From Engineering Dreams to Leading Safety Suite Global

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0:36Hi, good afternoon. And today we've got Bryce Gammon who is the CEO of Safety Suite Global. Hi Bryce, how are you I'm doing really well. How are you? Very well, thanks. Very well. So Bryce is calling in from Melbourne today, the craft capital of beer and also some good good fine coffee as well. Bryce, what's your favorite craft beer at the moment? Look, I've was a I lived behind Little Creatures, so that I was their big fan. And then they stopped making the pills there, and I've had to keep finding my my next one. So, I moved on to the Movers.

1:11And and now we've got a a little local one around the corner that I can't quite remember the name of, but that's the the go-to pills for these days. Well, keep supporting those independents. As you know, I own a craft brewery or two. I'm I'm into that field so as well. All right. So today we're going to just talk a bit about the journey Bryce. We're going to go through you know what started the journey and I'm going to ask some questions guide you through the session today. So it's very easy. This is a little bit of a background. What inspired you to become a consultant really at the beginning?

1:43That's a really really good question. I was started out studying engineering because I thought I wanted to build stuff. I got a little disheartened with the engineering degree that I was doing in Philly and I changed schools and ended up shifting to systems engineering where this is back in the early 90s and we ended up yeah basically realizing that I I quite like systems and processes and that's what I I got this degree in what's called management science which is like commerce process engineering and computer science and yeah I I nearly didn't move into this field. I played a a year of minor league baseball. Didn't do too poorly as a as a pitcher on a on a on a team that was pretty average, the Kentucky Rifles, and got an invite to come back the following year. So, I actually was I had two like a semester of classes to finish up to get my degree. I came back after playing baseball and I had signed my name down for something and I got I got introduced to this company called Clarks Battoic Group from there were the a group of guys that were Anderson consultants that did the first SAP project at Dow Chemical in the US. I met them they had an open bar. I had a little chat to them for a while kind of stayed a bit past my welcome maybe and then they asked me if I was coming to interviews and I said no I wasn't. They said why don't you please come to an interview and they convinced me to pursue my my my background in in in IT and systems rather than throwing baseball boss. So that's how I got into into this whole paper first place.

3:16So you moved out of university straight into sort of like a an SAP role at Clarkson Consulting. Is that what I was I was the first I was the first graduate that they had hired. So everybody else were old guys that had families and wives and things. And I actually I I helped them set up their very first office in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. So I I arrived there. I was carrying whiteboards on the top of my car, which I now know is not a very wise things to do from a health and safety perspective. But at the time, I just wanted to get the job done. And yeah, we set up a big SAP box back in the days when you had to do it on prem. And we we got it set up and ran a training program there. And then I moved up to New York and and ran a consulting project for them where I was cut and coat in SAP's old school R2 system.

4:04Yeah, it's a long time ago and that's in the good old AB days. So back then after you moved from Clocks and you went into Deoits which you know I was at Deoits as well but I was in UK de and what how did you get into that role? Well I I met an Australian woman through my an Australian exchange student actually. He and I became good mates. He introduced me to his his best mate's little sister and we liked each other. So eventually after a couple years I left the Clarks Battoic group and I moved out to Australia. So back then the SAP field was just starting to get kicked off in Australia. Rang up all the ba major players and there was a group called ICS back in the day. Rod Gallagher was running it down here in Melbourne and they offered me my first job in Australia and then they were acquired by Deote which is how it became Deote Consulting and and I was there for about four years. But the key thing we did there was we were doing HR projects and then people said hey where do we store an injury and we went SAP where do we store injuries and at that point in time their solution was just material safety data sheets and things. So in conjunction with a number of organizations and deote and SAP we developed this original Australian

5:22Which through a whole series of events ended up acquiring the company that ended up with the IP. How do you how do you do that? That's I mean you you're still young at that stage got no cash. How do you how do you get that offer out and how do you being dumb and naive like I I I mean I there's no way it would have happened with my knowledge base now. So So there were there were three guys, Bill Reed and Les and Mark that had this consulting company called Consultants Network Australia which of course in Australia everyone calls Cena because they don't like to say long words. And anyway, they they had come up with this intellectual property after SAP was looking for someone to support it in Australia and they rang me up and I just left Deote and hung out my own little shingles. So I came to work for them and then I guess over a series of years they decided that Mark and Les weren't thrilled about this model of investing money. They liked much better clipping the ticket on resources. And so they did a deal with Bill. Bill was the sole owner of Consultants Network Australia and then after a little while he decided he wanted to get out and I think it was Azelon tapped me on the shoulder. We had been working alongside them on some projects and they said, "What would you what would you do if if we were buying this place? Would you stick around?" And being dumb and naive, I went to Bill and I said, "I'll buy it off you." Except, you know, I didn't have any money. And but he was pretty cool with that cuz he didn't want to wind up the business and sell the assets. So he signed the shares over to me and I agreed to pay him some money every month for a while

6:53And that's how we did it and you know both of us I think were very fortunate that we we both held up our end of the bargain and I managed to not run safety suite into the ground before he got paid. So yeah that's how it happened. So you you started as a consultant at Deoitz. You found an opportunity through the consulting engagements a lack in the software at the stage. You built a solution around that and then that solution you ended up buying basically.

