Hey, Megan, let's do a podcast.

Great idea. What should we talk about?

All right, you guys ready?

Yeah. Let's do it.

Awesome.

This is so much fun. The Tangents with TorranceLearning Podcast is basically an excuse and an opportunity for me to go off and riff on all the really interesting tangents I find in my work, because I have a very hard time staying focused on just one thing. So thank you and welcome. And what I. What I've also learned about my work is that I get to have fantastic conversations with incredibly interesting people in the course of my work. Like, that's what I get to do. The podcast is an opportunity to share some of those really interesting conversations and insights with a much wider audience. Like, why should I have all the fun? So welcome.

Today I am joined by Deadre Welcome, Vince Han, Bob Mosier. I'm Megan Torrance. And let's have a conversation about the kinds of things that in house learning and development professionals might wonder about or might not even know about. What happens on the other side, what happens in that vendor and partner services and software side of things, and what they can learn.

So.

So let's go around the room, have some introductions and get us started. And then I have questions in kind of three parts, and maybe if we have time, there's a bonus question. No hard questions.

All right.

Deadre, you want to go?

I sure will. I am Deadre Welcome. Yes, my last name is Welcome. I am a culture and performance consultant. I help organizations perform better, and that means that I meet with the organizational leaders and in order to transform or elevate their culture and their performance.

And you know what was super exciting? Because I got to meet you at a conference last summer at the Training. Training Officers Consortium. So I just love the power of a conference to connect people together.

Absolutely.

So good to see you.

Likewise.

Vince.

Hello. Great to be here. I'm Vince Han. I am the founder of a company called Mobile Coach. We do specialized chatbots for largely learning and development, but for all sorts of departments and typically large organizations. And we've been doing this for 14 years.

Wow.

Lots of chatbots.

Happy birthday.

Yeah, Vince is the chatbot guy. And wonderful meeting you too, Deadre as well. Love the last name.

Thank you.

Very welcoming.

Thank you.

Bob Mosher. I am one of the co founders of an organization called Apply Synergy Five Moments of need. You may have heard of us through Dr. Conrad Gafferson's life, lifelong work. In the five moments of need, we focus in the performance. Love the pivot in helping learning organizations go take their services and solutions beyond just training. Not that that's alone bad. Right.

But into the workflow to help enable performance after, you know, those types of programs. So we work typically with large learning organizations, L and D teams, but tend we can also lately to Vince point, we're getting also pulled more and more into businesses directly who have the performance concerns and want to speak directly to that.

Awesome. Awesome. And I'll actually engage in this conversation too because I'm also a vendor in the space. And so TorranceLearning delivers a lot of custom learning, but also some off the shelf and some data and analytics and professional development to the learning development organization for all sorts of large companies. So we get to all play in here, but I'm the one with the questions. So what I really am hoping for today is just some really, really straight talk, really, really useful talk about what are peers on the other side.

Right.

Our peers who maybe our clients, maybe our prospects, maybe don't know about us yet. But what can someone who works inside an organization learn from this vendor ecosystem or this partner ecosystem? So, and this isn't us versus them kind of conversation. This is more like let's learn together and have better partnerships and everybody can get more out of it for our learners. So I want to start with like, what are we seeing across the market?

Right?

Like one of the things that's really cool about the work we do is we get to see a lot of different organizations and how a lot of different people are solving the same kinds of problems. So what are some of the patterns that you're seeing? Either you've always seen these patterns or there's something new going on out there. Who wants to start?

I'll start.

Go for it.

All right. Well, I've had the advantage of being an internal consultant in the federal government for 27 years. And now being on the outside, I am also celebrating 15 years in the business. So I'm super excited.

So many birthdays.

Yes. Yes. So I think that the, the thing that I see, the trend that I see across all industries, across all organizations, large or small, is Change. Change is happening rapidly, and we've always experienced change. Change is that one thing that's constant. However, it's happening a lot quicker than we are used to. So really being able to adapt and still show empathy has been a challenge in organizations that I've worked with across all industries.

Well that's interesting. Right. So from a leadership perspective. Yeah, tons of change. And it's really hard to be empathetic when you're really worried about who moved your cheese.

