1592 – How the Distributive Enterprise Changed with Big Leaf Networks’ Greg Davis

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0:59with us right now it's greg davis greg you are the ceo of big leaf networks you're found on the web at bigleaf.net greg thank you so much for joining us thanks josh i'm excited to be here i really appreciate it thanks for having me congratulations on the success of the podcast i've been a steady listener for the last week or so it's great content so again happy to be here I appreciate that. Very, very kind of you to say. All right. Explain Big Leaf. And again, if you could pretend that you're talking with, you know, maybe a group of middle schoolers, I think might be helpful, just so folks understand exactly where Big Leaf fits in and who you typically work with.

1:40Yeah, sure thing. And I would have it no other way. So Big Leaf serves the distributed enterprise. And so if you think about professional services, your doctor, veterinary medicine, the gym, the dry cleaner, think of kind of where you order food. So we live in this sort of the tail end of the B to B to C part of the economy. If you think about how you interact with that group, how you interact, how you order food, that has changed dramatically over the last four years. So you have, from a B to C perspective, sort of from a business to consumer perspective, if you think about the way that we order food, the way that we schedule, you know, when we want to get our haircut, for instance, the way that we schedule medical appointments, dropping off our dog at the clinic, that kind of thing.

2:30Those consumer applications, we've been investing in consumer applications pretty heavy. My last four years were specifically in that segment. And the adoption, in particular, accelerated by the pandemic has been awesome. So the way that we interact with that distributed endpoint and picking up groceries, that's changed dramatically. What's also changed, which is a function of the pandemic and the workforce and a lot of things, is the way that, think of it as a franchise. A lot of these tend to be franchise businesses. How they're run and how they're operated. What used to be sort of half digital and half analog has now become, or paperwork, has now become almost all digital.

3:05So we schedule digitally. We order digitally as it relates to how we work with our suppliers and vendors. When you're doing reporting from a corporate perspective, all of that has changed. And it's all cloud-based, which is super, super cool because it provides mid-market companies and franchisees and franchise owners with access to the economies that you can really only find in the cloud. And so what blocks access is it's too risky. I can't run all of my business applications and be completely dependent on what amounts to a public utility in a strip center. or they just don't move and they don't have the option to take advantage of some of the new marketing, third-party marketing, DoorDash, and those kinds of things.

3:53So they either suffer through the issue or they don't have access to cloud applications. And so what BigLeaf does is it provides a very simple solution that it provides a common experience over a large wide area network. So if you think of Hungry Howie's Pizza based in Detroit, which is where you're from, They have 550 locations. And all of those franchisees run Hunger Rush in a lot of cases is a cloud POS, but they also have online ordering and all of those types of things. So when there's a challenge, if you will, with an app, Dan McKay is looking across 500, 550 different ISPs to kind of figure out what the problem might be.

4:35but the big leaf overlays that so your network has a common look and feel which makes it a lot easier to manage more importantly it provides a common experience so we have peering relationships that allow your applications to work better so think amazon applications uh applicate you know connectivities to mckesson cloud apps those kinds of things that allow you know that allow our customers to have a better load balanced you know cleaner experience when they're accessing and applications. We also do prioritization. So within a doctor's office, for instance, so we do a lot in dermatology. So you're a dermatology image down in the Valley in Texas being supported by doctors that are in Houston.

5:16The prioritization of that traffic over other activity that might be going on at that distributed endpoint, the ability to say this is more important than that, super important. And then really the biggest part of our value proposition that seems to resonate with customers, you know, is the ability to maintain state in a failure situation. So our customers tend to, you know, if you're going to rely on the internet for business applications, you tend to have two circuits, you need those circuits to be able to, you know, to be able to work together. So it's a great product for a franchisee model, it deploys in about 15 minutes.

5:49It's relatively inexpensive, and it allows businesses to the confidence to do business over the internet. And, you know, it's when you can take control over a public utility, that just gives you a lot of advantages. And so we've done that. Big Lee's been at it since 2015. It's a super cool company full of great people. So, and again, just to make sure I understand this. So this is a solution for, let's say, you know, we've got brick and mortar business and our connectivity, if we lose connectivity, we can't process business at all. Is that more of a point of sale location? Or are you thinking more of, you know, you know, a web based application order taking that sort of thing?

