Episode 2 Transcript

The Challenges and Trends Shaping The Future of Services Delivery w/ Ray Grainger, Sean Crafts & Roger Neel

  • [0:00] Intro

  • [1:49] The Key Professional Services Technology Trends Organizations are dealing with today

  • [3:50] The increasing trend towards a sub-contractor workforce for growth and specialization

  • [5:51] The negative impact tribal knowledge has on an organization

  • [10:03] Centralized resource management vs distributed resource management

  • [11:35] How increased specialization and just in time requirements from clients are impacting professional services organizations

  • [13:29] How to improve employee and contractor satisfaction in an organization

  • [17:39] Utilizing technology for industry-based resource management

  • [21:38] Scaling resource management operations through the "liquid workforce"

  • [29:12] The importance of a centralized resource management function and applying a supply chain methodology to your services business

[0:00] Intro

Matt: Okay everybody, welcome to the Professional Services Pursuit, the number one podcast in the services industry, featuring expert advice, insights and guests from across the services world. I'm your host Matt Finch and my very special guest today are three amazing people. Amazing people in my personal life, but also in the services world in general. They’re Ray Grainger, Roger Neel and Sean Crafts, who are the founders of Mavenlink. So incredibly special guests we've got here today, thank you gentlemen for joining us.

Ray: Pleasure.

Sean: Thank you Matt.

Matt: Well this episode, we're going to be exploring two things and I think this is going to be a really cool conversation. So current challenges and future trends in the services industry. Now we've been warned already by our teams to keep this fairly short. We could probably do this over about four or five hours and maybe a couple of beers too but we're going to try and get to some key points here. If you're a services leader within the services industry, what's happening today that you should be taking note of, what are the challenges you might be facing, what solutions might be out there? And then we're going to talk about the future as well. So let's jump right into it.

The services industry, incredibly complex, the change that's happened over the last couple of years as well as just been completely game-changing in terms of the way services are delivered; everything's remote, now it's hybrid. Just some incredible forces that are shaping the services industry today that are different from two years ago, 10 years ago. You know, from the times that you guys were running services operations, now moving into a software company, you guys' experiences are going to be really deep here.

The first place I want to go here is people. I mean services are inherently a people business, right? It's all about putting the right people in the right place at the right time and everything that goes with that. So Ray, I'm going to start with you. If you were a VP of services and you were dealing with people-related challenges today, with everything going on in the world, what would be some of the key trends that you would say that you were being challenged with?

[1:49] The Key Professional Services Technology Trends Organizations are dealing with today

Ray: Well first, I would agree with you that over the last several years, the services industry is being shaped by some really powerful forces. Principle among those are the digitalization of everything; software is everywhere. And the workforce mix based on the explosion of technology and the skills required in order to implement new technologies within professional services for their clients. And so I think the key challenge that most services firms face is a lack of the right talent at the right time at the right place, in order to meet client needs.

Matt: Yeah, excellent. So in terms of the solve for that, I mean there must be 101 different things you could do. And if you were a VP of services at a software company or a consulting organization, how would you go about looking at that problem? What things would you have done in the past and then now, that you think would tackle those problems?

Ray: Well I think the past is very different from the current, right? In the past, you could have a broader set of offerings around a few technologies. In which today, your clients are asking you to implement many new technologies, which you will not have the people to go do. So it's requiring services firms to kind of be binary. Either very specialized, where they can have a consistent demand for the skills that they have or the skills that they want to acquire. Or they need to be very large firms and acquire companies with those niche specialties in order to move fast in the market. So you're kind of on two ends of the spectrum I think.

Matt: Yeah. So you raised a really interesting point there. There's always been this concept of a subcontractor that you work with when you need someone. I mean in the current climate, how difficult is it to go and find somebody that's available with the right skill, that must be a really tough thing to do. And historically, always probably has been as well, right?

[3:50] The increasing trend towards a sub-contractor workforce for growth and specialization

Ray: And it's increasing, so the typical services firm might have anywhere from 40 to 70% of their workforce which is now a sub-contracted entity, by either individual or firm. And that continues to increase for the reasons I mentioned earlier. And that's becoming increasingly hard because everybody's busy. It’s really at full capacity right now in the industry and so people are having to form new relationships, break old ones, reconstitute new ones on an ongoing basis. A much higher frequency than they had before.

