Risk | How Embracing Uncertainty Leads to Success

Join Conall Arora on The SCORRCAST as he explores how embracing risk and uncertainty can lead to success. Learn how taking calculated risks, adapting to change, and stepping outside your comfort zone can drive growth and innovation. Discover insights on turning uncertainty into opportunity and strategies for thriving in an unpredictable business landscape. Tune in for expert advice on navigating risk with confidence.

Transcript

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Music. Hello everyone, and welcome to another episode of The SCORR cast. It is Wednesday, Tuesday, March 4, right now where we're recording this, which is just incredible that we are already almost done with the first quarter when this episode is airing, it's going to be the beginning of April, so the beginning of Q2 and I've got a big smile on my face because I'm very excited about the conversation that I am about to have today. It feels like it has been a couple of months in the making. And when I first met this individual, I knew that there was a scenario where we ended up on a podcast together, kind of yelling and bickering at each other a little bit back and forth. After, after our initial introduction, and then after I got to know you a little bit more. And Lea LaFerla, the SCORR president, got to know you as well. Conall, it was right out of the gate that it was like, this episode needs to happen sooner rather than later, and just based on your experience and you know how you look at the industry, how you look at running and operating a business. I'm really excited for this conversation, and I know as anybody that listens to this, and anybody that that knows me, I can start running, and I want to ask you 789, questions. But before we do that, would love to have you kind of take a little bit of time introduce yourself, kind of talk a little bit about your background and your experience in the industry, and then I do want to talk about RDI trials a little bit, and then I'm going to pick your brain just on on some of the things within the industry and the business as a whole. How does that sound? Sounds great. Awesome. Well, I could do it. If I do it, it won't sound as good. So can I help? You? Want to just introduce yourself. That would be great. Yeah. So first off, I'm the you're the all. You're the most recent person to put me in my place. If you remember, we were going through the the proposal to build the new website, and I was, you remember this? I was like, Hey, I think I could build you said it'd take like, three weeks or four, whatever, two months. I was like, I could do this in a week. And you were like, well, yeah, if you have, if it was so easy, What haven't you done it yourself already? Why are we on the phone? I was like, damn, this dude, I felt good about that. I did. I felt I felt good. I do. I do remember it. I have to remind myself sometimes that that's in there when we get when we get pushed around a little bit. I remember that so clear. I was like, wow, this is great. We need to be working together. Because those you were totally right. I If it was, if I could, well, I hadn't identified then. So I would like to put that as the first part of my bio, put in place by Alec. I love it. Oh, that is awesome. Uh, so besides being before you put me in my place. I, I, I grew up in Ohio. I some more, basically born in Texas, but raised in the Midwest. I went to school in New York. I was pre med in economics. I had, you know, half of my my mom basically wanted me to be a doctor. My dad is a physician, and wanted me to be anything but a physician. So that's why I was pre med economics. And, yeah, I put, you know, I was on the golf team at school, and just sort of everyone at my, you know, was deciding between consulting and banking, right? Like those are the two career paths that were sort of laid out in front of us, and ended up getting an internship for George Soros at his hedge fund, working for the economist there, and that just set it off, right? I mean, I just love, I just fell in love with being able to understand businesses from a high level, and seeing how they fit in, like the macro economy, and then also how, like the micro decisions that they make make a big difference, and all that ends up ultimately creating value right, which is what investors are looking for, is companies that create value right at a high level. And so from there, I went into private equity because they had a more structured training program, right? So I was still looking for that credentials, right of a career path, and private equity had that, right? You go become a banker. They teach you financial modeling, right? They teach you how to analyze, and you're basically buying and selling businesses, or, you know, as an agent, and then that led to a job at a distressed private equity firm where we bought we invested in acquired and controlled bankrupt companies with the aim of saving them, turning them around and growing. Man, I just love that, right? Like that was really great. Yeah. I got to work with really smart CEOs. Got to hire really smart CEOs. Got to, you know, create jobs and save businesses. I mean, it was super, super rewarding. This. The problem was it was kind of too young, right? It was 26 and I had already been on two boards, basically, you know, helped turn around public company. And, you know, the firm that I was at sort of went into a different direction, because it was during 2008 when it was like, everything was bankrupt, right? And so all of us came out of this being like, oh, man, there's not a lot of bankrupt stuff to do, right? Not a lot of bankrupt or distressed companies to invest in. And so that's where, you know, I had to figure out what was next. And I had sort of that chaos had given me way too much responsibility at too young of an age, right? And so in order to get that, I was like, the only thing I can do is start my own company, right? Because that's going to put all this pressure on me, and man, what a slice of humble pie did agitate, right? Cuz it wasn't like, Hey, my name is Conall, I'm at Goldman Sachs, or, Hey, my