In The Thick of It

I think that your culture is a direct reflection of the

leadership and who they are and who they aspire to be.

And as you surround yourself and build out your leadership

team, make sure that you are bringing on people whose

values match your own, because it's going to be really

hard for your values as the founder to shine through

if the people who you're bringing on, if their values

are in conflict with yours.

Welcome to In The Thick of It.

I'm your host, Scott Hollrah.

From the very beginning of this

podcast, our mission has been to

inspire and encourage current future entrepreneurs.

We do that by telling the stories of people

who are still In The Thick of It.

Today, the tables are turned and I

am sitting in the hot seat.

I hope you learned something.

I hope you're inspired, and I hope you're encouraged.

Welcome to In The Thick of It.

It's good to be here.

I know you traveled far for this episode. I did.

Well, I'm sitting in the opposite seat

from where the host normally sits. Yeah.

Well, I've heard your story a handful of

times and probably not in the level of

detail that you've gone with other guests.

So I would venture a guess that our

listeners have this whole time been wondering who

is on the other side of that microphone?

What is Scott's founder story?

So, thanks for letting us turn the tables

on you and ask you all the questions

you've been asking other fellow founders.

I'm excited to do it, and this is kind of weird

since I've been doing this podcast for a while now, but

I'm actually kind of nervous sitting in this chair.

Well, now you know how it feels. Yeah.

Well, let's get started how you usually do.

Let's take it way back.

Wind the clock way back.

What was your childhood like growing?

Oh, the way you ask.

So I grew up here in the Dallas-Fort Worth area.

In fact, the house that I spent most of

my growing up with is probably not even 3

4 miles from where we're sitting right now.

Our family was middle class.

We always had everything that we needed

and a lot of what we wanted.

But times were also kind of tough.

As a kid, we went through some tough financial

times and learned a lot about hard work.

Through that I can remember as a kid, there was

a period where my dad worked two jobs to make

sure that we had everything that we needed.

And so even today, that's something I think about and a

just have a ton of gratitude for my parents and my

dad in particular, who really went above and beyond to make

sure that we had everything that we needed.

Grew up playing baseball and basketball was never really good,

but did it, enjoyed it a little bit later.

Got into playing roller hockey when I was

probably in, like, fourth or fifth grade, the

very first mighty Ducks movie came out.

Yeah, the flying v.

And hockey actually kind of started taking off

in Texas, and so every kid in my

neighborhood had rollerblades on a hockey stick.

And, man, for the longest time, every day

after school and throughout the summers, we would

have hockey games in my driveway.

Fast forward a few years.

Had this desire to play Ice hockey young, but

being in Dallas, there were a couple of rinks.

There wasn't a ton of opportunity to do that.

When I was 13, we moved from here to the

suburbs of Minneapolis, and, boy, it was a big change.

I can only imagine.

And so when you say from here, you

were in Texas, what part of Texas?

Here in the Dallas area.

Because didn't you also spend some time in Austin?

Well, so we lasted three years in the cold

in Minnesota, and we moved down to Austin after

that, so finished up high school down there.

But Minnesota was an interesting time.

Moving is hard, no matter what.

Moving as an adolescent is particularly trying.

And moved in middle school.

Middle school kids are mean and terrible, and I've

got two in middle school right now, and so

I'm getting to see it again through their eyes.

Probably didn't help myself a lot on my

very first day of school, which, the year

that we moved to Minnesota was the year

that the Minnesota North Stars moved to Dallas.

Before I knew that we were moving, I

got a Dallas stars jersey, a hockey jersey.

I decided to wear that on my

first day at my new school.

And let's just say that didn't help me make friends.

You didn't win that popularity. I did nothing.

I mean, I was never a popular kid anyway,

but maybe that was the beginning of the end

for me when it came to popularity. But, yeah.

So, lived in Minnesota for about three years, and by the

time we moved to Austin, I didn't want to leave.

I'd come to really love it up there.

I was playing hockey. I was snowboarding.

I finally had my friend group, and once I kind of

felt settled, it was like it was time to move.

Yeah, moved down to Austin,

finished up high school there.

And I didn't know it at the

time, but I learned a lot of.

About resilience in that, and I learned a lot about being

outgoing and willing to put yourself out there and kind of

had this understanding that if you want to meet people, if

you want to make friends, if you want to make connections,

you got to be the one to initiate, and you got

to be the one that's willing to stick your hand out

and say, hey, man, I'm Scott, nice to meet you, and

strike up a conversation.

And through that, that set me up for

a good college experience and on into life.

Yeah, there's kind of two key themes in that.

You mentioned sticking your hand

out and introducing yourself.

There's a level of confidence that you probably had to

learn in that, but then also adaptability and being able

to be fluid in those kinds of interactions.

Yeah, without a doubt.

So before you move on to college,

let's talk about you as a student.

Did you enjoy school?

Did you do well in school?

I can remember really young,

like first grade, second grade.

I really like school.

I was into it.

I think I wanted to be smart.

And as school went on, I enjoyed it less and less.

There were probably points that I

really, really didn't like it.

I would say that generally speaking,

though, I was pretty neutral.

I was an A/B student.

I definitely drives me nuts.

One of my kids won't turn in assignments, and,

oh, I swear we didn't have to do it

as a kid, that was never acceptable.

Not turning in an assignment on

time, that was never acceptable.

I may not have gotten a great grade, but

I did it and I turned it in.

So, yeah, school was fine.

I wasn't an excellent student.

I wasn't a terrible student.

I was somewhere in the middle.

And going into college, did you know where you

wanted to go and what you wanted to study?

Maybe school was a means to an end to getting

there, but where did you end up going on?

I always knew I would go to college, but

where I would go was really something that I

hadn't put a lot of thought into.

Had we not moved from Minnesota, probably would

have gone to U of M in Minneapolis

just because that's what pretty much everybody did.

You must not have hated the cold that bad then.

Well, and like I said, when we

lived there, I didn't want to leave.

And today, by the way, you could not

pay me enough money to live in Minnesota.

Like there is not enough money on the planet.

You'll take the hot Texas.

I will take over the cold winters.

I will gladly take my 110 degrees August

days over the 20/30 below in Minnesota.

When we got down to Austin, though,

I knew I was going to college.

Didn't really think a whole lot about where and

my childhood best friend from growing up in Dallas.

We stayed close all the way through and ended

up being roommates in college at our freshman year.

And his mom had really taken the charge and led

the charge and took him on all these campus tours.

And he kind of got it narrowed down

to a couple of places that he liked.

I do remember them coming down one

time and we toured ut Austin together.

Well, he really loved A&M.

That's where he wanted to go.

That was his top choice.

And even though my grandfather, my

mom's dad, had gone to A&M.

I really didn't know much about it.

I knew the Aggie jokes, but I

didn't really know much about A&M.

And I can distinctly remember one morning in the

summer, I think it was between my junior and

senior year, my budy had come down, stayed with

us in Austin for a week or so.

And on Saturday morning, we got up

early and drove over to College Station.

And I can remember getting in the car being like,

I do not want to go on this ride. I was tired.

Like, that's what it was. I didn't want to get up.

I didn't want to go do this.

Once we set foot on campus, I fell

in love pretty much immediately with A&M.

And knew without a doubt that that

was where I wanted to go.

And by the grace of God and a

recommendation letter from somebody who probably had donated

a lot of money, miraculously, I got in.

There's no way I could have got into Texas A&M.

Today, certainly not the business school.

And even if I'd applied a year later,

I don't think I could have got in.

I know that's a big part of your story,

and you have a lot of pride in that.

And I'd like to circle back on some of the lessons

learned, just even in the way of culture at A7M.

And how you've applied that to the business.

But we'll get to that later.

So you go to A&M. What did you end up?

You mentioned business school. Yeah.

So I got into the business school right out of

the gate, and I didn't realize how much of a.

I'm not going to say how big of a

deal it was because I shouldn't have got in.

I didn't realize how much of a blessing it was that I

got in right out of the gate and didn't have to get

on the waiting list to get into the business school.

So my degree was in marketing, and when

I was in school, I kind of thought

that I wanted to go into advertising.

My dream job after getting out would have

been to go to one of two ad

agencies, one down in Austin called GSDNM.

I had a friend from high school who was friends

with the Gersich family, which is the G and GSDNM.

And she worked in HR and took

me for a tour around the building.

And, oh, my gosh, I just fell in love.

Like, it is the most creative, mean,

it's just the most visually appealing thing.

And there's these jokes that are in the walls, not

in words, but in how they present this idea.

And it was so cool, so inspiring.

And then the other firm that I was interested in

was Richards group that's in Dallas, and never actually got

to go visit, but knew people who had been, and

the stories they came back with and talked about culture,

how they talked about the culture there.

It got me really excited.

And anyway, so that's kind of what I wanted to

do, and it didn't end up working out that way.

And I'll maybe talk a little bit

more about that in a minute.