7:21What a what an awesome story. And then because as you know and we've spoken about in the past you know some consultancy firms I talked to they services once always want to end up having a product all want to get away from the utilization and the daily billings and everything else and they want to have a product and and it get they get caught up with this whole utilization story. The best people that they need to build the product are actually the ones that are leading the projects who are actually bringing four to five people below them making them billable. So, you know, I suppose you didn't have that issue really at the beginning because you just went straight into a product. Is that what happened or did you

7:57No, we were very we were very much a service organization. So, while we were out using our product to get our foot in the door. And we It's fantastic to be able to sell back in the old days the upfront license fee and 22% annual maintenance fees ongoing. But we were we were putting people on those projects. So there was probably about a 1:1 ratio between the the license fee and the initial implementation. And then that turned into a longerterm relationship with those customers where we were, you know, basically learning about where they wanted to continue to evolve and often developing the software. But probably the key thing we did is we always treated it as like a we wanted to have a single solution that everybody had, not a solution that we then modified for every customer. So, as you're probably aware in that world of on-prem SAP, there's quite a bit of ability to write your own custom logic in places, but we we pretty much said if that makes sense for you and it makes sense for the other customers, we'll do it. We'll do it once properly and we'll support it rather than you having a bunch of custom developments. So, so it's fair to say that we we had we dined out on some decent service revenue. It certainly in those early days.

9:08Great. That's awesome. It's been running for you've been running for 22 years. according to LinkedIn, I looked at just to verify it early on. It's a long long time, Bryce. you know, most people end up only doing it for eight years or 9 years. so how's it feel after 22 years? Well, I can I can say that, you know, what I really learned was how little I knew about running a business when I started out.

9:32And the probably more so I've like probably in the last 10 years, I actually started listening to and seeking advice from others in the past. had a I think it people have this this this problem where we think we can solve every problem ourselves and we we love to figure it out and do it. So we sort of sometimes the problem solving is more interesting to us than the actual creating the opportunity and turning it into revenue. So, oh, I think we probably would have benefited a lot more from having a more revenue focus in the early days, but we just kept trying to solve problems usually of a technical nature. But then, you know, I remember we used to do our own marketing and those sort of things and branding and stuff. And then I brought a a professional organization in to help us with that and it was a it only took a couple weeks for them to pull the stuff together because that's what they do, but they did a hell of a lot better job than we did on our own. And so I then started bringing in people to help us with our strategy and people to help us learn about our sales processes and I've belonged to a lot of sort of networking groups where I catch up regularly with people that run their own businesses and being able to learn from their mistakes.

10:39Yeah. No, I had a I had a buddy who had a real tough situation where he had a fire and it it really gutted his business and his insurance was Elchipo insurance and so the process for him to actually get his money took so long that he was lucky to weather the storm whereas if he had gone with a perhaps a more premium insurance policy they would have had mechanisms in place to cover that. So I I learned from those sort of things and go all right these

11:03Good good tapping into tapping into networks that's brilliant. So you know if you look back you know 22 years ago you bought the company you're doing services to feed yourselves and and then co-develop the product at the same time which is is was awesome to do that. What was the vision there and then and you know what is the vision? You know did you have a vision? Did you sit down and go this is what we want to have? Do you want to have a global product or did it just work did you just work through it as you went? Oh, absolutely not. I And I I find that when I speak to a lot of people that get themselves into business, they go in without having a plan on how they're going to get back out again.

11:41My my vision in the early days was to build the recurring revenue to a stage where we didn't require additional services on top of that. So, and we got to that stage where we had a number that we were generating every year for annual maintenance fees. We had a formula that was like, "All right, 50% of that's going back into R&D for the product that translates into, you know, X number of FTE. Y is going into customer relationships that that's certain number of FTE. This goes into defect management." And so we kind of had this model that worked really really well until technology changes and then you have to reinvest in the product again.

12:17Yeah. Yeah. The technical depth. We'll get on to that later on because you know with all this vibe coding around at the moment, it's it's quite interesting. I was talking to a few clients and we'll get there later on but still at the beginning of the journey of Rice you know how did you secure your first customer cuz you know a lot of people when they're starting out on their journey one of the things is you know they end up being a contractor and then they ask a client to be their first real client as such. How did you get your first client cuz that's a major

12:43Yeah. it was probably I think in in reality it was because we had existing relationships in at that customer. I'd been in there at Toyota been at Deote. we had put together a business case for health and safety based on the intellectual property that at the time was SAPs and that initial piece of work didn't kick off right away and then once we took on the IP was still having conversations with the people there and then eventually it got some legs and we were able to get that first project off the ground.

13:14Brilliant. Brilliant. Okay. And then the last piece in the first you know the journey the early journey is what was the big biggest challenge you faced at the early stage in the first year or two as you were starting out can you absolutely cash flow I I mean I had a naive understanding of how quickly the the dollars were going to roll in I had a naive understanding at how often large organizations aren't the best at paying on time so yeah I was very very fortunate to have the ability to to tap a father-in-law on the shoulder. He was able to use some of his assets to guarantee borrowings which I did not have at that point in time.

