Latest / The Mobilization Mindset / Episode 145 | Disconnected Systems Are Costing Contractors Millions with David Heyer

Transcript

Episode 145 | Disconnected Systems Are Costing Contractors Millions with David Heyer · The Mobilization Mindset

• 0:00
  SPEAKER_01: What did people do before speed chain?
• 0:02
  SPEAKER_00: Short answer is, you know, struggled, right?
• 0:05
  SPEAKER_00: In some instances.
• 0:06
  SPEAKER_01: It's like data collection is so important, man.
• 0:08
  SPEAKER_01: Like I so many people, what it doesn't matter what position you're, this can be in construction, this can be within speed chain, mobilization funding, it doesn't matter.
• 0:15
  SPEAKER_01: A lot of everyday work is is is collecting, aggregating, and organizing data.
• 0:21
  SPEAKER_01: And if you have a platform, particularly on spend, makes that process autonomous.
• 0:26
  SPEAKER_01: Like it just, it's it works while you're sleeping.
• 0:28
  SPEAKER_00: There's there's something in construction, which I'm sure you guys are familiar with, kind of called the receipt rodeo, right?
• 0:33
  SPEAKER_00: How do I back down these receipts?
• 0:35
  SPEAKER_00: I got 50 on my dashboard.
• 0:36
  SPEAKER_00: I gotta go to the office to turn them in.
• 0:38
  SPEAKER_01: We experienced that here, like just with our own company.
• 0:41
  SPEAKER_00: Exactly.
• 0:48
  SPEAKER_01: Hey folks, welcome to episode 145 of the mobilization mindset.
• 0:54
  SPEAKER_01: I'm really glad you're joining us today.
• 0:55
  SPEAKER_01: I've got the pleasure of having David Heyer here, the Chief Revenue Officer from SpeedChain.
• 1:02
  SPEAKER_01: He's a good friend.
• 1:03
  SPEAKER_01: We work with Speed Chain quite a bit.
• 1:05
  SPEAKER_01: They're in our industry.
• 1:06
  SPEAKER_01: We see them all over the place.
• 1:08
  SPEAKER_01: We're really happy to have you here, David.
• 1:10
  SPEAKER_01: Welcome.
• 1:11
  SPEAKER_00: True.
• 1:12
  SPEAKER_00: Thank you.
• 1:12
  SPEAKER_00: Excited to be here.
• 1:13
  SPEAKER_00: Excited to have the conversation and dig into it.
• 1:15
  SPEAKER_01: Awesome.
• 1:16
  SPEAKER_01: Well, Chief Revenue Officer, that's a that's a big role.
• 1:19
  SPEAKER_01: So you're obviously uh you're obviously trying to grow the company.
• 1:22
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 1:22
  SPEAKER_01: And for our viewers to get a better understanding of of your role, kind of your background, what you focus on every day.
• 1:30
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 1:30
  SPEAKER_01: Talk to me a little bit about Speed Chain, Speed Chain at a high level and how it is kind of integrated into the construction industry and what your role is in contributing to that growth, growth of SpeedChain.
• 1:42
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 1:43
  SPEAKER_00: No, love it.
• 1:44
  SPEAKER_00: So to kind of give everybody some context, Speed Chain is a commercial credit card and expense management platform, right?
• 1:50
  SPEAKER_00: So put simply, piece of plastic plus a piece of software that helps businesses kind of manage and control their spend that they have in a field.
• 1:58
  SPEAKER_00: Now, what's unique about SpeedChain is we've purpose-built this platform uh for construction.
• 2:04
  SPEAKER_00: And the reason for that is there's kind of one kind of big unlock that we realized as SpeedChain was getting built and as we're kind of taking this product to market.
• 2:13
  SPEAKER_00: And that was that corporate spend and project level spend are two fundamentally different things, right?
• 2:19
  SPEAKER_00: And bank cards and and other card platforms really solve for that corporate level spend, but kind of that field spend is tougher, tougher to get your arms around.
• 2:28
  SPEAKER_00: And there's kind of three reasons why that's the case, right?
• 2:30
  SPEAKER_00: The first is um the underlying data for a project is far more complex than it is in a corporate environment, right?
• 2:37
  SPEAKER_00: If I sit in sales and marketing, I go out to take somebody out to dinner, I swipe something, and it goes to just a general cost center.
• 2:44
  SPEAKER_00: In construction, we have project codes, cost codes, cost types, and in some instances, sub job codes, right?
• 2:50
  SPEAKER_00: So really getting a platform that makes it easy for individuals to categorize that data.
• 2:55
  SPEAKER_00: Two is that projects operate on their own timelines, right?
• 2:57
  SPEAKER_00: Amex sends you your bill on the first of the month and bills you on the 30th of the month, right?
