From Vision to Venture: James Beresford’s Strategic Approach to IT and AI-Driven Business From Vision to Venture James Beresford’s Strategic Approach to IT and AI-Driven Business

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 the 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.

0:35Hi James, how you going? Good to see you Yeah, no, I'm good and and pleasant to see you as well. typically sort of freezing our way through a Sydney winter at the moment, but that's coming to an end. So, I'm gearing up immensely. Yeah, got another month, I think it is, of cold weather and hopefully after that'll be good. And, I'm looking forward. But we had a lot of rain on the weekend so that was pretty pretty bad for getting out getting out the house. So anyway, awesome to join us IT mastermind talks. The most important thing about these talks is just to get some honest opinion from people that I've worked with in the past or people that out in the industry just to understand, you know, where they've come from on their journey and not even from the background journey but where they're going as a company and what they actually do as well and what problems are they solving out there in the industry. So, I've got a few things I just normally just get going with. I've known James for quite a few years. but you know, it' be good for you to go through some of these things. Like, for example, can you give us sort of a bit of a background, James, on what inspired you to become a consultant initially and then an IT services business owner?

1:45Like all these things in life, not terribly well planned. A sort of an accident. and if I go all the way back to the very very start of the journey. So, when I graduated university, which is now a frighteningly long time ago, I was dead set on being a pharmaceutical research chemist, which seemed like a great way to kind of push my scientific sort of thinking and and kind of grow what I'd learned through my education. but at that time, all the research houses were all consolidating all of their research functions and firing people left, right, and center. So, it was an abysmal time for a graduate trying to break in. and so I accidentally I end through a sort of a typical array of sort of postgraduation jobs, I ended up working for a call center for an insurance company. and they started to run an MBA program and I just put my hand up or my my my manager told me to put my hand up because I think she just wanted to keep me quiet and give me something to keep me busy and out of her hair. and I ended up on the program and being on the program then sort of got along the attention of sort of some of the senior management and an opportunity came up in their pricing department which is a very sort of analytics heavy kind of function. and so I sort of took up a role there and and basically ended up in data ever since. so first hovering through a bunch of end user roles in insurance industry until when I came to Australia about sort of you know almost 20 years ago now and I had it in my head that I really needed to lift my game.

3:10I'd been an enduser for quite a while. and the sort of the last six months of my last role, I got exposed to some consultants who were showing off this great technology and a huge level of expertise. And it made me realize that I didn't know as much as I thought I should. And obviously, this is pre- internet days. So, there wasn't like YouTube videos everywhere telling me that this is the latest tool and I should get on board. We had to find out the hard way by talking to people and meeting them. and so when I was in Australia, spent probably about 10 years roughly bouncing around in in consulting organizations and building up my technical skill, building up my kind of client and and engagement skills and an opportunity arose where, you know, basically I was working with someone on a contract and they said, "Well, I've got a business. How about you join up?" I didn't any particular reason why not at the time. So, we just did it to see what would happen. and within the space of three three years, we kind of grown to from, you know, two guys running around in cafes desperately trying to spin up a business to, you know, a $3 million business with about 15 employees. and that kind of gave me the taste for it. now, as you probably well know, there's there's always ups and downs in businesses, and so that particular venture came to a bit of an end. tried with a different path, and that sort of fizzled a little bit. And so consequently now I'm here at Talos which is my own creation as well.

4:32I'm now about four and a half years in and flying solo for the first time which has also come kind of an a different dimension to the journey because when I first done it it was with the partner when I second tried it it was with a bigger corporate organization and this one it was just like you got to wear the whole thing. You are the boss the butt stops with you. and so this is where I've sort of landed now.

4:53Great. Great. That's awesome. you know it's it's quite it's quite difficult being a the only founder and the stats are out there that you know that it is extremely lonely and and it is difficult but I commend you James on it and it's very you know it's good and bad I mean the challenge having founders is you know it's it's like getting married and the problems with any marriage and you've got to work through them and and at some point just like you know 50% of people nowadays get divorced that exactly what happens with with with that and I often always get asked the question is how do we actually bring on a new partner equity new part into the business and it it is very tricky it is very very tricky so yeah doing it tough by yourself but you know that's not the you know the journey will carry on for you I'm sure around that space but we'll we'll probably come back to you in about four years time and and see how you're going around that partner piece what was it you know what was the vision when you started Talos what was the vision did Did you actually sort of put down a vision statement or an idea of what you wanted to do for Talis when you started by on your own?

6:02Yeah. So when when I started the business, I started thinking about why I kind of got into this in the first place and there's kind of a few underlying drivers that and these are personal drivers. So you know I get very frustrated with waste and inefficiency. you know, you know, lousy processes, badly designed forms, anything that's kind of just the grit in in trying to get things done. It drives me crazy, especially when there's kind of a better way of doing things. and also a lot of it is around so, you know, we supply a lot of capability around data, analytics, automation, and a lot of that basically revolves around giving the fuel to decision making or making those decisions automatic and and flowing more effectively. And so we came up with this tagline, well I came up with this tagline of efficient decision-making, which is kind of what we're about. So, you know, we're trying to provide data and analytics so humans can make the right decisions. We're providing AI and automation so the robots can make the right decisions, but trying to do it as streamlined as possible because a lot of people get I mean get analysis paralysis, right? You've got too many opinions, too many things. you don't know really what to do and you might sort of take the safer option or you'll just go by go with your gut which is something that always terrifies me as as somebody who's very data driven. It's like don't go with your gut. Behavioral science tells you not to do that unless you're in a forest about to be attacked by a tiger in which case trust yourself.

