S4E22 – Samuel Drauschak – From Process Scientist to SaaS Entrepreneur

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Key Timecodes

• (01:20) – Show intro and background history
• (02:03) – Deeper into his background history and SaaS business model
• (06:50) – Understanding his software and how it can help companies
• (10:23) – Understanding his marketing strategies
• (16:26) – A bit about his numbers
• (20:55) – Deeper into his business model and strategies
• (24:21) – What are the biggest challenges he faced and how he overcame them
• (27:34) – What is the worst advice he ever received
• (28:14) – What is the best advice he ever received
• (29:45) – Guest contacts

Transcription

[00:00:00.000] – Intro

Hey this is Sean Tepper, the host of Payback Time, an approachable and transparent podcast in building businesses, increasing wealth, and achieving financial freedom. I’d like to bring on guests to hear authentic stories while giving you actionable takeaways you can use today. Let’s go.

[00:00:18.620] – Sean

Let’s talk about process mapping. I know not the most glamorous subject in the world, but it’s extremely important. So when companies are making or selling products, there’s a lot of different processes along the way, and you can figure out what those processes look like. You can help optimize the processes. In other words, you can sell products faster with less time. Same thing goes for services. Now, the problem is putting together a process map with Vizio or some other tool can take a lot of time. Well, my next guest has created a software as a service tool that helps optimize that process. And what’s really cool is as one company uses the tool within one industry, other companies that use the tool in the same industry can see the same data so they know how to optimize their own model. This is going to be really exciting when this platform goes live. So my next guest talks about how they’ve been bootstrapped in the company, what they’re doing right now for marketing, and their go to market strategy on how they’ll get adoption within bigger companies, which can be a pretty big challenge. Okay, let’s dive in. Please welcome Samuel Drauschak. Sam, welcome to the show.

[00:01:22.460] – Samuel

Thank you for having me.

[00:01:23.720] – Sean

Good to have you here. So why don’t you kick us off and tell us about your background? Sure.

[00:01:29.010] – Samuel

So I’m a Process Scientist, and my background story leads into that. I originally studied biology and chemistry and studied the natural sciences, and then right after that, I went into process work. This was back in the early 2000s, where I was in process engineering in a more traditional sense. But then as the digital services revolution took hold, there was this huge need to evolve process work to serve that clientele. I’ve spent more or less my entire career pushing and learning and also contributing to that space. That’s the high-level notes, and I’m happy to delve into any particular part.

[00:02:03.460] – Sean

Well, let’s dive right into your company here, which is a SaaS business. It’s called Truvel, audience. Just a heads up. You can go to truvel. Com, which is T-R-U-V-L-E. Com. But why don’t you tell us a little bit about this company? What does it do? And then we’ll get into how does it make money.

[00:02:19.140] – Samuel

Absolutely. Truval is, as you mentioned, it’s a SaaS company. What we’re trying to do is we’ve taken me and my co-founders, we’ve been in the consulting space, and we’ve been developing these process science-based methodologies to help people with better process management. Ultimately, we’re trying to democratize all that consulting knowledge and application into scalable software products. Our hope is that all of our software solutions, whether it’s our very first product, which is specifically a process mapping solution through tracking our roadmap to build process management utilities, it’s the idea that we create that consulting accessibility. So a lot of small and medium businesses that might not be able to hire an Accenture or BCG or McKinsey, they can actually bring these tools, the knowledge, and the methods in-house, and that’s really what we’re trying to create with Trudle.

[00:03:05.750] – Sean

Got you. Just to back up a second, did you work for a management consulting firm?

[00:03:09.820] – Samuel

Yes. I took a tour with Accenture myself, and then I also consulted internally at various places, and I also have my own consulting company. That’s what’s rolled into Trubel. I’ve been in the consulting space probably for 12 years in various capacities.

[00:03:23.870] – Sean

Sure. Got you. Did you leave Accenture and then start your own firm and then start Truval? Is that you could say, How to the domino’s bow?

[00:03:34.360] – Samuel

More or less. I was doing internal consulting before I went to Accenture, and then after I went back and created some more consulting roles within larger companies because there’s this huge push in the last 10 years where center of excellences around process are starting to pop up everywhere in large enterprises. I was jumping around when I took my experience from Accenture and started to build out some of these center of excellences. Then in parallel, I built my own consulting brand, and that’s how that went.

