The Small Business Safari
Have you ever sat there and wondered "What am I doing here stuck in the concrete zoo of the corporate world?" Are you itching to get out? Chris Lalomia and his co-host Alan Wyatt traverse the jungle of entrepreneurship. Together they share their stories and help you explore the wild world of SCALING your business. With many years of owning their own small businesses, they love to give insight to the aspiring entrepreneur. So, are you ready to make the jump?
The Small Business Safari
From B-1 Bombers to Data Analytics: Collin Graves' Journey | Collin Graves
Collin Graves shares his journey from Air Force mechanic working on B-1 bombers to founding successful cloud computing and data analytics companies. He discovered his entrepreneurial path by identifying specific pain points for construction companies, creating cloud-based file-sharing solutions, and eventually building North Labs, where his team develops data analytics systems that transform businesses.
• Built his first tech company while still in the military, focusing on cloud storage solutions for construction companies
• Learned cloud computing through self-teaching, becoming one of the first 10 fully certified AWS professionals worldwide
• Sold his first company in 2014, which led to a two-year non-compete agreement
• Founded North Labs in 2016, focusing on data analytics as a profit center rather than just cloud migration
• Helped a $7 billion manufacturing company reduce their scrap rate with a data solution that saved them $40 million in just one year
• Emphasizes that most companies already have the data they need but don't know how to leverage it
• Creates "command centers" that unify data across different systems to provide actionable business intelligence
• Recommends the book "Simplify" by Robert Koch and Greg Lockwood for business owners
• Currently races in two series including Radicals and as a reserve driver in the Lamborghini series
Connect with Collin Graves on LinkedIn or visit NorthLabs.com to learn more about how data analytics can transform your business.
From the Zoo to Wild is a book for entrepreneurs passionate about home services, looking to move away from corporate jobs. Chris Lalomia, a former executive, shares his path, discoveries, and tools to succeed as a small business owner in home improvement retail. The book provides the mindset, habits, leadership style, and customer-oriented processes necessary to succeed as a small business owner in home services.
could charge a few hundred grand a pop, and when you're in your early 20s that's not a bad gig with a few employees. So I sold that in 2020.
Speaker 2:What would you have done, Chris, in your 20s with 200 grand a pop? I'm not sure, Alan.
Speaker 3:Welcome to the Small Business Safari where I help guide you to avoid those traps, pitfalls and dangers that lurk when navigating the wild world of small business ownership. I'll share those gold nuggets of information and invite guests to help accelerate your ascent to that mountaintop of success. It's a jungle out there and I want to help you traverse through the levels of owning your own business that can get you bogged down and distract you from hitting your own personal and professional goals. So strap in Adventure Team and let's take a ride through the safari and get you to the mountain top. Alan, we've got to rock something today. We've got to get rolling. We've got to get moving. Man, I love that music. Every time it gets me jacked up. But before we get going that far, big Daddy had a big weekend.
Speaker 2:Again I did. Gee, what a surprise.
Speaker 3:Yeah. So guess what I got? To go out there and hang out with my national nary people.
Speaker 2:By the way, listeners, you want to know how often I come in and I see Chris and he's like I've had a big week. I'm kind of recovering right now. I'm like that's every week.
Speaker 3:That's how the green room goes, like that until Alan says cheers bro.
Speaker 2:Yeah, give him the little hair of the dog that bit him.
Speaker 3:And I get going again and daddy's back up ready to rock and roll. Let me tell you about my week, though, man. I went out to Austin, texas. I met the great people of National Nary, the National Association of the Remodeling Industry. I hate saying it, but it's Nary. I'm on the national board doing the committee work and I'm actually the president here in Atlanta, and it was so cool to see the artistry that these people can perform in Austin, texas, and Silicon Valley and Pennsylvania and San Francisco and New York City and Atlanta. Of course, in Atlanta we won six awards. I didn't win one of them, but I went up there and accepted one, so of course I did, why not?
Speaker 2:So people put in the projects that they did, they put in the projects they did, and they put them up for national awards. Is there like an example you can give us of something? Oh, man.
Speaker 3:No, it's hard for me to explain it all. I would tell you guys, go check out uh, go check out naryorg, and you can see some of the national winners. Some of these projects were absolutely stunning. I mean a million and a half dollar deal down to a fifty thousand dollar deal and you still sit there with your jaw dropping going. I can't believe they transformed that space to make it look that cool. So being in the remodeling industry and seeing what people can do it definitely, definitely gets you going like, hey, I'm with good people, so I had a great time doing that. But then Daddy had to get back to what he does best.
Speaker 2:Fast boats, loose women, booze gambling golf there we go.
Speaker 3:Yeah, you got everything with the boat and we put the boat away this weekend. So I went to Lake Oconee, which is Masters adjacent. We had the Masters tournament to document where we were, and Rory McIlroy just got done, winning his career Grand Slam, Colin you love that Best final round ever.
Speaker 3:Colin Graves has given us a. He's got it. We're going to introduce him in just a minute. So we went out there and I flew from Austin, texas, at 530 in the morning, got in the airplane, got back to Atlanta, drove out to Oconee. I said I went out there. I changed my clothes, got out there, boom, stretch, hit the ball, bam. I was teeing off at 11.