Yes.

Right. But then also, we bring about change.

Absolutely. And so helping organizations know how to communicate it, how to manage it, how to prepare people for it has really been a challenge because you're kind of doing that at the same time that you're experiencing it. So managing your own emotions and feelings and emotional intelligence while still trying to help others do the same thing and be successful is a challenge. And so I really empathize with them, having been on the inside, but I also have some ideas having that strategic view from the outside to help them with their challenges.

Oh, fantastic. Fantastic. Vince. Bob, what are you seeing, like out there?

I am seeing as a trend, the need for L and D teams to be more collaborative internally, especially with procurement, with IT security people. I think, you know, maybe four or five years ago when that happened, there was a lot of intimidation, like, oh, I gotta speak to security. I don't know that language, but I'm seeing that people are getting more comfortable with that. They see internally that they have to be good partners, that security isn't just some checkbox to check. It's a really important governance issue, and it impacts the user experience that they're trying to build for their learners. And they have to partner internally with not just being in a silo, but with other departments. And I think that's. That's a really good trend.

I think it's important and will. And as organizations get more comfortable with that, more fluent with that, they'll find that suddenly they'll have more influence as well.

Yeah. You know, it's interesting. There's historically been this tension, Right, between L and D and their own IT teams. Right. And I can remember I used to deploy lmss, right. I can remember people saying, like, oh, if we get IT involved, we will never get done. Right? And now it's like, no, you will not get this project done unless you involve your IT and your security. And they are going to slow you down for really good reasons.

And build those relationships.

Absolutely. And as you build those relationships with each subsequent project, it will get easier. There will Be increased trust. And again, you'll just have a lot more influence.

Yeah. Yeah. Bob, what about you?

Yeah, well, you know, the elephant in the room is AI, right? I mean, my 40 years at this, I'm starting my 43rd soon. Is that.

Happy birthday.

Yeah, thank you. Is that the reality is that there's been great disruptors along that entire journey. Right. The last one close to this, in my opinion, was the advent of the Internet, right. These types of things. And it. And it changed the landscape of both the skills of those we support, the learning environment with which they learned in and tried to perform in. And then it challenged our skill set.

And clearly the same thing's going on right now. There's the disruptive emotional change of what that means, but there's also the strategic methodological, if that's the word, right up to us to re challenge our skills. So skills is a huge word in everywhere, right? From the CEO to everyone in the organization. And so we're challenged more now with helping organizations understand the new skill in evolving and changing skill set of what AI will be, will continue to be disruptive of and realigning our skills around how we then build solutions that map to those new skills. Are more workflow, frankly, embedded, because AI is in the workflow and therefore changing our deliverable set. So I think it's a wonderful time. We've been asking for a seat at the table for years. We've wanted to be the business partner for years.

And I find that in these disruptive times, you have a very receptive business partner than we've ever had before. Right. So I think there's a huge opportunity for us to walk into that position.

That's fascinating. And I think what's interesting, right, it's this is a catalyst to break down some silos inside organizations. Right. And I often start to tweak my language. It's not learning in development so much as learning in performance. And that busting down in the silos, what I'm also seeing from my perspective is that we also need to be busting down the silos between the tools that we use in L and D, right. And the, you know, it used to be you could throw all your stuff in a learning management system. You needed one tool, you needed an authoring platform to put the stuff in a learning management system, and poof, you could rock and roll.

And those tools become far more valuable when there are more complex components, but only when those components are connected to each other. We saw that with xapi. We're now seeing that with AI, right, where you, you need to have that data transfer. Otherwise I have one experience over here and another experience over here and it's not holistic and the organization doesn't know what's going on. Right. We spent a lot of time and I, I'm, I'm 100% learner centered. But if the organization doesn't understand what's happening, then they can't guide that and, and move that forward. So.

Okay, super, super cool. My second question again, in still in that realm of what do we see that maybe in house practitioners aren't aware of simply because we see a lot of different things, is what if I want you to think for a moment of your top clients? Don't name them. Right. But your top clients or prospects or people you talk to, what do they do that's different than the ones that are struggling or that may be behind what's that? Differentiator.