13:52I remember the last time we caught up, he actually mentioned that. I said, "Well, what an awesome father-in-law, you know." Because that is that is really the challenge is the cash flow really at the He he he had started his own his own business as well from from the beginnings, but his was in transport and eventually into property. And you know, he was always like, "You just need to go in, look them in the eyes, talk to the bank manager, shake their hand, and and I'm thinking, I don't think they need banking like that anymore. They it's all numbers and analysts. It's not it's not, you know, the gut feel that the bank manager has for whether you're going to you're going to do it." So, that was awesome. It was really interesting catching up with him for a number of years until I was in a position to pay him back. Well, not pay him back, but remove him from the the guarantee because I had to produce a one pager for him, you know, every time we saw each other. And it was Yeah, it was to probably you probably kept you accountable, you know, to be honest that it's probably a a great thing to have someone because one of the things that when I'm working with clients is the accountability is is one of the things that's really important.

14:55You know, once you got a plan and an action or a strategy and a road map where you want to go is how do you keep accountable? So, you probably were ineffectively being kept account. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, I would I would agree with that. So, it's probably an awesome thing that happened in the end. All right. So, you know, now you get going in your journey. How do you scale your business to where you are now? I mean, that that's a you know, you you are a global company doing some work overseas as well as Australia. Can you just talk about how you're scaling, how you're delivering work as

15:25So, that's probably that's probably the turning point for me. So as a member of a group called Vistage you may have run across or used to be called tech here in Australia. but it's where you you get to hang out with you know 17 business owners that tend to not have any we have NDAs in place. We catch up once a month and we have guest speakers come through you know I guess you sort of start learning about yourself and what your strengths and weaknesses are and your tendencies are. And there was this guest speaker that came in. His name's Adam Seagull. And he sort of presented just a little thing around, you know, a systematic way to run meetings and have really clear agendas and tie it to strategy and accountability and and things like that. And I was I really like that. And I implemented that solution. And then a little while actually co hit and and so we're sort of hanging out at home. We've got a bit more time to ourselves. And he did an online one around another topic. like this guy and I really gel in terms of how we like to approach things. So I spoke to Adam and he came in and helped us pull our strategy together. So that's the first time I actually had a what I'd call a proper vision and a proper strategy. And so that was great. You know, what's our big hairy audacious goal? What's our three-year highly achievable plan? What does that look like for this year? What does that look like for the next quarter? No more than five strategic initiatives at one point in time. and some really great foundations for for getting your your strategy in place. But I also think that that Adam had come from a background in more of a bigger end of town. There's the whole cash flow treasury side of things. So you get all you get all riled

16:57Up about this is our vision and it's great and how awesome is this and this is the next step I need to take and then things don't happen at the same pace that you hope they will. Throw in multiple lockdowns and COVID and organizations getting you know cold feet about investing money and those sort of things. And so probably what I learned there was was if you if you're going to expand at a more rapid a more rapid rate,

17:23Make sure you've got you've got an understanding of how you're going to how you're going to fund that growth and that you that you need a bit of buffer there. So that was that was a really harrowing experience for a while there where we started running out the gates. We put in a leadership team. So all the people that we, you know, we now have this layer of of expense that isn't isn't generating revenue and and and I probably wish I had eased into that a little bit more slowly, but yeah,

17:52Look, it's it's interesting when you you know, you actually do do that. A lot of clients that I've worked with have done it in the past and it's they want to believe that this all going to all going to work out. and and what I always say to them is you got to make sure that the structure actually suits your business for where you are. And you got to work hard. And when that structure is breaking, when those people are are actually breaking, that's when you hire a person. You don't go and hire and then fill up the void.

18:17You know, you got to be the other way around because I think that kind of happens too like when you start to bring in leaders and that was probably one of the things that that I was really missing was I'd say I did an okay job as a leader without any leadership background or training. Well, you must have been going for 20 years But when it's like the there's things that you do because you're emulating something that somebody that used to manage you did or played a bit of sports. So, it's sort of like well this is what we do and it and when I when I got to that stage of growth, all right, we need to invest in building out our leadership skills as an organization and I couldn't tangibly explain, you know, what is it that I do that I think is is good or bad. So

18:58We invested in bringing in some some training around leadership and I started to become able to tangibly explain what are the what are the leadership behaviors. I realized a lot of the stuff that I was doing was diminishing my team. They were relying on me to do stuff because I was wasn't giving up that control or I was too quick to give them an answer instead of asking them to try to find the answers for themselves. And so I think that was that was great experience for for us as an organization to start to be able to tangibly define what leadership is and to be able to understand how we can start building leaders out of the people that that we've got on the team.

19:36As opposed to bringing in someone who worked for a large multinational comes in and is like where's my EA and who's going to do that that that and that and you're like that's you that's in your job brief, right? Oh, I've been I've been mean so many clients and I have to help them interview their sort of new CEO or you know new director and you have to sort of really break the news and that you are the one man machine in that department you know everything stops with you. Yeah, highly know that. Now move on to the next stage is how do you retain customers? Now obviously you're software first play at the moment. I suppose it's a little bit easier but but you know do you lock your clients in for two 3 years four years? How do you do that at the moment? How do you retain your customers?

