The BrightGauge Blog

If you know us at all, you know we love talking about how much inspiration we draw from companies and people we admire. There’s so much to learn from industry leaders who have “been there, done that” so to speak, and there’s no shame in recognizing that we’ll always have room to grow. At BrightGauge, we’re huge fans of Jason Fried and DHH and what they’ve done with their super successful company, Basecamp. They seem to have found a sweet spot when it comes to balancing work and life. Basecamp employees are hard-working and productive, but still find time to explore the hobbies and passions that make them happy. We love that. So not only do we actually use their product on a daily basis, but we’ve also tried to adopt some of the work habits that make their culture so unique. One such habit - a big one for us - is trying to eliminate unnecessary distractions. We’re Focused on Staying Focused How many times have you left a meeting and thought everything could have been accomplished with a simple email? Or worse, the meeting time ran out so you set up another meeting to keep the conversation going (what I like to call ‘a meeting about a meeting’). This is an incredibly frustrating aspect of working at many companies. So, when the good folks at Basecamp started writing about the idea of eliminating recurring meetings and status meetings, it struck a chord with us. It was something we had already been thinking about, so reading about how others were doing it inspired us. You know, that whole ‘be the change’ thing. And we did it! We said goodbye to meetings. No more weekly status meetings. No more formally putting time on someone’s calendar in order to get questions answered. No more spending half your workday stuck in meetings and away from your actual work. If a meeting is absolutely necessary, we’re encouraged to limit it to 15 minutes when possible, or even to meet over lunch. There are, obviously, exceptions and special circumstances but we try our best to practice what we preach. Once we started working this way, a funny thing happened. Less Meetings, Way More Productivity When we got our work hours back, everything started to change. Suddenly, if one of our developers was deep into writing a complicated piece of code, he wouldn’t be forced to interrupt his train of thought just to attend a meeting that likely didn’t carry any urgency with it. Instead, he could continue to be laser-focused on his project without pressure to be anywhere else, meaning he’d probably have an uber-productive day. Productivity lends itself to higher-quality work. It’s not just a coincidence. Less Meetings, Less Anxiety I started to realize something recently. This corporate culture of having lots of meetings on our calendars is causing us to operate in an anxious state. In previous jobs, I remember opening my calendar at the start of the day, seeing the hours upon hours that were blocked for meetings, and thinking “when the heck am I going to tackle my to-do list?”. Sometimes, I even had meetings that overlapped with other meetings. We’re somehow expected to be in multiple places at once while consistently producing good and on-time work. Some days, I’d get home from work and be totally drained and exhausted. Not to mention, I’d be at work late, since my to-do list wasn’t checking itself off just because I was in a meeting. Having a wide-open calendar with plenty of freedom to actually complete to-do list items does wonders for the mind and soul. It allows you to go about your day with a sense of calmness, instead of feeling the buzz of high-anxiety coursing through your veins. You can actually take a deep breath and focus. You can actually smile at your co-workers instead of rushing past them yelling, “I’m late for my 3:00!”. You can actually get to work. What a concept. Quality Matters, A Lot When did we get into this habit of trying to do everything? Why do we treat it like its an accomplishment when someone says they worked 90 hours in a week and barely got any sleep? Why are we sacrificing our health and our free time just to say we did more, more, more? You know what people are actually going to notice? When a job is well-done. When you can tell that time and care were put into it. And when the product or service you’re working so hard on actually truly helps the end user. Cal Newport, author of Deep Work (a BrightGauge favorite), said, “If you don’t produce, you won’t thrive - no matter how skilled or talented you are.” It’s true. We need to be afforded the space and time to create. We’re living in the age of information where quality is king. There’s no shortage of information out there (i.e. quantity) but not all of it is worth our time (i.e. quality). Meetings, social media, a 24-hour news cycle, pool tables - they’re all distractions, and distractions hurt our focus much more than we think. Phasing out meetings is about more than just taking away a tedious task we all roll our eyes at. It’s about retraining our brains to remain focused and to be better. So, How Do We Communicate Internally? It’s a good question. Let us be clear. Doing away with meetings is no excuse for working in silos. We still very much stress the importance of good communication and visibility. Now, instead of talking about something out loud in a meeting, where people are most likely not even taking notes, we just write it all down. We use Basecamp to keep things orderly and organized. Something that could have been said in a weekly status meeting is instead written in a Basecamp post and shared with relevant co-workers. Anyone who has a question can pose it in the same thread and all pertaining notes and comments will live in that thread forever. It’s awesome, really. It’s so easy to go back and reference, plus it saves a ton of time that would have been wasted asking people to rehash what was said in a meeting or digging through lots of different emails to try to piece the puzzle together. The mental clarity you get from knowing you have 8 solid hours a day (give or take) to get your work done is insanely valuable. Add in the fact that Basecamp has your back and it’s no wonder that the quality of work will noticeably go way up. Make Small Changes at First It can be pretty jarring to jump to a meeting-free culture, so we took Fried’s advice on this one. He recommends getting rid of one meeting a month, then one a week, and so on. This has made a huge difference in our rate of productivity and the quality of work we’re putting out - whether that’s in blog posts, new product features, support team responses, or even our sales calls. Try it out and see how it works for you. We’d love to hear about it. Want even more productivity tips? Check out our free webinar, ‘Managing Productivity of a Service Team’, to learn how one of our customers leads his Service Team operations.

Announcing the latest integration to launch at BrightGauge: Webroot! Webroot is a powerful cybersecurity software that pairs really well with BrightGauge by allowing you to stay on top of devices that need your attention. Some of Webroot’s main features include antivirus and anti-spyware protection, firewall capabilities, online backup, password management licensed from LastPass, protection against identity theft and credit card monitoring for US customers. Many of our customers are already Webroot users and a lot of you have been requesting this integration for a long time. We’re happy to finally add this datasource to our roster so that you can begin monitoring and managing security operations for your business. How to Connect to Webroot Connecting with Webroot is easy. Once you’re in your BrightGauge account, visit the datasources panel to find Webroot and simply enter your credentials. Our support page includes a step-by-step guide for getting started. What Can I Get Right Out of the Box? The whole point of BrightGauge is to make it easy for you to view all the data you care about in one place, so we also want to make it easy to get started as soon as you open an account. That’s why we deliver out-of-the-box gauges, dashboards, and reports for all of our integrations, which you’ll find when you’ve connected to Webroot. Of course, you always have the freedom to customize your dashboards and reports to display the exact information you want, and our support team is always available to lend an extra hand. We’ll be adding more Webroot defaults over time, but for now get started with two pre-built dashboards and 15 gauges with corresponding reports. Gauges When it comes to cybersecurity, you really want to prevent disasters by being proactive and catching any glaring issues immediately. Default gauges like Attention Required, Infection Status, Realtime Shield Status, Sites, Scans and more help you stay ahead of the game. Dashboards There are two default dashboards that come with your Webroot integration: Infection Status and Sites. Infection Status will give you a look at the sites that require your immediate attention and how many active threats you’ve received this week or month. Sites will display details for each particular site. Remember that you can always drilldown further to get more detailed information. Reports Currently, we have two report templates ready to go, which are generated from our default gauges. One is a Weekly status report and the other is Monthly. We recommend that you kick things off with these templates, but then go ahead and customize them so that they display exactly what you or your client want. With BrightGauge, you can set up a report once and then set it to automatically go out on a recurring basis. Once you’ve got a handle on your data and your KPIs, you and your team can set action-driven Goals that can be tracked each week. This is a really awesome way to establish a culture of accountability and motivation and to run a more productive organization! We love hearing from you, so please make sure to leave us some feedback if you’re looking for more out of your Webroot integration. If you’re ready to upgrade your plan to include more datasources, reach out to our Success team.

