 It's not easy to grow professional services from from a small team to a large company but in this episode of the Civil Engineering Podcast, Brian Saunders, founder and CEO of Big Time Software, is going to talk about doing just that. Let's jump right in. All right, now I'm excited to welcome on our guest for today. Brian Saunders is the founder and CEO of Big Time Software. Brian, welcome to the Civil Engineering Podcast. Thanks for having me Anthony. I'm excited to be here. Yeah, we're excited to have you. Obviously, being that Big Time is focused on an online time and billing solutions is such an important aspect of what we do, especially in the civil engineering space. I know civil engineers don't like filling out their time sheet, but it's really the bread and butter and how you can bill your clients. So Brian, before we kind of get into some of the stuff that we're going to talk about today, take us back a little bit and tell us how and why you started Big Time. Now, I actually grew up as a software engineer. I ran a company in what people today would call product consulting before product existed back in the 90s and so we would go in and consult with firms and grew through that same space that we try to help today. We started out with two or three guys, me and a couple of founders and in my living room and eventually kind of grew that to one of the top 25 software firms in Chicago and had a great exit just before the market crash in 2000 and so I kind of lived that problem and my old partner used to say, we learned every lesson that we learned through just brute experience. We learned all of the stuff about time management and utilization and how to get projects to work well, not just work well, but work well together all through just failures and fixes and figuring out how to run the company better. So by the time we've been through that whole boxing match, Big Time was a repassion for mine because at the time there wasn't really anything out there to manage a professional organization effectively and there's lots of one-off solutions but we needed something that wasn't out there designed for plumbers and electricians and forest rangers. We need something that was designed for professionals and so that's kind of where I spent the next decade and a half kind of building the system that is today, the core of Big Time. That's great and you know obviously engineering firms are interesting in terms of the way they grow and they really are the way they evolve and you know you've had so much experience kind of watching them. Maybe you could talk kind of a little bit about the evolution of engineering firms from kind of infancy to how they kind of scale. Yeah you bet and you know everybody's different so I hate to paint too broad a brush with the industry because every engineering is especially, it's not like accounting where it's very much you know there's a kind of a prescription for how those organizations grow. Engineering firms are ultimately an art you know and so they develop a specialty and that might be a very lucrative specialty with five or six people over the course of the entire you know lifetime of the firm or it may be we start out just like Big Time did with two or three people who are focused on hiring younger engineers and trying to kind of train them in our methodology and take advantage of the area that we have an expertise in so it's always a little bit different and you know increasingly we're seeing a lot of people come to Big Time after the firm has been grown by one generation and really try to convert it from this lifestyle business into something that can grow to 40 or 50 engineers you know as the as the next generation takes over so it can take a lot of different paths but ultimately there's this point in a in a young engineering firms life where the founder or the initial partners can be involved in the sale and in the in the scoping of a project but they're not really involved in the delivery of every project and that it's a super stressful period of time and you know that happened with us too I remember the moment at you know for us it was probably 10 to 15 people where you know I kind of realized boy that a lot of these projects that I'm in you know I I made commitments to personally I'm not the one delivering on those commitments and it so it gets super stressful and and you know the way you approach that stress typically it depends on your personality but for me it was very much like being in everybody's face you know so where are we at where are we at and kind of moving people aside and getting involved and and it wasn't helpful for the growth of the organization and so that's where a system like Big Time comes into play and really any system comes into play that allows you to say look here's the system here's the budget here's the commitment and I want to push that down to the rest of the organization and then I want to react where I can be helpful and I want to let the team work where I can't be helpful and that that period of time that evolution is typically where somebody calls us and and that's where we kind of get started and then there's this so let's call it the first phase from an individual business into something where we're working as a group right and then as soon as you get used to that period that working as a group you get to you know 20 30 50 individuals and now suddenly not suddenly but typically the impetus for the next hire is is a financial team or a business team somebody who whose job is to work on the business as opposed to work on the client projects and that individual brings you know expertise in terms of workflow they're typically head of operations maybe you know they're there might have a finance bench maybe they're a controller but their their job is to really systematize the things that you do every day and oftentimes that's another flex point where they start to leverage systems like big time to to measure things like utilization and realization and to try and do allocation planning and figure out who's efficient and who's not and try and systematize things and that's the exciting part about that moment that flex moment and affirms growth is that you really see kind of a hockey stick after that individual has there it kind of