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Welcome to "Visionary Voices" the podcast where we dive into the minds of business owners, founders, executives, and everyone in between.
Each episode brings you face-to-face with the leading lights of industry and innovation.
Join us as we uncover the stories behind the success and the lessons learned along the way.
Whether you're climbing the corporate ladder or just starting your business journey, these are the conversations you need to hear - packed with visionary voices and insights.
Let's begin.
00:00:00:05 - 00:00:10:24
Aqil
So Colin, welcome to the Visionary Voices podcast. Thank you so much for taking the time to join us on today's episode. Could you give us a top level overview about what it is that you're currently working on and your journey so far?
00:00:11:01 - 00:00:35:02
Colin
Yeah, I appreciate it. So I'm calling Griffin. I'm, founder and CEO of Premier. We just hit our 10th anniversary for the company, which has been an amazing journey. But over the years, building this company has, has really shepherded and facilitated some of our growth and understanding of the evolution of the technology market and how we go and address needs and attack that market.
00:00:35:04 - 00:00:56:22
Colin
So I'm excited to talk to you today a little bit more about that. But in general, my focus, right now is around, prioritization of, methodologies and capabilities. So, what what that means, though, is there's this new wave or maybe it's not so new to some folks, but, a new focus for organizations called platform engineering.
00:00:56:22 - 00:01:17:16
Colin
And that's been a focus of ours for, you know, 7 or 8 years now, at least in what platform engineering, as a term means to us is, developing internal product strategy around how people do their work, what tools they use, how you provide those capabilities to them, but also how you maintain the lifecycle of those capabilities.
00:01:17:16 - 00:01:46:19
Colin
So as the the market changes and evolves, as the needs of your customers change and evolve as the needs of your employees change and evolve. We need to be maintaining an ecosystem of abilities for our employees to go deliver. But where where our focus has been as if we're spending all this time and energy for ourselves to deliver for our customers, how can we actually enable make the transition to shift and enable our customers to leverage those capabilities for themselves?
00:01:46:21 - 00:02:08:11
Colin
While, we can move into more of a, support or a maintenance, role for those capabilities. And so for, for us, it's, it's, doesn't feel like a fundamental change to the way we do business, but it is changing the way that we, approach the market as, system integrators and technology partners and resale partners and, and things there.
00:02:08:11 - 00:02:36:10
Colin
So, I feel like we are doing something new and interesting, and we've laid a lot of groundwork. So my focus is helping communicate these things to the market and create structure, around how we can work with other organizations and companies to better acquire these skills, to acquire these tools and services, and ultimately help their people do more and do things better.
00:02:36:12 - 00:02:56:16
Aqil
Yeah, absolutely. I mean, it all sounds very, very interesting. So I would love to dive into all this as well in this episode. But I also want to go back to the very start. Right? So starting out in the company building up, what are those early days like when you're building up this company? Because I think a lot of times, you know, someone might go from maybe working corporate to and selling a business, and that in itself is a huge shift.
00:02:56:18 - 00:03:05:18
Aqil
And then also the early days of business can be quite brutal as well. So I love to to hear your story on how that was for you and, and how the business was, was growing and.
00:03:05:20 - 00:03:42:03
Colin
Yeah, it sounds good. Yeah. The, the way that the business came about really was, I needed a, I needed a shell for learning. I needed something that, I needed a change from the the job that I was in, the company that I was in, and, really loved the place that I was at. And it taught me a lot, but, it the company had gone through an acquisition and, it had exposed some, some challenges and some, some thoughts that I had had that I really wanted to go chase down that my position at the, the new company, if you will, or not the company now, but the new company
00:03:42:03 - 00:04:02:08
Colin
post-acquisition at my my former job. It wasn't gonna allow me the ability or for me, the ability to go do that. And so I just decided to make a change, and and to just isolate myself and get off, onto the side and, at the same time that change was made again. That was about ten years ago.
00:04:02:10 - 00:04:32:02
Colin
We had we were starting to experiment and play with, like, what's this concept of containers and Docker and things there? And I had come from, a world where we were developing and delivering software that was deployed on premise to customer environments. And in those cases, we had we were maintaining software, which was interacting with hardware and other things that the customer environment that we just didn't have control over.
00:04:32:04 - 00:05:06:00
Colin
And there were challenges related to that, that I, as a software engineer, really was hit hard by, because my job changed from being software development and software engineering to technical support for somebody else's environment and infrastructure, you know, going through and determining and saying, hey, this camera's not working, but it's not us. You know, the burden of proof was on us as the visible software platform that they were using for their situational awareness and, and things like facility maintenance and some other things.
00:05:06:02 - 00:05:27:24
Colin
And so as an engineer, the challenge for that on the technical side was I need a layer to wrap around my software that gives me some control of the infrastructure. It gives me a way to interact with the infrastructure and collaborate with the infrastructure. And how do we provide those tools back. So I had when I started this company, I needed a technical anchor.
00:05:27:24 - 00:06:02:04
Colin
And we were I started out developing some SaaS product, and at that time I just decided to go full bore into Cloud Native, and really test those skill sets. Well, then I had to figure out how am I going to get paid, right. How's that going to work? So we ended up, kind of falling into some services contracts, and the service contracts were for developing cloud native first applications, kind of this new generation of software and doing some, some re architecture and replatforming of existing software as well, just a number of different things.
