Jason Ballard:
This is Coach Jason Ballard, and I'm a business wingman. Over the years, I've learned a lot from working in our family construction business, serving as a senior officer in the United States Air Force, and running 12 different organizations around the world. Many, many people helped me get to where I am today, and it's my mission in life to serve as a personal wingman to others. That's what this podcast is all about, providing knowledge, tools, resources, and mentorship to help people soar to their highest altitude.
Welcome back to the Soar Higher Podcast. This is your host, Coach Jason Ballard. Really excited to be here with you today. It's going to be another great show. We have an awesome guest on the show from the tech sector that's going to talk to us about technology, and how to leverage technology and data to make our businesses better, to make better decisions, right? We're talking about how to best maximize our productivity across the organization, and be smarter, be more intentional, leverage the resources around us a lot better when it comes to technology, to help us be more successful, be leaner, meaner, and smarter in what we do. So we're very blessed today to have Greg Williams on the show. Greg's the VP of Strategy at Western Computer, which is a nationwide software and cloud solutions provider that helps organizations innovate, maximize their IT investments, and achieve higher levels of success for their clients. So Greg, welcome to the show.
Greg Williams:
Thank you, nice to be here. I appreciate your time today.
Jason Ballard:
We are glad to have you. Greg is a technology expert. He understands it on a very technical level, but also can break that down and help us understand it from a higher level as well. So Greg, tell us a little bit about you and your background, and how you got to where you are today.
Greg Williams:
Sure. So I was an Economics major in college, but I always knew I wanted to be in the software industry. I had some family that worked in business application software, and when I got out of college I got a job with a software company and I've always been where accounting and software intersect, which is accounting enterprise-level software, it's a base software that every business needs to run their business. We're the first application you typically install, and the last application before you go into business, because we all have to file taxes and audit our financials and you need software to do that. So I've been doing that for 25 years now.
Jason Ballard:
Nice. Software and technology meets accounting. Boy, that's an interesting crossroads to be at, huh? Well, let's dig into the conversation. When you look at businesses, the folks that you work with in your company, and the folks that you guys are helping in the most beneficial manner, when you take a look at all these clients, what are you seeing in industry? What are businesses, when it comes to technology and innovation, where are folks struggling the most? Where are the folks in need the most right now?
Greg Williams:
Yeah, so most of them that we see are struggling with automation, and they're also struggling with just knowing the basic numbers within their business. So if you think of small startup businesses, for example, they will typically have an outside accountant doing their accounting for them. So he's probably running QuickBooks or something like that, or she, and they will give all the reports on the business to their accountant, or maybe they're using QuickBooks in more of a real-time basis. Then they're typically making decisions based upon their bank account balance, entrepreneurs are in a lot of cases.
They're not really thinking about, "How is my revenue trending up and down? How is, what costs should I be accruing for? How is my spend going every month? Is it increasing or decreasing?" They're thinking, "Oh wow, one of my customers just paid me so I have a nice bank account balance, so I can go out and spend some money."
Jason Ballard:
Wow.
Greg Williams:
And that's not the way you want to run a business. So when you get to a certain point within a business, you can bring the accounting in-house, and that's where companies like mine come in, is helping you set up the systems to do that properly.
Jason Ballard:
All right, well tell us a little bit about your company and what kinds of things you do to help people. Are you focused in small business, medium business, large business? Tell us a little bit about those things?
Greg Williams:
I would say we're focused on small to mid-sized businesses. Now everyone's definition of small is different. Most of our customers are 10 million in revenue and up, and once they get to a billion dollars in revenue, let's say, then they're going to want to be talking to one of the big accounting firms like an Ernst & Young, or someone like that. So we fit in the small to mid-market businesses, helping them to optimize their systems across accounting, across warehousing, manufacturing, project management, all the different systems, back office systems that you may have that touch your financials, we're going to help companies optimize those.
Jason Ballard:
With technology, it seems like we're just challenged with it so much because there's so many types of technology systems and tools out there, and then they change so rapidly. So how are you guys adapting to all of this rapid change? How do you help your clients go through all that? Do you use a bunch of different tools, and bring them together? Do you have a certain kind of systems and tool sets that you bring and package? How do you navigate that and help people with that?
Greg Williams:
That's a great question. We are fortunate enough to be a Microsoft partner, and so we lean on Microsoft technologies, and Microsoft has everything for a small business. They have the Microsoft Office suite, and then they have the accounting applications like we use, called Business Central, and then they also have CRM systems that compete with a Salesforce or something like that. So if you go down the Microsoft route, you can get everything from one vendor and be assured that it all works together. If you don't go that route, then you're going to be dealing with three or four different vendors, and trying to make those systems talk.
