[00:00:01] Speaker A: Hello. Thank you for joining us. Welcome to what Counts, the podcast where we dive deep into the world of information governance. Here we highlight proven solutions developed through our experience working with companies across various industries, and we talk about how you can apply these solutions to your company. Whether you're interested in information governance, have a need, or just want to hear about information governance challenges like email management, retention management, or. Or asset data management, this podcast is for you. This is Lee, and in this episode, Moore and I will talk about what it's like to start a small business. Include some interesting information governance aspects or guidance along the way. And in this one in particular, we're going to talk about being persistent, resilient and adaptable.
That's a lot more. That's a lot of stuff to talk about there. How do you feel about that?
[00:00:54] Speaker B: Persistent, resilient and adaptable. Okay, well, recently people have keep asking us what are our taglines about our business? And I don't think we've ever said persistent, resilient and adaptable, but I think we've lived it. I think we've lived it for the whole time that we've been around.
[00:01:16] Speaker A: I would agree.
[00:01:19] Speaker B: First of all, I don't give up. I don't think you give up. We just keep going. Even in the face of significant resistance to us.
Starting from the first big company we worked at and trying to make information management, records management, a big part of that company, second big company we worked at and. And of course, since we've been trailblazer, records management doesn't get a lot of respect.
And so we've had to be persistent because we see the importance, and this is the information governance aspect of owning your small business, is the information that you depend on to do your business is critical to your business. Regardless of what business you're in. The information that you use every day, you may not even think about it, but you depend on it. It becomes part of your ecosystem, part of your environment every day. And for us, that's our mission. So helping people realize that the thing they depend on actually needs care. So, I don't know, think about it like the roads. You don't notice the roads until there's a lot of potholes.
I live in New England and we're coming to the end of winter, beginning of spring, there are a lot of potholes. And I noticed it today. I was in the parking lot and I backed up, bump, bump, pulled forward, bump up. It was a pothole.
Anyway, same thing with records. So that persistence was kind of built into us before we Started trailblazer because our whole world is. Requires persistence.
But I would say.
[00:03:09] Speaker A: Sorry, but. But I think every entrepreneur faces these challenges. Faces a challenge.
[00:03:16] Speaker B: Yes.
[00:03:17] Speaker A: And what you're describing is our particular challenge. Everyone faces a challenge, especially when you're starting a business.
[00:03:24] Speaker B: I agree. And if you. And if you give up at the first pushback.
[00:03:28] Speaker A: Right.
[00:03:29] Speaker B: Owning your own business is not for you.
Truly, that resilience question, I was reminded yesterday I was reading an article about asset management and the idea of resilience in asset management and infrastructure and having a resilient infrastructure. So back to the potholes on the roads.
But it's also about. You hear it a lot, the grid, the electric grid. And if it goes down when there's peak load or it goes down when it's too cold or too hot, all of those questions around how to make that better, that ends up in a bucket in the world of asset management called resilience. And I was reminded when I was reading this article that early on in the pandemic I'd read some things about resilience versus robustness and that you could. That there was a clear difference in people's reaction to being shut down, being locked down, having to move everything online, those who were resilient versus those who were robust.
And at the time, kind of just personal rule of thumb was for me, robust meant you had backup systems, you had backup plans. You could keep the status quo. It's like having a generator for when the power goes out. You could keep the status quo, but resilient was about adapting to the new environment, adapting to change. And it might seem like being robust was more attractive because you didn't have to change. You, you just counted on your backup.
But I think in the long run, this is what I concluded yesterday when I was reading this article and I actually commented on it was actually being resilient was better.
You have any thoughts on that?
[00:05:35] Speaker A: Well, I do. I think it's.
It's how you respond. It's how you stay motivated.
Right. If it's, if you're, if it's status quo, the motivation, you know, it, it falters. I won't say that it goes away. I won't say it gets better. But it, I think you're it fault. There's. If, if you're resilient and you adapt to change, I think your motivation is there, Your. The juices start flowing again. I think it's. I think you're a point where you never stop learning. I think that's what it shows by you Just reading this article, Right. You never want to stop learning and moving to the next step.
