03: Scott Francis
Chris Suarez: (00:00)
I'm incredibly excited about today's guest for, for all of you to get to know Scott Francis, who's the CEO and co-founder of BP3 Global. Scott's professional credentials speak just volumes. He was recruited straight from Stanford's campus to work for Trilogy and Scott really became quite quickly. One of Austin's early tech Titans after his tenure at trilogy and his time at Lombardi, Scott and his business partner, co-founded BP three global. And as the co-founder, he served both originally as the CTO. And now as the CEO of BP3, one of the world's leading enterprise software process automation consulting companies. We're going to talk a little bit about what that means and what they do, and even more importantly, why they do it. But BP3's background in business process innovation has been the perfect foundation for, for supporting digital process transformation. If we're going to transform our businesses, truly pursued digital transformation then at some point we have to design and implement new processes and new decisions. So B3 mission is to be the very best partner to their customers for providing those processes and providing that decision-making. And by doing that, they create great customer experiences. Uh, so much of, of that piece is wrapped up in who we are within this community. Taking a step back, looking at our decision-making, looking at the process we go through to make those decisions and, and ask ourselves, are we building those experiential lives? Maybe three, his clients include household names, Boeing, PepsiCo, eBay, Walgreens, Costco, just to name a few. Prompts my favorite part of the interview is when we actually go a little bit deeper. Scott, isn't the only successful entrepreneur in his family. His wife, Cindy is an event strategists and producer who actually founded the company Red Velvet Events and in her own just an incredible entrepreneur, running a wildly successful business.
Chris Suarez: (02:09)
Uh, Red Velvet Events has an impressive client base as well. Her clients include BMW Marriott, PayPal, Ford. So imagine the minds that they get to interact with and collaborate with on a daily basis. And more importantly, imagine running these two massive businesses while coming home and living experientially with their two children. His wife also is the author of the Amazon best seller Behind The Red Velvet Curtain, which is a great read as well. So I can only imagine how experiential it is for these two dynamic entrepreneurs to raise two children while as you find out also serving the community in a really big way. So with that, let's jump in and have you meet Scott Francis of BP3 Global.
Chris Suarez: (03:00)
All right Scott would love for you to begin and tell us a little bit about, I'm going to go all the way to the formation of it, and then we'll come back and unpackage how it got there, but for our community to truly understand what you do, because you have a very interesting niche in your industry and in the marketplace. What is BP3? What's the purpose of it? What's the mission of the company?
Scott Francis: (03:23)
Yeah. So for BP3, our view is that all of our clients have something in common. They're just trying to find the shortest path between where they are in getting a specific business outcome. And so we have organized our company around the concept of finding a faster way to get things done, to get to that outcome, to get the answer. And that fits with what we do. We're all about automation, process automation, decisions, automated. We get to apply AI and machine learning and things like that as well. But a lot of process automation and process understanding doesn't require AI. A lot of it is human and understanding people. So it starts with how do we create a great experience for the people involved? And part of that is by making all that automation feel like magic. Like it's doing the stuff I wanted it to do, rather than making it feel like hard work and making me do all the things I don't want to do.
Scott Francis: (04:20)
So we're trying to get a focus so that automation is really making it feel like we have all the mundane stuff that's getting in my way, the friction in my business goes away. And if you rewind 20 years ago, people would talk about, you know, things like business process management, workflow automation, um, we're kind of terms of art. In Europe they have degrees, didn't go to university and get your degree in business process management. In the US that terminology has gone passe last decades, fashion, but you have to have a new fashion, the stuck it. And, and so we have to, because we do business in both comments, we have to reinvent ourselves periodically, but also stay in touch with our roots, right? And we're certainly all about business process management and automation. The idea that you manage your business through business process, but at the same time, we have to adapt and be thinking about what the next wave of technology adoption is. And in our business, robotic process, automation is a big wave rolling through right now, not just our business across corporate America, PA is a big deal. And when it fits right in with what we're trying to do, which is help our clients get the job done faster, a faster way often is getting a bot to type that information in for you or to especially repetitive information. So it is an interesting niche. And at the same time for almost anyone's business, if they're operating at scale, they have opportunities to improve it, right? There's opportunities to improve the operations, to improve the processes, or to add automation to things that are otherwise being new.
Chris Suarez: (05:45)
I love that explanation. And for those listening that know me know that I could geek out on process and system and automation for hours, and we won't, but that might be another conversation. Let me ask you this, Scott, that you use this word faster, getting things done faster. Is that something always constant in your mind? Were you that kid, were you that guy that always wanted to get things done faster or thought there was an easier way to do things? Or was this something that you developed later because you saw the need?
Scott Francis: (06:15)
Yeah. We ironically, the way we define faster, isn't so much about the speed. Although that's a marketing line, the messaging that we hit it's sometimes finding faster is finding the thing that's easier or less complicated. And so I do think it's that notion just in your personal life, right? You think about the things that make your life easier. Often the things that can take time and making those happen faster, or in some easier fashion, it just takes stress off your plate. And, you know, I was never that guy who was in a rush all the time, or I think it'd be fair to say that it was fairly unhurried, but I also, I, in high school, I wrote all my papers and word processor at an era when most people were handwriting. And I wasn't about to hand edit and use the whiteout or use a typewriter and type it up and use the white out.
Scott Francis: (07:06)
Now people, now my own kids would look at me like I was crazy. If I suggested and writing a paper, they wouldn't relate to that at all. Everybody uses a word processor writer, and at first they don't even use the word processor. They would say it was Google docs or it was word, or the name of the application. But back then it was really unusual and another, just silly personal example. My mother was a reference librarian at the university of Florida. And when I wanted to access information, I could log in from home, plugged the phone into the modem at 600 baht. Maybe I could log in, run a Lexus nexus search, right? Like actually search for the articles. I wanted to find out if they were available where they even at the library or the terminal that I needed and, uh, read the abstract. So I could do a lot of the research from home and then go to the library and check them out or read them at my leisure at a table in the library. So again, something that once you're at the library, much more time consuming to find things because none of it was computer aspect then. So now let's just a couple simple examples, but yeah, I think you always look for how can we be more efficient?