• 3:02
  SPEAKER_00: In construction, projects don't operate that way.
• 3:04
  SPEAKER_00: So have to have the visibility and ability to kind of control that spend and manage that spend, knowing that PMs and supers are really tasked with two things, being on time and on budget, right?
• 3:15
  SPEAKER_00: So building a platform that helps them.
• 3:17
  SPEAKER_00: And then ultimately, employees are traversing projects far more frequently than they do cost centers, right?
• 3:22
  SPEAKER_00: You know, in the morning you could be on one project in the afternoon on a different one.
• 3:26
  SPEAKER_00: So building a platform that provides individuals with the flexibility to kind of traverse multiple projects was kind of the thesis as to why we built speech in.
• 3:36
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 3:36
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, that's so interesting you say that.
• 3:38
  SPEAKER_01: I actually call what you just described as like project stacking, right?
• 3:42
  SPEAKER_01: So I'm on a webinar in a few weeks and I'm going to be talking about how not having a strong grasp on your cash flow can actually uh be a detriment in your in your forward-looking projections, but not because you have one project.
• 3:55
  SPEAKER_01: It's because you have seven projects that are stacked on top of each other.
• 3:59
  SPEAKER_01: And one project uh you don't have absolute clarity into, which can affect in a in sort of a ripple effect in your other projects.
• 4:06
  SPEAKER_01: So um, that's a really interesting thing.
• 4:08
  SPEAKER_01: You said one thing.
• 4:08
  SPEAKER_01: You said um it's it's sort of easy when you have a like a corporate card for your company as a whole, right?
• 4:16
  SPEAKER_01: Because there's a job costing center, right?
• 4:18
  SPEAKER_01: It goes to marketing or it goes to sales.
• 4:20
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 4:21
  SPEAKER_01: But when you're talking about construction, you're really kind of leaning into your cost drivers are really on the project.
• 4:27
  SPEAKER_01: So talk to me about how speed chain's application from a not from a payment standpoint, but but from like a UI standpoint, how you're displaying to the customer, uh, okay, these are your project costs.
• 4:40
  SPEAKER_01: This is how it flows into your the rest of your financials.
• 4:43
  SPEAKER_01: Talk to me a little bit about that.
• 4:44
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 4:44
  SPEAKER_00: So I mean, as you just described, there's kind of two big types of spend on any construction job, right?
• 4:49
  SPEAKER_00: You've got your committed spend, um, the spend that is captured in your project management software or your or your ERP, right?
• 4:56
  SPEAKER_00: It's anytime 75 to 80 percent of any given project.
• 5:00
  SPEAKER_00: And then you've got that kind of project level spend, which you just described, Drew.
• 5:04
  SPEAKER_00: It's kind of got teams all over the place.
• 5:05
  SPEAKER_00: You've got guys in the field all over the place, tracking all these different projects.
• 5:09
  SPEAKER_00: And and the big gap has historically been visibility into that spend, right?
• 5:13
  SPEAKER_00: We don't, it's really hard to capture that data, bring that data into the accounting systems or systems of record and giving the finance team visibility into all of that.
• 5:22
  SPEAKER_00: And so, you know, one of the things that we learned early, and you just kind of mentioned it, is that there's this data lag from when someone swipes a card on the field, when that data gets sent to the finance team, how the finance team categorizes that project and in their kind of back-end accounting software.
• 5:38
  SPEAKER_00: And then when you go to close out the project and this project stacking that you just described, you know, what you thought might have been a 10% margin project is really a 7% margin project, right?
• 5:46
  SPEAKER_00: And so what SpeedChain was built to do was to give that finance team real-time visibility.
• 5:52
  SPEAKER_00: So they have um, you know, the second credit card to swipe in speed chain, that transaction is populating in a data table, right?
• 6:00
  SPEAKER_00: For for the admin to manage.
• 6:01
  SPEAKER_00: Now, the admin, we've kind of built two different experiences.
• 6:04
  SPEAKER_00: The admin total visibility across the organization, and then a card holder to really kill the expense report from them.
• 6:10
  SPEAKER_00: So we've made it from a UI perspective.
• 6:13
  SPEAKER_00: Hey, if I'm a you know, somebody out on the job, I swipe my card off to do is go in there and hit a couple drop downs, categorize my transactions.
• 6:21
  SPEAKER_00: I can even text in to a receipt agent, you know, hey, it's from this job.
• 6:25
  SPEAKER_00: All of that data gets categorized in real time and flows across to the admins and PMs, right?
• 6:31
  SPEAKER_00: So that kind of need for real-time whip reports or real-time data visibility is really kind of satisfied with speed chain.
• 6:39
  SPEAKER_01: So let's take a step back from speed chain.
• 6:42
  SPEAKER_01: Um, actually, no, I have one more question before I ask the question I'm about to ask.
