EW 046 – How A Leader Got Focused and Turned One Company Into Two Companies To Become More Profitable – Winning With Daniel Haight, President of Darkhorse Analytics

Gordon Sheppard (00:01.748)
Daniel, welcome to the show.

Daniel Haight (00:04.984)
Thank you, Gaurd. It's a pleasure to be here.

Gordon Sheppard (00:07.262)
Well, it's just so great for us to have you here because somewhere in that brain with a big gang behind you, you solve hyper complex data scenarios in this really interesting way that is creative, massive problem solving, global. And it's just a remarkable thing. I've been to your office. I've seen the way that you folks treat your staff. And now I want to apply for a job. If I ever had that brain power, I just wish I did, because it's one of those remarkable places to go and visit. So good for you for setting up a wonderful culture there that's easily

easy to see when we sort of see it when we're there, but there's a lot of people that haven't met you. So if you had to introduce yourself, you know at an event, how would you introduce yourself?

Daniel Haight (00:44.302)
Okay, I would say that I'm a husband and a father of three beautiful children and co-founder of two companies, Dark Horse Visualization and Dark Horse Emergency. We started out actually as one company called Dark Horse Analytics and maybe I'll get into that story at some point in the interview here. But I think my goal in life, at least in business,

is to create a company where Monday mornings are more exciting than Friday afternoons. And that's a long-term goal. And can't say we're quite there yet, but we're looking forward.

Gordon Sheppard (01:22.814)
That's, you're working on your Monday mornings. I love the intention behind that, because that means that there's a point when Monday mornings didn't feel that great. Is that fair?

Daniel Haight (01:34.414)
Well, that's fair. Early in my career, I spent time in a big consultancy out in Toronto, and then I spent some time at a startup during the dot-com boom, and then spent some time, actually quite a long time, at Academia running a research lab at the U of A. And each of them had their positives, and each had their negatives, let's put it that way.

I had read somewhere that the number one predictor of life expectancy was how much you enjoyed your job. And so when my co-founder and I got together, we decided to start a company. One of the critical aspects of it was, can we build something that we would be happy to work for for the rest of our lives, and that would actually make that life longer? So that was the impetus behind Dark Horse.

Gordon Sheppard (02:25.86)
I love it. I thought you were going to jump in and say Monday morning is a predictor of your life expectancy. I think, but I think it's all tied into the same theme. Well, that's, isn't that lucky that, you know, you're at a moment in time where you're in a position to implement this. You're in a, you know what I mean? You've got your lived experience and then you're able to actually be in a position to say, no, we're going to make this a better thing. Dark Horse Analytics was the first company. I need the sort of the back history to that, if you don't mind. And then it led into a, a two company scenario. So take us from the beginning there where you got that going.

Daniel Haight (02:29.634)
Ha

Daniel Haight (02:51.95)
So like I said, I spent time at running a research lab at the U of A. We were doing research on ambulance and fire predictive modeling, everything from drive times to staffing, deployment, station location, a lot of optimization models and forward-looking predictive models. And I remember this moment, we are presenting a solution to an ambulance chief down in Calgary and he...

He looked at it and he pulled this aside after and he's like, what you guys have done is there's nothing out there like this. It is so beneficial to us. You should start a company. And that was kind of the kick in the pants that we needed. like, you know what, let's do it. So we had actually, back up just about a year earlier.

I'd kind of been this serial entrepreneur who'd never really started something that lasted. I tried selling used cars that I was importing from Japan. I tried a couple other things that had failed. one of them was I had this idea that we could use our phones and the mapping tools on our phones to basically create a radar detector. That if I saw a radar trap, I would talk into my phone and I would say,

Hey, there's a radar trap here. And then it would kind of put a point on the map and it would alert other drivers. So I started doing some research and I found, man, someone else had done the exact same thing and had launched it like a month after we'd started down this path. Like we'd gone so far as we bought a domain name and everything. And it turned out, I'm like, OK, we can still beat this guy. We had these ideas. I'm sure we're going to do well. And so we continue to work towards this, my co-founder and I, Joey.

