Ep. 46 – How One Firm is Evolving AEC Thought Leadership – Knowledge Architecture CEO Chris Parsons

It's kind of a motley collection of skills that you need to assemble to be a really successful, you know, architect. I think the comfort zone is in solving problems for a specific client in collaboration with the client, in collaboration with the engineer. I think the trickier part has been rising above the one project at a time and looking for trends that cut across projects, across clients, speaking in the language of the client versus in the language of design.

Chris Parsons founded a software company in 2009 called Knowledge Architecture. Knowledge Architecture sells a leading knowledge management software product called Synthesis. From a thought leadership standpoint, Chris leads a company that every professional services and software company could learn a lot from. In this episode of Everything Thought Leadership, Chris and I will talk about his company and how it has evolved their approach to building a customer community and its impact on thought leadership and product development and what motivates him and his colleagues to wake up every morning and go to work, which is not about becoming a big software company. All right, Chris, so I have been admiring you and your firm from afar and close up since 2011. And that's when I became interested in the topic of how B2B companies were building communities both in person and online to advance the collective wisdom of everybody involved. Thought leadership. And I looked at you as a best practice firm. You had a LinkedIn group at the time. You've abandoned that since, I think. Right. But you have your own private group. But I looked at you as best practice in use of community, in nurturing your product and service offering and in nurturing relationships with clients and potential clients and that kind of thing. So you guys keep, from where I see, keep getting better and better at this whole thing. Right? You've done a lot of tweaking and more over the years. So congratulations on having a fantastic business. So the reason I have you on this, our three year old podcast today is that I believe B2B companies that compete on thought leadership and learn a ton from you and from Knowledge Architecture on how to use their customer community to develop thought leadership and improve their product and service offerings. So I look at knowledge management probably to simplistically, but as codifying and sharing a company's internal knowledge and client experiences as that is a foundation for thought leadership, which I look at is sharing that knowledge and experience, you know, in the marketplace to generate leads and, and other things. But I want to go back to 2014 where you invited me to speak at your Ka Connect, your annual conference in San Francisco. And that's 11 years ago. And thought leadership was less of A thing from my impression in the architecture and engineering industry, thought leadership was less of a thing than it may be today. And I have a question about my presentation back then 2014 and I'm not trying to understand if you're audience like my presentation, although I do love feedback. I'm interested to know if they thought my presentation about thought leadership was relevant to them.

Yeah. Also admirer of your work and all of your writing really was influential in our way that we kind of market and think, but also for our community too. Yeah, I mean I think the thing that I took away from that talk and I think our community did was the connection between thought leadership and knowledge management. And so the way that you kind of set this up is you were talking about knowledge management being a foundation for thought leadership, which I think is true, but I think it kind of, it's more of a loop and it's more of a two way relationship in that, you know, you told a story of your old firm who kind of pioneered business process reengineering re engineering the corporation. Right. But they didn't. So they won on the idea. They kind of got credit for the idea, but they didn't necessarily win in terms of the lion's share of the delivery of that work and changing in terms of the consulting on the back end. And someone like an Accenture would win that. And so what I think you and I teased out through discussion was one of the core reasons was the knowledge management wasn't there. Like they didn't figure out how to translate it from one key subject matter expert's head into dozens of people who could then take that out and run their own implementation. So training programs and documentation and best practices and communities of practice to share and learn from each other. So I think thought leadership is oftentimes like the tip of the spear. But if it doesn't get, if it doesn't get backed up and the processes and the knowledge doesn't get built to help translate that through the organization, it, it just has a minimal impact. You don't scale it. And so I think knowledge management is a key tool for scaling thought leadership as well as surfacing new ideas that can be developed in the thought leadership. So I think it's a very like symbiotic kind of relationship between the two.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, I totally agree. You know, as I've said to, and I said in my book, you know, I look at thought leadership as the demand and the supply part of thought leadership. Most people, 99% are focusing on the demand part how to create content for marketing and selling and winning work. Very few people have been looking at the supply side of thought leadership, which is how to scale up services so that you can uphold the promises you're making to the marketplace with your Harvard Business Review article, your bestselling book, or, you know, whatever it is that clients think they're buying.

Right. Like, do you want to be famous or do you want to, like, change the world and have it, you know, have an impact through your organization? And, you know, it's like just like a scale of impact and like what the priority level is. I agree with your assessment. It feels like a lot of the investment is on the, let's just get our name out there and get known for this idea. But then people, then as soon as you scratch the surface with that, you know, it's like, well, how are we going to deliver this? Like, how does that happen inside our company?

Yeah. And you put it well. What I thought you were going to say is, do you want to be famous for your ideas or do you want to be famous for the client.

Work, for the impact? Yeah, I'm not judging. I mean, there's a lot to be said for being an influencer. Like, an Adam Grant doesn't have a 200 person firm behind him delivering his insights, but he's making an impact just on speaking. But that's not the same. But if you're an architecture firm or a software company or whoever it is, like, I don't think our job is to have a singular celebrity in the company who's known for their ideas. Like, you want to deliver architecture, you want to deliver software that makes an impact, and that's where you need to operationalize the thought leadership.

