Jun 24, 2025
On this episode of The Founder's Sandbox, Brenda speaks with David Hirschfeld, owner of 18 year old business Tekyz, that boasts a hyperexceptional development team building high “ticket” products in the B2B space. They speak about ways in which AI is a gamechanger, how Tekyz backs their work for clients with relentless pursuit of quality, and how Tekyz practices ruthless compassion,to protect the company and enable it to grow
Having collaborated with over 90 startups, he developed the Launch 1st Method—a systematic approach that minimizes risks and accelerates software company success with reduced reliance on investor funding, after observing that many companies launch a product first and then fail at a later stage – With Tekyz approach of Launch 1st exceptional founders are in love with the problem not the product.
David's expertise bridges cutting-edge AI technologies, workflow optimization, and startup ecosystem dynamics. When not transforming business strategies, he enjoys woodworking, golfing, and drawing leadership insights from his experience raising four successful sons.
You can find out more about David and Tekyz at:
https://sites.google.com/tekyz.com/david-hirschfeld?usp=sharing
https://tekyz.podbean.com/ - Scaling Smarter Episodes.
www.scalingsmarter.net - Schedule an interview
https://www.linkedin.com/in/dhirschfeld/
https://www.linkedin.com/in/dhirschfeld/
https://www.facebook.com/dmhirschfeld
transcription:
00:04
Welcome back to the Founders Sandbox. I am Brenda
McCabe, the host here on this monthly podcast, now in its third
season. This podcast reaches entrepreneurs, business owners that
are scaling.
00:31
professional service providers that provide services to these
entrepreneurs, and corporate board directors who, like me,
are building resilient, purpose-driven, and scalable businesses
with great corporate governance. My guests to this podcast are
business owners themselves, professional service providers, and
corporate directors who, like me, want to use the power of
the private company to build a better
01:01
world through storytelling with each of my guests in the sandbox.
My goal is to provide a fun sandbox environment where we can equip
one founder at a time to build a better world through great
corporate governance. So today I'm absolutely delighted to have as
my guest, David Hirschfeld. David is the owner and CEO of Techies,
17 or 18 year old business now that boasts
01:29
a hyper exceptional development team that are building high ticket
products in the B2B space. Welcome David to the Founder
Sandbox. Hi Brenda and thanks for having me. Great. So I'm
delighted that we actually did a dry run in February.
We've known each other for some time and AI, we're
going to be touching on AI. And I think that the world of
AI
01:58
particularly in software development, has changed
significantly since we last spoke in February. So we're going to be
getting into some, I think, novel concepts for the
listeners of the Founder Sandbox. So I wanted to, you I always talk
about how I like to work with growth stage companies
that typically are bootstrapped and
02:26
It's only at a later stage do they seek institutional investment
by building great corporate governance and reducing the
reliance on investor funding until such a time that they
choose the right type of investors that can help them scale. So
when I found out what you do at Techies with Launch First and
the type of work you do in B2B businesses, I absolutely wanted to
have you here on the founder sandbox.
02:56
So let's jump right in, right? I think I'm eager to learn more
about how to scale your bespoke development at Techies, right? To
scale my own business? Okay. So there's a lot of different aspects
to scaling my business and I bootstrapped for the last 18
years.
03:25
I've never taken any investment with techies. And I've
done that very specifically because it gives me a lot
of freedom. I don't have a reporting structure that I have to
worry about. That doesn't mean that I can be lazy with my team.
To grow my team, I have a philosophy
03:52
that I only hire people that are smarter than I am. And the
ones that are in a position to hire, they can only hire
people that are smarter than them. And by really sticking to
this philosophy, even though sometimes it makes us grow a little
slower than we would like, it means that when we bring in people,
those people contribute immediately and contribute in a
way
04:21
that it's our job to get the impediments out of their way and to
facilitate them so that they can contribute and help us
grow the company. So I call it the ball rolls uphill
here because my job is to support everybody that is
above me, which is everybody. And then the people that I support
directly, their job is to support the people that are above
them.
04:51
Because if we're hiring correctly, then people that we bring
in can contribute in the area that we're bringing them in way more
than the person that's hiring them. Okay. Thank you for that. So
before you launched Techies, you had a career in companies like,
I believe, Computer Associates, right? Texas
Experiments and TelaMotorola.
05:19
There was a period of time between your experience in these
large corporations before your launch tech is where you actually
had your own startup and you sold it in 2000, right?
And I believe you also learned perhaps with the second startup
about how hard it is to find product market fit. Can you talk to
that for my listeners, please?
