Noob School - Episode 89: A Genius's Journey with Javier Buzzalino

Episode Date: November 6, 2023

Today on Noob School, we're joined by Javier Buzzalino, SVP of R&D at Hexagon ALI, discussing his path to a vastly successful career, from the beginning in Argentina, to his work at IBM, Fluor and more. Tune in for a look into the mind of an incredibly talented businessman, and take away as much knowledge from his stories as you can. I'm going to be sharing my secrets on all my social channels, but if you want them all at your fingertips, start with my book, Sales for Noobs: https://amzn.to/3tiaxsL Subscribe to our newsletter today: https://bit.ly/3Ned5kL #noobschool #salestraining #sales #training #entrepreneur #salestips #salesadvice

New School. All right, well, welcome back to Noob School. Another great episode ahead. I've got an old friend, a colleague that I've worked with going back to 98, 99, 2000. We can't quite remember. But Javier Bozalino. And Javier Voselino. And Javi is different than most people that we've had on the show

because his specialty is on the development side. building products, making them work, understanding what the customer needs. And that's kind of his official title. I think unofficially, I've seen him as a secret salesperson. You all have heard of the secret saying, he's like the secret salesperson. Because if you take him to a presentation,

they don't suspect that the smart guy over here is actually going to be selling anything, but he's quite a good salesperson too. So thanks for being on the show today. Pleasure. Yeah, man. Yeah. So back it up.

Let's just do kind of the whole career and we'll focus on areas where you had to use some of your sales skills to get a job, a promotion, talk someone into something, whatever you had to do. So we're going to go back to, I believe, Buenos Aires. That's what I was born in, Buenos Aires. How long were you there? I was born in Buenos Aires.

and, you know, my middle-class family, dad was an engineer. Mom was an English professor, English teacher. And so I grew up there and always gravitated to our science, engineering, and so I studied school engineering. That passed away when it was very young. It was 14 years old. That changed completely the dynamics of the family because, you know, I was exposed to growing up, you know,

a little earlier than perhaps others. And so I went to school of engineering. engineering, all that. And I had to get a job. You know, we didn't have a lot of money at that time. And so one of those things, I applied with a company called IBM. Little old company. And this company had internships and things like that.

And so I said, well, what the hell? You know, it has nothing to do with engineering, but, you know, let's give it a try. And in retrospect, what IBM was doing is there was no computer science programs. in Argentina at that time. And they were looking for people who could learn computer science or software. And they said, well, the second best

is the people who understand a lot of mathematics. And there were two disciplines in engineering that were very, very good. One was aeronautical engineering, and the other one was hydraulics. They both have a lot of mathematics. And they said,

well, we're going to get people from those schools. And in the University of Buenos Aires, where I did my master's in hydraulics, we were six. And four went to IBM. It was basically the whole class. And so we started, I started getting into software. And one thing to enter the other one, I started liking it. And I started realizing that this was really good.

So right after university, you went to work for IBM? Exactly. Okay. And IBM did one thing that it was pretty peculiar. You know, when they convert me to full. employee, they said, well, we understand you, you understand technology. We get it. You seem to be good at it. But we want you to be a salesman. Ah, I didn't know this part of the story. And so I said, okay. And they said, well, I'm not sure my personality type is for sales. And they said, well,

let's put it this way. He says, the money you make today will make it your fixed salary. and we'll double that with the commissions. So even though if you sell zero and you're a complete disaster, you'll make exactly the same money. And I was like, well, okay, whatever. Let's give me a try. Let's see what happens. A free bet.

I like that. Okay. So one year of sales training course, one year of a complete systems engineering from IBM. Yeah. So now I had, you know, in civil engineering, masters in engineering. Now I did systems engineering in IBM for another year.

and I started getting involved into more software and not only projects but basically on selling. And two things came out of that. First of all, they said that I was pretty good at it. And the second is, I did not like it. So I was like, okay. And at that time, Argentina had hyperinflation. The country was extremely unstable.

So I said, hey, perhaps. I need to try to do something different, and perhaps I need to live somewhere else. So how old would you have been then? That was in the mid-20s. And so you wanted to get out of Argentina, and you went to the States? I went to Canada. Canada, okay. And that's a different story.

If you want a point of selling, you know, this was an interesting story. I have a brother and a sister. They're older. They're both emigrated to Canada. And so by the time I was at this point in my life, they were ready to living in Canada. So I went to the Canadian embassy and I said, hey, I want to emigrate to Canada. They have a scoring system. So you basically base on your background, what you do to give you points.

And the points were fine. I wasn't fine. And they had a meeting with the council. And the council says, well, you're crazy. He says, you have a brother and a sister. are a Canadian, they can let you come to Canada by being family. They sponsor you and they basically, you know, give financial insurance that you're not going to be a burden to the Canadian government and you're fine.

You admit it. It's just paperwork. So I took, I look at the council and he said, listen, I have a job in IBM. I'm an account manager. I'm doing financially very well. if I cannot do it in my own, why do I want to go to Canada? The guy looks at me and says,

you understand that all the people come here and beg me to be admitted and you're challenging me. This is not her. And the guy said, well, I challenge you back. 60 days. If you quit your job today, and in 60 days, you put your feet with your family in Canada, you're Canadian.

And so I believe that that moment was perhaps one of those sales trainings where you actually know where you stand. You know that you cannot be run over. And you stand your feet and you explain what is that you want and where you are. And I walked to that meeting with a challenge that is, what do I do now? Yeah, yeah. Well, it's interesting. I mean, you probably don't read a bunch of sales books, but there was a real popular one. a couple years ago called the Challenger Sale.

