133 - Empowering Employees and Transforming Lives: Inspiring Work with Laserfiche's with Karl Chan

Welcome to Listening with Leaders. I'm Doug Noll, lawyer turned peacemaker. I teach executive leaders how to listen to emotions rather than words so that they can become the leaders everyone wants to follow. And I teach those same leaders how to be authentically present, available, and connected to their families despite being insanely busy. I have learned that we are 98% emotional and only 2% rational. Learning how to listen to emotions is, in my experience, the foundational skill of life. Stick around to the end of the show and I'll reveal how you can be on our next guest in 15 to 20 minutes. So let's get started.

Carl Chan, welcome to Listening with Leaders. You are the CEO of Laserphish, founded Laserphish fiche.com. Welcome to the show.

Thanks for having me, Doug.

So Carl, you're a rarity. I, I, I interviewed you, uh, on Authority Magazine, and what caught my attention was that you have been with the same company for 30 years, and you started out when the company only had 8 employees. So you were junior, the junior guy, and today you're the CEO. And as you remarked just a moment ago, what's even more remarkable is you survived in a family-owned business.

Uh, yes, that is correct.

So tell us a little bit about your backstory and how all this came about.

So, uh, I'm actually coming up on my 35th year at Laserphish. Wow. So, um, as I was growing up, uh, my peers would be, uh, playing video games, but I was actually more interested in winning, but I didn't want to spend all the time playing, so I would end up, uh, trying to hack the system. And from there, I got really interested in software and figuring out how things work. And eventually I ended up studying engineering and I ended up at a large aerospace company. But in that large company, I felt whatever I did, I was not making an impact. I could just not come to work and The world would still continue. And so when this opportunity came out that there was this company called Laserfiche doing a paperless office, you know, digitizing paper, converting them into digital systems, I felt that was, you know, I felt that was my calling. And so I joined. Like I said, my My job, my career here is a little bit unconventional. People say, why do you keep on? Are you still there at the same place? And sometimes people who stay at the same place stay at the same job, but I actually do hop from job to job. The only difference is I stayed at the same company and luckily the company grew, you know, from a small startup to this large multinational company where we have offices in different countries. And I was able to move from job to job and grow with the company. And I got lots of different positions in all different departments. I worked in development, I worked in IT, I worked in support, I worked in accounting. I even worked a little bit in marketing. I really worked my way up, sort of, so to speak, in the, in the most classic way possible.

And I imagine that you were trained as a, as a software engineer, but you've had to learn a whole bunch of other skills along the way.

I think that most of the skills is just really problem solving, whether they're in software and they're in hardware, or they're just people problems or business problems. It's, it's really just problem solving.

And do you find that when you talk about, you're talking about problem solving in sort of a generic way, it strikes me that you have to develop different skills to solve different kinds of problems.

Yeah, and it does help to work in those different areas to actually understand a little bit about, you know, when I did a little bit of accounting, I go, oh, things don't work as I thought it worked. You know, you have to learn that part. And then when you go to marketing, you go, oh, Oh, it's different than development and everything is different.

So whenever you went into a new role, it sounds like you had to learn it, learn the business of the department that you were in or the division you were in, and then that allowed you to apply your problem-solving skills once you understood what the business was all about.

Yes. So it really is almost like jumping to a different company and starting from the bottom up again.

But that was— was that ever— was that ever intimidating for you?

I felt that in some cases, uh, when the opportunity opened up, uh, in the beginning I felt that, uh, did I really volunteer for that position? In some cases I felt really comfortable in my current position, and I felt that the door was opened and And people just shoved me through the door.

Or off the cliff, right?

Or they had more confidence in me than I had in myself to be able to accomplish the job. And so that's, it was great that they had my back and said, yes, I know that this position has opened up. I know you can do it, even though I felt that I may not be able to do that. And in times it was. Really scary and to actually go into something completely different.

I have to say that you probably, yeah, you gotta have a lot of courage to be able to do that and a lot of faith in people around you and in yourself to think that I'm gonna figure this out.

