EP 116 - FieldMagic - Glen Richmond

Transcript

Roland Siebelink - Host (00:45)
Hello, everybody, pleasure to have you tuned in again for all there is to learn about scaling mid-stage startup companies. Today's guest studied robotics and spent his early career building embedded systems for companies like Trimble and Caterpillar. Then he started a CRM consultancy that grew across five cities on three continents and won multiple Australian Business Awards. But here's where his story gets really interesting.

After a decade helping field service companies fix their broken workflows, he stopped consulting on the problem and built the solution. He launched a SaaS platform, completely self-funded, no outside investment. And then he almost killed it. He'd over-engineered everything: enterprise, architecture, multi-environment pipelines, heavy QA gates, releases stretched to every few months, innovation slowed to a crawl right from the outset. In his own words:

"We either need to ship faster or we are gonna die." So he ripped out the red tape and started shipping every week and that one change unlocked everything. With that, everybody, meet my guest, Glenn Richmond, the founder and CEO of Fieldmagic. Welcome to Scaling Without Breaking,

Glenn Richmond (01:58)
Thanks, Roland, for having me. Looking forward to the chat.

Roland Siebelink - Host (02:03)
told me you overbuilt your product for enterprise scale from day one! downtime, multi-tenant, the works. And then you realized that was actually holding you back. Now, that's an interesting story for our audience. Walk me through that moment.

Glenn Richmond (02:16)
Yeah, for sure. There's elements of that that worked really, really well and continue to service really, really well even today. But when we started to build the product, and this was actually the third iteration, we designed it properly as a pure SaaS platform.

We designed everything the right way to scale: zero downtime deployments, full DevOps pipelines, all that sort of thing. But we also had multiple different environments. had  local development, UAT, staging production, which is great if you're doing big enterprise projects.

But what it meant was that it took us months to deliver and deliver value to our end customers.

I guess probably a couple of years back now, we decided that we  needed to be able to deliver those features much, much more quickly and really be able to react to what we were hearing from our customers. moved from releasing every couple of months to releasing every week. And because we'd done that work to do zero downtime, proper DevOps, unit testing, all that sort of thing, we were able to deliver new updates every weekend. To be honest, it's often even more often than that these days. It's sometimes two or three times a week.

Roland Siebelink - Host (03:42)
Okay, it's not just a move fast and break things, but actually the second moniker that Meta has: Move fast, unstable infrastructure.

Glenn Richmond (03:53)
Move fast, try not to break things. but move fast regardless. Yeah.

Roland Siebelink - Host (03:59)
What does that do to your team, Glenn?  didn't have a huge team at that time. And I guess people were in a certain habit at that stage. How painful was that for them to adopt a different culture or had they been waiting for that moment for years?

Glenn Richmond (04:14)
Yeah,  it's a funny situation. It causes some initial stress, but it actually means that in the long run, things get a lot easier because  causes the initial stress of - you're a bit nervous about doing this so regularly, That's something you get used to. But what we were also doing, because we were taking so long to deliver the features that we wanted to deliver that our customers were asking for, we were spending a lot of time on customer service and customer support. Over time, that went down. It balanced Customers were able to ask for something and if it fit within our roadmap, we were able to deliver it within a week, two weeks, things like that. And that just meant we had happier customers. was obviously advantages  in doing that.

Roland Siebelink - Host (05:00)
In the sense of not having to do manual work that could now be supported by the platform or more having to field the same request  20 times in a row before you could actually deliver it.

Glenn Richmond (05:20)
Yeah, both. Not having to do manual workarounds. It's multi-tenant, so it's single code base, everyone gets the same features.  You  solve a problem for one customer, you've solved it for 50 customers. It's good from that standpoint as well.

Roland Siebelink - Host (05:39)
And Fieldmagic is particularly specialized in helping companies organize their field service, scheduling shifts, scheduling appointments, things like that, right?

Glenn Richmond (05:50)
Yeah, general field service, definitely. But anyone that does asset inspections is a huge, element for us. That could be anyone from a waste management company to fire safety to elevator a window manufacturing  company that we're working with at the moment. Anyone that builds, installs and services a product, it's a good fit for all.