name is Conall, working at $5 million fund. It's Hey, my name is Conall, and I'm a dip, right? And I got a startup, new software. I don't even know what it is, and I need a co founder, right? So I left my job and started a tech company, which originally started as it was going to federate search, right? Because Box and Dropbox were coming out at that time, yep. And so I was like, Wow, this would be really useful for a really useful tool to integrate all these cloud services, because at that time, you couldn't just search for what you needed in one place, right? That then evolved into an email startup, right? Because email was really the only thing they were they're searching for, and I built an automated tool for that. Google put me out of business, right? Because they built our product for free, yeah. And I just, you know, learned. I learned so much from that. That's where I learned marketing sales, like real sales, right? I had gone from an investor, overseeing a business to basically being a real entrepreneur and doing everything myself, right? I went to trade shows with my own T shirts, a person of one, right? I was doing a B testing on ads. I was a product manager, product owner. I mean, the number of books that I read and those in that period was insane, right? Because I went from being an investor at a board level to seeing overseeing strategy, to doing everything myself, wearing every hat, yeah, absolutely. Learning how to recruit, learning how to issue equity, like all sorts of crazy stuff, right? So I had to take a break. So I took a couple of jobs in between then and after my startup shutting down. And then, you know, normally I don't like telling my life story to anybody, but this is pertaining to rdi. So, like, I have to tell you how I got here. I sat down and was like, Man, if I number one, I am an entrepreneur. It's like, built into me, right? I'm wired this way. So the job, even though I can get, you know, very fancy jobs, and I've had very fancy jobs, right? There's something, some screw loose or something, right? And I think it ultimately it's I, the only thing I get satisfaction out of is building something and doing hard stuff. I mean, those are the two things. The harder it is, the more satisfaction I'm going to get, the less likely it is makes it harder, which makes it even more right. So it's like this virtuous cycle of me finding really hard shit to do and chasing it, right? So, but when I knew that, I was like, Okay, well, I'm going to do something that's really hard and has a low probability of success in general. That's just how I'm how I'm built, right? Because if it's laid out and the path is easy, it's just going to bore me, and I'm not going to be excited. So how do I maximize the chances for that low success, right? Or that risk, and I basically had assessed like, what am I really good at, and where am I uniquely set up to make a big difference, right? It's sort of like a sports analogy. If you're really tall, gravitate towards sports where there's a statistical probability that you know, a higher probability that being tall will put you in the top 1% it's just it's harder to do that when it's like your mind and your experience and your background, your family, all these like intangible things. So for me, I was like, I definitely have a good finance bank, right? I understand how to raise capital and how to invest it. I'm not scared of sort of hairy situations, right? Especially businesses. Having worked at a distress fund like, yeah, when a company goes bankrupt, literally everything has gone wrong, right? So that didn't stress me out too much. And then my time in the startup just gave me a lot of. Experience across everything, right? Like being an entrepreneur and using the Lean method and marketing, sales and so and I really had an advantage in adopting and developing new technology, right? I mean the fact that, well, my finance, my it wasn't successful, still had a good idea with paying customers, right? So there was something there. So, and I had to figure out, well, in a world of no distress, what do I do? So I went to this conference, and I went to the private equity conference, and I was like, ah, done that already. I went to venture capital conference. I was like, Ah, I don't know, done that already. I mean, to any VCs that are listening. I'm still interested, but not for them for this round. And then I saw there was a search fund conference, and it was like, basically, we have this idea of sponsoring an entrepreneur who wants to find and run a single business. And I was like, Man, this is it. I walked out of there. I was like, I just knew this was what I was going to do, right? Because it combined everything, right, the venture and sort of the building, building, something from scratch, off of a vision can be applied to a small business, right? Because you have to have that and see what you can do with that. Then it also required all the finance skills and the Capital Management, and, you know, the balance sheet, because you're acquiring something. So I was like, I could definitely find a good business, because I used to do that, acquire it, raise the money to do it, and then once I'm in, I have all the skills to be able to make it better, right? Yeah. So great plan. Just had no idea how hard it would be to run a small business, which is completely different from a big business, right? So, but with that, you know, with that algorithm, that's when I set off. So I said, Okay, I'm going to acquire small business with the intent of government, and what is unique to me, right? Versus all the other searchers who are out there and like and other people who could own that business, right? So I was looking at micro industries, and I remember, my dad's a physician. He was just talking about how a CRO had approached him. He's in the middle of Ohio, right? And they were like, begging to get on the phone with him, to talk to him about a trial. And I was like, I mean, Dad, I love you, but what the hell are they doing, calling you randomly and why? And like, you don't even use a calendar, you right. Barely use your email, and they're sending you 100 