Ditching Hourly

Jonathan Stark: Hello, and welcome to Ditching Hourly. I'm Jonathan Stark. Today I am joined by guest James Williams. James, welcome to the show.

James Williams: Thank you very much. It's a pleasure to be here.

Jonathan Stark: Before we get started, could you give folks who maybe haven't encountered you before, a little bit of background about who you are and what you do?

James Williams: Yeah. I am a serial entrepreneur, but software developer first sort of started software development back in the early nineties, uh, circa 1993. 14 startups later, I ended up running my own business, uh, a software development agency or, or firm, and then sort of baptized in a lot of failure. Ended up figuring out a formula that I think works for not only myself, but a lot of software developers.

James Williams: Had some great success in the industry. Worked for companies like Google, Symantec, Veritone, which we took public teletrack. So I've been through, been around the block. Times many, many moons ago.

Jonathan Stark: Cool. All right, so let's, let's start with the definition of terms. So what is a fractional C T O?

James Williams: A fractional C T O is someone who provides. Leadership strategy, and sometimes implementation for entrepreneurs or business initiatives who can't afford a full-time c t o? Anyone listening to your show, you know, they might be aware of what a compensation package looks like for A C T O. You know, in today's market it's $450,000 with one or two points of equity a.

James Williams: So a hefty stock package, a vacation package, a signing bonus, and a lot of entrepreneurs need the leadership. They need the strategy, they need the C T O insight, but they don't have the pockets to sort of pay like an I B M, like a Microsoft, like a Google, or you know, someone with a $20 million run rate backed by venture capitalist.

James Williams: So fractional C T O is the ability for that said entrepreneur to buy into that leadership. Get those insights at a fraction of the cost.

Jonathan Stark: And what does your day-to-day look like when you're doing, uh, the, that sort of service for someone? And, and maybe another way to ask that question is, or to get into that question is how many startups could you concurrently serve? 2 10 50.

James Williams: That's the, that's probably the best question I think for, for us in terms of the fractional C T O service, our sweet spot is eight a year. And it, and it sort of depends on the level of engagement because we don't like to, to fail. If it's an organization with 50 software developers, that's a very different picture than an organization with three software developers or no software development team.

James Williams: So we have to do a pretty good job of diagnosing and, uh, assessing the organizations that, that we work with. We've done up to eight successfully. A more comfortable number is actually four or five.

Jonathan Stark: And when you say we, what does that mean?

James Williams: Well, so, uh, the fractional C t O services is one of the services that we, we offer, but we also have a software development team. I mean, we've done software development since 2009, all over the, all over the map. So in some cases, To solve a specific business problem, we, it might make sense for us to use our software developers or oversee their software development team.

James Williams: So we have the fractional C T O service, which is sort of one business division, and then we have traditional software development where we act as an agency.

Jonathan Stark: And do you ever sell just the software development team, or do you only make that available to people for whom you are? CT Oing.

James Williams: We do, we do sell it separately, but not as you might imagine, not the hours.

Jonathan Stark: Mm-hmm.

James Williams: Uh, I don't think that's a surprise. So our software development agency partners with still entrepreneurs and, and business initiatives whereby they're looking for firm to partner on business outcomes or business goals. So rather than saying, I.

James Williams: I got a JavaScript guy or a Russ guy or Golan guy, and here's my rate sheet and you can buy my hours. It's more about what business goals are you trying to achieve? Is it something that we can get behind and that we can do successfully and then we partner to to solve a business problem.

Jonathan Stark: Okay, so, uh, we're already flying across topics. We're gonna have to loop back and go deep, but I'm taking notes. So, how do you, are there, is there more than one per, more than one person on your team who acts as fractional c t o or is that just your job and other in the other people Are the devs

James Williams: That's just my job. That's, that's an accurate assessment. So I'll focus on the fractional C T O when we have partners who like to engage that way. And then I have devs that where needed, we'll do the implementation or traditional software development practices and services.

Jonathan Stark: Right, but outcome oriented. Okay, so how do you price, if let's say you, uh, are just going to do a fractional c t O engagement with a non-technical founder who's who has. Three dabs, you know, whether they're full-time or you know, contract or not, but they're full-time, so he's got a, a little team. What is, is that like a monthly advisory retainer, or how do you, or, or does it, does it depend every time?