That's right. That's right. So a couple of months ago, I interviewed global head of editorial at Gensler, Sam Martin. He was on this podcast and they're the world's largest architecture and design firm, I think by far. Billion. $1.9 billion and nobody's even close.

Yep.

So they must be doing something right. And I knew you knew the former CEO Ed Friedrichs, God rest his soul. Wonderful person. What a leader.

Actually writing an article about him now. So, yes, timely that you bring up Ed.

He wrote a book. I bought his book a couple years ago, and his book is amazing. But you know Ed far better than I do. Seems to me he's a legend in architecture. It seems to me that Gensler, and I'm not an expert at all in architecture, it seems to me that Gensler is way Ahead of the pack among architecture firms in thought leadership, is that an incorrect, Is that an unfair perception, or is that a fair perception?

I think I would have agreed with you more in the past. I do think that, you know, if we take a step back from thought leadership, I think what has been a challenge for. And again, this is my limited view, so I can't speak definitively for everybody. But like, my observation over the last 25 years has been architects or creative folks who are part artist, part mathematician, engineer, you know, part business person. Like, it's a, it's a kind of a, a motley collection of skills that you need to assemble to be a really successful architect. I think the comfort zone is in solving problems for a specific client in collaboration with the client, in collaboration with the engineer. I think the trickier part has been rising above the one project at a time and looking for trends that cut across projects, across clients, speaking in the language of the client versus in the language of design. You know, I think that there's a, there's just a gravitational pull to want to like, talk about design and making beautiful, functional, amazing buildings. And I think that has changed. Like, it feels like that has changed. Like, I think you see much more recognition in the space of people wanting to speak at the level and the language of their clients. And I think you see that manifested in an increased investment in R and D programs. So this was a, a key part. To me. It's like in thought leadership plus knowledge management plus research and development, like, that's the holy trinity, you know, in terms of like really building a smarter firm. And I have seen a massive investment in R and D, you know, little R through big R. And I think Gensler has inspired a lot of firms. I don't think everyone's doing it the Gensler way. I don't think it's always. I think they do like a magazine or a journal, some kind of like longer form publication. They do these big strategic insight reports a lot, especially around workplace strategy. They're known for that. But there's a bunch of different ways, you know, to differentiate your firm and to be speaking the client's language. And I think it ranges from people doing some of the writing. It ranges from people doing like there's a firm in New York, a much smaller firm. I think there are 150 people. Ish Mancini Duffy, who has a podcast called the Anti Architect Podcast.

Huh.

Basically they're interviewing clients and other like, really well known architects to talk about the state of things in the industry and where it's going and how it's changing. So whether that's thought leadership or not, I'm not totally sure. I don't know that it gets packaged up into deeper insights. But there's some kind of like where's the industry going? Conversational social knowledge sharing that's happening and I see a variety of different programs in our clients. So I think the recognition that you have to speak at your clients language in the things that care about to them and then connect it back to design. Right. To put your, to put your hard work in context, in their context, you need to, you know, kind of them. I don't know if that makes sense or not but like I did not switch.

It does, it does. My perception of architecture, industry, marketing, whatever. Twenty years ago was pretty pictures on the website of the buildings they designed. Right. That's about it. And some high level description of what they do.

Yeah. And now it's about, you know, it's about climate, it's about equity, it's about health. Like there's all these like broader trends that people are figuring out. It's about affordable housing. You know, it's about fire. Like if you look in California, like what are we going to do about fire? What are we going to do about water? Like so there's much more big societal level impact changes that are driving the conversation and design. I would agree than 15 years ago.

Okay, so let's talk about your community building. You know the early years of KA Connect and you know I saw a different form of community building for CIOs in Fortune 500 companies starting around 1987 when I went to work for the. It wasn't big at the time. It's a $40 million management consulting firm. And how a research based multi company sponsored community could lead to big ideas if the consultants at the firm I worked at decided they wanted to commercialize those ideas. And they didn't commercialize most of them except for one which was business process re engineering. Going back. Look at this as a model for the way just about any B2B company should be working with clients. You know, get them together every year. And I know big software companies, Salesforce, Oracle, SAP, they have big user meetings every, every year. But it seems to me what you're doing is very different than what the average software company, much bigger than yours does with clients. Is that a fair, is that a fair statement?

