This week on the podcast Matt sits down with Josh Smith, CEO and Jonathan Sasse, Chief Strategy Officer of Metova Strategies. During the episode they discuss their roles at Metova and how the company has pivoted through the years since the initial founding in Franklin, Tennessee. They then dive into how empathy and effective listening to customers gives Metova a competitive advantage. They focus on understanding what customers actually need, not just building technologically capable products. They finish with a discussion around the importance of mobile-first design, the Internet of Things and other technology shifts like generative AI.

And it's remarkable how many companies

are so internally focused on how do we do the right thing for the

business? How do we build the things we want to build, without

ever really spending enough time with our customers to know what

do your customers want from you in the first place? And what's

most important to them?

Excellence, professionalism, innovation, and

collegiality. These are the values of the Sam M. Walton

College of Business explores in education, business and the

lives of people we meet every day, I'm Matt Waller, Dean of

the Walton College and welcome to the be epic podcast. I have

with me today, Josh Smith, who is CEO of Metova. And Jonathan

Sasse, who's the Chief Strategy Officer. Thank you both for

joining me today.

Thank you. Good to be here.

So Josh, would you mind telling us a little bit

about Metova?

Sure, yeah. So. So Metova was founded in 2006.

Really, around developing mobile applications. And at that time,

really, BlackBerry, and Palm were mobile. And so for the past

17 years, we've continued to lean into mobile and have

expanded beyond just not just Franklin, Tennessee, where we

started, but we're, you know, throughout the US and in Latin

America, doing all sorts of things mobile, but then also

digital transformation, digital technology partner to large

corporations.

And, Jonathan, I know, you have you're the chief

strategy officer. What does that mean? What do you what do you

focus on as Chief Strategy Officer?

Well, a lot of the companies that we work with

are at some point of a pivot in their strategy, their roadmap,

they're facing some kind of transformation. Typically, it's

not in their DNA to do that, especially if it's leaning into

technology that they don't understand. So a lot of what I

do is working with those companies, the senior

stakeholders, to better define what their customers need from

them, what their capabilities are, and what their roadmap

should probably look like in order to deliver on that.

I see. Josh, you know, you're in Bentonville.

That's right.

But the company didn't it start in Little Rock?

Company started in Franklin, Tennessee.

Oh, Franklin, Tennessee ok.

Yeah, that's where the original founder was from.

And then a gentleman from Arkansas acquired it back in

like 2010 or 11. That's when we became begin to have an Arkansas

presence. It's a long road after that, there's been several

different transactions that have happened, private equity

investors. But this latest iteration, no longer do we have

any institutional investors and, and we relocated headquarters to

Bentonville.

Well that's great, and you've been with Metova for

almost 10 years at this point.

Yes. Crazy to think. Yes.

So tell me a little bit. Now I know you've you've

had different roles there. But you've been CEO for almost six

years. Would you tell me a little bit more about your

company positioning? I know you where you started? Are there any

verticals, you focus on more than others?

Yeah, I'll be pitching us to Jonathan here.

Well, you know, and and I've noticed for you,

But it's really fascinating because we've been doing this

for so long. And actually, Jonathan and I were originally

introduced by the founder of Metova. We were both had our own

startup companies. Josh had Slacker Radio, I had First Orion

Privacy Star, we were trying to solve the same problems. But

being serial entrepreneurs and and being able to work with all

these companies for all these years. It makes us kind of

industry agnostic. We can go in and learn, you know, how a

company makes money, how they lose money, where maybe adjacent

revenue opportunities are, who the stakeholders are, who their

customers are, and then from there, build out you know their

product roadmaps and strategies going forward and then have the

development talent to go ahead and deliver on that.

Jonathan, also have been involved with another Arkansas

company, First Orion. And I had actually I've done a podcast

recording with Charles Morgan. Seems like it was a year or two

ago, I can't remember exactly, but he's an amazing individual.

Are you still engaged with First Orion at all?

Yeah, I do still communicate with them. I'm, I'm

a big fan of Charles, I've worked with him pretty closely

as we've that company went through a number of

transformations as well. So I kind of came in to do very

similar things I'm doing at Metova now, which is take a look

at the opportunities to the future and try and rewrite the

roadmap a little bit. And with Charles's help and with, you

know, Jeff Stalnacker and some of the others that were there.

We turned that company in a pretty sharp direction, in a

short amount of time and really created an opportunity for the

future. That was, that was a good stretch.

