White Fence Living
"White Fence Living: Real stories from New Albany, Ohio, hosted by a local dad, youth sports coach and community member. From community leaders to everyday voices, we share what makes 43054 tick—with a history sprinkle, no politics. Uncurated chats over the white fences."
White Fence Living
AI, Innovation, and Community: A Conversation with Brad Griffith
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What if technology could bridge equity gaps instead of widening them? In this thought-provoking conversation with Brad Griffith, founder of Buckeye Innovation, we explore how purposeful technology is transforming lives in unexpected ways.
Brad takes us on a journey from his early days as one of the first tenants in New Albany's business incubator to building applications that help students with disabilities find meaningful employment and assist justice-involved individuals in clearing their records. His passion for using technology to solve real human problems shines through in every project he describes.
The discussion tackles AI head-on, offering a refreshingly balanced perspective. "Is AI a threat? Yes, but there are so many other threats to business," Brad explains. Rather than fearing technological evolution, he embraces it while recognizing where humans still maintain the creative edge. "AI is built to give you the most likely answer. It's not saying 'I'm going to look at a totally different industry and see how it applies here.'"
Perhaps most intriguing is Brad's successful implementation of a four-day work week at Buckeye Innovation. When he announced plans to grow revenue by 25% while cutting work hours by 20%, skeptical colleagues questioned his logic. His response? "The behaviors that enable us to cut our work week back by 20% are the same behaviors that will enable us to grow." This philosophy of intentional rest and focused productivity challenges conventional wisdom about how we structure our work lives.
The conversation weaves together business innovation, family life, and community involvement, revealing how technology can enhance human connection rather than diminish it. Whether you're a business leader, technology enthusiast, or simply curious about creating more purpose-driven work, you'll find valuable insights in Brad's approach to technology that serves humanity.
Ready to rethink how technology can be used for good? Subscribe now and join our community of innovators making a difference through purposeful work.
ready to roll ready sweet. Well, brad. Thanks for uh. Thanks for coming on white fence living.
Speaker 2Thanks for having me.
Speaker 1Um, I feel like I keep talking with people that have been here longer than me, so like I want to walk them. Them to brick house blue, but you should be welcoming me yeah, I don't know you may have.
Speaker 2Uh, you've probably used this podcast studio a lot more than I have.
Speaker 1Yeah, yeah yeah, I think so. I think I've probably used it more than just about anybody, probably so yeah yeah, they built it just for you probably. That's exactly right, they were ready for it. Yeah, yeah.
Speaker 2I've been around a long time with Innovate New Albany. Before it was even Innovate New Albany, it was one of the first tenants in the city's incubator space, the New Albany Business Development Center they called it originally.
Speaker 1Okay, yeah, let's dive right into that. Yeah, sure, so even having been here for a while, I kind of had an idea what Innovate New Albany was prior to joining BrickHouse Blue. But you've been there forever, so give me, I don't know if somebody had never heard of it, right, I'm from out of state. What is Innovate New Albany?
Speaker 2Sure, Innovate New Albany is the innovation initiative for the city of New Albany, and I do not speak as an official representative of the city. We've been contracting for the city for years and we work with Neil Collins, who runs all the programming here as well. But I would say Innovate New Albany is the innovation initiative for the city. They do a lot of great things. One of the taglines I've used over the years is that New Albany is a great place to raise a company. A lot of people move here because it's a great place to raise a family too. We can talk about that. I've got two daughters and we love raising our kids here. But it's a great place to raise a company. They operate at the speed of business. It's not your typical local government. You think?
Speaker 2Parks and Rec and the show Parks and Recreation. It's not your typical government. That's getting in its own way and I know the stereotypical government getting in its own way, I feel very strongly.
Speaker 2The government does a lot of really good things for us local government in particular but we need an innovation initiative. When we're building this business park and we've got a health and beauty care campus and we've got data data centers and there's some industries that are very strong here in New Albany, they want to see before a meta or an Amazon or a Microsoft or AWS, before they build their data centers here, they want to see that we are an innovative city.
Speaker 2And I feel like an incubator space where there are events. It's an ecosystem for growing businesses and innovating. That's an important thing.
Speaker 1And that's what. Innovate New Albany is in my mind Cool and then so Innovate. New Albany started like 2000s.
Speaker 2Well, I moved to New Albany in 2008. Okay, and right about that time maybe 2009, they started up their first space and it was half a mile from here maybe West Campus Oval and we had this little space, maybe 10 offices, and you could barely call them offices. I had a cubicle to start with my first person I hired. He came to the building. He was a high school junior. He came to the building. He thought high school junior. He came to the building. He thought wow, I'm coming to work at this company. That's a four-story brick building that probably could fit a few thousand people in it. And he walks in and he sees the space, and he goes in to this little space of about 10 offices and I'm in the back in a cubicle and that's where he has signed up to work.
Speaker 2So we're very small, but it started off as a small space. I was one of the first tenants. I grew into an office there. They moved out of that space into what's now that it's the new Albany company's building. It's now actually, I think, the new Albany company may be in the space the using that as an office where the incubator used to be. Um, and then what?
Speaker 1just a year ago they moved here and this is a huge change.
Speaker 2They were upstairs for a little while. That's in temporary space on the third floor.
Innovate New Albany's Evolution
Speaker 1Yeah, I'd never been to the old space, but this is definitely like. This is a space where you can collaborate. It's definitely innovative. Yeah, it's unique, and I think AWS just had an event.
Speaker 2Trestle was just here Got to meet him at Barry Bagels. Yeah, lieutenant, governor Trestle is here.
Speaker 1Yeah, it is. It's kind of neat. It's fun watching the buzz around here. It is, there's always something going on. It is, so that's pretty cool. How do you feel like the businesses that are collaborating or working? How has that evolved from what it used to be to maybe what the tenants look like here now?
Speaker 2Good question. We had a number of clients in the old space. We still have some clients who are either current tenants or were previous tenants of Innovate New Albany. We definitely collaborated with some others where we would have, as my company, buckeye Innovation. We're a service provider. We build websites and mobile apps and build technology for companies building mostly custom software, and so there would be other companies that might. Maybe it's a marketing firm that specializes in social media marketing and we would partner with them, or was there was a company that did some educational consulting, a startup. We actually had a couple of startup clients out of innovate new albany who raised money and eventually exited and we would build their their website for them or build some technology for them.
Speaker 2that's cool, so that there were some organic relationships that happened, I think. The events there's a lot to be said for the events that Neil is running Tiger Talks the Tiger Talks.
Speaker 1Tiger Workshops. Twice. Now I've run into Neil and I've said Ted Talks and I feel terrible because I'm like it's not a Ted Talk, it's a Tiger Talk.
Speaker 2Well, my company is Buckeye Innovation. People will say to me oh yeah, I've heard of you guys. They probably have not heard of us. I mean there, but I named it something that would sound familiar. It would be very approachable to someone in the Buckeye state and I love Ohio state. It's not affiliated with the university so I think Tiger Talks Neil was playing off of that sort of Ted Akin.
Speaker 1He has to know that, so maybe I'm not offending him as much. Yeah, I don't think so. I don't think so. He has not told me that he's offended. That's good. The Tiger Talks are awesome, so let's touch on it. I'm sure you've attended a lot of them I've been to a few, so what? And I need to have Neil on at some point.
Speaker 2You should absolutely. He's great.
Speaker 1So yeah, so just tell me your experience with the Tiger Talks and kind of like you know maybe a few like really cool topics that you've seen.
Speaker 2Yeah, you know. I don't know his official count. He probably has a count somewhere. I'm up there for one of the people who's given the most Tiger Talks. It may not be the absolute most. Yeah, every year I come back from the Consumer Electronics Show and they're now just CES They've shortened the name just to the acronym. I come back from CES in Las Vegas and I give an annual update. I think I've done seven or eight of those annual updates on technology and what I see. Business executives, leaders in our community, people should know about the technology that that they're talking about at. Ces.
Speaker 2So I love those events but I'm biased, that you know that's one of my talks.
Speaker 1Yeah, can we get. Can we get, just like maybe a miniature tiger? Uh, consumer, consumer, sure.
Speaker 2Sure, yeah, ces, I meanes. I mean it. It started it was probably more about gadgets and home gadgets than it is now. It's shifting more towards technology, and you can imagine, I mean, what is the buzzword in technology these days? Ai, everything, yeah. So all of the gadgets have ai in them, whether they do or or not.
