Adam, thank you so much for taking time on your busy day. And I know every day is busy when you're a leader. I want you to tell me about Inflectra. Tell me what you do. Tell me how the idea came about. Well, thanks, Chris. It's nice to be here on the podcast. The company started in 2006. So we've been around for 18 years. In fact, we joke at the company that we're about to go to college as a company. So next stage in our growth. But the idea came about because I used to work for a consulting firm called Sapient. They did work in the both the commercial and government sectors. And I was responsible for the Marine Corps Navy work here in the Washington DC area. And during those projects, I realized that we really were using very primitive technologies, Excel sheets were documents and whiteboards, for the most part. And as a result, I always had this realization, fantasy, sort of like when they all build a company, and we can build tools that will fill that gap. And there were some products on the market, but they were very expensive only for enterprises. They also wouldn't let consulting firms use them across the board. They had to be licensed to end users, which meant it was very inflexible. So really a combination of, I think, cost and inflexibility of licensing meant that most consulting firms and certainly small and medium-sized companies couldn't afford to use these tools. So everyone was using spreadsheets and Word documents and manual methods. And it was horribly inefficient. And I realized that one day, when time is right, I'll start a company and try and fill this niche. And so that's basically the genesis of the company. And what we do as a company, so that's how the origination was, what we do today is provide quality products that help people deliver software and systems with high quality, particularly mission critical systems. And mission critical doesn't have to just be life or death. It could be big banks and insurance companies, where a system goes down for an hour. It can be billions of dollars of losses. But it's any company that really has an interest in delivering systems of high quality that mustn't fail. And the world got a lesson, I think, in this is about two weeks ago now, CrowdStrike, without picking on them, had a bug that went out that took out $8.5 million, $8.5 million computers. And you saw how one small bug could literally take out the entire world economy in one afternoon and one morning. And that's how dramatic the effects of a system failure can be. And our products really help you mitigate that and prevent that. If you're using our tools and using them well, they would ideally reduce the likelihood of something like that happening, even something not quite as catastrophic. But at a smaller scale, clients have eyes that work in hospitals or energy companies, automotive or aerospace. These are sectors that you don't want things to fail, even small things. For example, we visited a major UK airport a few weeks ago. And they said that they have planes landing every minute. And if the baggage claim or the check-in desk gets disrupted, that disrupts the entire flow for the day. And they won't recover to the next day. I mean, that's how finely tuned our systems are that run the world. And one failure can disrupt that finely tuned system and throw everything into chaos. So our mission is to stop that. I'm sure people are curious. How do you go from identifying that things need to work better to starting a company? And in terms of that entrepreneurial spirit, did you always know you were an entrepreneur waiting to happen? I think so. I don't think the idea or the specific business was in mind. And honestly, the testing quality space, something that really happened because I found testing and quality to be terrible at sapient because we didn't have any tools and had something else been difficult. I might have gone into that area. And in fact, there were other businesses I was considering at the time. So the specific domain, I think, was happenstance and opportunistic. But the one, the desire to start a company was always there. When I was a kid in school, I was 10 years old. I used to write computer software back in the 80s. And I would try and sell it in school for like, you know, pound one UK pound computer games and random spits of software that would do things like music and drawing products. I wrote a flow charting application. And I would try and write software that was useful because I as a technologist thought computers were amazingly powerful. And so it was really great to be able to write software and be able to build something that others might want to use. So I had some early successes as a kid and then kind of decided that was just, you know, playing around with computers, went to university, got a degree in physics, and then came out of that and said, I don't want to work in a lab. And well, I'm not a scientist, although I thought I might have been at the time. I realized what really got me passionate was business and technology and their interplay. And so I realized I was an entrepreneur, but also I think an entrepreneur that enjoys technology, because you can be an entrepreneur in other spheres, you know, opening restaurants or retail stores. And there's obviously a technology component to those. But I realized that my passion was about business and technology and their interplay. So I really wanted to start a business that harnessed those two loves that I had. And therefore would be something that both I enjoyed and also was good at. And I think that's an important thing is that to start a business that you don't like doing is there is a