99. Business Blueprints: Lessons Learned from Leaders with Adam Edwards Pt. 2/3

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Tune in to another special episode as we just about wrap up Season 2. Today, we bring you a conversation with Adam Edwards, CEO of Telarus. We’re here talking about Business Blueprints and sharing all kinds of lessons Adam has learned over the years in building the company with things like how to hire, how to focus on innovation, how to deal with conflict, the ups and downs of collaboration, and more! Don’t miss this one!

Lupresto Telarus

Everybody, welcome to a special episode as we wrap up getting closer to episode 100 here. Today, as you can see, joined in the studio with Mr. Adam Edwards, CEO of Telarus Adam, thanks for coming up here, man. Thanks for having me, Josh. Adam, I know that, and everybody else knows CEO of Telarus for a long time, but tell us a little bit about, I’d love to hear everybody’s journey. What led to that? How did Telarus come to start and kind of what did you do right before that?

You bet. You know, our origin story, I think, is different than most. Patrick and I formed the company together. We had no background in telecom. In fact, I had even less background than he did. I came up in accounting. I just wanted a job. You know, when it came time to choose a major, I looked around. I actually asked an uncle, look, economics looks really good because it’s the shortest major in business.

And I’m also looking at accounting because a lot of those people get hired. He said, look, we hire six accountants for every one economist. And so that was my choice. That was my big epiphany of why I should be in accounting.

And it was after years in accounting, after a couple of years in accounting, that Patrick came to me and said, hey, we should start a business.

And I said, well, what are we going to do? You design chips. You’re an electrical engineer. I’m an accountant.

You know, what in the world we’re going to do. And finally, he came up with the answer. It was telecom. And my response to him was absolutely not. I don’t know anything about telecom. You’re in MLM and I’m not a fan of being in MLM and good luck with that. And he came back said, no, no, actually, there is an opportunity to sell the enterprises, residual commission. And that’s where he had me residual commission. That’s why I got a hold. I didn’t care what we were selling. It was going to pay on a recurring basis. So that’s why I left accounting and started a business.

Not that I didn’t want to. I had always wanted to start a business, just didn’t know what it would be. But I thought I was headed down the CFO track. That’s where I thought my career would end up. And here we are. Love it. I know you love a spreadsheet.

Okay. So this session is a little different. These three tracks are a little different. You know, usually we talk about somebody from Telarus. We talk about a supplier. And we talk about a partner. I want to do these last couple sessions different. I want to help our partners out there that are out there building business, that are entrepreneurs also. What are the lessons? What are the things that we’ve learned? What can they learn from you to help continue to grow their practice? So I’m going to start to go down some of these things about leadership and challenges and innovation and things like that. And I want to kick it off with leadership. So let’s talk about the core principles that guide your leadership style. And then how have they influenced the company here at Telarus? You know, it’s interesting. We went back years ago. We studied leadership as an organization. We were trying to develop leaders internally. And I’ve still got a slide on it. The number of qualities that different leaders have. And they’re all over the place. You know, some there’s a top five qualities of a great leader. The top 23, you know, Maxwell’s got his and Drucker’s got hit. And they’re just all over the place. And you also find real differences in eras. You know, there used to be people chainsaw. Al Dunlap was absolutely brutal in terms of downsizing it. And Jack Welsh was just a blistering attack, you know, in the boardroom. Or with executives.

And you know, and then you hear Steve Jobs, you know, how aggressive he was. But then you hear about the good ones, you know, about Schultz at Starbucks. And what it comes down to with the lens through which I look at each of these leadership dynamics is really culture. I’m a big proponent of cultural alignment, meaning the culture that the customer wants to experience, whatever they want to experience. That better be the culture of your company. So everyone has this ideal of, hey, a good culture looks like this. I think the right culture looks like this. And a right culture is different for different companies. An example, you know, BMW tends to value engineering. And so when they pay bonuses, the bonus is going to go to the best engineer, the most talented. It’s they’re not building a car. They’re building the ultimate driving machine. So that culture is coming all the way from leadership through the, you know, the staff all the way to the customer and the product that they deliver, which is the ultimate driving machine. Whereas you look at Starbucks, it’s a very different cultural experience. I mean, you give them a bonus and they’re going to share it in their team. They’re going to buy something together as a team. And that’s what they’re looking for at Starbucks is that’s an experience. It’s a it’s a place to stop between work and home. It’s a break and you’re part of the community and you get your recycled cup, you know, and you’re doing good. That’s a very different culture. And so the culture inside Starbucks should be and is very different than it is at BMW.

