Meeting Title: Brainforge Final Interview - Abdullah Date: 2026-04-10 Meeting participants: Kaela Gallagher, Jasmin Multani, Greg Stoutenburg, Abdullah Ahmad, Robert Tseng
WEBVTT
1 00:00:07.850 ⇒ 00:00:12.790 Kaela Gallagher: Hey guys, hopefully this… this works. I’m gonna hop out now.
2 00:00:12.790 ⇒ 00:00:14.349 Greg Stoutenburg: Yep, looks like we’re in.
3 00:00:14.350 ⇒ 00:00:15.130 Kaela Gallagher: Okay, cool.
4 00:00:15.130 ⇒ 00:00:21.529 Greg Stoutenburg: I’m sure to make one of us hosts, and then we can, let Robert and Abdil in when they’re ready.
5 00:00:22.450 ⇒ 00:00:22.800 Jasmin Multani: Yeah.
6 00:00:22.800 ⇒ 00:00:25.110 Kaela Gallagher: Okay, yeah, let me see how to do that.
7 00:00:28.410 ⇒ 00:00:29.419 Greg Stoutenburg: There we go.
8 00:00:32.770 ⇒ 00:00:35.629 Abdullah Ahmad: Hey team, how’s it going? Are you guys able to hear me?
9 00:00:36.010 ⇒ 00:00:37.639 Greg Stoutenburg: Yep, you’re great. Good to see ya.
10 00:00:37.640 ⇒ 00:00:40.999 Abdullah Ahmad: Awesome, yeah, good to see you too again, Robert, Jasmine.
11 00:00:43.360 ⇒ 00:00:46.340 Robert Tseng: Is it, Abdullah?
12 00:00:46.670 ⇒ 00:00:49.069 Abdullah Ahmad: Yes, hi Robert, yes, this is Abdullah.
13 00:00:49.340 ⇒ 00:00:54.419 Robert Tseng: Abdullah, okay, sorry, I wasn’t sure where to… where the inflection points were.
14 00:00:55.730 ⇒ 00:00:57.850 Robert Tseng: Yeah, Abdullah, okay, great.
15 00:00:57.850 ⇒ 00:00:59.149 Abdullah Ahmad: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
16 00:00:59.360 ⇒ 00:00:59.950 Robert Tseng: Yeah.
17 00:01:00.950 ⇒ 00:01:06.050 Robert Tseng: Cool, well, good to meet you. Yeah, I think the team said great things about you, we’re excited to…
18 00:01:06.080 ⇒ 00:01:22.380 Robert Tseng: speak with you, I know you have something prepared for us. So, yeah, just as far as, like, kind of timing-wise, I know we have a tight 45 minutes, so, yeah, we just want to kind of give you, you know, really 10 to 15 minutes to kind of present on what you have, and then…
19 00:01:22.590 ⇒ 00:01:36.649 Robert Tseng: really want to ask a few questions about the assignments. It’s possible we may cut you off earlier, just kind of be prepared for all things, you know? And then, yeah, want to really save the bulk of this time to talk
20 00:01:36.920 ⇒ 00:01:44.929 Robert Tseng: More about the role specifically, and, like, if, you know, the rest of the team here, who you’d be working very closely with.
21 00:01:44.930 ⇒ 00:01:57.630 Robert Tseng: To ask questions, and I want you to feel comfortable, you know, have a better… have a clear understanding of kind of what you’re… as clear as you can, I guess, of what you’d be getting yourself into, since this would be the last… the last interview, so…
22 00:01:57.630 ⇒ 00:01:59.909 Robert Tseng: Does that sound all good for you?
23 00:01:59.910 ⇒ 00:02:03.469 Abdullah Ahmad: Amazing, sounds great, and been very excited for this, actually.
24 00:02:04.260 ⇒ 00:02:13.340 Robert Tseng: Okay, cool. Well then, I’ll turn it over to you, I guess if you want to share your screen, and we’ll just kind of… we’ll sit back and let you do… let you cook.
