Latest / Unstuck Pod / From Survival to Strategy (Matthew Kaisaris and Jamie Schneiderman)

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From Survival to Strategy (Matthew Kaisaris and Jamie Schneiderman) · Unstuck Pod

• Jamie: Welcome, everyone. Matt, welcome to you. ⁓ that you could be here. Let's right in. Why don't you tell everybody who you are, what you do, a little bit your background. That'd be a great place to start. Matthew Kaisaris: Thank you. Sure. Thanks for having me, Jamie. I'm Matthew Kazaris. I'm the CEO and founder of Boreal Systems. I've been a ⁓ project for nine years about mostly mix between the digital marketing space then shifted into product and AI. I was working at Zapier for years as a project manager. And then I've kind of bounced around the monday.com ecosystem and a different partners. ⁓ decided to start boreal systems last year. kind of do it myself. And so at boreal, we ⁓ are, I want to say just another Monday.com, consultancy, but we're, we're one of the only Canadian, Monday.com, partners. And, yeah, we're just, we're here to help companies ⁓ get the most out the workflow, ⁓ put systems in place hopefully work, ⁓ better for them to just, you know, optimize a lot of their workflows and. and hopefully help them scale a bit quicker and a bit more efficiently. Jamie: Great. So Can you just a little bit more for those who don't either don't know monday.com I see most do, but just in case monday.com and also when you start talking about optimizing workflows, getting more out of it, just a little more specific there would be great. Matthew Kaisaris: . Yeah, so for those who don't know monday.com, it's a work management platform. So anywhere from simple CRM system to a project management tool to ⁓ a service ticketing system. ⁓ Really, you can build ⁓ inside of monday.com. They probably don't like when I compare it to a spreadsheet, but for all my customers, I say the easiest way to think of Monday at the beginning is it's a spreadsheet on steroids. It's laid out in rows and columns, just like a spreadsheet, but you can just do so much more with it. And it's got such a nice open backend and API that you can just integrate lots of apps, whether there's a native integration or you build something, is something we do as well. It's very easy tool to work with. ⁓ And so we set it up for a lot of construction companies, a lot of like marketing firms, car dealerships, anything under the sun where somebody other needs just like a customer, ⁓ like relationship tool or they need like a project management tool or a task tracker or kind of anything under the sun. We've set it up as a full ERP for customers with integrations with accounting softwares and stuff like that. There, Monday's a pretty big company with a pretty big reach. They keep growing and growing and adding more AI tools and stuff like that, ⁓ you know, month over month. So it's a pretty, pretty robust tool and they've got a great partner ecosystem. So I've been in that for a couple of years now and enjoying it. Jamie: Great. so your ⁓ that's been the way that you've been finding people, like finding potential customers. Matthew Kaisaris: Yeah, it's funny. I'll take a little bit of a step back in my career and I'll talk about, I've worked with, well now three partners, Boreal being one of them. When I started actually working in the Monday ecosystem, worked for a company out of Calgary called Aligio. They were one of the first Monday.com partners in They're like Monday's poster child for the partner ecosystem. And I went there as one of their first. Solutions consultant roles really kind of designing the system and then handing it off to the developers And that's where I really got involved in the Monday partnership By the time I left Illegio Not I should share trade secrets or anything, but their relationship with Monday was was super strong It's probably the strongest out of any of the Monday partners and they've got thousands of partners across the world They were getting a lot of business from Monday. They Well together did a lot of co-marketing. got a lot of ⁓ leads from Monday. You know, people reach out to Monday saying, I want to use your platform, but I don't know how to set it up. I need somebody. They'd say, great. Call Ligio and they're a great team. Great, great company growing, you know, with a, with a construction focus on there. And then I went to work for Asians grow, which is a Quebec based ⁓ Monday.com Construction is still the same niche, still the same focus, but a very different approach to how they do the build, but also how they treated. ⁓ dealt with the money.com relationship. When I went over there, they, they were just kind of on their, their own Island. didn't really deal with Monday other than saying like, you know, give us commission for the licenses that we sell and stuff like that. But there's really no interaction between Monday and, and, and grow there. And