00:06:02:04 - 00:06:27:07
Colin
And I so I took on the role is to try to bootstrap and in order to still go learn the things I needed to learn, I needed staff. And so I hired some young folks out of university that I believed had the right amount of talent and particular skill sets, but also a fresh, open mind that hadn't been maybe spoiled by particular frameworks or something.
00:06:27:08 - 00:06:44:01
Colin
Universities and professors can sometimes tend to stick people into a framework which is necessary for their learning, but sometimes they come out of school with, you know, lacking an ability to move into a different mindset or a different framework. So just I learned how to to identify the folks that I needed, but then I needed to train them up.
00:06:44:01 - 00:07:12:01
Colin
I needed to set them up for independence. And that started kind of taking us down this thought road of, you know, so what are the needs of these really talented developers, and how can I help mold them into certain frameworks without having to constantly supervise? How can I give them just enough source material that they can have these starter kit so they can have some guardrails around themselves?
00:07:12:03 - 00:07:35:20
Colin
And I didn't really know it at the time, but that was teaching us, really. It was it was teaching me about how to have this product mindset and identify what their needs and capabilities were and almost create user stories for my employees to, fit them in to how we need to develop the software when they've never developed in this.
00:07:35:22 - 00:08:02:01
Colin
With this type of tool before, you know, especially they're 19 and 20, 21 years old. Yeah. And, you know, the after we had started doing that, that bootstrapping one of our contracts, is a way to convince the customer to work with us and take a risk. One thing, we tried to find areas of value that were important to them.
00:08:02:01 - 00:08:26:18
Colin
And one key area was the skill sets and growth of their employees, because they had had folks that were working in C-sharp and that and, you know, some older languages even that they were they were working on the same piece of software for 20 years or longer. And they needed a change. But this company didn't really know how to do that.
00:08:26:18 - 00:08:46:03
Colin
So we said, hey, take a risk on us. We will lay the groundwork and develop as much as we can of this software. It is up to you as the expert in your industry to really take it the last mile. So what we'll do is will onboard your employees into these frameworks as we go through this delivery process.
00:08:46:05 - 00:09:09:14
Colin
And, you know, our folks will teach them how to interact with these frameworks, teach them the new languages, start to assign them bugs and things that are accessible, that they can learn how to change. And we it's something that we can use to get that machine going. And gradually move them. And really, it was just a please don't fire us, type of moment.
00:09:09:14 - 00:09:39:18
Colin
And we said, you know, even if you do fire us, you will have accomplished your goal of of learning, learning something and shaking out of shaking them out of this, this, this technical stack that's become stale. And I didn't expect we got thank you notes in the mail from some folks. We, we had someone thank us, saying that they were going to retire because they were bored, you know, and they the their job was fun again.
00:09:39:18 - 00:09:59:08
Colin
And they were excited about work again. And they were it was because they were learning JavaScript. And like, meanwhile, our developers on the other side of the wall or, you know, we were to use rust, we want to use goes like, which yes, I do too, but. Right, look at how excited somebody is to learn this thing that you don't want to use.
00:09:59:08 - 00:10:25:04
Colin
You know, it was just kind of an interesting moment. And so that turned a light on for me because, you know, there were all kinds of business advantages to that, too. You know, if, if were able to incorporate another company's teams as a part of what we do, then we don't have to pay their payroll, right? So that's an offset and costs for me.
00:10:25:06 - 00:10:45:09
Colin
If if we give them our tools, then we can maintain the tools and we can deliver, broader scale than if we just, you know, do hours and hours out. And so that became interesting. And so, you know, all these sort of concepts started to come up. And when, like, how do we charge for this? How do we figure out how to not do hours and hours out?
00:10:45:15 - 00:11:07:06
Colin
How do we explain to people that we're not we're not consultancy, but we kind of are. But we're kind of services, but we're kind of product, but we're kind of not. And yeah. Yeah. And going to you know, investor meetings. Yeah. We have we have no outside investment at this point, entirely bootstrapped. And that's come with its own challenges.
00:11:07:06 - 00:11:26:16
Colin
But when, you know, going out and doing these meet ups and talking to, you know, people to learn how to fundraise or how to scale or how to grow and what is venture capital and all these things, it was always, if you're a services company, this is how we treat you. If you're a product company, this is how we treat you.
00:11:26:16 - 00:12:04:17
Colin
And it was really difficult to communicate and understand well, can you be both or. Yeah. Are we a product company disguised or what is our identity and it's it took years to figure that out. And I think now we're in a really interesting place where the market is actually seeking this out. And, they're, they're looking for, for offerings like ours to, you know, help their teams, but give them self-service capabilities, but identify technologies that they could use that have broader motivations than just reduction of costs.
00:12:04:17 - 00:12:32:18
Colin
And, how can who's somebody that can interact with multiple track, you know, there's this, this interesting missing piece of the technology delivery market or the service provider market that we're trying to fill now? And so over the past 4 or 5 years, a lot of my work has been educating partners and educating vendors and educating customers, and sometimes through the sales process, sometimes not.