Speaker 2:Isn't it funny? There's a lot of people here in Georgia that do that. It's like we're playing golf real close to the masters, while the masters is going on and you, you feel like you're part of it.
Speaker 3:I call it the Masters adjacent tournament. I mean I was among the Georgia Pines. We played through the same win. Those guys played through on Thursday.
Speaker 2:We played through the same.
Speaker 3:Yeah, you were an hour away, right, just an hour away. Yeah, because the deal is two of us go to the Masters and four of us play golf and check it out. And so this year none of us went to the Masters, because everybody just wanted to play golf, because we've been there.
Speaker 2:But again, when you see it on TV, it doesn't you realize how much that hurts some people who are listening to this you know, guys, if that hurts you, it should, because I'm telling you, we are so spoiled, because I'm telling you that is the closest place to heaven on earth I've ever been in my life, other than Kiowa. That was probably for me keela, anybody can get on to or at least.
Speaker 3:But the masters, yeah, when you go in that place. The first time I went on there, my buddy uh took me in there and this is an experienced thing. Before we get into talking to colin, my buddy says let's go. And I said, all right, great, we're gonna go. And I had a number of chances to go beforehand and I missed. So we go in and we park at somebody's front yard, which you don't.
Speaker 3:We came in at the bottom, where 16 green is, and I'm thinking to myself, oh my God, this place is perfect In my head. I'm like I wonder if they actually whip the grass to make it stand on attention, like if they're in the military. And I was like, and I look over and I see these guys whip these bamboo whips across the grass and knocked down the grass clumps. I'd never seen that my life. And I'm like, oh my god, they do. Oh my god, oh my god. And and I stopped and, uh, my buddy had to stop and come back and get me. He goes chris, are you ready? And he had to grab my hand, like like a little kid's, like it's okay, you can come in. Yeah, that's how hallowed it is. So we got to see that chris played a lot of golf, and and then here we are getting back together again in studio with Alan and we get to talk to the great.
Speaker 2:So I always just get the dregs of you. I never get you at your peak. I get you with the hangover you do.
Speaker 3:And, and look at that, even that is a high for you. It's still a lot. All right, everybody, let's get into it. We got to talk to Colin Gray's managing partner at North Labs. We're going to talk about data. We're going to talk about how you can use your data the right way. He's going to touch on some AI stuff. But before we do that, colin, first of all, thank you for your service and what you did. You joke about being in the Air Force. You joked about this. I don't give two shits about that. You actually did it. Thank you.
Speaker 3:Great job, buddy I appreciate it great all right, let's jump into this stuff, all right. So, colin, uh, what's the best score you ever shot at the masters?
Speaker 2:what, oh, I did not just do that so, but other than that, he's done everything else better than us, I think so. I mean, we figured that out in five minutes before we got on air.
Speaker 3:Yeah, when he started talking about the stuff he's into, I'm like special forces race car driver got more hair than we do.
Speaker 2:I mean, it's just, it's over we're gonna.
Speaker 3:We're gonna pin that race car thing. I'm bringing that up later. I want to talk a little bit more about data before we get there. Okay, can we?
Speaker 2:I know, because I know you really like data and I'm very leery of it.
Speaker 3:I know it. So, colin, talk to us a little bit about how you got into this space and what you're doing, and let's give a real background on that.
Speaker 1:Yeah sure, first of all, great to be here. Thanks for having me, and I'm sure you extended more grace to me than I deserve, but I appreciate the kind words. But yeah, long story short, I've been involved in the cloud computing industry since its infancy. I learned about it while I was in the military, still just turning wrenches on the B-1 bomber in Ellsworth Air Force Base, which translated quite a bit to overseas duty, seeing as it's the most active aircraft since 9-11. So I had one of the greatest pleasures of my life supporting such an amazing aircraft. But I was walking the flight line one day, dirty with grease and hydraulic fluid, and my dad sent me a news article talking about how Amazon was thinking about leasing data center space to other companies per second, and I thought that was an insanely novel idea. This was back when, mind you, amazon was only a what? $4 billion, $5 billion company, so they hadn't yet gone on there.
Speaker 3:So give us a mark on that timeline, wise, because this is yeah, so you want to age yourself. It's all about technology from since the time of technology. Yeah, so seven, you're right, amazon wasn't what it is today. A lot of us in 2025 are going well, amazon, you're like. Of course, you're like no, it wasn't Amazon in seven. So, all right, continue on. I love this.
Speaker 1:Yeah. So when you think about the magnitude of where Amazon is now, when you think about all the compute power they needed in 2007 to operate amazoncom and what would become AWS all of that computing infrastructure, all that data center space they are now adding that every single day across the AWS infrastructure, every single day. And so, anyway, I read that. I am not classically trained in computer science or software engineering. I just thought it was a really sweet idea and I liked Amazon and liked what they were about, and I decided to dive into it and learn more and I became obsessed with it. So I became one of the first 10 fully certified AWS folks in the world, started a company in 2010 while I was getting ready to transition out of the military.
