Upgrading Your Business - Save Time And Improve Efficiency

Welcome to Building Better Developers, the Developer North podcast, where we work on getting better step by step, professionally and personally. Let's get started. Hello and welcome back. We are Developer North. We are the Building Better Developers podcast. We are continuing this season, getting close to the end of building better businesses. This episode, I'm not going to make you wait. We're actually going to talk about upgrading your business. Now, how we talk about upgrading it, that you're going to have to wait for. You're not going to have to wait for me to introduce myself. My name is Rob Brodhead. I am one of the founders of Developer North, Building Better Developers. Also a founder of RB Consulting, where we are what they call a boutique consulting kind of place. It actually is funny. Somebody asked me the other day, actually the other day being today, what is boutique consulting? My thought on it is that you have your general consulting companies, especially in the IT world, that basically just throw bodies at a problem. So it's like, hey, you have a problem. We have people. They have skills. We're going to send them to you. We're going to bill you for them. Boutique is a little bit more of like, we have a specific set of skills. We have specific problems that we're going to work with you on. And it's really more of a partnership kind of thing where we're going to help you do better. We're not there to like just throw hours at you. We're actually there focused on solving problems, not just throwing random resources at you. I know that seems a little insulting to some consulting companies. So if so, call yourself Boutique then and make sure you actually do that. The way we work is we sit down with our customers. We talk about their business and understand what is it? What is the secret reference, the special recipe that you have that you're going to sell to your customers? Why are you special? What do you do? And then within that and understanding your business and how you approach things, we're going to help you figure out what is the best set of tools that you have out there. It's using technology, maybe even your people and things like that. How do we build a better business? Sort of that infrastructure for you to do business better. We do that through simplification, integration, automation, innovation. There's a lot of shuns out there and we use all of them, whichever it is that we need to, to help you move from sort of lost and trying to figure out what you want to do to having a plan, a roadmap and then executing on that roadmap so that you are in a better place for today, tomorrow, for months and years down the road. All right, good thing, bad thing, bad thing. It is I'm in the I'm in Nashville, Tennessee, in the time of year where there's like storms, tornadoes, hail, everything. It's just it's always fun here. So yesterday, I totally had to live through it. I had to I had to drive what should have been 10 minutes away. It took like 30. And at one point, which was sort of funny as I'm sitting there about to leave pouring down rain and I'm like, I'm going to wait a few minutes because I don't want to walk through this pouring down rain to get to my car in the time that it waited for like between when I sat down and when the rain abated enough for me to leave was only like two minutes. But my estimated time to reach my destination went from 30 minutes to almost an hour. And then I got on the road and was able to make a couple of things that I was initially I got it down to 45 and I got it down to about 30 minutes and got there. But it's just a bad thing because it sucks when you like get out on the interstated. You can't see 10 feet in front of you and everybody else has got the red blinkers going on and all that kind of stuff. And it's just it's just slow and exhausting to do so. Good thing is that my youngest is getting close to his capstone project. And we got to spend some time with him. He's he's in film and was directing his film for his capstone project. And we got to hang out with him and film crew and do all kinds of stuff there as far as like, you know, helping out and even do a little bit of acting and stuff like that. I didn't. But we helped with some of those and got some people in there. And just it was a good old time hanging out and just being behind the scenes, watching that kind of stuff go on. So as always, sometimes it sucks to watch the sausage get made, but sometimes it's actually really cool to do so. That was my good thing for this week. A mediocre sort of Mac kind of thing this week is that Michael is over there, but he's going to make it better with an incredible introduction. Go for it. Hey, everyone. My name is Michael Milos. I'm one of the co-founders of DeveloperNUR, Building Better Developers. I'm also the founder of Envision QA. We are, like Rob mentioned, we are very tailored to more of a boutique style company where we work with businesses really walking through how your business work. But we do it through the tester's eyes. We do it from the user's perspective. So we spend a lot of time understanding how your business works, what the problem is that you're having, how to solve it and really understand how it all works. So at the end of the process, we can build you a custom solution that works for your business to streamline the process and make things work better. Or we can help you find a custom system or cookie cutter system on the shelf, which may be cheaper and may get the job done without having to spend a lot of time developing. We look at both the pros and the cons. At the end of the day, we try to save you money and give you the best solution possible. Good thing, bad thing. Rob, you already mentioned the weather, so I'm not going to touch on that. Good thing I have been working on a very difficult project for months now. And I've had a particular task that was assigned to me that I started working on sometime early April. This is a legacy monolithic mess of an application. And after weeks of working through this, 90% of the problem being not having access to the systems I needed access to, which people didn't know what you needed access to. So it's one of those where you kind of peel back and