#30 - Risk Management & Startups w/ Maximilian Glodde

And we would nerd out over the Bigger Pockets podcast and, and all these other things. And I don't do that anymore, but probably should have kept all those properties that would have been useful, but not just, you know, you got to focus on one thing and just hammer it out 110%. So that's here I am so. Well, so that's what I was going to say is I feel like anything you do, you go all in on like it when you were in on real estate, you were all in. You like got to 65 units when you're wanting to do your start up, you're like, all right, I'm all in.

Burn the, burn the boats. Like go do this. Bring on partners like boom, I'm in. Like, yeah. It's. Have you always had that mindset? Like what's been is that? Is that just you? I mean, my wife will tell you that I'm like, like for example, when I first got into mountain biking, right? Like I used to road bike. And then a buddy of mine couple years, like 4 years ago, five years ago said, hey man, why don't you come mountain bike? I was like, OK, I don't have a bike. He goes here, you just borrow one of mine. And I said, OK, we go out there for an afternoon.

You know, 2 weeks later I buy the most ridiculous mountain bike, right? Amazing. And I just kind of got to get like at that time, all the gear. No idea sort of applied to that. It still probably does it in the mountain biking arena. But yeah, man, you got to you got to go in. You can't half ass stuff like that, right? So I don't know. And then running a, you know, now doing the start up thing. And, and I tell this to anybody, if you're, I said this on another podcast, if you have an idea, you've been stewing on it, you're working on it and you buy if you're by yourself.

Now I was not by myself. I had Co founders, right? So that's great. But we were just by ourselves and we were comfy. We had a job, we were getting paid. It was cool. You don't really have pressure to do anything. You're just, you know, we can talk about how that affects when you're trying to sell somebody something as well 'cause that matters there too. But you, you're just comfortable. It really changed for us when we brought in an external party to help us build stuff 'cause now you're responsible, that kicks you, that gives you a kick up the ass.

Sure, you're giving away some equity, but 100% of nothing is still nothing, right? So you got to get moving. And the best way to do that is you just figure out how you can hold yourself accountable. And that was our way of holding ourselves accountable is to each other, but more important, more importantly, somebody that was external to us, that didn't know us. And so how many people like when you say we before you brought in the partner, how many people were you before you brought in the external partner? Yeah, so we Chris and I founding team, right Two people quickly brought on some other people that we knew had the same mindset and we're going to be super useful.

So the team since those first two then grew to three to four to five and 16 right So yeah, I know it's crazy. It's weird that's. Wild it also in like what, 2 1/2 years? Three years. Yeah, quit corporate 2 1/2 years ago. OK, all right, wait. So I want I want to talk about that. So how did you know? OK, so you were stewing on this idea. You and Chris were like you were kind of scheming. You're like, OK, this is what we're going to do. This We're thinking, when did you know? Boom. This is the day that we're leaving. Man. Like how did, how did you come to that?

That was a lot of back and forth conversation. I think you come out with an idea, sketch it out, and especially if you have nothing to lose, you have nothing to lose. That's fine. But we had a lot to lose. Like you're giving up a very comfortable job. We really liked where we worked. We loved the team, the people we worked with. Like we cried when we quit. Like it was that like it wasn't like, yeah, I'm out of here. Like we loved it there, right. And so that was hard. So for us, especially when you're building B to B SAS, which so you're building enterprise grade stuff, it takes a while to build that, but you also somehow need to get an idea of who's going to buy it and what's the level of like, are you going to make money or like all of that stuff?

And we, when we left, we had gotten enough indicators that somebody would give us pay for it, right? And would be, would actually buy it that it was worth jumping and, and saying, let's take this leap of faith. If we don't do it now, we're never going to do it. And then proceeded to not get salary for two years, but that's a whole different story, right? So stuff always takes longer than you think. But that was OK because we knew that was as we prepared for that. Like we, you know, you, you, you make the right moves. We were also lucky in that we have partners, as in wives that got that were making money, right, They were working.

So it that helped to a degree to to offset you not just falling into nothingness, right, right, right. You have something into me personally, because of the real estate work that I was doing. I was still making money from that. So it was an easier. There are very much realities of like, yes, burn the boats, but maybe responsibly sometimes because you know, like you have kids, you got you got a house, you're not just going to. Could I and would I still sell everything to keep chasing that this right now? Yes, I absolutely would. I would burn it to the ground again, but I don't need to.

