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The Human Side of Tech Adoption (w/Collin Graves) [PODCAST]

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We’ve got another episode of the B2B Founder Stories podcast for you! This time, our guest is Collin Graves, the founder and CEO of North Labs. He discusses his background in the U.S. Air Force and describes the tremendous influence his father’s advice and entrepreneurial decisions made on his own career choices. Additionally, Collin talks about the evolution of his company’s identity, the profound value of “putting the right people in the right seats,” and the impact of AI technologies on businesses.

“[My father] went off on his own and started an electrical contracting company, and watching him do it and feel so liberated from ‘I’m no longer a number in a department at a large organization, I get to call my own shots, I get to live and die by the decisions I make, and I get to put my stamp on everything I do’ was really attractive to me. So, watching him succeed with that, I kind of figured out, even before I had joined the military, that that’s what I wanted to do.”

Collin Graves, Founder of North Labs

Transcript of Podcast Episode 17: The Human Side of Tech Adoption (w/Collin Graves, Founder of North Labs)

Julian Lumpkin: Welcome back to B2B Founder Stories with SuccessKit. As a reminder, if you need help with Case Studies or Video Testimonials, visit us at SuccessKit.io. In this episode, I interview Collin Graves. He is the founder and CEO of North Labs, a client of SuccessKit. We talk about his experience in the military and what ultimately led him to become an entrepreneur. We also discuss his early adoption of cloud technologies like AWS and his thoughts on how AI technologies like ChatGPT will affect the broader business world. I hope you enjoy the episode. Collin, thank you so much for joining.

Collin Graves: Good to be here.

Julian Lumpkin: All right, so, to kick us off can you give us, in a few sentences, tell us about North Labs?

Collin Graves: Sure. North Labs is a veteran-owned cloud data analytics partner. Mostly for small and mid-market organizations, but essentially, we help organizations along their journey to what we call data empowerment, which is what most people think of with data analytics, data enablement, which is how do we get our data in a place where it’s usable data operations, which is how do we make that enablement? Continuous and then data activation, which is once enablement and operations are generating insights, how do we take action on those insights?

Julian Lumpkin: Nice. And as a quick aside, I know we’ve done some Case Studies for you, so I know firsthand you guys do great work for your clients. Can you tell us, from a high level, a little bit about the structure of your company, number of employees, how long you’ve been in business, kind of the general size and structure of the business?

Collin Graves: Sure. I’m the sole owner of North Labs, just as I was with the last group that I ran. I used to run a very early Amazon Web Services partner company called Cloud CTO back through 2014, but I started North Labs in 2016. We have a few dozen folks today. on the full-time side, we do have a bench of maybe a dozen or so contractors who help us out on a flex basis, but I’m still the sole owner and own 100% of the company. We’re structured as an LLC and try and keep things pretty simple from that standpoint.

Julian Lumpkin: Do you have an executive team, or is it still kind of you at the top and everyone else?

Collin Graves: I do. I have a pretty well-defined killer leadership team. Brandy Thill is our vice president of operations. Runs everything on the operational and financial side of the business. She was my first hire at North Labs, so she’s been on this crazy roller coaster ride with me as long as anyone. Jared Herman runs our sales at North Labs. Jeff Strauss is in charge of our engineering and product, and Mackenzie Krebsbach is in charge of our customer success and delivery side of the house. And then we have Dana Borror who is by title, she is an executive assistant. By what she actually does, she’s more like a chief of staff and or superhero.

Julian Lumpkin: That’s really interesting. How did that relationship start? Did she start as an executive assistant and sort of take those roles on, or how did that come about?

Collin Graves: I met Dana through a colleague, actually at a close industry friend who runs a really well-renowned IT services group in the end-user computing space. He has since exited from the business. But I had met Dana and interacted with Dana through our organizations, collaborating on the Amazon Web Services side of the house. And when she became available, I quickly jumped on that, knowing that for the relationship she had with Darren previously, that she was so much more than an executive assistant and really helped fill in every conceivable gap within his organization. And I trusted she would do the same for us. And obviously she has.

Julian Lumpkin: Yeah. I feel like that’s such an underappreciated role: the person who really wants to help and make your life easy, but then can also really see the bigger picture and do more. I think it’s a very underutilized role because everyone who has someone in that role raves about that person, in my experience.

