“For me, it was really boiled down to three things: the differentiation, which ended up being the product focus, the ability to scale the go-to market, so from one to five people. And then I called it 1000 things. Just every week, we would do retrospectives and try to figure out what we did last week that wasn’t so good that we should improve, and we would just make little, tiny adjustments to everything about the business”.

“I tend to come in and listen first. And you just learn a lot. You kind of try to understand, read the room, read the market, figure out what’s really needed and what the pain points are, and then that’ll give you ideas for which problems are most important to solve and then potentially how to solve them”.

Mark Orttung, CEO of Projectworks.


Today, I’m speaking with Mark Orttung, CEO of Projectworks. Our conversation provides a wealth of practical, hard-earned wisdom for anyone looking to grow and improve their professional services business.

Listen to the interview to gain valuable insights from an experienced leader who has successfully scaled multiple professional services and technology companies. Learn strategies for driving innovation, improving operational efficiency, and providing real-time visibility for consulting firms. 

In this episode, we talk about . . .

  • Mark Orttung’s journey from scaling Nexiant and Bill.com to leading professional services automation platform Projectworks
  • Insights on driving innovation and providing real-time visibility to reduce administrative burdens for consulting clients
  • Leveraging patents and his approach to effective leadership, including the importance of being a proactive listener
  • Strategies for scaling consulting firms, including differentiation, go-to-market, and continuous improvement
  • Collaboration with AICPA and enabling accounting firms to create new revenue streams

Projectworks is a professional services automation platform that’s easy to use and enables the world’s experts to focus on their passion. Professional services and consulting firms use Projectworks’ to better plan their projects, resources, and profits and gain insights into real-time project performance and bottom-line projections. The platform integrates with leading accounting, reporting, and CRM systems, including Xero, QuickBooks, HubSpot and Salesforce.



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This transcript has been generated and transcribed by AI

 

Welcome Mark. How has your day been?

Mark:
Been great. Thank you for having me.

Heather:
Oh, very excited to have the opportunity to talk with you. So Mark, you’ve recently joined Projectworks as their CEO.

What inspired you to join Projectworks and what excites you about the company?

Mark:
Yeah. For me, it’s kind of a funny combination of my last two roles. So my prior to this, I was, as you mentioned, I was running Nexient from 2014 to 2021 and really there we were trying to find a tool that did what Projectworks does. So we’re looking for a tool to run our own platform on. And we tried a few. We had a saying at Nexient, that life’s too short for crappy software. We were all about trying to create software that was easy to use and people would love to use, and we did not love using any of the PSA tools we tried. So what we ended up doing was building our own tool, which as a company who is trying to make money billing hours, and it’s not a great idea to build your own software. Let me put it that way. But, from that, I knew there was a pain point. I knew there was a need in the market, and I met Matt and Doug, two of the three founders of Projectworks at a conference a couple of years ago. Immediately, I saw the product and the team, and really liked both. The product looked like it solved the problem we had, and I really liked Matt and Doug. And then what surprised me about it was how much what Projectworks needs to do looks a lot like what we did at Bill.com. So in terms of go to market with small and mid market companies working through an accountant channel, seemed like it would be a really powerful way to bring Projectworks to market. All of those things to me, and then integrating to Xero to QuickBooks to other accounting packages was just a big part of the play. So I thought Bill.com and Nexient had absolutely nothing to do with each other, but they both turned out to be quite useful in this role at Projectworks. So initially I got onto the board at Projectworks, I asked if I could be on the board. So that was about two years ago. And it gave me the luxury of…

You only met Projectworks founders two years ago at the conference, you asked to join them then?

