In today's awesome episode we welcome two guests for a fascinating insight into how Podio can really revolutionise a business. Our returning champion Joel Ordesky (Private Guru) brings one of his clients William Lindhal from the CPT Institute, a national charity that helps to preserve government benefit eligibility for the injured and at-risk by providing education and training to the legal community.
This is a fantastic episode for a number of reasons. First of all it really showcases why working with the right Podio Partner can bring enormous long-term benefits to your company. Second we get to hear a phenomenal success story about a charity who really has revolutionised how they operate by building out their entire business in Podio.
This is a superb episode for anyone who is looking at Podio and wondering if it will help their business, as well as anyone looking to understand just how powerful Podio can become when you really integrate it across your business.
Show Links:
You can check out the CPT Institute at https://www.cptinstitute.org/
Reach out to Joel Ordesky at https://www.privateguru.net/
Have you checked out our Podio Masterclass? (https://www.wearegamechangers.com/category/podio-masterclass/)
Make sure to subscribe to our YouTube Channel to get notified of new videos.
Please don’t forget to leave us a review and subscribe to the Podcast and if you’d like to be a guest on an upcoming show please register your interest at https://bit.ly/supercharged-guest
In today's awesome episode we welcome two guests for a fascinating insight into how Podio can really revolutionise a business. Our returning champion Joel Ordesky (Private Guru) brings one of his clients William Lindhal from the CPT Institute, a national charity that helps to preserve government benefit eligibility for the injured and at-risk by providing education and training to the legal community.
This is a fantastic episode for a number of reasons. First of all it really showcases why working with the right Podio Partner can bring enormous long-term benefits to your company. Second we get to hear a phenomenal success story about a charity who really has revolutionised how they operate by building out their entire business in Podio.
This is a superb episode for anyone who is looking at Podio and wondering if it will help their business, as well as anyone looking to understand just how powerful Podio can become when you really integrate it across your business.
Show Links:
You can check out the CPT Institute at https://www.cptinstitute.org/
Reach out to Joel Ordesky at https://www.privateguru.net/
Have you checked out our Podio Masterclass? (https://www.wearegamechangers.com/category/podio-masterclass/)
Make sure to subscribe to our YouTube Channel to get notified of new videos.
Please don’t forget to leave us a review and subscribe to the Podcast and if you’d like to be a guest on an upcoming show please register your interest at https://bit.ly/supercharged-guest
Welcome to the supercharged with Jordan Samuel Fleming, your weekly podcast dedicated to what your business can achieve when it's powered by Podio. Join us each week as we learn from the top Podio partners in the world as we investigate system integrations and add ons and hear from real business owners who have implemented Podio into their business. Now join Jordan Samuel Fleming, CEO of smartphone for this week's episode.
Jordan Fleming:Hey, everybody, and welcome to this week's episode of supercharged I'm your host, Jordan, Samuel Fleming, here to talk all about the awesome power of workflow and automation when your business is powered by Podio. What an episode we have this week, really, really a fun one. The guests today are Joel Ordesky, returning champion Podio partner, you'll probably have heard him on the podcast many times and he brought along a client of things. William Lindhal, from CPT, the CPT Institute, they are a charity in the US. And William gives a great summary of just how many people they help and, and how they do that, across the country. And I love this episode, I love this episode for a couple of reasons. Number one, it shows what a great relationship you can have with a Podio partner, and how much value that relationship can bring you. Right? How much value into you know, how you actually build your Podio, how you implement it, how you get it fully functioning within your business, it's very clear that, you know, William talks with glowing terms about Joel, but about that relationship and how the well they've worked together, and how, you know how much Joel has helped their organisation, grow their business processes using Podio. And I think that's a really great thing to see. Because it really, you know, I've put your partner for over 10 years, and I know that that relationship is critical. And it can be so so valuable. So that's one thing. The other thing is, I think it's a really great case study for a business, you know, kind of growing its software, finding Podio and, and kind of finding nirvana. I mean, you were gonna hear in this episode, how they went from sort of Salesforce environment that got too expensive, and they built their own sort of thing in an extranet, intranet sort of function. And that wasn't quite right. And then they found Podio, and Joel, and really, that's 4000, some odd years ago, and it's, you know, they've been kind of going ever since, and you really, you know, they've really sort of skyrocketed. And it's a great case study of how a business, you know, and a complex business business with a lot of regulations, a lot of moving parts can really build their whole kind of business process inside of Podio. How Podio can be that, that central hub of how the business works, containing the data containing the the the employees, being able to collaborate and being able to seamlessly integrate various elements. I mean, we talked about ShareFile, without question. We also talked about smartphones or a smartphone user. It's just a great example. So if you're a business out there, you know, wondering if Podio is the right step forward, wondering how much Podio can do for your business. This is such a great podcast to listen to. As always, please, before we get into podcasts, go to iTunes, Google podcast spot, wherever you listen, give us a like, give us a review. It really helps boost up the visibility of the podcast to make sure that we are spreading the gospel of Podio as wide as possible. And of course, I'm always looking to speak to new people. I'm fascinated to hear everybody's stories about how they work with Polycom. Podio so please do pop over to we are game changers.com And go ahead and you know, submit yourself in for a guest while you're there take a look at the master class really helps you supercharge your Podio particularly if you're relatively new to it shows you all sorts of cool things you can do with Podio and new videos get launched every week. Alright, enough of me. Let's hear from Joel and we'll and it's pretty informal as well. So like let's like the is the I will try not to curse. Joe will know that that is not an easy thing for me to do. But I will do my best my level best. So anyway, we'll we'll enjoy welcome to the podcast. Joel is obviously a returning champion will as a brand new champion to the podcast. Why don't you guys will maybe you can kick off by giving us a little background on the company so that we know where we're playing with.