Compuquip Cybersecurity is a Miami based, family-owned business that focuses on cybersecurity products and services for their enterprise partners. Since 1980, they’ve helped businesses address their network infrastructure and cybersecurity needs. The Compuquip team makes it a point to equip businesses of all sizes with the tools they need to manage any risks. In today’s information age, it’s an absolute necessity to safeguard your networks against outside intrusion. A need for efficiency Although Compuquip remains focused on their core mission, they do face the day-to-day realities of running a well-organized business. Like all technology partners (and any business for that matter), they find it important to track what their engineers are doing and to report on critical work that’s being handled. In the past, they found difficulty in processing their orders. Compuquip services many customers on a daily basis, covering a very sensitive topic. There’s a sense of urgency that naturally permeates the cybersecurity industry, as issues can unfold very quickly, so it’s important for technology partners to have a timely view of the status of orders and networks. Additionally, Compuquip had no real-time reporting. Everything was done via a manual report, which meant they had to take data from their system, literally type it into an Excel spreadsheet, massage the spreadsheet, convert it to a PDF, and then send it out internally or to clients. This was done for every single report on a daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly, and annual basis. As a company that is continually optimizing their cybersecurity offerings and adding more clients to their roster, it makes sense that Compuquip looks for ways to maximize their efficiency. Adopting BrightGauge Adriel Argote, Accounting Manager at Compuquip, had a request form his CEO: Compuquip needed visibility into the operations in each department of the company. To assist with that, Adriel helped implement BrightGauge as a trusted business solution. “We brought in BrightGauge in several different areas. We brought it in to automate our daily reporting of all the deals we close. We brought it in for our weekly aging report. We brought it in for sales reporting, so we can see how our sales team is doing month-to-date, quarter-to-date, and year-to-date. And we’ve also used it for tracking of our engineers - who’s billing, who’s not billing, how much time are they billing?” Through their integrations with Microsoft Dynamics GP and Harvest, Compuquip has everything they need to keep track of order processing, engineering, invoicing, time-tracking, billing, and more. sample Harvest dashboard How BrightGauge Has Saved Compuquip Time Since bringing on BrightGauge’s dashboards and reporting features, the Compuquip executive team has seen a significant shift in how departments are spending their time. As Adriel explained, “BrightGauge’s automated reporting has saved about 15 minutes every day for the daily report. We calculated it out to be between 8 to 10 hours a week that we are now saving in man hours, while getting much more accurate information. That’s a lot of time!” Although there’s an incredible amount of value in time saved, the Compuquip team has noticed an added benefit to using the features that BrightGauge offers. “It brings in a level of transparency for the team. When we find something that looks off on a dashboard or report, we jump in in real-time instead of waiting for the report to come out at the end of the day or week. We’re catching things faster, so errors are going down.” Favorite Feature Through BrightGauge’s reporting feature, Compuquip has been able to buy back time spent on mundane, but necessary tasks and, in turn, can focus on hitting KPIs in areas that truly matter - making sure each and every customer is satisfied with the level of security and attention they are receiving. “Allowing us to focus on what we need to do, instead of creating reports, reduces errors and saves us a lot of time, which makes us more efficient. And then having all the information in real-time where I can see it is a huge, huge victory for us.”

It’s no secret that a ton of companies look up to Google and the way they run their business (us included). What if I told you that you could implement one of Google's core management techniques in your company tomorrow? And that within 6-12 months it would improve your business to grow faster and run more efficiently and calmly. Would you believe me if I told you it all centers around goal management? Yes, GOALS!!! We say Goals, Google says OKRs Google follows a simple, yet powerful goal management system called OKRs, which is an acronym for Objective, Key Results. The short history is that Andy Grove at Intel came up with this system as an iteration to Peter Drucker’s original Management by Objective philosophy. Grove’s approach, which later became OKRs, was popularized at Intel and then introduced to Google in their early days by John Doerr, an investor who used to work at Intel. John just recently wrote a book called Measuring What Matters, and according to him (and Larry Page), Google credits much of their scaling success to being able to set proper goals company wide. Making sense of OKRs So what the heck is an “OKR” and how does it work? It’s incredibly simple. An Objective is the over archiving statement of what is to be accomplished in a given time period. The Key Results are the measurable items that, once completed, mean the Objective has been reached. Here’s an example: Objective: Expand into XYZ New Market Key Results: Hire or transition 1 new employee focused on XYZ Market Build 10K in new MRR pipeline in XYZ Market Close 2.5K in services revenue in XYZ Market Think of your Objectives as an aspirational statement about what you want to accomplish - they are easy to remember and easy to rally the troops around. Key Results are then the specific and measurable items (the boring stuff!). And just like many goal management systems, Key Results are time bound and typically done every quarter. OKRs keep everyone engaged and in sync with the aspirational (the Objective), but focused on the tactical (the Key Results). Putting OKRs into practice Google bases actions on knowing that in order to be successful with goal usage, you have to be well-rounded when implementing goals in your company. We’re in the habit of establishing goals here at BrightGauge and we’ve picked up a few pointers along the way that will help you unleash the power of goals: Alignment is key - buy in from the top, and everyone else as well. Everyone in the company should have a few goals (OKRs) per quarter and be okay with missing 1-2 of them. Don’t tie in goal achievements to performance reviews or salary bumps. To work like Google, you have to be disciplined with your goal management. And as always, it has to start at the top. The leadership team should have goals and they should be transparent to everyone. When everyone sees leaders going for stretch goals, not only do they understand priorities better, but they see that it’s okay to stretch for something BIG themselves. It’s okay to not be afraid to fail and to not settle for mediocrity. This can seem intense. But because of this culture of aggressive goal setting, Google does not tie performance or compensation to goals, they are completely separate. This can be hard to fathom and hard to do but if you want to push people to stretch, you can’t tie in compensation because we’re only human and people would end up choosing only attainable goals. BrightGauge can help you get started I’ve always bought into the idea of goals. I think it’s important to have constant motivation and a culture of accountability and transparency. Plus, since I’ve been consistent about goal-setting at BrightGauge, the proof has been in the numbers. Since we implemented goals seriously in early 2016, we’ve had our best growth years while also running more calm and focused. It’s no coincidence, setting goals across the company has helped propel our growth. All that being said, to run like Google, all you have to do is get started using Goals in your company. You’re not going to get it right the first cycle or second, but you’ll notice a massive difference in your company 6 to 12 months later when everyone is on the same page, engaged, and motivated to hit their goals. Using our Goals feature can help you get started since we automate some of the annoying stuff (reminders and data pulling). Your employees will be reminded to check into their goals on a weekly basis and assess whether they’re on or off track. Again, since OKRs are ideally not tied to performance and compensation, this will simply keep your team working towards a greater good, without unnecessary pressure. You might be stumped by what to focus on, so we’ve put together a guide for you that can help inspire company-driven goals. Just click on ‘Find Inspiration’ when you start a new goal list in Goal Management. Give it a shot and if you need help, let us know. We love this stuff!