Speaker 1:That effectively what we built was Dropbox for construction services companies to share large files in the field, over 2G cellular. This was before software as a service and the likes of Dropbox was a thing. And, of course, I wasn't smart enough to think of a new operating model, like Drew Houston, the founder of Dropbox, who figured out hey, I can build this once and have millions of people all consume this infrastructure. We were building it over and over again for companies, which was a sweet little gig. We could charge a few hundred grand a pop, and when you're in your early twenties that's not a bad gig with a few employees. So I sold that in-. What would you have done, chris, in your twenties with 200 grand?
Speaker 2:a pop. I sold that in 20. What would you have done, chris, in your 20s, with $200,000 to pop? I'm not sure, alan.
Speaker 3:I don't know, you know what? There's a reason God did not let me have that much money early on.
Speaker 2:God doesn't give you more than you can handle, Chris.
Speaker 3:That's why my first job was $38,000 a year Apparently.
Speaker 2:Colin can handle much more than either you or I.
Speaker 1:Yeah, well, yeah, you still go through the bad financial decisions.
Speaker 2:What kind of car did you buy? I certainly did. What kind of car did you buy?
Speaker 1:What'd you?
Speaker 2:buy What'd you buy.
Speaker 1:For me it was an Audi RS7 was my sort of bread and butter. I brought it back over from Germany where my last base was. I wrapped my time with with uh with ramstein and with nato uh, both of which are they're based out of ramstein. Uh shipped the rs7 over, was living in a crummy apartment on grand avenue in saint paul, minnesota, and that first snowfall came when the snow is up over the roof of your car and I thought this, this is too much car to park on a public street.
Speaker 2:So I sold it to my buddy.
Speaker 1:I just moved. Why didn't?
Speaker 2:you just move.
Speaker 3:Yeah, I mean, all this time I'm thinking Collins just got it going on.
Speaker 2:I'm like it's a pretty simple equation here.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, you know, I was trying to finish up finish up my degree and I sold it to a buddy for $3,000 less than I bought it for and I figured that's a pretty good for a car. You're a good guy. So, yeah, I sold that in 14, signed my life away in a non-compete from 14 to 16. I was young and naive. I didn't know what a non-compete was. I signed a non-compete that said not only will you not start a business in the tech space, you won't start any business for two years. So I consulted out in the Bay Area with a few of the bigger organizations out there, helping them with their journey to the cloud.
Speaker 3:Consulted from Minneapolis or moved out there.
Speaker 1:I would. Actually I would fly out there every week and I paid my buddy, dan, who is chief of staff for one of the huge tech companies out there. I paid him $400 a month to sleep on his couch and eat his groceries and I think their house was like 16 grand a month to rent out. Uh, so I I had a pretty, pretty good deal, so it was cheaper for me to fly in every week, crash on their couch and fly home than it was to get a place there, so you could have driven the car out there.
Speaker 3:Let's go back to that experience. Yeah, you could have driven the 7-0.
Speaker 3:You could have just left it there, you know, what I'm saying, not for nothing, man, I'm telling you somebody in San Francisco would have bought that thing in a heartbeat. Well, we're going to talk about that later. So again, here you go. You signed the non-compete. Here we are in 14. No kids, no family, no wife. Right, you're still doing your thing. Did you have a plan? This is where I want to get back to this. Did you have a plan? Did you say, oh man, I'm going to get here, I'm going to get to this? Or, with things just coming at you, you're like I'm going to take this problem and solve it.
Speaker 1:Take this problem and solve it. Yeah, Honestly, the original company was called Cloud CTO. It morphed into that. Originally it was supposed to be just advisory for companies to think about adopting the cloud, but the cloud was so new back then that I was getting chased out of boardrooms with pitchforks and torches. I mean, people were saying who the hell are you Snot-nosed kid telling me I need to abandon my data centers so quickly? I realized the only way we're making headway is with construction companies, because they have a pain that can only be solved with the cloud. So we built that solution and then just marketed the crap out of it that.
Speaker 3:So you pivoted to that because you saw your original idea was, you had the foresight to see that paying for the cloud by the minute, or basically renting the cloud, if you will, and picking up subsections was the way you're going to go, and you saw that this was your niche, and so is that how you started to figure out how to grow that one.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it was. Once we had one successful implementation under our belt, I knew that every other services company that was thinking logically needed this, because there's so much pain involved or there was back in the day with needing to make sure all of your plans and diagrams are on your Lenovo laptop with the rugged case on it before you load it into the truck and go to the job site. And guess what? You always forget something, and so the solution back then was to drive back to home base, get it and come back to the job site, and so you know. It was simple in nature. It didn't do backups or anything smart. It was just a place to land your stuff and make it accessible over crappy cellular connection. Uh, it would still take three minutes to download, right, but that's. That was a heck of a lot better than an hour and a half round trip from. You know a plot of land you're building on to home base, so um, so how'd you get people to buy into this?
Speaker 3:right, you had this great idea. Let's talk about how you, you know, how'd you get people to buy into this? Right, you had this great idea. Let's talk about how you, you know, how'd you get people to buy it? Because, back to being an entrepreneur. Right, you got it. It's cash is King, but you've got to have leads. So sales is the number one. She's the queen. Yep, sales is queen. How'd you find out how to? How'd you figure out how to sell it?
Speaker 1:Let them try it. So I I had spin off the smallest, simplest bits of it. We made clonable. So when I was going into a sales meeting with people, I would spin off a clone for them with their domain. I'd stick their logo on it. And while we're talking to some of the typically older gray men in suits who had been doing this for a long, time.
