In The Thick of It

Lately, a couple people have said, hey,

I'm thinking about starting my own thing.

What advice would you give me?

And I just say startups are spiritual and

don't think it's blocking and tackling and straightforward.

It's actually a soul crushing or soul invigorating

experience like you are signing up for that.

It's absolutely exposed.

Welcome to In The Thick of It.

I'm your host, Scott Hollrah.

Today's episode features Roy Keely,

founder of Firm Studio.

Roy is a lifelong entrepreneur who started his

career selling baseball cards as a kid.

Not much has changed since then,

only now he's selling technology and

helping businesses bring products to life.

Roy shares stories about his upbringing and life

post college, taking a job in circuit board

prototyping and another selling to accounting firms.

Later, he co founded a successful

managed it services company that focused

on serving accounting professionals.

Inspired by these experiences and challenges, the idea of

starting his own company firm studio came to life.

Today, Roy's team consists of experts in

design, development and business strategy to equip

businesses for a profitable future.

Throughout the episode, Roy shares the lessons

he's learned, including framing work as the

mingling of souls and being cautious about

financial commitments that are difficult to uphold.

Joining me today is Roy Keely.

Roy, thank you for inviting me.

I'm actually on the road today.

This is kind of a fun, fun setup.

So thanks for having me in your office

and eager to jump into your story.

It's fun to be your host

and I'm excited for the conversation.

So you grew up in the Houston area? That's right.

What part of Houston?

I was born in Amarillo.

I got an 806 number, so let's not

leave that part out of the story.

But grew up in northwest Houston in a subdivision called

Bear Creek, which is kind of a Katy Houston line.

Went to Katy ISD School District, but

great neighborhood, great situation out there.

One of those typical Houston or Texas plan neighborhoods

where the elementary school is in the neighborhood.

Kids roaming free, getting in all kinds of trouble and

killing frogs and lighting dog crap on fire and knocking

on people's doors, all that kind of stuff.

Was a great way to grow up

in the eighties in Houston suburbs.

Were you an only child?

That's a complex therapy question.

I'm an only child from this marriage.

I have a sister, my mom's previous marriage, half

sister, and then my dad has some kids that

I don't stay in touch with her nonetheless.

But so I grew up with a sister.

She's about 910 years older than me, so she

was doing her thing, I was doing my thing.

But, yeah, so good family, all that kind of situation.

Okay.

Is your family still down in the Houston area?

Everybody's still in Houston.

They're in the clear Lake NASA area now.

Grandma, uncle, cousins that got

some family in Nashville.

But all my immediate family is

still in the Houston area.

And so when we go back, we're actually just went back

to the rodeo a couple weeks ago, gained seven pounds, saw

a lot of cows and all that kind of stuff.

And my kids, you know, this is

like peak Houston weather, spring, Texas, like,

it's amazing from a Houston perspective.

But my kids were complaining how hot

and humid it was every day.

And I'm so thankful.

I live in Georgia now.

I love Texas, but I'll never go back to that state.

That time of year.

Was it really that much hotter coming from here?

That is hot Lanta, which is a forest, by the way.

If you're listening to this, Atlanta is great.

Actually, it's not great. Don't move here.

But yeah, I mean, Houston sucks.

I mean, it's humid all year round.

So, like, if you're used to 24% to 40% humidity

and you go hit 80% humidity, even on a 76

degree weather day, it feels like 84, 87.

And my kids are, you know, of irish descent.

Mutt, Anglos.

And so we wilt pretty quick, especially

if coming from my wife's irish background.

So anyways, that Texas summer, our Texas

heat just gets us really quick.

But we've just been spoiled.

And me and my best friend, who grew up

in Houston, now lives down the street from here.

Just can't believe what our parents subjected us to.

Growing up in Houston.

Land of concrete and 100 degree

days and humidity at max percent.

I didn't even understand why people had leather in

their cars, for example, I thought it was completely

insane to have leather in your car.

In Houston, cloth seats were so much more comfortable.

You didn't have to wear four shirts.

You wouldn't sweat through it.

And now modern cars, you know, ac seats

and cooled seats, it's a little bit better.

But, you know, like, leather didn't even make

sense to me growing up in Houston.

Well, I'm sure strikes some ire from some people, but

I'm just going to go ahead and stir the pot

by saying Dallas is far better than Houston.

So if you like monoculture. No, I'm just kidding.

Here we go. I love Houston.

I'm so glad I'm from there.

The people there, the business there, the food there.

I'm so thankful to be from Houston, but

I'm so thankful to be in Georgia now.

Yeah, we'll get to how you came to Georgia in a minute.

But so, grew up in the Houston area,

lighting things on fire, roaming around the neighborhood.

What else were you into?

Were you athletic?

You play sports? Kind of did.

Every sport, basketball, baseball.

I was neighborhood quarterback, football.

But my parents, I think, come to find out

they didn't want me to get hurt, sure.

But they couldn't afford the pads, honestly,

that's probably why I didn't play.

I played a lot of golf, which actually was

pretty cheap in Houston area public course, walked down.

It was basically like free babysitting.

I started playing at a really early age.

We'd walk to the course, walk home from the course,

we'd be gone, and we had spent $10 all day.

And so you know that back then you could roam

your neighborhood and go golf as a ten year old

and your parents not care for some reason.

It's shocking now to think through that, but yeah, I

was into every sport and then call it junior high.

Everybody else started to get their voices

changed and they started getting taller.

9th grade, they kept growing and I

just kept staying the same size.

Well, I got wider, I didn't get taller.

And so nonetheless, you know, everybody hit

puberty's, maintain their spots on the team.

And I kind of like was too short

and too slow, all that kind of deal.

So it's just blame it on genetics, I guess.

At least that's what I tell myself, you

know, I would have been a star athlete

if I would have just grown on time.

But that's all farce because actually my body is just

a broken shell and it breaks down pretty easily.

So I would have gotten hurt. Should I have played?

So I played golf through high school.

I gave up golf a few years ago, thankfully, but nonetheless,

I grew up playing golf on a team and then just

every other sport I dabbled in and got hurt at.

Okay, what'd you do after high school?

Well, I did the college thing, kind of.

I did a junior college called San Jacinto College.

Then I went to their feeder school

called U of H, clear Lake.

But in short, I, I worked 40 to 50 hours a week.

I lived in my parents two

bedroom, 800 square foot apartment.

So that's where I fell in love with coffee

for the first time because it was the cheapest

form of thing I could go, you know, d

drick's coffee or Starbucks or whatever it was.

But you go spend $4 and sit there for 8

hours and get free refills, have conversations, a bunch of

quacks and hoots and business people and whatever.

But I didn't have to be in

my parents apartment, but nonetheless, I just

stayed at home through college, quote unquote.

And the average school age, I think of fellow

students probably in their late thirties, maybe early forties,

a lot of people out of the plants.

That part of Houston, Pasadena, Baytown, everybody who's getting

their colleges paid for by, you know, three or

Dow chemical, and they're coming back for an accounting

degree to try to change the trajectory of life.

But that's who I was in class with.

So huge blessing in hindsight, but not necessarily

the college experience that everybody raves about.

But I only graduated $26,000 of debt, 13 on my

credit card, 13 for official school loans, and had a

great growing up experience, more than a college experience, but

that's what I did after high school.

But I think I got a 2.65 or something.

I barely went.

I went on Tuesdays for 15 hours and

worked the other rest of the week.

Robert and what did you study again?

Day it was marketing only because

you didnt have to actually try.

So it was technically a business degree, but it was a

marketing degree, which was, we were a dime a dozen.

Okay, you mentioned you worked a lot.

Tell me about your first job.

Clay my first job.

Well, this goes back.

I actually started working at the baseball card shop

when I was probably in third grade, and I

got paid $5 an hour in cards.

But I parlayed a lot of that

into cash, or I parlayed that.

So I had a good mind for memorizing the

Beckett and knew what was trending up and down.

Beckett was the pricing guide.

And then I worked at the shop and then also

had access to a couple of, quote unquote, athletes.

But in Houston area, Keema lazily was a big deal.

Hes a big deal, period, but hes

a really big deal in Houston.

So at an early age, I got

access to getting autographs from him.

So I got a few things autographed,

and the neighborhood found out about that.

And so I started forging a chemo

ajuan cards at a very early age.

When you say forging like,

you were copying his signature?

Yeah, yeah, I figured out a signature.

I traced it over, laid the piece

of paper on top of the card.

I practiced a lot just shadowing it.

And then I took that to the

real cards and started signing them.

And people gladly traded their Michael Jordans or

other things for that signed accumulation card because

actually, I did have real accumulation signature, so

apologies if you were a kid in the

eighties, Bear Creek, running around with an Akimalajmon

card, there's a 45% chance it's fake.

Well, if it was for me, 100% chance.

But nonetheless, I started dealing in

cards pretty early, made some money.

So I actually, that was my first job.

I did that for probably four years, from

third grade through 7th grade, getting paid $5

an hour on cards, like I said.

And then I worked at a grocery store, like your typical job,

where you need a card to ride the bike up, to throw

some things in the bag, help the old lady out.

And then I did the high school work program.

So I worked a bunch of retail jobs

in high school, and it was amazing.

It was tons of fun, to be honest.

I too worked at a grocery

store as a teenager, bagging groceries.

And then oddly enough, the favorite thing for all

the baggers was to actually be on the maintenance

crew because you didn't have to just stand there

at the end of the register.