page PowerPoint trying to set a calendar invite with you. I'm like, Don't they know? When you see five you have 5000 patients, you're like, crazy busy, like I have been in his office. He can treat and diagnose someone in five or six minutes and be spot on, because he's just knows them, and just like, with it. And he was like, Yeah, I don't know. I mean, they're going to pay me, you know, 1500 or $2,000 a visit, kind of crazy relative to what insurance pays for some of the similar stuff. So that's what turned me on the research, right? Yeah, like, Okay, I need to investigate this. And so I was looking around at just random research, and you know, there's like, stats that there's like, 15 or 20 times the number of patients demanded for a trial versus those that are actually supplied or fulfilled, right? So I was like, Okay, this sounds like a big problem, really valuable, actually good for humanity to get this going, assuming the products are of high quality, right? And I was reading all the stuff that you know, people are trying to go to patients directly. Sponsors are trying to design patient friendly trials and recruit around the doctor, because the doctor was the problem, or sites are the problem, and I just it didn't sit right with me. And I was like, this is also something that technology could solve, right? Because it's sort of a network effect of finding physicians and then the physicians finding the patients and really being organized to be able to get the right patient in the right door at the right time for the right study, right? So initially, my thesis was to look for sites and roll up a bunch of sites, so acquire a bunch of sites. But as you know, John at eligo basically beat me to that, right? Yeah. So while I was looking for those sites, I came across this business which was being marketed as a pharmaceutical site management business, right? And so when I first invested in RDI, it was actually running two or three really large pharmaceutical trials as an smo and the rep, but it was founded basically by a very large, publicly traded diagnostic company where the founder used to work. And so from 2008 to 2017 it was like the outsourced division of that huge public company, yeah. And then around 2015 it added, like, a few big pharma studies. And so it was kind of having this, like, I. Identity crisis a little bit at the time of, is the growth in pharma studies, or is the growth in diagnostics what we know and we love, right? But it kind of was, it seemed boring and less sexy, right? Yeah, pharma, sexy. Pharma in the newspaper, big things, right? And so basically, when I looked at this business, I said, I don't know which way it's going to go, but I know, you know, there everything was paper based for me to do the diligence, I had to fly here because the the the books were on a computer that wasn't connected to the internet. Oh my gosh. The all the paperwork was like, literally, in binders, printed out. So if I had to look at any of the contracts or anything, I had to come to LA. I was living in New York at the time, so I was like, Man, I could digitize this business. It was primarily an LA based physician network at the time. And I was just like, Okay, I also know a bunch of physicians right through my family and his my dance, you know, network, and I was like, I could easily, you know, once I acquire this, I could easily grow the physician network, and at the same time, digitize the business. So that's what I did. I was able to raise money in eight days to acquire it, because, because people really. And I went to investors, really understood the benefit of the network effects, right? So I went to other healthcare and people who would have built an insurance company, and I said, Look, this is kind of like a mini network business of I'm just matching scientists with physicians. I'm not going to patients. The reason is, is because majority of patients trust their physician, and you got to appeal to the physician. They are critical to getting the trial done right, and you gotta do it through them. So the approach is, help them recruit, help reduce the research burden on them right. If you invert it and make it physician first, almost like physician and patient first at the same time, because it's a team, right? They both have to want to be interested in your trial. If you get one or the other, you're not going to get that right. So the investors that had understood it, it was risky at the time because the business was so small and so dependent on a few key employees. But yeah, so choir in 2017 I became the CEO. I didn't tell people I was the CEO for like, six months, because I hadn't. I mean, it was just everything was so tied around. I didn't want to disrupt the apple cart, pretty, right? And I just learned the business for a year, two years, quietly, and the way I did it, I mean, the stuff I didn't learn was a lot of the small business stuff, right? A lot of stuff specific to the industry. So, yeah, I mean, I wrote our own my first protocol, got it IRB approved. I designed my own case report form. I went made the kits myself. I monitor the subjects, reviewed them all right, like, check the samples, put them in the freezer, right? I mean, I just did everything myself in the in the first few years. And every time I was doing something, in my mind, I was just thinking, how can I digitize this? How can I build a system around this? Or what's the job description that I want to hire to replace me to do this, right? So I've been doing that basically every day for different tasks for the last seven years, right? Everything from how we manage kits, right to so ending that process, I built a custom CLINICAL TRIAL MANAGEMENT SYSTEM. So I looked around and I was like, God, there's gotta be a better way to track consents. This is a huge pain. Yeah, we would have sponsors come and do monitoring visits. One sponsor had four different auditor four different monitors come to us. Each monitor had to start from scratch. This is a huge public company, and every monitor, they would come here, and they'd be like, I don't know what the other monitor did, so I apologize, but I need to