Speaker 3:Oh, you're talking about Alan, alan's old.
Speaker 1:I was referring to Alan specifically.
Speaker 2:I will be, I will take that, but anyway it was sort of a.
Speaker 1:They didn't understand the philosophy of what the cloud could do. But if it, if I could show them and I would say you know I'm going to, we got this. You know, you got a 2G cellular device. Go out into the parking lot, I'm going to load this file up, you're going to watch it populate, you're going to download it and you come back and tell me if it worked or not. And that was that was really what it took back then was them just seeing it for themselves, and then they would piece together all of the inefficiencies within their business that they knew existed.
Speaker 3:Let's break that one down, because I love this. This translates across any industry. Anything you want to do, I know you want to talk data and we will. But you know what, colin? What you figured out from being a grease monkey on a flight line and seeing some incredible people, from being a grease monkey on a flight line and seeing some incredible people is that if you can give somebody a solution that makes their life easier and then prove to them it makes their life easier, it's an easy, no-brainer sale. Back to the uh, you know I'm thinking about it's the qbc stuff. Hey, I'm the big guy, so let's go back to this. So you say hey, dude, I can sit here and talk all day long or you can take this thing, go out into the parking lot and 2g, just so everybody uh gets a feel for that. 2g. Today we're all in 5g. That's a big number, right. Two to five, I think that's three more I do, I don't know again it's this minis.
Speaker 3:I don't know how to do it, so you had to go out there and do that. How many times would they come back in and go? No shit, I think I, I, I think you're full of shit, you're lying to me, or how many times they come and go?
Speaker 1:got it, let's do it I mean there was, there was always hesitation, just because the, the, the methodology was new, right, the cloud was so new. People just didn't really. I mean people would literally look up at this point, up at the sky. Some, some people still do that today.
Speaker 3:I do, guilty.
Speaker 1:Talking to old guys, groups who would come in and they would design a solution for them, and they'd say, okay, cool, it's going to cost seven figures and here's what you'll get. And there's a lot of risk associated with that, especially when you don't understand the underpinnings of what makes the technology work. So for me, I came in and said, look, yeah, I was early on in this. I've got a few turns of the lathe so far. I built this thing.
Speaker 1:It's self-contained and self-managed, so you don't need to really worry about how it works. Similar to you don't think about how your operating system on your computer works At least I don't. So go out there and I'm going to show you and you're going to tell me if it solves your pain or not. Right, Imagine doing it from your 1500 truck at a job site and you tell me if you think it'll bring value to your group. And there's the occasional couple of them who are just like, nah, we'll keep doing it the way we do it. But yeah, a good number of them said you know what this is, I get it. And it's not theoretical and it's not just a 30 page statement of work talking about a consulting plan. It's just something that's already here that I can begin leveraging tomorrow.
Speaker 2:So it's not really in the cloud.
Speaker 3:Huh. Well, again you're pointing up. Isn't that funny? Everybody points up God cloud.
Speaker 2:Well, clouds are above us. What happens if it's a clear day?
Speaker 3:There's no data, then I don't get data. So I'm sure there's been a lot of that. But think about if you could go in front of a customer or a potential client and show them and proof of concept them that quickly. I think that's a genius selling proposition. Right, you came in, you did the pre-work, you walked into that sales call and you had done that pre-work. Don't tell me that people don't go. Huh, this guy actually listened to me, because what do people say, even in customer service but in sales, right, if you're trying to sell me on something, prove to me you know who I am, prove to me you know my biz and college, saying I'm going to come in and show you not only do I know your business, but I know how I can make your business better.
Speaker 2:I'm still and I get like this with every guest that has a similar path. Like you said, he's a guy turning wrenches on a B1 bomber sees an opportunity. We've all seen opportunities. I mean, how many of us are like, oh, I got this idea, but we never do anything about it. So he has the idea, it's very technical, he's got to educate himself, he's got to find somebody probably to build the program, then he's got to identify who the market is and then he's got to figure out how to get in front of these people and he's got to figure out how to sell it. I mean, it's just unbelievable. It's a huge curve that you went through in a really short amount of. I mean, did you have any sort of modeling, any sort of coaching, any sort of mentoring, or did you just freaking brute force it until you figured it out?
Speaker 1:Well, I mean, what I'll say is um, growing up, honestly, I didn't know that being an entrepreneur was an option until my dad was brave enough to do it. Um, dad was also army. Um, he, he's still in better shape than I am. Uh, he's more disciplined than I'll ever imagine being. He had a storied career at medtronic. Uh, inventing pacemakers that he he's got up on his patent wall and he helped design the the first wall the, the Keurig coffee machine. He worked with the contract manufacturer who designed that.
Speaker 3:How about that, dude? You're telling me the pacemakers and Keurigs are in the same vein. Yeah, get it. It's like oh, did that vein? Oh yeah, I got it All right.
Speaker 1:Yeah, but anyway, like you know, when I was All right, let's go back to this again.
Speaker 3:So back to the entrepreneurial thing. You didn't know it until your dad did it, and then you went huh, that's something. Yeah, Was he the mentor?
