Mastering IT Consultancy and AI Implementation in Turbulent Times: A Conversation with Jeff Roberts

Ever wondered how an IT maestro turns the tide during challenging economic climates? Jeff Roberts of Innovation Vista joins us to recount the storybook transition from passionate IT aficionado to the mastermind of a consultancy firm, navigating the choppy waters of the pandemic's onset. We venture into the strategic intricacies of bootstrapping a business that shuns the traditional bench model, opting instead for a dynamic network of freelance C-level IT consultants. Jeff's narrative is a testament to adaptability and foresight, highlighting how deep industry knowledge can be the linchpin for providing strategic IT leadership that resonates with clients.

The digital transformation wave is here, and with it, AI has become the talk of the town for small to mid-sized businesses wrestling with the "to automate or not to automate" conundrum. In our dialogue with Jeff, we peel back the layers of AI implementation, examining the delicate interplay between the perceived need to keep up with technology and the tangible benefits it can offer. As Jeff imparts his wisdom, listeners gain an insider's perspective on evolving their business models with AI—striking the right balance to fuel efficiency and growth, while establishing a strong brand presence in a saturated marketplace. Join us and uncover the tangible strategies that can help your business not just survive, but thrive in the digital era.

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:03

Hey folks, welcome back to the growing Lean podcast sponsored by Lean Discovery Group, an award-winning app development firm based out of Virginia. This is your host, dylan Burke, also known as Deige, and I'm happy to be here today with Jeff Roberts, founder and CEO at Innovation Vista. Welcome, jeff.

Speaker 2: 0:21

Well, thank you, dylan, for having me on.

Speaker 1: 0:23

It's my absolute pleasure, jeff. So, to get us started, can you tell us a little bit about yourself, your background and how you ended up at Innovation Vista?

Speaker 2: 0:34

Sure, yeah. So I have been an IT person for really my entire life, from the time I was a teenager, just fascinated with computers and what they could do, so studied that in college, spent my whole career in that space, had a chance to enter management for a finance company in my 20s and really have been in IT leadership since then, had a career as a CIO at five different mid-sized companies, mainly around finance and real estate, up to 2019, and the company I was last CIO for was acquired by a large competitor. Rather than try to find another CIO role, I decided to found Innovation Vista instead and begin to offer some of the things I've had some success with as a CIO to small and mid-sized companies. Maybe who can't afford that full-time C-level IT leader.

Speaker 1: 1:43

Okay, that's awesome. And when did you start? This was in 2019, correct, late 2019, yes, so right before COVID.

Speaker 2: 1:55

horrible entrepreneurial timing.

Speaker 1: 1:58

Yeah.

Speaker 2: 1:58

Although there were some silver linings in the clouds definitely at 2020 was a rough year, though, but gave me a chance to get my feet under me and figure out really where the opportunity was going to be in this space.

Speaker 1: 2:13

Yeah, 100%, and I can imagine it's not a terrible time to have been doing what you're doing, because people are looking to scale down and remote work was becoming normal, so it was actually quite a good time to enter the industry market.

Speaker 2: 2:29

Yeah, well said For sure, conducting business via conference call like this, virtually remotely that has been a game changer for what we do. And yeah, I just I think the digital transformation of the whole world, sped up by probably a decade or more with what happened in those 12 months. And so, yeah, it has been a growing need, a growing sort of understanding, I guess, of business leaders of how fractional executive services would work and more of a willingness on their part to think about that for their company.

Speaker 1: 3:13

Yeah, for sure. And since you launched, when, which period has been has seen the biggest growth for you? Was it that initial launching period or was it more?

Speaker 2: 3:25

You know we well, whatever traction we had early in 2020 was shut down in March and held on pause for about six or seven months until the fall. But since the third quarter of 2020, we've grown every quarter, so it has been, you know, just kind of a steady ramp up. It's not exponential growth, but that's probably good for me to keep my sanity as we grow and to be able to build some processes and get the right support team and outsourced partners and things like that in place.

