← Confessions of an Implementer
Confessions of an Implementer
S2E49 | Why Small Businesses Are Losing the AI Race and What to Do About It with Brian Sulka
00:51:46
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- [00:00]
A
Once people get comfortable with the idea that, hey, I didn't develop the software, it was developed by AI and it was tested by AI and we have security that was tested by AI and I feel comfortable deploying that. Once that, like, hurdle is overcome, I think it'll open up a new opportunities for custom software.
- [00:25]
B
Welcome to Confessions of an Implementer. I'm your host, Brian Hogan. We share unique stories of EOS implementers and the companies they've transformed to give you a rare glimpse into the successes and challenges of the system in action. Let's jump in. All right, so, Brian, first and foremost, thank you for taking the time this morning to jump on to share a little bit about your background, your life, your experiences, and see if we can get some good wisdom out of this.
- [00:51]
A
Thanks, Ryan. Thanks for the invitation. Seen the talent that you've had on here. So it's a high bar.
- [00:59]
B
There's been some good ones. And we were kind of talking about this before, which is like, I've had quite a few conversations, but never one with an implementer that has such a foundational background in technology. So I think today's going to be a really kind of interesting story, interesting journey of, like, how we get from kind of the technology background and then, and then into eos. But walk me through it. Was this a passion very young, where hardware and software was your thing, or did you stumble upon it?
- [01:32]
A
Yeah, I think if it's all right, I'll just kind of give you the overall background as to who I am. And I grew up north of Atlanta thinking Bill Gates and Steve Jobs and software were going to change the world. And I love those big ideas. And that passion took me through five software startups. And some of the software startups were successful. I've been in industry such as sales, configuration, software, energy, retail, manufacturing optimization, software, procurement, energy, retail. Some of them were successful. One of them we sold for $90 million. I was employee number six. Others were just really good stories that I'd love to talk about. And at the end of the day, I burned out. So I went back to school, got an mba, started leading larger and larger teams. And then I did something completely foreign and went into frozen fruit. Built that company together to be the country's largest frozen fruit importer. COO of $125 million in company until we sold it. Once we sold it, then someone handed me the book Traction in the year 2018. I read that book, 2020, I grabbed a couple clients. 2021, I started doing this full time. So along the way I learned a couple things and my passion never really landed in code. It never really landed in frozen fruit. It was about growing and managing really great leaders. It was about really great ideas and getting those ideas to the surface. And it was about executing, breaking down the barriers for those great ideas. So that's why I do eos to avoid the burnout and I use those tools.
- [03:11]
B
I'd love to talk about these startups a little bit. And one thing you just mentioned, which is really interesting, is it sounds like you went through a couple startups and then you decided to go get your mba. Now that's interesting. Now did you not that you know everything because like, obviously we all have something to learn. One thing that, that I discovered as I was going through the University of Maryland was I was learning more operating a business than I was like them teaching me about market strategies and things like that. So what when you went back to school, like, were you like Billy Madison with your legs above the desk and you're like, I've been here, I've done this. Or, or did you have a ton
- [03:49]
A
to learn, still a ton to learn? You know, I was never short of ambition, I was never short of the drive. I always had the want. And so I would start something without the foundational information beforehand. So it was almost like I had gone through this several times. And then you go back to school and you say this is way it should have been if everything was perfect. Right. So I kind of took the difficult route to get there. But you get exposed to so many different ideas and so many different people. People I still stay in touch with. I had coffee with one of them last weekend. Yeah, always go the difficult route. Yeah, that's not what I recommend.
- [04:31]
B
What were some of your biggest, like learnings from the startup world? So like, it sounds like you're like you really kind of cut your teeth coming up this path, then realized there was some burnout, went through the MBA and started a different chapter. What were some of those kind of early lessons or takeaways that you had from that high paced startup environment?
- [04:57]
A
I remember where we were in the economic cycle and economic history to really understand that we were early in the days going through the dot com bubble and so you could walk on air. If you had anything that ended in a dot com, you had, you know, 20x multiple on it, right. And you walk out and that's your experience for your first software startup. And you think life is just like this. All you gotta do is touch something and then people will just pay you for It. And so when you run into success that early, it can be a little bit damaging because you realize that it is hard work and there is a business behind it. There are things called investors. And those investors do want things like their capital and return on investment. Then you start understanding that, you know, because you have, you know, stock options that convert the value of those stock options. Really you can't calculate until, you know, much later. And so a lot of like, ideas that get the excitement and momentum rolling. Reality hits. And when reality hits, the dot com bubble comes to a bust. And then the real work begins. And mod, our visionary talks about this. He says the real work begins when the excitement ends. And it is, once you do a good software startup, doing the others is a little bit more.