05:46
I don't know that it's that hard to find product market fit. It
depends if that's your focus or not. If your focus is to nail down
product market fit, then it's not that hard to determine
whether you can achieve that or not fairly quickly. You can
do that by selling your product to potential customers.
That sounds strange. Of course, we all want to sell our
products, but
06:14
What I'm suggesting is you start selling your product before you
have a product, before you have a full product. And I don't
mean an MVP, but a design prototype. You go out to the market and
you start to sell it. If you have product market fit and you've
identified the early adopter in your market and you know that they
have a very high need from a perception perspective and
there's a big cost to the problem that you're solving.
06:45
then you can offer them a big enough value upfront that they'll buy
your product early and you can prove that there's a market for your
product and they'll buy it in enough numbers that you can
achieve a measurable metric, which I kind of call the golden
ratio, which is three to one in terms of what is the lifetime value
of a customer versus what does it cost to acquire that customer?
And you can get to that three to one ratio.
07:13
in a prelaunch sale model before you ever started developing your
product as a way of proving product market fit. Or you pivot
quickly and cheaply because you're not having to rebuild a product
that you've built in the wrong way. Or you fail fast and
cheap. And every entrepreneur's first goal should be to fail fast
and cheap. know that sounds backwards, but that should be your goal
is that you can fail fast and cheap or if you
07:42
If you fail to fail fast and cheap, that means you've found a path
to revenue and product market fit. And now you know you
have a viable business. making the investment to build the product
is a no brainer. And you came upon this methodology,
right? Yes. because you did yourself when you had your first
company, you did not understand the funding part, right? Can
you talk?
08:12
a bit about your specific example and then how that's informed now
17 years of techies and over 90 projects with startups. Okay. So my
first company was Bootstrap. Okay. And that one was
successful and we grew it despite me, it was me and a
partner. And despite ourselves, we grew it over eight
years.
08:39
where he ended up with 800 customers in 22 countries and sold it to
a publicly traded firm out of Toronto. That was in the product
food, snack food distribution business because that was what our
product was focused on. So I started another company about five
years later, not realizing the things that I did the first
time.
09:08
that made it so successful, which really fit the launch
first model to a large degree. But the second time I built a
product that would have been successful had I followed my first
model, but I didn't. So I went the route of building an MVP
and getting customers on a free version of it, and then going out
and trying to raise money, which is the very classic approach that
the SaaS products
09:38
take now. And the problem is with that approach is that you
end up digging a really deep hole in terms of the investment
that you make to build the product with enough functionality that
you can convince people it's worth putting an investment in and
you're not generating any revenue at the time. And I should have
just started selling the product and generating subscription
revenue right from the beginning. First of all, I would have been
able to raise money much more easily.
10:08
Secondly, I would have not needed to raise money as much if I'd
focused on sales. The problem with a lot of founders is they fall
in love with their product. They believe that people will buy it at
enough numbers and that investors will see the potential. they're
afraid of sales. I've fallen into this trap before too. I've done
it both ways. And I can tell you selling early
10:38
and staying focused on the customer and the problem are the way to
be successful. So founders who I find are consistently successful,
they are focused on the problem, they love the problem. The product
is just the natural conclusion to solving the problem, not
something to be in love with. They spend their time talking to
customers about the problems. So how does a potential
customer find you and work with you?
11:08
Oh, they can find me at Techies or they can find me at LaunchFirst,
was spelled launch1st.com. And they can find me on LinkedIn. And
then to work with me, it's just give me a call, send me an email,
we'll set up a Zoom. I'll start to learn about what you're trying
to accomplish and what your requirements are. And I'll typically
spend quite a bit of time with any potential clients.
11:39
in one to usually multiple calls or Zooms, learning and
creating estimates and doing a lot of work in advance with
the idea that there'll be a natural conclusion at the end of this
that they'll wanna start working with me in a paid fashion. So
there's a lot of value that my clients get from me whether they end
up contracting me or not. And how, again, back to,
thank you for that and that.
12:08
how to contact you will be in the show notes. But what types of
sectors do you work in? You know, in your introduction, I
talk about high ticket B2B, right? who are the, so
what founder that's has some idea today? What would be
their call to action to find techies? And what would you, is
it launch first before you go down?
12:35
No, it's not necessarily. It may be an existing company that
is trying to implement AI or implement workflow automation,
or they have a project and they don't have the IT team or capacity
to handle it. We love those types of projects. It might be an
existing startup that is struggling with their software development
team and they're not
13:04
getting to the end goal that they're expecting and the
product's buggy, it's taking too long, there's constant
delays, they're way over budget and they need to get
this thing done. And I call those recovery projects,
they're probably my favorite because people recognize
very quickly the difference that we bring.