6:36So, so all of the above, if you think of contact center, so the primary applications, it's easy to talk about POS, because people can relate to it. But the primary applications that drive the need for our product are connected connections to a customer service experience. So think of it as a call center, you know, anything that has mission critical business application. So, you know, again, you're, you're at, you know, you're at a remote healthcare facility doing imaging work. You know, that traffic is, that traffic is super, super important, but those applications, you know, the applications vary.

7:09It's not, it's easy to think about placing an order for food. It's a little more complicated to think about how, you know, the, the support and services that you get in a professional scenario and a professional services scenario, But it's all the same thing. It's cloud applications being accessed over the internet. And the big change has been the uplift on the consumer side. Yeah. So when we think about where typical, let's think about like a point of sale, like we're dealing with business and they've got multiple locations. One of those locations, or it might be multiple, right? If it's an outage, where do outages or disruptions typically occur?

7:50you know, when we're thinking about kind of that kind of the end user in person experience? Well, so, so, you know, outages are sort of the big dramatic event, the more prevalent thing is performance degradation. Oh, okay. So when I say, you know, the people buy on fear, if you will, you know, this is we're going to be able to maintain your state if you have a if you have a backbone failure, if the network's the last mile gets cut. That's kind of rare. I mean, you know, That doesn't happen nearly as long as protection if it does. But the main thing, and you think about it in the world that we live in with remote work and that kind of thing, it's the quality of the experience.

8:29And you mentioned POS. That entire industry is a battle over experience. If you think of DoorDash and you think of Olo and all that nature there, it's really who has the best platform that can create the best experience. And that is almost, I mean, a lot of that's about the user interface and the way that it works. but assuming that everybody's putting their best foot forward there, it's about performance and the ability of the application to perform. So if you are an application owner trying to get that application to market, the last thing that you want is to have problems around the connectivity piece.

9:00And again, so BigLeaf is a very, you know, it's an, I think I call it an elegant, very simple solution, but it has a big, it has a big bang and it does a lot of good. It creates a lot of opportunities for the endpoint and it creates a great customer experience for the consumer population. There absolutely have been very notable and publicized, you know, degradations of, you know, access for end level customers. Certainly outages can be not just damaging for lost sales during that span when there's that, you know, quality of service issue, but then there's reputational damage and, you know, shareholders that are questioning.

9:45You know, the readiness for that next fundraise, like, are you sure you guys have your stuff together? You keep having issues with quality here on being able to deliver. I mean, these are really valuable, you know, roads that need to stay flowing. Oh, think of the process of selling franchises. The things that people get tripped up on tend to be, outside of franchise fees and royalties, tend to be marketing and the performance of the things that they're required to use as part of the agreement. that the last thing that anyone would want to have from a from a reputation perspective is are issues associated with connectivity it's just not reasonable and so you know and big leaf solves that problem again it makes it it makes it very easy for folks to have that kind of confidence to say you know what i can i'm going all in i'm going to outsource my contact center uh you know everything's i'm going to move all in on digital i'm going to get a you know i'm going to get an LTE circuit or some type of wireless to, you know, to put some suspenders on the solution.

10:56And I'm going to put Big Leaf in front of it and let it rip. And that really is our business. So when we're dealing with franchisors, you know, certainly they're interested in our ability to create an experience for their consumers and all of the table stakes items that you would expect. but they're trying to sell franchises. And so they need to know, and those franchise, and they need access, they need visibility. So these above store applications that allow the franchise to have optics into what's going on from an operational perspective in the field, that's super, super important to them. And then the ability for their technology to help them grow their business and sell their franchise, that's beneficial.

11:42So think of marketing, You know, the ability to leverage third-party marketing, all of that stuff is done on the internet. And all of it accesses at some point in time the endpoint location. And so making certain that we've done everything we can to ensure the quality of that without having to use a private circuit, I think is just good hygiene. And the franchise or community clearly agrees. Yeah. And so obviously we've been talking about, you know, multiple location, you know, brands, businesses. is who else should be reaching out to Big Leaf and having a conversation, you know, particularly thinking about particular industries or stages or sizes of companies or just, you know, typical, I don't know, just higher risk where this is pretty mission critical stuff.

