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Ian, también conocido como DPR-Ian, es un talentoso artista originario de Australia que ha introducido una innovadora propuesta musical. Su enfoque fusiona música, visuales y narrativa, creando universos que transcurren entre la realidad y la ficción. Desde que abrazó la independencia artística, Christian ha dado vida a experiencias que nos sumergen en la genialidad de su mente creativa. Hoy en Debutar: Sara Trejos Ivónne García Ángela Ramírez Camila Hermida Producción: Sillón Estudios Edición: Paula Villán y Sara Trejos Dirección gráfica: Mielconejo Redes: Accede a nuestras actividades ✨ Ven a Discord ❤️ Ve a IG Notas Cómo la DRP Ian pasó de ser un ídolo coreano a una estrella del pop que desafía el género DPR IAN: “Siempre he sido de los que se alimentan del caos, lo que hace que mi arte sea tan oscuro, pero hermoso” DPR Ian analiza los cambios de humor del nuevo álbum en orden pista por pista ÍCARO, LOS MONSTRUOS Y EL LADO OSCURO; DESCUBRE LAS INSPIRACIONES DE LA RPD IAN DETRÁS DE MITO - The Mythology of DPR Ian Videos de IAN (1) DPR IAN Talks Moodswings In To Order, His Time in the Kpop Industry & Living with Bipolar Disorder - YouTube (1) Kids Watch DPR's Music Video WIth DPR (ENG SUB) - YouTube (1) Inside the Mind of DPR IAN | Part 1 - YouTube (1) Inside the Mind of DPR IAN Part 2 - YouTube (1) DPR IAN the Story of MITO - YouTube DPR Ian Reads Thirst Tweets
Anne is joined by special guest, Ian Russell, a multi-award-winning voice actor. They discuss his career in the voice over industry, including his journey to success. They talk about the importance of social media and authenticity in character creation. He advises aspiring voiceover actors to be careful not to violate non-disclosure agreements and to use social media to support their profiles. Anne and Ian also discuss the importance of respecting specified ethnicities and the limitations of casting notices. They highlight that authenticity and believability are essential in video game casting, and that having an acting background is a serious advantage. Tune in to hear the full conversation. Transcript It's time to take your business to the next level, the BOSS level! These are the premiere Business Owner Strategies and Successes being utilized by the industry's top talent today. Rock your business like a BOSS, a VO BOSS! Now let's welcome your host, Anne Ganguzza. Anne: All right. Hey everyone. Welcome to the VO BOSS podcast. I'm your host Anne Ganguzza, and today I am so excited to bring very special guest Ian Russell to the podcast. Hey Ian. Yay. Ian: Hey, Anne. Anne: welcome. For those of you BOSSes out there, we'll tell you a little bit about Ian, and then he's gonna continue on telling us about his journey, he is a, a multi-award winning, seasoned voice actor working in commercial, corporate, video games, audiobooks. His voice can be heard for companies including Coca-Cola, MasterCard, Nestle, Heineken, Club Med, Phillips, and a bunch more. He was the recipient of the One Voice Male Voice of the Year 2020 award. And also in that year, he was also best character performance. Is that correct? Ian: Animation, yeah. Anne: And then continuing in 2021, he won Gaming Best Performance for One Voice Awards. And in 2022, the SOVAS Outstanding International Audio Description, Museums and Cultural Sites. Wow. That is fantastic. Ian, so honored to have you here on the show to talk about your journey and your wisdom. So , let's start. Ian: Well, good luck with that. Anne: Well, let's start telling people about your journey. How did you get into voiceover, a little bit about yourself and how you got into voiceover. Ian: It's a long and winding road, which is a Beatles reference, but the first ever voiceover I ever, ever did was for a radio station in Liverpool. And it was a friend of mine worked at the radio station, and they had a pre-recorded interview for Paul McCartney when he bought and set up the Liverpool Institute for Performing Arts in Liverpool. It was his old school. And rather than having a boring interview where it was just Paul McCartney and some radio guy , he asked me. I was, we were in a local acting thing together, and he asked me to be the voice of Paul McCartney's teacher. Anne: Wow. Ian: When Paul McCartney was a kid. So we linked the questions, you know, and it was like, oh yes, that McCartney he was always playing around with a guitar. He'll never amount anything. So it was that kind of -- we made it funny. I didn't even know what voiceover was, but I did it anyway. And it was fun. I didn't get paid or anything. I was doing it for a mate, but I still have the magnetic cassette tape, shows how long ago it was. Anne: Yep. There you go. . Ian: And then 30 years go by, and I get married, and my wife's stumbling around for what she can buy me. And we, because you know -- Anne: What happened 30 years though? That was a long time. Ian: Oh, sorry. I, I went off and got a real job. I was, I was working in sales and sales management in the northwest of England and in Belgium and Holland and in and around Oxford. Anne: So International for sure. Yeah. Ian: Yeah. That's a whole other story, which we could get into another time. But that would use up our 30 minutes, would be nothing left . So anyway, so my wife's like, oh, well what do I buy him for Christmas this year? And I had done a bit of sort of community theater stuff as a young man, just explained with the Paul McCartney thing. And so she found a one day introduction to voiceover. Anne: Uh-huh. Ian: In London. It's a place called the Show Reel. And she bought me that for Christmas 2012. It's 10 years almost to the day. Anne: Wow. Yeah. Ian: And then two years later, we've had the credit crunch and the bank -- I was working for a bank at the time and they were trying to offload people, and I had to reapply for my own job multiple times. And in the end I'm like, I volunteer as tribute . Let me go, you know, I'm done here. I'm older than all these young guys. I don't want to be rushing around half of the UK seeing multimillionaires coming home at night, barely seeing my kids, writing reports 'til midnight, and then doing the same rinse and repeat tomorrow. I'll have a heart attack and die. Let me go. And two years later, they eventually let me go. And so my wife's American and we said, well, what are we gonna do now? ? Well, let's sell everything and move to America. Be near my dad, says my wife. So that's what we did. Anne: I love that. Let's do it. Ian: And I said, well, what am I, what am I gonna do? Anne: Let's sell everything and move. Ian: I'll give that voiceover thing a go. And I went to the guy in London and I said, does anybody get hired for this? And he went, yeah. And I said, would anybody hire me? And he went, I don't see why not. And that was the ringing endorsement that I had to come off and start. So 2014 I started properly, I would say. Anne: Wow. Wow. And so when you started, what was it that -- I assume you, you got coaching, you got a demo, and then you started working, and so you started working and were successful in which genres? Ian: I think I'm a product of the internet age. You know, I live in the metaphorical middle of nowhere. And everything I do is via the internet, pretty much. So I started probably the way a lot of people start. I didn't know anybody and I didn't know anything. I had some experience, life experience that helps for sure, the sales and having done a bit of community theater and all that. But I knew no one and I knew nothing. So I started searching on the internet, and I paid money down to online casting and, and started throwing mud at the wall. And I think in that market you do a lot of explainers. You do a lot of corporate. You do a lot of e-learning, e-sort of things that, that sort of thing. Anne: And of course in the States now, you know, that accent of yours doesn't hurt you. I had a very good friend when I started and she was hired all the time for e-learning. Because I think for us listening, and you gotta have some sort of interesting -- like an American accent is, we hear it all the time. But a British accent might be something that, oh, that makes it more interesting. And so she was high in demand for e-learning and, and those explainers and corporate things. And she was always so wonderfully like natural and conversational about it. And it was just a pleasure to listen to her all the time. And I remember thinking, gosh, I wanna aspire to be that relaxed and that friendly in my voiceovers. And so I can totally see where that just, it lends it. It's also a very large market. And so everybody kind of gets there, and it's a good, good place to start off. And I know a lot of students that I work with, they start off in corporate or e-learning. Ian: Yeah. There's masses of it. And it's relatively easy to find. Anne: Exactly. Ian: You might not get the best rate, but it's relatively easy to find. Anne: Now, you won these awards, but these awards were not for corporate or e-learning. It was for gaming and character performance. And so let's talk about, 'cause I know when people start out, they're very concerned about you know, what's my niche? Like, where do I start and how do I know what I'm good at? You evolved into becoming an award-winning voice talent in gaming and characters. Ian: Yeah, I know. Anne: So let's talk about that. Ian: How does that happen? Anne: Yeah. How does that happen? Ian: I'm gonna say I got lucky, but we all know that that's hard work meets preparation and all of that. But in 2015, so a year after I'd started, I booked a role in a significant video game called Payday 2. And the role is utterly -- it's this South African mercenary. He speaks like that, he's Locke, his name is Locke. And I have been performing Locke for Starbury Studios for seven years now. Anne: Oh wow. Ian: And it was the performance of Locke that won me the video game award last year. And we're still making content. And at the end of this year, we have Payday 3 coming up. Anne: Ooh. Get ready, BOSSes. Ian: And so there's a lot of chatter around who's gonna be in Payday 3. You know what it's like with a lot of -- Anne: NDAs. Ian: -- casting for voiceover. It's -- Anne: You can't tell -- Ian: -- NDAs -- Well, well, if I knew something, I'd be able to tell you, but voice over casting often happens right at the end. So nothing, I can't say anything. I don't know anything. So. Anne: So seven years. Ian: I'm like a mushroom. Anne: Wow. Ian: Yeah. So, so that was my first video game thing. And I think a lot of younger folk, they're growing up now with video games and animation and it's a very aspirational genre for people to get into. And I think I got one, and I'll keep the story very short, but Locke, the character, has his own Twitter account, which now has almost 12,000 followers. Anne: Do you have input into that account? Ian: It's mine. Anne: Okay. Okay. Ian: It's all mine. Anne: Now, was that something that maybe was requested of you through an agent or the company or -- Ian: No. Anne: -- you just created it? That's a very interesting marketing um Ian: Well, it was suggested to me because I went on a charity stream as Locke for Payday, and the guys that were running it said, you might want to set up a separate account because you don't want your personal account flooded with teenage boys -- Anne: Yeah, that makes sense. Ian: -- swearing at you. Frankly. Anne: Yeah, yeah. Ian: Asking you about Locke, you know, what's your favorite color, that kind of thing. So I set up a separate Twitter account for him then; that was 2017-ish. And that, that's kind of just grown from there. And I don't just use it for Locke. I use it for Locke. But I, all my video game stuff I promote on there because they're all video game players. So they're interested. Anne: I love that I'm talking to you about this right now because I wanna know, is the content monitored at all by the game company or the people that hire you at all? Or if you were to say something that maybe wouldn't be appropriate for your character, I would imagine that that's kind of a line that you walk. Ian: For sure, it is. I'm pretty sure there have been several occasions where I've written something, and I've had the wherewithal to go, no, don't do that. Don't say that. That would be silly . The only thing that Starbury said is, because they own the character, they own the IP of the character, that I can't monetize it for myself. I have run charity fundraisers and things like that, but if I'm gonna do anything out of the ordinary, I go through them and say, hey, I'm thinking about about this; what do you think? I don't think they've ever said, no. Anne: That's something that's so interesting for those BOSSes out there that are thinking about getting into video games or character animation. I mean, there really becomes -- it can have a celebrity attached to it, and that becomes more than just voicing. Right? That is voicing. And then also it becomes a marketing effort. It becomes something that is outside of your voiceover persona that is of concern, I would think, for you to make sure that you're not gonna say the wrong thing or make sure you're not gonna do something that spoils any new things coming out or disturbs any NDAs. Ian: Yeah. I just basically assume that everything I've ever done is under NDA until it's public. Anne: That's very wise, very wise. Ian: I really don't, you know. It's just, it's easier to do that than to go, oh, I've been cast, I can't... Anne: I think no matter what we do, we should consider that, even doing a lot of corporate work and e-learning, it really all should be considered. Ian: It is one of the challenges with video games, because whilst we get cast often towards the end of the process, it can be months before the game is actually shipped. And I have got the list, but I've got games coming out this year with my voice in them, and I am burning, burning up with desire to tell people because I am so excited about it. And I just can't. And it's just really, really one of the hard things, you know, that you have to bury that. Anne: Yeah. Yeah. So you got hired for this one game, it became something -- Ian: Yes. So the thing about the Twitter was, so a little while after that I had auditioned for a role in a Warhammer game called Inquisitor Martyr for one of the -- there were only gonna be three player characters. It was one of the player characters. And I got shortlisted, and they asked me for a second audition and I did that. And then they came back and they said, okay, it's down to two people, so can you do a third audition? I'm like, I almost didn't want to know. You know, me or the other guy. And if I don't get it, I know the other guy got it. And I'm like, I was so close. But , what I did say was, look, you must make the right casting choice for your game. But please know that I have a Twitter account with 10,000 followers who are all game players. And I promote any game I'm in on that Twitter account. So I just want you to know that. Anne: I like that. Ian: Don't let that influence your casting decision in any way at all, but know that I've got it. Anne: Hey, that 27 years in sales, I think it served you well. I think it served you well. That's fantastic. I love that. Ian: So I booked that. I don't know that, that's why I would like to think it was just because of my awesome acting talent. But it taught me a lesson that you can use these things to help support your profile, particularly in a high profile thing like animation or like games. You see like the anime guys that are doing that; they're always at cons promoting themselves. And you know that the anime companies are loving that. Because that sells more anime. And the video games is the same. So. Anne: Now would you say that your award also was something you were able to use as a marketing for more characters and more work? Ian: I'm gonna put it the other way around. I can't draw a direct line to -- I won this award in August last year in video games, and then suddenly I get cast in a lot of games. What I think happens, this is what I think happens, a lot of casters in video games are younger people. I mean, there are older ones as well, but they're very tech savvy. And I think that you --they get their auditions in, and if you get shortlisted, and you may not know you've been shortlisted, but they're gonna create a shortlist, and I think they pop over onto Instagram or onto Twitter -- Anne: Oh yeah, absolutely. Ian: Right? Anne: And look at your profiles and -- Ian: They wanna, who's, who is this guy? Is he an umpti or whatever. And they see the awards and they see the interaction with a game community from my case. And they go, oh, he knows what he's doing. He's obviously done it before. You know, and you can say that til you're blue in the face in a pitch proposal, but nobody reads them, I don't think. But when they see it on Instagram or they see it on Twitter, it makes a difference. Anne: Yeah. It's validation for them. Ian: Yeah. It's that whole trust. Anne: Right? That maybe they're picking somebody that has that little bit of trust. Yep. That you've got these experience. Ian: Well, and you think how many -- as, as the game studios get bigger, how many multimillions of pounds they've got invested in a game. And it has to ship successfully, otherwise the company goes