In this demystifying episode, Brian Childress, Owner of BrianChildress.co, shares how he uses his deep understanding of the technology landscape to be able to provide valuable insights and guidance that help drive strategic decision-making to his clients.
You will discover:
– When technology is a distraction rather than the answer
– Why you want your technology to be boring
– The paramount importance of simplicity
Episode Transcript
Scott Ritzheimer
Hello, hello and welcome. Welcome once again to the secrets of the high demand coach and I’m here today with Brian Childress. Now Brian is a husband. He’s a father. He’s a technologist and an avid adventurer. And as a technical adviser with a strong background in software engineering, cloud computing, and cybersecurity, he is experienced in helping both CTOs and CEOs to make the right technical decisions for their organizations. He understands the challenges that leaders face when it comes to technology. And that’s why he takes a very pragmatic approach focusing on delivering tangible results that impact business performance. He’s an inventor, and was awarded two patents for software designs. He’s in an industry thought leader as well in software design and development. And he’s here with us today, Brian, welcome to the show. So exciting to have you here. Before we jump into all the work that you’re doing a CTO CEOs founders in the like, I’d love to hear just a little bit of the story. What were you doing before stepping into this full time? And how did you ultimately decide to make the leap?
Brian Childress
Well, I’ve been doing, you know, helping out founders and startups for most of my career, you know, I’ve been in software engineering software architecture for about 15 years, professionally, writing code developing and scaling systems. And you know, before that, I really wasn’t in technology very much at all. Kind of interesting, my background is much more in outdoor adventure and adventure sports. And so coming into technology was quite a bit of a shift. But I really found that technology is is my sweet spot. And really, you know, I’ve had some great success over here.
Scott Ritzheimer
Fantastic, fantastic. I’ve got a what I feel is a pretty big question coming out of the gate. And that is, how do we really determined whether technology is the answer, or if it’s actually a distraction?
Brian Childress
My gut would tell me, it’s oftentimes a distraction. And the reason I say that is we try and leverage technology to solve problems that we may not even have. And ultimately, if we adopt a technology too soon, then we start creating problems. And so in my experience, it’s really important for us to solve the problem to figure out what it is that we’re trying to do for our business for our customers. And then we just use technology as a tool to help us solve the problem better, faster, quicker, cheaper. But if we start with the technology too soon, it oftentimes puts us in a bad place.
Scott Ritzheimer
Yeah, I could not agree more with this. And I love that it’s coming from someone who provides technical solutions. I think that’s the real kind of, because I can say it, but I don’t promote program code. So there’s an agency thing there. So walk us through, tell us about a situation where you help someone do this, where you help them recognize, hey, let’s solve the real problem first, and then build the technology or maybe even found out they didn’t need to build a technology.
Brian Childress
A lot of times what ends up happening, right, we, as technologists, we get really excited about all the new cool, fun, exciting tools that are out there, right AI or new friends these days, we’re trying to force that into everything that we do. And ultimately, we just don’t need it. I’m thinking back to a group that I worked with probably early 2022. And I came into the project, and they had really nothing was working end to end. And when I joined the project, we had about three weeks to deliver a fully functioning working system, or it was just kind of a complete waste of the entire investment. And so when I came in, I took a look around and I really stepped back and started with from first principles and said, Okay, what what is the thing that we’re trying to do? What are we trying to solve, and we’re just going to leverage technology to do it. And unfortunately, the team was just so overwhelmed with the options that were available to them, that they had adopted almost every technology or architectural pattern available to them at the time. And really what I did was I came in and said, Hey, we don’t need about 80% of this, right, some of the design, some of the ideas are good. But most of the complexity that we have here is just unnecessary. So came in and completely ripped that away. And then just started with a very, very basic architecture, very basic set of technologies. And from there, we were able to get that working within a couple of days, and able to scale to to process millions of records a day, within a matter of a week or so. So just by removing the unnecessary complexity, going back to first principle thinking we were able to get up and running really quickly and ultimately able to deliver on that project successfully. If we had continued down the path that we were on, I don’t think we were gotten there.
Scott Ritzheimer
Sure. One of the challenges that I see somewhat frequently is that a lot of the folks who are making the decisions, right, founder, entrepreneur, even CEO, don’t necessarily have the technical skills to validate whether or not they’re picking the right solution. So it’s it’s really intimidating. It feels like it’s a different language. Sometimes they feel dumb, it’s there’s a whole lot to it, what would you say are some of the biggest challenges that non technical founders and CEOs face as they lead their organization?