Speaker 1: 4:05

Okay, amazing, and for something like this, I can imagine that retention is a huge KPI for you. So if you've grown every quarter, does that mean you retaining most of your customers?

Speaker 2: 4:18

It is Well the ones where that makes sense, right yeah?

Speaker 2: 4:21

We have some clients that engage us for a project opportunity where there's sort of a defined statement of work and goal and the achievement of which means the end of the project. So we don't count that as a client loss. But yeah, a lot of what we do is more ongoing the virtual CIO, the IT advisory kind of services. That's really a company wanting us to join their IT leadership team or to serve as the ultimate IT leader on an ongoing basis and help them navigate the changing landscape and AI and data analytics and all the things that have changed so much over these last few years.

Speaker 1: 5:10

Okay, yeah, 100 percent, and can you help me understand a little bit more about how it works, because I can imagine you've only got so much time that you can dedicate or spread yourself over, right? So do you have other people that you bring on when you get full?

Speaker 2: 5:28

Exactly, yeah, actually, I was intrigued by the whole subject of your podcast just for this reason, because I've spent a lot of time thinking about how do you grow a services business and how do you really scale something like this. So we've made a couple of choices early on that have proven to be really powerful for us. The first was that we would not build a bench A lot of consulting firms. They hire a few experts and then they hire marketing and sales to go find projects for those experts to work on, and that might be better on a margin basis than what we're doing.

Speaker 2: 6:13

That's debatable, but where it for sure falls short is especially in the C-level IT world we live in. The industry knowledge is just critical. It makes all the difference. And trying to serve new clients who walk in the door with whoever it is that might be on the end of the bench for us that doesn't have an active client just really troubled me, and I've seen other firms make this mistake. It's just a square peg and a round hole.

Speaker 2: 6:47

No matter how smart that person might be, if they haven't worked in the vertical that that client operates in, they're not going to know what they need to know to really be strategic and they spend the first couple of months of an engagement asking a bunch of questions rather than bringing ideas to the table. So we avoided that 100 percent and started from the outset, building a network instead of a bench, and so what we've done is that all of the freelance CIO, CTO, CISO, CDO kind of consultants out there worldwide in English speaking markets everyone that I can find that I've not yet spoken to we reach out to more on an ongoing basis, and we are approaching 400 consultants that have made the cut for us, so to speak, that we feel comfortable with them. You know kind of serving client needs in certain kinds of companies, certain kinds of projects, and we know what those are and they know about us and they're comfortable being subcontracted when those kinds of projects come up.

Speaker 1: 8:04

OK, yeah, that makes a lot of sense. So basically you're kind of like a marketplace connecting fractional CIOs to businesses.

Speaker 2: 8:13

We are. In some ways it's a little bit of a brokerage and a guide into this very complex ecosystem of freelance IIT executives. We do some things to support our consultants after they're on an engagement as well, so we go past just the matchmaking component of it. We've got some intellectual property, especially around finding revenue streams with technology, market share improvements for clients using tech capabilities, things like that. But for sure, the main power that we bring is the expertise that's already in the mind of our consultant.

Speaker 1: 9:00

Yeah, 100%.

Speaker 2: 9:01

And how does it?

Speaker 1: 9:03

work from a business perspective. Do you take a cut of their pay or does the business pay you a finder's fee?

Speaker 2: 9:11

We're generally compensating the consultant and then invoicing the client and we're taking less than our competitors. We're taking a minority of the bill rate. Okay, most editors, you know there's there's a variety of how they operate, but many take half or more of the bill rate when they have found a client, or the consultant.

Speaker 2: 9:35

So you know, we try to be as lean as possible in terms of our operation, our back office. I sort of practice what I preach. We've outsourced a lot to experts and we've done that on a fractional basis and on a transactional basis, as opposed to hiring a bunch of full time support staff, and that's let us really keep our overhead costs very low so that we can keep less of that bill rate.

Speaker 1: 10:05

Okay, amazing. Yeah, sounds like an epic business model. I love that.

