Starting a company, Consulting, Delegation

Welcome to Building Better Developers, the Developer Nord podcast, where we work on getting better step by step, professionally and personally. Let's get started. Well, hello and welcome back. We are into a new interview. We're going to be speaking with Jay Ogner and we're going to talk about starting a company. We've talked about these things so many times, but this is somebody that's done it, I think, more like a lot of you will relate to as a developer, as somebody that's working on that side hustle, trying to get that extra little project here, project there, using things like what is now Upwork or guru.com or some of these other sites to go out there, find a couple projects and start doing that side hustle, start to build up your consulting gigs, basically. And that's what he did. His focus is not so much development as it was in the testing world, but I think it's a very good story, essentially, and a path that any of us could take, although he does get a little bit outside of the, you know, he grew out of the technical world and we're going to hear about that and why. So it doesn't mean you have to go his route, but I think a lot of key pieces and important steps that he took are the kinds that are going to help you take your next step. So let's go ahead and get started on our conversation with Jay. Well, today we are speaking with Jay Ogner and we are looking at how do you start your own business? How do you get out there and do your own thing? He's done it in an area that maybe some of you are familiar with, where you sort of start in the, start in the automate, in the testing QA world and worked his way up from just himself doing a nine to five and now has a company and people working for him, which I think a lot of us would love to end up in that same boat. So that being said, I'm going to let him introduce himself and tell us a little bit about how we got there and we'll kick this conversation off. Thanks for having me, Rob. Yeah, so I started, I went to full sale. I want to make video games. And so I got my computer science degree. I wasn't the best programmer. I mean, I went, my roommate in college, who still works in the game industry, he was a wizard. I mean, they like, he was big name stuff after him at the school. He was so good. Like he was an incredible programmer. And I just didn't think that that was for me. And I kind of got bailed out. I got interviewed to be a QA engineer for a games company up here in Pennsylvania. And basically from there, kind of cut my teeth in front end, back end stuff and kind of digging into Linux and figuring out how some hardware and software interaction stuff work doing testing. You have to do some game design there, which was great. I've always loved doing programming stuff on the side. So I never lost that. I just, I enjoy doing it in a low stress environment. I, you know, I always, I'm not a very anxious person, but I did get anxious thinking of having people looking over my shoulder at my code and like, you know, having a deadline around it. So I got bailed out. I did QA. I bounced around to a couple of different places. You know, I was making 50 grand a year doing game design in QA for a touchscreen game company and had a kid or two and it just didn't make sense for me to kind of stay there much longer. So I went to a medical healthcare company doing interoperability and interfaces testing, which was much more technical, much more involved. You know, a lot of, you know, integrations and stuff we had to test and some, some pretty low level technical stuff we had to deal with. Realized that road was not for me as far as the big corporate, you know, environment that I used to call it the death march. People would do in and out of there every day, just like walk into the cube farm and, you know, just hating every second of being there. Again, I got bailed out. I got called up by a headhunter and said, Hey, you want to work at a startup? And I was like, uh, um, but it was the best decision ever made jumped off into the startup world. Kind of leapfrogged across a couple of different IOT companies and doing some QA and kind of work my way up to a senior senior engineer. And then my wife is an overweight, an overnight nurse for pediatrics. And I don't know if you've ever been to a lawn care facility for children. It is a horrifying place and very sad. And working there overnight was tough. And we had a couple of kids at that point. We're going to have another we're going to have another one. And so I had to try to figure out how to make more money in the same amount of hours in the day. I applied for Uber who turned me down. I have my license from Virginia and I lived in Pennsylvania at the time, so I couldn't work for Uber. Same thing with Lyft. I tried looking at overnight stock boy jobs. I was trying like anything I could do to like make more money. So I went online and looked up QA contracts and I found Helance, which was later merged with Upwork, which is the behemoth that it is today. Started doing contracts, picked up more and more, had a problem saying no to the money that I was making, figured out how to bring other people into work for me. And I had a couple of guys, my old boss that I used to be at the game company came to work for me and just started by me saying, hey, man, I've got this project 20 hours a week. Is that something you'd be interested in picking up in your spare time? And that was really how I started the company and