Mark:
I asked pretty much, right when I met them, you know, if I could get involved as a board level. Yeah, and it gave me the luxury of knowing that it was a good company before coming in. A lot of times, when you come in as a new CEO, you almost have to assume the company is broken or they wouldn’t be looking for a CEO. So I knew in this case, they were not looking for a CEO. Actually, we had a great CEO in place, and I was a little hesitant to join. So I spent some time with the team and with Matt, and asked, sort of, you know, what do you think of this, you know? And he was quite open to the idea and to me coming on board. And so I view it as a luxury to join a company that was thriving and really growing. And so I’m excited about a number of things with Projectworks: the team we’ve got, the market opportunity is great. But I think also, we as a group have over 145 years of experience running professional services companies or being in them, so we got a lot of sort of bumps and bruises. And you know, being in professional services is challenging, as you know, and I’m sure your listeners know, but having done that, I’m excited about all the pain points that I experienced in being able to bring tools and bring expertise to the industry. To get people out of doing the administrative stuff and, hopefully, doing more interesting things with clients, and more time having an impact on the world. All of our customers are small, mid market consultancies. They’re kind of nerds that something really interesting in the world. They’re 20, 30, 50, 100-person firms that are really good at one thing. Usually it’s got a really positive impact on their community. So to the extent we can shorten the amount of time they spend on administrative stuff and give them more time with clients and more time to make an impact. That’s exciting. And it’s I always just get a lot of energy from talking to small and mid market companies and meeting the people who are really passionate about whatever it is their small company does. So I love that. And for me, that’s exciting.

Heather:
Fantastic. It sounds like you’ve sort of found this perfect opportunity. And I do love it when, as you said, two distinct areas come in and help you in that one place that you’re in: those two skill sets from Bill.com and Nexient that you mentioned.

Tell our listeners a bit more about the Projectworks origin story.

Mark:
Yeah. They originally were an internal tool for Provoke. Long before I was involved with Provoke, that’s sort of how I got involved. Here is one of the people who was on my team at Nexient, became CEO of Provoke, and he pulled me into the board of Provoke. So that’s sort of how I met this whole community. Projectworks was an internal tool there. And in 2019 the three founders, Matt, Doug and Julian, wanted to spin it out. So they got Bridgewest Group, who was the main investor, to help them create a separate company in 2019 to become Projectworks. So again, they were sort of originally created the tool out of solving the problem for themselves and all the challenges the Provoke had. And then in 2019, began to bring it to market and bringing other firms on board. So, for me, it was kind of an interesting way to create this tool and this company, and they’ve got a ton of passion, and they put a lot of just like the people at Nexient, they put a lot of sort of evenings and weekends into creating the tool because most, for the most part, they were billing hours as they were creating it originally. So there’s a real passion there, and that’s pretty exciting,

Heather:
Absolutely. So you have touched on this, but I want to ask a question, in case there’s anything else you want to say to this. You have touched on the sort of service-based industries, and they benefit because they have to. They do less admin because they’ve got the solution in place. Is there anything else that you’d like to touch on there?

What type of clients and partners does Projectworks primarily serve? And how do they benefit from the platform?

Mark:
Yeah, absolutely. So they all share sort of having a project structure to the way they do work. So they’ll do 6, 12, 18 month projects with a contract or a statement of work that defines it. And that can be software development projects. It can be small management, consulting firms doing strategy projects. It’s architects, engineers, so think structural engineers, civil engineers, doing these projects. And then what we do for them, we do really everything they need, from time cards, time sheets, expense reports, vacation and leave management to invoicing. So all the time cards become sort of the source of truth for the invoices and the comments that people put in. A lot of our customers, clients, require that the comments be there to say, what did you do this week, or this hours, this set of hours, and then we get into more firm level things. So we help you figure out who’s going to go on which project. Track billability, track utilisation on a given project. We can help track profitability, and we can show it to you in real time before the project is done. So we can tell you, based on what you’ve already worked and the hours you’ve allocated, you’re going to have a problem in a, you know, six weeks or eight weeks. So maybe you can get a change order. Maybe you can change the team or change the scope, but at least it gives you that visibility in real time to project profitability, and then all these things roll up to company level profitability, company level utilisation, and so forth. So it’s a real sort of everything financial related to running a consultancy.

Heather:
It’s so important to alert people to profitability issues in the future. Because you get in a project and you just get so busy and you just focused on deliverables, and everything always slightly goes out of scope. But knowing weeks or months ahead that you need to have further conversations about that is really important.

With the world moving towards automation and AI, how do you see professional services firms adapting to this trend, particularly when adopting tools like Projectworks?