00:12:32:18 - 00:13:03:06
Colin
Some, you know, sometimes it's retroactive. It's. Yeah, but but laying that groundwork and platform engineering has really given us a lot of language to communicate. You know, this type of organization that's really that is a facilitator that does connect to multiple parts of an organization or multiple customers together. And where we like to think that we're doing platform engineering for the IT space in general and not just, you know, doing platform engineering as a service internal to companies.
00:13:03:06 - 00:13:36:11
Colin
But then, you know, that's another education point. So there's there's been a lot of evolution, but we're really excited about where we are today. And we're excited about where the demand, has been pushing us. And we're we're looking forward to a really strong year this year. And we've gotten off to a great start. But that kind of brings me back to the focus as we've spent so much time understanding how to communicate with our customers and how to communicate with the market and how to communicate with our employees and all that.
00:13:36:11 - 00:14:00:18
Colin
Now it's, you know, we're putting all of that together, and it's time to productize and framework and build standards that are consumable outside of our company and not just internally for our employees. And, and, and that's going to be a whole journey in itself. But as we go through that, that's just bringing more and more and more to to bear in the market for us.
00:14:00:18 - 00:14:08:24
Colin
And so, yeah, it feels like we have a product development machine and engine and we're ready to rock and roll. So I'm excited about that. Sorry.
00:14:08:24 - 00:14:29:04
Aqil
That was amazing. No, no, I think I was great. I think it was great. And it's so interesting as well because I think that dilemma of, you know, how you communicate your product services to, to clients is I mean, it's something that we're going into ourselves right now because, for, for context, is like we're a B2B podcast agency, but at the same time we do the code outbound side of as well on the sales generation part by generation.
00:14:29:04 - 00:14:44:16
Aqil
So are we an outreach agency? We're a podcast agency and we're somewhere in the middle. And again, we're trying to communicate best to our clients and customers. Right. And it's it's trying to trying to figure out what's the language that gets to really understand it in a very simple way is what we, you know, we're trying to we're trying to go through it.
00:14:44:16 - 00:14:59:21
Aqil
It sounds like, as you said, you've kind of gone through those years of developing what does that look like? How does that all work not only externally to clients, but also internally to to the staff and the team members and everything like that, I guess. What lessons can you can you pull from that? It's me being a bit selfish there.
00:14:59:21 - 00:15:13:07
Aqil
Like, what lessons can you pull from that development, right, to figure out your communication to, to to make them understand what it is that you do. And in a very clear way, like it's anything you can, you can kind of pull from that and any, any tips you can give when it comes to shaping that, that voice, that same.
00:15:13:09 - 00:15:37:05
Colin
Sure. Yeah, absolutely. One thing that and maybe it's just the way that I've always been, but I've kind of observed as, as we've scaled our business development and, and like, scaled our company in general from a bunch of just all technical people and to everything else. And I do feel that there I the way that we observe how to go to market and everything there is very, very, very technical.
00:15:37:05 - 00:16:08:15
Colin
It's user experience driven, it's all that stuff for me. So maybe we we change things a little differently. But the biggest thing that I've noticed is that people tend to try to to hammer into their, their prospects of their customers, the terminology that they use, or that, that they themselves use and they, they don't wait to listen and understand how the customer does things or how the customer says things or what terminology they use, and then adapt themselves for it.
00:16:08:17 - 00:16:36:19
Colin
Because ultimately the terminology we use, the methodologies we use, there's, there's such a tremendous variety in the market and everyone has their own way of doing things. And so there's a lot of situations you get into where customer will think you are wrong, or you will think that the customer is wrong, or you will try to sell them a solution to something that isn't really a problem because you're misunderstanding what they're trying to say, or vice versa.
00:16:36:21 - 00:17:05:11
Colin
And so what we what we're trying to do is like as a part of our delivery and in extending, you know, our standard part of delivery extends into the pre-sales process, right? We want to identify as early as possible that this customer or this prospect can be a compatible customer of ours. From that point on, you know, understanding what their procurement looks like, understanding everything else, that's integration work.
00:17:05:11 - 00:17:26:10
Colin
That's discovery work. And the earlier we can get them to see that and and get them to compensate us for that discovery process and help them understand how to compensate us and like what value they're going to get from that compensation beyond telling them what they already know themselves, like a consultant, they might think a consultancy would do right.
00:17:26:12 - 00:17:48:21
Colin
Making sure that, you know, our mindset is about really is about integration. It's about understanding the way they do things and how to build a bridge to align their method of speaking and communicating and operating with, you know, the outcomes we're trying to bring them into. And so we need to do more upfront about understanding our customers.
00:17:48:23 - 00:18:21:05
Colin
And a lot of times when people come to us pointing and saying, we want to do things the way that that, you know, they want to do things the way that we do, which is the ultimate goal, right? Then we can deliver all these practices at scale to everybody and share lessons learned and things across customers. But when they, even if they know they want to work with us, we still need to go through and we need to do that process and learn how people work, because the stakeholders, the ones the decision makers, may have an entirely different way.
00:18:21:07 - 00:18:54:01
Colin
They talk about how they do work than the people they're trying to, you know, trying to bring us in to to benefit. And so we need to get boots on the ground as soon as possible, start learning what the challenges are. And ultimately it provides safety in our business development process because there have been countless times where we get we walk down all the trees and then suddenly there's one team, one incumbent to name that everyone's depended upon that says, no, we're not changing the way that we're working.
