Interview with Nick Zadrozny of One More Cloud – Small Business Show Episode 206

The Small business show episode 206 for Wednesday, January 16, 2019. Greetings, folks, and welcome to the Small Business show here at BusinessShow Co, the show that is by, for and about small business. Sponsors for this episode include Abby connect@abby connect.com SBS and textexpander@textexpander.com podcast. We'll talk more about that in a moment. Here in Durham, New Hampshire, I'm Dave Hamilton.

And out on the west coast, I'm Shannon Jean. How goes it, man?

It goes, it comes, it goes. I'm back here after CES and all that craziness, but, yeah, it's good.

Made it.

I made it. Yeah.

Nice. That's good. Yeah. We're gonna do a show next week, I think, about trade shows and conferences. Right?

That's the plan. Yeah. We'll talk about how to. How to do it right. Yeah. One way to do it right. Yeah.

Yeah, that's really cool. Very good. Hey, so we have a great guest today, you know, and we're really fortunate on the show to get to meet so many different business owners. I mean, we've had, you know, everybody from dog walkers, cricket farmers, you know, consultants, this kind of thing, and we get to meet just some awesome business owners. This week, we're joined by Nick Zadrozny, founder and CEO of One More Cloud. And we're excited to have you here, Nick, as a guest today. I really am looking forward to learning about what you do. One More Cloud. It sounds really intriguing and thanks for joining us.

Yeah. Hey, thanks for having me.

Yeah, we really appreciate it. So let's start with some background about One More Cloud. You know, I've looked at your website and I read your company, you know, that manages search engines for e commerce applications, social media, content management systems. Really out of my wheelhouse. So can you. Can you explain to us how does this work?

And I get that question a lot. Yeah.

Tell us what you do.

Well, I mean, in so much as the question is, what does One More Cloud do? One More Cloud helps product teams and e commerce teams build great search experiences. So, you know, we're not talking about search as in searching the web. I mean, that's Google. That's being. We're talking about software applications on the web that have some sort of search component to them.

I see, yeah. And searching for data within the app.

Exactly. Right.

Okay. Okay. So you manage that. I see.

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, any. Anyone who's involved in kind of building a software product, you'll know that there are a lot of Components that go into that, okay, you've got your source code for your application and maybe that's split into a front end and a backend. You've got your database usually, and that database stores the records about your company and your customers, you know, billing information, how much to charge whom on what schedule. And that's your source of truth about things that are happening inside the business. And it's those kind of databases are built to be fast and reliable and mostly they're built to be correct. But when it comes to the type of searching that humans do, and at this point we are all so trained by Google and Amazon and so many other prolific large scale search experiences, it turns out to be a lot more sophisticated and complex and subjective to do that well. And traditional primary databases aren't really optimized for that. So that's where search engine software comes in. And fortunately there's a lot of really great open source off the shelf software that's available that has millions of hours of experts contributing into these things. And so what we do specifically for our customers is we make those kinds of databases available. We make them fast and reliable and scalable and so that they can spend their time focusing on actually building their product and exploring how they can and use search to create kind of to help their customers and their end users accomplish what they need to accomplish instead of installing software and configuring and how much memory does the Java process need and all that stuff. So that's a little more focused view of what we do.

No, it's awesome. I had no idea.

It solves a problem and takes a headache away.

Yeah, and it's funny because search is one of those things that you never really think about and yet it's everywhere. I heard anecdotally once that like 50% of how we interact with software on the Internet is some kind of a search interaction. And unless you're like a practitioner in that area, you don't really notice it. Or I should say you do notice it when it's bad, you don't notice it when it's good. Which is kind of a funny dynamic, right?

It's true. Well, you know, it's for people who have been using email for more than say 10 years, maybe 12 years. You know, it used to be that we would pre categorize all our, like when we filed email it would be, oh, I have a folder for Nick and a folder for Shannon and a folder for, you know, small business show and this, that and the other thing. And now, you know, you Just put all your email into one bucket and let it search. Right. We rely so much on search that. And like you said, we don't even realize it because it's. Because it generally works well.