Mark:
Yeah, I think AI is really going to give up everybody another leg up in terms of saving them time. So if you think about a lot of the mundane things that you have to do, whether it’s time sheets or expense reports, we can effectively do them for you. At least create a draft and say, Here’s your timesheet for the week, and you can go in and edit, maybe make a few tweaks, or you might be able to just say yes, that’s correct and be done. So as we bring intelligence into the tool, we’ll just even more than today. Will save you more time. We’ll give you sort of drafts of what’s going to happen and all the various sort of pieces you need to do as part of your job. So I think it’ll just lead to again, more time to focus on clients and less time on the back end.

Heather:
Fantastic.

Projectworks has recently raised USD 5 million. What does this mean for your customers?

Mark:
So the what we’ve been doing with that is we’ve been expanding our product team, both product management, engineering testing, which means we can extend the product so that will show up in terms of more third party products that we can integrate to it’ll show up as more features and capabilities that we can bring to our customers. And we’ve also begun building out a Silicon Valley based product team. So it means some of the people I used to work with Bill.com a long time ago have joined us, and it’s a great group of people, and they’re going to help us move quickly and add lots of capabilities to the platform. So I think for our customers, they’ll just continue to get a stronger and better tool as we as we keep investing.

Heather:
I love that that you’ve brought in people from Bill.com into the platform. I do find that in the ecosystem, people do seem to sort of move around and bring their skills in, but sort of keep up leveling. So that’s fabulous to hear. So let’s circle back a bit and into your career.

Talk to our listeners about establishing Anderson Consulting Palo Alto Technology Center. How has that experience shaped your approach to innovation?

Mark:
Yeah, it’s a great question. So this was a long time ago. I’ve been doing this a long time, but in the 90s, Silicon Valley was pretty early in its growth cycle, and more hardware than software at the time. It was just kind of coming into the software phase, and so Anderson Consulting was just trying to figure out how to create an interface between all these technology firms, and at the time, pretty much fortune 500 large enterprise clients, and there was a pretty big gap between these startups and the enterprise clients. And it was not like today is just taken for granted that everybody’s consuming the latest and greatest technology and trying to figure out how to become more productive with it. At the time, that was not at all a normal thing to do. And so what we were doing at the we called it the Center for Strategic Technology. And the idea was people in an industry, so whether it be, you know, utilities or retail or finance, couldn’t really picture how this new invention that somebody had would fit into their world. So we would spend a lot of time actually building out working demonstrations of new technologies in a particular context, and then we would host groups from a client to come through, and they’d spend the whole day with us, and we’d show them these different prototypes. And it was fascinating on a personal level, just to watch part of it was these teams never got to go anywhere as a team and spend a whole day they were all so busy. So just getting the off site and thinking about things together was really valuable for them. But then when we could show them, like a banker, showing them how the technology would apply to a bank immediately the light bulbs would go off. Even though we would show them the technology in its raw form and explain it, they’d give us blank stare. So it was fascinating to me to see that ability for people, that they had to see it in their world and in their context. And that’s really what we were doing, trying to figure out how to make that technology adoption go faster.

Heather:
Yeah, absolutely, absolutely.

Briefly describe Nexient and share some key challenges you faced while scaling Nexient from 35 million to over 130 million in revenue.

