Sock it to Business w/ John Hajdukiewicz | Ep. 138

In this episode of the Biz/Dev podcast David and Gary team up to chat with John Hajdukiewicz, Principal at Outcome Design Labs. What is the true value of your product? How do you capture that message and how can you execute a successful campaign? We wondered this too and John socked it to us with tons of knowledge…

Links: 

Site: Outcome Design Labs

LinkedIn: John Hajdukiewicz

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David Baxter has been designing, building, and advising startups and businesses for over ten years. His passion, knowledge, and brutal honesty have helped dozens of companies get their start.

In Biz/Dev, David and award-winning Creative Director Gary Voigt talk about current events and how they affect the world of startups, entrepreneurship, software development, and culture.

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Transcript

[00:00:00] David: Here's why I am excited about my socks. I have little feet. I am not a large human being.

[00:00:08] David:

Hi everyone. Welcome to the biz dev podcast, the podcast about developing your business. I'm David Baxter, your host. I'm joined per usual by Gary Voigt. What is up, man?

[00:00:18] Gary: How you doing? Happy Father's Day for those coming off Father's Day.

[00:00:22] David: Thank you. Did you get any good gifts from your father's day hall?

[00:00:27] Gary: I did actually, I got a new set of pots and pants, but it doesn't sound very exciting, but works for me. Better than socks.

[00:00:36] David: I got socks. Wait a minute. That's just underhanded. Cause you already knew that I got socks and I am. So here you go. Here's why I am excited about my socks. I have little feet. I am not a large human being. So buying normal size socks, especially if they have colored heels, which I've never understood why they color the heel of a sock, but it looks like I've got this tumor on the back of my leg that's brightly colored when I wear normal size socks.

So my son bought me small socks. Which are hard to find. So

[00:01:03] Gary: Did you have to clip the little bow off the front of them? Are they baby socks?

[00:01:07] David: oh, that hurts. No, he already did that for me. Thanks. 

More importantly, we are joined by John Hajdukowicz. How did I do? Did I do it?

[00:01:18] John: That was good.

[00:01:19] David: Yes.

[00:01:20] John: Awesome.

[00:01:21] David: Success. John is the founder and principal of outcome design labs. Welcome to the show, Mr. John.

[00:01:27] John: Great. Thank you so much. Thanks for having me.

[00:01:30] David: Absolutely. So tell me a little bit about outcome design. What is, what are you all about?

[00:01:34] John: Yeah. So we focus on creating value for customers. So I come in from the industrial area and there's just a lot of pain out there, right? So people are trying to, they're struggling on finding value, trying to build it and then trying to convert it with value pricing and then really serve their customers.

I've seen that. I was in 22 years at Honeywell and just everyone is struggling with that on the customer side and then also on the the industry side. And so what we do is we go in and we work with the customers to try to figure out where are the pockets to really focus on to create the value. And then how do you capture that in the end and how do you create great customers from that?

[00:02:12] Gary: do you define the value in that scenario? What do you mean?

[00:02:17] John: So value is so if you look at how you improve efficiency or you improve outcomes for a customer, customers really care about something on the income statement. they either increase their revenue or decrease their costs. There are various things that they really want to focus on to improve their operations and to improve the.

Their income statement, and then when they look at bringing new companies in to help them with that, to improve their operations or help them sell more, they want to actually look for things that differentiate them in the marketplace. So you look at a company. It looked like a company at Palantir.

So all the AI that's coming in right now, it's really looking for areas that can improve the outcomes for different companies. And how could you do that with software? And so they're able to decrease the cost of it to actually do the supply chain. In COVID it's making it more responsive as well when that happened.

So that people get their masks on time when that happened. And and so companies are always trying to improve their operations relative to that. That's what value is.

[00:03:19] David: You are in your first year, which I'm going to have questions about, but I noticed that you said the word, we, is that the Royal we, or is there a team hiding behind there?

