The Secret to Productive Digital Workplaces with Daniel Amaro

Welcome to the B2B Growth Blueprint podcast, where we talk with entrepreneurs, founders, and leaders at B2B services, tech, and SaaS companies to learn the systems and processes they've used to create success for their business. We'll also learn from marketing and sales experts to provide insights to help you grow your business. I'm your host, Mark Osborne, and the podcast is brought to you by Modern Revenue Strategies and their 10x ROI B2B Growth Guarantee. Schedule a free diagnostic call to learn the fastest path to double your B2B revenues in just 90 days. Hello and welcome to another episode of the B2B Growth Blueprint Podcast.

I'm your host, Mark Osborne. Today, I'm very excited to welcome my guest, Daniel Amaro. Now, I'm going to read Daniel's bio to make sure I get this right.

Daniel is the CEO of Clarinet Solutions and the Digital Workplace Whisperer.

Clarinet Solutions is a digital transformation— and he works as a digital transformation strategist who believes that technology should work for people, not the other way around. With a knack for turning chaos into clarity, Daniel has helped organizations of all sizes streamline collaboration, boost productivity, and occasionally even enjoy their intranets. Known for his sharp insights and even sharper dad jokes, Daniel leads with a mix of vision, empathy, and just enough caffeine to power a small data center. He's passionate about building digital workplaces that don't just function, but more importantly, flourish. When he's not architecting smarter solutions or mentoring teams, you might find him debating the merits of SharePoint over a cup of coffee, We're trying to convince his team that just one more app is a perfectly reasonable request. So welcome to the show, Daniel. Thank you.

Glad to be here.

So I'm really excited about this conversation. Before we jump into some of the topics that we've been sort of batting around, why don't you give our audience a little bit of background? Like, how'd you get into what you're doing today? And really, what does Clarinet do?

Yeah, so I started in IT. like 27 years ago. So I've been in here for quite a long time. I've worked on intranets that entire time.

Wow.

And eventually found myself managing a consulting practice for someone else. And I kind of saw what was going on and saw where the emphasis was and, you know, just realized like, you know, I need to go do this on our own because I really wanted to put people first. That was the impetus. That was the reason. And so I started Clarinet Solutions in 2010 with another business partner, merged with another person in 2012 who was doing something similar but same philosophy. And now we're, you know, grown to 14 people. So we're still small but mighty. And yeah, we're still kind of doing the same thing where we're putting people first. That's the idea.

So when you talk about, you know, building intranets and, you know, sort of putting people first, like, what are the, you know, the challenges that businesses are dealing with or struggling with when they— that you solve? Like, what are the things that they're sort of going through that an intranet, you know, sort of enables?

Right. So an intranet really has, in my opinion, right, the experience I have, it really has 2 purposes. And one is kind of like, it's like the bait, if you will.

Okay.

So what intranet is really serving 2 purposes. One is being a resource hub for basically all the employees and for everybody, right?

Yeah.

It's the place you go to go get everything else is the idea. Well, what I then want to do is I want to use it as a communication medium to get continuity of mission and vision across the organization. So by having resources that everyone needs to have in one location, it gives me the opportunity then to speak to them. And that's really what I'm trying to accomplish with a lot of our clients on an intranet. And it's an interesting conversation because not all of them really kind of grasp it. They just see that resource hub idea first. And some just look at it as a communication medium. So merging these 2 things together is really one of the things that we work on a lot.

That's great.

Well, and you talked a lot about, or in our previous conversation, around sort of how it facilitates collaboration and this idea that, you know, the technology can serve the people instead of the people sort of being, you know, shackled to it, or, oh, I have to go here to get, you know, the latest version of, this report that I need to send out to a client or whatever it is, but instead it can really sort of facilitate and flourish this in a much more interesting way.