William Lindhal:Yes, yeah, I'm the executive director of a nationwide nonprofit trustee that protects people that are catastrophic ly injured, who are no longer able to make, earn a living. So basically administer trust, trust accounts in 48 out of 50 states, and the backbone of our organisation is Citrix. Podio. Excellent. And now, as I said, so you were working, you had your business in another platform before Podio, and then made a transition. So I guess that's something that I see, not only when I was a Podio partner that I do that a lot. But I see it all the time of people moving from other systems into Podio. What was, you know, what was the impetus and what was the transition, the initial transition like? A nightmare, just to be blunt. For the, we're about 26 years old, so the first 10 years, we were primarily Salesforce, and the more complex and the more diverse the company got, the more the bill went higher and higher and higher and higher, to the point where we got to about 10,000 a month, no big deal, then, we transitioned to a private extranet host provider, which is, I'm not sure they're even still in business. So we basically run a SQL Server and a private extranet system. And the problem we have is that we do a lot of stuff with API's that connect to say, banks or other institutions. And we needed something that had to have a lot more customization and flexibility on the fly, that would result in adding on a plethora of subscription services that would then price out to our word, charity, we're a nationwide charity. So costs are a big issue for us, we try to be the lowest cost provider in the country. So basically, most other commercial platforms, I think you tend to as you scale them, they tend to become cost prohibitive, at least in that line of work on it.
Jordan Fleming:And cost revenue. And also the flexibility of being able to, you know, to rapidly change around make modifications is something that most other platforms, or if you're building something in an environment or like an extranet environment, you're not going to have a rapid ability to do that. nearly as easy is that correct? as well.
William Lindhal:You know, not only is that correct, the most powerful feature of using podido for us was that you could emulate and replicate the functionality and most other third party options in the market in a much more efficient non cost without a rising costs. So we were, we were able to emulate a prior trust administration system that spent a half a million dollars building, and literally job and I re emulated it and reconstructed it and re designed it in Podio, probably within a few weeks our initial launch, I think of being able to use it within a few weeks. And you're talking about something we spent, you know, years developing, emulating the whole exact structure. And then that kind of got out of control in the sense that now we have like 90 Something apps that we've built. So we were able to customise the Podio platform to the diversification has tremendous relationship to HR data resources, knowledge, databases, authorization systems, auditing, I mean, it really exponentially changed the power of what we could do in our system.
Jordan Fleming:And let me actually follow up on something you just said, because I think it's it bears repeating. And if people listen to this and are kind of wondering are getting into Podio, you know, you're talking about these different, you know, whether it's HR or whatever, but you, you know, where you're trying where you've got other systems in particular, where you're looking at other capabilities, a lot of people end up having to link together multiple platforms, multiple services, you know, multiple online software applications, whatever. Not only can that become cost prohibitive, whereas building in Podio contains it, but it also means that the data is centralised and able to be accessed from every point of the business. And I think that's a really important part of this. Did you find that improved a lot by
William Lindhal:I looked at what you just referenced a call is my experience last, you know, I've owned multiple companies and I've been doing you know, I used to do software stuff myself, Ed many, many years ago now I'm inept. But to be honest, the real issue in today's modern technology environment is the cobbling together right. You know, the if then then that doesn't quite work what you think it would a lot of integration technologies are not refined enough. So we were able to take existing functionality and all kinds of third party options and emulate the similar exact type of structure without our subscription fee and with cobbling together another API interface into replicating that same functionality within Podio. So it allowed us to surrender and drop a lot of other subscription services that would have had a certain functionality that we could eventually emulate. And CTQ. The problem is you can't do it without a powerful partner, like many people have met Joel thing he works for me, but he does it. Joel has been supporting us for ages. And I can't thank him enough. But I think having a strong Podio partner is paramount because the average consumer or business person doesn't really understand how to make the technology do what they're asking, they know what they want, but they have no idea what goes into making that actually happen. And I thought that someday we would slowly wean ourselves of our private guru, your joy, and if anything, it won't be found out is that there's constant stability to enhance, replicate and expand to the capacity where he has such an intimate knowledge of operations. I can't imagine my life without him. He's not allowed to ever not work for us. It's just prohibitive. It's, you know, I personally haven't hunted down and superglue him to cheer.
Jordan Fleming:Well, that that mirrors I mean, I will say that I am 100% agree. You know, and it mirrors my experience when I was a consultant, you devalue a good consultant, you know, is an invaluable resource because they know your business, but also, you know, what you want, you don't really want to have to know how to execute in Podio. Like, why should you Why should your team have to do that? How did you end up finding Joel? Or, well,
William Lindhal:well, just not to just as applicable to this podcast, but I'm legally blind. So the first time I saw Joe without his headset on and said, I didn't recognise him, he walked right up to me and introduced himself. And I've been working with him for years. I didn't even recognise that guy. Now. That said, I actually don't remember how I met. It was it was a standard.
Joel Ordesky:It was a standard partner request that came through Citrix, the Citrix Podio partner platform, and it was about four years ago, I looked it up. Well, it was March of 2018. And it's been, we've, we've done 1000 hours of work together as of the last last time I the last billing period. And I looked it up and I have not yet not yet exceeded the cost of one year of your extranet.
