Fintech Corner Transcript: The Implementation Economy

Joseph Drambarean:

Welcome to FinTech Corner. I’m Joseph Drambarean. I’m your host, and I am joined by the one and only Brett Turner. Got to do it every time. Our founder and CEO here at Trovata. And I have a topic that I brought out of nowhere this week. I just sent you a Slack message and I said, I got a bone to pick. I want to talk about something.

Brett Turner:

Well, I got a slight bone to pick with you, I got to say.

Joseph Drambarean:

Okay.

Brett Turner:

Is that, you know how I’m a big Seattle sports fan?

Joseph Drambarean:

Yep.

Brett Turner:

And…

Joseph Drambarean:

Oh, hello.

Brett Turner:

I picked up the bring back the Sonics shoes here.

Joseph Drambarean:

Are we going to have…

Brett Turner:

And you didn’t even comment. You didn’t say.

Joseph Drambarean:

I did. The moment I walked in. The moment I walked in, I said, “Oh, shoes.” I didn’t point out the green because that’s more of an Oakland A’s green.

Brett Turner:

Isn’t it? It is a little bit, yeah. Throwing you off a little.

Joseph Drambarean:

Yeah. But respect where respect is due. I love it. Does this mean that we’re going to start to up our game on the podcast with regards to our fit?

Brett Turner:

Now that I’ve done that, every podcaster from here on out, you’re going to bring them because you’re the sneaker guy.

Joseph Drambarean:

And I didn’t wear sneakers today. I decided to go for a more simple fit. Okay, well, those are awesome.

Brett Turner:

All right. Yeah.

Joseph Drambarean:

So what’s the problem? Why are we upset? Well, I threw out a term. I didn’t check online. I didn’t do a Google search to see if anyone has ever said this before, but an implementation economy. And the way that I came up with that, and the reason I wanted to talk to you about it is because had a couple of interesting calls this week where I was just listening to client stories and listening to how they can’t just buy software. There’s a whole ecosystem that has to be drawn with them just to buy a piece of technology.

And I’ve experienced this my whole career. You’ve experienced it in your whole career. You’ve seen many manifestations of it. And the reason I wanted to talk about it is because I truly believe that that’s going to change and that we are at a breaking point in how software is created, sold, experienced as an end user. And we were talking about it in a previous podcast when it comes to APIs, when it comes to cloud and all of those different things. This is a new angle. This is looking at the logistics of buying a piece of software.

And I wanted to start with some horror stories because this doesn’t just branch into finance. This is any case where a large enterprise has a need that they need to fill and they don’t have the expertise in house. And it could be for procurement of software, that’s definitely where there’s a thriving implementation economy. 

But there’s also other cases where you might not have what you need in house to produce something, whether it’s a product or whatever it might be. And you go and you hire consultants to implement it for you. And I have my stories for sure, but I wanted to give you an opportunity to give the first take here. 

Don’t Say the “I” Word

What’s the worst implementation economy story that you have in your career that you feel like really hits home with regards to this experience as either a software buyer or just being in the thick of it and needing consultants and them really squeezing you when it comes to all the details of a project?

Brett Turner:

Yeah, early on in my career, just as a controller, I think one of the biggest things is just what you’re constantly using is ERP systems. And if you’ve gone through an ERP implementation system selection, these processes are just so Herculean. And in ERP, it’s touching so many different aspects of the business. And you have to then incorporate so many different people within the business because you have so many different stakeholders.

So I think that’s the one for any business that becomes one of the hardest things. And it just, the attach rate and how the length of time and how it gets ingrained in you about implementation is that it’s all about the setup. It’s all about the planning. It’s all about understanding all your processes. You’ve got to do all this stuff. You’ve got to clean house and prepare for months and months just to get to the starting line of doing that work.

And every consulting team will tell you about that. So maybe not one specifically, it’s that multiple times, but I think it’s also ingrained because, again, a big part of starting Trovata was what was happening at the time in VC circles too was this is right around 2013, 2014, was this concept of the consumerization of enterprise software. 

And we know those enterprise software, enterprise businesses take a lot longer to get going. They take a lot longer to scale. And then as a result, what started out as something new and innovative. By the time the company really hits maturity, it may be 20, 25 years and they have to draft in that. And it’s really hard to change software when you’re so deep in the journey, which helps or propagates that whole thing.

But now everything is happening with development cycles and the way everything’s architected, everything’s changing so fast. So one of the concepts of just embracing that right out the gate was that we’d never want to build something like that. We’ve got to future-proof it and we didn’t want to get away from that. 

And the whole thing of, remember in the early days, it would almost like to a fault that I would basically say, can’t say the I word. Implementation is a bad word. We want to theoretically get rid of that. And I know maybe we weren’t purely there at that point, but for the most part we really don’t have much. But if we could just rid that from this enterprise software space, then that would be incredible.

The Consumerization of Software

Joseph Drambarean:

You just said something that I want to latch onto. It’s the consumerization of software. I feel like that’s a buzzword that gets thrown around often just like cloud when we were talking about it in the last podcast. 

I have a take on that because I’ve obviously had an opportunity to play on both sides, on the enterprise software side and on the consumer side. And what I saw right away on the enterprise side, because this is my first rodeo when it comes to enterprise software. So it was interesting to see our competitors and being able to see how they think through software. 

And you think when you look at a phrase like consumer software or consumerization of software that it’ll mean something like, well, it’ll look pretty or look at the typography and it’s just so modern. Or you look at the colors and the choices of the palette and that is just pleasing to the eye.

