Build or Buy? The Software Crossroads | E10 – Hard Refresh – An ISSA Podcast

Sam.

Welcome, everyone, to another episode of Hard Refresh. We got a killer conversation today. Literally killer. It's either gonna kill software or expand software, so stick around and find out. But alongside me is my amazing co host, Karina Nef. And today we have Ryan from Pioneer, who's also been developing the Mycora or Quora software, proprietary software with Pioneer for the last little bit. And that's going to be the center of our conversation today. Ryan, welcome to the show.

Thanks, Kanan. Karina, excited to be here and talk about, I think, a really interesting subject. It's a really interesting topic.

It'll be fun. We have very different perspectives in this conversation today, and it's going to be amazing after we do a little bit of an introduction. Ryan, I actually forgot to give you a heads up on this, but. But maybe you've already known and prepared your two truths and a lie to kick us off. Sound familiar or do we need to give you a couple minutes?

Go ahead. Two truths and lies. You want me to give two truths and then one lie?

Yep. And, Karina, I expect you to blow this one out of the water.

Well, and I was going to say disclaimer. Ryan's probably one of my favorite people, so if I get this wrong, I will never forgive myself.

Ryan's like, I've been preparing for a long time to stump. Karina.

All right, so I'll give you here my three statements. I'm fluent in Spanish, I vacation in Europe, and I have web toes.

Okay. He absolutely is fluent in Spanish because obviously I know that because we speak Spanish together. Web toes. I don't think so, but. And did you say you vacation in Europe? Yeah, I'm. No, that's shenanigans. You do not vacation in Europe. I know you better than that. I know you a little bit better than that. So I'm going to say you do not vacation in Europe. You probably vacation out west with your family. All right, Kaden, what do you think?

I mean, you were so confident that I'm going to line up with you. But I will say this about the web toes. It could be very small. I had this swimmer associate in high school, long time ago that said that that was his competitive swim advantage and it was less like a little piece of skin. People were like, it's not really web toes, but it is. So maybe that's what you're leaning on. So I'll go with, yeah, you don't vacation in Europe either.

Yeah, I'll clarify. I've not vacationed, but I certainly would I would love to go one day. Just haven't made the time yet. But yes, that is. That was my one lie is I haven't been to Europe yet. This was very important to me with the web toes. I do get a lot of comments of, man, you must be a great swimmer. But I'm just your average, average normal Joe swimmer. So no competitive advantage here.

The doggy paddle. Right? That's funny. I've never been to Europe. In fact, here's something crazy. I have never been out of the country.

What?

Yeah. In all of my business travel, it's always been within the United States.

Do you even have a passport?

I haven't ever needed one.

It's time, Kaden.

I know. Where are. I've been trying to make a focus to get more in person with some of our larger portfolio companies, and some of them are based out of Canada. So literally like a month ago, I was like, I should probably start the application process. Just so I have it.

You should highly recommend going anywhere outside of the US Is beautiful.

Just anywhere better. Anywhere, anywhere.

We just got back two weeks ago from Mexico with the family. We went to Mexico City to visit some friends and it was. It was an incredible experience. It's the first time my kids got to experience another culture, being in another country, being totally lost because they don't speak Spanish. So the first thing my son said when we got back in the airport, he goes, I can read the signs again. And he was so excited because he didn't feel lost anymore. But what a great experience that I was happy that they could have at such a young age. A hundred percent, definitely great, great opportunities.

I. I've always dreamt of raising my daughter bilingual, and that means us parents have to, like, get on it. And so we've tried the duolingo Spanish learning approach, and it's actually really good. It's just you got to commit to it just like anything else that you want to master. So I have started and I know probably 10 words, and I can actually, if I see options in front of me, I've actually really gotten good at, like, being able to read it and know what it's saying, but processing like real time in a real conversation, that's like crazy hard. But anyways, we're not here to talk about Spanish or vacations any longer, but we have a quite the topic today. And that is the. Well, hold on. Wait, we skipped over. Yeah, quick control. Karina's like, don't skip me over.

You dare.

Let's hand it off to Karina. For some quick control. We got some. We got a lot coming up as we may do so.

