How Value-Driven Project Discovery Shapes Better Software Outcomes

Welcome to Building Better Developers, the Developer podcast, where we work on getting better step by step professionally and personally. Let's get started. Hello and welcome back. We are continuing our season of Building Better Foundations. We are the Building Better Developers podcast, also the Developer podcast, same name. And this episode, we are continuing our interview with Dusty Gullison and we will start that momentarily. But first I need to introduce myself. My name is Rob Brodhead, one of the founders of Building Better Developers, Developer, also the founder of RB Consulting, where we help you assess your technology, build a roadmap moving forward for success. Good thing, bad thing. Weather is so often a topic, but I'm going to go with this anyways. Recently, I was in Vegas for a week and the weather was phenomenal. I left a cold Nashville for a warm Las Vegas. That was great walking around each night. Everything went well. The one thing that was bad was we had one day where it just poured and poured and poured. And we met, it was good that we missed the pouring part of it. We went out, we saw the Grand Canyon, we came back, we didn't get rained on really while we were out doing all the tours and all that. We came back, we're like, we ended up at a hotel and we just wanted to go across the street to the other hotel. Now, I don't know how often I'm shared, but I am substantially taller than my wife. And during the rain, there was a place where I was like, all right, I'm just going to suck it up. I'm going to get a little bit of wet. And so I ran across like a stream of water going down a regular street. And like, this is like flash flood kind of stuff that you see in a desert. I survived fine and was not terribly well. As I looked back and saw what I'd left behind me, I realized that luckily my wife did not follow me because otherwise she probably would have been swept away. It was just that kind of a thing. It took her a while to get to safety, but the good news is that she did. And we went on and had a good old time. Somebody else who was probably not likely to be swept away in a torrent of three inch water or something like that is my cohost. Go ahead and introduce yourself. Hey everyone. My name is Michael Melasch. I'm one of the co-founders of building better developers, also known as developer. I'm also the founder of a software company called Envision Q8 where we help businesses build smarter, stronger software with custom development and rock solid testing. Good thing, bad thing. So thank goodness we're not in rainy season because we have had one to two inches of rain at the farm just running down the driveway. So we've had our own rivers here, but not this time of year. So that's the good thing. Summer situation here, while Rob left town, I was stuck in Tennessee. It got really cold. We got down to 21 degrees, had to wrap everything up. And then today I think we're like over 70 right now. It's beautiful getting ready to probably go outside, have a glass of wine and just enjoy the weather before we start getting cold again before the holidays. And now we're going to dive right into our conversation with Dusty and continue right where we left off. I hope you guys are ready to take some notes because once again, this is a great interview and a couple of good nuggets that get dropped along the way. Here we go back with Dusty. So it seems like we talk a lot about the 80-20 rule and getting like, you know, you're going to, especially when you're getting into like a, an MVP or version one of something where you're like, let's get, get the things that have the most value. Let's get those done, get those out there so we can start actually benefiting from it. And then we can come back and add the other things. How do you handle the situations where you've got, cause there are some things that depends on your company and your business, your line of business, stuff like that, your vertical, but there's, there are things that 80-20 doesn't cut it. There's like, there are certain things that have to be basically, you know, essentially have to be a hundred. Sure. Sure. I think when you first start off, there's going to be 80-20 identifying what that 20% is important. That's why we're very key on using that Moscow rule because a lot of, a lot of our clients have great ideas and they're fantastic. But at the end of the day, when you do that story, what is your honest to God outcome that you want to try to do? Well, we just need to process these three processes. Critical. Okay. Then those become your must-haves and you pair out what are the 20%. Sometimes, you know, if it's, you know, one process, I need to make sure that this API works. And well, then that's just one thing, you know, but usually when you're building an enterprise solution or a website or an app, there are a lot of things that are what I call data collection bloat where they're collecting a lot of data that that's not even actionable about. They want to do it in the future. So we always try to identify where your data collection bloat first. There's a lot of processes that they want to do because it's going to go into a future plan. And so you start pairing that back. So there