20:20So our original original agreements was a license fee with a perpetual annual maintenance and and a notice period. So there was no there was no locking in. Now with the the cloud solution, we're finding that customers want to lock in the pricing. I think maybe it was the volatility of of CPI and stuff in the early part of this this decade, but I think they're now wanting to, you know, lock in for 3 to 5 years so that they have certainty because we have we would have built a CPI like pricing increase into any sort of perpetual license. So yeah, so yeah, usually 3 to 5 year

20:55Brilliant. Believe. Now you had built your solution on one tech platform and then you had to rebuild it onto another tech platform I believe. Talk about that because that was happens all the time with SAS type companies or software companies and the technical deck debt. Explain what that really is and how much it cost you and what pain you went through. So the I think the starting point is I was I was you know born into this SAP world where I you know came up through writing code and consulting and those sort of things that I really understood that space really really well and could be fairly hands-on in it. It was challenging because SAP kept having a few false starts on how they wanted their web- based UI to work for their their product. So they had the old SAP AB app screens and then they introduced WebDim Pro and then they introduced Fiori and so we we a couple times started to look at like a new UI with the same backend and then SAP changed their direction. So it actually led us to go all right let's just let's build a product that is going to allow us to be more in control.

21:59And so we we went out and we looked at different different products and platforms but all of a sudden you got to like make all these decisions that SAP used to make for us. you know, what database you going to use, how are you going to what what tools are you going to use to scan attachments to make sure they don't have viruses and you know, a lot of that stuff's available as as services now, but you kind of have to map all of that out. And I think my simplistic view of the world having grown up around just the bits around application development we need to do in SAP led me to believe that the effort to build a product from the ground up was going to be similar and everything just took longer. And then all those things around performance testing and fine-tuning the you know it's not just the application it's the infrastructure level as well that all of a sudden we're accountable for where in the past it was our customers and SAP that were accountable for that. So that was probably my biggest learning curve was that we got to make a whole bunch of other decisions and and at the same time probably pretty cool because I couldn't micromanage parts of that team at all because I didn't have the skill set to do it. So I had to learn how to get people in that I trusted and let them make those decisions.

23:06Okay. Fantastic. So then and then you moved on to new platforms since then. no. So so we've now so now we have a solution that is fully integrated into SAP but it's using business technology platform and and those sort of things. We're actually certified by SAP to put a bit of our code inside SAP. So we can do things that no one else can do because we get to call our own functions in inside of their like their S4 environment and employee central perils. Yeah, that's kind of it took a while to to just learn about it and get to a level of maturity and you know now there's all this cyber security monitoring that we have to do and all those sort of other things that that become part of managing infrastructure.

23:51Yeah. Brilliant. So at the moment what's your go to market strategy? So I know at some point you're going direct and then you had a few partners. As well that would use because obviously for those that are listening to the session today your target markets large enterprise and sometimes you have to go through the big end of town consultancy firms to get those opportunities because they're only talking to those and those the ones on the vendor list.

24:14Could you explain a bit more to the to the listeners on that? Yeah, sure. So, so when when Adam came in and helped us put together our vision and strategy, it was very much we realized if we were going to invest in this cloud solution, our market had to expand beyond Australia, New Zealand, and we needed to look at it from a global perspective. And then we realized that our growth was going to be global growth through our partners. So, so we let our partners put a margin on top of the the SAS pricing. We encourage them to wrap other services and things around it like a second level support agreement and those sort of things. So, so in essence the partners get to resell for

24:53And so we've been slowly building out our various partners that are that are now resellers of the the software for us. It's pretty handy. And what we're realizing is that in Australia, the size organization that runs SAP doesn't do anything without going through procurement. So, you know, when you you follow your sales processes and you go and you build relationships with people and you go, "Hey, I've just got a new customer. Isn't this going to be great?" Eventually, they go, "We've just checked with we'd love to buy a software, but we've got to go through procurement, but now we're going to go through this long-winded process of defining requirements and sending it out to everybody and going through demos and going through short lists and d and all of a sudden it's 18 months down the track and you still haven't started a project." I think we've hypothesized that we might be able to cut through that unless it's with governments that have purchasing panels and things in

25:44Which is where having a partner on that panel is pretty helpful. It's it's a long process. It that is and you know these big companies they sometimes just don't want to make a decision and you know it's so easy not to make a decision because this decision is so big that it's it's you know want to make because no one wants to be accountable for it. you know the the large organizations are challenging because in particularly in safety because it touches so many different people in roles across the organization. So you've got, you know, someone who looks after your HR systems. There's obviously a lot of HR integration, but there's people that are using finance solutions. There's finance integration. There's the person who runs the compliance for safety. There's a person who looks after the injury management. As we get more into psychosocial related issues, it's becoming less about putting tape on the stairs and getting guard rails on there, which is tends to be your traditional engineering type controls. And it now goes back to how do we develop our leaders and our managers so that we don't have people putting in stress which then gets back into the core HR functionality as well. So we're really seeing there's like a huge number of stakeholders that we need to try to get on board to understand how a solution is going to support that whole organization. Whereas if you're running payroll you got to get the payroll person on board. And if they're if they're happy people are getting paid that that's that's where that's where the buck stops for them. So you have so it sounds like you have multiple stakeholders that actually are interested in in your product which is a bit of a challenge as you just suggested. Could you just talk a bit about this sort of implementation process that you would go

