In this conversation, Jason Niedle speaks with Mike LaVista, founder and CEO of Caxy Interactive, about the transformative role of AI in business growth and innovation. They discuss the importance of understanding client needs, the shift from service-based to results-oriented consulting, and the evolving landscape of sales strategies. Mike shares insights on the challenges and opportunities presented by AI, emphasizing the need for businesses to adapt and rethink their approaches to remain competitive. The discussion also touches on the significance of founders in driving change and the importance of aligning incentives for better outcomes.
Takeaways
- AI tools are evolving, but human input is still essential.
- Businesses must adapt to the new baseline set by AI capabilities.
- Consulting should focus on solving significant problems, not just minor fixes.
- The role of a founder involves understanding all aspects of the business.
- Sales strategies must evolve to align with client needs and expectations.
- Building strong relationships with clients leads to repeat business.
- AI can help identify new opportunities and streamline processes.
- The future of business will require innovative thinking beyond traditional methods.
- Change is necessary for growth, even if it feels risky.
- Aligning incentives can lead to better outcomes for both clients and consultants.
Sound Bites
“AI is going to write all the marketing content.”
“It’s all about picking the right problem.”
“We have to change this idea that we’ve always had.”
Show Notes
BeyondSaaS Transcript
Jason Niedle (00:00)
Today we’re talking with Mike LaVista, founder and CEO of Caxy Interactive about scaling companies with AI by sparking innovation and creating technology.
Welcome to Beyond SaaS. I’m Jason Niedle, founder of Tethos. We’re a growth agency and we’ve been accelerating tech company growth through strategy, branding, lead gen and conversion with a 20 year track record of success. And if you’re looking to grow, grab our brand new report at tethos.com/podcast where I’ve compiled interviews from everyone so that you can see what hyper growth companies are doing these days. Today, I’m really excited to explore tech company growth with Mike LaVista. He is the founder and CEO of Caxy,
which is a digital transformation company out of Chicago that helps companies grow faster, perform better, and delight customers. through consulting strategy and execution. And I also noticed you have one of these ultra rare four letter domain names, which I’m always super impressed with. My takeaway from what they do is that they go from tech strategy to product design and development in a variety of industries. And Caxy likes to say that they serve ambitious companies that are tired of Band-Aid solutions. And I can 100 % understand that in my company where I have like
22 different systems and anytime someone comes in, I get to train them on all of them and it would be amazing to wrap that up into one beautiful solution. So Mike is also the author of Superpowered, which is seven leadership superpowers technology executives can use. I probably need that as well. He has a great podcast called the Digital Transformist and I also hear Mike that you’re a guitar player, so welcome.
Mike (01:28)
Thanks, honestly, I’m going to record that. That is absolutely the best intro I’ve ever gotten anywhere hands down, bar none. That was really great when you nailed it all. In fact, I almost think you described our company better than we do. So really our sales team will have to listen to this when we’re done.
Jason Niedle (01:40)
I actually only used keywords from your website and from your LinkedIn, and I tried to be very specific to just piece those together. So I love to offer listeners a quick tip right off the bat. I do want to hear about Caxy, but do you have a golden nugget so they get something quick?
Mike (01:53)
So we’re in the software development business. I’ve been in software for 20 years. And one of things if you listen to the news or read any sort of social media lately, that developer jobs are going away, they’re done. There’s no future than ever. so trying to be smart about it, we want to see what the tools are and what’s kind of threatening our very existence, right? And so one of the coolest ones I found out there that people can go try out is called lovable.ai.
And it purports to be able to build a fully functioning app from a prompt. And so all of us are out there prompt engineering. And I’ve used it a little bit. like a lot of AI, it does some really amazing things really quickly. And I think they, like a lot of other AI tools, there’s a place where it hits a wall. And so part of the game right now in the evolution of all these AI tools is, can you, as a person who’s not in that field.