You got to roam around the store

and do all kinds of different things.

And I never in a million years would

have thought that mopping the dairy fridge would

be the highlight of my workday.

But back then, that's what we all wanted.

Very interesting.

Funny enough, that first grocery store ties back to cards,

because I think I was in fourth grade, me and

my buddy who now lives here, my best friend Travis.

So I also stole a lot of cards.

You know, forging and stealing was

kind of a deal for me.

But anyways, we'd go in the back of Gurlan's, which

was grocery store chain in the area, and we'd open

up the cards, take all the good cards out and

throw them in one pack and buy them.

I don't know why we just decided to buy one pack of.

Might as just stole it all.

Anyways, one day we got caught

and somebody flashed their badge.

Travis peed his pants.

Sorry, Travis, if you're listening to this,

but he peed his pants right there.

I ran, just ran around

the frozen food section, whatever.

And then he busted us and he said, you know, Karen

Keeley, he got on the mic on the grocery store.

Karen Keeley, your kids have been caught shoplifting.

Please come to the front of

the store and get them nonetheless.

That happened third or fourth grade.

I can't remember the days, but, you

know, I learned you can get caught.

But that's where I later worked, at that grocery store.

So it all came back.

They gave you a second chance.

I don't think they had my mug shot on

that poster wall, poster board for very long.

But, you know, third grade to

age 16, they didn't recognize me.

There wasn't the poster.

You know, this person is banned for life. That's right.

Okay, well, mischief aside, you had the foresight at

a very young age to buy and sell things.

Have you always been an entrepreneur?

Would you describe yourself that way?

No, I didn't know the word entrepreneur wasn't like a

word in my house or even in my neighborhood.

Like, everybody worked for a big company

or whatever, so I didn't grow up

around, quote unquote, business owners.

There was a couple of families

who I think owned businesses. Why?

Because they had lake houses and nicer cars

and all of the rest of us.

But it wasn't a thing that I was into, per se.

I was just into doing things

and not really asking permission.

So in that way, shape form, I'm an entrepreneur.

But at the same time, I grew up around very little.

No security, no house, no vacations, no nothing.

So as soon as somebody was willing to pay me

money and I had that guaranteed, I thought that was

the dream at a certain point, of course.

But nonetheless, if I could be entrepreneurial once

again, I didn't know what that word was.

If I could just go and do.

I just wanted a job.

To be honest, I didn't know to ask or

try to think to start my own company.

So it wasn't until call it four years ago to where

I started my own business and started thinking that way.

However, the stent of my career, I could go and

do an act like an intrapreneur, if you will.

I had the steady paycheck, I had some

de risk, which meant I also built someone

else's balance sheet far faster than mine.

But nonetheless, it was a great opportunity to

learn, like, oh, like, anybody can do this.

Like, really go and do it.

Everybody told me how entrepreneurial I was,

but I was like, I'm not entrepreneurial.

I have no risk.

I'm not losing sleep over some stupid employee

or me being stupid and costing them a

bunch of money, which happened a few times.

I didn't have to eat that myself.

So I wasn't entrepreneur in the sense that

I had skin in the game, but I'm

wired for it now, looking back in hindsight.

But all of its been kind of in prep from the

baseball card shop up to the last job, it's all been

in preparation for me to launch my own thing.

So how long did it take you to

get through college, you were working a lot.

Typical Texas five year plan was what we did.

And then, um, yeah, so five years, what it took me.

Okay.

And what came after that?

Moved to Georgia the next week.

I didn't even go to my graduation.

Just bolted through everything in the

back of my Toyota Tacoma.

I think it was 99, I can't remember

what it was, but nonetheless got out here.

My friend Travis, his parents had a basement here.

That's a basement's a real thing out in Georgia.

So I moved into the basement, free rental.

Worked at a coffee shop down the

street from where we're standing now.

Had three or four days of quote

unquote fancy job consulting, hourly work.

Didn't know what I was talking about,

but I just represented a young thinker.

So I got paid, call it $25 an hour instead

of my normal $6 an hour, and then just moved

out to Georgia and just figured it out.

I just wanted to get out of Houston. I knew that.

And then, I mean, I wasn't expecting much, so

I came out here and just figured it out.

So the draw to Georgia was simply free rent.

You had a free place to stay? Thats right.

And it wasnt Houston.

Yeah, I had free rent in LA and I had free rent here.

I went to LA and LA, its got great

weather, but if you look at LA like you

drive around the streets, its as ugly as Houston.

Theres no zoning.

It doesnt make any sense except

for its way more expensive.

A couple other things not going that direction, great weather,

obviously a lot of beautiful people and all those things,

but Atlanta was more my speed than LA.

So I moved here and enjoyed free

rent for as long as I could.

The only chore I had to do there to earn my

free rent was Grandma Nickerson lived there and she needed a

couple grocery runs and she needed her red wine.

So I would sneak her some red wine and

get her some groceries and I got free rent.

Thank you, mister and misses Shepard.

It's interesting, I think most people, especially, I think for many,

many decades, if they had the choice between a free place

to stay in LA and a free place to stay in

Atlanta, I think most people would have taken LA.

What was it about Georgia that was your

speed when you go to LA or Vegas?

I mean, I put them in the same category, you

know, really quick if its your speed or not.

Just like when you meet a person in the coffee

shop or at the restaurant and youre like that persons,

my people or that persons, not my people.

And nothing personal against those folks out there,

its just like they might value a different

thing than I value for once. Also.

I mean, I live in a very affluent suburb

of Atlanta, so who am I to say?

Now looking back, I might have been the frog that's

been boiled in that, but out there, just seeing all

the mercedes and all the fancy houses and people talking

a big game, like, I just had no game and

no car and no money, and just.

I just didn't fit.

And then my uncle, who lived out there, who's my kind

of inroads there, would every once in a while point at

a situation or a car and be like, that's all on

credit, and no one owns anything out here.

A lot of it's just for show.

And I think growing up in Texas and growing in Houston,

you know, it's all had no cattle type of framework.

I didn't want to be that person, per se, not putting

myself on a pedestal by any means, but I just.

That was against my grain enough to. And also debt.

Like, I'm just.

I'm very scared of all things.

Debt, anything on credit, I am deathly scared of.

And so I just.

California credit, Georgia debit.

Okay, I'm with you on.

You go to Vegas once, and you know

if it's your kind of place or not.

And it is definitely not my kind of place, but

we have to go all the time, don't we?

Because that's where every conference is.

I've been twice already this year, and we're not that

far into it, and I'll be shocked if I get

through the rest of the year without being there again.

So you moved into the basement, you're working in a coffee

shop, and you said you had kind of this consulting.

Yeah, and that's not really.

I mean, it was kind of just this holdover job.

A mentor of mine just brought me on

the road every once in a while down

to Savannah or Spartanburg, South Carolina, or something.

So it was.

It was fine, whatever.

But the thing that got me out of the coffee shop

job was there was a night manager there named Farahad, and

he was just a super dedicated guy who had an engineering

job by day and a coffee shop manager by night, and

just trying to keep people like me in line, you know,

23 year olds not knowing how to close a restaurant down

or any of those kind of things.

So eventually, I think one of his

old employers or current employers, somebody said,

hey, we need a marketing guy.

And Farhad liked how I worked.

And persian guy came here in the

eighties for all the right reasons.

To get him to leave his country and whatever.

So he was a hard worker, and I

think he bird of a feather flock together.

So he referred me in and got that job.

I couldn't get a job.

I wanted to get into advertising, I think listening

to your story, when I get into advertising.

So I interviewed at bBDO, J. Walter Thompson.

All those shops and the Ford accounts

run out of here, army account.

So I moved, actually, free rent, but also

because it was a good ad agency town.

Anyways, I was interviewing all those kind of places.

You know, those places are super sexy, everybody's attractive,

and it seems like a super fun job.

And shout out to Stephen Hutton, another

Texas guy who was interviewing at BBDO.

And pretty far along, I'm trying to get

out of this coffee shop job, interviewing with

him, meet him just by happenstance.

Oh, he's married to an aggie.

Oh, you're from Houston area. Oh.

So he kind of took me under his wing, invited

me out a couple times, but we went, met coffee.

He's like, roy, the reality is, like, I can't

now as your friend, let you work at BBDO,

I can't let you work at a marketing agency.

Like, you cannot do what I'm doing.

He talked me out of taking that job, and I don't even

know if they would have ended up hiring me, but he basically

got me out of the interview cycle, if you will.

And so I had to, quote unquote, suffer through the coffee

shop grind a little bit, pun a little bit longer.

But rationale for I can't let you into this,

like, grueling hours, bad pay, slippery slope lifestyle.

A lot of it is whether, I mean,

is there an ethical issue for army recruiting

ad campaign or direct condom campaign?

Like all these things I interviewed for, and ultimately, like, if

they threw me on some brand that I had an ethical

issue with, I'd probably have to do it and I would

do it and I would get sucked up into whatever.

And it's a lot of late nights and a lot of long hours.

And, you know, once again, nothing

against that profession or whatever.

And because I've always considered myself a marketer,

like, through and through, it was good.

He's like, you can't be on agency side.

You have to be on client side.

Like, that's where the life is. Go do that.

And he eventually got out of it too.

But nonetheless, I'm very

thankful for that conversation.

Looking back now and knowing what I know about

the industry and knowing myself better, I was pretty

disappointed as an early 20th something not getting into

that world, because that was my dream.

