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Tim Hamilton – Learning on the fly, the difference between technicians and managers, and the miracle of collective human action | Episode 8
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Welcome to episode eight of Builder, Banker, Hacker, Chief! Joining me today is Tim Hamilton, Founder and CEO of Praxent.
On this show, I’m unpacking the stories, decisions, and influences that make people successful leaders. Even among long-time CEOs, it’s rare to find one who has been running his own company since he was 16. Tim is a first-generation immigrant to the US who has been building with technology since the late 90s.
My name is Nathan Baumeister; I am the Co-founder and CEO of ZSuite Tech and the host of this podcast.
Leaders often talk about their early failures in business and how those paved the way for future success. Tim experienced almost a decade of unimpeded success before things got messy. Rather than pack up shop and do something else, Tim bet on his passion for learning. Today, he’s leading an IT consulting firm building digital products for major players in the fintech, real estate, insurance, and wealth management industries.
Praxent is known for their core values, often referred to as CAN DO, which stands for Care Deeply, Always Deliver, Never Settle, Do It Together, and Own The Outcome. Their high-integrity approach to partnerships has positioned them to help usher in the next wave of digital finance technology.
Tim is a voracious reader, perpetual learner, and a consummate builder. But above that, he’s dedicated himself to solving the human challenges that impede progress, not just the technical ones.
Resources:
Tim’s recommendations:
Turn the Ship Around!: A True Story of Turning Followers into Leaders
Connect:
Recommended
Transcript
Societal Pressure and Personal Leadership Choices
00:00:00
Speaker
It really does seem like there is a societal pressure on people to want to advance into positions of leadership, even if it may not be what's best for them. Marcus Buckingham writes beautifully about strengths and weaknesses. And I'll close off with this idea that strengths are not necessarily things we're good at.
00:00:21
Speaker
Strengths are those things that after we finish doing them, they leave us feeling strong. And weaknesses aren't those things that we're bad at. They're the things that after we finish doing them leave us feeling weak. And I think under the heading of competence, we need to critically probe into whether or not this person is leaning into a strength that energizes them or leaning into a weakness. They may look good at it.
00:00:43
Speaker
They may be perceived as good at it, but it could deplete them. And I think that's a real opportunity to have an honest, crucial conversation in that realm of competence.
Introduction to the Podcast and Guest
00:00:59
Speaker
Hi, my name is Nathan Baumeister, and you're listening to Builder Banker Hacker Chief, a podcast where executives from the world of finance and technology share the stories of how they got where they are and the decisions that made them who they are. I'm looking for hidden moments of truth and sacrifice, wisdom and folly, and what it's like to navigate the treacherous waters at the helm of a growing company.
00:01:23
Speaker
I want to do all that so that together we can learn from their journey and use that insight personally and professionally. In episode eight, my guest is Tim Hamilton, founder and CEO of Praxin.
00:01:36
Speaker
Tim has the rare distinction of holding the title of CEO since he was 16 when he first started building websites for businesses. In the years since, he's led his team through many transformations, partnerships, and industry changes. Today, Praxin is helping shape digital customer experiences for a range of high-profile companies and financial services.
00:01:59
Speaker
What Tim doesn't have is a chip on his shoulder. His humility, teachability, and deep compassion sets him apart. In a world obsessed with young, hotshot CEOs who are hellbent on remaking the world, this Eagle Scout from South Africa has a lot to say about integrity, perpetual learning, and the opportunity that comes with taking responsibility for problems.
00:02:23
Speaker
Tim may not have started his career at the bottom of the org chart, but he's one of the most dedicated servant leaders I've ever met. Get ready to learn from a man who embodies what Builder Banker Hacker Chief is all about. Well, Tim, I am so grateful that you're willing to join us today for Builder Banker Hacker Chief. Thanks for coming.
00:02:46
Speaker
Thank you so much, Nathan, for having me. I'm excited. Yeah. You know, we've had the opportunity to know each other for the last several years as we've worked in the industry together. And I will say that my conversations with you always leave me with bits of wisdom and thought that I had never had before. And so this is a special treat, I think, for myself, but also for everybody that listens to Build a Banker Hacker Chief because
00:03:14
Speaker
There are very few people in this world that I know that are so thoughtful and intentional about how they lead, about how they think about things, and I just couldn't be more excited.
00:03:26
Speaker
Oh, Nathan, that is so kind of you. Thank you. It's a delight for me to be here. I'm really looking forward to this conversation and the feeling is mutual. I can't wait to get into it. Awesome.
Tim Hamilton's Journey and Early Influences
00:03:36
Speaker
So one of the things that I have found to be very helpful as we dive into what makes a leader who they are and from there, what we can learn from them is to rewind the clock all the way back to how your life started and what were some of those formative experiences that you've run into early on in your life.
00:03:57
Speaker
It's not surprising to me that many of our guests, even though we haven't recorded that many episodes at this point, but many of our guests are immigrants and your story is no different. So I would just ask kind of just to get started as you think on your childhood and maybe some of those experiences of moving from one country to another, now that you can look back, what are some of the things that you might've learned from that experience?
00:04:26
Speaker
Yeah, for sure. Well, as you say, I am an immigrant. I was born in South Africa, Johannesburg. And I grew up in Durban on the East Coast. And my dad worked in oil and gas. And when I was 11 years old, we got this just once in a lifetime opportunity to move across the world and relocate to Houston, Texas.
00:04:43
Speaker
And that was an extraordinary opportunity for me and my family. And it was also a really challenging transition. Both were true. And it took a good three or four years for Houston to feel like home. It was jarring and exciting. It was full of opportunity, packed with new lessons. But it was also very difficult to adapt to a new culture, to learn the new norms, to fit in.
