The BrightGauge Blog

After turning to the EOS system back in 2016, BrightGauge found that there were a number of areas of our company we could improve to boost growth and employee happiness. Since reading Traction and implementing the EOS system, goal setting has been a big priority for our team, even making its way into our product. In this episode, Brian reviews why goals are important to any thriving business, and how to get started with them. Key takeaways Why goals are so important How Goals made it into BrightGauge Common mistakes made in goal setting It's ok to abandon your goal as long as you take what you've learned and have next steps planned out How to get the whole company to plan their future success with goals _____________ Transcript Danielle: So we formally launched Goals back in the Fall of 2017, and since then, we've seen a lot of users adopt and take on Goals for themselves, as well as run into a few questions about how to get started. So, today we're going to dive into how to set goals for every team member, while taking advantage of how this can improve your overall processes as a team, and lead to greater growth towards your company vision. So, Brian, why don't you just start us off a little bit with why goals, why are you so into goals? Brian: That's a good question. So the history of it in our product goes back further than 2017. We launched something called Scorecards in 2016, same time previous year, so it was a year earlier. And it really started with when I read the book Traction by Gino Wickman, and for those that have heard of Traction, or have not, I should say, it's part of the EOS system, Entrepreneurial Operating System. This gentleman wrote a book on how to basically run your company, and a big part of it was on using data to kind of keep an eye on things, and also to measure your success towards what you're trying to accomplish, so your goals. I love this concept, I took it exactly how he wrote in the book and we put it in the app itself, and then after a year of iterating on that, we realized that no one really understood what scorecards meant, or at least not in a way that we intended it to be, unless they had read the book specifically. So we transitioned to the feature that it really is, and that is just plain old goals. The reason I'm so into it is that I've been in this data world for 9+ years, and nothing has become more powerful in how we run our own internal business, in the sense of formalizing and committing to an internal set of things we want to get done with goals that are then measurable by data that exists in one of our systems, any of our systems. So I saw that first-hand when we were using spreadsheets before the scorecards came to our app in 2016, I saw our company that had 20 employees or maybe a little less really rally behind the few things that we needed to get done in a certain timeframe, and it was like magic. And we had all these dashboards up, we had all these reports going, and nothing impacted the behavior besides committing to a certain amount of things to get done, someone owning those things and having numbers to kind of manage it. So it's become kind of a passion for me in this odd sense, because it wasn't that I was ever big into school, I mean, I always wanted higher grades, but it wasn't like I had to hit this school I wanted to get into, or this degree. It was just kind of go with the flow in that sense but seeing it in practice in real life made me a huge convert of, goals is what makes a big difference. Danielle: So you weren't setting goals from day one, since you were born. Brian: No, no, no. I think, I mean even getting to school, it wasn't like I had to pick my top three and that’s where I went to, I just applied to a few schools that I thought would be interesting and kind of went for it. So it wasn't until running BrightGauge, and also seeing other companies adopted and feel the same way that I was like, this is real, this is really impactful, and then I just found an excuse to get it into our product. Danielle: Yeah, it's pretty easy to be aimless until you have the right process in place for effectively putting goals into place. Brian: For sure. Danielle: Otherwise, you set way too many of them, and none of them are achievable. Brian: For sure, and the biggest example is New Year's resolutions, I use it whenever I talk to people about why are goals important. It's very easy to set them, but in order to follow through, in order to hit them, in order to impact what you're trying to impact, you need to be held accountable. You have other people holding you accountable, which is why New Year's resolutions always fail. We were just talking about eating too much, and that's a thing that there's no one else holding you accountable, it's very hard to hold yourself accountable in the same way, so. Aimless is definitely something that every business is trying to fight. Danielle: So, why would you say goals are so important? It seems obvious in reaching a long-term objective, or even short term, but where does it really step into your company's profile? Brian: Yeah, and I guess goals in itself is not the important piece, right? That's the obvious reason, like you said, it's more how you implement it in your company, or in your team that makes it very powerful, and makes it important, because there needs to be a system in place that you as a manager, you as a leader implement in order to make sure that either the goals that are set are good ones, are the right ones, people are trying their hardest to hit them, and hopefully hitting most of them in that time period. So I would say goal management is super critical, and it's something that you can't take lightly and you need to make sure you're thoughtful in how you implement it in your team, and in your company. Danielle: So what would say makes these so essential to performing your best? It's clear how this is a motivating factor for companies overall, they want to see their vision put into place. Where would you say this fits in for individual improvement? Brian: Good question. So yes, at a team level, and as a leader, the goals are going to help you accomplish what you're collectively paying everyone to do together, right, as a team. Individually, they're a huge motivating factor because it helps create alignment, if done properly, it helps create alignment between what someone is doing individually, and how that aligns up with the company's goals. So when I say goal management, these are individually owned. So if the goal is we want to increase revenue by 10%, and someone in support would need to have some sort of goal that's attached to not losing any revenue, right? So their individual goal may be, make sure customer satisfaction's at 99%, they are kind of lasered in on that specific individual goal, they can see how that impacts the revenue goal for the whole company, and they can make sure they're doing a good job at their specific piece of the entire pie. So it's very motivating at all individual levels, because their impact should directly correlate with the broader theme of what the business is trying to accomplish. So it's that's sense of alignment that creates engagement with people, that are having these goals that are trying to hit them, that they can see why what they're doing is important. So it's a big part of successfully putting in goal management in your company is that everyone should be on the same. Everyone should be knowing what they can get done in their limited purview that then is going to impact the overall business. That's especially with millennial management, that's a huge part of like, how can they feel the impact that they make because they're two years out of school- Danielle: They want to feel like a champ. Brian: Right, they want to feel like a champion, exactly. And so it's hard to do, and these goal management concepts helps put that into place. Danielle: What were we doing before BrightGauge implemented goals? How were we managing that? Brian: So we were doing it haphazardly in the sense that we had these revenue targets that we wanted to hit, we still have the similar ones that we do today. But we'd say at the beginning of the year, hey, this is what we want to hit, x amount of net new customers. That was it, and now it's up to my brother and I when we were running the company to just make sure that everyone's doing their tasks, but when you're a small, six, five person, eight person company, everyone feels that sense of, they