[00:04:02.950] – Sean

Got it. Let’s get into diving a little further on the why behind creating this software. It’s not the most sexy thing, but we like non-sexy businesses because they can really solve a problem, especially if they’re sticky. Warren Buffett teaches us don’t invest in anything too speculative or glamorous. You want to find those boring businesses. Let’s get into that. How does this work a little bit?

[00:04:24.960] – Samuel

Sure. I’m going to caveat this because in terms of talking about this very unsexy problem, it excites me more than anything in my life. So if I start to go totally down a rabbit hole, please just interrupt and.

[00:04:36.530] – Sean

Stop me. Run with the line.

[00:04:38.680] – Samuel

Yeah. Generally, process mapping is the solution for people who are looking to get better process data. I’ll frame it that way. And the problem, it’s a massive problem, and it’s becoming more… Basically, people are growing more awareness that this is a massive problem every day because digitization, especially within services, is starting to become the entire marketplace, essentially. And what that means is if you’re increasingly digitizing, either through globalizing your workforce, people working from home, bringing on more SAS products, what that means is you need to have a good idea of what your process is, but it’s becoming less and less tangible. So the need for having processed data is becoming more paramount, and there’s no really structured way or standard to collect processed data. That’s the really problem we’re trying to tackle. And what I mean by that is if I hired six consultants and I gave them the same subject, let’s just say I’m in a bank and I want to know what is the particular service for booking a loan or something like that, those six consultants are going to draw you six different pictures. There’s no standard in which to actually structure process data.

[00:05:47.110] – Samuel

And what that means is those six diagrams are going to be at different detail levels. They’ll have different conventions, and they all might tell a story, but none of those data sets are comparable. And this is a very subtle problem that most people are running into, and it’s really keeping this whole process space very nascent and then very low maturity level because one person’s process work can’t really be compared in a database to anyone else’s process work. So to wrap that thought up, process mapping, it’s not just giving people another whiteboard or a blank canvas where they have to create their own language because there’s a lot of tools out there where you can map process. At TrueVote, we have a very strong opinion and a very strong methodology that we are positing is scientific, so that when you map in our product, you’re getting the benefit of the right method, the right detail level, and your data will be comparable to anyone else’s data that maps in the tool. That’s the real problem we’re solving, the lack of common language, the lack of comparable data, and generally just the lack of maturity in the process space that’s still pretty prevalent across any other alternative.

[00:06:50.270] – Sean

You provided a good example there just to back up a second because I have some experience in the mortgage industry, and it’s a very labor some process to go from step one, somebody’s going through their application to apply to get a loan to getting the money. There’s so many checks and balances, processes, software platforms. And you’re right, if you go to one person, it can be this path. But if you go to somebody else, it can be an entirely different path. And how much time they take can be all over the board. So with your software, does it help a company standardize a process and then show like, hey, here’s how much time you were spending and here’s how much time you can save? Does it do anything like that?

[00:07:34.030] – Samuel

It doesn’t yet, but what you’re doing is you’re basically forecasting our entire roadmap.

[00:07:38.440] – Sean

But.

[00:07:39.540] – Samuel

This is the exciting part, and this is what gets me really jazzed up about this business, because in order to do that, to do what you just said, you have to have a standard data source to work with. Because if everyone has a different version of process data, then there’s no analysis that can be done. There’s no structured analysis or standard analysis that can be done. Really, the first phase of a rollout is let’s create such a low friction, easy to adopt experience for people to start generating good quality process data. The next step that’s really coming is, okay, now we can analyze that data, especially when we have more data points that can be compared and build a database of this type of data. So eventually what you’ll get is you map your process, let’s say, it’s mortgages. You could actually say, How are other companies, for example, doing mortgages that are small regional banks, 50 employees using this system suite? And you could actually have the system generate comparables in terms of process design, efficiency, because you could have the same person doing mortgage loan underwriting. But you could look and ask the system, Well, do I have an efficient structure?