13:33
and they really, really appreciate us. As far as what
sectors, business sectors, healthcare, law enforcement,
prop tech, real estate, finance, entertainment, I mean,
we work in many, many different sectors over the last 18
years. So regardless in B2B, B2B2C, not so
much e-commerce unless there's some
14:03
complex workflow associated with your particular e-commerce, but
there's lots of really good solutions for e-commerce that
don't require developers to be involved. But
mobile, web, IoT, definitely everything is AI now.
Absolutely. And in fact, when we last spoke, I'd like to say
that you started to drink your own Kool-Aid at Techies.
14:33
you're starting to actually use AI automation for internal
functions as well as projects at Techies. So can you walk my
listeners through how you're using AI automation and
what's the latest with agentic AI? So let's do the first.
Yeah, okay. So there are a bunch of questions
there. So let me start with
15:02
that we're building products internally at Techies to help us
with our own workflows. These products though are
applicable to almost any development company or any company
with a development team. Some of them are, and some of them
are applicable to companies that are, well, so one product is
putting voice capability in front of project management
tool.
15:32
and we use JIRA and JIRA is an incredibly technical tool for
project managers and development teams to use to their
projects, requirements, their track bugs, all of that.
And so your relationship with what I call relationship with
project management is very technical one. If you're a client, some
clients are willing to go through the learning curve so that
they can enter their own...
15:59
bugs and feature requests and things like that directly into JIRA.
Most don't. They want to send us emails, which is fine,
and just give us a list of what's going on and the problems
that they're finding or the things that they need for a
future version and the planning and the documentation, everything
else. This is a real technical thing. We're going to make it a very
natural personal relationship by adding voice in front of all
this so that you can
16:29
be sharing your screen with your little voice app and say, just
found a problem on the screen. And the voice app can
see the screen. It knows your project. It knows your requirements.
And it can identify problems on the screen that you may not have
even noticed. And it can also prevent you from reporting bugs
that have already been reported and tell you when they're planned
to be built. And all of this just with a verbal discussion
with the app.
16:58
that basically knows your project. Kind of like talking to a
project manager in real time, but they don't have to write down
notes and they can instantly look up anything about
your project in terms of what's been reported in terms of bugs or
feature requests and update them or create new ones for you
or just report them to you and tell you when things are planned to
be built and released or.
17:24
where they've already been released and maybe you need to clear
your cache so you can see the change, whatever. Yeah. So it
be like an avatar, but it's trained and it's specific
to Jira in your case? In the first version, it's
actually being built architected so that we'll be able to add other
project management tools to it besides Jira in the future. to
begin with, because we use Jira, it's going to work directly
with Jira to start.
17:54
And this, by the way, you asked about agentic workflows,
right? So we're building an agentic workflow in
this tool where we have more different agents that work
together to resolve these issues. so we have an agent that
reads and writes documentation to JIRA. We have an agent that
communicates with the user and the user might be the
programmer
18:23
might be a person in QA, it might be a client for a lot of
different things. And we have an analyst agent that when the person
talks, the voice agent says to the analyst agent, here's what I
understand. Here's the information I just got. Go do your work and
come back and get me the answer. And it'll speak to the JIRA agent
to get the information. It will also speak directly to us.
18:52
a vector database, which is a database where all the documentation
from that project is ingested into our own separate AI
model so that the context of all the communication is about their
project and doesn't go off into other directions. And then
can get back. So this is an agentic workflow. The idea
of
19:20
agents is like everybody keeps talking about agents. Not everybody
is really clear on what that even means. Can you define that?
an agent is an AI model that you can interact
with that is focused on one specific area of expertise.
So if it's a travel agent, the word agent fits very well
there, then their expertise would be on everything related to
19:49
travel and booking travel and looking up options and
comparing prices. And that would be an AI travel agent.
So that's very different from an AI project management agent,
very different from an AI financial analyst agent. So each
agent specializes in its own area of expertise and may draw from
specific
20:18
repositories of information that are specific to that
particular agent's area of expertise. And they actually look
from the perspective of that type of person, if it was a person.
So, and so they'll respond in a way that is consistent with
how somebody who is a project manager would respond to you when
you're talking to them, asking you questions about your
requirements, knows what
20:46
information it needs to be able to assess it properly, things like
that. wouldn't be very good about travel because that's
not its area of expertise. Right. So is it common
to have companies that are creating with their own large language
model, right? Or their workflow processes internally to the company
to create their own agent AI?
