In this episode of the Dirt, Graeme Barlow, a seasoned tech founder and entrepreneur, shares his unique journey from starting an online gaming currency business as a rebellious kid to spearheading a multi-million dollar software development agency in Ottawa, Canada. 

With a candid recount of his entrepreneurial ventures, Barlow dives into the lessons learned from expanding and then narrowing his company's focus, the pivotal shift to a retainer-based business model, and the importance of investing in people and culture. His story is a testament to the power of adaptability, the value of focused execution, and the unforeseen paths to success.

Join Jim and Graeme as they unpack his unconventional path to tech company success …

3 Key Takeaways

• Focus is Critical for Growth: Maintain the focus on core competencies; expanding services can dilute your core competencies. Concentrating on your strengths leads to sustainable growth.

• Adaptability is Key: Embracing change and the willingness to pivot in response to market demands and internal assessments is crucial to survival.

• Culture and Leadership are Foundational: Develop a strong culture and invest in leadership training. This is critical for maintaining alignment and ensuring quality as a company scales.

Resources

https://www.linkedin.com/in/graemebarlow 

https://www.graemebarlow.com/coaching 

https://www.iversoft.ca/

About Our Guest 

Graeme Barlow, a serial entrepreneur with over 24 years of experience, has co-founded five companies, including a notable digital currency firm and RocketOwl Inc., which were both successfully acquired. He's significantly contributed to the pet industry through ProPetSoftware, achieving an ARR of over $1M. Leading Iversoft since 2016, he's driven its growth from a small team to over 50 members and nearly $10M in annual revenue, specializing in mobile and emerging technologies, and delivering impactful software solutions globally.

About The Dirt Podcast 

The Dirt is about getting real with businesses about the true state of their companies and going clear down to the dirt in solving their core needs as a business. Dive deep with your host Jim Barnish as we uncover The Dirt with some of the world's leading brands.

If you love what you are getting out of our show please subscribe.

For more information on how we dig into the dirt check out our other episodes here: https://www.orchid.black/podcast

About Our Company

Orchid Black is a new kind of growth services firm. We partner with tech-forward companies to build smarter, better, game-changing businesses. 

Website: https://www.orchid.black 

Jim Barnish’s LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/grow-smart-grow-fast/ 

Orchid Black’s LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/orchidblack/ 

YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@OrchidBlack 

All contents of this show are rights of Orchid Black©️ and are not to be used unless authorized by written consent.

All right, Graham, welcome to the dirt.

Thank you, I'm excited to be here.

We're excited to have you, man. So let's just, let's start with the basics. Who are you, what do you do, and why should we all lean in?

My name is Graham Barlow. I've been a tech founder and entrepreneur pretty much my entire life. Started my first software company accidentally as an act of rebellion when I was a kid. When I was 10 years old, I started a company selling online gaming currency and everything ranging from Diablo 1 to Diablo 2 to Neopets. Built that company for six years before selling it.

Since then, I have built and sold a game development company building on Facebook, where we built a game up over a million users, spent a few years in early stage venture capital, and for the last eight years have been building and scaling a software development agency here in Ottawa, Canada, where we've gone from, I think, a couple hundred thousand in revenue when I joined in a team of seven or eight to a team of over 50.

uh, pushing past 10 million in revenue this year.

Awesome, man. So obviously a lot of questions given this ain't your first rodeo, so to speak. The journey that you've been on and the number of different companies and series of milestones, if you will, that you achieved from a few different seats, what stands out the most?

Um, that you never know where things are going to lead. I think that's one thing that has been consistent my entire life is a lot of it has come from consistently show up, meet people, be a good human being. And it's incredible. The opportunities you kind of stumble your way into or the businesses you find or the direction you get to get to evolve into that's been like the biggest theme. I think.

One of the other companies I was a co-founder in that's still growing phenomenally well today, it was a SaaS platform that built business management tools for the pet industry. I grew up terrified of dogs. Never would have bet on that, but got into the right place, the right founders, the right team. And it's been an absolutely phenomenal company to have been a part of. So yeah, you never know.

You never know that is true. And now you guys at this company are up to about 10 million at Iversoft. Um, maybe, maybe higher, probably, probably 20 million by the time we're done with this conversation. What's that?

We're gonna beat it this year. I said, we're gonna try and beat it this year.

