Just Pick Up the Phone | Ep. 05

Hello and welcome to another episode of the Beyond Business podcast. My name's Charles Mackay. Today we had the absolute pleasure of interviewing James McCarthy, the CEO and co founder of Cradle. James and I had the pleasure to meet at Inbound last year in 2019, through a great friend of ours, Cloda Higgins. In that conversation, we had a really interesting chat around business, business values and personal values and how important are these to have them ingrained within your business and so that you hire the right people and keep the right people. But we don't really go that far into that. Today we talk about how James started Cradle, what the problem he was trying to solve at the time and now how that business has evolved into the business it is today and where it's going in the future. James is located in Auckland, New Zealand. And one really interesting story stat that he mentioned through this Covid period is that 40% call volume is up over 40% in the last few weeks. Just shows how important it is to talk to people and how people want.

To talk to you.

But without going to the detail of how James started Cradle, because that's what we're going to cover in the episode, I'm going to hand over to James and myself to get right into it. James, what a pleasure it is to have you on today. So, James McCarthy, tell us a little bit about yourself. Obviously, CEO of Cradle, Co founder of Cradle. But whereabouts are you sitting in these interesting times, my friend?

Yeah, yeah, look, thanks very much, Charles. Where am I sitting? I am sitting right here in Auckland, New Zealand, stuck in my house under alert level four, unable to leave, basically. Yeah, yeah, yeah. You know, having a lot of fun walking around 74 square meters on my own.

Yeah. What's your record? Kilometers clocked up in a day.

I think one day we're allowed to go for a walk and one day we went out for about 11k walk around the city. But within what they're allowing us to do is local. Lots of walking and not a lot of much else outside.

So haven't tried to clock up the marathon in the apartment yet.

No, no, I'm not competing with the. What is the joker in the UK who's walking laps of his backyard?

Yeah, that's classic. Classic. So, James, it's awesome to have you on today. I'm really looking forward to chatting to you too. We were lucky enough to meet at Inbound last year and have a really interesting conversation with a good friend of ours, both of ours, Cloda. And since then we've been able to build a bit of relationship and talk about lots of things and do some work together. But let's sort of rewind a little bit. Tell us obviously you're from New Zealand. Tell us, you know where, where your sort of business career got started and you know how you've got to where you are today.

Yeah, absolutely. So look, I, I did engineering at uni and left uni in about 2005 and at about the same time as I got back from my lv, there was a helicopter crash in New Zealand, quite a famous helicopter crash. One of the sort of wealthier New Zealanders, if you like, was flying from one end of the country to the other. And at the time I happened to have a sort of a temporary job working for another guy who was a helicopter pilot. Now this crash prompted a, like a more than two week search and rescue mission to try and find the wreckage. And the guy that I was working for and his wife became quite anxious about the fact that this was a problem that he could go through. He could be out flying, he could crash or even just have to land somewhere. The helicopter go missing for more than, more than an hour, more than week and nobody would know where it is. So obvious problem. And then we went about making a solution so that even the smallest of helicopters could have a device on it and someone who wasn't on the aircraft could see where it was when it was flying and could check that it continued to fly and then even get alerted if something went wrong. So we started a company called Spidertracks. There were about three or four of us that did a whole lot of stuff back in 2006, 2007. So we launched across New Zealand, Australia in late 2006, early 2007, and basically we set about our mission there was just to basically make the aviation world a safer place to operate. And the first instance, sort of post crash, make sure that if something did happen, you could go and solve it quickly and if someone was alive, go and find them. And we've got some great stories of those things, those events happening and us being successful with those. But then move more into how do we be proactive about making sure that an aviation business is a safe business to run and operate? How do we make sure that the pilots are flying properly and all of those sort of preventative things are being done. So the Spidertrax over the last 12 or 13 years has pivoted more into helping businesses be proactive about safety as well as still being there as a, as a tool to make sure that if an aircraft does crash, you've got information on where that's happened. So, yeah, that's my first venture into business. I was deeply involved in Spidertracks for a decade and we sold heaps and heaps of tracking units to lots of different aircraft operators all around the world. Started off, I think our biggest initial order, probably the one order that more than doubled the size of our customer base, came out of Victoria in 2007. Obviously firefighting was a big thing in Aussie and they had a need to know where those aircraft were when they were fighting fires. So one of the government departments over there bought a whole lot of stuff off us and more than doubled the size of our customer base. And yeah, the rest, as they say, is history. So, yeah, we got thousands now, thousands of aircraft around the world which are tracked by our system and we trying to help keep those people safe.

