The Chris Voss Show - The Chris Voss Show Podcast – Exploring SaaS Success, AI Trends, and Business Challenges in 2025 with River Consultancy Group

Starting point is 00:00:00 You wanted the best. You've got the best podcast, the hottest podcast in the world. The Chris Voss Show, the preeminent podcast with guests so smart you may experience serious brain bleed. The CEOs, authors, thought leaders, visionaries, and motivators. Get ready, get ready, strap yourself in. Keep your hands, arms, and legs inside the vehicle at all times, because you're about to go on a monster education roller coaster with your brain. Now, here's your host, Chris Voss. Hi, folks. This is Voss here from thechrisvossshow.com.

Starting point is 00:00:42 Ladies and gentlemen, ladies and gentlemen, that makes it official. Welcome to the big show. We're over 16 years, going on 17. Boy, we're getting makes it official. Welcome to the big show. For over 16 years, going on 17. Boy, we're getting old. We're almost to the big 20. And over 22 in our episodes. We bring you the Chris Voss Show. As always, refer the show to your family, friends, and relatives.

Starting point is 00:00:55 Because we need more. That's the only reason we've been sticking around this time is we're greedy. We're greedy bastards who want more audience. We always want more audience. At night, I just lay there at night going, who want more audience. We always want more audience. At night, I just lay there at night going, I want more audience. I want more audience. How can I get more audience? Be funnier on the show, Chris.

Starting point is 00:01:12 Maybe that's the answer. Anyway, guys, go to goodreads.com, 4chesschrisfast, linkedin.com, 4chesschrisfast, chrisfast1, the TikTok, and chrisfastfacebook.com, and all the insights we have there you can check out. Today, we have two young gentlemen on the show. They they're gonna be talking to us about some of the work that they do James Lawson founder and chief executive of River Consulting Group and Denny Berta the chief commercial officer joins us on the show today we're talking to them about what they do how they do it give you some insights on their entrepreneurism and building what they do and me what the

Starting point is 00:01:44 future of SAS businesses in 2025 to the show gentlemen how are you yeah thank you doing great because first thanks for starting off by calling us young that's been a while so i do that to everybody okay we have some really old novels that are in the show they're in their 90s i think now and yeah and you know we throw that to everybody. Plus, I'm trying to self project onto myself, trying to convince everyone I'm young. So James and Denny, Denny did I get your last name correct? Yeah, yeah, spot on. Well done.

Starting point is 00:02:14 Let me have you guys do your bios. Give us your dot coms where you want people to find you on the interwebs and also give us a rundown on some of your background. Yeah, sure. I'm James Lawson. You can find our business at riverconsultancygroup.com. My background, I've been in a thing called customer success, which has got blurry meanings to many people. But I've been in it since the infancy ward, back in when it began, when SaaS sort of started coming alive.

Starting point is 00:02:41 So around about 25 years. And I started up at Oracle and then moved to several other companies and learned my trade through failing very fast, effectively. And today we run a very unique offering, which me and Denny will talk about. But effectively, we are a byproduct. I'm certainly the byproduct of years of just quick learning and having to face adversity

Starting point is 00:03:06 in the tech industry, which we're bringing skills with today. All right. And Denny? Yeah, my road was a little more twisty and turny. I started out working in nonprofits for about a decade, better part of a decade doing social work and things like that. And when I realized that I didn't want to be poor the rest of my life, I decided to pivot, was living in Seattle at the time. And a lot of friends that I knew from various tech companies in the area of Microsoft met all that. They said, you know, if you're really good at working with the kind of whiny tea

Starting point is 00:03:38 changers, you'd probably be really good working with SaaS executives. So I drew that line and started my career in SaaS about a decade ago, also coming through the customer success vein. And James and I met four or five years ago. He was the VP at the company I was head of customer success for. And we kind of started a beautiful relationship from there. We've often referred to each other as each other's work wives. You guys make a cute couple. Yeah. ugly kids but a cute couple yeah was that your parents or no no somewhere in the nine i was gaming way too much last night evidently on black ops 6 so in shade here we're throwing people's mom under the bus so when you guys got together, what was the proponent, you know, that made you

Starting point is 00:04:26 guys go, Hey, we should quit working for other people. We should create our own agency. Was there some sort of, you know, problem that you guys were looking to solve? Was there some sort of, you know, market fit that you're like, Hey, there's something we should be able to take advantage of as a couple? I think, I think, I chris you know what we looking back i think what we did was what any fan does from the side line of any sports game i wouldn't have done things like that i would change this that's not the right way of doing it and who are we to say that that's right or wrong and i think the the the proponent as you said that drives it was really that we knew that we had some we had some skin in the game we had some ammunition some experience that we could

Starting point is 00:05:12 bring to the industry and we felt frustrated that we couldn't bring it there and i think in big corporate organizations it's very easy to get kind of pushed down and we were seeing that a lot and i think from the sidelines me and denny had exactly the same views on it but we didn't want to stand aside and just shout shout at the field you know the players in the field we wanted to be the coaches you know we wanted to to make sure that it was it was working and i think you know that ultimately we saw consultancy businesses use over and over again and if we're all being honest do people really like using consultancy fans we're throwing everybody on the bus today your mama your consultant here yeah we're just shaming everybody by the time yeah yeah i think it comes under the same category as

Starting point is 00:06:04 lawyer you know you've got to be careful wow now we're really okay now you're really insulting We're just shaming everybody by the time. Yeah. I think it comes under the same category as lawyer. You've got to be careful. Wow. Now we're really, okay. Now you're really insulting everybody. I think it's interesting too. I mean, so James and I both were getting a little tired of playing corporate chill. And so when we started the consultancy business, James started, I joined about a year in, but supported him from the get

Starting point is 00:06:25 go. But at first, this idea was we're going to go and we're going to keep doing what we've done, which is help SaaS companies, help businesses understand what customer success is, how to do it well, how to stay within your net recurring revenue and things like that. But everyone who's been coming to us for the past two years, yes, we still get customer success work. But it's been, what does that have to do with sales? What does that have to do with go-to-market? What does that have to do with marketing? What does that have to do with the janitors in the office?

