Transforming Business with SAP & AI: Glynn Williams’ Innovation Journey

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.

0:36Hey, good morning Glenn. How are you Good to see Ian. Fantastically well, thank you. How are you doing? Very well, thanks. Very well. Look, everyone to who's listening in, Glenn Williams is one of our long-term clients. We've been working with him for quite a few years. He's got an awesome brand. He's got an awesome business. and he's done a few things that are slightly different to the other sort of podcasts I've had in the last sort of few months. So, it'll be interesting to see his take on where he's going and the innovation he's bringing and on top of that the new things that he's doing with his business that will protect him, I think, for the future with AI and services and everything else that's going on. So, but but before we get going in there, I would just like to give Glenn the opportunity just to give a one one sort of sentence or two about who he is and where he's from and you know before we get into the into the podcast itself. So, Glenn, would you like to introduce yourself, please?

1:27Thanks, Ian. Yes. So, my name is Glenn. I help enterprises unlock millions in hidden value from their SAP systems. Over the last 27 years, I've worked in over 36 countries, written three books on SAP, published by Osborne Mcroill, and led transformations for brands like Toyota, HP, Honeywell, Schneider Electric, and Chase, etc.

1:49Great. And yes, a thought leader in the space and awesome because he's, you know, committed to writing books many years ago and I think that still pays dividends to to who he is and and where he's going as well. So we're going to start off like we do with a lot of our sessions here on our channel is really around the the background and the journey. So can you just talk a bit about what really inspired you? What made you become a consultant and then an IT services business owner?

2:16Sure. So having worked with multiple companies and very large ones, it became a very apparent that large enterprises had a little bit of a dysfunction in that they the executives were speaking in the language of KPIs and ROI and returns and the business were talking in processes and the way that they deliver things and do things and there was this missing piece in the middle about how to form the relationship between the executives and the business and so we found out that that space needed some highly skilled people which understood the business and so that's why we developed Emphasys. So Emphasys fills that gap where we become obsessed with helping organizations get more than just a system and more than just a solution but they get the strategy the speed and the significant savings that the SEP solution base and ecosystem can give

3:16Yeah, great word that you use there. Obsessed. Glenn's obsessed with you know his outcomes with his clients and he's got real clear crystal focus on on getting those objectives when he's growing his business as well. So it's it's really it's inspiring to to work with you Glenn and that because you are focused and you are obsessed and I I do love that comes through all the time. So yeah, now we talk next step then we're going to talk about is the initial steps to set up your sort of you know start your IT you know business. How did you actually do that and why did you do

3:46Yeah. Yeah. So most enterprises they they most enterprises that run SAP actually only use about 60 to 70% of the SAP system and they come with a legacy group of systems and their architectures normally adopted or they have M&As and so they've got all this adopted adopted legacy technical debt and so we come in specifically with architecture business process management integration advice advisory and we clean out their legacy systems and redundant systems. So because of that we needed to have a company that could deliver this and this wasn't being delivered by any of the other consultancies and so that's why we set Emphasys up and it it was not easy so Emphasys is now in its fifth year and the first two at the moment I only work about 12 hours per day but before that I used to work more and so you have to put in a lot of effort into setting the system up and setting up your your back end, you're looking after your staff, your HR, your sales function, all the hidden pieces before you even talk about servicing your customers and adding value to them. Fortunately, we're at the stage now where we've got a a solid foundation and now we're starting to see the results.

5:11Brilliant. Brilliant. Yeah, some really good nuggets there of of how you did it and why. What is your vision, Glenn, of your company at the moment? Where do you stand with that? Because obviously vision changes all the time. it sort of morphs and morphs and changes with the economy with tech change. Ian, I love the question and we actually talk about this often. so I I get together with other heads of businesses and we discuss this because about 2 3 years ago when GPT was released, I put out a LinkedIn post saying this is a watershed moment for mankind. But nobody knew, including myself, how fast things would actually move. And what I'm seeing now, I only thought we would be here in about 20 years time. It has moved much faster than I expected. So where I believe that consultancies, I think that every consultancy is going to have to have a vision that's adaptable and change. And especially the big the bigger ones, the bigger ones have always relied upon a return on investment based upon bums on seats. And so they have people, for example, we've just developed an AI tool called ERPscribe.

