21 Hats Podcast, Episode 2.5: He Patted My Hand and Told Me I Didn’t Know Anything About Business

[Music] hello everyone welcome to the 21 hats podcast I'm Lauren Feldman your host every week I sit down with three business owners to talk about the challenges they're facing it's the kind of conversation you don't often hear in public our panelists address difficult topics like why their business isn't making as much money as they think it should why their digital marketing isn't working or why exactly they hired their brother-in-law owning a business can be a lonely and isolating pursuit at least you'll know that you're not the only one facing these issues got a question you'd like us to address send it to us and follow us on Twitter at 21 underscore hats or on our website 21 hats calm this week we have something a little bit different for you instead of our usual therapy session with our regulars we're coming to you from Palm Springs California Andy Weis annual strategic growth forum I'm here with one of our regulars Karen Clark all CEO of Blink UX Karen I think you and I met here at this event you've been coming for years to learn we did not meet at this event I know you'd like to think that we met through your former gig at Forbes where I was writing however I do come to this event because I was actually in the program so entrepreneur of the Year program for the Pacific Northwest probably five years ago I was a finalist in the Seattle region and so when you do that you get to come to the national event which is in Palm Springs what you've been doing every year since once you go you'll never stop going because it's so incredibly fabulous and lavish and wonderful in every way give us some examples what do you what do you like about it you can ask a waiter for a bottle of champagne at any time and they'll bring it people don't no one ever told me that's true now I understand why you come back every year we're honestly the quality of the people that are here it is so incredible I mean it's mostly founders CEOs leaders and big companies and so the quality of the conversation while walking to the pool is its outstanding and you know then you add on you I generally every participant here has a host who will help set up meetings for you with anybody that you want is attending everyone gets the guest list and then there's there's always probably a handful of talks that I go to and they're usually the ones that I just sort of bumped into and didn't expect to go to which are the best that that are can be life-changing and really certainly make me think differently about how I'm running my company and you know what are other people thinking about or struggling with you want to ask me why I come to this event yeah well I I know that you love the winning women program and I can't imagine anything not to love about it so programs about 12 years or 13 years old now I think and I think it grew out of the entrepreneur of the Year program that you were referring to I think at a certain point you I realized there weren't as many women competing in that as they would have liked and they created this leadership program called winning women and as a journalist I just found it was an incredible way to meet really interesting entrepreneurs who were you know established but not that far into their journey and well it's like ey is doing all the work for you when you're trying to find entrepreneurs it's great to find people who've been vetted by somebody and I know they're legit and I've just made I've gotten so many great stories contacts sources out of it it's it's been really helpful to me and I come back I would come to this event every year just for that yeah I didn't even know about the champagne and you know this year with the podcast it's such a great opportunity with you and I knowing that we were both going to be here we decided to line up interviews and what we're gonna do now is sit down one by one with four of these winning women some of them most of them are alums who've won in the past one who's just won this year and we're gonna hear a little bit about their journeys it's fabulous and we should say that we're in a very lavish room where we can't close the doors because if we do we might lock ourselves in thank you for taking time away from the pool and the champagne to join me with this let's let's start doing the interviews [Music] welcome to the 21 hats podcast sherry Deutsch Minh thanks for joining us yeah delighted to be with you we want to talk about all aspects of how you built letter logic and your you know really impressive entrepreneurial journey but to start I'd like to read something from your from your book you've written a terrific book that I recommend it's called lunch with Lucy then it you write I was a 42 year old single mom with a high school education and meager savings when I cashed in my 401k and took a risk I sold my personal belongings in a yard sale that yielded just enough cash to start a company letter logic in my basement which defied every single rule of what makes a sure bed in business that business grew debt-free to a 40 million dollar enterprise give us a quick version of how you wound up starting your own business I was working for a company in the same industry and that was printing and mailing hospital bills I was responsible for the sales I was VP of Sales and we just screwed up everything we touched so I would sell a new account and losing an account and it was a constant and just observing one day I realized that all of our problems were simple human error and the human era was because nobody cared and nobody cared because nobody cared about them and it just hit me like a ton of bricks and so I went to talk to my boss about what we could do to change the you know to affect the morale and change the culture of the company and how that might affect the result you know the results and he patted my hand and told me I didn't know anything about business and he said just go sell another account so I did except this time it wasn't for his company was for mine unlike a lot of books about culture you don't just talk about treating people well which we all agree you should treat people well but you kind of connect the dots between treating people well and having a profitable business well it seemed to me it was absolutely recked line between behavior and and profitability and so I thought if all the employees understood exactly how we made money and their part and helping us make money that they would behave differently and they did so I set out to make sure that all of their basic needs were taken care of so that when they were at work they would not be worried about whether or not their lights were going to be on when they got home or whether or not their health insurance would cover an illness I just from day one paid for a hundred percent of everybody's medical dental disability life insurance from day one how did you afford to do that on day one I just never considered not being able to afford it it was a little bit less expensive back then and how many employees did you have right out of the gate - and then we grew to sixty at one time and they're back down to 50 and in the beginning we covered even their family's insurance and we did that for the first five years so it was a whole family plan and then we were challenged by a single employee who said it's not fair that I cost the company this much and she has five kids and she cost the company this much and so I want the difference so you know we had to equalize it by paying just for the employee but we also let them bring their kids and their pets to work which doesn't seem like a big deal but if you're a single mom and the kid has a wellness visit you have to take them to school first leave work go to pick them up to take them to their doctor's visit take them back to school come back to work you get nothing done or if the kid has a runny nose they can't go to daycare just bring them to work and we all pitched in and helped take care of the kids so that the parents could be at work with us and the most important thing we did the most game-changing thing was taking 10% of the profit every month splitting it evenly so that the CFO and the janitor got exactly the same dollar amount letting them know that they were just as important as everybody else in the company in the final results and I read that before you do that you show them how the company is doing you show them the financials once a month and then distribute the profit every month we brought everybody together in one room and went over the financials and so they could see top-line and all our expenses in between and bottom line and then we talked about the results and so what would happen for your employees do they understand it right away were they interested all of them I mean in my experience it's sometimes terrifies employees if they see you know really what's going on or it's too much information and so overwhelming and then and then how do they feel when when there wasn't a profit I think for most employees just the high level was enough there were some employees specifically the sales guys who really wanted to see more and so in those cases I would allow them to come to my office pull up a chair right next to me would get right into our NetSuite and say have at it you can go anywhere except to see people's salaries and let them see exactly to the penny and she actually did the fraction of a cent our costs and that changed their behavior in regards going after the right kind of account and selling at the right price because they understood exactly what her costs were and yeah it took us a couple years to become profitable I think 18 months when we were first profitable and non-stop profitable until about two years three years before I sold the company I was investing heavily into technology and grow her to run the business yes and actually just building out the e-commerce said that I would no longer be printing and mailing patient statements but sending the statements to patients electronically and facilitating payments for them electronically so I was spending millions of dollars doing that and not really minding our core a core so or you know what we were good at and so in so doing we had several amounts of declining profits and so I would have to stand in front of the entire company every month and say well no 60 people at that point know what Dad yes at that point it was 60 63 people I think and to tell them you know we didn't our profits were down this month you know they've gone