12:33It's kind of almost a no-brainer that they'd better have some investments in redundancies and, you know, know, again, configurations are going to provide availability when they need it all the time. So we, you know, we think about it, you know, from if it's mission critical, even single site locations, you know, have the need for, you know, for our products. When I think about, you know, what market are we not present in at the level that I think that we, you know, could and should be, it's really, you know, when we think about the unified communication providers, like I can't imagine, whether that's Verizon or at the highest level or companies like Broadvoice, which are RingCentral, that those type of businesses would ever deploy their product behind literally what amounts to commodity-based public utility strip center internet.

13:30That just doesn't really make a whole lot of sense. And so we're beginning to engage a little closer with those type of providers because they have an uphill battle as well. You know, the performance is important to, you know, we're starting to, look, you and I are on a video call that the performance of this is super, super important. The same thing, you know, holds true, you know, with teams and all the other collaboration applications. So it's, I don't, you know, I say this product, BigLeaf, is really perfectly elastic. I can't think of anyone who's doing anything important on the internet that wouldn't require a tighter peering, better performance, the ability to fail over, and then traffic prioritization.

14:17I mean, you could take it all the way to the house. I work as the CEO of BigLeaf from my home in Houston, Texas. I'm connected over an Xfinity broadband connection. That connection, it sometimes is the lifeblood of this business. And that's a lot of responsibility on Queensberry Lane in Houston, Texas. And so the thought of not having something that takes that circuit and allows me to have end-to-end control just doesn't make a whole lot of sense. So here's another one. There's a lot of people like me running businesses from their home, and they're doing it with performance problems. That won't work in the long run.

14:58And so I think you will see, you know, we're not a consumer company, but I think you will see people adopt, you know, the low end of our product to solve problems in their home. In particular, when it's a lot easier to buy a backup wireless circuit, you can integrate those two together so that you could fail over between your wire line circuit and your wireless circuit, which we're getting closer. Yeah. And that was my question. For someone who's a really, really early stage or, again, their operations are not as demanding. So I'm curious where that floor begins when they ought to start at least having a conversation to consider whether or not they're ready for something that BigLeaf can provide.

15:45Yeah, I think, you know, so this is an easy to buy product, Josh. So think about, we sell to the low bandwidth, cloud first, distributed community. The best example of that is the consumer market, you and I. We have cell phones, we consume cloud applications, and, you know, we're as distributed as it gets. One step up from that is BigLeaf's market. So the appeal is mass. There is no site with dual internet connections that doesn't have the use for our product. Now, they might be more sophisticated in that they need the type of security element or something that is over and above what BigLeaf provides.

16:33For instance, we have competitors that are a lot more sophisticated around SASE solutions and zero trust and some of those things. We work with those providers. In some cases, we're displaced because the use case is just above our head, so to speak. And we're perfectly fine living in that world. We don't have intentions to go all in in areas that we're not in currently. We want to be able to enhance, and I came out of the security space. I know it well, and I take it very serious. But we want to be able to accommodate the security needs of what people already have. Again, we're pure. This is an internet optimization product.

17:17Yeah. Again, the website, bigleaf.net. Greg, when somebody goes there and they're like, yeah, I probably should have a conversation with someone. Or is there some place that they can maybe do a little bit more research? And what are those next steps from here? Yeah, so go to bigleaf.com. The resource section has a library. There's a lot of cool videos, use cases. You can learn more about the product for those people with franchises that they're trying to sell. It's probably a great place to start. If you're interested in talking to us and engaging and understanding more about what we do, there's a tab for a request for a demo.

17:54or you can always reach out to me directly, gdavis at bigleaf.net and you can find me on LinkedIn as well. Yeah, awesome. All right, Greg Davis, again, CEO of Big Leaf, found on the web at, you'd mentioned bigleaf.com or bigleaf.net is the website I've been looking at. Greg, fantastic. Thank you so much for joining us. Josh, it was great meeting you. Take care, man.

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