[00:03:30] John: So the company itself, it's me, but I work with people. So I have a network of old colleagues that I used to work with that I bring in. And there's also, I work a lot with the companies. I'm not a, I'm not a fan of doing stuff on my own. I always have to be in the field with customers. Because otherwise you won't be able to understand their problems, right?

And help them get through their challenges.

[00:03:52] David: That's fair. That's fair. Yeah. I don't mind the Royal. We, I did the Royal. We, when it was just me for a long time and it was more future casting. What I, where I draw the line is I have seen. Especially in my industry, people who say I have five offices and what that really means is there's a contractor there, right?

And so they try to make it sound like they're this grandiose multi, you know, national firm. I, that Bob, that bothers me, but other than that, I'm totally on board. I get it. Oh,

[00:04:23] John: a lot of that going on.

[00:04:24] David: Oh, and again, in software development, it happens more often than not. And we always judge because we have I have three people in Florida.

Does that mean we have an office in Florida? No, I think it really where we kind of drew the line was, you know, Where do we have clients? Do we have if I had 10 clients or five clients that were hovering around Gary's area in Florida, we would say we had an office there. Cause then we would be serving them in some capacity.

We don't, they're almost all at where I live, which is in Raleigh. But but that's kind of where we've drawn the line. I it's different for everybody. I just, you just gotta be honest and upfront. I think you can get caught in some weird scenarios when you're like, Oh yeah. Where's your office in Denver?

And you're like it's a dude's house. I don't know.

[00:05:04] Gary: Yeah. That happens in the design space too, with some agencies that want to, you know, seem a little bit classier and more premier than they actually are. So if they do have maybe a contractor that works out of a shared space in New York, then they have an office in New York and that shared space is probably in a nice, you know, part of New York with a prestigious address.

So they'll use that as their like second New York location versus their LA location. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

[00:05:33] John: Yeah. And for me, you know, I prefer not to have an office. So I'm in, in my condo or my apartment right now, but I'd rather be in the field with a customer, or where their problems are. That's where I want to.

[00:05:45] David: So are your customers large, small, where are they at in terms of their size?

[00:05:50] John: Yeah, some of the, I would say medium size and small. So about 40 million is probably the smallest I have. And then larger they don't have revenues yet, but they're getting funded by a large company. So they'll, you know, they'll probably have funding in around 100 million, 200 million. in funding. So that's the space I'm in.

And then I'm also talking with bigger companies, multinationals that are billion dollars, billions of dollars. But I wouldn't, so things that I do with the smaller companies are probably more end to end. The bigger companies, it would be like a piece of what they're trying to fix, like the sales enablement part.

Or customer experience. How do we improve the customer experience? So it's very focused. And a lot of times these bigger companies, they have a full staff on board and they want to do stuff on their own.

[00:06:38] David: Sure. Yeah. It's interesting how people define small. Like the official government rule is a small business is anybody under 55 million in revenue. But if you ask most startup people, not technical, not like SAS software people, but normal, if you have a company that's two, three, 5 million. You're doing pretty good.

It's kind of funny how that all, what small has such a wide range of stuff. Cause I know a guy who runs a 50 million company and I'm like, that's a big company. He's got 200 employees or whatever. And that's exciting. That's very cool. But the government's that's tight. But of course, based on that same rule, 99 percent of all businesses in this country are small businesses, quote unquote.

So I think that's really interesting as well.

[00:07:23] John: I do. I do have one customer in Switzerland. That's micro that's actually less than a million dollars, but there are total startup they're getting funded by the Swiss government to build a sustainable technology. And so they're trying to figure out how to get traction in the market. Like they have this great technology.

They're getting good funding now. Commercially, how do they get into the market and start scaling it?

[00:07:46] David: Soon. I'm curious. I want to dribble down just a stitch cause I'm still trying to wrap my head around. What is a deliverable from you to your clients? Is it you leading a team of some sort and the team does great things? Is it a consulting document that you said, this is how you do great things.