Sean: And as Ray was mentioning too, as those things start to compound, there's this growth with subcontractors and the specialization Ray was talking about in general. Now the ability to engage with them starts to get more and more complicated. Like what you might've needed to know years ago was I trust this person, I've got some paperwork in place with this person, I believe they delivered good work. Now you've got to know really specifically what skills do they have, track those and keep those updated. Because as Ray also mentioned, the timing of these projects becomes shorter in duration. It's not just “is Sean generally available”, it's “is Sean available next week on Tuesday for this half week”. It gets a lot more complicated to think about and manage those subcontractors.

Matt: Definitely. And I think as well, like if you're a services leader, resource manager, you're tasked with filling out that demand with the right people. The concept of tribal knowledge I think is super interesting because that is your USP, as one of those people, that means you are unique in your organization. Because hey, I've got all of that information in my head, I know everybody's skills, I know their availability kind of generally, I know the usual contract as we go out too. But is that tribal knowledge? It's a benefit to the individual, but is it really a benefit to the organization? Does that create risk if that tribal knowledge is only in somebody's head and not in any kind of system?

[5:51] The negative impact tribal knowledge has on an organization

Roger: You're absolutely right Matt, the tribal knowledge does often benefit the individual, but it really doesn't benefit the firm. And as Ray was talking about, if we rewind some number of years, it's a lot of different cobbled together technologies. And what cobbled together technologies don't do very well is really communicate across one another. So visibility has been a real problem for the industry. Even if the knowledge isn't tribal and it is captured somewhere, the problem is it might be in a system you're not looking at right now. Therefore it kind of goes back to tribal knowledge again.

Matt: Yeah and I think we see that in a lot of the clients we serve as Mavenlink, is transmitting that tribal knowledge into a reusable and scalable system and environment. So Roger, as you were just talking there, being the kind of solutions man here, you're the man of the product let's say, how would you solve some of those problems that we'd seen and talked about so far?

Roger: Yeah, it's a great question. One of the first steps here was to really centralize the information as we were just talking about. The opposite of good organized information is what we're talking about, sort of tribal knowledge, disparate systems, things not talking to one another. You know, a kind of combined system where you could really get visibility and then people could see the gaps and see the trends and really get visibility into the business. Was one of the first major steps I think for our industry of professional services, to really kind of take it to the next level.

Matt: Yeah, absolutely. And I suppose when you're in that kind of role and your world revolves around your tribal knowledge and the 17 spreadsheets that you probably use to glue all of this together, do you feel like technology solving these problems is a threat to you or is it going to help you?

Roger: I think technology solving these problems is absolutely a help for the professional services business. If you really take it to the end here and say hey, we've got really good information centralized in one place or at least communicated across maybe a couple of systems. Versus what Ray was describing, where it might be 8, 10, 12 systems with a bunch of spreadsheets to your point Matt, you know that really helps. And one trend that we see in this whole realm as well is, it's a much more employee-first culture within the firm too. So it's not do we have the right person, but it's also does that person really want to do this and will it advance their career? And if all of that can be combined into a system where we can begin making recommendations to business, because we have the data, we have the information and now we can kind of come back with a different career-minded, as well as client-minded recommendations, you know, that's a perfect world.

Ray: Matt can I pick up on a couple of those points just to double down and emphasize. If you look at the role Roger alluded this to, the employee choice is part of it. But the person who's responsible for trying to deploy people in a professional service firm or the people that are responsible for that, who may have relied on tribal knowledge in the past, one you mentioned it doesn't scale, which it doesn't. But the importance of putting the right person at the right place at the right time, either an employee or a subcontractor, if they have the best fit to meet the needs for whatever the project is. The importance of the resource planner in the organization is increasing I think exponentially. Because not only does it satisfy the current need to a client and project and immediate revenue for the firm, but you're also determining the future capabilities you'll build as a company. Because deploying that person to the next thing that’s important for them to work on, is that in line with the capabilities I'm trying to build as a company? And so the resource planner by having all this consolidated information that Roger talked about is just so necessary today to make these important choices.

[10:03] Centralized resource management vs distributed resource management

Matt: So do you feel resource management as a practice is becoming more centralized or is it becoming more distributed, which way do you think it should go?

Ray: I think it's both. You need central capability that makes resource planning and management consistent across the firm. And it has to be distributed all the way down to the employee having choice or input and knowing what their options are. So it's a very diffuse mechanism that all needs to rely on a consistent information base.