00:05:10
Speaker
You know, silly examples, you know, growing up as a kid in South Africa, I played cricket and rugby and tennis. And, you know, in Houston, I had never seen a football game, didn't know anything about baseball. And so, you know, to this day, my team makes fun of me when when a sports metaphor gets thrown around, they have to break it down to me in first principles.
00:05:32
Speaker
which is just a bit of fun that we have with each other. But looking back, I think the thing that that move gave me is adaptability. I'll never forget 11, 12 years old, rehearsing an American accent, drilling that into myself so that I could assimilate. Middle school is brutal, just about for anybody. I think very, very few people had just an amazing 10 out of 10 experience at middle school. It's a hard time of life.
00:06:02
Speaker
And one of the strategies I employed was to just fit in to the best of my ability to learn that American accent and study up on the norms and mores. And that was one muscle I built early. And it turns out being adaptable is a very important muscle to have in consulting. Today, I run an IT consulting firm, and so that has served me well.
00:06:26
Speaker
I had another experience early on that was really formative for me. I'll never forget, we lived in a community and this wonderful couple, Betts and Cowboy Davis, he ran a law firm and she was a fine artist. They came over with food and they welcomed us to the neighborhood and invited us over to their house. And I was 12 and Cowboy,
00:06:48
Speaker
I noticed that i was on his wife's computer and you know with a microsoft prompt open and i open up q basic and i was writing myself a little q basic game on my mom and dad caught up with that's a cowboy. And he was surprised to see this you know twelve year old kid.
00:07:03
Speaker
who knew what he was doing on an IBM-compatible computer. He was like, can you tutor me and my wife on this thing? That was my first intro to business. I started getting paid to tutor bets and eventually word of mouth spread. I was tutoring a bunch of retirees throughout the neighborhood. Whereas kids in school found my accent
00:07:23
Speaker
and my mannerisms, my idiosyncrasies, my manners. They found that as a thing to make fun of. Older adults and retirees that started hiring me to tutor them found them to be endearing. And that was a lifeline to me, an absolute lifeline to me as a sensitive kid who just wanted to fit in and do good, to have that positive reinforcement
00:07:45
Speaker
At the very start of my entrepreneurial journey was i think an absolute game changer without which i'm not sure i would have gotten to where i am today. Yeah that's so cool you know this idea of starting business young that thing kinda continued for you a little bit didn't it.
00:08:03
Speaker
It did. As I mentioned, I played tennis and in high school, my junior year, the high school tennis coach, Jesse Cooper, asked the team, does anyone know how to make a poster? I want to promote a Pro-M tennis tournament in Houston and eventually build a tennis academy.
00:08:18
Speaker
And I'm not proud to admit it, but I had a pirated copy of Adobe Photoshop. And I started learning and teaching myself. And there was this website back in 1998 that taught you all sorts of tips and tricks about Photoshop. I'd been taking tutorials from it. I think it was called Designs by Mark. So I raised my hand. Jesse hired me. He paid me $75. And I thought I hit the absolute goldmine. I spent like 300 hours designing the world's worst poster.
00:08:47
Speaker
That thing was chock full of lens flares and super cheesy graphics, words set on fire, and this over-the-top photo of Jesse's face emerging from the universe. This was going to be the most epic tennis tournament anyone had ever experienced. I'm saying that all tongue in cheek, obviously, but incredibly, people showed up. His tennis academy launched, and he came to me then. He said, well, do you know how to make a website? That worked out pretty well. Without missing a beat, I said, absolutely.
00:09:16
Speaker
But the problem was, y'all, I had no idea. But I drove to Barnes & Noble and I got a book, Teach Yourself HTML in 24 hours. And I got to it. Now, it took me a hell of a lot longer than 24 hours to make my way through that book. I'm sure. But I got Jesse's website live. And, you know, someone who knew how to make a website for a small business in 1998, that was in high demand back then.
00:09:42
Speaker
From teaching retirees to wrangle their IBM computers to building websites in his high school bedroom, Tim clearly has the hacker's affinity for code creativity. He also graphs from an early age the importance of saying yes to opportunity and figuring out the details along the way.
00:10:00
Speaker
Later in the episode, you'll hear about a situation where Tim said yes and things didn't go so well. That's the tension of being an entrepreneur. Learning the difference between saying yes to everything and what you can actually deliver on.
00:10:20
Speaker
And so word of mouth spread quickly and I was able to build the business, basically building small business websites and doing digital marketing from then on. And the business has morphed and evolved in many, many different directions. I can give you an update on how it's evolved, but that's how I got my start.
00:10:37
Speaker
Yeah. I mean, how many 16-year-olds start a business like this? But then what's fascinating is quite literally, it's the same business that you're still running today,
Lessons in Leadership and Trust
00:10:50
Speaker
isn't it? I know that there's been changes of names and such, but really, you've continuously been the founder and CEO of a business since 16. I just have to ask,
00:11:03
Speaker
Is there anything that you can pinpoint that gave you this level of curiosity, this level of, oh, I can figure anything out at such a young age that made you kind of look at these opportunities and seize them? Because I work with a bunch of youth through different activities outside of work. And I can see the spark in many of these individuals
00:11:33
Speaker
But it's something that's being developed that I don't think is probably going to come to fruition until their 20s or 30s, maybe even their 40s. Whereas you had that when you were 16.
00:11:45
Speaker
Yeah, reflecting on it, it's a fascinating question of nature versus nurture. I think a good amount of it was nature. I think my parents baffled at it. My dad didn't quite know what to do with me. My dad's a chemical engineer. My mom's a fine artist. And in that double helix, I've got a bit of both. I've always had a real appreciation for, a love for the human factors of design, visual design, user experience, architecture, the way things feel. And I've always been fascinated by how to put them together.
