Tim Hamilton:
Where we partner with clients and where I see the opportunity is for financial brands as you've got to start by being willing to completely own the current set of circumstances the current set of challenges as frustrating or disappointing or embarrassing as they may be, we have to start by accepting them.
James Robert Lay:
Greetings and Hello, I am James Robert Leigh and welcome to episode 289 of the banking on digital growth podcast. Today's episode is part of the exponential insight series, and I'm excited to welcome tim hamilton to the show. Tim is the CEO of practice it a Digital Innovation Agency that designs and develops frictionless digital experiences for financial brands. Tim is also a fellow Texan who is right up the road from me and Austin. And he founded Praxis almost 23 years ago on the belief that technology has the power to unlock human potential. And I agree. That's exactly what we're going to be talking about today to empower you to guide you, dear listener along your own journey of growth at your bank, at your credit union, or FinTech because Tim and I are going to dive deep into the growth opportunities found within verticalized solutions that embedded commercial banking apps have for specific niche markets. Welcome to the show, Tim, it is good to share time with you today, buddy.
Tim Hamilton:
You too, James, that was quite an intro. Thank you so much for having me, I'm looking forward to geeking out together.
James Robert Lay:
Well, we've already been geeking out before we hit record on a lot of other topics. So I'm gonna have to stay very focused and not let my ADD mind just drift too far off. Because you know, it's an important subject unlocking growth opportunities within niche markets. It's a personal passion topic of mine, particularly when when framed around empowering and leveling up small to midsize businesses as an entrepreneur myself. But before we do that, what is good in your world right now personally or professionally, it is always your pick to get started off on a positive note.
Tim Hamilton:
I'm just feeling really proud of our team for wrapping up a great 2022. We just we just kind of reconciled the books and put all these numbers to paper. And we we picked up 28 new clients last year, which was a record for us and managed a portfolio of about 51 projects in total. Our Glassdoor score ticked up to a 4.9 out of five star and so culture and team health as well as client satisfaction are two critical measures of of success for me. And I'm just really proud of our team and very grateful to our friends and the FinTech community and our incredible clients for supporting and encouraging our growth.
James Robert Lay:
Absolutely. And I think you're you know, you're onto something here when you're talking about culture, and growth. It's all about people. That was one of the things that that that caught me is when you started practicing, almost 23 years ago, you did so in the belief that technology has the power to unlock human potential. And I want to go back in time to just set some context for the dear listener here because it was around this time that I was also founding what would become the digital Growth Institute. So we might have been living these parallel lives. Let's go let's go back early 2000s. What was your inspiration for getting this started back then?
Tim Hamilton:
Gosh, I have had so many mentors incredible mentors along the way that I gotta give them credit James for getting me up and running my you know, my my first mentor is my tennis coach in high school who actually hired me to build him a website and help him to launch his tennis academy. As any good tennis coach would this tennis coach Jesse asked me where I you know, where I wanted to take this and encouraged me to just keep on keeping on I was 1617 years old, and that's where I started. My next mentor was from Arthur Andersen later Accenture and he he wrote business simulations and agent based models to help large corporations and mid market firms to solve really impossibly complex business challenges that make in almost impossibly complicated business decisions using computer simulation. And so we would simulate different scenarios A B and C and then inform those strategic business decisions accordingly. The third mentor I want to give credit to is Tori Gaddis. He came from McKinsey. And he really taught me that progressive leadership and creating a an innovation of culture. And he really introduced me to the early ideas of employee centered and customer centered business management, though they weren't called that at the time, he was the first person in 2006, and seven to really introduce me to those concepts, and that those three mentors really set my direction in the business and inspired me to just keep on going making this thing as good as it possibly could be. I always was committed to professional services, I've always loved solving complicated projects problems. I had a mentor, say, you know, you may not be a product entrepreneur, but you really do seem to have a passion for services. And so that's how I got my start. And you know, what I've been doing for the past 23 years.