Matt: Roger you raised an interesting point that we expanded a little bit there around career growth. Certainly what I've seen recently is people taking their career growth into their own hands. You know, it's not a case of waiting on the corporate ladder for the right opportunity. It's like I'm going to head out there, do a course on some online thing, either free or otherwise and I'm going to come back to my organization with a new skill and I'm going to look to try and deploy that new skill in a certain way. If you're a resource manager, how'd you keep up with that kind of skill development cycle where people are taking that into their own hands? It's not just I went to college, I have that skill and now I've got X years experience in the field. I can go and do a course on programming or architecture or whatever that might be just tomorrow and then come back with a new skill to the workforce and then put new demands on my organization to find me somewhere to go. Otherwise, I'm going to go to this other place over here that might give me that opportunity. Is there like a way more fluid talent pool than we've ever seen before, or am I making a big assumption there?

[11:35] How increased specialization and just in time requirements from clients are impacting professional services organizations

Sean: I think the numbers would say that it absolutely is more complicated than it's ever been. I was looking at things earlier today, the number of businesses who have turned down work in the last year, it's almost 70%. You look at the time to deliver project-based work for an average services company, they have over 90 days to start a project. Those are not numbers that any services leader wants to see. They’re hitting up against those thresholds because they're getting it in both directions. There's this increased specialization just in time requirement from the clients and then there's all of these skills, specializations and updates. They probably don't have visibility too on their employee side. And it really puts them in a really tight bind in the middle of that and then the resource managers which we talk to every day are really feeling it in lots of different ways. Like you'll hear capacity and resource planning very generically, you'll hear time to revenue, you'll hear all these different numbers and things that their leaders are pressing down on them. They're struggling to solve for because a lot of times as you mentioned, it’s spreadsheets, picking up the phone, calling, talking, it doesn't scale.

Matt: Yes and you mentioned an interesting point. I've kind of got this concept in my head of employee empowerment that is more powerful than ever. Do you think that there's a channel for some kind of services employee or provider to choose more of what they do in the future? You know, I want to work on that project next time that's coming, I can see that project coming up in six weeks time. I finished this other one in five weeks’ time, I'll take a week off, but I want to be on that project, please choose me to be on that project. Is there a concept of employees becoming more like they're pitching for the work that they want as opposed to sitting and waiting to be told what they do next?

[13:29] How to improve employee and contractor satisfaction in an organization

Sean: Yeah it has to be, it absolutely has to be. And I think the firms are going to push more and more of this down to the employees for the benefit of retention. When you're looking at…pick your number 40%, 50%, 30%, whatever the number of people right now that are looking for another job, everybody's thinking about retention. And if you think about retention and satisfaction, you don't want to be the one dictating what your people are doing and not giving them a choice and a voice in that. So I think the retention challenge is going to force this more and more and I think it's a positive for the employees and the business. Like it’s the updating, the constant improvement related to skill development, identification on the employee side of what matters to the business or some visibility from the employer down to the employee. Here's what we have available, some way then for the employees to tap into that and also raise their hands. Like hey, I've got these skills and or, hey, that's a skill I'd love to have. I don't have it yet, back to your earlier comment Matt, go learn that skill, so the next week, or next month I can raise my hand and make sure I made myself available.

Ray: And to add a couple of points on that, if you think about the desire of the individual contributor, you know consultants want to work on things that are of high interest to them, has always been there. Especially in the early stages of their career, it's skills acquisition, that's what they're really seeking to build up some expertise. The challenge is that they only had a limited view of what the demand for their skills was based on the tribal knowledge of the resource planner, their project manager or supervisor or somebody like that. And so given, I'll call it the volatility, the short-duration project that Sean mentioned in the frequency of change, of moving onto the next thing. And having the firm perform better by giving people choice and having them staff themselves essentially to move more fluidly through the organization and giving visibility then across the entire demand spectrum is absolutely necessary today. So I think that the firms who operate in that way can meet both objectives much better than they did before.

Matt: Yeah I think you've nailed it.

Roger: Just to pick up on Ray's comments too, it's again, almost back to visibility. You know Matt, if I can give you visibility into what I aspire to do and maybe some of the skills that I went to training for and you can give me visibility into some of the projects that you are staffing, we can create a bit of a symbiotic relationship. And I can begin, as Ray put it, to really work on the things that drive my skills forward even more quickly in the context of client work. So it really does create, I think Sean mentioned it, kind of a win-win between the business and the employee and it creates tenure as well. Now that I've been here, I've been building all these skills and I have a lot of trust in the organization and this is a place I can really see staying for a while and growing my career. Versus just having to leave to the next services firm that might be doing work somewhere else.