from from seven to seventeen to seven hundred dollars and then it started going back down to nineteen dollars and then to six dollars which is not even gonna buy you a six-pack of beer right and just to tell them I'm sorry we didn't we weren't profitable and then two months back to back of losses and for me to stand up and say there's no profit share because we didn't make a profit did you feel it was your fault oh it was my fault absolutely was my fault how so I had was chasing the shiny object and I hired an outside consultant who ended up being you know one of the best things that ever happened to me in a lifelong friend who just challenged me to go back to our core strengths and to quit trying to be something I wasn't and make the company something it wasn't and you know the reason you've grown so fast and at that time I mean we were on the Inc 5000 list for ten straight years and the reason you've grown so fast is cuz you're so good at this you're the best at this you're the undisputed best at this even your competitors say you are and now you're saying that's not good enough I want to chase them down a rabbit hole so did you do that because you were worried about the times changing everything becoming more digital and you needed to go there yes and somewhat fear of missing out and my mouth sales team saying you know we we lost this account because we weren't able to do that and you've got to do this and just the fear that's totally acting out of fear and up until that time we had been partnering with other companies that could provide that part and we just had a tiny revenue share and that was really the right solution yeah so we went back to that so we we went back to that and we quadrupled eBay died over the next 18 months so you just cut off all that money you had invested and just said that's a loss sorry and we had just hired all these people to help us build out into technology and we had to tell them you know if you want to stay with us we'll find something for you to do but we're not doing that sexy work you thought we were doing did they say some stayed a few left some were contract workers that we had brought in and they let so we right-sized back to 51 52 people and and really got back to being how hard was that transition for running the company when you had to do the right sizing and make the announcement such a sigh of relief for everybody because those people that we had hired to do that work we were hiring them so quickly that we couldn't train them we couldn't integrate them into our culture there was no place for them to sit so we had to do a build-out to add more office space for them and to try to be cool enough for these techies that were coming in instead of being a manufacturing concern and I was sending mixed signals being I think a pretty bad leader at that time and just chasing running all over the place and so I think that there was a huge sigh of relief for everybody including those people we've brought in so what was the moment that you hired that consultant what what came into your head that said you should do that and something's not working because you were losing money losing money and having to tell them there was no profit with us my poor decisions so he came in and for the first week he said this is the best run company I've ever seen and I don't know that you have a problem that that we can't fix pretty quickly and in the second week he said oh you have a huge problem and it's this and you know what to do there's no kind of fix it it was all on me you know that's a made the hard decisions and did made the hard choices and got us back in profitability Terry you described talking to your bosses at the the job you had before you started your own company and you you told them what they were doing wrong and what you thought they could do better and your place said to you patted you on your hand and said you don't know anything about running a business to some extent they weren't wrong about and then you figured it all out on your own and all these steps you took it's you know from opening your books - you know the way you rewarded your employees was there anything guiding you on that up until the point where you hired a consultant or were you just you know kind of figuring out what made sense to you on your own I think it was a combination of just common sense and also an innate empathetic common though it's it's listening to your intuition and I think that's a you know that's the strength of a woman leader well simple human kindness - I was just listening to the CEO of Cisco who they've just been named the best company in the world to work for and he talked about the importance of that of just realizing that if people are just human beings that wanted to be heard and want to be treated like humans and I applaud that that trait that I have to serve the company we're having this conversation at a wise annual strategic growth forum you've come to this event for many years I met you here because of your involvement in the winning women program tell us how you got involved and what the program meant for you my company culture was so unique that you know we started getting a lot of press fairly early on and somehow he heard about me and invited me to apply for the program I did when they told me I'd won that was 2009 I figured it was just like any other award thing you go to fancy dinner which you pay for and then they give you a little trophy and that was it it was it's not like that at all it is really a commitment to helping the women with any resource they need to grow their businesses I'm not an investing in the business not that kind of resource no not that kind but connections invaluable connections and it really could enter alized to me it gave me credibility in a way that I could never have achieved on my own and introduced me to and the network of the other winning women but all the the brilliance of you I globally that they helped me several times with sales tax and access issues and other things didn't charge me a dime but helped me conquer pretty insurmountable problems at the time and then the press that I received as a result of the why winning women a program has been incredible I mean that's how I met you and as a result I was featured in the New York Times I've had Forbes talked about me and success and business leaders and Inc and entrepreneur none of that would have happened without the winning women program so we've heard this really impressive story about how you built this really special company and the success you had why did you decide to sell the business two things we had gone through that phase of quadrupling Avada in eighteen months and so the graph of our growth for the first time as the bottom line was outgrowing the top line and that on paper was exactly the right time to sell a company when you would get the highest multiple and that coincided with my teenage granddaughter coming to live with me so trying to raise a thirteen-year-old and working 60 hours a week didn't look like a good decision so it's like it was in the Stars and you had a buyer yes had a buyer had a lot of interest and had multiple offers and chose one so people had been approaching you about buying it you even before use yes for many years mm-hmm and did the sale work out the way you hoped it would yes and no financially it was tremendous success what pains me most is how the culture changed after that the first thing the buyers did was do away with the profit share although in and the dog-and-pony shows and all the negotiations they had indicated that they loved the culture and they loved the profit share and they saw how it affected the bottom line and not realizing it was just lip service did you have a role in the new company I didn't exit it okay it was an all-cash deal and I've invested in the new entity they created and then got a board seat with that investment and then it was too painful for me after six months I just said please I want out of this and so I was totally out got my investment back and I did some of the employees live yes so today were three years after the sale and of those 51 employees we had at the time I think only 12 are still there they weren't you know 38 mediocre employees they would cream-of-the-crop employees and so have they been able to maintain the profitability of a company without those people I'm not sure I think you know there's been two or three roll up since then so I sold a 40 million dollar company now to probably a quarter billion dollar company has emerged from lots of roll-ups so I have no idea about their profitability did you feel you were as prepared as you should have been to sell the business did you know what you needed to know probably not I learned a lot in the process and actually getting the company ready to sell was the most fun I ever had the whole time I was running the business loved it we had a brilliant broker who first did a free valuation for us and then coached us on having mini valuations and so every every Monday and every Thursday my leadership team had a mini valuation and we made decisions based on evaluation for the first time and so we could see you think that your company value it changed from a Thursday to a Monday but if you add a big account or you lose an account in that time space it can change a lot if you're looking at a seven or eight or ten multiple so it just changed our behavior and we were working as a really tight team and you do that for how long a year about a year and a half can I just ask you when you're doing your monthly reporting to the employees and doing the profit sharing how did you choose monthly versus quarterly seems more common to me it's really hard to tie your behavior and your actions to something if if it's quarterly or annually but monthly if we brought everybody together and said look we made a ton of money this month and this is why you know why we were just it was like a Swiss watch everything happened exactly as it should have then there was a direct correlation between their behavior and the profit and it's not how you were even you've talked about being able to measure profit by treating your employees well is that how you did that yeah I think mostly it was seeing their dedication to the company and retention of employees so Nashville is one of the fastest growing cities in the u.s. for the last three or four years we've had over a thousand open IT jobs every day and so our IT workers were highly sought after they stayed with us and stayed loyal because of the culturally we created