[00:08:47.040] – Samuel

Part of the analysis in the process world is just benchmarking. Well, actually, we have another company in the database that’s doing the same revenue, the same volume of business as you with 15 less headcount or 15 % less cost per unit. That’s the data that we’re talking about, and that’s a new world. We don’t have access to anything like that today. But even within that saying you have too many steps, you have too many handoffs, here’s a heat map of basic waste just based on lean principles, this will all become available and it’s stuff that we’re really excited about. But that foundational data layer is the first step to making that.

[00:09:19.970] – Sean

A reality. Right. Are you pulling in data from another source right now, or are you in a position where you want to bring out a lot of customers? So the more people use the tool, the more valuable it becomes.

[00:09:32.300] – Samuel

The latter, yeah. Okay. In a lot of these models, we do have a pretty good data set because this is where we collectively have about 30, 40 years of practitioner experience collecting data in the field by hand, but it’s only so far. You can’t scale that far when you’re just doing this with consulting. But the interesting thing is what brought about this company, this true-whole concept is that when you use the same type of process methodology, process science in every client, you start to see the fundamentals and how they’re fundamentally the same. The science holds. Whether you’re a financial services company, whether you’re a manufacturing facility, whether you’re in healthcare, you can use the same process techniques and derive incredible and comparable insights. The goal is get people really jazzed up about process mapping, build that database, and then the insights are going to be revolutionary. I mean, it’s really endless the different things you could do with that.

[00:10:23.770] – Sean

Right. As soon as you started talking about heat maps, I’m like, Okay, I have to test drive this thing. Let’s see where all the issues are happening, and let’s tackle those and get the waste out of the way. Now, knowing that the tool becomes more valuable, the more people use it, I assume you’re going vertical on this. Like, have you decided, Hey, I want to tackle, for example, the mortgage industry, or insurance is another good industry where there’s a lot of processes. Is that your go-to-market strategy?

[00:10:49.760] – Samuel

To be honest, our go-to-market strategy is we’d love to hit everyone all the time, which is a horrible market strategy.

[00:10:55.580] – Sean

Shotgun.

[00:10:55.930] – Samuel

Yes. It’s my Achilles heel personally, and I’m happy to admit that. I don’t want to create verticality in some ways, and I don’t want to be too industry-specific because I want to show people that it’s really industry-agnostic. The insight, the value. Now, from an actual tactical strategy, is that going to work? I don’t know, because there’s a lot of wisdom in just saying, Let’s just try to sell insurance and all of our marketing can align, or Let’s just try to sell healthcare, or whatever it is. So we’re still in the experimental phase with how that’s going to work. But I think generally, we’re a young company. We’re just on the cusp of releasing this product that we’re talking about. I think as a smaller group, whichever companies in our portfolio of clients or whichever enterprises that want to partner up early, that might guide that decision more so than it being consciously curated.

[00:11:45.150] – Sean

100 % agree with you. You do start out with the shotgun approach a little bit, but I would be totally open-minded. Let’s say, like you said, healthcare leans into this first. All right, go that direction and run with it. Get one customer, use the data, get a case study, and then get another, and then another, and just let it snowball from there.

[00:12:05.520] – Samuel

Yeah. In general, I think that speaks to a principle that I always espouse in relation to entrepreneurship, which is you can have the best design and plan, but where are you planted right now? Just what’s the easiest and those accessible resources and network players that are available to you? Because a lot of time, that’s the lowest cost. Let that shape your momentum a little bit versus trying to over design everything.

[00:12:28.000] – Sean

Right on. Okay, well, let’s get into the business a little bit. The name Truval, where did this come from?

[00:12:34.260] – Samuel

There’s a few practical aspects of that. There’s no four or five-letter dotcoms that exist anymore. Some of it is just a practical game of where can we get a dotcom domain that’s short enough that’s recognizable. I always like to say that because that’s not a sexy answer. There’s not some major story behind that, but it’s the reality we live in. For a particular market that’s not super tech progressive, you don’t want to be using dot IOs. You don’t want to be using dotnew or whatever it is. That’s part of it. But we actually lean on true. It’s just an amalgamation of true value. A lot of our products actually speak to process work that results in waste reduction, being able to actually do value analysis. In that way, it is married to our mission quite well. That’s really the whole story there.