Jason Ballard:
Yeah, what are the pros and the cons there? I know some people like to stick with one, put all their eggs in one basket, and some people are okay with that, some people hate that. Versus having different vendors provide different things. What are the pros and the cons from your experience on that? Which one's better or are they?
Greg Williams:
Yeah, I call that best-of-breed versus integrated systems. When you go with, let's use the advantage of the Microsoft Office Suite for example, because I think a lot of people can relate to that. The alternative to using Microsoft Office is to have, I guess, you could have Google Docs, but then that's not going to do your meetings. So you need Zoom, and then it doesn't have a messaging app, so you're going to go with Slack. So you can pay for three subscriptions and have three different vendors, or you just pay one Office 365 subscription to Microsoft, and get Teams for meetings and messaging and Microsoft Office for all your Word and Excel and those types of things. Now you may find that Slack, for example, may have some features that Teams doesn't have, but then it's another application, and another subscription to manage.
Jason Ballard:
Gotcha. So it sounds like you're leading us down the path of integrate this stuff together as much as possible. There's the camps of the Apple users and the iOS people that like their integrated things between their Apple computers and iPhones. Then there's kind of the Android people, the Windows-based people. I fall into that camp myself, but my daughters are more iPhone-related. And I guess it gets into personal preference, but it sounds like you can save money, and you can have less stuff to keep track of, and take inventory of all these different things if you integrate these things, assuming that those things meet your needs, right?
Greg Williams:
Exactly. Yeah, you can have less to administer, save money. Then in the future, if we think about AI, Microsoft is the best of a lot in OpenAI, I think, $10 billion let's say. They're building an AI platform that works across all your different applications. So in the future, if you need to look for something, you can use Microsoft AI tool called Copilot, and it's going to look for it across email, across Teams, across all your different applications you're using, it's going to find that data for you, and make your users much more productive. If you go another route, then let's say, you have, if you're using Google Docs, then it may do a great job of searching AI across your Google documents, but it's not going to reach into the other applications that you have.
Jason Ballard:
Yeah, I think that's important for people to be thinking about this stuff. I know a lot of people use the Google suite for the Google Meet, Google Docs, Google, Gmail, those kind of things for running things, and that is great. Those are great tools, a great company, and they're pretty lean. They're light and lean. Microsoft's a little heavier, because there's usually a client software you have to load on the computer to run it, to run it better. Whereas Google's a little more internet-based. You've got to connect to it online to read it and look at those things. There's some pros and cons, I guess, there.
But as you think about your business, and whether you're a $5 million business, or a 10 million, or a 500 million, or a billion-dollar business rate, you have to think about the more systems you have, the more things you got to keep track of, and the more stuff you've got to integrate in between the systems, right? Because isn't the data ... Because at the end of the day, technology systems are great, but isn't the real gold, isn't the real value in the data that lives in these systems and in these various repositories? Isn't that the real gold though?
Greg Williams:
Yeah, that is. It's access to your data, and leveraging your data. Most businesses over the last 15, 20 years, they've collected a lot of data in these systems, but they haven't learned how to harness it and use it yet. AI is going to help us with that. So having it in a platform where it's more accessible is really going to help you take that next step with your business. Then on top of Microsoft's value around the Office suite that I just mentioned, they're the only one of those vendors that also has ERP and accounting applications. So you can have the accounting application that your accountants use and your users use to enter orders, and manage inventory in the warehouse. It shows up right within that Microsoft Office suite. It's all right there, in the same platform. Whether they're on their iPhone or an Android, or on their Windows PC, they can access all the same information, all the apps.
Jason Ballard:
Yeah, I think it's important for people to understand. Some people like Microsoft stuff, some stuff Microsoft may be best suited for, other things, they may not. But when you're thinking about your money invested, everybody's investing more in the technology, because it's powerful, right? It saves in manpower, it saves in efficiencies, it processes things faster, more accurately. But you do have to keep in mind how do you maximize the power of technology to get to the data? Because at the end of the day, from a business standpoint, data equals information, and information equals knowledge, and knowledge equals power.
The more knowledge you have, the more information you can process quickly as a decision-maker and a company allows you to gather information, process information, and in turn, make really good, accurate, high quality decisions faster than your competitor, theoretically, you should be winning. You should have a competitive advantage. But if you don't have these things talking to each other, or integrated in some form or fashion, can that be counterproductive?