pop. Anne: Absolutely. Ian: That narrative story to a two or three talent generally telling the story is a big decision for them. So I do think they check. I have no evidence directly for it, but I absolutely think they check. Anne: Especially I think as a lead character. Right? I mean, there's more responsibility than just the voicing of it, because like I said, there's a persona attached to it, that can be attached to it, and the potential for that character to be able to sell more game, new releases of games. Ian: I kind of figure if I can help sell 10 or 20 or 30 copies of the game, I'm getting out someway towards paying my own fee. Anne: Now -- right? Now, lemme ask you though, in terms of, let's say compensation for games, right? What are your thoughts about that? I mean, do voices for big games get paid better? There's really no royalties, residuals, like that kinda sucks. Ian: No. It does. Yeah. If I was being paid union royalties for Payday 2, I'd be a wealthier man. Anne: Yeah. Ian: It's just the, that's the way it is, Anne. I don't have any control over it. So all I can do is negotiate the best fee I think I can for each individual one. But that's the other thing you've got, if you like AAA games at the top of the feeding frenzy, and they can afford to pay a great deal more. And at the bottom, you've got one guy with a 40-watt light bulb who's making a game, and he wants to get a voice in it, and he just doesn't have the budget. So you have to ask yourself then, is this a game that will further my profile? Do I want my -- you almost, you talk about the celebrity element of it. Do I want my name attached to this game? Anne: Absolutely. Yeah. Ian: And there are games I want attached. There are a lot of games out there that the content is marginal, should we say? Not safe for work is the phrase. . And there is no value to me as a talent in attaching my name to a game like that, because it would impact -- if I wanna be in a big AAA adventure game, I think it taints a little bit, my profile. So I, there are games that I will avoid and I will ask. There's one game I'm in and they have a safe for work version and they have a non-safe work version. And I said, uh, nothing to -- if you want this character in both versions, count me out. But they said, no, we can just write you into this one. So, they did that. Anne: That's great. Look at that. That, you know, and that's interesting that you bring up these things that I never would've thought of, because obviously I'm not doing video games, but I love that you brought that up. Ian: But you could, Anne. Anne: Well, I could if I wanted to. I mean, you did it. So what made you, I'm gonna say, what made you audition for that first game? Did somebody suggest it to you? Did they say, oh, we're looking -- Ian: The Payday one? No, it was an open audition. It said South African mercenary. Anne: And you said, oh, I can do that. Right? Ian: Yeah, absolutely. I was so naive that I thought I could do everything. Anne: So you said, I could do that. Ian: Yeah, I can do that. Anne: Okay. So I have to tell you my little story. Ian: They cast me so great. Anne: That's fantastic. I have to tell you my story. My story was a long time ago, like when I first started, I was on one of the pay-to-plays and they had a audition out, and they said it was for a phone system and it was for a British accent. And I thought, well, I can do that. I was naive , and I got it. And literally I worked for that company for 10 years. And it wasn't until like I actually spoke to somebody on the phone, because we had communicated, got jobs from them all the time onto this. And then it became not a cool thing to do because what accent am I doing? And it started to become that sort of a thing. Well, you're not a native. They didn't know. They said, oh my God, we thought you were native -- Ian: Oh, really? Anne: -- British. And, and it was because I just, I didn't know any better, and I made the mistake. I didn't read that where it said they wanted native. And I said, oh, I can do that. I'll give it a shot. I'll throw my audition in. And I got it. And they employed me for a good 10 years before it was like, oh, now Anne, we just need your English. You know? Not, not your British. So, but it's so interesting that you kind of on a whim just did it. And I think that really speaks to having the confidence to kind of just put yourself out there, and even for things that you don't think you're good at, because they think when people get into this industry in the beginning, they're so concerned about, oh my God, I think I should do this, and I'm no good at character, or I'm no good at -- and I think that really, you don't really know until you try. Ian: Well, let me share another quick story for you. Anne: Sure. Ian: So I auditioned for another game called Road Redemption, which is a motorcycle game. And you drive along the road and you have an iron stick and you're trying to hit other people off their motorbikes. And I auditioned with a sort of a Ray Wins, yeah. Come over, we all gonna hit you with a steel bat, you know, that sort of thing. And I thought, yeah, that'll work. And they decided that they liked my take on the character. So we got together on Skype . Who remembers Skype? And we are chatting, there's three of them, and there's me here. And they're like, what's your Australian accent like? Alright, where's that, right out of left field. Anne: Where'd that come from? Ian: Where'd that come from? And he said, because it's this sort of Mad Max kind of feel to the game. And they said, you know, what's your, and I said, very bad. I said, any Australian will immediately notice. You know, I can put another prawn on a barbie kind of thing. But everybody will, they will know, he's not from Australia anyway. So then we're on Skype and you hear tap, tap, tap, tap, tap, tap, tap. And they've sent me a line on the, in the chat. Read that in your Australian accent, whatever it was. Hey, I'm gonna hit you in me iron bar, mate, you know, tap, tap, tap, tap, tap. Read that one in your Australian -- yeah, this shrimp's gonna really get you, you know, anyway. And at the end of it, they said, yeah, okay, we're gonna use you for the game. And I said, okay, do you want the Ray Winston thing or do you want this? Oh, we want the Australian thing. Okay. Well, I, like I said, they went, yeah, but Australia's such a small market for us. We're not worried about that. Anne: We're not worried that people in Australia are gonna complain . Well, it's true. Ian: Right. And Locke's the same thing with his South African. And where it led me to in my head was video games, even if they're sort of set in an earth-like environment, are fiction. And I think a lot of game makers now particularly, but certainly back then as well, the acting performance of the character outweighs -- Anne: Is more important. Ian: -- the absolute accuracy of a given accent. Anne: Very interesting. Especially now because now it's a casting thing. Are they casting a native UK or a native Australian? And I think that we are all in a spot, like are we going to audition for that? Ian: Well, with that rider of there are accent issues and there are ethnicity issues. Anne: Yes. Absolutely. Ian: You know, I absolutely would not put myself forward for a British SWANA or MENA or -- I can't say African American because that's American. Anne: Yeah, no, I get, I get that. Ian: British Black, I think. Anne: I think if they're, if they're specifying -- yes. If they're specifying ethnicity, then I think, yeah, absolutely. It's something that we respect. Ian: PGM, person of global majority. Anne: Yep. Absolutely. Ian: That's, that, that works well for me. So there are things that I just will walk past now that maybe 10 years ago would've been acceptable. Anne: Sure. Yeah. Things have definitely changed over the past just a few years. Ian: This could be quite controversial, but I've seen casters ask for a minority ethnicity, and then in the sides it makes reference to, I don't know, America or Great Britain or whatever. And you're like, the ethnicity of of this character does not match the character in the script that you are portraying. And I fear a little bit, what's been the motivation for that? Anne: You know what, interestingly enough, I know that you say that that's a very inter -- I had that with an e-learning, believe it or not, they had the characters, it was a character based e-learning, and they were all different ethnicities. And mine was a mixed ethnicity, but then they said, don't perform it in any kind of accent. And so I thought, well what is that there for then? You know what I mean? And that was a few years back now. I would kind of hope that if they're specifying ethnicity, that they try really hard to get that so that there can be authentic and genuine. Yeah. Ian: Yeah. And at the top end, some casting directors at the top of the market will challenge that sort of thing. They'll go back to the studio, they're in a strong enough position to go back to the studio and go, really? Does that work? Are you sure? And they will challenge that if you like the mass market, often the person hiring the voice and directing the voice is a part of the studio itself. So. Johnny at the back, go and get a voice actor, will you, for this character. I think a lot of that is kind of left to the voice actor to work out for themselves. If you have an any kind of an acting background, and you are auditioning for particularly indie video games, you are already streets ahead because the guys in the studios have never hired anyone before. They don't know who to hire really. It's kind of like, we'll know it when we hear it kind of thing. So if you can make a performance, if you can create a character that's believable within the universe of the game, you are already streets ahead. Anne: It's very interesting that you bring up the casting directors for video games. And you know, it's not necessarily, I think, the talent agents of today that you think of for commercial and broadcast. For video games, you do have to make it authentic and believable. And these people may only be casting for their game, and maybe they've never cast for another game, or they don't have a lot of experience . But that's a great point. And so I think that even more so now, the marketing that you employed, having followers on Twitter, maybe putting your awards on your website so that it's out there and it's known, that definitely has an impact. Because your casting directors may or may not be as experienced as somebody who's casting like 10 commercials a day. Right? That's all they do. That they listen for voices and they cast, whereas games, they're so into their game that they know their characters, and they're listening for just that character to come alive, what they believe the character is like. Ian: Yeah, absolutely, absolutely, absolutely. I had a beautiful testimonial from an indie guy, he put on Twitter, it was on Twitter, his casting notice. And he said, the character is 60 and British from the southwest of England, and he's got early signs of dementia. And he said, but there aren't many older British actors. You know, I've always found it a struggle to cast older actors. So when I wrote to him, I said, , I am 60. Anne: I'm old. . Ian: So anyway, so I got cast of that surprising, surprise me though. He actually cast me as a second character that he was struggling. I said to him, you said you were struggling to cast this. Have you've got anything else that you're struggling to cast? So he sent me, said, yes, I'm struggling to cast this. And he sent it to me, and I thought, I can have a go at that. So I sent it back and I said, do you mean something like this? So I didn't put it as though I was auditioning. I just said, do you mean something like this? And he went, oh great. Was that you? And I went, yes. He went, okay, yeah, you are hired. Anne: I love it. I love it. Ian: I booked two characters. But he said, you might just, it's a real kind of bigging myself up, but you might be, he said, the best actor I've ever auditioned. Anne: Awesome. Ian: And I'm like, aww. Anne: What a wonderful, what a wonderful compliment. Ian: Oh. That is on my Instagram. If you check -- care to go. Anne: Yeah. There you go. . So I love that. Ian: Oh, and I know, what did I wanted to say about, you talked about casting directors. So Bianca Shuttling, who's one of the big casting directors in LA, she goes looking on Instagram. She's very open about that. If she's not got someone in her little pool of people where she goes, she gets -- she doesn't go to agents, she goes to Instagram. Anne: Wow, there you go. Ian: That's where she goes. Anne: There you go. I love that. Ian: There, you learnt it -- you heard it third or fourth here. . Anne: So let me say, because I really think that there's that business savvy that you have, which, BOSSes out there, do not discount the value of being business savvy and marketing savvy. Because I think that that's gonna get you opportunities that otherwise you would not already have. But I do wanna address the acting part of it because you don't just get these roles over and over again if you're not a great actor. So what do you attribute your acting prowess? Have you, just because you've been doing it for years, have you been working with coaches or what do you attribute it to? Ian: I owe it all to my mum. Anne: Ah, okay. Well, there you go. , I'd like to thank my mom and my . Ian: Well, yeah. But in this case, my mom was a very prolific community actress herself. Anne: Got it. Ian: So my first living memory is a smell, and it's not the smell of the grease pain. It's that kind of musty damp wood smell that you get backstage in an old theater. And I have the image that follows it, but -- and I must have been maybe around two or three years old. There's no words involved in this memory. So I basically grew up -- Anne: In the theater. Ian: -- in the backstage. Yeah. One of those things. So it was happening all around me all the time. And I did try and become a proper professional actor as a young man, but I couldn't figure out how to earn money doing it . So. Anne: Same thing when you start off doing voice acting, right? It's kind of hard sometimes. How do I even get money? How do I even get started? Yeah. Ian: Yeah, yeah. It took me another 27 years of sales and management -- Anne: Well, there's your overnight success. Right? And I love telling that to people. They're like, you're so successful. Like, how did you do it? And people think it's overnight, but I think obviously you've evolved so nicely into your success, and it well, well deserved. Ian: And now it pays two -- pays me and I hired -- my wife works for me now. Anne: There you go. Ian: So that Christmas present 10 years ago has employed both of us now. Anne: Yeah. So that 10 year overnight success in voiceover, I mean actually, actually it was a little less than that. Ian: Yeah, that's interesting. Because I got my first nomination, and I was -- Anne: In 2020, right? Ian: -- 2019, I got nominated. I didn't win anything that year, but I thought I was ahead of the curve at that point. You know, and then it all went a bit quieter after that. But the last two years, so years nine and ten, or if you count it from 2014, years seven and eight, really have my career, iIt just looks entirely different now. And it is for the people out there, the BOSSes out there, you know, if you are three, four, and five years in and you're making your way, keep going. Because it is my view that in another two or three years, if you are booking regularly, suddenly something will click, something will change, and bam, away you go. Anne: I was just gonna ask you what's your best advice? But I'll tell you what, that was a golden nugget of wisdom right there . I think so many people, they give up so quickly, and they get their demos, and they're like, well, why am I not working? And they get so frustrated and down and yeah. Ian: Took me three months to get my first booking. I worked for three months for nothing. Anne: Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. Well, Ian, it has been such a wonderful pleasure having you in here. Ian: Are we done? Anne: Yeah. Ian: Already? Anne: Well, I, I can probably talk to you for another three hours, for sure. But I appreciate you coming and sharing your journey. I think ,BOSSes out there, you can learn a lot from this wonderful gentleman. And thank you so much for being here with us today. Ian: You're very welcome, Anne. Anytime. Anne: I'm gonna give a great big shout out to my sponsor, ipDTL. You too can connect and work like a BOSS. Find out more at ipdtl.com. And then also I'd like to talk to you about 100 Voices Who Care. It's your chance to make a difference in the world and give back to the communities that give to you. Find out more at 100voiceswhocare.org to commit. All right, you guys, have an amazing week. Ian, thanks again, and we'll see you next week. Bye-bye. Ian: Bye-Bye. Join us next week for another edition of VO BOSS with your host Anne Ganguzza. And take your business to the next level. Sign up for our mailing list at voBOSS.com and receive exclusive content, industry revolutionizing tips and strategies, and new ways to rock your business like a BOSS. Redistribution with permission. Coast to coast connectivity via ipDTL.