fool's errand. You have because you know, you're gonna have good days and bad days in any company. And we have no bad days. We got super pattern infringement many years ago. We have customers that might cancel on us or people demanding questions. There's always good days and bad days. If you love what you do at its core, you will survive those bad days and enjoy the good days. But if you do the business, just because you want to start a business, but you don't really have any love for it, then I think on those bad days, it may be hard. So I think it's important to find something that you do care about. And it has some bigger than just making money. The best businesses are ones where the founders are passionate about solving the customer problem, the customer experience, making money is obviously part of it. That's why we will do it as well. But that can't be the primary or only reason, in my opinion. You say passion. I often for myself talk about joy, find something that brings you joy. And it doesn't have to, as you mentioned, it doesn't have to bring you joy every second of every day. There are always good days and bad days. But on the balance, if you wake up and you're excited about delivering your product or you're excited about helping someone, then you know you found your niche. Suggestions? Suggestions for someone who's in their late teens, trying to decide where they want to go, what, what were you doing? Or what do you recommend that they do in terms of hobbies or skill sets? Or how do you get on that path to success? So late teens, but I went to high school in the United Kingdom. So there's always this sort of discussion, right? Should you go to university? Should you just go start business? It depends a lot on your financial resources of your family. I mean, I came from a small town in Wales where my parents were, you know, low middle income, relatively humble, went to a state school, which is equivalent to a public school in the US. And so if I, if I, you know, knock onto university and just try to start a company, I had no network, no resources, and I really no idea what I was doing. So I didn't do that. I went to university, got a degree in physics, and that really helped me, you know, meet new people. That degree then got me a job working for an IT company in Boston, Massachusetts, got me to the United States. So I think you have to look at the journey that you take. So I think if I was 16 or 17 now, what would I, what would I try and do? Well, first of all, find hobbies that you like doing. Obviously, you know, you don't want to just become a CV machine or resume machine. I see a lot of kids that just do things because their parents tell them, oh, and I, I have kids, my son is 24 when it was 20. So I've gone through this relatively recently by proxy. A lot of times parents are like, oh, you should be doing music, you should be doing sports, you should be doing something technical, get an internship. And these kids get these, you know, massive resumes and they're burnt out and they don't enjoy any of it. I think that's not a good idea. So if you know, if you like computers or like technology, you know, messing around with it and learning about it is a great thing. If you don't like technology, then don't do something else. I mean, find things that you're passionate about. Be curious, network with people, you know, definitely look for internships. It is possible. We've had we have interns at my company that are in high school. We don't just wait for college. And you know, use use your network. Several of our interns came from my Boy Scout troop of all places. So it's going to be surprising. One of our best technical hires didn't go to university, but actually got a programming on the side I had met with him using my Boy Scout troop and friends of friends. And I suggested we'll just do some programming, build a portfolio of websites and apps. And that will help you build some, you know, build something that you can show on a future employer. So I do think there's lots of things you can do. Some people might start companies. If you want to start a company, you've got family financing, angel investing. You know, by all means, your life is long. You don't have to do everything all at once. There's always that danger. I think if you, you know, you lose momentum, I think for me, if I was talking to someone who's 16 on a 17, the big risk I could see is they go in with some friends to start a company and maybe they do it because they're like hanging out with their friends. And four of the years later, the business was really just a bunch of friends hanging out. It didn't really achieve anything. And they didn't get any skills. And they didn't learn from their failure. If it did fail, that's a danger. So the dangers you can fall into this startup culture without necessarily having a startup or a business. So that's one thing I've seen is a lot of, you know, when I started, you know, being a technologist or a nerd was completely uncool and sexy. Now it's kind of gone the other way. And so it's a little bit of a danger where I see this, there's people who want to start companies, they go to like a WeWork or an incubator. And a lot of people make money off of you. People often view, you know, co-working spaces or coffee or, you know, IT services. And in the end, lawyers, investors, finances, advisors. And so in the end, as you end up, the people who end up becoming the product, they are the product. So I think my advice is be very mindful of your time, time is precious. Do things that you're going to learn from, try things. But also don't necessarily think you don't have to get a