7:22But when you're trying to decide, you know, the path of an organization, you need a bit more of a a structured and and informed thing. So really my passion is about trying to make stuff work quicker and be able to make people to make their decisions more effectively and hence the efficient decision- making For sure. Fantastic. Look, I know that you know you do a lot of Microsoft PowerBI and sort of automation with UI path and a few other things. We'll talk about that later, but that's what sort of excites me about your business, James, is you know, my background was always analytics. So I I do I do have that love for analytics and I know it can be very powerful around enabling businesses to make decisions. So that's awesome. just before we get on to the next stage of a couple of quick questions to ask. How did you always you know how did you actually win your first client? Because that's a question I always get from people starting out in their in their their journey. is how did I get my first client Ian? How did you get your first that's getting into distant territory now. I can't. So I think some of it at the time was so when I started about 10 years ago, Microsoft was a lot more partner friendly and a lot more open to working with smaller partners and they kind of come and go in waves of that. So a few years ago they were back on that wagon and now they're back to let's just focus on enterprise partners. but we the organization that I was part of was running one of the user groups.

8:47And at the time it was like PowerBI was just being pushed into the market. And so Microsoft were very keen on sponsoring that kind of thing. And because we've managed to raise a name for ourselves as people who cared about PowerBI, some of the people in Microsoft were like, "Oh, well, we've got a PowerBI proof of concept. Who on earth do we call just call these guys?" Because they didn't have it there was new technology. There was nobody on their books that could do it. So they just kind of had to wing it as well. and so through our relationships with our partner vendors, I think we got sort of our first few. And then you know we did a lot of standard marketing stuff. So you know holding events doing and LinkedIn outreach was a lot easier back then because people were much more open to connecting. So we could like reach out to people start inviting basically like random CIOS and data people and say we'll give you breakfast if you sit and listen to us for an hour and that usually got enough people through the door that we could start generating inter you know generating interactions that then led to sort of projects and clients and work.

9:41Great. Great. Well thanks for that. That's good to share. everyone's sort of got their different way they started initially to get them going and and then the last piece for that background and and how you got going is where was the if you can remember because it's been a while. What's the biggest challenge you faced in the early stage of the business? A lot of it's about credibility and appearance. So, when you're a really new business, you've got zero in the way of track record. You're basically going on your ability to persuade people that you know what you're doing. and and I think it's just trying to establish that credibility. And for me now, having been in the business for a long time and worked with a large range of a organizations, I can kind of refer to things that I've done that I can talk to. but I've also got this kind of track record of like client stories that I can claim, you know, I can safely say, look, we did that. We delivered that. We own the project. It is our deliverable. Here is our evidence. whereas very early in the piece, a lot of it was, well, I'm a really good guy. I know what I'm doing and I've done it for these other people working for another co-organization. And it then just depends on that client's willingness to take that risk and go, I'm going to trust this guy because I think he sounds like he knows what he's talking about and he's got a track record. It might not be his organization's track record, but it's his personal credibility.

10:55And I think that's kind of what carried it initially was just the ability to be personally credible. and some of that was backed up by client experience. Some of it was backed by things like, you know, I used to used to have a blog that was fairly well read. so, you know, you had to kind of establish your personal brand in some shape or form to get past that initial credibility gap because if you just walk up to I mean, I'm sure you get bundles of them. these random emails from Indian and Filipino development houses going, "We'll build your website super fast." And it's like, "I don't know you from

11:26I'm not going to trust you." but and so you know you've got to build that credibility and that relationship to enable people to get that trust and take that risk on working with you. Yeah, that's great. That's great bit of advice there. and James, you know, I always talk about being people being a thought leader, trying to be that thought leader at all times and the more that you're out there putting yourself out there, the more chance you have of becoming a thought leader. So thanks for that share. That's awesome. all right so we moved on to sort of like team and culture you know of your business and how did you you know I know you've scaled up and you scaled down like most businesses when there's things are working well things are changing in the an economy or the technology landscape changes what are the things have you done when you've actually built around building your team around getting that culture right and and building a team what's the things that you've done

12:18Yeah so that's interesting it's an interesting topic because the models has changed a lot since I started like 10 years ago. So when we originally started, a lot of it just revolves around, you know, getting people together for team drinks before we had an office and then when we had an office, you know, having sort of regular gatherings, making sure that there was a regular kind of standup call, I guess, between the organizations. So when your team's, you know, up to about 10 15 that it's manageable to get everyone on a call for half an hour and have a quick spin through what's everyone doing and maybe, you know, get somebody to do a bit of a showcase about what they've done. but that gets harder in the digital world. So postcoid, nobody so much is remote now. and obviously during those two years, we couldn't have meetups. We couldn't sort of bring people into the state and have those gatherings. So it started defaulting more to having sort of team calls like effectively just like you know just regular standups making sure that people are talking and for myself having to be more physically present so there was less stuff that I could just go a consultant's got this in hand I know I need to be there to make them feel that they're supported that they've got someone on their side whether that's in a client interaction or just trying to troubleshoot things and still focusing on those get togethers but making them higher value. So what I did for the last couple of years was we just had an annual gathering. So roughly around about July, August, so once the financial year had settled, get everyone into the same place for an afternoon, you know, do some work rellated stuff.