puts their thumbprint on to the organization both they're very highly stressful of those transitions yeah for sure and kind of the reason that I was asking that and digging in on that a little bit is because I know for a fact a lot of our listeners are you know civil engineers aspiring to own their own firms in the future so I think it's really good for them to understand you know what that progression might look like because it is stressful and you know they should be prepared for that but at the same time like you said when you get through it can the problem is you get advice from well meaning advice from people who are at different stages of an organization's growth and from their perspective they have this aha moment and they want to share it with you as a one or a two person firm hey this is really important or that is really important and the reality is you know the advice that's helpful is helpful because it's you're at that stage in the company's growth so when somebody says you really need somebody to manage the you know work on the business of the business wait a second no we're three people we need somebody who can help us turn this from occasional you know jobs into something that's systematic we need to develop our kind of secret sauce if you will so it's it's it's super it's super tough but there's never been a better time to go out and start your own firm so yeah for sure and that's great advice right really really seeking you know advice and mentorship from someone who's kind of close to have where you've been you know not too far off or at least they can you know put themselves in those shoes in a relative time so just digging a little deeper on that I know you have something that you call you talk about growing your firm beyond the two pizza team can you yeah you maybe talk about that a little bit what that what that means yeah you bet that it's funny that that's a that's a an amazon thing um you know the idea that all these great things are invented by teams that you can feed with two pizzas right and so so uh and that's that first stage of growth right like I might be an individual or I might be two or three people but we can literally sit together in a room and work through most of our challenges together right and and these days maybe sit on a zoom screen where every face fits onto that expanded view right like we get it we're all there like I know everybody I know every project that's a great feeling and and it and it's a feeling that lots of engineers especially engineers and that's not just civil engineers but anybody in that with that bent you know that engineering bent loves because it's enough social uh that I can really collaborate and grow as a professional but it's not so much um drudgery that I that I I'm disconnected from the client work right and so uh then as the company gets bigger than that you you lose you lose insight into what that team is doing and so the question is how deep can you step into it so that you can feel comfortable that you're delivering what you've committed to to the clients uh but you're not standing in the way of the people who are benefiting from that two piece of team back back to your point about finding mentors that fit your stage right like your ultimately as you get bigger your job is to help the people in those teams get better at what they do that's your whole job right and so one I got to figure out what it is what our secret sauces is affirmed so that I can go out and make sure that I can reproduce it but also how am I I'm shifting from the business of delivering client work to the business of helping those people deliver client work and that shift is is mentally massive it's it's really tough and you have to work on how am I going to communicate this thing whatever it is and every engineering firm is different it might be a geography it might be a municipality it might be a specific kind of type of project that you're very good at at scoping out so how am I going to help these new engineers understand and kind of own that secret sauce and deliver it to my clients in a way that we're all proud of yeah that's great and I like terms like the two pizza team just because it's helpful for you to think about oh I'm still on that stage where you know I've got to feed everyone with two pizzas just you know because sometimes you're stuck in it so you can't see how you're progressing and what stage you're at and and things like that are helpful and really at EMI we're going through that now I mean I used to do all of our instructing and all of our podcast hosting and now we have a handful of instructors and now we have several different hosts on the different podcasts and so you know you're right it's a stressful time you want to make sure that the quality of the services that are being delivered are maintained but at the same time you also have to step back and realize that if I keep doing this all myself we're not we're never going to hit that trajectory or that path 100 percent and Anthony the question you find a podcast that just quite isn't quite what you're looking for and you have an opportunity to now talk to that interviewer or that individual that reporter and and help them understand all right well here's why it's a miss uh stepping in that's you're you've already made the mistake you know what I mean like you've already you've already the miss already occurred in that you didn't communicate yet enough for that person to be able to competently execute so it's less a question of kind of brow-beating the interviewer right like why is why is it missing this and this and this and more a question of okay so so we know these are important I want to confirm that we know they're important now how can I make sure that I'm communicating that to the next person so that I never have to step in and it's it's the key differential between that kind of two person team size and the 15 20 30 person firm those latter firms have made the transition successfully to say we can identify what's a success and we can identify what it takes to help other people build that success and now it's just a question of how good are we at scaling up how good are we at training and so and it takes some time it takes some calendar time to get good at that right