Yeah, I mean I think a lot of those conferences are one way, you know, communication, a lot of it. I don't know, I don't I don't need to go there. Yeah, I mean, I think. Let me get back to intentionality. So, like, even before starting Knowledge Architecture, when I was a cio, when there was some big new change, the way that I navigated that change was bringing people together. So we went through a massive change in workflow in our industry called Building Information Modeling, which basically meant instead of drawing everything in 2D, we were going to model everything in three dimensions. A whole big change. And so in San Francisco, I got together the other CIOs and design technology managers and we had a digital design breakfast club. And we got together once a month. And it's just like, what are you, this community of practice type stuff, you know, what are you seeing, what are you trying, what's working, what's not working, what do we think's coming next? And that is an amazing way to learn when you're at the beginning of something new and nobody has all the answers, but people have pieces and parts of the answers. And so in community you start to see a much bigger picture of, like, what's happening much faster and you can all move faster. And so when I started Knowledge Architecture, there were two big things. One, I was trying to bring knowledge management to AEC because it hadn't really been done. And number two, we were in the middle of what I called the KM 2.0 wave, which was bringing so the stuff that was happening on LinkedIn and Twitter and Facebook into the, into the enterprise for knowledge sharing between offices and teams. So there was. The way I knew how to do that was through community was to say, like, look, I know you're doing something with this, you're doing something with that. Let's get together and share what we know so that we all get smarter faster. And we're there again with AI, right? And now AI is km 3.0 for us. And it's changing the way that you access knowledge and share knowledge again and again. Community is right at the heart of that. So, like, I feel like it's a really killer app for navigating change as a community. It's a. It's also win, win, win, right? It's a benefit for the community members, it's a benefit for Knowledge Architecture. The product gets better. So it's a very, it's a very symbiotic way to do it. And it's also just super, for me, it's super fulfilling. Like, I just really enjoy learning that way. And, you know, you can start, you get a lot of good raw inputs and then as you start synthesizing and kind of crystallizing the ideas, you've got a built in community for vetting and testing those ideas. Like, you know, so it's just also like as an idea moves from it seems like something's happening over here all the way through a finished product like community is important every step along that, that whole, whether it's a product journey or a thought leadership idea journey, it's useful on that whole workflow.

So do you think you would have been less successful had you, when you started Knowledge Architecture you did the traditional software industry thing of yeah, you have an annual user group meeting but you're not, you don't really have a community. You're giving presentations once a year and maybe some clients are giving presentations, but it's, it's not an ongoing community that goes on even after the conference conference ends. Would you have guys have been as successful had you not done, you know, your form of community from the start?

There's so many things in that I want to address. One, I think that whether you're talking about Gensler or whether you're talking about Knowledge Architecture, I think programs like this, whether it's thought leadership or community or in the DNA of the founding team, often, I wouldn't say always, but almost always when I see a unique program that some firm is doing, it's got roots going all the way back to the beginning. So part of me your answer to your question is like I can answer the counterfactual but I also don't know if there's any other way that it would have happened. That just seems like it's so deep in the way that we relate to clients. But if I took imaginary company like ours, trying to solve our problems without our team in it, I think there somebody could have been a successful business building AEC Internets without community. That said, we were trying to do really novel things. We, our biggest competitor is SharePoint from Microsoft, which is essentially free. And so if you're going to take on a huge company that's basically distributing their product for free, I mean they sign enterprise agreements but there's no additional cost, then you need to be really different. You need to make it very clear that not only is the product completely different, but the whole experience of interacting with your company is different. Whether that's our community, our client success team, the fact that we build AEC specific advice and best practices and that we can point that back to successful case studies from our community. So I can't imagine Knowledge Architecture, the community's at the heart of this whole thing. I could imagine that somebody else could build another company. But I would also say like our goal is not to build the biggest software company in the world, otherwise we'd be doing this very differently. You know, we would have raised venture capital, we would have a whole different go to market strategy. We're trying to build a, an experience for clients who want to be. We use the term smarter by design. Right. Who want to make the best use of their knowledge to empower people to trust and share. Like there's an, an ideal client profile. There's some hallmarks, to borrow a phrase from you, there's some hallmarks of like those smarter design firms that we're looking for. And community fits really well with that. What's his name from mit? Michael Schrag, I think wrote a book called who do youo Want yout Customers to Become? And the whole idea is like having this vision for who you want your customers to be and who you want them to become through working with you. And we have a really strong vision around that which it just feels like community is essential to executing.

And you guys deliver consulting services as well as your platform. Would that be a fair.

Only to people who have our platform. So it's all, it's a tightly coupled system, but yes, absolutely. We provide strategy and implementation, ongoing success. And a lot of that advice is drawn from our community. So it's a feeder system to our advice as well.

Do you ever ask to provide consulting services to people who don't have your platform?

Yes.

And you say sorry, but what do you say?

Kind of what you just said, because we explain the whole integrated system, right. And like for us to consult. Like I believe that software is a form of thought leadership because it is so directly rooted to the insights we learn through community and through all that work that shows up in the software as an advantage. And so to like for us to consult with a client, trying to make them successful, it's like putting one arm behind our back to not be able to use our product to help deliver the results that we're trying to deliver. So it doesn't make any sense for us to do this without, without our technology.

So would it be like Auto Garage that focuses on Honda's, somebody coming in with a Mercedes and saying fix this. Well, we know basically how cars operate, but a lot of intricacies of Mercedes we don't really understand. So we're not the best people.

