Episode Description

In this episode, we sit down with Aaren Terrett, a Vancouver-based business leader, to talk about the lessons he picked up building Traction on Demand and taking it through its acquisition by Salesforce. Aaron walks us through that growth story, from a small team to nearly 1,900 employees and $190 million in revenue, and what it actually took to get there.

He shares why culture was never an afterthought for him but a driving force, one that pushed innovation while still putting the people behind it first. Aaron also talks about what he's building now with Vistera, a platform aimed at making professional services more efficient and accessible for small and medium-sized businesses. By combining technology with a network of vetted experts, Vistera is looking to give businesses tailored, cost-effective support and change how professional services work in Canada.

Key Takeaways:

• Culture was central to Traction on Demand's growth, especially through its acquisition by Salesforce.
• Scaling from a small business to a large enterprise brings its own set of leadership challenges.
• Professional services are shifting, and technology plus new delivery models are key to keeping up.
• Vistera gives small and medium-sized businesses faster, more affordable access to expert help.
• Building a strong culture means understanding what different employees actually need.
• Outcome-based pricing creates more sustainable, value-driven client relationships.

Links referenced in this episode:

• www.vistera.ai
• Vistera

I'm really excited to interview Aaron Tarrett today. He is a business leader here in Vancouver and he's done some phenomenal things here in the business community.

Always really focused on innovation, but the people behind the innovation. And so, Aaron, thank you so much for joining us today and looking forward to diving in.

Yeah, my pleasure. Thank you for having me.

So I chatted a little bit with your team to kind of understand a bit of your background. Now, I understand you spent a fair bit of time at Salesforce following the Traction on Demand acquisition.

Can you kind of walk us through what that experience was like and what that taught you?

Yeah, I mean, I think, you know, when I started with Traction on Demand, which is, you know, a great Vancouver success story, there have been many. We were, I think we were under 100 people and, you know, still in the lower digits of the millions in revenue. And then we were eventually acquired.

And then I think anytime you have an opportunity to go through an acquisition with an organization the size of Salesforce, you get a crash course on what that entails and how much the diligence takes and how long it takes and how deep a dive they go into the organization. Interviewing leaders and obviously you don't spend probably for them.

It wasn't a significant amount of money, but it still felt like a significant amount of money at the time. You don't do it without knowing significantly what the company is and who they are and what they're about.

So going through that was a tremendous experience for myself. I hadn't really done that in a CP senior leadership position before.

And so being a part of that acquisition and being exposed to all of those processes will help me as we continue to grow vistera and giving us options in the future and understanding what that entails and how we set the company up now for potential success in the future?

Well, I do hope that you don't end up selling to Salesforce.

I don't think they'd be interesting us. We don't do what they do.

But that experience, experience of growing something, something small to something large to a point where a national brand like Salesforce looks to acquire. That's. That takes a particular skill set and a particular set of, I guess maybe a deep culture. I heard a lot about the culture attraction. How.

How did that experience translate into what you're doing now? And are there some things that you learned in your previous role that you're thinking you're able to apply here in professional services?

Yeah, absolutely. And I. I think I speak about it a lot.

I was very for to be in an organization with traction, where the founder and CEO Greg Malpass, really believed in surrounding himself and others with great people that were just incredibly smart and wanted to do fun things. And we were able to take that culture and philosophy in the community that we had built. We called it a community of our attractionites.

And there's probably some synergies around.

People go, that sounds like a cult and all of those sort of things, and, well, that's probably the best of what those are intentioned to be and not the negative aspects of it. But we really were just a group of people that were really empowered to do some fun stuff. And we were doing it in the technology space.

Obviously, at the time, Salesforce was growing significantly, and if we could match that scale, we had one of the largest channels in software at the time. And so we just needed to make sure that we could manage. And I think we did.

There was obviously a lot of synergies to the way Salesforce was built and their culture and the culture of Ohana. And we adopted a strategy methodology that was born out of Marc Benioff's brain, and that's the V2 mom.