Use the tools to get you far enough to get what you need. So imagine Jason in your field, it’s like, the sky is falling and you AI is going to write all the marketing content from now on. But is it really, it’s going to do a pretty good job with maybe like ideation or some things, but like, is it going to write the killer tagline, for example? And I think right now the answer is no. And so for us, same thing. I was able to whip up an idea I’ve been working on in lovable in about, I don’t know, 10, 15 minutes to get something that looked pretty right. And then when I wanted to actually do something,
It required a developer, me, to step in and kind of tweak and connect some wires and do some other stuff. So I expect that that’ll get better. And so in 10 years, will the jobs be gone? I bet they’ll be different, but they won’t be gone. This is cool thing that people want to go play with. I wish I got a commission, but lovable.ai is a pretty fun nugget to play with right now
Jason Niedle (03:26)
So this is super cool that you talked about this in this hit on two points. The first one, is that we all have to rise to the level of what AI will be doing and then step above it, right? So I spent my years learning web development and web design and copywriting and all that stuff. And now there’s a baseline threshold where a lot of people can do that. And I talked with a client yesterday, a potential client yesterday, and said, look, you can go on Squarespace or Lovable and push a few buttons and you’ll have a reasonably good site.
Mike (03:45)
Hmm?
Jason Niedle (03:52)
And that’s okay if you want to do that. And if you want X, and Z, then you’re going to need me and I’m kind of expensive, but you’ll get more. But I have be above that level and I can’t even ignore that anymore. I can’t even pretend that doesn’t exist. That’s the threshold for baseline. And the other thing is
Mike (03:53)
Yeah.
Jason Niedle (04:08)
our guest Tomer from V24 mentioned Lovable and said how amazing it was. A listener has been trying it out and has messaged me that it’s absolutely astounding and he’s blown away at what it did for
— Shout out to one of our listeners, Anthony —
And so I’ve been watching that process and thinking, wow, it’s come time that pretty soon I’m going to have to perhaps rethink how we do that element of our business because those tools will be readily available everywhere. It’s fascinating.
Mike (04:29)
Yeah, and
really, I think it’s for me, the context is it’s a tool. And so when I think about when I started, we were developing websites in Notepad and writing HTML from scratch in Notepad because that was as fast as you could do it. So if you had to do a 10 page website, that was a lot of work. And an 11th page was kind of another 10 % work, right? Whereas now, you know, there all these tools that do this. So for us, we have to move past it.
I don’t think companies will spend less. I think it’s more like you have to spend as much as you’re spending , but now you expect maybe five or 10X more. And I think the interesting thing about the wave of AI that I think will come to fruition over the next few years is going to be businesses have a certain set of expertises within their domain. And there are probably a bunch of ideas or sub-businesses that they don’t touch because it’s just impractical.
Jason Niedle (05:04)
Mm.
Mike (05:22)
And so if you’re in manufacturing of some sort. There might be like a niche kind of thing you could do, but like how would we serve it? Who would sell it? All that kind of stuff. Now all of sudden we have an AI that could handle like a small business, but really a very profitable one because it’s maybe very AI driven. And so like a longer tail of interesting kind of niche things, I think is a way that something like Lovable could say, like once it’s able to create like a really like fully functioning, like first try app kind of thing.
you could stick it on those longer tail things to your point where you don’t need a Jason to come in and punch up the copy and it’s just like, it can be fine. As long as it’s fine, you know that kind of thing. That’s where I think the future is in the next five or 10.
Jason Niedle (06:00)
Kind of amazing. Tell me a little bit about Caxy.
Mike (06:02)
So Caxy is a sort AI driven software consultancy. And what we focus on is honestly things that would matter to the business. I don’t like to talk about us as a technology company like what we do. It’s more about the problems we solve. And so I think about a lot of businesses, you kind of mentioned it yourself. We walk into businesses and they are using a million software tools. They’re not connected. Even their processes around how they use them are usually kind of flawed.
They usually only just barely scratch the surface on things that they use. And even basic skills like, know, are people using all the hotkeys and all that really like in the weed stuff. Like optimizing how you use your stuff is kind of step one. So we do a lot of consulting around, like creating value stream mapping and like really optimizing where the parts of the business that matter happen and can we optimize it with software. And then the other part of the business is once we’ve done that, we might spot a big opportunity that’s like, well,
this whole thing here that’s like a black box and it’s like 10 steps, what if that was an AI tool? What if that was a software tool that kind of helps you rethink how that part works? And then if we get really further down the line, we can step back in the business and say, if you had to rebuild this from scratch, what would look like? What would your competitor do if they started on Thursday? And now we can think about things differently and build like more holistic broader tools and SaaS products and all that kind of stuff. But it’s an evolution. It’s a
a crawl, walk, run kind of approach.