I think it's almost more like asking someone to help run your cab business. Who came from Waymo, meaning there is a. There is a consistency in that. There is a car at the center of this, but the way that car is manifested out into the world is dramatically different. And so I think that's closer to the way I think about it. You know, as an example, we've made a lot of investment in AI Search. That's like the primary way that we're deploying AI. Well, that's tightly woven into our platform, which is connected to the AEC systems, you know, like the ERPs and the CRMs and all those enterprise systems they use. It's integrated with that. And we're also adding a learning management system into that mix. So that intranet with those integrations, the AI Search and the lms, that's all tightly coupled. And so, so many firms right now are trying to build AI chatbots or, you know, systems to help them use their knowledge to. For marketing purposes, for a variety of purposes. If we were to try and help a firm do that, but we've already built a system that's already designed for that purpose and already integrated and is already running. Yeah, I mean, it's just kind of. I just. We would just be so frustrated as consultants. We're like, well, I don't know why that. That bears. Yeah, it's just. It's just hard.

It must have been. Has it ever been tempting over the years, like someone says, look, we're willing to spend whatever half a million dollars for you to, you know, ramp up the knowledge management curve, and you may use your product or we may not, but we just want you to, you know, consult to us as knowledge management consultants.

It hasn't been tempting. In fact, it's been the opposite of tempting. And part of it is because I started my career in consulting and I've worked in. I. I'm probably gonna offend a lot of people on your podcast. I've worked in time and materials Bill by the hour model, and I got very frustrated in it because usually at the end I deliver a report and that's the end of the engagement. Like, you know, or maybe you do some implementation, but you don't. You're not there. And like, the client relationship we get starts all the way at them, discovering us through. You know, we've got clients that we've had on the platform for 15 years, and we've watched Leadership Changeover. We've watched people grow from being interns to being leaders in the program. We've watched. We have one client I was just talking to last week. They were 60 when they joined us. There are over 250 people now. They built a knowledge management department. We have this like long running relationship and it scales like so, you know, consulting. Like if it's me and maybe Susan and a couple like key senior people here, if we're spending all our time working on that half million dollar report, we're not building impact for all of our other clients. So I could go on and on down that route. That's it hasn't been tempting for a variety of reasons.

Almost like it sounds like having a financial advisor from your twenties to your, you know, retirement nurse and helping every step of the way and steering you away from things that are not good investments or safe investments in your later years and that kind of thing. But with you all the way.

Yeah. And navigating changes as they come up. So when AI is happening, we get people together in community, we talk about it. When the pandemic happened, we got our community together virtually and we help the IT teams navigate change, the marketing teams, the CEOs. So community again is that way to navigate change together. And we learn from it, they learn from it, we build relationships. It's just a really powerful. I'm going to keep going back to it, but it's really at the heart of it.

Yeah. Let's get underneath your statement. I loved in your first newsletter what was behind that and what the goals are and all that stuff, but little more. Under the Community is the killer app. You said it helps us navigate faster, more successfully and with more ease, joy and grace. None of us have all the answers, but I believe we'll get there further faster if we explore. My sense is that a lot of people will not really understand how important community is. Sure. So how would you convince somebody who said, look, love you guys, but the community. You got a successful software company. Is the community really that necessary? Could have spent that time and money somewhere else, hiring more salespeople to sell your product, all that stuff. Right.

It depends on your priors a little bit. So I think when a lot of us have experienced community through software companies, as an example on, you have to sign up for this thing and then it's a way to do ticket deflection. So you ask your question and they try and get other people and their client base to answer your question instead of them. Or maybe a overworked product manager comes in and is trying to like answer questions and that's not what I'm talking about. And you know, I think I should also like it can be as small as right now, using our technology, we've got. There's a use case emerging for it, which we're calling marketing research assistant. So because we have all that information about past employee and project work, past proposals, you know, all these kind of things, people can ask questions like, you know, when was the last time we built a project in Oregon that was over 50,000 square feet that, you know, had X challenge with it, or write me a draft approach to how we talk about mass timber and climate change or something like that. And so there's this, this new emerging capability that seems very, very promising. It's not ready for primetime yet. Like, you can see glimpses that it's going to be great. So I pulled together five CMOs and marketing directors from our community, and we're meeting monthly to work through what would great look like, what's working now. So it's partly product development, but it's also understanding what. What does this mean for your business? If. What's the impact? So it's a little small research group. A step up from that. We have a research council of like 20 firms that's a little bit more of a permanent thing. We meet in person once a year on the opposite side of the calendar from our conference. We get together almost monthly. We have an online community that's a group that has continuity over many, many years and a deep level of trust. And so when we're ever going to do something that's brand new, like, we, when we decided we were going to enter into learning management, like, we go there first, we're like, okay, we're thinking about doing this thing. Are we off our rocker or do we have the right to win here? You know, or like, if we were to approach this, what would you like to see? Like, they're great as a way for us to test our research, but they also use it for themselves, too. So if someone's trying to tackle a new program or trying to do something new, they can use that same community to learn. So we're there learning, watching them talk to each other about their hopes and dreams, as well as being able to vet our hopes and dreams from there. And then it scales up to, like, larger clusters and groups of people to all the way to, like, our conference, which is the biggest manifestation of it. So every step along that way you can curate these groups of people who share common interests to help us all advance and get smarter together.