know what they're doing is helping that overarching goal. But we just had that one annual goal, and where we found friction, especially as we grew was, okay, what are we getting done this quarter that's going to help us get to that goal? Because you would end up, aimless is not necessarily the word I would describe ourselves at that time, but it was more, you're zigzagging, you're going in different directions when if you can just set out, these are the things I need to get done, knowing that my goal revenue is this for the whole year, that's where we kind of transitioned and when we started actually managing goals itself. So before the spreadsheets in 2016, we were all over the place, just with an annual target of what we wanted to get done, and with no real clear path to how we got there. Danielle: So at this point, we've taken it and we've applied to our company. How can other companies, BrightGauge customers use goals? Brian: Yeah, that's a question that I answered in those workshops, right, that we host at our offices. It's a common question. The easiest thing is just to get started, just as a team and hopefully the team leaders are doing this, they know where they want to get to in a certain time period, whether it's a whole year, whether it's three months in a quarter. You should say, okay, these are the projects I want to get done, this is what I want to accomplish, and this is how I want to measure those things that we can make sure that they say, yes, these are accomplished at the end of that time period, and then just get started with three or four. The biggest advice that I'd give to everyone is, it's okay that you're going to screw up the first quarter, you definitely will, I did, everyone does, it takes a lot of kind of getting into the right routine, how to set the right goals, how to cut your losses when they're wrong, because you don't want to just stick on the wrong thing because you put it on a piece of paper. So there's an adjustment period, so the best thing I'd tell you is to get started, write something down, assign them to people to be responsible for them, and then let it iterate from there. If you're flexible enough, it'll come pretty natural in the first, I want to say six months. It sounds like a long time, but in the grand scheme of things, you get pretty down with it. Danielle: So what timeframe are these normally being measured under? Brian: Three months is a standard. Jim Collins, Gino Wickman, even Google sets their goals, it's always quarterly. Sometimes you can do it every six weeks, instead of having four iterations a year, if you have eight iterations it helps you fine-tune the goal setting process. But six weeks may not be enough time to get something big done, so typically everyone says quarterly. Danielle: And if something doesn't feel quite right, you get so far along and the goal that you're tracking on a weekly basis. Brian: Yeah, abort mission. Danielle: And it's just not working. Brian: Well, case in point for you, you just switched roles within the company, so that wasn't a goal of mine to switch your team. [laugh] But it just happened, right? In the business, especially small businesses, things just happen, then your goals may change. It's okay to cut loose and say, okay, what are we trying to get done in the rest of the quarter or the next six weeks and come up with new goals. It's not about, you're not a prisoner to the goals you set, right? It's the other way around, and the people get lost in there, especially in the first two iterations where the purpose is to pick a few things to get done and try how to get them done. And with those things that are aligned to some longer-term goal of the company or the teams or the person or the individual, and so you just have to kind of maneuver yourself throughout the quarter, cut your losses, hey, maybe you picked a goal that's super easy, you get it done in three weeks, that was a good one, just keep iterating, add a new one, that time of thing. So it's a common question, and it's a common concern of people, but it's like, don't overthink it, because at the end of the day, it's just goals, right? It's just goal-setting. Danielle: Progress tracking. Brian: Yeah, progress tracking, and it's not a project management, it's not in that sense where you're delivering to a client. This is what you want to accomplish as an individual or a team to hit some big vision down the road, right? And it isn't just like, I need to deliver x, y, and z widgets for this customer. It's like, I want to change my business, my team's way of working in a year, okay, what do I need to do now, what are the steps to take to do at that point? Danielle: So what would you say makes for a good goal and ones where maybe we've failed ourselves? Brian: I've noticed that we are at BrightGauge, we always, not that we always, I shouldn't say that. I notice that we set very attainable goals, too much so, right, where we know we need to get it done, and so we set that as a goal, but we get it done in eight weeks out of twelve, and it's like, that didn't do anything, you weren't really pushing yourself. The purpose is to kind of stretch yourself out a little bit in order to feel comfortable that you can get to it and be okay if you can't get into it. And you can't get to it, meaning you can't accomplish the entire thing, but you get to 70% of the way there. Google forces every single person to have goals, at least three in a quarter for each individual. But they want you to be 70% of the way there, so they don't want you setting goals that are easily attainable. So, that happens to us all the time. I think a good goal is something that is measurable, that there's some way of saying, yes, this is complete, but still inspirational, or aspirational in that everyone understands the broader theme behind it. So you being on the new success team, you know a good goal would have been like form a new success team, as measured by hire someone, implement 50 tracking calls, do this, so that everyone knows, hey, what we're trying to do is implement a new success team, but then tactically, you know these are the one, two, three things that you need to get done. Danielle: You can break it down by individual tasks, and I noticed a lot of goals are made up of one task, and it's pretty easy to just look at it through that linear view. Brian: Yeah, exactly, but there's a couple different philosophies for goal setting and this is where it gets kind of interesting, which I like, the Gino Wickman Traction model, EOS, is one specific way to track goals, and it's very much like you just kind of said of where, it's smart goals, they're specific, they're measurable, attainable, whatever the rest of the letters mean. Time down, so that's one way to do it. The other way which is a more popular way nowadays is called these OKRs, which Google has popularized, it started way back at Intel, and this is where you have an OKR, which stands for Objective, and then the KR is Key Results, and where you have this statement that's like, I want to change the world, or something a little bit smaller, I want to change my world. And then you have the key results which are the specific kind of, like you said, tasks, those are very much measurable. So everyone has three or four of these big goals that you can rally around, you can wrap your head around, you know it's important. You have some wiggle room in that, and you have specific, all right, let's get these things done to it. So that philosophy is very different than a lot of our listeners and customers that use it, but it's a very interesting way to set goals, as proven by Google doing it, since close to their inception, which they now credit much of their success, not just on the algorithm for searching, but for OKRs in the business, which is crazy. Danielle: And how would you say, because not every individual on your team is going to be able to choose a goal for themselves? Brian: They should, they should. So they should, each individual should come up with their own goals because the secret being, if they come up with it themselves, they feel more connected to it. So when if it comes top down, you're going to have people that just say, ah, I don't care, I don't believe that this should be the right thing. So you want everyone to kind of set their own goals, but just make sure that everyone's online with what we want to get done, and just that conversation itself helps everyone stay on the same page. If you can maneuver, or manipulate