Yes, exactly. So you were doing that before the book came out. Yes, exactly. Interesting. Yeah, I mean, Challenger sales is interesting because obviously it teaches you to know so much about what you're selling that you can legitimately challenge and push back on the prospect. And I'm sure you do a lot of that.

So that's interesting you were doing it before they were. So you moved to Canada. Moved to Canada, landed in Canada, then I realized that it was the middle of a recession. Yeah. Unemployment was 12% and I was like, okay, what do I do for a living? Yeah. And so there was this company called Fluor. And Fluor is an engineering procurement construction company.

And they had a mess with software. And I had a very interesting profile because I had studied civil engineering. and at the same time, I actually had a software background. And that was pretty rare. Yeah. And so I said, hey, you know, I'll get a job as an entry-level programmer and see where it leads. And I said, either I don't like this or I like this and we'll see what happens. And, but, you know, to make a long story short, five years later, I had a team of 50 people reporting to me and I was building software and then, you know,

one point they told me from headquarters that was either Irvine or Greenville. They told me, hey, guy, you need to move to corporate. So I couldn't afford California. They didn't have enough money to even buy it or rent an apartment or anything. So I was like, okay, I'm moving to Greenville. That's interesting. So one of the things you had going for you, from my perspective, is you had, you had like a task.

talent stack already by the time you're at 25. And what I mean is because of your family situation, you had to take some leadership pretty early on in your life. That gave you an excellent advantage to have become a leader earlier. Obviously, you're multilingual, at least two languages that I know of, and then got an excellent education, a technical education, and then got that cross-training in sales. And so you put all those four together and you compare this person

versus someone who just got a technical education or just a salesperson is not a fair fight. And that's exactly what we're looking for. Right? We're looking for not a fair fight. What was fascinating is let me do a call back into, I was an intern in IBM, just basically out of school kind of thing.

And this is the first time Argentina has a national... government election. It was a military regime. It hadn't been elections for 15 years. The government, Argentina, decides we're going to do elections again. The big problem the country has is they want to make the elections transparent to inspire confidence. They have no idea how to let the process of the election be communicated to the country in a fair way. So they pick IBM and they pick three or four companies. They say, IBM, can you? help us show the results as they go on of the election day and to make the public, you know, feel at ease that this is basically for real.

And IBM had no idea what they did. And they started talking to themselves and they said, we don't want any IBM employee talking about this because of the political ramifications of this. We're scared. Interns. Okay. And I was with a personal computing group and they said, Javier. You think you can actually write a program in a personal computer that displays in national television the results of the election as they go on.

And I was like, I need a couple of people. It says, well, how many do you need? I don't know, five? None. And spent two months of my life without sleeping, writing code. And we did programs to basically show the election in real time. The thing starts snowballing and they gave me more people. Now, IBM people started coming to the group.

60 days later I was managing 55 people and I started realizing something is with my personality that I somehow get to these things these hurricanes and I'm always basically managing these groups of people and something must be in my personality somewhere and highly successful

I got a commendation from the minister of the country and all that and they make me a tour to the president and all the things and it worked great And this pattern repeated. I believe that the sales education that I had is something that stayed with me. You're always selling.

When you're home with your wife, when you are with your children, when you are in the restaurant, there's always points in your life that you're constantly listening, is understanding, and is presenting your case. Persuiting. Persuading.

Yeah. Well, it's so funny because, I mean, To me, it's funny, but we worked together for a number of years, and we would go on these calls together. We would laugh. We would always laugh with you about how good you were as a secret weapon. But I never knew. You never told me that you'd actually sold before.

Now it all makes sense. But it's a good lesson, and we're not even to your 30s yet, but it's a good lesson for people to really think about building their personal talent stack. it's easy to say I want to lead a big company I want to lead I want to build a thousand person

company it's easy to say that and maybe don't want to do it but then you have to step back and say what does that perfect person look like that would do that that person would understand sales marketing something about development customer service accounting

raising money you know there would be a number of things that that person would have to kind of in a perfect world know about, and if they didn't know about one piece of it, they need to fill that hole somehow. But I see more people say, I want to start a business and then not have the faintest idea of how to do it. So, anyway, you're off to a good start.

So you're in Canada now, and you're working for Fleur. Floor Daniel, used to be Flore Daniel. Sorry. Floor Daniel used to be the Greenville. Charles Daniel. Greenville Company. And they moved to Greenville. And so what were you working on?

Let me tell your story about this. You know, I was in Canada, and I started getting a bigger team. And the group of Central, you know, engineering told me, says, we have a big problem. They had, you know, a big old program that did materials. And it was so old that they couldn't even utilize laser printers that started appearing. they were much more effective of the old basically clunky dot matrix.

And so they says, well, can you do something about fixing this? You know, we got a quote. The quote is like $600,000 to change the program to support laser printing. And I said down, started thinking of the problem and make a long story. Three weeks later, I had a program that did the thing. And that became very popular. And so they started saying, okay, we're going to give these guys some more challenges. That was good.

They brought me to Greenville and they told me, you think you can solve a problem of material planning for engineering projects. And I said, okay. And they says, we have a person that can help you. He says, I'm going to do it alone. He says, no, no, we'll give you a person to help you. That was Andrew Kurtz. Was it what?

Andrew Kurtz. Andrew Kurtz. Wow, Andy, okay. So Andy was put together and we decided to actually start, and we decided to actually see we can write a material requirements planning. Andy is phenomenally smart, as you probably know. And Andy is an accounting guy.

So we sat down and we started thinking about it and we basically did a phenomenal program. And at the end of that, they told me that you move to Greenville. And Fluor had a lot of disparate material systems like 10. And it was obvious to me that the problem of communicating the systems with each other was not working.