William Lindhal:No, that's that's the Dennis the truth. I think the the, this is a hidden gem, I hope the industry can understand I think Citrix polios biggest challenge is for people to understand the capacity integration and the augmentation of time together things like smartphone, and your video conferencing software, and sharing even an individual record or project is something that just is not that common in the CRM platform world. So the diversification of this platform is still astounding to me. And I used to be an MCSE guy, I used to develop a software like this for a long time ago. So I've been very, I'm still impressed at how we can keep augmenting and triggering and manipulating and adjusting it without having to keep adding more fees and more external services.
Jordan Fleming:That's a that is a that's a very succinct way of putting the benefit of Podio. And also, I think, one question it comes to mind because you know, when you first obviously, you had these other use Salesforce, then you had your own external, you know, element, when you first got sort of into the polio environment and started to, you know, start to shake the, you know, the kind of kinks out of it. What what did you find, if you can remember back to, to that to those kind of first weeks and months of Podio? Was there anything that stood out in a positive or a negative way that you've now kind of four years old, obviously won't matter to you? But is there anything that stood out to you as a new user?
William Lindhal:It was little hard to surrender to the will of Joel. So I had always been a development person myself. And one thing I did to make Joe's life miserable is he could work really hard on something and then I would take around and I break it for him. You know, there's creating work for him. So my frustration I would say about that people have to be careful about Podio is that it's very easy. It seems easy, because the fundamental way to manipulate stuff is fairly straightforward. But once you start setting up flows, and start automating features, then you kind of have to turn off anybody's capacity you start making changes because they can undermine or break things down. But what is beautiful is, I have a Director of Operations, named Kate. And she works with Joel now exclusively. And now we have this ongoing tech ticket app that of course, we developed in Podio. Right. And it's a forever list. And when I say it's a forever list, we can continue to make enhancements every week. I mean, I bet there hasn't been two weeks gone by and CPT, where Joel hasn't made a change that didn't enhance or better our business. And I don't think you can say that about any other software system. And Joel did not pay me to say that, I'm just saying literally, and I'll give you a very good example. We deal with people who are catastrophic ly injured in a difficult precarious situation, they can't make a living. So you can imagine we're responsible for hundreds of millions of dollars for other people. And having just triggers that send text messages to the cell phone, let them know if a request was approved to die, or letting them log into a system and see where things are at the scale of our capacity of what we've been able to accomplish has only gotten stronger and stronger and stronger over time. And I, I can absolutely not say that about any of the past experiences. Every time you had growing pains in your ground your business to almost a halt as you had to make adaptations or worse shelf, drop something and then restart something. And Gerald Jones had the unfortunate experience of us having to migrate hundreds of accounts from one institution to another. So the it's been, it's always difficult, but the fact that you have that constant scale and adaptability is just not, does not exist anywhere else. I don't know of any other platform that has this much flexibility.
Jordan Fleming:Agreed. Now you you I mean obviously you mentioned sending a text message but also you mentioned you know, having people will be able to log in and see things is that are you externalising Podio data for that is that are you know, we've come into Podio.
William Lindhal:We've experimented with that. But people just people are always averse, anything new and different and easily confused. So I just like that, I can do that. So let's say I'm helping a law firm in Louisiana right now. I share an open project with them and going Pope post everything uploaded there and have them go to one lake and constantly share a shared interface without me paying for a separate feed for that party. So that external licenced integration to an external party doesn't cost extra money on Podio, too. And that's very unusual. You're only paying for the seat, you're using internal within your organisation, you can integrate to outside third parties, we've even expanded experimented with working with mass tort organisations where you can handle hundreds of concepts externally. So again, you're not going to be driving up all this cost when you need to pull in third parties on a project. And you can't say that in most, most of the programmes, you've got to pay every time you had a person.
Jordan Fleming:That was actually one of the reasons I moved over to Podio back in 2011, or something was, I was using another software, another system. And if I wanted to bring in an external developer, just to share an idea on a project not to, not to hire them, but just to be like, share a bit of stuff, I had to pay 150 pounds, because I was working in the UK at one point, per licence. And I remember thinking, well, this is gonna, this is not going to be this is not going to be good for a small business, if I if every time I've got a new designer who's doing a teeny bit of work, I gotta check on him 50 quid a year, I had a licence for him, I'm not gonna be able to sustain it. And I went searching and found Podio back in the day when it looked a little different, quite well, quite a bit of different now, but also back when globey flow or Citrix PWA as it is now globey flow was then Podio flow, it was first name was Podio flow. And I remember when it launched and thinking, good lord, what is this tool? And, you know, it's but the trigger the catalyst was actually the external user problem. And the fact that Podio gave me a scalable way of working with other people.
William Lindhal:So no doubt, no doubt.
Joel Ordesky:We've also benefited with this implementation. Not only are we using mini apps for for like the, the the beneficiary's to be able to access their data. And we all have used internal Podio share and workspace share as well. But one of the things that has been really huge is the ability to access data from other institutions. So we have at least two financial and soon to be three financial institutions that are sending us financial data on a regular basis through an API. So or in one case, in our primary financial institution where we are sending payments, there's a constant flow of balance information coming from the banking balance information and sending requests. So you know, a lot of process that was being manually done. In fact, when I joined them did the financial institution. When I started this there was a process As we're faxes were being sent and people were reentering information from system to system to system outside of CPTs walls that even the financial institution was having to fax data around to make these payments. Today, it's all done via API, the data is kept up up to date, if if we make a payment today request today, then an API tells us tonight that that's been accepted. And then a day later, when the check clears, or the ACH clears, it updates in the system. So we have a lot of access that way to do it. If this is allowed, the growth potentials and controlling of of costs of manpower costs, you know, as well, by able to make a lot of these things happen. In an automated sense. I asked one of the staff people today, how much stuff comes in without them having to retype it all. And then she said to me, 70% of her stuff comes in today, you know, in an automated way that she doesn't have to retype it.
