Welcome, everybody to our building my legacy podcast today Today I’m with Ian Reynolds. He is I have to put my glasses on. He is partner and chief Solutions Architect at zip tech, a software development consultancy, focused on helping businesses build custom software. They help growth companies, enterprises and visionary firms solve their core business objectives. And boy Don’t we have a lot of core business objectives are going to have to work on now coming out of our pandemic. plan has spent the better part of his career in consulting is served in diverse industries such as finance, oil, gas, retail Field Services, midstream energy, healthcare, pharmaceuticals, and the list goes on. So he has a great deal of experience and his background and what he really wants to talk with us about is the The opportunities that come based on custom software design. So tell us a little bit about zip tech. And and then we’ll go into what does that really mean? And how do people use your information? And what does it mean for us at various levels in our business lives?

You bet. Well, first, thanks for having me on. I really appreciate it. And it’s great to great to be with you today. So really, one of the things that we try to help our clients understand and help folks who are sort of running existing businesses understand this, that the internet is still reshaping the way people do business. It’s really disrupting things continually because new technologies which you would have assumed have been created already, or actually still in the process of being developed. And so there’s going to be a long period of continued disruption for existing businesses in retail is obviously a particular area. But, you know, we see, you know, sort of distributors, people who are going to be moving product from location, location. So logistics is a sort of arena. But really every business in between, right, so the internet is a place where visit competition is transparent. And it’s what’s called, let’s call it from economic terms, virtually unlimited, right? I have business a and business B. And I could immediately compare the service offering pricing etc, of my competitors, just online by sort of doing a quick search. And you know, that there’s also the entrance of new arenas, everybody’s basically carrying around a supercomputer on their phone, right. So this phone is more powerful than the device that helped us go to the Right initially, and that’s this is still disrupting things, right people are, are attached to their phones at the hip. And our objective, our firm, firms objective is to really kind of extend the capabilities of our clients. A lot of companies don’t have the need to bring an entire engineering team in house. They don’t have the need to really build that expertise, they should really focus on their core business. If I’m a distributor or I’m, you know, a medical company, I really need to focus on providing that core service to my clients. But when I need to go get expertise, the thing that we find best is to go go get that particular expertise, we do it ourselves, right. So we don’t traditionally do our own marketing. We have a marketing company that helps us we just want to focus on delivering software. We have a company that, you know, basically provides us Certain Operational Services, we don’t want to focus on this Operational Services, we really just want to focus on developing solutions for businesses that help solve their problems. So take that very, very simple economic concept of specialization and apply that to your business. And that’s, that’s sort of the message that we share with our clients. It’s, if you don’t have a skill set in house, don’t feel like you have to build it, go go acquire that skill set. I certainly trade with other businesses to acquire that skill set, right. And so we’re the engineering service provider, right, we have, we have every layer of the technology stack, we have DevOps and network support, we have the back end engineering, right. So they’re really kind of doing the core programming. We have that front end, kind of dealing with the UI and those components. And then we do have sort of design elements, as well as sort of the project management, circling all of that. Top facilitate your particular role that a company has or the entire software development lifecycle for a company.

You know, I think one of the things that I am fascinated by is what you just said relative to focus on what you’re specialized in, don’t try and be everything. Because I think one of my observations is coming out of this COVID experience, people are going to need to be incredibly agile, versatile, flexible, adaptable, you can’t be if you’re burdened down by trying to do everything, right, fascinated by your decision to have done so. Was that a difficult decision on your company’s part? Or was that how was that to find the right partners to work with?

So we used a very iterative approach right? Let’s just talk about marketing. Right? So in marketing, we recognize that you can’t lean on just one thing, because, you know, it works until it doesn’t. It’s sort of the marketing analogy. And we wanted to build basically, our foundation for our building based on for really, for a company and company being building based on several things where we could have, you know, basically, multiple points of failure, and not everything’s gonna come tumbling down. So we said, here’s our budget for this problem, and then said, Okay, let’s, let’s spice it up into a number of pieces, and the test and the things that don’t work over a reasonable period of testing, let’s eliminate and keep focusing on the things that do work and then allocate some amount of budget towards testing new things. And by doing that, both in our business and let’s say, in particular for marketing and certain upper operational components You know, we’re able to fail faster is really sort of sort of the process. And, you know, we do a lot of work for, say probably about 30% of our clients or small businesses or startups. And they have the problem of bringing something unique to market that doesn’t exist or is unique to their business, because they’re maybe a small business and what they’re trying to solve for doesn’t exist in the marketplace. And that same sort of process of taking little pieces parts, and then sort of combining them as opposed to trying to say, Hey, I know exactly what the customer wants. Let me build that. It’s a much better approach. It’s much safer and costs much, much worse.

