Jay Nathan, CEO at Balboa Solutions: Tech Leadership and Customer Success

Scott Smith: All righty. I’m excited to welcome Jay Nathan, a tech exec and entrepreneur with over 20 years of experience driving customer success and growth in SAS. he’s currently CEO of Belboa Solutions. Welcome Jay.

Jay Nathan: Appreciate you having me,…

Jay Nathan: Scott. No,…

Scott Smith: 

Scott Smith: Yeah, thanks for joining. So, we were just talking about how you had put together a podcast with over 350 interviews and we were kind of joking about our little podcast. We’ve got 30. So, now I’m feeling nervous.

Jay Nathan: no, no,…

Scott Smith: Should be cool to be able to talk to you.

Jay Nathan: no. …

Scott Smith: I bet you probably spend more time in those conversations asking questions than you did giving the long form answer. Is that fair or were they pretty conversational?

Jay Nathan: yeah, pretty conversational. We tried to keep it very laid-back and relaxed.

Jay Nathan: Nobody likes just like a, pingpong match, question response kind of thing. So, I like to keep it a little bit more relaxed. So, maybe I’ll throw in a question here for you, too, as we get

Scott Smith: So I was actually kind of curious, maybe just to get started, a little bit about the early kind of defining stages of your education, like what got you excited about either starting or finding the path that led you to your career? A couple of the people that I’ve talked to in the past have, highlighted they were a ger or they worked at a restaurant and…

Scott Smith: they did a lot of customer success and support work and either they loved it or they hated it and they wanted to go away from it. But I’m kind of curious what were some of the formative early stuff for you that got you excited?

Jay Nathan: Okay.

Jay Nathan: Great question. So, growing up, my parents were entrepreneurs and they owned retail stores, basically gift shops in malls. And I can remember being eight years old, standing on top of a wooden box behind a cash register and ringing people up, getting what they ordered and ringing them up in the cash register. I remember my mom always had a keen eye toward quality of what the products were that we were selling.

Jay Nathan: She always wanted the best and wanted to make sure that every customer had the best product, whatever it was they bought, whether it was a drink or whether it was candy or whether it was a gift box of some sort. She wanted it to be perfect for them. And so I think, as I’ve reflected on my career, I wish I could say I’ve always done perfect delivery for my customers over the years.  I know that’s not true, but I think that has shaped me and sort of my standards and the way I think about the experience that I want customers to have as they engage with me and the teams that I’m a part of and the products that I represent.

Scott Smith: Yeah, I was going to say one of the things that really struck me just at more recent,…

Scott Smith: but looking at your website even just for BAW, it seems so crisp and clear and very elegantly put clearly somebody has painstakingly looked through that to make sure it represents you guys pretty well.

Jay Nathan: Thank you.

Jay Nathan: We’re appreciative of Framer’s templates that are very clean and…

Jay Nathan: simple to work with. but thank you for that. Always a work in progress.

Scott Smith: Nice. And when you were building these or…

Scott Smith: I should say helping serve your customers with your parents, I’m always kind of curious about these family businesses, is it like one of these things…

Scott Smith: where they’re like, “All right, if you do great today, we’re going to give you a dollar or I’m going to pay you 25 cents an hour.” Or is this family duty and service?

Jay Nathan: No.

Jay Nathan: I don’t know whether it actually started his family in duty service.

Scott Smith: Okay.

Jay Nathan: I can’t remember that. but pretty much from the earliest of my recollections, I do recall keeping track of the hours that I worked so that I would be paid for each one of them. So whether it was a quarter or a dollar or $2, I don’t even remember. but yeah, no, the reality was we were sort of brought up in me and my brother were sort of brought up in that environment. So we were always going to be there anyway. We were always doing something to help out or my mom probably remembers we were probably always doing something to avoid helping out as young kids.

Jay Nathan: but I do remember once we started getting paid for it, I really wanted to keep track of those hours because I knew I was going to be collecting at some point and I was always saving up for something, whether it was a new airplane that I wanted, new toy plane something else. I always had my eye on something that I wanted to get into. So, I knew I was saving for something. my god.

Scott Smith: I’ve got a buddy that lives around the corner.

Scott Smith: He has a similar kind of dynamic with his kids. He runs a farm probably a few months the year. It’s like I actually don’t really understand it quite very well because he runs a consulting SAS business, but at the same time he has a side hustle in the evenings out of a farm, but with his kids, he’ll say, “Would you rather I pay you hourly or would you rather I pay you a percentage of profits?” And so he has some kids two of his kids have just taken the hourly and then one of the other ones has taken the profits and…

00:05:00

Scott Smith: that it’s either been really painful or quite good. So

Jay Nathan: Yeah. …

Jay Nathan: it’s a very interesting question and a very thoughtful question for a father to pose to his children to teach them about money because I always tell my kids, it’s okay to work for 100% okay to work for somebody else.