• 6:46
  SPEAKER_01: Uh I I don't really know of any many other platforms and and and payment services cards like you guys.
• 6:54
  SPEAKER_01: What did people do before?
• 6:56
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, you guys work with so many clients across the country.
• 6:59
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 6:59
  SPEAKER_01: Uh I know of many of them.
• 7:01
  SPEAKER_01: Um, what did people do before SpeedChain?
• 7:04
  SPEAKER_00: Short answer is, you know, struggled, right?
• 7:07
  SPEAKER_00: In some instances, right?
• 7:08
  SPEAKER_00: They they went to their banks, they went to American Express, and they basically were trying to connect legacy systems to other legacy systems, right?
• 7:19
  SPEAKER_00: And I think when we talk about technology today, um, you've got all these different platforms and they're all siloed in different ways.
• 7:26
  SPEAKER_00: And so that they don't connect or they don't talk to one another, right?
• 7:29
  SPEAKER_00: And in the way to run, and what we've seen our lot of our clients do successfully is connect those platforms so that there is this kind of um data sharing and real visibility that really allows these businesses to operate efficiently.
• 7:45
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 7:47
  SPEAKER_01: All right, taking a step back from speed chain and kind of talking a little bit about best practices here, um, and I think this is worth talking about with our viewers, is um we we uh at mobilization funding um solve some of the same problems that you do, but you guys solve different components of the same problem, right?
• 8:07
  SPEAKER_01: So when you're looking at credit card spend on jobs, what are some best practices?
• 8:12
  SPEAKER_01: How does that work?
• 8:13
  SPEAKER_01: All right, so I'm a business owner, I've got a speed chain card, right?
• 8:18
  SPEAKER_01: I also have access to other capital, whether it be through mobilization funding or a bank or an asset-based lender of some sort, but also have speed chain.
• 8:28
  SPEAKER_01: What am I using the speed chain card for?
• 8:30
  SPEAKER_01: Like best practices.
• 8:31
  SPEAKER_01: What should I be focusing that spend on as I plan my project?
• 8:36
  SPEAKER_01: As I plan my month, I plan my project, and I have four or five other projects going on at the same time.
• 8:41
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 8:41
  SPEAKER_00: There's kind of two things.
• 8:43
  SPEAKER_00: One is um there's the plan spend that you just described, and like speed chain can really help you be a card on file and and and where mobilization plays and and kind of pairing the two together is going to buy materials, going to buy um kind of pre-committed spend, right?
• 8:57
  SPEAKER_00: What best in class looks like and the real value speed chain delivers is really out in the field, right?
• 9:03
  SPEAKER_00: So you've got a hundred guys at any given time working across multiple territories.
• 9:08
  SPEAKER_00: Um historically, you don't have the controls to dictate where and how that card can be used, right?
• 9:15
  SPEAKER_00: So with speed chain, what you're doing is you're you're creating a card for a for a person in the field.
• 9:21
  SPEAKER_00: You're gonna put spend rules around where and how that card can be used, right?
• 9:25
  SPEAKER_00: Is this a gas card?
• 9:26
  SPEAKER_00: Is this card only meant to be used to buy materials, right?
• 9:29
  SPEAKER_00: Are there spend limits or velocity rules that to say, hey, this guy can only go spend$1,000 versus$10,000?
• 9:36
  SPEAKER_00: So kind of before the card even gets into the employee's hand is putting those guardrails in place to ensure that the business has the protections it needs, but it also gives the cardholder the autonomy to kind of complete their project, right?
• 9:49
  SPEAKER_00: The second thing is really um the biggest hurdle that businesses struggle with today is collecting receipts and collecting data from the field, right?
• 10:00
  SPEAKER_01: And so when you say receipts, do you mean receipts for for items that they paid for, or are you talking about receipt of their AR?
• 10:07
  SPEAKER_01: You're talking about receipts for items they pay for.
• 10:09
  SPEAKER_00: Exactly.
• 10:09
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 10:09
  SPEAKER_00: So I walk in the Home Depot, I bought a hammer, um, the receipt associated with that transaction and getting it back to the finance team.
• 10:18
  SPEAKER_00: There's there's something in construction which I'm sure you guys are familiar with, kind of called the receipt rodeo, right?
• 10:22
  SPEAKER_00: How do I track down these receipts?
• 10:24
  SPEAKER_00: I got 50 on my dashboard, I got to go to the office to turn them in.
• 10:27
  SPEAKER_01: We experience that here, like just with our own company.
• 10:30
  SPEAKER_00: Exactly.
• 10:31
  SPEAKER_00: Um, speed chain kills that, right?
• 10:33
  SPEAKER_00: We have we have a feature called um card lockout, which basically says, hey, if as an organization from a company policy point of view, we want receipts to be required for transactions, there's settings within speech chain that you can turn on or off.