And I noticed that you are on the Forbes

communications council. So you contribute articles to Forbes,

what kinds of articles do you, do you write?

A lot of what we focus on is, is helping people

through those transformation challenges. So, you know, when

do you do it? How do you do it? What kind of signals do you look

for? You know, really trying to get people very specific things

to key in on to help them understand, when's the right

time to invest? Do you need to seek help? You know, are there

internal resources you can tap into for that? So really trying

to write, you know, a lot of super helpful content for people

that have big decisions to make and are looking for, you know,

how do I take the first step in the right direction?

Josh, maybe, let's suppose, you know, technology, a

lot of times people think of technology as just being

something behind the scenes. But technology, the technology that

you have, in your company can actually affect the brand that

you wind up building. Is it hard to get companies to see that and

to understand that?

It's a very long process. So I'm not sure who

said this, but the best technology is a technology you

don't even know you're interacting with it, right? You

get, and then the coding part of it, not a lot of people are able

to see that. It's not something they can participate in. So when

we're working with clients, usually the the strategy piece

of it and design, a lot of input goes into that, because the

customers can, you know, they can see it, and can help drive

that and are our goal is to really kind of stay focused on

what is it's gonna drive their business forward, and how to do

that in the most simple way, from a human interface

perspective, and then do the hard part with it with the

engineering to make that make that possible.

And I know that, you know, workflows and internal

communication patterns and trying to enhance customer

experience. You know, a lot of that you can do with technology

you have, but that you develop with your companies. But what

about companies that say, look, we we need your help here. But

there's also existing technologies in these other

spaces? Can you? Will you help with that as well?

We, generally, that is always part of the equation,

right? It's usually companies have been up in business for a

long time, sometimes 20, 30, 60 years, and are looking to make a

transition to digital. They've got a huge investment in that

technology stack that they've developed over the years, and

you can't just rip and replace it. So it is a very gradual

process of identifying what parts of the business can we

impact now? And what internal systems do we need to leverage

to be able to do that? And how do we expose those capabilities

to actually make that experience happen? And I remember one

client in particular that we had several years ago, first

question we asked is, how does a user create an account, and it

was all blank stares in the room as well, they call into customer

service, and the customer service person takes the

information down, like okay, so now we know where we need to

start.

Well, you know, Jonathan, when you it seems like

for me, at least, so many of the apps I use on my phone,

unfortunately, seem like they were created for my computer.

But this concept, would you mind speaking a little bit to this

concept of mobile first?

Yeah, I mean, the thing with mobile that, that

is interesting, when you think of it, there's everything you do

on your phone, your banks, your pizza delivery, whatever it

might be. It used to be that, as businesses, we would look at

other businesses like ours, to see what was competitive. You

know, if I'm a lawn care company, I look at what the

other lawn care companies do. If I sell TVs, I see what the other

TV guys are doing. But today, and as to your point, I when I

go through all the apps on my phone to me, I'm I'm engaging as

a customer in the same universe. And so I have certain

expectations I have as I go from app to app to app, I don't care

what the other gym apps do. But I know my other apps work really

nice. And they're really easy to use. And I can tap exactly where

I want to tap and they're really intuitive. And that's the level

of the way that customers are looking at things. Amazon does

things a certain way. For me, Walmart does certain things for

me, Netflix, whatever it might be. And so I have those

expectations that every app I use should be able to leverage

that technology, the elegance of the design those I have those

expectations. So it's a lot easier to be disappointed as a

customer too when you open up a new app, you're like, this isn't

as good as it should be. And I have that lens I can apply to

that because I have 10 other apps that can do that. You know

whether it's telling me when the delivery is going to be made, or

recommending things I might like or just making it easy to book

an appointment. And so we have to be really aware of that, as

we're designing apps, we're working with companies and

brands to make sure that you might have looked competitively

across your landscape to see what everybody else is doing and

try and make something as good. Or maybe even slightly better

than that. But you have to realize that your customers are

comparing you to the best experiences in the world every

That is, right. And you can tell a big difference. I

single day.

mean, there's some apps you use that you think this is so

intuitive, and others, you know, there was one app I was using

not too long ago, and it had pretty good ratings. But it was

for keeping track of your time. It's used primarily for

consultants, but I, I like to keep track of my time, where am

I spending my time, compared to where should I spend my time?

This thing was so unintuitive, I think it's hard to take

something that already exists and make it mobile first, if you

will.

