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On this episode of The Founder's Sandbox, Brenda speaks with Dr. Keith Dorsey – Keith is joining to announce the launch of his book on May 6, 2025 “The Boardroom Journey Practical Guidance for Women to Secure a Seat at the Table”. Dr. Keith D. Dorsey is an internationally recognized governance expert and NACD Directorship 100™ honoree who equips senior leaders with proven strategies to secure and excel in board roles. With over 25 years of corporate leadership experience and active board service spanning private, municipal, university, and nonprofit sectors, he delivers engaging...
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On this episode of The Founder's Sandbox, Brenda speaks with Chasity Lourde Wright. Chasity is inventor and founder of Infiltron operates in the cybersecurity space; a Service disabled-Veteran owned and women-owned small business. Infiltron offers quantum-resistant cybersecurity solutions for decentralized digital identity, digital assets, and AI governance, utilizing proprietary post-secure encryption. Its patented technology integrates AI, blockchain, and quantum-resistant encryption to provide advanced cyber resilience, compliance enforcement, and real-time threat mitigation across...
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On this episode of The Founder's Sandbox, Brenda speaks with Tammy Alvarez, founder and CEO of . Tammy is also an author, professional keynote speaker, inspirational coach, trainer, and epic storyteller. After experiencing firsthand burn out in a corporate career she struck out and intentionally created a work /life balance that resulted in creating Career Winners Circle, a company offering career coaching, helping individuals figure out what you do that you love and organizations that want to ignite their employees. They speak about Tammy leaving corporate life in New York,...
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On this episode of The Founder's Sandbox, Brenda speaks with Martin Tobias. Managing Partner of Incisive Ventures, an early-stage venture capital firm focused on investing in the first institutional round of technology companies that reduce friction at scale. Martin is a 3X venture-funded CEO raising over $500M as CEO with two IPOs who has also invested in hundreds of companies and is a limited partner in over a dozen VC funds. They speak about Resilience: Why starting a company today is awesome. You can find out more about Martin at:
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On this episode of The Founder's Sandbox, Brenda speaks with Eli Farhood, Chief Executive Officer at Katsh Digital ID. Hailing from Greece, Eli is a prior financial services executive and, with Katsh, a second time Founder. After experiencing fraud first hand, he pivoted a business in the making to create Katsh; separating one’s device from the need for authentication. Katsh aspires to democratize identify protection. For the month of October, they speak about cybersecurity and how to structure resilience into your company. You can find out more about Eli at: You can subscribe to...
info_outlineOn this episode of The Founder's Sandbox, Brenda speaks with David Hirschfeld, owner of 18 year old business Tekyz, that boasts a hyperexceptional development team building high “ticket” products in the B2B space. They speak about ways in which AI is a gamechanger, how Tekyz backs their work for clients with relentless pursuit of quality, and how Tekyz practices ruthless compassion,to protect the company and enable it to grow
Having collaborated with over 90 startups, he developed the Launch 1st Method—a systematic approach that minimizes risks and accelerates software company success with reduced reliance on investor funding, after observing that many companies launch a product first and then fail at a later stage – With Tekyz approach of Launch 1st exceptional founders are in love with the problem not the product.
David's expertise bridges cutting-edge AI technologies, workflow optimization, and startup ecosystem dynamics. When not transforming business strategies, he enjoys woodworking, golfing, and drawing leadership insights from his experience raising four successful sons.
You can find out more about David and Tekyz at:
https://sites.google.com/tekyz.com/david-hirschfeld?usp=sharing
https://tekyz.podbean.com/ - Scaling Smarter Episodes.
www.scalingsmarter.net - Schedule an interview
https://www.linkedin.com/in/dhirschfeld/
https://www.linkedin.com/in/dhirschfeld/
https://www.facebook.com/dmhirschfeld
transcription:
00:04
Welcome back to the Founders Sandbox. I am Brenda McCabe, the host here on this monthly podcast, now in its third season. This podcast reaches entrepreneurs, business owners that are scaling.
