1647 -Becoming More Technical with Growth Acceleration Partners’ Dave Moore

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0:58with us right now Dave Moore Dave you're the chief innovation officer at growth acceleration partners your website is growth acceleration partners.com Dave thanks for joining us glad to be here Josh thank you yes give us the overview of who growth acceleration partners and what you do and who you serve. Sure. So Growth Acceleration Partners, we advise, design, and build custom software and data solutions. So we've been in business, I think, about 16 years now. Just celebrated an anniversary. We are a woman owned and led with our CEO, Joyce Durst, and have a pretty awesome company that's about 600 people based in the headquarters in Austin, Texas, the United States, and the engineers are in Latin America, mostly Costa Rica and Colombia.

1:51So we help customers that are trying to build things for competitive advantage, and they need the engineering talent to help them figure out what to do and how to do it. Yeah. You know, and Dave, I've had this, you know, I've had conversations about this before. Talk about the advantages of working with a Latin America talent pool. Yep. So if you're US-based, which all of our customers are, central time zone is a big thing that's very important to them. So having that central time instead of something overseas where you have to make some pretty serious adjustments into how you work and how they work, that's one.

2:33But the main thing I would say is the talent pool of engineers in Latin America is phenomenal. So we get really high marks on the quality of engineers that are helping solve customer problems. So that's the big thing. And how is, you know, speaking from someone, maybe that, you know, let's say there's an SMB founder, potential founder that's listening to us, and they don't really understand the world of acquiring talent for software development. Can you kind of just give it, you know, paint a thumbnail picture of what that world is like typically? Yes, it covers a wide range and we have customers that are across the spectrum.

3:19So we have some that are very established, large companies that know exactly what they want and they just need teams of people to help build it. Right. Those are quick, long term engagements. On the other hand, we have some that are like either a startup or they're not super tech savvy. And they're like, I need some advisory services to start with to help me figure out how to lay this thing out and how to build this thing. And then if they like us, we then follow on with the additional engineering resources and say, now let's build it. And so they don't typically start staffing up full-time hires in the U.S.

4:00So they like the flexibility. And then if the startup takes off, then they start expanding with resources in the U.S. and Latin America. And I would imagine with Gap, Growth Acceleration Partners, let's say that the founder isn't explicitly uber technical. And, you know, and maybe initially they were thinking, you know, well, what we're going to do is we're going to just hire a couple developers and I'm going to tell them what to do. And we're going to get this thing built. the project management side of, you know, of, you know, larger, certainly larger scale technical projects, but, you know, things that can get kind of in the weeds.

4:43It's it's it can be not for the faint of heart, in my experience. That's true. And we have rescue missions for companies that have gone down that path that are then like help us because things are off the rails here. and then we need some serious help. But back to your point about not being very technical, when you're creating a business that is, maybe it's a SaaS play, maybe you're hosting it all in the cloud, we are recommending to executives that they should be more technical. This is your business. So something that is so critical on how that whole thing works, you should know that. You don't have to be writing code necessarily.

5:25but you should know about AWS and Azure and cloud and these things because your company depends on it. Instead of just saying, I have to trust this team of people that are wherever. I hope they know what they're doing. The most successful ones are getting more and more technical. Yeah. And where did Gap come from? And how did you get to a point now where you've got a staff of many, many, many, many, many hundreds? uh yeah uh joyce durst uh co-founded it with another person named brett bachman it was like a lifestyle business they had been in the big company world big corporate world and i think joyce's story is that she went down to latin america uh and was sold on the people and the talent and said hey let's start this thing and then it just took off like uh most good ideas and hard to keep up with demand.

6:20And she leveraged her network of resources that were people like that trusted her that said, we would love to use your company to help us build these things. Now we have 600 people. And what are some of these? I think we're in a really interesting time right now because I think we're looking at the promise of AI and how AI can supplement development teams. What are you observing right now? Or how are those conversations going? or things that I would just, what you're observing, what you're witnessing in your space, both with growth acceleration partners and kind of more largely in the industry.

6:59It's crazy. I mean, I have not seen a surge of any technology like this in my lifetime. So our customers, and I'm with quite a few different customers every week, they want to know how they can take advantage of it for business advantage, right? And that's a hard problem, especially when you're talking about you need lots of data and their data is a mess. They want to corral that, but they also want to consider things like data as a product. Maybe we can monetize our data as an additional revenue stream that we've never thought of. There are marketplaces now for the data. So we have very specialized practices, everything from advising around that to actually implementing it with our seasoned data scientists and data engineers that we can help.