Jason Niedle (07:17)
A couple of things you’ve said have made me think about a conversation I was having this morning about being a services company versus a results company. And so for 20 years, we were a services company. Come here and we’ll make you a pretty logo. Come here and we’ll make you an amazing website. they come, they tell us what I want. They complain if something’s too pixels off. Literally that’s happened, you know? And then now the point that we’ve transformed our business in the last year or so is like you hire us to get growth.
Mike (07:18)
you
Hmm.
Jason Niedle (07:43)
you hire us for dollars, period, right? And I can use my suite of tools, one of them which may be Lovable in the near future, to do the things that I used to pay a lot of money for, but now I look at it in a more holistic route. And I think when you said it’s the problems we solve, it’s the same thing, right? It’s not necessarily about your technology anymore or that I can consult with you, but I come in and solve these problems.
Mike (07:45)
Yeah.
Absolutely. I think the other, where we still have value as humans is I think it’s all about picking the right problem. Cause one of the things we find is as consultants we come in and the thing that they usually start with, they want us to do first is usually it’s a problem they already know about and they kind of already know how to fix and they just need something done. And often it’s sort of a convenience fix. So it’s like, something that makes someone’s job like a little bit faster, a little bit better.
But really then we come back with a price to do that. That’s expensive. You guys are outrageous. Well, it’s because you picked the thing that doesn’t actually matter. If we could come in and solve a million dollar problem for half a million, it’s still a good investment. And so it’s all about picking the thing that actually moves the business. So when we try to talk to our clients about what’s the financial benefit? As a CEO, If we can drive free cash flow into your back pocket,
then really anything we do is worth the investment as long as that’s our focus. And most technology companies are in the doing business, which is what you just said, which is about you want an ERP here, here’s how much it costs. You want to build a, online shopping here, here’s how much that costs, but not thinking through, what does that business look like? What does it cost to run? What do we actually take out of it? So that’s, and I’ll be honest, like you, I did it the other way for so long that it became kind of habit. And as soon as I kind of, that light bulb went on,
then that’s been about six, seven years, something like that. Our company has more than tripled since we made that switch. Yeah.
Jason Niedle (09:20)
Wow, and
it’s interesting for us too. In one way it’s a small mental shift, in another way it’s an entirely different way of looking and doing everything. We still do many of the same things, but now I’m actually responsible for what happens and the results of those things, which is an entirely different job.
Mike (09:35)
Right. And I think that’s the job of consulting. you’re like, honestly, if you’re an employee, I think most employees do a great job is to think about an employee of a bigger company. They do a great job if they do what they’re asked to do, right? But as consultants and agency people, I think part of our job is to like evaluate what you’re asking for and make sure it’s the right thing. Cause honestly, while that’s also being a good consultant at the end, if we deliver something, it doesn’t make any sense. That’s when we get fired. So it’s kind of, it’s in all of our best interest to actually do something valuable. And I think,
Jason Niedle (09:57)
Mm-hmm.
Mike (10:02)
That’s an under sold part of the consulting business for smaller groups like us.
Jason Niedle (10:07)
This is a challenge for us all the time. I’ll have someone where I’m like two layers down from the ultimate decision maker and someone says, do this. And I say, it’s going to cost money and I don’t think it’s going to do much for you. And that’s what my answer in the past was. And now that I’m looking at it more holistically, it’s like, Hey, can I get the leadership on the phone? And can we talk through the why of this and why this matters and how this won’t make you money the way we’re looking at it right now or won’t get to your result or tell me what they’re trying to accomplish so I can do the
what you need and not the micromanagement of the task.