Mark:
Yeah, so Nexient, when I joined, it was originally called Systems in Motion, and we changed it to Nexient. What it did when I joined was basically software development. So if you’ve got a design, you’ve got an idea, we will build it for you. And we thought we were innovative and differentiated because we were early adopters of the agile methodology at the time. In 2014 that was still unusual. I had an advisor come to me and say, That’s great. In three years, it’ll all be a commodity. So that forced us to think about, how are we going to differentiate, and how are we gonna not be a commodity? And we knew we had to become more valuable to our clients, so we added product management and we added user experience design, so that not only could we build your product or your software, but we could help you figure out what to build and how to build it and do the design for it. So we became, kind of the way I like to summarise it was like trying to take the way a startup works, put that in a bottle and sell it to large companies. So our customers were very large fortune, 500 enterprise. We would sell them a team of 10 people that could do the design, the product plan and build out for something in a matter of weeks, and they just weren’t capable of moving that quickly for the most part. So it was a really valuable thing for them to do so so that creating that differentiation was one piece, the other piece that I learned, I didn’t know this until later, somebody had told me, ahead of it, that in the US, consulting firms break somewhere between 25 and 40 million, and the reason why is that they have a fantastic founder, and everything goes through that founder. Founders are involved in selling. They’re involved in everything to do with customers, and they can all, they sort of break at a certain point. And so luckily, the founder of of systems in motion had also founded a venture capital fund, and he had to go, he sort of had to pick, he had to do one or the other as his day job, because both were successful enough. So he pulled me in to run it, so we sort of without really knowing this problem, pulled the founder out, dropped me in, and I didn’t want to really work the way he did. I didn’t want everything to go through me. So I started trying to build a decentralised team. It took me probably three years and a lot of mistakes before we got there. But, ultimately, we had five regions that each had a leader. So in a way, we had sort of five founders and the theory was that they could each get to 25 to 40 million before it would break again. And so our five people got us to 131 million. And I could tell we were going to break again, and I would have to figure out, like, do I need five more of them, or do we need a whole new model? And luckily, the way the market worked and the inbound interest happened, we were able to sell the firm, and I didn’t have to solve the next wall like that we were going to hit, but it was clear we were going to hit another wall. Because it was a similar sort of breaking point. So for me, it was really boiled down to three things, the differentiation, which ended up being sort of the product focus, the ability to scale the go to market, so from one to five people. And then I called it 1000 things, like just every week we would do retrospectives and try to figure out, what did we do last week that wasn’t so good that we should improve, and we would just make little, tiny adjustments to everything about the business. Over time that became really valuable and really helpful to the company. So those three things: differentiation, go to market in a scalable way. And then 1000 little details.

Did the five leaders you placed on your team meet and share knowledge?

Mark:
For the most part, yes. They were all sort of go to market sales professionals who are, by nature, a little bit competitive. So there was, you know, and you kind of want that, right, like they would jokingly, sort of jokingly talk about which region was largest and which region was growing the fastest at any given point in time. And there was, so there was sort of a healthy competition. But they also were a good team. It was also interesting, our clients, were nationwide, across the US, trying to have a single offering that effectively, five little franchises are selling, right? Like we’re all part of the company, but they had to be pretty independent. They had to do their own proposals. They had to listen to clients. And so you’re trying to keep the offering consistent amongst this distributed team. So it’s an interesting balancing act, because you can’t control everything, or you won’t scale. But you want a single product and brand and sort of service your offering.

Heather:
It’s really interesting. It sounds like you encouraged, I think the word is intrapreneurialism.

Mark:
Yeah.

Heather:
They were all being intrapreneurial in their own rights within the firm. So I’m sure that some people listening in are like, this is how we can do it. And explore that possibility of having sort of multiple friendly, compressed, um people in those roles.

Mark:
Yeah.

When it comes to scaling a consulting company, what strategies have you found to be most effective?

Mark:
Yeah, it’s really the differentiation is so critical. For Nexient, there were 10,000 firms globally that did what we did.

Heather:
There were 10,000 competitors?

Mark:
Yeah. So if you would go read the Gartner analyst report, they would have the software development outsourcing category, and there were 10,000 firms in it. And you kind of look at that, and you think about like, how on earth are we going to stand out from 10,000 other firms? So we really boiled down, or like what we did, to just this product software approach, and then we boiled it down to this, life’s too short for crappy software, which was, it’s sort of a little bit less formal than most at the time we’re using. And it just kind of stood out. The thing that was fascinating to me is, once we crossed 1000 people. According to Gartner’s report, the top 175 out of the 10,000 were over 1000 people. So we sort of started, you know, somewhere in the mass of 10,000 and over seven years, we grew it to be one of the top 200 roughly. So I think the differentiation is key. And one of the things I learned at Accenture was they would reinvent that company every two or three years. They were constantly reinventing themselves and changing what it was and changing what they stood for and what they were helping clients with. And to me, that was fascinating to see this company that just its nature was to keep changing. And so we were trying to do the same thing. We were trying to figure out, sort of, where is the market going, where do we stand with it, and how do we make sure we’re ahead of it? Because you really want to be ahead. If you’re an expert helping your clients, you want to be ahead of the trends. And so now it’s, you know, most of the being ahead of it is doing something with generative AI and really being able to apply that any unique way, at least in the tech sector, staying ahead. But yeah, for me, it’s mostly about differentiation and then about go to market and sort of how you build that motion. And there’s a million details there. Probably the most important one I found was that in our space, our buyers wanted to buy from practitioners. They did not want to buy from peer sales people. So very early in the cycle, you had to get somebody who builds products, either an engineer or a designer or product manager, talking to the prospect. If you had a more of a business development person that had not done that in their background, you’d only have one meeting, and that would be the end of that. That was fascinating. And so we really tried to develop practitioners who could sell, which is not like, it’s a bit of an oxymoron. Like most designers don’t really want to sell. They want to design, right? So it you have to find unique people who are open to learning how to do it and enjoy it.