25 00:02:13.710 ⇒ 00:02:14.800 Abdullah Ahmad: Awesome, awesome.
26 00:02:14.800 ⇒ 00:02:15.420 Robert Tseng: Correct.
27 00:02:15.940 ⇒ 00:02:21.029 Abdullah Ahmad: Perfect. Let me know if you guys are able to see my screen.
28 00:02:21.980 ⇒ 00:02:24.530 Jasmin Multani: I think it’s still loading.
29 00:02:25.420 ⇒ 00:02:27.300 Jasmin Multani: Okay, I see it now. There it is.
30 00:02:27.300 ⇒ 00:02:29.110 Abdullah Ahmad: Awesome. Perfect.
31 00:02:29.790 ⇒ 00:02:40.640 Abdullah Ahmad: Alright, I’m gonna start, and just as a caveat, I’ll point out that I’ll present this as you guys being the clients for DoorDash, just to make the experience easier in terms of asking questions.
32 00:02:40.810 ⇒ 00:02:42.730 Abdullah Ahmad: And we can take it from there.
33 00:02:43.640 ⇒ 00:02:44.480 Abdullah Ahmad: Awesome.
34 00:02:44.710 ⇒ 00:02:58.979 Abdullah Ahmad: All right, good afternoon, team. Thank you so much for making time today. Robert, Greg, Jasmine, really appreciate you guys, sharing the necessary data, in order for BrainForge to, conduct this analysis.
35 00:02:59.410 ⇒ 00:03:15.570 Abdullah Ahmad: Building on that, in this presentation today, I want to talk about DoorDash’s new verticals market in Cincinnati, essentially looking over, sales and user data from between September, mid-September, to mid-October, to better understand the company performance.
36 00:03:15.570 ⇒ 00:03:26.699 Abdullah Ahmad: The main goal of this presentation is to highlight how the business did, but more importantly, also identify exactly what they did well, as well as where the bottlenecks currently exist.
37 00:03:26.710 ⇒ 00:03:41.979 Abdullah Ahmad: Our goal at Brainforge is primarily to help our customers, DoorDash in this case, to truly maximize its potential when it comes to revenue generation, inducing efficiency into the workflows, as well as maximizing the customer experience.
38 00:03:42.880 ⇒ 00:03:57.690 Abdullah Ahmad: When we looked at the data between September and October, a few key insights stuck out right away. So for this period, the company was able to generate a total of $297,000 in revenue.
39 00:03:57.690 ⇒ 00:04:04.549 Abdullah Ahmad: However, grocery fulfillment failures, Dasher-related cancellation costed around $8,200.
40 00:04:04.740 ⇒ 00:04:12.749 Abdullah Ahmad: Additionally, a further $25,000 is at risk from customer churn driven, primarily by complaints and late delivery expectations.
41 00:04:12.880 ⇒ 00:04:21.730 Abdullah Ahmad: This together brings it up to around $33,000 worth of revenue, either directly we’re losing on, or it could be subjected to loss in the coming months.
42 00:04:22.050 ⇒ 00:04:32.990 Abdullah Ahmad: In order to alleviate these concerns, we have three main propositions. Number one, fixing inventory accuracy at the partner stores is the single highest leverage intervention that we can make right now.
43 00:04:33.210 ⇒ 00:04:34.390 Abdullah Ahmad: Secondly.
44 00:04:34.430 ⇒ 00:04:49.130 Abdullah Ahmad: targeted supply incentives for high clap period further helps de-risk, late-order-related churn exposure. And finally, dedicated 60-day intervention towards particular locations, in this case, grocery store number 2,
45 00:04:49.130 ⇒ 00:04:56.080 Abdullah Ahmad: Due to its subpar performance, before this particular store or others become a larger liability for the organization.
46 00:04:58.030 ⇒ 00:05:14.050 Abdullah Ahmad: In this presentation, I’ll first start off, like, by giving a full general view of what the performance for the business was in the set period, but more importantly, we want to dive into key findings across stores, dashers, and customers to see and identify exactly where the bottlenecks exist.