You talk a lot about automation. Automation has become so much a part of our lives. Talk about that a little bit, please, because I think it gets blurred with artificial intelligence. There’s a point where one maybe moves into the other, but if you would speak to that, please. Sure. So

We look at as an engineering firm, we look at all problems as things that should ultimately be made as efficiently or be executed as efficiently as possible, right? We don’t want to do the repetitive work, like build a login screen or build a, you know, build certain components of an application over and over again, that’s just not efficient, right? So we keep certain internals of repositories available of our own code that we can reuse. That isn’t that’s not quite obviously, that’s not quite automation. But the idea is you have a process in place that you are going to execute very quickly so that you’re not redoing manual work. And a lot of our clients are actively looking to use software to solve problem that is just like, Hey, I have Becky she’s Human Resources really, really helpful. But the problem is she’s moving items from system a to system Be and then sometimes this is see if we could just pass the records from you know A to B to C. In an automated fashion, I have 20 more hours of Becky’s time a week. And she can then go focus on this higher order problem that couldn’t be automated right? HR solutions providing for the organization. And so we do a lot of integration work, where we have systems talk to each other. But effectively, we’re trying to remove as much as possible, the kind of repetitive, standard human elements to allow people to free up and focus on things that really are going to push the needle, in a lot of cases. And for most businesses, it’s actually Customer service is the thing that gets prioritized as you’re able to free up from some of these operational activities. You can spend much more time focusing on the KPIs for you know, what does it mean for really, really high cost? For satisfaction by just eliminating as many, many small idle processes as possible, you know, inbound leads coming in, you’ll start capturing that in a CRM or data movement 50 other things

for you, who’s your ideal client?

ideal client is someone who doesn’t necessarily need a

engineering department in house, they really want to focus on their core business, as opposed to, you know, developing the competency across all of those sorts of technology layers that I talked about, is really looking for a sort of partner to solve that problem, and partner with them for a long term to provide those resources. So that’s, that’s number one. Number two is somebody who they do have a product, they have something that they need to develop and they have a really realistic two to five year timeline for getting that developed supportive. maintained, etc. Those are primary clients.

So those are companies that are somewhat established versus startup or am I wrong?

No, I think that’s correct. So our, our group of clientele was probably like 20 to 35%. Start up in what’s called SMBs, very small businesses, then probably about 60% of the work we do is for midsize businesses. And we do have a couple of enterprise clients. So you see Google and Adobe behind me. Those are case studies that we have, you know, we’ve been with Adobe for five years, Google for about three. And so those are, those are a smaller portion of what we do in relative terms to the number of projects that we execute.

So tell me when a company is looking at their next steps and what they want to automate their thought process that they should be going through as they make that evaluation and think about outsourcing

church. So the question they should be asking themselves is really related to opportunity cost, right? What is the cost, the actual cost to me as a business, if I’m trying to solve this myself, versus going in hiring an expert, who can get up to speed, you know, within a couple of weeks, and then continue to execute in support that project going forward? For most businesses, it’s actually not as efficient to basically understand the universe of technology, it’s much more efficient to go get that consultant or get that outside person, bring them in, and then have them solve and maintain that that solution for the firm, but it should be based on opportunity costs, right? What is the cost of my time, I mean, sit down, do the math, and the cost of the dollar amount of hiring that person potentially doing a bad hire, not being able to get every resource I need in that sort of technology stack, versus just going finding your trusted expert and bringing that person in to solve that problem.

So Talk about that it I think a lot of people tend to outsource to other countries for cost-efficiency reasons. Your thoughts on that, and what’s been your experience?

Right, great question. So we have full disclosure, our company, we have a hybrid model. So we have folks in the US where people need resources in the US. And then we also have basically the equivalent of an LLC, over in India, where we have two offices. So we have resources there. We have resources here in the United States, serving both functions, right. It really just kind of ultimately depends on our client’s needs and budgets.

