From Stormwater to Startups: How David Lockie Built Mojo Soup

0:00Welcome to IT Mastermind Talks. Your access to insights and experiences from thought leaders in the IT services industry and those that support the industry. Our podcast features not only the seasoned professionals charting their start to exit journey, but also the key contributors who help ensure their success. We delve into the diverse challenges encountered within the IT services realm, encompassing both professional hurdles and personal obstacles. Join us. Be part of our growing community and engage in the conversation hosted by Ian Markram of Loading Growth. Okay. Hi, good morning. I've got a really good friend and a long-term client, David Locky from Mojo Soup joining us today on the podcast on IT Masterminds and it's going to be awesome because I know their business really, really well and it's amazing business as well. So yeah, I'm just going to we're going to go through a series of questions, the deep dive questions we have for the CEOs or leaders of sort of IT technology companies and and with that, you're going to get to know David and the challenges obviously of running a small services firm and and the growth pains that come with that and where he sits in the technology stack and the services world as well. So I'm going to start back right at the beginning, David.

1:17Background and the journey. Okay. Right at the beginning. Yeah. And I'm just going to ask you some questions just to to can you just give us an an idea what inspired you to become sort of a consultant initially and then maybe an IT services business owner. What really inspired you? Yeah, sure. Thanks Ian. good morning. Thanks for inviting me on to this by the way. This is getting get me outside my comfort zone. I started life as a civil engineer. So I used to design and build storm water drainage and roads and subdivisions. But the bit that I love most about doing that was wrangling data, writing apps to process and the designs and create a design. And it all started for me when the company I was working for was a global engineering company. They had a contractor building database systems and he's just a really interesting guy. The thing that attracted to me at first was he was a guy wore a big brim hat. Didn't look like an engineer. Didn't look anything like everybody else in there. But I was just curious about him as an individual and I got to know him.

2:12Yeah. and that he was writing database systems and he just took me under his wing. I showed some interest had the opportunity to work with him and it just opened up a real passion for me in sort of database systems and it reflected back when I was a kid. My parents had a construction company. I used to go and work in their office and I laugh now. The thing I love doing was building forms in Word, all of their quality assurance forms. I love setting up all of their desktops. So, they're a standard operating environment. I didn't even know that was called manage it. didn't even know what I was doing but I just love that that kind of stuff automating everything making everything look standard look make it look good and see the impact it has on people so I think it started very early yeah I say to people it was a hobby became a day job became a business kind of thing

2:56Brilliant brilliant yeah so we're going to lead on to the next question did you have any initial steps become to start your own IT services business now some people did start it by mistake or you know by design what what happened with you there. How did you get to start your consultancy Yeah. it was about a 2-year journey for me when I sort of finally decided I do want to do this. The company I was with I decided either stay there for another 10 years, fantastic engineering company, would do my own thing. So I took some long service leave. I had an idea one customer through my network said, "Hey, we really need a database system to do this." So I took some long service leave, built out something for them, and that just gave me a test of what it could be like. then I went back to work at four days a week and had an idea around our first product which was suit which is team- based email filing and that kind of launched it. we start I started working on that part-time but then the professional services really came when I said oh look through my network I've got enough people and I had a a colleague of mine who who's still a customer to today actually called me up and said we need we need to implement a project management system on the Microsoft stack. Have you done that before? And actually I'd never done it before but I knew about the stack. and that was my first gig. So, I sort of launched out on my own on the back of having enough work for the next three or four months.

4:14That was it. Brilliant. Brilliant. You mentioned a few gems there. I know your business. Around soup mail. You're relaunching that shortly as well. Yum. I'm looking forward to that relaunch. And we'll get you who's David's co-founder. We'll get him on on that on a separate topic and how you actually built that into a product. A lot of services firms want to build products but caught up with the service delivery on site. So you guys have actually built a product and successful

4:37And it solves a problem a unique problem and that's brilliant. So I'll get you on that at some stage as well. So thanks for yeah that's good. So you started your company you know how did you start your you know your first client just talk about the way you got you just mentioned there you know you got a client but what was the how did you actually get your first client you know a bit more detail on that. Yeah. So, what was the approach? So, the colleague sort of called me and said, "This is the problem. We're a growing growing business. We run lots of projects. We need to track how they're going." He didn't have visibility of all the things they doing and where they're up to. And I said, "Well, coming from an engineering, that sounds like a project management system. It was just rolling out the Microsoft suite. So, I said, there's a thing called project project online. How about I support that for you?" And it was actually the original project server base. So I basically taught myself in a week how to install and how to do that and then I just went to site and used their that project as my learning project. So I did it once and sort of on my own I think I've got enough to front up credibly site to then actual implement it.

5:39Yeah, you got that you know David you got skills already you know you got those human skills and consulting skills already. So that's a that's a really good important thing and then you fake you fake the technology a bit before you can make it and that's how it worked. Great. Yeah. Spot on. I think my journey into this was definitely the consulting side first. You the engineering company I was in their consulting business. So the stuff I love most was actually being on site engaging with customers finding out what their problem was and then the technology just became an enabler for that. So that was definitely my entry point. What what is the problem and using my limited skills at the time I could solve some pretty gnarly and enterprise challenges and I thought well that that sounds great.