Yeah. Wow, that's fascinating. And so that business is still running today?

Yep. Yeah, absolutely. So, yeah, we still, we've got. We're probably the largest by number of aircraft tracked aircraft tracking provider in the world. Wow.

Wow.

With a focus on. Go ahead.

Oh, I was just going to say, and obviously in this current climate with planes not in the sky, I'm sure that that business is finding some really interesting things out.

Yeah, we're learning. So I'm still involved with that business and we don't focus on what I'll call scheduled commercial aviation. So you're, you know, your Qantas, Jetstar, Air, New Zealand Emirates, that sort of thing, they're not our customer. And those guys, that big end of town has really been hit. Most of those planes are getting mothballed around the place. We're more focused on smaller aircraft and the sort of customers that we have are doing things like checking that oil pipelines are safe, fighting, fighting fires and these are all much more essential things. So that part of the industry, whilst everyone's been affected right now, it hasn't been as affected as the top end of town.

Yeah. I do have an airplane tracker app, just because it's fascinating when you put it over American, you see there's no land, it's all planes. You're like, wow, there's a lot of.

Planes in this place. Was that Flight Radar 24 or something like that?

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So I think that's fascinating. I'm sure we could probably talk about that for hours in a nutshell of that 10 year journey within that business and what you've learned. But I think there's a reason why you've started this business. Which, you know, I suppose what was. If you can tell us about the driver and the current problem that, you know, you're trying to solve with the business that you're in now with cradle, and give us a quick, you know, overlap of what cradle is. But, yeah, what's that core problem and how did it come about?

Yeah, so I think it's probably best to tell a story of how it came about. And it was a little bit of an internal story that was also reflected in the way that we at SpiderTracks were dealing with our external customers. So there was a situation where someone internally said to me, hey, James, did you get my email? And I was like, I didn't get your email. What's it? Oh, it's about the Slack message I sent you, which is about the JIRA ticket that's open on a Confluence page. And I was like, look, just talk to me. And I. I said, talk to me like a fucking human. All I wanted to do was just have a quick interaction and find out what was going on. And we had all of these tools which were getting in the way of us just talking to each other. All we needed to do was sign off on something. And once that that process was done, all the work could keep continuing. But getting the right person on the phone or in person to have a conversation was just becoming more problematic for us. So aside from that little outburst in the office, we kind of reflected a little bit on what we'd done with our customers externally as well. And we had all these tools in place. We were pushing them to the knowledge bases and the help desks and asking them to do a whole lot of things that tried to get them off the phone. Obviously, Spydertrax, operating in aviation with quite a large export market, was dealing with customers from all over the place. And we had salespeople with mobiles and different markets, lots of different numbers in the market, and then difficulties as well, when Someone in the U.S. for example, picked up the phone and dialed our 1-800-number. Getting a phone to ring here in New Zealand, where most of our support team was, was actually just challenging. And it's not as challenging anymore because the world's just become more globalized and the tools and software and telephone services have improved. But basically, the phone experience when you called our business was shit. Our customers wanted to talk to us, but getting us on the phone was difficult. So there was this problem of just getting the right person on the phone at the right time and then having that person be able to help whoever it Was that was calling. So basically we start off with this, okay, calling a business is a shitty experience. That was probably the problem. And how do we give a medium sized business that's operating in this new international world a tool so, so that when their customer calls, the right person can answer the phone, have the correct context, all that data can be saved so that we've got this view of the customer that really sums up what's happening with them. Are they having a good time, having a bad time? What comms have we had with them? How can I help them right now so that they're going to be more successful with our product?

Yeah, it's fascinating. It makes so much sense to me and I also know how complex that is. So. And I can imagine through that journey, you know, as we've gone from these, you know, traditional legacy phone systems to, you know, that was the only way to communicate. Then it was email. We've gone to all of these channels and everyone's saying no one answers the phone. But reality is, what's the easiest way to articulate something if there's communication issues? If you can't do a video call, I pick up the phone. I still like a hundred percent. I do that because, because for me personally too, I'm dyslexic. So to write it in an email and get it sometimes out makes no sense to anyone until I talk through it.

Often an email's static, right. Once you've sent it, the information that's in there is going to be interpreted and read by whoever receives it according to whatever their concept is at the time when they open it. And you can't alter your messaging, you can't change the information you're putting in there based on questions that they're answering. So it's a pretty, as I said, it's a static form of communication that can't really help you once it's gone. It can just convey whatever you thought the problem might be and one, maybe two potential solutions. So the dynamic nature of a phone call and your ability to ask questions and vary what you're saying, vary your emotional tone and just connect like a human to the person on the other end of the phone is really useful.