00:18:54:03 - 00:19:16:03
Colin
And if we haven't done things the right way and listened to everybody, then we have. We won't have the chance to say, actually, we're just trying to learn from you. We're not here to say you are going to change. You know, we want them to be heard. You know, they just get combative and they can that can spoil the whole process.
00:19:16:03 - 00:19:40:08
Colin
And no matter what partner brings you in, no matter how successful, you know, this thing is going to be. But my big lesson there is you just have to be patient and you have to be willing to say, well, I guess this process isn't going to work because it's not worth fighting this one team on. Or maybe we just don't understand each other and that's okay.
00:19:40:08 - 00:20:04:01
Colin
Let's circle back in a year or two as things have evolved over, you know, we have an open door. We're happy to give you some advice along the way. You know, that willingness to to be receptive, I guess, is the biggest lesson that I've taken from that. And if we want to think about payoffs from that to what about like, what better way is there to do market research and understanding your customers than to listen to them?
00:20:04:03 - 00:20:31:15
Colin
Right, even in the pre-sales process? And one thing that I'd say that compounds on that is, you know, when you believe in something as strongly as we do and when you see the outcomes that have been like, so amazing down to the people level that we see, it's it's really hard for somebody. It's really hard for you to see somebody not understand what you're doing.
00:20:31:17 - 00:21:00:15
Colin
Yeah. You know, and and so what we're looking back when we started this model before 2020, right before Covid, we would go to customers and we would see all of the signs. We can visualize the outcomes. We know we can help them kick ass and, you know, you go talk to a CFO or something. We had one guy who said, son, I've been doing contracting for 50 years and I've never paid anybody over $15 an hour.
00:21:00:15 - 00:21:26:07
Colin
It's like, well, then I'm not sure I can help you, you know? Yeah. But yeah, but it hurts your soul because you want to go help these people. And you know what I like to say? Or you know, the term for that. And so I'm trying to find words, but the term for that, it was like we had a solution to a product that, you know, or to a problem that didn't exist yet.
00:21:26:07 - 00:21:45:24
Colin
So we had a solution to a problem that didn't exist yet. And that's not to say that the problem didn't actually exist, but, if if nobody knows what they're looking for, nobody knows how to seek you out. Nobody knows how to integrate and find what you can do, or they don't quite have a word for it, so they don't know how to search for you.
00:21:46:01 - 00:22:07:24
Colin
You know you can't get lost in that. You can't get upset by that. You need to just adapt and understand what are they looking for, and how can you bring them back and reeducate them and and build that bridge to them. So that's yeah, that's those are some of the biggest lessons that we've learned. And it only took ten years.
00:22:08:01 - 00:22:10:00
Colin
Yeah a lifetime in this of the world.
00:22:10:00 - 00:22:30:10
Aqil
Yeah. Yeah. Absolutely. Absolutely. I mean it's interesting as well because but we've been diving quite deep in the last, over the last few months about, you know, what language are our clients are using, and especially with AI as well now as AI tools we can use to figure out, you know, what are those long tail conversations people are having where they ai to figure out the solutions to these problems?
00:22:30:10 - 00:22:52:09
Aqil
Are they having before obviously we had we had like those this was like keyword research, right. You figure out some long tail keywords, etcetera in Google. But now with AI what we're finding is quite interesting is that what are our clients searching for for us. Then show us like the solutions to their problems. And we've actually seen some really big growth in, in that department of people finding us do that way because we're optimizing for those kind of long tail solutions.
00:22:52:09 - 00:23:10:00
Aqil
I say, well, which is which is interesting, and it's only going to become, I think, more and more like as well as I've seen people use AI more and more for search and just general channel, questions and everything. But it is interesting when you start getting into the mind of your, your prospects. Now, how your language starts to change and, and differ over time.
00:23:10:02 - 00:23:30:17
Aqil
And I think the biggest thing for me is because I'm quite a technical person in the sense of, you know, I used quite technical words. I have like the diving deep into the data and everything. And the first couple clients I was speaking to about joining us as a, as a client, I had like this whole presentation on like the ins and outs of code outbound, how we do like email sequencing, warm up pools, all these and and things.
00:23:30:19 - 00:23:48:02
Aqil
And I could tell at the end of it like just they didn't understand what I was saying, essentially what you do or exactly exactly. But yeah, I think to your point, when you start to change your language and it becomes more consistent with the language they use, the naturally, you'll see that that growth comes through, which I think, you know, you guys have cracked the code for as well.
00:23:48:04 - 00:24:00:10
Aqil
Changing is a little bit. So you mentioned about bootstrapping the business over kind of raising funds to, to help fuel the growth. So why did you make that decision to, to bootstrap rather than go down the, the venture capital?
00:24:00:12 - 00:24:27:00
Colin
Honestly, initially it was, more for flexibility. Maybe it's I don't that's not quite the right word, but, if we if we took venture capital early on, then it would have put immediate terms on in how we need to operate and what we're doing and what we're targeting and how we're going to market. And the reality was, we didn't quite know yet.