kind of grew that across. So still my side gig, still had a couple of main jobs as I went. But, you know, at some point I was at three or four contracts, big contracts running. I had a nine to five. So like in between meetings or, you know, break time, I'd run to the stairwell to make a call or like out in my car or do whatever and just kind of doing the doing the hustle thing before work, after work, doing whatever. And I kind of just grew it to a point where I had to do it full time. I had an opportunity where my CEO, my now CEO was one of my contractors and she was fantastic. And she came to me and said, I'd love to work for you full time. I'm about to get a promotion in my job, but I'd much rather work for you. And I took a leap and I took a big hit financially to say, like, I'll pay you, you know, 100 grand plus a year out of my pocket to work for me. And it was the best decision I ever made. It freed me up to bring in more leads, bring in more contracts, be the sales guy, be the marketing guy. And, you know, that kind of just kept growing until, you know, today we have 60 plus people. We're three different continents. We have a ton of long term clients, you know, we do around two million a year. And it's a it's a great business. It's super flexible. I have five, six, number six on the way. Kids, I do astrophotography. I'm a student pilot like I have a podcast. So doing those things along the way kind of put me in the position where I am today, where I get to be doing the things I'm good at. I don't have to be a professional photographer. I'm good at. I don't I'm not involved in the day to day on the client projects, which all of my CEO is probably glad I'm not anymore just because, you know, I put better people in those positions to do better than I could ever imagine. So I've kind of built the business up to that point. And, you know, we're looking for five, looking for 10 million. We're just trying to kind of keep making those next steps for the business. And like you said, it came together over starting with a side hustle, starting with contracting. And I'm a huge consulting evangelist. I think everybody should do it. And I think I'm a huge delegation evangelist. I think everybody should do it. And yeah, that's that's kind of how I build things up to where they are today. Wow, that is there's a lot in there. There's a lot to unpack. The first one, I actually want to go all the way back to early on. You mentioned something that's very it was amusing to me that you said one of the problems you had or one of the challenges you had as a developer was the stress was, you know, people sitting over your shoulder. How did you go into QA and how was that less stress? It feels like to me that the QA role is always like, got to do it now, got to do it now, got to get the work done, got to get that thing out the door production. You know, it should have been out the door six weeks ago. Get every get, you know, 10 weeks of work done and three days and make sure that everything works fine. I think it's a really fair perspective on the QA world. We are certainly the last line of defense, as I like to say. I think because it's not abstract, you know, when you're sitting down to write code, it's very abstract. You have to kind of pull a bunch of pieces together. You can write the perfect code and it still doesn't work because of some dependency somewhere and some other thing and some, you know, build process didn't work. And there's just a lot to it, which again, in my free time, I love that. I love the kind of tinkering aspect of like figuring things out and why did this break and where did this error come from? But with QA, it's very straightforward. It's, you know, documented functionality. Does it do what it's supposed to do? And then you can build automation around that to kind of safeguard and get rid of some of those repetitious tasks that you're doing manually. There's performance testing where it's like, can people, 10,000 people use this thing and set up very clear, you know, parameterized tests to do that. And then, you know, security testing, can people get into it when they shouldn't be able to? So to me, I think it's a very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very it just was a more logical path and less abstract and it was much less stressful. Yeah, I mean, the time and the hours and like the demands were more stressful, but it was just very cut and dry. What was expected and what you put in is what you get out. And as you know, as a programmer, what you put in is definitely not sometimes what you get out. Otherwise, I wouldn't have a job. Right. So that was why I was less stressful to me. Oh, that makes a that makes a lot of sense. And yeah, it definitely is the. The lack of the lack of having a hard target sometimes because there are those things we say you get that you get that integration that suddenly should have taken two minutes to get done. You've lost two days working on adverse QA. It's like, you know, you've got your plan, you work through it and yeah, something may if everything breaks, it's going to take you a little longer to write up all of the bug reports. But it's like, hey, it's broken. This is all the ways it's broken. We did our job, you know, pat ourselves on the back. You can fix it. Yeah, you fix it. You fix it and I'll let you know if and then give it back to me and I'll let you get it correctly. Now, in the. When you're sort of starting out. How did you how did you look for it? Because I think