00:31
professional service providers that provide services to these entrepreneurs, and corporate board directors who, like me, are building resilient, purpose-driven, and scalable businesses with great corporate governance. My guests to this podcast are business owners themselves, professional service providers, and corporate directors who, like me, want to use the power of the private company to build a better
01:01
world through storytelling with each of my guests in the sandbox. My goal is to provide a fun sandbox environment where we can equip one founder at a time to build a better world through great corporate governance. So today I'm absolutely delighted to have as my guest, David Hirschfeld. David is the owner and CEO of Techies, 17 or 18 year old business now that boasts
01:29
a hyper exceptional development team that are building high ticket products in the B2B space. Welcome David to the Founder Sandbox. Hi Brenda and thanks for having me. Great. So I'm delighted that we actually did a dry run in February. We've known each other for some time and AI, we're going to be touching on AI. And I think that the world of AI
01:58
particularly in software development, has changed significantly since we last spoke in February. So we're going to be getting into some, I think, novel concepts for the listeners of the Founder Sandbox. So I wanted to, you I always talk about how I like to work with growth stage companies that typically are bootstrapped and
02:26
It's only at a later stage do they seek institutional investment by building great corporate governance and reducing the reliance on investor funding until such a time that they choose the right type of investors that can help them scale. So when I found out what you do at Techies with Launch First and the type of work you do in B2B businesses, I absolutely wanted to have you here on the founder sandbox.
02:56
So let's jump right in, right? I think I'm eager to learn more about how to scale your bespoke development at Techies, right? To scale my own business? Okay. So there's a lot of different aspects to scaling my business and I bootstrapped for the last 18 years.
03:25
I've never taken any investment with techies. And I've done that very specifically because it gives me a lot of freedom. I don't have a reporting structure that I have to worry about. That doesn't mean that I can be lazy with my team. To grow my team, I have a philosophy
03:52
that I only hire people that are smarter than I am. And the ones that are in a position to hire, they can only hire people that are smarter than them. And by really sticking to this philosophy, even though sometimes it makes us grow a little slower than we would like, it means that when we bring in people, those people contribute immediately and contribute in a way
04:21
that it's our job to get the impediments out of their way and to facilitate them so that they can contribute and help us grow the company. So I call it the ball rolls uphill here because my job is to support everybody that is above me, which is everybody. And then the people that I support directly, their job is to support the people that are above them.
04:51
Because if we're hiring correctly, then people that we bring in can contribute in the area that we're bringing them in way more than the person that's hiring them. Okay. Thank you for that. So before you launched Techies, you had a career in companies like, I believe, Computer Associates, right? Texas Experiments and TelaMotorola.
05:19
There was a period of time between your experience in these large corporations before your launch tech is where you actually had your own startup and you sold it in 2000, right? And I believe you also learned perhaps with the second startup about how hard it is to find product market fit. Can you talk to that for my listeners, please?
05:46
I don't know that it's that hard to find product market fit. It depends if that's your focus or not. If your focus is to nail down product market fit, then it's not that hard to determine whether you can achieve that or not fairly quickly. You can do that by selling your product to potential customers. That sounds strange. Of course, we all want to sell our products, but
06:14
What I'm suggesting is you start selling your product before you have a product, before you have a full product. And I don't mean an MVP, but a design prototype. You go out to the market and you start to sell it. If you have product market fit and you've identified the early adopter in your market and you know that they have a very high need from a perception perspective and there's a big cost to the problem that you're solving.
06:45
then you can offer them a big enough value upfront that they'll buy your product early and you can prove that there's a market for your product and they'll buy it in enough numbers that you can achieve a measurable metric, which I kind of call the golden ratio, which is three to one in terms of what is the lifetime value of a customer versus what does it cost to acquire that customer? And you can get to that three to one ratio.
07:13
in a prelaunch sale model before you ever started developing your product as a way of proving product market fit. Or you pivot quickly and cheaply because you're not having to rebuild a product that you've built in the wrong way. Or you fail fast and cheap. And every entrepreneur's first goal should be to fail fast and cheap. know that sounds backwards, but that should be your goal is that you can fail fast and cheap or if you
07:42
If you fail to fail fast and cheap, that means you've found a path to revenue and product market fit. And now you know you have a viable business. making the investment to build the product is a no brainer. And you came upon this methodology, right? Yes. because you did yourself when you had your first company, you did not understand the funding part, right? Can you talk?
08:12
a bit about your specific example and then how that's informed now 17 years of techies and over 90 projects with startups. Okay. So my first company was Bootstrap. Okay. And that one was successful and we grew it despite me, it was me and a partner. And despite ourselves, we grew it over eight years.
08:39
where he ended up with 800 customers in 22 countries and sold it to a publicly traded firm out of Toronto. That was in the product food, snack food distribution business because that was what our product was focused on. So I started another company about five years later, not realizing the things that I did the first time.
09:08
that made it so successful, which really fit the launch first model to a large degree. But the second time I built a product that would have been successful had I followed my first model, but I didn't. So I went the route of building an MVP and getting customers on a free version of it, and then going out and trying to raise money, which is the very classic approach that the SaaS products
09:38
take now. And the problem is with that approach is that you end up digging a really deep hole in terms of the investment that you make to build the product with enough functionality that you can convince people it's worth putting an investment in and you're not generating any revenue at the time. And I should have just started selling the product and generating subscription revenue right from the beginning. First of all, I would have been able to raise money much more easily.
