How to Audit & Optimize Your Tech Stack | RBP Full Course

Foreign definitely jump in right away here and get kind of going. First things first. Why are we here? Right. Well, first of all, what is the true implication of software in your business? Right? As everybody kind of got a spook today because they heard that Sumoquote got bought by Job Nimbus. And that was like something that prompted a lot of people to ask me a lot of questions. It goes to show that there is a true implication to software in your business. The important thing to always remember with software is that it is a tool. It is a tool, right? And the tool does not matter as much as the process in which you use that tool or how you set up that tool to be used. And none of that matters as much as getting adoption of that process. Adoption is everything. Now, in order to make good decisions about software, it's important to kind of think about how do software vendors view you as their customer? Knowing who you are and what you represent and what power you have as a customer is key to running a strong business. When it comes to buying tech, your this is a part of your business development relationships that you're going to be responsible for now and in the future. And so understanding how to compare vendors and how they view you as a customer is big. And then also knowing how to audit your tech stack, because this is something that kind of balloons out of control for people. We see it all the time. And so I want to make sure that by the time you're done, you know, audit your current tech stack. Start starting off. What is your tech stack? It is the collection of the tools, the platforms, like Facebook is a platform, Directory is a platform, Google Ads is a platform. Or like your apps. Company Cam is an app, sales rabbit is an app, and then also pieces of software like QuickBooks or your CRM. It's the things that your company uses to build your products, to carry out your business operations, and to monitor your performance metrics, right? So you can grow. So software is a big deal, right? And you want to try and make it work for you so you don't have to work for it. But it's also going to include the operating systems that that software runs on. So you need to also think like, well, you have Windows or do you have Mac or do you have Android phones, right? Which is where hardware ties in, because you can have a great tech stack, but if you don't have the hardware to back it up, then your things are going to run slow and then you're going to have a lack of adoption because people are always waiting on the software. This is why you can't be letting your people use an iPhone 3G or an old, old Pentium 4 when you're trying to run this kind of software. If you're trying to use technology as a lever in your business, you need to make sure there's some controls over the ability for people to use it. And that means you might have to look at investing in hardware as well sometimes. But this is what allows you to create a consistent, deliverable in your business, right? Think about like McDonald's, right? If they want to roll out the self checkout where they have the screen, you can order your McDonald's food they want. They don't let people pick their own smart TV and try and install the software. No, they send the hardware and the software. So hardware, software, apps and how it integrates is important. But it can also be something that like you, like you said Cheryl, where you don't want to drain you dry because people like. The reason I'm doing this is because I see this all the time. It's in our personal lives as well. You start out with Netflix and that's good. But then all of a sudden your kids want to watch something like Avatar. So now you have Disney plus and now you're paying for that forever. But then Hulu, the Kardashians switch over to Hulu. And so now your daughter wants to watch the new Kardashian series on Hulu. But then Reacher is a pretty cool show. So now you've got prime video and then you got to keep up with the news, right? So you hate the ads on YouTube. So then you're paying for YouTube. We haven't even started on your music. So I used to love watching Joe Rogan on YouTube, but now you have to get Spotify to listen to Joe Rogan. But your phone, when you hook up to your car really is a lot easier to have. Apple music. Plus you got a home pod, so you want to be able to play your music over that. But then your truck automatically came with Sirius xm. So now you got to pay for your Sirus XM subscription because you want to make sure you can still listen to the hockey game or the football game while you're driving. And then there's a gym membership that you'd never use. You got to pay for that too. And this kind of stuff is just causing bills to constantly rise in our lives. And this is also your business. This will happen there too, because everything will seem important and urgent and something that would be cool, but it does like again, the tool does not matter as much as the process, and the process does not matter as much as adoption. This is why you want to be taking a very intentional look at your tech. Because their business is SaaS. This is how they do business. They are designed as a recurring revenue model. As a business, they just, they're built around getting you on and keeping you there. And that's not evil, it's just the way the business model works. And it's actually the invisible hand of capitalism has decided that this is better than paying for Microsoft Office 95. And then they have, then they release a patch and all the bugs and you pay for the patch for 79. And then you have to pay for Microsoft Office 98. Two years later, the invisible hand of capitalism voted and said that software as a service was better. Cloud infrastructure allows for faster updates, less requirement of server time. On a computer like this, it is better that this is there. But it required them as a industry to learn what makes the business succeed. And there's three key metrics. So if you're interested in the Sumo Quote and Job Nimbus merger, it's important for you to understand this because then you can start to predict what will happen as a result and you won't be sold a pipe dream. Through the marketing department, you understand exactly how they make these kinds of decisions of when to merge, when to integrate, when to buy, when to fold up, when to rebrand, when to add new features, why they add the features they add and won't add the features that you want. All of this becomes better if you understand this business model. And so the three key metrics that they focus on is ccac, cost of acquiring a customer, ltv, lifetime value, and churn. Everything in this business is built around improving those metrics after finding what we call product