Okay, so the very first thing is our podcast. So we do check out the roasted by AI Kaden. And I did a roasting via chat GPT and it is hysterical. So it's online now. Check that out. And then we also have the. More software, more problems with George. Super insightful. He's so smart. What they're doing over there, great conversation. And then we are going to next week we'll have funded and fumbled with Brian Snow and we have the CLX back on the calendar. So if you guys missed the CLX last time, do check this one out. It's June 24th. Topic is robotics. Super excited about that. And last but certainly not least, we're doing the July 15th webinar, our first webinar. So more, more details on that. And actually I lied. It's not the last but least. There's also the business growth series or strategies at Issa's headquarters that is June 10th through the 11th. Kaden and I are doing a workshop. We also have a live podcast with Brad Klein and Alex Crawley and we're doing some interviews in the morning with some other BSCs and some really great people. So check that out. There is a code. I'm not going to butcher it. I wrote it down. It's B as in Bravo, G as in green, s as in SAM 10. That is the code to get to exclamation point. Dang it. And that is for 10% off. So do check it out.

Yep. Okay. Well, a lot of exciting stuff coming up that the committee is heading up and it's a lot more going to be happening as we continue to build momentum. But today's topic, we're going to clear the cash on a on a topic today. Reset your thinking with the day and age of AI. This topic has been very, very much highly anticipated question, and that is the decision to build software in house or buying software off the shelf. AI is making software development much faster, much more streamlined. And Ryan has done this now twice pioneer his second time doing this of building proprietary software in house for the organization that he works with. So as our guest today, Ryan's going to give amazing mentorship and insights and how we should think about this topic and at the balancing act. And so that's actually where I want to start, Ryan is there's this balancing act, the cost and benefit balancing act. It's a very specific window that it would make sense. And so let's talk about that window. Let's talk about when Pioneer specifically decided to, to build proprietary in house tech. And like what, what benefits were you chasing that existing solutions couldn't offer or flexibility couldn't offer for you to, to start doing that?

Yeah, I think, let me give a little bit more of my background too as well. I think it'll help frame some of my, my opinions, some of the things that I've learned along the way. So when I got started as a software developer, um, I was hired on by a company in Purseville, Virginia and at the time they had just made this decision. They were, they made the decision to jump into let's build our own development team, let's build our own software. Their main product was they, they provide background screenings and they were specifically a wholesale provider of background screenings. So if you have ever done a background check and you went through a consumer reporting agency, they likely got that information from this company that I work for. And at the time the, you know, I was, I was a green developer so I was just excited to have a job. I was excited to just kind of get in there and get wet and, and start learning and how everything was done. This is probably around 2014, 1314 and and so a lot of the reasons why they decided that I understood at the time why they decided to, to go with their proprietor software was one, they were growing rapidly and the cost of their provider that they were currently using was increasing significantly. And so they were at a junction point where either the cost of their third party system would continue to increase or they could take that and start building their own software. So that was one of the big reasons, second reason why they decided to do it at that time as well was for customization. They had a very specific way that they ran their business. They had a very specific way that they wanted to continue to run their business and those third party systems were slow to adapt or could not adapt to those processes. So that was the second, I think big reason why they decided to build a team. And they went about it a little differently than Pioneer. And so I'll talk a little bit about the different ways of going down this path, but when they decided to go down it, they said okay, we're all in. They kind of just jumped into the deep end of the pool and, and they built a team, a software team about five strong right out the gate. And they had some stumbles along the way from doing that. Right, because they went from we're a background screening company, we know how to do background checks really well to how do we, how do we manage a software team? How do we even do this? And so, you know, they. They made some hires that probably weren't the best because they didn't know who they were trying to hire. They had some leadership changes and a lot of things. So for about the first year, there was very little progress, very slow progress. It took us a while to actually get the first product built and launched. And because we had such a large team, they had a large labor burden of developers. So it just, it kind of took a while to get the gears running. So that was my. I spent five years building that product with that team and learned a lot and learned some really great things while I was there. I've known Chase Carlos Charleston, the CEO of Pioneer, for a long time. He and I met in about 2013. While I was there, Chase and I would talk pretty regularly just about business strategy, different ideas, growth. He bounced ideas off me just because of my technical background. And around 2017, he and I had a conversation on the phone and basically he described some of the challenges that he was having at Pioneer was we're drowning in spreadsheets. We continue to grow, but it's hard, you know, you know, to, to go out and find a single product that can do everything that we need. It just doesn't exist. You know, back then there wasn't as many options or as refined options for cleaning companies. I know cleantelligent was around at the time Win Team was around, and so they were using some of Win Team. But part of it is understanding Chase is a very particular person and how he likes things done and how, you know, he has a very strong vision for the.

