1806 – Overcoming Project Execution Challenges with Sean Languedoc

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2:14With us right now is Sean Longadoc. Sean, you are the founder and CEO of Outforce. You're found on the web at outforce.ai. Sean, it's great to have you. Thank you for having me, Josh. I really appreciate it. Yeah, absolutely. I'd love to learn a bit about what Outforce does. It's the product of having built four tech companies and actually suffering from all the noise in the outsourcing world. You know, when you're looking to hire a software engineer, a good one, all the good ones are obviously employed. And sometimes you need to do a big push to get something ready for a conference or a big client.

2:57that needs something specialized done, whatever the reasons you want to do it, it's usually a time-sensitive requirement with expertise needed. And if you ask any outsourcing agency, they'll all tell you they can do it, but only a few are really good at what you want to do. So they're hard to find. So it's kind of like you go from a desert of engineering capacity when you're looking to hire them to water, water everywhere and not a drop to drink. So rather than what I wasted a lot of time talking to engineering companies that were a waste of time. And the worst thing you could do is waste your time spending money on those people.

3:32Yeah. So I really just wanted to build a filter so nobody wastes their time talking to engineering companies that are a waste of time and get matched way faster, way quicker and get their products built with the right teams. For someone that hasn't hired or staffed out, you know, engineers, can you explain like what the typical process usually looks like and why it can be problematic. You know, it's certainly risky. Yeah, it totally is. So, I mean, hiring your own engineers is usually really done well slowly, and it has to be done slowly because there's just not that many good people available.

4:11Even with the layoffs, there's still only a 1.7 % unemployment rate in engineering for software in tech sector. and there's still 350 ,000 tech jobs available in the market, even with all those layoffs. So don't kid yourself, it's a tight market and it's tight worldwide because everyone's discovered other markets where to find those good engineers. So that's a slow process. And if your typical hiring process would be, you find a senior engineer who then helps with his or her network to find other engineers and three months to find the first one, a couple more months to find the second and third to get a cross-functional team of about seven people takes between nine and 12 months between onboarding and hiring so outsourcing offers that opportunity to accelerate that to you know getting five or seven people in a couple weeks yeah takes months to figure out who's good right so and it and it is your baby i mean assuming you've built something already you know you're you know you built it and now you're growing it and maybe you got a big check from a venture capital company or, like I said, a big enterprise customer that wants to build a new front end or you need APIs to connect to other channel partners, whatever it is, this is your baby.

5:29And you don't want, you know, you don't take your baby to just any old daycare. You want to know who's good, right? So your first motion is generally to talk to friends. So Josh, do you know anybody who's good? Oh, sure. Yeah. But I don't know that they're the best for you. That's right. So you might, and if you know somebody who's good, they're generally booked out because good engineers, like I said, are booked out. Or they might be in a completely different tech, so domain expertise, right? So you might know media experts, but I might be in fintech or health tech or a marketplace need. And so I want people who understand the business logic, right?

6:05So that's first criteria is domain expertise. And then the second criteria is technical expertise, do they understand the tech stack? So that all reduces your onboarding process. And the problem is with the current motions is, and everybody does it, you sort of go to your friends who you know has a good experience. Like I said, they get booked out. Then you go online. Now you're subject to people who are really good at SEO and SEM, like online marketing. And then you speak to the leaders of the organization or the salesperson, and they'll tell you everything you want to hear. Right. And then they'll try and find whoever they can to fill it in.

6:43And that can be, like I said, a big waste of time. So we do a bottom up approach to filter. You know, and I don't know that every founder of a tech company is necessarily super techie themselves. Right. And so there's always to this, this challenge that, you know, A founder of Visionary may come in and say, hey, listen, I've got this great idea. But it's not as it can be challenging to make sure that you're hiring the right folks, but then the ongoing operation. And I know from my own experience, I had to learn through the School of Hard Knocks. Sean, you've been, what, a five-time tech founder now.

7:22So I'm sure that by the fifth go around, there was a lot of wisdom that you had gained that you didn't have in that first go around. Oh, yeah. I got the scars to prove it. No, no, definitely. And even hiring, like outsourcing is a risky business. Hiring is a risky business. You know, you got a 50 % chance it's not going to work out. There's anyone who's really good at technology. A lot of people who are really good at technology are not really great at interviewing. So if you're not in technology and you don't know how to interview, guess what happens? You end up hiring people who you think you're going to like who are good in technology, but they might not be as skilled as you want.