market fit. And this is the thing that I see so many business owners get sold down the river because of a pipe dream. So you see that you like a software and you've heard of a software and they come up with a press release and they say so and so just got series, blah, blah, blah, funding for $17 million. And you think, man, this product is good, but not great. But now they got $17 million they're going to make, they're going to make it better. And a lot of times their sales teams will call you up and like, guess what, we're coming out with this new thing and we'd love for you to be on the team of people that are going to help us formulate this Product. And then you think, and I seen this 100. No, sorry. We. We put a bid for $129,000 CRM for a $30 million company that operates in three cities in one of America's busiest states. And, and they decided that they were going to get on one of the new CRMs that came out, and they were basically told that, yep, we're going to build this software with you in mind, like that. Like, it kind of said, you're going to be the person that we're going to build the software for. So they think, ooh, wow, this will be like developing our own software. But we don't have to incur the cost of developing our own software. And they're going to make it exactly the way we want it. Bullshit. It doesn't happen. What they. That's how. That's the sales message that works. That's what they know about marketing. Yes, they will take some of your concerns and make those in a product, but they're going to look at the complexity. They're going to. What they're trying to do is appeal to the widest possible base. That's what they have to do. So they don't get too specialized. Because it's like, if you want a general health doctor, you go to a general health doctor, right? You don't go like you have. That's why you have your family physician. But when you get cancer, you want to go to a cancer guy. When you want to get, when you get butt implants, you go to a butt implant doctor. You don't go to your family doctor because you're looking for a specialist. And so when you're a $25 million company, the software that's being built to apply to the widest possible base is almost most likely not the best choice for you. And then there's also the cost of switching later. And a lot of times when it comes, when a company gets that 17 million in funding, it means they have already found product market fit, right? And that's what I said at the very end of that slide is they're looking to, like, they're looking for product market fit. They're trying to say, okay, here is a total addressable market. 60,000 roofing companies, or 20,000 roofing companies or. Or 750,000 construction companies, and then they find product market fits. You take like, you can even get out of the roofing industry. Look like service titan, Service titan found product market fit for the H Vac industry. That's where they found that people were in Most love with the feature set that they created. And then they, they penetrate that market and as soon as they get kind of a critical mass, meaning that they've achieved a lot of subscribers and the market has said, this product work us, then they say, okay, they look at these three metrics and then they pour on the gas. All right? And then what, what they don't do necessarily always work on the product. Because what they're doing is they're saying, okay, lifetime value. What is lifetime sell across sell revenue. So think of what acculinx, right? You have the monthly revenue of their base package and they charge you for documents, they charge you for payments. And they charge like in every business does this HubSpot does the same thing, right? Company Cam upsells you job, Nimbus upsells you to engage, right? So they look at monthly revenue plus upsell or cross sell revenue multiplied by the average amount of the time that people stay. So in Company Camp, $29 a user, the average account in CompanyCam has seven users. If they stay for 48 months, that means the LTV of the company user is $9,744. So essentially what they're saying is if we can get somebody to sign up for CompanyCam, we can predict with reasonable certainty that we will make $9,744. The next thing they have to look at is say, is this changing? Is this lifetime value changing? So then they look at the monthly and annual rate of churn as a percentage. So how many people are canceling? At what rate are they canceling? How long do they stay? So they want to look and see, okay, this year we got 100 new users and we have like three users who canceled. Okay, so then that start to look at our churn, because you might not think of it as much, but if company Cam loses their customers every month, they without adding any new ones, they will have only 74 of their customers after a year. The business will literally go bankrupt in a year. That's because they grow through funding, which is where we're going to go to next, which is the cost of acquiring a customer. Now why are you paying attention? This is a roofing company. Like, why does this matter? Because if you understand this business, you will be better prepared to make these kinds of decisions. It is the reason my company exists is because large companies would get to 20, 30, 40, 50, $60 million and they would have a laundry list of this kind of stuff, plus a whole bunch of spreadsheets that were all disconnected. And when I was going to market our old business plan was it just came to us by accident. But essentially all the guys who are in that kind of revenue range, when they go to roofing process or roofcon or Best of Success or ire, they get the VIP ticket, right? And then they sit in the front row section and they talk to each other. And then there's usually a dinner and you go to the roofing process dinner that they do at Mangoes where they play songs and everybody dances. But abc, srs, Beacon, acculinx, JF Owens, Corning, Iko, the metal roof guys, Euro Shield, the banks. They take their cohort of guys and go topgolf or go to a night like a nicer restaurant or maybe just a nice enough restaurant, but it's with them. And then they have a conversation, they're talking about what's going on, what do you see in the industry, what's happening. Then people share their problems. And most often these guys would be like, gosh, you know, I'm making this money, I'm doing putting 4 million profit in a year, but I just wish the business would run the way I envisioned my head. And I just wish that this software would talk to that software. We could get this manufacturer to connect to that and supplier, or we wish we get this software to connect to that other piece of software. The accounting doesn't connect to that. And they go like, I just wish I could throw a briefcase of money at somebody