And when you look at the culture of Telarus, I think that leadership needs to align with what the customer wants and what is our customer want? Well, they want someone to advocate for them, someone to fight for them. They want someone to be straight up honest and transparent with them. They want someone who’s looking out for their best interest. And so that’s got to be our culture internally. We’ve got to be looking for their success. And so that that I think has has instructed a lot of the way that I think leaders should behave within our organization is it’s really dictated by the culture and that then is dictated by our customer. Love it. Love it. Be empathetic understand what the customers want and I think it permeates all the way through great stuff.

Let’s talk about challenges.

Talk about a major challenge that our companies faced how you navigated it kind of you know, what the process was going through it. A point, you know, there’s always challenges. What’s funny is when you look in hindsight, they all look like speed bumps. But when you come up on the other side of a challenge and face a challenge, it looks like, you know, this could be the end and you know those challenges beginning are are we going to make payroll? You know, are we by the way, we’re not having those challenges, right? Everything’s good. Everything’s good. This is when I used to run down to the bank and try to deposit the checks faster than then payroll came up. I’ll tell you one of the most significant I think that that we came up against as a company is, you know, looking out to the future. I don’t think people saw the the change that was going to take place.

You know, when we saw it six six plus years ago of this is a business of scale and you’re going to scale or die. And what do you do about that? Well, we’re already doing everything we could be reinvested every dollar we had back in the business. It was not a lifestyle business.

