, kind of unique to family-owned business and second generation of leadership of that family-owned business is how well do you and your dad do at leaving the issues at the office versus trickling over to the Thanksgiving table or anything like that? Jason: Yeah, he's probably better at that than I am, but even I don't know. From the time I was born, he and I have had an absolutely solid relationship always. He was gone a lot when I was growing up for many years because he was doing a lot of offshore work. So he was gone a lot when I was growing up for many years because he was doing a lot of offshore work. So he was gone a lot, but we always had just a top-notch relationship. Yeah, so I think without that it would have been a hundred times worse. Yeah, but I don't think I can't remember a single time where any tension between me and him ever stayed very long period, but certainly much less made it out the door. Yeah, yeah, we could have this tough discussion and then say, all right, let's go get some lunch yeah, you know that's good here and you know. Chris: The other thing is, I think when you're an entrepreneur and you own this business, you live and breathe it, so you you're going to be thinking about it when you're at home and those conversations could come up versus, just as natural, when they happen at the office right it. Jason: It always has. Yeah, I mean, whether we're at my house, his house, it's typically something with work is going to come up and we're going to talk about it. Chris: It just happens. So let me ask you this just about your own personal leadership style. How would you describe your leadership style today? How do you think it's evolved or developed over the last several years? Jason: I would say my style is to. This is just off the cuff, but I would say my style is to help anybody that I'm leading, make sure they have the tools to do what they need to do. You know I'm really passionate about I haven't been extremely proactive about mentoring all of my leadership team, but I want to know their goals, not just professionally but personally too, and I think a lot about like, what can I do to help them succeed? If the person is going after what they were put on this earth to do and I can be a part of that and help guide them to that, I think that is the ultimate definition of success when it comes to leadership. Yeah, so that's kind of my passion. I haven't been as good at the mentoring side and maybe the personal side. We talk about business roles and stuff quite a bit but I really want to be more involved with their goals in life overall. Sure, Not involved in them, but what can I do to help? How can I help? Chris: Well, at least understand them, so you know how you can be a resource. Jason: Yeah, and again, I want all my resources to be their resources too. Chris: So that brings up kind of a good subject. When you think about that, and maybe I'm going to ask you about yourself, what do you do to try to maintain some type of balance in your life right between work and family, knowing that you're always thinking about the business, right? Jason: I've done pretty good with that for the most part. I've never been a workaholic, just not me. I've been a huge family guy always. I have four kids, ages 15 down to 7, so we stay busy, sounds like it, but that's another. Passion of mine, too is just the kids and the family. I've never had a struggle with staying at work when I should be at home. Chris: Now having the leadership team that I have is what makes that possible. I was going to say you got to have some tools in place to help facilitate that. So hiring good leaders to work with you, Anything that you look for, or when you do interview or interview someone for a leadership position and or think about promoting them to one. Jason: Culture is the number one thing. That's what I always start with. Will this person be a fit for our culture? And that's typically if we're going to hire not just leadership team, but maybe even the level right. You know, underneath that, most of the time I'll. I want to know the person. I want to have a one-on-meeting. You know, I've met several people for coffee that we were interviewing for a project manager position, just because I want to just get to know the person. The resume says what they've done. The resume says everything that they've accomplished. But I want to know are they going to fit with us? And if they don't, then that's an immediate no. So I think that hiring for the culture is the number one thing. Chris: So many people, including myself, believe that right. Lots of people have skills that could fit with what you do, but are they a type of person that fits with who you are and who you want your people to be? Right, and I believe the people that are culture fit. Jason: You never know where they might end up, even with the company. We've hired a couple of people that were a great fit for us and they were doing one thing. Well then, as soon as we get, they get in and they're a great fit, and then we start seeing all the stuff that they're capable of. Then they start getting snagged by this person and next thing you know they're just keep moving up because everybody's starting to see. Chris: You know they're capable of yeah, but it started with the fit right. That's great. Well, jason, I love the story and the family transition. I think it's a beautiful story when they're done right. They're not always are. I want to always wrap up on a few off-topic personal things. Okay, what was your first job? Was it something at Top Coat or something other than that? Jason: Yeah, it was Top Coat, the one right after high school, so weed eating, yeah, it was great. Chris: So great. All right, what's your preference? Tex-mex or barbecue Tex-Mex? I could eat it every day. I mean, I didn't even finish the sentence. Jason: I know you jumped on that one, I know. Chris: No question. Jason: So I always ask people if you could take a sabbat Ooh 30 days, oh man, for at least a week I'd take my wife and we'd just sit on a beach somewhere. Yeah, without a doubt. Yeah, and then I would just do some traveling, a lot of traveling. I want to do a lot more traveling. The only place out of the states I've been is to Mexico, for me and my wife on our honeymoon. Okay, so I've got so many places I want to see, but I just don't make the time or make the plans to do it. Chris: Well with the four kids as you described, you got your hands full right. Yeah, well again. Jason, thanks for taking the time to come on the show. Really enjoyed getting to get to know you better and meet you. Jason: I appreciate the opportunity man. Special Guest: Jason Hayes.

In this episode of Building Texas Business, I sit down with Wes Cummins, CEO of Applied Digital, for an inside look at the company's revolutionary trajectory. Wes takes us behind the scenes of Applied Digital's evolution from Bitcoin mining infrastructure to leading the charge in specialized cloud and high-performance computing. Our discussion also tackles the grit of entrepreneurship. Wes reflects on Applied Digital's resilience amid regulatory shifts, sharing lessons from his upbringing on perseverance and hard work. As the company grows, so does its specialized workforce, prompting insights on fostering talent retention and aligning culture with business goals. Overall, Wes offers a compelling narrative of continuous innovation through adversity, partnership and calculated risk-taking. SHOW HIGHLIGHTS Wes Cummins discusses the origin of Applied Digital, beginning with infrastructure for Bitcoin mining and pivoting to high-performance computing and specialized cloud services. We examine the company's strategic response to China's crackdown on Bitcoin mining and how this external challenge spurred a significant shift in Applied Digital's business model. I reflect on my own experiences with business pivots and emphasize the importance of seeking opportunities amidst market disruptions and regulatory changes. Wes shares insights from his upbringing on a family farm, including the values of hard work and resilience, and how these qualities have influenced his entrepreneurial journey. We talk about the rapid growth of Applied Digital, expanding from three to approximately 200 employees, and the operational challenges associated with scaling up. Wes outlines the importance of building a specialized team with the right skills, highlighting the role of strong human resources and recruiting in managing rapid company growth. The conversation delves into the significance of company culture in driving employee motivation, retention, and the cultivation of a spirit of empowerment and ownership. We discuss the energy challenges in powering AI technology, the use of renewable energy sources, and the potential of nuclear power to meet the increasing demand for data center capacity. Wes considers the future of Texas businesses within the energy grid, including the financial and infrastructural challenges of meeting the needs of hyperscalers. Finally, Wes and I touch on personal leadership styles, the evolution from micromanagement to autonomy, and the value of mentorship in fostering a productive work environment. LINKSShow Notes Previous Episodes About BoyarMiller About Applied Digital GUESTS Wes CumminsAbout Wes TRANSCRIPT (AI transcript provided as supporting material and may contain errors) Chris: In this episode, you will meet Wes Cummins, ceo of Applied Digital. Wes's company is building the next generation of digital infrastructure in the United States. He shares his thoughts on how building a strong company culture starts by providing opportunities for growth to your employees. All right, wes, I want to welcome you to Building Texas Business and thanks for taking time to come on the show. Wes: Chris, thanks for having me. I'm happy to be here. Chris: So let's start by just you introducing yourself. I'll at least say I know you're the CEO and founder of Applied Digital. Tell us a little bit about Applied Digital. What is that company and what is it known for? Wes: Sure. So. Applied Digital is a company that is building next generation digital infrastructure, and the company started by building infrastructure for Bitcoin mining back in 2021. Crypto mining, where a lot of the hash rate about 70% of the hash rate was in China at the time had to go elsewhere in the world. A lot of that came to the US. We assembled a team that had experience in the sector which there wasn't a lot of people in the US that had experience, given. I think it was sub 5% of the hash rate was actually in the US at the time Assembled a team, secured power sites because it takes a large amount of electricity and built data centers, which is the digital infrastructure for Bitcoin. We don't mine Bitcoin ourselves. We never have. We provide a data center service for Bitcoin miners, and the original business idea around that was anyone can be a Bitcoin miner if they come to us, so you need to have money to buy the miners, the servers, and you come to us and sign a contract. We put it in our facility, we run it for you and Bitcoin just starts hitting your wallet and you're a Bitcoin miner. So that was the original business idea. What it ended up being was we signed a few industrial scale Bitcoin miners that filled up all of our facilities Our largest customer being Marathon Digital, which I believe is the largest Bitcoin miner in the world and so that we built about 500 megawatts of data center capacity in about 24 months for Bitcoin mining. And then, in 2022, we started looking at what other products or services can we offer on our sites and with our assets, and what we landed on was high-performance computing, and at the time, high-performance computing was more of a niche market. That went after, like geotech analysis for oil and gas, aerospace design, automotive design, drug discovery, graphics rendering, and high-performance computing is typically GPU-based, typically requires significantly more power in a single rack, so much, much higher power density than traditional data centers. So we designed that in 22, started building it at the end of 22, our first facility, and then, in October of 22, we put a software layer in place to run a cloud service out of our facility, and we started running that cloud service in December of 22. Out of our facility and we started running that cloud service in December of 22. And the customers were initially small, mostly universities that were doing research, machine learning, deep learning out of that facility, and we put the cloud service in place to be our own first customer and our new style of data center, to show the data center work, and then we could lease out the data center capacity. And then, as everyone knows, the world has changed since December 22,. Really, it was when ChatGPT hit the scene, so everyone got their first taste of generative AI at a wide scale and what it does. And then, in March of 23, nvidia introduced the H100 GPU, which was their next big data center GPU upgrade from the A100. And it turned out that the data center we were building was kind of a perfect fit for the new NVIDIA gear and we were out marketing that and we landed our first actually cloud service customer in May of 20 character AI. And so we've leaned. Now we've done two things. We've leaned into the cloud services business and signed more contracts and more customers. There we're basically we own the compute and we provide a very specialized cloud service that's GPU based. And then the other thing we're doing is we went back and initially we were going to build five or 10 megawatt facilities on these sites and now we're back to building hundreds of megawatts of high performance computing, high power, density, data center capacity, mostly right now in North Dakota. But we, you know, this is a new kind of a new world on digital infrastructure and we can talk about that a lot more, but that's really what our company does is next generation digital infrastructure. Chris: That's an incredible story. Let me just kind of back up to the beginning. What was the inspiration for you to even start the business back when you did yeah, so? Wes: it's a little bit interesting. So the business model changed quickly after we started. So the initial business model was actually deploying you know kind of industrial scale GPU capacity to do altcoin mining. And that goes back a lot more to my background, which you know. I've been a tech investor for 25 years now and really what I saw was an opportunity in that market. So altcoins are anything but Bitcoin, basically, and the largest being Ethereum, and the idea was we were going to deploy a lot of GPUs and there were many different proof of work networks that require GPU capacity to run for different altcoins Again Ethereum being the largest when it was proof of work, before transitioning to proof of stake. And the idea was, as an investor, instead of putting money into these different altcoins, you could actually just aim the compute power at different networks depending on which one was most profitable. And so we were going to be a large scale GPU operator doing Ethereum and other altcoins, and we signed an agreement with a company called Sparkpool that was the largest Ethereum pool in the world I think it had roughly 25% of the entire hash for Ethereum at the time and we were going to deploy a lot of GPUs in China actually, and so we raised money for that in April of 21. And then, at the end of May of 2020, was when China cracked down on Bitcoin mining and our business model changed because the opportunity to build all this infrastructure in the US was basically presented to us. I'd already started to assemble the team that could go out and do that, and then we just accelerated that. So that was really the genesis of the company. But you know, when the world changes, you have to be accommodative to that, and so we have been. Chris: That's a great point to make and let's kind of stay on that for a minute. You start out with an idea and a plan and that was going to be in China. China, you know, without any control, you have changes, the laws and things, and you're forced to pivot. Walk us through, maybe, how that played out for you, the decision-making. Other entrepreneurs face that all the time, I think, and some successfully and, as you know, some unsuccessfully. So what are some of the things maybe you could share to help someone navigate through when market dynamics beyond your control change and force you to just totally pivot your business model? Wes: Yeah, it's an interesting position and, you're right, sometimes it's hard to make it through those. So what we did? We stepped back, because when the news first hit I remember it was I think it was the last Friday in May I was sick to my stomach. It was just like the entire business model we were going after has just been closed for us. But we spent some time over the weekend thinking about what opportunities does this create? And it became very clear the opportunity it created very quickly. The thing that was fortunate for us is I had already been in discussions about building sites for our GPUs in the US. We were looking at power sites. We were looking the US, we were looking at power sites. We were looking at, you know, construction, we were looking at that, and so there was a pretty clear path. And you know, our partners in China were looking for capacity outside of China very quickly and so we kind of had a natural customer base and we already had kind of the start of looking at these sites and what we could do there. So it was very helpful to have that. But you know, at the start it was a big gut punch when we found that out and it took us. You know, really over the weekend it became clear for us, but then it took us a couple of weeks to really change and take action on the new business opportunity and take action on the new business opportunity. But what I would say in general is typically if there's a big change, it definitely can wreak havoc with current businesses, but it's going to create some new opportunity. Chris: I think that's the idea. Wes: That's the idea of the opportunity, yeah. Chris: Yeah, I think that's the. The lesson I see consistent in talking to entrepreneurs is, you know, gut punch moments cause you to rethink the business model or where the weaknesses are, but it's about looking for the opportunity, because with every roadblock then I said, if you really take a close analysis of the situation, you can find opportunity, and then you just try to figure out how to pursue that. Wes: Yep, that's what we did, and, like I said, we were fortunate in that we'd already started putting some of these puzzle pieces in place prior to that news coming out, and so it was a little bit of an easier transition, but it wasn't an easy transition by any means. Chris: So you know it may be too a little bit of your makeup and I know I think a little bit about you. You grew up on a farm, I think in Idaho, and there have to be some lessons learned in growing up in a rural environment that teaches you that you just keep your head down and keep plugging away. Wes: Yeah, you know there's many lessons from farming and I was in kind of the last generation at least in Idaho of family farms where you know all the family members worked on the farm before it was much more commercial and so you know, generally around five to six years old we started working on the farm. I'm sure at that age we were zero help, but you know you have to get trained into it. But we, you know we did in Idaho. You do a lot of irrigating. You get up at 430 in the morning and go stand in a wet, cold potato field and move irrigation equipment around for about an hour and a half. Then you get to do it again in the middle of the day and again at night. So there was a lot of lessons. But our dad taught us being self-starters right. So self-starter was a big part of what else do I need to do, not just the task he gave me and then I have to wait for him to give me another task. Obviously hard work, but I always make the joke. The biggest thing that growing up on a potato farm taught me is that I did not want to be a farmer. That was probably the biggest takeaway for me, but it did instill, you know, very strong work ethic and that's. You know farming is a hard business. Just because you know, like many businesses or maybe it's the worst out of any business the predictability is just. It's just not there right, it's not predictable at all. You know, I always tell people when we used to do stock investments. You know, let me tell you how farming works is. Let's say that you're going to invest in a company that trades publicly. You give me all your money now, and let's call now being it's April, but let's say it was March, and then in October I'll tell you how many shares of stock you purchased, right, which would be your yield of your crop, and then you have, you know, five months to sell all those shares, no matter what the price, and that that's how farming works. You put all your money in up front. You have no idea what you have until your yield comes out, and then you don't know what the market's going to be after that, and maybe you're going to get zero shares because a hailstorm comes through or something. So you know there's a certain resiliency that it teaches you as well, because there's very lean years and there's very fat years. Chris: Yeah, interesting perspective and very true. So you know that's kind of turning back to kind of apply digital. So you know, kind of turning back to kind of apply digital, how has the company grown from a kind of a workforce and facility location in the last couple of years? Wes: So we went from three employees at the start to we're about 200 employees now. Our headquarters in Dallas, texas, and we have the second headquarters here where we run a 24-7 network operations center. And then we have sites, two sites in North Dakota. We recently divested a site in West Texas, so now we're down to two sites in North Dakota and we're really focused on those sites right now. Hyper-scale size data center deployments it is specifically our Ellendale North Dakota site. Data center deployments, specifically our Ellendale North Dakota site, where we have a significant amount of power contracted, so expect to continue to grow pretty significantly over the next few years just because of the market opportunity we see in front of us, it's a lot of growth in a short period of time. Chris: What are some of the things that you've done, kind of as a CEO, to help manage that growth, so that you know you're building a strong team to kind of execute on the company strategy? Wes: So one of the things I've done and I'm, you know, I've been an entrepreneur and investor for a long time, but as I've just, I guess the wisdom I've gained with age is making sure I put the you know the people around me that have the skills that I'm lacking. So I, you know, really focusing on the things that I do really well and putting the other you know other people in the seats around me that do things that I don't do well, extremely well. And so you know, as you grow, I would say the kind of the bigger one for me or for us growing this quickly is, you know, having strong human resources, having strong recruiting, so that we get the right people in the right positions and they're managed the right way and we put the right type of structure in place for all of our employees to be successful. And then so, so we have that. That's been a big one. And then you know, our financing team we're in a capital intensive business, and then so we have that's been a big one. And then you know, our financing team we're in a capital intensive business, and then so we have a great finance team, and then, you know, we have a tech team, so we're kind of a blend between a real estate and a technology business and we're on the leading edge of this new high power density. You know, really, ai workload technology, and so we've had to attract the right talent for that, because, similar when we were building the Bitcoin facilities, you know it was a really shallow talent pool in the US. And it's the same with, you know, large GPU deployments that, like I said earlier, that was a niche market going back to you know 22. And now it's just exploded. But finding the people that know what they're doing, managing these and you know deploying, operating, managing large scale GPU deployments is was difficult. We were early and we were able to attract you know good, really good talent in that space. But you had to go to, you know, national labs and universities to find people that had experience with really large GPU deployments, and so we've done a good job. But that goes back again to recruiting and HR and having a really strong team there to find the people that we need. But there's definitely growing pains, right, as you grow up as a company and you know putting the appropriate structures in place, because when you're, you know a three to five person startup, right, everyone's doing everything and as you grow, the people that were there originally doing everything need to become more specialized. You know, in a group of the company, so that's a that's kind of a harder transition as well. But if you, you know you find the right people and you, you know the team all works together, you're able to achieve that. But there's a in three years there've been a lot of changes at the company, a lot of new faces, and then you know, specializing people. That started, you know, doing everything. When we built our first facility, I think it was eight or nine of us at the company, right, and we're all doing everything to make that happen. And now it's gotten bigger and larger scale and we've added a lot of specialty inside the company. AD: Hello friends. This is Chris Hanslick. You're building Texas business host. Did you know that Boyer Miller, the producer of this podcast is a business law firm that works with entrepreneurs, corporations, and business leaders. Our team of attorneys serve as strategic partners to businesses by providing legal guidance to organizations of all sizes. Get to know the at BoyerMiller. com. And thanks for listening to the show Chris: That's great. So you talk about kind of the importance in the recruiting process and, I think, equally important, in the kind of onboarding, integration process, anything that y'all have implemented that you believe that's innovative in that regard to kind of help customize and streamline that process. Wes: You know, I don't think there's anything particularly innovative about what we've done. It's what I will say about our company is, you know you it's kind of recruiting from two different pools. So you have nationwide recruiting for you know people that will come and sit in, you know whether it's exec or you know SVP type roles at the company, and then we have to do a lot of local recruiting. That's another one is you know, our sites are managed locally. We have the 24-7 NOC that sits here in Dallas, but there's been a big push because our sites are typically in rural areas and so that's probably one of the biggest challenges is recruiting and training all of the people and the talent that goes directly to the sites. So it's a unique mix for our company in that instance is that you know it's kind of two different styles of workforce but we have two different recruiters that manage that. Chris: How do you then bring it back together, as you mentioned, two different workforces and obviously two different geographic locations, different states. What are some of the things that you are doing as a CEO and maybe with your senior management, to build and nurture a culture at the company that everyone gets behind, to kind of further the mission? Wes: So I think one of the biggest things that I promote a lot at our company and a lot of the other management promotes is what you would expect at a small, fast growing company. There's a lot of upward mobility opportunities at a company like this and I love to highlight those success stories within our company and really encourage people with the upward mobility. That, I think, is just a big motivator and a big part of our culture. Chris: I think it's been my experience. If people don't see opportunity in your organization, then they're going to start looking somewhere else. Wes: Look we have Our site manager in Ellendale. He was. He was like the I don't know if he was the night manager or but he was. You know he was. He was working at Walmart at night in Jamestown, north Dakota, when he started as an operator at our site in Jamestown jobs that you could do for our company and a year later he was managing the site in Ellendale and he just you know his work ethic and he just shined through and he was able to move up very quickly and, you know, moved his family to Ellendale, north Dakota, and is running the site there for us now. And it's just, you know that we have many of those stories inside of the company, but we do. I think we're unique in that we do hire locally, we offer training for these technical jobs and you know they pay typically very well versus other jobs that are available in these locations and again, there's a lot of room for advancement inside the company and it creates a really nice culture for us. Chris: So you were talking about where the business, I guess is pivoted to in large part, is providing energy and power to fuel the AI movement. There's been a lot written and discussed about the idea that one of the limiting factors of the power of AI is the lack of power to run the centers or the computers needed to run the machines to do the learning and have that advance. What's your take on that? Because where do you see the industry from the power supply and how do you see that improving over time to try to keep up with the technology? Wes: Yeah. So it's a big issue issue now and it's going to become an even bigger issue as we go through this year and into next year. Just the power capacity in the US. So the ring in Virginia basically out of power. That's the most popular data center market in the US. Santa Clara, maybe the second most popular data center market out of power. Chris: If you want new power there, it's seven to 10 years and a lot of the other Wait a minute, say those two things again because I don't think people have an appreciation for that issue and the magnitude of what you just said. So in Virginia and the nation's capital-. Wes: Yep Santa Clara. Chris: And so. Wes: California, yes, silicon Valley, two big data center markets. They're effectively out of power. Chris: If you want new power there, it's a really long wait time seven to 10. Wes: Because you have to build the infrastructure right. You need power generation and you need transmission right, and generation can be built much faster than transmission can be built. It depends on where you are right. Some states are much friendlier to new power generation than others are. So what we have done to solve that is we focus on stranded power, which stranded power means there's a lot of power generation and maybe not enough transmission to move that power out of the location where it's being generated. And the way we solve for that is we take our product, our infrastructure, to the point of generation. And so there's some other things that you have to do. You have to make sure that there's a good fiber grid for fiber optic communications at the site as well. So not every site works for this, but there's a significant amount of stranded power around the globe, but we're focused mostly here in the US. And how do you get stranded power around the globe? But we're focused mostly here in the US. And how do you get stranded power? There's really two ways that I've seen that you end up with stranded power in the US, and one is renewables are a big source of that solar and wind and typically everything we have done has been located with wind farms and there's an incentive to build where the wind blows a lot for wind farms and land is cheap, and it's, you know, there's an incentive to build where the wind blows a lot for wind farms and, you know, land is cheap. And so North Dakota, I believe, is the sixth largest wind producing state in the country and they're 48th or 49th in population. That state generates over double the amount of power that they use inside the state, and so we, you know, at our Ellendale facility, I believe, it's about two gigawatts of wind that feeds into that substation, and that's where we are located. So finding strain of power that way the other way strain of power happens in the US and, I would assume, around the world too is a very power hungry. Industry goes out of business, company goes out of business or closes a plant or something in a certain area, and there's this massive amount of power infrastructure that's left behind. So, like Alcoa smelter plants, for example, that have been shut down, those have become Bitcoin mining sites and probably sites that are attractive for high power density data centers as well. So we focus on that. Now that can be a short and kind of medium termterm solution. Longer term, you know, it becomes a bigger issue and I've heard you know any kind of. There's been so many numbers thrown around. One of the hyperscaler CEOs last week, at a conference I believe, said that a hundred gigawatts of data center capacity would need to be built between now and 20, just to supply the hyperscale. And so to put that in perspective, the entire US market for data center capacity is like 22, 23 gigawatts right now built over the last 30 years, and you're saying there needs to be a hundred in the next six years. That's going to be pretty hard One to find the power and two permitting building all of the other things that go along with it. Maybe the number's not that high, but it's still going to be a very big number. And in the meantime, for electricity, you have competing priorities, right. So you have this new data center application, you have EVs becoming a bigger percentage of cars being driven, you have new things like green hydrogen generation, which requires a lot of electricity as well. So there's definitely competing priorities and it's going to be a bigger and bigger issue. And for me I've thought a lot about this that the only solution that I see the longer term for this. If we want to do it in an environmentally friendly way, which I think everyone's focused on is there needs to be a lot more nuclear generation for baseload. Chris: Okay, that's interesting. Baseload, okay, that's interesting. Not dissimilar from what I've heard and the other things that get talked about is a lot of power is generated through water, right, and then we have competing issues on the need for water. Is it going to be to power these centers or for human life? So we're going to be struggling with those over the years to come. Let's talk a little bit about, I guess, from where you sit. Where do you see this AI and power generation issue and what are the opportunities and or risks for the Texas business ecosystem, if you will? What are the opportunities where Texas and Texas businesses might thrive and what are some risks? Wes: So there's I think there's a lot of Texas businesses that will thrive. We actually source a lot of our components and equipment out of many local Texas businesses here. So there's that ecosystem and that includes, you know, transformers, switchgear a lot of the electric gear that's going into our facilities we source out of Texas. So there's a big opportunity there for Texas at large. Outside of us, you know one of the largest, you know, energy grids in the country here with ERCOT, and so there's a lot of opportunity there. You know there's a lot of there is stranded power opportunities specifically in West Texas that could feed into this. It needs a little bit better. You know fiber network. It depends on where you are in West Texas. So some of those work. But there's a large opportunity for infrastructure in Texas for certain, and it's a very attractive market for that. But there's a lot of other businesses in Texas that are feeding into this entire supply chain. You know it goes down, it's pretty, it's a pretty deep supply chain for this business. And if you think about so, let's say, a meg of data center capacity, we have our own costs, that we do. But if you're building tier three style data centers for this type of power application you $1.2 billion for a gigawatt. You're spending $12 billion on construction and equipment and so we're saying $12 billion for a gigawatt and, like I said, on the high end of the numbers I've seen out there, we need 100 gigawatts over six years. That's a lot of business to be done. A lot of investment by the way, chris, that doesn't include the compute gear inside of the data center. So yeah, so that the cost does not include, you know, the gpus or servers and networking gear to go inside the data center and you should think about that being kind of. You know two and a half to three x what the cost of the data center is, so it's just staggering numbers. Chris: You're talking 30 to 40 million per gigawatt per megawatt. Wes: And then times that by a thousand for a gigawatt, and then the number I gave early was again this is a number that was not provided by me, but 100 gigawatts over six or seven years. Yeah, it's a really big number. Chris: Wow, well, it's coming off of that. I want to turn back kind of towards you a little bit and I always like to kind of talk about leadership styles. I think that's helpful for business owners to kind of reflect on themselves about how you show up as a leader, knowing that can evolve over time. So how would you describe your leadership style today? How do you think that's evolved over time? Wes: Yeah. So my leadership style is, you know I mentor some people. I like to, you know, keep people constantly involved in what I'm doing so they see what I'm doing day to day. And you know again, as the company has grown right, that I don't interface with every employee on a regular basis. You know I have a leadership style, that is, I'm not a micromanager. I want people to be successful in their roles. I want them to take, you know, the authority in their roles and manage their part of the business for them. And I think that's how you know, over time, how you build a much more efficient. You know big company versus a small company. You know, when we were first starting out, I definitely was, you know, had to be more of a micromanager because I was involved in every single task of the business. But as you get the right people in places and I give them a lot of autonomy to run their groups, I think that fosters a good culture and company over time is, you know, people feeling empowered and then feeling like they have you know, the destiny of at least their group. And then what I really still like about being a small company, even though we're much bigger than we were is everyone can see their own direct impact on the company. Right, you can still make a big difference as one individual inside of the company and I really I foster that culture inside the company a lot and again, I always push on this upward mobility and the fact that you're at a place where there's a lot of opportunity. Here at this place, you don't need to look outside of it to find opportunity, and I think it creates a lot of excitement inside the company and we all kind of with a small business, you kind of all ride the roller coaster together because you constantly have setbacks and you constantly have victories Then and you know we've had stretches where we have, you know, setback after setback and that maybe comes on the heels of a lot of victories in a row too. So you know, riding that roller coaster is something that everyone has to get used to, but I think we do it really effectively. But hopefully that answers the question of kind of a leadership style. Chris: Yeah, no, definitely. And you alluded to something that's part of my next question and that is because it's just part of life Can you think of and share with us kind of a challenge or setback that you've encountered could be in your personal life, but or in business that you learned from? That made you better? Wes: Yeah. Chris: And those are always, I think, some of the best learning moments. Wes: I've. You know, in my career I've had many of those and those are, you know, those are definitely learning moments and it's been, you know, either investments or in other businesses, and this is where I was talking about earlier that. You know, one of the biggest lessons I've learned is surrounding myself with people that have the skill set I don't have right. That's probably the biggest one, but I would say the biggest as far as running this company. You know, as you run a company that's growing fast and you're doing a lot of different things, you know you have to be a problem solver, right. A lot of people get really down about issues that happen inside the company. You know we had some setbacks recently where we had some. You had some equipment issues on one of our sites that went down and then, while that was happening our Texas site we were notified by the power provider that they were taking it down, for I don't remember if it was 10 or 14 days, for improvements on their grid had nothing to do with us, and so you have all of this kind of hit at the same time and if you're the CEO or another executive company, you have to be a leader. Through that. You have to solve those problems. I'm not a person who goes and screams and yells at people because I don't find it productive, but that's been the biggest is, if you're starting a company, you're going to have so many challenges. You have to be a problem solver for those challenges and especially if you have employees around you, you have to be the problem solver. And I say this about most. We're kind of an interesting blend between real estate and tech as a business, but if you're like a tech entrepreneur, you have to be a perpetual optimist. Right, you just have to be, otherwise you won't last. So you have a lot of setbacks and you have to fix those and grow and become stronger from them. But, yeah, I would say that's probably the number one is being a problem solver. Chris: I like that. So many people I've talked to. The word I would use is as an entrepreneur, you have to have grit, and it's not as easy as you think it's going to be and expect the unexpected right. Wes: Definitely expect the unexpected. Chris: Kind of like when China shut your business model down. Exactly so you know, Wes, this has been a really great conversation. I think we could go on forever, but I want to just turn to a little kind of fun personal side before we wrap up that. You know, I think we've already answered this question, because I usually ask my guests what their first job was, and I think it sounds like yours was on a potato farm in Idaho. Wes: So yeah, my first job was working on the family farm and then my second job when I was in college was I was a service station auto mechanic from skills I had learned on the farm. And then I was finally able to get out of that with an internship institutional money management firm. I think it was my junior year in college I was able to do that. But and then I went to an investment bank in New York out of college and then it's kind of been you know some of those through that to here. But yeah, the I would say my first real job outside of working for my dad on his farm was auto mechanic at a service station. Chris: That's impressive. So how long have you been in Texas? I moved to Texas in 2013. Okay, so you've been here long enough to answer my next question, which is do you prefer Tex-Mex or barbecue? Wes: If the Tex-Mex is right, I prefer Tex-Mex. Chris: Okay, I like that qualification, so we'll wrap up with this one. If you could take the Tex-Mex is right, I prefer Tex-Mex. Okay, I like that qualification, so we'll wrap up with this one. If you could take a 30-day sabbatical, where would you go and what would you do? Wes: Wow, that's a good question. It's never even crossed my mind that I would have the ability to do that 30-day sabbatical somewhere that is not a population center, probably has a beach, doesn't have to be anything specific and people can't find me on my cell phone. That would be the requirements. Chris: Those are good ones. I like those. Well, I do like the question, because most entrepreneurs never take the time to think about that right. Wes: Or have the liberty to. I have not thought about that one. Chris: Well, good, now you at least have a framework for it if it ever happens. So, wes, thanks so much for taking the time. I really appreciate getting to know you and hearing your story. It's fascinating stuff what you and your team at Applied are doing and have done already. Wes: Thanks for having me. I always love talking about our company.

In today's episode of Building Texas Business, I chat with Sassie Duggleby, founder of Venus Aerospace, about her groundbreaking work developing hypersonic flight technology. Her vision is to connect the world through travel that spans continents in just one hour. She shares her motivation, sparked by living abroad and a desire to unite people across borders. We discuss Sassie's journey building Venus Aerospace from the ground up. She offers insights into raising capital, growing from a small team to over 70 employees, and prioritizing work-life balance for families. Sassie also talks about navigating challenges in aerospace, an evolving field with careful regulation. Our discussion delves deeper as Sassie reflects on balancing entrepreneurship and motherhood. She also addresses tackling biases facing women in STEM fields. With her tenacity, Sassie is clearing paths for others. SHOW HIGHLIGHTS Sassie Duggleby, CEO of Venus Aerospace, discusses the company's vision to revolutionize global transport with hypersonic flight, aiming to turn international travel into one-hour journeys. We explore Sassie's personal experiences, from living in Japan to leading a pioneering company, which fuel her ambition to make the world more connected through rapid travel. The conversation covers the evolution of Venus Aerospace from a small team to a 70-employee company, emphasizing the challenges and strategies of scaling a startup. Sassie shares the importance of cultivating a strong company culture that prioritizes family time and how it aligns with their vision of 'home for dinner'. We delve into the regulatory challenges faced by the company, such as securing permission for supersonic flights over land and navigating government relations. The episode touches on gender biases in the aerospace industry and how societal norms impact women, with Sassie recounting her own experiences as a female CEO. Sassie reflects on the need for potential changes in the academic system to accommodate different learning styles and to support women in STEM fields. Discussing personal challenges, Sassie emphasizes the importance of balancing motherhood with the demands of leading a startup and the intentionality required to maintain a work-life balance. A lighthearted discussion ensues about Tex-Mex versus barbecue, providing a glimpse into Sassie's personal preferences and her vision for a tech-free sabbatical in nature. We highlight Sassie's journey as a successful female entrepreneur and her contributions to the aerospace industry, particularly during International Women's Month in March 2024. LINKSShow Notes Previous Episodes About BoyarMiller About Venus Aerospace GUESTS Sassie DugglebyAbout Sassie TRANSCRIPT (AI transcript provided as supporting material and may contain errors) Chris: In this episode, you will meet Sassie Duggleby, co-founder and CEO of Venus Aerospace. Venus Aerospace is a startup company focused on engineering the future of hypersonic flight by making one-hour global transport possible to connect the world and make it safer. Sassy talks about the importance of cultivating a strong company culture, where at Venus, they are focused on making it home for dinner. She also shares how she balances being the CEO of a startup while also being the mother of two. Sassy, I want to welcome you on to Building Texas Business. Thank you for taking the time to be with us today. Yeah, thanks for having me so very intriguing stories. I was reading your bio and I just want to give you a chance to introduce yourself to the audience and the listeners. Tell us you know who you are and what you do. I know your company is Venus Aerospace, which sounds really cool, so let's tell us about who you are and then what Venus Aerospace is. Sassie: Yeah, so I'm the co-founder and CEO of Venus Aerospace. Venus, we are using a next generation rocket engine to enable super high speed vehicles. So what does that mean? High speed vehicles is in planes, drones, and we've got an engine that allows you to take off and get up to speeds around Mach 4. So four times the speed of sound and super efficiently cruise across the globe. You can push all the way up to Mach 9 if you really wanted to, and then come back down and land and it would let you go. You know, say, san Francisco to Tokyo in under two hours. Wow. Chris: That's a little crazy, huh yeah, so does that mean you're a true rocket scientist? Sassie: I'm actually married to a rocket scientist and I manage a ton of rocket scientists, but I would not claim that title for myself. Chris: Okay, all right, so, but you're the one of the few that would say, well, it's not rocket science, but it kind of is. Sassie: It is in this case for sure. Chris: Yeah, I love it. Okay, so that Venus Aerospace, so high speed travel. For what? For? Obviously for a normal consumer. Sassie: Yeah, so the ultimate goal is commercial travel. We have near term opportunities doing hypersonic flight testing for the Department of Defense and then hypersonic drones, kind of for national security and defense purposes, both for, you know, nato and the US Department of Defense. But that ultimate goal is you know kind of how does the world change, if you could get anywhere, you know, in two hours, you know whether it's business travel or it's, you know, delivering parts or it's, you know, global organ transplant. There's a bunch of opportunities that you know what's your time worth and if we could give you back time by helping you get across the globe faster. That's our ultimate vision. Chris: Wow, I mean that's. It is visionary. So what inspired you to get into this business? Sassie: Yeah, so prior to starting Venus, andrew and I. So we co-founded the company together. Andrew's, my husband and we were both working for Virgin Orbit, so we were launching rockets off the wings of 747s. And while we were working for Virgin Orbit, we actually deployed to Japan. So Andrew's in the Navy reserves and in the Navy he does ship repair. So I always joke why a PhD rocket scientist is doing ship repair. That's a whole different question. But 2018 was a really bad year for the Navy and there were a bunch of collisions out at sea and they couldn't get the Navy ships all the way back to the United States. They could only get them to Japan. And so he got a call in like February 2018 and said, hey, we need you Any chance you could come to Japan. And I looked at him and said, can we go? And so we pulled the kids from school, moved to Yokosuka, japan, and it was actually living in Japan that we realized you know how big the world really is. So, you know, I had, we had traveled internationally, but we'd never actually lived overseas. And so it was literally a Sunday afternoon. We were sitting out on our balcony overlooking Tokyo Bay. You could see the whole, you know American shipyard there and we were talking about my grandmother's birthday was coming up and how do we get home? Do I take the kids jet lag socks, like we were just having a normal Sunday conversation. And Andrew looks at me and he says well, you know, there's a new rocket engine coming on the pipeline. That's been theorized for about 30 years. They've been working on it at academia, at the universities, and he said I think if this engine's ever proven, I think we could put it on a plane and we could be home in an hour. And I literally laughed at him in that moment. But then he started explaining the physics to me and how the engine works and how it's way more efficient If you don't have to, if it's more efficient, you don't have to have as much fuel. And just was getting into it. And we started kind of dreaming like, well, what if this engine ever really comes along and it's proven? And so you know, fast forward, we get back to Southern California and we're back working at Virgin orbit after the deployment. And he comes home from work one day and he said, hey, purdue University, their research, one of the research labs proved this engine and it's called a rotating detonation rocket engine, which I know is a mouthful Rotating detonation rocket engine. And so this engine in an A B test. So the rocket engines that, like we use today, are only about 2% more efficient than the rocket engines that we sent, you know, astronauts to the moon with 50 years ago on the Apollo missions. So in 50 years we've gained about a 2% increase in efficiency, which is not much. Well, this engine, on the other hand, gains about 15% efficiency, and so it's just a total game changer. It's almost equivalent of going from like propellers to jets, like how much that impacted airplanes. It's the same thing. So going from a it's called a deflagration engine like a campfire burn in a chamber, which is what we've been using forever, so subsonic combustion, to detonation, which is supersonic combustion, and if you can detonate a propellant you extract more energy. It's just more efficient. And so we literally stand up that rotating detonation waves, so it rotates around and around in an annulus. If you go to our website you can see videos of it and with that detonation it's just more efficient. And so if you don't have to hear as much fuel, you can put wings and landing gear and all the things that actually would finally make kind of a rocket plane actually work. Chris: Wow, yeah, and I guess going that fast at me all I know is what I see, like on TV in the movies, that going mock speeds is challenging, I guess for pilots now, because it's only people in, you know, in jets that do it. But for passengers, I guess the cabin can be pressurized or contained where it's safe for the, or maybe that's where you're getting to, I don't know. Sassie: Yeah, well, so humans are really good at constant velocity. So once you get up to speed and you're going the same speed, I mean you know an airplane, you don't feel like you're trying to get there. I mean you don't feel like you're traveling what? 800 miles per hour across the globe or whatever the speed is. You know it's acceleration, like when you have G's, that that's what we're not as good as handling. So our vehicle, our plane experience, you would take off and it would be about kind of a 10 minutes of that takeoff experience where you're in the back of your seat, but then you'll hit constant acceleration, just like an airplane. So it's no different. I mean, think about astronauts in space or traveling what Mach 24, Mach 25, and orbit constantly, and you know that it's just the acceleration that's the hard thing. So okay, we've got one of the joys of being here in Houston is you know we've got Johnson Space Center down the road from us and you know we've had their human factors team look at you know our kind of trajectory and they've said oh, you're totally fine, you've got no problems at all. Chris: That's nothing. Right, yeah, exactly so. You have an idea and I love the story of on a balcony in Japan and just it's interesting to me because so many entrepreneurs they may not be in that same setting, but it is this conversation about an issue or a problem and how to solve it and they have the idea right and it boiled down to its basics, no different than what you and your husband were talking about. So how did you take that concept and the idea that, ok, Purdue proved it and turn that into Venus Aerospace? Sassie: Yeah. So as soon as Andrew came home and said, hey, they've proved it, I kind of looked at him. I said, do you have this? Because he intimately knew he was a former professor at Texas A&M, so we intimately knew how far academia could kind of push the technology. And we said, all right, we've got to go grab that technology and kind of pull it up and actually bring it to the world. So I incorporated the company and then I actually went and took a class on how do you raise venture capital. You know, while I have an engineering undergrad and an MBA, I had not ever, you know, raised VC money before. And so it was actually a group of women that I found they were teaching a course on how to one of the goals was to get more venture capital into the hands of female founders. So statistically, about 2% of venture funding goes to females, and so they were trying to help with that. So I took a class and learned how do you raise VC money and how to, you know, build a pitch deck and all the things. And then, as soon as we got Virgin Orbit to its first launch, we actually quit our jobs and went full time on Venus and we spent about. It took us about six months and, I think, 200 conversations, 200 pitches, until we finally, you know, found that investor that said, yes, I'm in, and we closed a seed round of $3 million in January 2021. And that was actually the same time we decided to move the company from Southern California to Houston. I'm a seventh generation Texan so wanted to get back home and Houston. One of the great things about Houston is it's got the Houston spaceport at Ellington Field and it's the Ellington Field. It's the only urban spaceport in America, which means, you know, we are literally firing rocket engines here at Ellington. You know our previous experience. You know Virgin Orbit our headquarters was Long Beach, but our testing all happened out in Mojave, and so Andrew, when he became head of launch operations, pretty much lived in Mojave. I was a single mom for a couple of years and we were, like you know, as a husband wife founding team. This is not like we have to find a place. We can do it all in one location. And Houston, you know, rose to the very top, and so we closed our seed round of funding and moved the family to Houston and it's been, you know, I really believe, the best move for what we could have done, you know, for the company. Chris: That's great. So let's talk a little bit about the challenges of raising venture capital money. I mean you obviously at 50,000 feet, you said 200 conversations before you got one bite. But you know, I have to believe. I know we have clients that go through this or come to us, you know, in the similar stage trying to capitalize on an idea of raising money around it, so they get a company off the ground. And I have to believe. Other listeners out there are curious as well. What are some of the lessons learned that you feel like you could pass on to someone that might either one help them understand what they're about to get into, or maybe it's. You know, I learned this and avoid doing this. It might make it your process easier, sure. Sassie: You know. So one of the things that Coach Tommy in learning is it only takes one, yes, right, and so you just need one person to believe in you, so kind of having that grit and just saying no, like Andrew and I knew we had a good idea, we knew we had something. One of the challenges was finding the right fit. You know so venture capitalists often have a thesis in terms of what they want to invest in. So if you're an enterprise, saas, software investor, you're probably not going to invest in a rocket company, and so it took a while for me to find, for us to find kind of those folks with the correct thesis and they get introductions to them. The other thing is we needed patient capital. So we're also not on this like super short journey. We're not going to throw a bunch of programmers in the room and, you know, spit out a program of a unicorn. You know we need time. We need time to build, we need hardware, we're capital intensive and so finding those people that understood those longer timelines, and we're okay with that. So that's one. The other thing I would say is we started off building our own pitch deck and thought surely the design doesn't matter, and fortunately we had a pretty early believer that said hey, I'm interested, I want to help you guys, but you need a better pitch deck. And so it kind of like crushed my soul to go pay a designer to build our pitch deck. But the minute we went from the one we designed ourselves to like a professionally designed one, our traction went way up. And so it and I look back in the pitch deck we have was horrible. In the pitch deck the designer built was beautiful. And so you know, I'm actually glad, I'm very glad we sent the money. Chris: I think that you know there's a lesson there for sure in the way I've seen it play out in a number of different scenarios with kind of startups because you need to figure out what's truly an expense versus an investment in the future of your business right and what you just described and hiring that professional. You're trying to say I can do this myself, I'm going to save a little money, but the investment you made, even though it seemed like an expense you probably were questioning whether you could afford, is actually a smart investment. That the return on that was crazy. And you know I can analogize that. Sometimes the startup legal stuff we tell clients or potential clients look, you're investing dollars, even though it seems like an expense on legal, but you're investing dollars and making sure your company's set up right. That will help you going forward. Sassie: Absolutely I completely agree. Chris: So you got the pitch deck going and and then I guess you continued on the road to pitch the idea to people. I also love kind of what you said about the honesty and being direct about what your business was and what this investment would look like and what it wasn't right. You weren't going to be returning a profit or return on the investment anytime soon. So you that I think you said someone paid capital or patient capital. Yeah, I love that. So you got that going. It was January, I guess, 2021, you said. And so take us now. How many employees have you grown to? Sassie: Yeah, so we're. You know that was January 21, 21, we're what? In March 24. So it's been three years. We've scaled about 70 full-time employees and we scaled really quickly. You know we did a $3 million seed and, what was fascinating, the minute our main investors are called Prime Movers Lab for our seed round put out a why we invested in Venus Aerospace. We got an incredible amount of well we would have invested. We would have invested. So we ended up capturing another 10 million in safes, so simple agreements for future equity. You know, built for a year and then the Prime Movers Lab actually did a preemptive A. They were like you guys are crushing it, here's 20 million more, keep going. And so, yeah, so we scaled pretty quick up to, you know, 50 ish. And that was an incredible challenge, like going from three where it's three people and a PowerPoint presentation, to 50 to 70 people like you. Just, you know you go. You've got to learn how to communicate better. It's no longer sitting around a kitchen table. You know. We literally started the company at our house and so everybody knew what was going on. Everybody was connected. I think once we hit 15 employees, we were like we have to find a location because we had two new people coming and we did not have a single spot in our house to put them Like we were about to start using our kids' bedrooms, and so that was the trigger. That was like, all right, we, you know, we ended up finding the hanger at Allington. But yeah, scaling is a fascinating, you know, and every stage, you know, it just gets a little bit different the minute you think you have it figured out. You grow again, and so we've started about 70 now for the last year, which I think has actually been really healthy for us because it's allowed us to build kind of better systems and processes into the organization for decision-making and for budgeting and all the things that I think will help us as we go to raise our next round of capital and want to really accelerate and start building, you know, mach 5 drones. We've got all the pieces in place to help us with that. Chris: So that you know you described, I think, any fast-moving business the challenges that scalability and managing it right, keeping your arms around it so it doesn't get out of control. I guess that's very hyper growth that you went through. So what were some of the things that you had to do through the hiring process to make sure you were making smart decisions on these hires while you were still trying to build processes and systems in place to kind of manage it once they were all there? Sassie: Yeah, you know, one of the things we early on put we call it the Venus values into place, kind of our culture and who we are and how we operate is just as important to us as the technology that we're building, and so we call it the Venus flight plan and so every kind of and it's all related to, you know, flight. But we do a lot of, we did a lot of culture. Yes, we want to make sure you can fit technically and can you do the skills, but then are you going to be a cultural fit? And so you know, even from an interview perspective, we'd have people doing technical interviews and understanding their technical skills. But then a cultural fit, are they really going to fit in culturally? And I actually think that is key. And then I do tons like I'm constantly I feel like I'm a broken record but talking about our values and who we are and how we're going to treat people, you know, I think the aerospace industry as a whole is often very broken. It was born out of war and it's. You know, I found myself at 38 as the oldest female engineer at Virgin Orbit and I don't know, I don't think 38 is that old. Chris: So I don't think so either. It seems like we're getting young, right now. Sassie: Yeah, so you look around the room and there'd be a ton of, you know, 25 year old female engineers a few 30, and by the time they're 40, they're all gone. And so you know we it was like what's wrong with the industry that you know there's no 40 year old engineers, that they all flee. And so we were very intentional. I mean, we actually named the company Venus because she's the only female planet. All the other planets Mars, jupiter, saturn, mercury they're all Roman gods, whereas Venus is a Roman goddess, and then she's also the goddess of love, and so we have a premise of like what would it actually look like if we love our employees as well? And so you know that's. I think that's been one of the key tenants of like kind of who we are as a company. You know we want to build that family friendly, female friendly aerospace company and that you know those shouldn't be in dissonance with one another, but they often are. Yeah, that's brilliant. Chris: Yeah, what you kind of started with. And to totally agree, culture's keen and I think it's important you know that. You emphasize that in the way you did and I hope our listeners took note. We believe here is the same thing. When we hire, yes, you have to have the technical skills and that's kind of a given and you can interview for that and test for, you know, while someone's here, through your training programs and whatnot. But culture, it doesn't matter how good you are technically, if you're not a cultural fit, you will never work. If the company is really committed to culture, right With this inclusive and loving the employees and wanting that environment where people want to be. Actually, I think Jack Welch said it, if you have a real high performer, that's not a cultural fit. He calls that cancer, right, and that can. We all know what cancer can do to things. So you can't allow that into your organization. But I think it's great with your focus on that. So what are some of the things that you do to make sure the culture is one defined but two cultivated and nurtured? Sassie: Yeah, so we do, you know, values shout outs. I mean, everybody has the Venus flight plan. I literally have it here on a mouse pad, you know. It's like this is who we are, it's on our website, it's on our screen savers kind of plastering around, and then we do a lot of Venus values shout outs. So we have like kind of managers and we expect like we want shout outs on certain places. You know we do awards. Anytime I send a communications email out to the company, I always, like, put some reminder about a Venus value. So I've just I just constantly say that, say it over and over, like this is who we are, this is how we operate. I feel like sometimes I'm a broken record, but you know they say you have to say something seven times before someone really hears it, and that's been a huge lesson for me, Like things that I feel like, oh, it's obvious, this is what we're going to go do as a company. This is our strategic goal. Well, I'm talking about it all the time to investors, but I realized sometimes, you know, our team might not be hearing it, and so that's been. Probably one of the biggest learnings is just how often you just have to say the same things over and over again. Chris: Yeah, I think you're right. I think it's that repetition and certainly top down, it has to be at the tops to become to infiltrate the entire organization. And I believe what I've experienced here is when you start tying your values and the behavior that you say defines your culture to behaviors that others in the organization are doing, so your shout outs as an example, right, when you say you know, jane did such a great job on this task and it demonstrated this value, right, people start personalizing going. Okay, I see what that value means in action. That's. I think that's great. And you said something there at the end I think is so true, cause your job is so external sometimes and I can relate to this you sometimes forget how important it is to make sure all those great things you say externally to keep the company going, that you're saying them internally to remind everyone how great the organization is and you know how important it is to keep this thing going. Oh for sure, for sure, what? Let's talk a little bit just about any challenges you've faced getting this company up and going and kind of what the lessons learned have from that and how it's kind of made you or the company stronger, cause you went through a rough patch or two. Sassie: You know, I say one of our biggest challenges we've been hitting is regulatory. So we're trying to fly a supersonic. Well, we actually flew a supersonic capable drone a couple weeks ago but we had to throttle it down to below Mach 1 because we didn't have the regulatory clearance to fly supersonic. It's illegal to fly supersonic over land without authority. Yeah, I mean the sonic boom does. It's legit, it does make a noise and so you know, they outlawed that back, I think the 50s or 60s, and so there are places, there are ranges in the United States that you can fly those speeds, but you have to get government approval and it's, you know it's been. Yes, you can go fly here, but it'll be three years. Well, we're a startup in three years like we're out of cash or we're growing super fast, and so that's regulatory hurdles have probably been one of our biggest challenges. That I kind of didn't expect. And then you know we're building technology that right now is one of the top priorities for the Department of Defense, and so in my mind you would think that DoD would be just throwing cash at us, but it's been very small. You know, we've got a little bit of DARPA money and a little bit of NASA money and a little bit of AFWARX Air Force money, you know, but not to the extent of what you know, based on the priorities of what you would think it is. And so I've had to learn, like, how do you play the DoD kind of Congress lobbying game and I call it a game because I feel like it is a game- and so I don't. Chris: I don't envy you at all, but I game, I think is the right way to say it sadly. Sassie: Yeah. So you know kind of learning that it's not necessarily a meritocracy, it's not the best technology wins, but it's. You know, do you have the right relationships? And were you in Capitol Hill at this time and we've been talking to this person? And the minute you build that relationship, then that person leaves that group and then you got to start over again. And so I joke, I've learned. I've had to learn how Adventure Capital World works and then the minute I figured that out, it's like now I've had to go figure out you know how congressional budgets and DoD and how all that works, and you know. So it's been. I've learned more in the last three years than I've learned, I think, in my previous 40, just because it's fascinating, but it's been a lot harder, I think. In my mind I thought the DoD, like if you build great tech, they will come, and that's not necessarily the case, and so we've had to start really building the right relationships and brought in a team that knows how to do government relations and so it's been a big learning curve. Chris: Yeah, you hate to hear that bureaucracy can get in the way of something so innovative and potentially transformative, but at the same time, I don't know anyone's gonna be shocked by that either. Right, it's kind of a sad statement. Sassie: Right, and there are lots. I've got to give the DoD credit. There's lots of groups are really pushing on innovation and recognizing that hey, we need to change and you know, one of the things that makes America great is our innovative ecosystem and how we can. You know the startup world and the venture capital and you know what happens in Silicon Valley and other places, and so there are definitely folks within the Department of Defense that recognize that's kind of the. That's what the US is, super power is, and how do we leverage it. But it's just a really slow flywheel and we'll get there. I know, because I know what we are building is so important that you know we'll be able to knock down the right barriers. But it's just been. It's been harder than I think I expected it was going to be. Chris: Yeah, it seems that way. So, as you were talking about that, I'm curious are there competitors to Venus out there, like others, that either have a similar or they've gotten permission to use the same technology, and not just necessarily in the US and other countries? Is this kind of like a you know back, going back to the 50s and 60s, when it was a race, you know, us and Russia were racing to the moon? Sassie: So in terms within the United States, you know. So, venus, our whole premise is that if you want to go really fast with a plane, instead of being a fast jet you should be a slow rocket. You know so our last rocket went mock, like when we were at Virgin orbit. It would go mock 10, split in half and then go on to mock 25. And so you know, when we're seeing mock four or even mock nine, that's slow compared to what our last last vehicle did, and so there's nobody else that's using the engine technology that we are to build fast, fast or slow rockets, and so we're kind of the only one in that realm. Like there are some other companies trying to build really fast jets. But we always say Top Gun Maverick was the perfect marketing story for us because, assuming you saw it, what happens in the very opening scenes of Top Gun Maverick? Chris: Yeah, he goes faster than what they told him he could, or why right he pushes? Sassie: he tries to push his plane to mock 10 and he literally melts his vehicle. Because if you fly fast through the soup of the atmosphere, you know it creates an incredible amount of friction and it creates an incredible amount of heat, and so it's really hard. And so, because you're a jet, the difference in a jet and a rocket is a jet has to bring. You know, go to campfire one to one. What do you need for a fire? You need fuel, oxygen and a spark. So a jet gets its oxygen from the air, which means it has to fly low enough in the atmosphere that can. It can feed its jets, which means it's got to fly through the soup. Right, we're a rocket, we're carrying our own oxygen with us in a tank, and so we can go up higher in the atmosphere where it's not as soupy, and thus fly where it's way cooler, so our vehicle won't melt. It's actually a much easier problem. So nobody that we know of in the world is looking using the engine that we're using for in the ways that we're using it Now. There are other people using this rocket engine, possibly for, you know, orbital launches, or you know we're working with NASA because they're really interested in it as a moon lander. But you know, we think we're the only ones. Now, that's not to say that some of our competitive you know, near peer competitors are not also looking at the same technology. Chris: Gotcha. Let's go back, because you said something that I found interesting you know we're going to get your take on it and that was around females in this industry and how you looked around at 38 and you were the oldest and that there aren't any in there Once you get to mid to late 30s, into the 40s. What is it? Do you think that was, or still is, maybe driving women out of the aerospace industry after you know they're in it for early, an early stage of life? Sassie: You know I've done a lot, spent a lot of time reflecting on this and I wish I knew the exact answer. I think I think it's multiple. I think one of them, when you don't have mentors, when you don't have someone older than you to mentor you and show you how it's done, you know, you decide like hey, maybe it's not worth it. I think some of it is. I mean, it wasn't unusual to have an 8pm meeting on a Thursday night when I was at Virgin Orbit sometimes, and so you know, if you're a mother and have young kids at home, like that's really hard. So just hours and expectations of hours, I can. You know. I think, as much as I would love to say it starts at a young age. There's no messaging sent to young kids, to young girls versus young boys, of like hey, you should be playing with these types of toys and boys can play with rockets. And I don't know that. I don't think society intentionally means to do that, but I think those messages still happen. I mean, I can tell you this happened recently. I was, we were given a tour here at Vina and it was with a group of very respected angels that went to a very respected university, I'm not gonna see what it is. And this gentleman came up to me and I introduced myself we hadn't started to tour anything and I said hey, I'm the CEO of Venus Aerospace. And he turns to me and he says you don't look like a very typical aerospace CEO. This is you know what 2024. Like I was so shocked by it, I didn't say anything and I wish now I'd said well, what makes me look different? Like what does an aerospace CEO look like? But that is still, I'm typically the only woman in the room when they're presenting for Venus as a founder of an aerospace company. It's just I wish I had better answers. You know, I've, even I've spent some time talking with some people that do kind of education on, you know, stem education and some of it. They even say, like you know, a lot of the engineering education is built based on how men learn, like men and women actually learn differently, and so based on how they teach, because it's been, you know, taught since, you know, for a thousand, hundreds and hundreds of years. Engineering is often taught with more how the male mindset works, and so it just tends women to be like, yeah, we're not going to go that route. Interesting. So I think it could need some changes in the academic system. But I mean, having come from a world where my husband was a professor, like there is no incentives for a professor to change how he teaches or she how she teaches. Sure, they're. They're actually, especially at a tier one research institution. They're there to, you know, do research and teaching just happens to be this little side gig, right. It's something they have to do right. It's something they have to do, not exactly? Chris: Yeah, I'm still a little shocked by the comment you got a couple of weeks ago. But so let's talk. You know, maybe digging a little bit on your own personal journey, because you're I think you said a mom of two, correct? So you know how have you managed that and navigated through. You know, still being a mom to those two, while you, I guess, one when you worked at Virgin. It couldn't have been easy, but even more challenge embarking on a startup and you know the growth that you told us about from zero or three to 50 so quickly and that. How have you tried to balance and manage your time, because I know there's clients in our firm, of our firm and listeners of this podcast that are in that same position. Sassie: Yeah, you know, I wish I could say it was easy, but it takes a lot of intentionality. So our company vision is home for dinner. We want to fly you across the globe and have you home for dinner. If you work for us, we want you home for dinner. And that's because we have, you know, as a husband and wife team, we have, you know, the two daughters that it's like we've got to be home for dinner with them because you know one of them is in high school and she's going to be out, hopefully, god willing, out of the house in a couple of years, and so we just put that in as a value from the very beginning. And so we are home, we eat dinner around the kitchen table with them almost every night I can't, you know, I can't say every night, but most of the time. Chris: No one would believe you if you said that. Sassie: Yeah, no, we don't. I mean, I just came back from two weeks of almost straight traveling and I did. I was heading to another event and I came out with my suitcase in the morning and my daughter literally looked at me and said, mom, you're leaving again. And so there are times that's hard, I can't say, I can't say I've got to figure it out, but it's being that being super intentional. And then when I do have time with them, you know, just making sure I make the most of it. It's like, you know, we do not at dinner ever have our phones out. We don't talk about Venus at all, because it's the last thing they want to hear about, you know. And then I do try we have tried to kind of sometimes bring what we're working on into their world. So I got to fly my younger daughter out to one of my events and she got to see me on stage and see what that world looks like. And so you know, getting them to understand like what we're doing, you know we've been trying to be more inclusive of that for them. Chris: I think that's great. I mean, to your point, everything's a balance, right, but I think that balance of not talking about business with them or around them all the time is smart. But introducing and incorporating a little bit about what mom and dad do isn't a bad thing. So it gives us some context about, because all they know is you leave the house and you're gone, right, and then you come back and introduce some context to that? Sassie: Well, one of my favorite stories we did. Actually we were trying to hire somebody, you know, maybe six months, a year ago, and so we were told the girls at dinner we were like, hey, we're trying to hire this person. You know, what do you think we could do to incentivize them to come? And my younger daughter was like well, what if you give them cookies? Chris: I was like you know everybody likes cookies. Sassie: That's true, So-. Chris: That would get me Exactly. Yeah, the innocence of that is, I mean, that's magical. So yeah, busy schedule, we balance this. How would you describe kind of your leadership style? Sassie: Well, that's a really interesting question. I try to lead how I would want to be led with super high integrity, positivity. I actually one of the analogies we use a lot is giving away our Legos. So I've really had to learn. We started the company and I was doing everything. Well, not the technical stuff, but I was setting up accounting, I was doing payroll, I was doing HR, I was doing all the fundraising, and so, as the company grows, I will never have more responsibility. Today is the most responsibility I will ever have, because hopefully, we'll continue to hand away Legos and so trying to really encourage people to share their Legos like the story we use all the time is, if we want to build the largest Legot Tower possible, the best way to do it is for everybody to contribute and build, and so in that case, I have to share my Legos. Chris: I love analogies. That's a good one for building a business and you're right, I think it's hard. It starts with trust, right? You have to be able to get to a level of trust to give a Lego away to someone, to take over HR, to take over accounting. Sassie: And my goal is to hire everybody smarter than I am and that's more of an expert in their area than I am, because if that's the case, then Venus will be so much better. And so I ultimately want the very best in whatever role it is, and let them have it, because they're going to be so much better equipped to do that role than I ever was. Chris: It's a great goal. Well, the story is fascinating, sassy. I can't wait to continue to watch where y'all take this, and what do you I mean unique and special opportunity right? You're literally going to change an industry. Sassie: I always say it's the adventure of a lifetime, and Andrew and I were two engineers with an idea, and it really shows the power of the American dream that there are investors out there I mean, we're not billionaires and so that there are investors out there that understand what a world changing technology can do and that are willing to back entrepreneurs and then continue to support us and help us grow. To me, it's what makes America by far the greatest country in the world. Is this type of ecosystem that happens, so it's truly just such an adventure. Chris: Let's have a little fun before we wrap up. So what was your first job? We were growing up? I was a lifeguard. Okay, and do you ever have to save any lives? Sassie: I had one time a little boy that just had walked too far out and was up under underwater. I wasn't even on duty and I would happen to be walking by and his mom was screaming and I just jumped in the water and grabbed him. Chris: Okay. Sassie: So thankfully, that was the extent of my life saving. Chris: Very good. So this is going to be an interesting question. Seventh generation Texan. You told me yeah, so do you prefer Tex-Mex or Barbecue Tex-Mex? All right, I think that's spoken like a seventh generation Texan. Sassie: I like Barbecue, but yeah, deep down anytime when we didn't live in Texas and like we lived in California, virginia, all over, the first meal that when I would come back and like stay at my parents' house, was always like greasy Tex-Mex. Chris: I can identify with that. Look, the question's not meant to be easy. It's a tough one. I mean, most people struggle, as I do, because I like them both. But you're right, that may be the best barometers what's the first meal after you've been away? Yeah, so all right. So, given what you're doing and the pace at what you're growing this company, this may be hard for you to envision. But if you could take a 30-day sabbatical, where would you go and what would you do? Sassie: I am an outdoor person, so I would go somewhere in the middle of no weather I don't know if it would be up into the mountains or on a foreign. I'd probably want to hop between like an island and like surf and snorkel and scuba and play in the water and fish and then be up in the mountains and hiking or skiing. Anything that gets me away from technology and out into nature would be my what I'd want to do. Chris: Okay, that's good, that's good. Well, sassy, thank you for taking the time. Yeah, as I mentioned, yeah, we're in a really yeah, this is March of 2024. This is International Women's Month. I can't think of a better guest to have on the podcast than you out there, showing women by example how you can be a successful entrepreneur. So, thank you. Sassie: Thank you, thanks for having me.

In today's episode of Building Texas Business, we sit down with Jerry Mooty, the CEO and Principal of @properties, Christie's International Real Estate in Dallas and Austin. Jerry takes us through his remarkable journey from managing partner at a law firm to heading a major real estate brokerage. He shares how resilience and adaptability allowed him to steer his business through the 2008 financial crisis and leverage opportunities arising from the pandemic. Jerry also provides insights into growing his firm through innovative hiring strategies and technological platforms that streamline agents' work. We explore lessons learned around overcoming adversity, strategic partnerships, and balancing operations with culture. His story offers a candid look inside one industry titan's challenges and triumphs in managing debt, acquisitions, and new ventures in sports and entertainment. SHOW HIGHLIGHTS Jerry Mooty shares his transition from being a managing partner at a law firm to creating and growing a real estate brokerage, including the challenges faced during the 2008 financial crisis and opportunities leveraged during the COVID-19 pandemic. We discuss Jerry's innovative business model that hires agent-attorneys and how it differentiates his brokerage in a competitive real estate market. The episode covers the technological advances at @properties, such as the Platform, which incorporates AI and a suite of tools to increase agent productivity. Jerry reflects on managing $60 million in personally guaranteed debt and the strategy behind transitioning to a debt-free business structure. Strategic partnerships and the process of acquisitions, especially in the technology sector, are explored along with Jerry's experience in due diligence and venture capital dynamics. Jerry discusses the significance of cultivating a company culture focused on employee well-being and the shift in his leadership style from operations to creating an enjoyable work environment. We touch on the importance of friendships in Jerry's professional journey and how they've influenced his career decisions and leadership approach. Challenges facing traditional real estate agencies like Remax are considered, with a focus on adapting to technological advancements and market changes. Jerry provides insights into his personal preferences, revealing his fondness for barbecue over tex-mex, adding a personal element to the conversation. The conversation highlights Jerry's efforts in expanding his business, including the recent launch of a sports and entertainment division and developer services to cater to specific client needs in the real estate market. LINKSShow Notes Previous Episodes About BoyarMiller About @properties,Christie's International Real Estate GUESTS Jerry MootyAbout Jerry TRANSCRIPT (AI transcript provided as supporting material and may contain errors) Chris: In this episode you will meet Jerry Mooty, ceo and principal of App Properties, christy's International Real Estate in Dallas and Austin. Jerry, by anyone's definition, is a serial entrepreneur, having started a law firm, credit card processing company, real estate development company and now a real estate brokerage firm. And Jerry tells aspiring entrepreneurs expect the unexpected. Jerry, I want to thank you for taking the time to come on and welcome you to building Texas business. Nice to see you. Thanks for having me. Good to see you too. It's been a while. Let's just start. You know you've done a number of things and we'll get into some of that, but currently, what's the business that you've started and you're currently today? Jerry: So Jerry Mooty from Dallas have a business now in the residential real estate brokerage industry. So I compete with Compass and some big national brands that most of the listeners will know about. Chris: And that company's called App Properties right. Jerry: Yes, sir, it's called App Properties Christy's International Real Estate. So we kind of have a working on that. Chris: And I know you're kind of got the Dallas area covered, but I think you've also recently expanded into Austin. Jerry: Yeah, so we started in Dallas proper with our headquarters, and then we opened a second office in Frisco, texas, and then we just recently, in the fall of 2023, opened up Austin, texas. Chris: So you know, as a recovering attorney, what was it that inspired you to get into the residential brokerage real estate business? Jerry: So, interesting enough, you kind of know my history, but I founded a law firm when I was 28 and I grew that into about 60 lawyers in four cities. As the managing partner, I started doing a lot of deals for the partners as opposed to practicing law, and I went down several paths. I had a litigation support company that I founded and grew that for the partners and then, you know, ironically got into a real estate development a little startup where I had a home building division building spec homes and I had a commercial division where I was doing some commercial projects. Raw land development had a resort under contract in Bernie, but, like a lot of people in real estate, 2009, 2010 came and that was the end of my glory days in real estate. All right. Chris: So then, what led you to? You know, get involved with app properties and then take this down, go down this rabbit trail. Jerry: Sure. So in 2012, I sold my interest in the law firm back to the partnerships. I didn't want to go back to practicing full time and then did quite a few different entrepreneurial things from about 2013 to about 2019. Any you know, I had a credit card processing company, backed by the Jones family, called Blue Star Payments that merged in with a tech company and we rebranded Blue Star Sports. We were backed by some pretty large VC firms Bain Capital and GenStar partners and Providence Equity and then obviously, the Jones family. So we acquired about 27 companies in about three years and then we sold that company in 2017. Then I was kind of looking for the next thing and I became the chief business and legal officer for a Silicon Valley tech company for a couple of years. They were in a big money raise and it wasn't going so well and I was deferring comp. So I started looking at what I was going to do next. One of the people in my network is a ex litigation real estate litigator. She had gone on and got married, had kids, got a real estate license and had a brokerage here in Dallas and her model was she was going and convincing unhappy lawyers to get the real estate license. So she had about 10 agents slash attorneys as her brokerage and she approached me to come in and run her brokerage for kind of like I did the law firm. So that piqued my interest enough so we went down that path. Sadly we didn't get to execute our documentation because they ended up having a divorce situation. And then two weeks later COVID hits and so I'm waiting to take my real estate license and not sure what I'm going to do after that. Come out of the first 90 days of COVID, the market's red hot, so I hang my license, I start doing deals for my network friends and start marketing myself as an agent. All the meanwhile I'm looking for something to buy or to own or start, and so that led me through developer relationship here in Dallas to the ownership group of at properties out of Chicago. They made that introduction, flew up and met with them and really fell in love with not only the brand and the culture but also the technology that they had built. Chris: Amazing story. There's a lot to dive into there. I may definitely want to go back some, but let's stay with that properties for now. And yeah, so you that's a. It's born out of COVID, I guess. Tell us, though you know, because I know just from you, know keeping up with you and then reading on the website you've experienced some like amazing growth in the last, I guess, three and a half years. Let's talk a little bit about that. And in talking about what you've done that you think has helped accelerate it, let's talk also about the maybe the pains with growing so fast. Jerry: Sure. So as I was looking to own something and this opportunity came up, I negotiated to purchase, you know, the North Texas territory. But I wasn't really prepared to launch because it was just me and I hadn't done a whole lot of recruiting. But I had some real estate deals in the pipeline that I needed to leave the current brokerage I was at before I papered those up. So I ended up launching at properties by myself just one agent, and got temporary space and, you know, true entrepreneurial spirit started recruiting, putting in my support team, landed a pretty big compass team right out of the gate and that kind of helped accelerate the visibility. And so the first, you know, six months we grew to 10 agents by Christmas. So it wasn't, we weren't a big brokerage, but we were putting things in place. By the next year we were about just under 40 agents. So we had a really good, successful year and, you know, quadrupling our size and then last year 2023, we doubled again to about 80 agents in Dallas. So we've been kind of there's been some faster growth brokerages, but we're very we're considered more luxurious. Our agents are more high producing agents and they take a little longer to transfer from one brokerage to another based on their pipeline and their restrictions. So now that we're three and a half years into this and Austin's really kind of been a little bit of a catalyst in the last six months because initially that territory wasn't available there was a Christie's affiliate there my corporate partner asked me if I wanted Austin about a year and a half ago. I said yes and so I started putting the play pieces in place and we launched that in September. We've added quite a few agents in the first 120 days over 70 something agents there. So all in we got about a hundred agents in Dallas, about 70 in Austin. So that's the good side of the business. The headaches, as you know as an entrepreneur, are several and many. Too many to list, but we'll cover a few. My most recent success story is I just hired a controller after three and a half years. So I've been doing the books, reporting to corporate, paying the royalties, paying the checks, paying the agents. So those are the things. As an entrepreneur, you really you put your blood, sweat and tears into these businesses and then you have to get to a certain level, to where you could start to relieve yourself of some of these pains. Chris: Yeah, that's so true, jerry. A lot of the people that I've had on before say exactly that that it's one when you're starting out, you're not big enough to outsource it or to hire for it, so you got to do it. But then it's getting to that point when you even when you are big enough and can afford it the level of trust and hiring the right person to hand off those key aspects of the business, so it frees you up to do the things as an entrepreneur or the visionary you want to be doing. So let's talk about that. What was it that you think helps get to a level of trust and comfort that it's time to hand off and it's the right person to hand off to? Jerry: Yeah, I think, based on my background of being an entrepreneur, you make a lot of friends and you kind of know. You learn the hard way. You hire the wrong person a few times and then, as you get older and more seasoned, you kind of know what to look for. In this instance, with that properties, I hired somebody I'd known for 35 years to come in and be my director of agents. I've known her since the SMU days, so the trust was already built in and then you're just very selective as you add the pieces to the puzzle to get those right people in place. So in half years we've let one or two people go, but we've been pretty successful in hitting the mark. Chris: That's great. So 70 agents or so you said. Have you started to implement any kind of processes that help with the integration process as you bring in these new people, so they understand kind of what the expectations are, what the benefits are for making the move? I mean, so where are you and what's the process you've gone through to kind of make that more institutionalized? Jerry: So the background for at properties and the corporate support we have is pretty important in how we've gotten here. They're a 25 year brokerage. They're the eighth largest in the country before acquiring the Christie's affiliate network, so they kind of had the processes in place. So it's buying. Whenever you buy a franchise and you wanna go down this path, you kind of get a little bit of assistance from and some help along the way on someone else putting the right pieces in place. I think what we've done a great job is integrate and implement those things that they've brought to the table, which I think revolves around a lot of our culture. You know, I think culture is so important in any business you have and so it's just we have fun things called at love, local events that came from corporate. So we'll pick a merchant somewhere in our geographical area, we'll partner with them, we'll send out a marketing campaign. Let's say it's a coffee shop and then whoever shows up at that coffee shop, our agents are there and we're running a tap for a coffee or a Danish in the morning. So that's kind of the community outreach piece. We use the word love strategically in all our marketing. So we say bringing the love to Dallas, bringing the love to Frisco and those types of things. So you know, recruiting is probably once you get the, once you get your overhead stabilized and your office space and those types of things. This is a business about relationships and recruiting. So I would say our two most important people outside of myself are our head of recruiting out of Frisco, head of recruiting out of the Dallas office, and so those have been very good hires. Chris: You know most, I think most businesses. It's hard to say they're not people, businesses or relationship, but certainly you know in the business you're in, where you're so customer facing right, you need good people that can go out and attract good customers, provide good service. But I have to imagine the last 18 months or so in residential real estate hasn't been the easiest. So can you talk a little bit about what you've done to help continue, promote one, promote the culture, to keep people positive and energized while managing through what has to have been a challenging time? Jerry: Yeah, absolutely so. Obviously we're all aware of how hot the market got, you know, a couple of years ago, you know, during COVID and post COVID. What that did in our industry is everybody wanted a real estate license because they saw all these transactions happen. So we had an influx of agents that came in that are young, inexperienced, but were here to make some money. And then, when the market turns, you kind of have the reverse effect. Those people were all eat what you kill, or 10, 9, 9 commissioned agents. They got to figure out how to pay the bills, and so we've had a pretty big exodus. Probably 15 to 20% of our agents across the nation have left the industry, and so that's been good for the sense of the people staying in it because you got less competition. But the ones that stayed in it most of them, have been through some of these ebbs and flows of the market, and so they kind of know how to prepare. And most of that revolves around when your transaction desk is slower, what are you ramping up to do? Are you ramping up your marketing, your postcard, social media content, are you revamping your website? And so those are all things that we, which the agents that work for us and part of our big, strong sales pitch based on the technology that we have. Chris: Got you Speaking of that on the marketing side, you know, are you seeing? I guess, one area or the other as far as marketing strategy work better, get more visibility or more return on investment. You see so much on social media, so it seems natural that that would be one, but I don't know if that's the leading one based on your experience or not. Jerry: Yeah, I think in pretty much every industry has been affected by the internet and no industry more so than real estate. I would say probably 10 years ago you saw a lot of print ads. You saw a lot of ads and you know business journals and those types of things trying to move property. But now it's really a digital world. We're using social media, we're using tools called AdWords, which is a retargeting tool to where it's essentially like if you went and looked at a pair of shoes at Nordstroms and then you left Nordstroms, those shoes are following you around. So we have the ability to target, geo track and geo target potential prospects and clients through our technology. Obviously, websites are important. Your collaboration tools that you're preparing a search for a prospect, like they're looking in this area for a certain price point. We have the ability to set those searches up and work with a prospect or a client on finding the home, ironically in the last price. I don't know when this started, but in the last year or so, almost 85% of buyers find the home they want before they hire an agent, or at least they zero it down based on how much information is on the internet. And so, really, as an agent, what you're trying to do is bring your expertise not only to get that transaction under contract, but then most of the work happens one second transactions under contract all the way through closing. Chris: Right, that is an amazing statistic 85%, but you're right. I mean, when everyone goes to the internet first, I think, to research or validate or do something. So it makes sense to me, but it's a big number. Sounds like you know here you use your work, technology and innovation and stuff quite a bit already since we started the interview. Some of this may have come from your franchise or some may have come from some things You're doing, but what are some of the things you believe are innovative in the way that you're operating the brokerage and helping your agents be successful? Jerry: Sure. So I think when you start understanding what different brokerages bring to the table in regards to support for their agent portfolio. Obviously marketing is a big one because they're pushing all the stuff out that we're talking about, but also the day-to-day operation of an agent is pretty important. Most brokerages large brokerages like Coldwell, banker, some of your biggest national brands are very antiquated when it comes to technology support. I would say there's two brokerages at the forefront. I'd say Compass is in second place and I think App Properties is in first place. And I say that because we've been building a technology stack called Platform, or our franchise or has, since 2003 and basically an agent logs in and does everything they need to do as an agent in one technology. When I interview agents and I show them the technology, they're blown away because they're in four or five, six different technologies throughout the day trying to get their social media posted or created, their transactions done over here, their docuSigns another technology they have to use, and we have everything in one place, and so that's been a real big selling point for us when we're recruiting these agents. Chris: Yeah, I mean anything to make your employees or, in your case, I guess, your contractor's life easier. Have you started to look into, or is this already incorporating any kind of versions of AI? Jerry: AI is already integrated. Nowadays, agents are always doing, as an easy example, they're doing descriptions of the properties. So now you can lean on AI to help you describe a $5 million house with five bedrooms, six baths by describing it into AI, and then it'll help you create that luxury description. So there's things like that. Obviously, our CRM has a lot of AI tied to it and so, yeah, that's the way of the future and it's getting more and more integrated and implemented into all our tools. Very nice, very nice yeah. Chris: All right. So I want to make you kind of reflect back. So yeah, this about, by your own description, not the first time you kind of started a new venture or stepped outside your comfort zone. So when you think about what you did I guess leaving, you know, maybe leaving the law firm or even some of the ventures you started while you were there, but going to credit card processing et cetera where are some of the lessons you learn through those ventures that you think prepared you for taking the step you did without properties and the steps you're taking now to grow so rapidly? Jerry: Yeah, I think if you're a serial entrepreneur like myself, I think the one thing you learn each time that you have an idea or you go down the path of starting something is you think you're going to get to the finish line a lot easier. It's your idea and you think you're going to do that. And I think probably in every instance including the law firm, including the credit card processing is one lesson is it just takes a lot to probably 10 times, 100 times more man hours and work and you got hurdles. That you're not expecting. But I think that's part of the reward too is why I'm built the way I am. You enjoy that when an obstacle comes and you get your way around it or over it. But I think you know frankly, it's probably what every entrepreneur says it's never as easy as you think it is. There's no get rich. You know we talked about most of what we do as lawyers and what I'm doing is a people game. You know you're hiring people and people disappoint, you know, and you're having to find different people sometimes, and so the lesson is just pride and expect the unexpected and you'll be okay and be able to sleep at night. Chris: I like that. Well, think about, is there a kind of a challenge or a failure setback that you can point to over the last, you know, 15 years, 20 years, whatever that you feel is maybe in some ways either a defining moment for you or one of the bigger learning moments that you got? You kind of got hit with a little headwind but you overcame it and because of that it's kind of helped propel you either in your own personal journey as a leader or, you know, in things you learned as an entrepreneur. Jerry: Yeah, I'd say you know, probably the biggest lesson learned of all time was me starting a real estate development company with a home builder and a commercial partner and, you know, diving into that with not a whole lot of experience, and so the challenge was obviously, in real estate, you're hoping to build something and sell it, and so the big challenges is if you build it and you borrow a bunch of money and you don't sell it. And so in 0809, 2010 is probably should have been my premier happiest days of my life. I'm on a law firm, I'm making some good you know coin on the law firm side, but I'm literally getting dragged through the mud financially on the real estate piece, and it's probably one of the reasons it's taken me 10 years to get back into it on the brokerage side, because I literally came out of that was some financial PSD. You know just could not sleep, you know got I mean health issues, depression, pretty much everything you can experience as an entrepreneur and so you figure out a lot about yourself when you're going through something like that, and you know you either stay in bed and talk about it or you pull up your socks and get out and try it again. Chris: That internal fortitude, you know I think any entrepreneurs got to have that or it's just not going to happen. I appreciate you sharing that. Were there some things that you did? You know that you know other than just I mean pure gutted out. You know, to help you kind of get through that. You know, leaning on family friends, I don't know. I mean I have to believe we've got some listeners and other people out there that you're going through the same thing. Jerry: Sure, I think where I lucked out was, you know, just to be frank, I was on about $60 million and personally guaranteed debt that was worth probably about 30 by the time I was trying to get out of it. So there wasn't going to be any family help. It was. It was hey with you, you know, in a loving way, of course. But when you dig a hole like that, you just got to figure out the best way out. And for me, where I benefited was I had a law degree and I was a lawyer and creditors could not touch the ownership interest in my law firm because it was tied to my license. So, through bankruptcy lawyers and all that stuff, I got educated on that and gave me the strategy to get through that situation and come out on the other end, which was one of the reasons I sold the interest of the law firm back to the partners, because that allowed me to have a little bit of a stream of income there in 2012, 13 and 14, while I got the credit card processing company going and getting these other things going. So there was, if there was, a silver lining, it was that fact, but it was still still pretty embarrassing financially and pretty embarrassing as a professional to really go through that over a three or four year period. Chris: You got to be hard but, like I said, I mean now that you've come through it, you know you can certainly appreciate the opportunities you have today and know that. You know I certainly probably learned some lessons of what to not do, going forward right. Jerry: Absolutely, I would say. The one lesson you learn in that scenario is you become a lot more frugal with your financial decisions and you know, especially in the banking industry, like one thing I'm proud of with that properties is we've never bought a bar to dollar. We got zero debt, and so those that's a probably a direct result of what I went through, you know, 15 years ago was I don't want to do another business where I got a bunch of debt and I'm trying to get that off and make money to live off of. Chris: That's great. So you mentioned earlier I think it was a credit card processing BlueStar, where you had some dealings with Bain Capital, and obviously you're dealing with a franchise or in this current business. So let's talk a little bit about maybe what you've learned through that. I kind of relate or maybe call those you know investors, partners, strategic partners. What have you learned as kind of some of the best ways to deal with them so you keep that relationship strong and healthy? And maybe it's something you know that happened that you're like I did this or they did. You know something that happened that soured the relationship, one they got to help our clients here at the firm you know, you know find themselves in those situations all the time, and so I'm curious you know what you know, what lessons you've learned through that process? Jerry: Yeah, so I would say getting involved in. And so when we had the credit card processing company, it was pretty a pretty simple model. We were going out and you know recruiting or or you know we're trying to sell merchants, you know restaurants Anybody who ran a credit card was it was a prospective client approached by a group who had an idea of buying up these technology companies in the youth sports space. So like, if you sign your kid up for soccer, you're there's usually a form and at the end of that form, whether it be the YMCA or anywhere else, you're paying a fee for your child to play that on that soccer team. So the model we had was take the credit card processing that we had built our own API and those types of things and bake it into a technology and go buy these companies. And interestingly, it was about how do you flip the model from a EBITDA and a multiple perspective. So these tech companies that weren't that large of companies because they were kind of geographically located, running different types of youth sports camps or whatnot, they weren't sophisticated enough and they were usually outsourcing their credit card processing to stripe or squares or something like that. So we would acquire these companies and bake in our own processing and from an ownership perspective, then that would change the multiple for maybe two times to 12 times because you have that reoccurring revenue stream coming into your business model. I literally probably learned more over that. First, 12 to 20 per month as we were acquiring these companies, doing due diligence on them, and I was the chief legal officer of the company, so I was in charge of all the due diligence. So we acquired 20 something companies and I bet I did due diligence on about 300 over two years. But it was really cool because I got to see what investors and power players in the venture capital market, how they looked at things and it's there's not a lot of emotion, it's numbers on paper and it's how do we make, how do we do this to this group of businesses, and then how do we sell it and make money. All about the return on investment, right. Chris: Exactly so. It's a. Jerry: It's very cutthroat which some businesses are, some aren't, but it was a great learning experience. I'd like to say I probably learned more in that two to three years Dealing with those big VC firms and listening to those meetings and kind of running point on due diligence than I probably learned in any other aspect of my life. Now, that's so, but that's so. Chris: Let's turn it back a little bit to app properties specifically. I know you've recently launched a new sports and entertainment division Tell us about that. What's going on behind that and what are you trying to accomplish so in the real estate brokerage? Jerry: world. There's different ways to market yourself right, and a lot of that boils down to your experience of your agent portfolio, and so some real estate brokerages are residential, some may just be commercial, but on our side we have, we've accumulated some agents that allowed us to create these divisions because of their experience levels. So land and ranch is one division, and then sports and entertainment is another division, and basically there's some criteria that we've put in place before an agent can say they're part of that team or that division dealing with professional athletes or celebrities on a number of occasions, some of the qualifications, but essentially, when somebody's moving like a professional athlete or a celebrity, there's a lot of sensitivity to that, or there's a lot of urgency, there's a lot more moving pieces, and so that specific division has agents who are, you know, experts in helping that transaction or that client Get from point A to B and solve a lot of problems along the way how to move their cars, how to move their kids into new schools, you know everything that comes along with kind of that type of transaction, as opposed to someone just buying a house and selling a house. So are we going to see? Chris: Super Bowl ads anytime soon, if I can at homecom I could afford it. Jerry: No, that's the goal is. We're really good because of how the clients affiliate network has come into play for us. I don't know if we mentioned this before the call or on the call, but you know our corporate partner ended up buying the Christie's affiliate network, which is a network of independently owned brokerages around the world. I think we have 900 offices in 54 countries, about 35,000 agents, and the reason Christie's the auction house, christie's the family who's owned that brand and that company for two hundred years. They sold the app properties because of the technology and we've been for two years bringing a worldwide global powerhouse network together into the technology to share referrals and data and information, and so that's been one of the one of the real keys to some credibility for us. Very cool. Chris: I think you just launched something else, maybe in the last week. Developer services Tell us about that. Jerry: So so again, we all know there's developers out here but we're not sure there's developers out here building multifamily building, you know, developing neighborhoods, multi-use, and so for a brokerage our size to have the ability to provide those services was kind of hard. So we ended up meeting a group of people out of Austin who came from Storybill and for those listeners who've heard about Storybill, that's a multi-billion dollar developer who went, ran out of money last summer. But we ended up negotiating their entire creative team to come over to Christie, our Christie's, and create this development services division. So starting with the chief marketing officer all the way down to their website development team, their on-site sales, so we've got a team of about 12 of superstars and they really fell in love with the Christie's brand to kind of move from Storybill into our umbrella, to kind of push those services out. So that'll be a huge win for us. Chris: So, as you sit there running all this, what is it that kind of triggers for you that this is an opportunity that makes sense, because not everybody can see that, and so there are things you're looking for. How do you go about making that decision and taking on the risk? Jerry: Yeah, so risk is a little less scary in our business because most everybody who works for our brokerage is a 1099 contractor. So we really have a pretty lean machine when it comes to we're running this right now with about seven full-time employees, three offices, so you got overhead from an office space perspective, but really you're kind of it's kind of a lean business model, which is one of the things that attracted me to it. And then obviously you have to have the people to be able to promote these different levels of services. So I think the thing that's been lucky for us is one our relationship and our network in Dallas to help get it started. And then obviously the people we've been able to add at such a young infancy of a company have given us the credibility and the numbers are reflecting that. Chris: Gotcha. So before I don't want to wrap this up without talking a little bit just about you and your leadership style, let's talk. You know, how would you describe your leadership style? How do you think that's evolved over time based on the scars and other lessons learned? Jerry: You know you work at a law firm, so you know running a law firm is you got a lot of smart people, a lot of egos, a lot of staff, a lot of overhead, and so I learned a lot about you know the operational side of a business in that seat. And then I think my ownership style has probably changed completely since I left the law firm. I'm a lot more interested in the well-being of my employees, a lot more sensitive to the culture. I think. When you talk about people coming to work and going home, in my mindset now I want that to be a great experience. I kind of use the word experience a lot in the last couple of years for some reason, and I think it's just. My evolution is like everything in our lives is an experience and you can make it a good one or you can make it a bad one, and so I think my leadership style is I want every experience to be a good one. At the best I can make it. Obviously you're going to have your headaches and your issues pop up, but we have the music on in our offices every day. We have happy hours on Thursdays. We built bars in both of our offices in Dallas and Frisco, and then we're putting one in our location in Austin so that we can have happy hours with our agents and our clients and our prospects. We hold a lot of events and I think our interaction with the community and the philanthropic stuff that we're doing is really cool. So I think where I've gotten is you know I'm 54 now and you know I started that law firm at 28 and I had a whole different picture in my mind at 28, right Till 35, of what life was going to be for me, and now I'm kind of trying to enjoy it a lot more. Chris: I love that man. Happy for you. You know clearly you're on the right track and couldn't agree more about how important culture is to any company. And I think I've said similar to you. I think life is about experiences. I think they're only really down to learning experiences good experiences and learning experiences as though, rather than bad, just learn from them and don't repeat them. Jerry: Yeah exactly right. Chris: So let's turn a little bit on the personal side of things and not as serious. What was your first job? Jerry: First job, I was a clerk in a law firm. Chris: Okay. Jerry: I was working in law school. Okay, my first job in high school. Like most of us, I grew up in Missouri in a small town. I had a yard. You know service with my best friend and we had our lawn mowers in the back of his truck and we mowed yards. So that was probably my first experience as a having a job. There you go, and first is an entrepreneur was leaving a 250 person firm to start a law firm with two other guys and being 28 years old and that was pretty exciting. We had metal chairs and you know fold up conference room table and laid out of the movie. Chris: Love it. Well, I can relate to the a little bit to that, but definitely relate to the mowing yards. That's what buddy of mine and I did in high school. So you know good money then I guess. Okay, personal preference, tex-mex or barbecue? Well, that's a tough one Probably barbecue. All right. And if you could, take a 30 day sabbatical. Where would you go? What would you do? Jerry: You know, this is my two sons who are a senior and sophomore at University of Texas right now. They called a year ago about this time and said, dad, we're going to go to Japan. And I was like, okay, and they got on a plane, just the two of them went to Japan for three weeks and after hearing that I kind of want to do that. Chris: How cool is that. The two of us went and did it on their own. Jerry: They did it on their own, traveled around on trains and backpack and love it. They're experienced when they told the stories and went through the pictures. I mean it's just a really cool culture. I'd like to go experience that. Chris: Okay, jerry, I can't thank you enough for taking the time to come on. It's hard to believe that you know I don't. I might add the numbers we met at SMU and, as undergraduates, went to law school together, so we had a lot of years together. So it's great to see where you are today and what you're doing. So proud of you. Jerry: Man. I appreciate that. And the same back at you. I followed you your whole career and super, super proud of you. What kind of legal person you are and lawyer and leader and everything you're about. So appreciate having me on and proud of you too, my man. Chris: All right, we'll do it again. We'll find a reason to do it again sometime soon. Awesome Sounds good. Special Guest: Jerry Mooty.

In today's episode of Building Texas Business, we sit down with Jerry Mooty, the CEO and Principal of @properties, Christie's International Real Estate in Dallas and Austin. Jerry takes us through his remarkable journey from managing partner at a law firm to heading a major real estate brokerage. He shares how resilience and adaptability allowed him to steer his business through the 2008 financial crisis and leverage opportunities arising from the pandemic. Jerry also provides insights into growing his firm through innovative hiring strategies and technological platforms that streamline agents' work. We explore lessons learned around overcoming adversity, strategic partnerships, and balancing operations with culture. His story offers a candid look inside one industry titan's challenges and triumphs in managing debt, acquisitions, and new ventures in sports and entertainment. SHOW HIGHLIGHTS Jerry Mooty shares his transition from being a managing partner at a law firm to creating and growing a real estate brokerage, including the challenges faced during the 2008 financial crisis and opportunities leveraged during the COVID-19 pandemic. We discuss Jerry's innovative business model that hires agent-attorneys and how it differentiates his brokerage in a competitive real estate market. The episode covers the technological advances at @properties, such as the Platform, which incorporates AI and a suite of tools to increase agent productivity. Jerry reflects on managing $60 million in personally guaranteed debt and the strategy behind transitioning to a debt-free business structure. Strategic partnerships and the process of acquisitions, especially in the technology sector, are explored along with Jerry's experience in due diligence and venture capital dynamics. Jerry discusses the significance of cultivating a company culture focused on employee well-being and the shift in his leadership style from operations to creating an enjoyable work environment. We touch on the importance of friendships in Jerry's professional journey and how they've influenced his career decisions and leadership approach. Challenges facing traditional real estate agencies like Remax are considered, with a focus on adapting to technological advancements and market changes. Jerry provides insights into his personal preferences, revealing his fondness for barbecue over tex-mex, adding a personal element to the conversation. The conversation highlights Jerry's efforts in expanding his business, including the recent launch of a sports and entertainment division and developer services to cater to specific client needs in the real estate market. LINKSShow Notes Previous Episodes About BoyarMiller About @properties,Christie's International Real Estate GUESTS Jerry MootyAbout Jerry TRANSCRIPT (AI transcript provided as supporting material and may contain errors) Chris: In this episode you will meet Jerry Mooty, ceo and principal of App Properties, christy's International Real Estate in Dallas and Austin. Jerry, by anyone's definition, is a serial entrepreneur, having started a law firm, credit card processing company, real estate development company and now a real estate brokerage firm. And Jerry tells aspiring entrepreneurs expect the unexpected. Jerry, I want to thank you for taking the time to come on and welcome you to building Texas business. Nice to see you. Thanks for having me. Good to see you too. It's been a while. Let's just start. You know you've done a number of things and we'll get into some of that, but currently, what's the business that you've started and you're currently today? Jerry: So Jerry Mooty from Dallas have a business now in the residential real estate brokerage industry. So I compete with Compass and some big national brands that most of the listeners will know about. Chris: And that company's called App Properties right. Jerry: Yes, sir, it's called App Properties Christy's International Real Estate. So we kind of have a working on that. Chris: And I know you're kind of got the Dallas area covered, but I think you've also recently expanded into Austin. Jerry: Yeah, so we started in Dallas proper with our headquarters, and then we opened a second office in Frisco, texas, and then we just recently, in the fall of 2023, opened up Austin, texas. Chris: So you know, as a recovering attorney, what was it that inspired you to get into the residential brokerage real estate business? Jerry: So, interesting enough, you kind of know my history, but I founded a law firm when I was 28 and I grew that into about 60 lawyers in four cities. As the managing partner, I started doing a lot of deals for the partners as opposed to practicing law, and I went down several paths. I had a litigation support company that I founded and grew that for the partners and then, you know, ironically got into a real estate development a little startup where I had a home building division building spec homes and I had a commercial division where I was doing some commercial projects. Raw land development had a resort under contract in Bernie, but, like a lot of people in real estate, 2009, 2010 came and that was the end of my glory days in real estate. All right. Chris: So then, what led you to? You know, get involved with app properties and then take this down, go down this rabbit trail. Jerry: Sure. So in 2012, I sold my interest in the law firm back to the partnerships. I didn't want to go back to practicing full time and then did quite a few different entrepreneurial things from about 2013 to about 2019. Any you know, I had a credit card processing company, backed by the Jones family, called Blue Star Payments that merged in with a tech company and we rebranded Blue Star Sports. We were backed by some pretty large VC firms Bain Capital and GenStar partners and Providence Equity and then obviously, the Jones family. So we acquired about 27 companies in about three years and then we sold that company in 2017. Then I was kind of looking for the next thing and I became the chief business and legal officer for a Silicon Valley tech company for a couple of years. They were in a big money raise and it wasn't going so well and I was deferring comp. So I started looking at what I was going to do next. One of the people in my network is a ex litigation real estate litigator. She had gone on and got married, had kids, got a real estate license and had a brokerage here in Dallas and her model was she was going and convincing unhappy lawyers to get the real estate license. So she had about 10 agents slash attorneys as her brokerage and she approached me to come in and run her brokerage for kind of like I did the law firm. So that piqued my interest enough so we went down that path. Sadly we didn't get to execute our documentation because they ended up having a divorce situation. And then two weeks later COVID hits and so I'm waiting to take my real estate license and not sure what I'm going to do after that. Come out of the first 90 days of COVID, the market's red hot, so I hang my license, I start doing deals for my network friends and start marketing myself as an agent. All the meanwhile I'm looking for something to buy or to own or start, and so that led me through developer relationship here in Dallas to the ownership group of at properties out of Chicago. They made that introduction, flew up and met with them and really fell in love with not only the brand and the culture but also the technology that they had built. Chris: Amazing story. There's a lot to dive into there. I may definitely want to go back some, but let's stay with that properties for now. And yeah, so you that's a. It's born out of COVID, I guess. Tell us, though you know, because I know just from you, know keeping up with you and then reading on the website you've experienced some like amazing growth in the last, I guess, three and a half years. Let's talk a little bit about that. And in talking about what you've done that you think has helped accelerate it, let's talk also about the maybe the pains with growing so fast. Jerry: Sure. So as I was looking to own something and this opportunity came up, I negotiated to purchase, you know, the North Texas territory. But I wasn't really prepared to launch because it was just me and I hadn't done a whole lot of recruiting. But I had some real estate deals in the pipeline that I needed to leave the current brokerage I was at before I papered those up. So I ended up launching at properties by myself just one agent, and got temporary space and, you know, true entrepreneurial spirit started recruiting, putting in my support team, landed a pretty big compass team right out of the gate and that kind of helped accelerate the visibility. And so the first, you know, six months we grew to 10 agents by Christmas. So it wasn't, we weren't a big brokerage, but we were putting things in place. By the next year we were about just under 40 agents. So we had a really good, successful year and, you know, quadrupling our size and then last year 2023, we doubled again to about 80 agents in Dallas. So we've been kind of there's been some faster growth brokerages, but we're very we're considered more luxurious. Our agents are more high producing agents and they take a little longer to transfer from one brokerage to another based on their pipeline and their restrictions. So now that we're three and a half years into this and Austin's really kind of been a little bit of a catalyst in the last six months because initially that territory wasn't available there was a Christie's affiliate there my corporate partner asked me if I wanted Austin about a year and a half ago. I said yes and so I started putting the play pieces in place and we launched that in September. We've added quite a few agents in the first 120 days over 70 something agents there. So all in we got about a hundred agents in Dallas, about 70 in Austin. So that's the good side of the business. The headaches, as you know as an entrepreneur, are several and many. Too many to list, but we'll cover a few. My most recent success story is I just hired a controller after three and a half years. So I've been doing the books, reporting to corporate, paying the royalties, paying the checks, paying the agents. So those are the things. As an entrepreneur, you really you put your blood, sweat and tears into these businesses and then you have to get to a certain level, to where you could start to relieve yourself of some of these pains. Chris: Yeah, that's so true, jerry. A lot of the people that I've had on before say exactly that that it's one when you're starting out, you're not big enough to outsource it or to hire for it, so you got to do it. But then it's getting to that point when you even when you are big enough and can afford it the level of trust and hiring the right person to hand off those key aspects of the business, so it frees you up to do the things as an entrepreneur or the visionary you want to be doing. So let's talk about that. What was it that you think helps get to a level of trust and comfort that it's time to hand off and it's the right person to hand off to? Jerry: Yeah, I think, based on my background of being an entrepreneur, you make a lot of friends and you kind of know. You learn the hard way. You hire the wrong person a few times and then, as you get older and more seasoned, you kind of know what to look for. In this instance, with that properties, I hired somebody I'd known for 35 years to come in and be my director of agents. I've known her since the SMU days, so the trust was already built in and then you're just very selective as you add the pieces to the puzzle to get those right people in place. So in half years we've let one or two people go, but we've been pretty successful in hitting the mark. Chris: That's great. So 70 agents or so you said. Have you started to implement any kind of processes that help with the integration process as you bring in these new people, so they understand kind of what the expectations are, what the benefits are for making the move? I mean, so where are you and what's the process you've gone through to kind of make that more institutionalized? Jerry: So the background for at properties and the corporate support we have is pretty important in how we've gotten here. They're a 25 year brokerage. They're the eighth largest in the country before acquiring the Christie's affiliate network, so they kind of had the processes in place. So it's buying. Whenever you buy a franchise and you wanna go down this path, you kind of get a little bit of assistance from and some help along the way on someone else putting the right pieces in place. I think what we've done a great job is integrate and implement those things that they've brought to the table, which I think revolves around a lot of our culture. You know, I think culture is so important in any business you have and so it's just we have fun things called at love, local events that came from corporate. So we'll pick a merchant somewhere in our geographical area, we'll partner with them, we'll send out a marketing campaign. Let's say it's a coffee shop and then whoever shows up at that coffee shop, our agents are there and we're running a tap for a coffee or a Danish in the morning. So that's kind of the community outreach piece. We use the word love strategically in all our marketing. So we say bringing the love to Dallas, bringing the love to Frisco and those types of things. So you know, recruiting is probably once you get the, once you get your overhead stabilized and your office space and those types of things. This is a business about relationships and recruiting. So I would say our two most important people outside of myself are our head of recruiting out of Frisco, head of recruiting out of the Dallas office, and so those have been very good hires. Chris: You know most, I think most businesses. It's hard to say they're not people, businesses or relationship, but certainly you know in the business you're in, where you're so customer facing right, you need good people that can go out and attract good customers, provide good service. But I have to imagine the last 18 months or so in residential real estate hasn't been the easiest. So can you talk a little bit about what you've done to help continue, promote one, promote the culture, to keep people positive and energized while managing through what has to have been a challenging time? Jerry: Yeah, absolutely so. Obviously we're all aware of how hot the market got, you know, a couple of years ago, you know, during COVID and post COVID. What that did in our industry is everybody wanted a real estate license because they saw all these transactions happen. So we had an influx of agents that came in that are young, inexperienced, but were here to make some money. And then, when the market turns, you kind of have the reverse effect. Those people were all eat what you kill, or 10, 9, 9 commissioned agents. They got to figure out how to pay the bills, and so we've had a pretty big exodus. Probably 15 to 20% of our agents across the nation have left the industry, and so that's been good for the sense of the people staying in it because you got less competition. But the ones that stayed in it most of them, have been through some of these ebbs and flows of the market, and so they kind of know how to prepare. And most of that revolves around when your transaction desk is slower, what are you ramping up to do? Are you ramping up your marketing, your postcard, social media content, are you revamping your website? And so those are all things that we, which the agents that work for us and part of our big, strong sales pitch based on the technology that we have. Chris: Got you Speaking of that on the marketing side, you know, are you seeing? I guess, one area or the other as far as marketing strategy work better, get more visibility or more return on investment. You see so much on social media, so it seems natural that that would be one, but I don't know if that's the leading one based on your experience or not. Jerry: Yeah, I think in pretty much every industry has been affected by the internet and no industry more so than real estate. I would say probably 10 years ago you saw a lot of print ads. You saw a lot of ads and you know business journals and those types of things trying to move property. But now it's really a digital world. We're using social media, we're using tools called AdWords, which is a retargeting tool to where it's essentially like if you went and looked at a pair of shoes at Nordstroms and then you left Nordstroms, those shoes are following you around. So we have the ability to target, geo track and geo target potential prospects and clients through our technology. Obviously, websites are important. Your collaboration tools that you're preparing a search for a prospect, like they're looking in this area for a certain price point. We have the ability to set those searches up and work with a prospect or a client on finding the home, ironically in the last price. I don't know when this started, but in the last year or so, almost 85% of buyers find the home they want before they hire an agent, or at least they zero it down based on how much information is on the internet. And so, really, as an agent, what you're trying to do is bring your expertise not only to get that transaction under contract, but then most of the work happens one second transactions under contract all the way through closing. Chris: Right, that is an amazing statistic 85%, but you're right. I mean, when everyone goes to the internet first, I think, to research or validate or do something. So it makes sense to me, but it's a big number. Sounds like you know here you use your work, technology and innovation and stuff quite a bit already since we started the interview. Some of this may have come from your franchise or some may have come from some things You're doing, but what are some of the things you believe are innovative in the way that you're operating the brokerage and helping your agents be successful? Jerry: Sure. So I think when you start understanding what different brokerages bring to the table in regards to support for their agent portfolio. Obviously marketing is a big one because they're pushing all the stuff out that we're talking about, but also the day-to-day operation of an agent is pretty important. Most brokerages large brokerages like Coldwell, banker, some of your biggest national brands are very antiquated when it comes to technology support. I would say there's two brokerages at the forefront. I'd say Compass is in second place and I think App Properties is in first place. And I say that because we've been building a technology stack called Platform, or our franchise or has, since 2003 and basically an agent logs in and does everything they need to do as an agent in one technology. When I interview agents and I show them the technology, they're blown away because they're in four or five, six different technologies throughout the day trying to get their social media posted or created, their transactions done over here, their docuSigns another technology they have to use, and we have everything in one place, and so that's been a real big selling point for us when we're recruiting these agents. Chris: Yeah, I mean anything to make your employees or, in your case, I guess, your contractor's life easier. Have you started to look into, or is this already incorporating any kind of versions of AI? Jerry: AI is already integrated. Nowadays, agents are always doing, as an easy example, they're doing descriptions of the properties. So now you can lean on AI to help you describe a $5 million house with five bedrooms, six baths by describing it into AI, and then it'll help you create that luxury description. So there's things like that. Obviously, our CRM has a lot of AI tied to it and so, yeah, that's the way of the future and it's getting more and more integrated and implemented into all our tools. Very nice, very nice yeah. Chris: All right. So I want to make you kind of reflect back. So yeah, this about, by your own description, not the first time you kind of started a new venture or stepped outside your comfort zone. So when you think about what you did I guess leaving, you know, maybe leaving the law firm or even some of the ventures you started while you were there, but going to credit card processing et cetera where are some of the lessons you learn through those ventures that you think prepared you for taking the step you did without properties and the steps you're taking now to grow so rapidly? Jerry: Yeah, I think if you're a serial entrepreneur like myself, I think the one thing you learn each time that you have an idea or you go down the path of starting something is you think you're going to get to the finish line a lot easier. It's your idea and you think you're going to do that. And I think probably in every instance including the law firm, including the credit card processing is one lesson is it just takes a lot to probably 10 times, 100 times more man hours and work and you got hurdles. That you're not expecting. But I think that's part of the reward too is why I'm built the way I am. You enjoy that when an obstacle comes and you get your way around it or over it. But I think you know frankly, it's probably what every entrepreneur says it's never as easy as you think it is. There's no get rich. You know we talked about most of what we do as lawyers and what I'm doing is a people game. You know you're hiring people and people disappoint, you know, and you're having to find different people sometimes, and so the lesson is just pride and expect the unexpected and you'll be okay and be able to sleep at night. Chris: I like that. Well, think about, is there a kind of a challenge or a failure setback that you can point to over the last, you know, 15 years, 20 years, whatever that you feel is maybe in some ways either a defining moment for you or one of the bigger learning moments that you got? You kind of got hit with a little headwind but you overcame it and because of that it's kind of helped propel you either in your own personal journey as a leader or, you know, in things you learned as an entrepreneur. Jerry: Yeah, I'd say you know, probably the biggest lesson learned of all time was me starting a real estate development company with a home builder and a commercial partner and, you know, diving into that with not a whole lot of experience, and so the challenge was obviously, in real estate, you're hoping to build something and sell it, and so the big challenges is if you build it and you borrow a bunch of money and you don't sell it. And so in 0809, 2010 is probably should have been my premier happiest days of my life. I'm on a law firm, I'm making some good you know coin on the law firm side, but I'm literally getting dragged through the mud financially on the real estate piece, and it's probably one of the reasons it's taken me 10 years to get back into it on the brokerage side, because I literally came out of that was some financial PSD. You know just could not sleep, you know got I mean health issues, depression, pretty much everything you can experience as an entrepreneur and so you figure out a lot about yourself when you're going through something like that, and you know you either stay in bed and talk about it or you pull up your socks and get out and try it again. Chris: That internal fortitude, you know I think any entrepreneurs got to have that or it's just not going to happen. I appreciate you sharing that. Were there some things that you did? You know that you know other than just I mean pure gutted out. You know, to help you kind of get through that. You know, leaning on family friends, I don't know. I mean I have to believe we've got some listeners and other people out there that you're going through the same thing. Jerry: Sure, I think where I lucked out was, you know, just to be frank, I was on about $60 million and personally guaranteed debt that was worth probably about 30 by the time I was trying to get out of it. So there wasn't going to be any family help. It was. It was hey with you, you know, in a loving way, of course. But when you dig a hole like that, you just got to figure out the best way out. And for me, where I benefited was I had a law degree and I was a lawyer and creditors could not touch the ownership interest in my law firm because it was tied to my license. So, through bankruptcy lawyers and all that stuff, I got educated on that and gave me the strategy to get through that situation and come out on the other end, which was one of the reasons I sold the interest of the law firm back to the partners, because that allowed me to have a little bit of a stream of income there in 2012, 13 and 14, while I got the credit card processing company going and getting these other things going. So there was, if there was, a silver lining, it was that fact, but it was still still pretty embarrassing financially and pretty embarrassing as a professional to really go through that over a three or four year period. Chris: You got to be hard but, like I said, I mean now that you've come through it, you know you can certainly appreciate the opportunities you have today and know that. You know I certainly probably learned some lessons of what to not do, going forward right. Jerry: Absolutely, I would say. The one lesson you learn in that scenario is you become a lot more frugal with your financial decisions and you know, especially in the banking industry, like one thing I'm proud of with that properties is we've never bought a bar to dollar. We got zero debt, and so those that's a probably a direct result of what I went through, you know, 15 years ago was I don't want to do another business where I got a bunch of debt and I'm trying to get that off and make money to live off of. Chris: That's great. So you mentioned earlier I think it was a credit card processing BlueStar, where you had some dealings with Bain Capital, and obviously you're dealing with a franchise or in this current business. So let's talk a little bit about maybe what you've learned through that. I kind of relate or maybe call those you know investors, partners, strategic partners. What have you learned as kind of some of the best ways to deal with them so you keep that relationship strong and healthy? And maybe it's something you know that happened that you're like I did this or they did. You know something that happened that soured the relationship, one they got to help our clients here at the firm you know, you know find themselves in those situations all the time, and so I'm curious you know what you know, what lessons you've learned through that process? Jerry: Yeah, so I would say getting involved in. And so when we had the credit card processing company, it was pretty a pretty simple model. We were going out and you know recruiting or or you know we're trying to sell merchants, you know restaurants Anybody who ran a credit card was it was a prospective client approached by a group who had an idea of buying up these technology companies in the youth sports space. So like, if you sign your kid up for soccer, you're there's usually a form and at the end of that form, whether it be the YMCA or anywhere else, you're paying a fee for your child to play that on that soccer team. So the model we had was take the credit card processing that we had built our own API and those types of things and bake it into a technology and go buy these companies. And interestingly, it was about how do you flip the model from a EBITDA and a multiple perspective. So these tech companies that weren't that large of companies because they were kind of geographically located, running different types of youth sports camps or whatnot, they weren't sophisticated enough and they were usually outsourcing their credit card processing to stripe or squares or something like that. So we would acquire these companies and bake in our own processing and from an ownership perspective, then that would change the multiple for maybe two times to 12 times because you have that reoccurring revenue stream coming into your business model. I literally probably learned more over that. First, 12 to 20 per month as we were acquiring these companies, doing due diligence on them, and I was the chief legal officer of the company, so I was in charge of all the due diligence. So we acquired 20 something companies and I bet I did due diligence on about 300 over two years. But it was really cool because I got to see what investors and power players in the venture capital market, how they looked at things and it's there's not a lot of emotion, it's numbers on paper and it's how do we make, how do we do this to this group of businesses, and then how do we sell it and make money. All about the return on investment, right. Chris: Exactly so. It's a. Jerry: It's very cutthroat which some businesses are, some aren't, but it was a great learning experience. I'd like to say I probably learned more in that two to three years Dealing with those big VC firms and listening to those meetings and kind of running point on due diligence than I probably learned in any other aspect of my life. Now, that's so, but that's so. Chris: Let's turn it back a little bit to app properties specifically. I know you've recently launched a new sports and entertainment division Tell us about that. What's going on behind that and what are you trying to accomplish so in the real estate brokerage? Jerry: world. There's different ways to market yourself right, and a lot of that boils down to your experience of your agent portfolio, and so some real estate brokerages are residential, some may just be commercial, but on our side we have, we've accumulated some agents that allowed us to create these divisions because of their experience levels. So land and ranch is one division, and then sports and entertainment is another division, and basically there's some criteria that we've put in place before an agent can say they're part of that team or that division dealing with professional athletes or celebrities on a number of occasions, some of the qualifications, but essentially, when somebody's moving like a professional athlete or a celebrity, there's a lot of sensitivity to that, or there's a lot of urgency, there's a lot more moving pieces, and so that specific division has agents who are, you know, experts in helping that transaction or that client Get from point A to B and solve a lot of problems along the way how to move their cars, how to move their kids into new schools, you know everything that comes along with kind of that type of transaction, as opposed to someone just buying a house and selling a house. So are we going to see? Chris: Super Bowl ads anytime soon, if I can at homecom I could afford it. Jerry: No, that's the goal is. We're really good because of how the clients affiliate network has come into play for us. I don't know if we mentioned this before the call or on the call, but you know our corporate partner ended up buying the Christie's affiliate network, which is a network of independently owned brokerages around the world. I think we have 900 offices in 54 countries, about 35,000 agents, and the reason Christie's the auction house, christie's the family who's owned that brand and that company for two hundred years. They sold the app properties because of the technology and we've been for two years bringing a worldwide global powerhouse network together into the technology to share referrals and data and information, and so that's been one of the one of the real keys to some credibility for us. Very cool. Chris: I think you just launched something else, maybe in the last week. Developer services Tell us about that. Jerry: So so again, we all know there's developers out here but we're not sure there's developers out here building multifamily building, you know, developing neighborhoods, multi-use, and so for a brokerage our size to have the ability to provide those services was kind of hard. So we ended up meeting a group of people out of Austin who came from Storybill and for those listeners who've heard about Storybill, that's a multi-billion dollar developer who went, ran out of money last summer. But we ended up negotiating their entire creative team to come over to Christie, our Christie's, and create this development services division. So starting with the chief marketing officer all the way down to their website development team, their on-site sales, so we've got a team of about 12 of superstars and they really fell in love with the Christie's brand to kind of move from Storybill into our umbrella, to kind of push those services out. So that'll be a huge win for us. Chris: So, as you sit there running all this, what is it that kind of triggers for you that this is an opportunity that makes sense, because not everybody can see that, and so there are things you're looking for. How do you go about making that decision and taking on the risk? Jerry: Yeah, so risk is a little less scary in our business because most everybody who works for our brokerage is a 1099 contractor. So we really have a pretty lean machine when it comes to we're running this right now with about seven full-time employees, three offices, so you got overhead from an office space perspective, but really you're kind of it's kind of a lean business model, which is one of the things that attracted me to it. And then obviously you have to have the people to be able to promote these different levels of services. So I think the thing that's been lucky for us is one our relationship and our network in Dallas to help get it started. And then obviously the people we've been able to add at such a young infancy of a company have given us the credibility and the numbers are reflecting that. Chris: Gotcha. So before I don't want to wrap this up without talking a little bit just about you and your leadership style, let's talk. You know, how would you describe your leadership style? How do you think that's evolved over time based on the scars and other lessons learned? Jerry: You know you work at a law firm, so you know running a law firm is you got a lot of smart people, a lot of egos, a lot of staff, a lot of overhead, and so I learned a lot about you know the operational side of a business in that seat. And then I think my ownership style has probably changed completely since I left the law firm. I'm a lot more interested in the well-being of my employees, a lot more sensitive to the culture. I think. When you talk about people coming to work and going home, in my mindset now I want that to be a great experience. I kind of use the word experience a lot in the last couple of years for some reason, and I think it's just. My evolution is like everything in our lives is an experience and you can make it a good one or you can make it a bad one, and so I think my leadership style is I want every experience to be a good one. At the best I can make it. Obviously you're going to have your headaches and your issues pop up, but we have the music on in our offices every day. We have happy hours on Thursdays. We built bars in both of our offices in Dallas and Frisco, and then we're putting one in our location in Austin so that we can have happy hours with our agents and our clients and our prospects. We hold a lot of events and I think our interaction with the community and the philanthropic stuff that we're doing is really cool. So I think where I've gotten is you know I'm 54 now and you know I started that law firm at 28 and I had a whole different picture in my mind at 28, right Till 35, of what life was going to be for me, and now I'm kind of trying to enjoy it a lot more. Chris: I love that man. Happy for you. You know clearly you're on the right track and couldn't agree more about how important culture is to any company. And I think I've said similar to you. I think life is about experiences. I think they're only really down to learning experiences good experiences and learning experiences as though, rather than bad, just learn from them and don't repeat them. Jerry: Yeah exactly right. Chris: So let's turn a little bit on the personal side of things and not as serious. What was your first job? Jerry: First job, I was a clerk in a law firm. Chris: Okay. Jerry: I was working in law school. Okay, my first job in high school. Like most of us, I grew up in Missouri in a small town. I had a yard. You know service with my best friend and we had our lawn mowers in the back of his truck and we mowed yards. So that was probably my first experience as a having a job. There you go, and first is an entrepreneur was leaving a 250 person firm to start a law firm with two other guys and being 28 years old and that was pretty exciting. We had metal chairs and you know fold up conference room table and laid out of the movie. Chris: Love it. Well, I can relate to the a little bit to that, but definitely relate to the mowing yards. That's what buddy of mine and I did in high school. So you know good money then I guess. Okay, personal preference, tex-mex or barbecue? Well, that's a tough one Probably barbecue. All right. And if you could, take a 30 day sabbatical. Where would you go? What would you do? Jerry: You know, this is my two sons who are a senior and sophomore at University of Texas right now. They called a year ago about this time and said, dad, we're going to go to Japan. And I was like, okay, and they got on a plane, just the two of them went to Japan for three weeks and after hearing that I kind of want to do that. Chris: How cool is that. The two of us went and did it on their own. Jerry: They did it on their own, traveled around on trains and backpack and love it. They're experienced when they told the stories and went through the pictures. I mean it's just a really cool culture. I'd like to go experience that. Chris: Okay, jerry, I can't thank you enough for taking the time to come on. It's hard to believe that you know I don't. I might add the numbers we met at SMU and, as undergraduates, went to law school together, so we had a lot of years together. So it's great to see where you are today and what you're doing. So proud of you. Jerry: Man. I appreciate that. And the same back at you. I followed you your whole career and super, super proud of you. What kind of legal person you are and lawyer and leader and everything you're about. So appreciate having me on and proud of you too, my man. Chris: All right, we'll do it again. We'll find a reason to do it again sometime soon. Awesome Sounds good. Special Guest: Jerry Mooty.