Of the century. No big deal. Continue.

Chase is an incredible. I have a lot of respect and love for Chase Carlson. He's an incredible person, incredible president and leader. And I think it's because of his particular listeness. Right. He's very opinionated about how he wants certain things done. I think that's what has made him and Pioneer so successful. So anyways, he said, you know, really would love to do something on our own to help bridge the gap of communication between departments. Like I said, his comment was, we're drowning in spreadsheets and how do we just get out of the spreadsheet world and actually build an actual database? How do we do some of these things? So actually I started building the initial versions of Quora in 2017, moonlighting. So I was still at Lauer's Risk Group building that product there, started moonlighting with Pioneer and for, I guess the next four years I continued to kind of just help Chase and Pioneer on the side growing it. And we built, we started building the inspection, we started building nightly reports. We started doing a lot of different things until eventually it got to a point where Pioneer had grown enough. This project Quora had grown to a point where Pioneer has become dependent on it. Farina came on board about that time and she had some really great vision and ideas for how we could take this software and run. So around 2021 was when sort of the, the convergence of all these things came together. And it made sense at that point for Pioneer to say, okay, let's bring Ryan on full time. Let's maybe get one or two more developers and actually start developing this more aggressively and more seriously. So just to kind of pause there, I want to kind of contrast the two different approaches here of starting your own internal software. One company jumped right into the deep end, spent a lot of money kind of figuring it out, stumbling along the way. They eventually did figure it out. We built a great product and inevitably, ultimately what happened with Lauer's Risk Group was they were, they merged with one of their competitors through private equity. And that software that we built became kind of part of a larger organization. So it was the seed of something much bigger versus Pioneer. Started off very small. Let's just proof of concept one, two things. Okay, that's working. Let's slowly grow it so it's a little bit more organic and a little bit more bootstrapped with Pioneer until we got to a point where one, the company was more financially ready to bring on two, someone like me and to continue to support a project like that for the long term. And so that's kind of an interesting, I think, side by side comparison of two different ways. I do think that AI is, is kind of changing this context, changing the story a little bit because the cost per line of code is dropping dramatically as smarter tools are coming on board, as, as more sophisticated coding tools and agents are, are becoming, being developed. So there's a lot of really interesting things that we'll be able to talk about there. So to kind of go back, I think to your question there, Kaden, was what is that cost benefit analysis? What are the drivers that would are important for you to consider when deciding, okay, do we build our own or do we go out and get something else? And really it comes down to two things. One is, well, the first one is cost. Whatever you think it's going to cost, you multiply it by four. And however long you think it's going to take you multiply it by four. Right. It's going to take a lot longer. It's going to be a lot more expensive than whatever you think it's going to be. And that's kind of just how it is.

Unfortunately, since you were being generous for years, we always said it was 10. Multiply it by 10. But maybe AI is making it down to four. It's. Yeah.

And these are the clear differences between men and women, ladies and gentlemen. I always say times two because I'm very, it's girl math in my head. I'm like times two. You said four, you said 10. I have to somehow come up a little bit. I'm okay with three.

That's right. Yeah. You really do have to consider these software projects, not as one time projects. I think that's one of the first pitfalls that I do want to talk about is that a lot of business leaders, they think we're going to spend $50,000 and we're going to get this app and then it's going to, it's going to completely change our business and it's going to be awesome. And that is, that is a huge fallacy to think that it's, it's just a one time thing. Every software has ongoing maintenance, ongoing costs. And so yeah, the initial Investment may be $50,000 to get X up and running and going, but it's going to be some number every single month that you're going to have to continue to invest in that product, either in developer time, it's going to be server costs, there's going to be, there's lots of costs that go into it. And so you have to really consider, am I willing to take on this software child and put the resources into it that it needs to grow and mature into the software adult that one day in the future I hope it will become. But it's definitely, you have to really lengthen your time horizon for what you think you're going to use this product for and really understand the ongoing costs. And so you have to look at your organization and say, can we bear that burden? Because it's probably for the first six months you're going to be bearing a lot of that upfront costs and upfront burden without any of the benefits.