10:08
Secondly, I would have not needed to raise money as much if I'd focused on sales. The problem with a lot of founders is they fall in love with their product. They believe that people will buy it at enough numbers and that investors will see the potential. they're afraid of sales. I've fallen into this trap before too. I've done it both ways. And I can tell you selling early
10:38
and staying focused on the customer and the problem are the way to be successful. So founders who I find are consistently successful, they are focused on the problem, they love the problem. The product is just the natural conclusion to solving the problem, not something to be in love with. They spend their time talking to customers about the problems. So how does a potential customer find you and work with you?
11:08
Oh, they can find me at Techies or they can find me at LaunchFirst, was spelled launch1st.com. And they can find me on LinkedIn. And then to work with me, it's just give me a call, send me an email, we'll set up a Zoom. I'll start to learn about what you're trying to accomplish and what your requirements are. And I'll typically spend quite a bit of time with any potential clients.
11:39
in one to usually multiple calls or Zooms, learning and creating estimates and doing a lot of work in advance with the idea that there'll be a natural conclusion at the end of this that they'll wanna start working with me in a paid fashion. So there's a lot of value that my clients get from me whether they end up contracting me or not. And how, again, back to, thank you for that and that.
12:08
how to contact you will be in the show notes. But what types of sectors do you work in? You know, in your introduction, I talk about high ticket B2B, right? who are the, so what founder that's has some idea today? What would be their call to action to find techies? And what would you, is it launch first before you go down?
12:35
No, it's not necessarily. It may be an existing company that is trying to implement AI or implement workflow automation, or they have a project and they don't have the IT team or capacity to handle it. We love those types of projects. It might be an existing startup that is struggling with their software development team and they're not
13:04
getting to the end goal that they're expecting and the product's buggy, it's taking too long, there's constant delays, they're way over budget and they need to get this thing done. And I call those recovery projects, they're probably my favorite because people recognize very quickly the difference that we bring.
13:33
and they really, really appreciate us. As far as what sectors, business sectors, healthcare, law enforcement, prop tech, real estate, finance, entertainment, I mean, we work in many, many different sectors over the last 18 years. So regardless in B2B, B2B2C, not so much e-commerce unless there's some
14:03
complex workflow associated with your particular e-commerce, but there's lots of really good solutions for e-commerce that don't require developers to be involved. But mobile, web, IoT, definitely everything is AI now. Absolutely. And in fact, when we last spoke, I'd like to say that you started to drink your own Kool-Aid at Techies.
14:33
you're starting to actually use AI automation for internal functions as well as projects at Techies. So can you walk my listeners through how you're using AI automation and what's the latest with agentic AI? So let's do the first. Yeah, okay. So there are a bunch of questions there. So let me start with
15:02
that we're building products internally at Techies to help us with our own workflows. These products though are applicable to almost any development company or any company with a development team. Some of them are, and some of them are applicable to companies that are, well, so one product is putting voice capability in front of project management tool.
15:32
and we use JIRA and JIRA is an incredibly technical tool for project managers and development teams to use to their projects, requirements, their track bugs, all of that. And so your relationship with what I call relationship with project management is very technical one. If you're a client, some clients are willing to go through the learning curve so that they can enter their own...
15:59
bugs and feature requests and things like that directly into JIRA. Most don't. They want to send us emails, which is fine, and just give us a list of what's going on and the problems that they're finding or the things that they need for a future version and the planning and the documentation, everything else. This is a real technical thing. We're going to make it a very natural personal relationship by adding voice in front of all this so that you can
16:29
be sharing your screen with your little voice app and say, just found a problem on the screen. And the voice app can see the screen. It knows your project. It knows your requirements. And it can identify problems on the screen that you may not have even noticed. And it can also prevent you from reporting bugs that have already been reported and tell you when they're planned to be built. And all of this just with a verbal discussion with the app.
16:58
that basically knows your project. Kind of like talking to a project manager in real time, but they don't have to write down notes and they can instantly look up anything about your project in terms of what's been reported in terms of bugs or feature requests and update them or create new ones for you or just report them to you and tell you when things are planned to be built and released or.
17:24
where they've already been released and maybe you need to clear your cache so you can see the change, whatever. Yeah. So it be like an avatar, but it's trained and it's specific to Jira in your case? In the first version, it's actually being built architected so that we'll be able to add other project management tools to it besides Jira in the future. to begin with, because we use Jira, it's going to work directly with Jira to start.