And so if anyone knows the Salesforce ecosystem, that's a fairly widespread known strategy methodology that he met at early, early days. And so we had some synergies around sort of the quote, unquote, mothership.

And yeah, I think there's times when you do that and you scale that, there's some changes to it because you have to put foundations and processes in place that you didn't need to do with 80 people. But if you just. If you really focus on making sure you hire great people, I don't think it really matters.

Yeah, people are the lifeblood of any successful company. Now, I hear you're a fun fact guy. So how do you tie in sort of humor and fun to make a workplace enjoyable for those that you work with?

Yeah, I try and just again, taking a page kind of where we experience a detraction, just kind of bring a little bit of my own personality to the Table. I try and not take anything too serious. You know, we're all empowered to do some fun things, and I think work should be the same way.

And if we work hard and have a high performance culture, we should have a lot of fun doing it. And so I don't even know. I can't remember. So we have a. We have a.

A morning company huddle that we get the whole organization together and we Talk for about 5, 10 minutes about just some topics, some engagement things, things that are happening within the company. So everyone's on the same page and we're very transparent.

And I kind of remember where I came up with the idea of creating kind of a fun fact, but it's kind of taken a life of its own now. And I don't think I could do a company huddle without one because people might think that I've fallen ill or something.

But this is another way of not being too serious, but understanding that we do have a high performance culture and we're looking for some big heart, hairy, audacious goals in the future.

At the end of the day, I think employers used to just be a place where people went to make their living.

But increasingly, especially as we're so interconnected between our work life, personal life, digital applications, you got to be having fun while you're doing it. Otherwise you're giving up a large part of your life to something that really could be draining.

It sounds like with your teams, it's quite the opposite. It's like, how do we make this a place people actually want to be around?

Yeah, and I think that's the key, right? Having a culture where you have to start a certain time or you have to end it at a certain time. It's not what we necessarily want to build.

We want people to want to come to work and be excited to come to the office. For 55 years, a lot of the company has been a law firm. And even before I got there, the law firm had an arcade downstairs.

And, you know, obviously we. We have our own podcast and we have a podcast studio and we have pinball machines, we have a massage chair and things that.

So that culture was there before I even even joined.

But it was one of the reasons why I did join because, you know, with, with Tom Spraggs and some of our other leaders, the synergies about being just great people reminded me of the days when we were, you know, in the building stages of traction. And so that's what drew me in the first place.

It's interesting because in technology, I Think it's easier, quote unquote, to build that sort of fun culture. But in professional services, I would say the lion's share of quote, unquote, successful companies do not operate in that mentality.

It's still sort of an ivory tower. Where do you see that as being perhaps an area of opportunity for the Vistera platform and then professional services in general?

Yeah, I think professional services is sort of at the tipping point of needing to change pretty significantly.

I think for many years, even when I was in Salesforce professional Services, I think the concept of the tnm, time and materials statement of work or scope based engagements, clients were kind of pushing against that. Already there's so much uncertainty in it. There's such an opportunity to obviously blow by cost and timeline in those manners.

The contracting vehicles are significant. And it's really hard in this day and age of speed and technology for organizations to get their value out of those kind of models.

And I think professional services are going to have to change.

And if you look at the big consulting firms, I think anytime you try and shift a massive vehicle like those or a ship like those, it's really difficult because the rudder tends to be smaller than the vehicle itself. Right. And, and so I think what the advantage that we have is.

You know, we were sitting around a boardroom one day and we were talking and I said, there's gotta be a better way to do this. And I've always, I've always really been impressed by the models of the Airbnbs and the Ubers and even the E Health models. Right.

Where you take this idea and concept and things that people need and you break it down to the lowest common denominator and you solve it in a very unique and accelerated way.

And so that's why we kind of took it as we were supporting small and medium businesses in the legal space, obviously with the law firm and our other companies were doing some HR and finance support in the traditional consulting model. And I was like, there's gotta be a different way to solve this. You know, AI has been forced into the forefront.

The adoption at the enterprise level has been challenging for a lot of the other CEOs that I talked to. And so how do we take that model that can accelerate? It's helping me do things faster from a strategic level than I ever could before. Right.