21:14
Or is there a marketplace now where you can say, want this type of
agent to get in. This is a very basic question, but do build
it? Right. Or do you buy it? Or is it something in between? It's
something in between. So there are tools that allow you to
basically collect agents out there. And there's a
difference between an agent and a context. Cause you hear a
lot about model context switching and things like, don't know.
21:44
if your audience knows these things. Or model context
protocol. A context is not an agent, but it has some agent
capabilities because it's kind of specializing your model in a
certain area. But you would use this, but you're not, if it's a
true agent, then it's probably tied to its own vector
database.
22:12
that gets trained with specific information. It might be company's
information. It might be information, let's say if I'm a security
agent, then I'm going to be trained on the entire NIST system as
well as all of my security architecture that's currently in place.
And that so that it could monitor and
22:41
assess instantly whether there's security vulnerabilities,
which you wouldn't ask Chet GPT to do that. No. Right? Because it
couldn't. Because it doesn't know anything about your
organization or environment. And it really also doesn't
know how to prioritize what matters and what doesn't at any
given moment. Whereas a security agent, that would be what it
does.
23:10
I don't know if I answered that question. Oh, bad thing about
building or buying. there are- Or something in between,
Yeah. So there are tools that you can use to build workflows
and bring in different agents that already exist. And
you can use something like OpenAI or Claude and
use it to create an agent and give it some intelligence
and-
23:37
give it a specific, in this case, you're giving it a specific
context. You could even tie a special machine learning
database to it and make it even more agentic in that way.
And then build these workflows where you're like,
let's say a marketing workflow, where you're saying you first
go out and research all the people who are your ideal
customer profile.
24:07
I was going to say ICP, but I'm trying not to use acronyms because
not everybody knows every acronym. Ideal customer profile.
And then it finds all these people that fit your ideal
customer profile. Then it says, well, which of these people
are in the countries that I do business? And then it
illuminates the ones that aren't. then which ones, and it may be
using the same agent or different agents to do this.
Then once it's nailed it down to the very discrete
24:37
set of customers. Now the next step in the workflow is, okay,
now enrich their data of these people to find their
email and other ways of contacting them as well as other
information about them so that I have a really full picture of what
kind of activity are they active socially? they speak? Do
they post? What are they speaking about? What are they posting
about? What events are they going to? Things like that.
25:07
So that would be the next step and that'd be an agent that's doing
all the enriching. And then after that, the next step would
be to call basically call a writing agent to go do, am I writing an
email? Am I writing a LinkedIn connection post? Am I doing both?
Set up a drip campaign and start reaching out to these people
one at a time with very customized specific language, right?
That is in your voice.
25:34
It doesn't sound like it's written by a typical AI outreach thing.
All right, so these would be steps in a workflow that you
could use with several different tools to build the workflows and
then calling these different agents.
25:48
Let's go back to the launched first. What would be a typical
engagement with a company? you know, they, um, the founders that
have the greatest success in your experiences are the ones that
love the problem space and not the product. All right. So walk my
listeners through.
26:17
What a typical engagement. it's staff augmentation. it full
out outsourcing? it tech? because it's very complex. I
can touch so many. can touch high tech and high ticket B2B
products, sector agnostic. what, put some legs on this
for my listeners, please. Sure, sure. We're not.
26:46
so much a staff augmentation company, although we'll do that if
asked to, but that's not the kind of business that we
look for. We look for project type work. So a typical
engagement for launch first would be somebody wants to launch
a product, they're in the concept phase. We help refine the concept
and we build out, help that we do the design and then we
build a high fidelity prototype, which is a design prototype.
27:16
When I demo a design prototype to somebody, they think that they're
looking at a finished product, but it's not. It doesn't
actually do anything. It just looks like it does everything.
So it's very animated set of mock-ups is another way to look
at it. And it's important because you can build out the big
vision of the product this way in a couple of months, whereas
27:46
it takes instead of, you so you're looking at the two year roadmap
when we're done of the product. If we were to build an MVP, then
you're going to see a very limited view of the product and it's
going to cost a lot more to build that MVP than it takes to build
this design prototype. Now we're in the process of doing this.
We're also nailing down who that early adopter is. And there's a,
there's a very,
28:14
metrics driven methodology for doing this. your launch first.
Within launch first, right. Okay. All right. And then we'll
help the client build a marketing funnel and help them start to
generate sales. We're not doing the selling, they're doing
the selling. And it's important that founders do the selling
because they need to hear what customers are saying about the thing
they're demoing, why they want it, why they don't.