Heather:
Yeah. Yeah. No, it is. It is actually something like even in the accounting field that we find difficult to navigate. I’ve actually seen an AI solution that will sit on top of your inbox and it will surface when your clients want to buy more from you.

Mark:
Oh, wow.

Heather:
You need to sell them this. Like, it’s kind of like giving them you permission, because I imagine accountants, some, as you said, are not aware there’s this extra upselling opportunities, or basic selling opportunities there. Even though it’s standing right in front of you. So really, I’m interested in the conversation we’re going to next, because we have sort of pre talked about this. In your role as COO of Bill.com you work directly with the AICPA, which is for people listening in and correct me if I’m wrong, America has one massive accounting professional body. Now, many of the other countries that I deal with have multiple accounting professional bodies, but really in America, it is one, and it is AICPA, and you work directly with the AICPA to enable 1000s of us accountants to grow their services.

How did your time at Bill.com and collaborating with the AICPA shape your approach to helping firms grow?

Mark:
Yeah, the it was a great partnership with the AICPA. They had a sort of two levels. It was the AICPA itself, and they were creating the standards, you know, so the various like rules and standards for different types of audits and things. Then, in the US they’re creating most of that. They had what we call gap generally accepted accounting principles, so they’re creating that. They have a whole body of people who’ve been doing this stuff for 30-40, years that are the experts doing that. And then they had created what is now called CPA.com which is a for profit unit that helps create tools and market tools for the professionals in the industry. So originally this was training, education and tools like that. Now it’s mostly software. So they probably 20-25, years ago, made the switch to software as the primary tool set, and it was fascinating. We were one of the first tools, that was sort of a startup, when I was at Bill.com and we first started partnering with CPA.com I think we had almost no revenue, almost no customers, no accounting firms working with us. And so it was a pretty risky thing for them to come in early, that early and work with us to develop the market. And so it it helped me really, first off, just understand all the different sort of dynamics within accounting firms and the different practices. And then I, you know, one of the things that we liked to do at Bill.com was we wanted to create an offering that allowed the accounting firm to create a new service offering of their own. So we wanted to be an enabler for them to create a whole new revenue stream. And so I called these firms the machines where they would do, for example, bookkeeping as an outsourced service, and then they would try to get it sold as sort of a fixed bid approach, and then bring our technology in to remove a lot of the labour. And so their margins would become quite attractive for this service. And so there were a large percentage of the firms wanted to build these sort of machine like practices. They’re effectively outsourcing practices. But there was a whole set of firms that said, I don’t want anything to do with that. I’m an expert. I want to be consultative to my clients. I don’t want to do this kind of repetitive machine like thing. So the other end of the spectrum was, but my clients, even though I want to be an expert, I want to be consultative. They keep dragging me into their bookkeeping, right. The clients, were kind of pulling them into the mundane. They wanted to do the interesting. So in that case, we could at least help them recommend the technology that their clients could then automate the bookkeeping themselves and put much less demand on the CPAs and accountants to do that, and so they could then go be experts and advisors. So we had to sort of fit into the way they wanted to go to market. And it was quite a spectrum, and some somewhere in the middle of those two. But it was, yeah, I learned a ton, and I just always enjoyed working with the accounting firms, a lot of great companies and people involved.

Heather:
Yeah, absolutely. Look, it’s fascinating to hear that. I was unaware that things like that even even happened. So thank you for sharing that with us. So Mark, you’ve held leadership roles in both tech and service companies, and I notice that in when people talk about you, they’ve described you as the best listener. So I really love that. I really love proactive listeners and best listening, and it’s always something that I’m trying to do.

How do you think that being a great listener contributes to your effective leadership?