6:20That literally replaces one person on every single project and every single SAP program worldwide. No longer do you need to have a person to document stuff. So you don't need a person to document your functional specification document or your technical specification doc. It does it for you instantly, accurately, always, perfectly. So it's auditable compliance checked and it's there and this is it costs next to nothing. Now you think about that replacement we are going to see less and less need for consultants than we have seen in the past. AI is going to change things. So our vision is is to become a brains trust to become a entity that cannot be replaced by AI because of our broad understanding of architecture of processes of business and augment that with AI capabilities that can help systems and companies accelerate the implementation, accelerate their delivery of their goods and services to their customers and increase their return on investment.

7:31Brilliant. Yeah, look, no one wants to pay a lot of consultants to do an implementation or an upgrade. It's it's just one of those things, you know, people people always used to talk about, you know, you buy a software product and it's $1 and then it's $3 to roll it out and a lot of companies, you know, fall over that $3, you know, component for the implementation. I suppose over a period of time, they'll go from $3 to $2 and and and and $1. And the the real challenge I think for services companies, Glenn, is all the big tech companies do not want to do services. They don't do it. and they're always competing with services because they will rather ch charge more money

8:09For the license and do less services and let have less partners doing services. So it's going to be a bit of a a bit of a you know a tussle at some at some point with the ecosystem with partners and the software providers. Absolutely. Yeah. And just in line with that, what I've seen in the SAP space. So SAP is one of the largest EOP software providers worldwide. And what I've seen them develop is you take a business process, you document it. This automatically gets fed through to a cloud ALM where you've got your configuration steps which can automatically go and actually configure the system. So where hundreds thousands tens of thousands of consultants were employed to actually configure systems and solutions those are literally being replaced in the next four years by AI.

9:00Thanks for the insight. So that's that's you know it is coming it's here already I suppose and I think people you know in the services world have to really latch on to that and have a you know internal AI committee whatever it is to make sure that they don't fall behind and lose that opportunity. So yeah thanks for that. That's really good and I see that you know you're tying that in with your vision. Hell of important around that and a lot of my clients I'm talking to I'm trying to push them down that path as well. All right. So let's just go back still go back to where you are at the moment you know right at the back of you know the start of your journey

9:32How did you secure your first client because that's what everyone always asks when they're starting out the IT services firms or the consulting firm whatever it is. People want to know you know what was the trick or how did I get the first client? How did you get your first client? That's a real tough one, Ian. So, what's fortunately when somebody moves into an industry and it's any services or or technology solution or any own independent company that they set up, they're generally coming from a position of knowledge. They are either a key person of influence or they've got a history. They've got a mountain of knowledge that they're sitting on. And what I did was I leveraged that. So I said okay my experience is X and because of that you employ me for my experience and so I sold myself then I sold once I sold myself into a company I was then able to say well now that I'm here you know I've got this other person who can do just as well as what I'm doing and knows just as much as I do why don't you take them on as well and so I was able to sell another person and then From that I was able to grow out the services department. But that alone is not a sustainable model. So you you very quickly learn that you need to have a business model. You need to have productized services. You need to understand what your customer acquisition cost is. You need to

11:05Understand what your lifetime value of a customer is. You need to understand the ratio of your lifetime value to your customer acquisition cost. And you need to be able to put that in a wheelhouse and to run it and then to automate it. And so that's what brings the leverage about allowing the business to then Brilliant. Brilliant. Thanks for that. That's awesome insight into getting your first client and and the way you should actually have a model and a thought process around that. That's brilliant. What were the last question on the on that on the segment? What is the law the the biggest challenge you've ever faced or faced in the early stages of your business? Right at the beginning obviously there's a lot of things happening you know what was the biggest one if you can cross your mind back five five and a half years ago.