- [06:30]
B
It feels like we're kind of living in a similar ish environment right now. Except if you replace.com with AI, we might have something. Are there, are there signs or things that you're seeing now where you're like, there's a lot of similarities and if I were playing in this space or in here now, like I would, these are the things I would be thinking about. Or do you think it's different this time?
- [06:53]
A
In some ways it's similar. In some ways it's different. I think one of the things that was really neat about dot com, the web 1.0 was you could have an idea, hire someone to put it on the Internet and be able to deliver that product or service in front of people and be able to get pretty high ROIs. As long as you could do E commerce, as long as you had a shopping cart behind was early. Then the SAS model kind of took that away a little bit. Now I think the platform, in order to be able to be a good AI person and differentiate yourself, the skill set has to be a little bit harder. It's got to be a little bit deeper. You can't just go and just hire a few engineers and bring something to the marketplace. The barrier to entry is lower. We've globalized the economy, the world. The competition for the talent pool is much more diverse. And it just seems like it's a much more challenging environment than it was on the first time around.
- [07:56]
B
Do you think that, do you think that AI. I don't know if it's the winners or the losers, but do you think that, that AI is a. Is an enhancement to existing systems, existing softwares, existing technology companies in which they can better enable and empower the solutions that they're providing? Or do you think AI is truly this Kind of independent thing where there's going to be, you know, thousands of successful AI startups that are kind of independent from the conglomerates that are adding the efficiencies.
- [08:33]
A
It's early to know, it's early to tell, but I don't see a lot of AI startups coming into the fold and a lot of discussions on AI startups. I see companies that are existing companies that have budgets for AI hiring talent, bringing them in house and using it as a way of changing the dynamics of the. I don't see a lot of AI startups coming into the fold unless they've got deep industry experience. That means you'll see them come in under H Vac, we do H Vac AI or you know, some verticals. They'll align with verticals like that. But I haven't seen the way that we did in the dot com bubble which was hey, I sell dog food, let me put it on the Internet. All of a sudden you've got, you know, $100 million company, not it. It seems to, you have to have some resonance with an existing business or industry. I think, and I fear is happening is the differentiation between the people who have the people, the large scale companies who have the talent, have the money and can attract it and can make those investments, they're winning. And on the very bottom feeder pool you're seeing some people who have innovative ideas and are good at technology being able to come up with some ideas to be able to leverage those. And the small to mid sized companies are getting caught in the squeeze. I don't see a lot of companies being able to leverage it, leverage AI the way that the large companies are. I think that's a huge opportunity. I don't see, you know, AI, the portion of where we are feels like it looks a little bit like cogs. You can do something with AI and then you got to manually do something with AI and then bridge the thing across and you got to develop software to do that. You've got to develop things to bring all this together in order to get your value stream, map cost down, down. And I don't see small to mid sized companies being able to make that, make that investment or have the resources to do that. Ones that are, are the ones that are winning are the large scale players. So I see a lot of people using AI for augmenting the work that they do, creativity, thought, partner work, but I don't see a lot of reduction of cost. I think that for the right company, I think that that could be a huge Opportunity. We teach, teach you how to use AI for your specific industry, using your specific problems. I mean, remember we used to use all sorts of frameworks to try to optimize the way data flowed back and forth. AI has that opportunity, but I don't see it being played to industries. It's either coming in through large scale ERP companies. Other software vendors are picking it up and they're taking the capital or taking the investment. But I don't see anybody addressing the small midsize market because you work with
- [11:43]
B
a lot of these companies. So when you talked about kind of the squeeze like that, the SMBs out there, the five to $50 million companies, the ones that like really can't devote a ton of resources towards this stuff. Like when you go in, are you having them think about how do we have some small pickups? So you talked about like the thought partnership, maybe some efficiencies gained from GPT and some of the other kind of existing platforms out there. Are you having them just think through the experimentation of that and sort of the enhancement. Are you advising that they go out and find kind of off the shelf AI platforms that can help bring those efficiencies in? Or you like, hey, listen, there's these things called agents and there are companies that build agents. For 7,500 to 10,000 bucks. You should go have somebody build you an agent. How do you think about that?