job. I did get a job. I worked for eight years at Sapient, went from being a programmer to being a director. And my decision to do that was very intentional. I wanted to learn sales and marketing. I wanted to learn business management. I wanted to understand P and L's. I mean, I was a programmer and I was a physicist. I had no experience in business apart from a one week course I did in when I was in college. So going to SAP for eight years, I learned how to do enterprise sales. I learned how to meet with customers, get on a whiteboard and draw architecture diagrams and wow people. I learned revenue recognition. I learned accounting. So I learned so much in eight years while it's being paid a salary that versus going to an MBA or a business school after college or doing stuff. So you can learn a lot from getting a job. So I think just because you took a job, doesn't mean you're not an entrepreneur. The whole narrative around went to college, dropped out, started a company, meant to Stanford, made a billion dollars and ended up in the social network. It's a damaging fantasy in some ways because that's not how it is for most people. So I would say various different pieces of advice. Follow your dreams, follow your passion, grow to be realistic, get skills along the way, fail when you fail, start again. But there's nothing wrong with having a job. There's nothing wrong with working with someone. It's a way to learn skills and get paid for it. I love that you brought up finances that phrase a couple of times because I think it is unrealistic for a lot of younger people. They think that there's just this pot of gold waiting for them. Do you have any tips or suggestions for people as they're starting out? How to manage finances when they're younger? I mean, there's the personal finance side, which is a whole other story. And then as I would say, the business finance side. So I bootstrapped the company that we're still bootstrapped. We raised no money as a company. So you have to be very efficient. We started the company, the intellectual on $5,000. I can be happy to say that. And that was money that I'd saved up. I had young kids, so I didn't have a ton of money that was saving away. So I didn't have 100,000 that I saved. I started with $5,000 only. Now, how did I make that work? Well, I was very efficient with my time. I was also lucky I'm a programmer, so I didn't need to hire anyone to program. And so my time was free. My wife had a job. So I had income coming in from her. We downsized some of our personal finances to accommodate one salary, you know, then got to restaurants, cut back on discretionary expenses, driving vacation to the beach versus in a travel vacation to see family overseas. So we were very mindful, get our cost based out so we could run off one salary. I then became basically the daycare. Grant looked after my young kids when they were two and six. So we could save one daycare costs. And then in between that, wrote the software, put a website up together, got a book from the library, used the library, wrote by books, went to public library, got a book on accounting, got a book on trademarks and a corporation, incorporated through LegalZoom, did it very cheaply, did a lot of my own lawyering with someone reviewing it when it was critical. So did things to really keep the cost down. Got the first product coded in six months, got the website put together in six months, launched early 20 to 2007. So basically nine months from June 2006, my left savings to about March 20, 2007. So that's nine months. I'd gone from nothing to a first version of a product that I'd built a website, you know, I've got an accounting tool, I quit, nowadays you'd use QuickBooks Online or something like that. Very simple tech, didn't over complicate things, used PayPal for credit cards, now you could probably use Stripe. So there's a lot of cheap tech out there, they don't need a lot of money. And so the only money was my time. And we didn't use, we use almost none of that 5,000 till we started using advertising. So we did some very cheap Google AdWords, now it's a bit more difficult. But again, that money that 5,000 was really for sales and marketing, even then, I ordered that and did everything else myself or a minimal tech, minimal cost tech. So you had to be very judicious. If you go and raise money, you're going to have to raise a lot of money, you're going to hire programmers, send you below a higher cost enterprise, and the cost of getting started is bigger. There's nothing wrong with doing that, it's just different. So I guess, be intentional, are you going to raise money? Is this a speculative? I think you have to look at your product, therefore. Is it speculative? Is this something that doesn't exist in the market? So we don't know if this product market fits. Is it something that's going to is innovative or even inventive? If it's one of those two, you might need to raise money, in which case you're going to put together a prototype to picture an investor, and whatever much money you think you're going to need, you're probably going to need twice that. So you're probably going to need, you know, a million or two. Now, if you're going to start with a product category that largely exists, which is what I did, I took a product category that exists and looked for improvement. Honestly, we weren't innovative. We weren't inventing. It was improvement. Take an existing product, make a cheaper version of it that would have easier licensing, and was cheaper. And this should be almost copied the UI. I mean, we kind of cloned the UI, made it simpler, but it wasn't like I went out and came up with