Generally, yeah, generally.

I'll date myself. I still have those folders.

There you go.

Yeah. Is one more cloud? I mean, would I be correct? Is it a software as a service that you're.

We are, yeah. I mean we call it maybe search as a service or we're part of a larger trend, I think in the industry that you'd call infrastructure as a service.

Okay.

And when we got started, that was very, kind of a very new thing like this. We started the company in 2009 and that just didn't exist at the time. And now it's a fair bit more prolific. Now obviously you have Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud or Google Compute and you know, this is the larger quote unquote cloud and it's a lot more common these days for, you know, folks building and deploying software to then outsource these kinds of components to a third party vendor. But yeah, software as a service. I mean we're a traditional monthly subscription. Go to the site, sign up, enter the credit card, click a button and you have a search engine.

Nice. That's cool. So, okay, so tell me about now I know what you should do. Why did you start the company? How did the. What was the impetus to get. Get it going?

Yeah, good question. You know, I kind of, I kind of fell into, was sort of a right place, right time. It's, it's funny because if I go back to January of 2009, which is literally 10 years ago now, I had a sticky note on my monitor that said build passive revenue or something to that effect. I had been a freelance web developer for the five years prior to that, and I had worked on a bunch of different projects, you know, little project product ideas, concepts that someone wanted to prototype out and then go and take and raise around the funding or working with an agency to build sort of in house products at different kinds of companies. And so I built, you know, a dozen or so different little products and projects over the five years prior to that. And a couple of those had been search oriented. And that really gave me that firsthand experience of how challenging that could be and how subtle and subjective the user experience side of that could be. And one project in particular was with an agency and we were building a in house product for Qualcomm's marketing team and it was a digital asset management system so that their marketing folks could be creating these collateral type materials and uploading them into a place where you can then search for them so that salespeople can find the spec sheets that they need for a certain processor or whatever. Think kind of Google Drive, but for all of their kind of custom internal materials and naturally very search oriented. So I was very struck on that project that we had a team of very competent engineers and we picked the right technology for this. We kind of picked the best search engine of the day and there was still kind of a lot to be desired. And I remember the lead on that project saying how he wished he could, how he wished he could find an expert to bring in and spend a couple grand just to have him sit with us for a few hours some afternoon and tell us all the things that we were doing wrong. So those kinds of experiences really planted the seeds. And you know, after a while I got kind of tired of just selling my time to build projects for other people so that they can go off and get rich. And I thought, hey, I might as well go build a product for myself so I can go off. And that's where the passive revenue sticky note came in.

And that's a powerful thing, man, putting, you know, having that in front of you, it definitely, you know, it can remind you to stay on track for sure.

Yeah, yeah, it certainly helps you calibrate and you know, January being this kind of season of reflection and goal setting, I find, you know, goals for me really help me calibrate what I want to say yes to. And it really helped me say, it's helped me say yes when I bumped into an old acquaintance at a conference and he was starting up this project to build a managed search and was I interested.