Jordan Fleming:And that's, I mean, when you scale that, like, that's just that is make or break for, for an organisation. I mean, that kind of automation, that kind of that kind of efficiency, where team members can be more efficient in their job, because they're not having to do these very mundane processes that that are taking up, oodles of time and are soul destroying to do as well, right? I mean, nobody likes data entry, that nobody where I made them sure somebody does. But well, you know, another thing
William Lindhal:that Podio does, it saves our bacon is that I'm in an IRA very litigious shop, right? So routinely, when you're your trustee, it's the same as having a bull's eye target on your back. So we have to report to courts, to government agencies, to state agencies, and having the ability to have a transactional history of every every single change of a field and or data, and historically had that go back so far with so much depth. I think that's something that most I've never seen in any other programme where we have that level of transparency of all interactions and or changes within an actual app or a data record. So imagine now, if I get sued, or subpoenaed, which is pretty common, we've never been successfully sued in 26 years knock on wood. But my point is, our records have always been unbelievably thorough, in the sense that, you know, most times, it's just dismissed, and most people don't realise that most CRMs a lot of data records is things change, there's not a clear delineated history going back in the comment section or activity section, like they do in Podio of every single piece of meat. So even if someone makes a mistake and fixes it, you get to see who made that mistake, and who fixes it. And I can't understate this enough, because I think the whole problem is, a lot of times people can corrupt or damage records and or an app or a product or do something you kind of can't operate within Podio without there being a trail. And that cannot be understated. There's many programmes out there. Even in the banking industry, we don't use one of our financial institutions we work with, we don't use their interface because it doesn't have a strong enough audit trail. Think about that.
Jordan Fleming:100% That makes perfect sense. And, you know, I always used to say to people, when I implement Podio, you know, there's nowhere to hide in Podio. You can't you can't Right. And, and that is a from a management point of view, that's a blessing. But also, you know, you know, unless you're a complete dick, from an employee's point of view, it's, it's a blessing as well, because you, you know, you ultimately, you've got that safety net of I can always know what happened. What you know, what did I screw up? And oh, yeah, I can fix it now. Whereas, you know, I mean, I used to, you know, even this ability to you know, sometimes when you've got you know, you put a value into a number fields and you get the wrong one or you or you accidentally change it and you think shit what was the real one instead of me having to go you know, through different files to find it I just look at the Revision History go I you know, there it is. And that is a is a small thing, but it's a can be a real big thing as well.
William Lindhal:Yeah, I I think the only thing that I need in poor Joby busy doing this for a long time, is I think the biggest problem in every business is human nature. So you can have all the best fields in the world, you can have the best systems, the best triggers, you know, the best flows. But, you know, fundamentally in my business, whenever somebody makes a mistake, I asked myself could I have made that same mistake, and even if the data and stuff is present, the biggest value I see long term for us in Podio is having triggers and mechanisms to overcome human nature mistakes. So for example, even though Joel have an embedded history last 90 days where the transactional history is on a trust account, I can't trust that the employees actually looking at that thoroughly enough to look for trends or patterns are inappropriate. So learning how to build triggers into like, okay, when was the last time somebody submitted something? Are they still alive? You know, you know, you know, we do wellness checks, you know, I'm taking care of people that have catastrophic ly injured, I need to verify that they're still alive. I mean, it sounds terrible, but it's just, it's a fact. So I think a lot of things that the only thing I that I hope will get better for us in Podio is having the right triggers and mechanisms to overcome the nature of a human being just to be rushed over in a hurry or not pay attention to something that actually is quite critical. But it's easy if you're rushing to miss it. And that's probably the only thing I see us constantly wanting to adapt to human error. So as we see errors that occur in in the utilisation of the apps, Jo user comes back and says, we'll actually just turn a trigger on to let them know, hey, look, it's been three months, since you've talked this person, you might want to reach out, you know, you know, and Joe's pretty witty, I mean, we have some buttons that runs certain scripts that pull in data from other apps and bring them together. And it's really cute, because we'll look over into our comments section, I'll say this, squirrels are hunting for all your nuts. And we're like, what? And really, that's just Joe put a comment in that when it's going to grab the data for the field says, Hey, give me a chance I sent the squirrels out, they're gonna get all the nuts, and they'll put them in your box. And it's great, because, you know, it sounds silly, but it's, we have a daily thing, are we 2.0, but we pull in all the meetings, and we're very regimented, scheduled. So he's able to pull everything into you organise your whole week. And it's pulling all that data, you're not running around jumping from app to app to app. The other thing with Podio is we've fallen in love with it so much that I, Joe, do you think our total number of apps are now?
Joel Ordesky:God? Yeah, I mean, there's about almost a dozen workspaces that ate. And there there are, yeah, we probably you probably have about 90 apps. I mean, you have a lot of stuff. I mean, and we're constantly optimising and rearranging, and the names get changed occasionally. And it gets refined. I mean, I think that's, I think one of the beauties of the system is that that there is no, oh, we're going to have to plan for this revision, it's going to show up in a version, that so you have an idea, now, it's gonna take us three months before we can launch that version, after it's gone through all this testing, I can literally make a change, like, in 10 minutes, 15 minutes, and that changes is immediately affecting everybody, you know, down the line. So I mean, sometimes things are complicated, like the wellness check that we've been working on, you know, you get into it, it's a little complicated, because it's not just, I'm looking so that we don't call people up and go, are you okay? When they've actually made a request, made a phone call texted us, or done any of a number of activities, we don't want to call them just because when they've done one of those things, so there's about a half dozen factors that that are being measured, and then calculated, and then it makes a day since last event count. And then when we get that over 90, then it's flagged to an app they call matters to actually have a human. And in fact, we're not even going to we went one further, we're not going to have a human immediately, we're going to that's going to send an email, that's going to request them to either fill out a survey, or to make an appointment to talk to us via Calendly, which again, the API pulls it straight back in. And if that if they do those things, then the wellness check dates will reset themselves. And if they don't, then someone's ultimately, you know, after two attempts, the third attempt will be someone getting on the phone.