I love it. I love it. I love it. So, but, but even 10 is a huge milestone, right? Even five is a huge milestone. So what, what were some of the revenue ceilings that you hit along the way?

so many. I think it's what's been really, really interesting watching our evolution at Iversoft is I think we've made every mistake you can make along the way learning how to scale a services business and evolved a lot during that. So a couple examples, like when we first, when I got involved and the company had been around for a few years at that point,

Our average project size, I think, was in the like 20 to $30,000 range. The largest project we had ever taken on was somewhere in the range of 90,000. Well, if you're aiming to do a million dollars of work and you're booking $20,000 at a time, you need a lot of projects to do that. And the complexity of projects eight years ago in mobile was

See you there.

very different from where it is today. And over the course of time, we started to see the evolution of like, okay, we're not just building an app. Now it's an app that has in-app purchases. Now it's an app that talks to a web platform. Now it's an app that talks to an enterprise system. And so that kind of led to some fairly natural progression growth in the type of projects. So that helped, I think, spur our growth from probably a couple hundred thousand up to two or three million.

We thought the path to grow past two to three million was to obviously become the shop that does absolutely everything, which is always a good plan. So we acquired a digital marketing company, opened up a whole bunch of other services, and tried to become the digital agency that did kind of everything from your software build to your website, to your ad campaigns, to your marketing campaign, to your branding, to all of it. Fast forward a few, well, a year.

into that and it is incredibly hard to meaningfully sell, staff and deliver against, I don't know, 50 skews of stuff that you're trying to do on a small team. So right leading into the pandemic actually, just after the pandemic first hit, we ended up actually stepping back from being digital services for everything, carved out the marketing company

And, um, they're now running very successfully on their own, without the interference of a whole bunch of engineers, trying to tell them what to do and really double down our focus again on pure execution of kind of complex. Software development. We also got away from like marketing websites and promotional websites. Cause we also found that if you take the same talent that can solve really weird enterprise integrations and try and get them to build the WordPress landing page, a they hate it.

B, it takes forever and it's nobody wins. So again, it was like this weird kind of stumble over ourselves and our ambition to try and do too much and then reiterate like focus matters so much. I think that helped us get from kind of three to 4 million and the evolution from there was kind of a change in business model was moving away from project based pricing and these one-off things.

over to engineering retainers, which is kind of where 90 plus percent of our business lives now where rather than just coming on board with our clients to kind of build one piece of a puzzle over three or six months and then walk away, we're putting teams in place for 612 18 months, and kind of owning the entire lifecycle of a of a project which has been game changing for us and been kind of the main driver for scalable growth.

Yeah. I kind of look at you guys like the product, the product version of, of our commercialization and exit program, right? It's like, you know, without the full life cycle, you don't have enough, both control over the outcome, but also impact, which is kind of why guys like you and I get into this, right? Like, still like have an impact. Yeah. So, you know, that, that's, that's really cool to hear how some of your business model changed. Cause

Ahem.

Yeah. Oh yeah.

ours actually evolved in a similar capacity. And it is kind of a similar set of milestones or set of revenue ceilings that I hear a lot of people going through. It's like, you hit five, whether it's three, four or five, you hit somewhere five or less, and you've got to do a little bit of reinvention. And then oftentimes, around 10, you got to do a little bit different reinvention. So.

You know, as you guys are navigating through 10 to 20 this new version of yourselves, can you delve into a time when things might not have gone as planned as part of that reinvention process?

Yeah, I think like a lot of it kind of walked through at a high level the initial journey of like looking back on it. It's like, oh yeah, ha ha, we spread too thin. I mean, that had significant impacts. Like when we first went from digital everything back down to focusing on the core software, I think we reduced the team by 12 or 14 people when we did that. And...

We've been through kind of similar iterations a few times as we figure out what the right scalable model is. And we've been through that journey in the last probably two years really focusing on the retainer side of things. And for us in the services world at least, I talked to a lot of people early on who are like, oh, I don't know why you would ever do anything other than like fixed bid product or fixed bid project work.

Um, and we look back at a decade of data and say, cause it sucks. Like it, sometimes it's a home run and wildly profitable. Most of the time it's barely profitable and sometimes it's horrifically unprofitable. And in none of those situations, do you actually walk away feeling like both sides one, like you won delivering and the client one. And.