Chris Suarez: (08:10)
Yeah. Why as you look at it even today, uh, why is that efficiency or ease important?
Scott Francis: (08:19)
Yeah, I think as the world gets more complex, right, there just, there's a lot of stress coming at you from different directions on 2020 in particular, right. Just hits you from all sides. And so the more complexity you've left in your life and your work, the harder it is to resolve that when something new shows up. And so being, getting things done faster, getting things done in an easier fashion, leaving you with less complicated work to do, I think really helps. Right? It takes some of that pressure off. You have the head space to react, to think ahead or to think about what the implications of those issues are. Whereas if they're already working at the maximum number of hours, you can work in a week and you haven't optimized, or you haven't found a way to relieve some of that work that could apply to you or to your team or to your organization. It doesn't leave the head space to deal with new stress. So if something changes and you're just stuck, you're a victim to the circumstance rather than reacting to it and trying to innovate or optimize around it.
Chris Suarez: (09:16)
Yeah. That's a big reason why, um, I wanted to introduce you and your company and just your thought process to our community, because as you optimize or you simplify or eliminate the complexity in your work life, it allows the energy and time to show up outside of work as well. And I think you guys have done that incredibly well, not just for your clients, but for your people and employees and contractors and all of that. So let's go backwards now. I believe that one of the cool aspects of your company is really the story of even the city in which it is founded in. You went to school at Stanford and clearly a lots of opportunity in the tech space, in that part of the world. How do you find yourself in Austin, share with us how you landed in Austin, Texas,
Scott Francis: (10:06)
At the time. And I'm sure it's even more so now, right? It is one of those weird places where companies come find you. So when you're looking for a job, you don't so much look for a job as they're looking for you. And now you still have to put yourself out there and you have to interview, you have to go through the process, but you don't have to leave campus to find work. And that is really a kind of special feature of a place like Stanford, especially back in the 90's. And I happened to cross, I went to info sessions from Microsoft or McKinsey. I can't remember there's so many. I can't remember, the facts, it was a financial data company that I looked at and trilogy was one of the companies that ran an info session at Tresor union, which is right in the center of campus. And I was walking by, I recognized a couple of people in the room who are listening to thought will never heard of Trilogy. So I stepped into the back. There was some cookies and free pizza, and I listened to the pitch and I could see that they really had an interesting take on how to recruit people. Then what they're trying to do is challenge you or tell you that what they were doing was really hard. And they were looking for a few people that they thought could handle it, that could do the work, fit their culture. And the couple of people that I recognized who were already there were also people that I remembered from Stanford as being very smart and just really good folks. And so I'm going to have an interview and out of all the places I interviewed, I think Metrology seemed like the most crazy.
Scott Francis: (11:30)
They were the most out there. The culture was a little crazy. And I would even say, it goes so far as to say, I wasn't necessarily a great culture fit because I was a, although I was a hard worker and it was ambitious, Metrology, it was more worn on your sleeve, right? Like that the ambition and the, the, how fast they talked to, you had to amp everything up, talk faster, interact faster, and make your decisions quickly. And I could see right away. They certainly wouldn't punish you for having an ego. If you were interviewing and you had an ego, that's fine. Can you deliver? The only thing they cared about was getting delivered. So when I went through the interview process, I knew how to present myself, you know, in that mode and get the job. And they offered me the job to move down to Austin. And I thought I could come Austin for a year or two wouldn't wouldn't tell me right. Then I moved back to the Bay area and run screaming back. And, um, you're not going to Austin maybe once, right in my life before that, visiting my sister when she was an executive. And I didn't have much of an impression of Austin from that. And I think I saw the Doby, that building and one other building, you know, where she lived. And, and I came down to Austin and actually really, I really liked it, but I also, my first year in Austin, I lived in an apartment by myself. I had a futon and a stereo and like a lawn chair. That was my furniture. And it was very a Spartan lifestyle. I was traveling all the time for work. So although I lived in Austin, I was only home for weekends and about every other weekend.
Scott Francis: (12:57)
So it took a while to Jeanette, with Austin and kind of the turning point really was I moved in with some friends. We had the landlady upstairs and three dudes in the basement and they all worked at Trilogy and they all became great friends while I was there. But that's when I made the turn from living in an apartment to living in Huston. And there was a difference, right? And an apartment. Why do you unpack for, you're going to move again in six months or a year, you just don't have that same sense of home. And this was a house in lost Creek down and found a beautiful part of Austin, why though trees everywhere. And you could really imagine living there. And one of them used to go to the cigar bar and the Cedar street next door and listen to live music. And the other guy was into rock climbing and mountain biking. And I just really benefited from that sense of community, living with those three folks. And you probably could have done a good sitcom, like three's company style. Sit-com with our lean lady upstairs on the three dudes in the basement and the sort of escapades we got into. But luckily there were no cameras. It was all just for fun. And we can bring friends and working together. I think the other great benefit was I got the advice of people who were a few years older than me work my landlord. I want to K. And one of my roommates stay for they're both several years older, right, I just had better perspective and can share that with me as far as I growing as a young professional. And I certainly needed some of that at 23, 24.
Chris Suarez: (14:20)
I have a couple of questions actually. So you're a Trilogy all new years at the interview process, you felt that maybe I didn't fit the culture, but I know how to interview. And I know how I had to show up to fit the culture. When you got there, did you fit, did you grow into that? Did you change? How did that work ?