and have that problem fixed. And someone in the room would say, ah, we actually hired that guy. His name is Adam, he is at rbp. That's the guy you show up with the briefcase of money. And so we became this thing called this where people teased me and said we were a luxury of the rich. And that's fine. But what it was is that these guys would accumulate all this stuff and they would be just get, as you said earlier, sharing. They were just getting drowned in all these softwares and they weren't even getting the data that they needed to make good decisions. And they're terrified. They're terrified of people like you, people in this room who might get lean, who might have really good operating frameworks and you might be able to grow it and be dynamic and be able to approach the market at a lower unit price than they can because they become bloated and they're trying to solve that problem and they are willing to spend big dollars to do it. And then we changed our business model because I had a baby and I couldn't travel to those guys anymore. And at the end of the day, they want the industry to get better too, because they're not like they've already made plenty of money. They want, they actually want to see the improve. Plus they want to find companies to buy. So they like, they like the concept. So why it's important for you to know this information. Now let's get back to the information. So, cost of acquiring customers, we talked about churn, we talked about lifetime value cost of acquiring a customer. So the total cost of sales, marketing divided by the new customers. So look at it. A healthy software as a service business is trying to keep the cost of acquiring customer in a one to three ratio to lifetime value. So what that means if a customer is worth the $9,744 that we talked about here, right? If they're doing that, they want to be spending $3,248 or less to acquire a customer, which they do, right? They do spend that like they spend on there. So if you think your leads are expensive, you do not want to know what your software as a service company is spending per lead because. But here's the thing. If you did sign up right after they've done all their marketing and all their conferences and all their events, and then you go and sign up for company cam, odds are they have spent $3,248 to get you to that point. When they divide all their costs of marketing and sales by the number of people that signed up, that's what they would spend. Now, because of the fact that you're going to be paying per month, it's going to take two years to recoup that investment of $3,248 at your 29amonth, times seven users, two years. So how do you stay financially solvent? This is hence the need for funding, right? They get, they grow through funding and pay that debt down over time. Which is why venture capital funds, they bet on 100 companies and the three that work pay for the 97 that don't. Right? This is why they grow so much. When interest rates are low. When interest rates are high, that's why tech industry lays off, is because when interest rates are high, they can't just keep throwing money at advertising on the basis of that they're going to make the money back later. They start tightening their belts. And that's what you're seeing is you're seeing companies have to tighten their belts. And that creates an atmosphere where companies get acquired, kind of like how Sumoquil got acquired. So the prices go up over time and the lifetime values therefore improved. And so what do they do to make the prices go up? They focus on the eight Cs of sac sass success, right? Because for them the cost of adding a customer outside the cost of acquiring a customer, the cost of actually adding you is almost zero. It's pennies, right? It's kind of like how Iran can sell gas at 8 cents a liter, but by the time they get that gas to here in America, that's going to be like 4 bucks, right? I shouldn't have said liter gallon, like 24 cents a gallon or whatever. But the whole idea is that it's not the cost of adding a customer, right? To company cam job, Nimbus, HubSpot, whatever. The cost of adding a customer is almost nothing, right? It's the cost of acquiring that's high. And so the power is mostly in your hand as a consumer. But a good product is the indicator of future retention, which is why they get their money. Because once they found product market fit and their lifetime value churn and cost of acquiring customer is in line and they got the, they got their metrics, the banks and the banks say great, you got product market fit, you've hit critical mass. You have these three numbers, they're all in line with our investment thesis. Here's $17 million. Go pour a ton of marketing on the, on it. And then they're going to get turn on their investment because then as you get more users signed up on more contracts, you focus on the eight Cs of growth. And then now their investment is worth more because they would stay by at like you're in roofing, right? You're looking at like a three or six times multiple. They're trading like 8, 10, 12 times multiple. But then if they continue to follow the 8C's they're then they exit or sell off another check or take another series around a series of funding for an even higher multiple. And that's how they start to grow. And a lot of that's why a lot of these companies spin out and blow up at the end. And so it's important to see are, is your tech that you're working, are they focusing on their Etsy in a way that you can appreciate? So one of them is they want to focus on consumption. They want to make sure you're enjoying using the tools. So put yourself in this place. Are you enjoying using the tool? Are they doing things that make you continue to enjoy using the tool? Because if they are, that tool might have a bright Future, right? So try and focus on anybody you're paying money to monthly. Are they trying to increase your consumption of the tool? The next thing is collateral, right? So this is one of the ways that they try and keep you on the platform is that your data, you're putting your data in there and the closer they can get to being your single source of truth, the better. The problem is a lot of times you're plugging a bunch of stuff in and they don't necessarily want you to take your data out of it or integrate out of it because they want to hold on to your data. So having a very friendly relationship and knowing where they sit in your tech stack as far as like, is this a tool that I'm going to allow to hold all my data or not? You want to have one place that is a single source of truth. All the tech that you choose to buy after that should have a very healthy understanding that they are not the place for your data. They are a tool that plugs into the source of your data and they have to