47 00:05:14.130 ⇒ 00:05:24.899 Abdullah Ahmad: We use this information to identify the risk to the revenue structure, as well as customer satisfaction, but more importantly, identify exactly where the opportunity for improvement exists for us.
48 00:05:24.960 ⇒ 00:05:37.580 Abdullah Ahmad: Finally, we want to provide some actual recommendations, which can help alleviate some of these concerns, but also continue to see how Brainforce can truly offer its support in DoorDash reaching its highest potential.
49 00:05:38.700 ⇒ 00:05:48.820 Abdullah Ahmad: So to start off, when we first look at the business health snapshot, we see in the time period there were around 12,800 completed deliveries at a 98% completion rate.
50 00:05:48.980 ⇒ 00:05:57.999 Abdullah Ahmad: This generated around $297,000 in revenue, and predominantly contributed by the DoorDash, Dash Market Warehouse.
51 00:05:58.070 ⇒ 00:06:14.210 Abdullah Ahmad: The overall item find rate remains quite high at 93%. However, when we look at the failure metrics, about 5% of the orders were late by 20 minutes or more, and the complaint rate and the cancellation rate remain minimum at 1.6 and 1.57%.
52 00:06:14.490 ⇒ 00:06:26.889 Abdullah Ahmad: Overall, we think that the business actually performed extremely well in terms of revenue for the set time period, given the consideration that it was only operating with one warehouse and only 3 grocery partners.
53 00:06:27.210 ⇒ 00:06:36.600 Abdullah Ahmad: This view, however, does not really help us identify exactly where the bottlenecks and concerns are, so for that, we need to, like, take a more deeper look.
54 00:06:37.090 ⇒ 00:06:51.950 Abdullah Ahmad: We primarily focus on 3 stakeholders which make up our market. These consist of around 4 store partners, around 2,300 dashers, and almost 13,000, orders which were made by our customers who trusted us with their business.
55 00:06:52.030 ⇒ 00:06:58.710 Abdullah Ahmad: In the next section, I want to go in a bit detail about each of the key findings that we found across these main stakeholders for us.
56 00:06:59.810 ⇒ 00:07:14.489 Abdullah Ahmad: When we looked at the store’s related data, there were two key insights which, stepped, which we saw right away. Number one, the three grocery store partners are losing around 1 in 7 items, despite generating 45% of the revenue.
57 00:07:14.650 ⇒ 00:07:31.359 Abdullah Ahmad: We saw that the grocery stores show around 12-15% in missing rates. Essentially, a user made an order, but that was not found at the store, and this was extremely higher than when we compared it to the Dashmart warehouse, which had only about 0.3% in missing rate.
58 00:07:31.480 ⇒ 00:07:43.959 Abdullah Ahmad: The good news here is that this points to a larger structural elementary problem, which is actually easily solvable as long as we have, like, clear lines of communication with our grocery stores and are able to communicate that to them.
59 00:07:44.200 ⇒ 00:07:53.549 Abdullah Ahmad: Number two, particular stores, and in this case, grocery store number 2, consistently failed on key metrics and subpar compared to its competitors.
60 00:07:53.580 ⇒ 00:08:05.600 Abdullah Ahmad: We saw that the cancellation rate at 3.15% and late at 5.4% was almost, like, a third more than the other grocery partners, and 3 to 4 times that of, like, Dashmart.
61 00:08:05.610 ⇒ 00:08:24.149 Abdullah Ahmad: Additionally, the D2R time was 8.1 minutes, which was 2.5 times that of Dashmart, making this the highest priority intervention in the market that we can make right now, because our concern is we do not want to have an organization-level distrust by our customers, who are easily able to switch to other apps.
62 00:08:24.750 ⇒ 00:08:37.700 Abdullah Ahmad: When we looked at the Dasher’s related data, the two key insights were, number one, class, which basically is the time between the order being placed and the driver accepting the order, was two times more than the D2R.