13:48Go off and I think the last one we did, we do ax throwing. go and have a nice dinner, send everyone on their way. So you get that personal connection because, you know, and I've got people in Victoria and people in ACT and people in in New South Wales. So you can't just kind of drop by and and go, "Let's have a drink after work." you've got to make a conscious effort to bring them together. And I think to be honest, a lot of the culture stuff is just conscious effort by the person who's accountable for it. So obviously in most organizations that's the boss, it means not ignoring your team. So, you know, even though now my team is smaller than it was sort of a year ago, I'm still making sure I'm in touch with people constantly, always engaging with them, always trying to make sure that they feel that I've got their interests, be that career development, personal, you know, work life balance. I'm taking that into account and then that helps build a culture by itself just by engaging with people. And when the team was bigger as well, I started finding that that percolated through. And so people who I put in positions of leadership picked up the habits that I got and spent time engaging with their people in the same way. So it kind of cascaded down nicely.

14:52Yeah. Great. That's you know that's brilliant. you know people buy from people and your you know your staff are your product as well. So it's really is centered around people. I know I know that's something that's close to your heart. So thanks for that. It's really good share. really appreciate that. what what strategies do you do to to attract and currently and retain clients? You know, because one of the things I always see with with with clients that I'm working with and coaching through the learning growth program is, you know, some people just want to get on to the next client without even retaining properly retaining or or selling further at that existing client. and they get into this sort of habit of you know quickly do a project do it well tick the box and they move on to next project without spending time and and doing that. So attracting so going back to the question, how do you attract and then how do you retain

15:45So attracting clients has got a it's almost got a bit easier as I've got more focused. So you know when I when I was probably about five sort of six years ago when I was operating in the broad data space like what do we do we do Microsoft technology Microsoft AI and and that that attracted a certain cohort of people. we had to work with partners quite heavily to do that and you know we had to kind of do a lot of running around and work just trying to engage with people to go would you be interested in PowerBI developers or do you need some of your data infrastructure but it was very technically focused it wasn't very I guess it probably wasn't like super valuedriven and I'm I think I'm remembering something from a Microsoft course I attended a while ago which was run by some one of their kind of marketing strategy odds and and they basically said to If you go into an industry and go we do technology, you'll get about a 10% win rate. If you go into that sorry, sorry, if you go into the market, if you go to an specific industry and go, we do this for the mining industry, your win rate starts to creep up to that 40 50% mark because you're starting to go and address their specific problems. But then when you get into the really powerful win rates of like 90% plus is where you go to them and go we've got a solution to the problem we didn't even know how to solve and we can we can show the ROI for it and it starts becoming a bit of a no-brainer. and what I've I guess where I've been steering over the past few years is trying to get to that point where I've actually got something to offer. So when I started doing automation it was a bit like let's do automation and see what happens because

17:18We didn't know what was you know we didn't know who was going to be interested. the market was very new. very few people understood the technology. So, it was kind of trying to get that first mover advantage. But over time, we kind of narrowed down to one specific sector. and we've identified that, you know, that sector I guess, repeatability, I think, is probably the key thing. So, it's the same business model spread out across Australia and it's got more or less the same systems. It's got more or less the same processes. So, we're able to turn around to them and go, we don't need to come in and tell you that we can do an audit and work out how to automate this process for you. We just go, here's the process. Here's the code to deliver it. Here's the software platform and here's the ROI because I know how much this is costing you to run. It becomes and unfortunately the sector is is government related. So, it's still very slow decision making, but it's a lot simpler conversation because we are just talking basically hard numbers and we're often talking to CFOs about these things. So they'll go, I'm not going to spend 80 grand automating a 40 grand a year person's job, but I will spend 40 grand automating an 80 grand a year person's job. And so it makes the decision-m process a lot easier. What that also helps in is within our marketing efforts because it means that we turn and go in this industry there are approximately I'm off the top of my head probably about 300 potential businesses and there's a as as with all these things there's a scale. Some of them are small and have like sort of you know much smaller budgets and some of them have got big enterprise scale budgets. It's like let's go talk to the enterprise guys before we waste that time talking to the smaller guys. Chase the bigger sales. Get those foundation customers in and then it becomes a lot

18:51Easier to kind of platform off the back of those and go hey you know we've got this great offer. We've done it for this big reference client that you're going to trust. and you know, from there that's actually, and it's been a long journey to get to this point, but we're getting to the point now where we can target the right people, have a very immediate value based decision, and very quickly learn whether we're actually going to get traction with them or not.

19:14Look, that's it's it's amazing that that you you go on through that journey, James, and it's so so powerful to hear that because as you know, when I'm coaching clients, I'm always saying, you know, what is your, you know, what's your superpower? What are you famous And if you're not famous for anything, then you're just going to be generic and and people just don't know what that you solving if you're generic. So, I love that. I love that whole that's that was on fire. Well done, James. It's a really good really good piece there. And for those that are listening, please listen to that again over and over again. I think that is superb. you know, I think it's where consultancy firms are going more more and more. those generic big consultancy firms are in trouble not just because of AI but also because of people becoming more smarter making those decisions and they want more value quicker and faster and they want to be sold generic you know I think that's the that's the message that you could see more and more happening