So that, yeah, that's a, that's a powerful thing, right? Because as business owners, especially when you're starting out or you know, if you're a consultant solopreneur, saying you say no to, to, to very few things. Right. Because it's all about bringing in revenue and keeping the business going, keeping yourself going. And, and like you said, like you really need to learn what to say yes to. I like that. In the category of things to say yes to, I want to talk about our first sponsor today, which is Abby Connect, a new sponsor for us. The URL that you're going to want is abbyconnect.com SBS that's a B-B-Y connect.com SBS Abbyy is your team of world class professional receptionists at a fraction of the cost of what it would take to put someone in your office, if you even have an office, to answer your phone. Because here's the thing. Phone calls are so important for your business, right? It's a human connection. It's so easy to lose that. And we love unfair competitive advantages here on the Small Business Show. Having a human answer your phone is a huge competitive advantage. And Abbyy is the part that makes it unfair because they make it so affordable that you can totally get ahead of your competitors just by having Abby Connect answer your phone for you, right? These are people that are here in the usa. They sound like they're in your office. You get a team of people, 24, 7 if you like, but there's some flexibility there. You can have them pick up when you want or not, but you get a team of people that are trained on your business. We've used this. It sounds just like you're calling someone's business, because you are, right? If you had a receptionist in your office, that person would be trained on your business and it would sound like people were calling your business. Abby Connect does the same thing for a fraction of the cost. And as I said, you can use it as like, your main point of contact all the time or just engage it, like for overflow or vacations or trade shows. If you do a lot of work in your office and you can be there to answer the phone, you don't need to pay for Abby to do that. However, if you then need to go out like I was at CES last week, or, you know, you need to go visit a client or something, that's when you do it. Awesome, awesome stuff. They sound so professional. They're courteous. They might even be more friendly than you. And that's an awesome thing to employ. So check this out. We have a special offer from Abby Connect just for you. So, as I said before, Abby Connect.com SBS is where you go. The first thing you get is a no obligation free trial. The second thing you get, after your initial trial, you get 95 bucks off your first bill. So visit abbyconnect.com SBS that's abbyconnect.com SBS or you can call them, of course, and see how they are. Call 833-ABBY. Wow, 833-A-B- B Y W O W and mention small business show and they'll still give you the same deal. Our thanks to Abbyy Connect for sponsoring this episode. Our next sponsor is Textexpander, where@textexpander.com podcast you can get involved with A service that man like, I don't understand how I could live my personal life, let alone my business life, without textexpander. And I call it a service. It is an app. It's a bunch a series of apps, and they all sync together. And what they do is allow you to have blocks of text, email responses, addresses, email addresses, perhaps phone numbers, things that you type over and over again. You don't want to get them wrong, and you don't want to have to type them. You put them into textexpander and then you invoke them, either by clicking the mouse on your snippet or by typing a short bit of text that then expands and then, boom, it just puts it wherever you are in an email, in a web form, whatever it is. Or you can type a short bit of text, and textexpander expands that to a long bit of text. This is the beauty of textexpander. It's an awesome thing. You use it too, right, Shannon?

It is absolutely a life changer, you know, and long customer service responses. You know, we did a show last week on confidence, and if you want to be confident that your message and your customer service responses are all going to be standardized and done the way you want, this is the way to do it.

Totally.

I love it.

Yeah. Yeah, you're right. Because it is a thing that I can use with confidence. I use it for my phone all the time to type emails that I would never trust myself to type from my phone.

Right?

Oh, sure.

But I know that I've typed it on my desktop and read it through, and somebody else has read it through, and I know it's good. So I can just invoke that text with confidence and off it goes, no problem. Yeah, it's a beautiful thing. So check it out. Textexpander.com podcast. That's where you can learn more. While you're there, they will ask you where you heard about it. Of course, choose the Small Business Show. And our thanks to textexpander and the folks at Smile for sponsoring this episode.

That's good. So, Nick, on your website, you promote the fact that your company is small, independent, bootstrapped, and profitable. I really like that. And I wonder how important is that to the overall story of one more cloud? It's pretty prominent up there.

Sure. Yeah. Well, I mean, when you're bootstrapped, profitable is definitely important because you don't last long if you're not that. Yeah, it's an interesting artifact of where we came from, too. Like when we were first starting the project, the impetus there was we had this awesome company that we were partnered with. I don't know if you folks are familiar with Heroku. Some of your listeners might be, yeah, they're an awesome platform as a service cloud deployment product and they were just kind of getting up and started in those days and they knew they really wanted to focus on the application experience and so they didn't want to just be the same as every other VPS provider of the time where they give you root access to some container somewhere and you install your own software. So they partnered with specialists to handle these different. And they created a marketplace for all these different, different services. And so search didn't really exist at the time and there were some connections made. I think there was a cab ride at a conference and my co founder had some search background as well. And so they persuaded him and he persuaded me. And so we were able to afford to bootstrap because we already had a really great kind of distribution channel lined up from day one. They threw a ton of great customers at us and so that was part of that early revenue problem solved. In fact, it was funny because a few months into it they send us an email and they saying, hey, you're in production now, we're charging for your service, so don't crash. Good luck. Yeah, so I mean at the time there was always the, we're kind of part of that tech startup scene and do we want to go and raise VC funds and do a seed round and a series A and all that. And I think the cloud industry was still so young and so new, we didn't even really have a great idea what it was. And we didn't have that confidence that we understood the process well enough or could kind of make a compelling enough story for why we wanted to fund raise funds. And so we kind of just tried to stay true to ourselves and really only be beholden to what customers needed and stay flexible in our own strategy and you know, continue to just snowball into a healthy, thriving business. And to this day I'm, I'm happy that we can tell customers that their interests are our only interests. We're not out there to make a return on someone else's bottom line.