focus on the other 8C or the other 7C's to retain you as a customer because you do not want them to have the collateral of your data. The next thing that they're going to focus on is making sure there's a high cost of switching, right? So when you look at like say an enterprise grade tool like a HubSpot, a Salesforce or Microsoft Dynamics, they take a different approach to a cost of switching than some other companies. If you try and migrate your data out of say an Accu Links or a job Nimbus, they make it enormously painful, right? They don't surface a lot of the stuff in your system to allow you to export it because they don't want you to. They make the cost of switching high. Now things like companies like HubSpot or QuickBooks or NetSuite or Sage, like enterprise grade software, they know the companies are going to switch from time to time and they know that if that if they restrict your data that as a cost of switching kind of attempt to make their business more valuable, that will actually hurt them in the long run. So there's a point where the script flips where the customer has more power and at the enterprise level they just say, look, you're not holding my data. I went through that at that time. I'm not going to let you guys hold my data. I want to make it so my data is easy to get out of the system. So then they have to focus on other things that make it for a high cost of switching, such as making the tool super, super, super, super powerful. So the cost of switching would be high because then now you're going to have to make another thing super, super, super, super powerful. So that's where from the niche market tools that try and make the cost of switching high through basically making it hard to switch versus the people who try and make a product so great that you would have to spend a lot to make another tool as good. Right? The inverse of that, the other, the other C is choice, right? They want to make a product that is so unique that it's hard to find another market product that it can compete with it. That's like a company cam. Company cams, there's not a lot out there that is as great as photo documentation as company cam. So there's just not a lot of choice in the market. Like how do they make that? You look at Netflix. That's what they do. You have Netflix specials if you want to watch. Like if you want to watch suits, you have to watch Netflix. If you want to watch Reacher, you have to watch Prime. If you want to watch the new Kardashian series, you have to get Hulu. So they try and make it so that there is no choice but to use their platform if you're enjoying the consumption of what's on the tool. So if you're enjoying the consumption of the Reacher show on prime, you're not going to switch right now they don't have much of your collateral, they don't have your data, right? I mean, Amazon prime does a pretty good job of this, right? The cost of switching isn't much. You just cancel, right? You're really only losing some of the shows you might like to watch. But what they do is they really focus on lack of choice. The other thing is the control flow, right? The control flow is like Angie's List. Angie's List controls the flow of customers because they decide who gets the leads, they decide where they advertise. So then they get to choose who gets the leads and how many leads you get. So if they control the flow, they control you. That's what makes it hard to switch, right? The eight Cs of growing a SaaS, a software as a service business is because at the end of the day, any business wants to make recurring revenue, has to make a recurring impact on your business. And so that's why they control the flow, because then that is the recurring impact that they get is access to the flow. Your payment processor, your cell phone company Right. Cell phone companies make it very terrible to switch. When you try and port phone numbers out of provider, the cost of switching is huge. But if, at the end of the day, if your phone calls are coming through here, they're controlling the flow of your calls. And just the thought of losing that flow for even a day or two scares you so much that you don't switch phone companies. Same thing with banks or like Stripe or payment processors. Now, there's other things, like cause, right? Where they align with a cause that you believe in. Now, this could be anything from rescuing dogs to something like how most of the roofing industry feels obligated to buy a membership to the, you know, the American Policyholder association, right? Is it because company Camp really cares about policyholders? No, it's their way to say, hey, look, we support the industry, right? Just by being there, they're supporting the industry. You could be, it could be Hook agencies in the ring with Lee Hate, because Hook Agency and Job Nimbus were trying to align with a cause. So they take some of the money that you pay them and they give it to a cause so that you can feel good about the way that you spend your money, right? If you're a roofing company, you do this kind of stuff too. If you align with a local sports team, you're making it so that by choosing to buy from you, people can feel better about it because you align with a cause that matters to them. The other thing is community, right? Where the other people using the thing or the people running the thing or both has become a community that helps you become more successful. So this is one big part of, like what HubSpot does, right, is they have so much community building that they do, right? Like, like HubSpot doesn't go and like necessarily sponsor a cause, but they focus huge on community. Like they have employees everywhere. LinkedIn, Facebook. They got people in their knowledge base. They got this HubSpot user groups, they got these discord channels, they got these forums and the knowledge base. They got people everywhere trying to make it so that you're. You always have access to someone who can help you be better with HubSpot community is one of the eight Cs of switching, because you will feel like you're a part of something, right? This is like feeling like that your money is being well spent towards causes you like, but this makes you feel a part of something. And so if they have some kind of regular community events or if they're doing some kind of road to or like company camp did the highway to Hail. Right, the highway to Hail was an event where they traveled around the country and built a community because they said people could come and basically hang out. And so that's how you create community. And so it's just a big part of it. Right? And then contracts. Contracts, of course, has to be one of the eight Cs of switching. They have design contracts because the whole idea is that you might get the benefit of the tool in