go through this whole binder from the beginning, oh goodness. And I was like, okay, so they haven't figured it out either, right? So let me build a system, right? So now we have keep track of every subject. We have a monitoring report different queries against each one, right? And we tag it in the status. And then, so we built it for ourselves. And then we we flipped it out because clients wanted that too, because they didn't have that process too, right? So that was, like the first four years of basically taking all these disparate functions and clinical trials for diagnostics specifically, and building what we call now diagnostica today, which is almost our operating system, right? I mean, it is what allows our relatively small team to just punch far, far above our weight, right? Because it's we can see how many trials we are running, how many subjects we have, which site they're in, which one run that the kits. Right? It's just the insight that you give people right to make better decisions quickly is what makes a service firm like us just run faster. Yeah, so, yeah. I mean, I think that's, you know, if you go back to rdi. So it took four years to build the systems and to to build them into technology, right, right? And to kind of learn the business and separate ourselves right, from sort of its beginnings. And then, you know, I had a new investor group that came in. They They found us, and they said, hey, you know, we're interested in growth capital, and sort of, they're also, you know, search fund. They're in the search fund arena. And they said, Would you be interested in growth capital? I said, Absolutely. I have been growing on, like, whatever I can on, like, such a limited amount, right? Look at what I've built, right? With pretty much a very limited team of me being the only driver of a lot of the innovation. And I said, Yeah, I would love to take that capital. I'd love to have a board, right? I'd love to sort of take this business to the next level. And so they did, right? We, they in, they closed, I think in 2020, right after COVID? Right? When? Yeah, right, yeah. Which COVID Is that surviving a business through COVID, I don't know, is a topic for, yeah, a whole other podcast. I was just going to say, you the four years you talked about September, you know, 2017, four years, and then that puts us right in the middle of the pandemic. That's a whole other conversation. Yeah? So they invested Po, you know, basically as CO, you know, the the stay at home, I forget what they're called now, the stay at home, whatever orders sort of being lifted, yep, and yeah. So with their capital, basically got to build, you know, sort of the, the founder and the the prior team basically got to recruit new folks to fill in our capabilities and to expand them, right? And so I put out a LinkedIn post, which was, you know, I'm really excited about the RDI 2.0 this is a few years ago, yeah. And it felt like I remember, like, writing in and reviewing and be like, Oh, I don't know, you know, like, is it really 2.0 I don't know, right? Like, it's right for me. I'm still coming to the same place. But it really was, I mean, it's it that post marked a huge change stage, you know, just a paradigm shift for the business, yeah, yeah. Which looking back, I can say that. But you know, when you press post on that in the beginning, you kind of have butterflies of like, is this really it? But yeah. So with that the capital, right, we recruited Laura Flores, who as a senior VP of Operations, who has been a game changer. I mean, just straight, you know, they always tell you about, like, how on a small team, like, individuals can have such, like, an outsized impact. Like, you know, in a small team, anytime you add someone, it's a huge risk, but it's also a huge risk in the positive. Yeah, and she's definitely proven that right, like, the upside of her joining right, when she and when she was doing her own diligence, she was just like, I don't the way you're doing it is, like, way better than anywhere else at work. She's like, some of the systems that you have put in place are better than the stuff that she has used at public companies. Yeah, and I had no fucking clue. I mean, I'm just sitting here building what I think we need, right, right? I don't get to compare it to the big CROs or to anyone else. So how am I supposed to know that it's better or worse than anything? I'm just focused on what we're doing solving a problem, right? Yeah. And so when she came in, she was like, gosh, this is great. We really need to be using this more and investing more in it, and also getting it out there to be running bigger and bigger projects from our for other clients, there's a huge demand. And so that was great, because then as I turned operations over to her, I could turn be more externally focused on those things, right? And so almost every one of my achievements externally facing is only possible because she's here, focusing on the stuff that's keeping everything going smoothly, right, and so that, you know, going back to seeing when you added that, because, you know, the board and everyone, it was like a pretty big, big investment and a risky, another risk that you have to take, right? Yeah, we've never really had an SVP of operations in this business, and we're small. Do we deserve it? Right? You, you know, you go through these things, it's like, I don't know. Do I deserve it? I don't know, right? Yeah, I need it, right? And with hindsight, it's, it's totally clear. But. Uh, she came at the right time too, because the business was in a place with all those systems that she could actually do stuff with it right, and then she could recruit a team around her to be able to organize it. I mean, one of the horror stories I had, I when I first joined, I had, I just hired this young lady out of college, probably two or three years of experience were super sharp, and she came into my office in tears. I couldn't believe it. I was like, Well, what happened? She was just like, I have spent the last three hours searching for a protocol. All the projects are named by the person's name and I was like, Oh, man. I mean, that's