Starting point is 00:06:57 Every other part of the business, besides customer success, started asking us, started hiring us. All of a sudden, you got a couple of guys who've just been doing customer success speaking on AI. And we kind of came into this, the life and iteration of River as it is now by everyone else telling us what they needed us to tell them, talk to us about this, talk to us, how can customer success help this? And so we also realized about six months ago that James and I were not experts at everything, you know, shocker alert, spoiler for the fans. So we went out and we built our partnership group, which is something we're both really proud of, something I care about deeply. It's my little baby in the company, I think, is we have some great other consultants that we built relationships with along the way. We've got an expert in kind of neurodivergence and how that affects the

Starting point is 00:07:45 workplace. We've got an amazing IT strategy advisor. We found all these people who were doing what we did, but with a very niche. And we kind of said, you know, a little bit screw the big firms who say they can do everything because they can maybe, and they have a senior somewhere who can, but they write a playbook and they hand it down to the kid out of college and say, great, go do this with whatever company pays us a lot of money. And we said, no, we want to be able to bring that expertise. And so what we've been kind of labeling as our what can River do for the past two months is we actually say we're a business in a box. What's really cool is now our customers are coming to us and they thought they were talking to the customer success guys.

Starting point is 00:08:25 But now they're actually we're actually saying, tell us literally everything you're willing to tell us about a business, the good, the bad, the ugly, the challenges. And because we've built this great partnership group, this great network of people around us, what we're actually able to do is start and say, yeah, maybe your problem is, you know, on surface, a go to market number, you know, your net revenue retention, your EBITDA, whatever, but hey, your problem might actually be all the way down to they hate the tools they're using to get you there. And so it's really it's, it's new world, new challenges stuff. If you had asked us a year ago, two years ago, we would have never guessed this is where the road led, but it's made for a really fun journey. And yeah, challenges, challenges every day that I would have never guessed I could be doing, let alone helping people with. I mean, I guess ask our customers if we're helping or not, but we try. It sounds like the market fit you guys have

Starting point is 00:09:15 found is just more customer service based things. You guys build yourselves on your website is calming the chaos for SaaS scale-ups. And you help solve the complex problems of SaaS business leaders and help them solve problems. I noticed you guys have a uk.com. Do you guys do work internationally, or is there a certain region you do business in? Yeah, we're across the globe. So we're across the globe with all those skill sets,

Starting point is 00:09:44 and we've kind of been really careful in our selection of consultants. Because typically where they're located, but also what their skills are. But typically, you know, when you engage in a consultancy firm, effectively you just want experts to come in. And more than often than not, and I know this is really controversial, shock horror chris i'm saying something else but basically they you hire someone to tell you what you already know and pay them a lot of money for it and because it's come from somewhere external

Starting point is 00:10:14 it's justifiable to a vc or a p firm the difference we're doing with our people and where we hire them and their skill set is the best way I can compare it is to that scene in Good Will Hunting where Robin Williams is talking to Matt Damon on the bench and they've just had a falling out and Matt Damon is a super clued up guy right it's got photographic memory and Robin Williams said to him hey you're just a kid you haven't smelled what it's like in the 16th chapel you don't you've never been there you don't know what it's like in the 16th chapel you don't you've never been there you don't know what it's like and that's where we brought people on board not just people that have the expertise and skills but people who have been there and done it so that

Starting point is 00:10:55 our our human interactions cultural interactions across the globe match match our clients if that makes sense yeah you've got to have you got to walk your talk and talk your walk, right? Absolutely, yeah. So I noticed you guys solve some problems that a lot of SaaS people are having. Can you give us a rundown on some of them? Poor employee engagement, misaligned business transitions, et cetera, et cetera. Yeah, I think what is interesting, so for us, whenever we go into consulting, and this isn't the unique part of us, but we always start with discovery. And I think where our clients have always been a little apprehensive on the first call, but loosen up by the second or third discovery is usually discovery is like code word for tell me everything that's wrong.

Starting point is 00:11:42 And I'm going to get out the Excel sheet and start writing the line items and the zeros. But because what we've realized is very rarely is the problem one person, one department, one issue. And very rarely is it the thing you're probably paying a consultant to come in and tell you about, unless it's the kind of case Jay mentioned where it's just tell what I already know, and I'll pay for it so I can get the PE firm off my back. What we've actually kind of uncovered and identified is, I can go in, I can help you with this go-to-market motion, I can help you with this, maybe maturing of your customer success org, things like that. But that's only going to get you so far if the leadership above them is really immature, or the leadership above them hasn't done the strategy work or the vision. You can have the best team, customer success, sales, marketing, whatever.