00:12:14
Speaker
And gosh, I just had so many amazing experiences. Like Boy Scouts was a big part of my upbringing. I'm an Eagle Scout. And growing up in the Boy Scouts in South Africa was also very different than it was in Houston. You know, I'll never forget getting caught in quicksand and having to rescue myself, you know, thinking carefully through that process and, you know, getting through that. I mean, it just makes me think of this quote, adversity introduces a man to himself. I think there was
00:12:44
Speaker
Albert Einstein. And I honestly think that adversity has played a critical role in my formation, just again and again and again and again. When you get knocked down, there's something strangely motivating about that. I'm not sure if you've sensed that or felt it, but when you suffer a huge setback, initially there's a shock, you're overwhelmed by the loss, but then also being on the ground, getting your senses back, it's also strangely motivating.
00:13:12
Speaker
And that feels relevant somehow some way. And gosh, I just loved computers. I mean, frankly, from the very beginning, I just always wanted to be a programmer. I knew that since the age of eight or nine. And so this was an opportunity for me to just jump in and say, heck yeah, let's do this. Yeah. So the next question that comes to me, so you're 16, you started your own business and building websites, you're still running it today.
00:13:43
Speaker
However, you still made the determination and decision to continue through high school as well as continue through university collegiate level learning. And I think one of the things that I think our society is struggling with right now is what is the role of education, especially formal education versus informal education, costs rising and all those different types of things.
00:14:10
Speaker
You hear these stories of college dropouts that then build these billion dollar companies. I would say those are typically the exceptions, not the rule, but obviously we love looking at those exceptions and being like, maybe that's the path to success. So I'm curious, what role did this formal education have and the decision making of continuing down that path while you actually already had a business that was growing and thriving?
00:14:36
Speaker
Yeah, that's a fascinating question. I got a lot from school growing up. I was very fortunate in high school to go to a Jesuit school in Houston. If it's interesting, we can come back to that. I learned one of the most important lessons in that high school about trust. But first, before you go into the story, I'm familiar with
00:14:58
Speaker
the Jesuit line of thinking philosophy, how you tackle issues and stuff like that. But I'm not sure if that's a generally known thing. So maybe just a really small introduction of what it means to be going to a Jesuit school and then share the story that you have. Because even the fact that you went to a Jesuit school, if you know what that means, is interesting in of itself.
00:15:19
Speaker
That's a fantastic question. Yeah, so Jesuits are an order of priests within the Catholic faith, and they are big, big, big into education, pedagogy, and the Socratic method. They're also, they practice a radical form of acceptance. It's an interfaith
00:15:38
Speaker
community. And so I went to school with kids from all sorts of fades. And we studied theology specifically, a lot of Catholicism, but we also studied it broadly. And then we had a very rigorous
00:15:55
Speaker
Teaching method it was incredibly competitive and at the same time very supportive there was incredible integration between academic rigor and competitiveness as well as social emotional learning the administrators at the school the teachers of the school were absolutely committed to the formation of the student as a whole it was an all boys school.
00:16:17
Speaker
And so their mission was to form men in service to others and to pursue the greater good for all. And that very much is a Jesuit cultural pillar. That's how I would describe it. And I'll never forget, there's one teacher in particular, Mr. Mason. He was my English teacher, sophomore year.
00:16:38
Speaker
And I'm not proud to admit it, you guys, but my class of 2002 had a real problem with cheating. The academic standards were so high and we felt so much pressure to perform that a lot of us, we found ways through the system. And the teachers would routinely pop quizzes on us unexpectedly.
00:17:01
Speaker
And it would send a shockwave through the entire school, like, oh my gosh, we've got a pop quiz with Mrs. Petra Shevitz's class in Catholic morality. And as one class would come out, they'd share the questions on the quiz with the next class going in. And again, I cringe to share that story because I'm not proud of it. And as a class, we were violating our honor code, the one that we all signed up to.
Empowering Leadership and Organizational Success
00:17:24
Speaker
Now, Mr. Mason came in the first day after winter break, and he let us all file into the class, and he very earnestly walked in, closed the door behind him. And he addressed us from the front of the class. He said, now you all know your reputation for cheating in this class.
00:17:40
Speaker
And you've gotten berated by administrators and teachers. You've been taken to task for this as a problem. You all know that you're violating the Code of Honor. However, I think we've been letting you down as teachers. I think it's us who've been failing you and not the other way around.
00:17:56
Speaker
Now, I'm going to take a radically different approach to proctoring exams, whereas my colleagues, other teachers, have been heightening or increasing their standards, proctoring more closely, changing quizzes between sessions. I'm going to do the exact opposite. And here's why. It's because I don't think we, as teachers and administrators, have given you the trust and faith to live up to the honor code that you agreed to. And I think that trust is the missing ingredient, because I don't think you want a cheat. I think you know that you're better than that.
00:18:26
Speaker
I think the problem is you don't feel like we believe in you. And so I will not be proctoring exams this semester. You'll be free to cheat as much as you want. I will not be in the room. And today is our first exam. You all have assigned reading over the holidays, and today is an exam to probe into that. And so he went through and he slowly passed out the papers for the test, walked up to the front of class, collected his suitcase, and walked out, shut the door, and not
00:18:54
Speaker
Not a thing could be heard. Not a single word was said. And as an entire class, we each completed our exams without saying a thing to each other, walked into the front of the class, dropped him off on his desk, and walked out. And it was a profound experience for me in the power of trust.
00:19:16
Speaker
organizing the collective actions of a group and motivating them to perform at their best from a set of values that they signed up to. I take that story with me everywhere I go. For me, trust in those that you lead is a precondition to anything else. And that's one of those lifelong lessons I learned at Strip Jesuit from Mr. Mason that I'll take to the grave with me.