again, whoops, roadblock, whoops, roadblock. Well, needless to say today, I finally was able to push the button to commit the code, wrote the test, everything worked. It went in finally job done moving on. So that's one of those great moments. You just kind of like, yes, I checked something out, but it's a big side of relief. It's like, yay, party time. Bad thing. It's that time of the year. It's you'll be watching this probably after Memorial Day, but my mom passed away back in 2019 on Memorial Day pre-COVID and well, it was kind of bittersweet. My relatives went to visit the grave today, took some pictures. I got that. So it's a reminder of that time of year, you know, you lose loved ones. So that was kind of bittersweet getting that. So that was kind of my bad this week. Well, let's try to bring it up a little bit here and talk about upgrading your business. Now, the thing that got me thinking about this topic, for those of you that weren't there in the pre-game here beforehand, the pre-show is looking around at some of the just, for lack of a better word, the toys that I have and some of the technology that I actually have acquired and intentionally done so as part of my business over the years. I can go very, very far back because I can go back to the point where I had an actual fax machine because there was a day where like you really needed one for a business sort of. I don't think I use it that much, but theoretically you needed to have one. I also had a speakerphone, this was before you had cell phones and stuff like that. So I had a nice little one of these that you can put out there and you can talk to people. I've had wireless stuff over the years and things like that. And then eventually it's things like desktops, laptops, tablets, all the good things like that, including like now, I was looking around at some of the things like extra screens so that you can have your laptop, but then you can have like two or three extra screens there. If you could have a desktop that you have these really wide areas of views and things like that. Yes, these things are toys to some extent or they're like bonuses and bells and whistles, but there's also value to them. And I want to talk about not only that, but there's also more direct things like software and things like that. There's a difference between having a really like crappy, you know, male client from the 90s versus having something that is a, you know, something modern. There's a difference there is and people can get into religious discussions almost about this, about things like having an alternative software to something, for example, for a long time. And there are big camps on this, but there's like Photoshop that was expensive and still is not the cheapest thing. And then there are other things out there like a DaVinci and some of those that are going to be, you know, priced differently. But in some cases, there is going to be a productivity cost. Sometimes there's not. And that's what I talk about is stepping into somebody's things with looking. And this is one of those, it's like a, it really is a business checkup kind of thing, is looking at the things you do on a regular basis. And not only that, really, it's the things that your employees do on a regular basis. And considering, is it time for me to get something better? Is it time for me to invest in my business? Now, this can include things like training. You know, maybe it's your employees are just, they're struggling to use, like, let's say you go in and you're like, okay, we're going to go use HubSpot and we're going to use the free version. And that's going to help us with our customer relationship management. Maybe it's going to set up our website, some things like that, because it says it can do it. So it's like, great, we're going to do this. But then you get it and your employees are losing days trying to figure out how to just use it, that they don't have those skills. And a lot of times some training will help get them over the hump or sometimes even more than that. It will go from totally useless to, you know, super awesome employee because now they know how to do it. Now they've been trained on it. But of course, you know, some of these things you're going to find, it's like, I'm going to train them, but to train them, I'm going to pay plane tickets and I'm going to pay for a hotel for a week. And then I'm going to pay thousands of dollars for a training class and all of that. You're going to look at it and say, geez, do I really want to spend twenty thousand dollars training two of my employees to enter data into a system that I just spent fifty thousand dollars to do? And I'm making up numbers, but it feels like that or maybe worse. And then the bottom line is in a lot of cases, yes, it actually is valuable. That's the whole reason that people can honestly, that's the reason they can charge that amount of money for their training and some of the things they do. Not everybody is like us where we are just out here throwing stuff at you all the time. There are a lot of people out there that that's their that is their business. That is what they do. That is how they make money. And the reason they make money is because they bring value. They're not just randomly saying, OK, we're going to sit in front of a computer and say, we're going to sit in front of a video camera for several days with a class full of people and just charge random amounts. There is a value to it. They can see that, hey, yes, you're going to spend five thousand dollars for this class. But if you're a typical employee, you're spending, let's say, you know, it's a fifty thousand dollar a year salary. You don't have a lot of time that you have to save before now you're starting to wreck, you know, 10 percent of their time over however much time, let's say, some 10 percent of their time on a week for the rest of their career. Well, depending on how long they're with you, you're probably going to earn that money back fairly quickly. So, you know, there's a lot of things like that that you want to take into account. And the things I think I'm going to do is I'm going to throw it out to you real quick because I can see I. So I have a question for you. So your idea there prompted a question I want to throw at you that I think goes well