8:01So anything can happen like that. Yeah, it's totally fraught with problems. Yeah. And so can you kind of explain how the Outforce platform works and kind of where it fits in? Yeah. Yeah. So, I mean, like I said, the motions you can do, you can, and again, the third motion besides online looking is to pick a country, right? Poland, Eastern Europe, generally known for good engineers, or India generally has a reputation for less expensive, but obviously time zone constraints. So we say, don't pick a geography, pick the industry expertise, then pick the tech stack depth and then figure out geography where you really want to know who are the best engineers and where are and and then figure out if where they are are they available and are they at the right price and go from there so um so we take a bottom approach and as i said that most people ask like if i came to you and said josh you got an engineering firm hey i'm building a fintech application we need a payment rails for visa or whatever can you build it well josh you're in sales, you're going to go, yeah, of course I can.

9:11And then you go find something to do it. Picking the hiring requirements down the road a bit. What we do is we go to companies and we say, hey, we represent North American companies that are looking for engineering capacity. If we brought you the perfect client, what business would it be in? And they go, oh, Well, marketplaces, what kind of marketplace, B2B, B2C, fashion, logistics, you know, these are very different kinds of business logics. So we get down that down that well. And then out of thousands of companies, there's literally, you know, there's probably 200 ,000 companies out there. We have about 80 ,000 in our database.

9:51We narrow it down to about 50 that are really well suited on paper. And then out of those 50, we nail it down to who's the best teams that are available for our client based on their resumes. And so we're doing it a bottom up as opposed to a top down. We're looking at the actual people that are available at the time my clients are asking. That makes a big difference. Yeah. And Sean, tell me about, you know, Outforce AI, the company itself and kind of who you brought together. And, you know, because obviously I had a lot of backend stuff to develop just for this. Yeah, no, I can't imagine like who the engineers that you hired and you explain.

10:29All right. So here's what you're going to be building. It's a little meta. Well, it's actually a really, at this point, very much a services company. It's very high touch. You know, the amount of money spent on outsourcing ends up being pretty significant. And so we want to make, we have a lot of people making sure things go really smoothly. So we don't step away once we've matched a company with a client. We stay involved heavily on, you know, making sure that everything's working smoothly from an HR perspective and the timesheets are all lined up, you know, those kinds of things. I would liken us more to a travel agency.

11:06You know, we know where to go, who to talk to, where to eat, all those things, how many tables, how many seats you need at the table, where the best places to go are. We're slowly moving towards being more a do-it-yourself because I've also recognized that engineers hate talking to salespeople. Duh. And so letting the engineer actually doing the filtering for themselves, and then we'll do the due diligence once they've shortlisted a list. So we're slowly becoming more like an Expedia as opposed to travel agency. Yeah. And how does the model work? So if someone's like, well, look, you know, we're going to have some projects coming up ahead in 2024.

11:44We know we're going to need to staff, you know, two to four or five engineers. How do they how does the kind of the pricing model work and so forth? Yeah. So we work on a markup basis. So it's very important that we don't take any money from one of the vendors because then that would impede our neutrality in searching on behalf of the clients. So we make an agreement with the client based on volume and length of contracts on a markup. And then that markup gets added to whatever the winning vendor is. And what's nice about how we work is we have so much leverage, more than the client. So let's say a client needs two or three or five engineers.

12:25Well, in some companies that are maybe the perfect fit, that's maybe not a lot of their engineering bench. And so they're going to like, hey, this is our retail price. And we can say, hey, look, we're the entree for you to get in North America, do really well here, and we can know more about you, and you can potentially get more business through utilization and recommendations. So we have a much more levered negotiating power on behalf of the client. We generally drive it down to our markup being revenue neutral for the client or cost neutral for the client. Yeah, that's pretty great. I was going to point out something that you had recently written.

13:04It was in a Forbes Council post, but you kind of talked about, just since I got Gotcha. You've done some thought leadership work around this. As leaders, sometimes, again, defining scope can be tricky. Not scope, but just kind of how that gets executed, right? And sometimes we end up lumping a bunch of stuff that maybe isn't truly critical or essential. And you offered some advice about helping to understand, you know, maybe some of that unessential or non-essential work that's being done so we can kind of focus on what really matters. Do you mind maybe sharing some thoughts around that topic?