Yeah, the investment in that is always the

challenge because you spend all these resources to get where you

are. And and then you release it to the world and find out that

it's not what everybody hoped it would be. And it's very

difficult at that point, where you start taking a look at your

customer experience after you've produced your thing. And that's

where, you know, when we talk about these early strategy

sessions with with people that we work with, is trying to get

through that first, before you ever write a line of code is

let's make sure we understand what this experience needs to

be. So that we don't build a thing that's functionally

capable, but almost impossible to use.

And then what you know and what do your customers

use? You've got all all that system of ERP, all that user

input, where are the users spending their time and elevate

those features to the top and maybe push them those other ones

down so it's not so complicated and overwhelming to deal with.

One of the things I'd like to talk to you about a

couple others, but this concept of the Internet of Things. This

is still a you know, it was really popular for a while, you

don't hear about it as much anymore, but it's maybe more

critical now than it used to be. Would you mind speaking to that

a little bit?

Yeah. So you know, one of the things that's

interesting about Internet of Things, to your point for, you

know, five years ago, it was super buzzy term, you know, what

crypto and NFT's were maybe last year. And I think what we saw is

the difference there is Internet of Things today, we interact

every day, everything we touch is something's broadcasting

something somewhere, you know, from your vacuum cleaner to your

laundry machines to your refrigerator, whatever it is. Wi

Fi is ubiquitous, we're able to monitor these things, get alerts

and stuff. So it's been an interesting pivot in that time,

where the forecast of the Internet of Things becoming a

common everyday occurrence, this kind of happened. You know, we

connected 1000s of devices, whether we know it or not, you

know, throughout the day. And so it's shaping the way we live and

work and play in a way that it's become so ubiquitous now that we

may not even realize it. And so as we've worked with that, we've

enabled businesses who 10, 15 years ago, the tech wasn't there

to even try this. And so they weren't even inspired to pivot,

when the web revolution happened, when the mobile

revolution happened, they still didn't need to move, technology

still wasn't actually solving their key problems. And so when

you look at something like fleet rentals for like heavy

equipment, that's a business that's been on paper and phone

calls, and literally giant machines, you know, going off

into locations where they didn't know where they went or where

they were, or how they're being used. And that was a project we

worked on where you retrofit all these devices with the ability

to communicate. And now all of a sudden, I know where every piece

of equipment is, I know what state it's in, or you know, what

status it's in? Is it being used? How many hours is it being

used? You know, is it been returned on time? If I need to

go find it? Where is it, you know, so that completely changed

their business in a way that technology, you know, changes

over the previous 15 years, were kind of irrelevant to them. But

then it became, we can get rid of all this paper, we can get

rid of all this processing, we can find equipment in seconds

instead of maybe hours or days. And we're servicing the things

that actually need to be serviced the efficiencies

through the roof. It completely changed the trajectory of their

business. And that's where we're seeing, you know, on IoT, it's

either you have this massive inflection point for companies

that suddenly you know, logistics, shipping freight is

massive changes, but down to the smallest thing where I get an

alert on my phone, that my dryer is completed its cycle. So go

get it, like, okay, it's now it's not sitting there for till

tomorrow, because nobody remembered it was in there. And

we just start naturally in engaging with these things. When

we're like, oh, my car has an alert or my, you know, my

refrigerator tells me that the door was left open or whatever

it might be. And we don't really think of that as Internet of

Things. We just think of that that's just modern technology in

my world now.

Good point, you know, I there's there's a place

that they go on a regular basis that when you enter, you've got

to pull out your wallet and show it the barcode, but it's not

I've noticed lately, as I'm walking up to this building, it

pops up. And so I just click on it. And I thought, wow, that is

so nice.

very handy.

Yes. Now the fleet is an interesting topic too,

because I read an article, it must have been 10 years ago, I

don't remember, it was talking about one that one of the states

in the United States, but they were talking about how many cars

were in their fleet. And it talked about how many they

didn't know where they were. And they really didn't know it at

any given point in time where they were, which shocked me, you

know, I thought wow, that's a huge amount of resources that is

completely unaccounted for.

That's the glaring problem that gets solved

by that, right was that I mean, you think about just fleets in

general, whether it's the cars in California, or the trucks in

Wisconsin, or whatever it might be, is, you know, up until very

recently, that's how was for everybody who knows where they

are, you know, you might have to call a lot of people to figure

out where something is where today, you just pull up your map

and oh, there it is, like, I know exactly where that is,

every time.

