Mastering Technology - Fractional C-Suite Retreat - Episode # 006

Growing a business is hard, but it does not have to be. Once a week, we take a break from the hustle and bustle in business to talk about innovations and what's new in the C-suite. This is the Fractional C-Suite Retreat, and I'm Joseph Frost. Pull up a seat at the fire, grab a drink, smoke a cigar, and just join me as we relax, learn, and get inspired. This retreat is sponsored by Your CMO, helping organizations grow with better marketing strategy. Welcome. Today's guest is an industry thought leader, highly skilled in consulting, a builder of mobile and web apps, a fractional CTO at BentleyDavis.com, and guess what? His name is Bentley Davis. Welcome, Bentley. Thanks for being here.

Hey, Joseph. Thanks for having me.

So I appreciate, uh, you giving me some time today. I'm excited to talk to you. One of the questions that I like to start with is As a fractional CTO, you're in and out of different C-suites and boardrooms on a regular basis. And from your experience, what's one of the opportunities that you see that C-suites might be missing out on today? What are some of the things that you're seeing that maybe they're not seeing right now?

Yeah, I think one of the big opportunities that's coming up is The ability to, for your teams within your company to enable themselves with technology. So a lot of the no-code solutions are things that can even be used in corporations and then even in operations. There are several companies that rather than having a huge IT staff building custom internal software are using Airtable and other kind of low-code or no-code tools and allowing semi-technical people manage it. There are risks both with security and, you know, eventual quality on that, but it's, um, the benefits kind of outweigh the risks if you manage it correctly.

All right, so for a non-techie like myself, uh, what is the difference between no-code and low-code versus, I guess, a coded solution?

Yeah, well, that it really comes down to the amount of training that the person has to have before they can do it. So I mean, probably most in our audience know Excel, and that's kind of the original no-code. So a lot of people are writing very complex formulas. Probably half of accounting in the world runs off of Microsoft Excel. So you think of that, but now there's many, many more tools. Like let's say you wanted to have an email sent out to you every time a customer took an action on your website. Before you would need an actual software engineer to go in and code that. But nowadays you can use tools like Zapier to send off a message, and you can even integrate it with Slack if your company is using that, or Microsoft Teams. Often a lot of people can do that even without having to learn how to code. So it's just, it's allowing people a lot more flexibility of the tool with these tools than where they don't have to, you know, practice for years like I have in order to write the code itself.

So how would you recommend that a, um, a business owner or C-suite executive would go about identifying their opportunities that would be, uh, that would make sense for a low-code or no-code solution versus what traditionally they thought was, would need full coding capabilities?

Yeah, I think, well, one, one option is there's often a low-code or no-code community. So on Twitter, the, the no-code community is really helpful and always providing ideas, especially for like medium or small-sized businesses. So just actually kind of following that so that you kind of see how other people are using it, what they're doing, and then the next time you see a problem, you might think of that. The other thing is to— if you do have an IT staff, challenge them to learn a little bit about it. I mean, they should be able to say, oh, you can do that yourself. But a lot of developers haven't looked into it because they don't need to. It's not that much of— it doesn't save them that much time, although I personally have saved actually my own time by using these no-code tools rather than writing my own code in some instances. So that's some ways to kind of get a feeling for it. Also, there's a lot of really good advisors or mentors, and that's kind of what a fractional CTO also could do is, um, if you're looking for fractional CTOs or IT help, go ahead and ask them their opinion on no-code. And if they say, oh, you know, it's not— it's worthless or anything like that, then that might be kind of a red flag to make that they're not open to the full power of what's out there today.

So even if it's, uh, no-code or low-code, do you still need an IT person, or could it be a different type of person that is building those solutions internally?

Yeah, they don't— they definitely don't need to be IT. So the tools are designed to— usually they solve a specific issue like communicating between systems in the case of Zapier, or Airtable is a lot like Excel except it's a little bit more structured and is more powerful than that. So you definitely don't need to be a coder to do that, but you— they do take some time to learn. Sometimes for some of the cases, you, if you have a manager of a department, they're like, we really need to kind of track this information closer. They could use Airtable as a data entry point for their team members to, to type in kind of what they're doing. You can kind of build kind of a custom CRM out of it or other tools. So a lot of departments have very special little little needs, like they need to track all the team members doing all this and everyone needs to kind of know what everyone else is up to. That's kind of a good place where you might put that in Excel or Google Spreadsheet, but you could also use an Airtable for that.