I think it's more faith because I worked with the founder of the company who was, the founder of the company was a woman called Nailing Wacker and she brought, you know, built this company from nothing. And so a lot of these opportunities, she says, I think you're the best person for this job. And it was hard for me to say no.

Got it. You don't say no to the founder.

Yeah.

You don't say no to the founder.

Even if you think, well, I don't know whether I can do this or not.

There were a lot of times which I thought she was wrong. And then in the end, I found out I was wrong. So eventually I got to the point where I had faith in saying, oh yeah, she really does know a lot more than I do.

So, so today you've been with the company for what, 35 years now? And you're the CEO. You've seen a lot. What gets you excited to get up in the morning and go to work?

So, What Laserfiche does is it does a lot of digital transformations for company. It produces a software which helps move companies from the paper age into digital age. Like I said, we started out with document imaging, and that's what got me hooked into it. But eventually we moved into records management, document management, a lot of workflow, And, and now we're doing a lot of office automation. So we're taking these companies into the digital age. And what really makes, gets me excited is that all these companies that were helping out, one of the, an example would be the city of Long Beach. The Long Beach Police Department has a program called the GUIDES program. They call it the Government User Integrated Diversion Enhancement System. So this is a big long acronym called GUIDES. And so it started out having the police, because of all homelessness in the city, their police has really become an extension of social services. It is very expensive to take a person and put them in jail. The cost of housing a person is almost the same as putting 'em in, you know, a 5-star hotel. It is a very expensive thing. And it's actually a lot more cheaper and it's actually better for the person to actually put them into a shelter or some kind of halfway house. So there's a diversion in which they can move them from the justice system into social services. But the police must be empowered to be able to do this. So the, so our software helps, you know, build this application which gives the law enforcement personnel access to resources like whether this person has been has been moved into a diversion facility, or they have scheduled an appointment, or they left, or they missed it, and they can come up and say, oh, I've noticed that you've been scheduled to go to this facility, but you missed your appointment. Can I take you there instead of putting you in jail?

So in that particular application, you've got a database presumably a database of homeless people. As law enforcement encounters homeless people, they enter data, and then you can track really what's—

Yeah, you're gonna track. It's like their case information that is tracked in the system to help them, um, figure out. So when you divert them, it's not just any facility. That's fine, because there are a lot of resources within the city. Some handle mental illness, some just handle homelessness, some handle substance abuse, uh, some have, you know, 3 beds open, some have 2 beds open, some are men only, some are women only. So you really have to be able to divert them to the right facility.

And, and, and the software application that you people have—

yeah, and to be able to have that app thing accessible from a mobile device, that's really powerful. Wow. So that's the eventual dream of this, that we're getting into that, to be able to do something like that.

I'm just curious, how many employees does Laserfiche employ?

A little under 400.

Wow, that's a crowd. And you say that you've got offices all over the world?

Yes, we have offices in Shanghai, we have office in Guadalajara, in Toronto, in Ireland.

Hmm. When you, as you think about your long career, what's it, that you think that's been unique about you that you've been able to bring to the table that's made you successful and also made the company successful?

I feel that there's a— I do a lot of long-term planning. So I'm trying to say, what is the— what's the problem I'm trying to solve? Not for today, but what is the actual root cause of the problem that we're trying to solve and actually try to solve that that big class of problem.

So I, I, that strikes me as being analytical. You have an analytical ability to look at root cause of problems and then from there start developing solutions.

Yeah, and usually my solutions are, yes, there may be a short-term solution, but we also have to put a long-term solution to actually solve this and actually move the system into a higher level.

Right. Don't want to just treat the symptoms.

You want to— Yeah, I talk about, you know, we're not just putting lipstick on a pig, but we're trying to make pigs fly. That's what we're really trying to do.

And that's, I take it, that's a philosophy that is, that you try to imbue throughout the culture of the company.