the first month, but then they have to provide you that software. And they need to make sure that they're going to be getting paid for a period of time that makes it justified to provide you with the immediate power of the tool on the first day. And so that's why they sign contracts. Also, when you sign a contract that can go to their financial model and say, we signed a contract for a year. So now that is considered guaranteed revenue, which contributes to the valuation of the company. So I hope that you want, like, I spent more time on this than I usually do because I want to make sure that everybody here understands it. And I usually kind of move quickly through this. I slowed down this time because I think that it's important for you to understand what is the software company doing? How do you look at this through the lens of what are they doing to retain me as a customer, to make sure that I would not want to switch, and then by identifying your company's technology needs. So this how we get into auditing, right? And to optimize the software. So, like, I'll take Lauren. How do I optimize the software as I can in my company? What else can I add to make sales and production process seamlessly possible? So when you're looking at technology, it should save them time. So you, you would want to, like Lauren, you'd want to measure the time it takes to process a unit of business. There's four types of speed in business. You have your functioning speed. That is the speed which your employees can function. How. How can they function and do their job? Usually that's a lever, lever of training, right? If they train to do their jobs, they don't have to figure things out. They can do things like automatically, like, think about, like a firefighter, right? A firefighter, they practice all these things like putting all the hoses on and rolling up the hoses. They roll up the hoses a specific way because they're trying to improve the way that the speed at which they function. Think about the NASCAR guys, right? The NASCAR guys. It's a functioning speed that they can get that wheel on and just a fraction of a second later, someone's in there with the air hose going, right? And they got to get that. And I hope you appreciate the sound effects. But to get that wheel on and quickly requires, you know, the functioning speed. So that's one type of speed. The second type of speed is the processing speed. Right? Your processing speed is the time it takes to process a unit of business. So that's more of a function of the systems you have in place. Because you don't rise to the level of your goals, you fall to the level of your systems. So your systems have to be in place that allow you to go fast. So if you can take something from a 30 minute process down to a 10 minute process, you just increased the processing speed. And now if people know how to do it, then that makes the functioning speed work. And to work together, then you have the expansion speed, the rate at which you expand the business. Right now, if the other two are in check, you can expand. So then you have to think about what is the rate at which we can expand. So there's the capital involved, your ability to acquire talent is involved. The leadership team, if they are capable of leading enough people to expand, they can learn to run teams of 8, 10, 12, 100 people, right? So that like we just hired a new director of operations who ran a $250 million budget. I did that because the rate at which we're growing, I need to make sure that I have a guy who can run an organization that, that is the size that we're trying to do. That's your expansion speed. And then your timing speed is the timing in which it takes you to go make decisions. So if you're collecting data, you're going to go from hindsight, what happened to insight, what's happening to foresight, what will happen? And as you get there, your ability to improve your timing speed of making good decisions. Timing can be everything. And so that's a big part of being able to run a successful company. And your tech stack can help you with all four of those things because it should save you time. So if you're trying to get a seamless production process again, you want a tool that will reduce the seams, which means the data needs to pass back and forth. And what's happening in production in real time needs to be available and surfaced to you as data and has to be accurate because people use the the tool which is a function of training. Right. Then you should also save money on apps you don't want Feature overlap. It is better to reduce feature overlap by finding the best in class tools that don't want to be everything. Now, frequently the reason that you have problems with this is that you take Proline. It's a good example. Proline started out as a plugin for Job Nimbus Rooflink, Rufar all these, all these different tools. It was a plugin that said, we'll plug in your thing, it will send emails and text messages for you. Right? It's just a plugin. But what happened was they realized, I mean, I know I was on the call, right? I talked to them about this. They said, well, what we're seeing is like Job Nimbus got engaged, accurately says their tool, you know, like all these tools are coming out with their own texting and emailing automations. And right now all the value we have is like, we have good templates for emails, but all the other CRMs are coming out with this feature. We're becoming obsolete. So the only choice we really have is to become a CRM. So then they had to become a CRM and then what happened is that they had to raise their price. So now your automatic email texting tool that used to plug into your CRM is now trying to be a CRM. So then the price goes up and now you're spending more on apps because they're releasing features that you don't need. So if you're looking at auditing your tech stack, you have to make sure, is this product still meeting my needs or is it exceeding my needs because there's feature low feature overlap. And then when you're looking at tools, can you consolidate apps? Because now maybe you have two or three apps that are doing the same thing. Can you consolidate them to remove the need for so many apps? And then of course, you want to make sure every decision is made through the lens of a single source of truth for your data. Because, Lauren, for your intention, right, A seamless production process, right? Or for seamless sales to production process means that the data and information collected in the sales experience is clearly and effectively communicated to the production team, which means that they have to. That the information has to live in the same place. If they're doing sales in a folder and production is being done in Excel, the data that was collected in the sales