Yeah, yeah, it is fascinating. It's such an important piece. I just, you know, we obviously been pushed pretty hard on, you know, conversational marketing and email like all of these other channels, but it's, it's still a massive channel. What some. Since you've obviously built this and you've got it going and you've started to see it. And you've probably worked with industries and sectors that have gone very heavy digital and gone, you know, what we need to fix the phone. Like, what are you seeing and learning as people adapt to smart, what I call smart telephony, not just telephony. What are you starting to learn?

So one of our early hypotheses was that we would create technology which solved this problem of the phone experience being shared. And we thought that we could do that by understanding previous interactions and relationships and getting either the same or a similar skill set person on the phone. And we created this sort of feature set that we kind of rolled out and called smart routing, where we're going to route the call to the best person. Now that sort of works, but it didn't solve the problem of phone experiences being less than great. So we started collecting, in order to do that, we collected a whole lot of data on who people were talking to and how long they were talking for and what people's answer rates were and that sort of thing. And what we started seeing was that the people who anecdotally were really good on the phone had certain things that they, that we could reflect it in the data. And those who weren't also had things that were reflected in the data. Even simple things like how long does it take once the phone. Some people like talking on the phone and they do a good job on the phone. And some people just don't want to be on the phones at all. And we've seen businesses where two people with the same job title are meant to be helping their customers on the phone and one of them just doesn't want to talk. It takes than 15 seconds to answer the phone and then they miss half of their calls. So basically what we saw is that if you have some of this data, you're able to understand which person on your team is actually good at frontline phone call answering and which person isn't and should be doing something else. Maybe writing help docs or maybe managing people internally, but definitely not talking to people on the phone. And the outcomes that you get from those people match the sort of the data that we had. And we kept getting more and more questions from customers on, hey, can you tell us what this person's like on the phone? Can you tell us what that person's like on the phone? So we moved much more into providing managers with insight into the way that their team worked on the phone than just trying to, trying to short circuit things than use tech to solve the problem. And that for us has been an improvement, a dramatic improvement in the way that our customers are able to support this on the calling.

Yeah, it's fascinating. And then most of these customers driving people to the phone or are they giving people the option of whatever channel they want? Pick phone if you want.

There's a mixture of all of these things. Some of our customers are, they have various sites and those sites are like permanently on the phone and they don't do any non phone based communication. And we have some customers that just want to have a phone number there so that those people within their customer base who want the security of knowing that they can call someone, can call someone. So I, yeah, there's definitely no sort of blanket answer to that question of like everyone's driving people to the phone.

Yeah, yeah, totally. So you've been doing this for a couple of years now and you want people to have a fucking conversation or a human conversation, as you, as you say, do you think you've achieved that today?

I think by and large we're going a long way towards that.

Yeah.

So I was talking to someone this morning actually and we internally, we're struggling a little bit to articulate all of the value that we bring to a business because sure, we're a phone system, but by being hooked into HubSpot, for example, providing that insight, but also making the, or giving the person who answers the call the tools to be much more human in the way that they communicate, we're struggling to sort of tangibly wrap that up into what that value is. But when we have conversations. So at the moment a lot of businesses are struggling, right. And they're looking at cost and they're coming and talking to us and saying, hey, look, you know, we can't afford this, but we can't afford not to have you guys. So how do we get through this next period? Because we don't want to go back to just having a mobile phone sitting on a desk in an office somewhere and having it ring and no one answers or when you answer, you have no idea who they are. We don't want that and can't have them. So I think looking at it from that angle of people see the value and really get why having us as part of the business is important, demonstrates the fact that these conversations are actually of value.

Yeah, yeah, I agree with you. Like the current situation is tough, but in saying that if I ring someone and I ring the company line and then they answer it and know who I am, probably if I rang you and you said, hey, Charles, how are you? I'd be like, how cool is that? They knew who I was. I can see how a lot of people would be like, wow, that's just creepy. Like, who are you? But think we're going into a world where people go, you know what, I respect that. They've obviously got things pretty well set up. So I now like that. And then to be able to go, you know, hi Charles, how are you? So I saw last week you're doing this and then you're just like, wow, like this guy is totally tapped into how we're working, understands my business, all of that. It's just the experience at the end of the day is going to be better, which then will create a better human to human conversation. So I would say that you are a long way into that journey of solving that problem. It's just, you know, like any early adoption thing, people don't get it. And hopefully that's what we're trying to talk about today is to understand like that was the problem. This is what's possible.