Yeah.

And then even when it does come online. Yeah. At least. Right. Depending on the scope and how large the project is. And then once it is online, it takes time to build that momentum to train your team to adopt it into your, you know, to your processes and Then it takes time for that to kind of see the benefits and start to see it. Pioneer, we started, like I mentioned, in 2017 on the side. We started to see some of those benefits initially through efficiency of our times. Like I mentioned, the first module that we built was inspections. And so we measured success in how many inspections can our quality control team get done? And it went from they can do four a week to 15 a week. Right. Because now they can spend more time in buildings, less time building reports. So that was success, but we didn't necessarily see increased revenues from that. It was just now we have a better quality product. As that process sort of integrated itself into Pioneer further, then we could start to tell the story to our clients of when we're making bids. We've got this great technology. We use this inspection tool. It helps us provide a better, better service to you. You get these reports and it probably wasn't until 2019, maybe 2020, when you started to see, I guess, revenue coming in as a result of that product. Right. But you're looking at three years after we started building it. So there's quite a long time horizon there. And part of that is because Pioneer chose to go slowly with it. But I think most business leaders should understand that if you're looking for immediate revenue impact or bottom line impact, you're not going to see it initially. You kind of have to look for it in the margins of, well, we have better quality now. Even though that didn't necessarily translate into a number at the bottom of the.

P and L. Yeah, a hundred percent. And it's not. And that's not unique just to building in house. That's like software implementation in general. One of the things, Ryan, as you were talking, I thought of was this hidden pitfall, like can, can we create a measurement here in someone's mind that says, hmm, is this applicable? Applicable to me or not? And one of the things I would lean on is, well, how well have you implemented technology that is off the shelf right now? If you can't even have a strategy to implement off the shelf software, your style and your cultural ability as an organization is probably going to really struggle, which means it's going to be even longer if you even arrive at all on building software in house. Because there's a muscle that has to be exercised here, which is. Which sounds like Chase, which I've never met Chase. He needs to get on this podcast, guys.

Yeah, you would really love him. You guys are cut from the same.

That vision is so critical from a leader. And then Second to that vision is capacity to execute on it. And so maybe just as like an internal barometer for people listening, how well have you been implementing software? How well can you put strategy together? How well can you execute? And at that point then I would say hey you know what, it's not a, it's not a bad idea to go explore that route because software is 10 times more expensive to build in house than off the shelf initially. And in the long terms of scaling those might flip but most people don't ever arrive there. Like we've had customers that have failed for years at software implementation on their own and they finally switched to us and it was just like that wasn't the bad right or wrong decision but it was the consequence of the lack of clarity and strategy to take the internal software and actually develop in some because you want to hire a full time developer that's really talented. You're looking at 120 to 180000 a year in today's day and age. Most off the shelf software doesn't even come nearly close to that software on the smaller business side. So like be thinking about these, these concepts of just like and again AI. Ryan, I loved what you said. AI is going to bring that cost per, you know, line of code down but it's not significant enough yet. We don't have Sam Altman, CEO of ChatGPT saying today you can just say hey I have the software and I want to do that. And then boom, it's created back in data provider service. Scalability is done by the thought, you know, maybe one day.

But well and I love relationship too. Like I think one of the things that you have to think through not just from implementation adaptation but optimization. Right. Like I always I was where I started with service CEO. I quickly understood that the platform was not being optimized. They were only using a 10%, 20% just the client names and addresses. And then I was like let's do email merge, let's do batch processing, let's do crystal reports. And so thinking through that and to your point Kayden, like if you don't have a good relationship with tech already with the systems you're you're using, how can you expect to build something and transfer over those comp. Those elements of adaptation, implementation optimization, those are critical components.