And the question was how how do we get ahead of this because M&A is going to come and we’re either going to be purchased or we’re going to purchase. And of course, what we want is we want our great culture and the values we have and the vision we have to continue on. So we have to be the purchaser. So we went out and the way we approach that was number one study it out. Number two, look at the players and candidly we came back really disappointed. We looked at some different strategic opportunities. We looked at equity backers. We were really disappointed with what we found and decided to wrap it up. We stopped and decided we revisit it later. The problem was that inevitability was continuing to march toward us and what we would do. So carrier sales was a big part of that. We got together with carrier sales. I view that as a real catalyst toward getting us to where we are, you know, that depth of expertise that came in. And that was a very fortunate thing because we were on this path. We were not we were not getting the result we wanted and ultimately we did that that propelled us forward. We ultimately did find an equity partner to help us with M&A and here we are today. But you know, I think it’s interesting. You just look at the speed of which we want to operate and then the speed of which the market takes right. And the buying cycle for customers. And it really is interesting when you zoom back of how early you have to start planning for things because how long some of these things take to develop and then you’ve got to time it with when it’s right when it’s when the market wants it when the market will bear it. Yeah, it’s funny. Everyone assumes things happen so quickly. They really don’t. They’re setting up a long time in advance and you just got to be in tune with that somehow tune into, you know, what the trends are, what’s taking place and get ready for it and place bets. Yeah, yeah, fair point. All right. Let’s talk about innovation. So I think we’re in a space where whether using Moore’s law or whatever, we’ve talked about that a lot where everything out there technology wise is just innovating so fast and it’s more or less gone in 18 months. It’s obsolete. So how do you foster this culture of innovation and then really what do you feel the roles are that that plays for our just long term success? You know, I’ll tell you my views on that have really changed. We consider one of our cultural pillars to be innovation and I think some of what we did early on really helped us get to where we are. But if I look back on some of it, a lot of it was wasted. A lot of it we put together these groups. We called idea groups. We said, hey, guys, the company is faced with this challenge. Every month we do this. The company is faced with this challenge and each of the groups would be together and we’d have one person from say marketing one from engineering one from support one from sales. We want a different groups together to get different backgrounds get some diversity to think through the solution and would say here’s the problem come back with your solution. Well that the truth is part of the value was we’re just trying to break down walls within the culture and get people to talk together. The secondary outcome was we want a great ideas to come forward and we did we got boatloads of ideas. What we found though is in getting those ideas. Well, we got a lot of ideas part of the challenges without further direction on how we implemented those they didn’t become scalable. And what that means is we got some little you know areas of innovation and got some cool things happening but to really pull those things out in a business. You’ve got to be a little more directed and innovation is hard. The bigger the company gets the harder it is. In fact, there’s an example. Samsung used to do this in I used to live in Korea and it’s the society is very conformist when someone had an idea in the large organization. They would actually pull them out physically remove them from headquarters in Seoul and take them to a city down south where I used to live called Sue one and they would help them and incubate and get people around to help bring this idea to life because an organization longer the larger gets is looking for efficiencies. So you how do you balance those two? I mean innovation is about breaking. You know, it’s about breaking process about breaking the norms. Whereas efficiency is how do we do the norms faster and cheaper and so to have those two things now as an organization when we look at innovation. We want those great ideas, but more important to me today is not the ideas. It’s how do we execute on them? How do we put people around those great ideas to breathe life into them? And then how do we divorce ourselves from the past because we’re so we have so much conviction about things we’re doing today. It’s very hard to let go of those and embrace the new and that takes a concerted effort. It’s not just little groups of people coming up with ideas. It’s the execution as an organization. You know, I don’t think I understood scale, you know, five or seven years ago. I’ve really this has forced me to learn what it really takes to scale an organization, right? I envisioned a world where I was the only engineer. I didn’t see us ever needing more than that, right? We would just happily grow organically little by little, but just like you’ve talked about some of these accelerators and some of these things that have created that. How do you help relate that to what partners are going to go through as they’re building their business? Whether I’m a one-person shop, a solopreneur, I have a desire to keep that size, or maybe I want to grow to be a giant company. How do you help these ultra, super sharp, ready to grow, ready to sell, to do anything it takes to grow a business? How do you help them understand scale and the importance of scale as they go? Well, you know, I think you make a good point with your first part of it is some, if they’re a soloist, they may be just fine the way they are, you know. Being a scaled business isn’t for everybody. And that’s one of the unique things about, I think, our community is we have so many successful people in so many different ways. I think what they’ve got to start with is, what do they really want? Are they being purposeful about what they want? If they want to be a soloist, because I’ve talked to many partners like this, of, “Hey, I like this as a lifestyle. I only want 10 customers, 10 very large customers. I focus on them. It gives me what I want.” Or, “Other people are motivated by, “Hey, I want a team of just five to 10 people, you know. That way I feel like we’re a family. I feel good about this.” And there are other people that do want to scale, and they want to grow much larger, and they want to be acquisitive, and they want to do… So I think they’ve got to start with, you know, what they want. And if truly what they want is scale, then they can absolutely find it. And that’s what I found. If they’re going to be purposeful about it, then they’ll find those answers. Because there are different answers for a soloist. You look at a soloist and some of the things they leverage. I mean, think about some of these soloists right now. Leveraging your team, walking into some of the biggest companies in the world, going in there, pitching a project, creating a solution, having project management on top of it. They’re a soloist, and they’re bringing down these absolute Goliath in terms of opportunity. And, you know, I think that business model is just fine. In fact, we’d love to see more of those. But in terms of scale, I think it’s a subset of partners that are looking for that. And when they are looking for it, I think they will find it, and we’d be happy to share our lessons. But I’d say the biggest thing I’ve learned about scale is you’ve got to focus more on the process and the program. Then you do the individual circuit. Because it’s so easy. I mean, you kind of look back longingly at the days where you could jump in and roll up your sleeve and fix everything. You know, you feel more control and you feel goodness at the end of the day, like I really got something done. But now you’ve got to accomplish that through other people. So how do I set those people up to get it right every time? And it’s just a different mode of thinking that you’ve gone through, you know, as you’ve developed your team and grown it into the best engineering team in the world of, you know, here’s these people that you’re not on those calls anymore. You’re not in those engagements, but you’re watching them have a success because you’ve given them the tools and the process. And any of our partners can learn that. If the scale is really what they want, they can learn that. But I think you would agree. It’s a little uncomfortable at first. Totally is. Totally is. You feel guilty. Like, oh my gosh, I should be doing this. I shouldn’t make this person do it. But it really does come into the hiring process is so important. Finding great people. Protecting the culture, empowering people and going, oh, wow, they crushed that. Oh, they’re really good. Okay, let me empower you some more. This is awesome.