Roland Siebelink - Host (06:16)
This is a great example of how you may see a big ocean, but then also are targeting a specific sub-segment inside that where you have a strong competitive advantage.

Glenn Richmond (06:29)
Yeah, exactly. We compete reasonably well in the general field service space. And there's obviously opportunities that come along there we're a good fit for. And generally, in that space, we do well. But if we're talking about who our  ICP is, our ideal customer profile, it's medium to large business that does a heavy amount of asset inspections, defect reporting, quoting for repair, all that sort of thing.

Roland Siebelink - Host (06:58)
Okay, okay, very good. What is making Fieldmagic so special for those that are heavy on asset inspections?

Glenn Richmond (07:07)
It’s the very specific workflows around that particular process. When you go out, you do asset inspections, you need to be able to efficiently log and identify those defects, take photos. It needs to work offline, which is a design problem  in its own situation. It needs to feed seamlessly into reporting for the customer customer, the quoting process, back into a repair job.  You've got annualized reports that need to happen that give a summary of, here are all of your 5,000 assets across a customer. Here are all your defects. Here's what you need to get done by law. Here are the things that are advised but optional - all that workflow, is so it gets quite in depth around what you need to do. We're one of a handful of products that do that and do it well.

Roland Siebelink - Host (08:01)
Many of the people listening to this podcast are technical founders and typically they have to find out over time how to master go-to-market. You're probably one of those, although a while ago because you worked in CRM as well, you must understand something about sales processes.

How did that go for you? Coming from a technical background, learning about marketing sales, and how have you applied that to Fieldmagic right now?

Glenn Richmond (08:31)
ended up doing or starting off as a CRM company, as you say. We were very fortunate  in that  we had some really good advisors throughout our time as a CRM company that really advised us around  how to sell, how to structure our company, things like that, we felt that we...or realised we had a good product fit - this is only after we had enough feedback that we felt like we could then start to put in place all of the  outbound sales systems,  the remarketing, the lead generation strategies that we'd been running at the CRM company as well.

Roland Siebelink - Host (09:17)
Okay, very good. Would you say that that's generally  the advice you would give other founders,  bring people on your board of advisors who cover areas you're not that specialized in?

Glenn Richmond (09:30)
Absolutely, and this is not some amazing insight from me. This was something that I think we fell into, and  looking back on it, I really appreciate it. But people that  honestly know a lot more than you about different subjects really help you,  close down or get to where you want to get to a lot more quickly.

Roland Siebelink - Host (09:55)
For for Fieldmagic, you had your ICP really well defined. How did you organize your go-to-market for Fieldmagic were there any big learnings where you had to pivot or change your approach because the first just didn't work?

Glenn Richmond (10:13)
100%. We actually weren't very well focused to start with. That was our first big mistake. We thought we could build a field service platform that we could just sell to anyone. And very, very quickly that becomes a race to the bottom in terms of price.  The challenge with that is that there's often  not  enough money to really do a good job of the product  or the implementations, things like that.

Roland Siebelink - Host (10:18)
Can I double click on that a little bit because it's something I see so commonly with startup founders? When do you start realizing your target group is actually not specialized enough and/or how do you balance against, well, but then my total available market would shrink, how can I even sell that to myself or to investors?

Glenn Richmond (10:44)
I think for us, it was an expensive mistake. In the early days, where we were really just focused on trying to find product-market fit, we were paying Gartner for leads effectively. They own many of the lead generation websites for software, the likes of GetApp and Software Advice and various others.

Effectively, it's a pay-per-click model. People looking for a certain type of software, you pay to be higher in the list, they go to your website, they fill out a form and you get in touch and you have that discussion. Now, the problem with that is that you end up getting - you get a lot of leads and that's very validating in that it tells you that there's a strong market here. But it also means that you end up talking to everyone. You're paying for the leads.