So what's Airtable? That's new to me. Tell me how does that work?

So Airtable is a lot like Excel, except it— you actually define what your columns are. So rather than just having a spreadsheet of squares you can fill in, you say this is a— this column is this column is going to be the name of the company that we're interacting with, and this other column is going to be their address. And then the system enforces stuff like that. So we'd normally put it in Excel. And then there's a lot of visualizations that you can do, and you can also create a form. So if you had your— if you wanted your team members to say every time they make a sales call, you wanted to kind of log that, then you could use Airtable for that instead of buying Salesforce or something bigger.

Okay. So Airtable is a, it's a nice tool out there for kind of form building and database management that is a little more advanced than Excel and can be easily manipulated or customized by somebody who's not a coder, right? Like Access database or something.

It is actually, I call it Access online.

Okay.

So Microsoft Access, but if anyone's aware of it, it's, it's that on steroids and online. It doesn't quite do everything that Microsoft Access used to do, but it's, it fits that same niche.

So as a fractional CTO, you have this, I mean, any fractional professional has a level of knowledge and expertise that generally should be greater than the, than the other C-suite members in the room, because that's why they're there, supposedly. So you're able to go in as this fractional CTO, and probably see opportunities for cost savings, time savings through some of these low-code, no-code solutions that people in the room would just have no idea of. Is that, is that fair to say?

Yeah, and also with my expertise, you know, helping them optimize their, their any dev teams they may have, whether they're in-house or outsourced. A lot of times you have non-technical business owners that are trying to manage offshore developers or, or some sort of software team, and sometimes it helps to have someone who doesn't work for that agency or that group to kind of look at it from a slightly different angle. And really what it comes down to, sometimes I'll be mentoring an actual CTO that's in a company or working with them just so they have a second perspective on it. Sometimes I'm not necessarily know more than them, but I have a different level of experience. And also, if someone's been working in a single company for several years, they don't have the opportunity like I, like you and I have, where we're working with several companies, so we can bring the best of breed of the solutions and technologies in. So I've had, you know, a slightly broader exposure to a lot of technology. So that's, that's kind of what, what fractional CTOs like I bring to the table.

That makes a lot of sense. So it's not just companies without any CTO experience, it's, it's companies that have a variety and range of expertise already in-house, there's still value in bringing you in as a fractional to potentially give a different look at the same problem or challenges or mentoring role to somebody that might be developing and growing, or even just capacity, they need, they don't have the capacity to do what needs to get done, you can add some of that capacity to the table.

Yes, sometimes you'll get a new system or buy a new company and the, you know, you're already maxed out just handling your day-to-day job and now you got to integrate, get these two systems working together. That's a great opportunity to bring someone in that has experience managing large projects like that with technical staff and can speak both the technical staff and to the C-suite. To, yeah, to, to augment the resources that you have. Or just the time that the CTO has.

So what is your ideal client size, and/or what does the client look like in, in your ideal situation, just for your practice?

Yeah, um, the most profitable one would probably be a mid-sized business that's been around for a while, so, you know, a million or to 10 in, uh, annual revenue. Uh, but I, I really also enjoy working with the startups and the brand new thing. I've actually worked with several non-technical founders while they're looking for a technical co-founder. And so I can give them advice and point them in the right direction, help them manage those technical teams and help them find that, that, that technical co-person. Because often they will need someone on staff full time if they're doing— I mean, if they're just doing a a restaurant or something, they may not need that. But if they're trying to do a startup in the technology space, then they probably need someone in the C-suite that, that's familiar with a lot of software and coding. So that's, that's, those are the ones I enjoy, but they're often not quite as profitable for me.

Yeah. And in those scenarios where you're helping the startup, or maybe the kind of midsize company, What is the resources that you can bring outside yourself? Do you have those relationships with developers overseas or developers locally? Or how do you enhance yourself when you go into those engagements?

I have worked with a lot of them in the past, so I know how to manage them. At the moment, I don't— everyone's so busy, I wouldn't be able to pull someone out of a pocket, but I would help with that search. And oftentimes you do need to do kind of a fresh, fresh search for each company and help them find it. I did help interview a couple of CTOs for a startup tech when they were getting their technical founder size. They will help in that way, but also telling them, helping them kind of write up the list of, you know, how do they phrase what their existing technology is, whether they're willing to change. So helping them craft that message out when they're doing that search for that hire or a team or an agency to help them out. I'm working on building a list of agencies and developers that I trust that I've used personally. So I'm starting to do like small side projects so I can experience and make sure that I've, you know, have firsthand or just secondhand knowledge of these developers or other technical teams. So that if I give a recommendation, it's, it's a true recommendation.