Jay Nathan: But if you really want to sort of build wealth for your family and those who come after you, then you really need to own something, And that is owning a share of the profits so yeah, that’s really interesting. I have to think about that. my kids are a little older now. They’ve all gone on to do other things, but it’s a really interesting question. Maybe my grandkids

Scott Smith: When do you think the build wealth from ownership idea started with you?

Scott Smith: Was that because of your parents or later in life?

Jay Nathan: No, it was later in life when I really finally got my head around that.

Jay Nathan: Too late of course I would say but probably over just the past 15 or 20 years where I’ve had the opportunity to have equity in companies that I’ve worked for and so you see how that plays out. And then I’ve had the chance to own companies and some companies I’ve own 100% of and so, you get to reap the benefit of all the profits that’s your paycheck essentially. Some companies I’ve invested in and I own a percentage of them and then I, get the percentage of those profits and then some companies, it’s just a I haven’t invested in them physically, but I’ve invested in my time and so then I’ve gotten equity for that.

Jay Nathan: So, I think it’s the way the world works. It’s the way that money is made when you’re a professional. And to some degree, I wish everybody understood business a little bit more,  A lot of people go into jobs and they think of work as a job that you do for somebody else, which is fine, but part of the beauty of this country is it’s a giant platform to build businesses on, right? You have a legal system you can trust. You have currency that you can lean on.

Jay Nathan: you have so many things that really give you the infrastructure to make it on your even today that is true right despite all the political rhetoric out there we live in a great place to be able to earn a living and…

Scott Smith: Yeah. Yeah.

Jay Nathan: and build something if that’s what you desire to do with your life. Found.

Scott Smith: to your point about the opportunity when I was growing up and also just the ownership versus hourly. my dad was a Wall Street guy and he would always highlight to me even so many of his friends who were basically high-end hourly workers. whether it was like an accountant or a lawyer or a lot of these people eventually they can become partners and owners but for the first big part of their career they spend it on an hourly basis and…

Scott Smith: it’s like more the more they work the hard they make more but also if they take time off for vacation it’s like explicitly they can’t make money they’re losing an opportunity I had an uncle…

Jay Nathan: Yeah. Yeah,…

Jay Nathan: that’s right.

Scott Smith: who also would basically say to me I mean and he actually took smaller companies but he would always say to me the way to build wealth is to own a part of the company. And one of my first companies with when I lived in New Hampshire, his prerogative, but he was reluctant to sort of share in the equity, the ownership of the company. and I would every time we had a sales kickoff or, a sales a day like we went off and did something fun, he’d always come along and I would basically as a 20-year-old, I’d be…

Scott Smith: “Dude, what’s the deal? I want a piece of your company. I’ll do whatever I need to and we never got there. But I actually left that company primarily because of that. I joined another startup that Facebook bought and I was able to make a little bit of money. And yeah, just pretty lucky of course, but I think that that perspective is definitely the one I to chase after.

Jay Nathan: Yeah, absolutely.

Jay Nathan: Yeah. Yeah,…

Scott Smith: So I’m kind of curious.  So, you started off what was the store Did it have a name? Okay.

Jay Nathan: it was called Pops Delight. I don’t even know how they came up with the name, but it was so popcorn, candy, drinks, and gifts. that’s what it was, right? And it was in a mall. And at one point we had four of them in four different locations. And they were wildly successful And they were just there for a long time.

00:10:00

Jay Nathan: So people knew the name, they had tons of repeat business, the quality was high, and people knew that when they spent money there, they were going to get what they paid for. And so, the thing we try to practice and preach in the world we live in today in technology Yeah.

Scott Smith: Yeah, absolutely.

Scott Smith: Are like when you think about either you just kind of highlighted, you own pieces of company, you invest in part of a company, you’ve built a business. how do you view the initial and early product development and building process? I think there’s a lot of different perspectives nowadays. There’s sort of minimum viable product and there’s a version of the product that actually is great and it’s like you have to put all of your energy for it to be close to perfect. where are you on that spectrum and what are the kind of first early versions of your products?  Sure.

Jay Nathan: I mean, I have to say this just to dispel any myths.