with this. So when it comes to training your employees, what is your thought of training versus hiring a more senior developer for the cost to train your employees? This is and it's not just a senior employee, there are some cases where it's it's training your employee versus hiring a specific set of skills. So, you know, let's let's broaden that a little bit. And that includes things like honestly, it even includes things like people with college degrees, but also with certifications, with experience. You know, you're going to get cheaper if they don't have experience. If they just come out of college, they just need a job. They're not going to require a lot. But if they've been doing this for 40 years, they're going to want a pretty serious salary. There's a lot of stuff that goes into that. Now, this is where I am more of a do as I say, not as I do kind of person, because myself, I am very quick to invest in the higher end. I am not going to sit there and especially with my business and with that kind of stuff, I do not find it valuable to go for, you know, to lowball the situation. I would rather get somebody, you know, like a developer that is more skilled and spend some more money than I would. Then I would sneeze and I'm going to put that there. So hopefully you can pick that up later because we can edit that one out. I want to be able to I find that if I don't spend the money upfront, I'm going to end up spending more time bringing that resource up to speed. And time is the thing that I just I'm I am not a fan of wasting time. So I will spend more money. I will hire. I will. And I have been in these arguments. I'm one of my favorite that I was right with a with a company many, many years ago. There is a guy that was like he was he was decent. He was really green, though, like, you know, maybe one, two years experience. And then we had a guy on the other end that was and now I think he's like a C level C suite person somewhere or something like that, very accomplished, very skilled person, but was literally going to cost over twice as much to hire him. And I argued quite a bit. I was like, we need the double salaried person. Now, granted, that wasn't coming out of my back pocket, but it was something that was like in our budget, stuff like that. So there was the I had skin in the game. We hired the cheap person. They ended up being not useful, not effective. And we came back later. And after, I don't know, it's a few months, I think that person went away and we were able to go back and get the better person, the more expensive person and honestly better as well for the position and better as a human being. John, if you're out there, you probably aren't listening to us. The very good guy. And that was one of these that I had I said, I was like, I was right. I was like, we should have spent the money early on. We would have saved a lot. And you got to think about with employees. That's actually a very big thing is that you don't want there's a cost to church. So if you're going to get somebody, you're going to have to either spend the time and train them, or you're going to have to make sure that you bring somebody in and then you got to watch out for like, oh, I spent all this time training them. And then they go on to something else. So now they're worth more anyways. And I've got to pay them more. I think about that with, with tools as well. You could get the freebie version and stuff like that. And now it's nice that you have a lot of this software as a service and cloud things that they will scale up with you. But in the past, there's been a lot of situations where you're going to sit there and go, you know what, I don't want the community version or the free version. There's too much that I get out of the enterprise version, but there's value to me. So what are your thoughts on that? Yes. I was hoping you would throw that one over to me because I am the biggest cheapskate when it comes to things along that line. I look for the free option in everything I can possibly do because I'm a strong believer in open source and also, you know, been around for a long time, you know, WordPress or I forget, uh, Correll, uh, Correll and Microsoft hand in hand over office and word perfect or works or whatever the hell they were back in the day. Now you have Libre, which really is a good alternative to Microsoft office. You have GIMP, which is a more complex tool than Adobe Photoshop. Um, there's always a tool out there that you can do on the cheap. The question you run into is, is the time to learn the tool. Costly versus buying something off the shelf. So like Libre, no, you can download Libre boom. It is fairly simple, almost identical to Microsoft office. GIMP versus Photoshop. There is a learning curve to GIMP versus Photoshop. There's a lot of things that are similar, but GIMP can be a little less forgiving if you don't know what you're doing. So you have to spend a little time training up on that. So if there are trade-offs to all these, the question is, what is your return on investment? Are you spending more time learning the tool versus using the tool? Uh, that is usually my kind of go to, to determine what to use. The other thing you've got to be careful of, especially for small businesses is. Are you reaching the point that community additions are violating the licensing of the community addition? Um, I have not quite reached that point, but there I've been with companies where we were small, quick startup, a great, we can use all these tools, but then you reach a point that you can't. And if a internal or an external software audit is done on your company, you're going to find that, Oh crap, I'm out of compliance. I'm now going to be billed X number. So you have to be careful to watch out for those things. So if you are using free tools, community additions, open source, make sure you understand the licensing before you get too far into these tools. If you're just a small one-off person, just doing things here, probably fine. But as you grow, this is something you definitely need to add to your tuneup or your business, uh, upgrade ideas. Uh, the other thing along that line that we're talking about is you mentioned, um, tools a while back. Well, in the world of cloud-based development today, you know, we have things