Yeah, that's terribly important that you've got the right people that you're recommending into your clients. So I'm— I've been involved in some tech projects, some startups that have failed, and some challenges that I uncovered. How would you How would you help somebody avoid making a big mistake when it comes to technology? And let's first think about a startup. So you've got a non-technical founder that comes to you and is looking for help and support, has this great idea, knows they need to build some sort of widget, whether it's an app or a website or an app, an application. What is your approach to make sure that you can get them down the right path without making some of the big mistakes that they could make out there?

The first thing I find out is where they are in the stage. Do they have product-market fit already? Do they know the customers and the thing, or are they still trying to find out what their solution is? A lot of times founder will say, I know what I want, but if they haven't actually tested it, I, I would caution them to not trust their gut on that. And so I want to make sure that they have done, and this, this kind of falls more into the market research, is to make sure that they've done that market research before they pay me or some other agency to build a big product. So I help them with some often no-code solutions, stand up a website and make sure customers are willing to buy even though you don't have a product built at all. So that's if they're very, very early stages. Later on, when they're, when they kind of know that what their product is, then we want to take them— we want to have them— so when they do hire some developers, especially if they're non-technical, an important thing I tell them is you should be getting a demo of the updates every week. If your developers want to go off and not show you anything for a couple of months, that's usually a red flag. Now, not all the time will they have, you know, screen things that they can show on a screen to show you unless they think about it from the beginning. So a really good experienced dev team will know, I need to put in a feature that they can see what's going in, even if it's just a login screen or something like that, so that I can show progress and that you can make sure that it is meeting your vision. So that's kind of just basic agile methodology, but you'd be surprised How many agencies or companies out there, you know, go away for a couple months and then deliver a product and then it's not really what you wanted it. It should be a collaborative process where you're seeing updates and making tweaks and changes as you go along. Yeah, so that's, that's kind of in the middle. And then when you get into large companies doing large projects, then you really need a, you know, a full project manager on that, which I've done on some large projects. And then you kind of follow the bigger project management, but always there should be that, that, that cadence of iteration instead of the, you know, the old-fashioned kind of waterfall process.

So you've got a marketing step as your first step.

Yeah.

From an IT standpoint.

Yeah. I don't know what you think of that. Do you agree with that? Or—

No, I agree 100%. And I I've seen and heard that before from other people that I trust in technology. They say the same thing. You need to have a product market validation before you start doing major spend on development. But I've also seen it where that's not been required from dev shops that, oh yeah, we can build it. And they don't even ask what the marketability is because they don't really care. As long as they can build it, they will.

They'd have to turn around, turn down more work if they actually asked that question.

Right, exactly. So help me understand then, or somebody— and I actually have a, I have a business owner friend of mine right now who's looking to build a sales software that will replace an existing software that, that he's using. And he's thinking about going directly to a dev shop to just build it. And so it's for his own purpose, so the product market fit's not as big a deal for him as an example. How does that person need, or does that person need someone like you to oversee that dev shop, build the right software or do it the right way or keep the costs contained and— Is that something they need to have that expert extra?

And this, this owner's a semi-technical, not a—

not— he's a non-technical. Non-technical.

Yeah. I, I really— yeah, I would recommend they need someone who's not a member of the agency that they're hiring or the developer team that they're— especially they're probably going— I imagine something like that would be big enough you'd need an agency. I really think you need to have at least a technical advisor to, to keep a watch over things. There's just too many pitfalls, and like we were talking about with the market fit, there's a lot of decisions where agencies often don't think of that. There are some great agencies out there that do, that make sure you have your marketing in place, make sure that your architecture fits what you really need, make sure your requirements are really what you need and not just what you think you need, but that is, it's so rare that you really need a second set of eyes. It's trust but verify. You need to have someone that can look over the codebase and see whether they're making something that's supportable. So at least an advisor, and that's one great way, the fractional CTO, because hiring a full CTO could be rather expensive or giving away a lot of equity in your business in order to get a CTO is really might be too big for something like that. So if someone can just come in and look at the, you know, look at, you know, just check in on the project and make sure that it has a good kickoff and that it's progressing would probably be a wise use of resources.