And to your point, it seemed

like just such a sexy industry.

And the offices in all of these big agencies,

I mean, they are the coolest, most creative spaces.

Basketball courts.

Yeah, it's just a giant playground.

And getting to work on big brands

and things like that seems so cool.

But having friends that did that.

And Friday afternoon.

Hey, we're pitching a new account on Monday morning.

You're here for the weekend.

We got to get our ducks in a row to go pitch.

I would not have done well in that, and

family would not have done well with that.

And so I think that your friend was

very wise in steering you out of there. Thanks, Stephen.

So what did you end up

getting into after the coffee shop?

Printed circuit board prototyping.

And so anything that has a circuit running

through it, we would somehow touch the lifecycle

and R and D of that.

And it was a lesson of fake it till you make it.

And it was a company that had been past its prime.

It was on its way down.

Founder had been handed the business from his father, but

the age had, like, printing a board for an R

and D lifecycle became just as efficient or more cost

effective overnight type shipping, as opposed to doing the X

and Y axis CNC type machine where you make your

own board, test it in your missile or test it

in a phone or whatever.

But nonetheless, it was still interesting for, like, super

secret things or colleges or call it Apple was

a client because they just couldn't let a design

go out house, so they fabbed a board inside.

And so it was cool.

I would literally go call in Nortel or Apple

or Cisco, and I would go to these campuses

in Silicon Valley and talk to, like, phds and

electrical engineering at Sandia Labs in New Mexico.

And then I got to travel the world.

So I went in there, got that

job offer through the coffee shop.

I said, I need to make $36,000 a year.

They said, we'll give you 31.

I said, deal.

But the marketing director got fired

the first month I was there.

So I was like, assistant guy, and then I

was now, quote unquote marketing director, title and essence.

They just threw me out on the road, go work

with our partners, sell these things, and gotten sales.

And it was an amazing job from

once again, I had no bureaucracy.

Just go and do it.

I rebranded the company, launched a new website.

I think I hit 18 countries, all within 16 months.

I went from $31,000 to $76,000 a year in pay.

I became kind of like an OG in the building,

but it was a manufacturing rough and tumble crowd.

So it was great from a lot of different perspectives,

but ultimately it was like, clearly not a shooting star.

It was a, you know, dying dog, cat, you

know, cash cow, but at the same time, wasn't

like a growing thing, but thankful for that opportunity.

And then my roommate, they were like, hey,

we have a startup that's going pretty well.

We were another Texas guy.

We lived together and ran around together, and he

would work on the couch, I'd work on the

couch, and he's like, hey, we started this company.

We're doing accounting installs,

accounting firm type services.

And I knew about the business.

And we need a new sales guy, or

we need our first all encompassing swiss army.

Not sales, travel, whatever.

Why don't you come work here?

And so it was a quick learn, because I had

been thinking on the couch with them for the last

year, and the pay was right, the opportunity was good.

So that started a 14 year chapter of

growing that entity and getting some stake in

the company, and then growing and selling it,

and then eventually running that company.

And it was a great chapter, but

went from printed circuit board prototyping.

So, you know, I'm coffee guy

marketing, know nothing about technology.

I'm in like high tech now,

like deep tech printed circuit boards.

And then I get into kind

of information systems, blinky light game.

So once again, just like baseball cards, whatever.

It's just learning to talk about whatever

somebody values, framing it in the right

perspective and working with them on it.

So that's kind of been the trajectory of my career.

Looking back is just making dorky things

palatable to not dorky people, but business

leaders and what have you.

So that's what I've kind of how the

single thread of my career is tech people

and me being the conduit in between.

When you were with the printed circuit board

company, you were doing marketing, but it also

sounds like you were actually selling.

Like, were you closing deals?

Yeah, I was.

I mean, but it wasn't in the sense that the product

had to technically close the deal and the price did.

I'm purely the messenger.

There's that book, selling is human or whatever.

It's like selling gets a bad rap for

the right reasons, but ultimately, like, selling is

the most human thing you can do.

It's purely talking someone off the ledge, possibly

in your personal life, either literally or figuratively.

If you see a school bus driving towards a bridge

that's been washed out, and you're screaming at that bus

driver to stop so that kids don't die.

I mean, that's selling.

You're trying to sell that person

to stop whatever their will was.

And so that's how I've always viewed selling.

The fuzziest part about selling to me was money, because

I grew up with just like this weird thing around

money, like debt and all that kind of stuff.

I had a hard time bringing money up into the

deal, but I got over that, thankfully pretty quick.

And now it's like the first thing I lead with

is like, okay, how does this financially make sense?

Like, let's not waste our time.

But anyhow, printed circuit board, prototyping, selling, but it was

a small business, so I just got thrown into everything,

counting and parts and packing boxes and whatever you needed

to get an order out on time.

How big was that company?

There's probably about 30 employees.

I don't know how much revenue they were doing then, but

it had, it was 30 employees when I got there ish.

And I would say it was at

its peak probably about 200, 300 employees.

Wow, it's like working for a beeper company

and cell phone starting, that was the vibe.

Okay, so let's dig deeper into this startup.

So you and your buddies, you're sitting around

talking about this idea, they go get it

going, and then they say, Roy, come in

and be our business development marketing sales guy.

Yeah, they had actually bought out their previous company

and like this profit revenue share transition, basically, they

were the two young buck studs on the team

and they were like, hey, we're going to go

start our own thing in twelve months, just FYI.

And this actually, in hindsight is a

brilliant way to start a company.

It's like, hey, most of the revenue is coming

through us, most implementations are coming through us.

We're leaving, we're going to go do our thing.

That owner freaked out and said, well, I'm already at

the end of my career, let's just transition this thing.

So that was a company called Eccentric, and Chris and

Trey ran that just great culturally, and let's a lot

of us just roam and figure it out.

But then it became a decent sized business,

but it was basically managed services, it implementations.

And then the cloud came in

before it was really called cloud.

And then we wrapped it with service

software, managed services, and sold like a

total outsourced tech to accounting firms.

Simple revenue per user type price

or cost per user price.

And they could budget us and we

were an opex instead of a capex.

Maybe instead of buying blinky lights, they

replaced every two to four years, an

it person who quit every 20 months.

We were the hedge against that lifestyle.

So our average accounting firm client

was call it 30 ish employees.

Our average deal was call it $7,000 a month.

Our average terms are five years.

We got that to a few hundred accounting firms.

At that price, you get to

be a pretty big growing business.

But meanwhile, there was a lot of ups and

downs in those times and a lot of catastrophes

with blinky lights, not blinking, and everybody blaming you.

And ultimately, we were just the middleware layer of

Netapp or Cisco, UCS blades or something, some other

technical jargon I could throw out you.

But at the end of the day, we were a managed

service company, and you said you were there for 14 years.

Overnight success, baby.

And so it was a grind selling to accounting firms.

Everybody in a vertical, like,

you're a pretty vertical specialty.

When you think about what we all

do, whether you're selling to lawyers or

doctors or dentists, manufacturing people, everybody always

thinks they have the hardest job.

But CPA firms, accountants, I mean,

they are literally paid skeptics.

They are paid to find fault, error.

And they were an amazing group of people

to work with because they are loyal.

They're fiercely loyal.

They also have a high standard of customer service.

But nonetheless, you're selling to paid skeptics, and

they also work by the billable hour.

So when I would ever hire a new salesperson and

train them up in the space trying to sell to

a managing partner and a partner and an accounting firm,

their billable rate was called 400 800 an hour.

And I'm like, go up to a stranger on

the street and ask them for dollar 400 like

you're asking for an hour on their calendar.

Go ask them for dollar 400.

That's what you're doing.

So treat it with some respect.

Win the conversation, don't win the

deal, and it'll all work out.

So I've worked with accounting firms and still

do to this day as my core kind

of anchor, you know, prospect, if you will.

But nonetheless, accountants are also amazing because they,

they get in every nook and cranny of

the economy, whether it's like car washes, like,

there's a specialist in car washes for accounting.

So if you want to build a startup and car

washes, there's like, probably an accountant you should go find

that can help you with your p and l and

know where cogs should be and how much you should

be paying for soap and what your cost of building

out a building should be or just won't work.

And those conversations, like accountants, don't think they're sexy

and good dinner conversation people, but I think they're

amazing because they've typically helped guys like you and

I stay out of the ditch and just like,

look at our balance sheet really quick and be

like, dude, this is way off.

Like, you're going to go out of business in like

six months if you just keep doing this thing.

Anyways, I love working with the comments.

Sorry to go on that roof. Yeah.

So, I mean, 14 years, I guess.

When the firm started, they inherited some

infrastructure, some typically, like, statement of work

based type of billable stuff.

They inherited a brand and a customer base who

would call them when crap would hit the fan.

And they converted that to more of a reoccurring

revenue and started to get a little bit of

traction, enough for them to go hire people like

me or other technical people with some kind of

faith that the work would be there.

And we just grew the brand and the cloud really helped.

Cause in essence, like, managed services and

technical companies would go install servers and

make them work and fix them remotely.

We just said, well, we might as well just

put all this in our own data center.

And the thing called Citrix or RDS servers

kind of allowed us to do that.

So we created a subscription to our server bank.

It's like Amazon AWS or GCP, but

just for accountants in our own stack. Yeah.

And I guess was this probably like early

mid two thousands when you started there?

Yup, started in 2006, actually. And then we.