process, living in paper and a folder, not being in Excel is what causes the problem. And so we have to maintain that we have a single source of truth for all your data so that you don't have that problem. So now we're going to talk. How do we think of software? It is not an operating expense, it is a capital expense. It is a, it's. You have to think of a piece of factory equipment designed to make you more revenue per employee. Right? They're making automated McDonald's. Why? Why are they making automated McDonald's? Because the business, you're walking up or driving up to a window, you're saying I want a number two Big Mac, big fries, Diet Coke and an apple fritter thing. And then they have human beings who have to. Who don't show up for work minute bathroom breaks on their TikTok on their phones. I know I was at a McDonald's one time where the manager went in the bathroom and yelled at the kid because I was waiting to use the washroom and the kid was in there for 15 minutes and it was employee. And what was he doing? He's on TikTok. I'm trying to take crap and the kids in there watching TikTok and the manager had to go in there and kick him out of the bathroom stall. These are the people that are working in this McDonald's so they have to deal with people like that. And so you have to over hire overstaff so you can take advantage of the fact that people don't show up or they're lazy at work and they make mistakes. And if they can invest capital right into the company to make a machine that will just flip the damn fries and put into a bag and pour the cup and flip the burger and put it in a box and send it out a window, then they don't need any human beings anymore. And then what happens is now they're not paying for the drive thru staff, they're not paying for, for all these added expenses. And now they, they increase the revenue per employee which is a variable cost and they replace a variable cost with a fixed cost which makes the business more predictable and it creates leverage in your company. This is what the smartest people are doing. But they. A lot of people are just trying to one tool that will do it all. But one tool might not necessarily do it all because you're gonna have things that connect to other things. You have Facebook and LinkedIn. They don't necessarily want to connect to job Nimbus. You have QuickBooks job name or AcculinX might want to do cash accounting, but your accountant in QuickBooks might want you to accrual your website might be in WordPress or Wix or Squarespace or Webflow or any of these other things. Your Your CRM is not going to your website necessarily, so you're going to have to act to it. So you have all these things you need to connect. And so what kind of. When you're trying to get data, this place to this place, from this place to this place, you don't want it to feel like you're lugging a filing cabinet around, because as your business grows, you're going to need data to be in multiple places. This is how we help Lauren Shahoo, right, where we talk about making SA a seamless process. A seamless process means your data can't move like this because you're going to continue to grow more apps. You're going to get slack for communication, you're going to get something project management, you're going to have, you're going to have ways to do your measurements, your Google Drive to store files. Next thing you're in Photoshop and su quote, all these things start to add up. And so where do you start? This is where we're going to teach you guys what to do to audit your tech stack. We had one person do this one time and he saved fourteen hundred dollars a month is what he told us. So this is the exact process that he did after this webinar. So you want to make sure you get input from all your app users. You want to talk about, like, what are the team apps that they're using to complete their daily tasks? How does each app affect their efficiency and the customer experience? If it does not make them more efficient or more effective at their job and improve the customer experience, consider chopping it or replacing it with a tool that does. And then if you understand the business of impact of each app, you can make better decisions. And so what we've done is we've created a spreadsheet that you can use to go through this process with your team. It's called Tech Stack Audit. First, you're going to name all your apps out. You're just going to list out all the apps that are running through on your credit card, right? Anything that you've got going monthly, annually, quarterly. Then you're going to say, okay, which department or departments is using this app? Because you want to hopefully have things that touch multiple departments, because what happens is you actually get to connect them and then you will have that seamless process. Right? And so I'm just like trying to make sure, like when you're talking like Mike, about learning what is good and what is crap, you want to have stuff that can touch multiple departments and help multiple departments. Then you're going to say, okay, what is its current role in the business process? And you're looking for overlaps. You're looking for stuff that might do the same thing. There might be new feature sets in these softwares that you started using. You realize you have two people using two different softwares to accomplish the same goal. I've seen this countless times, right? Then you're gonna look at the number of users on that tool. You might. I had found a customer the other day that had 22 paying, you paid users that no longer worked at the company and they were paying for those users for a year costing thousands of dollars a month. Because again, you're not auditing your tech stack. So like this can be something that just as a big company, just doing this will save you tens of thousands of dollars because you probably aren't regularly cleansing the bad users out of the system, not to mention the security risks that are with that, right? Then think about what integrations do they have with other apps, right? And then what is the monthly cost of those apps? Total it up and you're going to start to get your revenue, your cost per user in your business. So everybody here, we're going to send you guys this. You guys don't have to worry about that. So my team's going to send it to you. But you need to know the tools you're currently using before you can evaluate a new tool. Once you start to evaluate new tools, your marketing tech stack should have tools for attracting, building, retaining an audience. That's what marketing tools are for. So you can have email automation, a content management system that's like WordPress, your website or HubSpot, CMS is another one, or WIX is another one. You're going to have SEO tools like SEMrush and Ahrefs