Episode 529: More Growth Creates More Conviction and More Clarity with Ashik Ahmed

Welcome to this edition of the million Dollar Mastermind podcast. This is where we pick the brains of high achievers from all walks of life and get their hard earned real world insights on winning. I'm your host, Larry Wydell.

I am talking with Ashik Ahmed and he's the co founder and CEO of Deputy. Hello, Ashik.

Hello, Larry. Great to be here. Thank you for having me.

Well, it's exciting to have you on and I'm looking forward. Your company now has been. Deputy has been incredibly successful, it seems like, in the workforce, was it workforce management?

Basically.

And it seems like a complicated world to navigate. And so congratulations on your incredible success because basically what you do is help people control their own army of people. It takes armies of people to do things on a massive scale. And then just managing that becomes a nightmare, you know? Well, even when it's five or 10 people, it's a nightmare. But when you get into hundreds, gee, what a job.

Well, think about this. You know when you have to book meeting or you have to book dinner with five people or 10 people, can you see the complexity that happens? And try living that with 100 people every single day. Okay. Try leaving that with hundred people on. On a 24 hour basis. Okay. Try living that with, you know, people falling sick. Okay. It is a. It is a very complicated world, the whole workforce management paradigm. But our company mission by RE is to simplify shift work. The company mission is to simplify shift work. So, yes, we are here to simplify it. If it ain't simple, we ain't doing it.

Yeah. And so talk about the scale of how big you guys are. You started in what, 2008? Do I have that right?

Yes. Well, actually, the biological age is about 14 years. We're coming up to 14 years. The mental age, though, is about seven.

Okay, all right, explain that.

Well, the first seven. I mean, you know, when we started even the word cloud wasn't necessarily that around. I mean, actual true age of deputies, even a lot longer than that. We just have been doing this for. For a long time. But yeah, first few years was just kind of like learning about things to do with technology and business without any real experience. I think the clock started around 2016 or 2017 when we had our first investment. And then, yeah, it's been a crazy, crazy ride. But now, I mean, I wake up every single day as excited as I was, if not more than I was in day one. I just have more conviction and more clarity about what needs to be done than I did when we started at the beginning, it's just we had an idea but didn't necessarily know where it was going to go. But over time we just got more clarity and more opportunity and more energy about how our vision is much broader than how we started.

And tell me about that, like how many did you start with? How many people did you start with? How many offices, how many clients would you say when you really got started there? And was it 2016?

Well, look, I mean, let me back up a little bit. I mean the story of Deputy probably starts in 1992 with my co founder when he started a small business. And it wasn't a tech business, it was a business of aviation ground handling. And he was, it was of what?

Aviation.

Aviation ground handling. So if you ever fly to any airport, all the people in the airport, you see who is running around, you know, loading the plane, unloading the plane, cleaning the plane. These are not employees of the airline, they're outsourced companies that the airlines get to service everything in there. And he actually had one of these businesses back here in Sydney, Australia. Yeah, I should have said I'm here in Sydney, Sydney, Australia, Larry. And that's where Deputy started. It's a global company, but I'm based in Sydney. But anyway, when he started this business, yeah in aviation ground handling, you know, he grew that business from two people to 200 people. It was a lot of challenge. Okay. I mean we're talking pen, paper, Excel and Nokia 8820D if anybody remembers that phone back in the days. That's how, that's how basically business ran. And I came in, in that business. I Back in 2004, I saw the challenges was happening. I put in quite a lot of systems in place. And these are web based system. Even before the word cloud was around, even AWS was around back, wasn't around back then. And the business was extremely successful because of the technology. And from there we realized, hey, we have something in our hand, that we can take it to the world. And that's then in 2000, end of 2008, we started deputy. I used to work for my co founder and then we kind of went in a 5050 venture. And yeah, everything we learned in the world of aviation, which is one of the most complex it can be, it's 24 hours is highly union.

I try, you know, I try and tell myself that when I'm at the airport and the flight is delayed for one reason or another, I try and be generous and say, think about the complexity of what the airlines have got to Deal with it is just unlimited, you know, and then you throw. They can have everything perfect and then you throw the weather in there and you know, every. All the dominoes come falling down, you.