But I actually think it goes way deeper than that because when you’re building consumer software, the issue is is that it’s for a very large target audience that has many personas. And so what you have to do is design an experience that works its way down to the lowest common denominator of what the cognitive threshold will be for that targeted audience. 

And so let’s say you have an app that you want that end user to be able to figure out how to use, and they have to sign up for the app and set it up in some way. Well, you’re incentivized as a builder to make it as easy as possible, as low from a cognitive load as possible and as delightful as possible so that they get to the end goal of using your software.

It was such a culture shock to go into the enterprise space where it’s the exact opposite. It’s almost as if the software is intentionally designed to be complex to set up and to be unintuitive to the degree that you feel fear. And as a result of feeling fear, you feel the need to get help and help coming from the community that’s part of this whole implementation economy that we’re talking about. Fleets of consultants, experts in various niches, right? Because you don’t just go to Upwork and find, Hey, I need help with NetSuite, right?

Brett Turner:

Yeah.

Joseph Drambarean:

What kind of help? Do you need help in setting up payments? Do you need help in setting up the entire ERP? How about selecting one? What industry are you in? Manufacturing? E-commerce? Well, depends because based on that, you might set it up differently. And I can just imagine being in an organization, a traditional finance organization where you didn’t go to school to learn how to think through computer science concepts or software, or any of that. And you’re faced with these challenges and your CFO is basically saying to you, “Yeah, guys, you’re going to have to figure this out. Everybody’s going to be on this project for the next six months.” And I can see why you would feel like it is a daunting task and you’d want to hire a set of consultants.

But here’s the issue. And this is where I get upset about this. If you don’t have an experience that is intuitive enough for you to at least doing the initial setup, then you are sacrificing mastery from day one. And this is where I’ve heard the stories and just recently in client call of having generations of implementation folks that were there at the beginning, did not provide documentation that codifies that mastery in a way where the next person, whether it’s on that finance team in accounting or whoever it might be, could pick it up and say, “Oh, this is the reason why we made the decisions that we did and configuring it in this way.” And then you have to work backwards, almost reverse engineer the implementation. And that consultant could be long gone.

Brett Turner:

It’s a nightmare.

Joseph Drambarean:

And they might not even be there anymore.

Brett Turner:

It’s like customized software. At the end of the day, where do you pick a… But I think one of the… How did we even get here? And I think one of the things if you look back over the last 20 years, it used to be in order to build enterprise software, it was always about the architecture had to be built for scale. You were solving a scale problem. And if you’re going to work with a lot of big companies, tons of users within the company, it was always an infrastructure thing that you had to solve. So pre-cloud, it was a hardware issue. And you’re having to solve for this compute capacity that you’re doing through lots of different servers and the technology, the infrastructure to be able to support it. And then lots of people to support all of that. But I think what got really shifted, it was really the consumer platforms that changed the infrastructure. So then it was the Facebooks, it’s the Googles, because now-

Joseph Drambarean:

They’re so much bigger.

Brett Turner:

Coming up with wide column models that were just disrupting the classic we’ve got to have Oracle as the underlying database, which is all of that traditional data structure where now it’s all these different, the database is essentially being reinvented because consumer scale now meant you had to have billions of people with Facebook and all that. So then consumer socks and consumer platforms actually solved and took the infrastructure problem, solved that in a very unique way. And so I think even the legacy hangover of enterprise software that we’re still dealing with a lot of these older systems, it’s all still on this legacy old hardware that allowed them to do that at scale back then.

But now it’s become the opposite. Now it’s become a crutch because now it’s so rigid. It was built that way, so robust and so rigid to solve those problems for a scale issue. And now it’s a yoke.

Joseph Drambarean:

Yeah.

Brett Turner:

Now you’re just stuck with this thing. You can’t do a lot of stuff with it. You can’t maneuver with it. There’s no flexibility. And all of that now when everything is moving lightning fast, speed of information, all the thing, and we need things in real time. We want to get cash liquidity, all these things that you want from a user experience now has to drive on modern infrastructure, which again, so a leaf frog, consumer leaf frog enterprise, and now enterprise, I think everybody thinks that, oh yeah, consumer, back in the old days, it was like, oh, consumer has, you can have really nice pretty charts because you put it on a very simple infrastructure stack.

And now I think honestly, this is a little bit why you see even older legacy software industries like the TMS space, when they look at Trovata as a new entrant, they’re thinking, oh, they’ll have scale challenges. They’ll start to hit the wall because they won’t have the robust infrastructure that we have. And it’s like, no, it’s absolutely the opposite. We now have the new infrastructure that’ll allow us to just blow past you and we’re coming.

Joseph Drambarean:

We’re built on the platform that runs amazon.com.

Brett Turner:

And this enterprise software stack, you’re going to sitting and you’re literally flat-footed and you’re going to watch a Trovata or a new player just race right by you because they can.

Recognize the Software Cycles

Joseph Drambarean:

So it feels like there are cycles at play in enterprise software. You would’ve probably been super impressed 10, 15 years ago when SAP was able to bring software to life that lets a mega blue chip like Amazon or Walmart or any of them that does enormous scale, almost incomprehensible scale, run digital analytics and do all of that and do it on-prem or do it in a private cloud and all of that. And at the time, I could see why it was very impressive. Because cloud didn’t exist back then in a meaningful way. So you would have to have an implementation team to bring that to life because as you said, it’s all custom. You have to define what is your requirement set for running this software? Where is it going to be based? Who’s going to use it? All of that. And if you are Walmart or Amazon, it’s huge. The requirements are incredible. And so you need a team of people that are thinking through that.

