In The Thick of It

Every step I kind of look at as

an opportunity to learn the next thing that's

going to help me sort of level up.

And there's no way that you can get

to the highest levels of success without being

really good at communicating with other critical stakeholders.

Welcome to In the Thick of It.

I'm your host, Scott Hollrah.

In this episode, I have an enlightening chat with

Drew Murr, founder and CEO of Banjaxed Solutions.

I have to say, Drew's story doesn't follow that typical linear

path that so many of our other guests have had.

I hope it inspires anyone listening that

thinks that there's a playbook to becoming

a founder, because there's not.

And Drew is a testament to that.

It wasn't until after dropping out of Texas A

M, experimenting in real estate to serving in the

Army Reserves, and working in the oil and gas

industry that Drew founded Banjaxed Solutions.

With thoughtful lessons on constant learning, speed

of execution, partnerships, hiring, and more, drew

exemplifies the creative mindset and resilience required

to build a successful business.

If there's one major takeaway from

this episode, it's just keep moving.

Well, Drew, thank you so much for

joining us In The Thick of It.

It's great to have somebody from Aggieland on the show.

How are things in College Station today?

Thanks for having me, Scott.

They are hot, and I'll go ahead and

mean that both in the literal sense and

the figurative sense in terms of busy.

Students are coming back into town, traffic

is bad, business is heating up.

So hot in every possible way.

Summers were great in College Station.

When I was a student, I did summer school

a couple of times and you could drive around

town and it didn't take you 30 minutes to

get from one corner of campus to the other.

And you could also go to just about any

restaurant in town on a Friday night at 07:00

and not have a two hour wait.

So that is over now, right? Exactly.

Yeah, exactly.

Within the last week, the traffic has

just gone up by four x probably.

So, yeah, I love the summers, love the low traffic,

but I guess also should be thankful for the students

and the university that brings so much to College Station.

But yeah, it's definitely getting busy around here.

Thousand percent.

Well, let's kind of start at the beginning.

Where did you grow up?

Did you have siblings?

What was your growing up like? Sure.

And that actually is a good segue

to how I got to College Station.

So I grew up in South Texas

in a town called Bishop, Texas.

Small town, Bishop Badger.

So I was a sort of small farm town.

I had one brother, one sister.

My brother and I were both sort of what you

would imagine from small Texas farm town football players.

Almost like the movie Varsity Blues.

If you've seen it, it was

a super interesting childhood, really. Enjoyed it.

My brother, when he graduated, came up

here to Texas A and M.

I graduated in 2003 from high school and came

up here to Texas A and M as well.

My sister came up here when she graduated a few

years later, and then it wasn't long after that that

my mom decided to relocate up here as well.

So my entire family basically

relocated to College Station.

We grew up I was sort of rooted

in South Texas in that farm community.

And my whole family, over the course of all my

siblings and I coming to A M, relocated to College

Station, and we all still live here, actually.

My brother and my sister are also both entrepreneurs.

They both own completely unrelated businesses.

So my brother owns a real estate company

here, and my sister owns an accounting company.

So yeah, that's kind of how we got here.

It's interesting how entrepreneurship just runs in

some families, and it sounds like you

guys were in that camp.

What did your parents do for work when you were a kid?

Yeah, and I've thought about this a

lot because what's the probability that we

would all three be entrepreneurs?

So we had great role models.

Let me just answer your question directly.

My dad was in oil and gas, and he

kind of started on the floor doing entry level

work, and the company he was working for told

him, hey, if you go back and get your

petroleum engineering degree, you can climb the ladder here.

And so that's what he did

and became a petroleum engineer.

And my mom was a CPA for a

while, and then she did some real estate.

And so, like I said, they were great role models.

But it's not like we had any of

these businesses sort of handed to us.

I mean, we just had some

examples of what that looked like.

And so my grandparents moved to South Texas.

My grandfather, decades and decades ago, took

a job in South Texas, which is

why they moved down there from Alabama.

And they didn't have past an 8th grade education,

but they started a chicken farm and then they

started a restaurant, and then all of this while

he was a full time diesel mechanic.

So we had a lot of exposure to entrepreneurship

at a very sort of very community level.

No big businesses.

Like, we didn't have any sort of

big exits or anything like that.

Just really from an early age, I got

a good understanding of the fundamentals of entrepreneurship,

and my siblings must have as well, because

we all ended up owning businesses.

So that's kind of what my childhood was like, and

I'm super thankful for both my parents and grandparents.

Would you say you guys were a pretty

typical middle class family in South Texas?

Yeah, I would say actually, through my elementary

to graduation of high school, we probably went

from lower middle class to upper middle class.

As my father got further up in his

petroleum engineering career and then as different business

ventures like the restaurant that my grandparents had

started to take off, we went from sort

of lower middle class to upper middle class.

But yeah, either way we were solidly middle class.

But yeah, that's pretty much

what my experience was like.

So I didn't get any exposure to

the stock market or anything like that.

My grandparents and parents did get into real

estate, so I had some exposure to buying

and renting homes from high school.

I got some exposure to that from my grandparents, which

I think that just the smallest amount of exposure on

a very real level is so beneficial to people.

If I want to go into a log rant on education.

But if there's any way that we can figure

out how to expose more people to just the

fundamentals of capitalism and what it means to own

something, to take responsibility for it and then to

utilize that resource to create some value in society.

I think that was so advantageous

for me and my siblings.

To see that not even on like a grand scale, but

just on an individual scale, was very impactful to us.

Talking about education for just a minute when I was

in high school, one of the most impactful classes.

In fact, I might even go so far as

to say the class that has impacted me to

this day was a personal finance class.

And I think that every kid in America

should have to take a personal finance class

as part of their high school curriculum.

Totally couldn't tell you the last time

I used calculus, but yeah, exactly.

Just something as simple as, okay, you're going to build

a budget for your theoretical household, and at 17 or

18 years old going through that exercise, it got me

thinking that way for the rest of my life.

And it was hugely impactful. Absolutely.

And what does an interest rate mean? Right?

How does that work if I borrow money?

What is the difference between paying it off

right away or paying it off later?

And how does that compound I mean, those are

so fundamental and there is absolutely I think that

there should be courses on it, but also to

my sort of advantage of seeing this and how

it actually affected my family, that hands on experience.

I actually think that we should give students loans

and I'd actually have to work out the details

of this in terms of the implementation of it.

I have kids, I have a six

year old and an eleven year old.

I haven't given them any business loans yet, but

this is absolutely something I'm going to do.

And I want them to experience what it means to

make a payment or miss a payment, to pay the

money back, to have that experience of what it's like

to use those financial instruments to level yourself up and

so if we could replicate that to a larger audience,

I think that would be great for everybody.

Thousand percent.

You mentioned football.

Sounds like that was probably a pretty

big, important part of your life.

You talked about it being the

Varsity Blues kind of period.

That was one of my favorite movies, by the way.

It came out, I think, my senior year of high school.

I remember going to theater very vividly. Loved it.

What position did you play?

I was on the line.

So offensive defense, three A school.

So offensive tackle, defensive tackle.

Big guy for that class. Yeah.

This episode will come out probably in the winter, but right

now I dropped my son off this morning for middle school

football practice at 645 before it got too hot.

But you'd be doing two days in the South Texas Heat.

Absolutely.

Are there any stories that stand out from

playing football in a small Texas town?

Man, it was really impactful experience to me.

And honestly, it created some challenges going off to college

and sort of readjusting what my life was about because

it was so much a part of my life.

But, yeah, I would say that there was

no physical discomfort that I wasn't willing to

endure for the success of the team.

And I think that aspect has definitely carried

over in many other respects in life.

But, yeah, so to mention, two a days in the Texas Heat.

Absolutely.

I remember five, six a. M.

So my town basically surrounds the school.

So I remember vividly at two

a days walking to the school.

And it was just like these high school athletes

were sort of coming out of the woods and

descending upon the school in the wee hours of

the morning and that degree of commitment, and we

would put ourselves through rigorous training.

And it was a great experience to sort of

contribute to a goal as a team and go

through a lot of personal sacrifice, particularly as a

lineman, which I was well suited for physically.

But as I'm sure you know, lineman,

they don't get a lot of publicity.

You show up and give your time and your energy

and your strength towards the objective of winning games.

And that was something that, in the moment,

I didn't see a bigger picture at all.

It was just part of my identity.

I'm just a high school football player.

I'm 16, 1718 years old.

I play high school football. This is what I do.

This is part of my identity.