[00:13:18.340] – Sean

I love the transparency there because it’s like, Okay, how do you find a two-syllable short word? You’ve got Google, Facebook, Uber, and get these short names, two syllables. They’re all gone. We got really lucky with Tykr. But as you’ve seen, probably have seen Tykr is not T-I-C-K-E-R. That’s long gone. We’re T-Y-K-R. All right, run with it. Two syllables short enough. It’s a dot com. Let’s go.

[00:13:47.330] – Samuel

I mean, it’s a real practical reality that you have to face. I’ve watched people who get really excited and they’ll spend hours in sessions with their co-founders trying to think of the perfect brand name, and then it’s been bought up, and it’s $50,000 to buy the domain. You just can’t go that route. To some extent, you have to have practical constraints to guide your path a little bit. I think that’s okay, but it’s just you have to let go of some of your creative liberties sometimes.

[00:14:12.070] – Sean

Yes. At the end of the day, it’s like your customers really don’t care. They want the value. What do they get out of it? They don’t care about your name or your logo.

[00:14:21.560] – Samuel

Yeah. It’s a lot of times your company’s energy and the value that you bring to the market is just associated with the word. The word could be random nonsense for the most part. It’s just a bonus if it’s aligned with what you’re doing, but it’s that association that’s created in the strong customer relationship that it could be anything. The best companies we know, we just think of it whatever their name is. It’s just an impression of the value that they’re serving the marketplace more so than the word is taken literally.

[00:14:46.890] – Sean

Right on. Are you guys bootstrapped or did you raise capital?

[00:14:51.130] – Samuel

We are bootstrapped. We’re about $400,000 in right now, and that’s just a combination of founders’ capital, and that’s really driven development. Development, and also just marketing and some of our basic contractors that we’ve used. That’s really been in an 18-month to about two-year timeline. That’s where we’re at. I think we’ll continue to bootstrap and we’re hoping to become revenue generative in 2024 and cover costs and eclips that if we’re really successful, but that’s where we’re at.

[00:15:19.290] – Sean

Got you. Okay. And how big is the team?

[00:15:21.470] – Samuel

The team is two co-founders, a CTO, a full-time marketing person, and then we have a development team in Colombia.

[00:15:27.870] – Sean

Yeah. You’ll burn through capital pretty quick. You’ve got a sizable team already. Yeah. I assume you’re not the coder. You’re not writing any code. You’re more sales marketing operations.

[00:15:40.410] – Samuel

Yeah. I’m going to be doing all that. And no, I’m not a coder, but I am the process scientist. My primary role is creating the actual business requirements, maintaining the integrity of our knowledge, and making sure that the tool has the technical accuracy to deliver our value promise. And then our CEO, I would say, is also in that role, but he’s focusing more on the business development, the sales and marketing side, coordinating our marketing resources. And then we have a CTO who is managing the development. He codes himself. He’s an excellent backend, actual code writing. Then he oversees the cohesion of the development resources that we have in our outsourced operation.

[00:16:20.680] – Sean

Yeah, makes sense. Between you and your partners, a 50-50 split?

[00:16:24.100] – Samuel

Yes.

[00:16:24.950] – Sean

Nice. Good for you guys. All right, let’s get into how much do you charge for this? What’s the range? Low end, high end?

[00:16:31.430] – Samuel

Yeah. Low end is $39 a month, and that’s for annual subscription, and then it goes up to $49 a month for just a month-a-month subscription. Then we have enterprise licensing, which is Call Us, and we haven’t flushed that out yet. That’s a pretty simple case. Depending on who you are and what you’re looking for and how it might help us develop, the price could be anywhere on the board for that. Our pricing really is based on, we did some initial polling. We’re looking at basically just a cost savings analysis on the majority of our first personas that could be buying this product. If it saves them an hour a month at the salary levels that most of them are in, that’s going to make up for the use of the product. That’s the basic logic behind our pricing structure currently.

[00:17:17.090] – Sean

Got you. Okay. And this seems to be a tough point for a lot of entrepreneurs is what do I do for marketing and sales? So knowing that your product is pre-revenue and you’re gearing up to do a big launch or reaching out to a few businesses to, Can we get you to do a pilot for a limited time and return? We would love feedback and potentially a testimonial or case study. Are you doing anything like that?