So it's OK. Right, right. Which is probably a better position to be in than needing to. Yeah, I mean, it was scary. The 1st 2. That's that's weird. Now listen, my fall back position is everybody's normal, which is just go get a job, right? Because you're qualified, right? Like if you're built this way, like fundamentally you have the drive and the energy to go chase something, people are going to want to hire you when if you decide to, to change it, right? So that's just how it is. So that that I took a lot of comfort in that. And when you say that you had, there was signal that you felt confidence someone would buy the product.

Did you have? Did you have a first customer before? We had an early adopter client for sure, but not before we left. They came in later, they came in month a few months after that. And, and dude, like your background is in finance, who is actually building out the tech? Like who is building out the software? We, we did have a person that kind of helped us with initial sort of proof of concept and then we moved from that to an agency. We were with that agency. It was very expensive. We were with the agency for a while. We bootstrapped for a long time.

So we were with the agency, paid them a lot of money and they helped us continue to build out the platform and to make it actually usable. And then we eventually then hired our own CTO, We hired our own people and we now have our own development team. They're awesome. They, they, they really do nice work, you know, and the agency thing is, is fine. You don't have a lot of control over that. The benefits are that you can scale A-Team up really quickly and you don't have to really worry so much about all the HR and all the stuff that goes with it because that is that is a real thing for us to drawback was more the quality and I couldn't audit them because I had no like, I'm not a developer.

I have no idea. Like you can show me like a line of code and I'm like, that looks cool, right? I like the colors. I like the colors, right? So again, said this on another podcast, please, if you do work with an agency and you know, just make sure that you have regular checkpoints. If you have a way of auditing, auditing what they're doing, do it. The other thing that I will tell you is your gut's really good at telling you when things are not going the way or, you know, you always like, it's like when you have a contractor come over to your house and you're looking at something you're like, that looks weird.

But maybe they'll fix it. Or maybe maybe they'll before they put the Sheetrock on or before they finish it, It'll, it'll be all right. Right Now, you and I both know because we've been in the real estate game and given the work that we do, I don't do that anymore. I just go ask a question. I was like, that looks weird. Explain it to me like I'm 12. And then they go, OK, and it's all right. So that's wrong. Let's fix that, right? Because we all know that once you put the drywall and you finish it, once you finish your app, once you put the pretty stuff on, it's way harder to undo what you did.

So it's important to get your requirements right. This is what I will say. And that responsibility falls on everybody, not just, not just the developer, they're just, they're just going to execute what you do, what you want them to do, right? So. But so to to that point, like, OK, you, you weren't able to audit them because you don't have necessarily the the software background. How does that change? By bringing the team in house like what you? Wow. So yeah, OK, well it bringing the team in house, one of the most important people in that process is the technical lead, right?

So the CTO. OK. And they do have that ability. To yeah, yeah. And ours is awesome. He's former EY, like super talented guy. His name's Eric. He's, he's cool and he's been with us now for a year and he then leads the charge on who do you hire, what are we looking for, technical assessments, etcetera, etcetera. And he's been great. He's been super useful. So you got to find somebody you can trust that you know is strong. So that's what it comes down to. If you don't have that technical background, you got to find somebody you can trust to do it. Sure.

And how long were you with the agency before you made the switch to? Probably 18 months, actually, almost 2 years I would say, yeah, 'cause then you have an overlap period where you have to hire your own team and it gets very, it gets very expensive very quickly. Dude, I'm. Sure. Yeah, I'm sure. And so it kind of took along a similar point like when did you make your first hire like you, you and your Co founder, you and Chris, you came on, you guys weren't taking salaries. The first person that came on was it was our head of sales, Eric. He came on like almost exactly.

I think he came on exactly a year after we left and then. Everyone's named Eric. Yeah, I know. We got 3 Eric's. It's a joke. It's a joke, man. It's like we can only hire people. Eric. Erica. No, I'm just kidding. We've hit our Eric quota for the time being. We hired Eric 25% of the company. I know, I know. It's a joke. We hired Eric in. It was a year and a half ago in May. It's funny. His first day was at risk World, which is the big risk conference, right? So like, I mean, he, he, Eric did the same thing. We met Eric. Eric's from F was at FM too.