Is that I think at companies there's room for people who can fit into the culture and the overlap on the things that matter, and the things that mattered in the professional services group, which is where I joined the consulting team, taking care of your customers and solving hard problems for them that they've viewed as unsolvable. And literally they would come to you with a problem and they would say, our IT team says, this can't be done. So can you do it? And then we would go solve it. And that is incredibly gratifying to your ego as a young professional, and you can solve problems that were intractable for your customers, and certainly gets you the kind of attention and rewards that you want within the company when you can deliver in those situations. So I think in that sense, yeah, I fit in fine, but there were, of course, Metrology has other parts of the culture that get a lot of attention, the flights to Vegas or parties and things like that. And I wasn't part of that culture. And I don't think it hurt me at all. You know, not being part of that culture. I don't think it really hurt anyone who opted out of that part, that sort of work hard, play hard. I hopped it out of the play hard, but certainly maintained for fun. I think there's a, it's time to go play tennis and go for a hike and go watch some live music. Like those are awesome, Austin experiences that we just can't get if you're flying to Vegas. So yeah, I think sometimes people try to figure out how to fit all elements of the culture in a company. And I think that's not really what's necessary for it. We're not all sort of carbon cutouts. And actually I think companies benefit from having a Trilogy certainly benefited from having people like me as a counterpoint, to somebody who, who might be more plugged in to that the party card side of the culture as well.
Scott Francis: (16:21)
When I ordered members put it this way and I love the expression. He says, you've got to have people to make it rain. And then it got to have other people to keep people from drowning. And I looked at my job, at Trilogy was mostly keeping folks from ground. That's a, how do I help customers and make them successful? Because somebody made a brand, somebody made that big sale happen. They sold software for $3 million, $5 million, $20 million. I'm going to make it worth it to the plan. And they would show us problems that are in classic computer science terms or NPR problems. I can't compute that in a reasonable amount of time. And we put the data structure together in the algorithms so that it would happen in milliseconds or something 30 second timeframes, predictable. And it's not because we're solving NPR, we reduced the problem. So it was no longer NPR. And you do that with an assumption or two, or setting up the data the right way so that your algorithm is no longer NPR. It's highly predictable and that's fantastic intellectual stimulus.
Chris Suarez: (17:19)
Here's what I, um, figuring out very quickly. What, um, what excited part of Trilogy's workforce may not have excited yours or you, but you were excited by solving almost what you said earlier that people thought was impossible. And coming up with that strove view, what's interesting, as I think most leadership teams have a need to show up with this concept that we need to find simple solutions to complex problem they say that a lot in our business again and again. And interestingly enough, from a young age that really turned you like that drove you, how do we find a simple solution to this complex problem? And that is, we talked, continues to show up as this theme in your life as well. Really? That was, if you will, the beginning, the Genesis, the foundation of BP3 Global, would you agree with that? Yeah,
Scott Francis: (18:14)
I think it was the Genesis kind of in the moment. You don't always connect all the dots. And then looking back, I think one of the things you do when you look back and say, okay, there is some consistency in the motivation and then like why you're thinking about things that way. But our experience when we were ready to start BP3, my partner and I were working within Lombardi, which was a VC funded company and they just couldn't let services be too big of a percentage of the business. And we just felt like that was the wrong way to think about it. That if you're really going to improve, if you're going to go to a company like an Aflac or a Walmart and change their culture around business process, it's not implementing a project. It's implementing a number of projects as part of a program as part of the way of changing their culture around process and rethinking that it's not just about spreadsheets and six Sigma or lean, although those are useful tools, it's also about pushing it into software so that it sticks.
Scott Francis: (19:12)
It's not just about human discipline. It's also about having software that runs it. And that just takes time. It'd be a bit like if I sold you Excel implemented the first pivot table for you. And I said done, you're ready to go. You're digitized, we've got a lot more spreadsheets you probably need to create before your whole business is running on spreadsheets. And it takes more than one to figure out how to use a pivot table properly. And so we felt like we were doing was introducing some culture change and that takes time. It takes a long time. And so we started BP3 partly to be a counterbalance, to Lombardi in a sense because Lombardi had to sell each new plant, take care of them, get them deployed, move to the next milestone. But as BP3, we could stick around longer to help them and make sure that it stuck, made sure that it became a mature customer and not just a one off, I got one project done and then stopped using it. So, uh, that was a big driver.
Chris Suarez: (20:10)
So it's interesting what we learn in each phase of our lives. You were at Trilogy for about seven-ish years. Is that right? Yeah. And Lombardi for about five. Yeah. What was your time at Lombardi and seeing this difference between solution and service, what caused you to recognize that there was a hole in what those larger companies needed and what they were being offered?
Scott Francis: (20:34)
Yeah. I think you look at it two perspectives, right? From your client's perspective, we're from your business's perspective. And certainly from the perspective of trilogy or Marty, we were delivering success in collecting payment and driving growth in the business from a customer success point of view. It depends on their goals. What are they trying to accomplish? And yeah, at both of those companies, I've observed a pretty big gap between what client's end goals were and what we were trying to deliver for them, not what we could deliver, but what we're trying to deliver. And so I think starting to BP3 in a way, was a chance to try to address that gap. And it's not one party or trilogy were poorly run companies. They did fantastically well. And they had clients who were very successful with their software, but that doesn't mean it couldn't have been more successful that there weren't more we could do for each of those clients.
Scott Francis: (21:25)
That, to me being part of a services team within a product company, I think gives you an interesting perspective as well. And you're not trying to catch up with it. I think the, the key thing is you learn how to take care of a client in the face of competing interests and needs. There's all sorts of cross-currents that drive product development. Then maybe you need a feature release and enhancement of bug fix what have you. And you have to learn how to, how to get those things done in your organization to support your clients and, uh, uh, Trilogy something fresh. If it was a crashing bug, then it was top priority and you'd have every developer's attention at the party. Just give a contrasting example, fractioning was bad, but the thing that really got their attention was if it had business impact, if he said My 20th can't go live with this process that will save them a hundred thousand dollars a month because of this bug. It didn't matter if the bug was crashing or it was like a text edit issue. If it was preventing them from saving a hundred thousand dollars a month, then it would get fixed very quickly if it was like, Oh, this thing crashes in the dev environment, but it doesn't have any production impact. Okay. No big deal. So they were laser focused on what's the business value to the client.
Chris Suarez: (22:33)
It reminds me of Dan Keith's new book, upstream talks a lot about the differences between those companies that are just right solve the problem, as opposed to recognizing that well, if we just hiked up stream and recognize that the problem isn't actually what we're solving, if we really went upstream in business. And interestingly enough, I think that's what you guys did at BP3 global. You had an incredible view, right? Two of the most successful businesses in that space, when you look at Trilogy and yet you went upstream and said, I think there's a different solution that the industry or these businesses need, which is a lesson actually for all business owners listening.
Scott Francis: (23:14)
Yeah. And at the end of the day, I think it's a good lesson to take away that I took from both companies is that if we're doing right by the client, that the rest of it will work out and it doesn't always work out on a single client, but overall, if you take that approach to your blinds and really work on their priorities and their goals, then your goals will get met along the way. And it works really well if you've listened to their goals and priorities, and then tell them what yours are and having a honest conversation about, Hey, I, I understand what your goals are. Let me share what trying to accomplish for BP3. I think they're in alignment. Do you agree? Can we help each other? And often we can. So I think just being open to that, but you have to hear theirs first.
Chris Suarez: (23:55)
In our conversation. You mentioned that one of the maybe perspectives or the way that you approach it as your consultants are going to be the hero, does that mean to you?
Scott Francis: (24:05)
I think in the vast majority of product, product driven companies, consulting is a necessary evil, right? Like ideally the product would just work. Everybody would use a customer's word opt to be virally adopted, slapped. Everybody wants to sell the product that is like Slack. Everybody just uses it. Nobody hires a Slack consultant to teach you how to use Slack. Maybe somebody does, but that's not their business model. And that's what every software company wants to be. But in the enterprise software space, that's not what most software is. And I think if you have software that requires a real expert to go out there and we're a team to go out there and build solutions around that software. So it's a platform rather than a finished problem. If you're going to send a team out there, you've got to really value them and think about it more.
Scott Francis: (24:49)
I think every business suffers from this, by the way, I'll give you an example in another industry, but really treat those consultancy grout as heroes, because they're the face of your company to your client. They take care of them. They're the ones who set the first and last impression is that you make with those clients and make sure that they get off on a good path with your software. And they're the ones who make it more or less likely that they buy more software that they renew their subscription, that they consume more. Are they positive turn or negative turn on your, uh, calculations at the end of the year. And yet the temptation is to not treat them like heroes, right? You've made sales the hero, maybe you make a product team the hero um, maybe even marketing the hero, but you don't make consulting the heroes of your organization and in BP3 get a chance to just say, look, we're going to think about it as consultants are the heroes. And when we refer to the team, the company as a whole, you know, it's mostly consultants. And so when we talk about making them the hero, yeah, it includes making sales, the hero, but not at the expense of consultants being the heroes. And we include our software engineers as heroes, but not at the expensive consultants. We don't put one team above another to distinguish that way. And I think that's been really powerful for our team. I think if you look at other organizations, I remember talking to company that was in the urgent care business. They virtual care clinics around the Southeast, and they were presenting right to two group of us. And there's some CEOs and investors in the room and they got asked for really good questions and a couple of them related to who the key personnel are in their operation. And they had made the comment about how that front desk person, the person who checks you in, when you call in turns out to be a really critical member of the team and, and the performance of each physical retail store was really driven a lot by that first contact person. And then when they put up some of their costing around how they charge or how much they have to for different roles, that was the lowest paid person in their whole organization. And I talked to the CEO afterward and I just said, look, God, I loved your presentation. And I love the fact that you understand who the key person is in your operation that determines the profitability of a unit, that front desk person. But why don't you just pay them more? Like you told me, the term is really hot. I got position as the highest churn. It's the hardest to get the right personality in. And it's a tough job when you get it. And it's not an easy job. It's a tough job. And that person, he looked at me like, why am I not paying them more? And to me, sometimes those are really obvious moments, right? When you just realize your whole company depends on this relatively low paid person, it's the same reason. I think that Costco pays their cashiers really well because they're, if not the most important person that Costco for their whole business, they're right up there, top five, for sure.
Chris Suarez: (27:34)
Customer, they probably aren't. As you think about your experience within that environment, at the end, it's at the end.
Scott Francis: (27:41)
And the reason you feel like Costco is a machine, right, is when you go through that checkout line, man, they are on it. They really know what they're doing, and they really take care of you as they check you out.
Chris Suarez: (27:51)
You know, that conversation, Scott reminds me of Joseph Campbell's book, the hero's journey. And I know Ray Dalio and Ben Horwitz have referenced that book is really influential in them building their companies and making sure that we don't get caught playing this movie in our head. We all want to be the hero. That's why we watch movies. We picture ourselves as a superstar and not the kind that that's like the sidekick. And yet we need to look at each role or each person in the organization and make sure we understand what's going to make them the hero. And then we invite them into our movie as the hero, not as a supporting role. And I think you've done that. And that is probably why your organization and company is known for its incredible culture. So maybe we can talk about that briefly. What's your perspective? How did you build the culture in your organization?
Scott Francis: (28:41)
Yeah, I think the culture is a funny thing because you can't fully dictate it top down, but you can set the framing right? When I'm being more tongue in cheek, I say really culture is about our team. They're the ones who build and decide the culture. That's just my job, not to screw it up. And I think there's some truth to that, right? Like it's easier at the top to do damage to the culture than it is to help it. But I think by setting a framework and part of that framework is having everybody have the same compass, like which way is true North for our culture is, uh, taking care of your clients. Is it taking care of your team? Is it both right? If I'm left to my own devices and I'm onsite with a client, how do I know how to behave in a way that will be consistent with the values of the company?
Scott Francis: (29:26)
If I have to call home every time to find out, right. Hey Scott, here's my situation. What should I do that works? But it doesn't scale. And really people want to be independent. They want to do their own thing. And I want them to be able to do it for themselves and be the hero in that story. And part of the way you do that is by rather than having a bunch of rules, although you can have some, it's not the rules that drive it, it's the values and understanding what we care about, what we'll reward punish. I think those things over time really set the culture, but some of it can't come from me and or maybe it could, but it would come out in a different way. At the very first time we did a mobile demo. We built a really slick mobile app, went to a conference in Vegas to show it off to some prospective customers.
Scott Francis: (30:11)
And the Saturday before the conference, our server, that was a hosting company or server just disappeared on us. No pins, no, we couldn't reach it. They didn't know why we couldn't reach it. Um, and we couldn't reach it from anywhere right back in Austin, in Vegas, wherever. So it just fell off the grid and it had all our server-side code running on it. And when we had just hired that week, who granted I had worked with before at Lombardic, so it was known quantity, something I've known for a long time and loved working with. He spent Saturday night, stayed up Saturday night and God IBM's business process, portfolio software running inside AWS. It's the very first time that package of software had ever been run in the cloud in any cloud. And it got to working on AWS, got us the new endpoints. We needed to redirect a mobile app to Sunday morning. We redirected our mobile app to those endpoints. We ran our demos and mobile grade. We had a great conference, but I didn't ask him to do that. I didn't ask him to pull an all nighter and figure it out. I couldn't have asked him to do that because I didn't even know if it would work, but if I knew it work, it might've been reasonable for me to ask him to stay up all night, doing it Saturday night, our plan, my coworker, Ivan and I, our plan was just to, well, we'll do the best we can without the demo. We'll have a conference and we'll talk to people about what we want to do, but we'll leave out the demo. It won't be the worst thing that ever happened, but Andrew took it upon himself to stay up all night and get it working. And that's the kind of thing that sets a tone and a expectation of the company that we're here for each other, that we help each other without being asked, without being explicitly asked or ordered to help. And that was, were probably 15 people at the time. And that kind of helping each other has really carried forward in the organization. Even to the point where we had an employee whose house burned down, we have one of the many forest fires we've had over the last few years and they lost everything. And it was a really tragic fire. Fortunately, they were both out of the house, one traveling for work. And that might be the first on traveling for work saved someone's life. But it, it may have in this case and the other one just in the city for their day job and I lost everything. And the company employees put together a fund and raised $20,000 to help them out. And as a company, there was nothing I did to make that happen. It was self-organized right. And I wish I had thought to organize it before the employees did, but I think it meant more that's on our team. And then what we could do as a company is manage so we can match what they raised and help in that way and be supportive without being top-down ordering people to do things or putting a different kind of expectation with folks. So I think there's a way to support the culture and support the things you like and to discourage things you don't like, but you really have to let it breathe too.
Chris Suarez: (32:52)
I don't know that I've ever heard it explained that way, but I think you're right, that it's probably easier for a leader of a company or the CEO of the company to do more damage to it. Then, then we're good, but you're there to protect it. And I suppose we protect it by those that we hire part of our role as hiring or talent acquisition or keeping or retaining. And I think that's a valuable lesson.
Scott Francis: (33:15)
And I think to your point at the point of hiring is where you can do the most good for your culture. Long-term right. Picking people that will reinforce or add to your culture and not focusing on things that don't really matter. I recall doing an interview where one of the people giving me feedback, all the feedback was about how the candidate wasn't dressed, right. Or hadn't dressed up for the interview or presented themselves professionally. And I honestly don't care about any of that. So I had to ask for the more substantive feedback, but how did they do in the questions you ask? How do they answer them? And so I think it's really important as a leader when someone says yes or no, when you're integrating is to get under the hood, what does yes. Mean? Why did you say yes? What does it mean? Why did you say no? And to learn over time, how each of your interviewees do their job, right. When they're interviewing, how do they determine a yes or no? And what does it mean for them? Some people are very reluctant to hand out a guess, some very reluctant to hand out a note. And so you've got to get to know them and times change too. I think when I was at Trilogy, I would have told you, I need people with a computer science degree who can solve these really hard problems. And I put them through the paces to figure out if they could, I try to figure out how flexible they would be about coming up with different ideas to solve the same problem, right? Not just one way to solve it, but multiple ideas. And I still think that aspect is really important, but the technical difficulty of what we do is different than BP3. It's not so much all the technical things are so hard. It's the understanding people that you're working with, right? The emotional requirements of the job are so much harder than what I was doing in the nineties. And the technical requirements are broader, but not as deep, right? So you don't, we're not solving NP hard problems in general, we're solving business problems and that requires a different kind of hiring profile. And so over time, you know, I've come to focus more and more on the soft skills and their motivation. So it's not about what exact coding skills you have today, or exact mental acumen you have today. It's about where I think you can go on the future and what do you want it? Right. Because I think that being good at software is like a lot of other things. If you'd love it, it's not hard. It just takes some time to get good at it, to become great. And is there a tennis player anywhere? That's a great tennis player that didn't love it. Is there a football player? Who's great who didn't love it. Like you have to love it if you're going to be really good at it. And so that's what I look for is the motivation, how they connect with it. And if they can't answer those questions, like they don't know how they feel about writing code. That's probably not a good heart for what we do, even though it's not all we do, but we need somebody who loves it. And I remember interviewing someone last year where they walked out of the interview. I think they had a tough day. We do a tough interview because we're looking for the edges and it's not to challenge. It's not to put people in a box or to make them feel bad, but you know, we're trying to figure out what their edges are.
Scott Francis: (36:04)
And so if someone walks out feeling pretty cocky at the end of the day, we didn't find the ridges, but, and some people do right. They do walk out of there. Like they just crushed it and wouldn't really know where their edges are. But for the most part, we find the red is we push. And I happened to get on the elevator once with a woman who's just finished her day of interviews and ended that look, someone has when they bombed it and they weren't expecting to see me get on the elevator. It, so there was like, and then they have to suck it up and pretend that everything's fine. And as we're running down the elevator asking them, Hey, how did you feel about the interviews today? And after mine? Because I talked to her early in the day and she said, I clearly have a lot of work to do. I thought I could do better in the interviews than I did. And I don't have enough coding experience to really nail the questions. So I got to go back and I got to learn more if I want this kind of job. And so I didn't tell her in that moment because I hadn't had the round table with the rest of the team, but I already had a feeling that the feedback was going to be positive. You do enough interviews. You can tell the buzz during the day and a short, if we had a round table call and I told him we haven't had our call yet. So we'll let her know the next day. And we offered her the job. And I think that mature because she had to correctly assess where she was at and that it was something she could do. If she just put the time in, I thought it was fantastic for someone coming out of school. This isn't like some of the five years of industry experience or whatever was right out of school. And they're already thinking I could do better. And I just don't know enough today. So that's the kind of, I think grit, personality and rolling with some bad news potentially to rolling with the punches that, that we're really looking for.