a lot of people struggle when they're when they're going into that that consulting world, what was if you remember, what was a little bit of your experience getting like that first that first contract, that first job? I'm. Upwork for all its. Downsides and it certainly has gotten to be a tougher place to work today than it was back when I was doing it 10 years ago. It took a lot of this, the ambiguity and the stress out of finding a contract, number one, right, because you could just get a list and they're like, does this match what I can do, especially for a QA person, right? Here's the app when you tested, you documented, we need X, Y, Z. No problem. The requirements are very clear up front, so there's no wiggle room really of what the expectations were. So it was just you have to you have to learn to sell yourself a little bit. And as a business owner, that's something that I think all of us continue to work on doing as we get bigger and better is learning to sell yourself and your services more. But that's kind of the original. Skill that I think I learned that I didn't have was getting on a call, listening to somebody's pain points of, oh, my God, I can't test this thing anymore. I'm a CEO and I've got to go be doing these other things. And I could say, yeah, I can do that. Right. And you got to be confident and you got to kind of trust yourself that you can get it done. So, you know, those initial contracts, I think Spritzer was one of the apps, it was a social dating app where you could suggest friends, matches, you know, date matches for your friends on Facebook. You could say, hey, you'd be a good mattress. This guy, which is no longer around anymore, but they didn't have QA and they had some developers and they had some bugs that they were dealing with. And I came in and kind of did my normal. And that's where I haven't that's why I always say consult, right, because I knew what I was doing with QA. That wasn't the question. I can come in and I can test your application to see if it works or not. Like, that's not rocket science. Now, can I communicate that effectively to a developer and to a product person, and to a C level person, which is all different kind of types of communication? Those are the things that I kind of learned how to do better as I did more consulting. So kind of a long-winded answer to your question is learning to sell myself and learning kind of how to effectively communicate to the client that I was providing value. And once I did those things, picking up contracts, doing the sales calls, doing the scoping exercises that we would do, it kind of became second nature. And is that really why you recommend consulting is because it's sort of a trial by fire kind of thing, whereas it puts you in those situations where you basically have to sink or swim. You're going to have to learn how to communicate to them. And you're going to like every you're going to make mistakes along the way. But of course, you can hopefully you can learn from them so that you you do get better at communicating with the various levels and the sales side of it. And I think a little bit to get that confidence in yourself. It's like, hey, I've done this and I haven't just done it as a company, which for some reason, some people, a lot of people seem to think that I did it as a at a company, as an employee. But that doesn't translate to me doing as a consultant. But no, actually, 100 percent. If you could do it in an office, you can do it out of an office, basically. So there's there's some things like that. That is that really where you're is that your push towards consulting is to really understand yourself and others a little better. I think it's just that it's the best foot you can put in the door to starting your own business and getting out of the nine to five. You have the experience already. You know, like I said, you know how to do the thing. There is certainly a difference between. The expectations of a consultant versus the expectations of a nine to five, right? Because nine to five, you're like, I'm doing what I'm supposed to do. This stuff doesn't work. Go figure it out. Right. Like you can't bring that sort of energy to a consulting gig. Like you have to be the guy that's providing value to them because they're paying you in addition to all these other people they're paying. They're paying you to solve a very specific problem for them. So, yeah, I think the reason why I push people to consult is just. Doesn't matter if you're, you know, my cousins, a chemical engineer, my, you know, people in restaurant background, whatever. People will pay you for that experience. And that's, that's the part where I said, go consult is like, use that experience to start your side business, just to start your thing. And that kind of gives you the leg up because you know, you can do it. You've got the experience doing a nine to five. It's just a different setting and you got to learn to communicate a little bit differently, but you get the leg up because you've been doing it for somebody else. Now, did you go as you started into that, you start into your first or second, your third contract and started going into that. You said it's, which I think is a common thing is if you've got a side hustle that starts basically where it's like, if you go to your day job, it's costing you money to go to your day job as opposed to your side hustle. It's usually a good idea to move to the side hustle. It's there right now. It's time to take that leap. And