2120 - Transforming Data Challenges into Growth Opportunities with Collin Graves

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1:05With us right now, it's Colin Graves. Colin, you are the founder of North Labs. North Labs is found on the web at northlabs.io. Colin, thank you for joining us. Happy to be here. Well, you say that every business problem is a data problem. Tell me more. Yeah, I've been in this world for a long time, 17 years and counting, and got my start not in the data space. We were early adopters of believing in what cloud technology was going to do for businesses. and I built my first business quite strictly around the cloud and moving organizations to the cloud. And 2016, 2017, I sort of had an aha moment and said, okay, what businesses actually struggle with is the ability to look across their data, across all their functions, all their workflows and processes, and use that data to steer the ship, right?

2:03So many of us as business owners are used to sort of navigating off of gut instinct, the stars in the sky, as you will. And wouldn't it be nice not only to have a compass as you're out in the, you know, sailing in the night, but to maybe have a GPS even. And really, I believe that successfully leveraging data within a business is the single greatest way that business owners can drive productivity, efficiency, and ultimately the growth of their profits. Well, so here we are. We've just now entered into 2025. I suspect that from your perspective, you have some observations. Can you give us a little bit of a state of the union for your world right now?

2:52Sure. Yeah, I think what we're going to see progressively over the next few years. Obviously, Gen.ai is the hot topic of the day within our space. How can we leverage these large language models to make better decisions for our business? Because they should be so much more than just chatbots or agents that you interact with for just singular needs. What I think is going to happen is we're going to see a slowdown in adoption of software as a service or SaaS platforms over the next five years, right? If you think of, I work a lot in manufacturing and industrial. If you think of the explosion of software just in that vertical over the last 10 years, the average manufacturing firm in America has gone from having something like 55 to 60 total systems to now having more than 130 total systems within their business.

3:54And the problem that emerges from that is what I call SaaS overlap or software overlap. That is, you adopt a product, but it doesn't quite do everything that you need it to do to fit within the constructs of your business. So what do you do to fill those gaps? You acquire another piece of technology and sort of lay it partially on top of the last piece of technology you adopted, and you're left with this very sort of complex interweaving of different systems. What I think is going to happen is that generative AI is going to be able to act as the business logic layer for a lot of companies out there.

4:43And the SaaS systems you do need to keep in place will more or less be relegated to just sort of being databases and structuring data in a certain way. But ultimately, the Gen AI, the AI movement that we're in is really going to usher in this new age of, hey, I don't need to stack a bunch of software tools on top of each other. I can build out customizations with AI, and the AI will understand what I'm talking about, and I don't need to buy more software to fill in those gaps. This is not just me thinking this. If you think of Satya Nadella from Microsoft, he shares a very similar vision. And we've already seen case studies, mostly in the Bay Area, right?

5:33Those folks who sort of live at the bleeding edge of technology adoption, who have successfully undergone this transformation. So they've shed a lot of software and they're now using AI as that webbing between systems as opposed to just stacking different systems on top of one another. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, there's so many other like, you know, critical connections and points. And, you know, what does this mean? And I think most of us, Colin, are just we're just insanely busy doing what we do. And just the, you know, unless you have someone dedicated to really looking for these opportunities internally, it's much easier to just stick with the status quo.

6:21But there's a problem with the status quo. And I'm sure that you see this with clients that come in. You've worked with clients like IMAX, for example. I mean, what an incredible opportunity that is. But I suspect that when you have a client coming in, Colin, do they know something is wrong or are they just they're probably sensing the consequences of that and maybe don't they need some sleuthing? I don't know. I'm just speculating here, but I'm curious, you know, kind of what that emotional journey is or that realization is that your clients have when they realize, whoa, when we started overlaying this data point and this data point and this information and this groundswell that we're starting to see here, well, you start connecting all those.

7:13Wow. And all of a sudden it becomes so much clearer. I'm sure you've got a story or two that fits that pattern. Your speculation is correct. I would say that most organizations who come to us are one of two varieties. One, they know they need to be doing something more than they're doing today and really don't know where to begin. or they're a group who has spent the last X number of years trying this out. And now they say, look, we're, we're 30 months into this. We've sent, we, you know, set so much money on fire and we're nowhere closer to our, our goals than we set out to be all that time ago, right?