7:49Yeah. Who are some of the folks that you've worked with or maybe some case studies or examples that you could kind of point to? Like, oh, oh, okay. Some of the big ones are Amadeus. So if you've ever made an airline reservation, which I'm sure you have, it goes through Amadeus' systems. Another is like Kestra Financial, based out of Austin, Texas, a big fintech play. Satva, the mattress company. We have customers in a wide variety of industries, but our main things are fintech and health, digital health type stuff. Those are our preferred. So yeah, but wide range of customers that were a pivotal part of their technology play.

8:40Right. Before somebody hires a, you know, firm that's kind of helped them build something that they right now is just, you know, it's just kind of on the whiteboard or it's kind of, you know, in there, they've done some mind mapping on it. They've kind of specced out, you know, what they hope to do with that. What would, what, what are some, it's a great pieces of advice you would give them so that they could make a good hire? Because there's a lot of options. And some of them are like, oh, should I just, you know, find some independent contractors? Should I hire internally? Should I, you know, should I work with growth acceleration partners?

9:18Maybe what, I don't know, maybe it's questions they could ask themselves or certainly things to look out for, be careful of. A great question. And in my experience, I find the C-suite is currently overwhelmed with a number of different options, whether or not it's technology or implementation. It's overwhelming. So I would say to get a trusted agnostic advisor, someone that has been there, done that, and has stories of successes as well as failures. Say, this is what's worked for us. This is what we've seen not work. We've been down these roads. We got a lot of scars and burns all over us. And we can help you navigate these treacherous waters.

9:59Find somebody like that. When you do that, then you have, you're kind of joined at the hip with this agency or company that can help really increase your odds of success. Otherwise, we see people making similar mistakes, like the one I mentioned earlier about totally trusting an outsourcing team and then trying to bring it back and stuff like that. We could have helped them before they went down that path. And I'm not saying an outsourcing team is always not the solution. Sometimes it is. But here are the things that you got to be careful of when you do that. Have a product manager on your side.

10:34Have a product manager on their side. We have a long list of things like that that help increase success. Yeah. And so, Dave, what is the, you know, kind of the exploratory process? You know, if someone's like, well, all I know is that we've got something that needs to get done. Sure. You know, happy to have a conversation. But what are those conversations usually look and sound like? They are a freak conversation consultation, typically an hour where let's talk about what you're trying to do and we'll see if we can help. Sometimes it might be something that is totally out of our wheelhouse. We're like, we're not we're not the best ones for this.

11:17but really just kind of chart it out. And the other thing that we like to do in that meeting, Josh, is everything that we do ties back to a business advantage. So we're not technologists that are recommending things because they're new, they're fatty, there are all these cool things. We're like, here's how it's going to increase revenue or it's going to decrease operational expenditure or it's going to make your employees happy or your customers delighted. Those are the things that we focus on And we use technology as a foundation to make that happen. But if we can't tie it back to a business benefit, it falls down.

11:56Yeah. And Dave, you have the distinction of being the chief innovation officer. Talk about that role. That is a role that is centered around failure. So I like to say that the most innovative companies don't just tolerate failure. they actually embrace it and celebrate it. So from an internal perspective, I'm working with our teams to help them kind of push the needle on doing some things and whether or not it's skill sets that we need out for our customers or building product lines that are pretty innovative that are solving specific problems. On the customer facing side, it's about bringing that kind of failure mindset and to make sure that they get comfortable with kind of iterating on things, knowing that you're not going to get it right first, but you're going to get it right eventually.

12:50So, and I'm not talking about failing where you're flying a plane in the side of the mountain. I'm talking about you have like a lab environment where you are testing and really pushing the limits on things and the art of the possible things that you were thought were way out of reach before. Let's focus on those. Those are the reasons people speed to work every day, is focusing on stuff like that. And so that's it. So I have an internal focus and an external focus where I help our customers implement some of these processes. Sure. And your website is growthaccelerationpartners.com to that person that's listening to our conversation.

13:30Maybe they're familiar with you already and this is just part of their due diligence. What are the next steps? The next steps are you can reach out to me. You can find me on LinkedIn. You can find me on the growthaccelerationpartners.com website. I would be glad for any listener. I would be happy to have a free consultation call and just hear what they're trying to do and see if we can recommend any good insights that they can take it forward. So they can find me. I'm easy to find and I'm eager to help. Yes. All right. Good deal. So again, growthaccelerationpartners.com. Dave Moore, your chief innovation officer.

14:10It's been great having you. Thank you so much, Dave, for joining us. Thanks, Josh.

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