Know, so you can't believe that it is. You know, there's many things that the human race is still trying to improve, but aviation and Internet, I often feel like two industries that we have almost perfected but even keep making it better every single day than what it was before.

So roughly, why did you say you really started 2016? What was the turning point there from 2008 and all?

No, I mean, we were in the journey of finding product market fit. It's such a big world in there. I don't necessarily say that I started 2016, it's just that like, I mean, quite often I feel that the mental age is 2016 because that's when we truly started kind of selling and marketing. We had our first investment, external investment back then, from open view until such time, we were actually basically been on a kind of product market fit journey and exploration journey. I always see the company as two companies, one before 2016 and the one after 2016.

Now what do you mean by the first phase? How would you describe that product? Would you say product marketing, product market pit?

It's like kind of finding is your product is something that the market wants. Yeah, you know, that was that whole journey. Okay. I mean nowadays quite a lot of companies start very early on in there, but we started at a time and I mean the only two tech companies in Australia back then was that of Atlassian and Campaign Monitor. Now there's so many other companies over here. I mean, if you started in Silicon Valley, I think our journey would have been a lot different.

Yeah, but now when you changed over to the, you know, primarily the workforce management. And why did you. You said you started raising funds the first time you were raising funds for expansion or things like that.

Yeah, that was, you know, venture capital investment didn't come into deputy till 2016. We weren't even looking. We weren't even.

And why did you look for the venture capital input at that point?

Two things. Okay. First of all, it wasn't because we needed cash. We were actually a breakeven business still growing at 200, 300% year on year. Okay. So it wasn't because of the cash. It was more because, you know what, when they come in, there's a set of expertise and experience that they bring in interest in how do we scale a company, how to take it to, you know, the rest of the world, you know, the talent and the network they bring with them. That was more a reason to bring in venture capitals in the business.

Yeah, because why go figure all that out yourself? You know, why not, why not piggyback off the experience and the, and the education that other people have got? And so as you are, how many countries are you in now? You know, just how big are you right now?

Let's just say so, yeah, there's deputies in over 100 countries. We have more than 320,000 different workplaces that are running, running deputy. Over our lifetime, close to 6 million people have like, you know, lived their lives through deputies. And yeah, I mean, obviously what is the active number of people that are using deputy right now? That fluctuates because of all sorts of different reasons. But now, I mean, it's been a wild journey. But even after all these things, we as a company, we're only at 0.02% of where we can be. There's 2 billion ship workers in the world.

How many?

2 billion.

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Good lord.

And now, as you look at what is fascinating to you about workforce management and what you're doing, what is intriguing, fascinating and intriguing to you about this world?

Well, look, I mean, let me define workforce management first. Okay. Workforce management is three things. Number one is scheduling the employee or the shift worker to do the right job at the right place at the right time. Okay? And that is probably the most challenging part. I mean, those who are knowledge workers. We usually work 9 to 5 or time, doesn't matter how much we are working. But a shift worker, okay, we're talking about the people who works at the airport. You go to the hospital. People are nurses and doctors. You go to the restaurant, okay? Shift workers are everywhere. The bus driver, the train driver, okay, you name it, they're everywhere. They don't work 9 to 5. So managing life and managing work is a really, really hard thing for them and their employers. Employee scheduling is probably the core part of workforce management. The second big part of workforce management is ensuring that, hey, those. Just because you have scheduled somebody, that's not it. Because they have to come to work. They have to come to work and establish their at work. They might come in early, they might come in late, they might finish when they're supposed to finish. They might finish even later. I mean, Larry, you and I probably don't get paid anything extra for working extra. Okay, if we're supposed to finish at five, but we have to sit back seven or eight, we don't get paid anything extra, most likely. But these hourly paid workers can get paid differently. There is labor laws that are involved. Okay? So managing all that, the whole labor compliance is the second part of workforce management. And the third part, and this is the most important part, this is the part that nobody, none of our competitors or anyone actually does a good job at all. Because that's where we actually try to emphasize much more than anybody else is looking after the needs and wants of the shift worker. Okay, when the way I want to work, who do I want to work with? Okay, A shift worker is probably not sitting by in slack. They don't probably sitting by the computer with Zoom, for example, to meet with their managers. How do you keep communicating with them? How do you let them know what's happening? How do you let them know what's expected of them and how can they control their life? Looking after the needs and wants of the ship worker. So these three things, the scheduling, the timekeeping and labor compliance, and looking after the needs and wants, that's what workforce management is. And Larry, to answer your original question, what excites me most is regardless of how I look at each of those circles in that Venn diagram, we have years of innovation left to do. And for everything that has been achieved in these three buckets, I can see at least another 30 to 40 years of innovation happening in each of these areas. You can build a $10 billion revenue business. The lives you can impact for each of the circles is just so, so large.