Yeah. Now I've had many people ask me kind of the same question and I always, my answer today is always if you have not exhausted the software that's already available to you, then you should not be Building your own, you need to absolutely attempt and try and use any third party system today that's already built. Because building it your own is going to cost way more and it's going to take way longer. And so you have to have really a really strong need before you go and build it your own or go out on your own, because it is, it's going to be a lot more expensive. As far as AI, we're definitely marching in that direction. Hopefully one day we do get little coding agents that are sophisticated enough that I can just manage them and I don't have to write it anymore. That's just me. I think I'm unique in that perspective. Well, I think a lot of people actually are hoping for that.

But now if you ask my developers, they want the same ability to hand off. And there's a lot of hype around AI of what it can do. Just ask any real developer and they'll give you the real truth of what it can't do. Still today, it's a long ways off, but it's progressing, it's headed that direction. And that's the coolest part, is that the direction is being attempted to arrive at. But you can't make that happen by thought prompting today.

No. Yeah, definitely not. So that was actually right before the podcast, before we started. That's what I was doing. And I have. I'm using a product called Cursor. One of the things that I hate doing most is writing automated tests. And I think 95% of developers would agree with me on that, that it's a tedious task that is necessary. It's like a necessary evil. And fortunately coding agents have made that a lot easier. So I can point it to a specific function and I say, write a test for this function and it'll write it out, but it doesn't get it right on the first try. And you know, it takes someone like me to kind of look at and be like, okay, you failed here and you suck there and, and let me fix this and. But it still speeds up my time. It did 80% of it and I didn't have to think about that. So now the boilerplate's there and I can finish it and a lot quicker than I would have and I'm spending less mental energy on it. And so when I'm done and I move to the next task, I have much lower burnout. Right. So now I'm able to kind of get more done throughout the day. Cause I'm not as focused and burning as much energy in the moment. So that's, that's where I'm hoping, you know, AI agents, that's, that's where it's helping today is reducing the, the mental burn. It's. And just providing sort of 50 to 60% of that initial boilerplate and that's what's helping to bring the cost down. So where, yeah, if you were to build your own, you would need kind of that one anchor developer that can lead and that can architect and can take the business requirements and translate them into technical requirements. You need that one person. That person like you you mentioned is not cheap. Right. Depending on what market you're in, you're looking at 150 to over $200,000 in salary for that type of person. And so yeah, there's, there's no way that you can justify doing that before going out looking at what does the market already offer me, what can I take off the shelf and try to implement today? And if you haven't gone through that part yet, then you're not, you're not even close to being ready to starting your own software project.

Yeah. Amen. It just made me start thinking about for the listeners what we could kind of outline and if you were to say, well I don't want to manage multiple systems, I want to build my. All in one. Very dangerous statement by the way, if you aren't truly ready to tackle it, there's this because we experienced it in the beginning and unfortunately we've had the repercussions as a software. We ended up bringing our software to market very quickly and then it was so clear that the way we operate, we operated as a building service contractor before we came to market. Guess what? Did not translate to how everyone else wants to operate. So it's so different. So then you also have to start building in all of that. And that's why off the shelf software holds its place. Now I kind of want to point out, and this might be on the more expensive analogy side, but so let's break down business software into a few categories that if you were a full on embracing of off the shelf software, you're looking at like a financial system, an operations system, a CRM sales marketing system. Those are some of the big ones. Right. So you're going to at least would be one.

I add to that as well.

HR Yep. 100%. These 4, 5, 6 systems at most, probably for the majority of the size of the industry, what these systems are going to cost for all of them on the expensive side is still less than 50 grand. A year to operate these off the shelf systems most of the time. And much, much, much cheaper than that when you're towards the SMB side. So to like to just put that into perspective, finding your ability to balance between both initiatives and say, hey, you know what, I really want to explore this path. We have super unique processes and that's the thing I'm going to challenge. 99% of this industry does not have unique processes. Don't have leaders like Chase that have a vision that's so set and unique, that's admirable and that's amazing. That's not the majority of the industry. And so there, there is a balance of, unless you're in that category, to be aware of coming in and just being like, all right, I want this feature, I want this feature. All right, we're building the exact same stuff that existed out in these tools that doesn't leverage a competitive advantage for it being in house. Why are we building this? Right. So I actually would love to. And Karina, I want your thoughts on where we're at so far in the conversation before we hop back to you. Ryan, but kind of to cue this up, Ryan, at what point did you really start to see this true separation in the features you were developing and like, moving forward, how is that going to be the mindset of, hey, we're going to make sure that what we need as Pioneer gets addressed that's unique compared to trying to then fit a mold that everyone can fit. And there's again, there's pros and cons to both. But.

