John Corcoran 5:25
Oh, definitely a lot more overhead back then. Yeah, right.
John Grover 5:29
Now you give them a laptop and an internet connection and a subscription to LexisNexis. And they can search up stuff. And, and, anyway, so it’s just a, I just got it, I just looked out, I saw Oh, there’s a river of, of kind of productivity and, and money flowing through this place. And, and it would just was a student of life and learning and I didn’t have much to, I just burned all the ships from before, right? None of my fraternity brother connections and all the stuff from being in a college my dad was kind of a bigwig in the college, and I kind of had all this stuff growing up, but came out here and, and and started starting over from scratch. Really? Yeah. And it was good, because you just you can really observe almost like a scientist, right? And like, this is how my dad thinks right? He was walking through the woods, he’s noticing everything. And and observing. Right. And so that’s that’s sort of what I did. And just for that curiosity, and and and that optimism that seems to be in the water in the Bay Area. I don’t know what it is. Maybe it’s the weather, maybe it’s the sunny, sunny weather that
John Corcoran 6:33
Yeah, so you’re fresh off the boat, so to speak from Alabama, I don’t know a lot about computers. And but there’s this crazy gold rush going on the.com waves happening, and you end up in an IT services company? are you educating yourself? Are you trying to learn these different courses? What path did you see? You know? And how did you figure out what path you’d follow?
John Grover 6:54
Well, so I was running seminar. So almost those kind of their sales person at the IT certification company, and they didn’t want me to get any of the certifications, because we were doing too well. They were worried that you would leave, right. And it’s not really a good thing to say to me. Or you can’t do something or like it kind of got on my fighting side. So I started really studying it on my own and coming in on the weekends, and I had keys to the place and I would do the labs and just started passing all the tests on my own. But in the meantime, as a as a because I knew it, I was kind of unhappy. They say, oh, we’ll pay for your MBA right at night. And so I ended up getting the certification and the MBA and working for, you know, leaving, right and working for a law firm. And then the rest is almost it’s almost history is like it was
John Corcoran 7:42
Yeah. Now. So you were you were in like director of IT services for a law firm?
John Grover 7:48
No. So I was the I was a customer, a technical account manager think virtual CIO, for small law firm, small, okay. Right. So I was doing their IT strategy, I would, we would come in and we would do an complete audit, understand what they have, and why they have it. Think about what their best imaginable future would be, what’s the plan of the firm, and then we build an IT plan, complete with budgets and timelines, to get them from where they want to be now to where they want to go. And I just got to, like, all you can eat strategy all the time. And you just can’t be having those conversations all day, and not rev up to like 11 on your like entrepreneurship. You know, yeah, just is just the the all day every day just talking about growth and how to get there. And yeah,
John Corcoran 8:44
so now, did you. I want to ask you about this. So you come to the Bay Area, the Bay Area has got this crazy, you know dot com frenzy that’s going on. But then you go and you’re working with law firms. Now I know I can say as a recovering lawyer, former having practiced law for myself, lawyers can make horrible clients. So kudos to you, that you you work with these clients, with lawyers as clients, they can be really difficult. But also at the same time, you know, it’s not working with like, you know, dot coms is not working with the kind of sexy companies of the time. Did you feel that at all at the time?