And so I said, you need to throw all this to the garbage and rewrite it. And they were like, well, how much does it cost you do that? And he's like, well, $2 million. He says, well, our sulfur projects are $10,000, $20,000, just $2 million. He said, heard of. And then I used the IBM self-training. And I said, okay, so you're saying that we're going to afford it. IT can afford it.

No, we can't. Who can? He says, well, some people in Flora have the power to do that. I'm saying, who? And they said, well, is the project executives, project directors of the big projects, the engineering refinery projects. And then I started thinking, saying, what does this guy decide, an engineering project manager? And they told me, oh, these guys make big decisions.

When you buy a reactor for a refinery, they make a decision of which supplier will actually the award, get awarded for a $20 million contract. And they do that. Yeah. And they make those decisions. They do. So I presented the software project as a bid evaluation of an equipment purchase. I formatted exactly like that.

They loved it. And they approved it. And how much would that cost? $2 million. It was $2 million, yeah. And we're a role material manager. Yeah. But by the way, I met two weeks ago, a week ago.

and the Fluor is now 30 years later the same program is still running 15,000 engineering projects were executed with that software, 15,000 and they're like, hey guys, I'm not sure we need to be in the software business, you know, what do we do now? And so I sat down with the Fluor people

that the executives running this project are my intern, my junior software developer and the secretary of the group 30 years ago. They did their careers. They progressed phenomenally. So I get to speak with them again and we're intersecting our careers again.

So does that meeting happen or is it going to happen? It's already happened. It was good. You had a good time. We're going to have, oh, excellent. And we're going to have sessions next week and campus and all that. I think, you know, a lesson there that I want to just call out is, you know, back to the challenger thing, is that you and your professional opinion,

If you're looking at it, you're willing to tell them something that was uncomfortable, which is all this stuff you're talking about bringing it all together. It needs to all go away, and we need to start over. It's going to cost a lot of money. It's going to take a while. And that's the answer, because you could do all the messing around you want with these 15 packages, but it's never going to work like you want it. And they didn't want to hear it.

No. But something about the way you told them that probably believes you. that it was real. So that's pretty cool. Okay. Okay, so you did that big project. Now, Andy was working at Floor at that time? Andy was working at that Fleur.

We did material manager. He was my architect, or we worked together. Half the way through the project, he told me, heavy, I love you. But I'm an entrepreneur. I'm going to create my own company. Yeah, he's great. He's great.

He's got a great company right now. do custom projects and stuff. I know, I know. Do you work with him at all? Oh, yeah. I think he has been staff augmentation for every job I did for the last 25 years. Okay. You know, this relationship you build in the last forever.

Right. Yeah, once you establish trust. That's exactly what it is. You could just call up and take care of. Wonderful. Okay. So keep going from there. How far between there and when you and I met?

So Flour basically put me aside and they told me, hey, have it. Great success, material manager. We like your styling software. We need you to go to the next level. And they said, okay, we want you to be the CIA of Fluor. Of Flore? Wow. And so I said, okay.

And it says, what does the CIA do? Can somebody explain what he does do for a living? Yeah, I'll do it. And so they told me, it says, well, we're buying SIP. we need to implement SAP. We have a very tight budget at the time, I think it was 60 million.

We need a person that leads this. He says, are we going to be writing code? No, no, no. You need to deal with SAP. So I started looking for a job. You didn't want to do that. I was like, oh my gosh, you know, this is going to be a great job

for somebody, but not for it necessarily for my style. Yeah, I mean, somebody who loves being a project manager on a big project for two years. I mean, I couldn't do it. I couldn't do it for 10 days. I'm not sure I would be, I'm not sure I'll be good at it.

And it's a skill that is different. Right. And so. Well, that's a good point, Hobby, because you said something a little while ago that when you ended up kind of accidentally managing that team to do the election results software that you were all of a sudden managing 50 people and you're like, hey, I'm pretty good at this. you know, the faster you can discover the things that you're just, that come easy to you,

and then also figure out the stuff that's very difficult for you. And the thing I tell people is the mistake people make is they find something that's hard for them. And then they're like to really try to overcome it. They try to say, well, I'm going to learn how to be an accountant, darn it. You know, and if it's not there, it's not there. There's not there. Yeah, but if you can find something that you are good at, you know, I'd spend your time on that. And if something that you're good at, you never work a day of life.

Right, right. It's fun. It's fun. It's fun. All right. So that means that you were starting looking for a job and... Mr. Greg Jackson. Yeah.

So what was... Was that Harbinger? Greg was actually, he was in Canada in a company called TRS that is a Fluor recruiting agency. They hire talent. He knew me from TRS. Okay. Because, you know, I started in Fluor. were, you know, temporary and then became an employee and all that.

And so, and then he followed when he moved to Greenville, we followed and we kept our careers and he was, we had a common friend called Peter Grace that, and so we kept talking. We were Canadians in Greenville, so we were like talking to each other. And Greg told me, he says, I have a person I want you to meet. It's Dr. Blackwell from a company called DataStream. You need to meet this guy. And so I said, okay. And I was saying, listen, I'm not sure.

I want to work in a company where software is not important. I would like to work in a company where software is important. I don't care of as big, small or whatever. And so I took me in a meeting to talk with Larry. And so I remember, he told me, says, well, 30 minutes meeting, spend an hour and a half talking with Larry. Larry was a fascinating person because the guy was Uber smart. and he could sense, I think he had a sponge effect

that whenever something that he didn't know, he wanted to learn more. Learn more, give me more, give me more. So he kept asking questions after questions after questions. And so I was like, okay, he's left up meeting, and I said, this is not good. This was a 30-minute meeting. It lasted an hour and a half.