Jordan Fleming:They flagged them up. Yeah. Okay, hands up who's using Podio for real estate, and they don't want more Leads. Nobody. You want more Leads closed, well check out smartphone for Podio, the only phone system fully built for Citrix Podio with an fully integrated power dialer, and amazing mobile apps. It means wherever you are, you can make more calls, love to Podio send more texts, love to Podio and close more deals all log to your Podio CRM, click the link, check it out.
William Lindhal:So again, you you're avoiding that human error issue. Like I can't the last thing any employee wants to hear from another employee is Oh, I'm sorry, I forgot. You take away that ability for people to actually forget you can't it's kind of the system the clock and the system's going to run it's got to do it regardless, and you're gonna get alerted. So there's not it's really important in my type of business as you can imagine, everybody's catastrophic.
Jordan Fleming:Now, just just I want to follow up on something there, you know, because we, you know, talking about employee error and things like that which which always happens. And there's a potential for that everywhere. But if I zero into your employees, how did in general, how was the Podio? Except, you know, the journey to getting everybody accepting Podio? I mean, new people are never really an issue. Because if you've never worked in the company, and you'd never use the other systems, then you're sort of like, well, I guess, is this the system? I gotta learn? And that's all there is to it. But was, you know, from a transitioning point of view for your employees as well? Was it difficult? Was it was it relatively easy? I mean, in general, what was the feeling and acceptance of it?
William Lindhal:Well, it seems like a whole lifetime ago, right? I don't remember life before Joel. And when I when I say that is that life before Joel was more of a, you, it was really more of a one dimensional system opposed and multifaceted. So Podio had so much depth and directions that our trust administration system before was just to an admin, okay. So if I look at Podio, now, I have workspaces that are client administration, trust administration, my board, analytics, monitoring, oversight, coms pay, you know, operations, third party workspace. So there, I don't, we didn't have anywhere near not even remotely, that scope and depth, we had a complex extranet that was just for trust administration to interface with banks. But that was just it was just one dimension, right? You just did requests and checks, and you stored it there. So when people switch to Podio, I think the only thing that surprised them was Oh, guess what, we have another new app? Oh, we have a new another new add? Oh, by the way, we're automating scheduling. Oh, by the way, we're, we're gonna pre read your emails and populate them directly to the appropriate client. Oh, by the way, all your calls are automatically going to link to your client. So we didn't have I don't think anybody in our companies ever complained about Podio. What they've really more complained about this, Hey, they get they get excited. They realise, Hey, you think Joel could do this? You can talk to that? And the reality is, most times the answer is yes. There's some version of yes, the bad part is that show how many open tech tickets you think we've carrying at a time? 34?
Joel Ordesky:Yeah, they were up to about 30. At the moment, there's just a bunch of I mean, the thing is that, I mean, the nice thing, again, is that Podio is dynamic enough that like our priorities shift, and we worked a lot on the wellness check in the last week. But if if something changes dynamically within the business, we shift our focus immediately to, you know, so I'm shifting between, you know, fixing a bug or a problem or a system, or reality induced issue, right. So to, you know, something else to developing new features, and it kind of seamlessly goes back and forth, where we're working on those different types of things. You know, I think, as, as people realise, you get that what I like to call the podium, aha moment. So you know, thinking back to the beginning, the beginning, I know that one of the things that everyone was just floored by is I convinced the banking institution at the time that we started this to participate in Podio. And this was before API and anything else. And instead of sending them faxes, we put something up on Podio, we mentioned them, and but the thing that was huge was that they would then change the status from acknowledged to funded. And all of a sudden, it changed the whole world where data that they'd never in the past, if someone called up and said, did that cheque get released, did that get paid? Did the check clear, they'd have to send an email, they'd have to wait for a response. Now, they didn't need to do that. Now. They just looked at the request, looked at the funding the payment, and if the payment said funded, it was funded. And if it said cleared, it meant that it cleared the bank. And they're like, Oh, this is a game changer, because now they have that information, like firsthand.
William Lindhal:You know, Joe, it's funny, you mentioned that, because that app mentioned thing is something that needs to be clarified. I think, you know, in this age of people using slack and iMessage and WhatsApp, it's so wonderful that that's another thing that you have an internal messaging system within Podio that can be less intrusive and interrupting. So I always am always surprised by that. So we use a plethora of tools to communicate, so you reduce distractions for your employee. So for example, we our staff know that you only do a Podio message meeting the instant messenger built into Podio. You only do that you need an urgent response when you're going to interrupt somebody's workflow. But you can be anywhere within any app anywhere on the system at any date, time and age. And you can The Add symbol on your keyboard and type in the name of your fellow employee. And you can send them an instant message that goes up into notices, but doesn't interrupt them. And they can review them twice a day and say, Oh, here's what's going on. The other thing that's shocking to me about Podio, because my job is so dangerous illegally, that I can literally look at the global inbox. And I see the actions and activity of everybody within the organisation and snapshots. And I can jump to and fro from there, so that you have a central repository that gives you a window shot of an organisation. Imagine we're an organisation with 90 apps, 12 workspaces. And in an instant, I can be on one place and jump around to any of that and not even have to know which app or where it is, is directly everything's URL based. That's the only thing that blows my mind about Podio is I can share anything just by copying the URL. I mean, you know, a lot of problems tend to close out people from getting in unless you're paying licence fee. Podio is just the opposite. I feel like it makes the door open, but it's still secure. And that's very unusual in the CRM space.