Awesome.

I want to call back a little more advice. So we had we had Paul German on and I said, you know, what’s the what’s the one piece of advice you could give out to partners? You’ve you’ve you’ve birthed some of this cloud contact center space. You’ve seen a lot of things come and go. And his advice was, you know, I love partners get into something and they get super excited and they go sell this one thing and then they go here and they do this and they do this and they do this. So his ask, you know, obviously towards contact center was I just want to see him stay focused on this thing, right? Because they’re entrepreneurs. They can do anything and they’re sick. They’re going to be successful at it inevitably. So what’s your advice for partners that are out there trying to build a business? Is it something like that? Is it completely different? Not as much about scale, but just about building the business. Well, first of all, I’d say anyone who’s been in the business for two years. Congratulations. I mean, you’ve beat the odds the fact that you’re here and still in business. Most people don’t we look at new partners who start up. They don’t make it. Everybody overestimates the revenue cycle and they underestimate the costs and as a result, you know, the industry is littered with people who tried and failed to build these businesses. And I think it’s easy for people to look from the sidelines and say I could have done that. I could have could you because we have a lot of examples of people who didn’t. So first of all, congratulations to those people. The second thing I would say is to be deliberate. Just be deliberate.

I did used to think that you should get very specific and very deep in a single technology. I don’t believe that anymore. I do believe in the generalist by the way, I think both of those work. I think there’s so much opportunity that both of those work for different elements, but I would say be deliberate. Pick a path and be deliberate. In fact, this is a great time of year end of year. If you’re going to implement one thing in your business as a result of this podcast, I would say start an annual plan. Start an annual plan at the end of the year that says hey by next year, I will be doing this and I will be selling in these cat and I’m going to add one more cat. Whatever it is again being deliberate. I think an annual plan is a great physical manifestation of being deliberate because you’re absolutely actually creating the planet and hopefully holding yourself accountable. Every month to am I getting closer? Did I break down those goals? Am I taking the right education course? My finding the right opportunities, hiring the right whatever it is on your path. So I get going back to the beginning. I wouldn’t prescribe a specific path to any partner. I’ve met so many different personality types that are successful from the soloist.

Solos can be a generalist. They can be specific to a vertical. They can be focused on a business size. They can be a larger company. We’ve seen a lot of scaled organizations. There’s one one skill doors. I love talking to you right now because it’s a company we’ve seen for 10 plus years is a great white whale that we’re trying to you know, convince that look at this business model. It is great and they finally came around their leadership said we want 50% of our revenue to be coming from this model in you know, the next few years and they said do you think that’s possible? I ran the numbers that given where your revenue is right now. It’s going to take more than two years, but here’s what we can do. And let’s get to that goal. Let’s get well, they’re being deliberate and what’s fun is have recurring conversations with them about what their goals are what they’re achieving the progress. They’re making and so it doesn’t matter. They may have you know, 700 people on staff, but even if you’re just one person on staff, you can go through the same motion and be incredibly successful by being deliberate. Love it. Let’s talk about decision-making high stakes decision-making. So you mentioned in the beginning, right? We go through some of these sometimes it’s every other day. There’s a crisis or a critical situation when partners go through that too, right? And it feels like right in that moment. Oh my gosh, it’s all over. I really can’t screw this up. There’s a lot of pressure here. What’s your advice there on decision-making high stakes where you just you don’t know everything? You know, one thing that’s fun about looking back like I mentioned before looking back. They look more like speed bumps. You know, when you’re starting out, you’ve got these two emotions. I love talking to brand new partners. They’re I’m in it. I’m doing it. I’m going to make this happen. But they go through these emotions of euphoria and terror, you know, and they can be in the same minute, you know, there’s no limits on me. Oh my goodness. How am I going to pay for groceries next week? You know, and they go through these these cycled emotions.