- [12:44]
A
First off, most of the companies that are looking for EOs out of the gate are not in a position to be able to start thinking about a new project. So the first thing is you got to get unstable. And then with some companies it is all right, who in the room is accountable for new technologies or it. What are you doing about AI? Then you start developing rocks around those AIs, those. And usually what ends up happening is those rocks end up saying, we are working with some, we've got relationships with some really great software vendors. Usually they're in your space. They've been, they've developed SaaS platform for your industry. And a lot of times those are starting to take advantages of AI. And you can latch into those, but you got to have time to be able to focus on it. Those become rocks. In other cases, we're seeing we need to reduce our cost obstacle. You know, call centers are the best one. You know, I'm, I'm call, I've got people staffed on the weekends and they're only getting three calls a week. We want them to be free. We want to be able to, you know, reduce that we think AI is a great opportunity here. That is the rock is go out, find a vendor who is doing this or find examples of people who are doing this and then come up with another rock, which is, is it feasible? If so, then how are we going to do it? So I think that those are those two things. The other one that you discussed, which is, requires a lot of technical prowess. I just don't think that a lot of the companies have that right now. They just don't have the ability. Agents are so new. They don't have the ability to go in and say they don't understand the risk associated with them. You know, they're high liability. They're. It's too intimidating for a lot of people.
- [14:28]
B
So what, we talked a little bit about this before we jumped on the call and this, this idea of like a big ideas coach, like, what is, what does that mean? And the reason I like this topic is because, like, we're talking about AI. These are very, very big ideas. And a lot of this sounds like your sweet spot. So let's walk through that a little bit.
- [14:48]
A
Yeah. So when I work with leadership teams, you've got to get to where they have some freedom, they have some thoughts, they have the ability to think about and dream about what their future looks like. And when they do, sometimes they come in with these ideas. I want to be able to do this. I want to go after this industry. I want to be able to, you know, we've got this hurdle or this obstacle in the industry. I think we can find a way around it. But they've got these ideas and this ambition, but they don't have the time or energy or they haven't thought through it enough to be able to say, is it something that I have confidence saying we should spend time on? So a lot of times in the session room, I will help drive them through some activities to help get to a point to where we as a leadership team can agree, yeah, this is a great idea, or not. Some of these tools that I leverage or use are things that I've just picked up along the way, but they're facilitation tools. They're things like, let's mind map what you're talking about and we'll create mind maps on the wall. It's things like making sure that you can ask the right questions. Right. It's a little bit of going back to first principles. Sometimes you've got people in the room that are too worried about chasing the end destination, that they can't see the goals that are in front of them. So teach gap and gain concepts. Borrow concepts from a strategic coach. We use techniques like storytelling in the future. If in three years this were to happen, what would you tell your present self? How did you solve it? We do things like pre mortem meetings. You know, let's set some time up. You know, let's assume it's failed. What were the causes of the failure? Suspension of time, moonshot or blue sky concepts. We'll use some of those in the room. Hero's journey. We'll do things like inversion principle. You know, you know you're planning a party and you assume it's a disaster. Let's. Great. Let's run to the fire. It's a disaster. That's great. Why was it a disaster? Oh, you know, we burned the cake. We, you know, had a fire over here. People didn't show up on time.
- [17:09]
B
Great.
- [17:10]
A
Let's protect against those things so that the party is successful. So we'll just. I'll borrow a couple concepts like that. And with the weight of the room just kind of meanders to a point where we can describe what it is clearly and the room has confidence that they're ready to go and then they can create the rocks or whatever they need to do to take that idea around. It's sort of that idea that there's ether and their ideas are somewhere in the ether. And our job in the room is just to go up and grab those ideas. They're waiting for us to pull them down, take them down and bring them down to where we can start discussing and talking about them. So a little bit of my background in software, because there's. In software you can visualize things that seem almost impossible because the barrier of entry is just code. How long would it take to develop that? You can think through obstacles or challenges, things that would normally stop everybody. And you could say, how do I get around that? Right. And so it was a little bit trained like that. But these are some of the tools or techniques that I use in the room.
- [18:18]
B
Help get the higher level, I guess, big ideas. Like how do you know when, when the room, the team, the company is ready for those ideas? Like one of the big things that, that we talk about a lot, especially with the visionaries, is like it's 20 big ideas a day. And like the, the whole reason the. I mean, there's a lot of reasons the integrator exists, but one of those reasons is like, hey, great ideas, do not tell anybody but me right now. How, when you're sitting in in this session room, like, how do you know it's like that? We're ready to take that, we're ready to do some sort of exercise.
- [18:52]
A
You got to look at the team. The team will tell you, right. The team is either exhausted because they haven't gotten out of their current work. They haven't learned to delegate yet. They're not available for it. And sometimes the ideas are so big and so ambitious that the team just has to like, the idea of the idea is just scary and intimidating. And so some of those times you got to wait. You do have to wait a little bit of patience, right? But it goes back to the LMA section. Who in this room is going to be accountable? This idea. Let's talk about that. Are you comfortable leading that discussion? Let's see where your head is. Then you start fleshing out the ideas, and you see how mature the ideas are, how well they land, and you see how the team is reacting to them. I've been in meetings where the ideas are so bold and so big that there's just. It divides the room and we end up having to say it's a good idea, but we're not ready for it yet. Let's put it back on the issues list and figure out what we can do this quarter to help mature it so that when you come back, we got a roadmap. At least we got an idea. You can talk about it like you could talk to a fifth grader. You could simplify it. You could sell. You know, sometimes that work has to be done offline in order to be able to come in, be able to.