Yeah, we do a lot of digital transformation, like I mentioned, and there are a lot of software out there that are talking about digitization and automation, and there's this fear of, you know, people losing jobs over this. But our philosophy is that we're basically, we're tackling human-centered digital transformation. Our job is to actually improve the life of the people that the software is meant to serve. So an example, a very interesting story was I had a customer once a couple of years ago came up and said, look, this is what we automated. We automated our Secret Santa process and we used your software to do that. And so when I first heard that, I go, wow, that seems to be a complete waste of time. You know, we're there's so much things that you can automate in businesses and you automated your Secret Santa process. How is this even, why is this even important? And it took me, you know, it just kept on bothering me and overnight I was thinking about, thinking about, then all of a sudden I realized, you know, if you were, if you had a problem and it was, in— directly affected the software that was directly handling the line of business, your IT would be directly on it. But the further and further away you get, you get less and less resources. So if you are at a university or you're handling student services and you couldn't bring in students, the system was down, someone would be on it immediately. But if it was an adjacent service or, you know, 3, 4, 5 levels away, something breaks down, they would say, you know, file a ticket and you, you know, you wouldn't hear from them ever again. So the Secret Santa actually represents a process to a specific work group that's really important to this group of people, but it may not be in line with what the main company's line of business app would be. And so if these people can actually automate the processes that are important to them, if they can operate, if they can automate the Secret Santa process, then it shows that they are enabled or empowered to automate the processes that are important to them. And they hold their own, you know, they control their own future for that and they don't have to rely on IT.

That is amazing. The fact that the, and what is even more amazing is that they were able to take your company's software And yeah, I've heard the same thing with fantasy football leagues at work where people do that too.

And so, you know, these, these weird, uh, one-off stories that, that are— it's, it's inspirational to see that.

Yeah, I can see that. Um, this, you know, when you see applications like that, these are things that you would have never thought of. As you develop, as you develop the software. And I can see that it would be inspirational to see people taking, taking this tool that's been created and use it in ways never imagined. But that, to your point, is really empowering. That's a pretty good—

Yeah. So you talk about Secret Santa, that is a complete edge case. We have other cases, like we have like logistics companies where they automate their, um, they digitize their electronic flight bags where they where the flight routes, the cargo, and everything else is done that, and the pilots access the information through iPads. And, you know, pilots all love that because they don't have to carry around, you know, big stacks of, uh, big stacks of paper anymore, right? So, you know, that's a business application. But you might tell people, and people says, okay, that's not that inspirational.

But when you start moving off to the Secret Sans and fantasy football leagues, it's, uh, Well, I can tell you as a pilot, being able to download and have on my iPad all of my flight plans, all of my charts, weather, everything on my little iPad compared to the old days. I started flying in 1977, uh, yeah, '77, '78, and everything was paper then.

Yeah. So that, that type of story, which I, which we had a, a customer, you know, a major logistics company, and I was surprised that, you know, they were still doing paper until you know, just recently.

And then they got the tool that allowed them to get rid of the paper.

Yeah, and then they just went electronic, I think, within the last couple of years.

In our Authority Magazine interview, you talked a lot about communication and the importance of communication. Tell me more about that and the importance of listening in your work.

So I think my, my entryway into learning about listening was I, I talked about having a lot of different jobs. So my first job here was actually in coding because I had this, the, they said, okay, you're a programmer, you started coding. But since the company was very small and, uh, I ended up bringing my lunch in for work. And so when everybody left, I was one of the few people in the office. And so they said, well, since you're here in the office, why don't you man tech support during lunch? And so I said, okay, how bad can that be? But, you know, sitting in for tech support during lunch is, uh, Tech support is a very difficult job. You know, I empathize with that. You know, when people call in tech support, they're not calling, say, have a great day.

Right.

You know, the software is working perfectly. Just stop by to say hi or stop by and say thank you. People have problems and they have, you know, they're usually at their wit's end before they start calling you. So, you know, listening to the problems on the phone, and back then there was no video calls that, you know, when I was, when I was picking up the phone, I was literally picking up the phone and trying to, you know, work people through problems. And a lot of times it's a lot of emotion that you have to get over before you start solving the problem. So that's my introduction into listening on the job.

How did you— tell me how you learned how to deal with people's anger and emotion and frustration.