And you already have, when you, when you make these breakthroughs, you have all of the markets, all the places ready to install it. So that's got to be rewarding right there. And you can tweak what your, the changes you make and see the results because you get a large number response. It's not just one office here or there. With your new program, you get four thousands of data points of research on whether or not, these are productive or not. But you didn't mention training. How about how does training fit into that?

Well, training is a really big part and I mean we don't necessarily do the training bit. We have a lot of partners we work with who offer training. But one thing, the great way training works with deputy is that in order to schedule someone into a shift, there's about six different constraints you need to look at. Okay, hey, are they double booked to work somewhere else? Are they going to be trained and qualified? Okay, are they going to be fatigued? Are they on leave? Are they available? Do they prefer to work in. There is so many different constraints we look at to ensure that someone can do a shift. But when it comes to training, there's a lot of partners of deputy. We work where if they have done the training then they get qualified to go and do that. We don't necessarily do the training, Larry. And that's not something a focus at the moment for deputy. Because there's still so much to do in the other areas, right?

Yeah, yeah, that and plus there's so many different fields. So when you go in, how do you wind up what sticks out to you as the area? How do you find the areas that you want to dive into next? Of all the areas and opportunities out there, you say we're only doing 2%, we could be improving for 30 or 40 years. How do you decide this is where we're going to move next? Or do you move in a bunch of different directions at once?

When everything is a priority, nothing's a priority. That's probably the probability of wisdom. Look, I mean it's been a journey for us and I think we've gotten a lot better at it. Even I personally have gotten better at it. I mean at the beginning of it it's like kid in a candy store, like in a wall. So many different things we can do. Okay. And we've trialed a lot of different things. Okay. I mean if you've never seen any candy in your life and you walk into a candy store, it will be dumb for you to just choose the first candy you see in there. So we have tried a lot of things, but then we have really holding on the things that we really want to be good at. Okay? I mean, and those are those three.

Things you're you're talking about right there, right? I mean you said, I mean those.

Are more of the like, you know, what the workforce management industry is. But I mean as far as, you know, market segmentation is concerned. But here In Australia, where deputy was born, one in 10 shift workers use deputy. Okay, I can walk out the door and meet someone, you know, 10% chance they're already using deputy in there. In. If I can achieve that in the United States, if I can achieve that in Europe, Deputy would be tremendously, tremendously successful given that there's 18 million shift workers in United States alone. So. But you don't get to go to all 80 million in one go. Okay. You have to look at the specific verticals. Like, hey, are they in the restaurants, are they in health care? Even under health care, you know, are they working in hospitals or are they working in clinics? Like, there's a lot of market segmentation. Do exactly what our product offering is for that industry and yet you have to work through all of that.

Well, you know, Ashik, you're in the enviable position where everybody wants to get, when they start a business, you know, they wanted to get big, big, big. We want to be everywhere. We want to go on, you know, you know, multinational, you know, and you know, have be known everywhere. But then you have to run it. And that, you know, that, that can be overwhelming. And I'm looking forward, I'm going to ask you how you go about unraveling that because it seems to be, you know, it's what everybody wants. But then it's like, how do you keep running that thing? And that's why I think when a lot of companies get that big, the founder bails out and turns it over to a professional manager because it's just too overwhelming. And I've talked to a lot of people about that, but you guys just seem to be, you're kind of like Donald Trump when he has something negative happen. You just get more energized. You know, it's like the more complicated things get for you, it's like, okay, all right, now I'm really going to get interested on this thing, you know. And so as you gone, you said you got more clarity, more excitement and seems rather than being overwhelmed by keeping up with this thing, you seem to be more energized about that and I can't wait to dig in on that.

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