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Episodio 846 #Podcast en donde contamos historias sobre todos los deportes y ligas americanas y los Yankees gana la división este de la Liga Americana.-Tom Brady dice que Huracán no será excusa-Steve Nash hizo las pases con Kevin Durant.-Tua planea jugar contra Bengals
About IanIan Smith is Field CTO at Chronosphere where he works across sales, marketing, engineering and product to deliver better insights and outcomes to observability teams supporting high-scale cloud-native environments. Previously, he worked with observability teams across the software industry in pre-sales roles at New Relic, Wavefront, PagerDuty and Lightstep.Links Referenced: Chronosphere: https://chronosphere.io Last Tweet in AWS: lasttweetinaws.com TranscriptAnnouncer: Hello, and welcome to Screaming in the Cloud with your host, Chief Cloud Economist at The Duckbill Group, Corey Quinn. This weekly show features conversations with people doing interesting work in the world of cloud, thoughtful commentary on the state of the technical world, and ridiculous titles for which Corey refuses to apologize. This is Screaming in the Cloud.Corey: Welcome to Screaming in the Cloud. I'm Corey Quinn. Every once in a while, I find that something I'm working on aligns perfectly with a person that I wind up basically convincing to appear on this show. Today's promoted guest is Ian Smith, who's Field CTO at Chronosphere. Ian, thank you for joining me.Ian: Thanks, Corey. Great to be here.Corey: So, the coincidental aspect of what I'm referring to is that Chronosphere is, despite the name, not something that works on bending time, but rather an observability company. Is that directionally accurate?Ian: That's true. Although you could argue it probably bend a little bit of engineering time. But we can talk about that later.Corey: [laugh]. So, observability is one of those areas that I think is suffering from too many definitions, if that makes sense. And at first, I couldn't make sense of what it was that people actually meant when they said observability, this sort of clarified to me at least when I realized that there were an awful lot of, well, let's be direct and call them ‘legacy monitoring companies' that just chose to take what they were already doing and define that as, “Oh, this is observability.” I don't know that I necessarily agree with that. I know a lot of folks in the industry vehemently disagree.You've been in a lot of places that have positioned you reasonably well to have opinions on this sort of question. To my understanding, you were at interesting places, such as LightStep, New Relic, Wavefront, and PagerDuty, which I guess technically might count as observability in a very strange way. How do you view observability and what it is?Ian: Yeah. Well, a lot of definitions, as you said, common ones, they talk about the three pillars, they talk really about data types. For me, it's about outcomes. I think observability is really this transition from the yesteryear of monitoring where things were much simpler and you, sort of, knew all of the questions, you were able to define your dashboards, you were able to define your alerts and that was really the gist of it. And going into this brave new world where there's a lot of unknown things, you're having to ask a lot of sort of unique questions, particularly during a particular instance, and so being able to ask those questions in an ad hoc fashion layers on top of what we've traditionally done with monitoring. So, observability is sort of that more flexible, more dynamic kind of environment that you have to deal with.Corey: This has always been something that, for me, has been relatively academic. Back when I was running production environments, things tended to be a lot more static, where, “Oh, there's a problem with the database. I will SSH into the database server.” Or, “Hmm, we're having a weird problem with the web tier. Well, there are ten or 20 or 200 web servers. Great, I can aggregate all of their logs to Syslog, and worst case, I can log in and poke around.”Now, with a more ephemeral style of environment where you have Kubernetes or whatnot scheduling containers into place that have problems you can't attach to a running container very easily, and by the time you see an error, that container hasn't existed for three hours. And that becomes a problem. Then you've got the Lambda universe, which is a whole ‘nother world pain, where it becomes very challenging, at least for me, in order to reason using the old style approaches about what's actually going on in your environment.Ian: Yeah, I think there's that and there's also the added complexity of oftentimes you'll see performance or behavioral changes based on even more narrow pathways, right? One particular user is having a problem and the traffic is spread across many containers. Is it making all of these containers perform badly? Not necessarily, but their user experience is being affected. It's very common in say, like, B2B scenarios for you to want to understand the experience of one particular user or the aggregate experience of users at a particular company, particular customer, for example.There's just more complexity. There's more complexity of the infrastructure and just the technical layer that you're talking about, but there's also more complexity in just the way that we're handling use cases and trying to provide value with all of this software to the myriad of customers in different industries that software now serves.Corey: For where I sit, I tend to have a little bit of trouble disambiguating, I guess, the three baseline data types that I see talked about again and again in observability. You have logs, which I think I've mostly I can wrap my head around. That seems to be the baseline story of, “Oh, great. Your application puts out logs. Of course, it's in its own unique, beautiful format. Why wouldn't it be?” In an ideal scenario, they're structured. Things are never ideal, so great. You're basically tailing log files in some cases. Great. I can reason about those.Metrics always seem to be a little bit of a step beyond that. It's okay, I have a whole bunch of log lines that are spitting out every 500 error that my app is throwing—and given my terrible code, it throws a lot—but I can then ideally count the number of times that appears and then that winds up incrementing counter, similar to the way that we used to see with StatsD, for example, and Collectd. Is that directionally correct? As far as the way I reason about, well so far, logs and metrics?Ian: I think at a really basic level, yes. I think that, as we've been talking about, sort of greater complexity starts coming in when you have—particularly metrics in today's world of containers—Prometheus—you mentioned StatsD—Prometheus has become sort of like the standard for expressing those things, so you get situations where you have incredibly high cardinality, so cardinality being the interplay between all the different dimensions. So, you might have, my container is a label, but also the type of endpoint is running on that container as a label, then maybe I want to track my customer organizations and maybe I have 5000 of those. I have 3000 containers, and so on and so forth. And you get this massive explosion, almost multiplicatively.For those in the audience who really live and read cardinality, there's probably someone screaming about well, it's not truly multiplicative in every sense of the word, but, you know, it's close enough from an approximation standpoint. As you get this massive explosion of data, which obviously has a cost implication but also has, I think, a really big implication on the core reason why you have metrics in the first place you alluded to, which is, so a human being can reason about it, right? You don't want to go and look at 5000 log lines; you want to know, out of those 5000 log lines of 4000 errors and I have 1000, OKs. It's very easy for human beings to reason about that from a numbers perspective. When your metrics start to re-explode out into thousands, millions of data points, and unique sort of time series more numbers for you to track, then you're sort of losing that original goal of metrics.Corey: I think I mostly have wrapped my head around the concept. But then that brings us to traces, and that tends to be I think one of the hardest things for me to grasp, just because most of the apps I build, for obvious reasons—namely, I'm bad at programming and most of these are proof of concept type of things rather than anything that's large scale running in production—the difference between a trace and logs tends to get very muddled for me. But the idea being that as you have a customer session or a request that talks to different microservices, how do you collate across different systems all of the outputs of that request into a single place so you can see timing information, understand the flow that user took through your application? Is that again, directionally correct? Have I completely missed the plot here? Which is again, eminently possible. You are the expert.Ian: No, I think that's sort of the fundamental premise or expected value of tracing, for sure. We have something that's akin to a set of logs; they have a common identifier, a trace ID, that tells us that all of these logs essentially belong to the same request. But importantly, there's relationship information. And this is the difference between just having traces—sorry, logs—with just a trace ID attached to them. So, for example, if you have Service A calling Service B and Service C, the relatively simple thing, you could use time to try to figure this out.But what if there are things happening in Service B at the same time there are things happening in Service C and D, and so on and so forth? So, one of the things that tracing brings to the table is it tells you what is currently happening, what called that. So oh, I know that I'm Service D. I was actually called by Service B and I'm not just relying on timestamps to try and figure out that connection. So, you have that information and ultimately, the data model allows you to fully sort of reflect what's happening with the request, particularly in complex environments.And I think this is where, you know, tracing needs to be sort of looked at as not a tool for—just because I'm operating in a modern environment, I'm using some Kubernetes, or I'm using Lambda, is it needs to be used in a scenario where you really have troubles grasping, from a conceptual standpoint, what is happening with the request because you need to actually fully document it. As opposed to, I have a few—let's say three Lambda functions. I maybe have some key metrics about them; I have a little bit of logging. You probably do not need to use tracing to solve, sort of, basic performance problems with those. So, you can get yourself into a place where you're over-engineering, you're spending a lot of time with tracing instrumentation and tracing tooling, and I think that's the core of observability is, like, using the right tool, the right data for the job.But that's also what makes it really difficult because you essentially need to have this, you know, huge set of experience or knowledge about the different data, the different tooling, and what influential architecture and the data you have available to be able to reason about that and make confident decisions, particularly when you're under a time crunch which everyone is familiar with a, sort of like, you know, PagerDuty-style experience of my phone is going off and I have a customer-facing incident. Where is my problem? What do I need to do? Which dashboard do I need to look at? Which tool do I need to investigate? And that's where I think the observability industry has become not serving the outcomes of the customers.Corey: I had a, well, I wouldn't say it's a genius plan, but it was a passing fancy that I've built this online, freely available Twitter client for authoring Twitter threads—because that's what I do is that of having a social life—and it's available at lasttweetinaws.com. I've used that as a testbed for a few things. It's now deployed to roughly 20 AWS regions simultaneously, and this means that I have a bit of a problem as far as how to figure out not even what's wrong or what's broken with this, but who's even using it?Because I know people are. I see invocations all over the planet that are not me. And sometimes it appears to just be random things crawling the internet—fine, whatever—but then I see people logging in and doing stuff with it. I'd kind of like to log and see who's using it just so I can get information like, is there anyone I should talk to about what it could be doing differently? I love getting user experience reports on this stuff.And I figured, ah, this is a perfect little toy application. It runs in a single Lambda function so it's not that complicated. I could instrument this with OpenTelemetry, which then, at least according to the instructions on the tin, I could then send different types of data to different observability tools without having to re-instrument this thing every time I want to kick the tires on something else. That was the promise.And this led to three weeks of pain because it appears that for all of the promise that it has, OpenTelemetry, particularly in a Lambda environment, is nowhere near ready for being able to carry a workload like this. Am I just foolish on this? Am I stating an unfortunate reality that you've noticed in the OpenTelemetry space? Or, let's be clear here, you do work for a company with opinions on these things. Is OpenTelemetry the wrong approach?Ian: I think OpenTelemetry is absolutely the right approach. To me, the promise of OpenTelemetry for the individual is, “Hey, I can go and instrument this thing, as you said and I can go and send the data, wherever I want.” The sort of larger view of that is, “Well, I'm no longer beholden to a vendor,”—including the ones that I've worked for, including the one that I work for now—“For the definition of the data. I am able to control that, I'm able to choose that, I'm able to enhance that, and any effort I put into it, it's mine. I own that.”Whereas previously, if you picked, say, for example, an APM vendor, you said, “Oh, I want to have some additional aspects of my information provider, I want to track my customer, or I want to track a particular new metric of how much dollars am I transacting,” that effort really going to support the value of that individual solution, it's not going to support your outcomes. Which is I want to be able to use this data wherever I want, wherever it's most valuable. So, the core premise of OpenTelemetry, I think, is great. I think it's a massive undertaking to be able to do this for at least three different data types, right? Defining an API across a whole bunch of different languages, across three different data types, and then creating implementations for those.Because the implementations are the thing that people want, right? You are hoping for the ability to, say, drop in something. Maybe one line of code or preferably just, like, attach a dependency, let's say in Java-land at runtime, and be able to have the information flow through and have it complete. And this is the premise of, you know, vendors I've worked with in the past, like New Relic. That was what New Relic built on: the ability to drop in an agent and get visibility immediately.So, having that out-of-the-box visibility is obviously a goal of OpenTelemetry where it makes sense—Go, it's very difficult to attach things at runtime, for example—but then saying, well, whatever is provided—let's say your gRPC connections, database, all these things—well, now I want to go and instrument; I want to add some additional value. As you said, maybe you want to track something like I want to have in my traces the email address of whoever it is or the Twitter handle of whoever is so I can then go and analyze that stuff later. You want to be able to inject that piece of information or that instrumentation and then decide, well, where is the best utilized? Is it best utilized in some tooling from AWS? Is it best utilized in something that you've built yourself? Is it best of utilized an open-source project? Is it best utilized in one of the many observability vendors, or is even becoming more common, I want to shove everything in a data lake and run, sort of, analysis asynchronously, overlay observability data for essentially business purposes.All of those things are served by having a very robust, open-source standard, and simple-to-implement way of collecting a really good baseline of data and then make it easy for you to then enhance that while still owning—essentially, it's your IP right? It's like, the instrumentation is your IP, whereas in the old world of proprietary agents, proprietary APIs, that IP was basically building it, but it was tied to that other vendor that you were investing in.Corey: One thing that I was consistently annoyed by in my days of running production infrastructures at places, like, you know, large banks, for example, one of the problems I kept running into is that this, there's this idea that, “Oh, you want to use our tool. Just instrument your applications with our libraries or our instrumentation standards.” And it felt like I was constantly doing and redoing a lot of instrumentation for different aspects. It's not that we were replacing one vendor with another; it's that in an observability, toolchain, there are remarkably few, one-size-fits-all stories. It feels increasingly like everyone's trying to sell me a multifunction printer, which does one thing well, and a few other things just well enough to technically say they do them, but badly enough that I get irritated every single time.And having 15 different instrumentation packages in an application, that's either got security ramifications, for one, see large bank, and for another it became this increasingly irritating and obnoxious process where it felt like I was spending more time seeing the care and feeding of the instrumentation then I was the application itself. That's the gold—that's I guess the ideal light at the end of the tunnel for me in what OpenTelemetry is promising. Instrument once, and then you're just adjusting configuration as far as where to send it.Ian: That's correct. The organization's, and you know, I keep in touch with a lot of companies that I've worked with, companies that have in the last two years really invested heavily in OpenTelemetry, they're definitely getting to the point now where they're generating the data once, they're using, say, pieces of the OpenTelemetry pipeline, they're extending it themselves, and then they're able to shove that data in a bunch of different places. Maybe they're putting in a data lake for, as I said, business analysis purposes or forecasting. They may be putting the data into two different systems, even for incident and analysis purposes, but you're not having that duplication effort. Also, potentially that performance impact, right, of having two different instrumentation packages lined up with each other.Corey: There is a recurring theme that I've noticed in the observability space that annoys me to no end. And that is—I don't know if it's coming from investor pressure, from folks never being satisfied with what they have, or what it is, but there are so many startups that I have seen and worked with in varying aspects of the observability space that I think, “This is awesome. I love the thing that they do.” And invariably, every time they start getting more and more features bolted onto them, where, hey, you love this whole thing that winds up just basically doing a tail-F on a log file, so it just streams your logs in the application and you can look for certain patterns. I love this thing. It's great.Oh, what's this? Now, it's trying to also be the thing that alerts me and wakes me up in the middle of the night. No. That's what PagerDuty does. I want PagerDuty to do that thing, and I want other things—I want you just to be the log analysis thing and the way that I contextualize logs. And it feels like they keep bolting things on and bolting things on, where everything is more or less trying to evolve into becoming its own version of Datadog. What's up with that?Ian: Yeah, the sort of, dreaded platform play. I—[laugh] I was at New Relic when there were essentially two products that they sold. And then by the time I left, I think there was seven different products that were being sold, which is kind of a crazy, crazy thing when you think about it. And I think Datadog has definitely exceeded that now. And I definitely see many, many vendors in the market—and even open-source solutions—sort of presenting themselves as, like, this integrated experience.But to your point, even before about your experience of these banks it oftentimes become sort of a tick-a-box feature approach of, “Hey, I can do this thing, so buy more. And here's a shared navigation panel.” But are they really integrated? Like, are you getting real value out of it? One of the things that I do in my role is I get to work with our internal product teams very closely, particularly around new initiatives like tracing functionality, and the constant sort of conversation is like, “What is the outcome? What is the value?”It's not about the feature; it's not about having a list of 19 different features. It's like, “What is the user able to do with this?” And so, for example, there are lots of platforms that have metrics, logs, and tracing. The new one-upmanship is saying, “Well, we have events as well. And we have incident response. And we have security. And all these things sort of tie together, so it's one invoice.”And constantly I talk to customers, and I ask them, like, “Hey, what are the outcomes that you're getting when you've invested so heavily in one vendor?” And oftentimes, the response is, “Well, I only need to deal with one vendor.” Okay, but that's not an outcome. [laugh]. And it's like the business having a single invoice.Corey: Yeah, that is something that's already attainable today. If you want to just have one vendor with a whole bunch of crappy offerings, that's what AWS is for. They have AmazonBasics versions of everything you might want to use in production. Oh, you want to go ahead and use MongoDB? Well, use AmazonBasics MongoDB, but they call it DocumentDB because of course they do. And so, on and so forth.There are a bunch of examples of this, but those companies are still in business and doing very well because people often want the genuine article. If everyone was trying to do just everything to check a box for procurement, great. AWS has already beaten you at that