00:24:27:02 - 00:24:43:09
Colin
If if we weren't already churning, what are we going to use that money for? Yeah. And at the time, you know, that was that was a big personal struggle. You know, family members are like, why don't you just go get a loan? Why don't you take money from somebody? Watch it. It doesn't. It's not that easy.
00:24:43:09 - 00:24:57:01
Colin
It doesn't kind of. It doesn't really work like that. We always got told if it's like if you were going to. We're in the Deep South. So I use the analogy of son, if you were going to, you know, but like if you were going to go buy a tractor, I can give you a loan for that. I know what that is.
00:24:57:01 - 00:25:26:24
Colin
I can't give you a loan for you need to go hire people to write. You know, imaginary lines of words that machines understand. And so really early on, it just turned into okay, so that mentioned those conversations. Do I have a service? Do I have a product? What am I selling? How do I communicate this. And I wouldn't have been able to effectively use that venture capital if it if it came down or I wouldn't have been able to function within the strings that it brought.
00:25:27:01 - 00:25:48:00
Colin
And now that we're at a point where we know what we need to do to scale, and we have a clear line of sight on that, and we have the measurables and the metrics, and we have the track record and all that stuff. You know, now, I think we're in a situation where we can and along the way, like, I think we're prepared really strongly and really well.
00:25:48:00 - 00:26:07:10
Colin
And looking back, I could probably rinse and repeat and do it a lot faster. But, so maybe the next time and the next time, who knows? But right now, you know, we're in a position where we're preparing to be able to do that stuff and ramp up with with whether it's venture capital, whether it's, you know, traditional investment.
00:26:07:10 - 00:26:31:12
Colin
But I'm thinking more of like, I want to open up to ownership for an equity for the employees. I want people to have, you know, feel the responsibility and the weight of, I want to grow this thing and have the, you know, feel that achievement and that satisfaction of helping something grow. And that's my first priority, right?
00:26:31:12 - 00:26:57:18
Colin
Is opening that up and then bringing investment in to amplify. Right. And to help really scale and grow. But, going back to by keeping it 100% ownership has really just been we can restructure now to whatever organizational type we need to in order to make that stuff work. If we had already taken on investment, we wouldn't have that flexibility as strongly to do.
00:26:57:18 - 00:27:04:05
Colin
Yeah. And so I wanted to maintain that flexibility so we could really strike when the time was right.
00:27:04:07 - 00:27:28:24
Aqil
Yeah. I think I think that's such a great decision because, it's interesting. I had, Adam Robinson on my, on my podcast last year, and we're talking about bootstrapping versus raising. And he was saying that pretty much everyone that he knows that have have raised have either been so stressed out their mind because they have to hit these, these quotas, or the business ultimately didn't work out because they're pushing too hard and not focusing on the right things because it's all about the the profit, the revenue only.
00:27:29:01 - 00:27:47:02
Aqil
Whereas when you're bootstrapping, like, yeah, you might not grow as quick, but it's hundred percent yours, you can do whatever you want with it, and you have full control and authority over whatever decision you want to make. So I think it makes a lot of sense, especially if you want to stay, flexible, you know, to 2.2 and yeah, 100%, do shopping way works.
00:27:47:04 - 00:28:01:09
Aqil
Which is hard sometimes if someone kind of waives, hey, we can give you this money here or whatever. You know, sometimes it's it's quite a tempting to to take it. Right. But it's, I guess depending on whatever the roadmap is for the business. And I think that makes the most sense on On Your Side as well.
00:28:01:11 - 00:28:02:15
Aqil
Just really cool to have.
00:28:02:17 - 00:28:33:04
Colin
Yeah. I've, I've appreciated the back pressure. I'm definitely somebody that's, driven by that fear, by the chaos. I'm a back against the wall kind of person. It's probably not good for my mental health, but I'm doing okay. But but I like, like, one of the first things that I did, after starting the company, as I'd been working in my home office, and I just wasn't I didn't have the sense of urgency that I felt like I really wanted.
00:28:33:06 - 00:28:52:12
Colin
I wanted to kind of chase that. I wanted to be busy. Right. And I found a co-working space. And, you know, we still have a strong relationship with that space today, even though we're like a tenant. Right? As opposed to, you know, having desks. But, when I, you know, first went into that room learning, I don't, didn't know what a coworker was.
00:28:52:12 - 00:29:21:09
Colin
I think my brother had recommended it or something. And, when I walked into that room, everybody looked busy and everybody was on the phone, you know, somebody's dog was running around and stuff like that. But that feeling of, you know, wow, these people are really doing work. I wanted that and I needed that. And so I think maybe not having taken the funding now, it's like the opposite side of the pendulum or of the spectrum.
00:29:21:09 - 00:29:42:02
Colin
Right? I've there is somewhere in the middle that we probably could have benefited from this stuff and still had the same feelings, but having our back against the wall and having those points of like low cash balance and all that. And by the way, we've never missed a payroll, but we've been pretty close at times. Right. So I'm extremely proud of that.
00:29:42:04 - 00:30:03:12
Colin
But yeah. Like having that back pressure I think has forced us to really get innovative about, you know, how are we going to get paid? How how do we, you know, this customer's got a different procurement vehicle, and we've been doing six months of pre-sales with them. And they they totally want to work with us, but they don't know how to pay us or we have to go get.