11:48Yeah and I still have problems right so I I still struggle with things one of them is is recruiting the right people and having a cash flow to support them. So in order to have a cash flow to support them, you need to have a pipeline of work. Having a very high very highly skilled consultants cost a little bit more than normal ones. And so there's that problem space to deal with. So that's something that I'm dealing with. And another one is just being able to manage because of that the cash flow that one has. And those are challenges that I think every business needs to be able to overcome. Yeah, it's it's services world. It's always cash flow. and clients pay you whenever they feel like it sometimes. So, it's it's a bit difficult bit difficult and especially in your industry where the clients are large, they've got a lot of priorities happening at the same time.

12:45Okay, that's great. Moving on to next segment. It's the growth and development side of it and you know how did you scale your business from its early days to where you're now? Okay. So, you've gone through the last sort of five years. you've done some amazing things that you've ticked over to get to where you're at. So what are the main points that you've sort of done if you can think about it to get to where you are now?

13:06So Ian I don't know if you remember but you and I have discussed this for a long time for probably two years and I starting back like nearly 5 years back I look at the revenue streams that are coming in. I'm looking at the channels and I'm thinking okay I'm going to go for all the revenue and all the channels and offer every service that's available. And then you tell me, "No, Glenn, you need to niche. You need to have be known for something, otherwise you're going to be known for nothing." And I then go away and I Google that and I find different opposing views and I'm trying to think how do I get as much revenue into the business as possible. had I just listened, it would have saved me probably about a year if I just listened to you. I've gone round and around and around and I and how we've been able to scale is only by niching moving away from implementing everything and offering everything. We we could literally discuss this one topic for hours because there's so many pros and cons to whether you are a generalist or a specialist. And what I have found is that specializing allows you to create packages of work and productized solutions and productized offerings which give defined cost, defined value and because of that they are repeatable and they are able to be scaled and that is where that's why we refer back to our

14:40Customer acquisition cost our lifetime value and how we are able to actually grow is only because of that niching. Yeah, look, it's powerful, you know, and I think with AI, Glenn, you know, that generic type of services across multiple, you know, service offerings, bigger consultancy firms will battle because they'll have two or three experts in one small component that they deliver as a service and how do you compete with with AI, you know, if you don't have really thought leadership in each space, that becomes harder and harder. So, yeah, it's a big thing. And I can see it across. You know, I've got 30 clients and I talk to them regularly and I can see, you know, the ones that are doing really really well are the ones that are stick to the knitting, are famous for something and they can deliver, you know, really good outcomes for clients and the margins then are reflect that. So it's it's it's

15:31Okay. So that's sort of you've sort of mentioned the pivotal moment there. We sort of impacted your growth as your company. That's probably one of the biggest areas that I've seen for you guys is niching down and staying focused and becomes less comp complex. Your business becomes less complex as well, right? Yeah, that's exactly right. And it also allows us to form relationships. So, it allows us to form relationships with the SAP ecosystem. They know us as partners who deliver X on X capability. So they know us as partners that deliver on architecture that deliver lean ex that deliver business process management that deliver signavio that deliver integration and advisory and we're known for that and so now we have customers who've heard about us who now come and ask us to help them and it's actually a wonderful place for us to be because we use what we call a hidden value framework work. It's a systemic way to uncover unused capability in the enterprise, streamlining processes and accelerating outcomes with SAP and AI.

16:37It's amazing the value ad. we've had one customer where the total order time of their sales order entry through to their delivery was approximately 2 and 1/2 hours for 120,000. And we took that from 2 and 1/2 hours to 27 minutes more or less. And so that additional volume actually impacts the bottom line.

17:03Sure. Awesome. Awesome. I'll talk talk a bit about that later on maybe. So let's say how do you stay competitive in the ever evolving sort of IT technology market because it's changed all the time as we you know. Yes. So the winners are going to be those that combine SAP's stability with AI's capability. The the power that artificial intelligence brings enterprises especially in the SMB space is massive. And so one needs to focus on the value ad and then accelerating it with the AI tools that are there. And as long as you are progressive, I believe that you will find the market and the opportunity. You must be dynamic and progressive and be willing to change.