James Robert Lay:
You know, as you're going through that you're taking me back, you went to the University of Texas, I went to the University of Houston. But I had a friend who went to Baylor University, and we both graduated at the same time, turn of the millennium, both graduated in 2000, from high school, and so we were freshmen in college, and he called me up one day, this is this idea of, of service, and solving problems. And he said, you know, that college bookstore, but yeah, that's annoying. You pay $300 for a book, and they'll buy it back for like, $10, the economics just, they don't work out for a student. He said, Why don't we build something that bypasses at the bookstore. And so this was back in 2001 2002. And so we built what became bear swap, it was bear swap.com, Baylor University of the Baylor Bears. And it was through that it was built on like ASP, dotnet, and Microsoft Access database. I mean, really incredible, really early on. But what I saw, and that's why I wanted to start here is this idea of using technology to unlock human potential, the idea of using technology to connect people together with people because we grew an audience of 10 15,000 students. And then I'm like, wow, we're going to take this to other universities, and it's going to, you know, it's gonna be great. Well, a little bit, flash forward a couple years, and you got this other guy out of Harvard, who's thinking way bigger about using the Internet to connect people together. And as you're going through your, your journey here, and your mentors, what have been the big lessons that you've learned along the way yourself when it comes to using technology to connect people, together with people to use technology to unlock human human potential?
Tim Hamilton:
What an amazing question I some of the best thinking I've ever come come upon in this area, or in this topic is from the authors of the blue ocean strategy. And and that book really hit me between my eyes and has really made a lasting impact on my career. The thesis of the book, basically, is that firms can play strategy, defensively, assuming that the rules of the game are set, and then they bend themselves to those rules, and they stick to the rules. And what you see is sameness. You see a bunch of competitors competing along the same lines of competition, what the author's called Value dimensions, where they say, you know, what, what the customer really wants from us as a lower price, you know, greater productivity, higher convenience, a nice selection of products. Consider a variety, but whether it's whether you're shopping for a hotel room, a rental car, or an airplane ticket, there are these six or seven dimensions of value. And you can play that game defensively, again, assuming the rules are set, or as Blue Ocean Strategy encourages. You can play it offensively where you basically change the rules of competition and there's some amazing innovations like Nintendo when they were up against Playstation and X Box. What they did was so courageous and counter intuitive. That it it is one of the best case studies of this idea. They underperform performed PlayStation and Xbox intentionally, by installing a sub performing video card and graphics system into their hardware. They spent a significant they cut the price significantly. And then they they targeted a non video game enthusiast market with their products with the Wii Fit. You know, in the Wii Sports games, they were going after grandparents who wanted to have a nice memory with their grandkids. And so there are two ideas there is like, look critically at the value dimensions of the market you're serving and don't take them for granted. Don't assume that because PlayStation and Xbox are packing their hardware with the latest GPUs that you have to as well. And don't assume that because PlayStation and Xbox are going after the hardcore gaming enthusiasts that you have to as well, to wrap that up, sameness is not strategy strategy is inherently the art of exclusion, we have to be different. To be different, we have to be bold. And as Francis Frey writes beautifully in her book on common service, most firms by trying to be great at everything, and for everyone end up in exhausted mediocrity. And that is one of the most compelling ideas James I have ever come upon, around how you can leverage effectively how you can leverage technology to bring people together and solve real problems that exist in the life of your customers and prospects.
James Robert Lay:
As you're going through that you're taking me back to reading the book. And it was a transformative book for myself as well. The idea of competing around commoditization, you know, the bloodied red waters of competition versus seeing things differently than how others might see them. being bold. Having the courage to go down a different path is almost like the Robert Frost poem, Two roads diverged in a yellow wood and I took the one less traveled and that has made all the difference. I looked at that poster as a freshman in high school. And I was like, you know, one path went to the left and one pathway to the right. But my curious mind was like, what's down the middle? Like, there's nothing there. Let's go, let's go down the middle, through the thicket. And eventually, we can find something even cooler that way, something way more powerful way more meaningful. And as you're going through the PlayStation and the Nintendo example, I'm thinking tying this back here to financial services. Change is always bringing new opportunities, when we're open to see these opportunities. What do you think, limits the vision limits the perspective of financial brand leaders as we're now entering into an entirely new age of technology, some call it web three, oh, some call it the age of AI? What holds financial brand leaders back from seeing new potential and then I want to talk about some of this potential that you see here just a bit.