Jonathan Stark: Or do you have like a set price for that? For that sort of tier?

James Williams: So we've productized that we have three tiers. So we have what's called Solopreneur, entrepreneur, and then Enterprise, which is on our website. And we have a variety of ways to play. But if you look at the list price on the website, There's, you know, we base it on revenue and size. So if you are a pre-seed or an, uh, you know, a series a organization, there's a package for you.

James Williams: That includes strategy and advisory. You know, things like technology roadmaps, product roadmaps. How do you plan your, your cap table and then you get deeper sorta of in the rat hole if you choose the next level up, which is entrepreneur enterprise, might include the fractional C T O service and the software development team.

James Williams: And in that case, we own a, a pretty good piece of, of software development. And you have me, whether you like it or not, as your C T O.

Jonathan Stark: And would they, at that level, would they probably have some sort of product leadership and you'd be working with them or maybe not?

James Williams: It depends. I mean, as you know, these organizations come in all sorts of shapes and sizes. So if an organization has product leadership, a vice president of product or a C P O, We're happy to work with them. Um, same thing with with designers, but if not, um, I'm an old dude, so I've been around since the early nineties.

James Williams: Uh, we're happy to fill any product holes. We like to think that we got a lot of experience in building a variety of products, and that's part and parcel to the service that an organization, you know, would get. That's what they're investing in.

Jonathan Stark: Hmm. Okay, great. And these three tiers, are they, they're priced on their website or do, how does the sales process work? Do they have to set up a call and, uh, you talk through it? Or is it they can just say, oh wow, here's how much this would be, and I can see that this is the slot I would go into. And then when they reach out to you, they're pretty much pre-sold.

James Williams: The, I would say the la the latter in terms of we have the pricing tier. On the website, but there's also, there's always that invisible fourth package. You know, I like to break things in three ala Allen wise. So, you know, we, we have the three services, but invariably you call someone up and they go, yeah, I like the price of solopreneur, but I need a couple of these things as part of the enterprise package.

James Williams: And so we do. Custom packages when it makes financial sense, and we do those custom packages also when it makes business sense. But we're not allergic to someone calling us up and say, here's our definition of a fractional c t o. We don't accept all of that business, but in the case where it does, you know where it makes sense and the Venn diagrams align, we're happy to take that business.

Jonathan Stark: Okay. And do you have any particular, uh, sweet spot kind of ideal client? I mean, other than the, the, the three obvious size differences that you've got buckets for, is there, I mean, we're talking startups, but is it generally a SaaS or might it be a hardware startup or like, Uh, aerospace? Like, does it, does it not matter or are you, is it mostly where the buyer's core business is?

Jonathan Stark: A software product?

James Williams: That's a great question. So we, we have clients who. Their core business is not necessarily software, but they have to do, um, integration. And then we have clients who are building a software development product or they're releasing, um, a mobile application for us, the sweet spot. As someone who just received investment or is about to receive investment, they might be anywhere from pre-seed to Series B.

James Williams: Um, anyone that would go to a Y Combinator or would go to some sort of incubator where they're looking for more than just hands on the keyboard. You know, I say that on our website all the time. Be more than just an engineer. Be more than just an entrepreneur. So we're looking for people who. We can partner with for their success.

James Williams: Get out of the question, get out of the conversation of, of hours and tasks and sort of, you know, I call it the helicopter mom, c e o. So we, we run for the hills and, and run affectionately away from that. And, and look for people that are looking to partner around, uh, success in, in terms of the shape of the, the entrepreneur, you know.

James Williams: The clients that I love to work with are the ones that have a dream. They might have raised money or they might be bootstrapping, they might have taken a second mortgage on their house, but they are really laser focused on solving a problem in in society, and they're less concerned about what our Jira tickets look like and more concerned about the outcomes that we can get.

Jonathan Stark: Cool. Great. That totally tracks. Okay. So, so for a, for a fractional c t o only engagement historically, how long do those last for you?

James Williams: It's all over the map. I think we've seen, if you look at eight out of our last 10 clients, they usually last anywhere from eight months to a year. A lot of cases I. When they buy fractional C T O services, they have a long-term plan to hire a full-time C T o, hire a team. And that is something that we help with.