so when they brought me in, it was to build that relationship up. we, you know, I, I've jumped through all the hoops of the partnership program before. So I did that with grow and we went from a silver, partner to a platinum partner in a couple of months, just because. the pieces were there, they just had nobody doing the actual relationship building. And so that's actually still working with grow on like a fractional basis to just keep that relationship going and slowly train somebody as I build up Boreal here. But the way that that grow approach, it everything was outbound sales. There was almost no relationship with Monday that's changing now. But it was like 90 or 95 % of their sales were all just their own efforts, their own marketing. And so that partnership was vastly different between two very similar companies doing the same thing, same niche. And so there's a wide breadth there. Now with Boreal, we're kind of starting from the bottom of their little authorized partner program and working our way up. So it's nice to see it from I've been with big platinum partners to just like a ⁓ dinky authorized partner until we kind of grow more and jump through those hoops ⁓ Monday yet again. Jamie: Well, so yeah, so let's talk a little bit about that because I'd like to hear about the challenges of initial growth, like getting started, right? You know, I know you were in the space, but you're still starting your own thing. So let's talk a little bit about that and also how the challenges ⁓ changed or are changing over time as you get some success, move the needle a little bit. Matthew Kaisaris: Yeah, talk about it. I think the biggest challenge personally was I need to pay my mortgage. And is it the right choice to start a business at this point? I mean, when you leave a company, it's either you leave on good terms and you're leaving for something else or they can kick you to the curb. Or maybe there's some in between there. But when I left Illidio, very, very beginning of 2024, I think. I don't remember. 2024. One of those years, a couple of years ago, ⁓ it was a sudden departure and I was, just wanted to shift the different direction, which was totally fine with me. But I was like, man, how am going to pay my mortgage? I got to pay bills. I bought a house a couple of years ago. I've got, you know, a new puppy I'd gotten like a month before that. And it was just a whole, I mean, it's never an easy thing, I think, to leave a job. I was fighting with the idea of, do I go all in and start something myself? And I had a couple of partners that I've Jamie: Yeah. Matthew Kaisaris: went to college with and worked with in the past that were in similar boats or were about to be in similar boats and kind of wanted to leave where they were at. And we said, let's do it. Let's look for other jobs and let's find something in the meantime to the lights on, but let's start building a boreal. So from like ⁓ March last year, we started ⁓ pretty a year ago now, we were starting to build that boreal and planning and we took our time and we didn't have a big rush on it, I think, which was a blessing in a way. Almost within like two, three weeks I was working at Grow. I made transition very quickly from the two companies, but I still had Boreal going and we were still kind of building that up. And so the immediate concern of, how am going to keep the lights on? How am going to put food on the table? And was kind of put on back burner because I had another job lined up, which was great. But it wasn't something that I wanted to give up Boreal. And I had a very open conversation with Carl, the CEO of being like, this is what I want to do. And he was like, I would rather have somebody that works for me go and start their own company ⁓ have a good relationship with us, then leave on bad terms and go start a competitor. He's like, we're going to be competitors because we're in the same ecosystem, but we can be friends. We can ⁓ each other. And so that's a lot of what we're doing now is we're subcontracting workout for Grow. And ⁓ that was kind of the biggest challenge upfront was making that decision of can I go? full in, full time, head first into Boreal right away. And the answer was no. Partially just, you know, as I said, kind of have to pay the bills, but I didn't really know what I was doing either. As you said, I had, I have experience in the ecosystem, but I haven't had experience starting a business before. I didn't know what to do and neither had the other two guys that I'm working with at Boreal. And so had a little bit of time and grace there to, figure it out. And really it wasn't till kind of mid or end of the summer last year that we were ready to say like, let's. let's kind of put our name out there. Let's start very slowly getting some clients and doing work, but do it on the side. And that kind of, that was, I think that was ⁓ good choice on our side, but it was, was hard to