And then I started reading this guy had created a forum where people could send messages to each other and talk about the product. And the more I read the forum, the more I understood how people were actually using this tool that he built. And they were using it to avoid drunk driving check stops. And I was like, wait a minute. I cannot create something that allows people to drunk drive. That is not what I'm going to build. And so that was it. We shut it down.

Daniel Haight (05:15.15)
And so again, and it was shortly thereafter that this ambulance chief convinced us that actually, why don't you take what you're already doing and research at the U of A, there's actually a business here. So that was.

Gordon Sheppard (05:25.652)
There's actually a business here and that sort of was the kick in the pants to kind of get out the door and get going. In the meantime, you've got the serial entrepreneur thing. One of the most successful companies I've known actually is a couple of engineers that got together. One of my brother-in-law was the genius sort of in mining. And then the other engineer that came in had been running a Molly mate, but the two of them put it together. They built one company, they sold it with 50 engineers. And then they just started up another one because they couldn't avoid taking their IP to the world because they just are in that. So how nice that you had that sort of warmup in a sense.

Daniel Haight (05:42.584)
Okay.

Daniel Haight (05:54.744)
Yeah.

Gordon Sheppard (05:54.815)
to get to that moment in time. And then you had the prompt, which then tipped you over the edge. And then there's like day one, you've got an office space and you're looking at your partner or whatever, and you're into dark horse analytics, which was that what problems were you solving in that first iteration?

Daniel Haight (06:09.048)
So initially it was literally taking the ideas and the models that we developed through our time at the research lab and commercializing them, solving these planning problems that fire and ambulance departments had. we did things like actually presented it to the mayor in St. Albert. If you build your third fire station, it will improve your response performance enough.

that you'll save somewhere between half and one life per year over the next 30 years, just by getting to cardiac arrests a little bit faster. And you'll reduce your property damage by, I think it was like a quarter million a year. So we'd done all this math to figure this out, both where to put it and the impact it would have by doing that. So we started out going into that area, the deep analytics predictive modeling for public safety.

And I'd say probably a year into it, we realized that we were gonna have a hard time surviving just on that as a business. And luckily we had given ourselves a fairly broad name so we could just take on other work. And so we started doing forecasting teacher needs in the province. That was actually a, we built this incredible model that could forecast how many teachers you needed. Basically by forecasting how many students they were gonna have.

Then we did some other work in oil and gas. We did some work in healthcare, forecasting the increase in wages that would need to be paid out under the fee for service model. So we got really good at the math and the maps and the communication stuff. While at the same time, we kept kind of hacking away and taking the odd public safety emergency services project with an eye towards eventually turning it into

a software product. And then right around the time we'd started the company, I had broken my ankle. And I was sitting in emergency waiting the hours and hours and reading Sports Illustrated and it was talking about this basketball player. And I think the title of the article was something like, the greatest player you've never heard of. And it was all about basketball analytics. It was money ball for basketball.

Daniel Haight (08:33.079)
And there was this player, his name was Shane Badier, that whatever team he went to, their win-loss record changed enormously, but he had very few points himself. So the team wouldn't even realize that he was the one that was making a difference. But finally a team, think the Dallas Mavericks figured it out, that this guy, when he was on the court, he turned the superstars into the average player. Like his defense was so good. And there's actually a photo of him doing one of his trademark moves.

is he would, when someone was shooting a free throw, he would jump up and he would put his hand in front of their face. He wouldn't try and knock the ball away. If he would've knocked the ball away, he would've got a block, right? But instead, he put his hand in front of their face and blocked their vision, and they would miss. And it would never show up on the stat sheet, but he turned these great shooters into very terrible shooters. so wherever he went, he was increasing the win. So I remember reading that and thinking to myself,

About the time I'd watched the Oilers almost win the Stanley Cup in 2006, and I thought, man, wouldn't it be great if I could do this in hockey? So fast forward about five years, and out of the blue, and like I'd set this as a goal, and I had a couple connections in the Oilers, and I was trying to call into there, and no one would even return my calls. It was like there was no way I was gonna get to talk to the coaches or the GM or anything. And then out of the blue, I get this call.

