Welcome to Top Floor, the podcast where we amplify discussions with CEOs and chief executives driving the future of small and medium-sized businesses, get ready to be inspired and formed and empowered as we delve into the unique minds and journeys of the executive leaders shaping tomorrow's business landscape. I am your host, Dr. Krista Crawford. In addition to being an adjunct business professor for two university MBA programs, I am also a VISTAGE chair. I coach leaders in peer advisory groups and in one-to-one executive sessions to make better decisions that lead to better businesses and overall better lives. My guest today is Jordan Harrison. Jordan is the founder and CEO of Omni Sync AI, the only tool of suites on the market built for e-commerce businesses. Their cloud-based software handles sales, CRM, HR, finance, order management inventory, and other operations for businesses of all sizes, in one place, 10 times quicker with AI. Welcome, Jordan Harrison. Please tell me more about Omni Sync AI. Tell me what you do, tell me how you came about creating it. Tell me what your goal is. Yeah, so Omni Sync AI is the only suite of tools on the market built for e-commerce businesses. We have a cloud-based software that handles sales, CRM, HR, finance, order management, inventory, and so much more for businesses of all sizes than one place. And we do this 10 times quicker with AI. Probably on the market currently, there are a lot of patchwork tools and different applications that people have to use to manage their entire business. And this comes from users having lots of things to manage, but business is only thinking the sale of the product is where it stops. So essentially, we like to look at the business holistically and provide solutions for the entire business. So again, that's getting into finance, it's getting into sales, it's getting into the HR aspect, because e-commerce can grow to be huge. And it is a huge market, it's a $71 billion market as of right now. So we wanted to target that and provide e-commerce businesses with a tool that they need to succeed. And then in terms of where we got it from, I was a successful e-commerce business owner for four years. And I had a lot of handwritten notes, inventory by hand, a lot of manual data entry, which caused a lot of customer dissatisfaction. And I was trying my hardest as one person to keep up. And a lot of times, AI make things a lot easier to do and a lot easier to streamline. But I did not have that access at the time. So again, I decided because I had a problem, I needed a solution and I was going to make it myself. Isn't that how so many amazing companies get started? The user realizes, here's a big gap. So putting your crystal ball and a very, very positive crystal ball in front of you, how large do you think you can grow this company? Yes. So the market is extremely huge. The ERP space alone is a $238 billion market. And even if we took the smallest portion, it would be still a huge amount of money, multi-million. And the goal is to get this global because the biggest country that is utilizing or in the e-commerce space is China. And they need a lot of AI tools. As of right now, they're still a little bit behind in terms of how they can streamline that communication between the buyer and the seller and also the supplier and the business. So we are working on some supply chain management tools as well. So we are already in route to be launched in China as well in the next year. So we're growing extremely fast. This company is blowing up and I am super grateful. I have a co-founder who works with me on it. But again, since I'm the CEO, there are a lot of coal that I have to make to get this out there and advertise. So we plan on it being huge. Tell me, in your progress, you're obviously very ambitious, very intelligent, have see a potential in a large market. Did you have a mentor along the way that inspired you? So in terms of mentorship, in this specific area, the answer is actually no. I had to self-teach myself a lot because product design and UX design was not really something I grew up hearing. I thought it was just web design, graphic design, because those things were all rolled up. But now, companies are starting to realize they need specialized employees working on specific things as they get bigger. So a few years ago, I actually learned in self-taught UX. I used a Google course and I learned and I applied a lot of the graphic design thinking that I had already had, thinking about brand guidelines and the user needs and the marketing and the target audience and things like that. And I applied it to designing interfaces for your screen. So I self-taught a lot. And of course, I had a lot of people inspire me and to speak life into what I was doing. But at the end of the day, I knew I had a God-given talent and I wanted to use it in a way that would touch more people for sure. You've obviously touched on the opportunities in this business. Tell me about some of the challenges that you've had in getting it started and how you've ever come those. Yeah, so the biggest challenge I've actually had is being underestimated. So with me being a woman-owned company, a founder, a lot of people asking me if I was fully qualified or if I knew what I was talking about, which in fact I do. And it was just constantly reminding myself that I got this far. I know how to do it. I can speak about it if I need to. If anybody asks, I know how to break it down at a high level or at a low level. Someone who's not even techy, I can explain it to them and they understand at the end and it doesn't take me hours to explain. So I am very well versed in technology as a whole. Again, I have a computer science degree. So I do know how to code if I really needed to. So again, being underestimated, I just have to work 10 times harder and I have no problem doing that to show that I am capable of running a company at this scale. And then in terms of technical challenges, I wouldn't say any because me and my co-founder, we really do understand this problem space. He's also an e-commerce seller. So there was never a moment of, I don't know if this product is really going to work. I don't really know if it's worth anything. Even with investors, right? We have numerous investors reaching out to us on a