John Grover 9:16
To be clear, I had law firm clients, but I had other industries too. But no, I don’t share that opinion. Actually, if you come with a really lousy poorly thought through strategy plan, right, that you’re shallow in an attorney, a law partner is gonna see straight through that and ask you 1000 questions, and they’re like, they just know, just through the look on your face and the tone of your voice. And so what that did was that, that taught me the difference between being a professional and an amateur. Now just decide I’m gonna go pro, I don’t need an easy client, because they don’t need they need. They could do it have anybody for that. I want to be the consummate professional, and I want to come prepared and There’s got to be an I’m the expert in this. And there’s not going to be something that they’re going to ask me that I haven’t thought of. Right. And so I loved it. It was professional services, a lawyer or law firm. That’s what we’re doing too, right? Like, national services. So they showed me the way they did it not. I didn’t want to be in an easy client situation, I wanted to get tough questions. In fact, it it got to the point where I would come in so well prepared. All right, that I wouldn’t get enough tough questions. And I’ll be like, Okay, well, you might be thinking, and I would start to ask all these questions for him and be way above the byline of, oh, yeah, let’s do the project job. We’re good. You know, like,
John Corcoran 10:42
then actually, that’s actually great. sales strategy, right? Because if they’re not voicing these objections, or asking these questions, it might be that they’re thinking that but they’re not voicing them. And then it could kill your sale later. So what you’re doing is you’re kind of addressing them, so that they have the answers. If I’m
John Grover 11:00
right, I would take them through how I landed on their strategy. And I didn’t care about selling them. The dollars, I wanted to sell the ideas of what I thought was the best way for they told me what they wanted, like the best imaginable strategy for their firm, they want to double in three years, all this, their email, and their accounting system can’t go down five nines, right uptime. Okay, cool. I know how to do this. And this is what it’s going to cost and why. And this is how we’re going to get there. And so I didn’t, I wanted to, I wanted to sell my ideas framed in their best interest. And I didn’t care. Frankly, I wanted to I wanted to sell hard for the further work. For the for the people that worked at the firm, frankly, you know, Zahn the stressed out attorneys that need this stuff, right. So and and that is what, ironically enough sells the best. And I just didn’t care. Right. Like, I know, I did like it when people bought into what I was talking about, right? Yeah. Yeah. But it was it was different than sales in the traditional sense. And it made me feel great because it was others oriented. Yeah.
John Corcoran 12:11
So 2004 is when you Co-found Endsight with a couple of other business partners. How did that come about? How did you end up starting this company?
John Grover 12:20
Well, so the firm before that got acquired by these young whippersnappers my age, and I had never, I met this guy, Mike shape it. Okay, in this guy moved to California is Engineering at Texas Instruments. And we were both like, in our 2524, this guy thought he could be a CEO. I never gave myself that kind of permission to think that big, right? Like, I was fired up on the Bay Area, trying it, but I wasn’t like, on his level while he was really. And he said, Okay, we want you to come in with us. That’s the good news. And the bad news is we’re gonna have to cut your salary by two thirds. And if we don’t figure this thing out, we’re gonna have to, you know, shut this whole business down. And I said, Great. I didn’t have kids. I didn’t care. Like, what do I care? Right? Like, sure. Let’s just Let’s go. It’s hard. Good. That’s, that was my attitude on it. I was like, Yeah, let’s do this. That’s a great story. It’s a great movie scene or whatever. And so that’s what we did. But what we ended up doing is shutting down that firm. Because all it was is doing project work for, you know, businesses. And we decided, let’s do, let’s be a business operations. For small businesses, we understand small businesses. We know it’s really hard to start a small business, not the least of which because there it sucks. Let’s just say it. Okay, right. Right. They don’t have a big team of helpdesk engineers, they don’t have a chief information officer. They don’t have proactive monitoring and patching and all this sort of stuff. Right? So let’s build the IT infrastructure that we wished we’d had. And that’s what we did. And we just hit it right. And we burn the ships we shut the other thing down. Most people eased into manage services like that, by doing it as a little pet project, shoot a few bullets, no, we went hard on it. And that’s all we did to talk about
John Corcoran 14:19
that that’s a rough decision for many businesses. If you got something that’s paying the bills to completely shut it down and go full bore and it’s something completely new. There must have been moments where you’re like, Oh crap, did we make the right decision?