Mark:
That’s great question. I think just trying to really understand the team and and the market and the customers and the prospective customers. I am, just by nature, I listen. You know, some people come in and talk first. I tend to come in and listen first. And you just learn a lot, and you kind of try to understand, read the room, read the market, figure out what’s really needed and what the pain points are, and then that’ll give you ideas for which problems are most important to solve, and then potentially how to solve them. And quite often, customers and prospects kind of have an idea what they need. And so if you just listen, it’s often in there, and you can kind of pull the best ideas out and then begin to productise them and and bring them to them. So yeah, I always, you know, I think I’m happiest when I’m learning, and I learn so much from customers and prospects and partners and fellow employees. So yeah, it’s just fun for me.

Heather:
I think, and correct me if I’m wrong, but I think that sometimes when you speak to people, they don’t know how to crystallise what the issue is, because they don’t exactly understand what the issue is. And it’s kind of something’s happening further down the track that they don’t like, but it’s actually something maybe back up the track that’s actually causing that. And through the listening, you’re able to crystallise what the actual issue is that is bothering them.

Mark:
Yeah, I think that’s right. I think it’s again, maybe with experience, you just you start to be able to see it faster, because you’ve talked to a lot of people, and you hear where it hurts, and you kind of have a pretty good idea, like, what’s causing it underneath. And so it comes a little bit with experience and just listening to a lot of different people, and a lot of times, I’m lucky enough to listen to a lot of different customers, or prospective customers, and they describe similar things, but in a different way. You can begin to zero in on like, what’s really common there, and what’s really the core problem.

Heather:
Absolutely. And I’ll do a shout out for people listening in. If you’re using a transcription tool, it typically tells you in the conversation what percentage you spoke and what percentage the other person spoke. So I know that I was having a meeting thinking I was doing the listening. I’ve got the report back saying I talk for 70% of the time, so clearly the robots are telling me that I wasn’t actually actively listening like I thought I was. So that’s a good piece of data surface from those transcripts.

Mark:
I haven’t tried that. I should go look at that.

Heather:
Yeah, well. You’re a great listener, as has been told by other people, so you’re probably fine. But it’s it does come back and tell you things like empathy and how positive you are in the meeting and stuff. And it is interesting. It’s sometimes easier for the robot to tell you. This is really intrigues me, and I don’t think I’ve ever spoken to someone who has, I don’t know. Do you create a patent or apply for a patent? You’ve had your hand in securing over 40 patterns.

What role does innovation play in your life today?

Mark:
Yeah, that’s a great question. I really enjoy brainstorming and coming up with new ideas to solve problems and so patents. It’s a weird kind of a thing, because if everything goes well, you never use them. Like you don’t really want to. There are people out there that create patents and then try to sue other people to get royalties and things like that. But most tech companies create them almost as a defensive play, so that if somebody sues you and says You violated our patent, then hopefully you have one in your portfolio to go back and say, well, you’re violating this patent, so we’ll just do a cross licensing agreement, and nobody has to pay anybody. That was sort of the philosophy that the companies I worked at have had around them. There are companies that people call them patent trolls, that buy the patents, and they just go out and try to sue everybody and get paid, which is not great. But so a lot of what we would do is just proactively sit down and think about where should the product be in five years. So you can patent it, if you can describe it, you don’t have to build it. You just have to describe how you would build it. So you can think about things that might come together in four or five years from now, write them down and and submit them. Then, in the US, the Patent and Trademark Office can take five to seven years to process it. So you like, I still every once again, I noticed that something from two companies ago became a patent because there’s all these applications that are just working their way through the system. But yeah, we would just try to think about for the platforms. I worked on so many different tech platforms, for these platforms, what’s going to be important in five years, and what do we want to protect as sort of our intellectual property? So, like one example, at Bill.com, we had the idea. So I don’t know if you’ve ever done a lot of international wires, but when you do an international wire, it’s a pretty unhappy experience. You might, you know, send $100 and then there’s all these banks along the way that each take a fee. Then there’s this foreign exchange fee and a foreign exchange rate, and by the time it gets to wherever it’s going, I might be $60 or $70 instead of 100. That just seems like it shouldn’t be the case. So we were taking that as a problem statement. Renee, who founded Bill.com and I, spent some time trying to think about that, and decided it’d be better if everything were sort of local transfers. So everything inside the country is local. And if we had enough people making transfers on our system, then a transfer from the US, say to Australia should be from our from them to our US bank account, and from our Australian bank account to wherever they’re sending it to. And maybe in a given day, you’d have a few 1000 of these. And at the end of the day, you can send one wire to balance out the two local bank accounts, and that’s it. So you don’t have the you’re all sort of sharing this one wire, instead of 2000 wires going back and forth and all the fees and all the craziness that happens with that. So that was we came up with that idea. We patented it years and years ago, and it came through. It was issued. Actually just saw Bill.com just recently released this feature called Local transfer that I think is effectively based upon that patent. And so it’s kind of fun to see. But it’s, you know, just take a hard problem, try to think about like a way to solve it. Building that at the time seemed crazy to us, because we didn’t have that many customers. We didn’t have that many payments, but we hoped one day we would have this giant number of customers making, you know, millions of payments. And if you had that scale, then you could build a system like this. So it’s fun to see they’re actually at that scale.