17:54
And this, by the way, you asked about agentic workflows, right? So we're building an agentic workflow in this tool where we have more different agents that work together to resolve these issues. so we have an agent that reads and writes documentation to JIRA. We have an agent that communicates with the user and the user might be the programmer
18:23
might be a person in QA, it might be a client for a lot of different things. And we have an analyst agent that when the person talks, the voice agent says to the analyst agent, here's what I understand. Here's the information I just got. Go do your work and come back and get me the answer. And it'll speak to the JIRA agent to get the information. It will also speak directly to us.
18:52
a vector database, which is a database where all the documentation from that project is ingested into our own separate AI model so that the context of all the communication is about their project and doesn't go off into other directions. And then can get back. So this is an agentic workflow. The idea of
19:20
agents is like everybody keeps talking about agents. Not everybody is really clear on what that even means. Can you define that? an agent is an AI model that you can interact with that is focused on one specific area of expertise. So if it's a travel agent, the word agent fits very well there, then their expertise would be on everything related to
19:49
travel and booking travel and looking up options and comparing prices. And that would be an AI travel agent. So that's very different from an AI project management agent, very different from an AI financial analyst agent. So each agent specializes in its own area of expertise and may draw from specific
20:18
repositories of information that are specific to that particular agent's area of expertise. And they actually look from the perspective of that type of person, if it was a person. So, and so they'll respond in a way that is consistent with how somebody who is a project manager would respond to you when you're talking to them, asking you questions about your requirements, knows what
20:46
information it needs to be able to assess it properly, things like that. wouldn't be very good about travel because that's not its area of expertise. Right. So is it common to have companies that are creating with their own large language model, right? Or their workflow processes internally to the company to create their own agent AI?
21:14
Or is there a marketplace now where you can say, want this type of agent to get in. This is a very basic question, but do build it? Right. Or do you buy it? Or is it something in between? It's something in between. So there are tools that allow you to basically collect agents out there. And there's a difference between an agent and a context. Cause you hear a lot about model context switching and things like, don't know.
21:44
if your audience knows these things. Or model context protocol. A context is not an agent, but it has some agent capabilities because it's kind of specializing your model in a certain area. But you would use this, but you're not, if it's a true agent, then it's probably tied to its own vector database.
22:12
that gets trained with specific information. It might be company's information. It might be information, let's say if I'm a security agent, then I'm going to be trained on the entire NIST system as well as all of my security architecture that's currently in place. And that so that it could monitor and
22:41
assess instantly whether there's security vulnerabilities, which you wouldn't ask Chet GPT to do that. No. Right? Because it couldn't. Because it doesn't know anything about your organization or environment. And it really also doesn't know how to prioritize what matters and what doesn't at any given moment. Whereas a security agent, that would be what it does.
23:10
I don't know if I answered that question. Oh, bad thing about building or buying. there are- Or something in between, Yeah. So there are tools that you can use to build workflows and bring in different agents that already exist. And you can use something like OpenAI or Claude and use it to create an agent and give it some intelligence and-
23:37
give it a specific, in this case, you're giving it a specific context. You could even tie a special machine learning database to it and make it even more agentic in that way. And then build these workflows where you're like, let's say a marketing workflow, where you're saying you first go out and research all the people who are your ideal customer profile.
24:07
I was going to say ICP, but I'm trying not to use acronyms because not everybody knows every acronym. Ideal customer profile. And then it finds all these people that fit your ideal customer profile. Then it says, well, which of these people are in the countries that I do business? And then it illuminates the ones that aren't. then which ones, and it may be using the same agent or different agents to do this. Then once it's nailed it down to the very discrete
24:37
set of customers. Now the next step in the workflow is, okay, now enrich their data of these people to find their email and other ways of contacting them as well as other information about them so that I have a really full picture of what kind of activity are they active socially? they speak? Do they post? What are they speaking about? What are they posting about? What events are they going to? Things like that.
25:07
So that would be the next step and that'd be an agent that's doing all the enriching. And then after that, the next step would be to call basically call a writing agent to go do, am I writing an email? Am I writing a LinkedIn connection post? Am I doing both? Set up a drip campaign and start reaching out to these people one at a time with very customized specific language, right? That is in your voice.
25:34
It doesn't sound like it's written by a typical AI outreach thing. All right, so these would be steps in a workflow that you could use with several different tools to build the workflows and then calling these different agents.
25:48
Let's go back to the launched first. What would be a typical engagement with a company? you know, they, um, the founders that have the greatest success in your experiences are the ones that love the problem space and not the product. All right. So walk my listeners through.