game, it seems.Ian: I do think that, you know, people are hoping for that greater value and those greater outcomes, so being able to actually provide differentiation in that market I don't think is terribly difficult, right? There are still huge gaps in let's say, root cause analysis during an investigation time. There are huge issues with vendors who don't think beyond sort of just the one individual who's looking at a particular dashboard or looking at whatever analysis tool there is. So, getting those things actually tied together, it's not just, “Oh, we have metrics, and logs, and traces together,” but even if you say we have metrics and tracing, how do you move between metrics and tracing? One of the goals in the way that we're developing product at Chronosphere is that if you are alerted to an incident—you as an engineer; doesn't matter whether you are massively sophisticated, you're a lead architect who has been with the company forever and you know everything or you're someone who's just come out of onboarding and is your first time on call—you should not have to think, “Is this a tracing problem, or a metrics problem, or a logging problem?”And this is one of those things that I mentioned before of requiring that really heavy level of knowledge and understanding about the observability space and your data and your architecture to be effective. And so, with the, you know, particularly observability teams and all of the engineers that I speak with on a regular basis, you get this sort of circumstance where well, I guess, let's talk about a real outcome and a real pain point because people are like, okay, yeah, this is all fine; it's all coming from a vendor who has a particular agenda, but the thing that constantly resonates is for large organizations that are moving fast, you know, big startups, unicorns, or even more traditional enterprises that are trying to undergo, like, a rapid transformation and go really cloud-native and make sure their engineers are moving quickly, a common question I will talk about with them is, who are the three people in your organization who always get escalated to? And it's usually, you know, between two and five people—Corey: And you can almost pick those perso—you say that and you can—at least anyone who's worked in environments or through incidents like this more than a few times, already have thought of specific people in specific companies. And they almost always fall into some very predictable archetypes. But please, continue.Ian: Yeah. And people think about these people, they always jump to mind. And one of the things I asked about is, “Okay, so when you did your last innovation around observably”—it's not necessarily buying a new thing, but it maybe it was like introducing a new data type or it was you're doing some big investment in improving instrumentation—“What changed about their experience?” And oftentimes, the most that can come out is, “Oh, they have access to more data.” Okay, that's not great.It's like, “What changed about their experience? Are they still getting woken up at 3 am? Are they constantly getting pinged all the time?” One of the vendors that I worked at, when they would go down, there were three engineers in the company who were capable of generating list of customers who are actually impacted by damage. And so, every single incident, one of those three engineers got paged into the incident.And it became borderline intolerable for them because nothing changed. And it got worse, you know? The platform got bigger and more complicated, and so there were more incidents and they were the ones having to generate that. But from a business level, from an observability outcomes perspective, if you zoom all the way up, it's like, “Oh, were we able to generate the list of customers?” “Yes.”And this is where I think the observability industry has sort of gotten stuck—you know, at least one of the ways—is that, “Oh, can you do it?” “Yes.” “But is it effective?” “No.” And by effective, I mean those three engineers become the focal point for an organization.And when I say three—you know, two to five—it doesn't matter whether you're talking about a team of a hundred or you're talking about a team of a thousand. It's always the same number of people. And as you get bigger and bigger, it becomes more and more of a problem. So, does the tooling actually make a difference to them? And you might ask, “Well, what do you expect from the tooling? What do you expect to do for them?” Is it you give them deeper analysis tools? Is it, you know, you do AI Ops? No.The answer is, how do you take the capabilities that those people have and how do you spread it across a larger population of engineers? And that, I think, is one of those key outcomes of observability that no one, whether it be in open-source or the vendor side is really paying a lot of attention to. It's always about, like, “Oh, we can just shove more data in. By the way, we've got petabyte scale and we can deal with, you know, 2 billion active time series, and all these other sorts of vanity measures.” But we've gotten really far away from the outcomes. It's like, “Am I getting return on investment of my observability tooling?”And I think tracing is this—as you've said, it can be difficult to reason about right? And people are not sure. They're feeling, “Well, I'm in a microservices environment; I'm in cloud-native; I need tracing because my older APM tools appear to be failing me. I'm just going to go and wriggle my way through implementing OpenTelemetry.” Which has significant engineering costs. I'm not saying it's not worth it, but there is a significant engineering cost—and then I don't know what to expect, so I'm going to go on through my data somewhere and see whether we can achieve those outcomes.And I do a pilot and my most sophisticated engineers are in the pilot. And they're able to solve the problems. Okay, I'm going to go buy that thing. But I've just transferred my problems. My engineers have gone from solving problems in maybe logs and grepping through petabytes worth of logs to using some sort of complex proprietary query language to go through your tens of petabytes of trace data but actually haven't solved any problem. I've just moved it around and probably just cost myself a lot, both in terms of engineering time and real dollars spent as well.Corey: One of the challenges that I'm seeing across the board is that observability, for certain use cases, once you start to see what it is and its potential for certain applications—certainly not all; I want to hedge that a little bit—but it's clear that there is definite and distinct value versus other ways of doing things. The problem is, is that value often becomes apparent only after you've already done it and can see what that other side looks like. But let's be honest here. Instrumenting an application is going to take some significant level of investment, in many cases. How do you wind up viewing any return on investment that it takes for the very real cost, if only in people's time, to go ahead instrumenting for observability in complex environments?Ian: So, I think that you have to look at the fundamentals, right? You have to look at—pretend we knew nothing about tracing. Pretend that we had just invented logging, and you needed to start small. It's like, I'm not going to go and log everything about every application that I've had forever. What I need to do is I need to find the points where that logging is going to be the most useful, most impactful, across the broadest audience possible.And one of the useful things about tracing is because it's built in distributed environments, primarily for distributed environments, you can look at, for example, the biggest intersection of requests. A lot of people have things like API Gateways, or they have parts of a monolith which is still handling a lot of requests routing; those tend to be areas to start digging into. And I would say that, just like for anyone who's used Prometheus or decided to move away from Prometheus, no one's ever gone and evaluated Prometheus solution without having some sort of Prometheus data, right? You don't go, “Hey, I'm going to evaluate a replacement for Prometheus or my StatsD without having any data, and I'm simultaneously going to generate my data and evaluate the solution at the same time.” It doesn't make any sense.With tracing, you have decent open-source projects out there that allow you to visualize individual traces and understand sort of the basic value you should be getting out of this data. So, it's a good starting point to go, “Okay, can I reason about a single request? Can I go and look at my request end-to-end, even in a relatively small slice of my environment, and can I see the potential for this? And can I think about the things that I need to be able to solve with many traces?” Once you start developing these ideas, then you can have a better idea of, “Well, where do I go and invest more in instrumentation? Look, databases never appear to be a problem, so I'm not going to focus on database instrumentation. What's the real problem is my external dependencies. Facebook API is the one that everyone loves to use. I need to go instrument that.”And then you start to get more clarity. Tracing has this interesting network effect. You can basically just follow the breadcrumbs. Where is my biggest problem here? Where are my errors coming from? Is there anything else further down the call chain? And you can sort of take that exploratory approach rather than doing everything up front.But it is important to do something before you start trying to evaluate what is my end state. End state obviously being sort of nebulous term in today's world, but where do I want to be in two years' time? I would like to have a solution. Maybe it's open-source solution, maybe it's a vendor solution, maybe it's one of those platform solutions we talked about, but how do I get there? It's really going to be I need to take an iterative approach and I need to be very clear about the value and outcomes.There's no point in doing a whole bunch of instrumentation effort in things that are just working fine, right? You want to go and focus your time and attention on that. And also you don't want to go and burn just singular engineers. The observability team's purpose in life is probably not to just write instrumentation or just deploy OpenTelemetry. Because then we get back into the land where engineers themselves know nothing about the monitoring or observability they're doing and it just becomes a checkbox of, “I dropped in an agent. Oh, when it comes time for me to actually deal with an incident, I don't know anything about the data and the data is insufficient.”So, a level of ownership supported by the observability team is really important. On that return on investment, sort of, though it's not just the instrumentation effort. There's product training and there are some very hard costs. People think oftentimes, “Well, I have the ability to pay a vendor; that's really the only cost that I have.” There's things like egress costs, particularly volumes of data. There's the infrastructure costs. A lot of the times there will be elements you need to run in your own environment; those can be very costly as well, and ultimately, they're sort of icebergs in this overall ROI conversation.The other side of it—you know, return and investment—return, there's a lot of difficulty in reasoning about, as you said, what is the value of this going to be if I go through all this effort? Everyone knows a sort of, you know, meme or archetype of, “Hey, here are three options; pick two because there's always going to be a trade off.” Particularly for observability, it's become an element of, I need to pick between performance, data fidelity, or cost. Pick two. And when data fidelity—particularly in tracing—I'm talking about the ability to not sample, right?If you have edge cases, if you have narrow use cases and ways you need to look at your data, if you heavily sample, you lose data fidelity. But oftentimes, cost is a reason why you do that. And then obviously, performance as you start to get bigger and bigger datasets. So, there's a lot of different things you need to balance on that return. As you said, oftentimes you don't get to understand the magnitude of those until you've got the full data set in and you're trying to do this, sort of, for real. But being prepared and iterative as you go through this effort and not saying, “Okay, well, I'm just going to buy everything from one vendor because I'm going to assume that's going to solve my problem,” is probably that undercurrent there.Corey: As I take a look across the entire ecosystem, I can't shake the feeling—and my apologies in advance if this is an observation, I guess, that winds up throwing a stone directly at you folks—Ian: Oh, please.Corey: But I see that there's a strong observability community out there that is absolutely aligned with the things I care about and things I want to do, and then there's a bunch of SaaS vendors, where it seems that they are, in many cases, yes, advancing the state of the art, I am not suggesting for a second that money is making observability worse. But I do think that when the tool you sell is a hammer, then every problem starts to look like a nail—or in my case, like my thumb. Do you think that there's a chance that SaaS vendors are in some ways making this entire space worse?Ian: As we've sort of gone into more cloud-native scenarios and people are building things specifically to take advantage of cloud from a complexity standpoint, from a scaling standpoint, you start to get, like, vertical issues happening. So, you have things like we're going to charge on a per-container basis; we're going to charge on a per-host basis; we're going to charge based off the amount of gigabytes that you send us. These are sort of like more horizontal pricing models, and the way the SaaS vendors have delivered this is they've made it pretty opaque, right? Everyone has experiences, or has jerks about overages from observability vendors' massive spikes. I've worked with customers who have used—accidentally used some features and they've been billed a quarter million dollars on a monthly basis for accidental overages from a SaaS vendor.And these are all terrible things. Like, but we've gotten used to this. Like, we've just accepted it, right, because everyone is operating this way. And I really do believe that the move to SaaS was one of those things. Like, “Oh, well, you're throwing us more data, and we're charging you more for it.” As a vendor—Corey: Which sort of erodes your own value proposition that you're bringing to the table. I mean, I don't mean to be sitting over here shaking my fist yelling, “Oh, I could build a better version in a weekend,” except that I absolutely know how to build a highly available Rsyslog cluster. I've done it a handful of times already and the technology is still there. Compare and contrast that with, at scale, the fact that I'm paying 50 cents per gigabyte ingested to CloudWatch logs, or a multiple of that for a lot of other vendors, it's not that much harder for me to scale that fleet out and pay a much smaller marginal cost.Ian: And so, I think the reaction that we're seeing in the market and we're starting to see—we're starting to see the rise of, sort of, a secondary class of vendor. And by secondary, I don't mean that they're lesser; I mean that they're, sort of like, specifically trying to address problems of the primary vendors, right? Everyone's aware of vendors who are attempting to reduce—well, let's take the example you gave on logs, right? There are vendors out there whose express purpose is to reduce the cost of your logging observability. They just sit in the middle; they are a middleman, right?Essentially, hey, use our tool and even though you're going to pay us a whole bunch of money, it's going to generate an overall return that is greater than if you had just continued pumping all of your logs over to your existing vendor. So, that's great. What we think really needs to happen, and one of the things we're doing at Chronosphere—unfortunate plug—is we're actually building those capabilities into the solution so it's actually end-to-end. And by end-to-end, I mean, a solution where I can ingest my data, I can preprocess my data, I can store it, query it, visualize it, all those things, aligned with open-source standards, but I have control over that data, and I understand what's going on with particularly my cost and my usage. I don't just get a bill at the end of the month going, “Hey, guess what? You've spent an additional $200,000.”Instead, I can know in real time, well, what is happening with my usage. And I can attribute it. It's this team over here. And it's because they added this particular label. And here's a way for you, right now, to address that and cap it so it doesn't cost you anything and it doesn't have a blast radius of, you know, maybe degraded performance or degraded fidelity of the data.That though is diametrically opposed to the way that most vendors are set up. And unfortunately, the open-source projects tend to take a lot of their cues, at least recently, from what's happening in the vendor space. One of the ways that you can think about it is a sort of like a speed of light problem. Everyone knows that, you know, there's basic fundamental latency; everyone knows how fast disk is; everyone knows the, sort of like, you can't just make your computations happen magically, there's a cost of running things horizontally. But a lot of the way that the vendors have presented efficiency to the market is, “Oh, we're just going to incrementally get faster as AWS gets faster. We're going to incrementally get better as compression gets better.”And of course, you can't go and fit a petabyte worth of data into a kilobyte, unless you're really just doing some sort of weird dictionary stuff, so you feel—you're dealing with some fundamental constraints. And the vendors just go, “I'm sorry, you know, we can't violate the speed of light.” But what you can do is you can start taking a look at, well, how is the data valuable, and start giving the people controls on how to make it more valuable. So, one of the things that we do with Chronosphere is we allow you to reshape Prometheus metrics, right? You go and express Prometheus metrics—let's say it's a business metric about how many transactions you're doing as a business—you don't need that on a per-container basis, particularly if you're running 100,000 containers globally.When you go and take a look at that number on a dashboard, or you alert on it, what is it? It's one number, one time series. Maybe you break it out per region. You have five regions, you don't need 100,000 data points every minute behind that. It's very expensive, it's not very performant, and as we talked about earlier, it's very hard to reason about as a human being.So, giving the tools to be able to go and condense that data down and make it more actionable and more valuable, you get performance, you get cost reduction, and you get the value that you ultimately need out of the data. And it's one of the reasons why, I guess, I work at Chronosphere. Which I'm hoping is the last observability [laugh] venture I ever work for.Corey: Yeah, for me a lot of the data that I see in my logs, which is where a lot of this stuff starts and how I still contextualize these things, is nonsense that I don't care about and will never care about. I don't care about load balance or health checks. I don't particularly care about 200 results for the favicon when people visit the site. I care about other things, but just weed out the crap, especially when I'm paying by the pound—or at least by the gigabyte—in order to get that data into something. Yeah. It becomes obnoxious and difficult to filter out.Ian: Yeah. And the vendors just haven't done any of that because why would they, right? If you went and reduced the amount of log—Corey: Put engineering effort into something that reduces how much I can charge you? That sounds like lunacy. Yeah.Ian: Exactly. They're business models entirely based off it. So, if you went and reduced every one's logging bill by 30%, or everyone's logging volume by 30% and reduced the bills by 30%, it's not going to be a great time if you're a publicly traded company who has built your entire business model on essentially a very SaaS volume-driven—and in my eyes—relatively exploitative pricing and billing model.Corey: Ian, I want to thank you for taking so much time out of your day to talk to me about this. If people want to learn more, where can they find you? I mean, you are a Field CTO, so clearly you're outstanding in your field. But if, assuming that people don't want to go to farm country, where's the best place to find you?Ian: Yeah. Well, it'll be a bunch of different conferences. I'll be at KubeCon this year. But chronosphere.io is the company website. I've had the opportunity to talk to a lot of different customers, not from a hard sell perspective, but you know, conversations like this about what are the real problems you're having and what are the things that you sort of wish that you could do?One of the favorite things that I get to ask people is, “If you could wave a magic wand, what would you love to be able to do with your observability solution?” That's, A, a really great part, but oftentimes be being able to say, “Well, actually, that thing you want to do, I think I have a way to accomplish that,” is a really rewarding part of this particular role.Corey: And we will, of course, put links to that in the show notes. Thank you so much for being so generous with your time. I appreciate it.Ian: Thanks, Corey. It's great to be here.Corey: Ian Smith, Field CTO at Chronosphere on this promoted guest episode. I'm Cloud Economist Corey Quinn, and this is Screaming in the Cloud. If you've enjoyed this podcast, please leave a five-star review on your podcast platform of choice, whereas if you've hated this podcast, please leave a five-star review on your podcast platform of choice along with an angry comment, which going to be super easy in your case, because it's just one of the things that the omnibus observability platform that your company sells offers as part of its full suite of things you've never used.Corey: If your AWS bill keeps rising and your blood pressure is doing the same, then you need The Duckbill Group. We help companies fix their AWS bill by making it smaller and less horrifying. The Duckbill Group works for you, not AWS. We tailor recommendations to your business and we get to the point. Visit duckbillgroup.com to get started.Announcer: This has been a HumblePod production. Stay humble.