Like what is a real deliverable for you?

[00:08:06] John: Yeah. So there are different things I do. So currently, like with the bigger of the three companies I mentioned so with that, they came in and told me, I need you to help with work with the team on the value story. So going from understanding the market, competitive analysis, build the value equations, understand value pricing.

And in that model, I'm doing the work with the team. And in that case, the team is going to continue doing the work I'm going to exit. So it's helping them. It's teaching them. It's actually doing the work. It's coaching them and also building tools around that. So that's one kind of model. The other one is doing workshops.

So very focused areas like customer experience or sales enablement, go in for a day or two, work with their team to help improve an area, and then they run off and do the work and I exit. And then the third model is like with the startup in Switzerland, I'm with them longer, so I'm working on, and they need to build up their commercial side.

And so I'm working with them on tools and frameworks as they go along, but it's not a full time job.

[00:09:10] David: So are you most, I mean, that's a service based company that you're talking about. And I run a service based company, very different, but. What the Holy Grail for service business is recurring revenue. Which is something our company has struggled with forever. 'cause our definition of recurring is a client coming back, right?

Because we do a project, we do the, we're we finish the project and then we're out. And now hopefully they call us back and say, Hey, you guys were awesome. We have another project that's recurring for us. How do you have recurrence? Or are you still not there? I mean, I know you're less than a year in,

[00:09:42] John: Yeah. So my plan for recurring revenue so I have, I want to have multiple revenue streams going deep with a customer is one, but again, it's me. And it's only me pretty well. And the team, so I'm out for about four months and then I got to work on something else. So I want to build out, there's an education piece.

So building out like these value toolkits building out education around, how do you get to value? So this is more like teaching. That's like a digital product that could scale. And I would provide that to the clients. The other thing is creating products around what I do. As I mentioned, a lot of stuff.

Around building value calculators. Understanding value is very manual. A lot of spreadsheets, a lot of manual work, and it's very arduous to kind of put the pieces together. So I want to start to think about a product, a digital product that people can use as a platform to actually start building their value story around.

[00:10:37] David: Nice.

[00:10:37] John: It's still early, really early.

[00:10:40] David: sure. We have one of our like, I mean, totally dif it's a similar model. He Basically turned himself into the Tony Robbins of his industry, right? Everyone knows him. If you're in that little niche and he's the guy who trains your people and all that, he's been doing that for, I don't know, 30 years, forever.

And probably 10 years ago, Way before we became a part of his world. He decided I was going to turn that into a product. So he basically made a CRM, but it's a CRM with that's super opinionated. And it sounds similar to what you're kind of thinking of is here's a normal piece of software, but it's got how we do business baked into its core.

And so for his industry, it's a very unique CRM and it's done very well. But so it sounds, that sounds like it's got a lot of parallels to what you're talking about.

[00:11:31] John: That's right. Yeah. So part of the thing I'm exploring is the influencer side, right? So I want the own value, like anything around value. I just love it. That's my passion area. I feel like I'm a career at Honeywell. It's there. That's the thread that cuts across all my experiences. So I love that.

I'll do that if I get paid or not. So I just want to totally envelop myself in that space and and get myself out there. So I'm going to be exploring that.

[00:11:56] David: If you haven't, you need, I don't think I've ever done this. Gary, tell me if I have, I'm about to pimp out one of our other guests. Cause I do this pretty regularly for him. If you haven't heard the episode that we interviewed Bill Harper about how to use social media to build a, oh my gosh, that dude is amazing.

I mean, I, outside of that, I've watched a lot of his stuff because not only is his content good, but the way he delivers it is like impeccable. If you want to learn how to discuss boring stuff to the average Joe in a way that blows up your business, he is the man. He's is all about marketing, but it's not.

Yeah. Just watch it. He's great.

[00:12:32] John: Sure.