Well, the pandemic really pushed telehealth

forward. And it still is moving forward. And I think it's going

to keep growing in the in the country. Are you all engaged in

that at all?

Yeah, absolutely. We've got a variety of health

care clients, one of which is innovator health, that has a

very good telehealth platform that's used within the

department defense, able to take compressed video and do you

know, medical procedures out on the battlefield, or at high

altitude with someone who's on the ground. So I think what

we're seeing on that side of the house, I look forward to seeing

it make its way over to the commercial side, because it's

talk about time and time wasted. As far as, you know, lab results

and go into a doctor's office and all these things can be done

much, much faster. And then on the IoT side of the house, are

vitals in our body, there's no reason that you know, blood

pressure cuff once every six months, probably not giving you

the most accurate reading on your health.

Well you know know I have an Oura ring, the Oura

ring, you know, captures so much data like it captures your

average and resting heart rate, while you're sleeping, your

heart rate variability, which is an important metric, your body

temperature, your respiratory rate, you know, it keeps track

of your activity so you know how many calories you're burning,

the frequency of your your workouts, just all kinds of

variables. And it also keeps track while you're sleeping,

have your average oxygen saturation, your breathing

regularity. And I thought, well, then you go into the doctor's

office, once every year, whatever. And they take your

blood pressure and weigh you and poke around on you and look in

your ears and stuff. And I thought this is way more

valuable than that. I mean, your blood pressure on one reading is

tells you nothing. You think that the medical system would

want to be taking this data as well and using it and maybe they

do? I don't know.

I think that's coming. The other thing that's

interesting, I think that we're gonna see in the next we're

seeing it now, but certainly over the next few years become

more ubiquitous, is a lot of these tools are great at

tracking stuff, right? But to your point, you track your

sleep, you track your heart rate, you track all your

biorhythms all these things. But the pivot there is what do you

do with all that information? What does it mean? Right? So

being able to use some of these AI models and some of these

other learning tools, you know, these systems can now start to

be like, what's normal for you? And what's not normal for you?

And what should you do about that maybe in real time, right?

We talk, we go to the doctor once a year, and they give you

like, hey, you should lose weight, you should do this, and

you come back a year later, and they check your blood pressure

again, right. But now you have something that's checking 1000s

of things all the time. And you can start to learn, like this is

a normal thing. It might be abnormal for someone else, but

it's actually maybe normal for you. And these might be

indicators that something's up, maybe you're not sleeping well,

maybe you're not eating well, maybe you're not getting the

same exercise you did before, whatever it might be. But

starting to turn into more prescriptive types of things

instead of like, here's a report of last 60 days, do what you

will with this information. It might be we've been collecting

information over the last 60 days, you should do these things

in order to improve these other things. And I think that's where

the medical community will start to lean into that a lot more

heavily too as you start to connect to these devices to your

healthcare systems and things like this where now you do have

that I think we're mainly I think the legacy systems that

they have make it harder to adopt this technology quickly.

But I think everybody's looking at this to make sure that you

know a doctor can thoroughly monitor a patient through a

whole year, not just in that moment where they're checking

your temperature one day.

That's encouraging to hear. So there's lots of

companies you can go to, to have software developed. But to be

successful, especially from a strategic perspective, and you

all have obviously had lots of success, there's got to be

something there that's giving you a competitive advantage. So,

you know, in terms of, what do you do differently? How is your

culture different? How's your experience different? Or how do

those combined to give you a unique competitive advantage in

the marketplace?

I'll take the the culture piece of it. So I think

our organization over the past probably 10 years, has evolved

like everyone else, every other organization, but we lean

heavily into empathy, as one of our core values, which is an

extremely hard practice empathy and, and with each other, with

our clients. And with that comes the follow ons of communication,

accountability, and these, these other, you know, tenants that

ultimately leads to empathy. And I think we've, we've got a team

that practices that daily, with each other, and with our

clients. And I think that that's the first part of this, I think

that sets us apart.

Interesting. Well, there's a book called creative

confidence. And it was written by the founders of the D school

at Stanford design school. And a key part of effective design is

empathy. You know, really trying to understand, put yourself in

the shoes of the customer in that case.

You know, a lot of companies focus on the wrong

things when they're building technology or using technology,

which is just, can I make it work? Not necessarily am I

making work the right way? Or even am I making it work for the

right people. And so invariably, what happens is, you end up with

a product that is not really built for anybody, it was just

built to do something. And so when we look at things, we're

always working with our clients to start there. What what do

your client why do your clients even hire you in the first

place? What do they expect from you? What are they trying to do?