But my time at A&M

was incredibly, incredibly formative.

I've said this in other interviews when interviewing other

aggies, but I learned way more outside of the

classroom than I did in the classroom.

And that's not to diminish the value of the education,

but one of the things that a M is big

on is they talk about the other education.

And when I was a student, there

were probably thousands of student organizations.

And today, it wouldn't surprise me if

there's tens of thousands of student organizations.

And there was this mentality in the student body

that if you somehow couldn't find a group that

you were interested in being a part of, the

infrastructure was there, the support was there for you

to start something, and it was encouraged.

And so I was involved in all kinds

of different things when I was in school.

And I remember at one point thinking, man, if I

could just take a semester and just don't take any

classes, but just be involved in different organizations and do

these things, that's what I want to do.

I was a part of campaigns for different student

body offices for yell eaters and student body presidents.

And I was involved in a group called

Aggie Men's Club, and was a non Greek,

faith based fraternal organization, and got to have

a few different leadership positions there.

And as a 21 year old, I'm responsible

for signing contracts for hotels and venues, and

catering and entertainment for a party, a formal

event that we did outside of town.

And I'm spending, I don't know, 30,

$40,000 as a 2021 year old.

And, I mean, the things that

I learned through that were invaluable.

So absolutely treasured my time at a m.

Made lifelong friends that I'm still

in regular contact with today.

And, yeah, just learned a ton just

being a part of that community. Yeah.

And it extends well beyond, as

you said, you're still connected to.

But that aggie network is so strong, it's incredible.

I heard stories. So at a. M.

The Aggie ring is a big deal.

And a lot of schools have a school ring,

but a lot of them, they can also be.

You kind of customize it, kind

of like a high school ring. You know, you want.

I want this on the side and this here.

And I want this top.

And the aggie ring is the same, and it

has been for not since the very beginning.

It went through a couple of iterations, but, I

don't know, call it 100 and 2130 years.

It's been the same ring, and it's very recognizable.

And I've been.

Remember one of the coolest experiences.

My wife and I, we'd been married a

few years, and we got engaged in Italy.

And we promised ourselves that before we started a family, we

were going to go back to Italy and do a trip.

Not like college kids.

And we were doing this bike tour through

the hills of Tuscany, which was amazing.

Highly recommend it.

As we're about to start the tour, I look

over and this hand that's gripping the bike next

to me, there's that unmistakable Aggie ring.

And here we are, a half a world away from

home, and instantly we had a connection with this guy.

And so we get to talking.

I've been on airplanes.

I've been at restaurants in random places.

I've been on trains.

I've been in all kinds of

different places, far, far from Texas.

Obviously, there's a huge concentration of aggies

here, but I've been all over the

place, and immediately I've got a conversation.

I've got.

A relationship is too strong of a

word, but we've got a connection.

We've got something to talk about.

We've got some common ground. Absolutely.

So you mentioned you and your

wife getting engaged in Italy.

And did you study abroad there? We did. Okay.

Tell us about how you met your wife and what

led into your going abroad, and I'd love to hear

some more about what you learned in that experience.

So my wife and I, we ran in the same circles.

The sorority that she was a part of, and the

group, the men's group that I was a part of.

Let's just say that there are a lot

of marriages that came from those circles.

And so we always kind of knew who each other were.

And at one point, I guess a friend had

told her that I was a safe date.

In college, you've got these date parties

and crush parties and things like that.

As she tells the story, she knew she was going

to marry me the first time she saw me, which.

Anyway, so she actually asked me to a date

party at the end of our sophomore year.

And I was really excited because I didn't

think I ever had a chance with her.

She was so far out of my league.

In fact, I told her this a week or

two ago, reminded her, I told her all the

time, you were so far out of my league.

Like, I couldn't believe that you called

me to go to a date party.

Anyway, so we did that date party.

We went on a couple of dates, and for

whatever reason, I don't know, timing just wasn't right.

It kind of fizzled, and I'd always wish

that I'd given a little bit longer.

And so a year later, at the start of our,

I guess our senior year, I called her up.

We went on another date.

And on our 2nd, 3rd date, on a whim, we

decided to go down to Houston and get dessert.

Neither of us were from Houston.

Neither of us had spent much time in Houston.

But somehow I knew how to get

to this one place, Crescent City beignets.

Who knows if it's even still

there, knew how to get there.

And on our way back, we picked the wrong

gas station and we got carjacked at gunpoint.

And so when you go through an experience

like that, that's fairly traumatic with another person,

that's the only other person that can relate

to you with that experience.

And our relationship went from, I'm not going

to say zero, but went from 10 miles

an hour to 100 miles an hour, pretty

much overnight for months and months and months.

I don't know that there was a day

that we didn't see each other every day.

And so, anyway, that was a huge catalyst in our

relationship and mentioned this study abroad trip in Italy, probably,

I don't know, three, four weeks before we left.

I knew she was the one.

And so friend's dad was a jeweler and got him

to make the ring and talked to her mom.

Anyway, I proposed to her on a beach on the island

of Elba in Italy, which is where Napoleon was exiled to.

The fortress is right on the water.

And it was, I don't know, a couple hundred

yards behind us when I proposed to her.

As an aside, if you ever get word that I'm going to

be exiled, if you'll just put in a word that that's where

I'd like to be sent, I'd be okay with that.

For exile. Noted. Noted.

Let's hope it doesn't come to that.

But agreed. Yeah.

Also, side note.

Sounds like a pretty epic proposal. Indeed.

Now I'm getting real personal.

I had never actually said the words I

love you to her until that moment.

And I had decided many years before that I wasn't

going to tell anybody that I loved him until I

proposed and didn't bother to tell anybody that.

But anyway, have to take your word for it, I guess.

So.

She was beyond shocked, and obviously she said yes.

And we're actually about to celebrate

our 20th year of marriage.

Congratulations. That's amazing.

And something I hope, I think, we all aspire to.

So did you go study abroad together? Yeah. Funny thing.

So this trip, we had both decided, independent of

one another, while we weren't dating, that we were

both going to go on this trip.

And so it's not like we started dating

and planned like, hey, let's do this together.

In fact, that might have been a dangerous thing to do.

But, yeah, we both.

When we started dating again that second

time around, it was like, yeah, I'm

planning to go to Italy this summer. Oh, me too.

Oh, are you going on? Yeah, I'm going on. Oh, my gosh.

So, worked out great.

And Italy is a very special place to us. Absolutely.

The stars aligned on that one. They did. Okay.

So is there anything that you learned during

that trip that kind of changed your perspective

or that you've taken with you into kind

of your post college and working career?

I wish I could say that there was

a lot of knowledge gained on that trip.

I was a marketing major.

I was in business school.

We're taking art and architecture classes.

And don't get me wrong, it was awesome.

We got to see beautiful, beautiful things, whether

it was sculptures or paintings or these incredible

buildings that have been there for hundreds, if

not thousands of years, that was amazing.

But it was a boondoggle.

I got humanity's credit.

I needed it, and I got to go to Italy.

What it did teach me, though, was

it started the travel bug for me.

And I know it's cliche. Oh, I love to travel.

No, we love to travel.

And I think that, for me, that really,

really kicked off that interest and excitement I

mentioned as a kid, we went through some

challenging financial times as a kid.

And so going to Italy, that was never even something

I could conceive that I would get to do.

And thankfully, my parents were in a position by the time

college came around that I got to go do that.

So, yeah, I think my love

for travel really got ignited there.

So you come back to Texas. What's next?

So, graduated in December of 2003.

And when I graduated, like I said earlier, my

dream was to go to a big ad agency.

And not too long before I graduated, just over two

years, we had this little thing called 911, and the

economy hadn't fully returned from 911 by the time I

got out, and the big agencies really weren't hiring.

I can think of a couple of friends that got hired

on, but there wasn't a lot of activity there at the

time, and ended up a professor that I worked for, introduced

me to somebody, and that led to my very first job.

I worked for an aviation services company

based in Bryan, Texas, of all places.

Bryan is right next to College Station, where a m is.

It's much closer than talking about Dallas Fort Worth.

Like, they're literally right next to each

other, and they're kind of interdependent.

And never in a million years did I think I would

stay in Bryan College station after I graduated from school.

But that's how things worked out.

In fact, I can remember as, like, a

freshman or a sophomore driving around town with

a friend who was from another suburban area.

I finished high school in the suburbs of Austin.

So growing up was pretty similar, being suburban kids.

And they made the comment, as we're

driving around town looking at houses and

people live like, people grow up here.

It's not just a place where college kids

go and go to school and leave. People live here.

Could you imagine?

I was like, no way.

And then fast forward four years,

and there I was, living there.

That's one thing that I've learned.

This show isn't about me.

But never say never.

Never say never, indeed.

Okay, so you graduate, you go on to work for

this aviation services company, and what were you doing?