Mike (10:38)
Yeah, you know, it’s funny. So that’s the thing I’ve had to work with too. And I’ll give you an idea that I’ve had for a while that works pretty well. Cause one of things I don’t want to do is I don’t want to go over someone’s head. And so one of the ways we, we have found to get invited to that person is we have a conversation with our direct client who’s a couple of layers down and we say to him like, Hey, well, that’s a great idea. It’s going to cost a lot. And have you ever had a thing where like you guys did something internally, you spent the money on it, but then management blamed you for wasting money on something? Yeah. Well,
Jason Niedle (11:04)
Hmm hmm hmm hmm hmm
hmm.
Mike (11:06)
this
might be one of those things. What if we all got together and figured out like how it is this is going to get measured and make sure it’s the right thing and if it’s not, we’ll do something else. And then that has with a higher percentage, they say, you know, that’s a good, let’s get all together and do that. Cause actually it might be that’d help me out. So I don’t get run over in three months. Yeah. Yeah.
Jason Niedle (11:22)
I’m recording and saving that. Obviously I’m recording it, but I’m going to clip that out. So
Your title is founder and CEO. What does that mean to you?
Mike (11:31)
I think there’s something special about being a founder. I’ve actually got a campaign that we do that is very founder focused and you’ve already said some of the stuff about being a founder. And I think if you’re a founder that made it out of that five year Death Valley and you made it out the other end, you’re relatively successful. Part of the experience was you can do all the jobs of the company a little bit. You may not be very good at some of them, but if you, if you had to take on any and every project at this point.
We’re well beyond some of the stuff I can do, like in principle, you know all the areas of the business and you probably went through a period of like, can we make payroll and what does it mean to have this tax problem and all the HR, all the other business stuff. Whereas I think just a straight ahead CEO may not have had that experience. They’re a really smart paid executive, but like the founder started from zero.
and somehow figured out a way to get it up and running. And that’s different experience. And I like working with founders because of that.
Jason Niedle (12:25)
I spent 17 years in, it used to be called YEO, and now it’s EO, Entrepreneurs’ Organization. And EO and YPO are always compared and contrasted. And EO was very founders and smaller, a little bit smaller companies usually. But with that startup mindset, and then YPO was often more of the, you know, CEOs, hired guns, (they) understood management in a different level, scaling in a different level, exits perhaps in different levels. So it was always an interesting comparison in there.
Mike (12:30)
Hmm, sure.
Jason Niedle (12:51)
So with that said, then what stage would you consider Caxy? And you you’ve been around to be far past startup, but do you still feel startup-y or do you feel mid-stage or what do feel?
Mike (13:01)
I don’t know if those labels don’t resonate for me in this, in this sense. And then I feel like those labels are more for companies where the startup portion is, a business trying to figure out what problem we solve and grow up and become profitable. And then you go to the place where you’re profitable and then probably there’s an exit. And I feel like for service companies like ours, it’s like, the stages are more like there’s the,
Jason Niedle (13:13)
Mm. Mm-hmm.
Mike (13:21)
scrambling for dear life and trying to make it through the day, the month, the year. And then there’s a place where you’re of like, you’re not cruising, but you’ve reached a comfortable place and then kind of what do you do next, right? I don’t know if you’ve heard of Scalable, it’s sort of a successor to EOS. And so Scalable is a kind of a business management platform that’s designed for you to rethink the business about what would it look like if we were 5 or 10X and then kind of reverse engineer, how do we do that better?
Jason Niedle (13:46)
Mmm.
Mike (13:46)
So
we’re doing that because I’d like to scale up mostly because I want to solve bigger and more interesting and more impactful problems. And I think some of the clients we run into, we could use some bigger scale to do that kind of thing. And probably they’d hope we’re a little bigger to do it anyway. So that’s kind of where we’re at. We’re about 50 or so right now, people. And so getting to that, what’s the next level? Probably 100, and then maybe it’s 200, something like that. That’s kind of where my three to five year plan sits.
Jason Niedle (14:14)
So you’re thinking magic wand, three years you grow for, 4X in terms of people.
Mike (14:18)
Yeah, that’s the goal.
Jason Niedle (14:19)
With all the AI improvements and enhancements. And so that’s probably more than 4X in terms of revenue hopefully.