Fast-forward, cloud consumerization of software, new concepts with regards to how users interact with software, we are all used to iPhones, Android devices, Google, the Facebooks of the world. We know how to navigate complex onboardings. We know how to set things up. We like customizing things now. And it’s happened slowly but surely over a decade plus. And we’re in a completely different spot.

Additionally, here’s the other thing that I have a bone to pick with. These monolithic mega apps, I feel like that’s another trend. It started where it made sense from a software sales perspective for you to say, Hey, we check literally every box. You buy this one piece of software and you get everything. And you look now at our behavior as consumers, I’ll open anybody’s iPhone, you could give me your iPhone right now, I guarantee you will have multiple apps for the same thing. And it’s because you’re super comfortable with one app being really good at one thing and another app being good at another thing and navigating between the two. Why?

Because you prefer the experience of one over the other. And you’re fine with having multiple apps and jumping in between them and having notifications for one versus the other. It’s just normal now, we don’t need super apps that do everything for us. And it’s because we’ve gotten used to this approach where if I need a problem and a niche to be solved, I just get an app and it’ll solve the problem for me. I don’t need to go and find the right app that has all the features that I need across every possible use case. Why? You don’t need to. You have a thriving app economy that is able to give you that.

So that’s interesting to me because when you look at the ERP space, when you look at the TMS space especially, it’s super apps. It’s apps where you have to literally have every check box checked in order to buy it and feel like you get value out of it. But then what happens is do you actually use all of those features? Do you set them up even? And then it’s like, what are you really paying for?

Brett Turner:

But the company needs you to pay for all of them, and that’s the problem. And I think that’s the thing. When you’re bound into this old world infrastructure model and it’s legacy software like that, then all of the engineering to meet the demands of customers in that paradigm is you’re constantly having to… It’s almost like you’re hard coding these features and it’s feature on top of feature on top of feature, but what you’re doing, even if you are listening to the customer and adding those in, it takes a long time to add them because of the trickle down effect all the way down to the root level of the data model. And then if there’s anything dynamic coming in, to account for that is really, really hard. So that rigidity becomes this crutch and you’re having to constantly add new things in that environment.

So then on the flip side, if you look at one of the most now scalable and robust infrastructure models on the planet, a good example that we all know is Apple. So we all have iPhones. There’s billions and billions of these devices out there. I don’t know how many iPhones do you think?

Joseph Drambarean:

I think it’s almost 2 billion now. For sure.

Brett Turner:

It’s just insane.

Joseph Drambarean:

So it’s like one third of humanity has one.

Brett Turner:

It’s crazy. So if you think of that too, like you say all the apps, the app layer becomes… You can basically just, if you don’t like it, throw it away, new app. You’re constantly changing things out because our behaviors and what we need from a user perspective is changing so dynamically and so fast. And then the infrastructure to support it though is crazy good. So if you think of Apple now, we’re constantly getting releases, new software releases, and even whether you’re a MacBook user, all that is now tied into on the same network. So when you look at rolling out these constant things, that’s where the infrastructure has moved to, but you can’t really do that on the legacy software because it’s all monolithic tied end to end.

So if you look at more of a modern tech stack, it’s built with incredible amount of robustness and on the infrastructures and it enables this really nimble, flexible, build it away, or we could build multiple user experiences for multiple different users in terms of what they want without this infrastructure penalty that you got to be constantly contending with. And that’s what makes it so exciting because now you can just like Apple rolls out a new release every how often, maybe three weeks or there’s some dot-

Joseph Drambarean:

Absolutely.

Brett Turner:

One five or whatever. Right?

Joseph Drambarean:

The other thing too, and that’s a great point that you just made. That’s another transition that happened in the world of technology is that we went from super apps to the rise of platforms and marketplaces. What used to be a very centralized experience now has been replaced with a decentralized platform oriented experience where you benefit as a software maker if you can create a thriving economy of developers, of applications, of use cases that all take advantage of your platform. And I think that that’s another thing that is super important here is that by having this decentralization, folks probably think that, well, that’s a bad thing because then you can’t learn anything and you don’t have the ability to centrally manage things. But that’s where the platform comes into play. Because when you think of Apple, they don’t let it become this wild west where security is lost, where entitlements and privileges are lost, where any of those things get compromised.

No, they handle those basics at the platform level so that you have the peace of mind of knowing that I can install any app and my privacy will be intact, my security will be intact. I don’t have to worry about what that app will do. And it’s because Apple has my back because they have made the promise that if I engage in the app store, they’re going to do this, this, this and this for me. They’re going to help me transact and buy the software. They’re going to update it, they’re going to do the security, all those things.

Should We Hire Consultants?

So getting back to this implementation economy angle, I think that what has happened is that because we’re in these cycles and they’re long cycles, that’s clear to me now that they can last a decade plus. Maybe even 20 years in the case of the TMS space, it’s really difficult to break those cycles because of the implementation economy. Because what takes place is that these barriers start to get placed in front of buyers, in front of operators that are using that software. And it’s because the implementation economy is incentivized to effectively remove all mastery from the end user. The more that they do that, the more that they create this reliance, the more that they will get more billable hours and all of that.

Now, I want to dispel one thing right away. I don’t have anything against consultants. I actually was one. My first job in my career was doing that and it was fun and you get to solve interesting problems for customers and there’s a delight in doing that. What I don’t like is when customers are taken advantage of because of the fact that you have knowledge that they don’t.