Oh, that's great. I love it. And you know, it just goes show there's a marketplace for everything, you know, whether you're selling products or infrastructure or whatever. So that's, that's fascinating. That's, you know, where you get your start. Definitely, yeah. So what drives customers to your business you know, I know nothing obviously about your market and learning here as you go along. I mean, are you in a highly competitive space? I know you started out when it was just getting going. I imagine there's some more competitors now. Or is it a niche that just a few players. How does it work?

Yeah, that's a great question and it's one I'm still learning over time. I think the market itself is evolving a lot in the sort of cloud industry. That's a really good question. I mean, so we get our customers. Heroku is a great channel for us still to this day. You know, we also run our service on Amazon Web Services, so anyone who is also running their software on Amazon can we rank pretty well on Google for the kinds of keywords you'd search for as you're evaluating if you're looking for a managed partner for specifically, we host two search engines, elasticsearch and Apache Solar. So if you go out and search for managed elasticsearch, you'll probably find Bonsai and that's us or a manager. Hosted Solar and Web. Solar is our original, so we rank pretty well organically. And that's just kind of a function of being early to market, participating in kind of the online Q and A sites like Stack Overflow. Otherwise. Yeah, I mean, we're still refining and iterating, always trying to do better at reaching folks who might find our services helpful. As far as the competition aspect, there are definitely a few others in the space and we were first to market on both of these different search engines. But others have come, others have gone. A lot of the others have did decide to raise funding. Some of them ended up exiting through some kind of acquisition and shutting down their product. Others have exited through an acquisition. It's interesting now that actually Amazon has a managed elasticsearch service, which is probably one of our biggest direct competitors, just because they have this, you might call it a walled garden ecosystem where folks who are using Amazon are logging into that dashboard all the time. And oh, I need elasticsearch. Oh, down here on the bottom of the page under the analytics section, there's elasticsearch. I thought it was for search. Well, anyway, that whole different story there. But yeah, they'll find elasticsearch through there. And I think a lot of people who just like the convenience of staying within Amazon's system can grab that. But yeah, so there's definitely competition and two of our competitors are our gorillas and that kind of puts us in that classic underdog position of trying to stay flexible and agile and Deep into some kind of specialization.

Oh, makes sense.

Makes sense.

That's good. It's always good to have an enemy.

I actually kind of enjoy it. It's nice.

Well, we always say one of the hardest things when you're running your own business is knowing what to do next. Right. And when there's an enemy out there, it's like, well, if they're beating us with our, you know, with our customers or the customers we want this way, cool. That's our problem. Now we know what problem to solve. Great, let's go solve it. We're good to go. Yep.

In order to take a clear market position, you have to say as much what you're not doing as you are doing, and then that definitely leaves opportunities. Now is, is the leftover market, you know, how big is that leftover market? You know, fortunately we don't have to, you know, beat ourselves up over those kinds of questions as much because we are small and independent and we don't have to move the needle on getting billion dollar unicorn status. Like, we can still be a very, you know, a very profitable, very valuable to our customers. Small.

Yeah, that's killer.

That can be a lot more fun to run too.

So I am definitely enjoying it. Yeah, that's great.