00:19:39
Speaker
Well, I'm going to take that one to the degree with me now too. It's a good one. What a great story and what a great example of leadership in a big way. I have to ask though, I lean on trust a lot as well. One of my favorite mantras is let leaders lead, right? Why do I have a leader if I'm not going to let them lead?
00:20:05
Speaker
But sometimes, some people look at that and say it's naive, and that the chances that you're gonna be taken advantage of at some times in your life increases.
00:20:16
Speaker
And I know that as you look across the years that you've been running your company that that has happened. So I'm curious just the balance between extending that trust while still knowing that every once in a while it's not going to be lived up to. And how do you kind of deal with some of that dichotomy and still be willing to believe in people even when a few times with some individuals that might not happen.
00:20:45
Speaker
Well, yeah, one of my favorite authors wrote a book called Turn the Ship Around. He's a retired Naval captain called David Marquet, Captain David Marquet. And his model of leadership talks a lot about in order to do what you're describing, Nathan, to trust and empower, you've got to have two critical ingredients, competence and clarity. And I think as leaders, we've got to continuously interrogate to what extent are we providing clarity around what the future state looks like, what success looks like, what's expected.
00:21:13
Speaker
short-term, medium-term, and long-term. And there's a bunch of different practices, whether they're rituals or gestures, meetings, crucial conversations, tokens, artifacts. And we can go to the field of anthropology to source a lot of those around how do we provide our company with or organization with more clarity about what success looks like. And we've been experimenting with that for two decades. I'm endlessly fascinated
00:21:38
Speaker
by how you can express in greater and greater and greater detail a clarity and fidelity, what the future state looks like. That's that clarity piece. The second piece is competence. And that's that tough one for us as leaders, is we've got to continuously evaluate and assess, do I have a competent leader? Does this person get it? Do they want it? Do they have the capacity to do it? That comes from Traction, a book by Gina Wickman.
00:22:02
Speaker
And there are other ways to evaluate the competence of people but i also think that you know this also gets into that crucial conversations piece where we gotta we gotta.
00:22:13
Speaker
I love the way that Brené Brown talks about this. We've got to rumble and dare greatly with the people that we report to. Go into those conversations for feedback and reflection to express our disappointments or express what we're seeing, to check in with people. You got to do that with vulnerability, and there's a real art to that as well. But I think that those are two key ingredients that we've got to have in order to have this concept of empowered leadership.
00:22:40
Speaker
Without competence, it's going to fall over. The Peter principle is going to play itself out, where we promote people to the point of incompetence. And that's not good for them. It's not good for the organization. That's a painful situation to be in. Gosh, it happens so often in technology and knowledge work, where we assume that because somebody is a real master at the technology, they therefore know how to manage or lead people who are technicians. And that can be a real fatal assumption. We make it again and again and again.
00:23:11
Speaker
The Peter Principle creates a powerful tension in the workplace, where people desire and are encouraged to seek promotion without assessing if they actually have the skills to tackle the new role. The employee in question may even know deep down that the promotion isn't a good fit, but they operate under the assumption that they should say yes and figure it out later.
00:23:32
Speaker
There's no magical solution for this puzzle. It requires radical honesty and empathy to navigate it well. We also need to break down the cultural stigmas around management as the end-all be-all for career development.
00:23:50
Speaker
And so I'm fascinated by what are the questions that you can ask to assess whether a person is a leader or whether they are a technician. It really does seem like there is a societal pressure on people to want to advance into positions of leadership, even if it may not be what's best for them. Marcus Buckingham writes beautifully about strengths and weaknesses. And I'll close off with this idea that strengths are not necessarily things we're good at.
00:24:20
Speaker
Strengths are those things that after we finish doing them, they leave us feeling strong. And weaknesses aren't those things that we're bad at. They're the things that after we finish doing them leave us feeling weak. And I think under the heading of competence, we need to critically probe into whether or not this person is leaning into a strength that energizes them or leaning into a weakness. They may look good at it.
00:24:42
Speaker
They may be perceived as good at it, but it could deplete them. And I think that's a real opportunity to have an honest, crucial conversation in that realm of competence. Yeah. I love that. Since I asked the question about trusting in people to do things, if you have clarity of what you expect of folks and what the future holds and you are constantly checking their competence,
00:25:09
Speaker
then that naturally leads into the fact that you're also continuously having those hard, difficult, crucial conversations that are important that if either the clarity is missing or the competence isn't there, that you're tackling them head on. So it's not like a surprise that comes out from anywhere. Rather, it's something that you're constantly looking at and evaluating, not
00:25:31
Speaker
because it's a lack of trust, it's just always checking on that clarity and competence. I love that. Well said. There's one other thing I want to share. I learned this from a friend of mine who recently told me, Tim, you cannot solve a problem until you take responsibility for it.
00:25:46
Speaker
We have six core values at Praxent. Own the outcome is one of them. I think of it as my Stephen Covey core value, the worldwide famous author of seven habits of highly effective people. And his habit number one is be proactive, which is a rearticulation of this concept, which is you can't solve a problem until you take responsibility for it. It's about radical responsibility. Own the outcome again is our articulation of that at Praxent.
00:26:10
Speaker
And when I lean into somebody with one of these conversations, that's the most important thing. That's the number one thing I'm looking for. Is this person going to defend or justify? Are they going to shut down?