But as I got past that and got into the real

world, I was able to take a lot of those experiences

and apply those to a lot of different domains.

So, yeah, it was a pretty impactful part of my life.

We've had a number of guests who played at a very

competitive level in high school, some in college, and even some

have gone on, taken a swing at the pros.

And consistently, everybody has talked about how that

team atmosphere, that team environment, the working toward

a goal, just like you said, has been

incredibly formative in certainly what they're doing today,

but in so many aspects of life.

Yeah, definitely.

So I don't know if we're going to do my

whole life story, but at some point after that, I

went into the army, and I would say just the

ability to endure discomfort and sort of pain for a

larger goal and team is just so applicable.

And then some people might think that that

doesn't carry over to a desk job, but

I absolutely think that it does.

There are forms of discomfort

that aren't just physical pain.

It's staying late when you don't feel

like it, it's getting up early.

It's swallowing your pride when you have to.

It's all sorts of stuff.

And I think that those experiences

definitely have helped me in business.

Did you go into the army straight out of high school?

I didn't.

So I went to college.

I went to Texas A-M-I was at a M for

two or three you know, I was pretty rebellious.

I was immature again.

I kind of had a difficult time

adjusting my identity after high school and

ultimately dropped out of Texas A M.

Did some creative real estate stuff at that time.

There was a lot of courses on the know.

I had read Rich Dad, Poor dad, which was out

back then, and there was all sorts of stuff.

My brother was doing creative real estate as well.

So when I say creative real estate, like, a typical method

that we would use back then was to find a home

that was appeared abandoned, to look up the owners, to make

some offer to owner finance, and then to do some work

to that home and then maybe owner finance, sell it.

And then we had sort of a routine about that.

I was not mature enough to hold

down a business at that time.

My brother stuck with it, and now he's the

biggest as far as I know, I think he's

the biggest real estate developer in the area.

So he did that all the way from while he

was in college at A and M till today.

So he's been at it for probably 20 and

made a real impactful company out of it.

But I wasn't ready for that

in terms of my maturity level.

Then I ended up going into the army.

And just to be clear, I was a reservist, so I

did about nine months active duty throughout my training phases.

Then I was a reservist.

Then I did another year on active duty in

Austin, and then the remainder of my time was

in the reserves going back to the real estate.

And your brother, were you all partners, or

were you kind of doing it doing the

same thing, but doing it independently?

We were doing it independently.

We may have partnered on some transactions,

but we were doing it independently.

And to be clear, he was way

more successful at it than I was.

I did a few deals.

I lost some money on some deals that

didn't work out the way that I anticipated.

Two of them got condemned by

the city after I purchased them. It was a mess.

Now, I had some good sort of understanding of

the real estate market, but by no means was

I a mature entrepreneur at that time.

I was fumbling my way around.

What do you do when the city condemns your building?

Well, they tear it down eventually. Yeah.

And then you have to pay for it.

We actually had some really so I don't know

if you've been through this sort of creative real

estate process, but a huge part of it is

going to the courthouse, like looking up records of

properties that are going to be foreclosed on.

So I'll tell you another real estate story.

This one's entirely my brother's.

I wasn't there for this.

Super interesting.

So my brother goes to the courthouse.

He finds out that there's a home that a house.

It's got the address.

So at the courthouse, though,

you have the legal description.

You have the legal description of

the house with the address.

The legal description, though, does

not include the address.

Usually it's like lot four,

plat three of this subdivision.

But then in addition to that, as

a note, it had the address.

So he finds this at the courthouse.

It's going up for foreclosure.

He buys it in foreclosure.

He has some buddies that's helping him.

They show up to the house.

They start unloading.

This house has a bunch of

stuff in it which isn't uncommon.

Like, you'll find all sorts of stuff in

homes that may have been abandoned or whatever.

So they start emptying out this house into a

trailer, and then all of a sudden, all these

people show up from the neighborhood, very upset.

And then the homeowners show up very upset.

And these people had no idea what's going on.

They were furious.

They start yelling at him.

He's like, hey, look, I've got this paperwork.

They have to get the sheriff to come over there.

They figure out that what had actually happened.

It was totally I don't know if it was James's, my

brother's fault, but the note on the foreclosure was wrong.

The address was wrong.

The foreclosure was actually on the lot next

door that didn't have a home on it.

So he actually bought a lot with no house.

And the address on the

foreclosure documentation was wrong.

So he had to profusely apologize to these people.

He obviously unloaded the trailer, helped

set all their stuff back up.

But could you imagine?

So he doesn't have a lot of money at the time.

He's invested a significant chunk of the money

that he has in purchasing this foreclosure.

Then he nearly gets into a street fight and turns

out that he actually purchased the lot next door.

So those are just some of

the experiences from that era.

I think there's a lesson to

be learned somewhere in there.

Yeah, totally.

I think it's similar to the other real estate

deal where the homes actually got foreclosed on.

And I'll tell you the lesson,

it's not that hard to uncover.

It's do your due diligence.

And I've had to learn that lesson many times.

But I suppose there's a certain amount of

diligence that would have uncovered those vulnerabilities ahead

of time and we could have avoided having

gone through going into the wrong house and

then getting the homes condemned by the city.

But in that space of trying to

take advantage of those types of real

estate opportunities, there's a lot of obscurity.

And this is one of the reasons why

not a lot of big real estate investors

do this kind of thing, because it's murky.

But yeah, so my brother sort of stepped that's

the type of real estate he was doing when

I was working with him 20 years ago.

And now he's working on a master plan

development right now, that's like 360 acres.

It's got mixed use

commercial, residential, hotels, restaurants.

And so just to kind of speak to his entrepreneurship

there, that is day after day of grinding away in

the same domain, but leveling up on exactly what it

is you're doing in the ecosystem to create value.

So there's definitely a story there. Yeah.

When you were doing real estate on your

own, was that your only source of income?

Was that your only job, or were you working

someplace and doing the real estate on the side?

At one point I worked at a

hotel, entry level, essentially night auditor.

So just overnight clerk, basically $16 an hour or something, I

think is what I was making as a night auditor.

And I was also doing real estate

at one point as an agent.

So that's typical agency where you're showing houses,

listing houses and making a commission on that.

So those are kind of the things

I was doing in that era.

Oh, we also had a car wash. I forgot.

So my brother and I had a mobile car wash.

So what the mobile car wash would do is

we would go to office complexes, office towers, and

then we would get subscription car washes to people

who went to work in that office complex.

So you'd basically say you're going to

get your car washed in the parking

lot every other Tuesday, something like that.

And so we'd show up to your office.

If your subscription included like a full detail,

we would go up and get your keys.

And then we had a trailer that had the power washer,

the soap, and then the vacuums and everything we needed.

And we would wash the cars and detail the

cars in the parking lot of the business.

But that was mainly my brother's as well.

I ended up moving to South Texas for a period to do

a real estate deal down there before I went into the army.

And I think he sold that mobile

car wash to one of his buddies.

But at this era of my life, these

are a bunch of 20 year olds.

I'm 19 2021 during this phase, and I've got buddies

around me that have the same sort of mentality.

So I don't want to overplay these businesses as if

they're really notable or successful, but it does give you

a sense to where my head was at.

Where his head was at.

And again, he landed on real

estate trying those other things.

He landed on real estate, stuck with it.

I fumbled through some other things, ended up going through

a stint in the army before coming back and finding

my way to the next thing there's building blocks.

It sounds like you had a couple of these experiences.

And the other thing, too, which I think

is a good thing, you had the opportunity

to fail small and not fail big.

So failure is not a bad thing if you learn from

it, and I'm sure he learned a lot going through that.

Yeah, absolutely.

I've learned a ton. Absolutely.

I've learned a ton.

I think that's a really good point, and this

kind of goes back to my philosophy on exposing

people, especially in education kids, to the opportunity to

do things like take out small business loans.

And it's okay if I were to present this, I

think a lot of the pushback that people might have

is, well, let's say they borrow $1,000 and they do

a lemonade stand, and then it fails and they default

on this $1,000 loan or whatever.

Is that going to be horrible for them?

Is it going to demoralize them?

Well, maybe, but it's a lot better to go through that

experience if you're 1617 years old and know what it's like

than if you're 30 years old or 40 years old and

this is your first time going through a business.

I mean, don't get me wrong, failure sucks at any

age, and you may go through it at any age,

but to start having those experiences earlier and get more

of them under your belt, I think is going to

put anybody in a better position to move forward.

Okay, so did the real estate thing, did the

car wash thing with your brother, how long before

you decided, I'm going into the army?

