 Welcome to the Leader's Mindset where we have illuminating conversations with leaders of all kinds who are making an impact in business and our communities. Today we have Mike Aidengren, the principal at Lean Scaled Architects out of St. Petersburg, Florida, and they're simplifying the digital transition for other organizations. Thanks for joining us, Mike. Hey, thanks for having me, Jason. So tell us what that means. Tell us what simplifying digital transition means and how you're doing it better than anyone else at Lean Scaled Architects. So I know that when folks hear the words digital transformation, they really think about technology. They think about the software. They think about all the implementation projects on the software and maybe hardware if we're talking about defense systems or and so on. But really digital transformation is more than just cloud code maps. It needs secure digital services that are usable by people, right? And additionally, that value has to be sustainable beyond the big digital transformation project, right? So we see three typical digital problems. A big bang approach, right? Let's just do this whole big thing and then get it over with, right? Misalignment and miscommunication, which are not unique to a digital transformation. So what we do is we simplify the approach with a simple digital formula, right? We're trying to help people be more average. Sorry, we're trying to help people be more agile and leveraging lean scale technology investments that provide better, more secure user experiences. While minimizing those full life cycle costs, including maintenance and operations, which have to be part of any sort of total cost calculation, right? So again, it's agile process technology and secure UX divided by full life cycle costs equals better services. That's how we get there. And I think what we're all excited to hear about is the idea of better services because IT is a tool that we all use. It's a tool that makes our lives better, makes our lives easier. But it's people that are benefiting from the IT. So when you and I talked a few weeks ago, you talked a lot about IT not just being a department in an organization, but actually delivering services that we can depend on. So as executives, as leaders, as managers, even if we're a small business folks, what should we all be expecting from our IT providers? So let's make this not necessarily just about IT, but let's make it about a partnership between business and IT. So for that true sustainable value to come from those big digital efforts for the life cycle of whatever products we're developing, we need to consider how both the business and IT work together to deliver and sustain value for our customers, employees, and partners. So the easiest way to think about, to deliver that sustainable value is to just think about everything in terms of service delivery. So simple examples. When we pick up the phone and ask for something from our IT providers, we want the problem solved and we want to solve fast, right? When our customers pick up the phone and ask us for something, they want their problems solved fast and for a reasonable price. So we should be defining what reliable cost-effective services we need from IT providers in order to deliver those reliable cost-effective services to our customers. So we have this triangle kind of picture where we have the business services and information technology underneath it to help you deliver those business services. That makes sense. Yeah, that's great. Everyone loves that we can save on cost. Everyone loves that we can be more efficient. It sounds like what you're saying is that by doing this, companies can also boost their competitive advantages. Am I getting that right? That's right. That's right. They can. As an example, so we might be defining key technical service operations, sometimes called tech ops, needed to deliver reliable website shopping cart services to our customers. Everyone has used a shopping cart before, right? So you'll want that shopping cart to be operational most of the time. We might say, let's say 99.5% uptime and this would be called an SLA, a service level agreement. And you'd want some transparency around the consequences if that uptime is not met. So there's, hey, there's going to be a business service impact on our customers at this shopping cart breaks. There's going to be an impact on the company. So lost revenue and reputation because we can't rely on this company to run their own services. Do we really want to buy something from them? And we want that clear communication and expectation about how those IT services are important to help meet that service level agreement. So it sounds like we, we as leaders, we as executives, managers, wherever we are in the organization and as a decision maker, we need to be thinking about our IT and digital infrastructure, not just as well as the website is the email, it's all of that kind of things. It even goes beyond our competitive advantage. These are the tools that will enable us to help us meet our brand promise to our customers. Is that fair to say? That's it. The technology can be swapped out, you know, for better technology in the future. But look, if it's not usable by the people to help solve their problems, then what is the point of it? Absolutely. Well, we talked a little bit about Agile. I know that's something that's very important to you. I only know really a little bit about what Agile means. So can you explain for our audience what Agile is, why it's important, and not just how it benefits benefits again at the working level or getting the job done. But how does it benefit achieving our strategic goals in our companies or organizations? Yeah, so now we'll talk about how those services we just discussed are getting designed, built, and delivered, right? So assuming that our goal is to deliver the fastest, sustainable value to market, sustainable being. It works for the life site. We've considered all of the maintenance and operations costs. So it's not extremely expensive, cost prohibitive to deliver. We can charge a reasonable price to our customers because it's not expensive to deliver. That's our goal. So to get there, we need, we embrace Agile principles and to give an example on that. So think about small everyday Agile mindset thinking, right? Because Agile is a mindset, right? So to be able to pivot quickly, to think in smaller chunks, building quality in, right? Being Agile, and I know folks have heard that word before, right? It doesn't mean just going fast. It means going fast, but not at the same time, not sacrificing quality, right? We want to be able to do the things necessary to build quality up front, instead of making them