Well, so I wanted to touch on one thing and I, I'm not sure exactly what my question was, Kaden, but I do think like the leader part of it, like one of the things that I'm hearing a lot is a lot of companies obviously want to create their own software and they want to create something that's unique to them because they're frustrated. Right? They're frustrated the fact that things aren't working and they have to find workarounds. But one of the things that I think makes Pioneer so unique and it's Chase really is a visionary when it comes to leadership style when it comes to innovation. But he also built a team that can support that vision. And that was Ryan. Right. And me. And so there was other people in that component and Dana, for example, like, we all fulfilled a different thing that is required to be part of, to build tech within an organization. Because I was very much like, oh my gosh, we could build all these amazing things, like I was very creative and Ryan was very tactical, very like, what is the problem we're solving and how are we going to do this? He was very, he is very methodical and logical and not that I'm not logical, but he. It's just a beautiful medley of the two. And Dana's super creative and, and so Chase is the one that's doing the ship. All this to say like, you do need to have a culture that is embracing that and people within your tech team that can support a mission and, and different skill sets attribute to that. And so if you only have one person in your organization that is the president or, or the CFO that really wants this product, but everybody else doesn't really get in line with that or they don't understand product, it becomes incredibly difficult because just working with a product company is not going to fulfill really what you want, in my opinion.

Yeah, I think, I think that, that can't be stated strongly enough, Karina, that having the right team around you because it's not a one person thing. Like you can't just hire one person to come and build it. Like I could not build what I'm doing without the rest of the pioneer team. You know, I mean Karina was there, she was helping come with so many creative ideas and then everybody else like, I can't do it alone. And so it's 100%. And then to your question, Kaden, I think Karina's biggest frustration with me is when I would say, well, we're not going to reinvent the wheel. She'd come and she'd say things like, we need to build a CRM in the cora. We need to have time tracking in Quora. We need to have this and that. And I'm like, those exist Red flag. They exist for a reason. That's very complicated software. Oh, we need, we need to build in like all these charts and reports into Core. I'm like, that's called the BI tool, right? Those exist. Let's go buy it. I don't need to, I don't need to spend my time building that or you know, go get our own CRM. Let's get that. And, and so I think that's really important to keep in mind. What if, if you decide to go down the road of, of building your own product is really identifying though the lane that you're, that you want your product to be in and really resist the urge. And it is a temptation to, to rebuild features that already exist somewhere else in a product that you're already Using it's very tempting and very challenging to do so. But the reason that, the reason that temptation exists, right, is because you want this utopia where all your data's in one place and you're able to have perfect clarity and you can easily be this awesome data driven organization and all of your managers are making the perfect decisions because they have the perfect data at the perfect time that they need it.

Right?