And maybe how did you decide that

that's what you were going to do?

So I would say it was about two years.

I dropped out of A and M, and

I was doing real estate at one point.

I also went into the ministry, so I went

through a lot of life changes, personal development.

Between 2003, which is the year that I graduated

high school, and 2007, I developed tremendously as a

person I knew when I went to college and

I left my sort of high school identity behind,

that I did not know who I was, really.

I really had such a strong identity

that was very localized in high school.

I know who I am in relation to my city.

I know who my opponents are.

I know the region.

And I knew when I moved away from that

that I did not know who I was.

So not to sort of tell a moral or ethical journey

here, but for the first couple of years, I definitely was

all over the place in my behavior, sort of my I

was doing all sorts of stuff I shouldn't have been.

And so I really struggled with that,

struggled with the ethics of it.

I sort of cast out my religious framework

and principles that I had grown up with

and reevaluated all of those things from scratch.

And so during that process, I came back to

a belief system that really was truly mine.

And whenever I got to that point, I started

participating in the ministry, started helping some churches, and

doing things like that, and all of that personal

development was overlaid with the entrepreneurial experiences that I

had grown up with and now was trying to

do on my own.

And so it's really difficult to pinpoint exactly

what led from one thing to the other.

At some point, I got sort of bored with what I

was doing with the real estate, and I just had the

sort of idea that maybe I should serve in some way.

And so I started evaluating, what does it

really mean to go into the military?

What are my options?

So the reason that I went into the Army Reserves

is because I still wanted to be an entrepreneur.

And if you go active duty, you can't have another job.

And so if you go as a reservist, you can

have a civilian job, so you can be an entrepreneur.

For people who might not know, the general reservist

commitment is one weekend a month and two weeks

out of the summer or out of the year.

So during that time, you train.

So you train.

First, you go to basic training

and then your specialized training.

And that might take you six to nine months.

But after that period, for the rest of

your contract, you do one weekend a month.

And two weeks out of the year, you go to your training.

Unless you're called up to active duty for a contract.

So in my mind, the reason why that was

a better fit for me than active duty is

because I could still be an entrepreneur.

And the reason why I chose my specific

unit, which I was a 37 Fox, which

is Psyop, which honestly, it sounded the coolest.

It was the coolest thing that

you could do as a reservist.

There were cooler things that you could do in the

military, but you couldn't go straight in as a reservist.

So, for example, you can't go straight into the

Navy Seals or Special Forces as a reservist.

If you want to be in the Navy Seals Reserves or the

Special Forces Reserves, at least at the time when I enlisted, you

had to be a prior enlisted Navy Seal or SF.

And so at the time when I enlisted, at least as

it was laid out to me by my recruiter, the coolest

thing that you could do, the most high speed thing that

you could do as a reservist, was 37 Fox Army Reserves.

So psyop army reserves which fell

under the Special Operations Division.

And so that's what I did.

That was definitely quite an experience as well, which

I got a lot of value out of, to

the extent that you can, what were the kinds

of things that you were doing in the army? Yeah.

What was your job?

So one thing I do want to clear up, because I don't

want to take credit for anything that I did not do.

I never deployed.

I was never in a war zone.

And I absolutely want to clear that up, because

while I was enlisted, my battalion did deploy.

I was not on that deployment.

I was in what's called the Rear Detachment, which they

take a portion of the people and they put them

on active duty in essentially an office in Stateside.

And in that role, you have some

logistics duties where you support the deployment.

I do want to clear that up because I

don't want to indicate that I'm the sort of

Jason Bourne hero, but I did work with some

people that do deserve that level of credit.

And so what the job does, 80%

of it is very similar to marketing.

So here's an example.

If we go into a city in a foreign country

we're occupying, like Iraq or Afghanistan, it's super common for

the civilians in that city or in that region to

have totally incorrect beliefs about what is happening.

They will literally think sometimes that the US

is there to take their land and move

our families over there and occupy and colonize

the country or something to that extent.

So 80% of the job is really just

disseminating truthful and correct information to the civilian

population so that they know what's going on.

And so that's the majority of the job.

Then you get into more of the gray area

where the messaging is actually targeted at the enemy,

and there is an element of deception that is

possible of maybe trying to mislead or direct the

different warlords or whatever parties in the area.

So it's pretty fascinating.

It was great to be a part of the training.

The training was amazing.

I got to train with some incredible soldiers of

all different branches and really, really enjoyed it.

I know you said at one point you were in

Austin, but where else were you in your training?

And throughout your time in the army.

So initially I went to Fort Benning for

basic training, which was at that time.

Is that arkansas?

Fort Benning is in Georgia. Georgia.

And hopefully I'm not wrong about that

because now it's on the record.

Somebody checked that before you published the podcast.

My basic training was one of the

few that was still all male.

I don't know if any of the basic trainings are still

all male, but Fort Benning was all male at the time.

It was pretty hardcore.

And then I went to Fort Bragg for

AIT, which is your advanced individual training.

In basic training, you

learn generalized soldier skills.

So you do like your weapons training, and then

obviously, like your PT, your fitness, all that stuff.

Ruck marches.

And then when you go to AIT,

you learn some more specialized skills.

AIT was at the Special Warfare

Center in Fort Bragg, North Carolina.

And that was super cool.

Again, this is one of the areas where I

really got to train with some high speed soldiers

and had a really good experience there.

It's actually where I met our COO.

So our COO, his name is Salil.

I met him at Fort Bragg.

We had AIT at the same time.

He was actually in a different class than me.

His class was two weeks before mine, but they

overlapped because it was like three months long.

So our classes overlapped and they

were actually competitive with one another.

So him and I were oftentimes the platoon leaders

for our AIT class, and we would have to

compete with each other in various competitions.

So that was pretty cool.

Are you a competitive person?

Actually, I'm not, and it depends on

how you frame and define competitiveness.

But this is something where I think that

I am different than a lot of entrepreneurs.

And so my brother and I, even though I

mentioned we're both entrepreneurs and we both have the

similar background, this is one area where we differ.

I would describe him as

competitive, and I'm more creative.

I actually think that competitiveness and creativity are almost

on opposite ends of a spectrum, because if you're

competitive, you want to know the rules and the

framework that the competition is existing in so that

you could win in it.

And you're always trying to figure out

how to understand those rules and play

better to win within that framework.

And then if you're more of a

sort of contrarian creative person, you're always

asking, how can I avoid the rules?

How can I not play by the rules?

How can I create a new set of rules?

And not that those things can't go hand in

hand, but I do see them sometimes as opposed.

And this in some ways, for me has

been an advantage, but absolutely in some ways

has been a huge weakness of mine.

Because rather than doing things a straightforward way, I

have a predisposition to do them in a unique

way, which is not always the best way to

do things well, being part of a team, hopefully

you have people that balance you out. Sure.

So you're in the army.

How old were you when you got out?

I was 27.

Okay, so you're mid to late 20s.

You've had this great experience.

Where did you go after that?

Did you go back to College Station?

So I did a short stint in car sales, which

is, I know, on the agenda for building an entrepreneur.

A lot of people have that in their story.

So I did about nine months in car

sales, which that itself gave me a lot

of good experiences on what salespeople are like.

Prior to that, I really wasn't a salesperson.

I had done real estate sales, but it

wasn't very salesy in terms of sales behaviors.

But in car sales, I got to see what

that's like and what different kinds of salespeople exist.

And that was interesting.

Now, mind you, some of this happened while I was

in the army, because in the Reserves, I did have

the ability to have a full time job.

So after car sales, I went into the oil field.

And so this is the one season of

my life that is not really entrepreneurial.

I'll tell you where my head was at at that time.

I had bounced around all over the place.

I had done the Army Reserves, and that was

great life experience, but I wasn't really very employable.

I didn't have a degree.

I didn't have any experiences that I

could really put on a resume.

And I had gotten married, and my wife was pregnant.

So at that time, I was like, how do I make some money?

So I went into the oil field, and I spent seven

years in the oil field, and that was a whole set

of new experiences, which was also really formative along the way.

Where were you working in the oil field?

It was a job that was on the rig,

and I was changing rigs all the time.

So I spent a lot of time in South Texas.

I spent a lot of time in West Texas.

I spent almost a whole year in Pennsylvania.

I spent some time in New Mexico.

So anywhere that there was a rig that

could use my services is where I was.

But mostly Texas, New Mexico and Pennsylvania.

And would your wife travel with you, or was

it the sort of thing where you would go

and be away and come back periodically?