17:54So dynamic, progressive, yeah, willing to change. Brilliant. Brilliant. What does sort of the same sort of vein what does the innovation play? How does that innovation play a part in your business It's actually huge. what what we do is we are starting to see the opportunity is not just in the Australian market and it's not just in the Australian market with services where we have people that can do the work but actually we've identified that we can develop the AI tools that can be used globally and we've proven that. So our AI documentation tool ERP Scribe is a global tool and we've got two others in the pipeline and we believe that we can scale these. Once you get the metric right and the business model right, you can scale these exponentially.

18:44Great, great, powerful, powerful. Okay, we're going to move on to team and culture. How do you how do you did you go about building your team? fortunately from my experience and being in the industry for a long period of time I really had a network having published three books by Osborne Mcgro Hill I think I've always had a more or less 6,000 people connected on LinkedIn and all of them are technical experts in the industry and they have and so when Emphasys began, I was able to reach out to the network and ask if anybody wished to join me. Fortunately, as well, I'm not a horrible person. I'm the nice person.

19:32That's very good. We I'm generally kind and generally generous and generally think the best of everybody. And it's only caught me out a couple of times. Most of the time people like to do business with me and so I like to do business with them and so we form relationships and we're able to work together. So I've been very fortunate to have a very good team that work hard and are known in the industry for the value that they

20:01Brilliant. Qualities that you look when hiring team members is there anything that sort of sticks out? Yes, absolutely. I don't look at the CV. So technical skills are not as important as personal skills. the most important thing for me is honesty and trust. so if the person tells one little lie, it sticks out like a sore thumb and it's wonderful. It's a litmus test and indicator to say that we will not work together and that's it. So, I like relationships and I like the character of the person more than the skill. The skill you can teach, but you can't teach the character. So, especially when you're in a lead leadership role, you can put somebody into a leadership role who's got the right character, but if if they don't have the right character, then you're going to have problems if they get into lead leadership role.

20:55Okay. Brilliant. And now around the company culture. So, you just talked a bit about hiring team members. How does that work in the in the in the company Yeah, so culture is important and I'm finding out as the company grows, so your culture and your HR actually becomes the most important thing. It's yes, you focus on customers and yes, it's customer delivery and it's making sure that the customers get the value, but the most important thing internally is the culture that's going to deliver that and team members that deliver that. And so I form relationships with the team and I trust them and give them the opportunity to do what they want to do and the authority and autonomy to do what they want to do as long as it's leading towards the outcome of delivering value to the customer. we follow a mission and our mission is actually to be known as the company that pro that saves enterprises millions in their architecture and their business processes and that's our north star that everybody adheres to.

22:06Yep. Good, good, good. Nice. I like to hear that. Now, how do you keep your staff motivated and productive? Do you for example you got the products that you're building, you got services obviously is your main gig at the moment and you got the products that you you've actually you know launched a few of those. Do some of those do some of those people work on the services and actually do the product or they separate teams? How does that work? Yeah, we we've actually got four different team groups. So so the one side is let's talk about the AMS. application and support. We have an alliance with another consulting firm and they look after the AMS and so that's looking after customers for their support and we don't aggressively go to market and sell that but if somebody asks us because they've got a relationship with us and they trust us then we've got something that we can give them. And then we we've got our services team and our services team are our integration Ignavio business process management Linux architecture and a little bit of advisory and so that's our services team and that's the team that we meet all the time. we have our quarterly business review, annual business review, end of year party.

23:15And that's the main team and then we have the digital development team which develops the software apps. That's a separate team and they're remote and I actually have never met them in person yet. So I need to meet them in person. Yeah, definitely. We had a discussion with another client and we talked about their remote team they've had for nearly six years and they've only been out to see them once and I said you got to do it. You got to get out there and they just recently went out to see them and they got better and closer together and works well. Yeah.

23:48Okay. So, we just you really mentioned some of the things that the services that you're doing. I know that services that you had have changed. You know, you niched down over a period of time and you've worked out that you've got a different service. Can you just explain the services that you have and the offer at a high level? You know, why how does it resonate with the with the targets, the clients you're going after?