the situation to say, hey, let's try, yes, you want to take these four certification exams, but it doesn't really tie into where we're heading, how about let's take one of those exams, let's do this other thing, now you have a good conversation with the person and they feel invested in it, and you're making sure that they're doing, kind of focusing on the right thing. So you definitely want them to be part of the process. Danielle: Yeah, in talking to a few of our customers, I've noticed that it's not always the case, that's definitely not the case. Brian: Yeah, because they think very top-down, especially there's a lot of engineers that our customers have on staff that use our product, so it's very much like, these are the five KPIs that I want you to hit every week. That's not really making goals, in a sense. That's just making sure that they're doing their job, what are they trying to accomplish in those, what's really a thing that pushes them to get something done, and you can't throw that down to them. They have to be part of that conversation for it to be truly successful. Danielle: Yeah, I love going through a lot of the different BrightGauge teams' goal lists and seeing not only is it something directed towards how they can do better in their position, be it hit a certain mark, close a certain amount of tickets, but a lot of it is towards self-betterment, self-improvement, and growth within the goal as well. Brian: Yeah, I mean, the self-betterment ultimately helps the company as well, so we 100% support it, most people should, where if it's a, I want to be better at ownership for a senior dev that we have on this team, that's awesome, we want him to be better at ownership, so it's part of scaling our team, he knows that he wants to get better, right? So it's just this great relationship that we have, and everyone's vested in this thing. Danielle: Seems pretty clear why we built goals into BrightGauge, we have dashboards and reports to go along with it. How do you tie all of that back together? Where did this really step into- Brian: Because everything is measurable, everything is measurable, and at the end of the day, what we're trying to accomplish here is helping these small companies, that's just like MSPs, run a better business, and data is a big part of that, real-time data is a big part of that, but it's the numbers that are attached, the measurable-ness of a goal that ties it very much back to BrightGauge, and a mission like, let's help these people run better businesses. So to link that, sometimes people get confused, like, this is so different, and it is, but when you break it down and streamline it, at the end of the day it could be based off of KPIs, it's very much measurable, it's very much your own data, and so that's where we see it fit in what we're trying to accomplish. Danielle: And so by your own data, you need looking at not only sales numbers, service to get numbers, but also on the operational side, something that you can extend to the whole team, everything's measurable. Brian: Everything should be measurable that you're tracking, and so at BrightGauge, we're adjusting as many data services as we can, so it's that same philosophy of, if there's numbers behind it to help you manage your business, that's where we want to be in, where we want to plan. So, that's how it ties back again, it's different mentality than thinking about a dashboard where you put it on a big screen, and that's it. Behavior does change in that situation, but goals is a different way to do the same thing, which is to improve and change behavior. Danielle: So how can folks start using goals? Brian: Well, if you're a current customer, it's already there for you in the product itself. There's a lot of these, it's that getting started part that people get stuck on. We did build in the app this inspiration feature where curated goals by other service providers are there for people to just pick off and say, oh, let me try this, this, and this. So that's a good way to get started. If people are really stuck, they can reach out to us in support, I'd even get on the call with them and talk through what they're trying to accomplish and help out, but it's just about kind of getting started and committing to it, it's the best way to get going. And even if you don't use BrightGauge and you're listening in, use a spreadsheet, that's what most people are using. Just track them, write them down, assign someone to a goal, and just iterate from there. Make sure it's attached to some longer-term vision, but just get started. You can always start with Excel. Danielle: Yeah, you might already be using a spreadsheet to track revenue or billing. It's kind of the same principle, really. Brian: Most people, I mean I'd say, I think we have 300 active goal users, I don't know if that's an appropriate way to say it, but goal companies, companies using goals, I guess is a better way. And I know it takes awhile, because spreadsheets, typically they come from people that are using spreadsheets and doing all right. So spreadsheets is just the fastest way, but if you want to get started with BrightGauge, it's easy as well, it looks very similar to a spreadsheet, but it just has built-in reminder features, and a built-in, sending out an email to everyone at the end, kind of helps that staying in sync part of it, but either way, just get started. Danielle: The beauty of the goals that you've set too are that they automatically snapshot, so they goal where you currently stand. Brian: Yeah, and BrightGauge, that's a huge value add, and it saves a lot of time. So if it's pulling from a number that exists already in our system, or being sent to our system, BrightGauge will take a snapshot of it, and then you have that stored data, so the person doesn't have to go and look for the data, and what was my revenue number last week, or what was my service ticket number? They can go in and it's already there, you just provide the context around why that number is what it is. Danielle: So with the context, you can just go in and add a little note next to the number, if you're on track or off track. Brian: Yeah, it's awesome. In a sense, so me as the business owner, and as a team lead as well, when your whole team is putting in, checking in, putting in a context or a note, right, around that check-in, it then emails you at a certain time when they're all done, and so you can get a quick snapshot of how everyone's doing across their goals. You know that their goals are still top of mine, so the system part of it is a huge benefit, but again, for people just getting started, I mean, use us, obviously, please, but you can always use Excel if you want to try something. Danielle: And what would you say, just for those who aren't familiar with BrightGauge goals, the difference between the two we offer process goals, and outcome goals? Brian: Good question. So there's two different, again, goal philosophies is very, it's incredibly debated, and it's been around since Peter Drucker wrote a book in the 50s or 60s, I hope that's right. But when you break it down, one delineation we saw is that you have two different types of goals, and one is this outcome goal, which is a traditional, hey, I want to lose five pounds by the end of the quarter, or by the end of the year. And then you have this other process goal, which is more of the, in order to hit that outcome goal, you have to be doing certain things. If I want to lose five pounds, I'd better be working out three times a week. I'd better be eating salads five times a week, whatever the process is to get to that outcome goal. So we see that a lot in our companies where they have these aspirational outcome goals, but there's no thought to the process to get there. And so we have these process goals that help people think that way, that like, hey, that's great, I want to get to this, I want to sign up 20 new customers, but I need to make sure that I'm making calls, I'm doing networking lunches, and I'm doing a process in order to get there. So those are the two differences, and we put that in the app, so it's clear what's what. Danielle: So if you were to take that and apply it to say one individual sales team member, it could have an outcome goal of 20 signups, or new revenue for the month, and then underneath it have a few separate key outcome goals, process goals. Brian: That gets you there, right? And it could be dials, sales is definitely a great example. They have to have activity in