I my first experience with

offshoring at a sort of extreme level was I was helping a refiner on the East Coast, that one of the largest funders United States was supporting and maintaining a very large system and they were making use of one of the leading offshore overseas providers In the world, and the experience with those folks was that it was very evident that they were really kind of the company providing the services, just kind of taking anybody off the street, and then training them up. And then really kind of putting them in a position, they were kind of focused on margin, as opposed to focus on quality. They are also they also had to provide a lot of resources to this client because they’re very, very large. So, you know, the observation that I had is that I think for most enterprise businesses, from very, very large businesses, there is a need oftentimes to bring in large amounts of talent, the quality of that talent is going to be very varied, right, you’re going to have stratifications of talent. But obviously, if you need to move large pieces, large numbers of folks in it can be very helpful. But for most businesses, that’s actually not going to work for most businesses, you are going to need really, really exceptional talent experienced talent that is going to be able to come in problem solve and then actually develop a solution that’s gonna help you. So I saw a statistic, and I don’t know if this is true, it may have changed, but about 60% of the software in the United States is actually being sourced in terms of development from overseas countries, right? The cost is lower, significantly lower than hiring an engineer in the United States. And domestically, we’re not producing enough engineers in the US to keep up with demand, the demand is there. We’re just not producing enough out of universities and other institutions to really keep up that demand. So by necessity, companies have to look outside of themselves. And so we as a company have been providing sort of this mixed hybrid solution for 15 plus years, really, 10 years is our current organization. And we’re effectively a company that could run we’re actually in an office right now, but we could run remote, right. So during this recent event, we just had everybody take basically wireless dongles, make sure they had access to the internet and go work from home. And we had No disruptions for business.

Amazing. You know, I’ve started doing some research on companies looking at, but the experience has been and it’s been really varied it bifurcated, really between those who are having your experience not impacted at all or been busier than ever before. And those of course, who have been mightily impacted. And so having that capacity to be able to move home or to work from anywhere is huge, isn’t it? And I think, coming out of this, that’s going to be one of the issues that we’re going to do what is right, what’s the cost of all this office space? And are we better having some people working from home? Tell me, what do you envision automation to look like, say in 10 years down the road? How will that change our workplace and what we do?

I think one of the things that What we’re seeing and not only seeing but also helping to facilitate is that there are many, many off the shelf products that exist for, you know, core business functions, CRM, things like try on course,

which is an automation product for sales and marketing.

There’s lots of products that are sort of becoming available. And I think you’re going to see tighter integration between virtually anything that you want to occur or want to purchase for your business. And the result is you really just are going to need to pick a number of off the shelf, software’s that solve your problem, integrate them, and then focus on those two things I sort of talked about, right customer service, and then the customer experience, and then the quality of your product. So automation, in my view, is going to really make it so that you’re going to have engineers like ourselves on the back end, building those connections, and that’s what we’ve been doing actually for a number of clients for many years. But what the consumer or the business consumer is going to be able to do is they’re going to be able to say, Hey, I just want these two systems to talk to each other. I’m going to click a few buttons, and then that information is going to pass to in amongst each other. So I think we’re going to see more of that. I think automation is going to increasingly, you know, have a sort of a semantic element. So on your phone, if you’ve responded to somebody via text, it’s very likely that you’ve seen a pre populated, you know, reply for, hey, you know, here is, yeah, I’m doing fine. Yeah, whatever. Well, you know, take that across billions of devices, and you’ve actually really rapidly facilitated much faster communication for the entire planet. And I think you’re gonna see a lot more sort of these semantic elements where we’re going to sort of accelerate communication and data sharing, as well as the ability to sort of look across an index to get information that we need.

One of the biggest mistakes people Make companies make as they make their decisions about what they’re going to do and what they choose to do.

I think I think it’s traditionally based on our experience. It always relates to the IT field, but I’m not gonna say sort of speak broadly about speak that I feel, I feel. I think it’s traditionally under estimating that you actually need a team to accomplish your objectives. You don’t get the ultimate solution you need by hiring one person who, you know, you may think is a stud because there’s no way that you can possibly understand the entire universe of software development and have a resource that’s able to perform equally across all of sort of those levels. Now there are I’m not saying there’s not exceptional people out there, but I am saying that it is really helpful to have people who have specialties even within the IT field to solve problems because you just, it’s too hard and too complex to have one person sort of build them.