• 10:47
  SPEAKER_00: And what I tell people is it's not meant to be a carrot and a stick.
• 10:50
  SPEAKER_00: What it's meant to do is give the finance team time back to focus on revenue additive activities and letting the technology police the behavior in the field and collect that data on behalf of the finance team.
• 11:04
  SPEAKER_01: It's like data collection is so important, man.
• 11:06
  SPEAKER_01: Like I so many people, what it doesn't matter what position you're this could be in construction, this can be within speed chain, mobilization funding, it doesn't matter.
• 11:14
  SPEAKER_01: Um a lot of everyday work is is is collecting, aggregating, and organizing data.
• 11:21
  SPEAKER_01: And if you have a platform, particularly on spend, that essentially makes that process autonomous.
• 11:29
  SPEAKER_01: Like it just, it's it works while you're sleeping and just reports to you when you need the report and it's accurate, right?
• 11:35
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, there's there's that whole decision, people are kind of going into artificial artificial intelligence, and how can we leverage artificial intelligence to to uh make us more effective, more efficient?
• 11:46
  SPEAKER_01: But you can have the best AI tool in the world that's the most efficient thing in the world, but if it's not accurate, it's it's useless, right?
• 11:52
  SPEAKER_00: It's a it's a great point.
• 11:54
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, we what we talk about is like good data in, good data out, bad data in, bad data out, right?
• 11:58
  SPEAKER_00: And so, you know, if you've got some of the large general contractors that we're working with have, you know, north of a couple hundred projects running at any given time, right?
• 12:07
  SPEAKER_00: And so if you just let an individual in the field click on his phone and and select one of those multiple hundred projects and then the cost codes that relate to those hundred, you're probably gonna get bad data, right?
• 12:19
  SPEAKER_00: You can't you've overwhelmed somebody with selection and choice.
• 12:23
  SPEAKER_00: And so, really, what we've also done is built a module that allows you to filter down visibility, filter down kind of selection and choice.
• 12:32
  SPEAKER_00: So that if I'm in the field only working on two projects, I only have the visibility into those two, right?
• 12:37
  SPEAKER_00: We're we're making it as easy as possible to collect that data, but we also want to make sure that that data that we're collecting, to your point, is accurate because if it's not, we've just created more work on the back end.
• 12:48
  SPEAKER_01: And for the credit card spend, and then this is kind of my last question about the sort of the mechanics of the uh of the card and best practice, a best practice question, is the mechan the are you are you only spending money on the card that essentially that you pay back within 30 days?
• 13:06
  SPEAKER_01: Because like a longer, longer term costs, like large material spend that that you might uh that that that might be uh that might be a significant portion of your job costs that you pay in 60 days, that's probably not something that you would put on the card, right?
• 13:22
  SPEAKER_00: Exactly.
• 13:22
  SPEAKER_00: You know, typically the way to think about spend of a speed chain is you make a purchase 30 plus five days after that, you you're paying it down, right?
• 13:31
  SPEAKER_00: And so this is for your field team that's scattered across the country, giving them the ability to kind of purchase um materials in the field, uh, unless kind of as you just described, those larger big purchases, which is obviously what mobilization funding helps with.
• 13:47
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, yeah.
• 13:47
  SPEAKER_01: And I don't, I don't want to use that there, there's a term petty cash, right?
• 13:51
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, you know, there's a petty cash bucket for guys out in the field.
• 13:54
  SPEAKER_01: Okay, I need, I need a couple things from Home Depot.
• 13:56
  SPEAKER_01: We don't have it in the truck, I'm gonna go get that, right?
• 13:58
  SPEAKER_01: That's very different than buying a million dollars worth of flooring from your flooring supplier to finish your job, right?
• 14:06
  SPEAKER_00: Exactly.
• 14:06
  SPEAKER_01: So, all right, I want to shift gears a little bit.
• 14:09
  SPEAKER_01: Um, I want to talk about the industry in general, sort of the payments industry.
• 14:13
  SPEAKER_01: Um we talked a little bit about sort of the evolution of artificial intelligence.
• 14:19
  SPEAKER_01: And the question comes up all the time with our customers is how can we leverage?
• 14:24
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, you cannot replace a guy in the field.
• 14:28
  SPEAKER_01: Like, how are you replacing the guy in the field?
• 14:30
  SPEAKER_01: Um, so the question remains how can we leverage sort of this ever-evolving technology landscape to make us, a construction company, more efficient?
• 14:40
  SPEAKER_01: So, what are you seeing out there?
• 14:42
  SPEAKER_01: I know you're going to all these conferences, you're in the tech space, right?
• 14:45
  SPEAKER_01: Payment space, which is kind of synonymous in a lot of ways.