an afterthought where we have to redo a bunch of things. So that's kind of what we mean by agility. And to give a simple, small example of what I mean by an everyday Agile mindset thinking. And everyone can apply this example. So whenever someone says, hey, look, we can't have this big meeting until everyone's available a month from now. I'm thinking immediately, what can we do out of band over email or website or something or chat group? Or in smaller groups, what smaller decisions can we make before the big group is assembled a month from now? Maybe we'll find the answers to a problems in our smaller groups and have the 80% answer, at least before we get to the big meeting, have a smaller big meeting or not have one at all? Well, I love that idea because any meeting that we can get rid of, I'm all for so. But it sounds like we have an opportunity here by thinking Agile, by doing Agile in our businesses. We actually can employ some really great leadership principles like delegating properly, giving authority to people, pushing authority down to the lower levels. And this is something you and your company, not just with a technology piece, but you help companies do this as well, right? Absolutely. In fact, there's two key Agile emphasis areas I'm going to talk about frequently. Number one is continuous improvement and number two is continuous learning. So I'll talk about a given example on continuous learning, for example. This is the importance of growing our people. So in an example from a past life I was in, I was sitting in a large building with brand new glass meeting rooms everywhere. You could actually look down and see the other, this massive building, see the other side of the building because all the compositions were glass. And so you could see the same 10 people moving from room to room, solving one crisis at a time. And I said, how is that scalable? I mean, these are the, what happens if like three of these people go do something else? Well, now we're in trouble and this is a Fortune 500 company. So now we're in trouble. So the idea that we're depending on these people just to forever be the experts is not sustainable. We've got to think about how we can train and mentor our people to make that 10 into 20 people in six months and make that 20 into 40 people in a year. I love that because developing the future leaders of our organization is exactly the tune I'm trying to sing here. And it sounds like you guys are singing the same tune. You know, you mentioned in a past life and can you tell us a little bit? How did you get to where you are today? What's a little bit about your background? How did you go into being an entrepreneur? That kind of thing. Yeah. So the idea is I kind of was working in consulting for, and I've been doing this for 25 years in one capacity or another. And mostly I was looking at the mistakes and the frustrations of the organizations I was in to applying big heavy approaches, traditional approaches, and not thinking about how we adjust for realistic ground conditions. I said there's got to be a better way. And so what I did was I said, hey, let's think about the things that I was good at and had experience with was not just the technology, but I can't be expert at all the technology. What I can do is figure out how to bring together the right people to help other folks use that technology effectively. And so this was the start of LeanSkilled Architects. Very cool. Well, we've definitely talked about how agility can help us make better decisions, lead more effectively. But it sounds like there's also a lot that you can bring to the table, you and your organization can bring to the table, not just on the nuts and bolts of leadership, but to help guide strategy and build culture. Can you talk about how you do that with your clients a little bit? Yes, and I will tell you from experience, the harder part is changing culture. So there's always smart consultants who can help develop a strategy PowerPoint deck or that's relevant for the industry. But the hard part is execution, really getting people to understand the vision to help them learn, grow and empowering them to make decentralized decisions. You'll hear me say this word pretty frequently too. If you can have people who are trained and experienced and have grown, well, you can start depending on them to make better decisions, right? And this is what I mean by decentralization. But this doesn't happen overnight. And while my agility advisors at LSA can help with people, process and technology and that side-by-side mentoring, leaders have to set a good example, both big and small. So for example, you know, committing to continuous lifelong learning, right? By setting aside some time for employees to learn new skills, or even if they're just, the leader is just taking the same agile team training classes and participating in key activities. Do you find resistance from some of your clients or some of the companies you work with when it comes to that idea of lifelong learning? I think that most people have heard this message. This is not the, I'm not the first person to say this, as you know, I mean, they, people have had leadership consultants, people have had leadership training, and they know they need to do this, but it's always somehow relegated to the last thing on our priorities. So what we're trying to do is show in, with agility, we talk about rapid cycles. One of the things we're trying to do is, is, is show as quickly as possible the consequence of having those 10 experts be the only 10 experts you've ever got. Because guess what? When there's a bunch of work stacked up and there's only 10 people to do it, you're not going to get to the priorities. You're helping to lead people learning grow. You're going to get more high quality stuff done, again, with that quality built in up front. So it sounds like your clients embrace this, or at least after you've worked with them for a little bit, embrace that. So what advice would you give to an organization that you're not working with right now? What, what should they be thinking about when it comes to the future of their organizations and how, how scaled agile can fit into that for them? So I would say, train big, start small. So that means a few things. I want to educate everyone on the basic basics of agility and how it gets scaled up when the time is right. And find those small teams that are open to the idea of trying something different and give them the time and space to shine. So with the right training and mentoring, we give them some goals in the autonomy to deliver higher quality outcomes faster, right? So they're, they become self motivated, right? And we motivate them by holding up their efforts as an