28:43
So that if we need to pivot, which we can do easily and
quickly with a design prototype, then we can pivot and
then go and test the model again, two or three or four times in the
space of a couple of months. And we'll either find a path to
revenue or accept the fact that this probably isn't the right
product for the right time. But in the process of doing this,
you're learning a lot about the market and about the potential
customer.
29:13
I want to be clear about something. Almost every founder that comes
to that I meet with, they love the product, not the problem.
They started out with a problem that they realized they had a good
solution for and they forgot all about the problem at that point.
And so I spend a lot of time with founders reminding them why
the problem is all that matters and what that means and
how to approach customers, potential customers so that
29:41
you're syncing with their problems, not telling them about this
product that you're building because nobody cares about your
product. All they care about is what they're struggling with.
And if they believe that you really understand that, then
they care about whether you can solve that problem for them
or
30:01
And can I be audacious and ask you what a typical
engagement duration is like? So this would be for launch first.
Yes. If it's a, and our hope is that they'll find a
path to revenue and start building the product and engage us for
the development. Cause that's really our business is building the
products. So, but it's not a requirement. And,
and our typical engagement with our clients are several
years.
30:32
Not all of them, but most of them, would say. Once they start
working with us, they just continue to work with us until they
decide to bring in their own in-house team or they fail
eventually, which many of our clients do, which is why I
created Launch First. Right. You often talk about your hyper
exceptional team at Techies. What is it that's so highly
exceptional? Talk to me about your team. Where are they? Yeah.
31:02
And if you go to my website, which is tekyz.com, you'll see
at the very top of it in the header above the fold, it says
hyper exceptional development team. And I don't expect people to
believe me because I write that down or I tell them that I
expect them to ask me, well, what does that mean? Do you have
evidence? And that's the question I want to get because I do.
Because when you work in an exceptional manner,
31:31
as a natural consequence of working that way, you produce certain
artifacts that the typical development teams don't produce.
And I'm not saying there aren't other exceptional teams, but
they're really few and far between. And what makes a team
exceptional is a constant need to improve their ability to
deliver and the level of quality that they deliver as well
and the speed at which they develop. It's all of these things.
31:59
So, and, you know, after 18 years, we've done a lot of
improving and a lot of automation internally, because
that allows our team to work in a really disciplined protocol
manner without having to feel like they're under the strict
discipline and protocol of, you know, a difficult
environment to work in. And so we create automation
everywhere we can. The voice...
32:27
tool is one of those automations. The way we do status
reports, it's very clear at the level of detail that we provide
every week to every client in terms of status reports
where we're showing here's what we estimated, here's the
actual, here's our percent variance on how much time we spent
and how much it's costing. We want to always be within 10 %
above or below.
32:56
Either being above or below is not, know, the
fact that we're ahead of that doesn't necessarily mean that's a
good thing, right? So we want to be accurate with our estimates.
And we are typically within 10%. In fact, our largest
customer last year, we did a retrospective and we were within six
and a half percent of what our estimates were for the whole year.
and that's a, we're pretty happy with that number.
33:24
I think most teams are looking at many, many times that in terms of
variance. it's not that uncommon for teams to be double or
triple what they're or even higher what the actual estimate was. So
when we do invoicing, we invoice for each person at their
rate.
33:50
based on their level of expertise, which is all part of our
agreement upfront. So the client is very transparent every month
for the hours that they work. And we attach the daily time sheets
to every invoice. I'm the only company I know of right now that
does that. I know there are others. I've seen monthly, but I've
never seen daily. Yeah. Yeah. Because for me, if I could ask,
well,
34:18
why did this person ask a work that many hours that last month?
What did they do? I hate that feeling that I get when somebody asks
that question. I know they're only asking because they have to
justify it to somebody else or whatever the reason, but I don't
like the way it feels because it feels like my integrity is being
questioned. I don't get upset at people for asking me that. I just
feel like I'm not giving them enough information if they have to
ask me that question. So we started about eight years ago.
34:47
providing the daily time sheets because I don't like that question.
And we never get questioned on our invoices ever anymore. I
bet you it's informed you as well in future
projects, maybe on including workflow automation
in your own internal processes, right? When you see people's time
sheets, right? And you've gone over budget. So it informs you
internally. So it's not only for the client.
35:16
I suspect, right? No, it's not. Right. And we use it ourselves to
also, because it also helps us looking at our overhead costs
because not everything gets built to the client. And so we track
all our own times, you know, what we're spending doing what. And we
don't get to, it's not like a developer has to spend a lot of time
or a QA person or whatever, putting in a lot of detail. We just
need a couple of bullets, you know, every day in the time sheet
with the, whatever they spend.