Jordan Fleming:When and picking up on your ad mentioned point. One of the things I've always felt is really powerful. And you mentioned slack. I personally hate slack. We use it in smartphone internally, and it's fine for it's fine for chatting to people. It's no problem. But it suffers from that. You know that? Forever scroll back to find something problem. Right? Because it's not. It's not threaded, and it's not always threaded, but it's not a
Joel Ordesky:contact contextual. Yeah, no contact.
Jordan Fleming:And one of the things I've always sort of encouraged people to really understand about Podio is, by with the ad mentions on things, you can contain conversations on the things they relate to, as opposed to just chatting about things back and forth. Or, you know, I'm talking about this customer or this claim, or this, whatever it is, and we've got the messages and the back and forth contained on it. And that is huge for being able to, you know, for being able to see the history and zero in and what you care about not have to forever, you know, I can scroll back back, you know, 18 months to find that one message that relates to the things you you are talking about. And that's where Podio I think in the app mentioning on the items is just, it's the only way to fly in my opinion.
William Lindhal:Well, in the West be the only thing I think is hard and especially using a podcast or video, I think contextually it's very hard for people to grasp the scale of what we're saying, even in this podcast, you, you if when I tell people that even if I show a person, it takes a little while and then the light comes on. And they look at our system. And I'm like, Oh my God, how would you do that? Right. So it this is, I think it's there's a lot of software out there in the industry that I'll call it eye candy. And they'll make the parts that are pretty that the people think they want the most, but there's not that much depth to the product. So they don't realise. They don't realise the box that they're boxed in it a good example would be like Salesforce sheet, you start at this level. And every time you add it's cutting, cutting, cutting, cutting and expanding, and you're like, Oh man, I can't even afford to run my business. I got too much money tied up in my CRM systems and my related collateral programmes. So in Citrix, Podio the more you use it, the more you realise there's more you can do with it. It doesn't get old and the depth seems to keep getting deeper and deeper. And then you know, it, there's a lot of creativity and uniqueness that I have never seen anywhere else.
Jordan Fleming:100% I, I 100% agree I hope Citrix listens to this. Because the you know, I mean they they've struggled for a decade to understand how to position Podio. They've, they've, they've tried to position it as a CRM, but then people log in and they're like, where's my CRM, you got to build it. They've tried to position as a project management tool, and people go great ways, my Asana boards, you gotta build it, you know, gotta shift, but you're, you know, to your point, all the various parts of your business, every one of our businesses can, you know, touches so many things from HR to finance to sales and customer and support and, you know, whatever it is we touch a lot of different things. And there is never been a one stop solution that works. And Podio is that solution because you can build it exactly how you work. And it sounds like what you guys have managed to achieve is and is continuing to evolve and get better and better and better and better. Is a good case point for you know, the power of taking Have a business and, and building, you know all those little bits so that the staff can seamlessly run their day to day. And they've got automation, they've got workflow, they've got all the data at their fingertips, and they're not wasting time jumping around, trying to find things. And that's, you know, sounds like you've got done that very successfully.
Joel Ordesky:I think one of the things also that's interesting is that, you know, the in management, we talked about that a good business runs on really clear organisational clarity, you know, who's responsible for what you know, who to turn to, in any circumstance. Podio promotes that sort of organisational clarity, because you can go to a record and say, Okay, I know who the, you know, I look at this record, this record is connected to this client, this client has a trust Officer of this person, it has a Junior Assistant of this person, okay, I now No. So like, when our outside financial institution, which is in one workspace, looks at a payment request and has an issue with it, they just look at the bomb, they can see the trust officers name, they can add mention the trust officer and say, Hey, there's something wrong with this payment, or this payment returned to us with something odd on it. You know, that organisational clarity that is both in the context and can be referenced by a member field makes all the difference. So Podio is not just a it's not a CRM, it's not a project management tool, it is a business tool, it is a is a enterprise level business tool that really makes it possible for a company to clarify. And then by putting the good process and procedures around it through the tool, you can really successfully run your business, optimise your business.
William Lindhal:And I have no job. No either. I love that. Imagine this, just think about the statement for a second, you're talking about a software that I pay almost the same money as when I started four years ago. Now in 2022, I'm spending the same money, give it a take maybe a couple of 1000 bucks total for the year. And I've increased the capacity and functionality of Podio, probably 100 fold. Now think about that you can't there's no other platform where you're not going to be running up an enormous amount of extra cost. So we took something that started off with say, 2030 apps at 90 and use it to run our HR project management, finances, banking, accounting, anything you can imagine your business. And yet none of those things increase my costs, except Joe.
Jordan Fleming:At 1000. He's,
William Lindhal:and you know what St Joe's never increases costs less either the whole time,
Jordan Fleming:that may change after this podcast, it's no, I listen, I mean, I'm so great. I think this is such a great example of both a, you know, of a comp of a relatively complex business, being able to build itself into Podio. And then expand. I think it's such a great use case. Just to close out as a closing thought, you know, you mentioned obviously finance events, in terms of, you know, add ons you you've got proc foo, I'm guessing Joel, you know, what are the core add ons, if there's right signature e Signature Tools are anything that that you use, as well in your Podio that you've been able to integrate into your workflow very well.