In today's episode of Building Texas Business, we have a discussion with Devlin Lyles, President of Improving, about AI's evolving role in business. With his extensive tech leadership background, Devlin offers insightful perspectives on strategically integrating AI and shifting workforce mindsets. He explains how AI enhances personal productivity and compels a transition from manual tasks to advanced system management. Other notable topics include vendor resiliency, learning cultures, and personal growth's influence on business innovation. Wrapping up, Devlin shares his views on AI's future impact through emerging tools and personal assistants that boost productivity. Join us for this enriching exchange at the intersection of technology, leadership experience, and work-life harmony. SHOW HIGHLIGHTS Devlin discusses his transition from a young programmer to a leader in technology, emphasizing the role of AI in changing business strategies and operations. We explore the psychological aspect of AI adoption in businesses, addressing how the workforce adapts to the enhanced productivity and evolving roles that AI tools bring. Devlin makes an analogy between the historical rise of ATMs and their impact on bank tellers, to the current transition from manual task execution to strategic AI system management. We dissect common misconceptions in AI implementation, such as the belief that data must be perfectly curated and the pitfalls of building bespoke AI solutions from scratch. Devlin highlights the importance of focusing on problem-solving over the technology itself, encouraging companies to differentiate between truly valuable AI applications and those simply following trends. The conversation delves into vendor resiliency, with a focus on the legal protection offered by large companies like Microsoft for their AI services. We discuss the cultivation of a learning culture within Improving and the impact personal development has on managing technology and fostering business innovation. Devlin shares insights on the future of AI, such as the potential of a "cloud of things" and personal AI tools that can enhance daily productivity and support memory. We examine the transformative effect of AI on mundane tasks and its potential for significant impact on industries like logistics, supply chain, and manufacturing. Devlin and I reflect on the importance of hobbies and personal interests, such as golf and video games, for maintaining a balanced life while engaging with technological advancements. LINKSShow Notes Previous Episodes About BoyarMiller About Improving GUESTS Devlin LilesAbout Devlin TRANSCRIPT (AI transcript provided as supporting material and may contain errors) Chris: In this episode, you will meet Devlin Liles, President of Improving. Devlin is a leading expert in the application and use of AI for businesses. Devlin shares several helpful ideas relating to AI for businesses and believes that a business's readiness for AI is mostly psychological. Devlin, I want to thank you for taking time to join us today. Why don't we start by just telling us a little bit about yourself and your background and your role with improving Sure. Devlin: So Devlin Lyles. That seems like an odd thing to say. So I'm a technologist by kind of trade and training, so I started writing software when I was very young. I was 8 when I started programming. Chris: My dad got me into it. Devlin: I started my first software company when I was 16 in high school, building used car websites and that kind of thing Right at the kind of dot-com bubble expansion, and so decided I was going to not do that as a career. I was going to become a professional soccer player. That didn't work, so I kind of fell back into it as a hobby and kind of continued on that. Chris: Most programmers think of a professional soccer player as a dream, right yeah absolutely. Devlin: And so I ended up kind of falling back into my hobby as a career and then came up through kind of corporate IT at Tys Foods and then got into IT consulting and been doing that for the last 15 years. So that's a bit about me. Chris: Okay, and let's talk a little bit about improving where you serve as president. Tell us a little bit about what improving does in your role there, and then you know one of the things I really want to focus on, as you know, is things on most people's minds over the last 12-18 months is AI, so it's kind of couched in that context. Devlin: Sure. So my role with improving has kind of evolved over the years. So I actually started as a consultant delivering to our clients and I came in kind of two and a half three years in and so we have an equity share model. So I grew an equity share at improving and then took over as president here in Houston in 2017. My global role for improving is chief consulting officer, so I own client delivery, thought leadership, go-to-market and employee growth kind of that space, and so AI has been a big part of that conversation. Now the interesting thing is I get to live in a time machine somewhat in this space of AI has been a big part of that story for us for five to seven years. The world with chatGPT, kind of making it a part of the zeitgeist, is really catching up, and so it's cool to have these conversations and really talk about it, because a lot of our excitement and like oh, it's going to be utopia from 2017-2018, when there were some big strides being made forward and we get to kind of relive with everybody else. Chris: Interesting. Yeah, so you're living it for the second time. Devlin: Yeah, and it's. The thing is that, going through at the second time, you get somewhat of the hindsight in real time, which is interesting. Yeah, because we ended up helping a lot of customers apply some of these technologies, and technology always has this kind of pull to off the shelf right Systems. We used to pay tens of millions of dollars to build custom right. Think about CRM, a client contact management system, right Almost everybody has today. Chris: Yeah. Devlin: In the 1990s that was a multi tens of millions of dollar project for only the biggest companies to really have a unified customer relationship management system. And today I can go, put in a credit card and sign up for HubSpot or Salesforce or Dynamics right off the shelf. There's this pull to off the shelf that happens in technology, which leads to the middle market and small businesses being able to take advantage of what used to be incredibly expensive technology and that's actually what we're seeing in the AI space is it's driving from. I no longer need 100 million to approach this problem. I can actually apply this for 20 bucks a month, yeah. Chris: It's a great observation and yeah it's so true that it becomes, I guess better, efficient and more economical right Each time, I guess, as technology is with us and develops longer. That's a great kind of segue. I want to just kind of start with what are some of the key factors a business should consider when evaluating their readiness for adopting AI into the business. Devlin: Interesting For adopting AI into the business. Readiness is mostly psychological, because there are pieces in the business today that you can do better. We break this into kind of three parts when we talk to business leaders about this. One is how do you do your job much more effectively, right? What's the superhuman version of Chris? Right, there's AI tools to make that happen. Like, I'm a very well augmented human, I have tools that analyze my notes and make sure that I don't forget things. I've got tools that keep reminders and stuff on my personal network. Now, they're not spamming my friends with, like text messages to buy things, but it's going. Hey, you haven't talked to Bob In two months. Here's what you talked about the last time, so I can reach out to Bob. Hey, man, we haven't caught up. How's your wife doing? How's your son doing? Like those kind of things. That's the superhuman version of me, because I want to stay connected with my friends Just bad at it and so it covers that gap for me. So that's the first part is like that personal productivity side, which is mainly just a resistance to change. That you'd see in any technology adoption. It's psychological, organizational. People have tied their identity to the work they do and so changing that means like an existential crisis sometimes, right? Sure, think about a bank teller when the ATM came out. Right Now, we still employ a lot of bank tellers, but their jobs drastically changed. It's that moment where we're not going to get rid of a bunch of humans and have robots doing those jobs. What we're going to do is change the job of the human to guiding them, controlling and managing the robots. Chris: I think that's an important point to kind of reemphasize for the listeners, because I think so much that's out there. You see these news headlines and articles. I think people think robots are going to take over the world and I think the point you just made that that's not the case. But the role the human will play will adapt and change and while that sounds scary in a vacuum, if you actually take a moment and look back, that's what's happened throughout our evolution, especially in the industrial world and the business world in the United States. Right, jobs have evolved and changed over time, and I've heard you say this before, so this is nothing different. I want you to dig in a little deeper on that to help the listeners understand and maybe some historical points to compare to. So it makes it a little more tangible. Devlin: Absolutely so. Think about the way we did accounting before the PC was invented, right? So before the Apple II, we're talking in the 1970s, right Before computing devices were in everybody's office on everybody's desk, right? The way we did accounting was we managed the book and you wrote entries in and you had somebody checking the math and you had the you know 10 keys sitting there with the stream of numbers coming out of it. Right, and your accounting department was massively larger than it is today. To be able to accomplish that, it had to be right, which was a big overhead for a business to bear. Right, and you had these big accounting firms who would help with economies of scale or whatever. But like, that was really the ballgame, right, and it took a long time to like, close out the books and do tax audits and those kind of things. Now fast forward to the introduction of broad computing power. That sped up that process. We still have accountants, we still have bookkeepers. In most businesses you can close the books on a month in 10 days, 30 days if you've got a lot of moving parts. It's not. Hey, we just closed January. In June, a crude accounting became far more prevalent. We had less financial fraud overall, the stories about it happen more often, but we have less by volume and we're actually getting more insights out of that, because it's no longer just tracking all the pieces but going hey, did you notice last month you had increased expenditures in this area without the increased revenue tied to them? And so we get business insights on top of what we used to get was just transactions. We not only have lower accounting costs, but we then have better outcomes from it. Ai is going to do something similar From a business perspective. It's going to allow us to get. It's going to allow us to get better outcomes or lower our costs, to give us pricing power in the market. Because all technology is labor compression right, what a welder by hand used to take hours to do on the original factory floors and structural integrity of the original cars that we were rolling across an assembly line right. Think 1930s, 1940s. We now have robotic welders who can do in 15 or 30 seconds with far more precision, with less human injury. Right Now, the quality checking, the x-ray and all that is still reviewed by a human to make sure that weld is solid, and even that we're automating some of. But like that, evolution allowed us to produce stronger, faster, cheaper, safer cars. I think we're in that space where AI is largely going to be applied to the problems that are on the edges of humans do a lot of it, but we're not very good at it because, like our bookkeepers, there's that whole notion of human error. Chris: Yeah, not that there won't be computer error as well. Oh, yeah, and so you kind of that's where the check and balance comes in. Devlin: And the idea of technology is just going to solve everything. Hopefully, as a civilization we've moved past right the 1970s to today. I used the 1970s because that was kind of the broad evolution of available computing right To today. Every new technology has created new problems. A joke with our team that yesterday's solutions caused today's problems. And that's a good thing, because, one, we always have problem to solve and, two, we don't have yesterday's problems. So AI being introduced is going to create things like we now need to manage bias, the computer error, right. That's not something we do today very well. When we talk about humans, right, like how do you manage bias at scale? In a thousand person company is like all right, hr and an army of training, but with a computer you can actually try to start tilting at some of these things. Now, does that mean we're going to do it Well, we're going to do it better than we do today. Probably we're going to do it wrong and have to create tomorrow's problems. Chris: Yeah, I love that perspective. So what are some of the obstacles or pitfalls that you've seen that businesses encounter when they're trying to implement technology, and maybe even specifically, obviously specific to AI technology? Devlin: So there are two. One of them is perfectly valid and it's going to be some learning that we have to overcome, and I'm going to start with that one the belief that I have to spend a ton of time and money to correct my data right. Because, traditionally over the last 20 years you've had data engineering and data warehousing and data lakes and, like you, had to clean it and curate it and do all this work. That belief is a little antiquated, right. You can bring in raw data and then actually use a lot of these automated systems AI systems to clean it up with you so that the labor of that is way less scary. Now that's the pitfall most people fall into is all I got to get my data cleaned up before I get any value. And so that ends up raising the price tag of going after these technologies and ultimately keeps companies from getting some of that benefit because they don't want to pay that cost. And then the second pitfall is building your own. And what I mean by building your own is every business has unique challenges and they have their particular flavors, right? It's why, where SAP works for one, but you know, acumatica would be better for somebody else as an ERP system. But you don't have to reinvent the wheel and we keep doing that, right? I was just talking to a friend of mine, houston based company yesterday. 500 million in revenue and we're like talking about one of their AI initiatives. It wasted $6 million, didn't get anything out of it Wow. And we're talking about them like. You can do that with almost off the shelf tools everything you guys were trying to accomplish in about four months for about half a million and the difference is that they try to reinvent all the wheels. We don't need to do that, just like you're not going to build your own email system, right? You don't need to build your own baseline architecture for a large language model. Use one of the foundational ones that's off the shelf and you don't waste a lot of that time and effort. Chris: And that gets you that good way to get started. Devlin: Yeah, it may evolve from there, may evolve from there you may hit a problem where you do need to build your own. Chris: I kind of the rule of thumb I use is if your IT budget doesn't start with a, b, you're probably not building your own machine learning models, so that raises a good question, and that would be how can companies distinguish between an AI solution that actually is going to offer value real value versus just a company following the hype right and being misguided by the solution. Maybe they choose. Devlin: Fall in love with solving the problem, not the tools. So if let's take my company right, we spend a lot of time trying to solve one big problem. That big problem was knowledge. We grow the acquisition We've done 14 acquisitions in 14 years and we always create knowledge silos. And so when we bring in somebody, our current team doesn't know their stories for, like, selling their skill sets, what they're good at, those kind of things, and they don't know all of our stories. And so we had this big knowledge silo gap problem right Right Now. Ultimately, what that means is when a customer goes, hey, do you do X, regardless of what X is, they're going to say no because they don't know the stories. Now, how do I overcome this? I could do training, all right, but then I got to do that training every time we acquire a company and we're doing like we're aiming for two to four acquisitions a year, which means that's not a sustainable thing because of the labor cost. Right, it's like, okay, well, maybe I allow the silos to continue and just accept that's part and parcel of the business. It's possible. Chris: Possible, but you're a miss out on a ton of opportunity. Exactly. Devlin: Or we take all their stories, their case studies, their customer testimonials. We loaded them into what we call echo, which is a AI enabled chatbot, and it literally reads SharePoint. Right, it's not like it's not parsing data. There's no big data engineering effort. It's loading Word documents, PDFs, all this off SharePoint and they just chat with it and they go hey, have we done a deal with a major energy company? And it goes yes, here are the three, they're most relevant to you. And then it embeds the PDF and goes and here's where you find more details, so that the sales team on a sales call can have echo up on another window. Like, hey, have we ever done that? And it goes yes, in this office, here's the people to reach out to that level of knowledge. Access would have cost us thousands of hours of training, Right, and so it's that type of thing. Focus on the problem. Where do you have pain and where are you wasting hours? You don't actually care as a business owner unless you're selling AI as a product, Right. You don't actually care if it's an AI solution, an automation solution or just really clever software. You just want the problem solved, and by not falling in love with the tool, but falling in love with solving the problem. You focus on the right thing Because the value add, the ROI, is all about the problem, not about the tool. Chris: Look, that makes sense. It's easy to remember, for sure, and I mean I think you're right. Devlin: I think most business owners agree. Chris: I just need this problem solved effectively and efficiently. Devlin: By the way, you find these problems by going. What would it take for me to 5x my business today? The things that immediately popped to mind? You're like, oh well, this would break and this would break, and this would break and this would break. That's your list. For me, it's like well, I need five times as many account managers and my accounting staff's got to grow and I'd need better hiring. That's my list. Do I need five times as many account managers or do I need to help automate a lot of the account management and administrator to make them more effective? How do I upskill and get my recruiters leveraging AI, sorting and those kind of things to pull more people into the pipeline? That's my list. By simply going. What would it take to get bigger? Buy a big number. If 5x isn't scary enough, tack a zero on there. Chris: That definitely would be scary. Devlin: So let's, talk about. Chris: There's a lot that's been written and it's something we're doing here ourselves and that's with AI out there. What are best practices that businesses should be considering around policies for using, evaluating, adapting AI technology in the business, ai technology in the business. There's a lot that I think it's probably best practice. There should one. Yes, you should have a policy, but anything you can kind of guide the listeners on on those issues around a competent and well thought out AI policy. Devlin: So it's got a few pieces. Number one data privacy needs to be forefront in that conversation, primarily to protect your business and to protect your competitive advantage. So if your AI usage or acceptable usage policy doesn't include something about how data privacy should be evaluated, that's a big gap. Now your opinions about data privacy are gonna be your company's opinions, but those tools that are cheap and freely available today are largely cheap and freely available so that they can use your data to train a better tool. Is that okay with you? Some people will like yeah, it doesn't matter, and some people are like no, I absolutely can never allow this data out of my control, at which point you gotta choose different tools. So data privacy is number one. Chris: To that point. You may be aware of this and I recently wrote a little, brought it on it, but you had the New. York Times lawsuit saying that all trained on copyrighted material. Trained on copyrighted material, so that's kind of to me somewhat akin to data security and privacy, and that's a whole other issue about copywriting and licensing around information. So we haven't talked with that in a minute. Let's keep on the data or AI kind of policies. And so you said, most important thing, data privacy. What's next? Devlin: Second is vendor resiliency. Now, this is gonna sound a little tough to like the indie developers who are trying to launch their product, but last year in the US there were 6,000 plus tools launched on the AI Hype Wave. Now the punchline to that story is over 4,000 have already failed Already, had to either pivot or gone out of business. Vendor resiliency if you're gonna start pulling these into your business, evaluate the vendor. Are they gonna survive long enough to be valuable to you, or do you now have a broken tool that's no longer being accessible that you've woven into your business? That is gonna drive you towards some of the bigger vendors, the ones that have been around for a while, and, as it kind of should. If you're weaving it into your ops Now for experimentation, use the little players, Like that makes sense to me, but when you're talking about a broad policy, vendor resiliency is gonna be a big thing. The other side of vendor resiliency is how are they going to indemnify you from the inevitable lawsuits in this space? Right? Microsoft, Google, Amazon have all said if you're using our tools inside the license agreement, there's indemnity. Right, that's a pretty big shield, right? Microsoft actually said that they would. If you're using their AI services. They would protect you and defend and pay a settlement if one ends up happening for copyright infringement. So, like the Times article thing won't hit the consumers of those AI tools. Microsoft has stood in front of it and said we're good, that's a big shield. Now if you're a small to mid-market software player, can you put up a shield right Right To your customers? As a customer, I need to start caring about this. And then, lastly, in that policy, some centralized knowledge repository, some centralized store, Because what we found is everybody's play. Everybody's trying, experimenting using these tools. They're wiring in their favorite one. I do this almost on a daily basis. I kick out unapproved tools from meetings that somebody like wired up like a meeting transcriber, listener, bot, and I kick them out of meetings and send a note to whoever did it. I'm like just to be clear not approved. Chris: Right. Devlin: Here's the approved one. Don't use that one and everybody's just so. Expense control and some kind of central review. It doesn't have to be heavy handed. Ours is literally just a let us know when you're experimenting so we can check in on the experiment because it might be something we want to share. Yeah, right, but some kind of central right. Yeah, because a lot of these are SaaS based. A lot of them are out, kind of in the ethos of like knowledge tools, like note taking tools that I use. There would be no way for improving to know that its IP is in that tool if I didn't tell them. And so you've got to. You've got to have kind of a reporting and honor system for the employees to tell you where your data and vendors live. Chris: So one of the things that I know that improving and the leadership and improving which includes you. You've done a great job of building a culture and a company that embraces technology, embraces innovation. What can you share about that experience and that journey at improving to maybe help others understand, you know how they may be able to do the same thing. Devlin: Absolutely so. I have the oddity of looking at this kind of if I look back down the mountain, it seems like it's a long way, but all I can see is looking up the mountain and it still seems insurmountable. So I guess first would be the journey doesn't end. Don't let the size of the mountain scare you, Just take a step Right. For us we have a lot of like growth and planning kind of baked into our employee management model. We call it PATH, that's our employee growth systems, and part of that is maintaining your marketable job skills, literally what we call hard skills right, the marketability of a person to maintain. Because there's this kind of natural degradation If I stop learning, I become less and less valuable because the market moves ahead of me. Right, and so, recognizing that truth and going okay, what are you doing this quarter to grow with technologies? Then we go okay, what new tech are you learning or playing with or experimenting with this quarter? What we have found is, as long as there's a vehicle for them to share that back to the company and make an impact, people are highly engaged If it is just playing over here and then they have to come back over here and do the same thing that they've been doing for 15 years less engagement, and so creating the vehicle in which their experiments can have a long lasting impact on the business created a lot of engagement. And then the other side of it is we recognized a while ago that if you're not growing, you're dying as a business, and that's true for all of our people. It's what we call the plateau of slow death. Like you've just decided to coast that will have an accelerating decline in your value to the business. How do we help people stay on a plateau of slow growth where they're still incrementally investing? Sure, Now for us that's five hours a week because we're a technology company, it moves quick. Right, that might not need to be five hours a week for somebody in manufacturing, distribution etc. But probably an hour a week just reading. Like there's the Wall Street Journal podcast, there's this podcast that's phenomenal for staying abreast of what's happening. Like consume an hour a week of new information for you and your team, and you'd be amazed at what doing that week after week will do to the business. Like it just accelerates. And it sounds very simple. It was one of the first steps we took. Chris: You know that the dedication to being intentional about the learning and self improvement on a weekly basis, I think is amazing that any business right I believe so I am amazed how many business owners and friends I have that work in businesses and they're so busy that they're too busy to survive. I've said here in this firm before and you have to repeat it, and we're all can be victim of it and guilty of it, but busy can't be an excuse. I'm too busy to do X when X is strategic work on how to improve the company or yourself. Busy can't be an excuse, Because if it is, then nothing will ever get done because you always feel too busy right, and so I pay for a lot of tools. Devlin: I'm a well augmented human right. One of those tools is summaries of like business articles and books and all that. And so while I was sitting here waiting for this conversation, I was reading one of those. And it's that overarching approach of like how am I getting value out of those moments, like when a meeting wraps up early, do you sigh in relief and like, walk out and waste 10 minutes? Maybe that's good recovery and you need that for emotional balance. Okay, but is it intentional? Did you go hey, you know what I need emotional balance and chose that. Or did you go? I got 10 minutes. I'm going to read that book summary, or I'm going to read an article, or I'm going to check out what's on HPJ innovation stuff, like those questions. Right, just making the consumption of data an option mentally for all this. This is why I say like, a lot of our barriers are psychological, because the technology is actually not scary Once you start exploring it. It's only scary when it's like Skynet and Terminator from the movies, and so then it's scary and that makes sense. Chris: But let's get this right, let's bring this full circle from the beginning of the conversation. Right what you're talking about and recommending people. Be intentional about that. Self learning, that discipline around self learning and improvement, is really going to be essential as new technologies come online, because we you said earlier right Technology is going to force the worker to adapt and the only way you can adapt is by continuing to learn. So, to be successful alongside technology like AI, it's going to be essential. Devlin: This is actually. I'm a future optimist, and what I mean by that is I think that technology elevates humanity right, Very similar to capitalism. Elevating humanity it has made life better. It's increased longevity, it's done a lot of things. Now, that's not to say technology is perfect and we live in utopia Like, but it is. Technology elevates us, but it makes us do the harder version of life right. Technology allows us to play life on hard mode. So, like social media, I can doom scroll forever, which means I have to own the choice. Right Before that, technology enabled me to stay connected with all my friends. I didn't have to make that choice Right. Right, ai, by taking a lot of the complexity, a lot of the time consuming tasks off my plate, means that all that's left are the difficult tasks, it's the hard mode tasks, and getting really good at the hard mode tasks is the value creation in the future. It's hey, I got to go write this software. The writing of the software, the actual typing, is going to get much easier, just like accounting, just like bookkeeping, just like going through and like automatic scanning of discovery documents in the legal space. Sure, used to be very time consuming Now is being accelerated by AI and automation. So now then, the hard part is understanding what software I need to write and why, understanding what those transactions mean to the business and why, understanding what, in that discovery, is pertinent, important and relevant to the story I'm telling. Right, like all the hard tasks, get left the difficult task, because those are the ones AI is really bad at Right. Chris: Basically for now. So before we wrap this up, I definitely want to ask you your thoughts on regulation and what you think Congress should or shouldn't do around putting some regulations in the AI space. Devlin: So AI regulation is coming, like that's going to be the case. Any sufficiently developed technology ends up getting regulated at some point. Should do. Transparency to empower a educated consumer is phenomenal Like stating if you've baked an ethical bias or a political or religious bias into a model so that the people who are using it can choose, right, that makes sense. Chris: Realize that the output is tilted in some way. Devlin: Right, that's great to know as a consumer. Right, and luckily that's where a lot of the early regulations in this space are tilting. The shouldn't do side of it is dangerously close to that, which is then publish how you built the model to prove that statement, which is a lot like saying give everybody your proprietary trade secrets. Right, there's a reason that open AI stopped publishing a lot of their and here's exactly how we built it, and that's because a whole bunch of other companies took that research that they poured tens of billions of dollars into and created additional models that were almost identical in performance. Right Now they're different and they were developed by different teams and all that. But, like, there's a reason it went from we have one major version of this to we now have 15 publicly available commercial models. Right, that gets dangerous when you start regulating people to destroying their business, and so that's the line I'm hoping we walk the stifled innovation that happens on that second one we're seeing in the EU when they passed the and here's all the restrictions of AI you have to publish your training set and your methodology and all this stuff. It's like awesome, and there was a mass exodus of AI companies from that area. Like yeah, they're like nope, we are not going to, not going to participate if you require us to kill ourselves. Chris: Right. And so we're going to invest time and money in something that they can't then have a return on. Devlin: I mean, if you look at the open AI side of it, this is tens of billions of dollars in decades of research and development and work to make this happen. Imagine if you then had a law that said and you have to enable your competitor, who doesn't have that cost, to then rapidly get to the same point for a 10th Right, and so there's a balance between you want to democratize some of it, you've got to balance the investment side of it, and if you go too far which I believe personal belief that the EU did it just causes a significant drop in investment. Chris: So you know, kind of with that in mind, where do you kind of foresee the evolution of AI over the next five to 10 years? Devlin: We have largely looked at AI as the Jetsons robot or terminator, where it's this one thing that is omnipowerful, omnikable, right, omnipresent. I don't believe that's where we're going. The best minds in this space, of which I get to talk to I am not one of, I beg the difference. Go ahead. They would tell you that it will be a cloud of things like imagine that you're surrounded by Chris's swarm of empowering bots. You've got a bot that helps you manage your schedule. You've got a bot that helps you take notes from a meeting without having to like jot them down, and all of these save you 10, 15, 20 minutes an hour and a half a day. That means somehow Chris is doing 50 hours of work in a eight hour day because you've got this super human capability that's empowered by all of these things. That's where we're headed. I just saw I was playing around with a toolkit that there's been a lot of hype over the last few weeks is the video generator, pica. It's like mid journey or Dolly or stable diffusion for images, but does videos. Chris: Okay. Devlin: Like cinematographic grade quality. The problem is you have to also get really good at understanding camera movements and placement and blocking and all these things that directors have known for decades, and so it's not built for this average consumer. It's built for making folks with that knowledge massively more successful. Right, being able to go and here's a rough of my movie idea. Right. Here's a short of my movie idea for $1,000, not 70. Chris: Right. Devlin: Right, that will accelerate the creative space in movie making, but it's not going to get rid of a need for that knowledge base. Same thing's true with geophysics and well-planning and the energy space. How do we conceptualize all of this and make a human significantly more powerful? So this team that includes a drilling engineer, a geophysicist and all this can plan wells and make financial analysis, and all that in days, not years. Right, that acceleration is where we're going to see it. We're going to see it through these kind of micro enhancements. I carry several of them with me. I've got a note-taking system that maps all of the connected topics that I've been researching and digging into and it's wicked, fun and crazy. But I built a chat system on it that runs on my laptop and so I can ask questions on my notes. I'm like, hey, in my last Vistage meeting there was a speaker who talked about this what were the key takeaways? And it goes. Here's the notes. Here are the key takeaways. It's that kind of empowerment, because human memory is fallible, and so how many of us have wished like I wish I had a better memory. Chris: It doesn't have to live in my head. Yeah, Kind of like what it. There was something five minutes ago I said I needed to do and now I can't remember what it is. How often does that happen? Devlin: I carry around to do this and to do this integrates with it, and so at the end of the day, right before I typically leave the office, I get a reminder set from the automation I hooked up to it. Now it looks at my calendar and goes where's the right point to remind a Devlin to do those things before the end of the day. So like folks literally like I don't know how you do this, I'm like I don't, I'm very well augmented that yeah, you said that more than once. Chris: I know you mean it very well augmented. So I was going to ask you what some of your favorite AI tools are. I think you've shared them just now, but maybe just a quick summary of maybe three or four of your favorite tools for the listeners who were trying to frantically take notes. Devlin: So I for network management. So my personal network management I use clayearth. You literally go to. Clayearth is the URL. I think it's phenomenal and I use that to manage my network. It does not spam or reach out to, it just helps me reach out and stay connected the kind of in my business version of that one is dynamics. We use sales copilot for dynamics. Einstein in Salesforce does the same thing. Chris: So in the business. Devlin: We use a different one because different needs, right? Sure For note taking, I use obsidian. You can use ever note or one note in this same thing and it'll do a lot of the same AI enablement through plug ins and those kinds of things. Chris: And then you mentioned one about just the main of the reminder. Devlin: So I use to do is and power automate. I've combined those two tools. So if you're in the Microsoft stack right, you use office 365 or Microsoft 365, you have access to this one already I didn't know it and so you can go to makepowercom. It's a Microsoft tool. You'll log in with your Microsoft thing and you can describe what you want it to do. I did this yesterday. I was presenting to a group of CEOs on this topic and I was like take the notes, my handwritten notes that I emailed a picture of myself. Take the notes I emailed a picture of to myself, parse them, put the text in my notebook, scan it for action items and put those action items into do list. Literally, that's all I described. And it goes okay, and it's got this massive library of these tiny little tasks and it pulls them all together and goes. Here's the automation that will do that and it writes the rough draft, the prototype of the automation for you and you just click all right, create. And it goes. This is the permissions I'm going to need. Are you good with that? Yep, go. And it's there and it's running. I had to write no code, I had to wire nothing together, it just did it and so we're using this for, like, back office automation all the time. Like, hey, take this output of our financial system, slice it, dice it in this way and it writes the pivot table creation and all that in Excel. Like that's might be half an hour or 45 minutes that I just saved our business partner in accounting, and so it's a lot of these tiny little bots. Chris: Wow. So when you think about AI and how it could be disruptive to industry, what are maybe one of the top two industries you think it's going to be the most disruptive to? Devlin: So oddly, I think logistics, supply chain and manufacturing are probably those two. One, they've typically been under invested in technology and so there's a lot of low hanging fruit. But two, it gives pricing power. Like, imagine that I can compress the labor to accomplish a task. I can now out price my competitors who aren't doing that, and in those two spaces where they're very commoditized prices can't. If you can be 3% cheaper while maintaining your margins, that's the ballgame and you can just put people out of business. So I think those two are going to have massive kind of immediate six to 18 month impact. If you look slightly beyond that, the construction space is huge in this AP great Houston story here has a robot called Dusty that they helped to develop. It takes the construction documents for a high rise and it prints the lay down onto the concrete. It uses basically a Roomba guided by AI. It parses the construction documents and, in color coded paint, prints the lay down. And it reduces the labor of manual labor, construction labor, of building out that building, because they don't have to snap chalk lines and measure everything and everything else, they just follow the color coded thing, which also means I need lower scale labor, which is the labor savings. And so these things are changing the game and changing the pricing power on a lot of these fixed bid contracts. And so you see some interesting spaces where traditionally non technology based business has a lot of low hanging fruit, like fintech and financial services has been heavily invested in technology. Less low hanging fruit there, sure. So the disruptive stuff I think is going to be in those three over the next few years. Chris: Okay, Devlin, this has been such an interesting and fun conversations. Thank you for doing that. I want to just turn just to a little bit of the fun side of things when I have a guest in, and what was your first job, I guess you told us today you were programming, but was that where you get paid to do it? Devlin: No. So my first job there was a pool near our house and I love like there was a cherry seven up, like you got the bottle cap thing and you could earn points and order stuff. Like that moment in time and I my parents like I didn't have enough allowance to like as much cherry seven up as I wanted, right, and so I talked to the owner of the pool that we were a member of near our house into letting me like, do the chlorine and the cleanup and scrub the pool for cash when I was 12. Like this was definitely not legal. And then so like I'm moving buckets of chlorine and doing all this stuff while my friends are playing at the pool, because I was earning $5 a day that I could spend on cherry seven up. Chris: I grew up from an early age right. I love it. Devlin: So hopefully I don't get anybody in trouble. I'm not giving you names of pools, okay. Chris: So what do you prefer Tex-Mex or barbecue? Devlin: Oh, barbecue Hands down. Yeah, I have a massive pit smoker in my backyard Like oh, for real Okay. So we throw a barbecue in Dallas every year for fourth of July, feed like 400 people. We throw one here at our office for Labor Day, memorial Day, which one's at the end of the summer. Chris: Labor Day, labor Day. Devlin: For Labor Day feed like 250 folks. Chris: Like I'm bigger than barbecue. You're serious? All right, I love it. And what do you like to do for fun when you're not out speaking? Devlin: on AI. So I play a lot of golf with my wife and she kicks my butt, or I like video games and stuff like that, and so my brother and I play a lot of video games Very good. Chris: Well, like I said, Dylan, I love the conversations we've had in the past. What you shared today was so enlightening and I know we'll be valuable to those listening, and I said that they probably, like me, took a lot of notes that they'll try to implement into their daily life. So thanks again for being here. Thank you, thank you.

In today's episode of Building Texas Business, fashion entrepreneur Elaine Turner is joining us to talk about her journey of launching Edit by Elaine Turner, her luxury boutique that emphasizes mindful consumption. She shares her experiences navigating the challenging retail industry and lessons from her previous ventures. Elaine gives advice on balancing your brand identity and adapting to changing customer expectations. Her stories highlight the difficulties of expanding business plans and finding community resonance. She also shares her views on building teams that align with the brand spirit, which can be valuable for entrepreneurs. Toward the end of the discussion, Elaine reflects on her personal experiences of living in Houston and Santa Fe. Elaine's gratitude for the hard-won lessons makes her a role model for navigating the industry's turbulence with empathy, vision, and agility. SHOW HIGHLIGHTS Elaine shares her experience with Edit by Elaine Turner, a Houston boutique offering curated European luxury brands, emphasizing mindful consumption and the art of editing in fashion. We discuss Elaine's background in entrepreneurship within her family, her early interest in fashion, and the influence of her parents and mentors on her career. Elaine describes the lessons learned from launching a luxury line that failed, the importance of understanding brand identity, and the value of knowing your core customer base. Chris touches on the challenge of balancing novelty with accessibility in fashion and the pitfalls of expanding too quickly. We explore the importance of community focus in retail and the critical role of hiring team members who align with the brand's culture. Elaine recounts the transition from brick-and-mortar to digital commerce, noting the surprising speed of change and the recent shift back to a balance between digital and physical storefronts. Chris and Elaine discuss agile leadership, the importance of empathy, and the necessity of adapting to the needs of the workforce in the retail industry. Elaine reflects on personal transformation, the process of starting a second business, and the evolution of relationships during life's challenging phases. We chat about Elaine's personal side, including her preference for Tex-Mex over barbecue and her dream retreat to Santa Fe. Elaine shares her gratitude and excitement for her new venture, Edit by Elaine Turner, and the journey of crafting a life filled with purpose and passion. LINKSShow Notes Previous Episodes About BoyarMiller About Edit by Elaine Turner GUESTS Elaine TurnerAbout Elaine TRANSCRIPT (AI transcript provided as supporting material and may contain errors) Chris: In this episode, you will meet Elaine Turner, founder of Edit by Elaine Turner and Elaine Turner Designs. Elaine's entrepreneurial passion centers around fashion and lifestyle brands, but her true passions are serving her community and empowering and supporting women through education, connection and philanthropy. Alright, let's get going. I cannot wait for this episode. I'm so excited to have Elaine Turner here. Elaine, thanks for joining me today. Elaine: I love being here. Thanks for having me. Chris: One of the things I love about you is that you are a serial entrepreneur, and I think those are my favorite people to talk to. Let's talk about what you're doing today with Edit by Elaine Turner. Tell us what that is. Elaine: I just opened a new store concept here in Houston, in Tanglewood, and the store is called Edit by Elaine Turner. Really, the whole idea of the store was concepted from a place of renewal and redemption, because we can talk about my story beforehand. But it was all about this idea of curating hard to find European luxury, upscale brands for the Houston clientele who I felt like the art of discovery, like what else? She goes to Tutsis and she goes to Neemans and Saks and Nordstroms and we're lucky we live in this incredible cosmopolitan city full of all the options. But I wanted to offer her something that maybe wasn't so out there and so ubiquitous. Edit was really born from the art of creation. I will be your editor and I will go out and find these really unique pieces for you to engage in and add to your wardrobe. Chris: That's great. Elaine: There's actually some real meaning behind the word edit, then right, yes, so edit is about not only let me edit for you and find those unique, hard to find pieces, but it's also about, for me personally, sort of leaning into this idea of, as women and as consumers, we only ultimately need what's essential. And I think, as we age and we become more mindful about what we put on our bodies, what we put in our bodies, that it's not always about quantity, right, we don't have to buy, like you know, every trend that's ever offered to us. Like we can be more thoughtful about what we choose. And so it's about letting go of the unnecessary and really retaining what's of value to you, and so edit is supposed to be all about that. Like I'm saying, this is what's of quality to you. Chris: I love that. I love the thought behind it. Thank you, because you're right, you can go into any store and get stuff, so this is one. This is an episode where I'm like there's so many different directions to go with you, but I think you're right. You talked about renewal and redemption. You have an amazing story because this is your second go at it. Elaine: And the first was successful. Chris: Sometimes people second goes coming out of failure. Let's talk about your passion and what got you into the kind of the fashion industry. Talk a little bit about that first venture. I think in doing that I encourage you to start what was called a Lane Turner or Lane Turner designs back in what, 1999 to 2000. Yeah, exactly 20, almost 24 years ago. A while ago, chris, you must have been an infant. Elaine: I was 29 or 30 when I started a Lane Turner designs and really my story really comes from an origin story of entrepreneurship. That's the number one thing. I was born in a family of entrepreneurs and I'm kind of a believer that entrepreneurship is sort of passed on through DNA. I think you've got to be a little left of center to engage in being an entrepreneur, because it's high risk, you kind of, it's lonely. You know you're the one kind of putting yourself out there thinking of these ideas and visions and you're usually entrepreneurs are trying to solve problems, so they're thinking, hey, what's not out there that could be out there? And I watched both of my parents start companies and both of my siblings also at one time had their own companies, and so I feel like for me it was sort of osmosis. You know, I was very much inspired by my parents. They were my mentors growing up and so I always knew when I went to school, went to UT and I majored in advertising, marketing, but I always knew I wanted to do something in fashion because my mother always encouraged. You know, this is how you express yourself. And it was always done from a more thoughtful, deep way and I was like I'm not saying, not just fashion, you know, because of materialism. But she would literally watch me walk downstairs and say, oh, you have a gift. Like you should really think about something in fashion, Like this is the art of communication. Chris: She wasn't one of those moms that looked at you and goes you're not wearing that. Elaine: Yeah Well, maybe a couple of times. You know it's an evolution, Chris. I'm not saying that I came out of the gate putting all the outfits together, right, but she always encouraged me on a much deeper level that I think this is something that you should offer the world. You know, Even in my teens and my twenties I knew I wanted to do something in fashion, and so I went to UT and then I immediately called a mentor of mine. Joanne Burnett and said I really want to do something in the fashion industry. And she said, hey, there's this company out of Dallas you should talk to and they might give you kind of an assistant job in the design area or whatever. And so it just was a super, you know, very organic growth for me. Back when I was at UT there was no fashion merchandising program, so that was in it. So I had to learn everything in the job, you know, on the job, and have like mentors train me Right, but always knowing I wanted to start my own thing. Okay, and that was always there. It didn't really happen Like some people say. That sort of happened by happenstance. For me it was pretty intentional that I knew in my twenties I wanted to learn everything and then I wanted to start my own business. Chris: So I hear that story a lot, but you also hear the ones where, like you said, there's a problem to solve and someone says, okay, I'll do this. Let's talk about taking you back to that 28 to 29 year old self when you said, okay, now it's time. Some people are scared to take that step. Let's talk about and educate the audience. What was it like for you to get to the point where you're ready to take this risk? What was that like? What did you learn from that experience? Elaine: Yeah, I mean it's a great question. I think I knew when I was 29, I had learned a lot in New York. I went from Dallas to New York and worked for several companies in New York and I started recognizing in the market that accessories were really taking a much bigger, I would say, segment of the market. So, like the big designers at the time, like Donna Karen and Ralph Lauren and all that they were starting to do these handbag collections or accessory collections right when they were really starting to kind of form a look and a name for themselves in that area. And Kate Spade was just coming on the scene and I thought, oh, there's something there that I think that there was a void that I could fill like an accessible price point, and I really focused on novelty applications. So I was really known for this resort wear look where I did Raffia rat bags and tortoise shell handles and I did a lot of specialty leathers like Python leather leathers with multi-colored. So a lot of novelty right. Chris: From. Elaine: Texas, of color and bold, and so I started thinking to myself well, what if I did a small handbag collection and put it out in the market? And I really thought about my price point because I wanted it to be accessible luxury price point and started to see if I could sell my wares. You know, and I had just moved back from New York to Houston and my first literally I have this memory my first account was walking into Titsies and Mickey Rosemary and meeting with me in private and saying I'll carry all your collection on consignment for the first six months and if it does well, then I'll start buying it. Wow. So I said it's a deal and that was how I started. And the bags were made in Brooklyn and he really mentored me on price and segmentation of the market and who you're catering to and the look and feel of the bags, and he was a huge part of why the company grew, because he really helped me understand, I think, from a little bit more of a mass perspective, how to grow the business and not keep it so boutique, right, Right. Chris: How to be able to scale to it. Elaine: Exactly, and then I was able to get into Neiman Sax and Nordstrom and started growing a really large business from there. Chris: So okay, as you got this fashion mind and creative mind, I mean, what were some of the things that you had to learn to grow that business to scale? Let's talk about that. I mean, and if you think about something like a failure man that went horrible, it went horribly wrong but by gosh, I'm glad it did because I learned so much. Elaine: Many failures and challenges and opportunities along the way. But I mean, I think that what I learned is the idea was really about offering sort of this accessible lady like elegant accessory line to women who I felt like that wasn't really happening like. As much as I loved Kate's bag, it was very basic at the time. It was like nylon little shopper bags, right. Chris: No offense Kate. Elaine: We love Kate, but now it's very novelty. So we all evolved, but at that time, yeah at that time it was just this really simple kind of utilitarian shopper bag. So I felt like I had a niche and like let's add novelty into the handbag space and the handbags were really becoming this sort of individualistic part of fashion. It's like, you know, wear a dark suit but what's the special handbag that just pops off? You Like what makes it almost that final touch. And so, for me, the challenges. I think what I learned is okay how do I retain the novelty and the specialty part, retain the price, keep the price where it needs to be, but also have a product that is appealing to a lot of women? Because I was growing scale, I mean I was like I want to open stores, I want to be in wholesale. I mean I had my own New York showroom and so some of the challenges, like an example was I decided to spin off and do a real high end more I don't know coutures, not the right line, but a real high end luxury line in Italy, but to keep my more accessible. So, like the bags were in from like 195 to 500. Chris: That was kind of where I saw it. Elaine: Well then I thought let me go off and try these $1,000 bags. Well, it ended up being a huge flop, which is okay. But I realized that by doing that I grew too fast and I was trying to appeal to a different customer too quickly before the brand had really penetrated and distributed distribution enough in those places. So it was like I jumped the gun and then I don't think I had exhausted the price point that I was in. So that was one failure or challenge that I kind of pulled back on and thought well, I think I did that too soon because you know it's a big investment, you're investing in real Python lovers and you're doing it in Italy and these little family and factories. But you learn from it. You know. You learn like no, go back to your core, don't get away from it so quickly. But you know. Chris: That's to me, what's so fascinating is getting back, you know, staying and knowing your core, because the story you just told I've heard told in many different industries, right, so it is applicable across industries. So, you kind of confused the identity of the company. Elaine: Yes, yes, that's exactly right. Chris: And you have to be careful as an entrepreneur. Be careful not to do that and if you're going to make sure you know. I think it's a delicate thing to do and it's interesting that it can happen in any industry. So right in the handbag and fashion, you can dilute that core customer who's so loyal to you. Elaine: And I think what happens with entrepreneurs that we all fall a little bit victim to and I think speaking someone might relate to this is that you're constantly thinking of the next thing because that's just you're always feeling that void will like that. I don't see enough of that. At that price point let's make it ourselves, and sometimes those ideas and that vision can get ahead of you, and then you have to be able to pivot and save yourself. Wait a minute, I think I jumped too quickly because entrepreneurism is really about creation or vision and filling the void and solving the. But sometimes you can almost go so far that you go too fast. Chris: How did you regulate yourself in? That was it? Was it surrounding yourself with, with the team? Was it just learning from trial and error? You go and I need to learn what I need to pump the brakes. Elaine: I mean it's a combination. I was lucky. I've been very blessed. My husband's always been a deep, strong partner to me and he helped me with. At first he didn't really get involved. He ended up full-time working with me in the business about after seven years of me being in business and then he started really helping me. But he was always a more cautious one to be like let's just, let's really exhaust what we're doing right now, but then seemed to have a really deep understanding of timing, of like. For example, I got into the shoe business and I was really nervous about that after what happened with the high-end collection and the shoe business did incredible for me and in fact I think if you talk to women today, that was really the category that they were the most wedded to so it, but it was the timing. I had enough, you know. I had enough brand awareness. I had multiple stores at the time. She was the loyalty and also the trust was built up at that time, whereas when I jumped to the real high-end bags I don't think I was quite there yet. So a lot of things are timing. You know when to be. You know you have to be really thoughtful about when you do big expansion moves, and I think the shoes happened at just the right time that she was ready for that. Chris: Yeah, a lot of it is timing right. Let's go back kind of the high-end handbag. So another thing that's hard for people, especially entrepreneurs, to do is to kind of admit that failure. How hard and what and what good advice would you give to say you got to know when, and it's okay, cut it and say this just wasn't, this didn't work, whatever it may be. Elaine: I think it's some one of the most important things you can do being a business owner and I mean honestly just being in business at a certain level is to know when to look in the mirror, be accountable and look at it not as a failure but as a huge opportunity for growth. And also, when that stuff happens and it's happened to me multiple times it also models for the people before you that it's okay. It's okay to go. You know this worked, this didn't, so how do we get out of this in the most thoughtful way? Also, the less you know the way, economically that doesn't hurt us as badly, but it having that courage to know when to sell, when to get out of a lease, when to liquidate a product that didn't sell. You know, those are all just parts of being in business, and I think what happens with people who end up really struggling as their egos become so involved and the pride takes over that they aren't willing to take a step back and say this doesn't mean I failed. This means that I have an opportunity to change something that didn't go as expected. Yeah, and that's also personal, like forget business how about marriages and friendships and relationships and how we navigate the earth. I mean, sometimes we just gotta look in the mirror and say we gotta redefine this yeah and that's actually a beautiful thing, and it's to me like winning in life. It's not failure. Chris: I agree. I mean, I think it's a mindset, and so I say all the time no bad experiences, just learning experiences that's it. Elaine: I'm inspired. Yes, that's it. I think we you could have answered the question okay so you have this going. Chris: You expand the shoes, you have stores that took people. So how did you build a team and how would you, when you look back, how? How would you verbalize and describe the culture that you built at a length turn? That's such a nice. Elaine: I love. Well, I loved all of that and I especially loved the culture and the brick and mortar aspect. I think that we spent so much time and energy focusing on the community and we had we're I like to say we were one of the first retailers in Texas to build a charity platform within our brick and mortar where we had an event-based charity platform. So each month we would hold several events and team up with charities and sort of have a win situation where we donate a certain amount of proceeds and then they get to experience Elaine Turner and what we're making and creating. And you know and today you see it across the board, with Tori Burch as a women's foundation and Kendra Scott has a huge event platform. But it was something that the brick and mortar stores were really an integrated, intimate experience with the community and it meant that's probably one of the biggest things that I take away that I'm the most proud of, is what I created within those stores. I really created a place for women to connect one with one another, to educate one another, to inspire one another and to give back to the community. Chris: Yeah, so it's beautiful, but it takes more than you if it's going to transcend right into the different brick and mortar locations because you can't be everywhere all the same time and I didn't know so what were some of the? Things that you did as you hired, whether it was store managers or you know, whatever your involvement was, to make sure that the people you were hiring connected with that vision and that passion. Elaine: It's. You know, hiring your team is the most foundational, essential part of how you win as an entrepreneur and it's not easy and sometimes even within that you make mistakes and vice-over I'm talking like that person might make a mistake that they even chose to come work for me. And then I realize that when the right fit on our side, it's very reciprocal. There's no one that's above anybody else, it's just sometimes the fit's not there. But we had become so well versed in who we were culturally that we were all about you know intimate experience. Giving back fun. Luxury was one of our big. We're all about having fun, it's not. We don't take ourselves too seriously. You don't have to wait in some line where there's a you know bouncer. You don't have to act like we're not too exclusive for you. We are an enveloping culture. And so it became where we actually and I'm saying at the beginning there were some probably bumpy roads, especially as we started getting into retail, but as we really started building this store footprint across Texas, we got pretty good at those managers and had really low turnover. You know where we really built and we had a store director who had come from Michael Kors who really understood how to build that team culture. But I mean, some of my most prized employees at the time were the people who are running those stores. They just got it, you know, and then sometimes it didn't, and that's okay too. Chris: It is. I mean, you're hiring is an imperfect process, right, and I think, but if you have a core identity that you know and you'll know when there's a fit and when there's not, exactly. And then the key is if it's not a fit to move fast. Elaine: Yeah, and they've all gone on. I mean it's just interesting you've asked me this question because we're going pretty personal. But you know, as I was launching edit, I started looking for some of my older leaders that I loved and they, I mean I look at my head and I'm like, oh, they're running. One's running Carolina Herrera here in Houston. Another one's store, director of Kate Spade, another that Jim's like well, we, you know, help to give them that foundation and that's awesome. But I mean nothing makes me feel better about myself to see some of those women soar in the retail space like a proud parent right yeah, and beautiful people. Chris: So that's good, that's so good. So as you ran the company, I know you got to a point where you decided it was kind of time to put things down. Yes, and you the original a late turn. You closed over a period of time. That had to be a pretty difficult decision, an emotional decision, because it was born out of passion right, it was very people come to those, you know, face those roadblocks or those forks in the road. You know how did you go about kind of handling that and then coming to grips that it was okay. Elaine: I mean, I think, just like anything, it's been a journey to get to the acceptance, or for me to find that acceptance, around that initial a lane turner designs journey. But there was a lot of things it wasn't an overnight thing that were leading up to me realizing that I needed to hit button in my life. And just like anything else, chris, it's never just usually one thing, it's usually a series of things. You know, I mean it's kind of morbid, but they always say, like a plane crash doesn't just happen with one wheel falling off, it's usually a series of things and at the time you know that's been almost six years retail had really shifted dramatically from more of a brick and mortar clientele experience to kind of the Amazon age being very real, which is all about ease and convenience, right and so, and then I'm always very transparent and vulnerable about my business. The capital was really put into the brick and mortar experience and I was behind on the digital aspects. I was, and that you know. That's just. I can totally admit that today. It wasn't that I didn't have it, but I didn't have it near like some of my competitors had it right and so I had to really come to grips with that reality that the store traffic had started to dwindle and women were really calling for the digital experience and saying, look, I don't want to find parking at your store, I don't want to do that anymore. I'm really moving into this idea that the package has dropped, I can return it and put a sticker on it, and so my husband and I were just sort of playing catch up. And then, alongside that challenge, which was immense, I personally have an autistic daughter who was also reaching teen tween age and starting to really have a deep awareness of her differences and struggling mental health wise, so I needed to find out how I could intervene and get her in a better place. And then both of my parents were diagnosed with terminal illnesses at the same time oh, wow and that's when I said okay, god, like I hear you, I get you and I'm not a failure. I need to change my life and I have, and I took those years to caretake and get people what they needed, because, even though I'm a passionate business person, I am a very driven, very ambitious. I am also just as passionate and just as I mean it's my whole life or my is my family, yeah, and so I knew that at that time I couldn't just be everything I I couldn't do it all at the same time. I realized I couldn't be and do it all at the same time, but that was okay that you know it's a beautiful story. Chris: I know there those things aren't fun to go through. I'm so sorry here, but they're seasons in life, right, and I think you know one of the. There's always lessons in every story and there's a lesson in what you just said to me and that is as passionate as you are about your business keep your priorities straight yeah, family always comes first, yeah and you're right, it didn't define who you were to shut the store down right. So that's you know it's a beautiful thing and I'm sure it was hard to go through yeah, I want to take you back to something you said because I think there is some learning in and I always have a question for you because you said look, I realized I was behind in the digital right. I was in the brick and mortar. When you look back at that, was that a function of you just truly believed brick and mortar was the way to go and this digital was a flash in the pan? Or do you think you miscalculated the digital presence and how it was really going to affect the industry and change the industry? Elaine: It was not at all discounting digital. I had a very built up website, three full-time employees who worked on my end, so it was honoring that digital was real. I had no idea how quickly the digital consumer you know landscape would shift. It was one of the most massive market shifts, I think if you've studied it. Chris: Yeah. Elaine: That's ever happened. It happened so fast. I mean, the Amazon age is real. It just took over business. It was just all of a sudden you're buying on this interface and you're not walking into stores as much and it was happened so fast. I remember my husband was like we've got to hire more digital people when we started hiring him. But as quickly as we'd hire him, it was just like our competitors were starting to offer, you know, free returns, all this stuff, like you will just come pick it up for you. Like it was, just became like. It was literally the way people were doing business and I just had no idea how quickly. I thought it would just seamlessly fit into the brick and mortar footprint. Yeah, it took over. I mean, women were like, well, just ship it to me, even just living. Like you live right here, I live over in Tanglewood, like you're you know you're saying no, you need to ship it to me, like even today I saw. Chris: Sitting at your yeah, you know, in your kitchen. I'm not coming, right, I'm not coming yet. I don't think you're dressed up, I'm not. So In hour two you're returning. Elaine: Yeah, so even our Houston base, which is our Houston Dallas our largest they were ordering on my website online and not coming in anymore, but I still wasn't able to provide the type of service that I think they were used to, even online. I was struggling to keep up with that, but what's interesting is how things come around in life, is I think there's been a real balance now? I think that's a little bit over. I think digital is still a value and I know you ordered lots of Christmas presents online. Chris: Almost all. Elaine: Right, but I still think brick and mortar now has eased back into people wanting more human interaction and tangible experience of product, especially luxury product. Yeah, I think people still want that. Chris: That's. What is funny is that I tell people the story. They've seen it in Holly's, my two girls. They create, like these, powerpoint presentations with pictures of their Christmas list with hyperlinks to the website. So yes, I did a lot of all of them. Elaine: I love hyperlinks to the website, but the higher end things. Chris: I didn't have to go to the store for a few things. So there you go. I'm a living example of what you just said. Elaine: Okay, Good, because there is a place for brick and mortar and for human interaction and human connection and educating them on product and servicing them. Tell me where you're going, tell me about you know what you need, and I think that's all finding much more of a balance now than it was six years ago. Chris: Yeah, yeah so let's talk a little bit about you as a leader. How would you define your leadership style and how did you try to show up? You know, in that 20-something year you were running a line Turner as a leader. Elaine: I think my biggest gift as a leader is I think I'm a very empathic person. I so I'm very committed to putting myself in somebody else's shoes and I think that's helped me especially lead women, because my 99% of my employees were women, and women hold a very complex position in society because of the roles and responsibilities that we have and the opportunities that we now have and the dual income families that we're creating, and so women are holding a lot of hats and are trying to be in due for a lot of people in their life. I like to call it the impossible paradigm Right. So I think that I held space for that and I think that when I look back as a leader, I hopefully felt like most of the people who work for me knew that they could pretty much come in and be vulnerable with me about what they could and could not do within the role that they had at my company. I also think that I'm a. I think I have vision. I don't want to like be arrogant, so I'm a visionary, but I think I have a lot of vision so I can look at things really high level and not get so in the weeds where we forget what we're doing as a company and what we're providing. So I'm very passionate about looking at things very philosophically and like well, what is it we're ultimately trying to provide? What's our cut through line here? What are we trying to do? I think that's another attribute that I am proud of. I think there's also challenges and opportunities and things where I've had to grow. I kind of lack structure. I've had to really lean in and and to how do I build more structure? I think a lot of entrepreneurs are sort of impulsive and are like out there trying to fill the void, and I think I've had to really understand guardrails and understand how people need structure. If they're going to work for me, so that's a big opportunity for me it's like okay, how do I provide them what they need to feel like they're doing their job the best that they can, and that's something I've had to work on. So I mean, you know, as a leader, it's just like you may just being human. You know there's some things that come really naturally to you and to me, but then there's other things. I'm like oh yeah, she really wants to have an understanding of her roles and responsibilities. Let me write that down. Chris: Write that down. Elaine: So I think it's just an evolution, it's a growth, you know very good. Chris: So we kind of started with edit and we've gone. I love what's going on, so I want to bring you back to that. You know you take a hiatus. Elaine: Obviously there was a pandemic in there and you're raising, as you said, you know teenage daughter and. What was? Chris: it that told you it was time to get back in the game. Elaine: Yeah, it's such a profound question I had. No, I was really tunnel visioned for probably three and a half years there, where I was just in this mode of caretaking and frontline decision making for my parents and my daughter and just in my husband had just recreated his whole deal and he was sort of out there sustaining us, you know which we had never in our whole marriage, had never not both worked. So that was a real interesting how we were going to figure each other out with our roles changing so much. Like I went through a deep identity crisis of like well, who am I now If I'm not this owner and this fashion person. I'm like you know who am I. I had a big grief process over kind of unraveling that, and he did too with me, you know. So it was an interesting watching us try to figure each other out. But we actually made this decision to once our daughter transitioned to this therapeutic boarding school that we found for her that she's done beautifully well at. But it was really hard for my husband and I. We went and lived in Santa Fe for six months and sort of decided that we needed a healing opportunity. You know of her kind of letting leaving the home and edit was kind of born in that sacred space and I think it's because, chris, I had a moment that I could actually create space within myself for something new for me, because for so many years it was all about somebody else. Sure, I was trying to kind of save these people that I love so dearly. And so I started talking to my husband saying you know, I have some ideas of something that maybe we could think about, and he's hugely entrepreneurial too, which is a whole other conversation we can have. Chris: But he was. Maybe we'll have him on. Elaine: He is huge and he was like let's talk about it. And so we started brainstorming over you know, burritos and we sit in town and I started telling him kind of my thoughts about you know, tanglewood needs this new idea and we need to serve women and brick and mortar. You know things are coming back. So I read all the time about consumer, you know the product sector and retail, and he was like I'm in, I think we could do it, I think we need to bring that to the customer, and so it just slowly started seeping into me and then I started going to market and he would come with me and finding all these unique lines, esoteric lines that nobody had heard of, like a lady from Copenhagen was the first person to bring her to the US and doing all these things where I was like I'm going to take a risk, and she did great. I mean, we just had three months of selling with her, but anyway. So just really leaning into this idea of finding these really unique lines, and it took us about a year. I mean we did a year of like negotiating the lease and meeting the contractors and coming up with the store idea, the space, and I'd love for you to come by and see it. Chris: I've got to come by, so you know, tell where is the store now. Elaine: So it's on Woodway and Voss, right across from Second Baptist Church, so literally kind of in the heart of Tanglewood residential area right by that Krabah's over there. Chris: Oh, perfect. Yeah, Everyone knows what that is, I know so. So you second go around. You opened just recently, like a couple months ago. Elaine: Yeah, open October 9th. So, yeah, what's today's? Chris: January 10th. So yeah, you've just been a few months Going. Well, I take it. Elaine: It's great. I mean it was just a total whirlwind because it's funny, I opened the store of course holiday time period it's like you know I'm trying to get press, I'm opening up during the busiest season of the you know the year and retail, and so it went great and I we beat all the goals that we had. But it's been also kind of a internal reset for me to kind of what is that balance for me, being an owner again but not losing kind of my sense of equanimity, if you will. Like I can go real strong, real singular into my career. And I've had to kind of really do a lot of self-awareness work about in Kaling this was a lot, so don't lose yourself in it and because you don't want to lose the joy in it. And so there's been, you know, even in the three months, there's been some setbacks that have happened already. There's been some huge wins that have happened already. I've had to hire a new team, and so you know I'm not going to lie and say, oh, it's just all like, oh, this perfect law, I mean it's been where. I'm like, oh shit, I got to fix that, I got to do that. But you know I'm doing it and I wouldn't be doing anything else. Chris: So how would you compare kind of starting the first one to starting the second one? Elaine: I'll tell you what you know. I want you to answer that, but I'll tell you you know. Chris: I remember when we were about to have a second child and I looked at someone and they're like oh, people think, oh, you got this, you know what you're doing. And I said you told me something you've done for the second time in your life and you felt like an expert, right? Oh, my God, it's so true, I mean it's been so. Elaine: It's so funny because the first time I was so young and you know, with youth comes a nice amount of ignorance, and so you have no idea what you're about to do or the consequences of what you're about to do, and you're like, yeah, I got this. You know, I'm going to put some little money in, we're going to start this thing. And I started getting handbags shipped to me from Brooklyn in my living room and I had a baby at the time and I just thought, oh, I'm going to figure this out. But when you're young, you know, you feel good, your body works, you're like I've got it. And then, as you age and you understand what really the consequences are of choices that you make, you become much more thoughtful and mindful and cautious about what you're going to actually do and the choices that you make in your life. And so edit was very mindfully thought out before I did it, before I signed that lease. But with that said, it's been a whirlwind, you know, and so, and I'm older and so I don't have the reserves. I'd really believe that I don't have the reserves that I had. So it's funny that you asked me that, because my new year goal for edit was simplification. I need to kind of pull back a little bit, simplify some of these. You know, I get real ahead of myself, you know, and kind of look at it through a clearer eyes. And how do I build a sustainable business with a digital footprint and a brick and mortar footprint and how do those seamlessly go together? And so it's really been about how do I make this something that is balanced and joyful. And even in the hard stuff I can see the joy and it doesn't get away from me, it doesn't go off the rails, you know, but it's hard, I mean. The second one isn't necessarily easier. Chris: No, it's just different. That makes sense to me, right? That's probably the best way to put it. And what a wonderful story, and you're just a joy to be with. Elaine: So we're going to go a little personal to wrap this thing up what was your first job. My first job was working at Sugar Creek Country Clubs tennis shop, but are you selling tennis clothes? Well, I was streaming rackets as a big tennis player. Chris: And. Elaine: I was a teenager, but I guess, if you're saying my first kind, of real job. Chris: that was the job. That's what I was looking for, Like what you did when you had your first job to make a paycheck. Elaine: The tennis. I worked at the tennis shop. Chris: And so my favorite question, especially for the lifelong Texans, is what do you? Prefer Tex-Mex or barbecue. Elaine: Tex-Mex. Chris: Okay, no hesitation. Finally, we'll wrap this sort of on this question. If you could take a 30 day sabbatical, where would you go and what would you do? Elaine: I go to Santa Fe, I love Santa Fe, okay, and I would do grounding, healing nature Kind of. I feel like that place kind of resets your soul and so I'd engage in being outside and being in the food, the food there is so wonderful, but yeah, I do Santa Fe. Chris: Perfect, Elaine. Thank you so much for taking the time. Congratulations on the second go round with edit. Elaine: There we go, it's going to be successful right. Chris: So thank you, and we look forward to coming to the store and maybe we'll do it in there. Elaine: Oh, I'd love it, and thank you, I'm grateful. Special Guest: Elaine Turner.

In today's episode of Building Texas Business, Mike Vellano joins us to share the things he has learned from building his company, Vortex. As the CEO who has steered Vortex's innovative growth, Mike offers a look inside deal-making - including acquiring their significant European branch. Beyond mechanics, it's a celebration of relationships that drive success. We explore personal connections too - from Mike's early job to his passion for Tex-Mex. Plans for an Italian sabbatical link work ambitions with heritage. Mike's gratitude for support systems and understanding of sacrifice offers a holistic view of leading an expanding company. Join us for stories of commitment, strategy and groundedness through change. Mike's experience navigating Vortex's eventful voyage provides actionable insights for any enterprise. SHOW HIGHLIGHTS Mike shares his journey of strategic acquisitions and company growth, emphasizing the significance of people, process, and technology in building a successful enterprise. We explore the legacy of Mike's family in the water infrastructure industry and how this history has influenced his professional path and the founding of Vortex Companies. Chris discusses the challenges and motivations behind starting Vortex in 2015, drawing parallels with the entrepreneurial spirit exemplified by figures like Kobe Bryant. Mike reflects on the transformation from a hands-on CEO to a leader who empowers his team and how he leverages team strengths through delegation. We touch on the importance of maintaining a company's core values, with a focus on the "win as a team" philosophy and the role it plays in Vortex's culture. Mike provides insights on the integration process of new companies and people into Vortex's culture, emphasizing the value of internal sourcing for successful expansion. We discuss the recent acquisition of a foundational manufacturing company and the strategic considerations behind taking calculated risks in business. Mike expresses his personal love for Tex-Mex cuisine and his anticipation for a sabbatical in Italy, highlighting the balance between professional aspirations and personal heritage. Chris and Mike explore the intuitive and emotional aspects of business negotiations and the importance of emotional intelligence in steering deals to success. Mike details the complex nature of legal matters in international deals and the reliance on expert legal counsel to navigate antitrust issues and other legal challenges. LINKSShow Notes Previous Episodes About BoyarMiller About Vortex Companies GUESTS Mike VellanoAbout Mike TRANSCRIPT (AI transcript provided as supporting material and may contain errors) Chris: In this episode, you will meet Mike Vellano, founder and CEO of Vortex companies. Mike and his team have built Vortex through a series of strategic acquisitions since 2015, 17 in total by focusing on people, process and technology. Mike, I want to welcome you to building Texas business. Thanks for taking the time to join me. Mike: You got it, man. Great to be here. Chris: Yeah, let's kind of just dive right in. You're the CEO of Vortex companies. Let's start by just telling the audience you know what that company is and what it's known for. Mike: Vortex is a comprehensive and full portfolio of products and services that serve to repair wastewater and storm water assets, pipes, structures, anything that you, anything that lives in a municipal or a commercial industrial application, and we do it all non-intrusively and through what's called trenchless technology Okay yeah. So find a pipe without excavating. Chris: Okay. Mike: So we get to save the environment a little bit every day. Chris: That's good, I like that. So tell us like this how did you find your way into this industry? Mike: So I'm a, my background, I got a. I have a picture of my great grandfather, paul Villano, laying a water main. In 1925, Italian immigrant came to this country installing a water main and I mean just connected to New York. My family actually fixed that same water main years later. I'm not a finance guy or I don't have an MBA. I'm a. I founded Vortex and I've spent my entire career in this industry, other than you know, cooking in a restaurant and college or bagging a few groceries. I've been married to this trade and and moving that forward, my family was in. My family had a pipe supply business and a and it was in trench shoring and open excavation. My father was one of the pioneers in this industry. In 1994, brought a technology here with my family. The business was actually called trenchless technology and and I left the family business to go to go at a quick stop at a trenchless services business. And then you know the vision to get this thing going. Chris: Wow, so so in. I guess there's a lot of ways. It's kind of a continuation of the family business. Mike: Yeah, I mean, if you look at, my grandfather was using an old steam cable machine to lay a water main to. You know my family delivering and supplying, you know, frames and covers and fire hydrants One of the first water work suppliers in the country to my, my, my father and his brothers and my own goals, who are all entrepreneurs, watching them expand it and bring new technology to, and all of them you know, sort of systematically advancing with the industry, with water infrastructure and buried assets and now vortex is. You know we're an innovative, we're an, we do a lot of R&D and technology development and we and we get to do some really great things with in some pretty, some pretty tough areas. Chris: So it's interesting you mentioned innovation and and R&D. What are some of the things that that you do to kind of instill the innovative side or innovative spirit within the company? Mike: You know, I think, if I think about you know our core values, we have this, our most. Our core values are centered around this, this statement or mantra, called. You know we win big together and then, as we drive down into our culture, we have that. You know we actually have that trademark. It's a big part of what we do. We sign off emails on it and we rally around it if you go into an office, but winning big is thinking big. You know that's a big part of our marketing strategy and you know what we have, the way we think about products that work in infrastructure. You know they don't always come from the lab to the field. They come from the field and they're perfected in a lab and and we have a lot of great people that are that have dedicated their career to this industry, that we've worked with for a long time, and I think everybody at Port Texas is an innovator and I think our culture drives that. Chris: That's great, yeah, so it sounds like you kind of encourage it at all levels, not just some one department that's responsible for things. But are there any things that you do to kind of allow a you know a process for the ideas from the field to bubble up? How do you create that I guess in engagement or pride for people to speak up? Mike: You know, I think having, I think having what what you know Tretches technology is innovative in itself. I mean we're taking liners and pregnant with resin and going through a manhole and we're essentially performing angioplasty in a sewer application. You know we're. When we're coding a large, you know 16 foot diameter culvert with a geopolymer, I mean there's, those solutions don't aren't solved with a material only, it's a system. So it's people, process and technology. I think the way that we innovate and encourage innovation is really, is really through. You know, it can be reactive, it can be proactive. And we started our geopolymer business. We really focused on how the field you know the material led to really, you know, try a ton of innovation and perfection in the field. That was driven by most of our superintendents and most of our group people. So, you know, I think it's, I think it's a combination and it's a, it's chemistry. It's, it's, you know, some of it's organic chemistry, but there is engineering and there is some real science behind it. But there is an art form to what we do. You know there is. You cannot perfect this technology in a closed environment. You need to be able to deal with a lot. You know pipes are pipes of all kinds of construction and diameters, and and condition. Chris: Gotcha, Let me take you back down to the building. You said the beginning. You mentioned that you kind of, you know, broke off and started this. What year was that? Mike: So that would have been 2015. Chris: 15. So you know, that's, you know, the one of the questions I like to ask. You know, guys like you is okay, you had to take, get, I guess, the intestinal fortitude to be ready to kind of take that step, say, okay, I'm actually going to do this on my own. What? How did you know you were ready? What were some of the things looking back that you know, you thought, you know you go, man, that was really tough and had I known it would have been this tough, I may not have done it. Mike: Yeah, I think you know I read it when you're in, when you're in YPO or you're in some of the organizations that are involved. You get some really great case study. And you know there was an article about Kobe Bryant and somebody asked Kobe Bryant how you know how he thought, if he thought he would ever play in the NBA. He's like well, my dad played in the NBA. You know my dad was an entrepreneur, was a CEO. You know I saw that, I saw that spirit and all with all my uncles and my family and my grandfather was in great uncle brought products to this country and innovated waterworks supply and we're one of the first in the country to do something like that. So my risk profile was kind of set out at birth. I mean, I don't, seeing it being around it, seeing your name and the pride of having that on the side of a truck or the side of a building was always something that I wanted to either stay in the business or grow it or, you know, have something that I could, you know, not only make my family proud of but also build on my own and I think, the real working for my family and you know, working for my family, you know we always say we're. You know I would never change that experience. But working around entrepreneurs, and then the stop that I made before I started Vortex, you know, allowed me to get to, you know, the MBA I never wanted you know working around private equity and doing some things that allowed me to recognize, you know, the principles of business that some family businesses don't always fully capture, like HR or fleet management or things that are, or how you know how you manage a P and L and things that are typically, you know, you know, managed at a page in my Italian family, a patriarchal level or you know, however that comes to bear. So I think I always, you know well, my wife, I remember coming home and she had 12, you know Ford envelopes and was like, what are these? And you know I was like, well, we finance some trucks, it's gonna be okay. You know, we had no money in our bank account. So I think some of that stuff is easier for me just because I, you know, back to the like, I had somebody that modeled that risk profile and that ability to say, hey, just go take some chances and you create your own lock and you work. Chris: That's a great story. I mean, it's unique. You're right, cause it sounds like you almost didn't have a choice in it. Right, you were just brought up through from birth to understanding how entrepreneurs work, the risk about it. But yeah, as you were talking, and that has to put a whole another level of pressure on you to say, yeah, this is what I, this is what we do in the Vellano family, I better make sure it works, cause everyone else looking back uncles, grandfathers, and they've all made it work. I better make this work. Mike: That has to be a whole another level of pressure 100%, and I think that's, I think that's, I think that is a driving principle, right, you know people, you can harness pressure and use it, use it effectively. I mean, sometimes I probably run myself a little too hard, but I still am afraid to be late to work. Chris: You know it's just. I love that, yeah, Especially in today's world right that the CEO is afraid to be late and there's that level of kind of accountability that, as a leader, you want to instill in everybody in the organization. Mike: What are some of the? Chris: things you do to kind of to do that to demonstrate that. I mean, obviously it starts with you know your actions, but how do you try to show up as a leader to make sure that those values that you grew up with get infiltrated throughout the organization? Mike: Yeah, I remember going to the first management meeting with my family and and you know we it was you know if you've been around Italians, you, there's always a big dinner. There's always, you know, more appetizers than entrees on the table, good wine, or you know definitely a few cocktails, and you know you sit there and you go and you run and you come in town for a meeting and I remember one of our branch managers. I remember one of our branch managers showing up late and my dad locking the door and just saying you know it's like that, it's two minutes late, it's like, well, we, this meeting started at seven o'clock. Chris: And. Mike: I've done that a couple of times. I'm mellowing out a little bit, but when I first started this business, I mean as a 30 year old guy, you know you're trying to prove a point and you realize that there's better way. You know that's not always the way to do it, but that left a left an impression on me. I think you know there are definitely times where I get overextended and I got to move calls around and I'm not. I want to be, I want to be more, but this is. It's a big job with a lot of responsibility and you got to prioritize differently. But I think you know our core values are you know we are a driven business and I think them seeing drive and our organization, not only by me but our team I mean our team is our team is a very close group, you know. I think, like when we went through our core values, we talked about how teams win. You know families fight, you know, so I don't know he's, I don't. You know we think like a family, but we work like a team, we are a team and I think them knowing that we are going to win as a team, I think that, look, they know that we're all going to get up, that nobody's, that nobody's fallen behind. And I think in a dynamic organization where that's a driven organization and you know they see every time they walk into a vortex office, they see that core value, that we are driven and core values are for all. You know some people. We stand behind ours and I think some of them have become a little cliche, but I think that's how we keep people. I think that's how we, I think that's a model that comes from our entire executive team down to the organization. Chris: Yeah, I would say you know we talk about core values. In my experience, if you identify them right, then their behavioral characteristics for the behavior that you, as the organization, want to see, expect to see and, almost you know, demand to see for those that are going to be successful in your organization. So you talk a lot about I love the win as a team and I thought it was. I love that family's fight, tim's win, that's a good one. I'm going to use that again. But so culture is definitely important to any organization. It sounds like it is. You know, obviously, the years with that. The win is a team mantra. To me, that, then, means that the hiring and onboarding process is critical to making sure you're getting the right people during the interview process as you're bringing them on and building the team. So what are some of the things that you do at Vortex to try to make sure you've got the right processes in place in the interview and integration process to add successful members to the team? Mike: I think that onboarding is we have a great HR person that our onboarding process when we first started was where are we going to grab a steak and or where are we going to where's a fun place to do an interview? And we've created some. We Brooke has really helped us to kind of formalize some things, and our head of shared services that to make that first day you know that first day at Vortex their most exciting day. I mean that's it's got to be. You know whether it's the type of swag they get or their waybook or whatever those things are, and what their introduction is to an organ, to a high performing organization. I mean they got to feel like they're. They got to feel that fire and that encouragement day one. You know when you I think that if you build your team right and you build your people, you know we have we've acquired seven companies now and our executive team has leadership across our. The leadership across our organization has come from those, has come from those transactions and those folks have moved into pretty dynamic roles in the industry and high level leadership roles. So we've brought some of their core values along. But we've also elevated several members of you know an acquisition we did in Maine. We have three people running different parts of the business. Our COO has mentored several you know of our younger project managers and sales people into roles that they're going to be leaders in our business and we have the same role, you know, for me as sort of a sales support role that you know young men that started around 22,. One of those guys is is our is our senior VP of services now and he's been with us for 12 or 14 years through through other places. So I think we focus on you know it is and it's a sink or swim Sometimes. We're, sometimes, you know we do, we do sort of police, our crew and we in our drive gets in the way of really understanding, you know, and wanting everybody to be more than maybe they should be in some cases. But yeah, I think that was a bit of a ramble but hopefully I answered your question. Chris: Oh yeah, you did. I think it's great. So I think in that answer that you hit on a couple of things. I want to follow up on 17 acquisitions in that sense 25. Yeah, that's small to large. Mike: I know that we've got. Chris: Yeah, I know that you recently just closed a new transaction, so it sounds like there's been a lot of growth through acquisition. You know entrepreneurs or people that started a company. I mean, they're faced with right. You know, how do I grow? Do I grow organically? Do I grow by acquisition? Do I do both When's it right? So what are some of the things I guess that you could share from your kind of strategic thinking about? When you felt it was right to make those acquisitions, how did you vet that to go Okay, this is a good fit, knowing, I guess, there's no sure bet. Mike: Yeah, we're acquiring businesses from $1 million to $15 million, $20 million in revenue. So a few of these businesses have been smaller tuck-ins or technologies or somebody would call them an asset deal. So we have, and in all of those we've never hired a banker. We source them internally because we either have a customer or a vendor relationship and we have some, you know, we have some. We have a little bit of a matrix that we use, you know, in the sense of do they have personnel, do they have technologies? Do they support the things that we do? Are there people innovative enough to expand? And, if we can, we add value. We're not going to buy a business that we can't grow organically or turn into something that is truly going to make that business better and make our business better. Sometimes it's technology and sometimes it's, but there is always an organic element to everything that we do. We start, we add crews every day, we implement our technology developments into our own service businesses or into others, and a true differentiator in how we go to market, like how we go to market up until, you know, up until this recent transaction, which is a products company, a subsidiary that I can get into that in a few minutes, but this is the biggest, the largest acquisition we've made and most of our product product's business was developed and grown organically through some smaller, what I would call partnering opportunities with. You know our we're so proud of our business out in Utah. You know we grew we've grown that business, by you know, 20 times from when we acquired it in 2019 with because we had a partner that understood the chemistry, we understood the operation and commercial side and together, you know, great products and a great strategy work. So that's been our that's been a big part of our strategy. And the product side and the services side. We've bought, we've acquired some mature businesses. We just bought a business in the UK that we're really excited about. It's got an excellent market opportunity. It's a service business but they fit our DNA. They're not afraid to do, they're not afraid to go out and work with difficult customers or on difficult projects or take on emergency jobs. You know we live in a municipal world and we really do focus on selling. We go after negotiated work. We don't just go and low bid work like a lot of, like a lot of municipal contractors do or have to do because they don't have the resources or you know, or some of the, I think, some of the talent that we have to go utilize procurement networks or emergency contracts. So it's a steady diet of acquiring to build on or just doing it. Crash roots organic. Chris: Gotcha. So then the next question comes. You do all these acquisitions. Acquisitions sound great and sexy and you go close a deal, but it will only be successful if you are successful in the integration process. You've done 17 of different sizes. It sounds like you've gotten pretty good at the integration process, so I want to talk to you about something about that. It's clearly not happening by accident if you're good at it. So what are some of the tips that you could share about what you all have done there? Processes you've you've developed I'm sure they haven't all been successful. You've learned from some failures, so talk to us about that, tell us kind of you know how that's evolved and vortex for you and your team to make sure you get the integration piece right. Mike: I think we start integrating a deal before it's close and I think that's important and I don't think that's a strategy that can be. I don't know if you can hear that thing. No. I don't know, and I don't know if that's a. I don't think that's a strategy that everyone has a luxury to support. But part of our story is we you know we've never hired as never hiring a banker. We are very familiar with the acquisitions that we're going in to make, both from a personnel perspective, the technologies that they support and how they think about the world. You know we want, we want these acquisitions to be as excited to join vortex as we are to acquire them. The other thing that we don't do is buy 100% of anything. We're typically partnering with a seller that is going to come into the business and continue on and you know we and we do a really good job of I think of, of, you know creating the right level of support. I'm understanding what their skill sets are. At a seller come to me after we bought his company and say you know what? I always wanted to own a business but I never wanted to run it and I'm like, ok, I can see that, but let's put you in a row Like you're. We're here because you were doing something right. Let's figure out what you're, what you're good at, and I think you know our team collectively took a step back and was like this is what he's going to be good at. And he's been and he's one of our best in that role now and still a shareholder and had enough, you know, hasn't had enough. You know really believed in what we're doing and we believed in him as a in this role. And you know, some of a big part of integration is understanding what everyone's thinking and being transparent and saying, hey, you know, you really think of this. We need to get you a better finance person, like, yeah, your finance person can go do this. We were not here to. I think our real focus is finding people and the other thing that we don't do and we buy cash flowing businesses that have good roots and have good people and we don't buy distress businesses. We're not. That's just not who we are and that's understanding what your capabilities are. We don't we want to manage. We want to manage a business, to grow it and build it and make it better. Like I said before, and I think when you really look at, hey, this is we. As you grow up, you know you you'll learn to deal with those, with those situations. We just had a business in Colorado. We kind of took a step back and said, hey, we're breaking even here. This is a distraction. Maybe we can move these assets somewhere else and focus somewhere else, and this is how we can do it in a way that will be more productive for everybody involved. So I think a big part of integration is really understanding our deals and having that luxury by being part of the diligence and really, I think, starting integration almost before we close an acquisition. Chris: Yeah Well, and what I hear you saying is look, we're very thoughtful about and transparent about, the process, and those are two key elements, I think, to anything being successful, so that you're going to have clear communication. It also sounds like you take a little page out to Jim Collins. Good to grade and get the right people on the bus, but in the right seat. Yeah, so your example of I want to always want to be an owner but didn't want to run it. I mean, that's someone that probably should be on the bus, obviously, but he just sure on the right seat for him. Mike: Yeah, I think that you know it's the my father would call it the Holy Trinity. It's sales, operations and finance. But you know, good to grade is that's one of the one of the big takeaways of our best businesses have just really a really great balance across all three of those, all three of those areas. I mean anything R&D, anything project level, any good strategy you have to have. You have to hit all three of those areas. Chris: Yeah for sure. So you talked about a lot of these acquisitions being either vendors or partners that you have interacted with over time, so that, in first to me, you do a really good job at Vortex of creating some really strong relationships with your vendors and your business partners, you know. So let's talk about that a little bit. What are some of the things you do to create in your people, I guess, to foster those strong relationships that sometimes lead to these add-on acquisitions and then become part of the team? Any tricks or things there you really encourage? Mike: You know, like you made the comment about innovation before, I mean, I think everybody, you know we have 800 employees now I think we have, you know, 700 of them want to be investment bankers. I get calls all the time hey, you know someone's supposed to say, hey, you know this, hey, I bet you that guy would be really interesting in this. You know, in this role, or we should look at this company, you know, I think, and some of those have come to fruition and look, you know, when you do that many deals in that time frame which seems like a lot more than it is, but you know, we did four deals in COVID which was crazy, but we all. But you know, I think a big part of that is, yeah, I think a big part of that is like we look at hundreds of deals. I mean we still we can turn. You know we're not going to get into early diligence, like there's some things I can look at with our team and our team is in the higher, you know, the more involved, the more involved we get with a company. You know we might say you know, man, these guys don't even know how to order material, like they're unorganized. You know, I know they want to put like, this is going to be a lot to fix. You know, maybe we can work together and there's been times where we've worked with companies for years three, three, four years talking to them about a deal why we work parallel as a vendor or them as a sub, and then they become an acquisition and I think we both got better together. You know, I think that some of that stuff is, but there's that's also a luxury in our strategy, but that makes our strategy sound. You know, we don't have, we don't have. You know you look at these deals and, hey, if half of them went well with our organic growth which is in the, you know just, you know, high teens to 20s and archaegers in the mid 20s, you know it's, it's, it's a great story. I think that was like as you should be. Chris: So let's talk a little bit. You know more about you and your evolution as a leader. You talked about it a minute ago, just referencing how you're probably a little bit harder, maybe from the lessons you saw from your dad, and you've evolved. Let's dig in a little bit there. I mean, how would you describe your leadership style and how do you think that's changed and evolved? You know, over the year since you started, you know this company and and grown into where it is today. Mike: You know, I think I know what. I know what I'm not, and I know that I have to surround myself with people, that that you know you backfill by weakness, I think. But at the same time, you know our CFO has been my partner for 15 years. You know we've had, we have, people in our team that we've worked with for all of that and even before and even going back 20 years in some cases. You know, I think leadership, I think leadership to me has evolved as I've really understood what I'm truly. You know what I'm really good at, and having enough and sort of having, I think, being intentional and having some humility and being able to say, hey, I'm not. You know, I believe in the one minute manager. I don't need a ton of detail, I just need to know what the issue is, and I've gotten better at really understanding why that detail is important. But, you know, as a leader, I think I think gaining perspective and, you know, and listening, I think YPO has helped me in a lot of ways. You know, being around, I think peer development is something that I never, you know that was not. That's not something. When you grow up in an Italian family in upstate New York. You know, therapy isn't something I don't know. That's something I don't know if I knew the meaning of that word until I was married, but those aren't things you don't. You don't share family business, you don't share problems, you fix problems, and I think that I think in some ways, that's good. Like you know, you, I know I want to run into I think I wanted to run into every birding building until about five years ago, and I've started to realize that there's people on my team that are better at things, that I am and can execute on that. So you know, I think it's a combination of a lot of things, but I do enjoy leading, I do love my team and I, like I love seeing them be successful. Chris: That's good. Now I think it like I said, I think it starts with drive right. You have to have the drive and the want to and a little bit of that risk profile to take the risk and then I think over time you learn maybe humility and empathy and you can let others do some things, backfill where you're not as strong or you want to provide the opportunity. Mike: But yeah, don't get me wrong, the New York Italian does come out. Chris: It's a, it's a, it's real, so Well let's, we'll test that a little bit then on, say, because I like to ask people you know I'm a big believer in I think we learned from failure right and so you know, is there a situation or decision or circumstance you can think of? You know there was a failure right when you got it wrong but you were able to recover, or what you learned from that moving forward that made you better, stronger, you know, leader person, whatever that might be. Mike: I think I, you know, I probably learned from the. You know we always say when we're hiring somebody from a competitor, you know, try to be a good leaver. I think the way I left my family business was probably not. You know it was. It's never perfect. If I could go back, I'd probably. I would probably do that differently. You know there's been technologies that I have died on a hill for and you take a step back and you go. God, why did I think that would work? You know, and I think now I'm having conversations that people had with me 15 years ago where they're going, hey, what do we should buy this company? I'm like, yeah, you know, I'm like that's not the right company for us. And I think there's times where I know I need to explain myself better. But yeah, I think there's been some. We've had. I've had some bad partners that we had to buy out and that I separated with. And you know, when you're going through that, you realize like, hey, this is this guy you know you want to. It's all there fall in your point, in the finger and then, as you get past it, you go you know, I didn't. I perspective in time or time changes perspective, right? So, yeah, I think there's certainly no shortage of things that I failed at. Chris: Gotcha. Well, the other thing I kind of like to ask people as we start to wrap things up is if you think about one or two things you would impart to an aspiring entrepreneur that if you're going to, if you're going to go chase that dream, you know here, here are a thing or two that I think you should keep in mind. Or you know, maybe it's a do this and don't do that type of thing. What would be that from you to kind of that generation, next generation of entrepreneurs, man? Mike: I love move fast and break stuff. Like and you know what, like when I did at first, I felt like we're breaking more. I feel like we've got a point where we move, really we move. It seems like we're moving at the speed of light. But, you know, something like this deal we just closed, which is, you know, sort of a dream deal for us. It's a company that is a founding, founding manufacturer business. It's applied, they're one of the largest producers of liners in our space and have go back to Eric Wood, who's really a, you know, a founding father of our business, who started a company called in situ forum. And you know, we've been working on this deal for two and a half years. I mean, this isn't like 90 days. We got the book and we hired a big New York law firm and our banker, you know, handled all the conversation and we walked in the door. You know, and and here are the changes we're going to make Like we have a foundational, innovative, pioneering you know industry giant that we want to, that we want to take to what we want to take into into its next evolution. And, you know, I think about moving fast. I think move fast breaks, but maybe we're not moving as fast as you think, but at the same time, you know, I do think that's a big you know. Don't be afraid to risk. Focus on what you're good at, because in the minute don't get distracted from that. And and don't be afraid to partner with. You know you're going to have some bad partners, but you'll. You'll if you can find the right ones. That means all the difference. Chris: That's really good. You know the point to that. Similar with employees. Right, you're going to make some bad decisions, whether it's a partner or personnel. But once you realize that move fast, right to cut, because a bad employee can be kind of road culture or a bad partner obviously can run a business down. But once you know that definitely want to move fast. Mike: Yeah, I mean, if it seems like it's, if it seems like you know, bring a raincoat. If it's raining every day, you know we're sitting here having these calls, like this business every month is having the same challenges. Okay, you know, you know, and we've gotten the point of my partners and the key leadership on our team where we look each other in the eye and we go all right, it's, yeah, we need to make a change, and then you know that that leads to some quick and real thoughtful action. So, yeah, I totally agree. Chris: Well, let's appreciate all that. I mean, I think, your success at more taxing your teams I know it takes more than just you in seven acquisitions since 2015 and the growth up to 800 employees is is anything. It's very impressive. So congrats on all that and the new acquisition. I want to ask a few personal questions Just before as we wrap up. What was your first? Mike: job. That was actually my icebreaker at my integration meeting today. My first job was was that Vellano brothers? Chris: Okay, doing what? Mike: I was I think it was counting T bolts because I wasn't old enough to drive a forklift or picking up paper. I remember my father told me hey, I want you to go pick up paper on the. I'll give you a dollar for every piece of paper you pick up on the warehouse floor. And I went out and I had like a grocery bag. I'm like gotta be $1,000. I think you gave me here's five bucks. Go buy a soda. That's right. That was my first job. Chris: Okay, I know you're from New York. You've been in Texas a while, so I ask all my guests do you prefer Tex max or barbecue? Mike: I prefer Tex max. Okay, I like a margarita. I like some good, proper cheats, texas cheese enchiladas and a good margarita. Chris: That's right. So last question is if you could take a 30 day sabbatical, where would you go? What would you do? Italy, no hesitation there. Mike: Anywhere in Italy would be okay. Chris: Very good, very good. Well, that's a popular answer, by the way, but I guess you have family ties that would make it your answer to you. Mike: So some family ties, and I like one that makes both of us. Chris: So, mike, thanks again for taking the time to come on the podcast. Really enjoyed getting to know you and hear your story and wish you nothing but the best of success in 2024. Mike: Awesome. Thank you for your time. I appreciate it. Chris: All right, we're going to end the recording there. Special Guest: Mike Vellano.