35:45
If they spent four hours on one thing and three on another, they'll
just break it into two entries just to make it easy. And
that's important for us, or they may be working on two different
projects and each project. So when we do the timesheets also every
month, we give our clients a breakdown by project. So if we're
working on four different projects for a client or even
one project, but it has four different really
36:15
functional elements that are very clearly different. Like let's say
a mobile app and a web app and a particular client
implementation. Each one of those gets assigned its own project and
we break down summaries of the time spent on each of those every
month and who spent the time on those, along with the daily time
sheets, along with the invoice. And nobody else does that
because it takes a lot of discipline and protocol and you have to
have lot of systems in place
36:45
to do that without literally getting everybody to quit,
right? That works for you. And nobody minds doing it because it's
easy because of all the systems we put in place to do that.
That's the whole point, right? Right. were not
particularly happy of getting asked that question oftentimes. So
eight years ago, you set out to provide the information on a
daily basis, which is incredible. We started that with
blended rates like a lot of companies do.
37:14
And then I didn't like that because at the end of a project when
most of it's QA, people would start to get frustrated that they're
still getting billed the same blended rate, even though for the
more expensive period at the beginning of the project, I
thought, okay, forget this. Well, just bill based on individual.
And then I didn't get those questions anymore, but then I
would get questions about individuals on the month. And that's when
I started doing the time sheets.
37:43
And like I said, I'm sure there's other companies that do it, but I
haven't run into one or somebody that works with one. So
that's an exceptional thing that we do. But it also allows us
to do really, really good reporting to the client on status
on what we've spent our time on, what we're expecting to spend our
time on next week, what we just spent our time on this week,
where we are.
38:12
in terms of our plan for the month, things like that. So
let's switch gears, David. Yeah. Back to actually the
podcast and some of my guests and listeners are
corporate board directors. So they're sitting on either advisory
boards or fiduciary corporate boards. And with all the hype
around AI.
38:39
it's not uncommon for them to be asking, what are we doing, right?
For existing companies, right? And I'd like you to walk my
listeners through while it's in the, you know, in the
imaginary realm, what is it? I think any founder today that's
actually scaling, right? Has to have some AI element. At least I've
even heard you need to have it.
39:08
an AI officer in the company. So what's your take on that? What
would you respond to either to your board of advisors, your
advisory board, or your board of directors? So, and of
course, a lot of it depends on the type of company you are.
Absolutely. Right. If you're making alternative
material I-beams, for example, for skyscraper construction,
then
39:37
AI, other than maybe in the design process of these specialized
materials, AI may not be as big a critical factor, although
for invoice reconciliation and distribution and
scheduling and all that, AI could be a huge value to you if
you don't have super efficient systems already. For most
everybody else though, if you have not embraced the need to
40:06
leverage AI and everything you're doing, then you're way
behind already. That doesn't mean you have to be in a race to
do this. just, because I'm of the belief that you
have to slow down to speed up. But you do need to make it a
priority. And in a lot of different ways. Number one is,
40:36
The most obvious is workflow automation. You should be probably
tackling workflow automation as just a part of your constant
improvement program to become more efficient, whether it's
with AI or not. But AI is particularly good at workflow
automation because it can tackle steps in that workflow that
couldn't be tackled without AI. So the first thing
41:06
the companies should be doing if they're not doing it is
documenting all of their processes, all of their tribal
knowledge into playbooks. So when you have somebody who's an expert
in something in your company and they're the person who's the only
one that knows how to do it and so we can't live without them,
that's a bottleneck for scaling. Because if you bring somebody else
in to expand their capacity, they're going to...
41:32
put a big dependency on that person with all the expertise, which
is going to cause problems. So anybody in a position
like that should be documenting all of their procedures and
protocols and especially all the nuances and all the edge cases
into playbooks. And there should be some centralized playbook
repository for the company. And this becomes part of your
intellectual property and part of your value if you ever
42:02
you're trying to raise money or you're trying to sell your company.
So it increases your value. So you do that, then AI, you
start to look at automating those workflows because now they're
documented. So now what can be automated in them from just a
workflow automation perspective. And then how much can you
implement AI in there? Because now AI can learn to make the same
kinds of decisions that this person is making.
42:31
And this is like the low hanging fruit that I'm talking about right
now. Right. Exactly. Right. Because the bigger stuff is if we
implement AI in here, what workflows would we totally throw
away and start from scratch? Because we can think of way more
sophisticated ways of addressing this now that we have intelligence
involved in all these steps. But that's later.