example to everyone and celebrate their success and then build on them. Because I tell you what, nothing's changed in terms of trusted relationships. Folks are looking around an organization saying, I trust that person. I've seen them get stuff done before. They have credibility. If they are able to apply a new process and, and learn faster and deliver better results, then others are going to pay attention to that. They're not going to listen to some consultants coming in and say, you should do this, right? And that's why that spark is still really important. You know, I think that's really great because we do, we do tend to listen to the folks that we know and trust, especially if they're in our own organizations. So, so for someone who might be a young manager somewhere or young executive somewhere, and they're, they're, they're watching this interview and they go, and you know, that's, that's something we could really use here. But I'm not, I'm not sure I can convince the boss to go hire Mike and his team or there's some principles they can be thinking about when it comes to agile. They can start applying today in their organizations and then give them give them some to show their bosses about why they should come hire lean scaled architects to do it company wide. Yeah, the basics, just the basics of agile, which is to, from, from a day to day perspective to think about the work that you're doing, why you're doing it and simply start thinking about how I can break it into smaller chunks and deliver smaller chunks of value faster. Because what's really important are the outcomes, the things of value that are actually done completed and delivered with the acceptable quality. So we can say, you know what, just like I gave as the example earlier about thinking we can't have this big meeting, why do we need to wait until we have this huge meeting before we do anything in 30 days. How can we take a software project or some new shopping basket improvement and say, look, we, we're not going to just going to try to do this work for six months and then hold and then never talk about it or release it until six months from now. How can we have smaller bits of features deployed one month at a time so folks can really see the there's something coming out of this group, right. And that group should continue getting funding because I'm seeing results. And at the same time, here's a two for one, at the same time, they're learning and getting feedback on what they've deployed so they can make the next five features better, the next three features better. So smaller bits of value delivered more quickly and not dependent on a single person or a small group of people. Am I getting that right? Yeah, they're always be dependencies, but we're looking at fewer dependencies, right. We're looking at and when there are dependencies, based on a certain skill set, because of that continuous learning culture, they're even getting shrunk as well because we've got more people to deliver on those important skill sets hitting it from both angles. Yeah, that's fantastic. I know we've got a bunch of folks who are in the audience who are from the startup community. I think that's great lessons for them on, you know, startups are always trying to think about scalability and that's, we talk about it a lot, but it's, it's kind of hard to teach people to do it. So I think that advice is not just great for our folks in big organizations, but also in our in smaller organizations, if you're watching, you know, deliver more value more quickly reduce those dependencies on a small group of people. And let's go right. So you and lean scaled architects, you're really making a big impact with the things you're working on. Can you tell us more about some of your clients and strategic partners and how you're helping them move the needle on their goals and missions because you're doing some really impressive work. Yeah, so our biggest client so far has been the US Air Force Research Labs and we've got a diverse mix of both delivery partners and technology partners. So we engage our partners to help us provide that expert guidance that is complementary to our own. So for example, an industry leader with deep digital engineering expertise and military hardware. So we're the engines behind those experts to help define and execute using those lean processes and technology to train and mentor people and put in tools like to put in install maintain and operate tools like JIRA for for for work queue management for portfolio lean portfolio management for business process management systems like areas and so on to make those systems connect together because it's important that we can have as least friction as possible in continuing to design and maintain our solutions as it is to build them up front. We all know how important those tools are. I remember being back in the Air Force when some of those early tools first came around and they were they were kind of more trouble than they were worth and we we we wrongly. What I'm saying here is we kind of kept doing things the old way because we didn't like using the tool. So how how do you and your team go in? How do you how do you get your clients to not be like me to to embrace these new tools instead of instead of going at was better the old way. Yeah so again we want to think about the outcome that we're trying to get to and and think about the leanest approach to get there and and generally from a tooling perspective. My biggest recommendation is to start with flexible tools that allow you to start small and scale big. So this typically means and I'm going to get I'm going to I'm going to reference here the reality of a military DoD situation a second year. But this typically means cloud software as a service and buying more modules over time and improving increasing the licensing cost but but getting the benefit out of it right. So our technology partners have that diverse mix of tool sets for scaling for example. We're partners with both Atlassian who makes Jira service desk and compliments and we're partners with service now whose products are built for scale and large organizations across multiple departments. But you don't want to try to do the big bang thing if you can why would you do that if you can just learn some smaller lessons and and have a better. Higher risk higher cost project go well right that's the intent. So in here I'm going to address your comments about military. So as a side note I know and appreciate that government systems require ATO authority to operate. And it's not easy to just use whatever cloud services that are the coolest things you can't just do that in government right. So we frequently work with what they have right frequently