John Grover 14:35
We hated that other business. Okay. It was like you were too busy and you didn’t have enough people or you had too many people on the bench and you were just you know, and it was never recurring revenue. And so we didn’t we didn’t look back not one bit now. There’s, there’s a bias in business like people will build things, not want to walk away from it and then just start to try to like Hold on to it. Sometimes you need to just scrap the whole thing, you know, pivot hard, and not just try to milk the marginal benefit of something that you have, right, like, and so that’s what we did is we built it from scratch, we didn’t do any project work it project work for people that weren’t willing to, like sign up for us as to be there, like IT department. And, and I think that served us well in the past, like, you know, like, we used to have a data center where people would would, you know, put their, their servers in our data center and do things like that. And then the public cloud came along with Microsoft, Azure, and AWS and goo. And rather than trying to just hold on to this investment that we had, No, we just got rid of it. We got we got rid of it, we converted people over and then we got out in front of and built a capability, a competency that really helped us win new clients. So
John Corcoran 15:59
when did you make that shift? You said these guys acquired this business? Did you make that shift right after acquiring it? Or is it a few years later, about a year and a half a year and a half after after acquiring it? So I don’t know what they bought it for. But how long did it take to get back to the level that it was at before using the new thing because the new business model,
John Grover 16:20
They acquired this other firm. And this firm had a severe lease of office space, like way too much office space, and it was this, it was this millstone around our necks.
John Corcoran 16:34
And it was oh four. So it was this, this thing is three years after 911. So it’s probably still kind of coming out of that economic malaise.
John Grover 16:41
Right? Well, so they had signed the lease in in like, oh, one right before the crash. And it was like a five year lease, right. And we just didn’t want to deal with it anymore. And so the end of 2003, we said, Let’s shut this down, we’re gonna, we’re gonna file we’re gonna file for bankruptcy. For this, for this other firm, we’re gonna shut the whole thing down and create a new entity altogether. When with, we’ll just be debt free and being a small thing and Bootstrap ourselves and make a little money pilot back in. We didn’t take any money from outside investors, we didn’t borrow. Other than, you know, from ourselves, right, I can remember putting credit cards and buying all the project gear and all the traditional entrepreneurship story. But by the way, funny story real quick, then I was out with my I remember, I would be out with my father in law, right and trying to pay for dinner. And because I just put $100,000 on my credit card for the last project, right max out, max it out and get declined? Yeah, well, I
John Corcoran 17:43
can talk about that. Because, you know, I know a few people that are in kind of similar space. And that management of money is such a huge challenge for if you’re doing that type of project work, and you have to buy a bunch of equipment that the clients then then going to buy off of you. Yep,
John Grover 18:03
it is. And your balance sheet. You know, I didn’t I didn’t realize it’s like they didn’t really especially talk about this in business schools, you could be profitable and go and go straight into bankruptcy. Right? And that’s because your balance sheet is all weird. You could also be very severely unprofitable, right? Yeah. And but you’re sitting in a big pool of cash and your balance sheets flush right so watching cash flow was top of mind I almost did not so we started having retainers in our attorneys got that concept and you know, it was a like, nor client or law firm clients, they understand or that understood that concept. And and for that we gave up a little profitability, but it kept it kept the capitalization of the business going. And we got this balance sheet discipline Okay, tight AR understanding it you know, like and not getting in these weird crunches just trying to chase profit, but then then getting burned on the on the sort of the cash turnaround. So
John Corcoran 19:02
yeah, I was really dialing in your accounts receivable process.
John Grover 19:07
That and then also doing things like like I said, having people prepay for their work, getting retainer work.
John Corcoran 19:14
Now some of the fear around that is that oh, you know, we will get the work if we are really strict about how the customer has to pay.
John Grover 19:23
Yeah, but but you’re also discounting the benefits and that’s it. Like if they’ve already got a balance with you that money spends easy. You see what I’m saying? They’re IT directors don’t have to go get approval, all that, you know, or whatever, you know, like that, that’s that retainer money is it’s it’s a lot easier to get approvals and to get get work approved that way. So as an account manager, I loved it. Now. It’s a little bit of a hurdle up front. Right? And if he didn’t want to do it fine. It’s not like we insisted that everybody did do it. It was just a way especially when people wanted a little break off the hourly rate.
John Corcoran 19:58
Yeah. So it sounds like You kind of started in a customer or a sales role. At what point did you switch into your focus on being Chief People Officer? Yeah, it because I know that’s really where your passion lies.