Yeah, there's a few things to unpack there actually. I mean, when we're talking about collaboration, there's, you know, you can use a lot of different technology solutions to do that, which are all fantastic. There's a ton out there that are really, really good at this. So it's really kind of, it's actually more of a human question. It's a use case question. It's a why am I even doing this question than it is a technology question. And so, Too often I've found, me being from an IT background primarily, is that, you know, us nerds, we want to take a technical solution and go find a problem, which is the complete opposite way of actually solving real challenges that include humans, right? It's really starting with their needs first and then identifying the solution. It sounds simple and profound, and yeah, we all agree, and it sounds obvious because you know the answer. But, you know, that's kind of the challenge there is making sure that we're putting people first, understanding their needs, and then aligning the solutions to them. Now, in terms of an intranet, what that's really doing is— an intranet being those 2 things as far as the resource hub and the communication medium— collaboration is almost something separate, right? Whereas the intranet is much more of a large system that provides those 2 things, collaboration happens more one-on-one or in teams and is a completely different solution.

Right.

So in reality, that's a different challenge that we're solving that's not an intranet.

Interesting. Interesting. So how, how do you solve that collaboration challenge other than just, you know, sort of creating the space for people to collaborate?

Yeah, that's a good question. The reason why it's a good question is because the real challenge isn't the technology, right? There's different kind of sort of levels of solution you can provide that would facilitate collaboration. And collaboration could be, hey, I have a document, I know where to get it. Here's the document, Mark, go work on the document. Maybe we work on it at the same time, maybe we don't. What system is it that's holding that document? Or is it something above that where we're actually able to converse around this document, we're able to co-author that document, work on at the same time, Or is it that we're trying to work on a series of documents that pertain to a project, right? So all these little things we need to kind of analyze and understand how a person is actually using that information, how they want to work together, what they're open and able to do, because not all people are the same in terms of our technology background, and some of us have different comfort levels. And so you kind of have to factor all those things in and then design and create a solution that actually serves the people. Wherever they are, because some people aren't really ready for co-authoring. They're not— they don't want to have 2 people in the document at the same time. That just isn't— that isn't good for them. So you kind of have to design for all of that and just consider their needs first.

That's so interesting. Well, and so on this show, we talk a lot about, you know, how companies use systems and processes to, you know, sort of scale and standardize. And you were saying something before that that I found really interesting, which is sort of this idea that it's not a control system, it's a support system. And talk to us a little bit about sort of your philosophy on that and that sort of concept of organizational design.

Yeah, yeah. So, as a business leader, we often think we hit these points in the business where we're growing and we're like, oh my God, something didn't go the way it was supposed to go. And what you want to do naturally, right, almost knee-jerk, is We must control. So—

Lock it down.

Right, what metric was there? Did we measure to the metric? If it's not measured, it's not managed, right? We've heard that over and over again, which is true, 100% true. I do agree with that statement that if it's not measured, it's not managed. The problem being though is that we're trying to work with humans and as much as you might want to, you can't control humans. I mean, I have 2 kids, I can't control them as much as I want to. I can as much as I can, but you know, you get what I'm saying. We're dealing with actual full-grown adult humans in a business. And the systems that we're trying to create here at Clarinet aren't control systems, they're support systems. So meaning that, you know, we've hired these people to be smart, intelligent, problem-solving communicators, right, in reality. And so what systems do we have in place that allow them to do that, that support them in doing that, not control them in doing that? And so it's a bit of a different mindset, and it actually makes things kind of hard. To get results because you think results become from control, they come from managing. But in reality, in our business, because we're a customer relationship business, results come from mentoring, they come from support, they come from allowing our folks to do the job that they want to do well, right? Everybody wants to win. And now we just got to make sure that the playing field is set up so that they can.

So, that's so interesting to hear you say that because we build marketing and sales systems for folks. And oftentimes when we're working with a client, they're like, oh, if we build this really detailed process, it limits creativity or it limits people's ability to think or find new solutions. And what we actually find is that the system sets you free because once you sort of detail the baseline of what needs to happen and how we've done it that's had the best outcomes consistently in the past. Now, that creative person can iterate and come up with new, better ways to do it, maintaining this sort of baseline of how it's been done in the past. And it gives them that freedom to actually make it better instead of every time they come to it, they have to figure out what to do. Well, then that takes all of that, you know, processing power just to kind of get the basics down. Whereas if they start with the basics, they can come up with the next level version of it a lot faster and a lot more easily.