And this gentleman says, you Dan Haight? You guys do analytics, right? Yeah. Are you hockey fans? Are you interested in doing it in hockey? And I'm like, you are speaking my language. Am I ever? I'm an expert on that. No, I didn't go that far. But that started this relationship. And that was kind of like the, I think you asked me before the call here, what was kind of a big turning point or a big win for the company? That was it. And it was kind of...

I look back and say, set an intention very early on and I had all kinds of hopes of how it would happen. literally it was an out of the blue call from someone who'd heard from someone else that we were good at analytics. And he figured, you know, analytics was the buzzword back then and brought us in. And that started a probably four year journey where we got to work with the Oilers in the draft, at the draft, even presenting to the players.

Gordon Sheppard (10:42.527)
I

Daniel Haight (10:53.263)
what all these advanced statistics mean to them and so forth. And it was both probably the best and the worst of times for us because it was all consuming for me and I kind of lost sight of the rest of the business to a degree. But it was also so much fun. But it was the only work I'd ever done where I had trouble sleeping at night. And I would wake up in the middle of the night sweating thinking, man, they are just, they're going to trade.

you know, they're best player for peanuts, you know, they're gonna make a big mistake tomorrow, I just know it. And it was so incredibly stressful. But then I actually had, and this was kind of foundational for us as a company, I had this epiphany at one point, because I kept telling myself, I'd go back to sleep saying, you can lead a horse to water, but you can't make him drink. And I just kept consoling myself in that. And then I had this epiphany. And it was a question.

what if your job didn't stop at the right answer, but your job stopped when they adopted the right answer? And that just was mind blowing for me. It was like, well, everything would change. How I approach problem solving would change. I would involve people earlier on. I would build less complex models. I would continue to kind of iterate on it. I would make them think it was their idea. I would invest heavily in how to visualize and communicate the results. It would all, in fact,

We came to the point, we have a saying now, getting the right answer is half the battle. Convincing people is the other half, and it's the harder half. so that kind of...

Gordon Sheppard (12:28.937)
Well, and you're in the data analysis business, right? So there's that sort of thing. So I'm to back up a little bit here and say, thanks for breaking your ankle. Thanks for checking out cool Sports Illustrated articles in that long wait time or whatever you had and manifesting an opportunity which came true for you. And suddenly you're genius data people. You can take complex data. You can help people to visualize it. It gets you to this moment in time. Suddenly you're in the NHL game, which you manifested, which is pretty interesting.

Daniel Haight (12:32.429)
Yeah.

Daniel Haight (12:36.975)
Ha

Daniel Haight (12:44.707)
Yes, yes, do.

Gordon Sheppard (12:55.125)
you know, as you kind of go forward, then you're in that moment of like, well, this is cool, but I'm losing sight, but I'm losing sleep and doing that kind of stuff. And then, so we had this one company, that, when did the divide occur then? Is it somewhere in this part of the story?

Daniel Haight (13:05.423)
So we were still one company at this time. The Oilers, they acquired McDavid and they brought in a new GM and he's like, I've already won a cup and I've got McDavid, what do need you guys for? So let us go, which was sad. And we tried to muddle along for the next three or four years trying to define a vision that was all encompassing, right?

Everyone says you need a strategy, you need a direction, you need a vision. And so you can imagine our meetings. It would be, we are an analytics company with particular capabilities in hockey and public safety with a knack for data visualization and we're all about the adoption, right? And it was like, that's not a company, that's just a wish list of the kind of things I have fun doing. I resisted, like it was my fault. I resisted the urge.

I resisted the imperative to focus and I wanted to keep my options open. And I wanted to be like, well, you never know. Like, I don't want to say no to this. I don't want to say no to that. Because what if another Euler's calls us up? You know, I want to be ready to say, yeah, we can do that. And deep down, I had this belief that I would be bored if I was doing the same thing over and over and over again.

Gordon Sheppard (14:26.827)
Boy, you've done some deep work as a leader. This is really good, because this was not running off the tongue like whenever, when you're in the moment. Because in the moment, you're like, I'm right, I'm cool, I'm the other's guy. Like, I'm all those things. But you've done some deep work as a leader. That's really interesting. Plus, you bolted in this other piece of the process that you figured out where you said, wait a second, I don't have to have the right answer in the office. I actually have to have this other incorporated. Like, that's feeding into this. Like what you saying earlier, we need to able to help people.