In 2017 and then I, you know, I

got handcuffed to the deal till 2019.

It was great handcuffs there.

It was a great experience.

And so left early 2020.

Okay, well, if you were in the Citrix

remote desktop world in the late two thousands,

like, man, it must have been just gangbusters

because that was huge at that time. Yeah.

And Citrix is a cuss word for a lot of

people because of how bad if implementations that surround it.

It's just like any tech.

It's like there's a lot of bad use cases of

fill in the blank tech word, but there's a lot

of good ways to do it as well.

So anyways, it was great, but we

were just selling to accounting firms.

If you were a butcher, a

baker, we wouldn't take your call.

We only worked with accounting firms, which was a

blessing and a curse, trying to do a startup

in just a narrow vertical, because everybody doing Citrix

or Cisco is why they take money from anybody. Yeah.

So the business sells in 2017, you

had golden handcuffs for two years.

What was it like working in this business

that you had helped build up when it

had transitioned to a different owner?

Yeah, thankfully, there's private equity gone wrong

and there's private equity gone right.

This was private equity gone right.

And so when people throw the baby out with

the bathwater, I try to add some kind of

counsel into that conversation because it matters what the

goal and your strategic fit in the deal is.

But we were a growth narrative,

not a EBITDA cash cow narrative.

And, I mean, honestly, they changed the game.

They showed me what capital infusion

could do for EBITDA and growth.

And Joel Hughes is the CEO of that company still.

And he rolled out a program called Clutch and shift.

And clutch and shift implies you take your

foot off the gas for a second.

And so we were growing.

We knew we were going to exit this business.

We were growing at a crazy clip. I don't know how much.

We sold so many millions of dollars of

contracts, 2016, 2017, to go into that exit.

We changed our commission plan on five year deals

so we can get guaranteed contract, never revenue to,

like, 125% to 135% of normal commissions.

So we could just sell those things because, you

know, once again, you show me the incentive.

You know, you see the output.

I forget what the buffet quote is exactly,

but nonetheless, we got all this stuff, but

we toppled over our own systems.

Like, we outsold, we out funded our coverage.

So they came in and just to

their credit, paused all new sales.

I had to go apologize to contracts we had signed

and say, hey, I'll give you your money back.

But, you know, the it person you fired to

justify our decision, you need to rehire them or

you need to get them to stay. Wow.

And so it was a pretty topsy turvy.

Like, literally, we had people,

you know, clients crying. I mean, it was.

It was a very traumatic 2017.

But to their credit, once

again, clutch and shift worked.

We got the business right, and we're off and running.

And to this day, that business is still

humming in a lot of good ways and

serving people well and doing good things.

So, anyways, it was a great experience.

And then I've had some private

equity experiences that hasn't been great.

And it was spreadsheet oriented, which is

fine, but nonetheless, like, not great for

kind of my desires and my dreams.

But, I mean, how have you seen private equity

in your space impact some of the transitions?

And, you know, great companies, are they

still great or are they not great?

Like, where are you coming from with that conversation?

I've probably seen more of the

not great than I have great.

And I think your statement about don't throw the

baby out with the bath water is really important

because in any car dealerships have a bad reputation.

But there's some really great car dealerships.

And when you go to one that's

amazing, it's like, oh, my gosh.

Hey, Scott, go to this. I got a guy.

Right, exactly. Exactly.

So you're locked up for two years.

You get to the end of that.

Did you go into that lockup period knowing that

you were just going to stay for that amount

of time, or did you consider staying on longer?

I don't know how you view strategic planning

and thinking about and dreaming about life, but

I didn't grow up thinking like that.

And I still, to this day,

don't really think about that.

I just worry about the next three to five things.

And so I have, like, a little notion documents like

the next five, and that's all I really worry about

because that's all I can have an impact on.

Funny enough, I'm looking down at a brick courtyard

right now, and that's actually where I had this

conversation underneath this tree, and I told this then

CEO and CFO who asked me to take on

this role, and the things were on fire.

And I said I didn't know I was going to

quit today, but I'm quitting right now, and I don't

have fu, money, but I have f it. Money.

And f it, I'm out, you know, because

I had, my handcuffs were technically off, and

they were like, no, we can't have this.

You know, like, you mean too much to the company.

Like, we can, you know, whatever, whatever.

And so they thankfully upped some

skin in the game also.

But also just gave me the bandwidth to go

and do the things that needed to be done

and do what I wanted the business to do.

But all that say I didn't plan that conversation.

I kind of go off gut and it served me well.

And it's also got me in a heap of trouble.

But I'll probably take that every day of the week

as opposed to these well intentioned, plan, five year grandiose

things, like, I've just been more of the guy that's

gotten punched in the face and had to react and

come up with a plan on the fly.

So I just don't plan three years ahead.

Like, I don't do that.

When I left my previous firm to go

start my own, it wasn't contentious at all.

But when I woke up, that

morning that I gave them notice.

I did not wake up knowing that

that's what I was going to do.

Did you tell your wife that you

were going to quit that day or. No.

When I pulled in the parking garage that morning,

I'd been seeing emails come through on my phone,

and, you know, I had this desire.

I'd been thinking for a long time that I

was going to go start my own thing.

And there were some frustrations that we're building.

And as I'm watching these emails roll in on my drive

into work, by the time I got to the parking garage,

I called my wife and said, I'm doing it.

Today's the day.

And once I'd made that decision, I couldn't

get with my boss for, like, several hours.

And I'm like, no, I really.

I really need to talk to, like,

I need to talk to you now.

And anyway, so I can relate on that.

I didn't go into this thinking that this

was going to be the day, but.

And as soon as, you know, you can't unknow.

And so, like, we're going through

a house transition right now.

We found our next house. We're moving out of this house.

I cannot wait to get on my current house.

My house is great.

My current house that I live in is amazing.

You know what I can't stand my current house.

And a company is that same way when you know,

you know, and so many people just grin and bear

it because they have a nut to cover.

They have rent, they have responsibilities, which I

honor all that and get all that.

But optionality is, like, a very extreme value for me.

And not optionality where I can get out of dodge

really quick and have no skin in the game.

No, I'm like, ride or die on the things I'm

in on, but, man, working somewhere you don't like.

And once again, I had every reason

to like every job I've ever had.

But when desire calls or when adventure calls,

you got to be able to go.

So what came after that?

I quit on January 2. I resigned.

And then I didn't really have a plan.

I just knew I needed to go.

That was January of 2019, January of 2020.

So not knowing something significant in the

world was right around the corner.

And so at the same week I resigned, a private equity

group out of Europe called me, and I didn't know that

I wanted to work for another private equity group.

But most Americans have, like, a thing for Brits.

You know, just, like, their accent, and they just sound

way smarter than you just like people from Ivy League.

Like we're all dumb slash equally smart.

So anyways, nonetheless, I get a call from a Scotsman

saying, hey, we're going to try to do a roll

up in North America of different software providers.

And I said, that sounds like fun.

They're like, can you fly to London next week?

We'll put you up.

So I stayed across from Kinsey to palace.

They said, do you have a resume?

I said, if you need a resume, I'm not your guy.

And so I went there and interviewed with

their C suite and the private equity group

and they just had my LinkedIn profile printed.

It was pretty funny on their desk.

So anyways, got that job and did that.

And then, yeah, COVID went down.

I don't want to spend too

much time talking about that chapter.

But that showed me not the

negative side of private equity.

But at the end of the day, people's hands

are tied based on some thesis or some spreadsheet

or some thought fund rules or bank covenants.

And you can be surrounded by nice people.

And there's a Marshall McLuhan, the

books over there, understanding media.

And he said, the medium is the message and

the medium of private equity or the medium of

that fund in that private equity group or the

thesis that you're exiting in three years.

Like, it means no matter how much

willpower you have as a leader, entrepreneur,

whatever, you can't move that dial.

And I worked probably harder than I'd ever worked.

I literally had conversations with

my friends over dinner.

Like, hey, I'm not going to be a

good friend for the next six months.

I'm going all in.

Wife, kids, I'm out with their permission.

Like, I'm not going to things.

I'm doing 60 hours week minimums.

I'm putting the office right where we're standing

now, just down the street from my house. I'm all in.

I'm 60, 80 hours weeks.

And Scott, I've never worked harder.

And I had zero fruit from about a 20 month chapter.

I was in constant boardroom meetings. It was COVID.

So it's like, once again, no one's fault.

Tons of great people.

But the thesis was a certain way their

desire to spend went from this to that.

And all of it was just real.

And that's what taught me.

Like, hard work does not pay off.

Actually, hard work mixed with humility mixed

with a bunch of other things works.

But it taught me how vain I was, how ego driven I was.

I taught me a bunch of stuff about futility

and basically I wasted 20 months of my life.

But it was an amazing lesson where your dream job,

Roy, you get to fly to England, go to London,

meet with really smart, intelligent people every twelve weeks, and

your ego is going to be stroked and you're going

to get to do this thing.

And it all came crashing down.

And, you know, not to make COVID

myopic, but it was an interesting chapter.

And so I decided like, hey,

I've had enough of the boardroom.

Let's go back to the basement thing.

And so that's what started firm studio

and kind of what I'm doing now.

Real quick, go back to your wife. When did y'all meet?

When did you get married?

Met in 2009, married in 20, 10,

14 month from start to finish.

From when she got dared to give me

her phone number in a coffee shop.

I was working on a Friday night.

Typical Roy thing.