know when do I quit my job and go full-time boreal. And it wasn't really until this year that that was the ⁓ Jamie: So, and is it the same for your partners? Matthew Kaisaris: ⁓ they're, they're transitioning slowly. ⁓ we made the choice to like, let's get me in there, ⁓ first, ⁓ just cause the dynamics us and, kind of how we're taking on roles at the company. made sense for me to jump in there full time first. And then as we hit certain monthly revenue milestones, we'll start transitioning other guys out of there. ⁓ originally their first plan was I'd be the last person to go full time because grow was very cool with me doing Boreal at the same time. ⁓ and that relationship. it was like, I'll just ride both as long as I can, but we'll get the other guys in there. And then we kind of switched that around to saying, well, let's put Matt, you know, his face out there. Let's get him doing the work and doing the marketing and a lot of and put him full-time first. And so they're kind of still making that transitional. Jamie: Okay, no, no. So let me ask you a question, because I see when I talk to companies, I see a lot of them start not necessarily the exact same way as you, but they start in a place where they're, we're building something. It's grab what you can, it's figure it out, it's survival. It's a whole bunch of things early on. You pass the point where it's just that, right? And in some ways, you're passing that because you've moved from the half and into the full. How is that affecting or changing or is it changing the way you're building, the way you're making decisions, you know, who you're trying to work with? Is it doing anything on that front? Matthew Kaisaris: Yeah, that's a really good question. When we were planning for real, it's all right? It's all trying to say, in a perfect world, this is what we want to do. Here's our mission statement, our vision statement. Here's the ethics behind our company and the path you want to go. But when push comes to shove at some point, you've got to take customers. And maybe that's not your ideal niche or your ideal kind of workflow. And you have these ideas for pricing and packaging that kind of go out the window when someone wants to say well. I don't really want to do that. I want to do this instead. And you're like well, Jamie: Yeah. Matthew Kaisaris: I'll take it. And so it's changed for sure. The nice thing is just I think the dynamic between me and ⁓ my partners is that we're very open to change. We knew going into it that like, let's design the ideal of what we want, but let's be super open to change. And that's how we always build inside of money.com with our customers anyways, ⁓ like, we're going to plan this future state, but we're going to be very agile. And we're going to, we know that this is just our plan going into it, but we need. Jamie: Yeah. Matthew Kaisaris: us and our customers have the head space of this is going to change a thousand times. I think that mindset has helped a lot because we're not doing the ideal stuff that we thought we would do. And a, mean, there's a lot of reasons for it, but one of the big ones, it's maybe a little more interesting to talk about for some people is with like AI, like the, get a little more specific is a lot of Monday.com partners or even not just Monday.com partners, but big, like, software service will say, okay, well, we're going to do like a big discovery phase and a big, you know, project assessment. You're going to, you know, Salesforce, they're going to spend $200,000 or $300,000 on just planning the project and gathering requirements and discovery. And then the actual implementation is going to be a few million dollars. We're not at that scale of pricing, but we would say, let's do a project assessment or a blueprint or spec book, whatever you want to call it to plan out this process. And we'll charge for it because a lot of companies kind of in our space do, and then we'll charge for the build after that. That's kind of gone out the window a little bit with AI. Building takes way less time. We can use tools like, like Claude via MCP to just be like, Hey, here's our document that we've come up with our plan, build it inside of Monday. And then we go and tweak and we've cut a hundred hours of work into like 15 hours of work. in the planning side, it's like, we don't need to do all this planning upfront. We can kind of build as we go with our customers. So it's less like software as a service. It's more like service as a service. That makes sense. ⁓ Jamie: Interesting. no, it's question for you. So as you bill and charge customers, you're doing it on an hourly basis. You're doing it on like, how is that set up? Because obviously that's the, there's a struggle if you get more more help, like I appreciate like you have, you've expertise, right? So you still have expertise that you're bringing to the table, the value that you're bringing is significant, but if it's