Daniel Haight (14:36.1)
Yeah, yeah.

Gordon Sheppard (14:52.171)
think they've made the decision for themselves and actually get them involved earlier in the process. So that's also part of feeding into this moment in time where then you were resistant, then that was for a couple years, but then you weren't resistant. What happened then?

Daniel Haight (14:55.098)
Yeah.

Daniel Haight (15:03.46)
Yeah, so to be honest, was a book. I read a book called The Business of Expertise and the guy literally nailed me chapter after chapter after chapter. He's like, and you say to yourself, I could never do the same thing over and over again. I would be so bored. And he's like, if you want variety in your life, do it outside of work. Stop learning on the company dime, you know, or on your client's dime.

their business, you know, just because you're doing it new for the first time. And that was the impetus I needed to finally accept the fact that we're actually two companies. had developed a data visualization practice that was becoming world renowned. My co-founder, Joey, literally, you know, he had millions of views of the things that he had built, so much so that, you know, got picked up by the Times of London and the Washington Post and crashed our servers when everyone...

wanted to see it. And then we had landed a deal in Toronto. Our first software client was actually the Toronto Fire Department, which is the largest, one of the largest, I think, top three in North America. And so we're like, we have to double down on the two things that are working, right? And you hear this idea of like shotgun first and then cannonballs. It just took us a really long time.

lot of shotgun shells firing in a whole bunch of directions and finally accepting that we are two companies. We're a data viz company and we are a public safety software company and that's when we split the company in two.

Gordon Sheppard (16:40.757)
Well, you so much for being a reader. You know what I mean? Like that's one of those moments where there's a fellow named Randy Valk was on, Dan McDonald was on. These are entrepreneurs in their own rights who have their own libraries as well and have very influential moments where it's like, yeah, there was this moment in this book, this moment in this thing. So great, lucky for us that you're a reader, lucky for you and your team in a sense that you sort of, you you're in the weeds for a bit there, but then you got focused. And now we've got this dark horse analytics breaks into two.

Daniel Haight (16:56.378)
Yeah.

Daniel Haight (17:04.698)
Yes.

Gordon Sheppard (17:07.915)
And now you have these two entities and you say, cause we are two companies and you went through and also you were able to challenge that typical strategic planning. Do you know what I mean? You are these things and you can already hear, you know, your sort of flavor for that typical language gets thrown in the mix, but then you found it and you've landed and then you're building these Monday mornings, which you're still said you're in process to do, but that's what gets us to that moment. Well, this is a great setup for.

Daniel Haight (17:27.012)
Yeah.

Gordon Sheppard (17:31.839)
how exciting the ride has been on. You've been able to pivot at those right times. You didn't get overly stubborn. There's something where you're able to be open enough to learn your life lessons along the way to allow your company, in a sense, to thrive in this sort of scenario. I'm just gonna jump in there and then say that if you had to describe your biggest win in your work that you've done over this time, what would that win be and how would you describe it?

Daniel Haight (17:52.636)
Well, I would actually describe the choice to focus and having the courage to start saying no to literally our name. People would call us for analytics and I would have to say, actually, we don't do that anymore. We do data visualization and we have software that does the analytics in public safety. Now, the truth is most of the same people are still here. We have a really strong culture, but making that decision to split and to say no to viable work that we could have done.

and to go all in on where we wanted to go. Interestingly enough, we had seen maybe 10, 20 % growth year over year, lots of ups and downs. Within 18 months of that split, both companies doubled from what they were previously. it was just, suddenly when you had clarity at the top, and you clarity of vision, and clarity of this is what we're working on, this is what we're doing, everything fell into place.

Gordon Sheppard (18:52.3)
I love the focus thing. So we know the focus is the win. I remember years ago, there's a podcast called Entrepreneur on Fire. What would he say? Focus, follow one course until success was his sort of take on what that was. You folks put it into a way that made total sense to double two businesses as opposed to going 10 or 20 % on one business and that turning down dollars. Cause you know how hard it is to get a contract.