24:08Sure. So, if you can think of this services as a triangle, the architecture is the foundation. So, we look at the systems architecture of the enterprise. We map it, we manage it. In fact, we have a fixed implementation time of 25 days where we implement lean ex for an enterprise. We give them the reports and we turn the architecture into a living breathing asset or product that they can refer to. So it's a phenomenal change moving people from powerpoints and Excel spread excel sheets and spreadsheets through to a living organism of their architecture. So that's the first thing that we we do fixed price fixed install 25 days. The next thing we do is business processes, a business process management with Sign Navia. We implement that also in 25 days. We have a methodology and a framework that we use and we've got a list of trainings that we do and we take the business not just implementing the Signavio as a tool but we take them on a journey of training to uplift their team to understand how business process management when it's done right can unlock incredible value sometimes even in the millions. It removes blockers and it automates processes and automates outcomes. And so that's the second pillar. The third pillar is you've got all this architecture with systems. You've got these business processes, but they need to talk. So that's what we do in the third pillar, which is integration. So

25:40Integration of systems. And when you're talking about integration of systems, you get two types of companies that do this. You get the standard company that'll come in and they'll connect the systems. Job done. We don't necessarily do that. What we do is when we connect the systems, we connect them effectively and efficiently at a low cost. So for example, we've always got cost in our mind about what this interface is going to cost as well as how secure is this interface as well as how is this interface going to be managed by an AMS support team after we leave. A lot of times there's no when other companies do it, they don't worry about warnings or error messages, excuse me, error messages or costings. And so they end up moving huge volumes of data across systems, doubling up on server costs, doubling up on bandwidth, doubling up on ingress and egress costs. And so we remove all of that. And then the last service that we deliver. So we've got architecture, business process management, integration. Last one is advisory and that's where we help customers understand their current landscape, their target landscape and how they can get from A to B at a very effective and efficient way.

27:00Great. Great. That's awesome how you can really articulate the service offerings that you take to clients and the benefits from them. And that's, you know, it's very powerful and that's what focus is all about. Common challenges when working with clients. What are the common challenges you see working with it it's interesting the top level are very pressed for time. So your CIOS, your CTOs, your transformation directors, they really pressed for time. They've got lots of responsibilities and teams. Some of them are not structured effectively. So because of that, they got too many people reporting in to them and they've got too many plates to juggle at the same time. So that's a a challenge in having to show that you can add value and at the same time not add to the burden of having to deal with another partner or another vendor. So that's one of them. The other one is being able to integrate whatever solution and offering you've got into the existing capability of the enterprise without adding additional headcount. So when the work that we do we try and reduce the headcount not reduce it as in people are going to lose their jobs but they can do more effective things and other things and so we we come into unlock millions and hidden value across the enterprise and we do that by saying you see these systems that you've got they're redundant because they serve the same business process the same business capability and they've actually got

28:32These security risks so why don't you just remove those systems save on your license cost, save on your training, save on your everything else related to that item's cost and focus instead on automating this business process which can help you with XY Z. So it's those two things. It's the one is being able to talk to the executives who are time poor and the other one is being integrate implementing and integrating the solutioning into the enterprise without overwhelming the existing people. Yeah, very good. Very good. Very good. Take some order. Take a break there. Another question around this is the you know how do you ensure high quality service delivery? You've you've got some projects that have been I think I saw one recently went global was a global project that you've been working on for I think maybe two years or plus. How do you actually work in a global environment and remote as well and then get the high quality service delivery because that is you know complexity with systems processes a multi-billion dollar company. It's global, different time zones. How did you How do you actually make sure you get quality delivery today,