26:17
What a typical engagement. it's staff augmentation. it full out outsourcing? it tech? because it's very complex. I can touch so many. can touch high tech and high ticket B2B products, sector agnostic. what, put some legs on this for my listeners, please. Sure, sure. We're not.
26:46
so much a staff augmentation company, although we'll do that if asked to, but that's not the kind of business that we look for. We look for project type work. So a typical engagement for launch first would be somebody wants to launch a product, they're in the concept phase. We help refine the concept and we build out, help that we do the design and then we build a high fidelity prototype, which is a design prototype.
27:16
When I demo a design prototype to somebody, they think that they're looking at a finished product, but it's not. It doesn't actually do anything. It just looks like it does everything. So it's very animated set of mock-ups is another way to look at it. And it's important because you can build out the big vision of the product this way in a couple of months, whereas
27:46
it takes instead of, you so you're looking at the two year roadmap when we're done of the product. If we were to build an MVP, then you're going to see a very limited view of the product and it's going to cost a lot more to build that MVP than it takes to build this design prototype. Now we're in the process of doing this. We're also nailing down who that early adopter is. And there's a, there's a very,
28:14
metrics driven methodology for doing this. your launch first. Within launch first, right. Okay. All right. And then we'll help the client build a marketing funnel and help them start to generate sales. We're not doing the selling, they're doing the selling. And it's important that founders do the selling because they need to hear what customers are saying about the thing they're demoing, why they want it, why they don't.
28:43
So that if we need to pivot, which we can do easily and quickly with a design prototype, then we can pivot and then go and test the model again, two or three or four times in the space of a couple of months. And we'll either find a path to revenue or accept the fact that this probably isn't the right product for the right time. But in the process of doing this, you're learning a lot about the market and about the potential customer.
29:13
I want to be clear about something. Almost every founder that comes to that I meet with, they love the product, not the problem. They started out with a problem that they realized they had a good solution for and they forgot all about the problem at that point. And so I spend a lot of time with founders reminding them why the problem is all that matters and what that means and how to approach customers, potential customers so that
29:41
you're syncing with their problems, not telling them about this product that you're building because nobody cares about your product. All they care about is what they're struggling with. And if they believe that you really understand that, then they care about whether you can solve that problem for them or
30:01
And can I be audacious and ask you what a typical engagement duration is like? So this would be for launch first. Yes. If it's a, and our hope is that they'll find a path to revenue and start building the product and engage us for the development. Cause that's really our business is building the products. So, but it's not a requirement. And, and our typical engagement with our clients are several years.
30:32
Not all of them, but most of them, would say. Once they start working with us, they just continue to work with us until they decide to bring in their own in-house team or they fail eventually, which many of our clients do, which is why I created Launch First. Right. You often talk about your hyper exceptional team at Techies. What is it that's so highly exceptional? Talk to me about your team. Where are they? Yeah.
31:02
And if you go to my website, which is tekyz.com, you'll see at the very top of it in the header above the fold, it says hyper exceptional development team. And I don't expect people to believe me because I write that down or I tell them that I expect them to ask me, well, what does that mean? Do you have evidence? And that's the question I want to get because I do. Because when you work in an exceptional manner,
31:31
as a natural consequence of working that way, you produce certain artifacts that the typical development teams don't produce. And I'm not saying there aren't other exceptional teams, but they're really few and far between. And what makes a team exceptional is a constant need to improve their ability to deliver and the level of quality that they deliver as well and the speed at which they develop. It's all of these things.
31:59
So, and, you know, after 18 years, we've done a lot of improving and a lot of automation internally, because that allows our team to work in a really disciplined protocol manner without having to feel like they're under the strict discipline and protocol of, you know, a difficult environment to work in. And so we create automation everywhere we can. The voice...
32:27
tool is one of those automations. The way we do status reports, it's very clear at the level of detail that we provide every week to every client in terms of status reports where we're showing here's what we estimated, here's the actual, here's our percent variance on how much time we spent and how much it's costing. We want to always be within 10 % above or below.
32:56
Either being above or below is not, know, the fact that we're ahead of that doesn't necessarily mean that's a good thing, right? So we want to be accurate with our estimates. And we are typically within 10%. In fact, our largest customer last year, we did a retrospective and we were within six and a half percent of what our estimates were for the whole year. and that's a, we're pretty happy with that number.
33:24
I think most teams are looking at many, many times that in terms of variance. it's not that uncommon for teams to be double or triple what they're or even higher what the actual estimate was. So when we do invoicing, we invoice for each person at their rate.