John Grover 20:13
So I took over this team of 13 engineers call it our professional services team, right. And they were all doing projects for our, our clients. And it was like having a bunch of NBA MVPs, right of like the superstars, but the team wasn’t winning together, right? There was a dysfunctional, and we were losing in every measurable way. And so I said, Oh, gosh, I’m gonna have to clean out here. And then I’m like, Oh, crap, I don’t I actually don’t know how to go out and find and hire skilled IT people. Right? I don’t I don’t know how to do that. And I’m talking to, you know, talking to my dad one day, and he’s like, yeah, what’s going on? That’s good son, you know, how you doing? What’s keeping you up at night, or whatever, you know, just as dads will do? And, and I said, Dad, I can’t find good people. It’s killing me. And you hear that all the time, I hear at power twice a month, or more. And he said, Okay, well, what’s working? I said, Well, we’re crushing it on the customer side, we’re winning lots of business and this and that. He said, Well, okay, well, who owns the customer side of the business and business development? I said, Well, that’s all the way at the top at the CEO level. We said, well, who owns the talent side? Crickets, right, 20% of the HR directors time, or I don’t know, what is this? Clear? Right? Yeah. And he said, Well, it looks like you got to go out in the world and you need to buy customer or do you need to win customers. But you also have to win talent. Right? So you have to design your place to create value, not for his for customers. And he said, Son, do you know what to do? Your customer guy, right. And I flew home to Alabama and had a nice thing. And I started realizing, Oh, the experience of being like hosted and, and all these genteel things that they do in the south, we’ve got a bunch of Napa winery clients, they teach us how to be right, really good and create a lot of value for customers and say, just do this for the, for the talent. So you’re doing
John Corcoran 22:18
it for your customers, but you’re not doing the same thing for your team. It were
John Grover 22:23
they were the they were they were fifth class citizens. There was all manner as a young leader, there’s all manner of bad behavior that I would justify, in the name of customer service. Right? Yeah, right. But you gotta realize you’re not, you’re not gonna you’re not doing the customer any favors, they hire you to have the talent, you must protect them, you must kind of create a place where you first of all, you need to understand what your talent that you need value. Right? We talked about product market fit when we’re starting a business for the customers on talent, talent, you know, company fit. So you need to understand what the people you need, what do they value, they need to build a business to create that value.
John Corcoran 23:03
What so what did you do after having this epiphany? What did you do with the team? Was it were there deliberate steps that you’d bring them together to do? What are some deliberate intentional things that you did?
John Grover 23:14
Well went off. First of all, I observed everything that was going on, that was the first thing and I just saw how we were doing hiring and we would hire like a typical engineering firm, we’d get 10 people in a room, it was an open house, and we start to run them through speed dating, like different offices, and when this person would interview there, them for a cultural fit for 15 minutes, and the other person would evaluate their IT skills and and it was horrible. All right, a it wasn’t a great way to make a decision. B we started getting like 60% No shows because everybody went on Glassdoor. So this sucks. Okay, this place is terrible treats is like a bunch of cattle. And it didn’t demonstrate at all what it was like to work at Endsight. That’s the worst. Right? So I say what’s stopping that? All right, you know, funny story is I started doing lifelines. You know, the EO forum lifeline?
John Corcoran 24:05
Yeah. So, for those that don’t know, a lifeline will you can explain what a lifeline is?
John Grover 24:10
Well, it’s essentially a way for you to talk about your defining moments in your life, right, and your highs and your lows. And we handle a whiteboard marker, if it’s in person, otherwise, it’s sort of virtual. And we say, take us through your defining moments, not just the the highs and your high best accomplishments, and you know, all the stuff we usually talk about in the interview. But we want to know the struggles, the crucibles, the low lights, as well, at least as much as we want to know you. And what made you who you are, what are your values and what’s the best team you’ve ever been on and you start to plot out their resume stuff on there. Right. And what it does, it’s fantastic because you learn their story, first of all, and they feel heard and understood these people don’t treat me just like a means to an end. See Nobody. Nobody wants to just be like a widget for profit. Right? So get to know understand ask him. Right and, and, and share a little bit be vulnerable yourself Brene Brown stuff one o one. It’s a basic stuff that we not we know this and forum.