Joel Ordesky:So they're the proxy definitely for the because we use it for not only scripts and for some functionality there, but we use it a lot. Now for many, many apps to allow clients to access stuff we are using. We use Calendly for for scheduling and through the API. It comes in and then that allows us to line stuff up. Right signature is there's a lot of contract work that is at the front side at the lead in the creation. We've we're in an early phase with right signature, but we were able to create something pretty basic, pretty simple. That allows them to set up their document and then get it off for electronic signature. So that that that initiative is growing, but it's definitely there. And also the entry point for that was the cost entry point for that was really relatively good. They're using ShareFile as well. Because there's they had a lot of documents, they have a highly sensitive and stuff. So they were a great candidate for shared files because we're creating stuff. It's the system is actually backed up to fold at this point. It we're using momentum tools, we use momentum tools, both for the tools portion for the power tools portion, but we also it is the system is backed up by that but we are also backed up by techie goes singing which we use for stuff we're using. We have a digital ocean SQL server which is helping the So, the miniapp so I mean, there's a host of little things that have systems that are out there that we're we're interacting with, it's grown over time as the bang for your buck has has worked, but it is definitely, you know, an evolving thing that is done in, like I said, the, the API game, you know, this is something that you sort of need a partner to help with. But, you know, like, just that Calendly API is priceless. You know, yes, anyone can take an email in, and then have a staff employee, you know, schedule the thing. But having Calendly, bring it in and let it put it on the calendar. And then it reaches out and it updates the lead and it updates the this or this is is very valuable. To have those things work. We have a little we're using a Integromat. For just one little thing, because we're making a connection to Google Gmail for Will, Will has a need to because he uses certain accessibility tools on his iPhone. So we do a little extra work for him with syncing some Google Calendar events for him. And using that, but I mean, like I said, each piece to a purpose. API calls to our different financial institutions then calling stuff to us, inquiring us it makes it really, really very powerful. And like I said, it's a constantly evolving and being tweaked and optimised and, and new features being added all the time.
Jordan Fleming:Yeah, sounds sounds fantastic. Sounds fantastic. And I'm going to point out because I'm contractually obligated, do you also use smartphone?
Joel Ordesky:Oh, yeah, I forgot. I'm sorry. I meant I didn't even think about
Jordan Fleming:my mind. I'm thinking to fucking logos here, man. Oh, man.
Joel Ordesky:Well, I'll say I'll say this, we are they on the smartphone side. I like to say when I'm doing chunk clients to smartphone, they're one of the biggest because they're a customer relation system. So they're constantly on the phone, their phone calls are a big part of it. Everything is recorded because they have a requirement to maintain all of the audio. In fact, we, after so much time, we pull the audio often stored in Podio, which is a, I think not a lot of people do that particular trick, they store it off to some other system, I actually store it in Podio. To allow that to go. But it's really interesting how they have, they've actually revamped the communication app because they actually app they actually look at whether something is a call is done or not. So even if there's a missed call, somebody's going in there looking at that missed call and has to market is done. They have disposition statuses for smartphones. So if you answer a call, you can say answered you can say answered and done, or you can say answered and I need something more done with this. So that they those disposition, statuses trigger other flows. So they're actually creating a tremendous amount of volume through the smartphone system. At one time you had how many people will in the office that we're all operating out of the same room, on smartphone. Free COVID. We had
William Lindhal:12 at one time, but and the other thing was smartphone that I thought Joe, is that imagine if you told attorneys and people in your marketing this that they can keep their own cell phone and never have to give it out? See I love dialling everything from a smartphone app and nobody has to get my cell number. And I you can't understate that. The other thing too is imagine your company you get I have 12,000 contacts. So when I use my smartphone, I just type in the person's name and Bada bing, bada boom, they pop up and you go, Oh, that's easy. And then it says, Okay, which one do you want? Do you want to send a text, you want to call it home, you want to call their office, those functionalities even exceed this general functionality in the iPhone. If you think about it, you're you're opening a smartphone app that literally is looking at your contact database of everybody in your business that you've been running for 25 years. I mean, that's unbelievable. And then I can keep logs and track and even add notes right then live while I'm talking about source in my smartphone app. And it's supposed to get to the record. So I can't you know, I think smartphone was one of those real nice, huge enhancements to our Podio system went once it was refined a little so I'm very much in love with smartphone.