James Williams: Um, I would say a hundred percent of the time we end up helping build a team for that third package. So they, they are fully aware that they're buying a, a fractional C T O service and they like partnering with people who are not trying to steal all the business or. Sort of keep all the technical toys to themselves, but someone who has a mind towards solving the business problem and solving that business problem might mean we're not the best firm for you long-term.

James Williams: It might mean you can't afford us long-term. It might mean you need an outsource team, uh, overseas team. Or it might mean we we're hiring locally in your market.

Jonathan Stark: Okay, cool. So let's drill into something that I, I've seen people, including myself, uh, have a problem dealing with, which is when you are operating with a client at an advisory level as the, this fractional c t o, but you're also getting, your dev team is also getting paid. So there's, uh, a potential situation, or at least the appearance of a.

Jonathan Stark: Conflict of interest is, uh, too strong. But you know, it's like you say to the, this, uh, the c e o, oh, we should do this thing that's gonna cause you to give my devs a whole bunch of money, right? So, but,

James Williams: A

Jonathan Stark: so, hmm. You know, what you should do is back a dump truck up to my bank account.

James Williams: right?

Jonathan Stark: yeah. So I've seen that personally, uh, and I've seen it with others, but, but, You mentioned this sort of outcome-focused implementation, which I imagine could address this issue.

Jonathan Stark: So let's, let's talk about the outcome-focused implementation or, or what, however you phrased it. You know, it's not about hours, it's not about, you know, this number of dev hours per week or month. How do you scope out and price that that tier.

James Williams: So when I think. Those are great questions and, and I, it's a challenge that, um, I've seen over the years that we're, we're pretty used to having this discussion in, in the case of, of pricing, I do a lot of disqualifying and I ask a thousand trillion questions upfront, mostly because I'm afraid of failure.

James Williams: Uh, when you're a small company, a relatively small company, all you have is that next referral. In terms of your business development, unless you're spending crazy money on, on ads. So I think for us, what we, we price it based on, on the business outcome. As an example, we've unfortunately or fortunately, worked in a, a lot of mortgage projects over the last six years.

James Williams: So rather than we're building you this, Thing, this back office thing, and you're gonna pay us a, a retainer. The, the scope of work, and, you know, we don't even do scope of works, but the proposal would be something like increased loan volumes by n percent. Or increase scale or reduce churn. So there are qualitative terms that we're sort of attracted to, and those terms help guide the narrative towards whether you need our team or not.

James Williams: And by the way, we're not a big team, so 90% of the time we're saying no, don't use our team. I would rather take the advisory part and use your team, um, if you have it. So we're not going gung-ho. And, and using our team, because I see that that fails, um, that fails a lot. And I think there are specific cases where that works, and you have to have a keen eye towards when that works and when you should steer clear of it.

Jonathan Stark: Can you unpack that a little bit because that's kind of like the magic trick.

James Williams: Yeah. So the magic trick here is if, if they have a software and incumbent software development team, I'm always looking for, Signs to, to disqualify. If they have an income and software development team that's pretty good or is very passionate, they've been there five years or they've been there six years, I already know at that stage that there's a good chance that our team won't work because rather than focusing on the business goal, you're trying to get personalities to mix. They're very territorial. Where is this team coming from? The c e O brought James and his crew in and. Who the hell are they? And you know, what are they gonna do? So you end up breaking up kindergarten fights instead of focusing on, on the goal. What I do is I wait for them to ask, and I usually wait for the ask to come from multiple areas in the, in the business.

James Williams: So if I'm working with a vice president of engineering and he is like, gosh, James, we gotta, you know, we gotta hit this goal here and. We just don't have enough resources. Would someone on your team be able to join or do you have several people? And I say, that sounds great. Let's talk about what that would look like.

James Williams: And usually I lead with questions from the back and let them sort of dictate and come up with what, what would work for them. What I don't do is say, I'm your fractional C T O and I think you should use my team for these things. And here's our top rate. I'm, I never say that.

Jonathan Stark: Right. It's too risky. Right. It's like, it's like, but you, you know, later the, the potential falloff from that is terrifying for someone like me, you know, it's like, but you told us we trusted you. Right.