It would have taken, you know, we were doing some growth modeling the other day. It probably would take in myself and a business analyst and some other, you know, strategic mind at a table probably a week to build these models.

You know, there was something like 730 lookup tables in an Excel, which I. There's no way that I'm doing that or have the skills to do that. And you know, I was able to go back and forth.

Mind you, I was on V14 by the time it finished checking its homework. But I was able to do that in a matter of, you know, a day rather than the weeks it would have taken me before.

Now I had the advantage that I've got some finite finance and legal and HR experts at my fingertips so I can get them to vet it.

But if I didn't know what I was doing, hadn't built growth models for years and didn't have those resources, I wouldn't have been on V14, I would have been on V2 thinking it was perfect, and there would have been some critical errors in that model.

And so we were thinking, well, how do we provide these services to small and medium businesses that need it more than others, but save them a significant amount of time, save them a significant amount of money and get them the help they needed.

So we came up with Vistera concept where we accelerate the outcomes or the outputs of these key documents or decisions that small medium businesses need.

And so they don't pay for that, they only pay for the small amount of time that the expert needs to make sure that they're validated and they're correct and you get some time with them to give you the advice that you need, need, and now you're not paying all of this overhead. I talked to many leaders, if they ever asked for advice, and I say to scale, you need to accelerate the revenue side of your operations.

The cost will come as you drive through your revenue. Don't spend the significant amount of money on the back end processes and the architecture, that stuff.

You can outsource, but drive your business and race to find your bottlenecks, race to find your problems, overcome them and keep going. And so we wanted to be able to give that view because a lot of times these businesses are just taking chances.

Right? Totally.

They're going into AI, they're going, well, that's good enough. I hope I don't stand in a landmine. Right. And then when you do, you only have to do it once and you've paid for Vestera for 10 years. Right.

And so we wanted to build this model that was proactive and reactive.

And the lawyers will make more on that end too.

Yeah, exactly. And, and so what we're also doing is we've kind of built this model of the expert network across Canada.

And that's how we're able to do on same day on demand expert help which if anyone had, I love lawyers, I know many of them, but if you know they're not, it's not the fastest industry in the world. They tend to get to, you know, get to you and in a couple weeks if they have time, et cetera, et cetera. What we're same day on demand.

And so we built this, this network across Canada that helps us live up to that promise.

And I was talking to the Globe and Mail the other day and what I was saying to them is there is many people, especially females, leaving the legal profession significantly because it doesn't give people the flexibility that they're looking for from their time, especially family commitments and et cetera. You know, it's still a very male dominated industry where some people find that to be intimidating.

And so what this does is we are allowing these experts have their own businesses faster than they've ever had before, work where they want to work, how they want to work and be really focused on the areas that they want to do and drive revenue. They don't have the overhead cost, they don't have marketing, they don't have admin, they don't need to figure out where their client is coming from.

They just log in and do their best work. And so I think we're doing two things right. We're changing the professional services, but I think it's the new way to work.

I think AI is going to drive us into a new way of work and I think this is potentially it.

I like that.

So there's so much information out there, but you're helping provide confidence in a more streamlined and more cost effective manner for small and medium sized businesses. Now you say you have experts in all the provinces.

Are these all going to be employees of Sprague's or will these be subcontracted through different companies? And how would you vet those lawyers?

Yeah, absolutely.

So, yeah, so we've got legal experts, finance and HR and they all have their own either sole proprietorship or business that we have a commercial relationship with. And then we kind of set those terms with them and they are the professionals, they work. We're just a, we're a SaaS platform.

I've renamed what SaaS stands for, which my PR company said that I shouldn't do, but I'll say it anyway, service AI assisted software. And so we are a SaaS platform. The experts get to do what they do best and we get to do what we do best.

And that is the integration between how we get the expert to the business as fast as possible with the right information. And so they are contracted with us, they get to run their own business, they get to work how they want to work, as I said before.

And then we have a rigorous testing program through our people team internally. So they're the ones that find these experts. They go through our regular recruitment process.