Jay Nathan: most of the products that I’ve built have been services products, right? I’ve been in product before, but not as just a pure startup. But here’s the thing, this term mini minimum viable product comes from, the lean startup, Eric Reese, that whole movement that happened, over a decade ago at this point, 15 ago, 20 years ago.  And there’s a lot of confusion. We’ve created a lot of confusion about what product is. A lot of people think it’s an excuse to build something halfway. It’s funny to me that very mature companies use the terminology minimum viable product. That’s fair if you’re launching a brand new product into the marketplace, And you’re trying to see if you can get traction with it, if it resonates with customers. But I often say that minimum viable product is not product at all. It’s actually not a product. It’s an idea.

Jay Nathan: It’s an experiment. So the way that Eric Reese always meant minimum viable product is what is the smallest piece of work that you can do to prove the market for something you want to sell. Whether that’s a consulting service, whether that’s a type of, gift store in the mall, or whether it’s a software product, it could be a website, a landing page, right? to  Is the idea worth investing more in is what you’re really trying to figure out.

Jay Nathan: So whenever I hear MVP to me that is the thing that we’re trying to do in early stage companies as an entrepreneur that’s what you have to do otherwise part of the story of that book is the first startup that I think it was Eric Reese was part of he went down this path and…

Scott Smith: Right. Yeah,…

Jay Nathan: spent a ton of money building a product that nobody adopted right that was the pain that led

Jay Nathan: lean startup methodology which is really let’s go prove out the market for this prove that there’s a desire for this before we go spit shine it if that makes sense resonate

Scott Smith: it totally does. Yeah. yeah. Absolutely. it’s a really tough thing, but last week we had a vendor that we were just starting to look at and they said, “Hey, we’re really sorry. Basically, we have to spin down the service because we’ve run out of money.” And I think it’s a good example to me of, either there’s fundraising from your customers or…

Jay Nathan: Yeah.

Scott Smith: But in either case, part of the goal of I think building a business is staying alive long enough that you can see a version or a great version, the best version of your product come out. But yeah, I’ve seen versions of this MVP where people spend years and then people spend weeks. one of the things I actually ran into, I’m trying to remember who it was, but I was in Palo Alto and this former CEO, I think he took two companies public and he was just talking about this idea of painting a door and trying to attract people to that door and you’re not really sure what’s behind the door. Sort of it could effectively be a website, a landing page, and when you enter your info, it’s actually just going to a form. but I think it really helps validate quickly.

Scott Smith: This is a terrible idea, it’s an okay idea, it’s a great idea. so I hear your point on not having written software, whatever, but you’ve built businesses and scaled them through services offerings and websites and it’s all effectively the same thing. So, have there been any examples…

Scott Smith: where I don’t know, you’ve gone down the path of maybe waiting too long or polishing it too much and it was just a bad idea have most of your ideas been thoughtful and executed okay or great?

Jay Nathan: Yeah.

Jay Nathan: I wish I could say, the most challenging, it’s easy to give people this advice. It’s hard to actually do it yourself. But one of the best pieces of advice that I’ve ever received from anybody back I had a consulting firm from 2016 to 2020 and people always used to ask me what is your specialty what do you do? What is the thing that you do?

00:15:00

Jay Nathan: And my answer back then was, we do a lot of different things, we’re good at this or we’re good at that. We can do this kind of advisory, we can do this kind of data analysis, we can implement software for Wrong answer, and I’m in that same boat today. I’m launching a professional services kind of business right now, Balboa, like you mentioned. And you really have to be focused on something. You need a beach head.

Jay Nathan: So I would say I’m guilty of staying too broad too long, which is, maybe the opposite problem of what you just described, which is spending too long polishing something before I get it out.

Scott Smith: Is there like when you reflect on is that…

Jay Nathan: but instead, not chasing a specific problem for a specific market, but chasing all the problems for a specific market or multiple markets, not even knowing who your market is, right? I think

Scott Smith: because I don’t know the sort of competitive landscape is offering a one-stop shop or are you just an enthusiast that can’t say no?  What do you think it is?

Jay Nathan: ear in the early days when you don’t take a lot of money for these kind of businesses that I’m running right now, you don’t raising millions of dollars to just go figure it out. you want these things to be profitable almost from day one. So to some degree you’re thinking in terms of okay let’s just get some cash flow going and then we can tighten it up later. And that actually does work to a large degree in the professional services world. but yeah, I think more often than not though, it’s easy to stay too broad. It’s not really a competition thing, although it is to some degree because you look around, you’re like, ” and so does this and this company does that.” we could do that, too, We’re smart. we know how to do these things. But there’s danger in that, And that you’re spread too thin. There’s not one thing that you can just laser focus in And in today, in our world, we live in a very noisy world.

