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Episode 2: Founding a Technology Consulting Company with Mark Wehby
57 Plays1 year ago
In this episode, we sit down with Mark Wehby, CEO of Callibrity. Mark shares some insights with us about his 25+ year career and what it's like to be a technology consulting company founder.
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Transcript
Focused Mindset and Client Education
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you
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Speaker
So I think it's the overall approach, the overall thought, right? We're there to kind of help lead and coach our clientele. A lot of it's a mindset. You know, I was there trying, I wasn't there just to do my job, right? I was there, I was trying to figure out what would be best for the client. I really spent a lot of time trying to understand the client and guide them from wherever I was at. If I was in there as, let's just say, an individual contributor, you know, I was looking around, where are the gaps, things like that, and I was trying to help educate.
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Educate the client.
Introduction to Forward Slash Podcast
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Welcome to the Forward Slash where we lean into the future of IT. I am Aaron Chesney with my co-host James Carmen. James, who do we have that we're interviewing today?
00:00:51
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Well, it is my pleasure to say we have Mark Wiebe, a good friend of mine from Caliberty. He's the CEO of Caliberty joining us today. Mark, maybe tell us a little bit about yourself.
Founding and Evolution of Caliberty
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So I'm Mark Wiebe. I'm the CEO and co-founder of Caliberty, which has been around since 2007. I have two adult children, Ryan Wiebe, who's 22, my daughter, Hannah, who's 21, and my spouse of 22 years, Rachel Wiebe.
00:01:21
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And then your mother's maiden name and social security number just for the record. Well, my mom's maiden name is nice try there, Aaron. Yeah. A little bit about Caliberty before we kick off. We started in 2007 and it was just Gary and I. And actually James Carmen, when we first started, we were in the basement of PNG and we formed a small company, uh, primarily to, uh, to keep.
00:01:48
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other you know well there's a few things we were trying to accomplish but thinking about it a little bit higher level we were independents in this we formed a company and there's a lot of benefits to being a small company as opposed to you know three independents and shortly after that James kind of left the company he had a lot of other external responsibilities and
00:02:17
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I don't want to put words in his mouth, but he had a lot of competing priorities at that time for the size of the company that he decided to focus elsewhere.
Caliberty's Growth and Hiring Journey
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And so we stayed in that business model roughly till 2014 or so, and we landed a client with enough of a footprint that we had the revenue. And Gary volunteered and did a great job. He stepped out of day-to-day consulting and focused more on business development.
00:02:47
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And, um, shortly thereafter, we started hiring full-time employees and the kind of the rest is history. Yeah. And I think it went something really cool about that. Employee number one is still with Caliberty to this day. So you know, all that time ago, he's still with us. It's pretty cool. And it's a rare thing these days. Absolutely. Absolutely.
Wiebe's Early Tech Fascination
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So we wanted to maybe, we had a list of questions we wanted to kind of go through with you, Mark, if that's all right with you. First, tell us maybe a little bit about what, what got you into software engineering. How did you get involved in our field at first? It's a great question. So during my grade school.
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We had a computer lab, and we got to go visit the computer lab once a week, and it was full of Commodore 64s, which I believe were even outdated at that time. It was cool. It was very interesting. There were the old games on the Commodore 64 that attracted me to computers, but also we got to
00:03:56
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do some coding and I believe it was basic. There was a lot, you know, line numbers were important. We could draw little dots, little asterisks and things like that. And I really, really enjoyed that. And that that's really what got me going in this field.
Programming on Vintage Systems
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So nice. I had a similar experience with the way I got started. Mine was an IBM desktop in
00:04:27
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put in a bunch of game code in basic from a Tandy book. And because it was Tandy to IBM and he sat there and it was a father son thing that we would do and sit there and debug the things. So respect to the old systems.
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I typed my first program in with an Atari 2600 joystick. So not too easy, you know, going left, left, left, left, press the button to type each letter. It was, yeah, painstaking. It's a wonder that I still do this. You didn't have the little Atari keyboard that they have? No, no. Oh, I had that one for the Basic A cartridge. No, I had to type it in old school. It was pretty crazy.