Brian Childress
I think some of the biggest challenges that I help non technical founders with is understanding what information they’re receiving, right? Because they’re getting advice from all over. And because technology, if you’re not familiar with, it can feel like this mystery, right? This big black box, you almost accept advice from anyone who sounds like they might know something about computers. And unfortunately, the folks that are really targeting these non technical founders are, you know, either ill informed or, you know, have bad intentions. And so they’re just going to try and, you know, take your money to develop a platform that you ultimately don’t need. And so really, I think the the challenge for non technical founders is just being careful of what advice they receive, and how much of it that they actually follow. Because a lot of the work that I do, Scott is going in and actually taking out technology that CEOs were sold on would be the silver bullet, the thing that was going to help their business grow and scale. Ultimately, it just created more complexity. And they wasted a lot of time and money, unfortunately, and so, you know, just being very careful about that advice they follow.
Scott Ritzheimer
On the flip side of that, I’ve also seen more technology driven leaders are in founders, maybe in a tech company, or have a tech background. And and they can struggle early on a lot as well, what would you say are some of the challenges that they face as they try to.
Brian Childress
In similar challenges, honestly, a lot of times, especially for technical people that are driving some of these decisions, we like to think that, you know, we have just this amazing idea, that’s going to be huge on day one. And we need to build for just a massive level of scale. And when we start to think of scale, the really the only examples that we have, if we don’t have a lot of experience in the industry, are the Googles and the Netflix’s of the world. And so we start to design our systems and the our approach towards what we understand from those organizations, and not necessarily what the business needs, right here. And now, because really, we can get really, really far with a handful of what I consider very boring technologies. We can scale to many, many millions of dollars in annual revenue, many millions of users without the unnecessary complexity of the technologies and the architecture.
Scott Ritzheimer
Yeah, what would you say are boring technologies and what what makes them boring versus something that would be, let’s say, more adventure?
Brian Childress
I think the classic debate is microservices versus a monolithic application as simple node and express type API with a simple Postgres database, right, a lot of those technologies have been around for well over a decade. They’re in big companies, they’re kind of battle tested, right? We have evidence of those technologies and use processing billions of records and being able to really, really handle a significant amount of load. Now, we have to be very strategic and how we architect the system. But those technologies are really easy to understand. There are huge communities around them. There are a lot of developers that have experience with those technologies. So it’s really easy to hire for when I go and adopt these new shiny technologies. It’s much much harder for us to bring in new developers to help and develop, right, there’s a learning curve that’s required. And so I think just adopting those boring technologies, and really focusing in on the business, is our best approach to be able to, you know, had the highest chance of success.
Scott Ritzheimer
Yeah, one of the things I’ve found in a lot of the service businesses that I work with is they have production issues, they’re largely able to solve them by adding more people, right? If you got more customers coming in, you hire more people to help them out and you can kind of, if you play the game, right, you can kind of throw people at the problem, and it’ll be okay. Do you find the same is true in development?
Brian Childress
I think we try to use people as a solution and unfortunately it’s not. I think that’s one of the counter productive measures. is adding more and more people. Because if we don’t have the systems and processes and the culture to be able to support more people, ultimately we’re going to have more people going in the wrong direction. And ultimately, it’s going to, you know, continue to perpetuate what we’re already seeing where we have instability in the system, and we have, you know, just unhappy customers, and you no longer time to get features out to our customers. I think it only exacerbates the problem. Unfortunately, you know, if we have good systems and processes in place, then certainly adding more people allows us to add more features to the system and support more customers as we grow. But I think we have to be very strategic about when we add.
Scott Ritzheimer
So on this vein of adding folks, you know, outsourcing development has been going on for a really long time. It’s, it’s getting faster and faster as other types of roles are getting outsourced as well. People are getting more and more comfortable with it. What are some of the challenges that that you see folks having when they’re outsourcing their development?
Brian Childress
I think whether we’re outsourcing to someone in another state versus another country, the challenges are largely the same. How do we communicate what it is we’re trying to build? How do we appropriately grant access to our systems to our sensitive information, like our credentials and our passwords, having those systems and processes in place, I think are a really big challenge. It’s also around how do I understand if this developer is the right one for my project, and for my organization, do they have the skills that are necessary to be able to support and help me to grow? You know, just being able to really validate if this person has the experience and the expertise that they claim to have, I think that’s a challenge, whether they’re sitting next to me or sitting in another country, I work with a lot of teams and a lot of developers around the world. And there’s a lot of fantastic development talent in other areas of the world. And, you know, if we can really work to better vet those developers, I think we can leverage the kind of collective brain trust that we have globally, and not just what we have locally.