Jay Nathan: That’s not a surprise to anybody who listens to your podcast, This is a very, very noisy world from a marketing standpoint. Everybody has an offer. So, if you’re generic and you do all things for all people, you are going to get drowned out so quickly by the people or…

Jay Nathan: the companies that focus on the problem that somebody is trying to solve at that moment. And it’s a whole different way of thinking, really got to be problem specific to the market you’re trying to serve.

Scott Smith: So yeah,…

Scott Smith: I’m trying to remember my grandpa always did a phrase, but I can’t remember it. But with our business, I think when we started off, it was basically a visual communication product.  And when people would ask us what it was, it’s like, I can capture what I see and share it. It’s sort of a word, a visual is worth a thousand words. some of these fairly broad statements that in some ways are kind of meaningless because they don’t resonate with a specific audience. And I think over the years we’ve realized exactly what you described.

Scott Smith: The competitive landscape has gotten more specific. And two, not only just their product, I should say, with their marketing and their podcasts and their customer support, it’s like everything is centered around this idea, this maniacal focus. And it’s really hard to win when you are kind of half-footed or…

Scott Smith: one foot in the door, one foot out. So, …

Jay Nathan: Yeah. …

Scott Smith: do you feel like, if you were to be asked that same question now, how would you describe it what do you think you’re quite good at when it comes to these things?

Jay Nathan: the thing for my company that we’re doing …

Scott Smith: Or maybe even just you like I think about it a lot.

Jay Nathan: I know.

Scott Smith: I’m often like, man, what am I really good at? I’m like, I

Jay Nathan: I think about that a lot, too. And I think what makes it even tougher and there’s a correlary here to a lot of AI company go to market messaging at least as well which is you should definitely come give us all your data because we can do anything for you right I hear that pitch a lot you’d be surprised how often I hear that pitch and I’m sure you do too so from an individual standpoint

Jay Nathan: But I think because we have all this knowledge at our fingertips, it’s no longer what we know that’s really interesting. It’s what can we as individuals actually do, right? where are you headed? Which direction are you going? Who do you know? What is your network? and so I think that’s a really important thing to think about. So for me, what I’ve realized, so I have a technical background.  When I came out, I taught myself how to code in college. I got a business degree, but I taught myself how to code. I was building software. When I got out of college, I was doing freelance work When I got out of college, I took an software engineering did a lot of data engineering, analytics, like all this kind of stuff. And I always looked at that because then I started moving to more of the sales and business development side of things, managing teams as well.

00:20:00

Jay Nathan: But I always kept just enough technical knowledge so that I could really understand what the issues were in the teams that I was working with or the technology that we were working with. Figure out how to get around the corners that nobody else could get around. And that was a advantage for me. And I’d say over the past decade, I probably stepped away from the technology a little bit.  But what I’m realizing here lately, especially with all these other tools that are coming into play like these AI development platforms like cursor and reflet and it’s important if you have some technical background to keep everything you can because nothing has changed. the way applications work on the internet is still the same as it was back in 1989. The plumbing is everything on top of the plumbing has changed, right?

Jay Nathan: the libraries are better, the open source, of course, now we have AI which just generates a lot of it for us, the API strategies, all that stuff is the same.  So, what I’m relearning again, it’s interesting that you’re asking this question, is that what the network I’ve built, my willingness to just spend time with people, right, is a superpower for me and make connections between different people who need to know each other without me in the middle. And then my ability to bring my historical knowledge of technology

Jay Nathan: to bear when it comes to what we’re trying to do for our clients. So, I don’t know if that answers the question. That may itself be too broad, right?

Scott Smith: I know I think it’s actually quite good.

Scott Smith: You developed this expertise early in your career and it helped you get to where you were. I actually find this a lot in very technical engineer CEOs founders they’re quite good at writing code and then they build a product that’s great and then it turns out they got to find customers and they got to manage a team and so much of the stuff that they used to do they used to be really good at but when it comes to you described being able to see around the corners of the problems being able to handle those

Scott Smith: Yeah, I think that really resonates with me. the other thing that was interesting you joked on or you joked about early on is you said I think you described your company as sort of like a number of things,…

Jay Nathan: Yeah. Yeah.

Scott Smith: but one included a BI company, and then you were like, I guess we’re an AI company now, or we should make sure to call ourselves an AI company. so I’m actually interested to hear a little bit about, what we’re talking about maybe 20ish years building up to now. Are you finding that the development of the AI stuff is substantially changing your business? Do you feel like you’re having to redevelop or renew some of these old technical skills or…

Scott Smith: do you feel like it’s more overhyped than maybe it actually is or a bit of both? Okay.