a blue sky idea. I'd actually had some blue sky ideas. I recognized I didn't have the financing for it. So if you have an improvement of an idea, you can probably sell finance that bootstrap. Maybe our friends and family, Angel, do a very low cost low tech. That was the way I did it. You could do that too. But if you've truly got something that's going to be breakthrough, and people need to understand what this product does, and you need to accept that people might take, you know, nine months a year to accept this product is even a valid category. That's a much deeper pocketed set of sales and marketing you need to do. You're defining a category. You really need to think, I think, more critically about potentially raising money. All you have to do it may be using the lean startup approach, where you build it for free, make a free version, put the free version out for your, see if there's demand for it, and then spend money. So you can't do it very low cost if it's innovative or inventive, but you have to be very careful, and it's going to require pretty much giving a free version away to build demand for this category or test the demand. So it isn't impossible, but I think definitely, there seems to be more of a skewing towards raising money when it's something that's going to be really blue sky, a big idea. Thank you so much for being so generous with your suggestions, because you've really kind of opened your playbook up for us, and I really appreciate that. Something you said prompted me to ask, you talked about, for example, an example only, we're not meeting in a crowd strike situation where a glitch happens. What pain points do you see on the horizon for Flectra that you're preparing for? What pain points as a company or an industry, do you think we're experiencing right now? So pain points for our customer base. Well, when we are seeing them, again, without picking on anyone, I put it in a little presentation for a talk I'm doing next week in Australia, in fact, and I've got 10 slides with 10 IT failures. So without going, I want to name all these companies, because I don't name and shame that that's not the point. But on the other hand, if I look back at these, there's like 10 years where the failures. So I think the big one problem is we haven't learned. So I think what's going to come on the horizon is not that these bugs are going to get worse, but what we're finding is really two things I think. One is that when software failed in the past, the impact, the probability, I guess, is the same, but the impact is much higher. So if a website failed, you know, I went to an expee here, I went to the book of flight, and the expee doesn't load. Again, not picking on Expedia, it does load. It's a great website. I use it all the time. But if it didn't, okay, I come back and I'll later try working my flight again, or I might call the airline or whatever. But if I go to my car in the morning, my EV, and it's got a software-defined vehicle, it's got, you know, onboard updates, if I go in the morning to get to the case of school, go to work, I try to start my electric car, and there's an update that went over the light before, and it doesn't start, or the gears that work, I'm in trouble. And of course, it would affect everyone with that car, not just me, most likely. That's catastrophic. So software has become so much more intertwined in the economy on a real-time basis, as we saw with CrowdStrike, that it's become, I think, more impactful when things fail. So the thing, I think, in our industry that's more important than ever is that the cost of failure has never been higher. At the same time, business leaders and industry leaders are pushing for faster releases. So we've, again, the second thing that's in our industry is that we've expected software to be updated all the time. Previously, you know, you get Windows 98, Windows 95, that's a three-year gap. Think of that. We didn't get a new version of Windows for three years, I know there were fixes, but by and large, it was stable. Windows 10 and 11 are effectively one product, just updating all the time. Mac is the same, your phones are the same. We expect continual improvements, and with cyber attacks, you almost have to be from a defensive posture. But then you've got the problem that you're updating things faster and faster and faster, both from an effort because people want it, because cyber security demands it. And then the second thing is, as I mentioned, if you make one mistake, the cost of failure is higher than ever. So I think that's the biggest challenge in our industry. How do we balance speed and quality? And that's very, very hard. The stakes are higher. It's getting harder. And then the second factor, I think, is that governments are finally woken up to this being important. So we really are in an industry where, for the most part, governments have left technology alone, law being lawyer, you know, you can argue why that is. But it's an interesting. So when I started in fracture, and if I started today, it's still the case, what do I need to do? I need to incorporate, maybe get a bank account, register with my state, put a website up. That's it. Now I can get security certifications and things like that. But that tends to be mostly optional, unless you're selling to large companies. Now, if I wanted to start an ice cream business, selling ice cream in my local, you know, mall, or even going hot dogs that are a scout parade, I have to get the Montgomery County, Maryland health inspector, I have to get a food safety permit, I have to have USDA, you know, FDA or USDA trained staff, which would make sense, right? We could