The one where the Doctor has way too much fun....a perfect serial to introduce Newbies to the First Doctor! Commentary and analysis for Doctor Who's "The Romans"Team TARDIS has been chilling in a Roman villa when the Doctor and Vicki get bored and go to Rome to meet Nero! But there is conspiracy afoot. Meanwhile, Ian and Barbara are captured by slave traders and suddenly must survive their very own adventure. DOCTOR: On my arrival, I was rather under the impression that there was some sort of intrigue going on here, hmm?NERO: Well, nobody said anything to me. Nobody said a word and I am always informed of intrigues!______BARBARA: Oh, it isn't fair, Ian, is it?IAN: No it is not. Still, got a funny side to it, hasn't it.BARBARA: Yes.____William Hartnell, take a bow! We'll chat about how brilliant Dennis Spooner is at dark comedy, the horror the comedy conceals, how the lyre-scene reveals the truth, and what these pure historicals can do better than New Who historicals....NEXT TIME: Hannah & Brianna Talk Doctor Who--a special podcast in which my friend Hannah and I chat over The Romans some more!The following week we will continue on with The Web Planet. Special thanks to Cathlyn "Happigal" Driscoll for providing the beautiful artwork for this podcast. You can view her work at https://www.happigal.com/ Do feel free to get in touch to share the love of all things Doctor Who: throughthevortexpodcast@gmail.com
In this episode of the Future Tribe Podcast, we had the pleasure of chatting with Ian Lindgren, an army veteran turned entrepreneur who currently owns and operates four companies here in Canberra. After suffering a career-ending injury during one of his deployments, Ian was forced to forge a different career path which eventually led him to create his first and most successful company, PayMe, Australia’s #1 payroll services provider. As you can imagine, our guest has a bevy of knowledge regarding the steps behind starting a company and implementing a strong workplace culture. Additionally, Ian also shares how he and his wife are able to simultaneously manage staff across multiple locations who work in completely different industries. Later, Ian shares how he used many of the lessons learned during his time in the army to inform his business philosophy relating to areas such as competitor analysis and information gathering. The show concludes with our guest talking about the future of his businesses given COVID-19 as well as his commitment to using his success to help support the veteran community within Canberra. What we talk aboutOvercoming adversityDeveloping a strong workplace culture across multiple businessesCompetitor analysis and strategic agilityCorporate social responsibilityLinks from this episodehttps://payme.com.au/ (PayMe website)https://www.linkedin.com/in/ian-lindgren-b15a93/?originalSubdomain=au (Ian on LinkedIn)Find us elsewherehttps://futuretri.be/ (Future Tribe Website)https://www.instagram.com/futuretri.be/ (Future Tribe on Instagram)https://www.linkedin.com/in/germainemuller/ (Germaine on LinkedIn)https://www.instagram.com/germa_ne/ (Germaine on Instagram)https://futuretheory.com.au/ (Futuretheory Website)Transcript Disclaimer: This transcript was generated automatically and as such, may contain various spelling and syntax errors[00:00:00] Ian: [00:00:00] So I started PayMe at home with, with no clients. I think within the first six months we had a $600,000 turnover. The next year it was 9 million and then 15 million. [00:00:11] Intro: [00:00:11] Welcome to the Future Tribe podcast, where we're all about taking your future to the next level, whether it is interviewing guests or unpacking strategies, you know, we will be talking about getting things done and backing you a fellow optimistic, go getter.[00:00:26] Ian: [00:00:26] And now as always. Here's your host, the formidable fortunate and highly favored Germaine Muller. [00:00:35] Germaine: [00:00:35] Hello, future tribe. Welcome to another episode of the podcast on this week's episode, I've got Ian Lindgren from PayMe, uh, how are you today, Ian? No worries. Thanks for joining. Yeah, it's a, it's a bit of a cold cold morning, um, in Canberra.[00:00:53] Um, but it's nice to be talking to someone who can sympathize. Uh, with, with what I'm feeling, [00:01:04][00:01:04] [00:01:00] hopefully, and then it will get too hot, but that's camera for you. Um, tell me, tell me a bit about PayMe before we get started. [00:01:11] Ian: [00:01:11] Oh, probably my Oregon pine mill is an accidental company. Uh, I don't really use it when I sit back and think about it.[00:01:20] It's a bit of a storage of it all yet. I had 20, uh, 21 odd years in the regular army. And then got injured and my last deployment to, um, Egypt and Israel, uh, area called the Sinai peninsula, which wherever I worked, I got injured in there. Nothing too bad physically, but it's effectively stopped me from working full time since the year 2000.[00:01:44] So it's a primer kind of came about, is that because I essentially had to work from home, uh, to do something I had to retire totally. Or do something. And, um, so I started, uh, PayMe at home with, with no clients. [00:02:00] Do you know about how to do or run a business? Uh, because I'd always been in the army. I think within the first six months we had $600,000 turn over the next, uh, year.[00:02:09] It was 9 million and then 15 million, um, thankfully corn grow that fast every year. Cause it would've given me a lot more growth, but yeah, it just boils down to some simple recipes and we've had a great time. I didn't stay inside a house and we've got a few offices around the country now.[00:02:31] What color contractors. [00:02:32] Germaine: [00:02:32] Yeah. That's amazing. So looking at your website, you are Australia's largest contractor payroll company. Um, have you stayed within Australia or have you thought about going across the pond so to speak? [00:02:46] Ian: [00:02:46] Uh, we have actually operated all over the world. Uh, certainly didn't, didn't, didn't, uh, uh, shy away from trying new business lines.[00:02:58] But what I found was [00:03:00] for very good reasons, the Australian unemployment and payroll market has a lot of regulation around it to protect people like you and me and, and, uh, Australia, those protections, they aren't there. And the rest of the world. So, for example, if I was speaking to an American company institution that someone needed to have maternity leave or, and that actually it was your responsibility.[00:03:27] If you suck, if you paid someone in Australia, if they ask for it, but they were entitled at these types of things, blew people away overseas. So in the end, I, uh, I didn't pursue that as mr. Lawrence, because the battles to convince people that when you operate in Australia, you've got to operate the way we operate too, like too, too large.[00:03:48] So they're having fun because there's no use working unless you're having fun. [00:03:55] Germaine: [00:03:55] Yeah, no, exactly. I mean, I'm having fun. Cause I think [00:04:00] that that funding means that you're passionate about what you're doing or you're at the very least you're enjoying what you're doing, which I think everyone should, should, um, aim to do.[00:04:07] Cause that's when you, I think do your best work because if you're not really having fun or enjoying what you're doing, then there's probably something else that you should be doing that. Um, [00:04:17] Ian: [00:04:17] and you can learn some, some huge lessons from that in business as your business grows, and people do business with people they trust.[00:04:27] Um, if you have trust. You have fun and you're really enjoy supporting each other. [00:04:32] Germaine: [00:04:32] Yeah, definitely. And I think that that trust component is really important as well. I mean, you've been in business for a lot longer than I have, but, um, you, you do realize that it is all about trust. You can sign all the contracts and do all that fun stuff.[00:04:46] Um, but at the end of the day, if, if there's no trust in it, then, um, as I like to say, there's no point turning back to sheet of paper with some ink on it. Um, if, if. Everything was to fall apart because, because what's that going [00:05:00] to do at the end of the day? [00:05:01] Ian: [00:05:01] Exactly. Exactly. And that affects the whole team, not just yourself, if you really have that kind of how you see that Cathy's, you've turned him at work.[00:05:11] Everyone feels the pressure, if something is. [00:05:13] Germaine: [00:05:13] Yeah. Yeah. And it sort of makes you feel like, like, so feature theory. My business. We're a, we're a family business. Um, my brother's involved in it and, you know, we, we try and sort of spread that, that family feel. And I, I just find that. Having that sort of level of rapport as well.[00:05:32] It just means that you're a, you're a unit and you're working towards a common goal and you're helping your, you want to help your customers and your clients, and they become part of the family. And you know, when they're doing it tough, especially given COVID and everything else that we're sort of experiencing at the moment, working from home.[00:05:50] Um, it's I think just. It really important that you bring back those probably old school, um, or, or, you know, someone call them old school sort of business [00:06:00] values, but, um, It certainly stood out to me as important. [00:06:04] Ian: [00:06:04] I think that is very true. Like your business, our business is a family business. Every single person in my family is in the business, including my daughter.[00:06:13] And it really truly is a family business across all four companies. Because it's a smaller company, a payroll company called just pies. And in order to protect ourselves and diversify, uh, w we have a car leasing company, uh, which is Pampers. I am in college and company, but otherwise just the marketing plug.[00:06:37] Um, but we also have a room. A recruitment company on a campus, all this recruitment companies go to effecting people, which we did quite a few years ago, but it just gives us the stability, the variety for the family members to, to operate in and make sure we've got some longevity. [00:06:55] Germaine: [00:06:55] Yeah. That's because you, you run the, [00:07:00] the four businesses together with your wife.[00:07:02] Is that right? [00:07:03] Ian: [00:07:03] That's right. Yeah, but Shane essentially for one of a better word and advice, and we have one external advisory. So that, to keep us honest, to ask what we're doing, we also, outside of that, we have good side of the same thing. That's I think very wise. So that done don't actually make errors.[00:07:27] Germaine: [00:07:27] Yeah, that's amazing. It sounds like a truly sort of family business. Now, when did you start all this? Was it in the early two thousands? Did you say? [00:07:38] Ian: [00:07:38] Yeah, after I got injured, I had about a year resting on my back cause I couldn't move and then I tried to work again, but I just, I just couldn't. And uh, although I tried to consult back into defense.[00:07:52] It just wouldn't work. So I started this January, 2005 with just myself and this office, [00:08:00] actually that I'm sitting in right now. And that's where, that's where I figured that I'd stay for them for the rest of my working life, because I was told about it. I wouldn't be able to work any further from a medical point of view.[00:08:12] Germaine: [00:08:12] Wow. Now, if you don't mind me asking. How old are you now? [00:08:17] Ian: [00:08:17] 58. [00:08:18] Germaine: [00:08:18] 58. Okay. So you were sort of mid to late forties when, when all this happened to you, what was it like? Did you have a feeling of having to start a fresh, having to start a new? Was, was that, was that sort of one of the sensations or are the things you have to get past?[00:08:33] Ian: [00:08:33] I always walk in it too. You know what, you know what it's like when you leave school, it's the best butterflies in your stomach? You know, you've got another career you guys are doing. That's essentially what I likened it to. It was, do I take this big step forward, uh, into something? And, um, do I back myself and I did.[00:08:53] More support me working full time in the public service. [00:09:00] And we went from there. I'm just following a simple recipe to what I thought was really important. Things that I've always just, you said before, the simple, old fashioned things in life sometimes are more effective than the more complex, highly theoretical ways that people were approach things these days.[00:09:18] I always think that a leader. Uh, if you are faced firm and friendly, you're a good leader. I'd probably get the word authentic these days, but that those are the things that I'm focused on rather than any greater theoretical approach to it certainly studied them. But that's, that's what it boils down to me.[00:09:38] Germaine: [00:09:38] Give us an idea across these four companies. Um, I know we were talking about PayMe. In, I guess, uh, with a bit more focused, but across the four companies, how many staff do you sort of manage? [00:09:51] Ian: [00:09:51] I'm not allowed to man. 20 eyes. So we have, I think 20 or 18 in Canberra. [00:10:00] I don't in Canberra across across three companies, uh, of deacon, um, more worse.[00:10:06] Men just size on a day to day basis. We have another company spread between Canberra and Brisbane. And we have a manager that manages, uh, day to day basis, but, uh, three other day, but to start every day, uh, we zoom in and huddle with what we call huddle with everybody in the company. Every company runs to the same blade.[00:10:32] Oh, wow. [00:10:33] Germaine: [00:10:33] Okay. So across all four companies, everyone meets on zoom. Did you say every day, [00:10:39] Ian: [00:10:39] every day, [00:10:41] Germaine: [00:10:41] does that happen? Usually, [00:10:43] Ian: [00:10:43] uh, guys for guys for about 10, 10 to 12 minutes, and it's kind of the core focus of doing business for us, we follow what's called the Rockefeller habits, which is a habit. If you have a habit.[00:10:58] Then, usually it happens [00:11:00] every day. So a ed, I stop at eight 45, where, where everybody zooms in and everyone goes across the three months important priorities that I've got to do today. Uh, the three or four, uh, interesting dot or that they, uh, that they had shaved yesterday. And perhaps I think probably the most important thing.[00:11:23] What are the stocks that are holding you back? And that could be stuck like the computer systems program or my husband's being a pain. If your partner's splitting apart. And just to give a bit of a laugh or it can be something serious, just boring as a team together, everyone gets synchronized and that can be things like, Oh, I haven't been able to communicate with a launch leasing yesterday.[00:11:46] I haven't been able to communicate with primate and it usually it's just a human factor and we just get over it on the spot sorted out and a sort of airflow and afterwards, and it gets the whole, whole group synchronized every day. [00:11:58] Germaine: [00:11:58] Really amazing and interesting. I've [00:12:00] never heard of that, that sort of approach to it.[00:12:03] And, and I can see the real benefits and no doubt. Um, it also, I think helps. Everyone operated as a family. Cause you're sort of sharing the things that are the annoyances, the little wins, the little, the little, you know, not so great things mixed in with, with all the, all the good stuff. Um, have you guys been doing that even before sort of this work from home COVID sort of situation that we're dealing with?[00:12:26] Yeah, [00:12:26] Ian: [00:12:26] we've been doing it since 2010 hours, so. Um, six to about 2010, I essentially ran the companies with the Milwaukee support and the team support and just did the best I could like anybody does. We all do our best. We all try to analyze, you know, how can we do it better? And like, most people, I was stuck in that rock of having a weekly meeting, which essentially goes over everything that we covered through the dots through the week.[00:12:57] And then we came across the [00:13:00] Rockefeller habits, which is based on John D Rockefeller and the way he did, he performed his daily functioning. And the way he started work every day was a team. He walked to work. Uh, with these senior executives and I effectively huddled, I told them, do we have the things that were going on?[00:13:17] Uh, and then they, then when I got to work, you know, talk to their, to their team members and everyone was synchronized. So that's essentially where we took that process up. And then it goes on from, you have this kind of, so the way you do business, you go de de de de. Uh, so you get the same process all through the day.[00:13:38] You get to Friday, and Friday's the day we, where you cover off on the key pieces of information that you might've heard of, uh, during that week, what the competitors are up to there. Um, you might, uh, I think mostly we do. So we have this, this routine is that moms and [00:14:00] where the quarterly meetings are actually even focused on signs.[00:14:05] If we stick to that. Everybody doesn't matter what company you're in, or even if you moved down to Canberra for a little while from Brisbane or from our Perth office, come to Canberra, you just synchronize rotting. You just realize that you're in the same office. [00:14:18] Germaine: [00:14:18] Yeah. That that's amazing. I mean, it's really that sort of, you used the word bait and I would say you sort of, your heartbeat sort of starts to sink and then, um, Without getting too sort of philosophical.[00:14:30] I mean, the, the staff are really are the humans buying a company are really the, the part bait of a, of a company. So you're just really synchronizing it all across the board so that, um, you are all on the same page, your you're sharing the wins, the failures. Um, and, and I think it gives a nice opportunity.[00:14:49] 10, 10, 15 minutes. Isn't a significant amount of time. Um, but it's enough that you can. Quickly rattle off any, any points. And then if someone has, you know, someone hears it and goes, [00:15:00] Oh, I know exactly what I needed to talk to Jermaine about when this happened to me six months ago, this is the approach that I took.[00:15:06] Or, you know, when, when X, Y, Z company, isn't very responsive, all you gotta do is call my, um, at, at regional whatever. And you just, just sort of solve those problems that. If you're doing that weekly, it starts to become this droning like 10 to 15 minutes is, is worst case scenario. Bearable [00:15:25] Ian: [00:15:25] was, there's an art to it.[00:15:27] You know, you should stand up because once people sit down, they get all relaxed and nice and comfy and cuddly and they tend to waffle a bit something it's just, boom, boom, boom. And you threw it. And then the day starts. And anything that, anything that was raised during the day, that's like a stock. Well, then you talk about Flon and of.[00:15:48] Germaine: [00:15:48] Yeah, definitely. I think, I think you can fall into the trap of sitting down and getting a coffee. That's warm. You know, you, you don't really want to get into the day. I need just end up. Oh, you know, if [00:16:00] we, if I rattle on for five or 10 minutes and then maybe the next person will, and that'll become a half an hour, 45 sort of minute excuse to not, not get your day started and just procrastinate, [00:16:10] Ian: [00:16:10] um, trust and things like that.[00:16:12] But I'm sure you'll ask me about that later. Trust is just so important and knowing everyone's strengths and weaknesses really just enhances it. [00:16:20] Germaine: [00:16:20] Yeah. That, that, that is something that I want to touch on. Now. That's why I asked you how many people you manage and you've got remote locations as well, or, you know, locations that are remote to where your base from.