So does your research lead to. I think I know the answer to this question, but I'll ask it anyway. Does your research lead to product improvements and enhancements as well as say new services. You know, you say we have now a training, a training program around this.

Yeah. So I mean, I'll give you a story. We went through a massive rewrite of our platform in kind of the 2000-20, 23 range when we. But we didn't have any product roadmap mapped out past that massive upgrade. And deliberately. And so what I then did is I launched a listening tour with like 50 to 60 of our long term clients. Just saying, what's on your mind right now? Not even necessarily KA or synthesis specific, but like what are your challenges as a company? Where are you struggling? And then like how do you think we could help? What aren't we doing now that we could or what could we do better? Open ended and at the end, that was a couple months to get through those interviews, Two things came out, AI and they were struggling with learning and development. They've got a bunch of baby boomers retiring, they've got the half life of knowledge is shrinking. All these kind of challenges that are kind of learning and development related. And out of that we decided to build a learning management system. So what was interesting about that to me is there are learning management systems. They've been around for 25, 30 years. Like, so what? Well, because of the way that we got at deciding to build a learning management system, it came from deep insight that we think is unique into our specialty. We generally work with architecture and engineering firms that are 50 to 500. We have clients that are a thousand or 2,000, but the majority of them are 5,500. Well, most learning management software is written generically. It's not industry specific. It's written for very large companies. It's kind of based on some of these very punitive models that carry over from high school all the way into college about homework and grades. And we just like got a really good insight of the actual problems they're struggling with that led us to build a technology that's wildly different than anything that you've seen on the market. It's deeply coupled with AI search in our intranet, which is also unusual. You don't usually find it's usually a learning management island within a company that's disconnected from everything else. And I could go on and on, on about all the kind of insights that make this very tailored and unique. But that community led to a very special product. But now that we have the product, we're vetting the design again with community. And now as we start putting the product into beta and rolling it out. Our community is going to help us figure out how do you prepare for it, how do you adopt it, how do you make good choices, how do we even do what's the best way to do learning and development in 2025 with four generations in the workplace. And so from insight all the way through execution, like community is there every step of the way. So I think that's the question you were asking.

Yes. And so it sounds to me it's minimizing the risk. Every new product developer has a risk of failure, of course, minimizing, not bringing it to zero percent chance of failure. But it sounds to me it's tremendously minimizing the risk of a product failure here.

I think you're right. I think it not only de risks. I hadn't really thought of it that way. Thank you for that. So it de risks it. But you're also. Have you ever heard this Jeff Bezos story about the whenever they start a new project, they start with a press release. And so there is a part we don't do that literally, but what's happening is we're also figuring out the storytelling all the way along from the beginning. But that storytelling isn't rooted in how smart we are. It's rooted in the client challenges and the insights and what we learned from them. And so, you know, you saw a little bit about the webinar we did last week about Knowledge Management 3.0. I told that through five case studies of firms who are, we've learned as much from working with those clients as they've learned from us. You know, and so it's really us getting smarter together with clients. And then that leads naturally to thought leadership and marketing because you've earned the right to tell that story because you've developed that story together, if that makes sense.

So is there a thought leadership module to come from architecture firms from Knowledge Architecture?

Well, I mean I do think that marketing research system people are using it. Let me give you a really good example. So we have a client LS3P out in Charleston. They're like 500 person architecture firm. They have started a program called, I'm dropping the name of the program, but they get two experts together and one interview, one expert interviews the other expert or hour, hour and a half on some like really important topics. So then the goal of it was critical knowledge transfer. It's like we're trying to get deep, tacit knowledge and expertise spread throughout our company. Well, they record all of that and it goes and it's available on their intranet. We can search the video transcripts, all that kind of thing, but marketing is sitting in the room and this thing is about employee development and education and knowledge management, but it's throwing off all kinds of juicy insights that marketing wants to take and then run and develop thought leadership with. And so from a technical perspective, you can ask a question on their platform that says like, how are we thinking about community based design? And it will draw from videos like that, other documents they read, posts that people have shared. So it's helping you source really interesting insights instead of having to go around and interview everybody one by one. There's like, it's speeding up the content development process quite a bit. Is that thought leadership? I think it still needs obviously more. It's like an accelerant to thought leadership. I don't think it is posting, you know, fully formed content for you automatically at any point. But I think that hard part is like what's even interesting in our company and who's thinking about interesting things. I think it can help you figure that out.

It almost sounds like automating the white paper process, content development process in a way. I'm not talking about the graphic end of it. I'm talking about.

Yeah, the actual part behind the scenes.

Yeah, the idea is part of it.

Yeah, the idea is part of it. And I think the thing that's interesting too is I think what's different in this era of thought leadership is it doesn't necessarily have to come from the most senior people in the organization. Like these seeds can be from a junior person who just saw something different because of their life experience, because of what they know about technology and they have an angle and they share it and then that can get like amplified and developed and maybe they become the messenger, maybe they don't. But I think it's a much more democratic way to of figuring out where good ideas come from.