I think they anticipate the future as they are building their current situation. They're not just reactive, they're more proactive and they're looking forward as to, okay, here's where we are, but here's where we need to be. And in the moment, what do we need to do? And I think the top organizations, the top clients realize that they don't always have all of the skills needed on their teams. So they reach out to consultants like us and vendors like us to help them augment what they're doing versus those clients who want us to come in and fix it. Yes. Yeah, you can't fix everything, can.

No, I haven't figured that out either. No, I want to. I'd make a ton of money if I could.

I wish. Okay. Training cannot fix a culture infection. That is just it. It just cannot do it. So helping them to understand that and those that come to the table that already know that makes our job easier.

Yeah.

Well, I don't believe either of you, I think both of you can fix everything. You're just holding out on us. As I think about our top projects and the people that are involved, the word that comes to mind and it kind of dovetails to what you said earlier, Megan, about interoperability of systems is rigor. There's a rigor that's required to understand the user experience, to understand users, the learner expectations and then putting together, putting together the experience to meet that expectation is non trivial. There's a lot of rigor that goes behind with each stakeholders, with the details of the content and of the technical aspects of it. And that's a pattern I see that people rise up to. They recognize the requirements to put together an excellent user experience and they're willing to put in the work.

Yeah. And I would argue with all of this is that the successful organizations we're working with are the ones that have made a training to a performance pivot in what they do. They're not the L and D department anymore. They're the performance architect department. They're the performance consultants. They're not the instructional designers doing, if I may addy, all the time, so to speak. And where I'm going with that is they've matured in, in both how their skill sets and where the world is going. And there's a lot of anxiousness around performance and productivity right now.

What's going to, how is this going to impact the skill sets of the workers with the AI human balance. Right. So the organizations that are being successful, the ones that are pivoting on the business need and the business anxiousness and the KPIs and all those other kinds of things and they're not thinking, you know, how do I re architect my E learning course? You know, how do I reposition myself as the L and D team? They're going in and saying look, we are a very different kind of a service provider to the organization. Now to your point friend, it's a retooling in our side then. So what does the ID do now? What new roles are emerging? Performance consultants on the front end versus the old analysis we used to do in the beginning. So they're maturing with that demand. They're not trying to square peg round hole things. I think they're evolving with the need of the business and it's a scary time frankly for a lot of businesses and what skills really means from a performance perspective.

And they're helping understand that landscape.

When you really touched Bob on something that I see in our top clients is they know their business.

Yep.

Right. They really, they bring that rigor. They read that learning design rigor. They're looking forward on the thinking performance but they really know what their business is and how their business makes money. Right. And what's important there. So I think that's pretty valuable stuff. Let's shift gears for a little bit here.

And the elephant in the room. So we might as well talk about it. It costs money to hire us

and

that often comes at sticker shops. So you think of somebody who might be working in an organization, they might make 150 or $200,000 or $90,000 and they're hiring us and there's a lot of zeros sometimes and yet I know all of you, none of you is driving that great a car. Right. So there must be something.

Right.

So, so what does it take to deliver that a client might not see or an in house practitioner might not see? What are just real quick some of the considerations you make and maybe we'll go a different direction around. Right, that's, that's part of your pricing.

Yeah. I think too often we're, we're judged by the deliverable, not the, not the rigorous. You know and I think the level of project management, the level of stakeholder management, the level of change management that's involved in the world we're trying to help people evolve today is a lot different and affects the bottom line and the price more so than the days of I'm going to hire you to help me make six days of leadership training. Right. That was jumping right to the deliverable. And our ideas got right in and did what they've always done with the tools they've always used. Well now they're asking us to play a much different role and the project management layer to that, the change management we have to help them with and getting these things to be adopted is a whole other set of skills that they haven't often seen in us and realize that frankly is built into the price for, for a good reason because if we don't offer those things, these solutions don't work. So I think that is a layer that I think surprises folks when they see us build that in.

And it's not an administrative logistic layer. It is a strategic key part of the kinds of solutions we're to going being asked to build to work successfully.

Vince, how about you?