A lot of that is recognizing that it is emotion first. There's, in tech support, there's the emotional part as well as the technical part. And I you have to solve the emotional part first before you can get to the technical part. If you end up jumping to the technical part first and you do not solve the emotional part, you're going to have a hard time running through that, trying to solve the problem.

I think you snuck into my graduate class up at Pepperdine. That's what I teach my graduate students at— I teach at the Strauss Institute of Dispute Resolution up in Malibu. And in my class on decision-making, I teach— I teach my students, de-escalate, then problem solve. Do not problem solve first. You've got to de-escalate before you problem solve. And you do that by listening to emotions.

So a lot of this is like on the job you learn it. Because I remember Nailing, when she, the founder of our company, she said everything she learned about customer service, she learned from her waitressing job during college. And that's another stressful job too.

Yeah. So how do you— I mean, your skills sound pretty extraordinary. How do you pass those skills down to your employees? You've got 400 human beings. How do you make sure that everybody's kind of on the same page around communication and listening, and especially listening to emotions and that sort of thing?

I think that's still a challenge for me. We're still working through that. Getting everybody on the same page. I recently had, I think I was introduced to this other concept of when you have, when you get everybody to talk in a room, because I've heard that, you know, you try to get everybody to be having a very inclusive conversation. I've heard this technique where someone said you should have the least experienced person talk first and then you have the most experienced person talk last. Because if you reverse it, if the most experienced person in the room talks first, everyone else shuts up.

Yep. And, and as a— that's absolutely correct. And as a corollary to that, you want, you want to make sure that all your introverts speak up and you've got, and you've got to know who they are and you've got to call them out.

Yeah. So, Carl, yeah, I've used that technique.

You're being quiet over there. You're thinking a lot. You're a really bright guy.

What do you—

what's going on in your head right now? What's taken up? What's, what's running space in your head around this idea?

Yes, I've used that technique.

And, and I make sure that— protect the introverts because the extroverts will take over. And, and the idea of having the least, the least experienced person speak first, I think that comes from the military. I think the military figured that one out. Um, but it's really good advice, really powerful. How do you, how would you describe the culture at Laserpeach?

How do I describe the culture? It's very open and I feel it's very collaborative. Since I think I set a different tone to the company, I Even though I have an office, I actually don't sit in my office. I sit outside in a cubicle right next to the hallway.

Really?

So if you wanted to walk past, you know, people say hi to me all the time. If I have to take a call, I would just jump into my office. But if I'm outside, then I would just work outside. And so I make myself really accessible. It's more than just open door. I'm really outside.

Really? So you have Office of the CEO in your little cubicle, right?

I'm just sitting outside with a—

And how does that— doesn't disrupt your own workflow?

Currently what we have in our office is we run a hybrid work environment. We have 3 days in the office, 2 days at home. So I So certain things that I need alone time or private time, I move my schedule out to say certain things I do at home or at night, and then the things I do in the office. I don't put, you know, secret stuff on my screen when I'm out in the open.

Right. So what kinds of things do you hear from people as they're coming by? And just chatting or just mentioning to you?

There are some chats and some people want to share their successes. Some people want to share their problems and some people do have problems and it's, I think it's more approachable. They're more willing to come by, walk by, cuz they're walking by the hallway anyways. And if you say hi, they, you know, people will be willing to share what kind of problems they have.

Do you, I mean, are you able to learn things you probably otherwise wouldn't, wouldn't know about?

Yeah. I think if I hide in my office, there would be stuff that I wouldn't even I wouldn't be even aware of.

And so it makes a difference for you to, to be available like that?

Yeah, I think it's a two-way street. I get stuff out from them and they get stuff out for me.

Hmm. Interesting way of managing.

It's different. I think I have this certain connection because I have worked in a lot of different departments. And when they tell me about certain things, yes, I've done that work.

You understand it.

Yeah, I understand it.

What is it you think that gives you the most joy in the work that you do?