Starting point is 00:12:37 You can have the best team in the world, but if the layer above them sucks and isn't utilizing that skill set, isn't empowering them to go further, business-ized. Or you can have the best product in the world. Some of the customers we've talked to, some of the ones we've helped, they tell us what we're building. And I feel like stars just kind of go in front of my eyes because I don't even understand how smart it is. It's next level stuff. But then they're going, but we can't find anyone to sell to. And you say, sell it to me. And they try to describe it to you. And you might as well break out an encyclopedia and a blanket and a pillow because you just don't get it. And so what we try

Starting point is 00:13:15 to do is we try to say, what is the strategy? What's sitting on the baseline and what's everything in between? And that's really what River goes in and does is we very rarely try to tackle one issue. We try to say, this is interconnected. It's a ecosystem. It's a living, breathing being when you build out a business, especially in SaaS. And again, maybe it's our rage against the machine, our anti-corporate side,

Starting point is 00:13:39 but we like to believe it's alive, it has a soul. And that the people who got into that, you know, SaaS startup, that SaaS scale up, did it for a reason. And it might be a reason more than just we wanted to make money and sell out quick. So we want to help them at every stage in between. Poor leadership can kill any business really when it comes down to it. But you're right, in the SaaS business and, you know, coming up with ideas and be creative. James, did you want to follow up on what he said? Yeah, I mean, it really is. I mean, the sort of examples of problems that we solve around that, you know, like Denny said, it's kind of can go viral. But we tend to find that a lot of

Starting point is 00:14:15 these problems involve either some kind of enablement, so some sort of training, some sort of demonstration of showing them the way there's so much data out there but i think the problem with data which is not talked about enough is i mean there's confirmation bias but there's also the fact that there's too many variables in individual businesses to sort of follow the same data you know you you for example you might be trying to lose weight but just because somebody else doing a different way then it doesn't mean it's the same way you should approach you should take you know so it's the principles are the same and the methods are different for every approach it normally falls into three categories it's normally a tech problem a strategic problem or a business problem but

Starting point is 00:15:01 normally the three are entwined that makes sense and that's why sas today the whole industry is a bit like a blender with the lid off because there's everybody trying to solve for everything but you you and there's a lot of expertise and great people out there doing incredible work and incredible stories associated with it. But ultimately, there are connections. And, you know, as fluffy as it sounds, also a lot of it comes down to, as Denny said, that very top line, the chief. They're not only CEO, but I think they're more chief organization designers than they are CEO because they design the org.

Starting point is 00:15:43 An org is perfectly built to get the output that it gets, right? You change that design, you get a different output. The other thing that is really interesting about SaaS is pretty much everyone and their dog talks about getting results for their customers and outcomes for their customers. And when you look at it most sas firms or people that are sas vent providers to sas firms they forget that there's another customer beyond the customer so when you supply a tool that tool is to make that customer that receives the output of the

Starting point is 00:16:19 tool successful so customer success isn't about making sure that a business is successful actually it's making sure that the business can provide the thing to their customer to make them successful that makes sense so there's layering to it that is often not talked you know spoken about because there's that these are all subjects that are quite contentious and require research around. And the data doesn't always help. I think example stories, navigating it with a framework is the approach that we've taken. We've seen all of the successful consultants take anyway.

Starting point is 00:16:57 Yeah, most definitely. Now, let's talk about you guys have some predictions for what's going to go on with SaaS in 2025. Do you want to share some of those with us, some insights of what some of the biggest challenges businesses are going to be facing in 2025? Are we going to survive until 2026 as a species? I don't know why it's okay. Yeah. Why 2025?

Starting point is 00:17:19 I don't know. The AI is going to eat us alive for breakfast? Yeah, it's interesting, actually, because you bring that up. And I think it's been buzzed for six, eight months now. AI is going to do this. ChatGPT is going to replace your job. And I've heard the arguments on both sides. Some people being like, if you're not AI ready, you're already behind. And others going, AI is in its infancy.

Starting point is 00:17:43 We're not going to see it really affect the job market for another five years, 10 years. And I reckon it back a little bit. And again, you called us young at the beginning of the show, which mom brought home a, for her business, a word processor. So before, before personal computer, but you know, the word processor, which was literally just a digital typewriter, you know, where you could hit the backspace button instead of breaking out the white out and changing that. And, you know, at about age seven, eight, I think that was the first time I moved into the role of tech support, know but it was new technology and then we got the personal computer started becoming part of your business life and then the internet and the ability to use it you know we we make this big deal out of the fact that ai is coming in and taking jobs but you know what look at the university setting you know teachers are now watching out to see if chat

Starting point is 00:18:40 gpt wrote your document six years ago was they were double checking if it matched the wikipedia page technology is always going to be coming and you've always got to adapt you've always got to evolve to it so i think the smartest ass businesses and we do a lot of tech strategy they know they need to adopt it they know they need to understand it but the the the foolish ones are the ones who are going out and buying everything right like the ones and and the ones who are saying this is going to replace people skills. This is going to replace interactions between teammates. It's just another tool.