John Corcoran 25:14
Now what was it like for you making this big shift of going towards from being, you know, acquiring customers, right which there’s like a dopamine hit to that right when you get a new client to shifting to internally and trying to win over your own team and improve the culture internally. Was that like for you personally?
John Grover 25:34
Well, we’re still winning, we’re still getting those dopamine drips, okay, okay. Because when you when a talent deal that feels nice, okay. And somebody, it’s a miracle, okay, they sign up with you, and they’re gonna, they’re gonna work with you. Right? That’s, that’s a miracle just like a client saying yes. And but my engineers weren’t that excited about it. And this is touchy feely stuff. And they wanted to get straight to what the people know, because they’re more technical scientific types. Yeah, because it’s more like, binary Yes, or No, can they do it or not? Right. And the worst mistakes that we were making were to hire people because of what they knew. And then everybody without exception was like, if they laughed, or we fired him. It was because of the personality, cultural fit stuff. It wasn’t because of weak because we were doing a pretty good technical evaluation. Not only want to know what they can do, until I learned who they are. Yeah, and if and if their values are gonna line up with our own. And then what new things are they gonna bring? They’re gonna make our team better, right? Like diversity is good, too, right? We need alignment on the core non negotiable stuff. And then, but it was a hard sell. And what happened was our candidates I started going through. And when as we would do onboarding with their hiring manager, I said, Why did you choose Endsight? And they said, You know what, this interview just treated me like a human. And the lifeline was fantastic. I said, Well, what was good about it, is that just nobody had ever really asked me about myself before. And when and how I became who I know, in my, my engineers that were so like, really nervous about this, this whole process of getting kind of personal, is stuff not in an offensive way. They just share what they want to share. They were so nervous about that. But it took these great, these great new hires, talking about what they valued in that selection process. And it wasn’t me selling them. It was it was the engineers that the managers started wanting to do it because of the of the effectiveness of it. Effectiveness before efficiency. They’re already worried about how long it takes, right? Like, oh, we’re gonna get 15 People here and try to do it real efficiently. What’s the point? If we look this is hopefully if we do it, right, they’re gonna stay for six, seven and 8, 10 years? Well, I’m gonna take another half an hour, you think that’s worth another half an hour to get to know? Yeah, yeah. Right. Asymmetrical, you know? Yeah, yeah. So this is a little bit of the kind of stuff that it wasn’t me the proof was in the pudding. And frankly, I had a hypothesis.
John Corcoran 28:11
And did you What did you lean on? Were there? Were there books, were there resources that you kind of got these ideas from?
John Grover 28:18
Well, I, I went to, I went to Harvard Business School’s Executive Education program, and, and I took a bunch of behavioral science classes. And I learned about, like, some of the biases of people and how to make great decisions. And we, you know, we’d go through Thinking Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman, which is a fantastic book, it talks about picking people for the Israeli army and all this sort of stuff. And we just, I just went on a search and just got obsessive about it, of how to make better decisions and to architect these decisions. Better create a system that would do that. And what we found out was through all this, or what I found out what the best way to do this was a let’s get a defined scorecard of what we care about. It’s got like five or six dimensions on it. And then let’s go through this lifeline. Even though it feels touchy feely, we’re actually filling out a scorecard. Hey, are they resilient? Oh, is there real evidence for EQ, right? Is there real, like self starting learning? Are they doing stuff to make themselves better? Is there real evidence and, and that’s what the interviewer picking
John Corcoran 29:24
those tidbits out of their life story?