33:50
based on their level of expertise, which is all part of our agreement upfront. So the client is very transparent every month for the hours that they work. And we attach the daily time sheets to every invoice. I'm the only company I know of right now that does that. I know there are others. I've seen monthly, but I've never seen daily. Yeah. Yeah. Because for me, if I could ask, well,
34:18
why did this person ask a work that many hours that last month? What did they do? I hate that feeling that I get when somebody asks that question. I know they're only asking because they have to justify it to somebody else or whatever the reason, but I don't like the way it feels because it feels like my integrity is being questioned. I don't get upset at people for asking me that. I just feel like I'm not giving them enough information if they have to ask me that question. So we started about eight years ago.
34:47
providing the daily time sheets because I don't like that question. And we never get questioned on our invoices ever anymore. I bet you it's informed you as well in future projects, maybe on including workflow automation in your own internal processes, right? When you see people's time sheets, right? And you've gone over budget. So it informs you internally. So it's not only for the client.
35:16
I suspect, right? No, it's not. Right. And we use it ourselves to also, because it also helps us looking at our overhead costs because not everything gets built to the client. And so we track all our own times, you know, what we're spending doing what. And we don't get to, it's not like a developer has to spend a lot of time or a QA person or whatever, putting in a lot of detail. We just need a couple of bullets, you know, every day in the time sheet with the, whatever they spend.
35:45
If they spent four hours on one thing and three on another, they'll just break it into two entries just to make it easy. And that's important for us, or they may be working on two different projects and each project. So when we do the timesheets also every month, we give our clients a breakdown by project. So if we're working on four different projects for a client or even one project, but it has four different really
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functional elements that are very clearly different. Like let's say a mobile app and a web app and a particular client implementation. Each one of those gets assigned its own project and we break down summaries of the time spent on each of those every month and who spent the time on those, along with the daily time sheets, along with the invoice. And nobody else does that because it takes a lot of discipline and protocol and you have to have lot of systems in place
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to do that without literally getting everybody to quit, right? That works for you. And nobody minds doing it because it's easy because of all the systems we put in place to do that. That's the whole point, right? Right. were not particularly happy of getting asked that question oftentimes. So eight years ago, you set out to provide the information on a daily basis, which is incredible. We started that with blended rates like a lot of companies do.
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And then I didn't like that because at the end of a project when most of it's QA, people would start to get frustrated that they're still getting billed the same blended rate, even though for the more expensive period at the beginning of the project, I thought, okay, forget this. Well, just bill based on individual. And then I didn't get those questions anymore, but then I would get questions about individuals on the month. And that's when I started doing the time sheets.
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And like I said, I'm sure there's other companies that do it, but I haven't run into one or somebody that works with one. So that's an exceptional thing that we do. But it also allows us to do really, really good reporting to the client on status on what we've spent our time on, what we're expecting to spend our time on next week, what we just spent our time on this week, where we are.
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in terms of our plan for the month, things like that. So let's switch gears, David. Yeah. Back to actually the podcast and some of my guests and listeners are corporate board directors. So they're sitting on either advisory boards or fiduciary corporate boards. And with all the hype around AI.
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it's not uncommon for them to be asking, what are we doing, right? For existing companies, right? And I'd like you to walk my listeners through while it's in the, you know, in the imaginary realm, what is it? I think any founder today that's actually scaling, right? Has to have some AI element. At least I've even heard you need to have it.
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an AI officer in the company. So what's your take on that? What would you respond to either to your board of advisors, your advisory board, or your board of directors? So, and of course, a lot of it depends on the type of company you are. Absolutely. Right. If you're making alternative material I-beams, for example, for skyscraper construction, then
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AI, other than maybe in the design process of these specialized materials, AI may not be as big a critical factor, although for invoice reconciliation and distribution and scheduling and all that, AI could be a huge value to you if you don't have super efficient systems already. For most everybody else though, if you have not embraced the need to
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leverage AI and everything you're doing, then you're way behind already. That doesn't mean you have to be in a race to do this. just, because I'm of the belief that you have to slow down to speed up. But you do need to make it a priority. And in a lot of different ways. Number one is,
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The most obvious is workflow automation. You should be probably tackling workflow automation as just a part of your constant improvement program to become more efficient, whether it's with AI or not. But AI is particularly good at workflow automation because it can tackle steps in that workflow that couldn't be tackled without AI. So the first thing
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the companies should be doing if they're not doing it is documenting all of their processes, all of their tribal knowledge into playbooks. So when you have somebody who's an expert in something in your company and they're the person who's the only one that knows how to do it and so we can't live without them, that's a bottleneck for scaling. Because if you bring somebody else in to expand their capacity, they're going to...