order to generate what they get paid on which is the revenue. So they could have, I want to hit 10,000 monthly recurring revenue, okay, well, they need to be doing, ten dials, three prospect lunches, those things, and it could be a sub-goal, it all depends on how you want to install the framework in your company, the system, the goal system, but they go hand in hand, or they could be totally separate in the sense that you just want to keep track of making sure that the business is running those process goals. Danielle: Thinking of that now, what advice would you give to business managers, owners, looking to implement this system into your company without making it feel like such a chore for those employees who might already. Brian: Yeah, it's a good question, because it's always, again, the hardest part is getting started, but the reality is, everyone's going to enjoy the concept of full transparency between what the business owner is doing, what their job is as the service technician, sales person, etc. So if the business owner is taking this seriously, is sharing how his progress to his goals, which he or she should have announced to the team, you'll get the behavior from everyone else to pick up behind that. So I think that's a good piece of advice, make sure that the business manager is actively participating in the goals as well, and sharing them, and being transparent, and that'll create that camaraderie and that buy in from everyone that you need in order to make this happen. I mean, I get jazzed up by this stuff, it's a very magical experience when you see people working towards a similar thing, but in their specific purview, and it happens in sports all the time, it happens in big companies, small companies kind of have the same feeling, if they do this the right way. Danielle: Definitely. Is there anything that you think would be helpful to share? Brian: There is a new book that just came out by John Doerr, I believe that's how you pronounce his last name, and it's a book, he was one of the early investors in Google, and he just wrote a 300 page book on essentially goal-setting, and how Google used it as well as other organizations that he's invested in. And I would pick that up because when people think of goals, they think of stagnant, not purposeful, kind of big company thing, but hearing the tech industry talk about it, in their cool, hip way, is very motivating. So take a look at that new book that just came out, it's called Measuring What Matters, and that's a great resource. The Traction book is fantastic, Google about goals, and see what people are doing. But it's powerful, it's a simple concept, it makes sense, everyone kind of has goals in the back of their mind, but it's all about how you implement it at your company and the system you use, so just keep learning about it and keep iterating. Danielle: Great, and if you have any questions about where to get started with goals, especially at BrightGauge, or even if you want to talk to us about some of the goals that you've been setting yourself, you can reach out over at support@brightgauge.com. Brian would be happy to take a peek- Brian: Yeah, great, email or call us, and there's a bunch of blogs that we've written and whitepapers on how to set goals, how to fix things when you set the wrong goals, or you set too many goals that are too attainable. So we have a bunch of resources out there for that but always just reach out. We're always happy to chat, especially on this, I love this stuff. Danielle: Great, thank you so much. Brian: No problem, thank you.

Tune in to this month's episode as BrightGauge CEO Brian Dosal interviews Accelo founder Geoff McQueen on their origin story, changing the way businesses operate, and what it's been like operating between San Francisco and Australia-based headquarters. Key takeaways include: Evolving Accelo's business model over the last decade Transitioning to ServOps What's going on in the Service industry Long-term growth plans _____________ Transcript Brian: Hey, Geoff. Welcome to the podcast! Geoff: Great to meet you. Brian: Yeah it’s great to, you know, I’ve heard a lot of great things about Accelo, and us being a new partner, it’s very awesome that you’re able to join us and tell us more and especially tell our market more about Accelo. Where are you based right now? Geoff: Right now, I’m sitting in San Francisco. So, our head office is in San Francisco, at 1st and Howard, down in the middle of, you know, sort of the start-up craziness of this part of the world. Brian: And obviously with the accent it’s pretty clear - so, Australia. Take us back - how’d you end up in San Francisco and we’ll come back around to, you know, how you and I got hooked up here. Geoff: Yeah, absolutely. So I moved out to the States to San Francisco back at the end of 2011. We had Accelo in a beta at the time and we were just getting ready to launch commercially and, yeah, so I came out to the States for a couple of reasons. We were, you know, a tech start-up with a lot of exciting things going on. We had a lot of support from Google. It’s actually funny, they’re having their IO conference starting, or it’s happening this month at least, and yeah, it was actually at that conference where we got asked to exhibit by the good folks at Google and we got to know a bit of the market. It was just like, you know what, if we’re going to make this work from a business point of view, let’s get out here, let’s make it happen. So, yeah, that was how it played out. Brian: Wow. Yeah, that’s a big move. So, I mean, you were born and raised in Australia. Stayed there for school? Geoff: Yeah, I went to school there and so, my three co-founders and I at Accelo, we all met each other through a… we all used to work together in an agency that I founded, you know, about a decade before that and we decided to make Accelo happen, not just as a side project, but actually we spun out and really poured our all into it Silicon-Valley-style, which is great. And, yeah, I left and the three of them stayed behind and they’ve since built up an amazing engineering and product team. My job out here in the States was to focus on fundraising, sales, marketing, client success, really all those customer-facing dimensions. And I’ve since built up a pretty amazing team out here. Brian: Yeah. How many - what’s the employee size now? Geoff: I think we’re nudging 90. Brian: Wow. That’s great. That is great. And how many - what’s the split between Australia and, I’m assuming it’s just San Francisco, the other space? Geoff: No, we’ve actually got another office that we opened earlier this year in Denver, which has been seeing a fair amount of growth as well. So, yeah, we’ve sort of, you know, about 40% is in Australia and then we’ve got, actually it’s more like 50%. We’re still very much a product and engineering driven company. And then San Francisco and Denver combined clocking in around about, sort of, you know 50%...45-50%. Brian: That’s awesome. And I’m sure, you know, our listeners as we spoke about are very much in the MSP space, MSP-centric, so I know a few have heard about Accelo, but it’s still relatively new in this market, right? So, give us, you know for them, that have never heard and just saw the logo on our podcast and decided to give it a shot, why did Accelo come to be? And I know that’s tied to the services business you had and what is it doing now? If you can get to how it would apply potentially to MSPs, that would be perfect. Geoff: Yeah, absolutely. So, my first business out of college was a services business which was a hybrid between doing, you know, digital agency-style work and MSP-type work. We ended up, relatively early in our journey, focusing, as one needs to do, on niche-ing our expertise around more the digital side of things, but always got a strong memory and recollection from the days of us, you know, in the early days pulling cables myself and crimping and setting up, you know, client offices and things like that well back in the day. But, yeah, we built that services business, and it was in the process of building that business that I came to realize, first-hand, the frustrations and challenges of what it takes to really run a good business. And that running the business piece is harder than it should be for small business in the service industry, which is almost all small businesses. Brian: Right. Geoff: You know, the average person - the data and stats are kind of heartbreaking - the average small business owner or manager today works something like 57 hours a week, you know, on average. I think it’s about 80% of them work six or more days. There’s not many more days left after six. So, you know, they don’t take vacations. All this really hard work, you know what it’s like and people listening to this podcast will be nodding away, I expect. And yet, the hard thing is, that it’s actually a really tough way to sort of make your way in this world. 