You know, this guy wanted to hear a lot, you know, this is it. He says, I need to sing what I'm going to do for living. And half an hour later, Greg Jackson called me. He says, what did you tell that? I was like, why? He says, they want you here now. I have no idea what you're talking. But they told me, he says, you know, we need to get this guy.

Tell me what you want. Yeah. So I went to join at procure. Yeah, yeah. And was Alex in charge of that then? No, it was Greg already. It was Greg already. Greg was being switching.

Alex was being moving out, moving out to more financial functions. And Greg was doing the I procurer. So we were doing, if you think about it, we were doing in Data Stream a web product, multi-tenant in the cloud in the year 1999-2000. I know. It's crazy. But it's basically 23 years before we're doing it today. I know.

I know. we were early. We were early to that party. A lot we could revisit that. A lot of different paths we could take. But, you know, the people who survived and really profited in that kind of I procured. Dot com world, they just managed to hang in there, right? They just, they kind of kept it together long enough where, you know, the technology improved and adoption rates improved.

We were fighting adoption rates so hard. Oh, my gosh. You know, getting people to switch how they bought gloves. They were like, well, what do I do? Poked there, you know. I mean, it was, but yeah. But we couldn't have had better people than you and Greg to help get that thing started. Did I tell you the story about Lumina and Lear?

Did I tell you the story about Lumina and Lear? Did I tell you the story? Did I tell you? Well, I mean, I've got some Lumenia stories too, but you go ahead. You tell me your story. I'll tell you story. Another sales story. Yeah.

This Lumenna was head of purchasing for Lier. He was ahead of purchasing in an automotive supplier. Yeah. And they had adopted I procure. And we were actually in the early stages and they were trying to adopt. And, you know, traditional struggles that you have when you have software is early and pioneering, but we were doing well. One day they call me and they do a big rant, typical of automotive, where they tell me,

Harvey, in this screen, there's a process that takes a couple of seconds and the cursor does not turn into an hourglass. And I was like, I've been not sleeping for last week trying to make this work with a team of people. And this guy is basically furious because, but I said, I need to listen to the customer. So I just kept calm and listen to him. I said, okay, so you want an hourglass year.

Yeah, okay. So on a weekend, I rally all the people to data stream, and we started thinking how to put an hourglass, and we finally, somebody came with an idea, brilliant, and they put it, and it worked. I was so upset, so mad, that I went to the mall, to the Haywood Mall, and walked around,

and to just relax, as if I go home, I'm going to be so bitter that this is not good. And I came across the Bombay Company, or one of those store companies. And I said, I'm going to look what they have. And they had a big hourglass. One of those decorationsal things that you put in your living room.

And bought the hourglass and shipped it FedEx to me that night. And I told them, it says, we implemented the hourglass and I procure, and I think this belongs in your dining room. Yeah, that's funny. And the guy still calls me and remembers, she's, oh, you're the guy who sent me the hourglass.

And sometimes those little touches. And the relationship after that changed completely. The guy was now no longer, you know, he was more friendly. Right. You know, the barriers were down. It was more collaboration. So it was amazing. Just small little symbols, little things.

It's a good sales lesson. I mean, you found a way to break through the normal vendor-seller relationship. and that's where you want to be because I don't really believe in the vendor-seller relationship because I feel like we're both kind of vendors, right? I mean, I'm giving you something, you're giving me something.

It's kind of a barter system. And I think particularly in automotive, they kind of just sit here like this and try to beat you up. But that was while. So we had a, you know, Havi and I and our team started a dot-com within our company. And it was wild for a couple of years because it was just, it was the wildest time. Because things were changing so fast and valuations were so high.

It was crazy. Contradicting accounting, that is part of your comments in your book, that is very astute. And the dot-coms were valued more, the more they lost. Right. That was kind of crazy. It was like the more you lose, and the thought process was that at that time was we think this is a big opportunity. The more you lose, the more investment you're doing and the more you're going to be valued eventually. Right.

Without having the way of discerning when are you losing money because you're not good. And when you're losing money when you're investing astutely. I know, I know. We had one company. I don't remember which one it was, but one, they would come try. to buy us every now and then. And one company showed up and I had the, you know, the audacity to ask them about their business model.

I'm like, I don't understand how you guys would ever make money when you're doing this, and you're giving away this. And the guy goes, well, he goes, I wouldn't worry about it. Wall Street's got us, Wall Street thinks were worth $3 billion. You know, and like, what, six months later they were worth zero? One dollar. Yeah. So, yeah, it was a while.

It was a while time. Remember the Enron story? I'm going to give another sales story. We sold the I procured the e-commerce solution to Enron oil, the smartest guy in the room. That was the slogan. The best company in the history of the world. Yeah.

So you actually ask them, you said, hey, why don't we bring one of the executives to Greenville so we learn? And so we put like 40 people from development, product management, sales. Everybody was in a room to hear to the smartest guy in the room. That was the slogan of Enron. And we heard to the guy, I had no idea with the guy. I talked for an hour. I couldn't understand one sentence.

This didn't make any sense. The next morning, Enron were bankrupt, and the guy went to Larry asking for a job. Only 24 hours. Yeah, yeah. We had so many Enron stories. Enron, before they went under, they were, they managed pipelines and refineries. They had a real strong business. and they used our software to maintain all that stuff.

And then when they got into all the financial stuff they were doing, we sold them, I procure stuff. And so I went out there to, I thought I was just going to sign the contract, and it was a multi-million dollar contract. I got out there and they were like, well, we got some work left doing the contracts. It took like a week of like we'd show up, we'd make some changes, whatever. So finally he says, okay, we're done. I just got to go get it signed now.