Speaker 1:He was yeah, and he, and he still is to this day. I mean, he, he, my dad's the smartest person I know, and I've met a lot of smart people in this industry, but he's got three master's degrees. He's, he's just incredibly intelligent. And so he went from this, this career, where you need three master's degrees in engineering, to being a a master electrician. He said you know, I want to get out of the rat race, I want to get into home services, and he started an electrical contracting company that became the most popular electrical contracting company in Minnesota after a few short years, and I got to watch him do that.
Speaker 3:I got to watch him. How am I talking to Colin? I want to talk to his dad. You could?
Speaker 2:be his dad, Chris, if only you applied yourself. You know, what, Honestly, if I quit?
Speaker 3:because I think your dad's a better. I know your dad's in better shape than I am, that's awesome, all right. So your dad was clearly your mentor, so you would go to him. But back to Alan's original point, because I love to hear this too and I think we all do.
Speaker 1:How did, how did you make that leap? I mean, how did you keep moving up? You know, I think there's. There is benefit to being young and dumb, Uh, and that's.
Speaker 1:I think there's. There's a lot of that. I think people just apply it incorrectly a lot of the time. But for it was like okay, I have a safety net with the military, I flew for a living, or flew on planes for a living, so my life was tax-free and per diem money, so I knew that I would be able to afford a 10-hour-a-week engineer if I needed help. But for me it was really just like I obsess over things that I'm interested in, and I became absolutely obsessed over the idea of learning how to create technology. I'd never done it before, but I would. We'd be flying over the country of Africa with a bunch of Navy SEALs in the back and I'd be stretched out in a hammock in the tail cone of the one 30 learning how to write Ruby code or JavaScript.
Speaker 3:So the first thing I just told myself. So you started a business and Alan asked so which one were you? Were you the technician, the one who was really technical? Were you the?
Speaker 1:great sales guy, or were you?
Speaker 2:the manager. Where were you? I was the visionary.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I was the. I was the visionary dreamer and still am today. I got good enough at the technology to make something barely work. I'll put it that way.
Speaker 3:So you hired for your weaknesses and you brought in help or whatever, you contracted or whatever.
Speaker 1:Absolutely yeah, and I'll still do that today. Right, I have to talk tech for a living, but you wouldn't. None of my engineers would would trust me to implement anything for one of their customers. So I knew that, if I could understand technical nuances, but speak, speak about those deeply technical things with business stakeholders that that's where the money is made, because business stakeholders are the ones who write the checks.
Speaker 3:So let's talk about this concept. If you don't know the details, how can you be so good at putting this in? This is the interesting concept that I always think about, like, hey, chris, you don't know everything about a house. I'm like, yeah, but I really enjoy it. Well, do you know everything? No, that's what I count on my guys to do right At this point in my life, in my career, what I'm doing. So, as you're doing that, how do you know that these guys are doing what you want them to do and how do you get them to buy into what you're seeing?
Speaker 1:I educated myself enough to know, at least for the early days of the platform, that what they were building was legit. I could read through their code and understand generally. Even if it wasn't optimized or perfect, I knew that it was flowing how it needed to flow.
Speaker 3:All right. So to your point then. That's what I love, so you could come in and let them know every once in a while I'm the pirate of the ship and I'm the lead of the ship, and every once in a while, while I can dip in and let you know that you didn't do it, just right. So sharpen that up. So they, they trusted you, they believed in you, and that's how you get your team to kind of follow in Right Nice.
Speaker 2:So we fast forward to where you are today. You're a data analytics guru. Is that fair to say?
Speaker 1:I, I, I play a. I play a guy who's a data analytics guru. No, yeah, I mean, at this point we're coming on year 18 in this industry. It's come a hell of a long way.
Speaker 1:Cloud is obviously a lot more self-introductory than it was back then. People generally get it, and so now, really, when I started North Labs in 16, after that hiatus, I wanted to keep it going, but I realized very quickly that migrating cloud systems or getting people into the cloud is a very thankless job. It wasn't a profit center, it was merely a conversation around cost, and anytime you're only having a conversation around cost, people are scrutinizing how much time you're spending, you're generating, and so I knew that if I switched more into a profit facing segment of the cloud market, that it would be easier for me to have those value-based conversations, and that's why we very quickly dedicated ourselves to the analytics and, yes, we were doing AI and machine learning way back then. Obviously, it's a lot more popular now, but we understood that if we could use the data, a company already had to help follow how a dollar flows through the business to increase production efficiency, to increase profits. Now you are a strategic partner to those companies and that's where we went.
Speaker 3:All right, here's my big question. Give me a good client who is somebody that says boy, I got to have Colin Graves and tell us how you took them from X to the stratosphere of going to Augusta National.
Speaker 1:So I've got a group in Minneapolis I can't name it because they're not. They're aligned with the defense industry. They came to us and they said they make like window films for like UV protection and energy efficiency. They do a lot of HVAC stuff. They're a $7 billion European company.
Speaker 3:That's a B 7B. Yeah, that's a.
Speaker 1:B Yep and they came to us and they said hey. Colin, our, our scrap rate is 24, meaning 24 of the time the stuff coming off of our lines gets thrown into the scrap heap. Wow, it's wasted money and that's wow that sounds.
Speaker 3:Tell me one out of four. Yeah right, I mean I'm again. I'm really good at math. Good job, chris. Thank you yeah, all right. Talk to us and so get the big brains on. Chris.