50% of the businesses that start this year won’t make it to their fifth birthday. Brian: Right. Geoff: There’s a lot of factors that come to play. It’s competitive, the big guys don’t play fair, there’s a lot of those sorts of things. But one of the fundamentals that I really saw from doing that kind of work is it was unnecessarily tough to run the business. And if you don’t know what’s going on in the business on a daily basis because there’s too much happening, and if you’re still getting by with spreadsheets and manual status update meetings and other kind of difficult systems pieces, then you end up making bad decisions. Not ‘cause you’re an idiot, not ‘cause you don’t know how to run a business, not ‘cause you don’t care. It really comes down to the fact that, you know, you’re not aware of what’s going on. And so that was really the genesis when it came to Accelo. Realizing that SAP and Oracle had made hundreds of billions of dollars of at least market cap but probably also revenue over the years, helping the big end of town to run their operations and yet small businesses, on the whole, were left to kind of fend for themselves with either a cocktail of different tools that still required you as the business manager, or owner, the person running the business, to try to stitch it all together, which is why you work so many damn hours and often feel like you’re not working on the business, you’re always in it, because you’re holding it together. Or, alternatively - and this is something that the MSP community had that other industries didn’t have as much - you could legitimately go out and buy a bunch of legacy technology that helped to run some of those key operational parts of the business. But the tools were, and are, incredibly conky, very hard to implement and get going, pretty damn expensive, and then after, when it’s all said and done, you’ll still end up becoming a slave to a tool that you put more into than you get out of. And, so I saw that the shape of that market and that world, with my co-founders, we also had our own personal experience and were like “This isn’t right. This isn’t fair. Cloud technology can now make these people’s lives better. They can make their businesses more profitable. They can help them do the work that they love instead of juggling spreadsheets or pulling it together manually.” And, so, it was with that conviction and mission that we decided we were going to do something about it and Accelo was born. Brian: And then, yeah, I know you said you moved to the states in 2011. Is that about the time then this kind of decision was made to take it seriously or you had built the product…? Geoff: Pretty much. We built, we spent some time building the product leading up to that in 2011 but, really, it was the 2011 period where we put the product out into beta in February of 2011 and then really leant into it throughout the course of that year. And that was when - I tell you, we’ve actually still got customers from those early days. Brian: Right. Geoff: It’s incredible. Like, I think about what our product was then and I’m amazed that anybody used it, much less paid for it because it was so MVP, right? Classic start-up journey. And it was interesting that it really still made such a material difference for our customers that we succeeded despite the fact that the product was something that would sort of embarrass me at the time. Brian: Yeah, they say that if it doesn’t embarrass you, then you’ve waited too long to ship it. That’s what I’ve heard. Geoff: That’s exactly right! I have a bunch of friends who were in the service business at the time who asked, “Oh should I use this product?” And I’m like “Ummmm, yeah, you know..”. Whereas now I’m like, “Heck yeah!”. This is definitely now the best product in the world for running a service operation. But for a long time there, it was aspiration at best. Brian: Yeah, we started around the same time, and it’s funny hearing, kind of the value proposition that you tied in there with running on spreadsheets, not knowing what’s going on, it sounds eerily similar to our pitch, you know, pulling different systems together. Geoff: Yeah. Brian: It’s a true need, every small business has that overworked, running around with your head cut off, and I like how you phrased it with this “The PSAs existed”. You guys do not call yourselves a PSA? I know you have project modules, service modules, I believe you have tickets as well, but you don’t call yourselves a PSA. What’s the category that you put yourself in? Geoff: Yeah, we had a look at the PSA market and for a while we tried to fit in, you know. Like, being new kids on the block. We’re thinking “okay, we’ll play this game and be a player in this existing category”. And it became clear as time went by that it really, like while there’s a lot of people probably listening to this who use a PSA or have heard of the category... Brian: Yeah, you have to be gentle. Geoff: Yeah, I mean, from a bigger picture perspective, if you take a step back beyond the MSP industry and look at the service industry more generally, because while all of the professionals in different parts of the service industry have different skills and expertise, like an architect and an engineer are very different to an MSP, the business models are actually quite similar in many ways. It’s smart people doing clever, creative work for clients and creating value with their brains. And, you know, looking at the wider market, it was pretty clear to us that PSA was actually a failed category. It had been attempted to be made, and it was still being slobbed away at some 20 years after it had emerged, and the state of the art was still these incredibly clunky, demanding systems with a big issue of garbage in and garbage out. A huge amount of burden for individual people to just keep the damn things up to date and filled in. All for what? So a CFO can pull a report once a month and feel good? Like, that kind of a mismatch between, you know, effort in and who’s providing that effort and benefit out struck us as a really strange thing. And it was a really common feature of the wider PSA market. We also recognized that the PSA market itself was sort of underselling the benefits of what technology could do to help you run a business. Because it was so focused on really just tracking billing and, in the case of MSPs it was tracking tickets and service contracts, but if you tried to do a project with any of the PSAs that were out there, you realized that they just wrapped them in a label and called it a project but it was really just a jumble of tickets. Conversely, you use other products called PSA products and they’ve got project management built in but they wouldn’t know a service contract or a ticket if it jumped up and bit them. None of them have good CRM and sales pipeline functionality to help you forecast what’s around the corner. So, it just sort of struck us that the PSA category was really just one disappointingly broken promise after another. When we talked to the market and we talked about what they were really challenged by, they were like look, we’ve got marketing automation, HubSpot, InfusionSoft, Marqeta, like, you know, the main tools that small and medium businesses can use and do use. We’ve got sales automation whether it be Salesforce or one of their up and coming challenges. And, of course, we’ve got the accounting piece, whether it be Quickbooks, xero, or something else. But, the bit in the middle, the operations piece where they actually have to run the business, that was their big gap and as we talked to them more and more, they weren’t looking for a different timesheet, they weren’t looking for a different ticket tracker, they’re actually looking for a way to run their operations. And, so that’s where looking at the experience we had of really running a business from coin to cash, not just, you know, in the PSA categories being defined. Talking to our users, it became clear that something that was actually focused on running the business for the benefit of everyone using it was actually an exciting new category and so, that category is called Service Operations Automation and we’re just one of the players who’s really helping to bring what should’ve been PSA’s delivered promise, but we’re bringing it to life in this category that’s much more broad and all encompassing. Brian: What’s the split then of industries that you are successful with now, or verticals? I know it’s the service space, but is it attorneys, photographers…? Geoff: Yeah, not so much the attorneys. So, there’s a couple of criterion. We tend to focus on people at this stage given that we are a tech company out of San Francisco, with still a bunch more that we know we want to do on the product. That tends to be a benefit for people who are classic early adopters, so there’s a bunch of MSPs, a bunch of consulting practices, a bunch of agencies, a bunch of accountants funnily enough. I wouldn’t have thought accountants were necessarily going to be early adopters. You would imagine them to be more tech laggards, but actually they’re not. Tools like xero and Quickbooks online have shown them that the power of the cloud and what it can mean for their business, so they’ve leaned into it and gone, “well what else can we do?”