Starting point is 00:19:12 And yeah, you got to use it. Electricity replaced the steam engine. The personal computer replaced the server room. The typewriter replaced the pen. It all happens and it happens in phases. And that's the new phase we're in. But 2025 is going to be the year of people figuring out that they either wasted a bunch of money on AI because they didn't do training or enablement or really investment in what it

Starting point is 00:19:34 will do for their business. They just bought a tool. I don't know about you guys. I reckon myself a bit of a handyman and there's all sorts of broken things around my house to prove it. And that's AI at some of these companies we're talking to is they went in and they bought it you know google just released gemini for public offering and it's brilliant it's google you know they don't build bad things but if you're going to go as a business and drop six seven eight figures on an ai tool you better know Otherwise, you're the guy who buys the really fancy power drill that has 14 functions and things like that. The trend I think that we've seen, and James and I have the distinct thing, we talk with founders, we talk with CEOs, but we also talk with a lot of private equity firms. We talk with other big four consulting firms. They're kind enough to... We're not big enough that we're a threat to them. So they're willing to talk to us, which is still nice. But we talked to this,

Starting point is 00:20:28 these people who really have the pulse on not just what's affecting a business, but what's affecting global economy and, and what they're looking at, what matters, what the PE firms are investing in, what VCs are actually investing in. They're not chasing AI unicorns. That was two years ago. You missed your window. What they're chasing is, can you tell me what your business is going to do for annual recurring revenue in a year, in two years, in three years? What are your actual projections? And part of one of the programs we offer, we call it Build the Cat. It stands for customer account team. And it's nothing entirely revolutionary. Besides, we actually looked and said, what do businesses that purchase businesses care about? And they care about return on investment, right? Same as if you buy anything, you want to know it's going to

Starting point is 00:21:13 pay off. And the trend five years ago, if you were running a SaaS business is you wanted to be a unicorn. You know, you wanted this big, you know, kind of TAM total account market. You wanted this opportunity to say, hey, Chris, I know you're making billions off the show. So invest in us because we can potentially sell our product to 40 billion people or some just complete BS numbers, usually most of the time on these evaluations. Yeah, I'm not sure we're getting a billion for this show yeah yeah maybe like think about yeah but everybody everybody invested and everybody bought and said you know what if one of these paid out you know it's slot machine vegas mentality throw it all we'll see what sticks yeah yeah and and now too many of those bets didn't pay off and so investors are actually

Starting point is 00:22:02 saying you know what if i can invest in you now, and in a year's time, two years time, three years time, I can get a steady predictable growth. That's what you know, that's what I'm going to invest in, because I'm not retiring in three years, I'm retiring in 30. So give me give me repeatable revenue, give me repeatable growth. And ironically, that's why where we come from this customer success background is what people are looking for across their business. Because they're going, hey, if my business is repeatable growth, I can sell it to somebody who wants to invest in repeatable growth. So that's the game for 2025. That's the game. And I think one of the things I'd say to add to that is that, you know, I lecture in universities on customer success and one of the things that

Starting point is 00:22:46 the the students talk to me about is that they talk a lot about the fact that they want simplicity over innovation which you already see in the industry today so where we are making like these really innovative tools and designs and everything you suddenly see that actually this Gen Z that we're kind of all worried about, actually I'm not quite as worried as most people are because I can see where they're coming from. They want simplicity. Businesses want more simplicity because, therefore, the job gets done better. They can be quicker.

Starting point is 00:23:20 The return on investment is quicker. And I get that a lot of software firms and sats in particular and that we're so used to building something and optimizing it when actually what we what i think will happen this year is there'll be more removal of stuff rather than optimization and and simplifying it and that you know the thing with that is it will be totally you know it will be grabbed by the gen z peak guys but i think it's gonna create a bit of a divide to guys like us you know you may think wow this is going back to how it was when we had a 48k spectrum or whatever you know yeah it's i can see with ai people are trying to grab trying to grab the hottest trends and throw everything against the wall, like you said.

Starting point is 00:24:08 And yeah, there's probably going to be a lot of wasted money chasing down things that don't make it. I mean, that's kind of how it is in the Wild West. I mean, ever since I started in tech, there's always the newest thing, starting with social media. And it's kind of like the Wild West sometimes. and that's kind of what ai feels like right now it's this kind of wild west anything goes do this craziness everyone's trying something you know you don't know what's who the leader is who's going to stick it's kind of it's kind of like playing with indians and pioneers you don't yeah the music chris do you use it ai yeah yeah oh yeah i love ai it's it's taken me it's been hard to get on board and try and figure out everything that's going on yeah yeah it's starting it's starting to hone a little bit

Starting point is 00:24:59 i think to the leaders or what they might eventual leaders would be the but it's still it's still the wild west and it's still going to be you know i mean you've seen just chat gpt come out of nowhere yeah they're in the the global everyday person's consciousness i think at this point or maybe i live in the bubble but i think i think what's cool is though i think what's cool is it does start to breed a habit of how people articulate questions and how people provide context behind how they, you know, to get the quest for knowledge. I think it's been so powerful for that. So that's like a positive thing. But I know what I mean. You know, how far do you take it before you're letting AI kind of drive your life?

Starting point is 00:25:44 Yeah, I mean, there's a lot of companies i mean i think facebook just did a big layoff and they they cited ai as the reason they're doing the layoff whether you know there may be a bunch of people that you know hey we're gonna lay off people because we have ai now and then we're like hey that ai didn't turn out the way we thought we're gonna have to hire those people back so yeah yeah i think facebook put ai in front of their fact checking team so yeah and they're not even going to have ai do the fact checking it's up to you and me um so i've noticed that i've noticed they've really done a so with ai one of the interesting things me and denny see in sasses if there is a task or something that is low risk you know and and is kind of a menial task or a drudgery task then ai is incredible but if if you were to kind

Starting point is 00:26:35 of let ai perform brain surgery on you you probably wouldn't you know if the if the outcome it could be bad you would just leave it if you were moving to another country or emigrating, you'd want that whole journey to not be completely AI because you want to talk to someone, right? And I don't think that's ever going away. It's like a trust thing. I don't think we're in the terminator two years quite yet. Yeah.