Vision Behind Caliberty's Founding
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So when it comes to, you know,
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running and creating a company. It's a daunting thing to do. What made you want to start a company like Clivery? What was the inspiration? You went over it a little bit in your intro, but tell us a little bit more about it. Sure. I was lucky enough to be recruited by a consulting company at a college, software architects.
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And you would see that name quite a bit in this area if you looked around for people roughly in the same years of experience or came out of college around that area. There's a lot of former software architects, both at Caliberty and in the Cincinnati area. I'm sure in other areas, too, they had quite a presence in Columbus.
00:05:57
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They did a lot of things right. They definitely are not they were not the same business model or this the consulting space that we are currently trying to evolve to and aspire to. But they they hired a lot of really smart people right out of college and it was a great environment for both learning and
00:06:19
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and getting exposure to a lot of different clients and business models. So, you know, originally I wanted to, Gary and I and James, when we very, very first started out, we were trying to create a company we'd want to work for, for our whole careers. Yeah. I like, you mentioned that software architects hired a bunch of really smart people, but I would like to point out they also hired me. So there's, there was the other side of the equation, you know, so.
00:06:47
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There's always an exception to the rule. Right, right. Yeah. So you can't hit a home run every time. You know what I mean? When you think about it too though, right? They did hire a lot of smart people and jokingly and not jokingly aside, right? But there's a lot of skills that go into consulting that are not directly related, I think, to overall intelligence, right? You have to have the personality and social skills to be a good consultant.
00:07:17
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It takes a little bit of charisma. It takes that presence, I think, is kind of how I phrase it a lot of times when I'm talking to people about consulting. I love getting good presence.
00:07:30
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Hold on, we gotta throw this in there. Mark, can you share a moment you can look back on your career that something that might have been inspirational to you or just something that significantly influenced your approach and how you thought about what we do in this crazy world we call software engineering?
A Pivotal Career Moment
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I think there's a few, but when I thought about this, when I think about it now,
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and just pull it back to me personally. Back in the late 90s, I was on a client project as a consultant on the Java side of things. And it struck me how non-object oriented the approach was we were taking to build the software we were building. We were building it in Java, which is inherently object oriented.
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domain-driven languages and domain-driven approaches really weren't around then like they are now, the thought, the books and things like that. I took some time and I started to go back to what I learned in college around object-oriented programming and I started to design a domain model without knowing what it was called.
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I spent a lot of time actually at the client but in a non-billable capacity exploring that. At the end of the day, what we delivered was very procedural in manner and that's the way it worked. But I did spend time exploring that and then not long after that,
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I was lucky enough to attend a not no fluff, just stuff in Cincinnati and saw Rod Johnson present on spring and I'm like, Holy smokes. And then, you know, you could see the evolution to where we're at now. So have you ever done something like that where you learned, uh, a, a thing on your own that didn't have a label and then
00:09:37
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On an interview or in a conversation, somebody asked if you did something and didn't realize that what you had done was this label that they were throwing out. Maybe not exactly that, but yeah, for most of my career, I've had to learn a lot of things in a self-motivated, self-directed way.
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And I've often been in meetings or in interviews where that's coming to play. Once I start learning something, I'm generally not blazing the path completely, right? So there's usually a name or at least some concepts floating around about the things we're attempting to do.