James Williams: I don't wanna be in a situation where I'm failing because someone has an imaginary list of things that we made up four months ago that neither of us remember. It's a, let's call it a product roadmap or a task list, let's call it, uh, a backlog. And then we look at that backlog and we're having, uh, a debate versus the backlog and reality.

James Williams: So I'm usually saying, here's the outcome. Here's the business business goal. But if that person is like, well, let's pull out this backlog from February and let's go through the backlog. Those are the things that I sort of. Steer away from. And what I find is if you keep the narrative on the goal, increasing loan volume, um, increasing scale, you have a latency problem, right?

James Williams: It's, you have a 500 millisecond latency problem and you're getting a 500 server error, which is costing your business X. That's the problem that we're solving.

Jonathan Stark: Okay. Yes, I love it. I mean, you couldn't be preaching to the choir anymore. I know we're both Alan Weiss, longtime Alan Weiss disciples. So that all tracks. How do you, in, in your world, how do you keep tactically, how do you keep the client focused on that metric? Keep them away from shiny object syndrome or like our competitors just did this thing.

Jonathan Stark: So I know we're in the middle of something else, but I want you to copy that or something. Or, or, well let's start there 'cause I've got a follow up question to that. So how do, how do you, or do you find it difficult to keep them on track with those things? And if, if so, what are the sort of lines that you use to get them back to the big picture?

James Williams: I L Y says something that I like that I've changed, which is no one likes a humble consultant. And my motto is, be rude. If I'm gonna help these people, I need to be rude. So if someone said, Hey, competitor, Acme is doing it this way, I want you to copy it. I might say, we'll go work with them then, because that's not why we're here.

James Williams: Right? I don't need, you don't need to pay me and I don't necessarily need your business. So go work with, with Acme. I also think that there's a level of an elevated status when I go to a doctor. I understand that that doctor is superior to me in that particular craft. When I work with my chess coach who's a grand master, if he tells me that this is the best move on the chess board, it's the best move on the chess board.

James Williams: And I'm not debating, I'm trying to understand why and I'm trying to learn. So I think part of what we offer in the software development business is an elevated status. And you know, I've been doing this since 1993. Um, I've been through every downturn in the market. I've had enough success that I sort of understand what it takes to build these software products, and I know what, you know, I know what the end of this movie looks like, and I'm trying to align myself with people who understand that.

James Williams: I would say if I'm working with someone who says, James, I think you should use React native. A combination of view, jss, and I would like you to use DynamoDB. Um, I'm sending them a termination notice.

Jonathan Stark: Yeah. Right. Uh, I, I can remember it, it reminded me of one of the things I used to say when I was doing a similar thing. Uh, they, they'd be, they'd bring something up and it wouldn't even be that, it wouldn't even be that ridiculous like they were dictating a stack or like, you know, whatever. But they would, they'd just be on, they'd have a be in their bonnet about doing something that I was like, that.

Jonathan Stark: I'm just like, that's not a good idea. And I, it wouldn't even necessarily be that I could articulate why, or that it was definite that there's any way to prove it. And I would just be like, I don't know, man. My spider sense is tangling about that. You know? And, and if, if you are working with people who respect your expertise at what you do and you respect their expertise at what they do, 'cause they're running a business that's in my, in my case, every single person who ever hired me had a successful business.

Jonathan Stark: It was a, a. Better than a going concern. They were big in some cases. Huge. So, and I would respect that. They knew their customers better than I did. They knew their industry better than I did. But you are, but you are not gonna tell me even, I'm trying to, I'm trying to think of a, a higher level decision like, um, I.

Jonathan Stark: Whether or not to go with, uh, HD Meer native or something like that. You know, it's just like a big, an early architecture decision. You know, it could be as simple as on-prem versus a w s or whatever, you know, something big and early, and I'd just be like, all, I don't, I don't know. I don't think so. And, and good clients would be like, all right, you're the boss with that stuff.

Jonathan Stark: You get veto power.

James Williams: I think that's the way, and I think that we also have to be prepared to. I, I believe in challenging people. You know, if, if I, if I Google something before I go see my doctor, I want my doctor to say, James, you're completely outta your mind, and if you want to die, keep Googling if you want to live.