We vet them with all of their standards and their industry, make sure they're good standing and loss of size. Example, if they're, if they're lawyers and they go through an interview as if they were being hired, but they're not. It was great.

We've had such a tremendous reaction in the marketplace. We put our first sort of posting out there for this expert network. We got 550 applicants in our first posting.

Incredible.

Yeah. So I really think that people see this as an opportunity and again, a new way to work.

Yeah. It's interesting. There's a company in Alberta called Good Lawyer that is, I think, a similar type of work. But I think your model is.

Is different because they're essentially just acting as a lead magnet. Yes, these lawyers, but you're essentially providing some of the infrastructure for these lawyers to operate.

Yeah.

And ultimately the relationship is with you and the lawyer collectively.

Yeah, yeah. The lawyer and the client have a direct one to one relationship. So it's, you know, just as if you were going to a separate. An individual lawyer.

There are some rules around being able to refer business to a lawyer through different. So we're not doing that. We're just the software vehicle that provides the relationship.

But the relationship is with the client and with the legal entity or the lawyer. So they're protected by all of the liability protections and client lawyer privileges. We don't get in the way of that.

Those documents and information isn't shared outside of the instance with the client and the lawyer. So they have all the protections and none of the information or the AI is trained on any documents of our clients.

So we are SOC2 compliant and we take data privacy and regulations very, very seriously. And so we built that intentionally with that in mind. First and foremost.

We talked a bit about your time at Traction.

Yeah.

What did leading that team at scale.

Yeah.

Actually feel like day to day. And how does that compare to being in the professional services world?

Yeah, I mean, I think, I mean we, we were, you know, we were. We were obviously a salesforce implementation shop.

So, you know, for the most part, in any professional services, your people are your Product, right. You don't have a product, it's your people. And so when you scale, you have to keep that in mind in any area of the business. So I, you know, I.

One of my areas of business I looked after was the client success group.

And then I also looked after our strategy groups, which included our vertical practice strategy leads and things like that, and had an incredible strategy. I think you've interviewed one of the people in the past that was on that team.

And if you look at that episode, obviously an incredibly smart, smart young man. And so when you're scaling, you have to keep that in mind. And most people have some client fitness facing responsibilities.

So even though you have a group of developers and client success representatives and strategy folks, even though they're people that are working in the business, you are also working with your clients. And so that's a mindful thing.

And then it's difficult to have the simple things of capacity planning and resource management and everything that's easy to do when you're 60 people. It's a heck of a different problem to solve when you're 1,900 people. Right.

And professional services margins are predicated on making sure you don't have necessarily a bench just sitting there twiddling their thumbs, waiting for the next assignment. Everyone's kind of got to go from one assignment to the next assignment to the next assignment for your efficiency and your margins.

And so there's a lot of complication that comes with that as you grow. I remember. So we used to bring people on board on Fridays.

And I remember for probably six to seven weeks there, we were onboarding like 60 people every Friday. Like every Friday. That's crazy.

So you can imagine the kind of systems and processes that need to be in place to make sure those people were looked after.

What percentage in office versus online?

We worked all across the globe. So we had offices and most of our offices were in Canada.

We were in Australia and obviously we had a development place in India and then the offices in Canada.

And how do you maintain culture across sort of geographic locations when you're trying to operate at such a high level?

Yeah, it's a great question. I was fortunate to know the CEO of a company called Kalint, and they are. I can't remember exactly what is around but let's call them 2,500 people.

They're all remote, they don't have one person in the office. So I was able to reach out to them and say, okay, how do you do it?

Like, how do you create this culture that you want without many people, or in their case, no one in the office? And so they just make sure that their engagement is really high.

And so they're doing town halls in every city that they have, you know, a certain amount of, of caience, I think they call them and doesn't roll off the tongue. No, that's why it's attraction night. No, I know, I know. Vestarians is what we're, we've got ourselves. I don't know if that ever.

That rolls off either space. Exactly. Yeah. And they do a lot of town halls, they do a lot of engagements and team events and strategy sessions in person.