00:10:22
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But as a side note, just real quick, one of the things I do is if I'm ever in a meeting and I hear technology I don't know about, I jot it down and I immediately educate myself after the meeting. So that's been really useful throughout my career as a consultant and even a CEO. I think one of the things, I don't remember what I called it, but I came up with like an object relational mapper type. I think everybody's done that, right? We've all written that in the past and I thought I was, you know,
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coming up with the next best thing. Of course, when I was at the client, I didn't know anything about it and what it was. I came up with some name for it. And then when I learned about it, I was like, oh, I like that name better. Somebody else came up with a much better name than whatever I came up with. And I think that was the one technology that I messed up the name for. This might be a little bit of a tangent, but when I worked with James early in our career, what then became named servlet chaining
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James was excited and walked a group of us through that on a whiteboard while we were on the, they called it the beach at soft architects. James, you'd have to go into more detail on that one, but, um, I don't know if that was something you blazed or not, but it did get a name later on. Yeah. I don't remember that one, but the one I do remember writing that, that ended up like, uh, it was very much similar to what struts when they came out with struts. I wrote something very similar to struts on an airplane one time on my way to San Francisco.
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And, uh, and then like a few years later, of course, struts came out like, Oh man, they did it so much better than I did. But what the heck, right? So James is kind of the Ted lasso of it. Right. Right. Yeah, exactly. Oh, we know that that's from this. We've done that before. It's like, yes, but we, we're going to do it. Right. I came up with this play and, uh, I think y'all should, oh yeah, we know about that. That's called this. Okay. Well, whatever.
00:12:20
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I invented that. What are you talking about? So, Mark, you've been doing the CEO thing for a little while, but it isn't your background. I mean, you didn't go to college for that. You don't have an MBA or anything like that. But looking back on
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your experience and what you've learned and how you've grown through the years. Is there anything that you would, you know, an aspiring young CEO and any advice you would give, or if you could go back in time and give yourself advice when you first said, Oh, Hey, now I'm the CEO of Liberty. Like, what would you smack yourself upside the head and say, Hey, dummy, don't do this. Like anything like that that you would care to share.
Building a Complementary Team
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you know, there's a lot, there's a lot, right? There's a lot to be in a CEO, there's a lot to start in a business and then then getting that business to the current size, Caliberty is so it was really hard. It is really hard to kind of do this, give that advice in such a succinct manner, but trying to think through the whole journey. The one thing I would concentrate on if I was
00:13:27
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Aspiring to be a CEO right now and I guess it wouldn't even matter what size the company is, right? So that's how I'm trying to frame this So, you know do a lot of self-reflecting figure out what your strengths are and you know It's interesting because some of us most of us I think are good or at least average at most things hence the term average, right? but what are you really good at what are your real true strengths and
00:13:54
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And then you need to figure out a way to address your weaknesses. So, you know, as the company grows, you know, you'll have the luxury of hiring people around you. For instance, Caliberty's executive team right now, we complement each other skill set wise and to a little bit personality wise. And that's just an example, right? There's other ways that you can augment or
00:14:21
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supplement your skill set, um, that doesn't necessarily mean hiring someone. So, but I think that's the number one thing. Yeah. And a couple good ways of, uh, getting a start at understanding kind of your, yourself is there's the Briggs and Meyers test, which will give you a personality profile with some descriptions on kind of where your, some of your strengths lies. There's also something out there that I've done before called strength finders.
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that will kind of give you the different types of strengths that you have that you could gravitate to. I know for myself, someone called me a maker once, and I'm like, and it made me think about it. And sure enough, yeah, I really enjoy making things. And that's why I gravitate towards software, I get to make
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make applications and see them run and get the enjoyment of seeing it all work. That kind of led me in my career path, so I like that advice. Mark, as you're talking about complimenting your weaknesses and stuff, there's
00:15:41
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You can kind of go through almost a build versus buy, right? Of a, of a decision on some of those weaknesses. Some of them, you just have to kind of bone up on it yourself. And some of it you have you hire to fill in those gaps. So what, how do you go about maybe making those decisions of which one is a build versus buy? What goes into that type of decision?