27:17Through because it's interesting and a lot of people there wouldn't really understand and then talk a bit about the product what it actually does you know what's the core reason for it. Yeah. So, so implementation, we use the same methodology that SAP uses to implement their solutions. So, it starts out with a little let's get our ducks in a row with a project preparation phase, goes into an exploration phase. In our particular situation, we've preconfigured the whole solution based on what we have learned that most customers like to do. And then exploration is around for us is around fine-tuning that to meet their requirements. And probably one of the lessons I learned halfway through my career was that this concept of best

28:02Requires an organization and people in that organization to change and adopt the way that they do work. And so what I 10 years ago is that you can't just come in and say here's best practice tell your people to do it this way. You actually have to go what are you doing now? Understand what they're doing now and introduce change in smaller bites that they can they can handle which is always not not always popular when you've got a new head of safety that comes in and says I want to throw out the old and put put the new in right but people need to go on the journey. So that exploration phase we we work at understanding what they're currently doing and we sort of we try to essentially take the decision-m out of really simple things like don't don't ask me for every single field in the system what values you want to have sitting behind the drop down. Let's go look at what they're doing. Let's align it with what they're doing in their existing systems and eliminate an element of that change and then leave the exploration phase focused to kind of the well we normally do it this way but you don't do it that way. I want to understand more about why you're doing it that way and make sure that we get to the what's the outcome we're looking for as opposed to what's the configuration of fields on a screen that we need to have. And so then that's and then you move into your next stage which is called realization where it's basically an iterative approach to configuring the system letting a core group of people play around with it provide feedback fine-tune it and then you get to the last bit which is where you cut over and you're if you're bringing data across you got to do all your data loads and test those out and push it into a production environment turn your integration on all that sort of stuff.

29:34Okay. And and all about the system so that's a system implementation. What about the the actual function that you bring to the OHS area? Yeah. So, I mean it was interesting. I think I alluded earlier that when we we first started doing HR work back in the customers were saying, where do I record the injury details? So, the product actually grew. It started out going, "Okay, we've got a person. What happens if they get injured?" So, we captured some injury records, but then they're like, "Well, what about if they put a workers's comp claim in?" And then we added in the workers comp claim bit. And then they go well where do I report the incident that happened that led to the injury and so then we built an incident management module and investigation. So we ended up with about eight modules in the end and you know getting back to organizations pace of adoption. It's kind of helpful to be able to put in a process at a time rather than trying to

30:26So you can roll you can roll out a module at a time. Yeah. So like at a really high level we've got a thing called proactive safety initiatives. You can set them up for a whole range of things. audits, inspections, safety observations, those sort of things. But the the fundamental concept is you you first ask the question, here are all the types of risks that can impact us in your location, in your area, your department. Which of these risks exist there? That's kind of like the audit. Then you go and say, great, based on those risks, what are the controls we want to put in place? And as an organization, you can say, well, these are like mandatory controls that we expect everybody to do, and these are things that might be more unique to your particular location. So then you run inspections to go check and make sure that the controls are in place. And then if you know, one of the controls might be like, oh, well, we're exposing these people in a smelter to to lead, we might want to go, all right, well, let's do some health monitoring. So we're going to monitor, you know, their their blood every periodically on different cycles for people to make sure that we are not having a negative impact on a person. Then you've got the whole actually something did happen.

31:31We've got an incident management process, report the incident, investigate it, work out what the actions are. But because we've got that those proactive safety initiatives and those risks and identified rather than trying to fix everything as an action against an incident, we actually go back to the person who is accountable for managing the risk in the first place and went, "Yeah, that didn't work so well. What are the what are the things that we're going to do to modify that so that it can it can be safer the next time that that's encountered?" And then you get your injuries. So we do the rehab side of things. We do early intervention. So I got a bit of a niggle. Let's get you some physio and, you know, have a chat to your doctor or review your the way that you're working to see if we can prevent you from losing time off work rather than waiting till you have a workers comp claim and then missing weeks of work and then the workers comp and self insurance.

32:22You're really looking that whole piece which is fantastic. But so we basically always look at it from an end to-end process perspective and I guess that's the benefit of having grown up inside the world of SAP is that sometimes the process doesn't start with the safety team. It starts with the the onboarding team. So I mentioned before with psychosocial. So we're doing a lot of stuff around HR case management types now. So, you know, when when somebody's and I use one of the governments we're working with, they had an issue where people that kind of do the wrong thing would work in one part of the one agency and then they go to another agency and because they're all running their own separate systems, that other agency didn't know about the stuff that was in that that used to take place. So, kind of like a police check. Now, they're doing an internal governmentwide check that allows them to say, "Hey, this person's applying for work." So, it's kicked off in the onboarding process. This person's applying for a role. do we know anything about this person that would cause us to have concerns about hiring this person into this role? You know, so it it does it does touch a lot of different things. And so we'll often find that when people are out scouting for a new system, they'll come to us and they'll say, "Oh, well, where do you capture the training qualifications that everybody that we need to manage for safety?" And we go, you do that in success factors. That's where it's you've already you've already got it. So it's it is looking at the big end to- end picture.