Speaker 1They call it AI.
Speaker 2So, yeah, we could talk about AI. It's a topic that I love and it's always interesting to me to look at cutting edge technology, and we're not going to apply cutting edge or bleeding edge technology to every project we do. It's not pragmatic for a lot of clients, but we need to be looking at what's next and how can they start implementing some of that?
Speaker 1Yeah. So I have a problem that maybe you could solve for sure um take my computer out.
Speaker 2We can, actually we could vibe code, something right now, amazing. Tell me.
Speaker 1Tell me about the problem so uh, youth football, the, the central ohio youth football league, koi, fl. I was talking with the uh, the president today, the we. The way that we do rosters is we take just a headshot of the player and then they use a Google form and then you have to upload a Google form for each individual athlete. So it's over 1,200 entries, 52 different rosters. And I was talking to him and I'm like I have to go through to each kid and fill out an individual Google form, put my email in, put the player's number, upload the player's's picture and then it goes to a database somewhere and then he has to take that database and then like organize it by roster and I'm like we're not going to solve that, oh yeah, but there's got to be a solution to that for sure for sure.
Speaker 1I tried asking grok this morning. Yeah, like he's way too smart for me snarky answer something rude.
Speaker 2Yeah, uh, yeah, so, um, you could definitely build something around that there's got to be the trick.
Speaker 2I mean, I don't know if this is that we can spend the rest of the podcast building this out. If you'd like to uh the image file names, that might be the most complicated thing that I'm thinking about right now. You need some way to associate, because we could upload a spreadsheet and get it into a database and then sort them by team it. You could do that pretty easily. The images making sure that those get associated with the right player. Yeah, would probably be one of the tricks. You just need the player name or I don't know a team and a number, something like that somehow correlate the two.
Speaker 2Yeah, but that's a great example. So you, there are tools now, uh, whether you want to use chat gT, chat GPT will do an okay job of building a single page application. If it's just one file, it can write one file with enough code in it. There are some really cool tools. Lovabledev is one that's gotten a lot of press lately. Was lovabledev Okay, and even if you misspell it, it I get you there um, because I keep, I want to like put an e in there and I don't know yeah uh, so there's one that I like called boltnew, b-o-l-tnew.
Speaker 2There's a whole bunch, there are a whole bunch of them. And, um, have you heard of this concept called vibe coding? I have not, no, so I'm a software engineer. I could write the code myself, yeah, yeah, I could build the application. We've built plenty of applications from scratch. But this idea that you could come up with this, like I, I am half tempted, like seriously half tempted, to pull my computer out and like let's just build a quick application that would take a spreadsheet and it would pull that into a database, grab the, the um, the image, and it would create a roster for you. That's sortable. You can pick which team you want. It would show you that team's roster, yeah, and then, depending on what the coaches want to do, they might say, uh, you know, I've coached, uh, youth sports, not not at the level that you're at uh you know very young kids.
AI's Impact on Software Development
Speaker 2Yeah, yeah, yeah, uh. And so we'll say we need to line up for the game and I see my roster, I'm gonna say the kids and it's going to create the lineup and I can click a button and it's going to text it to my other you know other coaches so that they all have, like you could build all that without writing any code these days you were the coach.
Speaker 1That was like super organized, everybody got the right playing time. I'm like who's been in? Raise your hand right.
Speaker 2What starts off with a great plan uh, and then it, yeah, it devol from there. Someone doesn't show up and someone gets tired, yeah. I try to be organized because I have to put a system in place because I'm not naturally organized. My wife is the naturally organized one in our family. Yeah, I have to compensate with systems and technology and trying hard, yeah, planning man.
Speaker 1I could go so many different ways with AI. And I don't want to bore anybody with the technical side of it, but I do think people that are genuinely interested in it and the future of it. So for you particularly, is AI a threat? Should AI be a threat to people? And is AI a threat to software developers or coders? Or like forever? Learn to code.
Speaker 1Right. And now, like just an example and it's not good, but on the white fence living podcast website, I wanted like a. I thought it'd be cool to have a community calendar where the city's calendar is awesome, it has everything in there. There's just a few calendars that aren't. So I was like man, what if you could add, like the athletic department's calendar, yeah, the school calendar to, the city calendar to, and there's a lot of overlap with the chamber and the foundation. But I thought it'd be cool to find like a really like user-friendly way to to build a calendar. So I did it through chat, gpt and like it wrote the code. But it was the code was so long so I'd make a small change and then it would just take like 10 minutes and then it would usually time out. So it's amazing what it did and it's only going to get more powerful. So for somebody who used to do that work, what are your thoughts on that?
Speaker 2Does.
Speaker 1AI pose a threat.
Speaker 2Is it a threat? Of course it's a threat. I mean, what's not a threat to a?
Speaker 1business.
Speaker 2Technology is changing, it's evolving. People's needs are changing. You've got the government changing rules and things that we have just held as truths for so long that now you can't assume the things that were true about nonprofit funding that are now true. So there's so much changing. Is AI a threat? Yes, but there are so many other threats, I would say, about my business.
Speaker 2We need to constantly be evaluating what is changing, and I've heard folks say that for my business, in five years, half of the revenue that we have today, half of our sales, half of our clients, will no longer be relevant. We just don't know what half, we don't know what half of the work we're doing is going to be irrelevant. We have to try to figure that out. So that is why I feel like, while it might be a threat, it's a huge opportunity. Ai is going to change my industry. It's changing other industries. We have to adapt with it. I don't see it as a brand new thing, though that AI is unlike anything else that's ever happened. When you look at really old photographs and if you've ever seen like one of the memes of like kids are so distracted these days and it shows people in like the 1920s, reading newspapers on the train.
Speaker 2Yeah yeah, so there's been a distraction all along. There's as technology of all, we had phones and so cause a distraction. Those revolutionize a lot of industries yeah we had um in web development design. When I started the business. It's been a little bit over 16 years ago now. We were custom developing a lot of sites yeah a lot of marketing sites. Now you can build those with wordpress. Uh, wordpress came along and it's it's grown quite a bit. 40 of new websites are built on wordpress wow, really yeah, it's.
Speaker 2Uh, it may even be a little bit higher than 45 of new websites interesting. About 40 of all sites on the internet are built on wordpress. It's an incredible percentage yeah I didn't realize next highest platform. It's like three percent is it amazing. So you can build on wordpress. These page builders. They're're plugins for WordPress or you can go to any other platform. It's a page builder where you can drag and drop. Those things change a lot of how, so we don't use our engineers to build sites as much anymore.
Speaker 2It's more content strategists and our designers, but with AI, you could automatically generate. There's a tool called relumeio uh, that is just amazing how quickly it generates a site map or a wireframe. So there are all these tools that come along, and every year in business I need to be thinking about what's changing in our industry. What new tools are available? What are clients paying us for today that they won't pay us for tomorrow? Or what do they need today that they won't need tomorrow? Yeah, so I feel like ai is another one of those things.
Speaker 1So we've got to know how to use it. I think like it's got to be challenged too, because I think the like some things have lost value in that like yeah, if ai like, website building has become so easy. Not that you can just go build a website and it's going to perform great on google or search engines or whatever, but at least like at a very basic level, it has become super easy. So therefore, I feel like people that develop websites, it's like you used to pay, you know, 10, $15,000 for a good website, and now it kind of seems like man, why would I do that? I could. It's so easy to do, it shouldn't take somebody that long. So I'm sure that's had to have evolved.
Speaker 2There are other parts of the process that are valuable now that didn't used to be valuable, so that if you need a website that looks pretty good, works pretty well on mobile devices, you can build that yourself. You don't need us to do it and that was not true 16 years ago Just the basics of registering a domain name and an SSL certificate for security. There are all these things that we used to have to do that now are just it's free and it's easy. But there are aspects, as you were alluding to some like the search engine optimization. Do you want to show up well on search engines Now? Do you want to show up well in chat GPT? We've got a client where when someone asks about clean water in Indianapolis, they show up in chat GPT, like it is the one phone number that's given when someone says I want to know about water quality in Indianapolis.
Speaker 2Yeah their site shows up.
Speaker 1I'm glad you touched on that, because I know every small business out there is going wait a minute. How do I I remember when Alexa came out and I remember thinking to myself man, how could I be? Alexa's response yeah, that's. I mean, it's 10x now, like with AI. So how could you Don't give away any secrets, but like so if we were to say, hey, buckeye Innovation, we really want to make sure that our business shows up in an AI search Like, how do you do that?