Is this entry level marketing position? Yeah.

So my title was marketing manager.

And time is really good for a

lot of things, and time gives perspective.

And at the time, when I was there at 22, I

didn't understand the value of the experience that I was getting.

I was still kind of hung up on this

idea that I wanted to go work for this

big agency, and I was also making nothing.

My first job, I made $38,000 a year, and

I had this mental hang up, like, huge mental

hang up that I didn't even make 40 grand.

Like, that $2,000 was like, that was a big deal.

Not so much because of the money, but because

of that hurdle that that next 10,000 mark meant.

So I was a one man marketing department.

The company really had never

had a marketing department.

And as a result, I got to do almost everything there

was to do in the world of B two B marketing.

I got to buy media, I got to work with creatives.

I remember one of the most fun things

I did that whole time I was there.

I ran a photo shoot and I hired photographers and

models, and it was just a really cool experience.

I put on events and I really, truly got

to do almost everything that a person gets to

do in a b two B marketing role.

And again, I didn't understand the value

of the experience that I was getting.

And I really struggled there, too, because I didn't know

what I was doing and I didn't really have anybody

to guide me, not in that area of expertise, anyway.

I was going to ask them.

Never having a formal marketing function, you being the first

marketing hire, did you have a mentor or coach of

sorts that empowered you to try these new things?

Or would you say that was an innate quality about you?

The guy that introduced me into the company had

a marketing agency of his own, and he had

done this big branding project, and the end of

his branding project was, here's the Playbook.

You guys go hire somebody to run the playbook, and I

will work with them and help them along the way.

And got the playbook, but I will help them

along the way, didn't really come to fruition.

And my boss, who wasn't a marketing person, I

don't think I, again, things that you look back

and go, oh, that's what was going on there.

He really did try to mentor me from a business

standpoint, from, hey, you're really young and let me kind

of help you with life kind of a standpoint, but

not so much from a marketing standpoint.

And so, to his credit, looking back, I think he

gave me a pretty broad amount of autonomy and gave

me room to run and make mistakes, but I don't

think I fully appreciated it at the time.

So where did you go on to next?

So I had a lot of struggles in that

job, and another one was just the location.

All of our friends had gone off to.

Dallas, Austin, Houston, San Antonio.

We were the only ones that stayed.

Were you and Elisa married by this point? Yeah.

So we got married a few months after we graduated, and

I was 22 when we got married, so very young, and

I wouldn't change that for anything, by the way.

So we were married.

And even before I took that job, I was really

struggling with, okay, what am I going to do?

What am I going to do?

I'm not getting this dream job.

And since we were getting married, moving home and living

with mom and dad, that wasn't going to happen.

So had to do something.

And toward the end of my time with this

company, I was there for right about a year.

They had taken on a bunch of venture

capital, and in the time I was there,

I learned three things about VC firms.

They want their money back.

They want their money back in

very, very high return very quickly.

And so our company, we were making money, we were profitable, but

we were a ten and they wanted us to be a 14.

And they came in, they brought a consultant in.

You remember the movie office space?

So there's the two bobs, and

they have that conference room interview.

So what is it you would say you do here?

I literally had that meeting.

There was only one Bob, and his name wasn't

Bob, but I literally had the so tell me

what it is you do here meeting.

And they ended up cutting probably half

the staff that was at headquarters.

And I guess, thankfully, I was fortunate that I wasn't

part of the cuts, but it didn't feel good and

it wasn't where I wanted to be, didn't feel safe.

And so called up one of my roommates, who I'd

actually interviewed with his boss before taking this job, and

ended up going the other route and ended up as

a mortgage loan officer with Chase for two years.

And again, hindsight, looking back, like you

realize now there's a great learning opportunity.

But I tell you what, I knew in the first two

weeks, if not the first 2 hours, that being in the

mortgage business was not what I wanted to do.

But again, I learned so much.

I learned about sales.

That's where I learned my first learnings about sales.

But it's also helped me personally in big, big ways.

As we've bought homes and even in the business,

as we've gone through buying a building and other

financial kinds of things, it gave me a good

understanding of how the loan process works, how underwriting

works, what are they looking for?

And there was a ton of value in that.

I think sometimes, well, I definitely have a

stance on even the jobs that you quickly

realize it's not something you want to do.

That experience is still so valuable.

It's that process of.

Now, I know you've tried things, and we'll get into

your perspective and some of the challenges maybe you've encountered

in the hiring process as a business owner.

But I know when I've been in a position of

being able to hire, if I see a resume where

there's many multiple job hops, it to me begs more

of a question of what did you learn about it?

That being able to opt out, maybe even quickly from

a time perspective, to be self aware that this may

not be a place where I can excel or a

job that I can be truly bought into.

There's value in that.

Obviously, you got to dig a note a little

bit further, but those experiences are valuable, too.

Yeah, I was very aware of the fact that if I were

to leave that too quickly, that it would look very much like

I was a job hopper, and I certainly didn't want that.

And as much as I struggled through my time there, I

knew that I needed to stick it out long enough to

really confirm that I didn't want to do it.

But also, I had this mental goal

is probably too strong of a word.

In fact, it was more of a hurdle than anything.

It was, I need to be here

at least two years for my resume.

And so I was actually there just right around a little over

two years, and went on to work in a company that kind

of set me on the path for what I'm doing today.

A little bit different, but really

kind of set the stage.

So went to work for a company called Mis Group,

and we were a top reseller for Sage Software, who

is very relevant to what we do today.

We were their top reseller in North

America, and they were growing like crazy

through acquisition and came in that role.

It's my first B two B sales role.

I was selling accounting, project management, and

estimating software for the construction industry and

a little bit in real estate.

And when I came into that company,

I was introduced there by my dad.

I should have actually probably talked a

little bit more about my dad.

Dad's been in this business, b two

B software, pretty much his whole career.

And he made some introductions for me to go

interview at this place called Mis group and the

reputation that they had built and kind of the

story that they had behind them.

I was just so, so excited to come into this place.

And I remember in my interview with, they had

a separate president and CEO, two separate people.

And in my final interview with them, I said, hey, guys,

I hope that this is received well, but someday I hope

that I'm sitting in one of your chairs, and I think

they chuckled and I think that they were more encouraged by

that than they were put off by that.

And anyway, ended up getting the job there.

And, oh, my gosh, I loved it.

I finally felt like I was doing

what I was supposed to be.

I was having success.

I built a good reputation inside the firm and got

a lot of encouragement, got a lot of accolades.

And my boss was just fantastic.

Much like that first boss.

He gave me room to run.

He gave me grace when I made mistakes.

I can remember, man, oh, my gosh, you've got

a great story about making mistakes in marketing.

Even though my role was really sales, the marketing

thing was in me, and I still wanted to

be involved in it as much as I can.

And somehow, I guess I conned them into giving

me access to our mass email distribution system.

And I sent out an email to, I'm going to

get the details wrong, but it was either, like, I

sent the wrong information out three separate times and then

had to send the we made a mistake email. Right.

And, oh, my.

Like, I can remember going into his office, tail

between my legs, just not quivering, but like, oh,

I know, I've messed up so bad.

How is Tom going to respond?

And he was just the kindest, gentlest man,

and he said, these are the kind of

mistakes that you don't make twice.

I trust that you're going to learn from it. Word.

And that was huge for me, and

it helped my confidence a lot.

And it was a great lesson to see him give

me that much grace, because he didn't have to.

And he did.

Yeah, absolutely.

Yeah.

I've got a story that's for another day, but

I can definitely feel your pain on that one.

It is one of those things that you don't do again.

And being shown the grace, I'm

sure you've carried that into.

I know you've carried that into your role because it

was not but a few weeks into my role at

Venn that I believe I made some similar mistake, unknowingly

hitting some customer list I've forgotten about.

So that one wasn't as bad as the one I told you about.

You did spill a beer on my

laptop on your first Friday or something.

Sure did. Still here, guys?

Still here, still here.

Laptop still work?

It did. Okay.

So you finally felt like you were home,

like you had a place, you were thriving.

How long were you there?

Well, not as long as I wanted to be, honestly.

And even today, if things had worked out differently at that

company, I think I'd still be there and hopefully getting closer

to that chair that I wanted to be in.

So it's probably year and a half after I started.

You could tell that things were not good.

So I started there, I think in December

of 6, January of seven, something like that.

And we all know what happened in the

eight nine time frame financial crisis and construction

and real estate were particularly hard hit.

And there was a group that was

kind of attached to my group that

was heavily focused on production, home builders.

I wasn't involved in that part of the business, but

it was a big part of our revenue stream and

they had put a ton of money into that group.

And I mean, that just cratered.

And so little by little, you could tell that

things were not going well in the firm.

Started with stuff disappearing from the break room, and

hey, we're not doing our 401K match anymore.

And then there were a few rounds of layoffs.

I can remember one day coming

in and my key didn't work.