6:17That's it. That's it. And you know solving problems is where you get paid you know and I think it's if you can understand those problems from a consulting perspective you'll always be in in a you know in a job as a consultant in some sort. Okay last question on that sort of the background journey side. Do you remember a long time ago now? You remember what was the biggest challenge you you faced in the early stages of your business?

6:37Yeah getting the right people was probably there was a real nervousness around both the responsibility and the impact of bringing people on. So that was probably in the early days that was one of the key challenges was to get the right people but then also establish the credibility because Mojo soup in the early days was very much a consult consulting organization and then to compete with the bigger vendors was always the challenge back then but yeah I'd say people and then just setting ourselves to compete with the some of the bigger vendors.

7:08Yeah. Yeah. It's always the the Yeah. Cuz I say oh you're small do you have the capability? What scalability do you have? That was some of the challenges in the early days. We knew we could do it with a small team, but we're up against others that yeah had a much longer track record and a much bigger business for, you know, a lot of our bigger customers. They wanted that. Yeah. Insurance. Yeah. Definitely.

7:29All right. So the growth and development sort of section, you know, what I like about you folks is you've built a brand and it's amazing brand and you put a lot of effort and time into that and it's I know you know we've had these discussions over the years, you know, how much how much is too much or how much is, you know, not enough, you know, because what do you really get out of it? But I can definitely see the value

7:51Where you guys have been is you've built a really good culture around the brand. Yeah. and and from that you've got some awesome talent in your organization and you built your method out and you've got your IP and your your spark and everything else and can you just talk a bit about you know just a little bit about that because that is the the the thing when I think of you guys you've got some really good

8:14You've really got good good assets in that area. Yeah, just on on the brand side, the thing that sticks out to me is when we we launched a customer experience program, we interviewed some of our best customers going back years ago and some of the feedback from that was the outside doesn't reflect the inside in terms of them them engaging with them working with us. Our brand and what we presented to the outside world didn't represent that. And the other thing we heard loud and clear was what we love about you, Mojo Soup, is you're humans first, technicians second. So that that was the kind of birthing ground for our brand to really emphasize that which I think is even more important now with automation and AI. What does it actually mean to be a human interacting to solve these problems? So that was the branding work we did. But the products and services without your question around Mojo Spark and our Mojo design sprints and all of those kind of things. They really emerged out of one of our core strengths has been and still is is around our ability to create bespoke solutions bring together a number of different pieces and that's like Mojo soup the essence of the individual the mojo you bring it together and you mix up a soup. So that's in our DNA our ability to assemble many different things to create a bespoke solution. There's also challenges to that and one of the ways we've tried to address the scalability of bespoke solutions is to identify a couple of packaged offerings that we can train people around that have a defined set of deliverables and we can manage the quality around it. So we've got a what we call our mojo spark and design sprint approach and again it speaks to the human first technician se second.

9:44It's really an opportunity for us to engage with our customer with an open plate around what problems are they trying to solve? what opportunities they're trying to realize, bring our outside in perspective and facilitate them through a really human- centered approach to define what possible future state could look like and what some of the options might be. Great. So, it's a really yeah designed humanled approach which is very aligned to our brand as a repeatable offering that we can do

10:08And I think that's as you said I think it's personally I think it's where tech is becoming more of a commodity now more and more. Yeah. Yeah. and and it's around, you know, the outcomes, focusing on the command outcomes and how to map that back to to the tech. Sorry. So, so that's really important. So, just on to some other questions then and how did you scale your business from its early days to where it's now? What do you you know, if I ask you, I know it's just a

10:34It's a big question because you've you've done a lot to get there and you've had pain and you've had glory up and down, which is every service owner has. I mean, it's not it doesn't go smoothly. so how did you you know what's your main couple of points that you thought have have helped you scale? Yeah, I think initially it was just a decision to be that is what we want to do because for a long period of time we just sort of organic and we realized at our size we we couldn't stay where we are what where we were. There wasn't really an opportunity for career paths for our team. There was an opportunity for us to have a a bigger impact. So we realized we couldn't really stay where we are. We didn't want to shrink. So the decision first to grow. We had a couple of false starts and it wasn't really till we started getting some advice from people like yourselves and others to identify well what what's actually possible how might you go about that and so I would say where we grew organically for quite a while but once we set a goal to say yes actually we do want to grow and set some targets around it and then got some outside in help that's probably what really transformed us in terms of growing.

11:36Yeah. No, definitely definitely you've put the focus on it and and as I always say, if you have a laser top focus, you will get a result of some sort. That's the thing is a lot of people are trying to do too much and then that is yeah that's still a theme for us. Yeah. Yeah. That's the thing with growth you end up you have bigger capacity bigger capability to do more and the temptation is to keep doing more which is the passion that we have for you know what trying to solve problems but yeah certainly that's very front of mind as we scaled and I think the growth for Mojo the next phase is different to what the growth was in the last three or four years. Yeah, great strategies around, you know, to attract and and retain. I know you guys do a lot of work with the same customers over and over again and that's so powerful because you're obviously doing something really really good to do that. But how do you attract and retrain retain customers?

12:24Yeah. Look, I think our best customers genuinely see us as a partner with them for for the long term. And when I reflect on our customers that are in that place now, it often started with a very small piece of work that we did for them to demonstrate value very quickly. And I would say all of our top tier customers, it started very small and then we were able to just build build from there.