Tim Hamilton:
I recently came upon a book called Designing your life written by Bill Burnett and Dave Evans. And they're using design thinking, the principles of design thinking to help people who are in a life rut maybe they're they're questioning their, their career path, or they're looking to find greater meaning on their journey. Incredibly, the first step in their process in their design thinking your life process, James is the word except that was such a surprising word choice for me in a seven part, you know, seven step framework to improving your current situation, it just really a jumped right off the page, except is the first step. Now, they went further to explain that they said you cannot solve a problem you're not willing to own.
And that's where I want to kick off with, where we partner with clients. And where I see the opportunity is for financial brands as you've got to start by being willing to completely own the current set of circumstances the current set of challenges as frustrating or disappointing or embarrassing as they may be, we have to start by accepting them. You know, one of the things we often encourage our new clients and partners to do is to start with a very small scale customer research project. You know, let's interview for five 610 or 15 customers, or lost prospects, or potential customers, longtime customers, let's, let's thoughtfully design that cohort and go in and ask them some qualitative research questions. To understand the problem from their vantage points. One of the major issues I talk a lot about in financial services is that we have really built the technology of the financial stack. From a systems centered point of view, we need to change that, or we are changing it, it's very exciting to see the progress, we are changing it into a human centered technology stack. But we can't do that. Right? If we don't accept the challenges and the circumstances, and we don't, we cannot do it. If we don't engage the very people, we need to recenter this world on in conversation. Now, there's a fallacy around that if I ask them, they will leave. If I asked my customers, they're going to quit me, I will bring into their conscious mind all the disappointments or frustrations or irritations that they've experienced with me and my brand in the past 18 months. That is a fallacy. But it's a universal fear that many of our prospects and customers experience it's a lot of resistance they have to do in customer research.
James Robert Lay:
I want to pause right there, because I think you're onto something. And I want to dive deeper into this. Why? You know, one of the things that I've written a lot about are the what I call the four fears, it's the fear of the unknown. It's the fear of change. It's the fear of failure. And sometimes it's the fear of success. Now, as you're talking through going in and doing this research, study, and going all in on people, which is a framework or an acronym to where you can ask really good questions, listen to what they're saying, but also then just learn through observation. Because what people say, and what people actually do sometimes is different. What's the fear here, like you said, we might be surfacing all of the pain that people feel from the past. Now in the present moment, that's going to have a negative impact going forward to the future. But you're saying no, because it's almost like that's the fear of the unknown. And maybe, maybe it's a fear of failure to like we have failed these people. But you're saying, we can, we can gain a lot from this
Tim Hamilton:
100% The fear is that perhaps the sense of disappointment or the pain that we've caused customers in the past is somehow unconscious, it's in, they're not conscious to that. And that by asking them or causing them to dwell on this for just a moment, all of a sudden, that pain is going to go from being unconscious to conscious, and they will then vote with their feet. Yeah. And we, we almost never see that that's the case, what we see again, and again and again, is that customers now, they replace their sense of disappointment or frustration or exasperation with a bad customer experience in the in the, in the past, and they and they replaced that with a sense of optimism, hope and admiration, even when that very company engages them now in a conversation focused on improvements. That it turns out is one of the most motivating things for, for people generally, is this this idea of the Progress principle, the best way to motivate a cohort and audience of people, whether they are on your team, as employees, or as customers is to give them the felt sense that if I stick around just a little bit longer things around here are going to improve. And what more could we want from our financial institutions, you know, like, that's really all we could expect. And in many ways, the, the knowledge of the past the known evil, quote, unquote, is many times safer than the unknown, unknown, and so apparent, the known quantity with a commitment to improve and make progress. Well, that is a very sticky place to build and improve on a relationship with our customers. And there's so many opportunities to do that within financial services.