And I thought, oh my gosh, did they not tell me?

And it turns out that the lock

was just really finicky that day.

But fast forward.

And actually, in this time, again, I love the company,

I love the people, and I wanted to do everything

I possibly could to try to keep things going.

And so I was getting into the office at 6630 in

the morning, and I was working until 6630 at night.

And later in this time frame, my wife was pregnant

with her first child, and I knew her plan.

She had told me when we were dating, she had

told me before marriage was even talked about, and we

didn't talk about marriage until I actually proposed.

But she casually mentioned to me one day, hey, just

so you know, when I have a family, someday, I'm

going to stay home and take care of the kids.

And I was like, oh, good to know.

Well, so my wife is pregnant.

She was a teacher at the time, but I knew that once

our son was born that she wasn't going back to work.

And here I am doing everything, trying to

do my part to keep this company going.

There was this deli in our building, and I

couldn't tell you the people's names now, but we

were definitely on a first name basis.

And I'd be in the car at 545 and I'd call

and say, hey, it's Scott, can you get my breakfast ready?

And I'd walk in, I'd grab my breakfast burrito and I'd

eat it on my way up the stairs into my office.

And so I was really committed.

And I just had so much angst.

I knew, this isn't good.

It's not looking good.

And our oldest son was born on April 30.

And over 4 July weekend, we'd gone down to Austin.

My parents were still down there.

They had this big party.

And I get an email, company wide email,

that says, cancel all your meetings Monday morning.

Mandatory company wide meeting.

Need to be there.

Well, we all knew what that was over the holiday.

Yeah, that's one way to not do comms, folks.

Well, it didn't really matter when they did it.

So we show up that Monday morning, and it

was what we'd been expecting for a long time.

They said, hey, the company is done.

We're locking the doors behind you.

Get your stuff.

Oh, by the way, since there is

no entity, there is no cobra.

And it was crazy.

And after that meeting was done, wonderful lady

named Carrie Schoop came up to me.

She was heavily involved in the group that I was in.

I had a ton of interaction with her.

She was just wonderful, wonderful lady.

And she came up to me.

She know I just had my first kid.

And she comes up and she

goes, Scott, are you doing okay?

You must be panicked right now.

New baby at home.

And I said, carrie, honestly, I cannot tell

you how good I feel right now.

I feel like I have just been this big ball of

angst and worry and anxiety for almost a year now.

And now that the band aids ripped off,

I feel this weight off my shoulders.

And it's something that I learned from that, is

that anticipation is almost always worse than the event.

And you spend so much time just worrying

and worrying about this thing that might happen.

And when it finally happens, it's like, you

know, that wasn't so bad after all.

And there were some really cool

things that happened in this period.

While I was looking for my

next job, I was playing hockey.

I mentioned hockey earlier.

I was playing on this recreational hockey team and

I'd been a part of for a few years.

And my wife and I are out in the front

yard with our dog and our newborn, and a guy

from my hockey team is on a walk with his

wife, and I didn't even know he lived by us.

And he comes up and we get to talk in,

and he says, hey, I know you lost your job.

We want to help you out.

I may choke up here in a second.

He hands me this envelope full of

cash, and he says, pay bills.

Do whatever you need to do.

And I'm like, I can't take this. I can't take this.

I'm expecting an offer.

Like, I think something's coming.

Like, I can't take this.

He goes, take it.

If you don't need it, you know somebody who does.

And I was blown away.

And thankfully, I think I got a

job offer within a couple of days.

And I think I was making more money than

I was making when I lost the job.

And everything worked out great.

And it gave me an opportunity to go to

one of my coworkers who I'd become friends with.

He was very sick, and when he lost his

insurance, he lost his ability to get his medication.

And we go to lunch, and I slid

that envelope of cash across the table, and

I said, hey, man, this isn't from me.

I'm paying this forward from somebody else.

I want you to buy your meds this month.

And it's just incredible that happened.

And a couple of weeks go by, and I

may have even started my job at this point.

And I go up the mailbox one day,

and there's another envelope full of cash.

There's no name on it, there's no nothing.

And I called that same guy and said, hey,

man, I got your meds for another month.

And so there was some really cool stuff

that came out of this really difficult situation.

No doubt. That's powerful.

So this next role that you took.

Yeah, so, actually, I mentioned my dad earlier.

My dad was working for a company that was similar

to the one that just went out of business.

They were part of this whole sage world.

They were a top reseller of their nonprofit product.

And as an aside, my dad had been the

CEO of the company that made this nonprofit product,

and he helped build up the company.

And they sold it to sage in 2001 and stayed

on with Sage for a few years and then decided

to go work with one of their top resellers.

And so he brought me over.

And while I was there, I

learned about this thing called salesforce.com.

And I'd heard of Salesforce.

I knew generally kind of what it was, what it did.

I knew that it was like this hot

new thing in the business technology space.

And my job there was to manage

a team of inside salespeople, account managers.

They're responsible for servicing the existing

customer base and looking for cross

sell upsell opportunities there.

And inefficiency just drives me bonkers.

And I'm also not very patient.

I know that's a shock to you, Mel,

but I'm looking at how we're doing things,

and I'm looking at this tool called Salesforce.

And I'm going, all right.

It takes us 17 steps to produce a quote for somebody.

Surely it doesn't need to be this hard.

And out of my frustration and out of

my curiosity I start doing research and I'm

reading blog posts and help articles.

And this was kind of in the earlier days of YouTube,

but there were even a lot of tutorials out on YouTube.

This was 2009 and for some reason

everybody in the organization had full access

to the system, had admin access.

That must have made for an interesting environment.

It did.

And I end up going into the

back end and I start tweaking things.

And also another lesson learned, if you are

making changes to a production system that other

people are using, you might give them a

heads up when you start changing things.

Because I got a couple nasty grams from

some people, one guy in particular that were

not happy that I moved their cheese anyway.

But little by little learned this

thing and I got this bug.

I loved working on this system and I saw how powerful

it was and all that could be done with it.

And I should add, I've said this a million

times before and probably say it another million times.

I've been a techie my whole life, but to this day I

could not write a line of code to save my life.

And with salesforce you could do some

incredible stuff without actually writing code, without

actually being a true software developer.

And again I saw these inefficiencies and I'm like, well,

no, I can come in, I can solve for that.

I can build this system in a way

that makes these things far more efficient.

One thing led to another and I just kind of

decided I wanted to rebuild my career around Salesforce.

And so been with that company for about

three years, maybe a little bit over that,

and had the opportunity to go to work

for a platinum consulting partner in the salesforce

ecosystem and was with a company called Etherios.

And man, just absolutely loved my time there.

I still look back on my time there just very fondly.

I got to work on small

projects, massive projects, everything in between.

We had an incredible culture.

One of our founders, Mike Dannefeld, who I still consider

a friend and mentor to this day, learned a lot.

Not like from him just sitting down and taking me

under his wing and talking to me, but just learned

a lot by how he ran the company. Observation. Exactly.

And while I was there, I got to work with

the smartest, hardest working problem solvers I'd ever seen.

And it was challenging and it was a lot of fun.

And to this day still have very, very dear

friends, treasured relationships that came from my time there.

And actually that's true of

many other places I've been.

And in fact, today at our firm, we have

a couple of people that I was fortunate enough

to work with in the past that always hoped

I'd get to work with again in the future.

I was there for a while and our

projects were starting to get bigger and bigger.

And my experience was really much more down market.

And with the increased size of the

organizations that we were working with came

more bureaucracy and politics within those organizations.

I can remember one client, the Salesforce group, and

this is a large energy company, the Salesforce group

and the SAP Group, they did not get along.

And we would have to go to these change

control board meetings and the SAP people and the

salesforce people would be shouting at each other and

we're just kind of in the middle.

And anyway, you just saw more and more of that.

And in 2013, I was on a project with a financial

services company and I flew to LA 26 times that year

on top of a whole bunch of other places.

And it was a terrible client

and it was a terrible project.

And we got done with a terrible meeting.

And I should back up before I say this next part.

I've had this entrepreneurial spirit my whole life.

And going back to my dad, I can remember as

a kid driving around the car, five, six years old,

like bouncing these business ideas around, could we do start

a business that does this and this?

And he and I talked through it.

And in college, I have a handful of these times

in my life where I can just close my eyes

and I can put myself back in that place.

I can see the room, I can feel it.

And I remember this time in college where

we had a guest speaker come in and

this lady talked about running her own business.

And it just hit me, someday I'm going to run a

business, whether it's one that I grow my way up through,

kind of like that company I talked about earlier, or whether

it's one that I start on my own.

And over the years, there were a number of things

that I kind of thought about and nothing really took.

Well, fast forward 2013 just

got done with this meeting.

I'm standing in this conference room in LA and everybody else

had left and all of a sudden just hit me.

It's another one of those.

I can close my eyes, I can see the room,

and I just had this overwhelming feeling, this realization.