And at the end of the day, this is where my gripe lies, is that as a software builder, we are, we feel like we’re master builders of software. You have a very real obligation to make a decision. Where do you stand on this subject? Do you want to create mastery in your end user? Do you want to give them freedom to operate? Do you want to allow for them to be delighted in your experience and feel empowered to learn when new features come out? Or are you doing the opposite? Are you creating an experience where it intentionally suppresses that mastery so that the implementation economy can thrive and anytime new features come out, anytime new configurations come out, it means that you have to hire a new wave to educate your team to get things set up and all of that? And I’m really upset about the state of the industry.

Brett Turner:

There’s two different… I think consultants are in some ways needed more than ever, but I think there’s a huge shift that’s taken place over the last 10 years that’s caused this divergence. You’ve got a group of consultants, I mean who make a living, a lot of consultants who make a living off installing these legacy platforms and maintaining them because they’re a real bear to maintain. You look at any… If it’s an Oracle on-prem ERP system, if you’re a big company, you’re likely going to have at least two to three dedicated system administrators. All they do is focusing on uptime, just data resiliency, all the things just to maintain that that system is always going to be on and working at its maximum potential. So then if you look at, and there’s consultants that are always doing that for other companies too, implementing these systems.

So all of a sudden now when you get this shift to something different, those folks then have to evolve to the new world already too. And there’s always going to be this long tail needed to support these systems. But if they’re not changing or adapting as that market’s starting to get smaller, then in some ways there’s a bias to make sure they can propagate that because that’s how their livelihood is gained. There’s other folks though who are focused on what’s best for the user and will continue to navigate in that can the new economy and future-proof the journey with on a newer platform to help them with that longevity. And there’s more of shifting over there.

A good example is when in the early days of cloud, you saw when cloud came and AWS was really gaining a head of steam, now finding its way in the enterprise world, there were sort of this fear from if you’re an IT person thinking, it’s just a little bit like now the fear coming with AI. It’s like, Hey, am I going to still have a job? Is this cloud thing AWS going to put me out of business? And it was actually the opposite because what happened was the folks, if you looked at now, nobody hires network administrators. Why? Because nobody has servers in the back room or your own server data center in your office environment. And so network administrators maintaining all those servers, they basically mapped over, probably went to an AWS Reinvent Conference.

Joseph Drambarean:

Only one company hires them, it’s Amazon or Google.

Brett Turner:

They basically became cloud architects and they’re now working at all these different companies, whether we have a specialization in those areas, so many other companies are building platforms or software specialization. Companies need those as well to navigate all from an IT perspective, it’s just the profession changed. They just pivoted to learning new things and learning the new way. And I think we’re still traversing that on the consulting. You have some that are still these old systems that you can’t quite put out to pasture yet because there’s so much reliance. But new software is coming in, it’s creeping in.

And another example is when we actually, you remember there’s a company, won’t name names, but we were talking to the treasury team and they definitely were excited they saw the user experience but who got really energized with was on the second call when there was actually the CIO and a couple other tech folks on the call. And when they saw it, they basically on the call talked to the treasurer and said, “Can we replace our old large system like now?”

Joseph Drambarean:

Exactly.

Brett Turner:

And just because all of the IT folks who have, which most now have already crossed over, they don’t want to support these old systems. They want to support something that’s new. And so when they saw it, I think, and that was one of the things we talked about, yeah, maybe we should actually just sell to the technology teams because our job would be that much easier because they see what we’re doing and all the things it enables. And so I think therein lies this interesting journey.

Joseph Drambarean:

You just made me think of a story. Do you remember… Okay, let’s rewind the tape. Three years ago, three and a half years ago when we first launched search, was that three and a half years ago? Pretty much. 

The Legacy System Hangover

Remember how the first few customers that started playing with search and our principles of reporting, how there was almost like this tentative almost I’m afraid to create things because is it going to mess up the system if I have too many of them? And we had to keep repeating something over and over, which was there is no penalty for being creative. Go ahead and make as many tags, create as many reports, create as many dimensions as you’d like, because we want you to be inspired. We want you to use this to be strategic. And it was so interesting to me, and I still think about this, is that a very real barrier that we face as software designers is not just the ability to understand our software, it’s the baggage that you might have from whatever previous software that you were using.

And this goes back to the implementation economy. That whole generation, we’re talking 10, 15, 20 years here of end users that are used to that behavior of having to work with a consultant. They set it up and now they just have a report, they have a dashboard, they go, they trust it. And they don’t think at all beyond that. They don’t have curiosity to set up things for themselves. They don’t have this nimble, Hey, my CFO asked a question in a meeting. I think I know how I could solve that. Let me go find the data, plug it together, maybe run a report and then I can solve that problem in a few minutes. That doesn’t exist because there’s a fear that you might break something, that you might cause an issue with the standard dashboards that you have or whatever it might be. That, to me, is it’s missional. We used to wake up to break that, to break that cycle. And I really feel strongly about this because at the end of the day, the next generation of thinkers in finance have to have this behavior. You just mentioned-

Brett Turner:

Well, they do. If you think of even my, I’ve grown up through tech and for me being in startups for most of my career, I have to evolve and I have to reinvent myself every few years because things are changing so much. If I don’t, I’m in trouble. I can’t do what I do. But when you look at these dependencies, it’s almost like there’s these behavioral aspects of doing your job that you just know it takes a long time to set up. So you’re like, I’m not even going to bother. Because if I do that, I’m going to be down a rabbit hole. I’m going to spend all my whole day tinkering with some report and get it right and then I can do my routine again.