Yeah. Well, just to give an example, so. And I'm sure that these guys won't mind me calling them out, but we have a customer called Henry. They're a New Zealand based company and they do sort of, they do software to help sole traders and contractors basically manage all their tax and expenses and invoicing and all of that sort of stuff. And they use us for all their phones. And a friend of mine called them, he uses them, he's like, knows that they use us, but wasn't really kind of aware of what was going on. And he signed up for them, had a problem and called them and they answered the phone with his name. They said, look, we can see that you've done these things, but this is what you're missing. And within a minute and a half, all of his things had been solved and they knew who he was. And because they had that, you know, we can, you and I both drink a little bit of the Kool Aid. Right. But because they had that single source of truth.

Yeah.

They knew exactly what was going on and that, you know, you can start to see the value and you can delight your customers so quickly and solve their problem. And yeah, there's the privacy issues. Do people feel creeped out that businesses know where they're up to in their, in their user journey? I think you're naive if people, if you don't think that people are, you know, making sure that you're working your way through this software properly.

Yeah, 100% and like also it's coming from a human element. It's people, you know, you're not using it in a, in a non human way. So, you know, I think people starting to expect it and understand it now too, especially the younger generation. I think it's the problem too. It's like a lot of problems that are in the globe today. Solutions already exist. It's just people have got their head in the sand to the problem and don't even want to be aware of it. So they don't actually then go and look for it, I think like this.

So this COVID 19 thing, I'm going to, you might cut this out later and go, oh, he's gone off on some weird, weird deviation here. But like COVID 19, there's a whole lot of stuff. It's. Economically, it's going to really destroy the world for 18, 24, 36 months. A lot of people are going to die, people are going to lose their jobs and all that stuff. Like we've just parked it off to the side. But what this is, you know, for me there's an exciting aspect to this, which is the fact that a lot of businesses are going to be forced to do things that previously they would have gone, oh no, we don't want to take that risk. But now they're going to go, okay, we've got to try anything to survive this and to come out the other side stronger and ready to thrive. So let's try all of these things that we previously thought might be useful but we're too risk averse to do because we've got to survive this. So now's the time to do something risky.

Yeah, yeah, totally. And I couldn't agree with you more. And 24 or whatever it is, quarters in a row of growth. Why would you take the risk? But I totally agree with you. And it's on other levels of problems. They're all there. And I think the thing that is fascinating in this current situation how, you know, what is it? Pollution's dropped. Like all of these things that supposedly could never be fixed or it's going to take till 2020 to be fixed. It's like it's happened in three months. So if we don't take learning out of the back of this and go, oh, actually we can move things. And you know, I've talked about this on a couple of previous podcasts actually of, you know, it's, it's just a shift in skill set. Don't sack people and don't remove their role. Just Shift their skill set, spend some time to train them and upskill them into using or doing new ways of working. And you know, the core of IT business is going to keep going. This transactions are going to happen. It's just how they happen is changing. And you've got to be up to, you know, up to the speed with that.

Yeah, exactly. And things like working from home, things like leveraging technology so that you can have people being really productive for four hours a day instead of spending an hour and a half in the car, going to an office somewhere and sitting around and sitting in meetings that are worth nothing. How do we use the tools, the technology, and really extract the maximum amount of value from people's time in half the amount of time and still get the same amount of stuff done as a society? That's the possibility that could sit on the other side of this. Maybe I'm a dreamer.

No, no, I'm in the same boat. Like I have read the Tim Ferriss Four Hour Workweek. And I'm not saying I run that four hour work week, but you know, you start empowering the right people, getting the right people in the right seats, getting people that love what they do and automate the tasks that people don't want to do. You know, having someone like, you know, how many receptionists exists today to just answer the phone like it doesn't exist. So, you know, like. But how important is that for some businesses that literally they still have a receptionist? Because I think it's really important for the business to be the face and all of that. But what's how empowering is that job for that person? I probably hate it.

Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Like how many people are in bullshit jobs that we don't need?