less and less time, does that make it harder to charge or how does that ⁓ Matthew Kaisaris: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, it's a concern that is very prevalent, I think, in the Monday.com partner ecosystem is like, this was our bread and butter was building Monday. How do we now charge if AI can do it? And I mean, you hit the nail on the head, it's expertise and a lot of companies could have somebody internally ⁓ AI tools and whatever to get them 80 % of the way there or 70 % of the way there to the build. But they want to take a little bit of the risk out of it. I mean, part of it's probably like a legal liability of let's have somebody else come in and if it's really bad and screws us up, then we can kind of put the blame on a scapegoat there. But I think a lot of it is these guys have done it before. So let's just kind of have them guide us through it. And even if it's me and a customer sitting beside each other all day at a computer talking to Claude or chat GPT or Gemini and then building Monday with them, a lot of them still see the value in that. And a lot of the customers that don't see the value are Probably customers that wouldn't have seen a lot of value anyways in there. So we kind of have to have that mindset. But pricing side of it is tricky because we used to be able to have our work breakdown structure of here's what we're doing and the hours involved and here's our rate and what we charge. And we can give the customer that breakdown or we can just say it's a fixed fee for to do this build for you, which is what we do at Grow. We have our ⁓ estimating internally, we just give them a fixed fee. If we go over... It's on us. If we're under, then we're efficient. We make a little bit more profit on it. Other companies worked in the past give a bit of a range, saying it be between 20 and 50 hours or ⁓ have you. And so they kind of keep it in there and they do charge per hour. We're kind of a mix. It just depends on the customer. We're still doing those work breakdown structures and those estimates internally per hour. ⁓ But Jamie: Mm-hmm. Matthew Kaisaris: What used to take two hours could take 15 minutes now. So we have to tweak that kind of on our side. But we're still charging fixed fee for a lot of our customers. Or if it's consulting wise, then it's just hourly, which hasn't changed a lot. Jamie: Got it. Okay. No, and I, you know, it's interesting. I was just talking to a client who's gonna, who was gonna spend like 150, that's a different thing, but $150,000 to implement something. And I just said to them for what they were looking for, for what they need, that was crazy. And I can see how that's changing and, you know, made them reconsider. And it's this shift and the shift is happening very, very quickly on that. How is that like, so do you hear, you you as a result of what you're describing, you must hear at times, you're, that's too expensive or, you know, it's too much or it's too expensive. How do you, cause like too expensive to me is all relative. Like what is too expensive? It's a lot, you know, need it, ⁓ want it, but how do they, how do you think about that? How does that change the way you sell or you approach things with them? Matthew Kaisaris: I think the mindset of like building value is still still prevalent. And could be naive, but I don't think that's ever going to go away. I've always been a value seller of, know, at the end of the day, if you design posters, as an example, your local community center might pay you 25 bucks to design a poster for a block party or something or a community dance. But Disney is going to pay you two million dollars to design a poster for a similar thing. The work that goes into it. ⁓ Jamie: Mm-hmm. Matthew Kaisaris: could be very, very similar, but it's kind of the value that they get out of it, right? So it's always a hard thing, I think, to explain, and it's a hard skill to develop. But at the end of the day, we're still saying, you know, ⁓ whether takes us 15 minutes to do it or 15 hours to do it, you're still getting the same value out of it. The upside for them is after our is ⁓ or their engagement is done with us, are they going to keep us on as? consultants to help them build, which a lot of customers used to do and they still do to an extent. But that landscape is a little bit different now. They might not say, well, we want to keep you on retainer for a year for 20 hours a month to just help us tweak it as we build. Now it's a lot of, can you kind of train us for a couple of months and then let us take over? Because they have all those tools at their disposal to make adjustments to the build and to add onto it. So a little bit of the long-term partnership, I think, is changing with customers. ⁓ Jamie: Yeah. Matthew Kaisaris: It's harder in some ways, easier in others. ⁓ But I think that that's the thing. Of course. Jamie: So does that make you sorry not to interrupt I just