John Grover 29:27
Yes. Just like a good interviewer would write just like you’re doing to me right now. You’re making the tick, to create value for the audience to serve the decision is what we’re doing. And it feels great to the to the to the candidate, and then we’re making a good, fairly objective decision. Right? And then we get into a really cool like, we drop them into a lab and they, we test drive them and we put them in an actual IT problem and they they take control and we like we see them and observe them work. What we found was, we’re doing really well, four out of five times. Right? I think. So you can say like, A or B hires, for three, you know, for four of them, maybe a b minus on the fourth one. And then one might be a with. Yeah. Right is that you feel like world class is world class, my Harvard professors, they think I’m the most arrogant person on the planet, they say, the best in the world not doing that. Three out of five is the best that they can do to, to you know, and what they’re probably inferring is, oh, there’s people hiding in the wings that I just don’t have confirmation bias. I like them. So I don’t, you know, and really obsessive about that, too. Like,
John Corcoran 30:46
I’m not doing that that’s not true. I
John Grover 30:48
Yeah. And so that’s the thing, you got to really know, hey, where are where are you in terms of performance and stuff like that, you’ll be able to predict future performance is the most insidious sort of, like, tricky thing to do in the whole world. Yeah,
John Corcoran 31:04
there are elements of this, I don’t know if you’re familiar with top grading, but that that has a similar kind of methodology, where you go through it, maybe not a lifeline, but you go through point by point by point through their entire career.
John Grover 31:15
Yeah, we do that we kind of we usually go from their current or most relevant job backwards. And we plotted on that we talked about what a day in the life was best leader they’ve ever had. And it just kind of goes where it goes. But and then what are our whole thing is to see. And then by the way, also have them force rank order a bunch of things like, Okay, what do you look for in a job in? And one of them’s, like, helping others another one’s personal development know, when I’m money? One of them’s, like, you know, like, the love of cool technology, are they you know, they put these things in order. Right? And, and, of course, we bias it because we’re, they want a job, and we have a job, and they’re probably telling, trying to tell us what we want to hear. But we do it pretty late. And they’re worn out that by the time that point, yeah. But what people but what people value is they want to absolutely be on a great team. They don’t want to be a one man, IT person at a law firm. They want to work amongst their peers. It is really scary to be by yourself. Yeah. And there’s no career path. Right? So they’re, they’re over it, or they don’t want to be in a big enterprise IT department where they get siloed in one zone. Yeah.
John Corcoran 32:31
Now. So this, I believe, is 2013 1617 time period that you’re kind of figuring these pieces out. Now, of course, march 2020, we all know what happens there COVID hits were all sent home or working remotely. How did that affect this? You know, this mission of yours to make work better for your team?
John Grover 32:53
Well, it gave us a chance for one to be transparent. I mean, it’s easy to say, hey, just be we’re transparent leaders. Okay? But when you’re scared, and you need to say, hey, we’re scared, we don’t really know what’s going on here. Right. And it just gave us the ultimate practice and opportunity to be transparent, vulnerable. Open, there was nothing that we would hide about anything. We avoided mostly we had I think we let seven people go. And that took about 10 years off my life. Right of that. And by the way, most of them got hired back, thankfully, which was like, the most exhilarating thing ever and satisfying thing to do but look hard times make for good leaders. Easy times make for weak leaders, right? Yeah. And weak leaders make for bad times and on and on the cycle continues. So it’s hard for everybody and I
John Corcoran 34:03
even skipped over but you know, you started the company in 2004. So that means you also experienced the Oh 708 meltdown. What was that like for your company? Did you have some tough times then did you have to do layoffs then as well?
John Grover 34:15
No, no layoffs. Dan? What I did was I was able to scoop up talent, like no other time. Right? Like we were able to find fantastic people that were working in the mortgage industry of all tanks and and that was that, you know, bubble crash and like my good friend Joseph Rogers, he still works with us. He came over because he got laid off and so we kind of scooped up some stuff where others were. Some people were other other people were thrown a lot of money around but but you know, kind of, you know, being a little too lackadaisical with their their financial discipline. So what that but of course, there was financial pressure for More Clients, right? And so that that whole bubble taught us to, you know, there’s this concept by Jim Collins, he says to have your oxygen containers, like when you’re climbing Everest, you need some extra oxygen containers, don’t just take what you need, you need a couple of more, you know, yeah, let’s take a couple more than we need, let’s get some safety margin. And that’s what we did with our cash. And we were able to give people terms on stuff that it did to help them bridge and just do these things that by having having this balance sheet discipline, that it really bridged us through and it was it was fantastic. And we came out of it stronger for it. We also did some acquisitions through that time. Right? Other really other MSPs that weren’t, weren’t doing it was opportunity time. Right? It was blood in the streets.