00:30:03:12 - 00:30:24:07
Colin
Yeah, we have to go triple our insurance premiums to get additional digital coverage or whatever. You know, we need for their compliance and all that. Having to to think about that stuff so actively I think has made us a lot stronger. And it's also helped us help our customers understand what to navigate, especially when a lot of our customers are software vendors themselves.
00:30:24:12 - 00:30:30:01
Colin
So helping them understand how to navigate that has been great. Like procurement.
00:30:30:03 - 00:30:49:20
Aqil
Okay. Brilliant. So switching gears a little bit, you know, I want to go into the entrepreneurship journey, which I think is a, you know, a good segue into it, talking about kind of going to the co-working and and getting to that feeling of, of, of working back into the wall and everything. But obviously the journey of entrepreneurship, you know, as you said, you know, getting close to not being able to meet payroll and all the stresses that come with it.
00:30:49:22 - 00:31:04:11
Aqil
It's such an interesting personal development journey, I feel like. And so I guess over the last ten years, what are some of the the key takeaways or lessons that you can pull from, I guess, how you've changed as a person because you've had this business that you're growing and you're running and you're scaling?
00:31:04:13 - 00:31:55:07
Colin
Yeah. I mean, there have been there been a lot of changes. I mean, I, I don't feel like my, my personality or anything has changed significantly. Right. But my, my understanding, of priorities of others versus my own maybe has changed a lot. I've had to work. I don't know if I may be saying I've had to work isn't the right way to say that, but I've worked really, really, really hard, to be intentional about understanding how things like how the company affects others, how it affects the community around me, how it affects my family, how it affects the employees and how it affects their families, how it affects our customers.
00:31:55:07 - 00:32:18:22
Colin
You know, there's a lot that I think about all the time related to that. I'm very much an ex of service kind of person. If you've ever done the love languages thing and all that, and you know, the money side of things to me is it's like a mechanical lever. It's it's something like used to to turn the knobs to fund other things, to fuel things.
00:32:18:22 - 00:32:50:02
Colin
It's something that we can we have to use to achieve these outcomes. It's not all right. Maybe the company could have benefited from having a founder that was more money driven. Right. But my motivation had never been to get rich. It was, how can I build and do more and help more people? And so my understanding of how do I need to change my motivations to say, yeah, it's time to go make a bunch of money isn't to go like buy a Ferrari or something.
00:32:50:02 - 00:33:29:22
Colin
It's to scale up. It's to go help people. It's to be able to get into more customers, to help, you know, like, you know, we don't have all the right answers for everybody. It sounds really self-aggrandizing or something, but like, how do we go put ourselves in a position to help other people? And in order to do that, like if we get more effective in our delivery, if we are able to take lessons from one customer and productize something and help another customer, or put our multiple of our customers in a position to actually build a relationship between them, between each of those customers and facilitate that like we are, we are affecting people
00:33:29:22 - 00:33:55:24
Colin
and changing people. So I've, I've been really, really intentional about understanding, going and understanding what is challenging people. What are somebody's needs? What how are they? How are they feeling inside and outside of work? And how do we help the company become, you know, a facilitator to help improvements there? Right. How do we affect and change people's lives?
00:33:56:01 - 00:34:25:18
Colin
And and that's always on my mind. But then on the the personal side, I've also learned how to be more intentional about myself too, because if I don't take care of myself, then I am not in as strong of a position to help other people. And so how does that work? And then thinking about, like my family, where maybe I should have taken more salary than I do and, you know, how do I support my wife better because of that.
00:34:25:18 - 00:34:55:15
Colin
And, and those are things that I'm I'm very strong. Like, I have a nine month old now. And so it's definitely top of mind now. It's thinking about taking care of family. But the I think one area where I differ from from other people is like broadly, there's this mindset in the industry about how, you know, it's just a job or, you know, the it's the company doesn't care about you or whatever else.
00:34:55:17 - 00:35:25:09
Colin
For me, that doesn't really compute. And maybe it's because, you know, because I founded the company, because it is my company. You know, maybe maybe it's unfair to to say that I don't agree with that, with that other mentality, because I'm in a different position. I totally I, I get that I understand that, but I really do.
00:35:25:11 - 00:36:00:03
Colin
You know, I look at this building, this company as a way to, to help others and represent others and try to be a representation of what, you know, in. So in my area, it's we're we're in a, small part of the southeast. We're in South Carolina and we're in Columbia. And, one of the things here has always been, you know, if if ten year old me was walking around, is there anywhere that ten year old me would want to work?
00:36:00:05 - 00:36:31:16
Colin
And, I mean, it used to be Google back then that's like, yeah, I started coding when I was really young. So you know, Google was like, man, I if I could just work there one day, then I will, I will have made it and it's not really that anymore. And that's unfortunate, but I can't really think of somewhere right now that says, you know, that ten year old me would have said, you know, I'll Google, and so here around us, how can we start to be more present in the community and do more locally, to, to try to create that type of mentality.
00:36:31:16 - 00:36:51:11
Colin
And it's less about we want to look cool, it's more about, you know, how do we create opportunity in this area and how do we help draw some attention to this area and say, yeah, great things are happening here. Yeah. But in order to do that, I've had to learn, yeah, to take care of my family and take care of myself, a little more.