I would go hang out with friends for dinner.

They'd go out fun, and I would go

to a coffee shop and just work because,

you know, college, I loved coffee shops.

And being alone with my computer or a book was probably more

fun than going to a club or going to talk to some

girl I never talked to again in the rest of my life.

So I was in a coffee shop and she

got dared to give me her phone number.

And we went out the next week

and got married 14 months later.

So we've made a home kind of

in the Alpharetta area ever since.

But, yeah, she's obviously a huge fan of

me and I'm a huge fan of her.

And she was a teacher, taught for ten years, and

the only teacher I've ever heard of that had a

six figure savings account, had no debt, and she just

was like, she'll eat ramen, as opposed to.

So she just grew up the same,

like, frugal and saving her pennies.

And that was very different than

the girls I'd previously dated.

So that was attractive just in how she wasn't

rich, but just how conscious she was and how

driven she was on some areas of life.

And then she stopped teaching a little bit after that.

The road with me while we were kidless, and then

we started cranking out babies a few years after that.

So we got three girls now.

So she was with you for the bulk of

the big run up, your managed service company? Yep.

And she saw very.

A lot of dark days as a part of that deal.

Not so much like me coming home raging

or whatever, like, none of that, but I'm

ride or die emotionally with whatever I'm doing

even more than oftentimes the founders.

And that's probably based on personality and where you

come from and what you're scared of, really.

And so I was always just

scared of, quote unquote, losing everything.

Cause I'd seen it happen in

my family life and whatever.

And so losing everything financially.

Yeah, like all this hard work

just going down the drain.

I mean, so much so, like, we were about to exit

this business, and there's a bunch of tornadoes in October.

We sold the company in October 2017, and

there was tornadoes for whatever reason coming through

like two days before deal close.

I'm like, a tornado is hitting that data center.

And we had a backup data center.

And so in theory, like, all the data

would have been fine, but, you know, backups,

I mean, like, have fun with that.

It's like going to Vegas.

You don't want to have to use your recovery center. No.

Anyways, but the previous, and there's tax season and billable

hours, and if you go down, they can't bill their

hours and then they're calling you, and then there's lawsuits

and there's breach of contracts, and then there's your competitor,

and it's just the whole narrative.

So she saw it all.

And so ive never had an intense

work period as ive had then.

Everything is kind of elementary relative to

risk compared to what we did.

So my mind can very, very quickly

go to catastrophizing, absolute worst case scenario.

Sounds like youre wired that way, too.

Yeah, im very much that way. I try to.

Only I live there probably one to

three days a month right now.

As an entrepreneur, im probably in that zone.

When I first started my business was probably

four out of five days a week.

Was probably in that zone.

Just kicked in the pants constantly or whatever.

And so I don't feel that way most of the time now.

And it's not because everything's up and to the right.

I think it's just perspective, you know, as you get

older and I mean, if you have a tough year

of marriage or you have a situation going on with

your kids, like, honestly, if you're able to have perspective,

nothing's that bad in that sense.

I mean, depending on what your faith is, whatever, even

cancer or death or anything, like ultimately, like, we're alive,

this is what we got signed up for.

Like, it's not all roses and all that kind of stuff.

So I think I have that perspective a little

bit more now than I did in my twenties,

where everything was more ego driven, more I'm going

to lose it financially or whatever.

But nonetheless, the perspective of getting kicked in the

pants enough has helped kind of frame everything up.

I agree wholeheartedly with that and things that I

used to get really, really spun up over.

When an equivalent kind of a thing comes up today,

I may get spun up a little bit, but not

near to the extent that I used to.

And I've been through enough of those

down, frustrating, difficult times that I've come

to understand that, you know what?

We're probably going to get through this

because we've gotten through a whole bunch

of other things like this, too. Yeah.

And I think our society has gotten to the point

where we can riff on this for a second.

They want to short circuit that maturity process

and take drugs instead, or escape or drink

or veg on their phone or whatever.

We have so many devices or vices to cure that.

And not getting spun up on something

typically implies one of two things.

You've matured past that point or you dull the

pain and you veg out in some other way.

Our society has gotten veggie, and I'm to blame, too.

I look at my phone too much.

All these things are basically things to dull the pain.

And I think we're doing ourself

a disservice this day and age.

By passing out the pills and vaping the things and drinking

the stuff and watching the shows and clicking on the talk

and all those things is really just dulling the anxiety around

some of these life things that come up.

And the reality is we just need to sit in it

and learn from it and be quiet and be still.

But we don't.

And on the flip side, enjoy the good times.

There have been times where it's been really

hard to enjoy the good times because I'm

worried about what's around the corner.

And I think a lot of entrepreneurs need

to enjoy the highs when they come.

And enjoy doesn't mean take a vacation.

No, it's the mental piece that comes from that.

It means you can take a walk and be present

and hear the birds and those kinds of things, or

just relax and not spout off at your kids because

you're not so tense and overreact to them.

Not putting the puzzle back when you

asked them to, you know, like, that's.

To me, enjoying things just as much as sitting up

on a beach and having a drink and thinking about

what you built, like just not being a complete asshole

is actually a form of joy to me these days.

So you did 20 months with this PE group out of the UK.

How did you know when it was time to

leave that I tried to quit three times and

the CEO talked me out of it every time.

And to her credit, shes an amazing woman and

very intelligent and very much smarter than me.

And her name is well known in certain circles,

far more than my name will ever be known.

I honestly, looking back at all the things, like I said, I

dont have a real big plan and I still every once in

a while have this kind of like woe is me, how much

more money I would have had if I would have stayed.

Because it came down to money in one frame of mind.

But I knew it was time when I could no

longer say something to a customer and back it up.

And ultimately when you have a customer and

if you're in that leadership role or in

a sales role, like they're buying you.

And the reality is I'm a long game person in

one sense is like I never want to have to

remember what I said, I just want to be a

truth teller and I just want to go and do.

And so if I ever have to start thinking about

what I'm saying, if I ever have to check what

my promises are made, because I know I just can't

do it or back it up, then I gotta bounce.

And so that's ultimately what happened.

And once again, it was no one's technically fault,

but I'm a big on throat to choke person

and there was no throat to choke.

And so it was my throat and I

just needed a bounce and so I bounced.

And when you were there, your customer in this

case was at the, you know, portfolio companies or

prospective portfolio companies that you, accounting firms.

It was a random stuff.

There was four p and ls and there were some

other random things going on, but it was accounting firms

and people I had even worked with previously.

Okay, so today, tell us about firm studio.

Yeah, so firm studio is a bet, really.

Its a bet that people who are in the trenches

of these service companies call it law firms, marketing agencies,

accounting firms, theyve been on the treadmill long enough, and

Mark Andreessen calls it the idea maze.

And its someone whos done something countless times

and they might have made their workflow or

efficiency 10% year over year or greater, but

theyre still using Excel, theyre still using Microsoft

access, theyre still doing full and blank things.

What would it look like for these

doers and domain experts to have access

to creating another company alongside themselves?

And they would be the first customer of it.

So typically you have somebody inside of a big accounting

firm, big law firm come up with an idea.

They get shunted at the top, no

funding, and eventually they get frustrated. They leave.

They either get funding or they bootstrap.

A way to fill that gap.

Then they sell it back to their old company.

So the brain that created the way to solve

the problem typically has to leave that company to

go solve it and sell it back.

What happens if we could capture that moment inside

those organizations of frustration or boredom or just knowing

there's a better way and give them the tools?

Developers go to market, whatever, and we create

a company alongside for the first customer.

And so firm studio, it's basically a product studio

where we come alongside a business and help them

think of a better way to do something.

Whether that's a sales tax return,

connecting schools and brands through like

a marketing agency, call it thing.

Completing a pricing for professional services, that's

a hard thing in accounting firms.

SoC, two audit app risk assessments, all these things.

There's better ways in all these people's brains.

It's just they're not a developer or they don't

know how to put it in context or a

business model or take it to market.

That's kind of where my background comes from.

So I'm just kind of ride or die with five

to ten companies a year trying to get ideas to

market building for the first customer, which is the firm.

So the idea is, let's say a

law firm knows of a better way. They create a thing.

So the worst case scenario in my ideal mind

is they're the first customer and they have secret

sauce and they can do something faster, better, more

accurate, delight their clients at a more affordable rate

and then, okay, this is checkbox like we hit

minimal viable success with this first version of product.

What is if there's other law firms or other,

let's say they're serving dentists and there's dental market

out there that we should sell this to.

So firm studio is just a vehicle to

come alongside service companies to create that widget.

And it looks different every single

customer, but that's what it is.

I'm going to paraphrase and tell me if I'm way

off here, but it sounds like you helped that intrapreneur.

You talked about being an entrepreneur

in other parts of your career.

You help that entrepreneur within an

organization bring this idea to life.

Yep, and theres a lot of corporate programs for that

kind of stuff and I dont do well in the

Fortune 500 and thats not where Im going for Im

going after the main street market, street type groups, ten

people to 1000 people but theres teams inside that has

a niche and a specialty.

So Im trying to attach myself to those people.

How have you found your clients?

Oh man, typical small business stuff,

just network, that kind of deal.

Just starting something new and

people want to support you.

So I would say there's a few people who

just took a bet on me and it's hopefully

worked out for them and I think so.

But that's the phase of business I'm entering into now.

Like firm studio is not like a

super scalable entity, I'm a not scalable

thing trying to create scalable things.