[00:16:31] So you've got 18 staff in Canberra based out of deacon. And then you've got, say another 10 spread out elsewhere. How do you. How do you manage what everyone's doing and how do you keep, keep on top of everyone's tasks? And, and especially as you sort of scale up, because when it was just yourself would have been very easy, cause you just check in chicken with yourself and make sure that you're on track.[00:16:55] And then what was sort of the next jump from that? So six months now that you said you're doing about [00:17:00] 600 K in revenue. [00:17:01] Ian: [00:17:01] Yeah. I think for me, the key thing is, is having the right staff. Staff that have the same core values as you so you'd know yourself from running a business, you tend to be the work.[00:17:14] Holly has been, people would characterize you as a workaholic. Someone, if you've got something to do, you don't. Go home at the end of the day, or you don't leave it on done. And, um, to find people that can actually work in the same way, even though they're not there yet is difficult. So for us, we, we, we, we, we have a set of core values.[00:17:39] The we, we, uh, we have one that's very simple, uh, uh, just, uh, just four of them. And, um, and from there, uh, we, we, we, uh, bring people along and trying them and we find that probably about. I mean one out of five people get through out our probation period because it's, [00:18:00] it's hard to demonstrate the same core values that we have the desire to know that the people out there that are using our services actually pay us.[00:18:09] So they're the people got no, no, no boss or, or anybody else. It's the people that you're giving them, giving, giving services to, because ultimately like, if you don't please them, then your business goes out of business. And your job disappears. So, so yeah, no, we, we, um, we focus on, on the core values, what people display, um, how, uh, how have their written expression, their, uh, verbal expression and, uh, yeah.[00:18:40] Yeah. And just willingness to, just to Gideon and do, do the jobs throughout the day and not just. Um, I'm not saying it's terrible clock watch, but you know, if you have a 1230 lunch break for an hour, you just have your lunch breaks throughout the day sometime. Because you never know when your clients are going to call up and need your help.[00:18:59] And if you have a [00:19:00] team member that's willing to just put the lunch down, uh, go and help them and then come back and finish their lunch and maybe take a half hour earlier off that day, because I missed the whole lunch period. That's a great private business model, you know? And it doesn't take away. I don't think it takes away from the fact that you're, you're, you're removing any of the satisfying for the payable because you were give to your time and they give to you on.[00:19:25] So that's a, that's a good team environment. [00:19:28] Germaine: [00:19:28] That's it. I think like you mentioned, especially given that given what, what services you guys offer, um, Australia is very legislated. There, there are a lot of rules and things in place to make sure that everyone's, it's it's fair. Um, and I think that's, that's a very good, um, but you shouldn't see it as sort of this rigid thing because, um, Just cause your lunch breaks from 1230 to one 30, like you said, if something goes wrong at 1225 and it's going to take you half an hour to fix it, you would hope that someone would fix that rather than saying, stop, [00:20:00] start at five minutes in and then say, okay, it's my lunch break.[00:20:03] I'm going to go fix the problem later, despite, you know, having started working on it and despite it being a clear issue that needs to be, [00:20:11] Ian: [00:20:11] and I feel that people should feel comfortable. To ask, because I think I've been in some places in my life where I haven't been comfortable to ask for time off. If I can remember when my wife had her second child and I asked my boss for time off.[00:20:26] And he said, no, when my wife had her second child, I was 20,000 kilometers away in Vietnam. So you don't have any time off go on and ride later. I didn't, I didn't agree with that. And I don't know. Yeah. We showed it to people. If you've got a swimming carnival on today for one of the kids that swimming carnival is never ever going to occur again, if your son or daughter comes number one to die, you're going to miss it.[00:20:53] So go and do it. But what we, what we just ask in return is just extra couple of hours, one [00:21:00] day or something simple, a real flexible model. [00:21:03] Germaine: [00:21:03] Just just make up for it. Yeah. I mean, it doesn't have to be, you know, as, as we were talking about it, doesn't have to be that rigid, you know? Okay. You, you miss out on this period of time, make sure that every, every hour is counter or gross else is going to come back and say, you know, Jermaine, what where's, that where's that 15 minutes that you should have given us?[00:21:21] Um, because that's not what it's about. It's about sort of collectively working towards this goal. And, and often it is just helping clients and, and, um, making sure that they're happy now. Talk to me a bit more about PeyMe. So, um, you guys do contract and contingent worker payroll. So are you a software company or are you [00:21:44] Ian: [00:21:44] not?[00:21:46] What we really are in simple terms is we're an outsourced payroll company. So I've used some industry language there, uh, and that's forum, uh, [00:22:00] optimization on the, on the, on the website. But really what it is is when I, a person goes to a recruitment company and says, for example, an information technology contractor goes through a recruitment company, gets a job site in defense.[00:22:15] Uh, quite often, these people are well paid.[00:22:24] They're experts in this field go like that would normally be high bar recruitment company. The recruitment company's core business is to place people in the job not to give complex payroll services. So if I, for example, need car laces, salary, sacrifices, salary, packaging, superannuation, salary, salary, packaging, and some flicks when they get paid.[00:22:49] And how do I get paid? Um, I requested services on the recruitment company app sources, the payroll to us, how they do that as a matter [00:23:00] of conjecture and probably out of the scope of today. But, uh, that's really what it boils down to is we're an answer was pyro company. [00:23:08] Germaine: [00:23:08] Right. Okay. So you, you effectively, yeah.[00:23:12] Just provide payroll services as, as just one sort of business system that is independent of [00:23:19] Ian: [00:23:19] exactly. And I know that it doesn't sound all that exciting. But, you know, from, from when you're an employee, uh, and you look around at your payroll element within your company, uh, you know, you just wait for your pay each week.[00:23:35] What we do is we act as the outsource payroll components for the companies that we look after and we have more contact with their employees on pay issues. Monday again, it's a routine go aside Monday morning. It's coming. If they talk streets on in him, then we text them, call them email, but usually call them, say, hello, Bob, haven't got your [00:24:00] time sheet yet.[00:24:00] And they might have some issues that the supervisor's not there. So they haven't gotten it approved proven company. In most cases, won't pay them that way. Because I used to be a contractor. So what we do is if we understand that the supervisor's not there, we still assure them that we're going to pay them.[00:24:20] Even though they are equipment company might not pay us. So it's, you know, the recruitment company, my past, the following week, it's either coming over those hurdles to that uncertain work arrangement that people have and when we put some certainty back into it, so that they have a guaranteed payday. So it's Monday time shooting Wednesday, page six gallery up Friday morning.[00:24:47] If the money's not in the bank and Friday morning, when you wake up, you just call us. And we have it to you within 30, 40 minutes. [00:24:53] Germaine: [00:24:53] That's amazing. So you're essentially adding a layer of, of almost certainty, sort [00:25:00] of almost a certainty of being an employee in terms of your wages and what your, what your benefits are, but then, but then you're a contractor.[00:25:07] So I guess as a, as an employer, you, you get the benefits of not having the same risks or having, having sort of a different, different profile. Um, so it's sort of. Um, basically someone who works with you, uh, with PayMe gets, gets the best of both worlds. Cause contractors generally have higher, higher pay rates, but then, um, intern, you know, you, you lose X, Y, Z employee benefits.[00:25:31] So that's really interesting. I didn't, I didn't realize that there was a market, um, to what you guys do. Um, is it, is it quite a big market, which is [00:25:41] Ian: [00:25:41] Australia wide? And, um, we look after, at the moment, just under a thousand pieces, we pay it threats, right? Uh, we would probably four or 5,000 people, uh, but they do come and go.[00:25:57] Um, but at the moment, [00:26:00] and that's in every state. So we pay them on behalf of their employees. Yeah. I won't go into the boring, you know, uh, uh, legislative sort of the hospital. It's important. It is important that they know their employees. You know, we hide them on behalf of their employers and we, we quite often have such a Christ relationship with them.[00:26:22] Talk with them on the phone. Rather than just send them an email. First thing is talk and you're talking, I don't understand that Bradley family, everything else. And wouldn't, I've got problems like, you know, heaven forbid that we've had issues where it will have, uh, lost a partner. And they're suffering financial stress and they don't ask for their employer for some help.[00:26:44] And we might just give them a couple of weeks worth of an advance. And so kind of look after yourself and then come back to us when you've come back to work and people like that. When those types of things happen, they stay with you. And they [00:27:00] value the fact that they might pay a little bit more for the service, but they have continuity of financial support.[00:27:07] Doesn't matter where they work. So we essentially act as a hub for them. And that might work for a site people for six months. Um, they might work for packs at another one of practices, clients, but timely is always paying them. Um, it's uh, so I want to go to one of my entire, in the same person that provides them with tech support for the year, then outsourced tax agent provides them that support, and we've had people using, using new services, even college.[00:27:42] And so there was a source since 2006. [00:27:45] Germaine: [00:27:45] That's that's amazing. So, um, you, you almost become, again like this, this friend for these people that adds a layer of, um, cause cause being a contract, I would imagine I've never been one, but you do [00:28:00] jump from six month contract to six month contract, a three month contract, and then there's you, you just become almost, um, this, this asset that comes in does what they need to do and then leaves that, that would.[00:28:13] Obviously make it difficult to build ongoing work relationships with people because you're just jumping from place to place. So you guys sort of adding that layer of, um, at the moment, as far as their pay is concerned and their tax and all that side of things. There's this regular contract. Who's. Um, and it sounds like you, you could almost, it's almost in your interest to continue to serve them rather than necessarily serving the, the employers so to speak.[00:28:40] So you can build [00:28:41] Ian: [00:28:41] this up. Cool. We try to focus on both. [00:28:45] Germaine: [00:28:45] Yeah, of course we really do, [00:28:47] Ian: [00:28:47] but you know, we have four core values. The first one is general. Contractors are our priority. Um, and then everybody is important, which includes their own employer, the [00:29:00] recruitment company, uh, actions speak louder than words.[00:29:04] So getting in there and personally helping women and growth through innovation, there are four core values. Keep it simple. And, um, and through that, um, certainly I think over the years is we've got more regulated in the Australian workplace environment. Oh, I've been mentor the industry, barristers employment, barristers, and I'm one of those people that really enjoys employment more and a, and contract law.[00:29:32] So it's very easy for someone that works in the contracting field to actually not know who their employer is to suddenly. They don't have work worker's comp insurance, for example, you'd think that wouldn't happen, but it does happen. So I tend to put myself out there, which can be a risk sometimes. Uh, but I, I let people know, uh, in my opinion, from alignment.[00:29:57] What is the appropriate way to go? [00:30:00] Personally, we started the Australian contractor community, which I don't think I've, I think he would know about this shit, but, um, if something was started just before, um, or just after cut of it, uh, just to let people know, have a central central location for where contractors can come and get.[00:30:17] Lyman advice on, um, uh, what is a country? What's, what's your employment status? What should your contract size? Should you have, are you an independent contractor or are you an employee boring stuff? Why not? But it's not boring when it doesn't work. All of a sudden when you're in low course, you need to know what's going on.[00:30:38] So, you know, I have that there, and it's a website which is Australian contractors. Uh, It's about 90% complete and it's also helping wherever we can find roles from, from some of our recruitment companies that we participate with. We're just about to stop putting them out there because, [00:31:00] uh, people are advertising roles much quicker and bypassing bypass is the wrong word, finding new ways to employ people, given that they've got reduced number reduced numbers of people at work.[00:31:13] So we're trying to help those employers, employees, anyone. Sounds like, wait. Yeah. I mean, I forget. It sounds like [00:31:23] Germaine: [00:31:23] you've almost got this theme of just, um, and you know, I, I guess I preface this with the fact that I think business exists to help him well, but it sounds like all your businesses are really there to help people and sort of genuinely help people, not in the way that, you know, Apple, for example, or.[00:31:39] Or an HP would believe that they're helping people by selling them the latest laptop for $3,000, or it may be, but I'm adding actual help, right. Necessarily yet, you know, showing you the latest, shiny object and, and selling it to you now. You've been in business for 15 years, um, across [00:32:00] four businesses, I'm sure it's, you know, 60 years worth of business knowledge that you've, you've managed to develop.[00:32:06] Um, what are the, what are some of the things that stand out to you as sort of mistakes or things that, uh, you wouldn't. Do again, or you'd give someone younger as a heads up, watch out for these things. Anything come to mind, [00:32:20] Ian: [00:32:20] what are the, what are the things that, um, what are the typical mistakes you can make or things that you wouldn't want to do again?[00:32:26] Huh? That's a good question. I think, um, I think the first one would be, uh, sharing that, you know, something, getting advice off of friends, uh, and thinking that it's factual. I think that that's important because you can even go to say a subject matter expert. And they'll give you the wrong advice. So I find having a three security degree examination of something is just so, just so important.[00:32:52] So I think that's the first aspect. Second aspect of doing business is [00:33:00] recognizing that you're going to fail sometimes. Uh, uh, not, not slitting your wrists when you do you just say, okay. Yeah, I've been kind of just invested, you know, X amount of time dollars and you're going to fly. I figure I'll give you a good example.[00:33:17] First I have a sales company. I support was an oil and gas company and providing them with payroll support. We grew them from now on in Australia. Two, um, I think 200, 214 or so 15 people throughout Australia and the world and gas industry and another 250 in Papa, new Guinea. And because we, well, you were bad before Diana died.[00:33:40] I worked at, in it anyway. We found that they couldn't work to the same boat because I didn't have employees that managed their contractors in the same way that we do so that when we needed to have, say, for example, a I time sheet and a, and an invoice to pirate on Tuesday. Oh, I didn't really write about that too much.[00:33:58] So I get to [00:34:00] the invoice to us on Wednesday. Well, when you move $4 million, I wait to pilot's people of magically appear between one bank account. Yeah. And the frustration that was caused, uh, in totally with us was so large, that idea that we really had to support people that were foreign foreign AI companies.[00:34:25] We're in Brooklyn, Australia, $23 million contract. One time we went from, I would just discuss again. And we said, Hey, wouldn't it be better if we just turned it off? So we did. The lesson we learned from that course, we put so much stress and we couldn't deliver on our brand promises of waking up a guaranteed payday on Friday because the people we were helping couldn't get us to the money and couldn't get us to Tom shirts so that we're leading them in the right time.[00:34:52] So yeah, picking the right people, you know, not knowing that you knowing that you will make mistakes and had to get over it. Is is [00:35:00] just as important as well. And, um, and I think, um, it would be one other thing I would say. And, uh, and that is. Um, being aware of the hall environment that you're working. It's just so easy to think of something and a little tiny, you know, you exist in the school little eco system, but you actually exist in a really, really big one.[00:35:22] And I guess the, the, uh, the outcome from that from me, We started with a small payroll company. We then we'll put our own leasing company in. Plus we acquired quite a recruitment company and it gave us that stability, uh, because you never quite know when legislation's going to change. So you don't think about legislation when you start business, what can happen, payroll tax, all the, all those types of things, how payroll tax impacts on you as you, as you move into different States and territories.[00:35:52] So, um, yeah, uh, looking at that holiday guy system, Miranda, the business that he got assisting and understanding it and [00:36:00] watching it very important. [00:36:02] Germaine: [00:36:02] I think some really good points there. I mean, talking about just the ecosystem story it's are the, or the, the, the a point there is that, um, it works both ways as well.[00:36:12] Sometimes I think people can get too, too held up on what is really in the grand scheme of things, a small problem, or a problem that. No one else actually thinks is as big a deal. Um, and quite the opposite as well. We can get so sort of, uh, lost in a, in, in your own world that you don't, you don't see what's happening around you and what's changing around you because, um, in business, um, you you've got legislation.