- [20:07]
B
When. When you see a team like it, you used one of these, or used the word like fear or, or. Or scary, like, what, what are some things. Maybe, maybe it's like tips and tricks, strategies that you use inside of a. Inside of a session room. But like, when you start to sense the fear, like, what are some ways. What are some ways that you can, like, get a team to kind of get over. Get over that emotion.
- [20:39]
A
As an implementer, you're always looking at the room with both a monocle and a telescope, right? You're looking at it at a different level so you can observe when people are sitting back in their seat, when people are not comfortable with it. And so at some point, we got to land to a point that we say, where's the business value? Sometimes that by itself becomes a rock. What would we do with this? I mean, it's an idea, but what's the street roi going to be about? That can you create an ROI statement that is your rock for the quarter. How much are you willing to invest in order to get out of it? And so at some point you find a way to cap the conversation to where it's not consuming the room, but at some point it's enough momentum to say, yeah, it's a good idea, we're not ready for it yet. Do some work on the back end and then come back to us.
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B
What was it used this word earlier? It was something breaker.
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A
Not. Not the barrier breaker.
- [21:36]
B
Yeah, barrier breaker.
- [21:38]
A
Yeah. Once you've got those big great ideas, then you've got to find a way to get past them, because the room, especially if they're not aligned on, yeah, this is what we're going to do. This is the idea that, hey, how are you going to actually accomplish this thing? What obstacles or hurdles do you get out of it? And how are we going to align the team to get past it? And so that's my background in software kind of naturally does that. Right. So the getting what you want tool, eos's getting what you want tool is great for that because it gets the team thinking, hey, here's the end result, let's back up. What are the steps that are necessary for it? And when it's done as a team activity, I've got huge whiteboards. So I'll draw it out and say, here's where we are, here's where we want to go. Let's back into it. People start to visualize the steps, the things that need to happen in order for that great big dream to come to reality. And then you can start to chunk it off and say, here's, here's this quarter, here's next quarter, here's the quarter. After you take this one, you take that one. And during that, we go back to first principles. Why are we doing this? What is the value of that? We'll ask questions, the five whys, clarify what is the issue we're solving, remind ourselves again of that. Something we forget about is the idea of building business cases behind something. If you were to fund this, if you were asking somebody to fund this, what would that business case look like? Sometimes it is go off and develop a business case and, you know, be able to convincingly sell the leadership team on that. Reframing the issue assumption, smashing. We'll go in there, let's talk about the assumptions, let's break them all together. So we. I use a couple tools in session to facilitate that conversation.
- [23:37]
B
What about, I don't know if I'VE ever shared this story on the podcast. One of the issues that I used to have in one of my companies, we'll just keep it as generic as possible, is I had this one leader and this one leader. We would talk about ideas, we would talk about new initiatives, things like that. We would all come together, we would figure those out, we'd create our rocks, we would all high five, we would turn around, walk out of the room, we come back, you know, 90 days later. And I used to have a leader that kind of had a different idea of like what that initiative was or what it should be. And they were often in left field. And when you, when you start to see stuff like that or you start to like when you're sitting in the session room as an implementer, you've always got this one person that's like, maybe not rowing in quite the same direction. Like, what's your, what's your strategy there?
- [24:38]
A
Especially if something is this big where you've got like three or four people working on it at the same time, there's usually one person who would be accountable for that, making sure that all the pieces are tied together. So it would be to create a rock that is the. Make sure that all, all the pieces come together. You balance a little bit. You want the creativity, you want the independent thinking, you want them to come up with ideas that challenge the group. Right. But on the other hand, at the end of the day, you got to be able to deliver something that is functional. That is what we said was inside of our mission. We're not producing a bunch of waste. And so it's for visionary type companies that are wanting to deliver stuff that is in that emerging technology or emerging space a little bit where happen more frequently. The way to handle that usually is to have one person who's accountable for the overall.
- [25:34]
B
Are you. And you talked about this a little bit earlier as well as this idea of like this idea of alignment and getting everybody kind of aligned behind the idea. Is there. Have you ever run into an instance where like everybody couldn't get aligned around that initiative and is like, does that ultimately come down to like, well, maybe that's, you know, right person, wrong seat or wrong person, right seat or whatever the case may be.