12:47Yeah. Brilliant. Brilliant. That's fantastic. And we've had a number of turnaround points again back to is we we had the challenge in the early days of well how do we compete and position like an IT vendor but that's not really who we are to now some of our challenges are we might be working with a customer initially and that they're trying to interact us like a standard IT managed service provider. We're trying to provide advisory partnering advice and there's a bit of friction, but then we've had a a customer recently where that clicked for them through the interactions with our people and the way we work non-transactionally. I was like, you guys are like a partner and we're like great, we didn't put those words in their mouth and we're like, and then it's completely transformed what we can do for them in the conversations we're having. It's no longer transactional about is a requirement. How can we do that? That's commoditized. It's got to be about the the conversation and what's going on in their context in them as individuals and how we can, you know, position something for them.

13:39So true. I was in Manila on Sunday in the Philippines and I got to go as a guest VIP at a big tech event and spoke to a lot of the big BPOS there through the guest breakout sessions. They had lined the government officials had lined that up with me. The thing is at the end of the day that one of the questions they ask me is how do they build relationships with their suppliers which are basically big IT firms in the US generally and and are saying it's very hard to build relationships with

14:10When you're a commodity number one and there is no need but you know there's hundreds of hundreds of these companies out there and there's no value in solving problems and you've got to get closer to customers to actually understand their problems and then solve those problems. And if you do that then the results will speak for itself and you will get organic growth for your consultancy firm and and that's what you guys have been doing. So it's really really it doesn't matter where you are the same message resonates you know you got to solve problems at the end of the day you know

14:41That's right yeah and yeah go the whole the only way to do that is to have the conversation to actually pitch up and ask them some questions and be there it's almost a novelty these days everyone's you know went into the shelves during co and haven't really came out but those companies that are you know get building human connection building trust

15:02Is is definitely going to be the the winning streak going forward. Okay. Now, we know it, you know, services market's evolving all the time. You know, there's new technology, new upgrades, you know, hardware, software, security. There's a ton of stuff that is happening at the moment. How are you staying competitive in the ever evolving IT services market Great question. Yeah, we what we're talking about a lot lately is what is the expectation of our team and therefore what time and effort and investment goes with that to remain current and I think my insight has been that some of it as a leader has just been about giving people permission that that that is what we need to do and that is the expectation that you you've got an awareness of of what's happening and the analogy I'm using with my team at the moment to to remain competitive it's and I got it from you actually the analogy of surfing. He said, "The most important thing is you've got to be in the ocean. You don't need to catch every wave. Sometimes you paddle, you ride the crest, and you pull off it. Sometimes you ride at the front of the crest, you ride it down." Now, he's not even a surfer, right? But it the analogy works for me that in terms of you, we've just got to be in the ocean. Does you need to ride every crest of it, but you need to be there. You can't be on the shore just sort of, you know, an armchair.

16:13So, the permission to our team is to dive in. And so how I've been remaining competitive with making sure our team's doing the things that are expected is just putting some challenges out there. Just painting a picture of what a future could be and then giving permission to folks to to create a solution for it just like we would when we engage with our customers. Yeah. It's it's difficult to do that. I

16:33When consultants are on the bench or they've got some capacity, the last thing they want to do is develop something because it's not on a client side and and it's that mind shift. I've seen it for the last 30 years. You know, consultancy firms have battled with doing sort of innovation. This is a rolls into next question you know, what what role does innovation play in your business strategy? I know you just did an awesome business strategy session like a month ago.

16:58What's what is the innovation component of that? It's massive. It's front and center for us and this has been sort of links back to that question around growth. As we grew, we knew what was important was to develop some methodologies and standards ways of work. And we're very proud of, you know, our both adaptable and disciplined way of work. But what we realize is sometimes when you define things concretely, you miss the opportunity to innovate. So front and center for us at the moment is actually building into all of our connections, all of our life cycle opportunities to innovate. and some of the things where we're inviting our customers, we're having innovation sessions just to just to open a conversation about what's possible, show some things that are possible. So, we're meeting with them with their executives and just talking about what's possible from an innovation point of view.

17:42Great. Great. That's good. I think that helps helps give back to those clients as well, those clients you've worked with because they need it. They need the help to innovate. They need the offsite facilitation as well to take them out of the van. And I sent you a text the other day saying, you know, next time you speak to a client, ask them about the AI committee. And and I was at event last night

18:05And I was speaking to, you know, one of my clients clients. Yeah. And basically they all have an AI committee at the moment. Yeah. But the challenge with that is as I was speaking to someone last night is what does that really what is the definition of that and is that driving the innovation around AI and and probably not as much as what people were thinking you know so I think those sort of innovation workshops or spark workshop that you that you guys actually roll out to clients I think it's a gem and I think it's the way you know

18:33It is and there's an absolute there's such a gift in it and such a joy when you like everyone could probably individually articulate a few ideas and list them off so it's not just facilitating that it's that genuine opportunity where a new idea emerges from those conversation. That's where the real joy is or some energy gets given to an idea that might have been that enables it to move forward.

18:53Yeah. Now, next section of questions and you guys ace this most of my clients most of my clients don't and that's because they're busy and it's it's no fault to them and and and you know when I had my IT services firm it was diff it's difficult to focus on the team and and the culture. you know, team obviously you want to hire the best staff and everything else and the You want to make sure that they're happy in a place that want to come to work.