In today's episode of Building Texas Business, join me as I welcome Corey Harlock of Key Hire Solutions to discuss his transformational journey transitioning from hospitality management to revolutionizing small business recruitment strategies. We explore Corey's grassroots experience and how reflecting on skills and networking empowered changes benefiting businesses, employees, and communities. From precision management to respectful rejection, Corey shares recruitment nuances and emphasizes reputation's role in success over time. As remote options demand adaptation, Corey relates relatable career anecdotes and perspective-shaping reads. His insights illuminate relationship-building, timing, and vision for seizing opportunities in fluctuating job markets. SHOW HIGHLIGHTS Corey discusses his transition from the hospitality industry to recruitment, highlighting the impact of hiring on small business owners' lives and the broader community. We explore the importance of reflecting on skills and the value of networking in Corey's journey to founding Key Hire Solutions. I emphasize the significance of managing the entire recruitment process to improve hiring success rates for small businesses. Corey explains the importance of treating candidates with respect throughout the recruitment process, including providing clear communication in cases of rejection. We examine the current job market trends, including the scarcity of candidates and the rise of remote and hybrid work arrangements. Corey advises on the critical nature of timely decision-making in the hiring process to secure top talent. We discuss how to hire for future growth, highlighting the need to find candidates who can scale with the company and align with its values and culture. Corey shares personal anecdotes about his early career, his move to Texas, and his reading preferences, such as "The Energy Bus." I recount the importance of meaningful connections in business and how books like "Barbarians at the Gate" await on Corey's reading list for inspiration. Corey offers advice to business owners on upgrading their hiring standards to attract professionals with the capacity to significantly grow their business. LINKSShow Notes Previous Episodes About BoyarMiller About Keyhire.solutions GUESTS Corey HarlockAbout Corey TRANSCRIPT (AI transcript provided as supporting material and may contain errors) Chris: In today's episode you will meet Corey Harlock, founder of Key Hire Solutions. Corey's goal at Key Hire is to improve the lives of business owners by improving the talent they hire, so they can focus on what is important to them. Corey, I want to thank you for taking time to join me here on Building Texas Business. Corey: Oh, great to be here. Yeah, good, good. Chris: So you're the founder of Key Hire Solutions. Tell us a little bit about what Key Hire is and what it's known for. Corey: Key Hire is. It's a business solution for small business owners. So we really target those small business owners five to twenty five million dollars and the reason we kind of the goal and mission of Key Hire is to make the lives of the business owners better by improving the talent and the capacity and the experience inside their business so they have time to focus on the things they want to focus on Whether that's getting a better night's sleep, spending more time with their family, going out and getting more sales, improving their business. And we can improve the lives of the business owners. They can be more focused and more happy at their business. It in turn improves the lives of their people in their business who then can go out and be more successful in their personal and professional lives and in turn that reflects on the community. So we really do see a holistic hesitate to use the word global because it's really community focus. But if we can do right by the business owner, they can do right by their people who can then go out and do right by their community and their families and their surroundings. Chris: It kind of builds each segment, kind of builds on the other right, correct. And when you tell a story that way, it emphasizes how connected it all is. Corey: Has to be yeah. Chris: So how did you get started with this, or what was a little bit about your background led you through your journey to get to Key High? Corey: Sure, yeah, I'm a recovering hospitality guy. I worked in restaurants for years and years. I did high-end, fine dining in boutique hotels out in Banff, alberta, canada, in the Rocky Mountains for years and years. That's where I met my wife and one day I came to the conclusion I was. I didn't want to be in that game anymore, and so I went through this kind of reflection process and said what skills do I have? And I kind of came out with three areas, three things I thought I could, that would could transition from the hospitality world into other worlds, and one of them was marketing, one of them was sales and one of them was recruiting. And at that time I was working six days a week and I had one day off a week and I made a promise to myself I would have coffee with anyone on that one day off a week and for about three, three months I just had coffee with. You know, you send out a help notice to your network, right? I'm looking at making a change. Here's what I think I can do. Does anyone know anyone I should talk to? And people get back to you. So I started having coffee and I ended up with this guy named Bob Scott who was a partner in a company called Questus recruitment in Calgary, alberta, and told him about my hospitality experience and in hospitality, a large part of what you do because of high turnover you do a lot of hiring. So I thought I was pretty good I thought I was good at it and he told me about how they had this great hospitality program at recruitment. He then also went on to tell me that none of us know anything about hospitality. So they hired me to build at this hospitality program and so that was my foray into recruiting and that was agency recruiting and I was with them for a number of years and it progressed that the main owner was a guy named Morgan Art and so eventually I created a company within a company called Questus hospitality recruitment and then Morgan and I partnered in that and then I bought him out, went out on my own and changed the name of the company of the hospitality recruitment network and did that for a couple years and then we got transferred to Houston. So I closed the doors and came down here. But I never liked the agency model. I mean it works for some people, but for me it just didn't, because it was so transactional and oftentimes you would work with business owners or corporations and you could see the problem they had or the disconnects or how they could be better. But as a transactional agency recruiter they just find you people right and don't bore me with that, just give me some. Chris: Yeah, I don't want to be better. Corey: I just need people. So you know, oftentimes you're putting people into a situation where you kind of didn't know how it was gonna work out and there's a lot of big failure rate in that type of recruiting and key hire. I wanted to create it to work with those little guys on a long way around. But I wanted to create it to work with the small business owners to really help them and impact them and work side by side with them and allow them to leverage that experience and improve their experience and their business and then their lives of their people and their lives of the community people in the community yeah. Chris: So I mean, I think one of the things that employers maybe don't realize on the front end, but certainly at some point come to realize how expensive recruiting can be for your business, from not just dollars out the pocket for a recruiting fee but you spend time away from your business doing the recruiting, sure, you have the onboarding, you have all these things until someone can be highly productive and, quite frankly, from the the hiring side, you know the transactional agency model. Sometimes you don't think they really care, like said, they just want to place them once they get a fee. Corey: So there's this bad taste about even having to engage in the process and I think where I never aligned with that is when my motivation is to get paid and your motivation as a business owner is to make your business better. Those don't line up in the big picture right. There's a big disconnect in there and what do you do then, I guess? Chris: or what have you done? Key hire to you know. Bring that right in the line yeah, that and that's the question. Corey: So when I built the business, the three kind of core values I wanted to that I thought were important were the value of the time of the small business owner, because, exactly what you said, I don't think anyone starts a small business or starts a business because they love to hire people. They have a passion and something they love to do and part of growing a business is hiring right. Chris:Well, I can promise you everyone that's come on this podcast, as a business owner has said, how important it is to have good people, and right means hiring good people, not missing. So, to your point, though, they think about the passion, the idea that's the core to the business, but they all acknowledge down the road that hiring good people is the key to success yeah, and so I agree with that. Corey: And you golf, I do so. I haven't golfed in a while, but I used to golf quite a bit. I was never very good and I've probably hit tens of thousands of golf balls. Could I be an instructor, golf instructor? no, because I probably hit 10,000 golf balls wrong yeah right, and just because we hire every day doesn't mean we are experts at hiring. It means we've hired because we've had to and so we wanted to honor people's time. We wanted to impact their business through kind of experience and talent. But we also wanted to create a pricing model that was fair and equitable for both sides. And that was the biggest key for me was, you know, not having huge fees, not have a business owner feel like man, I paid up a lot or I've invested a lot in trying to get someone and the results were me yeah so we, the model of key hire is, you know, we get paid for the work we do, but we guarantee the hire and the work we do is a lot more exhaustive than what a traditional agency might do. And so, if I break down those three criteria, on average our clients pay less than 15% per hire, if you wanted to compare it to the agency model. Right, sometimes they're less than 10% and I think that's great because I want them to get value and we show up as a fixed cost on the P&L. There's no surprises, there's no gotchas, it is what it is. You can budget for what we do and we have monthly fees that are very affordable for the business. But the second piece of that is, you know, making sure that we're valuing their time. We dive into the business and we spend, you know, 8, 10, 12 hours inside a business before we do anything. We want to create an action plan for that business owner. You know we're an in-sourced solution, so we become their fractional department of talent. So we want to make sure we understand the business almost as well as they do before we go to work for them, so we can tell their story in the marketplace, right? Chris: Correct and be looking for the right fit from a cultural standpoint, mindset standpoint for that company right. Corey: Exactly. And then the you just touched on something really important, right? There's the kind of three things we want to break down. We want to break down the experience they need in their business. We want to break down the culture fit, because that is super important. If you have a small business, if you have 20 employees and we're bringing someone in, that's 5% of your culture. And if that's not aligned or we always like to say, if we're going to put someone on your bus, we want to put them at the front so all the people behind you are saying, wow, that's a really great, they're really good at what they do and they're a really good fit. I need to raise my game right. Rising tide raises all boats, so we want to make sure we're doing that. The third and most important and overlooked element is capacity. So many people hire for their current needs because they're in this kind of fire drill. I just need someone and they look good enough, right, reactionary, correct. So we want to get in there and build capacity in the business. One of our favorite phrases is we're not hiring someone to run your $10 million business. We're hiring someone to run your $50 million business, currently doing 10. So we want someone who can bring the experience and the capacity to build process and procedure and has leadership capabilities to scale. Chris: Well, I, you know, full disclosure for everyone out there. I can speak from experience. Have them work with you now for the better part of 2023. It's a totally different experience, in a good way and dealing with the hiring and recruiting and acquisition of talent, Love the investments you made in learning our firm and our business, and how can't imagine how much time I didn't see you put in behind the scenes to make sure you were bringing us the right candidates and cutting out the first two rounds of interviews, just to you know. It is a huge time savings, you know, for us. Corey: Yeah, well, I think we put two people in here, and, if my memory serves me, you guys have conducted a total of four interviews to hire those two people. Chris: Yeah. Corey: And I bet you the total man hours on that would be two, four, probably in the neighborhood of 12 total man hours to make those two hires from Boyer Miller. Yeah, I would say max. Chris: Yeah, so it does seem like. Well, obviously there's a model that I think has value you know talk about. Maybe. I guess you know what led you to that. Because in my mind, what you're doing in the hiring process is innovative. I don't know anyone else that really does this. What? Corey: was it. Chris: I guess, based on your experience, that kind of led you to this. What feedback did you get? You know, would you draw upon? Corey: The agency model is kind of go out, hunt, kill, throw it over the fence and then turn it over to a company who may or may not have a really effective interview hiring process. So, selfishly, I thought if I can control everything from beginning to end and understand the needs of the business and the needs of the candidate and manage those expectations, you would have a bit of better success rate and you can learn from what's happening. You know, a lot of times we'll go through the process with someone, like we did with you for the first role, and we didn't get it right the first time. But because I was there and managing the process and a part of it, I could hear the feedback, I could learn about your company more so that I could be better at going into the market, telling your story and identifying who's right for your business. So I think what's different is if we're going to work with you, it's required that we manage the whole process. We will never when people say well, look, you just bring us the people and we'll take it from there. That's a hard no for me, because for me to do all that work you know you talked about stuff behind the scenes For us to do the 10, 12, 15 hours of work behind the scenes before you give us an hour of your time. It doesn't make sense, right To just say here, I've done all this work, here's what it is Now, give it to you and then be blind about why didn't it work? Why was it a fit? Why was it a fit? Chris: Right. I guess it prevents you from learning and adapting and getting to that success point, because you said you earlier, you guaranteed the hire. Corey: Yeah, and I can't guarantee someone I was an involved with from the beginning to the end. And the other thing is we keep people on time. Yeah, because timing is a big issue in terms of getting people on board in this marketplace. So if we're driving that process and kind of, you know, tapping our clients saying, hey, I need to hear from you, we need to get this done, and they expect that right, if that wasn't part of the agreement and I'm just this pushy guy who don't worry about it, you've done your part, we'll let us handle the rest, it doesn't make sense. So we just want to control the process, because this is all key hire dots. We just do talent strategy acquisition and develop processes for hiring. This is what we're expert in. So in our process, the data says the process works pretty good. Right, we have a 90% success rate in terms of putting people into companies and getting them to their six months and beyond. We have some people that have been working. I have a client the second client I ever signed seven years ago, the person I put in one of the first people I ever put in a business as operations manager, is now the VP of operations seven years later and the owner is still aesthetic with that person. Chris: That's awesome, so it brings up a good point. You clearly have built your business off of key relationships, partnerships with companies and others. What's some advice you can give to other business hours out there about how to go about building those relationships so that they're sustainable and help kind of grow your business from them? Corey: And when you say relationships, you're meaning just within their own markets. Chris: We're both, I think, within your own market and maybe beyond. You've done that to kind of grow your business off of relationships, so what? Are some of the things that you would say you found to be successful in helping you do that. Corey: Well doing. Whatever your product or service is, you have to deliver it well. Right, and I think that's the goal of every business that gets set up. But I think one of the more overlooked things is reputation is one of your biggest recruiting tools. Your reputation in the market, your reputation amongst your peers, reputation cross market who other people might interact with you but the big one is the reputation you have with people who have applied to your company and whether they were hired, interviewed or not. And let me give you an example of what I'm talking about. We don't post jobs, but I know a lot of business owners do, and that's kind of what you have to do as a business owner to try to attract people. So you post a job and 50 people apply to that job and 49 of them don't hear anything ever from you in return for that application. Those 49 people are three or four times more likely to never reapply to your company, even if you get successful and become a big company, they have a bad taste in their mouth and they will not apply to your company and they will tell people I mean, I applied to those guys and they never even come back to me. That's reputation in a really important market, the candidate market. Now, if you were to create a template that just said hey, thank you for your application, your experience looks really good. Unfortunately, I don't think it aligns with the job we have right now and I wouldn't want to put you in a situation where you weren't going to be successful. But I would love to keep your information here on file and reach out. If something more suitable does come open in our company, all the best. What's that person going to say now? Chris: You're definitely going to feel like you cared enough to reach back out. Corey: And you'll be one of the one in a hundred that took the time to reach back out. I can tell you this I've interviewed people and I believe in the good, the bad and the ugly. So throughout the interview process I might come to the conclusion they're not the right fit, and I'll have a conversation with them at the conclusion of our conversation and say here's where I land on this. I don't think this one's a fit, and here's why. You're obviously very good at what you do and I get that, but what we're looking for is really specific and I don't doubt you could figure it out. My challenge is we don't have time for you to figure it out and I would not want you to start a new role where the expectations are super high and you're disappointed and we're disappointed. I don't want to do that too. And man, I bet you 99% of people say you know, corey, that makes a lot of sense. Thank you for being honest with me. Then some of them and I might say 10% or less will follow up with this. I get it. I'm not right for me, but I have someone you should talk to. I've just told them they're not getting the job, but because I took the time to be honest and respectful and clear about why they say you sound like a good guy. Let me help you. Chris: That's amazing yeah. I can see how that would be right. So let's, talk a little bit about just what you're seeing out there in the job market. I mean, you know. Corey: I was talking a minute ago, you know, here we are, and you know, kind of starting a new year. Chris: What are some of the things you think employers should be looking for? And then maybe the other as a candidate, you know what kind of things. What should the expectations be Right, because I think a lot has changed even in the last 12 months about you know those two topics. Corey: Sure, a couple of things. The unemployment claims are going up slowly and they've been talking. I think we're supposed to be going into recession what for about 18, 24 months now. So if it's going to happen or not, it's still unknown. It feels like we're dipping a bit, but what's important to remember is, even in our current market, which feels a little softer than it was, there are still fewer people available than there are jobs open. And I think that number sits around like 0.7, 0.8 people per open job, really Okay. So we're going to be the thick of it and now that the people coming up in the system, there are fewer of them, right, Like we're past the baby boomers and there are just fewer people and there are more open jobs. So even if we get into a bit of a recession, there's never going to be that well, there's going to be so many people apply for this role that we'll just pick right. We are, for now, an imperfectity in a situation where it's a candidate driven market and they can be choosy. So that's something worth knowing. Chris: And just to kind of tag on that, I would have to believe that some of the flexibility and work remote has contributed to that as well. Correct? Corey: Yeah, so I'll touch on that in just a second. So we understand we have fewer people that are going to apply or we're going to be competing for people. If you're excited, I always tell my clients if we're excited about someone, I can promise you someone else's too, because they didn't just apply here. But that's one of the advantages using like a key hire, because we kind of go out and get people, even if they're not looking, and we can kind of get in the rear and have a conversation and engage with them. Chris: That makes sense. I mean it's a competitive. Corey: But if someone has decided to make a move, they're not just talking to you, and if they're good, more companies than yours will be excited about them. So speed matters right. It's the, I think, the stat is. Most candidates, when they start looking for or interviewing for jobs, are off the market in two weeks. So you have 10 business days to get it done. Chris: That's not a lot of time. Corey: But it can be done, right, when we do. That's part of the process that we have, because that's one of those key elements and landing that, those people you want. So then you touched on so we have fewer people and now we have these classifications of schedule that didn't exist what three years ago? Right, we have remote, we have hybrid and we have in-office schedules. Now, they always existed, but they were never prominent and they're the remote. People were told they weren't able. We can't afford to have you working at home, we're not set up for that. Then overnight was like hey, go work at home, we were set up for that. So, people, you we hear this right like, well, I've always wanted to do this and I was told I couldn't. And now the big companies are calling people back, they're starting to. So there's a movement back to the office. But there's also a movement amongst individuals and people out there saying, well, I don't need to go back to the office because I know there are other jobs out there that will let me work in the office, and so this is a conversation we have with our clients a lot. I think I had this with you guys. Chris: Thanks. Corey: It was about the. So if we have an in-office role, we need to target people that are, if argument's safe, in a 10 10 mile diameter from our office for make the commute, have the commute make sense. Now, if there are a hundred people in that diameter or radius or a diameter, right, that's the whole. So there are 100 people that can do our job in that diameter 10 10 mile diameter. There's only about 20 of them, 20% that are willing to come to the office. So we've taken our candidate pool and chiseled it at down to 20 out of 100. Now we have to have those 20 people. We have to a find them, be, make sure they have the skills we need and See, make sure they're even open to a new role. Right, 10 of those people are probably gonna say, no, I'm not even interested. Right now we're down to 10 people. If we move to a hybrid and I think I need to practice by saying there are two types of roles there's flexible and inflexible roles. So if I'm at a machine Turning a metal part, I can't do that remotely. That's not a flexible role, sure. But if I am in in accounting or an administrative function or sales, those are flexible and we can allow people to have that flexibility. So if we move to a hybrid role, we can expand that diameter a little bit, say to 20 miles, because if people only have to come to the office Two or three times a week, they might drive a little longer. But we also might increase our talent pool by 3x. Now we maybe have 300 people and we have 80% of 300 to draw from, because there's 20% of those are like I only want remote. But the people that are in office and the people that want hybrid will look at increases. Yeah, right, the interest correct. So now we're at 80% of 300. We're at 240 people versus the 20. Now if we go remote within the city say look at, I want someone remote, but I need them here in Houston because I want to bring him into the office once a month or twice a month to do whatever. Now we have, you know, 10x. Now we have a thousand people and the people that like being in the office won't be interested. So we have 80% of a thousand people. Yeah, so it's just a. For me it's working, the probabilities of it and whatever you choose to do is fine, man, I think what I'm hearing a lot about hybrid is. People are saying things to me like this a lot more. I'm happy to go in the office, but I want the flexibility if I have a doctor's appointment, just to work from home that day, so I can go to the doctor and come back and I don't have to drive all the way in the office and all the way back. So people are looking for Hybrid is starting to take on a bit of a different. If I could get a like one day or two days from home, or have the option like, if I have stuff going on, if my son has an early game on Thursday, if I could just work from home that day so I can just like get my work done, not be stuck in traffic, and then go see my child's game or performance or whatever. Chris: Up to 30 minutes for game time instead of hour and a half. Corey: Right, because they can you. So I think Hybrid, the definition of hybrid, is shifting and changing a bit. I am hearing more people saying yeah, man, I just want to. I'd really like to be back in an office. I like being around people. This remote thing just doesn't work for me. It's not going to go back to the way it was, but I think it's going to normalize here a bit. Chris: So let me ask you this from a company standpoint. I think from what I've experienced talking to friends, you know, read it in Wall Street Journal or whatever the companies are saying. Look at this, the fully remote Maybe or hybrid, that bias towards remote is a roadie. Our company culture because our people aren't too bad, there is much. What are you hearing from employees and the candidates about their view of Building culture or fostering culture and the need to either be any office some versus Really think it can be done fully remote. What's the kind of the censure getting in the candidate pool on that topic? Corey: I think it's easier to do in a smaller company. You know, I have a client now. They're 20 people, but every morning they have. They're all remote, but every morning they have a video call and they talk about who's working on one and what, who needs to interact with who and so. So they do it that way. In a larger company, I see it being harder. Chris: Yeah, it's just yeah, and there's just. Corey: There's more moving pieces and more departments and more people that have to get connected. And trying to get 500 people on a video call every morning would be hard, sure, but I do think and it might boil down to the person, chris, you know, some people are at home and they just do what they do and those I always say these employees, the people that just want to go work in a in their office and close their door and say, yeah, please don't bother me, I don't want to talk to anyone. They're super valuable people. If you have them in the right role and if they're working remotely, that might be just fine. But then there are some more Dynamic roles in the company where you do need that interaction and I think that's where that hybrid piece is Important to say, hey, we do need you in the office and I know your company culture here is really built around human interaction and keeping people close together. And, yeah, it's important to be able to walk down the hall and knock on someone's door. So I think that's where the hybrid model if you can pull someone in instead of a fully remote to a hybrid and kind of transition them there, you're gonna get that kind of dynamic Interaction and you're gonna foster culture more and people get to know each other and kind of on a personal level as well as a professional level. But it's, I don't know that there's a One answer, because every company needs to figure out Every company's per. I always say every role is perfect for someone. We just need to be honest and really define what that role is and what the company is and what the culture is, and then find the Person who's looking and craving that Right, and so I think a lot of what a lot of people will do is Find people and tell them what they want to hear and then when they get in the door they kind of think well, maybe I don't know if they told me the truth here. Yeah and then they start that relationship off a little bumpy. But if you're clear, like you guys are, about what you are and who you are and how you, you see the people interacting. People are either gonna love that or they're not. But that's all you want, right? The bet getting a hell yeah or a hell no, that's, that's a gift. There's value in both, right. I mean hell knows as valuable as a hell yeah, because you're not gonna waste any more time if you put it up front, say this is who we are and what we do, and if that excites you, let's talk more. If that doesn't sound exciting to you, probably not, for you. Chris: There's another place. It's right for you. Corey: Yeah, for sure there is. That's what I told you all the time. That make you bad person. Chris: There's just no different places they're gonna fit yeah that's exactly it. Corey: I think we do get a little people get a little hurt or whatever when they get rejected by someone, but sometimes that's Best thing that could to get happen. Chris: Yeah, any. You just thinking about the business owner out there, make you know, with the pressure of making some hires or filling some roles, trends, that you're seeing any pointers you might add you know, provide, say you know if you're gonna, if you find yourself in the need, you know hiring. Here's some things to focus on to make sure you get it right. Corey: Yeah, so what? The business owners I deal with? And I love working with business owners as they're always passionate, smart, driven people and they're all different personalities and I love speaking with them and learning from them. That's kind of that the secret behind why I started key hire to? Because Hang out with business owners is a really Awesome experience, just to hear how they think and what they do and why they do it. I love hearing the stories and I love be able to take those stories out and tell people about them, the if I could give them a piece of advice and I'm speaking to small business owners here right. But so we're always looking to bring people in with capacity. So don't hire for current needs. Hire for what you need five years from now. That's number one, right? Remember the phrase we're not hiring you to run our business currently. We're looking for you to run our business 5x Currently doing with our current revenues. So if you do that, you'll redefine what good looks like. And I have a client in Birmingham. His name is Edgar and he runs one of the coolest food manufacturing businesses in Birmingham. I worked with him four years ago and he wanted he had a role within his business that he thought he needed and after we did our diligence and spending time, I flew it to Birmingham, spent two days with them. I said I think you're too small on this. You know, we got a dream bigger and so we redefined the role. We found an amazing guy and put him in there and Edgar loves him and he's now his director of operations. Right, he wanted him to do this kind of smaller role, but I said no, we need to hire someone with the capacity to take over your whole operation. So I'm working with Edgar again, but I asked them this question. I said when we talked four years ago, you thought you had a really great team and then we put this new person in there, a professional, someone who had more experience than you needed today and was a true professional at what they do. Did that change your definition of what a good employee looks like? And he didn't even hesitate. He said absolutely, and I could see it in them. The way he viewed his hiring was different. The people he had hired since we worked together were Different. They were. They were just bigger, better, more capacity. They had that level of professionalism. And I guess what I want to stress is you have to grow your business a certain way, right. You hire your friends, your relatives, your neighbors your relatives are your neighbors and you hire a team that you hope can get it done. And if you're successful here's the paradox if you're successful, your business will outgrow the ability of all the people how who helped you get where you want to go. That sucks, because now you want to grow and all the people that helped you get to this level of success Don't have the jam, they don't have the capacity, they don't have the experience, the draw upon To help you get to the next level. And it's a horrible position for a business owner to be in it. And I've said to them all. I said the hardest. I don't care how long you've had your business and what you've gone through. The hardest decision you will ever have to make is looking across the table from someone who helped you get where you are today and telling them Thank you for everything you've done, but I don't think you can get me where I want to go from here. Chris: Yeah, it's. I've seen it happen time and time again Company out grows their capacity. Corey: Yeah, they just, and they're not. They're great people doing the best job they can. They just don't have. You know, the busiest business They've ever worked in is your business today. The business business they will ever work in is your business tomorrow, and they don't have anything beyond that to say, oh, this process is broken, or here's where our constraints are, or here's what we need to change. When your only input becomes ours, you've run into that wall where you think, okay, we need to upgrade process procedure, we need to include automation if people don't understand how to do. That's kind of your real limiting factor, that's your biggest constraint. So if I were to give business owners advice, it's that right, understand what 2.0 looks like in terms of your talent and capacity and experience. And I never advocate for like abandoning those people who got you where you are. You have to treat them well, but there will become a point where they could turn into a constraint to your growth and I've had lots and lots. I mean that's the other part of what we do, right, we sit with business owners and we walk them through these, like how to have these conversations with someone, and we can help them leave the company gracefully. We can reposition them within the company. There's lots of things we can do, but we always want to make sure we're treating them with respect, because they've probably given you blood, sweat and tears to get where you are and you just don't want to. I don't think I've ever come across a business owner who's like yeah, I just need to get them out of here. They're like it tears them up. It's a hard decision to make. Chris: Yeah, no, I can see that. That is great advice, though, for anyone that's out there running a business about to start one that you got to you know. There's another analogy and you're a hockey guy, I'm not, but I've told us before it's kind of the same to business. Is you look to where the keep your eyes on, where the pucks going not? Corey: where it is right. Chris: That's it, yeah, so they're always looking forward and what do you need to be doing to drive forward? And talent, your talent's the key to that. Corey: Well, I don't know how much time we have, but I can give you a kind of a quick walk through in terms of the kind of growth through a business that we've identified. Let's do that and then we'll wrap it up. Okay, so we've identified kind of five stages of growth through a business owner, and so the first one we've identified is what we call the paralyzed business owner. Right, it's a fire drill. They need instant relief. If you use a car analogy, the wheels have fallen off the machine. Right they're. If you look at their org chart, they're sitting in five, six, seven different seats because everyone's trying to do everything and they're at this. My only input is time, right. And so their mindset is I just need help. And they often think if I can just hire the right person, my life will be better. But obviously that's not how it works. But if you can hire the right person, you can take a little pressure out of the tire. Right, give them back a little time. You know, maybe they can have one dinner at home with the family versus zero, and then from there, from this kind of paralyzed state, they move. Then they move into the unsure state. So you put a really good professional person in the business, whether it's operations or in the administration or in the sales department, and they go oh, that's what good looks like, this person's really helping me. So they transition into this unsure and they start thinking, well, what else could I do? I know I have other problems in the business, but I don't know what they are right. So we call this the wobbly wheel. Now the car is kind of it's. They're on the road but they're wobbling down the road right. And so they know they have some constraints in their business, but they're not at the point yet where they can put their finger on and say that's a problem. So then you put kind of another professional in there to kind of take a little more pressure out of their tire, and they go oh, now they have a little more time to focus on important things. They have some professionals, some transformational talent in key places. So now they transition and this is a big transition where they go into the curious owner where else can I make upgrades in my business? And this is where they start looking. Now they can say I think this leader is a problem. You know, I've expected. I've asked them to, told them here are some deliverables. I need them done by this timeline. They're missing them. I think that is a problem there. So they're starting to now understand where the problems are. And this is where we say you know, you have a flat tire right. You just need to put some air in that tire and you can get back up on the road. And then they transition into a growing company. So now we're kind of putting professional, transformational talent in key roles and now they're at the point where they move to a growing company where you know, before they were paralyzed, then they were kind of walking, and now they're kind of in a growing like. They're moving forward, they're confident in their team. And growing company is now we're adding new talent. I need new layers, new levels, new roles we never thought about. So we're creating a lot of new roles and we're really kind of bolstering the company with the talent and the capacity and experience they need to continue growth. And then the final transition is they become strategic. That's just like we know exactly what we need, just start filling in the spots and let's roll right. So that's kind of the progression we take our people through and that how we identify where people are and that kind of okay. Chris: Yeah, I love it. Yeah, it's a great, almost visual, as you, you know, describe it and walk through it right. Corey: And so if you do the wheels right, so the curious person has the flat tire, so you go from wheels off the machine to a wobbly wheel to a maybe a flat tire. And then the growing guys like we just upgraded the wheels, gave them low profile, new rims, the whole deal right. And then it's strategic, is like we're adding wheels on the car, on the machine, because it's just flying down the road. Chris: Awesome, yeah well, court, thank you for coming on and sharing this. Let's let's talk a little bit on the personal side, sure? What was your first job? My? Corey: first job was a dishwasher at a restaurant called Casey's Roadhouse in Oshawa, ontario all right. Yeah, I started literally in hospitality that was probably why I stayed with it, because when I was 14 I was washing dishes. The unintended consequences of that job is I met two guys that I went to school with. That I didn't really know very well actually, I didn't go to school with them at that time. I was, I think I was, maybe I did. I didn't know them very well, but you know, fast forward 40 years later and one of them still a good friend of mine and I was able to hang it with them last summer and so made some lasting friendships out of that very. I mean, it was a horrible job, right the right of all the service coming in, all the cool people like you're 14 and there's all these 18, 19, 20, 21 year old cool kids coming in, throwing slop at you and yelling at you and making your life miserable. But yeah, built character. Chris: I guess yeah, okay, so you know from Canada, newer to Texas, but do you prefer Tex-Mex or barbecue? Oh man, that's tough okay, tex-mex yeah any books you read you or read recently you recommend. Corey: I just listened to the energy bus that was recommended by Bart Pitcock in my Vistage group. Okay, it's kind of a fable that's along the lines of the home man who sold his Ferrari oh, mongu sold his Ferrari by Robin Sharma. It's just kind of this fable about kind of changing your mindset, which is cool, and I have barbarians at the gate sitting on my desk right now, which I'm about to get into. Chris: Okay, a little holiday reading well again, corey, I really appreciate your time. I think what you're doing at Keiher is great. I certainly appreciate the relationship and the friendship yeah, I mean thanks for having me on. Corey: I think you guys are doing a great job too. I love this company and can't say enough nice things about the way you run your business. You guys are clear on what you do, you're in a great organization and I'm super happy to be helping you. Oh, thank you. We appreciate it. Take care, thank you.

In today's episode of Building Texas Business, we have an inspiring discussion with Tram Nguyen, the passionate founder of Living Good Candle Company. She shares her journey of launching a natural candle company and the power of her dedicated team. Tram describes the challenges of breaking into retailers like Amazon and Walmart and her three-month struggle that led to reinstating her Amazon account. We discuss her unique empathy-driven leadership approach and strategies for understanding the market. In wrapping up, Tram shares advice for aspiring entrepreneurs and her future plans. Additionally, we hear about her growth habits, first job at Chick-fil-A, and love of Texas barbecue. SHOW HIGHLIGHTS We discuss the entrepreneurial journey of Tram Nguyen, the founder of Living Good Candle Company, and her commitment to using natural ingredients in her products. Tram shares her experiences of getting her products featured on major platforms like Amazon and Walmart and the challenges that come with it. We delve into Tram's unique approach to leadership which emphasizes empathy, understanding, and active listening, contributing to her company's growth. Tram talks about the importance of a dedicated team and thorough market understanding for any budding entrepreneur. We touch upon Tram's strategies for budgeting and the difficulties she faces in accessing capital for her business. Tram offers advice for aspiring entrepreneurs, stressing the importance of hard work and life balance. We discuss Tram's personal habits for growth, including her love for reading and participating in a book club. She also shares her first job experience at Chick-fil-A. Tram shares her future plans for Living Good Candle Company, including product line expansion and increasing automation. We discuss the process of building relationships with big-name retailers like Amazon and Walmart and the importance of constant and timely communication. Tram talks about the setbacks she faced, including losing her Amazon account and her efforts to recover it, emphasizing the importance of resilience in entrepreneurship. LINKSShow Notes Previous Episodes About BoyarMiller GUESTS Tram Nguyen About Tram TRANSCRIPT (AI transcript provided as supporting material and may contain errors) Chris: In this episode you'll meet Tram Nguyen, founder of Living Good Candle Company. Tram talks about the importance of understanding your market before starting a company and how the power of a team can help you realize your goals. Tram, I want to welcome you on to Building Texas Business. Thanks for being here today. Tram: Thank you, Chris. Thank you for giving me the opportunity to be in this podcast. It's a really great to be here today. Chris: So tell us, you started a company on your own and it's a candle company. Tell us about Living Good Candle. Tram: Is that it? Yes, tell us about that. So I'm actually starting out my career as a chemical engineer. So I'm making many difficult products for lives, from plastic to car material, and now I'm making composite for airplane. So I've been making, producing so many useful products, and then suddenly, when I am a person that's really into candles I've burned a lot of candles throughout my whole life and then I got really bad headache from it and then I have to take a stop from burning any candle completely, and during that time I take a step back doing more research about what's going on in the candle industry and find out a lot of misconception or misunderstanding about different time material going to candles. And that's the reason why I decided to start a candle company that only make candles with be wires and only, and we make our own oil too. So we control everything into a product and we transparent about that to our customer, because I wanted the customer, when they burn the candle, not only feel good, but they know that they're not putting their health at risk. Chris: So your passion for candles is what kind of led you to start the company? Tram: Yeah, exactly. Chris: So you mentioned that. So what are the things that got you to? I guess you sound like you control the product mix so that it's more natural than having, I guess, bad chemicals in there. Tram: Yeah, it's 100% natural. Everything you make with be wires and we have the lab in Houston that make our custom oil. So I will come to the lab, I test all of them, reading or I smell them, go, improve all of the things going through with it and then approve them before we, you know, with them in the candle. So we also send our candle to the lab to test them to make sure no suit, no emission, no elegance, and because I have really bad allergy too. So that's the reason why I want a product that you know would my my at peace, knowing that it's not bringing bad chemical to my house. Chris: That's impressive. So when did you start the company? Tram: I started in last year. It took me a while to figure out the recipe. Seeing be wise a little bit difficult to handle, so I spent a lot of time testing it and work with a lot of vendor. So now all of our be was up from not Carolina and we have built trust with our vendor. And then you know, yeah, we've been around for a year and a half now. Chris: Okay, so your candles are all beeswax, and so what did you do to get the company started? Is it self funded? Tram: Yeah, it's actually self funded. So I spent all of my money from my night to five job with them all into the business. I work day and night, like weekend, no day off, and then, you know, put some of my seven on it. But as my plan for next year, we're working on some fund it. We're working towards some bank try to get the business fund it so we can spend them, because right now we focus on Amazon and Walmart, but my next year will be roll into the retail, so we will need a little bit more fun for that. Chris: Okay, so right now, the products excuse me are on. You find them at Walmart or Amazon yeah. What has that been like, dealing with those two to try to get into their system, and you know the logistics of having to be a vendor for Amazon and Walmart. Tram: You know what funny actually use the world for Amazon report. I use the world for Amazon. I used to be their operation manager, so I managed their warehouse and logistics, so I understand how it's work. That's why when I start the company, the first thing I do is I want my company as e-commerce because you know, I don't want to ship our product by myself, and the process again to Amazon is a hustle. You have to. You have to do everything right from day one with Amazon and we improve out the year, a year and a half. We get a lot of customers from all over the country. We do have some customers even from outside the country, but just our candle on Amazon and our Amazon sell it from 87% of previous customers. That's mean we build really big, you know, portfolio on our Amazon and then from there, when we're getting the profit from Amazon, we come back and talk to Walmart. Walmart will be a little bit harder to get in because they will require you to be at a certain revenue. So we come back, talk to them, convince them and now we like Walmart. Yeah, it's a lot of challenge dealing with, you know, those two big e-commerce website, because you have to do everything right and make sure that you know you don't get your company suspended and stuff. Chris: Very good. So let's kind of go back to this. Last year, or maybe even before you started business, you were doing a bunch of research. You said Talk to us about you know if there's entrepreneurs out there maybe that have just started what you're doing or thinking about it. What are some of the lessons that you learned? Maybe some bumps in the road that you encountered and how you got past those in starting this company. Tram: I think I make a lot of mistakes. I do think like that. The first thing I make mistake about is, you know, the lack of understanding of the market research Like even though I'm really good at production testing product but you know the lack of understanding of why people are looking forward. First Challenge Gina. For like three, four months we wasn't able to really push the sale up to where I wanted to be when I get started. So you know, if any intravenous want to start a side business or a business, the first thing to do we understand the market, understand your customer, and then the second thing will be understand your. You know the power of being in a team. I used to do everything by myself. I used to do candle pouring, production, packing, marketing, everything and then at one point I got burned out and that's the reason why I always say you cannot start a business by yourself. It's always needs help, you know from your teammate. And that's when we started bringing in more people, because my sale, my family and even my boyfriend got burned out. Everybody got burned out from helping me and that's why I'm like, okay, this is time for me to hire more people, and then I take in time, interview people and bring in some people to the team. Chris: So that's a great segue, so it does take a good team right at any company. So let's now talk about what were some of the things you did through, say, the interview process, to make sure you were hiring the right people to join your team. Tram: That's a hard question. Actually, I make a lot of bad hire at first because of the rushing feeling you know you got burned out and then I'm like, oh my god, I need help, I need help, and then we just take whatever. But then it's actually creating more problems down the line because I don't understand who I work with. And since I have my night to fight, I do looking for somebody that independent and can be at a warehouse by themselves. So in the interview I have conversation with them, I'm making sure that they okay. Working with the warehouse setting you know where it can hit can be a little bit of problem and it's you just have to look around for until you find a right one. So I, when I'm making so many bad hire, I take a step back. I say I'm not hiring more people. I try to do it by myself. I'm taking my time looking for a right person and then from there you know you just have to take your time talking to people, try to understand the goal. And one of my thing is I love hiring students because you know I used to be a student and working part-time, so I hiring them at part-time and right now we only have part-time worker. We didn't have anybody full-time yet. But you know I start with students because I like the curiosity of them and you know they want, they want to do the best. Chris: The young energy. Tram: I think so too. Chris: Well, I think you mentioned something that's true, I think, when you, when you're hiring out of what I'll call desperation, right, yeah you tend to overlook some things, and that yeah tends to lead to maybe bad hiring decisions as opposed to taking your time yeah and and really digging in to get to know someone and make sure they fit. You know the fundamental priorities of your company yeah, it's important it's very important. You only, you only figure that out if you slow down. Tram: I think so too. Yeah, you need to slow down to go far. This is what I take. Yeah, you need to slow down, take one step at a time so you can go for it. Chris: So let's talk a little bit about your process, I guess, and making your product. Do you, do you feel like what you're doing? It kind of in the candle manufacturing space is somewhat innovative. Tram: When I first started, it's actually was really manual. I actually took it out, like you know wasn't really innovative or efficient, and I'd good love it to be. But you know, of course, that I have to do everything by hand so I can figure out where I can twist stuff around. And the thing is I really listen to my teammate. So I talk to my candle maker almost every day and we ask you know, how was the process? Anything we can make them better. And then you know, from there I start looking more into automation stuff and my goal for next year is so right now we're working on the design not a machine, but a machine. But this can help us to pull the candles, so it can help us to minimize the mistake. But you know, when I first started it wasn't really innovative. It's really manual hand pull everything. But you know, one step at a time, and I always say we look into the process, talk to our people and see what we can improve. Chris: Well, I think at some level, just the fact that you're making such a clean candle is somewhat innovative as well like different than what your competition is. Tram: Of course, yeah, but it costs a lot of problem too because when they so natural, you cannot, you cannot control a lot of them. But then we, I always tell my customer, you know there will be some. The candle can cracking. So that's the biggest issue of BWAS. It cracked really bad and we have to do everything to control our temperature, but it still happened. And I always tell my, I tried to educate my customer that this is a clean product. We didn't put anything else. So there may be some imperfection, but you know it put you at peace. Chris: Yeah, what would have been some of the challenges on that kind of marketing this new product? Yeah, what are some of those challenges and how are you trying to overcome them? Tram: That's the tough question. Yeah, it is. It's a lot of maybe a lot of education for customers because you know you can just go to Walmart and buy some candle that I can never commit with them, you know, but I always tell people you know breathing is so important. You breathe in your air every day, so make sure you rent something clean to your house and it takes a lot of time for customers to get used to the product, understand some of the issues that might happen to be what and accept it. And the thing we do is, whenever a customer feel like you know the candle wasn't looked at, it's a. When it reached out to me, I addressed the issue immediately and tried to explain to them what's going on, and also some media is the same thing we post about our behind the scenes, some of the challenging that we encounter when we're making be what candle and you know, because of all of those issues, it actually make it unique. So we really stand out because we were looking at a product and say it's so natural. I have a customer about our candle on Amazon for a year and a half came to a farmer market to see me in person. Chris: Really. Tram: Just because she told me she's so impressed with the product she had to come all the way to the farmer market to see me. Chris: Well, that that had to make you feel good. Yeah, so you're dealing with two of the biggest companies in the world. What are some of the things that you do to try to foster and grow those relationships with the people you're dealing with at Amazon and Walmart? Tram: I think the first thing we do, we, we I don't always say like when you start out with them, you have to do right from the beginning, we from from even our account, you know reservation. We make sure everything is correct, no mistake, or you know, and we have actually have two people dedicated to just handling Amazon and Walmart. It's just because that this is a really bulky system from them and you need to have certain understanding and I feel like sometimes I'm in and out so much. That's why I'm dedicated to people. Don't do anything, spend four hours a day taking care of Amazon and Walmart for me and you make sure that you follow the rules. They have a lot of policy and rule. You make sure you understand it. You make sure that you you know update about the news because it changed up around a lot. So the thing is, you keep your communication with them. When something pop up, something doesn't, you know, sound right to you, you reach out to them immediately and they're actually very helpful when you calmly reach out to them, you know, and they will definitely get to you. I love working with Amazon and Walmart. Chris: Well, I think you hit on something. I mean that the key is communicating right yeah uh constantly and and timely uh yeah so let's talk about you. There's always learning and setbacks. What's what's a setback that you've encountered kind of along this journey that you know you maybe didn't think you could overcome, but but you did and it's made you stronger and better. Uh, can you, can you think of anything to share? Tram: yeah. So, um, we actually lost our Amazon account beginning of the year. Oh, we thought, we thought, we thought it for three months. It's, it's a. It's a disappointing feeling. You know, I just wake up. I just went too bad. Wake up in the morning, my account gone completely, amazon couldn't look, fired and there were so many people involved. Um, I was thinking that, all right, you know, maybe Amazon, you're not right for me. I have to be out Amazon, grow outside of Amazon. I was so I was really negative, you know, at that time, because you're losing a really big part of three months beginning of year. Sure, that's really hard for me. And we still have candle and a way hand needs to be sell. So, you know, I need to think about what do I want to do with it. So what we do is I reach out to so many people. I reach out to Amazon, prove multiple way. I send them a letter, I reach out from Twitter. I do everything I can make sure I'm in contact with a right person and then, when I'm in contact with them, we try to bring in an Amazon lawyer to just have some help from them, you know, to speed up the process and I really fight for it to get my account back. It's a three month. It's a long three month in my whole life, every day. You know we didn't get the answer we need. They say we cannot be an Amazon again. And then suddenly you know they, we just have to keep trying, send them more email, send them more message. Um, try to be kind with them. Even we be frustrated, but we need them help, they help. So we keep reaching out for three months and then finally they say, all right, we let we. They have to allow me to open a new account, so they allow me to open a new account, transfer everything, but the thing that you have to restart. We love all of our customers. Um, I thought that I would be out Amazon completely because of frustration that I have with Amazon. But, taking a look back now, we have so many great customers, like we have so many customers that reach out to me personally and send another message because just how much they love the candles and you know the fact that the people go out their way to go to the final market to see us, making me feel like Amazon, bring my product closer to more customers, and we actually have some wholesale order from customers on Amazon. So we roll really big on Amazon. Chris: That's right. So your persistence paid off, right. Tram: Yeah. Chris: But I have to imagine that was a pretty trying time for you as a young entrepreneur to lose an account like that. Tram: Yeah, and the thing is you cannot over new account. The moment you over new account, you shut it out completely. So you have to do the right thing. Chris: How did the rest of your team respond during this time? Tram: They actually work in hard with me. So at that time you know my Amazon team working hard every day with me. Sometimes I have to be at work so I wasn't being on the phone with them, so they help me to take on a call with Amazon, follow up with them every day. And the thing is, I'm really grateful for the people that I work with. We have awesome team. I have to tell you that we cheer every single wins, like, let's say, we have really great read, like Friday during this weekend, and it's when it's so great. So you know, that's the thing. You just have to put trust in your team and then know that they will do the best for the business and I just have them like hey, I don't care what you do, what long we, you know, can come back and run again. It should be good. Chris: Yeah. So that kind of leads me to the subject of talking. Maybe you as a leader of this team. How do you try to show up as a leader for your team? Tram: I think the thing is I show that I care in understanding and listening because, you know so we have one of my teammates recently have some of the things happen outside of work which you know affect the candle, because he dropped so many candles on the floor because of, you know, his mind was so busy. But instead of me yelling or upsetting what I tried to do, I tried to be calm and learn from it and ask hey, what's the issue, you know, do you have any problem that you want to share with me? So the thing for me is you'll be there for them when something happened, talk to them, listen to them, text them, like every day. Even I am not at the warehouse, I'm still calling. You know my people has, hey, are you doing good? Or I'm making sure they drink water, and you know we could text them hitting no joke for me. So I'm making sure that I'm taking care of them in everything I can Like. If they need a day off, you know I can cover for them. Or that's the reason why, you know, when I need help, when I need long hours, they will be there for me, because I'm be there for them and I listen to them and I go out of my way to help them, you know. Chris: That's right so it sounds, you know, someone likes servant leadership right, yeah. To make sure that they're taken care of when? How would you describe your leadership style? Where have you learned over the years in your other career maybe to develop these leadership skills? Tram: That's a hard thing, because I think that I see this improvement on my leadership. Chris: It's an evolving process. Tram: Yeah, it's a lot, but when I went to work, graduated walking I've been through it with so many it worked with so many bars, worked with so many managers and throughout the year I worked with them, I figured out what do I lie from them and what I don't lie from them. And now when I have my business, I try to do whatever I like from the manager. I have a boss that used to be there for me. He's so nice, he was helping me so much he could send me a card for Christmas or Thanksgiving and that's really something that, beyond our manager and work, a relationship he goes out of his way to help me when I need. And that's what I want to do for my people too. I want to be a type leader that if something happened at work, the people can feel okay to tell me what's going on, like there will be no upset or no being too aggressive. I want to be a good listener to them too, and I'm still working on that. Chris: Sure, so you're somewhat of an empathetic leader where they yeah. And have you seen that kind of take hold with your employees? The culture is forming where everyone feels safe to share if something's going on. Tram: Yeah, we have a worker just dropped like 20 candles on the floor the other day. If it's won't be before I have a business, I will be really aggressive, really angry. But with me dealing with my so many people, I try to become and try to clean up and I really don't mind to go to clean up their mess. That's what I normally say if I have to. So I really go out of my way to help people and that's actually make people want to work with me and stay longer. And we see that too. We see that even. You know we're small business, we're not big cooperation, so sometimes it's hard for us to keep people. But all of the people are working with us until this point in two years and I can see that they still want to work with me. Chris: Yeah, so you've talked several times at least referenced, kind of plans you have for the next year. So what are kind of, when you look to the next year or next three to five, what are the plans and strategies that you are putting in place and what you hope to accomplish and where do you see this company in the near future? Tram: So every year, like so, right now, I'm doing my six month plan. So I'm working better when I plan everything out and I would encourage all intravenous. You know, do nothing about it, write them down in the paper, do the chart, do everything you can you have. I think, like you can only achieve your goal when your mind is all about it. So right now, everywhere, I could sit everywhere and I could write down. You know how much revenue I want for every single platform. So so my year for next, go for next five years. You know I want that we will become the candle brand, that when customers want a clean candle they will say living, good candle code. So we want we, of course, that we want to become, you know, the goalie. Everybody wants to become a multi-million company, right, but for me, the goalie. You know, when you want something clean, you think about us and that's and that's something that I work hard every day and we and we have to do. You know, be what is so expensive. That's why so many brand cannot make a profit with them. And every day I have to continue, improve, to make, to make sure that a product is profitable. And another thing is you know, you just have to keep you know, thinking about what you want to do in your, what's your end goal of everything, all the hard work, and one of our next year I want to roll out a very, very new product on the market. We we don't want to disclose yet. Chris: That's fine you don't have to tell your secrets. Tram: Yeah, we, you know we will be rolling them out on January, but I think it's really right around the corner. Yeah, so it's really big hit for the market. Chris: So everyone should be looking out. It'll be on Amazon. Tram: Yeah, we Amazon and Walmart and our website Enough, we will be at a farmer market too. So if you locally to Houston, you know, stop by saying hi to us. Chris: Which farmers market. You mentioned that a couple times, so which farmers market are you at? Tram: We are the market for maker. Okay, so they in the highs. That's either only market I'm doing right now, but next year I would love to do, you know, more family market. I love the feeling of going there, going out there, talking to a customer and have them smell. I can't know. Yeah, but back to the question. We have a lot of go for next year. We want it to be more automation. We don't want people to manually apply every single label or every single jar. So we're working with a company, you know, to try to automate our process. We would love to hiring one or two person full-time with us, and that's something I'm working on. And we would love to increase our capital too. And it's really you know when, when you want to go, big capital can be a problem. So I try to get it ready for that. Chris: Yeah, let's talk a little bit about that. What? What are some of the the things that you're doing to put in place to Access? Yeah additional capital. Tram: That's a hard question. So right now we still small and I, you know, and I mentioned I invest everything I make from nine to five into my psychic, like my kind of business all the money, all the serving. Another thing that I do a you know we sometimes we will ask help from friends and family and that's the only way that pretty much I'm doing right now to keep the company running. But of course it's still about us hustling. So we try to go to more farmer market, we try to do different things, expanding them on Amazon, like on tick tock we now have tick tock shop and Instagram. So we try to run, you know, expand them out to make a little bit money. But I'm very strict on how I spend it, so I'm budgeting everything. So right now I'm looking at the how much money I need for 2024 and that's helped me. That you know. Try to see where can I get all the old fun? Do I have to get it from the bank? Or you know, like it's a heart, I still try to figure out a capital part. Chris: Yeah, yeah. Well, I mean, it's a very important part of the new business right. I think what you mentioned a minute ago to budget very consciously and thoughtfully so you manage your expenses well. Yeah and that's gonna be important. When you go out for capital whether it's a bank or you know investor one wants to know you actually run in a good business. Tram: Yeah, of course I try to talk to some bank right now to to hopefully get a funded. Hopefully that will be, you know, something I can achieve next year. That's one of my goal. Chris: Okay, have you had any mentors kind of along the way in your career that have kind of Help, guide you or inspire you to do what you're doing now? Tram: I actually have a lot of mentor. I know so many people that I learned so much from them, and you know some people that they probably don't know me, but I learned them from their podcast. I listen some of your podcast to you, by the way. I try to know that, whatever the people do that I'm really enjoying. Like you, talk a lot about innovation and that is something that I really want us to be better at. I want us to be more. You know Concepts about how we can improve thing. So I guess one of my biggest mentor I have a mentor that meant to me how to sail on Amazon and he actually was the one that get me started. So I wish out to him, you know, talk to him about my desire, why I want to have this brain and why I want to start on Amazon, and he actually will help me from day one. So he guided me throughout the way and then I met some other mentor. You know, like we, I learned a lot from people more than most of me. More of the thing I learned is cell top. You know from YouTube. Chris: Well, you, I think, what you Find along the ways, you can kind of learn from everybody, right, I mean some more than others where there's a lot of you, if you're Observing enough and willing to pay attention, that there's always yeah sometimes learning is learning what not to do. Tram: Yeah, yeah, that's true, yeah, it's. We learn from our customers. We have customer that angry right, you know, because on Amazon, so people can just buy our product and change them up there by the next day. So we learn so much about our customer and the thing might go it to review our return rate to almost zero and, to be honest, we don't have a lot of return in the big market like that, but we still have some. And Every time that I have a customer return, I accept it, I reach out to them, I want them to tell me what's happened or what can I make them better, and I do think that dough feedback is something that you know make us better every day. Chris: That's good, I agree. So any One or two things you might tell an aspiring entrepreneur to to think about as they're About to step off and start a company, like you did a couple years ago. Any pointers? Tram: I did so. If I have, I would love to Tell this to all intrapreneur. I think having the business and actually running a business at two different things is a lot of hard work. You have to read yourself out there. I used to be so shy, you know, but I have to go out there hustling, selling stuff at family market, ringing my product out there for people to judging is, but the thing is, when you want to do great in your intrapreneur, you have to make sure that you, you know you just keep pushing, don't care about anybody else, just think about yourself and be in it. And the second one a do not ever think that you can do everything by yourself. It's impossible. They have to be balanced between your life, your work life and your family. And you want to make sure that you know when you at your high point in your career, you still feel happy because your family happy with you. So that's it. Two things that I would love people to think about when I started their internship. Chris: Those are two great things to share, so thank you for that. Listeners out there, well, thank you. Tram: So let's, let me ask you this what was your first job? My first job. I used to work in Chick-fil-A before. Okay, you know, so I can't learn a lot about value. Customer week my in my mind. Customer in my number one, my priority. Everything I do to make sure they happy. Chris: So if you, if you work there, you must have eaten the food a lot. Are you like, done with Chick-fil-A now? They get me every time yeah, yeah, what's not the like about it. So, keeping with the theme of food, do you prefer Tex-Mex or barbecue? Tram: You. Chris: Very good. Who doesn't like good barbecue? Tram: and Texas yeah. Chris: So are there any things that you do to kind of keep yourself up, like reading or you mentioned podcasts any business related books or podcasts you like to listen to that you share? Tram: I listen to. I read a lot of books, so I actually attend to a book club, so we wake up at 5am in the morning picking the book that we read. So right now I'm reading a book called the Messy Truth from Alie Wab. So that's a really new book. Chris: The Messy Truth. Tram: Yeah, the Messy Truth. So she talks about the behind the scene of intravenous and every new intravenous will find themselves in there. She talks about lots of dark side of the business the busy, the doubt about your business yourself. So if anybody wants to start intravenous, I think that's a good book to start with, Because it will help you to see that everybody out there having a small business dealing with the same thing that you're dealing with. Chris: It takes hard work, it takes courage and a little bit of you know willing to take a risk, right yeah. So that's great, I'm going to have to go check that book out. Tram: Yeah, they actually just released. Yeah, they actually just released, like last week, I think. Okay, yeah, so just now yeah, they just out. Chris: Well, tramp, thank you so much for being on the show. Enjoy hearing your story. Best of luck as you continue to grow, living in good camel company. Tram: Thank you. Thank you, Chris. I really appreciate the opportunity and, you know, really appreciate that you helping me here. Let me share my story and hopefully it can inspire many small business out there. Chris: No doubt it will Take care. Tram: Thank you. Special Guest: Tram Nguyen.

In today's episode of Building Texas Business, I speak with Chuck Leblo, founder of Interact One. Chuck shares his entrepreneurial journey from working in the corporate world, where he was overwhelmed by paperwork, to starting his own business. He offers valuable lessons learned from launching a side business while employed and the critical decisions that helped him succeed. Chuck leaves us with wisdom on building effective teams and maintaining a balanced lifestyle as an entrepreneur. SHOW HIGHLIGHTS Chuck Leblo, the founder of Interact One, shares his journey from corporate America to entrepreneurship, detailing the reasons behind his transition, such as the overbearing workload in his corporate job. We highlight the importance of having a side gig while starting a business to ensure financial stability. He explains how his unique problem-solving skills were instrumental in the exponential growth of his business from a modest $14,000 to a whopping $140,000 a month. Chuck details his process of tackling a telecom company's issue of short duration calls and building a team of diverse fractionals to aid in problem-solving. He talks about the various challenges he faced as an entrepreneur, including the need to make decisions and pivot the business when necessary. We discuss the impact that COVID-19 had on his business and how he successfully managed to meet the new market needs. He emphasizes the importance of building a successful team of partners and fractionals and shares his experience in helping businesses navigate the remote working world. Chuck shares his experience of managing a large-scale door-to-door team in the deregulated electricity market in Texas and the challenges of the project. He emphasizes the importance of maintaining a healthy work-life balance, sharing his personal experience and strategies. Chuck advises entrepreneurs to treat everyone with respect, earn people's trust, and widen their network to succeed in business. LINKSShow Notes Previous Episodes About BoyarMiller GUESTS Chuck LebloAbout Chuck TRANSCRIPT (AI transcript provided as supporting material and may contain errors) Chris: In this episode you will meet Chuck Leblo, founder of Interact One. Through Interact One, chuck helps business owners solve problems and stresses the importance of building trust with clients as the foundation to successfully growing your company. All right, chuck, I want to thank you for joining me here on Building Texas Business. It's great to have you on the show. Now it's a pleasure to be here. So I know you've got a business or two you're involved with now and maybe others you've had before. But let's just kind of start by you telling the listeners kind of a little bit about yourself and the company that you've got and what it's known for. Chuck: Well, I'm pretty boring story, but so Interact One. Really, we're known for being problem solvers right, and not the type of problem solvers like I need a guy whacked right. Chris: Yeah, we have to stop the recording right now. Chuck: Right, right right, so I can say use the money, you can be my legal counsel, right. So, but now we solve problems for businesses right, and we've been doing that for about 17, 18 years now. I've always been known as a natural problem solver, from the time of a kid all the way through the military, through my corporate days and into my business. So it was a natural, natural evolution for me to just basically start a company that solves problems. Chris: All right. So I guess you mentioned a lot of, I guess, background going back from your childhood and military service. What was the real inspiration for you to kind of becoming an entrepreneur and actually starting a business? Chuck: Well, so 20 years in corporate America I was. I started out as a problem solver on an engineering basis right In telecom and then I got into the business side and I solved business problems which were more to do with like profitability right. And one day I was sitting there and I looked around my office and I just saw stacks in the business 20 years ago, right, everything wasn't digitized then. So stacks and stacks of invoices and contracts and lease cost, routing guides and all of this kind of stuff and I realized I was wasting my life away just doing that, just spending all my time. I was heavily compensated for what I did. Most people would die to have the job, but I was just like I'm not spending time with my family, I'm working 20 hours, sometimes 20 hours a day, right, and I said enough is enough. So I started my. At that point, you know, I had the funds available and I started my own company. Now, unfortunately in retrospect, I started a company doing basically exactly the same thing that I was doing for the telecom companies. I was controlling profitability for helping other telecom companies do that and then helping fortune 1000 clients and government agencies do it. So so that was like my little step in entrepreneurship, because I was really doing the same thing, but just doing it on my own. Then, about five years later six years later is when I really said no, we got to go full tilt into just solving problems. I want to solve them for all types of businesses. So really it was just sitting there looking at all the boxes and just to press the heck out of me. Chris: Yeah, the guy sounds like you're in a situation where you lost your motivation and you had to kind of look introspectively to go. How can I regain the motivation and inspiration I had about what it is I did? Chuck: Yeah. Chris: I wasn't excited about it anymore. Yeah, so. So you step out on your own, whether it was kind of that in that first venture or the five year later, let's talk about that. I mean, what were some of the, the lessons you learned that you were like, oh, I wish I to someone would have told me this. Right, it's like I gotta imagine some things kind of hit you in the face and you had to learn to adapt really quick to now you know, owning your own show. Chuck: Yeah, so the first thing I learned was when I took that first step, right where I owned the company, doing exactly what I was doing before, and what I learned was one it's feast or famine out there, right, as a consultant. It was a. It was feast or famine. The second thing I learned was it's okay to keep your toe in the corporate pond, right. So what I would do is, during those types of famine, I would go get a little gig you know, part time gig help a company out to pay the bills. One of the examples is we did an analysis for state government where we looked at five years of their telecom bills going back. We got them about five million bucks back, okay. So we renegotiated all their contracts, saved them about three million dollars a year going forward. Wow, it took us two years to do that analysis and to start getting that money back and we were paid on a contingency basis. We got a percentage of what we got them back. So two years without money. So if I hadn't known at the time that it's okay, it's okay to be, it's okay to be a part time entrepreneur, and in most cases it's better to get your side gig going before you take a full time side, before you take that side gig full time yeah. Chris: Yeah, that's interesting perspective because I don't know that. I've heard people use that term before, but I think there's some truth to it about that. Okay to be a part time entrepreneur, to kind of get your legs underneath yeah. Chuck: Now most people think that they have a side gig and then that side gig becomes their new job. I looked at it as that, that my business was my job, that I looked at the corporate America side as the side gig. Chris: Yeah, okay. So so you get you kind of learn that lesson and you move forward. What were some of the things, when you look back, that you feel like were the decisions you made that kind of set the foundation for your future success Because anything right, you can use any analogy you want, but also you got to have a strong foundation to be able to build from Anything that comes to mind that you really look back on and are kind of proud of the early decisions you made, in the way you set things up. Chuck: I think that you have to choose your clients wisely, right? There's an old saying out there that if everyone's your potential customer, no one's a customer. Right, you have to and I'm listening up, because I'm not perfect in any means. When I first started, I started going just after telecom companies, and that because that was what I knew. I'd spent 20 years in telecom and I had to learn all other aspects if I wanted to do this. So, you know, I became an expert at digital marketing. I already knew operations from telecom. I already knew finance from telecom. Right technology, of course I knew that one. I really know a whole lot about HR or legal, but what I didn't know was marketing and sales. So I had to become an expert in that Right. And that was really the catalyst is when I went from just being a just knowing, just doing telecom companies to now specializing in really all types of businesses, but only particular size businesses. So I learned that I didn't want to do business with those big fortune 1000s anymore. The big electric providers right, those were our clients. Telecom companies, those were the state agencies, government agencies and things like that. I didn't want to deal in that arena anymore because I can impact a small business much more. Right, if I save a small business you know $100,000 a year or fix a problem that solves, that's worth $100,000 or $200,000, that's much more impactful than getting a state agency back $5 million because it's not real money to them anyway. Right, it's just taxpayer money. It's not like they're going to give it back to the taxpayers. They're going to find someplace else to spend it. Chris: Right, right. Well, I think there's some truth to what you're saying is, as you're starting out with the new business, it's very important to be really laser focused about who your customer is and stay kind of within those bounds and not start to chase every little thing that may come your way because it may not fit your skill set, it may not fit your purpose and it can be distracting. Chuck: It can be distracting and it'll give you, you know, doubt as to what you're doing, whether or not you're competent, right, and that'll kill you as an entrepreneur. When you start doubting yourself and doubting your abilities than others will. Chris: So we've talked a little bit about kind of getting started as you were kind of moving through the process. You've talked about kind of focusing in, I guess after about five years on really just being a problem solver. Let's talk maybe a little more detail about what are some of the things you're talking about when you say you know we solve problems. I know they can vary, but I'm just curious about some kind of specifics, to the extent you can share some specifics on that. Chuck: Sure. First of all, I always tell people is your problem worth at least $2,000? Don't be gonna do me with a problem, right? That's not worth something. I'm not doing it for free, so let me give you an example. So about a year and a half ago I got called by a customer of mine, a roofer, and he goes hey, I've got this company that I want to outsource my back office to and I need you to vet them. So that's a problem. I said, okay, fine, let me vet them for you. So I did that and they were a good company, right. And about six months later after that, I get a call from that company and as owner of the company, and she held up a little sticky note and it said hire Chuck. And I said what's that? She goes. When we had our conversation I know that I knew that I needed a Chuck and I said, okay, so how can I help you? And she goes listen, I've been in business for almost a year now. We're an outsourced VA virtual assistance company and we're just not really making. We're not growing fast enough. We're going to get about $14,000 a month in revenue. And I said okay, and I took a look into our organization and we started making some changes and first thing we did was we rebranded her as a business process outsourcing company instead of a virtual assistance company. Then we made some operational changes with her personnel, helped her grow and hire the right people, got all of her people certified in the softwares that they were using so they could truly be viewed as an expert instead of just a virtual assistant. In less than a year they went from $14,000 a month revenue to $140,000 a month in revenue. Okay, just changes that. We did Another company, a telecom company, swiss telecom, a telecom company right, they were getting a lot of short duration calls that they were being billed for and they didn't know what the problem was. So we've got a problem. So we did an analysis of tens of millions of TCAP messages which are getting technical here in SS7. It's like a phone record, but it's the digital version of it, right and we found that what was happening was, down the line, one of the providers that they were connecting to, because, remember, you go through several switches. You call them the US, it might go here. Anyway, one of those switches was given back what's called false answer supervision, before the call was ever answered. So that's why they're having short duration calls. People would call, it would ring nine, 10 times, no one would answer and they'd hang up but it was showing it's answered. So we fixed that problem. So really, it's any type of problem. It's like I want to open a new location, okay, so one of the things that we do in our LinkedIn reach out, that we do how we find clients is we just ask people what their problem is and we tell them everyone. We tell them how we would solve the problem. One is what's the true problem and what's the real problem? Because a true problem or their problem might be I need more revenue. Okay, so what's the real problem? Or is the real problem you need more revenue because your costs are too high, because if your costs are too high and we bring in more revenue, we put you out of business because you're selling low cost, right? Is it because you're marketing? Is it because you just don't have the right staff in place? So we do that analysis and take them through that and either fix it for them and hand it back to them or, once it's corrected, we can monitor on an ongoing basis. Chris: So when you do these projects, you assume you're not just a one man show. You've got a team working with you, and how have you gone about, I guess, building that team around you to make sure you have the right people? Chuck: So what I? Did is listen. So experience is important, diversity is important right, and diversity from the sense of people with different backgrounds are going to have different ways that they interpret a problem and the corrective action that they would find for that right. So although I'm the chief strategist for the company, I don't really go by the title CEO, but I'm CEO and chief strategist. I'm more of a strategy kind of guy, so I do handle a lot of the problems. Chris: When you know, name of the companies interact one. Chuck: You're going to interact with me, right? In most cases, but what we did is we wanted to find people like me, because I don't know everything that lets surround yourself with people smarter than you, right? So we go out and we find fractional people just like me, right? Possibly someone that's got a full-time job, they are a CEO of a company or they're an entrepreneur that own their own company or they're an accountant, right? So we have a lot of people that are working with us for finance issues, it professionals, right, and we've built a network of these people to where we hold all of their information so that when a problem comes in, we have three or four or five in some cases, 10 people that we can send that problem to and see what their thoughts are on it and then engage that person the one that we want to engage with to help us solve that. And then we do the program management or the program project management of that and we have a lot of employees, but we have a lot of fractionals working for us. Chris: Okay, that's an interesting model. I mean it makes sense, given what you're doing, and then you can kind of pick the right person for the issue at hand, Absolutely. So we were talking a little bit earlier and I know you know we talked about challenges you faced and being an entrepreneur and I just want you know, maybe share, some of the challenges you've gone through and how that's impacted the business or changed what you've done. From you know, from a, I guess, a business strategy. Chuck: Well, I mean, if you're in business, you're always going to have challenges, right. So you know, starting from the very beginning, just being able to redirect yourself. You know don't beat a dead horse, redirect, you know, make a decision one way or the other lead, follow. Get out of the way all those little sayings they say is you know, do that? Make decisions. Some of the you know. The first one was switching from being just strictly telecom to really handling smaller businesses. That was one. Then we diversified into where we had our own public relations firm because a lot of companies, what they were, what we found is a lot of companies have an issue with actually people knowing who they were right. So we created that company and being able to to in the economy, be able to utilize, you know, both companies right. Listen when very small businesses, they can't afford a lot sometimes but they can afford a little bit and that's like the PR company. One of the challenges that we had with that diversification is when COVID hit. Right, we were leading up into COVID. We were spending probably 90% well, 70% of our business was from a revenue perspective, was coming from the PR firm and these are small clients paying $395, $500 a month, right, for our PR services. And the Interact One, the more consulting, the high dollar ones, was really just me at that time, okay, and when COVID hit, basically all those customers call me hey, we don't know what's going on. We've got to stop and we've let everyone out of their contracts, for sure, but we lost about 90% of that business, and at the time I really didn't know what I was. Yeah, it was a very big hit and they really know what to do. But then I started thinking well, people really have problems now. Right, they've got problems that need solved. A lot of problems were, you know, during COVID is. You know, how do we maintain a remote workforce? How do we keep our store open but just have deliveries? How do we keep our employees engaged out? You know, how do we give our customers engaged? How do we transfer our shop from totally brick and mortar to an online right? So it was a godsend for me as far as building back up or getting more involved in the Interact One business. But because if I didn't have that, I don't know where I'd be today. I'd probably be dipping my toe back in the corporate pond again, right, right, but you've got to be able to. Chris: Yeah, the ability to, I guess you know, kind of pivot when necessary and kind of keep going is critical, yeah, For an entrepreneur especially small business owner Yep. What other? I guess, excuse me, what other advice when you think about how you interact with your? You know your partners, your kind of your, these, maybe these what I would call maybe alliances you have with other fractionals. But maybe there are other type of partners you used to keep your business successful, whether that's you know banking relationships, you know accounting, legal. What are some advice you have on that, on you know best practices to make sure you kind of surround yourself with that kind of strong team that you need to kind of have a stable business. Chuck: Yeah. So, listen, a lot of small businesses out there, right, they try to do it all themselves, right and don't. Right, there are professionals out there that can help you and even if you want to build everything in house, you know, make sure that you know, like you said, have a strong relationship with a banker, a financial person, you know, some sort of business coach maybe to help you do things. What I do is I just try to treat everyone with respect and, as a consultant, sometimes we especially when we're solving problems, right, I can't, someone can't say something to me and me go well, crap, how stupid are you? Right, you got to treat that business owner with respect and sometimes, if they're making boneheaded decisions, there's a little bit of dance involved in it. Right, so be respectful and earn people's trust and with, whether it's your business partners like me, you know all the other C level professionals that I work with, right, because most of the people that we bring on as our partner or our hybrid or partner or fractional whatever you want to call it consultants that we lean on in areas that we don't have the expertise, they're all C level, okay, so you've got to be respectful of them and trust their decision. Now we have a leave at them. First, right, trust just isn't given. But you know, be respectful and widen your network. Right, you're only as good as the people that you're surrounded by. Chris: Yeah, no, that's for sure. And they're a reflection of you, right? If you're bringing them in, whether that's an employee and you're putting them on a project or a consultant, and you're bringing them in, whoever that client is sees them as a reflection of you. So it's important to make sure they align, you know, with your fundamental values, absolutely, absolutely so in what I think you referred to this a minute ago, when you're talking about certain problems, you've been helping people solve anything you've seen in the last couple of years where you've been involved and maybe in certain projects and develop some. I don't know if there are best practices, but I'm thinking about work, the work remote world we're in and helping companies kind of navigate to a place that can work for the business, to remain profitable but also allow for some of that flexibility. Anything you can share on that regard. Trust Right. Chuck: So one of the biggest problems Just in case. Chris: I didn't hear that clearly. I want to make sure the audio is clear. You said trust. Chuck: That's what I'm talking about Trust, right, that's my text is coming out Trust. So what happens? And it's instilled a sin from the very beginning? Oh, 40 hours a week, and this is your rate, right? And how do I know that my people are working if they're not here? And I can see what's going on behind the desk? And my answer to them is the work being done. Right, is the work being done? And you, as a manager this is what I tell the business owner you, as a manager, need to make sure that you're giving them the work that can be done in the time period that you want it done in, right? You know, if you give someone three things to do and they can do it in four hours instead of eight hours, well, those are the things you needed them to do and they did it. So why shouldn't they get paid what you would have paid them, which was eight hours, okay, but then again, if you don't have your finger on it to where you know how long it takes them to do something, then that's on you, that's not on them. And if you give them too much and they're not getting it all done, then that's when you've got to start looking into it. Am I giving them too much Right. Chris: So the main thing with work remote. Chuck: That I tell, like I said I tell people is trust your people Trust, trust yourself that you made the right decision when you hired them, right, or it's your fault anyway, and then trust the fact that they're working. I've seen businesses that are like well, they've got to log into this system and stay logged in. Okay, well, they could be logging in while they're taking a nap. That doesn't mean that they're doing the work. Well, you know, we make them have a zoom open so that at any time we can look and see if they're working. I said you know I would quit. I don't, I'm going to do the work, but if you're insisting on having a camera on me making sure that I'm doing work all the time, then it's not a right fit. Right, there has to be trust. Chris: Yeah, you're right. I mean I think you know, in addition to trust, I think what I've seen and I think you're saying this as well is you got to communicate clearly what the expectations are Right. So when you talk about these assignments, I mean you know not only is the word getting done, is it getting done timely and efficiently and correctly Right, and if so, then you know you're on to something. And if not, then you got to correct that from a work performance standpoint and be able to say look, this is what the assignment was, this is what the deadline was, and if it didn't meet the standards, be able to explain why. And then figure out what's the right corrective action from there. Chuck: Yeah, expectations are everything and then being able to you know, another thing you do is get buy in from that remote worker you know how, what can you do, how much can you do it? You know, it's like my telecom days, the old telecom days. You had what was called an occupancy rate, so you had a call center where people are answering the call and then, oh, I want 100% occupancy, which that meant that 100% of the time that people were on the phone. And it's not possible, right, even the best call centers run at 60 to 65% occupancy, right, and you got to realize the way your people are too. If you're paying them for eight hours, you know what you'll be good, you're doing really good if you're getting six hours of real work out of them. Because you got to stop and think sometimes, as, as American culture, we really, I guess we really think that our employee employees owe us when really we owe them. Chris: Yeah, that's a good point. So let's talk a little bit just about you know, maybe on your personal leadership style. How would you describe your leadership style? And first there, and then you know how do you work with some of your clients. Maybe help them with their leadership style when those opportunities present themselves. Chuck: Well, I think that in the business that I'm in, I have to be collaborative, right, you can't make all the decisions and do everything yourself, and really that's what business owners have to do all the time telling them that you're, you know, you're micromanaging your people, you know. Give them some room to breathe, let them have some creativity, let them help make decisions. Don't just tell them what to do, ask them what needs to be done, and that's kind of my leadership style, right. But then I always go back to problem solving. So I want to know what the real problem is, what, not just the problem, the problem, you think the perceived problem, but what is the real problem and how can we correct this with any decision that's made? Chris: Yeah, so kind of we talked a little bit about this maybe. But I want to ask you a maybe different way when you think about yourself and your career, any kind of setbacks that you've encountered, that you look back and go man, that was a tough time, or I made a boneheaded decision or whatever, but what I learned from it benefited me so much that I can look back and be grateful for that experience. Anything come to mind for there that you can share? Chuck: Yeah, Back when I kind of first started the Interact One on the marketing side, when I was learning marketing, I had a company come to me and it was like we want you to help us acquire more customers. You remember back when deregulation happened on electricity in Texas. Chris:So we started working. Chuck: The problem and the problem that we gave them was you need to have a door-to-door team that needs to be trained this way and done this way and do all this kind of stuff. And they said, okay, great, do it for us. And 286 people later right, five locations across the state of Texas, a lot of money, Thank you, but it wasn't worth it and it almost made me to where I didn't want to even continue. Right, it was so stressful having that many people that are working on a commission-only basis right, Selling electricity, training them, looking at Perf and all of that kind of stuff. So it was very profitable and it's one of the things that, if I had my if I go back in time, that's maybe one thing that I would have changed is I wouldn't have went down that path that took so much energy and took three years of my life to do that. I could have done much greater things. Chris: I believe, interesting. So that kind of segues well into the next question I want to ask you and that is how do you go about maintaining you know there's all the. You know the typical word is work-life balance, and I'm kind of a believer and I had some other guests on the podcast and I agree with this is more about work-life integration than how do you manage both, because you have work and you have your personal life and how do you integrate those so you can show up effectively in both? What are some of the things that you do to try to make that happen in your life? Chuck: I take naps. Chris: I love it. Chuck: I'm a big proponent of taking naps, but really OK. So I've got, maybe, a different viewpoint, because I did the corporate America gig for 20 years and I had my business, grew it very big, then pulled it back small again and I work because I want to work. There is no work-life balance. I have life and I work when I want to work. And if I want to work five hours this week, that's what I work this week. If I want to take a week off, I take a week, and I know it's different for a lot of entrepreneurs, you know. But I'm entering the, the, the twilight state. I don't look at that. I'm pretty dang old, right, and I think that for the younger people starting out, or you know, mid-mid-age, right it's important, right? Don't do what I did in the first 20 years of my career, where all I did was work and I saw my kids on weekends, which initially eventually led to a divorce, which meant that I only saw them every other weekend, right? Yeah, 14 years ago I started over again. Wonderful woman, she keeps me grounded and she is my life, makes me want to be a better man, and we started a new family, so that helps out too. So I've got an eight year old son now, right, and I've got an eight year old granddaughter and I've got an eight year old grandson right. Oh, wow, yeah. So it gives you the. It's allowing me to have a second chance with that and I'm not going to fail it. So, yeah, I don't necessarily know how you do it, whether it's working out or yoga. This is the one of the one of the people in the podcast. They were doing yoga and all this kind of stuff. I know that you have to have something that stimulates your brain at all points in time. I've got an eight year old that does that I've got. You've got to have something that exercises your body. I've got an eight year old that does that. I help coaches lacrosse team and the day after practices I can barely walk. So I don't know if I have a great answer for it. I know it's important, but I'm not there anymore. I just I work because I want to work. Chris: Yeah, no, I work great hours. I think what I love there. Everyone has a little different take on it because, look, everyone's situation is different and so you've got to get to figure out what works in your ecosystem and your environment, and that includes, right, the family and the business and the career and all those things, and those things can change over time. Chuck: There's another camp. Chris: All right. So yeah, I appreciate all this has been really good stuff. I'm going to turn it a little bit to the lighter side and ask you what was your first job? Like real job or entrepreneurial job? No, that real job, I mean I don't know, like in junior high you had to pay for route, or yeah. No, I didn't, I didn't do the paper route. Chuck: So my for my, as I was raised by a single mom, right, we didn't have anything. She was a waitress. So I went into the family business and I bust tables and lost dishes at a restaurant. Chris: That will humble you really quick right, make you hungry, and not just hungry to say I want something different. Chuck: Yeah, I know that I want. I always knew that I wanted to have something more than what I had growing up. Chris: I know you said you listened to some of the prior podcast episodes, so I know you're ready for this one Tex-Mex or barbecue. Chuck: Well, it depends where right Sure, you know. So I do my own barbecue. Okay, so if I'm eating out someplace, I don't necessarily do Tex-Mex very well, except for guacamole I'm a great guacamole. But so I would say, if I'm eating out, it's a text. I eat more Tex-Mex than barbecue, but I enjoy barbecue. Chris: Ma'am, I may have to see if you can ship me some of yours and I bet it's pretty good. Yeah, I make some pretty good barbecue. I love. The honest answer there was. It depends where, because so many of us have. Well, if it's, you know, if it's this that I'm hungry for, then it might be this barbecue joint or this different Tex-Mex place. So I have to share. I just saw and I share with my girls, you know the L L L L Roya in Austin in their signs. There, there was, I saw a picture of this. One says Texan a person who chooses a restaurant based on their chips and salsa. Chuck: You know that's very true, Isn't that true? Chris: What we need is a. Chuck: Tex-Mex barbecue. Chris: Yeah, but we have some of that here in Houston. We have some places that are using like brisket in their tacos and things, so it is. Chuck: They have Korean barbecue. Right, they have Korean barbecue, so why not? You know Tex-Mex barbecue and you know have more. Of. You know the beans would be more of the barbecue style beans with some jalapenos in there. So I put jalapenos in everything. So everything is Tex-Mex. Chris: I like it. Well, you and I may have to get offline and we may come up with a new restaurant concept here. Chuck: Yeah, so okay, last question. This one's out of the menu, yeah. Chris: Everything's out of the menu. Yes. Last question is, if you could take a 30-day sabbatical or you just get away, where would you go and what would you do? Chuck: Well. So sabbatical means something different, right, and getting yourself in a different thing. So I like, at least twice a year, we go to the Smoky Mountains, which is my, that's my spot, right. When I first went to the Smoky Mountains, I was like this is where I belong, right. But a sabbatical might be a little bit different, and I think it would be really cool to go over to Africa and do a photo safari. I don't want to shoot the animals anymore. I did that growing up. I don't need to do it anymore, but to get them on camera and to live in the camps and stuff like that would just be. That'd be something to be really cool, yeah. Chris: It's a bucket list item for sure. Yeah, that's great. Chuck: Well, Chuck, I want to thank you again for taking the time. Chris: come on the show and share your story. I love hearing kind of the career you've had and the way you evolved and I love this the way you're helping companies solve big problems, so really appreciate it. Chuck: Well, I appreciate you having me. It was fun. Chris: All right, we're going to stop the recording there. Let me see if I can actually do that. Hmm, no, here we go. I'm not the host, it won't love me, but they know where we stopped, so hey. I was talking, I talk enough. No, you did great. Look, we, you know I was watching our timer. Yeah, we were. We probably stopped the recording in minute 3435 and 30 to 40 minutes is our goal, so we were right in the sweet spot. And yeah, and it always goes so fast because you're just having a conversation and I think everyone gets amazed that I can't believe it went that well. We were actually talking for that long, but yeah. Chuck: In my business I don't talk, I listen. So it's hard for me to fathom that I'm. You know, when I listen like when I do a conference call with a client I one of the people you had said they use order. We use order also and it shows you the stats on how long each person talked and I always make sure and always tell the other people that make sure that the client's talking more. Chris: Yeah, what you're talking, you know. Chuck: you look at the the the recap and it says Chuck talked for 36 out of 60 minutes. Well, that's too much, Right? Chuck needs to talk for eight minutes out of an hour and let the customer talk. Chris: That's good, that was good. Chuck: I look forward to seeing the seeing the episode. Chris: Absolutely, we'll be back in touch. I don't know. So, josie, with my team and Mackenzie they're my marketing kind of folks and I can't remember the name I know you kind of came through, a group that was, you know, helps you book these things, yeah, thanks. We want a headshot, kind of thing and all that. Chuck: They're having great the ride up on me. All that kind of stuff yeah. Chris: Well then, what we'll do? We'll give you a little. Obviously, there'll be some advanced warning once we get it all packaged up and we have a date certain that we're going to release it, and we'll get it all to you and your people, and then it'll be, it'll hit the presses. Chuck: So also, and the next time I'm in Houston I'll look you guys up and we do lunch or something. Chris: Please do. I would love that Love to go grab some barbecue. Yeah, thank you All right man, I talk to you later. Enjoy the rest of your day. Bye, bye. Special Guest: Chuck Leblo.

In today's episode of Building Texas Business, I speak with Curtis Hite, founder and CEO of Improving. Curtis shares his entrepreneurial journey, from starting at Raytheon to selling his first business and experiencing betrayal, fueling his passion for conscious capitalism. We talk about how Improving has consistently grown during economic downturns by prioritizing employees and culture. Curtis provides valuable insights into his leadership strategies, innovative programs for maintaining connections, and stakeholder models for partnerships. Whether you're an entrepreneur, business leader or interested in leadership, you'll gain inspiring insights on building a resilient company through conscious capitalism. SHOW HIGHLIGHTS Curtis Hite, founder and CEO of Improving, shares his entrepreneurial journey from feeling betrayed and undervalued at his previous jobs to founding a successful business that values its employees. We discuss the importance of maintaining a people-centric focus and sharing strategies for leading a successful company. The concept of conscious capitalism, which is a philosophy that Curtis and his team at Improving have strived to embed in their work culture, is explained. He shares his unique leadership style, emphasizing positivity, high energy, and inspiration. We discuss the importance of listening to the ideas of employees and how he prioritizes them in order to benefit both the business and the employees. Curtis introduces a program called Come Together, which helps build and maintain connections among employees. He describes a homegrown product called Engage, used to measure employee involvement and assign values to their contributions, a major part of their profit share is based on this. We emphasize the application of a stakeholder model in business, which is about identifying key partners and building relationships with them. The discussion touches on the importance of leading by example and inspiring with vision, reflecting on how Hype shifted to utilizing personal life books and creating a vision for his organization. The episode ends with a light-hearted conversation about Curtis' first job, barbecue preferences, and cherished family memories. LINKSShow Notes Previous Episodes About BoyarMiller GUESTS Curtis HiteAbout Curtis TRANSCRIPT (AI transcript provided as supporting material and may contain errors) Chris: In this episode, you will meet Curtis Hite, ceo of Improving. Curtis shares several important lessons he has learned along his entrepreneurial journey, maybe the most important being believe in yourself, but not too much, because you're part of a team. Curtis, I want to thank you for taking the time to join me on Building Texas Business. Curtis: Alright, thank you for having me here. I appreciate you including me. Chris: So let's get started by just you introducing kind of yourself, but more importantly, your company and what it's known for. Curtis: Alright, so Improving is a modern digital services company. I think what we're probably known for most, though, is our participation in leadership in the conscious business movement in the United States. Chris: That's great. What inspired you to start Improving? Curtis: There's actually a story I consider Origin story here, that's good, we're here for stories, okay. And I was working two companies ago at Raytheon. It's a very large company, over 100,000 employees. I was very ambitious as a young man and I had this idea of creating an internal consultancy at Raytheon. Had some skill sets that were fairly unique at the time with the technology transition similar to where we are with AI today but that was object programming, and so I came up with a business plan with my partner there and we presented it to the leadership. It went all the way up to Boston and when a letter came back it included. The words were the sentence tell the software we need to get back to work. Chris: Oh, okay, and so. Curtis: I kind of reflected on that. Being part of 100,000 person organization, those words were never intended. I get that for my eyes right. Right it was intended for more of the senior executives at the organization. But it kind of inspired me to say, well, wait a minute, maybe I can do something different. This is a good business plan and developed it on my own. And instead I took that out and found three partners that were already in the industry and started my first business. But that was the first business, but that's how I got started there. Okay, I kind of pushed there, and this was after four and a half years of being at this larger company. And then the second story, the origins to this one, is rooted in that company, the three partners, that there were, three partners from Raytheon, three partners from this new business, xp, and in the end, without going into a lot of the details, I felt very, maybe betrayed by one of the partners and maybe misled was the a better word Very misled and taken advantage of, and I always remembered that feeling. So take those two stories, plus one more, which was we sold that business to a French organization and we went public during the dot com days and after several years of running that business the French business, let me go and we were experiencing literally record revenues at the time and record profits. Even a majority of the profits of the group are coming out of North America, which I was responsible for. And I remember the shame that I felt in that moment and embarrassment and all the raw feelings that go with that. And there's a little bit of irony there because I might have been thinking about leaving or trying something new, but that kind of jolted me and I had something to prove. I had no intention of going back into the services business again. Yeah, I found myself with something to prove, creating a new services company. That was fueled out of shame, and some people may like that. Chris: Well, essentially you say it that way because my sense is that people were really honest about it. They probably come to the same conclusion you just did and did years ago. Is it maybe some shame or embarrassment that fueled them to prove something wrong and got them going? I don't think there's anything wrong with that. Curtis: Yeah, I'm not going to say there's anything wrong, because shame, if channeled properly, can be a great motivator. Chris: It's not the healthiest of feelings, I get that Right, but it does create a high degree of motivation or denotation, depending on how you are built, how you let it handle or affect you right. Curtis: Right. And so my partner, rick, in this business he actually three or four years in and we very quickly we went from 600,000 to 2 million to roughly 6.8 to 10 million in our first four years and he was worried that I would lose the motivation right, and that really didn't happen. It shifted and motivation came from a different place. But in those early years. Chris: I remember the earlier events and what can I learn when shake this company and I didn't want to mislead anybody, Right. Curtis: From lesson from. Lesson two yeah, I didn't want to feel like a number, anybody that would feel like a number. I was 139662. Chris: That was my number at the large company and that's what you would give that number instead of your name. Curtis: Right, and I felt a little treated that way when it's tell that software, we need to get back to work Right. And so when we formed the company, culture was a very important and perhaps one of, I think, our greatest accomplishments is that we've been named to over 100 best places to work. We've been number one here in Houston, led by Devlin Wells. We've been number one in Dallas, we've been number one in Texas, we've number one in Ohio, and it's not about being number one because in almost all of our offices were recognized, but it's just really about the executives at the company caring about the employees. Chris: Right the way they feel valued. Curtis: Right and that's what I'm genuinely carrying and valuing the employees, although it's not all about the employees all the time either. It's this careful balance. Chris: Sure, Well, if they don't feel valued, you're not going to win awards like that, right? Because they pull into your organization to really try to get a feel for the pulse and what's really going on. Well, thank you for sharing the origins because to me there's so much learning in that and in each entrepreneur's story there's different things that cause inspiration, from ideas and knowledge to emotions and feelings. What I gather from yours is there's kind of a series of three different setbacks, if you will, that you learn from in different ways An idea being disregarded by a large corporation hear those stories all the time. Partner issues in a business and learning from that. Hear that, represent and guide people through those issues all the time, and then this kind of the shock of being let go when you thought you were doing everything right. So I think it's a really cool, well-rounded story. So when did you talk about starting improving with your partner? What year was that? Give us a reference in time. Curtis: The very end of two things. Chris: Okay, so, wow. So you were a few years into that company. You were talking about the success over four years. You had economic crash in 08, but you were thriving through that. Curtis: Right, we actually built the company in the Great Recession and we grew every year through that environment. In fact, we've grown every year in our history, so we've never had a year. Some years it's small, a few percentage points. Other years it's big growth, but that really it's core of one of our values, which I call involvement, or which we call involvement, and that our success is a consequence of our collective involvement and leaning on each other, no matter what the conditions are good times, bad times. So, yeah, really have a big team and I really believe that. Chris: Yeah, so you've then managed at least through a couple of big downtimes. You talked about the Great Recession. Obviously, we had a global pandemic. What are some of the maybe lessons learned that you could share about how you kept focused to allow the business to continue to grow even though the world around you is, like you know, in chaos? Curtis: The first thing is remembering your team. Sometimes, as entrepreneurs, it's easy to become self-reliant, sizing your own role in this and maybe even disregarding the roles of others. So I highly encourage people and I had that lesson early on that I don't have tendencies to do that. In fact, I know deep down the exact opposite is true and pull the team together and what are we going to do in these crises or these downtimes? What are some of the ideas? So that also lets you know you're not alone. It's a good point. A lot of business owners, including myself, I often feel alone. Chris: Sure. Curtis: But I'm reminded that when I ask for help or I'm a little bit vulnerable, then I'm not alone. I'd simply feel alone, often because of the own barriers that I put up for myself, and that would be the number one thing I would remember in any of these downtimes. The second is to remain focused on what is most important, and that's unfortunately sometimes that's keeping a business alive and being not only an active member but considered a leader in conscious capitalism movement. People sometimes misinterpret that means we can't do layoffs. We can't because we're conscious business. How those are contradictory. They're not contradictory. Sometimes we have to make the decisions to keep a business healthy and unfortunately, when you care about the employees, yet at the same time we have to make decisions because you care about the business and the longevity of the employees. It requires difficult decisions. Don't be afraid to make them, but make them with a caring heart. Chris: Right, but I wanna talk more about the conscious capitalism movement. But I think you hit on something that's very important Not losing sight. At the end of the day, you're kind of responsible for a healthy, thriving business. Does it mean you're not gonna face hard decisions that affect people's lives? But the other thing I think I've learned and I'm curious if it's been your experience is, when you're faced with those hard decisions, the sooner that you can make them and not rashly but with good information the better off everyone involved is the employees affected, the company, yourself as a leader and moving through that process. Curtis: That's true. In my career I've had to do layoffs three times. Okay, one was during the dot-com bust and Enron was our largest client. We built their software. Let's not, we don't need to visit that story anymore. It wasn't us but we built the software. And then the second was during COVID was such a rapid decrease, people pulling back in business and services, just a lot of fear in the industry. And then the most recent one was some restructuring that we had to do this year. Chris: Okay. Curtis: In a weaker and very what I call volatile economy, and they're never easy and I know they're imagined by people that are affected, as this is easy but they're not. But we can't be afraid and I learned from I was forced into it with Enron All night. 40% of our business went away in a single day. Covid was the same thing. Chris: Sure. Curtis: Right, we had business units that lost 65% of their business in three weeks and when you look at that, you're forced into very expedient decisions, but it slowed down enough to make the good decisions. Right, and don't be afraid because you're gonna get negative pushback, but treat people with respect and treat people with care, because these are real people that have real lives and it's a very sad thing. Chris: It is. It is, and in other words I'd add there, treat people with dignity. So it is Absolutely. It is not an easy thing to have to go through as the leader making those decisions. So let's talk a little bit about the conscious capitalism movement, because you talked about it and referred to it twice. I was fortunate enough I shared with you, before we started recording, to speak at one of their events. I think what that is all about is just so wonderful for the business world. Share a little bit about how you and improving have been involved in that. Curtis: I got invited in 2009 and I mentioned earlier my motivation was kind of shame when we're trying to survive and build the business. But about three and a half years in, I got invited by a good friend that I still do business with and friends today, to this CEO summit in Austin and it was a phenomenal event and it was really shifting in my motivation. The keynote speaker there really had a statement at the beginning of his presentation that landed with me and it was that, outside of sales professionals, it professionals have the worst perception among CEOs and I got really defensive because we're an IT company and I'm thinking in my head and I'm journaling instead of listening to the presentation and I kind of realized our own business. Wait a second. Our industry has earned some of that, not all of it, and whether it's perception or reality, we have to own it. And that is when I actually shifted the. My own motivation was to change and shift that perception and not feel victimized by it, but to really turn that into energy on how we change that as an organization. So I was inspired by that event, by the people at the event John Mackie of Whole Foods, who originated the Tip Kindle container store, doug Rao of Trader Joe's these are really great leaders inside these businesses and I got inspired by them, plus that message and I wanted to help the organization. So, through helping the organization, the local chapters speaking on it quite frequently, not being ashamed to be a capitalist but knowing that capitalism can be used for something even greater than the good it already does, is becoming the foundation of our business. I call it the philosophy of our guiding principles. Chris: Yeah, I love that. So, taking that, how does that, or how has it and how does it continue to shape and influence the culture at improving? Curtis: Well, the first, a year later, when I was with my partner at a conference or seminar that was being taught by Stephen coming on trust, I kind of had the epiphany that the reason why we had the perception was because the CEOs didn't trust their IT organizations or partners a lot of the time. So we refold our value to include this concept of trust, and I consider three of our values are identity, but one of our values, building trust, is our ambition, and so this combination of changing this perception by focusing on trust has reshaped our business for the next decade. 70 percent of our employees participate in trust pods every week, voluntarily. They don't have to trust pod is a group of five to 15 individuals talking about these 13 trust behaviors, how they're going to use them in their daily lives with their clients, our stakeholders right, but the biggest effect is how it affects you outside of business, how it affects your relationships at home and with your friends. But this is a relentless pursuit when you think that 70 percent of our employees voluntarily join these groups and talk about building trust every week. Chris: That's. That's amazing what I guess I'm, what I'm assuming occurs in the through the participation of these trust pods, is almost a blending of work and work life and family or personal life, and there is allowing for a bridge, which to me is so important, because I think it's a mistake when people think I'm going to drop who I am as a person or what goes on in a personal life when I step in the office and vice versa, because there's a, to me, a natural blend. It's like let's just acknowledge that it's there, but how can we help them coexist? Curtis: I completely agree. Different conversation, different presentation. But I really don't believe in the concept of work life balance because it really suggests there's one or the other right. They're not connected in any way. I love many of the premises behind it, but I'm a proponent of an integral life. Yes, work is part of your life and family's part of your life, and health, and maybe faith and or learning right, everybody has the areas of their life that they prioritize, but this is a and work is almost in everybody's life. So how do we integrate these and these trust pods become a significant way of integrating and we help right. At least I like to think, and I often get this feedback that the people who participate in these trust pods with the intent of applying it at work benefit even more at home yeah, I can see that. Chris: So You're a software company let's talk about. I mean just saying that, as it is to me, infers innovation. So what are some of the things that you do as the CEO to help encourage and instill the employees at improving, to be innovative, to act innovative, because with some of that, you know you have to create a safe environment and allow for failure. So what are some of the things that you have done or are doing there to improving, to help foster that? Curtis: I referred to one of our values before, that our success is the consequence of our collective involvement, and I've referred to trust. One of the trust behaviors is to listen first and really combining those two things to try to be innovative, to gather ideas right. As a CEO, you also have to be mindful that you're going to get a lot of good ideas from your employees when you ask, but you can rarely execute on them all right. So at any given time there's probably 100 things on the money put in quotes. The world's be doing right Well, but we can only do three or four of them. So I really try to make an effort to listen, have our other executives at the company listen, try to bubble up some of the most important ideas, but also represent what's important to the business and where the important ideas to our employees overlap with the important ideas to the business are those that we take, because sometimes they don't always overlap right. Employees may want something or the business may want something. That doesn't overlap. So that's a way that we prioritize, but I would say, of the ideas, of the programs we have in place, of the initiatives, we have something called come together. That is a phenomenal gathering and creating connection. The vast majority, 90% don't come from me, they come from the company. Yeah, and it's just listening and finding the good and finding the value is often probably and letting your own ego. You don't have to be. This is for the entrepreneurs up there. You don't have to be the source of all the good ideas. In fact, I would encourage you to be take more pride on identifying the good ideas than being the source of the good ideas. Chris: There's a lot of satisfaction, I think, when you can get to that point of being proud of someone you hired, that maybe you helped train or develop or created an environment where they could be trained, developed, create their own opportunities and reward them for the ideas that they come up with right Absolutely the whole new level of satisfaction. Curtis: It is. Chris: Freeze you up as the leader to do so many more things if the pressure of all the good ideas is off your shoulders. Curtis: That's right, or all the accolades is off of mine or other executives. We actually have a homegrown product. That's, I believe it's part of our competitive advantage. It's called engage, but it's about measuring this involvement that I've talked about. Employees get to enter in things that they are doing to benefit the company, often while benefiting themselves, and it tracks these things and even assigns values to them so that when they do this, they kind of know how they're participating and how they are adding value. A major part of our profit share is based on that. Chris: Oh wow, that's right. Yeah, well, as you know, too right, if you incentivize the behavior, you're likely to get people to behave in that way. So if you incentivize something like that, yeah they're. I imagine the engagement is really strong. Curtis: It is for two reasons. The engage creates visibility. So, as the CEO of a 1600 person organization, how do I get visibility to what people are doing? I have detailed visibility into what people I look at this so they often get accolades. So people that are seeking kind of affirmation and things like that's their reward for something like this. Those that might be more utilitarian and might be more motivated by money there's a money component to it for those people, but not everybody's motivated in one way, so we try to create a mixture. Chris: I like that. So changing the subject a little bit, but still to building a company, driving it to success. You have to work outside your organization with other stakeholders or surrounding yourself with a strong team. You know external professionals. What are some of the things that you have done to identify key partners, build and maintain those relationships that have benefited, I guess, are allowed for improving, to grow, to the company it is today? Curtis: You use a very important word for me, which is a stakeholder. Here we're big proponents of a stakeholder model, not just a shareholder model, and it's very important, I believe, to make sure, like you would your own employees that all of the stakeholders have a certain alignment with your values and your ethos. You're never going to get perfect alignment because these organizations have their differences, which are wonderful, but you should kind of tell those that align similarly and those that don't. So, when we look at suppliers, what are the suppliers that have a similar set of core values? How do they treat right their own suppliers? Because we treat our suppliers better than our own customers treat us right. Chris: Very important. Sure. Curtis: How are they treating their own suppliers? When we look at partners, right, a lot of partners out there are looking at it. What's in it for me? And despite the rhetoric of us, you can sift through that, because as a partnership, are they sometimes willing to go first? Do we go first? Right, have you conscious capitalism? The movement this way? It's a partnership, but we were going first all of the time, without resentment, right, right. Yet in the long game, that ends up paying, even though that was not our purpose. So looking for this alignment becomes key, just like you would with an employee. Chris: Makes sense. It makes us. I like the treat the suppliers better than the customers, because without those suppliers you can't serve your customers. Curtis: No, right? Well, I'm not saying we treat our customers worse than our suppliers. I said that we treat our suppliers better than our customers treat us. Chris: Oh, that's right yeah. Curtis: Because we give the, we try to treat our suppliers as if they were a customer. Chris: Yeah, Makes sense. We like said they're integral to you delivering on your promise. Curtis: Very. Chris: Let's talk a little bit about leadership style. How would you describe your leadership style and maybe I'm probably pretty certain based on this conversation how you would describe it today versus maybe 15 years ago, and maybe some of the things that occurred to cause or help you evolve to where you are today? Curtis: I would describe myself as very positive, high energy. I genuinely care about people and I believe and this isn't hubris, I think many people would agree that I'll rely on inspiration too and I think I'm fairly inspiring in the right circles, both one-on-one and at least at a larger level. But when I look at some of the lessons, how that inspiration has evolved over time is very important and it's kind of very different. When I was younger I tended to rely on kind of leading by example, and if I did everything, then people would be inspired and follow. And that works to some degree and that's a common source of inspiration for people Like oh my gosh, look how hard Curtis is working. And right, he really cares about the business. I might do the same thing, but I do believe that only goes so far. Chris: It's kind of like the command model, and I think even Jim Collins talks about it. You can only get a company so far if it's the charge up the hill type of leader. Right, you can be successful, but to a point. Curtis: And to a point and I switched to trying to inspire with vision, the vision of what we could be, the vision maybe of what I personally can be. And I started with my own personal life books and creating vision for myself, but switched that to the organization inspired by a leadership group, training, staying out of Dallas and to even put together a 10-year vision for the business. And so today we have a 10-year vision, we have three-year visions, we have one-year vision. These are all written, but I tend to be able to see things and see the good in things, and that's one thing. That's why I sit on positive. So that's I see the good and can inspire around the good versus the negative or polarizing concepts in our world today. Chris: What I like about that because I can identify with that is that positive attitude is kind of how to interpret what you're saying. Is that you're in control of that. Right, you can control whether you're really going to bring up positive mindset to whatever the circumstance is or not, and you choose to say I'm going to look for the positive and then try to be inspirational about what we can do in this circumstance, and I think that's effective leadership right. Curtis: Positivity is a choice. Chris: Yes, right. Curtis: And whether it's in our personal life or our professional life, we can, in almost any circumstance, choose to find something of gratitude in the circumstance. There are things I get it that we it's too hard to find and I'm not diminishing those, but for most things in people's lives and that becomes a choice. I've also found, and for anybody listening to this, think of your three favorite managers, leaders you ever worked for. Would any of your favorites ever be described as negative? I've asked this more than 1000 times and outside somebody hearing this and trying to prove me wrong, nobody, ever, not a single person, has ever said yes, their favorite was negative. It is something of the most effective leaders. Positivity is one of what we have found to be the six most common traits. Chris: It didn't surprise me at all. It didn't surprise me at all. So let's kind of just to wrap up this conversation. What I always like to ask guests to do is we've got an audience of aspiring entrepreneurs, or maybe just started our own business. What are one or two nuggets of you know? My guess, takeaways that you would say, hey, if you're out there doing this or thinking about it, if you don't do anything else, do at least this. One or two, two things, or maybe avoid X and learn from my mistake. Anything that you can draw upon in your experience of you know. Two, I guess, two companies, three companies now that you could share. Curtis: First I would say believe in yourself, but not too much, and remember, remember deeply in your heart that you're part of a team and while the pack maybe nothing without the wolf, you have to remember that the wolf is also nothing without the pack and these things come aligned. So it's a team effort and very early on to and this is a radical idea I shared 87% of the company, and this was not just me, this was my partner coming alongside saying let's do so. My partner and I combined had about 23% of the company voting units, so we could be voted off the island at any time. Interesting that is sharing in the success of the company and that's one of our tenants today of creating a good work environment that we really did share. From an equity perspective, you may not have to share that much, okay, but it worked for us and I'm not and I'm not going to complain. But what I found most commonly, the most owners that we've found true owners in any business has been six and we've talked to hundreds of businesses. Yet we have hundreds of them and we're a privately held company. Chris: Yeah, no, that's impressive and definitely putting your money where your mouth is right about trusting the collective group to be successful, because they'll benefit from it as much as you will. Curtis: And then they. We found people have stayed, they've benefited and they're inspired often, yeah, harder towards a collective goal. Chris: That's great. That's great advice. Yes, thank you for that. Thank you. So on the personal side, we'll lighten up the mood a little bit. So what was your first job? Curtis: Oh, first job was mowing lawns because I got in trouble as a kid. Don't want to share that full story, except me and my brother putting some napalm burn some people's tires, goodness only, and I ended up mowing lawns for a long time to prefer to buy the tires back and all of that. Chris: Oh, that sounds like that. Yeah, there's a deeper story there, for sure. Okay, Tex-Max or barbecue. What do you prefer? Curtis: Barbecue. Chris: Okay, no hesitation there. I like it. Curtis: Love barbecue. Chris: And then last question if you could take a 30 day sabbatical, where would you go and what would you do? Curtis: Wow, I don't know where I'd go, but I know who I'd go with and I would take my two kids, Colin and. Chris: Autumn Awesome, that's great. No, no better people spend time with right that's right, all right. Curtis, thank you for sharing your story and being so open about what you've done through your career, the setbacks, the successes, and what you're doing now to build, improving, to the amazing company it is. Curtis: Thank you so much for having me today.

In today's episode of Building Texas Business, I chat with Rafael Nasr, the man behind Craft Pita. Rafael shares his fascinating journey in the food industry, from starting his first business at a young age to launching Craft Pita. He talks about his experiences running a food truck and working for other businesses, emphasising the value of community involvement. We also discussed his perspective on private equity and assembly-line restaurants and how these experiences shaped him as an entrepreneur. It's an inspiring discussion with a successful food industry leader. SHOW HIGHLIGHTS Rafael Nasr the founder of Craft Pita, began his entrepreneurial journey at 20 with a food truck, which was a learning experience in managing all aspects of a business and the importance of choosing the right business partner. He worked in various roles in the food industry before opening Craft Pita, learning about the importance of being part of a community, the impact of private equity, and the challenges of assembly style models. When opening Craft Pita, Nase had the goal of creating a scalable concept, planning from day one to open multiple locations. The name Craft Pita was chosen to reflect the restaurant's focus on quality and to clearly communicate the type of cuisine to potential customers. Rafael believes that hiring decisions are crucial in the restaurant industry, looking for a high hospitality quotient for front of house staff and attention to detail and quality for back of house staff. The company culture at Craft Pita is centered around sharing culture through food, creating an atmosphere where guests feel like they are walking into a family home. He had to adapt quickly to the challenges brought on by the COVID-19 pandemic, transforming the restaurant into a drive-through and offering additional products such as cleaning supplies and produce boxes. As a leader, Nasr believes in being in the trenches with his team and also knowing when to step back and let them do their own thing. He emphasizes the importance of empathy, awareness, and adaptability in leadership. We discuss the challenges of managing a team with diverse ages, backgrounds, and perspectives, emphasizing the need to individualize leadership styles. The podcast episode concludes with Nasser sharing his plans for a third Kraft Pita location and discussing the financial and legal implications of business expansion. LINKSShow Notes Previous Episodes About BoyarMiller GUESTS Rafael NasrAbout Rafael TRANSCRIPT (AI transcript provided as supporting material and may contain errors) Chris: In this episode you'll meet Rafael Nasr, founder of Kraft Pita. Rafi is growing a fast-casual restaurant concept with the goal of sharing culture through food. Rafi, I want to thank you for joining me here on the podcast. First, I just want to start with tell us who your, what your business is, what are you known for? Rafael:Yes, I am the owner and operator of Kraft Pita. We have two restaurants here in the Houston area, One in the Briar Grove Tanglewood Galleria area on San Felipe and Foundview, and we just opened our second location last November over on Buffalo. Speedway in West Park, here in the West U area, very close to y'all's office. Chris: Yeah, and I'm grateful for that, by the way. So I've heard a little bit, but I want to hear from you. Tell us what inspired you to start Kraft Pita. Rafael: Yes, so I'm a first-generation Lebanese, peruvian American. My father is from Northern Lebanon, and I spent my summers visiting my grandmother in Lebanon. My family has a restaurant business there as well, and so I spent a lot of my summers, you know, hanging out in my uncle's restaurant, always around food. I was the kind of kid classic story of grabbing scraps off the table at my grandma's house while the other kids are playing. You know, my sisters wanted to go to the beach and I wanted to go find the best shawarma possible. Chris: Okay, so that was the origin of my interest in the business when I was at Texas. Rafael: Christian University studying entrepreneurial management. I actually opened a food truck while I was in school, so I started my first business when I was 20 years old. It was basically a late night business for all the college kids after they got back home from the bars, soaking up a little of what they had enjoyed at the bars. So, as a university, this is a safety thing you guys need. And I sold my business because I wanted to graduate on time and TCU is not a cheap school by any means and worked for several other businesses but kind of, while all that was going on, working for other restaurants. Chris:I knew I wanted to open my own restaurant. Rafael: I saw an opportunity here in the Houston market for a higher quality Middle Eastern Mediterranean food. Chris: Okay, I love the idea that you started your first business when you were 20. Yeah, tell us, what was that like? Rafael: That was insane. I would go to class from 8am until 3.30. I would prep food from 3.30 to 5.30. And I would serve from about 6pm until 2am. Luckily I found my girlfriend slash wife right before I started the business, because my social life kind of took a back seat. So it was, you know, I didn't go to college anticipating being in the restaurant business, but it taught me what I wanted to do for the rest of my life. I can tell you it was a lot cheaper than my degree, but it was a really valuable lesson in what it takes as an entrepreneur to wear all hats in a business, and I learned that very early on in my career and it set me on for a great path to eventually own craft beer. Chris: Yeah. So let's talk about kind of the things, that lessons you learned. You know doing that food truck, and then you get the idea for craft pita. What were you doing before that? And then what sparked you to kind of take the step to go on your own again? Rafael: Yeah. So lessons I learned owning my food truck tell you a very valuable one. I didn't have a great partner. You know that was part of the reason I wanted to get out of the business and I think that was a really valuable lesson I learned super early in my career and I think that's a valuable lesson for any entrepreneur is that when you choose who you're doing business with, it's like you're getting into a marriage. Chris: Right. Rafael: And I also learned that you know when you are starting a small business, particularly in the food side of the industry. You have to do as much as humanly possible yourself, because labor is your biggest expense. And I was in school and owning a business. I think if I was just running the business, I could have been more profitable. Things could have gone better. That was a valuable lesson I learned. I think everyone has a study. Oh, I want to, you know, invest in a restaurant. I want to bar, do this and it'd be cool. But I also want to do what I'm doing. This is a all in business. Gotcha and obviously now I'm all in. Chris: Look, I think what you say is right. I'll say I'm not sure it's much different for most businesses. If you're really going to be in it as the entrepreneur, owner, founder, you have to be all in for sure. Rafael: And especially that applies to business. Where business is, where you know human capital is the business you know you're. You need hands to to prepare something, you need hands to to serve something. And after that I came back here to Houston. I worked for a family friend over a Island Grill. Oh sure, yeah, I worked for a phasal, helped him open up his bunker hill store, worked there for about a year and I learned a lot working there. You know I learned that being a member of a community, being in neighborhood, a restaurant and shaking hands and kissing babies is a big part of being successful in this industry. I also worked for him to also gauge what Houston's interests were in the cuisine and Mediterranean food. After that I went to go work for a company called Bert's Cabot, which it was a Chipotle style Middle Eastern restaurant Okay, and they were opening up several units very fast to MBA guys out of UT and when I worked for them it was amazing they're growing really fast. But I also saw the negatives of what happens when private equity gets involved and their only priority is opening as many units as possible. I also learned that the assembly style, chipotle style model was not something I wanted to do for Kraft Pita. I thought it was something I wanted to do, but it's kind of hard to convey quality and translate that when you're going through an assembly, style, model, concept right. And I knew at Kraft Pita I wanted to be a better quality than like a sublayer Chipotle or any of those things. I also learned from them that branding is a really important thing. They, when I joined them, they were Bert's Cabot, then they were Bert's and then they became New Mediterranean and there was Turkish donor kebabs that are influenced by German food and I just learned that you don't have much time to translate what your food is to people especially when you're not selling American food. Chris: It sounds like they had an identity crisis. Rafael: It was an identity crisis and literally sometimes it was honestly just the name. You know your name is so important when you're in the food business and you can be kitschy, you can be cute, but when people read your name or need to type it into a web browser or into a social media search bar, it's got to be clear and has to be concise and has to translate what the product is. Chris: Yeah, sounds like you had an immense amount of learning in just a few years. Rafael: That was just two years and at the time my wife she's still in tech sales she moved to Austin so I followed her over there and I tried to get into fine dining. No one would hire me in any of the fine dining restaurants because of my past casual experience and taking two jobs in two years, so I ended up taking a job with Poppus at Popocitos I'm 35 in Austin and I stayed there for about three and a half years. I thought about going to culinary school but I already spent a lot of money on my degree and I decided to go work for Poppus because, being here in Houston, everybody knows the weight that name holds and also their management training is probably the best in the country when it comes to the hospitality industry. Chris: They're definitely known for that. Rafael: And they're known for that from outside of the industry when it comes to management, and I decided to go work for them, because why am I going to go to culinary school when I can go to restaurant school and they'll pay me? Chris: for it. Rafael: So that was an amazing opportunity I learned they have you start off as a busser and then a server, then a bartender, then a front of house manager, then you're a kitchen manager and when you get in the kitchen they have you work the fry line, then the grill line, make salads. They really. I learned there that as a manager, if you want to gain the respect of people that you're managing, you have to be able to do the job. You probably want to do it as well as them, but you have to know how to do it. Sure, I mean, there there was guys working the grill that were as old as I was. They've been working there for as long as they've been alive, right. So it's one thing to manage a few people, but then when you're a restaurant like that and you're managing 40 people at once, it really taught me everything I need to know to be ready to go my own. Chris: So you mentioned the importance of branding. So what was it that led you to Kraftpita True Mediterranean and to develop the concept that you came up with? Rafael: So funny story about the name Kraftpita. I'd actually come up with it before we opened our food truck. We ended up not using the name and one day in Austin we had been brainstorming what we would call the restaurant, whatever. My wife brought the name up and she said what about Kraftpita? And I was like that's a great name. What did you think of that? She said you came up with it 10 years ago. Chris: You were forgotten. Rafael: I had forgotten. I'm like man. I'm so glad my wife remembered. Chris: And again. Well, let me pause there For those that were at TCU late night what was the food truck? Rafael: called. So the food truck is again an example of bad branding. It was called Mediterranean Chunky Monkey. This was my partner's idea and actually funny story. We had gotten a cease and desist letter from Ben and Jerry's for the name because they owned the rights to all food products that have the words chunky and monkey next to it. I wish I would have known you then. Maybe you could have held down. Chris: The other important having a good legal team right yes, exactly. Rafael: But to that point I told, hey, make sure you look it up. We're all good. Obviously didn't, but this time around I definitely looked up, covered my bases, so, and luckily we were selling the truck at the time while they were sending us the cease and desist letter. We chose the name Kraftpita because, like I mentioned earlier, when you read the words Kraftpita and you know it's a restaurant, you know you're walking into a Mediterranean, middle Eastern restaurant and because of the word Kraft, that you are walking into somewhere that has premium goods baked from scratch, made to order, it connotates quality and true Mediterranean is partially a joke. Lebanese people think they invented everything and the Greeks think they invented everything. The Turkish think they invented everything. Palestinians, israelis it's a little bit of tongue-in-cheek of Lebanese food is the best Mediterranean food and we do believe that. Obviously I'm very biased, but I think what makes Lebanese food the best Mediterranean food is it has this through line of a freshness and spices that really brings the food up a few notches, whereas Greek food is not super heavy in the spices but lots of fresh herbs and things like that. And then, if you go into Turkish cuisine, syrian, jordanian, palestinian, and even if you go into Persian cuisine. There's a lot of spices. I think Lebanese food is that right balance of spices and freshness, and so that's where Kraftpia two Mediterranean food. Chris: I love it. So you opened your first location. You now expanded to a second location and some would say, especially in the restaurant business, going to that second one to two is a huge jump, because can you make it work when you now your attention split between two different locations? How have you made that work? Because part of that comes with having a good team. Rafael: Definitely. We developed Craft Media from day one to be a scalable concept, so we always knew we were going to have more than one location. It starts and when you, it's one thing to open a restaurant and then think about opening another one, but when you do it from day one, it does make it a bit easier. Not saying that it's been easy, but, for example, our menu is not that big, it's consolidated. We developed managers and a management training program that allowed us to train up one set of managers and then split them off once the new store opened. The other thing that I'm very lucky to have is I work with my mother, claudia. Her and I are a great team and I kind of spend, you know, 80% of my time at the new store 20% of my time at old store, whereas my mother does about a good 75 25 split. She stays at the old store and that makes a huge difference. You know, having ownership presence is one of the most important things at a restaurant and because I have, you know, because we're a team, we're able to split our time. Chris: Yeah. What is it then about making sure you're hiring right, because so many people you know and I, we live it here and I think any business owner you talk to is the hiring decisions are so critical to getting it right. What are some of the things that you do at Craftpita to make sure you're making the best decision you can when you make that hiring decision? Rafael: Definitely. At Craftpita we have a very high standard for hospitality. I do think it's something you can teach people, but there isn't a nature of hospitality when it comes to front of house. We really just ask basic questions like where do you like to eat? What's your favorite example of a good restaurant experience? You know, and typically you can find out if someone has hospitality based on the way they grew up, based on you know their families. They'll tell you. Like you know, my mother taught me. You know, to say hi bye every time I left the house, small things like that. And then in back of house we really try to find people who care about quality, because there's a lot of restaurants where now certain things are so a cookie cutter but they don't even really have to think while they're cooking. It just comes out and we're not selling. You know a very basic food we're selling food. You know, some people have never made hummus before or tasted in their life, and so how are you supposed to hire someone, teach them this recipe and know, even though, what the expectation is. So, front of house, we really look for a high hospitality quotient. You know, when we're interviewing in a back of house, attention to detail and quality, those things are really important for us. Chris: That makes sense. So how would you describe, maybe, the culture that you are building there at Craftpita, as you started it, and now growing it to multiple locations? Rafael: Definitely. I think you know it's in our mission statement that we are committed to sharing culture through food and I think that's really the company culture we try to derive at Craftpita. You know the two cultures I come from actually the three. You know, in Lebanese culture, hospitality is a big thing. You walk into your grandma's house, she gives you hugs and kisses and then there's about seven courses of food that come out, and you know that that food and that is part of the love right, and same thing with my mother's Peruvian culture it's all about family, all about having good time, all about being together and food is kind of this the core part of that and then also being here in Houston. Chris: I mean, you know, I always think Houston is where the south meets the rest of the country and southern hospitality is a thing. Rafael: So, yeah, we really just want you to feel like you're walking into our house and that's the company culture we build and that comes from you know, serving high quality products, and everyone has a group effort making sure people feel welcome. Chris: Very good, excuse me. So let's talk about starting a business and all that not easy. What are some of the maybe setbacks you've encountered and what have you done to overcome those? We've been through some, you know turbulent times recently and I'm sure starting a new business has not been the easiest. Yeah, what are some of the lessons learned that you could share with our listeners on that? Rafael: I mean, I think and I hope no one else has to deal with this lesson ever again, but I COVID happened six months after I opened my restaurant ouch yeah so I, you know, spent my whole life dreaming of this restaurant and you know things are going really well. We actually made a national list of the Yelp top 100 restaurants in America and it just made our business skyrocket because we were the only restaurant he's on the list wow and that was in January of 2020. Of course, you all know what happens February of 2020 and you know. I think the lesson with COVID is there will be outside forces that you did not predict that will affect your business and you can sit there and cry about it, you can roll over and die or you can hit the problem head on. I decided to. I realized when one of the big problems that was happening was how are people going to know we're open for business? Because not all a lot of people. You know we had the two week period here in Texas and some people stay closed and some people open up right after the two weeks happened. So I reached out to a friend of mine that had like a tent rental business and I said I need the biggest tent that can fit a f 350 because you know we got big trucks here in Houston. I need the biggest tent and I'm going to. I need to build a drive through. So I reached out to my landlord. I said, hey, can I do this? you was fine with it, and so we had a tent outside of a restaurant for, I want to say, about six to eight weeks okay, and you know several of my staff had to leave, for you know they had pre-existing conditions or they wanted to go on unemployment and so I basically worked for about 90 straight days outside selling food. I even started. I realized quickly that a lot of people wanted, like you know, cleaning supplies and gloves and sanitized. I got in the sanitizer business. I got in the gloves business. I reached out to my local farmers so I got produce from and I got farm share boxes. We became, you know, pseudo grocery store and that was that saved us, yeah, and a big reason another you know reason why that ended up working out for us is because of the presence of me, my mom, in the restaurant. I think a lot of people, you know, a lot of our local guests, didn't want us to fail right, that loyalty you know going above and beyond for people, for those several months that we were open, I think, built a relationship that to this day still keeps our business, you know, afloat, and a couple other things that our business ran into, partly still because of the whole COVID scenario. But other things is labor inflation over the last few years. I mean, I was looking at my business plan from 2019 and I was like I'm not projected labor numbers. I can tell you we're way above that. And then same thing with our food pricing still going up, and these are just things I think any business person will go through. Is, you know, outside forces affecting your business and unexpected increased costs that you cannot do anything to change? Right, you just have to find ways around it, whether that's giving the guests more value. In one way or another, you have to solve these problems or else they're going to take over. Chris: Yeah, it's funny you say, because most people having a good business plan is critically important and thoughtful and as soon as you finish the plan and go into action, the plan's worth nothing, right, exactly? Rafael: Since I opened my business 10 years ago, people have always come up to me with crackpot ideas. I want to open a bar, I want to open a restaurant, I want to go food truck. And my first question to them is have you drafted a business plan? And it's not. You know, the business plan is not the end, all be all. It's not what's going to get you all the investment money. But it is a plan. You just need guidelines. Chris: You need guidelines. Rafael: You have some thought laid out right, that's all Just laying out your thoughts and you know once you lay out your thoughts you should take that business plan, give it to someone who knows something and have them rip you to shreds. It's some of the. You know it might be humbling but it's necessary yeah. Chris: So how would you describe your leadership style? You know fairly young entrepreneur you mentioned earlier when you were in Poposita. Most people that were reporting to you were much older than you, so how have you managed through that and how has that leadership style developed? Rafael: Yeah, I think you know I've only been a manager. I've never. I never was like a server at a restaurant. So for me I've only been in management. I went from, you know, being on my own being a manager I would say not a very good one at all in any way, shape or form and I was maybe managing four or five people. Then I went to a mom and pop business where there was one central leader and I was just kind of a cog in that wheel and I molded my style of leadership then to, you know, be a service leader and help out the staff with Under Me and kind of bring whatever they needed to my boss. And then at Verds it was kind of like a, you know, a small to mid-sized growing business where they were really trying to implement their leadership style and I just I kind of went along with whatever they needed. But it was a little bit autonomous in the sense that they were headquartered in Austin, not in Houston. So you kind of also have to develop an in-store, in-store leadership that you are, at the end of the day, the point person. Papa's taught me that you know, you can't manage everybody to say, especially in a big restaurant like that, you do have to individualize your leadership style with people. And I think in my industry I think that's a really important lesson, because some because at the end of the day, when you're managing people and you're being a leader, there are the moments where you're in a big like pre-shift total and everybody's listening to you and in those scenarios I would say I tend to do extremely well because I can command a presence. And then there's the times where you have to sit someone aside and listen and just let them talk and that is not necessarily you leading from, that's not necessarily you leading in the sense that you're telling them what to do. Chris: But by you just listening. You're showing them that you're there for them. Rafael: And I think I would describe my leadership style as I don't even know this, but experiential. You know, I'm in the trenches with my people and I also know when to pull back and let them do their own thing. Chris: Well, I think what you were describing earlier is as a leader, how important it is when you're talking about the listening side is to demonstrate an empathy Right, and you learn so much. I mean you're managing or leading people. Everyone's different and one size doesn't fit all. Rafael: One size does not fit all, especially in the restaurant industry, where, in a lot of hospitality, where you're dealing with teenagers, middle-aged people and older people I mean just from the age perspective, let alone people's different backgrounds you have to not everyone's in the same bubble, right. Chris: You know, some of the best workers I have are teenagers, and it's their first job. Rafael: They've never done anything before, but I've molded them into what I need at Craft Pita. And then other times you might get someone who's a 20-year vet in the industry, but they don't listen. So you might have to stroke some egos and let them do their thing, but those two people you have to manage completely differently. So, yeah, it's been definitely. Throughout the years, my leadership style has changed and I think that's a good thing, to acknowledge that. You can go through ups and downs, but just constantly being, I feel, like awareness, in my opinion, is probably the most important trait as a leader if you're the owner of a company, because if you have that awareness that you might need to change your leadership style or sometimes you got turned up, sometimes you got turned down. That will take you really far. Chris: Very true, very true. So interested to ask you about this. So you've expanded to a second location. You said earlier when you started you were always planning to scale this business. So I have to think this is a question on a lot of entrepreneurs' minds what does it take, or when do you know when's the right time to make that expansion? And you know because you're gonna be facing it. You probably are now, but when do you go to the third store? So what are some of the things that you look forward, that you've learned to look forward to know when it's right? Rafael: Of course I think it's. I think this applies to a lot of businesses and it definitely applies to the restaurant business. One, obviously, financials you have to make sure that you can afford to expand right, and I think that's obviously an obvious one. But you should be conservative. This is a tough business in the sense of it's very capital intensive. To open up a restaurant Construction is a nightmare. Dealing with the city is a nightmare. You don't. You can have a really good idea of what something will cost to build out a restaurant, and I can't tell you it's wrong. I definitely had some struggles getting this store open and it was already a second-generation restaurant which normally should be easy, but it goes to like. Chris: The lease terms and tenant allowances are important, and then timing of when you're going to actually rent commences off of completion. All those. Rafael: Which the first store. You know, we dealt with a smaller landlord, the local landlord, and this new store. Over here on Bubblest Weedway there's a big national one. And just dealing with that legal process inside. That was really eye-opening to me. But yeah, that all plays into the financial decision, right. Secondly, I would say knowing when you're ready is it's a management autonomy issue? Is the restaurant running itself? Yeah, if you took a step back. What would happen? I was fortunate enough to kind of have a situation be forced upon me in that I had to go on my honeymoon, I had to get married. You know, my wife wasn't gonna let me get away with that one, so she was tired of waiting Is she we watch ad proposed and then COVID pushed back our wedding about two years but it was kind of a good. Hey, I need to get this restaurant to function for two weeks without me and obviously with COVID having all this stuff. I was very hands-on with the business but I think a lot of small business owners, specifically a lot of restaurant small business owners, struggle with like literally trying to step away. You have to. It's active, that don't do it passively is I'm going to walk? Chris: away today. Rafael: And you know what, if they mess up a catering order, if they mess up a few, this happens, that happens. You got to kind of, you know, eat sour grapes, or else you're never going to be able to scale. Chris: Well, and I think on that mess up part, I mean, obviously it's usually more in how you respond to the mistake than the fact that you made one, because we're all human, yes, now, if you consistently make mistakes, that's one thing, but if you make it, your customer may not be happy, but how you respond and own it and make up for it will speak volumes as to whether they give grace. Rafael: Absolutely Two things on that. One, I always one of my management things is it's okay if you make mistakes, I just care that you learn from them. If you show me you don't learn from mistakes, that's telling me you don't care? Yeah, you know we're, it's human, whether it you know, what we do is very. There's a lot of errors, whether it's temperature or technique, whatever. It's just a matter of if you do learn from those mistakes. So, if you have to step away from your business and your team makes a mistake, it's very important to say, okay, guys, how do we prevent this from happening again? And on that same point, this is something I learned from Papas is that you know if you make a mistake and you train your guests that, no matter what mistake happens at our restaurant, we're going to fix it, whether that's comping it, remaking it, giving them a gift card for the next time they come in, or just if some of those people want it as an apology or to be heard. It trains your guests that your money is good here. If you spend $50 here, we're going to make sure you get $50 worth of your time and money. Yeah, so I think that's super important, Very good. Chris: Well, so Let me ask you this I mean, as we kind of wrap things up, what are one or two things you would advise anyone, whether it's to start a restaurant or just any business, to kind of keep in mind as they move forward with that plan, that dream, whatever it may be? Rafael: I would say, you know, to touch on a few things that we've already talked about at the end of the day. The restaurant business is not about food. It is about people. It is about your own people and it is about your guests. You're gonna spend a majority of your time dealing with your own people or dealing with guests. You're not gonna spend a whole lot of time, you know, coming up with recipes and making sure the food turns out perfect. That's obviously a given, but the restaurant industry is a people business, so you have to mold everything you do around taking care of your own people and taking care of guests and if you approach it. That way you're gonna be successful most of the time and hopefully you're halfway decent at making food. But that's just probably the first thing I would tell people. Secondly, you know I don't want to be one of those people that says stay away from the restaurant business. But this is. It is a business that requires high business acumen as well as knowing how to operate. I consider myself you know I'm a chef. I've been cooking for 10 years but I will always consider myself a business, a businessman before a chef. And I think that's an important I think if you approach operating this in this line of work as being a businessman or woman, I think you're going to be successful. More than do I make delicious food. Chris: You're 100% right. I mean, if you can't run in any industry, if you can't run a disciplined business, you can make the best product, whether it's a plate of food or a widget your business won't survive. Someone else will take over that widget or replace you, but your business won't be there unless you can run a smart, disciplined business and that has financially human capital yeah, lots of tenants to it. So, very true, all right, so let's have a little fun. This will be interesting from you, since you've shared your passion for your food and from your culture. Do you prefer Tex-Mex or barbecue? Rafael: Ooh, that's a tough one. I'm a big barbecue guy. That's probably my passion food. Chris: Oh, I love it yeah. Rafael: I'll never get in the business. I actually just did a barbecue cook-off in Midland at the Permian Basin Cook-Off. I did barbecue for about 14 hours. I respect all my friends at barbecue so much more after doing that, I bet. Chris: So barbecue, barbecue, it is all right. So if you could take a 30-day sabbatical, which you've already explained how difficult that would be for you where would you go? What would you do? Rafael: Oh man, 30-day sabbatical. I've always wanted to do a trip to Japan. I've yet to go there. It's one of the culinary capitals of the world. I would like to go there and kind of get out of my comfort zone from a perspective of not being able to speak the language and not being super familiar with the culture. So I probably do about 30 days in Japan if I could. Chris: All right, and I don't usually go here, but since you're an expanding business, you've got two. When can we expect the third-craft, pita? Rafael: Third-craft pita. We're very comfortable with where we're at right now. It's going to be a lot easier to find a third location when we already have two operating. And I told my realtor team hey, give me the green light. I'd probably say 16 months. Ok 16 months. Chris: Well, as I've said before, I've told you I think you're doing a great thing. It's a great concept, the food's outstanding and congratulations, thank you so much. Rafael: I really appreciate it because it really means a lot. Chris:Well, thanks again for being here, enjoyed here and your story, and I wish you the best success. Awesome, thank you. Special Guest: Rafael Nasr.