is generally speaking, going to always be a 20% that you can find somewhere. And usually, the easiest place to find it is in the budget. You only have 100 grand. This is what you can get for 100 grand. You only have 300 grand. This is what you can get for 300 grand. So usually the budget is the first place that will constrain your deliverables. And then timeline and then, you know, phase two stuff that, you know, once you understand the story, you go actually, that's really not much necessary. One of the things that people, and I mentioned this earlier, people that are starting out a lot, run into, I think, is there's a budget. So you do have a budget and they have a vision of what they want and it may not, it's usually not going to be complete, but they've got some level of what they want as a customer, but the budget doesn't fit what is really going to be most likely a solution, whether they've thought it out enough and you look at it and you say, yeah, that'd be great. And you need it, but your budget can't cover it or vice versa, where it's just like, they sort of picked a budget and they said, well, I think this is what I can do within the budget. What do you say to somebody that's, especially if somebody comes to you with your company or something like that that says, Hey, this is what I need. You know, I need to go get these guys to go spend a thousand dollars. They say they only want to spend a hundred dollars. Should I just tell them to spend a hundred dollars and figure out how to make it work within that? Or should I push them and say, this is really where you need to be? Well, the best way to solve that problem I find is talk about the story. Let's not talk about budgets. Let's talk about your story. What do you, where do you want to be? What are you trying to do? What are the characters in the story? And they map it out and I go, what's the most important part of your story for your company right now? It's this. Okay. And then we talk about what we call golden processes. What are your golden process? The ones that generate revenue for you that are a must have so you can actually sustain and grow. So in this story, what are the things that are actually going to generate revenue for you? And then we identify those. And then I said, okay, you want to do this thing. Maybe you focus on chapter one of this story, which is, you know, we want you to spend a thousand dollars, but let's spend a hundred bucks and get chapter one done and then start building on it. I'm a firm believer in that. I really hate huge budgets. I mean, you have them, but I hate huge chunks. I'd rather solve small chunks little by little. And you start having that fly wheel event where they were successful with a hundred dollars. Let's do 200 bucks or successful with 200 bucks. It's adopted. Everyone likes it. And then you're 300 bucks. And the more you do that, I think you're going to find a more success and actually the delivery of the solution. But really at the end of the day, the client has to see the whole trajectory of where they're trying to go and go. Uh, that makes sense why you want me to spend a thousand dollars. But if I can spend a hundred dollars here and it improves my, my revenue prospects, then let's do that. And then we can do the next part. And so you break things down. This is why it's so critical to have that discovery, to do that Moscow approach, um, to understand outcomes and where everyone's going. Yeah. It's amazing to me how often I've seen even huge budget projects where they balk at, you know, spending a few thousand, you know, there'll be, it'll be six, seven figure projects and they want to like, no, we can't spend a few thousand on a discovery process or anything like that. And it's like, to me, it seems, it seems ridiculously, you know, short-sighted to do so. Don't have a budget or are doing their first project and they have no clue where to begin. And it's like sticker shock when you try to explain what the costs of some of this stuff will be. And they're like, well, wait, you know, it needs to be cheaper. Those are the hard ones to talk to. I was just in Tampa meeting with a retail company, uh, last week, last Friday and, uh, sat down with them and they had spent a year and a half struggling with creating this online e-commerce environment and they were trying to do it cheap. You know, I think it will commerce or something, but you know, they had at bare minimum 15 to 20,000 skews. I was like, well, and they want to do all these kinds of things. And I was like, I don't think that's going to work for you. And they're like, well, tell us what we should do. I said, first of all, I can't tell you what to do until we actually know what you want to do. You're telling me you just want to sell stuff. Well, everybody does, but have you thought about logistics? Have you thought about integrating, you know, a shipping platform? Have you thought about your inventory in real time? Have you thought about insurance? Have you thought about claims? Have you thought about your ADA compliance on a store online? Have you thought about, and so I started laying about all these things because they handed me a two page proposal from, from a company that just had like five line items and a price. And I was like, this is not a proposal. This is a disaster. I said, you're throwing more good money after something. I said, did they give you a discovery document? Did they give you a roadmap? Did they give you a development calendar? Did they give you a schedule? And, you know, you're spending hundreds of thousands of dollars. What are you doing? And so I couldn't agree more with you. A lot of folks just don't understand what it takes. Everyone's looking at the finish line and not the start line. Right. And he's like, oh, I'm going to have a store that's bringing a hundred, 200 grand of, you know, revenue a month. Like you don't have anything yet. How do you get there? So understand the roadmap and understand the journey and the story is so critical to these clients. And I remember leaving that meeting and they were just shaking their heads and like, what should we do? I'm like, you don't even know what you need to do yet. You need to sit with a partner that's done it for other clients and walk me through it. Like you need the hard work. So they're like, all right, we'll get put together your budget and we'll be back in key one. I'm like, that's a good place to start. Put together a budget, figure out what you want. And for what you want to do, I said, you need at least a minimum of a quarter million to half a million budget. Start there. If you're not ready to do that, you're not ready to get to the companies that you gave me as examples of what you want to be like. So yeah, I love, I love, I use an example of time where people have a, you know, someone come in and be an entrepreneur or something like, Hey, I want to build, you know, eBay for pet supplies and I got a $500 budget or something like that. So, you know, these things where it's like, you realize this is like, sometimes the economy is a scale. I'd like pull my mind where it's like, you really think that if you could build a billion dollar business for hundreds of dollars, there wouldn't be 10 of those already out there at least or more. Oh, which before we go too far down that road, I'll switch gears. I just say that that client I was meeting with literally said that this developer wants to build an Amazon for this environment and have me put my skus on there. Like I said, that's a red flag just to start. Yeah. Right away is like they are, they are, they're missing something. So there is a disconnect there. They're going to vibe code their way to millions. That's right. That's right. Boy, that's there's a lot of that out there right now. We'll see where that I want to switch gears a little bit because one of the things that's built a sizable company over a hundred people, a hundred employees without outside capital. And I know that a lot of times that's, that's like a chicken and egg thing that people seem to run into. And they're like, well, I would love a lot of money, but it takes money to make money and I can't get there. So I'm going to have to go. And that sometimes that even stops developers with great ideas that have got, you know, I've run into plenty that I've got great product ideas are like, well, but I've got to go, I'm going to go deal with venture capital or find an angel investor or something like that, or get a big loan or whatever it is. So I can actually fund it. And I'd like to, I think this is where you can, you can ride some of your experience and for somebody else that's wanting to go without going out and getting all that funding. Yeah. So there's two parts of that. The first part of telephones is you can do anything with time and grit. And when we first started the first five years, it took me five years to get to a million bucks and gross revenue, just, it was just myself. And then I hired a childhood friend. I grew up in Asia. So I used H1B to get one of my friends over here back in 19 or 2000. And I remember early on, he would code and I'd sleep on the floor and then he'd wake me up and I get up and QA and, you know, put some design documents where he slept on the floor. And we did that for years, you know, during the day when he was coding, I would just grind it. I'd pick up the phone and call folks and be like, you know, I think you need this. This is in their days when there is we're competing with like vignette for CMS and a lot of nonprofits and associations didn't have a CMS. And so we built our own CMS and that took a lot of work. And that got us off the ground. That led to one thing after another. And you start getting momentum. It's all about momentum. You've got to just keep moving. I mean, you're going to struggle. There's so many pivot points in our business where like, if that didn't come through, I don't know what we'd have done, but we'd have done something else, right? We'd have figured something else out. And I always tell folks, if I knew what I know now back then, I probably wouldn't have done it because it's such a barrier. But I got to say in the States, there's so much opportunity with so many businesses, you can start so much you can do. And you don't really need money. You just need the ability to find an opportunity and sell it. I lived on, you know, for a year, I lived on checks from credit cards. That's how I paid my own self. That's how I paid rent. You know, we were my wife and I were newly married and we lived in a basement, some person's house. It's the classic story. You just work hard. So I would say grit, just do it. If you have a great idea, don't worry about failing. Fail as fast as you can. I mean, I know that's a cliche these days, but it means a lot. Fail and find a solution. Then, you know, put your foot in the door and open that little wider. The other way we grew about 2015 after we were in business for about 15 years, we grew through acquisitions. Once we had established ourselves and I would say the SBA financing vehicles are extremely, extremely good vehicle. And we use that to acquire companies over five companies in the last 10 years, 11 years. We both on the company, integrated, get the revenue up. And, you know, my job switched from actually working in the company, working on the company, and we'd find opportunities, both them on and create more revenue, pay off the note, do another one. You know, I'm in the middle of looking another opportunity right now because it's, there's so much out there. And it's the same thing with the like house flippers, right? They go out and find some hard money, flip the house, same kind of notion. There is money out there, but you have to execute in order for that money to work. So there is risk, you know, I have a mortgage and some of that stuff is tied to an SBA guarantee. That's fine. But I'm willing to take that risk. So we're looking at 100 plus employees now and did it work? Yeah. And you can do it. And there are venues for cash out there. You don't have to go to a private equity. I mean, between you and me and the fence board, I don't like private equity folks at all. I mean, they drive me crazy because they have no interest in your company. That's why I tell folks private equity are great. As long as you know that they are a tool, but they don't care about you personally and the business and the culture and what you're trying to build. They have one thing in mind. What's their exit. And that's the only thing they care about. And as long as you're on an extra trajectory with them, great. But generally speaking, you're not, you're trying to build something. So I always try to say use like an SBA vehicle. You have equity in your house. Use that to leverage for a bigger loan. Do those things if you need cash. But at the end of the day, hard work and actually building relationships in your network is people want people to solve problems. There's a zillion problems out there. You know, I remember when my first big gig came in, I was at church and I said, Oh man, I could do that problem for you. Here's let's meet on Monday. Let's talk about that. And I'm like, Oh, you have an idea. You know, people want to be understood and they're going to entrust people to understand and then deliver on that. You know, our slogan at e-resources and we're actually changing our name next year. We were not, but our slogan always has been strategy delivered. We won't just consult with you, but we'll actually deliver on that strategy. And folks really love that. So that's your question. Oh yes, very much so. So I got kind of a follow up to that. So you went through the whole process. You know, you had these experiences building your company up to a hundred employees as you were going through this over the years, you know, have you ever, I'm sure you have most entrepreneurs have had kind of that down point where you really, while you were trying to build things up, things weren't going right. Things were going down and right. Things were going down and you started managing it. What was kind of your worst point where you like almost threw it in, you know, threw it away, but how did you overcome that? Yeah, that's a great question. There's a number of those spots. I've never been quite in the throwing it away unless it got taken away from me by through like everything fell apart. So probably the biggest overcoming story was probably in 2008 when the market went completely sideways. I think about 30 to 40% of our clients, their cash seized up. And so our AR seized up and our vendors seized up and everything seized up, right? There's that two, three months and it took like a year to unwind everything. And cash was super. My wife and I had just moved to Washington state and we just decided to buy a house. And then I think every mortgage lender, one after another, pooled their portfolio from us. We get another mortgage ready to sign, pull it, another one. So I think we went through six mortgage prices and it took us a year to actually get that place. And that's just in the consumer side. Just think about it on the business side where I had clients that said, we can't do this. And, you know, I would say the good thing about this, I saw this coming, and I pulled out all our lines of credit right before they all got axed. And that was just watching the macro economics of it. I knew something bad was coming down the pipe. And so we were able to not fire anybody, thank God, or lay off anybody, because we knew that that would affect them. We had some attrition and we let that happen. But we went to our clients that were struggling and said, hey, we're going to work with you. We're your partner first. We're not going to harass you. Let's see how we can work this out together. And those having strong