42:57
worry about that once you get your arms around implementing AI,
automated workflows and then- So workflow automation. So
playbooks, workflows and AI in your automated workflows. That's
sort of the stepped wise process. Excellent. You heard it here
on the founder sandbox. Thank you, David. And if you're
not sure how to do all that,
43:25
ask AI, okay, here's my company. What should I be focusing on if I
wanna implement playbooks, workflow automation and AI? And AI will
help you figure this all out. Right. That's a jewel here. So what'd
you do? Chat GBT, co-pilot, what's your complexity? Where would you
go to? All right. Well, it just depends on the flavor of the day.
Right now.
43:53
I was using chat GPT primarily for this stuff just because it was a
first and I'm very comfortable with the apps. have them everywhere.
And Claude's recently come out with a new version and it's in
some ways I'm just finding the output way more organized and
smarter. And so I've been using Claude more in the last couple of
weeks, but that'll change in another week or two. Any one of
them will do a pretty decent job.
44:21
I'm not using perplexity because it's built on top of the
other ones. But perplexity is a great tool if you're newer
with this because it makes some of the... It's a little bit more
accessible for somebody who doesn't know how to use AI.
Gemini is also really good, but that's more of a
technical... And there's so many things you can do.
44:49
with AI that you wouldn't even think about. And I'll give you an
example, more as a brain opening exercise for everybody than
anything else. Because this is something I did about seven weeks
ago. I, chat GPT had just come out a week or two before
with their vision capability in the mobile app. And for those
of you who don't know it, with chat GPT, there's a talk
45:19
button. It's not the microphone. It's the one that looks like
a sound wave in the mobile app. You tap that, and now you
have a voice conversation with chat, which I use this constantly.
Even when I'm working with, I've got some contractors at my
house whose English isn't very good, so I ask it to do real-time
translation for me. And it does matter the language. And I
start talking, and it translates to their language. And they
respond
45:49
in their language and it translates to English and it's doing it
perfectly. And so I can have a very natural conversation with
anybody just holding my phone up in front of them now. Right?
But it has this vision capability where when you go
into that voice mode, you tap the camera next to it, and now it's
looking out the front of your screen while you're talking to it.
And so I'll give you a couple of examples where I've used it
six weeks ago and again, like
46:18
weeks later and I now used it many times like this. I was in
Lowe's, which is a store for home improvement.
And for some project I was on, my wife calls me and
says, I need fertilizer for a hibiscus. And I say, well, what do I
get? She says, anything that says hibiscus on it, it'll be fine. I
said, okay, fine. And if anybody that knows these big box stores,
there's like hundreds of bags of fertilizer of different
brands.
46:48
And I couldn't find one that said hibiscus. This is a typical thing
with my wife. Oh, just look for this. And of course, there isn't
that. So I asked Chess GPT, okay, I'm in Lowe's and I'm
looking for a fertilizer for hibiscus. What would you
suggest? And it said, oh, there's a number of brands that are high
acid. And I said, we'll recommend a brand. Tonal is a really
good brand. And I said, okay. So I'm looking and I can't find
it.
47:18
So I walked 30 feet back and I'm talking, right? I'm having this,
know, people are looking at me like, what the hell is he doing? And
I walked 30 feet back because there's many, many shelves, you know,
columns of shelves with fertilizer. I walked back and I turned on
the vision and I say, okay, there's all the fertilizers. And I'm
moving my phone across all these shelves. say, do you see tonal
here? And it says, yes, look for the one in the red and white
bag.
47:48
And I see it on the shelf. So I walk straight forward. see a
red and white bag. That's not tonal. said, this isn't it. And she,
cause it's a woman's voice that I have, she says, it's two
shelves to the left, second from the top. I walk over there
and it's right where she said it was. Crazy. And you're not a beta
user. So this is available today. This is available. It's been
available for a couple of months. And then
48:18
My daughter-in-law asked me to get something from the pharmacy,
from CVS, another big box pharmacy store, right? And this is
something I don't even know if I'm in the right aisle because it's
something I've never bought. So I ask it, I say, I'm looking for
this brand and I'm not sure if I'm in the right aisle or not,
but I'm going to walk down the aisle and tell me if you see it. As
I'm walking down the aisle, holding it straight forward so it can
see both sides. And it says, well,
48:45
Yes, I'm familiar with the brand. You should look for it in a green
and white box. then she goes like this. Oh, I see it. It's down
there on the right on the bottom shelf. And I turn and I look and
it's right by my right foot.