Mike (14:24)
You
I’m curious what your take is on this. With services, I don’t like being in a position to have a windfall moment. I don’t want to charge you, I know value pricing is one way people do this stuff. So if we can solve a million dollar problem for half a million and we do it in $200,000 worth of time.
Are you happy to pay that 300 windfall to us? And I think the answer usually is no. And I’d rather lose that 300 windfall than to be honest, what usually happens is everything changes, requirements change, people change, vice presidents change. And all of a sudden we’re at a million five instead of the five. And now we’re solving a different problem. And I just feel like in consulting, we do better with the hourly. Maybe that’s a hot topic for us to discuss, whatever, but.
That’s a long answer to are we four times as profitable. I think we get more efficient.
Jason Niedle (15:13)
It’s something I’ve considered for a long time. So I’ve been going along, being an hourly biller and thinking, okay, well, there was one point in my career and I think you and I graduated about the same time and I was like, okay, I’m going to go be an artist and that’ll be fun and I’ll make no money or I’ll go be a lawyer. And so I applied and I got in at Berkeley for the law and I got in at USC for music. And then I was like, ah, screw it, I’m going to go for music. And so I went to USC instead of Berkeley.
Mike (15:19)
Yeah.
Jason Niedle (15:39)
And then I’m like, oh good, now my hourly rates are like a quarter of what a lawyer with my experience would be, right? Because if I’m charging two or 300 bucks an hour, for something, they’re charging 1200 bucks, or more. And I’m like, that was dumb, but hey, at least I enjoy what I do. And then meantime, I’m watching one of my friends and she has a consulting company and they say, look, we don’t charge you anything, but we get a cut of the amount of money we save you when we renegotiate your freight and transportation contracts.
Mike (15:43)
Right.
Jason Niedle (16:02)
So she goes and saves someone $20 million and she gets a whatever the number, I don’t know the number, $2 million paycheck, let’s say, right? And then like, that doesn’t happen here. I just work and work and work and then I go on vacation and I make no money. And so recently our model has changed and I like the change A) for me and the business model wise, but I also, think it’s better for our clients in that we do build in a percent to incentivize us to do the right things. So if I were coming into a company,
Mike (16:08)
Something, yeah.
Jason Niedle (16:29)
I’ll build it more along like a lower labor cost, labor percentage as my fixed rate, but I’ll say plus we’re going to take X percent of sales that we generate. And then I tell my team like there’s no bonuses this year and there’s no extra money unless we generate and hit those sales. And so that incentive is the sales, not the hourly billing. And the incentive was always the hourly billing, which is not great for clients, right? So.
Mike (16:47)
Where?
Jason Niedle (16:51)
I don’t know, I think that incentive lines up way better for everybody and I wouldn’t call it a windfall. It’s not like that’s the big thing, but it certainly can increase profits.
Mike (16:59)
Yeah.
No. So this is great. I love that. This is a conversation we will have, I hope many more times because I want to get to the bottom of this too. I think for us, it’s about, there are some things I’d love to do that for. To be honest, the consulting work we do where we find efficiencies, that would be something I’d be really open to saying, hey, listen, we’ll do the consulting for free and then we’ll get, whatever, 20% productivity bonus. I think for us, it’s the making something that works, like the software engineering side of it.
Just has so many unexpected twists and turns that I could price risk into it, but then it would feel too expensive. And if we did a great job, that tension is weird for me, but I’m certainly open to ideas and thinking about that.
Jason Niedle (17:32)
Mm-hmm.
So other ways to look at that type of situation, because I totally hear you, are some sort of tiered bonus levels based on either time, based on usability surveys. Like, hey, if we get to an 8 out of 10 in your user survey, and you’re at a 3 right now, or whatever the number is, if we get you to some dramatic increase, then it’s an X dollar bonus. What do you think?
Mike (17:57)
Interesting, that’s interesting. Yeah, okay, I’ll think about it.
Jason Niedle (17:59)
Because
it’s kind of like the idea of aligning win-win results with the right incentives. Like, I had never considered it before until I had a consultant come in and that’s what they told me. They’re like, why are you not aligning your incentives for both of you? I’m like, that’s a damn good point. what are you doing? 50 people are hard to keep fed. How do you fill that top of funnel?