Scott Ritzheimer
So in terms of technological change, the obvious big one right now we haven’t touched on yet is AI, right? And it’s a buzzword for about 1000 million different things. But how do you see AI changing the startup landscape over the next several years?
Brian Childress
I think AI is going to become a foundational component, right? And when I see businesses and how they’re shifting, AI is just going to be become core to every role that we have. In my teams, I’m encouraging every role, whether they’re technical or not, to try and find ways that we can leverage the AI technologies that are available to us today. Right the shadier beauties of the world. How can we leverage those in our business today? How can we AI proof our business or the future so that we can continue to bring human creativity in and we just are leveraging AI as kind of a superpower, right? It’s just it’s supercharging our existing workflows. The same with automation, I think that’s gonna continue to evolve. We’re seeing a lot of startups kind of pop up and really be rappers on top of some of these bigger, you know, chat GBT type technologies, I don’t know how many of those will actually survive, if they aren’t able to solve a real business problem. But if we are able to leverage those platforms and those technologies to solve business problems, I think it’s gonna be huge. I think we’re gonna see a seismic shift in, you know, not only startups, but most industries and most organizations and how we work together.
Scott Ritzheimer
Yeah. How do you see users effectively using AI tools today?
Brian Childress
Most effectively, it’s to do our day to day processes. It’s to avoid the idea of a blank page or a blinking cursor that just how can I leverage existing, you know, understanding of the documents and the knowledge that we have within an organization to kind of get me started. And for me, I’m looking for a way to get started and get to maybe 80% of perfection. And then from there, I can layer on my additional knowledge and understanding and my creative take on things. But I’m able to do that much, much more quickly. I don’t have to start from scratch. I’m at least starting from a solid foundation. And I think that’s really where I’m seeing a lot of it being leveraged. Additionally, how can I better support my customers and being successful and using AI and some of those tools to be able to do that? Because my customers are working on my platform. Just 24/7 AI is able to support them, as well.
Scott Ritzheimer
And so there’s a question I like to ask all my guests, and it’s this, what would you say is the biggest secret that you wish wasn’t the secret at all? What’s that one thing that you wish every founder, CEO, CTO listing today?
Brian Childress
I think for me, it always comes back to simplicity. And we as humans are always looking to make things more complex than they need to be for a variety of reasons. But really, if we can go back and just find the most simple way we can solve a problem, that has been a huge unlock for me. And in my personal and professional growth. A lot of the teams that I work with is, what is the most simple way that we can solve this particular problem. And then really continue to hone and refine and iterate on that particular approach. But when we start with complexity, we only have to add additional complexity in order to to be able to try and solve the problem. So I think in order for us to be successful, I think it all comes down to simplicity.
Scott Ritzheimer
Yeah, so true. So true. Well, there’s folks out there listening in there like me, someone who understand, like someone in the technical world who’s just not trying to sell another tool, but really wants to see us succeed. How can they find more out about you in the work that you do?
Brian Childress
It’s got the best place to find me is probably on LinkedIn. I’m most active on there. Brian-Childress. I encourage everyone to kind of reach out, send me a message, and I’m happy to connect.
Scott Ritzheimer
Well, Brian, thanks so much for being on the show. It’s just a privilege having you here. I absolutely enjoyed this conversation. And for those of you watching listening today, you know that your time and attention mean the world to us. I hope you got as much out of this conversation as I know I did. And I cannot wait to see you next time. Take care.
Contact Guest Name
Brian is a husband, father, technologist, and avid adventurer. As a technical advisor with a strong background in software engineering, cloud computing, and cybersecurity, he is experienced in helping CTOs and CEOs make the right technical decisions for their organizations. He understands the challenges that leaders face when it comes to technology. That’s why he takes a pragmatic approach, focusing on delivering tangible results that impact business performance. He is an inventor and was awarded two patents for his software designs. He is an industry thought leader in software design and development.
Want to learn more about Brian Childress? Check out his website at https://brianchildress.co/ or connect with him on LinkedIn at https://www.linkedin.com/in/brian-childress/
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