29:39Ian? I I live by an acronym. It's my personal acronym. It's energy. The E stands for exercise. I wake up in the morning and I go to gym and that's it. The N stands for nutrition. I try and be healthy. Try not always good. The other E stands for elevate. Elevate anything specific which I need to elevate at that particular moment in time. Sometimes it's drinking water, sometimes it's advertising, it's whatever. The R is rejuvenate, rest, make sure I recover. And this is where it comes into the work piece and the delivery. The G is generosity and giving and giving that value. And so when we deliver to a customer, we don't just deliver what is required. We give value to the customer. So we go over and above what the customer wants and we never say no. And we never let somebody else do it. So if somebody says, "Can you please do X?" We'll put our hand up and say, "We'll do it." And we'll deliver it. So we give generously. And the Y for the acronym is yield carefully. So we only do things that are in line with our vision. We won't do everybody's work. We'll just do what we is our channel. So we stay in our lane and we do our work. So because of that when are we talking about a global delivery we go to the customer and we visit the customer on site that particular customer you we're referring to I personally have been with them in Japan multiple times in to Tokyo was

31:15With them in London helping the roll out there and so we hold their hand and their team's hands and ensure that their delivery is successful. We partner with the customer. Now with other deliveries, we have a delivery manager on every single project. So even if we've got a consultant that can do the work autonomous autonomously by themselves, we have a delivery manager who is there as well as a conduit to the customer. And if the customer has a problem and they don't feel like they can talk to the consultant, they can talk to the delivery manager. If there's an escalation that's required, it can come to me and I can then look at that. Great. Great. I like I love the energy part. You have a lot of energy. You bring your aame every time I'm working with you and and that's great because sometimes you're working with clients and they got no energy. You know what I

32:06That's right. Just and that's important because it's it's just, you know, it demotivates me as a coach. But also the other thing as well is the why, the yield. I love that yield part. it is powerful. So anyone out listening there, you know, I think I don't know if it's copyrighted. I don't know where you got the energy thing from, Glenn, but you could probably probably look at it later at some stage.

32:26Got it on my phone as well. You see there? See on my phone energy just to remind me. Fantastic. I like that. Good. Good. Stay focus. Stay focused. Stay on on task on point. That's really really good. Okay. So, now we're going to go into the the challenges. You've already talked a bit about some clients that you've had a huge impact on. So, you've sort of done a a bit of a success story there. would you like to elaborate on the last that project you just done now that was a bit of a success story could you just give us a a highlight what the project was about at a high level

32:57Sure so that was a massive success story that was a company well I'll say the company's name was Chaseu so chaseu were rolling out S4 Hannah a global transformation went worldwide covering 120 countries where they took five SAP ERP systems landscapes and consol consolidated them onto a single platform and then serviced all their geographies from the single platform. So you can imagine the complexity is not just dealing with consolidating or moving a system for example from ECC or a legacy enterprise through to S4 but it's also consolidating geographies consolidating business processes dealing with change management dealing with multiple CIOS multiple CTOs multiple executives multiple different KPIs and objectives and outcomes and dealing with all of that to consolidate the enterprise. Now what does that do for the company? It saves them millions, millions and millions. They move from having multiple AMS teams to having a single AMS team.

34:07From multiple servers and systems to having a single set of servers and instances, multiple integration systems to having a single suite of integration systems. I could go on and on and on. so that was a massive success and in line with that we helped increase their throughput of their sales order items and took it from 2 and 1 half hours to 27 minutes which is incredibly fast and this is from when the order is placed online through to it going through to an ERP system for it to having checking the customer checking the stock checking the material they're checking the pricing doing the availability check of the product creating the delivery sending the delivery to the warehouse, having the warehouse pick the delivery, pack the delivery, and have it ready for shipment in 27 minutes,

34:5812,000 items. Incredible. But that said, one of our other customers had a successful go live over the week weekend. UGL went live over the weekend. Great success. We had a very little part to play. Right in the beginning of the program nearly 2 years ago they asked us to do an assessment on their current ASIS landscape their ECC system and to help identify how they would move to IS and we've formed a 74 or so page PowerPoint on the items that they need to remediate how to shift the project left and do a lot of work up front how to prioritize the workload and which items to prioritize in order to derisk the program in order to reduce the cost and to help make it a success and it was a fantastic success over the weekend. So well done to the team and everybody that was part of that.