00:16:00
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I think that's a great question, James. And putting some thought into that and reflect on what you said a little bit, you do have to have a basic understanding of some of the core concepts around business. An easy example would be finances. You have to understand a certain level of that. And then as the company evolves and grows,
00:16:25
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more than likely, depending on your background, you are gonna get to the point where you're no longer good enough at that, right? Like your skill set, it would take too much effort to get to that level in years of experience. An example of that is we have Terry Farrow now as our CFO, and I could try and spend as much time or effort as possible to get to his level, but he has a whole career doing that, right? So at some point you will outstripe
00:16:54
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your talent level. And I think for this particular case, and to answer your question more directly, you know, there are core things that are really important to Clivity as a business, right? There are things that make us stand out in the marketplace where we're trying to position ourselves. And our ability to, our finances, right, don't directly impact that, right? So I try to steer my effort towards things that
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make Caliberty unique and you know answer that question for clients why or potential clients too like why Caliberty right so our ability to do our books and Terry's taken us to a whole other level and we needed it right at our current size but I try to focus on things that are directly impact Caliberty's ability to get to where we want to be as a company.
00:17:53
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I love that you, you started off that by talking about like how you educated yourself in areas where, you know, finances, that's not one of your specialties, but you did at least educate yourself. So you didn't like completely abdicate all of those responsibilities immediately. You at least educated yourself to a level, but you, you saw that you were running out of like space to grow in that area. And then that's when you need to bring someone in. That's an interesting approach. Thank you for that. Um, what about, um,
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In our world of software engineering, things change so
Staying Informed with Industry Trends
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much. How do you stay informed? How do you understand what are the latest developments and trends? And how do you incorporate that into your work? So that's a great question, James. So this is going to be
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an interesting answer at the beginning. So I read a lot, right? I take in a lot of information from a lot of different sources. Even sources I don't necessarily, I know I'm not gonna agree with, right? So there's from an overall perspective, I feel the need to keep up with macroeconomic trends, right? Because that affects our ability to do business.
00:19:05
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So there's trends in sales and marketing that I try to stay at least a little bit abreast of. But for our core competencies as a company, so I read a lot of blogs. I look at a lot of technical radars.
00:19:25
Speaker
Um, the more, the, the bigger Caliberty gets, I have to lean on our CTO a little bit, right? Um, to say a breast of, of what's going on. Um, I also talk to our practice leads and that helps a lot. So, um, it is getting harder and harder, the, the, the larger we get, but I would say it's more.
00:19:47
Speaker
I stay abreast of the abstract ideas, the big concepts, and I don't have the time to deep dive like I used to and actually do, I do still do personal projects where I'll stand up a full stack and mess around at the house, but I'm finding out, finding time to do that is harder and harder, so I have to rely on the overall team and the company. But I do a lot of reading, the pragmatic engineering,
00:20:17
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Email is great. ThoughtWorks, they produce a radar. I've been following that for a long, long time. You mentioned you read things that you know you're not going to agree with. I found that interesting. Why do you read those types of things?
00:20:38
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I think it keeps you well rounded, right? I think the concepts are still important to understand, even if your position is different than the author's position. Have you ever been surprised by something that you read in one of those that you you're like, Oh, I kind of see your point.
00:20:56
Speaker
Yeah, it's hard to come up with an example off the top of my head, but absolutely, there's been times where I've either learned something new and or changed my position on something based on what I read or podcasts I've listened to. So I do think it's important to, you know, at the CEO level, it's a breadth of knowledge, a lot more I'm finding than it is the ability, you know, to deep dive on one particular topic.
00:21:26
Speaker
And that's a change a little bit from being a day-to-day consultant. Although over the years I did accumulate a large breadth of knowledge. Yeah, I think being intentional about seeking out those potential blind spots that you may have, I think that's pretty smart Mark, that you seek out opposing viewpoints because it can help you grow and that's a neat aspect of your learning. What about,
00:21:56
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If you ever had any sort of an example of a time when you were working on a project where you faced a particularly tough challenge or a challenging problem or setback that you went through and how did you overcome that?
Handling Project Setbacks
00:22:14
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That's a great question too. So early on in my career, I'll give two quick answers because I think they're both kind of important.