poison someone. So but you think about a small business selling ice cream or some kind of perishable product in a small town versus a software company that could derail the entire economy. We have more regulation of the ice cream cart than an attack platform. And I think governments are starting to wake up to that. Europeans are particularly in, you know, and that's going to change it. Software is no longer going to be me deciding me, the technology platform, deciding what I do, how I do it. Or if I decide to get certified, it's really self-certification to some degree. Governments are going to start saying, well, if you want to service the telecom industry, guess what? We're going to have order to come in and we're going to require this and it's not going to be self-certification. And we're going to tell you how you do your development and we're going to tell you if you can release this new version maybe. I mean, I don't know what level we're going to get to, but I just think we're going to see more government regulation. And some of it will stifle innovation, some of it will help, some of it will hurt like anything. So I do think that's going to be an issuing moving forward change is how do we balance that, you know, speed quality regulation, the three parts of the triangle. That's a big challenge for our industry. We've never had that before. So I've always been kind of left alone to its own devices. And how do you make that uniform from one part of the world to the next? To me, that's always the confusion. Like how do you handle cybersecurity issues from one continent to the next in terms of making them uniform? I don't know if they will be. I mean, for example, if you look at health safety, whether it's drugs or food, that's not the case. European Union has very different rules, GMO products versus US. We have different tolerances for risks. We make care about different things. So I could wealthy the world where maybe the European Union, for example, cares more about privacy, maybe the US cares more about free speech, but also more about resiliency. And there's some pros and cons. If you increase privacy, you would decrease potential resiliency. Because if I can't move data out of the EU, if the data center goes down, I have less redundancy because I don't have another continent to ship the data to. So there's already that's right off. So I think I don't think this I actually don't think it'll be uniform. And that's going to be a challenge for the IT industry because we've been used to a level playing field where I can write one piece of code, deploy it anywhere. And it doesn't affect the regulations locally that much. Whereas if I was a medical doctor and I trained in the US and I go to Europe, it's very different. So hopefully we won't get to that level of fragmentation. But you do see fragmentation. I mean, another challenge globally is the fact that the world is de-globalizing to some degree that in five, 10 years ago, we would do business in China or Russia that we wouldn't do today in technology. So that's something that in our lifetime has gone from being de-global, non-globalized, globalized, de-globalized in the last 15 years. That's a great example. And I did love your analogy with opening an ice cream shop or starting some type of technology company. One thing you said that I want to dig in a little deeper, you talked about when you took your first position in Boston here in the United States, and then after a period of time, you became a director. What skill sets did you need to home to go from being someone who's applying the information to directing others? What would you recommend? That's great. And the journey was sort of two, three levels. I guess it was a programmer, then it became like a senior programmer, like a lead programmer to managing a team. Then I became what was then called a manager, which meant you managed a whole team, and then I became a director, which actually was managing a business unit. But it was really more in selling, I'll be honest. So it was actually a bit less managing. So it's sort of funny. The skills change. So the skills that really, I think, honed was as a programmer, I was responsible for writing code in a quality way and being a good team member. And Safin was a consulting firm. It was always Ray team-based. And then to become a lead developer, that meant you were able to mentor others. You weren't just heads down writing code. You were willing to understand the business problem you were solving and help others understand why that code worked a certain way. So you had to understand the business. You had to be good with customers. You had to go into personal skills. You had to be willing to train on mentor people, which not everyone likes doing. So those were the skills I think to get from a programmer to like a manager of a team of programmers or a small management team. And the next level was to be, by perfectly the manager of a group of people. At that point, I was doing a lot more around HR, career growth, feedback, talking to people. One of the things I used to do a lot when I was in that role was walk around the route. This is before working home, of course. Walk around the office with a cup of coffee and just go to every single desk and chat with someone. And obviously, there's formal metrics for like, you know, checking with people. But I found that you would learn more by walking around each day with a cup of coffee, asking random questions that you saw and asking people what they're worried about than you did any formal reporting methods. That's a challenge now with COVID and post-COVID and people working from home