[00:17:41.680] – Samuel

Yes, that and all the above that’s really within all of our personal networks. So we’re also, in addition to Truval, all the founders are also maintaining relationships with other clients, and we’re doing some consulting work also because we’re obviously paying into the business and not paying out. So we’re maintainingwe’re bringing some consultative work to generate revenue in all of our respective businesses. And in those regards, we’re warming those clients up to be that joint partnership for the product. We’re also calling our own Rolodex since we’ve been in the consulting space for many years and starting to get feelers out there now that the product is viable. Hey, do you need this? Do you know anything to deploy this? And also just looking for strategic partnerships with other businesses that are going to use the product with their own sales. So it’s that shotgun again, where we’ve got a lot of resources within our own personal networks and we’re seeing what’s the best way to leverage and test with that first, concentric circle before we want to our cost per acquisition would go up if we start getting out of that zone.

[00:18:38.390] – Sean

Yeah, absolutely. If I were in your position, I’d be all about like, let’s get some people to test drive this thing, work out the bugs, give feedback on what features or tweaks you can make, and then get some customers, get some momentum. And then you’re probably thinking ahead of this because you’ve got management consulting experiences. You go to some of those firms and say, hey, how about an implementation deal here where you could help implement this into a company and you could take a cut of the sales? Or I know Accenture, I’ve done a lot of work with them and Deloitte. And it’s like they will integrate a huge software platform and they’ll be paid the service implementation to make it happen, get everybody trained up to speed, all that good stuff. It’s a fun channel partner play for your model.

[00:19:26.350] – Samuel

Yeah. And that’s all part of the conversation. And in some ways, the product, again, we talk about how not-sexy process mapping, let’s say, is or process requirements generation is, but it’s so ubiquitous for so many different use cases. There’s this aspect of being overwhelmed because we can insert this in terms of product fit in the many different scenarios, that’s the overwhelming part, like picking the first channel and picking the first use cases that you want to target. But I think a lot of what you’re saying is viable. Anything could really lead to a great expansion of exposure and different angles to take the product. So I think for us as founders, the challenge is really how do we want to rocket it into the marketplace and then control its trajectory? Or do we want to control the trajectory? These are the strategic questions we’re juggling internally.

[00:20:14.010] – Sean

Yeah. Let’s take a quick commercial break. Hey, this is Sean. I’d like to say thank you for taking the time to listen to this podcast. I know there’s a lot of other podcasts you could be listening to, so thanks for taking the time to listen to this one. I have a quick request. If you have a moment, could you please head over to Apple Podcasts and leave a five-star review? The reason is the more ratings we get and the higher those ratings are, the more Apple will share with the world. Thanks in advance for doing that. Then I have a quick comment. If there are any questions you want me to ask the guests, please head over to our Tykr Facebook group. You can drop a question right there. I’ll go ahead and make a note and I’ll do my best to ask that question on the podcast. All right, back to the show. Have you identified a certain persona or maybe job title and companies that might use this more than others? Right away, I think offline I mentioned maybe analysts would get into this, but process engineers. I’m thinking of a manufacturing companies that are process engineers.

[00:21:12.020] – Sean

But anyway, what are your thoughts on that?

[00:21:14.550] – Samuel

You pretty much hit it on the head. Our model use case was lean practitioners who were actually their full-time careers going and doing Kaizen events, lean facilitation, people who were actually practitioners of lean in various contexts. But in terms of our internal targets, exactly right. Business analysts, process analysts, process engineer, even project managers to a certain extent who are actually looking to source tools for their project teams. But largely that market is productized within larger corporations. But it’s actually still a very nascent job role. Like I was mentioning earlier in my history, it’s only in the last decade or so where people have started creating centers of excellence around the process skill set because it’s become such a need, but it’s not really a well-articulated need. So you can’t just say, Hey, process analysts, and know that there’s process analysts at every company. It’s still trying to find those people by the various roles that they’re being called.