35:52Yeah, brilliant. Thanks. Thanks for sharing that. That's brilliant. Now we're going to move into the next segment, challenges and lessons. So what are the biggest challenges you know you're thinking it services industry is you know focused on right now? You know it's obviously there's a if you break it down to simple ways you know you break it down to sales, marketing, staff or delivery. Those are the four things that really are impacting you know IT services firms. So what do you think the biggest challenges are at the moment and some some of them that you might have

36:21Sure Ian staff is always a challenge in Australia specifically. I think the unemployment rate is something like less than 3%. And I think if you take the people that want to work that don't have jobs, I think there's actually a number related to that. I think it's something like 120,000 people are the only people without jobs in the whole country. Everybody has got a role and has got a job. But that doesn't mean to say that it's difficult to find people. A lot of people are working for teams that they don't want to be with or for companies they don't want to be with. and you are able to identify key people of influence who can add value to your enterprise and reach out to them and ask them if they want to join you or come and join your team. So people is a problem but there's a solution in that space too. and then as far as a challenge goes with the sales and marketing those those are always a space where there's opportunity but from what we found is that don't treat this in any other way than a scientific formula where you know the numbers. If you don't know the numbers, you're doing it wrong.

37:33So what we've dialed in is we count every single activity that we do for a single sale. We know how many calls, how many emails, how many times we've had breakfast, lunch or dinner, how many coffees, how many powerpoints. We know all the time invested for a single deal. We now try and qualify the deal as early as possible. So, we ask the person, is this something you are interested in? If it's not, no, there's no issue. Let's move move on. We don't want to waste anybody's time. We just want to help those people that want to be helped. And so by qualifying the deal early, keeping the metrics, you are able to dial in what's working for your marketing and dial in what's working for your sales.

38:19So that's where we come into our customer acquisition cost. We know what the cost of one customer is. And because of that, we can now then set a budget on acquisition of new customers. And as long as our customer acquisition cost is lower than our competitor's customer acquisition cost, we will beat them every time. Great. Great insight there. Brilliant. So, you know, you've systemized your approach. I've seen it in your CRM and it's it is a work of art and you put a lot of time and effort into it and and that shows you focused and and you can actually see where things are falling behind and actually how long a normal opportunity takes. It takes longer than everyone thinks it does, you know.

38:55Yeah. Yeah. Coffee right through to the signing the Yeah. And as we've taken more time in the business, we've matured it. So, we've now learned to just delete the deals that are not going to move. Like, don't fool yourself. So, we we clean out our CRM. So, we have a sales pipeline. We've got a marketing pipeline. The marketing pipeline are deals that we used to have in our sales pipeline, which we no longer care about. And in the marketing pipeline, we've got close on 400 deals. Can you imagine? We've actually picked up and played with 400 deals and we've dropped them because they're not going to work. And in our sales line, we continuously tighten our sales line. We continuously removing customers and removing clients which are just not going to work for us.

39:45Brilliant. Brilliant. How do you handle competition in the market? It is, you know, every every services industry has its, you know, specialists in there and obviously you compete with people, but how do you handle the competition in the I actually love them. I love them. I know the people. So, because of the ecosystem, I know pretty much all the players in our space and I'm actually friends with them. when I see them at conferences and networking events, we catch up over a beer and we're good mates. competition is healthy and everybody's got their own space and they've got their niche that they look after. Yeah. and we we all play nicely together in the sand pit.

40:28Fantastic. Talk about failure, setback, and how you overcame it. Got anything on top of your mind? That's a tough one. I don't see anything as a failure. I I see it as a learning. And I think there's never a failure. There's always just harder work than it needs to be. So we we could try and make a deal work and try push a deal and when it's coming on to 350 400 days that we've worked on one deal I think it's time to take a step back.

41:03Fair enough. So it's not a fail failure it's a learning and then we focus our attention somewhere else. Okay. most important lessons you learned as a business owner if anything you know you haven't shared already. Yeah, absolutely. The most important and and this is honestly absolutely honest advice to whoever is building a business, the most important things for me that I've learned are relationships are pivotal and key. And in fact, if you haven't got the opportunity to socialize with the people that you need to have the relationships that you need, then find some additional teams and meetups and networks and areas in order to meet them because relationships are pivotal. That's number one. Number two is numbers don't lie. And as soon as you can get numbers that you can refer to, even if you've only been operating for one month, track your metrics. And every single month, track your metrics. And after you've done a year or two years or 3 years, you'll have the insights that you need in order to make decisions. And the third one is always be on the lookout on how you need to change because things do not stay the same and you will be changing all the time.