they might have a basic configuration of Jira right. And at the same time we'll work through the process compliance work to upgrade the tooling with with the with the authorizing official. So the point is we have to respect the reality of the compliance ground conditions with respect to how far and fast we can go with our tool which is another reason to use a scaling approach. Well it sounds like and that was a beautiful answer the question it sounds like what we did all those years ago was we got the whole big thing and they said now you're going to use this for everything. And we kind of overwhelmed and didn't know what to do. And it sounds like the way you're talking about it when you go in and work even with a government client or a military client you go in you bring that you bring them some pieces where they can get those small victories deliver that those smaller chunks of value quicker. And then build up build up confidence in the system am I getting that right. Yeah you're getting it right and let me tell you the phrase use the terrain it applies to more than just battlefield tactics. Absolutely applies to it as well. Well I love that that's clearly going to be a clip for this episode so yeah I think that's a that's a fantastic answer and I love to see that that we are adapting as a military in a government to start. Doing things in a more agile way as well. So we talked about some of the tools you bring to your clients. What are some of the tech tools that you and your team are using to help lead your team make decisions make things efficient and what are some recommendations for all of us for tools we should be using to do the same. So even today. First thing good old Microsoft Office it's been around forever it still is it's still a gold standard for documents documents right. But I will say we combine the standardization and the broad appeal of office standard products with the flexibility of the latest Confluence and Jira cloud tooling. I got to it's they're doing some really impressive things the way they've been able to integrate Jira with Confluence such as. Pivoting a flexible database table right into a Confluence web page to allow Jira tickets to to be that data to be automatically averaged right. We say we talk about artificial intelligence frequently being the cool thing these days we talk about. That's not even artificial intelligence that's just good use and integration your products right so this again is a reason I like to to use those cloud services is because. They have these features you can just turn on experiment with learn something and say this is what I need from my bigger larger complex deployments going forward. That's cool I mean it sounds like the the example you're giving is like a help desk ticket system or something like that but I love I love to hear cuz I'm. I think we have a bright future with AI and I definitely want to hear your thoughts about that as well but. Yeah I you know I love to hear that there are cool solutions effective solutions that that you can get where you don't necessarily even need to use AI like that could be another step coming down so. What what are your thoughts on AI where where are we going this what's the what's the future look like with AI for business for our communities for government etc. Yeah AI is going to open a lot of doors in terms of having better higher quality information and being able to act on it for sure folks folks know that chat GPT has been a very broad and public example of that. The the my answer on it because I'm not my organization though we help advise on technical investments that folks that company shouldn't shouldn't make to help them reach their goals. In terms of the raw technology. You got to think about the compliance side of it right so again let's be realistic about how we're going to to plan to use and deploy artificial intelligence and that's going to mean. Rules regulations and policies necessary to make sure that we are protecting our data client our clients data privacy. That it's that the solutions are deploying our secure and making sure they are usable by the folks that we intense user experience they're having a good user experience that we intend to use the products. So so I tend to answer the question from that perspective because that's how I think of making it really realistically usable is his hitting the governance risk and compliance side of artificial intelligence. Yeah I think there's I think there's definitely going to need to be a lot of conversations about governance and compliance especially when we start talking about government military. Integration to do that is this since we're talking about lean and scaled and agile is AI something we can start to bring in in a in an agile way can we bring it in with some real tight compliance but try to try to demonstrate those those quick victories that quick delivery of value. Or is when we think about regulation compliance we need to think bigger picture before we can start using it. So I think that so first of all no surprise it is going to be easier to move faster in a commercial context than a military context or a government context. In any case in both cases we want to think about defense in depth and layers of government governance and compliance so if we wanted to do a small experiment for example. At I'll five which is a data protection level that is not classified but it protects its intended to protect export control information for example that we might want to say hey we're going to test. A chat GPT type API that is a way of getting information from the system over the Internet back and forth with this very small experiment that's going to summarize information in a block of text that's going to make it a sentence instead of a huge block of text. We might say look we want to chunk this small experiment as as a request to our authorizing official to get ATO or at least interim ATO to be able to say we want to use this very small experiment at I'll even if it's starting at I'll four to lower security level to say we want to test this and the kind of information that we're going to submit. We'll not have anything to do with military designers it might just be about administrative finance right right we might be talking about what's happening at the at the officer's club or the or the the dining hall this week right yeah yeah yeah exactly you know it might be lower value it might not be the big the big you know the big swing that everyone's expecting but we'll learn something in the AT the authorizing official will learn something about how they need to. Think about the next layer of controls that get applied to the next ATO request and then we really something bigger so so