[00:22:09.060] – Sean

Yeah, it’s not easy. But if you can find one in a certain business, in many cases, you can lift and shift, go to another company and be like, Okay, so I’m looking for the equivalent to John Doe in this company to Susie Kim over here in this company that has a similar role. Let’s get her using this tool, trying it out. And then this leads to another good point. And with payback time, I’ll do pause moments, break the fourth wall, and talk to the audience a little bit, and feel free to chime in. But something Sam and I were talking about offline is it can be really hard to sell an enterprise software from the top down. What that means is going to your C-suite, like your CEO, and be like, Hey, you need this tool. And then they’re like, Sure, I do. And then they roll it out to their whole company. That rarely happens. What you want to do is get somebody using the tool from within, like, I have a lot of experience with software engineering, so get them using a software engineering tool, get them excited in their teams, and then let that excitement bubble up within the company, and that will sell itself.

[00:23:11.490] – Sean

That’s a lot easier approach. So I see the same thing happening with Truval.

[00:23:15.790] – Samuel

It’s going to have to happen that way. It’s such an apt commentary because you could sell yourself horse trying to make a CEO understand the nuance of where their process requirements are going awry and where their business analysis is not really plugged in correctly. It’s just a tough sell. It’s a very, in a way, like I said, it’s a huge market, but it’s a very nuanced conversation in a way because it’s the root cause of a lot of things that end up catching on fire: software implementation has gone wrong, inability to communicate or coordinate operations of the vendors. It’s all like the same thing where we don’t have the ability to communicate our process requirements properly, but getting people to go there in a sales context is almost impossible, not at the level that we’re talking about selling a CEO or.

[00:24:00.100] – Sean

Like a.

[00:24:01.360] – Samuel

It’d be a very silly sales strategy, at least on the onset. Now, if Truval really went big, I think you can change that dynamic as the company evolves. When you have the credibility and you have an established user base, but initially that ground up, it may seem more laborious, but it’s probably more realistic entry.

[00:24:20.390] – Sean

Yes, 100 %. Yeah. Before we go to the rapid-fire round, I have to ask this question. In your journey here leading up to a go-live, what is a big challenge you faced and how did you overcome it?

[00:24:33.800] – Samuel

Sure. The biggest challenge we faces are on the coding front. We’re dealing with some actual very proprietary stuff, and we didn’t anticipate that. You go into software development thinking everyone’s already done everything to a certain extent. It’s just researching, finding the right papers or finding the right libraries so that your developers can cobble together what you want. But we ran into some really unique challenges on line optimization and some of the finer points of intelligent automated formatting because this is a big problem in this industry. We had to really do research and we had to really go to the drawing board and build proprietary code and algorithms to meet the business requirements. It’s still a work in progress to the point where the challenge was we didn’t think we could launch because this is not serviceable. We just didn’t have a code base, and writing that thing from scratch can be a real hurdle. From a cost perspective, like a burn rate on using outside development resources and various things. So it was a major negotiation for a few months there trying to figure out where we’re going to take that. And we overcame that challenge just by staying the course, making a lot of negotiations, trying to figure out from an ROI perspective what we could borrow from existing solutions versus what we had to go from scratch.

[00:25:43.030] – Samuel

And it’s still an ongoing conversation. But I think because we’re launching, we’ve solved it to a certain extent and we’ve highlighted other features and recompense for this one to be more complicated. But we’re really hoping we can get it across the finish line here in the next few months.

[00:25:56.590] – Sean

Awesome. With that in mind, when is the expected go-live?

[00:25:59.760] – Samuel

So soft launch of the product is actually as of this recording, which I don’t know when this will be around, but right at the end of 2023. And then we’re hoping that we’ll be able to launch formally and have people want to purchase at full price sometime probably first or second quarter next year, ’24.

[00:26:17.980] – Sean

Sure. Nice. All right. Very exciting. I got to get my hands on this thing. Again, I got to see these heat maps and how this thing looks.

[00:26:26.550] – Samuel

Well, heat maps aren’t out yet. Right now, just process mapping. But if you start and you build all your process maps, once the heat maps turn on, then you’re just going to be able to press buttons and do.

[00:26:34.710] – Sean

The things you need. I like it. That’s awesome. Let’s dive into the Rapid Fire round. This is the part of the episode where we get to find out who Sam really is. If you can, try to answer each question in 15 seconds or less. You ready?

[00:26:47.600] – Samuel

Ready.

[00:26:48.360] – Sean

What is your favorite podcast?

[00:26:50.610] – Samuel

I don’t listen to a lot of podcasts, but I could say when I do listen to audio media, I listen to fantasy books, and Project Halemary was one of the best ones I’ve listened torecently.