I'm trying to be like a miniature version of

Berkshire Hathaway or tiny to just service companies.

And I think there's this movement for holdcos, personal

holdcos, but those are more so like capital storage

units or vendor machines and a bunch of like

steady eddy businesses that are easy to understand.

I'm trying to do that kind of more

so in the software services play sector.

But yeah, so you talk about

you're not a very scalable company.

Maybe I misunderstood this, you are

not a very scalable company.

Trying to help scale companies is the idea.

You just want of to help them get that initial v

one release and then have them go take it to scale

success is them firing me because we hit some kind of

market rate where they need to bring on the dev team

internally or they can go to market themselves, but it might

even be version 2.0 or whatever the product needs to be.

But yeah, and the reason it's not scalable is because I'm

kind of ride or die on call for all these entrepreneurs

all the time and I don't know that someone's going to

do it like I'm going to do it.

So that's your typical paradox of nature and scale.

However, I've surrounded myself with Priya, my product person,

or whether it's Fino or Santee on the development

side, they're way better at it than me.

I know my clients are in good shape with them.

So those aspects of the business are super scalable.

Actually really good product

people aren't super scalable.

They're kind of not easy to find.

And I don't actually think great

developers are easy to find either.

But I think I've found them and I want

to scale and just go hardcore after the ten.

But I don't think I don't

want a sales team for example.

I don't want a huge marketing team for example I want to

keep my costs low because I do a cost plus model to

try to get skin in the game on their success.

So my upside is their upside

and my downside is with them.

Like I'm not making a bunch

of margin on my software company.

So you want to go deep with a

few as opposed to go wide and shallow. Yeah.

And how much of your week are

you spending with a given client?

I mean I would say I get probably 80% of my

time is with a client or for a client matter.

I mean the reason you're in town is because

of a connection we've made together and whatever.

So that client I've spent a lot of time

with probably 18 hours a week of my personal

time, but I have my team collectively spending 1200

hours a month on their stuff.

So it's a lot of people at this one idea

that we're trying to buck a huge industry, right.

And so depending on how you frame it.

But I'm just, I try to be available, I try

to be call it 50% scheduled and task oriented and

50% available and 50% time if that's not needed for

things I'll dream and think through or just read or

do something that hopefully helps the day job.

And are you helping the clients with the go to market

aspect or is it really just let's get the product built?

No, I want to help sell the first ten customers.

I want to help make connections, I want to

design their website, I want to hook them up

with legal counsel, I'll help them raise a round.

That's why it's not very scalable.

It's all out, all intents, all

the time for these ten things.

The way I view it is and we're about to

launch one of our own entities out of the studio.

So the goal is to launch one of our ideas a year

and help five to ten other people launch their ideas a year.

That's where this goes.

And the way I frame it is my clients

are like my cousins or my nieces and nephews

and then my products are like my babies.

And so ultimately what's going to keep me

up at night is more so my babies.

However, I'm going to go bail my nephew or niece out of

jail or I'll take them in for free rent or whatever.

I'll spend a lot of time with them and

I want their best, but I'm not going to

go to the grave worrying about them because ultimately

they are the adult, it's their baby.

And I think having a throat to choke and

a singular vision from whether he or she, the

chief, that's their thing and I'm helping them.

I have my things and I'm going full tilt.

I don't blame anybody for my failure and so I'm

here to support them and as soon as I do

a bad job with that, they can fire me.

Like, that's how it's wired.

You really are an extension of their team.

I mean, you're basically embedding yourself there

until you get those first ten customers.

Yeah, and a lot of people have offered, they want to

buy us out or, you know, those kind of stuff.

And maybe like you, like, I don't want anyone to ever work

for me for the rest of my life and I don't want

to work for anyone else the rest of my life.

I want to work with people and I don't believe

in a client vendor relationship in that traditional way.

It drives me batty.

I hate being a consultant.

I don't like that framing, I rail against it.

Consultants don't usually do the work.

I want to do the work and I'm ride or die.

Like if you sell a hundred things

then, man, I got some upside.

If you lose 100 things, Im getting

fired or I lose my margin, Preston.

So that means youve got to be very

selective about the projects that you take on.

Youve got to believe in the idea.

I have to believe in the idea or I

have to just de risk it the right way.

Because some of the things, the reality is Im not

the expert, Im not the domain expert in certain areas.

So I dont know in any amount of

research its not going to be proven.

But does this person have a following?

Does this person have clients?

Does this person have cash flow?

Have they done it before or if they

built a business, do they have a team?

Do they have HR, do they have payroll?

Do they have risk? They have skin.

And all these things are probably enough for

me to take a bet, to be honest.

If it's like cap mittens and like a better way to

make cat mittens, like I don't know anything and I have

no passion around that, but if you have like twelve employees

and you're growing 50% year over year, I bet you've probably

stumbled on something and I'll probably try to help you make

cat mins a little bit better.

I just try not to be an expert in Catman's

up, but I'll oh, you need e commerce shopify, you

need a whole plug in how it goes back into

shipping, like, okay, I'll help you figure that out.

We'll build it because that's all, like,

rinse, repeat, recycle between all the commonalities.

But I'm never going to know about Kathman's

as much as that person would be.

Let's go back to.

All right, you spent 20 months at the

PE, and you told your family and your

friends, I'm going away for a while.

How did your wife take that conversation?

Interestingly enough, like, I think she, like me, is

more of a wartime person than a peacetime person.

And she was down.

She was just like, go do it.

Honestly, she has a harder time when things are going

really good at work and giving me the freedom to

go and do more just because I think her and

I are both wired for more intensity.

Like, we're, like, a really good team.

And not to say more like a Ferrari,

but, like, Ferrari's oil changes are, like, expensive.

So that's how I view our marriage.

It's like, counseling is very expensive, but when we're

humming, it's like, nothing can beat us if we're

on each other's team and we've had years where

we're not on the same page and not.

Doesn't feel like we're on the same team.

So that came the right year at the right

time, as you know, is like having a family

and whatever, the same thing in a different time.

If your marriage or a different time where

it's family is either right or wrong, and

there's nothing different about it, it's really about

just timing and where you're at.

And so that happened at Timewell also. It was COVID.

It was batting down hatches, so she was

already in wartime mode from a mama bear

perspective about all that kind of stuff.

And so, yeah, it was just buckle up.

So you just went through that really intense period,

and now you want to go start your own,

where you do have all the risk.

There is no paycheck. No paycheck.

And I gather that you're a risk taker,

but you also like the safety and security.

What was that conversation like when you said, hey,

I'm going to go start my own thing? Yeah.

And I codified this in a

blog called playing with House Money.

And I actually do, weirdly, like Vegas.

Not necessarily the pomp and circumstance,

but I like gambling, actually.

So I'll take 200 or $400 out, whatever I

can afford to lose that day, and I'll.

I'll play it, like, the right way,

whether it be blackjack or Texas holdem.

I don't really play slots or blinky light things.

I like Texas holding the most.

And so if I double my money, I take my $200

that I put in and put it in my pocket, and

I start playing aggressive and I start playing for asymmetrical gains.

And so with starting firm studio, I promised my wife

she would never, quote unquote, have to work, ever.

I promised her she would always have a house,

and I promised her that I was always be

able to put foot on the table.

So I de risked through some of those exits.

I de risked our life this way.

But I was going to take major asymmetrical

risks the other way with my thinking about

it a little bit more fine tunedly.

It's my ego, actually, that stands the most to lose.

Because financially, like, I don't really think I'll

change my lifestyle depending on no matter what.

Like, I don't think I'll ever join that

country club or buy that boat or whatever.

Like, those things don't really bring me happiness.

My ego is actually more to blame for how I'm wired.

And so the biggest risk I have now is failure

and shutting my business down more so than financial.

For me, the emotional aspect of it. Yeah.

Like, I'm a three on the enneagram.

Some of your listeners probably know

what that Enneagram stuff is.

And a three can be like a narcissist, ego

maniacal, lie, cheat, steal to get their way.

Thankfully, God gave me a little bit of

awareness around some of this failure and blind

spots I have in my life.

But nonetheless, that's the biggest risk

I have now, is ego.

And just looking like a failure.

And then financially, like, I actually did get myself in

a pretty topsy turvy situation that was going after my

core nut, that I thought I had de risks.

But when you're burning $30 to $40,000 a month of your

own money because you made a promise to a customer that

you'd build thing for X and it ended up being Y

and that you would cover that Delta between X and Y,

and that Delta was $30,000 a month.

Like, I bought a Honda Civic a month

for the first ten months of launching firm

studio, and it was completely stupid.

It's all worked out now after a cry fest with

a client and a couple other things, but, yeah, that's

what it took to get it started, I guess.

Well, but I mean, there's an important lesson in that, and

that is you gotta do what you say you're gonna do. Yeah.

And sometimes it costs you to do that and you

got to be careful about the commitments that you make.

But well, and honestly, like, I've always, I've taken bets

in areas that I'm not necessarily an expert in.

So I take bets on people who are experts in areas.

And I've learned that my judgment of people was actually not

as good as I thought it was going to be.

And so looking, you know, I use a neo bank and

so it's a lot of good dashboards and charts and all

this stuff and who I pay and who I wire money

to every month, and I pay 58 external companies or vendors

to help me cobble together these things.

But I actively only now pay eight and I'm only 22 months

into this and I've fired 50 out of the 58 now, and

it means now I'm a all in on the eight.