And so I think they've been able to create that engagement. We try and do the same thing.

We have an office in Toronto, we have an office in the lower mainland here, but we also have people in Calgary, people in Kelowna. We hired somebody down in the US who's running our revenue. And so we've got to start to think about the same things.

How do we make sure that we've got engagement and we bring people up to go on the boat, Tom's boat, and things like that and have some fun. And so when they come to town, it's, it's a bit of a special event.

We make sure that all of our technology is conducive of people feeling they're engaged in any meetings and things like that. We do company huddle, we have people join remotely as part of that.

And so everything you do, you just, you have to keep in mind that your, you know, that the team is working with you, is multifaceted and try and engage them as much as you can.

Yeah, it's something that I think all leaders have to really consider these days because the way in which younger generations want to operate and work is different perhaps than previous generations. So you have to kind of bridge the generational divide and that also I think can parlay to clients. Right.

So professional services, whether you're working with small or medium sized business owners, demographics is this someone who is a bit older or someone who's a bit younger. They need to be able to see you online and trust you and then ideally have a space to meet you in person.

Yeah.

Depending on the nature of the relationship. So it's, it's something that I don't think any of us are experts in at this point in time. We're trying to figure out what is this new normal.

Like Covid said, okay, everyone's virtual.

Yeah.

And we're post Covid and now it's like, okay, how do you blend that. Yeah. Professional experience in person with, with the digital. Yeah.

And now you've got sort of this national roster of professional services providers. How are you guys thinking about that as you kind of grow that group out? Yeah.

I think Covid did teach us that we can do business everywhere. It's interesting. I was kind of towards the end of my tenure at Salesforce, they were starting to have back to work mandates and things like that.

And I was probably sitting at the time on the fence of that of I think we've heard four years or whatever. We've been doing a pretty good job and being able to work from sort of anywhere.

And then I got back into a full time office environment than I am now and I'm like, I understand every CEO and why they said go back into the office because it is such a different environment. We're getting things done at lightning speeds.

And I think what AI has done or is doing is it is allowing the human connection that we potentially lost during COVID to come back and be at the forefront. And I do think that the benefit and even for businesses is that.

And that's again, it's a little bit why we built this model is let the experts who are great at what they're doing just do what they're doing. Right. Because that's where we're going to be off.

We're going to be able to help each other with everyone's business in a different way because we don't have to concentrate on the minutia. Again, going back to focus on growing your business, not on the operational minutiae. Well, let product do that for you. Right.

Like spend an hour with your lawyer. Don't hire somebody full time, don't sit on retainer for $10,000 burning every hour going, where is this money going?

If I send this email, am I going to get burned for 15 minutes? We're billing by Outcome.

So it doesn't matter how long it takes to get your employment agreement or your demand letter or your sal reviewed or whatever because it's by the outcome. So you're not sitting there counting, oh, I can't send this email because I'm going to get charged $250 for the 15 minutes. Right.

We are supporting your growth. And now you can be like, I'm going to talk to this lawyer for half an hour. I'm going to get everything I need.

The AI is going to build the file and the case for me, put it all together. The lawyer knows exactly what it is we need. They're going to just do the final brushover and get it to you.

And I can go concentrate on the communication, I can get back into the events, I can get back into the networking, I can go sit on roundtables, I can talk to other CEOs, I can, you know, I can be a part of the Terminal City Club or the Vancouver Club or whatever. And, and that's going to drive your business faster than anything else you concentrate on.

And so I think the, you know, platforms like Wistera is what's going to help us do that. And that's what I'm most excited about.

Yeah. At the end of the day, the technology just empowers us to spend more time on the relationships. That's especially professional services.

The most important part is being able to fully understand your client, to care for them and provide the best value added service.

And if the tech can do most of the boring work or help us get V1 or to V2 a little bit easier so that when you get to be 16, it's the actual best case for that particular client at a much more cost effective rate. That's, that's awesome. That's one thing, what we all need to do.

Yeah.