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put a big dependency on that person with all the expertise, which is going to cause problems. So anybody in a position like that should be documenting all of their procedures and protocols and especially all the nuances and all the edge cases into playbooks. And there should be some centralized playbook repository for the company. And this becomes part of your intellectual property and part of your value if you ever
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you're trying to raise money or you're trying to sell your company. So it increases your value. So you do that, then AI, you start to look at automating those workflows because now they're documented. So now what can be automated in them from just a workflow automation perspective. And then how much can you implement AI in there? Because now AI can learn to make the same kinds of decisions that this person is making.
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And this is like the low hanging fruit that I'm talking about right now. Right. Exactly. Right. Because the bigger stuff is if we implement AI in here, what workflows would we totally throw away and start from scratch? Because we can think of way more sophisticated ways of addressing this now that we have intelligence involved in all these steps. But that's later.
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worry about that once you get your arms around implementing AI, automated workflows and then- So workflow automation. So playbooks, workflows and AI in your automated workflows. That's sort of the stepped wise process. Excellent. You heard it here on the founder sandbox. Thank you, David. And if you're not sure how to do all that,
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ask AI, okay, here's my company. What should I be focusing on if I wanna implement playbooks, workflow automation and AI? And AI will help you figure this all out. Right. That's a jewel here. So what'd you do? Chat GBT, co-pilot, what's your complexity? Where would you go to? All right. Well, it just depends on the flavor of the day. Right now.
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I was using chat GPT primarily for this stuff just because it was a first and I'm very comfortable with the apps. have them everywhere. And Claude's recently come out with a new version and it's in some ways I'm just finding the output way more organized and smarter. And so I've been using Claude more in the last couple of weeks, but that'll change in another week or two. Any one of them will do a pretty decent job.
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I'm not using perplexity because it's built on top of the other ones. But perplexity is a great tool if you're newer with this because it makes some of the... It's a little bit more accessible for somebody who doesn't know how to use AI. Gemini is also really good, but that's more of a technical... And there's so many things you can do.
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with AI that you wouldn't even think about. And I'll give you an example, more as a brain opening exercise for everybody than anything else. Because this is something I did about seven weeks ago. I, chat GPT had just come out a week or two before with their vision capability in the mobile app. And for those of you who don't know it, with chat GPT, there's a talk
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button. It's not the microphone. It's the one that looks like a sound wave in the mobile app. You tap that, and now you have a voice conversation with chat, which I use this constantly. Even when I'm working with, I've got some contractors at my house whose English isn't very good, so I ask it to do real-time translation for me. And it does matter the language. And I start talking, and it translates to their language. And they respond
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in their language and it translates to English and it's doing it perfectly. And so I can have a very natural conversation with anybody just holding my phone up in front of them now. Right? But it has this vision capability where when you go into that voice mode, you tap the camera next to it, and now it's looking out the front of your screen while you're talking to it. And so I'll give you a couple of examples where I've used it six weeks ago and again, like
46:18
weeks later and I now used it many times like this. I was in Lowe's, which is a store for home improvement. And for some project I was on, my wife calls me and says, I need fertilizer for a hibiscus. And I say, well, what do I get? She says, anything that says hibiscus on it, it'll be fine. I said, okay, fine. And if anybody that knows these big box stores, there's like hundreds of bags of fertilizer of different brands.
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And I couldn't find one that said hibiscus. This is a typical thing with my wife. Oh, just look for this. And of course, there isn't that. So I asked Chess GPT, okay, I'm in Lowe's and I'm looking for a fertilizer for hibiscus. What would you suggest? And it said, oh, there's a number of brands that are high acid. And I said, we'll recommend a brand. Tonal is a really good brand. And I said, okay. So I'm looking and I can't find it.
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So I walked 30 feet back and I'm talking, right? I'm having this, know, people are looking at me like, what the hell is he doing? And I walked 30 feet back because there's many, many shelves, you know, columns of shelves with fertilizer. I walked back and I turned on the vision and I say, okay, there's all the fertilizers. And I'm moving my phone across all these shelves. say, do you see tonal here? And it says, yes, look for the one in the red and white bag.
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And I see it on the shelf. So I walk straight forward. see a red and white bag. That's not tonal. said, this isn't it. And she, cause it's a woman's voice that I have, she says, it's two shelves to the left, second from the top. I walk over there and it's right where she said it was. Crazy. And you're not a beta user. So this is available today. This is available. It's been available for a couple of months. And then
48:18
My daughter-in-law asked me to get something from the pharmacy, from CVS, another big box pharmacy store, right? And this is something I don't even know if I'm in the right aisle because it's something I've never bought. So I ask it, I say, I'm looking for this brand and I'm not sure if I'm in the right aisle or not, but I'm going to walk down the aisle and tell me if you see it. As I'm walking down the aisle, holding it straight forward so it can see both sides. And it says, well,
48:45
Yes, I'm familiar with the brand. You should look for it in a green and white box. then she goes like this. Oh, I see it. It's down there on the right on the bottom shelf. And I turn and I look and it's right by my right foot.