I often get asked when I'm putting together a proposal in collaboration with a customer, they say hey Vince, tell me what I don't know. And it just occurred to me that I should ask the same question. You tell me what I should know that I don't know about your organization. What gotchas are going to be in there for me. All of a sudden you say oh, it's going to be smooth. But then a meeting with two people turns into a meeting with 20 people. And I didn't realize that. And now I have to figure out who all these people are and start holding everyone's hand.

And so I do think to dovetail what Bob said, that there's a lot of supporting a learning curve, supporting the inevitable ups and downs in a project. And I Think those things sometimes are hidden costs.

Yeah. And if all you did was give them the deliverable, boom, here it is. Right. You. It'd be cheaper, but it wouldn't solve their needs or their problems.

No one would win.

We would all win.

Yes.

Nobody wins. Yeah. I love it. I love it. Deadre, how about you? What's it take to deliver?

I think mine. My view is slightly different. It is. I come in. So my whole pitch is we meet clients where they are and we help them co create and reimagine a culture where everyone thrives and belongs to. So I think that when they come, when I come in to help them with training, it helps I prove my worth. And then they bring me in to do other things that are more strategic and organizational and OD based because they know that I've asked these questions in something simple like what does success look like? And they're like, oh, I don't know, we just want this. And then I explained to them, in order to get that I need to do this.

And so it's really kind of teaching them without them knowing that they're being taught.

Oh, yeah, yeah.

And may I build up that. I've seen the deliverable in my 40 years go from much more of a point in time to an iterative process. And you couldn't have said it any better. I wish that my buyers would be more understanding of letting us phase into the work, then commit to a dollar amount. Yeah, right. This is going to cost $40,000 or whatever, you know, whatever it is. And therefore we're locked into that deliverable in that point in time. We've tried to mature our buyers more through.

Look, there's. This is phased and we don't know what phase three looks like till we do phase one and two. Yeah, right. So what if phase one. So can we. Can we can. We'll lay out the journey. But please don't, don't ask me to put a price point on phase five, because we don't know what phase five looks like until we've done phase one analysis, then phase two change, you know, those types of things.

And sometimes that's unsettling, I think, for the buyer that's used to coming to L and D for the six days of leadership training. And how much is that going to cost me? It's a very different ask, I think.

Well, because from. I say, in our Agile workshops, right. Every day you learn more about the project you're working on, including the people who've hired you.

Absolutely.

And so as we Evolve together. We either find out that something is harder or easier. Or we have this cool idea. We could go over here and that would be amazing. And let's scrap this entire thing. We started with. I started a few years ago writing my proposals and like you have given us a list of requirements. My estimate is that that is about 60 to 80% of the things that we will determine are absolutely required to go live.

That's a great start. We will continue to find those things out up to and including the week before we go live, whatever it might be. And that mindset and that ability to say yes is part of what goes into it. The other things that we see as far as going into it, you know, our clients expect us to be always on, always available to them. But each individual person on a team might have three, six or more projects they're working on. So the ability to be on for any one person at any given time requires that we build slack into their lives. We also actually, during the pandemic, I think was our catalyst. We started building redundancy.

Not redundancy like in the European sense, where we've got too many people. We need to let some of you go. It's the. What happens if I've got Bob on a project and Bob gets. Goes to a conference and picks up Covid. Right.

Or.

Or gets a fantastic job offer, maybe even from one of our clients, which happens.

Right.

But I still have to deliver on the work even if Bob is no longer working. So I need to make sure Deadre knows how to plug into that, which gets to rigor.

Right.

And so you have to have that internally. So there's a lot of things that go into it and sometimes those are hard to foresee in the beginning. I'm loving this conversation. I'm loving this. Let's then. And we started to touch on it.

Right.

I'm gonna let you go first, Vince, on this next question. Right. So let's transition from, like, take this one kind of permutation to the side here. The problem with the podcast is nobody can see my interpretive dance version of my agenda here. So I'm now on part three. But let's talk about how to partner with your vendors from our perspective to get the most out of that relationship and. And what kinds of things a buyer can do to either signal this is going to be an amazing relationship, we're all going to have a lot of fun, or I am going to be your worst nightmare and you're going to regret your life choices and really wish somebody else had won that rfp. What are some of the signals that you might pick up early on in a relationship?