Matt: Yeah, it's such a fine balance isn't it? Because as employers, you need to provide growth opportunities and individual happiness levels, retention levels. You want people to work for your company, but at the end of the day as a services firm, you still have to deliver as much money. You have responsibility to your shareholders, right? So how do you balance the two together? And Roger, maybe a question for you. If we were thinking from a technological perspective, how do we bring in all of the different possibilities that any project at any point in time could be staffed on and then taking into account… Well, there's actually always more than one project happening at one point in time anyway. Like if you think about a resource manager and the number of computations it's going to take and the combinations of different people in places and skills and all the rest of it, how'd you manage that? I mean as a resource manager you're doing that in your head, but how can we do that technologically in the future? What kinds of things are we seeing out there from a technological perspective?

[17:39] Utilizing technology for industry-based resource management

Roger: You know me well, so I'm going to start with an old joke. To your point about being expensive, the old joke is a CFO came to the table and said hey, this training program looks pretty expensive, what if we train all these people and they leave and the retort is well what if we don't and they stay right? So it's really the notion, as we look to the industry-based resource recommendations, which I think you're alluding to and factoring in not only what projects and all the combinations of skills these projects require. Which drives hiring and subcontracting as we were talking about before, but then also kind of what the individual employee wants to do. The combinations are pretty staggering and this is why it's so critical to get out of the tribal knowledge world and the manual world. Where we're just going to put John over here and Jane over there and into a world where the computer is actually making the staffings. As we look at it, the airplane industry, the oil and gas industry, even the NFL, they couldn't do all the different team staffings and kind of week by week plays. And in the NFL's case, or all the pilot and crew machinations and kind of Denver to here, New York to there. On a sheet of paper, why is the professional services industry any different when we're thinking about hundreds of projects and thousands of people in a mid-market firm?

Matt: Yeah, could you imagine that? NFL1.XLS gets deleted and the whole NFL stops.

Roger: Right, I'm sure it probably happened in 1968.

Matt: Yeah, maybe.

Ray: What's the difference of staffing a team to go to Mars? It's going to be months and months and months on end and maybe years, versus short hops between LA and San Francisco and having to figure all that out. That's what's happened in the services industry, these short duration projects, had shorter ops which leads you to think about things more in a supply chain orientation.

Matt: Yeah and there's also COVID globalization, right? Suddenly you can be literally anywhere in the world, as long as you're happy to get up at the right time zone. You could be anywhere in the world and work on a project that previously you might go, oh gosh, I've got to spend three weeks in Boston and then another five weeks in India and then two weeks in Australia. I do it all from my house now. Maybe I gotta get up at a different time of the day, but I can do it all from home.

Ray: It's rare that location will be a consideration in staffing anymore.

Matt: That's what I was going to ask you, one of the things we want to get onto is kind of future trends. But we've seen it already, this kind of concept of digital transformation we've been selling for decades and COVID did it in the course of three days. Where we all disappeared and went from home, but it's so true what the future holds now. When you think about optimizing resources, I agree, I think location is going to sink far down the list. You know, got an internet connection, do you have a phone line? Then great, you can be on the project.

Ray: People have to have visibility across all of the potential resources all at the same time. There's no more, I'm responsible for these 100 people, everybody's responsible for the entire firm all at the same time.

Matt: Yeah, definitely. And I think added into that would be this gig economy style where people are just more and more becoming contractors effectively. They are an individual business, they are themselves and they are selling their own time to whichever organization they want to sell that time to. Talk about the future in a second, but future marketplace for contractors to tap into and put their hand up for a project that they might see, what’s your thoughts on that? Let's talk about the future for a second. Sean, you were going to jump in there, where would you see future trends heading when it comes to resource management in the services industry?

[21:38] Scaling resource management operations through the "liquid workforce"

Sean: Well I think all the things we've been talking about are really going to drive us. It's almost a perfect storm. Like you get to a point where you've got this specialization, you've people who don't have the tools. I think one of our studies or Forrester came out and said 70% of people don't have the tool, so we're not just making this up what people are doing on spreadsheets and tribal knowledge. That's what's happening. It's a cobbler's children problem, they haven't invested in these technologies. Then you've got this layer on, growth and demand, so expect it to be a large demand growth year in the services world. Layer in employees are probably going to have the highest FTE churn year in the last 15, 20 years. You're in a situation now from a staffing perspective where these firms are really, really up against it. And I think and we feel it directly in the conversations we're having, there's this strong understanding that I need to get a better handle on this broader pool of resources that I could potentially bring to bear to solve these problems. Everybody's feeling it.