Yeah, the word that really popped in my mind when you were speaking and you said it, and I was so happy when you did, is freedom, right? It's perfect.

But it's so true. And it's not like systems really do set you free instead of locking you down. They open up a lot of potential. I'm curious, one of the things that, that we see as we build systems in marketing and sales is, you know, a lot of folks are primarily visual. But oftentimes we see that companies don't take the time to make sort of visual maps of systems. And so they don't get, you know, the feedback. Do you do much of that kind of visual mapping with, with your processes and teams?

We do, we definitely do. We kind of have to, right? Because you're right in that, you know, let's just get real, right? So different people learn in different ways. We all consume information in different ways. This is true, but primarily you're right. I believe that that is true, that we're a lot of very visual learners and it's much easier to kind of put your head around or get your head around a concept when you can see it.

That's right.

It's a challenge, right? Because we're trying to take something that is, could be less tangible or just even complicated, right?

Yeah.

And there's some danger there, in essence, even still where you're trying to take something that might be complicated and you're trying to simplify it, and the danger is oversimplification. But even with that, I think there's a lot of value in starting with a simple sort of diagram and then allowing yourself the ability to dive deeper wherever necessary. We do that for ourselves. But we're also doing that with clients, right, is to understand. So what we were talking about earlier about understanding humans, what we're looking for here is what drives them, right? Why would technology matter to them? How's it going to impact them positively in their job, right? Hopefully not negatively, but positively.

Right.

But understanding that, and then what we're doing is creating a diagram based on their jobs to be done. their flow of work is what we call it, and understanding what that looks like. And then from there, what are the technical elements, technical pieces and solutions that actually help facilitate that job? Or what could they add on reasonably later on to their, their technology set to actually have positive impact? So yeah, those, those visualizations and diagrams help tremendously in being able to communicate where, what, and why.

Yeah. Well, and the other thing that we see in, you know, we've used the word collaboration a lot, but it's really true, is that having that sort of visual makes it a lot easier for everyone to sort of collaborate around it rather than, you know, if one person's kind of trying to describe it in words or it's only written down, it's a lot harder for people to sort of work on the problem instead of just, you know, it's more about just, you know, kind of pulling it out of each other of what they're trying to describe.

Right.

Whereas having that visual makes it so much easier to collaborate on it.

Totally true.

Yeah. So, you know, as you work with companies, what are some of the common challenges that you see that are holding companies back that, you know, could, you know, really be facilitated or solved by some of the technology solutions that you've implemented? Like, what are some of those common things that people are holding themselves back by not implementing these types of solutions?

That's an interesting question. The reason why I find it interesting is because you were saying, you know, what are the technical solutions? And more often than not, I can't hammer on this enough, is it's not the technology that's the challenge, right? It's more about the culture and the users and what we're actually asking them to do. So we actually specialize in change management and adoption, Uh-huh. which is all about human behavior and human motivation. And that's one of the things I'm focusing on all the time, is understanding why someone would want to change, understanding really that you gotta think of it this way, right? That technology is trying to solve, or I'll say not so much solve, but it's trying to eliminate pain.

Mm-hmm.

Okay, let's think of it that way for a second. But in order to actually eliminate that pain, the pain that you're gonna go through in that change Has to be less than the pain you're experiencing now, right? Because if it isn't, if it's more pain to change than the pain you're experiencing now, you won't change.

No motivation.

So, right. So that's what we're dealing with a lot of our clients is it— where— what is the essence or what is the feeling of pain now? And the problem I'm seeing a lot of times is the pain right now isn't great enough from just their perspective to actually go through the pain of change. Which is— that's their feeling. But I know looking at some of these things and just having the experience, if you don't do something down the road, there will be pain. There will be pain. You're just not seeing it yet. You're not feeling it yet. And you're just so kind of numb to it. That's a pretty big problem. And it's not really a technical problem. It's more of a human behavior perception problem.