daily basis. But at a certain point, you have to realize you cannot have all 200 investors investing at this stage. So being realistic with myself and saying, just because they said no, does not mean that's a permanent no. It just means not at this stage. Or maybe that's not their vertical. Maybe they don't understand it. But that doesn't mean that I'm going to give up. A lot of huge companies have gotten noes from VCs, including Airbnb. I don't, I'm not sure if you're familiar with their story, but over 150 rejections from VCs. And now they're a multi-billion dollar company. So my biggest thing with that is just don't give up. And that's something I live by every day. In terms of employees, how many people are in the company now? So in terms of employees, it's me, my co-founder, and then we also have a lead engineer. Again, using the crystal ball a year from now, what do you anticipate that will be? Anticipating, I'd like to ideally keep the team small for the next year, just so that we can make sure that the talent quality is higher on the higher range. We do plan on having around 10 to 15 employees within the next year, a slower growth, so that we can make sure this product is really doing well. And then as we raise more funding, then we can be able to invite more people to join us. But we are definitely very picky about who's on our team. Let's take you back to when you were about, let's say, 12, 13, 14. What advice would you give young Jordan now, thinking back to then? I love that question. So when I was 12 or 13, I was doing the same stuff. I was doing graphic design. I was learning, I actually built my first HTML website at six years old. So I would just say keep going, because it really does pay off. And I think I look back and my mom, she never doubted me. She always put me in the best classes and moved my family across the country so that I could continue to work on this. And I had a graphic design program at that specific school, and she moved everybody just so that I could go there. And just be grateful, enjoy life, and keep going with what you love, because it can actually be a lucrative career. I'm surprised at the number of times that I taught to CEOS. It seems, I don't know, I don't have any empirical data, just anecdotal data. But I'm saying well over half the time, people were doing something similar. And then there were people that weren't doing anything at all, like what they ended up doing. So it's always nice to hear that you had a vision, and you're executing it. Absolutely. Yeah, yeah. So I'm excited that I'm getting to know you early on in this process. I know you've worked in other positions. In general, what type of positions have you held as you were getting to this point of CEO? That's great. So in terms of positions that I've held in the past few years, I have had multiple product roles. So product design, user experience design at companies like Meta and Adobe, I worked on WhatsApp in the FinTech sector. So financial technologies within Meta, that was extremely cool. I wasn't expecting to be working on finance at Meta. I thought it was like that's a social media company, but there are a lot of things that go to running a business as big as Meta. And same with Adobe working on artificial intelligence, machine learning components for the design system. So when you go on Adobe Firefly, or when you go on Chad GPT and you're interacting with it, what do the buttons look like? How do you navigate from tab to tab? I'm working on designing for the AI technologies. And then in terms of marketing and understanding product market fit, I've worked at a medium-sized company called Spartan Surfaces, which is a flooring company based in Maryland. And I did social media marketing. So, and I also assisted with graphic design, web design, and just kind of covering and being a Florida Reverend E.B. And I learned a lot about very, very niche markets. I wasn't impressed with working in the flooring industry. I won't lie, but I learned so much because it's like something that you never really think about like, oh, I could be a social media manager for Starbucks because, you know, I understand coffee, but I don't understand flooring. I know it's in my house. I know it's in my favorite coffee shop, but I don't understand LBT vinyl or anything like that. So, I had to learn and that really pushed me out of my comfort zone. And this alone, my company is a very niche market. Still e-commerce is big, but we're, you know, reaching it down to specific needs. So, I understand niche business markets and these roles that I've had have taught me how to address these in my design decisions, my product and business thinking as well. So, you said you really haven't had many mentors, but I'm going to see if possibly is there, are there business writers, leaders that you read or pay attention to? Is there someone who's inspired you in terms of their leadership philosophy or approach? Yeah. So, I would definitely say I follow a lot of chief product officers on LinkedIn, and then I also go on Medium and read my daily read, whether it's for UX design, business thinking. And also, I love watching Business Insider. That's one of my favorite channels, and I love Shark Tank as well. Mark Cuban is definitely, I guess I look up to him in a business sense because I think that he makes very smart moves, very smart calls, and he's very choosy about what he invests in. And I also look at that myself. I'm very choosy on who I choose to run my business or who I choose to work with me and advertise because I think my business is a direct representation of me. So, I want to make sure that I'm, you know, choosing and also listening to the best people. So, definitely, you know, a lot of Business Insider, Shark Tank, Mark Cuban, Medium, things like that. What do you do to take care of you? What do you do when you're not working? What is something you do to add value and strength to your own person? That's a great question as well. So, it's actually funny. Design is a hobby for me as well. So, I have, you know, talked to my therapist about it, and I was like, you know what, I literally love design no matter whether it's for work or for personal. So, a lot of times, I'll hop into Adobe Illustrator and just make fun posters because there's no business thinking. It's