33:42Okay. Brilliant. So just talk a bit about innovation now because there's obviously AI is popping up. do you have something with AI you know you know AI washing as they call it now where everyone's putting their product through an AI wash or putting AI bots in there. Do you have AI involved in your product? We've got a we've got a team of people that are looking at how AI can be applied not only to the product but also to our internal processes. So, as an example, when you're when you're doing your development, we use a tool called Jurro to manage all of the requirements through the development side of things. Well, that now plugs straight into another tool that we use that uses AI to actually produce the product documentation, which in the past used to be something that we needed to have done by a human. There's I mean there's just so many places now where we can look at opportunities. So, you know, getting away from the old incident form where you've got all these fields that some poor person who probably never reported an incident has to go and fill out all these things to more of a,

34:46You know, just hit the the microphone button and tell us what happened and make it super easy. And then we'll get that to a a professional that can go and actually triage it, call the person up, make sure they're all right, and then get other information that they might need to get. But that that process now is becoming easier because his AI is able to look at the natural language that's of the information that's already been collected and going I can tell that was an injury and there was a motor vehicle and you know they hurt their wrist and it's it can start to have a crack at precompleting a lot of that

35:20As as it's coming through. Yeah. A lot of our clients are starting to use AI for the delivery as well because a few clients seen the procurement processes have come back and they've said you know what happens if you we sign up a multi-year project with you where do you think AI is going to actually reduce some of the cost you know so procurement departments are are pushing the clients for it as well and the clients are you know coming up with solutions around that so that's that's going to be really interesting to see what happens over the next couple of months to year the next thing as well I had a bit of fun the other day with one of my clients and you know I did a bit of limited coding in my my life. I always wanted to get more into it but I never got into never got the opportunity but have you seen the vibe coding at the moment the wave of vibe coding that's happening. so we built a little app together online and we spent you know two three hours and it was pretty awesome to go through that whole exposure of it. and yeah it looks like some companies will be able to innovate a lot quicker with software products. So one of my other clients who's built a SAS solution was was you know their roadmap for new enhancements was taking you know two months to 6 months forment to actually happen and they realized that they could actually rewrite the whole system with bit of vibe coding and on the new tech and actually the enhancements then become a lot easier to deploy and quicker and faster the road map. Have you seen anything like that in in the SAP stack at all or is it still the status as before? So, so we we've got a project at the moment that's looking at that process. So, basically it takes the the

36:52Use cases and business cases out of our Jurro system. So, when we talk to to real people and understand what their problems are that we're trying to solve, it looks at you know like the there's there's libraries in SAP UI5 library stuff which is the look and feel that is aligned with the way that SAP looks and or that success factors works. And so basically it can go and have a crack at building your your first round of applications and cutting the code for all that sort of stuff. And then it's really I think it's it's going to be interesting to see how young people get into the the world of coding as those you know if you go talk to any organization out there and ask them how they develop a young a young software engineer they you know they put them on defects for a little while and they try to figure that out and then they give them sort of smaller things to do. And what's happening now is that is that the AI is so clever that it's picking those things up now. So it's going to be interesting to understand how you skill a junior person into a senior person when the easy problems are being solved for them.

37:59That's going to be don't I don't know the answer either. I don't know either. My daughter's doing HSC this year and she keeps asking me. I said just go and get a degree and we can work it up later. get a psychology degree because we're gonna have to deal with the stressed out people that can't find work when she she jobs. She's doing psychology and business. So, double degree.

38:20So, that's her. So, she can work out what she wants to do later on. But anyway, we'll we'll know I suppose in a couple of years time and and what's happening that I've got a few clients that are AI companies. They've one of them I was actually at dinner with him last night. They had a successful go live. a fourth client they've actually rolled out and the biggest problem they have is the project's actually meeting its requirements and it's doing what it should do but the users don't want to accept the pro the the product and and they know why because they will start you know in the situation unfortunately become redundant at some point okay there's a lot of resistance and you know rolling up big systems at big companies is a resistance already from the old way they've done it for 20 years why do we have to change. Now I can imagine that times up it by four because you could be losing your job. So it's going to be hard to roll these systems out as well. So any thoughts on that in your ideas?

39:13It's it is the biggest challenge of rolling out a system to a large organization and often you only get access to a couple of the subject matter experts and so it's all the people that you don't get access to that are completely outside of your control as someone who's helping with an implementation to influence. So I think it's it's where you need you need your change management people. Back in the in the old days back in the '9s we had these huge projects. We had teams of change management people. They were really understanding the number of people that are going to be impacted. I think we've been seeing more recently organizations are trying to absorb that into their into their normal BAU staff to try to to roll out change. I don't think they do a particularly good job in many cases, but I'm just starting recently we've seen more change managers reenter the the frame. So I think it's

40:02It's got to be a big thing. It's people we we got we got to deal with the people. Everyone love us IT nerds love AI and tech and isn't this cool? But if we're providing a service to a person, we need to understand how that person needs to interact but also how they need to evolve to learn how to use this the tools. Yeah, definitely. Definitely. All right. So how do you handle competition in the market? Do you have any competition?