You're often talking to people that are talking to seven, eight, 10 other providers. Which was actually okay in the early days because there weren't as many competitors. But very quickly we realized that that was not going to allow us to scale. And we found that there was a certain type of customer that where our feature set or set of offerings really fit better than others.  And so we ended up just really accelerating the development around those feature sets and making sure that we were unique in that space. At some point, you're  hooked on these leads from someone like a Gartner and you're paying X thousands of dollars a month for those leads. But 90% of those leads are not really the leads you want. The question becomes, how do you solve that?

Glenn Richmond (12:43)
We wanted to be able to target businesses that were going to be more viable for us and allowed us to provide a much better service. And that simply meant outbound marketing. Reaching out to those customers that met our ICP and having those conversations.

Roland Siebelink - Host (13:00)
Really, the theme you're referring to here is what I see many startups go through, which is from a focus on inbound towards understanding your market better and then really having that particular outbound in mind. And that almost requires extreme focus on just a group that you can reach.

Glenn Richmond (13:13)
It does. Otherwise, how do you structure the messaging? How do you do any of that? If you don't have a very clearly defined ICP and value proposition, it's very hard to do that. And the inbound still plays an important role, but it becomes more of a - I find that it tends to become more of a tool for remarketing.

Your Facebooks and things like that, where you can use them for lead gen, but it's a very broad demographic within there. What we found is that that tends to be something that's really good after we've identified them as an ICP. We've had interaction with them. We've attached a pixel to them, for example, so Meta knows who they are. And then we're feeding messaging to them  based on their interactions with us. The role of that broader media changes from pure inbound to something that's more of an influencing type toolset.

Roland Siebelink - Host (14:18)
Coming back a little bit to the composition of your team on the developer side, in our prep call, you also mentioned that part of the change you had to implement is  getting people to say goodbye to perfection, especially junior developers who are so  fearful of shipping anything that could be seen as anywhere imperfect, but then being slow about it. How did you manage that culture and how do you hire for that?

Glenn Richmond (14:40)
Well, if they're juniors, you don't hire for that. They come out of university with the expectation or with not the expectation, but the experience that they've worked on a project for six months and then they do a big presentation.

It's not this constant shipping. It's interesting because we have a lot of the junior guys that are perhaps very sensitive about whether people will judge them on their code or whatever the case happens to be. They'll work on something for six weeks and not even push it into say a staging environment for the testers and people to give them feedback on. just something that you have the conversation with them and say, hey, it's no big deal if you put  it out there and it's not great, that's okay. We'll give you feedback. We'll improve it, but if you don't put it out there,  you're still going to get the same feedback. It's just that it's going to be three months down the track because we haven't seen it yet. It's better to get that feedback early and make those mistakes and then fix it. It's just a learning process and it probably takes someone that's straight out of university, it takes them probably a year before they can really deliver too much that's useful. You just pay for that first year  almost as a training exercise and then probably from the second year onwards they tend to start to really produce some good stuff.

Roland Siebelink - Host (16:15)
There's been a lot of talk about  the dearth of juniors in programming, where AI is taking over some of that role. How do you look at that from a practical point of view and how is this working at Fieldmagic?

Glenn Richmond (16:31)
Well, you always need the senior guys. You need senior developers and architects to make sure that you design a product that's going to scale and going to do the right thing longer term. I don't think AI - it can make recommendations and things like that, but really that critical thinking of, if we design up with these indexes and do that and use that technology stack, we know  that's going to scale versus here's a bunch of code that achieves the outcome but isn't going to scale. You always need those senior developers. If you don't invest in those juniors, you're never going to get the seniors.  I think in this situation, I think junior developers are still really great because you need them to come through the system. But AI as a tool to help them get over their roadblocks is an amazing tool set to have for them. As long as they don't just always rely on throwing it into AI and hoping it gets the right need to do.

Roland Siebelink - Host (17:38)
So no matter how much AI you use, you're still going to be responsible for the results, right?

Glenn Richmond (17:43)
Yeah. And AI is amazing.  Even when ChatGPT was first coming out, I had some strong debates  with my senior developers who refused to use AI. And I was like, "Man, it's a great tool." This thing you're delivering in five days, you'll deliver it in two. Just use the tool. Just don't fully rely on it. You still need to be a developer. It's finding that balance more than anything.