Greg Williams:
Yeah, it can be. And I'll give you an example of what AI is going to do for us. In the past, a lot of companies were really dependent on what we call, "Exception-based reporting," which means I'll use, let's say, you're a distributor of hunting and fishing supplies, in the morning as the owner, you want to come in and say, "Hey, what orders didn't we ship yesterday? What are the orders that came in that we couldn't fulfill? I want to focus on those and see, is that list growing? Is it shrinking? How are we doing managing our back orders?" To do that, you may need help from an IT guy in the past to say, "Hey, run me a report of all the orders that we didn't ship yesterday, and by the way, tell me the ones that are over a certain dollar amount."
Then the IT guy would've to go in there and he would have to write a query that says, "Select from the orders table the orders that are greater than a thousand dollars," and he'd have to write some code to do that typically. With AI, we're going to be doing that in the future with natural language, so you won't have to ask your IT person anymore for that information. You'll be able to type into the computer, "Show me the orders that didn't ship yesterday," just like that. And then the computer being generative AI is going to take this step further and be like, "Do you want to know the orders out of which warehouse?" And then you'll say, "Just my east warehouse." And then generative AI, you can go a little further and say, "Okay, the orders from this vendor that has a stock-out, let's exclude those." And you can keep narrowing down that data without having to know how to run reports or really be an Excel expert. So it's going to democratize data for the masses.
Jason Ballard:
Well, the thing that I think is really powerful about it, is it's plain English. You can type or talk to these things. So, "Give me a report on X, Y, and Z," and it will go do that. And I think as you gets smarter, it will be more intuitive to the things that you you're talking about there, Greg. And it'll allow you to almost have a conversation with the tools-
Greg Williams:
That's exactly.
Jason Ballard:
... with the technology, and translate it. It's like you're talking English and the computer to deliver what it needs, needs to talk ones and zeros, right? It's like English talking to somebody in Chinese or something, some different language, and you've got to translate that back and forth and understand what each other are talking about to deliver the same information back that you're looking for, and have a smart interaction, right?
Greg Williams:
Yeah. So one of Microsoft's visions is using that to blur the lines between all your systems. So you're asking it that data and it's like, "Oh, I found in your accounting system that there's this back order report. Would you like me to surface that for you, ecetera." That's the future of these types of systems where it's working across different systems and say, "Oh, by the way, we found a customer service message on your chatbot, where a customer was chatting with you on your website saying, 'Hey, where's my order?'"
Jason Ballard:
That's really cool. I think technology's great, and oh my gosh, companies are creating just monster loads of data. Data all over the place, just terabytes and terabytes of data all the time, and you've got to store all that and put that in the cloud, or put it on a server, or something somewhere, right? But one of the challenges that I see, I want you to talk about this a little bit, is how much data do we have? How good is the data? How accurate is the data? And where is all the data at?
You've got a system in the cloud over here and another system in the cloud over there. You may use Salesforce, and that's in the Salesforce cloud, and you may use an ERP system and that's different, that's in a cloud solution, something. And you've got a local version of this in Microsoft Word, and Excel and Office over here. Knowing where your data is, how much of it is out there? Nobody has a clue. They have no idea. The report they're pulling from department A may be similar than department B, and department A and B don't talk to each other very much. So the system should be able to understand what's out there in the ecosystem, and connect these dots, because most people don't, right?
Greg Williams:
Yeah. There are tools that big companies have for building big data warehouses, or data lakes in the cloud. That hasn't been acceptable to small businesses yet, but big companies have a way to aggregate data across multiple systems in the cloud, and then report on it. But Microsoft's really democratizing that by putting it in all their tools for the small business, so you don't have to worry about it. They're going to find that data for you across their different systems.
Jason Ballard:
So when you think about your suite of tools in your business, when you think about how to integrate those, how to harness the full power of that, because you can go out and get an AI translator that you can talk to, that can go do a lot of this stuff for you. But if it's not all connected, you're not going to get good data. And if the systems aren't tuned a certain way, then you're not going to get good data. So what are some of the best practices? What are some of the best things that you've seen, where no matter where you are, whether you're a small business or a larger-sized business, best practices that you see working the best for folks out there these days? How do you package that?
Greg Williams:
Right. Well, I think there's a few different ways to do that. One is to use some type of reporting tool that combines data from multiple data sources. That's harder for a small business to do, easier for mid-size business that has some IT expertise. In the past we used to have to carefully define that data set. We'd have to say, "If we have a customer from this system, a customer from this system, the CRM system is the master. So use that one and dedupe the data." We used to have to do a lot of work. I call that formatting the data as you're building the data warehouse. But nowadays we're able to format the data as we're reading it, so we can have somewhat messy data and depend on AI and algorithms to pull that data for us.
Jason Ballard: