I owned a job long before I owned a company

Hey Nicholas, thanks for having me.

Yeah, so the start would have really been Facebook marketing. and I tell people that I owned a job a long time before I owned a company. I didn't I didn't really have mentors who could help me understand or see what it took to own a company and to have employees. So it was sort of a pride thing when I was younger to say I own my own company. Now in hindsight, I I absolutely owned a job. but it was a job that I was really good at. So we had a lot of clients that we worked with and it was all about performance marketing for them. if you fast forward to about six, seven years ago, I had an interest in getting more familiar with a vertical. and I really wanted to work in a bigger organization and see what that felt like because I had never done it before. So I transitioned into independent schools. I was lucky enough to find Hargrave Military Academy. That that's been a tremendous blessing in my life. The leaders that I've gotten to work with in that organization. there's been three presidents since I started working with that group. the gentleman who hired me, the head of the board. I mean, these were individuals who had managed very large teams. They had done amazing sort of transitions in organizations. They had overseen the sort of broad sweeping things that make organizations better. I essentially left Hargrave without leaving Hargrave because my wife had an opportunity to pursue a PhD. And that felt to me like a time where I felt competent and capable of building a business in the true sense of the word, because I had those mentors in that organization. So I got to work really quickly on hiring some folks. And that's where the sort of modern genesis of WBI Consulting Group came from was. feeling like I now had the skill set to teach other people what I had learned with Hargrave. So I still spend a lot of time with Hargrave, but now as we build our team, I can sort of pass these things to them and we can help more groups and more organizations.

I th I think the hardest piece for me is to take the time to try to mentor people who work for me and work with me. I I have a really bad habit of trying to put my hands on every problem. and it's not that I think that I'm the only person who can come up with a strong solution. I I I ri I really don't have that opinion of myself. Unfortunately, I think it can read that way, but I I I'm a doer. I like to stay busy. I I like to grab problems and see if I can pull them apart and put together a good solution for them. So the thing that I really have to work on day to day, week to week, is empowering the people who work for and with me to put their hands on problems and give them the freedom to find a solution that fits that problem that gets to a sort of endpoint that is reasonable or effective for a client w without inserting myself and you know, having this attitude of I would have done it this way or you should have done it this way. I'm working on it.

Yeah. So unfortunately, a lot of times mission driven means dependent on outside funding, donor support. and it also a lot of times attracts people who are very strong in emotions and care for what they're doing. And the individuals who maybe have a lot of technical capacity are the sorts of folks who are looking for the high-paying jobs. So as we work with mission-driven organizations, what what we see a lot is that processes have taken the place of systems. There's not a lot of systems thinking going on in those organizations. It's just there's a lot of routines of things that have been done this way for a very long time. And there's a lot of disconnect between departments. One of the things that the mission-driven organizations we've worked with haven't necessarily been able to or known to invest in is those connectivity layers of data and process and systems. So I I like to try and minimize seams, right? I I'm a big data guy. I think data sort of has a story to tell of its own when you can get at real data. I think data can help inform future decisions. And the organizations we work with, historically have been organizations that either have not done the best job of keeping track of their data or they haven't had the means or the opportunity to connect those disparate data sources to be able to draw insights.

Yeah, so I I think it's getting people on board, helping them understand that better data, better better data aggregation, better systems, better processes is not a pathway to removing jobs from an organization. you know, there are plenty of consultants out there that will come in and and they'll build things that help you to remove employees from the equation. I I think the first thing that we try and do is we sit down and we talk with as many of the people at the organization as we possibly can. Help them understand that we're there to be a partner. Right. we're really I feel like we're embedded reporters sometimes with the groups that we work with. You know, we're we're talking to them on a daily basis, sometimes multiple times per day. And the biggest compliment that we got from one of our clients most recently was that she felt as though we know them, which means any work product that we share with them, anything that comes from sort of our side of the desk. She can already feel confident that it's going to be on brand, that it's going to be in line with how the organization operates and who who they want to present themselves to be. So I I take that as a tremendous compliment, you know, in really getting to know those individuals. And then the third piece of it is really showing them just what's out there, right? Because they've sort of been sheltered in their little bubbles. They aren't necessarily aware of how far technology has progressed over the last seven to ten years. And being able to sort of pull back the curtain on that and just share that. I I mean, I get really excited about the tech piece of it. I have to reel myself in, right? Because it's not what everyone gets excited about in this space. but but it again, if we can tie the sort of nerdy fun tech stuff to the results that they're hoping to accomplish, then I I get to see their eyes light up too.

Yeah, I I would say the biggest misunderstanding i is a lot of times there's an expectation that, you know, myself or my team have come on the scene to shine a light on something they've done wrong or, you know, a way in which they've been ineffective or to catch someone not doing their job. And and it I wouldn't take on that sort of assignment. It's not the sort of work that I'm interested in. So it I think that is the biggest misconception. You know, we step into a room and in a lot of cases, initially the walls go up because it's, you know, here's some talking heads who don't know us, they don't know our history, and they're here to tell us everything that's wrong about us. and that's just not an approach that we take.

Yeah. So the I don't want to be another person who's talking about AI all the time, but if I go back to my time in university, I had maybe 12 hours of coursework in coding. And I would I was amazed by how powerful it could be. And I was also disheartened by just how much time it took to get to the end products. So not necessarily a specific project, but with the sort of state of the world with AI assisted coding tools. You know, for seven years I I was looking at problems and saying, gosh, is this the one that we should hire a developer for? Because I I know if we if we had the little widget that operated in the middle of all of this disparate data that we could get really good insights from it. you know, over the last two or three years, we've been empowered to start to build those things. And we formed relationships with organizations that I I would broadly coin as real developers, right? That they've been doing it the hard way for 20 plus years and they understand the intricacies of it. So there's a back and forth there. the thing that I'm most proud of right now, though, is the intelligence layer that we've built for independent schools. And that intelligence layer pulls in all of the activity on digital surfaces of families that are interested in the school. And it it's able to really with precise detail show you the sort of things on websites, landing pages, advertisements that are driving the outcomes that the school wants to see. So it yeah, I it it it's it it's so fun to work on that project. And now we've started to tie that to outbound communication from the organizations as well. And we're We're getting heat scores for the sort of families that the school should engage with who are most likely to enroll. I mean, it it it it all feels so new, but it it's working as intended and that's really exciting.

Yeah. So if if you'll forgive me for sort of flipping the question, I was just having this conversation with my right hand gal and the company yesterday. And and the place where we don't want to use it is in design. You know, she's hands-on. She she really likes to create the flyers, the materials, any of that sort of stuff, or at least sketch it out by hand first. so we're we're being cautious about that piece because I I I'm sure if you spend any time on the internet, you can see this sort of issue where every design is coalescing into a particular style of the handful of LLMs that folks are using, right? So that's that's a little bit of a hard pass for us. Excuse me. Where it's very powerful for us is in the coding, in the tool building, but also in building out agents who help to red team what we're doing. and for anyone who may be listening who isn't familiar with red teaming, this is something that I picked up from all the military folks, retired military folks at Argrave Military Academy. But you have a group of people and they're there to really question your bias, to poke holes in the plan. I find that AI does a good job of Separating itself from all of my human bias, my team's human bias, the client's human bias, because we tell it we want you to find the things that are wrong with this plan. We want you to identify those potential pitfalls. You know, ri rip us apart, like rip the plan apart. and and it makes no bones about doing that as long as you sort of guide it to doing that. I I think that's tremendously useful for us. In the early stages of an engagement, we can use that to perhaps pre cog. some of the objections we may face, but when we're in the midst of an engagement and we're really working on solutions, it it's also helpful to just have this outside partner almost in AI that's telling us here here's the blind spots that you aren't accounting for.

I I think I would probably tell him that like all those stumbles and struggles are going to be resolved through the people that you encounter. I I I think I tend to be a little more inclined toward the solopreneur. I don't I don't want to say isolationist, that's a little bit too strong. I but I enjoy my sort of quiet, alone time. the The deficiencies, the early challenges in my life, they they were really resolved through meeting the right mentors and people who had been here before me. and I I think for any young entrepreneur or somebody who's interested in starting a company, the the quicker you can humble yourself and and understand that these people who are in the places that you wanna be or who have accomplished the things that you believe you want to accomplish, I They're so willing to have these conversations and engage with younger folks. And it just didn't feel that way to me when I was younger and I didn't know how to go about doing it. but yeah, it it's a little cliche, but I think I would say don't worry about figuring everything out for yourself.

Yeah, I I have no idea about an end destination. I'm I'm learning how to fly planes. I I spent some time out on boats sailing. I I I think in terms of the business's end destination, I can't see it because five years ago I couldn't see that AI was going to revolutionize our ability to build tools. you know, I would say that I hope in five years that there are more WBI consulting group employees and and that I've brought more people. to doing work that they really enjoy working, or brought them to projects, sorry, that they really enjoy working on. what one of the things that I struggle with is I never have and I don't I hopefully never will hire people to sort of slot into neat buckets of what WBI Consulting Group needs in terms of like you're gonna pull these levers at these times, right? I I want to find a sustainable path to growth where people get to be passionate, but they also have the safety net of a real job at WBI Consulting Group. and it's not easy to find that sort of alignment with people. It's not necessarily easy to find that alignment with roles, but I do think that the tools that we're building, the systems that we're putting together, the work that we're doing is impactful. It's meaningful. And I want to bring more people to the table. I'd like more voices at WBI and I'd like to be helping more of these mission-driven organizations.

Yeah, so WBICG dot com. there's a hello at WBICG dot com. It pretty easy to get to us that way. I'm on LinkedIn. the company has a weaker presence on LinkedIn, much to the chagrin of my right hand gal that I mentioned earlier. So we've got some work to do in that space. but you know, we're always glad to talk to folks. We we love problems.

Thank you so much, Miclass.