[00:12:33] Gary: About him too, is he's become a quote unquote influencer by acting like the opposite of an influencer, like it's very down to earth and very just straight to the point, not any kind of fluff or Hey guys, follow me, subscribe, blah, blah, blah, none of that stuff. And he's gained a following just for being honest and direct and very eloquent too.

[00:13:03] AD: BigPixel builds world class custom software and amazing apps. Our team of pros puts passion into every one of our projects. Our design infused development leans heavily on delivering a great experience for our clients and their clients. From startups to enterprises, we can help craft your ideas into real world products that help your business do better business. 

[00:13:32] Gary: I had a question.

[00:13:33] David: Go for it. There you go. See us back.

[00:13:36] Gary: John, so you said this idea, this business was born out of experience and value was threaded all throughout your days at Honeywell, briefly, if you can give us an idea of towards the end of your stint at Honeywell and how you came up with the concept for this business and what made you take that leap?

What made you jump from one to the other? Because it seems like you had a pretty good gig going and it was, so I just like to hear that pivot. Appreciate it. Did

[00:14:02] John: Yeah. There was a, there were a few things going on. So I've been in 22 years at Honeywell and I found that I went through all parts of the company. I think every. Nooks and nook and cranny, small, you know, small offerings, big offerings went through start like the startups. We used to call them greenhouses to like big behemoth products in aerospace.

And in the last few, so I got into a leadership role where I was just managing all the product management and user experience. I didn't really like that role. There's just a lot of feeding the beast, like a lot of like turn within a product management. Things around metrics and things like that.

I wanted to get back to product and I thought we were missing out on value. And the most important thing after COVID, we weren't really focused on the customer during COVID because we couldn't get access to them. So I had this initiative called customer labs where we focused on one strategic customer.

We went in, we dug in there, we really understood their problems. It was, I felt like this was my mission within the company. And that led me to, you know, going through that whole process of finding where the value is, trying things out, certain things work, certain things didn't, but we kept with the customer and ended up being a really good result in the end.

I started to think that is my mission. That's what I want to do more. And there really wasn't, A spot in the company for me to do that. And that's where outcome design labs kind of start to flourish. So I had like customer labs, then I had value machine, then breakthrough launch pad, and then in infinity and beyond, I had this like little picture in front of me where I was starting to get out. And the one thing I saw also was that there's just a lot of pain out there. And I felt you know, I need to go deeper to understand how to alleviate that pain, how to make value easier, how to increase the speed to value and the speed to results in the end. And then I'm seeing all the stuff going on with AI that's starting to march along.

New tools are coming in. And I thought, okay, now's the time. And I want to have the next 20 years to kind of think through and to work through how to get to something awesome.

[00:16:06] Gary: you test the waters at all? Did you have a couple of freelance clients that you were just kind of helping out at first? Or did you just take a clean,

[00:16:14] John: The Swiss company that I've been working with. So I did a bit of work with them, pro bono work. And and then I just talked with people. And

[00:16:24] Gary: Yeah. Networking seems to be a huge thing. Helping people transition from like their nine to five to starting their own.

[00:16:31] John: Yeah. For me people's everything, right? The network got me the first two jobs. I was not really out there on social media to, to advertise myself. But it was the network people used to work with. I knew my work. There's so many people turning from company to company. Now the network is all over the place, right?

So that's a really good thing for any entrepreneur is to build your network and then just continually following them, add value to them, right? Show up, energize action, and then. You have to wait, like it's not going to happen all at once. You got to keep on engaging with them over time.

[00:17:07] David: Gary stole my thunder. I'm very sad now. I had this whole idea of these questions and he just robbed

[00:17:15] Gary: Percy Jackson steals lightning. I steal thunder.

[00:17:18] David: Oh my gosh, get out. Oh my gosh, you 12. Anyway, so I'll dig in a little bit. I, what we talk about a lot on the podcast is the slog, which is the time from your idea. To when people care about your idea, right?

