Scale Like a CEO

Leveraging AI for Business Growth: Jason Doudt's Journey and Insights

• Performance Accelerated Learning • Season 1 • Episode 6

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Welcome to 'Scale Like a CEO!' In this episode, we explore the intersection of technology, leadership, and innovation with Jason Doudt—Navy veteran and CEO of Quantify 360 Solutions. Jason discusses his journey from the Midwest to the Pacific Northwest, the challenges of building a successful consulting business, and how leveraging AI has drastically transformed his work efficiency. Whether you're a founder, tech enthusiast, or curious about the future of work, this conversation is packed with inspiration and practical insights. Join us as we dive into Jason's professional journey, the secrets to his efficiency, and the strategy behind building a thriving business.

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Jason Doudt:

The trick is, I would only be able to do about a fourth of what I'm able to do if AI had not been invented, if we didn't have the ability to leverage tools that I can research quicker, I can do emails quicker, I can edit things I've written quicker.

Speaker 2:

Welcome to Scale Like a CEO. Today, we're diving into the world of technology leadership and innovation with Jason Dowd, navy veteran and CEO of Quantified 360 Solutions. Jason shares his journey from the Midwest to the Pacific Northwest, the lessons learned building a thriving consulting business, and how leveraging AI has transformed his work and life. Whether you're a founder, a tech enthusiast or just curious about the future of work, you'll find inspiration and practical insights in this conversation. Let's dive in.

Justin Reinert:

Hi Jason. Thank you so much for joining me today. Just to get us started, if you wouldn't mind giving a brief intro to yourself and everything you've got your hands in, Awesome.

Jason Doudt:

Thanks, justin. I'm happy to be here. Thanks for inviting me. It's an honor. Midwest born in Chicago, navy veteran, spent a majority of my life here in the Pacific Northwest, the greater Seattle area. I've really spent the last 15 years of my professional career in the internet service provider, the network space. I've worked with several of the large companies the top five in the US from small business, medium enterprise, government, strategic and now, at a strategic level, ceo of Quantify360 Solutions Inc. Here in the Seattle area. We are a small IT technical consulting company that's growing year over year, involved in an AI SaaS product that's being developed that may go to market in the middle of my MBA at Eastern Washington University, as well as working on my first book, which is going to be titled Mind the Exponential Gap and that is me Do you have a lot of free time which is going to be titled Mind the Exponential Gap, and that is me.

Jason Doudt:

Do you have a lot of free time? The trick is, I would only be able to do about a fourth of what I'm able to do if AI had not been invented, If we didn't have the ability to leverage tools that I can research quicker. I can do emails quicker. I can edit things that I've written quicker. I can do emails quicker. I can edit, you know, things that I've written quicker. I'm able to save a lot of time and I'm in this beautiful space in my life at 55. My four kids are out of the house. My wife and I have no pets or responsibilities. Be working in a space that I'm passionate about, that I enjoy. I wake up every morning and I'm excited for what I'm getting to do.

Jason Doudt:

If I was one of the unlucky ones that's working just for a paycheck to pay the bills, I would not last very long. I did down that road. I've done the nine to five and just working at some mundane administrative job. I think maybe I'll last six months, because it's just boring and I'm not having fun. I'm looking at the clock like okay, when's five o'clock here? What's Friday? Get here, let's live for the weekend. Life's too short. Once I figured out what I was good at and what my skillset was and what I really enjoyed doing. I started aligning my skillset with the different positions and jobs I was going after. Now, everything I'm involved in I love, I don't feel like I'm working for 14, 15 hours a day. I feel like I'm playing and having fun, meeting great people like you and people from around the world.

Justin Reinert:

That definitely makes a big difference when you enjoy what you're doing. I'd like to talk for a minute about Quantify360. Within the industry that you serve, what's one of the?

Jason Doudt:

biggest problems you see, and how are you solving that? So I would say, from a company perspective, you know internally, if you're a founder of a small technical consulting company, you're trying to grow it I think the biggest problem is weeding through all of the talent that's mediocre, all of the talent that looks good on paper and maybe even interviews very well, but then when you actually get into the productive environment, getting the level of productivity that's kind of talked about up front, that is getting delivered and that level of quality is the biggest challenge. I've heard it from some of my colleagues of several CEOs of technical consulting companies have been in business 10 years, five years that I kind of mentor, that I reach out to, and they still struggle with weaning out. That's the gold right. You find the good people and you want to hold on to them. And I also think it is very difficult to find staff that understand the startup environment.

Jason Doudt:

If you're any business that started in the first five years, it's not a sustained thing. Someone could come in and do a half-assed job and still get a paycheck and not get fired. That's never the environment we're in, at least in my team. You have to produce. If you don't produce. It's painful and everyone in the team feels it. I think that is the biggest challenge we face.