awful, right? Like this, I need to fix this right away. And so, you know, there's a time and a place for everything. So investing in a big team that all is coming in and spending hours to find files, right? That would have been the wrong time. So thank God I had built the foundation and organized it and then recruited, you know, great people to basically run it right. It's like, don't have, you know, don't have guests over until you've cleaned up your house. At least. Don't have bananas and the trash and all that everywhere. Clean it up. Literally, it. It seems like such a obvious thing when you look back and hindsight in terms of the timing, but I you talked about the horror stories, and we see it all the time, where you try to grow too quickly, and a lot of times that person is in operations or is in commercial sales, and we bring them in, and it's too early. How did, how did the experience through the distressed companies and kind of being outside, you know, for lack of better terms and outsider of this space help you navigate the early stages of those pieces. Yeah, so I would say the biggest thing is looking my clients in the face and knowing that like, Man, when I take their project on, I'm going to run it to completion, right? That's the only thing. I mean, all that fancy experience doesn't really matter. It's like, if you hire me, I am going to run your project like it's my own period. My team is going to do that itself. And when you have that attitude, you don't need resource management, you don't need you're just going to know, right? Am I going to take this commitment on or not? Right? And I can say that we have never taken a commitment on that we have not been able to fill period, but that means I've had to turn a lot of stuff down or let a lot of stuff go when I knew that we weren't capable of handling and I think in a life sciences business, in a regulated industry, this is like a big difference from startups and stuff like that. That is all we have, our word and our commitment period. Everything else is there to fulfill that, but that's all you got in this business and in this industry, and that's something the founder taught me, and that I learned, you know, probably from day one. Yeah, I I love that. And I know you said you don't typically love giving your life history out, but the life history has already led the podcast, and so I appreciate you taking us through that, and I am curious on that point right there, in terms of this industry versus, you know, another startup, or on the SaaS side, this industry is also really complex, and, you know, coming in with fresh ideas and different ways to do things at times can get people in a little bit of trouble. Did you experience any of that as you embarked on this journey? I would love to know just kind of what was going through your mind. You know, I don't know if there's a horror story or specific example, but what was going through your mind as you were bringing some of that to the table? Oh, gosh. I mean, I'm every corner. I'll give you a funny story. I was just talking about this with a new, new person that we had joined the team, like, a week ago, and we were going through, like, a quality check process, right? Like, what should our quality check process be like? And so to start off easy, I was like, let's just pretend that we're trying to quality check the assembly of an iPhone case, right? So, pretty harmless, right? So we went through the process, and she, she was coming out with, like, where all she would want to have a quality check and who she would want to do it with, right? So, like, the iPhone case design, you don't have the quality checkpoint there. Then when it's manufactured, you want to have a quality checkpoint there. And then, you know, before it shipped, maybe you check one and then you assume that all of them are good. I said, Okay, great. What if we change the iPhone case to a pacemaker? How would you change the quality control process? And immediately she froze because. She got stressed, and it immediately became far more risky. And that, I mean, just in milliseconds, she knew it's the same process, right? But the only difference is that the importance and the outcome of getting it wrong impacts someone's life and in health care, right? And there's nothing more valuable to humans, right? Is life and other people's life and preserving it, right? I mean, that's what the whole industry is out so how could you risk that and be like, Oh, something I'm going to do can damage that, or hurt that, or give some the wrong diagnosis. And so that frees that you feel, and everyone feels it is what you have to navigate through, because if you just freeze, you'll never innovate, right? You'll never change anything. You become completely risk averse. But then that also has its own impacts of damaging stuff by not making things better. So it's incredibly hard, because you have to have two sort of gears. One is, how can I make it better? How can I make any process better? And then the other gear is, how can I make sure it's make it's not making it riskier, right, right? And a lot. And so you have quality, manual systems, and you have processes and checklists. This is all stuff to make sure you're reducing risk, right? And the industry is really focused on this. And this is like the big engine that is easy to fall into, but then you never do this, and they kind of grind against each other sometimes, right? Yeah. And so to innovate, you have to be able to do both. You cannot skip one or the other. And you've got stories of all sorts of places right, that have done one or the other and gotten in trouble or have done something wrong, right? And I think you know, you can all picture the mad scientist that's just super focused on innovation, right? Doesn't do any of the quality or any of the checks, right? Because they're so focused on the innovation. And then you have other places that have all the T's crossed and the I's dotted and the paperwork is perfect, but they actually haven't made anything better. And so every process, everything that we've had to change, the ultimate goal is it takes a little longer and