Speaker 1:They had brought in other consulting firms to try and you know, plan stuff out. It didn't didn't really pan out. I went in with my, my little team of you know. My whole mission has been I wanted to create the Navy seals of the cloud uh, elite operators who just get shit done and don't brag about it and don't kill you with powerpoints. Um, amen. So we, we grabbed their data, we unified it into our system.
Speaker 1:We quickly realized that it wasn't their practice in general. It was one what's called extruder head on one of their sub assemblies. So it would. It would coil out metal, right, it extrude metal filament when that was getting too hot. Everything that it touched then thereafter was scrap because it would burn the product. So we realized that and that's where a lot of groups would stop. What we did was we implemented a system that would say all right, when we're five degrees short of that threshold, we're going to notify someone. When we're two degrees short of that threshold, we're going to slow down the assembly line by 50% until the extruder head cools down, because 50% is better than 0%, right? And then if it did reach that threshold, we would trigger an auto shutdown of the line to at least avoid all of that finished material from getting burned and thrown into the scrap heap. But that one change. We were in there for about eight months. It saved them $40 million in operating income in year one.
Speaker 3:I got one word Badass Holy shit. Is that two words? That's one. Oh my God, dude, that's awesome. What a great story. Because when you talk about doing that, you got the precursor. You started to find because we always talk about things, especially when you start measuring your KPIs, key performance indicators in your business Many of them are lagging indicators, not precursor indicators or future indicators, and in your case, you found the future or the feed forward lag. That's an engineering. Talk To it the feed forward. Thank you for dumbing it down for me.
Speaker 3:Chris, I know I'm trying really hard, so that's amazing. Wow, what a fun thing to work on and find and really dig into. But it sounds so simple when you look at it in hindsight, right.
Speaker 1:I mean it usually is. It's just you're not. You are.
Speaker 1:Most organizations already have all the data they need to run their business more effectively. They just don't know how to leverage it, because the leveraging component of it is very difficult to unify data across systems, to create a common operating picture of that data and then to actually ask the right questions. That's the biggest thing is there's so many tools out there that will show you one little sliver of the universe within Salesforce or HubSpot or wherever, and these companies have been using that as a selling feature for a long time. The problem is it's only showing you the context that exists within that tool, which is a small fragment of your entire value chain. That tool can't possibly understand how your business is actually structured and actually operates. So by doing what we do, we create what we call a command center. So now, where all that data knows how to speak to each other and we're able to ask questions that involves data from different domains and paint that picture for them, so today, how many customers are you working with actively?
Speaker 1:We've done over a thousand projects for a little over 200 customers, lifetime Actively. Right now we've got several dozen, including our first military contract. So it only took me 17 years to land my first military.
Speaker 3:Way to go. Way to get back there, man. Yeah, I thought that'd be your, that'd be your cherry right.
Speaker 1:You're like basically success yeah.
Speaker 2:That's exactly what you say, Chris. Overnight success 16. Yeah.
Speaker 3:I do the same thing. Yeah, I've been at, you know, big guy, so for me and here I am yeah, look at me. Oh, my god, you get your ass kicked right. Brother, I hear you. Yeah, you wish. Sometimes you kind of wish, you know. I'm gonna ask you this if you had to go back to any point in your career, money no object. When did you have the most fun?
Speaker 1:flying, flying around with, with special operations forces in foreign countries and I agree with you, know we, we would being the air force right, you get access to a little bit more budget than the rest of the branches. I think it's 50 51 cents of every dod dollar goes to the air force you're, you're right, I didn't know that, so Air.
Speaker 3:Force. You're telling stories inside the, but for many of the people outside they don't know that one I have a many friends who are out of the Air Force. But yeah, I know that.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I almost joined the Marine Corps and my Army father grabbed me by the shoulders and said I will disown you. You're joining the Air Force or you're not joining anything. And I'm glad I did, because we broke down in the Seychelles more than a, more than a half dozen times during my scare quotes for the listeners when you go back to a.
Speaker 3:So Colin's been at this for 17 years 16 years and I've been at it for 17. And I talked to many other business owners and I will tell everybody the same story. When you look back on it, you go well today, no, screw that. You're not as happy as today, is your? Your the days you had when it was very simple, when I was turning wrenches or I was just out there and it was six o'clock in the afternoon and I was finished something like, oh shit, we're finishing something at six o'clock in the afternoon, but it's a bathroom and I'm wiping this thing down with my guy. That's the most gratification I could have ever gotten. Now I've grown to the point now.
Speaker 3:Again, six million dollars doing all this. I don't get to see all of it anymore. But you ask me money, no object, I want to see that finished product and I love it when I can see it, feel it, touch it. Wait, my, my kids always make fun of me when I walk into a place. My kids laugh. They're like hey, dad, you always have to rub your hands on the walls. So I said I just want to make sure they're all finished smooth. That's all I'm looking for.
Speaker 2:Right.
Speaker 3:So it's just a beautiful thing. So, colin, you obviously have been grounded. You got that, you're in. What's going on? How can people find you, how can people find your company? Because we've got to get to our famous four questions. I want to hear about the race cars. Oh shit.
Speaker 2:Hang on.