So he was a risk consultant. That's where we met and we were like best friends. So it's like, of course, we're going to do this together, right? And then we, we hire, then the next hire came in like a couple months after that. And then, and then it just kind of started cascading. It also coincided with we, we raised venture money. So that of course helped as well to just be able to keep investing in the team and the growth, right? So that's so a lot of the team growth has been in the last 12 to 18 months. Yeah, OK, dude, that's so cool. And so it was after you did a raise, you're like, OK, cool, now we have some cash to go pay people.

Let's go higher. Yeah, hire the right people. Yeah. Now our dev team is is they're all near shore. So you know, you've got Canada, you've got Latin America because yes, you get cash, but you're not going to go and just burn it on, you know, some of the devs domestically, yeah, you see it a couple $100,000 a year. Yeah, it's crazy. Yeah, it's wild. If they know AI really well, like they, they know what they've got so right, it's good for them, you know, good for them. It's great for them. Yeah. Also if you see headlines of Meta offering, what is it?

Billion dollar? PayPal yeah, OK. But the clauses in that contract have got to be like mental, like how do you there's got to be some crazy performance clause that you have to hit. So did they turn it? Didn't they turn it down? Yeah, they did. Yeah. OK. So there's obviously like if someone just said to you, if if someone said to you or me and said I'll give you a billion dollars a year cash, even if you only make it one month, you do, you're gonna be just just on boarding. You're like, oh, that's not gonna work out. OK. I got like got like $80 million.

Thanks. Like, yeah, those people like NBA players, professional sports players, like their, their incomes are so high that it it goes beyond, beyond like the FDIC insurance. I always wonder, like, do you just get that direct deposited? Like how does that work? Gold bars in the safe? I don't know. Apparently it's. A tangent for a different day. Yeah. OK, so you're, so you're hiring out the team, you're building the team. Can we just take a a quick back step in like can you explain risk management to someone who doesn't has never heard that term outside the industry maybe like what does that mean?

Risk, risk management, yeah, that's a big. But like, like this is continuity planning, like that kind of thing. Like to someone who's the the uninitiated, so to speak. Yeah. Let's nerd out a little bit, OK? So principally, you have a discipline called enterprise risk management, right? OK. Enterprise risk management, if you had to like really distill that down, is geared towards protecting the value that the enterprise generates, right? And that could literally mean that risk can come from anywhere. It can be operational risk like how you run your business and and you disrupt part of that, like let's say you burn down a factory supplier gets disrupted.

You can also be things like operational risk, sorry, reputational risk, which is your company shows up in the media and it's bad for you or you know that that's so enterprise risk management cover is very, very broad and there's, there's a lot of other areas too within enterprise risk management. You have a discipline called business continuity management, right? Business continuity management is generally split into business impact analysis, business continuity planning, crisis communication and emergency response, right? So business continuity management is kind of like the term suggests is, is really more geared towards how does the business continue to operate once it is disrupted.

And it, and disrupted can be literally, it really depends on what your risk tolerance is, right? For some companies, the disruption could be, think of like Crowdstrike. That's a major, that's a major business continuity event, right? Something crazy happened. That's so it sits within that enterprise risk management, right? For other companies that let's say they're heavy into manufacturing, they may not worry so much if a plant is down for seven days because it doesn't, the impact's not that big, right? So it really is it's, it's, it's a little bit personal to each company.

But fundamentally in BCM, you have those, like I said, 44 disciplines what we do. Business continuity management. Yeah. We, we sit in the business continuity management space predominantly, right. The challenge that we often see is that companies will do business continuity planning. So they build a plan that says here's if something bad happens, this is how we're going to continue to operate. This is how we're going to safeguard our customers to make sure that we can keep delivering our products and our services to them. And what we see very often is that there's a just a distinct lack of quantification.

And what we mean by that is that's nice. I can give you a plan of like what I'm going to do, but nobody ever says, well, how much does that actually reduce the risk by for the organization right in, in, in dollars or EUR or whatever your currency is. And what we've endeavored to do with Mio is to say, OK, before I even plan for stuff, let me first quantify what's important to the business. Let me connect all my factories, all my business functions, all my IT applications, all my suppliers into all my revenue streams. And let me also connect them to each other so that I understand like domino effects, right?