Speaker 2Yeah, it's challenging. It's very much like search engine optimization. So if AI all it's doing, it sounds like you have used some of it. You know how some of this works. It is guessing the words. So if I ask it a question, it looks at all the language that it has consumed and it guesses what are the words that would most likely be associated with that prompt you gave me. So if you want to be the website that it mentions or the phone number, soap and.
Speaker 2Water wants to be mentioned. You've got to make sure that there's content on your website that uses those words and words associated with it. So it's just like search engine optimization, where, although search engine optimization was more deterministic, where you give it an input, you can expect the same output, whereas now, uh, when you've got a probabilist I'm getting kind of geeky probabilistic system there's a probability Like when I give it a certain prompt, there's a probability I would get something similar to this. But it might like if you give chat GPT the same prompt a bunch of times, it's going to give you different things. So if you have a bunch of content on your website that is related to the prompt, it's going to be more likely that you show up.
Speaker 1Yeah, interesting. So yeah, it's an evolution. When I'll search something on AI and you see it instantly is like 121 websites, this many X posts. And I just picture back in the day on aol where it's like I'm listening to the dial up and watching it and I'm like it. Now it's like just scanned a thousand websites in two seconds.
Speaker 2It's crazy yeah, yeah, it's a chat. Gpt uh, they're just the new gpt 5.0 is being released, and so every that that's like um, you know these algorithm updates where you'd hear about google updated their algorithm, and they're doing that constantly, on a daily basis. Now, when you have this new model, new version of GPT, or anthropic releases, a new version of clot, those are going to be like oh, my site used to be, or my business used to be, mentioned, and now in this new model it's not mentioned. So it I don't know. To me, it's just another tool. We need to know what are the limitations, what are the really great uses for it? Um, but it's just another technology tool and so it's a unique one. We need to try and understand it. Yeah, I do. I think there's.
Speaker 1I mean I just I think there's so many good that can come from it with you know, obviously there's bad. It's like anything else, like I had Drza from your concierge doctor, yeah, and he's using ai in his business and like one of them, and I won't remember it now, but it's basically an ai, it's kind of search engine just for health related things, to like debunk myths and and he uses it just like with his clients, like if you have it, like should I be taking you know? One thing we talked about was creatine. It's like you could just search that and get facts, not just somebody trying to sell creatine. You know what I mean. So he said they have a tool to examine a mole and, with like 99% accuracy, can say if it needs to be biopsied or not, which is amazing. That's an insanely good use of AI, right, right.
Speaker 2It is cool. I would assume he's probably also talking about some of the risks, and it sounds like it's supervised AI use that he's using it with the client so that if it says something crazy, if it says absolutely, you should take a whole bottle of creatine, like he knows to tell it, to tell the patients. Well, that you know, I can see how. Maybe it got this from somewhere, but it doesn't actually have knowledge about medicine. It just has consumed all of the content that it reads out there and it's making a guess.
Speaker 2It doesn't actually understand it. So I still feel like humans have an edge in a lot of ways. I also think for doctors or in any industry, if you come up with brand new, creative ideas, something that is not the most probable answer to something and your business is based on, I'm going to come up with something new and creative that's outside of what could be expected. That is something that AI is not built to do. It is built to give you the most likely answer and, yes, it can consume tons of content and across all the content in the world it can give you, it can synthesize something out of that. It's really just combining and averaging what's out there. It's not saying I'm going to apply, you need a website? Well, I'm going to look at a totally different industry. I'm going to look at the automotive industry and see what they're doing.
Speaker 1See how it applies here. Yeah.
Speaker 2So there are certain things I feel like humans will still be really good at, and tons of them. In software development, there are things that AI will be really good at. You did some vibe coding, even building something, but as that file gets larger, I've been talking a lot about how it's generating all this code that someone is going to have to support, and if the AI can't fix a bug for you, you're going to have to have a human who's going to fix that for you. Yeah, I needed a human. It's going to be fascinating what that does to our industry?
Speaker 1Yeah, and I'm just curious, like, where do you think this lands in 5, 10, 15 years? Like, how do you think? I mean, nobody can predict it. Yeah, predict it, yeah, but I mean because the, its growth in power is exponential, it's you know. So what, like do you have a? Like if you could guess in the crystal ball? Like, what do you think? What can ai get to a point where it is creative? Like, do you think you can get to a point where, like, ai has that ability where it's not just recalling information? Maybe it can learn on its own? Yeah, I'm sure it will get better I there.
Speaker 2There are things that I think it may never do.
Speaker 1Some of the it's not going to be. We're not going to run into irobot, where robots are taking over the world. I don't think so. I mean it will do some bad things.
Speaker 2I know that at some point you're going to have some ai that, uh, particularly when you get into a agentic ai, when it's agent, it's going out and doing things on your behalf Someone's going to give it its credit card number and it's going to rack up a bunch of debt and we're going to have to figure out whose responsibility is that. Or it might hurt someone, and we've seen some instances of AI giving someone advice and telling them what to put on their pizza and it's not an edible topping or gives them some medical.
Speaker 2So we we're starting to see that. But your question five years out, you know I I can. It's going to keep getting better. Yeah, I think there's something authentic about human connection that it's never going to replace. And you hear about people dating an AI bot or using it. I mean, I've done it too. I've asked questions like I would a therapist. Yeah, I mean, I've done it too. I've asked questions like I would a therapist. Yeah, I go to a therapist, I think going to a human therapist is a very good, healthy thing to do.
Speaker 2I've asked some therapy-like questions of a chatbot so I mean, I think it's going to keep getting better, but there's still going to be something about an authentic human connection that can't be replaced.
Speaker 2For sure, and I see all sorts of things right now that are limitations. Some of those will be addressed, but some of us will not keep up with the pace of AI and it will replace jobs. Some people, though, I think, will keep adapting and will say well, where do I provide value If not consuming all of the code that's out there and learning how to write something are there. Is it the creative ideas about how we combine different systems together, or all sorts of things I'm noticing sending emails, server-side processing, handling time zones. There are a lot of things that doesn't handle well.
Speaker 2Responsive design you gotta very specifically tell it. How do you design something for a phone and a desktop computer? There are a lot of edge cases that it doesn't handle right now, a lot of which I think a human can handle better. So those are the things that I'm thinking a lot about, and then there's the whole topic of how do we use this technology to bridge equity gaps. This could cause bigger gaps, could cause big workforce problems. That AI can do the job of a junior developer right now, and you see, a lot of tech companies are saying, well, we're not hiring any junior developers because we'll just use AI to do that junior work. What's the long-term implication of that? If you never have someone who's junior, in 10 years, you're not going to have anyone who's mid-level because you never have them a junior.
Speaker 1So you've told me you're super passionate about that, how you can bridge that equity gap, and just tell me some of the work and your thoughts and what your passion is around that.
Speaker 2Yeah, so I attended a neat talk. We did a dinner about ikigai. Have you heard of that principle? No, the Japanese principle called ikigai I-K-I-K-I-G-A-I-N-G-A-I-N-G-A-I-N-G-A-I I-K-I-G-A-I, ikigai. And it's this intersection between what you're good at, what you love, what the world needs, and what you can get paid to do so if you find you think of like a Venn diagram, but four parts and right in the middle there that meets all four of those criteria.
Speaker 2That's your Ikigai, and the more time you can spend in that area, the better, the better for longevity and your fulfillment. What?
Speaker 1were those pieces again.
Bridging Equity Gaps with Technology
Speaker 2So what you love doing, what you're good at, what the world needs and what you can get paid to do, and so it's gotta be. To some extent, it's a career. I'm in a unique position as an entrepreneur. I've built a business around the things that I love doing and I'm good at, and I find where does the world need those skills and how can I get paid to do those things, and so so we're trying to help solve a lot of problems. We work with a lot of local governments and nonprofits some for-profit businesses as well, but I think eight of our top 10 clients last year were nonprofit local government clients. That's awesome.
Speaker 2And so we're. It's not all AI, we're doing some applying. We have an application called VocFit, a vocational fit assessment.
Speaker 1Okay that, and this is something you guys developed.