Collin Graves: Exactly. If you’re willing to make the investment in sort of leveling up. The biggest thing for me was letting go of certain tasks and activities and things like that. I’m definitely somebody who wants to be involved in the minutiae. I wouldn’t call myself a micromanager, but I like to be busy. I like to be involved with all the various areas of the business. But it was Dana who really came to the table with the rest of the leadership team and said, “Okay, that’s great that you want to be involved. We love you for it, but you’re actually going to stifle our ability to scale as a business because you are one person. Sometimes you like to golf early on a Friday, and we need continuity in place.” So, she’s been great when it comes to challenging the status quo along with the rest of the leadership team. if I’ve gotten anything right when it comes to building North Labs, it’s been putting the right people in the right seats.

Julian Lumpkin: Nice. I actually want to come back to that. But let’s start from the very beginning about kind of how you got here. So, what did you want to be when you were growing up?

Collin Graves: That’s a great question. I certainly didn’t know what the cloud was when I was growing up. I think for most of my childhood, I was set on being a doctor. I wanted to be specifically an ophthalmologist and do eye surgery, which is a unique flavor of wanting to be a doctor, for sure. But I know I went through the astronaut side of the house and the pilot side of the house. which perhaps led me to the Air Force and some of my other pursuits. But I think for most of my childhood, it was around medicine. And frankly, when I was getting ready to go to college, I had been accepted into several schools for premed. So, I was sort of on that path before realizing that I wasn’t entirely sure that’s what I wanted to do, and decided to enlist in the military instead.

Julian Lumpkin: Well, tell us about your experience in the military, briefly.

Collin Graves: Sure. Spent five years in the Air Force. Started in Ellsworth, South Dakota. Shout out. Ellsworth quickly translated into a very long deployment overseas. The B-1, which is—I was an aircraft mechanic—the B-1 is the most active aircraft since 9/11, and it’s also the least mission-capable aircraft in the military’s fleet, which means it’s broken all of the time, yet needs to fly the most. So, what a way to take sort of an ego-driven, not super mechanically inclined 18-year-old kid and say, welcome to the real world. You’re going to figure out how to do this in the heat of the Middle East. so spent a couple of years at Ellsworth, then transferred to Ramstein, Germany. Started as an aircraft mechanic there, became all systems qualified, and actually toward the end of my enlistment was a flying crew chief helping special Operations Forces for NATO. So, I was able to fly with a lot of the most impressive people the military has to offer which is, again, a great way to snuff out the ego of a young, twenty-something kid to, say, two really cool pilots, a loadmaster 82 Navy Seals and Collin, who at the time vaguely resembled Harry Potter. And it was quite a way to sort of usher in my adulthood.

Julian Lumpkin: So, most of the people I speak to and interview kind of have this kind of classic entrepreneurial background where they were setting up lemonade stands when they were at seven and kind of always knew they wanted to be an entrepreneur. Sounds like that wasn’t quite the case for you. Was there any point in your career where you kind of realized that you wanted to work for yourself or start your own thing?

Collin Graves: Yeah, and don’t get me wrong, I did this sort of side hustle. I’ll mow your lawn for a few bucks, I’ll trade some baseball cards, that sort of thing. But that was always more just to fuel hobbies and things like that. Really, for me, it was watching my father go from a long-decorated career at Medtronic, where he helped invent different types of pacemakers and things like that. And then he went to a contract engineering group to help design the original Keurig coffee machine. But he went off on his own and started an electrical contracting company. My father is a master electrician. He’s the smartest person I know. And watching him do it go off on his own and feel so liberated. Granted, he works harder than just about anybody I’ve ever met, but that liberation from “I’m no longer a number in a department at a large organization, I get to call my own shots, I get to live and die by the decisions I make, and I get to put my stamp on everything I do” was really attractive to me. So, watching him succeed with that, I kind of figured out, even before I had joined the military, that that’s what I wanted to do. So, now I can say that I’ve worked for the largest corporation ever with the Department of Defense, and the organizations that I’ve started or advised or invested since then.

Julian Lumpkin: And about how old were you or at what point in your career did your dad make that transition?