00:26:22
Speaker
Or are they going to lean into the conversation and say, you know what, Tim, thank you for the feedback. It's hard to give feedback, but man, it's the only way I know how to learn. I'm so grateful for it, and you're absolutely right. I'm going to take responsibility for that right now. That second case indicates to me, you know what, this person has a growth mindset, and they're going to stick in with me, and they're going to do the hard work to change behavior. But if the person deflects, defends, justifies,
00:26:46
Speaker
Oh, that's a sickening feeling. In the pit of my stomach, I've been in that situation. I mentor people who are in that situation. You can't do anything with a leader who doesn't take responsibility. And so as people are advancing in their journey, thinking about whether or not to go from technician to manager, manager to leader, I think I would counsel them to reflect honestly on that responsibility piece. That is a critical muscle to build for anyone to step into the work of leadership.
00:27:14
Speaker
Yeah, absolutely. My favorite thing that I hear over and over again in business is, well, I don't have control over that. It's like, Oh man. Well then what are you going to do? Yeah. A hundred. Well said. That's a perfect example, right? Of, of someone who's not, not yet able to, or ready to take responsibility. Yeah. So I'm curious in those early days, as you were building, as you were building the company and trying to figure out who you were going to be as leader, trying to figure out what you wanted to be as a business.
Entrepreneurial Challenges and Learnings
00:27:42
Speaker
and growing that team. I wonder, is there any adversity that kind of comes to mind that helped clarify those things for you?
00:27:49
Speaker
I was really lucky the first seven years. I was building websites, e-commerce sites, small content management systems, and I really didn't have any failures. I was doing all the engineering, mainly I had some design contractors and I was project managing them, selling them. But because the team size was so small, basically it was just me selling and delivering the projects and then working with a small group of contractors. And because of the nature of the work was relatively straightforward, I didn't have any failures.
00:28:18
Speaker
Now, reflecting on that, there is a framework called the Kenevan framework, C-Y-N-E-F-I-N. It's a Welsh word, and it has a matrix of different domains of complexity. You can go from a simple domain to a complicated domain to a complex domain to a chaotic domain.
00:28:40
Speaker
And depending on which domain you're operating in, your practices need to evolve. So when I started my business, I was doing complicated work, basically. It was fairly straightforward, and the best practice is to make sense of the situation, analyze it, and then respond with good practice.
00:28:57
Speaker
But as I evolved the business and I evolved outside of web design and development, digital marketing, I started taking on custom product engineering engagements, building enterprise applications for larger organizations. I had clients like the City of Houston. I took on almost a 200,000 URL website migration for one of the largest media companies in the oil and gas industry. These weren't complicated projects. These were complex projects. And the best practices here
00:29:26
Speaker
Actually, if you think about the concept of applying the best practice, it's really inappropriate in a complex domain because before you can make sense of the situation, you've got to probe. I didn't probe. I just jumped to making sense of things. Therefore, I was operating with incomplete information and I was applying the wrong approaches, the wrong practices.
00:29:48
Speaker
I had a series of failures that were really, really painful between 2008 and 2012. I launched three SaaS companies, took them to market and they all failed for different reasons.
00:30:05
Speaker
I had a very large content migration project in 2009 fail in a really challenging and painful and costly way. I formed a business partnership with somebody that I learned a lot from. We merged our companies together and that would ultimately go on to fail. And then one of the most painful things I had to do is I had to fire my first employee.
00:30:29
Speaker
And I'd worked closely with this individual for five years, and he is an extraordinary human being, one of the brightest, smartest, funnest people I've ever worked with. And it was devastating to terminate that relationship. And for this series, like wave after wave after wave of failures, I really, I look back, it was an incredible gift, but man, it was hard to go through. It was a gift though, because it taught me what I value, what is negotiable in my life, and what is non-negotiable in my life.
00:30:57
Speaker
I think that's really the phase in my leadership journey where I started to understand the role of principles and values. I put them down on paper and I started getting crystal clear on what are the non-negotiables in my life. I have a friend who said to me, you know their values only if you're willing to spend money or lose money to defend them.
00:31:21
Speaker
And this period gave me an opportunity to really reflect deeply on that, and ultimately write the six core values that now are the foundation of Praxent, and then form every decision we make. And so I'm very, very grateful for that adversity, that period of failure, but it wasn't fun to go through at the time. Yeah. It does not sound fun to go through. I mean, wow. Tried to launch three SaaS products and
00:31:49
Speaker
created a partnership and didn't work out. I mean, that's a lot to work through. And I mean, I would love to hear each and every one of those stories. I'm not sure if we have time, but I would be curious if you had to pick one, if you think if you're willing to just to kind of jump into and dig apart a little bit just for us to learn from, I'd be super grateful.
00:32:11
Speaker
I can summarize a couple. The three startups I launched, what I ultimately observed in my behavior, as soon as I launched them, I finished building the product, I took it to market, I lost interest. And I had somebody reflect, again, another mentor, reflect on that situation with me over coffee. He said, Tim, growing an enterprise software company, a SaaS company, is much more about go-to market and sales and marketing than it is about R&D and building.
00:32:40
Speaker
And you are a builder. Here's where you can see that Tim had his own reckoning with his skill set and passions versus an ambitious objective. Launching three software startups can sound impressive, but quantity is no substitute for quality, especially if your heart isn't in the work.
00:33:03
Speaker
The world needs more people who are doing meaningful work they love, people who are entering a state of flow. This dovetails with the distinction Tim made earlier between strengths and weaknesses. I think that most people would benefit from looking for work that energizes them. It's more valuable in the long run than settling for work you can tolerate, even though it steals your joy and vitality. I'm not saying that it's easy to find work like this. I am saying it's worth the search.
00:33:38
Speaker
And so you either need to join a SaaS company or join somebody who is a go-to-market expert who is committed to and energized by and strengthened by that sales, marketing, and go-to-market work.
00:33:53
Speaker
Or you should consider a firm or business, a focus where you can just do nothing but building. And that's what ultimately led me to commit to consulting. Essentially, one of the times I recommitted to consulting was when I realized, oh, I just want to do nothing but build. And so that was one of those Marcus Buckingham strengths versus weaknesses moments for me.