19:16Sometimes that there's a bit of a conflict between, you know, utilization rates, you know, and daily rates and and what you can get for someone. how do you go about building your team? You mentioned a bit about it early on, but you know, if you think back about and you probably didn't do this initially in a strategy strategic way. You probably just did it naturally cuz you guys you and you are humans first

19:39And it second. So how did you go about building your team you know and any any thoughts on I think yeah it's interesting reflecting on what I said right at the beginning now around always been attracted to the curious people who are a little bit different. So I think part of our strategy in the early days for building the team was actually because myself and you and we didn't come into it from it. We came from another background. So building the team initially was very much around people who came from almost a nonIT background and I would say we probably got half and half in our team from that. So I think that was a key thing in the early days around that. as we've grown, I think it's giving like the word accountability and and empowerment is overused, but setting the expectation that people can shape and craft the future of this business. That's been at our size and shape. We've always been, look, an individual can have a genuine impact on on the shape of this business and what it does in the world. So, that's that's been challenging for some people, but just having that in our ethos has been important to say, look, you're not here to just to fill a job description through here. It's very much you will have an impact by who you are, your particular skills, your creativity is going to impact not just the team here, but what Mojo can actually do for our customers. So, I think it's giving permission for people to be who they are and create that sort of safe, welcoming space where people are genuinely valued for what what they bring as an individual.

21:05Sure. For sure. That's great. That's great. How do you maintain it? How do you maintain that strong company culture? You know, it's a cost as well. It is a cost you know and that's always difficult but sometimes I I think you know certain clients either don't do enough or certain clients do too much. How do you get that balance right as a consultancy firm David as well? Yeah I think there's two dimensions to it. One is the sort of codification of it. We did go through we articulate what are our values? What is our personality? We define that in our brand book like joyfully eclectic and insatiably curious. So you know we have little ticks like that. You know we craft solutions that excite customers. So, we've got a whole bunch of I guess onboarding codification of who we are and what we do and that that's that's of value to our customers and it's of value to people who want to be part of that. But then the other part of it is we have an incentive scheme

21:56For our team as well. So that's been a big part of it. And then just regularly spending time together. We at least do a quarterly event that's all the team all together. do some fun activities as well as yeah, review performance, celebrate success, all that sort of stuff. Very good. Very good. You know, there's some consultancy firms and I'm just going to mention them like Accenture for example, they have a program in place that sort of every year drops the the 3% worst performing of their organization

22:24Yeah. And it's a combination of, you know, sort of KPIs and utilization. And to me that's it's it's a bit of a a negative way to do it, but it's a big An extent person, but how do you keep your staff motivated and productive because people are humans? I mean, they're humans and they go through their, you know, ups and downs as as a journey in life. How do you keep people motivated and

22:49Yeah. I think I often categorize that into there's for you for you people who just love technical stuff. I think it's talking about demonstrating and engaging in conversations energy about gnarly technical stuff like I love to jump in our meeting rooms or having a bunch of meeting rooms where we rally together. We're trying to nut out a problem that can be hugely motivating for for people who who love that. The other part which is interesting there's another set of people who one of the most motivating things is just to give him a clear set of guard rails and guidelines in terms of what are the goals what are the boundaries I can work with and go after it. So I think we balance those two things a mix of like really bright sparks of collaboration and intense passion around the core business of building digital solutions with with also providing some guidance and a track for people to kind of run on.

23:41Great great Okay. Yeah. Last question around this with the team and the culture. How do you handle conflicts within the team is it you know because it humans you know do clash every now and then. How do you how do you normally handle that David? Yeah, I would say we're still learning how to do that like everybody. But I think again I come back to this expectation setting. One of our we did some got some outside in facilitation around the dynamics of organizations and it was really interesting to high there's always tensions that exist and what's become obvious to me is that sometimes particularly maybe the kind of people in this industry we always want to resolve the tension as if the answer is it's just a binary. You know we resolve it. It's either resolved or unresolved.

24:27I think what we're doing a lot more of is there's the tensions that will always exist. So it it's about talking about strategies to mitigate those natural tensions that like for example we I want to be individually rewarded. I'm important and valued, but we're also the collective. We also work together, want to celebrate. So that's a natural tension. And so it's one acknowledging the tensions that exist. talking about how we mitigate it and then developing our own I guess it's that compassion for each other as humans that we all have bad days sometimes we get it wrong but we're committed to the best outcome that we can so I think it's if I was to distill down

25:04Our mindset around it would have to be that I'm going to expect the best in you and I we're both after the best thing for the situation the customer and we'll persist with each other and leverage curiosity to work through that knowing it's a natural part of what we Yeah. Yeah. Great. Last thing I do I do see when I see you guys in person, I see that you've got a quite a few team members coming into the office

25:26Working together. They, you know, they're doing activities at sometime during lunch together. It's awesome. And a lot of companies I think you know they've gone through this remote place and it's very hard to build a culture remotely and you know in a services type environment. You know, you got to leverage on people as well. How do you do that if you don't have a connection with your colleague? It's