In case you missed it live, here’s your opportunity to watch our most recent webinar, featuring Ryan Giles, founder of Traction Strong. In the webinar, Ryan and BrightGauge CEO Brian Dosal talk all about how to improve the efficiency of your business by implementing the Entrepreneurial Operating System (EOS) process made famous by Gino Wickman’s book Traction. Simply put, EOS is a framework for building a business with an actionable and trackable plan for success. Many MSPs and other companies in the technology sector have adopted the EOS process because it is easy to implement and has proven to be effective. In the webinar, Ryan and Brian cover: What a successful business plan looks like Common issues that many companies face The 6 key components of EOS What it takes to implement EOS into your business How to create and track goals quarter by quarter Ryan himself saw a 30% year-over-year growth immediately after implementing the EOS process in his MSP. After this webinar, you’ll be armed with valuable information that can put you on your own path to growth! “Vision without traction is just hallucination!” - Ryan Giles Watch ‘Guiding Growth Through EOS & Goals’ now to learn more about the simple process you can take to optimize your business.

Sweden-based Intersolia is a chemical management company connecting over 500+ customers with the right tools and information to reduce and manage their chemical usage. With a team of 85 employees dedicated to providing consultations on improving chemical management, Intersolia has succeeded by continuing to keep their core focus in view: to always keep the environmental implications of their work in mind. This has proven invaluable to not only them, but also their customers. Tools for great customer service As a company with customers worldwide, Intersolia faces constant growth. That’s why they’ve set up two teams in different locations to cover their support queue: one in Sweden and the other in Serbia. They have plans to expand staffing in both locations. With so many team members dedicated to great support, it’s important to them to know where their time is being well spent, and where it’s facing a bottleneck. "One of our biggest focuses has been to help our customers before needing to provide reactive support. A big part of this is to take our Support team’s insights to our Product team. With this data and feedback, they’ve been able to build a better product and help train our team to better listen to our customers.” Enter BrightGauge dashboards The Delivery Manager for Intersolia, Jörgen Skoglund sees to it that his team has all of the data needed to make quick, sound judgements and to increase their value to clients. Considering himself somewhat of a non-technical person, Jörgen turns to BrightGauge for help in sorting through the data that matters most to his company’s bottom line. Through BrightGauge’s integrations with freshdesk and some custom SQL, Jörgen is able to track his support ticket and SDS document statuses. To get each Intersolia team member on the same page, every Intersolia office location has BrightGauge dashboards up around the office on TV displays. At any given point in their day, they’re able to see where their support queue and products stand. Favorite Feature “The dashboard helps us to get the temperature of how our support is doing, while showing off our work to all of the company.” Why BrightGauge After much research, Jörgen found that BrightGauge was the easiest solution for him to get started with. From there, he learned pretty quickly that he could do a lot more with it than just monitor dashboards. On a daily and weekly basis, he has his most important reports sent internally to keep track of what needs extra attention in his support queue: stale tickets, tickets past due date, and all unresolved tickets. Constantly checking and adding new gauges, Jörgen keeps these organized in separate folders so he can quickly jump to what’s of interest to him in the moment — CST, internal reports, SDS, surveys, and ticket volume. Through daily reports and dashboards on view, Jörgen and his team have been able to get a handle on their workload while measuring their KPIs.

A lot of users really like working with BrightGauge because of our capability to integrate with many popular business solutions on the market. The whole point of our app is to make it easy for you to see important metrics from your PSA, RMM, and financial tools all in one place. You might be asking how we go about choosing the tools that we integrate with. Great question! Two-fold approach When we’re looking into business solutions to add to our roster of integrations, there are basically two things we take into consideration: what you - our customers - are asking for and what that solution’s documentation looks like. Listening to our customers BrightGauge began on the idea that we could help make the lives of business owners and managers a bit easier. From experience, we knew how much time was spent creating reports each week or logging in and out of multiple accounts and we figured there was a smarter way to use our time. Our attempt to improve lives, however, would be meaningless if we didn’t take the time to listen to our users wants and needs. Many of you submit requests to integrate with your favorite business tool, and we really take those requests into serious consideration. If we’re receiving multiple requests for one specific tool, that makes a pretty compelling argument to bring it into our system. That’s not to say that we only focus on popular requests. There have been instances where just a handful of our end users would benefit from a specific integration, but that benefit would be so tremendous that it became a no-brainer to add it in. What we’re trying to say is don’t be shy about telling us what you need! In addition to listening to you, we rely on our own experience and knowledge, too. Once upon a time, we were the customer, so we’re aware of what the MSP owner’s daily life looks like. We know which tools are being used most often and which key performance indicators (KPIs) to track because we’re really engrained in the industry. Dissecting the tool Once we’ve made the decision to take a specific solution into consideration, it’s time to inspect that tool. Generally, we’re asking ourselves two questions: What kind of support exists for those looking to integrate? Which KPIs will the tool allow us to track? If the tool we’re looking to integrate is hosted, or cloud-based, it’s essential to look into their API. What does it look like? How is it written? Will it be simple for us to connect to that API? Will the integration be seamless? How much work is there to do on our end? Is there a sandbox account we can use for testing while we set up the integration? What kind of authorization does the API use (we prefer OAuth 2.0)? If on premise, what does the SQL database structure look like? Are the fields well defined? Does the database support querying by third parties? Once we’ve deemed the tool’s documentation as friendly, we’ve got to check out their KPIs. What are they allowing us to track and measure? How much data will you, our customers, be able to extract from this tool? If you aren’t able to see KPIs that matter to you and your organization, then what’s the point? We don’t want to create noise - we want to take actions that will make a difference. Looking ahead As we continue to improve upon our product and welcome more customers into the BrightGauge family, surely we’ll add new integrations to the mix. We’re looking forward to announcing new integrations in the coming weeks. In case you missed it, we recently added Infusionsoft to our list! We know lots of customers like you are using these tools on a daily basis, so these are big. Stay tuned for more on this. How to voice your needs Our Support team is an incredible resource when it comes to helping our customers, whether you’re having issues with your dashboards, needing help building out a more complex gauge, or trying to connect a new datasource to your account. We highly recommend that you visit our support page. Here, you can email our data team with your own integration requests, open a support ticket for bugs you may be experiencing, or browse the knowledge base for a little self-help and troubleshooting.