I don't know if this will answer your question, but this is what's coming into my brain so,

Go for it.

this is what you're going to get.

It's tangents. That's what we're here for.

The model I have in my mind as I hear this challenge is that I've used for years, is when the meeting is over, when I have left the room, and let's say that I'm, you know, you're. You three are my clients, and we had this meeting, we're talking about the project, and then it's over, and I. I leave, and then a colleague knocks on the door and says, hey, Megan, you were just meeting with that Vince mobile coach guy. How. How did it go? So in my model, when projects are successful, they are confident in how they talk to their colleagues about how the project is going. Because a lot of times in meetings, we can all sort of fake it till we make it. But when I'm not there, have I empowered my customer to be effective internally? Because so much of what we do in deploying chatbots for learners requires a team, requires collaboration. But there's an innate elephant in the room.

AI. Everyone's bridging their AI literacy gap. It's a learning curve. It takes time. There's a lot of techie talk. And so have I made it easy? Have I given people the taglines, the vocabulary to be successful internally? And so that's what comes to my brain to help this be successful.

Okay, so what could they be doing that signals to you that they're either getting it or not getting it? Like, how do you know?

Yeah, I think maybe if I'm making it safe for them to say, you know, actually, I don't know how to explain this, so I think I get it. I'm nodding my head, but, Vince, help me be more successful in explaining this when you're not going to be in the room to cover me to explain this technical component or explain how this bot works, or explain that we need this request requirement from this other. So if they, if I can make it safe for them, then to raise their hand and say, I need help, please help me. And then I, I think then, you know, everyone can be more successful when we can share. Share our vulnerabilities.

Yeah, yeah.

Yeah, you know, it, it. If I learned anything over the years is that a partnership is by definition a shared collaboration. There's. It's, it's A relationship. Right. And the successful relationships I've been in are transparent. You know, they can have the hard conversations. Right? They can.

It's okay to be wrong. You know, the balance of the roles is clear. Right. And so I hate a project ending and going, wow, I wish we'd put a PM on that. Well, why didn't we do it in the first place? And by the way, when we start our next project, we should probably have a PM in every project. And we, by the way, we kind of like one on the other side. So we always require a PM because that's us building what we define as a partnership. So when we start with an organization, we're like, look, if we're entering into a collaborative partnership, at least from our side, and of course we want to hear from yours what a successful partnership, when you bring us in to do work, looks like.

And here's the following roles, here's the following stakeholders, here's the following meetings we're going to have. I mean, down to that level. Like, you know, we require a senior stakeholder meeting every month. Not the people in the weeds, but the senior because we want to see if buy ins happening. And all this kind of stuff that used to be happenstance, to be honest. There wasn't the rigor to when you sign a contract with us, here's the required roles. Now they can push back. But that we find make a partnership and therefore the deliverable successful.

We were never that rigorous about it and it was more of an art than a science and it got us in trouble. And the partnership was left to the potato, potato. And we found that the clothes clearer we can get on that with pushback and compromise. But the clearer we can get in that, the more successful we proceed as we go along.

Awesome, awesome. Can I just call both of you on something?

Yeah.

Because you're really good friends of mine, both of you. Neither of you answered the question I asked. I asked how do you know if the client is going to be delightful to work with or not? And you answered what we can do. So Deadre, you want to answer my question, please?

I absolutely will answer your question. At least I hope.

Okay. All right, I'll call you too.

Okay, call me out. I. I know if a client is going to be a. And I'm using air quotes on the air and on a podcast. A good client or a good partner is when they have a clue about what outcome they're looking for. And it goes back to what you said about knowing their business. When they know that I Want the outcome to be this. Then I feel like I can get them there.

The challenge is when they don't have a clue and they just want team building. And I'm asking them, okay, what are you able to do or not able to do? And what does success look like? What do you want them to be able to do at the end? And they don't know. We just want to work better together. Then I know that it's going to be a struggle, and I'm going to spend a lot of time trying to get to what it is so that we can do it.

Yeah.

Yeah. If I can defend my answer real quick, because I apologize, and I apologize.