Usually I would go and be gone for three or four

weeks and come home, and she would not travel with me.

Occasionally, if I had a stint that was longer than

three weeks, we would try to make some arrangements where

she would come and meet me and maybe so she

did have my daughter at that time.

And so if I was going to be gone for three

plus weeks, she would either bring my daughter with her to

come see me and maybe we would do this thing.

So the way that the oil field works

for a lot of jobs is you work

twelve hour shifts because the rig never stops.

So you work a twelve hour shift and you

hand over your duties to another guy who's going

to work a twelve hour shift, and then you

come back for your twelve hour shift after that.

So when you get in a scenario where your wife's

going to come see you, if you have good buddies,

you work out some arrangement where the other guy actually

works an 18 hours shift and you work a six

hour shift, or maybe he'll work a double.

And so that's how we would manage it,

to see our spouses and our kids. That's tough.

And kudos to your wife for helping raise a

baby while you were away for so much time. That's hard.

Well, my wife, she deserves a ton of kudos.

But we actually got together two days before I left

for basic training, so I had chemistry class with her.

So during this time, I neglected to mention that

I re enrolled in college for one semester because

I didn't know what I was going to do

with myself while I was re enrolled.

I took chemistry.

While I was in that chemistry class, I met my wife.

So we had chemistry both literally and figuratively.

As soon as we met, we started hanging out.

We started studying together.

We were legitimately studying together.

And while we were studying together, we knew that

we liked each other and everything, and we even

talked about it and I told her.

So at that point, towards the end of that

semester, I had already signed up for the army.

I already knew what day I was shipping off, and so I

was like, hey, I would love to date you, but I'm leaving

for the army in four weeks, so maybe we should just be

friends and then I'll call you when I get back.

Well, as that date approached, we didn't really want to

leave on just friend terms and take the chance that

it wasn't going to work out, so we decided to

officially get together two days before I left.

So she has been enduring this lifestyle since the very

beginning, so, yeah, she deserves a ton of kudos.

Okay, so you mentioned that you were able to

work concurrently while being in the reserves, and when

that all ended, what did you go do next?

I'm sorry, it was the oil field.

You went to the oil field?

Yeah, that's right.

So I went into the oil field.

I got super lucky in the sense that the type

of job that I got was a job that it

did not require any certifications or credibility, but it had

a ton of upward mobility because basically they threw you.

In there and you have to assemble a

bunch of very complicated equipment, a whole bunch

of computers that have to be connected together.

And then they have to go down a

hole and endure extreme conditions while drilling.

And then they will take anybody who's willing

to do the work on twelve hour shifts.

But if you can figure out the equipment, and if you

understand what's going on, you can work your way up relatively

easily if you really put your mind to it.

And so that's what I did, which was super

fortunate for me to be in that position.

I went ahead and ordered the petroleum engineering textbooks

from the University of Texas, and I ordered the

ones from UT rather than A M because those

were available to purchase online at the time, whereas

A M didn't have any.

So I only ordered about three of them, the

ones that were most relevant to my job.

And I just read those on my own while

I was off shift and really progressed to build

quite a career in oil and gas.

I could have stayed in oil and gas, but ultimately

I wanted to go back to being an entrepreneur.

And so what was that next step like?

You had this desire, I guess you probably

felt like you'd done your time in the

oil and gas space, you'd had enough.

Well, I actually have to give credit to

a budy of mine that I worked with.

He worked for Shell, and I

worked as a third party contractor.

We worked together on a big job

in Pennsylvania for a long time.

We spent about a year together.

And at the time, oil rigs generate a lot

of data, but they don't necessarily use that data.

So they store it on the rig in a

sort of primitive machine, and it stores this data.

You can download it as a CSV file.

So if you've ever downloaded a CSV

file, it's just all these values with

commas, separating them with column headings.

You can then import them into Excel.

So while I was working in the oil field, one of

the things that I would do is I would download these

CSV files from the rig, and then I would write some

macros in Excel and some VBA code in Excel to then

go through that data and generate charts and graphs and logs.

And then from those charts and graphs, we would make

our business decisions, or I call them business decisions, but

they're operational decisions, like, do we want more weight on

the bid, or a higher flow rate, or more pressure,

or how is the temperature affecting our tools?

And so I was generating these charts, and this is

where my buddy came in that I mentioned, Mateo.

He said, man, you need to just

sell this back to the oil companies.

Like, you just need to just quit your job and take

these Excel sheets that you built and generate these charts and

sell them back to the oil and gas companies.

And we brainstormed about this because we

work together for 12 hours a day.

And a lot of our work at that

time is not like we're turning wrenches constantly.

We're looking at computer screens all day.

So most of the time, so we're sitting next to each

other on a rig, but in like a mobile home on

the location with big computer screens in front of us.

I'm using my programs.

You can call them to do our job.

And we're brainstorming how this would work.

And he eventually convinced me, and he insisted that

he would put in some money into this endeavor.

So I quit my job.

I borrowed some money from Mateo, and

I started what was called Royal Services.

So I don't know where I would be today had he

not really helped in pushing me to make that decision.

Maybe I'd still be on a drilling rig, I'm not sure.

But I got to give him a lot of credit for that.

So I started Royal Services.

I started selling these reports back

to oil and gas companies.

So we charged $500 a day to just have our reports.

So I would just download the CSVs from

the rig, run the reports, and then sell

them back to the oil and gas companies.

And it was very cumbersome.

It was not efficient at first.

And so I got up to where I

was running three rigs at a time.

So I was making $1,500 a day selling

reports on these three rigs by myself.

And during that whole time, I realized

I need to learn more about software.

Because the way that I'm doing

this now, it's very inefficient.

It requires a human to go download these CSVs.

I need to stream this data.

I need to do this in a much more scalable way.

And so during that period, I

started to learn more about software.

So that's really interesting.

You're sitting in the job trailer.

You're taking the data that belongs

to your employer on your own.

You took the initiative to go build out these models.

Is it fair to say that what you

were selling back to them was your models?

Yeah, it was an interpretation of their information.

Okay.

So, like, today, you can buy all

sorts of products to look at data.

Like, if you pay for Tableau, tableau

doesn't give you any new data.

They're just giving you some framework to interact with that data

so that you can make some sense out of it.

This was very specialized in terms

of it wasn't like Tableau.

It didn't just give you graphs.

It gave you decision making points, which

was really helpful to the operators.

So what was that conversation like, going back to

your employer saying, hey, here's my two weeks, but

two weeks from now, I'll continue to work for

you as a third party, analyzing your data that

I've been doing this in the trailer all along.

Was that well received.

I mean, I guess if they gave you three rigs

and paid you $1,500 a day, it went okay.

Yeah, honestly, parts of it were awkward.

So I was far enough removed from the business

office of my employer that they didn't really know

me on a sort of first name basis.

I put in my two weeks and

then I ended up working with them.

So to be clear, they were not my customer.

So the oil and gas is a super interesting business, but

you have a ton of service providers that come along.

There's the oil and gas company who is primarily their

focus is getting the actual oil and gas out of

the ground and then getting it to production.

But then you have the drilling rig,

which might be a completely independent company

that is a service provider.

Then they sub out to a whole bunch of other

service providers that do a lot of other services.

So anyway, the company that I worked for was one

of those service providers that wasn't necessarily involved in the

analysis that I was providing to the operator.

It was quite a bit sort of

above and beyond what my job was.

And so they were kind of oblivious to the whole thing.

I put in my two weeks and quit.

They didn't really know a

difference one way or another.

But I ended up working with them on some future jobs.

So I was selling my services mainly directly to the oil

and gas companies and then I would see some of the

same people on jobs that I was on in the future.

So that was interesting to run into them there.

And now I'm coming out there with my computer

and downloading the CSV and it was pretty cool.

I still have a lot of relationships from that era.

Oil and gas is a a especially in Texas.

It is a sort of cowboy industry where

you can make a lot of money for

doing hard work, for understanding things.

And this is especially true with

the Texas based smaller service companies.

And so I just want to clarify this.

If anyone's thinking about going into oil and gas,

if you think that you are a real go

getter, the way to get in is not by

working for a Fortune 100 oil and gas company.

Find a company that's run by

some guys out of Corpus Christi.

They have 150 employees and they make $50

million a year or $100 million a year

because those people are go getters.

They know how to work and

how to outrun Exxon and Chevron.

I mean, don't get me wrong, I

appreciate the big companies as well.

But it's really those small players in oil

and gas that are still living in this

era of hustle and industrialism good advice.

I want to jump back for just a minute.