Now how they do that is the next step. Like the future of this is how do we get beyond just our FTEs, our everyday contractors and really start to analyze and have much more visibility as Roger was talking about into what these pools look like beyond that immediate hey, I work with these people every day. How do I tap into Sam who's got 50 people that they call, Joe who's got 20 people that they call, a database over there that's got a thousand people and we see it. Like we see on average somewhere between 5 to 10 X, the number of actual engaged contractors at any given time, there's a 5 to 10 X pool behind that of people that are somewhere connected to the organization. As loose as in Sam's head to as detailed as they've got consulting agreements in place, NDAs and everything else. That's a lot of people and a firm of a hundred people might have a thousand, to track and manage on a spreadsheet. Now you go up in size, it just gets more and more complicated.

Matt: Yeah, exponentially worse. I think that there's a phrase I've heard a lot, you know liquid workforce, right? Where that gray area between supply and demand and who has the demand and who provides the supply is now so liquid to use the word, but such a gray area and such kind of normalization behind the person you sat next to on the project. Are they a contractor, are they an employee? Who cares? It doesn't matter, we're doing the job and we're executing on it, then we move on to the next project. And I think that those traditional boundaries of an organization, we have a hundred staff and I can’t do more than the capacity of my a hundred staff, plus maybe a few contractors here or there to fill a gap. Now it becomes just blown wide open right? So I think it's a super interesting concept.

Ray: I think it's more than a concept. It is a reality now in the way that firms must operate. So it's a way of sort of a services firm to look like in a networked economy, they have to have much more visibility into the broader labor supply that they could tap into than they've ever had. And technology can be the facilitator of all of that because it's going to be about speed and sometimes people might be reluctant to leverage subcontractors. I'll call it too much, given the potential margin erosion with that. But if you could do it at speed, shared demand and supply information much more readily, you can contract for a certain amount of demand to a certain part of the supplier base at better pricing. And so it becomes moot as to whether you have an employee or use a contractor because speed and technology have enabled pricing match.

Matt: Yeah and there's always been that kind of time to revenue versus margin balance. Well we could make more money if we waited longer, but then it's going to be another six weeks until we can recognize the revenue and deliver the project right? So having that at your fingertips, I think is fascinating stuff.

Sean: And I wonder too as Ray was talking, like he mentioned earlier this idea that services can now be delivered from anywhere, anytime. Do you start to look at the cost of contracting and does that come down over time? You know, you don't have to travel, everything’s in both directions. Like they don't have to charge as much because they don't have to get themselves to so-and-so to actually deliver the service, cost of travel, availability, just in time. It's not as expensive for me as a resource to do marginal work because I can just jump onto a zoom from my bedroom, so now I don't need to charge certain rates to cover my costs. Like I wonder if the actual cost to deliver those subcontracts might come down.

Matt: Yeah, by the nature of more people moving into that contract world because technology makes it easy. The more people there are, the price comes down; supply and demand. It’s classic economics. Absolutely. Roger, any thoughts on this one?

Roger: Yeah, one of the trends I think we touched on a little bit that we've been tracking for a long time is client demands increasing but also speed of work increasing and Ray touched on speed a little bit, speed of delivery, et cetera. And so if you think about increased demands, but then also shorter duration, kind of quick engagements you get right into the concept of speed. This notion of having to be able to find that perfect resource at the perfect time. And just kind of tying that together with what Sean was just saying too. If now the new expectation of a new world is one that's much more comfortable with distribution of resources, we actually just benefited a little bit on speed. It doesn't have to be somebody out of the New York office or out of the Los Angeles office, it could be somebody anywhere. And you know, that really just kind of opens up this notion of the network as well, as we think about our supply partners as a firm.

Matt: Roger, maybe a follow on question, If you were a services leader, services organization right now, who are going to be the kind of winners and losers in this, in terms of the people that grow quicker than the ones that maybe don't adopt the technology? What advice would you give to somebody thinking gosh, how do I manage this in the future? It's entirely different to what I'm used to.