And that is what exists when you’re on an older legacy platform because of the things we’re talking about. But in the new environment, you get this nimbleness where you just don’t have to do that. And I think there is, like you said, when we launched search, all of a sudden you start using, it’s like that was cool. You get this really cool discovery moment, light bulbs go off, you start playing around a little bit more and then all of a sudden you realize it’s probably like maybe Rapunzel being locked up in a castle. You get out in this wide green open field and you’re like, oh my goodness, this is really, really cool.

Joseph Drambarean:

And we as the designers of the software have massive cognitive dissonance in that scenario because we’re watching the end user going, “I don’t get it.” It’s so easy, just use it. But I think when you treat with respect the psychological background, where they came from, how they have been doing their job for years, how they feel that they have a level of mastery and trust their own skill set, that’s where you start to get into these interesting design challenges. And you know this, I’m going to give a shout out to my brother who’s a freshly minted CPA. He’s doing his first consulting gig right now.

Brett Turner:

It’s awesome.

Skills for the Future of Finance

Joseph Drambarean:

So he’s a consultant. And what’s interesting is watching his generation. When he graduated, he obviously had to go through the same things you went through, same tests, all of that. However, a new requirement was you have to learn programming. And I was like, “what? What for?”And what he walked me through was, “Well, we’re being taught how to do query languages like SQL so that we can do our own searching of a database. We don’t need engineers to help us with that. We know how to use graphical analysis tools, so being able to do reporting and Tableau and stuff like that. And we’re also being taught how to interact with APIs so that we can plug them into Google sheets.” And when I saw that, I thought to myself, “This next generation paired with even tools like ChatGPT, and all of these other things that are coming out, you should be worried.”

Brett Turner:

It is crazy. Yeah.

Joseph Drambarean:

You should be worried because they have a set of principles that are guiding their thought process, that is enabled through creativity, through exploration, through technology, and they’re not going to have any barriers. So they’re just going to accelerate through this learning curve and get mastery because they’re used to it. And so I really think that this is an important principle. We have to break through this barrier of the implementation economy. It’s not because we’re just trying to save people money. It actually has nothing to do with that because like you said, there’s still complex software that needs to be implemented. And there are things outside of just the user experience that we haven’t even talked about. For example, in the banking world, it’s still very frustratingly complicated to connect to certain banks, right?

Brett Turner:

Yep.

Joseph Drambarean:

APIs are great. We’re on the forefront of that. And when they’re available, they’re magical and it’s great, but guess what? So most banks don’t have them. So that means that there’s still a need for having experts that know how to interact with the SWIFT network or with file-based reporting and the host systems. Yes, of course, there’s always going to be that need, but on the software side, on the mastery and the value part of the software, if you don’t have a team that is incentivized to learn, to thrive, to continue to innovate, then you’re on the wrong path as a finance community.

Brett Turner:

Well, and I think that’s where I could just say, because I lived through it. There’s hope for, I think maybe older generations will look at that and say, okay, how am I going to compete with this? All this stuff coming, AI or this younger generation, they’re just equipped. Everything’s native to them where it’s now maybe a little harder for me. But I can just say once you start to cross over a little bit, yeah, it requires you to lean in and learn some of that, but it’s definitely learnable. It’s not like these are barriers that you can’t… It just requires a little bit of learning to get through. Once you do, I would say in some ways, companies get the best of both worlds because there is so much of this wisdom, experience, experience by doing for so many years, and there’s so much knowledge to be harnessed. And then once it gets weaponized on how to tap into that.

I just look at my whole career in finances. Always been CPA, controller, finance track, but in startups. And so there’s always pressing the envelope a little bit of you got to learn new things of how to… You’re always managing risk, which you have to do. And there’s that notion of playing defense. But then there’s this other aspect though of playing offense. And that’s where I still think just because you’re playing offense doesn’t mean it’s aggressive or dangerous and putting you in these, it’s actually the opposite. I think the mode was what I would want to do is I wanted to know exactly where those really hard risk areas were. It’s almost like you’re carving out the ring around you, and you know that’s where the cliff edge is. But within that, if you had a lot of precision around that, then you could have a lot of freedom to operate knowing you can be a little more aggressive, but within that area, that play area.

And that’s the thing. You’re actually doing things. It’s helping your company or finding areas of improvement or efficiency or just ways to optimize in so many different levels. But if you’re not thinking that way, which now the beauty about it is all the new tools equip you to do that. And so my whole career having to do that with not a lot of good tools and so it was hard, but now more than ever, it sort of democratizes all of that. So anybody can do that, and you’re enabled and equipped to be able to do that better, faster, more capable than ever. And if you’ve got all of this knowledge about how to do it that’s accumulated over the years, it’s that much better.

So now you get the best of both worlds doing all of that. It just requires you to lean in. It’s more native for younger folks who just have been brought up into that, but then they might be lacking all of the knowledge and things of how to do stuff, or maybe they haven’t made enough mistakes to learn from some of those things. Oftentimes that’s where that wisdom is gained. But I think between the two or even working together. That’s why it’s so cool to have this cross collaboration too.

Joseph Drambarean:

Absolutely.

Brett Turner:

Is because it’s challenging each other. The younger generation is learning from folks who’ve been in the trenches in a different way, and the older generation is learning these new tools that the younger generation is brought up on. And I think that’s just where it’s super cool because then everybody is learning and everybody is, that aspect of teaming, which we always talk about culturally, is just so cool and so powerful.