So, hey, I was looking at your LinkedIn profile and there was a statement there that really stood out to me, and this is that your role with one more cloud has shifted now towards scaling the business itself by recruiting and managing along with automating systems. So, you know, it sounds like kind of a classic technician to management transition. Can you talk about that? Has it been easy for you to shift to this role or has it been a struggle? Like, like I've had that struggle as well. How's it going?

Yeah, that's a, that's so interesting. And you know, it is that classic engineer turning into kind of a manager or a leader, as it were. Like, you have that. You, you, you define yourself for so long by your ability to like, do a deep dive into the, this very focused flow state and solve hard problems and write code and write tests and all this stuff. And then you kind of make that switch to managing people who do that and you can still do a little bit of it yourself. And that has its own rewards to it as well. And I still do a little bit of the engineering management within the team, but zooming out even further to leading and kind of managing other people or directing other people, whose job is to direct other people, you start to remove yourself from the work in a way that can be really hard to deal with with. Um, I find in. And, you know, earlier in this process for myself or I am. When I am in a place where I am not, I don't know, not healthy or. Or stressed or something, you. You have this. It's so easy to reach for what to others seems like micromanagement, but to the person who's made that transition or still going through, it is more of a reaching for that kind of. That kind of comfort zone of like, I want to do something so I feel competent. Right. Like, sure.

Give me.

Give me a softball to. To tackle something. So there's very much like an emotional awareness component to that, which I. I feel very lucky to have some good support systems around me. I'm part of a coaching group of other CEOs that, you know, we process a lot of these kinds of issues. And I think a lot of small business owners have come from that place of being the expert to then trying to find others and manage those others. And it's. It's a. It's. It's a very different set of not just tools and approaches, but how you think about yourself. And I still have days where I'll have meetings all day, and I feel like I got nothing done.

Oh, yeah, that has to be a.

Shift in what you're valuing.

Yeah. And tracking that. You know, I did get all this done because I've got these people pointed in this direction and we're working on, you know, but I totally get it.

The company got these things done under. Under my leadership. Yeah. And, you know, another interesting kind of flip to that is, you know, how you would want to be treated in any of those positions, but chances are the people that are in those positions aren't you, and they want to be treated a little bit differently. And it's. It's always an interesting thing. You know, you. You've got that owner's kind of entrepreneur's mindset. Not everybody has that. In fact, it's kind of a good thing when your employees don't necessarily have that. So, yeah, it's always interesting.

One thing that's been surprising to me in that is, you know, coming as an entrepreneurial mindset, you know, you do look for. I look for. And I value having a lot of autonomy and having a lot of context and having the freedom to be creative. You know, some of the folks on my team, like, they really just like the craftsmanship of the role that they're in, and they want. They don't necessarily want to sit down and Brainstorm the big picture vision. There's enough relationship there and enough built up trust that they can say like, you take care of that or someone else take care of that and you just give me a project to work on and I'll knock it out of the park. And that was actually a little bit of a mental, mental tweak for me to realize that like, oh, those kinds of people are out there and, and they're so valuable. I love them. And, and whereas I wouldn't have. That was not how I approached the world. And, and I was, I was trying to give them like a seat at the table. The planning and the strategizing and that was really like pulling teeth for them. So that's a, that was an interesting kind of shift in my own approach.

Well said, really common. Yeah, very well said. And I, and I really commend you for realizing that. That's why I wanted to talk about this because it, it is that you're, you make during this transition and then you're treating people to Dave's point, like you think you would like to be treated. But a lot of folks, especially employees, like, no, no, give me the task, I'm going to dig down, I'm going to feel good at the end of the day. I got these things done, but I don't. Yeah, I don't want all this autonomy and decision making power, if you will.