I think we had a pretty good moment of clarity a few years ago and we had three large simultaneous fixed bed projects running and in each one significant complexity came into it halfway through the project from new scope changes or new things that were happening on marketplace changes. And

trying to kind of pivot and adapt and accommodate that and, or go back to the table and have the conversation like, look, here's all the stuff that's changed. Here's the new information. Here's what we're doing and renegotiating contracts. And it was just like painful for everyone involved. Um, versus the kind of partnership retainer model that we've moved to where it's kind of an ongoing weekly scrum, bi-weekly scrum, active living conversation with the clients. And we know we're all pulling towards the same.

Mm-hmm.

end goal, we know what we're involved in, we are able to kind of make way smarter decisions on a day-to-day basis because it's more about the actual deliverables and the execution in that week versus trying to protect profitability or trying to not have to issue a change request and therefore trying to like pull back other scope. So like that entire learning process is great to reflect on now.

Education comes from pain and suffering along the way. And I am certain we will see similar learnings as we grow from kind of 10 to 20, because as you said, like each major stage, there's different things that need to happen. We've gone through a heavy exercise recently as well of like realizing that we're a team of 50. If we're going to go from 50 to 100.

There's a whole new layer of like management and leadership and training and education that we need to be able to like inherently foster inside of the organization and shockingly, uh, those skills don't happen just because you promote someone, you actually have to teach them and train them how to be a lead and train them how to be a manager and how to kind of lead with empathy and all of these things that

aren't reflected in the PNL when you're looking at like, Oh, we've grown from this to this, our head counts grown from this to this. It's like, okay. But now you have this many more people that need to be brought up to speed and need to know your culture and your values and why you make the decisions you do and how you treat clients and all of these things. And so you can't just A promote people that haven't managed people before and expect them to immediately be successful in the role. Um, but also you can't hire out from outside the company.

people that have managed before and immediately expect them to have five years of history on how and why the culture is the way you've built it. So yeah, that's been one of the fun things that I never saw on a spreadsheet when we were modeling how to grow.

So what's the answer to that dichotomy? Right? Like how do you answer that question?

very candid open conversations with our leadership team and very strong, I think, self-reflection on where in your org chart you're seeing bottlenecks of decision making and whenever you see something not happen correctly, whether it's client communication or a sprint doesn't happen the way you want it to or a contract doesn't close the way you want it to,

being extremely self-reflective of what happened and rather than taking that immediate like, oh, you fucked up or sorry, or you screwed up or like you did the wrong thing here or there, recognizing that was a failing on your part to either train people correctly or put in the right process or coach correctly like.

defaulting to it was on me to have better armed that team. And where did our process and where did our content fail? Versus, oh, that person made a mistake and something went wrong. Like that's been, I think the more humbling part to try and get to is not the immediate response of like, oh, they screwed up, it's their fault. They didn't know. So no, if they're in your organization, they didn't know that's on you. Full stop, that's on you. If it happens a second time.

that's a different conversation. But the first time it happens, that's on you as a leader, as a manager, as an owner.

Lot to unpack there. So did you, or how did you cultivate a culture there as the years grew or as the years went on that continued to foster the innovation of what you guys do on a day to day, right? Developing cool stuff, but also the adaptability of roles and of...

structure and of things like that as you guys faced some of these new challenges.

Yeah, it's a great question. I think one of the things that sometimes people forget in service-based businesses is at the end of the day, the value that we are bringing to clients and the value that is offered as Iversoft is ultimately our people. It's not the brand, it's not the logo, it's not the portfolio, it is literally the people that are involved in the teams, the people that are doing the work on client accounts.

And when you start to look at the company from that lens and you forget all the other brand noise, nonsense, whatever. Um, the only thing we need to do to deliver more value to our clients is make sure we have the best people we can possibly get them and make sure that the people that they are on their teams and they're working are the best equipped, the best trained, the best motivated and the best supported.

And we've been very fortunate. Um, we've had a kind of head of people of culture, people in culture since we were, I think 11 people, um, she's grown with company through kind of coordinator to director to now our, uh, chief people officer and has been a voice at the table from day one of like, this is where we have to be investing. This is where we have to make a difference. And what's

really crazy and a little bit controversial is the biggest single leap in quality we had there that I think opened a lot of our eyes to a number of possibilities is actually when we went remote with COVID. And as much as we lost the in-office interaction and pour one out, we had just finished renovating 12,500 square feet when we went remote. But

Perfect timing.