Where you have your own gravity, where you're not just on the treadmill, trying to survive. So where are you? I mean, you brought over the Swiss client. I was, that was kind of, that's where he stole my thunder. I was thinking, you know, how did you get started? That's done. But how was that for you're in your first year?

Which is usually pretty horrible. How's it going? I mean, you started with a leg up, so you're probably doing pretty well, but how's your first year going?

[00:18:01] John: It started off with a bang, right? So the Swiss client, you know, they're very small. They don't have a lot of funding, right? So it's pretty scrappy, but I do some bartering. So I stay over at my friend's place in Switzerland, you know, and I do a bit of work with them at the same time, but the other two clients have paid, right?

So that pretty well covered. You know, a year, my first year, those first two clients. And then now I'm kind of building out, I want to take the summer off to kind of regroup and trying to build some assets. And then in the fall, I'm going to start up again, in terms of trying to find a big, I would like to have one big project per year that would be able to fund the year.

And the rest is building for the future. So it's been,

[00:18:40] David: do you foresee yourself as staying a one man show or do you see yourself as the first employee of many?

[00:18:48] John: the first employee of many. So think I'll come to design labs is like an incubator. Yeah. I don't want, I'm not a big fan of huge companies but many, like more than one for sure with the people I love to work with. So I'm very people for, you know, people first. So awesome people, places and projects, people have to be first.

Otherwise I don't want to do this. Then. If project, if products come out of that, then that could spin off into another company. So that's probably three, four years away in terms of the spinoff, but there'll be right now I'm using a network and pulling him in and out as contractors. That's going to be my first step.

I had the advice of don't get. A team, full team together, unless if you're ready to go, right? So yeah, it's better to just have that flexibility because otherwise you'd be just spending money and you won't be able to get revenue. So revenue is pretty choppy as you know, initially. And so what I've been trying to do is to get like a buffer, have a buffer amount of cash to get me through the ups and downs.

And then when there's something more consistent, which I expect next year, then to start hiring people to come in to scale. I

[00:19:56] David: I wish I had, whoever gave you that advice. I wish they would have given me in my head. And I've told this story before, but. In my head, you had to hire, and then you had to work them like, if I had two people, I had to work them like three people so that I could get enough work to hire the third. And then we work three to four.

That was what was in my head. That's a horrible way to run a business, by the way, don't ever do that. It was when they all three left it within a month that I realized that was a bad way to run a business. Thankfully, I'm a little more mature now but at that point I went to contractors because I didn't have a choice.

And boy, that would have been better if I had reversed that, right? Cause now we have employees again, cause I, my business group, I'm in a group called C12 and my business group loved that. I was so heavy in contractors for so long. Cause he's you have the 100 percent lean business. You only cost money when you make money.

It is a beautiful thing. And I was like, yeah, but they're all hired guns. And they don't, there's no culture here. They're just here for a paycheck and there's no company. I hated that. And so slowly but surely I started hiring people back, which of course is not nearly as efficient. It's just not. So you have, like you said, you have to be in a position to handle that and, but I just wish I had that advice backwards because I did it wrong.

Just so wrong, which is what it's funny because I did it wrong is one of the reasons why we, this podcast exists is because I. Years later when I started finally figuring some of this stuff out I realized I was a horrible leader and I wanted to become a better leader So I started studying it and then Gary and I started talking about it And here we are it's just kind of funny how all that rolls down.

[00:21:43] John: And then for me, I use the AI tools quite a bit, and those are people, right? So any manual work I needed to process my voice of the customer interviews or building out materials, I'm using AI first, right? It's pretty scrappy. It's not super great, but it's a. Big start, right?

[00:22:04] David: I find AI is great. There still needs to be a lot of handholding. And I think a lot of people are trying to skip that step. Like we have a, we have, we're doing lots of different projects and research and stuff to see what can we do with AI with our clients and almost to a. Man, every research project we have done, the client has said, I am not comfortable putting that out in front of a client, unless a human was involved.

