Scale Like a CEO

Scale Like a CEO: David Duguan on Building Teams, Delegating, and Creating a Growth-Centered Culture

• Justin Reinert • Season 1 • Episode 53

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Customer support often feels like a cost center, but what if it’s actually the engine that powers your growth? We sit down with Voxify founder and CEO David Duguan to explore how deliberate customer conversations by phone and text shape better marketing, tighter sales cycles, and smarter products. David shares the moment he realized he had to move from lone problem solver to systems builder—and how a simple metaphor, “rearranging the furniture in your team’s mind,” changed the way he communicates intent and builds trust.

We dive into the qualities he hires for—honesty, trust, and self-awareness—and why early hiring decisions determine how well your company survives transitions. David opens his playbook for delegation, including how he turned his own judgment into a documented decision algorithm so his team can act quickly without constant approvals. That lightweight operating system for choices speeds execution and reduces bottlenecks, while still leaving room for learning and iteration.

Culture is where it all sticks. David outlines a decentralized pod model anchored by a few clear principles: invent beyond the box, prioritize relationships, and stay adaptable to achieve outcomes. He backs those ideas with everyday practices that make values real, from team game nights to thoughtful gifts that celebrate individuality. The goal is simple and ambitious—create a platform where people grow, take initiative, and build leverage in their careers while driving the company forward.

If you’re a founder aiming to scale like a CEO, you’ll leave with practical ideas for hiring, delegation, process design, and culture building. Subscribe for more conversations that turn leadership into systems, systems into momentum, and momentum into sustainable growth. Got a delegation tip that changed your team’s speed? Share it with us and leave a review to help others find the show.

Speaker:

Welcome to Scale Like a CEO. In this episode, host Justin sits down with David Duguan, founder of Voxify, to explore his journey from founder to CEO. They'll discuss building effective teams, delegating with confidence, and creating a company culture centered on relationships and growth.

Justin:

David, thank you so much for joining me on Scale Like a CEO. Just to get us started, if you wouldn't mind, give us a 90-second intro to you and your business.

David:

Yes. Hi. Hi everyone. I'm David DeGuan. I am the founder of Voxfy. And our goal of VoxFly is to really help businesses understand and work more efficiently with the most annoying part of running the businesses, and it's your customers. What we do is we create customer, custom digital agents that help handle customer inquiries and help adapt how customers interact with your business and make sure that we understand how they they want to interact with you so you can get the most perfect results. And to summarize it in one phrase is we handle your customer support problems for you. That's it.

Justin:

That's great. It sounds like an amazing, an amazing concept. I'd love to dig in just a little bit on you know what problem, specific problem does your company solve and why does that matter right now?

David:

Yeah. So the problems that we solve on the the main, if you had to pinpoint it to a micro, a micro, a micro level, is understanding and keeping up with your customers and just answering customer inquiries mainly via phone and text. And why it's super important is that is the core, like the nucleus for service-based businesses or businesses that revolve around other humans. If you have a service or a tool or whatever, and then you have to interact with humans, you need a way for you to gather their feedback, their support, and make sure that the service that you're providing is getting used properly, or they're getting the results that that is anticipated. And the reason it's super important, again, is because we make sure that that interaction is as perfect as possible. Because that interaction powers your marketing, your sales, your apps, everything in your business. It's like that one thing that powers everything in your business.

Justin:

Yeah, well, that's great. So, you know, as you've been growing the business, I'm curious what's one of the biggest shifts that you've had to make personally moving from founder to really growing a team and being the CEO of a company.

David:

Understand and rearrange the living room. This is an analogy rearrange the living room furniture in my team's mind to understand where I'm coming from. That's the main thing that we've I've had to learn. I have to adapt because it's super easy to go tunnel vision about problems, how I would resolve them. And the main shift is to really just rearrange the furniture and whoever I'm speaking to, whoever my team member, so they understand deep down what I'm trying to do, not just solve a task and understand the ethos and the reason behind it so they can more efficiently do it without even needing my help asking questions. What I'll say.

Justin:

Yeah. Yeah. I don't know that I've ever heard this metaphor before of rearranging a living room furniture. I'm curious. Tell me a little bit more about that. What does that metaphor represent?