Jay Nathan: I don’t feel like it’s overhyped at all.

Jay Nathan: What I think it’s doing is back to our conversation about MVPs,…

Jay Nathan: too. we got to think about that maybe a little bit differently now because it actually is possible to build something that is functional before you actually validate the idea. you don’t have the same cost, right? This is all a function of cost.

Scott Smith: Yeah. True.

Scott Smith: Very true.

Jay Nathan: AI has made Cloud made the cost of deploying software go down exponentially, right? We didn’t have to go provision servers in that data center, do networking, all that crap. We used to have to do all that stuff to go launch software. we didn’t have to do that after AWS came on the scene.

Jay Nathan: after Rackspace came on the scene and then AWS but now we have cloud it’s ubiquitous so what AI is doing is taking the cost of the next layer down…

Jay Nathan: which is all the stuff we built on top of the cloud all the actual software it’s taken that down to near zero literally my son is 19 years old you should see the stuff that he’s building he has no clue how it works he doesn’t really he does know a little bit about how it works but he doesn’t care right he doesn’t need to here.

00:25:00

Scott Smith: Right. Yeah,…

Scott Smith: exactly. No,…

Jay Nathan: Because he’s not engineering massive systems right now. He’s just getting proof of concepts out there. But all these ideas that are in his head. I feel like I’m veering off your question a little bit here. Right.

Scott Smith: no, that’s great. I think just along the same lines, I remember when we hired an engineer from Google and his sole focus was overengineering and over infrastructurizing our product that didn’t have enough users to justify what he was doing. And it was kind of like,…

Scott Smith: “No, no, no, no. That’s totally No, please stop. let’s change your perspective.” It sounds like your son is like, “I don’t care how the sink works. I just want to wash my hands.” he understands that.

Jay Nathan: Yeah. Yeah,…

Jay Nathan: that’s yeah. So, I don’t think AI is hype. it’s the cost function that is powerful. do I think Of course There’s a lot of hype in blockchain. There was a lot of hype in, mobile. There was a lot of hype in the internet, right, when it was first coming out. And you had some companies crash And you will have companies crash and burn here as well. but I think what we see happening right now in AI is changing every facet of work in some way. Whether you’re a doctor, it’s helping you do that faster.

Jay Nathan: What I think the real risk is with AI is that we just have to look out for kids who are my son’s age, right, who will be coming out of college in a few years. There is no entry-level job anymore, Because in a lot of ways, I can be outsourced to as a 40-some year old dude, can go do four times the work that I used to do.

Scott Smith: Yeah.

Jay Nathan: I don’t need to delegate as much. I just ask that GPT to do it for me, so no I don’t think AI is hyped. It is changing how we do everything. So my company we work on the Pendo platform and other things like snowflake or data bricks or some salesforce work all these downstream systems from the product itself but we need to build tools and utilities. We need to build consulting templates and methodologies.

Jay Nathan: How do you think all that stuff gets built with Claude,…

Jay Nathan: with chat GPT? we’re using all those tools because we’re not going to go out and spend money on a junior associate to go build stuff like our junior associate is now those tools, so yeah I think it’s it the major impact that it’s having is on the cost of building a business today.

Scott Smith: I think that makes absolute sense. I have a similar feeling where with my four kids, I’m frequently like, am but am I going to want to have them be an intern at my company so that I can help them be doing something because I don’t know, maybe it’s going to be as hard as you’re describing. Maybe it’s not. I think one thing that’s pretty funny or I don’t know, surprising is I play ice hockey and so I get banged up and…

Scott Smith: 

Scott Smith: I hurt my knee and I’m going to do rehab and I have to go to the doctor and then I get my referral, I go to the rehab place and then I go to the sort of place to get it imaged and at each place they hand me a piece of paper and I fill in the same information and it’s like we’re living in this golden age but we just can’t figure out how to get data entry figured out, it’s so brutal.

Jay Nathan: Part of that is policy and…

Jay Nathan: legislation and…

Scott Smith: Yeah, sure.

Jay Nathan: data protection, there’s so many other facets and issues that if it were just technology, I don’t know, the world might be better and worse at the same time, In certain ways. So,

Scott Smith: Yeah, absolutely true. I’ve worked as an example that one of the first companies I worked for, Pars, we were a way to quickly make mobile apps and it was great. It was easy to set up.