Today we launched Two Factor Authentication (2FA) for all user types! Head to your My Details page (in settings menu) and you’ll see a new sub-menu area with My Details, Password Reset, and Two Factor Authentication. When you click on Two Factor Authentication, you’ll be presented with an input box to enter your cell phone number. We’ll then send you a text to confirm. Once that is set up, every time you log in afterwards, you’ll be prompted to use the code sent to your cell phone. If you lose your cell phone or change it, contact support and we can verify your identity and remove 2FA for you. And you can always disable 2FA anytime you’d like. *Note: Be sure to not include any special characters or symbols in your authentication code. Additional Updates We have updated our legal docs and improved our security posture, making us now fully compliant with GDPR! As mentioned in our blog last month, we took the GDPR regulation as an opportunity to focus on security from top to bottom at BrightGauge since the beginning of 2018. You can visit our new security page for more details but below are the most recent and important changes: Updated Terms of Services and Privacy Policy to more specifically provide GDPR related privacy and terms. And added a Data Processing Addendum. These pages can also be found in settings of your BrightGauge account. In an effort to be more transparent about how we handle your data, we added more information to our Security page. Updated internal security policies - Information Security, Risk Management, Incident Response / Breach Notification. Created a formal bug/vulnerability program for users to find and report vulnerabilities they see. Performed and scheduled, twice annually, an external penetration test on our system. Added Disk Encryption at Rest for our databases. Updated & Increased our application monitoring tools to provide even greater visibility into data flow and potential malicious activity. Assigned a dedicated Data Protection Officer who is responsible for security and privacy at BrightGauge. Added a more stringent password policy for all user types. Added the ability for personal data to be deleted / downloaded by request (a GDPR specific requirement). Worked with all our 3rd party SaaS applications to ensure they are GDPR compliant as well. For more info, check out our https://www.brightgauge.com/legal/.

Announcing the newest tool for teams to customize their BrightGauge: Images for Dashboards & Reports plus some long requested additions to the report builder. Dashboard Images With the ability to upload a photo for more context(or just for fun!), dashboard images allow you to personalize your dashboards and share visual cues with your team. Adding images to dashboards is a lot like adding a text gauge. From your dashboard, select the image module and upload a new image or choose an existing image from the BrightGauge image uploader. You can upload image files up to 5MB in size. Use the image cropping tool to edit and fit your image for display. Once you have chosen your image it will appear on your dashboard filling the entire image container. This container can be resized just like other gauges there. At BrightGauge, we like uploading our logo or client logos to dashboards, as well as images that are meaningful to the team to keep everybody motivated. So go ahead and add a team pic or a client logo. Customize yours to fit the team members or client viewing it. Images in Reports In addition to images for Dashboards, you’re also now able to add them to reports too! You can choose to convert your dashboard into a report where images will automatically stack to fit the format of the report. You can also move images around and remove them from the report too. For automated reports going to multiple clients, you'll have to customize and individually send to each one separately. Report Builder Item Height Restrictions We've added a height restriction on items while resizing in the Report Builder. The builder will now stop you from resizing items bigger than the page. This also works for the first page where allowed height is smaller. Note that this restriction is being applied on ALL items. Items that split between multiple pages, such as Tables, will still continue to be dynamic. Announcing another big set of BrightGauge Reports updates for this month: your company logo, cleaner background color, and an overall clearer presentation of information. Adding Your Logo to a Report Now, all reports include a token to pull your company logo to the header of the email. So if you already have a logo set for your account, this update should automatically apply to your emails. If you have yet to upload a logo to your account, we'll prompt you to do so. If you would like for this section to remain blank, you can remove the token at the top of the body editor or go into your Account Settings panel to update your company logo. To read more product updates, visit our Knowledge Base.

Tune in to this month's episode as BrightGauge CEO Brian Dosal interviews Accelo founder Geoff McQueen on their origin story, changing the way businesses operate, and what it's been like operating between San Francisco and Australia-based headquarters. Key takeaways include: Evolving Accelo's business model over the last decade Transitioning to ServOps What's going on in the Service industry Long-term growth plans _____________ Transcript Brian: Hey, Geoff. Welcome to the podcast! Geoff: Great to meet you. Brian: Yeah it’s great to, you know, I’ve heard a lot of great things about Accelo, and us being a new partner, it’s very awesome that you’re able to join us and tell us more and especially tell our market more about Accelo. Where are you based right now? Geoff: Right now, I’m sitting in San Francisco. So, our head office is in San Francisco, at 1st and Howard, down in the middle of, you know, sort of the start-up craziness of this part of the world. Brian: And obviously with the accent it’s pretty clear - so, Australia. Take us back - how’d you end up in San Francisco and we’ll come back around to, you know, how you and I got hooked up here. Geoff: Yeah, absolutely. So I moved out to the States to San Francisco back at the end of 2011. We had Accelo in a beta at the time and we were just getting ready to launch commercially and, yeah, so I came out to the States for a couple of reasons. We were, you know, a tech start-up with a lot of exciting things going on. We had a lot of support from Google. It’s actually funny, they’re having their IO conference starting, or it’s happening this month at least, and yeah, it was actually at that conference where we got asked to exhibit by the good folks at Google and we got to know a bit of the market. It was just like, you know what, if we’re going to make this work from a business point of view, let’s get out here, let’s make it happen. So, yeah, that was how it played out. Brian: Wow. Yeah, that’s a big move. So, I mean, you were born and raised in Australia. Stayed there for school? Geoff: Yeah, I went to school there and so, my three co-founders and I at Accelo, we all met each other through a… we all used to work together in an agency that I founded, you know, about a decade before that and we decided to make Accelo happen, not just as a side project, but actually we spun out and really poured our all into it Silicon-Valley-style, which is great. And, yeah, I left and the three of them stayed behind and they’ve since built up an amazing engineering and product team. My job out here in the States was to focus on fundraising, sales, marketing, client success, really all those customer-facing dimensions. And I’ve since built up a pretty amazing team out here. Brian: Yeah. How many - what’s the employee size now? Geoff: I think we’re nudging 90. Brian: Wow. That’s great. That is great. And how many - what’s the split between Australia and, I’m assuming it’s just San Francisco, the other space? Geoff: No, we’ve actually got another office that we opened earlier this year in Denver, which has been seeing a fair amount of growth as well. So, yeah, we’ve sort of, you know, about 40% is in Australia and then we’ve got, actually it’s more like 50%. We’re still very much a product and engineering driven company. And then San Francisco and Denver combined clocking in around about, sort of, you know 50%...45-50%. Brian: That’s awesome. And I’m sure, you know, our listeners as we spoke about are very much in the MSP space, MSP-centric, so I know a few have heard about Accelo, but it’s still relatively new in this market, right? So, give us, you know for them, that have never heard and just saw the logo on our podcast and decided to give it a shot, why did Accelo