again compliance can be built in along right alongside agility and it should be. Well it sounds like we should all be thinking about when it comes to implementing things like AI we should be thinking about. Hitting singles and doubles and not worrying about swinging for the fences on this and build our score up that way because I think there's huge potential for AI to help us make better decisions faster decisions. And decisions that have a more positive impact I see that even with the small things that I do with AI is because it handles so much of the work. I can focus more on making the decisions so I think it's a I think it's great I think I think that's great advice for again whether you're small startup or your big organization. You know especially when it comes to implementing these things like AI where compliance will be will be so important is do it in such a way that you can demonstrate that value in a really protected way early on I think that's great. So besides your tech tools that you guys love what are are there any other tech tools you guys really like to use before I shift the topic. No no I would say well okay I will say I'm a Mac guy so so we we of course depend on our fleet of Macs and iPhones and what I'll say about that is yeah I'm probably more connected than I should be so that's that's about it for the technology side. Okay well I think I think it's a goal for all of us to unplug a little I know I try to find myself getting a portion of the day where I'm unplugged as well. What do you do when you're unplugged. Workout I try to you know and as you know folks who have been through the ring or being in a position where they've got to deal with business owner concerns whether it's a high position at a company that you have a lot of responsibility or being an actual small business owner. It can be stressful. There are a lot of different tiny things decisions that have to be made every day and it's I think it's important to to reserve some time to to recharge and relax every even it's just 30 minutes of cardio or something just find something to do to unplug. Isn't it amazing that the lessons that our grandparents had for us all those years ago eat right get some exercise drink a lot of water get get the get an appropriate amount of sleep are what help us be better leaders and executives and and managers and all of that because because the because the stress is there the stress is real and there's no there's no better way of dealing with stress than live in a healthy life I love it I love to hear that that you're making time for that with all the other things you have going on. So what are what are some other work tools that may not be tech related that that you use at lean scaled architects to keep to keep the information flowing the decision making happening people happy. What are some of those things. Non tech related. I would say the process of the theme of agility being applied to ourselves constant prioritization. We just frequently have to ask each other what is is it really is the juice worth the squeeze on chasing this down to and getting everyone to learn this software on getting everyone to to use this to figure out how to deliver this new service offering. It's constantly looking and being honest with ourselves about what we can and can't do and just saying stop we're not going to try to do everything right so prioritization is it is something we do all the time. Yeah, you've got to have priorities and I know you're working with some big organizations. Where sometimes sometimes you have to remind people if everything's important nothing's important. So it's a you know I'm glad you're bringing that to the table. Now you guys are doing big big things at lean scaled architects but you're totally self funded you you don't have any investors or any equity investment. As a as a business owner as a founder what are what are some of the advantages you found from being bootstrapped instead of funded by investors. And what advice do you have for founders who are at that crossroads of thinking about. I want to scale the company I want to grow. Do I want to take investment do I want to bootstrap what are your thoughts on that. I would say the biggest benefit to bootstrapped. We have no other investors is the autonomy to rapidly pivot knowing where LSA needs to go based on market ground conditions and opportunities because they happen fast. There can be a merger there can be and the market and the software it market that said that that all of a sudden opportunities open up and we need to jump on it. Right that means we need to say we're going to prioritize delivering this kind of service and prioritize that one. So that's the biggest benefit. My biggest advice to folks in this kind of situation about who and how to fund would be to think about the level of involvement you want your investors at. Will they be active and providing input and votes about the direction of your company or will they be silent investors interested in only return. If they are if it's going to be active and they insist on being active I would make sure they really have the background and experience to make those good informed decisions about opportunities and risk. And I would interview them in the same way that I might interview folks and I'd look for those battle scars. I would look to make sure they've been there and done that to so that you can actually not only get their cash but also really depend on them. To help make good give good advice. I think that's beautifully put here in the starter community in Las Vegas we we talk a lot about investor dating and making sure you understand what you want from investors besides just their money. And I think you've given everybody a lot to think about in a really detailed way that we don't often talk about about do you want active investors or silent investors and what what should you do if you do want active investors or you've got investors who insist on being active. How do you how do you determine if that's the right investor for you. I think that's great. So where are we taking the company in 2024 what are the goals for lean scaled architects. So by the numbers roughly to grow revenue by 25% and our staff by 50% right so we want to think about the accomplishments so to start working with new clients across different industries and engaging our partners to really help us deliver that faster value. And by the outcomes because we we are an organization is focused on outcomes and learning right we want to measure much of our success stories published as case studies on our website we want more of these across different industries. Those are our goals. What are what are some of the industries you're looking to get