Now what's that? What's a mistake perhaps, Aaron, that you've made in the past as a leader that someone on the call today could learn?

I think it'd probably be easier to tell you not the mistakes I've made than it is the mistakes I've made. There's been so many I don't know. And I think that's what part of potentially the lesson is. Don't be afraid to make the mistakes.

You know, I say to my team so many times, race to find the mistake, race to find the problem, race to find the bottleneck. Because you can't solve something or you can't unblock a bottleneck if you don't know what it is.

And so I think a lot of leaders are very busy, but maybe not effective in the sense that speed these days is everything. Do not be afraid to go fast and do not be afraid to go too fast. You know, it's, it's like watching.

I remember many, many years ago I dabbled in this thing called acting and I remember being on stage and you'd have to walk from one side of the stage to the other. And while you're doing it on stage, you think that you are running. You think that you are moving so fast because there's some intention you have to.

And then you watch back in tape and you're like, I look like I was crawling. Why did that feel so much faster? And the analogy I'm trying to make a really poor one.

The analogy I'm trying to make is you may feel like it's going fast, but actually in this world you're probably going slow. Right. And so build that culture as a leader, especially as a CEO, to push it to go as fast as possible.

You're going to make mistakes, guaranteed you will not get it right. But you can only overcome them when you find them.

Yeah, no. Certainly made a lot of mistakes over the years. And each one is a learning experience. You know, I say to the team, it's either you win or you learn.

And every experience is an opportunity to do that. But if you're not taking swings, then you're not going to do either of those things.

Absolutely. So the greatest home ridder home run hitters in the world, easy for me to say, strike out way more than they hit home runs, for sure.

Yeah, yeah. It was a Roger Federer. I think he only wins like 52% of the time, but it's enough to crush, so. But he swings a lot more than most.

That's right.

Now, I've been following you on LinkedIn, Aaron. I've noticed you said traditional professional services is broken. Now, we've talked a bit about sort of how Vestera solves that.

But culturally, what do you think the challenge is with moving to perhaps the future state of what professional services could. Could look like?

Well, I think. You know what, again, I talked a little bit about the challenges we had. Attraction where we were growing so fast. Right.

Just from a growth and development standpoint, I think professional services today can execute in a completely different model. I think that some of the processes and some of the bottlenecks that you do have can be overcome by technology today.

We were developing the things that we are developing, the functionality in Vistera, the pivots we're able to make daily is astronomical. Every day it blows my mind of what we can do even from a development standpoint. So I think from that perspective it has to change.

Technology is making a change and if you don't change, you're going to get left behind because the client is going to expect what others are doing. And I think the entire concept of outcome based pricing and professional services people have been trying to solve that for years.

I remember even for us interaction we would say we could t shirt size these implementations.

Well if we'd done 10 of the same similar implementation, why wouldn't we know already that the price is this and then we can just go into fixed fee pricing and then we did a deal with that and then realized boom, that is dangerous because you know, nuance, a four person house looks significantly different when you get inside than the, than another one. So that problem has been trying to be solved for a long time.

I think technology and AI helps us get there now faster than ever before because all of that nuance can be done so much quicker than it ever could be done. And so that's what we're banking on with Vistera. But I still don't trust it.

So we still need those humans in the loop or what we call in the lead to make sure that what we're providing is top notch.

So I think if services organizations aren't thinking of outcome pricing and a way to get their clients cheaper, dependable, trusted engagements, I think they're going to get.

Left behind, tend to agree with you because information is abundant and it's easy to look at competition and compare. Now there's some aspect of prestige and well, you know, our business has been loyal with this company for 20 to 30 years.

For more say established companies, smaller companies have less of that sort of loyalty perhaps to some organizations and they've worked with and professional services, how, how does a technology LED platform get around that or build that level of prestige in the marketplace while still providing a easy access and great digital experience?

Yeah, I don't, I don't know if this will answer your question but you know, I think for, if you go to old business schools they'd say you can have, what was it? Speed, quality and inexpensive. You can pick two out of the three, but you can't have all three.