20:13Yeah before before we drop this topic though I think there's probably there's a little bit to explore further and and so I guess the challenge and and I think you know when you're talking to your customers is about, you know, what is your superpower? When you're just starting, it's really, really hard to work out what your superpower is because a lot of tech people who get into consulting come from a tech background and they've been like they blitz the technology. They know it inside out, but they've never had that kind of business application. And you know this is part of you know what we went through with the automation is you've got to poke at it with a stick and you will find success somewhere and then you've got to work out very quickly if that somewhere has got enough success potential that you're prepared to invest in it and go for that particular sector or whether you have to go actually no I need to move on and find the next thing. because I remember, you know, about sort of 10 years ago, I was working with a chap who was full of ideas like, "Hey, we could do this or we could build an app to do this. It would be great." And I turned around, how much money is in it? And then we just quickly go down and go, "Oh, here's the market size. Here's what they're going to pay. We've got this great idea that's worth about $5,000 in the whole country. Okay, next." So, you know, you've got to go through a really brutal process of trying to work out what's going to work for you. And then the gutsy bit in the decision-m process is going, I'm going to choose this one. I'm going to run with it because I said that the one that I'm working on now, it's taken me four years to get to this point. It's not been a quick journey and that means that there's also been that classic scrambling around doing any random stuff in order to support that bigger goal.

21:39Yeah. But you'll get that, you know, the thing is once you've got that 15 of those clients, you become the thought leader in that space, whatever it is. And then it's really easy. So I see that all the time. I've got clients have gone from you know 15 staff to 100 150 staff rapidly over you know but it's the last two three years of that growth is all come through niching down and being famous and actually delivering. So the thing is and this is what people don't see see it James is they worry about missing the opportunity so they try and do everything but that's when they really do miss the opportunity because they can't focus on actually the the the opportunity that is in front of them and and and around that repeatability takes stress off consultancy firms take stress off people if you're doing repeatable work and you get better margins and you get better outcomes you know it just makes it so much easier. So yeah very good very good there. So let's move on to next part is how do you stay competitive in the ever evolving IT services market? I mean there's so much changing obviously with AI now as well but even just thinking about the Microsoft u stack in the last year and a half two years you can probably talk a bit about that what's what's happening with the Microsoft stack where you we you know where you guys are service quite a bit of that work and then AI on top of that how's that sort of changing your market for you right now James

23:07Well the and one of the challenges that kind of imposed by all of these platforms is that they're constantly trying to make them easier to use, which is great for the end user, but it's terrible for people who then try to make a living telling people how to use the platforms. so a lot of it's trying to figure out where the value to the business for that ex that external advice is. So, you know, when I started with PowerBI, a lot of it was just like how on earth do I do anything in PowerBI? I don't understand. Now, the demand for that is much smaller because the I guess the the maturity of of people coming into the organization is increasing regarding data literacy. And so throwing together a few basic reports is now kind of well within the grasp of most people. And because of the ubiquitousness of Microsoft and and PowerBI as from a licensed product perspective, anyone and their dog can kind of build stuff. There's still hard things to do, but the number of hard things is shrinking. And with tools like Copilot sort of dropping into the into the kind of development environment as well, people who are struggling to do stuff now have a tool at their fingertips that would will take care of that. So where I'm seeing I guess the demand coming from now is either organizations who know that they could solve this themselves but can't because they can't justify the expense. So you know you're getting into that classic support contract world where you're basically a gun for hire who drops in and helps them solve specific problems or otherwise you've got to kind of move up the value chain and go right what what's the next hard thing that people are struggling to do. and so in our space, data engineering continues to be a difficult place because it's it's complicated. There's a lot of tools.

24:40It's definitely not as user friendly. And so working in that data engineering space is one. AI is kind of the next level above that. But the challenge with getting into the AI space is that the people who know AI and can deliver it really well are also incredibly expensive resources. You're looking at like 300K minimum for a decent AI engineer. So for a small business, that's not feasible. So then you have to kind of look and see where else you can add value.

25:03And then the other part is still that kind of abstract layer, the strategic thinking, the design, the architecture, those higher order things where you need that experience of somebody who's been in multiple different fights and knows what's going to win and not going to work when you're trying to go after that thing versus pure technology development. So, I think, you know, for for me, the core message is get away from development and delivery type work because that's definitely the appetite for that is shrinking in the market. as you alluded to right the big four consultancies are throwing people away because they can get AI to do the junior work so that's kind of disappearing and then the other part is then to focus on package solution so rather than saying I'm going to build you a nice piece of code that will solve your problem I'll come to you don't bring me back to the earlier point here's a solution it costs X do you want it yes or no and you know don't worry about the nuts and bolts underneath because that's not really relevant to you

25:56Yeah yeah that's brilliant you know the package solutions is the way because once you've got that solution you actually treat it as a real product and then you put effort into actually developing it versus you know bits of pieces of methodology or IP that you have and you try and cobble that together for a project versus it's this is a product this is how we take it to market and this is what the problem we solved in and then you spend more time in it and develop it out which is what I know you're doing now and that's really you know that's really I think is the way to play to be honest. what are you innovating around with any new tools or anything out there? and are you putting them in your business range? So obviously you know AI is out there open AI or co-pilot you mentioned are you using anything else out there that's interesting or cutting edge?

