Stephen: Welcome to Actions Antidotes, your antidote to the mindset that keeps you settling for less. Today I want to talk to you about a little bit of a broad topic, something that really affects all of our lives, regardless of whether or not you're pursuing your passions, regardless of whether or not you're even thinking about a business or a career at all. And that is decision making. There's a lot of people out there saying that your life's outcome is a sum of all the decisions you make, which can get a little stressing to the mind, I would say in that sense. To talk to us all about decision making, all the facets of decision making and how to make effective decisions that really truly reflect who we are and what we want to see in the world and our lives, I would like to introduce you, my guest today, Greg Williams, the VP of Strategy for Western Computer. Greg, welcome to the show.
Greg Williams: Thanks for having me, Stephen. It's great to be here.
Stephen: Yeah, thank you so much. And so first of all, let's get a little bit of your background. You're a VP of strategy, Western computer. The name doesn't necessarily clearly state what it is. What is it that you do as VP of strategy?
Greg Williams: Yeah. We're an old company and I like to say that we don't sell computers and we're not really Western that much anymore, but that's our name and it has a good brand in the marketplace. We provide ERP and CRM solutions to small and mid-market companies. That's what we do. We're primarily a Microsoft partner. We implement the Microsoft dynamic suite of products for our customers. We support them long-term. The last few years has been their journey in digital transformation.
Stephen: And just so everyone knows what we're talking about here, ERP and CRM, what are those two acronyms refer to?
Greg Williams: ERP is the backbone software of a business accounting inventory control. Sometimes e-commerce. It's really the core system that you enter orders in and ship products out of or manage projects and that type of thing.
Stephen: Yeah.
Greg Williams: And CRM, there's two main companies out there, Microsoft and Salesforce that do that for the most part. And it's for your front office, it's your sales team, it's your customer service team, it's your field technicians if you're in the service business, the applications that they use.
Stephen: And in your role as VP of strategy, are you mostly concerned with the strategy of your company and how to obtain and retain clients? Or are you mostly concerned with the strategy of the companies you work with, helping them pick which business solutions they want for their businesses?
Greg Williams: A little bit of both. I'm obviously very focused on our strategy, but I do advise our clients quite a bit on what IT strategies they can take to optimize their investments in technology.
Stephen: Well, regardless of which side of your business, which side of this dichotomy you're on, a big part of it is around this decision-making process. Do you have any general ideas or general pieces of advice for anyone that's making a decision around their business, whether it be, obviously you talk a lot about the IT, the tech decisions, but people who are starting something up, whether it be a business or even a side project, are making decisions pretty much every day about selecting this tool or that tool.
Greg Williams: I do help out there quite a bit. One of the things I see with founders of startups is that they often don't think holistically about what applications they may need in two or three years from now. They're just plugging holes with what I call point solutions. And before you know it, they're paying 10 different subscriptions. They have Google Docs, they have Slack, they have Zoom, then they may have a HubSpot CRM system, and the list just keeps going, right?
Stephen: Yeah.
Greg Williams: And none of them really talk to each other that well, if at all. And we're a little biased because we're a Microsoft partner, which is the all-in-one solution. But we do see sometimes serial entrepreneurs come to us and they say, hey, I've been down this path before of being two or three years in business and trying to scale with disparate systems.
Stephen: Mm-hmm.
Greg Williams: Instead of going down that road, I'm going to pay a little more upfront and get on an integrated platform and scale with that.
Stephen: You talk about paying a little bit more upfront. Is there any element of fear or concern, especially around say first-time entrepreneurs or first-time business owners where people don't pay more upfront because they're just still in that mode of, well, is this going to work? Am I ready to pay for this full suite of products given that I haven't gotten too many sales yet?
Greg Williams: Yeah, I think that's probably the fear. And a lot of times they just don't know. They just don't know what small and medium-sized businesses are using. They come from a consumer mindset of what consumers use in their technology every day, and they try to apply that to the small business.
Stephen: Oh, interesting. Because they're still thinking themselves as this is me and my initiative, not that this is a business.
Greg Williams: Exactly. And there's some validity to that because over time we see consumer behavior and applications come into business-to-business applications, right?
Stephen: Mm-hmm.
Greg Williams: 10 years ago, e-commerce sites for between businesses did not have reviews on them. Now people are asking for that. Even if it's a business-to-business site where they're selling to other businesses, they want to see reviews and Q&A and a lot of that stuff that you see on consumer websites. All that stuff trickles down into businesses. We were doing Skype calls long before we were doing Teams and Zoom calls.
Stephen: Yeah. And then have you found a balance between say, being too reactive and being too in the moment we need this versus being too long-term and possibly falling into analysis paralysis, that state where people just keep thinking and thinking and thinking and don't do anything?
Greg Williams: You can definitely get into what I call feature poker.
Stephen: Okay.
Greg Williams: Where you are looking at different applications and comparing them purely on the features.
Stephen: Mm-hmm.