7:57Several business cycles ago. And you're exactly right. I mean, I equate it to, I keep going back to navigation. I'm not an expert navigator by any means, but imagine you had a map in front of you and you had to traverse through mountains. And all of a sudden, you know, instead of having the entire map with the entire range and all the trails that can lead you to where you're trying to go, you have a one inch by one inch piece of that map. And you're needing to figure out how to navigate on the basis of that small bit of the map. That's essentially where a lot of organizations are today. And we see that with them having to abruptly turn the wheel of their business every single quarter, because that's how quickly they're getting access to unified information.

8:49That's when finance has the reporting, sales has the reporting, marketing has the reporting, and the executive team can sit down and go, okay, it's labor intensive, but let's combine these and see what the state of the business is, like you alluded to. Imagine if, for an instance, that data was combined and updating a hundred times a day, even one time per day, how much better that would be for the business. And where a lot of organizations fall short, and this goes back to sort of my original point, the hardest thing when you're talking about data maturity is integrating between systems. Yes.

9:31Because every system is structured differently. You know, some databases say customer first name, customer last name. The other one just says customer name. Something as trivial as that actually requires effort. You want to get all of your data speaking the same language. Now imagine for an instance, you had a system, an AI system that was smart enough to say, I know what a customer first name is and what a customer last name is. And I also know that a customer name should have a first and last name in it. Now, all of a sudden that manual work that is tedious and prone to breakage and all of that stuff, it's gone.

10:10And all of a sudden you have these systems that can be operating around the clock, not only to show you what's going on, but what I'm most excited about is when a system can reach out and tap Josh, the CEO on the shoulder and go, hey, this is important enough for me to make you aware of right now. I know you're busy, but you need to see what's going on. And all of a sudden, you have a much better worldview of your business and can make better decisions. You know, Colin, and I suspect too, this is kind of the final question I want to ask on this topic, is that I suspect that there was likely gaps that were known gaps in the past.

10:51And maybe these gaps when it came to intelligence and or data were just too prohibitive to gather or too labor intensive. Or listen, that's going to take us four or five months. It's not worth it to do that. Now, to our friend that's listening, you may have had an experience like that in the past. With today's technology and AI, there are no more excuses. Anything that you want clarity on is so much easier to get today. Do you mind, Colin, just as we kind of get toward the end here, just to put a cherry on it, how is North Labs specifically giving? So what is the kind of the day-to-day operation manual that comes with working with you?

11:42What is it like using North Labs? Yeah, it's a good question. I mean, if you think of the data, excuse me, an AI landscape today, there are more tools than ever before. And the folks who you go out and hire in the market might have a small amount of experience with some, not at all with others. and where I usually see organizations get hamstrung is twofold. One is where do we start? Because we're still in the mindset of in the business world today of saying, I just want to have better data maturity. I just want to have insights. And so that sort of brings this boil the ocean mentality into the business.

12:28Let's just get all of our data ingested and all of our data in this worldview and then we'll get to it. Well, guess what? You are years away from that. And most of that effort is going to be wasted because it's not an important enough business ROI thesis to be spending money on. So my encouragement to anybody listening to this is you have a top three list as a business leader within your company of where you think data can help you the most. Start with one. And it's exceptionally difficult, but start with one. That's the hardest conversation I have with people. Secondly, secondly, because the desire I can imagine is we want to fix all the things we, like if we're going to do that and it's so, I don't know what a good analogy is for that, but it's like, I can, I can so identify with that, you know, even just like on a super micro small scale.

13:27Like I, you know, like, you know, I, I'm kind of a geek when it comes to smart home technology and IOT and, you know, like getting automation shortcuts working. Well, you know, it's like, even in my house, like if you want to totally trick out your house and make it a smart home, you know, if you just start so macro like that, and it's like, you're not going to know where to start. It's going to be overwhelming. You're going to get like, everyone's going to be frustrated. Everyone is going to be me, right? It's just like, it's too big of a job, right? So then you're just like, you know what? I'm just going to focus on the bedroom and we're going to, we're going to make this, and your, and also Colin, I would imagine you're going to learn so much by going, rather than going an inch deep and a mile wide, go an inch wide and a mile deep.