So that's so interesting. Well, and, you know, We work with a lot of technology companies and when they're trying to think through the sort of the buyer's journey of what causes them to sort of evaluate solving this problem at all, much less solving it with you, so often people don't think about the pain of change as a blocker to actually working with someone to solve that problem. So, they're like, well, they're going to get all this efficiency gains, but You have to get them past that hurdle. What are some of the ways that you help companies realize the future benefit is worth the sort of current change as you do that change management?

There's a couple of things you got to do, right? For sure. There's more than a couple, but a couple of things pop into my head when you ask the question.

Yeah.

Number one, for sure, is you have to understand people. You have to understand not just people, like as in all people. No, no, you have to understand the person, right down to the person. You got to understand who they are, what they're motivated by, what they're trying to accomplish. And really, like I said earlier, we are a relationship-based business. And what I mean by that is we need to understand and connect with people. That helps us then understand how we can help them through whatever change they're going to go through. Because like it or not, no matter what you want to believe or whatever someone's going to tell you, any new technology adoption is going to be a change. There is pain associated. There's no way around it. It's just a matter of understanding, look, this is where you're at right now. And you may not realize how much is actually here because you've been doing it for so long that you're just numb to it. But in reality, when you take a step back from what you're actually experiencing, it is quite painful, right? And this path that we have for you right here, it isn't as painful, right? And so that's kind of like the idea, but you can't do that without understanding the people, right?

Mm-hmm.

And the second part of it is, because there's— I said there's 2— is making sure that you're crafting that journey with them to be as painless as possible, not free completely of pain, but as painless as possible, right? So making sure that you're communicating with them, making sure they understand the use cases, revisiting the why— why are we doing this? It has to have a positive strategic impact that actually matters to the people, or we won't do it. That's, that's it. And so sometimes we'll get into a client where, hey, we think we need this, and then we start uncovering and going through some of You know, just the needs analysis and getting deeper and deeper with that client on what their needs are. And we find like, hey, you think you need this, but in reality, you kind of don't. All you need is this little bit over here and you've got your pain solved. That's what you need. And so it's kind of like talking them down from a bigger, like larger implementation that they won't actually appreciate. It's not going to solve their issue. So I would say understanding the people and then making the journey as seamless and painless as possible is the 2 things I would look at. Wow.

So it's so funny to hear some of the kind of human behavior stuff that we think about, you know, from the psychology of marketing and sales, you know, represented there because, you know, in psychology, like, people tend to be fundamentally either a towards kind of mindset and personality of like, I want to go towards something that I want, this gain that I want to realize. Or they're an away from. I want to get away from a pain that I'm experiencing. And they tend to be kind of persistent personality types. And in fact, we oftentimes find that people in certain industries tend to sort of attract and gravitate to the same types of people. And so, when we craft marketing messaging, we will use the messaging that we think is going to align with the buyers in that space. It's so interesting to hear you talk about doing that. As you're designing, you know, sort of this change management program that you guide your clients through. And obviously you take a much deeper approach to technology than a lot of other technologists that, like you say, you know, they have a tool and they just run around looking for a problem to apply it against.

Yeah, I mean, we try to. That's the point. Like, I don't think we can be successful without it. I mean, yeah, it has to be human first. It's got to be.

So interesting. So, you know, as a technologist and someone that, you know, works in this space, is there something on the horizon that is either an interesting innovation that you see coming down from a technology perspective, or I'll give you another angle. Is there just something exciting on the horizon for your business or you personally that you're looking forward to?

Yeah, I mean, goodness, like, We can't go a day without saying AI, right? I mean, sure, let's be honest. It's just, it's just the way it is. The, the agent-specific sort of solutions around AI are quite interesting. Microsoft had an interesting take on this on their, their latest conference that they had in Las Vegas, which is that really everyone's gonna be managing agents, right? And so everyone's going to be a manager. They'll be managing their own, you know, team of agents. And if you want to kind of break it down, what an agent actually is like, and try to do it in simplest terms as possible, is it's just simply a system that's going to do one job as well as it can. That's kind of what it is, right? And so the idea here being, or an example I can think of is, let's say I need to do research on a new prospective client.