PLG Disrupts the Implementation Economy

Joseph Drambarean:

What I think is important in that context is trust. One of the things that if you have that teaming going on in your organization, and there are folks that do feel comfortable in an environment where they’re exploring, they’re trying something new. This is why the current state of SaaS I think is so exciting, and for me, when it comes to purchasing software, it is a lot about trusting the software provider. And everybody thinks that the first layers of that are related to security. Of course they are. They’re related to privacy. What are you going to be doing with my data? How are you going to be scaling what I’m doing? So yes, of course, that has to be the first layer.

But believe it or not, for me, and I have bought a lot of software at Trovata, you have too. The first thing that I look for is will you allow for me to get in there and see for myself whether or not this is going to be valuable? And if you don’t, I immediately have a reason to believe that you have something that you’re hiding. Because if you’re not willing to let me sign up and try it, then that means that either you just don’t have a modern piece of software that is capable of doing that, and you haven’t gotten to a point where you can create an experience that is that dynamic.

And when I think of the greatest SaaS softwares, Intercom, Zendesk, all of these pieces of software where they literally let you sign up same day, you set it up, you see the value, and boom, you’re off to the races. And the reason is because they have nothing to hide. They’re very clear on what they’re offering in terms of value. And they’re saying, don’t believe us? Try it right now. And we’re so confident that you’re going to love it, that we’re going to just let you use it.

And it works. Why? Because it’s creating this trust cycle where you are incentivized as the user to find out for yourself. You get the mastery on their software because you are basically checking, you’re checking the receipts. They said that they can do this, can they? Oh, wow, it does. Whoa, this does what they said that it does. This is going to save me a lot of time.

And here’s where the trust and the teaming inside of your community happens too. Because if you are someone that feels comfortable doing that exploration, then you can go to the team and say, guys, “I signed up for this piece of software. It was free. Here’s what I learned. It gets us this, this, and this. And if we pay for this subscription fee, it’ll get us this.” That behavior, in my opinion, is an evolution of how you should be interacting with software. Why? Because it’s built on the foundations of trust. It’s the antithesis of the implementation economy. Because with the implementation economy, it’s here is this very long laundry list of things that we can do, trust us. And by the way, you’re going to have to hire a team to get you to that space. Trust us though, you’ll get the value, right?

Brett Turner:

Yeah.

Joseph Drambarean:

What a different experience.

Brett Turner:

That’s crazy.

Joseph Drambarean:

Isn’t that crazy?

Brett Turner:

It is crazy. And I think as we traverse this new world order, it’s imperative. I think younger generation, they’ll only buy that way. And I think there’s this other still maybe a little bit of skepticism from an older generation to say, well, if it feels too easy, then therefore it must be not as secure. Or there’s something not as robust about it. And again, there’s too many things we could start to draw from in terms of consumer platforms that says, well, that’s not true. Apple, like we talked about and others.

But I think what now starts to happen is, and I learned early on from a mentor of mine in the startup world, that in sales, in an enterprise world, when you’re dealing with disruption and disrupting the legacy side of things, is that if you can’t convince them, confuse them. And I think unfortunately that is happening a lot is because if you are an enterprise software, you’ve been around for 25, 35, 40 years, you simply can’t do what a newer platform does. You just can’t. And so what are you going to do as a business?

Well, you can’t replatform, it’s too expensive. It’s going to take way too long. It’s probably going to cannibalize some of your margins. So if you look at that, you have to keep it going. And eventually, the music’s going to stop. Eventually, it’s going to catch up to you. And so you want to be able to prolong that as long as you can. You want to keep your customers on your platform as long as you can until they finally, the pain is high enough, or they truly know that they’re missing out on not being on the offense to take advantage of these new things to where they finally leave these older platforms, and that’s when they finally get put out to pasture.

But that’s what’s happening. I think part of why I’m even talking about this is really helping to educate the buyers. In the enterprise world or different sales methodologies in selling, looking at one of them is with Miller Hyman. You look at the approaches to selling. The user buyer, the economic buyer, and the technical buyer. And I think in the treasury space, you often get the economic buyer and the user buyer sometimes are the same. But still, there’s still missing out on the technical buyer. It’s still looking at all feature function and then not these aspects. And then wondering, not even realizing that they could even do these things because nobody’s telling them about it and they’re not asking these hard questions because they just don’t know the things that we’re talking about.

I think they intuitively know, all right, everybody complains about it. User interface is terrible or it’s clunky, or I ask for that feature and it gets there a year later or it’s never going to get there. But this is really the reasons why. And at the end of the day, these older platform, and I shouldn’t even call them platforms. They’re more this older software model. It’s never going to get there. And if you’re never going to get there, then at some point you have to start to make a move.

Joseph Drambarean:

This has felt good. I’m starting to feel like this is almost like our treasury therapy podcast, just dissecting this industry, thinking through why it needs to change fundamentally in so many different ways. This one has been on my heart for a while because we’ve been on this journey for years at this point. We’ve seen it on the front lines. We’re faced with it pretty much every time we have a sales conversation. And I think that it’s important for us to get our perspective out there because at the end of the day, your software provider best, when you look at their leadership and their philosophy, what they believe, and the we believe of Trovata, is that you should not have to buy or experience software in that way. And don’t believe us. Check it out for yourself. Right?

Brett Turner:

Yeah. Yep.