and Moz SEO, right? Then you're gonna have lead generation tools. These are like your click funnels and your go high level and your, your automated texting stuff and whatnot, right? And they have analytics tools, things that are gonna actually help you analyze or analyze the marketing efforts to make better decisions. But then you have your sales team, right? And that should empower your sales team to sell confidently and prospect effectively. So when we think about current role in the business and we're talking to our employees and we're saying how does each app impact the employee efficiency and the customer experience? That's what we're talking about here, is it should make sure sales team more efficient and prospect effectively. So you have CRM software that's the baseline, right. Then you're going to call tracking where you want to make sure you can track the calls made in and out of the company. So you know how much effort are we putting into sales making sure your data stays accurate. So you're going to data management, you're just scheduling software. You want to make sure that you're getting your appointments, you know when appointments happen, you know how many appointments are being done. You want to make it so your customers can easily get appointments and be reminded of them. So they show up so you don't have one leg appointment, stuff like that. Then you're going to have your configure price quote software. That's like Sumo Quote. The reason that Job Nimbus bought Sumoquote is because their internal tool was not as good. So by buying this, they get a better tool. Now they're not going to stop people from using Sumoquote outside of it. They just wanted to acquire it and then hopefully better integrate it over time. But that's going to take at least a year. Year, Right? Your photo documentation software and construction, we have to have that. So that's like your company cam. And then sales enablement is tools that will drive more efficiency and effectiveness. And like that's like the mission control app that we made or train you all or stuff like this is going to enable your sales team. Then you're going to have your service team, right? This is for things like your production, right. So you're gonna have the field management software knowing what's going out in the field, material ordering software, software, warehouse management, and then also getting reviews and surveys to learn how to serve your customers better. Then your accounting tech stack should be assigned to streamline your financial processes and ensure accuracy, efficiency and compliance. So commissions, invoice, generating, payment processing, job costing. You want all this stuff to talk to itself so that you can make sure that you're getting good data back. Because all these things should talk to each other, right? So you don't have silos. And then of course you're going to get all kinds of random other software. The email company that you're using like Gmail or Outlook, your productivity suite, like your Google Drive, Google sheets, Google Docs, Microsoft Office, whatever. You're probably going to get photo or design tools because you're going to want to make graphics here and there and then you just pretty much anything else that your team's going to use. So once you've gone through this audit process, right, you're going to identify gaps in your current Tech stack because you're asking, is your marketing team missing a tool? Is your sales team taking too long to close tool deals because the tools don't work the way the sales team needs them to? Right. Are your customers out of the loop because your production department doesn't have access to that technology? Keep them informed. This is exactly what you were talking about, Lauren. Right. Is making sure it's seamless, that there are no seams between sales and production. And you want to make sure you're talking to your team, you're going to get information, talking to people in your business who interact with these tools and interact with your customers and your vendors and your subcontractors. So you have high performing tools and it's important to then establish a budget. Right. And we talked about budgeting this morning in today's financial course and we're going to continue being talking about that in our upcoming financial classes. Making sure you have a budget so you understand the licensing requirements of any tools you're evaluating. If they have monthly, quarterly, annual subscriptions. Right. And how they charge per user. Right. There's even companies that charge a percentage of revenue like Procore, very, very good commercial management tool. Right. But they charge a percentage of revenue. Right. So the more money you make, the more chart they charge as a software company. But there's. And you want to know what these things cost because there's a reason to pilot tool you can't afford. Right. So like Procore probably can't afford it. NetSuite for accounting probably can't afford it at 2 million. So don't even bother looking at it. QuickBooks Online is your accounting tool. Don't bother vetting some product like Sage or netsuite because it's not the right tool for you. Right. And then once you have your budget, you find the tools to meet your needs from both a technology and budgetary perspective and it fills all the gaps, make the investment and then build the software to help you and be successful. Right. Then I want to talk about one last thing which is integrations. Right. Why do softwares integrate? Right. And integrate is a loose word, but it's a great way to co promote a software. Very first thing, just by saying that each software integrates with each other, they're co promoting to their use to their user base. It's just a great way to use the base because it makes it feel more useful just by plugging them into each other. Right. It's a great way to get a customer share of wallet just by integrating with another tool you Immediately get access to all those users that might want to use your tool because they know it integrates with their tool. You haven't even figured out if you want to use it yet or how it helps your business or if your employees even like it. You just heard that it integrates so that now you're somewhat interested. It's just a great way to market. Typically, it means that that software company no longer has to build that feature themselves. So like I said with the proline thing, they didn't have to build automatic texting and emailing themselves. They could integrate with Pro Line. But then eventually they go, our customers are spending X amount of dollars on Pro Line. What if we just built that feature ourselves? Then we could charge half as much as they do and then our customers would pay us more to get the same features they're already