Mike (18:04)
for sure. Yep.
That’s really good.
So for other agency people, don’t forget that your best repeat business usually comes from your current clients. So we make sure we do a great job with the people we serve already. And I mean, with a pretty high regularity, and we’ve had a handful of core clients for 10 plus years that we just keep finding something new to do. Again, if you find something that is a positive investment for you, you get something back when you work with us and you’ll keep doing it, right?
So then on the top of funnel stuff, we’re doing everything from podcasts. That’s been actually one of the more effective things. We have a bunch of different campaigns that we send stuff in the mail to. We call you on the phone. We actually do calling. We do LinkedIn campaigns. We’re trying a million things to see what works. Ads, paid ads, kind of thing. But honestly, the person-to-person referrals and networking has been
so far and away the best thing that’s what I focus a lot of my time on. sure. We’re really interested in working with private equity and companies who they’ve invested in that have an exit thesis. And so part of that is we’re supposed to make money on this company in a timeframe, three years, something like that. And so now we know, okay, great. So we’re all working together.
Jason Niedle (19:09)
I was going to ask you, events, yeah, do you guys show up at events and stuff? What kind? What’s working?
Mm-hmm.
Mike (19:31)
to take this company that’s at 4 % profitability and get it to 22% in 36 months. And this person’s working on finance, we’re working on tech and software. This person’s working on sales and scripting and brands and all this, all these things work together. Now we’re aligned, whereas honestly, it blows my mind. We talked to a lot of companies where the founder, CEO, whatever is like, oh, this is fine. whether we grow it or sell it, I don’t care.
whether the kids get it. It’s weird, a lot of people are just sort of happy being complacent, even with pretty significantly sized companies. So I want to work with people that want to have fun and grow and do interesting things and make a difference. And life is short, it sounds like we both, like you said, we graduated a little while ago. I’m not going to do this another 50 years, I want to have some fun and make a difference. All right?
Jason Niedle (19:57)
That is weird.
I know, right? So
in that process, it sounds like you’re doing a lot of the right things. Podcasts, thank you for being here. Mail, calls, LinkedIn ads, trade shows, networking, right? Somewhere in there, there are constraints that are limiting you and limiting that potential growth. And I guess the other way to look at it is like, if you could wave a magic wand and make something better or make one of those work better, like what would that be?
constraining more sales in terms of either new leads or friction.
Mike (20:40)
I
I’m semi-delusional that I can help every single company in America, in the world. The challenge is to just get the first conversation because nobody answers. My phone rings, I don’t answer that. I get an email, I don’t read don’t if it’s message or timing or medium or whatever it is, but something about
getting that first conversation is, I think, one of the harder things for a service company that doesn’t have a brand, like a global brand. So that’s kind of where think we’re a little constrained.
Jason Niedle (21:15)
Sure, that makes sense. Is there anything that surprises you lately about your sales process or your marketing process in terms of things that used to work and are flopping for some reason or things that you thought would never work and all of a sudden have some great ROI?
Mike (21:30)
So as crazy as this sounds, we ramped up our calling efforts and I think people are answering the phone, our numbers would say 5X more than they used to and that’s going from like a very small under half a percent to like up to one and a half almost two percent, which is significant enough to make your week if you’re calling for us, you know, I got nobody till I got three people, right? And that’s a big difference. That’s a win for somebody.
And so we’ve even had one of our people who is doing more packages and sending and other things move more over to calling just as a time thing and is getting some success. So that’s a really old fashioned, old school thing that, is working better than I thought it would honestly. Yeah.
Jason Niedle (22:08)
And it is surprising, yeah.
I wonder, it makes me think too, I wonder if there was some way, I guess it would be difficult, if you could match phone numbers and emails or phone numbers and addresses if you could somehow prep that call some easier way. But anyways, just a thought.