Jonathan Stark: Right. Yes.

James Williams: So if someone, I had a customer the other day goes, you know, I wanna work with you guys and you know, we want to use MySQL.

James Williams: Um, before I spilled my coffee on my shirt, I was like, why do you want to use, how do you know you want to use, um, MySQL? I read, I read about you guys ahead of time. None of you guys are engineers. Why MySQL? Well, that's what we used before. Why don't we talk about the goal first? What we're trying to achieve.

James Williams: Maybe my SQL works. I have nothing. Nothing against my sql, but I can tell you there's a truckload of other choices that might get you to your business goal. So let's get back to talking about that.

Jonathan Stark: It's just so weirdly specific and it's just completely the wrong altitude for the discussion.

James Williams: Yeah.

Jonathan Stark: Alright, so let's, so were you always good at detecting that? Or is this something that's come from the school of hard knocks? Like what could you tell people who don't? What could you tell people who, for example, in this, in this situation, they love MySQL.

Jonathan Stark: They agree with the decision, and they just accept the client's suggestion because they agree with it, but they don't make a, but they don't, you know, pull the ripcord and say, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. Like we're talking about the wrong thing here. Like, how. If you were gonna coach someone a, a mini me, if you're gonna coach them how to do this, what advice would you give them for detecting or building that spider sense detecting when the conversation has entered into murky waters?

James Williams: I would say, you know, to address the first part is I think it was the school of hard knocks, you know, failing, um, a ton. Um, just, just failing a whole lot, you know, at, at every level of a startup. At every I. Every position, and I worked my way up through the ranks sort of manually. Starting in, in the nineties.

James Williams: I was always a, uh, you know what, what I would say better than average engineer, most of my, my, my career usually end up running something. But I was a terrible employee because I disagreed with everything. And then mentors took that disagreement and honed it into a business owner and to. The sort of the consultant mindset.

James Williams: The thing that I would challenge sort of the 25 year old me is how much do you like to fail? Because the chances of failure increases proportionally with you accepting what the customer tells you they want. And if you get back to that business goal or the business outcome, you have to ask yourself, if you accept the MySQL suggestion and they fail, are you okay with that?

James Williams: Because at the end of the day, it's gonna be your fault. If you accept 100% of your client's suggestions and three months from now they can't launch or it fails, guess whose fault that is?

Jonathan Stark: Hmm. Yeah. It's like a pilot letting the passenger fly the plane

James Williams: Yeah. It doesn't make any

Jonathan Stark: and it makes no sense. Right.

James Williams: you gotta diagnose. I think that's the key, I think in this business. I mean, even if you're a software developer working for a FA company or working for a mid, mid-size company, I don't think you let the product person walk up to you. Hand you the proverbial Jira ticket and say, yo, get to work it.

James Williams: I think you, you sit back in your chair and you ask some questions and you challenge everything before professionally. Challenge everything before you get to work and make sure that you've got context, that you provide suggestions and that you, you just don't become this mule or this brick layer.

Jonathan Stark: Yeah.

James Williams: Be a thought worker.

Jonathan Stark: So that implies that you get involved in the project or the, the situation before those big strategic decisions get made. So how do you attract people at the right stage that early? How do you, how do you help those particular people become aware that you are an option?

James Williams: An insane amount of research. So as part of my prospecting process, I, I have an idea. O prospect profile, uh, everyone does right, whatever they call it. And it is a list of traits for the human, a list of traits and properties for the business, what stage, what problems they're trying to solve, and what problems that we've solved where there's a Venn diagram overlap of, of success.

James Williams: I make a Twitter list or I make a LinkedIn list, or I make a a list in vi. I target specific people based on a ton of research. So when you get my cold DMM or my email or you get my, my call, I am so in tune with what your issue is already, that the conversation starts and, and ends there. I've got clients that have never asked me a question about technology stack and the as you might imagine, those are the best. So if I call a mortgage company as an example, not that I love mortgage, by the way, don't mistake this 'cause there's parts of mortgage that discussed me. But if I call a mortgage company and I say, I've done some research on your competitors. You do 2000 less loans a month. They're charging $95 a loan.