Chris Suarez: (37:42)
In that process. What you find is how they respond when they're faced with a stressful situation or they're feeling uneasy or out of balance when you're on your own two feet, always, you knew how to nail the original trilogy interview. If you push, if we don't, like you say, I love that. If you don't find their edges, if you don't get them off balance, you won't see how they're respond to a client customer or a challenging situation when they show up.
Scott Francis: (38:08)
Yeah, that's right. And you get a sense for how will I handle it with grace in front of a client?
Chris Suarez: (38:12)
Yep. Yep. Speaking of real life, let's transition just briefly. One of the, one of the things that I'm just highly impressed about is your family sets this example of both spouses growing tremendously successful businesses while living experientially as well. And that's a challenge. Your wife is an incredible entrepreneur. Cindy is an event strategist and producer. She founded The Red Velvet Events has clients like BMW and Marriott and PayPal. The people that you guys interact with individually in your own right, is incredible advice for navigating that. So you're building something big and you're coming home. How do you bring experiential living to the home life with the kids?
Scott Francis: (38:57)
One joke I always tell is before I met Cindy and we started dating and then got married before that, all of my friends, everyone I knew who considered me to be a workaholic after that, they were wondering why I was so lazy because Cindy sets a new standard for how much she can get done. And today how productive she is. And it really, but it blows me away. 20 years later, it still blows me away how much she can get done in a day. And she does it with grace and she's my energy and positive and optimistic. And to me it's amazing. And so I married up that's step one, if you want to make it work, just marry up. Yes. Yeah. And my other joke is the right time to propose is when you realize you're marrying up and the other person hasn't figured out yet that they're marrying down. That's the key opportunity to propose. It's, it's good to if we both feel that way, but I think that Cindy and I are good yin and yang, we support each other really well. I think when we first started dating, actually she left trilogy to start Red Velvet Events. And I had already left Trilogy and was doing independent consulting and Cindy started Red Velvet Events, and I felt like I needed to support her doing that. And so actually I took the job with Lombardi, partly to make that work right, to have one steady income while we got her venture off the ground. I haven't yet built anything that scaled, but I felt like I'd figure it out if I kept at it. And so what it meant was putting that on pause for a few years, but, you know, it's hard to, even at the time, I didn't have any resentment about that. I felt like it was the right thing to do. And I had been doing independent consulting contracting long enough that I just missed working with a team. And I realized something about myself that I was not a loner as much as I thought I was on that introvert extrovert scale and maybe on the introverted side of that spectrum, but I'm not so much so that I don't ever want to leave the team. And when we'd have a good day, there's no one to celebrate with. When you have a bad day, there's no one to cry over your beer with, and you step over your dog to get your computer. And so I really miss that a spree decor and going back to the party, I think turned out to be great for me in two respects. One is I got to reconnect with a whole set of professionals that are just amazing people to work with. And two, I got excited about a space to work in that set the stage for the next 15 or 20 years for me. And I wouldn't have had that if I hadn't made that decision to go back and take a full-time job there. And then the other thing is you have the opportunity to watch Cindy really blossom and watch her business really grow and turn into a sustainable long-term business. So I think I got the best of both worlds in the end, but I had to make the short term, you know, sacrifice if you will, to get there. And I think it was worth. And that sense, maybe it isn't a sacrifice.
Chris Suarez:
I think as you guys are both building now incredible organizations and companies to kids, what are they learning from you while you do that?
Scott Francis:
I think, I think there's a bunch of things they take away just that you show by example, more than not so much that we're explicitly sitting down to teach them. But I think they learn by example. They know that a lot of what we do, we're doing for our kids and to try to set the example that we want them to see the work ethic that we have, how we take care of our teams, work of being self-reliant and independent. I think that we give them enough space to be self-reliant and independent and really count on themselves to get things done. And my world where kids don't get to wander off as much as they used to when I was growing up, my parents didn't know where I was till dinner time, but if I wasn't home at dinner time, it was the result of a and different culture. Now around how kids get around in the world, they don't just disappear until dinner time, but still they need ways to explore their own self-reliance their own abilities and gotta give them room to do that. And I think our kids have also seen how we handle hard things, layoffs, recessions. They've seen a stress about money, stress about each other's businesses. And I think one thing that I really take away from it that I think makes, makes it work for me when I'm traveling and of person, I haven't been lately thanks to COVID. But prior when it was traveling, I think being away for a couple of days gives you very perspective when you come home. No small thing bothers you when you've been gone for three days, right? You just want to give her a hug, give your daughter a hug, your wife and I just want to be there for them.
Scott Francis:
And you're just happy to be back. And so if something like there's some dirty dishes in the dishwasher, in the same corridor, who cares, if those little things that might bother you when they're everyday, just all get put into perspective. And, and I think the other thing that our kids have gotten to see is how we support each other. When we come home from travel, we don't come home and blow it up. You don't want bolts in from the garage and then start screaming about why the house isn't clean, why this isn't right. That isn't right. Although certainly it happens. So you come home and the house is a mess where my wife travels as well. So we both have experienced those come home. Like I don't remember it being like that. And I left, but on the flip side, when you're the person who stays home, we both, because we've done that job. We both traveled for work. We know it's not all a party while you're out there. It's not just a boondoggle, they're working hard. And so when they come home, we don't lay on the guilt of all these things you aren't here to help you with while you were gone. I think, you have to provide that support for each other. And it comes from both sides, whether you're the person staying home or the person traveling, you've got to really dial that in because it doesn't work. If one of you becomes the victim. And I think our kids get a chance to see that in action. And I hope that will be something that helps them when they're adults and they're navigating relationships. If they have the opportunity to travel for work or pleasure that doesn't become something that divides their family, that becomes something that helps hold it together.