Yeah. Although I sometimes think too that my, my instinct to give people a seat at the table, as it were, was also kind of an abdication of my own role. Like in a way that the leader, like that is kind of the job now. Like it is your. To synthesize the inputs of what the markets and customers want and to turn that into vision like that is now a process that you need to work and you can't just democratize that and take a step back and wash your hands of it. And at least that's how I view my role now is my output is do we have a clear mission statement and vision statement and goals for the quarter and do people have what they need in order to feel like they are investing their time wisely into something that's adding value to the world? So yeah, it's an interesting kind of mix.

Yeah, no, it's really great. Okay, so I want to jump back into the product a little bit since one more cloud you manage search for all kinds of different companies. I'd like to know your thoughts on this because I'm in a lot of different marketplaces with various businesses and social Networks and stuff. And I'd like a thought of how companies use search to kind of persuade us. And I'm going to use the word manipulate not in a negative connotation because we're all kind of manipulated. But they manipulate the search results to get customers to act in a certain fashion, whether it's surfacing results in a marketplace to a customer that's paying more or selling a product with better profit margin. Give me some background on that based on your expertise.

Yeah, it's a great question. I think we all agree that's a valid part. Any business is sort of a manipulation of people's behavior, trying to persuade them of something and take a certain course of action. And search can definitely be a part of that. And I think something that's really interesting that I've had to kind of reconnect with this idea recently as we're exploring some new feature ideas and having more conversations with customers and just kind of going back to some of the fundamentals. I think people associate search a lot of the time with you're finding the thing that you want. And it's a very transactional kind of experience. I have a thing I need and I found the thing I need and I'm done. But I was actually talking with another, with a customer of mine. Their products called Muckrack, they're a PR tool where PR professionals can find journalists to connect to or publications that are writing about the subject they're interested in or measure the results of certain public articles that have been published. And for them, search is much more of a. For their customers, it's more of an exploration. There is no kind of concrete. I found the thing that I wanted because you're really trying to build up a Rolodex there. There's no end point to the search experience. And it can be very subjective where the product overlaps with that kind of search experience. By contrast, you might have like an E commerce site which is much more transactional. It's much more focused on like, I'm going to sell you a product. And we use exactly this example of there are so many different ways to rank the results. And there's a whole field called information retrieval that studies the intersection of statistics and human language and computer science and builds up kind of statistical models and algorithms for this stuff. But ultimately you have a lot of knobs and levers as someone who's building out your search to control how matches happen and how the ordering happens and.

Right.

Yeah. Boosting by profit margins is totally valid. Pinning or having Sponsored results is also really common, and that's actually a core feature of kind of any good search engine out there where you can say, like, this person is paid to be top spot for a certain amount of time.

Yeah, yeah, I see it everywhere. I mean, it used to be, I think, you know, search would kind of default to a certain expected thing, lowest price, whatever. But even on, you know, I manage, we have a vacation rental business and even on the vacation rental marketplaces, it's absolutely sorted by who pays the most, you know, so it's fascinating. I think we all have just kind of come to expect it.

I guess it is interesting. I think, you know, it can definitely be overdone. You know, you have to, I think product teams have to be mindful to make sure you're measuring the right thing. It's not always your, you know, it's not always the clicks, it's not always the total gross revenues. It's, it's, it's a lot of different things. And so, well, you lose your users.

Right, if they're not going to get at least somewhat, you know, accurate or useful results. So you're trying to massage it a little bit. A little bit. But enough to, you know, be beneficial to the business, I guess.

Exactly. Yeah. At the end of the day, folks have to feel like they're getting value out of research experience, go somewhere else.

Right, yeah. So that's cool. So, okay, so let's talk about what's. What do you think your greatest challenge is for one more cloud and. And what steps are you doing or have you done to overcome those challenges?