John Corcoran 35:48
Yeah, it you know, when they will they say what cash is king at those times, right. But of course, it’s also a bit of a gut check, too, because it’s like, well, you know, is it the right time for us to be doing this? Should we conserve our cash? Or should we spend it to acquire a company? Talk me through some of that, you know, mental gymnastics and discussions that I’m sure you went through?
John Grover 36:09
Yeah, it’s tricky. So a lot of the mergers that we were doing would be seller financing. And
John Corcoran 36:19
so you’re serving your cash because they’re financing it.
John Grover 36:22
Yeah, they’re, they’re sort of carrying the note for us. And most of the owners were riding off into the sunset and doing something else and had other other projects that they wanted to do. They just got tired of operationally running an MSP, which is hard, it’s a hard business. And so they were quite happy to kind of take it off of, you know, have us take it off our hands. And then we buy them out over time, usually only three years, though. And so it wasn’t like we strung them out for a long period of time. But we gave them some guarantees and stuff. And they, they guaranteed some other things for us. So but it was just trying to make sure that the fit was right. And the biggest thing that we also learned was like, what to do with the people through that that merger process, that’s the most risk is like, oh, what can what could hurt a merger? You lose people disappear? And the people, right customers, right? And usually go together? Right? Yes, people leave the customers are going to leave on and on. Right? So you have to be operationally Excellent. Right? This whole thing of growing and I don’t want to work on being better. And I just want to do mergers and somebody else run and I’m not into that. I’m not That’s not me. Right? You don’t you don’t even really belong until you really obsessive about quality and running a really well run business. Okay, yeah, you don’t really need to be messing around. That’s how you’re gonna get wrecked. You know, I’m saying because because it’s just, it’s just the look, if you’re a worse place, than the place that you acquired to work, people are gonna leave, if you’re a worse place for the customers than the place that you know, that was that you require. So you have to be the deal has to make sense, like, are the customers and the talent better at your place?
John Corcoran 38:08
Right? Of course, that means that you need to be acquiring a company where you take a look at the culture, you take a look at how they treat the customers. And you kind of say, they’re not doing a lot of things, right? They’re doing this wrong, they’re doing that wrong, that wrong, which of course is hard when you you know, you want to buy something that has value? Well,
John Grover 38:27
I mean, it’s not that they’re all doing stuff wrong. It’s just with the power and the balance sheet that we have, or with the career opportunities that are here, are we a better place just but our size, and we’re only bigger because we never gave up? We started in our early 20s. I mean, we were the babies now I’m halfway to 94. My son says, I’m old guy now. So but it’s like, you know, like, if you’re a scale, you could do 24 hour support, or, you know, you could just do things that that a smaller MSP can’t do or a smaller business can’t do. Even if it’s like, oh, they are they are great businesses, you know. So not to I don’t want to say anything poor about the business. We wouldn’t bother them if they were really really sure that yeah,
John Corcoran 39:15
it just it just it is a tension, right, because you don’t want to you don’t want to buy something that you can’t add any value to as you said people won’t be as good at it experience yet.
John Grover 39:25
And we were really meticulous about like synergies, not not like axing half the staff to pay for the deal. The deal with the headcount, that’s there, it’s got to make sense. Okay, not we’re gonna get it we’re gonna lay off 30% Because that goes around and it’s just, yeah, it’s not a it’s a really risky. There are deals out there like that, right. But it’s not the ones that we did, and when we’ve never been heard on one. So
John Corcoran 39:54
I want to ask a bit about EO Entrepreneurs Organization. You joined it I forget when Exactly, I think within the last year, year and a half or so what drew you to joining Entrepreneurs Organization after having, you know, run your company for 20 years or so.