You talked about you get this raw data

in the CSV file and load into Excel.

And I think most people in high school probably

get some exposure to some very basic Excel stuff.

Here's how you sort things.

Here's how you filter things, getting into

some charts and graphs, but getting into

writing VBA, that's a different level.

Where along your journey did

you develop that skill set?

And maybe taking that a little bit further,

were you gifted as it relates to technology

at this point in your life?

So I would say that VBA So

let's say you start on Excel.

The very first thing you have to Google

is how to create a new tab, right?

So VBA is probably about the 150th Google search.

This was before Chat GPT, which, if you're learning stuff

today, you have more resources than I had then.

But then I already had Google, which I

had more resources than the people before me.

And so almost everything I've learned has

been a byproduct of Googling something.

So, yeah, I mean, I was

just learning something new every day.

And so I imported that CSV into Excel. Step one.

That was Google search number one.

Okay, well, how do I write a formula?

Okay, well, how do I do this next thing?

How do I add a button to the page?

How do I do this?

And I would say that it's all just been a progression.

So VBA, if you don't know,

Excel is incredibly powerful tool.

You can write code VBA directly

on the back end of Excel.

And if people don't know that, if you want

to go further into Excel, you can keep going.

I mean, I've seen people sell Excel

sheets for $50,000 because there's that much

value that can be built onto Excel.

So, yeah, it was just probably about the

150th Google search that got me to VBA. Interesting.

I like how you phrase that something,

though, I think that is important.

And we're seeing this with Chat GBT and

some of these other Chat AI tools.

Knowing what to feed it is critical to

getting the kind of result that you want.

But even in the Google days, how

did you know what questions to ask?

How did you know what terms to search for?

That's a good question, and I

think Googling is a skill.

And when I used to talk about hiring

with our hiring manager and stuff, we've talked

about how can we evaluate this skill?

But I definitely think that it's the same

whether you're trying to learn VBA or you're

trying to look something else up.

It's understanding the way the system works and what

words you would need to put into the system

to get the result that you are looking for.

And that is definitely a skill.

And the way that Google works is different

than the way that Chat GPT works.

We're finding that out now.

And it's actually interesting.

Someone made the comment that we used

to make fun of the previous generation

for the way that they would Google.

But the way that they would Google is now the

way that you need to put stuff into chat GPT.

So when you ask a question, if you ask

Google the question in a very straightforward way, like,

hey, Google, what would happen if the president and

the vice president died in the same incident?

Who would become president? Question mark.

If you put all that into Google, you may not get

the desired result because that's not the way Google works.

Google works by indexing on terms you might

now because Google now actually uses AI.

People may not realize that Google is better today

than it was ten years ago because it uses

AI in the results, but that's exactly how you

would ask that question to chat GPT.

So I would say this is almost like a fundamental skill.

There's not very many things that I would

say people need to get good at as

fundamental skills, but we are now superhuman, right?

We interact with technology to

go about our daily lives.

And so the way that we interact with that

technology, that is now like a fundamental skill.

So learning how to Google and learning how to use

chat GPT are almost more fundamental than learning finance.

These are very primitive.

These are like just right there

above walking and using your hands.

You need to learn how to use Google and chat GPT.

Well, I think my takeaway from your story about starting

with a CSV file and going from what's a CSV

file all the way to selling these spreadsheets back to

these companies for $500 a day per rig, I think

that that speaks to a natural curiosity that you have.

And you talked earlier about that

creative mind that you have.

I feel like those two go together.

Yeah, I think so.

And you did ask earlier, but I avoided the

question if I was particularly gifted in this field.

That's an aspect of it as well.

I do have certain advantages that

I'm just kind of blessed with.

Like, some things I pick up easier than others.

I also have disadvantages, like huge ones that

I've had to work on and adapt to.

But as far as picking up on technology and picking

up on stuff like that, that has been sort of

a gift that might come a little easier for me.

You mentioned through this experience having to actually physically

go to the rig and get the file, then

go to the next rig and get the file.

You determined that it wasn't a scalable

way to grow this business and you

started researching other technology things.

Where did that lead you?

Well, today I use a whole bunch of different

technologies, but I don't want to tell you about

the fancy ones that I use now.

I actually want to tell you about the next

one that I use because this is such a

hack that I'm proud of and it's just like

a good example of a business technology hack.

So what I wanted to say, and what I wanted to

do after I had to physically download the CSV, was to

say that we were live streaming the data, okay.

Because nobody was doing this at the time.

And we wanted to live stream the rig data off

site where I didn't have to go on site.

And then I can generate these reports faster and

I can get them to my customers faster.

So there are all sorts of

technologies for live streaming data.

But what I ended up doing, which this is the

hack, is I left a computer on the rig.

I left it plugged into the rig,

which is called a Rs 232 port.

But it's basically those old printer cables.

You remember the old printer cables?

And they look kind of like VGA monitor

cables wide and looks like it has teeth. Yes.

I think it has like nine pins or twelve pins.

So I connected the computer to the rig.

With that, I had the CSV saving to this computer.

And then on every computer I had a Dropbox account,

and those CSVs would save into the Dropbox account.

And on my home computer, I had Dropbox opened.

So every time a CSV file would save, I

was reloading my home computer in real time.

I'm just like refreshing the page, and that

refresh would get me the latest data.

So rather than using a more sophisticated data streaming

technology, I just installed Dropbox on every rig and

then refreshed that on my home computer.

It was pretty cool. You know what?

Sometimes the simple solution is better

than the elegant, sexy solution. It works.

It gets the job done.

Didn't take hardly any time at all to get that set up.

And now you're able to service the customer better.

Yeah, exactly.

Nobody knew nor cared.

This is a sort of business mantra.

The customer doesn't care what kind

of technology you use, really.

They just care about the result.

So if I could get them their reports faster, they

don't care whether I'm using some super complex streaming technology

or whether I'm using Dropbox to sync the data.

Don't tell me how the watch is built, just

tell me what time it yeah, exactly how long

did you do the oil rig data?

And I guess what became of that?

Or do you still have these contracts?

Do you still have Dropbox running

out in the oil field today? I don't.

I did that for about a year.

I had three rigs running.

So that three rigs was one customer, the price of

oil tanked, that one customer actually closed up shop.

And so at that time, I had already

been courted by somebody else that I knew

just from a relationship through my church, actually.

So I had some people that

were in a completely different industry.

So they're actually attorneys.

They owned a law firm.

They also owned a service company that worked with law

firms, and they knew that I was doing this business.

But also, I was sort of struggling with it.

Like, I didn't have three rigs running continuously.

It was up and down.

They would stop running those rigs

for a period of time.

So I was struggling.

I was struggling to get that company off the ground.

So they had already approached me about working with

them to create a product that served their industry.

So when that client closed the doors, it was

pretty rough in terms of letting go of all

of that domain expertise and that technology.

I just really liked it and I was proud of it.

And I hated to put it in the closet,

but I literally put those computers in the closet.

Oh, I have one right here, actually.

It's basically a regular computer, but

it's a fanless mini computer.

And it's kind of got, like, a radiator design

so that it expels the heat pretty quickly.

And then these are the Rs 232 ports.

So I had to order these from China so

that they would have all the things that I

needed to connect them to the rig.

But yeah, so I still have these, literally.

You can see I have it in

my office for kind of sentimental value.

But one of the reasons why I was

okay with it was oil and gas.

Like I said, fascinating.

Love that industry.

But I also saw it as limited due to

the increase in technology in oil and gas.

We can achieve higher production with lower numbers

of rigs drilling at any given point.

And the type of technology that my

expertise lent itself to was drilling rigs.

So if you look at a graph of, like,

number of drilling rigs and oil production, the number

of drilling rigs is going down while production is

going up because our ability to get more production

out of one well has increased significantly.

So I knew that the technology that I

was building was maybe a little late.

And so it was kind of bittersweet to put away that

technology, put it in the closet, and do something new.

But at the same time, I was excited for a new

challenge, and I needed a way to support my family.

So I took the opportunity to build this

new technology, which was working with law firms

and helping them communicate with their clients.

So I built a text messaging application that

allowed law firms to communicate with their clients.

Real quick.

Were you able to pay Mateo back? Yes.

Great question.

That is the first thing that I did.

So I was not able to pay him back at that time.

But I had his money

in a spreadsheet collecting interest.

I had his interest rate on the spreadsheet.

We signed a loan contract, and

that contract had an interest rate.

I don't recall exactly what it was.

I had sort of the monthly

amortization, and I never forgot about.