it sounds like that's sort of the progression you did. Was there a, was there before you got to that point or maybe even at that point, had you really thought about turning it into something you could do on your own? Was it really, was it really a, you know, a, you know, a, you know, a really more of that reacting to, Hey, I've got to, I've got to earn enough money to, you know, feed myself and my family and sort of that almost that acting out of desperation in a sense of like, Hey, I've got to, I've got to make this, I've got to make it happen. I'm the person. The desperation thing caused, you know, push me to do the side hustle. I would say, um, once I, once I realized I could pay somebody else to work for me, have a client pay me an amount and I get to keep the difference. That was the light bulb moment for me where I was like, I was, you know, I had, I had four or five contracts and I had another one come in and I said, I can't do this. I can't take on more work. How do I, it's kind of the same problem I had before I started consulting. It's like, how many, how do I get more hours out of the day? It's the same exact problem, but it's with the business side. It's I have too many contracts. How do I get more hours out of the day? And it's to hire somebody else. And when you make that initial, when you flip that switch and you go, holy shit, I can pay somebody 25 an hour. The client's going to pay me 50. I make $25 an hour to do nothing other than to connect these dots. That's the, I mean, I remember run up and down my steps, trying to forget a name to put on my first contract to start my business. Cause I was just like, how do I, I don't even know what to do. Um, but that was the light bulb moment where I went, okay, now I can scale Jay up, right? Like there's only one me, but if I can scale out what I'm doing by making, having other people that do it just as good or better than I do, I mean, the sky's the limit and that's really where, and I still kept it as a side hustle for years and the money was great. I mean, I was a senior executive at a FinTech company and I still had this business run on the side. And then, you know, I got forced into doing it a couple of times. I got laid off from a telecom company where I was the director of QA there and director of product. And then I was a CTO, chief product development officer at a FinTech company. And I got laid off there and both of those times I leaned into the side hustle now and retrospect doing that senior executive job at the FinTech company. I probably could have used that year or two to just grow the business and, you know, I'd be ahead of where I am now. But I mean, I'm glad I had that experience, but I got pushed into it. And I was like, it's either go find another job or take this thing that I've kind of developed and is, you know, it's making, I don't know, whatever it was back then, 500 grand a year or something, or, you know, a million a year, maybe, you know, just gross revenue. I knew I could support my family with that, but it was just like, okay, do I really want to be a business owner? And the answer was yes. So that's kind of when I left that is I got pushed into it a couple of times. And sometimes it takes that. Sometimes we have to have a little of that, you know, that kick in the butt to get us to take that step to get there. Well, healthcare, having healthcare is a powerful thing, brother. That is, yeah, but that was something, you know, I'd be interested to hear your experience because I've always heard that that's like, you know, that's one of the big things that's hung around people's neck. And I know, and I know young people that I'm at that age, I know a lot of, you know, my kids and a lot of younger people, that's one of their things like, Hey, we're at a point we need healthcare. But I actually ended up not having that much of an issue finding it. It was, it was one. Now, granted, I didn't have a whole lot of, of special cases or anything that at one point, the worst thing is I had somebody that had a preexisting condition where we had to, I had to pay for Cobra for just that one person. And then the rest of the family was actually covered for like a 10th of what it costs to do that, you know, the one person Cobra coverage. But it ended up not being too much of an issue. And I was at something for you that was, was always a hold back until you basically turn into a company or was it something you just sort of transitioned over and was this pretty smooth move? It's the biggest BS reason not to do your own business, man. Like you said, I mean, there's so many things that people use as excuses not to start their own business, mainly just because they're scared and it is scary. It's scary thing to do, go out and do it on your own. But yeah, I mean, is healthcare expensive? Absolutely. Does it suck? Absolutely. But like, am I making way more money now? And I'm a way happier and way more flexible now that I have my own business a million percent. So yeah, it's, it's just another one of those things where it's like, you know, benefits and insurance and whatever. Like it's not, it shouldn't hold you back. If you've got, if you've got something clear cut where you can go out and do your own thing, a services based business or some sort of product that you know is going to be successful. Yeah, it should not hold you back. Now, as you transition, cause you were, you know, you're, you're hustling all along early on and just scrambling to get, you know, make ends meet