And I'm like, you can't sign it? He's like, no, I got to get someone else to sign it. So we go in this guy's office, this young guy, and he looks at the thing, and he goes, so you're going to pay these guys a couple million dollars for some dot-com software that's just going to be on the shelf to maybe sell later? And my guy goes, yeah, yeah.

And he goes, Mr. Sterling, could you step out for a minute? I need to talk to this guy. So I stepped out, and then my guy comes walking out, and his head's down, he's like, oh, he's just so mad, you know. And I'm like, what happened? He goes, he's not going to sign it. And I'm like, oh, okay. So what are we going to do?

And he goes, don't worry about it. There's plenty of people who can sign. So we started going person to person until finally, like the fourth guy's like, oh, sure, sure, sure. I'll just sign it. So they were running a little loose thing. at the end, for sure. Amazing story. Yeah.

So we got through, you coming on board with us, and then it wasn't that many years later, you ended up running all development for our company, and then it wasn't that many years later that we sold the company to in for. And they kicked all the Yahoo's like me out, but they kept you. Yeah, it was interesting.

I was, you know, all the acceptance. executives were in data stream and they put me aside and they told me he says, hey, you know, we're going to separate the other executives. We think that, you know, it's good to cut it off at this time. It's nothing personal. We think the people running the show are really, really smart people. He says, but you're in such a technical role that we'll leave it up to you. Do you want to stay or do you want to move? And I was like, I'll stay. I'm not doing. And so I stayed, and then the next morning they called me and says, well, there's a condition. And there was a condition.

He says, well, you have all product development. That is, you know, 100-something people. You just inherit another 300. That is another three teams of other Yahooos that are doing something else. And I was like, okay. So it was the first time that now I'm starting to manage hundreds. Right. And that is a big change in the way you manage technical things.

And I started realizing at that time that for me is layers. And I think the Army has find this out. I found it probably 100 years later. That one thing is teams of 10, you're like brothers. One thing is teams of 50 or 60. You know everywhere by the first name. You know their families. When you get to 200, you just cannot.

You don't know them anymore. It's moving stuff around the board. It's like you no longer can develop a relationship with 200 people, you're not having people, personal, vulnerable one. You don't have time. And when you get to, you know, 3, 400, if you meet with every person once a day, you see them once a year. Right, right.

So you just have to start now delegating, making others do things, and you have to start working through others. That is very different. So right now, in the last count, you had what, 1,000 people or 2,000? 1,600. So, Havi has 1,600 people working for him that are developing or product managing, I suppose, the various products at the company. How many managers do you have to manage that many people? What's the ratio?

I like the many. The answer is many. But I like, I believe that the sweet spot for people to manage other groups is six to eight. And so you cannot have more of eight people that you interact on a regular basis reporting to you. You just lose control. I think that it's accent that data studies that if you try to keep 14 ideas in your brain at the same time, you start making mistakes. And so, you know, because our human brain is not good enough, we need to basically see. stop. And four or five is too little, and you're basically giving a lot of time to yourself,

but probably around eight is the right number. Every person is different. So I have around eight people, the executives reporting to me, but they have eight that report to them, and then there's a pyramid going on. Just out of curiosity, of course, I've never managed development. But if you were managing, or if I was managing a team of eight developers, you assign them, you assign them, pieces of a product to write and then every day do you go over what they've done the code review kind of thing okay yeah when you manage in date they do the code that's what we do and but I like hands-on I like I still like the the like last week I was a traveling and I went to Huntsville Alabama where part of her quarters is I got the

people to get into the office despite that people work from home now and I sat with a team of 20 people that do development and I start asking them, what is that you do every day? It's like what exactly is your problem? And it's still a sales exercise where you go through, okay, we are a team, what works, what's broken, what's missing, what's confusing, and write it down and say, okay, we can only act on a couple of things practically. And let's vote as a team into what we think is broken.

And they voted and then I said, okay, too many things are voted. We're going to erase so that it's not, has votes. And we need to vote again. We need to get to three. And, you know, the usual process to try to narrow and focus on something. And then after we got to three, I says, well, we need to pick one because that's the only thing I need to do. It's like, the only thing I know how to do is do one thing. One thing, yeah.

And let's do it right. Yeah. And we picked one and we're going to do it. And we're going to repeat. You know, real son repeat. Do it again. Yeah. Well, so interesting, I was just thinking, you know, from Buenos Aires, Argentina,

you know, you got a job with IBM, which is a great move. And then you segue to Floor Daniel, and you probably wouldn't have left IBM. I wouldn't have thought if you didn't have to move countries. But, you know, Floor Daniels is a great company also. and then from there to data stream and you're essentially still there. Just changed names a few times, but same.

You want to hear the biggest selling story that I have? Tell me. Yes, of course. We sold data stream to Infor for 200 million or so. When Infor sold to Coke, Coke with the K, Coke brothers,

you know, owners of Georgia Pacific and Mullicks and so on, and you know, Flint Hill Resources Oil and Gas. Basically, we sold it for the equivalent of $800 million. That was the equivalent EAM portion. And then we sold, Info decided to divest EAM and sell it to Exagon. And so they told me, says, hey, we think that you are the guy

to be in front of Exagon to try to, and the other people that were trying to buy it. And I think you need to be participatory. in the sales process. He says, what do you need? I says, I need Kevin Price. And so Kevin and I were the two people that basically sold EAM for $2,800 million. Wow.

That was Koch Brothers or the next company? Coke Brothers, we sold it to Exagon for $2.8 billion. So the biggest sale probably I did is selling a company for $2.8 billion. Yeah. And that was based on recurring revenues of like $300 million. So it's almost nine times that, which is really not out of range. It's not a range, but it was a lot. It's a lot.