00:36:51:11 - 00:37:12:13
Colin
And it's just changed my understanding of an area where priorities are, I suppose. I don't know, it's it's a it's a hard question to, to answer, but those are those are a lot of the things that have been on my mind. And over the years, I've had to learn more and more and more about how to actually help people and what their needs are and how to build those pipelines.
00:37:12:13 - 00:37:19:18
Colin
And that really has kind of driven the way that we've we've done business at the end of the day. So a lot of evolution alongside that I suppose.
00:37:19:20 - 00:37:44:18
Aqil
Okay. Perfect. No, I love the the analogy of, you know, what would the ten year old me, you know, but why would they want to work? Right? I think that's a really cool lens to, to look through. And it's interesting now especially I think, in the, in the software side of things. And I'd love to get your, your take on if you're seeing this with a lot of the engineers, but it seems like a lot of them have become very entrepreneurial because I see the barrier to entry to like launch a SaaS product or whatever is, you know, much lower now.
00:37:44:18 - 00:38:05:20
Aqil
And I feel like there's a lot of engineers I'm seeing on LinkedIn and people that I know, my cycles are just spinning up. These are the kind of Microsoft tools or these other type of SAS platforms or whatever, really, really quick. And they're going down this entrepreneurial route of of trying to test all these different tools out. And obviously we saw with like crowbar, right where that was a whole recent thing right now where I obviously got acquired by ChatGPT.
00:38:05:22 - 00:38:25:15
Aqil
And, you know, all these products coming out from like, software engineers themselves. Right. So are you also seeing that in the marketplace that, you know, maybe these kind of younger software engineering guys, they're actually like, John, let me just start my own, let me start my own software company and start my own thing, rather than maybe going to work in a company instead.
00:38:25:17 - 00:38:45:08
Colin
Yeah. I think it's the space is really interesting. And we've always had we've always had employees that, you know, go leave us to go work for Facebook or somewhere else. And we've had a number of people that have come back. And, I love the idea of of boomerangs. Right. Like I never want to say, oh, screw you.
00:38:45:08 - 00:39:07:22
Colin
You've, taken a job somewhere else. You tried to do something on your own. You know, a lot of times they they end up wanting to come back for, for whatever reason or another. And I think, the nature of the work that we do and the exposure we get inside of other companies kind of helps educate our people on, you know, if they were to go do this themselves, what mechanisms would they need in place?
00:39:07:24 - 00:39:49:11
Colin
Yeah. And I like to think that showing them all of that also helps him understand what it's like to be a part of a proper company or organization, and not something that's just like a shell for, you know, a SAS product or something. It's it's tough to define, to say and maybe unfair to say that, but I don't know that people understand from the outset just how much work there is to do outside of the code, if that makes sense.
00:39:49:11 - 00:40:09:12
Colin
Right. The the code is just one small part, the the rules, the rest of the code for the rest of the organization with like, how do people interact with each other? What are the compliance rules and requirements? What, what happens if a customer doesn't pay? How do you handle that? What about that big bill that you didn't expect?
00:40:09:12 - 00:40:36:15
Colin
What about like there are thousands of challenges that you could probably want to at that challenge, try to get an answer from Gemini or ChatGPT or whatever else that's pulled together, somebody's blog from a few years ago and made it its own and tried to explain that. But there are so many challenges that go into running a company beyond the interface that somebody uses, or that CLI tool or something there.
00:40:36:21 - 00:41:10:06
Colin
I think I'd just my advice to folks that are doing that is like, go do it. Like go shoot your shot. And go make a bunch of money. That's great. Like that is exactly what you should be doing. But not everyone is going to make it. Not everyone's going to use your tool. And with the micro app saying we are, we're reaching a place where we're fast approaching a place where somebody is going to use go on their phone and use Gemini and say, hey, I need an app that lets me turn somebody into a frog.
00:41:10:08 - 00:41:30:18
Colin
Like, cool. Here it is. Whip it up. And so suddenly that little micro app where somebody has, you know, made a, a SaaS tool or an advertisement based thing that turns somebody into a frog and uses a filter, maybe that's not gonna make all that money anymore. Or maybe that's not as magical as it used to be.
00:41:30:20 - 00:42:03:22
Colin
And so I'd be really careful because the, the strength comes from. Yeah. The ability to connect those users with other things that they need. We are so, so exhausted by the sheer amount of different tools we need to use all the time. On the other side of the spectrum, we are frustrated by tools that are generalist and can't do things, to depth that we need them to do.
00:42:03:24 - 00:42:33:09
Colin
So there needs to be an in-between world where we have where we have both. For us, that's a big focus of platform engineering this year. Is is how do we facilitate, you know, interconnected or integrated experiences across multiple tools and really across multiple platforms inside of a company. But, yeah, think about what lies ahead for you with that company beyond just the code.
00:42:33:12 - 00:42:57:24
Colin
How are you going to go work with those users and do your user experience journeys? How are you going to gather actual evidence and present that to potential investors? How are you going to, you know, set yourself up for infrastructure to be portable across multiple providers to protect you from, unexpected cost increases or breaches or downtime? Like there's just a tremendous amount of things to learn.