it takes a higher level of effort without reducing the risk, right? Of basically, you still, like, I could spend all this time to move our system from paperless to electronic. I have to get it validated right. I have to then make sure it's kept up to date, because there's regulations guiding that, and so all of that stuff. When I was moving, I knew it wasn't like, I could just sign up for CTMS and, like, Okay, everyone we're using, right? It's not like Instagram, right, right? I'm switching from Instagram to Tiktok. No, it's real and but then you still have to live with the risk that maybe that paper is better than electron. And so it's two two things, of it's just a bigger hurdle to get over. But you, I mean, you have to do it. You just have to have that stomach and the tolerance for the risk and the mindset to de risk it constantly, and have respect for both right, the innovation and the quality. I love that, and I think it's one of the things that we've talked about a lot on this podcast, is innovation is for a lot of companies, at the forefront of who they are, but it's not actually at the forefront of what they do. And they don't actually have a culture or a community internally of genuine innovation. They just say they're innovative. And there's a big difference between innovating to to save lives at the end of the day, or innovating, you know, to move away from Microsoft Excel for the first time in a long time. But saying you are innovative does not make you make you innovative. And I think that's something that, you know, it's been a buzzword in this industry for for a long time, but certainly something that I think a lot of companies are dealing with right now too, especially coming out of the pandemic. Okay, I have a question. You hinted at it. I didn't plan on asking this question. I've got two questions. Actually, I always am allowed one bad podcast question, but I've gotten to my favorite color. Yeah, you you mentioned when you were able to learn in the startup and you were able to learn all of the different pieces of running the business. You mentioned sales, and you mentioned marketing, and those are two areas where most of the people listening to this within the clinical research space, are either on a commercial team or they're on a marketing team, or oversee those two individuals. What was that like coming from the background that you have and then now, how important do you do you have a greater respect for the marketing. In sales, just kind of give me the thoughts on learning that and then now having to apply it for RDI and for the work that you guys are doing. Yeah, man. So I went through a startup class where, you know, like an accelerator, they brought all of these different companies, and each founder had a different approach, right? So, you know, mine was sort of more analytical and data driven and technical, right? I guess just from my background, being an analyst. And we had another one who was an architect, so very like, product focused. And then there was another one who was pure sales, like, worked on a sales desk, like a bullpen, interesting, and, God, I learned so much from him and his ethos and the way He ran stuff, because sales is everything I mean. Like, digest. It makes me speechless at how important it is, because sales is it gets a bad rap, I think, from the outside, at least from my own perspective. When I was looking at it, it's like, oh, that dude's trying to give you to do something I don't want to do. We're trying to upsell me, right? But if you look at the core of sales, it's really solving other people's problems, right? If you look at the best sales people, they either figure out, they figure out a problem that you don't even know you have right, or they have the perfect solution for the problem that you do have right, and, or they make what they have right fit that. And so when you look at it like that, it's incredibly, you know, it's like a really human and personal sort of endeavor. Does it get abused? Yes, all the time. Does everything get abused? Yeah, a little anything into, you know, too much or too you know, too extreme. Always is, you know, seems bad or can be annoying, but at the essence, I mean, and that's what that other startup was, right? Was just really focused on figuring out people's problems were and solving them, and then also being very focused on, this is the problem that we solve. Let's not try and solve other problems. Let's go find people who have this problem right, and then all the other stuff, of like breaking through the ice and building trust, right? And the, you know, email like punchy subjects and all that stuff that's all just trying to get people's attention right, which ultimately, I mean, you can do it in a respectful way of if it's if it's done and applied in a good, a good way, it can be really effective. I mean, when I was looking for a CTMS, right? I would have loved for a salesperson to reach out and be like, Hey, do you have this problem? I would be like, actually, I do. I have this solution, right? And that would have been great, right? When I get calls about student debt, right, and do you want to cancel that, that's super annoying, because I don't have that right? I don't have that problem, and it's, like, really annoying. And so if you take one and apply to the other, yeah, you lose it, right? And so if I boil sales down, and this is what I learned through my process of solving other people's problem and seeing genuinely and honestly, if you can do it, yeah, then it's incredibly important, and everyone should learn, right? And I was just thinking like, if I went back to my if I were to redo my career, the one thing I would do is get a sales job early, because having to put yourself out there and get rejected, which, you know, I did that with my own startup, right? I would like, I had a little flyer to get people to download stuff. And I went to New York, like, corners in New York or the street, just like, and I was just like, Hey, can I get you to enter? And just like people blowing you off right now and then. But you learn from that of like, oh man, 99 people blew me off, but the