Which of course defeats the purpose of what we were doing, right? Cause we're automating stuff, but, and it's been, that's been consistent because like you said, it comes out and it may be 80 percent there, which for you is lovely, right? I just saved 80 percent of my time, but that 20 percent makes a difference and you've got to get in there.

You got to do your thing to make it. So it's not this rambling thing, which is very commonly AI, they just keep talking but yeah, it, that AI stuff is, we talk about that pretty regularly, but it is interesting and we're close, but we're still so far. It's so interesting.

[00:23:05] John: Yeah. For me, the first, you know, the first round gets you to something that's okay. Then to get to good, use prompt engineering. There's like prompts you could do to kind of zone in a little bit better, but then to get to great and even better, you need to do your own look at it and the experts out there as well.

But that first part is so fast. Like it's in seconds. You get it. And that's the thing I'm saving. There's a lot of productivity gains getting from it.

[00:23:31] David: They're all better than Gary. So we have

[00:23:34] Gary: was going to say just getting something started, even if it is not good, but at least it's started. So you have a jump off point.

[00:23:41] David: Throughout the stuff, Gary and Gary doesn't do a very good job. So we just throw out whatever AI spits out. And that's better than Gary does.

[00:23:48] Gary: You told me it was a world class designer.

[00:23:51] David: No. Yeah. It's a world class designer named Al.

[00:23:54] Gary: Great.

[00:23:54] David: so what do you see are your next, so you're you've already answered that. I'm don't want you're building product of some sort. You're still early. So where is your company in five years? And if. Magic happens pooh for five years later.

Everything you've wanted to happen has occurred. Where are you?

[00:24:13] John: Yeah. So we'll still have the, I think there's going to be different arms to it. There's the consulting doing arm. I still want to be doing quite a bit of that. There's going to be an education or these could be separate companies or the same one. And so that will have its own team, like assuming value is something that people care about and they are still struggling with that would go out there.

And then the product will be around. How do you make value easy? So there's. Instead of getting all these spreadsheets and all this manipulation you're doing, it's one platform that companies can use to create all their assets, their sales materials, the engineering specs from some core elements around where you want to create your value.

So those are the three big areas that would have sustainable models around and right now I'm starting to just with the consulting side because that's for me. That's where the meat is today and where I could bring personal value. I get a lot of fulfillment by doing this and then now. So that's deep, but that doesn't scale.

So now I'm trying to build out different areas for scaling.

[00:25:16] David: Nice. I

[00:25:17] John: And then if there are others, so that's the core value piece, like the thing that I want to be centered around. But if there are other products that do come out for out of this, like we find there's a whole new area where you could create value that may spin off as well.

So I want to keep that open. Cause I got 20 years to work on this.

[00:25:35] Gary: Nice.

[00:25:36] David: What I like to hear about that so many times I hear vary as broad as I can make that people who started a company of some sort, a lot of them, if you actually ask them, where are you in five years, they've sold the company and they've started something new. So it's nice to hear, you know, you're thinking this is, in some flavor, right?

Obviously you got a lot of ideas here, but in some flavor, you're still doing this in 20 years. And I find that to be somewhat rare. A lot of people just want, they want to build up something they can sell. And I get that to a point, right? Then you got a nest egg and your life changes a lot when you don't have to work for money, right?

That, I get that, right? If you can sell a company for 5 million, now everything's just kind of, what do you want to do? Cause you no longer have to worry about your mortgage payment. I get that. But at the same time, having the passion to stay with it. Of course, I'm that guy. So of course, but I'm just saying it's refreshing to hear I'm rambling, but

[00:26:36] John: Yeah, again, I found the thing that really gets me excited, right? So that's the thing, value, right? Each person will have their own thing that gets them excited. And for me, the suggestion I have is find that thing and make that as part of the core thing you're driving, because you're going to, as an entrepreneur you're going through ups and downs.