26:48Probably not super cutting edge but it's I mean like the this machine like practical applications of machine learning. So I mean all the hypes around LLMs and and I've had an interesting conversation with a customer this morning which I'll go back to shortly but there's a lot of capability that's matured nicely. So things like you know reading documents for example. So obviously we work heavily with UiPath and their document reading models are now really really good. so you know you don't need to train them you know I think they need like 20 or maybe 50 example documents and then that's as good as trained and after that you're just refining it. So those kind of AIish tools you know the what gets called as narrow AI so it's like very narrow function it can read a document or it can transcribe text that stuff we're finding it very practical and useful because there's still plenty of cases where there's documentation or there's you know they're just trying to transcribe calls and pick out sentiment that kind of stuff still has is still is working and reliable whereas things like LLMs are they're very cool but they're not reliable and when I they're not reliable is they can't be guaranteed to deliver a consistent outcome. and and I think people's expectations of them are a little overblown. So there's kind of two angles to that. So if I talk about reliability I don't know you must be familiar with William Deming the guy who's like big productivity guy and his central thesis almost around business was a well-run business is actually just a group of well-executed processes and well-executed processes have a fairly deterministic outcome.

28:20Large language models do not have a deterministic outcome. You know, there's been plenty of cases where people have asked LLMs and been given massively erroneous advice or even harmful advice. and that kind of comes back to a customer that I was talking to this morning. They had like some sort of process where they wanted to review some government grant applications and be able to try and transcribe some information from a portal and says, "Yeah, we just thought AI would do that." So, AI is not going to be able to do that consistently and reliably. You might be able to make it slightly better by feeding it some of your context and making it more reliable, but you can't trust it. And I think this is kind of the gap that we're going to see exposed in businesses over the course of the next few years is AI tools that can be trusted versus AI tools that can't. and you know, obviously we being focused on some some more stable industries. They're interested in stuff that works and works reliably and has a predictable outcome. And so that's the, you know, for me that's the AI that we'll be f focusing on is the stuff that we know works and works consistently. The LLMs are, you know, cool and shiny, but you know, they're they're questionable value at this point in time.

29:26For sure. For sure. Okay. That's good. That's good. I mean, I think you you spot on there with that. there is a lot of over overhype. and a lot of people are sort of working out what to do. you consultancy firms or or you know businesses they're trying to work out where does everything fit at the moment and and I suppose it'll just take time to settle down you know that's the and there'll be a lot of people running around saying you know we'll do a proof of concept and burn through quarter of a million dollars and disappear and deliver nothing of value but expect that happens at the hype start of every hype curve so yeah it's really there there's a lot of a lot of those sort of AR projects have failed over the last 6 to 12 months. So, you know, it's it's quite a it's quite an interesting thing. I was with a client chatting through loading growth in the US and and that and he was talking about his AI projects that he's deployed and a lot of them actually haven't gone anywhere and it's the user case. It starts off really understanding that user case and does that user case really fit for the AI purpose.

30:29And and then once you've got that user case mapped out, it's getting that training documentation. And as you know, no one's got the right documentation in their organization, and that's that's the next step. So anyway, it's it's all interesting. you know, when I'm hearing stories like this, I suppose as usual, it'll just take a while to get it right and and who knows how long it'll take. okay, so let's just quickly move on to a couple of things around you know, we talked about the common you know, common things around some of the services that you're doing. What are the challenges that you have with clients at the moment? any sort of common challenges you're facing with working with clients at the m is it is it AI maybe you know with expectation sounds like it's one of them expectation that everything can be done quicker and

31:18I think clients are actually they haven't changed that dramatically that you their expectations you know you get volatility and and you know some people demand the world and some people are much more easily ch or satisfied I think the real problem has become actually communicating with people so you know and this is where AI is having a fairly negative impact. So, you know, LinkedIn 10 years ago was a great way of networking and reaching out to profession like peers and and and bring you know reaching out to genuine buyers or people who might be interested in what you're doing. Now, the platform's been so saturated by sales people virtual people sorry virtual you know people like outsourcing you know lead development and then also just the amount of AI crap that's now getting posted on LinkedIn because it's really easy to tell a chat GPT to post an article put it in with some hashtags and off you go. it's becoming that platform's become devalued. and obviously with all the scam calls that are going on, people don't pick up the phone anymore unless they know your number. So despite the fact that we have all of this connectivity available to us, the paradox is actually becoming harder to get hold of people because people are just so used to being bombarded that they're starting to filter out anything unless they go this is directly relevant to me and I'm going to pay attention to it. which means that from a marketing and outreach perspective, things are getting really tricky. You've got to be really really pointed in your messaging. And even if you are really pointed in your messaging, you're still going to get snowed in amongst like, you know, any CIO gets like sort of a hundred of these messages a week. How are you going to stand out among from that? So realistically, that's my

32:51Biggest challenge is just simply getting people's time. Yeah, it's good. It's good. Thanks for that. Really good. so let's go back to your your business Talos and just talk a bit about some of the services you're offering now. It's a bit of a understanding and and and have they evolved over time? I know they have but you know why and how they evolved over time to get to where they are now? It's just a bit of a journey on the services side.