David:

Yes. So it's how is how they think. So for an example, let's say I'm trying to explain to you how a car runs. And for you, you're understanding in the way where, let's say, that you grew up in in Ghana or Africa, and you understand that majority for a car run, you need to go to the gas station, put fuel in it, so on and so forth, versus someone that was raised in, I don't know, Dubai or somewhere that's a lot more eloquent, they probably had a gas station come to the house. The same thing, I'm trying to teach how to fill up a gas tank. So instead of me telling you to go ahead and go to the gas station, if I'm speaking to someone in Dubai, I'll tell them to, hey, you could just call this line, blah, blah, blah, and then you can go ahead and get the same objective done. It's finding a way to explain the objective in a way that is a lot more understandable and a lot more relatable to my team. That's what that's what the idea of rearranging the furniture. I know it's a little bit obscure.

Justin:

No, I love it. I love it. So, you know, as you've been building your team, what are some of the qualities that you look for in those first key hires we've been making?

David:

Honesty is probably one of the first things that I look for in trust. Also, self-awareness is also another thing that I also look for too, is to admit that when things go wrong, to take accountability of it and know that okay, in this problem, this is where I messed up, and this is where I could tweak or I could do to make sure that I can get a better result. So taking taking acceptance and blame in a form that is not self-judgmental, but for self-improvement, I'll say is the one of the core features. And someone that is objective driven, someone that that that is driven by the objective and not just this want to do it because it gets the pay shop. That's that's how I'll say that those are the few things I look for heavily in times of when I'm bringing on a new team member. Depends on like the roles.

Justin:

Yeah, for sure. So, you know, one of the challenges when I speak with founders as they grow their teams, one of the challenges is is letting go of things and delegating things. Tell me a little bit about that journey for you.

David:

Man, that it took a while for me to accept something that I personally need to work on. Because majority of the time, my previous roles, I was a C-suite member, but I wasn't like the CEO or company. And it's so different because there's so many different tasks where innately you delegate because you don't want to do it. The hard part is delegating tasks that you want to do. And that's the hard part that I had to switch and had to figure out. Because at the level as a founder of CEO, you majority of the decision that's made is made off of logic. And a good amount of emotion too is definitely not to ignore them, but majority of it is based off of logic, logic versus emotion. So making sure that that is properly explained and makes the initiatives or whatever that we're working on is properly delegated is more important.

Justin:

Yeah. Well, and you mentioned that decision making and the logic that's required. You know, uh let's dig into that a little bit. You know, tell me about a time when you've been overwhelmed with decision making and how did you break through that?

David:

That's a great question. Uh, time where we got overwhelmed by decision making was right in the process of launching our company and transitioning from binary to Voxify. Um, is a lot of things that needs to get done on in some technical specs, how the tool acts, the interaction, how our customers interact, the experience that they get, marketing materials, and so on and so forth. There's so many different decisions that had to be made. And as a profession is at home, that is not necessarily the most efficient way to run an operative business. And what we did in terms of like how I helped breakthrough that was I pictured this as an algorithm. These decisions are made based off of things that I consider, things that I think about, what are the pros and cons of it. So how I was able to break out through that is identifying what that algorithm, what that logic is to based off of decisions that I make, noting that down, documenting it, and basically creating like a little cheat sheet where all of those and handing it out to either my assistants or my other team members that support all of these different specific initiatives for them to make that decision. And it's just like, I don't know, like I don't want to compare it to LL humans LLMs, but based off of LLMs, it's a similar thought process is it's this, this, this, and that. This is how I make my decision in this case. So if you see a scenario that's similar like this, you should apply it and then let me know what the result is. And whatever the result is, and then we tweak it and we fine-tune it and make sure that it's adaptable for other scenarios.

Justin:

Yeah. And that's I I really like that is kind of helping your people kind of give them give them that cheat sheet and the logic to be able to approach those decisions. And I think that will definitely accelerate learning across the organization, which is great. And it sounds like you've been through some different transitions with the organization. And so I'd love to dig in a little bit on, you know, as you've gone through some of those transitions, what have been, you know, some of the toughest parts, or how you how have you effectively maintained alignment and culture for the organization?

David:

So that is because majority of the time, based off my experience, it's not a problem about that exact moment, it's decisions that you made previously, and that's usually what affects it. So in this in this case, with like the problems of fully explaining and transitioning, the problems that come with transitioning into a different scenario or different initiative. We notice that I personally noticed is that it's not really about the person that like what the person is doing, it's hiring the right person. That's the main thing that that that I noticed in like introspectively looking, is hiring the right people from the get-go. And again, that decision is not made on the spot, like when you need the initiative done, is usually done previous, previous months prior to that. So making sure you for you hire the first person and actually going deeply and understanding the role that you're trying to hire for, and understanding the possible scenarios that might that might be needed, and also outlining the outliers. And then making sure like that person can fit in those scenarios is what I've seen that has helped breakthrough and was make and whenever we start a new initiative, whenever we we we start a new project, that's what makes it easier. It's first making having the right people in place. The second thing I would say is definitely processes and making sure that your processes are both pretty rigid and also pretty malleable at the same time, that whenever a problem happens or something that we did not expect or we were not aware from, we're able to easily pivot and make sure that we're able to get the results needed. So combining those two things and they they kind of seem a little, I don't know, paradoxical or like they just oppose each other, but it's the truth. It's it's like a it's like a dance in a sin, where it's not all you do the same step over and over again based off the beat, you move your body or do whatever dance style you want in the moment. So yeah, that's how that's how I like to explain there.