40:25It depends on like the integration that we have into the other business processes for organizations. So running SAP, there's a there's a lot of stuff that we can do that other people can't do. There's a level of complexity to it as well that that take that it took us 20 years to figure out. You know, you you built the basic integration and then they go, what about this and what about this and what about this and you you sort of evolve and build all these these other use cases that you don't pick up. So yes, there's there's there's heaps of of people that have gone and started creating cloud products and apps and you know and I think part of the challenge is when you is is when you ask somebody what they want if you

41:0515 years ago like so you want to get into the city but you don't want to drive home and you know how you going to do it and they're like I'm going to take a taxi right and they'll tell you exactly what it I should be able to ring a number and this person will come to in 15 20 minutes and pick me up and drive me home and you know I'll pay him with my credit card in the in the thing right now. You know when Uber first came out we I was why I on earth would I want to get in the back of some stranger's car.

41:33And then all of a sudden you're like how great is this? I can wait two minutes for a lift and I don't even have to get my credit card out when I get to the end of the journey. I know who the person is. It's all digital record of it. Why would I take a taxi? And it's a bit like that. I feel like even with the, you know, AI generated code, we've got people trying to solve problems, but they're actually they're not getting to the why of the problem. They're just getting the all right, I had a paperbased form. I'm going to turn it into an electronic form and use AI to build it. And now, so I don't I don't think that quite a few of the the cloud products, they're still maturing in terms of learning how to deal particularly with enterprise scale

42:11Sure. For sure. Requirements. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. So, we'll just talk about personal challenges and and lessons you've learned being a CEO of a 22-year-old company and a successful company. Can you talk about any failures or setbacks that you've had to overcome? It's hard. I know every day. But I mean, so the bigger ones, the bigger ones, Bryce,

42:32Well, I think I may have alluded to, you know, this goes back ages ago was a was a financial the challenges of managing cash flow. So I can remember I was we had a big council that we were about to sign up. It had gone through all the legals and everything like that and it was ready for signature and they had asked us you know can you give us a contract for services and a contract for the for the licensing and it got to the final signature of whomever signs it off. and they signed the first one and then they picked up the next one and they were like that's the same vendor and then they added the two numbers together and they went oh we have to go to international tender for this and they ripped them up and I didn't have more revenue coming in there I'd already hired people to come to join to to work on that particular project and so my explained to me exactly you know here's plan A we're going to go ask we're going to not pay our tax and we're going to ask the tax office for a little bit of help and you know plan B and D, plan C.

43:34And plan C was he had another client that had a factoring company and so if we can't get through plan A, plan B, we've got a future contract, we're we're going to get some money up front for that. You'll pay them back. So anyway, that's what ended up happening. So it went all the way through to to atto demanding money. We show up on the court steps. We give them a check from this factoring company. Now we're running a project and of course this project's not going to plan. And so the milestones are shifting, but I've made a commitment to pay the factoring company back and they and they were selling their business. And so now they're going through due diligence and they've got to deal with bad debt. Just come straight off their their valuation as a business. And so my accountant Henry went, "All right, I know you got your annual maintenance fees coming in, this is like October or something, coming in in January." He paid it on my behalf out of his own pocket, not even a handshake on it. and got us through our cash flow issue and then I was able to pay him back in the new year when our maintenance fees came in and but that was that was definitely a harrowing time. the pressure would have been on you. The pressure I've been in that personal situation multiple times and it's it's so difficult. You just trying to you couldn't sleep at night. You're trying to work you know you're thinking over and over again what what is the way out of this? Is there any way out of it? You know and it is difficult. One of the things that you know you're a single founder as well by the way. So that is another pressure which we haven't even spoken about cuz majority of people that are single founders actually you know have another level of pressure on them because

45:06There's no one to talk through it. And most of these things you can't go back and talk to your better half because they wouldn't understand it. And when you start you go like how long is a piece of I could be here for 5 hours talking about this one problem. So you just keep quiet. First took over when I first took over bought consultants network Australia off Bill. I also was having my first child at the same time. And so in like the first year, my wife's been home with the the child and she's kind of like, you know what? I think I need a little bit of time to exercise my brain and she came to work for me as a part-time bookkeeper. And there's nothing worse.

45:44Yeah. So, so during the she'd just chase things up and then and then I'd have three days where she wasn't at work and I come home from work and she'd be like, "Has has the so- and so paid?" And I'm like, "No." And she's like, "Did you ring him?" And I'm like, "No, I was on a project. I didn't have time to ring him." She's like, "Yeah." And that was it was I was just happy when she got pregnant with the second child because it was a level of of interaction that I would rather not have. I'd rather have a different style with her. But I think I mentioned, you know, her her dad had started his own business. And S's got a amazing level of understanding around how business is run. and I'm constantly blown away by some of the questions and suggestions that she makes when we do talk about things. So, I

46:31Don't I don't want to stress her out about things and I don't share everything with her, but I think when it's when it's really bothering me, it is great that I can I can share things with her. And I remember when we started the business, she said, "We can always can always live in a tent in my mom's backyard." And I've always felt like, you know, that we're in it together. So, it's been it's been pretty cool to be able to yeah

