Leon Goren
Special thanks to National Bank for helping us bring you today's PEO Leadership Snippet Podcast.
Welcome to our Snippets Podcast. I'm Leon Goren, CEO of PEO Leadership and Innovators Alliance, North America's premier peer-to-peer network and leadership advisory firm. Today, I'm very excited to welcome Ryan Casey, Principal and Founder of Skapa Tech, and a member of our Simcoe 2 peer advisory board. Skapa Tech helps enterprises and startups build high-performance web, mobile, cloud, and AI-powered platforms that inspire users and drive results. Ryan, thanks for joining us here today.
Ryan Casey
Thanks, Leon. Happy to be here.
Leon Goren
Well, I'll start off, Ryan, with you got to tell us a little bit about yourself. And I know you have a unique story about moving to Barry, so you got to tell us it.
Ryan Casey
Yeah. Well, it's funny. I'm originally I was born in Ohio. So I'm an American, which I don't always advertise, depending on what's happening politically here.
Leon Goren
It's OK you moved to Canada. So you're in a good spot.
Ryan Casey
That's right. And I moved before Trump, too. That's the other thing. But no, it's just I was born in Ohio, but spent most of my adult life in Virginia. And a couple of years ago, we were looking at making a change. And my wife and I visited Ontario. I spent a month here in the summer and really enjoyed it. Our boys are young teens, I'll put it that way. And they took to Ontario, brought them up here to Barry for I think it was the only weekend of snow in February of '23 or something like that. It was a weird year where there was, like, no snow but the one weekend we visited. So we were able to go cross-country skiing with them. And they were like, yeah, we really like Barry. And so family-wise, it's worked out great. They're happy. I mean, they're teenagers, right? So they're happy for being teenage boys. Business-wise, it's worked out as well because both of our data scientists that we use in our AI services and product are Canadian. One lives in Waterloo, not too surprisingly. And the other lives in Berlin, of course, because I think Canadians are very mobile people. But it's been great. I'm enjoying being with CIMP GO2 as well.
Leon Goren
So tell us, when did you start the business? You started it when you were south of the border, and then you sort of brought it forth.
Ryan Casey
Yeah, exactly. So Skapa, I founded it in August of 2016. So we're coming on 10 years now, which is kind of hard for me to believe and fathom. And so Skapa Canada, Skapa Ontario, we started a little over two years ago. So I started it incorporated before we moved and kind of started the process of business development and meeting folks north of the border, as it were.
Leon Goren
So tell us a little bit about the essence of the organization. You're playing in a hot spot. Everybody's talking about AI these days. What do you guys really do?
Ryan Casey
So we have two focus areas. One, a little less than a year ago, we launched a product that it's very niche. Yes, I'm used to saying niche, but I got to say niche up here. It's very niche. And for those of you in the construction business, you probably recognize it. Any time you dig in Ontario and pretty much any state in the US, you have to have the utilities, your hydro, your gas lines located on the property. And there's each state and province essentially has one center business that does it. And so there are customers. And we have a product that looks for errors with those locate requests. And we're currently live in two states. And they're finding two to three times the number of errors in those requests than what they were previously, as well as seeing big operational efficiency gains. We've got contracts with two more that are in implementation. And hopefully, a fifth will sign, go live here in June. They're all in the states working on Canada at this point. Had really good progress with that. Yeah, and so that's kind of our pivot, if you will, to do a SaaS product, AI-powered.
Ryan Casey
The other service we provide is consulting and either custom software development or AI consulting. So in terms of our software development, what I used to tell people is, if you can't buy a system that your business needs, we could build it for you. So one example is an environmental engineering company. They do a lot of work with the US government. And they had a process to bill their client. And they probably do, I don't know, $1 million US a month in billing. It would take three people, 34 people a week, to generate one invoice every month, which sounds insane. And it is insane. Yeah, so with the solution we developed for them, their CEO, all their kind of leadership, has visibility into the organization. And then that one billing process, one person does in less than a day now. So that's kind of on the custom side.
Ryan Casey
On the AI side, we've worked kind of based on what our clients' needs are. So for one example, a client of ours has a lot of data but not able to use it for marketing. So this is a damage prevention organization. Their damage prevention outreach is general, like, let's just target everyone at a NASCAR event, right, a racing event. What we did is we built kind of a data pipeline that helped them segment their customers better and say, OK, we actually have plumbers having a higher damage rate than electricians. So let's target plumbers with outreach, focused outreach to them, and not just blasting the same message to everyone. Yeah, so the AI part of that was, OK, let's review millions of records of data, categorize it, segment it, and then also assign kind of a risk score based on the likelihood that someone's going to cause damage to a water main, gas main, et cetera, and kind of help them make the data actionable.
Leon Goren
So it sounds like a lot of your effort is focused on things that are related to damage prevention. Is that because the construction industry sort of like, how did you even find the construction industry or that type of product?
Ryan Casey
Well, that's a great pitch for PEO, right? I found it at a Virginia CEO peer group. I met the CEO of Virginia 811. So they're kind of a utility notification center. Virginia CEOs is the name of the group, which obviously, now that I'm not in Virginia, isn't the right fit for me.
Ryan Casey
Anyways, met him at a networking conference and told him a bit what we do. And he said, you know, I've got a problem that I think you could solve. And that kind of resulted in our first engagement with them, first engagement in the industry. And then, interestingly enough, they were we took that engagement and now built the product around it.