48:58
You heard it here. This is crazy. think it's a bit creepy.
How many times have you been looking for something on a
shelf? You know, and you're like, oh, how long, how many hours is
this going to take me to spot it? Good internet connection
and all that. So, oh my goodness. It's creepy and it's wonderful.
So same time. the same time. Yeah. Yeah. For quality of
life and even for, um, yeah. So
49:25
That's a mind opening thing is all the reason I bring that up.
Excellent. Hey, let's go. Let's continue on in the founder sandbox.
I'd like to ask each of my guests to share with me. I'm
all about working with resilient, purpose driven and scalable
companies in the growth phase. So what does resilience mean to you?
You can either answer, you know, what's the first thing that comes
out of your, you cannot use chat, GBT. I'm not fancy. No hands.
49:55
No hands, and I don't have the voice version going because you'd
hear it. Podcast we could do it. And we are real. We're not.
Yeah, we are real. We're not. So I think that's, I don't think
that's a difficult question to answer. Resilience means
opportunity. So no matter what happens, even if it seems terrible,
what opportunity does that create? Excellent. If you ask
that.
50:22
keep reframing everything from that perspective, it creates
resilience. Right. Thank you. What about purpose-driven?
Purpose-driven means having a clear
long-term path and goal and asking yourself if
the things you're doing keep you on purpose to that.
50:56
Scalable. What's scalable mean for you? Scalable for me means
eliminating tribal knowledge or not eliminating it, but
documenting tribal knowledge. First of all, figuring out how
you generate revenue and then how you expand your ability to
generate revenue, which means growing your
51:25
growing your team, growing your capacity and identifying the
bottlenecks and focusing all your energy on the bottlenecks. And
usually the bottlenecks have to do with tribal knowledge or
with lack of workflow automation. Wow, you know, it's easier
said than done though, that tribal knowledge, it is resistant,
right? Oh yeah, because it's career, what's the
word I'm trying to think of?
51:55
It keeps you in your job forever if you're the only one that
knows how to do the thing. Absolutely. That's for another podcast,
David. My final question today is, did you have fun in
the Founder Sandbox? Oh, yes. I had a lot of fun. Thanks.
That's a great question too. Thank you, Brenda. Did you have
fun?
52:20
Did you? I had had fun. And particularly in this last part, right?
Cause we're talking about some heavy duty, you know, uses of, um,
agentic AI, right. And scalable, you know, LTV, CAC and all that.
And then we get to hear these real life, you know, kind of creepy,
um, uh, uses of, um, on our phones today with, um, with AI, which
is, which is quite amazing. But I also know that in your world of
techies,
52:50
your team, which is distributed, have a lot of fun events too. So
you probably- have one more thing on the whole scalable thing. You
have to be compassionately ruthless or ruthlessly compassionate,
however you want to say it. Okay. So that the people, every, and
the ruthless is anything that's going to get in the way of you
growing your company, which benefits everybody in the company.
53:19
it needs to be addressed in a ruthless way. But if you build a
culture of ruthlessly compassionate, then all the people that work
for you feel that same level of ruthlessness to protect the company
and make it grow. And you practice what you preach, I suspect, at
Techies. Yes. Yes. It took me a while, but if we accidentally hire
the wrong person, either because
53:45
we made a mistake in the process or they faked us out and we
recognize they're not smart enough. Literally, that's usually the
problem. They're not smart enough to carry their weight. We fire
them immediately. We don't try to bring them along because you
can't improve somebody's IQ. You can improve any other aspect, but
their IQ is their IQ. And that will be a bottleneck
forever.
54:13
in our team and it'll require other people to carry that person.
And it sends the wrong message to the team that I don't value them
enough to make sure that we only surround them with people that are
going to inspire them and help them grow. Excellent. And I suspect
they are not fungible by AI, your employees, not techies. I mean,
we've gotten better and better.
54:40
at not making those mistakes over the years. So that doesn't
typically happen. takes us, we're much more careful about how we
hire. AI gives us the ability to recruit faster, more
broadly, along with workflow automation. But what I
mean by real, this is the compassionate. Once my team understood
this, now they embody that and they will get rid of somebody
if they made a mistake. I don't have to force the issue ever
anymore because
55:10
they recognize how much, important it is to protect their teams. So
to my listeners, if you liked this episode today with the CEO and
founder of Techies, sign up for the monthly release of founders,
business owners, corporate directors, and professional service
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resilient, scalable, and purpose-driven.
55:40
to make profits for good. Signing off for today. See you next
month in the Founder Sandbox. Thank you.