You're my friend. I'll let you go.

I apologize for wandering around the answer tangents. We've learned very quickly that there's some questions we had to ask them right away to see if they're going to be a good client or not. And we're more than happy. This took us a while, but to walk away. Yeah, right. As a consultant, you want. You gotta put your lights on, you gotta pay for your car and things. So we learned to not take everything and then figure out if we could.

If we could make it right. We. We come to us. People come to us for the five moments of need workflow, learning period. They don't come to us for a chatbot. We have partners, Vince, that can help Megan for other. But. But if they're gonna come to us.

And so we have some very explicit questions in the beginning, and they're like, well, you know, we really just want a lot of training. Can you help us rework our E learning? We're like, well, no, we can't, because that's not what we do. And by the way, you need to find the partner that will help you do that. And we have partners we know that we can talk to, but we have some vetting questions early. Not to be rigorous or to turn business away, but to make sure that when we step in and they pay us what it costs, we're able to deliver in what they want.

Yeah, absolutely. Do you want to defend your answer, Vince? I see.

No, I already told you I wasn't answering your question, so. But I will answer your question now very briefly. Yeah, I can tell if a client's going to be a good client when they pay their invoices on time.

Okay. Yes.

And I'm not.

That could be.

I mean, I'm serious, because that means that they care and that they're being conscientious of my team and my time and that I have to pay my people. So that's my answer.

Yeah. And I think there's a particularly people who work in very large organizations have no idea how money happens.

Right.

And that's fine. But those of us who work in small organizations, we really know, we know how money happens.

That's absolutely right. But I have found that our best clients will find out and they take the time, you know, let me find out the status of that invoice. It's important to me and I'm going to get back to you on that.

Love it. Love it. Yes, absolutely. I just had a client who literally walked us to the proverb. You know, the, the accounting department said, here's, here's my new vendor. I just picked them up. Please take really good care of them. Here's the statement of work, here's all this stuff.

And I thought, wow.

I don't know if you find this, but the larger the client, the longer the terms.

Yes, well, that's cash management on their part.

So it's another conversation to have up front. It's like, look, my contractors work on a 30 day or would like to because families to feed. But you have a 60 day pay term. 60 days. Now can we work with that? Can you help us with that? Can we be sure that we get, we're all in the procurement system so we get paid on the 60 day and we get that. You know, that fe people that will work with us on that I think really helps them understand us as a provider and therefore provide the best service we can.

Yeah, absolutely, absolutely. So we touched on this a little bit second to last question here and it's what's something that a client can do to make sure right that they are getting the best out of any vendor led work that they're doing? What's something they can do to make sure besides pay their bills? Pay their bills. Check after that or ach, I'll take either. But after that, what's something they can do to signal or to make sure they're getting success?

Maybe Deadre answered this earlier and so I'll just reiterate what she said. But to start with success at the beginning, what does, how are we going to measure success? What is success going to look like? That's one of our questions in our project kickoff is actually how, how are we going to tell that we're successful? And so you define that up front and so we're not like chasing something.

Love that. Love that.

If I understood your question,

I think

that the client needs to be available for us to do the work that we need to do.

Yeah.

Which sometimes is a challenge. You know, they're really busy and so are we and we need to know who to put, you know, to put on a project. And we need to have these conversations. But I need you to show up so that we can have the conversations because your, your timeline is really short and here's what I need.

They have to put in the work. Yeah. It doesn't get magic if they don't participate. Because we don't, we don't have crystal balls.

Exactly.

Yeah.

And back to the same thing. I love that. That's why we do the whole role definition. In the beginning, for instance, we need three SMEs. I mean I made the number up, but you know, and then all of a sudden we find a month in that the SMEs aren't available. Or there was no, there's not three SMEs. There's one maybe and he's available every fourth Friday. So, you know, it's that, it's that constant communication and iterations and check ins of what success looks like.

I hate to guess my right answer. Right. And let's get, let's get right to it and let's iterate such that we're hearing in a manageable window how it's going. So we can remediate or check or correct or continue and tell us what we're doing great. Tell us what we're not, only what we're not. So doing great. Right. And then.