Does the business own the patents, or do you own the patents?

Mark:
The business owns the patent. So in the US, the way the law works is you, as an employee, write the patent, and then the business has to compensate you for assigning it to them. It’s assigned over to them, and then, yeah. I don’t own any of the patents I’ve worked on. They reside with each of the companies that I happen to work at the time.

Heather:
And do you get royalties from it afterwards?

Mark:
No, I do not.

Heather:
I’m completely ignorant of this situation. So if I’m looking at solution A that’s out in the ether, and I go, it needs X, Y, Z, and no one else has got X, Y, Z. Should I write a patent so they can then buy it off me?

Mark:
Potentially. Yeah, that I you know, there are people that do that. They create patents.

Heather:
I can just spend the rest of my life doing that.

Mark:
There all kinds of crazy patents people have written. Like one very early in the days of cell phone, somebody patented the idea of inside the battery, a little thing that vibrates, so that instead of ringing your phone, it would vibrate your phone. And for the for however long that lasted, every cell phone that vibrated had to pay this person a royalty, right? So there’s these crazy things like that are just sort of one little niche thing. But then you think about, like, how many cellphones that would be in. It’s crazy. So, yeah, if you can get a patent and go out and license it, it can be quite lucrative.

Heather:
Oh my goodness. I didn’t even know. I didn’t understand, or conceptually understand the whole process of that. So thank you for explaining that to me and I’m sure a lot of other people. Hopefully we have not encouraged any patent trolls. Okay, because I don’t want to encourage but patent innovators, because there’s a lot of frustrated people who want this features and functionalities, and maybe that’s the way they go out and do it. I don’t know how it works in Australia. I don’t you talked about the US and whether it’s a global thing as well, whether people can do that globally, but certainly an interesting route to explore.

Mark:
Yeah. Yeah.

Heather:
So one of the other things that you do, amongst those things that you do, is you write a blog called the Consulting Balance, and you share insights into growing professional services firms.

Could you just give us an overview of what your Blog is like?

Mark:
Yeah, that’s actually it’s kind of fun for me, because it started with someone at Projectworks asking me if I could write one blog on my experience at Nexient. And I thought about it, I said, I don’t think so. I think it would take me like, 30 or 40 blogs. So I just did an outline, and sort of figured I would try to do the whole experience, from the beginning when I didn’t know what I was doing and breaking all kinds of things, to when we figured a lot of pieces out, and then the growth, and ultimately, I still haven’t finished it, the sale of the company. So yeah, so I try to use the stories that I got to experience. And if you’re running a company, you get to experience all kinds of amazing things all the time, most of which you can’t really talk about, like they’re sort of confidential, or they’re at the time, they’re confidential, or they’re personal, whatever. So for me, it’s kind of nice to be able to talk about it, because the company doesn’t exist anymore. I can just somewhat freely write about it. I think for me, I would have loved to have had somebody telling me this. When we went to go, you know, into Nexient, I had no idea about most of these things, and I wish somebody had told me. So that’s part of what I’m trying to do, a little bit, is give back and sort of say these are the lessons I learned along the way. And I try to do it in a way that each one has a story that is, I think people would rather read stories than sort of like textbook or so. I try to use stories to capture the moments that were pivotal in either breaking the company down or then ultimately fixing it and growing it. Yeah, so it’s been fun for me, and I’ve I’ve also pulled in some of the other some of my colleagues have co written, some of them with me, and I hope to do that more with a few more of them. And that’s been fun as well, to get them involved. And because one of the things I try to do is hire people that are smarter than me and better at what they do than me. And so a lot of these things, I’m like, Hey, can you come explain this part of it? And that’s been fun as well.