looking back are the things that you would do differently if you had it to do over again in terms of the sale yeah what would you do differently I would have coached the leadership team about how to handle the integration with a newer bigger leadership team and how to what a thought naively was that we were going to infect the larger company company that was swallowing us up that you know we were going to inculcate our culture into them and I think we could have done that if I had realized that I needed to train the team on courage and sticking to their convictions and and I think I failed in choosing a bad leader and not a bad leader but somebody who wasn't really equipped to withstand or somebody that you do your role right yes although that was going to be hard anyway I mean once they got rid of profit-sharing I mean but the right person would have stood up for that and would have gone to the board and said no this is why we're profitable these other companies these other companies that you're acquiring they're not profitable they've got tons of debt and they've got three times the employees we have with the same revenue I wish that I had taught them to take that tack in to really to infect the other company what are you doing now too much the first thing I did was start a little angel investment firm to invest in women all businesses because women only get like less than two percent of the private equity and venture capital and I wrote a book lunch with Lucy which will be out it's available right now on Amazon but it'll be out a bookstore near you on March 10th so there's a lovely quote at the beginning the put in by mother Teresa can you tell me about that is an old favorite of yours yes that might make me cry but she says there was more hunger in this world for love and appreciation than for bread and when you think about how many people in the world in the world are starving literally haven't don't have enough food and more people suffering from lack of a love and appreciation yeah so you started the investment firm yes but you don't you have a business now as well yes I've started a company brain trust which is a peer-to-peer membership for women-owned businesses to help them get to the crucial million dollar mark less than 2% of women-owned businesses I think there's almost 12 million of us now in the u.s. less than 2 percent of us get to the million dollar mark which means and beyond that yes right and but it I think the average is like 88,000 and annual receipts you're not gonna ever build personal wealth or financial independence when your total cash receipts or 8888 thousand dollars and you're not going to change the lives of your family at that rate and you're not going to be able to be an influencer in the community to change the world so helping women get to quarter million dollars at that point they can start paying themselves a little better by the time they get 2 million they're making a decent salary they have several people working for working for them that are working on the business in the business so they can work on the business at that point they are more bankable so that can get a lot of credit to grow the business they can attract investors and importantly they can join organizations like the women's presidents organization and yo the entrepreneurs organization but until you get there you can't be a member and I have been lucky enough to be in WPO in EO and found how critically important they were to me and so I started this organization for all those people who don't qualify all the women who don't qualify I'm going to help you get there we're gonna help you get there so you can move on and go from a million to 10 million it's awesome sherry dortmund thank you for joining us we really appreciate you sharing your thank you it's been a pleasure [Music] Laurie Torres welcome to the 21 hats podcast really appreciate your stopping by to talk about parcel pending why don't we start tell us what the company does first okay thank you so much for having me here I'm thrilled to be part of it and a parcel pending we have electronic smart lockers so we manage packages we're a package management solution company and so our electronic lockers envision a bank of lockers that have a keypad where a courier UPS FEDEX can go to the touchscreen once they find your name in the system they then put a package into the locker close the locker door and now it sends you a text or an email that says you have a parcel pending it's the physical Locker it's a physical Locker imagine you're at work and you have personal items delivered and so instead of having it stolen off your front porch at home instead you can have a chip to your office but it go straight into the locker at your office building now you can go on your way home grab your package and off you go and you have not lost your package into varying sizes that you can rent I assume that's right small medium large extra-large different size packages and lockers for the packages and we are now in multifamily we're in commercial we're in grocery retail universities and commercial office buildings we even have our lockers and corporate headquarters such as UPS all their employee packages go through our lockers at their headquarters so well this is a multi-family do you mean my partner building yes apartment buildings can you tell us how big the businesses now sure we've grown the company over the last five years we're now in 48 states in Canada we take 1.6 million packages a month we're expecting to take 3 million from Black Friday to Christmas this year oh my god so it will be a crazy wild ride yes a lot of that's a lot it's a lot and we have over 200 employees Wow so where'd the idea for the company come from how do you end up starting it yeah you know I was in real estate my whole career and I was working for a large company a developer in Orange County California and we had 44,000 apartment units and I was the senior vice president overseeing the operations of those 44,000 units and I kept going to the properties and they would say to me Lori we have such a package problem we need more headcount and we need bigger package rooms and I thought no way we're not gonna add head counts that's gonna kill on the margin and we're not gonna get bigger package rooms because it just doesn't make sense so I knew there had to be a way to take technology and marry it to something some type of a box system so it could be self-service the other benefit to parcel pending lockers is that you can get your package in the evening on your time we have to go people pick up packages at 2 a.m. 4 a.m. can people share luck it's not a one for one so it just depends on when your package comes today your Locker might be on the Left upper hand side of a small Locker oh and tomorrow you might be get a package over on the right hand bottom that's a large Locker so it's not your own designated Locker it's based on when you have a package so if you don't get a package but once every five days you only have a locker used once menu paper package no there's different pricing models we we actually sell the lockers to the landlords and owners and they pay a monthly software and service fee and then some models we give them the lockers and then the end user pays a monthly fee in the different verticals that were in there are different models models whether it's a subscription model a lease model or a purchase model and how long or how many years that it take you to figure out these different models I just thought this is gonna be genius at one point I actually thought we will never sell another Locker and we will only give lockers away and charge this fee and the residents will pay well the industry said no no we don't want to nickel and dime our residents we want this as an amenity and so they said we'll pay for it and so I really thought that it would be you know eighty percent would be the subscription model and 20 percent would be the purchase and it's the opposite and so how many years would it take to figure that out it was originally no I mean look we've only been in business six years now and so we've had to figure out a lot very fast we're going really fast yeah does anybody else doing this when you started when I started no and then since I started there's been a few competitors and I'm sure you've heard of those guys called Amazon they're a big competitor now and so and they will say same sort of product the same products yes and they came into multifamily because they want to distribute more purchased at Whole Foods they're not just in Whole Foods anymore they're in universities they're in commercial office buildings there in retail even and reason for that is they just want to distribute more stuff faster but their models completely different they're not doing it for a P&L purpose and so it's tough because competing against them when they're not out to make money they you know their prices are can be significantly less than ours but we have a value proposition of what makes us different but I will tell you that competing with Amazon some entrepreneurs like I've heard people say we went out of business because we couldn't compete with them and for me I'm like bring it on this has been the greatest challenge it's made us a better company it's made of smarter and think better and be more on our feet so you know I'll take it that's great but it must have squeezed your margins too didn't it uh it has squeezed in some areas yes for sure and then the tariffs have certainly squeezed margins because we manufacture in China so we've had our challenges it's it's not been a walk in the park by any means oh that's interesting how did you deal with a tariff you deal with them do you have a choice so we're actually moving or manufacturing out of country and and so this year we'll start manufacturing still offshore but in a different country Vietnam yeah interesting yep with that kind of fast growth and competing with Amazon did you have to raise capital to to build the business my bootstrap my way for the first year or so and then I did a range around of about a million and a half and then I had a strategic investor that did we did a fifteen million dollar round and the strategic was interesting because we'd set it up in some different tranches and we ended up after the first year of that deal going back and renegotiating it and it became just a revolving line of credit and I only used six million of the 15 million before selling the company so I recently just sold the company in January to a French company