Turning down money, what was that like for you to get that first couple? We're just like, nope, we don't do that. Was it easy? Because you made the decision or was it hard?

Daniel Haight (19:24.571)
You know, it was actually very difficult because it was a company that I was pursuing for quite some time, wanted to get this work. I knew that we could help them. And then they reached out and I'm like, I'm so sorry. We can't do that anymore. Yeah.

Gordon Sheppard (19:38.539)
What a strange moment, because the business development time that it takes, these are not easy cycles on the business development side. They take time and you made that investment. Well, how wonderful again that you're evolving. That's why I can hear your Monday mornings are going to pay off, because you're going to keep evolving as a leader. I can hear as well. So we know what the win is was choosing focus in a sense, which then allowed this success to occur. We can see kind of how you got there. Great. I want to just jump in and talk about what I call the anatomy of a win, which is what is the strategy, work plan, people, operations and results behind it. Strategically,

Daniel Haight (19:43.312)
Yeah. Yeah.

Gordon Sheppard (20:08.156)
If we say vision, mission, values, goals, this kind of thing, is there sort of a highlight strategically where you kind of knew or what can you describe as the strategic highlight for getting this win?

Daniel Haight (20:26.001)
We've been accused, rightfully so, of trying to reinvent the wheel at every stage. And I will say that in some cases, that was a really good thing. Like we broke with tradition on a number of cultural aspects, and I'll maybe cycle back to those in a bit, and to our benefit. We have very unique culture. At one point, we went for a couple years letting people set their own salaries, for instance.

We're very open, very transparent, very kind of theory Y, not theory X. But the other thing that we did do on splitting the companies and creating this focus is we said, you know what, let us adopt something that is tried and true. And we adopted what's called the entrepreneurial operating system, EOS, and applied that in both companies because I knew I couldn't keep.

reinventing the wheel, trying and failing at all these different cultural experiments and structural experiments and organizational experiments, that we just needed something to kind of hang our hats on so we could focus on the business. And I would say adopting that and rejecting my strong urge to just invent everything from whole cloth, at least on that particular thing, I think was really key.

Gordon Sheppard (21:47.949)
Isn't that a trap of being bright and adaptive? Do you know what I mean? But you knew that because you probably could have put in your own operating system, but instead you went to a tried and true EOS system. For anybody that doesn't know, the entrepreneur operating system is worth looking up. It's been implemented. There's at least three other entrepreneurs that have been on this show that have successfully implemented. And again, it's changed the way that they do business. So again, you implemented in both.

lines of business and you're able to do that and that was another way to help you focus in terms of strategically going forward. Great. So we've got a feel for sort of the backstory, the strategy, and in fact the strategy, if you want to talk about revenue, it led to doubling up on the revenue in two companies and that was part of it too. we could go into all kinds of things there. Anytime we have a strategy, we need a work plan. There's the moment where you're like, boy, we don't have focus. And then how long did it take from I realized I didn't have focus to implementing focus?

Daniel Haight (22:18.353)
Exactly.

Daniel Haight (22:40.197)
Yeah, you know what, it took, I think the initial benefit and the initial shift was pretty straightforward. The actual kind of legally splitting companies and all the tax and accounting nightmare of doing so, you know, it took a bit longer to incorporate that and so forth. Also recognizing that these are two very different businesses and that the, you know,

trying to figure out what parts of the culture we want to maintain as common between the two and what parts where we want things to diverge a bit. I think it was a very interesting thing. So the one company again is a software company and we run it at Break Even on purpose and it is growing. We were doubling every year for the last three years. think this year,

Maybe it was only about a 50 % growth. We had a bit of a hiccup with the election in the US. But again, we'll probably be back on that target of just doubling every year. Like it's a ridiculous scalable business once you have software in place. So that's the one company. And like I said, we're running it at breakeven. And when you say running it at breakeven, means one year you have a significant loss, the next year a significant profit. Like it's really hard to predict because it's pretty volatile.