[00:27:00.330] – Sean

I had a look at that. The logic tale, Mary. Really? That’s a fictional book?

[00:27:04.610] – Samuel

It’s a sci-fi. It was fantastic. It really scratched my process and my science, nerdiness.

[00:27:10.840] – Sean

I’m going to put it on the list.

[00:27:12.780] – Samuel

Same guy who did The Martian.

[00:27:14.630] – Sean

Oh, yes. Got it. Very cool. We checked two boxes in one, the podcast in the book one. Let’s go right to movie. What’s your favorite movie?

[00:27:25.250] – Samuel

My favorite movie is The Nightmare Before Christmas.

[00:27:27.700] – Sean

Really?

[00:27:27.890] – Samuel

The Timberworth film.

[00:27:29.580] – Sean

That’s the first on the podcast. Good movie. Nice. All right, next up. What is the worst advice you ever received?

[00:27:39.270] – Samuel

The worst advice I ever received? That’s a good one. The worst advice I tend to not catalog the worst advice I’ve ever received. I think it’s probably the idea that I need to temper my impatience in creating new solutions. I think that was the worst advice that I’ve ever received. If I try to follow that my life, I think I would not be where I am today. A lot of times jumping into a Blue Ocean space and really being the first one to tackle problems has been very rewarding for me, and it might be frustrating for some. That was probably bad advice I received to not do that.

[00:28:14.380] – Sean

Got you. Good to know. Now flip that equation. What is the best advice you ever received?

[00:28:18.750] – Samuel

The best advice I ever received was more in the form of a mantra, which is just to internalize the fact that perfect is the enemy of great. Yes. That’s actually a pretty common one in the process improvement space. But I tend to be a perfectionist and really internalizing that. An early mentor really tried to beat that into me, and it’s really changed the cadence and the pace at which I approach my work and my life generally.

[00:28:43.480] – Sean

I used to be the same way younger. I had to get past. I feel like, Sean, it’s never going to be perfect. Get it out to the market and let your audience shape it from there. Don’t worry about it. Otherwise, you could be an analysis paralysis, polishing your tool or software until the end of time. And it’s like, Nope, time box it. Let’s go to market. Cool. All right, last question here is the time machine question. If you could go back in time to give your younger self advice, what age would you visit? What would you say?

[00:29:11.880] – Samuel

I would go back to probably the end of middle school, early high school, and just give myself some social advice, to be honest. I was a very socially awkward and I was a late bloomer. I think I could have gotten a lot farther if I just had some simple advice on how to be more self-confident, how to be more assertive, how to communicate better. I think that would have gone a long way to fast track what was an awkward few years for me. That’d probably be my point. Because other than that, everything went iterated in a fairly smooth direction.

[00:29:44.970] – Sean

Sure. No, that’s crazy. All right. And where can the audience reach you?

[00:29:48.870] – Samuel

Audience can reach me at truval, Sam@truval. Com. That’s the easiest way if you want to reach out to me directly. And also, I’m the only Drawshack on LinkedIn. So if you just look up Sam Drawshack, I encourage you to connect with me, send me LinkedIn messages. That’s also a very easy way to find me. And if you just type in my name with Google, I’ve got pretty good SEO, so you can find me wherever Sam Drawshack appears.

[00:30:07.750] – Sean

Nice. We’ll get all the links listed below. But thank you so much for joining me.

[00:30:11.470] – Samuel

Thank you so much for having me. It was.

[00:30:12.750] – Sean

A great conversation. All right. We’ll see you, Sam. Hey, I’d.

[00:30:15.990] – Sean

Like to say.

[00:30:16.590] – Sean

Thank you for.

[00:30:17.290] – Sean

Checking out this podcast. I know there’s a lot of other podcasts out there you could be listening to, so thanks for spending some time with me. And if you have a moment, please head over to Apple Podcast and leave a five-star review. The more reviews we get, especially five-star reviews, the higher this podcast will rank in Apple. So thanks for doing that. And remember, this show is for entertainment purposes only. If you heard any stocks mentioned on this podcast, please do not buy or sell those stocks based solely on what you hear. All right, thanks for your time. We’ll see you.