I think technology allows you to have all three now and I think that's what Fanstera does. It allows you to have the quality, speed, incredibly inexpensive.

And so right now we're very much focused on the small medium business because that is near and dear to my heart and I, you know, it's the leading grower of our GDP in terms of the business GDP, right. It contributes 44% of all GDP. There's 1.2.

I might get this slightly wrong, but somewhere around 1.2 million businesses in Canada, 1.1 million of them fall under 50 employees, right? So it really is the backbone of Canada. And so I'm very passionate about helping them succeed because I had people in my past that helped me succeed.

And if I had access to some of these technologies even a couple years ago when we were doing stuff, it would be very different.

But if you think of how much we can support even medium or large sized businesses, I think it's important to have a leader of your people team or your HR team. I think it's important and you get to a certain size to have someone who's got your legal interests at heart, who's there every day.

And I think it's important to have a really smart financial brain at your executive table. But let Visdura do the rest, right?

Let those people used the outsourced cheaper model to execute at scale rather than employee after employee after employee after employee.

We can save companies hundreds of thousands of dollars as they scale by using experts on demand when you need it, rather than the overhead that so many companies have to have. That kills them as they scale. They just can't survive.

It sinks them because they can't get margins in fast enough that, you know, their output never gets to where they, where they break even. So this tool can support, you know, small medium businesses, but also any scale. And I think that's what's going to change, right?

The you talk about the legacy and the brand recognition.

Well, the legacy model of, you know, not to name names of some of the big, the big firms, but a lot of their model was sit as many people butts in seats in these enterprise organizations and just get them to bill as much as they possibly can. Right. And just farm that account. Well, maybe an enterprise organization can consume that.

But if they're not already thinking about efficiencies and how they can use the technologies, I mean, you know, they are, right?

These organizations are thinking of that, you know, and if they've got these incumbents, especially in the small medium business space, well, any leader is going to take a look at their bottom line or piano and say if I, hey, if I can cut 100 grand, $150,000 off my bottom line, then my loyalty only goes so far.

Right.

Like I like you, but I Don't like you that much. So, you know, I think that's the kind of. We want to be incredibly trusted from a brand perspective.

We want to make sure that we are doing all of our due diligence and everything we can to make sure that all of the data, all the value information is secure and that we bring the great minds to the table across Canada. But then you only use them when you need them, and that could be half an hour a week, it could be 10 hours a month, it can be whatever.

It can be for five outcomes, it could be for 20. But you're only paying for what you need. And I think that's the brand we want to be.

So I don't know if that answered your question, but that's what comes to mind when you ask those types of questions.

No, it's wonderful to hear that strategy and that ambition because we need more productivity in this country.

And I think the best way to do that is to have all industries think about how we can leverage this new tech to provide as much value to each other as possible, rather than how do we simply just cut costs from existing enterprises so that they can make higher profits? That's not going to help small businesses grow.

So, yeah, I think your approach is the right one and I look forward to seeing the success in the years ahead and supporting how I can.

Thank you. Appreciate that.

You're working to become a pilot. What drew you down that path?

Top Gun.

You got the look already. Yeah.

You're too good. Well, I mean, I think when I was growing up, that was. That was kind of the. The movie for my generation of, you know, wanting to be the. Be the pilot.

But I've always been super interested in flying and really enjoyed, you know, the thought of. Of being in a plane, really a small plane. So, yeah, I got some, some lessons that I've been doing, which has been really, really exciting.

And I should knock on wood, but the flying of the plane is easier than I thought. I still haven't landed yet, which looks awfully difficult.

More opportunity for error.

Yeah, that's right. Yeah, exactly.

It's.

It's like the old saying. It's not the jump off the cliff that worries me, it's the sudden stop at the end that does. It's kind of like flying.

Getting up in the air and flying the plane is not the problem. It's putting it back on the ground.

So we'll have to let the AI take care of that.

Yeah, one day. Well, I'm sure it already does, really. I mean, I think for most pilots in commercial airlines, the plane does most of the work.

But I'm still glad they're there when something goes wrong.

100%. Yeah.