00:34:18
Speaker
And the business partnership one is the other one I'll summarize for you. I think, as I mentioned, this partner I got together with was brilliant and very, very capable. I learned a lot from him. He was an exquisite salesperson, a very strong consultant himself. I learned a ton, because I was young. I was in my early 20s, and he taught me an awful lot, and I'm very, very grateful. But ultimately, we wanted to build a different kind of organization, and we thought about engineering culture differently.
00:34:46
Speaker
Now, he's gone on to achieve great things. But after six months, I had to pull the trigger and essentially unwind from that partnership. That was in 2011. It was such a painful and stressful process. I basically lost everything that I built up into that point. I lost the business that I built for 11 years. I lost all the employees that I hired. I lost the office space. I lost everything. Wow.
00:35:12
Speaker
I had this opportunity to go back to the two employees that had been along with me for the furthest. Nick, who runs our design practice today, and Andrew, who's the technical director on the team still today. I went to them. I said, guys, I have no guarantees for you whatsoever. I have this tiny little e-commerce website, ironically, for a stress relief client.
00:35:33
Speaker
And we can consume a lot of these stress relief supplements while we're building the site. But I have no guarantees, but I do want to do this with you. Would you come with me and let's rebuild this business together? And we got together in my kitchen, my dining room, my living room. We moved into the condo and we started the business again. And that was in 2011.
00:35:52
Speaker
And it wasn't until 2015 when i had an occasion to reflect again on the importance of business partnership i met my now business partner kevin kevin her with you join me in 2016 and he was just the most generous.
00:36:10
Speaker
Just organized thinker intelligence consultative he was just he's just an amazing human being and i started having coffee and he started referring clients to me. And i got to the point where he was wanting to get my advice for how to build a team and hire his first couple of employees who want to launch a company and i said what would you think about joining forces.
00:36:29
Speaker
Anyway, that's how it started. I was terrified at the prospect of getting another business partner because I've been through this process. I read this book called Rocket Fuel, which is all about the two different types of leaders that
00:36:44
Speaker
form successful companies. There's the visionary and the integrator. The visionary is the leader that's more emotional, more in tune with the culture, is much more of a relationship person. It's the face of the company in many cases, often the founder, but they're disorganized, they're episodic, they're ups and downs, they may be more sensitive.
00:37:00
Speaker
They're not great systems and process thinkers, and they badly need an integrator to be cool, calm, collected, organized, methodical. And that's Kevin. So we got together. It was that book, though, that really helped me to do business with my fear and to ultimately accept the fact that I was being too close-minded about business partnership as a result of my failure. I was actually letting that really inhibit my
00:37:26
Speaker
perspectives on this in a destructive way. And so I'm so grateful. Kevin put up with six months of, we hired a psychologist to do personality testing and conflict testing. We had endless one-on-ones during that six month period before I ultimately committed to the partnership and we made it happen.
00:37:43
Speaker
And i look back at that that's a six months decision nathan that should have taken me sixty seconds but you know such as life i had to unlearn. Some habits you know i had to work through some professional scar tissue there to realize you know what what was the right decision. I know one of the things that i've shared with a lot of founders is
00:38:04
Speaker
Like they're like, should I raise money? Should I not raise money? Should I set up a board? Should I not set up a board? I'm like, look, I can't tell you whether you should raise money or not because that has to do with control of your company, control of your destiny, et cetera, et cetera. But I'll tell you this, get a board.
00:38:19
Speaker
get a group of independent people, and a lot of it has to do with just the advice. They don't necessarily have to be on the board, but I 100% agree that having a group of individuals that you can trust that aren't in it day in and day out that can help you get outside of yourself is just invaluable because
00:38:38
Speaker
Look, we're all going to hope that we're not like that we don't have inherent biases in place and that we don't have blind spots, but we do. And having systems and people around you to be able to help you get outside of yourself is extremely helpful. So thank you for sharing that. Well said.
00:38:56
Speaker
So this journey of Praxent, I mean, starting in 16, building websites, ending up doing a lot of project management on your own, going into a partnership and then going basically where you had to, you lost the business, if you will, and had to start all over again, bringing on a new, a new partner. You know, I'm familiar enough with your business to know that you had another really big transformational decision that came
Strategic Shifts and Industry Focus
00:39:23
Speaker
up in Praxent. So I was wondering if we could talk about that a little bit more as well.
00:39:27
Speaker
Yeah, there's a lot of evolution, changing the name to Praxent in 2015, codifying our core values, recommitting to consulting. But perhaps one of the most significant was when we had this incredible run. Kevin, my partner, and I, we got together in 2016. And from 2016 to 2019, we grew the business 400
00:39:55
Speaker
460%. It was just an incredible run. And we were working for some incredible clients. Cisco Foods, a Fortune 50. We worked for Kinder Morgan. We worked for Texas Mutual, one of the largest insurance carriers in the state of Texas.
00:40:10
Speaker
And we had built a really nice portfolio. We also had a lot of startups and we had some client concentration in the portfolio where a small number of clients accounted for an outsized amount of our revenue. And the other thing is we had mainly
00:40:28
Speaker
Well, we had a team of 75 engineers, and we'd grown to this really nice level. But as I mentioned, there were real structural challenges. I also saw that the future of the industry, it was a matured industry of product engineering firms coming not only from the US, but all around the world, entering the United States market. And we just did not have a compelling answer to the question, well, what makes Praxent unique? What's special about Praxent?
00:40:56
Speaker
We would talk about our people, our talents, our core values. But when you got a portfolio of oil and gas and logistics companies and hospitality companies, a couple in financial services, some in life sciences, you really can't.