Chris Suarez:
That's huge Scott, truly. It is. That's a huge takeaway for a lot of working couples, right? Entrepreneur couples, or maybe not even entrepreneurial couples, but we come home and our expectations and our mind are not met, but the perspective is very different from the person that was home versus the one that was traveling. And either one could have had a phenomenal day or a terrible day. And just allowing that lesson to be shown to the kids like you wouldn't have had that opportunity to share that lesson with your kids. If you both, weren't doing what you were doing.
Scott Francis:
Yeah. And maybe it happens in a smaller way for folks who work in the same city. Sometimes you work late, sometimes you don't, but I think it's harder to let go, right when it's every day, but you don't have a chance to just get a perspective because you've been out of town and then you come home and all you want to do is just give everyone a hug and be part of the family. And I think that is different than the sort of everyday grind.
Chris Suarez:
One of the things I just wrote down in experiential living is a life with perspective. And so you're either going to be in a world that gives us that perspective. We need to figure that out and find that perspective so that we don't ruin the experience.
Scott Francis:
I think it's a good argument for the staycation as well. Having creating some opportunities to get out of your normal four walls or even away from each other parents away from the kids or one parent and one child getting away from the others right then. So you separate or get smaller groups of the family together, different groups, because sometimes your kids are tired of each other too.
Chris Suarez:
In the last conversation we can have Scott, I don't want to take too much of your time. I appreciate it so much that you're not just shaping your own children's future. You have, um, played an instrumental role in starting the Magellan International School in Austin. Arguably maybe the fastest growing school there in Texas. I'm going to make sure that in our show notes, we have a link to Magellanschool.org so that people can find out about it and learn about it. I dove deep into the mission of the school, which I love it's really truly experiential living. But how did you get involved in and why is it important to you?
Scott Francis:
I got involved because, uh, my wife, Cindy knew Aaron [inaudible], who was the founder of the school and, and Erin and I have a couple of things in between Cindy and I, Aaron has some things in common. He went to UT, but he also went to Stanford. And so there's some, you know, mutual conductivity there. We know some people in common and things like that and, and share some values about education. And Aaron went to the American school down in Mexico city and had an amazing bilingual experience growing up. And when he was raising his kids in Austin, he wanted to create that same kind of experience in Austin, but in reverse a Spanish immersion school instead of an English immersion school, Spanish emergent inside Austin with all those same brain characteristics of an international baccalaureate school. And I would say, you have to be a little bit crazy to start with school. If you're not a billionaire and Aaron is not and neither am I, Oh, he started the school anyway and always reminds of that Apple commercial to the crazy ones. It takes some crazy to start a school from scratch, with no money. And there's no endowment, there's no big fund funding. It it's just parents, parents like Aaron. And like me and his cohorts got started. I went to one of the first info sessions and I remember hearing it and coming back home and tell them, Cindy, they definitely can talk the talk, but let's see whether they can actually put a school together. It was a long way to go to get it done. And I remember that point, we offered Aaron a very modest donation to help with some spending money in the, by modest. It was like a thousand dollars and it wasn't a lot of money, but Aaron loves the idea that it was like there was a trigger, like you had to start class to get the rest of the money right then. And he was telling me he was going to use that when he approached other donors, the preclass opening donation versus the post-its classmates. Cause I don't think anyone believes I'm actually going to open. It might unlock some money that way. And sure enough, they opened it. And I met the founding head of school and Marissa De Leon the first time she came to Austin and she met prospective parents and she was one of those people who could tell you how the whole educational system works and peel back every layer all the way down to what happens on a particular day in a lesson plan. And after going to that and talking with her, I knew that I had the right head of school. So then I'm thinking maybe we really shouldn't consider sending our kid to Magellan. And Sophia are, was almost old enough to go and turn off.
Scott Francis:
We waited one year and we went the second year. We sent Sophia as a four-year-old and, and she just graduated eighth grade this past spring. She went from four years old. Pre-kinder all the way through eighth grade. After the end of a year, she was speaking Spanish fluently. And in third grade they started Chinese and she can carry a conversation in Mandarin. She can not only carry a conversation in Spanish. She can read college textbooks, real Spanish literature. It was about first grade. When I noticed that I could hand her something in English and asked her to read it to me in Spanish or vice versa. And sometimes she didn't know, a word but if it was in her reading level, she could just on the fly, I'll read it to you and are there other great benefits? Both of our kids do a pretty dead ringer impression of me speaking Spanish, which is horrible like that with my very gringo accent. It's quite amazing. I did take Spanish in high school and I learned some Spanish, but my accent apparently is not up to their standards, which they love reminding me of. And it really, to me, the thing that Magellan did for us. So was it gave us the chance to give our kids an opportunity that we never had a true multi-lingual experience. And I believe not everybody shares this belief, but I believe that the important things you learned are language, what does that mean when you're learning a new language, it is something that changes the way your brain works, the way you think, maybe how you relate to people or problems differently. And so other examples, things that to me are language music is a language. And I think we're all able to listen to music, but we're not all able to speak or communicate with music, right? There's a level of fluency that musicians have that we don't.