Roland Siebelink - Host (17:55)
Glenn, just asking a little bit was it always that obvious that you were going to be such a successful founder? Where did you grow up? What was your childhood like? What inspired you to become this founder?

Glenn Richmond (18:24)
I probably would have been a lot safer just following the traditional engineering path. in the hills in a place called Kalamunda in Perth, Western Australia. Really, it's kind of a bush. It's not quite country, but it feels very rural.

My mom was a teacher and school principal. My dad, he actually worked for one company his whole life and  worked his way up the ladder. was always important to my parents. They pushed us down that path, which was good. We didn't want for anything. went without food or anything like that. But also, I think my family was living for various periods from paycheck to paycheck. We definitely didn't grow up in a wealthy type

Roland Siebelink - Host (19:17)
Does that still influence your potential frugality as a founder at this stage?

Glenn Richmond (19:29)
I think it gets built into your DNA almost.

I think how I got into technology is an interesting story actually, because my mum, she would work at all these government schools and they never had any money  for any  fancy computers or things like that.

Whatever they got, they had to make last for a long time. What she used to do is she used to, they'd have all these 286, 386, 486 computers. This is back in the nineties, right? And even then they were obsolete, but they had them there and they were good educational tools, but they would break.

My mom used to bring these computers home and say, "See if you can fix them." And  so I did. pull apart all the different parts and find what worked, find what didn't, rebuild them. Out of maybe four or five computers, you might get two or three that were working and they could use again. And then eventually,  you did that enough times and they said, oh, you can keep that one that you rebuilt.

And so I had  an old, I think my first computer was a 286 or a 386, something like that. Nothing fancy, but you learn how that stuff works. From there, obviously I  was pretty decent at math and sciences and  got pushed into engineering and was fortunate enough that I And it was actually not really me that had the founder mindset. I had a good friend of mine at university, really had a very entrepreneurial mindset and decided to start a business with - it was four of us initially. we were young, we were students and we didn't know what we were doing. Overconfident and tried to build some things and obviously it didn't work. But set that founder bug, that desire to want to create something.

Roland Siebelink - Host (21:48)
The wheel in motion, yeah.

I love to keep talking for a long time, Glenn, but we're almost running out of time. Last question is when you meet with younger founders, people who are a bit behind you, what is the one piece of advice you would give them?

Glenn Richmond (22:11)
First of all, I encourage them because I think it's awesome that they're trying to do their own thing. One, back yourself. But also, if you want to get there quicker,  find some good coaches or advisors and take that advice from people that have been there and done that because it really is one of the most helpful things that I've had. I didn't necessarily actively seek it out when I was in my twenties, but I have  at various periods and it's been a really, really helpful thing to do.

Roland Siebelink - Host (22:49)
Excellent. Okay, well, very good. Glenn, this was an amazing conversation. I'm sure the listeners will love this. For anyone interested in more information about the company, it's fieldmagic.co, I believe. And Glenn is, of course, also on LinkedIn. And if people know me and they don't know Glenn yet and want an introduction, I'm always happy to provide. With that, Glenn, is there anything specific that they should go on your website to download or to check out?

Glenn Richmond (23:01)
Yeah, that's right.

If you would like a demo,  you can book a demo online or you can sign up for a free trial as well. That's all easy enough to do on the website. It is something that's a very powerful piece of software, so it's probably worthwhile getting someone to show it to you. We're happy  to do that at any time.

Roland Siebelink - Host (23:36)
And I'm very happy to have had you on the show, Glenn. This was amazing. After meeting in Perth, Thank you so much for taking the time and being on the show telling us your story.

Glenn Richmond (23:46)
Thanks, Roland. I appreciate your time.

Roland Siebelink - Host (23:48)
Thanks for the audience as well. This brings us to the end of this episode and we'll see you on the next one.

Shipping Every Week: The Release Strategy That Finally Unlocked Fieldmagic's Growth | EP 116

Show Notes

Transcript