it's Neopost now they they've changed the name to quadrant now they were they've been in the business since 1934 of mail so probably every mail room you go into it either has equipment from Neopost or from Pitney Bowes and so the two were competitors and but the big big business but somewhat declining because obviously people aren't sending mail anymore and so the locker strategy made a lot of sense for them and it was in alignment with their business and the other business verticals that they have and products that they have and so they already had lockers in Japan and in France and but they just really couldn't bust into the United States and so you know what I say if you can't beat him by him yeah and where they're their locker system in Europe was similar to yours or the yeah was similar yeah similar technology had you been thinking about selling the business you know it's a great question because of course I had been thinking about selling a business from the day I started the business but uh but I will tell you I think it's really important that I never did it to make money and so while I've had a wonderful outcome it was never my goal like whoo I can't wait I'm gonna be rich not at all I was solving a problem I saw this I'm a solution finder and I just looked for you know because what the real estate business I was in when you're in property management and property operations all you do all day long to solve problems and when I saw this problem I knew I could solve it and so but yes once I started planning for the business and writing my three year plan deciding you know before I even put a name to the company or spent a dollar I wrote a three year plan and and so I always thought I'd exit in probably seven years and so we were just starting early on early yeah and we really were starting to just interview investment bankers like who are we gonna use we're just we're gonna have our first audit because we didn't even have a formal audit yet and so we were just in that process and they came along and it was a crazy fast deal I met them December 3rd in my office we got a letter of intent December 21st and we closed on January 23rd holy-moly is a 32 d 32 day deal and they said you know we'll do light due diligence and now you I was involved and so let me tell you it was necessary their side their side and it was not light due diligence the banker said but they went that fast we were in fast you know what's interesting about that I think you set a precedent I think it set a precedence for the new owners if they think that we can always work at this pace which we do we leave work at an insane pace but they said you know we've never seen a company fill a doubt of room as fast as you guys fill the data room I because we work day and night and it was over the holiday so December 17 or 21st actually was the letter of intent think about that the office was pretty empty and people were off cuz of holidays and we just worked day and night weekend after weekend it was crazy Wow congratulations thank you I hope you don't mind I read on the internet that you had a very successful outcome you sold the business for a hundred million dollars million dollars yeah I don't like to say it out loud actually but it was very public as a public company bought us so yeah was that a difficult negotiation or were they they come knowing what they wanted to do they were very clear on what they wanted and they had a clear agenda and I had a clear agenda and I wasn't planning to sell the company I thought we were two years out and I our revenues weren't for far enough along and our new business verticals that I was trying to achieve hadn't gotten to where they were and so but I said look in order to sell it this is the price and I just stayed firm on it I started it I stuck to it yeah and they stuck to it as well they're great people they there are such wonderful people to work with I've really enjoyed everyone at the company and you're staying with a company at least so far yeah yeah how long well I'm under contract for a couple years did you sell 100% I did so you're an employee I am an employee again but here's the funny thing I was in corporate America my whole career thirty years so I really thought I'd probably be the best person to be acquired by a large corporation because I can deal with corporate America is it as much fun maybe I would not admit that it's as much fun as I used to have it no I have not but I'm sure the day will come I have too much to do we are we have huge huge growth goals and so I don't have time to go France because we are running still with our hair on fire and so what's your role in the new organize I'm still the CEO of parks opinion okay yes they kept it separate yes so you're running the u.s. part of it then us in Canada yes but do you have a lot more capital to spend now do you know what it is really nice to have a big backing of a billion-dollar company yeah very nice and so we're scaling it a much it faster than what we we were able to do and making the investment back into the company now so yeah it's it's a wild time it's fun given Amazon a run for their money oh for sure I think they know us for sure yeah but then you know they're gonna deal with Amazon as Amazon they can make a decision to just give away free lockers and if they do that that'll be a problem for us but also they're not delivering on their promise and their service and so not everyone's you mated with them I just a client meeting in Dallas on Monday in the client said I can't wait to get these markers out of here and reach for Amazon lockers but you know you're gonna have good and bad I'm sure people that say that about us we're having this conversation at ey is annual strategic growth forum you've been here many times because you've been part of the winning women program tell us about how did you get involved with that and what it means for you it has been a game changer for me and so I was in the class of 2017 I have met amazing people I have friends for life I mean I have people that are now and the group of gals that we traveled together we talked we also have a funny enough three of us all sold our companies this past year and all three of us are struggling somewhat in the new world just because there's the goals when a new company comes and buys you they want to take it to a whole new level and we were already growing at this crazy level and so um so it's challenging but it's nice to have some partners in crime and to you know talk through at other CEOs because you can't have that conversation with your employees and and so it's nice to have other CEOs and that's what it's done for me is it's created this network of people to be able to you know I can call and reach out so you've forgiven you I for the due diligence they did you know what it's funny that you asked me that but yes I had a softer spot in my heart because of it so I didn't want to wring their necks as much I mean there were three times during the deal that the deal on this died but it but it I had leverage and so I said look I wasn't not in a hurry to sell and so there were three different times right like if we need to put this on hold and pause and go clean up what you think is an issue let's wait six months and they were motivated to make the sale happen and so it it probably I did cause a few pain points for us I will tell you know did you learn anything through that process that you think others could benefit from oh my gosh I learned from every process I mean in the winning winnaman program if the women that take advantage and really embrace the program get so much out of it and the women that don't don't they don't show up they don't participate and they're so missing out and then selling the company of course I mean you just you specially doing it in 32 days you just don't get an experience like that I mean there was so much I didn't know and so much that I I had you know ton of phone calls and yet advisors in and what do you think about this and oh my gosh I'm not sure what direction this is and then what happens is when you're going that fast and you're so tired you work so many hours you simply start to forget things like wait did we negotiate that did you get that covered in written you also can't run the business the same way when you're going you can't and I will tell you it has been a very the acquisition has hurt not hurt I wouldn't say but I'll say it has been a challenge for the parcel pending for this year and I finally feel now after ten months we're finally like the dust has settled and we've got our arms back around this beast and we can go and take this next trajectory but it really set us back because you're just there's this get to know you and there's so many new processes and new reporting and it's been a challenging year for sure I I say it's been the hardest year ever but I think that maybe it's like having a baby and you forget the pain cuz every year wasn't growing my company was really hard and I mean you forget I had an interview and I would say gosh it's so hard and I don't even know what that means like I can't articulate how challenging it is did your employees know that you were going through that your wedding laughs yes and no no there was a small group that were under the tent about six of us and for the beginning no my family didn't even know I couldn't even tell my family in the beginning and that was pretty brutal because your family is particularly untrustworthy or no no I just my family so as no I know you're right you are part of it was when I was growing the company I ended up hiring a lot of people that were that there's this web of a lot of connections so my son knows this guy who works at my company and this guy who knows this guy who knows my son or my other son they're best friends and she works here and so there were all these can i oh and my ex-husband's best friend was an investor in the company and so there were all of these interconnections that I felt I couldn't tell the family until we were ready and we couldn't announce it because it was a public company but I had to go to the shareholders because it was such a short window I couldn't get a vote in time I mean there were a lot of challenges that happened with that quick of a sale and so I had to tell my family the day before I told the shareholders because I knew that the shareholders that knew my husband don't agree cooking - no you didn't have to tell your house but why have an ex-husband we were very good but I still had to tell him what was the reaction from your