Scott Francis:
And it's a beautiful thing. When you can think something and have it come through your hands into a keyboard or a clarinet or a saxophone, and it takes a of practice to get there. And it's not so different to learn Mandarin or Spanish, but at some point your brain just does it, right? It's like magic inside your head. And, and math was like that. It changes the way you think you could describe problems. You never could describe before. Or, and I think writing code is another example of a language, right? Something that you will think about problems differently. If you can think of an algorithm to solve that problem, and I can write code for that, the algorithm, and that's very logical ordered way, way of solving problems. That's a little different than math. There's some correlation between, but they are different and you can take it further and think about a sign as well. What's the difference between design and art. I heard someone once say that the differences that art, every interpretation was valid, how you feel about the art is valid and nobody can tell you otherwise for it. And there can be professional opinions and amateur opinions, but they're all valid opinions and feelings. And in fact, the artist probably doesn't want you to know their specific content. They want you to discover your own meaning in there are both design. I have a specific intent and I've really done a poor job if everybody has a different interpretation of my design. And just because they leverage similar skills of drawing or painting or sculpture or 3d model doesn't mean that they're actually the same thing. So I find those to be really good examples. As we got involved in Magellan and our kids were having great success there. At some point, they asked me to join the board and I didn't see that quite what the trap was right to give. It's quite a bit of work to join a board of a school early on. And I started really gotten that deep into that process, but it's also the most gratifying thing I've ever been a part of the school. The first year was like 44 kids. And last year it was 482 and absent COVID. I think would've gone to 490 to 500 in that range. You know, it was where we were headed. So really the school has grown tremendously. Um, we've gone from, we were pre-K three years old, all the way to second grade. Now we're all the way to eighth and obviously with plans to go to high school in the future and to find a permanent home. So those are like big things to accomplish in the future. And one of the things I loved about being on the board or being a parent at Magellan is the opportunity to make an impact. And we've had parents who've done amazing things like the library was primarily donation from two grandparents that our school, uh, they really donated the key funds to make that library happen. The same thing for our sport court that are used for almost everything. And at some point, and then Cindy and I were really fortunate. We were able to help as well. We helped them found the a, a I lab for design and making, which is kind of like a modern day shop class, 3d printers, laser cutters, you name it. They've got all kinds of crazy equipment in there to make things, to take things that are ideas and turn them into physical objects that can interact with and build with. I think it just fits to me. The international baccalaureate model has an aspect of having insight and then taking action. And I wanted to get the school thinking about other kinds of actions that actions don't have to only be terrible in nature or purely non-profit in nature that enterprises can have an impact as well. That's something can be physical, not just virtual, right something. You can make something you can feel and touch. And so I wanted to kind of encourage that entrepreneurial spirit as well as the charitable. And so giving them a path or a different way to think about how to take an action was a key element, but also just think having good design skills and being unafraid to make something, it would be a really rewarding skill for our kids to have.
Chris Suarez:
As you talk about it, I can see and hear just the passion behind the future of what that school is going to do for not just your kids, but you almost 500 kids that will then go out into the communities and change community. So interesting because if you go to your business mission, Scott, it's a great example of how your business mission of implementing processes and helping people make decisions fast forward. And now that mission is woven through your charitable work in a school that helps implement new processes of learning and education and helping children make decisions or helping them learn how to make those decisions that honestly, when you say, gosh, how does that corporate or for profit business leave a legacy beyond the profit? What are your volunteer service that you're putting your skillset into is shaping those brains and those minds and those future leaders and entrepreneurs from age three and four on into getting them ready to enter the real world.
Scott Francis:
It really is also an amazing journey to see these kids grow. I remember watching my daughter's classmates grow from very shy inwardly focused kids in three years old, four years old to, by the time you a little bit you're in middle school, they're confident they're presenting. They're holding the room right when they speak. And that transformation doesn't wait until eighth grade it's every year, they make an improvement on that journey, but it really is an amazing thing to watch them develop and turn into kind of miniature adults by the time they graduate and being a part of that has been incredibly gratifying. I think if there's one key piece of advice I'd take out of our experience with Magellan is we could have given all of our charitable contributions to Stanford or to UT, and it would have made some impact, but to Stanford is rock in the grand Canyon, the amount we could donate and probably for UT as well. Although we do donate to both of those institutions set a smaller much smaller level, but by focusing all of our charitable contribution, our work and our money into one thing, we could make an impact that we just couldn't make otherwise. And I know a lot of people in ourselves included before Magellan came along, we spread our charitable contract hundred dollars here, a hundred dollars there and spread it around. And at some level you don't even know what impact you're having. And I think if you pick a, cause it doesn't have to be ever Magellanism. It's a community that we're invested in. And that can be really powerful, right? Just the impact on your own community. And by pooling our resources and really putting them behind one thing, we could really impact Magellan's trajectory and give it something that it couldn't get. Otherwise give the kids something they wouldn't get otherwise. And I think that's something that is really overlooked, but I think too many people spoke, spread themselves too thin with they're out of work, their charities, their other activities in a way that really diminishes them or diminishes the impact. Whereas if you really focus, what, what a difference.
Chris Suarez:
It's interesting as you talk about all the people that it impacts, it's clearly impacting you and Cindy as well. So that's the byproduct of having that personal impact. I was having a conversation much like this one with another executive, from a different company. And he said that he looked at the three T's of giving, which was time, which was giving up your talent and then giving of your treasure and gave those three combined. It led to transformational giving, right? The checks are easy, but you're giving your time. You're giving your talents that you bring to the table. You're giving your treasure clearly as well. And it's transforming the people that you're touching, but it's transforming you as well. And it's experiential giving. You're experiencing something while you do it. So I think it's a Testament to the company you've built and the world you're building for your family and those that you're impacting. So I appreciate that. I love that lesson.
Scott Francis:
If I can add one thing for us, I'd say sometimes people assume like when we donated the money for the eye lab at Magellan, I think it was easy for people to assume that well, well, it must be rich or really well to write that check. And I would say it was a case where the company and the charitable interest converters, we took on some outside investment that year into BP3. And I approached the investors in particular, the guy who was going to join our board, uh, Rob Smith, who is a fantastic guy. And unfortunately he's passed away since then. And Rob really made an impression on me. And so I called him and talked to him about the fact that I really wanted to transfer some of my stock to Magellan so that we could help fund the school and work. I wanted to be upfront with him about it so that we could work that out. And he loved it. He loved the idea. We love the fact that we were passionate about it. And didn't mind that when, some small portion of those funds wouldn't go to me or my co-founder were the company, but we'd go to the school instead. And that allowed me to transfer to effectively donate more money to Magellan because I was able to donate it. Pre-sale right. And therefore pre-tax. And the way I looked at it as this is something that will be BP3 has given me a chance to make an impact on my school, right on the school that my kids go to, that their friends will go to. And we could have spent that money in any number of different ways, but I think you make choices, right? You make choices about what matters to you the most. And to us, there's nothing more gratifying we could have done than that. And believe me this year, we might personally be better off. If we had that money sitting in the bank, I wouldn't feel any better about it than what I did with Magellan.
Chris Suarez:
Scott. Thank you. Thank you for your time. You're being willing to have the conversation. Help people continue to build lives outside of just work as well. And some incredible lessons of giving and experiential learning.