Speaker 2We built. There's a technology out of Ohio State University that now the principal investigators left and they're at Cincinnati Children's and Colorado State University. Okay, we built the application for them that took their spreadsheet model. They used to have just spreadsheets. They would create and they would sit down with a student with disabilities and their family and family members would say, well, here are his abilities or her abilities and things that they can do well right now. And then they had all these jobs that were evaluated, what skills are required for those jobs, and their spreadsheet model would match that up and say here are a few jobs that would be really great. That would help develop the skills that they need but uses the abilities that they currently have. And so we took that from a spreadsheet model where they could work with one student a month.
Speaker 2It was not a very fast pace, and now they can just pump out these reports.
Speaker 1And it's self-service.
Speaker 2It's software as a service model, so they're able to do this. I got a video a few months ago from our client when he was in Italy and he had a video of someone in Italy, in Italian, describing this VocFit application. I was like this is really cool.
Speaker 2This thing we built, they're talking about it in Italy, they're spreading it internationally. So we wow, it's like this is really cool. This thing we built, they're talking about it in italy, they're spreading it internationally. Yeah, so that we use a little bit of ai in that for job matching. We've got the, the technology, that that they build at osu, but then also some ai to analyze a little bit more beyond the data and match natural language processing. Look at what are the, the jobs that we have in our job bank, and can we match those to the students' interests as well and add some extra components in it? Yeah, but it's things like that. So there are students who maybe would not traditionally be brought into the workforce because they have a disability. Yep.
Speaker 2And we're able to help build some technology that matches them up better.
Speaker 1Yeah, that's really cool. Yeah, yeah, that's like, it's those sort of things. Like you know, and obviously doing this, like I have a great appreciation just for like, just for human connection, like I just I don't know, I I'm one of the people that are like pessimistic of of ai and technology and yeah, um, just because I kind of like the way things are you know yeah that's just.
Speaker 1It's just. I'm just naturally like resistant to yeah, um, my wife's way more than I. She's like wanting nothing to do with technology, but I do like it's cool to hear stories like that where the technology is serving such a great purpose. That's fantastic. Any other pieces on that, like bridging that equity gap?
Speaker 2yeah well, so when I give my uh ces talks, uh, the last couple talks they had last year, I'm trying to remember what their theme was. Last year it was, um, they just talked about security for all. Uh, they uh talked recently about, um, human connection, and it's interesting when you talk about human connection and technology that technology frequently we can see the kids putting a phone in their face and it's keeping them from interacting with other people.
Speaker 2It can separate us more, but it can also connect us more. So Apple Vision Pro might be an example I would give. I'm a big fan of a lot of the concept of Vision Pro. Have you tried it?
Speaker 1before no, no, no no.
Speaker 2I saw a guy here at Brickhouse Blue using it Really yeah, first person.
Speaker 1I lot of the concept of vision pro. Have you tried it? No, no, no, no. I saw a guy here at brickhouse, blue, using it really yeah, um first person I had seen actually using it here.
Speaker 2I have here's me like I don't even know what it is okay, so I'll just did you. Uh, did you ever?
Speaker 1see google glass. Yeah, yeah, google glass is augmented reality.
Speaker 2It's got a little screen on a glasses frame, yep, but there weren't actually glasses in it.
Speaker 1Um, and then have you seen meta quest and yeah, augmented meaning like I'm seeing the real world, but there's also, like some, some right right your view of the real world is augmented or it's added to with some sort of a display yeah, um.
Speaker 2And similarly, I've got, uh, the ray-ban meta glasses that have, um, meta ai built into them and there's no screen to see, but you can do audio prompts. So it's got a microphone and I can say hey, hey, meta, and ask it questions. I can take pictures and video with it, but there's no screen to see. So Apple Vision Pro, for instance, it feels when I put Apple Vision Pro on, it looks like a VR headset.
Speaker 2And if someone's wearing a VR headset and you go up to talk to them, it's going to feel like they can't see me. I'm not going to interact with this person, so it feels like it's very much dividing people. Yeah, but the promise, so it could. It could just divide people, but the promise of vision pro and and what it does for technology it's actually augmented reality that when I put it on, I can see everything around me and the latency is so low. The the delay between something happening and me seeing it can't tell the difference. It's so so low. Someone can throw me a baseball and I can catch it yeah while wearing this headset.
Speaker 2so the the promise of it, I think, is that it could help connect people more, that, unlike a typical vr headset, that I put it on and now no one else around me wants to talk with me.
Speaker 2Now it needs more iterations because the the current, uh way that it shows up it definitely is off-putting you wouldn't want to talk to someone wearing it but it has the possibility of helping someone who maybe hasn't had a real job before at an office to wear this headset and have this sort of a VR experience. Maybe they sit at their own desk and it's augmented reality and they can experience what's it like to sit at their own desk and it's augmented reality and they can experience what's it like to sit at their desk for a remote job and interact with someone. Yeah, or uh, maybe I want to see the great barrier reef and you know it's. It's going to get bleached and it's not going to be around in a few years and I don't want to hurt the environment and go there and so I can experience scuba diving in the great barrieref with this headset and augmented reality style. I might be able to interact with things or reach out and like virtually pick up the coral.
Speaker 2So, there's all these sort of experiences that I think it can enable, whether it's workforce development or it's entertainment, it's travel. There are a lot of things that it could do to provide experiences. Or I have a 360 camera.
Speaker 2I play with a lot of technology as you can tell a 360 camera, um, that I uh I put down with my daughters when they were opening christmas gifts and then I could send that video to their grandparents in florida and say you, I'm sorry, you know we weren't able to open gifts with you, but here's a video and they could either put that in a vr headset and they're not ready for that yet or on their camera. They could uh on their phone, they can look at the video and they can like look around and just move around with their phone and it's like they're in that room with the kids and they can see my one daughter here and the other one here and the opening gifts and yeah. So being able to connect people better, uh is important, but misused, it can absolutely divide people.
Speaker 1Yeah, and so like I could see people getting addicted to that. Yeah, like just why go out in the real world Cause? I could just live this like fantasy life through VR, which is kind of scary.
Speaker 2Yeah, and.
Speaker 1I told you I'm a pessimist about this.
Speaker 2You have to trust the people that are using it.
Speaker 2And I can understand not trusting some of the tech companies to do things right in In New Albany. We have great people, as I think about leaders in New Albany. We've got a trip coming up next month, a DC fly-in that Sheree Nelson from the New Albany Chamber is organizing to take us to Washington DC and meet with legislators. That's awesome. I think it's very important that we have leaders. We've got a business community. We've got the city of New albany doing some great things. Um, great non-profit community. Uh, craig moore, the new albany community foundation yeah, he would be a great guest as well, talking about all the things that that they do I've got a.
Speaker 1I got a quick story about that um. So the foundation. So I had um and this. This is tying into like human connection and why I think that like sometimes I think technology will put a greater value on like real human connection, because so I had Irene Adams on, yeah, yeah, karen Wellington Foundation.
Speaker 1I hadn't talked to Irene in a long time and she reached out and she's like oh, you're doing a podcast, it's so fun. Can I come on? I'm like, absolutely so. She's explaining the foundation. I knew a little bit about it but I'm learning more and I won't use any names. But there's a teacher in the district who was recently diagnosed and I'm like I got to nominate this person and so as soon as we finish, I'm like Irene, I got somebody for you. Long story short, that family was nominated and got to take a trip and like has completely changed their outlook on the treatment and they're both educators. Has completely changed their outlook on the treatment and they're both educators. Well, so the foundation this was the first gift from the foundation. They wanted to keep it to anybody within the school district.
Speaker 1And they said that, like it'd be really cool if we were able to give to somebody in the school right and not that they ever wanted that to happen, you know but it did and that was their first gift with karen wellington foundation was to a teacher in this family and so it was incredible and, like I've told everybody, like just this is just fun. I enjoy doing this, it's a hobby. It's not I'm not going to make a living doing this, um, but just that one connection absolutely yeah, if that's all I get out of this changing some lives.
Speaker 1It was, it was incredible so um, anyways, just wanted to.
Speaker 2That's great. That piece is I. I was on the new albany chamber board with irene uh years ago, so yeah, I love her and she and ted will be out on a walk. We ran into them at um in market square the other day. We're getting ice cream, so yeah, that's great. They were able to make those connections so cool yeah really cool, really so we need to be leveraging people. In New Albany We've got some amazing people with great talents and passions. We need to be leveraging that.
Buckeye Innovation's Client Work
Speaker 2Craig I think does a great job of bringing money to the table, making sure that donors who have a passion, there's something that they care about, that they want to sustain beyond their life Yep, then connecting that with the nonprofits, with the needs and we have needs right here in our community Garden for All, a great organization here in New Albany that has grown a lot. They have a new farm out in Johnstown. My daughter and I are going to volunteer there on Friday. Nice, go pick some weeds.