James Robert Lay:
I'm a big believer in one of the big things that I teach and coach with financial brands and their team's progress is exponentially far greater than perfection. I think it particularly in this world that we're living in, you know, where, if you think historically about financial services, you would go and when it comes to growth, you'd go, you build a physical branch location, and that would have some research tied to it, you know, site placement, etc. But once that branch was finished, it was finished. Now, digitally, when we're talking about experiences, we can continuously be learning, gaining feedback on that what we can do better. I think, the better way to frame the question, or the perspective here is, what can we do even better, and it's by adding that one word, even if we're paying homage to the past, like, we only knew what we knew to get to the point to where we're at today. Now we have this new knowledge, we can apply this new knowledge going forward to be even better to create even more value for our customers. And one of the opportunities that you see from your perspective is instead of looking you know at the generalized banking solutions for small businesses, within a standalone banking portal, you believe that future growth and value can be unlocked through the lens of verticalized solutions, perhaps even creating blue ocean opportunities that embed banking within apps that target specific niche markets, lawyers, veterinarian, offices, dentists, I mean, it truly is an exponential growth opportunity, if we just take a moment just to kind of pause and think about that. But why why is this? Where is your perspective around this coming from?
Tim Hamilton:
That's exactly right, James, there are several trends that are emerging. That led me to conclude that 2023 2024, I think, is a really exciting time to start making moves in this direction. The first one is the interest rate environment. As we all know, there's a war among banks and credit unions for deposits, we are now in a in a profitable lending environment. Again, the challenge is keeping up and maintaining that balance sheet. In the past, serving small business customers has not been all that attractive, they're very needy, and they have complicated needs more complicated than consumers. However, they aren't very much more profitable than an average consumer I do think, however, that with the right focus the right groups of small business customers, we can actually gain and start to build up those balance sheets gain those deposits at a faster clip than we could have by focusing on consumers. And so for the for the banks, I think small businesses are attractive for that reason. On the small business side, what I see is that the enterprise software as a service industry is maturing, you know, SAS is almost the phrase SAS is going to turn 20 here in a couple of years, right? So it's maturing, it's getting old.
But as that category is that industry matures, it's very rare to find one or even two enterprise SaaS companies focused on a particular niche, we're seeing 3456 10 or 15, depending on the size of that total addressable market. Now, as we know, as markets mature, they seek ways to differentiate as we were talking at the very top of the call, we can play strategy defensively and accept the rules of the game. And in this case, that would mean enterprise software as a service companies just continuing to compete on price contract terms features, or we can compete offensively. And that's where I think that the enterprise SAS industry is going to go and increasingly, we're going to see mashups. And we're going to see embedded finance and interchange based business models coming in and disrupting are up ending differentiating enterprise long established enterprise solutions that are built for particular verticals. And so you mentioned in a veterinarian offices or law firms, I think that's a great place to start, consider the financial needs, that those businesses have law firms, for example, have to manage utilization, billable utilization, they've got to generate invoices, they've got to process payments every two weeks, every every every one month, they've got payroll processing they've got to do.
They've even got professional advancement. As that law firm grows, you've got to provide a path to partner for other people. And then you got to process distributions. There's so many ways for us to imagine innovative value propositions and and an enterprise SAS solution built specifically for law firms to manage all of these concerns. And, and by creating a partnership between a sponsor bank and the right enterprise, SAS company, all these value propositions can come to life, which is one of the reasons why we are so excited about the sponsor, banking movement that's unfolding. And see the incredible opportunities that exist for banks, specifically within SMB.
James Robert Lay:
I have written extensively about this, this was a key part of banking on digital growth. I have done a lot of keynotes on the subject here, which is, like I said, just to begin this conversation, it's it's a personal passion topic of mine. Because when you help these organizations grow, you as a financial brand are going to grow as a result of that. It's kind of like this win, win win. I mean, we're all we're all getting better together, a rising tide lifts all ships.
Tim Hamilton:
Could not agree more, James, I think a huge opportunity still, for more banks to get into the sponsor banking game, and to do so with conscientiousness and the right the right compliance team just to ensure that we're not we're not doing so recklessly Dave mayo and the folks over at the bankers helping bankers, the Bankers Association, and are a great place to get started and also they're talking a lot about how to do this responsibly. I think it does. It does represent a huge opportunity but but at. As we all know, we need to do it responsibly to ensure that you know, we're staying compliant. I think one great way to do that is to focus your sponsor banking strategy to begin with, for example, you know, we talked about law firms and dentist offices, that could be a way to begin focus on SM is service based SMP businesses or professional services based SMB businesses, you could even focus on high risk businesses, business categories, that's a topic that comes up an awful lot, you could instead decide to focus specifically on you know, low risk CPG or ecommerce or DTC brands direct to consumer brands that that, that want to embed a financial value proposition into their into their brand. But by focusing in this way, you could reduce the the amount of complexity and variability that you're, you're offloading to your compliance team. And instead, by serving the same kind of customers, you could start to accumulate expertise within that business vertical. And you know, what happens when you build expertise, people start sharing your knowledge, they start linking to you, inviting you to speak, pulling you into their conversations, and then all of a sudden, you start getting word of mouth, and your brand starts to do your heavy lifting for you. And so it's it's a virtuous cycle that Jim Collins writes about beautifully as he describes it with the book Good to Great and the whole concept of flywheel concept. But anyway, I agree, it does. You know, it rises it raises all boats, for sure.