but like does that make you you know there's a building and then a advising and or sort of support kind of role is that the way again the longer term as opposed to every time they need to change you do it for them like. Matthew Kaisaris: Yeah, I mean, that's the ideal, right? We engage them beginning, we do a build, whether we do it in phases or we do it all at once. And then there's some sort of like, we call it managed services after the fact of you keep us on retainer, basically on a call for whatever you need down the road, whether it's little tweaks or training or the new things you want built in the system. That's kind of the ideal. I think that that's changed a little bit in terms of maybe what customers want out of it. Jamie: Yeah. Matthew Kaisaris: But at the end of the day, it's still very similar. It's still, whether we get AI to do the build or redo the build or some mix in between, they still want your expertise. They hire you for a reason. want your expertise. And a lot of them still want your expertise after the main build is done. Just what that actually looks like in execution might look a little bit different now, but it's still very much that partnership. And so really, you're selling your service as opposed to the software or the product you've created, it's really that relationship that you're building with the customers and gaining their trust and then keeping that relationship going by just providing more value for them over time. I don't think that's changed much. Jamie: No, sure. ⁓ me ask you question. So If you've started down this path, like you said we went in with all this idealistic kind of view of where we're headed. ⁓ And I get it. If you wave a magic go back, take a look at the last year and then obviously where you're at right now. Is there anything that you would change? Anything you do differently? You know, How do view that? Matthew Kaisaris: Yeah, that's a really good question. I think with our execution of how we've done this, there probably isn't a lot that I'd change. Maybe little tactics here and there and little choices we made, but nothing major. I think the big thing that we haven't done the greatest job at, it's something that I'm saying, it's on my roadmap for next month, and then it gets kicked to the month after and the month after, ⁓ is building our And I think that that's Jamie: Mm-hmm. Matthew Kaisaris: an underrated thing. ⁓ I was in Prague couple of weeks ago for a Monday.com event with a partner's event. And I was talking to some of the other partners I've got good relationships with. And they were saying that you know, one of the difference makers ⁓ that's that is hard to ⁓ quantify terms of return on investment is building your brand, doing podcasts like this with you, making videos, just providing value for free to people out there is an underrated. And that's something we haven't done a great job at. Like if you look at Portale Systems online, okay, we've got a website. We've got an Instagram with one picture of me in New York from last year with somebody from Grow and then our logo. And you look at TikTok, we've got nothing. Facebook, I think we've got one or two posts. we've got me posting, but you don't have a lot from the business. And it's hard to, especially in this day and age where customers are doing a lot more research before they walk in your door or call you up. There's not a lot out there for Boreal Systems. There's a ton out there for Grow. They're very good at marketing and the CEO is a bit of like an influencer in Quebec in that way. But there's not a lot for Boreal. So I think if I could go back and make changes, I would say like half my time is ⁓ to be strategy and planning and half my time is going to be like, let's get our name out there and let's build that brand up. Jamie: Very cool. So here's the, how do people, sorry, I'm thinking, writing, lots of stuff going through my head. How can folks find you? So can they find you? How can they reach you? Matthew Kaisaris: I mentioned a lot of social channels that don't have lot of activity on them. But if you Google Boreal Systems, you'll find us out there. But borealsystems.ca is the best way to check us out. Funny enough, I get a lot of ⁓ messages on Reddit as well. There's another Boreal Systems. So if anybody's on Reddit, can shoot me a message there. Or Instagram is Boreal Systems. Facebook's Boreal Systems. LinkedIn is Boreal Systems. Everything's there. or just reach out to me on LinkedIn. I'm an open book, so happy to chat with anybody. Jamie: And I'll add some links into this when we post. So ⁓ try to get people to find you. That would be great. anyway, ⁓ thanks so much for taking the time. Really appreciate it. This is great, really ⁓ insightful, really valuable. So thank you. Thanks so much. And thank you, everyone, for watching, listening. Until next time, ⁓ you later. Matthew Kaisaris: Perfect. Thanks for having me on. Happy to do it.