I think it's that transformation. It's like that Secret Santa job, you know, that story. There are some really amazing stories that I've heard, you know, with customer stories that says, okay, I've transformed this. There's a customer, I believe this in Ghana, in Africa, and they said that because we handle documents, and currently right now they can pull documents online and digitize. But before they did this, he told the story, says, if I want to find a document, I had to get a Jeep, I had to get an armed guard with a shotgun. I drive out into the wilderness, I get to the warehouse, and there I have to fight rats the size of small dogs.

Wow.

So they literally have paper that's stacked up in, in like cubes, and they tie like a little small ribbon, like a little small package, and that's how they're tied up together in like paper blocks, and they're just shoved on shelves like that. And that's how they, they were storing their paper. And of course, you know, their paper is, I guess, edible by their, by their rats. And that's what they're, they're, they're eating the documents.

Yeah. Not to mention the humidity.

Yeah.

Watch the paper.

So fighting the, you know, you know, picturing the guy saying, I'm fighting, uh, you know, rats the size of small dogs. And he says, now I don't have to do that. You go, wow, these, you know, the lives of these people have have changed. You know, you talk about, you know, accessing flight information through your iPad rather than through paper, and he said, yes, that's changed, but there are other people who's exactly the same thing. You know, he can just say, oh, I'm accessing electronically but with instead of on paper, but his life has changed completely.

Right. Yeah, that's amazing. And I imagine that the sense of satisfaction you're talking about permeates the company. People realize they're transforming lives.

Yeah, the people, we, that is our mission to actually transform lives and transform businesses by making software that people love to use.

Wow, good for you. I got one more question, I'll let you go. What's one thing about you that we would never know unless you revealed it to us?

What's one thing that people would not know about me, huh? Well, I'm learning Italian.

Well, there you go.

I picked it up because I started— so I played this instrument, this Chinese instrument. And so I decided to say, let's see if I can play an Italian opera song. So I did that opera song. And then, then I said maybe I could sing it. So I start learning the song without learning, without knowing any Italian at all. I, I learned to sing the song and I thought, oh, this is so cool. I picked up this, and then I picked up another Italian opera song and I, I learned that song. And I did like 3 or 4 songs and I, and I didn't speak a word of Italian. I have no idea what I'm saying, but I could sing the song. And it became a challenge for me to actually, it became like a memory problem to say, can I sing this song without understanding what this, without understand Italian. And then eventually a couple of people said, you know what, you should start learning Italian. And then, so I thought, okay, maybe. And then I, when I started it, became a little serious, and now I'm like 3 or 4 months into this.

So music using a traditional Chinese— what was the traditional Chinese instrument you play?

It's, uh, erhu.

Is that the—

it's an upright two-stringed instrument.

Yeah, I, I, um, I play violin. I play jazz.

It's very— yeah, when I was small, I played violin also, so it's very similar, right?

Well, I was going to say that many, many years ago, I played in a band And one of my bandmates was an amazing mandolin player, played that instrument, and he played bluegrass with it.

So that's what I was trying to do. I go, let me see if I can play Italian opera with this Chinese instrument. You know, it was the same thing. And then once I got there, it became Italian. And then—

amazing. Ah, good for you. Well, thank you so much, Carl. It's been a wonderful conversation. You're doing great work, and, uh, I know that my audience is completely inspired by everything you had to say. Thanks again.

Okay, thank you, Doug.

Doug Noll here. Thank you so much for listening to Listening with Leaders. If you are a successful executive leader who would like to be on this program, please visit podcast.dougnoell.com. DougNoll.com/podcast. If you got something out of this interview, would you please share this episode on social media? Just do a quick screenshot with your phone and text it to a friend or post it on the socials. If you know someone that would be a great guest, tag them on the social media to let them know about the show and include the hashtag #ListeningWithLeaders. I love seeing your posts and guest suggestions. We are regularly putting out new episodes and content. To make sure you don't miss any episodes, go ahead and subscribe. Your thumbs up ratings and reviews go a long way to help promote the show and mean a lot to me and my team. Want to know more? Go to my website, DougNoll.com, or follow me on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Instagram. That's @DouglasEnoll. Thanks for listening, and we'll see you on the next show.