I know it was so pretty. Um, but the caliber of talent we were able to tap into when we were no longer limited to recruiting within a one hour drive of a building went through the roof and great talent like that feeds more great talent and they make more referrals and people that come and join the team get more excited about working in it. So like.

that whole lens shift and then seeing the results and seeing how much faster we're able to deliver projects, seeing how much we're able to take on kind of crazy things like we had. We have one client in the US we work with that's in kind of major media space and we're working with them on media delivery platform. They were having trouble finding the right talent for it because of

a very forward people first culture and philosophy at Iversoft, we were able to go source some of the best talent in the world working on other platforms in that space to come lead their project that they weren't able to approach because we'd built an entire culture around it. But it's one of the most kind of counterintuitive things when you're looking at the finances for services business to lean into.

Mm-hmm.

Right. It's like over, over invest in your people and people and culture and that side of things. And it, it pays dividends as you're scaling. It also makes scaling easier because you have managing really smart people is way easier than managing less smart, less motivated people.

Absolutely. When you look at kind of the journey of scaling, right? That we talked about before. What are some of the key strategies that you and the team implemented to successfully increase revenue to the point that you have?

Ah, the biggest one that I can speak to has been changing to a more recurring model. Um, prior to the shift to retainer based contracts, uh, as I'm sure you guys have seen across your portfolio, but like the spikiness of revenue when it was project based was crazy and so challenging to navigate regardless of how well

the sales or marketing team were doing to drive leads or bring new projects in, you would have some months that were like 3X the month before, and then two months later, if you were in a trough between projects, you would have everything like dump way back down, but you're still carrying the resources that need to deliver the next month. And so like that was getting ourselves away from that. And it took a fair bit of work.

honestly, to kind of curate our client list. And as much as it was great to have some of the clients that occasionally showed up with a big project, resourcing that, managing that, modeling for that is so disruptive and challenging. And if you're left with kind of six idle people for four months in between the things they want, regardless of how profitable the project is, you're gonna get wiped out if you don't have something else for them to do. So like managing growth was really around

nailing the business model and then arming our sales team and our marketing team as much as possible with what is the value prop. Really, really, really understanding what is our differentiator? How do we stand out? We're in software development. And I think everyone listening to this podcast will have seen probably a hundred cold emails from various shops all over the world, offering them developers from anywhere from five bucks an hour.

to 500 an hour. So the pitch of we have devs is not exactly unique. The pitch of we have product expertise, have shipped hundreds of projects and kind of curate and retain high caliber talent starts to stand out more. And when you start to talk to a lot of growth companies,

in the kind of medium to large size, if they're not kind of at their core, a technology company, most of them have had a very hard time recruiting and retaining really good technology people. Because it's not if you're a construction company, if you're even a media company, or I don't know, physical goods company or security company, like

The ability to attract really good UX or mobile talent or web talent, if you don't have a culture built to support that, is extremely challenging. And that's where we've been able to find a lot of successes, really telling that story, leaning into that narrative and honestly, just getting out there and sharing the message as much as we can.

So is that your go-to-market as well, the email blasts and such, just a different message? Or have you guys employed or deployed a number of other different go-to-market strategies?

Hahaha

I would love to say we've got a crazy innovative go to market thing for the most part. And I mean, very fortunately, knock on wood so far. The vast majority of our business is word of mouth referral from existing clients. And the more you successfully deliver, the more referrals you get and the bigger projects you take on, the more you get referred into big projects, which has been great. And then the kind of probably

Mm-hmm.

immediate second largest referral source for us has been partner organizations and affiliates finding kind of space adjacent organizations. We work with a lot of branding agencies, marketing agencies, strategy organizations where they'll do maybe the first piece and then they're handing to their client a roadmap of like you guys need to go do this but we don't do it.

we've been a really good fulfillment partner for those, that ecosystem. And that's where I would say the majority of our kind of cold inbound referral stuff comes from that's not from already existing clients. Outside of that, we have, we have tried the cold outbound email stuff. We've tried the cold LinkedIn stuff. We're playing with ads. Haven't found a kind of silver bullet in that space beyond kind of

do really good work and talk to people that are already talking to your customers. That's been, that's honestly been the biggest one. I think it's where we're focusing most of our outbound effort at this point is who else already works with our customers and already has relationships and how do we go build relationships with them?