come to be? And I know that’s tied to the services business you had and what is it doing now? If you can get to how it would apply potentially to MSPs, that would be perfect. Geoff: Yeah, absolutely. So, my first business out of college was a services business which was a hybrid between doing, you know, digital agency-style work and MSP-type work. We ended up, relatively early in our journey, focusing, as one needs to do, on niche-ing our expertise around more the digital side of things, but always got a strong memory and recollection from the days of us, you know, in the early days pulling cables myself and crimping and setting up, you know, client offices and things like that well back in the day. But, yeah, we built that services business, and it was in the process of building that business that I came to realize, first-hand, the frustrations and challenges of what it takes to really run a good business. And that running the business piece is harder than it should be for small business in the service industry, which is almost all small businesses. Brian: Right. Geoff: You know, the average person - the data and stats are kind of heartbreaking - the average small business owner or manager today works something like 57 hours a week, you know, on average. I think it’s about 80% of them work six or more days. There’s not many more days left after six. So, you know, they don’t take vacations. All this really hard work, you know what it’s like and people listening to this podcast will be nodding away, I expect. And yet, the hard thing is, that it’s actually a really tough way to sort of make your way in this world. 50% of the businesses that start this year won’t make it to their fifth birthday. Brian: Right. Geoff: There’s a lot of factors that come to play. It’s competitive, the big guys don’t play fair, there’s a lot of those sorts of things. But one of the fundamentals that I really saw from doing that kind of work is it was unnecessarily tough to run the business. And if you don’t know what’s going on in the business on a daily basis because there’s too much happening, and if you’re still getting by with spreadsheets and manual status update meetings and other kind of difficult systems pieces, then you end up making bad decisions. Not ‘cause you’re an idiot, not ‘cause you don’t know how to run a business, not ‘cause you don’t care. It really comes down to the fact that, you know, you’re not aware of what’s going on. And so that was really the genesis when it came to Accelo. Realizing that SAP and Oracle had made hundreds of billions of dollars of at least market cap but probably also revenue over the years, helping the big end of town to run their operations and yet small businesses, on the whole, were left to kind of fend for themselves with either a cocktail of different tools that still required you as the business manager, or owner, the person running the business, to try to stitch it all together, which is why you work so many damn hours and often feel like you’re not working on the business, you’re always in it, because you’re holding it together. Or, alternatively - and this is something that the MSP community had that other industries didn’t have as much - you could legitimately go out and buy a bunch of legacy technology that helped to run some of those key operational parts of the business. But the tools were, and are, incredibly conky, very hard to implement and get going, pretty damn expensive, and then after, when it’s all said and done, you’ll still end up becoming a slave to a tool that you put more into than you get out of. And, so I saw that the shape of that market and that world, with my co-founders, we also had our own personal experience and were like “This isn’t right. This isn’t fair. Cloud technology can now make these people’s lives better. They can make their businesses more profitable. They can help them do the work that they love instead of juggling spreadsheets or pulling it together manually.” And, so, it was with that conviction and mission that we decided we were going to do something about it and Accelo was born. Brian: And then, yeah, I know you said you moved to the states in 2011. Is that about the time then this kind of decision was made to take it seriously or you had built the product…? Geoff: Pretty much. We built, we spent some time building the product leading up to that in 2011 but, really, it was the 2011 period where we put the product out into beta in February of 2011 and then really leant into it throughout the course of that year. And that was when - I tell you, we’ve actually still got customers from those early days. Brian: Right. Geoff: It’s incredible. Like, I think about what our product was then and I’m amazed that anybody used it, much less paid for it because it was so MVP, right? Classic start-up journey. And it was interesting that it really still made such a material difference for our customers that we succeeded despite the fact that the product was something that would sort of embarrass me at the time. Brian: Yeah, they say that if it doesn’t embarrass you, then you’ve waited too long to ship it. That’s what I’ve heard. Geoff: That’s exactly right! I have a bunch of friends who were in the service business at the time who asked, “Oh should I use this product?” And I’m like “Ummmm, yeah, you know..”. Whereas now I’m like, “Heck yeah!”. This is definitely now the best product in the world for running a service operation. But for a long time there, it was aspiration at best. Brian: Yeah, we started around the same time, and it’s funny hearing, kind of the value proposition that you tied in there with running on spreadsheets, not knowing what’s going on, it sounds eerily similar to our pitch, you know, pulling different systems together. Geoff: Yeah. Brian: It’s a true need, every small business has that overworked, running around with your head cut off, and I like how you phrased it with this “The PSAs existed”. You guys do not call yourselves a PSA? I know you have project modules, service modules, I believe you have tickets as well, but you don’t call yourselves a PSA. What’s the category that you put yourself in? Geoff: Yeah, we had a look at the PSA market and for a while we tried to fit in, you know. Like, being new kids on the block. We’re thinking “okay, we’ll play this game and be a player in this existing category”. And it became clear as time went by that it really, like while there’s a lot of people probably listening to this who use a PSA or have heard of the category... Brian: Yeah, you have to be gentle. Geoff: Yeah, I mean, from a bigger picture perspective, if you take a step back beyond the MSP industry and look at the service industry more generally, because while all of the professionals in different parts of the service industry have different skills and expertise, like an architect and an engineer are very different to an MSP, the business models are actually quite similar in many ways. It’s smart people doing clever, creative work for clients and creating value with their brains. And, you know, looking at the wider market, it was pretty clear to us that PSA was actually a failed category. It had been attempted to be made, and it was still being slobbed away at some 20 years after it had emerged, and the state of the art was still these incredibly clunky, demanding systems with a big issue of garbage in and garbage out. A huge amount of burden for individual people to just keep the damn things up to date and filled in. All for what? So a CFO can pull a report once a month and feel good? Like, that kind of a mismatch between, you know, effort in and who’s providing that effort and benefit out struck us as a really strange thing. And it was a really common feature of the wider PSA market. We also recognized that the PSA market itself was sort of underselling the benefits of what technology could do to help you run a business. Because it was so focused on really just tracking billing and, in the case of MSPs it was tracking tickets and service contracts, but if you tried to do a project with any of the PSAs that were out there, you realized that they just wrapped them in a label and called it a project but it was really just a jumble of tickets. Conversely, you use other products called PSA products and they’ve got project management built in but they wouldn’t know a service contract or a ticket if it jumped up and bit them. None of them have good CRM and sales pipeline functionality to help you forecast what’s around the corner. So, it just sort of struck us that the PSA category was really just one disappointingly broken promise after another. When we talked to the market and we talked about what they were really challenged