Joseph Drambarean:

And that’s the truth of it. And at the end of the day, we’re hoping that we’re going to make a change in the industry, one customer at a time, one story at a time. And that will spawn those same customers then telling their colleagues and working through their community and realizing, guys, even if you’re on an older piece of software, what’s preventing you from checking to see if there’s a better way of doing things, especially if there is a way to do it with low risk, right?

Brett Turner:

Yeah.

Joseph Drambarean:

Zero penalty. You can try it for yourself. And that’s just the new way of buying software. And you know what? I’m not going to apologize for having come up with a way to do this, and we shouldn’t ever be apologetic about improving the experiences of our end customers. And so you’re right, the phrase that you just gave of confusion, a lot of the time, what we see in our space is that because you can’t compete on these principles, because we’re not talking about features here. This is not apples to apple, we’re talking about fundamental philosophy about how software should be. And like you said, you can’t change that unless you completely take it apart and rebuild it. And so what is your only other tactic as an alternative? It’s to confuse, to deny, to provide maybe misinformation in this space. And there’s a lot of that, unfortunately.

Brett Turner:

Well, it’s like if you’re going to be an athlete, do you want cement in your shoes. You’re not going to be able to move around very much. There’s certain things you could probably still sit out in the three point line and shoot and make some shots, but you’re not going to be able to drive in for a layup very easily without every defender getting on you. So I think people are now seeing it. They’re weighted down with these things, and you just… More than ever the world and whatever you believe, you can recognize that there’s changes going on in the world and you need to be nimble.

Joseph Drambarean:

Absolutely.

Brett Turner:

You need to be ready. It’s hard to traverse with all the different elements going on in whatever phase in life, or not just in treasury and finance, but I think all of that mentality comes to this. You don’t want to be wearing this heavy medieval chain mail armor to go into battle anymore. That’s not the way you’re going to do it. You got to be more lightweight. Your armor will be more protective. You look at the upgrades in the military with how they… It’s so different. You’ve got to have that nimbleness to be able to do what you do. And I think we’ve entered the new era. What’s so interesting, and yeah, we’re helping folks hit the freedom button.

Joseph Drambarean:

Right. Exactly

The Problem With RFPs

Brett Turner:

We want to set you free and this is how everybody should be operating. Anyway, that’s where everything’s headed. And it’s just a matter of time. And we’re going to start to make our move up market. We’re already starting to do it. And telling this story, if you look at still what’s going on in the treasury world or in enterprise software, there’s still this aspect of do an RFP and it’s all feature and function that lines out. Users, we’re trying to educate our buyers a little bit too. What about all the technology questions? Why is that being left out? That’s one of the most important things again. It’s being left out I think of most RFPs in terms of their focus and they get glossed over because the consulting ecosystem, it doesn’t benefit for them to talk too much about that. If they’re talking about a modern tooling, it’s probably going to change their role. And in that whole thing, they’re going to have to change the way they make money and that whole equation.

All that stuff is just getting brushed under the carpet right now. It needs to be front and center because at the end of the day, there’s core features and functionality that you have to have for sure. But there’s this other aspect, if you miss it, you’re going to be tying yourself down and burdened with this where that’s not going to allow you to really move nimbly.

Joseph Drambarean:

Absolutely. And you know what’s funny about the RFP and RFI process is that at the end of the day, it’s supposed to be helping you. It’s supposed to be helping you wade through, well, how many options do I have? And what’s the pros and cons of each of them?

Instead, what it’s doing today is it’s adding almost like this additional level of burden for even having the curiosity of exploring for yourself which piece of software will drive value for me. And at the end of the day, if you are making a decision based on checklists and based on a contrived demo at the end of the day from whoever it is that is providing you with that information and you are not seeing it for yourself, would you buy a car like that? Would you buy any other important purchase where you don’t get to actually touch it, feel it, drive it, see it, check the receipts? Is this going to do what I think it will? No. And yet for what is considered the most important piece of software that many businesses have, that’s how it works. It’s literally a total trust fall.

Brett Turner:

Yeah. It’s so cool what Truvada’s meant to… We are disrupting the treasury space, this old TMS 25 years to 45 year old software. It’s just right for innovation. Everybody knows it, everybody sees it coming. We’re on a path. We’re going to disrupt it. We’re moving up market now. It’s going to happen. But I think the other thing is too, as this broader platform, a big part of our mission too, because of all the things we’re talking about, the way we’re architected is we can help all the other companies that are less than a billion or 2 billion where that’s all that they can do, they might have to or be able to have the resources to buy that. Now, all these other companies, and there’s arguably millions around the world to do that.

Joseph Drambarean:

We’re democratizing it. We’re saying, why should there be a barrier for any of these companies?

Brett Turner:

There’s no barrier. And you look at the overuse of Excel for doing core things. You look at the overreliance on legacy internet banking or online banking, that was really brought about as a website to provide some balances and transactional information.

Joseph Drambarean:

A website.

Brett Turner:

It is. It’s essentially a [inaudible 00:50:02].

Joseph Drambarean:

[inaudible 00:50:01] was literally a website.

Brett Turner:

And it came out in the late nineties because really the analyst at the time when the internet was starting to come out, all the analysts were hitting up the banks and they say, “Hey, you guys need to change. You guys need to be more like media companies. And that was the pressure analysts we’re putting on banks. And then banks were responding also.” Kind of like AI, we don’t know what it is. We got to get on this thing. And so you start to develop what has now become online banking. And we got some stories I think coming off to talk about that.

Joseph Drambarean:

We should invite John Philpot to tell us about how you made those websites.