Yeah, really good one. That's because of our. I always have to kind of go back to how we started, which I feel like is. I don't know, to me, it feels so strange and such a journey and it's so exceptional because we had all these customers thrown at us on day one. Our biggest challenges early on were just keeping the lights on, keeping the servers running and keeping the bills paid, and, you know, two engineers with, you know, pretty good skill set to tackle this, scaling to, you know, the first ten hundred thousand. You know, these days we have over almost twenty thousand customers, I think, and we're a team of ten people. So, like, one of the things we do really well is the scaling of the operational side and the platform engineering that goes into running a search engine. And I think, which is, which is interesting, but because of that and because of the bootstrapping, we very much underinvested in the early days in kind of the sales and the marketing. So it was kind of a funny, funny part of joining a coaching group almost two years ago now. The first time we did a real deep dive into my business, I just got beat up left and right. Like, you are not marketing at all. Like, you cannot. I'm. Okay, fine, you have this one channel, but how much control do you really have over that? Like you. We can be very well integrated into that channel and give great support to the customers and shape our product in ways that meet their expectations. And we definitely do. And that's. That is. But that's. There's only so much you can do. You can't really get a new lead through that or your control over. That's very indirect. So, yeah, I've been really. And myself. I mean, what I'm trying to do is. Well, for sure, we hired someone to run marketing in the team last year, and that's been really great. We've had a salesperson working with us for a couple years who runs our sales, and that's been really great. I have learned a lot about both of those disciplines. And, you know, I am very motivated to kind of learn. I think a lot of entrepreneurs, you like that role because you like to learn a lot of different areas. At least that's one type. And that's. That's definitely my type. So really just just drinking from the fire hose of that and trying to, you know, always stay faithful to understanding what customers need and translating that into the sort of sales and marketing materials that can be scaled. Because I think I can get on a call with someone and make a pretty good case for the product. But my job has to be how can I enable the rest of the team to make an equally good, if not better case for the product? So that's great.

Yeah, totally makes sense. So we get to one of my favorite questions, probably because I've made so many mistakes in my businesses that I've learned from. So, you know, we all learn so much. We talk about it on the show all the time by our mistakes. And, you know, it's got a tradition here to ask each guest, you know, what their best mistake has been that has taught you the most. What would you say that is for you and either personally or one more cloud. What do you think?

Yeah, that's a tough one. There's all sorts of little mistakes I could think of, but we're looking for a juicy one here. I mean, I had a lot to learn in the early days about managing the operations of a business. I think for me, part of that Was not feeling confident in my own skills as a leader or as a CEO. So I had an original co founder. You know, we were basically equal partners. After about five years, he decided he wanted to kind of move on and exit. And so we. We worked on that and exited on great terms. He's actually back on my board of directors as of. You know, he's been on the board of directors for a while now, and great relationship, great guy. But when he left, I thought, oh, man, I don't have what it takes to run this company by myself. I need to find someone who's equally invested into it. So this combined with, I think, you know, a classic mistake is to hire the wrong person. And so when I went searching for another business partner, I hired the wrong person.

Yeah.

Good luck. You will always get that wrong, I think. Yeah. Like, it needs to be that organic thing so that that person truly is committed like you are. And that's. I don't know. That's hard, man.

Yeah.

And I thought. Yeah, and I thought I kind of had this.

This.

This assumption that I was only going to get that level of commitment from someone who was really, like, equal to me and pushing me. But. And there was some positives about it, and there were some negatives, but, like, someone who's at that level and who's a bad hire. Wow. Can do way more damage than someone, even your average hire, who's just kind of bringing in a specific role. So, you know, I had. I had to go through a lot of pain to fix that mistake and kind of protect the team. And I. I think through that is when I really assumed, really, the role, the mantle of CEO and really realized, like, no, I am. I have what it takes, and I have the ability to find really skilled people who can be motivated and want to come in and do this kind of work with me. And, you know, I think because of going through that mistake, I've had a lot of personal growth, and I don't know, it could have gone really badly. I could have, you know, just. Just been complacent about it. And I don't know that we would have survived, you know, through the kind of. This was maybe three years ago, the 2015 era, 2016. And that's a tough thing, man.

Yeah, good for you. Is exactly the right sentiment. No, because you're totally right. That could have gone. That could have killed the business for sure. It could have killed your confidence in your ability to run the business. Whether. Yeah. And that's really the key there is. You have to have that confidence and you have it. You know, you start a business, you have some early success, that's enough to kind of, you know, springboard off of. And then suddenly, you know, half of that mentally at least goes away and you gotta, you gotta step in and fill, fill that space yourself. Good for you. That's great, man. Yeah.