00:22:25
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you know, I found myself pretty far behind a deadline. You know, back then, things weren't agile, even lowercase a on the first few projects I was on. So, you know, you go through all at least that point in my career, my overall growth wasn't there yet. So
00:22:47
Speaker
It's interesting how much angst that caused me, and then I went to my tech lead at the time, and luckily, as soon as I realized it, I maybe struggled thinking through this for maybe a couple hours, and I just went to them, and I said, listen, this deadline, I know I did the estimates on it, but it's no longer
00:23:14
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attainable and you know it's easy now looking back at that moment in time right well of course the sooner you get that information into the hands of the people that can actually help with the deadline moving the deadline right the better it gives them options you know James Carmen you know give you a little bit of credit James and I have worked together quite a bit over the years right
00:23:36
Speaker
And so he says it now, right? The time that I'm maybe not going to say it correct, James, but, you know, that gives the it gives options. Right. The sooner you know, the more options you have to address that, that you're not going to hit that deadline. So, you know, management can help move deadlines out. They can push marketing campaigns, all that. But if you hold that to yourself and then you miss the deadline, right. And that's going to be a much bigger deal because the client or the company has less time to react to it.
00:24:05
Speaker
And I think that's a big thing. And then kind of similarly, if you're running into a problem, I do think you give it a shot, right? You give the effort to solve it on your own as best you can, but you really have to keep in mind the overall amount of time you spend on that, trying to solve it. You should time box it. And if you hit the end of that time box, you should reach out to coworkers and get the help because
00:24:33
Speaker
Um, you have to be humble enough to understand that you can't solve everything and that they're going to have experiences that you haven't and they can absolutely help. So I've seen both of those play out many times in my career. For those listening at home, just to fill you in. So Mark mentioned the lowercase a agile.
00:24:56
Speaker
And for those that may not know, the difference between lowercase A Agile and uppercase A Agile is the amount of implementation in a given company for how they're following Agile practices. So lowercase A would be just like a touch point. Maybe you've got like a storyboard that you're following, but you're not following any other practices that are like iterative in that kind of stuff with the Agile methodologies. And the capital A Agile is
00:25:25
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whole hog, we're all going agile all the time. And we're, we're pulling in frameworks and experts and coaches and doing all that. So that's the capital A agile. Just wanted to clarify on that.
00:25:38
Speaker
Yeah, I think my, my spiel on that topic, Aaron is a little nuanced. It's the same, the same, the gist of it is the same as what you're saying. But like, I think of like, when I think of like lowercase agile, it's sticking to the principles, the agile principles, right? From the manifesto, just sticking to the principles and not so much being dogmatic about a particular, are we doing safe or are we doing scrum or are we doing XP or you know what I mean? Like stick, like you said, getting very litigious about it. That sort of stuff is just.
00:26:04
Speaker
Yeah, that's the big A agile. And that's where, you know, a lot of companies have gotten a bad rap for, you know, pushing these methodologies and frameworks when it's really, you really need to stick to applying those, those concepts. I think is, is where that little A agile comes into play. And I find it helpful to go back and read the manifest every once in a while, just to refresh myself. It's like, am I still being agile or am I, am I fooling myself?
00:26:30
Speaker
Absolutely. Absolutely. Mark, you mentioned, uh, it's interesting that the experience you had with, with, you know, do you dig into a problem and no one went to raise your hand and say, Hey, I need help. It made my experience, the, the, the junior level folks or the associates in, in, in our industry, you kind of get one or the other and it's on the extremes. It's hardly ever that people land on that kind of middle ground ever. It's either.
00:26:58
Speaker
I never want to dig in at all and I raise my hand immediately or I sit and work on something for two weeks straight and banging my head against it and I end up in a padded room, right? And those are the two extremes you experience. So landing on that sweet spot is hard and you mentioned humility. That's a big part of it is being able to humble yourself and say, I need help and understand that. So that's great. Thank you. When it comes to being.