It's interesting. It could lead to a new thought leadership module on synthesis.

Could be. It could, yeah.

Let's talk about your new newsletter, Smarter by Design. What was the rationale behind that? Why a newsletter now?

It's a good question. We, I'd say as a strength, we have historically done a good job at creating long form video content, whether they recordings. At our conference, webinars, podcast, me going on podcast episodes like we're pretty good at 45 minute to an hour long content. What I think we have not done well, our friend Bill Shander, who you know and Love has this 4 by 4 model for content Development. And without going into the whole thing for your audience, it starts with like, how do you hook somebody in for really casual conversation at like a cafe, you know. And so in the content side, it's like, is it a good infographic? Was it a very short video clip? And then kind of gradually step them through a little bit longer piece, maybe a full blown article, and then into something like we had developed, which is like a 45 minute to an hour long video. We never put the front end on that stuff to help ease people into those insights. And there are a lot of people who are never going to spend 45 minutes to an hour or, you know, not even because they don't have the time. It's like, talk about de risking. I get an hour long webinar and it's like they're hard to skim, you know, I don't necessarily have the confidence that I'm going to get the value out of putting the time into it. So some of it is we have so much good insight that can actually help people, but it's not as in an accessible format as it could be. So the newsletter is one step among many that we're taking, including the short form stuff on LinkedIn to help take that deep case study and drill it down into, you know, I'm trying to average 1200-1500 words, something like that on the newsletter. That's still pretty rich. Like that's not 10 sentences, you know, they can take you into the story, but it's a much lower investment initially. And then maybe you can go back and read the whole thing or maybe you got what you needed, you know. And so I think trying to meet people at different, that's part of the idea of it. But then also it's like realizing, you know, we passed 15 years in business and we've been, you know, we've got 150k connect talks in the archive, we've got more webinars. We've just learned so much from this community and we're seeing young knowledge managers enter our community now who didn't have the benefit of being around for the last 15 years and so starting to figure out how to tell these stories in ways that you can move, you know, people that are new to knowledge management, new to aec, speed up their learning curve to be faster than it was for us all to learn it, you know, together, if that makes sense.

Yes. The way I look at it is you can preach to the already converted for hours, right? You can't breach for hours to the Unconverted. You might like give you a minute or two or five minutes.

Right.

Then they'll decide whether they want to learn anymore.

Yeah.

And especially younger generation are used to, you know, mobile device, laptop, you know, social media, hard to focus attention on any one thing. They're doing multiple things at once and spending an hour, 45 minutes, that's a big time risk. Right. Or the non converted. So I think that that's very good.

That's half of it, Bob. The other half is. So half of it is wanting to tell those stories of leading firms and knowledge management. And I'm getting to go back and revisit some of the old stories and I'm doing kind of interviews to bring them up to date. So I'm also kind of like learning almost like the VH1. Where are they now? I'm kind of learning the ending, you know, to some of these stories from the one I just talked to last week was from 2016. So like it's what's happened over the last almost 10 years. The other half of it is we're at this transformation wave with Knowledge Management 3.0. And so I like to speak and write my way through these big changes. And so it's also a way as I'm seeing like kind of trends that cut across firms emerge. I've got a good vehicle for delivering those insights again for people who aren't going to listen to a full podcast episode. So it's kind of both. It's like me telling what I'm seeing plus featuring really interesting examples of what clients are doing.

I saw you're already approaching. You had like 921 subscribers. It's only after one issue.

Right, right.

That's pretty good.

That's. I feel happy with that. And the thing that's even better that you can't see is somewhere between 20 and 25% of those are second degree and third degree connections on LinkedIn. So they're people that were new to knowledge architecture. So the virality of, of social is helping us bring new people into our universe in a really. I mean that's, that's like we're talking two to 250 new people who know who we are in two weeks, which is pretty awesome.

Wow. I would have figured all of them are past or current clients.

That's what I was expecting. And then I kept getting surprised by seeing how many new people were finding their way to it. So.

Wow, that's, that's a great sign. Colleague of mine just interviewed somebody who works at a Large IT services company whose name I divulge. And I saw a transcript of this discussion, and there's a huge knowledge management problem in this IT services firm. It's probably no surprise to you, I'm sure you've heard about these things and other companies from other industries saying, hey, can we license this thing to us? So I imagine your platform and your research and community would be valuable to any professional services firm that is selling advice by the hour, by the project or whatever. Have you ever been tempted to expand your target market beyond architecture and engineering?

No. So we are. We have considered construction, which is technically part of the AEC industry. We actually talked to a property developer last week who's still an owner. Like they're still in the space. I think there's a couple reasons why we haven't. I think from a marketing perspective, like we want people to land on our website and feel like this company was built for me. And instead of trying to spread across multiple verticals. Most of our team came from aec. We know it, it's in our DNA. We love it when we create community and events. Like, I just went to a conference, I won't name it where it was multiple markets. And even though we were part of it, it was very jarring to constantly, you're looking at somebody's name tag, trying to figure out if they're in your industry or not in your industry. And like, does this talk gonna be relevant to me? Like, there was so much mental work I had to do to find my people. Whereas we wanted to create a space where it's all your people. Like, that's literally who it is. And so that's on the community and the kind of marketing side, but on the product side, you know, we just have these very deep integrations into systems people care about. But we've done things like we built an AEC specific video transcription model.