John Grover 40:08
Right. So it’s funny, like, you get lonely sometimes as an entrepreneur, in some ways, of course, I’ve got my business partners, and we’re all best friends and all the good stuff. I don’t know when to quit stuff, right? Like, I have people in my form that have done fantastic exits. And, and knew and it was time, and they can share their experiences and their story. And they might forget, and I can learn and kind of like, understand some patterns and some decision making. I know, I know how to buy and sell and hold things. Right. But I don’t go around thinking about my exit I’ve never had I would have made it this far. Right? It’s just like marriage, right? Like, I don’t think about divorce or what you know, like, I just think I’m in, I’m good, I’m good to go. We were in this thing. And so I just, it’s really fantastic. So originally, that was like, oh, I want to get access to some of the people and how they’re sort of thinking about getting out or, or like transactions and things like that, because I really had not allowed myself to the liberty of, of thinking about that at all. And what it’s turned into is, first of all, my forum is ridiculously awesome. Okay, there. We call ourselves bricks, I think it says something to do with wine and sugars into wine or something like that. My group I liked, they love they love a glass of wine. They do. Yeah, I will say that. I don’t think that’s too much. So there’s so many tight connections. And I came into a place where they really love and respect each other. And it just story after story. And so I am the luckiest person on the planet Earth. I got dropped into this forum. I didn’t know any better. And they are. They’re just, they’re my people. I mean, they’re just, they’re just fantastic. So I wouldn’t say that we just deal with hard charging business issues, the whole meeting. Right? There’s a lot of talking about what’s going on, where are we struggling personally. And that’s, that’s the huge value of what I get out of it is this sort of thing that you can’t really, like, you know, I’m not gonna call my fraternity brothers that that’s working, you know, a nine to five job in Atlanta and say, hey, you know, I don’t know when to sell my, you know, yeah, several multimillion dollar business. And it’s so hard, you know, like, that’s not really appropriate. So, anyways, it’s, um, it’s been, it’s been fantastic. And there’s people that also that I’m learning a lot, there’s people that are starting new businesses, serial entrepreneur type stuff, there’s people that have exited, and they’re kind of taking a breather. Right? Yeah, they’re doing other things like, you know, real estate investing and some other stuff. And so it’s almost like a glimpse into windows that I, I haven’t really necessarily been privy to look, entrepreneurs. It’s like it used to be to call yourself an entrepreneur mean, you are unemployable in my hometown. Okay. I mean, you were just selling, you know, sodas on the sidewalk, and you were horrible, right? It wasn’t a thing that I thought was cool. Okay, at all it wasn’t. And it isn’t the easy thing to do right now. So anyways, it’s really fun to, to know that there are as many flavors of entrepreneurs, as the day is long, okay. Everybody’s got their own story. Oh, they’re taking money and kind of like grow or die. And, oh, this person is kind of chugging along with a nonprofit, and it’s kind of doing great making a difference in the world. This person is just starting all these little things. Oh, they’ve got real estate, you know, it’s, it’s just, it’s not just one thing, like I and I know this group will probably understand that, but it to the outside world, they think like, oh, entrepreneur, and they just think, to even like tech entrepreneur, they just think, Oh, you’re trying to go public. And yeah, it’s just really not my experience. But this has been really good entree into lots of different in a variety of different ways.
John Corcoran 44:16
I couldn’t agree more. John, it’s been a pleasure talking to you. Where can people go to connect with you and learn more about what you do?
John Grover 44:23
So our website is Endsight.net. E N D S I G H T dot net. And that’s a good place to find out more about us and what we do around IT services and support. I’m on LinkedIn, but I don’t know my URL right off the top.
John Corcoran 44:43
They can they can look it up, John.
John Grover 44:45
Yeah. Perfect. Go ahead and link into me. I sure like to talk to you about talent issues or anything at all if you’re out there and want to connect.
Excellent. John, thanks so much.
Thank you.
Outro 44:56
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