getting. And they start to make these connected tools obsolete. Right now. Whether they do it as good or not doesn't make a difference. It just they that that was why acculinx made its own photo tool. Because they looked and said, our customers are paying for Company Cam. We could just make our own company cam. The company cam copy and accurately is not as good as the company cam out there in the real world. I can sell this stuff because we're not sponsored. Nobody sponsors these things. I don't want sponsors. I don't take money from anybody to say, hey, this is a sponsor of this webinar. So it doesn't matter to me. But my opinion and generally the accepted opinion of others is that the company Cam tool is better than the AcculinX photo tool. But AcculinX made a business decision to build the feature themselves because they didn't want their customers to pay company camera money when they could get that money. So that decision is usually made on the potential improvement in retention, including how much they spend on it. So they will spend money on integration because they make a mathematical equation to say like they make a hypothesis to say, if we build this integration, we will probably keep our customers for longer. How much longer? Maybe this much longer. Okay, well, that would increase our lifetime value. Go back to the very beginning, our lifetime value by this much. And so if we improve our lifetime value, then our company is worth more. So that's why they decide to integrate. But integration does not always mean the same thing because you have one way integrations, two way integrations, data sync integrations. So we're going to kind of talk about these. A one way integration is where a company is like one way means they send the data one way. So it so example, when I do this in this software, it creates a company CAM project. When I push this button or when I push this button, I send this customer information to QuickBooks Online and then there's no way for that anything to come back. It's just a one way. We push information in one direction to another. Then you have a two way integration. So like saying, well, when an invoice is paid, move the deal in the CRM to invoice paid. So it connected the deal to the CRM and the accounting software. And when the invoice is paid, it moves the deal in the CRM to invoice paid. So it's two way, right? When the sumo quote is signed, move the deal to project sold. So it's basically you could create the sumo quote and then when the sumo quote is signed, it will go back to the place where it was created and move a deal stage. That's a two way. Then you have data sync integration. So it's an enhancement on a two way integration which is saying that say you add a customer to HubSpot, right? Because Alyssa and her name is like a L, L, I, S, S A. Then you push her to QuickBooks. But in QuickBooks when you go to invoice her she says actually my name is Alyssa with a Y. When you change in QuickBooks it automatically changes the name again in the CRM so that the records match, right? This is again seamless. How do you create seamless? Or when a deal value changes in the quoting software, it changes the deal about in the CRM. Or when the line items change on a supplement, they change on the invoice. This is how we do data sync, right? So we want to sync between two places so that always matches. It's different than two way which is based on a trigger and an action, right? Like integration here. Trigger, action, trigger, action, right. With this, it's sinking, it's connecting. It's always maintaining a single source of truth. Then what kind of decision making is made around integration? So you're going to keep things inside one software as much as possible. You want to try and have everything in one place as you can. If you're going to have to go outside to get best in class tools, you want to look for data sync possibilities first, then two way, then one way only if the tool will not need any changes later. And you want to build your processes around the limitations of the software integrations to ensure the right data gets passed. And you always want to make sure you check the fine print, because this is an example on the Sumoquote website it says it integrates with Sales Rabbit, but when you put your mouse over it, it says Zapier. So it doesn't integrate, it's just Sumoquote integrates with Zapier, Sales Rabbit integrates with Zapier. But you have to build it. So what does that mean? You need to work with a technical expert to build and maintain it. And there are usually limitations on both sides and you'll need clearly defined triggers, searches, filters and actions to make it work. And they break all the time. So it's a common issue with these. But then there's native integrations, which is where the software to software define the integration. So these two softwares got together, said this is what you get and how you get it. So in some cases it could be maintained by a third party of the two software. So that for example, we built a native integration between Sumoquote and HubSpot. We did that because the integrations that we see them making suck. And so we wanted to make a really good one. And so we maintain that third party integration. We don't charge any money for it, but we just knew that our customers, again those luxury of the rich customers, those guys wanted something badass that didn't exist in the market. So we had to build it, we have to maintain it. HubSpot didn't make it, Sumoquil didn't make it, we made it, right? And then there's API integrations where there's not maybe an integration that you can see that surface, it's like a one click plugin. But you need a software developer to make and maintain that integration. And if you want to do something like that, assume it's $5,000 to even start talking, right? Some companies will charge 18,000 just to do discovery when building something complex. Like we spent $14,000 just to get the Sumo code integration done. And we still have to maintain it and have ongoing expenses and we give it away for free. So it's like API integrations cost a lot of money. Don't assume that it's something simple and easy, but you're going to want to do this in your business. Think about this, this is part of your job as a CEO of growing company until you have someone doing it for you. And that's why we exist, is to help do this stuff for you, because we make a lot of these decisions on your behalf through the products that we offer. But you're going to want to continue to audit this annually because it's important to evaluate the tools on a regular basis because they change. So don't let yourself get complacent. Is an investment to do this audit, and it's an investment to act on it. And your metrics will thank you in your business.