48:58
You heard it here. This is crazy. think it's a bit creepy. How many times have you been looking for something on a shelf? You know, and you're like, oh, how long, how many hours is this going to take me to spot it? Good internet connection and all that. So, oh my goodness. It's creepy and it's wonderful. So same time. the same time. Yeah. Yeah. For quality of life and even for, um, yeah. So
49:25
That's a mind opening thing is all the reason I bring that up. Excellent. Hey, let's go. Let's continue on in the founder sandbox. I'd like to ask each of my guests to share with me. I'm all about working with resilient, purpose driven and scalable companies in the growth phase. So what does resilience mean to you? You can either answer, you know, what's the first thing that comes out of your, you cannot use chat, GBT. I'm not fancy. No hands.
49:55
No hands, and I don't have the voice version going because you'd hear it. Podcast we could do it. And we are real. We're not. Yeah, we are real. We're not. So I think that's, I don't think that's a difficult question to answer. Resilience means opportunity. So no matter what happens, even if it seems terrible, what opportunity does that create? Excellent. If you ask that.
50:22
keep reframing everything from that perspective, it creates resilience. Right. Thank you. What about purpose-driven? Purpose-driven means having a clear long-term path and goal and asking yourself if the things you're doing keep you on purpose to that.
50:56
Scalable. What's scalable mean for you? Scalable for me means eliminating tribal knowledge or not eliminating it, but documenting tribal knowledge. First of all, figuring out how you generate revenue and then how you expand your ability to generate revenue, which means growing your
51:25
growing your team, growing your capacity and identifying the bottlenecks and focusing all your energy on the bottlenecks. And usually the bottlenecks have to do with tribal knowledge or with lack of workflow automation. Wow, you know, it's easier said than done though, that tribal knowledge, it is resistant, right? Oh yeah, because it's career, what's the word I'm trying to think of?
51:55
It keeps you in your job forever if you're the only one that knows how to do the thing. Absolutely. That's for another podcast, David. My final question today is, did you have fun in the Founder Sandbox? Oh, yes. I had a lot of fun. Thanks. That's a great question too. Thank you, Brenda. Did you have fun?
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Did you? I had had fun. And particularly in this last part, right? Cause we're talking about some heavy duty, you know, uses of, um, agentic AI, right. And scalable, you know, LTV, CAC and all that. And then we get to hear these real life, you know, kind of creepy, um, uh, uses of, um, on our phones today with, um, with AI, which is, which is quite amazing. But I also know that in your world of techies,
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your team, which is distributed, have a lot of fun events too. So you probably- have one more thing on the whole scalable thing. You have to be compassionately ruthless or ruthlessly compassionate, however you want to say it. Okay. So that the people, every, and the ruthless is anything that's going to get in the way of you growing your company, which benefits everybody in the company.
53:19
it needs to be addressed in a ruthless way. But if you build a culture of ruthlessly compassionate, then all the people that work for you feel that same level of ruthlessness to protect the company and make it grow. And you practice what you preach, I suspect, at Techies. Yes. Yes. It took me a while, but if we accidentally hire the wrong person, either because
53:45
we made a mistake in the process or they faked us out and we recognize they're not smart enough. Literally, that's usually the problem. They're not smart enough to carry their weight. We fire them immediately. We don't try to bring them along because you can't improve somebody's IQ. You can improve any other aspect, but their IQ is their IQ. And that will be a bottleneck forever.
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in our team and it'll require other people to carry that person. And it sends the wrong message to the team that I don't value them enough to make sure that we only surround them with people that are going to inspire them and help them grow. Excellent. And I suspect they are not fungible by AI, your employees, not techies. I mean, we've gotten better and better.
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at not making those mistakes over the years. So that doesn't typically happen. takes us, we're much more careful about how we hire. AI gives us the ability to recruit faster, more broadly, along with workflow automation. But what I mean by real, this is the compassionate. Once my team understood this, now they embody that and they will get rid of somebody if they made a mistake. I don't have to force the issue ever anymore because
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they recognize how much, important it is to protect their teams. So to my listeners, if you liked this episode today with the CEO and founder of Techies, sign up for the monthly release of founders, business owners, corporate directors, and professional service providers who provide their examples of how they're building companies or consulting with companies to make them more resilient, scalable, and purpose-driven.
55:40
to make profits for good. Signing off for today. See you next month in the Founder Sandbox. Thank you.