00:27:22
Speaker
you know, leading a company? Are there? Could you identify just a key couple of like, skills or maybe even attributes of a person for that a person would have, or need to have in order to be an effective CEO? I think there's a few comes to mind, at least for a company, like Caliberty collaboration, right? And communication. There, there
00:27:49
Speaker
two sides of the same coin in a lot of cases so I think it's really important and I mentioned building the team around you that that complements your skill set and then you have to be able to collaborate right with that team and then I think another thing that at least for me is important is thinking through how you message things and both internally and externally they're equally important and
00:28:19
Speaker
You have to do it often and I think those are really important for a CEO.
00:28:28
Speaker
And also realize it's a team sport. I truly believe that. And then at the end of the day, there are times when you have to make a decision and you can collaborate too much. And ultimately, a decision has to be made. And there'll be multiple opinions. But you have to make one at the end of the day. Sometimes the decisions can be really hard because they affect people's lives.
00:28:57
Speaker
we're blessed to be in an industry where I think there's a little less impact most of the time than you have to make those truly hard decisions.
Leadership and Company Growth
00:29:06
Speaker
And the interesting concept, I think there's obviously there's different types of CEOs and some some excel in other ways in other situations. And, you know, you just thought that that goes to the collaboration and teamwork. If you if the company hits a time when
00:29:25
Speaker
your skill set's not the best for that part of the company's journey. You have to bring in and or delegate and find the skill sets you need to put on the team. Yeah, I think there was the great philosopher Robert Van Winkle once said that you need to stop, collaborate, and listen. You know what I mean? Those are important things to keep in mind as a leader, I think, every now and then. Absolutely.
00:29:56
Speaker
He was a great philosopher. Yeah. In an okay rapper too. Yeah, he was like, he has some moves. You could dance. You could put that philosophy to like a musical beat and you could like come up with something pretty powerful. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, that's nice. I love it. So what about
00:30:23
Speaker
If you, you know, what kind of advice would you give someone if they were wanting to start a business? Like from scratch, from the ground up and what kind of advice would you give someone like that? It can be quite the journey, right? So it's hard.
Challenges of Starting a Business
00:30:41
Speaker
There's no shortcuts. You know, sometimes I think companies that get started and
00:30:50
Speaker
They're lucky enough to be caught up in a wave or something like that and they're successful pretty quickly, but the majority of businesses are not like that. There's a lot of hard work. There's a lot of times where you get discouraged and you have to work through them from a different perspective too, right? I have a very
00:31:18
Speaker
trusting and you should, right? My wife's very trusting. She has a high tolerance for issues that arise sometimes as one of the co-founders of Caliberty because there are times where it can be good effects and spills over to the family, right? So that, you know, learning how to separate the two and you can't really successfully do it. At least I couldn't, right? There's
00:31:44
Speaker
work-life balance is important, but it's hard to do total separation. So, you know, that's another maybe something that you could take away as a CEO. That's a good skill to develop.
00:31:55
Speaker
to figure out how to minimize the impact to your family. And then also be able to step away, relax a little bit, right? Yeah, spend that time with the family. And when you do it, you should focus, try to turn off the business side of your brain and focus. Be present, right? There's books around this concept. So Mark, you have an interesting background.
00:32:23
Speaker
with being a CEO that's actually been in the trenches doing the work that your employees do. And that seems to be non-typical of your CEO. Most of them are school learned or brought in by a VC to manage a company instead of actually understanding the work that's being done at the
Consulting Experience's Impact
00:32:47
Speaker
lowest levels. But you've been there. How do you think that's helped you mold Cliberty into what it is?
00:32:54
Speaker
That's a great question, Aaron. So I do think that's important, especially in the type of company Caliberty is aspiring to be. So knowing some of the day-to-day challenges that being a consultant entails, and also being a consultant at different levels of experience.
00:33:19
Speaker
in the field, so to speak, for 17, 18 years as a consultant. So it's not just early in my career or late at a high level. It's been through the whole journey. And I think that is important. I can very much empathize with the day-to-day challenges of being a consultant.