[00:36:38] That's just one thing, you know, you've got your competitors, um, who are always looking to not necessarily beat you, but, um, at least a win, win more. Then they lose. So, um, yes, they're not sort of coming after you, but it's important to keep sort of that, that, um, sort of eye on everything that's going on now, speaking of competitors, do you, do you [00:37:00] guys have, um, sort of some, some clear competitors in the market or, um, and how do you, how do you handle that [00:37:07] Ian: [00:37:07] Australia?[00:37:08] Um, and when you actually good point, you made earlier on, you know, we are not, you know, the largest payroll company in Australia, Uh, um, because we don't employ anyone other than the, the, I don't know, on people within, within payment is let's just talk about paying money. I only employ my team in payment, everyone we pay, we don't employ every other payroll company in Australia.[00:37:31] They do that, but they also have a contract with say the government to supply labor and workforce. And therefore they're not a payroll company anymore. They're actually under the under, um, the various state legislation. They actually are in a light behind supplier. And that contradicts with the fact that you're providing.[00:37:50] Probably probably the people that they have been people in this business in the past, which undermine that relationship with the recruitment company and taken the part, the taken the, the [00:38:00] contractor or Y um, and themselves, which is not entirely full of, it's not stopped for integrity. It lacks, integrity so much.[00:38:09] So. No, I've actually just gone off. I've actually gone off on a tangent there for a second. Just the question [00:38:16] Germaine: [00:38:16] that's all right. Um, so we were talking about competitors and [00:38:20] Ian: [00:38:20] sort of, yeah, so I keep a fair on my competitors as to how they operate for anyone that's watched top gun, actually. Here's a good one.[00:38:30] Yeah. Yeah, you might've heard there's a, there's this we're getting inside the enemies decision cycle where you observe how they operate. Certainly it was explained well, and top gun, but, or something, something I learned in the military observe how they operate. You orient yourself to, to acting a different way, decide how you're going to act to the threat.[00:38:54] And then you, you, you, you act in a way that's faster. Then you can pay [00:39:00] this and then you do that faster and faster and faster and faster. Um, and that's a practice that we get into again, we're actually is we actually have a section called, we call it intelligence, um, competitors, competitors, intelligence, where we, we bring it up and we say, what are the competitors doing so that we can act, um, and not necessarily.[00:39:24] Um, put them out of business or anything, uh, but hit of them. Cause I don't like the term putting people out of business. [00:39:33] Germaine: [00:39:33] No, I mean, that's what your goal, it's not to, it's not to take something away from them. It's just to reinforce what you've got. I think that, you know, Um, it's it's, it doesn't have to, you know, they don't have to be the same thing.[00:39:46] You don't have to attack someone to, to beat them. Um, you don't even have to beat someone to be better and grow. Um, it's just about having that loop and, and, um, that's another definite benefit of that hotline because I think what [00:40:00] you're doing there is really, um, Thinking faster by meeting every day. Yay.[00:40:05] Um, where everyone else meets weekly or, or even quarterly what you're doing out, meeting them. And therefore, I would think you've got 28 people coming in with what they've heard, what they've, what they've been told, what their friends and family have come up with to getting almost, you know, um, hundreds of ideas.[00:40:25] On a daily basis or the potential for rather than every quarter. Um, I mean, I don't know about you, but, um, generally I'm so busy that I forget what I even had for breakfast yesterday. Let alone ideas to, you know, to mention to someone that at all, you know, XYZ is coming up with this thing. But when it's been done on a daily basis, You only need to remember it for 24 hours or it can be as simple as, Oh, did you see that TV ad for this company, um, where you wouldn't mention a TV ad in a quarterly meeting because it's a quarterly meeting, you've got much bigger things to talk about it.[00:40:59] It's probably a, [00:41:00] a full day event. So Hey, I think, I think you've got me converted and I think, uh, not, not that I was against it, but I think I'm going to talk to the team and sort of suggest that we meet for 10, 15 minutes every day. And. It probably even helps sort of at an individual level to come up with your, to do list.[00:41:15] Cause, cause yeah, otherwise they just end up working on just pointless names. I think you're [00:41:20] Ian: [00:41:20] spot on. And in fact, what we find is that if, if Maria and I don't get to work on time, uh, or if we get distracted, The team were already lined up in the, in the, in the board room, standing up ready to huddle. They just simply can't go without it.[00:41:34] It's something I look forward to every day. It's that exchange of information, ideas. And then, you know, we carry that on to having lunch with them every day. We all sit down where we can have a break and we break bread. I have lunch with them. And then on Fridays, when I started, you're usually a low, low pressure die.[00:41:53] We actually have a good team lunch and do some lessons, some professional development. And funnily enough, [00:42:00] yeah, I read the Cambridge, get to get the quizzes out of the camera Thompson and run through those. So we have a great laugh. [00:42:07] Germaine: [00:42:07] Yeah. Yeah. That is, that is, that is really amazing. And it just sort of brings in that, that family sort of vibe, um, it's almost like, um, you know, going up, I remember we used to do the, um, puzzles and all that stuff in, in the, in the newspaper and that's sort of something you do on a Sunday, and you're sort of bringing that to work on a, on a Friday, which is.[00:42:28] Which is awesome. And it's a nice sort of positive way to even get into your weekend so that your weekends, not, not so much de-stressing and, and getting prepped for another, another hard week at work. It's it's, um, you've got into that sort of nicer sort of mindset and moving into the weekend. Um, tell me a little bit about what you guys hope to do, do moving forward.[00:42:50] Um, Is it, is it sort of, um, business as usual, or are you hoping to do some, some, um, different, exciting things moving forward across the different companies? [00:43:01] [00:43:00] Ian: [00:43:01] We're, we're, we're planning on expanding and growing. Put the payroll company is solid for a moment. The payroll company's going very well. We have so much business.[00:43:12] We're actually slowing it down, coming in. And what we don't want to do is we don't want to over promise. And under deliver. So a car leasing business, uh, it's focused on Canberra at the moment. We're very lucky in Canberra where we've still got a good percentage of jobs of good hype. Anyone on any salary can benefit from having a college?[00:43:39] Uh, there's two ways to run a car the normal way, which is the most expensive. For most people like, you know, right. At least we'll be able to have a much more cost effective way to run a company. So we're going to be focusing on that. And of course our recruitment company, without in any way, addressing the people that are in pain, we're looking at.[00:44:00] [00:44:00] Uh, supporting other, other contractors and doing it and doing it in a while. I think this is really important doing that is legislative and legally, correct? So that the individual knows that they are our employee for short term period. Which finishes at the end of every, every, uh, engagement. I know that they're employed and they have that regular contact with us and regular PI and they looked after.[00:44:31] So I'm not saying that doesn't exist in the rest of Australia, but if you get around Australia cipher with a recruitment company and ask recruiters, who is the employer of contractors, you'll get an interview. You'll get an answer from everyone except me. We're not the employment. Um, the payroll usually employer.[00:44:49] Uh, but really if you control somebody you're higher and farther, you're the employer. [00:44:56] Germaine: [00:44:56] Yeah. Yeah. So especially in Australia with the, with the legislation in [00:45:00] place, you don't have to call yourself an employer to be the employer in the eyes of the law. Um, you can, you can give yourself whatever terminology you want.[00:45:08] I mean, even in a lot of cases, I think I've heard of a lot of contractors who are actually employees. If you look at the government, sort of the legislator definitions around it, just because you pay them, you know, for. Uh, in a different structure to, to what, what you would an employee, you for all intents and purposes, they're an employee.[00:45:30] You were just, um, illegally paying them as a contractor cause there's a benefit better for you. [00:45:34] Ian: [00:45:34] Exactly. And you know, we won't do business with people that want to say to a worker, go and create your own propriety limited company. And then we'll employ you. That that is contrary to the fair work act. And I'll tell people that and I can choose to believe it.[00:45:54] And then act within the war or if they don't believe it, got it. Someone else or that came, but I'm [00:46:00] not getting involved in something that's contrary to the law and puts that worker at risk. Um, so yeah, we're that philosophy is something that we're putting in across Australia, simple philosophy and it's just integrity.[00:46:14] And so we've got some ideas to expand, um, effective people and where they are business case. We're investigating those in the last week of this month with our key, our key leadership time, and also considering a couple of acquisitions, as you know, unfortunately it's a good time for acquisitions because it's not, not a good time for many businesses, but I think acquisition can help people keep jobs and can help delivering those services to people that would lose them.[00:46:40] If those companies went under. So w we see it as a good opportunity to do something, something more continue to help the community. And for us[00:46:51] is on the veteran community. Really functioning on the unique skills that veterans bring to Australia [00:47:00] to the workplace, I should say, and understanding how the older victim like me is quite comfortably looked after through veterans affairs. And the younger veteran is very, very frustrated. I'm not, I'm not getting through to.[00:47:15] To veterans affairs and another locations. And it's not, Nope, not through lack of trying, but I'm trying to identify why that communication isn't occurring without upsetting anybody. Uh, you know, it's just a teamwork thing. So, so they're, they're things we're putting out in our corporate social responsibility into, into, um, assisting veterans, having employment.[00:47:37] A understanding of it. I moved from the, from the uniform job into a SIDA, a contract role, and lightly one of their lighter initiative within the system was security clearances. So long as we've got a job for them to go to, we can assist them with security clearances, which in the past were quite hard. So yeah, no, it was what are your plan?[00:47:58] And, um, we've achieved [00:48:00] their five year plan every year that we've, since we first did it, which I think was about 2009. [00:48:06] Germaine: [00:48:06] That's that's awesome. I think, I think again, it's thanks for having a plan to help and assist with knowing where you want to go and where you're heading as well. I think having that, that plan always helps.[00:48:17] And I'm just touching on your point about the acquisitions as well. I think, um, rather than. You know, given that given the current climate for better or worse one, you can help a company that would otherwise go bust and then everyone else involved would, would suffer. But, um, also from, from the other point of view, you can acquire the Goodwill, the branding, the marketing, and the efforts that someone else has already put in, rather than going out there and having to expend a lot of energy and money, um, to.[00:48:47] True. You know, what is really a gamble to see if you live in, get, get to that same position that as someone has. So, um, um, I think a lot of people look at acquisitions as sort of this negative thing or, um, sort [00:49:00] of this, I don't even know, like, like a whale, just eating up the smaller fry, but. You've gotta look at it in the opposite as well.[00:49:07] Um, I've heard of people who, who are not in a space at all, who don't even have a business who just acquire a business because they've got the financial resources to, and get into business that way and then grow the business from there. So, yeah, that's really exciting for me. Yeah. [00:49:22] Ian: [00:49:22] Not something I went and looked, we manage it all centrally from here in Brisbane.[00:49:27] Because these days, and I think this is how we kind of, it, we didn't miss a beat. I think the only thing, the ball I was for wireless modems to, to help some people that didn't have enough bandwidth at the home, uh, our infrastructure was it's already in place to support remote operations. Yeah. Business continuity plan.[00:49:48] They did it. I've met people in Brisbane, the Brisbane river floods. So we've gotta be able to work at home people in Canberra. It's just the building burnt down. We'd have to offer right externally from home. So we've [00:50:00] always had that there and we've used it by the way and for, for real, with practices. So it worked well, and it also helps with acquisitions and expansions because you just bolt it on, continues to grow.[00:50:12] Germaine: [00:50:12] Yeah. Yeah. Fantastic. Where can people find out more about you? And, um,[00:50:19] Ian: [00:50:19] I wave, so I play my group. It's just a very high level summary of the three companies, the three main companies. And it takes you, it takes you through to the websites. And of course likely I really can't get past that. The writing. The raw addict, uh, he, the stories about, you know, successes and failures and, and you can identify[00:50:40] just by going with a robotic and you'll be able to identify the personalities cause they, they, they fight and a little bit about them. A little bit about us. [00:50:49] Germaine: [00:50:49] Awesome. Amazing. Um, are you ready to roll? [00:50:53] Ian: [00:50:53] Okay. Yeah. [00:50:55] Germaine: [00:50:55] Awesome. Let's get into it. Um, so the top three books or podcasts that you [00:51:00] recommend[00:51:03] Ian: [00:51:03] I am, and I think the most important one to me is a, is a fiber it's called the five dysfunctions of a team. The second one is leadership in action by a general John Campbell. And the third one is actually the Rockefeller habit. So we've spoken about to die. Um, uh, certainly recommend reading the Rockefeller habits, but also attending a seminar that's put on by a trainer.[00:51:35] Who's the book itself. So that will dry. Uh, and you don't get some of the excitement that I enjoy out of it, but there are the three books. I regularly revisit [00:51:44] Germaine: [00:51:44] also, um, top three software tools that you can. [00:51:47] Ian: [00:51:47] I think the top three tools for me, firstly, a Microsoft office three, six, five, and SharePoint. It's the, no matter where you are in the world, you can get access and get access securely and [00:52:00] you can use it internally within the company.[00:52:04] Uh, the internet. Which is for those that don't know about intranet. So it's just a, a central place to, uh, to go, to, to define it. Um, the key pieces of information, the knowledge base that occurs within the company. So you don't have to find it. And all of the places that are usually hidden in a business and thirdly, as a strategic planning tool, Uh, you know, I look back on that every day, where was I supposed to go?[00:52:33] How am I getting towards it? There's three pieces of software that I can't do it. [00:52:37] Germaine: [00:52:37] What tool is that? Is that, is that a, um, tool that you guys have developed or is that an external sort of software that you've [00:52:45] Ian: [00:52:45] again?[00:52:51] Um, it's actually a company that works with the person that came up with the Rockefeller habits. [00:53:00] Um, so I can start the day every day. Well, by looking at, um, Uh, an electronic version of a huddle, uh, prepare the wait, uh, was the electronic recording. Um, but people said last week that have a guy into a chain so we can hold each other accountable in the long run are.[00:53:27] I wonder have core values in perpetuity. [00:53:33] Germaine: [00:53:33] Amazing. I didn't know such a thing existed, but um, sounds like a handy tool. Um, the top three mantras, you try and leave [00:53:40] Ian: [00:53:40] them. Increasingly people do business with people they trust. You've got to have fun doing business. If you go somewhere and see someone, uh, nothing in your hand, nothing in your head is a phrase we use.[00:53:54] And so you're always taking that book. And when you go and see someone otherwise, you're, you're not showing that [00:54:00] you've got an interest in what they're doing. And the last one is the fundamental thing to everything that we do within PayMe group unquestionable, integrity, [00:54:06] Germaine: [00:54:06] love it, love it. Um, and the last one, top three people you follow or study.[00:54:11] Ian: [00:54:11] And so I guess I'm a little bit old school. I like to look at what people have done and learn some lessons from them. So, uh, uh, I look at weary download. From from world war two and he passed away in perhaps the early two thousands. I can't recall now, but his characteristics, that's the interface for them and friendly, uh, something, uh, how near and dear the[00:54:38] He did a guy at each child was to help him play, uh, after the war second world war. Likewise. Um, major general, uh, Pompey, Elliot, who many people were in first off today. But if you were alive in world war II, you unquestionably will the open more ANZIC, uh, uh, Memorial, some than [00:55:00] anybody else ever has sadly passed away, uh, for what's now and as posttraumatic stress disorder, sometime after world war one.[00:55:07] Um, when he was practicing his troop, these other professional, which was a lawyer, uh, but the, the, the, the stresses of losing people during the war, uh, and other things got to him and likewise, um, uh, John camp, uh, I did my initial training with. In the army. Uh, and he, he grew from being a private soldier, uh, to being the best of my knowledge.[00:55:32] Anyway, the only person promoted on the battlefield to mind in general, since world war two, uh, he was promoted to general. Um, Uh, in, uh, some of the recent campaigns and then came back to buddy Chase's army, but he was suffering bad posttraumatic stress disorder, and couldn't, uh, take up that role and he's near and I'm over in the army, of course, but he wrote, um, leadership and action and the, uh, the concepts and [00:56:00] ideas.[00:56:00] And that book don't just apply to military. They apply to anybody. And I think that that sums up him because a normal fellow, not someone that you'd always characterize as purely male. [00:56:13] Germaine: [00:56:13] Awesome. Well, that was a very solid top 12 at UN. Um, and thanks for your time and thanks for coming on [00:56:20] Ian: [00:56:20] places in your mind.[00:56:21] It's really been great on our Saturday. I enjoyed it. [00:56:23] Outro: [00:56:23] Thank you for listening to the future tribe podcast. If you enjoyed this episode, please subscribe and leave a review on your podcast.