And then the other company was the custom data visualization company. Much more a very profitable services business, very high margin, but also high touch, white glove approach. Our clients are like top researchers in Harvard and Stanford, groups like the Gates, Bill and Linda Gates Foundation, Chan Zuckerberg Foundation, like these.

fairly high profile groups that expect fantastic quality work and they pay for it. And so you can imagine that the focus in the one business is it's like we're just as fast as we can, as frugal as we can, building as quickly as we can. And the other one is like high touch, high service, high value for the client. So that did have an impact on the culture and we've seen a bit of a divergence, but at the same time, there's certain parts of our culture that are core to us that we never want to lose.

Daniel Haight (25:02.842)
And that's been an interesting battle for us to kind of like, what do we keep? What do we keep common? How do we keep what made us successful? But how do we move on from the things that are holding us back?

Gordon Sheppard (25:15.422)
And scaling is always in your way. Like you've created something that can scale and with scaling, it doesn't matter what it is. When we go from one to two, one to 10, 10 to a hundred, whatever number we're at in terms of say even people, that would be in your way. But you have a clarity and a focus. It's really interesting about, I remember years ago reading a book called Small Giants and that's an interesting thing where folks sort of cap out at a certain, they have an in-demand product or service, but they're able to sort of maintain.

Daniel Haight (25:31.43)
Yeah.

Gordon Sheppard (25:42.35)
a mood around the place or a culture because that's the most important thing for them in something that's, know, but that's again, that's touchy stuff because how do you keep that viable? So your two businesses also, the way you're talking about them are really dialed in. That's really interesting to hear. Like you've got a really good feel as you describe those macro kind of ideas around there. So we've got strategy work plan, this idea of how far that's come and did, sorry, from focus to now three years, four years, 10 years, how long did that?

Daniel Haight (26:08.562)
I think officially we split in 2021, although, yeah, about four years.

Gordon Sheppard (26:12.575)
Okay, so about four years to say roughly in a sense and still a work in progress, and you've got your decisions to make as you go forward. So strategy work plan, there's always people involved in a win. We've heard you, if I described you and your attitude from what I've learned so far, I'd say there's a moment in time where I thought it was this way, and then I had to open up to go in a different direction. How would you describe your own kind of peaks and valleys in this journey for yourself?

Daniel Haight (26:36.946)
Well, being an entrepreneur is...

Every day is a new crisis. It's like telling my kids this. So you get up and you get punched in the face every day, you know? You just think things are going great and then you find out your most important employee is pregnant and is leaving, you know, for a year. you know, like it's... We had one situation. got one of the very well... I'm not going to name his name, but a very well-known multi-billionaire threatened to sue us into oblivion.

over a misunderstanding. I remember thinking at the time, how come I'm so excited? It's like I get super dialed in. like, we're going to solve this. It's not going to take us down. And it just kind of brings out the best in me. Whereas if things are all going well, I seem to be kind of probably a little bit lazy when that's happening. But I've learned a ton about myself. I know what I'm good at. And I know what I'm not good at. the hardest, well, maybe not the hardest, but the most important thing for me.

is finding the people and bringing the people around me that fill in those gaps and that can do the things I can't do. And getting out of the trap that as the founder entrepreneur that I've got to be able to do it all. At some point you realize that others are going to go further in the areas that you built the foundation and they're going to maybe even rip up that foundation and build it better.

Gordon Sheppard (28:04.709)
lucky to get to that point where you are now and to be able to have that in place and what a gift to yourself. I have another entrepreneur coming on soon. Her phrase was clarity in the ambulance. And so it took her out and then she had to take three months off to then create a distributed leadership model in her words to then put people empowered in place and that was but that but her learning came from hyper crisis which anyway that was sort of just another one that's coming up on the show. So we've got

Daniel Haight (28:30.854)
Yeah.

Gordon Sheppard (28:33.383)
There's other people involved and I don't mean to go through all of them, but who would you say are the maybe one or two other key people and their attitudes from when you made this realization that also contributed to the win that you're describing?

Daniel Haight (28:45.904)
Yeah, well, we have a pretty diverse set in our company. by not mentioning some, I'm sure I should and vice versa. Probably, I mean, obviously in business, the most important thing is sales and business development. I if you don't have the pointy end of the spear, you don't have a spear. Craig Hiltz was our first, I remember it being very risky for us, it was our first non-junior hire.