But I think as time goes on and you gain this experience, you start to get a feel for what really is a crisis and what’s not a crisis when we talk about high stakes. There are a lot of things out there that are high stakes, but maybe low probability. I think over time, what happened? You start getting a sense for okay, what is really, you know, let’s hit the panic button. Now what you find is there aren’t many things that are really hey hit the panic button. We’ve got to move now. There’s some definitely some big moves and and and changes you got to make. I would say when when it comes to my decision, what I’ve learned over time is number one, I don’t panic.

I’ve seen enough experience enough things that I thought were, you know, industry ending company ending whatever it was that just aren’t there’s always recovery time. Well, another comforting thing to me is that even if you make the wrong decision, you can recover and that helped me a lot because one of the things I suffered from early on was analysis paralysis felt like I can’t make a mistake can’t do the wrong thing. People are depending on this. I can’t get it wrong. What that causes a delay? It was more of a delay of a decision rather than making a great decision.

And I think that the way I approach it now is gather as much information as you can and then decide, you know, where this fits in terms of priorities. Is this really critical?

And then with that information can if I got 70% information, we’re in a pretty good place to make a decision. We can make a good decision on 70% because again, leaning back to we can undo a bad decision.

And so it’s okay to go forward. So that’s typically what I do is rely a lot on experience. Try to gather as much information as possible and with as much information as practically possible. Got to make the call. Let’s talk about personal growth. So we’ve talked books. We’ve talked Rockefeller. We’ve talked podcast. We’ve talked all these things that are out there. What’s your what’s your recommendation for partners right to help them continue to grow and develop as a leader any specific resources or where would you where would you push people?

Number one, I would say get just get curious. I mean, you got to get curious at whatever passion is that drives you. You know, it may be just your fear of losing. I think that’s the passion that drives them when they’re starting a business. It may be the desire to win. I just want to beat everybody and be number one. I think those are decent motivations. I think a more pure motivation is, you know, this more, you know, generative feeling of I want to learn. I want to grow. I want to produce something. I want to see what’s around the corner and that curiosity I think causes more learning and growth and my advice would be look our brains are just lazy. That’s just how it is. We’ve only got a limited amount of, you know, power going through our minds. And so it takes shortcuts. You don’t think when you tie your shoe, I make the tree and make the whole the bunny goes around the tree in the hole. You don’t think those thoughts anymore with like you did when you learn to tie your shoe. You just do it. You don’t remember doing it because your brain is constantly taking shortcuts. And that’s why it’s so hard to innovate and it’s so hard to to see new things is because our brains taking shortcuts. So I think learning is critical. So whatever curiosity takes you to then I think you then go down the road because that bombardment of new information is going to create insights. So some of the things that you know, I like to see our partners do is engage in the learning that we’ve provided. You know, the things that you’ve done, you know, listening to a podcast like this is going to I mean, geez that the insight they get from people around them who have seen different things. The fact that you can get a book for $20 on someone’s life. Someone’s worked for 70 years and they’re going to distill it down in a couple hundred pages and sell it to you for $20. That’s incredible. I mean the compression of information there of someone’s life and they’re going to hand their life’s work to you for $20 is amazing. But if you can consume those things on a regular basis, I think it can feel like drudgery to some people, but if you’re curious and excited about it by it, which I am and I know you are. That’s why it’s so fun to talk to you about these different top podcasts and different concepts. And I think that’s what propels us forward is constantly bombarding our lazy minds with new ideas. I love it. There’s just so much to learn and if we can we can grasp all the things. I’m a big fan early in life, made a lot of mistakes, didn’t listen to anybody later in life, tried to read a lot, listen a lot, surround myself with good people and go, well, it seems to have worked for them or it seems to work for these guys that built companies for 100 years to your point. Why would I try to go recreate the wheel? Why not? To your point, there’s just so much good advice out there and read those books and just look for that one or two little things that are going to help you that you’re going to walk away with. Yeah, but I think most people go through that cycle. What you’re talking about is, you know, you’re as you were young, you know, didn’t want to hear it. Doesn’t matter. People could be giving you gold, you know, here’s the map. Here’s the way. Here’s the it doesn’t matter. You’re not interested. So until someone turns on and does become interested, that’s why it’s so fun in this part of the community to watch people self-select, to watch them raise their hand, you know, and say, hey, I’ve been listening to your products. I’ve been, you know, talking, I’ve been trying this new concept. Will you help me on this new pitch I’m working on? To see those people step forward and say, I want to grow, I want to develop. Like those are the people who are going to take that advice. Those are going to run with it and make something of it. And that’s a lot of fun. Yeah. Let’s talk about industry trends. So there’s a lot of trends happening right now. There’s a lot of things out there. It seems like there’s never a slow and growth of technology.