Speaker 1Yeah, pick some weeds. They've got a lot more produce to harvest.
Speaker 2It's a big farm right. It is, it has dramatically increased what they're able to do. Yeah I need to check that out yeah, so I I love that we're not like we're taking something that started in new albany and it's had some funding from new albany and it's growing beyond our community. Because yes, there are needs. In new albany we've got a great food pantry that's serving some important needs here.
Speaker 2Uh, there's a fairly large portion of uh of the students of the school that are on free and reduced lunch as well, so hunger is a challenge here. Mental health support very, very important A lot of things that are important to support here. But then also I feel very strongly that we in New Albany we've got a lot of privilege and I struggle a little bit with the role that wealth and privilege play in my life, and there are some entrepreneurs who can say you know, I started with nothing and I grew up in a very poor family.
Speaker 2I had a great support system as a kid I wouldn't say I grew up in the wealthiest of families, but I had a lot of support and so I feel like there's a responsibility for us to not and I guess I'll speak for myself, I don't want to speak for others I feel a great responsibility to use the resources that I have, some of which I was given. Some come to me out of luck, some come to me out of systemic inequities, honestly, things that have been built into the system, and I want to leverage other people in New Albany and other people in entrepreneurs organization and great organization of entrepreneurs New Albany and other people in entrepreneurs organization and create organization of entrepreneurs, leverage those relationships and those resources to help find people who lack some of the opportunities that I've had and make sure that they get those opportunities.
Speaker 2So that that I'm trying to work that into the business, but that's a big part of my personal mission as well.
Speaker 1Yeah, no, I think that's like you gotta have that purpose right. Like I think, if you can, if you can find that mission statements and all those things are great for your business, but like I can tell you genuinely like that's, I can see the purpose pouring out of you in those things. Yeah, which is which is great, because I think you're right, this it's such a. It is like every community is unique, but New Albany is a little. It's a little different. It's cool. Yeah, it's really cool.
Speaker 2The combination of resources and passion. Yeah, A lot of neat businesses here the schools, the parks and trails We've got a lot going on here.
Speaker 1Oh, it's amazing. Yeah, I tell my kids all the time like you are so lucky to grow up in a community like this.
Speaker 2Yeah, getting them out of the community, I think, is an important thing.
Speaker 1Oh, yeah, doing some travel.
Speaker 2I know we, like many people, found a love for national parks during the pandemic and I've always been a fan of national parks, primarily Yellowstone National Park. I grew up going out there as a kid and my mom's from Utah, so we would travel out.
Speaker 1I really want to take that trip to Yellowstone. Yeah, it's amazing.
Speaker 2I'm done.
Speaker 1I hate the beach. So we take these beach vacations and I'm like, I just don't like it.
Speaker 2There's so many national parks. We went to Acadia National Park. It's up in Maine and so there's some beach there but a lot of cliffs. But we love national parks because it's untouched nature, it's protected, and so you don't get the crowded beaches. You get a beautiful beach that's not crowded and it's well-protected, it's not commercialized. Yeah. So yeah, hopefully we can. I see a lot of those opportunities where some New Albany kids do a lot of travel but there are others who don't get out of New Albany and don't know that there's something beyond.
Speaker 1There's a world out there. There's a world out there. There are different struggles?
Speaker 2Yeah, and whether struggles? Yeah, uh, and whether it's visiting via ai or visiting via uh vr, where they have this vr experience and they can see how someone else lives. How does a student in a different country live? Yeah, what are the challenges that they? Even here within columbus, though I'm the uh, the current chair for city year, columbus okay, you're familiar with city year, I'm not, so city year it's an americorps program, so it's um young, young folks who are generally recently graduated from high school to recently graduated from college and they are going to go out and do a year of service in the community.
Speaker 2And there are a lot of different AmeriCorps programs. City Year is one program that AmeriCorps funds. We have these young professionals, a lot of whom are just out of college, who come and they spend a year in Columbus City Schools, nice, and they partner with teachers. They're student success coaches so they'll augment the teacher's ability to work with more students. They'll give them more one-on-one interventions. So even just within Columbus, not very far from New Albany, we've got great resources and a lot people know about the, the funding in schools. In ohio it has been ruled unconstitutional yeah, over a dozen times, because it's all based on property value, so communities that have more expensive houses are going to have better education and that that is not equitable that is not fair, yeah and just right in columbus there's a great need.
Speaker 2Yeah, so anyway, yeah, that's the kind of thing where, where I want students here to see what is it that people, what are the challenges that students deal with, even just in Columbus City Schools.
Speaker 1Yeah, I did so. I was an educator years ago and so part of the licensure or graduating was you had to do a co-op in inner city. So, I got matched. I was at Northland with Satch Sollinger, which was an amazing experience and I know a lot of the community knows Satch because he hangs out at at Starbucks.
Speaker 1Um, but, man, I learned so much in that six weeks that, like I never would have learned, you know, if I were doing that co-op at new albany. Yeah, um, it was just an incredible experience. So so, yeah, I can, I can appreciate that, like, yeah, I don't know if I there would be like if, if some new albany students went to columbus public for a few days, there'd be some culture shock for sure. Yeah, um, but yeah, I think it's important for them to understand, know that's out there and experience it. And yeah, I don't know, know, having done that, I don't know if I really strongly consider teaching in Columbus Public, but I definitely was like, like it just felt like you could have more of an impact, yeah, but, but yeah, that's neat. So let's, I want to talk a little more about Buckeye Innovation and like, like what, what, what are your clients look? Like? Like, what exactly are you doing in the business right now? Sure, you know what services are, like, what's, what's the core of what you do?
Speaker 2Yeah, who's your?
Speaker 1ideal client.
Speaker 2Yeah.
Speaker 1Good question. So other than Central Ohio Youth Football League?
Speaker 3Yeah, we can help you out. We can vibe code something later.
Speaker 2We'll figure that out. Actually, I was just talking to Melanie on my team, our vice president of growth and strategic engagement, about setting up a Tiger workshop where we could teach people how to use one of the many AI coding tools. That'd be cool, so you could bring that to the workshop. Yeah, or we just hang out out here at Brookhouse Blue.
Speaker 1That too, that too, and we can build it.
Speaker 2So, yeah, our typical client a lot of our clients are local government and nonprofit OK, I would say, any sort of an organization that is trying to bridge an equity gap and they want to use technology to build capacity to help them do their work better. So if you've got an important equity gap, an important change you want to see in the community, and your organization thinks maybe there's a way to do this better, maybe technology and design could help us, yeah, I want to have those conversations do you have?
Speaker 1can you highlight maybe a client that is doing that, that you've worked with or yeah, I mean they're.
Speaker 2They're I mean a lot of different needs in the community, so another one I might evoke fit was a really good one.
Speaker 1I enjoyed that with students with disabilities.
Speaker 2Yeah, opportunity port is another one that our team has really enjoyed, and there are a couple local ones here that we're working with right now and hopefully they wouldn't mind me talking about them. Opportunity port was a really great project for the justice involved community. If you have something on your criminal record, yeah, it can even just be a minor offense, maybe it's not even a conviction that can cause discrimination in housing and lending, employment a lot of different ways. And so Opportunity Port what they did is they said someone who's coming out of the judicial system, maybe they've spent a little bit of time in jail or in prison and they want to have their record cleared and legally, there is a way to have your record sealed after a certain period of time if you have. They're fairly minor offenses, they're not violent offenses, uh but they just don't want to have anything to do with the legal system, like, yeah, I'm just done with it and do I want to fill out a bunch of paperwork and go back to court or hire somebody to?
Speaker 1help hire someone.
Speaker 2yeah, you may not have the money to, so opportunity port um started with Rob Dorans, a Columbus City Council member, and Hannah Miller, who was on his staff, and they built this application. They had a vision for the application.
Speaker 2They went to Smart Columbus a really great organization in town we've done several projects with and said we want to build an application that helps with the record-sealing process For someone who is legally allowed to get their record sealed. We just want to make it easy for them. The law says that this should happen. We want to make that easy and so we built an application that, uh, works with the reading level of someone who's coming out of the prison system, um, and helps. Just make it very easy, like wizard style.