14:15And boy, can you imagine if you optimize a single department within your organization, and then you learn so much through that process? Man, Colin, I am sorry for, I just got excited talking about this and thinking about the opportunities here. This is your interview. No, for sure. But let me pull on that thread for a second, because that brings me to my second point where people get stuck. Now, imagine you're focused on your home automation. The concepts are the exact same here. Where would you argue the person who's really jazzed up, is there a New Year's resolution? I'm going to turn my home into an automated Fort Knox.

14:54Where do you think most of them get stuck in the process? Yeah, it's a technical hurdle and feeling just getting overwhelmed, right? It's just, it's too much. I don't know where to start. And also they think that they need to buy thousands and thousands of dollars of new equipment and stuff. And like, hold up, right? Even before you start making those investments, I'll tell you this from a personal experience, is I went through, just for ceiling lighting, I went through three brands before I finally picked the one that was going to fit. And having gained that knowledge early, well, actually I didn't.

15:31I ended up making a mistake. Now, thankfully, it wasn't my third brand in all of the rooms, but it was my second brand in all of the rooms. had I stuck to my guns on the principle that we're talking about, I would have saved money. I would have got to the end solution a lot faster. I see you smiling, Colin. Yes. So that's exactly my point. I just proved your point. So we have to remember that the folks that you're assigning to build your data maturity are engineers by trade. And this is me speaking as a former reformed engineer, if you will. right? What do engineers love more than anything in the world?

16:08They love to tinker and build things, right? And they like to test out various models of things. It's just within their DNA. So the two places where most organizations get stuck is, one, I don't know where to begin, or I want to begin everywhere, which is wrong. The second choice is, I really want to make sure that I make my tooling decisions correct, right? And so some organizations spend years evaluating different tools, all of which are probably similar to each other. So the way we help solve this for customers is we bring all of the people, all of the process, all of the technology to the table for an all-inclusive fee.

16:52It's unlimited, all you can eat, everything's paid for, but we know what works. We've done the R &D. So everything from basic insights and dashboarding and reports all the way through to that generative AI connective tissue that I talked about earlier, it's ready for you on day one. We have pre-built models that are deployable around your use cases, which is typically 80 % of the lift for anything data related is how do I get the data from all these various sources to speak the same language and subscribe to the same laws of physics. So we have a lot of that stuff pre-built. So we drop it in, we turn it on, lo and behold, it works.

17:34And now we can focus our time, attention, budget, and capacity on actually leveraging that data to learn what we need to change or reorient within the business to drive measurable value. Because everything else that precedes that is what I call undifferentiated heavy lifting. There is no ROI thesis on what tool you choose or how long your contract is or which large language model you're going to use. There is no ROI that comes from that decision. The ROI comes after the fact, after those tools are in place, and you can leverage it in a business capacity to optimize your operations and optimize your profitability.

18:22And so we, I like to say, we offer cheat codes to our customers because all of that is done. All of the pieces fit. There are no random fires that pop up. And everyone that we bring to the table from a people perspective are deep experts in all of those tools, which means you can move faster, which means you spend less budget, which means you spend less time, which means your ROI is greater. Your website, northlabs.io. Colin Graves, when someone goes to visit northlabs.io, what would you recommend they click on? What do they do? Have a look. Our websites do a refresh for sure. I would recommend folks connect with me on LinkedIn, just slash in slash Colin with two L's, Graves like dead people.

19:11I'm very active on LinkedIn, nowhere else on the internet. I have no other social media, but I love LinkedIn. I love to share what I've learned over the past almost two decades and really just be a sounding board for people and share what I've learned over, you know, now a thousand customer projects. And I think that's, you know, I can help them avoid the, at least the largest icebergs in the way going back to that navigation problem. So, yeah. All right, northlabs.io, Colin Graves. You're the managing partner and founder. Colin, it's been a great conversation. Thank you so much for this. Thank you, Josh.

19:58Thanks for listening to the Thoughtful Entrepreneur Show. If you are a thoughtful business owner or professional who would like to be on this daily program, Please visit upmyinfluence.com and click on podcast. We believe that every person has a message that can positively impact the world. We love our community who listens and shares our program every day. Together, we are empowering one another as thoughtful leaders. And as I mentioned at the beginning of this program, if you're looking for introductions to partners, investors, influencers, and clients, I have had private conversations with over 2 ,000 leaders, asking them where their best business comes from.

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