• 14:48
  SPEAKER_01: What are some trends that you're seeing out there that you'd feel comfortable talking about?
• 14:51
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 14:51
  SPEAKER_00: And so I think from a payments perspective, it's super important to ground us into like where we see that innovation, right?
• 14:56
  SPEAKER_00: So historically speaking, a lot of that innovation starts with the consumer.
• 15:01
  SPEAKER_00: So B2C.
• 15:02
  SPEAKER_01: Actually, I'm gonna I'm gonna interrupt you.
• 15:03
  SPEAKER_01: Where do you think we if you if you if you like look at a curve, right?
• 15:06
  SPEAKER_01: Where do you think we are on the technology in the technology landscape with regard to payments technology?
• 15:13
  SPEAKER_01: Like you think we're still kind of on the upward, upward slope?
• 15:16
  SPEAKER_01: Do you think we flattened out?
• 15:17
  SPEAKER_01: Where do you think we are?
• 15:18
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, I think, I think the r the rate at which technology is changing these days, and and specifically for construction, I think we're still on that upward slope, right?
• 15:27
  SPEAKER_00: I I think that you know, speed chain and and other um financial technology companies, we see a lot of innovation in B2C that hasn't even come to B2B yet, right?
• 15:37
  SPEAKER_00: And so um I think that and historically from innovation trends, you see a lot of stuff start with consumer because it's less enterprise, it's more one-off, right?
• 15:45
  SPEAKER_00: And that's where the innovation starts.
• 15:48
  SPEAKER_00: Um when you look at the financial landscape, you kind of have your your technology first businesses, right?
• 15:55
  SPEAKER_00: And you've got your your banks and and and two big buckets.
• 15:59
  SPEAKER_00: And I think one thing to say is banks are great at many things, moving money, helping you with financing your business, but building technology is not one of them, right?
• 16:08
  SPEAKER_00: And so that let leaves itself to businesses like speed chain to go build that technology.
• 16:13
  SPEAKER_00: Um, I think where we're seeing the most innovation is around processes, right?
• 16:18
  SPEAKER_00: So it's not the the transaction itself or the movement of money itself, there's not a ton of innovation.
• 16:23
  SPEAKER_00: Where the innovation is, is once a transaction has happened, what is the workflow uh that needs to happen to get that data to where I want it to?
• 16:32
  SPEAKER_00: And how do I eliminate as many paths or barriers to get that data categorized or from a workflow perspective, alleviate that pain point for the for the end user?
• 16:44
  SPEAKER_01: Interesting.
• 16:45
  SPEAKER_01: Interesting.
• 16:45
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, the payments industry, I I worked at a payments company for a minute, not long.
• 16:50
  SPEAKER_01: And the amount of technology that goes into sort of um modernizing our payments infrastructure is incredible.
• 17:00
  SPEAKER_01: Quite honestly, a little bit over my head.
• 17:02
  SPEAKER_01: I learned the term API while I worked there.
• 17:04
  SPEAKER_01: I felt like I made a lot of progress.
• 17:06
  SPEAKER_00: And but but that innovation that you just like the API, which you just even mentioned, kind of it's you have all of these disconnected systems, and we're now getting into a world where with open APIs and the ability to move data, it's breaking down all the walls, right?
• 17:21
  SPEAKER_00: So um, it's now easier than ever before to push data into systems that historically you couldn't get data into.
• 17:29
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 17:30
  SPEAKER_01: You talk to, or at least you're you the guys on your the guys and gals on your team talk to business owners uh all the time.
• 17:37
  SPEAKER_01: And uh I bet I bet they a lot of the business owners are like, well, talk to my CFO, talk to my controller.
• 17:43
  SPEAKER_01: You guys have talked to a ton.
• 17:45
  SPEAKER_01: So, what are some best practices from your perspective that some of the best controllers, best CFOs have instituted within their organizations that when you look at companies and say, hey, is this gonna be a good customer, is this gonna be a good partner for us that are like no-brainers for you?
• 17:59
  SPEAKER_01: Some tendencies that they might have.
• 18:01
  SPEAKER_00: I think the first thing, and you just mentioned tendencies that they might have.
• 18:03
  SPEAKER_00: The first thing is this understanding of like constant improvement, right?
• 18:08
  SPEAKER_00: Just because we, you know, certain CFOs or controllers have done something a certain way for 20 years doesn't mean it's the right answer, right?
• 18:15
  SPEAKER_00: And so I think that some businesses say, hey, we've done it this way, we're we're comfortable with this, versus, hey, we've done it this way, but we understand there's a better way to do it.
• 18:24
  SPEAKER_00: So I think kind of just approaching problems with a with a lens of, hey, there's always gonna be something new, interesting, exciting out there that can make my life easier.