Yeah, yeah. I mean, I, I'd love to tell you, um, much different, but we've, we've experimented with a lot of that type of stuff too, and that's exactly where we are. Luckily, when you do, you know, when you do really good work, value added services, um, you're allowed to charge a premium price point, um, and, and premium value. Unfortunately, that value is very hard to translate in things like a direct marketing approach, right?

Ha ha.

Um, so, um.

I have to ask of the things you guys have experimented with, and I know I'm supposed to be the one answering questions, but of the ones you've experimented with, what's been your best campaign if you've got one and what's been your worst campaign that you thought was gonna do something and didn't?

Now go for it.

Yeah, that's a good, that's a good question. I think, so let me start with the, let me start with the worst. Cause that's just the kind of guy I am, um, getting the best out of the way. Uh, I think the worst was probably, um, you know, when we, uh, so in, in the intent of what somebody does when they, uh, work with Orchid Black starts off a little bit different than their, their intent ends up being by the time they engage. When they engage, it's all about a business transformation of.

I love it.

uh, making themselves the most valuable version of themselves, right? But when they, when they find us, it's usually, you know, I, I know I need a pricing and packaging strategy, or I know I need a strategic plan, or I know I need to put an exit strategy in place, right? Something along those lines. And so, you know, we dialed in on those niches for some of those campaigns, um, to go after what, you know, their initial intent was. And then we.

Um, and then we, um, you know, connected that to intent data, thinking that we had this, you know, genius scheme, right. Um, of, you know, figuring out people where they were, uh, where they would find us. And then ultimately a full customer journey. Well, you know, we, we got some opportunities out of it, but nothing that like, in, in nothing that was. What our DNA is, right. It was, it ended up being a pricing and packaging conversation, or it ended up being.

a strategic plan conversation. And, and so, um, you know, our best ones are when, you know, we're just, uh, really upfront about like what we're doing and the value that we provide to people and we say no to anything that's outside of that, right? I mean, it's, it's really easy to say yes to things that are tangential to what you do. Um, but I've found that saying no to the things that, um, sound exciting, but are maybe like just a little reddish red shiny object type thing.

Awesome.

Ah

um, can, uh, can get you into a lot of trouble if you don't say no.

I think that is one of the hardest lessons for entrepreneurs to learn at every single stage of growth. It is like a superpower to be able to say no to shiny opportunities because there's so much growth and potential in focused execution, but it's so easy to fall down the trap of like, oh, but there's like...

There's this opportunity. It's not quite in our wheelhouse, but it's not so far off that it's about like, literally that is the path that led us down to doing an acquisition and expand our services and having like this completely unsustainable offering was like, Oh, well, like are we finished building something and then our clients want to launch it, we could launch it for them. Oh, well, they've launched it. They, they have the in ads. We could do the ads for them. Like we're just here forever. And it's like, Oh, we have, we have nine fields of expertise that we aren't even.

remotely qualified to try and figure out. And now we're scrambling to like either hire good talent for it or. We finished delivering it. Now we've got this person that's sitting here that only does ads and beta C space in this, and we have no clients like that. So our sales team was like, all right, you need to you need to go find a client to keep this person busy and profitable. Anyway, yeah, it's like that. Learning to say no.

Yeah.

the classic thing learning to say no. We're told that from an early age. Say no, say no, say no to the things that, whether it's talking to strangers or running across the street, those are the things that are outside of your so-called lane at that point. But we don't really listen when we become adults.

But I think there's an entire generation or like cohort of entrepreneurship internet gurus that are kind of screwing people on that front because you see content constantly about like revenue diversification and like, oh, you need to have multiple income streams. You need to do all these things.

And some people take that as like, oh, I need to divide my focus a hundred times over and chase a hundred different things where it's like, you would be way further ahead if you did one thing and just like focused on it so, so well and became so good at it. Um, but it's so easy to fall down that trap. I think that's, that's one thing. It's, it's refreshing here. You talk about it and it's like one thing that we, we try and keep

Anytime any one of us on the leadership group starts to stray, I'm like, what if we added this other thing and it fits so nicely, see how it's like that focus. There's enough of a market in what we do. Focus just keep executing.