Right.

We trained a model on all the acronyms and jargon and lexicon that this industry cares about. Like, the product is built with a lot of assumptions, whether it's search or the way that it's laid out around aec. So we pushed all our chips in and we just want to keep going deeper. What's your. I've heard the saying from you in the past. It's like, I'm still plowing the same fields, only deeper as Michael Hammer. Michael Hammer, Yeah. Yeah. So our intention, at least as long as I'm in charge of knowledge architecture, I don't imagine that we spin outside of aec. I think we Just coming deeper and deeper and deeper. It's a big industry. It's like the sixth biggest industry in the world. So there's plenty of Runway for us in meeting our goals. And it's just very satisfying to go very deep in one domain. But that's our view.

Okay, so where do you see your firm going over the rest of the decade? I mean, asking 10 years out I think is a silly thing, but let's say over the rest of this decade. And how are you define success? What is successful look like? How do you define it by the year, say 20, 35 years from now? Sure.

We're in such a dynamic time right now that the way that we're building the AI search piece, for example, is we're only going one release at a time. We built a mechanism in the product to give you really rich feedback so that, so that users can give us really rich feedback, which is helping tell us exactly what we should build next. So I can tell you, if we're talking 2030, I'm guaranteeing we're still investing in building synthesis AI. Like it's hard to imagine that's not a huge part of what we're doing. I have no idea what we're going to be building. Like, the technology is changing so fast. The use cases are very dynamic that are emerging from our clients. So our means will be staying very close with them. In that community iterative loop I talked about before, the learning management piece I also believe in, was it 2025 now in 2030, we're still going to be building that out. So we're releasing version one in private beta at the end of this year. There is so much to do. Like version one is going to be really focused around on demand courses and assignments and transcripts. But like, we can get into mentoring, we can get into skills assessments. There's like all these things that we can follow in terms of how to develop an employee. There's so much rich field for us to mine there. Kind of like pulling back. I told you we had to rewrite our platform. We had the first 10 years of the company where we were very much in a blue ocean for people that are familiar with blue ocean strategy. But we were built on, we were built on Microsoft SharePoint.

Yeah, you were on SharePoint. We were.

We're not anymore. So we had it. We had a fork in the road. Do we stay on SharePoint or do we build our own thing? And we had to build our own thing.

Why did you make that decision? If I can interrupt you yeah, why not just stay on SharePoint?

We felt like for our. So for anyone that's ever built on anything on top of a product. So SharePoint was changing so we had to do something. It was going to SharePoint online. So we could either write it on top of SharePoint Online or build our own thing. Building on somebody else's tool is like building a house on sand. Like it's just changing underneath your feet. Clients would come to us and say that we really want X to work better and we would have to say, I'm Sorry, that's a SharePoint feature we can't change. It sucks. It's a horrible message to deliver. So we wanted control of our own destiny. We wanted. Microsoft has gotten better the technology, no doubt it still is a hyper complicated tool set usually. And it's built for firm, it's built for Pfizer and NASA as well as like it's just a very complicated product. And we thought we could build something really simple, really intuitive and even more powerful specifically for AEC and turn off everything else that wasn't relevant. So we thought we could just really elevate the experience. And I think we did that. But while we were building that, SharePoint kept getting better. And so we kind of found ourselves coming out of the pandemic in more of a purple ocean where it was harder to differentiate ourselves against SharePoint with just our straight up intranet platform. So like we, we improved it, but we didn't add additional capabilities into it. And so this has led to that listening tour where I'm like, okay, our clients will help us figure our way through this. And they gave us AI and lms and so now we're on a. To answer your question about what success looks like, work towards a new blue ocean. So we are building an integrated intranet LMS AI search platform, Really a comprehensive knowledge management platform. I don't know of anything that exists like that anywhere, let alone for aec. And so we think we've built something substantially more valuable and interesting. It'll help us win, it'll help us retain people, it'll help our clients go to the next level. So building out that blue ocean vision, that to me is where we're going for the next through 2030.

So how do you define, how do you measure success? Is it number of employees or revenue or number of clients or number of successful projects? How would you measure success by the year 2030?