00:33:39
Speaker
and interacting with clients, right? That's a skill set, that's important. So, but I think that speaks to making sure I surround myself with people that do understand a business and do understand how to scale it.
00:33:56
Speaker
Because that's, you know, something I've not done. Now I do have experience doing that at this point in my career. But early on, I did not, right? So, you know, and as we grow, that those skills become more and more important. So, their clivity as a company has to figure out how to address that.
00:34:14
Speaker
But to bring it back to your question, I do think it's very important for our type of company. Otherwise, I think it's a slippery slope to go in and there's nothing wrong with these business models. But I think it's a slippery slope to go to the more staff augmentation type of consulting company or one where the easy answers seem to make a lot of sense.
00:34:41
Speaker
But you don't truly understand the impact of that, right? So let me, you know, thinking through that, right? Like why it's so important for the things we're trying to do, right? Continuous education of our workforce, you know, team-based initiatives, things along those lines. I think it's more and more important that we stay in touch with that.
00:35:07
Speaker
So what, what would you say the differences between consulting in staff
Consulting vs. Staff Augmentation
00:35:12
Speaker
augmentation? Cause there's a lot of places out there that call themselves consultants, but they end up doing that staff augmentation, like you said.
00:35:20
Speaker
So I think there's a little bit that goes into that. So I think it's the overall approach, the overall thought, right? We're there to kind of help lead and coach our clientele. I think that's really important. And it's easier to do when we're positioned the way we're trying to position ourselves.
00:35:38
Speaker
And I do think there's been times in my early career where I was just a staff augmentation consultant, even though I didn't know at the time I was behaving more like a strategic type of consultant. So there's times you can do embedded leadership and things like that. But I think a lot of it's a mindset.
00:36:00
Speaker
you know, I was there trying, I wasn't there just to do my job, right? I was there, I was trying to figure out what would be best for the client. I really spent a lot of time trying to understand the client and guide them from wherever I was at, at my point in career, and the service that I was providing for that client. So if I was in there as, let's just say an individual contributor, you know, I was looking around, where are the gaps, things like that, and I was trying to help educate
00:36:28
Speaker
educate the client at whatever level I happen to be at. And I think that mindset is one of the biggest things that distinguishes that between the consultant and just a staff augmentation or a contractor. So as a CEO of a company, what keeps you up at night besides coffee?
Current Challenges and Leadership Development
00:36:53
Speaker
That's a great question. So, you know, I think it's changed over time. So early on in Caliberty's life cycle, a lot of it was around cashflow and, and sales, right. And so now at the, where we're currently at, you know, what, what kind of keeps me up at night is, and to be honest, which is since, uh, our current executive team and, um,
00:37:19
Speaker
And it's not just the executive team, so I just want to make sure I make that clear. Where Liberty currently is, there's not really much that keeps me up at night, but I think that's a combination of many things, right? So we've grown as a company to where we're currently at, and we have a lot of leaders in the company from top to bottom. So everything from individual consultants that have kind of stepped up and taken on more,
00:37:48
Speaker
and to CA's and DA's to practice leads to there's just a lot of leadership and I think a lot of that goes back to you know our hiring practices and our philosophy overall and what we're trying to position ourselves. And CA's are our consultant advisors and DA's are our
00:38:13
Speaker
delivery advocates, delivery advocates, okay, they're like a liaison between our clients on our delivery teams. So, you know, I think we've done a good job of putting the structure in place where we have leaders throughout the organization. You know, we have a lot of we do have a lot of things to work on. And we have a lot of places we can grow, and maybe getting a little more systematic around growing leaders and making
00:38:41
Speaker
helping natural leaders kind of get better at what they do. So that, you know, helping them on their journey. I think we, Clivity, that's, you know, an area of growth for us here in the near future.