and get things going and now the business is starting to grow. Was it difficult to transition into that? You know, other than the, Hey, they pay me X and somebody else gets Y and I get the difference of it. Was there, was it difficult to start sort of releasing some of that work off to somebody else and say, Hey, I'm going to, I'm going to let them go. And, and especially, like you said earlier, is, is finding those people that can do it better than you could anyways. And so you, you raise the quality and you get a, you know, get to make a buck on the end as well. Um, I think just having, uh, I dunno, I, I do pride myself in my ability to read people pretty quickly and starting with some trusted people definitely helped me. Um, I mean, I must've interviewed thousands of people at this point in my career. So, uh, I've even trained my team to do that part of it now where like they interview people based off of what my characteristics and my standards are for meeting people. And I've been shocked how well they've been able to bring people in that, that I would have hired and said no to the people that I wouldn't have hired. Um, yeah, it's a trust thing. It's another excuse, right? Like, Oh, I couldn't, I can't possibly hand stuff off, but like, yes, you can. The worst thing is somebody screws up and you lose it. It's literally the worst thing is you lose a client. Like that's literally it. There's no, they're not going to shut you down. They're not going to, you know, I mean, I guess unless you're doing like you're building rockets or something and you kill somebody, like, I mean, there, but there's no, you're doing software as a service or some sort of service thing, but hire somebody you feel like you can trust, you know, ask them blunt and legitimate questions and give them a shot. And you know, you'll find the ones that work and the ones that don't. I mean, I think over the last 10 years, I've had, you know, three or four people that I read wrong out of a thousand, you know, I mean, it's, it's really not been many, it's just, you start to do it and you start to realize like, who are the good people? What do they talk like? What do they act like when they show up? Do they not show up? And then you kind of start to develop like a pretty good mental picture of the people you want working for you. So yeah, it's once I got the first guy in, who still works for me today, by the way, great friend of mine. Um, it just kind of snowballed from there. It was, it was, it was the release of that trust. And I don't even think it was even trust. It was just finding the client that would trust me to do that. Right. Cause on Upwork, you build a profile around yourself and I was doing, I had to do the tap dance for a while of like, Hey, it's not really me. It's like my team that's going to be doing it. You know, this is my profile, but like, so that was an interesting kind of transition, but, um, eventually I just got away from it and I stopped talking like that and I said, no, you're talking to me about my team, right? I mean, that's, that's the kind of bar that was set. There's no, I'm not doing the work, but my team is, and we're fantastic. And these are all the things we can do. Tell me your pain points and I'll tell you how we'll solve them. Um, that was kind of, it just became second nature at that point to start bringing people on hand stuff off. Yeah, that's interesting. I mean, that I'm in that transition as well, where it's, you know, you have that, that profile, it's very much, you know, the, you, in that case, you know, you're going through it and you're, you're the one that everybody knows. You've built all that experience and all that. And it goes into that idea, as you mentioned earlier, of scaling yourself. And that's a lot of people that's their, that's their blockers. They get to a point where they don't, they don't have the, whatever it is, the skills or the knowledge or, or understand the next steps to take it from here's what I know on what I can do in being able to pass that off onto other people and still bring what you bring to the table, that special stuff that you bring to the table, but then also pass it off in a way that other people can do it. And, you know, either filters through you or you, uh, you know, by osmosis sort of other people pick up your traits as it sounds like you did. So it's like, yeah, this is, this is maybe who I, you know, who I was a while back, but now that same persona is just happens to be a team of people instead of one person. Yeah, I agree. Now, how did you, um, one of the things that you mentioned early on is I didn't want to talk it into a little bit is the, says you like, you're working on private pilot license and you've got podcasts and all these other things. Is how did you sort of transition into doing some of those other stuff? Cause it sounded like you were just, you know, wall to wall working your butt off for quite a while. Was there something that triggered that? Or is it just something where you finally get to a point where you're like, Hey, I've got a free hour. I want to do something with it. Or how did you sort of progress away from being that death march kind of an approach? Uh, it was a couple of things. One was hiring my chief operating officer autumn. She basically installed an operations layer at my company. So my job became sales and marketing. And when your job becomes sales and marketing and not managing projects and not doing onboarding and not doing scoping and not doing