We read a book as a group together, 2015 16, called the Advantage by Patrick Lencioni about organizational Health. And I recommend that book to everybody that I talk to. In that book, he kind of takes you through the classic mission, vision, values, all that stuff, but in a very different way. His very strong point is, his view is you have to kind of have the founding team in the room, and you need to write the version of this that you think the outside world will never see. So you don't want to end up with our core values or innovation, respect and trust or whatever it is. Like, he pushes you. Like, the statement you start with is, why do we exist? Like, that's it. That's the beginning. And so what we got through, I did a lot of reflection and shared it and we workshopped it and it got to. We're a platform to help our employees build the lives they want. So that's why I started the company, you know, that's why we're here. Is like, it starts with, like, being a really wonderful place to work that gives people opportunity to be flexible or to build the things or work on what they want to work on. And that radiates out the clients. Clients feel that. And what I hope is, by extension, we radiate that and then clients can start. You know, we try to build technology that helps clients do the same thing. But, like, really, that's a core of what success looks like. And so are we moving closer to that North Star? You know, in. In a way, do we have, like, target profit margins? Yes, but that is in service to keeping KA going and being healthy. And the way I look at it is I want to be working on this into my 70s and 80s. Like, there's no exit strategy. We didn't raise VC, there's no private equity coming anywhere near this company. You know, we are going to keep building as an independent company. And so to me, ensuring the fact that the band can keep playing together for the next 10, 20, 30 years, that's priority number one. And so profits serve to that. Having us be competitive and create value for our clients is all in service to that.

And that'll mean turning down a bunch of offers over the years, right?

Can't tell you how many. Yes, yeah, Real offers. And then all the spammy kind of. I get real offers.

Turning down real.

Not interested. There's a guy named Jason Freed who you might have come across. He's a co founder of Basecamp and he was probably six or seven years ahead of us in terms of company building and thank God. And he was writing really good stuff. This is like thought leadership, I would argue, on the whole Industry in technology is VC centric, Silicon Valley centric. And here was this guy writing this stuff with his partner David. Like, there's another way up the mountain. You can be bootstrapped. You can be privately held, you can be profitable. You don't have to raise a bunch of debt. And that was so inspirational for me is to follow Jason. And Jason said this thing I always loved. He's like, we get offers all the time to get bought. And he's like, but I'm already working on my best idea. If I sell this company and then I ride out my two or three years or whatever it is and I have to start over, wouldn't I have wanted to build this? I'd rather just keep building this. And so if you can find, like, my wife and I, we don't need a lot of money. You know, it's not about money for us. It's about freedom and the ability to do the work you love with people you love, serve clients you love, build really great products. Like, to me, that's the goal is to preserve the ability to do that the way that we want to do it, where our employees can build the lives they want. Like, that's what keeps me going up the mountaintop. Yeah, it's fun to grow. Like, it feels good, all that stuff. But it's all secondary to me.

I know two other business owners, both very successful, who have very similar philosophies. And neither one of them ever wants their business to be sold. Right. One of them is a project management firm called Integrated Project Management. The other is a moving company, moving people from house to house. Channel giant moving company. Neither founder ever wants to see his company sold because he knows that a new owner will likely to decimate the workforce, get rid of a bunch of duplications and back office functions. And they're there really because they want their employees to have the time of their lives while they're working. Yeah, it's unusual. It's unusual to see in my business career. It's an unusual thing to see, but I love it when I see it.

There's a new book I just read, and I can't remember the title of it, but it wouldn't be hard to find. It's by one of the founders of the Tugboat Institute, and it's about building evergreen companies. And it is. Do you remember the book Small Giants written by Bo Burlingham, like 15 years ago or something like that?

I don't remember the book. He was an Ink magazine writer, right?

Ink magazine guy. And the book was like, he profiled companies, he said that choose to be great instead of big. And it was also, it came out right when we were starting so super influential on me. He was part of this new community. They're slightly bigger firms, but they have the same ideas that we're going to be legacy companies, evergreen companies that won't ever sell. And it gets into even some of the strategies on putting the company into a long term trust with a can't be sold in a hundred years and all these conditions on it. And I totally align with that philosophy. Like, I really hope it's still running and going past me. That would be the idea. But not now. I still got. I have plenty of innings left, you know, God willing to play.

That sounds like you'll never retire. Is that fair?

I mean, who knows? I might be looking at you in my 70s and have learned a lot of different lessons in life and saying, no, I'm out. But like, I don't. When I look at architects and writers and artists and musicians, those people don't ever retire. Chefs don't generally ever retire. If you're a creative person, you may choose to do it in a different way. But to me, like there is the creative part that's product, there's the creative part that's thought leadership, but there's a creative part that's designing an organization and being able to do all three of those things at once. Product design, marketing and designing an organization. It feels like, you know, in Maslow's hierarchy of needs to me that's close to transcendence from like a work capacity. And I just, there could become a point where it's not fun anymore and I don't feel that way about it. But like I just, I'm having the most fun I've ever had in the company right now. And if that continues, then I wouldn't stop. So I don't imagine not planning for any retirement. Like I said, life, life can change. But like, yeah, this is what it seems to me now.

I don't think I'll ever retire. I get out about the scale back, but I don't think. Yeah, Kathy, my wife said, oh, so you're gonna, you're gonna go from working 70 hour weeks to 35. That doesn't sound like.

But for you, that's retirement.

Exactly. Well, Chris, this is great, great having you on our podcast.

Thanks for inviting me.

The newsletter is great. I'm going to read every issue and I think it'll be a hit.

Awesome. Appreciate that. And I've been enjoying your podcast. It's fun to see these and keep up with these stories.

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