Collin Graves: I must have been 14 or 15. So, definitely old enough to recognize what was going on. And the shift from him wearing a suit and tie every day to really being able to flex his muscles on the contracting side of the house and make his own hours… He was very available for all of my baseball pursuits as a big baseball player growing up, for my entire childhood. And all of a sudden, he was able to spend a lot of time with me, honing that craft and practicing, and even helping with travel requirements and things like that. So, it was really, I think, impactful for me as a kid to see all of a sudden that my father had all of this. He could adjust his schedule to spend time with his family, which I know a lot of kids notice when that happens.

Julian Lumpkin: That’s interesting. So, it sounds like maybe you didn’t explicitly know at the time your goal was to be an entrepreneur, but the seed was planted, even though you had some other things to do first.

Collin Graves: Exactly.

Julian Lumpkin: Nice. So, let’s talk about starting North Labs. What were you doing right before? How did the idea come to you? Tell us what led up to you starting North Labs.

Collin Graves: Yeah, so we got to take a journey back to when I was in the military. In 2008, I first learned about Amazon Web Services. Could have been 2007. And my father was the one who told me about it, which, if you know my father, that’s ironic, because for the longest time, he navigated with the King’s Atlas instead of the GPS. He’s an old-school, no-frills sort of guy. But he told me about AWS, and I started looking into it again. I was a hydraulics mechanic on the B-1s on the flight line at Ellsworth, and I went, “This is something that I need to learn.” So, I actually became one of the first ten fully certified AWS folks on the planet. And while I was living in Germany, I started my first company called Cloud CTO, which was really designed to help organizations in that really early cloud computing conversation, help them migrate workloads to the cloud. But more specifically, we built a lot of document storage solutions for regional construction companies. of course, now we have the likes of Dropbox or Box. I was not smart enough to think like Drew Houston and create a SaaS platform out of what we were doing. So, I built a Dropbox-esque type of solution about 20 times for various organizations while I ran Cloud CTO and never had the bright idea to make it more repeatable. But I sold that company in 2014. I had been out of the military for about nine months. I signed a two-year non-compete that was the size of a Charles Dickens novel. So, I consulted out west with various groups who were getting their start moving to AWS. So, in the Palo Alto Silicon Valley area, Chicago area, obviously, Minneapolis where I was living at the time. And then the night my non-compete ran dry, I started North Labs. And we originally started North Labs to sort of be a continuation of what Cloud CTO had done, just in a much more mature market. It was a lot easier to start talking about cloud to people versus back in 2010, 2011, people thought I was insane talking about cloud computing. So, we originally started that to focus exclusively on AWS. Once again, it wasn’t until about 2018 when I realized that the cloud data analytics side of the conversation was really where I wanted to be. There’s a much more tangible use case. You can measure outcomes a lot easier. And I knew that we’d be able to take the clout we had developed with Amazon over the years and pair that with other industry-leading tools to really have a unique DNA when it came to cloud data analytics providers who typically don’t have quite the same chops from an infrastructure or It perspective as they might. More on the reporting or dashboarding side of the house. So, I considered us a very true, full-stack cloud data analytics partner fairly early on in North Labs’s journey.

Julian Lumpkin: What was the structure of the company when you just started? Did you start it on your own? Did you have some partners? How did it begin?

Collin Graves: I was a one-man band for a while. I was working as a software engineer for a friend’s health It company, building out APIs when my non-compete ran up. And I would sell deals. I would act as the finance department, I’d act as the engineer and actually build the solutions, and I’d act as the delivery manager to actually pass along the solutions that had been developed. So, it was a lot of work. I very quickly exceeded my available capacity. And that’s when I brought on Brandy Thill, who’s still with the organization. She’s sort of my number two at the company. She’s our vice president of operations and comes from a CPA background. Just such a wealth of knowledge. And so she was able to work with me and I’d make a sale. I’d be responsible for engineering. But she would keep a close eye on the financial aspect of things and the delivery aspects of things to make sure that I didn’t burn the house down. And that’s, I think, what allowed us to have early success, because had all of those responsibilities remained relegated to me for the long term, I would have stifled our ability to grow early on as an organization. So, making the decision to bring Brandy in was I look back on it as the best decision I ever made but perhaps also the most impactful decision I ever made.

Julian Lumpkin: And when you started the company, was it always the plan to build a company with dozens of people, or was it initially just going to be you as a consultant? And then it sort of grew into that? what was your goal from the beginning?