00:41:12
Speaker
I don't think. Answer that question in a way that a client or prospect will hear it. At the end of the day, when a client wants to know what's unique about your consulting firm, what they're really curious about is what's your expertise. A client's greatest fear is spending a dollar for you to learn on their dollar. They don't want to hire you to do a thing for the first time. They want to hire you because you've been there and done it.
00:41:39
Speaker
And when we took a step back, we went on a partner retreat in the summer of 2019. We realized that while we had enjoyed a lot of success, it really felt like we'd kind of gotten lucky. And there wasn't a good way for us to predictably and sustainably continue to scale in a way that wouldn't feel like it was all going to fall down like a house card.
00:42:01
Speaker
And we read a bunch on the topic. We hired a consultant. David C. Baker is an extraordinary leader in the space. And he worked through a really challenging engagement with us to really challenge our thinking on this. And ultimately, we were convinced that what we needed to do was to verticalize the firm and pick a single industry and just go deep in that industry.
00:42:22
Speaker
No that terrified me nathan because for nineteen years at that point i had succeeded entrepreneur lee by saying yes to everything starting with my tennis coach you know and i am. Do you know i do exactly you got it and i've done that for nineteen years there was a very very well warm pattern.
00:42:41
Speaker
But picking a single industry now felt like I was going to put a huge big no on the brand. That was terrifying, but we did business on that fear and we kind of overcame it. We did a bunch of analysis, ultimately picked financial services because of
00:42:56
Speaker
The trends that we saw in the industry, a trend towards self-service, a real strategic role of a human-centered digital experience that could do more and more and more than a brick and mortar location or branch could do to help people to serve themselves and get through those processes.
00:43:13
Speaker
And we saw that there was a very complex, multi-layered ecosystem of FinTech providers that played a big role in the value chain in financial services. And that really led itself to integration work and orchestration work and cloud migration work. And so we saw the trends and we also reflected on our strengths.
00:43:33
Speaker
At that time, we had six clients in our portfolio in financial services, six referenceable clients. We thought, you know what? It's a big bet. It's a huge leap of faith. We see the future and we've got a starting point. Let's go in that direction. In 2019, we took a hard turn and we announced boldly that Praxisom was going to go in this direction and we verticalized the firm.
00:43:58
Speaker
A huge bet, a huge investment, and ultimately it's paid off. Our big hairy audacious goal is 500 referenceable clients in financial services and to become known as the boutique mid-market consulting firm to clients in banking, lending, payments, wealth management, insurance, and fintech. Bold is the right word for this.
00:44:20
Speaker
Is anyone who has worked in the industries that Tim rattled off? You know that heavy regulation and bureaucracy are the dominant modes of operation.
00:44:29
Speaker
Jumping into these markets to build modern digital experiences is not a task for the faint of heart. That said, people in these industries also know that transformation is a matter of survival, not preference. You don't need to have a background in banking to see the opportunity. Institutions and companies that embrace new technology and take calculated risks will grow, while everyone else withers or gets eaten up.
00:45:00
Speaker
And we've built now an incredible team who are all committed to that vision. And by day, by night, getting expert, more and more expert in the systems that power insurance, banking, lending, payments, wealth management. And the incredible takeaway from this is that to become expert in a thing,
00:45:20
Speaker
I'll take a step back. Why become expert in a thing? In order to have a compelling answer to the question what makes you different in a client-centered way. Anytime I would say our people, our values, our culture. Guess what? That's not about the client. That's about practicing. Yeah.
00:45:35
Speaker
I want to have a client-centered way of answering that question and that ultimately comes down to expertise. I think that's the bottom line in consulting. Now, because of this focus, we're accumulating expertise at a rate that's much higher than 99.9% of the competition who have a generalized focus with respect to the market today.
00:45:54
Speaker
Yeah. Well, that's also an important pivot because that's when we got to meet and got to know each other is once you made that decision. That's right.
Recommendations and Reflections
00:46:02
Speaker
Personally, I think that's the best part of the decision was we got to meet each other. Naturally. One of the things that I've so enjoyed about this conversation, but also in all of our conversations is,
00:46:22
Speaker
Almost every time I ask you a question, you have a story and you have a book that you can reference that has helped you to kind of think about the answer to a question or how you tackle a problem or something like that. And you've been super generous throughout this whole conversation and sharing some of those books that have had a meaningful impact on you in certain times in your life. But I always like to ask,
00:46:50
Speaker
non-business books, because there are a lot of business books out there and a lot of recommendations out there, but I've personally gained so much talking about books that have nothing to do with business that have helped me become a better leader. So I'm curious as you think about books that have had a outsized impact on you, that isn't necessarily or wouldn't be considered a business book. Do you have any recommendations for our listeners?
00:47:19
Speaker
You know, there's a lot to choose. I'm going to have to go with Sapiens by Noah Yuval Harari. Sapiens is a story about the history of Homo sapiens told in the most
00:47:32
Speaker
accessible, light-hearted, humorous, self-effacing way. But it's so also balanced with incredibly well-researched and insightful nuances and anecdotes and histories and science. That's the one. And my takeaway from that book
00:47:55
Speaker
is the thesis I would say that the author is writing about is the thing that sets us apart from other species. What is that? He's fascinated in exploring that question. And the thesis is that it's not that we're more intelligent than other species. It's not that we're better tool makers, which are theories that have been put forth. He argues that it's that we are uniquely able to
00:48:18
Speaker
orchestrate collective action in a larger group than any other species on the face of the planet. We were able to get things done in larger team sizes, essentially. And he writes about Dunbar's number, which is a famous number referring to the maximum size of a primate tribe.