into. Healthcare for one and we're already in aerospace with the DoD and we might want to start looking at the commercial side of that. But healthcare is a big opportunity especially on trying to to leverage those as I said before we're looking at making sure that folks can use technology that there's a good user experience that it's compliant it is secure. So in the healthcare industry there's a lot of concerns about data privacy and security in terms of adopting technology so we're very interested in being able to add a lot of value in that industry for example. I love that I think you definitely can be a lot of help in the healthcare industry. How is your team going to need to grow and I know you said you want to grow by a certain amount but like who what's the talent you feel like you need to bring in to work with these new industries and to grow the company. Folks who are at two kind of layers number one we like if we're going to get into healthcare we want to have folks who have some experience in healthcare and have helped do digital improvements in healthcare preferably. But even more important than that so our directors are continuously evaluating the team of our the diversity of our team against the service offerings we want to market so functionally we need folks who are good with with process design and process automation. And technology design and technology governance and compliance right then when we when we see that we've got folks that are good in some areas and not good in others we want to make the decision to bring on some new folks or even even as a baseline. It is learn learn learn and apply starting with those controlled scenarios we even offer LSA learning certificates to make sure that look you can do you can do it in the lab but are you going to be able to do it on billable engagements right you can't beat the real thing but you can prepare. Love it love it train like you fight right. I love the deep commitment you have to continuous learning in the company. Besides the technical what are some of the things you do to develop and have your team learn about leadership what are the what are the whether it's the principles or skills. What are what are you trying to develop in the company and in your employees on the leadership development side. So when we are. So I'll say when we're trying to develop leaders want to make sure that they can walk the talk we want to get them to delegate and that means training and development of their own people. I personally and my own leaders I try to get them to communicate their intent and not try to get and try to get out of the weeds as much as possible. Which gets back to you know if you've been doing the training development of folks they should feel more confident and able to carry out the intent right. This is something that we we practice and we preach so this is scaled agile so we use scaled agile framework. Which is has a whole lot of lessons of these agility principles built into it in fact there's 10 of them which is kind of the kind of the number one guideline of scaled agility. These these concepts I'm talking about are built in right it's not just about using a lot of technology or deploying the big huge framework it's about these agile principles. So in in turn when I'm seeking someone to fill a leadership position. I'm looking for experts and leaders with those battle scars folks who have actually been in the hot seat to solve those pain points that our clients actually are feeling right. And when I'm interviewing folks I can pretty quickly tell when someone's been beat up in the past by reality. There's kind of a certain realistic tone in response to situational questions where they have been able to figure out the reality did not meet the ideal. That's what we're looking for both in hiring and developing our leaders. Yeah it's such a it's such a delicate balance because we we do like when people are realistic we don't want to be cynical right we don't want to be small minded. We want them to think big right how do you foster that while still keeping that that idea of staying focused on reality in your team. I'll say something that's also not new. So in terms of bringing on leaders I'm also looking for diversity and style. And by that I'll give the example of myself so I'm an ENTJ field marshal personality type and I have all the typical traits therein and trust me it is not all good. I can be really impatient really direct and frequently mine is not the kind of relaxed relationship building tone that's needed for for building those those trusted relationships and getting people to know and feel comfortable and relaxed enough to talk at a bar over a beard. I'm not as good at that but let me tell you what my executive staff is in there there so we compliment each other in terms of style and techniques as well. That's fantastic and I'm so glad to hear that because so often leaders feel like they need to do everything on their own they feel like they need to be everything to everyone and I'm glad. I'm glad we're talking about you know build a team around you who compliments you I think that's great. And you've you've done a lot of things you've been in consulting now you're a an owner and a founder and have all these big these big great things going on with lean scaled architects. But how have your views on teamwork and leadership changed over time since you got your start. I'd say generally to be realistic about how far and fast I can push people. As I said I tend to be impatient so I've had to learn that one the hard way. And and and you just have to be realistic about how much you can push on folks to get them to learn and apply and know that it's a journey not just a completion of a class certificate. They got to get the battle scars to really truly be able to understand and deliver on the lessons and that just takes time. You know I love that I love the idea of letting them develop the battle scars because I also had to learn that lesson the hard way of you know hey we've got 24 hours we can push and get this done. And sometimes we rush people through the lessons we rush them through the battle scars and they don't they don't form as well because when we push hard like that so I think it's great that you're you're focusing on letting letting your folks develop develop those things. I think that's great advice for all of us. So what is one of the best mistakes you've ever made and what did you learn from it. I'd say hiring the wrong consultant advisor partners he talked a big game. I I learned to really read between the lines and asked questions that expose those real battle scars right so this was a learning journey for me as well. It made me better by making sure we get