And is that a, is that something that you do as a fractional CTO kind of on that project basis, come in and manage just that one build as an example, or do you need to be more involved in the overall business strategy? Or how does—

well, I would, I would come in on that project, but part of the initial process and check-ins throughout the time would be making sure that not only before you start the project that it's going to meet your business needs, find out what your business needs are and is it going to meet it, and then keep checking because things change, right? And that's another reason why we do more of the agile development process. Because sure enough, if you're building something as big as a sales tracking tool or market, like you were talking about, then something will change and those requirements will change before you get it built. So being able to know when that happens, and sometimes the owner or founder sees the change but doesn't think about the impact on there. So having someone kind of come back and periodically check and say, hey, so, you know, what's, what's new in your business? And then as they tell me that, then I would identify, oh, well, we need to jump on this change now so that the product, when it finally gets delivered and in use and production, that it will really fulfill your needs.

You mentioned tech stack. And I know personally that in some sort of web app or application development, you have to choose the right languages and the technology you're going to use. But within a business, there's— we have so many different technologies that we use, from software to, you know, do we use— and choices like, should we be a Google or a Microsoft shop? Should we be, um, use Salesforce as a CRM or HubSpot CRM? Do you offer kind of guidance along those fronts for companies? Do you have a preference of your own for some of those technologies, or are you pretty agnostic?

I can use them all. I still have my preferences. And then I also give guidance, but generally the guidance is what your developers— what are your developers already most familiar with? There's not such a— like you said, choosing the right language or the right vendor like Microsoft or Google or Amazon. There is no— there usually isn't a right there. There's enough parity that it's almost a commodity service. There are definite differences, but you could build an app in all those services and one wouldn't be significantly different than the other. So it comes on to when you're hiring people, what are they comfortable and familiar with? And yeah, so I mean, right now my my preferences, like a lot of Google products right now, although I did a decade in the Microsoft space and then I've, you know, I've dabbled with, with certain clients on Amazon, which is AWS. And a lot of the technology nowadays for them to compete, they're using technology that actually works on multiple clouds. So depending on how you don't want to be locked into one service, you may choose to use those technologies and then you can move from Microsoft to Google without too much trouble. But you're, you're never quite— it's— you could develop faster if you choose one and use their specific path and you get a little— there'll be a little bit of lock-in, which also it's okay to have a lock-in if you're experimenting, if you're a startup. Trying new things because you'll probably delete all this code that you're writing anyways and restart once you get that product market fit. But if you're building a more mature product, then you might want to make something that can transfer between clouds.

So Google or Microsoft?

For small startups, Google. So Firebase and Firestore is kind of their technology, I suggest. Yeah, I don't know if I was doing a large company, I would probably still prefer Microsoft or AWS. But really it comes down to by the time you get there, you already have a dev that started one. I wouldn't suggest moving. And one caution I do give is whenever you hire a new CTO or a new developer, they're always going to come in and say, oh, this was done all wrong, we need to start from scratch. Well, Everyone likes having a clean playing field when they come on, but that's rarely the right decision.

Salesforce or HubSpot?

I'm only familiar with Salesforce, so I would choose that.

Salesforce or Dynamics?

Salesforce still. I've done Dynamics before, but that was, that was 10 years ago.

Zoom or, uh, was it Microsoft Teams or version of video?

I know someone that really likes Teams. I, for me, it feels very clunky, so I'm more of a Zoom and a Slack, uh, person.

Slack or WhatsApp?

Uh, I'm just more familiar with Slack right now. Uh, one that I'd be interested in trying is Discord just because more customizable, even though it's mostly for gamers.

But so tell me about Discord. What is Discord?

So it's a, it's a lot like Slack. It was originally developed for video game players. So they've always had the live chat so that you can chat using Discord rather than, you know, whatever game you're playing and stuff like that. And they also have live video and they have rooms that you could hop in, you could just hear everyone else talking. And in our virtual environment, I, you know, you kind of miss the thing to where you're, there's someone in a cubicle next to you where they can kind of hear what's going on a little bit, or you can, you can pop over and ask them a question without having to ring them up or something like that. So I think kind of that having that ambient office environment's an interesting idea, which I haven't really tried, but I've been kind of wanting to.

Interesting. Squarespace or WordPress?