Hence the analogy.

Oh yeah. I was in air cadets as a kid, did. I did some flu, some gliders and that hadn't gotten back into aviation yet. So I'll look forward to joining you up.

Yeah, yeah, absolutely. I'd love that. Yeah, absolutely.

Now, I have heard from your team as well, Aaron, that you're. You're more of an experiences guy.

What do you think that means for I guess you as a leader and then as a team when you're building it, building culture?

Yeah, I think I've always been a traveler. I've always enjoyed seeing other cultures and other places and I'm not a big all inclusive person or cruise ship type of person.

I'm sure they're fantastic for people like those things. But I always like the smaller cities and the exposure and to the people and sitting in little cafes and.

And watch people go by and I find that more rewarding. I am a natural introvert by heart, which people always seem shocked at that.

And so I get a lot of energy by being introspective and thinking and those kind of experiences give me that. But what I do think from a cult, tying it back to culture.

I think what's important to remember is that everyone is a little different, especially in our organization. We have a lot of people, which is great, where they get a ton of energy from other people and they love being in those types of environments.

And there's other people like myself that I think I'm okay in those environments. I was about to say good, but I'm not sure that's the case. I think I'm okay in those environments, but it does drain a lot of energy.

So I need time then to recuperate and kind of react. Energize the social batteries. And so at work we need to. And in the office we need to understand that people are different in those ways.

And we have to give people.

Just because we have lots of fun things and arcades and doesn't necessarily mean everyone enjoys that there are people that love the cruise ship experience. Right.

And so as we're building a culture, we need to build one that's very, very inclusive for people who like lots of different things and have different life experiences and different life commitments and understand that everyone brings something to the table. And when we're working, we work hard and we're high performance and we're committed to Some really, really exciting things.

But during our downtime and during the things we enjoy, it doesn't necessarily all have to align.

Yeah.

And I think being a leader of evolving organization, one that's bridging the old and the new, you kind of need to be open to what that culture is going to look like as you bring in different perspectives, different team members, different partners over time. So.

Well, Aaron, this has been a great opportunity for me to get to know you a little bit more personally and more about the Vistera platform and how that's going to help solve, I would say, this evolution of legal services and HR services here in. Here in Canada. A couple final things before we wrap up.

First off, if anyone who's listening today wants to learn more about Astera and yourself, where's the best place for them to go?

Yeah, I appreciate for me that if you're interested in Vestera, you can go to. Do we say WWW anymore? Is that even a thing? It shows you my age. Bestera AI is our website, so you can learn more about there.

Obviously, I'm in LinkedIn, happy to connect with anyone. So if anyone, anyone has any questions, you can find me on, on LinkedIn. But yeah, I've really, really, really appreciated the conversation.

It's been fun. It's always great to chat with you. We all always appreciate your, your, your intelligence and, and how you bring topics to the table.

So I've enjoyed being here.

Thanks, Aaron. And last point before we wrap.

Yeah.

For any business leaders out there, what's one thing that you wish you knew before you got into a position of influence in business?

There's one thing I wish I knew. I wish I knew everything today that I know today that I didn't.

In my early years, I think sometimes I wish my body was younger, my brain was still the same age. You know, I think there was. There's been a lot of things that I think just the ability to. It's okay to take risks.

Like everyone is sitting in the same position. Not everybody has all the answers. We're all the same. We're all flesh and blood. We're all looking to do the same thing.

And through experience, you learn. And you can't learn unless I go back to the mistakes again. You cannot learn unless you just force yourself to be willing to.

I worked at a company called O2E Brands, which was led by Brian Scudamore. And he had this thing called wtf. But the analogy was willing to fail. And so, you know, I, I take that to heart.

You know, you have to be willing to fail. Not everyone has their own answers. You get some scars and some battle worms and, and that will help you get through.

But don't, don't be afraid to, to put your neck out and, and try some things.

Well, thank you so much for being here, Aaron. Really appreciate you sharing the time.

Thank you.

Great conversation.

Yeah, absolutely enjoyed it. Sam.