And to his credit, he saw something in Dark Horse, this is about 10 years ago, where he had already successfully joined and been a part of a scale up to, you know, an eight figure company and taken a buyout and retired or so he thought, and then got bored and realized he wanted to back in the game. And so he came and reached out to us and he put up with our immaturity as a company long enough to get to the point where

we could actually get some value out of him. And so he's led business development, sales and marketing for both companies for the last four years, and he's done an amazing job. And so having that, I'm not a natural salesperson, but having someone who, and again, he would claim he's not either, but he is, and it's done really well. And then our technological roots, Maciej Baczynski is one of our earliest employees.

and he's done an amazing job of building the technical infrastructure. He's one of those guys that had started a BBS, a bulletin board system, when he was like 12 years old in Poland, right? He's building computers in grade four. So he's one of those guys. And as each new wave of technology comes, he rightly embraces but also rejects the excess and doesn't get caught up in the hype cycles.

Gordon Sheppard (30:42.317)
Boy, sounds like we're in the NHL draft using your moneyball approach right now. Do know what I mean? And I don't mean to do disservice to, I'm sure, the dozens or more or hundreds or whatever it is of other people that are involved, including there's some clients that are influential along the way. There would be some mentors, I'm sure, that are in the mix. But we're starting to hear this team and some of the attitudes and those key cornerstone pieces.

Daniel Haight (30:42.439)
but he's done a great job.

Gordon Sheppard (31:03.127)
that come into place around the people side. So we've got strategy, work plan, people. Operationally, you've described a little bit about that. We looked into our process. We took on EOS. We read a book, and that gave us some leadership inspiration. We brought in a, I'm going to say white glove business development process that understood the upper end of the market that we were able to reach out to and do that very, very successfully. Any other sort of operational highlights as you're building out these things that you'd like to point out in regards to this win?

Daniel Haight (31:33.46)
I would say it's almost more of cultural thing. Our first value is trust first. We say that when you join us, actually trust you to have our best interests at heart. We're not going to check, and this goes back to my university days. No one checks when the professor comes in the office. No one checks when he or she leaves at night. Do they publish and do they show up for class?

If those two things are there, then the university is thrilled. So we kind of had that same attitude, like, we're going to pay for outputs, not for inputs. You we care about what you deliver. And if you can do it half time from Hawaii, then more power to you, right? And so we have like things like unlimited holidays and, you know, work from home or work from the office, however you like, just a very high level of trust. But our second value is own it. We want people to

own their mistakes. We want people to own the work product. It isn't about, you're not doing it. Like the greatest employees are the ones, they're not doing it good work because we're paying them. They're doing good work because they have personal pride in whatever they're creating. And the more people we found like that, just the greater the benefit was to our company. I would say that that cultural and that those first two values

embedded in our culture is probably the most important process that we had, was giving people the free rein and the trust to create amazing things. And they've come through.

Gordon Sheppard (33:13.889)
I can see the soup mix for Monday mornings, right? We're getting the list now, you know what mean? If I went back in the transcript here, I'd like, that's four, okay, good. that's interesting. And again, because you're in a growth mindset, that's simply gonna hone and evolve. Pride in work, trust first, manage yourself, be adult about these things. a unique thing. And this is not culture that you build in five minutes.

Daniel Haight (33:16.434)
Yes.

Gordon Sheppard (33:38.467)
This is culture that takes time, it takes falling down, it takes what's it going to look like, but how nice now, because you would know automatically if someone's not a fit. You'd know almost instantly and then you don't need to, on both parties, waste any time on that. You'd say, that's not going to work. And then for the people that do work, I'm sure they are there for, you'd have some long standing people that you would point out. Strategy, work plan, people, operations. Finally, there's results, quantitative and qualitative results. Quantitative, you've got the, you mentioned the double revenue, two companies were formed out of this. I don't know if you want to.

Daniel Haight (33:46.429)
Yeah.

Daniel Haight (33:56.464)
yeah.