better advisors in the future and also thinking to myself hmm how can I get my own leadership to evaluate and bring on new employees and advisors not just consultant consultants right so so it applies to everyone now across the board and it's it's been it's been a helpful learning experience. What are what are some of those questions we can ask you know without getting into the detailed technical stuff what are some of those questions we can ask to to understand if someone who's pitching us really has those battle scars if they if they can live up to the promise they're making. Simple. Start off a sentence with a question with tell me about a time when dot dot dot and listen. And listen, read between the lines, ask about what you did when, ask about what the reaction was from your client when, and kind of try to feel out what they're, what you're trying to do is look for this pattern of, of, again, that here's how I thought it was going to be and here's how it actually was. If you can tease that out in your, in your line of question and let them do that talking, then you're going to, you're going to pretty quickly figure out if they have actually been there and got the scars or not. Yeah. And also how hard it is to tease it out of them, right? Yeah. So who is someone you admire as a leader or in business? Steve Jobs. I know a lot of folks say that. I, I admire him not just not as technical, first technical skills or business market instincts. Those were spot on and awesome, of course. What I really liked was his relentless pursuit of a better user experience, right? He focused on this product is going to be garbage because no one's going to want it, because it just doesn't solve their problem. It's so basic and simple yet he was able to nail that every time. Let me, let me correct myself. When he wasn't able to nail it, knowing when to pivot and when things don't work out, stop. Don't throw good money after bad is another way of saying, don't, don't cry about sunk costs, pivot without, without any sort of hesitation. If something's not working, that's, that's the, the biggest takeaway I have from Steve Jobs. That's, that's fantastic. And I know Steve Jobs learned that lesson the hard way a couple of times too. So is there anyone else who shaped your views on leadership besides Steve Jobs? Yes, I had personal mentors when her name was one that particularly stood out was Jill Womble. She was both a lawyer and an engineer when I was in college and even past college, she would guide me and say, and she was a tough cookie too, man. She went through, through the ringer in the 80s growing up and, and, and going into leadership in big power companies in Florida that were kind of good old boy networks. And you paired up that, that sense of toughness with someone who has both a legal and an engineering mindset. That was a mentor for me to really understand the, the diversity of the skills you got to bring to the table to truly be a good leader, right? And you got to have a tough shell in addition. She was a woman and she made it. And it was, I just think the world over. Yeah. The 80s were definitely a different time. You know, that, that brings up a question for me. What do you think makes a good mentor? Someone who number one has battle scars to share to really tell you about how it was not the ideal how it should be. And secondly, someone who, who likes to share their experience and see others grow who truly believes in continuous learning because it's a journey. It's not just a one piece of advice and it's done. That's what a mentor really thinks about is how can this person grow? What is it they need to hear need to hear not want to hear and actually deliver that message to them? Be tough with them. Yeah, I love that. I think it's so important when we're mentoring people that we have to be invested in their, in their success. And I think that's, that's, uh, I always encourage people to look for someone you can mentor, find someone who you're invested in their success and help them out. I think that's, so I think that's great advice. So big things coming up for lean scaled architects, but we know, you know, you talked about the Steve Jobs example, when things aren't working out, you've got to pivot quickly. What keeps you up at night? What are the, what are the challenges you see ahead and how are you going to deal with them? Lately, it's my friend's puppy who's yapping to go out all night. It's what's keeping me up, but, but, uh, but generally, um, it's not any worries about LSA's future. So, so I know we're going to be successful because we're doing all the right things, developer message, even though we're trying to still trying to do too many things, even with all the prioritization. We're building trust and relationships like showing up on this podcast, right? To, to try to connect to your viewers and say, look, we, we can do this instead of just reading web pages, right? Um, what keeps me up or the, again, the hundreds of things I need to do everything to make sure it happens and sometimes just got to find a way to shut it off. Is that where you feel like you need help with that is learning how to shut it off or finding the, finding the people to take it on? Where do you feel like you need help with those challenges? Yeah, though I say, you know, I, I, I, we do practice what we preach and trying to find the right people. But as a startup, not everyone has the funds to just bring on the people to help, right? And so it does get stressful. That's the reality of it. Um, but again, just thinking about where to put your time is going to be the most important thing. So from a staffing perspective, we're looking to get the right people from the market and generally we're trying to, to leverage those same relationship building skills to find people who we trust, right? Who we know have the battle scars instead of shooting out ads all over the place, right? That's, that's going to be, that's going to have better benefit and better, a better trusted relationship. Pull through it. It sounds like, oh, go ahead. Oh, it's from a business development perspective. You know, just getting in front of folks, you have the same kind of problems we need to solve and connect with them. It sounds like being really deliberate has paid off for you and the company as you, as you've gone through the challenges of the past and are going into the challenge of the future. I wish there was something I could do to help you with your neighbor's dog. I can't, but if I think of something, I'll let you know. Besides working out, do you have any other techniques you use to say calm and centered in the face of adversity? I'll tell you, just in the heat of the battle, sometimes I will just