Ryan Casey
But essentially, you know, word of mouth. They were very happy with our work. Another center found out about us. They liked what they heard from Virginia and kind of grown from there. And it's a target, a newer targeted area of ours. So I met that CEO about four years ago.
Ryan Casey
And really, in the past year to year and a half, we've focused more in that area, probably because there's not as much competition, I don't think. And it seems like it's ripe for innovation.
Leon Goren
So I'm just understanding, in that world, what you're doing is basically, they're looking for gas lines, wires underground. You're improving their effectiveness in terms of hitting those lines or finding out exactly where they are.
Ryan Casey
Yeah, more business processes around that. So either automating, improving communications with, like, a mobile app so you can allow different stakeholders to communicate better than phone calls, emails, using AI to help identify trends and prevent hitting these lines. I've had a couple of near misses in downtown Barry, then also at our house.
Leon Goren
What do you mean, near misses? Where you were actually saying, this is it's not here. Dig down?
Ryan Casey
No, I was smelling natural gas. Like, there were gas mains hit, gas lines hit near where I was at at the time. So it's personal to me. I say that in every speech I give. It's like, you know, this is why it matters to me is because I've been closer than I want the damage.
Leon Goren
So I mean, you're immersed in this on both developing a product or a SaaS model. You're also doing the consulting thing. You got AI being talked about all over the place these days. What's your perspective on it? Like, how's your industry changing in terms of what you do?
Ryan Casey
I think it's about to radically change. I'm not sure exactly who to believe. But obviously, some people think all jobs, all white-collar jobs will be gone. Our data scientists joke with me that apparently, by 2021, all white-collar jobs are supposed to be gone. But, you know, five years later, they're still here.
Ryan Casey
You know, from the one hand, I think what we're seeing is people can do some of the software development that they would come to us. They can do it themselves. On the other hand, it's also enabling us to be more efficient and do more that would have been cost prohibitive, do a project that would have been cost prohibitive for someone previously, right?
Ryan Casey
So there's a startup that we're working with out of Ottawa, where it's one guy in the logistics industry. And he's just grown a large US e-commerce company is his client. But he's been able to service them and their growth with just himself. So he hasn't had to hire anyone because of some of the solutions we've built for him. But previously, I don't think we would have been able to do the work that he needed if we weren't using AI to make it faster, more efficient, and more effective.
Ryan Casey
On the one hand, I'm a little bit optimistic that people are still going to want to continue to improve things and aren't just going to be like, this little thing I built with my AI tool is good enough for my entire company. I don't know exactly where it's going to be. So that's part of the reason why we're looking at switching to AI in a way that, one, our developers use it, but also the product that we deliver, the solutions that we deliver are not, at least at this point, something that you can just do with an AI tool from Google or ChatGPT. And so that's my hope. But, you know, we'll see.
Leon Goren
What would you tell members that are sort of they're sort of sitting there thinking about their next step, like, even on the custom development side or buying something out of the box today? Because all these changes are coming so rapidly. You know, I see some members who just they don't even know the direct like, they know they got to do something, but they can't make the decision of who to do it with because they're worried, I'll go down with this path. How do I know this individual is any good? And maybe something's coming out tomorrow.
Ryan Casey
So I think the more things change, the more they stay the same. So what's the same is you still want to find people with a good reputation, with the people that care about budget, care about delivery, right, care about getting things done, and care about understanding your company or needs. That I don't think will change no matter how good the AI tools get.
Ryan Casey
What is different, I think, is what we emphasize is you don't always know the ROI until you get a little bit farther in. That's not to say you should go spend $1 million and look for the ROI later.
Ryan Casey
What we're finding successful with these feasibility studies, where you can do a small amount of work to just see better what the landscape is, kind of thinking about the creativity talk, right? You do a little bit of exploration, a little bit of discovery, better understand the problem, better understand the solutions. And then you have a better sense of what the ROI is. And that's something that wasn't really possible in software development 5 to 10 years ago.
Ryan Casey
On the AI side, on the custom side, you can kind of develop an interim proof of concept, if you will, or MVP, minimal viable product, much more cheaply and effectively, and then know better what the ROI is and go forward.
Ryan Casey
But I still think you're looking for the same thing, people that care, people that have great track records. They're going to continue to deliver.
Leon Goren
No, that's great. Yeah, thanks for that advice. I'm going to wrap it up. But people that want to who are involved in looking for these different projects, I mean, they can find you now on the internal portal as the member, Ryan Casey at Skapa Tech. They can just email you directly. No problem responding to them and speaking.
Ryan Casey
Or you can go to our website. We've got my scheduler on there to book a time as well. But email's fine.
Leon Goren
Well, Ryan, thank you so much for just joining us today and sort of introducing yourself and to the membership. It's great. And I've had a chance to get to meet you a little bit more, too.
Ryan Casey
I appreciate it. I look forward to meeting more people.
Leon Goren
Yeah, it's great to have you with us in the community. If you're interested in any other live webcasts, The Way Forward Live and/or any other snippets, please take a moment and visit us at PEO Leadership.com.
You'll find on our site various previous recorded webcasts, which include guests such as Morgan Housel, Professor Janice Stein, Harvard's Rosabeth Cantor, Michael Beer, Rob Chesnut, and the list goes on.
Thank you for joining us today. And we look forward to seeing you again shortly.