- [25:59]
A
Yeah. I mean, you think everybody, you love working with everybody until you put fire underneath them and say this is where we're going. That's when you. Then when the questions change and everybody's like, I didn't know this was going to be work. Yeah. I mean, people haven't Been challenged. You're putting them in front of them and they're learning new talents. Their ability to. Their ability and speed to learn comes into play. I mean, 90 days seems like a long time, but you're pushing the envelope. It's not that long. If you got to learn something, pick it up. Are you comfortable having conversations with vendors? I mean, who are you going to reach out to? How do you structure projects? All these things come out during that. And you realize which one of your leaders are capable of taking these abstract concepts that you're talking about and being able to put meat behind it. You got to be able to think abstractly and then be able to realize that these are the deliverables. And some people with that, you know, we teach Colby that fourth number implementer. Some people that are high with the implementer, they don't love those conversations. They don't love the, you know, I, you know, what are we talking about again? Kind of conversations. Those are the ones that are good at being able to say, just execute on this portion. Everybody has to figure out their role inside of it.
- [27:24]
B
I may. Oh, gosh, I'm a 2392395 is. Is my. My Colby. I should, I should. I should put it on my. I see a lot of people put it on their zooms. I should do that. So you said the implementer. The implementer side of it is like, doesn't want to continue to have the same conversations.
- [27:42]
A
So if you. The last. In Colby, that last number, the one that you're a five, I'm a two. My last number is a two. Right. I deal with abstract naturally. That's the kind of thing that when you're doing, especially in software, Right. That's one of the reasons software appealed to me is I like being able to talk about the abstract. I don't need to see it or to feel it in order for that to. I don't need to tangibly touch it in order for that to happen. And so that's why these big ideas, I love those big ideas, right. I play in that space mentally. It's like a gymnastics field for me. A lot of times you'll just sit there. I can process things inside that, inside that space. And some of the times they're ideas and sometimes they're not. And when you're in a really great leadership team, you've got some people who are good at that and some people are strong implementers and some people that are, you know, not high and implement. And so you need to have a combination because it's the people that are the higher implementers that are going to be the ones like, just break it down. What do we need to do this quarter? I need to see the product. I need to see, I need to see the software. I need to see what you're talking about. Break it down, put it in Excel. Let's break down what you're. I mean, you got to have the, you know, so the conversation doesn't land in the clouds. You got to have somebody who's sitting there saying, what are we delivering? And so you gotta be able to balance the room so that those voices are heard and we also deliver something. And so having one side of the conversation always go to the visionary and hear the visionary talk about the idea will burn out a team. Because at the end of the day you've gotta have the execution on it also.
- [29:26]
B
All right, quick break friends. Do you find it impossible to hire and retain top sales talent or worse, are you paying insane recruiter fees who are all using outdated hiring processes? Yeah, I was too at Hunt a Killer, we were spending hundreds of thousands on recruiter agency fees. And after I sold that company in 2025, I started Talent Harbor. And the whole vision here was to make sales recruiting accessible to small and medium sized businesses. Because the organizations that can hire and retain world class people are the ones that ultimately win. Most organizations rely on things like ZipRecruiter or LinkedIn and they get hundreds if not thousands of resumes. But we find that the best salespeople are already perfectly placed somewhere else. And that's why our approach is to go after them. And we do that through a business model called recruiting. As a service, we do not charge large commissions, we do not have success fees, we don't have contracts, we don't have long term engagements. And we become an extension of your team as expert sales recruiters. If you're tired of the same old recruiters and want to actually grow your sales team, check us out@talent harbor.com. that's Talent Harbor. T A L E N T H A R B O R dot com. Let's get your next sales superstar hired. Is your opinion that that like in a leadership team it is, it is very, is very balanced and, and I realize Colby is not about like, oh, too much is, is too good or too less is too bad or like it's very much something that, that is not right, wrong, good, bad. It's just, it's just the, the reality and what it is and there's, there's both positives and negatives on. On both sides. When you look at a leadership team, are you like, hey, in a perfect world, if we were. If we were to bring in Colby, in a perfect world, like, it just kind of balances. There's this equilibrium based upon, like, what everybody's Colby is. And the. The sum of those averages I like
- [31:30]
A
to have where people are completely complete opposites. They're very strong, they're very respectful, and they're complete opposites. And if you can achieve that, inside of the room, you got someone who is an advocate for saying, hey, we got to deliver something, and someone's saying, hey, can we just talk about this a little bit more and brainstorm as to what we could do? So you got to be able to have both. And to the. To the extent that you can still hold together a team that has opposite Colby's, I think you end up with better results. If you have a. A visionary and integrator relationship where they. The, you know, they're on other opposite sides of the Colby, you. I believe you get better results as long as they don't kill each other.
- [32:18]
B
That's like the. That's the key, the key to all
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A
of this, because they get so passionate and they're so entrenched in, you know, in the way that they think that the other person's like, get me out of here. I. These, these details, I don't need to hear about them anymore. The other person's like, but you've got to hear about them. That's how we're going to get it done. That's, you know, so there's. There's definitely a balance, and to the extent that you can get as far apart as possible, that's great. But, yeah, blending a team together, it's fun.