People ask me like, John. If I do this candy cash flow, by the way, and all this, where I was doing all this, I think in your book you cover this, that is you need to keep your habits healthy. And I was in Fluor and, you know, did material manager, was doing great, then I started getting bored. And so because the project was already in cruise control. and it was more, you know, the thinking time was over and it was more execution.

So we started going after, every day after work, we used to go to the bar. And a bunch of flur guys, we go to the bar and we talk about the day, what he was going to do tomorrow. And then I started reflecting, I'm four nights a week, I'm in bar for three hours. And I said, it has to stop.

This has to stop. This is not a good thing. And it says, what can I do to find an example? excuse not to go to the bar. So I decided to do an MBA. And so I applied for Clemson. They accepted me and I said, hey guys, I have to go to school. I have classes. Sorry, coming in the bar, maybe on Fridays. And I still went on Fridays, but that was it. And so in a year, I basically graduated for an MBA in a year in something like 14 months or something. Was your MBA just in the general NBA or was it down a certain track?

It was the general MBA. But I specialized in management. That's what I do. And so that gave me the accounting thought that was missing from my background. And that gave me the idea that when we sold the EAM business

to Exagon, I positioning, you know, I was looking at the discounted cash flows and we're looking at the growth and we're looking at the projections. And to justify, you know, a big big play for both companies. Yeah. Yeah, well, people ask me, they're like,

don't you wish you to stay because, you know, because this number got so big, I'm like, I'm not sure it had been the same number if I was there. I mean, you all did such a good job with it. What I wish, if I had more equity. Yeah, yeah. Every time you sell, you'd lose your equity, so it was impossible, but, but, yeah.

That's a great story. So it's worth $3 billion at last stake, and now it's with hexagon, right? Is that who you work for now? Yeah, Exxagon. And they're a monstrous... Big monster, you know, a multi-billion dollar European company. And they make instruments for checking maintenance stuff?

They have different divisions. Two big divisions. One is called Manufacturing Intelligence, that they do hardware for precision measurements. Yeah. Like for automotive, you know, measure exact size of a fender, car, or equipment or a turbine. And the division I'm on is asset life cycle intelligence, that is software,

that is what used to be integrated, that is CAD. Okay. It's 3D CAD and engineering tools like process and instrument diagramming, stress analysis. So I connected two worlds, the world of Fluor, that is old engineering software, with the world of commercial software that I did with the instrument in for, It's not converging and I'm using both cloud and engineering thoughts at the same time.

It's very unique. It's not many people. And are they Swedish? They're Swedish. They've been over there. In Sweden, it's very interesting. They have an office with six people. And they said, we're happy to have you here.

I'm not sure what are you trying to see here. You know, we have the secretary. We have the, you know, the investor, and we have two more chairs. So they don't really have a. presence, even though the capital owners are originally from Sweden. That'd be good to go talk to those guys. Some powerful stuff going on there. It's interesting.

I already did some conversations with them, and there is a, there is a, it's a company that is changing a lot. They also have software for doing reality capture. in reality capture is basically hardware that you scan things like a city and you get a perfect model of the physics of the geometry of the city that competes with geographical information systems

like Asri or so on and so it's very interesting how this is changing is very much used. Imagine that you can scan how the topography of a place is, especially in areas of war conflict, you know, this is actually has life of his own. Interesting. Well, I can't quit thinking about this because I've always known, you know, I'm on the sales side and you came from the development side, but I always known how effective you were

and until we had this discussion, I didn't know why, but for the people watching, I mean, anybody who is, you know, about to get out of school or in school, whatever, they can aim to get these gaps filled, MBA to learn accounting and finances, and, you know, something to do with computer development, something to do with sales and maybe even another language, but you build yourself out as if you're an avatar, right, and you're trying to make this avatar as powerful as possible. Now, Harvey didn't get an MBA from Harvard, okay, but he's got an MBA, right? And so you fill these things out, and it makes you a very valuable,

commodity because IBM didn't want to give you up, floor didn't want to give you up, and the place you are now, you've been through several iterations of companies and apparently they want to keep you. It's pretty cool. It's incredible. Never stop learning. I read avidly, and you never stop. It comes naturally to me. And, you know, I know that we're all different.

So some people do like this and people don't. But there's YouTube videos. There's, you know, Khan Academy. There's you what I mean. There's all kinds of things that you can do. to learn if reading is not your thing, but in this modern world, there is no stop. We have to continue. Right.

And when you have a certain time a day when you like to do your learning or reading? I like, my perfect times is actually on weekends. And when I go a vacation, I take a bunch of books. They all believe that I'm crazy. I can tell you one of the books I'm reading now if you're interesting hearing. I'm kind of a nerd, so you're probably going to figure that the books are very nerdy. And so the book that I'm reading now is quantum computers for programmers. And there's one thing going on in the world that's called quantum computing.

And I don't know too much about it. And I said, that's not acceptable that actually I'm ahead of development, and I don't know too much about quantum computing. So I said, okay, I'm going to read a book on quantum computing. And the first thing that I get into my mind is quantum mechanics is not my forte from school. So now I have to buy a couple of books of quantum mechanics. It has heavy mathematics. I have to buy a couple of ads or books. So I digested all that.

Now I'm starting to understand. And what I'm starting to understand is that the idea that this is a faster computer is not exactly right. It is a faster computer sometimes. And the art is to try to understand from a business perspective what is it better at? What is it worse at? And this technology is very early, so it's going to take 10 years,

unless we believe Mission Impossible that they have a quantum computer there. But I'm actually so fascinated, so fascinated that there is a customer of ours called CERN. CERN is the nuclear agency of Europe that has a large Asian Collider, you know, big customer. Yeah, in Geneva.