Yeah, yeah. I actually talked about this topic yesterday. We can go to that abundance mindset or a scarcity mindset. So what's abundance? Looks like it's less hours work, more hours of connecting with people and family and pleasure. At a global scale though, like you start shifting the way and the ways of working and the way work's done, we can be doing more productive, empowering things. You know, this is where I get a little bit cranky with people when they say outsourcing. It's like, no, you don't outsource mundane work. You work out a system to do that work and you, if you partner or whatever it is, you get the right people doing that work. So yeah, yeah, Fascinating. It's fascinating. So now that you've seen, you know, people are starting to be more human on the phone. And if not, it's definitely going to happen now for more and more people are going to be more empathetic, I think, than ever. What problems are you seeing? And especially in this current situation, what problems are you seeing businesses do and how are they leveraging your technology that you just weren't expecting?

So I think, oh look, to sort of come back a little bit into some more basic stuff. People are talking more, people are talking more on the phone. Obviously. Obviously our technology enables any business to send their team home and provided they've got an Internet connection, they can still continue doing any of their customer facing work that requires them to talk to them. So, you know, we're being leveraged in that regard a lot by lots of people. But one of the things that we've really noticed is that people previously like our average call time was something like 80, 90 seconds and it's gone up by two minutes. So people are spending so much more time when they, when they call someone. I think there's probably an underlying need just to interact with another human. But when they call someone, they're actually spending time to talk to them instead of just some kind of transactional phone call that we previously had. How else are people leveraging us? Obviously, as I mentioned and touched on, you can send your team home and they can still continue to work. People are really, really learning what their business continuity looks like. If they do have to send people home, they're leaning on us a little bit because we're relatively well set up for it. They're asking questions like what sort of security considerations do we need to have? What tools do our team need at home that they might take for granted in the office? How do we see, how do we have oversight that our team doing what we expect? How do we measure them? We've seen a lot of what I'd call more traditional businesses that kind of operate on an activity rather than an outcomes type basis, especially managers who are very activity focused. Like has he answered 15 phone calls today or has he spent 8 hours at his desk? Why did he take a 17 minute lunch break instead of a 10 minute lunch break? All that sort of thing. We've got some tools to tell what someone's up to right now. So I can tell right now, for example, that. So Joel, he's the last person on our team that I spoke to. He's at the top of my call this year and he's been on a phone call for a few seconds. I just saw his presence change and we've got Some tools like that. But what we're really pushing our customers towards is understanding outcomes rather than activity. Because ultimately what the business is trying to do is deliver value to their customers that therefore willing to pay for. So trying to push our customers towards that and provide mechanisms for them to do that has been something that we've been helping with. We've had requests for. Can you tell me how much time people are spending on the phone each day and yeah, sure, that information is available, but is it the most relevant information for you to be checking up on?

Totally. Makes sense. Makes sense. What's maybe the funniest thing that you've seen in the last couple of weeks where you're just like, wow, I wasn't expecting that one.

What's the funniest thing I've seen? I think probably one of the things is some of the customers and this, I don't know if this is funny or not, but we've got, we've got a range of customers, right? So we've got your tech companies where everyone's already set up to work from home and They've got a MacBook Pro and a brand new awesome headset and high speed WI fi and they work from wherever they want to. But then we've got, we've got a district council here in New Zealand that's a customer of ours and that's filled with all sorts of people. Some of them have been working there for a long time. And I think it's fair to say that when we brought them on as a customer, we were not flavor of the month. We were, we were new. We were like some young guy from Auckland drives down here and tries to show us what to do. And we worked hard to really meet their needs and bring them on a journey. But now, you know, they've been with us for over two years now and I've been talking and interacting. I send out a weekly email and we talk about, you know, what we're doing, how we're surviving, living in a house. I put a picture of whatever latest puzzle it is that I'm working on in there and the people who were the, you know, like, were the most established at doing things the old way, let's word it like that. They've come back to me like, oh, this is really awesome, you know, thanks for the pictures of the puzzle. Here's my puzzle. So people who we really struggled to get across the line are going, oh wow, here's the value in this thing. That's been really cool. I think there's One other thing which I can talk about, and it happened yesterday. We were a Jabra reseller and they were scheduled this month. They had a conference in Sydney where they did a big release of all their new products and obviously that couldn't go ahead. So they did it virtually yesterday and they organized the weirdest way of demonstrating their new headsets. And it was basically this like blind dating online exercise with three guys wearing three headsets and someone asking questions, trying to get engagement from people. So it's fair to say that some people experiment around ways to take previously physical things online. Has been an absolute balls up.

That's funny. That is going to be really interesting to see how the traditional enterprise rollout of the playbook, which traditionally is a bit of a digital presence. Regional marketing events, regional events, regional. Then trade shows, how that's going to get deployed. The SMB market's actually way, way ahead of the enterprise market in that space.