In today's episode, I chat with Amber Jones from Tangram Interiors about her company's move from California to Texas and how they foster innovation through their unique design process and showroom experience. Amber shares insights on staying ahead within the cyclical furniture industry through careful research and an emphasis on maintaining company culture during times of growth. We also discuss the challenges of managing virtual teams and leading with collaboration. Amber offers perspective on balancing work and family from Brené Brown and shares her wisdom on these topics. It was a thought-provoking discussion exploring transforming workspaces and ideas to enhance life beyond the job SHOW HIGHLIGHTS Amber Jones, the Vice President of Sales at Tangram Interiors, discusses the journey of moving their operations from California to Texas, and how they use unique tools like noise and digital maps to improve their showroom experience. She provides insights into the cyclical nature of the furniture industry, emphasizing the importance of staying ahead of the curve and fostering an environment of innovation within the company. Amber emphasizes the significance of maintaining company culture amidst expansion and managing a virtual team in a post-pandemic world. She highlights the importance of work-life balance, which differs from person to person, and shares Brené Brown's perspective on marriage and the importance of enjoying the people you work with while maintaining a balance with family life. The episode includes a fun chat about Amber's first job and her preference between Tex-Mex and Barbecue. Tangram Interiors creates innovative workspaces, making spaces where people can learn, work, and heal. They use technology and unique tools like noise maps and digital maps to improve their showroom experience. Amber believes in fostering a strong company culture, which she sees as vital when expanding into multiple offices. She emphasizes the importance of planning and research when entering new opportunities or meeting new people. Amber talks about the evolution of leadership styles and the challenges faced due to the pandemic. She highlights the importance of creating workspaces that allow productivity and foster collaboration. She discusses the potential of radical honesty in relationships and how it can foster growth and trust. She also talks about the importance of leading with a collaborative mindset and the need for self-awareness. The episode ends with a discussion on dreaming of a life in France and wishing Amber Jones the best of luck as she expands her business in Texas. LINKSShow Notes Previous Episodes About BoyarMiller GUESTS Amber JonesAbout Amber TRANSCRIPT (AI transcript provided as supporting material and may contain errors) Chris: In this episode, you will meet Amber Jones, vice president of sales at Tangram Interiors. Amber shares how Tangram uses innovative designs to create amazing places for people to work, learn and heal. Chris: So Amber, I want to welcome you to the podcast. Thanks for agreeing to join us. Amber: Thanks for having me. Chris: So let's talk about Tangram Interiors. I want you to at least start by telling the audience what is the company known for and what do you do. Amber: Yeah, so Tangram is a commercial interiors organization. Basically, we create amazing spaces where people learn, work and heal. So all of the interiors, from the flooring to the walls to the furniture, I'm just really creating spaces where people can go to work or go to learn in classrooms or education or, like I said, heal in hospitals and those types of environments that's great. Chris: How old is the company? When did it start? What was the inspiration for it? Amber: So Steelcase we are Steelcase dealership, which is a major mainline manufacturer, and so they've been around for a hundred years, and the Steelcase dealership that Tangram purchased was in 2000 in California, and so what brings us to Texas is that in 2021, we acquired a dealership here in the Dallas Metroplex, and so that is what's brought me to Texas via Tangram Interiors. Chris: Okay, so you're a transplant Californian, now Texan. I'm one of those. Amber: Yes, but you know I'm really enjoying this place and I you know it's not something that I would have like raised my hand and volunteered for, but honestly I feel so at home here, and I just know that the business world that we found ourselves in over the last two years is exactly where our business is supposed to be. Chris: That's great. Let's talk a little bit about that process of the move. What has it been like from your perspective? You know, moving a basically a California business I know it was by acquisition, but moving that California business to Texas, yeah. Amber: And so, what has it been? Chris: like. Amber: Interesting. You know, it's really it's. I want to say it was a challenge, but it wasn't. I think that the Metroplex is confusing in some ways in that it's large but there's a lot of really close knit relationships here and so we were able to bring on some really great people that had some really existing, really good, strong standing, existing relationships in the market, which helped us to position ourselves in the right way in the right place. But I definitely part of the reason for it and part of what made it so helpful and necessary is that the majority of our customers were looking at moving to Texas, and so when you start thinking about how can we do business in both states with you, it made sense for us to be able to send them away from California and then receive them as they arrived in Texas. So it was really, it was an obvious next step for us and when the position you know, when the dealership position opened itself up, it made sense for us to acquire them for sure. Chris: That makes sense. I can tell you, at least from the legal perspective. I've lost count of how many California companies we have represented and since, say you know, late 2000, early 2001, helping them set up shop in Texas. Amber: Well, it's interesting in that regard, you know. It's like where do you home them from right? Like, are you running your business as a California business that has an extension in Texas, or do you have a Texas business that has an extension in California? Or two independent companies. So, yes, some struggles, as we like learn to adjust about. You know where do we write the laws from as far as, like you know, labor laws, etc. Chris: So, yeah, I can tell you, most of our experience has been the we are doing Texas based entities, that basically converting the California entity into a Texas entity. Amber: There's a bajillion reasons why that makes the most sense. So, yeah, it's definitely the direction that we're heading in. Chris: So you've got this company. You create amazing spaces for your clients. What about for your people? I mean, I guess your showroom has to showcase your talent. So how do you go about designing your showroom and fostering, I guess, that creativity in the workplace for your employees? Amber: Yeah, so it's very important that we have spaces that reflect what we do. So we work in our showroom. So working showrooms are a little bit more interesting than just a regular like office place would be. Everything is pristine and there's lots of choice and control about how and where you work throughout the day. So maybe I'm coming in for a quiet day and so I would locate on the floor plan, on the digital map, as to where it's most quiet for the day in the space and then maybe that's where I want to work so that I have access to the resources, Whereas other days maybe I came into the office to have more of a social day. So I'm going to look on the kind of noise map for the space and decide where it's loudest and maybe that's where I'm going to go set up shop so that I can get that like extroverted you know full feel that I needed in coming into the office. So it's really exciting. I really it's almost like working in a zoo some days because there's just tours happening so regularly that it's. But it's cool because it gives us the opportunity to really use and show the product that we sell. Chris: So you mentioned two things that I've never heard of before. That was a noise map and a I forget the other one a digital map, I guess. So yeah, tell me a little bit about that. I'm just intrigued. So is that something that I guess that you offer your clients where you can and you use it there in the office to figure out what's? Amber: your debt on. So we have a technology arm of what we sell so furniture, technology, walls and we really feel like if you can plan a space that integrates the technology and the furniture together versus an afterthought, you're going to have a much better experience for your users. And so for us, we want we want anyone to come in all day and be able to work wherever they want. So part of that is that we are a view, sonic mood, sonic showroom, and that means that we have different zone maps throughout our space. So when you walk in, there's like literally a floor plan on a big digital screen and it shows you where it's loudest throughout the showroom and then where it's quietest, and then what the noise does and the little iPads is. It allows for you to adjust the soundscapes that pump into that area of the showroom to adjust to how much noise is happening there. I personally am a very loud human being, so we joke that color follows me throughout the showroom as I get louder and walk. But also that means that the white noise that's pumping into the space follows me, so that you can see that I'm talking, but you can't make out what I'm saying while you're on a video call across the room. So we really feel, as we get back, especially post COVID, to how many video calls that we're all having in our workplace. No matter what we do for a living, there must be something in your workplace that allows for you to have that hybrid experience and not have it be choppy. So there has to be a reason for you to leave your house Right and it has to be an office that works for you. And the office that we left pre-COVID, that we didn't do a lot of these video calls, didn't have to have the same things that the office today have, and we really feel like a lot of that is the addition of technology because of the communication that happens on screen. So much now. Chris: It's so true. I think anyone I know I can speak for myself but anyone that's been back in the office and we really came back to the office in May of 2020. Amber: Pretty quickly Very smartly, very carefully. Chris: Most people have their own private office here. Amber: Different experience. Chris: But the number of doors that are shut throughout the day for the reasons you just said to control the noise, because we're on Zoom or team calls can get frustrating because we are very open door policy, very great culture, but it's somewhat counterintuitive. So what you're talking about makes total sense to me. Amber: It's hard because it's like why am I leaving my home office, where I have everything set up and I don't have to drive, so that I can go sit in another private office in a conference in a big building where I had to drive in park, just to shut the door again? Like what am I getting from one or the other? What's the benefit to leaving the house? And so really the challenge is what's the pull? So we say you have to return to something better than you left. It can't be the same office. Chris: Yeah, that's great. So kind of on that topic and he's thinking about your company, the downturn. I mean, you're clearly in a business that requires personal interaction and connection. How did y'all manage through keeping the business going when your employees and probably your customers or potential customers did not want to be in person? Amber: Yeah, it's interesting. I would say that the vertical markets that we cover is one of the benefits of our organization, because when things got bad, hospitals still had a huge need, there was still healthcare requirements that were happening around. Covid Schools still needed to pivot and make changes, so there were still things that were happening in some of those other sections. But certainly furniture is something that people don't buy when they don't have to right, and certainly not when there's not people in the office, and so it was a weird time for sure. But I think that what happens in this industry, specifically with furniture, is it's very cyclical. You can look back at like the 2007, 2008,. Then you can look into like there was like this 2016. I mean, there's like times and moments in time where things like took a little bit of a dip, not as much purchasing was happening. I think those are moments in time where we can be strategic and really align ourselves with where do we see those next verticals growing? Right now, bioscience is huge. That's where we need to be focusing, as we move forward, some of the more opportunities to track the industries, versus just waking up and expecting the same type of business to be there every day, you know. Chris: Makes sense. So innovation's got to be a very important aspect for the well-being and growth of your company. What are some of the things that y'all do to instill or encourage innovative things to be fostered throughout the company and encourage your people to think and act innovatively? Amber: Yeah, so I guess two pieces. Obviously, it's very important that what we're selling is innovative. I think a lot of that is based out of absolute research 100% research-based organizations in Steelcase, and so they spend a lot of time trying to figure out what people need and why. And so when it hits the market and we're selling it, we've got so much history and so much research to back why we're bringing another chair or another table or another thing to the market. Otherwise it's just that right, another table and another chair and who needs those things. But I think internally within Tangram Interiors, we really are a super authentic organization. Anyone can walk up to my desk at any point in time. I don't work in a private office. None of us do. None of the executive leadership ever work in private offices, and really in all of our six offices, the only one that has a private office is the human resource team so that they can have the privacy of lockability. Past that I mean. Really there's no one within the organization that can't have an idea that could be implemented today. I think that's kind of the greatness of any organization is when you have that open door policy. Because there's not a door, they're never one right. It's like if you have an idea and it's something that is helpful to the progress of the organization, by all means, and I think those are things that we reward throughout the year. I mean, we have different focuses and different events, but we have a fact award. So we really want people to be focused, accountable, we want them to be strong culture, advocates that show strong teamwork and strong trust, and those are things that we are pillars of our success on a regular, daily basis, and when we talk about them and we look for those in employees, it is that we expect them to come up with ideas in their team meetings and we expect them to have the trust within themselves and the trust within us to bring those new ideas to us for implementation. So, honestly, I think this whole industry and this whole world is about change and choice and honesty. Like have an idea, let's chat. Chris: Yeah, let's talk about it, so OK. So you're touching on culture, one of my favorite topics. Amber: Mind you. Chris: So let's you know a couple, you know at least a couple of questions on that. For you, you know, one is I always ask all guests kind of, how would you define your culture? And I think for you a corollary to that is how has it migrated east from California to Texas, you know, have you maintained the culture that was built in the roots in California to the Texas office, or has there been some adaption to this new office in a new state, in a new city? Amber: Such good questions. Cultures is one of my favorite topics as well. So in California one of my roles there was on boarding all of the new hires and I think for me that was an opportunity to instill in them the culture that I found at Taingram and I really found it important that as they kind of graduated out of one on one training with me that they moved into the next portion of their organ, of their role in the organization. Really understanding the culture was the basis of it all, the foundation of who we were as a company, and so I think for me it was really hard to leave behind the culture that I feel like I was such a huge part of building in California. In fact, I remember standing in front of everyone here in Texas holding this piece of paper as we were about to like tell them that we just acquired their company, and I was so nervous and I think back now and it's like so funny to think that I was nervous in front of those people but because I didn't know what kind of culture I was walking into and I think it matters so much. So the longest way possible of answering that question is that I brought that culture with me and I spent the last two years trying to foster it here, and I would tell you that we absolutely are the same company in Texas that we are in California because of those kind of cross pollinations and making sure that we've got people flying back and forth from both locations and executive leadership, as well as like marketing and different sales people, and I think that we all have a lot to learn from one another that if we treat each other as like a bench for both cities as opposed to Dallas, tangram and California Tangram, just Tangram continue to have that culture be you know, exemplified in all of our offices. Chris: You really want you branch. I guess it could happen in one office. Amber: That's the thing, yeah. Chris: Yeah Well, once you branch out to more than one office, you really can't have the us versus them or you have a culture. It's just not a healthy one, Right? I mean yeah. Amber: Yeah, so it's actually. It's interesting we just did a company survey and we just got the results back and read them off to the whole organization verbatim for the way that they answered the questions with all of the comments and feedback, and it was such a delight to be able to read the results back to the organization and have results be in like the high 80s for how they felt about our culture and the way that we run our company and how they feel comfortable talking to us. Those are astronomically high percentages. I mean it felt like we should all clap. You know clap because genuinely that's not me or any of the other leadership, that is every single human being that wakes up and says they are part of 10 year materials every day. Chris: We all make sure Very impressive. I mean because you're right, I'm going to be proud of and usually yeah, okay. So we talked about this a little bit before we started recording. I'm going to ask you now so you can tell the story behind you are words to say start right, to finish right. Is that some type of pillar within the company? Or you know how is that? It's not there by accident, right? Amber: No, it's not. And I mean, I think with anything good goes planning, goes research. You know, I think we have a really great network in the people that we work with, and with every opportunity that hits the street, there's a way to go about doing it. That's the strong way, the smart way, that it starts with strategy, and so for us it's like you know, you can send off six emails while you're sitting in a meeting talking about a possible opportunity, or you can spend 10 minutes doing some research and figuring out who might be the warmest opportunity or person to connect. You do that right. There's ways to go about things. So I think, from an organizational standpoint, we look at it like take the time to do your research, to be prepared to show up and make sure that you earn the opportunity to win the business, versus just showing up, which is sometimes easier to do. Chris: Well, you mean it's always easier, or seems easier, to take the shortcut. But you're right being thorough and showing up there, there's no substitute for that. Amber: Sounds easier, until they ask you a question and you're like I don't even know what this company does. Chris: Yeah. Amber: And then you feel silly for an hour and a half in front of that person in person. Like I would rather do the research, find a computer to be prepared to not sound silly. Chris: So do you do some training around that? How do you instill that into your new hires? Amber: Yeah. So I mean I think like the true answer is that we're really good at using our AI and our tools that we have. There may be a little bit big brothery, but I think that there's a mentor that we have within our organization that always says that our network is equal to our network, or, sorry, our network is equal to our network. And it's true. We know so many people within the 400 people that work at Tangeram that there's no reason that we shouldn't be able to have a warm introduction to people that are chasing business in our markets, Whether that's our partners, whether those are GCs or those are, like you know, architect or design firms that we work with. There's got to be somebody that can make a warm introduction rather than you just like going and knocking on someone's door. Nobody likes that. Chris: Yeah. Amber: And so, I think, just be smart, use the tools that we have and use the resources that we have and be thoughtful and it you know we all get cold calls every day. What do you do with most of them? Ignore, yeah, you can tell what the difference is. So like, do you want to be the one that gets ignored, or how do you go about doing it a little bit differently, and it's generally because someone sends you an email that said you know, chris, you should meet Amber. Chris: That's actually how this happened, right? Someone sent an email and said right, so there's. So you know that you touch on a topic that I do like to talk about it, because there's there's always learning. So what do y'all do at Tangram to try to, you know, build and maintain these important relationships with customers, with your partners, with your stakeholders? I mean, they're all so important. So what are some of the things that y'all maybe talk about and try to put into practice to make sure you're building and maintaining those relationships? Amber: Yeah, good, I mean, I think there's kind of there's a million different ways, but I think there's three kind of pillars, if you were to boil it down. One, it's the social touch. Right, let's have a drink, let's go to dinner, let's just get to know each other as people because, truthfully, everybody wants to hang out and do business with people that they know right. Chris: People know what they like, that they like and then, ultimately, they've learned to trust right, exactly right. Amber: So, but the flip of that and it's a double edged sword is that nobody likes to do business with someone that goes out and has a bunch of drinks and doesn't wake up the next day Like no one wants to do business with the party animal either, right? So we say that when you're doing your social touches and you're entertaining and you're getting to know someone as a human being, then you also need to follow that up with. You know, research, information, like what are you doing to add value to what they're doing in their life or their job? And so for us, the ability to bring what other organizations are doing to the table for other companies that are in like situations is a huge benefit for us. So maybe you're a I don't know a science, I don't know. Let me think of something good. Maybe you're in the industry entertaining industry and you are trying to figure out what to do with your new space. Well, we've got five other companies that are in the same industry. So we'll pull together a round table and you guys can talk amongst yourselves about how you, what you're doing to bring people back or what you're doing. That's a little bit different. So I think it's utilizing our resources. It also helps to be able to prove that we've got some customers in that market or that industry right, that vertical, and we know what we're doing in that vertical. Let's bring those people together. So it's again, it's utilizing our network to really help teach each other and in doing that you become a trusted advisor. I think that's it, and consistency, right, just showing that over and over again and not when there's work. Just to say happy birthday, or I thought about you. How's your Tuesday going? Chris: Yeah, be genuine. Amber: The thing that we all want right that they say no one checks in on the strong people Like. Sometimes it's nice to just get a message that says hope, you have a great day. So I mean, I think that's the simplest way of just being human and authentic, but it is so underplayed in this world. Chris: Sad but true. So let's go back to, maybe, the office space. Yeah, I think there's obviously so much that's been discussed from the, you know, the work remote hybrid. Now you start seeing companies are mandating back in the office, so maybe you can talk some about what are some of the trends that you're seeing in, you know, in office space design concept, etc. That companies are asking for or coming to you with to try to create that environment. As you said earlier, that will make it compelling for someone to leave home to be back in the office. Amber: Yeah, I mean I would say number one there there's a lot less private offices that there used to be. If there are private offices, they're on the interior core of the building so that the light can be exposing to all of the stations and the other employees throughout the office space. We're seeing a lot of greenery being added to spaces and lots of areas that should make you feel like you have choice around where you work. So lots, a lot of maybe two employees to one desk type of environments, less dedicated desks so that you can walk in and say you know, today I want to work over in this corner in this little nook, or today I want to work at this desk. Those are the kinds of things that we're seeing a lot of. I think every single area has so much technology that we might have also started forgetting about the analog just whiteboard right. The ability to just pick up and just brainstorm versus having to create a flow chart on a PowerPoint right. So one doesn't cancel out the other. The need for both is still there, and so I think, when you're talking about these kinds of different spaces, when you get to the office it's like are there team breakout rooms that maybe I have whiteboards and monitors and desks that move around and I can set it up for my team for the week and then set it up for another team the next week. So just lots of things that are mobile and allow for the most amount of spaces to work harder than just with one purpose. Chris: Okay, yeah, so just kind of the flexibility. Amber: Massive right now flexibility and technology that's on casters, so it's also mobile right so everything is moving and I think part of that is realizing that, like that, when COVID hit and everything was fixed, it was like how are we going to rearrange, you know, when things then automatically went to casters and it was like we can move around wherever so that you really can't allow yourself to set up for the day the best that works for your goal, for the day at work. Chris: I like that. So I'm going to kind of change subjects a little bit. Amber: Would you like that though? Like, would you like if you didn't have to go into your office? Like, would you feel comfortable working out into the open floor plan? Because you just said you guys all go into your private offices when you get there and but you like having the doors open. If you found yourself in an open environment, do you think it would change the way that you work? Chris: I don't know. It's a great day. I like, well, see this one. I like coming into the office, I like the flexibility of, you know, working remote when it makes sense or when I can, and like to your point, there are some days when, at least given what I do, I get lots of interruptions throughout the day and if I need to not be interrupted, you know I may not come to the office to, so I can focus for four or five hours or whatnot. Amber: Isn't that interesting. And it's so funny because I don't know that I would have said that five years ago. Like if I have a focus day, I'm going to stay home. Chris: Yeah. Amber: Also to think about that, like, what it works for you might not work for the 30 year old mom. Right, they need five hours to focus. They can't do that at home, they're going straight to the office, right, and I have. Chris: We have some young mothers here that will tell you. They come to the office and please don't make me go home to get work done. The other thing that I'll say to you as an aside, that it is part of the younger generation which, unfortunately, I guess I'm not but earbuds while they work, listening not just to music, but they'll be listening to crime podcast or things, and I'm like how are you doing that and still focusing on what you're doing? I, you know, I don't know. Amber: Outwild. Yeah, so I think that's funny. We learned that while we were all in the same storm we were all in very different boats. Right, what your boat was and the size of your boat at home was very different than other people's with kids and talking to people's with kids and toddlers and kindergarten, and yeah, I got to the office and was like, oh, I want to drink hot coffee here in silence. This is heaven. But yeah, the micro or the multitasking and getting a lot of stuff done, it's interesting when we used to see the head, the earbuds that were more like hey, this is my cue to say that I'm doing heads down, quiet work, so don't interrupt me. I'm doing some furniture pieces that allow for you to like kind of pull out and it's a storage piece, but it basically, when it's out, it's the equivalent of your buds and like don't, I'm working, I'm in heads down road right now. For those of us that don't have the private office ability to shut the door. Chris: I think you know to you're asking about our space and it's hard because when we're not, that I mean everyone up here is kind of in a cone of confidentiality with our clients, business. But to be in a, you know, in a private, close space, to be able to have a conversation without a bunch of other people in open space, is, you know, kind of what works in our environment, in our industry related to law. Yeah, yeah, and the and I, you know I would work remote even before Kobe hit, you know, because it's just the nature of what I do and it's what I do and the demands. But I do believe the flexibility is a good thing. We also think we work and what we do, and it may be true for you, when we can collaborate together and, like you said, get on a whiteboard and actually brainstorm something together, you just can't do that on video. And the other thing that I know you're aware of that there's lots of been written you lose that social, there's a social piece that happens kind of before or after in between meetings. That when you're on scheduled zoom and you're going to the next and next, you lose. And that's to me really where culture gets built. Amber: Yes, it's the how is your weekend, which sometimes is grading, because it's small talk, but then it's like then learning that they like X and oh, me too, and right, and it creates a whole another conversation which then leads to brainstorming. And right, I mean like the Googles of the world created a 15 minute line on purpose in their cafeteria so that people from different buildings across the campus would cross pollinate intentionally while they waited for their food. It's exactly the same idea. It's like how do I get these people to stop and talk to other people within the office If they're never here? How do they create a relationship? There is no culture created on a web camera. Right, there's not just a bunch of people themselves in the camera. Chris: That's right. You're distracted by backgrounds and or or I was literally conducting an interview earlier this week via video and the person that was interviewing for the position had a dog barking and finally it was like it has to be, everyone else is on mute, right and but they didn't finally like 20 minutes in. They finally said you know, I'm sorry, my dog, but I was like, oh my gosh. Amber: I would be so mortified. I had a very awkward one early on where there was a naked moment. We'll leave it at that. And yeah, it's been a wild ride. These zoom backgrounds and so, anyway, blurring is best, if nothing else is the lesson. Chris: So let me talk a little bit about you and what the question is kind of you as a leader, how would you describe your leadership style? Let's say this as a today, but how has that evolved? Because I know where you are today is probably not where you were five plus years ago, because we all evolve as we go. Amber: Yeah, I try to be super authentic. I try to be the boss I always wanted to be, which I think if you do it like that, then it kind of keeps you human. I never try to ask anyone to do something that I wouldn't be willing to stay and do with them, and I think that comes with the history of starting in this business and working my way through it, so that there's not really any job here that I don't know how to help with. But I think the ability to know that I'm not just kind of hollowing down from the mountain top and willing to like roll up my sleeves and do it with you Gosh, how have they changed? I think that before I would have had things I would have wanted to say and I would have thought long and hard about how to say them, and I think over the years I've learned that rapid, radical honesty is play. So rather than spending a week and a half trying to come up with the exact way that I might say something that wouldn't offend someone and then dredge it all back up again, I'd rather just address it, talk about it. Hey, this didn't feel right. A better way to do that might have been this had this you know effect and you might not have realized that when you were doing it. Here's a different way. I think if you can address those things instantaneously, even though it might be a little raw in the moment, I think that for me that is really allowed for there to be a lot of growth and honesty in my relationships for people that work with me. Chris: I like that. Amber: And that statement right there people that work with me. That's the other piece the people that work with me. I think something happens when you get into a certain leadership place where you're like the people that work for me and I will never be that leader the people that work with me. Chris: It's a team mentality 100%. I think that's a very it may sound subtle to some, but I think it's a very big distinction and how your mindset is. If you could, if you approach it with the we versus the I and actually in a genuine way, that will your, the people you work with will feel that and sense that, and I think the way they respond to you is exponentially better. Amber: Yeah, you know it's funny because I had a conversation with a colleague recently that said you know, you might be too close to some of the people on your team. And it was funny because in the same way that I'll take the rat, I'll give the radical instant criticism. You have to be able to receive it as well. And I think I took it the other way. I swung the pendulum so hard and I cut all of these really strong relationships that I had made in a business way and kind of turned them into friends and started to try to draw this line. And it took me about six months to realize that I was very sad without those people in my world and I wanted to open back up again and be the person that I had been before. So back to the leadership piece. I think it's important for me to say that while I'm also willing to receive feedback, I'm also not willing to accept it all as fact. Good, that's all of it is stuff that you have to be able to process through and realize what you want to keep and what you want to discard, and then what you want to implement right. And so for me, I tried it and it didn't work and it was like nope, I'm going to go back to this other way. And I think that is what growth is is the willingness to change and change back. Chris: Sure, and I think, being self aware right Absolutely. I think that's that can apply in so many ways. I think to the willingness to try something different, the willingness to be honest about it, whether it's working or not, and it's okay as an example, it's okay. Well, that decision ended up not being right, so let's go back. Amber: For me. Right, it didn't work for me and that's good that it works for others. I think I appreciate that boundary. For other people it's. That kind of work life balance is a funny it's a funny conversation. For me I think that it's a joke, frankly, like some days we spend 90% of our effort and energy in the office and we only have 10% left at home. Sometimes it's like I can give 50 feet and you know it's not an issue. Some days I have got to deal with my familial obligations and it's going to maybe only be a 25 day for the work life and the business life is going to get the rest of it and I think that when you work yourself into an organization that you're happy and comfortable with, that, it allows for me as a leader to have that type of balance, but it also allows for me to provide and allow that type of balance to the people that work with us. Chris: Yes, but we can do a whole episode on work the myth of work life balance. You know it's to me the word balance is probably the worst word you could use for that. I think it's work life integration. Amber: Exactly. Chris: Yeah, it's a way you know there's no you know, and that it all changes depending on your stage of life as well. We used to have work-life balance in our core values. We changed that because what we realized is that's not really a corporate culture, it's more of a personal value or culture, right, because it depends on life. If you're in your late 20s versus your late 40s, your world is different and the way you balance things is going to be very different. Amber: Greatly different. It's so ironic that you say that we have. We used to have some meetings with new hires where we would tell them you know, this is kind of what's been working for their lives, some of the upper leadership and management and early on those 20-somethings we're hearing, if you just make all of your work friends, your own friends, then you'll be fine, which, they heard. Lose your friends because we're going to take over your life, right, and it's like that's not what we're saying. What we actually mean is that you will find a balance there where you do genuinely enjoy hanging out with people that you work with or people that you do business with, and you will find a balance in that and that's a little bit of the integration, but also that you'll be able to give and take where and when you need throughout the day and week. So yeah, it's a. The word balance, I just think in general, is hilarious. It's a funny word, but I do think it's great that we all keep trying. Chris: Well, that's the point, right. As you said, every day's a little different. Do you find the way to make it work and integrate both? And so, yeah, some days are 90 work, 10 families, some are 90 family, 10 work and everything in between. Amber: Yeah, it's funny Brené Brown talks about like in marriage it's not 50, 50,. Like she walks in at home and is like I got 70 today and he's like cool, I got your other 30. And it works like that and I feel like that very much in the office and I think if, if we could all just be honest and stop calling these workplaces families right. Like this is not our family. These are the company that we work for and we enjoy very much the people that we work with, but we all have families at home and you know it's important that they feel as much love as the people that we enjoy working with on a regular basis. And you know it's going to wave and it's going to ebb and flow, but I think that's part of what life is. Chris: That's so true. Okay, this has been really great conversation. I love the hearing in which all are doing to help companies you know, move forward, be innovative in their space. I want to turn now the last minute or so. Just some fun stuff to know about you. So tell us what was your first job. Amber: I ditched school at 14 to go get lunch at Subway and I left with a job. Chris: So, but instead of ordering a sandwich, you got behind the counter. Amber: I ate my sandwich. And then that on car sued offered me a job and I left at 14 as a Subway sandwich artist. My mom was not very pleased that she had to drive me to and from the subway on multiple times a week, but it was a great first job. I loved it. Chris: Okay, did you stay with school? Amber: Yeah, oh, of course yes. No it was an after school job. Chris: I got you. I got you All right. So you're new to Texas. But I ask all my guests do you prefer Tex-Mex or barbecue? Amber: Oh my gosh, I can't even say Tex-Mex, like I feel like I need there to be Mexican food here. So we're just going to default to barbecue, for sure, absolutely. Chris: So you have not adjusted to Tex-Mex. Amber: You know what? I'm 40 years, a Californian, and I don't know that I ever will. I was laughing because they were doing the best tacos in Texas. A little blurb the other day on the news and I was like they're in the wrong state for the best taco competition. This is not where they live, but I'm sorry, I do love your eyes as barbecue. Chris: That's okay. That's okay, we'll forgive you. We will agree to disagree on that. Amber: Okay, all right, you have bomb queso, though I'll give you that. Chris: Okay, we'll meet you, you all, don't have queso in California. Amber: Not like you guys do. You have it at like every Mexican restaurant. It's not a thing there really, oh sure. Chris: I mean, I think the first real food both of my daughters had like at a week old was queso. Amber: We started early. Chris: Yeah, so okay, If you could take a 30-day sabbatical, what would you? Where would you go? What would you do? Amber: Ooh, that's an excellent question. I feel like I would probably go just get an Airbnb in France and just spend a couple of weeks just living life there, cruising around on the bike, traveling with my family, working, painting, just being. I think we spend so much time following a calendar. I would love to just kind of float and see what happens when we're creative without the schedule. Chris: That's where. Amber: I come from and we don't do enough of it. Chris: Sadly, you're right, Amber. This has been awesome. It's been a pleasure, you know, hearing your story, tangram story. Thank you for all the insights you've provided and just wish all the best of luck as you grow your business here in Texas. Amber: Thank you so much, chris, we appreciate it. Chris: All right, take care.

Today's Building Texas Business Podcast episode finds us chatting with Robert Grosz, President and COO of the tech company WorldVue. Robert shares insights into how WorldVue has sustained success for decades through strong customer relationships and a responsibility-centered culture. He details their customer-centric approach and innovation fostering, revealing lessons learned navigating the pandemic with a dedication to service and constructive dialogue. Robert also opens up about transitions into leadership, emphasizing quick decisions, balancing loyalty with progress, and his thoughtful vision for a blended family-exploration sabbatical. From navigating disagreements to keeping pace with industry shifts, Robert offers a compelling view of resilient leadership. SHOW HIGHLIGHTS Robert Grosz, the President and COO of WorldVue, discusses how the company drives growth through strong customer relationships and a company culture rooted in responsibility. He highlights the importance of fostering innovation, creativity, and relevance in the ever-changing tech landscape to stay competitive. We discuss WorldVue's response to the pandemic, emphasizing the importance of their company culture, which includes responsibility, dedication to customer service, and the importance of constructive dialogue. He talks about his transition into a leadership role at WorldVue, emphasizing the importance of quick decision-making and his philosophy on loyalty. Robert shares his proposition for a 30-day sabbatical, and his appreciation for the dynamic beauty of Texas. The episode touches on building relationships and driving growth,We discuss how WorldVue has been successful for 50 years by solving problems, befriending customers, and adding value to their lives. Building a strong company culture is discussed, with Robert explaining how WorldVue managed to successfully navigate the pandemic thanks to its dedication to customer service and focus on responsibility. Building trust and success in leadership is also covered, with Robert emphasizing the importance of making decisions fast and how loyalty can be an adversary to that philosophy. Robert shares his vision for a 30-day sabbatical, which includes spending the first two weeks at home with family and the last two weeks exploring the dynamic beauty of Texas. Finally, We discuss Roberts approach to navigating leadership disagreements, sharing a key lesson learned from past experiences that resulted in lost opportunities. LINKSShow Notes Previous Episodes About BoyarMiller GUESTS Robert GroszAbout Robert TRANSCRIPT (AI transcript provided as supporting material and may contain errors) Chris: In this episode you'll meet Robert Grosz, president and Chief Operating Officer of WorldVue. Robert shares how WorldVue focuses on building a culture of responsibility by being a service-oriented company to its customers in order to drive growth. Robert:, I want to thank you for agreeing to come on Building Texas Business. It's a pleasure to meet you. Robert: Chris, it's great to meet you as well. Chris: Let's get started by just telling the audience about WorldVue and what it's known for. Robert: Chris, have you ever had a friend that is really good at something, whether it's fixing cars or technology, programming your TV, things like that? Chris: It's a friend that you can count on. Robert: It's their best friend. Sure, they go above and beyond. If you've got a problem, you know you can come to them. They respond quickly and they give it their all. Even if they don't know about the solution, they give it their all and they help you and they add value to your life and you build that friendship. That's what we strive for at WorldVue. WorldVue is a company that's been in business for almost 50 years now, houston-based. Our customers are hotels and our expertise is technology. So if a hotel brand, a hotel owner, an individual hotel has a problem with technology, we want them to come to us because we want to be their best friend forever and add value to their lives. So what we're known for is solving problems for hotels, befriending them, building relationships with them and just being part of that industry, being part of the hospitality business. Chris:And that's what's made us successful for 50 years. That's great. I love how it's so ingrained that it's about relationships and even using the analogy of best friend, what inspired you to get involved with WorldVue? What inspired this company to get to where it is today? Robert: Yeah, so they've been along a lot longer than I've been with them. Chris: Sure, I don't look that. You started a company. I started when I was one. Robert:No, no, that's started long before. It's a family business. It's still a family business. The founder still comes to work. He's usually the first one there and the last one to leave. I'm very, very engaged but of course the business has changed a lot over the years. I've known the company for the last 17 years. I actually was with Dish Network. Dish Network is where WorldVue gets their programming, their content, the TV content and some of their technology and I got to know them as a supplier, vendor, got to know the people. I fell in love with the people, fell in love with the company, the culture. The time came where they were kind of pivoting and it's kind of the next generation of WorldVue and we're building this company as a legacy business to last for the next 10 generations and they needed someone with my skillset, my expertise, to help lead them into that. And that's kind of how I got to know WorldVue and got to be involved with WorldVue. Now I'm the president and chief operating officer of the company and I've got a great team around us and teamwork I'm sure we're going to talk about teamwork and people are very, very important and kind of fulfilling our mission. So yeah, that's the origin story of how I got involved with WorldVue. Chris: Okay, that's great. So technology company means evolution and innovation have to be in the fabric of the company. So talk to us a little bit about what you do in your role to foster creativity, innovation, to keep WorldVue relevant in its industry. Robert: Yeah, sure, and relevance. I'm glad you said that word. Relevance is our key growth driver. So you know we've got two growth drivers One's relevance, which is all about product, it's all about the technology that we're out there evangelizing, designing and supporting and really becoming experts at, and with that relevance drives market share growth and getting into more and more and more hotel properties. We currently serve 7000 properties in the US, and now we're expanding internationally. But we're a product driven company because that's our expertise. You know, we want to be the best friend to our clients. That's kind of why we exist. But the what we do is the technology, and we will use technology from leading providers that are off the shelf, you know some big brands that everyone's heard of before, like LG and Cisco. You know brands like that, but what we'll do is we'll take those and we'll integrate them. So integration is kind of what we do best and it's kind of our secret sauce is how do you integrate big, big brands like an Oracle with a LG which does interim entertainment and TV technology? That's our secret sauce. Chris: So the integration. Robert: We're the glue between big technologies and we do it very well. And again, if you lean back on the why you actually want to develop this relationship to add value to your customers and we want your customer to be your best friend. That's kind of what we're doing. So it is related to the technology. We like to say we're a service company that just happens to do technology. We're not a technology company that tries to do service. That's one of our big differentiators. Chris: I would imagine that's a meaningful difference in mindset when you go to the hiring process and building your team to have that servant service oriented mindset be the lead, primary thing you're looking for. What are some of the things you're you do to make sure you're hiring the right people that fit that mindset? Robert: Yeah, yeah, yeah surrounding yourself with people better than you is one of our mantras at any level of the company, and I think if you, just if you, champion that mantra, you know constantly looking for people that do things a little bit better than you, whether it's a specific skill or an attitude, and I think attitude is something you can't really teach. Attitude is something that you carry with you as a human being in your existence, is your WorldVue, which is one of the reasons for the name world. Chris: Gotcha, that makes sense is. Robert: You've got to have that. You've got to have your head on straight as it relates to how do you interact with others, how you act with it, with a team, how you help build the team, how you pull in the same direction to achieve a goal, and those things are very important. We can hire people that are incredibly intelligent, incredibly book smart, have done amazing things and we do but but if, if you don't hire for the attitude and you don't hire for the teamwork, you're going to end up failing, and that's really what we look for there's some tools you have in place so that in that process, the people doing the interviews, whatever it is, and however you go about that, that help you identify or get a bead on the attitude that the candidate has. Yeah, so so we developed our own tools and we, of course, use off the shelf tools, personality assessments and things like that. But, we developed a tool that we called chirp. It's an acronym C, h, I, r, p coachable, humble, intelligent, responsive and persistent. So what we do is, when we're talking to someone, we try to bounce those, those, those challenges, those dynamics off of the candidate to see if they're open to actually learning and becoming a better person. Chris: And if you don't have the C, the coachable. Robert: It's going to be hard for you to be part of the team. Sure Because regardless of what you know, even the smartest person on earth, there's still something for them to learn and they have to be open minded about absorbing that and taking some direction and realizing the experience of others. So coachable humble humility is important. It's related to coachable Intelligence. Isn't book smart, it's more emotional intelligence. It's no one what to say when to say it. Being quick on your feet, having that mindset about who you actually are as a person and how you interrelate to each other, and then how you actually consult problems related to a specific tactical technology, that's intelligence. Chris: Responsive you know. Robert: When the phone rings, you answer it. When an email comes in, you respond to it, you don't let it dwindle. Right and persistence. Persistence is that hunger and that energy, right. Persistence is, you know, knowing that there's a goal, knowing that it's going to be tough to get to that goal, if it's worth pursuing and fighting for it. You know so. Together is the chirp. If you look at our logo, there's a wonderful sparrow icon, which is the chirp, which is a bird, so it all ties together. Chris: Okay. So how do you then take this service oriented mindset you hired using chirp, which I love the acronym. How do you then take that into action and actually go about building these relationships to where your customers become your best friends? How do you connect those dots? Robert: Yeah, so I mean it's about engagement with the customer on their turf right. The world revolves around the customer, doesn't revolve around us as individuals or as a company. So you go to where they are. You go to where the relevance factor is high to them, whether it's a trade show event or it's their office, whether it's charities that they might sponsor and support that are worthwhile getting involved with you. Try to make it about a personal relationship, and that's where our best customers and our best employees thrive is when you can truly make it about the individual. That's very, very important to us. We get on their turf and we try to understand who they are as a person. We're not just checking a box. If we check a box, we become a commodity. When we become a commodity, then the margins are rode, financial performance isn't there and we don't exist Right. So we've got to make it about that personalization. We've got to make it about the customer. Chris: Very good. So let's talk a little bit about how the company has maybe managed over these last few years. I would think, given what we experienced in 2020 and coming in a few years out of that there was, your customers, at least, had probably suffered some downturns in their business, which probably translated to you. What are some of the things you did to help manage the company through those tough times? Robert: Sure, yeah Well, the hospitality industry in general and a lot of industries, but especially the hospitality industry. When people stopped traveling for business, they stopped traveling for personal. They didn't go on vacation. We had a lot of our hotels closed down. Some of our hotels stayed open for first response medical personnel, things like that and they did okay. Some very limited service hotels that don't really exist for that business traveler but they exist just because they need a bed to rent Actually did okay. They thrived, they had good occupancy. We as a company were fortunate. We managed, not by laying people off and cutting back, but we managed by committing and recommitting to our employees. So we had no layoffs because of COVID. We took a kind of unique philosophy to the pandemic and that period of time two, three year period of time where we got back in the office as soon as we could and we did that in a safe way. So there was social distancing and making sure that everything was clean and being aware to the health of all of our employees and respecting individual wishes, but we encourage people to get back in the office in October of 2020. And we've been back since, and we do that because we think that people communicate best in person. It's probably one of the reasons you have us all here to have a podcast, as opposed to doing it virtually. Absolutely Is that personal connection. You can't put your finger on it, but it's important. So I think that that action was a cultural move and I think it's had it's paid dividends for us. I hope it's paid dividends for our employees and I think we'll continue with that mindset. We were there to help our customers, so we were making sure, from a commercial perspective, that we could give them as much relief as possible. We were there to help them turn up their properties, turn down their properties using all kinds of technologies. So there's a lot of different technology out there that a hotel uses. And we were there for them, in all fronts. Chris: That's great. I can totally identify with that thought process, that mindset. We took the same approach in 2020, got people back in in May of 2020, doing the same thing making sure the workplace was safe, but with the view that we work better together. It does foster a healthy culture. I think it makes us better in who we are and in our work and how we can serve our clients and customers. And, to your point, I'm pretty adamant that these podcasts although we've done a few via Zoom because we had to 90, I mean there's I don't need all fingers on one hand, they've almost all been in person, because you just can't replace the dynamic when you're together. So you touched on it. I want to go down this trail with you. And that's culture. How would you make, describe the culture at WorldVue and what are some of the things that you have done to build and foster that culture? Robert: Sure, so we have a culture of responsibility. We're responsible to each other as much as we're responsible to our customers and we have a promise that we make, which is we deliver every time, no exception. And that is as relevant for the guy in the office next to you as it is to your customer, which could be a couple thousand miles away. Right, you know, we deliver every time, no exception. So if someone needs something, we strive to deliver that right. We strive to deliver on the promise. Sometimes it's not easy, oftentimes it's not easy, but it takes a lot of energy and a lot of focus, and I think everyone knows that. But that promise in the company from, you know, from the, the, the, the newest call center rep, all the way to the top they all try to kind of pull that direction. That creates that culture of rowing in the same direction. And that is very, very important. Because if you've got a company that's rowing in multiple directions, it's going to be, it's going to be problematic, it's going to be expensive, the trust is going to be violated, you're not going to be able to move quickly and address customer needs, you're not going to look at the dynamic of what customers can offer in the marketplace and turn quickly to address that it's. It's really core to to who we are as a company, as as individuals. Chris: So what do you do as the president, chief operating officer, low leader, to show up so that people understand that you live the culture, you can enforce that culture. What are some of the things you do to reinforce that every day? Robert: Yeah, so you've got to lead from the front. It's all about attitude. You can't come in all slouched over. You've got to be on point and you've got to do it authentically. It can't be fake, right? And that's a challenge sometimes. Chris: For sure. Robert: And you've got to have your focus. You've got to have your eye on the prize, if you will. Communication is critical, so routine, touch-based meetings. I don't like to have long meetings that consume people's time or people attend the meeting to be attending the meeting. I want there to be a purpose and a reason. I want there to be lots of dialogue. Constructive criticism. Constructive differences make everything special and you can't just kind of dominate. You've got to listen to the different opinions. Chris: Ask more questions. Robert: Ask more questions. We like to say listen 10 times more than people are talking, and you've got to lead by example. If you don't do that yourself as an individual, again something's wrong and everyone sees it and everyone knows it. Chris: So I asked most guests about setbacks or failures and we learned sometimes much more by those. Is there a situation or experience you can think about as a leader where it didn't go as you hoped or it was a failure or setback in a decision or strategy, but you learned from it and the learning from that has made you better today than you were before. Yeah, absolutely. Robert: I mean I've got lots of setbacks and failures, but I think one big example would be if there is a disagreement between leaders and they're not seeing eye to eye and they don't address it quickly, it can create division and that division creates distraction and the distraction creates lost opportunities. And we've dealt with that over the last few years. We've had some disagreements on the direction we needed to go and the solution was coming in the room together, fixing it, getting it on the same page, having the confidence and the buy-in at the most inner level as a person, as an individual, and making the team more cohesive. So you can go from cohesive to a failure very quickly if you don't pay attention to that dynamic. So that was one of big lessons learned. There are others where you bring individuals into the company based upon their experience and their pedigree and you throw them into our mix and they just don't dance our dance and they create a bunch of disruption and you've got to move fast there. It's tough letting people go. It always is tough letting people go, but oftentimes it's good for them as much as it's good for the company, because they're not comfortable in their shoes. That's tough to be a person. When you're not comfortable in your shoes, it's tough to live a life. Chris: Yeah, you touched on something there that I think everyone that I've interviewed in these podcast agree. The biggest lesson learned maybe in that difficult time when someone's not fitting is making that decision faster than you feel like you probably want to, because the person that's not fitting in your organization will be better off because it's just not a good fit and they'll find the place they fit better and your organization will be better because that person that's not fitting is going to be a distraction. It potentially could erode culture and you're just always better off moving faster, even though it'd feel right in your gut sometimes. That's right. You're affecting human lives. Robert: Yeah, and loyalty, by the way is the adversary to that philosophy. Chris: Right, so we all want to be loyal to people. Robert: I think good people are loyal, but you have to have the vision, the foresight, the clarity to understand where there's loyalty and then there's a bad fit, a poor fit. And if there's a poor fit then the best move is always make it a better fit. So that's very important. Chris: As WorldVue has grown, what have you done to build a team around you and let go of some of the things that maybe you used to do more on a day-to-day basis and learn to make us trust and let go yeah, trust is a key word. Robert: So finding people better than you at things, making sure that they're the right fit and then trusting that they're going to get the job done, and sitting back and delegating some responsibilities that you may have you may think that you need to do to them or to their teams, and then watching it grow. And it's very easy to delegate to somebody, but it's difficult to give them enough rope where they're going to actually lead or fail. If they fail, then you can step back in and you can fix it and you can delegate to someone else. You could coach them, but if you've got good people around you I mean if you've got good people that are pulling in the same direction they will self-adjust, they will succeed because they want to reach the same goal that you want to reach. So in some ways it can be very, very simple and easy. Oftentimes it doesn't feel that way when you're doing it, so that's an interesting dynamic. Chris: It really is. The other thing I was going to ask you about, excuse me, is you kind of had an interesting experience in that. I guess I'm talking about transition, succession from founder of company that's still around, as you mentioned in the beginning, but you stepping in to the leadership role as president, chief operating officer maybe talk to us, because there's some listeners out there maybe doing that or or that's in their near future. Let's talk a little bit about what were some of the challenges of bridging that transition gap as you took over as the president of the company. Robert: Yeah, I think, from my personal story, it's about building trust and having integrity as well as having a deep level of respect. If someone founds a company that's been around for almost 50 years, I look up to them. I don't care what that company is. I mean, they've done something that a lot of people have never experienced or will never experience, and I've got to give them tons of credit for that and have utmost respect for that effort. But making that person or that group of people trust you and inspiring them to let you lead is a significant, significant initiative that you've got to have a lot of purpose, a lot of focus on, and that's kind of the most important part, I think, is to to build a relationship. Build that relationship, build the trust, be authentic, have integrity. They will then see that you can lead and take what they've done to the next level and hopefully that will benefit their family and families for generations to come, because that's the ultimate outcome. It's not building to flip it, it's not make a fast buck. In fact, the bucks have nothing to do with it. It's about the purpose. It's about what you deliver value to society, to your customers. It's about what you want to do. That's why that analogy to a friend a best friend is really good at something. I think that's a very good focus for us to have, and I think that if you can generate thousands and thousands of friends throughout the world that all have that need, you've got a successful business that's providing college educations, food on the table, happiness, travel, fun for families, countless families. That's really exciting. That's kind of the passion. Chris: Did you have any challenges as that transition, where the people that used to report directly to the founder maybe weren't coming to you at first, and how did you manage that? Robert: I would be lying to say that that doesn't still exist. It does. It's just a challenge that you have to acknowledge and you have to kind of embrace. I get it. Like I said, the respect level that I have for the founder, the founding family, is so high that I would expect that legacy employees that have been around for a long time. Look at that with the same level of respect. Chris: So you don't take offense to it, oh you can't take offense to it. Robert: It's an eagle driven thing. Chris: Yeah, well, it sounds like that attitude that you bring to it is consistent with the culture, that you're the mindset of the right attitude and that the company's got everyone going in the same direction. Yeah, that's right. So it's not easy running a company the scale and size that you do. What are some of the things that you've done personally to try to have a very successful business life, but also very successful and fulfilling personal life? Robert: Sure, yeah, I mean, I've got four children, twin three-year-olds, a seven-year-old and a 22-year-old and a wonderful wife at home and you know you can't lose focus on what they need and what they want. You can't lose focus on being at home. Right, home is where the heart is. Home provides all kinds of emotional support and you know that's kind of been my exercise routine is making sure that I can maintain a healthy home, which you know. There's this concept of balance that I haven't figured out yet Sure like everyone has their own definition right. Yeah, but because of technology you can be in one location and have a FaceTime call with someone else and you at least can, you know, make sure you're there from a voice and a conversation standpoint. But it's not easy. For sure, but it is definitely worth living for, it's worth striving towards, and you know I value the family component of my life tremendously and I'm hoping that that lends itself to the mission of where we are, the direction we're headed as a company. Out that comes off, and you know I try to treat the folks around me that are closest to me in the office like family as well, and I get a lot of practice. Chris: That's good, that's great, great attitude about it. So what do you see on the horizon? What's next for WorldVue? Where do you see the near future taking you? Robert: Well, our friends are getting larger and larger. We're getting more of them. We are expanding internationally. So we just formed entities in the UK and the EU and Dubai, as well as, I believe, in Singapore and Mexico City. So, we've got a strategy to expand what we do globally, which is going to be very, very exciting. It's going to be very, very difficult. The challenge is exciting, though, and the great people around me and our teams are all excited and enthusiastic about that. But, from just growing business and sticking to our knitting in terms of domestic growth. We've got great relationships with hotel brands. There are multiple. The environment of hospitality is multidimensional and very fascinating to me at least. Where you've got a brand presence, you've got real estate owners, you've got operators and then you've got, of course, guests and the occupants of the property and you've got to serve all four of those groups in a special way and make sure that you're coming through for them. And so we've done a pretty good job at all of those levels. We're excited about some of our brand relationships that are growing and we're becoming more of their best friend. They have other friends. Sure You're their best friend. So the growth plan with product competencies as one lever and market share expansion as the other lever, is what's going to take us forward, and we'd like to be five times larger than what we are in the next five years. Chris: Oh, it's aggressive, it's aggressive. I was going to ask you what's driving that growth? Robert: It's demand. The demand that there's so much technology out there. Technology has become this kind of ambiguous word, right. Sure when it could be hard technology, like a wireless access point or a TV or an ethernet switch or a door lock, or it could be a software right. The software is kind of the glue that makes that hardware valuable, and the software on each of those individual devices is unique. And the key is how do you integrate those softwares together to create an amazing experience, whether it's for a guest, for a hotel associate, the housekeeper or for the owner of the property? In terms of value creation through stronger profitability, there's opportunities to leverage technology to not only solve problems but create opportunities. We think that's where the real demand is going to come from. We just have to be there to be their best friend make it all work and when they have a problem, come to us. Chris: Be that trusted friend. Robert: Be the trusted friend, trusted advisor. Chris: So what advice would you give to someone who aspires to be a business leader or entrepreneur, based on your experience, Create a focus, like create something you really want to achieve. Robert: Start at the end, like what do you want your life to look like and what do you see doing that really is a passion for you. Leave all the other stuff out of that equation, leave the money out of that equation, leave the location out of that equation. But focus with the end in mind, in terms of how you'd like to live to, and then build backwards from there, like what does it take to get there? Create a roadmap for yourself. I know, very early on in life I saw the movie Wall Street and this is on silly, but I loved business after that. I don't know why I don't know what it was, maybe it was the acting, I don't know but I wanted to be a businessman, I wanted to be in business and then I lived my life. I got to college. I was lucky enough to run into some very influential professors. One of them happened to be a real estate guy. He was doing commercial real estate development and exposed me to a company called Equity Group Investments which is based in Chicago. I grew up in Wisconsin, based in Chicago. A guy named Sam Zell who just passed away this last year. And Sam was an iconic entrepreneur, a builder of businesses all along the real estate kind of foundational area, and I decided I wanted to work for Sam Zell. So I graduated college, moved to Chicago, no job, started originating mortgages 100% commission straight out of school and just pursued Sam's company, got involved with Equity Residential, which was his apartment rate, got in the flow of that company, developed this love of technology. I've always had a love of technology, applied technology to real estate early on in the early 90s, kind of made a name for myself, and then that took me to where I am today, which is real estate technology, the scene between the two, solving problems and then being someone's best friend. Chris: There's value there. Robert: And that's kind of how what. I would advise so, start with the end of mind. Chris: Okay, I love that Great story, so let's turn to a little lighter subjects. What was your first job? Robert: First job was? That's a great question. First job I worked in a warehouse and I was moving things around a warehouse after school and I was 14, 15 years old. Like no technology involved in that there was like a tow motor, a tow motor and a truck and a dock. But you know, and really exposed myself to an interesting lifestyle, you know, the people who work in warehouses are pretty salt of the earth and you know, boy, you sweat it in that job right, and then you know. But probably my most interesting job and the one that I was at the least or the shortest amount of time was. I joined a roofing crew in a summer in college and I was on that job for a total of four hours. Chris: And. Robert: I had blisters and bloody hands in that first morning. It was a commercial three-story roof, pitched roof, asphalt, you know, shingles and those guys. I've never seen someone work as hard as them and I couldn't do it. I just couldn't do it. So I went to work as a teller after that. Chris: Okay. Robert: Two weeks later, a bank teller. Chris: Okay, okay, well, so you mentioned you grew up in Wisconsin. Yeah, Been in Houston a while now, so, being newer to Houston and Texas, what do you prefer Tex-Mex or barbecue? Robert: Oh, barbecue. I love the quality of the food meats you know the taste. I think it's good that there's a competition between barbecue to see who's best. I love like playing that game. Chris: It's a good experience as well, there's so many good options. Last week, in fact, someone was visiting Houston, so we've heard all about Texas barbecue. Where do you recommend we go? And I was stumped. Tell me kind of what you like or what you want, because it depends. That's great. So if you could take a 30-day sabbatical, where would you go and what would you do? Robert: Yeah, so that's easy. I spend the first two weeks at home just being at home. You know being a dad being, you know being a husband. I think that's very, very important, boy, that would be a good vacation. Chris: Yeah. Robert: And then maybe the last two weeks I'd stay here in Texas. I go to Hill Country. Yeah, there's so many great places in Texas. It's like a whole different country really. Chris: Sure. Robert: You could go to Dallas and spend some time downtown Dallas doing some fun stuff. You could stay here in Houston and experience all kinds of interesting stuff. Or you could go to Austin, go to Hill Country. It's just the dynamic is incredible. Chris: Couldn't agree more, so I'd stay here close to home. I travel enough. Okay, fair enough, fair enough. Well, Robert:, thank you again for agreeing to be a guest. I loved hearing your story and what you're doing at World View and the team that you all have there. So thanks again. Robert: Absolutely, it's been a pleasure. Thank you, Chris. Special Guest: Robert Grosz.

Listen in today's episode as entrepreneur extraordinaire Mark Walker shares Direct Digital Holdings journey. Mark reveals how laser-focusing on people, processes and credibility grew revenues from $6M to $120M in just five years. His insights on genuine networking and understanding capital raising are invaluable. We also explore leveraging AI for personalized ads and how concentrating on small wins propels growth. Mark's servant leadership style emphasizes collaboration in decision-making. Transitioning from private to public, Mark outlines assembling experienced boards through professional connections. Continuous learning, reading and informed networking develop strong leadership. This glimpse into Mark's exemplary journey offers a treasure trove of strategies for success. SHOW HIGHLIGHTS Mark Walker, the co-founder and CEO of Direct Digital Holdings, emphasizes the importance of people, processes, and credibility in scaling a business from $6 million to $120 million in revenue within five years. He explains that adopting an "it's okay to fail" mindset and involving every team member in the hiring process can lead to a more efficient and collaborative team. The unique sales strategy of Direct Digital Holdings is shared, which involves dividing their sales groups into hunters and farmers, contributing to their remarkable growth. We discuss the significance of focusing on small wins and leveraging AI for personalized ads in accelerating business growth. He mentions that his leadership style is rooted in servant leadership, emphasizing collaboration in decision-making. Walker explains his strategy for assembling a board of directors to transition a company from private to public, highlighting the advantages of collaborating with law and accounting firms to recruit experienced board members. He stresses the importance of continuous learning, networking, and staying informed in maintaining effective leadership. Walker reveals his love for Gatlin's Barbecue and his dream of taking a 30-day sabbatical in Asheville, North Carolina. He explains that maintaining a genuine network of connections before needing something is a valuable tool for success. Walker also shares the importance of a company culture based on integrity, service to each other, and accountability. LINKSShow Notes Previous Episodes About BoyarMiller GUESTS Mark WalkerAbout Mark TRANSCRIPT (AI transcript provided as supporting material and may contain errors) Chris: In this episode, you will meet Mark Walker, co-founder and CEO at Direct Digital Holdings. Mark shares his views on how the importance of focusing on people and processes will help accelerate and manage the growth of your company. Mark, I want to thank you for being here today and being a guest on our podcast. Mark: Yeah, thank you for having us. Chris: So let's just get started by you telling us, tell us, direct Digital Holdings. What is that company? What are you known for? Mark: Yeah, very simply, direct Digital Holdings. What we do is we help companies buy and sell media and we leverage technology to do it. We have a buy side platform where we actually work with roughly about 250 different clients all across the United States, focused on the middle market, and when we look at the middle market, there are companies that are five to 500 million in revenue and we help them purchase media in order to drive our way of performance for their company. The second half of our business is Colossus SP, which is a supply side platform, and that side of the business we help publishers such as USA Today, gannett, hearst, brands of that Nature actually sell media in an automatic or programmatic way throughout the digital ecosystem, and so we work with about 26,000 publications, helping them sell media online and that's everything from digital banner ads to CTV, ot, streaming audio ads and help them generate revenue for their publications and for their websites. Chris: That's great. So what was your inspiration to start this company and grow it to where it is today? Mark: Yeah, absolutely. My business partner and I. We actually worked on another publisher, ebony Media, and while we were at Ebony we saw how the value chain of the programmatic ecosystem and media buying was changing. We saw that publishers were having difficulty specifically multicultural publishers were having difficulty getting connected into the programmatic ecosystem because their websites were too small and typically the larger players in the marketplace would want to work with publications that had 10 million unique visitors Well, anyone less than that. They didn't think it was worth their time giving them the technical expertise, know how, wherewithal, to connect into the programmatic ecosystem and purchase media automatically. So we saw the opportunity to buy two nascent platforms. One was Huddle Masses, which was the initial buy side platform. The other one was Colossus, which was the sell side platform. We put them together underneath one brand direct digital holdings and we started off with roughly about $6 million in revenue, and this year we're projected to grow to about 120 million in top line revenue over the course of these five years, and we've been really blessed and honored that many clients and partners have decided to work with us over this time. Chris: Yeah, I get a meant remarkable growth. Let's talk about a little bit. So this is your first stint at being an entrepreneur. Mark: Yeah, absolutely. Yeah it's myself and my business partner, Keith Smith. It's our first time really stepping into the role of operator. Previously I worked at startups. That's really where I first got my digital expertise and worked at Deloitte, worked at NRG Energy here in town and then also at Ebony Media. So all the while I've been working in the digital space, but this is my first entree into entrepreneurial space, really around the digital platform. Chris: So what were some of the lessons that you've learned, starting basically your own company and taking on that leadership role where everything you know, the buck stops with you? Maybe explain to our listeners, maybe, some of the things that that you've learned along that journey. Mark: Yeah, you know, I would kind of frame it up into three different categories. Chris: One one. Mark: It was about building up credibility in the marketplace. Having a good name, having a good reputation, having a network that you could lean on, I can tell you has been categorically valuable. That network is what I've leaned on for board members, what I've leaned on for contacts, relationships all throughout my career and really it's been 20 years of building up relationships that has come to fruition through this organization. Chris: That's number one. Mark: The second was really building up the credibility as well as the connections, but really the credibility of learning a craft and an expertise. That's been the second thing. And staying inside of the digital space and having 20 years of experience, it just kind of gives you secondhand knowledge of how things are gonna operate and how digital operates and flows. And then the third piece is understanding how to raise capital and put capital into the ecosystem. My business partner he came from private equity, worked on Wall Street and so he had the expertise and really brought that to bear, and so really it's been the culmination of those three things that we made a good partnership in bringing all three of those together. That's actually allowed us to have the success that we've had today. Chris: Yeah, it makes sense. I mean you can't, I think, overemphasize the importance of building really good relationships throughout your career, because you never know what you're gonna need to lean on them. Mark: No, that's exactly right. Yeah, my buddy, he gave me a saying a long time ago. He said network before you need something, and so I kind of lived by that ethos and I thought it was actually a good way of thinking about relationships. And usually if you do something good or nice for someone, even though you don't know how it's gonna come back to you, nine times out of 10, it always comes back when you need it, and that's really has been the story of our career and also our experience working with direct digital holdings. Chris: Yeah, I like that Network before you need something which said in other ways be genuine, right, build relationships in a genuine way, and then, yeah, it's always nice to help people out, and then if you do that from a point of genuineness, then it gets returned. It always gets returned somehow. So let's talk a little about your growth. I mean 6 million to 120. What are some of the things you feel like you and your co-founding partner have done to help kind of manage that growth, Because sometimes rapid growth can destroy a company. Anything that you can kind of share with us, that you think you all have kind of put into place to kind of manage this growth so that it's a healthy growth and that the company is sustainable. Mark: Yeah, absolutely, you know. It was really, you know, going from 6 million to roughly we did. God took about 30 million through an acquisition and so that was a good push for us and then, from that 30 million, really the next trunch from 30 to 90, which is what we did last year we really started working on processes. I can't stress enough in my experience back at Deloitte as well as with NRG really emphasize the importance of process people. You can't grow without people and you can't grow in an organized fashion without processes. And so we internally have been focused for the last two years really building up the processes and bringing new people into the organization to work specific tasks you think about when we look at organizations inside of us, inside of our organization. Part of the training had incorporated is you look at the functional first. Remove all the bodies, just think about the functions that need to be executed, think about the KPIs and the accountability, and then you start assigning the right person for the right role within those functions and understanding that each leader can only manage roughly four or five people effectively. So, we've definitely have had an emphasis and a focus on people, processes and accountability in KPIs inside of our organization. And that's really has led us really to take it from 30 to 90 million. And then we're putting more processes in, more what we call our third and fourth layer of employees inside the organization for us to really take that growth from the 90 to the 120, hopefully from 120 and beyond. Chris: That's great. So totally agree process and people, especially people, are the most important right. You can't no chance of achieving that kind of growth without good people. So what are you doing? And I don't know, how's your employee head count grown when you were at the six and even maybe the 30 to now? How many people are we talking about? Mark: Yeah, so back when we were at six we had probably eight, nine people total. Today we're at 85. So definitely like 12x growth from where we started off. The good thing is we've hired a significant amount of people with experience, a wealth of experience inside of the industry. So that really cuts down on the learning curve. And then the next piece is giving people the distance and direction where we're trying to go, and give them the guide rails. We'll let them figure it out. The thing I try to say internally is if I had to tell you how to do your job, then one of us is not doing their job effectively. So my goal is to hire people who understand and aren't afraid to fail. Put them inside of a structure, give them the distance and the direction of the resources that they need to try to accomplish a task and hopefully, get out the way and try to remove boulders when necessary. That's been kind of our leadership philosophy inside the organization and we think we empower our employees to actually accomplish a task that we put in front of them and hopefully we can celebrate at the end of the year for them achieving it. Most of the times nine times out of ten they actually outperform. So we think if we set up the right structure, giving them the right resources to help, them and then giving them the proper distance and direction and get out of the way. usually that's an effective way If you hire the right people, for them to be effective in their jobs. Chris: I like that. So, going with the people theme, you got to get them in the right seat, give them direction. What are you doing there at Direct Digital to foster a culture and so that people want to stay? Let's talk a little bit about that. Mark: Yeah, the culture that we really try to foster is one based on integrity. So if you're going to say something, follow up and do it. If you don't do it, take account of it before it. That's number one we try to foster that. We also foster service to each other, and that's the biggest one. My job as a leader is really to be of service to the employees, so take it serious to try to provide service to them and getting them what they need in order for them to execute effectively, and so we try to instill that inside of our leadership team and view it as it's not you doing what I say. It's about you enrolling in what we're trying to accomplish, and then let me help you get there. And so, even though we give big goals to our employees, we feel like it's all of our jobs to own that goal. And so I'm right there making phone calls. I still go on sale pitches. Last night, I had a client dinner we're still out here boots on the ground and if I'm not the number one salesperson trying to help generate sales and leads for the team, then I feel like I'm not doing my job. So that's kind of how we think about it. And when we try to hire employees, the word we termed as we want strategic doers. I like that. Yeah, we don't. We, you know, we're very deliberate that, especially in the growth phase that we're in, I need a strategic doer, someone who can be strategic but someone who doesn't mind rolling up their sleeves and getting dirty and running a report or making a sales call or generating leads. We need everybody doing it and then if you do effective job, then hire more resources underneath it. You can start moving into the strategic role. Yeah, Every employee starts off that way. We think it's a bit of an effective way for us to grow. Chris: Kind of that mindset of do what it takes to get the job done. Yep, well, it sounds like you know a lot of collaboration to kind of a team, teamwork, team, teammate mentality. Yeah, but you talked about you know just your hiring process, anything that you guys were doing there. Do you think they're somewhat innovative in how you go about the hiring process to make sure you're getting the right people? And maybe any challenges you faced in the last few years, given the environment and the economy? Mark: Yeah, when we come to the hiring, what we adopt as our philosophy is everybody touches them. So if the team is going to interview, if the person is going to be working on team, everybody on team has a say. Everybody on team has veto authority. And then the one thing I try to remind the leaders is the problem is going to be the problem. So if one person identifies a weakness, another person identifies a weakness, then that's probably the weakness in that person and it's not going to change. So then you have to ask yourself the tougher question Is that weakness detrimental in this role, or is that something that can be covered up or managed? And so that philosophy has been very instrumental in us being effective and we've been very. When we have our debriefs after we interview someone, everyone comes together. One person feels like I don't think they're going to be a good fit or I don't feel comfortable working with them. Then that's a no across the board. So very rarely have we made a decision that the collective wasn't comfortable with that person coming into the organization. Maybe it's my old fraternal approach to things, pledging a fraternity, and my business partner he actually played football at UT, but feel like a team and a collaborative approach is always the best way to try to find the best candidates and make sure you can protect the culture of the organization. Chris: Yeah, no, I couldn't agree more. I think that you've got that cohesiveness. You just can't put a price on it. And one person you hear it a lot in sports right, but a bad apple in the locker room or can destroy a good team, or quite the opposite. Maybe not a group of the best stars, but they get along. They can play above their natural ability. Mark: Yeah, absolutely. Chris: And. Mark: I love that yeah. Chris: So let's talk about a setback that maybe you've encountered in the last since starting at the company. Explain, maybe a setback you've encountered, what you did to overcome that, maybe what the learning was and how it's made you or the company better. Yeah, absolutely. Mark: You know, in moving and growing this fast, sometimes you miss processes and you know the way that we view it. One person didn't miss a process. We all missed the process. So for us you know, we've done that before where you know you have might be a process set up to protect the organization and you missed it. Sometimes you got to go in and everybody has to rally around and say, okay, guys, let's figure out what happened. There's no fault to be assigned, but really what it is. Let's figure out where did the process break down and we're all collectively accountable. So, that's really the approach we've taken, what I think it actually helped us. It actually helped us Really identify are there any other holes that we have in the organization we need to plug up? You know, you know what you know, but you don't know what you don't need. You don't always know what you don't know Right, and so it's that piece that, unfortunately, usually errors get pointed out and that's the correction that you have to go in place. But we try to take an attitude of it's no one's fault, it's all of our problem, let's all own it, let's take accountability for it, let's fix it. Chris: I'd have to believe that helps foster that it's okay to fail type of mentality you talked about earlier. Right, that if everyone's kind of you feel like everyone, that's your coworkers are in it with you, then you're more likely to take that risk, knowing that failure is not going to point fingers at you as a result. Mark: Absolutely, and that usually usually helps, because if everyone's in there with you together, then you're okay. You know you got coverage. Chris: Yeah. Mark: So that's the best benefit that you have. Chris: Switching subjects a little bit, let's just when you think about what you guys are doing and both sides of your business, anything kind of innovative that you all employed, that you think has really helped the trajectory of the company and this growth you've seen. Mark: Yeah, I would say a couple things. One, we bifurcated our sales groups, so we have lead generation and then we have our sales closers. That has been instrumental. Let the hunters be the hunters, let the farmers be the farmers and let them both work collectively together. That has been instrumental to help us grow. Specifically on our buy side business, we've been growing solid 10-20% year over year. That's a tougher business to grow but the level of growth that we've been able to see has been very effective for us. Very proud of what we've been able to accomplish on that piece On the sell side of our business, which has been growing 100-200% year over year we've been able to really foster an environment where a lot of companies will go in and try to get the big whale. We play a lot of small ball inside of the game, so a lot of fruit what I call was low hanging fruit had gotten left by our competitors. We called, we made calls, not to the highest level person, to the lowest level person, told them to test out our platform and, sure enough, we were able to grow that business that way. Our business leader was very innovative on that approach, calling what we call fingers on keyboards those are the decision makers, the day-to-day decision makers to get them to try out our platform and through those efforts we were able to grow effectively. So sometimes, especially when talking to other entrepreneurs, sometimes look for the slow hanging fruit. Don't try to hit the home run, try to hit the single. The single will get you on base and that gets you actually in the game. That's kind of the strategy we've taken. Chris: I think that's great advice for some of our listeners out there that maybe trying to grow their company they just started is. You know, you don't always have to hit the home run of the Grand Slam right, you can start small and let that momentum build. What about AI? How do you see AI playing into your business model and what changes do you think are going to be coming down your path where you may need to make some adjustments? Mark: Yeah, no good question. When it comes to AI, I think what you're going to start saying is it's definitely been around for some time, or some level of machine learning has been around for some time. We think of it in two different counts. We think of behind the house and then in front of the house. Behind the house, that's the stuff that you really don't see, but that's really inside of the processes. That's stuff that we're taking advantage of right now. We're taking advantage of a lot of different algorithms. We're incorporating AI into different pieces of it. You won't be able to see it, touch it, feel it, but it's actually making our systems run much more, our technology run much more efficiently. On the back end, that, I think, has been around for a while and we're definitely in that space and moving more advantageously in that space. Behind the house. In front of the house is where I think all the excitement is actually coming with AI. The fact that you can do words with image imagery, natural language, learning, things of that nature I think we're going to start seeing in the next two years is a personalization of ads. Right now, you do a lot of ads. You might come up with 16, 17, 20 different recipes, trying to hit different segments. I think you're going to see a lot more personalization. On the data side, we have a significant amount of personalization of understanding what people like, what they dislike, their behavioral, demographic, psychographics all that information is already there. Now you're going to start seeing the creative reflect that, because creating new recipes of ads is going to be a lot easier leveraging AI technology than when you don't have AI technology. You have a human who has to replicate 20 different ads of the same idea. I think that's really the next evolution that you're going to see. I think that's going to be the exciting part coming to our space in probably the next two years. Chris: Wow, that'll be before you know it. Mark: Yeah, it'll probably be here sooner than later. Chris: Yeah, let's talk a little bit about leadership. How would you describe your leadership style? Mark: I think it's more of a. As I said before, I try to serve all of my team members. On the personal, we all think of more of it as a collaborative approach. We think of each other as a work family. We try to foster that type of environment of a work family. If you go to our office space, there are offices, but the main area, about 3,000 square feet, looks like a house. It looks like a kitchen, has a TV, has couches. We try to foster a work family environment. We want kids up there. We ask employees bring your kids. We have X-pots for them to play. It needs to be a collaborative approach because we spend probably more time at work than we do at home. Chris: Yeah, no question, right, so you might as well enjoy it while you're there. Mark: The other way that I would say is my leadership style is I try to really believe in trying to be a servant leader, so every problem is my problem. If my team has a problem, it's my problem. I try to own it. I try to help people solve through it and work with them and try to hold them accountable for the result. But no one's held accountable on their own. We're all accountable, so everyone pitches in to try to help out. So that's what we try to do with the environment, that we try to foster Type of leadership style that we have. My team probably would say I get into the weeds a little too much. Sometimes you can't help it right. Chris: Yeah, but I enjoy getting started. I get that. I get that there's some value, as long as you can regulate it to your team, seeing you willing to get in and get dirty get your fingernails dirty from time to time, right, and they're like, okay, you are in this with us, yeah, let's talk about. So. You've got your co-founder, keith Smith. How do the two of you manage the leadership roles in the company to be aligned and kind of maybe not contradict one another or step on each other's toes? Mark: Yeah, so the way we operate Function is we both bring two different experiences and we actually did bring two different personalities to the equation my business partner, keith. He's definitely more on the finance side. So when it comes to the finance, when it comes to the administrator, when it comes to the legal, he owns that, that's, he takes the leadership piece on that and I'm more than happy to step out of the way. All those pieces we got to do refies. We're going through the IPO process. He definitely took the lead on how to get that whole structure and organizing. Yeah, that expertise and experience for that. Chris: When it comes to the operational side. Mark: that's the piece that I bring more of my leadership style to, and so we meet in the middle. So when those two come together we meet in the middle. So it's really kind of clear lines in how we are structured. When it comes to investors, he takes the lead on talking to investors and stuff like that. If they need to hear from the operator, then I step in and have those kind of conversations. Chris: But that's pretty much how we structure the organization and it works well that way, so clearly delineated roles and responsibilities, and then everyone in the organization understands that as well, how it shapes up. Mark: Yeah, and then personality wise we make a good match, because I'm probably more of the passionate one, he's probably more of the sub dude one, so we meet in the middle that way. Chris: Okay, yeah, that sounds like a great team. The results speak for itself. What about mentors? Any mentors you've had along the way? That kind of help get you to where you are, shape your leadership philosophies, your work ethic, etc. Mark: Oh, absolutely, I had a thousand. You know a lot of them Some of them have been independent entrepreneurs. I call them my own personal board of directors. Reach out to a lot of them one-on-one to have conversations with them and get feedback and thought. Some of my mentors and leaders actually have joined the board, okay, and they're on our board of directors, and so definitely get a lot of leadership and good guidance from our board of directors, very happy with what they provide and the expertise that they deliver. And then they definitely help shape the organization and also give me and challenge me to think through different either opportunities or also different risks that are out there. So definitely got the board, got my independent individual board of directors as well. Of friends that I actually call on that I've known for 20 plus years. Some are in the industry, some are outside the industry, but they haven't been shaped by all of them. Chris: Let's talk a little bit about that. You know the board and board composition, etc. When did you and Keith decide to form a board of directors? Was it right out of the start or was it as the company was evolving and growing? Mark: Yeah, so we started our when we were from 2018 to 2022, we were actually privately held, so we're probably I'll do as myself, keith and we had a third business partner who we ended up buying out, so we made up the constitute the board and, trust me, it was 100 times easier as a private company yeah. Because you look at Keith and I look at him and say what do you want to do? Chris: Yeah, Right, which is typically how the small, privately held entrepreneur starts out. Right Exactly. Mark: Yeah, and just kind of kind of keeping moving. When we ended up deciding to go public, we had to actually form a public board, and so then we had to start recruiting people with actually board experience and expertise and you know some level of ground toss and all that. And that's when you know, we had to start tapping into our own connections, our own network. Our lead director we worked at Deloitte. We both worked at Deloitte, didn't know each other at that time but we knew mutual people and mutual friends and so we recruited her to come on the board as our lead director. She's been absolutely phenomenal. But really thought through, what did we need to help us grow to the next level? So we knew we needed technologists. We knew we needed someone with finance background and a strong experience and accounting around audit committee. Then we knew we needed someone with industry expertise, specifically from the agency side. So we're very strategic about who we brought on the board, why we brought them on the board and what value we were really looking to get in expertise. So you know, my advice on performing a board is really to think through. Don't think about where you are today, but really think about where you're trying to go tomorrow and try to bring the people who have that experience and expertise to come on the board. Now I will say for us to recruit one of those members, best place to go is your law firm and your accounting firm. They know good people. They know people they probably worked with on other boards. My first piece of advice go to your attorneys and go to your accountants and see if they know of anyone who might be a good board member. That's how we started our recommendation process, yeah. Chris: And I think you're right in picking those disciplines that you have again as a mentor or resource to bounce ideas off of, get direction from. Yeah, and you don't have to be a public company, a privately held company trying to grow can that entrepreneur can benefit from those resources. Mark: Absolutely Firmly believe that and then build the right culture even inside the board. You want to collaborate on board who can think through problems collectively and come to a solution. Chris: Yeah, what about? You know we all, we all try to continue to learn and grow. What are some of the things you do to kind of keep yourself sharp, to keep learning, to be that servant leader? You know the type of person that you want to emulate in the company. Mark: Yeah, a couple things. One definitely mentorship. So you know, one of the pieces of advice I give is get into a CEO group, because everybody has problems. Chris: Right, then you can learn from other people's problems before they become yours. Mark: Before they become yours. You're like, let me take note of that problem. That's number one. But I would also say you know I read a lot. Yeah, every morning I'm reading, every afternoon I'm reading, I subscribe to God knows how many publications. So you really try to absorb information and I have to say you have to get out of the ivory tower and get out on the street. Yeah, I'm a firm believer in, you know, hearing kind of the qualitative information. To me, if it's in the news, it's already too late. It's really the qualitative information that you get from networks that really kind of give you insight on where the trends are going. So I always try to keep my ear to the street. By getting out and meeting with people and taking people to watch, I get a lot of good information that way. Chris: These are great pieces of advice as far as how to kind of stay in tune with things, and I think you're right. These days there's some great publications, you know I think Bloomberg does since two meals a day, one in the morning, one in the evening, and all that where news is coming at you fast. Mark: It's coming at you and you gotta be on it every day, For sure You're absolutely right. Chris: Before we change subjects, one or two things that you would say to some of our listeners that are trying to start, or maybe just start, a new company about here. If you're about to embark on this journey to pursue a passion on your own or with a couple partners, here are one or two things that I think you should absolutely do or consider doing, as you kind of embark on that wisdom there. Mark: You know, the one piece of advice I would give is be all in Like entrepreneurship. I will just say two things. One, it's not for the faint of heart, but you gotta be all in. And so I think there is something about failure and success. The risk of failure will drive you to success. But if you kinda have one foot in and I'm still doing my job, but I wanna do this then you're not wanting to be an entrepreneur. You either gotta be all in, ready to risk it all, or you don't. That's probably the one piece of advice I would give Pretty much everyone. And if you're not in the position to get yourself in the position to and then go all in, Don't think you can do it half in, half out. It won't work. Chris: That's great, great advice actually, and very true. It's funny that's a pretty consistent theme of the guest I've had. Is that all in mentality? And the second is it's not for the faint of heart. Mark: Right. Chris: So just know there's gonna be tough times and you just gotta muscle through it. So let's go a little bit on the personal side. What was your first job? Mark: First job in high school was a sacker at Randalls. I used to sack groceries when I turned 16, over off of Jones Road and, yeah, you made good money. If I came home with $40 after a cycle, I was pretty happy. Chris: Yeah, and in the hot Texas heat. Oh absolutely, yeah, okay, so your native Texan. I always ask all my guests you prefer Tex-Mex or barbecue? Mark: Barbecue hands down Gavils barbecue. Chris: Oh, okay, there we go, no hesitation, and applaud for Gatlins. I love it. It's pretty good stuff. They've gotten a lot more competition now, but Gavils gonna win, yeah. So let me ask you this so if you could take a 30 day sabbatical not that you would, if you could where would you go? What would you do? Mark: If I could take a 30 day sabbatical I would probably. You know, I really wouldn't mind going to Asheville, north Carolina, getting out in the mountains and enjoy some of that, especially in the fall I'd be out there all day Just out in the woods and hanging out. Chris: It's a beautiful area. Oh God, it's gorgeous. Yeah, it's got a sketch right out there. Well, mark, I wanna thank you again for coming on. Congratulations to you and Keith on what you've built and are continuing to build. Love hearing your story and the insights you shared. Mark: Yeah, absolutely, absolutely. Pleasure being here. I appreciate your time and thank you for having us. Special Guest: Mark Walker.

My guest on this episode is Petra Reski, a German writer and journalist who has lived in Venice since 1991. As a result of her numerous publications on the Mafia, she was subjected to lawsuits and threats, which is why she received police protection for a while. She has received numerous awards, including the prestigious Ricarda Huch Prize in 2021, which is awarded every three years to personalities whose work is characterized by independent thinking and courageous action, and who are fully committed to the ideals of humanity and international understanding.She has not only written novels, non-fiction books and numerous articles about her hometown of Venice, but also made a film already in 1998 with the prophetic title "The Last Venetians". Her most recent book is about the sell-out of Venice and has been published in Germany, Italy and France. She is a member of PEN and since 2018 has been driving a small fishing boat with which she can also park in reverse.Show NotesEveryday Life on an Overtouristed IslandThe Last VenetiansThe Fascist Political Rigging of Municipal PoliticsMurano Glass and The Death of an IslandThe Changes in Venice in the Last 30 YearsTaking Back Venice in the PandemicApril 19, 2023 Collective Action & Referendum in VeniceThe Loss of the Venetian LanguageOnce I Fell into the Grand CanalHomeworkPetra's Website: www.petrareski.comBooks: https://www.petrareski.com/buecher/Book in English: https://www.petrareski.com/buecher/mafia/the-honoured-society/Discover more episodes and join the conversation: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠http://www.theendoftourism.com⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠You can follow us on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter @theendoftourismLikewise, you can join the conspiracy and support the pod by subscribing below:Transcript[00:00:00] Chris: Welcome to the end of tourism podcast, Petra. Could you tell us a little bit about where you're speaking from today and what the world looks like for you, where you are?[00:00:08] Petra: Well, actually, I'm speaking from the center of Venice, just kind of not even 300 meters to the square, San Marco Square.So in the middle of everything, what happens here because 90% of the tourists who come to Venice go to San Marco Square and to the Rialto Bridge, and that's all. So, I'm in the middle of what people consider, unfortunately, interesting for just a day trip, for example.[00:00:43] Chris: "in the belly of the beast" we, we might say in English, yes. Yeah. I mean, not to denigrate, right? I'm sure that despite the, the hordes, the masses that there's, there's beauty to be found there still.[00:01:01] Petra: Yeah. Yeah. It is. It is, of course. But let's say for us it's a little bit, how do you say it? Because what we just experienced yesterday was the 1st of May, so it's a holiday.So we had long period of holidays. The 25th of April is a national holiday. So, we have been overcrowded by people. And the problem is even if you live upon tourism, like pizzeria, whatever, you can't even organize because you can't expect today it will be the mass and tomorrow there is nothing because it's changing.Even depends on the weather. Sometimes it's raining. People don't come that much. Or in this case it was almost cloudy. Not really nice weather for a trip to Venice, but it was overcrowded for one day and the next day there's nothing. So, let's say you are organizing a pizzeria and you can't even buy things, so everything is just in the freezer.It's nothing fresh. So, even for this simple motives, it's a problem here. You can't even calculate like you do it in a normal town where people come, you have kind of periods how to, organize your work. No.[00:02:14] Chris: Yeah, certainly. I feel that in the sense of, you know, there's certain types times of year in Oaxaca as well where many of the locals here, they either stay in their homes or they leave the city for an extended time. And this is just part and parcel of what it's like to live in a tourist city and so in that regard, Petra, I wanted to ask you, you're an award-winning journalist, an author of many books, articles, and, and novels.I'm curious what drew you to Venice in the first place?[00:02:48] Petra: Well, actually, for me, for example, I didn't know anything about Venice. When I moved to Venice, I moved to Venice just for a romantic reason, because I knew a Venetian. So that's the only reason I moved to Venice. For me, it would've seemed like, I've lived in Berlin, I lived in Paris, and Venice was not the place I wanted to be actually. So, it was just a choice because I have been drove by this Venetian, who, he like all the Venetians, if he looks outside of the window and he can't see water, so he feels bad.So that's the reason why. And he's very Venetian and he's very attached to a city and to the culture, so for him it would be impossible to live anywhere else. While for me it was easier. So many people, I know so many, who come to Venice and they buy a house or apartment or whatever because it's so romantic to live in Venice.That wasn't the case for me. My romantic reasons were different, like the man I met here a long time ago. So, well I lived here in Venice and I tried to do a kind of normal life, like because I'm a journalist, so I'm not writing always about Venice. I'm, I'm traveling around in Italy and my special subject, for example, is mafia.So I'm not connected to this to tourism. I don't live upon tourism, but I just feel the consequences of tourism and as a journalist, for me it was like the experience to see, because I arrived here actually in 89, and even at the time, one of the first journalistic things I did was, for example, for the radio transmission about the so-called last Venetians, and we are talking about 30,000 Venetians more than today.We were more than 80,000 at the time. 85,000. Wow. If I remember. So, because we lose every year, thousands habitants. And that was for me, quite curious. I wanted to understand the reasons why it is like this. Mm-hmm. And for Venice, what is not almost not known at all outside of Venice, I'm not talking even about in Europe or somewhere else, but even outside a few kilometers outside of Venice, they don't know that Venice is, by a political choice at the time of fascism, there was a group of industrialists who had this good idea to say, well, Venice, it's nice.And we keep it like a museum. And we put all industry, everything, which is not really nice, attractive, we put it on the mainland. Mm-hmm. So, the petrol chemical industry, for example, the oil at the time, but it started really only in the fifties and sixties. So, they settled the whole industry on the mainland and.At one certain point it was very important for the development of Venice was in 66 when there was the first really disaster of high water in Venice. And what they did, they created at the time of fascism.The whole administration, Venice is called now Venice, which is Venice, and they call it Venice, which is not Venice because Venice, as everybody knows, is inside the water, it's island. Mm. But they consider for administration, mainland as Venice. This is very interesting because we are suffering from this monoculture of tourism.And this monoculture of tourism has been started already, kind of 30 years ago. Really, it was really the aim, the drive at a monoculture of tourism, not to do anything else, no industry, not even small industry in Venice, not more classical things like construction of boats or anything else.Just only monoculture of tourism and the reason why, because for example, if you consider the island of Murano, the Murano glass factories, as there was a, a certain moment, the Murano glass factories actually, they have a kind of problem because they live on Murano. So everything that has to be brought to the island is much more expensive than if you produce on the mainland, of course. Mm-hmm. So the European community supports regions who are for geographical reasons disadvantaged, like Murrano obviously. So they had kind of suspension and they felt fine with this, but at a certain time, of course the European community said, well actually you are not an island.You are mainland. Mm. And in this case, the mayor should have said, well, actually, it's a problem because we are both. And so if you are both, you can't have this suspensions. You can't have this money from the European country. And this was the reason why today, for example, Murano is dead.The Moran glass industry is completely dead. Yeah, they don't have any more. They even had to pay back the European community or the money they had . And so it has been a political decision just to isolate Venice and to maintain Venice just only as a kind of monoculture as a museum without.And the last obstacles in a way are the last remaining Venetians. Mm-hmm. And they have to be pulled out. And I think at the speed in which the Venetians are pushed out of the city because they don't find departments because everything is Airbnb.They don't find any job, which is not in the tourism. So it's will be completely dead in a few years, not even.[00:09:00] Chris: Wow. Those are strong words. I'd like to, return to this notion of the quote last Venetians shortly. But I'd like to ask you just to give a little bit of context as you were for our listeners.How have you seen Venice, your home, change over the last, I guess, 30, 35 years?[00:09:23] Petra: So when I arrived here, it was for me quite funny to study the Venetians in the way, because you can see Venetians, how they move differently, for example, if they move around in Venice.And at the time it was like this in the whole crowd of Venetians, you saw tourists completely disorientated, going around, didn't find the right way to go. While today it's just the opposite. It's a huge crowd. And you'll see, I see, I know who is Venetian, even if I don't know him, I can recognize the Venetian, how they move inside the crowd. They try to get around.So even, really just have a look on the crowds. You can see what changed. And well actually where I live, just close to the Fenice Theater, the Opera House and behind this there's a street "Calle de la Mandola," and in this small street, it was like Venice. Everywhere there was fruit and vegetables and cheese and meat and whatever you can buy you, for your everyday life. You could go to these small little shops, and at the time everybody said, oh no, supermarkets are not good in Venice because the people, they don't buy in supermarkets. And so the supermarkets were only on the mainland and no supermarkets in Venice.They are just all these small little shops. But when more and more Airbnb came up and the people in the Airbnb, they are used to use supermarkets. They don't want to pick up the meat here and the fruit there. And so they were supermarkets everywhere. So all the little shops closed.And transformed into tourist stuff like gondolas or something. Just tourist stuff. Completely useless things sold. And because at the time we had already kind of Murano glass shops at the time for tourists, of course, because Venice has always been a tourist city.But now it's just very, very low level tourist stuff, which is sold and it is sold by, today, by Chinese and by Bangladesh, and that's all. So there's a little street and one of these so manys here in Venice is completely dead, dead in the sense it's just tourist stuff and even very cheap tourist stuff.[00:11:57] Chris: Wow. And I'm curious. You know, you spend, I guess 30 years and you see this over tourism as it's called rise and just get stronger and more caustic or problematic in the place you live, in the place you call home. And then suddenly, in probably a few weeks, I imagine in March of 2020, it's all gone.Or at least the tourists. Right. And so I'd like to ask you a little bit about the pandemic and what the feeling was like for locals in Venice during that time. You wrote in that time that Venice's quote, rape was temporarily suspended.Yeah. And so what, what was it like to go from one of the most over touristed cities in the world to having what I imagine was no tourists and no tourism, whatsoever?[00:12:54] Petra: Yeah, for us, it was unbelievable. And I will never forget this, because it was the most beautiful time in Venice I ever experienced, because there was nobody. Actually, everybody, all the Venetians went around with a phone and took pictures and videos. And I sent even videos to my friends in Germany and they said it was astonishing for me, as surprised me, that they said, "oh no, it's terrible. There's nobody there."And I said, yeah, it's true. There's nobody, it was like a ghost town if you want. But, after a few weeks, when we got used to this, there was one moment completely crazy for me because we live on a canal where gondola serenades pass by from nine in the morning until 11 night.So even with rain, singing "Ciao Venetia, Ciao Venetia." So, no gondolas serenades around. That's the reason why we keep always the windows closed because otherwise there's too much noise. Mm-hmm. So, at the time we had the windows open. In this 30 years, the first time I took place on this small balcony and I sat there in the sun and I had a glass of wine. The first time in 30 years.And at a certain point, I heard on the other part of the canal and window opened and there was a guy crying, "oh, Johnny, what do you do here to the other side of the canal?"And the other said, "Well, I live here." And the other said, "since when?" "Since 20 years." because everybody has always closed these windows.We can't open this. So, for me, the experience was to hear in this apartment, when I went around in Venice, in this moment when I heard people in the apartment talking and I was kind of, "oh, these are real Venetians living here." And it was for us, we tried to get back in a way our city, you know. So, when we went around, for example, with the boat, and we entered in small canals where we never go, because you can't even try to get in them. And so we tried to get in possession once again of our own city and obviously we had like, I think so many people in the whole world. We had the hope that there would be a change on even a rethinking. But already after some time we, we had to, to admit that there won't be a change, actually.Today, it's like "revenge travel" no? Everybody wants to travel and they always wanted just to go back to the life they had before. So didn't change anything unfortunately.[00:15:43] Chris: Well, I mean, at least it entered into the minds of the people, the locals anyways, that things could be different. This notion of revenge traveler, revenge tourism, which you don't hear so much about anymore after, I guess a year or two of global tourism having returned.And well, revenge. Revenge against what, right?And people say like, "oh, well, the pandemic." And I'm like, "you can't really take revenge against a virus?"And okay, "well then the lockdown." Well, "you can't really, I mean, if you're leaving a place, you're not really taking revenge against your own government."So who is the revenge against? And then When you think about the consequences, you realize that the revenge is against the places that they want to go. Yeah. Right. The damage that they're causing through their vengeance is against the the places they want to go to, right.And so we see this this return and revenge of travel and tourism and certainly, you know, Venice, like many of the other most over touristed places and cities in the world bear the brunt of this feel this. And so I was in contact with some of your friends and colleagues at Groupo 25, apri. Because there was some protests a couple weeks ago in Venice. Yes. And I'm curious if you could tell us a little bit about those actions, how the turnout was, the overall reaction and the next steps?[00:17:15] Petra: So Venice is, let's say, the "golden goose" for the mainland because, do you remember, the mainland lives mainly upon Venice. And so, and even for political reasons like we are here in Venice now, less than 50,000 inhabitants, while on the mainland it's 180,000 inhabitants. So, the election of the mayor means that he is elected by the mainland, not by the Venetians, against our own interests, you know? Wow. And this is for us, the biggest problem of all.So once, one of the activities even of a Gruppo 25 Aprile and even other associations of Venetians was in 19. We had the fifth referendum, two to be autonomous, separation from the mainland, because just we want to decide, we want to elect our mayor who defends our interests and not the interests of people who are not living here, but living on Venice.And actually, it was a huge success, but it hasn't been recognized. It has been declared invalid. Okay,[00:18:42] Chris: So, the referendum passed then?[00:18:44] Petra: Yes. Okay. And had a lot of big success, even on the mainland. But the fact is, it was as if the independence of Scotland, England has to vote too.That's the reason why. So it's completely absurd, no? But we had this. So even the inhabitants of the mainland voted for a separation from Venice. But anyway, so this was one of these things we did. But the last manifestation, the reason why there was this demonstration on the Campo San Angelo was because it's 50 years now that Venice is should be financed by a special law because at the time, in 66 was this completely destruction of the high water in Venice. So then after, the politics in Italy, they decided we have to do something to maintain Venice. And so they decided a special law (legge speciale) to maintain Venice.We are, in a way, we are kidnapped by the mainland. So what do they do with the money? The money they should use, they use it for the mainland. And in this case, for example, money that is thought for Venice, they wanted to put it to construct a sports stadium on the mainland. So this is for voters obviously.So, this was the reason why we were manifesting that you can't go on with this to spend the money which is thought for Venice for other things like even the flood.The money that comes to maintain Venice goes directly to maintain this huge thing against the high water, and this is too long to discuss, but are not really only positive for Venice actually, because we need the flood and so on.But it's very, very delicate and so the money doesn't finish here in Venice and it's invested everywhere else in this huge modern project and on the mainland. That's our problem here.[00:20:57] Chris: Sounds, as you said, extremely complex and convoluted, at least as far as the money is concerned.I'm curious, in those days of organizing and action, I imagine these were public events, and given that I've never been to Venice, I have this image in my mind of, on any given day kind of 80% tourists, 20% locals. I'm curious if there was any noticeable response or acknowledgement at the very least, by tourists in regards to these actions.[00:21:37] Petra: Yeah, let's say a little bit, but only a little bit because they don't speak Italian. They don't understand the problems. I wrote recently a book about Venice, about all the problems. And it was interesting for me because it was published in Germany.So, they might assume the people who read my book, obviously people are interested in Venice, so they said, "oh, it was strange for us. We never knew about this. We never knew."And actually they don't know about it. No. Because even on discussions on Facebook, as somebody, even Italians say, "oh wow, yeah, they are always complaining about the tourism, but they are living upon this tourism."I said, no, they don't live on the tourism. That's the biggest problem because they don't know that, what I explained now, the thing was the mainland, that we are really kidnapped by the mainland. Mm-hmm. And it's a political problem and they don't know anything about it.So that's the biggest problem for us because I think, I wouldn't criticize tourists actually. They come and they don't know anything. You might inform the people of what is happening here and for example, the day trippers. One could organize it easily to diminish this huge masses who come here.So it's not if you want, but they don't want. It's a disadvantage for the tourists who come here, who love Venice, who go to the museums, who stay here for a long, long time. That's long time, today. It's like three or four days, no? "Long time." But if they come and if they don't see anything Venetian anymore and they can't, for example, the food in the restaurant, it's if a restaurant is run by Chinese or Bangladeshi, it's not Venetian food.You come here and you don't have the food, you don't hear Venetian, anymore. Mm-hmm. You don't have Venetian craft work anymore, here. So it's like you go to Pompeii.. No.[00:23:37] Chris: The ruins. The ruins of pompeii.[00:23:38] Petra: Yeah. Yeah. You see nice palazzi, but there's no life in it because the people come to see the life. Because why do you do tourism? Because want to see how people live here and in Venice, the importance is, even a few kilometers from here to the mainland, it's a completely, it's a different culture. It's a different culture.We are here, we're living upon water, which is completely different, completely different concept of living. We don't have the car in front of the house.[00:24:10] Chris: Right, right, right. Yeah. I mean you know, in some of the the articles that I read regarding your work, you had, you had written that "living in Venice consists in watching the city die."[00:24:23] Petra: Yes.[00:24:23] Chris: And that's an incredibly heartbreaking statement. And you mentioned a little bit about this notion of the, the language. I imagine that many foreigners, especially Anglophones don't know that Venetian is a separate language from Italian and that the culture is very, very distinct and unique, of course, geographically and otherwise.And so you mentioned the restaurants and the food. What have you seen happen to Venetian culture and language? Has it just gone to the mainland or are there still pockets of it there on the island?[00:24:58] Petra: There. Well, there's a few places, but you have to know it because everybody asked me even when I arrived here and now, until today, they "No. Where do Venetians go?" There, you won't find any Venetian. You don't even find somebody speaking Italian in restaurants here? No. Wow. Wow. So when I'm in a restaurant, I don't hear Italian. I hear just here English, German, whatever, French. This is Venice. This is daily life in Venice. No, you can find some. It's not because it's not because you can't transfer Venetian life on the mainland. The mainland is different form of life. It's completely different. In Venice, life is like, the food is different.If you are eating fish, for example. All this fish things that were very specially Venetian. You can find it only in Venice. You don't find it on the mainland. So, this is all almost lost now because all the venetians still know where there's still a good restaurant that prepares kind of Venetian food.But you have to know this, and if you come here, you don't know it. You won't find it. No. Mm-hmm.[00:26:15] Chris: I imagine, that perhaps there are still some native Venetian grandparents and great-grandparents on the island still living there and I'm curious, if that's the case, what they might think of the issue.[00:26:29] Petra: Yeah, they see this and for them, it's heartbreaking because they see that their city kidnapped by the mainland is sold out and sold out, and their culture is destroyed. There's nothing left, nothing. So, and we are kind of minority. 50,000 and not even there.Let's say we are really living here, it's about 30 thousand. While on the mainland, 180,000. We do what we can. But the mayor, for example, he thinks in voters, what does it mean? Doesn't mean anything for him. He doesn't care at all. He doesn't care at all. They just want to have the office in Canal Grande.And for example, the Mayor of Venice, he doesn't live in Venice. He never lived in Venice. He doesn't even live on the mainland of Venice. He lives outside, in Treviso. So he has nothing to do with, with Venice. He has never lived here. He doesn't know what it mean. At the time, when we suffered from the flood in 19, it was a complete disaster.I've never seen this cause I experienced even high waters here, but this was, you can't even imagine, was really like, a horror show. Yeah. And if you know what this means for Venetians that they had to pick up when the siren was yelling and you have such a long time. You have to go to run to your shops or whatever you have to protect it against the water because the water it was like until here. No,[00:28:08] Chris: up to the chest. Wow.[00:28:10] Petra: The chest. It was completely crazy. And if you have experienced this, because we had even high waters before and even terrible high waters, but not like this.But you have lived with this for years. It makes something with you, obviously, you know, but if you have always lived in Treviso, or Mogliano or whatever, what do you think? You don't care. You don't care at all. Hmm.I would've, I would like to tell you something more positive.I mean, you know, it's important, it's key that we have the capacity to hear these stories, right? That I think so often go unheard. I just had this image pop into my mind of living in a place where, constantly with this threat of floods and the floods are both natural or I guess in the sense of water and then perhaps unnatural in the sense of tourists.Right. And just reminded me, you have this new book that I had a chance to read a little bit from called "Once I Fell Into The Grand Canal." I don't think it's been published in English yet,No, absolutely not. It's been published in Italian, German, and French. If there's in an editor, I would be happy to publish it in English because Yeah. For me, it's all about my personal experience in this three decades that I live in Venice and how I watched it developed and I participated with my Venetian husband. Yeah, because for him, it's even worse than for me. Yeah. He's very attached to Venetian craft work and everything. So it is very sad for them because yeah, they know that their whole life is almost gone.[00:30:01] Chris: Wow. Wow. And what's been some of the response to the book or the feedback that's come out of places that, you know, as you said, this is where some of the tourists come from.[00:30:11] Petra: No, I was really, really surprised. Positively surprised cause I had so much feedback, so, so much. And every, everybody was like, oh, what can I do for Venice? I would like to do something. I would like to help you and to sustain you. And well, the groups, all this association, because it's not only a Gruppo 25 Aprile. Well, there are several of them, but even Gruppo 25 Aprile is very, very active.And so the Venetians do some things. I don't know, another town, with people so active, coming to this manifestations or even to come to know about what the problem of the high water is really for geographical reasons.I don't know ever if somebody in Munich or somewhere maybe. It's only concerns you immediately, but I don't know, if in other cities the people would have been so engaged in a way. So, the readers were really, really interested and gave me a lot of response and a lot of them even said, I feel guilty if I come.I feel guilty. Mm-hmm. And I said, well, you don't have to feel guilty unless you don't take an Airbnb first thing. Second thing is don't do cruise to Venice for the rest. If you stay here and you go around and you go to the museums and you have, look on Venice, it's okay, but you don't have to feel guilty.Guilty. Guilty are these who come just for day trippers. Day trippers is completely useless. Yeah. It's useless. Mm-hmm.[00:31:51] Chris: I hear this word a lot in the work that I, that I do with the podcast around guilt and shame even. Right. You know, there's, there's certainly people in tourist cities who want to shame tourists, so they feel bad or guilty or whatever.But the other side of that, the constructive side perhaps is, in lieu or instead of feeling guilty, we could feel responsible for our movements, for our travels. And I guess one of the questions that I would have for you in that regard, because, just for our listeners, one of the statistics that I pulled up. There's an unbelievable amount of statistics around Venice, in this regard. But this one is pretty intense. That as Petra said, there's about 50,000 residents, Venetians, that live in Venice on the island, and that Venice receives about 110,000 tourists per day on average.And so, The question is around, responsibility and is that the advice you would have for people who wanted to come and visit Venice? Don't choose an Airbnb? Yeah. Don't go on a cruise ship?[00:33:04] Petra: Yes, this is the most important thing and don't do a day trip to Venice. Don't just buy a little small book about Venice.It must much better than for several reasons, for you and for the environment because whatever you cause with your car or your plane or whatever for one day to come to Venice, it's completely useless because Venice is so special because, it's not the city like Rome or Florence because it's different.It's a different world, and you can experience this different world only if you stay here, if you walk around, if you walk around in the evening because the noise is, for example, is different in the evening. And even to hear you walking, to hear your feet on the ground. This, you can't hear it.But when I go to outside of Venice, I'm always astonished that you hear the cars and the whole time there's a kind of ground noise that nobody hears anymore. And you don't have this in Venice. Mm. So, there are so many experience of kind of sense for sensitivity, and you can experience this only if you stay here more than one day.Of course. So it's even this experience and the water and yeah. This is, it is very important to spend some time in Venice.[00:34:28] Chris: Hmm. Yeah. I mean, how much could you possibly learn in a single day? Right? And. Maybe that's part of the problem, is not only is that we don't even use or consider the term " learn."It's just how much can you see, right? It's always about seeing, and even if we did take up this, exchange of words, and we use the term learn instead of see how much could you possibly learn in one day. We're always quantifying it right? We're always putting it into a number, instead of the quality of our learning.And I guess, that last question brings me to this next one. We can offer advice and suggestions to tourists. Of course it's very, very important and very much needed. But part of the goal of this podcast is to create solidarity across disparate movements, across disparate places, across disparate cultures.And so over the course of your 30 plus years in Venice, seeing these very different social movements all working towards the regeneration of the same place and culture, what advice would you have for other social movements in other parts of the world, maybe suddenly or maybe for a long time, having the storm of tourism or over tourism in their place. What advice would you have for people who want to try to make things better in, in their place?[00:36:03] Petra: Well actually, we in Venice and I, somebody else, they try to connect with other movements over the time because to just create a net of, because we are suffering, for example, Dubrovnik.Which is in Croatia has similar pro problems than Venice. And we try to learn, one tries to learn from the other. Like Barcelona for example, has the same problem of the cruise ships and so we try to learn from each other and mainly, we, we are connected. The different groups in Venice are connected with other groups like in, and even the ones No Grandi Navi were fighting to quit because we have still the cruise ships here in Venice because this was a kind of big fake news that went around the whole world that there won't be any cruise ships anymore.We have still today, the same number of cruise ships in several points, but for the lagoon, it's the same. So mm-hmm. We had a lot of contact and No Grandi Navi they do it with all associations in the world. Like in America, it's like Key West.It's some completely similar to Venice. Yeah.[00:37:19] Chris: Hmm. Fascinating. We'll have to organize a conference in Mexico maybe, and Oh yeah. Invite you all over. Yes. Before we finish, Petra I just wanna thank you deeply for your time, for your willingness to speak with me today to speak for on on behalf of our listeners and on behalf of Venice.And also to speak in a language that I imagine is not your mother tongue. It's very, very much appreciated and something that I think a lot of people forget a lot of the time. And so I'd like to again ask how might our listeners find out more about your work and the social movements you're involved in there in Venice?[00:38:05] Petra: Thank you very much.Yeah. I hope that this will, yeah, we have to bring it in the whole world. So just think about Venice and try to participate if you come to Venice, participate with Venetians. Thank you very much.[00:38:20] Chris: Mm-hmm. And you have a website, is that correct?[00:38:23] Petra: I have a website. It's www.petrareski.com. Petra Reski. If you just Google "German journalist in Venice," you'll find it immediately. And if you put a drawing with Mafia things, mafia, journalist, German, Venice, and you will immediately find my name.[00:38:51] Chris: Beautiful. Well, thank you so much Petra and I have one small final question, if that's all right.I wasn't gonna ask it, but you brought it up at the very end. And if you don't want to answer it, it's quite all right. But I'm curious, given that you've done all this work and, and research and a lot of your books have to do with the mafia or organized crime in that part of the world, I'm curious if you know whether or not Organized crime Venice, or at least in northern Italy, is involved in tourism.[00:39:25] Petra: It is absolutely. It's one of the favorite investment just to to wash the money to. For the lavatriche. What is it still in English? Money laundering. For the money laundering. It's one of the favorite points. now, because it's, and even to invest the already laundered money in big hotels and restaurants, but even the restaurants. So, it's not by coincidence that the money is laundered in so many restaurants even. And we have to deal with Albanian Mafia. We have to deal with Italian Mafia. We have to deal with Chinese mafia.And we have a local, we had even a local mafia, Venetian Mafia too. Mm-hmm. So we have all this so where money, where the money goes. Just follow the money, this is the main concept of mafia here in Venice.[00:40:22] Chris: And so they, they, they own, I imagine they own businesses that are more or less fronts for money laundering.And do they also tax local restaurants and bars ?[00:40:31] Petra: No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. It's like, you know no, no, I know what you mean. No, no, because this, you do this only in Southern Italy with a small shop. No, no, no. They don't do it because they know the legal culture of Northern Italians.It's completely different from Southern Italian. You can't threaten somebody with this here. They don't do this. No, no, no, no. It's just. It's like they move in the Venice, like they move like in Germany or in other parts of Europe, because they know very well how to move it.[00:41:03] Chris: Okay. Interesting. Well, to our listeners, take notice, right? Once again, thank you very much Petra, and if you're ever in Oaxaca or if you're ever in southern Mexico, please let me know. It'd be great to meet you.[00:41:18] Petra: I hope so.I hope very much to join you once in Mexico. Thank you very much for your interest. Thank you very much and thank you to the listeners. Get full access to ⌘ Chris Christou ⌘ at chrischristou.substack.com/subscribe