And so, and, We always talked with the head of engineering. I know them for 20 years. And so I had to go to Switzerland for business. And I said, hey, I'll stop in Geneva and visit you. And I said, by the way, I'm reading this nerdy book of quantum computers. The guy told me, says, oh, we have a quantum computer. Do you want to actually have a training course on quantum computing?

Wow. And I was like, really? He says, I'll give you the four-hour course. And so I'm going in Switzerland in September. And I'm going to sit down in CERN and get hands-on experience on quantum computing. It's pretty cool. Do I really need this for my job? No.

Right. But yes. Yeah. Yeah. Because you have to learn how the world is changing because that's the only way that you can adapt. Right. Right. Otherwise, it'll just pass you by.

It's innovation's dilemma, you know? You change or they change you. Yeah. All right. Let's talk about chat GPT. Oh, lovely. yeah, I figured, you know, most of my guests don't really want to get into it, but I figured you would. So is that the one you're using, you're using Chad, or a different one?

We use various things for different things. You know, when I wasn't in for, I was the head of artificial intelligence for one of the teams, and we used it in the context of retail. And, you know, when you go to the drugstore, you're at the Walgreens, and if you think that the items on the shelves are randomly placed there, You're seriously wrong. There is thousands of thousands of dollars that get consumed in electricity every night to figure out exactly what they're going to put on the shelves and where.

And we did the software that does artificial intelligence that does that. That's very specific. This is so science-based that one of my employees was the head professor of the University of Glasgow of computer science. He was my employee. because you need science that is basically very abstract. That from the management side, you need to learn how to deal with these people that are so intellectually smart and so emotionally not smart. So it's actually balanced.

So we use tools that the reality is in artificial intelligence, the majority of the software is open source. So it can be embedded. Chat GPT is generative AI, but the beauty is that the results are not numbers. sentences. And the sentences are in perfect English. So I'm going to give you two examples on this. Two thoughts on this. Did you ever think that a software will understand your emotions as a user what it does? And let me tell you how we do it. So the question is this, can you have software that understands the emotions of the user? What we do is we track the mouse in the screen. And we track if a person is frustrated,

if a person is confused, or if a person is happy, or it has a job that is interrupted. And how do we do that? It's not so hard, if you think about it. Person that is frustrated, they move the mouse, they click. They're so angry at it.

That we check how many clicks they do, how much they move the mouse back and forth. And we record in this particular process, they're frustrated. Something is wrong with our designs. If the person actually does this, pauses, clicks, helps back, pauses, clicks help, he's confused. He has no idea what it has to do. And so we are determining with artificial intelligence checking all the clicks of all the people that are clicking,

and we detect the emotion and the software reacts to that emotion. And we start putting message saying, hey, we think that you're probably confused about this. there's these videos that help you understand what we're trying to do do you want to post and then chat dpte comes on that is we listen to the questions and we have ways of answering with chat dpti that is scanning a big database of the knowledge behind the software and we put it in english responding back so very interesting how we're doing this that didn't exist

this did not exist four years ago this happened all in the last four years and and we use chat dpT in a very different context from sales that is inside programs you put code to check if the software has good quality, if it works the way it's supposed to be.

Sometimes people don't write this code, everybody's sloppy and forgets to do this. ChatGPT writes the code for us. And the military of the US, they do this as part of their processes. We are adopting those processes and the thing works. It's not perfect,

but it works. So we get all code, and we go through chat GPT and we add lines of code to do automatic testing. And we're adding it for conversational assistance with people on the field. So this is changing the game completely. Yeah. Well, you know, I've heard about it for so long, but when chat came out and I could actually type in like a Google search box, what I want to done, and it comes, it's like, there it is.

I tried some things that are silly. You go to Chagip, you create a user account, and I put failure modes over HPEC system, heat ventilation and air conditioning. Yeah, it's crazy. It was like, the only thing I had to do is just put this into asset management and basically half of the problem solved.

And so, and this is done through traversing or crawling tremendous amount of information in the web and then having a engine that can answer back in English in proper sentences. Yeah, amazing. Amazing. Yes, I always recommend to our viewers that they use chat GPT at least a little bit every day, try it for something because it's almost like the computer just came out.

You get familiar with it. Now, you see, actually, risks on all this. You always see there's two sides. One is security. Everything you put in chatypT is open source or is shared whatever in the world. So, you know, if you put things that are confidential, you have to be careful. But of course, Microsoft has a version that is private. But that's exactly the same thing.

The only thing you have to pay for it. A little bit more. Yeah. That is as expected. And so we're happy to pay and keep our confidential things back. way. Well, a couple quick questions we close up here. What's your, you like to read? What's your favorite book? We talked a little bit about the quantum computer satiric and of course I read the sales for dubs, you know, thank you. Yes, yes. And a couple of things that I touched on today. I think

there's a lot of wisdom. It's a very different book, by the way. It's a book that is most of the books on management behavior, they always have a format that is very similar. In the first chapter, they tell you what they want to say. Then there's five chapters that basically covered what they just said. And then they have a chapter that repeats you the summary and says it one more time. And this is different. This book is different. And it's obvious that the stories of real experience and have the stories I know firsthand because I live them. And so it's very, very, very good, very practical. Thank you.

You know, no accounting. This also, not also is for people in sales, but for everybody. You know, nothing bothers me more. They're going to a meeting and having somebody starting talking about themselves. And it's like, oh my God.

And it's like, we're here to listen. We're here to, and they just have this necessity to actually digress and talk. It's amazing to me how many people get away with that their whole career. And somehow, I mean, it's not going to kill you, but you're not ever going to get, do as well as you could if you learn how to listen. Now, I was intrigued by this.