and and really I always tell people for engineers specifically this is one of the hardest things to do because if you think about it when you start your career you're knee deep in every detail of every project and you like it right because that's what you taught and learn in school you like doing those calculations but if you really want to be that kind of entrepreneurial engineer who's going to start and grow a business you're just going to have to pull yourself out of those details and find someone that can handle them and like Brian said not get sucked back into them and you know kind of kind of resist that and it is a difficult thing to do but it's good to you know to talk about a little bit with you because I think people need to hear about it so it's fine I talked to uh I talked to somebody who's running a software firm much bigger than us and he's a he's a mentor in Chicago for for me and for a bunch of other people and I was sitting in his office about about he's a product guy he's like me and I said one of the questions I asked him was you know don't you miss it like don't you like aren't you tempted to go sit at your desk and think product and call the person who's running it now and say hey what about these seven things and like I'm looking at the firm to come over and chat with you and I'm thinking of four things I do with your product and he said well the company's the product now and so and I thought you know so I have the same approach but now it's the company's the product I thought oh that's interesting and it's kind of the same thing with engineering right less so the the firm right it's not the logo the website the case studies the the marketing team the finance right although those are indicators but it's more like how are we communicating what makes us unique such that when I hear questions from young engineers I know that the that I know I can spot from the questions what the problem is so the calculation you're doing is on okay well we ended up here and I wanted them over here so so let's work backwards and figure out the calculation of how they got there so that we don't do it again it's less the answer to the specific question and more the answer to how do we get here right yeah on in its own right the philosophy is you know really important right like you said the product is the company just that little that little mindset itself is really huge and so all that being said let's talk for a minute about your kind of journey from going from software engineering to obviously becoming a CEO of a company for you was that something that was kind of a goal of yours like talk about that because I know like I said a lot of listeners want to do that maybe some listeners don't have any idea they're going to own their own company but they may end up doing it so tell us about kind of your specific journey well it's funny I I've always been an entrepreneur so I so I worked for other people when I was in college but but you know I've kind of always been kind of doing my own thing and so and so it's hard for me to say what the transition is I know you know I we work with two or three thousand and you know CEOs at at firms big and small and so I get to talk to them a lot too and you know I think there is you know there you kind of make fun there are two types of individuals right there are people who who are entrepreneurs and people who could have done that right and so so as you start your your firm you hear a lot from the ladder right as you as you're off doing your own thing you hear a lot from people who oh yeah I was going to start my own firm and so I wouldn't say that you know there's a there's a kind of hobbyist entrepreneur who just who it takes a lot of risk it takes a lot of stupidity to be able to just jump out and say you know I'm going to forego the paycheck but on the other side of it it's super rewarding and you know at the end of the day you the only person you have to blame is yourself for both your successes and your failures and and the you know part of the joy of growing the company is that you get to experience that and share it with other people so so that you increase the number of people that can celebrate those successes and and come together for all the failures right and so so and there will be a ton of those so so you knew you knew you were going to be you know you knew you were going to grow a business it was just a matter of finding you know what industry what type of business yeah and what's what's fun about that is that you you know you uh I think the the type of the things that stop the person who ought to be running their own business and you know who you are right you should be on your own what stops you and one of the things that stops you is this spreadsheet paralysis you know you go do the analysis and say okay well so I know I could probably get two customers or two clients and I think they could produce this level of of revenue but I don't think I could get make the same kind of money and I don't know how I would do X and Y so so as you put together the spreadsheet you you can't get the numbers to foot and um especially in services it's so uh it you know it kind of works itself out like as long as you're you continue to practice your craft and you're good at what you do as long as you can find people who believe in you as an individual who will give you a chance uh you can grow a pretty successful engineering engineering practice and now the hard part is where do you want to be do you want to be 50 people do you want to be five do you want to have a specialty in a given geography or a given type of you know structure site uh you know end product and and be the best in the world at that and that's it and the nice thing is today's business environment lets you to pick any of those things but you do kind of want to have an eye toward what you're trying to build because then all your decisions are going to drive you in that direction that's great and you know one thing I'll add to that just from my own experience and I agree with Brian and that you know that kind of paralysis by analysis I think haunts a lot of entrepreneurs and you know taking that step getting out there you know they say they want to have their own business but they never actually take