Gordon Sheppard (34:08.283)
what else you'd to point out quantitatively if you want, but any quantitative and qualitative highlights that you'd like to point out as the result of this win.

Daniel Haight (34:17.416)
Yeah, I would say the proof is in the pudding. So like in our software company, we have effectively 100 % retention of our software clients. So that's a pretty strong signal. We don't have reference clients. You can basically call any one of our clients and they will give a glowing review. So the results are certainly there in the customers.

And the same is true on our data visualization NGO foundation space. many of our clients we have worked with for, even though we're doing custom data visualizations, they come back and they want another one and a new one and an upgraded one for many of them five, even 10 years they've been working with us on various projects. And they'll describe it as this is like the best decision I've ever made was working with you guys. We do want to measure.

our impact. When we are founding the company, we set up these two pillars. I talked about the first one, work that we love, loving your job. And the way we define that was developing great people, both developing ourselves kind of in that Goldilocks zone of being pushed by growing, by extending our capability set. So developing great people and having an impact was the other one. So one's kind of internally focused.

and one's more externally focused. And in my consulting work, I'd had this experience working with some other people where they're like, yeah, you go from, one guy, he's like, I spent the last nine months working for the government of South Africa, creating a transportation plan, presenting it to parliament, knowing that I'm gonna change millions of lives. And then my next job, I'm peddling cigarettes to minors, right? Like it can be really difficult.

especially in a consulting business, like to have consistently meaningful work. the way I describe meaningful work is work where I can go home and describe it to my kids with pride. You know, I'm not embarrassed to say, yeah, we're helping alcoholics get access to better booze, you know? So by having those as our pillars, we're finally getting to the point where, and I've set it as a goal for our team, for our public safety company, where we can measure how many lives we've saved.

Daniel Haight (36:43.57)
so that we can say, are the cities and counties that we're working for. These are the improvements they've made as a result of our software. And that equates to X number of lives for each of them. So we can have this big dashboard internally that says we've saved 6,000 lives or whatever it is. So the impact for us, that's the meaningful impact. If you're doing things like that, you're attracting people with that missionary mindset, the money will take care of itself.

It's when you know that you have this purpose that is making an impact, you're proud of the work you do, then all the other metrics, all the other measurements, take care of themselves.

Gordon Sheppard (37:24.141)
Wow, you've got your two so clearly laid out. And I was just gonna go back to that one and a half lives saved in St. Albert that started at the beginning of the conversation. But in the meantime, you're multiplying that. You did it for the city of Toronto. And I'm sure if we went down your client list, we would find all these other impacts and how nice again, when we're shaping up our Monday mornings to be able to be that intentional and that dialed in and that good that you can then shape your actual impact. so this is now, this is legacy. There's another podcast in a couple of years about.

legacy and impact and overall that really pulls out the values and you keep mentioning your kids and the culture and isn't that wonderful that you've been able to build such an impactful organization to do this in that way. Wow this is super rich. I always get lucky when I get leaders on the show if we've got just a couple sentences on the way out here. If you had a few sentences to say to another leader, another entrepreneur, what are sort of that what's sort of a brief little bit of leave behind that you'd like to you know if you had an entrepreneur in front of you what would you say to them?

Daniel Haight (38:25.397)
I would say the.

Daniel Haight (38:31.73)
The limits on your impact are almost entirely self-imposed. And the upside that's available to you, especially now with the advent of AI, is almost limitless. your ability to dream is probably, the fact that you're an entrepreneur means you already have that ability, but.

Leaning into that, I think, is one of the most powerful things, especially today, because the bar is so much lower for being able to just do things that you couldn't even contemplate in the past.

Gordon Sheppard (39:09.387)
Remarkable and I can hear not only in the words that you've said but you you you believe it I can hear the tone of your voice and it's infectious and what a wonderful thing Anyway, we could keep talking for hours and hours and hours Daniel. Thank you so much for being on the show

Daniel Haight (39:14.484)
yeah.

Daniel Haight (39:23.962)
It has been my pleasure, Gord. You do a great job of bringing out the best in people, so I appreciate that.

Gordon Sheppard (39:32.439)
Holy.

So that's.