Mike (22:17)
you
So one of the things we did for ourselves with AI that I thought was kind of cool is that we built a tool to go, like if we’ve got like a, we can list up a hundred people, for example, and we’ll use some of the tools that we have and go get the number, have it click the button to get the cell phone number, go research them in chat GPT, go research them on all the different things, collect it all together, put it in the CRM and then score the deal.
So on a scale, here’s some criteria. So then if you’re looking at like, say we have a thousand or 5,000, it’ll score the top 211 people that seem to be the best for us to focus on. And that saved, however long it would take someone to research all that. I I don’t even know if you could get it done. But I think we’ve combined like an AI workflow to get that done. It’s actually pretty cool. Yeah.
Jason Niedle (23:03)
That’s amazing.
What do wish other leaders, other founders knew about growing sales?
Mike (23:08)
I’m such a sales aficionado, I love sales stuff.
I wish they knew.
I think the thing that was hardest for me to get was this idea that when there’s investments in a thing you’re going to do, there’s money, there’s time, and there’s change. And most people think of, money’s the big deal. I mean, be careful around the money. But really, if you’re a client of any sort of scale, the fee you would pay either one of our companies is something you have immediately available to you. It’s not a big deal.
Even if it’s a million dollars, if you’re a $200 million company, you have that money. The thing I think that people struggle the most with is the philosophical change to do the thing we’re going to do. And it’s either we’re going to ask our people to do something different, and I don’t like the idea of that. We’re to have to get over the idea that, we have to make everything here ourselves. These are like, well, maybe you can’t. Maybe that’s not your skill set. There are all these sort of inertia moments of, well, here’s what we’ve always done.
And everyone knows you’re not supposed to do everything we’ve always done, but yet they keep doing it because it’s so hard to change. So as a salesperson, we’ve got a whole process around how we lead you through, yeah, you’re right. You do have everything all handled. We lead you through this process where you basically have to confess that, we don’t have it all handled and we do need help. And it’s really hard and some people fight it. But if we can get aligned, like we’re really just trying to help you with the thing that you know is the problem.
And it usually comes down to we have to change this idea that we’ve always had because we have the money. It’s fine. We have the time to do this. But we’re going to have to think about a different way to do it because if we didn’t need the help, we wouldn’t have to change. But we do need to change.
Jason Niedle (24:37)
There’s this analogy that I kind of always think of and I don’t remember who told it to me. But there was these monkeys they were trying to catch somewhere and they could not catch the monkeys and whatever they went to do, the monkeys were faster than they were. And they would leave food out and go to catch it and the monkey would flee. And they finally realized, well, if we put a hole in this log that’s the size of the monkey’s wrist, but smaller than his fist, and we put the food in there, he’ll put his hand in the hole, he’ll grab the food and then when we go to get him,
He’s stuck because he just self-trapped him. He’s not going to let go of the thing he has. And I realized in my business, I’ve had a great business, it’s been 22 years. And it was running smoothly, but I was like the monkey holding on to the way that it had to be for the longest time. And then finally, it’s like, at some point you have to change. You have to let go of that and take the risk. Like, okay, I’m losing that thing that I know that I have that’s good, but I’m doing that to move on.
Mike (25:13)
Yeah.
Yeah, you know, it’s funny. I’ve heard that story many times over the years and I’ve never thought of it through that lens. And I think you have exactly right. Cause that we have this thing and it’s scary to try the new thing. Cause I might lose what I’ve got. That’s a really good insight. And I’ll remember that you told me that that’s a really good one.
Jason Niedle (25:40)
And then the other way I like to think of it similarly is kind of like someone new to a trapeze. They’re not going to let go and fly to the next handle. But that’s the exciting part. That’s the good part. That’s the movement. But someone who’s new is going to swing back and forth until they lose their momentum. You’ve got to let go for a second.
Mike (25:48)
Right,
Yeah.
my God, that’s really good.
Jason Niedle (26:00)
So you guys are working a lot with AI. What do we need to know about AI and or how can that help us grow? I mean, this that in itself is obviously a whole discussion, but how does AI help us grow as founder leaders?