. And that’s where their 40 year old practice management software that’s had a constant lineage since before DAS sort of finds itself struggling to really make its value clear in the face of new technology, like our stuff in the ServOps space. Brian: Yeah, from an MSP standpoint, I know - I go back to it because obviously that’s the listener space - I think we are probably 90% in that traditional MSP space. So, what is, and originally we had hooked up - I should circle back to one of my original points I wanted to make, was, which is typical for our customers or how we get new integrations, is they say, “hey, awesome new product, I use it and I want to use BrightGauge with it, please integrate.” And when we look at these new - anything that’s pitched to us like that - we first just google API doc of [insert company name] and it’s funny because even like Ninja, who we’re friendly with but they just don’t have any API, like they didn’t, they haven’t invested in that part of the business yet, or an API that would be suitable for a reporting tool like ours. But you guys had a great, well-documented system that we could pull data from. It was modern, it was normal in our opinion… Geoff: Yeah, we weren’t forcing you to usurp, right? That’s the key. Brian: Exactly! And you would be amazed how much joy that brought to us. You know, we’re in the early stages of our partnership and just trying to - I think we have five mutual partners - so, how many other (and these are MSPs), so how many other MSPs are there if you’re allowed to answer that question? Geoff: Oh, we’ve got hundreds. We don’t disclose exact customer numbers but we have hundreds and hundreds of MSPs using Accelo today. One number that we do share sometimes, you won’t find this very publicly so it’s a bit of a scoop for you guys, but we find that about 83% of our monthly active users are also daily active users, so we have hundreds of MSPs that are running their business on Accelo with a level of addiction that is just right up there with, you know, Facebook, or Gmail. It’s an intensely heavily used product. Brian: It would have to be, right? If they’re going to run their business on it? Like, that’s awesome. Geoff: Yeah. And it’s great to have that validated because there would be nothing worse than saying yeah, they use it to run their business, and then actually find out they just tinker with it once in a while to create an invoice. Brian: Yeah. Geoff: So, no, this thing really runs the show. Brian: Yeah, it takes over. Um, that’s awesome. And, you guys - and I read this that you raised the $9 million, what was the, and I think you had raised a few million before that at some point. Geoff: Yeah, we’ve raised 11 now. Brian: Ok, so what’s the story behind that in the sense that now you have 9 million to spend? You know, where’s that going and how do you see this shaping up over the next few years? Geoff: Yeah, I mean it’s predominantly going into smart, capable people. You know, what we’ve got with Accelo and what it does for our customers lives every single day is really quite special. But, as a product CEO and one of the founders, I know we’re just in many ways still getting started, so the ability to overlay what we have with even more automation, with even more forecasting, bringing in machine learning and AI to provide insights before you even know what questions to ask - these are all things that should be in the hands of regular people running regular businesses. This shouldn’t be stuff that’s just quarantined to only you know, enterprises and the corporate end of town. Because small businesses, especially in the MSP space, but all sorts of other parts of the services sector, I mean, it’s an industry that creates all the jobs in our economy, frankly. It’s main street prosperity that, you know, small businesses that provide services to other people in businesses create and so, it’s not fair that these industries, that these kinds of people are stuck with spreadsheets or other garbage. They deserve a tool that helps them to be prosperous because, if they fail then people’s livelihoods fail. People lose their jobs, lose their homes, it affects health and marriages. It’s too important to just, you know, sort of say “bad luck, work it out yourself”. Brian: So, is that then… Geoff: ...so, investing heavily in product and growth, to help more people and to help them more easily. Brian: Did uh - so, you sound like a very product-centric guy and I’m similar. It’s kind of where I think a lot of software companies miss, um, if the priorities are in a different direction, especially early on. Where’s your strongest, in the features section - I mean, you built a big product… Geoff: Absolutely. Brian: ...there’s a lot to do there. So, where do you feel you’re strongest? Where do you think you’re weakest, therefore you’re investing in? You know, when you can close a big deal, how do you...what’s that perfect module that you know will get ‘em hooked? Geoff: Yeah. No, it’s a good question. Um, it’s a funny one, because we sort of look at the fact that we’ve got really a multi-product play and they all have to be singing in harmony for the promise to be delivered to clients. As, you know, instead of focusing on one area, letting one area get wake, we really try and spread it around and rise together so we don’t end up off-balance. There’s a few things, though, that a lot of folks can now see coming to the fore as the product rises further, particularly around some of the scheduling resource utilization forecasting dimensions. Just that ability to run your operations and have a good, clear feeling that’s automatically being updated as people do their work, around utilization availability, productivity. That kind of stuff is really quite invaluable, because for a lot of folks it requires today maintaining separate spreadsheets or doing other forms of really manual processes to sort of try and keep a handle on what’s going on. So, that’s I think, really the summary, it’s bringing it together that’s the unique part that other products aren’t even anywhere near… The other thing that’s, that I use as we talk to MSPs, is their expectations from tickets and service contracts and SLAs are pretty advanced, pretty developed. And what that means is that when customers who are not MSPs buy Accelo, they actually immediately get all of the cross-pollination benefits of what a sophisticated, smart, experienced, reactive service provider can do. But, conversely, when an MSP buys Accelo, they benefit from the project management and delivery insights that have been honed by folks running projects whether they’re life or death. And, I think that’s a really interesting perspective and benefit for MSPs because the cloud, while creating a lot of opportunities, also creating a few challenges to the business model of the MSP. It’s no longer a case of walking into your small business customer, installing Microsoft Small Business edition for the service stack and then turning on and licensing whatever the pieces are that they need, and the work is in stitching them together within the server. Now, with the cloud, it’s actually much more important for an MSP to be a trusted consultant and partner because there are so many alternatives and choices, they’re not just