[00:06:19] Speaker B: That is definitely true for me. I think the status quo thing is it leads to complacence and you're comfortable and you want to stay comfortable. It is hard to say. And I would not say this about me that actively looking to be uncomfortable. I would not say that. But I'm not afraid of it either. And I am looking at. I want to keep learning, I want to keep growing, I want to keep changing in the business and personally. But. But in the business.
So our resilience has been tested over the years. I would, I think a few times. I can think of three in particular so we could talk about those. What do you think?
[00:07:09] Speaker A: We have seven minutes left.
[00:07:13] Speaker B: With seven minutes left. All right. So the first time was when we took the assignment overseas.
And it at first didn't seem like that big a change. It was just another trip. And the first trip was two weeks long. Okay. We did the thing and then the idea was, okay, we'll take the project and I will go with one of our team members. I'll go for a few months, I'll go for six months. And then I was supposed to come back.
So we had to deal with time differences. You were always, wait, I don't think we should be.
[00:07:49] Speaker A: Yeah, don't shortchange that one. Because that was huge.
[00:07:52] Speaker B: I'm not. It was huge. I was basically done my day when you were starting, which meant that you were expecting me to be wide awake and paying attention to things like when you talk to your spreadsheet at 11:00 at my night.
[00:08:08] Speaker A: Absolutely.
[00:08:09] Speaker B: Because that was early in your day, so. Or Maybe not quite 11, but 8, 8, 9 o'clock at night. And that was hard. And I would be at some mornings over there, I was frantic, just waiting for you to wake up because I needed to tell you whatever had happened that I needed advice or needed to bounce ideas off you.
And you had the same thing on the other end of the day that you. We would have to wait.
That was huge. That was a huge thing.
The second challenge in that same project, though, was when I didn't come back after six months.
I couldn't come back because the client was unhappy. The client didn't want to change. Um, and that does kind of get back to a weakness that I talked about before in a different episode of I. I'm not as good at teaching as I am at doing. And so the client wasn't willing to accept a switch for me out and the other person in.
And then we. We didn't make a decision. I think we just kept going. We didn't really stop and say what's the impact on our business at this point? And I don't know that. If we had stopped and had that conversation, I'm not sure we would have made a different choice because I don't think we knew then, but we know now. We know now that taking me out of our daily business is a bad idea. I'm not saying we never do it, but we know it's not the best choice. We just do it with our eyes wide open now.
So.
[00:09:51] Speaker A: So I'm good.
You could get so much deeper into it. But I think this is. This is good. Right? You need to have sales, you need to have operations, you need to have these things working together. And that's kind of the key piece here is a lot of our sales was with. With you. And if you're.
[00:10:15] Speaker B: And I think that's true with a lot of small businesses. The founders have the vision and the founders are the best salespeople for what this business will do for you because they have the passion. It's their baby. If this was our baby, we knew what we wanted to sell and that ended up just being my role. I don't know by accident or I would not say it was by design, but it was sort of a natural distribution of. Of skills and tasks. Right.
So we had to recover from that and we had to change a lot of things. We had to change the number of people working on projects. We had to change the expectations of people working on projects.
We had to do it under the gun because we didn't have enough.
We've tried to learn from that even when we've been busy and how we add people, we've tried. And we're going to talk more about the differences between full time employees and 1099 employees. We'll talk about that later in a different episode. But that was part of our adaptation. Our adapting to that change was thinking about how we staffed our teams.
[00:11:41] Speaker A: Absolutely.
[00:11:44] Speaker B: The next big thing is we kind of talked about two of those together because it was the going and the staying coming back was recovering from it. But the next big change that everyone experienced in different ways was the pandemic and consulting required. Previously constantly being on the road. And I was traveling three weeks out of four at least, even when I wasn't overseas, but around this country and then we couldn't.
And so immediately we had to figure out five years ago this month, how do we do the projects that we have and how do we find new ones.
And we've had to come up with new ways to do all of that in the last, immediately in that first year and second year. But we're still learning and we're still adapting.