00:38:56
Speaker
Yeah, I think it kind of goes back to that. You talked about surrounding yourself with good folks. And in some sense, I think what you've done with the keeping you up at night type of stuff is you've delegated that mostly to me. I think I'm the one that's staying up at night worrying about the things. That's why Mark gets to sleep so nicely. So, Mark, when you look back on
00:39:19
Speaker
You and I both worked for software architects coming out of college.
Reflection on Company Roles
00:39:22
Speaker
And I think our perspective, your perspective changes over time just naturally. Anyway, we have an interesting point or you do to look back on.
00:39:32
Speaker
Your perspective as an individual contributor, as a consultant working for a consulting company, and then as the CEO running that consulting company, in some sense, we were probably a little naive to all of the goings on behind the scenes and whatnot. What was probably the most surprising thing maybe that you can think of that you were unaware of at that time, that now you're like, I wish I would have known I might've been a little more
00:39:58
Speaker
I don't know, empathetic towards leadership because this job is not easy, but anything you can think of along those lines.
00:40:05
Speaker
Yeah, that's a great question, James. So when I think back to myself when I was at Salford Architects, we jokingly called the non-consultants blood sucking overhead, right? And I get it, right? That's a funny term. And to a certain degree, right? It's the part of the organization that isn't doing the day-to-day works, so to speak. And that's kind of how I thought about it, especially early in my career.
00:40:34
Speaker
So when I think about one of the things I learned a lot about when starting Caliberty and being part of this side of the house, so to speak, being part of that blood sucking overhead, is it's a lot of work to have a functioning company. And there's a lot of effort and talent that I didn't necessarily have a
00:41:03
Speaker
of respect for that goes into running a company. So I'll just pick an easy one for me, because as a software developer, true sales, like my knowledge of sales, in particular, especially early on my career, I'm like, well, how hard is it, right? Like, just make some phone calls. Like, we got a skill set everybody wants, right? Like,
00:41:25
Speaker
clients should just be calling us, they should be following in our, in our, in our laps, right? But marketing and sales is hard and it's a skill set. It took me a long time to appreciate, but I mean, you could rinse and repeat that HR, all those types of things. Yeah. Anybody that thinks sales is easy should watch Tommy boy. That's a perfect example of how hard sales could be.
00:41:48
Speaker
Let me tell you why I suck. Well, another that too is the expense, right? Like it takes a lot to run a company. So to fully understand that at the level I do currently as CEO, it was somewhat of a surprise that the effort and the expense it takes to run to run a company.
00:42:14
Speaker
Yeah, I think I had the same, and you know, we did, we caught the, the non-dillable staff, the blood sucking overhead back in the day. You know, we kind of looked at it selfishly. At least I did. I don't want to put words in your mouth, but I kind of looked at that as like, those are the reasons that I can't make a better salary, right? Like that, you know, because we have to pay all these people, right? That's how kind of I approached it back in my, my naive days. But I, but I guess I have to think back of some of those folks that.
00:42:40
Speaker
Um, you know, the way we like to think of ourselves, uh, the non-billable people working at Deliberate is, is we're the support staff, right? So we're, we're there to support. And I, and I think, uh, you know, looking back on our, you know, the people that were involved with us, uh, like the Greg Morfields and the Jean Jalassie's of the world that were, they were there helping us to learn and grow along the way, uh, probably didn't have as much, uh,
00:43:03
Speaker
appreciation for all the stuff they did for us. Looking back on it now, I can see that it probably wasn't an easy job guiding a young James Carmen that's fresh out of college when I knew everything. You know what I mean? So in what's changed? Not much. It's just I don't have them anymore. They're not, they're not here. So I have to figure it out on my own now. Yeah. But you still come up as you know everything. So
00:43:29
Speaker
I've known everything since I got out of college. I just haven't learned anything since. That's the problem. Thank you, Mark, for your time and your insights into the life of a CEO. Thank you to my co-host James Carmen and our editing production staff that put this lovely production together. Stay tuned for our next episode on the forward slash where we lean into the future of IT.