Like if I, if I it's like the OR the butterfly effect is a better example, right? I do something over here and I disrupt like an app that supports injection molding in a plant. And that piece then moves to another plant to be assembled into a bigger plant, into a bigger product, and then moves to a distribution center and then maybe moves to a regional distribution center and then gets to the customer. Yeah, I want to understand the butterfly effect and the ultimate impact on trade sales to the customer if if this thing over here falls over at the beginning of the chain.

Right, right, right. So that's a pretty complex problem to solve, dude. That's because you're mapping every nut and bolt. To yeah, we it's, it's it's basically. So the way that you want to think about this problem is that when you take that, what I just explained for an organization of any size, and you said you want to do that all at once, you're not going to do it for sure. You know that concept of when people say, hey, what you, if you're set, set yourself in a, a big hairy audacious like goal, OK, but how do you actually get to that goal, right?

If your goal is to map the whole company, that's pretty massive. How do you get to that? You break it down into smaller goals, right? Like if you want to lose 20 lbs by the end of next year, that's pretty, that's very high level. Chances are if you just if that's all you say, most people won't hit that goal. But if you break it down to like, hey, OK, what do I need to do this week? What do I need to eat? What like we talked about this before this recording. It's like the best success you're going to give yourself when you are trying to train for something is, hey, I just need to pre plan my week.

Yeah, and get after it. I just need to execute the plan. Emotion's not a part of it. Anyway, Yeah, slight tangent there. But the point is what we really help companies do is the way we set up our process and our technology platform is that they can eat the elephant one bite at a time. Because risk managers have this monster job, right? They are supposed to span the whole organization or whole division and they're getting all this piece meal information over time to help understand what is most at risk in the business. So what we allow them to do with our technology is just keep adding to their data set, quantify exposures and say, hey, here are the things that are most valuable to your company.

And by the way, we then also capture from all of the different parts of the business, how would the business continue to operate if a factory failed, if a process in a factory failed or if a supplier stopped working or an application stopped working? We capture all that and we quantify it. So what that then allows us to do is after we understand importance and exposure, we can then force rank those and say, OK, now based on what is the most important to you and most exposed, now go build continuity plans for those things. There's no point in building a continuity plan for something that you cannot mitigate.

Like if, if, if you have a particular process that you can only do in one place and your company has no other option, a continuity plan will not help you because you have no option. The continuity plan only helps you if you have options. So what we're what we're doing with with these companies is we're taking the business continuity planning that normally happens in this very, very high up in the corporate tree is very abstracted often. And we push it down to the things that actually make money because if you can protect those, then you're protecting the business, right?

Right. You can have a Business Today. Companies have continuity plans. I'm not saying everybody, but many of them have continuity plans that sits so high up in the tree. But if you don't know how to mitigate your production or your service delivery, then your continuity plan doesn't matter because you're not going to be making any. You're not going to make any money. It doesn't matter that you want to call tree. It could be like a couple pages for a huge organization. You're like that doesn't seem like it's real. Yeah, we've seen some fun ones.

Those are like one page, but it's because they often go, hey, let's plan to plan, right? We're going to say read the plan and it says this is our war room, this is our communication tree. And those are all important things. And then when it gets to the actual practical strategy of how are you actually going to continue to generate cash as a business, it just says very often, well, we plan to meet in the war room to discuss our options. And here are some high level options that we think we have, right? We do that the other way around. Let's first look at what are our options.

And we, by the way, we, we don't just ask like high level, we go to the plant manager and say, hey, plant manager, if that thing over there stops working, where else can you do it? They go, well, based on my 40 years of experience, I would shift this and this to this plant and I can do 40% after six months. And we can then quantify what that's worth and what that protection is worth. So you can see how that information is actually particularly useful, not just to like a CFO or like the board, but it's also useful to insurance carriers because they can better understand now where do I place my my capacity?

We've seen many situations where clients are, it goes both ways, but clients are either they're buying a certain coverage that maybe they don't need. And now we can't opine on insurance because that's not our job, right? We can just help principally understand where is the exposure. Maybe it's not always insurance. It could also just be physical risk improvement. Do you like the stuff that you do? Do you as an engineer? As a risk engineer, you made a recommendation to put a sprinklers in a certain area of the plant. The risk manager now has to take that information or the plant manager and make a business case to the CFO why they should spend 456 million dollars on that.