If you're not, don't have any passion, if it's only for money, I don't think That's not sustainable.

[00:26:59] David: Oh here. Absolutely. I love that. It's I'm actually giving a speech at NC state tomorrow. And one of my slides is, you know, passion versus pain. So many people, their passion is they want to exit or make a pile of money. And I'm like, but to get to that pile of money, you've got to perform. And is that desire for that pile of money worth the pain you're going to go through?

And often the answer is absolutely not, right? That year, that slog, that pain, that getting up in the morning, running on the treadmill, nose to the grindstone, all the cliches. It's really hard doing what we do is really hard. And if all you're looking for is a paycheck that's floating out there five years in front of you, odds are you're never getting there because it's just not worth it.

It's just not worth it. You got to love what you're doing every day so that the 10 percent of your time, that's awesome. And you get to do exactly what you want to do is so fulfilling that the 90 percent of crap it takes to get there is worth putting up with. And that's a lost art. I think

[00:28:05] John: And if you hit it you know, that's all the stuff you're going through. That's painful. You don't even feel the pain. You're so focused on the thing that drives you. That's what I noticed, right? Once I hit.

[00:28:15] David: doing taxes, I still feel the pain. I'm just telling you, I still feel it every time. 11 years later, that never goes away. But I totally understand. Yeah. I mean, it's not as painful when you know, you're going to get back to doing what you love. What's interesting in my case, I have loved and always been a developer for getting close to 25 years, which is almost as old as Gary.

But I find that I'm giving that away. So that's been what I love, but I, in order for our company to grow, I have to get away from it. And that is a very strange transition because I've, this is what I've done for 20, Something years and now I'm not going to do that at least day to day. I will always tinker because that's just my thing, but that is really weird.

It's I've, we've said this before, but you know, delegating is really easy when you're giving away the things you hate, giving away taxes, really didn't think about it twice. There you go. I'm out, but giving up design early on to Gary. Was somewhat painful. I enjoyed doing it. I wasn't great at it, but I enjoyed doing it, but development's my heart.

And so giving that away now, cause I have to do leadership and culture and sales and all the other things that company needs me to do. I have to give that up. And that's the been tricky. So it's kind of, kind of a hard thing.

[00:29:35] John: That's a tough one because you need to tap into the thing you love. Otherwise it's going to be a slug. In my experience, again, with the big company, I was in these cycles of going into, you know, stuff I love to do. And then stuff I didn't quite like doing it, but it was bigger and scale scaled up. I was going up in the company and then I went all the way back down to the stuff I love, right?

So I like being in the middle. I like leading, but I don't want to be totally high up. Where it's all transactional, like there's not a lot of jazz there.

[00:30:05] David: I have found that my passions have slowly started switching where. I love development. I think I always will. I will always tinker and build something, but I have really started to find a passion in being with people, whether that's sales, whether that's leadership, you know, training and mentoring people.

It's funny how you're, I have just naturally it's been shifting. I'm not sure why, but it's, so I don't feel like I'm giving something up necessarily as I'm doing something new, which is now a new passion. So it's been interesting, but yeah, you can't give it up. Otherwise, if you don't enjoy your job, you're not, you didn't start a company to get a job.

That's what I, someone told me that a long time ago. I was like that's really wise, man. You didn't

[00:30:48] Gary: when you're still building,

[00:30:50] David: Yeah,

[00:30:51] Gary: just not building software as much, but you're building a company and you're building relationships to keep software, you know, building from your company.

[00:31:01] David: And yeah, it just you're, I think it becomes more abstract what you were doing, creating, like in your case, you're creating value. That is your shtick, but you might find out that what you really love is just creating and what the noun of that sentence might change. And that's kind of a. Kind of a deeper thing that now I'm philosophical.