James Robert Lay:
Well, you're getting me really excited, because you just went down the path of expertise. And that's a big area, that I see future opportunities around focusing on these vertical areas on these, these these niches. And when you say niche, like, oh, well, that's small, that's going and I think maybe we can address this concern here, we're going to focus a niche that's going to limit our future growth potential. But in reality, it's going to exponentially open up growth potential, because you are going to be viewed as the expert within that vertical. And back to your point is this virtuous cycle, which is why once I get banking on change my second book into the market, I'm going to very quickly be rolling into the next title, which is banking on expertise. So I want to get your take on this. What holds financial brands back from making a commitment, you mentioned boldness before is required, you know, when you're talking about Blue Ocean, what is it that limits the commitment?
Tim Hamilton:
It's a terrifying prospect, James, to focus your business to pick a niche, to commit yourself to a vertical is seemingly a counter entrepreneurial thing to do. I think as many of us, you know, business people, successful business people, leader leaders and managers, we've succeeded by saying yes to everything that's come our way. Yes, we can do that. Yes, we can do this for sure we can do that. My tennis coach, Jesse said, I believe in ways not walls. Now, that's a great way to get started. But it's not a great way to scale. Because as you said, you cannot Maslow talked about the in the hierarchy of needs he talked about, once you've got your safety, and your physiological and safety needs met the next, the next level up in that pyramid, is to belong to a community. You have to belong to a community before the next level is a steam to be important. In the minds and eyes of those community members, you have to first belong to a community. And saying that we serve all types of businesses or all types of consumers is not belonging to a community. That is not the way to define a community, you've got to define a community in the words and phrases of that community. It cannot be in your own words. But there is a real reluctance because it does feel like an anti entrepreneurial move to do. I just implore people that they cannot be important, they cannot be perceived as experts. Unless they make that very inconvenient decision. It's unavoidable.
James Robert Lay:
So you know, you're touching on another book. And by the way, we probably just need to get you back on for a conversation as part as part of the by the book series that I do with my operations lead over here, Audrey, we're both big readers. And so we're always talking about the books that we're reading and how they apply to to help financial brands maximize their future growth. And back in 2011 Seth Godin wrote a book called We are all weird, the rise of tribes in the end of normal, it's this idea like you're coming back to massive community. And I and I think you know, that word community community banking, whether you're a community bank or a credit union, community goes far beyond the physical boundaries Now, beyond borders beyond zip codes. And back to the point when you think about working within a niche vertical, there are inherent communities, there's like, what is it the American Dental Association, that's a community that you could tap into and provide your knowledge and expertise through the lens of banking to help these dentist grow. And so when you think about this, this requires a transformation to a degree of, of seeing that seeing is going to lead to a transformation of thinking. But the thinking doesn't always necessarily apply to action to bridge the gap, the gap between the thought and then the action. It's the feeling and the emotion. It's the commitment here. And I want to get maybe a bit personal with you, because you have done this yourself with your firm, you've picked a niche to focus on. You've turned away other opportunities, you said, this is the path that we're going. What was that like for you to make that commitment?
Tim Hamilton:
I have said it's a terrifying decision.
James Robert Lay:
You did. I want to talk about that. Yeah, as I said, I, you know, like, this is my vertical. But what like, why, why? Why did you do this?