that step I mean they try some things on the side and for me what I recognize is that once you kind of go all in on something it's a total different game like you're so into it and you have so much energy and it's it's kind of you need to go all in it's easier than you think but it's not easy don't get me wrong but when you're doing all those calculations saying geez how am I going to get two clients if you're working on this every day all day like and you need to get two clients or you're not going to get paid and you know be able to pay your mortgage you're going to get two clients so but sometimes you just need all that pressure you need to just go for it and put everything into it and so you know I'm just sharing that in case some of you are out there saying you know I'm really close but but it's like well unless you try it you're not going to know how it is to be full in right and and think about the clarity you get once you are fully plugged in right like it right that it's scary it for and and I'm not sure there ever is a right time to make the move but it's always just a little bit later than you should have you know like no I could think more and more and more it's never quite the right time and then when you're in it you're like god I should have done this last year or I should have done this last week or I should you know you just you develop that energy and that clarity and suddenly those opportunities just show up I can tell you without question that when we were doing product consulting back in the 90s I have no idea how we how we landed our first client I can tell you who they are you know but I have no idea how we land they just kind of happened and I and we didn't have a plan for it it wasn't in the spreadsheet it wasn't the clients that we identified as likely they just kind of happened and I think that that's the type of thing you get when you just jump in you know with both feet yeah no that's great so Brian just getting a little bit to you know the recent times now we had this pandemic that we've been going through still going through and that's kind of you know that's caused hardships of course across all industries and I know you work with professional services firms a lot of them are engineering firms and I know big time's done some surveying of their their clients and in the industry and I just wonder if you could talk a little bit about you know what you found with some of that surveying in terms of you know now and maybe you know in the future based on what you're hearing of kind of where we're headed if you could share any any insights that you may have picked up yeah you bet you know we to set the the stage and I'm sure we can share those links with your with your viewers somewhere in the in the podcast once you publish it but you know we went out with our several thousand customers early on in in kind of mid-march to ask them you know are you reducing staff how long do you think work from home is going to function how are you dealing with travel you know just some basics and then we followed up with them in May and we'll do our third kind of survey in June just to get a feel for sentiment and how it's changed we're a few when by we I'm in engineering we're maybe a ridgeline or two away from the epicenter of this particular recession you know you may be consulting with people who are in you know travel leisure restaurant but you're not in that business right so so while those businesses are imploding and it's all over the news engineering isn't necessarily imploding when we looked at the survey I'm staring at the results above so I keep staring up at the next screen we have something like 41% say in in this most recent survey that they have little or no impact for revenues in 2020 and even among those folks we only had about 23% that the impact say the impact would be significant and that's principally related to the types of of firms that you or the types of customers that you service it's also you know I think a reflection of how strong the pipeline was at the end of 2019 a lot of the work that you're doing today because the recession is so quick and so deep and then the in theory the recovery should be you know if if you know whether it's v-shape or not it should be fairly quick because those those businesses that shuttered can suddenly open right and so so that does create a little bit of a bounce and it could be that that people are seeing less of an impact in 2020 revenue because 19 is carrying us through but most firms only have four to five months worth of visibility in their pipeline so as it stretches as we get you know state closures or re-openings that take longer than that I'm kind of burning through that three or four months or four to five months of of visibility meaning booked work that I can continue to work on because you know I don't need to do anything new and and you know it takes longer obviously than that so to really get back to somewhere close to normal then then it will probably start to see the sentiment change but for now we haven't seen a lot of it a significant number of our customers that are small are looking at PPP in order to preserve staff a very small group of people are looking to lay off significant staff although more than half are looking to cut back in some way I had a I don't know if we talked about this already but Anthony but I had a conversation probably month month six weeks ago with an engineering firm in California who who said you know he just had furloughed his whole his old survey team and I said I don't get it like what why it's survey like why are you guys they can go out and survey they're out in the middle of nowhere like they're going to see anybody why would you have to furlough I mean he said I can't pull permits like the state of California has said none of the work we do is essential so we can't pull parcels so there is that type of thing that is encouraging to me because that means as soon as that guy can pull permits he's got backlog you can go out there and get the work done right a lot of people though so that I think that what's interesting you asked about 12 months from now like what happens next and I do think that there's a fundamental shift in the in our physical environment that will never go