Chris Toomey is back! (For an episode.) He talks about what he's been up to since handing off the reins to Joël. He's been playing around with something at Sagewell that he enjoys. At the core of it? Serializers. Primalize gem (https://github.com/jgaskins/primalize) Derek's talk on code review (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PJjmw9TRB7s) Inertia.js (https://inertiajs.com/) Phantom types (https://thoughtbot.com/blog/modeling-currency-in-elm-using-phantom-types) io-ts (https://gcanti.github.io/io-ts/) dry-rb (https://dry-rb.org/) parse don't validate (https://lexi-lambda.github.io/blog/2019/11/05/parse-don-t-validate/) value objects (http://wiki.c2.com/?ValueObject) broader perspective on parsing (https://thoughtbot.com/blog/a-broader-take-on-parsing) Enumerable#tally (https://medium.com/@baweaver/ruby-2-7-enumerable-tally-a706a5fb11ea) RubyConf mini (https://www.rubyconfmini.com/) where.missing (https://boringrails.com/tips/activerecord-where-missing-associations) Transcript: JOËL: Hello and welcome to another episode of The Bike Shed, a weekly podcast from your friends at thoughtbot about developing great software. I'm Joël Quenneville. And today, I'm joined by a very special guest, former host Chris Toomey. CHRIS: Hi, Joël. Thanks for having me. JOËL: And together, we're here to share a little bit of what we've learned along the way. So, Chris, what's new in your world? CHRIS: Being on this podcast is new in my world, or everything old is new again, or something along those lines. But, yeah, thank you so much for having me back. It's a pleasure. Although it's very odd, it feels somehow so different and yet very familiar. But yeah, more generally, what's new in my world? I think this was probably in development as I was winding down my time as a host here on The Bike Shed, but I don't know that I ever got a chance to talk about it. There has been a fun sort of deep-in-the-weeds technical thing that we've been playing around with at Sagewell that I've really enjoyed. So at the core of it, we have serializers. So we take some data structures in our Ruby on Rails code base, and we need to serialize them to JSON to send them to the front end. In our case, we're using Inertia, so it's not quite a JSON API, but it's fine to think about it in that way for the context of this discussion. And what we were finding is our front end has TypeScript. So we're writing Svelte, which is using TypeScript. And so we're stating or asserting that the types like, hey, we're going to get this data in from the back end, and it's going to have this shape to it. And we found that it was really hard to keep those in sync to keep, like, what does the user mean on the front end? What's the data that we're going to get? It's going to have a full name, which is a string, except sometimes that might be null. So how do we make sure that those are keeping up to date? And then we had a growing number of serializers on the back end and determining which serializer we were actually using, and it was just...it was a mess, to put it lightly. And so we had explored a couple of different options around it, and eventually, we found a library called Primalize. So Primalize is a Ruby library. It is for writing JSON serializers. But what's really interesting about it is it has a typing layer. It's like a type system sort of thing at play. So when you define a serializer in Primalize, instead of just saying, here are the fields; there is an ID, a name, et cetera, you say, there is an ID, and it is a string. There is a name, and it is a string, or an optional string, which is the even more interesting bit. You can say array. You can say object. You can say an enum of a couple of different values. And so we looked at that, and we said, ooh, this is very interesting. Astute listeners will know that this is probably useless in a Ruby system, which doesn't have types or a compilation step or anything like that. But what's really cool about this is when you use a Primalize serializer, as you're serializing an object, if there is ever a type mismatch, so the observed type at runtime and the authored type if those ever mismatch, then you can have some sort of notification happen. So in our case, we configured it to send a warning to Sentry to say, "Hey, you said the types were this, but we're actually seeing this other thing." Most often, it will be like an Optional, a null sneaking through, a nil sneaking through on the Ruby side. But what was really interesting is as we were squinting at this, we're like, huh, so now we're going to write all this type information. What if we could somehow get that type information down to the front end? So I had a long weekend, one weekend, and I went away, and I wrote a bunch of code that took all of those serializers, ran through them, and generated the associated TypeScript interfaces. And so now we have a build step that will essentially run that and assert that we're getting the same thing in CI as we have committed to the codebase. But now we have the generated serializer types on the front end that match to the used serializer on the back end, as well as the observed run-time types. So it's a combination of a true compilation step type system on the front end and a run-time type system on the back end, which has been very, very interesting. JOËL: I have a lot of thoughts here. CHRIS: I figured you would. [laughs] JOËL: But the first thing that came to mind is, as a consultant, there's a scenario with especially smaller startups that generally concerns me, and that is the CTO goes away for a weekend and writes a lot of code... CHRIS: [laughs] JOËL: And brings in a new system on Monday, which is exactly what you're describing here. How do you feel about the fact that you've done that? CHRIS: I wasn't ready to go this deep this early on in this episode. JOËL: [laughs] CHRIS: But honestly, that is a fantastic question. It's a thing that I have been truly not struggling with but really thinking about. We're going to go on a slight aside here, but I am finding it really difficult to engage with the actual day-to-day coding work that we're doing and to still stay close to the codebase and not be in the way. There's a pattern that I've seen happen a number of times now where I pick up a piece of work that is, you know, one of the tickets at the top of the backlog. I start to work on it. I get pulled into a meeting, then another meeting, then three more meetings. And suddenly, it's three days later. I haven't completed this piece of work that was defined to be the next most important piece of work. And suddenly, I'm blocking the team. JOËL: Hmmm. CHRIS: So I actually made a rule that I'm not allowed to own critical path work, which feels weird because it's like, I want to be engaged with that work. So the counterpoint to that is I'm now trying to schedule pairing sessions with each of the developers on the team once a week. And in that time, I can work on that sort of stuff with them, and they'll then own it and run with it. So it makes sure that I'm not blocking on those sorts of things, but I'm still connected to the core work that we're doing. But the other thing that you're describing of the CTO goes away for the weekend and then comes back with a new harebrained scheme; I'm very sensitive to that, having worked on; frankly, I think the same project. I can think of a project that you and I worked on where we experienced this. JOËL: I think we're thinking of the same project. CHRIS: So yes. Like, I'm scarred by that and, frankly, a handful of experiences of that nature. So we actually, I think, have a really healthy system in place at Sagewell for capturing, documenting, prioritizing this sort of other work, this developer-centric work. So this is the feature and bug work that gets prioritized and one list over here that is owned by our product manager. Separately, the dev team gets to say, here are the pain points. Here's the stuff that keeps breaking. Here are the things that I wish was better. Here is the observability hard-to-understand bits. And so we have a couple of different systems at play and recurring meetings and sort of unique ceremonies around that, and so this work was very much a fallout of that. It was actually a recurring topic that we kept trying a couple of different stabs at, and we never quite landed it. And then I showed up this one Monday morning, and I was like, "I found a thing; what do we think?" And then, critically, from there, I made sure I paired with other folks on the team as we pushed on the implementation. And then, actually, I mentioned Primalize, the library that we're using. We have now since deprecated Primalize within the app because we kept just adding to it so much that eventually, we're like, at this point, should we own this stuff? So we ended up rewriting the core bits of Primalize to better fit our use cases. And now we've actually removed Primalize, wonderful library. I highly recommend it to anyone who has that particular use case but then the additional type generation for the front end. Plus, we have some custom types within our app, Money being the most interesting one. We decided to model Money as our first-class consideration rather than just letting JavaScript have the sole idea of a number. But yes, in a very long-winded way, yes, I'm very sensitive to the thing you described. And I hope, in this case, I did not fall prey to the CTO goes away for the weekend and made a thing. JOËL: I think what I'm hearing is the key difference here is that you got buy-in from the team around this idea before you went out and implemented it. So you're not off doing your own things disconnected from the team and then imposing it from on high. The team already agreed this is the thing we want to do, and then you just did it for them. CHRIS: Largely, yes. Although I will say there are times that each developer on the team, myself included, have sort of gone away, come back with something, and said, "Hey, here's a WIP PR exploring an area." And there was actually...I'm forgetting what the context was, but there was one that happened recently that I introduced. I was like; I had to do this. And the team talked me out of it, and I ended up closing that PR. Someone else actually made a different PR that was an alternative implementation. I was like, no, that's better; we should absolutely do that. And I think that's really healthy. That's a hard thing to maintain but making sure that everyone feels like they've got a strong voice and that we're considering all of the different ways in which we might consider the work. Most critically, you know, how does this impact users at the end of the day? That's always the primary consideration. How do we make sure we build a robust, maintainable, observable system, all those sorts of things? And primarily, this work should go in that other direction, but I also don't want to stifle that creative spark of I got this thing in my head, and I had to explore it. Like, we shouldn't then need to never mind, throw away the work, put it into a ticket. Like, for as long as we can, that more organic, intuitive process if we can retain that, I like that. Critically, with the ability for everyone to tell me, "No, this is a bad idea. Stop it. What are you doing?" And that has happened recently. I mean, they were kinder about it, but they did talk me out of a bad idea. So here we are. JOËL: So you showed up on Monday morning, not with telling everyone, "Hey, I merged this thing over the weekend." You're showing up with a work-in-progress PR. CHRIS: Yes, definitely. I mean, everything goes through a PR, and everything has discussion and conversation around it. That's a strong, strong like Derek Prior's wonderful talk Building a Culture of Code Review. I forget the exact name of it. But it's one of my favorite talks in talking about the utility of code review as a way to share ideas and all of those wonderful things. So everything goes through code review, and particularly anything that is of that more exploratory architectural space. Often we'll say any one review from anyone on the team is sufficient to merge most things but something like that, I would want to say, "Hey, can everybody take a look at this? And if anyone has any reservations, then let's talk about it more." But if I or anyone else on the team for this sort of work gets everybody approving it, then cool, we're good to go. But yeah, code review critical, critical part of the process. JOËL: I'm curious about Primalize, the gem that you mentioned. It sounds like it's some kind of validation layer between some Ruby data structure and your serializers. CHRIS: It is the serializer, but in the process of serializing, it does run-time type validation, essentially. So as it's accessing, you know, you say first name. You have a user object. You pass it in, and you say, "Serializer, there's a first name, and it's a string." It will call the first name method on that user object. And then, it will check that it has the expected type, and if it doesn't, then, in our case, it sends to Sentry. We have configured it...it's actually interesting. In development and test mode, it will raise for a type mismatch, and in production mode, it will alert Sentry so you can configure that differently. But that ends up being really nice because these type mismatches end up being very loud early on. And it's surprisingly easy to maintain and ends up telling us a lot of truths about our system because, really, what we're doing is connecting data from many different systems and flowing it in and out. And all of the inputs and outputs from our system feel very meaningful to lock down in this way. But yeah, it's been an adventure. JOËL: It seems to me there could almost be two sets of types here, the inputs coming into Primalize from your Ruby data structures and then the outputs that are the actual serialized values. And so you might expect, let's say, an integer on the Ruby side, but maybe at the serialization level, you're serializing it to a string. Do you have that sort of conversion step as part of your serializers sometimes, or is the idea that everything's already the right type on the Ruby side, and then we just, like, to JSON it at the end? CHRIS: Yep. Primalize, I think, probably works a little closer to what you're describing. They have the idea of coercions. So within Primalize, there is the concept of a timestamp; that is one of the types that is available. But a timestamp is sort of the union of a date, a time, or I think they might let through a string; I'm not sure if there is as well. But frankly, for us, that was more ambiguity than we wanted or more blurring across the lines. And in the implementation that we've now built, date and time are distinct. And critically, a string is not a valid date or time; it is a string, that's another thing. And so there's a bunch of plumbing within the way you define the serializers. There are override methods so that you can locally within the serializer say, like, oh, we need to coerce from the shape of data into this other shape of data, even little like in-line proc, so we can do it quickly. But the idea is that the data, once it has been passed to the serializer, should be up the right shape. And so when we get to the type assertion part of the library, we expect that things are in the asserted type and will warn if not. We get surprisingly few warnings, which is interesting now. This whole process has made us pay a little more intention, and it's been less arduous simultaneously than I would have expected because like this is kind of a lot of work that I'm describing. And yet it ends up being very natural when you're the developer in context, like, oh, I've been reading these docs for days. I know the shape of this JSON that I'm working with inside and out, and now I'll just write it down in the serializer. It's very easy to do in that moment, and then it captures it and enforces it in such a useful way. As an aside, as I've been looking at this, I'm like, this is just GraphQL, but inside out, I'm pretty sure. But that is a choice that we have made. We didn't want to adopt the whole GraphQL thing. But just for anyone out there who is listening and is thinking, isn't this just GraphQL but inside out? Kind of. Yes. JOËL: I think my favorite part of GraphQL is the schema, which is not really the selling point for GraphQL, you know, like the idea that you can traverse the graph and get any subset of data that you want and all that. I think I would be more than happy with a REST API that has some kind of schema built around it. And someone told me that maybe what I really just want is SOAP, and I don't know how to feel about that comment. CHRIS: You just got to have some XML, and some WSDLs, and other fun things. I've heard people say good things about SOAP. SOAP seems like a fine idea. If anything, I think a critical part of this is we don't have a JSON API. We have a very tightly coupled front end and back end, and a singular front end, frankly. And so that I think naturally...that makes the thing that I'm describing here a much more comfortable fit. If we had multiple different downstream clients that we're trying to consume from the same back end, then I think a GraphQL API or some other structured JSON schema, whatever it is type of API, and associated documentation and typing layer would be probably a better fit. But as I've said many a time on this here, Bike Shed, Inertia is one of my favorite libraries or frameworks (They're probably more of a framework.) one of my favorite technological approaches that I have ever found. And particularly in buildings Sagewell, it has allowed us to move so rapidly the idea that changes are, you know, one fell swoop changes everything within the codebase. We don't have to think about syncing deploys for the back end and the front end and how to coordinate across them. Our app is so much easier to understand by virtue of that architecture that Inertia implies. JOËL: So, if I understand correctly, you don't serialize to JSON as part of the serializers. You're serializing directly to JavaScript. CHRIS: We do serialize to JSON. At the end of the day, Inertia takes care of this on both the Rails side and the client side. There is a JSON API. Like, if you look at the network inspector, you will see XHR requests happening. But critically, we're not doing that. We're not the ones in charge of it. We're not hitting a specific endpoint. It feels as an application coder much closer to a traditional Rails app. It just happens to be that we're writing our view layer. Instead of an ERB, we're writing them in Svelte files. But otherwise, it feels almost identical to a normal traditional Rails app with controllers and the normal routing and all that kind of stuff. JOËL: One thing that's really interesting about JSON as an interchange format is that it is very restrictive. The primitives it has are even narrower than, say, the primitives that Ruby has. So you'd mentioned sending a date through. There is no JSON date. You have to serialize it to some other type, potentially an integer, potentially a string that has a format that the other side knows how it's going to interpret. And I feel like it's those sorts of richer types when we need to pass them through JSON that serialization and deserialization or parsing on the other end become really interesting. CHRIS: Yeah, I definitely agree with that. It was a struggling point for a while until we found this new approach that we're doing with the serializers in the type system. But so far, the only thing that we've done this with is Money. But on the front end, a while ago, we introduced a specific TypeScript type. So it's a phantom type, and I believe I'm getting this correct. It's a phantom type called Cents, C-E-N-T-S. So it represents...I'm going to say an integer. I know that JavaScript doesn't have integers, but logically, it represents an integer amount of cents. And critically, it is not a number, like, the lowercase number in the type system. We cannot add them together. We can't -- JOËL: I thought you were going to say, NaN. CHRIS: [laughs] It is not a number. I saw a n/a for not applicable somewhere in the application the other day. I was like, oh my God, we have a NaN? It happened? But it wasn't, it was just n/a, and I was fine. But yeah, so we have this idea of Cents within the application. We have a money input, which is a special input designed exactly for this. So to a user, it is formatted to look like you're entering dollars and cents. But under the hood, we are bidirectionally converting that to the integer amount of cents that we need. And we strictly, within the type system, those are cents. And you can't do math on Cents unless you use a special set of helper functions. You cannot generate Cents on the fly unless you use a special set of helper functions, the constructor functions. So we've been really restrictive about that, which was kind of annoying because a lot of the data coming from the server is just, you know, numbers. But now, with this type system that we've introduced on the Ruby side, we can assert and enforce that these are money.new on the Ruby side, so using the Money gem. And they come down to the front end as capital C Cents in the type system on the TypeScript side. So we're able to actually bind that together and then enforce proper usage sort of on both sides. The next step that we plan to do after that is dates and times. And those are actually almost weirder because they end up...we just have to sort of say what they are, and they will be ISO 8601 date and time strings, respectively. But we'll have functions that know this is a date string; that's a thing. It is, again, a phantom type implemented within our TypeScript type system. But we will have custom functions that deal with that and really constrain...lock ourselves down to only working with them correctly. And critically, saying that is the only date and time format that we work with; there is no other. We don't have arbitrary dates. Is this a JSON date or something else? I don't know; there are too many date syntaxes. JOËL: I like the idea of what you're doing in that it sounds like you're very much narrowing that sort of window of where in the stack the data exists in the sort of unstructured, free-floating primitives that could be misinterpreted. And so, at this point, it's almost narrowed to the point where it can't be touched by any user or developer-written code because you've pushed the boundaries on the Rails side down and then on the JavaScript side up to the point where the translation here you define translations on one side or, I guess, a parser on one side and a serializer on the other. And they guarantee that everything is good up until that point. CHRIS: Yep, with the added fun of the runtime reflection on the Ruby side. So it's an interesting thing. Like, TypeScript actually has similar things. You can say what the type is all day long, and your code will consistently conform to that asserted type. But at the end of the day, if your JSON API gets in some different data...unless you're using a library like io-ts, is one that I've looked at, which actually does parsing and returns a result object of did we parse to the thing that you wanted or did we get an error in that data structure? So we could get to that level on the client side as well. We haven't done that yet largely because we've essentially pushed that concern up to the Ruby layer. So where we're authoring the data, because we own that, we're going to do it at that level. There are a bunch of benefits of defining it there and then sort of reflecting it down. But yeah, TypeScript, you can absolutely lie to yourself, whereas Elm, a language that I know you love dearly, you cannot lie to yourself in Elm. You've got to tell the truth. It's the only option. You've got to prove it. Whereas in TypeScript, you can just kind of suggest, and TypeScript will be like, all right, cool, I'll make sure you stay honest on that, but I'm not going to make you prove it, which is an interesting sort of set of related trade-offs there. But I think we found a very comfortable resting spot for right now. Although now, we're starting to look at the edges of the Ruby system where data is coming in. So we have lots of webhooks and other external partners that we're integrating with, and they're sending us data. And that data is of varying shapes. Some will send us a payload with the word amount, and it refers to an integer amount of cents because, of course, it does. Some will send us the word amount in their payload, and it will be a floating amount of dollars. And I get a little sad on those days. But critically, our job is to make sure all of those are the same and that we never pass dollars as cents or cents as dollars because that's where things go sad. That is job number one at Sagewell in the engineering team is never get the decimal place wrong in money. JOËL: That would be a pretty terrible mistake to make. CHRIS: It would. I mean, it happens. In fintech, that problem comes up a lot. And again, the fact that...I'm honestly surprised to see situations out there where we're getting in floating point dollars. That is a surprise to me because I thought we had all agreed sort of as a community that it was integer cents but especially in a language that has integers. JavaScript, it's kind of making it up the whole time. But Ruby has integers. JSON, I guess, doesn't have integers, so I'm sort of mixing concerns here, but you get the idea. JOËL: Despite Ruby not having a static type system, I've found that generally, when I'm integrating with a third-party API, I get to the point where I want something that approximates like Elm's JSON decoders or io-ts or something like that. Because JSON is just a big blob of data that could be of any shape, and I don't really trust it because it's third-party data, and you should not trust third parties. And I find that I end up maybe cobbling something together commonly with like a bunch of usage of hash.fetch, things like that. But I feel like Ruby doesn't have a great approach to parsing and composing these validators for external data. CHRIS: Ruby as a language certainly doesn't, and the ecosystem, I would say, is rather limited in terms of the options here. We have looked a bit at the dry-rb stack of gems, so dry-validation and dry-schema, in particular, both offer potentially useful aspects. We've actually done a little bit of spiking internally around that sort of thing of, like, let's parse this incoming data instead of just coercing to hash and saying that it's got probably the shape that we want. And then similarly, I will fetch all day instead of digging because I want to be quite loud when we get it wrong. But we're already using dry-monads. So we have the idea of result types within the system. We can either succeed or fail at certain operations. And I think it's just a little further down the stack. But probably something that we will implement soon is at those external boundaries where data is coming in doing some form of parsing and validation to make sure that it conforms to unknown data structure. And then, within the app, we can do things more cleanly. That also would allow us to, like, let's push the idea that this is floating point dollars all the way out to the edge. And the minute it hits our system, we convert it into a money.new, which means that cents are properly handled. It's the same type of money or dollar, same type of currency handling as everywhere else in the app. And so pushing that to the very edges of our application is a very interesting idea. And so that could happen in the library or sort of a parsing client, I guess, is probably the best way to think about it. So I'm excited to do that at some point. JOËL: Have you read the article, Parse, Don't Validate? CHRIS: I actually posted that in some code review the other day to one of the developers on the team, and they replied, "You're just going to quietly drop one of my favorite articles of all time in code review?" [laughs] So yes, I've read it; I love it. It's a wonderful idea, definitely something that I'm intrigued by. And sort of bringing dry-monads into Ruby, on the one hand, feels like a forced fit and yet has also been one of the other, I think strongest sort of architectural decisions that we've made within the application. There's so much imperative work that we ended up having to do. Send this off to this external API, then tell this other one, then tell this other one. Put the whole thing in a transaction so that our local data properly handles it. And having dry-monads do notation, in particular, to allow us to make that manageable but fail in all the ways it needs to fail, very expressive in its failure modes, that's been great. And then parse, don't validate we don't quite do it yet. But that's one of the dreams of, like, our codebase really should do that thing. We believe in that. So let's get there soon. JOËL: And the core idea behind parse, don't validate is that instead of just having some data that you don't trust, running a check on it and passing that blob of now checked but still untrusted data down to the next person who might also want to check it. Generally, you want to pass it through some sort of filter that will, one, validate that it's correct but then actually typically convert it into some other trusted shape. In Ruby, that might be something like taking an amorphous blob of JSON and turning it into some kind of value object or something like that. And then anybody downstream that receives, let's say, money object can trust that they're dealing with a well-formed money value as opposed to an arbitrary blob of JSON, which hopefully somebody else has validated, but who knows? So I'm going to validate it again. CHRIS: You can tell that I've been out of the podcasting game for a while because I just started responding to yes; I love that blog post without describing the core premise of it. So kudos to you, Joël; you are a fantastic podcast host over there. I will say one of the things you just described is an interesting...it's been a bit of a struggle for us. We keep sort of talking through what's the architecture. How do we want to build this application? What do we care about? What are the things that really matter within this codebase, and then what is all the other stuff? And we've been good at determining the things that really matter, thinking collectively as a group, and I think coming up with some novel, useful, elegant...I'm saying too many positive adjectives for what we're doing. But I've been very happy with sort of the thing that we decide. And then there's the long-tail work of actually propagating that change throughout the rest of the application. We're, like, okay, here's how it works. Every incoming webhook, we now parse and yield a value object. That sentence that you just said a minute ago is exactly what I want. That's like a bunch of work. It's particularly a bunch of work to convert an existing codebase. It's easy to say, okay, from here forward, any new webhooks, payloads that are coming in, we're going to do in this way. But we have a lot of things in our app now that exist in this half-converted way. There was a brief period where we had three different serializer technologies at play. Just this week, I did the work of killing off the middle ground one, the Primalized-based thing, and we now have only our new hotness and then the very old. We were using Blueprinter as the serializer as the initial sort of stub. And so that still exists within the codebase in some places. But trying to figure out how to prioritize that work, the finishing out those maintenance-type conversions is a tricky one. It's never the priority. But it is really nice to have consistency in a codebase. So it's...yeah, do you have any thoughts on that? JOËL: I think going back to the article and what the meaning of parsing is, I used to always think of parsing as taking strings and turning them into something else, and I think this really broadened my perspective on the idea of parsing. And now, I think of it more as converting from a broader type to a narrower type with failures. So, for example, you could go from a string to an integer, and not all strings are valid integers. So you're narrowing the type. And if you have the string hello world, it will fail, and it will give you an error of some type. But you can have multiple layers of that. So maybe you have a string that you parse into an integer, but then, later on, you might want to parse that integer into something else that requires an integer in a range. Let's say it's a percentage. So you have a value object that is a percentage, but it's encoded in the JSON as a string. So that first pass, you parse it from a string into an integer, and then you parse that integer into a percentage object. But if it's outside the range of valid percentage numbers, then maybe you get an error there as well. So it's a thing that can happen at multiple layers. And I've now really connected it with the primitive obsession smell in code. So oftentimes, when you decide, wait, I don't want a primitive here; I want a richer type, commonly, there's going to be a parsing step that should exist to go from that primitive into the richer type. CHRIS: I like that. That was a classic Joël wildly concise summary of a deeply complex technical topic right there. JOËL: It's like I'm going to connect some ideas from functional programming and a classic object-oriented code smell and, yeah, just kind of mash it all together with a popular article. CHRIS: If only you had a diagram. Podcast is not the best medium for diagrams, but I think you could do it. You could speak one out loud, and everyone would be able to see it in their mind's eye. JOËL: So I will tell you what my diagram is for this because I've actually created it already. I imagine this as a sort of like pyramid with different layers that keep getting smaller and smaller. So the size of type is sort of the width of a layer. And so your strings are a very wide layer. Then on top of that, you have a narrower layer that might be, you know, it could be an integer, or you could even if you're parsing JSON, you first start with a string, then you parse that into a Ruby hash, not all strings are valid hashes. So that's going to be narrower. Then you might extract some values out of that hash. But if the keys aren't right, that might also fail. You're trying to pull the user out of it. And so each layer it gets a richer type, but that richer type, by virtue of being richer, is narrower. And as you're trying to move up that pyramid at every step, there is a possibility for a failure. CHRIS: Have you written a blog post about this with said diagram in it? And is that why you have that so readily at hand? [laughs] JOËL: Yes, that is the case. CHRIS: Okay. Yeah, that made sense to me. [laughs] JOËL: We'll make sure to link to it in the show notes. CHRIS: Now you have to link to Joël blog posts, whereas I used to have to link to them [chuckles] in almost every episode of The Bike Shed that I recorded. JOËL: Another thing I've been thinking about in terms of this parsing is that parsing and serializing are, in a sense, almost opposites of each other. Typically, when you're parsing, you're going from a broad type to a narrow one. And when you're serializing, you're going from a narrow type to a broader one. So you might go from a user into a hash into a string. So you're sort of going down that pyramid rather than going up. CHRIS: It is an interesting observation and one that immediately my brain is like, okay, cool. So can we reuse our serializers but just run them in reverse or? And then I try and talk myself out of that because that's a classic don't repeat yourself sort of failure mode of, like, actually, it's fine. You can repeat a little bit. So long as you can repeat and constrain, that's a fine version. But yeah, feels true, though, at the core. JOËL: I think, in some ways, if you want a single source of truth, what you want is a schema, and then you can derive serializers and parsers from that schema. CHRIS: It's interesting because you used the word derive. That has been an interesting evolution at Sagewell. The engineering team seems to be very collected around the idea of explicitness, almost the Zen of Python; explicit is better than implicit. And we are willing to write a lot of words down a lot of times and be happy with that. I think we actually made the explicit choice at one point that we will not implement an automatic camel case conversion in our serializer, even though we could; this is a knowable piece of code. But what we want is the grepability from the front end to the back end to say, like, where's this data coming from? And being able to say, like, it is this data, which is from this serializer, which comes from this object method, and being able to trace that very literally and very explicitly in the code, even though that is definitely the sort of thing that we could derive or automatically infer or have Ruby do that translation for us. And our codebase is more verbose and a little noisier. But I think overall, I've been very happy with it, and I think the team has been very happy. But it is an interesting one because I've seen plenty of teams where it is the exact opposite. Any repeated characters must be destroyed. We must write code to write the code for us. And so it's fun to be working with a team where we seem to be aligned around an approach on that front. JOËL: That example that you gave is really interesting because I feel like a common thing that happens in a serialization layer is also a form of normalization. And so, for example, you might downcase all strings as part of the serialization, definitely, like dates always get written in ISO 8601 format whenever that happens. And so, regardless of how you might have it stored on the Ruby side, by the time it gets to the JSON, it's always in a standard format. And it sounds like you're not necessarily doing that with capitalization. CHRIS: I think the distinction would be the keys and the values, so we are definitely doing normalization on the values side. So ISO 8601 date and time strings, respectively that, is the direction that we plan to go for the value. But then for the key that's associated with that, what is the name for this data, those we're choosing to be explicit and somewhat repetitive, or not even necessarily repetitive, but the idea of, like, it's first_name on the Ruby side, and it's first capital N name camel case, or it's...I forget the name. It's not quite camel case; it's a different one but lower camel, maybe. But whatever JavaScript uses, we try to bias towards that when we're going to the front end. It does get a little tricky coming back into the Ruby side. So our controllers have a bunch of places where they need to know about what I think is called lower camel case, and so we're not perfect there. But that critical distinction between sort of the names for things, and the values for things, transformations, and normalizations on the values, I'm good with that. But we've chosen to go with a much more explicit version for the names of things or the keys in JSON objects specifically. JOËL: One thing that can be interesting if you have a normalization phase in your serializer is that that can mean that your serializer and parsers are not necessarily symmetric. So you might accept malformed data into your parser and parse it correctly. But then you can't guarantee that the data that gets serialized out is going to identically match the data that got parsed in. CHRIS: Yeah, that is interesting. I'm not quite sure of the ramifications, although I feel like there are some. It almost feels like formatting Prettier and things like that where they need to hold on to whitespace in some cases and throw out in others. I'm thinking about how ASTs work. And, I don't know, there's interesting stuff, but, again, not sure of the ramifications. But actually, to flip the tables just a little bit, and that's an aggressive terminology, but we're going to roll with it. To flip the script, let's go with that, Joël; what's been up in your world? You've been hosting this wonderful show. I've listened in to a number of episodes. You're doing a fantastic job. I want to hear a little bit more of what's new in your world, Joël. JOËL: So I've been working on a project that has a lot of flaky tests, and we're trying to figure out the source of that flakiness. It's easy to just dive into, oh, I saw a flaky Test. Let me try to fix it. But we have so much flakiness that I want to go about it a little bit more systematically. And so my first step has actually been gathering data. So I've actually been able to make API requests to our CI server. And the way we figure out flakiness is looking at the commit hash that a particular test suite run has executed on. And if there's more than one CI build for a given commit hash, we know that's probably some kind of flakiness. It could be a legitimate failure that somebody assumed was flakiness, and so they just re-run CI. But the symptom that we are trying to address is the fact that we have a very high level of people re-verifying their code. And so to do that or to figure out some stats, I made a request to the API grouped by commit hash and then was able to get the stats of how many re-verifications there are and even the distribution. The classic way that you would do that is in Ruby; you would use the GroupBy function from enumerable. And then, you would transform values instead of having, like, say; each commit hash then points to all the builds, an array of builds that match that commit hash. You would then thumb those. So now you have commit hashes that point to counts of how many builds there were for that commit hash. Newer versions of Ruby introduced the tally method, which I love, which allows you to basically do all of that in one step. One thing that I found really interesting, though, is that that will then give me a hash of commit hashes that point to the number of builds that are there. If I want to get the distribution for the whole project over the course of, say, the last week, and I want to say, "How many times do people run only one CI run versus running twice in the same commit versus running three times, or four times, or five or six times?" I want to see that distribution of how many times people are rerunning their build. You're effectively doing that tally process twice. So once you have a list of all the builds, you group by hash. You count, and so you end up with that. You have the Ruby hash of commit SHAs pointing to number of times the build was run on that. And then, you again group by the number of builds for each commit SHA. And so now what you have is you'll have something like one, and then that points to an array of SHA one, SHA two, SHA three, SHA four like all the builds. And then you tally that again, or you transform values, or however, you end up doing it. And what you end up with is saying for running only once, I now have 200 builds that ran only once. For running twice in the same commit SHA, there are 15. For running three times, there are two. For running four times, there is one. And now I've got my distribution broken down by how many times it was run. It took me a while to work through all of that. But now the shortcut in my head is going to be you double tally to get distribution. CHRIS: As an aside, the whole everything you're talking about is interesting and getting to that distribution. I feel like I've tried to solve that problem on data recently and struggled with it. But particularly tally, I just want to spend a minute because tally is such a fantastic addition to the Ruby standard library. I used to have in sort of like loose muscle memory transform value is grouped by ampersand itself, transform values count, sort, reverse to H. That whole string of nonsense gets replaced by tally, and, oof, what a beautiful example of Ruby, and enumerable, and all of the wonder that you can encapsulate there. JOËL: Enumerable is one of the best parts of Ruby. I love it so much. It was one of the first things that just blew my mind about Ruby when I started. I came from a PHP, C++ background and was used to writing for loops for everything and not the nice for each loops that a lot of languages have these days. You're writing like a legit for or while loop, and you're managing the indexes yourself. And there's so much room for things to go wrong. And being introduced to each blew my mind. And I was like, this is so beautiful. I'm not dealing with indexes. I'm not dealing with the raw implementation of the array. I can just say do a thing for each element. This is amazing. And that is when I truly fell in love with Ruby. CHRIS: I want to say I came from Python, most recently before Ruby. And Python has pretty nice list comprehensions and, in fact, in some ways, features that enumerable doesn't have. But, still, coming to Ruby, I was like, oh, this enumerable; this is cool. This is something. And it's only gotten better. It still keeps growing, and the idea of custom enumerables. And yeah, there's some real neat stuff in there. JOËL: I'm going to be speaking at RubyConf Mini this fall in November, and my talk is all about Enumerators and ranges in enumerable and ways you can use those to make the APIs of the objects that you create delightful for other people to use. CHRIS: That sounds like a classic Joël talk right there that I will be happy to listen to when it comes out. A very quick related, a semi-related aside, so, tally, beautiful addition to the Ruby language. On the Rails side, there was one that I used recently, which is where.missing. Have you seen where.missing? JOËL: I have not heard of this. CHRIS: So where.missing is fantastic. Let's assume you've got two related objects, so you've got like a has many blah, so like a user has many posts. I think you can...if I'm remembering it correctly, it's User.where.missing(:posts). So it's where dot missing and then parentheses the symbol posts. And under the hood, Rails will do the whole LEFT OUTER JOIN where the count is null, et cetera. It turns into this wildly complex SQL query or understandably complex, but there's a lot going on there. And yet it compresses down so elegantly into this nice, little ActiveRecord bit. So where.missing is my new favorite addition into the Rails landscape to complement tally on the Ruby side, which I think tally is Ruby 2.7, I want to say. So it's been around for a while. And where.missing might be a Ruby 7 feature. It might be a six-something, but still, wonderful features, ever-evolving these tool sets that we use. JOËL: One of the really nice things about enumerable and family is the fact that they build on a very small amount of primitives, and so as long as you basically understand blocks, you can use enumerable and anything in there. It's not special syntax that you have to memorize. It's just regular functions and blocks. Well, Chris, thank you so much for coming back for a visit. It's been a pleasure. And it's always good to have you share the cool things that you're doing at Sagewell. CHRIS: Well, thank you so much, Joël. It's been an absolute pleasure getting to come back to this whole Bike Shed. And, again, just to add a note here, you're doing a really fantastic job with the show. It's been interesting transitioning back into listener mode for the show. Weirdly, I wasn't listening when I was a host. But now I've regained the ability to listen to The Bike Shed and really enjoy the episodes that you've been doing and the wonderful spectrum of guests that you've had on and variety of topics. So, yeah, thank you for hosting this whole Bike Shed. It's been great. JOËL: And with that, let's wrap up. The show notes for this episode can be found at bikeshed.fm. This show is produced and edited by Mandy Moore. If you enjoyed listening, one really easy way to support the show is to leave us a quick rating or even a review in iTunes. It really helps other folks find the show. If you have any feedback, you can reach us at @_bikeshed, or reach me at @joelquen on Twitter, or at hosts@bikeshed.fm via email. Thank you so much for listening to The Bike Shed, and we'll see you next week. Byeeeeeeeeeee!!!!!!!! ANNOUNCER: This podcast was brought to you by thoughtbot. thoughtbot is your expert design and development partner. Let's make your product and team a success.

CHRIS NEWBOLD: Hello, wellbeing friends. Welcome to the Path To Well-Being In Law Podcast, an initiative of the Institute for Well-Being in Law. As you know, my name is Chris Newbold. I serve as executive vice president of ALPS Malpractice Insurance. You know, our goal here on the podcast is to introduce you to thought leaders doing meaningful work in the wellbeing space within the legal profession, and in the process, build and nurture a national network of wellbeing advocates intent on creating a culture shift within the profession. As always, I am joined by my co-host, Bree Buchanan. Bree, how are you doing today? BREE BUCHANAN: I'm doing great, Chris. Great to be here. CHRIS: Good, good. As you all know, Bree is the president of the Institute for Well-Being in Law. Bree, we have some really exciting news to share about the institute and the journey that we're on to engineer this culture shift. Would you maybe give us a clue as to the breaking news that I think that we were so excited about? BREE: Nobody could be more excited than me because you said, you know, Bree is the board president. Well, up until this news, I had two jobs. I was the acting executive director, so I am just delighted to let people know we have hired our first full-time staff person and that is our inaugural executive director. Her name is Jennifer DiSanza. She comes to us with a whole host of experience in wellbeing issues and particularly with the law students. For many reasons, we wanted to bring Jennifer on board, but also strategically, we really realized that's where she's coming from is the future of our profession. And also, aside of where we know there's a lot of behavioral health distress and stress on the youngest members of our profession and the law students. So we're just thrilled to have Jennifer on board. CHRIS: Yeah. See, I had the privilege of serving with you Bree on the hiring committee. Boy, we have a dynamic leader now that will be working day-to-day to think about advancing wellbeing in our profession. You know, there's so much work to be done as you well know. We're actually planning on having Jennifer as our next podcast guest, which will be awesome to be able to just talk about the vision, why she's passionate about this work. It will also happen to be after the conclusion of some strategic planning that we as a board will be doing. So things are just really aligning well with both what has transpired, where we're going, and then focusing on what lies ahead in terms of some big issues that we have to tackle as we think about the wellbeing of lawyers and legal professionals in the profession. With that, today we're going to circle back to, we've spent considerable time in the area of diversity, equity, and inclusion. You know, we had anticipated a three part series on this, but sometimes you extend an offer and you get somebody who's so awesome that you sit there and go, we have to expand this even further. Right? BREE: Along came Kori. Yeah. CHRIS: That's right. Along came Kori. And when Kori came along, we're like, okay, we're breaking the rules. We're totally bringing Kori into the mix. And so we were really excited to welcome Kori Carew to the podcast. Bree, would you be so kind to introduce Kori? And again, this is I know a podcast that we've been very excited and looking forward to. BREE: Absolutely. So Kori is a people inclusion strategist, an advocate, a speaker, a writer, a status quo disruptor. Got to love that. Child of God, wife and mother of two curly-haired, wise, energetic, fierce, spitfire daughters. Her family is multi-ethnic, multi-racial, multi-religious and spans multiple nationalities. She brings a fierce love of community and belonging that transcends differences to work, ministry and life. She loves to sing, cook, entertain, dance in the hallways at work, we need a video component of that, and read. Equipping leaders to be inclusive, to interrupt bias and disrupt the status quo. At her day job, she focuses on developing and implementing strategies for individual career and diversity and inclusion success, and helps organizations build bridges across differences and improve inclusion. BREE: When she's not working, she focuses her voice and talent on issues of gender equity and rights, inclusion, and human and civil rights, serving in her church and community, and cherishing her phenomenal tribe and community. She's energized by helping people live their very best lives. Kori was the Director of Strategic Diversity Initiatives for seven years at Shook, Hardy. And then she came over to Seyfarth and is now the Chief Inclusion and Diversity Officer there and oversees their really spectacular wellbeing program, Seyfarth Life, and a whole host of other initiatives we're going to hear about. So Kori, welcome to the podcast. CHRIS: Yay. KORI CAREW: Thank you. I appreciate you inviting me to be on this podcast and also very much the work that you are doing. This conversation of wellbeing for attorneys is such an important conversation. It's one that we probably started having too late, and it's one where diversity and inclusion, there's more work to be done than time. I'm super thankful for all that you do and all that you do to help our profession be better, so thank you very much. BREE: You bet. Kori, I'm going to start off. We ask all of our guests a variation of this question. What experiences in your life are drivers behind your passion for work around diversity, equity, and inclusion and belonging and wellbeing? KORI: Thank you for that question. And of course, you're causing me to go down a bit of memory lane. You would think this is an easy question, but it actually is not. It's not as easy because it forces you to look in the rear view mirror and try to understand where the dots connected to where you are. Before I do that, I do want to make one small correction. Seyfarth Life is an incredible initiative at Seyfarth that I am super proud of and one of the things that energized me about joining the firm. It has a steering committee that leads it. It's four partners at the firm, all of whom have a connection to wellbeing and mindfulness. My department and my role actually does not oversee Seyfarth Life, but we do work very closely with them. Because as one of the founding members, Laura Maechtlen noted from the very beginning, there's that intersection between inclusion and diversity and belonging and wellbeing, and the two work very closely together. But my department does not oversee Seyfarth Life. So just wanted to make sure I give credit to the right people. BREE: Absolutely, give credit where it's due. KORI: You know, because they're awesome and they do great work. In fact, if I may brag on them, out of the steering committee members, one of them is the chair of the largest department in the firm and an executive committee member and co-chair of the national diversity and inclusion action team. Oh, wait a minute. No, that's not right. Three are office managing partners. They're part of this steering committee, this leadership group, because they actually practice wellbeing and mindfulness and meditation in their own personal lives and allow it to influence how they lead. So I know Seyfarth didn't pay me to do a promotion, but I felt like I needed to shout some guys out. BREE: Absolutely. KORI: Our talent team helps them quite a bit in terms of organizing programs and handling the administrative and logistic things. Okay. So to answer your question, what are the experiences? I often say this and it is true that when I look at my life in the rear view mirror, how I ended up where I am makes a lot more sense as I connect the dots in ways that I probably couldn't have foreseen. For example, I never intended to be a diversity and inclusion professional. I actually never intended to go to law school. I started my university career as an electrical engineering major. When I came to the U.S., I wanted to build planes. That was my thing. I wanted to be an aeronautical engineer. I wanted to build planes. I loved science. I could spend hours in the lab. One of the best gifts I ever got was a lab coat. My dad had a custom drawing board built for me when I was a teenager that I carried with me everywhere because technical drawing, engineering drawing was one of my top subjects. KORI: So a lot of things make sense in hindsight. I look at my family composition and my sisters and I were all born in different countries. We have different passports. We grew up in Nigeria, a country with over 300 different ethnic groups with different languages and traditions and customs, so there's that. My family is multi-religious, multi-ethnic, multi-national, multi-racial and there's just so much diversity there. You know, in the family tree, there's a granduncle that's a Methodist church bishop, and one that's an Imam. And my grandfather's father was a teacher, was a teacher of the Quran. And so all of that diversity is there in the family, but it probably influenced how my parents raised my sisters and I and how even through childhood, I was always the person who was connecting the dots between similarities between people. And today we would call that cultural fluency, this ability to recognize cultural differences and not judge them but just adapt to them and be able to say, okay, you know what? KORI: It looks to me like person A is looking through a lens that's different than person B, but they're looking at the same thing. So how can I get these two people to be on the same page? So there's that family dynamic. But another thing that happened when I was growing up that I do think influenced me quite a bit. I grew up in Nigeria. Most of my childhood, we had one military dictator after another. So I grew up with coos happening more often than I would prefer. There were times that things broke out into religious violence. You're talking about incidents where a few people are killed or a lot of people are killed and everything goes to standstill, everybody's on edge. You don't leave your home. When the students go on riots because they're protesting something and things get out of hand, you're turning off the lights in your home and sort of huddled together, trying to make sure that you stay together as a family until everything passes over. So that was also something that I grew up around and experiencing. KORI: And then my parents are from Sierra Leone. Sierra Leone is actually my home country. If you ask me where I'm from, I will tell you I was born in Canada, grew up in Nigeria, but I'm from Sierra Leone. Because in my culture, you're where your father's from. So my entire identity has always been that I am from Sierra Leone. In the '90s, Sierra Leone began to experience a very brutal civil war, which calling it a civil war is actually inaccurate. You have a bunch of people with weapons who terrorize the population for 11 years. And it's been one of the most brutal wars that the world has seen at least in recent times. And that impacted my family in the sense that we lost people, in the sense that I hadn't been back to Sierra Leone for a long time. And it kind of started with my mom not feeling it was safe enough for us to go and visit, with grandparents living on the run and being sick and dying and me not seeing them in a long time because of just this state of chaos. KORI: And all of this fueled how I ended up going to law school, wanting to do human rights work, wanting to be a human rights lawyer, feeling as if I learned so much about the American system and the role that the legal profession played in terms of maintaining democracy and freedom and wanting to multiply that. Right. But then I go to law school. I graduate. I fall in love with a boy who I actually started dating in college, and I ended up in Kansas City because I followed a boy. You know, career took a different turn, ended up being a defense lawyer. And then you fast forward to doing an evaluation and me going through a process of saying, okay, I've done a lot of the things I wanted to do. I've achieved a lot of the things I wanted to achieve. I wanted to try cases. I wanted to build this reputation. I wanted to be successful in A, B, C, D. KORI: And I started taking inventory of the things I was passionate about, the skills I developed, the experiences I had and where I was losing time. You know, where was I given my time in community? What were the things that I could lose myself doing in such deep flow that I don't even recognize that time has gone by? And that journey ended up leading me to inclusion and diversity work and I haven't turned back since. There's some aspects of the legal profession I miss. I miss trying cases. I miss solving problems for clients. It may sound like the weirdest thing, but boy, playing around with evidence, rules, and figuring out how to get things in or keep things out is a nerdy love of mine. And so those are just some of the experiences that I would say led me to this love for helping people build bridges and I'm empower people to succeed despite the challenges, and being able to create just a level of cultural fluency amongst groups of people so that we understand how much better we are together as opposed to isolated from one another. So that's a long answer. BREE: Well, what an amazing life you've had to date and an incredible background that informs your work at a depth that I know Chris and I can't even begin to imagine. CHRIS: For sure. Kori, how long have you been more squarely centered on the inclusion and diversity side of things? KORI: I have been for 11 years now full-time diversity. What I realized, you know, somebody asked me a question similar to this, how long have you been doing diversity work, which is different from what I usually hear. I actually did the inventory and realized that, you know, 29 years ago, when I first came to the U.S., that was when I actually started doing presentations. At the time, we called them multiculturalism. We started doing presentations on bridging differences, on being able to understand different cultures and how you navigate it. And so I've been actually teaching on diversity, inclusion, cultural fluency leadership topics now for 29, 30 years. But it being my full-time job, that happened when I left litigation and moved over to Shook, Hardy & Bacon. CHRIS: Okay. I think a good point to maybe start the conversation is, you know, again, your perspective is so unique and informed. For diverse members of the profession, can you talk to our listeners about some of the more challenging aspects of the last couple of years? KORI: Yeah. So the last couple of years have been tough for everyone. This pandemic, it's been brutal and it's impacted us in so many different ways. We've lost our sense of certainty to the extent that we didn't had any. We've lost our ability to have some kind of predictability, something that is a core need, a core need for many of us. Well, not for many of us, for everyone. It's actually a core human need. And so we've been sort of thrown into this whirlwind of uncertainty with no deadline, right? We went from thinking, well, I'll speak for myself. You know, since I'm not a scientist, I foolishly thought, well, maybe in two weeks I'll go back to the office. And then it was a month. And then I thought six weeks. And then I thought for sure by summer 2020 we'd be able to go out and about and things would be quasi under control. And here we are, you know, some 28, 29 months later and we still have COVID. I'm sick right now recovering from COVID after avoiding it for almost 30 months, I get it. KORI: So you have that benchmark that is impacting everyone and the uncertainty that we've seen with everything going on around us. But as with everything, I think people from historically underrepresented and marginalized groups, what happens is the things that... There's this saying that the things, and I'm going to probably say it wrong. And it may be an African American saying, but it's this thing that what gives some people a cold will give others the flu. And so what you've seen then is populations that have been historically marginalized and underrepresented and haven't had access to full equity, had been impacted very differently by the same storm that we're all in. So we're all in the same storm, but we're not in the same boat. We're experiencing it differently. So communities of color, we know got hit by COVID much harder. KORI: And you have that intersection between race, between housing inequity, between education inequity, between healthcare inequity and healthcare access, all of those things coming together to adversely impact some groups more. So if you are someone who is Brown or Black, or from one of these historically marginalized communities, and you are going to work during the pandemic, or you're working from home, you are more likely to have family members who have been directly impacted by COVID, right? You are more likely to have lost family members. You also, generally speaking are more likely to be in a position where you are in an extended family situation where you are responsible for more people than just yourself. You know, one of the things that we know, for example, that impacts generational wealth is that those of us from communities of color oftentimes are responsible not just for ourselves, but for extended family members. KORI: So you have that dynamic playing, then you have the racial pandemic, which has been going on, but in the last two years have come to fevered pitch. And so the daily trauma of dealing with racism and microaggressions then gets compounded by all the incidents, George Floyd, Charles Cooper, and all the other incidents that have been bombarding us from our television screens, from the news reports, from articles. And so now all of a sudden everything is right in your face and you're dealing with all of it at the same time. And so those are some of the things that are professionals from "diverse communities," from underrepresented marginalized communities have been dealing with. And our reserves have been tapped into and overstretched to where for some of us, it feels like it's been just too much. BREE: Absolutely. It's unimaginable just how much to carry on in that space. All of the things that you just described, this litany of horrors is on top of just the day-to-day difficulty as been expressed to me, and reading in my friends of people of color, just the microaggressions and just how hard it is. Just take away pandemic and everything else and the racial reckoning, how hard it can be just to get through the day. I can't even imagine. It is absolutely just too, too much. Kori, there's so much to unpack here. I wanted to kind of pushing us along here talking about diversity, equity, and inclusion and talking about belonging and overlaying that. I mean, when I started looking in the legal profession, we talk about DEI, it was diversity then DEI, and now we're getting into some of the really, to me, needy and interesting stuff around belonging. I know that you created a belonging project at Seyfarth. Could you talk to us about the importance of that, and also about this project that you got started at Seyfarth? KORI: Sure. Let me separate them out. Belonging is a conversation that more and more of us are having, and it is fairly new to the conversation when you're talking about diversity and inclusion. It started with we talked about diversity, and then we started talking about diversity and inclusion, and now we've included equity and belonging. Belonging goes to that sense, that feeling that each of us have when we belong and we feel like we are part of a group and that we belong to something that is bigger than us. It is also a core human need. Brené Brown has this phrase that she says that we have three irreducible needs, and they are to be loved, to connect, and to belong. What we know from the research is that when we don't have belonging, it impacts us. It is wired into our DNA to belong to something. KORI: So we will either have healthy belonging, or we will seek a belonging that may not be healthy and may not be good. This is where you can queue in hate groups and cult because they will do anything to belong. We will also conform to fit in so that we have a quasi sense of belonging. The problem though is that when we don't have belonging, we actually see physiological, physical, spiritual, mental, psychological impact on our wellbeing. It impacts our sense of health. Forget our sense of health. It actually impacts our health, right? We know that exclusion and the lack of belonging actually results in increased depression, increased high blood pressure, increased diabetes. Incidentally, a lot of the same things that racial trauma and microaggressions also causes on the human body. And so if we don't have that sense of belonging, then we are not able to actually actualize that sense of inclusion where everyone is able to be leveraged and their differences and their strengths leveraged so that they can succeed as they want to succeed. KORI: And without belonging, you don't get wellbeing. But conversely, without wellbeing, you can't cultivate that sense of belonging. And so those two things are intertwined as well as this concept of engagement, which also is in the mix, right? You can't create engagement unless you have social connection and belonging. And so all of these things come together. Unfortunately, in many of our organizations, they're treated as separate, right? In many organizations, you have the wellbeing function being managed in a way that it doesn't speak to diversity, doesn't speak to belonging at all. So imagine now we just talked about COVID and we talked about how COVID has impacted everyone. Then imagine you're developing a wellness initiative or a wellbeing initiative and you're not stopping to think, oh, wait a minute, because of diversity, this pandemic has impacted people in different ways. KORI: And so I can't just trot out a wellbeing program without factoring in diversity and how diversity has resulted in different people experiencing this pandemic differently. Similarly, we fail when we try to, for example, have a wellbeing initiative that doesn't stop and think, oh, wow, we're not talking about racial trauma. We're not talking about microaggressions. We're not talking about the impact of implicit bias and exclusion on the psychological and physical wellbeing of the people in our organization. And so what's happening is these concepts are tied together, but in our organizations and most of our organizations, we're not doing DEI and incorporating wellbeing and we're not doing wellbeing incorporating DEIB. Instead, we're acting as if they're completely separate and they're not. CHRIS: I mean, I think it goes without saying, we, I think as human beings, sometimes we compartmentalize of there's this and then there's that. I think that from the infancy of the institute, I think we've emphasized the importance of diversity, equity, and inclusion as part of, has to flow through everything, every lens that we look at from the wellbeing perspective. But I have to admit, it's been more challenging than I think, than we've appreciated because sometimes we look a little bit myopically at some of these issues without broadening our lens. That's the perspective that I think that you can bring our listeners that, again, this intersection of diversity, equity, inclusion, belonging with wellbeing, I guess I'd be curious on just, how can we merge? Right? Because again, even the fact that there's organizations that work over here and organizations that work over here, and we really should be just the coalition and the umbrella and the totality of how it all works together is something that I don't know that we appreciate the magnitude of. KORI: Well, and the only way we can appreciate the magnitude is if we have these honest conversations. But we also have to have the conversations around the structural and the cultural underpinnings, right? How do we have conversations about wellbeing that take into consideration differences? That take into consideration, okay, we're telling people, hey, we have therapy or we have EAP, or we have whatever the organization offers. But how do you do that and also acknowledge that for some communities that there is a stigma around maybe going to a therapist? How do you have that conversation with those communities? Or that racial bias and racial aggressions are having an impact on people, but you have an entire generation of Black people, for example, who have survived by plowing through all the challenges that the world has put in front of us. And to sit down and talk about the way in which racism has impacted us is asking us to put our shields down, which means opening up ourselves to attack, which means possibly being accused of playing the race card. Right? KORI: All of things that you may have grown up in a time where we just didn't talk about that in mixed company, we only talked about that with each other. And so there are all these layers, all these layers. I recently listened to a friend of mine, Ratu Basin, and she was talking about how it feels for her as someone of Indian heritage to see how much yoga, for example, has been whitewashed. There's so many conversations to be had even in the wellbeing space, even when we're talking to people about things like self-care. Well, what are you recommending? Because some of the things we tell people to do for self-care, go get a massage, who can afford that? What culture support that kind of self-care? And is that really self-care or is that treating a symptom? Should self-care and wellbeing be about a way of life and a way of working such that we don't need these emergency [inaudible 00:32:26] like solutions to fix the symptoms, right? KORI: And that's the big conversation and that's the conversation I'm hearing some lawyers begin to ask where they say, the organization says they care about wellbeing, but we're getting these other messages that say it's productivity and hours and billables that matter, right? How do we shift the culture and how we're embracing these topics in a way that makes it more meaningful? I just realized, I didn't even answer your second question about the belonging project, but yeah, this is the stuff that to me, I see a lot of potential for us to have really good conversations that can lead to solutions that are more inclusive of a diverse profession. BREE: Kori, you're clearly such a thought leader and a visionary in this space. Can you talk a little bit about how do we get change to occur in a profession, the legal profession that is so reluctant to change? Even more so than general society. Where do you see the bright points of really being able to make some change? KORI: Can you repeat that question? BREE: Yeah. Just about how do we get change to occur in the legal profession? You know, this is a profession that is just so stayed and slow and bound up in tradition. This is the way we do it, that sort of thing. And here you are with these fabulous ideas, working with a very large law firm, having come from another very large law firm so you're in this space. What are your ideas for actually getting real change to occur? Where are the pressure points, I guess? KORI: Well, I think some of the pressure points are actually external. You asked me a question earlier about the last two years, something that I didn't mention that has impacted a lot. It's impacting individuals from underrepresented groups, but it's also impacting our organizations. Is this fake cultural war that is also going on, you know, regardless of what political party you're in, I think we can acknowledge that for the last six years, there has been an attack on everything that we are trying to accomplish in diversity and inclusion. White is now Black, Black is now white. And if we are in a state of being, for example, where I'll use Florida as an example where someone can say, we want to ban any training if it makes someone uncomfortable. What you're essentially saying is let's keep the status quo the way it is, even if the status quo supports white supremacy. KORI: Even if the status quo is inequitable. You would rather keep the status quo than have an uncomfortable conversation. When it comes to the legal profession, in particular, law firms, because of how we are constructed. A law firm essentially has multiple owners. It's not like a corporation that has a board of directors and has shareholders. Let's say you have a law firm of a thousand people and 300 of them are partners. You have 300 people running around who think that everybody should have an equal say in every single decision. It's one of the reasons that law firms function so differently from other companies and why decision making is so different. Everything we do is different. You know, we put people in leadership positions not because they're leaders, but because they're great trial attorneys or they're great business generators or whatever, whatever the criteria is, but rarely is it because someone actually is a good leader. KORI: And so we have this culture that we have built that really makes it difficult for us to have real hard conversations on the things that really matter, on the things that really can make change. So imagine that law firm now sitting in the last six years and even more so in the last three years. I can tell you when it comes to diversity, inclusion, many of us are throwing our hands up and saying, so how in the hell are we supposed to have this conversation then? If you're saying, oh, we can't talk about white privilege because someone says, oh, that offends me. Or we can't talk about systemic racism because someone's going to say, oh, wait a minute, if you say systemic racism is real, then that's anti-American. So we are living in a time where the terms racism, the terms CRT have been completely redefined to where they mean nothing that even resembles what they actually mean. KORI: And then we're over here arguing about these fictitious decisions, these fictitious definitions, and we're not actually doing the hard work that needs to be done, right. Because if you won't even acknowledge that systemic racism is real, then how do we evaluate the systems to see where we may be having inequitable results and then changing those systems? Because if you deny a thing exists, then we can't even address it. BREE: Absolutely. KORI: And so that's probably one of the biggest challenges I see, but also the biggest opportunity. And if anything is going to change when it comes to diversity, we have got to get more courageous about having difficult conversations, but conversations that are worthwhile, they are important. Nothing about creating equity is comfortable and cozy and touchy-feely, it's hard work. It requires us to say some things that we maybe may not have faced before, but we don't get to change what we won't face, what we won't acknowledge, and what we won't be honest about. It's like, you can't write a new end into the story if you won't acknowledge the truth of the story. That's the whirlwind that I think we are in now, not just as a profession, but as a country and a society. BREE: Absolutely. What an incredibly difficult place to be? Yeah, go ahead, Chris. CHRIS: Well, I was just going to say, I want to unpack that more. Let's do this. Let's take a quick break and come back because I mean, my burning question and Kori began to sort of thinking about it, which is what's the pathway to better, more productive, honest conversations, right? Because I think that you're right. The question is, how do we create the environments for ultimately that societal discussion to occur in the most productive way? So let's take a quick break and we'll come right back. — ADVERTISEMENT: Meet VERA, your firm's Virtual Ethics Risk Assessment Guide developed by ALPS. VERA's purpose is to help you uncover risk management blind spots from client intake to calendaring, to cybersecurity, and more. VERA: I require only your honest input to my short series of questions. I will offer you a summary of recommendations to provide course corrections if needed, and to keep your firm on the right path. Generous and discreet, VERA is a free and anonymous risk management guide from ALPS to help firms like yours be their best. Visit VERA at alpsinsurance.com/vera.   — CHRIS: Okay. We are back with Kori Carew, our esteemed guests and the chief inclusion and diversity officer at Seyfarth Shaw. Kori, we were just getting into the, I think the discussion. I feel like we're going deeper than even I had thought we would in the conversation, which I love. You know, as we think now about we need to have the honest conversations, right. And so I would just be curious on your opinion as what's the pathway to get there. If we appreciate that there's a lot of noise and the volume levels are high, and there's a lot of yelling, frankly, on both sides of the equation. What's the pathway toward problem solving, thoughtful discussion, intentional discussion that ultimately advances the dialogue? KORI: Thank you very much for that question. Honestly, it's one I've been thinking a lot about. You know, I did do a TEDx in 2017 and the impetus for that TED really was that question that you just asked, which was, there's a lot of yelling and not enough dialogue that allows us to move into action. Since I gave that TED, I've sort of watched what's been going on in organizations and in the country. I don't think I would change anything about that TED, except that there are a few more things that I would emphasize. One of the first things that we have to do if we truly want to make progress, and I'm going to steal a Nigerian thing, tell the truth and shame the devil. We are avoiding being honest with ourself about so many things. Whether it is just being honest about the experiences people have in the organization, or being honest about where the gaps are, or being honest about what the failures are, or even individual honesty. KORI: That self-awareness to say, you know Kori, you talk a lot about wellbeing and you talk a lot about leadership, but the reason you talk about those things is because you were searching for something that you did not have in the leaders that you grew up under, right? So you were trying to create something for others that you didn't have, but you are also trying to create it for yourself. And there are many days that you totally suck. There are many days that you are making very bad wellbeing decisions. There are days that you are not as inclusive as you would want to be, but it's okay. And the only way you're going to get better is by acknowledging where you're not doing it right. Now, think about that when we're talking about gender or race or LGBT inclusion or disability inclusion. If we as individuals and we as organizations are not willing to be honest about our history, what has happened and what is happening, then we don't even have a starting point. KORI: And the way that we do that is very, very cliché. Getting comfortable with what is uncomfortable. I remember when I first started saying that, when I was at Shook, Hardy & Bacon and it wasn't even a thing many people were saying, and now people say it so often that it has lost its meaning. But it truly is the beginning point. And in too many of our organizations, we are shutting down any discussion or any movement in the name of trying to get consensus, or in trying to water things so much that they're meaningless, right? Or being so hyperworried about future possible hypothetical litigation that somebody may have over something that they don't like that they heard as opposed to possible litigation over people who do not feel like they are being treated equitably. You know, it's like we have to choose our heart. And so it's either the heart of sitting in the discomfort and learning things we may not want to learn, challenging ourselves, reaching deep to say, you know what? I don't really like that. KORI: When you talk to me about Christian privilege, this is a true story. Okay. True story. A [inaudible 00:46:22] of mine talked about Christian privilege. We're talking about something. She said, "Yeah, but there's also Christian privilege and people never talk about that." And can I admit to you that I was like, "Oh, is she for real? We're talking about racism and she's talking about Christian privilege." That was my initial reaction. But I sat with it. You know what? She was right. Because she was Pagan and I'm Christian. I've never had to use PTO for Christmas. My holidays are respected, they are recognized, they are centered, they are prioritized. But other people in this country who are not Christian do not have those privileges. Now that's a benign example because it's not one that makes people get as upset as some of the other topics. KORI: But the first step has to be a commitment to sit through the discomfort, sit through what may rub you wrong, and acknowledge that just because something is uncomfortable or just because something offends you does not mean the thing is wrong or it is offensive. And in many of our organizations, we haven't even gotten past that first part. Then the next part has to be a commitment to learn more. We have to operationalize being able to say to each other, tell me more, and not just, oh, I didn't like that training, or I didn't like what I was learning. But to say to yourself internally, okay, I didn't like that. But rather than projecting how I'm feeling it in this moment, I'm going to put myself in the position of saying, tell me more, help me understand why that bothered you, help me understand why you feel that way. Because until we're willing to do that, we're not going to learn. KORI: And without knowledge, we have no opportunity for growth. Growth comes with new knowledge. Growth comes with practicing new skill sets. Growth comes with trying things that you haven't done before. But if you're more invested in protecting the status quo than you are fighting for change, then the status quo will always win. And the status quo right now, it's not working for a lot of people from a lot of underrepresented and marginalized communities. Those are some of the things that have to happen. Oh, Chris, something else I want to add. Both sides. We got to talk about this both sides thing. Not every opinion and argument is equal, and that's something else that we're not willing to address head on. We've allowed inclusion to be so redefined that some people think it means anything and everything is of equal footing, right. KORI: But someone saying in the workplace, we need to be more inclusive of people with disabilities is not the same as someone saying, I don't think disabled people should have to work here. And sometimes what is crouching in is people want to hide behind inclusion to spew hate or bigotry or an excuse not to make the change and growth that is consistent with the so-called values of our organizations. I'll pause there because you're about [inaudible 00:50:05]. BREE: Yeah. I just want to comment to our listeners Kori's TED Talk, just in your browser, put in Kori Carew and TED Talk. I really encourage people to check it out. It is powerful and profound. So Kori, I'm going to ask you a question here that we also tend to ask this sometimes near the end, if you could look for, I don't know, five years or even a decade. If we can do a decent job around changing hearts and minds and attitudes around diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging and wellbeing too, hopefully, how would the profession be different? What do you want to see? KORI: My goodness, my goodness, my goodness. Excuse me. That cough came up. If we could actually accomplish all these things that we've been talking about for 20 years, we would see leadership teams that are more humble in their approach, leadership teams that are people-centric, organizations that are listening to employees and actually care about what employees want. We would no longer be having conversations as if it's either you focus on the bottom line or you focus on employee happiness. Like we will understand that without happy employees who are engaged and doing fulfilling and meaningful work, we actually don't have a great bottom line to talk about. Right? Our organizations would look like inclusion and wellbeing and belonging, it's just part of the business strategy. It's not this separate siloed thing. It's not this thing that we talk about when we are worried about how the woman or the gays may react. Right. KORI: But it's just something that is operationalized into our values, into our competencies, into how we evaluate people, into how we promote people, and that we are constantly in humility, learning from each other. Right. So that even when somebody who's a chief inclusion and diversity officer, here's a phrase and someone says, "Did you realize that that was ableist?" That I would say, "I didn't. Tell me more." And once you tell me more, I changed my language, because we understand that we're always going to be moving. We're always going to be learning something new and there's always an opportunity to be better. And if we do that, we will also see different representation at all levels. We will actually have critical mass of diversity in our organizations. And then I would be unemployed. CHRIS: I was going to wrap up with this though, Kori, like if I was to serve up to you 500 managing partners, that were, again, I think one of the things that you've already mentioned is every individual in an organization is either additive or perhaps distracts from the culture that you're ultimately trying to create. A lot of the wellbeing discussion is about connecting and emphasizing wellbeing with decision makers and those who set the tone of organizations. And so my question to you is this, if I served up 500 managing partners of all sizes of firms around the country and they came and Kori was the keynote, what would be your message to them? KORI: My message to them would be that they are ridiculously in charge, that things happen in their organizations because they allow it, or they create it. And that by choosing to focus a hundred percent on their inclusive leadership skills and up in their ability to interrupt bias, to be culturally fluent, they could transform their organizations because where the leader goes, everyone else follows. BREE: Right. CHRIS: That's great. That's awesome. Well, again, Kori, you have certainly cultivated my curiosity, which I know is one of the things that you strongly advocate for. Couldn't be prouder to have you on the podcast and the sharing of your perspective. We got to get you more platforms for you to be able to shout loudly about these particular issues, because again, we got a lot of work to do, right. We know that there's a lot to be done in terms of realizing the potential of this profession, to realizing the potential of historically underrepresented and marginalized lawyers within our profession. Bree, I think that we all would agree that even as we pursue our wellbeing mission, that so much more has to be done on the diversity, equity, and inclusion perspective that integrates in the intersection there between those two that lanes need to merge in a much more substantive way. KORI: Thank you. CHRIS: Thank you, Kori. KORI: I appreciate it. I appreciate you having me. I appreciate you allowing Justin to come and hold my hand because she's my blinky today. I appreciate you inviting us to talk about what we're doing at Seyfarth and just my perspective as an individual separate from Seyfarth. Again, I've said this before, the work you're doing is so critically important. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you for everything that you do to promote wellbeing in the profession. So important. CHRIS: Awesome. Well, again, thanks for joining us. We will be back with the podcast probably in a couple weeks with our executive director, Jennifer DiSanza, which we are so excited to be having her join us as we talk about the future of where this movement is going. Thanks again, Kori. And to all our friends out there, we will be back in a couple weeks.

Natural disaster movies, anyone? It's what Steph's been into, and Chris has THOUGHTS on the drilling in Armageddon. Additionally, a chat around RuboCop RSpec rules happens, and they answer a listener's question, "how do you get acquainted with a new code base?" This episode is brought to you by BuildPulse (https://buildpulse.io/bikeshed). Start your 14-day free trial of BuildPulse today. Greenland (https://www.imdb.com/title/tt7737786/) Geostorm (https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1981128/) San Andreas (https://www.imdb.com/title/tt2126355/) Armageddon (https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0120591/) This episode is brought to you by Airbrake (https://airbrake.io/?utm_campaign=Q3_2022%3A%20Bike%20Shed%20Podcast%20Ad&utm_source=Bike%20Shed&utm_medium=website). Visit Frictionless error monitoring and performance insight for your app stack. Become a Sponsor (https://thoughtbot.com/sponsorship) of The Bike Shed! Transcript: AD: Flaky tests take the joy out of programming. You push up some code, wait for the tests to run, and the build fails because of a test that has nothing to do with your change. So you click rebuild, and you wait. Again. And you hope you're lucky enough to get a passing build this time. Flaky tests slow everyone down, break your flow, and make things downright miserable. In a perfect world, tests would only break if there's a legitimate problem that would impact production. They'd fail immediately and consistently, not intermittently. But the world's not perfect, and flaky tests will happen, and you don't have time to fix all of them today. So how do you know where to start? BuildPulse automatically detects and tracks your team's flaky tests. Better still, it pinpoints the ones that are disrupting your team the most. With this list of top offenders, you'll know exactly where to focus your effort for maximum impact on making your builds more stable. In fact, the team at Codecademy was able to identify their flakiest tests with BuildPulse in just a few days. By focusing on those tests first, they reduced their flaky builds by more than 68% in less than a month! And you can do the same because BuildPulse integrates with the tools you're already using. It supports all of the major CI systems, including CircleCI, GitHub Actions, Jenkins, and others. And it analyzes test results for all popular test frameworks and programming languages, like RSpec, Jest, Go, pytest, PHPUnit, and more. So stop letting flaky tests slow you down. Start your 14-day free trial of BuildPulse today. To learn more, visit buildpulse.io/bikeshed. That's buildpulse.io/bikeshed. CHRIS: Hello and welcome to another episode of The Bike Shed, a weekly podcast from your friends at thoughtbot about developing great software. I'm Chris Toomey. STEPH: And I'm Steph Viccari. CHRIS: And together, we're here to share a bit of what we've learned along the way. So, Steph, what's new in your world? STEPH: Hey, Chris. So I've been watching more movies lately. So evenings aren't always great; I don't always feel good being around 33 weeks pregnant now. Evenings I can be just kind of exhausted from the day, and I just need to chill and prop my feet up and all that good stuff. And I've been really drawn to natural disaster like end-of-the-world-type movies, and I'm not sure what that says about me. But it's my truth; it's where I'm at. [chuckles] I watched Greenland recently, which I really enjoyed. I feel like they ended it well. I won't share any spoilers, but I feel like they ended it well. And they didn't take an easy shortcut out that I kind of thought that they might do, so that one was enjoyable. Geostorm, I watched that one just last night. San Andreas, I feel like that's one that I also watched recently. So yeah, that's what's new in my world, you know, your typical natural disaster end-of-the-world flicks. That's my new evening hobby. CHRIS: I feel like I haven't heard of any of the three that you just listed, which is wild to me because this is a category that I find enthralling. STEPH: Well, definitely start with Greenland. I feel like that one was the better of the three that I just mentioned. I don't know Geostorm or San Andreas which one you would prefer there. I feel like they're probably on par with each other in terms of like you're there for entertainment. We're not there to judge and be hypercritical of a storyline. You're there purely for the visual effects and for the ride. CHRIS: Gotcha. Interesting. So quick question then, since this seems like the category you're interested in, Armageddon or Deep Impact? STEPH: Ooh, I'm going to have to walk through the differences because I always get those mixed up. Armageddon is where they take Bruce Willis up to an asteroid, and they have to drill and drop a nuke, right? CHRIS: They sure do. STEPH: [laughs] And then what's Deep Impact about? I guess the fact that I know Armageddon better means I'm favoring that one. I can't place what...how does Deep Impact go? CHRIS: Deep Impact is just there's an asteroid coming, and it's the story and what the people do. So it's got less...it doesn't have the same pop. I believe Armageddon was a Michael Bay movie. And so it's got that Michael Bay special bit of something on it. But the interesting thing is they came out the same year; I want to say. It's one of those like Burger King and McDonald's being right next door to each other. It's like, what are you doing there? Why are you...like, asteroid devastation movies two of you at the same time, really? But yeah, Armageddon is the correct answer. Deep Impact is like a fine movie, but Armageddon is like, all right, we're going to have a movie about asteroids. Let's really go for it. Blow it out. Why not? STEPH: Yeah, I'm with you. Armageddon definitely sticks out in my memory, so I'd vote that one. Also, for your other question that you didn't ask, but you kind of implicitly asked, I'm going to go McDonald's because Burger King fries are trash, and also, McDonald's has better ice cream cones. CHRIS: Okay, so McDonald's fries. Oh no, I was thinking Wendy's, get a frosty from there, and then you make that combination because the frostys are great. STEPH: Oh yeah, that's a good combo. CHRIS: And you need the french fries to go with it, but then it's a third option that I'm introducing. Also, this wasn't a question, but I want to loop back briefly to Armageddon because it's an important piece of cinema. There's a really great...like it's DVD commentary, and it's Ben Affleck talking with Michael Bay about, "Hey, so in the movie, the premise is that the only way to possibly get this done is to train a bunch of oil drillers to be astronauts. Did we consider it all just having some astronauts learn to do oil drilling?" And Michael Bay's response is not safe for radio is how I would describe it. But it's very humorous hearing Ben Affleck describe Michael Bay responding to that. STEPH: I think they addressed that in the movie, though. They mentioned like, we're going to train them, but they're like, no, drilling is such an art and a science. There's no way. We don't have time to teach these astronauts how to drill. So instead, it's easier to teach them to be astronauts. CHRIS: Right. That is what they say in the movie. STEPH: [laughs] Okay. CHRIS: But just spending a minute teasing that one apart is like, being an astronaut is easy. You just sit in the spaceship, and it goes, boom. [laughs] It's like; actually, there's a little bit more to being an astronaut. Yes, drilling is very subtle science and art fusion. But the idea that being an astronaut [laughs] is just like, just push the go-to space button, then you go to space. STEPH: The training montage is definitely better if we get to watch people learn how to be astronauts than if we watch people learn how to drill. [laughs] So that might have also played a role. CHRIS: No question, it is the correct cinematic choice. But whether or not it's the true answer...say we were actually faced with this problem, I don't know that this is exactly how it would play out. STEPH: I think we should A/B test it. We'll have one group train to be drill experts and one group train to be astronauts, and we'll send them both up. CHRIS: This is smart. That's the way you got to do it. The one other thing that I'm going to go...you know what really grinds my gears? In the movie Armageddon, they have this robotic vehicle thing, the armadillo; I believe it's called. I know more than I thought I would remember about this movie. [chuckles] Anyway, continuing on, the armadillo, the vehicle that they use to do the drilling, has the drill arm on it that extends out and drills down into the asteroid. And it has gears on the end of it. It has three gears specifically. And the first gear is intermeshed with the second gear, which is intermeshed with the third gear, which is intermeshed with the first gear, so imagine which direction the first gear is turning, then imagine the second gear turning, then imagine the third gear turning. They can't. It's a physically impossible object. One tries to turn clockwise, and the other one is trying to go counterclockwise, and they're intermeshed. So the whole thing would just cease up. It just doesn't work. I've looked at it a bunch of times, and I want to just be wrong about this. I want to be like; I don't know what's going on. But I think the gears on the drilling machine just fundamentally at a very simple mechanical level cannot work. And again, if you're going to do it, really go for it, Michael Bay. I kind of like that, and I really hate it at the same time. STEPH: I have never noticed this. I'm intrigued. You know what? Maybe Armageddon will be the movie of choice tonight. [chuckles] Maybe that's what I'm going to watch. And I'm going to wait for the armadillo to come out so I can evaluate the gears. And I'm highly amused that this is the thing that grinds your gears are the gears on the armadillo. CHRIS: Yeah. I was a young child at the time, and I remember I actually went to Disney World, and I saw they had the prop vehicle there. And I just kind of looked up at it, and I was like, no, that's not how gears work. I may have been naive and wrong as a child, and now I've just anchored this memory deep within me. In a similar way, so I had a moment while traveling; actually, that reminded me of something that I said on a recent podcast episode where I was talking about names and pronunciation. And I was like, yeah, sometimes people ask me how to pronounce my name. And I can't imagine any variation. That was the thing I was just wrong about because 'Toomay' is a perfectly reasonable pronunciation of my name that I didn't even think... I was just so anchored to the one truth that I know in the world that my name is Toomey. And that's the only possible way anyone could pronounce it. Nope, totally wrong. So maybe the gears in Armageddon actually work really, really well, and maybe I'm just wrong. I'm willing to be wrong on the internet, which I believe is the name of the first episode that we recorded with you formally as a co-host. [chuckles] So yeah. STEPH: Yeah, that sounds true. So you're going to change the intro? It's now going to be like, and I'm Chris 'Toomay'. CHRIS: I might change it each time I come up with a new subtle pronunciation. We'll see. So far, I've got two that I know of. I can't imagine a third, but I was wrong about one. So maybe I'm wrong about two. STEPH: It would be fun to see who pays attention. As someone who deeply values pronouncing someone's name correctly, oh my goodness, that would stress me out to hear someone keep pronouncing their name differently. Or I would be like, okay, they're having fun, and they don't mind how it gets pronounced. I can't remember if we've talked about this on air but early on, I pronounced my last name differently for like one of the first episodes that we recorded. So it's 'Vicceri,' but it could also be 'Viccari'. And I've defaulted at times to saying 'Viccari' because people can spell that. It seems more natural. They understand it's V-I-C-C-A-R-I. But if I say 'Vicceri', then people want to add two Rs, or they want a Y. I don't know why it just seems to have a difference. And so then I was like, nope, I said it wrong. I need to say it right. It's 'Vicceri' even if it's more challenging for people. And I think Chad Pytel had just walked in at that moment when I was saying that to you that I had said my name differently. And he's like, "You can't do that." And I'm like, "Well, I did it. It's already out there in the world." [laughs] But also, I'm one of those people that's like, Viccari, 'Vicceri' I will accept either. In a slightly different topic and something that's going on in my world, there was a small win today with a client team that I really appreciated where someone brought up the conversation around the RuboCop RSpec rules and how RuboCop was fussing at them because they had too many lines in their test example. And so they're like, well, they're like, I feel like I'm competing, or I'm working against RuboCop. RuboCop wants me to shorten my test example lines, but yet, I'm not sure what else to do about it. And someone's like, "Well, you could extract more into before blocks and to lets and to helpers or things like that to then shorten the test. They're like, "But that does also work against readability of the test if you do that." So then there was a nice, short conversation around well, then we really need more flexibility. We shouldn't let the RuboCop metrics drive us in this particular decision when we really want to optimize for readability. And so then it was a discussion of okay, well, how much flexibility do we add to it? And I was like, "Well, what if we just got rid of it? Because I don't think there's an ideal length for how long your test should be. And I'd rather empower test authors to use all the space that they need to show their test setup and even lean into duplication before they extract things because this codebase has far more dry tests than they do duplication concerns. So I'd rather lean into the duplication at this point." And the others that happened to be in that conversation were like, "Yep, that sounds good." So then that person issued a PR that then removed the check for that particular; how long are the examples? And it was lovely. It was just like a nice, quick win and a wonderful discussion that someone had brought up. CHRIS: Ooh, I like that. That sounds like a great conversation that hit on why do we have this? What are the trade-offs? Let's actually remove it. And it's also nice that you got to that place. I've seen a lot of folks have a lot of opinions in the past in this space. And opinions can be tricky to work around, and just deeply, deeply entrenched opinions is the thing that I find interesting. And I think I'm increasingly in the space of those sort of, thou shalt not type linter rules are not ideal in my mind. I want true correctness checks that really tell some truth about the codebase. Like, we still don't have RuboCop on our project at Sagewell. I think that's true. Yeah, that's true. We have ESLint, but it's very minimal, what we have configured. And they more are in the what we deem to be true correctness checks, although that is a little bit of a blurry line there. But I really liked that idea. We turn on formatters. They just do the thing. We're not allowed to discuss the formatting, with the exception of that time that everybody snuck in and switched my 80-line length to a 120-line length, but I don't care. I'm obviously not still bitter about it. [chuckles] And then we've got a very minimal linting layer on top of that. But like TypeScript, I care deeply, and I think I've talked in previous episodes where I'm like, dial up the strictness to 14 because TypeScript tends to tell me more truths I find, even though I have to jump through some hoops to be like TypeScript, I know that this is fine, but I can't prove it. And TypeScript makes me prove it, which I appreciate about it. I also really liked the way you referred to RSpec's feedback to you was that RSpec was fussing at you. That was great. I like that. I'm going to internalize that. Whenever a linter or type system or anything like that when they tell me no, I'm going to be like, stop fussing, nope, nope. [chuckles] STEPH: I don't remember saying that, but I'm going to trust you that that's what I said. That's just my true southern self coming through on the mic, fussing, and then go get a biscuit, and it'll just be a delightful day. CHRIS: So if I give RuboCop a biscuit, it will stop fussing at me, potentially? STEPH: No, the biscuit is just for you. You get fussed at; you go get a biscuit. It makes you feel better, and then you deal with the fussing. CHRIS: Sold. STEPH: Fussing and cussing, [laughs] that's most of my work life lately, fussing and cussing. [laughs] CHRIS: And occasional biscuits, I hope. STEPH: And occasional biscuits. You got it. But that's what's new in my world. What's going on in your world? CHRIS: Let's see. In my world, it's a short week so far. So recording on Wednesday, Monday was a holiday. And I was out all last week, which very much enjoyed my vacation. It was lovely. Went over to Europe, hung out there for a bit, some time in Paris, some time in Amsterdam, precious little time on a computer, which is very rare for me. So it was very enjoyable. But yeah, back now trying to just get back into the swing of things. Thankfully, this turned out to be a really great time to step away from the work for a little while because we're still in this calm before the storm but in a good way is how I would describe it. We have a major facet of the Sagewell platform that we are in the planning modes for right now. But we need to get a couple of different considerations, pick a partner vendor, et cetera, that sort of thing. So right now, we're not really in a position to break ground on what we know will be a very large body of work. We're also not taking on anything else too big. We're using this time to shore up a lot of different things. As an example, one of the fun things that we've done in this period of time is we have a lot of webhooks in the app, like a lot of webhooks coming into the app, just due to the fact that we're an integration of a lot of services under the hood. And we have a pattern for how we interact with and process, so we actually persist the webhook data when they come in. And then we have a background job that processes and watch our pattern to make sure we're not losing anything and the ability to verify against our local version, and the remote version, a bunch of different things. Because turns out webhooks are critical to how our app works. And so that's something that we really want to take very seriously and build out how we work with that. I think we have eight different webhook integrations right now; maybe it's more. It's a lot. And with those, we've implemented the same pattern now eight times; I want to say. And in squinting at it from a distance, we're like; it is indeed identically the same pattern in all eight cases or with the tiniest little variation in one of them. And so we've now accepted like, okay, that's true. So the next one of them that we introduced, we opted to do it in a generic way. So we introduced the abstraction with the next iteration of this thing. And now we're in a position...we're very happy with what we ended up with there. It's like the best of all of the other versions of it. And now, the plan will be to slowly migrate each of the existing ones to be no longer a unique special version of webhook processing but use the generic webhook processing pattern that we have in the app. So that's nice. I feel good about how long we waited as well because it's like, we have webhooks. Let's introduce the webhook framework to rule them all within our app. It's like, no, wait until you see. Check and make sure they are, in fact, the same and not just incidental duplication. STEPH: I appreciate that so much. That's awesome. That sounds like a wonderful use of that in-between state that you're in where you still got to make progress but also introduce some refactoring and a new concept. And I also appreciate how long you waited because that's one of those areas where I've just learned, like, just wait. It's not going to hurt you. Just embrace the duplication and then make sure it's the right thing. Because even if you have to go in and update it in a couple of places, okay, sure, that feels a little tedious, but it feels very safe too. If it doesn't feel safe...I could talk myself back and forth on this one. If it doesn't feel safe, that's a different discussion. But if you're going through and you have to update something in a couple of different places, that's quick. And sure, you had to repeat yourself a little bit, but that's fine. Versus if you have two or three of something and you're like, oh, I immediately must extract. That's probably going to cause more pain than it's worth at this point. CHRIS: Yeah, exactly, exactly that. And we did get to that place where we were starting to feel a tiny bit of pain. We had a surprising bit of behavior that when we looked at it, we were like, oh, that's interesting, because of how we implemented the webhook pattern, this is happening. And so then we went to fix it, but we were like, oh, it would actually be really nice to have this fixed across everything. We've had conversations about other refinements, enhancements, et cetera; that we could do in this space. That, again, would be really nice to be able to do holistically across all of the different webhook integration things that we have. And so it feels like we waited the right amount of time. But then we also started to...we're trying to be very responsive to the pressure that the system is pushing back on us. As an aside, the crispy Brussels snack hour and the crispy Brussels work lunch continue to be utterly fantastic ways in which we work. For anyone that is unfamiliar or hasn't listened to episodes where I rambled about those nonsense phrases that I just said, they're basically just structured time where the engineering team at Sagewell looks at and discusses higher-level architecture, refactoring, developer experience, those sort of things that don't really belong on the core product board. So we have a separate place to organize them, to gather them. And then also, we have a session where we vote on them, decide which ones feel important to take on but try and make sure we're being intentional about how much of that work we're taking on relative to how much of core product work and try and keep sort of a good ratio in between the two. And thus far, that's been really fantastic and continues to be, I think, really effective. And also the sort of thing that just keeps the developer team really happy. So it's like, I'm happy to work in this system because we know we have a way to change it and improve it where there's pain. STEPH: I like the idea of this being a game show where it's like refactor island, and everybody gets together and gets to vote which refactor stays or gets booted off the island. I'm also going to go back and qualify something I said a moment ago, where if something feels safe in terms of duplication, where it starts to feel unsafe is if there's like an area that you forgot to update because you didn't realize it's duplicated in several areas and then that causes you pain. Then that's one of those areas where I'll start to say, "Okay, let's rethink the duplication and look to dry this up." CHRIS: Yep, indeed. It's definitely like a correction early on in my career and overcorrection back and trying to find that happy medium place. But as an aside, just throwing this out there, so webhooks are an interesting space. I wish it were a more commoditized offering of platforms. Every vendor that we're integrating with that does webhooks does it slightly differently. It's like, "Oh, do you folks have retries?" They're like, "No." It's like, oh, what do you mean no? I would love it if you had retries because, I don't know, we might have some reason to not receive one of them. And there's polling, and there are lots of different variations. But the one thing that I'm surprised by is that webhook signing I don't feel like people take it serious enough. It is a case where it's not a huge security vulnerability in your app. But I was reading someone who is a security analyst at one point. And they were describing sort of, I've done tons of in-the-code audits of security practices, and here are the things that I see. And so it's the normal like OWASP Top 10 Cross-Site Request Forgery, and SQL injection, and all that kind of stuff. But one of the other ones he highlighted is so often he finds webhooks that are not verified in any way. So it's just like anyone can post data into the system. And if you post it in the right shape, the system's going to do some stuff. And there's no way for the external system to enforce that you properly validate and verify a webhook coming in, verify that payload. It's an extra thing where you do the checksum math and whatnot and take the signature header. I've seen somewhere they just don't provide it. And it's like, what do you mean you don't provide it? You must provide it, please. So it's either have an API key so that we have some way to verify that you are who you say you are or add a signature, and then we'll calculate it. And it's a little bit of a dance, and everybody does it different, but whatever. But the cases where they just don't have it, I'm like, I'm sorry, what now? You're going to say whom? But yeah, then it's our job to definitely implement that. So this is just a notice out there to anyone that's listening. If you got a bunch of webhook handling code in your app, maybe spot-check that you're actually verifying the payloads because it's possible that you're not. And that's a weird, very open hole in the side of your application. STEPH: That's a really great point. I have not worked with webhooks recently. And in the past, I can't recall if that's something that I've really looked at closely. So I'm glad you shared that. CHRIS: It's such an easy thing to skip. Like, it's one of those things that there's no way to enforce it. And so, I'd be interested in a survey that can't be done because this is all proprietary data. But what percentage of webhook integrations are unverified? Is it 50%? Is it 10%? Is it 100%? It's definitely not 100. But it's somewhere in there that I find interesting. It's not a terribly exploitable vulnerability because you have to have deep knowledge of the system. In order to take advantage of it, you need to know what endpoint to hit to, what shape of data to send because otherwise, you're probably just going to cause an error or get a bunch of 404s. But like, it's, I don't know, it's discoverable. And yeah, it's an interesting one. So I will hop off my webhook soapbox now, but that's a thought. MIDROLL AD: Debugging errors can be a developer's worst nightmare...but it doesn't have to be. Airbrake is an award-winning error monitoring, performance, and deployment tracking tool created by developers for developers, that can actually help you cut your debugging time in half. So why do developers love Airbrake? Well, it has all of the information that web developers need to monitor their application - including error management, performance insights, and deploy tracking! 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You literally have nothing to lose. So head on over to airbrake.io/try/bikeshed to create your FREE developer account today! CHRIS: But now that I'm off my soapbox, I believe we have a topic that was suggested. Do you want to provide a little bit of context here, Steph? STEPH: Yeah, I'd love to. So this came up when I was having a conversation with another thoughtboter. And given that we change projects fairly frequently, on the Boost team, we typically change projects around every six months. They asked a really thoughtful question that was "How do you get acquainted with a new codebase? So given that you're changing projects so often, what are some of the tips and tricks for ways that you've learned to then quickly get up to speed with a new codebase?" Because, frankly, that is one of the thoughtbot superpowers is that we are really good at onboarding each other and then also getting up to speed with a new team, and their processes, and their codebase. So I have a couple of ideas, and then I'd love to hear some of your thoughts as well. So I'll dive in with a couple. So the first one, this one's frankly my favorite. Like day one, if there's a team where I'm joining and they have someone that can walk me through the application from the users' perspective, maybe it's someone that's in sales, or maybe it's someone on the product team, maybe it's a recording that they've already done for other people, but that's my first and favorite way to get to know an application. I really want to know what are users experience as they're going through this app? That will help me focus on the more critical areas of the application based on usage. So if that's available, that's fabulous. I'm also going to tailor a lot of this more to like a Rails app since that's typically the type of project that I'm onboarding to. So the other types of questions that I like to find answers to are just like, what's my top-level structure? Like to look through the app and see how are things organized? Chris, you've mentioned in a previous episode where you have your client structure that then highlights all the third-party clients that you're working with. Are we using engines in the app? Is there anything that seems a bit more unique to that application that I'm going to want to brush up on or look into? What's the test coverage like? Do they have something that's already highlighting how much test coverage they have? If not, is there something that then I can run locally that will then show me that test coverage? I also really like to look at the routes file. That's one of my other favorite places because that also is very similar to getting an overview of the product. I get to see more from the user perspective. What are the common resources that people are going to, and what are the domain topics that I'm working with in this new application? I've got a couple more, but I'm going to pause there and see how you get acquainted with a new app. CHRIS: Well, unsurprisingly, I agree with all of those. We're still searching for that dare to disagree beyond Pop-Tarts and IPAs situation. To reiterate or to emphasize some of the points you made, the sales demo thing? I absolutely love that one because, yes, absolutely. What's the most customer-centric point of view that I can have? Can I then login to a staging version of the site so I can poke around and hopefully not break anything or move real money or anything like that? But understanding why is this thing, not in code, but in actual practical, observable, intractable software? Beyond that, your point about the routes, absolutely, that's one of my go-to's, although the routes there often is so much in the routes, and it's like some of those may actually be unused. So a corollary to the routes where available if there's an APM tool like Scout, or New Relic, or something like that, taking a look at that and seeing what are the heavily trafficked endpoints within this app? I like to think about it as the entry points into this codebase. So the routes file enumerates all of them, but some of them matter, and some of them don't. And so, an APM tool can actually tell you which are the ones that are seeing a ton of traffic. That's a really interesting question for me. Similarly, if we're on Heroku, I might look is there a scheduler? And if so, what are the tasks that are running in the background? That's another entry point into the app. And so I like to think about it from that idea of entry points. If it's not on Heroku, and then there's some other system, like, I've used Cronic. I think it's Cronic, Whenever the Cron thing. Whenever, that's what it is, the Whenever gem that allows you to implement that, but it's in a file within the codebase, which as an aside, I really love that that's committed and expressive in the code. Then that's another interesting one to see. If it's more exotic than that, I may have to chase it down or ask someone, but I'll try and find what are all of the entry points and which are the ones that matter the most? I can drill down from there and see, okay, what code then supports these entry points into the application? I want to give an answer that also includes something like, oh, I do fancy static analysis in the codebase, and I do a churn versus complexity graph, and I start to...but I never do that, if we're being honest. The thing that I do is after that initial cursory scan of the landscape, I try and work on something that is relatively through the layers of the app, so not like, oh, I'll fix the text in a button. But like, give me something weird and ideally, let me pair with someone and then try and move through the layers of the app. So okay, here's our UI. We're rendering in this way. The controllers are integrated in this way, et cetera. This is our database. Try and get through all the layers if possible to try and get as holistic of a view of how the application works. The other thing that I think is really interesting about what you just said is you're like, I'm going to give some answers that are somewhat specific to a Rails app. And that totally makes sense to me because I know how to answer this in the context of a Rails app because those organizational patterns are so useful that I can hop into different Rails apps. And I've certainly seen ones that I'm like, this is odd and unfamiliar to me, but most of them are so much more discoverable because of that consistency. Whereas I have worked on a number of React apps, and every single one I come into, I'm like, okay, wait, what are we doing? How are we doing state management? What's the routing like? Are we server-side rendering, are we not? And it is a thing that...I see that community really moving in the direction of finding the meta frameworks that stitch the pieces together and provide more organizational structure and answer more of the questions out of the box. But it continues to be something that I absolutely love about Rails is that Rails answers so many of the questions for me. New people joining the team are like, oh, it's a Rails app, cool. I know how to Rails, and we get to run with that. And so that's more of a pitch for Rails than an answer to the question, but it is a thing that I felt in answering this question. [laughs] But yeah, those are some thoughts. But interested, it sounds like you had some more as well. I would love to hear what else was in your mind when you were thinking about this. STEPH: I do. And I want to highlight you said some really wonderful things. One that really stuck out to me that I had not considered is using Scout APM to look at heavily-trafficked endpoints. I have that on my list in regards as something that I want to know what's my error tracking, observability. Like, if I break something or if you give me a bug ticket to work on, what am I going to use? How am I going to understand what's going wrong? But I hadn't thought of it in terms of seeing which endpoints are heavily used. So I really liked that one. I also liked how you highlighted that you wish you'd do something fancy around doing a churn versus complexity kind of graph because I thought of that too. I was like, oh, that would be such a nice answer. But the truth is I also don't do that. I think it's all those things. I think it would be fun to make it easy. So I do that with new applications. But I agree; I typically more just dive in like, hey, give me a ticket. Let me go from there. I might do some simple command-line checking. So, for example, if I want to look through app models, let's find out which model is the largest. I may look for that to see do we have a God object or something like that? So I may look there. I just want to know how long are some of these files? But I also don't use a particular tool for that churn versus complexity. CHRIS: I think you hit the nail on the head with like, I wish that were easier or more in our toolset. But here on The Bike Shed, we tell the truth. And that is aspirational code flexing that we do not yet have. But I agree, that would be a really nice way to explore exactly what you're describing of, like, who are the God models? I'll definitely do that check, but not some of the more subtle and sophisticated show me the change over time of all these...like nah, that's not what I'm doing, much as I would like to be able to answer that way. STEPH: But it also feels like one of those areas like, it would be nice, but I would be intrigued to see how much I use that. That might be a nice anecdote to have. But I find the diving into the codebase to be more fruitful because I guess it depends on what I'm really looking at. Am I looking to see how complicated of a codebase this is? Because then I need to give more of a high-level review to someone to say how long I think it's going to take for me to work on a particular feature or before I'm joining a team, like, who do I think are good teammates that would then enjoy working on this application? That feels like a very different question to me versus the I'm already part of the team. I'm here. We're going to have complexity and churn. So I can just learn some of that over time. I don't have to know that upfront. Although it may be nice to just know at a high level, say like, okay, if I pick up a ticket, and then I look at that churn and complexity, to be like, okay, my ticket falls right smack-dab in the middle of that. So it's going to be a fun first week. That could be a fun fact. But otherwise, I'm not sure. I mean, yeah, I'd be intrigued to see how much it helps me. One other place that I do browse is I go to the gem file. I'm just always curious, what do people have in their tool bag? I want to see are there any gems that have been pulled in that are helping the team process some deprecated behavior? So something that's been pulled out of Rails but then pulled into a separate gem. So then that way, they don't have to upgrade just yet, or they can upgrade but then still keep some of that existing old deprecated behavior. That kind of stuff is interesting to me. And also, you called it earlier pairing. That's my other favorite way. I want to hear how people talk about the codebase, how they navigate. What are they frustrated by? What brings them joy? All of that is really helpful too. I think that covers all the ways that I immediately will go to when getting acquainted with a new codebase. CHRIS: I think that covers most of what I have in mind, although the question is framed in an interesting way that I think really speaks to the consultant mindset. How do I get acquainted with a new codebase? But if you take the question and flip it around sort of 180 degrees, I think the question can be reframed as how does an organization help people onboard into a codebase? And so everything we just described are like, here's what I do, here's how I would go about it, and pairing starts to get to collaboration. I think we've talked in a number of episodes about our thoughts on onboarding and being intentional with that, pairing people up. A lot of things we described it's like, it's ideal actually if the organization is pushing this. And you and I both worked as consultants for long enough that we're really in the mindset of like, all right, let's assume I'm just showing up. There's no one else there. They give me a laptop and no documentation and no other humans I'm allowed to talk to. How do I figure this out and get the next feature out to production? And ideally, it's something slightly better than that that we experience, but we're ready for whatever it is. Versus, most people are working within the context of an organization for a longer period of time. And most organizations should be thinking about it from the perspective of how do I help the new hires come into this codebase and become effective as quickly as possible? And so I think a lot of what we said can just be flipped around and said from the other way, like, pair them up, put them on a feature early, give them a walkthrough of the codebase, give them a sales-centric demo. Yeah, I feel equally about those things when said from the other side, but I do want to emphasize that this shouldn't be you're out there in the middle of the jungle with only a machete, and you got to figure out this codebase. Ideally, the organization is actually like, no, no, we'll help you. It's ours, so we know it. We can help you find the weird stuff. STEPH: That's a really nice distinction, though, because you're right; I hadn't really thought about this. I was thinking about this from more of the perspective of you're out in the jungle with a machete, minus we did mention pairing in there [laughs] and maybe a demo. I was approaching it more from you're isolated or more solo and then getting accustomed to the codebase versus if you have more people to lean on. But then that also makes me think of all the other processes that I didn't mention that I would include in that onboarding that you're speaking of, of like, how does this team work in terms of where do I push my code? What hooks are going to run? And then what do I wait for? How many people need to review my code? There are all those process-y questions that I think would ideally be included on the onboarding. But that has happened before, I mean, where we've joined projects, and it's been like, okay, good luck. Let us know if you need anything. And so then you do need those machete skills to then start hacking away. [laughs] CHRIS: We've been burned before. STEPH: They come in handy. [laughs] So when you are in that situation, and there's a comet that's coming to destroy earth, and there's a Rails application that is preventing this big doomsday, the question is, do you take astronauts and train them to be Rails experts, or do you take Rails developers and train them to be astronauts? I think that's the big question. CHRIS: What would Michael Bay do? STEPH: On that note, shall we wrap up? CHRIS: Let's wrap up. The show notes for this episode can be found at bikeshed.fm. STEPH: This show is produced and edited by Mandy Moore. CHRIS: If you enjoyed listening, one really easy way to support the show is to leave us a quick rating or even a review on iTunes, as it really helps other folks find the show. STEPH: If you have any feedback for this or any of our other episodes, you can reach us at @_bikeshed or reach me on Twitter @SViccari. CHRIS: And I'm @christoomey. STEPH: Or you can reach us at hosts@bikeshed.fm via email. CHRIS: Thanks so much for listening to The Bike Shed, and we'll see you next week. ALL: Byeeeeeeeeee!!!!!!!! ANNOUNCER: This podcast was brought to you by thoughtbot. thoughtbot is your expert design and development partner. Let's make your product and team a success.