Justin:

Yeah, that's I you know I think that's so critical is getting getting the right people in and then helping them understand process, but you know, also that that ability to flex and adapt as they need within a certain framework. So, you know, as you look forward, tell me a little bit about the vision you have for the culture of the organization and how that will evolve.

David:

It's a another great question. Coming up with a lot of bangers, man. A lot of good, a lot of good questions, Justin. And the way that I kind of envision it is to is for the future is to first usually look introspectively to think about what cultures have I experienced outside of work, honestly, that are really, really amazing that I appreciate. And what I found out is, and this is how I base culture from our company right now, what I what I found out that is those underlying principles to have really, really good community and good working communities is usually the same that applies to just regular everyday relationships and communities that we have outside of work. So what we look for in the future is to create a decentralized model of teams and pods where people are able to effectively make and give them the autonomy of to make the kind of culture that they want to create in their own little organization, but still adhering to the overall principles of, I guess, principles or cultural values of the royal company. And for us, it's four, it's four things. I'm not going to go into detail every single one of them, but some of the most important ones are to invent your weight outside the box because there's no box. It's like make sure that people understand that is that there's really no box. And we have to invent ourselves, reinvent ourselves every single time to make sure that we get the result that we need. Another super important one, too, is relationships over, is the main objective, it's the main priority in making sure that we prioritize the relationship that we have with our people and even people that are external to our company. But that's the that's that's that's what I will wrap it up into bull ass, as in terms of what are the different things and values that we try to, that we that I envision in the future for for Foxify.

Justin:

Yeah, I love those. And you know, what what are you doing today to prepare, you know, prepare the the business for that future?

David:

That is a great question. So in our team, our teams, we have kind of redefined happy hours in a sense. So for our engineering team, we we have uh we have they have little game nights in a sense where whenever there's free times objectives are done, you can hop on a game on Friday and then do whatever you want. Play video games, I don't know, Fortnite, whatever video games they want to play, they they do that. Also, ideas too in in terms of what we do too right now is instead of sending a generic note, wishing someone happy birthday is fine, thoughtful gift for them. So for example, we have a few gamers on our scene and just sending them a headset, or you know, some of our employees like to snowboard and so on and so forth, like sending them steagoggles, stuff like that. To give that sense of individuality and show that that individual individual individuality is appreciated and their perspectives aren't are appreciated too. But those are things that we're doing now to make sure that we set the stone, set the stage well for the future and where we grow.

Justin:

Yeah, I love that. And one more question, kind of along those lines. So if someone joined your company tomorrow, what would you want them to say about your leadership in the next five years?

David:

What I would love for them to say is giving them the platform to grow, is offering people the platform to grow, either in using Voxify or the company or whatever company that they work, they work for that I I work with, is that it's at its core is a platform to grow and able to expand during the abilities to different platforms, to different avenues. That's what I will that's what I would love for people to say. It doesn't directly uh tie to like a specific role that they're doing at either one of one of the companies that I operate. But in a core, that's the main thing, is it ties back into everything that's saying is that we don't just want to bring in someone and want to just do the job. We want someone that can that can take initiative, that can think through, that can use those qualities that are that that shows growth in innately in somewhere in a human being and apply that to what the work that they're doing for us. So it's like taking a reverse, uh reverse card essentially and mutually benefit benefits both the employee and also the company.

Justin:

Yeah. I love just any companies that understand the value of investing in their people and how that it really makes it a sticky place to work when people feel like they're being invested in. So I just love that. It sounds like you're setting yourself up for success in the future. Yeah. David, I've really enjoyed the conversation today. If folks want to get in touch with you, what's the best way to do so?

David:

My LinkedIn is the best way to get in contact with me is David D A V I D and then D U G U A N. And then you can check us out about on our website at ww.hello h e l o voxify v o x i f y dot com and find out more information about us and what we do.

Justin:

Great. Well, thank you so much, David.

David:

Thank you. We definitely look forward to it. Thank you.