• 18:33
  SPEAKER_00: So I think it's this openness to approach a problem in a type of way.
• 18:36
  SPEAKER_00: Um, I think from there is there's a level of um intentionality about how they want to solve that problem, right?
• 18:44
  SPEAKER_01: I use the word intention all the time.
• 18:46
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, you know, it's not like we saw this problem, so we're gonna go spend a couple of days figuring it out.
• 18:51
  SPEAKER_00: It's hey, no, we're gonna go identify what the problem is.
• 18:54
  SPEAKER_00: We're gonna understand the pain points that are causing that problem.
• 18:57
  SPEAKER_00: We're now gonna go out to the market to find a solution that does that.
• 19:00
  SPEAKER_00: And then we're gonna identify someone within the organization that's responsible for implementing and scaling this across the organization and really setting up the program for success uh and not letting it die on a bye.
• 19:12
  SPEAKER_01: David, you just you just hit the nail on the head.
• 19:15
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, so many, so many people have good ideas, right?
• 19:19
  SPEAKER_01: And organizations.
• 19:20
  SPEAKER_01: However, execution is the hardest part.
• 19:23
  SPEAKER_01: And what I've noticed in organizations that I've been a part of, um, and I and I kind of check myself in the current organization, uh, more mobilization funding, is if you have a new idea and and it there's a clear problem that it that idea is solving too, right?
• 19:39
  SPEAKER_01: You all you have to pick an owner of that initiative and set expectations on it.
• 19:46
  SPEAKER_01: So many organizations just they're in a room, in a meeting, there's eight people, they're like, all right, let's go, good, the idea is great, but there's no owner.
• 19:54
  SPEAKER_00: Totally.
• 19:55
  SPEAKER_00: And and I think specifically for tech rollouts and or innovation, you're you're changing a process or you're improving a process, right?
• 20:03
  SPEAKER_00: And so if the first person that experiences this says, well, it's different and gives up, it's it's not gonna work.
• 20:11
  SPEAKER_00: And so where we've seen a lot of success is, you know, sometimes we're rolling out credit cards and the platform to hundreds of users, if not thousands of users, right?
• 20:19
  SPEAKER_00: And so it's as you just described, it's like, okay, who is gonna be the champion that takes this through all the way to for to the finish line?
• 20:27
  SPEAKER_00: And by the way, once you get to the finish line, everyone's gonna pop up and say, holy shit, this is a lot easier, right?
• 20:32
  SPEAKER_01: Good job.
• 20:33
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 20:33
  SPEAKER_01: And it might have been a struggle.
• 20:35
  SPEAKER_01: I tell, I tell our folks all the time, I want you to struggle.
• 20:38
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 20:39
  SPEAKER_01: If you don't struggle, you're not growing.
• 20:41
  SPEAKER_01: If if if if all the answers are provided to you, you're not growing.
• 20:45
  SPEAKER_01: You're not exercising your muscle, your brain muscle, right?
• 20:49
  SPEAKER_01: Or your problem-solving muscle.
• 20:50
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, the ability to solve problems or work through uh challenging scenarios is practice.
• 20:57
  SPEAKER_01: It is a muscle, right?
• 20:59
  SPEAKER_01: All right.
• 20:59
  SPEAKER_01: I want to shift gears a little bit uh in the in the last part of our uh meeting here.
• 21:04
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and it's it's it's a little bit away from payments and all that stuff.
• 21:08
  SPEAKER_01: It's more to business sort of strategy, business philosophy.
• 21:11
  SPEAKER_01: I have the opportunity to be sitting here with the chief revenue officer for for a very, very fast growing company, right?
• 21:21
  SPEAKER_01: I've always believed that no matter what industry you're in, whether that be construction, you know, technology slash payments, lending, whatever, you know, whatever it may be, if you are in growth mode and you are growing and you want to grow, you can learn a lot of perspective and strategies from other industries, right?
• 21:41
  SPEAKER_01: So as the chief revenue officer for speed chain, you're looking at the market.
• 21:47
  SPEAKER_01: How do you define growth?
• 21:50
  SPEAKER_01: What are sort of the um actions and strategies or tactics you're you're taking to uh execute on that sort of definition?
• 22:00
  SPEAKER_01: Growth.
• 22:01
  SPEAKER_01: And third, how do you view the market?
• 22:03
  SPEAKER_01: How do you attack the market?
• 22:04
  SPEAKER_01: Meaning, all right, uh, you know, this is how we define growth, this is success.
• 22:09
  SPEAKER_01: Number two, all right, I'm gonna look at the whole market and see where the opportunity is.
• 22:13
  SPEAKER_01: And number three, these are the tactics that I'm gonna use in order to execute at a high level, you know.
• 22:17
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, I think I think all of that starts with kind of like a guiding strategy, right?