Steph has a baby update and thoughts on movies, plus a question for Chris related to migrating Test Unit tests to RSpec. Chris watched a video from Google I/O where Chrome devs talked about a new feature called Page Transitions. He's also been working with a tool called Customer.io, an omnichannel communication whiz-bang adventure! Page transitions Overview (https://youtu.be/JCJUPJ_zDQ4) Using yield_self for composable ActiveRecord relations (https://thoughtbot.com/blog/using-yieldself-for-composable-activerecord-relations) A Case for Query Objects in Rails (https://thoughtbot.com/blog/a-case-for-query-objects-in-rails) Customer.io (https://customer.io/) Turning the database inside-out with Apache Samza | Confluent (https://www.confluent.io/blog/turning-the-database-inside-out-with-apache-samza/) Datomic (https://www.datomic.com/) About CRDTs • Conflict-free Replicated Data Types (https://crdt.tech/) Apache Kafka (https://kafka.apache.org/) Resilient Management | A book for new managers in tech (https://resilient-management.com/) Mixpanel: Product Analytics for Mobile, Web, & More (https://mixpanel.com/) Become a Sponsor (https://thoughtbot.com/sponsorship) of The Bike Shed! Transcript: CHRIS: Golden roads are golden. Okay, everybody's got golden roads. You have golden roads, yes? That is what we're -- STEPH: Oh, I have golden roads, yes. [laughter] CHRIS: You might should inform that you've got golden roads, yeah. STEPH: Yeah, I don't know if I say might should as much but might could. I have been called out for that one a lot; I might could do that. CHRIS: [laughs] STEPH: That one just feels so natural to me than normal. Anytime someone calls it out, I'm like, yeah, what about it? [laughter] CHRIS: Do you want to fight? STEPH: Yeah, are we going to fight? CHRIS: I might could fight you. STEPH: I might could. I might should. [laughter] CHRIS: Hello and welcome to another episode of The Bike Shed, a weekly podcast from your friends at thoughtbot about developing great software. I'm Chris Toomey. STEPH: And I'm Steph Viccari. CHRIS: And together, we're here to share a bit of what we've learned along the way. So, Steph, what's new in your world? STEPH: Hey, Chris. I have a couple of fun updates. I have a baby Viccari update, so little baby weighs about two pounds now, two pounds. I'm 25 weeks along. So not that I actually know the exact weight, I'm using all those apps that estimate based on how far along you are, so around two pounds, which is novel. Oh, and then the other thing I'm excited to tell you about...I'm not sure how I should feel that I just got more excited about this other thing. I'm very excited about baby Viccari. But the other thing is there's a new Jurassic Park movie coming out, and I'm very excited. I think it's June 10th is when it comes out. And given how much we have sung that theme song to each other and make references to what a clever girl, I needed to share that with you. Maybe you already know, maybe you're already in the loop, but if you don't, it's coming. CHRIS: Yeah, the internet likes to yell things like that. Have you watched all of the most recent ones? There are like two, and I think this will be the third in the revisiting or whatever, the Jurassic World version or something like that. But have you watched the others? STEPH: I haven't seen all of them. So I've, of course, seen the first one. I saw the one that Chris Pratt was in, and now he's in the latest one. But I think I've missed...maybe there's like two in the middle there. I have not watched those. CHRIS: There are three in the original trilogy, and then there are three now in the new trilogy, which now it's ending, and they got everybody. STEPH: Oh, I'm behind. CHRIS: They got people from the first one, and they got the people from the second trilogy. They just got everybody, and that's exciting. You know, it's that thing where they tap into nostalgia, and they take advantage of us via it. But I'm fine. I'm here for it. STEPH: I'm here for it, especially for Jurassic Park. But then there's also a new Top Gun movie coming out, which, I'll be honest, I'm totally going to watch. But I really didn't remember the first one. I don't know that I've really ever watched the first Top Gun. So Tim, my partner, and I watched that recently, and it's such a bad movie. I'm going to say it; [laughs] it's a bad movie. CHRIS: I mean, I don't want to disagree, but the volleyball scene, come on, come on, the volleyball scene. [laughter] STEPH: I mean, I totally had a good time watching the movie. But the one part that I finally kept complaining about is because every time they showed the lead female character, I can't think of her character name or the actress's name, but they kept playing that song, Take My Breath Away. And I was like, can we just get past the song? [laughs] Because if you go back and watch that movie, I swear they play it like six different times. It was a lot. It was too much. So I moved it into bad movie category but bad movie totally worth watching, whatever category that is. CHRIS: Now I kind of want to revisit it. I feel like the drinking game writes itself. But at a minimum, anytime Take My Breath Away plays, yeah. Well, all right, good to know. [laughs] STEPH: Well, if you do that, let me know how many shots or beers you drink because I think it will be a fair amount. I think it will be more than five. CHRIS: Yeah, it involves a delicate calibration to get that right. I don't think it's the sort of thing you just freehand. It writes itself but also, you want someone who's tried it before you so that you're not like, oh no, it's every time they show a jet. That was too many. You can't drink that much while watching this movie. STEPH: Yeah, that would be death by Top Gun. CHRIS: But not the normal way, the different, indirect death by Top Gun. STEPH: I don't know what the normal way is. [laughs] CHRIS: Like getting shot down by a Top Gun pilot. [laughter] STEPH: Yeah, that makes sense. [laughs] CHRIS: You know, the dogfighting in the plane. STEPH: The actual, yeah, going to war away. Just sitting on your couch and you drink too much poison away, yeah, that one. All right, that got weird. Moving on, [laughs] there's a new Jurassic Park movie. We're going to land on that note. And in the more technical world, I've got a couple of things on my mind. One of them is I have a question for you. I'm very excited to run this by you because I could use a friend in helping me decide what to do. So I am still on that journey where I am migrating Test::Unit test over to RSpec. And as I'm going through, it's going pretty well, but it's a little complicated because some of the Test::Unit tests have different setup than, say, the RSpec do. They might run different scripts beforehand where they're loading data. That's perhaps a different topic, but that's happening. And so that has changed a few things. But then overall, I've just been really just porting everything over, like, hey, if it exists in the Test::Unit, let's just bring it to RSpec, and then I'm going to change these asserts to expects and really not make any changes from there. But as I'm doing that, I'm seeing areas that I want to improve and things that I want to clear up, even if it's just extracting a variable name. Or, as I'm moving some of these over in Test::Unit, it's not clear to me exactly what the test is about. Like, it looks more like a method name in the way that the test is being described, but the actual behavior isn't clear to me as if I were writing this in RSpec, I think it would have more of a clear description. Maybe that's not specific to the actual testing framework. That might just be how these tests are set up. But I'm at that point where I'm questioning should I keep going in terms of where I am just copying everything over from Test::Unit and then moving it over to RSpec? Because ultimately, that is the goal, to migrate over. Or should I also include some time to then go back and clean up and try to add some clarity, maybe extract some variable names, see if I can reduce some lets, maybe even reduce some of the test helpers that I'm bringing over? How much cleanup should be involved, zero, lots? I don't know. I don't know what that...[laughs] I'm sure there's a middle ground in there somewhere. But I'm having trouble discerning for myself what's the right amount because this feels like one of those areas where if I don't do any cleanup, I'm not coming back to it, like, that's just the truth. So it's either now, or I have no idea when and maybe never. CHRIS: I'll be honest, the first thing that came to mind in this most recent time that you mentioned this is, did we consider just deleting these tests entirely? Is that on...like, there are very few of them, right? Like, are they even providing enough value? So that was question one, which let me pause to see what your thoughts there were. [chuckles] STEPH: I don't know if we specifically talked about that on the mic, but yes, that has been considered. And the team that owns those tests has said, "No, please don't delete them. We do get value from them." So we can port them over to RSpec, but we don't have time to port them over to RSpec. So we just need to keep letting them go on. But yet, not porting them conflicts with my goal of then trying to speed up CI. And so it'd be nice to collapse these Test::Unit tests over to RSpec because then that would bring our CI build down by several meaningful minutes. And also, it would reduce some of the complexity in the CI setup. CHRIS: Gotcha. Okay, so now, having set that aside, I always ask the first question of like, can you just put Derek Prior's phone number on the webpage and call it an app? Is that the MVP of this app? No? Okay, all right, we have to build more. But yeah, I think to answer it and in a general way of trying to answer a broader set of questions here... I think this falls into a category of like if you find yourself having to move around some code, if that code is just comfortably running and the main thing you need to do is just to get it ported over to RSpec, I would probably do as little other work as possible. With the one consideration that if you find yourself needing to deeply load up the context of these tests like actually understand them in order to do the porting, then I would probably take advantage of that context because it's hard to get your head into a given piece of code, test or otherwise. And so if you're in there and you're like, well, now that I'm here, I can definitely see that we could rearrange some stuff and just definitively make it better, if you get to that place, I would consider it. But if this ends up being mostly a pretty rote transformation like you said, asserts become expects, and lets get switched around, you know, that sort of stuff, if it's a very mechanical process of getting done, I would probably say very minimal. But again, if there is that, like, you know what? I had to understand the test in order to port them anyway, so while I'm here, let me take advantage of that, that's probably the thing that I would consider. But if not that, then I would say even though it's messy and whatnot and your inclination would be to clean it, I would say leave it roughly as is. That's my guess or how I would approach it. STEPH: Yeah, I love that. I love how you pointed out, like, did you build up the context? Because you're right, in a lot of these test cases, I'm not, or I'm trying really hard to not build up context. I'm trying very hard to just move them over and, if I have to, mainly to find test descriptions. That's the main area I'm struggling to...how can I more explicitly state what this test does so the next person reading this will have more comprehension than I do? But otherwise, I'm trying hard to not have any real context around it. And that's such a good point because that's often...when someone else is in the middle of something, and they're deciding whether to include that cleanup or refactor or improvement, one of my suggestions is like, hey, we've got the context now. Let's go with it. But if you've built up very little context, then that's not a really good catalyst or reason to then dig in deeper and apply that cleanup. That's super helpful. Thank you. That will help reinforce what I'm going to do, which is exactly let's migrate RSpec and not worry about cleanup, which feels terrible; I'm just going to say that into the world. But it also feels like the right thing to do. CHRIS: Well, I'm happy to have helped. And I share the like, and it feels terrible. I want to do the right thing, but sometimes you got to pick a battle sort of thing. STEPH: Cool. Well, that's a huge help to me. What's going on in your world? CHRIS: What's going on in my world? I watched a great video the other day from the Google I/O. I think it's an event; I'm not actually sure, conference or something like that. But it was some Google Chrome developers talking about a new feature that's coming to the platform called Page Transitions. And I've kept an eye on this for a while, but it seems like it's more real. Like, I think they put out an RFC or an initial sort of set of ideas a while back. And the web community was like, "Oh, that's not going to work out so well." So they went back to the drawing board, revisited. I've actually implemented in Chrome Canary a version of the API. And then, in the video that I watched, which we'll include a show notes link to, they demoed the functionality of the Page Transitions API and showed what you can do. And it's super cool. It allows for the sort of animations that you see in a lot of native mobile apps where you're looking at a ListView, you click on one of the items, and it grows to fill the whole screen. And now you're on the detail screen for that item that you were looking at. But there was this very continuous animated transition that allows you to keep context in your head and all of those sorts of nice things. And this just really helps to bridge that gap between, like, the web often lags behind the native mobile platforms in terms of the experiences that we can build. So it was really interesting to see what they've been able to pull off. The demo is a pretty short video, but it shows a couple of different variations of what you can build with it. And I was like, yeah, these look like cool native app transitions, really nifty. One thing that's very interesting is the actual implementation of this. So it's like you have one version of the page, and then you transition to a new version of the page, and in doing so, you want to animate between them. And the way that they do it is they have the first version of the page. They take a screenshot of it like the browser engine takes a screenshot of it. And then they put that picture on top of the actual browser page. Then they do the same thing with the next version of the page that they're going to transition to. And then they crossfade, like, change the opacity and size and whatnot between the two different images, and then you're there. And in the back of my mind, I'm like, I'm sorry, what now? You did which? I'm like, is this the genius solution that actually makes this work and is performant? And I wonder if there are trade-offs. Like, do you lose interactivity between those because you've got some images that are just on the screen? And what is that like? But as they were going through it, I was just like, wait, I'm sorry, you did what? This is either the best idea I've ever heard, or I'm not so sure about this. STEPH: That's fascinating. You had me with the first part in terms of they take a screenshot of the page that you're leaving. I'm like, yeah, that's a great idea. And then talking about taking a picture of the other page because then you have to load it but not show it to the user that it's loaded. And then take a picture of it, and then show them the picture of the loaded page. But then actually, like you said, then crossfade and then bring in the real functionality. I am...what am I? [laughter] CHRIS: What am I actually? STEPH: [laughs] What am I? I'm shocked. I'm surprised that that is so performant. Because yeah, I also wouldn't have thought of that, or I would have immediately have thought like, there's no way that's going to be performant enough. But that's fascinating. CHRIS: For me, performance seems more manageable, but it's the like, what are you trading off for that? Because that sounds like a hack. That sounds like the sort of thing I would recommend if we need to get an MVP out next week. And I'm like, what if we just tried this? Listen, it's got some trade-offs. So I'm really interested to see are those trade-offs present? Because it's the browser engine. It's, you know, the low-level platform that's actually managing this. And there are some nice hooks that allow you to control it. And at a CSS level, you can manage it and use keyframe animations to control the transition more directly. There's a JavaScript API to instrument the sequencing of things. And so it's giving you the right primitives and the right hooks. And the fact that the implementation happens to use pictures or screenshots, to use a slightly different word, it's like, okey dokey, that's what we're doing. Sounds fun. So I'm super interested because the functionality is deeply, deeply interesting to me. Svelte actually has a version of this, the crossfade utility, but you have to still really think about how do you sequence between the two pages and how do you do the connective tissue there? And then Svelte will manage it for you if you do all the right stuff. But the wiring up is somewhat complicated. So having this in the browser engine is really interesting to me. But yeah, pictures. STEPH: This is one of those ideas where I can't decide if this was someone who is very new to the team and new to the idea and was like, "Have we considered screenshots? Have we considered pictures?" Or if this is like the uber senior person on the team that was like, "Yeah, this will totally work with screenshots." I can't decide where in that range this idea falls, which I think makes me love it even more. Because it's very straightforward of like, hey, what if we just tried this? And it's working, so cool, cool, cool. CHRIS: There's a fantastic meme that's been making the rounds where it's a bell curve, and it's like, early in your career, middle of your career, late in your career. And so early in your career, you're like, everything in one file, all lines of code that's just where they go. And then in the middle of your career, you're like, no, no, no, we need different concerns, and files, and organizational structures. And then end of your career...and this was coming up in reference to the TypeScript team seems to have just thrown everything into one file. And it's the thing that they've migrated to over time. And so they have this many, many line file that is basically the TypeScript engine all in one file. And so it was a joke of like, they definitely know what they're doing with programming. They're not just starting last week sort of thing. And so it's this funny arc that certain things can go through. So I think that's an excellent summary there [laughs] of like, I think it was folks who have thought about this really hard. But I kind of hope it was someone who was just like, "I'm new here. But have we thought about pictures? What about pictures?" I also am a little worried that I just deeply misunderstood [laughs] the representation but glossed over it in the video, and I'm like, that sounds interesting. So hopefully, I'm not just wildly off base here. [laughs] But nonetheless, the functionality looks very interesting. STEPH: That would be a hilarious tweet. You know, I've been waiting for that moment where I've said something that I understood into the mic and someone on Twitter just being like, well, good try, but... [laughs] CHRIS: We had a couple of minutes where we tried to figure out what the opposite of ranting was, and we came up with pranting and made up a word instead of going with praising or raving. No, that's what it is, raving. [laughs] STEPH: No, raving. I will never forget now, raving. [laughs] CHRIS: So, I mean, we've done this before. STEPH: That's true. Although they were nice, I don't think they tweeted. I think they sent in an email. They were like, "Hey, friends." [laughter] CHRIS: Actually, we got a handful of emails on that. [laughter] STEPH: Did you know the English language? CHRIS: Thank you, kind Bikeshed audience, for not shaming us in public. I mean, feel free if you feel like it. [laughs] But one other thing that came up in this video, though, is the speaker was describing single-page apps are very common, and you want to have animated transitions and this and that. And I was like, single-page app, okay, fine. I don't like the terminology but whatever. I would like us to call it the client-side app or client-side routing or something else. But the fact that it's a single page is just a technical consideration that no user would call it that. Users are like; I go to the web app. I like that it has URLs. Those seem different to me. Anyway, this is my hill. I'm going to die on it. But then the speaker in the video, in contrast to single-page app referenced multi-page app, and I was like, oh, come on, come on. I get it. Like, yes, there are just balls of JavaScript that you can download on the internet and have a dynamic graphics editor. But I think almost all good things on the web should have URLs, and that's what I would call the multiple pages. But again, that's just me griping about some stuff. And to name it, I don't think I'm just griping for griping sake. Like, again, I like to think about things from the user perspective, and the URL being so important. And having worked with plenty of apps that are implemented in JavaScript and don't take the URL or the idea that we can have different routable resources seriously and everything is just one URL, that's a failure mode in my mind. We missed an opportunity here. So I think I'm saying a useful thing here and not just complaining on the internet. But with that, I will stop complaining on the internet and send it back over to you. What else is new in your world, Steph? STEPH: I do remember the first time that you griped about it, and you were griping about URLs. And there was a part of me that was like, what is he talking about? [laughter] And then over time, I was like, oh, I get it now as I started actually working more in that world. But it took me a little bit to really appreciate that gripe and where you're coming from. And I agree; I think you're coming from a reasonable place, not that I'm biased at all as your co-host, but you know. CHRIS: I really like the honest summary that you're giving of, like, honestly, the first time you said this, I let you go for a while, but I did not know what you were talking about. [laughs] And I was like, okay, good data point. I'm going to store that one away and think about it a bunch. But that's fine. I'm glad you're now hanging out with me still. [laughter] STEPH: Don't do that. Don't think about it a bunch. [laughs] Let's see, oh, something else that's going on in my world. I had a really fun pairing session with another thoughtboter where we were digging into query objects and essentially extracting some logic out of an ActiveRecord model and then giving that behavior its own space and elevated namespace in a query object. And one of the questions or one of the things that came up that we needed to incorporate was optional filters. So say if you are searching for a pizza place that's nearby and you provide a city, but you don't provide what's the optional zip code, then we want to make sure that we don't apply the zip code in the where clause because then you would return all the pizza places that have a nil zip code, and that's just not what you want. So we need to respect the fact that not all the filters need to be applied. And there are a couple of ways to go about it. And it was a fun journey to see the different ways that we could structure it. So one of the really good starting points is captured in a blog post by Derek Prior, which we'll include a link to in the show notes, and it's using yield_self for composable ActiveRecord relations. But essentially, it starts out with an example where it shows that you're assigning a value to then the result of an if statement. So it's like, hey, if the zip code is present, then let's filter by zip code; if not, then just give us back the original relation. And then you can just keep building on it from there. And then there's a really nice implementation that Derek built on that then uses yield_self to pass the relation through, which then provides a really nice readability for as you are then stepping through each filter and which one should and shouldn't be applied. And now there's another blog post, and this one's written by Thiago Silva, A Case for Query Objects in Rails. And this one highlighted an approach that I haven't used before. And I initially had some mixed feelings about it. But this approach uses the extending method, which is a method that's on ActiveRecord query methods. And it's used to extend the scope with additional methods. You can either do this by providing the name of a module or by providing a block. It's only going to apply to that instance or to that specific scope when you're using it. So it's not going to be like you're running an include or something like that where all instances are going to now have access to these methods. So by using that method, extending, then you can create a module that says, "Hey, I want to create this by zip code filter that will then check if we have a zip code, let's apply it, if not, return the relation. And it also creates a really pretty chaining experience of like, here's my original class name. Let's extend with these specific scopes, and then we can say by zip code, by pizza topping, whatever else it is that we're looking to filter by. And I was initially...I saw the extending, and it made me nervous because I was like, oh, what all does this apply to? And is it going to impact anything outside of this class? But the more I've looked at it, the more I really like it. So I think you've seen this blog post too. And I'm curious, what are your thoughts about this? CHRIS: I did see this blog post come through. I follow that thoughtbot blog real close because it turns out some of the best writing on the internet is on there. But I saw this...also, as an aside, I like that we've got two Derek Prior references in one episode. Let's see if we can go for three before the end. But one thing that did stand out to me in it is I have historically avoided scopes using scope like ActiveRecord macro thing. It's a class method, but like, it's magic. It does magic. And a while ago, class methods and scopes became roughly equivalent, not exactly equivalent, but close enough. And for me, I want to use methods because I know stuff about methods. I know about default arguments. And I know about all of these different subtleties because they're just methods at the end of the day, whereas scopes are special; they have certain behavior. And I've never really known of the behavior beyond the fact that they get implemented in a different way. And so I was never really sold on them. And they're different enough from methods, and I know methods well. So I'm like, let's use the normal stuff where we can. The one thing that's really interesting, though, is the returning nil that was mentioned in this blog post. If you return nil in a scope, it will handle that for you. Whereas all of my query objects have a like, well, if this thing applies, then scope dot or relation dot where blah, blah, blah, else return relation unchanged. And the fact that that natively exists within scope is interesting enough to make me reconsider my stance on scopes versus class methods. I think I'm still doing class method. But it is an interesting consideration that I was unaware of before. STEPH: Yeah, it's an interesting point. I hadn't really considered as much whether I'm defining a class-level method versus a scope in this particular case. And I also didn't realize that scopes handle that nil case for you. That was one of the other things that I learned by reading through this blog post. I was like, oh, that is a nicety. Like, that is something that I get for free. So I agree. I think this is one of those things that I like enough that I'd really like to try it out more and then see how it goes and start to incorporate it into my process. Because this feels like one of those common areas of where I get to it, and I'm like, how do I do this again? And yield_self was just complicated enough in terms of then using the fancy method method to then be able to call the method that I want that I was like, I don't remember how to do this. I had to look it up each time. But including this module with extending and then being able to use scopes that way feels like something that would be intuitive for me that then I could just pick up and run with each time. CHRIS: If it helps, you can use then instead of yield_self because we did upgrade our Ruby a while back to have that change. But I don't think that actually solves the thing that you're describing. I'd have liked the ampersand method and then simple method name magic incantation that is part of the thing that Derek wrote up. I do use it when I write query objects, but I have to think about it or look it up each time and be like, how do I do that? All right, that's how I do that. STEPH: Yeah, that's one of the things that I really appreciate is how often folks will go back and update blog posts, or they will add an addition to them to say, "Hey, there's something new that came out that then is still relevant to this topic." So then you can read through it and see the latest and the greatest. It's a really nice touch to a number of our blog posts. But yeah, that's what was on my mind regarding query objects. What else is going on in your world? CHRIS: I have this growing feeling that I don't quite know what to do with. I think I've talked about it across some of our conversations in the world of observability. But broadly, I'm starting to like...I feel like my brain has shifted, and I now see the world slightly differently, and I can't go back. But I also don't know how to stick the landing and complete this transition in my brain. So it's basically everything's an event stream; this feels true. That's life. The arrow of time goes in one direction as far as I understand it. And I'm now starting to see it manifest in the code that we're writing. Like, we have code to log things, and we have places where we want to log more intentionally. Then occasionally, we send stuff off to Sentry. And Sentry tells us when there are errors, that's great. But in a lot of places, we have both. Like, we will warn about something happening, and we'll send that to the logs because we want to have that in the logs, which is basically the whole history of what's happened. But we also have it in Sentry, but Sentry's version is just this expanded version that has a bunch more data about the user, and things, and the browser that they were in. But they're two variations on the same event. And then similarly, analytics is this, like, third leg of well, this thing happened, and we want to know about it in the context. And what's been really interesting is we're working with a tool called Customer.io, which is an omnichannel communication whiz-bang adventure. For us, it does email, SMS, and push notifications. And it's integrated into our segment pipeline, so events flow in, events and users essentially. So we have those two different primitives within it. And then within it, we can say like, when a user does X, then send them an email with this copy. As an aside, Customer.io is a fantastic platform. I'm super-duper impressed. We went through a search for a tool like it, and we ended up on a lot of sales demos with folks that were like, hey, so yeah, starting point is $25,000 per year. And, you know, we can talk about it, but it's only going to go up from there when we talk about it, just to be clear. And it's a year minimum contract, and you're going to love it. And we're like, you do have impressive platforms, but okay, that's a bunch. And then, we found Customer.io, and it's month-by-month pricing. And it had a surprisingly complete feature set. So overall, I've been super impressed with Customer.io and everything that they've afforded. But now that I'm seeing it, I kind of want to move everything into that world where like, Customer.io allows non-engineer team members to interact with that event stream and then make things happen. And that's what we're doing all the time. But I'm at that point where I think I see the thing that I want, but I have no idea how to get there. And it might not even be tractable either. There's the wonderful Turning the Database Inside Out talk, which describes how everything is an event stream. And what if we actually were to structure things that way and do materialized views on top of it? And the actual UI that you're looking at is a materialized view on top of the database, which is a materialized view on top of that event stream. So I'm mostly in this, like, I want to figure this out. I want to start to unify all this stuff. And analytics pipes to one tool that gets a version of this event stream, and our logs are just another, and our error system is another variation on it. But they're all sort of sampling from that one event stream. But I have no idea how to do that. And then when you have a database, then you're like, well, that's also just a static representation of a point in time, which is the opposite of an event stream. So what do you do there? So there are folks out there that are doing good thinking on this. So I'm going to keep my ear to the ground and try and see what's everybody thinking on this front? But I can't shake the feeling that there's something here that I'm missing that I want to stitch together. STEPH: I'm intrigued on how to take this further because everything you're saying resonates in terms of having these event streams that you're working with. But yet, I can't mentally replace that with the existing model that I have in my mind of where there are still certain ideas of records or things that exist in the world. And I want to encapsulate the data and store that in the database. And maybe I look it up based on when it happens; maybe I don't. Maybe I'm looking it up by something completely different. So yeah, I'm also intrigued by your thoughts, but I'm also not sure where to take it. Who are some of the folks that are doing some of the thinking in this area that you're interested in, or where might you look next? CHRIS: There's the Kafka world of we have an event log, and then we're processing on top of that, and we're building stream processing engines as the core. They seem to be closest to the Turning the Database Inside Out talk that I was thinking or that I mentioned earlier. There's also the idea of CRDTs, which are Conflict-free Replicated Data Types, which are really interesting. I see them used particularly in real-time application. So it's this other tool, but they are basically event logs. And then you can communicate them well and have two different people working on something collaboratively. And these event logs then have a natural way to come together and produce a common version of the document on either end. That's at least my loose understanding of it, but it seems like a variation on this theme. So I've been looking at that a little bit. But again, I can't see how to map that to like, but I know how to make a Rails app with a Postgres database. And I think I'm reasonably capable at it, or at least I've been able to produce things that are useful to humans using it. And so it feels like there is this pretty large gap. Because what makes sense in my head is if you follow this all the way, it fundamentally re-architects everything. And so that's A, scary, and B; I have no idea how to get there, but I am intrigued. Like, I feel like there's something there. There's also Datomic is the other thing that comes to mind, which is a database engine in the Clojure world that stores the versions of things over time; that idea of the user is active. It's like, well, yeah, but when were they not? That's an event. That transition is an event that Postgres does not maintain at this point. And so, all I know is that the user is active. Maybe I store a timestamp because I'm thinking proactively about this. But Datomic is like no, no, fundamentally, as a primitive in this database; that's how we organize and think about stuff. And I know I've talked about Datomic on here before. So I've circled around these ideas before. And I'm pretty sure I'm just going to spend a couple of minutes circling and then stop because I have no idea how to connect the dots. [laughs] But I want to figure this out. STEPH: I have not worked with Kafka. But one of the main benefits I understand with Kafka is that by storing everything as a stream, you're never going to lose like a message. So if you are sending a message to another system and then that message gets lost in transit, you don't actually know if it got acknowledged or what happened with it, and replaying is really hard. Where do you pick up again? While using something like Kafka, you know exactly what you sent last, and then you're not going to have that uncertainty as to what messages went through and which ones didn't. And then the ability to replay is so important. I'm curious, as you continue to explore this, do you have a particular pain point in mind that you'd like to see improve? Or is it more just like, this seems like a really cool, novel idea; how can I incorporate more of this into my world? CHRIS: I think it's the latter. But I think the thing that I keep feeling is we keep going back and re-instrumenting versions of this. We're adding more logging or more analytics events over the wire or other things. But then, as I send these analytics events over the wire, we have Mixpanel downstream as an analytics visualization and workflow tool or Customer.io. At this point, those applications, I think, have a richer understanding of our users than our core Rails app. And something about that feels wrong to me. We're also streaming everything that goes through segment to S3 because I had a realization of this a while back. I'm like, that event stream is very interesting. I don't want to lose it. I'm going to put it somewhere that I get to keep it. So even if we move off of either Mixpanel or Customer.io or any of those other platforms, we still have our data. That's our data, and we're going to hold on to it. But interestingly, Customer.io, when it sends a message, will push an event back into segments. So it's like doubly connected to segment, which is managing this sort of event bus of data. And so Mixpanel then gets an even richer set there, and the Rails app is like, I'm cool. I'm still hanging out, and I'm doing stuff; it's fine. But the fact that the Rails app is fundamentally less aware of the things that have happened is really interesting to me. And I am not running into issues with it, but I do feel odd about it. STEPH: That touched on a theme that is interesting to me, the idea that I hadn't really considered it in those terms. But yeah, our application provides the tool in which people can interact with. But then we outsource the behavior analysis of our users and understanding what that flow is and what they're going through. I hadn't really thought about those concrete terms and where someone else owns the behavior of our users, but yet we own all the interaction points. And then we really need both to then make decisions about features and things that we're building next. But that also feels like building a whole new product, that behavior analysis portion of it, so it's interesting. My consulting brain is going wild at the moment between like, yeah, it would be great to own that. But that the other time if there's this other service that has already built that product and they're doing it super well, then let's keep letting them manage that portion of our business until we really need to bring it in-house. Because then we need to incorporate it more into our application itself so then we can surface things to the user. That's the part where then I get really interested, or that's the pain point that I could see is if we wanted more of that behavior analysis, that then we want to surface that in the app, then always having to go to a third-party would start to feel tedious or could feel more brittle. CHRIS: Yeah, I'm definitely 100% on not rebuilding Mixpanel in our app and being okay with the fact that we're sending that. Again, the thing that I did to make myself feel better about this is stream the data to S3 so that I have a version of it. And if we want to rebuild the data warehouse down the road to build some sort of machine learning data pipeline thing, we've got some raw data to work with. But I'm noticing lots of places where we're transforming a side effect, a behavior that we have in the system to dispatching an event. And so right now, we have a bunch of stuff that we pipe over to Slack to inform our admin team, hey, this thing happened. You should probably intervene. But I'm looking at that, and we're doing it directly because we can control the message in Slack a little bit better. But I had this thought in the back of my mind; it's like, could we just send that as an event, and then some downstream tool can configure messages and alerts into Slack? Because then the admin team could actually instrument this themselves. And they could be like; we are no longer interested in this event. Users seem fine on that front. But we do care about this new event. And all we need to do as the engineering team is properly instrument all of that event stream tapping. Every event just needs to get piped over. And then lots of powerful tools downstream from that that can allow different consumers of that data to do things, and broadly, that dispatch events, consume them on the other side, do fun stuff. That's the story. That's the dream. But I don't know; I can't connect all the dots. It's probably going to take me a couple of weeks to connect all these dots, or maybe years, or maybe my entire career, something like that. But, I don't know, I'm going to keep trying. STEPH: This feels like a fun startup narrative, though, where you start by building the thing that people can interact with. As more people start to interact with it, how do we start giving more of our team the ability to then manage the product that then all of these users are interacting with? And then that's the part that you start optimizing for. So there are always different interesting bits when you talk about the different stages of Sagewell, and like, what's the thing you're optimizing for? And I'm sure it's still heavily users. But now there's also this addition of we are also optimizing for our team to now manage the product. CHRIS: Yes, you're 100%. You're spot on there. We have definitely joked internally about spinning out a small company to build this analytics alerting tool [laughs] but obviously not going to do that because that's a distraction. And it is interesting, like, we want to build for the users the best thing that we can and where the admin team fits within that. To me, they're very much customers of engineering. Our job is to build the thing for the users but also, to be honest, we have to build a thing for the admins to support the users and exactly where that falls. Like, you and I have talked a handful of times about maybe the admin isn't as polished in design as other things. But it's definitely tested because that's a critical part of how this application works. Maybe not directly for a user but one step removed for a user, so it matters. Absolutely we're writing tests to cover that behavior. And so yeah, those trade-offs are always interesting to me and exploring that space. But 100%: our admin team are core customers of the work that we're doing in engineering. And we try and stay very close and very friendly with them. STEPH: Yeah, I really appreciate how you're framing that. And I very much agree and believe with you that our admin users are incredibly important. CHRIS: Well, thank you. Yeah, we're trying over here. But yeah, I think I can wrap up that segment of me rambling about ideas that are half-formed in my mind but hopefully are directionally important. Anyway, what else is up with you? STEPH: So, not that long ago, I asked you a question around how the heck to manage themes that I have going on. So we've talked about lots of fun productivity things around managing to-dos, and emails, and all that stuff. And my latest one is thinking about, like, I have a theme that I want to focus on, maybe it's this week, maybe it's for a couple of months. And how do I capture that and surface it to myself and see that I'm making progress on that? And I don't have an answer to that. But I do have a theme that I wanted to share. And the one that I'm currently focused on is building up management skills and team lead skills. That is something that I'm focused on at the moment and partially because I was inspired to read the book Resilient Management written by Lara Hogan. And so I think that is what has really set the idea. But as I picked up the book, I was like, this is a really great book, and I'd really like to share some of this. And then so that grew into like, well, let's just go ahead and make this a theme where I'm learning this, and I'm sharing this with everyone else. So along that note, I figured I would share that here. So we use Basecamp at thoughtbot. And so, I've been sharing some Basecamp posts around what I'm learning in each chapter. But to bring some of that knowledge here as well, some of the cool stuff that I have learned so far...and this is just still very early on in the book. There are a couple of different topics that Laura covers in the first chapter, and one of them is humans' core needs at work. And then there's also the concept of meeting your team, some really good questions that you can ask during your first one-on-one to get to know the person that then you're going to be managing. The part that really resonated with me and something that I would like to then coach myself to try is helping the team get to know you. So as a manager, not only are you going out of your way to really get to know that person, but how are you then helping them get to know you as well? Because then that's really going to help set that relationship in regards of they know what kind of things that you're optimizing for. Maybe you're optimizing for a deadline, or for business goals, or maybe it's for transparency, or maybe it would be helpful to communicate to someone that you're managing to say, "Hey, I'm trying some new management techniques. Let me know how this goes." [chuckles] So there's a healthier relationship of not only are you learning them, but they're also learning you. So some of the questions that Laura includes as examples as something that you can share with your team is what do you optimize for in your role? So is it that you're optimizing for specific financial goals or building up teammates? Or maybe it's collaboration, so you're really looking for opportunities for people to pair together. What do you want your teammates to lean on you for? I really liked that question. Like, what are some of the areas that bring you joy or something that you feel really skilled in that then you want people to come to you for? Because that's something that before I was a manager...but it's just as you are growing as a developer, that's such a great question of like, what do you want to be known for? What do you want to be that thing that when people think of, they're like, oh, you should go see Chris about this, or you should go see Steph about this? And two other good questions include what are your work styles and preferences? And what management skills are you currently working on learning or improving? So I really like this concept of how can I share more of myself? And the great thing about this book that I'm learning too is while it is geared towards people that are managers, I think it's so wonderful for people who are non-managers or aspiring managers to read this as well because then it can help you manage whoever's managing you. So then that way, you can have some upward management. So we had recent conversations around when you are new to a team and getting used to a manager, or maybe if you're a junior, you have to take a lot of self-advocacy into your role to make sure things are going well. And I think this book does a really good job for people that are looking to not only manage others but also manage themselves and manage upward. So that's some of the journeys from the first chapter. I'll keep you posted on the other chapters as I'm learning more. And yeah, if anybody hasn't read this book or if you're interested, I highly recommend it. I'll make sure to include a link in the show notes. CHRIS: That was just the first chapter? STEPH: Yeah, that was just the first chapter. CHRIS: My goodness. STEPH: And I shortened it drastically. [laughs] CHRIS: Okay. All right, off to the races. But I think the summary that you gave there, particularly these are true when you're managing folks but also to manage yourself and to manage up, like, this is relevant to everyone in some capacity in some shape or form. And so that feels very true. STEPH: I will include one more fun aspect from the book, and that's circling back to the humans' core needs at work. And she references Paloma Medina, a coach, and trainer who came up with this acronym. The acronym is BICEPS, and it stands for belonging, improvement, choice, equality, predictability, and significance. And then details how each of those are important to us in our work and how when one of those feels threatened, then that can lead to some problems at work or just even in our personal life. But the fun example that she gave was not when there's a huge restructuring of the organization and things like that are going on as being the most concerning in terms of how many of these needs are going to be threatened or become vulnerable. But changing where someone sits at work can actually hit all of these, and it can threaten each of these needs. And it made me think, oh, cool, plus-one for being remote because we can sit wherever we want. [laughs] But that was a really fun example of how someone's needs at work, I mean, just moving their desk, which resonates, too, because I've heard that from other people. Some of the friends that I have that work in more of a People Ops role talk about when they had to shift people around how that caused so much grief. And they were just shocked that it caused so much grief. And this explains why that can be such a big deal. So that was a fun example to read through. CHRIS: I'm now having flashbacks to times where I was like, oh, I love my spot in the office. I love the people I'm sitting with. And then there was that day, and I had to move. Yeah, no, those were days. This is true. STEPH: It triggered all the core BICEPS, all the things that you need to work. It threatened all of them. Or it could have improved them; who knows? CHRIS: There were definitely those as well, yeah. Although I think it's harder to know that it's going to be great on the way in, so it's mostly negative. I think it has that weird bias because you're like, this was a thing, I knew it. I at least understood it. And then you're in a new space, and you're like, I don't know, is this going to be terrible or great? I mean, hopefully, it's only great because you work with great people, and it's a great office. [laughs] But, like, the unknown, you're moving into the unknown, and so I think it has an inherent at least questioning bias to it. STEPH: Agreed. On that note, shall we wrap up? CHRIS: Let's wrap up. The show notes for this episode can be found at bikeshed.fm. STEPH: This show is produced and edited by Mandy Moore. CHRIS: If you enjoyed listening, one really easy way to support the show is to leave us a quick rating or even a review on iTunes, as it really helps other folks find the show. STEPH: If you have any feedback for this or any of our other episodes, you can reach us at @_bikeshed or reach me on Twitter @SViccari. CHRIS: And I'm @christoomey. STEPH: Or you can reach us at hosts@bikeshed.fm via email. CHRIS: Thanks so much for listening to The Bike Shed, and we'll see you next week. ALL: Byeeeeeee!!!!!!! ANNOUNCER: This podcast was brought to you by thoughtbot. thoughtbot is your expert design and development partner. Let's make your product and team a success.

CHRIS NEWBOLD: Hello, well-being friends, and welcome to The Path To Well-Being in Law podcast, an initiative of the Institute for Well-Being in Law. I'm your co-host Chris Newbold, executive vice president of Alps Malpractice Insurance and most of our listeners know that our goal is pretty straightforward. We want to introduce you to thought leaders doing meaningful work in the wellbeing space and within the legal profession. In the process we want to build and nurture a national network of wellbeing advocates intent on creating a culture shift within the profession. I am always pleased to introduce my co-host Bree Buchanan. Bree, how's it going? BREE BUCHANAN: It's going great, Chris. How is your spring starting off? CHRIS: It's a little colder in Montana than I would like, but the warm weather is on the way. So I'm certainly looking forward to that. So a lot going on, obviously, in the wellbeing world and super excited to continue with kind of thoughtful discussion here on the podcast. We're going to continue. I think our series here on diversity, equity and inclusion and the intersection of DEI with well-being and super excited to be welcoming Lia Dorsey to the podcast. Bree, would you be so kind to introduce Lia to our listeners? BREE: I would love to. So we are so delighted to bring to you Lia Dorsey today, and she is a thought leader in the movement to advanced diversity and a driver for inclusive change. As the chief diversity equity and inclusion officer at Ogletree Deakins, she's responsible for the development and execution of the firm's diversity equity and inclusion strategy. Ms. Dorsey collaborates with firm leadership, practice group leaders and business resource groups to expand in advance efforts in the recruitment development promotion and retention of diverse talent. BREE: Ms. Dorsey previously served as the head of diversity and inclusion at Denton's, U.S. There she was responsible for the strategic oversight, design and implementation of this very large terms, diversity and inclusion initiatives. Before that she served as the director of diversity and inclusion at Eversheds Sutherland and has also held senior positions at DLA Piper and Buchanan Ingersoll & Rooney. All of those names that many of us know. Lia's also president emeritus, I told her the best place, best position to have, of the Association of Law Firm Diversity Professionals. She's a sought after presenter in panelist on a broad range of topics covering diversity, equity, and inclusion at conferences across the country. Lia, welcome. We are so glad you're here with us today. LIA DORSEY: Thank you, Bree. Thank you, Chris, for having me. I am thrilled. Thrilled to be here. BREE: Yeah. Thank you so much. So Lia, I'm going to ask you the question that we ask all of our guests, because I think it just is well, so interesting. So what are some of your experiences in your life that are drivers behind your very clear passion for the work around DEI? LIA DORSEY: Great, great question. I like to start by saying that I've always been an inclusionist, if you will, although it didn't have a term back in the day as I was growing up and I'll just kind of share just a really funny story. I used to get in trouble a lot as a child, because I would give away my toys to my friends who didn't have them. So I would always just share, I would always just give. I was always that compassionate person and I think my parents appreciated it until I gave away my brand new pink and white huffy bike with the [inaudible 00:03:54] and then I think after that, it's "Okay, I think we need to kind of reign this in and pray." But all jokes aside I've always been a giver. I've always been a giver and I live by the verse, "To whom much is given, much will be required," and I seriously take that to heart. LIA DORSEY: I've long supported those from different backgrounds and environments. I've been a volunteer for a long time. I mentor, especially now in my role, I think it's very, very important for me to reach back and pull others forward. But for me, this was just what you did as a good person, right, it was never about shine or the accolades. You helped people who need it. I'm still an inclusionist, but now I like to refer to myself as a disruptor for good. BREE: All right. LIA DORSEY: Just today I heard someone else describe herself as a professional troublemaker, and I think I'm going to borrow that one as well, because at the end of the day to do this work, you have to be brave and you have to be bold. I'm also clear that it's not for everyone, that this is by far the hardest job that I've ever had, but it's also the most rewarding and I honestly can't see myself doing anything else. BREE: Yeah. I hope that I can be a professional disruptor at some point, but it does take a lot of courage. Absolutely. So good for you. CHRIS: It does. Lia, tell us a little bit about... One of the things I was impressed about kind of how your professional journey has kind of taken shape, is you've had the ability to move in and out of different cultures within the legal profession, which I just find is really fascinating. Tell us about your journey in the area of diversity, equity and inclusion and in the time that you have been a disruptor for good, how have things changed over that time? LIA DORSEY: Yeah, so I have been in law firms for a very, very, very long time. Although, I didn't start out in DE&I. I actually started out on the business side of the law firm for years and at one particular firm, we didn't have anyone at that time leading DE&I in an official capacity. So I raised my hand, again, I would love to volunteer and that's a reoccurring theme with me. But two years later, I found myself with almost two full time jobs. So the job that I was hired to do and the job that I was meant to do, and that was the DE&I role. So that same firm really saw how passionate I was about DE&I work and just how happy I was doing it. They actually created a role for me as the director of DE&I at that firm and as they say the rest was history. LIA DORSEY: But when we think about what changed over time, I think we've seen DE&I become more of a strategic focus in priority for firms. Even before the events of 2020, I think, we started to see firms dedicate more resources to DE&I, like creating full time positions, moving away from DE&I being embedded in HR or being seen as a compliance requirement from the GCs office. So we had really started to see kind of an elevation of DE&I and the role. Then 2020 happened and we'll talk about that a little bit more, but what we saw was even more of a cohesion around DE&I. We saw leaders speaking up, stepping up. We saw a heightened level of awareness. LIA DORSEY: People became aware of issues that weren't on their radar in the past. I think the murder of George Floyd was a pivotal moment. I'm often asked how that moment was so different because sadly George Floyd, wasn't the first Black man to be murdered at the hands of police and sadly he wasn't the last, but I think the difference that the world was at home, watching it happen and people who thought things like this didn't happen were now outraged, right. But that rage led to empowerment. We have to do something. We have to say something. LIA DORSEY: So we're seeing a lot of folks speaking up more because they aren't afraid and they're making demands for change. All of that is great and that is a big change, because I would say before 2020, I don't think that you would've seen people speaking up and standing up the way that we're seeing it now. I think all of that is great, but I also think that we're in an inflection point, right, because there are forces in this world who don't want things to change. The thought is the system has worked in one way for so long, so why change it? But the only way to move forward successfully is to change and I'm one of those change agents that's working to try to make this world a better place. BREE: Absolutely. Wow, absolutely. That's so wonderful. So [inaudible 00:08:48], I've seen you... Lia, I'm sorry, seen or heard you talk about your experience over time here. What have you seen now that legal employers are doing right in this area? What are some good examples and we'll get to weaving in the intersectionality of well-being, but right now let's stick with the DEI work. What do you see as going right here? LIA DORSEY: Absolutely. I think there's much more focus and intention being put around the advancement and retention of diverse talent, specifically minority talent. Recruiting is still a focus of course, but we realize that diverse talent need meaningful support once they join the firm. So for the listeners, I just challenge them to ask themselves, how are you investing in your diverse talent? Are you having real conversations around the development of your talent because we really need to make serious and meaningful investments. I've always said that the talent is there, but the opportunities aren't always there and the opportunities that I'm talking about are things like introductions to key clients and the ability to develop client relationships. It's getting the high value work. It's being able to tap into the resources for business development and the list goes on, because we all know that these are the types of things that can really impact someone's career. LIA DORSEY: So with that as the backdrop here, a few things that I'm kind of seeing that are having a meaningful impact today. We're seeing the creation of formal DE&I sponsorship programs. So we know the difference between mentorship and sponsorship, right. So a mentor talks to you and a sponsor talks about you and the best DE&I sponsorship programs that I've seen have leaders of the firms and that's the board, it's the managing partner, the executive committee and what I like to call the front page of the [inaudible 00:10:36] sheet lawyers. But that group of people are actually the ones serving as the sponsors. That has two great benefits. One is that it shows the stakeholders that the leaders are invested in the diverse attorney's development and they aren't pushing it off on someone else to do. So we know that law firms are top down organizations, right, but having those at the top who are actively engaged in the DE&I work has a profound impact. LIA DORSEY: The second thing is that that group of people are in a position to make sure that the lawyers are getting those opportunities that are referenced, right. So they actually have the work and they can make those key introductions. So I think sponsorship programs are definitely on the rise and I think that they can be very, very effective and can lead to retention. LIA DORSEY: The second thing that I'm seeing is kind of a focus on culture overall, because we know that culture is a differentiator, right. It's the reason people stay or go. A survey by McKenzie found that the majority of employees have considered the inclusiveness of companies when they're making career decisions. I like to say this, if you ask the people at the top of the organization to describe the culture, I'm sure that what they would say is probably different than what those who aren't at the top would say. I mean, and this is what we like to call that perception gap that often exists between the leaders and the employees and it's how do we get everyone to kind of experience the culture in the same way? So just think about it and ask yourself is your culture by default or by design. BREE: Wow. LIA DORSEY: Right. So we've been talking a lot about the great resignation and the she session, but now we're... I love that term. I mean, it's sad, but it's still a good term. BREE: I love it. I hadn't heard it before. CHRIS: I hadn't either. That's a good one. BREE: She session. Yeah. LIA DORSEY: The she session. Yeah. But now we're talking about the great reboot or the great realization and the reality is that the world is different since the start of the pandemic. People are expecting to work differently and they want companies to kind of meet more in their needs. So this is really an opportunity for firms to reimagine their workplace and their culture. Then the last thing I would say here is the inclusion of staff, right. Inclusion really is inclusion for all and not for some, but we know that law firms typically focus on the benefits of the lawyers and now we're seeing staff being introduced into that conversation, which is long overdue, but it's definitely necessary. If I can just touch just quickly on the things that don't work. BREE: Yeah. Please, please. CHRIS: Yeah. For sure. Lessons learned. LIA DORSEY: When companies don't make DE&I a priority. So when they still think it's just a nice to do, or if the efforts are just performative and they're doing it because their clients are kind of forcing them to do it. So you have to make it a priority. It has to be part of the overall firm strategy. And then if your leaders aren't engaged, and I'll talk a little bit more later about the difference between commitment and engagement, if they aren't engaged, then you're probably not going to have a lot of success. BREE: Right, right. So important. CHRIS: It seems Lia that you're, I feel like in your tone that you are optimistic that the level of engagement and particularly leadership leaning in, is increasing. Is that fair? LIA DORSEY: It is. It is definitely increasing. There were people who just because they could have been checked out of this conversation for such a long time, and now they are checking into the conversation. But I'll also say that just because you're checking in it doesn't always mean that you know what to do and know what to say and that's where folks like me and people who do this kind of work can really help with that. But I am definitely encouraged and I like to look at life as glass, half full with the way that things are progressing and the level of interest by certain stakeholders. It's really encouraging. CHRIS: Yeah. Because I know we're going to talk about this a little bit more, but I just think it's so fascinating how, as you know, even in the work that Bree and I do on the well-being front, so much of what maybe I'm going to say, not the easy part, but building awareness and educating others is one element to it. But ultimately action and taking on systemic barriers become probably the harder part of advancing social change and being a catalyst for cultural shifts, right. Sometimes it takes years, sometimes decades, right, to effectively be able to do that. But I find such interesting similarities in the efforts to advance both one DEI on a track, one well-being on a track and then the intersection of the two, which I think is even more interesting because some of the challenges are obviously unique and differentiated that... Really interesting. CHRIS: You said earlier in the podcast, Lia, that the hardest job that you've had, and that a lot of this has to do with, is the fact that you are trying to get people to change, right, and evolve their thinking and ultimately act in appropriate and effective ways. What works here and how do you get people to not necessarily... Well, I would call it evolve their attitudes and actions as they think about what the right work culture is and what ultimately is the right thing to do. But also, advances kind of where the firm is as a business entity. LIA DORSEY: Yeah. That's such a great question. You can't do this work thinking that you will be able to get people to change, right. There's a great cartoon clip of someone addressing a crowd of people asking who wants to change and everyone raises their hand and then they ask, who wants to change and then all the hands go down, right. That graphic perfectly sums up what it's like doing this work. A lot of people are committed to DE&I and they care and they have good intentions, but not many folks are actively engaged and I said I would talk about the difference between the two. LIA DORSEY: I think right now you'd be hard pressed to find a leader who would actively come out and say that they aren't committed to DE&I, but it's more difficult to get them to actually engage in the work. It's hard to get folks to willingly use their influence and internal capital to help someone else, especially if that individual isn't like them. So they don't look like them and you're not part of my in group, but that said, if we won't change, we cannot sit on the sidelines, right. So I believe that in action or neutrality is complicity. Action is courage and courage is a habit. It's a muscle that you build over time. It's consistently committing to something, knowing that at times you may get it wrong or you may be uncomfortable. I mean, look, sometimes I still get it wrong and I do this for a living, but- BREE: Thank you for saying that, Lia, thank you for saying that. Oh, my gosh. LIA DORSEY: It's just, it's continually showing up and engaging and if you get it wrong, you get up and you continue to try again. So, we spent a lot of times educating our stakeholders and raising awareness around DE&I. What does it mean to really be an ally or an upstander? What do those terms mean, right. What does equity really look like in a law firm? How do you work across difference? How do you have courageous and meaningful conversations with others who are not like you, right. What is bias? How does it show up in your interaction with others? LIA DORSEY: So once you understand some of these issues, hopefully that'll lead to greater empathy and then hopefully that will lead to action. Just in closing, I'll say, so instead of focusing solely on changing minds, focus on changing your systems and changing your processes and changing your policies, because that's also where a lot of this bias breeds, which sometimes folks don't want to change their minds because they're set on something. As my friend, Michelle Silverthorne, she is a popular DE&I and culture consultant says, if you change the system, you'll change the world. So I spend a lot more of my time focusing on changing the systems and then the hearts and minds will follow. BREE: Absolutely. That's just absolutely brilliant. Yeah. I've always thought that if you get the right form in place, things will follow. You ask the right questions on the right forms- LIA DORSEY: Absolutely. BREE: ... And that starts to shift the culture. Yeah. Yeah. So important. So Lia, I'm wondering if you could tell us a little bit, we're going to take a break here in just a second, but you are just coming off as president of the association of law firm, diversity professionals, and I can really hear the polish of your message, which I'm sure that you honed over the time as president. What has that group been focusing on? What are you guys focusing on now? LIA DORSEY: Oh, absolutely. So, for those who may not know, ALFDP is an association of law firm professionals working in the DE&I space in the United States, Canada, and in the U.S. I'm sorry, UK. The association is around what, 16 years old at this point. As you mentioned, I served as president for two years. I served as VP before that. I'm technically still on the board and it is just an absolutely amazing organization just to be able to connect with people who are trying to solve the same problems, right, and achieve the same goals. So let's try to put our heads together and solve it together. But essentially we equip our members with the tools, tips, and talking points that they need to advance DE&I within their own firms and to help get the buy in and the resources that they need and resources is sometimes talent and then sometimes it's money. LIA DORSEY: Another great thing that we do is to collaborate with other DE&I focused organizations as well. Last year, we collaborated with Thompson Reuters and the ACC Foundation on a white paper called the Pandemic Nation: Understanding its impact on lawyers from underrepresented communities. It was a great white paper. I encourage your listeners to download it. It essentially was an in depth look at the impact of the pandemic on the careers and lawyers from underrepresented communities. What's great about that research even now is that it really points out the challenges and the opportunities of those historically excluded lawyers, which is really, really important. Particularly the opportunities part as all of us are slowly returning to the office. LIA DORSEY: There are things that organizations can keep in mind and I'm cleared about saying returning to the office and not returning to work because trust and believe for the past two years, we have been working hard, harder than we ever have. So I really want to remind people, we're talking about returning to the office, but ALFDP keeps on top of the primary issues that everybody is dealing with and then we try to find resources and give tips and tools to help solve some of those challenges. So great, great association and I'm so glad and honored to have been able to lead it. BREE: So, Lia, what is the web address for that in case our listeners are interested in checking it out? LIA DORSEY: Absolutely, www.alfdp.com. CHRIS: Lia, I have to imagine that, and this would be an encouraging sign that your membership has expanded significantly of late. Is that the case? LIA DORSEY: Oh, my gosh. Yes. CHRIS: Right. I mean that's a sign that, again, people are leaning in, that they're looking for a community that can provide national resources to be able to aid them. I mean, this is an organization that I wasn't aware of, but again, gives me cause for optimism that there are change agents that are coming together and sharing best practices that are ultimately going to advance our profession. LIA DORSEY: Absolutely. The membership grows every day and a lot of that is because a lot of these firms are creating a lot of DE&I roles and positions and sometimes they're elevating existing people. So the interest in DE&I overall, and in ALFDP, specifically, is just amazing. CHRIS: Awesome. Well, this is a great place... Let's take a quick break and hear from one of our sponsors and then we'll come back and I'm really excited to kind of start to talk about the intersection of DEI and well-being. So we'll be right back.   — Advertisement: Meet Vera, your firm's virtual ethics risk assessment guide. Developed by ALPS, Vera's purpose is to help you uncover risk management blind spots from client intake to calendaring, to cybersecurity and more. Vera: I require only your honest input to my short series of questions. I will offer you a summary of recommendations to provide course corrections if needed, and to keep your firm on the right path. Generous and discrete, Vera is a free and anonymous risk management guide from ALPS to help firms, like yours, be their best. Visit Vera at alpsinsurance.com/vera.   — CHRIS: All right, we are back with Lia Dorsey, chief diversity equity and inclusion officer at Ogletree Deakins. This is an area that I've been just very excited to delve into, because I know that our board at the Institute for Well-being in Law, you can't talk about well-being unless you're integrating and considering elements of diversity, equity and inclusion as well. Lia, I'd love just to hear more about in your experience, how do they intersect, right, and how do we think about them, I guess not as two tracks, but two tracks, obviously intertwined. LIA DORSEY: Yeah. Mental health and DE&I are definitely closely connected. I would say right now, mental health and wellness and burnout, are very common topics in the workplace today and I think it's great that we're starting to normalize conversations around those topics. Asking for help now is not seen as a weakness and people are having dialogues and they're willing to talk about their personal experiences and their struggles. When we talk about DE&I, diversity, equity and inclusion, there's also another letter that's joining that and that's the B for belonging and that's really the psychological safety that folks feel. Honestly, we weren't talking about these things before, but it is just so important that we're having these conversations now and the fact that all of us spend the majority of our time at work, prioritizing mental health in the workplace is really, really a must. LIA DORSEY: Many of us are managing work related stress and experiencing diminished mental health because of the pandemic and the racial injustice crisis. This is, it's taken a toll on people and more so for those from diverse backgrounds in communities. We talked about, since 2020, there's been a much needed spotlight on racial justice, but it's also highlighted the serious lack of dialogue, addressing specific mental health needs and challenges for those from underrepresented communities. I think just kind of navigating and adapting to those challenges is really important because there's a lot of stress that that community is experiencing because of what's going on and that stress can worsen and it can cause health problems, it can lead to increased mental health conditions and so much more. LIA DORSEY: On the diversity piece of it, folks from diverse backgrounds often face increased bias and microaggressions and other stressors that impact their mental health and that psychological safety. So I think for the intersection between the two, it's really important to focus on that sense of belonging, because it's critical for overall mental health and well-being, because the more we feel like we belong, the more we feel like we can be ourselves, right. BREE: Absolutely. LIA DORSEY: [inaudible 00:27:16] like we have that support, then we can cope effectively with the stress and the difficulties in our lives. So firms and companies really need to prioritize creating this type of culture that supports, not only just mental health and wellness, but that inclusion and that belonging piece as well. I think another way that they intersect, and it's a way that a lot of people don't think about often is when you think about benefits. So really, evaluate the benefits that you are offering at your company. Are they inclusive? Are your wellness benefits available to everyone, or just... And now that we're talking about possibly, returning back to the office, look at your flexible working policies. Who gets to continue to work a hybrid schedule, who's asked to come back into the office, and when you examine that, you'll see how that too impacts diversity. So as we're trying to all come up with these solutions around mental health and wellbeing, it's really important to keep some key DE&I concepts in mind, as well. BREE: Absolutely. I just love what you're saying there around inclusion and belonging. One of the things that I teach about when I talk is also the idea, and this is where I touch upon the intersectionality here, and I talk about the impact on mental health outcomes of what's called thwarted belongingness. I don't know if you've heard that phrase before, but it's also something that's been studied in a precursor or predictor or suicidality. I mean, it's really serious. I think about, I use the example of, if you can't think of anything else, remember what it's like to be a little kid and everybody's being chosen for the basketball team and you're the last one, that was my experience, [inaudible 00:29:04], and just how awful that feels. Can you try to touch into that and have some empathy or compassion? So, yeah. That's brilliant. LIA DORSEY: Absolutely. If I may, there's one thing when you just shared that story and I was the person who got picked last too, I don't have any [inaudible 00:29:19]. But it just made me think about this amazing quote and I'm sure a lot of folks have heard at this point, but it's by Bernie Myers, and it says, "Diversity is being invited to the party and inclusion is being asked to dance." It's that last part that is just so important, right, because it's not good enough just to be seen, right. It's also about being included, being involved, feeling that sense of belonging and so that made me think of that quote, as you just shared [inaudible 00:29:48]. BREE: Yeah, that's great. I'm afraid I also the person [inaudible 00:29:51] not being asked to dance, but anyway, that's another story. So Lia, I really want to dig to hear a little bit about a theme that has run through our conversations here, is about the role of leaders in the profession. Of course there are the CEOs of the big law firms, some of the ones that you have worked for. There's other leaders of the profession that I think really have a responsibility here are the judges and the state bar presidents, people that really are at the forefront of the profession. So what thoughts do you have about how we influence these leaders, that if you care about wellbeing, you have to care about diversity, equity, inclusion, and vice versa. How do you get them to pay attention and to take action to become, I think you were saying, it's not commitment, it's engagement. LIA DORSEY: Absolutely. Absolutely. Deloitte conducted a survey. I believe it was last year, which found that DE&I and employment health and well-being are top priorities for CEOs. I thought that was very, very telling, right. So leaders really need to prioritize their employees total well-being, and that includes their physical, mental, emotional health and it also includes work life balance. But in order to do that leaders must understand and address the unique challenges that their underrepresented employees face. We talked about this a little earlier, so that's the bias, the microaggression, it's the health disparities potentially, it's different mental health treatment and outcomes. Sadly I think that list goes on. So I think you can influence and encourage them, if you will, by just making sure that they understand that this is really important for every single employee, right, and some of the current support programs that they have in place, it's just not enough. LIA DORSEY: Firms have to really take a strategic and a holistic approach to mental health and wellness because there isn't one solution to the problem or silver bullet, but it's really a series of actions that they need to take. Then you need to tie this some kind of way to retention and culture, because we talked about this at the top, culture plays a big role in mental health, right it's about those safe spaces. It's about inclusion, because we know that inclusive workspace are more engaged and productive, but if you can really help your employees feel like they truly, truly belong, then you can help them achieve that greater sense of satisfaction in health and wellness and that can impact retention. LIA DORSEY: So just to kind of sum this up, leaders really need to prioritize their people and they need to create a workplace that fully supports every single employee, even the one from historically excluded groups and they must address those needs. If they want to create connected and inclusive workplaces, they have to address mental health because it's not an option to continue to ignore it. BREE: That's right. CHRIS: Yeah. Well, said. Let's look forward a decade and if we were to do a good job around evolving and changing attitudes and encouraging engagement and affecting hearts and minds, Lia, how will the legal profession be different? LIA DORSEY: Well, for starters, I hope the profession will be more diverse 10 years from now. It's a shame that after all these efforts and initiatives and research and data that the legal profession is still struggling with diversity. I want to see more of this diversity at the top as well. We all know that representation matters and I'd also like to see more accountability, right. How do we hold our leaders to account? I would love to see firms and I'm sure a lot of people are not going to like this, but I would love to see firms link the compensation to the advancement of DE&I, because our corporate partners are already doing this, right. I always say that diversity isn't black and white, it's green, because when you start talking about money, people listen. [inaudible 00:34:10]. So I would love to see that link because I think that will get us more change faster and sooner. BREE: Right. LIA DORSEY: So that's what I would say. CHRIS: Okay, and I'm just curious as we think about one thing, law schools obviously have a role here to play as a kind of a pathway into the profession. I'm just curious on your impressions on how they're doing relative to some of these challenges. Obviously, a lot of our work on the well-being front kind of starts with how folks come into the profession. I got to think that there's some direct corollaries there. LIA DORSEY: It is. One of the things that I've seen, which I think is great, is that our law schools are talking about DE&I earlier in the process or period, because it was a time when they weren't. So the fact that they're introducing and they're talking about these topics in law school, I think is great. Then we're also seeing a connection with some of the law school offerings and partnering with firms and other diversity associations that are out there, NCCA, the DFA and LCLD are three that come to mind. They're really just trying to make sure that particularly the diverse students are well prepared for a full enriched career in a law firm and really looking at how do we make sure that they know what to do and to make sure that they can ask the right questions and to find that mentor early and all of the things that come with that. So I'm really encouraged to see that type of partnering with some of the law schools and some of the other associations that are out there and with some law firms, as well CHRIS: As you said earlier, evolution here or progress I think has been slower than almost all of us believe could have been achieved. Are you optimistic about the future, and if so, what are some of the accelerator drivers that have you particularly excited for what's on the horizon? LIA DORSEY: Oh, Chris, I have to stay optimistic because if I don't, I'll go in my room, sit in the ball and cry. I just think it's really just my outlook. If I think about when I started in this field, not that long ago really, but when I started, we weren't even talking about some of the stuff that we're talking about even now and we were not as bold then as we are now. So, that definitely gives me hope. Some of the people that I see who are starting to do this work gives me hope. The fact that we're seeing managing partners and CEOs who are standing up and speaking up and actually putting that capital and using it to help advance it, all of that gives me hope. LIA DORSEY: I don't think that we will get there in my lifetime, but I am happy to be a person right now and a change agent who's really trying to plant the seeds that hopefully folks will continue to water. I tell people, this is a marathon. It didn't take us overnight to get into this and it's not going to take us overnight to get out of it. It's going to take some time, but I am very, very hopeful. CHRIS: Awesome. Well again, thank you so much for joining us. Whenever we can have a disruptor for good or a professional troublemaker on the podcast, we are all in and Lia, we certainly commend you for your longtime commitment, the impact that you're having, the willingness to serve and leadership structures and challenging the status quo, improving cultures, right. I mean, you are doing critical work, not just for your firm in particular, but well beyond in terms of improving this profession and the ability for this profession to ultimately serve the legal needs of the country, all of the legal needs of the country, right, not just certain legal needs of our country. So again, thank you so much for joining us on the podcast. BREE: Thank you. Wonderful. Wonderful. LIA DORSEY: Thank you, Bree. Thank you, Chris. I have enjoyed my time immensely and I would be happy to come back if ever you would have me. This has been great and I love this so much. I can talk about this all day. I feel like our time just flew by. So thank you. Thank you again for having me. CHRIS: It certainly did and we will be back in a couple weeks with one final installment of kind of our series on the intersection of diversity, equity, inclusion, and well-being. Thanks to all of our friends out there for listening in and if you have ideas, continue to reach out to Bree or I for suggestions on future speakers. BREE: Absolutely. CHRIS: So everyone be well out there. Thank you. BREE: Take good care everyone. Bye-bye.  

Chris switched from Trello over to Linear for product management and talks about prioritizing backlogs. Steph shares and discusses a tweet from Curtis Einsmann that super resonated with the work she's doing right now: "In software engineering, rabbit holes are inevitable. You will research libraries and not use them. You'll write code just to delete it. This isn't a waste; sometimes, you need to go down a few wrong paths to get to the right one." This episode is brought to you by BuildPulse (https://buildpulse.io/bikeshed). Start your 14-day free trial of BuildPulse today. Linear (https://linear.app/) Curtis Einsmann Tweet (https://twitter.com/curtiseinsmann/status/1521451508943843329) Louie Bacaj Tweet (https://twitter.com/LBacaj/status/1478241322637033474?s=20) Become a Sponsor (https://thoughtbot.com/sponsorship) of The Bike Shed! Transcript: AD: Flaky tests take the joy out of programming. You push up some code, wait for the tests to run, and the build fails because of a test that has nothing to do with your change. So you click rebuild and you wait. Again. And you hope you're lucky enough to get a passing build this time. Flaky tests slow everyone down, break your flow and make things downright miserable. In a perfect world, tests would only break if there's a legitimate problem that would impact production. They'd fail immediately and consistently, not intermittently. But the world's not perfect, and flaky tests will happen, and you don't have time to fix them all today. So how do you know where to start? BuildPulse automatically detects and tracks your team's flaky tests. Better still, it pinpoints the ones that are disrupting your team the most. With this list of top offenders, you'll know exactly where to focus your effort for maximum impact on making your builds more stable. In fact, the team at Codecademy was able to identify their flakiest tests with BuildPulse in just a few days. By focusing on those tests first, they reduced their flaky builds by more than 68% in less than a month! And you can do the same because BuildPulse integrates with the tools you're already using. It supports all the major CI systems, including CircleCI, GitHub Actions, Jenkins, and others. And it analyzes test results for all popular test frameworks and programming languages, like RSpec, Jest, Go, pytest, PHPUnit, and more. So stop letting flaky tests slow you down. Start your 14-day free trial of BuildPulse today. To learn more, visit buildpulse.io/bikeshed. That's buildpulse.io/bikeshed. CHRIS: Good morning, and welcome to Tech Talk with Steph and Chris. Today at the top of the hour, it's tech traffic hits. STEPH: Ooh, tech traffic. [laughs] I like that statement. CHRIS: Yeah. The Git lanes are clogged up with...I don't know. I got nothing. STEPH: [laughs] Hello and welcome to another episode of The Bike Shed, a weekly podcast from your friends at thoughtbot about developing great software. I'm Steph Viccari. CHRIS: And I'm Chris Toomey. STEPH: And together, we're here to share a bit of what we've learned along the way. So, hey, Chris, what's new in your world? CHRIS: What's new in my world? Actually, I have a specific new thing that I can share, which is, as of the past week, I would say, switched from Trello over to Linear for product management. It's been great. It was a super straightforward transfer. They actually had an importer. We lost some of the comment threads on the Trello cards. But that was easy enough to like each Linear ticket has a link back to Trello. So it's easy enough to keep the continuity. But yeah, we're in a whole new world, a system actually built for maintaining a product backlog, and, man, it shows. Trello was a bunch of lists and cards and stuff that you could link between, which was cool. But Linear is just much more purpose-built and already very, very nice. And we're very happy with the switch. STEPH: I feel like you came in real casual with that news, but that is big news, that you did a switch. [laughter] CHRIS: How are you going to bury the lead like that? You switched project management...[laughter] I actually didn't think it was...I'm excited about it but low-key excited, which is weird because I do like productivity and task management software. So you would think I would be really excited about this. But I've also tried enough of them historically to know that that's never going to be the thing that actually makes or breaks your team's productivity. It can make things worse, but it can't make you great. That's the thing that I believe. And so it's a wonderful piece of software. I'm very excited about it but -- STEPH: Ooh, I like that. It can make you worse, but it doesn't make you great. That's so true, yeah, where it causes pain. Well, and it does make sense. You've been complaining a bit about the whole login with Trello and how that's been frustrating. But I haven't even heard of Linear. That's just...that's, I mean, you're just doing what you do where you bring that new-new. I haven't heard of Linear before. CHRIS: I try to live on the cutting edge. Actually, I deeply try to not live on the cutting edge at this point in my life. That early adopter wave, no, no, no, that's not for me anymore. But I've known a few folks who've moved to Linear. And everyone that I've spoken to who has moved to it has been like, "Yeah, it's been great." I've not heard anything negative. And I've heard or experienced negative things about every other product management tool out there. And so, it seemed like an easy thing. And it was a low-cost enough switch in terms of opportunity costs or the like, it took the effort of someone on our team moving those cards over and setting up the new system and training, but it was relatively straightforward. And yeah, we're super happy with it. And it feels different now. I feel like I can see the work in a different way which is interesting. I think we had brought in a Chrome extension for Trello. I think it's like Hello Epics or something like that that allows...it abuses the card linking functionality in Trello and repurchases that feature as an epic management thing. But it's quarter-baked is how I would describe it, or it's clearly built on top of existing things that were not intended to be used exactly in that way. So it does a great job. Hello Epics does a great job of trying to make something like parent-child list management stuff happen in Trello. But it's always going feel like an afterthought, a secondary feature, something that's bolted on. Whereas in Linear, it's like, no, no, we absolutely have the idea of projects, of course, and you can see burndown charts and things. And the thing that I do want to be careful about is not leaning too much into management. Linear has the idea of cycles or sprints, as many other folks think of them, or iterations or whatever you want to call them. But we've largely not been working in that mode. We've just continued to work through the next up list; that's it. The next up list should be prioritized and well defined at the top and roughly in priority order. So just pick up the next card and work on it. And we just do that every single day. And now we're in a piece of software that has the idea of cycles, and I'm like, oh, this is vaguely interesting. Do we want to do that? Oh, but if you're going to do that, you probably do some estimation, right? And I was like, oh no, now we're into a place that's...okay, I have feelings. I got to decide how to approach that. And so, I am intrigued. And I wonder if we could just say like ten carts that's how many come into a cycle, and that's it. And we use the loosest heuristics possible to define how we structure a cycle so that we don't fall into the trap of, oh, what's our roadmap going to look like six months from now? JK, what's anything going to look like six months from now? That's not a knowable fact. STEPH: I was just thinking where you said that you're moving into sprints or cycles, and then there's that push, well, now you got to estimate. And I just thought, do you? Do you have to estimate? [laughs] CHRIS: We need a burndown chart through 2024, and it must be meticulously accurate down to the hour. STEPH: I think meticulously wrong is how that goes. [laughs] CHRIS: Which is the best kind of wrong. If you're going to be wrong, be meticulous about it. STEPH: Be thorough about it. [laughs] Yeah, the team that I'm on right now, we have our bi-weekly planning, and we go through the board, and we pull stuff in. But there's never a discussion about estimation. And I hadn't really appreciated that until just now. How we don't think about how long is this going to take? We just talked about, well, what's in-flight? And how much work do people still have going on? And then here's the list of things we can pull in. But there's always a list that you can go back to. Like, it's very...we pull in the minimum and knowing that if we run out of work, there's another place to go where there's stuff that's organized. And I just love that cadence, that idea of like, let's not try to make guesses about the future; let's just have it lined up and ready for us to go when we're ready to pull it in. Although I know, that's also coming from a very developer's perspective, and there are product managers who are trying to communicate as to when features are going to get out into the world. So I get that there's a balance, but I still have strong feelings and hesitations around estimating work. CHRIS: Well, I feel like there is a balance there. And so many things in history are like, well, this is an overcorrection against that, and that's an overcorrection against this. And the idea that we can estimate our work that far out into the future that's just obviously false to me based on every project I've ever worked on that has tried to do it. And it has always failed without question. But critically, there is the necessity to sync up work and like, oh, marketing needs to plan the launch of this feature, and it's a critical one. What's it going to look like? When's it going to be ready? You know, we're trying to go for an event, it's not just know...we developers never estimate anything past the immediate moment where like, that's not acceptable. We got to find a middle ground here. But where that middle ground is, is interesting. And so, just operating in the sort of we do work as it comes up is the easiest thing because no one's lying about anything at that point. But sometimes you got to make some guesses and make some estimations. And then it gets into the murky area of I believe with 75% confidence that in three weeks, we will have this feature ready. But to be clear, I said with 75% confidence that means one-quarter of the time; we will not be there at that date. What does that mean? What does that failure mode look like? Let's talk about that. And can you have honest, open, transparent, useful conversations there? That's the space that it becomes more subtle if you need to do that. STEPH: You're reminding me of a conversation that I had with someone where they shared with me some very aggressive team goals. And it was a very friendly conversation. And they're like, "How do you feel about aggressive goals?" And I was like, "Well, it depends. How do you feel about aggressive failure?" Because then once I know where you stand there, then we can talk about aggressive goals. Now, if we're being aggressive, but then we fail to achieve that, and it's one of those, okay, we didn't meet the goal that we'd expected, but everything is fine, and it's not a big deal, then I am okay. Sure, let's shoot for the stars. But if it's one of those, we are communicating these goals to the outside world, and it's going to become incredibly important that we meet these goals, and if we don't, then things are going to go on fire, people are going to be in trouble, and it's just going to be awful, then let's not set aggressive goals. Let's not box ourselves into a space where we are setting ourselves up to fail or feel pain in a meaningful way. I agree that estimations are important, especially in terms of you need to collaborate with other departments, and then also just to provide some sense of where the product is headed and when things may be released. I think estimations then just become problematic when they do become definite, and they're based on so many unknowns, and then when I don't know is not an answer. So if someone asked, "What's your estimate for this?" And the very honest real answer is I don't know, like, we haven't done this type of work before, or these are all the unknowns, and then someone's like, "Well, let's just put an estimation of like two weeks on it," and they just sort of try to force-fit it into being what they want, then that's where it starts to just feel incredibly problematic. CHRIS: Yeah, estimation is a very murky area that we could spend entire episodes talking about, and in fact, I think we have a handful of times. So with that, Linear has been great. We're going to see just how much or how little estimation we actually want to do. But it's been a very nice addition to the toolset. And I'll let you know as we deepen our usage of it what the experience is like, but that's the main thing that's new in my world. What's new in your world? STEPH: Well, before we bounce over to my world, you said something that has intrigued me that has also made me start reflecting on some of the ways that I like to work. And you'd mentioned that you have this prioritized backlog that people are pulling tickets from. And I don't know exactly if there's a planning session or how that looks, but I have recognized that when I am working with a team, and we don't have any planning session, if everybody is just pulling from this backlog, that's being prioritized by someone on the team, that I find that a bit overwhelming. Because the types of work being done can vary so drastically that I find I'm less able to help my colleagues or my teammates because I don't have the context for what they're working on. It surprises me. I'm like, oh, I didn't even know we're working on that feature, or I don't have the context for what's the problem that we're trying to solve here. And it makes it just a lot harder to review and then have conversations with them. And I get overwhelmed in that environment. And I've recognized that about myself based on previous projects that were more similar to that versus if I'm on a project where the team does get together every so often, even if it's high level to be like, hey, here's the theme of the tickets that we're working on, or here's just some of the stuff, then I feel much more prepared for the work that is coming in and to be able to context switch and review. And yeah, so I've kind of learned that about myself. I'm curious, are you similar, or how does that work for you? CHRIS: I'm definitely similar. And I think probably the team is closer to what you're describing. So we do have a planning session every week, just a quick 30-minute scan through the backlog, look at the things that are coming up and also the larger themes. Previously, Epics and Trello now projects and Linear. But talking about what are the bigger pieces of work that we're moving on, and then what are the individual tickets associated with that that we'll be expecting to work on in the next week? And just making sure that everyone has broad clarity around what that feature set is. Also, we're a very small team at this point. Still, we're four people total, but one of the developers is on a break for a couple of weeks this summer. And so there are really only three of us that are driving on the code. And so, with three of us working on the projects, we try very intentionally to have significant overlap between the various...like, we don't want any one person to own any portion of things at this point. And so we're doing a good amount of pairing to cross-pollinate and make sure everyone's...not everyone's aware of everything, but at least one other person is sufficiently aware of everything between the three of us. And I think that's been working well. I don't think we have any major gaps, save for the way that we're doing our mobile architecture that's largely managed by one of the developers on the team and a contractor that we're working with to help do a lot of the implementation. That's a known we chose to silo that thing. We've accepted the cost of that for now. And architecturally, the rest of us are aware of it, but we're not like in the Swift code writing anything because I don't know how to write Swift at this point. I'd love to learn it. I hear good things about the language. [12:26] So yeah, I think conceptually very similar to what you're describing of still want to have people be able to review. Like, I don't want to put up a PR and people be like, I don't know, that looks like code, I guess. I'm not sure what it does. Like, I want it to be very...I want us all to be roughly on the same page, and thus far, we are. As the team grows, that will become trickier to maintain because there are just inherently probably more things that are moving, more different feature areas and surface area that we're tackling in any given week, or there are different ways to approach that. I know you've talked about having a limited number of themes for a given cycle, so that's an idea that can pop up. But that's something that we'll figure out as we get further. I think I'm happy with where we're at right now, so yeah, that's the story there. STEPH: Okay, cool. Yeah, all of that resonates with me, and thinking about it a little more deeply in this moment, I'm realizing I think something you said helped me put this together where when I'm reviewing someone's change, I'm not necessarily just looking to see does your code work? I'm going to trust you that your code works. I may have thoughts about design and other things, but I really want to understand more what's the change to the product that we're making? What's the goal that we're looking to achieve? How are we measuring this? And so if I don't have that context, that's what contributes to that feeling of like, hard context switching of not just context switching, but now I have to level myself up to then understand the problem that's being solved by this. Versus had I known some of the themes going into that particular cycle or sprint, I would have felt far more prepared for that review session versus having to then dig through all the data and/or tickets or talk to someone. Well, switching back to what's going on in my world, I have a particular tweet that I want to share, and it's one that Joël Quenneville brought to my attention. And it just resonates so much with all the type of work that I'm doing right now. So I'm going to read the tweet, and then we'll link to it in the show notes as well. But it's from Curtis Einsmann, and Curtis wrote: "In software engineering, rabbit holes are inevitable. You will research libraries and not use them. You'll write code just to delete it. This isn't a waste; sometimes, you need to go down a few wrong paths to get to the right one." And that describes all the work that I'm doing right now. It's a lot of exploratory, a lot of data-driven work, and finding ways that we can reduce the time that it takes to run RSpec on CI. And it also ties in nicely to one of the things that I think we talked about last week, where we discovered that a number of files have a high runtime variance. And I've really dug into the data there to understand, okay, is it always specific files that have these high runtime variants? Are there any obvious contributions to what's causing this? Are we making real network calls that then could sometimes take a long time to return? And the result is there's nothing obvious. They're giant files. The number of SQL commands that are being run for each file varies drastically. They're all high, but it's still very different. There's no single fact about these files that has really been like, yes, this is what's causing these files to have such a runtime variance. And so while I've been in the data, I'm documenting it, and I'm making a list and putting it all together in a ticket so at least it's there to look at later. But I'm going to move on. It's one of those I would love to know what's causing this. I would love to address it because it would put us in an ideal state for how we're distributing tests, which would have a significant impact on our runtime. But it also feels a little bit like chasing my tail because I'm worried, like with some of the other experiments that we've done in the past where we've addressed tentpoles, that as soon as you address the issue for one or two files, then other files start having the same problem. And you're just going to continue to chase and chase, and I don't want to be in that. So upfront, this was one of those; hey, let's look at the data. If there's something obvious, let's address it; if not, move on. So I'm at that point today where I'm wrapping up all of that data, and then I'm going to move on, move on to the next thing. CHRIS: There's deep truth in that tweet that you shared at the start of this segment. The idea like if we knew the work that we had to do at the front, yeah, we would just do that, but often, we don't. And so, being able to not treat it as a failure when something doesn't work out is, I think, so critical. I think to expand on the idea just a tiny bit, the idea of the scientific method, failure is totally an option and is part of science. I remember watching MythBusters, and Adam Savage is just kind of like, "Failure is always an option," and highlighting that as part of it. Like, it's an outcome. You've learned something. You have a new data point. You can take that and then carry it forward with you. But it's rough in the moment. And so, I do think that this is a worthwhile thing to meditate on. And it's something that I've had to revisit a handful of times in my career of just like, man, I feel like I've just been spinning my tires all week. I'm like, we know what we want to get done, but just each approach I take isn't working for one reason or another. And then, finally, you get to the end. And then you've got this paragraph-long summary of all the things that didn't work in your PR and one-line change sort of thing. And those are painful, but they're part of the game. Like, that is unavoidable. I have not found a way to just know how to do the work upfront always. I would love that. I would sign up for whatever seminar was selling that. I wouldn't. I would know that that seminar is a lie, actually. But broadly, I'm intrigued by the idea if someone were selling that, I'd be like, well, I mean, pitch me on it. Tell me why I should believe you; I don't, just to be clear. But yeah. STEPH: This project has really helped me embrace always setting a goal or a question upfront about what I'm wanting to achieve or what I'm looking to answer because a number of times while Joël and I have been spelunking through data...And then so originally, with the saga, we started out with why doesn't our math match reality? We understand that if these tests are distributed perfectly across the CPUs, then that should cut the runtime in half. But yet, we weren't seeing that even though we had addressed the tentpoles. So we dug into understanding why. And the answer is because they're not perfectly distributed, and it's because of the runtime variance. And that was a critical moment to look back and say, "Did we achieve the goal?" Yes, we identified the problem. But once you see a problem, it's just so easy to dig in and keep going. It's like, well, now I want to know what's causing these files to have a runtime variance. But it's one of those we achieved our goal. We acknowledged upfront that we wanted to at least understand why. Let's make a second decision, do we keep going? And I'm at that point where, frankly, I probably dug in a little more than I should because I'm stubborn. But I'm recognizing that now's the time to back away and then go back and move on to the next high-priority item, which is converting for funsies; I'll share. The next thing is converting Test::Unit test over to RSpec because we have, I think, around 25 tests that are written in Test::Unit. And we want to move them over to RSpec because that particular just step in the build process takes a good three to four minutes. And part of that is just booting up Rails and then running the tests very fast. And we're underutilizing the machine that's running them because it's only 25 tests, but there are 86 CPUs to run it. So we'd really like to combine those 25 tests with the rest of the RSpec suite and drop that step. So then that should add minimal time to the overall build but then should take us down at least a couple of minutes. And then also makes it easier to manage and help folks so that way, there's one consistent testing framework that's in use versus having to manage some of these older tests. CHRIS: It's funny; I think it was just two episodes back where we talked about why RSpec, and I think both of us were just like, well yeah. But I mean, if there are tests and another, like, it's fine, you just leave them with the exception that if there's like 2% of our tests are in Test::Unit, and everything else is in RSpec, yeah, maybe that that conversion efforts seem totally worth it. But again, I think as you're describing that, what I'm hearing is just like the scientific method, just being somewhat structured in the approach to what's the hypothesis? And what's the procedure we're going to use to determine if that hypothesis is true or false? And then what do we do? And then what are the results? And then you just do that on loop. But being not just sort of exploring. Sometimes you have to be on exploratory mode. But I definitely find that that tiny bit of rigor of just like, wait, okay, before I actually do anything, what do I think is going on here? What's my guess? And then, okay, if that guess were true, what would I be able to observe in the world? Okay, here we go. And just that tiny bit of structure is so...it sometimes feels highly formal to go into that mode and be like, no, no, no, let me take a step back. Let me write down my thoughts. I'm going to have a little checklist and do the thing. But I've never regretted doing it. I will say that. I have deeply regretted not doing it. I feel like I should make a list of things that fit that structure. I've never regretted committing in Git ever. That's been great. I've always been able to unwind it, but I've never been able to not unwind it or the opposite. I've regretted not committing. I have not regretted committing. I have regretted not writing out my hypothesis or approach. I have not regretted doing it. And so, yeah, this feels like it falls firmly in that category of like, it's worth just a tiny bit of structure. There's a reason it is the scientific method. STEPH: Yeah, I agree. I've not regretted documenting upfront what it is I look to achieve and how I think I'm going to answer the question. That has been immensely helpful. Because then I also forget, like, two weeks ago, I'll be like, wasn't there a question around why this was happening, and I need to understand? And all of that was so context-heavy that as soon as I'm out of the thick of it, I completely forget it. So if I care about it deeply or if I want to be able to revisit it, then I need to document it for myself. It's given me a lot of empathy for people who do more scientific research around, oh my gosh, like, you have to document everything you do and then still be able to prove it five years from now or however long. I'm just throwing out numbers. And it needs to be organized enough that someone, if they do question your research that, then you have it there. My research documents would not withstand scrutiny at this point because they are still just more personal notes. But yes, it's given me a lot of empathy and respect for people who do run very serious research, experiments, and trials, and then have to be able to prove it to the world. Pivoting just a bit, there's a particular topic that resonated with both you and I; in fact, it's a particular tweet. And, Louie, I do apologize if I mispronounce your last name, but Louie Bacaj. And we'll include a link in the show notes to the tweet, but Louis shared, "I managed multiple engineering teams before quitting tech. Now that I quit, I can speak freely. Here are 12 things your manager may not be telling you, but I know for a fact will help you." So there are a number of interesting discussions and comments that are in this thread. The one thing in particular that really caught my attention is number 10, and it's "Advocate for junior developers." So they said that their friend reminded them that just because you don't have 10-plus years of experience does not mean that they won't be good. Without junior engineers on the team, no one will grow. Help others grow; you'll grow too. And that's the part that I love so much is that without junior engineers on the team, no one will grow because that was very thought-provoking for me. It's something that I find that I agree with deeply, but I hadn't really considered why I agree with that so much. So I'm excited to dive into that topic with you. And then, as a second topic to go along with that is, can juniors start with a remote team? I think that's one of the other questions when you and I were chatting about this. And I'm intrigued to hear your thoughts. CHRIS: A bunch of stuff there. Starting with the tweet, I love elements of this. Some of it feels like it's intentionally somewhat provocative. So like, without junior engineers on the team, no one will grow. That feels maybe a little bit past the bar because I think we can technically grow, and we can build things and whatnot. But I think what feels deeply true to me is truly help others grow; you'll grow too. The act of mentoring, of guiding, of training, of helping someone on their journey will inherently help you grow and, I think, change the way that you think about the work. I think the beginner mind, the earlier in the career folks coming into a codebase, they will see things fundamentally differently in a really useful way. It's possible that along your career, you've just internalized things. You've been like, yeah, no, that was weird. But then I smashed my head against it for a while, and now I understand this thing. And it just makes sense to me. But it's like, that thing actually doesn't make sense. You have warped your mind to match the thing, not, quote, unquote, "come to understand it." This is sounding too judgmental to people who've been in the industry for a while, but I found this of myself. Or I can just take for granted things that took a long time to adapt my head to, and if anything, maybe I should have pushed back a little more. And so, I find that junior engineers can be a really fantastic lens for the complexity of a project. Like, the world is truly a complex place, and that's just true. But our job as software engineers is to tame that complexity and manage it. And so, I love the mindset that can come or the conversations that can come out of that. And it's much like test-driven development is a pressure on the complexity of your code, having junior engineers join the team and needing to explain how all of the different features work, and what the overall architecture is, and the message passing under this and that, it's a really useful conversation to have. And so that "Help others grow; you'll grow too" feels deeply, deeply true to me. STEPH: Yeah, I couldn't agree more in regards to how juniors really help our team and especially, as you mentioned, with complexity and ¬having those conversations. Some of the other things that have come to mind for me as well around the importance of having junior developers on your team...and maybe it's not specifically they're junior developers but that you just have a variety of experience on your team. It's going to help you lean into a culture of learning because you have people that are at different stages of their career. And so you want an environment where people can learn together, that they can fail together, and they can be public about it. And having people that are at different stages of their career will lead, well, at least ideally, it'll lead to more pair programming. It's going to lead to more productive code reviews because then people can ask more questions around why did you choose this, or why are you doing that? Versus if everybody is at the same level, then they may just intuitively have reasons that they think someone did something. But it takes someone that's a bit new to say, "Hey, why did you choose this?" or to bring up some other ideas or ways that they could pursue it. They may bring in new ideas for, like, why has the team always done something this way? Let's think about new ways that we could do this. Or maybe this is really unfriendly, the way that we're doing this, not just for junior people but for people that are new to the team. And then there's typically less knowledge siloing because then you're going to want to pair the newer folks with the more experienced folks. So that way, you don't have this more senior developer who's then off in a corner working by themselves. And it's going to improve your communication skills. There's just...I realized I'm just rambling because I feel like there are so many benefits that go along with having a variety of people on your team, especially in terms of experience. And that just leads to such a better learning environment and, ultimately, better software and better products. And yet, I find that so many companies won't embrace people that are newer to software. They always want the senior developers. They want the 10x-er or whatever those are. They want the people that have many, many years of experience. And there's so much value that comes from mentoring the next group of developers. And it's incredibly frustrating to me that one, companies often aren't open to it. But honestly, more than that, as long as you're upfront and honest about like, hey, this is the team that we need right now to build what we're looking to build, I can get past that; I can understand that. But please don't then mislead people and say that you're a junior-friendly team, and then not be prepared. I feel like some teams will go so far as to say, "Yes, we are junior-friendly," and they may even tweak their interview process to where it is a bit more junior-friendly. But then, by the time that person joins the team, they're really not prepared. They don't have an onboarding plan. They don't have a mentorship plan. And then they fail that person because that person has worked hard to get there. And they've worked hard to bring that person onto the team, but then they don't have a plan from there. And I've seen it too many times. And it just frustrates me so much because it puts that junior person in such a vulnerable state where they really have to be an incredible self-advocate to then overcome those hurdles from a lack of preparation on that company's part. Okay, I think that's my event. I'm sure I could vent about this a lot more, but I will cut it off there. That's the heart of it. CHRIS: I do think, like, with anything else, it's something that we have to be intentional about. And so what you're saying of like, yeah, we're a junior-friendly company, but then you're just hiring folks, trying to find folks that may work at a slightly lower pay grade, and that's what that means to you. So like, no, no, that's not what this is. This needs to be something different. We need to have a structure and an organization that can support folks at different points in their career. But it's interesting to me to think about the sort of why of it. And the earlier part of this conversation, we talked about some of the benefits that can come organizationally from it, and I do sincerely believe in that. But I also believe that it is fundamentally one of the best ways to find really talented people early on in their career and be in a position to hire them where maybe later on in their career, that just wouldn't happen naturally. And I've seen this play out in a number of organizations. I went to Northeastern University for my college, and Northeastern is famous for the co-op program. Northeastern sounds really fancy. Now I learned that they have like a 7% acceptance rate for college applications right now, which is wildly low. When I went to Northeastern, it was not so fancy. So just in case anyone's hearing that and they're like, "Oh, Northeastern, wow." I'm not that fancy. [laughs] But they did have the co-op then, and they still have it now. And the co-op really is a differentiating thing. You do three six-month rotations. And it is this fundamental differentiator in terms of when you're graduating. Particularly, I was in mechanical engineering. I came out, and I actually knew what that meant in the world. And I'd used Outlook, and I knew what a water cooler was and how to talk near one because that's a critical thing to learn in the world. And really transformative experience for me. But also, a thing that I observed was many of my friends ended up working at companies that they had co-opted for. I'm one of those people. I would say more than 50% of my friends ended up with a position at a company that they had done a co-op rotation with. And it really worked out fantastically. That organization and the individual got to try things out, experience. And then, I ended up staying at that company for a number of years, and it was a wonderful experience. But I don't know that I would have ended up there otherwise. That's not necessarily the way that would have played out. And similarly like, thoughtbot has the apprenticeship. And I have seen so many wonderful developers start at that very early point in their career. And there was this wonderful structure around them joining the thoughtbot team, intentional, structured, supported. And then those folks went on to be some of the most talented developers that I've ever worked with at a wonderfully talented organization. And so the story of like, you should do this, organizations. This is a thing that you should invest in for yourself, not just for the individual, like, for both. Everybody wins in this case, in my mind. I will say, though, in terms of transparency, I currently manage a team of three developers. And we hired very intentionally for senior folks this early on in where we're at. And that was an intentional choice because I do believe that if you're going to be hiring more junior developers, that needs to be something that you do very intentionally, that you have a support structure in place, that you're able to invest the time in where they're at and make sure we have sort of... I think a larger team makes more sense to bring juniors into broadly. That's the thing that I'm saying out loud that I'm like, I should push on that a little bit. Is that true? Do I really believe that? But I think so, my actions obviously point to it. But it is an interesting trade-off space of how do you think about that? My hope is that as we grow as an organization, that we would then very intentionally start hiring folks in a more junior, mid-level to junior and be very intentional about how we support them, bring them into the organization, et cetera. I do believe it is a win-win situation for everyone when done with intention and with focus. STEPH: That's such an interesting bit that you just said because I very much appreciate when companies recognize do we have the bandwidth to support someone that's more junior? Because at thoughtbot, we go through periods where we don't have our apprenticeship that's open because we recognize we're not in a place that we can support someone. And we don't want to bring someone in unless we can help them be successful. I very much admire that and appreciate that about companies when they can perform that self-assessment. I am so intrigued. You'd mentioned being a smaller team. So you more intentionally hire senior developers. And I think that also makes sense because then you need to build up who's going to be in that mentorship pool? Because then people could leave, people could take vacations, and so then you need to have that support system in place. But yeah, I don't know what that then perfect balance is. It's like, okay, so then as soon as you have like five people available to mentor or interested in mentorship, it's like, then do you start bringing in the conversation of like, let's bring in someone that we can help build up and help them be successful and join our team? And I don't know what that magical number is. I do think it's important for teams to reflect to say, "Can we take on someone that's junior?" All the benefits of having someone that's junior. And then just being very honest and then having a plan for once that junior person does arrive. What does their career path look like while they've joined that team, and who's going to be that person that's going to help them level up? So not only make that choice upfront of yes, we are bringing someone on but let's also think about like the first six months of their work here at the company and what that's going to look like. It feels like an important step that a lot of companies fail to do. And I think that's why there are so many articles that then are like, hey, if you're a junior dev, here's all the things that you should do to be the best junior dev. That's fabulous. And we're constantly shoring up junior devs to be like, hey, here's all the things that you need to be great at. But we don't have as many conversations around; hey, here's all the things that your manager or the rest of your team should be great at to then support you equally as you are also doing your best to meet them. Like, they need to meet you halfway. And I'm not completely unsympathetic to the plight; I understand. It's often where I've seen with teams the more senior developers that have very strong mentorship communication skills are then also the teammates that get pulled into all the meetings and all the different projects, so then they are less available to be that mentor. And then that's how this often fails. So I don't think anybody is going into this intentionally, but yet, it's what happens for when someone is new and joining a team, and it hasn't been determined the next six months what that person's onboarding and career path looks like. Circling back just a bit, there's the question around, can juniors start with a remote team? I can go first. And I'm going to say unequivocally yes. There's no reason a junior can't start with a remote team. Because all the things that I feel strongly about come down to how is your team going to plan for this person? And how are they going to support this person? And all the benefits that you get from being in an office with a team, I think those do exist. And frankly, for someone like myself, it can be easier to establish a bond with someone that you get to see each day, get to see in person. You can walk up to their desk and can say, "Hey, I've got a question for you." But I think all those benefits just need to be transferred into a remote-friendly way. So I think it does ratchet up how intentional you have to be with your team and then onboarding a junior developer. But I absolutely think it's doable, and we should do it. CHRIS: You went with unequivocally yes as your answer. I'm going to go with a qualified maybe as my answer. I want this to be true, and I think it can be true. But I think it takes all the more intentionality than even what we've been describing. To shift the question around a little bit, what does remote work mean? It doesn't just mean we're doing the work, but we're separate. I think remote work inherently is at its best when we also are largely async first. And so that means more structured writing. The nature of the conversation tends to be more well-formed in each interaction. So it's like I read a big document, and then I pass it over to you. And at your leisure, you respond to it with a bunch of notes, and then it comes back to me. And I think that mode of interaction, while absolutely wonderful and something that I love, I think it fits really well when you're a little bit further on in your career when you understand things a little bit better. And I think the dance of conversation is more useful earlier on and so forth. And so, for someone who's newer to a team, I think having the ability to ask a quick question over and over is really useful to someone who's early on in their career. And remote, again, I think it's at its best when it's async. And those two are sort of at odds. And so it's that mild tension that gives me pause of like, something that I think that makes remote work great I do think is at least a hurdle that you would have to get over in supporting someone who's a little bit newer. Because I want to be deeply present for someone who's newer to their journey so that they can ask a lot of questions so that I am available to be interrupted regularly. I loved at thoughtbot sitting next to someone and being their mentor and being like, yeah, anytime you want, just tap on my desk. If I got my headphones on, that doesn't mean I'm ignoring you; it means I just need to make the sounds go away for a minute because that's the only way my brain will work. But feel free to just tap on my desk or whatever and grab my attention for a moment. And I'm available for that. That's an intentional choice. That's breaking up my continuity of the day, but we're choosing that for a reason. I think that's just a little harder to do in a remote context and all the more so if we're saying, hey, we're going to try this async thing where we write structured documents, and we communicate in these larger, more well-formed, communicates back and forth. But I do believe it can be done. I think it should be done. I just think it's all the harder for all of those reasons. STEPH: I agree that definitely makes it harder. But I'm going to push a little bit and say that when you mentioned being deeply present, I think we can be deeply present with someone and be remote. We can reduce the async requirements. So if you are someone that is more senior or more accustomed to the team, you can fall back to more of those async ways to communicate. But if someone is new, and needs more mentorship, then let's just set up time where we're going to literally hang out for a couple of hours each day or whatever pairing environment works best for them because pairing can also be exhausting. But hey, we're going to have a check-in each day; maybe we close out each day and touchpoint. And feel free to still message me and interrupt me. Like, you're going to just heighten your availability, even though it is remote. And be aware, like, hey, this person could message me at more times, and I'm okay with that. I have opted into this form of communication. So I think we just take that mindset of, hey, there's this person next to me, and I'm their mentor to like, hey, they're not next to me, but I'm still their mentor, and I'm still here for them. So I agree that it's harder. I think it falls on us and the team and the mentors to change ourselves versus saying to juniors, "Hey, sorry, it's remote. That's not going to work for you." It totally works for them. It's us, the mentors, that need to figure out how to make it work. I will say being on that mentor side that then not being able to see someone so if they are next to me, I can pick up on body language and facial expressions, and I can tell when somebody's stuck. And I can see that they're frustrated, or I can see that now's a good time for me to just be like, "Hey, how's it going? What are you working on? Or do you need help with something?" And I don't have that insight when I'm away. So there are real challenges like that that I don't know how to address. I have gone the obnoxious route [laughs] where I just message people, and I'm like, "Hey, how's it going? How's it going? How's it going?" And I try not to do that too much. But I haven't found a better way to manage that other than to constantly check in because I do have less feedback from that person that I'm working with unless they are just incredibly open about sharing when they're stuck. But typically, when you're newer to a team or newer to a career, you're going to be less willing to share when you're stuck. But yeah, there are some real challenges, but I still think it's something for us to figure out. Because otherwise, if we cut off access for remote teams to junior folks, I mean, that's where we're headed. There are so many companies and jobs that are headed remote that not being junior friendly and being remote in my mind is just not an option. It's something that we need to figure out. And it's hard, but we need to figure it out. CHRIS: Yeah, 100% on we need to figure that out and that that's on us as the people managing and structuring and bringing folks into teams. I think my stance would be like, let's just be clear that this is hard. It takes effort to make sure that we've provided a structure in which someone newer to a team can be successful. It takes all the more effort to do so in a remote context, I think. And it's that recognition that I think is critical. Because if we go into this with the wrong mindset, it's like, oh yeah, it's great. We got this new person on the team. And yeah, they should be ready to go in like two weeks, right? It's like, no, no, this is a different thing. We need to be very clear about it. This is going to require that we have someone who is able to work with them and support them in this. And that means that that person's output will likely be a little bit reduced for the period of time that we're talking about. But we're playing a long game here. Let's make sure we're clear on that. This is intentional. And let's be clear, the world of hiring and software right now it's not like super easy. There aren't way more software developers than there are jobs; at least, that's been my experience. So this is something absolutely worth investing in for just core business reasons and also good for people. So hey, it's a win-win. Let's do it. Let's figure it out. But also, let's be clear that it's going to be a little tricky along the way. So, you know, let's be intentional about that. But yeah, obviously do it, got to do it. STEPH: Wait, so I feel like we might have circled back to unequivocally yes. [laughs] Have we gotten there, or are you still on the fence? CHRIS: I was unequivocally yes from the beginning, but I couched it in, but...yeah, I said other things. You're right. I have now come around; let's say to unequivocally yes. STEPH: [laughs] Cool. I don't want to feel like I'm forcing you to agree with me. [laughs] But I mean, we just so rarely disagree. So we've either got to identify this as something that we disagree on, which would be one of those rare occasions like beer and Pop-Tarts. CHRIS: A watershed moment. Beer and Pop-Tarts. STEPH: Yeah, those are the only two so far. [laughter] CHRIS: Not together also. I just want to go on record beer and Pop-Tarts; I don't think would be...anyway. STEPH: Ooh, I don't know. It could work. It could work. CHRIS: Well, there's another thing we disagree on. STEPH: I would not turn it down. If I was eating a Pop-Tart, and you're like, "Hey, you want a beer?" I'd be like, "Sure," vice versa. I'm drinking a beer. "Hey, you want a Pop-Tart?" "Totally." CHRIS: Okay. Well yeah, if I'm making bad decisions, I'm obviously going to chain them together, but that doesn't mean that they're a good decision. It's just a chain of bad decisions. STEPH: I feel like one true thing I know about you is that when you make a decision, you're going to lean into it. So like, this is why you are all about if you're going to have a Pop-Tart, you're going to have the highest sugary junk content Pop-Tart possible. So it makes sense to me. CHRIS: It's the Mountain Dew theorem, yeah. STEPH: I didn't know this had a theorem. The Mountain Dew theorem? CHRIS: No, that's just my name. Well, yeah, if I'm going to drink soda, I'm going to drink Mountain Dew, the nonsense nuclear option of soda. So yeah, I guess you're describing me, although as you say it back to me, I suddenly feel very, like, oh God, is this who I am as a person? [laughs] And I'm not going to say you're wrong. I'm just going to spend a little while thinking about some stuff. STEPH: I mean, you embrace it. I think that's lovely. You know what you want. It's like, all right, let's do this. Let's go all in. CHRIS: Thank you for finding a wonderfully positive way to frame it here at the end. But I think on that note, should we wrap up? STEPH: Let's wrap up. CHRIS: The show notes for this episode can be found at bikeshed.fm. STEPH: This show is produced and edited by Mandy Moore. CHRIS: If you enjoyed listening, one really easy way to support the show is to leave us a quick rating or even a review on iTunes, as it really helps other folks find the show. STEPH: If you have any feedback for this or any of our other episodes, you can reach us at @_bikeshed or reach me on Twitter @SViccari. CHRIS: And I'm @christoomey. STEPH: Or you can reach us at hosts@bikeshed.fm via email. CHRIS: Thanks so much for listening to The Bike Shed, and we'll see you next week. ALL: Byeeeeeeee!!!!!!!! ANNOUNCER: This podcast was brought to you by thoughtbot. thoughtbot is your expert design and development partner. Let's make your product and team a success.