one person who did really loved it, right? And so you just have to have that patience, which only sales can teach you. And, God, I just have a ton of respect, because you have to have a certain type of resilience, right, to just be so outward focused about other people, and this is good people, good salespeople, right? Yeah, another story is the bad ones. But it is a craft in and of itself, and it's when when used appropriately for good. It's incredibly powerful, and I think it hit the nail on the head for sales and even for the marketing side, which is the problem identification. If you know what problem you solve, and you know that you can solve it, marketing and sales should become much easier, and we are able to identify the people who who have that problem. We're able to communicate it with them. And like you said, with the CTMS example. If you know you're not trying to, you know you don't want 48 people reaching out to you about 48 different things, but if one person reached out to that one person with that specific problem, and that's why, you know, I always talk about my LinkedIn rants, and I've joked often that everybody should have to be a journalist and a salesperson, because you're going to get told no 100 times, and everybody's going to hate you, and that's just kind of the way it goes. But if one person reads that that post, or one person sees that thing, then that's enough. As long as you have that target market, one out of 100 or whatever it is, you can really build that out. And that's how I'd like to reposition marketing too. Is just marketing is the support of that problem identification and making sure that people know the problem exists. I'm not alone, and there is somebody to be able to solve the damn problem. And if we can do that, we can be much more effective in marketing and in sales. So one of the books that I read, I think when I was trying to learn was, I think selling the wheel. Have you heard of this? Yes, yeah, yeah, yeah. So I just that just changed my whole perspective on marketing, yeah, and sales, right? Because just intuitively I was thinking like, Man, if I had invented the like, everyone talks about inventing the wheel, yeah. And to put that in perspective, where even the wheel won't sell itself, yeah, right. Was just like, super powerful. And so, yeah, I think it was the wife in the story who was basically like, you gotta go advertise this thing, because just, you know, it's the best, literally, the wheel, if people don't know about it and don't know how to use it for them, yeah. And then sales and marketing can be a very noble profession, if you view it like that, yeah, 100% i The the really bad analogy is, you know, if a bear shits in the woods, but no one is there. Didn't the bear actually shit in the woods. And we say all the time, you'd have the greatest science you could have the greatest technology, you can have the greatest people, but if people don't know that, then it's not going to matter. And so we talk all the time about before, especially in our industry, before someone's going to buy from you. It could be months on end before they actually engage and have a conversation with you. And so the Trust has to be built. They have to know you first. They have to like you second. And that's where marketing and sales, you know, I think, often get overlooked, and especially they don't they get overlooked because they're not looked at together. And that's kind of one of the the soap boxes that I go on is if you hire 12 sales people, but no one knows the brand, it's not going to matter. If you hire a bunch of marketing people, but you don't have sales people and no one's knocking on doors, it's also not going to matter, and so we have to have that marriage of the two in order to be successful. Yep, yeah, golf. I'm curious. I'm curious what you know, you talked about, how the bigger the challenge is, the more likelihood that there is an opportunity for failure, the more difficult it is. Did sports? Did golf play a role in kind of your in that process of you getting to that mindset, I'm just picturing you behind a tree saying that you're going to go for it, kind of did that? Did that help in terms of making you the the entrepreneur, the CEO that you are today. Yeah, I don't know if golf made me the entrepreneur, or if I was born this way, and golf was just an expression of of it, right? Yeah. Because, yeah, I mean, I have dropped a lot of balls in the trees and purposely practiced trying to get out of there. I believe it, right? You know, there are days where it was raining outside, and I would grab my clubs and be like, I need to go practice in the rain. Yeah. Then it was a little bit shittier the weather. It was like, Oh God, I gotta go play in this because I have to be able to see what my game is like in 30 mile an hour wind, yeah? So I, you know, that's where I don't know, like golf provided that outlet for me to be, yeah, unhinged, basically, right? Because, you know, my my dad, and lots of people I know are in golf and most of those scenarios, right? They're not hitting pretty balls out of the trees when it rains. They're like, okay, maybe it's time to go in. Yeah, and yeah, golf is great for that, because it's there. I mean, there's a lot of similarities to life and challenge in that. And, you know, unfair bounces and unpredictability. It's just it's fraught with uncertainty. It's got a super high learning curve, right? Relative to other sports, I'm not saying those other sports aren't difficult. They're super difficult to get to those levels. But, you know, I can kick a soccer ball. Goal right in five minutes, and at least get the essence of the game. Yeah, golf, it takes 678, months minimum to be able to get the essence of the game right. I mean, you can hit a ball, but that's not what the game is about, right? The sport is about scoring lower and you have so many shots that you have to do, plus, then you add the level of competition of being In match play, like you go first, then I go, right? I mean, it takes a while to get to that. And the fact that that didn't deter me when I was 12 or 13, picking it up, yeah, I just think