Speaker 3:We're going to have five questions. We're going back to race cars Shit, how can people find you, colin?
Speaker 1:Sure, I am without social media other than LinkedIn. Colin Graves on LinkedIn Two L's Graves like dead people Always happy to connect. Our website is Northlabscom and, yeah, that's where we exist on the internet.
Speaker 2:What's the typical size of the? I mean, it sounds like you've worked with some huge companies, but do you work with companies of all sizes?
Speaker 1:We do as long as the use case fits. I mean, we're definitely not the cheapest group on the planet. Our smallest customer right now is about $10 million in revenue. Our largest is $1.3 billion. So we're across the gamut, as long as the use case fits. Our whole shtick is we bring pre-designed data solutions to our customers based off of industry or function. So think revenue, intelligence, hr analytics, but then also packages for manufacturing, industrial, higher education, biopharma, so we can plug this stuff in and have it running within 45 days as opposed to 12 to 18 months you take all that, that's impressive.
Speaker 2:He is impressive because he used words I didn't I just want to do, I just want to rebuke and rebuff, I just can't believe it's not really in the cloud, but anyway, let's talk when is so? When are we going to hear about the race cars? All right, let's go.
Speaker 3:All right, colin, one of the things we talked about before we got on the air was that you like race cars.
Speaker 1:I do like race cars.
Speaker 3:We have an affinity for that here too, so we want to talk about that for just two minutes, because we're almost running out of time. Cool Go, what do you race?
Speaker 1:Yeah. So I grew up racing go-karts, did some of the regional scene for that. I raced 600 600 class motorcycles while I was in the military, which?
Speaker 2:now makes my stomach do somersaults when I watch it. Oh, thank god. Oh my god.
Speaker 3:Those days like going on a 40 foot ladder for me dude yeah no, I'm done, yeah, 24 foot ladder. No, I'm done too done with that.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and today I race in two series. Uh, I race uh radicals, which are uh sort of formula style cars, high downforce, open cockpit, manufactured in Europe. They are by far the most popular racing car, as far as I'm concerned, these days. Great way for people to get into racing. You go really, really fast and you get that downforce effect that you're usually missing on most race cars. And then I am. I did just get accepted to. I'm now a reserve driver in the Lamborghini series with a group called Dax and Gray down here in Scottsdale.
Speaker 3:All right, brother. Well, when you make it to Road Atlanta, you got to look us up, man.
Speaker 3:Because, I was waiting to hear about that because I got a bunch of buddies who are in the ssca and uh road. Atlanta is right here outside of atlanta, but actually, um, only 30 minutes from where. We live very close, and I have been there and I did not realize how cool that industry was. Yeah, I mean, I mean I grew up in a family that, uh, all we did was work on cars and trucks because they were a trucking family, and I decided to go to the houses because that's all we did was work on houses. But that's where we are. Let's get going. Colin, give us a book you'd recommend to all of our audience Show it.
Speaker 3:Show it talk, it make it happen this book is amazing. Race it in.
Speaker 1:It's called Simplify by Robert Koch and Greg Lockwood. I'm reading it for about the ninth time. It really talks about position simplifying in businesses. I think that particularly businesses in my industry try to be too many things to too many different buyers. Try to be too many things to too many different buyers so they end up being nothing to no one, and so my core ethos has always been solve one problem super well and everyone will tell their friends about it, and that's sort of the philosophy I try and follow All right.
Speaker 2:The book is really geared towards what you're offering your client base, or is it how you're running your business as well?
Speaker 1:It's how you're running your business, too. It's how you yeah, how do you harness your internal processes to cater to a simpler message than you have today, right? So it's really about how the best businesses in the world, uh, have succeeded over over time, right?
Speaker 3:by identifying. Have you ever seen the movie? Uh, beautiful mind. Let me tell you about my business a little bit. Um, and I need to read this book called simplify because to scale to, I mean, I mean, don't get me wrong, guys are you russell crowe with the writing on the windows and stuff?
Speaker 3:Honestly, if you look at our office here in the headquarters at Norcross Georgia. Yes, I've been in every window and every whiteboard you could ever find and I scribble the shit out of it and I've taught my guys to do it. But the same thing is that to build a complicated business is hard to scale. To build a simplified business is easy to scale. It makes your life easier and it's so hard to get away from it and it's so hard to simplify. And that's what Colin's basically telling you, and I think that book will too. You got to understand that because it's hard to do it, because you want to solve a lot of problems and I you know, Colin, that's the one thing you got from you, man, you love solving problems.
Speaker 2:I problems and I you know, colin, that's the one thing you got from you man, you love solving problems, I mean you have.
Speaker 3:You have all your life and we all love to solve every. He fixes things from b1 bombers to your data data, yeah, yeah, I mean, he can do anything. And your race cars? Yeah, because he doesn't have people working on, well, maybe he does something. All right, should we ask the second question? Sure? Did you ever win a race? No, I'm kidding.
Speaker 1:Not in the latest series. I finished on the podium.
Speaker 3:Oh, there you go. So you're shooting champagne everywhere. All right, nice, All right. Number two question.
Speaker 2:I almost remember it we're customer service freaks.
Speaker 3:And what is a customer service pet peeve of yours when you are the customer? Ooh.