And I think that's like, we're, you know, we're, we're it changes depending on like what you do, right? Like our, our services and your services are high ticket services. If you've got, if you're selling, um, you know, some sort of retail or non luxury goods or service, a lot of those things do work. Like I've used them at companies, um, whether they're, you know, B2B SaaS or B2C or, you know, things along those lines and, and if you do them well, you can, you can do them really well, right? Um,

but at the same time that and not ever go to market is translatable into, you know, where, where you focus at the time. So, you know, it's, it's fun to talk about these things though, because you're right. There's a lot of internet gurus out there. I'll say like, you have to have an SDR program. You have to have, um, direct marketing. You have to do paid ads. Don't do paid ads. Don't do this instead. Right. It's like, there's so many, there's so many avenues, but what, what are people looking for? Where can you hit them?

And then how do you get them towards the customer journey buying process? That's really all that, that's really all that matters at the end of the day.

Yeah. Well, and I think before you try a hundred different hacks, and I've been saying this to a bunch of companies recently, before you try the latest trend or hack or growth or whatever the hell it is, figure out who's already working with your customers and go talk to them. Literally start there. Like there are already companies out there that are working with the people that you want to work with. If you can identify that and go talk to them, they've already done half the work.

Mm-hmm.

It's not always going to be a fit, but at least, at least you're talking to people who are already playing in your audience versus, yeah, I mean, you can spend an unlimited amount of money on ads. We spent, we spent a ton of money years ago, um, chasing home builders all over North America, cause we had four home builder clients in Ottawa and I was like, Oh, this is great. We're so good in the home builder space. Um, not.

Mm.

kind of fully realizing that like a lot of that was because we had the local personal relationships, all the home builders wanted to buy from a local vendor who they go meet with and sit down with. And when we started to try and expand out to a bunch of markets that we weren't physically in, like I think we reached out to something like two or 3000 home builders. I think we booked four meetings and got nothing out of it.

At the time, leading up to it, I was like, oh, this is going to be a big campaign. We're really focused on this. We'll go all in on it. We'll do all this collateral. I was like, and nothing, nothing. I don't know. I was like, oh yeah, no. Okay. That was, that was misunderstanding who our audience needed to be.

Yeah, and it's easy to do. Like you said, like you do something that's 1% out of your lane and then all of a sudden it's two and then it's 10 and then it's 20. And before you know it, you're doing something that's completely out of your lane. It's really easy to do. So like when you mentioned your leadership and your leadership team and the culture, evolution and uniqueness of the way that you guys are now making decisions versus the way that you did before, I'm curious, your leadership style

in particular, how has that evolved as, as you know, the company grew.

Yeah, a lot. I think a lot as a person and an entrepreneur over time as well. I think one of the things that really got me excited when you guys first kind of connected, I think I reached out to you guys about the dirt was like being able to talk about the parts of the journey that really shape you as a founder, as an entrepreneur.

And I look back at some of my approach to leadership even before Iversoft and like, my previous company or the game company that we built. And I was very young and very confident, arrogant somewhere along that blurry line. And I think, I say, yeah, absolutely all of

Yeah. All the above.

a 20 something founder that's had an exit that has just raised a bunch of money, taking over the world, try and tell them anything really. It doesn't go super well. Talked to them a few years later with a few more bumps and bruises and all of a sudden you learn a lot. And I've been very fortunate and always be surrounded by a lot of really good mentors. One of the things that I think for me...

Yeah.

has evolved a lot over the course of Ibersoft is when I first joined, there was a very strong culture of kind of like secrecy or protection of information. And that's because they're like our CTO Vicky prior to coming to Ibersoft had been at Apple, not necessarily a place known for a ton of like open communication.