46:54Be able to to sit down on our front porch and have a coffee in the morning and go, "Yeah, I'm stressed out at the moment. I'm chasing Victorian government for, you know, they're 3 months behind and when payment was due and I can't get an answer out of them and not sure how the cash flow is going to run sort of thing." And she know she's she's able to at least be there. So, it's not my secret, it's our secret. That's that's really that's awesome because I mean most most most business owners that that I know you know they try and talk to the better halves and and they get to a point where they they can't communicate about it. It's too difficult because they just don't know that obviously your your partners had the background from her her father and being an entrepreneur family and then you being part part of that as well. So it's worked out quite nicely. Very very very cool. Let's move on quickly because we've got time. I know you're busy. you you know off to the next meeting pretty shortly. What are the what is the future and the trends for and you know we sort of did speak a bit about this around the IT professional services industry as a whole. Now I know you're software but you know the industry very very well.

48:00What do you think about the IT professional services industry? I haven't yeah it's interesting. I haven't really thought about it yet in a lot of detail other than to recognize that you know the partners that we the people that we partner with that's what they do. that's where they they generate their revenue. And I think if they what am I seeing? I'm I'm seeing a lot of movement in that industry. I'm seeing a lot of smaller midsize firms that are getting purchased by the larger firms. And so I I guess I've noticed a little bit of a cycle. So you get this kind of lean, very customer focused organization and they grow and they build and they they they do a great job of building relationships with the customers and solving the customers problems and they get to a certain size people and then one of the big firms is like we're going to buy them and that's great for the people that started that business and founders they get a couple years they have to work for for one of these bigger bigger companies but there's the payout that's associated with it. Then the culture of that organization takes over the smaller organization. A lot of the people that aren't handcuffed to the larger organization leave and then they go and join another small to mediumsiz firm that's has that same similar culture. So I've seen that happen a couple times now in Australia where the same people just there's there's a there's can see there's always going to be another small to mid-size firm that's going to fill the gap of the one that just got absorbed by the bigger company.

49:21So you know so the future of I think at the end it just boils down to people you you know build relationships with people and people have confidence in your ability to deliver. So I think with if you think about how large organizations run their their strategic initiatives and and as they get leaner and leaner I feel like there's fewer strategic initiatives that somebody in a BA BIOU role takes on as like a mini pet project. it now is like, let's go bring a consultant in to do this because we're so lean in what we're doing on our day-to-day that we couldn't, you know, we could we can maybe be the the stakeholder for that project, but we can't roll the sleeves up and get get dirty. So, I think there's always going to be professional service firms out there that that that need to support.

50:07Yeah. Very nice. I like I like your your thoughts on that. That's pretty good. And then long-term vision for your business. Where do you go? You know, it's 22 years now, Bryce. are we you know what we going to be doing in in 10 years time or 15 years time? Yeah. So we very much are looking for that to shift things globally. So I've got a I've got a big hairy audacious goal of 30 million people going home safely by 2030 and that's based on moving through our partners into the US and Europe. So that's that's the vision for the for the company and I guess the the element to that is learning how to develop people to deliver the solution and deliver the value in the solution. So like a couple years ago we invested in bringing in an adult learning person who I think is very special Sue Sue her approach to learning seems a whole lot more sound to than some of the old school corporate learning that we've experienced in the past. And so, you know, we're getting our systems and processes in place now so that as new features are being developed, we're building out the learning content. We're getting the coms channels to go out to the users of of our existing software so they're learning about the things that are coming through rather than that traditional we send it to the IT department and whether they turn that feature on or not is up to them. trying to sort of have more of that longer term engagement and build that community of people that understand safety suite and safety that can then help service each other in in in continuing to improve the

51:41Safety performance in their business. Nice. Nice. Last question and then we'll let you get back to your day job. If you were to give some advice to someone, Bryce, around starting IT service or a software company today, what would be the thing that you would get them to do Probably understanding what all that initial strategic stuff, understanding what problem you're solving, why you exist from a customer's perspective, getting clarity on your vision, getting clarity on how you're going to step through and achieve that vision. I learned some good lessons around getting your values right as well. In the early days, I think our values someone had picked off the internet off someone else's web page. They weren't the ones that we lived. We went through a great exercise where we got everyone in the company to identify the things that they they liked, appreciated about other people. So, you know, I love the way that that you know, Arty is so kind in the way that she supports other people in their learning or something along those lines. And we we boiled all these comments down and realized that we had a couple recurring themes

52:44And and then we came up with a sticky way to remember them. So in safety there's a there's a metric loss time injury frequency rate. Well our values are leadership sorry leadership they're learning teaching innovation friendship and reliability. And you know we try to incorporate that into into like our daily rituals. So everybody sort of is constantly there. And I I find often when we're stuck making a tough decision, we go back to our values and go, what what should we do based on these?

53:13Brilliant. Brilliant. Thanks, Bryce. I really appreciate having you on the show today and when I'm next in Melbourne, we'll get a craft beer at the local. Sounds great. Thank you very much for having me, Ian. Thanks, Bryce. Speak soon. Cheers. Bye. Thanks for joining us on IT Mastermind Talks. Don't miss out on our next episode. Hit the follow button and stay updated. Want to be our next podcast guest? Contact us and share your expertise with our audience. Visit for more information.