Scott Smith: And we had a lot of time where our infrastructure would just fall over and all these companies who built these apps that were serious, they were like, “What’s the deal?” And that’s like a bunch of 20-year-olds moving too fast, trying cool new technologies and maybe weren’t sophisticated enough. but now we’ve got AWS and all that is actually great. so yeah, I think your point on legislation and all those kinds of things. Maybe slowing it down in certain places makes sense. It’s still frustrating.

Jay Nathan: Right. Yeah,…

Scott Smith: I’m still frustrated.

Jay Nathan: I don’t blame you on that, by the way.

Scott Smith: Do you going back to your point about building tools? I think last week McKenzie was highlighting how they’ve taken all of their internal kind of corpus of data knowledge and they’ve been able to sort of create an internal model not just a chachi but an internal model that helps answer and figure out a lot of the standard questions that those associates would have and I think there’s a similar concern that you highlighted is your perspective on more of a terminator

00:30:00

Scott Smith: or more of a Robocop, it’s helping us become the best version of ourselves or is it more replacement or kind of a mix? Yeah.

Jay Nathan: Yeah. …

Jay Nathan: I mean, back when spreadsheets were first released, everybody thought finance jobs were going away. There are more finance jobs today than there ever have been, right? and it’s just sort you’re standing on the shoulders of what the technology can do for you there. So, I mean, I hear people talking about AGI and sort of the singularity and what happens when the technology is more intelligent than humans are and it sort of takes over. I don’t know what to think about that.

Jay Nathan: I guess I’m not close enough and I’m not educated enough on that to actually make a call, but I tend to think of it more as the Robocop. I think if I got your analogy right versus the Terminator.

Scott Smith: Yeah. Yeah.

Scott Smith: Okay. Yeah,…

Jay Nathan: So, maybe I’m just wishful thinking here, too. But I tend to think that we have control of this stuff, not the other way around.

Scott Smith: 

Scott Smith: I think I’m on the same page, so maybe we talk about something that’s less esoteric. you’ve worked with a lot of great people. You’ve built great businesses. And we’ve talked a little bit about focusing on the customer, their specific needs, finding that first version of the product. but I am kind of curious how you think about hiring people, building teams, and identifying the people either you want to work with…

Scott Smith: because you’re excited or identifying the ones who are maybe earlier in your career, but they’re worth investing in. how do you think about hiring?

Jay Nathan: Yeah. …

Jay Nathan: man, that’s a good question. for me, I think back to when I was running really large teams and one of the things that I always did, I had interview you, when you bring somebody in, you have an interview team, maybe three or four people who are triangulating. They have different lines of questioning, different areas that they’re responsible for sort of teasing out. you got to have some aptitude for the hard skills that you need to do that job. And I even tell people this, if you’re a young person and you’re just coming out of college and I’m asking you for examples of what you’ve done, you got to think back to school projects.

Jay Nathan: You got to think back to individual things that you got into as a kid, it’s not just about the work that you do. you live. It’s about sort of like the kind of person that you are, right? Do you complete things? Do you do hard things or not? So, one of the things I always ask people so let me stay on this team interviewing thing for one of the things in building a team that I always sort of tried to do and I built some teams that grew pretty fast. one of the bigger teams I ran was about 120 people and we grew it from a team of six or seven to start with to a team of 120 in probably 18 months. it was a pretty fast ramp. I mean I’m sure there are people that listen to your podcast that have ramped bigger teams faster, but for us it was pretty fast. And the thing we always did was we had those groups and it had to be a unanimous yes.

Jay Nathan: So if any one of those people in the group objected, even as the leader of that team said, “I love this person,” if any one of them objected, it would be they were done. It was an the one caveat I gave was that everybody they had a chance to voice it to that team.

Scott Smith: That’s cool. Okay.

Jay Nathan: And if there was somebody who could convince that other person or if the team could convince that other person to change from a no to a yes, then of course because then it would be unanimous again. the cool part about that is when you go make the offer to somebody that’s been a unanimous yes, you get to tell them that, Scott, I wanted to make you an offer today. We’re so excited to have you on the team.

Jay Nathan: Let me tell you, you shouldn’t take this lightly because everybody on the team unanimously wanted you, we talked to a lot of people, but we wanted you because of the conversations you had, the experience that you had.

Scott Smith: Yeah, absolutely. Yeah.

Jay Nathan: That’s a really powerful thing. So, I think about recruiting and building teams almost as selling too because in a lot of ways, You’re selling a part of somebody’s life. They’re getting ready to invest a lot of their time and energy and effort. Yeah. You’re going to pay them. they’re giving you their time. That’s way more valuable than money, Every line on your resume is very very valuable. So, that’s something that I always tried to do in building teams. When individually interviewing people, I always ask two questions. One is I want you to tell me about the biggest failure you’ve had professionally or, if you’re young, in something else, and I want you just tell me where you screwed something up.