Speaker 2Fill in this information, we'll connect you up with free legal assistance at the self-help resource center, or we had a bunch of different legal partners and then would help them through the record sealing process. Wow, it automates a lot more of the process and the studies showed that for someone who gets their record sealed, on average, one year after getting their record sealed, their income is increased by ten thousand dollars a year. Year after getting their records sealed, their income is increased by $10,000 a year. Wow, it's an amazing impact that can have on someone's life. So that was another one where we could build some technology.
Speaker 1It bridges this equity gap, makes a huge difference, which has to be, and maybe there is like returning to the system is probably greatly reduced.
Speaker 2The chances, I would think so Right, with an increased income, the ability to get a job that is more fulfilling for you, that leverages your skills more. There's some real rehabilitation. Absolutely, that's really cool. A lot of local government clients, so the city of New Albany has been a big client of ours over the years.
Speaker 2We just most recently we launched a new intranet for them. So all the staff members of the city of New Albany use this intranet for their communication the main website for the city of New Albany. We built the Innovate New Albany website. We manage the city of Hilliard's website Wow, we did a bunch of websites for the Delaware County government a number of years ago. City of Powell we've worked with OBATS Cool Locally here. So do you know, buddy Up for Life.
Speaker 2Oh yeah, so yeah, Buddy, Up for Life. They were a tenant. They're now next door, next building over. We're working with them. I had Beth on the show. Oh, very good. Yeah, I missed that episode.
Speaker 1I'll have to go back.
Speaker 2I've listened to most of your episodes.
Speaker 1Thank you.
Speaker 2Yeah, so we're working with Beth and her team on a new website for them and a volunteer management system. That's really we have a product that we've been building, this volunteer management system. They're our pilot client for it. Wow, uh, matt, you've probably volunteered at some point and you have to sign up. Usually there's some software for it, the process you know. We use signup genius at my daughter's school for a lot of things. It just feels like an application that was built 10 or 15 years ago.
Speaker 2And so we want something that's modern, that is very easy to use, that adds those volunteer appointments to your calendar, that sends out reminders and makes communication easy, streamlines the check-in process. So modern application that's very easy and serves a need in the community. So Buddy Up is a great organization. I volunteered with them as well. Buddy Up Tennis yeah. That's awesome.
Speaker 1Yeah, I got to get my kids doing it Once they're old enough.
Speaker 2I forget what the age is. Great volunteer opportunity for them. It is really cool. Are they tennis players or pickleball players?
Speaker 1Pickleball. Grandma plays pickleball. We've got a basketball court in the back that they use for it, they love it. That's great. That's a good segue into kids so yeah, let's talk about you kind of where are you from? I grew up in Dublin, dublin, not too far away and went to Ohio State.
Speaker 2Ohio State I said I wanted to get away to college and then my guidance counselor encouraged me to apply to Ohio State had a scholarship program and I visited their honors program and I just absolutely loved it. Yeah.
Speaker 2The attention I could get in the honors program, the resources of a university like Ohio State. I loved it so much I decided to go there, got the scholarship, which was helpful, Decided to go there and I became a recruiter for Ohio State's honors program. Nice and then that's where I met my wife. She also became a recruiter in the same program.
Speaker 1So is she from the Columbus area. She's from Northwest Ohio.
Family Life and Homeschooling
Speaker 2Okay, grew up, moved around a lot in Northwest Ohio, yeah, but then came to Ohio State and we met there Very nice Been in New Albany now 17 years, okay. Okay, I've got two daughters, 15 and 11.
Speaker 115 and 11. Yeah, yeah, 15, that's scary.
Speaker 2Yeah, yeah, you know a lot of people I. I hear from people, wow, that these teen years like just I've got this little, uh little terror. Yeah, I honestly I might be able to buy this. I have not experienced it. That's good, yeah, um, teenagers can also be really incredible, inspiring, delightful people and I don't want to say you know with rose-colored glasses that everything is is amazing, because I'm waiting for that.
Speaker 2Yeah, I mean, there are challenges but there there are a lot of ways that Noel, my 15 year old, that she inspires me. I became vegetarian because of my 11 year old, which you could argue whether that's like a, an ethical good. I mean there's a little harm that can be done going vegetarian. I don't need great praise for it, but I feel like she has inspired in me this care for the environment and for animals and even my own health. I feel better with a vegetarian diet. Yeah.
Speaker 2My 15-year-old also a lot of care for the environment. She's got the entrepreneurial bug. I think both of them do, but maybe a little more so the 15-year-old. She's running a babysitting business. She's got a business called Crafty Kids Care Great, I don't know if you've ever been to Inside and Out. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, little little boutique part of Oakland Nurseries. They're one of her customers.
Speaker 1I was in there recently. Oh, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 2Where's that, where's her stuff? So right at the register, just to the left of the register there's a little display case and it's got some hand-painted greeting cards.
Speaker 3How cool is that. So yeah, she's got them there and she's got them also at Elliott Cooper in Market. Square.
Speaker 2Yeah, so it's something I haven't done. I have not had retail distribution of a product before and she's got reorders from both of those customers. Wow, that's awesome. I, of course, helped her set up the e-commerce side of it. So anyway, yeah, having kids I have, I absolutely have loved it. I had seven nephews. I didn't know what to do with a girl in the family until we had our daughters. Yeah, and I am a hundred percent girl dad now, like I all in on uh on parenting.
Speaker 1Yeah, it's wonderful, my oldest girl, so I've got four. My oldest girl is like super easy right now. Oh yeah, like yeah, she just.
Speaker 2Good, you have got at least one, it's easy.
Speaker 1My oldest boy not so much, yeah, the youngest girl not so much, yeah, yeah, it's kind of amazing how different they all are.
Speaker 2Yeah.
Speaker 1All unique beings. You're saying so. My oldest um girl will. I think she'll be that. Yeah, like I don't see her being a difficult teenager.
Speaker 2Yeah, um, the the others we'll see yeah, yeah, I mean, there of course are challenges yeah, you know no, no marriage, no family life is perfect. Um, my wife is amazing. She homeschools noel, our 15 year old. Um, and just it, yeah, just she was a school psychologist uh, she did psychology undergrad and then school psychology grad school. Wow, uh, brilliant, super organized. A great planner uh, balances me out incredibly well, yeah I'm an engineer, she's a psychologist, so it's yeah very different people um, but with very similar values and missions, and so yeah, that's really cool.
Speaker 1Yeah, so how's homeschool Like? So you got a rock star at home, so she's kicking butt.
Speaker 2Yeah, yeah, Noelle's great, Very highly motivated. You know every kid needs something different and you know we moved to New Albany because we wanted really great schools. And do they have great schools here? Yes, the test scores are amazing. The resources they have the McCoy Center for the Arts, the Hinson Amphitheater, they just have so many amazing programs and resources. It didn't end up being the right thing for Noelle. She was very, very stressed out and I remember going to a coffee one time and talked with Mr Sawyer's superintendent and I said you know, can, can we just get a little less pressure on Noel, Like she's really stressed out. She's a high achiever, very smart, She'll do well. Just we need less pressure, he said for every one of you. I hope I remember this right.
Speaker 1I'm not misquoting.
Speaker 2Uh, for every parent like you who's saying put less pressure, we're getting 10, say more more. Why aren't you challenging my kid more? Yeah, so it. It didn't end up being the right thing, yeah, yeah, noelle is now. She came home. Um her, her mental health and wellness immediately improved.
Speaker 1Uh, and she, she's thriving in old school and she, she considered going back, you know, going to private school.
Speaker 2Um, I've got one who's at columbus school for girls gloria, our little one. Uh uh, little little one, 11. And uh, everyone needs their own thing. She considered going there. She just loves homeschool so much it gives her a lot of independence. I think she's she's like me that she wants to control, she wants to be the master of her own domain, she wants to control her schedule, and homeschool is the entrepreneurship equivalent, the self employment equivalent in schooling.
Speaker 1Yeah, I mean, yeah, you can get a lot more done, right, you can. You can compress your day.
Speaker 2We've got a four-day work week at Buckeye Innovation, because I want the kind of people who are going to optimize their schedule, who are going to be super efficient and are going to get things done, and they can do it in four days by cutting, cutting out waste, cutting out time that doesn't need to be spent, and so you can do the same thing in homeschool. So you know what?