- [32:51]
B
And. And if you were to put four numbers together and let's say you were thinking. You were thinking specifically about the integrator, what would. And. All right, this is probably a tough question just because you said opposites, but maybe. Maybe it'll work like perfect. Integrator. What would their numbers be on Colby?
- [33:11]
A
What. What industry? Oh,
- [33:16]
B
I was about to say frozen food industry. We'll get. We'll get back to that. We're coming back to that story, by the way, because it sounds like a very fun, exciting story.
- [33:25]
A
What industry?
- [33:27]
B
Let's. Let's go with, like, business services.
- [33:29]
A
Business services. Are they delivering a product or is it consulting?
- [33:36]
B
Consulting.
- [33:37]
A
Consulting. So there's a team of consultants, and the integrator is accountable for delivering the product or service, which all they do is business consulting, right?
- [33:47]
B
Yes.
- [33:48]
A
So you would probably want to have moderate to high on that first number. The second number is. Let's see, you're going to want to have a low quick start. So that third number is going to be low. The fourth number is usually a lot of people on the. Believe it or not, most leadership teams are low when it comes to that implementer, that fourth score. So keep that low. So I would say 1, 2, 3, 4. I would say medium, high, low, medium. So on a scale of 1 to 10, you would go with about mid range, then high, follow through, low, quick start, and high and low.
- [34:37]
B
All right, I went 5, 9, 2, 4. Wait, what? Where did you go with that?
- [34:43]
A
That would be good.
- [34:44]
B
Got it. Okay. That was. That was theoretical, right?
- [34:50]
A
That was fun. Yeah. No, no, I mean, that's. That's part of. And you got to also look at what the team makeup looks like, right? Because if you've got a. If you've got a visionary who is always going out and wanting to bring in new deals and always saying, I know we do business consulting, but can we create a product out of that? Then you're going to want to. Some have someone who is a little bit higher quick start to be able to match that visionary. Because they're going to want to say, okay, yeah, let's do a pilot project before we roll it out. Visionary is going to say, no, let's roll it out next week. Visionary integrator is going to say, let me contact somebody who's done this before and see what we could come up with. But they're still going to be able to do that. Now, if you're purely business services, it's all about execution. It's doing the same thing over again. It's just about maximizing that consulting service. Those are your billable hours. It's all about removing roadblocks for those billable hours. And that's where you would have somebody just in that traditional one, someone who is lower. Quick start would be effective. It would be good for their industry. So I think it depends on the industry, depends on the situation, depends on the team. You can be effective in all of it. But those are the ones that I see.
- [35:58]
B
I like it. I like it. And I realized there was going to be an asterisk on it as I was asking the question. And it was a very selfish question because I was just. I'm curious now. I got to go back and look at my team's, Colby or everybody else's. But it kind of went to Your earlier point of, like, some of it depends a lot. Not just the other team, but also the visionary. So like, to be able to balance that visionary, that's probably one of the missing links in, in there. But the visionary is a 2-395-and- we just, we knew that part. So let's. I do want to talk about. It was frozen fruit, right? What, what? And it sounded like it was like hyper.
- [36:35]
A
Yeah. So I met a guy, no, the, he had a business. It was successful, had it for quite a while. And they were at, they were just at a level where they were growing and they wanted to be able to be the biggest. And so I met this guy and he's, you know, had a software division and he's like, I'm building my own, rolling my own custom software to make this thing happen. So had a small, small team, great family, great guy. He had his hands in the business. His wife ran the sales department. It was her business. And he's like, I just need help. And so I went over coo and we were able to do some pretty cool stuff. Rolled out some pretty cool technology, aligned the team, grew the team, and we ended up building it to where it was the country's largest. So we would import frozen fruit, mangoes. A lot of popular restaurant chains. If you go into frozen fruit section at your grocery store, a lot of that was the ones that was in there.
- [37:41]
B
What's like the, the, the biggest challenge in that business that like nobody thinks about in, in margins.
- [37:52]
A
Interesting. Oh yeah. Margins are razor thin. And anything dealing with food, margins are so thin. Yeah. Yeah. So I mean, there, there's always cool dynamics that come into play, right. I mean, you're, you're always, there's always these trade offs. Right. It's like, I've got a great source of being able to get this frozen mango. I've been getting it there for five years. Then all of a sudden there's a disease. There's a, you know, something. And so you have to be diversified. You've got to be able to always be able to pivot and pull from somewhere else because you've got a contract that's on the other side that is saying, hey, you know, I need this delivered. And so, you know, regulation is really high. Cost is really high. It's, it's, it's about execution, about being able to execute and keeping your prices down all the way along the chain. So that when we were rolling our own software, we had, we had developed it in a way that would enforce that to keep costs down along the way, just boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. Every, every time, you know, you're 3% over over here, you got to make it up over here. Storage costs are crazy. I mean, stuff is, you know, you don't know what would happen with tariffs. You don't know what would happen with, you know, FDA regis. You know, rules change. I mean, it's just, it's crazy. It's a really fascinating industry. It's a hard industry though.