like a doctor, you have AWS, we have all these tools that we can use to throw up virtual environments and to go from tools to like your workforce development, a lot of times make sure that the software you're using, not just. The tools, but your environments, make sure they're all up to date. Make sure you're not running into something that is running into security risks, especially if you're dealing with things like HIPAA, uh, healthcare, banking, things along that lines, make sure that what you're using is still compliant, also make sure that you're not running into zero day crap. Make sure that your windows is updated, your Mac's updated, your devices are updated, make sure you stay compliant and up to date, because a lot of people can fall behind on that and you run into the situation where crap, uh, this bug came out and whoops, now my software is down. Let me throw that back to you, Rob. Uh, I know I kind of tally it a little bit. Yeah, this is, there's definitely that side. Um, and I think this is where it's, I want to go back too much on that. We have talked about that a little bit in security and some things like that. So I do want to swing back around a little bit to the, uh, the equipment and the training side of it is really the things, and this is, yes, it's a little bit about your customers and things like that. So it may be like, um, purchasing, you know, having a really good license for some maybe help desk software or outsource outsourcing your help desk to somebody that is going to do a better job than your, you know, your employees. But sometimes it is more cost effective, obviously to do that kind of stuff. It may be that it, you know, everybody hates the offshore help desk, but that is cost effective at times. And then there's also now AI is starting to be a part of this and things like that, where it's like, there are cost savings, but then there's also these where it's, you're, you're not really sure it's, and it is like time. Like I said, I'm very, uh, cognizant and intentional about time, but also it is something that is, it's very easy to, uh, to lose it when you're thinking, lose it in the calculations where you're saying, Hey, bottom line, I spent a thousand dollars on this person or on this hardware software or whatever it is. Where is my bottom line increase? You don't see directly that I did this and it saved an hour a day, which, you can do your math then and say, okay, now that means that I earned that thousand dollars back that month, next month, six years, however long it was. You know, we keep talking about employees, but the other thing we have not mentioned that does fall into this category is our time because you and I have done this a lot where, Oh, I can do this quickly. And I think in my mind that, Oh, I'm saving money by doing it myself quicker when actually you might be costing yourself more money over time. And that's exactly it. Is that you may be doing something that you're like, okay, it takes me five minutes to do it, it's not that big a deal, but the cost savings of buying that other thing of upgrading or whatever it is suddenly can make a big difference. I go back to an, Oh, I had very like a more in your face kind of example of back in the day when people were, this is a developer kind of thing, but, and even actually, I think across the board, it would take sometimes minutes to boot your machine in the morning. So people would come in and they would, they always had to turn their machine on and boot it up and it would take literally minutes. So it was literally something where you could like come in, you turn your machine on, you go get yourself a cup of coffee, you come back, you're talking to people for a little bit, and then finally you can actually like log in and do work. Just to go to a machine or wireless or some of the things now that we have, where it's just like, it's basically instant on you've saved several minutes, but now you've saved five minutes a day over a week, you're talking almost a half an hour, you're talking a couple hours a month. That stuff adds up. Same thing, although it's going to be harder to measure are things like getting a modern machine versus something that is just, that isn't visually, some people are like, Oh, nobody needs a big screen. Nobody needs a wide screen for their work, but depending on what you do, and there was a lot of people that are not developers, accountants are a good example where it is very valuable for them to have a nice big screen where they can have two spreadsheets up at the same time, or they can be reading a spreadsheet or a report while they're entering it into the accounting system. There's things like that. There's a lot of places where having better equipment actually helps quite a bit. And this goes back, I will throw this back to one of the very first places I worked at, this guy was the development manager was coming in and they were starting a new software development wing in this consult consulting company. And his, one of the stipulations of him coming into work at the company as a development manager was that he was going to be able to have the budget to buy the highest end machines for his developers, which at that point literally made a big difference of hours a day, probably that we spent working instead of waiting for things to compile and things to read, recompile and regenerate and all that kind of stuff that the machine was, would take large amounts of time. And of course the stronger machine, the faster machine allows you to get through it faster. And that's where you may not have to worry about it too much, but things like having a better, you know, internet connection or higher speed wireless or having wireless that is consistent, things like that in your business of, yes, it costs money. Yes, it is. It's infrastructure and investment there, but there is a huge value in doing so because there is return on your employees time. I'll tack on to that slightly before we get to the challenge, but just a good case of point, this is just, this is not just for developers. This also runs it to all levels of business. And I will throw this out because I had a customer over a decade ago that I had for almost 11 years before he passed away. But he had this, he was a property management business