Depending on your options, WordPress is much more flexible, but is harder to use. So if you really just need a, a really good-looking marketing site that doesn't have any real functionality to it, I'd probably suggest Squarespace. If you're doing a podcast and you want links and episodes and stuff like that, I'd probably still suggest WordPress right now.

Twitter or Facebook?

Uh, you have to do both today.

Good answer.

Good. Right.

All right, that was kind of fun. We just like word association almost. We should do that.

Yeah.

Um, all right, I want to switch gears a little bit.

I want to talk a little bit about your journey as a fractional professional.

Um, how did you get into this space? Um, what, what made you decide to be a fractional professional versus your full-time, um, role in the past?

Yeah, so I did work 2 decades in the hospitality industry, all at one company. I wasn't really sure how good I was. And then also, I, I once did an estimate of how much time I'd saved, and I found out I had automated 10 jobs. Now, we never really had to fire anybody because there's always more work Right. So no matter how much of automation— say that again.

You automated 10 jobs in one year.

And I worked there for 20 years. So you can think of how many, how much money I saved them. And I realized I'm not getting 10 people's worth of pay. So yeah, so I was like, this is kind of a raw deal. My pay is not going up. I mean, even if I got like double the pay, that would be nice. So I decided that I needed to be more on the equity side of the business. I need to own my own means of production, right, rather than working for someone else. And then I thought it'd be fun to do some startups because you get equity. So I tried my own startup, which of course failed, which almost everyone, their first startup fails. I joined one that was doing some fabulous technology where it, you use the Microsoft Kinect camera that can see how your body moves and track body movement. And we were using that in orthopedic offices so that they could check the range of motion on how far you can do and show progress digitally. So we can say, oh, they, they're doing 2% better after 2 weeks of physical therapy. And then they, they had some funding issues. So I moved to another startup dealing with genetic counselors that helped them see twice as many patients than they normally do. And right now there's a huge shortage of genetic counselors. And we sold that startup to a genetic testing company that wanted to give it away for free. So I worked for the genetic testing company for a couple years. And then, but since then, you know, back when I started, the main goal was money, money, money. Why am I not getting all the money that I need? But since then, you know, I've gotten a little bit more mature. And I'm thinking, I really want impact. I really want to help people out. So the only way to really have the time to donate and volunteer my time to things like the Dallas Wave Impact Ventures, which is a startup incubator and accelerator for minority and women-owned businesses. So I mentor startups there. And so to have the time to do that, the best way to do that is to be a, you know, a gig worker or a fractional worker. So then I can, I can make some money helping out, helping businesses make a lot more money and then use some of the funds from that where they're compensating me for that time to, to donate to these needy organizations. And then I also have my own ideas on software that will save the world. So I'm experimenting. Wow.

What's your— what's one idea you can share about software that can change the world?

So you'll have to stop me before I spend too much time talking about it. But my current experiment is a website called Gullibot. It's a gullible robot. The idea is that it'll help reduce the divisiveness that we have in our current culture, especially when discussing contentious issues. So A lot of people have been concerned with how people can't seem to talk to each other anywhere today and talk past each other. So Gollybot's a character that we can all explain our— so we take a contentious issue, we show our evidence on why we think other people should kind of agree with us on it. And instead of getting angry and being on Twitter and repeating something and typing in all caps, it's a place where you can put in your evidence and all the evidence from both sides of the issue collect in one place.

Place.

And then Golly Bot has a scoring mechanism that everyone can understand. And, uh, and you realize that you can change Golly's mind by adding more and more evidence. So we gather everything together. Yeah, I love it.

I always have— I, I love that idea because I had this— I had an idea a couple, several years back along the lines of, if you get what's the true source of news these days, and there's left news, right news, I don't care what side you're on. And my idea was If you could put the sources up and then everybody could vote on how reliable that source is, and over time the algorithm, the more reliable sources start spreading to the top, but you could go one place to see all the news with the most reliable sources as the truth behind the news. But Gollybots, the similar concept, right?

Yeah, yeah. Tackles the same issue, yeah.

I love it. That's great. So when are we gonna build that? And I suppose I could help market it as a marketer.

Yeah, if you're available, it's, it's one of those ideas that I doubt it will ever make money. So I don't want to— so I'm finding it difficult to kind of hire people to help out with it. So if people are willing to donate some time to improve the world, this is an opportunity for them. Yeah, I love it. Yeah, it is. I do have something up at gullibot.com, G-U-L-L-I-B-O-T.com, and you could probably find that at bentleydavis.com too. And yeah, the other thing I need is contentious issues and people that are willing to kind of debate them.