13:47Well, yeah, a lot of people think of outsourcing as doing a project. And most people don't have projects sufficiently scoped out to really do that kind of a thing. Big government organizations, they can spend months getting these things organized and enterprises have a fully scoped out project. But most companies really don't have, as you said, Josh, earlier, the technical expertise to really understand scope or how an agile development environment works. So sometimes it's better to actually bring, there's many methods of applying an outsourcing agency. probably the best method is to bring a few of the engineers into your existing engineering team as a staff augmentation team so they really get embedded with the culture of your organization, understand the logic of how you're building things better, and then they can break back into their own team so that they are really efficient and understand everything and they effectively become a clamp-on to your existing team.

14:52and time and materials as opposed to fixed price contract. Because fixed price contract sounds, oh man, that's great. I know exactly what it's going to cost. We'll get, you know, three weeks later, you're going, oh, I forgot about that. I forgot about that. And then you're adding and adding and adding and it goes infinitum. You can get really. Scope creep. Scope creep is so easy to do. Is any advice on like how to either get it right at the beginning or how to, I don't know, what's your opinion on that? Because I know that that happens frequently. I know I did that. You know, so for our last company, it was a, you know, it was again, it was a SaaS B2C platform.

15:27And I mean, we were just constantly in the iterative process of developing like, oh, yeah, we should probably do that. Oh, yeah, yeah. No, oh, I didn't consider that. Right. And so just like along the way, and I'm sure the developers I was working with are like, oh, man, this guy. Well, that's true of any earlier stage company. Most companies have an idea, build a product, and then realize, oh, this is what the customer actually wants, and then drift off. Hopefully, if they're going to be successful, they're going to listen to the customers and actually build what they want, not what you think they want.

16:01And very few people have the Steve Jobs magic of knowing what the customer wants before they actually want it. Most companies are responding to customer demand. And so it's almost impossible to figure out what they want until you actually push it out to them. So what's really important, what you just described though, Josh, is having a lot of dynamic interaction between engineering and sales and customer success teams so that you're getting that feedback loop on what's important because you don't want to build what you think is important and find out it's a waste of your time and money. You want to build what you really want the customer to know.

16:37And that's probably where a lot of companies fail is they just think those engineers, they don't know what they're, just go build what I tell you to build. No, let them get involved. And that way they can also scope out whether this is going to be a massive project or whether it's minor. And sometimes the minor things are the tweaks that the clients love and really hook onto and gets you sticky with your clients. So very important to have a leader within the engineering team that is really good at listening and communicating with sales, customer service, and ideally directly with the client. But nobody gets it all.

17:15I can guarantee it. No, right. Yes. Well, good. It's good to know that I wasn't too far off course in our experience with that. Sean, your website is outforce.ai. To our friend that's been listening to our conversation, what would you recommend that they do? Well, first of all, one of the most important things, and I do this company as much for the sake of entrepreneurs, that they don't waste time talking to engineering firms that are a waste of time. And there's a lot of them. They can be the right ones on paper, even for us, but they don't have the right engineers at the right time. So effectively shortening that period of time to understand how to do this.

17:59somebody told me I should sell the book. We've written the definitive guide for outsourcing, and that's available for free on our website. So even if you don't use our service, take a look at that before you go and outsource for engineering. It has all the trick questions to ask, all the things to look out for, and I implore you to take a look at that. And if you want to test drive our product, we do have a redacted version of the entire database, which is 79 ,000 companies to choose from and their median rates. So you can get a sense of how much in our database is actually fitting what you're looking for.

18:38And generally it does work. And then we would love to help you. I mean, that's what we're here for. It's doesn't cost anything to search. As I said, we only take a markup if you successfully find the right agency through our service. I like it. All right. So the website again is outforce.ai. the resources. If you hover over where it says resources and then you click on guides, you actually have six different guides here that, again, looks like you just click and it's yours. And then again, you can test drive the platform as well. And again, the website, outforce.ai. Well, Sean Languedoc, again, thank you so much for joining us again, founder and CEO.

19:20Sean, it's been a joy having this conversation. Thank you, Josh. I appreciate it. And happy holidays.

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