So.

That'S going to be fascinating, I think as an outcome down the track.

Yeah, it's amazing how we're lucky, right? You and I are lucky and most of our customers are really lucky because we can try something like that and if it works, great. If it doesn't, we pivot somewhere else. But large corporates, man, they can take so much time to create something. Yeah, this, this sort of environment needs you to be responsive.

Yeah, yeah, it's, it's just on that too. I think like one of the businesses that is obviously flying in this environment is Zoom. And I read in an article, this is a couple of years ago, that when they had their first board meeting, so they've only ever had two face to face meetings at business. And the first one there was two board meetings. The first one was to install Zoom on their computer and then the second one was to make sure they knew how to use Zoom. And it just shows though that you can do these things. Yes, face to face is absolutely important at times, but it's not, you know, it's not the number one thing anymore and people are too busy for it too. Like you said before, if I could do my job in three hours a day without having to go and sit in the car to see five people, I could do those meetings in two hours, 20 minute blocks. It's just as valuable. Yeah, I'll come and see you a couple of times a year or once a year, but not just for a coffee.

Yeah. And I think there's a lot of. This is slightly off to the side, but I think it was Vidyard who were giving me an overview of some of their stuff a wee while ago, and I was talking to one of the team there and they said, look, this is what I do in my sales process. I send them a video. It's five minutes. It covers off all of the basic boring stuff that I'm going to do at the end, at the beginning of every. Every call. And it's the stuff that prompts the questions and it's the stuff about which we're actually going to have the real conversation. And when you do that stuff in person, you. You know, because you're doing it in person, you go to the effort of doing it all live, every single time. But if you can seed your meeting with all of the stuff that's really important but mundane, and once Vue gets the questions going and everyone arrives at the meeting with all their questions and ready to start the actual conversation, you can speed up that process. Instead of having five people sitting around doing nothing, you can have a really productive conversation. And maybe your meeting only needs to be 20 minutes instead of 40 or 50 or 60 minutes. So, yes, you know, speaking to that point about people becoming more productive and actually having meetings that deliver an outcome 100%.

100% that can be an outcome of this whole period to get rid of pointless meetings, that would be awesome.

Yeah. Look how much time. Pointless meetings, presenteeism, sitting in the office because you feel like you've got to be there for eight hours or nine hours or whatever it is, instead of just doing what needs to be done, delivering what it is that the business needs on that particular day, and going for a bike ride or doing a yoga practice or kicking a ball around or whatever it might be.

100%. 100%. So starting to switch gears a little bit and talk about your journey as a business owner and what your, you know, your vision, probably personally and within this current business at cradle. Like, what did the vision originally look like? And, you know, what's it looking like today and how's that journey been?

Yeah, so originally, look, so we called this company Talk Like Humans. When we first started, it was just kind of like a placeholder name. And I am a big believer in the value of social connections and especially when it comes to people in business who do business with each other. Right. There's that trust element that you need to have in order to back someone to do what it is that you need from them and vice versa. And I believe that a lot of that is built on the social interactions that you're able to have with People, and sometimes that's meeting up and having a beer, and sometimes it's just being able to jump on the phone and have a call and actually talk like a human. So the vision was to create something that. To bridge that gap between being with someone and not being with someone, but still having the same experience for people where you meet them, you recognize who it is, you can actually have that human conversation and basically take the telephone experience from being a shit one to being a really awesome one. Where. Where have we got to? And what has changed? Look, nothing's really changed. That's still what we want to do. We want to help people talk to each other.

Yeah.

The way that we've gone about it over the last four years has changed a little bit. And all that this has highlighted, all that this COVID 19 thing has highlighted is that we're actually really relevant. Previously, people went, oh, yeah, we could do that. But, you know, our PBX in the closet kind of works now. People are calling us and going, man, everyone's at home. We need the phone. We can't help our customers if we can't talk to them on the phone. Can you set us up now? So there's been a lot of emergency setups of our software. And I think this presents for us and for our industries a big opportunity once the world pulls out of this place. But I think fundamentally, the vision of a more connected and human interaction between businesses, where people can just pick up the phone and talk to each other or have a piece of technology that allows them to communicate using the best method, is still very much there.