Speaker 2: 10:11

It's worked. Yeah, it's. What really is powerful is the match we can make for the client because they often are blown away that we can find someone that has done something similar to what they're looking to do in their industry or something adjacent, even if it's leaving edge. We can find someone who's who's done something that's very relevant and really helps them know the landscape and their way around the block, avoiding the major mistakes and bubbles.

Speaker 1: 10:41

Yeah, 100%. So do you? Do you give them a couple of options and then they have some interviews and then choose the right fit? That I'd work.

Speaker 2: 10:50

Often they trust us to make the choice and we'll just bring the very best match to the table. Okay, there are a few. Some it's a client preference thing and we're okay to do some, you know identify two or three finalists in some cases and let them make the choice. So we operate either way. But but often they're coming to us because they realize that they don't really know how to discern who's the best choice, right? Anyone could Google or do a LinkedIn search for freelance CIO and you will find over 1000 of those people out there at any one time. And you know choosing okay, well, who's the right person for my project in this industry? And we're trying to do this. And we are, you know, formal, with committee control structures, or informal, as a small, you know, family owned business. Just understanding what really matters is a lot of where we add value to the whole equation.

Speaker 1: 12:01

Okay, that's awesome. That's awesome, and we spoke about how the pandemic boosted us 10 years, like into the future, technologically speaking. How has AI entering the game affected your business? Because I believe that's also boosted us another five to 10 years, if not more.

Speaker 2: 12:21

Absolutely. Yeah, it's. You know it's funny, it is. I tell people a lot that AI has been the inverse of a lot of it problem solving from years past, where before you identified a business problem and you went to work determining what could be done technologically in order to solve that AI, it came so fast and so powerfully particularly with the launch of chat, gpt three publicly last November that it was sort of a problem in search of solutions, and we had a lot of mid sized companies reach out and say look, you know, we want to do something with AI. We're not sure what that is. We want your help in determining our AI strategy, or our board of directors wants us to do something, or our competitors are doing it and we want to be able to tell our, our customers that we're doing something also.

Speaker 2: 13:23

So the fear of missing out and the pressure from from powers that be an ownership groups has been really significant in the space, especially for small and mid sized companies, and where we can help is just, you know, navigating and guiding them around the landscape of the art of the possible. There's a tremendous amount of hype still around AI and people have made promises and claims about capabilities that are nowhere near ready for primetime, or if they are, they would be so cost prohibitive in terms of the analysis and CPU and cloud load that it would be really not feasible to do it. So we help them navigate that and the tradeoffs between what's possible and what's possible. For 20% of that cost. That gets you 80% of the way there and so, yeah, there's a lot of value add there just from people who have run successful AI projects and started up AI programs. We've got several hundred of those in our network and that experience, even if it's only a couple of years, you have a couple of years head start on the rest of the world.

Speaker 1: 14:47

Yeah, exactly 100%, and that's kind of what we do is we build AI-centric tools to help supercharge business growth, and it's part of us, too, like growing lean. We help them do it for as cheap as possible in as quick amounts of time as possible, and it's been awesome. It's great to see what is possible and how it actually does help businesses. We're not just selling the product, we helping their business grow, so it's really cool. Are there any tools that you use within your business that helps automate your workflows or makes your processes more efficient?

Speaker 2: 15:25

Yeah, absolutely. Again, like you said, part of growing lean and part of practicing what we preach, so to speak. We have some AI that helps us on our marketing front outreach, customized messaging for different audiences. We've got some RPA automation that helps us just with basic back office paperwork and tracking and things of that nature. So we are fairly high tech at the same time as we're helping our clients to figure out how to be high tech.

Speaker 1: 16:01

Okay, that's awesome. I love that. And back to the business side of things what have been the biggest challenges or obstacles that you've faced and how did you overcome them?

Speaker 2: 16:12

You know, I think, a lot of standard business challenges like branding, just visibility and awareness in the market, getting the word out that we exist.