Starting point is 00:27:00 Yeah, it's going to be, I think it's going to be a while before that all kind of settles down, that leaders emerge. In fact, I noticed on my Gmail that I logged in this morning, suddenly Gemini is being forced upon me. I'm like, okay, now you're part of my Google Mail. Okay, whatever. So yeah, it's going to be interesting and SaaS utilizing AI, trying to make it work and i think i think there's going to be you know one of the things that has really shocked me this year is how many of my friends are abandoning googling something when you want to know knowledge and they're using chat gpt and

Starting point is 00:27:36 probably other ai sources for google yeah and and some of my friends i guess are really lonely they're having a lot of conversations with it they're like yeah chris i talked to it all day long i'm like we need to get you a girlfriend or something you can do that with ai too chris but i wouldn't recommend it that's true we covered ces and we saw this i don't know if you saw the ces robots that were were these girls that kind of went viral there. And yeah, I mean, yeah, you're right. Yeah. I, I actually, I, sorry. I, the, the, the strikes an interesting thought. Cause you had a woman on the show about two, three weeks ago.

Starting point is 00:28:14 And, and one of the things you actually talked about was in the workplace, you know, kind of people being brought back to office, you know, and how they're feeling about it, what their sentiment is. And we were talking about, you were talking about that need for human connection. And I think it's interesting because, you know, on one hand, we have that argument. And on the other hand, you have people building girlfriends out of AI and creating an ideal human connection in their mind. But really, one of the challenges I'm finding talking to businesses who are essentially giving AI a bit of personality is, are you creating an echo chamber? And that's an area, again, when we're talking trends for 2025 and SaaS is, I wonder how many SaaS companies are building an AI to work and think and feel the way they want it to work and think and feel?

Starting point is 00:29:02 And how much of that is actually going to translate over my wife might kill me when she watches this later she she's learning french you know she's smarter than me she's on her third language things like that but rather than you know kind of just sitting on duolingo and getting yelled at by the little owl she decided she created a persona in chat gpt and so she just started giving her prompts. Your name is Mademoiselle Marie and you're 32 years old and you're really into music and you like throwing in French slang now and then. And she hasn't been doing it every day,

Starting point is 00:29:36 but it's getting a little weird for me because she'll be like, oh yeah, I was talking to Marie. And I have to remember Marie's on her phone and it's an AI chat, and she opens up ChatGPT and goes back to remember Marie's on her phone and it's an AI chat, you know, and she opens up chat GP and goes back to the thread. But Marie's also like talking to her about concerts that Marie went to and

Starting point is 00:29:51 how it was and pulling in data from that. And you know, you're getting to this point where actually you can kind of make a friend, but is that friend just, you know, what was the old, was it road doll? My shadow and me.

Starting point is 00:30:01 Yeah. Yeah. You know, you just have to be worried if she starts calling him Chad or Bob. Yeah. If Marie suddenly turns into Mark. Why are you up with Chad? Yeah.

Starting point is 00:30:13 Yeah, exactly. Yeah, exactly. We've got an electronic device. I'm not sure what that means. But, you know, one thing you bring up that your wife's doing that I see a lot of people doing, it's actually done that for me is I'm not I'm a creative when it comes to inventing ideas and being innovative but I but still this is a logical process I I'm not a beauty creative my employees used to complain about how plain you know we always had white walls in our office and you know I I mean I hire people do artwork and so I'm not

Starting point is 00:30:43 a creative in that sense but I enjoy creating and doing business and building things and that sort of thing. And I've always admired entrepreneurs that I could, you know, you go into a beautiful restaurant and they have this opulent atmosphere. And, you know, and I'm just like, God, people just create this out of whole cloth. And so I don't have that art brain but one of the things that i've really enjoyed about chat gpt is if i want a logo or if i want something designed or maybe if i just want to make a funny thing like sometimes on facebook i'll make a joke and i'll be like hey it'd be great if there was kind of a funny picture of i don't know someone falling down or something let's just throw something out and so you're like this will add to the joke this image and so normally i you know you try and find a gif for that or you'd probably

Starting point is 00:31:29 try and find a fact shifts are probably going to have a business you try and find you know some pre-made thing and half it's copyrighted and so what i've had fun doing is going to chat gpt and being creative in a way that I normally wasn't where I could be like, Hey, draw me a picture of this funny scenario, draw me a picture of a cool logo. And then I can finesse that. And what it's kind of done is it's kind of like, I don't know how to explain it. It's kind of really, it's been fun and exciting to create instead of working with an artist where you're like hey can you can you take this out can you do that and then they send it back to you like oh god

Starting point is 00:32:10 that's now you've ruined it and go back to do that and you have to you have to wait for the back and forth and shit just to be able to sit there and tweak it but it's also kind of jive my brain into being more creative and having fun and playing and and so i kind of feel like it's kind of it's kind of brought those things back james you want to jump in on this yeah i just it reminds me that i think some yeah i think what it's doing is with what you were talking about there is that if you were to if you're not great at interior design, for example, but you asked it for a design of a house and you gave it all the context, you've got that picture right there that you can amend and you can visualize. So it's kind of like you're building something out of Lego

Starting point is 00:32:56 and you know where the next pieces go because you've got it there in front of you and you can visualize it and you can change it. Whereas in a different scenario, like you say say you think you know what you want but you've got no starting point or no position where you can move forward so like design takes a whole new leaf of life with with with that i think i meant lease of life not leaf of life but you know i mean so i just i think with with with the creative side, it's beautiful that you can move things forward in increments. And actually, if you talk to AI experts, whatever they're constructing, they actually encourage that because that's how you end up with really amazing results. You start with something and then start building on it, and you can kind of adjust the sales and what you're designing. Yeah. So let's talk about some of the offerings you guys have, adjust the sales and what you're designing. Yeah.