Speaker 1we're going to compress it, yeah, and I'm going to have fun, I'm going to, I, I uh we implemented that um, I tried it at my previous company and it did well, because you do, you cut a lot of inefficiencies like this is in the home services, but yeah, there's a lot of inefficiencies in travel and and things that happen every day. If you can, you know, obviously cut back on that. Um, we did do it at soap and water for a little bit, um, and it does work. It works well. I love it because then our team's getting more time off, like go be with your family, plan a weekend, like spend time, like refresh, because it can be such a grind here, like give me Monday through Thursday, take Friday, saturday, sunday off, and I think it worked pretty well. We kind of strayed away from it a little bit, I just think, because weather, like yeah it's so weather dependent.
Speaker 1We we would always like fall back. We'd end up working that day anyways, but I love that idea. That's pretty cool. Um, and then, like I'm sure you're probably more productive, I would assume, at a four day work.
Speaker 2I think. So you know the when we switched over to the four day work and we're jumping back and forth um the four day work week, uh, when we switched over to it, I told some of my entrepreneur friends in in EO I think it was in a in my entrepreneurs organization group. They, um, I said, you know, we want to grow, got to grow goal of growing 25% in revenue this year and we're switching to a four day work.
Speaker 2Wait, wait, a second, you're going to yeah, you want to grow by 25% while cutting your work week by 20%. I said, yeah, actually it's the same behaviors that, the behaviors that enable us to uh, to cut our work week back by 20% it didn't go down to four days instead of five those same behaviors of efficiency, identifying what's really going to deliver value to clients and what's not. Yeah, so those same things that are going to enable us to grow. So, yes, we're going to grow while cutting our work week back. And it's been fantastic. That's awesome. Yeah, and I love it.
Speaker 1I feel like a lot of companies have a four-day work week.
Speaker 2They just don't know it. Well, so right. So I mean you can have people who are, I mean, at best 80% focused for five days or can you get them 100% focused for four days? Yeah, but yeah, I think a lot of studies would show they might be. 60% focused show they might be 60% focused.
Speaker 1So you're really maybe you're getting three days out of them even though they're physically there for five days. It's kind of like this concept of like unlimited vacation, Like you hear companies going like you don't have vacation, Just you just take vacation when you want, use your vacation how you want. Um, and I've spoke with some people that are in that they're in a sales role, Um, and they can, they, just they.
Speaker 1It doesn't change anything that their productivity whatsoever yeah they just they're able to budget their time, they're able to like have some flexibility and I I think like for me, I might, I almost would like feel like I might work more, because then it was like I'm on vacation, but I can still work you know so I think that's a unique concept too. It's kind of like what do you mean? Unlimited vacation? Yeah mean, but you still have a job to do. There's other ways to measure, yeah we do meter vacation.
The Four-Day Work Week Advantage
Speaker 2I think it's important also, if you're not taking enough vacation, you're not taking enough time off. That's a problem. You're never disconnecting A big part. I read a couple of books called. One was Rest and the other one was Shorter and the other one was shorter and the first one by the same author, I can't remember the author's name. Rest was about great leaders that a lot of us recognize as great, powerful leaders or influential leaders in community and in politics and, historically, world leaders, and how they valued rest. A lot of well-respected leaders have taken naps during the day, or they take sabbaticals or they take a week off once a month to just like. The amount of rest that they get is really incredible.
Speaker 1I hope my wife listens to this because I love a nap. Yeah, well, my wife will appreciate you saying that.
Speaker 2My wife is encouraging a lot of rest. I came back from family camp this weekend.
Speaker 1I told my wife.
Speaker 2You know I'm not as sore. I'm not as physically sore as I was last year. I don't know if it's because I didn't do enough at summer camp that I didn't push myself enough or if. I'm doing a better job balancing. She said oh, you did plenty.
Speaker 2She wants to encourage rest. Yeah, I'll say so. The rest is really good about. What is the value of intentional rest? And then, shorter, specifically applies that to the work week and it looks at a bunch of different companies that have shortened their work week encouraging intentional rest. And intentional rest for an engineer or a software developer frequently does not look the same.
Speaker 1So I talked with my wife about rock climbing might be intentional.
Speaker 2Rest that I'm going. It's a rest from work. Yeah. I'm disconnecting, I'm doing something different. Resting my mind doesn't mean I'm resting my body, yeah, um, so that's one of the things that Abby sees differently in my life, but it's sort of shorter, talks a lot about what does it look like to physically shorten your work week? Fewer hours it's not for 10 hour days, it's for essentially eight hour days. Everyone on my team, except for art. We've got one intern from New Albany High School this summer. She's hourly.
Speaker 2Everyone else is salaried, so we're not metering the hours, but I'm telling them I want you to shorten your week. I don't want you to compress your week. I want you to shorten it. I want you to cut out waste. So those are two good books that I think inspired. Yeah, I'll have to check them out.
Speaker 1Yeah, I like the concept and I think for the most part I mean I think it works. It just makes sense. It's not you know. Now I'm sure there's some industries where it doesn't right, it's hard.
Speaker 2We have one client in particular who does not love our four-day work week, wants support on Fridays. But it's a great challenge of figuring out how do you communicate. This is what we're trying to do with an innovative business practice. The solutions you're getting are going to be more creative because my team stops after Thursday. Yeah and I. If you, you need something this week, we're going to get it to you sooner. You're going to get Thursday.
Speaker 2We're gonna get you the same amount of work, but in four days, and they're going to be more creative solutions. Because my team disconnects. You know how? How often do you have your most brilliant ideas when you're in the shower or you're, you're out on the golf course or you're doing something outside of work, that focus dedicated at your computer, kind of work. So we're giving more time for that and that intentional rest, whether that's. You know, we've got some team members who like to go hiking or cycling. One of one of our team members, Stacy, organizes the pan Ohio hope ride cancer research fundraising event, and so she takes some time to go on cycling rides and plan so that time it's community time, it's family time. Who among us doesn't need a little bit more time with our family? I want that for myself, so I'm going to give it to my team too.
Speaker 1Yeah, no, I think it's fantastic because it is it's, it's man, especially if you have young people not that I'm calling myself young or younger like trying. I can't imagine if I had a job that I was tied nine to five, that I couldn't like go to the you know entrepreneur day right, or or go to the you know the park, with the, with the class, like those things I like I can't imagine not being able to do. Yeah, yeah, absolutely Super important.
Speaker 2That's a big part of why I started my business. I wanted flexibility. My mom was PTO president for multiple years. As a kid I said you know what, abby, I want you to know if you want to be PTO president like you're going to have some competition. I want to. I want to be a.
Speaker 1PTO president dad this year for um, and so we've got one homeschooled. So there's no real PTO there, oh you're the PTO.
Speaker 2Yeah, I am the vice president of the PTO. Uh, at at Columbus school for girls, I'm the parents association treasure.
Speaker 2This is one of five executive four or five executive team members, um, so working my way up there, uh, so, yeah, I think it's super important that I have time to volunteer. I want my daughter's friends uh, both of the girls, I want their friends to know me, um, I want them to to know who I am and that, uh, that I'm a part of Gloria's life and Noel's life, and, um, so I I think that's important. It's important to me that I know the teachers that I'm there at the school. I sometimes will spend a little bit too much time there, and so I've had some comments like weren't you here yesterday? Like if I'm there too many days, they might start paying you, they might. So we actually built some stuff, for I built an Alexa skill and this will be my official pitch for it.
Speaker 2Um, that I took to csg. I said you know, kids have trouble remembering their instruments on instrument day or, uh, their gym shoes. Make sure they wear the right shoes on gym day. And so I built an alexa skill where my daughters can say alexa, open, unicorn report.
Speaker 2Unicorns are the mascot for csg and it, it opens up and it tells them today is an A day. You have instruments. Don't forget your instrument. Today. For lunch we have chicken fingers, and so it looks up the lunch menus, it looks up what day it is I need that.
Speaker 2Based on their grade. So this is one of the products that we might try and commercialize. Schools are traditionally not amazing like nonprofits, like local government, at adopting brand new technologies. There are a lot of cool technologies they use, but there are some things that are not as accessible because, particularly at you know, I should be looking at schools that might be outside of New Albany, outside of private schools, where there may be a fair amount of funding available. Yeah. But I want to build technology that makes people's lives better. Yeah.
Speaker 2Maybe doesn't replace you as a parent, but instead. I mean, if your kid keeps out every morning, they ask you, hey what do? I need today, or they don't ask you. And then they get to school and they're like, hey, can you bring me my instrument?