relationships with those, your vendors and your clients are super critical in times like that. And starting from the point of a positive intention of everybody, right? There's a lot of clients that ghosted us and I finally got them on the phone. So listen, you don't have to ghost me. You're safer. We're both in the same boat. You're no worse. You're no better. We're going to work this through together. And that helped dramatically solve that. Yeah, that was a huge pressure point. And I don't think we came out of that. Like I took out a bunch of loans prior to that. And I think it wasn't until 2011 that I pulled ourselves out of that situation. And it was just like, we'll work harder. You can't afford this. Great. We're going to discount this 20% to get you here because we know you need to have this done. And so we just discounted. We worked harder. Our team, you know, at the end of the day, God bless our team. And we have great employees. Our average employment term is 14 years. People stay with our firm, which we're a 26 year old firm. And we just had an employee that had his 25th anniversary with us this last week. And we're 26 years. Right. So I would say going back to that, it came down to just relationships, maintaining good relationships, great communication. Don't fear the bad thing. I always have a saying is don't fear the monster in the closet when you're a kid, you're scared in your bed and you think something's in the closet. It's a little jar. I said, turn on that flashlight, open up that door, have a look in there. Just it's better to know how bad that PNL sheet is, how bad the AR report is, how bad that debt statement is, then not to know it. The unknown is the death of you. Knowing is better than knowing your situation. So yeah, I would say that 2008 was a huge pivot point. There's other times where things happen, but I said the other big one probably for us, we did two acquisitions within four months of each other. We, I don't recommend it. We bought two separate companies, two separate cultures. And we've had a, we inherited a senior manager that was just the absolute worst. It's probably the worst experience with a coworker in my lifetime. And that like the day, you know, the ink was dry on the acquisition. That person turned completely like disruptive. They didn't like change. And they basically tried to undermine the whole thing. And I thought we're going to lose the acquisition of value. You know, it was a 2 million plus small, but for a small company at the time, it's a lot. And the hardest, you know, the hardest thing I had to do is I was, I felt threatened that if I got rid of this person, that we'd lose a chunk of our business from all the people that they hands up. But I basically said, well, it's better to know what's going to happen. Can't live this way. So I was sleeping three, four hours a night for like seven months, just stressed out about the situation. And, you know, I flew in, we did it as a like a little ninja move. We set up everything, fired the person, reestablish new management on that, that tool. And I slept nine hours that night. I just remember how relieved I was. And you know what? Generally speaking, when you have a bad teammate and you get rid of them, your clients are going to say, thank you, because if they're bad to you, they're bad to everybody. So always get rid of the cancer. It's the worst. That person was pure utter cancer. Yeah, that's, we haven't talked, that's something we haven't discussed in, I think, years on this, but we said we had, we've had more than a few times that we've talked about the, the poison pill type people and stuff like that. You know, the poison hire and I've, I always bring that up also as part of talking to customers is saying like, look, part of the discovery is making sure that, that the personalities work for our company, as well as their company. Cause I'm like, I don't want to be in a situation. And I've been in those where corporate wise, you know, we do our thing and somebody else does their thing, but it just doesn't mesh. And they've ended up being really bad engagements where it's just like, look, we, you know, you eventually get to a point where you're like, look, we just need to part ways. It's like no person, nothing personal, but like, we just, we don't fit together. We don't work well together. And usually it'll be like, Hey, here's what you need to, you know, sort of lesson learned. Here's the, here's what you need to look for moving forward. And it's not just, you know, you're just like, it's not just the technology or the skills you need those, but this is what you need from a culture or background or whatever it is that we can highlight that is like, this is why it just doesn't work. You know, it's pretty surprising how much of like digital consulting and any technology. There's a fair amount of business consulting that just happens. There's, there's coaching that happens from it. There's, and I always tell folks when you go through a story approach, you're going to find out that the technology you're looking to solve your problem is really small percentage of the problem. The problem is again, there you go back to the three P three P's it's people and processes and platforms in that order. And the biggest problem is