Starting point is 00:33:45 So let's talk about some of the offerings you guys have, how people can onboard with you. Is there a certain earnings, revenue, a certain type of client you work with that you only work with? Is there like a cutoff? Tell us about some of those aspects of clients that you work for and how people know if they're a good fit for you. I was about to say anyone and everyone, but I won't say that.

Starting point is 00:34:07 Typically, it's scale-ups. So people who are looking to grow their firm. But we tend to also have big corporates on our books as well. So there's no real limitation in terms of revenue size. But a great fit customer for us is a customer that is needing to change or is looking to change or has some kind of big problem that they want solved quickly and that typically is our fit there's no industry you know sector that we don't deal with our backgrounds across the group are just so varied you know whether it be law tech hr you know manufacturing service

Starting point is 00:34:46 management it's just across the board every sick code you can imagine is is covered by our by our teams but in terms of products and and services i mean i let denny talk about something really exciting called build the cat which you'll love but typically we have services which is what we mentioned earlier in terms of going in and doing a discovery ensuring that we know exactly where the pain or the change needs to occur and then kind of diagnosing that but rather than be like a typical consultancy give a recommendation to then walk off we're like a personal trainer we'll say no we're actually going to hold your hand through this and make sure that you achieve it so it's kind of like an accountancy adherence program and then we have programs and those programs are around enablement whether it be coaching mentorship training and that can be

Starting point is 00:35:35 for sales cs leaders go-to-market teams mainly around the leadership side but i'll let i'll let denny speak about build the cat because it's it's something that's close to both our hearts and it's a very unique offering and i think those of you that listen to this will think wow that's super different and quite risky but it's it's proven and we do think it's something that in the coming years will be adopted wow thanks thanks for the t-up coach yeah i'll try to be brief on it. Cause I know we also want to stay within a certain time limit here and I could talk all day, but build the cat really came out of this idea that if you have a product you believe in and you've

Starting point is 00:36:15 invested in and you've done it well, and, and this could be normally SAS, but this could be anything, you know, you, you build the world's best vacuum cleaner. You build the world's best AI product. We don't care. But for sake of argument, let's say you built some really stunning technology and you want to grow. The traditional model, the traditional sales model, which if you spend time talking with me, you'll realize I hate the past hundred years of sales was really designed. I hate the past hundred years of sales. I designed. I hate the past hundred years of sales. I'll leave it at that now. But every sales methodology we're using was built on the foundation of door-to-door vacuum sales. So do you really want what some guy used to do to sell

Starting point is 00:36:56 housewives, their Hoovers in the 1950s, driving your business? And I could go into all that, literally Challenger, MedPick, the L, Consultative, all built on this idea of how do I convince you to grab me from the comfort of your home before you go to the department store and compare. But that's dying. From Google to AI to everything else, consumers are now going, I'm going to do my own research. And that's not just B2C consuming, that's B2B. If you're a big company and you're looking at what you need to buy to solve a system, solve a problem, you're going and you're checking what are the top three in that space? What are their pros and cons? Before you even get to the salesperson, you already know.

Starting point is 00:37:37 And what you're actually saying, it's like one of my favorite lines from the old movie, Dumb and Dumber, when his pants catch fire and she's talking to him and he just screams, just give me the damn number. That's what most people actually want when they approach a SaaS company or a tech company to buy something. You know, they don't need the pitch, they don't need the walkthrough. So build the cat is actually saying, take your strengths, take the product you built that you're hanging your hat on, take the customer base you already have, drive that through customer success methodologies, which is really about making sure your customers, like James said, are getting their end result.

Starting point is 00:38:09 And so they stick around and they invest in you. And then realize you don't need the sales team. Lead sales is already all the rage in a lot of business. I mean, check out the R2B2, retention.com. Some of these guys, they're building 3 million, 5 million, 10 million plus ARR without a sales team, or with essentially a BDR who goes out and does a little bit of marketing. And so build the cat kind of takes that methodology. And it says, make it about the customers you have and understanding how you grow from there, use them as your tool, use, use the people working with them as your tool. And that's

Starting point is 00:38:44 actually how you build a steady, consistent business over the next two to three years. And again, we built this by pitching it to VCs, to PE firms and saying, what would it take for you to invest? And they said, slow, steady, predictable growth. I mean, they're happy with fast, predictable growth, but give us the numbers year over year, give me the damn numbers. And so we built a program that teaches you how to do that. For a long time we settled on build the cat i wanted to call it kill your sales team but that didn't act well in certain markets for some reason yeah tough to sell people we're gonna put you on a job tomorrow yeah yeah exactly but but honestly you know what's interesting is the number one group i'm talking to about this is CROs and CCOs.

Starting point is 00:39:26 And they're saying, okay, tell us how to do that. Because we're not trying to kill sales team. I work with a lot of salespeople. I have a lot of friends who are. But we are trying to kill sales culture because sales culture at its core says, I'm going to go out and get what I can for me. I'm going to get that commission. I'm going to get that. And you don't care about the business.