And the first thing the CFO is gonna say to you is, well, we don't have any loss history at this site, so why would we do that, right? It's like, well, it's not about lost history, it's about impact to the business. So we help quantify the impact to the business. And if you can demonstrate a material impact in financial terms, you're far more likely to get the CF OS ear to get their attention, to get the investment and to make that investment to protect that part of your business, right? So anyway, we're on a little tangent there, but that's principally what the value we delivered through our software and our services 'cause we also do consulting work, so.

Well, dude, like it sounds like it's not just for I know it's all under the umbrella of a risk, but at the same time you're you're almost dollar mapping every dollar of every business. So I'm sure CF OS like to your point love. This, yeah, you know, and that's, that's, that is, it's, that's exactly what we do. But you know how, what that what makes that it makes marketing really difficult. Cause who do you go talk to? I talk to a risk manager, but I can also talk to ACFO. I can also talk to supply chain manager. I can also talk to CSO 'cause we also map IT applications in that same way.

So I can map an application to a production process and I know how much revenue that production process supports, even if it's not selling a finished good. And I know the mitigation options for that production process. So I can quantify what the residual exposure is. Butterfly effect. I can therefore tell you how important that app is every minute, every hour, every day that it's down based on the butterfly effect, right? So that that it becomes a super useful tool that unifies a lot of different areas of the business. Right, right. So OK, let's say I have a a widget manufacturing company with a couple of factories, you know, one in the US, one in Canada, one in Europe.

Yep. And I come to you, I say, Max, I have nothing. I have no business continuity planning. I have no risk management of any kind. Go like I would love to love to work with you. How long would the process take before you can start to kind of see useful data from my business? Assuming you know, hey, here's the key to any, anything you need help yourself to anything anyone's at your disposal, Like how long does it take to get the flywheel of data going in order to start answering questions. Yeah. I mean that's typical. So it's, it's graduations of detail, right.

So typically within the first two months we would have your, in that example, we'd have your company's dependency map built. We already have financial exposures for all your different locations. We probably would have had some mitigation conversations. So we understand where you're exposed. If you then also had us go to each of the sites because we do that, we go to sites and we break them down into all of their process areas, their processes, etcetera, utilities, suppliers, IT apps, we do those in three day increments. So if you had that scheduled in that first quarter, we would have that answer as well.

So if you're an organization of just that size, we would have BIAS and BCPS built for all three sites for a lot of your corporate stuff easily inside six months. And BIA is is what? Business Impact analysis So the the the concept of trying to understand what is the business impact of a location, an asset, an whatever it is you have on the organization if it were to be disrupted. And how, how is, maybe it's a silly question, but how is that different than a business continuity plan? Yeah. So a business continuity plan ideally is always preceded by a business impact analysis.

A business impact analysis in layman's terms just tells you what's important. Business continuity plan then tells you how does that important thing keep going when stuff goes sideways? Got it right. So between the two of them, you again, I use this all the time, context. You use both of them together to provide context to ACFO, to a carrier, to whoever to help understand what's important in the business and why they should make a certain decision, right? So we talk about you're, you're, you're on the engineering side. You understand that right?

When you create an engineering report for somebody and you give it to them and it has a number of engineering recommendations for a location where you're saying, hey, I recommend you put in a firewall, I recommend you put in a sprinkler, right? Same example. Like I said earlier, the challenge that these that that people have when they just get that report on their own, it's a good report, is they have to add more context around the edges of that because they're going to have to give it to somebody to say, I need you to make a decision. And the first thing, yeah, I'm going to need you to spend money.

CFOI need you to spend money. They're going to go OK. The report on its own doesn't give me enough contextual information to make this decision because the CFO is trying to prioritize your budget over somebody else's budget. Totally. So that's why I'm saying you, you, you have to do, you have to story tell for somebody with, with data, with their own data. We don't make anything up. We just hold up a mirror to an organization. So here's what it is, right? You got to provide that context and that clarity so that you can make better decisions, right?