because that sort of accidental information that no one knows, I wouldn't say it's in the middle to the quote it's scuttled by. But it's the it's the it's the intangible information that we used to call the water cooler discussion. Yeah, it's that sort of thing. But what kind of a coffee you would do that now on a virtual environment, we have teams now that are virtual and in person. And it's interesting. We have we have a Thursday kind of get together every week in the office. So those are in the DC area, which is only a subset of our company we meet in person. And they probably have a slightly stronger relationship with still the local employees, unless I'm traveling and meet them in person. So my strongest relationships in the company even today are with the DC employees and the sales team. Like I meet them when I'm traveling. We have some employees who started to work remotely in development. You know, I know them from the Zoom calls. I don't probably quite as good a relationship. And I probably know less of what's going on directly. I rely much more on my management team for that. So anyway, as a middle of a manager, I did a lot of walking around talking to people. And then when I became a director, then I was mostly working with the managers sort of like so a little bit more like today where I really found that, although I'd want to walk around and talk to people and never to anyone to undermine the management. So one of the things that you get when you go from sort of middle management or team management to the next level, you don't want to undermine that. And so one of the things that I've been always very careful of is when you're talking to other people, you want to know what's going on, but you always want to make sure you talk to their current managers to make sure you know what they think's going on. So you don't undermine the accident and you should never ever publicly undermine any of your leaders. And obviously you should never ever publicly chastise someone used to always do that privately. And a lot of the leadership tips I actually got, interestingly, were from the Marine Corps. So one thing that was very interesting was our client was the US Marine Corps. So they're always working for Safin and Safin had a really good leadership culture. They promoted leadership. They had a course that you would do once, you know, once a year where you'd go to Boston and you'd meet with the CEO, Stuart Moore, who did a whole session on leadership. And there were various qualities that I hadn't appreciated until we did that course, like modeling the heart, you know, showing people, you have to make sure you show people not just tell them. So if you're going to do something or make them do something, you should be able to do yourself. So never asking to do something you wouldn't do yourself. So lead by example, encouraging people, modeling the behavior, all these different aspects of leadership they taught. But the Marine Corps had a slightly different style. And so as a client, we almost got through as Moses a lot of their techniques and use them with the Safin leadership. And I think in the DC area, we had a little bit of a unique culture that had a little bit of both intertwined. The Marine Corps were interesting because they believe what we could call like this tight loose leadership, where I'll set you the goal, but I won't tell you how to achieve the goal that's up to you. And in corporate America, that's actually quite rare these days or become more rare maybe. And certainly with remote working, it's more difficult to do. But the idea that was the goal was to do this task or this objective. You can accomplish that in a number of ways. Obviously, I want to know how you're progressing, but I don't want to sit there and tell you how to do anything. And for some people, that was quite a culture change. And some people in the company when they would review our projects would be like, whoa, how can these teams, you don't know exactly what they're doing? Well, we don't need to know exactly what they're doing. I trust them. We've trained them. They're good people. They've delivered in the past. Here's their goal. We talked to them every week, but we're not necessarily going to go to every single line on the Gantt chart and say, why is this task late? Why is that task early? Why we're doing this? Why are we doing that? Well, explain to me how you're going to meet your goal. That was the question instead. So it's a very different way of leadership. So I think a lot of things I learned, both from SAP and the Marine Corps, are very useful. One of my program managers, when I first started teaching at the graduate level, he was a retired fighter pilot, IBM controller type person. And so I had expected him to have this very rigid approach. And the very first thing he did after I was hired was to say, ask me, how do you like to be managed? Do you want me to contact you regularly? And I said, you know, actually give me a goal, check in with me halfway point. Let's do some course correction. And I promise you I'll have it delivered on time. And he honored that. And I learned from that that, you know, we don't lead everyone the same way. There's situational leadership, as you were talking about. But generally, what is your leadership style now? Right. Probably very similar from that, because I guess I found it, I found it at work. I like, I believe that my role as a senior CEO is to be externally the cheerleader for the company. I go in there to be externally like today on this podcast, you know, cheerleader, be advocate for the company. But my other role, that's one aspect of leadership is