• 22:21
  SPEAKER_00: And and what what we say at speech on speech chain is without choices, there is no strategy.
• 22:26
  SPEAKER_00: So you cannot solve every problem on the planet well.
• 22:29
  SPEAKER_00: It's impossible.
• 22:30
  SPEAKER_01: Totally agree.
• 22:32
  SPEAKER_00: Um, so like what are the choices that we're gonna make and how are we gonna go after them and attack them, right?
• 22:37
  SPEAKER_00: So um, for us, as you just described, growth for us um is really, I mean, we're a venture-backed business.
• 22:47
  SPEAKER_00: We're growing quickly.
• 22:48
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, we when we talk about growth, it's not just like 10, 20% year over year.
• 22:52
  SPEAKER_00: We're talking about hundreds of percents that we're growing every year, right?
• 22:55
  SPEAKER_00: And yeah, and part of what's important to remember and ground ourselves within that growth is our clients coming a speech aim and our customers saying, wow, this has made my organization easier, or has it made my process easier?
• 23:07
  SPEAKER_00: And so I think we really ground ourselves in a client-centric approach, which is we can grow all we want, but if our customers don't love the product, the growth's gonna stop, right?
• 23:16
  SPEAKER_01: And also if you're looking at your customer and you realize we're actually not even solving, we could do business with you, I suppose, but we're not really solving any problem that you have.
• 23:25
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, it it's it's it's always that's kind of what we ground ourselves in, right?
• 23:31
  SPEAKER_00: Is are are we solving the customer's problem?
• 23:34
  SPEAKER_00: Right.
• 23:34
  SPEAKER_00: And so I think like when we think about those actions and strategies, there's a bunch of different things that we can go do, right?
• 23:39
  SPEAKER_00: We're investing in our technology roadmap, we're investing in and partnerships with AGC and ABC, kind of the the associations that be in and kind of growing within those ecosystems, but it all comes back to does this move the needle for the customer?
• 23:52
  SPEAKER_01: And I think when I want to hit on one thing, David, sorry to back up.
• 23:54
  SPEAKER_01: You said you said something very interesting, and I love this mentality.
• 23:58
  SPEAKER_01: Um at you said something along the lines that at speed chain, if if if you don't have choices, it's not a strategy, or it's something along those lines.
• 24:06
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, if you're not making decisions or making choices, there's no strategy.
• 24:09
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 24:10
  SPEAKER_01: When you are a venture-backed company and you have really aggressive growth goals, like I don't want to say gun to your head, but a little bit of a gun to your head.
• 24:19
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 24:19
  SPEAKER_01: How do you balance growth for growth's sake and smart growth?
• 24:26
  SPEAKER_01: And what I mean by that is all right, I've got all these opportunities in the universe in front of me.
• 24:31
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 24:32
  SPEAKER_01: This is our core business because we've defined our core business.
• 24:35
  SPEAKER_01: These are nice little shiny things.
• 24:37
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 24:38
  SPEAKER_01: We could do that.
• 24:39
  SPEAKER_01: How do you balance that?
• 24:40
  SPEAKER_00: It's a great question.
• 24:41
  SPEAKER_00: I think to your point, is like we've decided that we are for construction or purpose built for construction.
• 24:46
  SPEAKER_00: There are customers that call on us that say, hey, we're in media and telecoms, we want to use you, right?
• 24:53
  SPEAKER_00: And and we tell them no.
• 24:54
  SPEAKER_00: And the answer, and the reason why we tell them no is because we believe in this concept called innovation stacking, which is if you solve for every person in an organization within a construction company, and you build and you stack what you built last month on top of what you're building next month and future months, you build a defensibility to your business as you think about features and product roadmap.
• 25:16
  SPEAKER_00: Oh my gosh.
• 25:17
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 25:17
  SPEAKER_01: And guys, for those of you out there who are listening, what David means by uh a defensive position in the market.
• 25:24
  SPEAKER_01: And guys, you can apply this to your business as well.
• 25:28
  SPEAKER_01: David and his team are getting deeper and deeper with regard to core value add features that their customers are using, right?
• 25:35
  SPEAKER_01: So the value is high.
• 25:37
  SPEAKER_01: And then eventually they're so ingrained with their customers the exit costs or the or the willingness or the appetite to exit from a relationship with speed chain is so high that it's it's it's a very defense, defensible position, right?
• 25:53
  SPEAKER_01: And that's the ultimate goal within any company, right?
• 25:57
  SPEAKER_01: And with with with your companies out there in the trades, do you do really, really good work?
• 26:03
  SPEAKER_01: Right?
• 26:04
  SPEAKER_01: Do you do work on time?
• 26:07
  SPEAKER_01: Are you reliable?
• 26:08
  SPEAKER_01: Do you do it within budget?