Mike (26:13)
So I think the main lesson is that everyone will be doing it. And so in a way it becomes, I think you said something like this earlier, it becomes table stakes to be relatively accomplished at. And so, be proud of yourself that you did something, but you have to do that to keep up in the future. And so I think that where growth is going to come is put it this way, if you did something
Jason Niedle (26:27)
Hmm.
Mike (26:34)
and you’re really proud about this amazing thing you did in two days. That is amazing. But realize everyone else can do it in two days also. So the valuable stuff is going to be just like it used to be. Unless it’s something that took you like three or six months or a year or something to develop, it’s like a really valuable, like difficult, cost of entry kind of thing, then it’s not really worth it.
The jobs that are going to go away are the same kinds of jobs that went away with the last round of technology innovation. So things that are easy to do should be easy to do and get that stuff knocked out. I always think of this idea where when radio first came along, what they did was they did plays on the radio because before there was plays and now there’s radio. So I guess we just do the same thing again. And then they figured, wait,
radio can be different and now we’ll do sound effects and it’s on location and now we can broadcast a baseball game and all that kind of stuff. And then same thing with TV. Now TV comes along, I guess we just do plays on TV. I don’t know, there may be different camera angles. And so we have to figure out what’s the thing that we end up doing that isn’t just the same thing we were doing now with AI. And in a way, like I don’t know what that is. I can’t predict that. What I found is when we go into businesses,
there’s always something that’s like, wait, when we look at this all together, it’s really crazy that we’re doing these five things. Why don’t we just make that a thing? And now we’ve got that, we can do this thing we never even dreamt of being able to do. And that second part, that’s where the growth comes from. And that sometimes can be a different business. I mean, it’s not uncommon for that to be the thing that now we jettison the old business and now we’re in this new business. That wouldn’t be unsurprising to me.
Jason Niedle (27:43)
you
It’s so true. Last night I was talking to my 10 year old and I was trying to make predictions like the world’s going to change and AI is going to do X, Y and Z, right? Your house bot will do your laundry or whatever. so I went to the analogy of the phone. I’m like, phones used to be this brick that was like attached to your wall and there was like a dial thing and it was only meant for talking to someone and you had to be within the length of the cord. And I never could have imagined when I was a kid that like all the
entire information in the world would be in this little brick that I carry around with a screen and my TV and blah blah blah and all this stuff. And then I realized, I have no idea what your future is going to look like. I couldn’t possibly predict. There was no way I could have looked at that phone back then and realized that it was going to become all of my information and I was going to carry it around. You know?
Mike (28:43)
Yeah, you know, it’s
even like a subtle or almost dumber one that I think about a lot is the default orientation that when we, you know, before phones came along, the default orientation was a horizontal view of things. And in fact, like cinemas, like the wider, the better, like the big screen and whatever. And we used to make fun of people who took videos straight up like this, because it’s like, well, that’s not how this works. And then all of sudden you realize
wait with this new application, this fits the human form better and we can do different close up videos. It’s like in a new form of entertainment and everything emerged from just a simple orientation change. And it’s like stuff like that. It’s not until you experiment a thousand different things, you’re going to find, here’s the new, now this when there’s no looking back.
Jason Niedle (29:25)
Yeah, so there’s no way to know it’s coming, but we know it’s going to change. This has been super interesting. Where can our audience find you?
Mike (29:29)
Yeah. Yeah.
For the company Caxy.com, C-A-X-Y.com. actually I’m going to invite you on my podcast, thedigitaltransformist.com. I’ll let you shine with all your great nuggets and insights.
Jason Niedle (29:39)
Beautiful.
Appreciate it. And it’s Mike LaVista. Can they look you up on LinkedIn if they want to connect?
Mike (29:48)
Sure, LinkedIn’s great. I answer virtually all those and I’m on Twitter as well, or X.
Jason Niedle (29:54)
Perfect.
Mike, thank you for being on Beyond SasS. For leaders in mid-stage tech looking to grow, we drop episodes twice a week on Tuesdays and Thursdays. And you can find me, Jason Niedle, at tethos.com, t-e-t-h-o-s.com. Of course, drop any questions, comments for me or future guests in feedback below. We really appreciate that.
And feel free to share if you got some value today. Until next time, this is Beyond SasS.