Content Warning: Brief mention of sexual assault. So, Jimbles wanted to hang out with some friends. Jimbles invited some friends around. We ate some dinner, we watched some dumb videos, we played card games. Then, as we all got too tired to keep watching shit on YouTube, Jimbles knew the PERFECT thing to revitalize our evening (very early morning, at this point). A drunken rambling podcast episode. I present to you, my friends: Ian (No twitter) Eliza @Birdventures Dev @DeksDM James @Wyrmwoods and newcomer Jade. We hang. You're invited. We discuss: Hbomberguy: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UClt01z1wHHT7c5lKcU8pxRQ Breadtube: https://www.reddit.com/r/BreadTube/ Zoe Blade: http://www.zoeblade.com/ Anime vines (Wait, did we? I don't remember this. BTW: Vodka Cranberries are great.): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KDVZsQjdnlc Ship of Theseus: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ship_of_Theseus Eclipse Phase: https://www.eclipsephase.com/homepage Soma: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soma_(video_game) Cracked's: So You're Locked In a Room With Your Clone: Fight or Fuck?: https://www.cracked.com/blog/human-clones-do-you-fk-or-fight/ Star Trek: Discovery: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_Trek:_Discovery Facebook: www.facebook.com/ProfessorJimblesDiceBag/ Professor Jimbles' Dice Bag is a hobbyist podcast - We create episodes for fun! Please rate and subscribe on iTunes in your favourite app, and tweet your favourite parts to @Prof_Jimbles on Twitter. If you think anyone would enjoy listening to us, send them a link! If you think we're idiots, tell us so with a 5-star review in iTunes, I promise I'll read them and be sad. Finally, you can always contact Jimbles and the crew on the facebook page: www.facebook.com/ProfessorJimblesDiceBag/ or at ProfessorJimblesDiceBag@gmail.com
Summary:Ian Crosby, co-founder and CEO of Bench Accounting gives an overview of his accounting company and how it takes care of its customers. Bench helps entrepreneurs with their bookkeeping needs by making it simple, affordable, and easy. Crosby discusses the innovative approach of Bench, gives advice to entrepreneurs, and talks about wanting to help people with their accounting needs.Show Notes:● 0:25 - Ian Crosby is the co-founder and CEO of Bench Accounting, an accounting company that fully handles entrepreneurs’ accounting needs.● 1:10 - How Bench Accounting was founded● 2:42 - Services Bench Accounting offers● 4:37 - How Bench Accounting is helpful for entrepreneurs● 5:30 - Why the Bench mission and messaging is different than those of other companies● 8:05 - Why Bench accounting focuses on bookkeeping and considers it the foundational piece of accounting● 10:20 - Provides confidence and reliability that there are no mistakes in the books● 12:05 - The Checklist Manifesto,a book about emergency checklists and how Bench accounting uses it● 13:44 - The advantages of charging a fixed price● 16:05 - Manual versus automated bookkeeping - which is better?● 20:00 - Why the government shut-down was a big problem● 20:45 - The biggest challenges to starting and running an innovative company● 22:09 - Why Crosby avoids surface-level efficiency● 23:30 - Crosby’s motivations - solving problems and making a contribution to society3 Key Points:1. Bench Accounting takes full responsibility for entrepreneurs’’ bookkeeping needs.2. Companies need to find the balance between manual and automated bookkeeping.3. Bench is focused on helping people solve their accounting problems.Tweetable Quotes:- “There must be a different way to do business. We must be able to create theseinstitutions that really make a difference in people’s lives.” - Ian- “No one's really taking responsibility on a massive scale that it’s done right.” - Ian- “No one has gone out and built with the kind of philosophy that we have.” - IanResources Mentioned:● bench.co● The Checklist Manifesto by Atul Gawande See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.
Guys, honestly, it’s almost 10pm, and I’ve been up since like 5am and I’m pretty tired so I’m not going to dedicate too much time to writing this description. So, generally speaking, this episode sounds like this: Ian: Subscribe and rate our podcast! Kelsey: it’s ya boi, Kelsey! Ian: -eye roll- Kelsey: Do you want to go first? Ian: You go. Kelsey: No you. Ian: No, you. Kelsey: I always go first. Ian: Fine. -funny story- Kelsey: -laughter- Ian: -tongue click sounds- Kelsey: -funny story- Ian: -laughter that’s too loud for our iPhone recording- Cat: meow AD BREAK Kelsey: -next funny story- Ian: We’ve been doing this for like 45 minutes, should we stop? Kelsey: Keep going, we’re fine. Ian: -less funny story because he’s obviously getting a little tired. Yeah, he’s doing that thing where you can tell he’s trying to be funny, which he is being funny, but like, in a way where it feels a little forced- Kelsey: Thanks for listening! Ian: Subscribe and rate our podcast! Cat: Meow again. Follow Ian on Instagram: ianblevine Follow Kelsey on Instagram: kelseykraz www.waytpodcast.com All Music by Ian Holiday (Instagram: enholiday) Recorded August 20th, 2018
Ian Hamilton's feisty heroine Ava Lee tracks down white collar fraud and retrieves ill gotten gains with an ancient and deadly form of martial arts. Think Jackie Chan meets Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. And if the going gets a little rough sometimes, well Ava and her mentor Uncle like to think of themselves as the guardian angels of investors, restoring lives. Six things you'll learn from this Joys of Binge Reading episode: How the prospect of dying got Ian writing Why the process of writing is 'magical' for him Ava Lee as guardian angel The one thing that's most contributed to Ian's success The crime writer at the top of his binge read list And how Ava's mentor -'Triad Uncle" - got his own series Where to find Ian Hamilton: Ian can be found at his website: http://ianhamiltonbooks.com/ On Facebook https://www.facebook.com/avaleenovels/ And on Twitter: https://twitter.com/avaleebooks For more details, a full transcript follows: Note - this is a "close as" rendering of our full conversation with links to key points. (Not word for word) Jenny: Hello there, I'm your host Jenny Wheeler and today Ian is going to tell us how he made a Chinese Canadian forensic accountant so sexy - yup - so sexy - that all eleven books in the Ave Lee series have been optioned for TV or movies. Hello there Ian and welcome to the show. It's great to have you with us. Ian: Thank you Jenny I am very pleased to be with you. Jenny: Ian you've said you've had “40 years between books.” You wrote a very successful history book in the late 60's that became a Book of the Month selection it was popular - and then business and government jobs intervened for forty years 2011 when you got the idea for Ava Lee and wrote four books in eight months. Have I got that right? Ian: That's true! 'Story teller' Ian Hamilton Jenny: So what was the "Once Upon a Time” moment that got you started on Ava's story? Ian: The "Once upon a time moment" was the prospect of death. I actually thought of Ava Lee in summer of 2009 and I was still running a business. It was very stressful at the time, there was a lot of money involved, and I was probably drinking too much. My wife sent me off to the doctor. She said 'Your liver has got to be shot." And my liver was perfect, but they found I had an aneurism. I ended up in one of the big old hospitals in Toronto for eight hours of surgery. As I was being rolled back to the ward after surgery the orderly said to me "You room is in an old wing of the hospital. If you see any nuns, don't talk to them." And I said "Why wouldn't I talk to a nun?" and he said "Because they are dead, and they only come to talk to you if they think you are going to die." So here I was, its the middle of the night heavily medicated I drugged up to the eyeballs, hearing noises, seeing shadows, and I was actually really terrified. And I lay there thinking I am going to die, and I'm going to die having not done a lot of the things I want to have done - and one of those was writing a book - or trying to write a book I should say. So on my second day out I sold the shares in my business, and on the third day out I started writing a book. Jenny: Wow. When you say write a book you obviously had already written a very successful non fiction book, so you're talking here about fiction? Ian: Fiction right, and I loved the crime mystery thriller genre but I had no clue what I was doing. No clue. When I started writing I had the name Ava Lee, which came to me from nowhere, and one sentence. No plot, I didn't do an outline. Ava Lee - Ian Hamilton series Jenny: Amazing. Just back tracking for a moment . . you didn't see any nuns? Ian: No! but when my wife came to visit me that evening she walked in through the door and she remembers said as she came through the door, I was yelling at her "Keep the nuns away, keep the nuns away." Jenny: You were obviously still sedated at that time.
New post from The eCommerceFuel Blog: Wondering what it's like to sell your business? Or how much you can actually make through passive investments? Both are more complex than you might think, and it pays to hear from someone who knows both. Ian Schoen of TropicalMBA.com and the Dynamite Circle answers questions about recently selling his own small business, the idea that passive investments can build substantial wealth, and building entrepreneurship communities. Subscribe: iTunes | Stitcher (With your host Andrew Youderian of eCommerceFuel.com and Ian Schoen of TropicalMBA.com) Andrew: Hey guys, Andrew here, and welcome to the eCommerce Fuel Podcast. Thanks so much for tuning in. Today on the show, I’m joined by Ian Schoen from the TropicalMBA blog and podcast. He’s also one of the men behind the Dynamite Circle, which is a private community for location-independent entrepreneurs. I really always enjoy talking with Ian, and our conversation today covers a lot of different topics. We talk about his recent business sale, we talk about how to invest money. Both of those topics are a couple of episodes that I really enjoyed from his podcast recently, and we can get into those. And then finally, we talk about running private communities. We both run private communities for entrepreneurs and talk about some of the challenges, some of the things we really enjoy, get a little bit inside baseball on that. It’s not eCommerce specific per se, but if you're in the community or it’s something you’re interested in, hopefully it’s something that you enjoy. Ian, you and your partner Dan recently sold the business, congratulations sir! Ian: Thank you. Yeah. Andrew: Are you sick of talking about it yet? Ian: No, I’m not, I’m not actually. Andrew: What caused you guys to sell? Ian: Oh man. Well, I think essentially what happened was we started the business in 2008 – at the time I think I was about twenty-five, twenty-six years old, and you know that was a long time ago. I feel like I’m a different person than I was then. You know, I felt like I wanted different things out of my business and my life, and we just kind of reached an interesting point. I think one of the feelings, one of the emotions that I had at the time when we decided to sell was that it’s all been like high-fives and good times, essentially. I mean, there was some growing pains and whatnot, but we never missed payroll, there was always plenty of cashflow, it was just really good times. And I thought, "let’s just leave this on a high note, ‘cause I’m not super passionate about the business anymore, and I don’t wanna fake it to my employees anymore that I’m not into this business, so let’s just leave it on a high note." Ian's Insight Into Selling His Business Andrew: And you said you wanted different things out of your life and your business – what specifically were you looking for in terms of change, things that the business wasn’t fulfilling, apart from the passion aspect and selling at the top – which makes a lot of sense – what was that underlying thing you kind of alluded to? Ian: I think just change in general, you know? Like I said, I started the business when I was in like my mid-twenties and quite some time had gone by, so I just wanted to see kind of what other options were out there, you know? I felt like I had conquered that business in a way, or at least the skill set, and for me and I think a lot of small business owners, that’s kind of what you do, right? I mean we were selling like hospitality equipment and although I was passionate about that in the beginning, it became more about the process of doing business. So through the process learned SEO, learned ad words, learned how to manufacture products in China, learned how to build a team of fifteen. So kind of all these things that I wanted to learn in that business I learned; I just didn’t feel like there was much...
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