Yes.

You know, what I really want to have is I just have someone just go out and, you know, look at their website, do some reading on them, check out who's, you know, connected with them on LinkedIn and understand as much as I can about them, create a bio that we can create from all the information we have available to us, where they're from, what their work experience is, all those things. Well, you can have an agent do all that, right, instead of having a person do that. And so that's kind of the idea there is. You know, agentic AI. There's a lot of buzz on this on LinkedIn. On is it even valid? Is this going to work? Is it not going to work? It's going to take our job. There's just it's a ton of stuff flying around right now. But in reality, what what I'm seeing as a challenge from all of our clients is what are the use cases? Like where does this apply to me? How does this actually help me? How does it hurt me? Right. All those those things are are kind of being talked about right now, and the challenge that most companies I'm seeing are having with AI in general is just really understanding either if it's chat-based or it's agentic or if it's automation, whatever it may be, is really just what is the use case? What are the use cases, right? How do I actually leverage this in my business? I know that if I don't do something, my competition will.

Yeah.

And that scares me. Okay, but what is it that I'm gonna do? And right now, I would say that a lot of people— there's a few early, early adopters that I'm talking to, but for the most part, it's like everyone's on the same page. No need to freak out yet. Nobody knows anything is almost kind of where we're at with it. But it's quickly becoming, I think, something that everyone's going to have to really kind of look at and understand a lot better. And we are helping our clients do that. So Of course, what we're looking at here is AI, with all the things I said as far as it being scary, exciting, amazing, whatever, right? All the kind of really emotionally charged sort of language we have behind it. In reality, it's just a technical tool, right? And all it matters, the only way it matters at all, is how it relates to us humans. And so it's still got to be a human-first approach. on any technology that we're looking at, especially AI. That's gonna be, I think, the key here of if you're successful or not is where does it apply to humans? Why does it make meaning for them? How can they leverage it to be better? How does it serve us? So I think that's kind of the thing on the horizon that we're all looking at and we can't ignore it really, so.

It's so interesting to hear your sort of strategic, you know, thought process and through line from kind of everything you've talked about is this sort of human-first approach to technology and also really a strategic approach to how to leverage new technologies, not for the sake of using them, but actually how they're going to impact your business. So, you're obviously an expert in tons of really interesting things and we could talk all day, but I got to be mindful of your time. But before I let you go, like, give us the pitch. Like, who does Clarinet work with? What are the types of things that they tackle? And, you know, what are the type of results that folks get working with you?

Yeah, yeah. So, I mean, clients come to us for one of 3 reasons, really. One is that they're trying to increase productivity. So, pretty simple. Technology fits, makes sense. The second reason they come to us, though, is they're trying to increase the quality or quantity of their communication. Both from an internal strategic communication, also amongst each other, right, from a collaboration perspective. And the final reason they come to us is they're trying to take a strong culture and make it stronger. And all we do is focus on the technology. It's really simple, actually, right? The technology is the easy bit. That's hard— that's easy. The hard part, and what we work with clients on a lot more, is how does it actually fit into their culture? the human elements? How do we get change to happen? Right. And so that's really what we're looking for there is making sure the technology fits the strategic sort of culture of the organization and serves it right to make us all better. So our tagline is elevate your workplace. And that's exactly what we're trying to do every day for our clients.

That's fantastic. And so for folks that are listening, and this sounds like something that could help them break through and achieve sort of that next stage of growth, what's the best way for them to get in touch with you?

Honestly, I'm on LinkedIn all the time. So that's like the best way. You could also email me. I do respond to email and it's damaro@clarinetsolutions.com with a K, or find me on LinkedIn. I'll respond. I'm pretty good at it.

Awesome. Well, Daniel, I really appreciate you taking the time to join us today. I've learned a lot about the way to approach using technology, and I'm sure our audience has too.

Thanks. Glad to be here.

All right. Talk to you soon.

All right.

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