in place well I think it was a mixed actually I mean we were on we had a vision and we were clear on what our purpose was and we were clear on what we were trying to accomplish and then the game changes and it creates fear because the first thing that happens when you sell a company people say what's in it for me and what's gonna happen to me and oh my gosh are they gonna keep me around and it's not like a company that comes in and buys you has all these people in their back pockets but you hear of all the horror stories that people you know lose out on opportunities and things change and so you know but it was funny because I have an all-hands meeting with all employees once a month and we talk about what's going on in the organization you know talk about different things and when I announced that we were selling or that we'd sold the day that it was closing I asked the team to raise our hand if they thought we were going through a sale and half the room said yes yeah I mean we're just we're too transparent of a company and on all of a sudden were doors closed and were off-site meetings and right it was just no it was not our behavior yeah they knew something was up last question you referred before to how fast you are already growing and then the challenge of being bought by a much larger public company and having to grow even faster what are you doing to grow even faster and and what are the challenges that your face I'm going to give you my secret sauce I can't because Amazon could be listening or another competitor and but we have had you know significant growth in the prior years for first five years we had seventy percent year-over-year growth every year and it was just insane and and now you have to do it even faster faster so without telling us what it is do you have a secret sauce is it like that well I think that every company has a secret sauce and what makes some of them well I doing what makes some I think you have to ask yourself what makes a company successful and why are not other companies that have a good product and a good service why are they successful sure and I think it's about the vision of where you're going it's absolutely about the people I mean you talked I read about employee appreciation yeah because I could have done any of this without the team you know I won the regional UI and it felt wrong for me to take that that win it's not me it's the team that did it and I could never have done it without the team and I did every single person in my company benefited from the sale and so I wanted to show my gratitude they all had I had stock options but no one had vested we hadn't been in business long enough the best so me best of a lot but everybody got some that's awesome Laurie Torres thanks so much for taking the time we really appreciate you sharing that story here thank you for having me appreciate it [Music] Diana Lee thanks so much for joining us on the 21 Hatt's podcast we'd love to hear a little bit about constellation agency the business that you've built give us a sense of what you do and how far along you are now sure thank you so much for having me today so I am the CEO and co-founder of consolation agency constellation started about three and a half years ago we ran ad tech company originally we started as a digital media company actually running social search display advertising very quickly we realized we couldn't scale because the amount of customers that were coming in and so we invented and patented pet patent-pending our ad technology that basically produces ads within minutes time for those platforms and how far along have you gotten how big is the company now oh wow so three and a half years we're projected to hit right now twenty million in sales by December right there next year we're hoping that we could make close to 40 million because we've doubled tripled your over your growth a first year we're at four million second year ten million and one the most amazing of all I believe you're profitable doing that yes so we we've been self-funded as well so yeah so it was been a very painful journey because it is not easy so I'm a self-funded but it was a desire that I had right from the beginning and the technology idea where did that come from so it's interesting because I'm 50 years old so I am NOT the person that said I want to start developing now it wasn't even in any of the structures of what we were looking at really when it came around was I couldn't have enough manpower to produce the assets that we were actually getting and at the end I I booked for outside sources to actually make the ads you just stop for a minute talk about what you mean by assets so people send me images or as I were sure so when you go on Facebook and you go on Instagram and I'm just going to use them as an example it takes a good 30 to 45 minutes to actually make an ad on platforms by the time that you actually have the ad ready like the design of the ad ready and now you got to actually import talk about a banner ad on the top of the page maybe outside you know so we're talking Facebook so social right for example those platforms were invented by a genius Mark Zuckerberg but the platform was made by a developer it wasn't made by an advertiser so the platform thinks like a user right so it's great if you want to like something and you want to basically share the content you want to view it with your friends and family but if you're an advertiser and you need to go on ads manager that is actually a part of Facebook and Instagram it's really hard to manage that situation we have so many brands that we represent we have outie we have a Volkswagen we have Jaguar we have Land Rover everybody has brand compliance right and everybody's got different fonts and different colors and different tones the problem is this platform that was made by Facebook and Instagram doesn't support all the different functions that you actually need to do in order to launch a brand compliant ad so it takes manpower to do all that work the problem is if you're gonna screen shoot every single ad that you have are doing in that platform send it to legal send it to compliant for them to send it back then you gotta edit it our platform basically does all of those compliance situations within seconds time PDFs it can you can send it to legal you can send it to compliance it's got a full ad library that's brand compliant already do you realize this opportunity existed because it was a problem that you were confronting how how did you come to the conclusion that you could solve the problem with technology we went to India and we're like okay maybe we can get people and Indians to it and realize there's a language barrier we can't do it that way then I hired high school students I mean this is how funny it was right I was desperate I'm like okay I'm gonna hire high school students because at least they know the computer they're really efficient and they said dan I hate my job and I'm like what do you mean I'm paying you $300 a week you know what do you mean we hate your job listen I am just cutting and pasting all day at the end I want more from my life than just cutting pasting screen shooting things so I thought okay this is not something that's gonna really compel anybody to stay at our company I got to find a different solution so one day was really funny I asked my co-founder I said get up and he was like where we going that's it you're going to github and he's like what and I were in a we work building and github was our name this is in New York right this is in New York City basically it's a development company and they're probably one of the biggest and largest actually out there and I walked in and I looked at all their developers and I said guess what I need some developers and you do the hotness by himself and I think they thought that was crazy but there was so nice they said okay so we have some recommendations of people that would actually help you out you explain the problem yeah blame the whole problem they gave me some names and one of the one of the names was this person by the name of Vinnie and so Vinnie was previously a senior vice president at Big Spaceship which is a huge ad tech brand in New York City so and he started his own development consulting company and I thought this is great Oh Vinnie what to do so hard Vinnie to consult and he said to me after he heard about everything that we're doing he said the guy you want is Noman from RGA so RJ is another huge ad tech company but he's been there over 10 years Diana and you're never gonna get him and of course you know when anybody I will get him right so call nom nom on he comes to the office meets with me and our co-founder and I'm pitching I'm pitching so hard right and he looks at me and he goes you know you have a good idea but I'm not leaving so I said okay why don't you think about it right there's a lot of things that gonna happen and you know and and I want you to think about what we're proposing so just go home and think about it so about a week later I reach back out and he's like you know Dianna you're a really nice person I think you've got a great idea but I'm not leaving leaving RJ I've been here over 10 plus years and I'm just not going and I said alright so just meet me for dinner and just hear me out and what were you thinking at that moment where you've sort of on the fly or did you think if he says no I'm gonna take him for dinner and I have this big plan no I mean I really thought I'm gonna convince him to come over I mean I really thought that he was the right person and I was gonna do everything to recruit him so I took him out to dinner and I remember I was sitting there and pitching pitching again pitching her pitching hard and he looks at me and he goes Danna you know really I'm just not interested at this time you know you're too small startup and I'm not gonna do it and you know I and I probably shouldn't have said it but I did I looked at him and I said you're making the stupidest mistake of your life that's when I said you were making a stupidest dumbest mistake of your life and he looked at me like I was crazy and I said nobody's gonna ever walk into your life and offer you the deal that I just gave you no one and ten years from now you'll still be at r/ga making maybe a 2% raise or a 4% raise you're over a year and at the end you're gonna see us blow up and you're gonna regret this opportunity so I'm going to ask you again to rethink I love your confidence and he said okay this is what I'll do I said what do you want to do he