And the other founder, Matt, had come from the Formula One engineering world. Again, not a huge place for communication. And so there's this like culture of like, don't tell anyone what we're working on. Don't talk about it. Be like super heads down, get the work done. And like that kind of culture was very new to me, but really interesting. But as we've grown and especially.

since we went remote, there's been this whole re-examination of what does culture mean? If you're not in the office together, if you're not seeing people every day, what does culture mean? How do you lead? How are you an effective leader if nobody can see you? I talk to a lot of people who are like, I don't know how to manage people if I can't go walk by their desk or see their vibe or whatever. And like a lot of what I've learned and evolved into and seen is culture is...

the actions and the attitudes within the company. It is how information flows. It's how people are able to report problems or raise suggestions. And so we're very fortunate. We've worked our way into a very transparent culture. And I would say we're at our best version of it to date right now. And I'm hoping we can continue to evolve with that. But a lot of my approach

as a leader during that has been becoming more and more comfortable with being hyper transparent with staff through good, bad, otherwise, like when things are going really well being able to, well, every quarter we do all the financials with the whole company, good, bad, or otherwise. So we go through expenses, we go through revenues, we go through whether we're profitable or losing money. And we've been very fortunate to have really cool.

sessions where we're getting to share bonuses and things are going really well. But we've also had sessions where it's like, look, things are, things are not in a good place right now. Here's what we're going to be doing to cut expenses. Here's how we're going to navigate it. Here's how we're being proactive. Um, and I think getting comfortable with being transparent like that, getting comfortable with trying to lead with empathy, um, has been. Extremely positive, extremely humbling to learn. I mean, I think I.

Mm-hmm.

I used to think I was a very empathetic person. And then I saw people actually lead with empathy, uh, and realized I wasn't necessarily as empathetic as I thought I was and took some good time kind of looking in the mirror and figuring out how to, how to learn to be better at that and learn to better kind of connect with people. And I think that's been, that's been a big part of the evolution through the growth.

That's a great answer. What has you most excited going into next year?

Ah

Oh, man. So many things. We're playing with AI stuff on every possible front of the company, every department of the company. And

the tools that are available today take smart people and give them absolute rocket fuel for what they can produce and what they can do. I am so excited to see the kind of output and the kind of stuff we'll be able to do 12 months from now. Like I think what it is enabling and it's really taking away a lot of the mundane, repetitive stuff and letting you go

Uh-uh.

bigger, faster, more ambitious, more complex. And I'm so, so excited to see what that can do for so many of our clients. Like it's, honestly, it's my favorite part of being in the services world right now is rather than being in a tech product company, where I've been in the past, where you're kind of hedging all in on one product and hopefully staying focused.

Uh, we get to kind of hedge on a whole bunch of technologies in a bunch of different industries with all of our clients. And it's kind of incredible being able to see all of the opportunity in front of us. Like we're doing, um, we're doing amazing projects right now in healthcare around AI. We've got some cool stuff coming out in the real estate space, optimizing how a whole bunch of stuff in the real estate world happens. Um, we've got some really cool AR stuff.

Going on that I think will get even more interesting with the Apple Vision Pro So yeah, just pretty excited

How about you guys?

Any, uh, you, oh man, this is my show, man. You're hijacking it. Yeah. We've got some really cool, uh, really cool projects we're working on. Um, I, uh, I think, um, you, uh, you know, you hit the nail on the head around focus and I think that's something that, um, you know, we've doubled down on over, over the course of this year. Um, we, uh,

I know, but I'm excited about what you guys are doing too!

You know, our, our mantra is really trying to find projects where we can, uh, maximize the value of the business or transform it, and then take a piece of the upside, um, because, you know, we're really good at what we do. Um, and so we, um, you know, it's, we took on some cash projects that were, you know, helping to pay the bills and not that we don't take cash in our normal business, but it's a mix, right? We just took on, we took on clients that would, you know, we'll never have an equity position in. And.

Um, you know, it actually turned out in this case that formed a new business, a new advisory business that's going to be really healthy, uh, for us. Uh, so I guess I'm kind of going back on the focus point, but, but at the end of the day, it was kind of time for a little bit of a reinvention of ourselves. Um, and, um, and there was a lot of, not a need out there for companies that, um, may have wanted to keep a hundred percent of the equity themselves or a hundred percent of the upside.

That's awesome.

Um, but we're willing to pay heavily for our services. Um, and so, you know, it's, that was, that was actually pretty tough for me, man. Like I, you know, I, I've been in the upside business for 10, 10 years now. And, um, you know, it's, I'm all about like incentivization for doing an awesome job, whether it's my, my team or, you know, myself or, or anybody. And, um, and so sometimes.

That's not always the right answer. Sometimes the answer is a retainer model. Right. Um, so, you know, in terms of what we've gotten going on next year, that business is actually, you know, uh, taken off pretty well on the retainer side, that advisor, that more advisory up market business of commercialization of IP and of, uh, trans business transformation work. Um, and then meanwhile, you know, the core of the core of what we do, uh, at the growth stage. So.