And I was talking to you about

some of them earlier, but more so.

I now have a litmus test that if you

fail early amount on this and it's software development.

So it's a little bit subjective, but I think I

have a few people in my corner now that can

help me say like, no, that's trash code, that's good

code, that was efficient, that was good use of time.

And you can know, and you're not a developer yourself.

I am the last person you'd ever call to code or turn

on a server or do a damn thing, as am I.

And it's funny how we find ourselves in the

tech world talking about going from 58 to eight.

How much of that is consolidating and

getting more from a given partner versus.

No, we're just severing the relationship

because the quality is not good.

The only way I found, it's just like cold calling.

It's like you have that 1%, but you don't know if it's

going to on your third call or on your hundredth call.

Right?

It was that same way.

Honestly, if I would have found the people

I eventually found earlier in the cycle, I

would never built up that thing.

So it was no consolidation type thing. Thing really.

It was not that intelligent.

It was more so.

Man, this isn't working out by, this isn't

working out by and doing that countless times.

But as you know, just like when you hire a

marketing person, you hire an HR person, you don't know

if they're good until they're in the house.

And that's one of the hardest things.

I mean, people can interview, talk

about, everybody's in sales, right? Yeah.

Anybody interviewing, they are looking to sell themselves

and you don't know until they're in there

for 60, 90 days, maybe even longer. Yep.

And what that's created a little bit in me is

being I'm very fast to hire and trust, actually.

But now I can't hire people in certain states

because I can't move off of that decision.

And so I think, I mean, it was on

the Lex Friedman podcast, Jeff Bezos talked about that

one way door decision and two way door decision.

Like, hiring people should be a

two way, two way door decision.

This is easy in and out if it's

not working out, and that should be a

mutual thing and they shouldn't be a surprise.

However, hiring people in certain states, it's

more like a one way door decision.

And I, as a small business owner,

can no longer take on the risk.

So I've interviewed great people that called me asking

for a job and I'm like, dude, you're awesome.

Like, this woman in our world, like, I'd love

to work with her, but she lives in a

state where I just can't afford to hire.

To be honest, I can't afford the risk.

I'm like, if you move to Georgia or Texas, I'm all in.

Let's go.

I got my family here. Right on. You agree.

But sorry, thats such an important thing.

We were very much the same way and we really

try to hire local people anyway, right now we only

have two remote employees and weve got our list of

no fly states that even if theyre the greatest person

in the world, we can afford them.

Theyre the home run.

Theyre going to have to cross some

state lines for this to work out.

The real problem is when you hire a local stud or

stud at in Dallas and theyre like, hey, ive fallen in

love with hiking and ill move to so and so state.

You're like, what did you just know?

I do not comply with any of the labor laws.

I have no HR systems to do with that.

I did not want to pay insperity, I

did not want to go ADP full thing.

And now I am forced with an 11% increase in

my cogs related to HR because this one employee moves

to a state that I don't have operations in.

And it's just like, that's the thing

that you don't know you're signing up

for when you become a business owner.

That is just literally shocking and just takes

up and consumes a lot of oxygen.

Yeah, we have a member of the team who had

been with us in our Dallas office for two and

a half, three years and originally from Georgia.

And he came to us last year and said, hey,

I don't want to leave the company, but we need

to move back to Georgia to be close to family.

Can we work something out?

And he was somebody we did not want

to lose, but we did have to.

We have an outsourced HR group.

And they were my first call to say, hey,

talk to me about employment law in Georgia.

What am I getting myself into?

And they said, fortunately, it's very much like Texas.

And if there was a state you were going to

have somebody relocate to, this would be one of the

ones that we would say, yeah, go for it.

So, yeah, geography, it's crazy

how much difference that makes. Totally.

I've turned a corner a little bit on a couple

of things, but one is starting out with a contract

role instead of w two and then also encouraging my

team to have side hustles as kind of a shocking.

You encourage that?

Yeah, I mean, the way I frame it up is imagine going

to one of your team members, your employee, and you have a

big customer meeting coming up, and it has to go a certain

way for you to get the deal or the extended sale.

And you say, all right, give me the

plan on how we're going to do this.

And they tell you the plan, and you're

like, well, what happens if, like, this happens?

So what's plan b?

And they say, I don't have a plan b.

You told me to come up with a

plan, and I came up with a plan.

Imagine me telling another human to

only trust me with their plan.

Like, why shouldn't they have a plan b?

Why shouldn't they have a plan?

I would expect my team with my customer

or whatever we do with multiple plans on

how we're going to achieve success.

Why shouldn't the human, with their families and

their best interests of mine have multiple plans?

And that, to me, is a side hustle.

And to think that someone's not going to

side hustle, especially with the cost of living,

the way it's increased all these things.

So I just call a spade a spade and just say,

hey, I'll hire you up to 40 hours a week and

anything else you want to do with your time.

Like this is our 90 day, 180 day fill out period.

And you go be a marketing company or you go do a thing.

And also, I've reframed how I think

w two s should think about things.

And I, as a w two, it's like

instead of being a solopreneur and entrepreneur with

multiple customers and multiple vendors, whatever.

I as a w two say, no, I

want one customer and that's my employer.

And I'm going to do everything I can to

support that one customer and their best in and

for that exchange they give me x money.

So I'm more in the mind where we

should be all reframing both w two and

consulting work and having multiple plans in place.

And I think I, as a 25 year old

young woman or young man, should not be putting

all my eggs in my employer's basket.

I don't think anyone's earned their trust

to be able to do that. So I just don't think I

should ask that of people anymore. Interesting.

Yeah, I gotta wrestle with that one. Yeah.

And especially when they don't have any equity,

because I don't want to give out equity

to be honest, because equity implies what?

Like equal.

Are you going to cry like I've cried?

Are you going to walk countless miles beating yourself

up over something you did that was completely unintelligent

or you're just going to move on?

So you want equity.

You want equity.

That means very deep and dark moments and not being able

to make payroll or not, or burning your own money.

So in exchange for not giving equity, I want them to

de risk, you know, and I want to give equity and

obviously some of our enterprises and some of those things.

And for sure, like, I love giving out those

kinds of vehicles of earning stuff, but equity means

like, there's got to be a downside to, and

I don't think people want that downside.

So anyways, I'm wrestling with it myself.

Like it's a moving target for me.

But I used to take it really personal when people

quit, and take it really personal when people had side

hustles, like, I want to go fire them right now.

I heard they made $10,000 doing managed services on

the side with managed routers, with blah blah blah.

I'd want to go fire them right now.

Looking back, that was such an ego move of me.

I've had to apologize to a couple

people for that ride or die mentality.

And it comes from, I no longer

think of work as a family environment.

I think it was a team environment, because as

soon as they don't do their job, I'm firing

them because they've been hired to do a team.

Now, if you have a heart attack where you get

cancer or your kid has leukemia, I'm going to be

completely flexible with you, but it's still a team.

Like my wife and kids are my only people

I'm kind of ride or die with now.

And so I think employers trying to do the family

thing, it eventually is just not scalable and it eventually

you get found out as being a hypocrite.

And I just rather call it spade a spade early

on and not try to act like a family.

You can press in more, but yeah,

it's a wrestling match for sure.

Yeah, I see a lot of good points in there.

We're pretty adamant that people

not have a side hustle.

And, you know, in our employment

agreement, it's very clear in there.

And I think that the reasoning, the heart behind

the decision is as important as the decision itself.

And for me, the heart behind our stance on people not

having a side hustle is a we want your best. Yep.

And if you're splitting your time, you're probably not

going to be able to give us your best.

And the other thing too is we want

people to be engaged in their personal life.

We want them to be engaged with their family,

with their kids, with their friends, with their community.

And if you're burning the candle at

both ends with work, that's not sustainable.

Not for very long.

And I think it's just a

different way of thinking about it.

The way I try to reframe that is.

How about an Airbnb?

Somebody had an Airbnb on the side.

Is that a side hustle?

No, but it is a.

It's a whole other p and l, technically.

And then they'll say, my boss, you know, if he

finds out I have a set hustle, it's bad.

Does your boss have a lake house?

I guarantee you having a lake house is more

distracting than your five hour week side hustle because

that boat, it takes a crap that, whatever, that

tree that fell in the house, that's more distracting

to that person than your side hustle of helping

me do a cash flow projection.

Because you're a badass CFO, what you can

do in 3 hours is way less distracting

than that lake house that that partner has.

And so I just like reframing and

challenging that side hustle perspective because having

a kid is super distracting.

And being there at 04:00 and being a coach,

like, you know, me and my wife make promises

that we should never, ever coach a team because

this is like not good with our personalities, because

we're all in and it is a major destruction.

All that to say, like, I think I've just gotten.

Not that it's a good thing

but anyways, it's a good conversation. Yeah.

So, looking back on the last couple of

years, is there anything you would do different?

Not do fixed fee.

So never do fixed fee.

Try your best, you know, take ride or die approaches.

Call a spade a spade when you make a mistake.

Steak and eat it.

But no, like most of the stuff, I wouldn't do

differently in the sense that, once again, I steal a

lot from Marc Andreessen or other dead british people when

I think of things or regurgitate stuff.

But the best entrepreneurs probably don't look for advice

because they have to learn on their own.

So lately a couple of people have said,

hey, I'm thinking about starting my own thing.

What advice would you give me?

And I just say, startups are spiritual and

don't think it's blocking and tackling and straightforward.