by, they were like look, we’ve got marketing automation, HubSpot, InfusionSoft, Marqeta, like, you know, the main tools that small and medium businesses can use and do use. We’ve got sales automation whether it be Salesforce or one of their up and coming challenges. And, of course, we’ve got the accounting piece, whether it be Quickbooks, xero, or something else. But, the bit in the middle, the operations piece where they actually have to run the business, that was their big gap and as we talked to them more and more, they weren’t looking for a different timesheet, they weren’t looking for a different ticket tracker, they’re actually looking for a way to run their operations. And, so that’s where looking at the experience we had of really running a business from coin to cash, not just, you know, in the PSA categories being defined. Talking to our users, it became clear that something that was actually focused on running the business for the benefit of everyone using it was actually an exciting new category and so, that category is called Service Operations Automation and we’re just one of the players who’s really helping to bring what should’ve been PSA’s delivered promise, but we’re bringing it to life in this category that’s much more broad and all encompassing. Brian: What’s the split then of industries that you are successful with now, or verticals? I know it’s the service space, but is it attorneys, photographers…? Geoff: Yeah, not so much the attorneys. So, there’s a couple of criterion. We tend to focus on people at this stage given that we are a tech company out of San Francisco, with still a bunch more that we know we want to do on the product. That tends to be a benefit for people who are classic early adopters, so there’s a bunch of MSPs, a bunch of consulting practices, a bunch of agencies, a bunch of accountants funnily enough. I wouldn’t have thought accountants were necessarily going to be early adopters. You would imagine them to be more tech laggards, but actually they’re not. Tools like xero and Quickbooks online have shown them that the power of the cloud and what it can mean for their business, so they’ve leaned into it and gone, “well what else can we do?”. And that’s where their 40 year old practice management software that’s had a constant lineage since before DAS sort of finds itself struggling to really make its value clear in the face of new technology, like our stuff in the ServOps space. Brian: Yeah, from an MSP standpoint, I know - I go back to it because obviously that’s the listener space - I think we are probably 90% in that traditional MSP space. So, what is, and originally we had hooked up - I should circle back to one of my original points I wanted to make, was, which is typical for our customers or how we get new integrations, is they say, “hey, awesome new product, I use it and I want to use BrightGauge with it, please integrate.” And when we look at these new - anything that’s pitched to us like that - we first just google API doc of [insert company name] and it’s funny because even like Ninja, who we’re friendly with but they just don’t have any API, like they didn’t, they haven’t invested in that part of the business yet, or an API that would be suitable for a reporting tool like ours. But you guys had a great, well-documented system that we could pull data from. It was modern, it was normal in our opinion… Geoff: Yeah, we weren’t forcing you to usurp, right? That’s the key. Brian: Exactly! And you would be amazed how much joy that brought to us. You know, we’re in the early stages of our partnership and just trying to - I think we have five mutual partners - so, how many other (and these are MSPs), so how many other MSPs are there if you’re allowed to answer that question? Geoff: Oh, we’ve got hundreds. We don’t disclose exact customer numbers but we have hundreds and hundreds of MSPs using Accelo today. One number that we do share sometimes, you won’t find this very publicly so it’s a bit of a scoop for you guys, but we find that about 83% of our monthly active users are also daily active users, so we have hundreds of MSPs that are running their business on Accelo with a level of addiction that is just right up there with, you know, Facebook, or Gmail. It’s an intensely heavily used product. Brian: It would have to be, right? If they’re going to run their business on it? Like, that’s awesome. Geoff: Yeah. And it’s great to have that validated because there would be nothing worse than saying yeah, they use it to run their business, and then actually find out they just tinker with it once in a while to create an invoice. Brian: Yeah. Geoff: So, no, this thing really runs the show. Brian: Yeah, it takes over. Um, that’s awesome. And, you guys - and I read this that you raised the $9 million, what was the, and I think you had raised a few million before that at some point. Geoff: Yeah, we’ve raised 11 now. Brian: Ok, so what’s the story behind that in the sense that now you have 9 million to spend? You know, where’s that going and how do you see this shaping up over the next few years? Geoff: Yeah, I mean it’s predominantly going into smart, capable people. You know, what we’ve got with Accelo and what it does for our customers lives every single day is really quite special. But, as a product CEO and one of the founders, I know we’re just in many ways still getting started, so the ability to overlay what we have with even more automation, with even more forecasting, bringing in machine learning and AI to provide insights before you even know what questions to ask - these are all things that should be in the hands of regular people running regular businesses. This shouldn’t be stuff that’s just quarantined to only you know, enterprises and the corporate end of town. Because small businesses, especially in the MSP space, but all sorts of other parts of the services sector, I mean, it’s an industry that creates all the jobs in our economy, frankly. It’s main street prosperity that, you know, small businesses that provide services to other people in businesses create and so, it’s not fair that these industries, that these kinds of people are stuck with spreadsheets or other garbage. They deserve a tool that helps them to be prosperous because, if they fail then people’s livelihoods fail. People lose their jobs, lose their homes, it affects health and marriages. It’s too important to just, you know, sort of say “bad luck, work it out yourself”. Brian: So, is that then… Geoff: ...so, investing heavily in product and growth, to help more people and to help them more easily. Brian: Did uh - so, you sound like a very product-centric guy and I’m similar. It’s kind of where I think a lot of software companies miss, um, if the priorities are in a different direction, especially early on. Where’s your strongest, in the features section - I mean, you built a big product… Geoff: Absolutely. Brian: ...there’s a lot to do there. So, where do you feel you’re strongest? Where do you think you’re weakest, therefore you’re investing in? You know, when you can close a big deal, how do you...what’s that perfect module that you know will get ‘em hooked? Geoff: Yeah. No, it’s a good question. Um, it’s a funny one, because we sort of look at the fact that we’ve got really a multi-product play and they all have to be singing in harmony for the promise to be delivered to clients. As, you know, instead of focusing on one area, letting one area get wake, we really try and spread it around and rise together so we don’t end up off-balance. There’s a few things, though, that a lot of folks can now see coming to the fore as the product rises further, particularly around some of the scheduling resource utilization forecasting dimensions. Just that ability to run your operations and have a good, clear feeling that’s automatically being updated as people do their work, around utilization availability, productivity. That kind of stuff is really quite invaluable, because for a lot of folks it requires today maintaining separate spreadsheets or doing other forms of really manual processes to sort of try and keep a handle on what’s going on. So, that’s I think, really the summary, it’s bringing it together that’s the unique part that other products aren’t even anywhere near… The other thing that’s, that I use as we talk to MSPs, is their expectations from tickets and service contracts and SLAs are pretty advanced, pretty developed. And what that means is that when customers who are not MSPs buy Accelo, they actually immediately get all of the cross-pollination benefits of what a sophisticated, smart, experienced, reactive service provider can do. But, conversely, when an MSP buys Accelo, they