James Williams: You're charging $55, uh, a loan. Would you like to stop sucking?

Jonathan Stark: Oh yeah. Like Dear listener, let that sink in. If you're, I did a, a, a podcast episode recently about like when and how to do cold calling or out cold outreach and, and what you just rattled off the top of your head, the person on the other end cannot hang up. They cannot not reply to that email. It would almost be like, uh, unethical for them to not respond to that.

Jonathan Stark: Right. And it also sets the tone, you know, whether you know to the listener, whether or not you like the. James' style here. You, James, you are laying it out like this is what it's gonna be like to work with me. I got, I, I play hard in the paint. I'm gonna sh I'm gonna shoot straight. I'm not gonna, uh, mince words.

Jonathan Stark: I'm not gonna, uh, just be a yes man. And there's tons of people who like that. It doesn't, it doesn't, it's not necessary that you need to be that way, but you, but what you are doing there is just setting the tone 100% for what kind of consultant relationship it would be. And for folks who did that, you're automatically gonna resonate with them.

Jonathan Stark: So that just like a plus plus. That was great. Love that.

James Williams: Hundred percent. And I think if, if you're looking, you know, if, if you're looking for someone to say, yes, sir, and salute. Who is going to U use next jss, because you said so with DynamoDB, you know, I'll just tell you straight between the eyes. Like, I can recommend somebody to you. I hope you're successful, but I can tell that we're not gonna get along and life's too short.

James Williams: So, so why do it? But if you're looking for someone who is going to die trying, who is gonna sleep less than you to get this done? Once we sort of buy into to each other, if you're looking for that, that teammate, you know I always say when, when they put Meta world peace with Kobe Bryant, if you're looking for that person when there's a fight on the court to sort of run and jump in front of the punch for you, but who's also gonna hit you straight between the eyes, then you've got the right partner,

Jonathan Stark: Nice fighter in both directions. Okay, so, so let's talk about sales cycle. How long is your sales cycle historically? How long has it been on average, if you know that? Just roughly.

James Williams: So sales cycle for us, our, our close rate if I get on the phone is 95%. That's if I can get a call. I'm not saying that I always do. Our sales cycles are measured in in weeks. I mean, we're always somewhere between 11 and and 24 people. I know that's a strange number if you don't include. The, the partners that we work with, but we're, you know, I try to stay 25 people or less.

James Williams: My goal is always to get smaller, not larger in terms of the number of people. So our sales cycles are roughly, you know, two to two to four weeks. And it starts from either a warm lead with a lot of research or a complete cold outreach, you know, over LinkedIn or over Twitter, just dms. Um, and I have a process.

James Williams: So I have a flow chart and a spreadsheet that I follow. So I send you a dmm. If you don't answer, I send you a follow-up email if I have it. If you respond to the email, I suggest, uh, a call. And in each, at each point in the sales cycle, I'm offering value. Did you know this? Did you know that you suck relative to your competitors?

James Williams: My fa my favorite for mobile is, uh, you know, I'll spend all night going through like the reviews and I'll find an

Jonathan Stark: On their app, their their two star app.

James Williams: you know, and I'll say your two stars and you know, your competitor is five stars. How does that feel? And would, and would you like to talk about that? And I, you know, that that little pitch there gets a call like 98% of the time.

James Williams: E even if they, even if they're prickly or pissed off that, uh, you know, I had the gall to insult their, uh, their application. But I think it comes with, comes with research and I have a seven step process. That, um, I've honed over the years that go from the first message to, you know, first message to the call, to what we call the whiteboard discussion, and then from the whiteboard discussion to the follow-up all the way up to the proposal and close.

James Williams: And once we send a proposal, we're usually closing like 95% of the time if we get that far.

Jonathan Stark: Right, right. Wild. Okay, so let's jump back. Jumping all over the place. So let's jump back to the, I I had a, a question. I said I was gonna split in half, and so here's the second half. When you're, when you're in a situation where your team is, I. Building out stuff. What are the, what progress metrics do you use to satisfy the, the client and yourself that you're on track to?