00:35:00

Jay Nathan: The way people answer that question is very insightful, If they can’t really come up with anything, it’s not that they’re a bad person,…

Jay Nathan: but they probably aren’t self-aware enough to work for me.

Scott Smith: Yeah. Or maybe they haven’t tried to do big things or…

Scott Smith: or tried to do something new because to screw something up usually means you’re doing something new or different or unique.

Jay Nathan: I only asked So, that’s The first question is, I want you to tell me about the project or…

Scott Smith: Yeah.

Jay Nathan: the thing that you were a part of that you were most proud of, And I should have gone there first. That gets them opened up. They tell you all this great stuff. They’re so excited. They did that. And then you flip it on them, right? And you say, “Okay, now I want you to tell me where you really messed something up.” And they’re like, ” I should have seen that coming.” Yeah, you should have. so you get a real sense.

Jay Nathan: To me, the number one characteristic of anybody that would work for me is you’ve got to be self-aware, And that goes for me, too, right? Because none of us are going to get it right, especially when we’re building new things, whether it’s services or products or something in between.  You’ve got to be self-aware enough to know and to sort of have high empathy for your teammates and where you’re pushing too hard, where you’re not, because especially now when we’re all communicating a lot of times via these communication mechanisms like you and I are on right now, Google Meet, Zoom, whatever it is, right? we’re virtually working together. You really have to be attuned to the people around you, how they’re feeling, what they’re doing. You have to have some empathy.

Jay Nathan: So, there’s a book and…

Scott Smith: nice.

Jay Nathan: I’m blanking on the name of it right now. Do you my I’ll come back to it if I remember it, but there’s a book that I’d recommend. it’s called The Ideal Team Player by Patrick Lion it’s really good. But in the three characteristics that he outlines in that book, he tells most of his books are written in almost like a fable kind of style. But the three characteristics are humble, hungry, and smart. And that those are the three things that I think have sort of resonated with me over the course of my career. And by the way, smart is not like you’re the smartest person in the room. you’re smart in terms of how you deal with people. Back to the advantages that we all have, right?

Jay Nathan: you’ve got to be good at dealing with people. And s That’s my team. I’m not hiring a bunch of engineers, right? I’m hiring people who can work with other people.

Scott Smith: Yeah, I especially liked too,…

Scott Smith: so first of all, I have never read that book, so abs I have to read it now. I think anything I’ve listened to or read by Patrick Lencion, I’ve been whoa, it feels like these obvious things that bore into your soul and you’re like, okay, I got to change something. but I’m also just kind of curious one quick followup, but you said there’s two things that were interesting about the group of people and the dynamic in that sort of quorum panel. First, you said you trust those people and then second the candidates that you look for complete and do hard things. do you feel I don’t know came up with a little algorithm of they were an athlete or they were a Navy Seal or…

Scott Smith: and those things are more important to you or you are able to identify and relate to those as hard things that they can complete five days marathons Right.

Jay Nathan: I mean it’s just to build off…

Jay Nathan: what you just said there. Yes. I don’t think I’ve ever hired somebody who was a college athlete that did not work out right because if you’re going to make it to that level you’ve got a different kind of work ethic than probably 95% of the world. Right. some of it’s genetics and maybe it’s 90% of the world, right? so yes,…

Jay Nathan: that’s one thing. Anybody who’s an Eagle Scout, right? Were you an Eagle Scout?

Scott Smith: I’m an Eagle Scout.

Scott Smith: Yeah. All right.

Jay Nathan: I’d hire you in a heartbeat, man, because I just know, That’s not some And you do that when you’re really young, too. So, you learn that at a very young age, which I am even more impressed by.

Jay Nathan: I was not an Eagle Scout, and my other kids were not in scouting. but I respect that.

Scott Smith: I think not to ruin the credibility of the Eagle Scout,…

Scott Smith: but more often than not, there’s one parent who really guides you through it. but I also think that’s another telling sign is to complete good things, a lot of the time you need the architecture or support underpinning a lot of this and that often means you had great parents, you’re humble, that’s sort of another kind of tell right there.

00:40:00

Jay Nathan: 100%. Yeah.

Jay Nathan: And look, I’m not foolish enough to believe that a lot of people didn’t grow up with great parents, You did as we were blessed in that. so you got to take everything with a grain of salt. But maybe the one other thing that comes to the top of the mind is anybody who’s run a business before, tried to start a business on their own, that’s usually a good sign, too. Now, those people can be sort of rogue at the same time because they’re entrepreneurial but they also are aware of the cold,…

Jay Nathan: harsh realities of business, right?