Brett Turner:

Exactly. And that’ll be maybe a preview for the next one with John Philpot, our general partner from FINTOP Capital, one of our seed investors. He was like employee number four or five of this company, S1 that was really part of that early, the first internet, the bank on the internet and helping with even that online banking experience very early on. But yeah, it’s sort of a website journey. It hasn’t largely changed. So people are asking, well, how do I use online banking if-

Joseph Drambarean:

Same cycles.

Brett Turner:

It’s the same cycles. And arguably, it’s even harder because the banks have to contend with so many of these other things. They’re not just a legacy enterprise software company where they could start to incorporate new things like the bank has other aspects that they got to deal with from a regulatory standpoint so it’s even harder for them. They can’t just pivot and become a tech company or add that component easily. So I think we’re able to add all the things that we do, we’re becoming really a, which is hard. It’s not easy, has its pros and cons of really becoming a category builder because what we’re building doesn’t really exist and we’re helping the bank. We’re augmenting and building this experience that’s automating a lot of these cash workflows that people don’t really know that it can even be done. So there’s still a lot of discovery even on what Trovata is that’s happening. And it’s just an exciting journey to be a part of.

Advice for Finance Pros

Joseph Drambarean:

All right. Let’s wrap it up. If you were to give advice to our listeners and just give it maybe in a short, sweet couple of bullet points, what would it be? What should you be looking for?

Brett Turner:

It’s just asking basic questions. I think right away it’s asking questions about things that you know, and this is what happens in human nature. You always go to what you know, you ask about what you know, but there’s other things when you really start to think about what is best for the company, start to future-proof where we need to go. There are some of those things that are heavy needs, but also start to actually ask some of the technology questions. Spend time networking a little bit with other stakeholders in the company. Talk to your IT group or talk to maybe a software engineer.

Joseph Drambarean:

They’re beyond me. Because ultimately the decision you’re making, you might not even be there a few years after the fact, but the company will still be relying on whatever decision you made. So put a little thought into what the community is that will be impacted by that decision and will they be burdened because of what you’ve decided? Did you just check a box because it was the one that everybody said you should get? Or did you make a decision that really listened to that community and said, Hey, look, there are multiple stakeholders here and they all need something. Maybe there is a way to solve their problem.

Brett Turner:

We’ve always asked this question and is like you don’t know what you don’t know. And that’s the thing. It is. But you can ask a few questions or talk to a couple of different folks, probably not too far from people already maybe in your circle to ask some of these questions about what does modern tech even mean and how would that support what we’re doing? And just a little bit of learnings around that would just go a long way.

I think the other thing I would say is that you get into the cycles of habits and your routine and the systems. And like we said, it’s always been that if you change any of that or you deviate from that, you feel like you’re getting off the road and it’s going to take all this time to get back. And I guess the message here too is that you can experiment and you can discover in a really easy way. And everybody has a good experience with this.

When you get on the internet, you see a Google, if you’re using Google, get on Bing, you see a search bar and you start typing stuff in and, you realize once, maybe the very first time you did that when it first came out is a little bit, what am I going to type in? And you’re a little hesitant even to touch the, but once you start doing that, it’s so natural now to using that and discover all kinds of things and all the YouTube self-help videos, it’s just incredible to me now where that’s gone. There’s so much stuff at your fingertips. You shouldn’t be afraid to experiment and realize that if you just do take a step to just try something, it’s not going to set you back like days. And it’s not going to cause hours and hours of time that you’re going to have to do.

In fact, once you go down that path, you’re going to realize a little bit of time is going to actually page huge dividends and the dividends that it’s going to save you in time savings, which is really what everybody wants, which is the irony in it. You feel like, well, I don’t want to… Like Trovata, I don’t want to really try it because I don’t have the time to do that. I don’t have the time to implement a new system. It’s like, no, no, no. The new world order of how to do that now is so different. You can actually get in-

Joseph Drambarean:

I love this.

Brett Turner:

Play around and instantly you will save time instantly, not in six months after consultants help you set things up.

Joseph Drambarean:

Not to get too philosophical, but this is the whole principle of embracing discomfort. And I think that this is actually a community that gets really comfortable in their job, where they have their way of doing things, they have their mastery, whatever it was, and they get to a point where they just repeat that. 

But the thing is, what do we learn in our lives is that we become the better versions of ourselves, the best version of ourselves when we embrace discomfort. 

Think of when you are in sports or when you are in a situation where you have to learn something new. And even physiologically, what have we learned recently that you do cold plunges and things like that. And when your body goes through that-

Brett Turner:

Resistance builds muscle.

Joseph Drambarean:

Exactly. Our bodies are our way of thinking. Everything about a human is about evolving, right?

Brett Turner:

Yeah.

Joseph Drambarean:

Creating those moments of discomfort that allow for you to get that innovative moment, to have that breakthrough, to have that moment of inspiration. If you just let yourself be and keep going on the same path, well, you’re not going to change at all. And I think that that’s a great point, and that’s a great piece of advice is that embracing that and allowing for yourself to be vulnerable in that way, and really all you have to give is a little time. We’re not talking about taking a cold plunge here. We’re talking about just taking a little bit out of your day to look into something. So, yeah.

Brett Turner:

Yeah.

Joseph Drambarean:

That’s awesome advice. This has been amazing. Great episode.

Brett Turner:

Yeah.

Joseph Drambarean:

I’m glad we got a chance to talk through this. Thank you for joining us. This has been FinTech Corner. I’m Joseph. This is Brett. We’ll see you next time.