And it's, and that is, it's a very difficult place to get to if you're not a multi billion dollar company with hundreds of millions of dollars to spend on this type of project. That's not the case for any of us or any of our list listeners. So for me, my damn always asking that question does you know, like Karina said, what is the problem, what are we trying to solve and what is the best way to solve it? You know, the best way isn't always building it into cora and a lot of times that was my response and that was the decision. I don't know if that's why Karina left because we said no to too many of her ideas, the idea person, if she needs to run, but I know that's not the reason. But that's definitely. How do you stay within that lane, how do you set those bounds and how do you position your product, what you're building within this ecosystem of things? And so we've made strategic decisions to say that like we're not doing time tracking in Quora because that's what our H R I S system does. We're not doing accounting and financing tasks in Quora because that's what WIN Team does and that's what your ERP system does. You know, we don't do email tracking and communication tracking in Quora because that's what the CRM does. What we've decided to do is take an approach of saying, all right, where is that source of truth? Right, for that particular information, for that data. And where we're working today is now we know where those sources of truth are, we know where the information is, let's go ahead and centralize it into a type of data warehouse so that we can have the information one place so we can run those reports, so we can do the bi, the business analysis. But the data can live and be managed in the respective systems where they need to be. So that's a big initiative for us today is we're not trying to make Quora be anything and everything, but it is a system of truth for operational information, operational data. And now let's marry that in our own data warehouse with our financial data with our HR system and let's see where that gets us as we automate sort of the ETL processes and our data analytics. And so once we get to that point, that's sort of our next stage and then once we get there then we can start to look at all right now how do we really leverage this information to proactively have more predictive analytics? Right. How do we proactively predict what our staffing needs are going to be pre identifying clients that may be having issues that we couldn't see before. And so we can proactively reach out and say, you know, and, and work with that client and hopefully prevent someone leaving us. So things like that. And that's where you know a lot, where having that data warehouse is going to be a big part. And having our own proprietary product has helped with that because it's given us sort of the technical in house knowledge to build a lot of that in house. But it's also, you know, we have all that data and we're in control of it. But I certainly having our own software, should we not build in our own software if we didn't have core, if we used clean intelligent and we used some other one or O2V sorry, I keep forgetting you guys renamed. I apologize for that. Otv. Say we used otuv. You know, we, we could still have this data warehouse. We could still do these analytics even if we used a third party system. So that wasn't necessarily like don't think that you would have to have your own system to get to there to that point that's not the case because we didn't build our erp, we didn't build our HRS systems, but we're pulling that data all together in one place.

Yep.

So I think kind of going back to this, do I build or do I buy? Like I said, you really gotta have a strong business use case to build before you get there and you have to exhaust all your buy options first because there's not much that unless you really do have strong customization needs. And you're like, yeah, we have a ton of extra cash coming in and we don't know what else to invest it in. So let's go for it. Right. I don't think many of our listeners fall into that category, but if you do and you're like let's then that might be a good reason to go do it.

Go ahead, Karina.

I was just gonna say I learned a lot about discipline When I was with Pioneer, and that was one of the things that I took away. And now I do say the same thing, like, don't build something that already exists. Like don't create something that's already in the market. The trick now is to integrate with those things, to Ryan's point, like creating that single source of truth, making sure that your systems are connected so that it all funnels and serves the internal stakeholders, really where you need to be at. You do not need to create something and it's already. Because that's a waste of money. And so just making sure that you understand that and what's possible once you integrate. So that's essentially what you want. You want to be able to serve both your team members internally and you also want to serve your external stakeholders, your clients. So data really allows you to do that. You just have to connect.

Yeah. Your UDIS concept, Karina, has really become such a future proofing mindset that people need to adopt because analytics and data exists within the silo of each of its own systems reporting and stuff. There's a moment where you have all of these five different platforms to capture this vision, to create this ability to connect your HRIS systems, your financial systems, all of these pieces to then tell a story. But here's the interesting catcher is data is just raw data and most people will not be able to make sense of it. You have to be able to understand the story it needs to tell. So even at this, Ryan, you mentioned an ETL layer that exists for, for layman's terms for the audience and trying to figure out it, picture it as like everything funneling through a unified piece of being able to read data. And maybe there's a better way to explain it, Ryan. But yeah, this concept of trying to get insights is even the next challenge because when you arrive at, hey, I have all this data in front of me, well, what does it mean? How do I interpret data? And it's to an industry that doesn't have a muscle that's been exercised on how to read data. So these are even next level pieces. A lot of software is going to turn into those that have taken it to the idea of like, hey, I want to go build my own tool. They just start, I want this feature, I want this feature. And they create this behemoth of a pot mess. That hodgepodge can't give you insights. Like we've been in those situations before. And it's, I mean, it's taken us 20 years to focus and dial in our initiative. What kind of software. We want it to be where we're going, all of those things. We've so many of the same conversations usually. Karina, I am the also idea person and over the last few years I've had to exercise my own muscle to be like, no, let's focus, let's follow one course until we're successful. Service titan, huge model to look after. For those of you who don't know, Service titan is a software that went public a few months ago. $9 billion public IPO, incredibly successful. They did not start there. And it came through acquisitions, it came through strategic alignments and that is enterprise level grade software for maybe closer to those all in ones that you're talking about. Even that kind of stuff does exist, Ryan, to kind of circle it back. Go exhaust all of your research and options before you choose the path of building because it's a long road and it's very expensive and times those statements by a thousand when you don't know what you're doing.