I think there’s a certain amount of comfort you have to have with yourself. To do that. You have to be, it’s a different kind of leader in a sense. It’s going from being that leader who was everything to everybody, and who could touch every piece and felt confident to now a leader who is more

the orchestra, the conductor of an orchestra, right?

Music will do and how it will play based on the instrument. But you don’t know how to you don’t need to know how to play the instrument. It’s a different way of managing and leading.

Correct, correct, but you know, and the thing you have to be smart about is I think it actually comes down to sort of those emotional intelligence people skills, right? Is the person that I have retained, to serve be in that capacity? Being honest, being genuine, really serving my need? Are they looking out for my best interests? So this is sort of really fundamental skills actually become heightened. When you go to outside parties, there’s a different dynamic. I think that comes into play, when you’re looking for outside trusted resources.

I think one of the things that I’m fascinated by is I think we’re going to need to create these allies, in a sense amongst one another, in order to be able to be efficient, is we can’t afford to be everything. Right and that alone is going to push people to need a lot of things like automation, ways of communicating it, and those systems exist, but they need to be refined.

Yes, very much so and I think some of that refinement is kind of going back to one of the errors that we encounter is that oftentimes, you know, businesses we find, they say, Well, this is exactly what the customer wants, you know, it’s this, it’s this box in a bow, get it done, and they’re gonna love it. Well, they haven’t sort of pulled the clients, they haven’t really gotten their feedback. They haven’t gotten them in the tools or, you know, integrating with that sort of business process to really understand how are they going to interact with it? How are they going to ultimately respond to these things? And is it really what they need? Is it going to solve their problem? And there’s a tendency to sort of think that you know, exactly what your clients want your customers to want, as opposed to putting out something that’s a little more simple testing, getting feedback and then iterating over time.

We do tend to make things more complicated, don’t we? Everything? I think that is the challenge is People want sophisticated systems. But the challenge is, well, I know how to use it. Right? And so how do you support companies with what you develop?

Mm hmm. So I think you’re right. In terms of the development landscape, we’re seeing actually some degree of consolidation among tools, right. So you’re seeing these basically like Swiss Army Knife type tools that do a lot of things in one. And by building these, it’s like cloud four systems or much, much more accessible software, really in that sort of design level component that I sort of talked about in that in that stack. You make it so that your processes for training for support can all be very easily standardized. And you have to really design the software and the tool to be intuitive enough that the person can get into it and also sort of train themselves. It’s similar to other existing systems. And I think you actually see a lot of homogeneity across multiple systems and that like, Hey, I understand how Facebook works. So therefore, I understand how LinkedIn works, right? You see some homogeneity in terms of layout. And so it’s expected when you’re developing software to sort of look at what the landscape is doing, look at where the landscape is moving, build that into your tool, but then also, as much as you can radically simplify. And, as you simplify, put that into a process that your support team is aware of, that your engineers are aware of, and everybody’s sort of working towards that, that goal of simplification. So that training is much easier, especially as it relates to these automation systems.

I think that’s huge. Another question for you is, I think,

we’re going to be seeing people needing to draw on big data sources, open source data.

Your thoughts on that? And how do you integrate that into some of what you work on.

So we have done a lot of big data ETL type projects, and

lots of companies, especially sort of in the risk space companies have massive, massive datasets, right? They’re trying to take all these variables, correlate them against each other and really understand what their exposure would be on something that’s incredibly important, especially for these large infrastructure firms. And the problem that we see is that oftentimes, people are sort of fooled by randomness, and they’re not focusing on say, the top five or top 10 variables that really are gonna cause systematic risk, or there’s a lurking variable in there. So when people are building these large datasets, one of the things that we try to do and highly recommend is that at every step of database movement, you need to have checks and balances where you’re basically running a small what’s called an executable or small job that’s checking the original data source to say, Hey, is this data clean? Is this data correct? Before I get the output, and then with any data output, or any result, you need to still have that sort of statistical variability for you could be wrong, right? There could be an error in the data set. And so as we move towards doing a lot of these big data projects, that you know, we talk a lot with our clients about, okay, at every stage of the data movement, you know, what is your failure rate? And what are your checks in place to make sure that the data is correct, because most Big Data Tools actually take from you know, in some cases, hundreds or even thousands, we had a EHR healthcare company that was rolling up these hundreds of systems and co-locating the data in one place and one of the issues They run into is that well, can we really trust data source, you know, a 23, or whatever. And I think these, so you have to take all the data in, you have to still check it against something that’s going to give you sort of a is statistically accurate. And then on top of that, you really have to make sure that you’re thinking about outside variables that could exist within that data set. What am I not including? What couldn’t be captured?