goes let's how about I watch you guys for a little bit I said actually I kind of like that idea I said why don't you come to some of our meetings and in a few months if you really don't want to do it what loss do you really have just watch my team watch what's coming and watch what we're selling watch our revenue numbers I'm going to give you access to all of it fully transparent but at that point you had no platform you were doing it the kind of place where you are still okay now we had actually made one platform me and my co-founder by ourselves with an outside development company and it was messed up and this is when we had realized we need somebody that can speak that language because neither one of us understood developers there were strange breed to us and so we didn't understand the language how they worked I said watch us for a little bit and so he did so what I've ended with every client meeting I had which we had a ton back then right and they were with major companies I contacted no one I said you know what join the meeting join the calls we have right now with Volkswagen without E and I you know throw out these names out there so then he heard the millions that were making right just in a very short amount of time that he's watching us a few months he's seeing the revenues go up I'm sharing my revenues would I I'm sharing the whole bottom line I'm sending him exactly how profitable we are and then basically after a few months he's like I'd be stupid not to make this deal I know it thank you very much was he worth it he was I mean it was just you know we blossomed we learned a lot as a team and it wasn't like it was perfect right from the get-go I think he needed to learn how each of the operations worked with each of the other teams and we you know the operations team our account team our sales team our campaigns team our search team all also had to learn how the development would actually play in terms of being able to scale the rest of our operations so then if he come in and build an engineering team that he loved exactly so he built a small initially it was a small engineering team and our thought was this engineering team was just gonna be internal to us right at the end so there were two things that had happened we wanted him to be internal to us to build the platforms that we needed in order to scale the advertising right so how do we a hundred ads in five minutes versus you know fifty hours right how do we produce all those assets and was that your goal from the start is or did that sort of evolve as you saw what the platform could do yeah so it started evolving and really what it was was each of the team members were really frustrated with parts of their jobs right it was like Diana it's taking way too long to QC all these ads we need something that actually allows us to QC in a streamlined process Diana we don't want to screen shoot anymore we want PDF filing basically where all of it is screen shot within seconds time so as we're actually fixing all the different situations that each team members having in terms of the operational part of what makes their job really not engaged for them or how difficult it was for them that's when we would go to no Mons team and say okay there's five people on that team they're all complaining about the same thing I need you guys to enter this into that platform that you're building right now you're doing an internal research yeah so it was our internal research of our agency that basically told our tech team what to develop so that they could actually produce those things for what was challenging for the internal team you said there was some pain involved in being a self-funded what were you referring to this is where I feel like it's great when I come to events like this and everybody talks about you know being the visionary and being such an incredible CEO and kind to your people and you're so compassionate and all the things that I think every CEO wants to do but when you don't have any money and everybody has a problem suddenly your compassion goes away I mean as much as I would like to say that there is a difference between a start-up CEO and a mature company CEO if somebody funded me of course I'd be like oh I have all the money in the world yes you take an extra vacation yes you can you know I'll pay for you to go out for another two weeks these are all the things I want to do of course I want to do it but I'm limited with the resources that I have so it that has been a very difficult journey right I like to ask people what what comes first does a great culture result in a successful company or do you need a successful company to create the great culture you always wanted to have that question drives me nuts I'm a certified coach right so obviously I I've done 360s of course I know actually how to do this right I know how to what employment engagement is all about but at the end when you were the one that's on the line and you got to support a team of 60 and make sure payroll happens for everybody you got to do what it takes and it's sometimes not compassionate I'm sorry as compassionate as you want to be sometimes you can't be a hundred percent during that time and so and I said this to my co-founder because he always pulls me back sometimes and she's always the one that gets me grounded is and I hate to say but it's true but everybody said Steve Jobs was a jerk right she had the most innovative company that was so successful that had all the money in the world but he was a jerk and to me I don't know if that was because he started Apple that mentality of that founder is very different than one that actually is assigned by a board yeah how do you deal with retention in the company we do have what we do is we do give out equity rights and what that means is 80% of our company company employees have equity rights to constellation agencies so if there's any type of buyout in the future they would actually cash out as well with those equity rights is the 80% based on their tenure or something like that no we don't do it that way we really I mean I make it pretty much performance-based right okay and so it's a reward it is what it is and really you know how much that they're contributing into the car any that we all feel like we want to retain that a player so that it has a lot to do with that but I've learned a lot from that experience and just recently actually to be honest because to me I'm so passionate about you know our company right and I live breathe and sleep consolation and it's probably a sickness but it is super I am and so when people have left me in the past I was really insulted I mean you're not sure mic-check it personally I took it personally it's Benny still with you so Vinnie is not he was always just a consultant but Noman is still with me yeah what I find interesting is somebody said to me recently Diana this is just their job to them don't you understand that this is just a job they're not even thinking about the equity rights they don't know when you're gonna sell at the end this is job and you need to actually make it engaging for them enough to stay and I'm like I buy them food Tuesdays and Thursday we have all the medical benefits there are we have city bikes we have Metro passes we we buy $800 worth of Amazon food each week I put in a bevvy machine with sparkling one what more do I have to do and they're saying you just have to keep coming up with ways to engage each employee and it's gonna be different from each person's perspective so it's something that I'm still trying to figure out do you relate to that cat yeah sure and I mean I would say it's the they want to leave at the end of the day feeling valued and so finding a way to do that is gonna be what you're describing which is give them interesting work give them clarity of what that job is and then you know it sort of started snowballing from there we don't have a lot of time but I wanted to cover a couple of things before we let you go one is it's such a technical product and a lot of people don't get involved in this aspect of you know marketing could you give us an example of a typical client and kind of walk us through how they use your program do you have to be a large company to do this or those large companies doing a local version of this that would be affordable to smaller companies as well yes so it can be localized and it can be much smaller as I said before we made a self-made self-serve platform you can do it yourself and realize there's people out there there and want to do it themselves so we have what's called managed services we can do it all for you or you can do it yourself so if you have a marketing team that's already in-house and you already have a hundred and twenty people then basically they would go onto the platform and they would just basically say I want a search fanners I want social banners I want display banners I want Facebook ads I want website banners and they'd be able to produce all those assets within minutes time and they would be pre-templated so how it works with the bigger manufacturers is they want the branding right so their biggest concern is if you have so many advertisers out there advertising for all separate locations of our brand then its brand compliance is a mess right because every agency is going to use their own interpretation of the brand guidelines if they even use the brand guidelines sometimes they don't every font is different the designer does it different the colors are different now it's not consistent at all it's like looking at my McDonald's ad you know that it's McDonald's whether in your Houston you're in China you're in Japan you know it's a McDonald's ad but if you don't have that brand consistency now you you you booze brand identity and so what we're saying is we can keep it brand compliant but allow you to localize that ad based on the location of where you are so if you want to make it in Chinese and Hindi if you want to put an offer I want to offer a hundred dollars for this product just for my location now you can do all of that and still have that brand consistency do you have competition now there's nobody that's doing it in this thing I mean literally nobody and I have had big giants call me up and said we have all the data in the world we can now target a woman in a blue dress at two o'clock in the afternoon in Central Park right you have all the data in the world but where is the creative to go along with that that's why they needed us to actually produce the creative assets for the data that's actually