I mean, how many times have you seen clients that would just roll engineering recommendations forward year over year? Totally. Right. Why does that happen? And you're like, wow, why are they not doing them? It's like maybe because they don't know how to articulate their importance to the people that will give them the money to do it right. Right. That's that's it. Dude that's amazing. This is so cool. Are there other companies doing something similar or are you guys kind of pioneering in this space? You know, we, we are different in that we really do the quantitative aspects in financial terms.

There are a lot of organizations that also quantify risk. But the, The thing is, a lot of companies are using scales like 1 to 10 or letter gradients and stuff like that. And it's OK there, there's a place for those things. But if you are able to quantify in revenue terms or in margin terms, you should, if it touches your product, you should. The danger is that companies that use this abstract quantification like scale of 1 to 10, they get kind of comfortable with, oh, well, we asked 10 people their opinion on what's important and some ranked to the 9, some ranked to the seven.

And then we added the numbers up or we did some kind of math, then we get an average. Then we put it on the heat map and now it becomes a Red Square. OK, that you've, it's, it's an abstraction is what you've done. It's OK. Like do it. If that's your process, go for it, right. But then you wonder why that doesn't lead to action because you still have to explain to someone what a Red Square means. Then you're arguing, you're arguing with people more over the definition of what's a nine versus what's an 8 versus if I show you it's $600 million there, there's no opinion in that.

It's just 600. It's a $600 million exposure. Yeah, OK. We can all agree on that. And I think the other thing too, is that we see this often too, is, you know, you, you hire a consultancy or you do this yourself. There's nothing wrong with that is they'll go survey senior leadership. And that's to say, hey, what, what do you think is the most critical? What's the most important? Right. And they'll, they'll have an opinion versus saying, let us go do some analysis. I'm going to show you what's what should keep you up at night. And then what do you think about that?

Now listen, this is all very negative right now, right? But like there are a lot of risk managers out there that do a fantastic job, right? So sure, it's not all like this, but there is opportunity in that people for those of you that are doing this this way, just consider augmenting your process with some financial quantification. I'm not saying replace it, but just add that layer because it'll help a lot with Judith communication. I feel like anybody, if you, if you said to someone, hey, do you, is this better to have or not better to have? Like there's not a single person I could think of in the business world that would say this is not better.

Like this is clearly it is useful to have this information. It is useful to have, but you also got to remember we're operating in the risk space, so ROI is really difficult to quantify, which is why talk about entrepreneurship, startup world. Our sales cycles sometimes are over 2 years long because you have to align with people's budget cycles. You have to, you're asking someone to spend money on protection for something that may never occur. It's like the insurance thing, right? Like you're buying insurance. You're like man, like how many times have you looked at your car insurance and you're going, you know what, if I just change that coverage, it gets like 100 bucks cheaper.

Yeah, yeah. That's all good when nothing's going on. Sure, all right. So it's it is a challenge for and that by the way, that's not doesn't just go for us, right. I really feel for the for the risk management managers that try to get money to protect the business. It's it's really hard like so we try to help as much as we can, but is. There any potential to partner with the like the insurance carriers themselves to be offered as like an add on service to some of their higher premium customers or no? Yeah, absolutely. Same with brokers, same with consultancies.

Like we're super friendly towards all of that. I think the data that we that, that clients or the insights that clients get, I think it would help them or does help them a lot in those conversations with those people. Now, of course we don't share data with anybody, but they they could absolutely benefit. And we do have some stuff in the works with some brokerages where we're partnering with some major brokerages to do this. So it helps the brokers in the conversations with the carriers to say, hey, look, this client's really well protected and here are all the quantifications.

So super useful. Same on the insurance side. We do have some conversations with some big carriers where we're doing the same thing. So it is very useful information. Yeah, absolutely. It's. Dude, that's awesome. Definitely something that that is useful for them. That's super. That's that's amazing. That's the that's really cool, man. I try. I kind of knew tangentially the story of of how the company started and what it does, but like I hadn't had as deep of a dive. So this is. No, it's good, you know, and then we're also just, you know, we're starting to work with some other software providers like there are broader GR.