Well, it’s like anything, there’s a point where you have to also apply observation, common sense, right? When you look at data, and I know from my years of doing research that when you get a result, some people will just accept a result as is because it was statistically significant. But if it doesn’t make sense, it doesn’t make sense. You have a question. You looked at it the wrong way. And I think those are the pieces, you’re saying that really people need to attend to as your that’s your failure rate, so to speak. So one of the things I am that I’ve noticed with the pandemic is we have all become incredibly sensitive to data. We want data, we want to hear it, and then we’d be beta, right? Right here. Everybody debating it. So we’ve learned a new, almost sophistication in terms of let’s take a look at it. What does this mean? Which I think is healthy, but it also it proposes another challenge to you companies like you, does it not?

I so I go back to I remember having a lesson in grade school where we were given a lot of pieces of feels like a small newspaper clippings, etc. And we actually had to discern what information was valid. What was an authority Data Source and what information actually moved us forward towards a specific conclusion. And so this was an exercise that we did I remember to to for a couple weeks, I must have been like 10 or something. And the idea is that in life, you know, you’re going to have really confusing problems where you’re gonna have lots of superfluous information and the that sort of opportunity cost questions when it comes up again, where you really just need to focus on what are the available options that I can execute, right, what is the actual available? solution, so path forward for me, and really just take in the relevant data points, and then things that really are not going to be helpful for your decision making. It would probably be best to, you know, store somewhere, keep it right, maybe it’s gonna come up later. But don’t, you know, basically try to put your decision making efforts around the entire data set, really kind of keep it around. The things that are going to most directly affect you. So more than macro economic factors, look at those sort of micro economics of your business. Wow.

I and we have, we have spent a lot of time we’re almost out of time. But before we close, I want to know, last-minute thoughts, things that we haven’t talked about that you really would like people to know about in terms of software, custom software design and automation, and the things that you

do for it. So I think I think the last thing I want to leave people with is that the world is accelerating in terms of the pace of technology development. It’s it’s moving faster than even the large enterprise firms like Google, Adobe, Facebook, etc. I can really maintain right there are new technologies are going to be emerging that are going to create new jobs, create new opportunities, create new things, so businesses that are not intentionally innovating, that or not intentionally working towards a goal, at least in whole or part are going to find themselves behind in five to 10 years. And we, as a company have actually we say 10% of revenue we’re putting towards an r&d budget, we’ve just decided on that we’ve been doing that for a year and a half. And it’s had remarkable changes that have affected our business and in wonderful ways that we sort of didn’t anticipate, but it’s our expectation that companies that do not intend to innovate and do not intend to move forward, at least, sort of romantically systematically, are gonna find themselves very much behind the curve of their competition in the next three to five years.

Yeah, I think that is so true. But putting that money aside is tough. And I think people are going to be challenged with that coming out of this because they’re going to look very carefully at where every dollar is spent. And it as interesting as we’re talking a little bit before we began about Andrew Carnegie’s observations coming out of 1917, and the economic collapse that followed. And he said the people who really did well, were those who looked at everything that happened every problem and saw opportunity, positive opportunities, not the negative limitations of what others were seeing. And so part of what I’m hearing with what you’re saying with r&d is, that’s part of that is really looking at how can you find opportunities.

You know, our approach has been, now is actually the time to invest even though while it’s harder, and it seems like the opposite thing to do, now is the time to invest because most certainly a lot of companies are going to pull back just out of fear and uncertainty. But if you’re investing now, and you know, people are not going to sort of restart investing towards innovating their business for let’s say, a year or two, or until they really have clear picture, you’re going to be here to help them. So that’s exactly the sort of observation that we have.

Yeah. And it’s been wonderful to have you with us. I’m building my legacy podcast today. And we will be sharing your information with our audience on various platforms. Thanks. Thank you so much, because I do think automation is going to be more and more a part of our lives like it or not, it’s here to stay.

Well, thank you very much for having me. Really appreciate it.

Thank you.