out there so we're having this conversation at a wise annual strategic growth forum you're here because you're part of the latest class of winning women can you give us some sense of what it's meant to you oh my gosh it means everything to me that e Y has picked us to be a part of this event and and to be a part of 2019 winning women I didn't realize what it was exactly but the most interesting thing I found in this entire experience is I've lost some friends in this journey you know the last three and a half years and it's not even the last three and a half years because I've always been really fiercely ambitious right and I've always had this fire in me ray and now it even burns bigger and it's much bigger and so you most women couldn't understand neither and and I think my friends have always sort of questioned my ambition right like is it really worth sacrificing everything else you know you know you're not even showing up to our friends events right now because you're putting your the job always ahead of a lot of things and sure I was in the 2019 winning women conference with all the women that were chosen this year and I'm hearing the same craziness coming out of their mouths that it's been coming out of mine and I'm looking at them and I go oh my gosh were so similar right like we're twinning today all of a sudden I'm in a room full of women that sound just like me I should get bigger and bigger I could see how lonely that life could be because you no longer can express all your thoughts and feelings and your stress one you can't do it with your employees you can't do it with people within your own company and then my friends I couldn't do it with them my husband is fantastic I do you know rely on him and he's a super ly super super supportive but at the end there's not a lot of people out there that can understand and to have a room full of women now alumni zand people not not only understand me but they are Who I am inside that's an incredible journey to go together with and a tribe I mean II why is created a tribe for me it's awesome Diana leave thank you so much for taking the time to join us and share your story it's an amazing experience [Music] Michelle bond rossik thank you so much for joining us tell us about bond technologies what is the company do well we're actually in such an exciting space right now bond technologies started out as a deployment company and now really specializes in network infrastructure and wireless and that's a space right now that's pretty exciting a lot of unique technology that's touching Wi-Fi like never before tell us what you're doing specifically one of the reasons that we started bond technologies was because there was a gap in an a services company that was focused more on the solutions for a customer you know you have your carriers you have your bars and they have their purpose and that business drives circuits if you're a carrier the equipment of your bar but there wasn't anybody really focusing on being agnostic and giving them a solution that was right for them so that's where we came in thought we could do it a lot better than the way it was being done they're really focusing on the customers needs becoming experts and advising them they want to run their business but networks Wi-Fi very critical to a business and now it's so exciting look at what's happening with technology on Wi-Fi I don't know what you're referring well think about if you if you go into even a restaurant today it's expected to have Wi-Fi right I mean everybody wants to log on they want to be in touch these restaurants are turning to Wi-Fi too to satisfy their customers and it's going to stop further because now you can start collecting information and kind of understanding the foot traffic through Wi-Fi of where your customers are coming in where their dwelling where they're spending their time do I need more staff based on how many feet people are showing up at what times understanding how often they come being able to ask them to log in and learn a little bit more about them and be able to send them messaging Couponing that's really relevant to who the restaurant chain is where it gets really compelling right so if one one restaurant knows that you've been there and then you're going to go to another one at another one they can use that intelligence from the Wi-Fi to better serve you in the next location is that right absolutely and especially I have multiple brands you can really understand what locations they're going to what foods they like how far they're coming from and might you serve them a discount code to get them to come in if they're walking by can you do that do you need to give somebody a discount if they show up every week are you really trying to transition that infrequent user that shows up once to once a month and try to get them to come one more time a month that's gonna increase your revenue but can you reach them when they're not in the restaurant if they're not on your Wi-Fi that well once they've logged in and you've captured that information you know who they are I mean you can even get it down if they're logging into through certain social medias sharing who they are allowing you to see who they are and your responsibility is to give them relevant content nothing annoying it's important that you said that is that there's a responsibility on either side absolutely in terms of the data that you're talking about collecting obviously everyone's aware that that data is being collected when you go to a website it's it's a social exchange these days they understand but I don't think of it this is my lack of expertise but I don't think of that happening just signing in on Wi-Fi but you're telling me the same thing happens if I go into Starbucks you accept the terms I'm I'm saying not everybody has embraced the technology a lot of the larger corporations surely have figured out that they want to understand who their guests are they want to make good decisions about the future menus that they have who the next generation is going to be coming into their stores and they can do that without having people go to their website they can do it through what customers showing up to do is give customers an incentive together and a great experience if you want somebody to get on your Wi-Fi you better make sure it's stable there's a lot of things that people are doing on Wi-Fi that you know without the right network it's not going to be a good experience and they're not going to go back who else is doing this I'm sure it's not just restaurants that you're working with well I think anybody that's got customer service customer Hospitality's it really is a great example a mall is a great example where you have people coming any kind of brick-and-mortar you know it applies to auto industries where people going out on my Lots and and hovering other here in the trucks they didn't buy though so maybe I'll and you hang out at the auto store or the auto shops a lot it never occurred to me I've signed into Wi-Fi at an auto dealer what's the incentive why do I do it perhaps you want to go ahead and learn more about the car you can log on their website or log on their Wi-Fi and get more information maybe they do our code that would have prompt you to do it right absolutely not to mention the kids are sitting there waiting for mom and dad all day long as they stroll around here kid here's my here's my phone get on the Wi-Fi how did you get into this business I actually call it an entrepreneurial Caesar you know I was really lucky when I got into IT services I had a great mentor back in the 90s and he he taught me that if you if you were good to your customers if you were honest if you were really trying to solve problems for them you would be successful and they were a great company and in line with you know sort of how my parents raised me but then they got acquired and there was some differences in the new company that just wasn't in line with what were you doing in that company I was running a sales team for them so you know I waited about a year for for things to get better and they doubled down on what I thought was bad so yeah I left the company I think within a month when was this 2006 and December and then started bond technologies January 1st not a lot of time to think about a name so it's not real creative what was the opportunity you saw obviously a lot has changed since 2006 well you know the company that I work like I said they really let us build sort of our own PNL we saw a niche out there for services to help companies build networks it was getting more complex they didn't have the in-house resources they needed somebody that they trusted not just somebody who was wanting to sell them equipment that was gonna get them a rebate at the end of the year but a real service that was you know more purpose based kind of like being a mechanic I hate taking my car and they tell me I need five hundred dollars worth of stuff and I don't know better I kind of wanted to be the mechanic for Wi-Fi and be right with the customer be honest with them and be fair did you know what an important element data would be at that point I did not I mean we started the company right before the iPhone and it's been an amazing evolution for our company for the industry I look at you know Wi-Fi before and what it meant hey I just want to connect I want to send an email now it's I want to watch a movie I want to send updates to labels on a shelf or a two-hour flash only on the rows that are athletic shoes that's over Wi-Fi I want to allow frictionless payment so nobody has to go to a register oh by the way my point-of-sale systems they're on Wi-Fi so how'd you innovate over these years to to get to where you are now what was the did you have a vision or did you change it every day well you know when you're augmenting those carriers and bars and the OEMs we built partnerships and really were at the forefront of what cutting edge technology was needing to be installed we're a smaller company we have awesome engineers and we could learn that quicker than some of these companies could cascade out to their organization how big are you we're big we have about 80 engineers and a couple hundred what we call Tech's smart hands across the country so but we'll be a lot bigger there's so many things that we're doing now which is exciting is not only are we developing this these awesome Wi-Fi networks we've made some great partnerships with some software analytic companies to be able to build analytic solutions with some OEMs that have some