Justin Reinert:

Yeah, great. And if you think about the solutions that you're providing with Quantify 360, what makes you unique in the way that you serve your client base?

Jason Doudt:

Well, in my experience in working with a lot of different businesses and seeing failed solutions or solutions that were short-sighted, I've been brought in and like, well, yeah, you know, we asked for this two years ago and they did just that. But they didn't. You know, we didn't know we were going to be here. And my question is well, did you know two years ago that you'd be here? And they're like well, yeah, but no one really walked us through that.

Jason Doudt:

I think one of the things that we approach when we do client discovery is not just what is the pain, what's the band-aid, what's the thing that's focused right now, but we really play out what is the root cause of that number one. And then how are our solutions going to impact the results? Does it push this pain into a different part of the organization? So it's just going to pop up six months later because now we've alleviated the pressure in this department. But now we've put pressure on another department because this department now is working more efficiently and effectively. And did we consider that? Or did we give a solution because they just asked for it? We didn't push back, and now, two years later, they have to do a rip and replace of what we did because we didn't keep something in mind, and I think that's what makes us a little bit different. There are other good consulting companies out there, but the ones that are bad there's a lot more of those, I think keep the rest of us that do a thorough job employed, so keep us going.

Justin Reinert:

As you started to grow the business and hire folks and build that team. What are some of the challenges that you faced as you were building the team?

Jason Doudt:

There's always a financial concern of do you make the pledge and you make W2 employees or independent contractors and what's the mix? And do you use onshore you know, in the US resources team or do you do offshore? There's a whole variety. Each project we've been on there's been a mix of everything. I think the biggest key is making sure you're bringing on the talent that works within your budget and you have really good project managers that can keep track of your run rate, your burn rate, how fast you're getting through the funds and how fast the project's moving along. And making sure those are in alignment is kind of the challenge.

Jason Doudt:

We have not, because each of our projects are so different and we really want to apply a lot of quality to what we're doing. We don't keep a bench and we don't try to take on more than we can handle, because it's easy to do that and then quality suffers. A couple of the projects end and now you have a bench that either you're paying for and eating through your profit margin and if you can't get another project, there's stress. So we try to keep our teams really lean. We try to do the independent contractor for the contract and we want to keep contracting them so they know that they're going to be brought in on a good project. It's going to last a certain amount of time and then we'll call them back. We try to pay a little bit more of a premium in those positions and we incentivize getting things done not only on quality but ahead of time. So the incentives are if we can get things done early, there's bonuses. That's how we do it. It seems to work Bonuses are helpful, I'm sure.

Justin Reinert:

So you had mentioned earlier that it's challenging to evaluate talent to bring on for these types of roles when you're expanding and I know you don't keep a bench but as you're hiring new people, what are some of the key qualities that you're looking for? I think?

Jason Doudt:

the resource's history or the staff's history and if it's verifiable and if there's references and if there are other projects that's successful that they've worked on. And I think you'll have a lot of these technical staffing companies outside in the world that say, oh, we have thousands of qualified applicants and they're're just amazing and we have anybody you need. And that's a lie, it's it's just not truthful and they're they have not fully vetted all of them and half the time you'll get them saying it's a senior developer but they've only said, well, they've been a developer for six to ten years and that's a senior, but their thought process and what their capability is more like a junior because they only know very narrow skill set and coding languages. It's trial and error. I don't think you can go through and there's a magic wand that says, oh, this staffing company or this company can get the right one because again, they're gonna do some sort of technical testing which a lot of people can fake unless you're doing it live. Live meaning you can't have help opened up on another screen while you're doing the testing. You need to think through code. So that's one thing.

Jason Doudt:

So we look for those that have good history, like staffing companies that say, yeah, we have X, y, z people that meet this criteria. They've worked with us on these projects. We've got these kinds of ratings from these companies. Here's some references you can check. That type of company is the ones we want to work with or the ones we've worked with on multiple projects. We know their capability and we can bring them back.

Jason Doudt:

But that's the challenge. I would say this also to other CEOs and founders Realize your own limitations. I'll be the first to say I thought I was a good judge of character and I thought I could do this, and I realize recruiting and finding the right talent is an amazing skill set that I don't possess very well. That's not one of my strengths. So I need to leverage recruiters and specialists in this area. That can bet better than myself being humble and saying I'm not the answer to everything. Let me find some help. Let me find people that have good track records of finding talented people and that really understand what we're trying to do. And partner with them is what I'd recommend, because I had to get out of my own way. I made some terrible mistakes early on that were painful, and you live and learn.

Justin Reinert:

Thank you for that vulnerability and sharing. It's hard to say. Here's what I know I'm not good at. Not everybody's always willing to say that. I'm curious, as you think, about growing the team and the evolution you've made over the past years. How have you gone about delegation of tasks and decision-making? You've got your hands on a lot of stuff, and so you've got to be able to offload things. How do you go about that?