Collin Graves: Yeah, we are experiencing the goal that I put in place for North Labs today. I never wanted to be a super small group. I also never wanted to be a thousand-person organization. I think it’s important for somebody of my makeup to remain close to all of the people within the business. For me, it’s about building a tribe. It’s about really controlling quality and repeatability within the business. And so for us, the goal has always been if we get somewhere between 100 and 150 employees, I think that’ll be good enough. We’ll have hit our growth goals from a revenue perspective, and we’ll be able to support those with that many people. And it’ll be large enough to where we can have a conversation, really, with any organization, but small enough to where we can still be considered boutique and fast-moving, which to me is really important. I never want to be seen as a larger SI that has gotten ahead of its skis in terms of size and is now sort of overly complex and slow and kind of gunky. I always want to be seen as sort of the Navy Seals of cloud data analytics.

Julian Lumpkin: Interesting. And I’m curious, how long were you on your own for? Were you a team of one?

Collin Graves: I was a team of one for probably the first nine or ten months of the business. I think it was just shy of a year. Brandy and I had been speaking about things, but I hadn’t yet really convinced her to move over. I think she was eager and willing to do so. But really it got to a point where I was noticing that I was going to start dropping the chainsaws I was juggling if I didn’t have more capacity. So, that’s when I sat her down and said, “Okay, we got to do this thing, and you’re the one who I need.”

Julian Lumpkin: Got it. And how many years did it take to get to this point around where you are now, where you have what you said, the goal-realized dozens of employees. How long did that take?

Collin Graves: Yeah, I’d say that Brandy and I sort of made things work for about a year and a half after I brought her on. We brought in one other engineer, one other early engineer, John, who was really critical to helping get some early engineering capabilities off the ground. But we hadn’t really solidified our identity as an organization. It was one of those things where we were selling a lot of AWS-based services all across their portfolio. Right. Remember when I started with AWS, they had two services, and when we were talking about when I started North Labs, they had 170 generally available services. So, there’s a bit of an identity crisis that occurs when you go, well, back then, I could just say I was an AWS partner. Now I need to get more niche down and more specific. And so we were accepting work sort of all across the board from the AWS portfolio perspective. And that worked for a while. But as you know, Julian, the more delivery line items you have, the more processes required and the more complexity comes with those processes. So, we sort of acted in a very ad hoc manner for probably that year and a half after Brandy joined, before we realized, hey, migrations are cool, but migrations are super complex. They’re super thankless. And you’re never the good guy in a migration conversation. It’s always, well, why isn’t this done yet? What do you mean? Things are broken again? So on and so forth. For me. I wanted a value narrative where I could go to executives and say, “I really want to sit you down and talk about how we can give you tangible, measurable impact that you can tie a dollar amount to at the end of our engagement together or at the end of each year of our engagement together.” And that’s where that shift to cloud data analytics occurred. But it took us a few years to figure that out.

Julian Lumpkin: Interesting. So, it sounds like you have a kind of interesting balance between putting processes in place to let people grow and run the business on their own, but you still like to stay pretty hands-on. So, what is your day-to-day like? Give us a typical day in the life of Collin.

Collin Graves: These days, the team has done such a good job removing items off my plate. I used to be responsible for accounts receivable, accounts payable, sales architecture, design, a little bit of everything. And these days, I’d say I’m more of a politician than anything. For me, it’s all about forging relationships, it’s all about unlocking additional value within our customers, getting them to speak about the work that we’ve done together, showcasing them in certain ways and then working to build sort of brand awareness in engagements like this. so that to me is I’m definitely available as a utility player whenever I’m called upon. But I will say that I don’t create any choke points within the business anymore, which is something that I truly never thought I’d be able to say. And I’m very thankful to be able to say it because anybody on my team would say that I’m very good at choking processes. Out. If we need to wait on call and to get something done. So, I’m the biggest cheerleader for the company. For me, it’s about removing obstacles from my people. I call it jumping on grenades. So, if ever there’s an unfortunate conversation to have with a customer, if ever sales needs help getting a new customer across the line, or even if it’s just a bit of political ah, sort of thank you, going on a little roadshow, whatever is needed I’m willing and able to do it. But the business is no longer dependent on me to thrive.