So so your your governance risk and compliance systems that people buy that do more stuff than we do and we work with with them just to provide them the quantitative side of it. So if you know, if the GRC system came and said, hey, got Mio, like can you just give us back the exposure data and stuff like that? So linking in with them and just you know, if the if our client has them, being able to just with APIs connect the two together. Of course with their permission. Just making it a more integrated solution is is super important. Dude, that's wow.

There's a lot going on. All right, so where do you, where do you see yourself or the company in, in 5 and 10 years? Like what's your, what's your goal here? Man, five years, huh? We've just finished planning for next year. Where do we go? And there's a lot of opportunity here to go, a lot of different places with it. I mean, next year especially, a huge focus on AIA, huge focus on usability, just continuing to improve. We don't ever want to be the company where someone says, oh, you know what, Mio? That really hasn't changed in a year. Yeah, yeah.

It has to change in a good way. We work very closely with every single one of our clients on the features they want to see and it it's become this little community where we don't really build custom for each for any client specifically. What we do is it's almost like a council, like the clients provide feedback collectively, we then triage that, prioritize it and say, all right, well, such and such said this was important to them. Do we think this is important to everybody else? And then we go reach out and have some questions and say, do you would you use that?

Oh yeah, that's a great idea. Or can we talk about that some more? And then you bring those people together. So you're bringing clients together from across industries to talk about what it and that's really cool. Like you end up getting some really good insights. So we're going to keep doing that type of work. We, you know, we're, we're, we're putting out some new products next year specifically for the insurance space. You'll see it. I can't talk about it just yet, but I'm excited for that. And you know, down the road 5 years from now, I mean, look, everybody's dream is at some point do you go public?

Do you do whatever? From a company perspective, certainly on the docket, I always say man, as, as a start up looking five years out is tough. All I can say is you want to build a billion dollar company, of course, that's it. I mean, that's, that's what we're geared towards so far. I'm, I'm just really proud of the team we have been able to build right. Everybody's, everybody's really good people and it matters. It really matters to me. Like it's, you know, we didn't leave corporate jobs to, to work with people we don't like. So we've managed to build a solid team and we'll keep doing that.

So we'll, we'll see where that road takes us. Dude, that's. Amazing. Nah, we're excited. That's amazing. OK, so switching gears just a little bit here, like you're obviously a very high output individual as we, as we spoke on earlier, like can you walk me through like a day in the life, like a typical Tuesday? Like what do you like literally what time do you wake up? What do you do before work? What time do you get to work? How much are you working? Where do you fit everything in? The the biggest challenge has been working out regularly. I'm an active person, but my day kind of gets turned up.

Actually. Frankly, I just don't, I can't really step away for an hour and a half during the because there's just too much going on. Yeah, I usually get up by like 4:45 or 5:00 in the morning, go work out. First thing I do, my son wakes up at, I don't know, 7. So I'm lucky in that not all parents can say that, but generally wakes up around that time, you know, in the mornings. What is that? School drop off is at 8. So I do that every day, get in and then the whole day basically is just work until about, you know, whatever six since I already worked out, I don't really have to do I don't, I don't have to go outside.

So it's great. And then, you know, there's a lot of calls, a lot of meetings. Usually there's a lot of travel too. And then, you know, the Evening Times from 6 to 6 to 8 is, is of course family time again, bedtime, stuff like that. And then at 8 it'll be. Honestly, it's either work a little bit more or watch some TV or spend time with my wife, whatever it is, right? She works, she has a pretty big job too. So she, she works a lot as well. And that's kind of the, the week, right? So I mean, the biggest thing for me is like going to bed before like 10:30 because 44455 o'clock's early.

That's the week. That's at least the objective of the week doesn't always go like that. You know, sometimes you're just like, like this morning, right? Oh my God, I feel a little, a little under the weather right now. Yesterday too. Didn't go to the gym in the morning yesterday. And then I woke up this morning and I was like, man, you can't skip two days in a row. You just can't. So I just, I listen half of the battle here, just show up every day. So I just rolled. I, I, I put my clothes on. I went to the gym, I did a super half ass workout, but I was there and it was, you know, I was OK.

I went, it's cool. I feel good about it, you know, I'm good. So that's it. It's you. You if you show up every single day, something will happen. That's it. Like you will, you'll be successful or whatever success means to you is like you'll make progress, right. So yeah, that's, that's that's my day. It's not, it's really not. On the weekends I go mountain biking, play tennis or whatever. And that's spend time with my family pretty basic like that. Do you do you work on the weekends or do you try to be pretty strict about? Sometimes, but I don't.