Speaker 1Yeah, let's just ask the Alexa yeah, my wife, but yeah, let's just ask the Alexa, yeah, nat, my wife, natalie, like yesterday was like losing her mind because she's so we're in three different buildings, so we're in the, we're we're out of the ELC now. So primary, intermediate and middle school, and so four kids in those three buildings and like she wrote down everything that we have to do just this week and I'm like holy, like how are we going to do it?
Speaker 1I don't know how we're going to be in all these places at once.
Speaker 2There are two of you yeah. We got three buildings, that's exactly right.
Speaker 1So I kind of like it because the kids, like they're pretty independent, like they have to be Like the two older ones for sure, like we're not, we can't constantly remind them of everything, so so I think it's built some independence in them, which is great, um. But it's also like, when something does fall through, as a parent I'm like I feel terrible, like they needed their instrument and they didn't have it. Well, man, I, maybe I should have been there to like help them, remind them, or. But the other part of this, I don't have the mental capacity to remember it all anyways. So it's like I, they don't really have a choice. I can't remember every teacher, every bus time, every. It'll take me six months to figure out the bus times. I'll still have to go back to where we have it written down.
Speaker 2Yeah, so if they could build some technology around that.
Speaker 1That'd be pretty cool.
Speaker 2Finding the things, and we do this with businesses as well and nonprofits. What are the pieces of information that you really need that are hard to get? Or there are multiple pieces of information in different places and we could automate pulling those together. Maybe it's instead of all the emails that you get and you've got to sort through all that information.
Speaker 2Maybe it's giving one centralized website where all the information is, or it's a text messaging system where you can say will you please text me every morning that we have instrument day, or text me the night before. Those sort of things that could be done. We like to do that with nonprofit and local government and for business. You can drive a lot of efficiency by taking these disconnected systems, integrating them together, building some piece of custom software, maybe even largely automatically generated with AI, and it can revolutionize the way that you run your business.
Speaker 1Yeah, that's one thing I think that's going to be a really cool byproduct of AI is like people have a lot of good ideas. There's so many ideas out there that have probably never come to fruition because they didn't have the skill set or the resources to have somebody develop it. So I think that's pretty cool, like where somebody would be like this is a cool idea. I think we're going to see more innovative things like that because there's less of a barrier to it. So yeah.
Speaker 1I'm kind of excited to see that People like me like dream it like this, like at some point, can we just like describe this like voiced to software, like can we just describe what we wanted and it'll go do it?
Speaker 2Absolutely. I mean these tools like lovabledev, like it you've seen on chat GPT. It's a single file. It generates the, the boltnew or lovabledev. They build you a whole file system, the whole application. Wow, so I've been. I am a big Girl Scout volunteer as well.
Speaker 1My wife runs the troops.
Speaker 2I'm the cookie dad for my younger one's troop and help out with cookie sales. I'm the treasurer for both troops and I try and get the girls involved. Like we used NFC tags, you know. Nfc like you would use kind of the technology for tap to pay but, you see them access cards for buildings, and so I gave them for the Girl Scout cookie sales. Do you have any Girl Scouts?
Speaker 1No.
Speaker 2So for Girl Scout cookie sales? Do you have any Girl Scouts? No? So for Girl Scout cookie sales, they now have a digital cookie platform that Girl Scouts of USA provided. But then I give them each this little credit card size NFC card with their photo and their favorite cookie on it. It's a QR code on the back in case you just want to scan the QR code, but you can tap it to a phone. So they go door to door for sales and it's in the winter, great planning. Yeah, girl Scout cookies don't melt.
Speaker 2But it's like January to March go door to door in the cold of winter and we'll have the card like in their glove, and that they'll say would you like to buy some Girl Scout cookies? And the customer says, yeah, do you have your order form with you? He says, well, just tap on my glove with your phone and you can order cookies and they're like what, what do you mean?
Technology for Community Connection
Speaker 2and just the way that the girls enjoy that technology and they can see the application of it. Or I built for packaging, basically packing slips for the cookies. We've got to organize all of those orders and put them together, and so I I created this packing slip generator. They can download their orders and just upload them into this generator and it gives them these pretty little thank you notes.
Speaker 1How cool is that.
Speaker 2Like a pick and pack list.
Speaker 1Here's how many of each variety they need.
Speaker 2Trying to introduce some sort of technology to the girls as well, so that they know what's possible. My little one she's going to get tired of me calling her my little one, so Gloria, she is going to be a software engineer. I think she wants to be an environmental engineer, builds robots that help the environment in some way, and so I try and introduce her to software and what's possible and isn't, uh, speaking of robots.
Speaker 1I think is it dublin that is using like robocops I thought I seen an article really like they're using these, these, uh, these robots to, like, monitor areas that don't have a lot of, like a parking garage, like it would be in a parking garage where it's constantly surveilling, but you can also approach it and like get direct communication with the police department. Really, it looked pretty cool. I'm going to have to look into that, I think it's. Dublin. It has a few of them out there like operating right now.
Speaker 1I may have just made that up it's.
Speaker 2Dublin has a few of them out there like operating right now. I may have just made that up. That's that's fascinating. Is that an ai response? A?
Speaker 1hallucination? I'm pretty sure I saw that's really cool somewhere.
Speaker 2Yeah, it seemed pretty neat.
Speaker 1The columbus zoo, I heard, is using ai to uh, it's not robots, but they're analyzing video of their animal enclosures to determine are animals happy in their enclosures yeah there are some really cool things you could do with that, so Avalon in New Albany used to be something else before it and I actually looked at it when my grandmother was in town.
Speaker 1She moved up here from Palm Beach but we looked at that and they have some of their rooms and again, I think it was before Avalon, so Avalon may not have this, but the technology was there when like yeah, yeah, through motion detectors they could monitor, uh, a resident's activity. So like utis are a big issue with the elderly, so it could monitor motion, like trips to the bathroom or how many times they get up. Yeah, and then that would alert like okay, the nurses need to go check for this, and which my wife's a nurse. I'm so far from understanding medicine, but like it's a precursor for other issues and they could like catch it right away. And this is probably 10 years ago, right, so I can only imagine like what some of that technology could be really cool at ces.
Speaker 2They've got all the health tech stuff oh really okay, uh, you know, in home urine analysis, so like you could put some dip stick in your toilet and it gives you a diagnosis. That's cool. Um, so yeah, there were a lot, a lot of interesting technology. That's cool that they were doing that, that sort of predictive analytics based on behavior, even just motion within a room.
Speaker 1I thought that was really cool. Yeah, like that was a huge selling point, like when we were looking like we shouldn't. Fortunately she didn't end up needing to go, but I was like man, man, I want somewhere that's going to have that kind of monitor. Because so much of that stuff goes undetected.
Speaker 2But man, that's cool.
Speaker 1I feel like we could go on forever.
Speaker 2Yeah, I appreciate the conversation, yeah it's really fun.
Speaker 1So, yeah, I thank you for doing this, yeah my pleasure. Thank you for having me.
Speaker 2Buckeye Innovation seems like a phenomenal place to work. Thanks, yeah, I mean, I look forward to having more conversations. Hopefully, if, uh, if you're listening, you haven't been out to Brickhouse Blue, I would love to meet you here, please Um, you know listeners, please come out. Uh, it's a great space. Come to some tiger talks, some tiger workshops. Hopefully, we'll have a workshop on AI code generation soon.
Speaker 1Yeah, I need to do a better job of um of kind of talking about those tiger talks, because, like I, I'm not affiliated with brick house blue I use this podcast space, love the people here, love this space, um, but I think I could do a better job of like, trying to get like, because I I can get guests out here, yeah, um, and every time I get a guest I think it's a genuine like holy, this place is awesome. Yeah, this is really cool and I I see new faces on events, um, but the Tiger Talks are one in particular. Like I need to stay up to date on, like what's coming so that if there is something interesting that somebody wants to see, they can come see it.
Speaker 2Yeah, you can subscribe to the calendar on the New Albany website. There you go. And, while you're here, have a conversation with me. Tell me what kind of problems you're trying to solve for the world and how can we apply some technology.
Speaker 1And we'll work on your spreadsheet intake system for the football roster. Yeah, well, hey, we got to do it again, like yeah, I don't know, I think kind of like maybe a technology update. Sure, yeah, I can give you my conspiracy theories on technology and.
Speaker 2AI yeah, we need to be aware of those things, so that we can mitigate against them.
Final Thoughts and Invitation
Speaker 1Yeah, hey, thanks again I appreciate it. Thanks so much for having me All right take care. Man that.