Speaker 1:Um, just had a snafu with, with uh, with capital one not too long ago. So this is, this is top of mind and it it does have to do with data, I think. But making me repeat the same answer every time, you transfer me to the next guy who's trying to help me solve something and you make me answer the same questions that he did, it makes me absolutely blood boiling, mad. Yeah.
Speaker 3:Yeah, that's a good one, and you can't blame the people. You got to blame the process because they don't know man, it just sucks All right. What's a favorite feature of your house?
Speaker 1:And where do you live? So I live in Scottsdale, that's Arizona.
Speaker 3:Scottsdale, Arizona. Yeah, we're worldwide.
Speaker 1:Yes, scottsdale, arizona. So I live squarely in the desert. Favorite feature of my house, uh, is our, is our front, is our front family room, you know it's? Uh, it's where our our 14 month old hangs out and plays, it's where I keep all my wine oh we have? We have our nicest, our nicest leather furniture that the kid likes to chew on uh, your 14 month old plays with the wine.
Speaker 2:Is that what I'm hearing?
Speaker 3:100 all day long maybe in a couple years, huh yeah well, not the best wine, but, uh, as an italian family, um, they're very proud to say that uh, chris started drinking at six, eight, uh, six years old, and you were helping with the bathtub wine. I was helping with the bathtub wine where they're like heyito, look at him, oh, he likes it, he likes it. My eyes were coming out of my like. Just imagine the old cartoons, your eyes are over your head, yeah, so that's awesome and a 14-month-old. Congratulations, brother, because Thank you.
Speaker 3:Alan and I are on the other side. Alan's waiting for grandkids.
Speaker 2:I'm going hold on.
Speaker 3:I got 10 more years. I'm good Hang on.
Speaker 2:I don't think it's 10, buddy.
Speaker 3:Oh, it better be 10, bro, you're in denial, I am in denial, all right, last one, kyle. Last question.
Speaker 2:You ready. He's never had one of these. You had to have it.
Speaker 3:He has a nightmare story.
Speaker 2:Everything he does works out.
Speaker 3:I don't know house. Did you get death?
Speaker 1:dismemberment. Did you shoot a nail through your hand? Yeah, a hundred times. Yeah, I've got uh. So you're asking what's the, what's the worst thing?
Speaker 3:worst diy nightmare story. Not a contractor, because I am one, I know we do a bunch of something you did okay, um, well, I have.
Speaker 1:I have a scar on my cheek that's faded with time. As DIY I was working on a plane, but I was working on it, supposed to be working on it myself. I was inside of the over. It's called the overwing fairing of the B-1. So when it sweeps its wings back to fly over the speed of sound, the wings tuck into this fairing. It's got a bunch of hydraulic shit in it. It's messy and nasty and loud and I needed to depressurize the system. All the systems are pressurized for fluid flow. The plane can fly upside down all that stuff. I had a very, very experienced crew chief come out and say he's from the middle of nowhere, Louisiana.
Speaker 1:He said hey, brother, I, I can depressurize that system for you, hey watch this so you don't have to, you don't have to crawl down and do it yourself I said sure to help you you know what.
Speaker 1:You know what you're doing, let's go ahead and do it. Well, there's two systems on either side, one and four, and two and three. Well, I needed one depressurized. He depressurized four didn't tell me I was screwing off the, the hub of a reservoir. There's a sensor inside of the reservoir for fluid quantity, uh, but it had hundreds of psi of pressure on it. It exploded. So it was like white hot shrapnel, uh, and you know. So I'm working on this. All of a sudden I hear a very loud bang. My vision goes white. I thought I was dead for a second oh no, my eyes rolled out of the overwing fairing.
Speaker 1:Thank god for osha. I rolled out onto a stand instead of falling 16 feet to the ground, and when I stood up I I climbed down the stand. I turned and looked at Johnny was his name and he looked at me bug-eyed and I went what's going on? And I had literally a piece of the sensor hanging out of my face. Oh my God, I looked like a cyborg and that was the last time I ever trusted and didn't verify. So even now, today, I always trust but verify. No matter how much faith you have in someone, it doesn't take them that long to verify that they did the shit they said they were going to do.
Speaker 2:Colin wins. Three and a half years Colin wins. That is incredible.
Speaker 3:He had shrapnel off an airplane, sitting at his face, looking like a cyborg.
Speaker 2:It's the first time I've ever heard somebody say thank God for OSHA, All right, but just the fact that it's a classic Southern. Hey, watch this. I got this. I got this.
Speaker 3:Hold my beer, hold my beer, I'll take the pressure off. I got you, bro. You know what, alan Colin? This has been amazing. Go hook up Colin Graves on LinkedIn. Guys, if you didn't learn something, man, this has been dynamite, figuring out some stuff. If you're not a 5 billion dollar company, you're not a 10 million dollar company, it don't matter. Listen to what Colin talked about how he grew his business to the point he was, and there are some great lessons in there. Man, pick it all up, make it happen. We gotta get back. We're gonna come back next week. Let's make it happen. We got to get back. We're going to come back next week.
Speaker 3:Let's make it happen, Cheers everybody, Thank you for listening to this episode of the Small Business Safari. Remember your positive attitude will help you achieve that higher altitude you're looking for in the wild world of small business ownership. And until next time, make it a great day you.
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