What are the trends that are out there that you think will significantly impact this industry? And then how are we helping partners prepare for those? You know, I think we can look at it from from a product set. We look at it often for products of hey, we take from Telco and network and voice and now we’re into security and here comes AI around the corner. I think it’s bigger than that. The trend that we’re seeing that is bigger than that is that distribution is broken. And whenever you see distribution get disrupted,

massive change and massive opportunity takes place. So if you look at the internet, you know, that was a huge distribution model that shifted. And all of a sudden people went online and that became a distribution model where there was opportunity. There were winners and losers. Same thing happened with mobility when things went from just a computer to mobile.

And distribution shifted as well. And once again, when it went to social, the way people get their news now, the way advertising takes place now, it’s done through social. It’s not necessarily done through the old news sites or wherever it was before. And the same thing is taking place in technology distribution. You know, when you look at legacy distribution, it’s really logistics and you look at the people selling it and they represented a single brand or two or three. And now what you’ve got is this proliferation of technology. And so again, we go back and talk about the products. It’s most fun to talk about AI. So let’s talk about that one. Why not?

So everyone, you know, just assumes, well, you know, it’s just game over. I mean, open AI is now with Microsoft and Amazon’s got their answer and you know, Google’s got their answer and Salesforce says AI means this and you know, all these interpretations. Well, it’s game over. Absolutely not. It’s not game over because you had all these enterprises now. Well, but you got the substrate there. You’ve got the platform on what is going to be built on. You’ve got the engines.

But then you’ve got all of these products that are going to be developed and going to be innovating. You’re going to have a fragmented market out there with a lot of choice to be made and what businesses have that people don’t recognize as risk.

How this I know this is a cool thing, but how do I put my business at risk? How to put my career at risk making a decision on what’s right for my business. So is all these new applications are going to come and by the way, price is going to change too. It’s no longer to be based on seats can be based on workload or how much OpEx can I reduce based on using this AI and all the different changes? How do I navigate that? Well, portal doesn’t necessarily get me there because I can’t look into their eye and trust and say, hey, you’ve seen this before. You know how this goes in. Have you seen my situation before? Oh, okay. Yeah, it does look like them that engagement that our advisors have is not replicable today, nor do I think it will be in our lifetime. And so I think that just like it was in the old, I’m going to take it all the way back to, you know, long distance, the competitive telecom, long distance rates. The reason it was not searchable is because there’s so many new companies popping up. There’s so many different choices. It was fragmented when there was a fragmented market when there is risk involved in the decision, people are going to look to an advisor. And that is the greatest trend that I see for our partners for our industry and propelling us forward. So yeah, AI is the next big thing, you know, before, you know, we’ve already got generative AI. We’ve got, you know, voice got security. You got all the, they’re all good products. They’re going to sell, but the underlying trend that is taking place is that disruption to distribution. Yeah, great point too. And I think if you look back at when I talked to people about investing, right, people that are maybe worried about investing is now the right time. When do I hold? Oh, the market’s a bear, the market’s bull. You look back at some of those charts that are out there that say, here’s the statistical percentage that the S&P has returned for the last hundred some years, right? And it’s 10, 11, whatever percent. The reality is just it’s always going to perform. And as long as you stay in it, and as long as you’re willing to talk about these things and be invested in that market or invested in these products with the customers, they’re always going to need help. And it’s always going to get harder. And there’s always going to be, to your point, a million options and people need help. That’s right. Great point.