it's, it's like it was an outlet, right? Yeah, and then I just used it this way, same way I approach everything in life, is with 100 110% Yeah, it's a golf is always so pain. It's such a pain in the ass, because it's you against you all the time. You know, you could come out on a Friday, play great, and then come out on the Saturday, and it's like you forgot how to, how to use a golf club. And so I figured that was a large part of that. So I love to hear it, yeah, it's growing up. I mean, now running a company and a company is growing. I mean, the demands on my time are insane. And really for me, anytime I can put my phone down, yeah, is a good you know, is a good thing. And golf is just a little harder because it's such a but I use it when I need that much time away, right? Because it's, it is a recent it's like a separate challenge that day that gets me reset from everything I love it, yeah? Well, now I need to go cancel the rest of my day. Yeah, I know. I put it, I put in your mind. You put in my mind the very beginning. And I promised that I would have you out of here by the top of the hour. So we only have a couple of minutes left. There's been a fantastic conversation. I think that how I want to end this is just kind of what's next. What's next for you? What's next for RDI trials. Where can we find you guys? You know, give us, just give us a little more context there, yeah. I mean, we are fortunate. I mean, we are a full service diagnostic exclusive CRO and we take, you know, we have an awesome team come from all different we have all sorts of expertise is covered with Lara and operations and assay validation scientist from the beginning, which is critical. We have a clinician, Dr samosuk, right, who is our lab Medical Director and Chief pi, who oversees our CLIA CAP lab. We have excellent regulatory experts, right, who are helping with LDT conversions. And then, you know, working on CLIA waiver studies, 510, K process, PMA, so we have, we have everything that we need. And turns out that, it turns out that people in diagnostics really want this, and really need it, right. And so the biggest thing for us is when we they don't even know that this exists. So when we tell them, hey, we're out. You know, we are only focused on diagnostics. We are a CRO run by scientists, so we treat your assay like our essay. You know, the samples that come in, it's got the most scrutiny. You don't have to explain to us how this works, right? Because they go to other CROs, and they're like, trying to adapt a pharma model. Everything that we have is pure, pure play, fully built for diagnostics. And so we're growing already. I mean, just this exposure, even through the, you know, working with your firm, doing sales efforts, it's a little overwhelming. I mean, just so many people are really interested in using us to to help them. And we have, you know, even the the large companies that give us like trial projects to start us out, because it's a trust based thing, right? And so we have huge clients that we have been working with for 10 years that keep coming back to us. And then we have these new clients who don't know us at all and are giving us those test projects right to see how we can do it. So it's fun, because you get to read through your worth with these clients every day. And so email me directly and give me that trial project that you're not sure that we can handle, because we will crush it, right? And we're open to that, and that's how, how long relationships are built. Our second largest client now that's been working with us, I don't know, several years we've been through free FDA audits with them. The first project started with, like, I think a $5,000 request for leftover samples that was six, six years ago, yeah, and just last year, we ran four trials for them, 1000s of samples, probably 20 sites, right, way, more than $5,000 incredible. Uh. And they've expanded us internally into different groups, right? And we're actually even working with a European group. So, yeah, it's just, I wish I could tell you it was an overnight success, but that would be a lot, and we have a lot more ahead of us, right? We're building the team. Continue to build out the team, expanding our physician network, adding more labs, adding more instruments to our high complexity lab. So it's just more more, doing more of the same is what we're needing to do, and just getting exposure to more people so that our customers know we're out, we're out here ready to solve your problem, and we've done it before, and we're a trustworthy partner that can do it, do it, right? I love it that. That's a snippet right there. I'll save that, send it to you. You can use that and leave it as a lead behind. I knew, I knew coming into this, that I was, I was ready to buy the stock, the, emotional stock, and I feel that way 59 minutes later. And so can I really appreciate you taking the time out of your day to share your wisdom and your experience and story with us. And if anybody is listening, I know at times you'll want to reach out. I'm certain that can all would be excited to receive outreach on LinkedIn, commentary, things like that. Send them a note. I know that people who are listening to this are gonna get a lot of value out of it. And if you are listening to it and you thought, man, what an incredible episode, I have to leave a five star review. We would really appreciate it over here at the SCORRcast, because somehow, someway, this is episode 47 in the last 40 weeks, we're on pace to have 52 this year. And so really excited about the progress for the SCORR cast, and we can't do it without the listeners, but also without the unbelievable individuals like yourself. So Conall, thank you so much once again for spending an hour with my pleasure. Thanks for inviting me. I'm honored. This is my first podcast, so I appreciate it. I love it. As always. Thank you for tuning in to this episode of The SCORR cast, brought to you by SCORR Marketing. We appreciate your time and hope you found this discussion insightful. Don't forget to subscribe and join us for our next episode. Until then, remember, marketing is supposed to be fun.