All right, Scott, you're good at what

you do, you love what you do.

And I think you can find a

way to feed your family doing it.

And I came home from that trip and

told my wife what I wanted to do.

And she said, you want to do what?

She said, you're making the

best money you've ever made.

You've got great benefits.

You've been promoted three times in two years or

four times in three or something like that.

Why would you want to leave that?

And I said, I've just got this desire. I always have.

And so from there, took year, year and a

half to pray about it, seek wise counsel.

And in that time, I went to breakfast, lunch,

dinner, drinks, coffee, whatever, with anybody who had any

relevant experience that was willing to meet with me.

And in that time, I got a ton of encouragement.

I only had one person tell me I was crazy.

And one night after we put the kids to bed, and at

this point we had, I guess, three kids, my wife came to

me and she said, all right, hey, if you really feel like

you're called to do this, I support you, and I want us

to do this, but I need you to promise me right now

we're going to draw a line in the sand.

And whether it's some amount of time or some amount

of savings that we're willing to go through, I need

you to commit to me right now that if it's

not working and it doesn't look like it's going to

work, that you're not going to drag it out, that

you will go get what she called a real job.

And it cracks me up, because starting

a business is not a real job.

She was, and maybe still is, a little bit risk averse.

And we had just watched some close friends of ours

struggle for years in a business that ended up failing.

And so here I'm wanting to go do this, and

we're watching people that are close to us go through

these struggles, and their business was totally different.

And they made some choices that not sure I would

have made, but she was very hesitant because of that.

And I remember standing in our kitchen, and I

didn't want to put the dollars to it.

She said, time or money?

And I didn't want to put dollars to it.

And I said, you know, I think that a year

is probably not long enough, but 18 months in, if

we can get to 18 months in, we'll know whether

or not this is going to work.

And so I'll come back to that

18 month thing in a minute.

But once that decision had been

made, I got this total curveball.

I was planning on going in and giving my notice.

And out of the blue, I get an

email from our founder that I'd mentioned.

He says, hey, want to talk to you

about moving you into a director level role.

I think that you would do really well at this.

And, like, what kind of curveball is this?

And so at first decided to take it, and

he kind of handed me off to somebody else

in the organization, and that person made a ton

of promises that didn't come to fruition.

And after a few months of just kind of fighting that,

I went in and said, hey, I think it's my time.

So to be clear, when you say you took

about a year seeking wise counsel, coffee, breakfast, lunch,

dinner, you were still working at this time?

Yeah, this was early mornings

or breaking away at lunch.

It wasn't time theft, but, yeah, I

was still working there at the time.

And before we move on back to your story,

I want to camp on that for a second. So did you have.

So for others who are thinking about this, they've kind

of got this entrepreneurial spirit, and they're kind of going

through their mental Rolodex of who would I call on

for lunch or coffee to run my idea by?

Did you have a set of questions, or did

you go into it kind of free format?

Here's what I'm thinking, and go from there.

Yeah, not everyone I talked to had started a

business, but they were entrepreneurial in some way.

Most of the people had started a business,

but there were a number that hadn't.

And I think that the question that I probably asked

most frequently was question that we ask sometimes on the

podcast, and that was, what would you do different?

What would you tell your younger

self, knowing what you know now?

And, man, there are things that people

told me now at this point.

Golly, some of those conversations were 1011 years ago.

There were things that people said that I still,

all these years later remember and think about.

I remember somebody who I hope to

have as a guest at some point.

He talked to me about, at some point,

you're probably going to need to leverage contractors.

And he said, man, pay your

contractors like you pay your employees.

Pay them immediately.

Pay them on time.

Do not make them ask to get paid when

they have two projects in front of them.

Make them choose yours over the

other if they have limited time.

Somebody else gave me some advice, and this was

kind of more on the like, hey, is this

a risk I should take or not?

They said at this point, this person had gone

on to start their own business, and she says

to me, working for a bigger company.

I always just had this illusion that things

were safe and that things were good.

And it hit me one day, no.

At any given point, the board could

say, well, it's been a bad quarter.

It's time for layoffs.

And she said, I had this illusion that

I was safer in a bigger organization.

And she said, I'd rather take destiny in

my own hands and go do this.

And there were just tons and tons of those

nuggets that have been incredibly beneficial to this day.

Let's get into that.

So what were some of your fears going into it?

I mean, Elise says, let's do this.

You put the 18th month mark on it.

You say, it's time.

That's your aha moment, or maybe one

in a series of aha moments.

What's next? Yeah.

So when I came to the conclusion that it was time

to leave, that this other thing wasn't going to materialize like

I thought, and for the record, the CEO of that company

that offered the promotion, I think that he was genuine in

what he intended to do, and the person that he had

me set to execute it with didn't do his part.

Something that I learned in that time.

Somebody that I worked with came to me

and said, this was good old Christy Shatswell.

She was the office mom.

She was a wonderful lady.

She came to me and said, you got three kids at home.

Kind of like that conversation all those years ago.

She said, why don't you stay here for

five more years and get more experience and

be that much more prepared to go on?

And I said, I hear what you're saying, but myself,

five years from now, if I wait, I'm going to

look back and go, where would the business be today

if I had started five years ago?

And so that was a huge thing.

So fears I had going into it, I mean, in my

mind, and maybe this isn't the case, but I feel like

the most obvious fear is the fear of failure.

And for me, the fear of failure is more on

the financial side of like, okay, what is this going

to do to me if this doesn't work out?

And am I going to lose my house?

Am I going to lose my car?

Are my kids going to be able to go to college someday?

And things like that?

That was the biggest fear.

And then secondarily, it was the fear of failure.

From the.

You think about Maslow's hierarchy of needs, and

that top part is that self actualization.

Like, if I fail at this, what is it

going to say about me as a person?

And we're nine years in and still trucking.

Took the words right out of my mouth.

So let's go back to 2015.

January of 2015, Scott has a home office,

and he starts a business called Venn Technology.

What does that business do?

Yeah, so I'm going to talk about the name for a

second, and in a couple of different contexts, there's a book

called the four hour work week by Tim Ferriss.

And in that book, one of the things that

he says is don't name your company your name.

Know Scott Hallray, Inc.

And his reason behind that is you

need to look bigger than you are.

Like, if you are a one person company, a lot of

people may not want to work with a one person company.

So you need to look bigger than you are.

And when I started, it was just me.

And I was very intentional in not naming it Scott

hall or consulting because I wanted to be bigger.

And so when I started thinking about names, it

was all right, what would be a name?

And there's this idea in the world that we live

in, in the technology space of people, process and technology.

And kind of my riff on that is that

over the years, I've seen a lot of companies

implement technology for the sake of technology, and they

forsake the people in the process.

And the way that I want to approach this

world is we're going to build systems where the

people in the process intersect with the technology.

And so our name ven technology, like a

Venn diagram, we've got three circles in the

logo that represent people, process and technology.

And the idea is that we build systems

at the intersection of people, process and technology.

And so business was born, one person

firm working out of my home office.

And I still remember when I came home

from my last day at my job.

My wife says, so what are you going to do on Monday?

And I said, I'm going to build a website and I'm

going to set up as many meetings as I can.

And so did just that.

Did you have a logo at that point already?

Logonerd that part of the logonerds.com.

I found these guys, and for, I think, like $50, they'll

do like three designs or five designs, and they'll give you

these concepts and then you pick one that you like, and

then they'll do a couple of iterations on that.

In the end, you get your final logo

way pre like chat GPT AI image generator.

I couldn't even have conceived of chat GPT back then.

So, yeah, had a logo pretty quickly done.

And I think I had sketched

one out on the computer myself.

And you know this, I'm not much of an artist.

And so gave my concept to them and they made it better.

You set up some meetings, or

at least you started that Monday.

So you had like a kind of a target list in mind.

Yeah, it started with my network, but also

anybody that anybody is willing to introduce me

to, I want to go meet with.

And so I'd been in this b two B technology space for

many years at this point and had a lot of contacts in

the Dallas area from prior work that I had done.

And so reached out to a lot of those folks.

And many of those people have been dear

friends and some of them have been just

wonderful mentors to me over the years.

And so started with them.

And for the first 90 days, I think it was rare,

if ever, that there was a weekday that I didn't have

at least one meal or coffee or something with somebody.

And then some days it was multiple.

And on that note, networking is

something that is a long game.

It is not something that you should have

one meeting and expect that all of a

sudden you're going to get a deal.

Somebody early on said something to me after a lunch,

hey, did you get a deal out of it?

I said, no, that's not how this works.

Maybe I'll get a deal in six months.

Maybe I'll get a deal in two years.

Maybe I'll never get a deal.

But this was about me having a

conversation with somebody that I don't know.

And more importantly, it's me trying to

figure out how can I help them.

And if you help enough other people,

eventually something's going to come back around

and it's going to help you.