So I read another book. There's one of the books I read that is The Six Working Genius. And I think he is, let me let me go on my cheat sheet here and see what is the, the author and Lenzioni. And the concept of the book is they call it that there are six types of personalities that most humans have. And they call it the wonders, the inventors, the discerners, the galvanizers, the enablers, and the people who like checklist, the, you know, tenacity.

And so, but what is interesting? important of that book, at least it resonated with me, is that most people are very good at two things, two of the six categories. They're okay with two more, so they can do four things, but they hate two. Sometimes what I notice in management is we put a person that we like in a job, and the job changes and evolves, and we move them to a place to something that they hate. And That's where things go really wrong. Because nobody likes doing something that you don't really like. It consumes a lot of energy to do that.

And so intersecting what you just said is that understanding this, the people that, you know, what are their personality styles and what is that they don't like, then you create teams that are better that have all the styles of personalities to be more compact. Yeah. Yeah. That's called the six The six-working genius. Gene. Okay.

Do you have a favorite? Well, I'm, you know, my particular genius is innovative and I can do galvanizer, but I'm discerner, probably your as well. Discerners are the guys who can judge. And, you know, discerners don't have problem in judging. And whenever I sit down in, I not always, I rarely share,

my judgment, but I have a judgment of what was going on. I have an opinion of what's going on. I learned to actually wait and get more information so I refine my opinion. But going back to your book, when people actually go to meetings

and you go to visit a prospect or internal meetings in business to learn something about other groups. And then you start talking, it's just, what's the purpose of this? It's like, you know, We didn't need a meeting for that. Yeah.

So easy. It's so easy. What about favorite band? I have a condition that is ringing ears. So my hearing is kind of not good. And so my favorite bands are like classical music because it's soothing. Yeah. You know, I don't have to pay a lot of attention.

It helps me think. Yeah. And so I use it going to work and got for work when I go to the beach. and when I read, I like classical music, you know, Ania kind of thing, you know, Irish music. And the bands have a lot of words or whatever, I have to work too hard to try to understand all that, especially with all the noises. And it's not pleasant for me. So I'm kind of a...

So when you're trying to do deep work, do you want to listen to classical music or do you want to have nothing? Both. Sometimes. Sometimes I need to sit down with nothing. Yeah. And I don't know how this works. The brain must work this way. The shower is the thing.

It's like you're after one night and you're, you have this big problem. And, you know, you're trying to find what is the possible options. And the shower is it. You're showering and you're like, oh, I get it. These are the options. And just in the mornings. And I keep a notepet and a pen at night. I wake up in the middle of the night.

And it's super clear what you have to do. So you're ready dumb because you forget. Well, this is a segue, but where I went to school, we had a president of our school at the Citadel would get up early in the morning and he would go to the pool and he would swim laps. And that was his thinking time. And he kept the notepad on both ends of the pool.

He would stop and he'd swim back the other way. Admiral Stockdale, I don't know if you remember him, Jim Stockdale, If I have to do your management advice for people who actually have to interact with other people is book time with yourself. Making your calendar an hour where you book that you're going to talk to yourself. And you have an hour where you block the time and you can actually hear yourself think in that you can spend an hour of thinking of what you're doing. Otherwise, you know, the endorphins are going meeting after meeting after meeting after meeting

after meeting and now you value your bringing to things is not so high because you're not reflecting what you're doing. So you're recommending blocking some time every day if possible to just say what's actually happening today. What am I trying to accomplish? What are my goals? I used to do in sales. When I was in sales, I used to do it in the early career.

You know, what is that I'm trying to do? What is I'm trying to accomplish today? How many calls? How many people are going to visit? What is that I want from this visit? Yeah. And, you know, I want to learn the project. I want to learn what they're doing.

What is that I'm trying to do here? Otherwise, it becomes a going through the motions over and over again, and then you start wondering, what's I'm doing. Yeah. Well, you're ahead of the game because that's, I tell people, it's the most important thing, is to take the time to figure out what it is, in fact, they want. And once you know that, then anyone can help you figure out a plan to get there. It might take longer than you like, but, I mean, there's a plan.

to get there. So that's good, that's good advice. Now, you're going to, do you have any other just general advice to the noobs, any other things you would tell them? Probably would say, you know, I'm a South American guy. Yeah. Was born speaking Spanish, not a dime in my pocket. You know, moved to Canada, came to the U.S., when landed in the U.S., my total wealth was $230. And so, you The only wealth I had was knowledge. I had an engineer degree. I had read a lot. And I was willing to learn whatever it got thrown to my way.

And so my thought is, if I can do it, anyone can do it. This is basically the answer. It's like, you know, it's just the only reason what you can not do is this is yourself. If you're determined to do it and resonate from your book that is postponed gratification. You know, when you start having some financial success, we all get tempted to say, hey, let's buy this or buy that, that I need. No, you don't need, you want. But it's different. And I'm very frugal in that sense.

That is, you know, I postpone gratification. I just buy what I need to exist. And if you spend less than you earn, you will be rich. It doesn't matter what number it is. Yeah. Right. Right. That's a good point.

Well, it's a great story, hobby. I think it's a great sales story, and it really surprised me that you had that sneaky sales training early in your career I didn't know about. But I've always known how good you were and what you did, and not surprised at all that you're managing

1,600 people now around the globe. So thank you for being here today. Thank you. A pleasure, and nice to have joined serving times with you and for you. And I always have a great admiration of your story as well. And we all have our own story. So we had to find our past.

And I've had a pleasure to be here today. All right. Thank you, man. Thank you. Appreciate it.