Yeah. Well, I mean, hiring the wrong person is almost always, always the thing. And I've had a few folks who, we get to a point of tension and we are able to sort of collaborate and manage our way through it. I've had a few folks who are, you know, I've had to make the hard decision that they should, you know, pursue their success elsewhere. And yeah, that's good. Some of those part on better terms than others, but it's, it's one of those really. I think any leader of a business kind of needs to learn that skill. And I think, I think if that is too easy for you, you probably have other problems. It probably should be hard.

Yeah, I would agree with that.

You can't call down to HR and say, hey, let's let a few hundred people go or whatever. Let this guy go. You have to manage it yourself.

I'll be on the golf course. That's right.

Definitely.

Very good. That's a powerful message. So you may have just told us this, but I'll ask it anyway. We've got thousands of small business owners listening to us here each week. And right now, if you can offer your single best piece of advice to those listeners, what would it be?

I think I have so many things I could talk about, but I think the number one has to be to really find and invest in a support system. I mentioned my coaching group earlier. I think that was definitely a turning point for me that helped. Gosh, I think when you're a leader and a manager, you serve so much to fix other people's problems and to be the listening ear and that kind of be that sounding board and helping to provide check ins and accountability and consistency for them. And you don't really, unless you look for it, you don't really have that for yourself. And so when I, you know, meet with this group of a dozen other CEOs and I get to, we all get to kind of, it's like a group therapy for CEOs. It's amazing. And I know other CEOs who you are either in some kind of like paid coaching relationship or have just kind of pieced together other people and you meet at a bar once a month and kind of Talk about stuff. It's sort of either way or honestly too. I think therapy or counseling is also really good. You just need to be able to take care of your own self health. One of my friends calls it mental floss. Just, you know, it's just something you got to do to make sure that you can take that time so that you can unburden yourself and talk about your problems and be a little bit selfish for a little while and have a listening ear. And all the better if people can collaborate and share stories about their own experiences and that can kind of give you ideas. Or in my case too. In the coaching group I'm in, sometimes it's nice to just go hear about other people's problems all day long and realize, oh my gosh, I'm glad I don't have those problems. I actually have it pretty good.

That's cool. And that is great advice. We've had a number of CEOs and business owners on the show that have all talked about those experiences. And to your point earlier, those groups kind of holding you accountable. I think that's a, that's some great advice finding that. You know, we talk a lot here about building your own board of directors, if you will.

Oh sure. I've got a board of directors also and that's been amazing because that's not just, that's not just social accountability. That is literal. I have empowered them with the legal authority to fire me. Right. Like that's real accountability.

Yeah, that's awesome.

Yeah, that's great.

Well, it's a fascinating story. It's a fascinating business that I knew nothing about before we started talking. Now I know just enough to get me into trouble. So that's great and we really appreciate you coming on and sharing your story. Open it up to us. What's the best way for our listeners to learn more about One More Cloud?

Yeah, well, we have OMC IO omc, short for One More Cloud is just kind of our general landing point for that'll kind of tell a little bit more about the business and link out to our products. So if folks need a search engine, you could go look up web, solar or Bonsai. And if anyone ever wants to follow me on Twitter, my handle there is NZ underscore. I'm annoyed at because I signed up for Twitter back in the day when single letter usernames were still available and I still for some reason signed up with my full first name, last name. So. But no, those are good ways to connect with us. I think we have some kind of mailing list, sign up on one of those sites.

Sure. That's great. Well, we really appreciate it. We wish you the best. We'll certainly like to keep in touch and have you come back on the show and let us know how things are going down on the road.

Sounds great. Yeah. Thanks again. This was fun.

Thanks for coming on the show. Really great stuff, folks. We will see you next week. In the interim, businessshow.co Facebook. You can join our support group and keep living that charmed life together. See you next week.