• 26:10
  SPEAKER_01: That gets you deeper and deeper within your or uh within your GCs or the owners of the projects, where the exit costs of working with you are too high for them to do that.
• 26:19
  SPEAKER_01: So you're def you're you're in a very defensible position.
• 26:22
  SPEAKER_01: That's a barrier to entry from competitors.
• 26:25
  SPEAKER_01: And all of a sudden, price becomes less of an issue.
• 26:28
  SPEAKER_01: Because I've said in the past, guys, you know, costs or price is only an issue with the absence of value, right?
• 26:36
  SPEAKER_01: So I mean, I think that's a really good point, David.
• 26:38
  SPEAKER_01: And uh, I just wanted to, I wanted to touch on that.
• 26:40
  SPEAKER_00: No, you you literally hit it on the head.
• 26:43
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 26:43
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, that that's how we prioritize decisions, is you know, and that's how we think about going after the market.
• 26:49
  SPEAKER_00: Is this, is this, you know, I we say two things.
• 26:52
  SPEAKER_00: Do we have a right to win?
• 26:53
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 26:53
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 26:54
  SPEAKER_00: Do we if we're going into a new space, should we?
• 26:57
  SPEAKER_00: And can we?
• 26:58
  SPEAKER_00: Because is it what's right for the customer?
• 27:00
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 27:00
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 27:02
  SPEAKER_01: David, this has been really awesome.
• 27:04
  SPEAKER_01: I really appreciate your time.
• 27:06
  SPEAKER_01: My last question is is there anything I haven't asked or anything that you want to say that that I didn't touch on?
• 27:11
  SPEAKER_01: Obviously, I'm not a payments expert, but um No, I here's what this has been great.
• 27:17
  SPEAKER_00: I I've enjoyed the conversation.
• 27:19
  SPEAKER_00: The the last thing I'll say is um there's a lot of technology out there, right?
• 27:23
  SPEAKER_00: And and a lot of um disparate solutions, right?
• 27:27
  SPEAKER_00: You if you went out to the marketplace, you could find a hundred different things to solve a hundred different problems, right?
• 27:32
  SPEAKER_00: And and I'd say my my kind of guiding principle or or what I try and help advise businesses on is like find solutions that can solve multiple problems and try and keep your tech stack as simple as humanly possible, right?
• 27:45
  SPEAKER_00: You know, we've seen customers that say, hey, well, we've tried these hundred solutions and we only use 10 of them.
• 27:49
  SPEAKER_00: It's like great, but you could have started with these five.
• 27:52
  SPEAKER_00: So um approach it with intentionality, think about what's right for you and the problems that you want to solve.
• 27:58
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 27:59
  SPEAKER_01: To David's point, um, I the other day, David, you're gonna laugh at this, but um, I just feel like I have so many things going on at one.
• 28:08
  SPEAKER_01: This is on a personal level.
• 28:09
  SPEAKER_01: So this is not enterprise level.
• 28:10
  SPEAKER_01: This is a personal example that you can absolutely apply to enterprise level.
• 28:14
  SPEAKER_01: I said, I need like an all-encompassing man, like almost like operating system for me for when do I follow up with people, you know, CRM, uh, yeah, note-taking, all that stuff.
• 28:26
  SPEAKER_01: And you you Google it or you chat GPT it, and there's a hundred different websites that come up, right?
• 28:31
  SPEAKER_01: And it's so confusing.
• 28:33
  SPEAKER_01: And so, you know, you want to find someone who's an expert.
• 28:36
  SPEAKER_01: So when you are, folks, when you're working to increase your technology infrastructure, such as working with a company like SpeedChain on the payment side, for example, if they're a tr if they're a good company and they care about the well-being for you, they're gonna try to offer value outside of just the direct relationship that they have with you.
• 28:57
  SPEAKER_01: So don't be afraid when you're talking to someone like David, if you're looking at speed chain saying, hey, I'm also trying to solve this problem.
• 29:03
  SPEAKER_01: You're in the textslash payment space.
• 29:05
  SPEAKER_01: Do you have any recommendations on how I should tackle this?
• 29:09
  SPEAKER_01: Because he and his team are experts, right?
• 29:11
  SPEAKER_01: Why not just leverage that relationship?
• 29:13
  SPEAKER_01: So, anyway, guys, this is closing out episode 145 of the mobilization mindset.
• 29:21
  SPEAKER_01: David Heyer from SpeedChain, friend, partner to mobilization funding.
• 29:26
  SPEAKER_01: Thank you so much for taking the time.
• 29:28
  SPEAKER_01: You're so informative and uh looking forward to seeing you soon.
• 29:31
  SPEAKER_01: That's a sign off, guys.
• 29:32
  SPEAKER_01: Thanks a lot for listening.