Speaker 2: 16:26

This was a bootstrap company, so I bought the web domain. It had never been operated before, no one ever heard of innovation, vista, and now we need people to know that we exist. So just a lot of challenges around that, and it's been very humbling, to be honest with you as a tech business leader just how difficult that really is, because mindshares, they call it we just are bombarded every day with marketing messages and advertising and so forth, and even if someone hears about us, the likelihood that they remember that the next day is so low that it just needs this constant sort of freshness and constant effort in order to stay in front of people's minds and for them to think about us when that need does arise and when the time might be right for our services, because often when they hear about us the first time, it's an intriguing idea. A lot of people like what we do, but if it doesn't fit, they're going to discard that and move on to the next thing on their to-do list.

Speaker 1: 17:39

Yeah, 100%. That's. Couldn't agree more. And you said you bootstrapped the business right, so have you. Are you still completely bootstrapped, or has there been any collaborations or partnerships that have helped?

Speaker 2: 17:53

you. Well, we have plenty of partnerships, but not in an equity form. You know the nature of what we do being focused on C level services really means that we need partnerships in order to bring solutions to our customers. So we are not, you know, doing custom software development or system hosting or support services or any of the other things that a lot of IT service companies do. And that's on purpose, because we tell people we are the opposite of land and expand. We are there to give you the best guidance we can, not to find work for more people back at the home office. And that's in stark contrast to a lot of consulting firms out there, obviously. But it means that when we make recommendations that they need to upgrade a certain system or that the economics of a custom software package might make sense for them in certain ways.

Speaker 2: 18:55

We want to bring really reputable and talented groups to the table so that we can help make that happen for them, rather than just to get them to work, rather than just throw the recommendation over the wall and, you know, don't do anything to make it happen. So we're constantly looking for partners in that way and, you know, people that work well with us and understand how we want to treat clients. But up to now we are still bootstrapped and we've not had to bring in an outside partner or anyone like that. I'm very reluctant to do that unless they're really really aligned with my vision for how this model really ought to give clients the very best option for their IT strategy and leadership, and I don't know that that partner's out there they might be.

Speaker 2: 19:50

Never say never, I guess.

Speaker 1: 19:52

Yeah, 100%. I appreciate your time today, Jeff. Thanks so much for your insights. Before we go, if you could give one piece of advice to other business owners looking to succeed in this ever-changing technological world, what would that be?

Speaker 2: 20:11

Great question. I would say don't be afraid to do something different. And that sounds a little bit cliche, but you know this growing, lean and building a network instead of a bench. You know, a lot of people assumed when I mentioned to them that I was starting this consulting firm that I would do it the very traditional way because companies have succeeded doing it that way and I probably could have and maybe succeeded in some form. But I would have looked like everyone else. And so I would say you know entrepreneurs that have their own idea that you really want to operate differently, and especially if your differences lead to better outcomes and better results for the client.

Speaker 2: 21:03

Go with it and really believe in it, because they can tell the difference. The word gets around. Reputations build, and honestly, in both directions. If reputations are good, then that's an asset for you. You know from then on, as you grow, if your reputation is bad. I have a feeling it would be just impossible to overcome that at some point. So go with your gut and, especially if it means taking better care of the client, don't be afraid to be different 100%.

Speaker 1: 21:38

Thanks so much for that, jeff, and thanks for being on the show. What is the best way for people to reach out to Jeff Roberts if you have any offers for them to take advantage of If they're looking to follow your journey?

Speaker 2: 21:50

Yeah, so I'm posting pretty actively on LinkedIn and an X. We've got a website, innovation VISTAcom, where we've got a library of our thought leadership pieces, webinars, things like that that they're out there for free for people to peruse and certainly we welcome a message. If anyone has a question, we're happy to chat. It doesn't need to lead to billable revenue for us. I just love talking about this stuff and we would be happy to get on a call at any point.

Speaker 1: 22:25

Amazing Thanks. So much, jeff. Thank you. Have a great rest of your day, you too.