Greg Williams: And what I usually suggest is look at the viability of the vendor and the strength of the platform and weight that in your decision, maybe not as equal to features, but as an important weight.
Stephen: Mm-hmm.
Greg Williams: Because a feature here and there isn't everything, and you may not even use all the features.
Stephen: Yeah.
Greg Williams: There are companies that make amazing accounting systems with all kinds of features, but they're not hosted properly, they don't have scalability, they don't have geo-redundant backups, they don't have all that stuff that's really important to a business. But you would never think to ask that. You just assume everybody has that.
Stephen: Yeah.
Greg Williams: Unless you know.
Stephen: And so you bring up geo-redundant backups because that's something that I think most people who don't have that much experience with data, especially big data, probably wouldn't be thinking about something like that. But I think in any business there's going to be something technical that you're maybe not thinking about. I don't think the average person even knows geo-redundant data, why they want it, how they want it, et cetera. What's a way of trying to think through as many of those bases as possible, knowing you're not going to think of every single thing, but think about as many of those as possible without obviously falling into this analysis paralysis where you're spending too much time trying to think of everything.
Greg Williams: Right. I think you just have to ask the questions about the platform and how it's hosted and what the technology backing is, and also how it's supported. I'll give you a quick example. In our business, we have a lot of European vendors that have great software applications, especially out of Scandinavia, and they want access to the US market.
Stephen: Okay.
Greg Williams: And they come to us to get that access. Some of them are very organized and they're like, hey, I'm going to set up an office over there. I'm going to have people. In two years I expect to have five people. We're going to be able to provide tech support. We're going to have boots on the ground to help people in your time zones. Other ones say, hey, we have great software and you can buy it from us, but we're not setting up an office over there and we don't see a need to.
Stephen: Mm-hmm.
Greg Williams: And our customers won't always pick up on that. They're falling in love with the functionality, but we ask those questions because we know if you're trying to get support from someone in Scandinavia in August, it's really hard, 'cause they're all on vacation.
Stephen: Yeah.
Greg Williams: And that's a cultural difference that we just take for granted. We don't even think about it.
Stephen: And then how often are you able to ask those right questions and say potentially, not to say that there's a right and a wrong, but lead a customer to a better decision? Say, had you not asked this, we probably went this way and it would've caused a lot more hardship.
Greg Williams: Yeah. What we've done is I've put together a vendor grading document of the questions to ask because I can't do it all. Then we have our sales team who's helping customers with these decisions or our support team in some cases, and they're asking those questions of the vendors. And sometimes they're very uncomfortable questions, 'cause they don't want to answer those questions, they want to focus on the cool functionality they just built.
Stephen: Yeah. Yeah. And I've been in a lot of product demos myself where it is they have this cool functionality, and as a customer, as a client, you're just saying, no, is this going to solve my need? I don't care that it does this particular thing.
Greg Williams: Yeah. And sometimes that's okay. Sometimes if the functionality is very, very compelling and no one else has it and there's huge productivity gains, then you'll take that risk on a partner that's startup or less vetted.
Stephen: Yeah.
Greg Williams: But for me, especially in the accounting software world where we're very risk averse, it has to be very compelling to be willing to take a risk.
Stephen: Interesting. And so in accounting software, obviously it's a very different industry. How much do you take into account what industry people are in? Some of the specifics about the company, because obviously the reason why there's a ton of different solutions out there for anything is the fact that there are different types of organizations, different types of companies and different combinations of capabilities work for different people.
Greg Williams: We always take that into account, and again, we just look at the vendor viability, just make sure it's not one guy in his basement typically.
Stephen: Yep.
Greg Williams: Then we look at what's their support structure in the United States so they have legal agreements in the United States, that type of thing. Then we'll start to really look at the functionality and see if it fits or not.
Stephen: And one of the functionality hot topics that a lot of people are talking about right now at the time of recording in the middle of 2024 is AI. It seems like AI is everywhere and everywhere. I like to joke, trying to remember the last time I went 72 hours without hearing about AI.
Greg Williams: Right.
Stephen: How is that popping in to a lot of these solutions and what is, I guess, the current status as well as what people should be thinking about whenever any potential vendor brings up AI?
Greg Williams: Right. Just think about how it's going to impact your everyday life and how it's actually going to be used within the application. Don't just let a salesperson use it as a buzzword. Challenge them a little bit as to what it's actually doing. Microsoft has already embedded into our products 'cause they have that huge investment in OpenAI.
Stephen: Yeah.
Greg Williams: One of the big improvements we saw was bank rec auto matching, matching up transactions with your bank.
Stephen: Yeah.
Greg Williams: And that was relatively easy for them to deploy, and it's a big time saver. In the whole scheme of things, it's a pretty small piece of functionality, but someone is saving them a few hours every day and that's worth it, right? They also have an example where you can upload a picture in the database and it reads everything in the picture and automatically writes a marketing description. It's probably a little bit less useful. To me, that's more like a proof of concept.