And in general, I've tried to have a long

term outlook, a long term mindset on things.

And that what I do right now may not

yield something immediately, but I know that eventually it

will, especially if I do enough of these things.

So did you have any goals after your 1st 90 days?

Probably looking further out than the 90 days, and

I guess I'll elaborate on what the business did.

So coming from this salesforce world, I

started off as a one man salesforce

consulting firm that did some integration work.

And I'll talk more about that part in a minute.

But my goal for my first year, I can

remember sitting in the home office in those early

days by myself thinking, okay, what would it look

like for this to be a good year?

And getting there is not success, and

not getting there is not failure.

But where would I need to be for this to feel good?

And I thought, okay, I'm

starting with no business whatsoever.

I didn't take any customers.

I didn't have any projects lined up.

I literally jumped off a cliff.

And I thought, if I could generate $100,000 in revenue in

year one, I feel like that would be doing great because

I got to find the work, I got to do the

work, I've got to build the work and all the other

things that come with running a business.

I said, what would it look like if

I just knocked it out of the water?

And I said, man, if I could

do 150, that would be phenomenal.

And in that first year, I think we did about 180.

And I was just blown away.

And a lot of that came as a result of the network.

And I'll go back to my dad for a minute.

My dad at this point, had moved on

and was working for a company that would

become one of our most critical partners.

And partners of their firm needed people like us

to come in and complement what they did.

Our offering and their offering was very complementary.

And so he opened a lot of doors.

And something that I was very nervous about in

those early days was that it might seem nepotistic,

and to some people it may have, and for

some people it may still seem that way.

But he opened the door.

We had to walk through and we had to do good work.

And people continue to call us

back again and again and again.

And so for a while, I really struggle with that.

But we very quickly came to stand

alone, stand on our own 2ft.

And it's funny, a few years in, he and I were at

a conference together, and he came to me toward the end, he

goes, man, you know, more people here now than I do.

And so that was something that felt good.

A minute ago, though, I mentioned that

timeline, and we're standing in the kitchen.

My wife says, hey, time, money, what do

you think that needs to look like?

And I said, 18 months.

And about nine months in, I get a call from

a buddy and I told him about this 18 month

timeline, and he said, how are you tracking against that?

And I said, andy, I haven't even thought

about that in three or four months.

And so it was amazing just how quickly things

did get off the ground and up and running.

Do you remember the day that

you got your first customer?

Yeah, I do.

It was a company in Fort Worth.

And in fact, they make drilling rigs.

And it's crazy.

I'll drive around town and I'll see their.

They're very, very distinct, and they

sell them all over the world.

And, yeah, so I think about them every once in a while.

It was a very small engagement and person I

was working with ended up leaving pretty shortly thereafter,

so didn't get to continue doing work there.

But, yeah, I do remember that.

I remember getting that first check and

talking about early checks and early deals.

You don't know how much.

You don't know until you just get into it.

And one of our early clients, definitely not the

first, but I don't know, first five or ten,

I got their check, and literally I hand signed

it and deposited it on my mobile banking app.

And I get a call a couple of

days later from the owner of that company.

And this lady says to me, hey, my bank just called.

Did you deposit that check that we sent?

And I said, yeah.

And she said, did you just hand sign it?

Like, you didn't use the rubber stamper that the bank

gives you with your account number and all that?

And I'm like, yeah, I just hand signed it.

She goes, don't do that.

So I didn't know that was that big of a deal.

But this is a finance person, actually.

Yeah, it was.

That's telling.

Okay, so first year of business, you've

forgotten about the 18 month timeline.

Things are rocking and rolling.

Had you made your first hire at this point?

No, but somewhere kind of toward the end of

that year, I was starting to get a little

bit burnt out because I was selling the work.

I was doing the work.

I was doing all the other things that go into it.

And I can remember sort of like October, November.

It was going to be a beautiful weekend, and

I wanted to be able to go kick the

soccer ball in the backyard with my kids.

I did not want to spend

the weekend in the office working.

And something that we'll get into that, you know,

all too well, is I really like control.

And I really didn't want to have somebody else

doing the work because I wasn't in control of

it and finally had to just get over that.

And it wasn't even the money.

It wasn't even paying somebody else to do it.

I was fine giving up the margin on the work.

It was, I didn't want to give up the control.

And anyway, I finally relented and called a

guy that I'd worked with before and asked

if he wanted to do some contract work.

And, oh, my gosh.

That just immediately relieved so much stress.

And then one contractor turned into a couple of

contractors, and it was toward the end of my

second year in business that I connected with the

person that would become my first hire and still

with me all these years later.

I've heard you say on many episodes in the

thick of it and with conversations with founders around

the first hire, that that was one of the

most difficult decisions that you had to make.

Can we talk about that a little bit more?

Just expand on that?

It was and probably will always be the

hardest thing that I have had to do.

And the first hurdle that I had to get over was,

all right, I'm at a point now that I feel confident

that business is strong enough, pipeline is strong enough, that I

can feed my own family and pay my own mortgage.

Now I got to go make sure

that I can feed somebody else's family.

And when you own the business, you eat last.

And so I knew that going in.

That was my mentality going in.

And so first I had to get over this hurdle of,

can I feed not just my family, but theirs as well.

And once I got over that, the next hurdle was,

again, kind of going back to this control thing.

Is this person going to care about the success

of the customer as much as I do?

And thankfully, not just him, but I would

say the overwhelming majority of everybody we've hired

since has had that same kind of mentality.

You've built that culture since day one.

We can talk about that.

I've got a few more questions.

As you know, there's two of you.

Did you have an office at this point,

and you moved out of the home office?

So when Chase came on, I knew that my kitchen table

was probably not the place for us to meet each day.

And so got our first office, and I'll back up a second.

When I first started working from home, I remember

thinking to myself, I never want to go back

into an office ever as long as I live.

And the more I worked from

home, the more challenging that became.

We had more kids and just

became more background noise, more distractions.

And I remember our first day in our first office.

I remember that drive home, and when I

got in the car, this just amazing relief.

I just remember, and I came to understand that

I think a lot of people are this way.

I'm very much wired like this.

I need a physical separation between work and

home because I have a very hard time

turning work off in my mind.

And if work is always just 15 steps away,

it's really hard to turn off the mind when

you can't separate the physical aspect of it.

And so, yeah, that first office, it was huge.

And that was one of the harder decisions I

had to make, was signing up to take on

that ongoing monthly responsibility of the office.

And now it's a separate Internet bill.

It's not just my home Internet bill and

it's utilities and all these other things.

And I look back now at that rent and

I'm like, man, I wish I still had that

rent because things are very different today.

But man, that first office, that was a huge milestone.

And the first office was maybe twice the size

of the studio that we're sitting in right now.

It was a tiny little executive suite that they

was a bigger executive suite and they did a

little bit of modification to it for us.

But golly, it was such a cool moment moving in there.

I can still remember putting together the desks and the

conference room table and hanging the TV on the wall.

Nesting, making it your own. There you go.

So you've mentioned a couple of times now

about how things look really different today.

Maybe we should kind of talk about the trajectory or

the growth of the business from that point forward.

And what was the inflection point to?

Yeah, going back to that very first year, and it

was within the first, may not have been days, certainly

weeks and definitely months of starting the business.

I used Salesforce and I used quickbooks to do

the accounting in the early days and I was

looking for a way to integrate my own systems.

And I, at the time intuit,

had just deprecated their salesforce integration.

And so I'm out there researching, looking for something

that I could use, and I come across this

tool that, again, I'm not a developer.

I can't write a line of code to save my life.

I pick up this tool and I'm

like, wow, this is incredibly powerful.

And even a dummy like me can

go in and build really powerful integrations.

And so I sign up for this trial and a

couple of days later the phone rings and this guy

says, hey, I'm one of the founders of this company.

Thank you for starting a trial. I've looked you up.

Looks like you're in the Salesforce space.

We're building a partner program.

Would you be interested in joining?

And my first question was, is there

a cost to be a partner?

Because in a lot of places there's

a fee to be a partner.

And he says, no, no cost.

And you get these margins and it's great.

And I was like, yeah, sure, why not?

And I had no idea what that would do for the business.

And so I tell people all the time, back

then I would have told you that we were

a Salesforce consulting firm that did integration work.

Today we're an integration firm that does Salesforce

work, or more broadly, we do CRM work.

So that was a major change and

not one that I saw coming.

It's been the growth engine for the business

that I didn't plan for at all.

And there's a really important lesson that I've learned

from that, and I'm not going to articulate it

very well, but it's really, really hard to know.

There's no shortage of opportunity.

There's no shortage of new things that you can take on.

And figuring out what the right one is and when the

right time to do it is is really, really hard.

And on that one, I just got lucky.

Does this fall into the category

of surprises, things that surprised you?

Without a doubt, yeah.

Happiest accident of this whole journey was getting

connected with that and the trajectory that that

put us on with building integrations.