That and the moment I made money later.

So later I ended up selling Client

Connect, which is the text messaging company.

And the day that I sold Client Connect, I called

Mateo and said, hey man, I need to see you.

I want to give you a big pile

of money, which is your investment plus interest.

So that was a good moment for me.

I bet that felt good for both of you.

Yeah, absolutely.

I think so.

Law firms, text messaging systems, what size law

firms are buying this kind of technology?

Are they the big firms that are coast to coast?

Are they more local family law type offices?

So I'm going to answer that question.

I'm just going to jump forward at that point.

The product that I created was called Client Connect.

It was a text messaging application for

law firms that mainly integrated with a

case management system called Needles, and it

mainly focused on personal injury law firms.

And the average size there was

about 100 users per firm.

But since then, I've sold Client Connect into

Banjax, which is the company that I'm currently

one of the founders and the CEO of.

So I sold client Connect into Banjax

and we recreated Client Connect into the

product, which we now call conversations.

So conversations serves law firms on Litify.

It does text, fax, and email, and it keeps

all of those records on the case file.

So if you're an attorney, you can see your text,

fax, and email all on your client's case file.

And today our average firm size

is probably about 100 and 5200.

We've got some firms around 50, and then

we work with some larger firms as well.

And what we're working on now is taking that same

technology that we're applying to law firms and exploring whether

that is advantageous for other verticals as well.

But we work with a case management software

called Litify, which is based on Salesforce.

So Salesforce is the underlying technology and Litify

is the law firm implementation of that technology

so that law firms can run their business

on Litify, which is on Salesforce.

It sounds like you wouldn't be where you are

today with Banjaxt if it weren't for Client Connect.

Is that a fair statement?

Going from writing VBA and modeling things out in Excel,

going from there to building a text messaging app?

That's a big leap in terms of technical ability.

Did you just roll up your sleeves

and figure out how to do that?

Or did you bring in did you hire developers and

guide them on what the product needed to do?

So by this point, we're on

about the 2500 Google searches.

So I really do want to give credit here to

a friend of mine who is the current software architect

at Banjax and who I've worked with since I started

Royal Services, the oil and gas company.

His name is Ayaz Zafar, and it is a

super interesting story how I got started with Ayaz.

So when I decided that my oil field

technology needed to advance beyond the dropbox model,

I wanted to create some real time streaming,

big data application and sort of go all

the way with the sophistication of the technology.

And so I put out a job ad on an online portal.

I think it was freelancer.

And I said, hey, I can only pay $15 an hour.

I want someone not to build an application for me.

I want someone to get on a zoom call with

me and walk me through how to build a big

data, real time, data streaming interpretation product that's going to

be sort of large scale, and we're going to sell

this to oil and gas companies.

And it has to be sort of enterprise grade.

So just in case it isn't obvious, that

request at face value is pretty absurd.

And it's coming from a person who literally,

other than VBA, knows no software development.

So a lot of people on this

freelancer platform wanted to make money.

So they're like, yeah, okay, I'll take the job.

So I cycled through developer after developer

that could not hang with this concept.

They would all try to convince me to,

oh, just let me build you an application.

I'm like, no, I don't want

you to build me an application.

I want you to teach me

how to build a sophisticated application.

And so about five or six developers in, I get Ayaz.

I enter into this contract with him off a freelancer.

Ayaz lives in Pakistan.

He lives in a village outside of Lahore, Pakistan.

And he got on the call with me.

Incredibly patient, incredibly smart, self taught, learned

everything in his home in Pakistan, and

walked me through every step.

What is HTML?

What is JavaScript? What is CSS? What is a server?

What is a database? How does it work?

How does it interact with each other?

What is Http protocols?

What are these things?

And I needed someone who could teach, but also keep up

with the rate at which I wanted to learn and develop.

And we just sat there and developed this

application while he taught me from the beginning.

And I have never let Iyaz go.

So everywhere I go, every product I've worked on,

I have taken Ayaz with me to the point

where I, Oz, actually got equity in Client Connect.

Whenever I started Client Connect when we sold Client

Connect to Banjax, we purchased ayaz out of that.

Ayaz is now runs a development company in Pakistan.

My entire development team now works for

Ayaz, and he owns that company.

And we have a contract with that company

for all of our development needs today.

So, yeah, had a real sort of

friend and partnership working with IAS.

Out of curiosity, have y'all ever met in person?

Have you been to Pakistan, or has he been to the?

So we have met in person.

When we started banjaxt.

I wanted to create a full fledged development team.

Prior to Banjaxt, I had worked with

Iyas, and then we'd hired remote contractors

that would work on the project.

But I wanted to create a team that had an office

and Ayaz was definitely going to run it, that was known.

So I decided that we should

open an office in Lahore, Pakistan.

Lahore is a giant city.

It's like 12 million people, so

it's bigger than New York.

There are several universities there, so

we have access to talent.

I flew into Lahore.

Ayaz picked me up from the airport.

I'd already spent hundreds of hours with him on zoom

calls, so we were already close friends, but got to

give him a hug in person for the first time

a couple of years ago, about three years ago now.

When we started Banjax, we opened

an office there in Lahore.

I went to his home, met his family, stayed in

his village, and met the people in that area.

It was an incredible life.

Know, prior to that, I had never traveled overseas.

The only country I'd been to is Mexico.

So I'm not really a well traveled

person, but this was an absolute cultural

experience for me to go through that.

And now we have many developers in Pakistan and I've

got to know many of them both in person.

We hired some in person on my trip and

also remotely I've got to know quite a number

of them over the years, even prior to the

Pandemic certainly have spent a lot of time on

Zoom and GoToMeeting and other screen sharing tools.

And when I've finally met people in person that

I've spent a lot of screen time with, I

go into meeting them with kind of this expectation

of what they're going to be like in person.

And some people I'm like, oh my gosh,

you're completely different than what was that like?

Did you have a preconceived notion of what he was

going to be like and how did that match up?

That's a good question.

I think that it was pretty close.

So I will say this.

Of all of the experiences of Pakistan, ayaz was the

one that I had gauged and I knew pretty well.

But all the other aspects were

much more shocking to me.

And I don't mean shocking necessarily in a bad way

or really just like seeing the way the culture functions

was much different than I would have expected.

And I don't know that I could fully sort

of convey participating in their culture and really seeing

that firsthand, but really an incredible experience.

Let's go back to the founding of Client Connect.

It sounds like you started on this path of

wanting to build this big data live streaming service

that you go take to other oil companies, but

there was clearly a detour at some point where

you get into text messaging for lawyers.

Where did that idea come from and

how did you bring that to life? Sure.

So the idea was actually brought to me by those

sort of extended friends that I just happened to be

networked with in my social network, really, through my church.

And it was attorneys.

It was these attorneys that wanted to solve a problem

that they had, and so they had this problem.

And initially, when I started working on

that product, I did not own it.

They were bringing me on, and there was an equity

deal, but I was going to be a minority owner.

And then while I was working on it, for them,

that was a part of a different service company, not

their law firm, and they sold that service company.

And so a bunch of business deals shook out.

They didn't know where I was supposed to land, and so

they gave me the opportunity to just buy it from them.

So I purchased it from them for $10, essentially.

So this is an element of the journey that

maybe we can just chalk up to good fortune.

But yeah, I bought it from them for $10.

So it wasn't initially my idea, and I was

not intended to be the primary owner of Client

Connect, but when all that business shook out, client

Connect wasn't fully off the ground yet.

So it didn't have customers revenue, or at least

it didn't have a lot of customers and revenue.

And so, yeah, I had the

opportunity to purchase it for $10.

I've got that contract around here somewhere, too.

At this point, you've done a lot of different

things in your work life and kind of going

from the Excel model to trying to build this

app to landing a company for $10.

You've been through so much change.

Was that kind of like a non event,

or was there like, a sense of excitement?

Was there a sense of panic, like, I just lost this job?

What's going through your mind?

Well, so there was a little bit of the latter

of sense of panic, loss of job, because even though

purchasing Client Connect for $10 was an incredible stroke of

good fortune, prior to that purchase, I had a job

and a salary, which I needed to pay my bills.

So there was a period of time after that moment

and before we sold Client Connect to Banjax, that I

was actually running Client Connect and working on oil rigs.

I went back as a contractor, as a consultant.

And so the craziest sort of moments of that,

I would get Client Connect customer service and sales

calls while I was on a drilling rig.

And so I would try to carve out moments of

time to run away from the drilling rig, like, literally

distance myself from the rig so that the noise of

the rig would not interact with the call.