Jay Nathan: which again the population of the world may not be as attuned to that right and so you just sort of get a different perspective there that’s really really valuable so those are a few of them but yeah the athlete thing I’ll tell you what even among that pe women who played college volleyball have always knocked my socks off even more so than everybody else for whatever that’s worth Yeah. Yeah.

Scott Smith: Yeah. my niece she just became or…

Scott Smith: she was just accepted to I’m trying to remember what school it was in Boston to be a volleyball player there on the team. And I would agree. I mean it was a lot of hard work, some craziness, some endurance, but all those kinds of things. I have maybe one kind of final thing just to kind of wrap it up, but when you think about your kid, it’s 19 other kids who are sort of entering the job force, you’ve given a lot of good insights for…

Scott Smith: how to maybe demonstrate that you’d be a great qualified worker, but what kinds of advice would you share maybe to your son kind of folks who are just getting started?

Jay Nathan: Man.

Jay Nathan: I think maybe three things. One is focus on who you work for first, not necessarily what you do. Everybody out of school needs a really good first manager that can sort of set them up for success, Your first real encounter with the professional world. And your network starts on day one, right? the rel I have relationships in my life today,…

Scott Smith: right?

Jay Nathan: people that I worked with 25 years ago. And boy, am I glad that I have those. And I didn’t even though I was probably and by the way, I probably have some relationships talking about my own personal failures.

Jay Nathan: there’s probably some relationships that I don’t have that I probably should have because I was hotheaded as a kid or something didn’t go my way and I was frustrated about it, But luckily, I have a lot of people in my life who are still there from all those years ago. So, your network you just start building that from day one. Number two is I think you can sort of grow your influence if you learn how to write down and share what you’re learning in real time.  So, interestingly, he’s a mechanical engineering major at Clemson University in South Carolina, and he has been doing all these AI and drone type projects, just incredible stuff. you wouldn’t believe the stuff he’s doing with the technology that’s out there. And I said to him, he wants to get interviews with people and he’s meeting people and he wants to keep them up to date on what he’s doing.

Jay Nathan: maybe get an internship at some point, maybe get a job. And so we’re trying to think about how to get him out in front of these people more often. And I was like, you could email them individually, but then we came up with this idea of he grew up in engineering in high school,…

Scott Smith: perfect.

Jay Nathan: he was doing engineering classes. So he learned the discipline of writing an engineering notebook. I said, ‘Why don’t you take all the stuff that you’ve learned in your engineering that you’ve documented already in your notebook and why don’t you just create little blog posts and post them on LinkedIn about it? And he started doing that. he’s been out to visit the Andrew site. He’s met people from all these different drone startups. I mean, just the conversations he’s having are unbelievable. And all the time I have people coming to me saying “I’m seeing your boy on LinkedIn.”

Jay Nathan: it’s incredible and all he’s doing is just sharing what he knows. one of the best pieces of advice that I ever got about sort of sharing what is that you don’t have to be miles ahead of everybody else to share something valuable to somebody. You just need to be one step ahead of them, So, I guess that’s a long-winded way of saying you try to learn how to write down what you’re learning and share that with somebody would be the second thing.

Jay Nathan: And then number three, I would say don’t worry so much about how much money you make out of school, but just look for the best opportunity to learn,…

Jay Nathan: the best opportunity to get into a market that is growing. obviously, if you have the propensity or the desire to get into something in the technology world, it’s got to be AI at this point, right? You’ve got to get on a wave.

00:45:00

Scott Smith: Yeah. Yeah.

Jay Nathan: Don’t go into coal mining, because you’re going to be under a wave at some point, And I’m shade to any coal miners, but there’s industries that are going away and…

Jay Nathan: there’s industries that are growing. And if you’re in an industry that’s growing, you will always have opportunities. So, there’s a few things. Hopefully that’s helpful to somebody.

Scott Smith: I love it.

Scott Smith: I think those are such great very reasonable things that you can actually do.

Scott Smith: And it goes to your point way earlier on, get out there and try hard things, which is writing for a small but growing audience. that’s actually really hard to takes a lot of guts, but that’s something hard that he can fail and he can succeed on, which is super cool.

Jay Nathan: Yeah. Yep.

Scott Smith: All right, thanks for joining today and again, Jay, Nathan, Balboa Solutions, and so many other great things, but thanks for your time.

Jay Nathan: Yeah. Thanks, It was great to meet you, No worries at all,…