Tim Hamilton:
You know, what I realized years ago, before we before we had done this was, you know, we built a great business, we had been around for a good long time, we'd serve several 100 customers. And we built some really neat technology. And a lot of those customers had scaled, they'd made, you know, hundreds of millions, in some cases, billions and savings or are generated billions and new profits as a result of their investment in technology. Even the most singular outcomes did not generate word of mouth, they did not lead us into new introductions, they did not kick off that flywheel the virtuous cycle, where by running the process of the business, you beget more opportunities that then allow you to grow the business, there was not that virtuous cycle happening in the business. And this this confounded me for a decade, you know, like, I was scratching my head, just thinking we need to get better, we need to get better, we need to get better, we need to ask for referrals. If we ask them, then then that's, that's going to unlock it. I took sales training, and then I took better sales training and continue taking sales training. And, and I I all of a sudden realized, oh, no, this is not happening because of something fundamental about the business. It was due to a lack of strategy, strategy. You know, strategy is the art of exclusion. It's a very inconvenient truth. But it's true. Strategy begins by carving away what doesn't fit so that you can, you know, commit yourself to what does. And so after I realized for years and years, we were not having any word of mouth, we weren't getting as many referrals in spite of very, very happy customers, I realized our customers had no affinity, they were not in a community, they didn't go to the same trade shows the same events they didn't have any relationship with with each other whatsoever. You know, another another way to look at this is to take a scatterplot of your customer base, look at where they are geographically, are they in your backyard? Or are they scattered across a broad geographic region, if they are in your backyard, it means that they are hiring you not because of your expertise. But because of your proximity. That may mean that you know your your proximity is convenience, or that they want to hold you accountable, be able to look across you from across a conference room table. Yeah, and guess what, those are not difficult to replicate, your competitors have the same exact things that they can offer the same value that you can offer. If you're competing based on proximity.
That is not a basis for competition. However, if you see that your customers are distributed across a wide geographic area, it means that they're willing to forego proximity for something else. And that is a sign of a company that has made this bold decision to commit itself to something that is hard to build which is a brand and and to do so you've got to have a strategy. Now you don't have to I decided to burn the bridges. I did that for personal reasons. When I when I made this transition many years ago like we we burned the bridges to hold ourselves accountable. And it was not a popular decision. It was not an easy one. But by God it was absolutely absolutely the right one because now we have a community that we belong to. And we've got friendships and relationships that want to see us succeed. We've got people that we can serve and support, we've got ways to focus our efforts and investments that before we made this decision we never had.
James Robert Lay:
When did you burn the bridges here, and I want to just put a caveat for the dear listener listening right now, we're not advocating that you go out and you do this bridge burning today or tomorrow. But the reason I'm asking is I had to do the same exact thing for my firm. And this happened in 2012. And my marriage was like, on the rocks. And it there's a whole thing that I had to call in some outside help. I couldn't do this alone, like I needed some external perspective, some external guidance from someone who has helped other firms like mine, show me the way forward. So I'm curious when when was this timing just for just it for me just for context here, because it's a great, it's a great story.
Tim Hamilton:
We did this in 2019. After a, you know, realizing that in 2018, we had served a concentration of clients and financial services. So we had already started working in, in financial services, we'd also done a lot of work and CPG, and E commerce and transportation, logistics, life sciences, health care, oil and gas, etc. So it wasn't just picking something out of a hat, it was a very intentional and deliberate decision that was built on past experience that we already had.
James Robert Lay:
The other thing too, and this is really, I think, something that you didn't really touch on from your own journey here of committing to a vertical. But you touched on this earlier, when you're talking about doing light usability studies and asking questions. It's pattern matching. When you focus in on a vertical market, you could then in theory, go in and do research studies, to identify patterns that may or may not have anything to do with, quote, unquote, banking. But you're identifying patterns that provide perspective for the vertical alarge to provide them a path forward and maybe create a unique positioning or unique point of view, that is different from the marketplace that's tying this back into more of like a blue ocean strategy that we begin the conversation. And as a result, you're, you're creating a bit of a protective moat, right?