whatever Microsoft happens to sell. And, businesses are looking to their MSPs more than ever to provide that kind of counsel and advice. But what it also means is that there’s a lot less remote things to monitor and manage if it’s all living inside Google or AWS or Box or Dropbox or somewhere else. So, we’re finding the MSPs out there are very appreciative and excited that they actually have a project management stack connected to their sales stack with Accelo, that they’ve really never had before with the other major players in the market selling PSA software, you know, not really that capable when it comes to projects. It’s that classic thing of if all you’ve got is a hammer, everything looks like a nail...and with these guys it’s more like, if all you’ve ever done is tickets then everything looks like a damn ticket, and so they just wrap tickets in a label and call it a project; whereas having real-time forecasting on what their project’s profitability is going to be based on the work that’s progressing, or being able to see in real-time what the estimated completion date is based on things moving late or starting early, this is really special and a major benefit for MSPs who, you know, my big prediction is, are going to be doing a whole lot more project-based work than straight service contract work over the next ten years as they evolve, because so much more of the stuff they’ve traditionally been patching, monitoring, and managing is either becoming disposable or moving to the cloud. Brian: Yeah, yeah. So, before we had started BrightGauge, we had an MSP ourselves, and that was always the scare - you know this was ten years ago. It’s amazing how the MSP market still continues to grow. The cloud has taken over a lot, it hasn’t taken over everything, though. So, everyone that was scared crapless like I was ten years ago, you know, it’s not as bad, but it’s just the MSPs nature, they change, because at the end of the day they’re just the technology partner to the small business. So, their needs have to adapt and so far, they do a good job because it’s their livelihood and they have to, so… It’s funny because I just had lunch with a customer on Friday and he was saying the same thing, “Oh, the cloud is going to come in and ruin the business model.” And I thought, man I swear I woke up with chills in 2010, thinking the same thing. Geoff: Exactly. I think it’s a tremendous opportunity, isn’t it? Because it is now so much more complex and you’ve got systems to integrate and connect together. You can create so much value as a trusted technology partner by stitching together some APIs. The customer just looks at you with delight when things light up. So, I think it’s a beautiful opportunity but it does require tools and systems and a toolkit which, just like when VARs became MSPs and that evolution, they needed to have tools that could run service contracts. It’s the same sort of thing here. As MSPs evolve into, whether it gets another acronym and we look back in ten years and go “oh yeah, that’s why we started calling them Cloud Solution Providers”, or something, but regardless of the names and the labels, the smart people who are going through this transition gradually, as you say not the sky falling in, they’re going to need the tools and that’s one thing we hear from our MSP and technology customers a lot, is they love actually having proper project management, which isn’t designed to build a skyscraper, it’s designed to deliver a service project, where you’re doing it in concept with your client, and you know, it needs to be really adaptive. Brian: What - sorry, I’m looking at the time here and making sure we’re respecting it.. Geoff: ...yeah, yeah, sure. Brian: I know you just recently announced or are announcing a NinjaRMM, I believe I saw on the blog.. Geoff: Yeah. Brian: Do you have any other integrations coming besides obviously our wonderful integration at BrightGauge? But any other MSP-specific ones coming down the pike? Geoff: Yeah, we’re working with the good people at IT Glue, still early days, but certainly the ability to take what Accelo does - which is know who your clients and contacts are and obviously then request tickets, retainers, service contracts, being able to then connect that in with documentation and configuration management is really beautiful. So, that’s a work in progress. We’ve been focusing primarily on the Ninja piece for the last little while, but that’s cool. We actually, we didn’t get a chance to make quite as much of a fanfare about it, because it was a really kind of beautiful coincidence. One of our clients is still a very happy LabTech user, whatever they call it now, and they actually built an integration similar to your experience of looking at Accelo’s API docs and going “hm, we’ve got this”. These guys, you know, sort of messaged one day and said by the way, we’ve built this thing and we’re about to launch it on this, you know, I think it’s called labtechplugins.com or something, and sure enough, they built a fully bi-directional integration with LabTech, so folks that really love that product - and in talking to MSPs, there is so much love - they can actually keep their love of LabTech and be able to break out with their alternative parts of the stack that they really don’t love. Brian: Right. Yeah, there’s a loyalty there. God bless them because they’ve funded our evolution… Geoff: Yeah! Absolutely. Brian: That’s awesome. That is a great way to go about expanding the space, is to integrate more tools because automation is so top-of-mind. In the automation space, I know you’re bringing in AI - what is your big, for you your perfect world, you said quotes or invoice or however the phrase you said… Geoff: Yeah.. Brian: What’s your perfect world of a scenario that you kind of tell your prospective customers? Geoff: I mean it’s really, you know, you didn’t get into starting your business to get in their and jockey spreadsheets. No one enjoys spending two to three days a month to do their monthly billing, yet if you don’t do it, then you’re going to go broke. Um, so it’s really about automating as much as possible the busy work, the friction, the overhead that comes with running a business so that you can do what you’re actually good at, what you really love doing. And, whether you choose to take that time that you’re saving and invest it in growth and things that are enjoyable in that respect, or whether you want to invest it in spending more time with your family or finally getting a vacation without fear, you know, it’s your choice. But it’s really freeing you so that you’re running a system to run your business, as opposed to having to tie it all together yourself manually all the damn time. Brian: Geoff, you sound - by the way, it sounds beautiful and I respect and love the vision - what is, for you yourself, for your co-founders, what’s your big plan? What are you telling them - as much as you can tell us, obviously - with regards to money, you’re going to spend it, you’re going to help out a whole lot of businesses around the world. You know, what’s that ten year out game plan for you? Geoff: I think, I mean, reality is what we’re tackling is like the biggest opportunity in B2B SaaS, B2B software as a service technology, and so, for us its drive a company as far as we possibly can, helping as many people sustainably on the way to that destination, whether that’s an IPO or some other form or result. You know, this is an opportunity that’s at least as big, if not bigger than what the good people at Hubspot achieved in marketing automation. You know, it used to be that marketing automation was something you had to buy Eloqua, which is now owned by I think Oracle, you had to spend well into six figures to even get started. Much more like seven figures, and that was, you know, your average florist was locked out of that industry, right? They were still stuck doing things the old way, if at all. And, Hubspot, as an example, came along, made a technology platform that was affordable and accessible for small businesses and now, the florist has marketing automation and I’ll get an email at some point in the next little while reminding me of my upcoming wedding anniversary and making it a one-click process to order some flowers, right? So, that’s marketing automation. Operations automation, which is the category that we’re focused on, is probably between five and seven times bigger than marketing automation when you consider the value that it creates. And