25:47Different. You guys are doing work on that at the moment. Can you mention Yeah, this is something I'm really passionate about. So, we've recently actually, maybe it's a bit controversial, actually asked our team to be in the office 3 days a week, up from 2 days a week. And look, for me, if we genuinely believe that there's more to you and I than just the outputs we can produce, then we have to acknowledge that human face to face interaction generates new insights and generates more than online. Like, you know, we're more than the outputs that we produce. So it's sort of come from that place and the other the other thought experiment for me is particularly with the AI and its ability to have such a huge context. So what does it actually mean to be a human in the context where you've got agents we have got available to general context as well as maybe some of your specifics and I think for me as I said earlier I think what's going on for say you as an individual what's going inside of me going on in my context what's in the context of the the people from our customer and our team who's actually wedged together here to to solve this problem or realize the opportunity there's something unique in that and we believe in that and there's you know those moments where your hair steps up stands up on your head. You know, my experience has been they typically mostly happen, not not only, but mostly happen when people are in person together.

27:05Yeah, definitely. Oh, great. Great great to see that's happening. And I think it's going to it's going to increase the sort of the team culture and the output to clients, you know, that's what's really about and and the osmosis as well. That's the other big one. we have a I really feel like I went through us leaders in our career went through the opportunity to be an on-site overhearing conversations that you weren't directly invited into seeing how other people respond without having to be directly invited into that meeting. So I think from a pure learning and development and career development for folks in the team just being able to observe see over here wheel over to somebody is a is a skill set that's really going to help them in their own career and therefore you know improve what the company can do for our

27:47Great. Great. Okay, we've got to move on to the sort of like the services, what services you actually provide and and then the clients as well. so just talking about services, what type of services do you offer and and have how have they evolved over time? Yeah. Yeah. So our so we have three core services. So one is our digital digital practice which is about building apps on the Microsoft stack. So our second service is around data and AI. So that's everything data, everything AI in through there. And then our third is what we call strategy and transformation. So we probably were always in the digital space building apps, implementing sort of business process optimization, automation and data was always an enabler. But we just realized that leading with data has been a is just so important these days. So we established that practice a few years ago. Mhm.

28:37And then strategy and transformation came out of our reflecting with our customers about look some of the best work you do for us is when you facilitate for us through a process when you provide some advice to us when you help understand and develop a roadmap for us and we realized that wasn't called out separately as a service. So it's really evolved over time from just really focused around building apps particularly in the sort of portfolio project and program management space and doing sort of reporting off the back of that to a yeah data digital first and sort of human focused transformation

29:12Great. Great. Nice. I love the way you describe those three pillars. It's fantastic. Most people can't actually even describe what they really do and it's it's crazy but I know you've worked a lot on that as well easy you know so that's great now your ideal client okay how do you target your ideal client and who is your ideal client at the moment

29:32We've got more than one ideal client but I think at the highest level an ideal client is someone who's of a certain size and shape who wants to partner for the long term so they're our best customers so we can leverage all of those three services So some of our best customers range from people working in advanced manufacturing through to stateowned corporations. So organizations which have a degree of complexity about them have a number of different connected systems that seems to be our perfect customers are the ones where they realize actually it's not just a data problem. It's not just an app problem. It's not just an automation problem. It's actually how all of that fits together because we've already done the market scan. There's nothing off the shelf that picks it or we've got three or four of those already. that it's more in some of those complex systems where we can help sort of simplify that for them and really create a change for them in their organization.

30:23Yeah. Yeah. Now the next sort of question is around the customer engagement and how do you actually sort of connect you know you we talked about that your ideal clients you know partnering type of client which is what you know which is what you you really put a lot of effort around but how do you actually you know how do you actually sort of connect how do you go together you know what's what's the

30:43You know because there's challenges around that because there's always this trust factor you know from a from a client to a services partner you know that here to to rob us blind or you know what I mean whatever Are they going to deliver what they say they're going to deliver? So, what are the most common challenges you see to build that relationship? You know, that stops you from building that relationship. I would say if we haven't invested enough time up front just actually talking to them like you you mentioned earlier around there's that tension sometimes between or what's the utilization, what's the scope, what's the budget and I think sometimes having good discipline around budget, around utilization, around timing, around milestones, which is what the customer wants. Sometimes that discipline actually prevents building building a relationship that can open up other conversations. But it's like this paradox because you have to first demonstrate then demonstrate you can do what you said you were going to do. You got to do it to a high quality do it to the to the value that you know we agreed to in the business case that can build the trust to then have a broader conversation about other things. Whereas other times the fact that you haven't wanted to talk about their strategy or wanted to talk about what this is all about or at some higher level objective can actually create a transactional relationship. So it's a bit of a I think initially I I think it's just getting curious understanding whether what's the most important thing now to build trust. Is it to just be a bit blinked and just do what we said we were going to do and what they asked for or is it the kind of customer where we need to do that plus actually start to talk to them about ideas and what else they could do