to be the outward cheerleader for the company. So if you will feel like, you know, we're displaying the company at its best. The second thing from a leadership standpoint would be I try not to get into the weeds too much on what my two different parts of the company are doing, because we've got the technology side, my CTO Simon runs that, and then the sales and marketing organization, Tara runs that. Now, because I do more sales and marketing now than I do back programming, I probably get more involved hands-on with her side of the company. So there is a challenge there where when I'm working with Simon's team, it's very much hands-off because I'm literally not involved apart from if a client gets, you know, if we have an upset client, I might parachute in to be like an extra pair of hands to deal with a support issue where, you know, my title can help. Oh, we've escalated to the CEO. This is really serious. He's going to talk to you about this issue. And that can be very useful. The client feels listened to and it can help diffuse something. So I don't tend to get involved directly as much on the building of the product side on a day-to-day basis. Certainly I'm aware of what's going on. I give strategic direction and then let the team figure out how we're going to deliver it. Whereas on the sales and marketing side, I do a lot more work hands-on because often I'm in a sales call because again, as a smaller company, it's very helpful to have me there. It could help tip the deal. I can show our company's commitment to this client. As a result, I have to be a bit more hands-on on the biz dev side and probably less a little bit less hands-off than on the product side. But the challenge there is also, because I'm coming into a deal I may not be running, I have to be very careful not to undermine the salesperson or their manager or their manager. And so I'm trying to be sensitive to be if I'm going to come in there, not be a bull in the China shop and do things that have been done or make a decision on the fly that might undo weeks of work that our head of sales and marketing is put together. So it's a bit more tricky on that side because I'm effectively sometimes working for the team as well as the team working for me. And that's where I have to be a team member as well as a team player as well as being the CEO, particularly because at our size a CEO often does get involved in sales for the large clients where it's a very large enterprise and you know I need to be there to be that final help on getting something over the line. Also I wrote the software, so some of the bits and pieces, I'm still the best at demo, even though I don't write it anymore, I do demo it quite well. So I'm sometimes 14 on certain tricky demos just because of historical baggage. So I think in my leadership style, I try and be hands-off and very consistent. I'm a little bit more hands-on on the sales side, especially because also as a company sales is ultimately the lifeblood of our business. If we don't make the deals and close the deals when we're in trouble, whereas on the product side there's a bit more margin for error. So certainly at our scale, and I think if someone's in a 50 person company, the CEO should be still I think very involved with customers and sales. If you're in an ivory tower running the company by Excel sheets, I think you're missing out. You just talk to customers. So I like to be hands-on in terms of talking to customers. Doesn't mean I'm necessarily going to do something because again I don't want to undermine what the team is doing. But I think as a CEO, you have to be a good listener, listen to customers, listen to the partners and be in. And also if someone's with the company, you need to be able to know what's going on that you're not being told. So I think another thing that I find important is just listen to people, talk to people through meetings, through virtual calls, just look at the body language, see what's going on. And if you identify problems and also be open, I think it was the last year we had some personality conflicts on one of the teams and someone came to me to say they were a bit concerned and I took them out for coffee and we chatted and then we made some changes and made some personal changes even. So I think the other thing is you'd have an open door and demonstrate that, not just literally have an open door, but actually if people come to you and make sure that they know they can be listened to and they're not going to get attributed to them, but you can use it to actually fix problems. So I think it can be hard if you want to be not a micromanager, not too hands-on, but you have to know what's going on. So that can be a hard thing to get right sometimes. Balance and everything we do, we're always balancing something. Just curious, how do you stay up-to-date? How do you keep freshening your skills? One of the questions I'd like to ask is, is there someone, a business writer you read or someone you follow or when you see so-and-so's about to do something? Does that peak your interest? Who do you follow? If we're not so much an individual people, I read obviously Bloomberg and I read the Economist every week. That's one of my favorite publications. So I love the Economist. If you do nothing else, get us a subscription to the Economist and read it every week. I think it covers so many industries. It's international. It's just a great publication. Number one. Short articles and I'm lucky because through my schools that I teach and I get access to it. Oh, that's cool. Yeah, I get a picture copy. Bring on a plane with me when I'm traveling. The second Bloomberg and