Oh, I think there's plenty of those. Plenty of those to find.

Yeah, finding people that are willing to have a long conversation over several months, like you have several meetings so that you can really dig deep, has been a challenge. And sometimes these issues are so contentious that people don't want to publicly touch them, right? Because you don't want to scare away potential customers because they misunderstand what you're saying.

So the next question I had around fractional work is, what do you think are the, the top criteria for business owners and C-suite executives to consider when choosing a fractional CTO? What are 2 or 3 things that you think are important for them to consider when choosing a fractional CTO?

One of the main things is communication. I think I've heard other guests on your show talk about this, is that especially in the C-suite, each of the different kind of areas, you know, marketing and finance and, and technology need to be able to communicate together. It's all about coordination to make the company kind of move as one. So when you're kind of talking and interviewing people to help you out with being with technology, they should be able to talk about the technology in language you understand. Like when I was using Airtable and I didn't check to make sure that you knew what that was, that was a sign that I wasn't doing the perfect job of that. But, you know, think about how did you feel during that conversation? Did you feel like that you understood everything and that you could— you were open to ask questions, or did you feel like that you didn't quite understand what they're talking about? That is probably the most important thing. And then making sure that they do have experience, a wide range of experience of challenging issues and managing teams. When you talk about CTO, it's— the person actually doesn't have to be a software developer. I think it helps, but it's really kind of a management job where you also know what technology is out there and how to use it to its best. But they could have been someone that hasn't written code in several years. But depends where you are. If you're a very small company, then it would be nice to have someone that could jump in and help with some of the coding from time to time and do some code reviews. So a wide range in that they don't come in with any real biases, like if they're not open to no-code as one of the potential solutions, or if they only— if they say, oh, you always have to use Microsoft or you always have to use technology. It should be more like, I recommend this technology, and here's why. If that doesn't fit your business model or your team, then let's discuss it. And, and my job is to make— is to give you all the relevant information filtered down, and then the, the CEO or the, the people in the company make the final decision.

How important is cultural fit in your opinion?

Um, I think it's important that most of the good people, I think, go from culture to culture. And sometimes you have to be careful if, depending on what you mean by cultural fit, sometimes you won't have as high a diversity, uh, because you say, well, would I go out and have beers with this person? Well, maybe that's because you haven't been around that type of person as much. It's kind of a polite way to say it. And so it you may not feel quite as comfortable, but you need to think about it. So it's really kind of the values of your company. If you're doing a company that is either a nonprofit or an impact business, you want to make sure you're not— you don't have someone come in who's used to just going for profit for any reason, because they'll make technology decisions that are not necessarily best for your customer. But are best for profit. So decisions like that, and it really helps if they're passionate about the area you're in. If you're running pet sitting, it's really good if, if that person, you know, even if they're doing your technology, it's really good if they understand the problem. So if they have pets, or if they, you know, have a passion for animals, then that, that I think that is a bonus. And when you're trying to hire them, Yeah, that makes a lot of sense.

Have you enjoyed being a fractional professional?

Yeah, I've enjoyed it quite a bit. The flexibility for me is great. The diversity of work and handling different problems and the diversity of technology keeps, keeps it interesting. It's, it's challenging. I mean, you know, it— doing my own marketing for the most part to get my name out there has been a challenge, but then I'm learning marketing, then I can work better with CMOs such as yourself to understand their needs so I can back them up with technology. Yeah, I've, I've really enjoyed it. And yeah, that's awesome.

So what are some of the other things you do outside of work? You talked a little bit about your, your, you give back through the organization there. But what are some of the other things you do for fun or relaxation?

Yeah, we, we live just down the street from a lake. So my wife and I are often walking around the lake, doing other short hikes. We're not— we don't do camping or backpacking or anything like that. But we do enjoy walking and traveling from time to time. But most of the time I do spend— there's several organizations that I'm a member of that are trying to impact the world. So they're Some of the names are like the Canonical Debate Lab that's trying to figure out how to make debate effective and something that stays around so that people can have more effective discussions. And then Open Global Mind, which is helping people just access to the world's information. We actually, we have too much information these days. The problem is it's not well organized and filtered. To where we can find the right thing at the right time. So Open Global Minds kind of doing work on that. Society Library is doing some great stuff in the kind of the debate space. So they're gathering up all the information on contentious issues and building explainers and stuff like that so that people can more quickly understand the full scope of the situation. And make it easier for people to feel and to actually be a little bit more knowledgeable about what's going on. And it also kind of helps build a bit of humility. I think a lot of the times, uh, one of the challenges with us communicating is on contentious issues that we all kind of feel like we're right. We kind of forget how complicated the issue is.