Jonathan Stark: The bigger goal

James Williams: Favorite question of all times. So, so for me, we're very demo heavy and we're, we're very, uh, qualitative. So I, I, I honestly think 90% of the metrics in software development don't work. They don't tell your client where you are. No one has an idea of. Progress. And when you get to the end, you get, you know, fingers pointed in opposite direction.

James Williams: I thought I was gonna have X. And we're saying, no, you said Y.

Jonathan Stark: wrote a million lines of code.

James Williams: Exactly. Look at all this. Look at this. Look at the number of check-ins. And the guy's like, but I can't sell this. So what we do is we set up a demo. Schedule. And for the demo schedule, we set up qualitative goals. And you and I both know how difficult it is to communic to to communicate with our people.

James Williams: And when I say our people, I mean engineers. So rather than having an engineer go from say, a Jira ticket and a mock. Write what he or she thinks they should develop. I'm usually saying, okay, for this particular demo, um, the app should be on the iPhone and five users should be able to log in, or 500 users should, should be able to log in.

James Williams: So we write sentences, and I stole this idea from from Amazon, so I write paragraphs on how our clients should feel at every demo. What the qualitative goal should be. And for me, that has been spot on in terms of how engineers make decisions and what makes clients happy. And I'm usually asking the client, um, ahead of time.

James Williams: So what are you expecting for the demo next Thursday? Like, what, what would make you smile and what would make you just tomato me right in the face? Right. And we, and we have that discussion and then I share that information transparently with the team to make sure that I'm evoking the emotion on the demo rather than going through a list of crap that we know we're not gonna hit.

James Williams: And even if we hit it, they're gonna have a different mindset or different idea of what that outcome looks like

Jonathan Stark: Hmm. So, and would you do the same thing if you were working with their team and your, your devs weren't involved?

James Williams: a hundred percent.

Jonathan Stark: Great.

James Williams: I spent, I spend time, I do a lot of training. Um, most developers, experienced developers know what the, you know, that software development projects fail 77% of the time. That's no secret. You know, just Google, go, go to Gardner, and

Jonathan Stark: atrocious.

James Williams: it's a, it's an incredibly, it's an insane failure rate

Jonathan Stark: It's ridiculous. It's ridiculous in my opinion, that they even call themselves engineers when the failure rate is that high.

James Williams: Hundred percent, boy. Yeah, you are. You're preaching to the converted

Jonathan Stark: Imagine if the bridge, every 77% of bridges fell.

James Williams: or flights.

Jonathan Stark: Yeah.

James Williams: Yeah. It's like you're gonna get on this plane, but 77% of the time we're gonna crash. So I engineers that don't work for me, they also know that. And so I'm very good at building relationships with those engineers and saying, let's put together an accountability plan that we agree. Let's put together that demo roadmap and let's go dictate that roadmap to your boss, which is my client, and tell them what we're gonna do instead of waiting for mommy to come tell us what to do.

James Williams: And that is a message that I think resonates with every engineer in the world, and it's something for them to, to get behind very easily and just, just having a dialogue about, you know, what, what success looks like. Right? And I, I, I listen to a lot of basketball coaches and N F L coaches in the huddle when I'm watching sports, and they're almost saying the, the right thing, right?

James Williams: They're not saying, you know, Hey Steph Curry, I wanna count your dribbles. Right. If you, if you do, if you do 220 dribbles,

Jonathan Stark: We're good.

James Williams: Right? That's not how you talk to Steph Curry. That's not how you talk to engineers. You say, look, they're out hustling us, right? If we win this quarter, we, we, we win the game. I wanna see that guy sweat.

James Williams: I want you to knock that guy down. So I think when you, when you come up with those sort of qualitative goals, it's easy for people to understand it and they like it because that first iteration where they get success, they're bought in.

Jonathan Stark: Oh yeah. I'm surprised you don't end up accidentally poaching devs from other, from client teams who want to

James Williams: You know, we, we do, we do. Sometimes I, it, it is, it is. We have, uh, a lot of engineers that want to come work with us or want to join one of our courses to learn how to run a business this way. And I think it, I think a lot of engineering teams, if they just sat down and, you know, no one really knows what qualitative means unless you are a disciple of, of Alan Wise.