while we focus on just the services vertical - and when I say just the services vertical, it’s the largest employer in the Western world, largest private sector employer, it’s about one in six jobs in the Western world in the private sector are in professional and business services, which is the category name that the stats agency gives it. Brian: Right. Geoff: It’s a massive, massive category and yet, it’s worth probably seven times as much as marketing automation. If you think about this, people who are listening this think “ok, how much do I spend in terms of time or money or both on marketing versus my techs? What’s my labor cost look like on that? How many marketers do I have, or how many techs do I have for every marketer?” And you ratio is probably going to be something in the vicinity of 20 to 1. So, if you’ve only got five full time people, then someone’s spending like half a day a week or something like that in marketing. Now, if you’ve got a platform that can automate and help you scale and double the profitability of your service delivery, the place where you create value and make or lose money, that’s a lot more important to your business and your bottom line and your ability to continue to help reaffirm your view as your family’s head of the table than marketing automation, so you look at it and think ok, marketing automation, add it together, market caps probably something around a $20 billion dollar market cap out there and we see this operations automation as being worth, you know, a lot more than that, and so that’s what we’re working towards and you know, we feel like it’s a race against the clock where every year that goes by where we haven’t got the product easy enough to use for people to solve this problem at their own pace, you know, every year that goes by that people don’t know they exist because we haven’t been able to get in touch with them yet and share the news is a year that literally tens of thousands of businesses will fail, if not hundreds of thousands of businesses will fail unnecessarily, you know? So it’s a bit of a mission for us. Brian: No, it’s great. I feel the feeling here, the passion. You know, the Hubspot thing, I have to bring it up, because it’s funny, I just saw today that they’re in beta with some ticketing part of their product, and that’s what always scares the crap out of me with these larger software companies is you kind of jump the shark of we have to have a functionality to provide, because we try to do everything, you know. Geoff: Yeah, yeah. I think they’ll do alright because they’re focused on the, they’re not focusing on the ticket the way that an MSP thinks about it. They’re focusing on the ticketing in the sense that, you know, I’ve actually got a browser tab open here for some baby clothes on Shopify, you know, and if my wife or I were to buy that and there’s going to be a problem, I’m going to want to talk to those guys about it. Brian: Yeah, it’s the conversation, it’s the Intercom model. Geoff: Yeah, exactly. It’s much more Intercom-style. We talk about it as like, you know, there’s products out there - zendesk being the best example of them - where you can do great support for love, but no money. Whereas what a service business needs is ticketing technology and service delivery automation, which is actually focused on delivering a service to clients that at the end of the day you’re being paid for, not just that it’s best efforts. Brian: Yeah, I just, you know, there’s only so much great product a big team can build and that’s always a scary thing for me. I agree with you, they’ll shape it in the way that benefits the ecosystem that they kind of solve, so… Geoff: Correct. The general case, shall we say. Brian: Yeah, exactly. Well, as we depart here, we always like to ask people, and it’s very Tim Ferriss of me, any books that you read that you really enjoy that you’ve passed on to other folks, or any podcasts you listen to on a regular basis? Geoff: Yeah, no, good question. From a books perspective, there’s been a couple that I’ve really enjoyed and have been pretty well-shaping in recent times. One of them is called Play Bigger by a guy called Al Ramadan and his co-authors. It’s maybe a little sort of Silicon Valley in terms of how people think about markets, but I found it to be a really, really good book for thinking about strategy and how you sort of see your place in the world. You can think of it almost as sort of an updated version of that classic marketing text Positioning from back in the ‘70s. I also highly recommend to folks, regardless of their walks in life, whether its business or personal, to make sure you read Simon Sinek’s Start With Why. I think it’s a really important piece for folks who are really trying to understand what they should do next or how they should do it, and it’s been really important to us, understanding that we’re not just solving a problem because we think we can. This isn’t some intellectual exercise, there is a major social, human, life payoff that comes from doing this stuff right, and that’s what drives us, that’s our why. Brian: Gotcha. And I’m sure there’s going to be some folks listening to the podcast that would say, “Man, how can I try this out if everything - it sounds so good”. What would you recommend as a next step for contacting Accelo? Geoff: Yeah, absolutely. So, we have, we’ve stuck with the somewhat unfashionable approach now of letting people try it themselves. Imagine that. So, you can go to Accelo.com, you’ll find a sign up button on a lot of our pages. Just click there, the sign up process takes a couple of minutes, it’s a free 30-day trial, we don’t crimp it, we don’t sort of limit it. That’s probably the best way to get a look at Accelo. We also do, you know, regular walk-throughs and things like that, because it is a big and powerful product. One of the downsides of a trial - we always are kind of torn, on one hand should you trial it empty so people can load their own data into it and, we often, whenever we have a trial loaded up, people go “how do I delete all this stuff??”; and then conversely, how do you demonstrate the joy and the opportunity of seeing what your schedule dashboard looks like once it’s loaded up without having to load it up first - so, we often do webinars and other forms of demos first so folks can see it a bit more in a finished state and have their questions answered as well. Brian: Do you publish price on the site? Geoff: Absolutely. It’s at Accelo.com/pricing. All transparent, all, you know, honest, the way it should be. Brian: Excellent. Well, Geoff, thank you so much, this was awesome, especially for you and I to get to know each other here. Geoff: Yeah! Thanks, man. Brian: If someone wants to reach out to you here, what’s the best way to do that? LinkedIn? Twitter? Email? How does that… Geoff: Yeah, probably just email. If you fill out the contact form on our website, for example, that’ll get through to me pretty quick as well as the broader team, and that’s probably the better way rather than hitting me up directly because there’s a fair amount of travel going on in my world, with multiple continents and multiple offices on multiple continents, so, yeah, that’s a great way to get in touch: the contact form on our website. Brian: Alrighty. And we’ll in show notes put the books and contact info and the website and we’ll get that for everyone. Geoff, I appreciate it. Thank you. Geoff: Thank you. Brian: Hopefully we’ll talk again and maybe we’ll check in in a year and see how we’re both doing, so.. Geoff: ...Looking forward to it, man. That would be great. And it’s been great working with you guys, too. It’s a real delight when you get to work with a partner who reads the documentation and just hits home with it. And, I think as well, there were a couple of opportunities for us to improve things based on your feedback, which it was nice to then, you know, loop the API team in and they took great delight in turning around changes to make things better. So, yeah, awesome working with you guys. Brian: Thank you, Geoff, thank you. Alright, we’ll talk soon. Geoff: Alright, take care. Thanks again.

Danielle Ungermann

Customer Stories: Cards Technology Extends BrightGauge to their Customers

Product Update! New look to Client Mappings

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Podcast #46: Achieving Great Customer Support Through Team Building with Cenon Hipolito, NetworkDr

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