- [39:21]
B
Did, did the software itself become like
- [39:25]
A
a,
- [39:28]
B
a true competitive advantage? Because like when you talked about a lot of these things, like anytime there's razor thin margins like it, it's all about execution like you said at that point. Because if you can't execute, then you're not getting your margins and if you're not like, you know, detail oriented. And I love what you talked about, like the software in there and how like the software was able to like evaluate a lot of things as it pertained to the execution. Did that wound up being a pretty big competitive advantage for you guys?
- [39:56]
A
That's huge. I mean, we could, we were able to have one person manage more containers than our competition because of the way that we developed the software, have these large monitors on the screen. We would have the resolution set to them and we would develop options where it's like this, this vehicle is going to, or this ship is going to be late. Here's the impact. All of the containers, one button would do all of it. We had cool things that we could do when, when, you know, 2012 came around and software, you know, having documentation of evidence of food protocols and food safety was becoming big. You know, you used to be able to import a container, five, five documents to prove that it was safe, went up to 30 overnight. And each one of them required a different level of investigation, different agency to approve, had to have teams to be able to do that. We custom developed our own portal to be able to upload the documents, manage the documents, manage the expirations, manage the. We had the option to do all of that because we had a team that was able to do it. So we had much better integration with our vendors. Our suppliers could handle a lot of stuff on their own that we would not have to touch because they would be responsible for uploading it, diversify the cost, spread the cost out, and we were able to deliver a lot more per person. People couldn't go off the golden path too far because the software would bring them back. So yeah, when you talk about process, having a solid process and being able to nail it software sort of required it. Someone come in and say, hey, I want to be able to do this. The software won't let me. You can have the hard conversation and say why are you wanting to do that again? Well, I had this situation on. That's not real. Let's talk about that. And so you can put guard, you can put guardrails in place that you buy software off the shelf. Can't do.
- [41:55]
B
You talked about documents and the import. The complexity increasing almost overnight. What year was that?
- [42:02]
A
So I think it was 2012. They passed what was called the FSMA law. It was part of FSVP, but it was essentially food safety. And about that time we were seeing outbreaks of diseases with food. And so there was just a big movement to clean that up and get food safety as a priority. So FDA came out with all of these protocols and recommendations. That would have been 2013, 2014. And before you know it, overnight the amount of paperwork that you had to do to sell, legally sell a product to a customer went through the roof. Amount of paperwork that was required required was insane. And there were agencies along the way to make sure that all the paperwork was in place. And so because of that we were at an advantage develop our own software to be able to handle this complex problem. Because you've got this factory now has to have four different letters of certification. Some of them overlap. They all expire at different times. Some of them are only valid for certain types of food. And so it becomes a very. The exponential problem. The complexity of it just rises exponentially. So having a software solution for that was. It was very good to have a team that could develop.
- [43:29]
B
There are folks that are listening, like may not understand the complexity of building software. Like, you know, when you kind of say this, not that you're nonchalant about it but, but the. I've been a part of organizations where the software wasn't the core competency. We weren't developing software in order to like sell it, but the software became like you were doing inside of your organization a competitive advantage for the execution of the business itself. And ours went completely different. Like we had about $3 million in sunk cost. We wound up walking away from it. We wound up going back to an off the shelf solution. Like kudos to you for the ability to be like, to be able to execute on that. Because it is not easy to build software, make sure you're solving the right problems and keep everybody rowing in the same direction.
- [44:20]
A
It's also interesting that AI is opening a lot of opportunities for custom software that were not there before. So I think your story, along with everybody else who tried rolling their own software at that time, you tried doing it here in about a year or two, I wonder if your results would have been different and you could have hired one person to develop software. And those ERP systems that are out there that, you know, they, they give you the dashboard and they say, here's the way to do it, there's lots of different ways to get there. That standard approach is being replaced with more customized software solutions because the cost to deliver those solutions are decreasing. And when we talk about, like, what's happening in the software industry, it is so hard to know, you know, if you could successfully deliver a customized solution like that for a fraction of the cost, and you could do it through AI, you could test it through AI and you could just describe it through AI, and it was a very quick speed to be able to deliver it probably would have been successful. And so now it's time to reevaluate all those previous assumptions. The question is, these large ERP companies that developed all this stuff for years and were really great at selling at an enterprise level, how successful are they going to continue to be? Those big players, how successful are they going to continue to be? When I could black box develop something in AI and be able to have it out the door quickly, and I think that's an interesting question to see how that's going to come play out, because the cost to deliver software is going to decrease every time that happens. The ROI increases for those investments, which means the number of investments increases. So it's going to be interesting to see.