33:15So I've always been sort of consistently focused on the Microsoft partners or the Microsoft data and AI stack. So and and then sort of UI path from about sort of 5 years ago. what's when we started a lot of it was very sort of basic delivery work. You know people just wanted PowerBI reports built you know simple projects executed. I think that the appetite for that has been dying down and you know we talked about this we know AI is kind of chewing up some of that capability. So the the need the services need has changed and and you know this is why I've kind of moved into that more packaged approach is instead of trying to just solve generic problems because businesses are getting more capable at solving their own generic problems in this space is to look for specific problems where either people won't have invested time or organizations can't have the time to invest in it. So you know like I said you know some of our package solutions you know we've used big clients to help develop those. We can now take that to smaller clients and go, well, look, it cost us 30 grand to build it for this client, but we can now do it for you for 10 because we've done it with the other guys and we've got all the code and we got all the models and we got all the processes, so we can get it out to you for cheaper. So, I mean, that's kind of like how innovation is supposed to kind of cycle is like the first cycle's always expensive, but you're always innovating and trying to deliver things cheaper and cheaper. And I think this is where I guess how my business is evolving is trying to get away from that you know the traditional consulting model which is well I'm going to give you somebody for 5 days and I will now charge you for 5 days of their time to I'm going to try and deliver you a unit of value and you're not going to

34:47Care whether it takes me 3 weeks or six months to deliver it behind the scenes as long as you get it on the day I promise. and I think that's the mindset that consultancies are going to have to start shifting towards is that more productbased mindset because otherwise you're just going to get lost under a sea of like overseas developers and other people offering you and undercutting you on rates and that market just seems to be dying. So it's very much moving towards that identified problem and and well structured solution to that problem now.

35:17Yeah. Yeah. It's good. It's great. Great. Going back into that, you know, the focus, that laser sharp focus that you have, it's it's so powerful when you when you get that right. how do you how do you sort of describe your ideal client at the moment? You mentioned a bit there was government and and obviously I know but for the audience just to understand how your service offering is matching to the

35:40Well because it's very product driven and so one one of them is very much focused around one particular vertical. So you know my ideal customer is in that vertical and that pretty much covers it. It's quite simple but it's a very small vertical. So you know as I said there's about 300 350 organizations in Australia. So I can keep it nice and tight. for the broader stuff like the more sort of data and AI type stuff. So you know we still do do some PowerBI reports. We still do sort of data engineering work and and building out solutions for customers. It tends to be people organizations that are earlier in their journey. So, as a small consultancy, we're the sort of people can come in and go, well, you haven't got anybody, you don't know what you're doing. We can advise you on getting started, get you on that journey correctly and kind of get you moving and building things successfully. you can start having data and analytics as part of your organization and not just something that, you know, your CEO being told he needs to be doing but doesn't quite know where to start. so that's where we're focused and I've kind of always stayed in that space because I like helping people get from that sort of zero to, you know, getting maybe not 100 miles an hour, but you know, they're moving along at 50 and they're not bump bouncing off of other cars anymore. They kind of learned to drive. So that that sector is what I'm looking for. And again, it's we're trying to leverage where indust verticals where we've been successful previously. So, you know, we've had good luck with the pharmaceutical industry. We've had good luck with the manufacturing industry verticals. And so we're trying to stick and talk to clients in that space. And so well, you know, again, it's that focus thing. We don't I don't go talking to Riotinto because they're not going to listen to me, but I will listen to Joe Blogs, Inc. who's got like 200 people in

37:13A plant out in the back end of nowhere in Queensland and they need some help, but they can't justify bringing on like a full-time resource and they need to get that sort of advice to getting started. So it's a mix of for me picking the right business stage and also the right vertical so that we've got information and we can actually add value not just from our services bums on seat perspective but also from the and we've seen what's happened in other industry I'm sorry in other organizations in your industry and so we can tell you things that you should be looking for and things that you know are going to sort of you'll be able to get more value from. So trying to get to that domain specific value ad.

37:48Yeah. Yeah. No, that's good. That's good. on to the next part around the you know the services and the clients. how do you ensure you know quality outcome for your your you know around your service? How do how do you get the services you know quality for the delivery part? Yeah. So I mean there's there's a there's a few different sort of angles to that because quality is a bit of a nefarious thing. You know sometimes if a report works it works until it breaks and then it becomes a problem. So there's there's some parts that are internal process. So you know going back to the William Deming thing is like you know if we're delivering a piece of work what are the things that we need to do what are the stage gates that we need to go through you know to make sure that you know the code's been built properly that we're following some standards that some best practices are being adhered to so that the technical delivery of the component is as sound as it can be. And then whilst I know agile has become a bit of a dirty word in a lot of places, there's one core cont concept that I take out of that which is the close communication with the customer. That's the bit that makes all the difference.

38:53The rest of agile is noise to me. That's the important part because particularly because what we're building is sort of data products or automation products. The the enduser experience is really important. So in the world of automation, it means that the people trust that the automation we built is doing what it's supposed to do. And you know, hand on heart, I've had a a customer where that failed because built an automation app using one of our structured processes, but it was it driven. And so when the business got it, they didn't trust what the robot was doing, was double-checking everything that it did. And it ended up taking twice as long to process things instead of a fraction of the time. and the project customers subsequently where we've been successful is when the business has driven it been very very hungry to make sure that the process is built the way they want it to work and they can see the whole kind of you that you know you're not supposed to see the sausage factory but you know you see the sausage factory happening and you can see the leading to the outcome that you want. So a lot of I guess you there's two sides. The technical and I've used this actually on my interview. The technical quality which is am I building things in a robust and repeatable kind of way which is you know for somebody who's a technical consultancy that should be bread and butter. But the business quality the fitness for purpose you can only really evaluate that by spending time with your customers and talking to them as you're doing the delivery and making sure that when you get that end product in front of them that they fully understand it and they accept that it is what they've asked for and what they want. Yeah. Great. Great.