Heather:
Yeah, absolutely. It sounds like what you’re actually going to end up with is a nice book.

Mark:
Yeah, I think we’ll probably pack it up as a book and then make that something we make available as well.

Heather:
I know that whenever I go to conferences, I always like the stands that have a book. I think I’ve even put one that, oh, I don’t know if you can see it. You can’t see it’s a blue book up the back there, which I think was from Zapier. And I just kind of got to the stand. Okay, if you’ve got a book, I’ll read the book. So and I think it really humans sell to humans, and it really embeds you with the understanding of while you’re talking about that business. It really embeds you with the philosophies of how the company is moving forward your current business, by knowing you as a person. Lastly and when, for listeners who are listening in, when someone is joining me on the podcast, I ask them to share with me a book that they have recently read and that they’re going to be happy to talk about and I want to highlight that Mark is the first man, first man to suggest two books written by female authors, which is just, I’ve been doing this seven years, and I was just like, whoa, first time that’s happened. So thank you very much for being a diverse reader. You’ve mentioned two books, Burn Book by Kara Swisher and the Mindset book by Carol Dweck.

Talk about those books you recommend: what they’re about and what you’ve taken from them.


Mark:
Yeah, they’re very different. And it’s funny. I didn’t even know that I was suggesting. I just figured I was suggesting two good books, the two books that were probably the most impactful recently and a long time ago. But Mindset was how we built our leadership culture, and ultimately our culture across the whole company at Nexient. It’s a really great book about a growth mindset versus a fixed mindset, and being open to failure and being open to learning from what’s happening, versus a fixed mindset, person is more likely to seek sort of validation of how great they are from whatever they do. Then when something doesn’t go well, it’s this like negative cycle they get into where they don’t get validation, and it’s kind of a mess. So that one, actually, I originally selected it because Satya Nadella at Microsoft, somebody was interviewing him and asked him. They sort of said, you know, like, when you took over, the place was kind of a mess, and it seems to be in really great shape now. Like, what do you attribute that to? And he said, this book. I had three or four people recommend it to me. I don’t usually have a lot of time to read books. I it takes a while for me to, like, go get a book and read it, but when he recommended that, because the transformation of Microsoft has been pretty impressive, that he’s orchestrated. So that got me reading it, and then I made my whole team read it, and we just sort of adopted it as part of our culture. So I highly recommend that one. And then Burn Book is a completely different it’s a she wrote it in the end of 2023 so it’s much more recent. And Kara Swisher, for those that don’t know her, has been a journalist and an entrepreneur documenting the Silicon Valley for probably 30 years, maybe more, and she’s got access to all the leaders. So Steve Jobs and Elon Musk and all these people, she interviews, she texts with them, and she gives her very blunt, raw opinion. Burn Book, a good title for it. I’m not sure how much they’re going to talk to her anymore, but if you want to kind of get a really interesting view of the Silicon Valley and big tech today and where it all stands, it’s fascinating. It’s a really well written book.

Heather:
Yeah, absolutely. Thank you so much for sharing them with us. I’m sure that our listeners will be interested in them, and I will take some time over the break and grab both books and read them. Thank you so much for joining us on the podcast. It’s really been interesting talking with you, Mark. Is there anything else that you would like to share with our listeners? And I would encourage them, if they’re interested, to connect with you on LinkedIn and subscribe to your blog post as well.

Is there anything else you’d like to share with our listeners?

Mark:
No, just thank you for having me. I really enjoyed the conversation. And yeah, please do reach out on LinkedIn or go check out the consulting balance. It’s on Projectworks, currently, projectworks.io a soon to be projectworks.com so it’ll be there on our site.

Heather:
Fantastic. And I’ll drop links to it in the show notes, so you’ll be easily able to find them. Thank you so much, Mark. I really appreciate having you on the show.

Mark:
Thank you.