All right, last couple questions on here. I would love to hear, you know, this is kind of a success and failure conversation. So maybe an experience about a perceived failure that ultimately led to success or just maybe some really important learning.

You know, the one that stands out in my mind was, you know, 10 years ago, some people still talk about this. 10 years ago, we hired an individual in the organization, leadership position.

Absolutely brilliant person. One of the smartest people I’ve ever worked with. By the way, the things that he said have come true. Like the things about this industry of how things would shape up, what it will look like were absolutely true because he came from a parallel industry. The challenge was the culture fit. The culture fit wasn’t there. And the damage that caused the organization. The problem is, so failure number one, hiring the person in the door. So we do our culture interview, you know, we want to make sure the person fits the culture.

Mistake number two, hanging on for too long. It’ll get better. It’ll get better. It’ll improve. We’ll figure it out. We’ll teach. We’ll buffer. We’ll put people around. Hold on for too long. And what happened was it caused damage, visible damage to the organization. You can still look in our charts in our growth flat line during that time. And you can see why, you know, culture matters internally to our employees, externally to our suppliers, to our partners.

It’s felt by all of them. And so I did make the change.

And what happened was I would tell you the reason I view as a positive now is we got religion. And we knew what it gave us was conviction, more conviction. The things we were doing before were right. The things that didn’t show up on a spreadsheet, the things that didn’t show up in a report, the way in which we behaved were right. And you can see that in the performance. I mean, it comes in the outcome. It’s very hard to put your finger on it and say, oh, I put in two, you know, quantities of this and I got five quantities of that. It just doesn’t turn out that way. But that was the learning. That was there. I would say the reconviction in our culture and how we go to market, how we show up. And when partners do say that’s my favorite thing about our brand, when you talk to partners, they say, hey, I know they’re in it for me. I know they got my best interest in mind. That matters and that’s felt. Love it. All right. Final question. So let’s say we look forward 10 years from now, 10 plus years, right? And it’s been incredible to see what we’re building here through your leadership, through the people that we’ve hired, through the culture, through all these things that we’ve talked about to enable the partners to be successful. But if you’re 10 plus and we’re looking back, what is the legacy or what is the impact that you want to say, I helped do that on this industry. I enabled X, whatever you want to put on it. Well, that’s exactly it. You know, I hope that when my story is written, you know, it is that he helped grow the industry beyond what it was. Because I don’t think things just show up by default. I don’t think it’s pre-written, you know, it’s in the stars. I think we will it to happen. And I think we inherited something great that great people started and I think we’re carrying it forward. And what I would love to look back on is to say, you know what? He helped grow the industry because it’s not what the industry is today is not big enough for Telarus to thrive and do the things we want to do the scale we want to achieve. Bring on the talent we want to nurture the talent we have. We have to bring in more partners. We have to help our existing partners sell more. We have to convince customers that this is a normative behavior. And that’s where I think we win is once a customer, once a CIO says, oh, that’d be malpractice for me to make a decision without talking to my advisor. That’s crazy talk. You know, once we get to that state, then we will have arrived. But to get to that, there’s still a lot of work to do with suppliers. Still a lot of partner growth has got to take place. And if I can take a play a role in that that’s ultimately goodness for Telarus but it’s goodness for the entire community. What we have to do is expand the industry. We have to make this mode of selling this this mode of technology acquisition to be the normative behavior. And that’s still even though we believe it’s superior, even though we see it and feel it every day, we have a lot of education to do. And that’s what I see my role is doing because Telarus is going to thrive in that environment with the vision we have in that bigger environment. We’re going to thrive, but a lot of other people are as well. And that’s what I’m set on. Love it. Good stuff.

That’s it, man. I’m questioned out. I really appreciate you coming on. Appreciate you supporting us. Everything that you do to help grow the company, man. Thanks for thanks for being a part of this. Thanks for having me, Josh. Awesome.

Okay, everybody that wraps us up. I’m your host, Josh, the Presto SVP of sales engineering at Telarus here with Adam Edwards CEO. This has been business blueprints lessons from leaders till next time.