00:48:36
Speaker
A group of chimpanzees can get together and get things done as a tribe up into the point of about 150. In 150, there's a challenger to the alpha, and that often leads the tribe to splinter into two. You can see this replicated across all sorts of different species, but somehow, some way, the human being
00:48:58
Speaker
has been able to get things done now in a globally interconnected ecosystem of over 7.5 billion working together on this thing called the globally interconnected economy with trade across borders. He argues that we are able to do that because of story.
00:49:20
Speaker
ultimately because of narrative. He also thinks of it as ideology or mimetics, like memes. It's basically this idea that we're gonna have shared meaning together by moving in this direction together. And democracy is a narrative, it's a story. He argues that religions like Christianity, for example, are performing the same exact function.
00:49:47
Speaker
And that's the thing that sets us apart from all other species. And I think that's fascinating. It's hard not to apply that to business. But yeah, that would be my number one. I love it. Thank you for sharing that. And we'll make sure to include that in the show notes as well so that folks can get to it. So as we're wrapping up, I always have a final question I like to end with. But before doing so, just wanted to see if there was anything else that you wanted to make sure we covered today that we haven't.
00:50:17
Speaker
Oh gosh, it's just been such a pleasure. I'll say that I love the focus on leadership in this podcast.
00:50:26
Speaker
I think what I've learned in my career, given that I work in technology, it's easy to think that the major challenges or hurdles that we've got to clear in financial services and banking are technical in nature. We talk endlessly about the legacy architectures and monolithic structures that we've got to integrate to, the ancient core systems that are running on mainframes that will fall over if we breathe on them wrong. We talk a lot about the technology challenges.
00:50:55
Speaker
But the thing i love so much about the focus of your work here is that it's on leadership i personally much more fascinated by the human factor i think the human factor is as. Important as challenging if not more challenging than the technical challenges that play gas.
00:51:12
Speaker
And I don't think we're going to be able to usher in the next generation of financial services ultimately to do the right thing for the account holders, the policy holders, the investors that we're serving. We're not going to be able to do that unless we talk about and tackle the societal challenges, the human and collaborative challenges that face us. And the tools we have to do that, that's leadership. So thank you for creating this resource for people. And I cannot wait to follow it going forward.
00:51:40
Speaker
Yeah, well, thank you very much. We definitely share a similar vision on that. It doesn't matter if you have the best strategic tactical plan that has ever been invented that is the perfect way to accomplish something. If you look behind you and there's no one there that's going to help you accomplish it, it ain't going to happen. It's just not going to happen.
00:52:07
Speaker
Building businesses, changing industries, making a difference in the world, it's not an individual sport, it's a team sport, right? Truly.
Nature vs. Nurture in Leadership
00:52:16
Speaker
So with that, on this question of leadership, and this is how we always like to end, is from your perspective, is a leader born or is a leader made? Gosh, you know, it's hard not to think about the question of nature versus nurture here. Yeah, which he touched on a little bit earlier, right?
00:52:36
Speaker
You know, anytime I read the updated studies on this topic, it seems like more and more and more leans in the direction of nature. I think some recent studies have found that up to 80% of human behavior can be explained by hereditary factors. I mean, that is, that's shocking. 80% is a big number. It's huge. And so, you know, I do think that that research applies here.
00:53:05
Speaker
As I said, there are just some things that I am strong at and I am weak at. And again, it has a lot more to do with what energizes me and what depletes me.
00:53:20
Speaker
about the role of hereditary factors. I've also shared a lot of the formative experiences in my life as an immigrant, the role of adversity, the critical role of mentors in gaining that third-party perspective. So I'm gonna give a cop-out here, and I'm gonna say both Ann Colomay and Colombe, and it depends. I think in different seasons of our life, we've gotta lean more heavily on the gifts that we came with,
00:53:47
Speaker
And then in different seasons of our life, particularly when the organization outgrows us, we have an occasion to stretch beyond that, to reflect on our strengths, but also to what extent our habits are starting to get in our way as the organization has gotten bigger and bigger around us. What do we need to unlearn and or what skills do we need to now apply? So I'm going to go with both and I apologize in advance for coughing out in that way.
00:54:14
Speaker
Yeah, well, I don't feel like it's a cop-out at all. I really appreciate your thoughts on the subject, as well as pulling in some research that you've looked into it as well. I have to say, your stories, your journey, your insight has just been so much fun to listen to and learn from. So thank you so much for taking your time with us today. It was an absolute pleasure. Thank you so much, Nathan, for having me.
00:54:43
Speaker
In 1970, the psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi identified and named the state of flow, where a person is utterly absorbed in the task at hand, an optimal combination of focus, challenge, and activity. My sincere hope is that every person will experience flow at least once in their life, but hopefully it's something you can incorporate as a ritual, immersing in an activity you love and walking away refreshed.
00:55:10
Speaker
Tim Hamilton dedicates himself to this kind of work and encourages his team to seek the same kind of passion and focus. Even though Praxis is somewhat new on the fintech scene, I have no doubt they'll continue succeeding with a strategy like that. Thanks for taking the time to listen. Tim is a fountain of wisdom, humility, and sharp thinking. I love that he poured some of those qualities out for us on this episode. You'll find Tim's book recommendations in the show notes. They're all excellent.
00:55:38
Speaker
You've been listening to Builder, Banker, Hacker, Chief, a podcast produced and distributed by Zsuite Technologies Incorporated, all rights reserved. I'm your host, Nathan Baumeister, the CEO and co-founder of Zsuite Tech. The show is co-produced, written, and edited by Zach Garber. Sound engineering was done by Nathan Butler at Nimble Wit Productions. If you enjoyed the episode, please take a moment to leave us a review or share the episode. This helps other people to find our show. You can also listen on Apple Podcasts, Google Play, and Spotify.