Roger: Sure, maybe I'll hit on both topics we've really been kind of considering today during the podcast here. Number one, the winners are going to be the ones who are really thinking about the skills that they have internally, as well as in their network. You know, just really kind of nurturing their skills and making sure they have interesting work for everybody to engage in. And then kind of the second part of that which we're talking about now, is just this notion of being able to tap into a flexible network. I can't just give Ray a call and ask him hey, do you know anybody, which is kind of the old way of doing things. It has to be much more liquid as you put it, where we have these known suppliers and we can tap into them quickly. Perhaps we know their availability quickly, so we know who to tap into and begin to staff. But thinking about that in terms of a little bit more automation and a little bit less manual, I think is going to separate the winners from the losers.

Matt: Absolutely. Ray, any thoughts on that?

[29:12] The importance of a centralized resource management function and applying a supply chain methodology to your services business

Ray: What I would just want people to really think about is that they're now living in a supply chain-oriented world in services and they didn't need to before, right? You can deploy people on long-term projects, they're going to be staffed, you make a ton of money. That world has changed. And so you need to be able to somehow very rapidly understand all the demand signals for the potential services that you could provide and where all the supply is. So you have to be a supply aggregator at this point. New suppliers and ongoing capability within the firm around identifying new suppliers based on how your offerings are emerging and then some way to really rapidly facilitate matching. So you can move that in a supply chain-oriented fashion.

Matt: Yeah, interesting.

Sean: I think for my piece, Ray just made the perfect argument for it. You need a centralized resource management function. Like we know less than 20% of the firms out there today have that. How do you do all those things Ray just described without having it as a functional group inside the organization? And the value you're going to get out of that, we touched on a lot of it. Employee satisfaction, the things you can do there, from a business development perspective, the type of work you can respond to and how quickly you can respond to it, margin improvements. The business case is there in spades. You just have to take advantage of it and make the investment and have that group that's dedicated to actually delivering all those things Ray just touched on.

Matt: And what about the kind of connection to the sales funnel, you talked about demand signals, right? You know, our sales organization, that connectivity to marketing campaigns versus what goes into a sales funnel versus what gets executed and then what needs to be staffed and delivered? You've got to put those signals way further out. It's not just tell us when you're two weeks away from signing a deal and we'll talk about the staff. You need to be way further out in the funnel, right? Would you agree?

Ray: Yes. I think Roger highlighted this earlier about this idea of consolidated information. Right now in most services companies, they might have a good demand capture mechanism, whether they’re using Salesforce or some other CRM. And they might have an okay I'll call it financial capture, capturing time or the activity of people. Those two things are very separate and most of the availability is captured in some time system that's offline from any demand signals. And so what's lacking is this operational infrastructure in between all of that, most firms lack it. It's usually spreadsheets and people. Thinking about it from demand all the way through supply availability, all the way out through your suppliers, the supply chain thinking and then the systems that go along with that is really where people need to be paying attention to.

Matt: Yeah, fascinating stuff. Just as we kind of wrap up, I want to have a little bit more fun. So we're going to do some sort of quickfire-type things here, but just kind of final thoughts from each of you just kind of going around the table here. Sean, what's the number one thing you'd want people to take away from this discussion that we've had today?

Sean: Oh I already hit it. Have a centralized resource management function, enable it with the right technology and you'll see all kinds of returns.

Matt: Yeah. Ray, what about you?

Ray: Get some supply chain operations research thinkers in your business and start applying these principles to the services industry.

Matt: Roger what about you?

Roger: I'll take a technology spin since that's my wheelhouse. We know technology moves quickly. Arthur C. Clark once said any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. And I think the professional services industry has been underserved for years and they're about to see a lot of technological change.

Matt: Yeah, absolutely.

Sean: A little magic coming their way.

Roger: Yeah, a little bit of magic.

Matt: Roger the magician, yeah absolutely. Underserved by technology, underserved by podcast. Guys I can't thank you enough for being on the show today, it's been a great amount of fun. I know the three of you, we could kind of carry on talking for hours and hours. This could go on. Maybe we'll do an episode two, episode three and episode four, we'll see how we go. Listeners, I hope you found this incredibly useful, I know that I certainly have from my perspective. And I know the insights that we've shared today have been really, really interesting.

If anybody has any follow on questions or they would like to be even a guest on the show, or they want to ask our guests some questions for next time, please reach out, drop us a line podcaststhatmavenlink.com. Connect with us on LinkedIn, follow Mavenlink, follow myself, Matt Finch and Brent Trimble, the two hosts of this show. Roger, Ray, Sean, any other final comments before we clock off today?

Ray: Thank you Matt, it's been a pleasure.

Sean: It’s been a lot of fun.

Roger: Thanks man, it's great.

Matt: Thanks everyone, take care.