You start to think about the future of working. Be like, you know, Siri, call it whatever you want, but it'd be like, hey, Siri, video call James. Or it's like, hey, Siri, I just want to chat to him. Can you just call him? Hey, Siri, send James an email about this. Oh, hey, Siri, can you get an update on that project? They don't even have to ask James. It'll just tell me. Like, I think that's quite cool. So then when I do have that meeting or conversation with you, it's not about business. It's about who you are, what you're working on, or what your challenges are. You know, not about the transaction or the product or the service that you're talking about. And I think that's a better place to be too. So I think, yeah, your story and journey is amazing. So I love it. It's been cool to hear and listen.

Yeah, look, I think One of the interesting things is going to be how our approach transfers across into different cultures. So in the past, obviously I've done a lot of business up in, up in North America and a decent amount in Europe and then all around the rest of the world as well with spider tracks. New Zealand and Australia have a, I would call it a very similar business culture. We, you know, we spend the first five minutes of each meeting talking about what we did on the weekend and what's happening in the footy, the rugby, the, you know, whatever it might be, depending on where you are. The North American approach is very much more sort of cut to the chase and transactional. You know, the Americans are very. Time as money. Click your fingers, make sure, you know, let's make this a good time, not a long time. So I'm interested to see what our approach and our, you know, this kind of thinking does when you apply it in that context. But I guess that's a, it's a part of our journey that still lies in front of us.

Yeah, it's fair. It's 100% like, I don't know how that'll play out. I agree with, I think maybe Americans, when you like, you know, we met in the US we met at Boston and that isn't it, you know, it's an amazing event. But I think that's probably one of the more human, probably ecosystems around too. If you look at what HubSpot are doing, it's trying to make businesses better, to be more human. At the end of the day, the.

Whole philosophy around grow better is, well, I like it. That's why we align with HubSpot. Right. It's because it fits and feels right and well aligned with our values.

Yeah. And like, I'm exactly the same. And it's just fascinating too because everyone you speak to and you end up interacting with, you have these great conversations. So I think that's the values at the deep down level, how ingrained they are and how important they are to most businesses. And I can sort of say personally, where we've had challenges with clients is because there's a mass value disconnect. And even that transactional stuff in the US it can flip to be like, all right, deep down, once you get past that, they will open up. Just takes a bit of time.

Yeah, I think they find the same with us. I think they, they find that the culture's so different, they don't know how to interact with us properly to begin with.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, totally, totally. So obviously four years of helping People talk to each other and the current environment and everything that's going on. What would one or two tips coming at a business that is, you know, I'm going to talk two things here. One, that is going, holy, holy smokes, we've got to actually do something here, what's really important. And then two, you know, I'm okay, but I really need to start thinking about what the future looks like from a business. Like, how would you go about it when you've got a lot of people that you employ? You know, the end of the day you're feeding lots of families and there's a lot of pressure on you. What would that tip be to get through this and leverage your systems like you and digital technologies to make your business get through and help you through this challenging time?

Yeah. So I think both of those are going to be underpinned by whatever your values are. And you mentioned it there, you've got a lot of people at work for you. There's a lot of dinner that gets put on the table every night. So different people are going to have a different approach based on what their values are and what's important to them. Look, from a tech perspective, let's say things are okay. Your people are often and probably always going to be your biggest resource. Right. And if you can leverage those people and really listen to everyone on your team and what they're hearing from customers and what they're seeing, you've got a huge resource here that you can already go and leverage to understand where you can make improvements. If you've done well and you've got a decent amount of data that you can quickly access. For us, we can look on a minute by minute basis at how many calls people are making, how much time people are spending on the phone, whether people's calls are actually good or not, we can, we can look at our data and respond really well. So if you're set up and you've got that strong data about what's important for your industry and your business, then you can see the opportunity and your team who are closer to the ground, are going to see a lot of that as well. So leveraging them to maximize the opportunities or minimize the downside of this would be where I'd go first and where we have gone first. And if, you know, if times are, you know, if times are tough and you're in that, probably half of businesses that are really struggling, again, big values questions around what you do. Sometimes you're not going to be able to keep your entire team on. So how do you do those things in a way that respects the time and effort and work that people have given you in the past? There are some really big questions there and I don't, I don't know if I can answer that question well enough without more sort of context to a particular business situation. But I think going back to what is, you know, where your values set would be the first place that I'd be looking.

Yeah, I think you've answered that really well. And you know, if you were to remove the manager mindset and go, right, if I empower my team to just make their day and job easier, what would they do? It'd be fascinating to see how much efficiency gain you would get out of your business instead of saying, no, we can't do that.

Now, I've got this, I've got this. I'm not sure if you can see this here, but I've got this post it note which I remind myself to keep asking these questions. What's working and what's not working and how can we use that as a starting point for our team to look at the things that we should A, do more and B, stop doing altogether change?