- [46:07]
B
I. I have to ask you the question. And I was, I was, as you were saying it, I was like, I got to ask you the question. And then you were like, that's a good question to ponder. And now, now I'm going to ask it anyhow. But I'm. I'm sure you've given this some thought. Like, is there. My take on AI right now, I think is pretty similar to yours. Like, SMBs are getting squeezed. They don't have the resources. A lot of the bigger organizations are investing into it. I also think we're kind of at a weird stage in the cycle of AI. Do you believe that there's a universe 10 years from now where these software companies don't really exist in the capacity that they exist, because the accessibility for all organizations to be able to, like, develop features and functionality that are customized solutions for their business, like, there are no barriers to Entry anymore barriers?
- [47:03]
A
Yeah. So the barriers to entry are definitely decreasing for certain types of things. But just, I mean, don't forget where we were first five years ago. Right. You could develop SaaS software and be able to bring it into a company. And then five years ago, you know, ransomware was a huge thing. Ten years ago it was ransomware. Right. So now you had to prove that it had security that didn't expose the company. So all of a sudden there were new barriers put into place. And I think the question is that, you know, are you going to be able to develop something deployed into an organization overcoming all those previous barriers and what new barriers are going to be coming out in place also? So I think it's a fascinating time. I think it's extremely exciting. And the only thing I know is that the cost of to deliver custom software will be decreasing and that's going to lead towards a lot of new opportunities once people get comfortable with the idea that, hey, I didn't develop the software, it was developed by AI and it was tested by AI and we have security that was tested by AI and I feel comfortable deploying that. Once that, like, hurdle is overcome, I think it'll open up new opportunities for custom software.
- [48:29]
B
I love this. Like, I, I knew we were going to talk about big ideas and, and, and some other things. I didn't realize how focused on AI, but this is, like, it's not my, it's not my, my background or expertise, but it's something that I am deeply, like, curious and interested in. So I, I appreciate the conversation and, and allowing us to go down that path.
- [48:50]
A
I, right now would be an amazingly fun time to have an AI company. I think it would be. And the sector you could focus on and make money right now is consulting for small to midsize businesses. On AI. There's enough people saying it's affecting me. I don't know how it's affecting me. And there's no one standard answer. It is, what vendors are you using? What are your big business challenges? What are you doing right now? Where are you? What's costing you the most right now? Value stream map your workflow. Okay, this is expensive. This. There's an AI solution for. Let's go get that one ass. No one's escorting. No one's putting a business consulting lens on those level of problems. And that's where I think that there are, there are opportunities.
- [49:36]
B
Awesome. All right, two, two last questions and I'll make these rapid fire. The number one is we didn't talk about EOs too much. But you were obviously an EOS implementer. You're doing a amazing things on the EOS side. What does, what does the perfect client look like to you?
- [49:52]
A
They're frustrated, they're tired, they've got great people, they love the people in the room. They're stepping on top of each other in ways that they don't even understand. They're making investments and stuff that are just not going to pay out. They're starting projects and not finishing them. I can get those people into a room and within two to three meetings streamline those types of organizations. The other ones are, hey, I'm going to handle my, I'm going to hand my business off to the next generation. They don't have confidence, they don't know how to run a business and in some cases they don't even have an executive presence. That's the kind of client that I'm always doing LMA role playing with and getting those questions out of the field, helping to develop those leaders so that they can take over, you know, two year timeframe. We've got to develop people. Let's get to work. So those, those opportunities are the ones that I find the most exciting.
- [50:48]
B
Last question. Someone just listened to this whole thing. They're like, I need to get a hold of Brian. I need some Brian in my life. How can they get a hold of you?
- [50:55]
A
So my name is Brian Salka. Brian with an I B R I a n.s u l k a@eosworldwide.com you can search me up on the Internet and you can find the links to me there.
- [51:09]
B
Brian, thank you, thank you again for coming on. This was like such a fascinating conversation and I learned so much and I think like this is what's top of mind for business owners right now, and we talked about this a little bit earlier, is like, am I behind the curve? I don't understand AI yet. Am I like, am I losing it? And then there's the other companies that are just like putting AI system systems in that they shouldn't be and they're just wasting a whole bunch of money. So I think today's conversation was like relevant, valuable and, and appreciate you.
- [51:38]
A
I appreciate it. Thank you, Ryan.