42:18Sure. Fantastic. Great. how do you balance short-term versus long-term goals? Because, you know, there's obviously the cash flow, resource restraints, technologies changing, and there's a whole lot of things happening. You got to invest re, you know, in certain things. How do you balance short-term needs versus long-term goals? So, Ian, our long-term is a northstar.

42:40Ultimately, we want to be known in the industry. and we want to be known as a leader in our space, a leader in business process management and architecture and advisory. And so because of that, that's the vision. And then in line with that, we've got a number of flags and indicators to say that we're on the vision. So in line with that, we've got revenue goals, we've got profit goals, we've got customer goals, we've got customer satisfaction goals, we've got team satisfaction goals. And so along the journey, we check the metrics on all of those to see how we're progressing. And that's it. All the small short-term goals are bricks to build a long-term goal, which is wall.

43:27Yeah. Brilliant. Brilliant. Okay. future trends in IT services industry. We spoke a bit about AI. I suppose that's the big topic for the moment. AI is not just a hype. It's it's not just a a hype. It's not like it's not even like the internet. The internet was a big thing, right? I actually remember the olden days when you could get a domain name on anything. You could lit literally just I think I had about 20 domain names.

43:53I should have actually bought more like 2,000. But I honestly the where we are now is an even bigger watershed moment for mankind than that. and web now if you think that people are using AI now you're wrong nobody is using it they're using GPT they're scratching the surface with a little bit of chat help that is not using AI we are we are at the bottom of a mountain which is so large and nobody has really taken advantage so the opportunity is in the AI space and the opportunities we don't even know them yet We don't even know how AI is going to help. But unless you're looking for those opportunities in that space and unless you're actually practicing, trying building stuff, doing stuff now in that space, then you're going to miss it. So if you want to be successful in like 5 years time, 10 years time, you need to jump on the this bandwagon and you need to start developing solutions in the AI space now.

45:00Brilliant. Brilliant. Yeah, it looks good. I mean, I've got a few clients that actually have developed solutions in in the AI space and now selling it to a few of my clients as well. So, it's it's it's out there. It's working and it's doing some amazing things. So, you know, that probably that leads into my sort of my last sort of type of question that I have is, you know, what would you say to an aspiring IT professional services business owner at the moment who wants to start his business? Would you say AI first approach? M so I would definitely say AI first and I would also say look there's there's a couple of reasons to get into business. One is because you have a passion for it and you like doing it. The other one is you want to make money. If you want to make money and money is a goal then something where there's a repeat repeat purchase like a subscription is going to snow roll and give you more revenue and profitability over time especially if you can get into a SAS subscription. So develop AI tools with S sub sub S SAS sub subscription base would be my number one goal. But in line with that is that you need to develop a solution as well in your enterprise which can beat the market because other people will come and copy you and there's no barrier to entry nothing. So or your other customers, Ian, that have developed AI tools, I can pretty much develop the same tools in pretty much a month or two a month.

46:31There's no barrier to entry here. And so you need to be able to not just develop the tool, but you need to understand the metrics. You need to understand your customer acquisition cost. You need to understand your delivery cost and your hosting cost and your everything. and then play the numbers game to see if you can scale yours faster in order to win the market share and become the incumbent that everybody refers to in your space. We add a game now. It's actually a race and the winner is the person that can build the app and scale it faster than the person next door.

47:05Brilliant. Thanks for that. I appreciate that. Glenn, thanks for your time. I know you're hell of a busy. I appreciate you coming on the show today and sharing some amazing insights and how you, you know, have created an awesome organization and hopefully to see it keep on flying like a rocket in the next couple years as well. Thanks a lot, Thank you, Ian. Have a wonderful day. See you.

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