Being pregnant is hard, but this tapas episode is good! Steph discovered and used a #yelling Slack channel and attended a remote magic show. Chris touches on TypeScript design decisions and edge cases. Then they answer a question captured from a client Slack channel regarding a debate about whether I18n should be used in tests and whether tests should break when localized text changes. This episode is brought to you by ScoutAPM (https://scoutapm.com/bikeshed). Give Scout a try for free today and Scout will donate $5 to the open source project of your choice when you deploy. Emma Bostian (https://twitter.com/EmmaBostian) Ladybug Podcast (https://www.ladybug.dev/) Gerrit (https://www.gerritcodereview.com/) Gregg Tobo the Magician (https://astonishingproductions.com/) Sean Wang - swyx - better twitter search (https://twitter.com/swyx/status/1328086859356913664) Twemex (https://twemex.app/) GitHub Pull Request File Tree Beta (https://github.blog/changelog/2022-03-16-pull-request-file-tree-beta/) Sam Zimmerman - CEO of Sagewell Financial on Giant Robots (https://www.giantrobots.fm/414) TypeScript 4.1 feature (https://devblogs.microsoft.com/typescript/announcing-typescript-4-1/) The Bike Shed: 269: Things are Knowable (Gary Bernhardt) (https://www.bikeshed.fm/269) TSConfig Reference - Docs on every TSConfig option (https://www.typescriptlang.org/tsconfig#noUncheckedIndexedAccess) Rails I18n (https://guides.rubyonrails.org/i18n.html) This episode is brought to you by Studio 3T (https://studio3t.com/free). Try Studio 3T's full suite of features for 30 days, no payment details needed. Become a Sponsor (https://thoughtbot.com/sponsorship) of The Bike Shed! Transcript: CHRIS: Hello and welcome to another episode of The Bike Shed, a weekly podcast from your friends at thoughtbot about developing great software. I'm Chris Toomey. STEPH: And I'm Steph Viccari. CHRIS: And together, we're here to share a bit of what we've learned along the way. So, Steph, what's new in your world? STEPH: Hey, Chris. There are a couple of new things in my world, so one of them that I wanted to talk about is the fact that being pregnant is hard. I feel like this is probably a known thing, but I feel like I don't hear it talked about as much as I'd really like, especially in sort of like a professional context. And so I just wanted to share for anyone else that may be listening, if you're also pregnant, this is hard. And I also really appreciate my team. Going through the first trimester is typically where you experience a lot of morning sickness and fatigue, and I had all of that. And so I was at the point that most of my days, I didn't even start till about noon and even some days, starting at noon was a struggle. And thankfully, the thoughtbot client that I'm working with most of the teams are on West Coast hours, so that worked out pretty well. But I even shared a post internally and was like, "Hey, I'm not doing great in the mornings. And so I really can't facilitate any morning meetings. I can't be part of some of the hiring intros that we do," because we like to have a team lead provide a welcoming and then closing for anyone that's coming for interview day. I couldn't do those, and those normally happen around 9:00 a.m. for Eastern Time. And everybody was super supportive of it. So I really appreciate all of thoughtbot and my managers and team being so great about this. Also, the client team they're wonderful. It turns out growing a little human; I'm learning how hard it is and working full time. It's an interesting challenge. Oh, and as part of that appreciation because…so there's just not a lot of women that I've worked with. This may be one of those symptoms of being in tech where one, I haven't worked with tons of women, and then two, working with a woman who is also pregnant and going through that as well. So it's been a little bit isolating in that experience. But there is someone that I follow on Twitter, @EmmaBostian. She's also one of the co-hosts for the Ladybug Podcast. And she has been just sharing some of her, like, I am two months sleep deprived. She's had her baby now, and she is sharing some of that journey. And I really appreciate people who just share that journey and what they're going through because then it helps normalize it for me in terms of what I'm feeling. I hope this helps normalize it for anybody else that might be listening too. CHRIS: I certainly can't speak to the specifics of being pregnant. But I do think it's wonderful for you to use this space that we have here to try and forward that along and say what your experience is like and share that with folks and hopefully make it a little bit better for everyone else out there. Also, you snuck in a sneaky pro-tip there, which is work on the East Coast and have a West Coast team. That just sounds like the obvious correct way to go about this. STEPH: That has worked out really well and been very helpful for me. I'm already not a great morning person; I've tried. I've really strived at times to be a morning person because I just have this idea in my head morning people get more stuff done. I don't think that's true, but I just have that idea. And I'm not the world's best morning person, so it has worked out for many reasons but yeah, especially in helping me get through that first trimester and also just supporting family and other things that are going on. Oh, I also learned a pro-tip about Twitter. This is going to seem totally random, but it was relevant when I was searching for stuff on Twitter [laughs] that was related to tech and pregnancy. But I learned...because I wanted to be able to search for something that someone that I follow what they said but I couldn't remember who said it. And so I found that in the search bar, I can add filter:follows. So you can have your search term like if you're looking for cake or pregnancy, or sleep-deprived and then look for filter:follows, and then that will filter the search results to everybody that you follow. I imagine that that probably works for followers too, but I haven't tried it. CHRIS: I like the left turn you took us on there but still keeping it connected. On the topic of Twitter search, they apparently have a very powerful search, but it's also hidden, and you got to know the specific syntax and whatnot. But there is a wonderful project by Shawn Wang, AKA Swyx, on the internet, bettertwitter.netlify.com is the URL for it. I will share a link to his tweet introducing it. But it's a really wonderful tool that just provides a UI for all of these different filters and configurations. And both make discoverability that much better and then also make it easy to just compose one of these searches and use that. The other thing that I'll recommend is, I think it's a Chrome plugin. I'm guessing is what I'm working with here like a browser extension, but it's called Twemex, T-W-E-M-EX. And there's a sidebar in Twitter now, which just seems wonderful and useful. So as I'm looking at a Swyx post here, or a tweet as they're called on Twitter because I know that vernacular, there's a sidebar which is specific to Shawn Wang. And there's a search at the top so I can search within it. But it's just finding their most popular tweets and putting that on a sidebar. It's a very useful contextual addition to Twitter that I found just awesome. So that combination of things has made my Twitter experience much better. So yeah, we'll have show notes for both of those as well. STEPH: Nice. I did not know about those. This may cause someone to laugh at me because maybe it's easier than I think. But I can never remember that advanced search that Twitter does offer; I have to search it every time. I just go to Google, and I'm like, advanced Twitter search, and then it brings up a site for me, and then I use that as the one that Twitter does provide. But yeah, from the normal UI, I don't know how to get there. Maybe I haven't tried hard enough. Maybe it's hidden. CHRIS: It's like they're hiding it. STEPH: Yeah, one of those. [laughs] CHRIS: It's very costly. They have to like MapReduce the entire internet in order to make that search work. So they're like, well, what if we hide it because it's like 50 cents per query? And so maybe we shouldn't promote this too much. STEPH: [laughs] CHRIS: And let's just live in the moment, everybody. Let's just swim in the Twitter stream rather than look back at the history. I make guesses about the universe now. STEPH: [laughs] On a different note, I also discovered at thoughtbot in our variety of Slack channels that we have a yelling channel, and I had not used it before. I had not hung out there before. It's a delightful channel. It's a place that you just go, and you type in all caps. You can yell about anything that you would like to. And I specifically needed to yell about Gerrit, which is the replacement or the alternative that we're using for GitHub or GitLab, or Bitbucket, or any of those services. So we're using Gerrit, and I've been working to feel comfortable with the UI and then be able to review CRs and things like that. My vernacular is also changing because my team refers to them as change requests instead of pull requests. So I'm floating back and forth between CRs and PRs. And because I'm in Gerrit world, I missed some of the updates that GitHub made to their pull request review screen. And so then I happened to hop in GitHub one day, and I saw it, and I was like, what is this? So that was novel. But going back to yelling, I needed to yell about Gerrit because I have not found a way to collaborate with someone who has already pushed up changes. I have found ways that I can pull their changes which then took a little while. I found it in a sneaky little tab called download. I didn't expect it to be there. But then the actual snippet it's like, run this in your terminal, and this is then how you pull down the changes. And I'm like, okay, so I did that. But I can't push to their existing changes because then I get like, well, you're not the owner, so we're going block you, which is like, cool, cool, cool. Okay, I kind of get that because you don't want me messing up somebody else's content or something that they've done. But I really, really, really want to collaborate with this person, and we're trying to do something together, and you're blocking me. And so I had to go to the yelling channel, and I felt better. And I'm yelling again. [laughs] Maybe I don't feel that great because I'm getting angry again talking about it. CHRIS: You vented a little into the yelling channel; maybe not everything, though. STEPH: Yeah, I still have more to vent because it's made life hard. Every time I wanted to push up a change or pull down someone else's changes, there are now all these CRs that then I just have to go and abandon, which is then the terminology for then essentially closing it and ignoring it, so I'm constantly going through. And if I do want to pull in changes or collaborate, then there's a flow of either where I abandon mine, or I pull in their changes, but then I have to squash everything because if you push up multiple commits to Gerrit, it's going to split those commits into different CRs, don't like that. So there are a couple of things that have been pain points. And yeah, so plus-one for yelling channels, let people get it out. CHRIS: Okay, so definitely some feelings that you are working through here. I'm happy to work together as a team to get through some of them. One thing that I want to touch on is you very quickly hinted at GitHub has got a bunch of new things that are cool. I want to talk about those. But I want to touch [laughs] on an anecdote. You talked about pushing something up to someone else's branch. You're like, oh, you know, I made some changes locally, and I'm going to push them up. I had an interesting experience once where I was interacting with another developer. I had done some code review. They weren't quite understanding where I was. They had a lot of questions. And finally, I said, you know what? This will just be easier. Here, I pushed up a commit to your branch, so now you can see what I'm talking about. And I thought of this as a very innocuous act, but it was not interpreted that way. That individual interpreted it in a very aggressive sort of; it was not taken well. And I think part of that was related to I think of Git commits as just these little ephemeral things where you're like, throw it out, feel free. This is just the easiest way for me to communicate this change in the context of the work that you're doing. I thought I was doing a nice favor thing here. That was not how it went. We had a good conversation after I got to the heart of where we both were emotionally on this thing. It was interesting. The interaction of emotion and tech is always interesting. But as a result, I'm very, very careful with that now. I do think it's a great way as long as I've gotten buy-in from the person beforehand. But I will always spot check and be like, "Hey, just to confirm, I can just push up a commit to your branch, but are you okay with that? Is that fine with you?" So I've become very cautious with that. STEPH: Yeah, that feels like one of those painful moments where it highlights that the people that you work with that you are accustomed to having a certain level of trust or default trust with those individuals, and then working with someone else that they don't have that where the cup is half-full in terms of that trust, or that this person means well kind of feelings towards a colleague or towards someone that they're working with. So it totally makes sense that it's always good to check and just to be like, "Hey, I'd love to push up some changes to your branch. Is that cool?" And then once you've established that, then that just makes it easier. But I do remember that happening, and yeah, that was a bit painful and shocking because we didn't see that coming and then learned from it. CHRIS: I do think it's an important thing to learn, though, because for me, in that moment, this was this throwaway operation that I thought almost nothing of, but then another individual interpreted it in a very different way. And that can happen, that can happen across tons of different things. And I don't even want to live in the idealized world where it's just tech; we're just pushing around zeros and ones; there's no human to this. But no, I actually believe it's a deeply human thing that we're doing here. It's our job to teach the computers to be a little closer to us humans or something like that. And so it was a really pointed clarification of that for me where it was this thing that I didn't even think once about, no less twice, and yet someone else interpreted it in such a different way. So it was a useful learning situation for me. STEPH: Yeah, I totally agree. I think that's a really wise default to have to check in with people before assuming that they'll be comfortable with something that we're comfortable with. CHRIS: Indeed. But shifting back to what you mentioned of GitHub, a bunch of new stuff came in GitHub, and you were super excited about it. And then you went on to say other things about another system. [laughs] But let's talk about the great things in GitHub. What are the particular ones that have caught your eye? I've seen some, but I'm intrigued. Let's compare notes. STEPH: So this is one of those where I hadn't seen GitHub in quite a while, and then I hopped in, and I was like, this is different. But some of the things that did stand out to me right away is that on the left-hand side, I can see all of the files that have been changed, and so that's a really nice tree where I just then immediately know. Because that was one of the things that I often did going to a PR is that I would see what files are involved in this change because it was just a nice overview of what part of the applications am I walking through? Are there tests for this? Have they altered or added tests? And so I really like that about it. I'm sure there's other stuff. But that is the main thing that stood out to me. How about you? CHRIS: Yeah, that sidebar file tree is very, very nice, which I find surprising because I don't use a file tree in my editor. I only do fuzzy finding to jump to files. But I think there's something about whenever GitHub had the file list; these are all the files that are changed. I'm like, this is just noise. I can't look at this and get anything out of it. But the file tree is so much more...there's a shape to it that my brain can sort of pattern match on. And it's just a much more discoverable way to observe that information. So I've really loved that. That was a wonderful one. The other one that I was surprised by is GitHub semantic code analysis; stuff has gotten much, much better over time subtly. I didn't even notice this happening. But I was discussing something with someone today, and we were looking at it on GitHub, and I just happened to click on an identifier, and it popped up a little thing that says, "Oh, do you want to hop to the references or the definition of this?" I was like, that is what I want to do. And so I hopped to the definition, hopped to the definition of another thing, and was just jumping around in the code in a way that I didn't know was available. So that was really neat. But then also, I was in a pull request at one point, and someone was writing a spec, and they had introduced a helper just like stub something at the bottom of a given spec file. And it's like, I feel like we have this one already. And I just clicked on the identifier. I think it might have actually been a matcher in RSpec, so it was like, have alert. And I was like, oh, I feel like we have this one, a matcher specific to flash message alerts on the page. And I clicked on it, and GitHub provided me a nice little inline dialog that showed me all of the definitions of have alert, which I think we were up to like four of them at that point. So it had been copied and pasted across a couple of different files, which I think is totally fine and a great way to start, but they were very similar implementations. I was like, oh, looks like we actually already have this in a couple of places, maybe we clean it up and extract it to a common spec support thing, and ta-da, I was able to do all of that from the GitHub pull requests UI. And I was like, this is awesome. So kudos to the GitHub team for doing some nifty stuff. Also, can I get into the merge queue? Thank you. ... STEPH: [laughs] There it is. That is very cool. I didn't know I could do that from the pull request screen. I've seen it where if I'm browsing code that, then I can see a snippet of where everything's defined and then go there, but I hadn't seen that from the pull request. I did find the changelogs for GitHub that talk about the introduction of having the tree, so we'll be sure to include a link in the show notes for that too. But yes, thank you for letting me use our podcast as a yelling channel. It's been delightful. [laughs] Mid-roll Ad Hi, friends, and now a quick break to hear from today's sponsor, Scout APM. Scout APM is an application performance monitoring tool that's designed to help developers find and fix performance issues quickly. With an intuitive user interface, Scout will tie bottlenecks to source code so you can quickly pinpoint and resolve performance abnormalities like N+1 queries, slow database queries, and memory bloat. Scout also recently implemented external service monitoring, adding even more granularity when it comes to HTTP requests and API calls. So give Scout a try today with a free 14-day trial and experience first-hand why developers worldwide call Scout their best friend. And as an added bonus for Bike Shed listeners, Scout will donate $5 to the open-source project of your choice when you deploy. To learn more, visit scoutapm.com/bikeshed. That's scoutapm.com/bikeshed. CHRIS: Well, speaking of podcasts, actually, there was an interesting thing that happened where the CEO of Sagewell Financial, the company of which I am the CTO of, Sam Zimmerman is his name, and he went on the Giant Robots Podcast with Chad a couple of weeks ago. So that is now available. We'll link to that in the show notes. I'll be honest; it was a very interesting experience for me. I listened to portions of it. If we're being honest, I searched for my name in the transcript, and it showed up, and I was like, okay, that's cool. And it was interesting to hear two different individuals that I've worked with either in the past or currently talking about it. But then also, for anyone that's been interested in what I'm building over at Sagewell Financial and wants to hear it from someone who can probably do a much better job of pitching and describing the problem space that we're working in, and all of the fun challenges that we have, and that we're hopefully living up to and building something very interesting, I think Sam does a really fantastic job of that. That's the reason I'm at the company, frankly. So yeah, if anyone wants to hear a little bit more about that, that is a very interesting episode. It was a little weird for me to listen to personally, but I think everybody else will probably have a normal experience listening to it because they're not the CTO of the company. So that's one thing. But moving on, I feel like today's going to be a grab bag episode or tapas episode, lots of small plates, as we were discussing as we were prepping for this episode. But to share one little thing that happened, I've been a little more removed from the code of late, something that we've talked about on and off in previous episodes. Thankfully, I have a wonderful team that's doing an absolutely fantastic job moving very rapidly through features and bug fixes and all those sorts of things. But also, I'm just not as involved even in code review at this point. And so I saw one that snuck through today that, I'm going to be honest, I had an emotional reaction to. I've talked myself down; we're fine now. But the team collectively made the decision to move from a line length of 80 characters to a line length of 120 characters, and I had some feelings. STEPH: Did you fire everybody? [laughs] CHRIS: No. I immediately said, doesn't really matter. This is the whole conversation around auto-formatting tools is like we're just taking the decision away. I personally am a fan of the smaller line length because I like to have multiple files open left to right. That is my reason for it, but that's my reason. A collective of the developers that are frankly working more in the code than I am at this point decided this was meaningful. It was a thing that we could automate. I think that we can, you know, it's not a thing that we have to manage. So I was like, cool. There we go. The one thing that I did follow up on I was like, okay; y'all snuck this one in, it's fine, I'm fine with it. I feel fine; everything's fine. But let's add that to the git-blame-ignore-revs file, which is a useful thing to know about. Because otherwise, we have a handful of different changes like this where we upgrade Prettier, and suddenly, the manner in which it formats the files changes, so we have to reformat everything at once. And this magical file that exists in Git to say, "Hey, ignore this revision because it is not relevant to the semantic history of the app," and so it also takes that decision out of the consideration like yeah, should we reformat or not? Because then it'll be noisy. That magical file takes that decision away, and so I love that. STEPH: I so love the idea because you took vacation recently twice. So I love the idea of there was a little coup and people are applauding, and they're like, while Chris is on vacation, we're going to merge this change [laughs] that changes the character line. And yeah, that brings me joy. Well, I'm glad you're working through it. Sounds like we're both working through some hard emotional stuff. [laughs] CHRIS: Life's tricky, is all I'm going to say. STEPH: I am curious, what prompted the 80 characters versus 120? This is one of those areas that's like, yeah, I have my default preference like you said. But I'm more intrigued just when people are interested in changing it and what goes with it. So do you remember one of the reasons that 120 just suited their preferences better? CHRIS: Frankly, again, I was not super involved in the discussion or what led them to it. STEPH: [laughs] CHRIS: My guess is 120 is used...I think 80 is a pretty common one. I think 120 is another of the common ones. So I think it's just a thing that exists out there in the mindshare. But also, my guess is they made the switch to 120 and then reformatted a few files that had like, ah, this is like 85 characters, and that's annoying. What does it look like if we bump it up? And so 120 provided a meaningful change of like, this is a thing that splits to four lines if we have an 80 character thing, or it's one line if it's 120 characters, which is a surprising thing to say, but that's actually the way it plays out in certain cases because the way Prettier will break lines isn't just put stuff on the next line always. It's got to break across multiple lines, actually. All right, now that we're back in the opinion space, I have a strong one. STEPH: This is The Bikeshed. We can live up to that name. [laughs] CHRIS: So I do want an additional configuration in Prettier Ruby. This is the thing I'll say. Maybe I can chase down Kevin Newton and see if he's open to this. But when Prettier does break method call with arguments going into it but no parens on that method call, and it breaks out to multiple lines, it does the dangling indent thing, which I do not like. I find it distasteful; I find it noisy, the shape of the code. I'm a big fan of the squint test. I know that from Sandi Metz, I believe, or maybe it's Avdi Grimm. I associate it with both of them in my mind. But it's just a way to look at the code and kind of squint, and you see the shape of it, and it tells you something. And when the lines break in that weird way, and you have these arbitrary dangling indents, the shape of the code is broken up. And I don't feel so strongly. I actually regularly stop myself from commenting on pull requests on this because it's very easy. All you need to do is add explicit parens, and then Prettier will wrap the line in what I believe is a much more aesthetically pleasing, concise, consistent, lots of other good adjectives here that are definitely just my preferences and not facts about the world. But so what I want is, Prettier, hey, if you're going to break this line across multiple lines, insert the parens. Parens are no longer optional for breaking across multiple lines; parens are only optional within a given line. So if we're not breaking across lines, I want that configuration because this is now one of those things where I could comment on this. And if they added the optional parens, then Prettier would reform it in a different way. And I want my auto formatter don't give me ways to do stuff. Like, constrain me more but also within the constraints of the preferences that I have, please, thank you. STEPH: I love all the varying levels there [laughter] of you want a thing, but you know it's also very personal to you and how you're walking that line and hopping back and forth on each side. I also love the idea. We have the idea of clean code. I really want something that's called distasteful code now [laughs] where you just give examples of distasteful code, yes. Well, I wish you good luck in your journey [laughs] and how this goes and how you continue to battle. I also appreciate that you mentioned when you're reviewing code how you know it's something that you really want, but you will refrain from commenting on that. I just appreciate when people have that filter to recognize, like, is this valuable? Is it important? Or, like you said, how can we just make this more of the default so then we don't even have to talk about it? And then lean into whatever the default the team goes with. CHRIS: Well, thank you. I very much appreciate that because, frankly, it's been very difficult. STEPH: I do have something I want to yell about but in a very positive way or pranting as we determined or, you know, raving, the actual real term that wonderful listeners pointed out to us. CHRIS: Prant for life. That's my stance. STEPH: We had a magic show at thoughtbot. It was all remote, but the wonderful Gregg Tobo, the magician, performed a magic show for us where we all showed up on Zoom. And it was interactive, and it was delightful, and it was so much fun. And so if you need something fun for your team that you just want to bring folks together, highly recommend. I had no idea I was going to enjoy a magic show this much, but it was a lot of fun. So I'll be sure to include some links in the show notes in case that interests anyone. But yeah, magic. I'm doing jazz hands. People can't see it, but magic. I like how you referred earlier, saying that today is more of like a tapas episode. And I'm realizing that all of my tapas are related to being pregnant, yelling, and magic shows, and I'm okay with that. [laughs] But on that note, what else is on your tapas plate? CHRIS: Actually, a nice positive one that came into the world...I always like when we get those. So this is interesting because I was actually looking back at the history, and I had Gary Bernhardt on The Bike Shed back in Episode 269. We'll include a link in the show notes. But we talked a bunch about various things, including TypeScript. And I was lamenting what I saw as a pretty big edge case in TypeScript. So the goal of TypeScript is like, all right, JavaScript exists, this is true. What can we do on top of that? Let's not fundamentally change it, but let's build a type system on top of it and try and make it so that we can enforce correctness but understand that JavaScript is a highly dynamic language and that we don't want to overconstrain and that we've got to meet it where it is. And so one of the design decisions early on with TypeScript is if you have an array and you say like it's an array of integers, so you have typed that array to be this is an array of int, or it will be an array of number in JavaScript because JavaScript doesn't have integers; they only have numbers. Cool. [laughs] Setting aside other JavaScript variables here, you have an array of numbers. And so if you use element access to say, like, say the name of array is array of nums and then use brackets and you say zero, so get me the first element of that array. TypeScript will infer the type of that to be a number. Of course, it's a number, right? You got an array of numbers, you take a number out of it, of course, you're going to have a number, except you know what's also an array of numbers? An empty array. Well, of course. So there's no way for TypeScript because that's a runtime thing, whether or not the array is full of things or not. Or imagine you get the third element from the array. Well, JavaScript will either return you the third element, which indeed is a number, or undefined because there's no third element in this array. So that is an unfortunate but very understandable edge case that TypeScript was like, listen, this is how JavaScript works. So we're not going to…frankly, we don't think the people embracing TypeScript and bringing it into their world would accept this amount of noise because this is everywhere. Anytime you interact with an array, you are going to run into this, this sort of uncertainty of did I actually get the thing? And it's like, yeah, no, I know how many things are in the array that I'm working with. Spoiler, you maybe don't is the answer. And so, we ran into this edge case in our codebase. We were accessing an element, but TypeScript was telling us, "Yes, definitively, you have an object of that type because you just got it out of an array, which is an array of that type." But we did not; we had undefined. And so we had, you know blah is not a method on undefined or whatever that classic JavaScript runtime error is. And I was like, well, that's very sad. But now we get to the fun part of the story, TypeScript, as of version 4.1, which came out like the week that I recorded with Gary Bernhardt, which was interesting to look at the timeline here. TypeScript has added a new configuration. So a new strictness dial that you can configure in your tsconfig called noUncheckedIndexedAccess. So if you have an array and you are getting an element out of it by index, TypeScript will say, "Hey, you got to check if that's undefined," because to be clear, very much could be undefined. And I was so happy to find this. We turned it on in our codebase. It found the error in the place that we actually had an error and then found a few others that I think probably had errored at some times. But it was just one of those for me very nice things to be able to dial up the strictness and enforce correctness within our codebase, and so I was very happy about it. Other folks may say that seems like too much work. And, you know, I get that, I get that take. I'm definitely on the side of I'm willing to go through the effort to have enforced correctness, but you know, that's a choice. STEPH: Yeah, that's thoughtful. I like that, how you said you can dial up the strictness so then as you are introducing TypeScript, then people have that option. There is an argument there in the back of my head that's like, well, if you're introducing types, then you want to start more strict because then you're just creating problems for yourself down the road. But I also understand that that can make things very difficult to then introduce it to teams in existing codebases. So that seems like a really nice addition where then people can say, "Yeah, no, I really want the strictness. This is why I'm here," and then they can turn that on. CHRIS: So TypeScript in the configuration has strict mode, so you say strict true. And that is a moving target with each new version of TypeScript. But it's their sort of [inaudible 28:14] set of things that are part of strict, but apparently, this one's not in it. So now I'm like, wait, can I have a stricter? Can I have a strictest option? Can I have dial it to 11, please? [laughs] Really rough me up and make sure my code is correct. But it is the sort of thing like when we turn any of these on; it will find things in our codebase. Some of them, we have to appease the compiler even though we know the code to be correct. But the code is not provably correct as it sits in our file. So I am, again, happy to make that exchange. And I like that TypeScript as a project gives us configurability. But again, I am on team where's the strictest button? I would like to push that as hard as I can and live that life. STEPH: Yeah, I like that phrasing that you just said about provably correct. That's nice. CHRIS: That's the world I want to live in, everything you own in the box to the left, which is probably correct. STEPH: [laughs] That's how that song goes. CHRIS: Yeah. This is a reference to move errors to the left, which I think I've referenced before. But now that I'm just referencing Beyoncé and not the actual article, it's probably worth referencing the article, but the idea of, like, if a user hits an error, that's not great. So let's move it back to QA, that's a little further to the left in sort of the timeline. But what if we could move it to an automated test in CI? But what if we could move it into your editor? What if we could move it even further to the left? And so, a type system tends to be sort of very far ratcheted up to the left. It's as early as possible that you can catch these. So again, to reference Beyoncé, everything you own in a box to the left. STEPH: [singing] Everything you own in the box to the left. CHRIS: Thank you for doing the needful work there. STEPH: [laughs] Mid-roll Ad And now a quick break to hear from today's sponsor, Studio 3T. When you're developing applications, it can often be a chore to work with your underlying data. Studio 3T equips you with a complete set of tools to work with MongoDB data. From building queries with drag and drop, to creating complex aggregation pipelines; Studio 3T makes it easy. And now, there's Studio 3T Free, a free edition of Studio 3T, which delivers an essential core of tools. This means you can get started, for free, with Studio 3T Free, and when you're ready, you can upgrade and enjoy even more features through Studio 3T Pro and Studio 3T Ultimate. The different editions unlock more tools and additional integrations with MongoDB, SQL, Oracle, and Sybase. You can start today by downloading Studio 3T Free, which also includes a 30-day free trial of all the features of Studio 3T Ultimate, so you can try out some of the enterprise features as well. No credit card required. To start your trial, head to studio3t.com/free that's studio3t.com/free. STEPH: I have a question for you that I'd really love to get your opinion on because I myself I'm waffling back and forth where someone brought up some really great points about a concern or just a question they had brought up around testing and i18n specifically. And I agree with the things that they're saying, but yet, there's also a part of me that doesn't, and so I'm Stephanie divided. And so, I'm trying to figure out where I stand on this. So let me dive in and give you some context; I'm going to share the statement/question that they had asked. So here we go. "One of my priorities has been I should be able to review a test without having to reference any other code. References to i18n means that I have to go over to YAML and make sure the right keys have the right values, and that seems error-prone. In some cases, a lack of a hit in the YAML defers to defaults. If the intent is to override the name of model attribute and error messages and it is coded incorrectly, the code fails silently without translating and uses the humanized attribute name, and that would go undetected. If libraries change structure, it might also fail silently as well, so to me, the only failsafe way is to be fully explicit in test." So this goes with the idea that if you're writing tests and then you're testing text, but it's on the screen or perhaps an email, that you're actually going to assert against that string that is shown to the user instead of referencing the i18n keys. And then that also backs up this person's idea that you really want to not have to jump around. If you're reading a test, everything you really need to know about that test should live very close by. And I really agree with that initial statement; I want everything that's very close to the test, especially if it's anywhere in that expectation line, I really want it close, so I can understand what's the expectation, what's under test, what are the inputs, what's the expected outcome. So I wholeheartedly support that idea. But yet, I am in the camp that I then will use YAML keys instead of providing that exact string because I do look at i18n as a helpful abstraction, and I want to trust that i18n is doing its job. And so that way, I don't have to provide that string that's there because then we're also choosing, okay, well, which language are we going to always use for our test? So this is the part where I feel divided. So I'm going to walk you through some of the reasons that I really support this idea and other reasons that I still use the i18n keys and then get your take on it. So there is a part of me that when I'm using the i18n YAML keys, it does make me sad because it reduces the readability in tests. Sometimes the keys are really well named where maybe it's a mailer.welcomemessage. And I'm like, okay, I understand the gist. I don't need to go see the actual string. I also think they highlighted a really good use case where if you're overriding behavior and it could default to something else, your test is still going to pass, and you don't actually know. So I could see the use case there where if you are overriding, then you want to be explicit about the string that you expect back. I also think there are some i18n messages that are fairly complex, and where then I really would like to see the string. So if you are formatting a date or a time or you're passing in just a lot of variables, then there's a chance that I do want to see how did that actually get generated for the person who's going to be reading it versus just maybe it's garbage text that came out? And I want to validate that the message that we think we're crafting is actually the one that the user is going to see. The case against actually being explicit, my biggest one is because then I do see i18n as a helpful abstraction. And I want to trust this abstraction that it's doing its job and it's doing it well. Because then if I do use explicit strings, it makes me sad if I change text from like hello to welcome, and now I have a failing test. I don't like that idea either. So I'm torn between these two worlds of it is very nice to have everything that you need in a test to be able to understand what is the expectation, but then I also lean into this abstraction and reference the i18n keys. So, Chris, with all of that, that was a bit of a whirlwind, [laughs] what are your thoughts? How do you test this stuff? CHRIS: Honestly, I'm surprised that you've got that much division in your own answer because for me, this is very obvious there's one...no, I'm kidding. This is obviously complicated. Similar to you, I think I'm going to have to give a grab bag of answers because I don't have a singular thought of like it is concretely this or that. I tend to go for explicit strings and tests all the way to...so like the readability of a test, and the conciseness of a test is interesting. I will often see developers extract. Say they're creating a user with a specific email, and then they log in with that email later, and then they expect something else. And so the email is referenced a few times, and they'll extract that into a variable called email. And I personally will tend to not do that. I will inline the literal string like user@example.com, and I'll do it in a few places. And I'm fine with that duplication because I like the readability of any given line that you're reading. So I will make that trade-off within tests. This is the thing I think we've talked about before, but the idea of DRY in tests is like I want to be careful applying that idea, Don't Repeat Yourself, to break apart the acronym. Those abstractions I will use them less than tests. And so I want the explicitness, I want the readability, I want to tell a little story, all of that feels true. That said, to flip it around, one of the things that I'm hearing...so I think I'm hearing a part of this that is around well, we can fail silently because we fail symmetrically in both the implementation and our test. Then an assertion may actually match even though it's matching on a fallback. I think that's a configurable thing. I would actually want my test to raise if I'm referencing an i18n key that is not defined. Now, granted, that's different for languages. And maybe this becomes a more complex story of like in production; in a different locale, it will fail because we don't have 100% parity across all our locale files. But fundamentally, I want to make sure that at least exists in our base, which I think typically would be en-US as the locale. I want to make sure all keys are looked up and found, and it's an error otherwise in our test. So that's a feeling. But am I misunderstanding that part of the story or how that configuration typically works? STEPH: No, I think you've got it. But just to make sure we're on the same page, so if you reference a key that doesn't exist, then it is going to fail. So at least you have your test failure is going to let you know that you've referenced something that doesn't exist. But if you are referencing, like if you want to override the defaults that Rails or i18n has provided for a model and say for an error message, if you reference that, but you want to override it, but then you've forgotten, that does exist. So you're not going to get the failure; you're going to get a different message. So it's probably not a terrible experience for the user. It's not going to crash. They're going to see something, but they're not going to see the custom message that you intended them to see. CHRIS: Gotcha. Okay, well, just to name it, the thing that I was describing, I don't know that that would be the configuration for every system. So I would strongly encourage any system where i18n just has a singular behavior which is we fall back to the key. I want my test to absolutely tell me if that's happening. And that should be a failure of the test. But to the discoverability documentation bit, I do wonder if tooling can actually help answer the question. And as I was describing the wonderful experience I had on GitHub the other day, viewing code as just static characters in a file is both true and also, I think increasingly, a limited view of it. We have editors, and we have code hosting tools that can understand semantically our code a little bit better. There's got to be like 20 Different VS Code plugins that, when you hover on an i18n reference, it will do the lookup for you. That feels like a thing that exists, and if it doesn't, well, now I've nerd-sniped myself, and I got a weekend project. JK, I'm definitely not building that this weekend. But that feels like can we use that to solve this? Maybe not. But that's just another thought of where we have these limitations where it's static, like those abstractions can be useful. But if we can very quickly dereference them, then the cost of the abstraction or that separation becomes smaller, and so the pain is reduced. And I wonder if that's a way to sort of offset it. STEPH: If I can poke at that a little bit more, because I think you're touching on something that I haven't expressed or thought through explicitly, but it's the idea of, like, why do I like the abstraction? What is it that's drawing me towards using these keys? And I think it's because most of the cases, I don't care. I don't care what the string is, and so that feels nice. Like, I understand that, yes, we're referencing something. If that key didn't exist, I'm going to see a failure. So I know that there's text there, and that's why I do lean into referencing the keys instead of the text because it feels good to not have to care about that stuff. And if we do make changes to the text, then it suddenly doesn't fail, and then I have to go update a test because we added a period or added a comma. I think that's the path of more sadness for me. And my goal is always a path of least sadness. So I think that's why I lean into it [laughs], I'm guessing. Is that why you lean into it as well? Or what do you like about referencing the keys over the explicit text? CHRIS: No, I think I share your inclination there, and the reason that you're in favor of it, and I think the consistency like if we're going to use i18n, then we should lean in because it's a non-trivial thing to do like porting to i18n projects, and they're tricky. Getting it right from the first step is also tricky. If you're going to do it, then let's lean in, and thus let's use that abstraction overall. But yeah, same ideas as you. STEPH: Cool. I think that helps validate where I'm at in terms of how I rationalize about this where ultimately, I do like leaning into that abstraction. And as you'd mentioned, some of those porting projects, I haven't been on one specifically, but I've seen that they are a lot of work. And so, if we have that in our system, then we want to continue to use it. It does reduce some of the readability. Like you said, maybe there's a VS Code plugin or some way that then we can help people be able to see if they want that full context in the test and not have to jump over to YAML. But yeah, otherwise, unless it's overriding default behavior or complex, then that's what I'm going to go with is with the keys. But I really appreciate this person's very thoughtful question and approach to testing because, normally or typically, I fully agree with I want full context in the test. And this one was one of those outliers that came up for me, and I had to really think through all the feelings and the reasons that I have for those feelings. On that note, shall we wrap up? CHRIS: Let's wrap up. The show notes for this episode can be found at bikeshed.fm. STEPH: This show is produced and edited by Mandy Moore. CHRIS: If you enjoyed listening, one really easy way to support the show is to leave us a quick rating or even a review on iTunes, as it really helps other folks find the show. STEPH: If you have any feedback for this or any of our other episodes, you can reach us at @_bikeshed or reach me on Twitter @SViccari. CHRIS: And I'm @christoomey. STEPH: Or you can reach us at hosts@bikeshed.fm via email. CHRIS: Thanks so much for listening to The Bike Shed, and we'll see you next week. ALL: Byeeeeeee!!!!!! ANNOUNCER: This podcast was brought to you by thoughtbot. thoughtbot is your expert design and development partner. Let's make your product and team a success.

Chris updates us on his new window manager of choice, Moom, and tells us what's good with it. He's also giving yet another task manager a go: OmniFocus. (Sorry Things.) Steph talks about defining test classes in RSpec and readdresses flaky tests to improve CI build time. Chris is worried about productivity. He's still not coding as much as he'd like to be. Steph lends an ear, and together, they discuss potential ways Chris could gain back a little bit of coding time at work. This episode is brought to you by ScoutAPM (https://scoutapm.com/bikeshed). Give Scout a try for free today and Scout will donate $5 to the open source project of your choice when you deploy. Moom (https://apps.apple.com/us/app/moom/id419330170?mt=12) OmniFocus (https://apps.apple.com/us/app/omnifocus-3/id1346190318) Is It Worth the Time? (https://xkcd.com/1205/) Knapsack Pro (https://knapsackpro.com/) Shopify Monolith (https://shopify.engineering/shopify-monolith) Sacrificial Test Classes (https://blog.bitwrangler.com/2016/11/10/sacrificial-test-classes.html) rspecq (https://github.com/skroutz/rspecq) Become a Sponsor (https://thoughtbot.com/sponsorship) of The Bike Shed! Transcript: STEPH: Hello and welcome to another episode of The Bike Shed, a weekly podcast from your friends at thoughtbot about developing great software. I'm Steph Viccari. CHRIS: And I'm Chris Toomey. STEPH: And together, we're here to share a bit of what we've learned along the way. So hey, Chris, what's new in your world? CHRIS: What's new in my world? Well, hey, Steph. Oh, I have an update on a thing that I think I talked about a while back or at least asked on Twitter. But I've been looking for a window manager for forever. And in that way that I sort of overcorrected a while back, I think where I'm no longer allowed to do anything related to productivity or dev tools. I was just forbidden because it was a time sink. I'm slowly trying to correct back and be like, you know what? I regularly think about how it would be nice to have a better window manager. So previously, I had used Divvy, D-I-V-V-Y, which is fine. It did an okay job, but it just didn't have quite the level of control that I wanted, or maybe I didn't investigate it enough. But it felt like it was lacking. So I did a little bit of research. A bunch of people recommended different things. There was Spectacle; there was Rectangle. There was a whole bunch of other things that I'm forgetting now because I have settled on Moom, M-O-O-M. Those are fun words. STEPH: I feel like you keep bringing interesting words [laughs] because last time, it was Things where you're tracking all the things. And now we have Moom to track the space. All right. CHRIS: If this is my legacy as a podcaster, then I feel like I will have done well just, you know, weird sounds mostly that's what he's going for. But yes, I've been using Moom now for…[laughs] God, it's just ridiculous to say, but here we are. STEPH: [laughs] CHRIS: I've been using it. I've been enjoying it. In particular, the thing that I liked about it...a bunch of the other ones that I looked at were like, oh, we've got all these different configurations. And you can move things any which way, and you can have any number of hotkeys. And I was like, wait, wait, wait, say more right now. You want to take over my global namespace of hotkeys and just clutter it with 19 different things? You know that that is a limited space that I'm working with here. And so Moom, somewhat uniquely, at least in the ones that I experienced, was what I would describe as a modal window manager. So much like Vim is modal where you start out in normal mode, and you're moving around and you kind of bounce and search and all of that, and then you enter insert mode. And in insert mode, keys do different things. And then in command mode...it's got all these different modes. And so there are lots of different namespaces for hotkeys. It's one of the things that makes Vim so powerful. Moom is similar in that there's one global activation hotkey. And then, within that, I can have a whole namespace of hotkeys. So like M will put something in the middle of my screen now. F will put something full-screen. And I don't need to remember weird multikey combinations for that. There's just the one to get started, and then I've configured it such that the tab will bounce to a secondary display and sort of rotate through them. M and F and Q and P I've got it physically laid out on the keyboard. So it looks like my screen. Q being on the left side will push something to the left side, P to the right side. And I'm very happy with that. I don't need a lot out of this tool. I don't need very complex management or scripting or any of that, which are very nice features that exist in the other ones. But that combination, the one hotkey to rule them all, and then the sub hotkeys within it, and the ability to mostly move between the screens and then put stuff where I want it is great. I'm very happy. STEPH: I think I've figured it out. So Moom, I think it's a combination of move and zoom, and that's how they got Moom. CHRIS: You're probably right. STEPH: That does sound really nice. I'm a Spectacle fan. And I have enjoyed it and just stuck with it because I haven't felt a need to change from it. And it's really nice where I use my arrow keys for which direction I want to go. So that has been easy for me to recall. But that sounds really nice, all the things that you're describing with Moom. CHRIS: Does spectacle have the like, is it some Command Option Control and then left or right or up or down? Or is it you type something, and then you type left, right, up, down? STEPH: I have to actually touch my keyboard to answer that question because I have the muscle memory, which is an interesting thing that my muscles knows it, but my brain has to really think about it. So I think it's like the Option Command, and then yeah, then use the arrow keys. CHRIS: Gotcha. That's roughly what I had when I was using Divvy previously, but I found just enough of a limitation there. And so Moom has been great as another tool. But I think Spectacle has a lot more features in terms of scripting and other fancier stuff that you can do, which is both super intriguing and, again, sort of the thing that I'm not allowed to do. [laughs] So I went with, like, this tool seems fine and has the one feature that I really want. That said, you brought up Things, which is the to-do list app that I've been looking at. I've been using it for a week now. It's great. I'm enjoying having a more structured way to say, like, here's what I'm doing today. Here's what I'm doing tomorrow. It's been wonderful. But I'm already looking at OmniFocus as a better version. STEPH: [laughs] CHRIS: Because I think there's some stuff that I don't love, and yes, I can hear my own voice in the back of my head that's like, always chasing that next thing. But I haven't actually made the effort to switch over or even tried. I've used OmniFocus in the past. But anyway, I'll let you know if I do make additional moves there. STEPH: Yeah, I'm enjoying this journey. Keep me up to date on it. I've heard of OmniFocus, but I know nothing about it. But I feel like I've heard good things. So I like this journey you're going on where you just keep switching and trying new things. That's fun for me [laughs], and there's chasing productivity. So I'm into it; I'm here for it. CHRIS: If I just invest enough hours to save a handful of minutes down the road, then I will have...oh no, wait, that's not how this goes. There's, of course, an xkcd about this which we can include in the show notes. But I'm trying to be very intentional with it. I waited for many years before I allowed myself to reinvestigate the world of to-do lists. And I'm hopefully going to keep it to just a couple of weeks of nonsense and then back to a few years of stable. That's the dream. But yeah, that's some of the smaller things that are up in my world. I have another topic that I want to chat about. But I'd love to hear what's new in your world? STEPH: Yeah, I have some interesting bits that I can talk about with the project that I'm working on. But more concretely, I have something that's been on my mind that I don't think that I've talked about here on the show, but I think would be fun to talk about because I just happened to run into it this week while working on some code. And it's the idea of defining test classes in RSpec so as you are testing part of your code, but then you want to create just like a fake class, something that you can use as a substitute for real application code. And so it's a really nice way that then you can have this replica behavior, but then maybe it's just one particular method or some behavior that you need to use in the class but then doesn't actually go to the real code. That's wonderful. That's great. One thing that I've learned is that with RSpec is when you are introducing a test class, so let's say if you have your RSpec describe and then either a string or it's the name of a class, and then you have a block so do, and then within that block is where you write your test. If you create a temporary class, say, like I have my class test class, and then I have some behavior, that gets defined in the global namespace. It's not scoped to that particular RSpec example. And the reason for that it's not specific to RSpec. RSpec is not the one that's doing this; it's actually Ruby behavior. So for Ruby, when you're defining within a block like that, if you're defining a constant, if you're defining another class inside of a block, it's going to use the outer namespace as its namespace. So if you had a top-level class that you were defining, but if you define a class as a block, and then inside of that block you define a constant, that constant is then defined in the object namespace instead of within that particular class that you have written. And so that's why RSpec has this behavior. Because someone brought up a really great question about this on RSpec::Core asking about it, and they're like, yeah, that's actually how Ruby works. And so we're not going to change RSpec's behavior since that is how Ruby has decided to handle this. And the part where this becomes important is when you define a test class within an RSpec example. While it may be unlikely that someone is going to use that exact same name for their test class that they're going to create in their RSpec example, if they were to use that same name, then you're going to have a collision between the two. One of them's going to win, and you're probably going to end up with some really weird test failures because it's going to get confusing as to which class is being used, and they may not match up with each other. So one way around this, and this is going to be one of the rare times that I suggest this, but let. Let is scoped to an RSpec example. And so you could define a class inside of a let, and then that will scope it to the example. There are probably some other approaches as well, but that's the one that I'm most familiar with to ensure that when you define that class or constant, it's not getting defined in the global namespace and ensuring that none of the other tests have access to it. CHRIS: Well, this is certainly interesting. I'm pretty sure I've been operating under the opposite assumption for the entirety of my career. This is good to know. I feel like I probably have had tests that failed because of this. And then I learned this truth, and then I subsequently forgot it. I don't know if you know this, but if you define a method within just a helper method that you extract in RSpec, are those also on the global namespace? I don't define classes in RSpec blocks that often. It's pretty rare. Like if I have a controller concern sort of thing that I want to test, I might say random controller and inject the thing there or some other abstracted piece. That is the only case I can think of where I have a fake model or a fake controller or something like that for test purposes. But it doesn't come up that often. I do extract a heck ton of local helper methods. And I'm wondering now, are those all in the shared global namespace? STEPH: I'm pretty sure they're not. And I'm getting on the edges of my knowledge here, but I think it has to do with the fact of when you're defining a constant. So if you're defining a class versus an actual constant, that will get into the global namespace because it's using the outer scoping. But in my experience, I'm pretty sure that's not true for the method just because I remember one time I did some funky stuff with RSpec. And I remember seeing that I couldn't access those methods from another example. CHRIS: I like the honesty. And you're like, to be clear, I was doing something weird, but I learned that day. Okay, that's good because at least that part maps to my understanding. So methods may be safe, but classes get shared. Very interesting. STEPH: And it's something that I rarely think about or had worried about just because if I'm defining a fake test class, I often will put it somewhere that's intended to be more global. So I'll stuff it somewhere in like spec support. So then other people can see, hey, I've already mimicked this behavior. So if you need to use the same thing, just go ahead and use this. It's not often that I am adding that class directly to the RSpec example group. So I think I've been fortunate where I haven't actually run into that conflict for that reason. But this came up while giving an RSpec course. And while we were just in a very small, tiny codebase and replicating some examples, someone in the class was like, "Hey, by the way, do you know that that's in the global namespace?" And I was like, "No, friend. Tell me more." So thanks to that person, they're the ones that actually enlightened me about how it's going into that namespace and how it can actually pollute your testing namespace. There's a really good article that's written by Ken Mayer. And we'll be sure to include a link in the show notes that talks about it and also provides the let example as a way to work around this. And also links to the GitHub discussion on RSpec::Core, where they talk about this behavior and why things are the way that they are. Circling back to some of the more general project-y things that I alluded to earlier, I've shared a bit about the project that I'm working on. But just to recap it, it is focused on helping a very large team that has a large number of tests, around 85,000. And they are looking to address flaky tests that they have and overall really improve their CI build time. So right now, it takes about 30 minutes for the build to take place. But they also have flaky tests, and then that slows things down. And so, the re-verify rate has been painful for them. There's been some really great work that has improved that, particularly there is a, I think we've talked about this before, but where they're re-verifying certain flaky tests, which isn't great because they're still flaky tests, but at least they're not preventing people from moving forward and shipping code. But some of the bigger stuff that is just on my mind is when you have a very large team and a very large application, by large team, I'm talking about 100 developers, and they are all contributing to this codebase. And there are around 85,000 tests, and that has grown substantially in the last 12 months. And so, if you think about the trajectory of the addition of those tests, it is just going to continue to grow. So there's a concern there of even if we address flaky tests and we improve things, there's an architecture concern of how do we really reduce the CI build time? And so there's that aspect, and then there's also the aspect of then well, how do we still work to improve the tests and the codebase as well as we go across all of these disparate teams? And right now, there is a bit of a culture where engineers don't feel empowered where they can necessarily address all of the flaky tests or things that they run into. And so there is a bit of a mindset of I'm stuck on this, or this test failed, or it's flaky, or I don't understand it. So I'm just going mute it, or I'm going to hand it off to someone else to work on it. So there are three big areas that are on my mind. The first one is architecture. You can throw architecture at it. There's also the code quality that's a concern. And then how do you improve the code quality in a way that you're improving it fast enough that then you've got 100 other developers that are also contributing to it at the same time? And then individual IC empowerment where then people feel like, hey, I ran into a slow test or a flaky test, and I feel like I can triage this, and I can make changes. For the architecture piece, we're still in the infancy stages of how to approach this and the strategy that we're using. But one of the ideas that has come up is how do we reduce tentpoles? And the tentpole is like when you're running your test and, let's say that it's parallelized, all of the various tests. But there is one process that takes like 20 minutes, and then the other process is completed in 5 minutes as a drastic example. And overall, you could have reduced your time if you had managed to split that 120-minute process across all the other workers who are then available for that work. So there are some tentpoles that are taking place. And that could be one first step in reducing the CI build time. There are also discussions around how to scale horizontally. Right now, we don't think that's something we can do with the service that we're using to run the test. But it's something that maybe we need to manually look into is then how do we build a queue of all these tests and not where we just split test by a file, which is typically how the Parallelize gem does it. But you could actually split up tests within a file. So if you had a particularly large file, that doesn't necessarily matter. But then building a queue of all these tests so then as each test finishes, a worker can just grab that next test. And then also you can easily scale up and scale down workers. As I'm saying that, that feels big, that's a lot to invest in. But that as an idea is how can we essentially then scale the architecture? So even as we continue to invest in the tests, in the system, and they continue to grow, our architecture can keep up with it. CHRIS: That last bit there is super interesting to me. It's something that I've looked into and haven't pursued yet. We're currently running on CircleCI with our test suite. And I don't even know that we pushed on parallelization because we're early enough on that. And we turned off bcrypt recently, which super-duper helps with the speed up. But overall, the test suite time is fine, is where I would put it. It had crept up, though, to a place where it was starting to be painful, is how I would describe it. And I think it's very easy for that to just continue growing and suddenly, it's 20 and 25 minutes. And then, depending on your merge strategy and all of that, it can be all the more complicated, and this gets in the way of deploys. And so, I think it is a super important thing to keep an eye on. I know Charity Majors pushes really hard for 15 minutes from merge to deploy to production. And so if your CI suite takes 25 minutes, then already you're stuck. As an aside, I just once more want to say out into the ether, CircleCI or any other CI platform, if you would allow me to say yes, we've already tested this Git hash, this Git SHA, or the working tree, ideally, because that's also deterministic, I would love that feature. I would love to not have to rebuild the same code when it gets merged into main, just saying once more out into the world. Also, GitHub, if you want to put me on the merge queue beta, I would love that if anybody out there is listening. [laughs] STEPH: I like how this has become a special requests hotline for all the things [laughs] that you're hoping to get a part of or features you'd like to see added. CHRIS: Hello, internet. I have some requests. STEPH: [laughs] CHRIS: I would love to see those things, but in the world where those don't exist. The particular thing that you're talking sort of a test queue, is something that I've seen. So Knapsack is a...what's the word? It's a tool; it's a service. It's a combination of things. But it does that essentially where it starts up a local build agent. And then it basically says like, all right, give me all of the tests that you need to run, and then I will feed them back to each of the individual agents that there's one agent running per parallelized process. And so say you've got five of them. The first one says, "Hey, give me a test," and runs it. And the second one says, "Give me a test," and et cetera. And so, the queue manager on the other side is in charge of that orchestration. And it means that they basically all finish in identical time, with one being an outlier, whichever one happens to be the longest. But it's only going to be however long your longest test is is basically that outlier versus what you're describing of like, well, if we split it by file, we can end up with more naive things where there's a bunch of feature specs on one of them, and it skews by two minutes. We obviously don't want that. So Knapsack, in particular, is a tool that I've looked at, but generally, I'm very interested in that as a solution to how do we maximally take advantage of parallelization there? STEPH: Interesting. I have not heard of Knapsack. There is one that sounds similar. It's called RSpec Queue. And it does some really interesting work where it will split the individual test, so it won't do it by file. It will also look at historical data to then try to be intelligent about how it's going to split it and find the longer running test. And I believe it uses Redis to then keep track of the test set up in run and things that still need to be run. That is a gem that the team is looking into using as well. I don't know how that works if that can integrate with the current platform as we're using TeamCity to run tests. I don't know if that's something that can integrate with TeamCity, if it's a replacement. I don't have all of the knowledge about RSpec Queue yet. But it seems to do a number of the things that we're interested in. So even if we can't use the gem, then maybe it's something that we can still imitate. CHRIS: The other thing that I'm surprised we haven't said yet is this is one of the places where people would often reach for microservices. I feel like we have to have the microservice conversation at this moment. Microservices can actually be a great solution to organizational problems. As a team scales, it does become really hard to manage a large group of developers. And so microservices introduces a very fixed boundary that then draws nice lines that you can have around things. And so, the individual build time for a portion of your application can be much more manageable by virtue of that. But it has this huge cost of technical complexity and overhead and et cetera, et cetera, all of the reasons that we may not want to go that route. And so interestingly, I was just looking at Shopify's Deconstructing the Monolith blog post, which I think at this point, they've skewed a little bit more into the microservices. Shopify is huge, one of the largest Rails apps out there. And so looking at them and being like, oh, what are they doing? It's an interesting sort of plot a course and to see how long they waited before they even started thinking about the much deeper things and even exploring microservices. But in this blog post, they talk about a different approach where they stuck with sort of a monolith. But then they started to introduce Rails engines and clear encapsulation within the large codebase such that then you can actually start to say, well, we don't need to run all the tests every time because if we're making a change within this section of the application, then we just need to run those tests. I've also heard of organizations having some logic that can determine based on the code change; we know the associated test files that we should run. I'm scared of that is how I would describe it. I want to trust my test suite. I want to be able to deploy on a Friday and say if tests are green, it's going out to production. That's great. And I worry about that sort of thing. That's hard to get right. That feels like caching, right? And that's one of those things that we historically get wrong a lot. But nonetheless, that is an approach that large organizations I've heard having good success with. So some way to determine what's the affected code and what tests do we need to rerun and et cetera. And that can really drastically reduce down the scope of each CI build. But those are some larger things that I have not had to reach for on any of the applications I've worked with. I've taken different approaches, different ways to reduce the time or otherwise Parallelizer et cetera. But it's interesting for when you get to a certain scale. STEPH: Yeah, it's funny that you bring up that idea because that came up in conversation with some of the other developers as well, was the idea of, like, what if we could just not run all the tests? You changed one file, and you don't need to run everything. And I immediately was like, that sounds very cool and super hard to be able to get right. And a lot of this code is extremely coupled, which then moves to the code quality area. So I suspect a lot of the test times could be improved by creating smaller objects because right now, a lot of the tests will load the entire world because they have to. They have to test everything. And so that is creating a ton of data, and then taking a long time to run versus if we were able to split out that code into smaller objects and test in unit tests, then that would also help speed up. But that's also hard to do. Where do you look first? We do have some great data, thanks to RSpec. RSpec is letting us know how long each test file takes to run, and then we are capturing that data. So I can go look at which files and say, oh, this file takes 10 minutes to run. Let's look at that file first versus some of the other ones that are performing better. But that is a battle that will take a long time to win. And it's something that takes consistency and then also encouraging others to join that battle. So while it's very important, it doesn't address the concern of tests growing rapidly and then being able to support that. Something that you said in a previous episode also was on my mind in talking about building processes in a way that encouraged people that they can make small, quick changes. And I think that's really important. So if we can build out the architecture to help scale this so then the tests were running in say 15 minutes, then if someone saw a test and they wanted to make a small refactor, they saw a factory.create, and they're like, oh, that could be a FactoryBot.build_stubbed instead and issue that into a pull request or change request and get that merged. I don't know if people feel as comfortable doing that right now because it takes them 30 minutes or longer to run the test. But that idea of how do we get a structure in place where people can make tiny, little improvements and do that as a whole, as a team, to then work on the code quality concerns? CHRIS: That last little bit is so interesting where you're saying, like, oh, we have a FactoryBot.create, FactoryBot.Build, but it has the overhead of having to go through the 30-minute test suite. But coming back to the thing we were talking about before, what if we didn't have to run all the tests? Although I find it very hard to tell, given a code change in actual production code, what tests do I need to run? When I'm just changing a test, I'm pretty sure I know which test I need to run in order to determine if that test still runs correctly. So that feels is there an optimization that can happen there? Which is I've only made test changes; therefore only run the changed tests. And then that's an encouragement to say, like; this is a part of our codebase that we are trying to improve on. Let's optimize the iteration speed there. You'd have to figure out how to write that. And so it's probably much like my productivity adventures, maybe not a good investment. Although given that this is such an organizational concern, maybe that is the thing that's worth spending an afternoon on and seeing if it could happen. Because if you can speed that process up, get more [inaudible 23:46] and more iteration in fixing the tests, that feels like it could be a win. STEPH: I think that's a really good idea. I think we could certainly tell that if a file's changed, that it's only a test file that has changed. And then I've heard very good things from the other developers that TeamCity has a wonderful API to work with. And so there's a way that we could then tell TeamCity to say, hey,...or it may not even be a TeamCity command. It may just be somewhere in the universe we have to say, "Hey, RSpec, only run this test," or "TeamCity, we're only going to feed you this one RSpec test to run, so user agent but only run this particular test." So I really like that idea. I think that's really intriguing. And I'll bring it up with the team because that would be a huge win, especially as Joël and I are really focused more on tests. That would just improve our lives. So selfishly, I'm excited about that idea because we are touching less of the application code and more focused on improving the test at this point. CHRIS: I mean, if right now you're getting, say, 5 or 10 pull requests through a day which frankly feels like a high bar on this, if suddenly that's 10 to 20, that's material right there. STEPH: Yeah, I don't know how large of an impact it would have for the rest of the team because I don't know how often they're only making changes to a test file, but it still feels like a nice optimization to have. Cool. Well, thanks. I appreciate that idea. CHRIS: My pleasure. Mid-roll Ad And now a quick break to hear from today's sponsor, Scout APM. Scout APM is leading-edge application performance monitoring that's designed to help Rails developers quickly find and fix performance issues without having to deal with the headache or overhead of enterprise platform feature bloat. With a developer-centric UI and tracing logic that ties bottlenecks to source code, you can quickly pinpoint and resolve those performance abnormalities like N+1 queries, slow database queries, memory bloat, and much more. Scout's real-time alerting and weekly digest emails let you rest easy knowing Scout's on watch and resolving performance issues before your customers ever see them. Scout has also launched its new error monitoring feature add-on for Python applications. Now you can connect your error reporting and application monitoring data on one platform. See for yourself why developers call Scout their best friend and try our error monitoring and APM free for 14 days; no credit card needed. And as an added-on bonus for Bike Shed listeners, Scout will donate $5 to the open-source project of your choice when you deploy. Learn more at scoutapm.com/bikeshed. That's scoutapm.com/bikeshed. CHRIS: What else is going on in my world? I continue to not code a ton which is interesting and probably makes sense for right now. But to share a small anecdote from this week, we had retro, and I ended up attending retro ever so slightly late. I was doing a hiring interview, which is super exciting. Again, for anyone that's out there, we are hiring at Sagewell Financial. And I would love to chat with you if that sounds interesting. But so I was having a wonderful hiring conversation that ran a little bit long. So I was a little bit late to retro, and I arrived, say like eight minutes in, and someone was expressing a concern. And the concern was, I very sincerely know this to be true, but they were saying in the most positive way. But they were like, "It'd be great if Chris could code more," and not in the judgmental like, Chris, why are you not getting as much done? Not in that way at all, very much in the it would be great if Chris had more time, if there wasn't as much pulling my attention in different directions. But then it kind of went into this interesting direction. So we then go back through and address the concerns and talk as a group about how we resolve them. But this one was like, my name was in the concern, again, in a very positive way, in a very supportive way. And we had a wonderful conversation, and there were really great ideas that were passed around. But man, did I feel weird having my name in a retro item. [laughs] STEPH: So one thing I've learned is that you do a really good job when you are giving presentations and being in the spotlight. But I don't think you actually love it. You love sharing content and things that you have learned. But I could see how being a focal point, especially if there's a concern or something that could have a negative connotation, that would feel squeamish. It would make me feel squeamish. CHRIS: I hadn't thought about it in that way. But as you say it, also, this conversation is a meta version of that. Like, let's talk about me talking about me. I don't want to be the center of attention. But I love technology or process. I love talking about the work. That's great. And so I'm happy to do that. I'm happy to stand in front of a room and talk about it. But yeah, when it's about me, that's weird. And so now I'm going to move...well, no, I'm not going to move on [laughs] because this is the topic right now. But so there's a bunch of things that we have been trying to introduce. And I think this is a useful part of the conversation more broadly and less about me. So one of the things that I think I mentioned in a previous episode was the introduction of point-dev, which is each week, we rotate through a person. And that person is in charge of triaging the errors, making sure that nothing is stuck in Sidekiq, responding to any support requests, et cetera, et cetera. But they're meant to be the frontline such that everyone else can be heads down and really focus on the work. And what was interesting of the three developers that are working on the project, I am point-dev this week. So I was like, yes, that's awesome this week because I'm the person on the frontline. That has not helped me, but in the future, it will. And then one of the other developers mentioned that they feel like it's really useful but also feel like it's been noisy. And we realized the previous week was their week on point-dev. But the other developer was like, "Yeah, it's been great. I haven't had to think about anything." And so they have been off of that rotation for two weeks now. They'll be taking it over next week. But it is doing exactly its job of providing that attention coverage so that they can keep their focus on the code, and that's really wonderful. So I'll be honest, when we started talking about it, there was a tiny voice in my head that was like, is this a failure mode? Should we be dealing with the noise rather than having a process to address it in the moment? Should we be dealing with the root cause rather than the symptoms? And I still think that's a good point of view. But we found so much value from this. And as I've mentioned it, many people are like, oh yeah, we have that. It's great. I've heard enough positive things. So I've backed away from that. But there was a voice in my head that was like, are we failing right now? But yeah, so point-dev has been really wonderful. And next week, I will have to...well, frankly, the next two weeks, I'm off of point-dev appointments, so I'm very excited about that. I've been doing some of the product management or sort of the tech side of the product management and helping to triage cards and make sure that there's very clear work lined up for the engineering team when they're ready to do that. I'm trying to back away from that just a little bit. And one of the things that we did there was introduced an inbox column in our Trello board. You know how I love a good inbox. You know how I love to get to inbox zero. But that is a good way for me, for anyone now in the organization, which I don't want everyone to have to learn our processes, but just saying, "This is the place that you put requests, and we will deal with them. I assure you of that." It has been great because that means I don't need to be quite as responsive in Slack. I can just gently redirect people, "Hey, if you don't mind, please put this in Slack in the inbox column, and that'll be great." That thing, though, that gentle pushback in Slack is one of the things that I've struggled with. And this was one of the more personal aspects of the conversation that happened in retro was me being, like, if we're being honest, I tried to do that. But it's not my favorite thing to do in the world. Whenever someone asks me something, I want to be helpful. I don't want to seem rude or brisk or like I'm too busy for you, et cetera, et cetera. So I will often respond to the question or do the thing that they're asking and then say, "In the future, if you could go to this other place." And ideally, I'm slowly moving forward and being like, "No, no, no, please go to the other place. We've talked about this a few times." But it is an interesting example of one of the specific aspects of my personality coming through in this. But that introduction of an inbox has been great. Love me a good inbox, as I said. And then, more generally, we just tried to talk through what are the things that I'm doing? Do I need to own all of those uniquely? And some of them the answer we decided was yes but some of them we decided no. And we started to sort of distribute the work there or some of the meetings or different aspects of it. And so overall, it was a really great conversation but also very weird for me. STEPH: Yeah, because then you wonder, am I not doing the right thing? Am I not spending my time the right way? But then hopefully, that meeting helped reinforce that yes, you are spending your time the right way and that you're doing a lot of productive things. There are just too many productive things for you to do, and so you have to prioritize those aggressively. I like all the things that you just highlighted. There's one in particular, the last one that you mentioned about finding things that you can hand off to others. And I love that for a couple of reasons. It came up in a recent conversation that I was having with some other thoughtbot developers around when someone's on a project, typically someone just falls into being the point person. They just happen to be the person that the client talks to and ask questions and goes through the most. And that's something that is okay. But we want to make sure that that's not a bad thing, that everybody is treated equally, that everybody is given equal opportunities and room to grow. And so, in my mind, whenever someone is that point person, or you have fallen into that role, it is your job to then pull other people up. So if you have been given the responsibility of running a particular meeting each week, then go ahead and do it once or twice, so you can demo it and show it to someone else as to how you do this. But then tag somebody else and say, "Hey, I'm going to let you or ask you to run this next time." So then that person can experience it. They can demo their style, and then it continues on to have more people. So I really like that you are highlighting it's not just beneficial for you to then distribute those tasks, but it's empowering for everybody else on the team as well. I'm curious, so what was the final outcome? It sounds like there are some really good things in place, and you're transitioning, handing some things off. But I can't imagine that things have gotten...all of your priorities are still there. So do you think you'll actually code more, or what's the outcome for next week? CHRIS: Short term, maybe probably not, if we're being honest, but trending in that direction. So one of the things that's going on right now is hiring. That is just an activity that takes a lot of time. And I care a lot about doing that well, both for the organization and then for individuals on the other side. I want to be respectful of their time and communicate in reasonable timelines and not leave people without an answer or follow up or those sorts of things. It probably makes sense for that to sit with me as the starting contact. And then from there, folks that are continuing on in our hiring process they're going to talk to many other members of the team, and that won't just be me. But there are a lot of first conversations that I'm having. And so right now, my schedule has a bunch of that, which is fine and good. And that will hopefully, at some point, we'll hire some great people. And then we'll be on the other side of that. And that piece of the work that I have right now goes away. Some of the other outcomes that we named there were a couple of action items. And so I think those will help, but they're sort of we got to work towards that. One is transitioning a meeting, but it's a biweekly meeting. And I'm not going to just not attend the next one. So it'll be me and one of the other developers attending to transition ownership of that meeting moving forward. And then from there, so like, two weeks from now, I will not have that consideration on my calendar. And that's like one 30-minute block that I get back or, depending on how you think about it, one block that that 30-minute broke up. I do want to touch back just on something that you're saying there. I think you're being very kind to me in saying like, no, but you've got so many things, and so it's hard to do that. I think that's true, but that's kind of the work overall, and my version of that is one thing. But everyone sort of has, as a team, we have a version of like, how are we being most productive? Are we making sure we're doing the most important things? And so it was interesting in the moment, but I think it was a very good conversation. And I want to make sure that both we as a team and then me as an individual, wherever that happens to be the case, are open to these sort of constructive things. Like, frankly, to do the work to figure out how to get work off my plate that hasn't felt like the most important thing. It felt like close to the most important thing, but then there were all the other things that I had to do. So I wasn't doing the work to figure out how to not do the work. It is a complicated sentence that I just said. But this was a case where retro, I think, very usefully highlighted that this was a good thing for us collectively to put effort into such that we can be more productive moving forward. It happened to be slightly more focused on me rather than the entirety of the team. But broadly, that kind of thinking is why I'm a huge fan of retro. I think it's a great place to take a step back think about how we're doing the work rather than just being in the work day-to-day. STEPH: So if I'm internalizing what you said correctly, let me know if not, but it sounds like you're in one of those places, and I've witnessed this with other people and myself where someone is overwhelmed. They have a lot to do, and they're very focused in that grind and in that moment of doing all the things that they have to do. And it's very hard to then say, "I'm in the weeds right now. And then I also have to figure out how to get out of the weeds." And that's a very different skill and mental space to be able to do that. Because often, when you're just in that mode, all you can focus on is a bit on survival at that time. And then it may take other people to notice to say, "Hey, you're in the weeds. We need to figure out a way to help you not live there and to find ways to distribute some of the work." Does that sound like a fair assessment? Because I think I say all that because I've just seen people in that position. And then they think back, like, oh, I should have offloaded stuff earlier. And it's like, yeah, true, totally. And it often takes a retro or someone else coming to you and saying, "Hey, I've noticed...I looked at your calendar today; how can I help?" [laughs] CHRIS: I think that's probably the right calibration. And mostly, my emphasis was just I want to make sure that broadly, any team that I'm on has the space for this sort of conversation. And that thing that you're saying exactly that phrasing of like, "Hey, I saw your calendar. How are you doing? How's that going, though? Are you feeling okay? [laughs] You can't sleep and whatnot." That can be a really useful thing to have and to have organizational norms about what are our expectations of how many meetings someone should have in a week. And where do we start to think about different things? You did use the phrase overwhelmed. I want to say that I'm like 101% whelmed. So I'm just ever so slightly overwhelmed, but it is like I'm in the weeds. I need to figure out how to clear some of the weeds so that then I can get out of it. And it was a great conversation that came from that. STEPH: That's awesome. I'm glad you got a good team that, frankly, felt comfortable bringing it up, and then that you could lean on them for ways to talk about how you could code some more and talk about priorities and where you want to focus your time. CHRIS: It will be an interesting thing. As the team grows, I don't expect this to get easier. We talked about this a number of weeks back. And I think for a while; hopefully, we clear a little bit of dust here, and then I get back to being a little bit more on the code, and that's going to happen for a while. But as I think about the longer sort of the future of the company, this is something I'm going to have to revisit a handful of times. And it's a really interesting question that I'm still struggling with internally. And where do I want to be versus what will be needed and whatnot? So it'll be interesting to see how it evolves. But for now, I think I can gain back a little bit of coding time, a little bit of maker time versus manager time, as Paul Graham's essay goes. And yeah, I think that'll be good. STEPH: Yeah, I like how you're already looking forward to the fact that it will probably fluctuate because, yeah, right now, you are sort of paying a tax. You are building up to then where you can have more people on the team. And then that may give you back some of your time where then you can code because you can outsource some of the work to them. But then, as the team grows, so are other responsibilities. And traditionally, being in a CTO role and most CTOs I know will code here and there because they want to, and they enjoy it, but it is not their full-time job. So I think you're really wise to have already noticed that and start thinking about how that's going to trend in the future. And it sounds like you might need to figure out how to throw some architecture at it. So then you can scale horizontally, and then you can just have more time to do all the things. Yeah, that's right. [laughs] CHRIS: You're suggesting microservices, right? That's how my job becomes easy? STEPH: Yeah. Well, I'm thinking more like RSpec Queue, but we'll have RSpec Chris or some version of that. CHRIS: Chris Queue. STEPH: Chris Queue. [laughs] CHRIS: And then I just paralyze my human, and then it'll be great. STEPH: Yeah, that's always worked out well in the movies. Whenever somebody clones themselves, that goes super well. CHRIS: Multiplicity is a fantastic piece of cinema, and I stand by that. STEPH: I haven't seen it, but I feel like it doesn't end well for the main character. CHRIS: I feel like every time I mention a movie, you haven't seen it. I feel like we need to do a movie marathon at some point just to catch up so that we've got shared analogies. But yeah, it's a fun movie. It's fine. It turns out fine in the end. But there are some humorous adventures that happen in the middle. Cloning maybe [laughs] isn't the most direct option to solve productivity problems. STEPH: [laughs] Yeah, I think I've got Labyrinth, Hackers, and Multiplicity now on the watch list. And I appreciate the fact that you know that I'm not likely to watch them, although out of the three, Hackers will probably happen. CHRIS: All right, what if I were to get a bunch of Pop-Tarts, non-frosted? STEPH: Ooh. CHRIS: Does that change -- STEPH: Wait, are you going to send them to me? Because if you just have them, that's no good. [laughter] CHRIS: Eat Pop-Tarts on a video call and be like, "Look at this movie. It's great." [laughter] STEPH: All right, bribery definitely works for me. [laughs] CHRIS: Okay, so got it, noted. And based on the nature of the conversation that we have devolved into here, I think we've probably reached a good point. What do you think? Should we wrap up? STEPH: Let's wrap up. CHRIS: The show notes for this episode can be found at bikeshed.fm. STEPH: This show is produced and edited by Mandy Moore. CHRIS: If you enjoyed listening, one really easy way to support the show is to leave us a quick rating or even a review on iTunes, as it really helps other folks find the show. STEPH: If you have any feedback for this or any of our other episodes, you can reach us at @_bikeshed or reach me on Twitter @SViccari. CHRIS: And I'm @christoomey. STEPH: Or you can reach us at hosts@bikeshed.fm via email. CHRIS: Thanks so much for listening to The Bike Shed, and we'll see you next week. All: Byeeeeeeeeeee!!!!! Announcer: This podcast was brought to you by thoughtbot. thoughtbot is your expert design and development partner. Let's make your product and team a success.

Happy New Year (for real)! Chris and Steph both took some end-of-year time off to rest and recharge. Steph talks about some books she enjoyed, recipes she tried, and trail-walking adventures with her dog, Utah. Chris' company is now in a good position to actually start hiring within the engineering team. He's excited about that and will probably delve into more around the hiring process in the coming weeks. Since they aren't really big on New Year's Eve resolutions, Steph and Chris answer a listener question regarding toxic traits inspired by the listener question related to large pull requests and reflect on their own. The Midnight Library by Matt Haig (http://www.matthaig.com/books/midnight-library/) Tim Urban on Twitter (https://twitter.com/waitbutwhy/status/1367871165319049221) How to Stop Time by Matt Haig (http://www.matthaig.com/how-to-stop-time/) Do the Next Right Thing (https://daverupert.com/2020/09/do-the-next-right-thing/) Debugging Why Your Specs Have Slowed Down (https://thoughtbot.com/blog/debugging-why-your-specs-have-slowed-down) test-prof (https://github.com/test-prof/test-prof) Tests Oddly Slow Might Be Bcrypt (https://collectiveidea.com/blog/archives/2012/11/12/tests-oddly-slow-might-be-bcrypt) Transcript: STEPH: Hello and welcome to another episode of The Bike Shed, a weekly podcast from your friends at thoughtbot about developing great software. I'm Steph Viccari. CHRIS: And I'm Chris Toomey. STEPH: And together, we're here to share a bit of what we've learned along the way. So, hey, Chris, what's new in your world? CHRIS: What's new in my world? Well, spoiler, we actually may have lied in a previous episode when we said, "Hey, happy New Year," because, for us, it was not actually the new year. But this, in fact, is the first episode of the new year that we're recording, that you're hearing. Anyway, this is enough breaking the fourth wall. Sorry, listener. STEPH: [laughs] CHRIS: Inside baseball, yadda, yadda. I'm doing great. First week back. I took some amount of vacation over the holidays, which was great, recharging, all those sorts of things. But now we're hitting the ground running. And I'm actually really enjoying just getting back into the flow of things and, frankly, trying to ramp everything up, which we can probably talk about more in a moment. But how about you? How's your new year kicking off? STEPH: I like how much we plan the episodes around when it's going to release, and we're very thoughtful about this is going to be released for the new year or around Christmas time, and happy holidays to everybody. And then we get back, and we're like, yeah, yeah, yeah, we can totally drop the facade. [laughs] We're finally back from vacation. And this is us, and this is real. CHRIS: Date math is so hard. It just drains me entirely to even try and figure out when episodes are going to actually land. And then when we get here, also, you know, I want to talk about the fact that there was vacation and things, and the realities of the work, and the ebb and flow of life. So here we are. STEPH: Same. Yeah, I love it. Because I'm in a similar spot where I took two weeks off, which was phenomenal. That's actually sticking to one of the things we talked about, for one of the things I'm looking to do is where I take just more time off. And so having the two weeks was wonderful. It was also really helpful because the client team that I'm working with also shut down around the end of the year. So they took ten days off as well. So I was like, well, that's a really good sign of encouragement that I should also just shut down since I can. So it's been delightful. And I have very little tech stuff to share because I've just been doing lots of other fun things and reading fiction, and catching up with friends and family, and trying out new recipes. That's been pretty much my last two weeks. Oh, and walks with Utah. His training is going so well where we're starting to walk off-leash on trails. And that's been awesome. CHRIS: Wow, that's a big upgrade right there. STEPH: Yeah, we're still working on that moving perimeter so he knows how far he can go. Before then, he needs to stop and check on me. But he's getting pretty good where he'll bolt ahead, but then he'll stop, and he'll look at me, and then he'll wait till I catch up. And then he'll bolt ahead again. It's really fun. CHRIS: I like that that's the version of it that we're going for. This is not like you're going to walk alongside me on the trail; it's you're obviously going to run some distance out. As long as you check back in once every 20 feet, we're good; that's fine. Any particularly good books, or recipes, or talks with friends to go with that category? But that one's probably a little more specific to you. STEPH: [laughs] Yes. There are two really good books that I read over the holidays. They're both by the same author. So I get a lot of books from my mom. She'll often pick up a book, and once she's done with it, she'll drop it off to me or vice versa. So the one that she shared with me is called The Midnight Library. It's written by Matt Haig, H-A-I-G. And it's a very interesting story. It's a bit sad where it's about a woman who decides that she no longer wants to live. And then, when she moves in that direction to go ahead and end her life, she ends up in this library. And in the library, every time she has made a different decision or made a decision in life, then there is a new book written about what that life is like. So then she has an opportunity to go explore all of these lives and see if there's a better life out there for her. It is really interesting. I highly recommend it. CHRIS: Wow. I mean, that started with, I'm going to be honest, a very heavy premise. But then the idea that's super interesting. I would, actually...I think I might read that. I tend to just read sci-fi. This is broadly in the space, but that is super interesting. There's an image that comes to mind actually as you described that. It's from Tim Urban, who's also known as Wait But Why. I think he posts under that both on Twitter, and then I think he has a blog or something to that effect. But the image is basically like, all of the timelines that you could have followed in your life. And everybody thinks about like, from this moment today. Man, I think about all of the different versions of me that could exist today. But we don't think about the same thing moving forward in time. Like, what are all the possibilities in front of me? And what you're describing of this person walking around in a library and each book represents a different fork in the road from moving forward is such an interesting idea. And I think a positive reframing of any form of regret or looking back and being like, what if I had gone the other way? It's like, yeah, but forward in time, though. I'm very intrigued by this book. STEPH: Yeah, it's really good. It definitely has a strong It's a Wonderful Life vibe. Have you ever watched that movie? CHRIS: Yes, I have. STEPH: So there's a lot of that idea of regret. And what if I had lived differently and then getting to explore? But in it's A Wonderful Life, he just explores the one version. And in the book, she's exploring many versions. So it's really neat to be like, well, what if I'd pursued this when I was younger, had done this differently? Or what if I got coffee instead of tea? There are even small, little choices that then might impact you being a different person at a point in time. The other book that I read is by the same author because I enjoyed Midnight Library so much that I happened to see one of his other books. So I picked it up. And it's called How to Stop Time. And it's about an individual who essentially lives a very long time. And there are several people in the world that are like this, but he lives for centuries. But he doesn't age, or he ages incredibly slowly, at a rate that where say that he's 100 years old, but he'll still look 16 years old. And it's very good. It's very interesting. It's a bit more sad and melancholy than I typically like to read. So that one's good. But I will add that even though I described the first one, it has a sad premise; I found The Midnight Library a little more interesting and uplifting versus the other one I found a bit more sad. CHRIS: All right. Excellent additional notes in the reading list here. So you can opt like, do you want a little bit more somber, or do you want to go a little more uplifting? Yeah, It's a Wonderful Life path being like, starts in a complicated place but don't worry, we'll get you there in the end. STEPH: But I've learned I have to be careful with the books that I pick up because I will absorb the emotions that are going on in that book. And it will legit affect me through the week or as I'm reading that book. So I have to be careful of the books that I'm reading. [laughs] Is that weird? Do you have the same thing happen for when you're reading books? CHRIS: It's interesting. I don't think of it with books as much. But I do think of it with TV shows. And so my wife and I have been very intentional when we've watched certain television shows to be like, we're going to need something to cut the intensity of this show. And the most pointed example we had was we were watching Breaking Bad, which is one of the greatest television shows of all time but also just incredibly heavy and dark at times, kind of throughout. And so we would watch an episode of Breaking Bad. And then, as a palate cleanser, we would watch an episode of Malcolm in the Middle. And so we saw the same actor but in very different facets of his performance arc and just really softened things and allowed us to, frankly, go to bed after that be able to sleep and whatnot but less so with reading. So I find it interesting that I have that distinction there. STEPH: Yeah, that is interesting. Although I definitely feel that with movies and shows as well. Or if I watch something heavy, I'm like, great, what's on Disney? [laughs] I need to wash away some of that so I can watch something happy and go to sleep. You also asked about recipes because I mentioned that's something I've been doing as well. There's a lot of plant-based books that I've picked up because that's really my favorite type of thing to make. So that's been a lot of fun. So yeah, a lot of cooking, a lot of reading. How about you? What else is going on in your world? CHRIS: Well, actually, it's a super exciting time for Sagewell Financial, the company that I've joined. We are closing our seed financing round, which the whole world of venture capital is a novel thing that I'm still not super involved in that part of the process. But it has been really interesting to watch it progress, and evolve, and take shape. But at this point, we are closing our seed round. Things have gone really well. And so we're in a position to actually start hiring, which is a whole thing to do, in particular, within the engineering group. We're hiring, I think, throughout the company, but my focus now will be bringing a few folks into the engineering team. And yeah, just trying to do that and do that well, do that intentionally, especially for the size of the team that we have now, the sort of work that we're doing, et cetera, et cetera. But if anyone out there is listening, we are looking for great folks to join the team. We are Ruby on Rails, Inertia, TypeScript. If you've listened to the show anytime recently, you've heard me talk about the tech stack plenty. But I think we're trying to do something very meaningful and help seniors manage finance, which is a complicated and, frankly, very underserved space. So it's work that I deeply believe in, and I think we're doing a good job at it. And I hope to do even a better job over time. So if that's at all interesting, definitely reach out to me. But probably in the coming weeks, you'll hear me talk more and more about hiring and technical interviews and all of those sorts of things. I got to ramp myself back up on that entire world, which is really one of those things that you should always be doing is the thought that I have in my head. Now that I'm in a position to be hiring, I wish I'd been half-hiring for the past three months, but I'll figure it out. It'll be fine. STEPH: That's such a big undertaking. Everything you're saying resonates, but also, it's like that's a lot of hard work. So if you're not in that state of really being ramped up for hiring, I understand why that would be on the backburner. And yeah, I'm excited to hear more. I've gotten to hear some more of the product details about Sagewell, but I don't think we've really talked about those features here on the show. So I would love it if we brought some more of the feature work and talked about specifically what the application does. I am intrigued speaking of how much energy goes into hiring. Where are you at in terms of how much...like, are there any particular job boards that you're going for? Or what's your current approach to hiring? CHRIS: Oh, that's a great question. I have tweeted once into the world. I have a draft of a LinkedIn post. This is very much I'm figuring out as I go. It's sort of the nature of a startup as we have so many different things to do. And frankly, even finding the time to start thinking about hiring means I'm taking time away from building features and growing out other aspects. So it's definitely a necessary thing that we're doing at this point in time. But basically, everything we're doing is just in time compiling and figuring out what are the things that are semi-urgent right now? And to be honest, I like that energy overall. I've always had in the back of my mind that I like this sort of work and this space, especially if you can do it intentionally. It shouldn't feel like everything's on fire all the time, but it should feel like a lot of constraints that force you to make decisions quickly, which, if we're being honest, I think that's something that is not my strongest suit. So it's something that I'm excited to grow that muscle as part of this work. But so, with that in mind, at this point, my goal is to just start getting the word out there into the world that we are looking to hire and get people interested and then, from there, build out what's the interview process going to look like? I will let you know when we get there; I will. I will figure that out. But it's not something that I've...I haven't actually very intentionally thought about all of this. Because if I were to do that, it would delay the amount of time until I actually say into the world, "Hey, we're hiring." So I very purposely was like, I just need to say this into the world and then continue doing the next steps in that process. I'm prone to the perfect is the enemy of the good just trying to like, I want to have a complete plan and a 27-step checklist, and a Gantt chart, and a burndown. And before I take any first action and really trying to push back, I'm going to be like, no, no, just do something, just take a step in the right direction. There's actually a blog post that comes to mind, which is by Dave Rupert, who is a former guest on this podcast. It was wonderful getting to interview him. But he wrote a blog post. The title of it is Do the Next Right, which is a line from a song in the movie Frozen 2, I believe. He is like, all right, stick with me here. And I know this is a movie for kids, maybe. But also, this is a very meaningful song. And he framed it in a way that actually was surprisingly impactful to me. And it's that idea that I'm holding on to of you can't do it all, and you can't do it perfectly. Just do the next right thing. That's what you're going to do. So we'll link to that blog post in the show notes. But that's kind of where I'm at. STEPH: I love that. I'm looking forward to reading that because that has been huge for me. I used to be held back by that idea of perfection. But then I realized other people were getting more work done more quickly. And so I was like, huh, maybe there's something to this just doing the next thing versus waiting for perfection that is really the right path. So, how do folks reach out to you? Should they reach out to you on Twitter or email? What's best for you? CHRIS: Oh yeah, Twitter. This is all probably going to be said at the end of the show as well. But Twitter @christoomey. ctoomey.com is my blog. I'm on GitHub. I make it very easy to contact me because I haven't regretted that up to this point in my life. So basically, anywhere you find me on the internet, you will be able to email me or DM me or any of the things. I'm going to see how long I can hold on to that. I want to hold on to that forever. I want just a very open-door policy. So that's where I'm at right now, but any of those starting points. And bikeshed.fm website will somehow link to me in any of the various forums, and they're all kind of linked to each other, so any of those are fine. I will happily take inquiries via any of the channels. STEPH: Cool. Well, I'm excited to hear about how it goes. CHRIS: Me too, frankly. But in a very small bit of little tech news or tech happenings from my holiday time, this was actually just before I started to go on break for the holidays. I had noticed that the test suite was getting very slow, like very, very slow but on my machine. It was getting a little bit slow on CI, but the normal amount where we just keep adding new things. And we're adding a lot of feature specs because we want to have that holistic coverage over the whole application, and we can, so for now, we're doing that. But our spec suite had gotten up to six-ish minutes on CI and had a couple of other things. We have some linting and some TypeScript and things like that. But on my machine, it was very slow. So I hadn't run the full spec suite in a long time. But I knew that running any individual spec took surprising amounts of time. And in the back of my head, I was like; I guess I hadn't configured Spring. That seems weird. I probably would have done that, but whatever. And I'd never pushed on it more until one day I ran the specs. I ran one model spec, and it took 30 seconds or something like that. And I was like, well, that's absurd. And so I started to look into it. I did some scanning around the internet. There was a wonderful post on the Giant Robots blog about how to look through things from Mike Wenger, a wonderful former thoughtboter. Unfortunately, none of the tips in there were anything meaningful for me. Everything was as I expected it to be. So I set it down. And there were a couple of times that this happened to me where I'd be like, this is frustrating. I need to look into this a little bit more, but it was never worth investing more time. But I mentioned it in passing to one of the other developers on the team. And as a holiday gift to me, this person discovered the solution. So let me describe a little bit more of what we've got working on here. On CI, which in theory is less powerful than my new, fancy M1 MacBook, on CI, we take about six minutes for the test suite. On my computer, it was taking 28 minutes and 30 seconds. So that's what we're working with. The factories are all doing normal things. We're not creating way too many database records or anything like that. So any thoughts, anything that you would inspect here? STEPH: Ooh, you've already listed a number of good things that I would check. CHRIS: Yeah, I took all the easy ones off the list. So this is a hard question at this point. To be clear, I had no ideas. STEPH: Could you tell if there's a difference if it's like the boot-up time versus the actual test running? CHRIS: Did that check; it is not the boot-up time. It is something that is happening in the process of running an individual spec. STEPH: No, I'm drawing a blank. I can't think of what else I would check from there. CHRIS: It's basically where I was at. Let me give you one additional piece of data, see if it does anything for you. I noticed that it happened basically whenever executing any factory. So I'd watch the logs. And if I create this record, it would do roughly what I expect it to. It would create the record and maybe one or two associated records because that's how Factory Bot works. But it wasn't creating a giant cascade or waterfall of records under the hood. If we create a product, the product should have an associated user. So we'll see a product and a user insert. But for some reason, that line create whatever database record was very, very slow. STEPH: Yeah, it's a good point, looking at factories because that's something I've noticed in triaging other tests is that I will often check to see how many records are created at a certain point because I've noticed there's a test where I think only one record is created, but I'll see 20. And that's an interesting artifact. But you're not running into that. But it sounds like there's more either some callback or transaction or something that's getting hung up and causing things to be slow. CHRIS: I love those ideas. I didn't even know those were sort of ideas in the back of my head. I didn't know how to even try and chase that down. There was nothing in the logs. I couldn't see anything. And again, I just kept giving up. But again, this other developer on the team found the answer. But at this point, I'll just share the answer because I think we've run out of the good bits of the trivia. It turns out bcrypt was the answer. So password-hashing was incredibly slow on my machine. What was interesting is I mentioned this to the other developer because they also have an M1. But there are three of us working on the project. The third developer does not have the M1 architecture. So that was an interesting thing. I was like, I feel like this maybe is a thing because we're both experiencing this, but the other developer isn't. So it turns out bcrypt is wildly slow on the M1 architecture, which is sort of interesting as an artifact of like, what is password hashing, and how does it work? And in normal setups, I think the way it works is Devise will say by default, "We're going to do 12 runs of bcrypt." So like take the password, put it into the hashing algorithm, take the output, put it back into the hashing algorithm, and do that loop 12 times or whatever. In test mode, it often will configure it to just run once, but it will still use the password hashing. Turns out even that was too slow for us. So we in test mode enabled it so that the password hashing algorithm was just the password. Don't do anything. Just return it directly. Turn off bcrypt; it's too painful for us. But it was very interesting to see that that was the case. STEPH: Yeah, I don't like that answer. [laughs] I'm not a fan. That is interesting and tricky. And I feel like the only way I would have found that...I'm curious how they found it because I feel like at that point, I would have started outputting something to figure out, okay, where is the slow process? What's the thing that's taking so long to return? And if I can't see tailing the test logs, then I would start just using a PUT statement to figure out what's taking a long time? And start trying to troubleshoot from there. So I'm curious, do you know how they identified that was the core issue? CHRIS: Yes, actually. I'm looking back at the pull requests right now. And I'm mentioning that this was related to the M1 architecture, but I don't think that's actually true because the blog post that they're linking to is Collective Idea blog post: Tests Oddly Slow? Might be bcrypt. And then there's a related Rails issue. They used TestProf, which is a process that you can run that will examine, I think the stack trace and say where are we spending the most time? And from that, they were able to see it looks like it's at the point where we're doing bcrypt. And so that's the answer. As an aside, my test suite went from 28 minutes and 30 seconds to 1 minute and 30 seconds with this magical speed up. STEPH: Nice. That's a great idea, TestProf. I don't know if I've used that tool. It rings a bell. But that's an awesome sales pitch for using TestProf. CHRIS: Similarly, I don't think I'd ever use it before. But it truly was this wonderful holiday gift. Because the minute I switched over to this branch, I was like, oh my God, the tests are so fast. I have one of those fancy, new fast computers, [laughs] and now they're so fast. STEPH: Wait, you had to switch to a branch? I figured it was something that you had to do special on your machine. So I'm intrigued how they fixed it for you, and then you switched to a branch and saw the speed increase. CHRIS: So they opened a pull request. And that pull request had the change in the code. So it was a code-level configuration to say, "Hey, Devise, when you do the password hashing thing, maybe just don't, maybe be easy for a moment," [laughter] but only in the test configuration. So all I had to do was check out the branch, and then that configuration was part of the Rails helper setup, and then we were good to go from there. I added an extra let me be terrified about this because the idea of not hashing passwords in production is terrifying. So let me raise...I put a couple of different guards against like, this should only ever run in test. I know it's in the spec support directory, so it shouldn't. Let me just add some other guards here just to superduper make sure we still hash passwords in production. STEPH: Devise has a bcrypt chill mode. Good to know. [laughs] And I like all the guards you put in place too. CHRIS: Yeah, it was really frankly such a relief to get that back to normal, is how I would describe it. But yeah, that's a fun little testing, and password hashing, and little adventure that I get to go on. Mid-roll Ad And now a quick break to hear from today's sponsor, Scout APM. Scout APM is leading-edge application performance monitoring that's designed to help Rails developers quickly find and fix performance issues without having to deal with the headache or overhead of enterprise platform feature bloat. With a developer-centric UI and tracing logic that ties bottlenecks to source code, you can quickly pinpoint and resolve those performance abnormalities like N+1 queries, slow database queries, memory bloat, and much more. Scout's real-time alerting and weekly digest emails let you rest easy knowing Scout's on watch and resolving performance issues before your customers ever see them. Scout has also launched its new error monitoring feature add-on for Python applications. Now you can connect your error reporting and application monitoring data on one platform. See for yourself why developers call Scout their best friend and try our error monitoring and APM free for 14 days; no credit card needed. And as an added-on bonus for Bike Shed listeners, Scout will donate $5 to the open-source project of your choice when you deploy. Learn more at scoutapm.com/bikeshed. That's scoutapm.com/bikeshed. STEPH: So I have something that I've been wanting to ask you, and it's not tech-related. But we can make this personal and work however we want to tackle it. But there is a previous episode where we read a listener question from Brian about their self-diagnosed toxic trait being large pull requests. And Brian was being playful with the use of the term toxic trait. But it got me thinking, it's like, well, what is my toxic trait? And it seems like a fun twist on you, and I aren't really big on New Year's Eve resolutions. And in fact, I think you and I are more like if we're interested in achieving a goal, we'd rather focus on building a habit versus this specific, ambiguous we're going to publish ten blogs this year. But rather, I'd rather sit down and write for 15 minutes each day. And it seemed like a fun twist instead of thinking about what are my toxic traits, personal, at work? Large pull request is a really fun example. So I'll let you choose. I can go first, or you can go first, but I'm excited to hear your thoughts on this one. CHRIS: I think I've been talking too much. So let's have you go first at this point/ also, I want a few more seconds to think about my toxic trait. STEPH: [laughs] All right, I have a couple. So that's an interesting point start there [laughs], but here we are. So I was even bold because I asked other people. Because I'm like, well, if I'm going to be fully self-aware, I can't just...I might lie to myself. So I'm going to have to ask some other people. So I asked other folks. And my personal toxic trait is I am tardy. I am that person who I love to show up 5, 10, 15 minutes late. It's who I am. I don't find it a problem, but it often bothers other people. So that is my informed toxic trait. That might be a strong term for it. But that's the one that gives people the most grief. CHRIS: Interesting. I do find the framing of I don't find my own tardiness to be a problem as a really interesting sort of lens on it. But okay, it's okay. STEPH: I see it as long as I'm getting really good quality time with someone; if I'm five minutes late, I'm five minutes late. I think the voice going high means I'm a little defensive. [laughs] CHRIS: But at least you're self-aware about all of these aspects. [laughs] That's critical. STEPH: I am self-aware, and most of the people in my life are also self-aware, although I do correct that behavior for work. That feels more important that I be on time for everything because I don't want anyone to feel that I am not valuing their time. But when it comes to friends and family, they thankfully accept me for who I am. But then, on the work note, I started thinking about toxic traits there. And the one I came up with is that I'm a pretty empathetic person. And there's something that I learned that's called toxic empathy. And it's when you let people's emotions hijack your own emotions, or you'll prioritize someone else's physical or mental health over your own. So, for example, it could be letting another person's anxiety and stress keep you from getting your current tasks and responsibilities done. And there's a really funny tweet that I saw where someone says, "Hey, can I vent to you about something?" And the first person telling it from their perspective they're crying in the middle of a breakdown. And they're like, "Yeah, sure, what's up?" And I felt seen by that tweet. I was like, yeah; this seems like something I would do. [laughs] So over time, as something I'm aware of about myself, I've learned to set more boundaries and only keep relationships where equal support is given to both individuals. And this circles back to the book anecdote that I shared where I had to be careful about the books that I read because they can really affect my mood based on how the characters are doing in that book. So yeah, that's mine. I have one other one that I want to talk about. But I'm going to pause there so you can go. CHRIS: Okay, fun. [laughs] This is fun. And it is a challenging mental exercise. But it is also, I don't know, vulnerable, and you have to look inside and all that. I think I poked at one earlier on as we were talking, but the idea of perfect is the enemy of the good. And I don't mean this in the terrible like; what's your worst trait in a job interview? And you're like, "I'm a perfectionist." I don't mean it in that way. I mean, I have at times struggled to make progress because so much of me wants to build the complete plan, and then very meticulously worked through in exactly the order that I define, sort of like a waterfall versus agile sort of thing. And it is an ongoing very intentional body of work for me to try and break myself off those habits to try and accept what's the best thing that I can do? How can I move forward? How can I identify things that I will regret later versus things that are probably fine? They're little messes that I can clean up, that sort of thing. And even that construing it as like there's a good choice and a bad choice, and I'm trying to find the perfect choice. It's like almost nothing in the world actually falls into that shape. So perfect is the enemy of the good is a really useful phrase that I've held onto that helps me. And it's like, aiming for that perfection will cause you to miss the good that is available. And so, trying to be very intentional with that is the work that I'm doing. But that I think is a toxic trait that I have. STEPH: I really like what you just said about being able to identify regrets. That feels huge. If you can look at a moment and say, "I really want to get all this done. I will regret if I don't do this, but the rest of it can wait," that feels really significant. So the other one that I wanted to talk about is actually one that I feel like I've overcome. So this one makes me happy because I feel like I'm in a much better space with it, but it's negative self-talk. And it's essentially just how you treat yourself when you make a mistake. Or what's your internal dialogue throughout the day? And I used to be harsh on myself. If I made a mistake, I was upset, I was annoyed with myself, and I wouldn't have a kind voice. And I don't know if I've shared this with you. But over time, I've gotten much better at that. And what has really helped me with it is instead of talking to myself in an unkind voice, I talk to myself how someone who loves me will talk to me. I'm not going to talk to a friend in a really terrible, mean voice, and I wouldn't expect them to talk to me. So I channel someone that I know is very positive and supportive of me. And I will frame it in that context. So then, when I make a mistake, it's not a big deal. And I just will say kind things to myself or laugh about it and move through it. And I found that has been very helpful and also funny and maybe a little embarrassing at times because when pairing, I will talk out loud to myself. And so I'll do something silly, and I'll laugh. I'm like, "Oh, Stephanie," that was silly. And the other person hears me say that. [laughs] So it's a little entertainment for them too, I suppose. CHRIS: Having observed it, it is charming. STEPH: It's something that I've noticed that a lot of people do, and we don't talk about a lot. I mean, there's imposter syndrome. People will talk about that. But we don't often talk about how critical we are of ourselves. It's something that I will talk to people who I highly admire and just think they're incredibly good at what they do. And then when they give me a glimpse into how they think about themselves at times or how they will berate themselves for something they have done or because they didn't sit down for that 15 minutes and write per day, then it really highlights. And I hope that if we talk about this more, the fact that people tend to have such a negative inner critical voice, that maybe we can encourage people to start filtering that voice to a more kind voice and more supportive voice, and not have this unhelpful energy that's holding us back from really enjoying our work and being our best self. CHRIS: That's so interesting to hear you say all of that for one of your traits because it's very similar to the last one for myself, which is I find that I do not feel safe unless (This is going to sound perhaps boastful, and I definitely do not mean it as boastful.) but unless I'm perfect. I guess the standard that I hold myself to versus the standard that I hold others to are wildly different. Of course, for other people, yes, bugs will get into the code, or they may misunderstand something, or they may miss communicate something, or they may forget something. But if I do that, I feel unsafe, which is a thing that I've slowly come to recognize. I'm like, well, that shouldn't be true because that's definitely not how I feel about other people. That's not a reasonable standard to hold. But that needing to be perfectly secured on all fronts and have just this very defensible like, yeah, I did the work, and it's great, and that's all that's true in the world. That's not reasonable. I'm never going to achieve that. And so, for a long time, there have been moments where I just don't feel great as a result of this, as a result of the standard that I'm trying to hold myself to. But very similarly, I have brought voices into my head. In my case, I've actually identified a board of directors which are random actual people from my world but then also celebrities or fake people, and I will have conversations with them in my head. And that is a true thing about me that I'm now saying on the internet, here we are. STEPH: [laughs] CHRIS: And I'm going to throw it out there. It is fantastic. It is one of my favorite things that I have in my world. As a pointed example of a time that I did this, I was running a race at one point, which I occasionally will run road races. I am not good at it at all. But I was running this particular race. It was a five-mile January race a couple of years back. And I was getting towards the end, and I was just going way faster than I normally do. I was at the four-mile mark, and I was well ahead of pace. I was like, what is this? I was on track to get a personal record. I was like, this is exciting. But I didn't know if I could finish. And so I started to consult the board of directors and just check in with them and see what they would think about this. And I got weirdly emotional, and it was weirdly real is the thing that was very interesting, not like I actually believed that these people were running with me or anything of that nature. But the emotions and the feelings that I was able to build up in that moment were so real and so powerful and useful to me that it was just like, oh, okay, yeah, that's a neat trick. I'm going to hold on to that one. And it has been continuously useful moving forward from that of like, yeah, I can just have random conversations with anyone and find useful things in that and then use that to feel better about how I'm working. STEPH: I so love this idea. And I'm now thinking about who to put on my board of directors. [laughs] CHRIS: I'm telling you, everybody should have one. As I'm saying this, there is definitely a portion of me that is very self-conscious that I'm saying this on the internet because this is probably one of the weirdest things that I do. STEPH: [laughs] CHRIS: But it is so valuable. And it's one of those like; I like getting over that hump of like, well, this is an odd little habit that I have, but the utility that I get from it and the value is great. So highly recommend it. It's a fun game of who gets to go on your board. You can change it out every year. And it is interesting because the more formed picture that you have of the individual, the more you can have a real conversation with them, and that's fun. STEPH: So, as I'm working on forming a board of directors, how do you separate? Is it based on one person is running work and one is finance? How does each person have a role? CHRIS: So there are no rules in this game. [laughs] This is a ridiculous thing that I do. But I find value in it's sort of vaguely the same collection of individuals. Some of them are truly archetypal, even fictitious characters. As long as I can have a picture in my head of them and say, "What would they say in a situation?" If you're considering, say, moving jobs? What would Arnold Schwarzenegger have to say about that? And you'd be surprised the minute you ask it in your head; your brain is surprisingly good at these things. And it's like, let me paint The Terminator yelling at you to get the new job. STEPH: [laughs] CHRIS: Not get to the chopper, but get the new job. And it's surprisingly effective. And so I don't have a compartmentalized like, this is my work crew, this is my life crew. It's a nonsense collection of fake people in my head that I get to talk to. I'm saying this on the internet; here we are. [laughs] STEPH: That makes sense to me, though, because as you're describing that situation, I do something similar, but I've just never thought about it in these concrete terms where I have someone in mind, and it's a real person in my life who are my confidence person. They're the one that I know they are very confident. They're going to push for the best deal for themselves. They're going to look out for themselves. They're going to look out for me. They're going to support me. I have that person. And so, even if I can't talk to them in reality, then I will still channel that energy. And then I have someone else who's like my kind filter, and they're the person that's going to be very supportive. And you make mistakes, and it's not a big deal, and you learn, and you move on. And so I have those different...and in my mind, I just saw them as coaches. Instead of board of directors, I just see them as different things that I don't see as strong in my character. And so I have these coaches in those particular areas that then I will pull energy from to then bolster myself in a particular way or skill. This was fun. I'm so glad we talked about this because that is very insightful to you, and for me as well, and to myself. CHRIS: Yeah, we went deep on this episode. STEPH: No tech but lots of deep personal insight. CHRIS: I talked a little bit about bcrypt. [laughs] You can't stop me from talking about tech for an entire episode. But then I also talked about my board of directors and the conversations I have with myself, so I feel like I rounded it out pretty good. STEPH: It's a very round episode. CHRIS: Yeah, I agree. And with that roundedness, should we wrap up? STEPH: Let's wrap up. CHRIS: The show notes for this episode can be found at bikeshed.fm. STEPH: This show is produced and edited by Mandy Moore. CHRIS: If you enjoyed listening, one really easy way to support the show is to leave us a quick rating or even a review on iTunes, as it really helps other folks find the show. STEPH: If you have any feedback for this or any of our other episodes, you can reach us at @_bikeshed or reach me on Twitter @SViccari. CHRIS: And I'm @christoomey. STEPH: Or you can reach us at hosts@bikeshed.fm via email. CHRIS: Thanks so much for listening to The Bike Shed, and we'll see you next week. All: Byeeeeeeeeee!!! Announcer: This podcast was brought to you by thoughtbot. thoughtbot is your expert design and development partner. Let's make your product and team a success.

Listen to The Bikeshed (24mins in) https://www.bikeshed.fm/313TranscriptSo we had a bug that occurred in the application where something was supposed to have happened. And then there was an email that needed to go out to tell the user that this thing had happened. And the bug popped up within AppSignal and said something was nil that shouldn't have been nil.Particularly, we're using a gem called Time For a Boolean, which is by Caleb Hearth. And he's a former thoughtboter and maintains this wonderful gem that instead of having a Boolean for like, is this thing approved, or is it paid? Or is it processed? You use a timestamp. And then this gem gives you nice Boolean-like methods on top of that timestamp. Because it turns out, very often just having the Boolean of like, this was paid, it turns out you really want to know when it was paid. That would be a really useful piece of information. And so, while you're still in Postgres land, it's nice to be able to reach for this and have the affordances of the Boolean-like interface but also have the timestamp where available.So anyway, the email was trying to process but that timestamp...let's pretend that it was paid as the one that matters here so paid at was nil, which was very concerning. Because this was the email that's like, hey, that thing was processed. Or let's say it was processed, actually, because that's closer to what it was. Hey, this thing was processed, and here's an email notification to tell you that. But the process timestamp was nil. I was like, oh no. Oh no. And so when I saw this pop up, I was like, this is very bad. Everything is very bad. Oh goodness.Turns out what had happened was...because I very quickly chased after this, looked in the background job queue, looked in Sidekiq's UI, and the job was gone. So it had been processed. I was like, wait a minute, how? How did this fix itself? Like, that's not the kind of bug that resolves itself, except, in this case, it was. This was an interaction that I'd run into many times before. Sidekiq was immediately processing the job. But the job was being enqueued from within the context of a database transaction. And the database transaction had not been committed yet. But Sidekiq was already off to the races trying to process.So the record that was being worked on, the database record, had local changes within the context of that transaction, but that hadn't been committed. Sidekiq then reads that record from the database, but it's now out of sync because that tiny bit of Sidekiq is apparently very fast off to the races immediately. And so there's just this tiny little bit of time that can occur. And this is also a fun one where this isn't going to happen every time. It's only going to happen sometimes. Like, if the queue had a couple of other things in it, Sidekiq probably would have not gotten to this until the database transaction had fully closed.So the failure mode here is super annoying. But the solution is pretty easy. You just have to make sure that you enqueue outside of the database transaction. But I'm going to be honest, that's difficult to always do right.STEPH: That's a gnarly bug or something to investigate that I don't think I have run into before. Could you talk a little bit more about enqueueing the job outside the database transaction?CHRIS: Sure. And I think I've talked about this on a previous episode a while back because I have run into this one a few times. But I think it is sufficiently rare; like, you need almost a perfect storm because the database transaction is going to close very quickly. Sidekiq needs to be all that much more speedy in picking up the job in order for this to happen.But basically, the idea is within some processing logic that we have in our system; we find a record, we do some work. And then we need to update that record to assign this timestamp or whatever it is. And then we also want to inform the user, so we're going to enqueue a job to send the email notification. But for all of the database work, we are wrapping it in a transaction because we want it to either succeed or fail atomically. So there are three different records that we need to update. We want all of them to be updated or none of them to be updated. So, therefore, we wrap it in a transaction.And the way we had written, this was to also enqueue the job from within the transaction. That wasn't something we were actively intentionally doing because those are different systems. It doesn't really mean anything. But we were still within the block of ApplicationRecord.transaction do. We're now inside of that block. We're doing all of the record updates. And then the last piece of work that we want to think about is enqueueing the job to send the email.The problem is if we're still within that database transaction if it's yet to be committed, then when Sidekiq picks up that job to run it, it will see the prior state of the world. And it's only if the Sidekiq job waits a little bit that then the database transaction will have been committed. The record is now updated and available to be read by Sidekiq in the correct updated state.And so there's this tiny little bit of inconsistency that can happen. It's basically because Sidekiq is going out to Redis, which is a distinct system. It doesn't have any knowledge of the database transaction at play. That's why I sometimes consider using a Postgres-backed background job system because then actually the job can be as part of the database transaction.STEPH: Cool. That's helpful. That makes a lot of sense the way you explained the whole you're actually enqueueing the job from inside that transaction. I'm curious, that prompts another question. In the case where you mentioned you're using a transaction because you want to make sure that if something fails to update so, everything gets updated together, in the event that something does fail to update because you were previously enqueueing that job from the transaction, does that mean that the update could have failed but that email would still have gone out?CHRIS: That does not. And the reason for that is because we're within dry-monad world. And so dry-monad will implicitly capture the ActiveRecord rollback, which I think is an exception that gets raised or somehow...But basically, if that database transaction fails for any reason and ends up getting rolled back, then dry-monads will not continue processing through the rest of the sequential operation. And so, therefore, even if we move the enqueuing of the email outside of the database transaction, the sequential nature of that processing and the dry-monad stuff that we have in play will handle that. And I think that would more generally be true because I think Rails raises an exception on rollback. Not certain there. But I know in our case, we're fine on that. And we have actually explicitly checked7 for that sort of thing.STEPH: So I meant a slightly different question because that makes sense to me everything that you just said where if it's outside of the transaction, then that sequential order won't fire because of that ActiveRecord migration error. But when you have the enqueuing inside of the transaction because then that's going to be inside of the sequential order, maybe before the rollback error gets raised. Does that make sense?CHRIS: Yes. I think what you're asking is basically like, do we make sure to not send the job if the rest of the stuff didn't succeed?STEPH: I'm just wondering from a transaction perspective, actually. If you have a transaction wrapped block and then you have in there, like, update this record, send email, end block, let's say update...well, I guess it's going raise because you've got probably like an update bank. Okay, so then yeah, you won't get to the next line. Got it. Got it. Got it. I just had to walk myself through that because I forgot that you probably...I have to visualize [laughs] as to what that code probably looks like. All right, that answered my question.CHRIS: Okay. So back up to the top level then, this is the problem that we have. And looking through the codebase, we actually have it in a bunch of different places. So the solution in any one of those cases is to just take the line of code where we're saying enqueue UserMailer.deliver_later take that line of code, move it outside of the database transaction, and make sure it only happens if the database transaction succeeds. That's very easy to do in one case.But my concern was this is a very easy failure mode to end up in. And this is a very easy incorrect version of the code to write. As far as I can tell, we never want to write the code where this is happening inside of the transaction because it has this failure mode. But how do we enforce that? That was the thing that came to mind. So I immediately did a quick look of like, is there a RuboCop thing I can do here or something?And I actually found something even more specific, which was so exciting to find. It's a gem called Isolator. And its job is to detect non-atomic interactions within database transactions. And so it's fantastic. I was like, wait, really? Is this going to do the thing? And so I just installed the gem, configured it where I wanted, and then ran the test suite. And it showed me every place throughout the app right now where we were doing this pattern of behavior like enqueueing work from within a database transaction, which was great.STEPH: Ooh, that's really nifty. I kind of want to install that and just run it on my current client's codebase and see what I find.CHRIS: This feels like something like strong migrations where it's like, yeah, this is great. I kind of want to have this as part of my core toolset now. This one feels even perhaps slightly more so because sometimes I look at strong migrations, and I'm like, no, no, no, strong migrations, I get why you would say that, but for reasons, this is actually fine. And they have configurations within it to say, like, no, this is okay. Isolator feels like it's always telling me something I want to know. So this, very quickly, I'm like, I think this might be part of my toolset moving forward on every single app forever.