where he would go buy in industrial properties and things like that and contract that. Not a, not a software developer, a business user. So he was using all of his computers for business word, Excel, you know, QuickBooks literally just to keep his systems running. I would have to come in on a Friday night and spend six hours updating three machines to the latest software updates, backing everything up. It took me six years to convince him to upgrade to the current level of systems. I mean, we're talking business level. He didn't want to go developer level. My time to upgrade his systems went from six to 12 hours to two hours. Right there is a huge savings. So again, don't think of this just as a developer's, what I need from my developers. What do I need for my business in general? So if you have secretaries, accountants, make sure you look at how long it is taking to do these system maintenance. And is it worth upgrading versus just maintaining? So that brings us to the challenge is take a look at your business. If you're, if you have employees and spend a lot of time just watching what they do during the day. This is actually, I had a recommend this on a regular basis. Cause it, and it's not so that you can figure out if they're like, you know, playing solitaire or something like that, it's because you will learn where they're spending their time and be able to help address those issues. Because that's part of what you want to do is help your employees work better, be more effective, be more productive. If it's you as you're going through the week, where are the times you're sitting there like tapping your thought is tapping your fingers, waiting for something to happen, where are the times that you are tempted to go off and catch up on Facebook or something like that? Cause you're like, okay, this is going to take a while or that you get lost reading email or things like that. Honestly, just the times you get lost reading email, maybe there's something that would be worth it to invest in software that like puts a big red warning light when you've spent more than five minutes in email or things like that. There, some of these are, yes, they are restrictive and they feel like, oh my gosh, that's the Gestapo tactics, but they're not these are things that we do to ourselves as well, because we know that we can get squirrelish, we can sit there and go, oh, there's a squirrel. And the next thing you know, we are off on something else. Instead of doing this stuff that we really want to do. And this is even our cell. Like I know myself, I shut down notifications on a regular basis and now like live with my phone, pretty much not notified me of anything except for my, like my kids get through. And now I actually resent my kids sometimes cause they'll just be like, they'll send something, some dual text. And I'm thinking, okay, are you dead? Are you on fire or what? And no, it's just, they want to show me a cat video or something like that. However, see, I digress. That's why we put these things in place. And that's what I want you to do is take a look at where are you spending your time? Where are the, and it's not the things that we get distracted by as much as it's like, what are the things that are actually like these little thieves of time that are in our daily and our weekly routines that maybe we can like find a way to improve it. And it, you know, it would be extreme to say, yeah, you know, it would be nice if I had a car that could go a hundred miles an hour so I could get to work faster. Okay. Maybe that's not quite it, but there are things like that. There are things like, and it is my, my employees. That's why there is a phone stipend. There is an internet stipend cause they all have internet. I'm like, spend this to upgrade your internet. It's things like that. Make sure they've got a modern phone and not some little thing that we can't get ahold of on. These things are all valuable. Some of them are just like, it's easy. It's like, it's a low hanging fruit business needs to have it. But then there are other things that if you want to be a better business, you need to have it. One thing that everybody has, including ourselves is an email address. So shoot us an email at info at developer.com. Let us know your thoughts, your thoughts, your frustrations, your budget, stuff like that. And anything that you have heard that you like that you don't like, we love feedback and we are wrapping up a season pretty soon here going into another one. And we are very much looking for what is the next topic. We are very open to that even more so than normal. You can also reach out to us on developer.com. We have a contact us form. You can get us out. You can follow us on YouTube. There's a developer channel wherever you get podcasts. You can follow us there. You can like us, you can send comments. We will give us feedback. We'd love to hear from you. Also on X at developer, we have stuff out there on a regular basis. If you haven't tried the podcast, but you're doing YouTube. Okay. You're getting pretty much everything you need, although it is a little bit different, you don't see quite, it is a little more cleaned up. We'll say when we get to the podcast level, but if you're on the podcast, you do get there as bonus material. We have other stuff that we talk about. We have at least, I don't know, usually at least five to 10 minutes of extra content around every single episode. And then also on our YouTube channel, we've got stuff way, way, way back. I, I have had people that are like marketing and brand people that when I talked to them about my little company and what I do, and then I point them to develop a newer, they're like, Oh my gosh, you were talking about some little thing of content you have mountains and oceans of content. And yes, that is what we have there. And if you would like even stuff that we haven't thought of in years, if you'd like feedback, you'd like help, if you'd like us to throw some of our suggestions, we would be happy to do so right now. I'm happy to give you some time back into your life. Go out there and have yourself a great day, a great week, and we will talk to you next time. Thank you for listening to building better developers, the developer 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.