Tim Hamilton:
Know, I want to use a different word than usability studies, for a very particular reason. But when I got started, I challenged myself to have 100 conversations with veterans and experts in FinTech and financial services, and I wanted to have those 100 conversations as quickly as I as my calendar could possibly allow. I mentor a lot of entrepreneurs, entrepreneurs who are considering a similar move. And if they're not considering a similar move, after meeting with me once or twice, all of a sudden, they start considering it's almost all I ever talk about. And the thing I encourage them to do is start with five conversations, then ramp that up to 10. And then have 25 conversations that all of a sudden, the most important tool to inform this, as you say pattern matching process is conversations with people who already belong in that community. And guess what, by doing that, you're going to see opportunities to serve them, opportunities to support them, you're going to see unmet needs, you're going to see hair on fire problems, you're going to understand what they love about their industry and what they hate. And a byproduct that's going to happen, the more authentically you serve these conversations and relationships, you're just going to start to pick up friends. And then all of a sudden, you're gonna look behind yourself and realize, oh, my gosh, I'm, I'm part of this community. Yeah. And it just happened naturally, it happened organically. And you're also going to then have an intuition around those patterns. You know, intuition comes from inductive reasoning, not deductive reasoning. Inductive reasoning is also known as bottom up reasoning. Where to do it, you've got to make a bunch of observations. And then what you do is you synthesize those observations into patterns. And then those patterns lead to conclusions. And that pulls you up to meaning and making sense sense making is the fourth step of inductive reasoning, but you cannot get there until you collect the observations. Deductive reasoning is top down and happens in the complete opposite side. You start with a hypothesis, and then you start to structure experiments to prove or disprove it. What we're talking about James is going about this in an inductive way. And so don't just listen to you and me talking about dentists for example or veterinary offices. It really is about picking picking a base and having as many, you know, 25 conversations as you can within a concentrated period of time so that you can kick off that intuitive and inductive reasoning process and get to those patterns that you mentioned.
James Robert Lay:
That's a fantastic way to start to wrap this up here. Go out, pick a vertical, maybe pick three verticals, and just conversations, am I hearing you correctly with this so that you can identify patterns through the conversations through the inductive reasoning, and then use that to help inform future decision making as you're moving down this journey? If there if if someone is listening, and they're like, Okay, I think I can have these conversations, I can have five and then 10, and then 15, and then 20. And then 25. Because Because it's all about progress, once again, not perfection, we're getting momentum. What, what questions should one ask? In these conversations within a vertical?
Tim Hamilton:
Yeah, 100%. You know, I will also just quickly say that you'll never be done with these conversations, once you do 25 Guess what your next assignment is to do another 25. And so this will become this will become your, you know, a full time focus for a very, you know, for the the founder, the leader of the firm, but great questions to ask are, you know, what, what are the trends that you're observing? What do you think? What do you think the future looks like? What do you what are the biggest challenges you're experiencing right now? You know, there are, there's so many frameworks and tools in that book, The Blue Ocean Strategy, I'm just going to share one more. It's the what they call the buyer utility levers, and they propose a six stage customer journey that applies to every industry, it starts with the purchase of your product or service, then you get into delivery, and then use the use of your product or service. And then supplements, how do you supplement it with other products or services, then maintenance, and finally disposal, just take those six stages of the customer journey, and start structuring your conversations to understand who is really which which providers, service providers or product providers are really investing heavily in the purchase stage or in the delivery stage, or the use stage, etc, of this particular category who excels. And this is going to enable you to start mapping the industry and identify those pockets of blue oceans, that uncontested market space that you can create an uncommon and uncontested value proposition that now because it's targeted on a community will gain brand awareness and graph.
James Robert Lay:
What a great way a great recommendation for the dear listener to apply this thinking, to move forward and make progress on your own journey of growth. Tim, thank you so much for sharing your knowledge, sharing your expertise with all of us today. If someone wants to connect with you and continue the conversation that we've started here, what's the best way for them to reach out and say hello to you?
Tim Hamilton:
Oh, James. Well, thank you so much for having me. I am on LinkedIn every day. So feel free to connect with me there. You guys are also free to check out the website praxis.com. And we have a contact us page there. Just reach out to us and we'll be right back in touch. But in the meantime, James really, really enjoyed the conversation. Thank you for everything you do for this industry. And I'm looking forward to staying in touch.
James Robert Lay:
This has been a lot of fun for sure. Thank you Tim for joining me as always Be well. Do good. Make your bed.