So we'll come back to that.

So let's go back to the hiring piece.

So you get chase on board.

You guys have an office.

Where does the team, how does the team go from there?

And this is what, 2016?

2017, yeah, it would have been 2017

was when he came on board.

So we hired Chase not too long after

we hired another consultant, and then we may

have hired an assistant before that other consultant

and then hired this other consultant.

And so business was growing like crazy.

I mean, at that time, it was probably

growing like 70, 80% year over year.

And when you're that size, when you're still in

six figures, doing 70, 80% is not that difficult.

And not too long after, we did 100% year over year

growth one year and finally broke that million dollar mark.

And that was another huge milestone.

And that first office, we were there.

Thankfully, we only had a one year lease because

by the time we're coming up on the end

of that year, it was clear where things were

headed and that we needed more space.

And so moved to our second office

just a year after that first.

And that was another one of those really cool

moments and another one of those oh, crap moments

of, okay, I was nervous about the rent there.

Now the rent is going to be three times.

And part of my calculus for feeling comfortable taking

the risk was we'd built up enough recurring revenue

through this integration product that I looked at and

said, okay, well, if all of a sudden things

cratered and I've still got to pay the bills,

there's exactly enough money in our recurring revenue for

me to be able to pay the rent on

this building if nothing else was coming in.

So that was a huge.

Gave me a lot of comfort knowing that

I could anchor paying that to something else.

Absolutely.

And then one day, you would go on

to buy the building, not just rent. Yeah.

So many years after that first building, I

was encouraged by an outside accounting CFO, accounting

firm, CFO, fractional CFO that we had.

Interest rates were just stupid, low SBA loans.

They had these ridiculous programs, and they

said, Scott, I really think you need

to look at buying a building.

There's some good tax advantages to doing this,

and you'll be building equity in something instead

of building equity for somebody else.

And we touched on culture a minute ago, and

having a cool place, having that office was a

place where we could really live out our culture.

We're kind of loud, and having neighbors that

are just on the other side of the

wall, that can be challenging sometimes.

And sometimes having neighbors who are

loud can be challenging for us.

You know who I'm talking about? I do.

We were in a co working space for a little while,

and there was loud talker guy that we referred to.

I don't think we ever learned his name.

So, yeah, fast forward all these years.

We bought a building at a time

when many businesses were shuttering theirs. Right.

So it was not in the midst of the pandemic.

Although you do have an interesting story about

when the things did shut down there.

Yeah, I'll tell that story real quick.

So it's early 2020, and for years, I had thought,

I want to have an office in Washington, DC someday.

Nonprofit was, and still is still a

big part of what we do.

But years back, it was even bigger.

And DC is like Mecca for nonprofits.

And on top of that, so there's

tons and tons of nonprofits there.

We had tons of clients there.

We also have a ton of referral partners

up in the DC, Maryland, Virginia area.

The cool kids, I've learned, they call it

the DMV, not department of Motor Vehicles.

So we had a lot of relationships up

there, and I was traveling there pretty frequently,

at least once, if not twice a quarter.

I'd had this idea years before that if we had boots on

the ground here, I bet we could do a lot more.

And so for years, I'd wanted to do

it, and this seemed like the right time.

There was this thing called COVID-19

that was being talked about. It was in China.

I was like, yeah, whatever.

And funny enough, I can distinctly remember after

we've been involved in a small group with

our church for a long, long time.

And I can remember in early 2020 having a

conversation with guys one night and we're watching all

these lockdowns that are happening in China.

And one of my budies goes, could you

imagine if they try to do that here?

That would never happen. Yeah.

Famous never. Yeah.

Never say never say never.

That is again.

So March 11 of 2020, I signed a

lease on our office in Washington, DC.

We had hired a couple of guys up there with

plans to hire more, and that was a Wednesday.

We bought some office supplies and

stuff, moved in on a Thursday.

The guys that had hired worked there.

On Friday, I flew home, and the only

time those guys ever went back was to

get their things and be done with it.

And the landlord was not willing to even respond to my

calls and emails about, hey, can we do something here?

And needless to say, we did not rent.

But one of the things that that experience taught

me and that the pandemic taught me was that

our culture is best experienced in person.

So these guys that we'd hired up in DC,

they effectively became remote members of the team.

And our plan going into it was that either they

were going to fly to Dallas or somebody from Dallas

was going to fly there at least once a month.

We did not want them to feel

like they weren't part of a team.

We wanted them know, feel the love, feel the culture.

But they weren't comfortable traveling down here.

And Texas opened up much earlier than a lot

of other places, and things weren't really open there.

They weren't comfortable traveling here.

We couldn't really go there.

I mean, we could, but couldn't

really get out and do stuff.

And so those guys didn't end

up sticking around for too long.

And again, through that experience, learned our

culture is best experienced in person.

And so bought the building.

And as you said, at a time when people

are shedding their offices and everybody's going hybrid or

full remote, and I remember probably a couple of

months after we bought the building, somebody in our

space, somebody's a good friend, called me one day,

he's like, Scott, everybody's getting rid of office space.

You were literally going against the grain here.

You were literally doubling down

in the opposite direction.

What's up with that?

And I said, we learned that our culture is best

experienced in person, and we get paid to be problem

solvers, and sometimes we ourselves get stuck on things.

And to be able to tap somebody on the shoulder

and spin your chair around and draw on the whiteboard

right there in the same room is far more effective

than what you can do over Zoom.

And we talk about the water cooler like it's

a real thing, the conversations that people have just

walking through the hallways, and it's really hard to

build and maintain culture in a remote environment.

I'm not saying it can't be done. It can be.

It's just a lot harder.

And so this is who we are. Absolutely.

What challenges, if any, have you run into as the company

continues to grow and scale and you add more people?

Has that presented any challenges in maintaining that

culture that you've obviously done a good job

of crafting since, really since day one?

One of the absolute highlights of this journey was

a conference that we sponsored in 2019, and it's

where our mascot Bjorn was born out of this.

And this conference was just incredible, and

we got a ton of accolades.

It was such a positive thing.

We actually flew out this marketing agency that we

were working with at the time and had them

come and film video testimonials, and I had become

really good friends with the owner of that firm.

And a week or two afterward, he and I are

talking and he says, scott, I'm not blowing smoke.

He said, I've worked with tons and tons of

organizations over the years, and I've never heard customers,

partners, whoever, talk about a business the way that

your customers and partners talk about you.

And what he said next has haunted me for years.

He said, how do you maintain that as you grow?

And we were talking late at night when he said that to

me for the first time, and I couldn't go to sleep that

night, I was like, oh, my gosh, it totally rocked me.

And if I'm being honest, yeah, there's

things that we have to do a

little bit different today because we're bigger.

But the mentality, I think, is still the same.

Our values are still the same.

We established our core values many years back

and probably two years ago brought in a

consultant to help us with something that's been

just a total game changer with the organization.

But one of the exercises we went through with

him was, hey, we're going to take a look

at your values and we're going to change them.

And I was not expecting that at all.

And the more we go through this exercise,

I'm like, no, this is who we are.

This is who we are.

And so those values have remained in place.

And the way that things get executed might look

a little bit different, but the intent and the

heart behind it is still the same.

What other advice would you give to

fellow founders looking to build a culture?

You've got core values, but is there anything else

that they should be thinking about as they're trying

to build that up within their own organization?

I think that your culture is a direct reflection of the

leadership and who they are and who they aspire to be.

And as you surround yourself and build out your leadership

team, make sure that you are bringing on people whose

values match your own, because it's going to be really

hard for your values as the founder to shine through

if the people who you're bringing on, if their values

are in conflict with yours.

And for us, it is a very people first mentality

and hot take here, and I got my hand slapped

by somebody at one point for saying this, but I

put my people over my customers, and a lot of

people tell you, no customers first.

And my mentality is, if we take care of our

people, our people will take care of our customers.

It's great advice.

This is one of my favorite kind of moving on to

the next question, one of my favorite questions that you ask

founders, what are the parts of the job that you love

the most that you enjoy the most, and what parts of

the job do you enjoy the least?

Because what Scott did on day one and year

five looks different, and that doesn't necessarily mean that

you don't still enjoy some of those things.

But let's start with, what do you enjoy the most?

The parts of the job that I enjoy the most

are working on our brand and working on our culture.

And I had a realization recently that brand is

really just an outward expression of your internal culture.

It's telling people outside your

four walls who you are.

So the brand is just an extension of the culture.

And so that's the part that I enjoy the most.

Honestly, the podcast, which that marketing agency I

referenced a minute ago told me years ago,

I need to start a podcast.

And, Mel, you told me, like, day one or

two, Scott, you need to start a podcast.

And I've fought it for so long.

This has brought so much joy, and it's kind of

intermingled with another part of the job that I enjoy

most, and that is talking with our partners.