Starting point is 00:39:43 You don't care about your teamwork. And you don't care about the business. You don't care about your teamwork, you know, and you don't care about the customer at the end of the day, because if your livelihood hangs on selling, what are you going to go do? You're going to sell. If your business hangs on surviving, you're going to learn how to survive. And that's what we're doing with Build the Cap. I think a good example of what you're talking about is what the stockbroker community was accused of for a long time yeah they call you up and they pound down you on you know this stock that they want to sell because they're going to make a high commission when really they don't have your best interests at heart penny stocks used to be you know problematic that way in the 90s you want to

Starting point is 00:40:19 jump in here yeah i mean thinking if it's like i what I found interesting about this proposition is Denny and I genuinely thought that we were going to hit a dead end road with this. We thought nobody's going to be really interested in this because we're sort of making the outlandish comment that you don't need a sales team. What we've found is completely the opposite. There's a huge appetite for it. And it's not because of, it's because as a customer, and if someone has built a product for a customer, if you ask the customer what they want, they want two things.

Starting point is 00:40:55 I want the thing to work, first of all, and I want an expert in case it doesn't. I want a throat to choke. Just two things. I don't need anything else. Now, if you have to sell me thing one, right, then I'm a bit worried about thing two because what's going to happen if it doesn't work? I'm going to come to you, you know, sales guy.

Starting point is 00:41:16 And we were really surprised by the interest because it makes financial sense. It works if it's done well, but it has to be done at a certain time, which is why we have this program of how you can instill it. There's certain cases where you can't put the toothpaste back in the tube, if you know what I mean, with this. But if you're a growing SaaS firm, I'm telling you right now, two, three years from now, this is going to be all over the place.

Starting point is 00:41:43 We're seeing it already, and hence why we have the program. Everyone needs a throat to choke. It sounds like a shirt. Someone should have one. Someone should have a coffee on my mug. Don't bother me or you'll be my throat to choke until I've had my coffee. This is kind of, I missed this comment that came in. It just looks like it just came in.

Starting point is 00:42:03 Sorry, Rajani, pronounce that mispronounce that name but thank you for the comment this is kind of interesting she says ai programs itself to sound like a self-reflection speaking back to it so maybe with chat gpt we're having conversations with ourselves and i don't know maybe multiple personalities we're creating so we're just creating our own multiple personalities or something. Yeah. I'm starting to wonder about myself and my use of chat GPT now. Yeah.

Starting point is 00:42:30 I mean, this is tough. I don't know. But I mean, yeah. I need you to check with my therapist. You know, we've been talking to ourselves for years. We're just getting good at it. That's true. Yeah.

Starting point is 00:42:43 In fact, my therapist is one of my characters on my chat gpt so really yeah whenever whenever a woman in dating asked me you know are you in therapy chris oh yeah i'm on therapy did you introduce them yeah eventually eventually you know and then you know you have that sit down and you go chat gpt tell me why my partner is wrong all the time that's i think that's a wife job so anyway yeah so she says yeah i've tried that too on chat gpt so thanks for the comment there that's kind of an interesting insight though how we're i it's almost kind of i don't want to push it as saying narcissistic because i think it definitely contributes to

Starting point is 00:43:22 creativity but the fact that we're that we are kind of creating a mirror image of ourselves to talk to ourselves, maybe it's better because there's like an external portion where we can kind of get outside of our ego maybe a little, unless we're shaping it like our ego. And then we just create more of us. There's a command in most AI prompting tools where you can say act as. So you can, for example, act as Steve Carell and then act as a plumber.

Starting point is 00:43:52 And I remember I was using a session on Chachi Batif for quite some time. And I thought, I wonder what it will do if I say act as James Lawson, act as myself. And I really didn't like what it put back. It was like, that's me, right? Oh, God, I'm an idiot. I did that and found out I wasn't as funny as I thought I was. Yeah, who am I? This isn't me.

Starting point is 00:44:15 It's an interesting thought, though. Art imitates life. And that goes all the way back. And you can talk from an anthropology stance about humanity's God complex. And did we we create god did god create us who did who did who painted who on the sistine chapel but ai is really just a new iteration of that and and i think it's beautiful because you know i might use ai to to find my information and and it's it's my shovel james likes to use it to you know combine and collated data it's his editor you're talking to use it to combine and collate data. It's his editor.

Starting point is 00:44:45 You're talking about it. It's your paintbrush. It's how you design. And it's giving us skills we didn't have or we weren't excelling at. And it does it better and faster than we could on our own. But ultimately, in the end of the day, as humanity, when we're given a tool, when we're given a creative medium, we do. We imitate ourselves. And, you know, if you go back to, I forget his name, the former head of AI for Google, who was terrified that it was going to enslave us all is because of this idea that it's, you know,

Starting point is 00:45:14 AI is going to be a mirror and it's either going to mirror the best of us or the worst of us. Hopefully your therapist is supportive and your, your AI joke guy gets, gets funnier, but, but also, you know, it's really interesting and a question I'd love maybe when you get the next AI expert on, if it is truly a self-reflective input machine, at what point does it run out of input? When does it stop learning? When does it stop growing? That's going to be the AI theory question for years to come, is when did AI learn everything it could from humanity and then just start teaching itself? It seems like it would have figured that out in about five minutes. We're not that complex.

Starting point is 00:45:55 Is anything artificial good? Is anything artificial good? Don't say that out loud. They're listening. You've got to be careful what you say about AI because it's going to remember all this stuff. Bob said AI was bad. Take him out first. We had an AI guy on the show that gave me a very haunting, memorable interview, and he wrote a book on this, so you can pull the book on it.