back to the way it was and and partially because people don't want to be shut up in offices partially because we've had months and months of people working from home where they've been effective and so maybe I don't need to go back to it and partially because I want to be prepared as a company for the next threat and so I don't see a lot of expertise in the new physical space I don't know what that looks like but you know post 9 11 which was the crisis that was where my industry was at the epicenter right that's when technology went to zero and and and uh post 9 11 we had another change in physical infrastructure like our public space has changed and at first they were all these concrete blocks in front of the federal building downtown chicago right they're just really ugly and slowly architecture and engineering firms started to specialize and in an area that is a brand new area which is okay so how do I protect this public space but not make it look like a bunker and that's an expertise that people now make a ton of money on I think that there's that same opportunity in this space today but I haven't seen it play out it'll be interesting to see who steps to the forum and you know to your point it's pretty much exactly what we're seeing you know and talking with a lot of civil engineering companies over the past few months I mean I have to say I think every one of them told us that q1 2020 was their best quarter kind of like in the history of their company but then to your point while they have some backlog now what they're concerned about of course is you know all infrastructure a lot of infrastructure funding comes from people driving their cars and paying tolls and that hasn't been happening so that's going to catch up eventually unless of course the federal government does some kind of infrastructure stimulus which is possible but that's where uncertainty I think is playing in a little bit as yeah everything's going great we're riding some stuff now that we've had but just not sure we can't kind of see over that hill and see what's going to happen and some of this stuff catches up so so again we're talking with Brian so under CEO of big time software and you know we're talking we've talked a lot about building engineering companies building companies in general but Brian's talked to a lot of engineering CEOs as clients and I know a lot of you out there are either growing civil engineering company or you want to start one and so hopefully some of what we've talked about has been helpful what we're going to do now is just take a quick break we're going to come back in our civil engineering hot seat segment and wrap it up by kind of pepper and uh Brian with a few more questions here so stick with us I hope you are enjoying this episode of the civil engineering podcast which is produced by the engineering management institute please be sure to subscribe to our youtube channel here for more podcast episodes and for all of our engineering manager ed20 shorts videos that we publish weekly where we interview successful engineering managers now it's time to jump into our civil engineering hot seat segment all right we are back with Brian Saunders CEO of big time software big time is an online time and billing solution that helps service professionals and Brian some great stuff that we've been talking about so far but now we want to focus a little bit more on on you and kind of some of your routines just because you know that's what we do in the civil engineering hot seat segment so the first question is are there any specific rituals that you practice every day for example do you have a specific routine whether it's morning lunchtime something that you do consistently on a daily basis probably I have no idea you know it's funny I I uh I think I like the um the chaos I mean you know part of part of being entrepreneurs that you wake up to a new opportunity fire uh you know right you know important topic whatever and you know I guess um I do like to leap into it you know uh I don't really do much in terms of breakfast um so your routine is consistent chaos basically it is it is consistent you know my wife makes fun of me because I'll come home and and really hungry and she'll say well what what the heck like what did you have for lunch and I I don't think I ate like I don't remember I was at my desk the whole day so so I think that once you get into it I really like that chaos and it just kind of sucks me in and keeps me occupied for the full 10 hours and then um you know I feel like that kind of energizes me for the next day so you should I guess routine is important for sure getting into the details important for sure I would say try and get into the stuff that you love right away like whatever it is like get into the stuff that you're passionate about because it gives you so much energy and that's going to drive you through the rest of the day as the company grows and there are those things that you don't enjoy get them off your desk like somebody somewhere is going to really love that if if if your thing is not the financials or the monthly billing and and the whole workflow for invoicing there is somebody who's passionate about that give them a chance like that's the way the firm grows you focus on what you love you find other people who focus on what they love and together you build a great company that's great all right next question I see you have a lot of books there what's one book that has been a big big time you know help for you personally or professionally um you know we read a lot of books but there's always those couple that stick out is there any that stand out for you yeah I mean you know a lot of what I do is in in kind of the software product space so I you know read a lot of Jeffrey Moore he's kind of archetype for me at you know my philosophy for product is kind of a marriage between Jeffrey Moore and and the innovators dilemma that Clay Christiansen wrote back in the 90s and so so those two were kind of fundamental touchstones for me I do a lot of incidental reading most of this is not at all related to business or self-help or or you know anything related to product that you know that book sapiens is great if you haven't read it yet you should it's about the kind of the history