other sources are good too, absolutely. The second thing is there's a newsletter at least for the tech space called TLDR, which you know, Gen Z speak for like the summary too long, didn't read, but it's called TLDR and they have a series of newsletters. There's a TLDR founder, TLDR marketing. I subscribe to a bunch of relevant ones and it's a daily email, very short, hence the name, very, very concise. I would say that's been a really good source. That Bloomberg and the Economist, my three main sort of general sources. In terms of people to follow, I mean, when I started the company, I followed Richard Branson because he was kind of inspirational to me. I don't, these days, I think he's taking a little bit more of a backseat on his businesses, so I haven't been following it as much. Some of the early books I read were the Built to Last Good to Great series by Larry Collins. I found those very helpful, especially when you want to build a company that's not just going to be a flash in the pan. You want to build something enduring. We are 18 years in existence. We have a strong company culture and core values. I do credit that with both Sapient and those two books, which interestingly Sapient also give it followed. We give a copy of Built to Last and Good to Great to Everyone in the Company, which is helpful. There's some other books I've read. One was recent when I actually just wrote down, it's called Smartcuts. It's about how to climb the ladder in different ways. That was a pretty interesting book and about innovation. I read that at the beach a few months ago. I thought that was good. So I generally read a lot. I don't necessarily think I don't necessarily follow a lot of personalities. I must admit, maybe I should. I do have an executive coach, so that's something that can be very helpful. I'm a member of a CEO around him. We meet once a month in person and we also have one-on-one coaching sessions. That's been good. I think especially with the beginning when it was just me and a smaller team, I had no talk to. One challenge is often who do you talk to. You can't talk to your employees all the time because you may be dealing with things that would scare them. We're going to make payroll this month. Well, I don't think they want to know that. How are we going to pay all our bills? Or I'm worried about Microsoft copying us. These are all valid things that have happened years in the past, or we've been super patent infringement. Things that I had to deal with that they don't want to be dealing with. I want them focused on their job. So who do you talk to? Well, you talk to your wife. That does not always good because then they're going to get worried. So having someone to talk to a coach is really good. So I think that's something I would definitely recommend. It's worth the money. They also may know people that could be inspirational too, but that's who I generally talk to is my coach, my team. But again, most of the things that are for me are reading and those publications. Adam, this has been so wonderful. What have I not asked you that you think the listeners should know about either you or about InFlectra? I mean, so about the company, I think one of the things that people would like to know is that as a company, you can take on your large enterprise clients. As a business, we've had from day one, large international businesses from day one. Many times companies will start out and they think, I'm only going to sell to small US companies, SMB market. And our product really is a better fit because it's really around quality. And although it obviously can be used for everyone, it's got a higher product market fit for more complex organizations, big hospitals, biotech companies, aerospace. Well, they tend to be larger companies. So from day one, we've always been selling maybe to teams, but always to enterprises, teams of enterprises. We've also always been selling internationally. We went online day one, maybe our first order was from the US, probably our second one was from Germany. We could very easily have said, oh, that's too much hassle. Just use Google Translate. We can, you know, we can accept credit cards or wire payments. You know, very quickly, we're international. We have people over the world working for us now. So I would say what these people should know about us is we're a global company, but we're only 50 people. However, what I wish people to think for themselves, therefore, as a reflection of that would be just because you're only 50 people or 20 people or we did this when we were five people, you can be a global company with five people. Absolutely. I think technology letters do that and that maybe wasn't true 20 years ago, but it's completely true today. So don't limit your horizons by what you think is your perceived size or scale. People don't, people don't necessarily know how big you are. At the time, we didn't tell them and they just didn't work with us. And then they liked the product and they liked us and they didn't care then. So I think be really careful about limiting your ambitions. That's something I think I see people do. They think too small. So think big, be bold. I would say that's something that I would encourage everyone to do. That is wonderful. You really are living quality at its core. And yes, absolutely. For those who are just listening to this and not seeing you, I want to let you know his eyes light up. He's got energy, his hands are in motion. If you're only listening, you're missing all this wonderful positivity that Adam presents to those who are around him. Anyway, thank you, Adam Sandman and thank you, Inflectra, for participating.