32:14Or before we even get started do we need to just reallyate the whole project which we've done before as well. Yeah. Look every customer's grateful for that. Yeah. It is a challenge you know y you know you you Yeah. It's difficult and it's one of those things you'll have to keep on working on. Yeah. And I think working with our customers, one of our key, I would call it a key success factors for building that trust is our customer experience program which we started years ago. So every engagement we have, we have a CX champion. And so that's someone who's independent of the project team and they schedule a conversation with like the project lead, the project manager, the sponsor on our customer side just to check in on how we're going and how the team's going, how the project's going, anything else you'd like to talk about. And I've been blown away by I could be involved with a customer having conversations all the time. The things that they will share with someone who's independent to the whole project who might be a very junior person in the organization and the impact that what they've shared and the insight and how we can adapt and tweak our services to better serve them has been amazing. So I think that's built a lot of trust and that it's been amazing to see that actually when when people just ask questions about how's it going and it's someone who's got no information to be able to defend it. They're just there to

33:29For sure. It's generally created huge opportunity for us to build trust with our customers. Yeah. Brilliant. So, I know you got a lot of projects on the go because you're you're you know, you're busy company, you got a a decent sized team. you know, one of those things that always battles with with firms is obviously the quality of delivery when you've got multiple projects, say, complex projects as well. Yeah. and you know and you got to deal with the client side and ever changing requirements from a client because they never know really what they're going to get until they start the project spend the time. It's amazing. Hasn't

34:04Until the end actually you know it's usually at the end we only ever know have we got what we thought we want the last 30 years you know I've been consulting that I've been doing is is you know do they really know what they're getting you know and and how to educate them but how do you ensure high quality service delivery you you talked about the TX program that you got to hire an awesome person to to do that

34:25And I've seen her in in action she's really good but you know is that really the way you're going to focus for the high quality of delivery. Yeah. I think you know there's the obviously that's from a customer engagement and way of work and are we are we aligned and also are the outcomes and outputs we've got you know adding a value so we get that insight there

34:46But from the mechanics of what we do dayto-day is we've got a framework called taste like we always want to leave a good taste in someone's mouth. So we we've got some frameworks and some tooling around how we do testing through our technical deliverables. We've tasked someone at the moment with automating more of that. We're leveraging a bunch of AI tools to support us in the the testing through there. But it's also I think the I think there's just a mindset as well that doesn't let you know doesn't leave good enough alone is part of our ultra as well that sometimes even if you've defined the requirements well even if you've written test scripts and automated those sometimes that still doesn't quite meet. So I think it's that putting the hat on as of an end user. We're not all here just following a process. It's the process doesn't give us the outcome. having the mindset of an end user and bringing that to what we do has been really important. Like who are the people? What's their persona that's going to sit around and use this app or view the outputs of the data warehouse or maybe it's the technical person that needs to maintain that tooling. Who are they? What's important to them? And just to put put that hat on. So I think defining personas and what's important to them is is a key part of enabling

35:57I like the taste quality. Brilliant. And that's all part of our taste framework. And the other current priority for us is being an organization that balances. We want high collaboration. We know that high collaboration generates really cool stuff. Our customers want it. But we also need high traceability to manage change to manage chaos. So you know we've set the vision. We've got GATH. Gaff's an agent

36:19In our business who helps support us maintain traceability in our systems where there's changing requirements where there's new requirements where there's decisions and actions to maintain that traceability for us automatically so we can engage in high collaboration but have our systems support us. From a traceability point of view. Brilliant. Brilliant. Okay. That's good. The last piece now I know that you know when I'm when I'm talking to you you folks that you you always you know give me a bit of updates on your sales pipeline and and customer stories and and and And that's you know that's where you know success is really happening.

36:51You know. So could you just talk through example just so it gives the listeners sort of an example what type of things you do. Can you give us a one customer success story? Obviously don't mention the company name or whatever just maybe the industry and sort of talk about the significant impact that you had on the client Yeah. Yeah. Sure. So, one comes to mind recently, a customer we've had, they're a state government customer we've had for for for many years. We've established such a trust with them and we connect with them regularly. So, we've got a couple of projects that were on the go. But then out of the blue in June, I didn't know this at the time, but the DG there had put a challenge to the department to say, I want people to come forward with some good ideas about what we can do. And our customer thought, well, who who do I talk to when we want to talk about ideas and innovation? and they sort of you know came up to our office and we had an amazing session on the whiteboard just free form architecting what a solution could look like and then in a couple of weeks time we turned that around using some tooling into a set of wireframes and then right now we're building that solution and we demoed it last week there's going to be senior government stakeholders who are involved in some high level budgeting processes really excited about the impact it's going to have on the process

38:04Yeah it's the next it's going to help it's going to really transform the way that they do things genuinely it's in some respects it's a simple piece of technology, but the way it's assembled and what it's going to do is completely change for these senior government stakeholders the way they engage with their decision-m process. Brilliant. Brilliant. It's nice when you actually do something. You know what I mean? For a client where it actually has a real impact, you know, sometimes you do a project and you wonder, yeah, it's done what it's supposed to have done, but what impact has it really done?

38:31That's right. And you hear that from the executive director DG this is you know when they're customer this is going to transform the experience for the people who normally do that process not just yeah they'll do the process and it's just maybe a bit faster or they're doing the same it's actually going to be a different way to yeah yeah great to do what they've done previous so it's a genuine example of transformation not just you know automate the same thing they've always done.