Steph talks about binging a few Things Worth Learning podcast episodes and particularly enjoyed an episode that featured one of thoughtbot's design directors, Sameera Kapila. Sam shared her expertise about management and inclusion, and Steph shares her favorite parts. Chris shares the story of a surprising error and the resulting journey through database transactions and Sidekiq that eventually resolved the issue. He also shares some follow up on the broken build and the merging process changes they introduced (spoiler, the process changes have been rolled back). Leading Inclusively, with Sameera Kapila - Things Worth Learning Podcast (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eiV6_3pZFc0) How to Skim a Pull Request (https://thoughtbot.com/blog/a-smelly-list) Isolator (https://github.com/palkan/isolator) aftercommiteverywhere (https://github.com/Envek/after_commit_everywhere) timefora_boolean (https://github.com/calebhearth/time_for_a_boolean) Transcript: STEPH: Oh man, I'm about to stop eating my pop-tart. I'll put it away. It's within distance. I'm going to eat it. CHRIS: Your high-fat content unfrosted pop-tart. STEPH: You know, surprise Sunday twist: it has icing on it. CHRIS: Steph, who even are you? STEPH: [laughs] CHRIS: There are a few canonical anchor facts that one knows about other people, and when one of those... STEPH: I like to keep everyone, including myself, on their toes. CHRIS: Or you've just secretly accepted that the icing adds another textural flavor adventure component. It's just better with icing. STEPH: All right, all right, all right. There's a complicated answer to this. And the complicated [chuckles] answer to this is that the more organic ingredients that I recognize when reading about pop-tarts are by a particular company, and they all have frosting on them. And the more generic pop-tarts that don't have frosting on them, I don't know how to pronounce a lot of those ingredients. So I'm like, no, but okay, I still eat them. But I prefer the ingredients I can pronounce. So I either go with the ingredients I can't pronounce or have a little bit of frosting on my pop-tart. And I'm going with the non-cancer route for today. CHRIS: For today, in this moment, and accepting the frosting. Okay, all right. Well, that is complicated. [laughs] It's tricky out there. Hello and welcome to another episode of The Bike Shed, a weekly podcast from your friends at thoughtbot about developing great software. I'm Chris Toomey. STEPH: And I'm Steph Viccari. CHRIS: And together we're here to share a bit of what we've learned along the way. So, Steph, what's new in your world? STEPH: Hey, Chris. So the weather, I'm going to talk about the weather for a little bit. [chuckles] It's been almost non-stop rain for the past several days, which is fine. I'm sure it's great for plant life. But it's really hard on my dog Utah because then we can't go outside for our normal walks and playtime. Although he is my four-legged water baby because he absolutely loves water, and puddles, and playing in the rain. So he's very fine with going outside and playing for a long time. But then I have to essentially give him a full-on bath before I want to bring him back in. So not wanting to have to give him a bath each time, in the spirit of improvising, we started finding more indoor games to play. And I've started teaching him to play hide and seek. And he's not great at it mainly because he will only stay until I'm out of eyesight, and then he will come and find me. And so I have to be really, really fast at finding a hiding spot to like dash around a corner or hide behind the door. But I think he enjoys it because he will find me and then he seems very excited. And we go back, and we play again. And so I just have to work on teaching him to wait a bit longer so I can find better hiding spots. CHRIS: When you said that, at first, I was like, how did you teach him to hide? But I realize he's only playing the seek part of the game, and you're only playing the hide part of the game. STEPH: [laughs] CHRIS: I'm just so used to you exchange roles back and forth. First, you hide, then you seek, and then you switch it up. That would be a lot to get your dog to be like, now I'm going to secretly hide. STEPH: [laughs] I'd be very impressed. Yes, we have very distinct roles in this game. I am the one that always counts and hides. But he's a very good seeker. So that's been fun. We just got to work on getting a little better at it. But on a more tech-related note, one of the design directors at thoughtbot, Sameera Kapila, who also goes by Sam, was a guest on the podcast Things Worth Learning, which is hosted by Matt Stauffer. And Matt is also the host of The Five-Minute Geek Show and The Laravel Podcast. And in the show Things Worth Learning, Matt meets with individuals that are excited to share something that they're deeply passionate about; maybe it's tech, maybe it's not. And I've binged a couple of those episodes. And I really like how you can choose between the podcast format or the YouTube format. So then you can really watch the conversation unfold, which I know you and I a couple of times have thought it would be fun if people could see us because there are so many facial emotions and gestures that go along with conversations. So it was really delightful. And speaking of delightful, Sam shared her expertise about management and inclusion. And I definitely recommend listening to the episode because I can't share everything that Sam shared. But a couple of the topics that Sam mentioned that I really enjoyed and would love to chat about, so the first one is about helping someone, in this case, someone that you manage that comes to you with a concern. So there's often a presumption that just because someone comes to you with a concern or an issue that they've experienced at work, that they're the ones that will also want to work to address that concern, and that's often not true. It can be true; maybe that person wants to be involved. But they're often coming to you in the leadership or management role to say, "Hey, I've had this issue," and they really want help with that instead of walking away with homework for it. Because then that trains people to essentially be in this mindset of well, if I bring up this concern, then I'm going to be the one that has to address it, even if I'm the one that's most negatively impacted by this. And addressing this concern could be actively harmful to me. And she shared a really great real-world example from her own experience where her and another co-worker had noticed a concern about the hiring process. And her and that co-worker got together, and they talked about the concerns. They even rehearsed for the meeting because they were trained by the tech industry to say, "Hey, if you bring up a concern, you're going to be responsible for addressing and then resolving that concern." And so they had that meeting with the person in leadership. And they were pretty nervous about how it was going to go. And that person in leadership said to them, "Thank you both so much for sharing that. That must have been such a burden. And this is my responsibility to fix. And here are what my next steps are." And that was amazing because it allowed Sam and the other person to go back to client work. And they also received follow-up conversations about how that issue was being addressed. So there was even that feedback loop as to how things were going to change. And I have a personal example that...I really resonated with the example that Sam provided because I remember there are different teams that I've been a part of, where often I was one of the few women engineers on the team. And so we often have conversations about how do we get more women engineers into the company? And they're wonderful conversations. But there's a part of me that always felt resentful about, like, why am I here? Why am I the one fixing this? I understand I have some more insight and expertise, and experience in this area. But I was also frustrated by the fact that I was the one that was in that meeting often with other women, and it felt like our responsibility to fix this. And I used to feel bad about feeling resentful towards that. Because I was like, shouldn't I want to help other people? And I do. But Sam's example really helped remind me and clarify that yes, just because there's a concern doesn't necessarily mean you should be the one to address it. And it really takes everybody involved, or it takes leadership to step up and address that concern. CHRIS: Oh, that's really interesting the way Sam is framing that and describing the situation of not having any problem that you bring in be now your work to solve. Like, oh, I found the issue, and now we've got to go do this. But the idea that you can bring something to light and then be able to walk away from it. And the particular thing that you were saying that if your interaction is always that when you reference something when you bring in a concern that then your manager works with you to figure out how you can solve it, then you get this mental block of like, well, do I even want to say anything? Because I don't want to try and deal with big, amorphous unclear issues. So maybe I just won't even say anything. And so this as a way to make sure that there's room for all of the conversation is a really interesting framing that I hadn't really thought about, frankly, but it's very interesting. I haven't seen this interview either. So I'm definitely excited to give this a look because Sam is wonderful. And the topic that you're describing here sounds fantastic as well. STEPH: Yeah. There was an important moment for me where...one of my managers is Matt Sumner, who's been on the show. And when Matt was my manager, at one point, we were having a one on one, and we would often go for walks for our one on one. And I mentioned something about "I have this concern, or I have this problem, but I don't really know how to fix it. So I'm not sure I'm ready to talk about it." And Matt, in his delightful way, was like, "We can still talk about it. You don't have to have an answer or a solution." I'm like, "Yeah, but I feel like I should be able to fix it. Like, if you have a concern, or if you have something that you want to gripe about, then you should come to the table with solutions for it." And Matt was like, "No, you don't need to do that at all. We can totally gripe about stuff or talk about concerns and then either figure out the solutions together or go to other people for ideas." And that was really important to me because, like you'd mentioned, otherwise, it felt like this mental block where then it feels like you can't air out some of the things that you're worried about or have concerns about because then you think you're the only one responsible. And you may not be able to come up with the best solution. You may need other people to then help you strategize and come up with ideas. And I just love, love, love that part of Sam's discussion. And oh, there was one other part about the conversation. Well, there are lots of parts that were amazing. But another one in particular that blew my mind is about Comic Sans, the font, the font that everyone loves to hate. [chuckles] And I learned that it's one of the most legible fonts for kids. And it's one of the more accessible fonts for people with dyslexia. And it's actually recommended...I think there are still more academic studies that need to be done to really classify fonts that are best for people that have dyslexia. But Comic Sans is recommended by The British Dyslexia Association and the Dyslexia Association of Ireland. And there are some other really great posts that talk about the benefits of using a font like Comic Sans because the typeface has long ascenders and descenders and generous letter spacing and asymmetrical lowercase b and d to then help distinguish those letters. And I just thought that was so cool. This font that everybody wants to rip apart because it seems whimsical, unprofessional gets overused. There are lots of reasons, I suppose. [laughs] But there's a really big benefit to it, and it can help others. And I just found that very whimsical in itself. CHRIS: I love the idea that there are multiple levels of knowing about Comic Sans. First, you're just like, I don't even know the name, but it's that comic book-looking font. And then obviously, the next step is to be like Comic Sans? How could you ever use that? It's an atrocity. And then it's like, but actually, Comic Sans has some things going for it. And it is a really interesting consideration and something that you wouldn't necessarily think of. But then once you learn it, you're like, okay. Man, I wonder how many other things in the world have this interesting shape to them? Hmm. STEPH: Do you know the history behind Comic Sans? CHRIS: I do not. STEPH: I read about it fairly recently, but I'm probably going to botch some of the details. But I believe it was designed or created by Vincent Connare. And it was created for Microsoft. And Vincent was working on a project where I think there was a dog that was essentially going to have these bubbles that would then show you different parts of the application and walk you through the different features. And the dog had a very comic book feel to the character. And so then Vincent designed a font to go along with that comic book character, this dog and came up with Comic Sans. I don't think the dog actually launched with that particular font. But since the font was still developed, it was released as part of the available fonts. And there we go, there is the birth of Comic Sans. And then it just received so much love and ire all throughout history. [chuckles] CHRIS: There's something that you said there that I want to loop back on when you were talking about chatting with Matt Sumner and saying, "Here's this thing, but I don't know how to solve it. So I don't even want to bring it up." I really liked the framing that you gave and the fact that Matt was like, "No, no, we can still talk about it. We can at least explore this thing, have a conversation." I think that's really wonderful. There's a very similar thing that I experience a lot when doing code review, particularly when I'm in more of a leadership role within a team, which is I often want to highlight something that feels a little bit off to me in the code, but I may not have a specific solution. Like, I may see a variable name, or I may see a controller action that feels like it's the wrong shape or something. And I'll often name it but explicitly say, "I actually don't have a better idea here. So feel free to continue on with this, but I want to name it. So in case that sparks something in you, if you were also feeling some incongruousness, maybe it's worth you spending another minute to think about it, but I want to make sure my comment isn't blocking or otherwise making you feel uncomfortable." If I just come to you and I'm like, "This feels wrong," and that's all I say, that to me is unacceptable code review. Because now I want all of my code review feedback to be very actionable, it's either here's the thing that I feel strongly I think we should definitely change this. If you disagree, let's have a conversation. But yeah, this one definitely needs to change. Here's the thing that, like, I don't know, maybe we could break this into two lines and split it up. But if you don't like that, that's fine. Do whatever. And so then it's I've given the person my thoughts but given them clarity and a free rein to do whatever they want with that information. And then there are ones where I'm like, I don't even know what I think we should do here, but I think something. But if you don't have any ideas...like, I don't have any ideas specifically. If you don't have any ideas, it's fine. We'll continue on with this and maybe revisit it down the road. But I want to make sure each of those different tiers is actionable for the other person, and I'm not just giving them homework or something to be sad about because that would be bad code review. STEPH: I'm just imagining a PR comment that says, "I don't know what we should do here. But I don't think this is it," [laughs] and that just creating sadness. That's so interesting to me because I have flip-flopped with that opinion in regards to there are times that I very much resonate and do what you just said where I will point out to someone where I'm like, "I'm not sure why, but I just have concerns about this. And I don't know if you also ran into anything that was weird about this and would like to talk about it. I don't have any really great ideas, so I think this is good for now. And we should keep moving forward, so we're not blocked on it," but just wanted to, as you mentioned, highlight it in case it sparks something for the other person or for someone else that's reviewing the code. And then there are other times where I'll look at something, and I'm like, "Yeah, it's not great. There's something that feels brittle or potentially maybe hard to maintain or things like that. But I don't have a better idea." And I don't comment on it because I'm like, I don't want to distract that person or block them. And I do think it's good enough, and I don't have anything to add to the conversation, so I just leave it out. So it's interesting to me where is that line of when I feel like it's important enough to comment to then potentially spark some conversation versus just letting it go so then I don't add any distraction to their work? CHRIS: I think it's when the spidey-sense gets past 47%. It's a very specific number. I do the same thing where there's something, and I'm like, you know what? I can't even clearly express what about this makes me feel something off, and so I won't even comment on it, and I agree. And then there are things that trip past some magical line in the sand. And I'm like, you know what? I think I'm going to say something here, but I don't even have a recommendation. And then there's a whole spectrum of the nature of code review and, again, 47% being the specific number. STEPH: There's actually a thoughtbot blog post that correlates nicely to that concept of spidey sense. It's written by Mike Burns, and it's titled How to Skim a Pull Request. But essentially, grabbing from one of the lines here is where Mike presents an unexplained, incomplete, and arbitrarily grouped list of keywords that will cause us thoughtboters to read your code with more care and suspicion. [laughs] That feels perfectly aligned with that idea of spidey sense, spidey-sense 101. I'll be sure to include a link in the show notes. Or, you know, 40%. CHRIS: I think it was 47%. It's a very precise number. [chuckles] STEPH: Very precise nonsensical number. Got it. [laughs] CHRIS: If I'm making up fake statistics, I'm not going to have them round to an even 10. [laughter] STEPH: Makes it seem more legit somehow. CHRIS: Exactly. STEPH: But that's really the novelties that I wanted to chat about. Mid-roll Ad And now a quick break to hear from today's sponsor, Scout APM. Scout APM is leading-edge application performance monitoring that's designed to help Rails developers quickly find and fix performance issues without having to deal with the headache or overhead of enterprise platform feature bloat. With a developer-centric UI and tracing logic that ties bottlenecks to source code, you can quickly pinpoint and resolve those performance abnormalities like N+1 queries, slow database queries, memory bloat, and much more. Scout's real-time alerting and weekly digest emails let you rest easy knowing Scout's on watch and resolving performance issues before your customers ever see them. Scout has also launched its new error monitoring feature add-on for Python applications. Now you can connect your error reporting and application monitoring data on one platform. See for yourself why developers call Scout their best friend and try our error monitoring and APM free for 14 days; no credit card needed. And as an added-on bonus for Bike Shed listeners, Scout will donate $5 to the open-source project of your choice when you deploy. Learn more at scoutapm.com/bikeshed. That's scoutapm.com/bikeshed. STEPH: What's new in your world? CHRIS: I have some follow up on a recent topic that we talked about. So we had a kerfuffle which I described where we had a branch that got merged and the rebase some stuff got out of hand. And so we introduced some process, the protected branch configuration within GitHub that required the branches to be up-to-date before they can be merged and CI to be passing. And everybody was happy. It was like, this is great. Turns out it was never turned on. That's actually the day I was like, man; this is really straightforward. There's been no annoyance here. And then I got to the point where it was like; this seems weird because we just merged a lot of things in rapid succession. I went and checked, and it turns out what I thought was the name of the branch protection rule in GitHub's UI is, in fact, a regular expression pattern. It might not be a full regular expression but like a wildcard pattern for the branch name to match to, and so it's specific. I created this rule, and in small, gray text underneath, it said, "This applies to zero branches." I missed that the first time but then the second time going back, I was like, oh, I actually wanted it to apply to more than zero branches. So I went back in and changed that. It's a great example of very subtle UI that just slipped past me. STEPH: I was going to say in your defense, the very subtle gray font to say, "This applies to zero," feels tricky. CHRIS: That...also, going through the work of creating this thing and if that results in zero branches that would match, maybe that's the thing to emphasize on creation. I would love that. Because in my case, I was trying very specifically to target an existing branch. There is the ability to say, "Oh, any bugfix-* named branch," if you're using branch naming strategies like that, you can use this for that sort of thing. So it may be that currently, there are no branches with that name. But in my case, I was just like, please, main, anytime anything is happening on main, that is what we want to do. I just needed to put the word main there. But anyway, once I actually turned it on, insufferable, absolutely not, cannot survive in this world. We have a relatively small team. There are three of us, and not everyone is even full-time, and my time is pulled in a lot of different directions. So I'm actually not pushing as much code as I might otherwise. Even with that, nope, absolutely not. Our CI is like; I don't know, five-ish minutes per run. Turns out, especially Monday mornings, we have a volley of things that will have been reviewed and trickled in through Friday afternoon. And then there's a bunch of work we want to land Monday morning. And then, just at any point, it turns out, yes, this was untenable. So we have turned it off. I would like to revisit this down the road and introduce the MergeQueue functionality, so the idea of being able to say, "Yeah, you just name when you want something to go in, and then the system will manage the annoying finicky work there." But for now, I had to give up on my dream of everything running on CI, on a feature branch, before it gets merged. STEPH: Ooph, that phrase, "I had to give up on my dream," that breaks my heart for you. [laughs] CHRIS: I may be going a little bit fanciful with my language but, like, a little. STEPH: [laughs] CHRIS: I liked this thing. I want to exist in that world. But it is not feasible given the current state of the world. And that will only get worse over time, is my expectation. So I get to revisit this when I have the time to more thoroughly figure a thing out. But for now, I don't know, merge whatever; it will be fun. STEPH: There's a small part of me that feels a little reassured that it was a terrible time, although I hate that it was a terrible time. But I have felt that pain on so many other projects where I am constantly waiting, and I'm constantly checking to be like, can I merge? Can I merge? Can I merge? And then I can merge, but then someone beats me to it. And I'm like, oh, then I got to restart. And I got to wait, and I'm constantly checking. So that feels like it helps validate my experience. [chuckles] I am excited for that MergeQueue. I would be super excited to try that out and hear about how it goes just because that seems more like the dream where you can just say, hey, I want this PR to go whenever it can go. Just take care of it. I want it to be rebased, whatever the flow is, and have it be merged, so I don't ever have to check on it again. CHRIS: But once we configured this, there was a new thing that appeared in the GitHub UI, which was auto-merge. And so that was a button where I could say like, "Hey, merge this whenever CI passes," which was a nice upgrade, but it didn't have the additional logic of and rebase as necessary. Or the more subtle logic of like, you don't actually want to rebase where you have five different branches that are all trying to merge, and they keep rebasing. You want to have the idea of a queue, and so you get in line. And you rebase when it's your turn, and then you run the CI. And you try and be as smart as possible about that. If anyone at GitHub is listening, I would love if you all threw this into your platform, and then you could ping Slack if anything went wrong. But otherwise, there are, like I said, existing tools. At some point, I will probably, I don't know, over a long weekend or something like that, sit down with a large cup of coffee and explore these. But today is not that day. STEPH: I'm excited to hear about that day. CHRIS: So that is a tale of woe and sadness. But luckily, I get to balance it out with a tale of happiness and good outcomes. So that's good. The happiness and good outcome story does start with trouble, as they always do. So we had a bug that occurred in the application where something was supposed to have happened. And then there was an email that needed to go out to tell the user that this thing had happened. And the bug popped up within AppSignal and said something was nil that shouldn't have been nil. Particularly, we're using a gem called Time For a Boolean, which is by Caleb Hearth. And he's a former thoughtboter and maintains this wonderful gem that instead of having a Boolean for like, is this thing approved, or is it paid? Or is it processed? You use a timestamp. And then this gem gives you nice Boolean-like methods on top of that timestamp. Because it turns out, very often just having the Boolean of like, this was paid, it turns out you really want to know when it was paid. That would be a really useful piece of information. And so, while you're still in Postgres land, it's nice to be able to reach for this and have the affordances of the Boolean-like interface but also have the timestamp where available. So anyway, the email was trying to process but that timestamp...let's pretend that it was paid as the one that matters here so paid at was nil, which was very concerning. Because this was the email that's like, hey, that thing was processed. Or let's say it was processed, actually, because that's closer to what it was. Hey, this thing was processed, and here's an email notification to tell you that. But the process timestamp was nil. I was like, oh no. Oh no. And so when I saw this pop up, I was like, this is very bad. Everything is very bad. Oh goodness. Turns out what had happened was...because I very quickly chased after this, looked in the background job queue, looked in Sidekiq's UI, and the job was gone. So it had been processed. I was like, wait a minute, how? How did this fix itself? Like, that's not the kind of bug that resolves itself, except, in this case, it was. This was an interaction that I'd run into many times before. Sidekiq was immediately processing the job. But the job was being enqueued from within the context of a database transaction. And the database transaction had not been committed yet. But Sidekiq was already off to the races trying to process. So the record that was being worked on, the database record, had local changes within the context of that transaction, but that hadn't been committed. Sidekiq then reads that record from the database, but it's now out of sync because that tiny bit of Sidekiq is apparently very fast off to the races immediately. And so there's just this tiny little bit of time that can occur. And this is also a fun one where this isn't going to happen every time. It's only going to happen sometimes. Like, if the queue had a couple of other things in it, Sidekiq probably would have not gotten to this until the database transaction had fully closed. So the failure mode here is super annoying. But the solution is pretty easy. You just have to make sure that you enqueue outside of the database transaction. But I'm going to be honest, that's difficult to always do right. STEPH: That's a gnarly bug or something to investigate that I don't think I have run into before. Could you talk a little bit more about enqueueing the job outside the database transaction? CHRIS: Sure. And I think I've talked about this on a previous episode a while back because I have run into this one a few times. But I think it is sufficiently rare; like, you need almost a perfect storm because the database transaction is going to close very quickly. Sidekiq needs to be all that much more speedy in picking up the job in order for this to happen. But basically, the idea is within some processing logic that we have in our system; we find a record, we do some work. And then we need to update that record to assign this timestamp or whatever it is. And then we also want to inform the user, so we're going to enqueue a job to send the email notification. But for all of the database work, we are wrapping it in a transaction because we want it to either succeed or fail atomically. So there are three different records that we need to update. We want all of them to be updated or none of them to be updated. So, therefore, we wrap it in a transaction. And the way we had written, this was to also enqueue the job from within the transaction. That wasn't something we were actively intentionally doing because those are different systems. It doesn't really mean anything. But we were still within the block of ApplicationRecord.transaction do. We're now inside of that block. We're doing all of the record updates. And then the last piece of work that we want to think about is enqueueing the job to send the email. The problem is if we're still within that database transaction if it's yet to be committed, then when Sidekiq picks up that job to run it, it will see the prior state of the world. And it's only if the Sidekiq job waits a little bit that then the database transaction will have been committed. The record is now updated and available to be read by Sidekiq in the correct updated state. And so there's this tiny little bit of inconsistency that can happen. It's basically because Sidekiq is going out to Redis, which is a distinct system. It doesn't have any knowledge of the database transaction at play. That's why I sometimes consider using a Postgres-backed background job system because then actually the job can be as part of the database transaction. STEPH: Cool. That's helpful. That makes a lot of sense the way you explained the whole you're actually enqueueing the job from inside that transaction. I'm curious, that prompts another question. In the case where you mentioned you're using a transaction because you want to make sure that if something fails to update so, everything gets updated together, in the event that something does fail to update because you were previously enqueueing that job from the transaction, does that mean that the update could have failed but that email would still have gone out? CHRIS: That does not. And the reason for that is because we're within dry-monad world. And so dry-monad will implicitly capture the ActiveRecord rollback, which I think is an exception that gets raised or somehow...But basically, if that database transaction fails for any reason and ends up getting rolled back, then dry-monads will not continue processing through the rest of the sequential operation. And so, therefore, even if we move the enqueuing of the email outside of the database transaction, the sequential nature of that processing and the dry-monad stuff that we have in play will handle that. And I think that would more generally be true because I think Rails raises an exception on rollback. Not certain there. But I know in our case, we're fine on that. And we have actually explicitly checked7 for that sort of thing. STEPH: So I meant a slightly different question because that makes sense to me everything that you just said where if it's outside of the transaction, then that sequential order won't fire because of that ActiveRecord migration error. But when you have the enqueuing inside of the transaction because then that's going to be inside of the sequential order, maybe before the rollback error gets raised. Does that make sense? CHRIS: Yes. I think what you're asking is basically like, do we make sure to not send the job if the rest of the stuff didn't succeed? STEPH: I'm just wondering from a transaction perspective, actually. If you have a transaction wrapped block and then you have in there, like, update this record, send email, end block, let's say update...well, I guess it's going raise because you've got probably like an update bank. Okay, so then yeah, you won't get to the next line. Got it. Got it. Got it. I just had to walk myself through that because I forgot that you probably...I have to visualize [laughs] as to what that code probably looks like. All right, that answered my question. CHRIS: Okay. So back up to the top level then, this is the problem that we have. And looking through the codebase, we actually have it in a bunch of different places. So the solution in any one of those cases is to just take the line of code where we're saying enqueue UserMailer.deliver_later take that line of code, move it outside of the database transaction, and make sure it only happens if the database transaction succeeds. That's very easy to do in one case. But my concern was this is a very easy failure mode to end up in. And this is a very easy incorrect version of the code to write. As far as I can tell, we never want to write the code where this is happening inside of the transaction because it has this failure mode. But how do we enforce that? That was the thing that came to mind. So I immediately did a quick look of like, is there a RuboCop thing I can do here or something? And I actually found something even more specific, which was so exciting to find. It's a gem called Isolator. And its job is to detect non-atomic interactions within database transactions. And so it's fantastic. I was like, wait, really? Is this going to do the thing? And so I just installed the gem, configured it where I wanted, and then ran the test suite. And it showed me every place throughout the app right now where we were doing this pattern of behavior like enqueueing work from within a database transaction, which was great. STEPH: Ooh, that's really nifty. I kind of want to install that and just run it on my current client's codebase and see what I find. CHRIS: This feels like something like strong migrations where it's like, yeah, this is great. I kind of want to have this as part of my core toolset now. This one feels even perhaps slightly more so because sometimes I look at strong migrations, and I'm like, no, no, no, strong migrations, I get why you would say that, but for reasons, this is actually fine. And they have configurations within it to say, like, no, this is okay. Isolator feels like it's always telling me something I want to know. So this, very quickly, I'm like, I think this might be part of my toolset moving forward on every single app forever. And actually, there's another gem that I used. It's made by the same team. So this is from the folks over at Evil Martians, which is another Rails consultancy out there in the world. And the Isolator gem is one thing that they've produced. And then I think the same author of it who is an Evil Martian's employee created the aftercommiteverywhere gem. So aftercommit is one of Rails' ActiveRecord callbacks. But in this case, it allows you to use it everywhere, as the name implies. And so rather than actually having to take that line of code out of the database transaction block, which is naturally where we would write it because that's how we think about the code and how we want to express it, you can just use this aftercommit method, wrap the call in that, so it's after_commit, and then a block. So either braces or do..end. That enqueueing of the email now just gets wrapped in that. And so what that does is it says, "Defer this until after the transaction commits. If the transaction does not commit, if we roll it back, then don't run it." And what was nice is the actual code change when I finally submitted all of this was add the gem to the gem file. And then everywhere that we're doing the wrong thing, which running the test suite told me, I just went in, and I wrapped that line in after_commit and a block. And it was such a nice, clean...like, I didn't have to move the code around or actually shift the lines, which was my first attempt at this. I was able to just annotate each of those lines and say, "You're special, you're special, you're special," And then I'm done. And again, the first gem told me every case where I needed to do that. It's like, well, this is a wonderful little outcome here. STEPH: That's really nice, yeah, how you can make the changes and then, like you said, re-run the test or re-run that gem, and it lets you know what else still needs to be updated. I'm intrigued where you mentioned you didn't have to move any lines, though. Maybe I just need to look at the gem and see it, but I'm still envisioning that you have your transaction do block. And then you're doing some things; you're updating records, and then you have your end. And then after that, it's when you want to enqueue the email. And with this after_commit, you actually added that method call inside of the transaction but then wrapped the call to Sidekiq to send the email inside of that block. CHRIS: Correct. Yeah. So it's basically like saying, "Here's almost an anonymous function." If you think about a Ruby block in that nomenclature, you're saying, like, here's some work to do when and if the transaction succeeds. And so it meant that I was able to keep the code in the way that we as humans would talk about it but deal with the murky details, and edge cases of database transactions, and Sidekiq, and whatnot. Sort of just handle it by saying like...it almost feels like an annotation or a decoration or something like that. But it was this, in my mind, almost like a perfect melding of I don't want to think about this. Oh, cool. Okay, here's a quick, easy way to deal with it but to not have to fundamentally change how I write the code. STEPH: Interesting. So I like all the things you're saying. I'll be honest, I'm not totally sold, and I'm trying to think of why. I think the benefits...one, as you mentioned, it's something you don't have to think about or at least signals to others that hey, maybe you should think about this to the extent that you use after_commit. And so that way, you don't have these asynchronous events taking place inside the transaction. So I like that visibility and communication to the rest of the team. Putting it inside of the transaction feels interesting. I don't know why; I feel a little weird about this. [laughs] I'm bringing my true self. CHRIS: That's fair. So if we're being honest, I solved this first by finding the Isolator gem. Well, I solved it first by just doing it manually. I went through the app, and I found all the places. And I was like, you know what? I'm worried that the next person authoring code like this, it's so easy to fall into this trap. Like, this is such a subtle little thing that our brains are not thinking about. And so I had first fixed it, and so I had a diff that involved moving lots of lines of code, every instance of this moved from being in the database transaction out of it. And that was fine. I was fine with that as a solution. But it was a little bit noisy because I was moving a bunch of lines. So then I brought in the Isolator gem. I actually reset that, and I went back to before I had made the fix, ran the test just to make sure Isolator was actually finding every instance. They did; that was great. So I was like, all right, cool. This is better because now I have this thing that will tell anyone when this happens. So I'm very happy about that. Because frankly, this is some hard-earned knowledge that I had to read Sidekiq and remember how database transactions work and convince myself of what was going on here and finally come to what I believe the solution is. And now Isolator is just like, cool, that's encapsulated. And it gives a very nice failure message in the test suite. So it's like, excellent. I really like this. But still looking at it, the diff, the amount of code that I had to change, it's like, well, naturally, this is how we want to write this code, but for reasons, we can't. And it's appeasing the computer more than it's appeasing the reader or the author of the code. And so then I happen to be reading through the Isolator gem's README, and they mention the aftercommiteverywhere gem. And I was like, oh, that's interesting. So one more time, I reset. And then I really tried fixing it with after_commit. And the look of the diff there felt nice to me because the lines got a little more on them, but they didn't move. And so it's like, this is how we naturally would have authored it, and now it works correctly. And I liked that. But I understand your hesitation because you're like, but the thing is, it's wrong. And so you've made the wrong not wrong anymore, but you didn't...and so I get your hesitation. I still like the fancy version. STEPH: Yeah, I think you just helped me figure out my grumpiness with it or why I'm not totally sold on it. And it was in regards to adding a dependency to avoid a noisy diff is the oversimplified version that I was processing or the reason that I was a bit grumpy about adding this other gem for that. But then you also just brought a lot of other really good reasons. One thing that you said that I do really like is adding tools that help us author code in a more natural style, the way that we want to highlight this process, and how this application does work, and how this business logic flows. So given in that light, that makes me feel better about it. But yeah, I think that was my initial grumpiness. I was like, it'll be a noisy diff. It's okay. CHRIS: I think I definitely share your hesitation, or you're like, hmm, that's an interesting reason to bring more code into the application. But at the same time, I think the counterpoint that comes to mind for me is we're using Ruby because of its expressiveness; at least, that's why I'm using Ruby. I really want the code that I write to be as close as possible to the thing that I would say to another human about like, oh okay, when a user signs up for the application, we need to create a record in our system, and then we need to send them an email. And then we need to do this other thing. And so, the closer that our code is to those words that I would use to describe to another human, the happier I am. And I will put in some pretty significant effort to hold that line as long as the code can also be correct. And so, the Isolator gem here does a great job of enforcing that correctness. And then after_commit allows me to still maintain that expressiveness and not have to think about the murky details as much or not have to reshape my code to match the murky realities of different persistence engines. But I do agree. I think it's a good thing to look at and ask, like, is it worth it? Are you sure? And in this case, I will say, "Yeah, I think so," but with that amount of certainty in my voice, [chuckles] which is not a ton. STEPH: I think this is going back to my days of working with dependency bot PRs where every time there was an upgrade for a gem, I always ask, what do you do here? [chuckles] Do we need to upgrade you? Can we just remove you from the codebase? So I'm fairly...I don't know, resistant is a strong word. I'm skeptical of when we're adding stuff in, and I just want to question the value that it's adding. But I want to circle back to something that you said, and that is hard-earned knowledge. And that part I understand so much where when you have gone through a fair amount of work to uncover an issue, and then you want to make sure that others don't have to go through that. This is a really nice way to highlight; hey, there's something that's tricky about computers and software here, and we need to watch out for that. And I want to help you lookout for that. Versus this is just inherit information where this needs to happen outside or after that transaction. And so that makes a really nice entry point where someone can look to say, "Why did we add this gem?" And then there's a commit message that goes with it that explains this is why we use this after_commit gem because we're specifically looking to avoid this type of bug. And I love that. CHRIS: Yeah, I think more lines of git commit message than diff on this one. So yeah, I wrote a short novel describing all of the features, describing the different pieces that are coming together. And then it's actually a +28 -6 diff. So it's a very small code change. But yeah, lots of story captured there. STEPH: And if you had just moved the lines, you could still have that commit message. But it's not likely that someone's going to look up that git commit change or that message that went along with it because they're not going to know to blame that one. But if they look at that particular edition of after_commit, they're more likely to find that historical context. So long story short, I think you have walked me through my initial grumpiness and provided some really good ways to avoid that really tricky failure mode for other developers. CHRIS: Well, thank you. I'm getting Steph's seal of approval starting from grumpy places. [laughs] I feel good. All right. STEPH: I'll have some special Stephanie's approval stickers designed and printed for you. CHRIS: I hope you're not joking because I very much want a yellow heart that says, "Steph-approved." STEPH: [laughs] CHRIS: And I can put it on PRs, and I can put it on the wall. [laughs] STEPH: Well, now I have to find a sticker designer and make a...well, it's just a yellow heart. I can probably handle this. I'm going to use Comic Sans. That will be the approved part. [laughs] Yellow hearts and Comic Sans for everybody. CHRIS: Well, with that absolutely fantastic call back to earlier parts of the episode, shall we wrap up? STEPH: Let's wrap up. CHRIS: The show notes for this episode can be found at bikeshed.fm. STEPH: This show is produced and edited by Mandy Moore. CHRIS: If you enjoyed listening, one really easy way to support the show is to leave us a quick rating or even a review in iTunes, as it really helps other folks find the show. STEPH: If you have any feedback for this or any of our other episodes, you can reach us at @_bikeshed or reach me on Twitter @SViccari. CHRIS: And I'm @christoomey STEPH: Or you can reach us at hosts@bikeshed.fm via email. CHRIS: Thanks so much for listening to The Bike Shed, and we'll see you next week. All: Byeeeeeeee! Announcer: This podcast was brought to you by thoughtbot. thoughtbot is your expert design and development partner. Let's make your product and team a success.

You know what really grinds Chris' gears? (Spoiler Alert: It's Single-Page Applications.) Steph needs some consulting help. So much to do, so little time. Sarah Drasner tweet about shared element transitions (https://twitter.com/sarah_edo/status/1431282994581413893) Article about Page Transitions API (https://developer.chrome.com/blog/shared-element-transitions-for-spas/) Svelte Crossfade layout demo (https://svelte.dev/repl/a7af336f906c4caab3936972754e4d6f?version=3.23.2) Svelte Crossfade tutorial page (https://svelte.dev/tutorial/deferred-transitions) (Note - click "Show Me" on the bottom left) Transcript: CHRIS: I have restarted my recording, and we are now recording. And we are off on the golden roads. Isn't software fun? STEPH: Podcast battle. Here we go! Hello and welcome to another episode of The Bike Shed, a weekly podcast from your friends at thoughtbot about developing great software. I'm Steph Viccari. CHRIS: And I'm Chris Toomey. STEPH: And together, we're here to share a bit of what we've learned along the way. Hey, Chris, happy Friday. How's your week been? CHRIS: Happy Friday to you as well. My week's been good with the exception of right before we started this recording, I had one of those experiences. You know the thing where software is bad and software is just terrible overall? I had one of those. And very briefly to describe it, I started recording, but I could hear some feedback in my headphones. So I was like, oh no, is that feedback going to show up on the final recording? Which I really hope it doesn't. Spoiler alert - listener, if I sound off, sorry about that. But so I stopped recording and then I went to go listen to the file, and I have our audio software configured to record directly to the desktop. And it does that normally quite well. But for some reason, the file wasn't there. But I remember this recently because I ran into it another time. For some reason, this is Finder failing me. So the thing that shows me the files in a graphical format, at least on my operating system. Although I think it also messes up in the terminal maybe. That feels like it shouldn't be true, but maybe it is. Anyway, I had to kill all Finder from the terminal to aggressively restart that process. And then suddenly, Finder was like, oh yeah, there's totally files there, absolutely. They were there the whole time. Why do you even ask? And I know that state management is a hard problem, I am aware. I have felt this pain. I have been the person who has introduced some bugs related to it, but that's not where I want to experience it. Finder is one of those applications that I want to just implicitly trust, never question whether or not it's just sneakily telling me that there are files that are not there or vice versa. So anyway, software. STEPH: I'm worried for your OS. I feel like there's a theme lately [chuckles] in the struggles of your computer. CHRIS: On a related note, I had to turn off transparency in my terminal because it was making my computer get very hot. [chuckles] STEPH: Oh no, you're not a hacker any more. CHRIS: I'm not. [chuckles] I just have a weird screen that's just dark. And jellybeans is my color scheme, so there's that going on. That's in Vim specifically. Pure is my prompt. That's a lovely little prompt. But lots of Day-Glo colors on just a black background, not the cool hacker transparency. I have lost some street cred. STEPH: What is your prompt? What did you say it is? CHRIS: Pure. STEPH: Pure, I don't know that one. CHRIS: It is by Sindre Sorhus; I think is his name. That's his Twitter handle, GitHub name. He is a prolific open-source creator in the Node world, particularly. But he created this...I think it's a Bash and a Zsh prompt. It might be for others as well. It's got a bunch of features. It's pretty fast. It's minimal. It got me to stop messing around with my prompt, which was mostly what I was going for. And it has a nice benefit that occasionally now I'll be pairing with someone, and I'll be like, "Your prompt looks like my prompt. Everything is familiar. This is great." STEPH: Well, if you get back in the waters of messing around with your prompts again, I'm using Starship. And I hadn't heard of Pure before, but I really like Starship. That's been my new favorite. CHRIS: Wow. STEPH: Wow. CHRIS: I mean, on the one hand… STEPH: You're welcome. [laughs] CHRIS: On the one hand, thank you. On the other hand, again, let me lead in with the goal was to stop messing around with my prompt. So you're like, oh, cool. Here's another prompt for you, though. [chuckles] STEPH: [laughs] But my goal is to nerd snipe you into trying more things because it's fun. CHRIS: I don't know if you know this, but I am impervious to nerd sniping. STEPH: [laughs] CHRIS: So try as you might, I shall remain steady in my course of action. STEPH: Are we playing two truths and a lie? Is that what we're doing today? [laughs] CHRIS: Nah, just one lie. It's easier. Everybody wins one lie. STEPH: [laughs] CHRIS: But anyway, in other news, we're going to do a segment called this really grinds my gears. That's today's segment, which is much like when I do a good idea, terrible idea. But this is one that I'm sure I've talked about before. But there's been some stuff that I saw moving around on the internet as one does, and it got these ideas back into my head. And it's around the phrase single-page application. I am not a fan of that phrase or SPA as the initialism. Thank you, Edward Loveall, for teaching me the difference between an initialism and an acronym. I really hope I'm getting it right, by the way, [laughs] SPA as people call them these days. I feel weird because of how much I care about this thing, how much I care about this idea, and how much whenever I hear this acronym, I get a little bit unhappy. And so there's a part of it that's I really do think our words shape our thinking. And I think single-page application has some deeply problematic ideas. Most notably, I think one of the most important things about building web applications is the URL. And those are different pages, at least in my head. I don't know of a different way to think about this. But if you are not emphasizing the URL and the fact that the URL is a way to address different pages or resources within your application, then you are throwing away one of the greatest advancements that humankind has made, in my mind. I care a lot about URLs; it turns out. And it's not inherent to an SPA that you will not be thinking about URLs. But again, in that idea that our words shape our thinking, by calling it an SPA, by leaning into that idea, I think you are starting down a path that leads to bad outcomes. I'm going to pause there because I'm getting kind of ranty. I got more to say on the topic. But what do you think? STEPH: Yeah, these are hot takes. I'm into it. I'm pretty sure that I know why URLs are so important to you and more of your feelings around why they're important. But would you dive in a bit deeper as to why you really cherish URLs, and why they're so important, and why they're one of the greatest advancements of humanity? CHRIS: [laughs] It sounds lofty when you say it back to me, but yeah. It's interesting that as you put into a question, it is a little bit hard to name. So there are certain aspects that are somewhat obvious. I love the idea that I can bookmark or share a given resource or representation of a resource very simply. Like the URL, it's this known thing. We can put hyperlinks in a document. It's this shared way to communicate, frankly, very complex things. And when I think of a URL, it's not just the domain and the path, but it's also any query parameters. So if you imagine faceted search on a website, you can be like, oh, filter down to these and only ones that are more than $10, and only ones that have a future start date and all those kinds of nuance. If you serialize that into the URL as part of the query param, then that even more nuanced view of this resource is shareable is bookmarkable is revisitable. I end up making Alfred Workflows that take advantage of the fact that, like, oh, I can look at this URL scheme, and I can see where different parts are interpolated. And so I can navigate directly to any given thing so fast. And that's deeply valuable, and it just falls naturally out of the idea that we have URLs. And so to not deeply embrace that, to not really wrap your arms around it and give that idea a big hug feels weird to me. STEPH: Yeah, I agree. I remember we've had this conversation in the past, and it really frustrates me when I can't share specific resources with folks because I don't know how to link to it. So then I can send you a link to the application itself to the top URL. But then I have to tell you how to find the information that I thought was really helpful. And that feels like a step backward. CHRIS: Yeah. That ability to say, "Follow this link, and then it will be obvious," versus "Go to this page, click on this thing, click on the dropdown, click on this other thing." Like, that's just a fundamentally different experience. So one of the things that I saw that got me thinking about this was I saw folks referring to single-page applications but then contrasting them with MPAs, which are multiple-page applications. STEPH: So the normal application? [laughs] CHRIS: And I was like, whoa, whoa, everybody. You mean like a website or a web app? As much as I was angry at the first initialism, this second one's really getting me going. But it really does speak to what are we doing? What are we trying to build? And as with anything, you could treat this as a binary as just like there are two options. There are either websites which, yeah, those have got a bunch of URLs, and that's all the stuff. And then there are web apps, and they're different. And it's a bundle of JavaScript that comes down, boots up on the client, and then it's an app thing. And who cares about URLs? I think very few people would actually fall in that camp. So I don't really believe that there is a dichotomy here. I think, as always, it's a continuum; it's a spectrum. But leaning into the nomenclature of single-page application, I think pushes you more towards that latter end of the spectrum. I think there are other things that fall out of it. Like, I believe deeply in having the server know more, have more of the logic, own more of the logic, own more authorization and routing, and all of those things because really great stuff falls out of that. And that one has more of a trade-off, I'd say. But I won't name any names, but there is a multiple billion-dollar company whose website I had to interact with recently. And you land on their page on their marketing site. And then, if you click log in, it navigates you to the application, so a separate domain or a separate subdomain, the application subdomain, and the login page there. And the login page renders, and then I go to fill in my username and password. Like, my mouse makes it all the way to click on the little box or whatever I'm doing if I'm using keyboard things. But I have enough time to actually start to interact with this page. And then suddenly, it rips away, and it actually just renders the authenticated application because it turns out I was already logged in. But behind the scenes, they're doing some JWT dance around that they're checking; oh no, no, you're already logged in, so never mind. We don't need to show you the login page, but I was already on the login page. And my feeling is this sort of brittle UI; this sort of inconsistency erodes my trust in that application, particularly when I'm on the login page. That is a page that matters. I don't believe that they're doing anything fundamentally insecure. But I do have the question in my head now. I'm like, wait, what's going on there, everybody? Is it fine? Was that okay? Or if you see something that you shouldn't see and then suddenly it's ripped away from you, if you see half of a layout that's rendered on a page and then suddenly you see, no, no, no, you actually don't have access to that page, that experience erodes my trust. And so, I would rather wait for the server to fully resolve, determine what's going to happen, and then we get a response that is holistically consistent. You either have access, or you don't, that sort of thing. Give me a loading indicator; give me those sorts of things. I'm fine with that. But don't render half of a layout and then redirect me back away. STEPH: I feel like that's one of the problems with knowing too much because most people are not going to pick up on a lot of the things that you're noticing and caring deeply about where they would just see like, oh, I was logged in and be like, huh, okay, that was a little weird, but I'm in and just continue on. Versus other folks who work very closely to this who may recognize and say, "That was weird." And the fact that you asked me to log in, but then I was already logged in, did you actually log me in correctly? What's happening? And then it makes you nervous. CHRIS: Maybe. Probably. But I wonder…the way you just said that sounds like another dichotomy. And I would say it's probably more of a continuum of an average not terribly tech-savvy user would still have a feeling of huh, that was weird. And that's enough. That's a little tickle in the back of your brain. It's like, huh, that was weird. And if that happens enough times or if you've seen someone who uses an application and uses it consistently, if that application is reasonably fast and somewhat intuitive and consistent, then they can move through it very quickly and very confidently. But if you have an app that half loads and then swaps you to another page and other things like that, it's very hard to move confidently through an application like that. I do think you're right in saying that I am over-indexed on this, and I probably care more than the average person, but I do care a lot. I do think one of the reasons that I think this happens is mobile applications came along, and they showed us a different experience that can happen and also desktop apps for some amount of time this was true. But I think iOS apps, in particular really great ones, have super high fidelity interactions. And so you're like, you're looking at a list view, and then you click on the cell for that list view. And there's this animated transition where the title floats up to the top and grows just a little bit. And the icon that was in the corner moves up to the corner, and it gets a little bigger. And it's this animated transition to the detailed view for that item. And then if you go back, it sort of deanimates back down. And that very consistent experience is kind of lovely when you get it right, but it's really, really hard. And people, I think, have tried to bring that to the web, but it's been such a struggle. And it necessitates client-side routing and some other things, or it's probably easiest to do if you have those sorts of technologies at play, but it's been a struggle. I can't think of an application that I think really pulls that off. And I think the trade-offs have been very costly. On the one positive note, there was a tweet that I saw by Sarah Drasner that was talking about smooth and simple page transitions with the shared element transition API. So this is a new API that I think is hoping to bring some of this functionality to the web platform natively so that web applications can provide that higher fidelity experience. Exactly how it'll work whether or not it requires embracing more of the single-page application, client-side routing, et cetera, I'm not sure on that. But it is a glimmer of hope because I think this is one of the things that drives folks in this direction. And if we have a better answer to it, then maybe we can start to rethink the conversation. STEPH: So I think you just said shared element transitions. I don't know what that is. Can you talk more about that? CHRIS: I can try, or I can make a guess. So my understanding is that would be that sort of experience where you have a version of a certain piece of content on the page. And then, as you transition to a new page, that piece of content is still represented on the new page, but perhaps the font size is larger, or it's expanded, or the box around it has grown or something like that. And so on mobile, you'll often see that animate change. On the web, you'll often see the one page is just completely replaced with the other. And so it's a way to have continuity between, say, a detailed view, and then when you click on an item in it, that item sort of grows to become the new page. And now you're on the detail page from the list page prior. There's actually a functionality in Svelte natively for this, which is really fancy; it's called crossfade. And so it allows you to say, "This item in the component hierarchy in the first state of the application is the same as this item in the second state of the application." And then, Svelte will take care of transitioning any of the properties that are necessary between those two. So if you have a small circle that is green, and then in the next state of the application, it's a blue rectangle, it will interpolate between those two colors. It will interpolate the shape and grow and expand it. It will float it to its new location. There is a really great version of it in the Svelte tutorial showing a to-do list. And so it's got a list on the left, which is undone things, and a list on the right that is done things. And when you click on something to complete it, it will animate it, sort of fly across to the other list. And if you click on it to uncomplete, it will animate it and fly back. And what's great is within Svelte because they have this crossfade as a native idea; all you need to say is like, "It was on this list, now it's on this list." And as long as it's identifiable, Svelte handles that crossfade and all the animations. So it's that kind of high-fidelity experience that I think we want. And that leads us to somewhat more complex applications, and I totally get that. I want those experiences as well. But I want to ask some questions, and I want to do away with the phrasing single-page application entirely. I don't want to say that anymore. I want to say URLs are one honking good idea. Let's have more of those. And also, just to name it, Inertia is a framework that allows me to build using some of the newer technologies but not have to give up on URLs, give up on server-side logic as the primary thing. So I will continue to shout my deep affection for Inertia in this moment once again. STEPH: Cool. Thanks. That was really helpful. That does sound really neat. So in the ideal world, we have URLs. We also have high fidelity and cool interactions and transitions on our pages. We don't have to give it a fancy name like single-page application or then multi-page application. I do wonder, with our grumpiness or our complaint about the URLs, is that fair to call it grumpy? CHRIS: It's fair to call it grumpy, although you don't need to loop yourself in with me. I'm the grump today. STEPH: [laughs] CHRIS: You're welcome to come along for the ride if you'd like. And I'm trying to find a positive way to talk about it. But yeah, it's my grumpytude. STEPH: Well, I do feel similarly where I really value URLs, and I value the ability to bookmark and share, like you said earlier. And I do wonder if there is a way to still have that even if we don't have the URL. So one of the things that I do is I'll inspect the source code. And if I can find an ID that's for a particular header or section on the page, then I will link someone to a section of that page by then adding the ID into the URL, and that works. It's not always great because then I have to rely on that being there. But it's a fix, it's a workaround. So I wonder if we could still have something like that, that as people are building content that can't be bookmarked or the URL doesn't change explicitly, or reference that content, to add more thoughtful bookmark links, essentially, or add an ID and then add a user-facing link that says, "Hey, if you want to link someone to this content, here you go." And under the hood, it's just an ID. But most people aren't going to know how to do that, so then you're helping people be able to reference content because we're used to URLs, so just thinking outside the box. I wonder if there are ways that we can still bookmark this content, share it with people. But it's okay if the URL isn't the only way that we can bookmark or reference that content. CHRIS: It's interesting that you bring that up, so the anchor being the thing after the hash symbol in the URL. I actually use that a ton as well. I think I built a Chrome extension a while back to try what you're saying of I'll inspect the DOM. I did that enough times that I was like, what if the DOM were to just tell me if there were an ID here and I could click on a thing? Some people's blogs...I think the thoughtbot blog has this at this point. All headers are clickable. So they are hyperlinks that append that anchor to the URL. So I wouldn't want to take that and use that functionality as our way to get back to URLs that are addressing resources because that's a way to then navigate even further, which I absolutely love, to a portion of the page. So thinking of Wikipedia, you're on an article, but it's a nice, long article. So you go down to the section, which is a third of the way down the page. And it's, again, a very big page, so you can link directly to that. And when someone opens that in their browser, the browsers know how to do this because it's part of the web platform, and it's wonderful. So we've got domains, we've got paths, we've got anchors, we've got query params. I want to use them all. I want to embrace them. I want that to be top of mind. I want to really think about it and care about that as part of the interface to the application, even though most users like you said, are not thinking about the shape of a URL. But that addressability of content is a thing that even if people aren't thinking of it as a primary concern, I think they know it when they...it's one of those like, yeah, no, that app's great because I can bookmark anything, and I can get to anything, and I can share stuff with people. And I do like the idea of making the ID-driven anchor deep links into a page more accessible to people because you and I would go into the DOM and slice it out. Your average web user may not be doing that, or that's much impossible to do on mobile, so yes, but only more so in my mind. [laughs] I don't want to take anchors and make them the way we do this. I want to just have all the URL stuff, please. Mid-roll Ad Now we're going to take a quick break to tell you about today's sponsor, Orbit. Orbit is mission control for community builders. Orbit offers data analytics, reporting, and insights across all the places your community exists in a single location. Orbit's origins are in the open-source and developer relations communities. And that continues today with an active open-source culture in an accessible and documented API. With thousands of communities currently relying on Orbit, they are rapidly growing their engineering team. The company is entirely remote-first with team members around the world. You can work from home, from an Orbit outpost in San Francisco or Paris, or find yourself a coworking spot in your city. The tech stack of the main orbit app is Ruby on Rails with JavaScript on the front end. If you're looking for your next role with an empathetic product-driven team that prides itself on work-life balance, professional development, and giving back to the larger community, then consider checking out the Orbit careers page for more information. Bonus points if working in a Ruby codebase with a Ruby-oriented team gives you a lot of joy. Find out more at orbit.love/weloveruby. STEPH: I have a confession from earlier when you were talking about the examples for those transitions. And you were describing where you take an action, and then the page does a certain motion to let you know that new content is coming onto the page and the old content is fading away. And I was like, oh, like a page reload? We're just reimplementing a page reload? [laughs] That's what we have? CHRIS: You have a fancy, though. STEPH: Fancy, okay. [laughs] But that felt a little sassy. And then you provided the other really great example with the to-do list. So what are some good examples of a SPA? Do you have any in mind? I think there are some use cases where...so Google Maps, that's the one that comes to mind for me where URLs feel less important. Are there other applications that fit that mold in your mind? CHRIS: Well, so again, it's sort of getting at the nomenclature, and how much does the acronym actually inform what we're thinking about? But taking Google Maps as an example, or Trello is a pretty canonical one in my mind, most people say those are single-page applications. And they are probably in terms of what the tech actually is, but there are other pages in those apps. There's a settings page, and there's a search page, and there's this and that. And there's like the board list in Trello. And so when we think about Trello, there is the board view where you're seeing the lists, and you can move cards, and you can drag and drop and do all the fancy stuff. That is a very rich client-side application that happens to be one page of the Trello web app and that one being higher fidelity, that one being more stateful. Stateful is probably the thing that I would care about more than anything. And so for that page, I would be fine with the portion of the JavaScript that comes down to the client being a larger payload, being more complex, and probably having some client-side state management for that. But fundamentally, I would not want to implement those as a true client-side application, as a true SPA. And I think client-side routing is really the definition point for me on this. So with Trello, I would probably build that as an Inertia-type application. But that one page, the board page, I'd be like, yeah, sorry, this is not going to be the normal Inertia thing. I'm going to have to be hitting JSON endpoints that are specifically built for this page. I'm going to have a Redux store that's local. I'm going to lean into all of that complex state management and do that within the client-side app but not use client-side routing for actual page-level transitions, the same being true for Google Maps. The page where you're looking at the map, and you can do all sorts of stuff, that's a big application. But it is one page within the broader website, if you will. And so, I still wouldn't want client-side routing if I can avoid it because I think that is where I run into the most problems. And that thing I was talking about where I was on the login page for a second, and then I wasn't; I do not like that thing. So if I can avoid that thing, which I have now found a way to avoid it, and I don't feel like I'm trading off on that, I feel like it's just a better experience but still reserving the right to this part of the application is so complex. This is our Wiziwig drag and drop graphical editor thing, cool. That's going to have Redux. That's going to have client-side state management, all that stuff. But at no point does single-page application feel like the right way to describe the thing that we're building because I still want to think about it as holistically part of the full web app. Like the Trello board view is part of the Trello web app. And I want it all to feel the same and move around the same. STEPH: Yeah, that makes sense. And it's funny, as you were mentioning this, I pulled up Google Maps because I definitely only interact with that heavy JavaScript portion, same for Trello. And I wasn't even thinking about the fact that there are settings. By the way, Google Maps does a lot. I don't use hardly any of this. But you make a great point. There's a lot here that still doesn't need such heavy JavaScript interaction and doesn't really fit that mold of where it needs to be a single-page app or even needs to have that amount of interactivity. And frankly, you may want URLs to be able to go specifically to these pages. CHRIS: That actually is an interesting, perhaps counterpoint to what I'm saying. So if you do have that complex part of one of your applications and you still want URL addressability, maybe you need client-side routing, and so that becomes a really difficult thing to answer in my mind. And I don't necessarily have a great answer for that. I'm also preemptively preparing myself for anyone on the internet that's listening to this and loves the idea of single-page applications and feels like I'm just building a straw man here, and none of what I'm saying is actually real and whatnot. And although I try to...I think we generally try and stay in the positive space of like what's good on the internet. This is a rare case where I'm like, these are things that are not great. And so I think in this particular case, leaning into things that I don't like is the way to properly capture this. And giant JavaScript bundles where the entirety of the application logic comes down in 15-megabyte download, even if you're on 3G on a train; I don't like that. I don't like if we have flashes of a layout that they can get ripped away b; it'secause it turns out we actually aren't authorized to view that page, that sort of thing. So there are certain experiences from an end client perspective that I really don't like, and that's mostly what I take issue with. Oh, also, I care deeply about URLs, and if you don't use the URL, then I'm going to be sad. Those are my things. Hopefully, that list is perhaps a better summary of it than like...I don't want it to seem like I'm just coming after SPA as a phrase or a way of thinking because that's not as real of a conversation. But those particular things that I just highlighted don't feel great. And so I would rather build applications that don't have those going on. And so if there's a way to do that that still fits any other mold or is called whatever, but largely what I see called an SPA often has those sorts of edge cases. And I do not like those edge cases. STEPH: Yeah, I like how you're breaking it down where it's less of this whole thing like I can't get on board with any of it. You are focusing on the things that you do have concerns with. So there can be just more interesting, productive conversations around those concerns versus someone feels like they have to defend their view of the world. I have found that I think I'm a bit unique in this area where when people have a really differing opinion than mine, that gets me really excited because then I want to know. Because if I believe very strongly in something and I just think this is the way and then someone very strongly says like, "No, that's not," I'm like, "Oh yeah. Okay, we should talk because I'm interested in why you would have such a different opinion than mine." And so, I typically find those conversations really interesting. As long as everybody's coming forward to be productive and kind, then I really enjoy those conversations. CHRIS: That is, I think, an interesting frame that you have there. But I think I'm similar, and hopefully, my reframing there puts it in the way that can be a productive conversation starter as opposed to a person griping on a podcast. But with that said, that's probably enough of me griping on a podcast. [chuckles] So what's up in your world, Steph? STEPH: Oh, there are a couple of things going on. So I am in that pre-vacation chaotic zone where I'm just trying to get everything done. And I heard someone refer to it recently as going into a superman or superwoman mode where you're just trying to do all the things before you go, which is totally unreasonable. So that has been interesting. And the name of the game this week has been delegate, delegate, delegate, and it seems to be going fairly well. [chuckles] So I'm very excited for the downtime that I'm about to have. And some other news, some personal news, Utah, my dog, turns one. I'm very excited. I'm pretty sure we'll have a dog birthday party and everything. It's going to be a thing. I'll share pictures on Twitter, I promise. CHRIS: So he's basically out of the puppy phase then. STEPH: Yeah, the definition for being a puppy seems to be if you're a year or younger, so he will not be an adult. Teenager? I don't know. [laughs] CHRIS: What about according to your lived experience? STEPH: He has calmed down a good bit. CHRIS: Okay, that's good. STEPH: He has gotten so much better. Back when we first got him, I swear I couldn't get 15 minutes of focus where he just needed all the attention. Or it was either constant playtime, or I had to put him in his kennel since we're using that. That was the only way I was really ever getting maker's time. And now he will just lounge on the couch for like an hour or two at a time. It's glorious. And so he has definitely calmed down, and he is maturing, becoming such a big boy. CHRIS: Well, that is wonderful. Astute listeners, if you go back to previous episodes over the past year, you can certainly find little bits of Utah sprinkled throughout, subtle sounds in the background. STEPH: He is definitely an important part of the show. And in some other news, I have a question for you. I'm in need of some consulting help, and I would love to run something by you and get your thoughts. So specifically, the project that I'm working on, we are always in a state where there's too much to do. And even though we have a fairly large team, I want to say there's probably somewhere between 7 and 10 of us. And so, even though we have a fairly...for thoughtbot, that's a large team to have on one project. So even though there's a fair number of us, there's always too much to do. Everything always feels like it's urgent. I can't remember if I've told you this or not, but in fact, we had so many tickets marked as high priority that we had to introduce another status to then indicate they're really, really high, and that is called Picante. [chuckles] CHRIS: Well, the first part of that is complicated; the actual word that you chose, though, fantastic. STEPH: I think that was CTO Joe Ferris. I think he's the one that came up with Picante. So that's a thing that we have, and that really represents like, the app is down. So something major is happening. That's like a PagerDuty alert when we get to that status where people can't access a page or access the application. So there's always a lot to juggle, and it feels a lot like priority whiplash in terms that you are working on something that is important, but then you suddenly get dragged away to something else. And then you have to build context on it and get that done. And then you go back to the thing that you're working on. And that's a really draining experience to constantly be in that mode where you're having to pivot from one type of work to the other. And so my question to you (And I'll be happy to fill in some details and answer questions.) is how do you calm things down? When you're in that state where everything feels so urgent and busy, and there's too much to do, how do you start to chip away at calming things down where then you feel like you're in a good state of making progress versus you feel like you're just always putting out fires or adding a band-aid to something? Yeah, that's where I'm at. What thoughts might you have, or what questions do you have? CHRIS: Cool. I'm glad you brought an easy question that I can just very quickly answer, and we'll just run with that. It is frankly...what you're describing is a nuanced outcome of any number of possible inputs. And frankly, some of them may just be like; this is just the nature of the thing. Like, we could talk about adding more people to the project, but the mythical man-month and that idea that you can't just throw additional humans at the work and suddenly have that makes sense because now you have to coordinate between those humans. And there's that wonderful image of two people; there's one line of communication. Three people, suddenly there are a lot more lines of communication. Four people, wow. The exponential increase as you add new people to a network graph, that whole idea. And so I think one of the first questions I would ask is, and again, this is probably not either/or. But if you would try and categorize it, is it just a question of there's just a ton of work to do and we're just not getting it done as quickly as we would want? Or is it that things are broken, that we're having to fix things, that there are constant tweaks and updates, that the system doesn't support the types of changes that we want, so any little thing that we want to do actually takes longer? Is it the system resisting, or is it just that there's too much to do? If you were to try and put it into one camp or the other. STEPH: It is both, my friend. It is both of those camps. [chuckles] CHRIS: Cool. That makes it way easier. STEPH: Totally. [laughs] To add some more context to that, it is both where the system is resistant to change. So we are trying to make improvements as we go but then also being respectful of the fact if it is something that we need to move quickly on, it doesn't feel great where you never really get to go back and address the system in a way that feels like it's going to help you later. But then, frankly, it's one of those tools that we can use. So if we are in the state where there's too much to do, and the system is resisting us, we can continue to punt on that, and we can address things as we go. But then, at some point, as we keep having work that has slowed down because we haven't addressed the underlying issues, then we can start to have that conversation around okay; we've done this twice now. This is the third time that this is going to take a lot longer than it should because we haven't really fixed this. Now we should talk about slowing things down so we can address this underlying issue first and then, from now on, pay the tax upfront. So from now on, it's going to be easier, but then we pay that tax now. So it is a helpful tool. It's something that we can essentially defer that tax to a later point. But then we just have to have those conversations later on when things are painful. Or it often leads to scope creep is another way that that creeps up. So we take on a ticket that we think, okay, this is fairly straightforward; I don't think there's too much here. But then we're suddenly getting into the codebase, and we realize, oh, this is a lot more work. And suddenly, a ticket will become an epic, and you really have one ticket that's spiraled or grown into five or six tickets. And then suddenly, you have a person that's really leading like a mini project in terms of the scope of the work that they are doing. So then that manifests in some interesting ways where then you have the person that feels a bit like a silo because they are the ones that are making all these big changes and working on this mini-project. And then there's the other one where there's a lot to do. There are a lot of customers, and there's a lot of customization for these customers. So then there are folks that are working really hard to keep the customers happy to give them what they need. And that's where we have too much to do. And we're prioritizing aggressively and trying to make sure that we're always working on the top priority. So like you said, it's super easy stuff. CHRIS: Yeah. To say it sincerely and realistically, you're just playing the game on hard mode right now. I don't think there is any singular or even multiple easy answers to this. I think one question I would have particularly as you started to talk about that, there are multiple customers each with individualized needs, so that's one of many surface areas that I might look t say, "Can we sort of choke things off there?" So I've often been in organizations where there is this constant cycle of the sales team is going out. They're demoing against an InVision mock. They're selling things that don't exist. They're making promises that are ungrounded and, frankly, technically infeasible or incredibly complicated, but it's part of the deal. They just sold it, and now we have to implement it as a team. I've been on teams where that was just a continuing theme. And so the engineering team was just like, "We can never catch up because the goalpost just keeps moving." And so to whatever degree that might be true in this case, if there are ten different customers and each of them right now feels like they have an open line to make feature requests or other things like that, I would try to have the conversation of like, we've got to cut that off right now because we're struggling. We're not making the forward progress that we need to, and so we need to buy ourselves some time. And so that's one area that I would look at. Another would be scope, anywhere that you can, go into an aggressive scope cutting mode. And so things like, well, we could build our own modal dialogue for this, but we could also use alert just like the JavaScript alert API. And what are all of the versions of that where we can say, "This is not going to be as nice, and as refined, and as fitting with the brand and feel and polish of the website. But ways that we can make an application that will be robust, that will work well on all of the devices that our users might be using but saves us a bunch of development time"? That's definitely something that I would look to. What you described about refactoring is interesting. So I agree with we're not in a position where we can just gently refactor as we find any little mess. We have to be somewhat ruthless in our prioritization there. But like you said, when you get to that third time that a thing is working way harder, then take the time to do it. But really, like just every facet of the work, you just have to be a little better. If you're an individual developer and you're feeling stuck, raise your hand all the earlier because that being stuck, we don't have spare cycles right now. We need everybody to be working at maximum efficiency. And so if you've hit a wall, then raise your hand and grab somebody else, get a pair, rubber duck, whatever it is that will help you get unstuck. Because we're in a position where we need everybody moving as fast as they can. But also to say all of those aren't free. Every one of those where you're just like, yeah, do it the best you can. Dial it up to 11 on every front. That's going to drain the team, and so we have to also be mindful of that. This can't be forever. And so maybe it is bringing some new people onto the team or trying to restructure things so that we can have smaller communication channels. So it's only four people working together on this portion of the application, and therefore their communication lines are a bit simpler. That's one way that we can maybe save a little bit. But yeah, none of these are free. And so, we also need to be mindful that we can't just try harder forever. [laughs] That's a way to burn out the team. But what you're describing is like the perfect storm of every facet of this is difficult, and there's no singular answer. There's the theory of constraints (I think I'm saying that right.) where it's like, what's the part of our process that is introducing the most slowdowns? And so you go, and you tackle that. So if you imagine a website and the app is slow is the report that you're getting, and you're like, okay, what does that mean? And you instrument it, and you log some stuff out. And you're like, all right, turns out we have tons of N+1s. So frankly, everything else doesn't matter. I don't care if we've got a 3 megabyte JavaScript bundle right now; the 45 N+1s on the dashboard that's the thing that we need to tackle. So you start, and you focus on that. And now you've removed that constraint. And suddenly, the three megabyte JavaScript bundle is the new thing that is the most complicated. So you're like, okay, cool, let's look into tree shaking or whatever it is, but you move from one focus to another. And so that's another thing that could come to play here is like, which part of this is introducing the most pain? Is it feature churn? Is it unrealistic sales expectations? Is it developers getting stuck? And find the first of those and tackle it. But yeah, this is hard. STEPH: Yeah, it is. That's all really helpful, though. And then, I can share some of the things that we are experimenting with right now and then provide an update on how it's going. And one of the things that we're trying; I think it's similar to the theory of constraints. I'm not familiar with that, but based on the way you described it, I think they're related. One of the things that we are trying is breaking the group into smaller teams because there are between 7 and 10 of us. And so, trying to jump from one issue to the next you may have to really level up on different portions of the application to be able to make an impact. And there are areas that we really need infrastructure improvements and then essentially paving the way for other people to be able to move more quickly. We do have to prioritize some of that work as well. So if we break up into smaller teams, it addresses a couple of areas, or at least that's the goal is to address a couple of areas. One is we avoid having silos so that people aren't a bottleneck, or they're the only ones that are really running this mini-project and the only one that has context. Because then when that person realizes the scope has grown, bringing somebody on to help feels painful because then you're in an urgent state, but now you have to spend time leveling someone else up just so that they can help you, and that's tough. So the goal is that by having smaller teams, we will reduce that from happening because at least everything that feels like a small project...and by feels like a small project, I mean if we have more than one ticket that's associated with the same theme, that's going to start hinting at maybe this is more than just one ticket itself, and it might actually belong to an epic. Or there's a theme here, and maybe we should have two people working on this. And breaking people into groups, then we can focus on some people are focused more on the day-to-day activity. Some people are focused on another important portion of the codebase as we have what may be extracted. I'm going to say this, but we're going to move on, maybe extracted into its own service. [laughs] I know that's a hot one for us, so I'm just going to say it. CHRIS: I told you I can't be nerd sniped. This is fine. Let's continue on. [laughs] STEPH: [laughs] And then a small group can also focus on some of those infrastructure improvements that I was alluding to. So smaller teams is something that we are trying. We are also doing a really great job. I've been really happy and just proud of the team where folks are constantly reaching out to each other to say, "Hey, I'm done with my ticket. Who can I help?" So instead of immediately going to the backlog and grabbing the next thing. Because we recognize that because of this structure where some people are some silos, they have their own little mini backlog, which we are working to remove that to make sure everything is properly prioritized instead of getting assigned to one particular person. But we are reaching out to each other to say, "Hey, what can I do to help? What do you need to get done with your work before I go pick something else up?" The other two things that come to mind is who's setting the deadlines? I think you touched on this one as well. It's just understanding why is it urgent? Does it need to be urgent? What is the deadline? Is this something that internally we are driving? Is this something that was communicated without talking to the rest of the team? Is this just a really demanding customer? Are they setting unrealistic expectations? But having more communication around what is the sense of urgency? What happens if we miss this deadline? What happens if we don't get to this for a week, a month? What does that look like? And then also, my favorite are retros because then we can vote on what feels like the highest priority in terms of pain points or run these types of experiments like the smaller teams. So those are the current strategies that we have. And I'm very interested to see how they turn out because it is a tough way. Like you said, it's challenge mode, and it is going to burn people out. And it does make people feel fatigued when they have to jump from one priority to the next. So I'm very interested. It's a very interesting problem to me too. It just feels like something that I imagine a lot of teams may be facing. So I'm really excited if anybody else is facing a similar issue or has gone through a similar challenge mode; I'd love to hear how your team tackled it. CHRIS: Yeah, I'm super interested to hear the outcome of those experiments. As a slightly pointed question there, is there any semi-formal version of tracking the experiments? And is it just retro to retro that you're using for feedback on that? I've often been on teams where we have retro. We come up with it, and we're like, oh, this is a pain point. All right, let's try this. And then two weeks later, we're like, oh, did anyone actually do that? And then we just forget. And it's one of those things that I've tried to come up with better ways to actually manage, make slightly more explicit the experiments, and then have a timeline, have an almost scientific process of what's the hypothesis? What's the procedure? What are the results? Write up an executive summary. How'd it go? STEPH: We are currently using retro, but I like that idea of having something that's a bit more concrete. So we have action items. And typically, going through retro, I tend to revisit the action items first as a way to kick off retro. So then that highlights what did we do? What did we not do? What do we not want to do anymore? What needs to roll over to the current iteration? And I think that could be just a way that we chat about this. We try something new, and we see how it's going each week in retro. But I do like the idea of stating upfront this is what we're looking to achieve because I think that's not captured in the retro action item. We have the thing that we're doing, but we haven't captured this is what we hope to achieve by taking this experiment on. Mid-roll Ad And now a quick break to hear from today's sponsor, Scout APM. Scout APM is leading-edge application performance monitoring that's designed to help Rails developers quickly find and fix performance issues without having to deal with the headache or overhead of enterprise platform feature bloat. With a developer-centric UI and tracing logic that ties bottlenecks to source code, you can quickly pinpoint and resolve those performance abnormalities like N+1 queries, slow database queries, memory bloat, and much more. Scout's real-time alerting and weekly digest emails let you rest easy knowing Scout's on watch and resolving performance issues before your customers ever see them. Scout has also launched its new error monitoring feature add-on for Python applications. Now you can connect your error reporting and application monitoring data on one platform. See for yourself why developers call Scout their best friend and try our error monitoring and APM free for 14 days; no credit card needed. And as an added-on bonus for Bike Shed listeners, Scout will donate $5 to the open-source project of your choice when you deploy. Learn more at scoutapm.com/bikeshed. That's scoutapm.com/bikeshed. STEPH: As for the other thing that you mentioned, I do have an idea for that because a former client that I worked with where we had experiments or things that we wanted to do, we were using Trello. And so we would often take those action items…or it was even more of a theme. It wasn't something that could be one-and-done. It was more of a daily reminder of, hey; we are trying this new thing. And so, we want to remind you each day to embrace this experiment and this practice. And so we would turn it into a Trello ticket, and then we would just leave it at the top of the board. So then, each day, as we were walking the board, it was a nice reminder to be like, hey, this is an ongoing experiment. Don't forget to do this. CHRIS: I do like the idea of bringing it into a stand-up potentially as like that's just a recurring point that we all have. So we can sort of revisit it, keep it top of mind, and discard it at some point if it's not useful. And if we're saying we're doing a thing, then let's do the thing and see how it goes. So yeah, very interested to hear the outcomes of the experiment and also the meta experiment framework that you're going to build here. Very interested to hear more about that. And just to say it again, this sounds like your perfect storm is not quite right because it doesn't sound like there's a ton of organizational dysfunction here. It sounds like this is just like, nah, it's hard. The code's not in perfect shape, but no code is. And there's just a lot of work to be done. And there are priorities because frankly, sometimes in the world, there are priorities, and you're sort of at the intersection of that. And I've been in plenty of teams where it was hard because of humans. In fact, that's often the reason of we're sort of making up problems, or we're poorly communicating or things like that. But it sounds like you're in the like, nope, this is just hard. And so, in a way, it sounds like you're thinking about it like, I don't know, it's kind of the challenge that I signed up for. Like, if we can win this, then there's going to be some good learnings that come out of that, and we're going to be all the better. And so, I wish you all the best of luck on that and would love to hear more about it in the future. STEPH: Thank you. And yeah, it has been such an interesting project with so many different challenges. And as you've mentioned, that is one area that is going really well where the people are wonderful. Everybody is doing their best and working hard. So that is not one of the competing challenges. And it is one of those; it's hard. There are a lot of external factors that are influencing the priority of our work. And then also, some external areas that we don't have control over that are forcing some of those deadlines where customers need something and not because they're being fussy, but they are themselves reacting to external deadlines that they don't have control over. So it is one of those where the people are great, and the challenges are just real, and we're working through them together. But it's also hard. But it's helpful chatting through all the different challenges with you. So I appreciate all of your thoughts on the matter. And I'll report some updates once I have some more information. On that note, shall we wrap up? CHRIS: Let's wrap up. STEPH: The show notes for this episode can be found at bikeshed.fm. CHRIS: This show is produced and edited by Mandy Moore. STEPH: If you enjoyed listening, one really easy way to support the show is to leave us a quick rating or a review in iTunes as it helps other people find the show. CHRIS: If you have any feedback for this or any of our other episodes, you can reach us at @_bikeshed on Twitter. And I'm @christoomey. STEPH: And I'm @SViccari. CHRIS: Or you can email us at hosts@bikeshed.fm. STEPH: Thanks so much for listening to The Bike Shed, and we'll see you next week. All: Byeeeeeeee! Announcer: This podcast was brought to you by thoughtbot. thoughtbot is your expert design and development partner. Let's make your product and team a success.

In this episode, Steph and Chris talk about things they've changed their minds about over the course of their careers as software developers. Steph talks about as it turns out, arm chair rests are good, feature flags and comments are also good, she's changed her mind about how teams structure the work that each person is doing at once, and believes strongly in representation in the field. Chris is not a fan up upgrading his operating system and when he first started out, he gravitated towards learning dynamic languages, and since then, much prefers functional languages, static typing or more broadly, static analysis. He also no longer believes in the 10x engineer, and also very much believes that URLs matter on the internet. So basically, don't call them single-page applications; call them client-side applications instead! Arq (https://www.arqbackup.com/) Karabiner-Elements (https://karabiner-elements.pqrs.org/) Kent C. Dodd's Epic React Course (https://epicreact.dev/) The Art of Code Comments by Sarah Drasner (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yhF7OmuIILc) Gary Bernhardt: Functional Core, Imperative Shell (https://www.destroyallsoftware.com/screencasts/catalog/functional-core-imperative-shell) Transcript: CHRIS: I still have dreams that I missed an entire semester of math class, and now it's time for the final. I don't know that I'm ever going to grow out of that. STEPH: That's wild. CHRIS: You don't experience that? It's a mixture of I'm in elementary school, but it's a college final. Like, the physical school that I'm in is my elementary school, but it's a calculus college course that I missed. And now it's time for the final, and I won't graduate college as a result. But it's also high school at the same time. Just every part of education sort of melded together into this nightmare scenario. Do you not experience that? I thought this was normal. STEPH: [chuckles] Not in a very long time, not since I was in college. But I'm imagining this very cute, young Chris showing up with a backpack to the calculus final like, "Oh no." [laughs] CHRIS: Yeah, pretty much, yeah. I really thought I would grow out of it at some point. But it shows...I think it manifests when I have anxiety about something else in the world, and then I have a math terror dream. STEPH: That's your stress sign. That's your terror dream. CHRIS: Apparently. STEPH: Hello and welcome to another episode of The Bike Shed, a weekly podcast from your friends at thoughtbot about developing great software. I'm Steph Viccari. CHRIS: And I'm Chris Toomey. STEPH: And together, we're here to share a bit of what we've learned along the way. Hey, Chris, how's your week going? CHRIS: Oh, it's going fine. Yeah, I'll go with fine. I had to upgrade my operating system. Enough things had stopped working or seemed to be pestering me about it regularly, which normally I'm going to ignore that for as long as I can. That's sort of where I'm at in the world these days. Like, I don't want to upgrade because I don't know what's going to break and whatnot, but then things had broken already. Text messages were no longer showing up on my computer. And it turns out that the primary way that I interact with text messages is by replying to them through my computer. I don't want to type on my phone, that's not a thing. I'm already grumpy enough about text messages, to begin with, that I will regularly respond switching to email, and then I'll go off from there. But yeah, they stopped working, it stopped connecting. And then I got this really weird message from Apple when I tried to sign in. And I was like, I feel like I should at least try to upgrade to the new operating system, which I think has been out for a long time, and I've just been ignoring it. But then I had the added problem of I didn't have enough space on my computer to install it, which I tried once before. So I downloaded the installer, but the installer downloader doesn't check whether or not you have enough space to do the install. So it's just like, hey, so you know how you didn't have enough space? Well, we took up the remainder of it, and now you can't do anything about it. And the installer is hidden somewhere in the computer. So at one point, it just went away, and then suddenly had a lot of space on my computer. But finally, I decided to bite the bullet. I found a bunch of caches on my computer. So there was a cache for my backup utility, which is called Arq, A-R-Q, which was a lot of space. It was like 20 gigs or something like that. So it was like, sorry, you have no more cache. I'm pretty sure my computer's going to light on fire the next time it tries to do a backup because it has no cache to rely on, and it's got to try a lot harder, pull a lot more data down. I don't know what it does, but whatever. It's going to do that. And then, I found the more general application caches on the computer. Spotify had like six gigs of cache. Well, what are you doing? Aren't you streaming from the internet? Stop it. That's not okay. That is not acceptable. Yarn had three gigs. I was like, what is everybody doing? And I busted all of these. I threw away everything, and my computer seems to be doing fine after the fact. So, were the caches even doing anything? I ask. Anyway, so I upgraded, and then some stuff didn't work. And so then I had to find the versions to make stuff work. The particular one that stood out was Karabiner-Elements, which I used to make my mechanical keyboard do the right things for the function keys. That stopped working. And I tried to upgrade it to the newer version because I figured okay; they probably hopefully released a new version, but it failed in the upgrade process. And it turns out the secret was I had to upgrade to an intermediate version. I was on 12.3, and I needed to go to 13.4. But in between, I had to go to 12.10. And if I went to 12.10, then the upgrade to 13...everything about it was everything that I hate about upgrading software. It's like, I just know it's working right now, and I feel like if I even just look at it wrong, this whole tower of software is going to fall over. The worst thing, the thing that I have not been able to fix, is now I use iTerm as my terminal, my terminal emulator as it were. And I typically run with transparency mode on which some people look at and say, "Wow, that's a choice." And I say, "I kind of like it. I don't know; it makes me feel like a hacker or something." I don't know, whatever. [chuckles] Let me live my life. But for some reason, switching to Big Sur, the version of OS X that I'm on now, iTerm doesn't have transparency anymore. And I just haven't been bothered to fix it yet. But, man, I got rambly. I clearly have some feelings about upgrading software. STEPH: You have so many feelings. The fact that you kept going...People can't see me, but I'm just dying because of that whole story. [laughs] CHRIS: I kind of felt like I had to get through it. I had to exorcise the demons, tell my tale, and then be done with it, which I think I'm at now. STEPH: When I start laughing that hard, [laughs] I try to hide from the camera view because I want you to keep going for people to listen. CHRIS: But what's fun is you bob and weave. You'll hide for a minute, and then you'll come back and be like, okay, I'm composed, never mind. And then you'll just fade off to the side again. So yeah, but I powered through. [laughs] STEPH: Oh, all right, there is so much there. [laughs] Upgrading is the worst. I agree with that. That was actually something I ran into earlier this week. Well, it was a mix of where upgrading presented a problem and then upgrading something else resolved that problem. And so that was an adventure where I shared a tweet. I can link to it in the show notes as well. But Ruby was just taking up 100%, a full core, just all the time, and I couldn't figure out why. I wasn't doing anything with Ruby. We weren't talking at the moment, but it was just turning up one of those 100% CPU or higher. And so then I did some searching. And I did find the resolution, which was to upgrade the Listen gem because there was something in the Listen gem that didn't fully support Big Sur. Is that the name of the thing that I am on? CHRIS: That's the new one, yeah. I know because I've just upgraded to it. I have thoughts on the matter. [chuckles] STEPH: Cool. [chuckles] Yeah, when I upgraded to Big Sur. But then someone had kindly marched in to fix it, then upgrading resolved that problem. And Ruby is back to a peaceful level as to the amount of process, the amount of CPU that it should be taking up. Transparency mode, I'm thumbs up on it. I like how you called that out, how that's a choice. And I'm with you on that choice, although I didn't realize that's broken. I guess I just hadn't...I guess I don't care deeply enough that I've tried to restore my transparency, but you're telling me to hold on. CHRIS: We're going to get realer now in this moment. So I have a very old version of iTerm because it has a different way of going fullscreen than the default operating system level fullscreen. I really hate that it animates to fullscreen, and it doesn't quite fill the full screen. Like, it still had a border around it or something. So I have a very old version of iTerm that I've been running with forever, and I refuse to upgrade in any way as a result of I want to cling to this old version of things working. But as a result, I think I finally hit the end of the road on that. This is like years running now too. I remember I kept it in a Dropbox folder so that each time I upgrade or get a new computer, I'm like, okay, good. I still have my old special version [chuckles] of iTerm. But I think that time is over and I got to find...I feel like there are new terminal emulators out there. It's like Alacritty and other stuff that people talk about. So maybe it's time for me to try and find something new as long as I can get that transparency because I want to feel like an uber lead hacksaw. STEPH: You have such a brand of new-new that I'm now discovering that you are also a software hoarder, so you have both in your personality. [chuckles] CHRIS: There was a period early on in my software career that was like, oh, I got to find all this stuff. I got to figure things out and configure it. And then I was like, wow, that's taking up a lot of my time, I should stop it. And I think since then, I haven't upgraded anything. If you go look at my .files, I don't know the last time I pushed to them, but it's been a while. I'm still doing things, of course, but not as much. I know the cost of it, and I know the cost of maintenance. And really, this is an allegory for software overall. This isn't just about our local development environments, but entropy exists in software. Software does not exist at rest, and it will decay over time. And so the idea of we've worked with so many clients where they're like, yeah, we're on Ruby 1.8, and it's Rails 0.9. So okay, all right, well, we're going to have to deal with that, it turns out. We can't just keep ignoring that. So really, it's the same story played out but in my local hoarder cavern. STEPH: There was a part of the saga, the story that you shared with the installer and that you don't have enough space, and it took up the rest of the space, and you can't do anything. I'm very nervous; what happened to your stuff, your space? How did that resolve? [chuckles] CHRIS: I finally bit the bullet. And so I have a bunch of...I've tried a bunch of the different pieces of software that will visually analyze your disk space. So they crawl the whole directory starting from the very root of your computer, and it will be like, all right, applications has this much, and the library directory in your home directory has this much. Here are all of the different places that stuff might be hiding on your computer. And then you can visualize and be like, okay, that's where the most of it is. Node modules, as an aside, we did not choose an efficient way to approach how to put code on my computer because Node modules take up a lot of space on my computer, but they're so spread out. Multiple times I've seen people share a version of rm -rf, and then it's some subshell that does find every Node modules directory underneath a code folder. So you can find every single Node module and just blow them away. That will regain you some space. But that was not the solution this time. I've tried lots of piecemeal solutions over time. But eventually, the thing that got me there was just busting all of those caches. So I cleared the backup utility, Arq's cache. I cleared a bunch of them, Spotify Yarn, et cetera. And that cleared enough space for the installer to actually run. And then, once that was done, the installer program itself was no longer around, so I reclaimed that space. But it was this weird chicken and egg thing where I had to have enough space to complete the installation such that the installer could go away. And now...actually, let me see what my hard drive looks like now. So somehow, according to the Macintosh hard drive info, I have 50 gigabytes of available space, which is really frustrating because there were a number of weeks where we went into a Bike Shed recording, and I was like, I have one gigabyte. I'm not safe right now because this audio is going to be more than that. And so I don't know how now I'm sitting at 50. I guess all those caches that I cleared and the installer being gone probably puts me in a good spot. But anyway, I'm living in an upgraded, wonderful world. As an aside, Big Sur is ridiculously rounded and colorful and almost cartoonish. They're really leaning into the iOS vibes. And I'm not sure it's my personal aesthetic, but that's fine. I spend most of my time in the terminal anyway. But I think that's enough of me ranting about upgrading my operating system, which apparently I had a lot to say about. But what else is up in your world, Steph? STEPH: I do appreciate the ranting, though. You're not often grumpy, and when you are, it's quite humorous. [laughs] I really enjoy the grumpiness. And it's often a painful process. So I appreciate all of that story. Something that I really need to share with you and get off my chest is a couple; I don't know, x number of episodes back, you and I were talking about computer chairs. And I bragged about the fact that I have a computer chair that has no armrest, and I love it. I love my chairs like this, and it's wonderful. And I just think it's the best way to live. And it turns out that that's bad because I happened to go see a massage therapist who's also very well-skilled in physical therapy and other areas. And they were talking to me about my desk setup. And I mentioned the fact that I get these typical headaches, and I have my chair, but there's no armrest. And they're like, "Oh, that would do it." I was like, "Why? I like my setup. What's wrong with it?" And they're like, "Well, if you don't have armrests, then your back is having to compensate and to hold up your arms and your shoulders all day. So while you're typing, you're using more muscles to then hold that. And then they eventually tighten and contract, and then that can cause headaches." So in case, I have led anyone astray into having no armrest, they are apparently very important to not having headaches or having your back overworked to the point that you have headaches, which I'm a bit sad about. But on that front, I have ordered a new chair, and we'll see how it goes. I will have to assimilate into the world of chairs with armrests. CHRIS: We welcome you with open armrests. [laughs] Sorry, I saw it, and then I went with it. Anyway, I'm realizing now I actually don't use the armrests on my chair per se. I actually end up putting my arms on the desk, which is probably not ideal either. I have a little wrist pad so that my wrists are brought up and so that I don't have the upward breaking of the wrist thing going on. I think that matters a lot. And then my arms are supported by the desk, but it is just right on the desk, and I wonder if that's worse. But I've never...I don't know, getting the armrests just right and then also having the wrist pad. But I can't adjust my desk is probably the main problem. If I could bring my desk down a little bit, and if it were a thinner top, then I'd have more flexibility. The chair that I have is wonderful and has flexibility. The arms can go up and forward into the side and lumbar and this and that. And so I'm able to make the chair work to the desk. But I do wish I had more of an adjustable...ideally, like a stand-sit desk. But I haven't made that jump just yet. STEPH: When you're ready to make that jump, I'm going to share with you where I bought my desk because I'm really happy with it. And it's also not nearly as expensive as most of the other desks that will go up and down. CHRIS: Presumably, we can include it in the show notes as well so that we share it with everyone. STEPH: Definitely, yeah. CHRIS: Otherwise, that's just kind of mean. [laughs] You and I have a weird back channel that we talk about on the show, but they're not actually put in the show notes. STEPH: We're not mean. We wouldn't do that. I love my desk. And it was from someone else. They're the ones that shared it with me, so I'm happy to pass it along because it has served me well. And yeah, I'm also not sure about how this is going to work with the chair and the armrest because I'm just worried they're going to be too wide, and they're not going to actually offer support. I have doubts. I have lots of doubts, but I'm willing to investigate. And we'll see how this goes because I would like for the headaches to stop. CHRIS: Good luck on that front. That definitely seems like an indication of worth putting in some effort there. STEPH: Agreed. I also have some other exciting news. Stephen Hanson at thoughtbot has organized a number of other thoughtboters to get together who are interested in really diving into leveling up, learning React, and specifically focusing on purchasing the Kent C. Dodd's Epic React course. And it's for anyone that is comfortable writing code, whether you know React really well or if you're new to it. Everyone's welcome to join. So we just kicked that off today where we're going to go through the course together and then meet every Friday. I think the cadence is probably three hours, three and a half hours every Friday, that then we're going to commit to working through the course together. And I have to admit, I always nerd out a bit over how does someone build a course? Like, I'm really excited about the content as well, but I just want to know how did someone go about producing this content and then sharing it with everyone? And then what's their outline? How do they help people that are getting stuck because they can't be there in the same room? How do they record their videos? So I'm really excited to see all the ways that Kent has crafted this workshop. And so far, there's so much content, but I'll have more to report as we really start to dive in. But I'm excited to revisit React because I haven't been in React land for at least a year and a half; it's been a while. And so it's one of those areas that I know some bits, but a lot has also changed. And I would like to just revisit that world. So I'm really excited to dive into the course. And so far, I really like the structure that Kent has taken with the curriculum where we're focusing first on what exactly is happening and all the effort that goes into if you wanted to actually write HTML and then layer on JavaScript on top of that. But then here's how React makes that easier for you. Here is how JSX makes it even easier on top of the React API. I really liked that. Here's some pain; feel a little bit of pain, let's get a little bit better. And then let's get even better on top of that. And that has been a really nice reminder and progression into the course. CHRIS: I'm definitely a fan of the way you're describing it like, feel some pain, and then let's get better. But then, like, what's the hook? With any educational content, this is the sort of structure where there can be full education. But this is the thing that I feel very deeply about conference talks is my goal isn't to teach you everything if I'm giving a conference talk; it is just to get your attention just to say, "Here's the thing, here's why you might care." And starting from the problem, starting from the pain is always such a good way to do that. Because you know how this stuff is hard? What if I had an option that was easier? And then building from that totally makes sense. I want to say that course, Kent's course was built in conjunction with the egghead team, egghead.io. And it's a distinctly branded course. But it was built on top of the framework in the platform that's there and all of that, and then some of the editing support. I don't know this for certain, but I think there was some teamwork there. And I love just pushing forward the envelope of how we do educational content in the world of development because it is such an interesting world that has, frankly, such a need for ongoing development. The world is changing out from underneath us every two days. And therefore, having great educational content is so important. So yeah, definitely interested to hear how your experience goes both with the course and then also diving deeper into React. Well, switching gears just a little bit, I had a topic that I wanted to dig into with you today. And so to give some context, the topic, the thing that we're going to be talking about today is what have we changed our mind about? So you and I have both done a little bit of thinking and tried to come up with some answers to this. The background, this was actually inspired by a tweet that I saw between Shawn Wang, aka "Swyx" on the internet, and Charity Majors, a recent guest here on this podcast. And Charity is someone who is known for having strong opinions. But Shawn asked the question of what are some opinions that you've changed your mind about? And Charity actually had a wonderful list, which we'll link to her tweet thread where she shared some of her both technical and then also more personal ones, but really talking about the sort of evolution of thinking and the way someone's thoughts can change over time. And I thought it was just such an interesting thing because, for most points in time, we experience someone's sort of snapshot of where are you at now? What do you believe to be true? But I think there's such an interesting story and sort of the arc there of what did you believe to be true that you don't anymore? What have you softened your beliefs on? What have you strengthened your beliefs on? So yeah, with that as the context, what have you changed your mind about, Steph? STEPH: Yeah, this one really got me thinking, and I feel a little stumped on it. I have a few that I'm excited to share. But I'm very excited to hear your list to see if that also helps me reflect more on some of the things that I have changed my mind about. And I have found that there's only a couple maybe that I feel like I've really solidly changed my mind about. The others, I've either dialed up the strictness, or I've dialed it down. So the ones where I've really changed my mind about are feature flags and comments. Those are two of them. Well, there's a third one, but I'll get to that in a moment. So starting with the first one, feature flags I was more in the camp where I very much appreciate feature flags, but I use them sparingly because then there is a tedious nature of introducing them and then having to clean them up, and then having to maintain two states of code. But now I've really seen the value of feature flags and how we can make sure that we have calm releases and ensuring that main is always in a deployable state. So feature flags is one for me. I'm very invested in having more of a robust feature flag system because I see the benefit to that. The other one was comments. I used to be very rigid about comments are bad. We should never have comments in our code. They are just waiting to go out of date, and they're not going to be helpful. But I have since dialed down that strictness where I have certainly seen moments where comments do feel very helpful, and I can see how people use them. I still want to avoid them for the most part, but I am less strict now in regards to people who really find value in comments. I'm more open to that discussion. I want to understand what it is they find helpful about that comment, and if it is something that we can't capture with code or a test, where does that live? CHRIS: Those are both interesting. Feature flags, for me, I think I actually was more strongly opposed in the beginning. Earlier on in my career, I saw them as added complexity, as noise. I often would encounter them left behind in a codebase. And so, I had this negative association with them. And I didn't see the value; I hadn't yet felt that pain. And over time, I've definitely shifted to where you're at where I'm like, I love feature flags. This is a critical tool in our toolset of how we actually…like you said, calm deploys, being able to always deploy main, making sure that we don't have long-running feature branches. There are so many benefits that come out of it that I'm now very strongly in favor of them. But it's interesting; I think I would say that I started in a more strongly opposed place. So that wasn't on my list, but it's an interesting one that you've brought up and probably one that I've moved more on. Code comments, I think, actually started in my career being like, obviously, you comment your code. It's the thing that I read about and stuff. And slowly, over time, I think I've just dialed in on I don't think we should be doing that. There are, of course, going to be exceptions. And actually, one of the things that I discovered about myself as I was trying to go through this exercise is there are very few things that I believe are black and white. If anything, that maybe is one of the things that I've leaned into over time. It's like, nothing is binary. Nothing is black and white. Everything is on a continuum or shades of gray. There are things that I believe a little more seriously. But there's almost nothing that I can be like, nope, absolutely I will not equivocate on this beyond how we interact with other humans and being reasonable, kind people. And in terms of software practices, not really. Comments, though, are one that I still am pretty strongly not going to lean into. So it's interesting that you're like, eh, I've kind of opened up to that one. STEPH: There's a particular talk, The Art of Code Comments by Sarah Drasner, and that's the one that really shifted some of my opinions around comments, and then how we talk about them, and what benefits they can play. But I will admit, if I see a PR that has code comments, I still immediately have a negative reaction to that. And I want to have a conversation around why that comment was added and if we can remove it, and how we can remove it. But even with that negative perspective, I still find that I'm more open to that discussion versus before, where I would have been like, no, that's just unequivocally bad. CHRIS: I do like that you always bring up that talk whenever we talk about comments. This is a great talk. And in the background, I just looked up Sarah's Twitter profile because every time you bring it up, then I mention that she has a still from the movie Labyrinth in her Twitter background, but she actually changed it. And so now that's not true anymore. It's now something from The Force Awakens. Well, it's actually a joke, but I'm still going to suggest that you watch the movie Labyrinth at some point. That's the thing that I feel actually kind of weird about. It's a weird movie. STEPH: I'm going to take your suggestion, but not watch it. But thank you. [laughs] To share my truth today. CHRIS: That's fair, that's fair. STEPH: What are some of the things on your list? CHRIS: Okay, I have a couple, some more on the technical. Let's lean into one of the technical ones. Early on, I started with dynamic languages. I think I started with Python primarily and a little bit of JavaScript. I eventually found my way to Ruby and felt very at home there. And then, I started to explore functional languages. And I started to lean into them really hard and felt that immutability and functional programming and true pure functional programming was the thing. It was the answer, and I just needed to figure out how to do it. And so I would say that is the belief that I have since changed my mind on and decided, you know what? Actually, it feels like a bit of a force fit. I have tried. And maybe for others, it is actually a really fantastic way to build software. But having worked with a number of other people in more functional contexts, I find that it is a bit of a force fit. It's a bit rough. And in particular, of late, I've been working with Svelte as opposed to React, and React does sort of lean into the functional paradigm, especially with Hooks and all those sorts of things. And it's a little bit rough because it turns out UIs are these deeply mutable things. We're changing values or typing things in. There are actions that are changing the state over time, and having a system that just more directly models that feels very natural. I still love functional programming for the more core of an application. So again, I reference this talk often, but Gary Bernhardt's Functional Core, Imperative Shell. Gary has really formed some of my thinkings on this. And now I've started to find the examples in the work that I'm doing of like, oh, okay, I see that pattern actually applied here. But much as I would love to use them, the functional languages I find just aren't quite landing for me. And additionally, the mutability, particularly in the front end right at the edge of the UI, is not quite as good of a fit. STEPH: So I think that resonates with me although I do still get very excited about following more patterns that represent more immutable state just because I felt so much pain and found bugs from the fact that we have mutated state in surprising ways. I'm honestly not quite sure how I feel about it. I'm going to have to think on that one. That's a very interesting one that you've changed your mind on. CHRIS: Yeah, similarly, my feelings are lukewarm, whereas before, they were stronger. I was like, oh, okay, I think I found something here. And then, in attempting to use it across a wide variety of applications, it just didn't quite feel right. I felt like I was swimming upstream sort of thing. Actually, there is an interesting counterpoint. One thing that I have leaned into and definitely changed my mind on and embraced is static typing or, broadly, static analysis. But I think static typing being the most pointed version of that. Early on, like I said, I got my start in very dynamic languages in Ruby, and Python, and JavaScript. And so that dynamic duck typing runtime can be anything. We just make our systems respond to the messages, and all of that sounded great. But it turns out I really love having a compiler that can tell me some truths about my program before it ever reaches runtime. And the idea that a typo can make it to production feels absurd at this point. And actually, as I'm working in Ruby, I'm like, man, I really got to go look at that whole Ruby typing thing we got going on. I don't know what the state of it is. I've looked at it in the past, and I need to revisit it soon. But like TypeScript, I've definitely embraced that very strongly. And I would not work without TypeScript in a JavaScript project at this point. I've loved the work that I've done in Elm, although that also sort of blends into the functional stuff where it's like, it was a little bit noisy, though, I'll say that. But the type system and the fact that the compiler can give you so much rich information about your program, I would not trade that at this point. And I don't see myself going back on that front, which is an interesting place for me to be on of actually, I'm not that into the functional programming as the core way that I build my applications. But I do like static typing. And I feel like functional programming and static typing actually go together incredibly well. And functional programming and, more imperative, whatever it is that I'm doing with my day-to-day life these days is a more interesting fit. But it is interesting to me to observe that sort of combination of opinions where I really like static typing, and having a compiler, and something that can tell me about my program before I get to runtime. But also saying that I don't quite want the functional programming thing, or at least not as the entire way that I modeled my application because I found it a bit difficult to work with. Because I think static typing or compilers and functional programming go really well together. But I think generally, what I'm finding is a more middle ground dynamic optimization of a bunch of different things. And the answer is like, well, it depends which I guess if you've listened to the show before, you'll have heard those words said, so I guess it makes sense. STEPH: Yeah. All of that makes sense to me. And I can see why you might have a favor for types or why that feels more valuable initially because that is giving us so much feedback right off the bat versus following a more functional paradigm is something that could feel like more of a force fit and doesn't provide that same immediate feedback. But it has a longer-term or a longer cycle of that reward system. So I can see why you might favor one over the other or why I myself would favor one over the other. CHRIS: How do you feel about types? STEPH: I'm a big fan, although I say that, but I work in Ruby. [laughs] I don't have them. But when I have worked with types, I very much enjoyed it because it makes me think more about the design of my code in a way that I don't as much with Ruby. And working with types has heavy influence than when I am working in Ruby and thinking about the design of my code. So I think working with types is a wonderful thing that, frankly, all of us should do as developers at some point because it is so influential. So I'm for types, but I'm not using types in my day-to-day. Another thing that I have changed my mind about is how we structure the work that each person is doing. So I used to be more in the camp of everybody can work on their own very complicated piece of codebase, their own complicated feature. We can have a bunch of complicated things in the sprint, and everything will just be great; it'll be fine. And we'll get a bunch of work done, and we'll ship it. And then we're an even more productive team. And I very much disagree with that now where I have found where everybody is working in their own silo on a complicated feature has slowed down the progress of then being able to ship that feature. Because we often want to collaborate with someone, we need to collaborate with someone. Then the PR review process is tough if I really have no idea what you're working on, and I don't have a context that then when I look at your code, not only am I evaluating at the code level, but then I'm also trying to understand the feature and gain all of that context. And that's a heavy cost for me to have to pay to then pick all of that up and then for you to have to reintroduce me to what's happening. Or I might make the bigger mistake, and I may look at your code and just evaluate it from the code perspective but not really understand the feature, the value that's being delivered. And that doesn't feel useful. And I have a recent example where that happened where someone was working on a very complicated feature that I didn't have any insight into. So then, when I was looking at the PR, it was easier for me to just look at the code and get feedback on that. But then it was probably a day or two later. It wasn't until then that I finally started asking, what are we building? Like, what purpose is this serving? And that opened up a much larger discussion where we realized what was being built didn't actually really deliver what we needed to deliver. So I no longer agree with the idea that everybody should be working on their own complicated features independently, and there should be some collaboration. And, you know, it's the buddy system; we all need a buddy. CHRIS: Well, I like that one. I feel like I've shared similar ideas where it made sense. It was just the efficient thing to do, to split the work up and have everybody very independent. I also feel like earlier on in my career; I was more scared of Git conflicts and things like that or people interacting with the same parts of the code. And so in my mind, it made sense to really strongly separate like, oh, you shouldn't even be touching the controller for this. I'll handle the views, and you handle the controller; it'll be separate. And I care less about that now. And I think what you're saying of like, it's actually better if we have some shared context, and we understand what we're working on, and it's more of a collaborative process. Yeah, I like that one. I think I followed a similar arc, and I'm at a similar place now as well. Interestingly, to go into another one of mine that I think you'll probably be most surprised by on my list is I think I used to believe in 10x engineers. I used to believe in the idea of that one developer just off in the corner fueled entirely by Mountain Dew that would just produce the perfect code. They would just solve it. Over the weekend, they would write the entire billing system, and it would be great. And I think it was predicated on the idea that the coding is the hard part, which I no longer believe. I think coding at its core is communication. It's taking this thing that we want to be true in the world and then communicating it to a computer but also ideally communicating it to our teammates, and to future versions of ourselves, such that we can revisit that code, we can maintain it over time, other people can add to or augment it. And so the idea of this loner that can just do incredible volumes of work and have that be a good outcome that just doesn't make sense to me anymore. I've worked with incredibly talented developers, to be clear, folks that I was sort of in awe of. I've worked with people who have, I think, just truly photographic memories. They seem to remember every single bug that they've ever had and exactly where they can look it up. Or from the top of their head, they can just intuitively know, oh, this bug means this. Go look at this line of code. I'm like, how did you do that? How did you do that magic trick? And they're incredibly capable developers. But at the end of the day, the folks that I see being most impactful on a team are the folks that are able to communicate and collaborate most effectively and make the whole team more effective. STEPH: Maybe it's the Mountain Dew; maybe that's actually the secret sauce here. That's what I'm missing from my life to take me into that status. CHRIS: I'm now imagining Mountain Dew but in a more viscous form, like a barbecue sauce, but it's Mountain Dew flavored. That's the secret sauce because it's a very…anyway, moving on. [laughs] STEPH: It's a terrible product. We should make it and sell it. [laughter] CHRIS: Career pivot, we now sell Mountain Dew sauce. STEPH: [laughs] CHRIS: But yeah, I do not believe in 10x engineers anymore. If anything, I believe that that is a huge warning sign if you have anyone that's behaving in something close to that space. STEPH: Yeah, I'm super interested in that you've shared because I don't think...We've talked about 10xers, but we haven't talked about the fact that you used to think that they were more of a thing and that they existed. And now it's all I'm sorry, but it's all crap. [chuckles] That's super interesting to me. Do you remember what changed your mind? Do you remember that pivotal moment of where you were like, oh, maybe this is all bullshit? CHRIS: I think it was just an amalgamation of experience over time. I've encountered people who fit the archetype. But if anything, I would say they're deeply problematic in teams. They're that individual who refuses to collaborate, who just goes off and heads down, writes a bunch of code, but then it doesn't integrate with the other pieces, or no one else knows how to use it, or they won't let anyone contribute to it. And yeah, I've seen that just be very, very problematic. So the folks that most fit, I think the imagined version of this, actually end up, in my experience, leading things astray. And the folks that are actually most productive and really cause teams to improve in a drastic way behave very differently. They're much more collaborative; they're much more engaged with the team. It's less about their individual contributions and it's more about building a system together, collaborating, communicating, engaging external stakeholders, et cetera, et cetera. It's all that stuff that matters. And so, it's very much in contrast to what the 10x engineer ethos is about. But there's no one day where suddenly this idea that I had in my head crumbled when I saw that behind the pile of Mountain Dew cans, there was nothing there. [laughs] STEPH: It's all a mirage. [laughs] I do like what you just said around that there are very impressive people out there. And those impressive people often focus less on their individual contributions and more at a higher level around communication. And then they are the powerhouses that then is helping facilitate everybody else be their best and have high levels of individual contribution. Those are the ones that...I'm still not going to endorse a 10xer, but they are the ones who, to me, embody the idea of someone that is incredibly efficient and really good at their job. CHRIS: There's an adage that comes to mind here that "If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together." And that does ring true to me. I think an individual can have their individual productivity be higher if they're working entirely on their own, if they understand every line of code because they wrote every single line of code if they know where every feature of the platform is integrated because they wrote the whole thing. But they're going to be fundamentally limited. And in order to do bigger, more complex things, fundamentally, we have to work as a team. And then the way you have to interact just fundamentally changes. So I think it started from that, like, one person on their own I think can be individually more effective. But the minute you start to have a team, that one person acting on their own is actually dragging the team down because other people can't then work in that space, and that's a problem. STEPH: I really like that adage that you just shared where, "If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together." And that touches on something else that I have really changed my mind about, and that's representation. And this is more specific to me. So when I joined engineering and became a web developer, and I joined a team, and I was the only female engineer on that team, my initial feelings were I am the only female engineer, and that is fine. We're all just a group of engineers. We're here to solve problems together. It really doesn't matter if there's anyone here on this team that's like me. It's fine if there's no one that I can see myself in that's in leadership because we're all just people, is what I was coming down to. And I've completely changed my mind and realized that that's not true. And I've experienced this where I've worked on other engineering teams with female engineers, and it's fucking awesome, and it does make a difference. And then when I can see someone that I can see myself in, in a leadership position, that is also inspiring. So that is something that I went in where I think it was more of I was trying to shield myself from the idea that I am different from everybody else in this room, and that could be a problem. And instead, I just tried to neutralize it by saying it's not. But I think representation is incredibly important. People are not just people. We all have very important social and racial, and cultural identities. And it's very important that we get to feel that we can express all of those identities and see people that represent those identities in spaces where we would like to go. That's a big one that I've changed my mind on. CHRIS: Yeah, I certainly agree that representation certainly matters, and being able to bring your full authentic self to work and seeing others around you that reflect that. And frankly, having teams that are made up of people that represent the users of the software that we're building feels so critically important. And it's very interesting to hear about the arc that you've had on that where initially, you tried to downplay it, but then you found a little more truth in it. And so yeah, thank you for sharing. STEPH: You're welcome. It feels good to say that, too, because that's something that I've admitted and realized on my own, that that is something that has changed and shifted. But it's nice to be able to share that here with you as we're going through the things that we've changed our mind about. What else is on your list? CHRIS: Well, to round us off with one more very technical version because, of course, that's where I'm going to take us after a much deeper and more nuanced topic that you led us on, single-page applications. Broadly, I'm opposed to the name; that's a side conversation. But, man, URLs matter on the internet. So don't call them single-page applications, but client-side applications or whatever. Broadly, the idea of a bundle of JavaScript, and so you send down an empty HTML document, and then you reference a bundle of JavaScript, which that thing boots up and it then makes a bunch of API requests to the backend, and then it starts to fill in the page. I was convinced for a while that this is a reasonable and perhaps even necessary way to build software. We need APIs for our mobile apps anyway. So if we're doing that, then let's have that be the consistent way that we are accessing information. This is going to be fine; it's not a problem. And then eventually, we found some problems. So then we got GraphQL, and we tried to solve it that way. But overall…and I have spent a lot of time trying to make this thing work, trying to find a version of this that I'm happy with that I find the end outcome of the software to be as pleasant to work with from an end-user perspective as a server-driven application, and I can't find it. And so, to be clear, I'm still doing client-rendered applications these days. But Inertia.js is the framework that I've leaned into that helps me bridge that gap. And the idea that the server owns routing, that the server owns statefulness, things like that, not having to think about client-side routing, not having to think about client-side state management, being able to use traditional auth mechanisms built into cookies, all of these familiar things that we've had. Leveraging the fact that the server is the more privileged in terms of the information it has access to, the more secure, the more powerful environment, all of these things feel right to me. And the nature of the application that I can build just feels more robust, more consistent, easier to evolve. There were a lot of promises that I heard when we started building applications in these ways. And I just haven't seen an example or have not worked on an example, at least of an application that is built as a client-side bundle that boots up and does some stuff and had a good experience with that. So Inertia, as an aside, is my answer to this. And I continue to be extremely happy with that as a solution, as really a middle-ground solution. Because going all the way back to true HTML server-side rendering is limiting in other ways that I didn't like. But I find that Inertia really strikes an ideal balance in the middle there. STEPH: I feel like I completely agree with everything you're saying. But I also feel like I have a developer secret to share where I really haven't worked on single-page applications, and I am okay with that. [laughs] CHRIS: It's fine, skip it. Just go straight to Inertia. It's better. STEPH: Cool, cool, cool. I am working on leveling up React, and then the plan is to go to Svelte and Inertia. So I'll just completely...I'll skip that. I'll skip that part of my career. CHRIS: I actually want to back up just a little bit as I'm saying this because I really try to avoid being in a more negative space. And I think this space, this architecture for building applications, is complex, and there are things that will warrant it. So things like Google Maps, it makes sense to have a lot of Dynamic JavaScript and to be doing complex things on the client-side. Trello is another example of an application that that as a server-rendered thing, doesn't really make sense. And frankly, using a tool like Inertia wouldn't quite work there. That said, that is, in my mind, truly a single page within the broader application. So the Trello board page is a very, very complex stateful application, and I think modeling it as such makes sense. Google Maps, similar. But there's still the profile page, and the login page, and all of these other things. I think routing is probably where it breaks down for me. I think client-side routing is the thing that I feel the most pain on. Because at the end of the day, the server still needs to know the answer. And if we do client-side routing, we end up with this duplication of logic across the client and the server-side. We end up with disagreements from time to time. We end up with the weird flashes of half-rendered layout, and then we go to the login page because we get an API response that is different. And so, I think that is probably the kernel of the thing that I struggle with. And, of course, it is possible to build great things using any of these technologies. But I think my summary is I've really tried on that front, and I've just not been able to make the fidelity of application that I want using…primarily; I'd say it's client-side routing is the thing that I struggle with the most. STEPH: Yeah, it sounds like you're saying there are very valid use cases for using a single-page app or following that structure. But we haven't really gotten there in terms of our web development expertise, where we've made that easier to maintain and easier to implement. And there's still enough pain points around it that even though it seems like a very valid idea and approach, it still feels painful enough that you actively avoid it until it feels like something that you have to then invest in at that point to then really deliver the user experience that you want to provide. CHRIS: Yeah, I think that's an accurate summary. And I think adding on to that, I'm noticing it becoming more and more of the standard approach; this is the way we build applications, and I don't agree with that. That is probably the thing that is the kernel of what I don't believe in. I think actually server rendering is a great way to start, and then you can slowly augment or move more things into complex client-side behavior. But starting with this as the mode that we're building our applications just feels like a less stable foundation than I would want. So it's perhaps an architecture that you want to evolve to at some point as the complexity necessitates it, but I definitely wouldn't be starting there. Similar to service-oriented architecture, not going to start there. Client-side routing, I'm not going to start there. STEPH: Ooph. I feel like I've been holding my breath this episode. I feel like this was a very interesting topic that has been challenging to reflect on what we believe and what we've changed our mind about. CHRIS: I think it's perhaps more nuanced than a lot of our episodes where often we're saying this is what we did, and this is how we felt in the moment. And that can be very experiential and true. But this, yeah, we had to draw the line in the sand and say what do we believe? I similarly definitely feel more tension in this episode than other ones. But hopefully, it was useful. Hopefully, folks found some value in the things, and hearing our story, also, the idea that we have singular formed opinions. Hopefully, this episode has broken that idea in anyone's head. And we're all on a journey. STEPH: I really like how this has prompted me to reflect on the things that I used to hold dear and really cherish or follow strictly to then reflect on what are things that I used to believe versus what I believe now? Because that transition often happens so seamlessly for me that I don't really stop to think about it to be like, oh, something just happened that is really changing how I approach things, how I build, how I work with teams. And I really like this reflection point to be like, oh, what did I used to believe, and what's different today? I'd like to keep this practice going and just try to track the things...I'll have to make a list of all the things I believe. That seems like an easy list. [laughs] CHRIS: Just the easiest list to write. STEPH: The easiest list to write. And then I'll just check in with it every so often, scratch stuff out, or update it with the things that have changed my mind about. This is the good idea, terrible idea where you go, "Stephanie, that's a terrible idea." [laughs] CHRIS: I don't know, write it down on a list, and then look at it in six months and see if it sounds like a good idea, and then we'll be able to close the loop on the whole thing. But with that, should we wrap up? STEPH: Let's wrap up. I've got a list to write. CHRIS: The show notes for this episode can be found at bikeshed.fm. STEPH: This show is produced and edited by Mandy Moore. CHRIS: If you enjoyed listening, one really easy way to support the show is to leave us a quick rating or even a review on iTunes, as it really helps other folks find the show. STEPH: If you have any feedback for this or any of our other episodes, you can reach us @bikeshedor reach me on Twitter @SViccari. CHRIS: And I'm @christoomey. STEPH: Or you can reach us at hosts@bikeshed.fm via email. CHRIS: Thanks so much for listening to The Bike Shed, and we'll see you next week. All: Byeeeeeeee! Announcer: This podcast was brought to you by thoughtbot. thoughtbot is your expert design and development partner. Let's make your product and team a success.