But sometimes that iteration goes too long and the error correct or the redirect, you know, consumes the money put out in the first place and all that other kind of stuff that's built into these things. So transparency, iteration. Right. Roles to help us get the job done and committing to them and having them show up.

Yeah. And I. You mentioned it before, Bob, that having a client side project manager is magic. Absolutely magic. And we also had a client a few years ago who came to us and said, hey, you know what really would be nice would be to have a quarterly meeting where we review, we step up above all the projects and we review that. And I thought, oh my gosh, talk about partnership. Right. Talk about partnership.

Okay, last quick question. And some people listening to this may be thinking about making the leap from being an in house practitioner out to either the entrepreneurial side or to join a company that's on the vendor side. What's something that people who are making this leap may not realize about what it's like to work in our world.

Ooh, that's a good one. I think they need to know that you have to wear all the hats when you're internal. You can call it, you can call finance or accounting. When you are in a business and you are starting out and you're by yourself and so you to partner with people and build relationships with people who don't have what you do.

Yeah, yeah, that's a good one.

Yeah. This is a great book we read when we first started our company called the E Myth which is the it's ease short for the entrepreneurial myth. Right. And every entrepreneur starts out with a great idea and no business sense whatsoever. Right. And so the collapse of many efforts at this is that we go, we have the skills to deliver the resource but we came from an internal L and D team and don't understand the running of the business and the balance of the P L and all those other things. Even if we're not in that role in the company, we service provider we enter into. My staff knows that they are entrepreneurially part of my business being successful.

And if they wanted, if they don't like that or uncomfortable then they should have joined a. They may want to go back to a larger whatever corporate where someone else worries about that. But in our world we collectively worry about that all the time. Not you know, and are aware of that all the time. So we're always being careful and frugal and effective and those types of stuff. So understand that when you step into this world it's exciting. You leave some of that stuff behind that drove you crazy. But there is, there are some challenges in the entrepreneurial side of this thing that you have to be prepared to

all new set of stresses. Vince, how about you?

I'm not sure if I'm really qualified to answer this question because I haven't been on the other side. But if I just project, I think that you have to. Think that you can thrive doing a lot of different things. And so, so because you're going to be working on multiple projects and some projects will be simple, some will be complex, some will be wonderful, some will be frustrating. And if that's and, and you, you'll. You have the opportunity to meet lots and lots of different people and build those relationships. And so like if you're listening to this and that sounds great, it. It is pretty great to be on this side.

I think it's kind of cool. It's kind of cool. One thing I find is that people who Come from in house to the vendor side. Need to. It's often, but not always, a faster pace. But certainly the switching is faster. Right. On our team, you might be doing spinal cord injury and one morning survey design.

In the afternoon, you might switch to spray dried cheese powder like your project. Switching is so rapid and the business models and the people involved are so rapid that I find it exhilarating. But it's a, it's, it's a challenge.

Just to clarify, they're not doing the surgery.

No, we are not doing surgery, I promise.

And it's not for the faint of heart. Right. But we are not bored. I mean, if you never like that rigor and you love the multiple relationships and you love the. Today I'm doing brain surgery, tomorrow I'm helping, you know, Wegman sell produce off of point of sale. You know, that's. I find that incredibly exciting and renewing for me every day. But it also comes with a level of stress and anxiousness and pace that you got to be just prepared for and understand it is the exciting side of this.

But I think you need to be realistic going into it.

Yeah, absolutely. Well, Deadre, Vince, Bob, thank you for following me down this tangent for about 45 minutes. I have really, really had a good time, great conversation. I hope you have a great rest of the conversation or the conference and we'll see you on out there. And we'll add links to everybody's business in the show notes in case people want to follow up with something pithy and interesting that you said. Thank you. Awesome. Thanks, everybody.

This is Meg Fairchild and Megan Torrance, and this has been a podcast from Torrance Learning. Tangents is the official podcast of Torrance Learning, as though we have an unofficial one. Tangents is hosted by Meg Fairchild and Megan Torrance. It's produced by Dean Castile and Meg Fairchild, engineered and edited by Dean Castile, with original music also by Dean Castile. This episode was fact checked by Meg Fairchild.