of humans from a from a park you know archaeologist perspective and so I would pick that up and read it tomorrow um but yeah I think probably if I read you four titles off that shelf you'd be like yeah I got nothing there's nothing that links well you just gave us three books so that's a good start that's a good start okay um all right next one thinking back you know and I know you've been an entrepreneur for pretty much your whole life but in any situations where you did have managers that you can remember um what what made them you know what did you like about them or if you think back and say man that was a great manager to me they were a great manager they knew how to lead like what are the characteristics that anyone that led for you I don't know about the great managers in my life um because that they're more personalities or uh just this cult of strong personality but um but I think the guys who are most successful that I have uh talked with the the people who are most successful at building firms that that I get to talk with their their number one trait is empathy like they as a manager the first thing I think is already well how did you get here and how must you where where are you right now and then I can I can use that empathy to figure out how to get you to where you ought to be right so um you know there are people who talk a lot about kind of hard driving managers you know pound on the desk and and that type of thing and I just I know that there's a place for them I just I am not motivated by them at all like the people who really help me and the people where I've seen make a profound a difference in in the folks that work for us they're empathetic and they they listen first think about it oftentimes you know I might present a conflict or a problem with a client or a situation and their answer to that is okay I get it I understand I gotta think about it I'm not sure like and that think about that so so now you have empathy and then coupled with that you have just this total honesty about about what they do we we have uh in the software one of the things people either love or hate is that it's very open you know we try to we try to make sure that the budgets are open to everybody the the billing rates are kind of you know out there for for for people to understand in terms of how it affects the budget uh and and I just you know I think that reflects my own personal philosophy that the more open you are with the line employee the staff at the firm the more likely they are to do the right thing because ultimately that's kind of what they want to do and so I think empathy and honesty are the two things that really kind of drive a successful manager in my in my life that's great our last question here and we call it the civil engineering career elevator advice question but really it could be focused on any service professionals because I know that's who you work with on a on a broad basis I thought you were going to quiz me about some calculation but if you get an elevator with you know young service professional and they're like you know I really want to grow my career I want to be a CEO at some point you only had about 30 seconds with him or her what would you tell them I see it a lot I my son is 19 now and thinking about business and they ask the same question him and all his friends what would you do and I I think uh you're at a firm now where you can get close to somebody who is doing what you do so so and typically in a civil engineering firm that means the partner uh partners that you work on and other firms it might be somebody who's kind of a senior architect um or engineer get close to them you know understand kind of not just how they do the work right because it you know your job is to do the work you ought to know how to how to run the calculations and put together the the the right specs but uh how do you deal with a client how do you deal with this problem and it like listen to it and then the second piece of advice that's important if I had more than 30 seconds we're in Chicago it's a very tall building uh get close to the client like like every single chance you have to sit in a meeting with a client be there I don't care if you can't say a word if it's not your client you have no idea this is a brand new project that you're sitting in for like sit in every client call meeting conversation you can possibly sit in because what you're going to see is oh okay all of us take this for granted but they have no idea like all of us understand that soil composition is super important or whatever the thing is they have no idea and and when when when when Joe or Sally explained it to them they didn't get it and you start to understand the miss and so a lot of selling is storytelling and the more you're involved in in customer relationship the the better you're going to have the more stories you'll have to tell that's great and I love that last piece of advice there I mean that's what I did as a as a young civil engineer you know oftentimes you know we have to go to planning board meetings and present to the towns and the civil engineer is there with the client and you know when you're young you don't go to those meetings they don't have a budget to bring you to those meetings but I just would go I just told the engineers go you know volunteer what it's one night a month and you're going to see the client interacting with your boss you're going to see your boss presenting the project and you know you can't that that's just invaluable I mean you can't get that back and that's something that you can really use going forward so so with all that again we we appreciate the time and um Ryan Saunders founder and CEO of big time software thank you so much for spending some time with us today on the civil engineering podcast it's nice to see you Anthony thank you I hope you enjoyed this episode of the civil engineering podcast on YouTube produced by the engineering management institute we're always looking for new ways to help engineers become effective managers and leaders you can view all of our content on our website at engineeringmanagementinstitute.org and be sure to subscribe to our youtube channel here for our weekly videos until next time please continue to engineer your own success