It's actually a soul crushing or soul soul invigorating

experience like you are signing up for that.

It's absolutely exposing.

The only thing I would change would be going

in a little bit more spiritually minded, a little

bit more thick skinned, but with a soft heart.

I went in a little bit machismo, a little

bit guns ablazing, a little bit like that.

I didn't take my spiritual life

as serious as I should have.

And unfortunately, they say pain is God's megaphone.

And that can come in cancer.

It can come in a bad balance sheet.

We know, who's to say what pain is for, you know,

certain individuals, and I would just say anybody looking to start

their own thing, realize that this is far more of a

spiritual experience than it is a work experience.

Do you think everybody should be an entrepreneur?

No, I think it's completely stupid.

It is a bad math formula by and

large, based on percentages and blah, blah, blah.

And once again, like, if I reframe what entrepreneur

or entrepreneur should be, like, maybe a lot of

people should reframe how they think about their w

two job and they should have one customer and

that should be their employer.

I think everybody should reframe how they do work. Yes.

Should they be entrepreneurial in how

they go to their day job? Yes.

Should they be an entrepreneur where they have to

be the throat to choke, be the HR team,

be the salesperson, be the marketing, be the client

triage, try to act like, you know what development

means or how to make a widget?

I mean, honestly, it's not for the faint of

heart, but I think everybody can do it.

Should everybody do it?

Absolutely not.

And not because I'm anti whatever.

I just think most people aren't cut

out for the pain and suffering that.

I don't know who said it, but entrepreneurship's

like chewing glass and you begin to like

the taste of your own blood.

Elon Musk I saw an interview in the last

couple of weeks where he talked about entrepreneurship is

like chewing glass and staring into the abyss.

And I wont even try to recap his story behind it,

but I think hes right in a lot of respects. Yeah.

Has your day to day changed much since day one

to now, or does it look pretty much the same?

So anyone who knows me knows I walk a

lot, like six to 10 miles a day.

And I walk the same amount of

mileage now as I did then.

It's just now I have people to call and

emails to respond to or voice text to do.

But I've kind of committed to once you've seen my face

a couple times, you don't need to see my face.

Another zoom call.

And so I try to keep walking

as a paramount thing for me.

I stopped golfing a couple years ago because of

various reasons, but I want to walk every day,

so that is still the same as day one.

My emails boxes are more full, so that's different.

So I spent a lot more time corresponding.

I do have to go to more meetings,

but by and large, it's the same.

Honestly, it's I'm in every nook and cranny

of my business and my balance sheet.

But I do have, like, I

have a finance person named Suzanne. She's amazing.

I've known her for a long time.

I trust her literally with my Social Security

number, my bank account, all the things.

But now I have her to help me close

the books every month and, you know, nag me

and chase me down for the stupid stuff I've

done or the types of clients I've taken on.

So what I love about growing a business is that

you get to hire really smart people to go do

things you suck at, and people think, oh, bigger.

And this, it's like running a bigger company

is actually easier than a smaller company.

I've run a 150 plus person team and made

a lot of money and a lot of profitability.

You never have more fun when

you're solving problems at scale.

It's that in between pubescent years that

are the hardest, and that's the phase

I'm in right now where I don't.

I can't go hire smart people for every odds and ends.

So I very much look like day one right now.

I'm still in the nooks and

crannies of problems all the time.

I can't throw a grenade over a fence and trust

somebody's going to jump on it or somebody dismantle it.

What do you enjoy the most today?

My two words in life is

commissioning wins and just seeing wins.

Wins for their customers, wins for my clients, wins of,

hey, I don't have to spend 16 hours importing an

excel spreadsheet and mapping the fields and cleaning data.

This tool does it in two minutes.

Like, this changes my life.

Now I can get to my kids soccer game.

Now I can not burn the candle on both ends.

Like, that's the thing I enjoy the most.

Money, to me, is always a byproduct of finding wins.

If you just find wins, money

will come and sort itself out.

And sure, you shouldn't be taken advantage of.

You know, you need to learn how to the market

mechanism of pricing wins and what that revenue is.

But chasing wins and having them, like, things

happen on the field and people being impacted

by that, what do you enjoy the least?

Causing somebody to lose because of some bet

you convinced them to make didn't work out

the way you thought it was going to.

Reality set in and you oversold,

maybe a promise or something.

And so I was seeing, like, where I have a

direct impact on somebody losing, maybe the inning, or the

analogy going, you know, the week of time, or they

have to redo a client work because of, you know,

whatever process you told me to do didn't work, Roy,

and wasted $37,000 of development.

And not only that, we wasted three months of time.

That's the biggest loss.

Yeah, that's the worst part.

And those experiences are more internal than external.

Or both.

No, they're completely like, egg on your face external.

Hard to somebody explain.

Like, I've had people get on webinars with me

and say, hey, this guy we brought on is

going to help us solve our problems.

And then six months later, they still have

those same problems, like that soul killing degree.

But it's also, I'm a big guy who,

like, announces what we're going to do.

I say the goals out loud, and I

was known for this at my last companies.

It's like, if we're not 7% more efficient,

I'm firing myself on next year's town hall.

Because what's the point of me

if we don't get more efficient?

Or you, the manager, the only reason you should

have managers, because everybody's going to get better.

There's no other point to have management.

So if I'm the leader guy and I can't actually turn

on a server or code anything, what am I good for?

Unless we're, you know, have this concept

of, like, providing shade to your team.

Like, if you ever try doing, like, manual labor

in the sun, like, you can last very little,

but if you're in the shade, you can last

a long time, and it's the same temperature outside.

It's just whether or not you're keeping the

sun off, your employees backs your team's back.

Like, a leaders role is to provide shade for their

team so they can have a great work environment.

And so what's soul crushing? The.

My least favorite thing is somebody getting beat down.

Thinking about the time at the PE

firm, sounds like it was really difficult.

It wasn't what you expected it to be.

I think about times in my career where I've been

in jobs that I just being real blunt, just hated.

Just absolutely hated.

Would you go back and do that again

for the experience that you gained from it?

No, I would have started firm studio

when I should have started that.

To be honest, as much as I hated being in

the moment when I was in these jobs that I

hated, I looked back and I just learned so much.

And I don't think I would be where I am today.

I wouldn't have learned what I needed to

learn to do what I'm doing today if

it hadn't been for those experiences.

Did you have any of those kinds of takeaways?

Yeah, that was the previous thing. 14 years.

I should have punched out countless times.

I could have made more money.

It would have been way less tears and literally fetal

position underneath my desk moments had a few of those.

Staying was the right decision, and

learning through that staying was paramount.

However, the reality, like I said at that coffee shop I worked

at, I guess I did get a job out of that.

So, in hindsight, but literally, that job

made me dumber every day because their

processes were so backwards and it soiled.

It made me a more negative person. Right.

So I would say if your jobs ever

a tough chapter, but it is questioning your

work ethic or it's not questioning your ethic.

It's like if you're at risk of losing your

soul, then it's probably not worth learning through.

I'd say.

So if you're ever asked to be unethical,

I would say bounce the minute it happens.

And that job wasn't that.

It was more so just like, literally, you can

do nothing to help your team or your customers.

Have fun. Like, go.

It's like, wait, what?

There was nothing to learn there, to be honest.

All right, thinking ahead, I

always ask people what's next.

But you said you can only think about

three to five things at a time. Yep.

What are the next three to five things on your list?

Grow relationship with my dev team

that's based out of South America.

That's the most important things.

Second is to get one of our products out the door.

We're in like the final six week sprint

of company called share via sharevia.com dot.

Getting that out the door, raising money for a

new time of billing software called modern PM.

Not many people know about that, but we

have a few customers that have signed up

to be both investors and customers.

Give my team shade and figure out what they need.

So always be asking them.

And then cut.

Burn is number five all the time.

Those are the five things in my current five list.

Each one of those things are 17 or 27 things. Right.

But those are my five things that

I try to focus on every day.

Is there anything we didn't get into

that you would want to share?

I mean, we talked on startups or spiritual and

reframing some work ethic stuff, but I mean, no,

I'm appreciative of the conversation for sure.

I think at the end of the day, understanding

that the reason work is hard is because you're

exposed to other people's wills, and you're exposed as

the selfish person you are when you get married,

for example, or when you have kids.

Same thing goes for work.

And the reality is it's everybody's

got their own will and understanding.

That's the game you're playing.

And that's not work.

It's the mingling of souls.

And every soul is eternal, and every soul has worth

levels the playing field to where you will never work

for another person or no one will work for you.

It's a mingling of souls and wills that

have their own desires and wants and needs

and caveats and downsides and hang ups.

I think framing work as a place where that happens

at scale is the right way to approach work.

And as an entrepreneur, I think you have to have that

mindset or you're going to literally think everybody's out to get

you and you are out to slash throats and go at

other people, because it's a zero sum game.

And the reality is even your competitors have kids.

And if you want ill will on your competitors, which

I have, I've hired private investigators to go after my

competitors owners like I knew the rap sheets of people.

Like, I was that cutthroat at one point in my career.

And now it's not good.

That's not a good place to be in.

That's not a good mental model.

That's not a good heuristic.

And so I think understanding the former perspective of

souls and work being the place where that goes

down is the right way to do it.

So that's the only thing I've heard.

Roy, thanks for sharing your story. Great time. Scott.

That was Roy Keeley, founder of firm studio.

To learn more, visit Firmstudio IO.

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