James Williams: But the, the way I like to, I. Communicate that to the team is what do we want the client to feel the customer to, to feel? What is that e emotional cue that we want to trigger with this particular demo? And we lay out an entire demo driven plan that has basically Bitmojis intern, you know, on. You know, on the actual, you know, laid out, whether we're doing it in Figma or whether we're just hand drawing it, we lay out that entire map and we said, you know, we said you would be here.

James Williams: Um, and it works very well.

Jonathan Stark: Do you ever get the clients, end users involved?

James Williams: It depends. So we'll run beta programs for. The right client so that, again, that third package, you, you kind of get everything and I, I like suggesting getting customer feedback. Right away, especially if I think the c e o is smoking something, right? If they're, if they're drinking their own Kool-Aid, you know, it's like, let's talk to a couple users or um, let's comp this.

James Williams: We have a term that we use, you know, at Cobe where it's a comping strategy. Let's go look at a product like yours. Let's go look at the reviews. Or let's bring in customers who used a product like yours and let's see what they say. So we, you know, So maybe you're right, maybe I'm wrong, but let's go validate

Jonathan Stark: Yeah. Instead of spending two hours and 10 people in a room thinking it through,

James Williams: Oh God. Yeah. That, that you just made my skin crawl. I don't want to think anything through. Right. I want to comp it.

Jonathan Stark: Yeah. Right. Oh man. Okay, cool. There's like, we could surely go for three hours here. Um, so, but you, you mentioned a couple of things that I think, and I think there's gonna be a, a number of people whose ears perked up at certain points in this conversation.

Jonathan Stark: You mentioned, uh, uh, courses or workshops or something, and I know you have a mailing list and so forth, so, Where can people go to find out more about, about how to kind of follow in your footsteps here?

James Williams: I mean, you can go to our, you know, our website cobe.com and we, that's where you see both the fractional C T O service. And then we also have courses.cobe.com. And it's a passion project for me for courses.cobe.com, because. I feel like a lot of engineers are giving away a lot of value. Right now. There's millions of engineers giving away a lot of value, and there's someone else riding off on the white horse with a million multimillion dollar, um, stock package.

James Williams: When I write articles, one of the things I say is, business guys get yachts and engineers get nice monitors, and I want to cut that crap out so, Part of what we do in what we call our technology accelerator is teach engineers and you know, how to be, what I would say entrepreneurs, not a term that I, that I coined

Jonathan Stark: What is it?

James Williams: entrepreneurs.

James Williams: So engineering entrepreneurs

Jonathan Stark: got it. Okay.

James Williams: whether you want to work for a company long term and uh, you still need these. These skill sets or whether you wanna start your small business or start a big business, these skills are essential. And it's how do you sell? How do you negotiate? Do you know how to look at a cap table?

James Williams: Do you know how to negotiate your, your salary? How do you go from $110,000 a year to $230,000 a year or 300,000? Um, how do you go get a bank loan? How do you raise money? Which unfortunately I've been around far too often on the losing side, probably 98% of the time. And for me, what made the difference was mentors who said, James, you're really great coding, but you're an absolute dummy.

James Williams: When it come like 2,500 options, you are walking around here like you're gonna own a jet and you're gonna be able to buy your wife a couch. Let me tell you why. Right. So I've taken that experience and put it in, uh, sort of in an accelerator on courses.cobe.com so that people don't have to live through the same pain I did.

Jonathan Stark: And I'll put it in the show notes, but how do you spell that?

James Williams: Cobe is c o f e b e.com

Jonathan Stark: is that?

James Williams: Oh. It stands for Code for Engineers by Engineers.

Jonathan Stark: Oh, very good. Very good. Well, this, this has been a blast. I, I'm so glad you reached out. I, I feel like we should definitely keep in touch. Uh, but I will, I will, uh, put that in the show notes. Dear listener, if you want to find out more, if about, about this list of stuff that James has shared, if you think that the fractional c t o path is the one for you, uh, I think you're probably convinced I don't probably need to see anymore.

Jonathan Stark: Well, James, thanks so much for coming on.

James Williams: I appreciate it. Thanks for having me.

Jonathan Stark: Folks, that's it for this week. I'm Jonathan Stark, and I hope you join me again next time for Ditching Hourly. Bye.