And then, of course, I don't want the customer to

know that I'm working on a drilling rig while I

own the company that they are paying money to.

So I'm on a sales call, just kind

of like, trying to make light of the

noise around me, like it's coincidental.

And so I did that for several months while

things developed, and I actually sold Client Connect into

Bandjax, which is the current company that I'm the

owner and founder of, with my partners now, I

haven't got into them yet.

My partners now.

So James, Chad and Steve out of Baton Rouge.

They own Dudley Debosger Big Law firm in Louisiana.

Incredible people, incredible partners.

So super fortunate to have hooked up

with them and get into this partnership.

I definitely want to dig into partnership more

in a minute, but I do want to

go back to Client Connect for a second.

You bought the company, and it sounds

like the product wasn't totally finished.

And obviously you said you didn't have

paying customers, you didn't have revenue.

How did you get the product over the finish

line, and how did you land your first?

Interesting, like, the product, I completed

the product from a technical standpoint,

so just a bit of clarification.

When I started Client Connect, they had a version

of Texting that I just couldn't grow with.

I couldn't sell it.

It was like a clunky add on.

So I said, hey, I need to

build a new product from scratch.

I was actually working on this for about 18 months, and

it did get over the finish line about four or five

months before the sale that caused the business shakeout.

And so I completed the project from a

technical standpoint and started selling this new product.

I actually had about $3,000 worth of revenue

at the time I did the deal.

And not only that, but I still had

customers that were calling to sign up.

And so when I purchased the company for $10,

it had about $3,000 of recurring monthly revenue.

The owners of the company didn't see

that as significant at the time.

They were like, oh, well, it's got nothing that's

less than the salary we are paying him, so

we might as well let it go.

But if you know anything about SaaS products,

like, you got a SaaS product that's completely

built and making three grand in monthly revenue,

like, you're on the right track.

So I knew I was on the right track, so I

had to go back to work in the oil field so

that I could make some money to put into marketing so

that I could sell more recurring revenue contracts.

So by the time the Banjacks deal closed, I was

already doing over ten grand a month in recurring revenue

by the time the Banjacks deal came together.

But during that period, I had to work

on oil rigs and put money into marketing.

It was quite a dance. Imagine.

So and I'm sure you're not the first entrepreneur maybe not

an oil field, but I'm sure you're not the first entrepreneur

that had to step away from some other job to go

take that call from a customer or prospect. Yeah.

So how did the Banjax merger acquisition come about?

Sure.

So one of my other partners and good friend Martin Rice,

I had worked with him when I was on Client Connect.

He was the head of a

services company called Legal Monkeys.

That's the one that sold.

And so he knew me.

He knew my capabilities and work ethic.

He went to go be the CEO of Dudley Debosure.

And the owners partners of Dudley Debosure are

James, Chad and Steve, my current partner.

So Merton told these guys, james, Chad and Steve, hey,

guys, I happen to know about this resource, this guy

that's running around right now, building a company on his

own that has no investors, that is basically ripe to

be snatched up to create a partnership with.

And so they said, all right, great. Let's meet him.

So I flew out to Baton Rouge, where they're

located, met them, and also met with Tyler Stillwell,

who's my other co founder here at Banjax.

And we talked about what we could do together, what

I already had, and they essentially supported everything that I

wanted to do in terms of company direction.

They also gave us a new direction.

So at Client Connect, it was a

web application, but they wanted to start

moving law firms to salesforce with Litify.

They're the ones that initially

turned me onto Salesforce.

They said, hey, our law firms are going

to go to Litify, which is on Salesforce.

And if you could build the text messaging application

to work with Litify and Salesforce and maybe add

some additional communication, functionalities, there's going to be a

big market there that we are actually going to

create and pioneer with our law firms.

And so to me, that seemed like a

ton of business synergies, plus great partners.

It made perfect sense to me.

Plus, it was a lot more security for me

to be partnered up with a well established group.

And so this was a perfect opportunity to start Banjax.

And when they bought you out of Client Connect, was

the plan from the get go that it was going

to be tied into Lidify and you were going to

go take that whole thing, or did they want the

text messaging technology and it was going to run standalone?

And after the fact, they're like,

hey, let's roll this all together.

There was a lot of brainstorming around it.

There were a lot of different avenues that

were sort of considered, and I don't really

recall exactly whether this was the first iteration,

but it was definitely early on.

We knew that the text messaging service was going

to be compatible with their business, their businesses, with

them moving their law firms to salesforce.

And so it just made perfect.

Had I already had a lot of experience text messaging

for law firms, but the law firms I had text

messaged I had created the service for in the past

were using a different kind of case management system.

So early on we knew it was going to be a

good fit to text message for law firms and salesforce.

One of the things I absolutely love

about doing this is getting to hear

the stories and they're all so different.

There's certainly a lot of common

threads, but they're all so different.

And hearing your story, I'm thinking about the questions I

normally ask and I don't even feel like they apply.

And so I think one of my takeaways from

talking with you and actually in a way there's

some parallels with another guest that we interviewed recently.

I think one of the morals here,

my takeaway is just keep moving.

I feel like that's what you've done

from the beginning is just keep moving.

So I do want to dig into the partner thing.

There are people out there that will tell you

whatever you do, do not have a partner.

There are other people out there that will

tell you 1000%, get a co founder, get

a partner, get a group together.

It sounds like the partnership has

worked out really well for you.

What do you attribute that to?

And what would you tell somebody who

is considering going that partner path?

Yeah, well, I would say that

there are definitely pros and cons.

So I experience with client connect and with

Royal Services really not having a partner.

And if you don't have a partner, you've got

nobody that you have to keep up to date.

You have nobody that you have to run your decisions by.

And that can be both a blessing and a curse.

If you do have a partner or multiple partners,

the need to keep alignment does require calorie burn.

So I would say that invest the time in communication.

So if you're going to change directions, also I

would say you want to establish clear expectations as

far as what kinds of things require communication.

Obviously, if you change the strategic direction of

your company, if you're going to change what

product you're offering or whatever, that's something that

really requires partner buy in.

Maybe there are smaller things that don't and

which partners need to know those different levels

of information you need to know.

And so I actually have a lot of partners right

now because I have co founder, I also have James

Chad, Steven Merton, who all have an interest in Bandjacks.

And so fortunately for me, the partners

that I have are super cool.

I mean, they definitely want to be kept up to date.

They have gotten frustrated at me before if I've

made some decision that they felt was significant enough

that I should have talked to them about it.

But I'm also in the habit

of making fast decisions, right?

And so to me that sometimes is a challenge for

me to realize like, okay, this decision is significant enough.

I need to go ahead and get bored, buy in.

It has been a learning experience,

but we're into a rhythm now.

We understand each other.

They trust me, I trust them, and

I try to get better at it.

And we call each other out.

If they're upset with me for not doing something, they

tell me and we have a lot of fights.

But I say that in air quotes because

it's kind of like a relationship, right?

If you have a relationship where you never call

each other out on things that you're not quite

happy about, and then those relationships that keep silent

often end up in a blow up where somebody

leaves because they haven't been properly communicating.

So, look, I'm going to call Merton, who's the chairman

of the board, after this, and that discussion might get

heated because that's the way we talk to each other.

It's learning to communicate, learning to express

yourself and in very specific expectations of

what you expect from the other person

and what requires communication.

But absolutely there is a calorie burn to having a partnership,

but I thoroughly enjoy it and I view it every step

I kind of look at as an opportunity to learn the

next thing that's going to help me sort of level up.

And there's no way that you can get

to the highest levels of success without being

really good at communicating with other critical stakeholders.

There is a ceiling to how far you can go on your own.

And at a certain point, you've

got to learn to communicate.

You've got to learn to understand

the perspectives of other stakeholders.

So, yeah, I would definitely say weigh the

pros and cons, know what you're getting into,

get great partners, communicate with those partners.

If you're frustrated, if they're frustrated, make

sure that those things are communicated openly.

And those are my sort of pieces

of advice for maintaining a partnership.

You talked about when to bring them in on decisions,

and I'm thinking, okay, if you're changing the coffee in

the kitchen from Folgers to Starbucks, clearly that's not a

decision that you need to roll up.

And obviously if you're going to completely

change the strategic direction of the organization,

obviously that is a call.

But man, there's a lot of middle ground in between

and I imagine you kind of walk a tightrope figuring

out, okay, what can I decide on my own and

what do I need to go to for them?

Do you feel like you're walking a tightrope with that

or do you feel like you've landed in a pretty

good spot and you know when to escalate? Not really.