40:17Awesome. just the last piece around services. Have you got a sort of a success story you could share with us around your services and and what sort of an impact that's made, you know, you know, with a with a with a client? Yeah. So, and I think the one is probably our sort of our big flagship automation customer. So, you we and it was a long journey with these guys. So, we first actually brought them on board with automation about four years ago. And at that point, they used it in a very tactical way. they had like a clunky system that had to update another clunky system and it was one of these things where it was it's very slow and it was going to take somebody six months to do it. or they could or and we sort of talked to them about automating their way out of it and that actually worked because we could sort of build them a solution. Once that problem had solved, they kind of fell off a little bit and and you know they stopped stopped doing any more automation work for another year or so. But we kept talking to them and talking about our vision and engaging with all because we're engaging in that market quite heavily. You know, different stories and ideas that were coming from different sectors and because we maintained that open communication with them and we always tried to present ourselves as much as possible as like a partner, not somebody who's desperately trying to sell them something. that you know we'd managed to maintain that trust and so when they were ready to start moving into automation again and we'd had a bit more experience talking with other organizations we could go okay this this is our roadmap for doing this we've got our proven process we've got our approach here's all the stakeholders that need to be engaged here's all the checkpoints that you've got to go through and being being able to have that view of the process end to end not just from our side from a delivery perspective but what it means

41:49As a customer to be receiving that product and what they need to do meant that that conversation was so much easier and so now you know what we've done we've deployed what three automations to them now we've actually got a like we've also given them a dashboard so you know being data people we want to say oh what value are we actually delivering next and so we've got that that log of all the activity that's being presented back to them so we're actually presenting them back in dollar value saying we've saved this much money we've saved this much time and you're running the robot this much so they can see when it's being used and they can see the value that's coming which is for an automation once that's up and running a lot of the time it's a set and forget thing right people forget that it's even happening so to have that dashboard at a high level means that the people who are involved in the automation can wander around and go here is my proof that I am doing something valuable and then obviously that then helps propagate it throughout the organization because they then got a proof point that they can talk to and it's not just somebody going I've got nice feelings about the customer who's done oh sorry this organization who's done nice things for me here's some cold hard numbers demonstrating that they delivered value. and so I think, you know, we've really been able to through those conversations and through that long engagement get them on that point, get them to the point where they've gone, well, look, we've done automation as a tactical thing to solve some problems and get rid of some big workflows. Now, we're starting to go, well, how do we approach this on a strategic level and go, right, what are we actually going to do that's going to transform our organization? And it helps that you know partnering with a big software organization like UiPath where they can go here's a customer in your

43:22Vertical in another country who's now got like a hundred automations running and they've saved this like millions of dollars. So there's like that they can provide that end vision and we can provide them the pathway to delivering that path to that vision. So I think you know that's something that I'm really happy with the way that's worked and it's been through it's been approached through doing all the right things and it's always been you know like all these things sometimes it feels frustrating doing the right thing because you kind of sit there in silence for three months waiting for your customer to come back to you but when they do come back to you it's a great underscore that you've actually really been doing the right thing for them.

43:54Great. Great. Yeah I love that. you know an ROI dashboard with you know real dollar value and that is just so powerful. So yeah, I think if you could just replicate that same scenario through multiple organizations, you know, it' be really good. we're going to go on to sort of the challenges and and lessons sort of section now quickly. So just to what are the biggest challenges you've faced in in the IT services industry? Is it sales, marketing, staff or delivery, you know, and just give me one quite one example of one of those just for one? it it's always going to be sales I think because and for staffing it's down to internal quality and support. You can very quickly identify whether you've pulled the wrong people in but having good quality processes for pulling people in in the first place lowers that risk. So I've actually had very few bad hires. I've had you know like anyone who've had a couple of failures along the way but I've actually been pretty good on staffing deliveries similarly because I've approached it in a structured way.

44:50You know, we've had, you know, like any IT project, sometimes things have gone awall, but I've had a pretty good success rate in terms of delivery. Marketing is a bit hit or miss because, you know, for an organization our size, it's really difficult to see when you're pulling the levers if they're genuinely having an impact or not. If you're Facebook, you can tweak a pixel and see if it can adjust your conversion rate. When you're, you know, a small IT services business in Sydney, you can change a web page and maybe it'll lead to a customer, maybe it won't, not in a statistically meaningful way. but the sales bit has always been, you know, the most challenging part. And I think it's, and as I've alluded to, it's got harder because the outreach channels are getting clogged. And so people are getting more defensive about getting engaged with. And so it means that you need to get more into relationship based marketing. and you know, one good example of that that I got this year is because I've been working this this industry vertical, I got pulled into one of their conferences to prevent, you know, it's not very glamorous. It was in the middle of balorat in the middle of winter. But you know I got pulled up on stage to talk about a topic because I've been talking to people in that in that industry and they wanted to get my point of view and that then opened a lot of doors because people have gone oh here's a person on stage not just another phone number or a missed call.

46:02So and in the remote world it's getting harder because nobody's nobody's in their offices either. So you can't even arrange to kind of meet people for coffee. So yeah, the biggest challenge and within sales, it's not even just sales per se. It's the even getting that initial contact to talk to the right people has just become exponentially harder in the last few years, I think.

46:24Yeah, I think you're right. You know, trying to get that to build a relationship with people so they trust you is so important. How you do that is it's going to get harder, you know. All right, thanks for that share. It was brilliant. what do you think are the most important lessons you've learned as an IT services business owner that you could share with people? What are the most important, you know, things that you've learned wish someone could could have told you, you know, five years ago, whatever, 10 years ago.