Jordan Fleming:That's great. I also to your point. One of the things I always tell people when when they're taught when I you know if a business is like Oh, I'm not sure if I move my phone system on, you know, online because some some are, you know, some businesses are just a bit wary if they've never used the cloud phone system. They're a bit wary and I understand that but I always say look, you know, you got 20 employees. How nice was it? IE, to never have to worry about, you know, buying them a phone anymore about about you know them, you know, taking your seat that having all your contacts on their iPhone, which they can just download and or speak to regardless, how nice would it be if you have to work from home because a pandemic hits that nobody drops an inch of a second, because, you know, I remember people were sending IP phones to people, you know, when they were using RingCentral, or these systems. And you know, with smartphone, you just like, man, just open your browser or pick up your mobile phone, the apps there. So there's a lot of value around that, you know, about around not having an infrastructure there that you have to develop? I think, well,
Joel Ordesky:also for will the context is killer, because you know, we've got he, you know, not only is it a litigious business for him, he's dealing with a tonne of attorneys, right. Every client has one, if not two attorneys involved in the circumstance, right. So we sometimes get situations where people are like, I've been calling for three days I have or whatever, well, we have every phone call logged in me even if you hang up, we have the call log. And if you talk to anyone, we have the call recorded. So you know, it's very easy to track where failures are happening, or if they are indeed really happening. We had I remember there was an incident, we had somebody who called and was like, I've been at it and I'm like and will would work with me in the sessions as much during that time. And I was like, wait, wait, wait, look here. I'm like, Look at this. And I'm like, does he have any other phone number, there was no other phone number. It's like, we look the calls, we're just not there. And we'll get on the phone. And he said, I'm happy to get this result for you. I see you called Three days ago once and didn't leave a message. And, and, you know, we're happy to do this and deal with this. But I'm just I'm really concerned on I've got my developer we only see the one call. And you said you've been calling for three days. And then the guy kind of admitted he was exaggerating massively. But it is useful to have that track and information. It also is useful for us to optimise. Kate and I will spend time occasionally optimising what staff is doing by looking at call flow, looking who's answering the calls looking how stuff is is moving. You know, it's not just about, okay, now you control your phone system. It's it's that you gain this information and you in into the context of what records who's doing it not only what contact, but what record is that related to? Because we add that piece in so that we know a lot more about communication. It goes back to that wellness check. As I mentioned, it's like one of the factors I'm checking, okay, was there there has to be a phone call. It has to be outbound or inbound and answered. And or it has to be an inbound text from the right phone numbers, that qualifies it out of a wellness check. Because that sets the date that I've heard from them. You couldn't do that with a lot of in fact, I'm not sure you could do that with any other telephone system. Because without the disposition status of answered, because I've had clients who tried to use some system other than smartphone, right? And I'm like, Yeah, but how do I know that you answered this call? How do I know that it wasn't just a voicemail or something else? That doesn't count? I need to know that that there was communication. So I mean, there's a lot to be said. In fact, I remember at one point, the disposition buttons disappeared from one point of view. And I'm like, hold it. Wait, this is the biggest single feature of smartphones are these disposition buttons. It's like nothing, no one else has that. Oh, so it's huge.
William Lindhal:With joy, I always feel like it saves our bacon all the time, because it allows me to know for sure, I can't tell you how many times a client or person says, well, your people didn't call me back. Well, I just put the login ago, they tried to call you four times, here's the times, oh, my voicemail is not set up. Okay, well then stop telling your attorney that we're not following up and keeping up with you because you're not answering your phone. So if anything gets saved, it's probably saved us more from customer service problems and allows us to have quality customer service, because smartphone gave us a feature to say Oh, I see you call I just did this yesterday said ma'am. You call us nine times. You gotta give us 24 hours to call back and calling nine times doesn't help and leaving nine messages doesn't help you. So we use it very much. Our communication logs with smartphones in our video is like our lifesaver. I can't imagine anybody doing high volume call work where they wouldn't benefit from that type of system.
Jordan Fleming:Well, mental note do not change the way dispositions work in Podio or Jolin. Will will fly over and beat me to death. So that's that good point. All right. I've made that note now. That's That's good. Well listen, guys, I gotta say, I so much appreciate. I think the story is fantastic. Both, you know, obviously the journey into Podio, but also how much Fotios broadened into you, your organisation and how much you are now seeing the great you know, even more opportunities, I think that's fantastic. I think it also shows a real value in working with a good partner, where the that partnership of you guys wanting business ends and, and Joel being able to help you guys meet it. I think this this illustrates very, very, very well. Just gonna give you guys a last kind of the last word, if you have any last thoughts and or let people know, you know, obviously your very specific case, I is you're not, you're not going to be cold calling selling to be blogged through the podcast, but I will drop your website link into the podcast, of course so people can see it. But just final thoughts and just let people know how you can find both you and Joel.
Joel Ordesky:But let's do this, I'm going to promote will and I'll let will promote me as a little bit of a change. Alright. So let's say it's CPT. So if you have a situation, if you're you're you do law, if you're a lawyer who does deals with cases, and has need of a Fiduciary Trust Company, as a charity, CPT, you know, at really low fees with excellent customer service with people who really care that is not a profit targeted company, they they really work very, very hard. I've learned more about wills business from working with him, and how hard they work to be the right sort of company, for their beneficiaries. And, and also truly as as, because that's only a part of what they do. The other part is to educate attorneys, and I've been on calls and listen to will work with attorneys. This is a very complicated point of law and will is the subject matter expert, he knows more about these things and can help lawyers really do an excellent job for their clients. So if if you know anybody who's in this service circumstance, where a trust is needed, CBT is always worth checking with, it will always be, I think the best choice for you.
William Lindhal:All right. Thank you, Joe. You know, and I want to say that most importantly, I can't. And I know this sounds strange and corny, I can't imagine my life without Joe's influence, he's profoundly changed the way we operate he and having a Podio partner that joins the journey and has such a granular, intimate relationship with a business partner. At this level, you don't see that with other products and services. It just doesn't exist. I mean, everybody that needs Joe thinks he actually is one of our employees, you know, it's like no, no, he's been a vendor supporting us for years. The only thing I only want to caution anybody about Podio is you have to have patience, because you get to make this exactly what you want it to be. But you're not buying a thing out of the box, you're basically buying one hell of a foundation that you can turn into whatever the hell you want. And with a good Podio developer like Joel, the sky's the limit, you just have to know to ask and you'd be surprised what someone can create new for you.
Jordan Fleming:I couldn't ask for a better sum up of both joy and Podio as I've known Joe for years. So both of you gentlemen, thank you so much for being on the podcast today and on telling a bit about your journey. I really appreciate it. And I hope you guys continue to thrive together. So thank you so much.
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