38:54Sure. For sure. All right it's that's been brilliant. The next piece you know we've got two more pieces left to go and then we we done it. So what's the biggest challenge you think you know IT services industry has at the moment? I mean I I think I know obviously but what are your thoughts and and can you talk a bit about that as well you know and if you want you could be talking around the sales marketing or the

39:15Off or the delivery you can take one of those areas or multiple areas when you talk through that. Yeah. Yeah. The thing I'm seeing ahead at the moment is just to keep differentiating in the market. I keep asking the question, what is it that we do that we uniquely do? How can we have an impact on this customer that's just beyond the particular skill sets that we've got at the moment? Because the ability to to build apps, wrangle data, facilitate a workshop, it's becoming not a commodity. you know, our primary value is is not in our ability to deliver that. It's it's knowing probably what's possible, how to orchestrate a number of those things happening together. So I think the biggest challenge is actually what is the business model of the future? What is the mix of humans orchestrating agent orchestrators who are orchestrating fleets of agents like I think that as a leader trying to cuz it's we've never done it before just trying to envision what the shape of that looks like because there's not other organizations you can easily go to and say oh yeah that's the next evolution for us. So it's it's inventing something new in terms of the shape of the organization and I think continuing the ex when I think about the market the expectation is well because of all those things in AI we should be able to do things quicker less cost to a higher degree of quality. So are we are we actually doing that? So those normal pressures downwards around from a delivery perspective. So I think yeah what is the shape of our business of the future occupies a fair bit of my mind as a challenge because there's not a model

40:47There's no model to go to. you know, there's people who are doing well right now, but what does it look like? No one knows. We're in we're creating that now. and then managing increasing expectations that things are done faster, deeper into a higher quality, which has always been around. It's just a new competitor in the in the scene. Yeah, sure. For sure. So, you know, I would say that, you know, I always talk to people about what's who's your competitor in the market and maybe maybe it's at the moment AI. It's not not the enabler. It's a bit of a competitor, the services industry. It's a bit of a bit of everything at the moment.

41:17Yeah. so like every everyone's posting at the moment, look what I did over the weekend. I could create this. We're able to, you know, do this thing really quickly. We could wrangle this. So yeah, so then it it just often it's like like great, look what I did. Then it's like kind of tumble weeds with a lot of that stuff and we do that too. So it's it's really about owning the ability to understand well what's what's of value to you? What's going to make an impact

41:38For sure? And defining those use cases and understanding how you can orchestrate humans and nonhumans to make that happen in the best way. that that's kind of the skill set and sometimes you don't sometimes the answer is we don't know so let's experiment so I think that's that's exciting for me to think about that again different business model for us in professional services where outside of our packaged offerings and products that bespoke assembly of a of a a custom solution for someone is completely changed how we can do that

42:07For sure thanks great so we're on the challenges and lessons learned sort of section now and sometimes quite hard to talk about it but have you had any failures setbacks and and how did you overcome that? Yeah. Yeah. I think it's the flip side. Yeah. I think the one that comes is the flip side of our human first, technician second, and our real people focused. I think what it's meant certainly reflected a lot as a leader that there's probably some cyber decisions that would probably be more impactful to people that I should had earlier. So, you know, that that that's probably one of the hard lessons recently is actually Yeah. Yeah. and the other probably key learning is just to keep that tendency to over complicate things. I think as a leader, some of the best things I've seen happen is when we've set a clear vision and example, focus on a few things and go after those. That's been a huge lesson

42:58For sure for me. And just realizing the power of of people being mobilized around fewer Yeah. Yeah. Look, it's You know, it's it's always that challenge. There's always that tension in the services world, you know, back and forth, you know, and and that's that's just what it is. You got, as you said early on, you got to live with that some, you know, and that's right all the time. It's not a yes and no answers.

43:23The next the last question is is around how do you balance the shortterm needs and the long-term goals of the organization? So, I I think about this all the time. I was with the those big BPOS's in Philippines on Sunday with some of the government officials and they're losing staff. you know they're losing work from the US companies and I said to them they have to invest in becoming you know solution providers rather than sort of order takers if that makes sense. they have to be able to solve problems and and they have to skill themselves up to solve problems on the client side and identify problems so they become closer to the client. Okay. So you you really engaged in that and and you've ticked that off. But for them it's just trying to you know get an education get them to learn how to do that but you're doing that already. Okay. But the other thing is what actually happens in a in a typical services world. Even if let's you look at the big four model the big consultant firms they're also backing not just the BPOS because they are so tight on their on their profitability and their metrics and how they set up. So the only way they can do it is if you you don't get utilization we firing people. Y

44:25And they are they investing in their model in their business model? They they they aren't and they the reason why they aren't is because they haven't allowed themselves and they're so big to invest in the short term, you know. So, how you invest in the short term for your long-term goals, David, that's yeah, I'll come back to that. But that whole thing around utilization, we had an insight, we had a big strategy planning day yesterday and we thought the importance of innovation and the value that we bring to customers. We had some real insights that some of the measures we use to measure performance are just in conflict with innovation. So hyperfocus on utilization, hyperfocus on, you know, budget around a profit, a project, you know, profit around an individual project in its budget can actually have the converse effect of actually not incentivizing people to actually think about how we could do it differently and what the innovation is. That was a key insight for us that that changes that. So just so back to the question can you just repeat

45:22Before we get back to the question I just want to elaborate on that I totally agree with that and that's the problem with the big four because when you have you know 10,000 how do you actually manage you know services environment like that it's so difficult so you have these basic archaic KPIs to to run the business and that actually stifles everything innovation it does you know y