46:54Don't do that, James. That James. Yeah. So, I think there's probably two real standouts. So, so one is and and this is going back to our conversation around partners is you do have to choose very very wisely. I've been burnt once and had a middling experience with another which is why I'm currently sort of flying solo. you do need to be very clear that you are aligned on your goals, your personal values, and what you're trying to get out of the business at the end of the journey. And you know, if you're in a position like myself where you're currently, you know, the boss and you own the whole thing. If you're going to invite someone in to take a slice of your business, you've got to be clear on what that value is going to be. you've got to set some KPIs around it. And you've got to put some sort of defensive wall around your organization in case that person failed to deliver because I had, you know, I brought someone on about a year and a half ago who was supposed to do that. And, you know, that just didn't work out. But because the guard rails were there, I wasn't suddenly left with, oh great, I've now got someone who owned half my business who isn't contributing anymore. So really really make sure that you are aligned very very well and that you've got contractual stuff in place to kind of deal with the eventual possibility of fallout. so that's the the kind of the business side of things. And then, you know, from a just a day-to-day perspective, sometimes you and I struggle with this, you've got to be brutal sometimes. you know, if if your business is running down and the work isn't there, act fast. Get people out the door. It it's not nice. It's never pleasant saying goodbye to people.

48:22But if you don't do that, then you end up running up significant, you know, you're generating problems for yourself in terms of cash flow or finance. and you know, you you've just got to sort of sometimes put away your Mr. Nice Guy hat, which is great for all the culture building, and go, I've got to worry about the bank balance now. The Mr. Nice Guy hat's got to come off. Yeah. Yeah. So true. you know, fire fast, high slowly. Unfortunately, that's

48:46That's the that's the horrible saying, but it's the truth when it comes to that. All right, so we're on to the last piece there. I know it's been a bit of a marathon session. Always good chatting to you. you know, what trends you see shaping the IT services industry. What I mean, we spoke a bit about that already. I think the the AI, but is anything else or or any more? I think I think the killer the to be honest the killer thing is going to be it's an immediate impact of AI is that just and the developer roles the builder roles are going to start disappearing and so you know that's going to cause there's going to be problems that's going to cause down the crack because you know this is happening across a number of industries like law is another one that's very heavily affected by this is that the junior level roles are going to be disappearing but that means that the greyhead well used to would be greyhead if I had any people are going to just start sitting there and not moving and they're not going to be able to open up opportunities for people below them to start rising up through the ranks and developing those skills because the AI is kind of eating them. So,

49:45I can I can see there's going to be a bit of a redefinition of what services businesses offer and how they work and how they bring talent in. And I think that's going to shape some of the economy over the next 5 to 10 years. And I don't really have any pressing answers for that one. I'm still trying to work through what the implications are going to be. but you know it just means that you know your if you if your ambition was to be a web developer you probably need to be rethinking what you were doing. but it's it's you know the the people value the people I guess the bit that the computers and the AIs can't do well is interact with people understand their needs work out solutions and so I think services businesses are going to get more and more solution focused because the value in just delivering people you can hyper keyboards is just going to diminish.

50:30Yeah. Fantastic. Look, my last question was really around that is what advice would you give to anyone who's out to start a new start a business, an IT services business, you know, what would would that be? Would it I think look and the market has not been great for the last couple of years for a lot of industries. It's definitely been challenging. I think unless you go in with a very clear vision about what you're doing and a very clear-headed understanding of what the value proposition that you're bringing to the market and how much you can then still take out of the market. you know, going back to my friend with the brilliant app ideas, it might be a great idea, but you've got to be really clear that there's money in it and you've got to know who to talk to to be able to kind of extract that money from them. So I think it's become you know you've got to be very solution focused and you've got to have a clear vision on what the value of that solution is and what people are going to pay and the size of the market that you're going to be operating in because otherwise you will end up you know chasing a dream that might fall flat. or alternatively if you don't have that product market fit right then you're going to flounder and you're going to spend some time kind of trying to work out what that market fit is and you'll need a strategy to make sure that there's cash coming through the tool while you're actually going through that process.

51:39Yeah. Yeah. Great. Well, that's that's so so so true. So true. James, anything else you would like to share or or because it's it's been an hour nearly. anything else you'd like to share or or you under the pump? No, I I'll sort of start with a bit of a sort of a closing remark, I think, in terms of the direction of my industry generally. you know, I data and analytics and automation is only ever going to get more important and it's going to become a bigger and bigger driver for businesses. what services providers need to think about is you know how am I adding value into that solution? How am I helping or how am I helping my industry? How am I generating value by delivering the services that I'm doing? and if you can get that right and you find that right opportunity then you will do very well leveraging all these tools because the landscape getting really complex and if you can figure out how to stitch together different components to make it work you know like you know and sometimes it's simple stuff like you know what I've done with the dashboard that presents the value that's being output by our automations on a different platform it's still powerful stuff when you can link those technologies together. So I think it's really my advice to anyone who's getting into IT services now and kind of general forces you just got to be really clear on what it is that you're taking to market and you've got to be clear that market exists otherwise you're going to have a lot of heartache along the way.

53:00Very very very true. Very true. Well thanks a lot James. Good chance chat you as as usual and can't wait to catch up for a beer at some stage when it's a little bit warmer in Sydney. Yep. Sounds good. Awesome. Thanks a lot. Appreciate the chance. 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 for more information.