Julian Lumpkin: It’s really interesting, everything you say resonates. You and I come from very different kind of backgrounds as far as skill sets and different companies. But a lot of what you say about the type of company you want to build and the type of leader you want to be is exactly what I’m striving towards, so definitely appreciate those points. I know we’re running up on time here. To close out, I’d like to ask you something just kind of topical little outside of this conversation as such an intelligent person. I’m curious for your perspective on whether people are overreacting or underreacting to the changes that are coming from AI in the B2B world. What are your thoughts?

Collin Graves: I think ChatGPT is a real thing. I know that we’re currently, when you think of Gartner’s hype curve, we are certainly on the uphill portion of it right now, where ChatGPT is sort of—”impacting” is the kind word, “infecting” is sort of the little nastier word—but it’s impacting basically every corner of a B2B sales lifecycle for sure. I think we’re going to see use cases that really shine, I think, asynchronous customer support could really be helpful. So, you’re not dependent on connecting with an agent and being on hold for 45 minutes, ChatGPT’s ability to make inferences for non-mission-critical things like that, I think could be really helpful. But we have to remember that ChatGPT is a neural model that depends on being good enough from a reasoning standpoint. So, whenever we talk about really mission-critical things that involve say, people’s livelihood, medical diagnoses for example, or anything to do with your finances, whatever that might be, I’m a little bit more wary about where that ecosystem sits today. Now we’ll talk again when ChatGPT 56789 comes out because those are only going to become more impressive. But the philosophy of ChatGPT and what it is, is this notion of “how do I narrow broad understanding and get as narrow as possible within reason?” that doesn’t come with 100% certainty, 100% accuracy, so on and so forth. So, it’s a long-winded way of me saying I think it’s interesting. I certainly don’t treat it as the end all, be all that some people do. If I looked at my LinkedIn newsfeed today, you’d think that we’re all using it for every aspect of a sales lifecycle. We don’t need doctors anymore because ChatGPT’s got it. We don’t need to model data anymore because ChatGPT’s got it. I don’t buy that.

Julian Lumpkin: Let alone content writers like my business.

Collin Graves: Right? Exactly. And I think that domain specificity is a really real thing. I think ChatGPT is going to get really good at creating the most generic form of content available. But when you talk about domain specificity, it’s not going to be able to get there, as well as people who understand the human side of the house and connecting those dots. So, that’s where I sit today. I’m willing to be open-minded about ChatGPT’s continued development. I do think it’s useful for certain tasks, but I don’t think it’s the panacea that everyone’s treating it as.

Julian Lumpkin: Yeah, I see things very similarly, and I would note that you constantly hear people talking about using it to create content, but you don’t hear anyone talking about actually enjoying and liking the content. So, it’s kind of like, hey, we can make a lot of things, but no one really seems to actually like digesting it. My limited experience, it’s helpful for very simple tasks, but unless your inputs are perfect, it’s not really saying anything interesting. It’s giving very generic, boring content.

Collin Graves: My perspective, and that’s what it’s designed to do. So, it’s doing its job. But what it’s not advertising is replacing human emotion, human feel, human intimacy that I think maybe some people are saying it can do. I think we’re seeing that that’s simply not the case in most domains.

Julian Lumpkin: Great. Well, to wrap up here, if you just tell our audience where they can find you, I know, I follow you on LinkedIn. Your content is great there. Where should people go to follow North Labs and everything you’re doing?

Collin Graves: Yeah, I’m not on social media other than LinkedIn. So, LinkedIn.com, and Collin-with-two-Ls Graves. Follow me on there. I like to post about what it takes to successfully build data and analytics capabilities through the view of an executive leader, as opposed to maybe somebody working in the data engineering realm. So, I approach it from a more high-level executive perspective, but I’m always willing to act as a sounding board for people as they’re going on this journey. I’ve been around the block many times and have seen what works really well, and more importantly, have seen what doesn’t work at all. So, I’m always working to make myself available as a resource to our broader community.

Julian Lumpkin: Great, well thanks again for doing this.

Collin Graves: Thanks, Julian.

Julian Lumpkin: Thanks for listening. I hope you enjoyed the conversation, and we’ll see you next time on our channel.

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Stef Mates

Stef Mates, SuccessKit's Creative Director, has been writing, designing, editing, and managing a variety of content types for several different industries for more than 15 years. She started at the company as a freelancer in November 2019 and became an official part of the team in June 2021.

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