45:42So yeah okay back on to the question yeah yeah now I've forgotten what the yeah yeah no so short-term versus long-term goals. How do you actually, you know, how do you balance that out? Yeah, I I think setting so setting a cadence of how we manage the organization. So, you know, in terms of, you know, we have our strategy planning we do every year and then we check in quarterly on all of those things. So, there's the long-term sort of vision that we keep alive through there and we're focusing on fewer and fewer things. In the short term, I used to think the answer to that was a fair bit of what I now call sort of bureaucracy setting up quite a few a lot of internal governance. But I think the best thing in the short term I find is for our for us to just continue to focus on our core business which is helping organizations transform the way they work. And the way we do that is we need to engage with our customers at a high degree of frequency. And I think that's the that's the short term for me. So we're constantly know cuz we could set all of the goals that we like for the long term, but if we're not aware of what's happening right now with their existing customers, then I think they're the things that protect you in the short term for me is the existing customers that you've got what they're doing.

46:53Yeah. So that's brilliant onto the future and Yep. And I was talking to a couple of ex CIOS or you know CIOS that were my clients over the years when I was when I had my consult consultancy firm and and there's a bit of a trend that I've seen to hear from from those and even from my customers and then I read an article on the weekend from overseas where they were talking about some large enterprises where HR departments are starting to merge with the IT having sort of like a HR director who runs it and HR

47:28Right and it's it's interesting when you think that and then I thought about it over the period of time and I thought well this is why this is why this it's it's really because AI is obviously bringing people closer together and the need for people to work with technology and that whole paradigm shift that's happening it's evolving and they did a they actually did a

47:48I think it was BBC did a a poll of how many companies that I think in the next two to three years where the IT and HR departments will merge and the results shock me. Okay. It was such a high percentage where they think this trend is going to actually change. And it sort of goes back to your ethos as as organization, you know.

48:08It is. Yeah. Yeah. So, just going back to the question I want to ask you is how do you adapt to these trends? Because this is a definitely a trend that I can see is going to happen. Yeah. Yeah. I think it's really interesting what you said there like if you're if you're going to be sort of deep in one area say you're you know HR you've got to be super deep to be competitive with anything like there's still you there's a room for experts but you got to go deep

48:31To position that as an expert otherwise your role is orchestration and understanding how you can assemble things together so I think that's a that's a massive challenge and I just reflect a conversation I had recently with one of our someone in advanced manufacturing one of our customers who's just doing amazing stuff on a global stage. Just talking about the tendency that sometimes we have as humans, the need to get clear on roles and responsibilities for whatever reason and then assembling around structures and and bureaucracy is is against the best work that happens when crossunctional teams are working together focused on what's going to impact the customer. On that similar example like some of their teams are now being deployed from say in it into production. So people are working to see what is it, what's happening, what do we actually do and then then understand well if that's what we do and where some of the real pains are how can we solve that and the answer is never one tool one individual it's bringing a few of those things together. So I think it's just broadening your own if you're not going to go super deep in one area but broaden your own awareness of what are the challenges and what what what's actually going on around us

49:36For sure. sure. so you've got, yeah, something to say into that situation camp that's been around for so long. They don't really know what they're really doing and they don't know what how they're serving and and that's that's interesting like if you look at Elon Musk's his whole innovation idea and his theory is rather delete before you innovate because what you actually could be doing is innovating on something that you don't actually need. And that's that is actually quite a mind shift because you know what does it really need? They just serving HR. HR doesn't, you know, it's dysfunction of across the fence. We're not together.

50:07And you probably got some things that you don't even need in those environments. And if you bring them together likely, you know, you'll be probably able to delete a lot of that function, you know. Yeah. 100%. It reminds me, you know, I think, you know, Mojo Soup, you know, we started was the name of a band. So music's always important to me. And on that same vibe, I think I think it was Louis Armstrong said, "Every note that's ever been played is already being played." So, you know, creating something sometimes it's what you don't say. It's the note you don't play. It's where you do the rest is which is similar to what you're saying there. It's like, you know, in some respects, every bit of knowledge, information, methodology, tools is now more available to you and it can do things on your behalf, not just tell you how to do it. So maybe it's what you don't do. Maybe it's how you sift through the noise and it is what's of value. For sure.

50:52Last question and then we we can wrap up because I know you're hell of a hell of a busy person. So I really appreciate the time and everything else. David, what would you give to an aspiring IT small IT services business that you know wants to start out or someone's joining joining that sort of rank of being an owner maybe one or two people is there anything that you would love to give them to help them on their journey?

51:14Yeah, I think don't do it alone. It was that was something it took me about 6 months when I started. I think it's when you're, you know, all all the risk, all the reward, all the passion, but then all of the, you know, the shadow side of that. I think it's yeah, don't do it alone. I think it's would be the first thing. and then yeah, get get advice from people who have maybe bit further down the road.

51:38Sure. Brilliant. Okay. Thanks. Thanks for the thanks for that open the open discussion on Mojo Suit and your great business and it's a a pleasure to be working with you guys and I love you guys to bits. Thanks very much for your time, David. Cheers. Yeah, thanks Ian. Yeah, thanks for all your help. Cheers. 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 www.itmastermindalks.com. It mastermind talks.com for more information.