Yep, we're in our eighth year at Pioneer Building, Quora. And so it just kind of gives you an idea that nobody, when we started we weren't thinking eight years down the road, right? We were just thinking we need, we need inspections and now we need nightly reports. And here we are eight years down the road and we're thinking, gosh, we kind of have this thing and let's, let's see if others can use it too. So we'll see, you know, we'll see if pioneers processes match. Like you, you made the point right, where you went to market and you realized nobody does it the same way. And so we'll see. And we're excited, we're excited to kind of take this next step. But, but yeah, it's certainly taken a while to get there. You know, eight years and over a million dollars kind of give a point of reference for people to, to consider.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Well, Karina, any final thoughts from you?

Yeah, I mean, so one of the things that I was thinking through, I just had a client meeting last week and we were talking about, you know, we connected the systems and, and they're super jazzed. They're looking at the dashboards that we're making. And so one of the things that he challenged me on, which I thought was super interesting because I look at data in a different lens specifically because this is what I do, right. So my, my way to digest data I think is different. But what he said to me was, okay, Karina, essentially what we're doing here is we're gathering the information. I data and then we're processing the information. And then it's the so what? This. What, hold on. The so what of this data? Like, what does this mean? And then you get to the final stage. And I was like, I love that. That's so clear. Gather, process and then so what? And so I think that is something too. As you think through building, the question of are you going to build something? Why are you going to build something? What data or information or analytics are you looking from that thing that. Because ultimately I think that's what people are looking for as well, to make better business decisions and to be able to predict things in their business and use. Then you can start to use things like the AI tools, things that enhance the technology that you're building. But it's a really long. To Ryan's point, it's a really long journey. The relationship is very complex. And so there's a lot of variables. We don't want to discourage anyone from building, but we want to be honest about what really it entails. Because I do get that question so much like, should I just build my own thing? And I'm like, it's not as easy as a yes or no. I have to ask you millions of questions.

Yeah, it. It literally, I think of it this way. And to plug in what Karina and I are doing representing the committee at Otuvi, we've had this internal process when we have customers come on board about the idea of how is a software tool going to help you become more efficient, more streamlined? Those are kind of the same words, but it's, it's related to three core aspects of a business. When you're, you're in business to make money, right? So what controls, what controls revenue? It's three things. It's your acquisition of customers, it's your retention of customers, and it's your ability to expand current customers. That's where revenue comes in as a business, in a reoccurring model business, which, this, this method we're going to bring to market for free and start sharing it at the Business Growth Strategies Conference. Unrelated, directly, really from Otuvi, it's just, it's the method. It's the methodology behind when I'm evaluating software in a problem. Can I look at it through the lens of where is this going to help me acquire, retain or expand customers? Because that's the bottom line. That's the roi. It's going to come from one of those three categories, which is a revenue generation of some kind, right?

Yeah.

So be sure to come to the business growth strategies. Remember that there's a code that we have given BGS 10, exclamation point, that gets you 10% off the ticket price. Right. On Issa's website. Maybe I'll drop the link in the YouTube description of this video. It's a month and like eight days away. A month and eight days. So book your tickets.

I cannot believe we're in May. Like, what is happening with the year. It's flying by, so.

But that's a wrap on today's episode. Ryan, amazing insights. Thank you for joining the podcast today. And I hope, I hope this is a more listened to one because it's a very dominating question. Not even in, just in the cleaning industry. This is just a dominating question in the world because people are thinking more about what AI can solve. And can AI do all this for me? Hopefully you found this insightful. If you did, comment on the video where this is being posted, offer your perspective, offer your feedback and then let us know. What other topics do you want us to cover? Karina and I are always looking for guests to bring these insights to you, and this is to help leverage. This is an Issa podcast and this network is to educate and inform the industry as a whole through Issa. And so if you have those insights, please share them. And that's a wrap on today. Thanks, everyone.

Thanks, guys. Great job, everyone.

Thanks. Kay and Karina.

Yep, you bet.