just my thinking. It's my art. It's my creative expression. And then, aside from that completely, I do love working out, being active, going outside, spending time with my dogs. I'm a huge dog person. And spending time with family because family is very important. And I don't, I don't believe in working so, so hard that you forget about the life that you had prior to. So, I do my best to balance and make time for the people that I love. I'm never too busy for, you know, a quick phone call with my family. I'll give them a call myself. And, you know, just make sure that Jordan is still being taken care of. It's, that is so important, particularly when you're in this early growth phase. I mean, sleep sometimes, you know, goes by the wayside. So, it's so important to take care of yourself because you're in this for the longer haul, right? You wouldn't see this company go all the way. Exactly. Wonderful. What has happened to date with Omni Sync AI that surprised you most? What surprised you most in this process? So, I guess the thing that surprised me the most is the interest. I did not expect so many people to reach out to us. Again, as I mentioned earlier in the fall, we have had hundreds of investors reach out. And we've really only been going public for the past couple of months, two or three months. And a lot of accelerators reaching out to us. We made it into the top 10% of Y Combinator companies for the summer batch. So, that was really exciting, considering they typically get around 44,000 applications each batch. So, that, you know, definitely confirmed a few things for me. Being able to talk to some sea level executives at Google as well about the product, getting accepted into their accelerator, lots of mentorship. You know, there have been so many people supporting me on this and that was really surprising, but very heartwarming as well. That's wonderful to hear. Let's bring it local. What are your thoughts on the current employment situation here in the greater DC Baltimore metro area? What are your thoughts? So, I think in this area specifically, I will speak for the tech jobs out here. I would say that they're definitely harder to come by. And for me, my whole intention with starting Omni Sync AI was eventually to be able to pour back into underrepresented communities and give them jobs as well. So, I know that I'm doing my part in working on this so it can be successful so that other people can be successful. I understand that breaking into tech as well is very challenging for some people, especially not with a traditional background, whether it's a top school, CS degree. Some people are leveled down to boot camps and I would like to be able to provide those opportunities for them. And again, I'd like to see more growth in the tech space up in the DUB area for sure. I know DC has a lot and then you'll have to go a little bit further north for New York because there are a lot of tech jobs out that way. But yeah, again, I'm doing my best. I'm headquartered in Baltimore, Maryland. So, trying to bring some jobs up to this area for sure. That's fantastic. I think you may have already answered this, but we'll try again. Who is the first person that comes to mind when you think about success? Mark Cuban. Yeah, okay. I hope we can somehow tag Mark Cuban and he can see this and see how inspired you are by him. Right. Yes. Do you have a favorite quote that you like to share or signature that you like to use? I believe Mark Cuban said this. It was something along the lines of if you want to purchase without looking at the price, you need to work without looking at the clock. And I think that that is really a great quote and I live by that because I don't count the hours that I spend on Omni Sync AI. Somehow, I just have this supernatural strength to continue and work and every day I'm driven to get up and work on it because I know it's going to be successful. It's not a, I hope I know it will. So, with that, I continue to strive every day and there are some days that I tell my co-founder, "Hey, I'm out. Not feeling too well. I do take those times off for myself." But I don't want to live a life of having to choose or decide whether I can get this or not. I want to be able to live a life that's fulfilling and I also want to be able to give back. So, for this moment, I need to work and I need to put everything that I have into it so that it can really grow. And I'm definitely seeing that pay off. Right. Start up. It's a lot of work and then there will come a time, hopefully, that you'll be able to reap the benefits from all of your efforts. Whether a startup or whether your company's been around for tens of years, if not decades, there's always a pain point. What's the pain point right now for your young company? I would say I think it really is getting the word out about how helpful we will be to e-commerce businesses. Because I don't think people understand while it might seem like, "Oh, you know, there's an app for that. There's an app for that." There is an app. But the problem is it doesn't communicate with the other app very well. So, we're trying to get out to the sellers, whether small, medium, or enterprise. This will help your business scale extremely because you don't have to keep up with a bunch of platforms and applications. You can keep it all in one place and they communicate with each other. Eventually, as we scale, it will be a super business or a super platform for these e-commerce businesses. Of course, we operate in that B2B model, but it's B2B to C because it's going out to the consumer at the end of the day. This is a product that they're using. Eventually, we'll have a mobile app package where users can easily create a mobile app. Again, the value proposition of that is the benefits of push app notifications being able to offer in-app specials and things like that. There's so many things that we plan on doing with AI, with business tools, with finance. That is what we want people to understand. It's all in one place. So, that's our biggest pain point is really just being able to communicate that in the best way. Getting the message out. What have you learned about yourself on this journey? I am very capable. That's pretty much all it is because I always had a dream to have my own tech company. I guess