How regularly do you like, you're obviously looking at it every day but how regular do you as a team sit down and go, right, what's working, what's not?

So look, we are, what we've done is we used to have stand ups every morning. We would kind of, and it became a little bit formulaic. This is what I'm doing. This is what I did yesterday a little bit based on the Agile Scrum model from Software Dev, but we've made those a lot more meaningful now. So we're meeting every, every morning and we, we're kind of, oh, sorry, I'm just getting a call here with, yeah, it's going to ring over here in a minute as well. We've pushed that further and we're just asking those questions all the time. So, you know, we're not waiting, we're not having formal planning sessions, we're not doing any of that sort of thing. We're just heading them as soon as we can. As I said earlier about larger companies taking a lot longer to, you know, turn the Titanic around, we can, we can make a change just like that. We decided two weeks ago that our website was crap and so we went out and a week later we changed the whole thing. Yeah, and you know, that's the sort of thing that we as a smaller business can afford to do and can Pull off.

Yeah, yeah. I think they're great tips. And always be challenging yourself how you can get better, not necessarily bigger or stronger. Like, what. What will get, you know, how do you become better? Yeah, Like, I do that personally is like, what's my happiness radar if I'm not. If I'm not high on a happiness rate or there's something that's not right, generally underpinning to my values personally as well. And you just challenge that. So over these challenging times, it's full on. But get a bit braggy here. Tell us some of your success stories and I suppose where the business is at today and where you see it in the next couple of years, but a couple of those success stories where you're at.

Yeah. So look, I think our team needs a pat on the back with double revenue last year and we just closed out the financial year. And for an earlier sort of bootstrap business, we've done really well, which I think really demonstrates how we are bringing value to our customers. What else is worth bragging about? I think the thing that, you know, one of the things that keeps me coming to work is that our customers love us. More than three quarters of our customers, when we ask them, basically tell us that they love us. And even the people who were like, I don't really want to change technology, I just want a phone that sits on the desk. I don't really care if you save the fact that I had a phone call, I don't want any of that. Once they've had us, they go, I love you guys. So delivering value and having that demonstrated, both financially is a bit of a dipstick, but also just sort of through the stories that our customers tell and the way they talk about us has been really, really cool. We've done a series of case studies over the last three weeks since we've been in lockdown. We've had someone who's sort of semi external to the business doing these case studies for us. And so there's an element of neutrality there. And the feedback from this person has just been, wow, these customers all love what you do, how you interact with them and what your product does for their business. So that's been really cool.

That's amazing. Especially to have an external source do that and challenge those questions. I think that is very exciting. And you got a very exciting future. And out of, obviously Australia and NZ and a bit of the us, how many countries are you guys in now and can you service most of the world?

Yeah. So we're, I think we've probably got customers in about five or six countries and we've got users. We've got users in more countries than that because a lot of our customers, even though they're like, for example, New Zealand based, they might have an Aussie office, a South African office, UK office, you know, like this spread around. Yeah. So we're making, you know, like the decent number of calls going through our service. We had a, I think it was a 40% increase in calls over the course of this period. Which just goes to show you how much more time people are spending on the phone with this, with this thing going on.

Yeah.

And like, growth wise, where do we go next? I think. I don't know. We'll see. I think we're really following HubSpot. We're very vertically integrated with them and we're HubSpot successful and people of medium sized businesses want to talk to the customers. We end up going there.

Yeah, yeah. It's fascinating. You're like, obviously the cornerstone of this conversation and podcast is about people trying to do things better in a more sustainable way. And, you know, I think you're a really nice shining light to that. So I want to say, you know, thanks for coming along and thanks for sharing your story. We better start to bring it to ground because I'm sure you've got lots of people you need to talk to. But James, I really appreciate you joining the conversation. So how do people find you? What's the best channel or, you know, place to find you if they want to reach out?

Yeah, so you can give us a call in Aussie, 038-595-9965 or in New Zealand, 098-879333. Phone number. I must be like autistic or something because phone numbers never leave me. But you can hit our website Cradle IO and all of our details are on there. Yeah, best way to get in touch with us is on the phone, of course.

Amazing, amazing. Well, James, thank you very much. I really appreciate it again. And stay safe and I hope that the NZ lockdown doesn't. It becomes unlocked sooner than later because you guys I think have done a pretty amazing job. So stay safe and keep things rocking, my friend.

Yeah, thank you very much, Charles.