benefit from the project management and delivery insights that have been honed by folks running projects whether they’re life or death. And, I think that’s a really interesting perspective and benefit for MSPs because the cloud, while creating a lot of opportunities, also creating a few challenges to the business model of the MSP. It’s no longer a case of walking into your small business customer, installing Microsoft Small Business edition for the service stack and then turning on and licensing whatever the pieces are that they need, and the work is in stitching them together within the server. Now, with the cloud, it’s actually much more important for an MSP to be a trusted consultant and partner because there are so many alternatives and choices, they’re not just whatever Microsoft happens to sell. And, businesses are looking to their MSPs more than ever to provide that kind of counsel and advice. But what it also means is that there’s a lot less remote things to monitor and manage if it’s all living inside Google or AWS or Box or Dropbox or somewhere else. So, we’re finding the MSPs out there are very appreciative and excited that they actually have a project management stack connected to their sales stack with Accelo, that they’ve really never had before with the other major players in the market selling PSA software, you know, not really that capable when it comes to projects. It’s that classic thing of if all you’ve got is a hammer, everything looks like a nail...and with these guys it’s more like, if all you’ve ever done is tickets then everything looks like a damn ticket, and so they just wrap tickets in a label and call it a project; whereas having real-time forecasting on what their project’s profitability is going to be based on the work that’s progressing, or being able to see in real-time what the estimated completion date is based on things moving late or starting early, this is really special and a major benefit for MSPs who, you know, my big prediction is, are going to be doing a whole lot more project-based work than straight service contract work over the next ten years as they evolve, because so much more of the stuff they’ve traditionally been patching, monitoring, and managing is either becoming disposable or moving to the cloud. Brian: Yeah, yeah. So, before we had started BrightGauge, we had an MSP ourselves, and that was always the scare - you know this was ten years ago. It’s amazing how the MSP market still continues to grow. The cloud has taken over a lot, it hasn’t taken over everything, though. So, everyone that was scared crapless like I was ten years ago, you know, it’s not as bad, but it’s just the MSPs nature, they change, because at the end of the day they’re just the technology partner to the small business. So, their needs have to adapt and so far, they do a good job because it’s their livelihood and they have to, so… It’s funny because I just had lunch with a customer on Friday and he was saying the same thing, “Oh, the cloud is going to come in and ruin the business model.” And I thought, man I swear I woke up with chills in 2010, thinking the same thing. Geoff: Exactly. I think it’s a tremendous opportunity, isn’t it? Because it is now so much more complex and you’ve got systems to integrate and connect together. You can create so much value as a trusted technology partner by stitching together some APIs. The customer just looks at you with delight when things light up. So, I think it’s a beautiful opportunity but it does require tools and systems and a toolkit which, just like when VARs became MSPs and that evolution, they needed to have tools that could run service contracts. It’s the same sort of thing here. As MSPs evolve into, whether it gets another acronym and we look back in ten years and go “oh yeah, that’s why we started calling them Cloud Solution Providers”, or something, but regardless of the names and the labels, the smart people who are going through this transition gradually, as you say not the sky falling in, they’re going to need the tools and that’s one thing we hear from our MSP and technology customers a lot, is they love actually having proper project management, which isn’t designed to build a skyscraper, it’s designed to deliver a service project, where you’re doing it in concept with your client, and you know, it needs to be really adaptive. Brian: What - sorry, I’m looking at the time here and making sure we’re respecting it.. Geoff: ...yeah, yeah, sure. Brian: I know you just recently announced or are announcing a NinjaRMM, I believe I saw on the blog.. Geoff: Yeah. Brian: Do you have any other integrations coming besides obviously our wonderful integration at BrightGauge? But any other MSP-specific ones coming down the pike? Geoff: Yeah, we’re working with the good people at IT Glue, still early days, but certainly the ability to take what Accelo does - which is know who your clients and contacts are and obviously then request tickets, retainers, service contracts, being able to then connect that in with documentation and configuration management is really beautiful. So, that’s a work in progress. We’ve been focusing primarily on the Ninja piece for the last little while, but that’s cool. We actually, we didn’t get a chance to make quite as much of a fanfare about it, because it was a really kind of beautiful coincidence. One of our clients is still a very happy LabTech user, whatever they call it now, and they actually built an integration similar to your experience of looking at Accelo’s API docs and going “hm, we’ve got this”. These guys, you know, sort of messaged one day and said by the way, we’ve built this thing and we’re about to launch it on this, you know, I think it’s called labtechplugins.com or something, and sure enough, they built a fully bi-directional integration with LabTech, so folks that really love that product - and in talking to MSPs, there is so much love - they can actually keep their love of LabTech and be able to break out with their alternative parts of the stack that they really don’t love. Brian: Right. Yeah, there’s a loyalty there. God bless them because they’ve funded our evolution… Geoff: Yeah! Absolutely. Brian: That’s awesome. That is a great way to go about expanding the space, is to integrate more tools because automation is so top-of-mind. In the automation space, I know you’re bringing in AI - what is your big, for you your perfect world, you said quotes or invoice or however the phrase you said… Geoff: Yeah.. Brian: What’s your perfect world of a scenario that you kind of tell your prospective customers? Geoff: I mean it’s really, you know, you didn’t get into starting your business to get in their and jockey spreadsheets. No one enjoys spending two to three days a month to do their monthly billing, yet if you don’t do it, then you’re going to go broke. Um, so it’s really about automating as much as possible the busy work, the friction, the overhead that comes with running a business so that you can do what you’re actually good at, what you really love doing. And, whether you choose to take that time that you’re saving and invest it in growth and things that are enjoyable in that respect, or whether you want to invest it in spending more time with your family or finally getting a vacation without fear, you know, it’s your choice. But it’s really freeing you so that you’re running a system to run your business, as opposed to having to tie it all together yourself manually all the damn time. Brian: Geoff, you sound - by the way, it sounds beautiful and I respect and love the vision - what is, for you yourself, for your co-founders, what’s your big plan? What are you telling them - as much as you can tell us, obviously - with regards to money, you’re going to spend it, you’re going to help out a whole lot of businesses around the world. You know, what’s that ten year out game plan for you? Geoff: I think, I mean, reality is what we’re tackling is like the biggest opportunity in B2B SaaS, B2B software as a service technology, and so, for us its drive a company as far as we possibly can, helping as many people sustainably on the way to that destination, whether that’s an IPO or some other form or result. You know, this is an opportunity that’s at least as big, if not bigger than what the good people at Hubspot achieved in marketing automation. You know, it used to be that marketing automation was something you had to buy Eloqua, which is now owned by I think Oracle, you had to spend well into six figures to even get started. Much more like seven figures, and that was, you know, your average florist was locked out of that industry, right? They were still stuck doing things the old way, if at