[00:12:41] Speaker A: I would agree. I mean you could go so much deeper in that as well, but I don't think we should for lack of time.
But at the same time, our sales cycle is longer. And so it depends on your business. Right. If you're a movie theater, you might be there. It might be kind of hard to, to get beyond the pandemic if you're that, if you're a consulting business that. During the pandemic, sure, we shut down, but we still had work to do. It was, it was a year afterwards, because of our sales cycle being a year long, that we didn't have anything else in the hopper and that that was the challenge.
[00:13:23] Speaker B: Well, that was lucky, right? Because we just happened to be at the beginning of the year. We were at the beginning of two big projects that we were carrying on for that year. But the second thing about our sales cycle is not just that it's long, but that it is very much of a one on one in person approach has been. Had been up until then, connecting with people, understanding problems, understanding industry trends, understanding changes and evolutions and improvements in response, in, in the response from the information management perspective. But in whatever way, being part of that flow, you always, you always talk about the flow. That was your, was a major theme of yours for the first, I don't know, six or eight years that we worked together, but you got to be in the flow and the flow was cut off.
That didn't translate to a video conference environment. We could do our work that we had already sold and people that we already knew we could do it. It was slower, it impacted how we did it. We had to adapt tactically. But the bigger impact on us was the sales piece. How do we connect with people? And I think that that was not unique to us by any means. But just because this podcast is about our business and about how we look at it, that was. We're, we're still working through that, we're still adapting.
That's why we're still here, is because we're still adapting. I also want to add, just from an information governance perspective here in the resilience stage, the pandemic changed how people think of information as well. And what we saw, particularly in one client, we saw through the course of the first few months, their realization that their processes were heavily dependent on in person interactions. And paper.
Literally writing things down on a piece of paper and handing it to someone. And for the first few months, everybody was trying to recreate that in their house. They were piling up pieces of paper. They were printing things out and saving them in their living room.
And about three months in, they were all like, there is an avalanche of paper in my living room. We got to do something else. We've got to depend on the electronic world. It caused policy changes for them from an information perspective and what was acceptable electronically and what wasn't. And how did they. How could they leverage their collaboration tools and communication tools better and differently? We had to adapt our approaches around interactions and that personal connection and rapport that we really depend on to help people understand and move forward in their information management journey. And we saw the way people interacted with information change tremendously in that time. So they had to adapt as well.
So it was that. That was a good. It was not good, but it was an illustration of a lot of resilience and adaption to change. The beginning of that, they were trying to be robust by printing stuff out. Everybody was bringing printers home, but they stopped.
So that's good.
[00:16:56] Speaker A: You said you had three.
[00:16:59] Speaker B: Well, it was going to. Taking the. Taking the job in Europe. Then it was when we came back. Because when we came back, when it came back from Europe and we had. That was the second one. And the third one was the pandemic. That second one was okay, now we're back. And it was almost like we were starting from scratch again. In fact, it was a little bit worse because when we started this business, we been in the flow. We had clients and potential clients that we'd been in touch with and had been talking to that 22 months that I was out of the flow and that we were maintaining and slipping a little on the domestic side. When we came back. When I came back, it was start from zero again. And we had to make a lot of changes. We changed how we staffed the teams. We. We changed how we reached out to people.
We changed how we staffed up once we got new projects. We changed our approach from the earlier approach. It was leaner.
We expected more of ourselves in the second. I would say 2018 was our 2018. Yeah, was our second founding. We started in 2013, but we started again in 2018.
And then maybe we started again in 2021 at the end of the pandemic.
And that's okay. Like, I think that's what people do.
[00:18:33] Speaker A: All right. That's a wrap.
All right, if you have any questions, please send us an
[email protected] or look us up on the web at www.trailblazer.com.
thank you for listening and please tune into our next episode. Also, if you like this episode, please be a champion and share it with people in your social media network. As always, we appreciate you, the listeners. Special thanks goes to. Jason Blake created our music.
[00:19:02] Speaker B: All right, thanks, everybody.