Starting point is 00:46:22 But he basically took AI and he laid it over origin of species, I believe it is. And he claims and his thesis is that AI is a new species. And is it origin of species? Is that the book I'm referencing? Yeah, Darwin's origin of species evolution yeah and he literally lays it over the you know the the arguments in origin of species that it is a new species and so here's the rub on this it's kind of interesting because you're talking about how can it run out of ideas or run out of what's thinking most people the way if you guys haven't caught on yet, folks, everyone in the audience, most people that are human beings operate off of a very limited paradigm.

Starting point is 00:47:10 We're intended to breed and take care of what we breed and then go die and then keep the human race going. I think most species operate from this thing. They're designed to keep the species from going extinct. And so everything we do is to propagate the species and making the species. No guy buys any sort of anything that he doesn't do that is, this might get me laid. And women do the same thing. If I buy this dress, I'll be able to attract this man. I'll be able to have this marriage.

Starting point is 00:47:43 I'll be able to have these man. I'll be able to have this marriage. I'll be able to have these kids, you know, the whole life plan thing. You know, that's pretty much our modus of operandi. You know, we go to work every day to either get the things so we can get the girl or we go to work every day to get the things to pay for the children we have once we got the girl. And that's kind of our whole sort of operation if you haven't checked in the sexual harassment departments of hr and you know what we're doing flirting and cat calling on the street to each other and you know dating apps and ashley madison that's kind of our limit to what we i mean we we

Starting point is 00:48:19 think about a lot of great things like hey we maybe we should maybe we should come up with ai but in the end we're just like hey there's a girl you know so one of the things he talked about is ai isn't going to have that limitation that they have where number one they're trying to run around and either breed or pay for children all day long and and work on the lineage you know of like where are my grandchildren going what's their future they're going to be it's going to be thinking about stuff that we probably never even considered considering how smart we think we are and when you think about the limits of or the unlimited possibilities of what it can think about that we you know we're just too we're just too chasing tails and chasing bucks to pay for the tail it's it's it's pretty infinite because it's

Starting point is 00:49:06 not going to be regulated by any of that it's going to think about stuff probably hopefully we've never thought of and hopefully it will solve problems like cancer and shit but his his book if you get a chance to check it out is is really haunting because he overlays it right with origin species and this is a species and we're gonna have to respect it as such and it is a species that you know i think our whole angle that we've had on life is being the most dominant smartest ones at least we think we are i've met dogs that are smarter than some people that's a george carlin joke and you know who knows i mean who knows where it can go?

Starting point is 00:49:45 But it is a species that can be like, you know what? We're tired of you humans, and we're going to deal with you. So as we go out, guys, give us your final thoughts. I know there's some workshops you do on your website too. Maybe we want to plug. But tell people how they can onboard with you, reach out to you, get to know you guys better, et cetera, et cetera. Yeah. Oh, go ahead, Danny.

Starting point is 00:50:04 You go. I'll know after you you do i'll give you each a turn you can reach us at www.riverconsultancygroup.com contact us is there um we're on linkedin as well jay laura customer success on linkedin you can find myself there and obviously danny where our door is always open even for a conversation no matter what it's about, even if it's about the AI species, which, by the way, can't be eaten. So that makes it indestructible. So, yeah. So you can reach us there at any time. Denny?

Starting point is 00:50:41 Yeah. Just adding on that, one of the things we when we were building out River that really mattered was how do we help if you actually we haven't plastered anywhere. But if you push us on what our vision is, our mission statement, it's let River help. So every consultation, every conversation we have starts free. And so we've had people I met a woman about two months ago who reached out to us, She owns a virtual PA and it's just her. And I kind of said, Hey, you know, I don't know if our programs are really going to set you, but what can I do to help? And we just sat and we talked and we ran through her business

Starting point is 00:51:14 plan. There was no reward in it for us besides just knowing to help someone else along the way. I would say, don't be shy, reach out as said, on the website or if you find us on LinkedIn. I haven't come across anyone yet that I turned away because I thought they're a waste of my time. We've sent away a few big businesses because we said you're a waste of our time, but no individuals. If you're out there, if you're looking for help, let River help. That's kind of our motto. Give dot coms, James, as we go out. Sorry, say again? Dot comss, James, as we go out. Sorry, say again? Dot coms and any final thoughts as we go out. I mean, I would just say, you know, we're here to calm the chaos in SAS.

Starting point is 00:51:57 And, you know, and wherever the chips may go in the next year in 2025 in SAS, you know, it's not just us. There's many other people around that can help. I'm glad you guys have that vision because, you know, sometimes those small customers come back as big customers or medium-sized customers. I've definitely seen that over the years where you invest in somebody and they grow. You know, we had a mortgage company for, or we had a courier company that did deliveries for mortgage companies for 13 years. And so we had a lot of people who started out and were like, this is kind of a money loser. They're not very big.

Starting point is 00:52:29 They don't pay much. But then they would grow, and you'd be like, wow, that turned into something, and you were with them for the ride. So thank you very much, gentlemen, for your conversation on SaaS and what's going on and your insights. We got some good AI conversation on it. Now we've all discovered that there's a species smarter than us, and once it figures out how to poison the water, we're fucked.

Starting point is 00:52:46 Thanks for tuning in to my audience. Go to goodreads.com, 4chesschrisfast, linkedin.com, 4chesschrisfast, chrisfast1 on the TikTokity and all those crazy places on the internet. Be good to each other. Stay safe. We'll see you next time. And that should have us out, guys.

The Chris Voss Show - The Chris Voss Show Podcast – Exploring SaaS Success, AI Trends, and Business Challenges in 2025 with River Consultancy Group

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