all. And, Hubspot, as an example, came along, made a technology platform that was affordable and accessible for small businesses and now, the florist has marketing automation and I’ll get an email at some point in the next little while reminding me of my upcoming wedding anniversary and making it a one-click process to order some flowers, right? So, that’s marketing automation. Operations automation, which is the category that we’re focused on, is probably between five and seven times bigger than marketing automation when you consider the value that it creates. And while we focus on just the services vertical - and when I say just the services vertical, it’s the largest employer in the Western world, largest private sector employer, it’s about one in six jobs in the Western world in the private sector are in professional and business services, which is the category name that the stats agency gives it. Brian: Right. Geoff: It’s a massive, massive category and yet, it’s worth probably seven times as much as marketing automation. If you think about this, people who are listening this think “ok, how much do I spend in terms of time or money or both on marketing versus my techs? What’s my labor cost look like on that? How many marketers do I have, or how many techs do I have for every marketer?” And you ratio is probably going to be something in the vicinity of 20 to 1. So, if you’ve only got five full time people, then someone’s spending like half a day a week or something like that in marketing. Now, if you’ve got a platform that can automate and help you scale and double the profitability of your service delivery, the place where you create value and make or lose money, that’s a lot more important to your business and your bottom line and your ability to continue to help reaffirm your view as your family’s head of the table than marketing automation, so you look at it and think ok, marketing automation, add it together, market caps probably something around a $20 billion dollar market cap out there and we see this operations automation as being worth, you know, a lot more than that, and so that’s what we’re working towards and you know, we feel like it’s a race against the clock where every year that goes by where we haven’t got the product easy enough to use for people to solve this problem at their own pace, you know, every year that goes by that people don’t know they exist because we haven’t been able to get in touch with them yet and share the news is a year that literally tens of thousands of businesses will fail, if not hundreds of thousands of businesses will fail unnecessarily, you know? So it’s a bit of a mission for us. Brian: No, it’s great. I feel the feeling here, the passion. You know, the Hubspot thing, I have to bring it up, because it’s funny, I just saw today that they’re in beta with some ticketing part of their product, and that’s what always scares the crap out of me with these larger software companies is you kind of jump the shark of we have to have a functionality to provide, because we try to do everything, you know. Geoff: Yeah, yeah. I think they’ll do alright because they’re focused on the, they’re not focusing on the ticket the way that an MSP thinks about it. They’re focusing on the ticketing in the sense that, you know, I’ve actually got a browser tab open here for some baby clothes on Shopify, you know, and if my wife or I were to buy that and there’s going to be a problem, I’m going to want to talk to those guys about it. Brian: Yeah, it’s the conversation, it’s the Intercom model. Geoff: Yeah, exactly. It’s much more Intercom-style. We talk about it as like, you know, there’s products out there - zendesk being the best example of them - where you can do great support for love, but no money. Whereas what a service business needs is ticketing technology and service delivery automation, which is actually focused on delivering a service to clients that at the end of the day you’re being paid for, not just that it’s best efforts. Brian: Yeah, I just, you know, there’s only so much great product a big team can build and that’s always a scary thing for me. I agree with you, they’ll shape it in the way that benefits the ecosystem that they kind of solve, so… Geoff: Correct. The general case, shall we say. Brian: Yeah, exactly. Well, as we depart here, we always like to ask people, and it’s very Tim Ferriss of me, any books that you read that you really enjoy that you’ve passed on to other folks, or any podcasts you listen to on a regular basis? Geoff: Yeah, no, good question. From a books perspective, there’s been a couple that I’ve really enjoyed and have been pretty well-shaping in recent times. One of them is called Play Bigger by a guy called Al Ramadan and his co-authors. It’s maybe a little sort of Silicon Valley in terms of how people think about markets, but I found it to be a really, really good book for thinking about strategy and how you sort of see your place in the world. You can think of it almost as sort of an updated version of that classic marketing text Positioning from back in the ‘70s. I also highly recommend to folks, regardless of their walks in life, whether its business or personal, to make sure you read Simon Sinek’s Start With Why. I think it’s a really important piece for folks who are really trying to understand what they should do next or how they should do it, and it’s been really important to us, understanding that we’re not just solving a problem because we think we can. This isn’t some intellectual exercise, there is a major social, human, life payoff that comes from doing this stuff right, and that’s what drives us, that’s our why. Brian: Gotcha. And I’m sure there’s going to be some folks listening to the podcast that would say, “Man, how can I try this out if everything - it sounds so good”. What would you recommend as a next step for contacting Accelo? Geoff: Yeah, absolutely. So, we have, we’ve stuck with the somewhat unfashionable approach now of letting people try it themselves. Imagine that. So, you can go to Accelo.com, you’ll find a sign up button on a lot of our pages. Just click there, the sign up process takes a couple of minutes, it’s a free 30-day trial, we don’t crimp it, we don’t sort of limit it. That’s probably the best way to get a look at Accelo. We also do, you know, regular walk-throughs and things like that, because it is a big and powerful product. One of the downsides of a trial - we always are kind of torn, on one hand should you trial it empty so people can load their own data into it and, we often, whenever we have a trial loaded up, people go “how do I delete all this stuff??”; and then conversely, how do you demonstrate the joy and the opportunity of seeing what your schedule dashboard looks like once it’s loaded up without having to load it up first - so, we often do webinars and other forms of demos first so folks can see it a bit more in a finished state and have their questions answered as well. Brian: Do you publish price on the site? Geoff: Absolutely. It’s at Accelo.com/pricing. All transparent, all, you know, honest, the way it should be. Brian: Excellent. Well, Geoff, thank you so much, this was awesome, especially for you and I to get to know each other here. Geoff: Yeah! Thanks, man. Brian: If someone wants to reach out to you here, what’s the best way to do that? LinkedIn? Twitter? Email? How does that… Geoff: Yeah, probably just email. If you fill out the contact form on our website, for example, that’ll get through to me pretty quick as well as the broader team, and that’s probably the better way rather than hitting me up directly because there’s a fair amount of travel going on in my world, with multiple continents and multiple offices on multiple continents, so, yeah, that’s a great way to get in touch: the contact form on our website. Brian: Alrighty. And we’ll in show notes put the books and contact info and the website and we’ll get that for everyone. Geoff, I appreciate it. Thank you. Geoff: Thank you. Brian: Hopefully we’ll talk again and maybe we’ll check in in a year and see how we’re both doing, so.. Geoff: ...Looking forward to it, man. That would be great. And it’s been great working with you guys, too. It’s a real delight when you get to work with a partner who reads the documentation and just hits home with it. And, I think as well, there were a couple of opportunities for us to improve things based on your feedback, which it was nice to then, you know, loop the API team in and they took great delight in turning around changes to make things better. So, yeah, awesome working with you guys. Brian: Thank you, Geoff, thank you. Alright, we’ll talk soon. Geoff: Alright, take care. Thanks again.