great IOT devices that we can leverage and a lot of different data points to build some pretty interesting information and solutions for customers how have you financed your growth we have bootstrap this 100% ourselves it's been exciting impressive has that have you wavered on that at all have there been moments when you thought we need to bring in you know where we're absolutely there right now interesting that you should ask we've kind of built this awesome machine and we'd love to bring somebody in to put some gas in it so we can really scale it and and grow doubles because do you think the opportunities are greater right now than they ever have been opportunities are greater we moved not just from a service company but built our own managed service platform to be able to monitor and manage the networks that we're building and all this technology that's connecting that's really important that it's constantly running you are in the session earlier with Chuck Robbins from Cisco talking about you know we don't even know what's going to be connecting to our networks in the future so it's been evolving it's fun to see that to work meet people like the entrepreneurs here that are making cool products that we can incorporate into our ecosystem and and sell to our customers to solve for some of these business needs they have you're here at the ey strategic growth forum and part obviously because you've been a member of the winning women program I think you were in the class of 2015 are you here this year specifically because you are thinking about the potential of taking on an investor I come every year for so many reasons certainly that the conversations around investing is been a high percentage this year but the conversations to just understand these new companies that are existing how they were created what are their challenges or where are they heading especially around a technology perspective some of the solutions we've developed and partnered have been because of conversations with new companies that are going in a unique direction and want somebody to help develop solutions for them Karen you've been through the process of talking to investors do you have any thoughts lessons learned warnings cautions there's a lot of work it's a lot more work than I could ever have imagined what happened three with her it's sort of a theme lately of all the in some of the talks I've heard as well of all the preparation time that goes into just being ready to even have a conversation with an investor and I think that's time that I have never heard anyone be warned about but it's really you know has a big impact on the company for sure yeah I've been very fortunate I've met some wonderful women through the ey program back in Chicago who has done this a lot who's giving me guidance really assisting me through the process and making it less intimidating and less overwhelming because it can be and it seems to be getting easier and easier to have these conversations and really understand my value and go how I I'm getting people excited and it's kind of turned the tables and I'm so so grateful for that for you is it mostly about getting the capital that'll allow you to grow are you looking for a strategic partner that might be able to open doors or take you places you haven't been yet yeah I mean I really want that money to come with a strategic partner that has done it before can give some guidance I think our team has all the capability in the world but we're looking to double triple over the next few years and would love never turn away anybody who's done it before and says like that I think I know a few things that can that can help you do you have competitors you know what I found is there are folks that are good at designing and and engineering things and they're usually with the big corporations they charge a lot of money and a lot of them outsource some outsource that work to us that's who our customers are and they leverage our capabilities and expertise they know they can't be great at everything they're trying to get product offerings out the door for themselves and they go to third parties who can help them develop those wrapped offerings and then there are companies that just manage networks we do both so we really have kind of formed a company that's in a space that there's not a lot of us in there we have a nationwide footprint how do you find your employees we have our own in-house recruiting it's a tight market it really is and I think we've done a great job in grooming and building our workforce doesn't stay for a while that stays for a long time good yeah and gives them a career path they get to see a lot of cool technology I mean that they do a lot of travel but they're not sitting at the same environment every day just maintaining it you know tweaking here and there they're seeing new technology a lot of proof of concepts that we work with and it's exciting to them so yeah it's been fun that's great what are you doing or what do you think works well to keep your culture I think what works well is we have a fantastic onboarding process and and a great diligence when we hire people we hire and we literally go through our values and talk to them and ask them to give us examples of how that applied to them and because in our industry it is very competitive for these resources like the our industry NIT and Technology and engineering it's very tight out there right now so having that small family feel and that flexibility for them you know I've always had a note door policy our leadership has and when you can call and say look I need some time off for some family issues and there are no repercussions and things can be made or a call gets made in the middle of the night because somebody was in an accident and they need help with the insurance I don't know they can't get through that that that's why people want to come work for us to maintain that small family feel even as we grow that we do care about them and we try to find hire people that are of like minds with us you worry at all about the impact on your culture of bringing in an outside investor who may might point you in a different direction absolutely but I'm more excited about the ideas they can bring to us you know there's there's always gonna be that risk and I'm trying and that's why - Karen's point it's a long process because you do want to get to know these people you kind of want to understand who they are you're there your next husband at least for three years five years whatever the plan might look like so yeah I think that's it's a little concerning but if you go through the right process and I think the reward is bigger you know I've always said I'd rather be 75 percent of a watermelon than a hundred percent of a grape do you feel you're in an industry where you have to grow well I feel like I just spent 13 years getting us to a position for that growth building out a company that had a great reputation that became expertise would you even have the option though of saying you know what this is we've been pretty darn successful I'm comfortable in my life as it is and I don't need to take on an outside investor I want to just keep going the way things are no because it to a former Olympic Swim trials no I think that I see the potential of where it could grow because of the effort that company the the people that work at Vaughn have put in the last 13 years to build a reputation to build a product this is what we've worked for to get to this pool to get to this point to really scale do I want to do Dunston but I want to stop at the 90 yard line I'd rather see it get kicked across the goal line Karen what would your point with the Olympic swimmer well I think there's a lot of ambition that is driving Michelle and people like her people like you right and it's not as straightforward as saying like oh I'm not gonna grow I'm happy it's not it sort of doesn't even go there it's not a question well I I didn't mean to imply that either and I didn't mean to suggest no I don't want to grow but there are trade-offs and you know in some cases you can say I'm happy to grow organically I like being my own boss I don't want to bring in but sometimes I think it's hard to not grow for starters and so if you can do it better with a little bit of infusion because as we talked about you know earlier today it's you can't always do all the things you want or know you should do if you're cash-strapped and I think when you're growing you're always investing in the company and yeah therefore you don't have a pile of money sitting on to be able to pay your employees bonuses for example when you know you especially when you're funding it yourself and there's not a pot of gold just sitting here that I oh okay I'll take a little bit more out of there yeah or you want to raise right go it's yeah it cost a lot to get where we are also I think it really depends on the industry there may be some industries where you can say I want to just continue to grow organically but in certain industries and yours might be one of them if you you know rein it in someone else is gonna come along and do it you know you may not even be able to maintain what you have if you haven't continued to invest and expand absolutely well you look at I'm sure you experienced with having such sought-after employees that the the you know raises are real thing and they're constant and so how do you keep up with that as you grow you know you have to acknowledge it you really do and you have to unfortunately build that into to the customer when you know we've never claimed to be the cheapest out there never will be but when people do analysis on quotes versus cost of ownership and what it's delivered at we went all the time so we try not to really go in price wars we try to discuss what you're going to get for what you're paying and the customer recognized the value of that so have you met someone here who you think might be the person who the next message you need oh gosh yeah there's there's so many conversations I've had no here yeah it's really exciting actually conversations you know that I didn't expect interest that I didn't anticipate from people that you know didn't even consider so yeah it's been really exciting Michelle crossings congratulations and thank you I really do thanks so much thanks for listening everybody this episode was produced by Jess Stuber on founder of blank word productions remember if you liked what you heard tell your friends tell your enemies 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