00:42:57:24 - 00:43:13:00
Colin
But, hopefully some of those will be lucky enough to anticipate that and will be able to direct and funnel some of that money they're going to get immediately into, hey, I gotta go fill the holes that I've intentionally left.
00:43:13:02 - 00:43:28:08
Aqil
Absolutely. And I love your take on it where it's like, hey, like, go try it, right? Like, go try this thing like, shoot your shot and see, see how it goes. Right? And if it works, great. If it doesn't, then you can always come back. So I think that's a really cool frame to have as well with, with the people that you're working with.
00:43:28:10 - 00:43:29:01
Aqil
Yeah. So one of.
00:43:29:01 - 00:43:32:17
Colin
The more people learning that is just going to make the market stronger.
00:43:32:19 - 00:43:49:08
Aqil
Right? Yeah, 100%, 100%. No, I completely agree. One of the, one of the final questions we always ask guests on the show is if you can go back to your 18 year old self and only take three lessons with you, whether it's some philosophical knowledge, some some business knowledge, some general advice, what are those three lessons?
00:43:49:09 - 00:43:51:08
Aqil
Be and what be those three things?
00:43:51:13 - 00:44:17:19
Colin
Sure. Oh, that's a hard one. There's just so many. One that I talk about is like when I, when I, when I came to South Carolina, my mentality was, I'm just going to go to college here. And I did end up sticking around and I did end up finding a great job. But looking back, I wish that I hadn't had this one foot and one foot out mentality.
00:44:17:21 - 00:44:42:08
Colin
I wish I had allowed myself to to go all in and to to be present and to get involved more deeply in things that are local and like, not chase things that like, I'm going to have to move to San Francisco or, well, this is just a temporary place, you know, I think I would have I would have built stronger relationships.
00:44:42:08 - 00:45:11:03
Colin
I would have, you know, I think I would have been able to, to contribute earlier. There's just a lot of things that I wish, I wish I had given this area, more of a chance, and believed in it more, if anything, just to be fully present at that time. Now, I wouldn't change anything because my, my journey has gotten me to where I am today.
00:45:11:03 - 00:45:30:17
Colin
But that's that's kind of a lesson learned for me is like being present, being willing to do what the edge of the pool and the deep end and all that stuff. Don't try to hedge your bets like go, be present, go all in, trust yourself. And coming to school, you know, and being able to have that mentality of saying like, this is it now?
00:45:30:17 - 00:46:01:09
Colin
Like looking ahead, push the other stuff off. That would have been really helpful to me. So that's one lesson. Maybe I don't know how this would have affected 18 year old me. I feel like I need to tell myself that I should have paid myself more. How strange that sounds. Or maybe I should have been a little more money motivated than I than I was.
00:46:01:09 - 00:46:20:20
Colin
And that would have put me in a stronger position to to help others today, and to do the things that I needed. I didn't think that money was as important, or maybe I had the wrong reasons for it. So, I wish I had treated money with more importance. You know, going back to, like, I didn't get any bitcoin.
00:46:20:22 - 00:46:22:02
Aqil
00:46:22:04 - 00:46:42:20
Colin
I've had friends that are angry at me for for not doing that. Like, I'm the smartest dumb person that they know or the dumbest smart person that they know for for something like that. But, you know, it's because I wasn't money motivated and thinking other things are more important. But, man, the things that I could have done today, you know, but that's that's dumb hindsight.
00:46:42:20 - 00:47:02:13
Colin
But I think if, if 18 year old me had that, had that on their mind, because I've always been working, I've always had a job, but that, that would have put me in a different position. And then I don't know, I can't I don't think it would be genuine to say, you know, I should have started a business sooner.
00:47:02:13 - 00:47:21:12
Colin
I've always had ideas. I've always wanted to build and create something, and I've always created things. And I've always had that mindset just never really took the plunge. So I. I don't think I would have done it any differently that way. I don't know, I'm having trouble thinking like, the third one.
00:47:21:14 - 00:47:42:15
Aqil
Well, I mean, the those are two, two solid ones. So, yeah, I, I completely resonate with that as well. I like the both points that you said, but for the, for the money side, it's quite interesting for me. Like starting the business was out of, hey, I want to make some money. But then what that led me to do is I took really big risks when I was like, 18, 19, which then 18, 19.
00:47:42:15 - 00:47:55:17
Aqil
Every know what you're doing. So you get a bit of a hole, and then you kind of get out of that hole for a little bit of time. And so I think there is like a happy medium, like the happy balance where like, yeah, money is important, but it's not the be all and end all of everything.
00:47:55:17 - 00:48:16:06
Aqil
So I think somewhere in the middle is probably the safest bets, to be. But anyways, like, thank you so much for taking the time. So I really enjoyed the conversation. I think there's so many golden nuggets for everyone listening. And I'd love to have you back on, you know, maybe next year we can talk about some of the updates you guys have had and things that you've learned as well, because I think you guys are skating pretty quick and learning a lot of things about building the company up and all those things.
00:48:16:06 - 00:48:18:03
Aqil
So it'll be great to have you back on.
00:48:18:05 - 00:48:20:17
Colin
Yeah, I appreciate the opportunity. I think that would be fun.
00:48:20:17 - 00:48:21:20
Aqil
Afternoon. Thank you very much.