I didn't mean to be, but that's kind of what it turns into eventually as you get old and turn into Gary. But anytime I call him old, it's just gravy. All right, Gary, give him a question.

[00:31:31] Gary: Well, John, since you, this is still your first year, but you do have experience in working for a larger company and then making that transition. So our final question, usually to our, Guests is what are your top three pieces of advice for any entrepreneur or new business when they're starting up? What have you learned in your transition and what piece of advice would you give?

[00:31:53] John: Yeah. For one there are three here. So the first one is increasing clarity, right? So clarity and necessity. It's been. When think when I was not clear about what I want to do it why I'm doing this thing, what drives me? What, you know, how am I going to show up? Then things started to go out of control, right?

So I was not getting excited about what I was doing. But I think it's for everybody entrepreneurs in particular, if they're not clear. About why they're doing this in the first place. Is it for money? Some people aren't too jazzed by money. If it's, is it for something else, then it's going to be so much harder to actually get through the ups and downs.

There will be troughs in some cases you're failing for a while before you get a success and you're not going to have any staying power. And so for me, this whole thing about clarity and as very individual, very organizationally specific, if you don't have that, then you're going to have a problem. Necessity is how do I elevate that?

How do I, you know, you know, if I don't have a paycheck and I don't have any other funding sources, you have necessity to get that and that's going to drive action. So all these things are going to eventually drive to action. So for me, that was a big aha within the company it was at before. And even now.

If I didn't have that clarity, I'd be looking for the next consulting gig, right? I would have liked it or not, and I would have been going all over the place. I probably would have gotten completely frustrated. The second one is around, no big surprise, value, right? You know, whoever your customer is, again, it's very segment or very specific to that customer.

What's going to give them value. And it may not be just the product. It could be your expertise in an area. It could be your availability to the product. It's think holistically of value. How could you serve that customer better? So they get a better outcome and they get excitement about working with you. And that may happen over time. You don't need to have this massive. You know, delta value initially, so try to just keep the actions going, keep focused on what you want to do. And the third thing is focus and action, right? So I like, I don't know if you know James Clear and habits, atomic habits, but that's a very awesome book.

I know it's not just him that's in this area, but it's not about the outcome. It's about just having those habits day in day out that will lead you to those outcomes. So baseball players, you know, they're not going to be doing home runs every time. You just need to go at bat every time and improve yourself over time.

And so that focus and action is really critical. And I see that a lot of big companies is they're all over the place. They're, they have a hard time focusing and for an entrepreneur. Like I, like for myself, I have so many things I could do, but if I wasn't focused, I wasn't taking action, nothing would get done, so those are my three.

[00:34:41] David: Love it.

[00:34:42] Gary: Yeah, those are good. The focus one definitely is a great one. I love that. And I love the idea that matter as your own entrepreneur, as your own boss, you do have just an infinite amount of possibilities on where you want to try to chase money, but instead of staying focused on what you actually want to deliver and then worry about the money later, that's, that seems like a good point to make too.

[00:35:03] John: Get traction.

[00:35:04] Gary: All right, John if anybody wants to learn more about you or your business, how can they reach you?

[00:35:09] John: You can reach me at outcomedesignlabs. com. That's the website. And then obviously on my LinkedIn, which I think you'll have from the session, reach

[00:35:18] Gary: Yeah, we'll put those links into the show notes in the descriptions underneath this

[00:35:22] David: Awesome, John. Thank you so much for taking the time to be with us this week. We have really enjoyed talking to you.

[00:35:27] John: Great. Likewise. Have a great day.

[00:35:29] OUTRO: Hi, I'm Christy Pronto, Content Marketing Director here at BigPixel. Thank you for listening to this episode of the BizDev Podcast. We'd love to hear from you. Shoot us an email, hello at thebigpixel. net. The BizDev Podcast is produced and presented by BigPixel. See you next week. Until then, follow us on Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, Threads, YouTube, and LinkedIn.