Again for me I love Mondays man. Like only because everybody else is working too. I I get excited on a Sunday. Weekends I sometimes do like creative stuff because I'm really involved in the product development. So I end up doing like the stuff where I just need to sit for 3-4 hours and think in a box. Weekends are great for that. I usually do it. My son still naps during the day believe it or not, so I end up put him down for a nap at like 12/30 1:00 and I usually get about two hours out of him where he's sleeping. That's amazing. And I'll just sit and noodle on like you gotta have that free time in your brain to just noodle on.

Okay, what is this new thing gonna look like? Or what are we like marketing? Like, what are we doing? So yeah, yeah, man, that's, that's it. You're a stud. Yeah, you're a. Stud. We try. What, what content are you are you into these days? Are you into books? Are you into podcasts? Like what do you if you're listening to stuff or having inputs, what are they? Yeah, it's funny. People will hate me for this. I don't really read a lot because I don't really, I don't know, I just don't have a lot of time. But, well, I don't prioritize it, let's put it that way.

I do have the time. I just don't prioritize it. For me, there are a few books or there's one book in particular that I really enjoyed reading, which is the hard thing about hard things. One of my advisors, actually, Brian, he recommended that to me. I really enjoyed reading that. It really talks, it talks about the founder story and just like the, the, the stuff you mentally go through, which is I think super important. Outside of that, I mean, podcast wise, I, I, I move in and out of like various different topics. Like sometimes it's parenting stuff 'cause you know, that's like making the switch from work to home is hard.

Yeah, that's why I don't work from home. I, I have an office, so this is my so that 10 minute drive. Like I can switch, but then I, I'm not a big celebrity person. Like I don't like they're to me, they're normal people. I would get excited if I met the rock. That's just, that's just, you know, big dude works out, has a lot of discipline, whatever. Seems like a great person. So content wise, yeah, it's it's really I read the odd book and then I spend a lot of time on LinkedIn, as you know, so so and having these types of conversations, I learn a lot from them.

And yeah, that's that's it. That's me. You know, I like basic TV just to turn on like Gold Rush. If you haven't watched the great show, they do the same thing every episode. They dig a hole, they put the gold in the sluice box and then they see how much they got. It's. Awesome. There's like 17 seasons of it. Dude, you're incredible. Thank you so much for doing this. I really appreciate you and I'm so excited to see where Beal goes and like where you go. And yeah, for anyone who hasn't seen on LinkedIn, your LinkedIn content is is unreal. We try, you know, we have fun with it.

It's good. It's it's. It just looks so nice, like all your your video is so crisp, like your microphone is perfect, like it's unbelievable and honestly but for. 150 bucks you can get a sweet set up, you know, like it's it's true. You gotta and you gotta have like that's not a fake background, right? Like that's I. Dude I know I'm your background is like on point you said. Always watching, just get a nice space. Although we're moving offices, I don't know how that's going to work. Like it's I don't, it's not as like I have my own room here. Like yeah, I do.

And it's going to be more open, but it's more open. It's like open concept warehouse type situation. OK, I'm going to. I'm going to bother everybody with my stuff. Right, right. Like, hey, I'm recording over here. Stop. Shut. Up every shut up. I need like an on air button, you know, just like a big red. Oh man, Yeah, man. Look, it's it's been a pleasure. Thanks for having me. It's good. You got to enjoy doing hard things, you know, and that's it. And that's I like it. I wouldn't. Go amazing, so amazing amazing. Well dude, thank you again. I so appreciate you and I'm looking forward to wishing you much continued success.

Oh, if if people want to find out more about you, what's the best way for them to get in contact or learn more about? Me, LinkedIn is probably the easiest way. So it's Maximilian Glotti, Maximilian spelled with 1L. Or just look up meow continuity on LinkedIn. I'm pretty easy to find and happy to share the story with anybody. And you know, I try to be more involved with the the startup community because again, it's time and got to give back. So yeah, all good, but no thanks for having me on. Loved it, dude. Thank you. I appreciate you. All right.

See you, Joe. All right. Bye everybody.