I mean, my partners are so cool.

If there's ever an issue, it's usually my fault.

Meaning I have decided we're going to start

new service lines that I haven't cleared with

them and that was totally my fault.

They have no issues.

Like, if I hire someone today that's not

something I have to run by them.

Unless this is a person that is going to

get equity in the company or is some strategic

hire that is an outrageous salary, I don't have

to run really anything by them unless it affects

the structure of the company, the services and products

that the company is offering, the cap table.

So yeah, any issues have mostly been me moving

too fast for their taste and that's all me.

I should have communicated.

I don't really have an issue

with them wanting me to communicate.

Sort of petty decisions.

It's the big things and it's

been my fault the whole time.

Do you have a regular communication

cadence with all the partners?

Yes, I do.

I have a financial summary that I

send out every month and then immediately

after sending that, schedule a zoom call.

And so every month I send out financials and

they have a bunch of graphs, I got pie

charts and line charts and month over month, year

over year, all those sorts of things.

And then in addition to that financial update,

we immediately schedule a zoom call to discuss

those financials and any other significant events.

How long ago did you sell

client connect and form Banjaxt?

So we initially formed the partnership and I'm

going to say that not in the legal

sense, but in the sort of agreement sense.

The spirit of it?

Yeah, the spirit of it.

We formed the spirit of the partnership

a little over three years ago.

We formed Banjax, the company, about

two and a half years ago.

We formed Banjax on January 25 of 2021, but

we had the spirit of the partnership already for

about a year prior to that, maybe nine months.

And during that nine months we were really evaluating

exactly what we were going to be doing.

And then we formed Banjacks around a

particular thesis, which was we were going

to bring communications into Lidify and Salesforce.

And also I didn't mention this part.

We were also going to build technology

for data migration and implementation into Salesforce.

And that's what I was doing for that nine

months prior, was moving a law firm to Salesforce.

And during that time I built an application that is

basically like a wizard for moving on to Salesforce.

So you can map your data from a

legacy database, like an on premise SQL Server.

You can map that over to Salesforce.

And so we formed Bandjacks with those

two underlying technologies, communications and data migration.

Two and a half years ago it was just you

stepping out of the job trailer to go take that

call in the oil field and today you're the CEO

of a company that I would say is fairly established.

Remind me how many employees you have today.

We have about 35 employees.

Well, we have about 35 US based employees, as I

mentioned, ayaz as well as two partners that he has

owns a development company in Pakistan and we contract to

that development company, and we have about 15 developers in

Pakistan that work on that contract.

And then in addition to that,

we have about another five contractors.

So, including US based and overseas, in

the capacity of employees and contractors, we

have about 55 team members.

So two and a half years ago, you were a one man

show, and today you're the CEO of a 55 person company.

Didn't complete college, don't have

a Harvard Business degree.

Man, how have you learned how to run

an organization of that size so quickly?

Well, I think I'm on about 15,000 Google searches

by now, but it's one thing at a time.

I mean, every day is a new challenge, and

it's a challenge that is slightly different than the

one that I had yesterday, but I have some

experience from the one that I had yesterday, so

I just Googled the one that I'm having today.

And now Google has changed to other sources, chat, GPT.

I also have a great team, so I have people

here at Bandjax that are an incredible support to me

that I wouldn't be able to do on my own.

So, for example, our COO Salil, who I met at AIT,

is almost the opposite of me in a lot of ways.

So I dropped out of college.

He has five degrees, including a master's degree,

most of those from the University of Texas

in psychology, economics, and all sorts of stuff.

And so where I default to creativity,

he knows all the best practices.

He knows what Harvard Business School is

going to say about any given situation.

So that gives me the support I need to

know when I'm probably making the wrong decision.

If a scenario comes up and he says, hey, I've

got an SOP for this, I've got a best practice

for this, then I have something to vet my thought

process off of, which is a fantastic help.

I also have people like

Monique and Grammar and Christine.

These are operational people that really

cover a lot of my weaknesses.

So I can delegate you're handling

this aspect of the business.

I can move on to my next Google search, which is

in relation to the next thing that is happening at Vanchext.

What are the parts of the job that you enjoy most?

And on the flip side, what are the

parts of the job you enjoy the least? Good question.

So the most, I think, is the constant learning.

The next thing that is expanding

my perspective on the world.

I really look at it all as

just updating my model of the world.

Everything I'm learning, whether it's about the physics of oil

and gas drilling or the structure of a line of

credit versus a venture fund, like, all of these things

are just updating my model of the world.

So I think the learning experience is what I enjoy

the most and then what I enjoy the least.

Is the things that don't really inform those

the monotonous and doing payroll or just, like,

the stuff you have to do.

And that's, again, why I am so glad I

have a team that handles so many of those

things that I'm not especially excited about doing.

But, yeah, I'd say that's what I

enjoy the most in the least.

What's next?

Well, I don't want to think too much about what's

next until I have identified what success is for Banjext.

And so one of the things I'm working on right

now from a business perspective is rolling out either a

stock option plan or some kind of a stock unit

plan to employees in the company, which we don't currently

have that working on the legalities of that right now.

And so I want to establish what does success look

like for Banjax over the next 24, 36 months?

Like I mentioned, we have two pieces of underlying technology

that I think are super valuable to the marketplace, and

I absolutely want Banjaxt to be a success.

I want all of our employees to be

successful in whatever sort of framework they have

created for success here at Banjaxt.

And then once I start to wrap my hands around that,

I'm sure that I will be thinking about what's next.

I do consider myself an entrepreneur.

I consider myself a founder.

And so at some point in the future, I

imagine there will be a life after Banjax.

But right now, all I'm concerned about is Banjax.

I would say Banjax is probably a toddler in its

life cycle, and so I need to get it to

be an adolescent and then to be an adult.

And then when it graduates from college,

then I will feel comfortable thinking about

that question a little further.

Is there anything that you had hoped to

talk about that we haven't covered yet? Not really.

I mean, I really didn't have anything other than,

like you said, hopping on and having a conversation.

So I feel like I did too

much talking in proportion to you.

So maybe next time I need to hear more from you.

Mel knows exactly what I'm about to say, but

I am not the star of the show.

Our guests are the star of the show,

and we want to hear your story.

So you did great.

That's what we were going for.

So one of the things that I want to talk about

is how we got connected, which I think is a little

bit unusual, and I think it speaks to your character and

how you approach business and members of your team.

So I'll tell this real quick.

We actually hired at my firm, then Technology.

We hired somebody from Drew's firm, from Banjax.

And I will say we didn't go out recruiting them,

but it was a situation where he needed to relocate.

And I think our mentality is very similar in that we

want people in the office to be a part of our

culture, and so you really do need to be local to

the office, and so we've got a similar mindset there.

But when he left you and he joined

us, he did it with your blessing. Yeah.

And I just thought it was so cool.

I was only mad at you for a second, Scott.

Not for very long.

Yeah.

So you did take one of my employees, but no,

I think the point that you're getting at is we

did not try to stop him at all.

And as a matter of fact, one of the

things about just like you said, keep moving.

I don't have time to think any negativity about

some direction that someone else is going to go.

All of our employees are getting smarter every day.

They're getting more skills.

We need to keep them employed.

I believe in free markets, and

they may have a better opportunity.

We try to keep a good opportunity here,

and if we can't win that competition, then

we don't deserve to win that competition.

And so I spent no energy trying to hold anybody back.

And when we found out, like you mentioned, one

of the main reasons he needed to change jobs

is because of location he needed to move.

So the one thing that we were happy

about was at least we didn't lose him

for lack of creating a good work environment.

And he found someplace that had the kind of work

environment that he was used to, which is a good

work environment, and that we were super happy about.

So I'm glad that you guys got to benefit from

that, that he got to benefit by finding a good

place to work where he needed to relocate.

So, yeah, that worked out great.

And I met you in the process, so he hooked us up.

So he had enough confidence in me and in

you to know that we weren't going to hold

any grudges, and that worked out great.

I wasn't familiar with you all before he joined us, but when

he came on, I went out and I researched, and just looking

at your website, I get a sense for the culture and the

kind of company you're building, and I love it, and I'm excited

to see where you guys go from here.

Thanks a lot, Scott.

I really appreciate you having me on. Absolutely.

That was Drew Murr, founder

and CEO of Banjaxed Solutions.

To learn more, visit banjaxed.com.

That's banjaxed.com.

If you or a founder you know, would like

to be a guest on In the Thick of It,

email us at intro@founderstory.us.