usually folks that don't know what their mission, what, how they're part of the story. And once you do, they understand it and you help them understand it. You're coaching the leadership to, Hey, you need to communicate with them. This is their job response. You know, you start going through all this business consulting and the next thing you know, you're, you're, you're doing a little bit of HR, you know, a little bit of coaching and it's funny, you know, my, my, my daughter said, why don't you get your MBA? I'm like, I already got multiple MBAs. I don't need one. I totally understand. Yeah. It's funny because before fractional really became a thing, I mean, it's, it's been around for a long time, but before it became like a well-known phrase or anything like that, as somebody, when I first heard about a fractional CIO or CTO, whichever it was, they talked about the time I was like, they described what it was and it's exactly what you described. It's like you're coming in here, you're consulting, you're providing, it's not just technology. It's about the people. It's about the processes. It's about looking forward and looking back and just so much in there. And I was like, oh yeah, yeah, that sounds exactly like what we do. And I think it's more often than not, I like it's, yeah, everybody does it. I'm like, I don't know how many people I've talked to that it's, if you're in that, if you're in the, really, if you're, if you're in technology consulting, you're in business consulting in a hundred percent that you're, you're probably going to come in at some level and be a fractional something for them. Because like you said, there's key things like RFPs that people just really struggle about just budgets and roadmaps and estimating and all these things that go in to projects. And then of course that's before you even get to the platforms, the platforms, they, they get lost because they were like, well, I don't know how I'm going to be able to navigate it. And I think for me, a lot of times it's like, well, you've got person and people and processes to navigate first. Basically it's like you, you're, you've got the cart way before the horse. It's like, let's, let's, let's figure out what you really want. And for so many, I think that's, as I've gone more and more into my career, I think that's as much, if not more, why software projects fail is really because the business was never held to like put their thing. They didn't really understand what they wanted and nobody on the technology side said, wait, we really, we're just going to build what you ask as opposed to let's actually, let's solve a problem. Let's understand the problem and solve that. Yeah. I think that's a big differentiator for us talking to someone who's starting off in their business, like you said, and consulting or software developing, whatever I'd say you will grow faster. If you focus on the people processes first than building the solution, building the solution is not as important as understanding the problem, understanding how they got from point A to point B and re-engineering that because people want to be heard. People want to be understood and being heard as part of being people being understood as part of the processes. And the platform really is the outcome of understanding those well and accommodating that. So yeah, if you're going to start a business, start there. So we're, we are pushing our time. I appreciate it has flown by. This has been great conversation now and I'm, you've brought up a lot of great points. So for those that are out there, they're in the audience. They're like, yeah, this sounds like somebody or a company that we'd really want to work with. What's the best way for them to get ahold of you? Sure. You can shoot a message for me on LinkedIn, just linkedin.com forward slash dusty.gullison, e-resources.com. We have a new brand coming out where we're unifying everything in January. We're really excited about that. But yeah, you can find me anywhere at LinkedIn. My email is dusty at gullison.com. You'll get to me, or dusty at e-resources.com. I'm quick to respond to anything that you have. I'd love to work with you. I love solving problems. It's fun. Enjoy it. I agree a hundred percent. Well, thank you so much for your time. Appreciate you hanging out with us for a little bit. Yeah, absolutely. And yeah, so I think we'll, we will wrap this one up. This was sponsored by RB Consulting, your partner in building smarter, scalable tech. From startups to established teams, RB Consulting helps you turn tech chaos into clarity with proven roadmaps and hands-on expertise. Visit rb-sns.com to start your next step forward. Also sponsored by Envision QA. They help businesses take control of their software by focusing on what matters most, quality, reliability, and support you can count on. Find out more at EnvisionQA.com. Thanks for tuning in to the Develop the Newer Podcast, where we're all about building better developers and better careers. I'd love to hear your thoughts or feedback, so drop a note to info at DevelopTheNewer.com. Be sure to subscribe on Apple Podcasts, YouTube, or wherever you listen. And remember, a little bit of effort every day adds up to a great success. Keep learning, and we'll see you in the next episode.