Jason Doudt:

So one. I don't believe in blind trust, I believe in earned trust, and so I believe you need to demonstrate trust. You know, are you responsible and do you understand what we're trying to do in that role as a company? How does your role fit in to everything else? And I'll give you a prime example. I turn a lot of what I do over to business development. So my business development managers we had two, we're down to one now. We're going to be looking for another one here shortly.

Jason Doudt:

Their job is to work with our clients and bring in projects. They know what our expectations are as a team and the way we run our hierarchy of our company is more like King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table. We're all a team, we're collaborating, we all have a mutual goal, a mutual vision that we're all going towards and we want to win as a team. If they think here's what we need to do, I let them, in their style and how they would want to approach it, try that out, and we need to have measured metrics, activity and results. If they can get that with their play, then great. I'm not here to throw a monkey wrench in their program, but if they try it their way and it's not meeting the results and it's not getting the level of activity that we need, then I'll step in and say, okay, we need to have a coaching session. Now. The nice thing of me and my schedule is I'm like, okay, that coaching session may be at seven o'clock at night. It may not be at, you know, 9am in the morning because I'm in other meetings, so or it may be at five o'clock in the morning or whatever works for the time of day.

Jason Doudt:

That the person's availability. Because I love what I do, I'm available 16 hours a day, seven days a week. Most people won't. Most people don't. Most people say, oh, this is my personal time, this is my work time, so you reach me between here and here.

Jason Doudt:

You know, the reality is we aren't a fully established company where I can stick to a 45-hour week at the cabin on the weekend and so don't bother me, we're not there yet. We'd like to be at some day, but not now, and so I just need to be available, and I think that's the commitment level a founder needs to have. The work-life balance comes in two ways. Either you love what you do, so the balance is already built in because you're happy about what you're doing and so it's not really work, or you're waiting until you've established a sustained business where it's on an auto growth trajectory and it's not taking all hands on deck to keep the thing going. We're not there yet, but that's the reality, at least what I found so far. Maybe we will be within the next 12 months. There's a few things we at least what I found so far. Maybe we will be within the next 12 months.

Justin Reinert:

There's a few things we've added that I think will get us there, but we'll see here's hoping, speaking of the next 12 months, or maybe even further, looking forward, what's your vision for the evolution of the organization and your leadership culture within that organization, and then what's critical for achieving that?

Jason Doudt:

So for us our history has been. We started off with technical consulting and mainly working with founders, small projects, bringing it from thought idea to MVP or the first draft where they can go out and raise some money with it, or we've been additional hands on a startup. That's kind of helping it move forward when they needed some part-time help. This last 12 months we've kind of focused and shifted not shifted away from that, but we're adding more of the IT consulting, which is where I've spent my expertise in the last 15 years, working with IT departments and providing consulting to connect them with as many different providers as possible, and we're adding new providers every month. That has a residual revenue model. You get a client and it's monthly revenue that comes in for the length of the contract or longer. So adding in that is what we see as the answer over the next 12 months to fill the gaps of the technical projects that will have a finite timeline and then end. We have one effort that's finding technical projects that want to be outsourced, and then we leverage the heck out of AI and all of that process. So even for junior developer type stuff, we're leveraging AI. We're using AI as much as we can to speed traditional software development, custom coding, whatever we need. Speed that process up. We have another effort that's supporting established companies and their IT departments with the services that we provide.

Jason Doudt:

Let me go to the leadership part. I've encouraged all of our people on the team. We have a book list that I send out of about 20 to 25 books that I recommend different people read. I personally am making efforts to be on more podcasts. I'm accepting invites. Thank you very much Again. Working on my first book and kind of authoring being thought leadership, getting that out there over the next 12 months, I'll be done with my MBA at that point. Constant learning, constantly putting yourself out there, constantly promoting your company, your services, sticking to your values and, you know, being consistent. I think consistent is key and that's what we kind of build into what we're doing over the next 12 months that's great.

Justin Reinert:

So, jason, what's a good way for people to contact you if they want to reach out?

Jason Doudt:

I'm one of these ones that I love LinkedIn. It's open on one of my screens all day long so people can go to my website or email all that stuff. But if you want to know who I am and what we're about, I would say find me on LinkedIn. There's's a place to book a meeting. I'm always up for networking and finding how we can create a win-win environment. I always like to learn new people and what they're trying to do, and if we can help, we do. We can go to our website, but I'd say LinkedIn is probably my favorite way of contacting me.

Justin Reinert:

Great Well, jason. Thank you again for joining me today on the podcast Outstanding.

Jason Doudt:

Thanks, Justin, for having me.