Ha ha ha!

That's awesome.

Yeah, it's fun, fun stuff. We've got some awesome people that are doing some incredible work. Uh, and, uh, it's, it's fun to see them grow. We had, we had a cool event last night where one of my team members just knocked it out of the park. So, you know, it's always fun to, it's always fun to see people shine.

Yeah?

That's amazing, I love it. How have you guys found attracting talent in your space?

Yeah, dude.

So we're in a small market. We're in a relatively small, we're in Tampa. Um, and, um, I think part of it is kind of a mix of two things. Number one, um, uh, there's not all that many people here that meet what we're trying to, you know, the, the talent requirements that we've got. So we've had to recruit, but then, you know, they also at the same time need the creative juice of being in the same room sometimes because it's a big part of what we do and so luckily we're in Florida and that's a big draw to.

Yep.

You know, a lot of folks, whether.

It's a bit more of an attractive pitch than the come enjoy minus 40 at winter in Ottawa pitch that we used to do.

Yeah, you come to me for our joint vacation, some of that. Well, I've got a couple of final questions for you. We call it the Founder Five. It's five quick hit questions all about you and your growth. And the first one is a top metric or KPI that you are relentlessly focused on.

Hahaha

Hmm, honestly, it's gotta be cashflow. Cashflow and profitability. As CEO, you have two jobs, right? Make sure the right people are on your team and make sure there's money.

cash flow.

Yep. Ain't that the truth?

That's gotta be it.

All right, a top tip for growth stage founders like yourself.

Surround yourself with peers that are at a similar stage and constantly reevaluate your peer group. If you're not surrounded by people that are a combination of the stage you're at and the stage you're trying to get to, change your group. You need to be surrounded by people that inspire you and you need to have peers that are going to do the same thing as you to bounce ideas off of. If you are the most successful person in your group, build the new group.

I love that one. Favorite book or podcast that has helped you to grow?

Uh, biggest one right now would be buy back your time from Dan Martell. Um, I've given it to our entire leadership team. I'm giving it to every founder I work with. Uh, I think I've given away 40 or 50 copies of it at this point. So highly, highly recommend it. Phenomenal book, great founder. Um, really good guy. And yeah, if you're, if you're in any way at a growth stage,

It is the right book to read on how you scale yourself and your team.

Awesome. All right, last one. What is going to be the title of your autobiography?

Great question.

I skipped one. If you want to think about that one, I,

I wanna say something along the lines of...

trained in World of Warcraft. I learned most of what I know about how to like manage finances and economy and demand generation and team playing video games. And if I could build that into a book title, I'm all in. Ha ha ha.

Huh?

wild I that's the first I've ever heard that so we're gonna dig into that some other time Graham for sure all right I actually skipped one on accident I almost did the founder for so your last one is a piece of advice that counters a traditional wisdom

Absolutely.

Alright.

Ha ha.

Oh

Get rid of educational requirements for every job you overpost.

Learn how to do skills-based assessments as soon as you possibly can. Focus on the people and the output, not the pedigree.

Love it. That's a great one. You're full of them today. I like it. Well, yeah, this was fun and you've given a ton to our listeners today, Graham. So I always allow for a little bit of self-promotion here at the end. How can those listening help you out?

Thank you, sir. This was fun.

Yeah, easy one is definitely check us out at iversoft.ca or myself at grahambarlow.com. If you know anyone that's scaling up in the technology world and looking for support on engineering or product work, give me a shout. If you're at a growth stage in your business and looking for support from a coach or CEO, I take on a couple of clients a year and work with them through scale up. So feel free to reach out.

would love to chat with other founders building cool stuff.

Awesome. Thank you, Graham, for joining us and thank you all for listening in. This has been another episode of the dirt featuring Graham Barlow. And this is awesome. This has been so much fun, man. Thank you so much.

This has been awesome. I really appreciate it. This was, this was so much fun.

Yeah, let's do it again.

Absolutely. I'll have to teach you how you can get a business degree in World of Warcraft.

Alright.

You know, that's actually, I was a big gamer back in the day, but I've never actually played World of Warcraft.

Probably a good thing, that's why you have other hobbies.

Yeah, I'm gonna stop recording for a second