Do you think people want to be more aware of the, uh, these issues? Do they want to learn more about the other side? Because I love, I love your noble cause, but I wonder from a marketing standpoint, like, you know, are people really interested in that?

Yeah, no, they, they don't. Um, but what they are interested in, the marketing side, is they don't want to have these fights on social media all the time. They don't want to lose friends. Over these contentious issues. Um, oh well, one of the problems is that we do actually kind of enjoy the outrage a bit, um, you know, being able to hop on the internet and prove someone wrong even if they don't understand. That makes you feel good. Um, so yeah, part of the problem is kind of finding out how can we— but in, in the end, they, they don't want their planet to either have too much warming or to waste a whole bunch of money trying to find something that doesn't exist. So either whichever side you are on that debate, they do care about the specific situations and they know they need to, that they're not gonna get anywhere unless they convince the people that disagree with them one way or the other. And so I think if we're giving them tools, so yeah, we don't, tell them so much that they'll be humbled in seeing it, but we will tell them that, uh, that they will be able to change other people's minds. And, you know, just as a byproduct, your mind might change too, but we're not selling them that.

Yeah. Have you thought about gamifying the experience at all to make it more engaging?

I have a game show model of GullyBot.

Okay.

Yeah, they get two teams arguing and it's got a score and you watch it go up and down.

Yeah, I could. So that's what I was— as you're more and more you're talking about, that's what I was seeing and visualizing, is that you're pounding the other side and they're pounding back, and then somebody wins, and it's like a game. And so you're— you kind of remove yourself maybe from the emotional attachment of the subject, and, uh, the outcome is— if it's, you know, some sort of validated outcome— yeah, I guess I lost that one, but I'll go, I'll go the next one and then keep going again there.

Yeah, I think that would be fun. I've been spending some time trying to figure out how to do that.

Yeah, well, it's fascinating. I'm really intrigued by these, those, I mean, the subjects that you choose to spend your free time in are really large issues that as a society we do need to solve and there's not many people that will tackle those kind of big issues in their free time, right? They're usually focused on that or paid to do that work. So it's encouraging to hear there's people out there like you that are spending their free time or have a passion to help solve those bigger issues. I appreciate that.

Yeah, I enjoy it. It's very challenging work though, 'cause it is so hard.

But yeah, well, you'll, you'll find a way through it. And I'm curious to see what that Bully Bot looks like and see what I can— if I can lend a hand in any way, please reach out. I'm happy to brainstorm on marketing.

Take you up on that. And also just kind of mention everyone, as a Fractional CTO also, I often swap with other Fractional professionals or just companies where, you know, you know, if I, if I know a graphic designer and I need some graphic designing, but, and then she could use some tips on technology or, you know, other like that, then, you know, we, we can kind of help each other out. That's, that's often something that I enjoy doing as well.

Good. So we're going to share like all the ways for people to get connected with you in the, in the show notes. But I think the, the easiest way is probably to go to bentleydavis.com and, and connect with you that way and see what you're up to with BullyBot and other things. And, um, is that your preferred way to get contacted?

Yeah, that's the easiest way to get everything. And scroll down a little bit, you can see all the links to social media. Um, so yeah, that's, that's the, that's the shortest path to find out what I'm up to right now.

Is it a Squarespace site or a WordPress site?

This one is custom built.

That was my third choice.

Yeah.

Custom, of course, from us.

Right, right. Well, you get to play with the technologies that way. Yeah.

Good. All right, well, I really appreciate this conversation. It was very informational and interesting, and I enjoyed it quite a bit. I hope you did as well.

I really did. Yeah, it was a lot of fun.

Okay, well, thanks, Bentley, and we'll talk soon. And that's a wrap. There's another successful episode of the Fractional C-Suite Retreat. See our show notes and more episodes at fractionalcsuitretreat.com. This podcast is sponsored by YorCmo, helping organizations grow, save time and money with better marketing strategy and fractional execution. Visit them at yorcmo.com. Yorcmo.com, spelled wrong on purpose.