And how can we make that possible? And so taking that

approach is very different than something like a dev shop. And

that term gets thrown around a lot. And there, there are dev

shops out there teams of engineers waiting for you to

call them and do work for them. But if you don't know what

you're building, having a team of engineers is not terribly

helpful, actually. And so, for us, we've built our organization

with, you know, leadership, who's been through the wringer

of startups and technology, and building and shaping things for

customers and knowing where some of the landmines are, and what's

really tricky. And also, how do you make sure you're listening

to your customers, and you're not just building you the thing

that you want, or the thing you think your business needs, but

the thing that your customer wants, and that they need. And

so, when we bring in a team, you know, we spend sometimes weeks,

sometimes months going through those cycles with customers,

making sure they understand what value do you bring to your

customer base, and to the people, you want to be your

customers.

And those can be hard conversations, once we've

exposed everything, talk to all the constituents of the clients,

you know, their customers, their, you know, the people

within the company, and, and sometimes think things aren't,

as they thought they were. And their customers actually come to

them for something totally different than they thought they

Yeah, And there's one question that I ask

were.

a lot, especially if we're, if we're at a crossroads somewhere,

which many of the customers we're working with are. And it

is kind of a tough question. But why does? What is your customers

even care that you exist? What what value do you really bring

in here? And that can be a very tough question for people to

face, especially when they've just been business as usual for

quite a while. And then you get to that point where like, why do

your customers care that you still have the products you have

or the services you have customer? I say, you're choosing

not to make a good experience for me. And so I'm going to

apply some judgment to that.

What are you all seeing in terms of integration

of current technology with generative AI tools? Are you

seeing my sense is in talking to senior people at companies is

many of them are still not, they wouldn't even know what I just

said that that was possible. What are you seeing with that?

Well we're certainly seeing, I think the

point you bring up about training your own data, using

some kind of an AI tool is is a really positive direction

because you know, the source of truth of that information. One

of the things that's challenging with a lot of the tools we have

today, and a lot of the ones you described is the results you

get. It's hard to tell what level of accuracy it is? Or

even? Is it accurate at all? Or what was the source of the

information in the first place. And so you're casting a pretty

wide net, with also a lot of uncertainty of the result you

got, which could be totally wrong, or it could be totally

right, you don't know.

But I mean, students are getting into this

problem, because they trust it too much.

That's the interesting thing about it is,

we're at this infancy of this, everybody has their theories of

like, you know, we're going into, you know, Terminator days,

or this is going to change our lives for the good, or whatever

it may be. But I think that's, that's gonna be the one thing

that shifts a lot, I think, you know, in the coming year or more

is using these tools on datasets that we know to be good. And so

it'll get better at answering the question correctly, when

it's using a set of data that's known, and not just wherever it

might cobble some of these things together. And so, you

know, I think as you get, you know, certain industries, I

mean, we all have interactions with chatbots. And these things,

and a lot of them are pretty poor, those things could get

considerably better with the right set of learning and

training on that and get real useful feedback with complicated

questions. I think that's where we'll start to see some of the

early benefit, but then that internal use of to your point,

training on a set of known data that goes back maybe a long

time, and be able to mine and utilize that data in a way

through, you know, the same way we do today with Chat GPT, or

others, but getting responses back that you could rely on in a

much more credible way. And I think we might see some of that

where being more transparent in the results. It almost feels

sometimes, like, when you talk to somebody who doesn't really

know what they're talking about, and they just give you a

confident answer, and you're like, well, that's probably

true, that seems reasonable. And then you find out that it wasn't

at all

Yeah,

that's how a lot of these chat tools feel the AI

tools feel like is it? It can't, it gave me a very confident,

plausible answer that if it in because I know very little about

the subject I was asking about, it seems believable. But it's

really difficult to check that in any way. And so you might use

that for inspiration for more research and be like, okay, I'm

gonna go learn and this is true, but not everybody's gonna do

that. And then that's the risk of kind of where we're at, like,

at this moment, I think.

First of all, Josh and Jonathan, congratulations on

the great success of Metova. And, you know, it's it's

encouraging to have a company here in Northwest Arkansas

that's doing business all over the place, not just in Arkansas,

and doing well. So congratulations, and thank you

for taking time to visit with me.

Thank you.

Thanks for having us.

On behalf of the Sam M. Walton College of

Business, I want to thank everyone for spending time with

us for another engaging conversation. You can subscribe

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