stop, you know, turn off my camera and just take five minutes because you don't want to say something you're going to regret. And this is good for people. This is for me because I am impatient and I do have high expectations of others. You just have to stop and say, what's going to be the consequence of pushing too hard or blowing up right now? So five minutes just of break time to say step away from everything and relax, right? In addition, you pair it up with a good exercise routine. That's how I get by. I love it. I think just taking, whether it's five minutes or a few seconds to think about what's the outcome I want to get here and how do I conduct myself to do that is such great advice. So besides all the good things coming up with the company, what are you excited about coming up in the future? Big conferences, those events coming up where I can really meet people and hear about their problems and kind of get a reality check on what I thought everyone was asking for and getting that grounds on the ground sort of, oh, this is what people actually really need out of digital transformation years, problems we're having, right? And I'm excited about delivering on those really big, the really big solutions, right, that are the reason that we did so much staff development and training because it's a lot of work. I mean, it's easy just to say continuous learning, but our folks are really going for the ringer and they're learning things fast and they're having and really being able to turn around and say, okay, guys, now we've got an opportunity to really apply it and we're going to have success stories to show for it. That's the thing that excites me for the future. Well, it sounds like you're your own best customer when it comes to applying the principles that you bring to your clients. And I think that's great. Besides healthcare, what are some of the kinds of industry conferences you want to attend? I assume you're kind of out looking for the customers when you want to attend those. Yeah, yeah. It's not just the industry conferences, it's technical ones too. Like, so for example, we're going to the Atlassian conference to talk to a bunch of folks who use JIRA and Confluence. We go to Service Now conferences to understand the problems from big companies and kind of what kind of scaling problems they're having. And we go to government conferences to scale the agile framework for enterprise. SAFE is where we're a gold partner with them. And we're sponsoring a government SAFE conference coming up. And we expect to really build strong partnerships with folks in federal who have had the frustrations of all the kinds of federal problems, especially on staffing, especially on keeping people in the chair. And you've probably seen this before, Jason, being a military, you know, sometimes, frequently folks, uniform folks will get will get orders to say you're going to fill that chair, and then you're going to go fill another chair later. This is one of those big drivers of why there's there's so much pain in terms of being able to get things done to have outcomes is because people switch, they change so fast, right? And that's just one example of the things I'm excited to hear about at these conferences is really hearing about how folks have dealt with that and what we can do to help with even those kinds of problems. Well, I can't wait to see what you guys do to dig in and and help out our military folks and our civilian folks and and help people, even if you can't fix the problem of we move people around so quickly, help them hit the ground running with the things you offer and get them into the seat and into the job much faster and making great decisions much faster. It's it's continuous learning. How can we get them to learn the new folks to learn the most important things up front fast and better processes, right? That are more agile and flexible. Love it. That's just my my two second advice. Love it. So what is or who is someone or something you're grateful for? I will say patients from my own friends who are who are patients with all the crazy hours I put in and still replying to me when I want to go do something with them. And and and I'll just say again, my health, which is kind of a real concern for some business owners to get really stressed. I as I said, I do I do make time to work out every day to not just be thankful for it, but to maintain it. I don't think that advice can be given to leaders of any age, young, old, up and coming experienced. Make time for your health because if you don't, it's going to be a much harder day for you. Besides the health stuff and the continuous learning stuff. Is there any other advice you would give to future leaders, especially young people coming into tech fields? I'd say put in the time and effort to really know your field and match that knowledge and experience with a realistic view of how things are, right? So so take the training, get the certifications. If you're in security, take your CISSP, right? Have those credentials, know the right way to do it. But know how things really are versus how you think they should be. Find good mentors. Find the ones that have battle scars. And find a way to get your own battle scars as soon as you can and as frequently as possible. That way, that's going to help you prepare not just for technology fields, but also tech leadership. I don't think there's a better way to put it. And I think that's a perfect place to wrap it up. What else do we know about you and lean scaled architects and where can everybody find you? Yeah, you could reach us at lsadigital.com and we're happy to engage with you not only on those big digital problems or existing ones that might need QA or rescue. We also offer smaller business process improvement systems that's in GRC, helping to integrate those systems, helping with policy process controls and design and monitoring for new technologies, just AI. And again, helping with culture change and helping put an agility across the board. So it sounds like even though you're doing great work with big organizations, someone who's watching who thinks they could use your help or needs your help, they shouldn't be intimidated that they maybe they're a small business. You've got something for them as well. That's right. Awesome. Well, Mike, thank you so much for being here. Thank you all for tuning in. If you liked Mike, please like comment and share. Thank him for being on this episode with us. And if you liked just this interview in general, please check out some of our other videos and like comment and share those as well. We love sharing these conversations with you, whatever you have today, plan today, do it in a way that makes an impact onward and upward.