contracts and not doing customer retention and all these different things that I was doing. Your time magically frees up. Um, now at that point, I was still doing the chief product development officer stuff at the FinTech company. Um, but even there was kind of flexible. Um, you know, I kind of. The C-suite. So I was kind of doing strategy and stuff, which, you know, if anybody tells you they work 80 hours a week, it's like a C-level person at a semi successful company. They're probably lying to you. So I started free up there, but then I got laid off. And, and I mean, I keep saying I got laid off. It was an interesting end at the company, but kind of both split ways. We kind of felt it was time and, um, I think that was the end of the, the um, yeah, I had worked really hard and. I told her I retired for like six months. I like, I just, I kind of just stopped doing stuff, started working my pilot's license, you know, really focused on my astrophotography community that I built up and, um, the hobby of astrophotography really kind of leaned into that. It's been a ton of time with my kids. And then, um, I guess 20, nine or 20, 20 ish. Um, I really just leaned into doing the things I kind of figured out what I needed to be doing. I was like, okay, uh, I need to, I need to be the guy who brings business in. I need to land sales. I need to tee things up so that the next call, the scoping call with my team that does the scoping for the projects, they have what they need, the information they need, the clients prepped, ready to go. And if I do all that, then I can spend my other time doing other stuff. Like I like doing, uh, I like to work on the business too. Like I love running a business. It's like super interesting to me, like investing in, uh, automation tools, like LinkedIn, I use, you know, a bunch of automation tools for outreach and I do try to do some content marketing on there and, um, you know, outbound email stuff using like different tools like Apollo and, and, uh, robots and using, uh, dripify for LinkedIn and like all these different tools, that stuff's exciting to me. And so it excites me and it grows the business and I kind of get out of everybody's hair where like they get to do, they get to do what, you know, they're good at, I get to do what I'm good at and everybody's happy. Um, so again, a long winded answer to your question, but, uh, I mean, I've always been into hobbies forever. I love having hobbies. I can't, I can't understand how people don't have a million hobbies that they want to do at all times. Just who I am. Um, but, and I, you know, I've always, even when I had a nine to five job, my family was number one priority, never got like, never missed anything, you know, any date, you know, big events or anything because of work. Um, and never really sacrificed my hobbies, like playing video games or doing home electronics stuff with Arduino and Raspberry Pi, like all that stuff. I love doing that. And I always just kind of found time to do it. And then as it freed up more and more, you know, I almost, I had to dial it back. I was, I was doing too much stuff that wasn't, you know, growing the business and it was fine and everything was good, but you always have to kind of be feeding the machine and there's like that 30 90 rule or if you're not, uh, you know, your next 30 days of prospecting and getting clients, uh, will kind of dictate your success and how many sales calls and all the other things you have over the next 90 days. So like that's wrong. Pretty true for me. So I mean, working in the business is fun for me, but I've always been a hobby guy. So just kind of having that time free up was huge for me. And we will pause there. Never fear. We are coming back as almost always for part two. Uh, we're going to continue our conversation with Jay. We're going to talk about how he got to where he is today. And, uh, I think again, this is one of those you're going to want to take some notes, you're going to want to maybe even pause and re-listen to a couple of these pieces as we hear how he has grown his business, how he has, you know, we've got sort of that backstory now we've talked about where he came from and it should seem as, as common as anything else out there. There's no, you know, super rich parents or incredible mentor or anything like that, that suddenly stepped into his life. It was just people he worked with slowly found the right people to work with and built a business from there, showing us that any one of us could do the same thing. It just takes some time, takes some effort and a little bit of patience. We're going to come back next time, talk a little bit more of that and continue going through Jay's story. Till then go out there and have yourself a great day, a great week. And we will talk to you and Jay. Thank you for listening to Building Better Developers, the Develop-a-Noor podcast. You can subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, Amazon, anywhere that you can find podcasts. We are there. And remember just a little bit of effort every day ends up adding into great momentum and great success. Hi, this is Rob from Building Better Developers, the Develop-a-Noor podcast. We're excited to be on Alexa now. You can enable us by simply saying, Alexa, enable Building Better Developers. And we will be there ready for you every time you want to listen to your now favorite podcast. Whether we are your favorite podcast or not, we would love to hear from you. So please leave a review on Amazon.