for a little while it was, I just want to work for a big tech company and I want to be higher up, but I realized I can be that higher up for my own company. There's no cap on my imagination. There's no cap on how much I can earn. I understand the space very well, so why not just do it? Me being young, people like to underestimate me or maybe they're just shocked. It might not be under-restimating me, but it's just how. I'm so young and I'm a woman and you don't really see that. Especially in Baltimore, there's not too many women founders for tech companies and AI. I am very capable and I can do everything that I want to do and there's nobody stopping me. You are very capable. I can tell. It comes across and confidence is an important factor, particularly as a CEO. You want your CEO making decisions that they're sure of. Absolutely. Yeah. On terms of risk, how big of a risk taker do you consider yourself? Very much so. I think that this company I've invested my time, my money, and I knew that it would be at the cost of a few things, even leaving behind a job offer at Google to really be able to focus on this. I'll be up in Adobe for a few months and then I plan on working on this full time starting September. But as of right now, I'm full time and then I'll be finishing up with my other job and then I'm dropping everything for this. As you can see, I am a very big risk taker. Again, I'm taking calculated risks because I don't want to drop anything with absolutely no sign of interest at all. Investors weren't reaching out to me or offering a certain amount of money, then maybe I wouldn't have done what I did. But I feel very strongly. I'm a very strong conviction about the product. I feel like the risk was definitely justified. Any decision you've made so far that if you had to make it again, you do a little differently? I have no regrets. I so far have been able to vet out everyone working with me, vet out the investors we've talked to. I even vet out the information I tell investors when we're on polls. So I'm very cautious because again, I understand this type of business and the amount of money that this business will make. I have to be very careful in the beginning so that I don't get messed up in the end. So I take calculated risks. I make decisions based off of logic and not emotion. So I personally don't have any regrets. What's the favorite course you took while going to school? Hmm. My favorite course was actually Java 1, Java 2. And that was because it was very challenging for me. For some reason, Java was just a very hard programming language for me. But then when I conquered it and I had As in both classes, I felt good about it. And I even bought myself a Java logo keychain to remind myself I passed this class and I did great. But it was very challenging at first. Yeah, you come across as someone who likes to test yourself. Yes, absolutely. I like to prove to myself that I can do it. What are the next steps for your company for OmniSync AI? So in terms of next steps to close out the fundraising for our seed rounds, and then again, we're launching in July, that is the beta. So we have over 10,000 weightless signups as of right now. And they're very interested. They're very active signups. So they're reaching out to us, asking us when is it going to launch, asking us questions about the apps that will be available for the beta. So we know that people are very excited. So we're going to have them test out the beta for a few months. They have three months to use it for free. And from there, we'll get their user data, we'll get their information and feedback, which is all authorized by them. This is an agreement that we had. So when you do test it, please report bugs. Please let us know what you think so that we can go in and revise what we're working on so that we can make the product better for the public launch. That's what a beta test is all about. Absolutely. Now, what if people want to learn more about omnisink AI? Are you in a position for people to inquire or do you want to wait until after the beta test? No, they can inquire as soon as when they're watching this as soon as today. So essentially, we have a website, which is just omnisinkai.com. And then we also have our weightless. So if you'd like to join the weightless, there is going to be a button that says get started. You can find it pretty much anywhere. And then if you would like to book a demo, our co-founder is doing demos for the beta. And you can actually get a demo before we launch. So feel free to contact us that way. And we're also on LinkedIn. You can find me on LinkedIn. I'm just Jordan Harrison. And there are plenty of different places around the internet that she can find us. But the website is definitely a great start. Fantastic. What have I not asked you that you want to make sure we cover before we close today? I would say how we're using AI in the product and how we're changing the game with that. So essentially, we're having AI streamline data, give users a high level summary of their tasks for the day, whether they're an employee or they're an admin. We're getting AI to create product listings and also create product images as well. So we're working very closely with our suppliers to create AI-generated product mock-ups so that we can send that straight over to the supplier and detailed AI, you know, construction details. So for instance, if you want something made and you have your product mock-up and you would like to include specific instructions, we can have AI write the detailed instructions to the supplier. So when they make the product, they understand the width, they understand the height, the colors, the, you know, textures. And you really don't even have to describe that yourself. It just goes straight to the supplier. So AI is definitely being used in the product space a lot, but in all of our apps, we'll have it riddled with AI. So we're definitely ahead of the game in terms of how we're using it. We're starting off as that AI business model so that we can grow and create something worthwhile. Jordan, thank you so much for your time today. It's been a pleasure meeting you and I look forward to talking with you again. We're both in the Baltimore area. Absolutely. I would love to get coffee sometime. Thank you so much. Sounds great.