And I had a call this morning with one of

our top partners, and we've just come back from a

conference last week and getting to hear their perspective on

things and share with other senior leaders in an organization

kind of what they're doing, what's going on with them.

It's not all that different than

what we do with the podcast.

We're taking these founders that are

senior leaders and sharing their story,

sharing their learning, sharing their mentality.

And I love that.

I love that interaction with other senior leaders.

What are the parts of the job that

you enjoy the least that you dislike?

My job looks very different today

than it did nine years ago.

I said it several times before I had to sell

the work, I had to do the work, I had

to bill for the work, I had to do the

bank reconciliations, and on and on and on and on.

And over the years, thankfully,

I have learned to delegate.

That was a very difficult thing for me to learn.

Earlier, I talked about how I love control

and didn't even want to hire that contractor.

And there's way more stories about the

control that I could get into.

But thankfully, I've been able to delegate

more and more things over time.

And conflict is something that I've

always had a hard time with.

And the bigger you get, sometimes

the conflict gets greater, too.

And so dealing with friction points that we've

had with a handful of different situations, that's

just been really, really, it wears on you.

Outside of that, I am not an accountant, and I'm

so thankful that we have people that do the accounting.

But even then, sometimes I still get really overwhelmed

when I'm looking at the books and going like,

what does this mean, what I do with this?

But again, I think that the more you can learn

to delegate and offload those things to other people, the

more satisfaction and joy you'll get out of the work.

It's great advice.

And if you're listening and you, too, don't

enjoy accounting, or you need to know what

benefits you can get from outsourcing that.

I think we do have a

toolbox episode coming out here soon. We do.

What hasn't worked like you'd hoped?

Well, where do I start?

Our DC office didn't work like I'd hoped, and at the

same know, had there not been a pandemic, I think that

would have been a really great thing for the business.

There have been a handful of new endeavors that we've

taken on that we weren't ready to dedicate ourselves to,

and as a result, they didn't really take off.

And so there's some new service offerings that we've

tried to take on, and without dedication to it,

you're just not going to get anywhere.

Like, it can't be an afterthought, it can't

be a, hey, we're just going to wait

and see if something works out.

Sometimes you do that, and sometimes you get lucky.

But for the most part, if you're not willing

to really dedicate resources, dedicate time, dedicate people, dedicate

cash, you're not going to be successful with it.

And so that's been something.

There have been some tools that we've invested in, and I've

tried really hard not to chase shiny objects, but every once

in a while, I still fall into the trap.

And so there's been systems that we've tried to implement that

just we weren't ready for, or I didn't do enough research

and turned out to not to be right for us.

Got to do your research, and even when you

do, sometimes, you got to get your hands on

it and just do it and experience it. Right.

This next question I know is very near

and dear to your heart, and I know

the answer, but the audience may not.

Have you had any mentors along the way?

It's my favorite question to ask guests.

So mentorship is something that

can be formal or informal.

And I talked about the founder of Ethereos.

It's not like he was sitting me down and taking

me through a textbook and teaching me these lessons.

I learned a lot from watching him, and I

can't tell you how many people I go to

lunch with a couple of times a year.

And there's mentorship in that conversation

over a plate of enchiladas.

And even last week at this conference, partners that

we do a lot of business with, there are

people that are in those firms that are 10,

15, 20 years ahead of me in their careers.

And we sat down and had drinks,

and there was mentorship in those conversations.

And so I've had many, many informal

mentors, and I seek that wisdom.

Anytime I see somebody I feel like I can

learn something from, I want to just sit with

them, and I just want to soak it in.

And so there have been tons and tons and

tons of informal mentors, but I've also had a

coach that I've been working with for probably the

last seven years and plug for another toolbox episode.

Go check out the toolbox episode with Jim Woodward,

who's been my convened coach and chair of our

convened group for a number of years.

And he's been invaluable.

And then my dad going all the way back

to being five or six years old, driving around

in our car and bouncing these ideas around.

And, in fact, this morning on the way to work,

I called and said, hey, I've got this call today.

Here's how I'm thinking about approaching it.

You got some advice for me.

And so my dad has been,

without a doubt, my biggest mentor.

Knowing what you know today, what would you go

back and tell yourself when you started the company?

It's hard not to be fearful, but things work out

more often than you might think that they do.

And it doesn't mean that you can be foolish.

It doesn't mean that you can be careless.

But most of the risks we've taken have worked out well.

And I would encourage myself to not

worry so much about some of them.

As the pandemic was starting and we just hired

these two people, I was so worried about what

was going to happen and in the pandemic in

those first couple of months, because I didn't know,

I didn't take a paycheck for several months.

And it wasn't necessarily that

there wasn't the money there. It was.

If at some point I'm going to have

to make hard decisions, I'm not going to

do that without having sacrificed something myself first.

And what was amazing, in March of

2020, we closed our biggest deal ever.

And at this point in the month,

it was here, pandemic was here. Everybody knew it.

Places were on lockdown, and yet this company

still signed a big contract with us.

And that was this huge encouragement, this huge

bright spot as a person of faith.

That was something that was very validating

and encouraging from a faith standpoint.

And then in May, we closed an even

bigger deal, and that just blew me away.

And we ended up growing 70% in 2020.

And with that came some survivors guilt, right?

Because you see businesses around you

that are not making it.

And here we are very well poised to

support people through this, and we flourished.

The other thing, kind of similar to this risk conversation,

this can go too far in the other direction.

So you have to be very careful.

But I would say, don't be afraid to spend money,

and spend money is not even the right word.

Don't be afraid to make

investments, make smart investments.

And I can remember toward the end of my first year,

there was this conference that I was thinking about going to,

and I didn't want to spend the money to go, and

I also didn't want to take the time out of doing

billable work and trying to sell work.

And like a week or two before the event,

I finally said, okay, I'm going to go.

And, oh, my gosh, if I hadn't gone to that

conference, there's no telling how far behind where we are

today we would be if we hadn't gone.

Is there anything that you would do differently as

you're kind of in this moment of reflection. Yeah.

Tagging on to some of what I said, there's probably

some risks that I would have taken earlier, and this

one is a little bit of a sensitive subject.

But over the years, eventually you're

going to have challenges with people.

People don't necessarily work out like

you think they're going to.

And I hung on to people for a really

long time that it was clear for a really

long time that they weren't going to work out.

And I'm a pretty kind person.

I'm a pretty compassionate person.

I'm a person that wants to believe

that things are going to turn around.

And I've had to learn that it's okay to

free people to go someplace where they can flourish.

And that's a huge mental shift

that you have to go through.

Maybe not everybody, but I get hung up on this.

I'm harming them, when really, if they're

not flourishing, you're holding them back.

That is the harm.

And freeing them to go find that thing where they

can flourish is actually a good thing for them.

What's next?

My hope is that we continue to have the growth that

we have and that we can do it in a way

that I talked earlier about how the values haven't changed.

The execution may look a little bit different,

but my hope is that as we grow,

that I know the values won't change.

But my hope is that we don't

have to change the execution too much.

And I want to not just do more of what

we're already doing, but I want to get into more

in terms of doing additional things, whether that's working in

ecosystems that we're not currently working in today or adding

some kind of service line that we don't have today.

And that could be done through partnerships

or that could be done through hiring,

that could be done through acquisition.

But I want to be able to find

ways to service more customers and service our

customers that we already have even more.

I truly believe that the work that we do is

game changing for the businesses that we work with.

It's game changing for the lives of

the people that work in the organizations.

Our mission is to free people to

focus on what they're best at.

I want to get that person that's

been burned out from having to manually

enter data or export and import files.

I want to get them to their kids soccer game.

And the more organizations we can touch, the more

people we can get to their kids soccer game.

And as we do that, we can bring more people

into our culture at Venn, and I believe that we

offer something different for members of our team, for people

on the inside than they're going to get someplace else.

And so there's this symbiotic relationship that as

we grow, we impact more people internally, that

allows us to impact more people externally, that

allows us to impact more people internally.

And through this flywheel, we can

improve a lot of people's lives.

Scott, it's been an honor.

Thank you for allowing me to ask you the

questions that you've asked so many founders before and

look forward to seeing you in the seat again

for many more founders to come.

Thank you for kicking me in the butt over

and over to finally do this podcast, because it

has been incredible sharing stories and connecting with founders

after their episodes have aired and hearing things that

have come out of the podcast, going out there

and how it's helped them and their business.

And it's allowed me to create relationships with

people that I probably never would have met

otherwise, that have turned into some of them

have already become dear, dear friends.

So thanks for the encouragement.

Amen to that.

I hope you enjoyed hearing my story

on In the Thick of It.

We really try not to be self promoting,

but since we do this for everyone else,

I'm going to go ahead and say it.

To learn more, visit Venntechnology.com.

That's V as in Victor E-N-N technology.

If you or a founder you know would like

to be a guest on In The Thick of

It, email us at intro at founderstory.us