63 00:08:37.720 ⇒ 00:08:49.760 Abdullah Ahmad: What that basically means that how long a Dasher takes to accept the order matters way more than actually how far they have to travel when we’re trying to anticipate if the order is going to be late or not.
64 00:08:49.760 ⇒ 00:08:59.459 Abdullah Ahmad: So this suggests that this is not going to be just a geographical fixed problem, but rather need to increase incentivization for the drivers to accept the orders quickly.
65 00:08:59.630 ⇒ 00:09:07.079 Abdullah Ahmad: Key insight, too, was there’s clearly a difference between the experience of the drivers and how they contribute to the business.
66 00:09:07.150 ⇒ 00:09:25.219 Abdullah Ahmad: High-experience dashers, who we say… who we assume to be 40-plus deliveries, we saw that their late rate was at 3.7, their missing rate of at 2.3, and the D2R time of 2.48%, and all of these metrics were more than 2 times, more than… less than half
67 00:09:25.260 ⇒ 00:09:43.320 Abdullah Ahmad: of that of low-experience drivers who only had 1 to 9 deliveries. What this means is activating this pool of high-experience drivers, we can truly increase the performance, as a business as a whole, without really needing and adding the… expanding the network of drivers that we currently have.
68 00:09:44.380 ⇒ 00:10:00.229 Abdullah Ahmad: Finally, when we come to the customer experience, in our data, we did not have customer-level data, so we could not really calculate churn here. However, we can leverage the metrics that we did for dashers and stores to get a better understanding of the customer performance.
69 00:10:00.410 ⇒ 00:10:15.500 Abdullah Ahmad: And for this, we create a new metric. We call this the perfect order, and we’re hoping this can be the new North Star metric for the business. A perfect order basically means that there was nothing missing in the order, the order was not 20 minutes late, and there was no complaints filed.
70 00:10:15.690 ⇒ 00:10:26.640 Abdullah Ahmad: If you look at the chart on the left, this gives, like, a very clear understanding about how our stores are performing. The dash smart one we see, like, almost performs at 100% perfect order.
71 00:10:26.680 ⇒ 00:10:35.990 Abdullah Ahmad: And primarily the deficiency that this dispatch location is experiencing is in about 5.5% of orders which were consistently laid.
72 00:10:36.410 ⇒ 00:10:47.669 Abdullah Ahmad: In comparison, when we look at the grocery store, the three partners, they’re very consistent to each other, and also consistently falling short, almost at a near 50% when it comes to perfect order rate.
73 00:10:47.840 ⇒ 00:10:58.090 Abdullah Ahmad: The primary contributor to this issue is essentially the number of orders, or number of items, which were missing at the store, been placed by the user itself.
74 00:10:58.370 ⇒ 00:11:07.280 Abdullah Ahmad: When we see the categories of these missing items, they consistently fall within storage and cleaning, beauty products, baby and child, and kitchen.
75 00:11:08.210 ⇒ 00:11:10.570 Robert Tseng: Hey, Abdullah, can I ask a couple questions here?
76 00:11:10.570 ⇒ 00:11:12.510 Abdullah Ahmad: Correct. Yep. Go for it.
77 00:11:12.510 ⇒ 00:11:18.800 Robert Tseng: Yeah. So, no, I think this is a great, kind of attempt at, like, building a North Star metric.
78 00:11:18.990 ⇒ 00:11:24.819 Robert Tseng: So yeah, I mean, from your part, I think it’s a way to kind of normalize,
79 00:11:25.410 ⇒ 00:11:26.649 Robert Tseng: All the different…
80 00:11:26.880 ⇒ 00:11:41.039 Robert Tseng: kind of issues that could come up from each of these different marketplaces. From your perspective, you know, what… what’s… what impacts the customer more between missing orders, late deliveries, complaints? Yeah.
81 00:11:41.040 ⇒ 00:11:42.149 Abdullah Ahmad: How do you think about that?
82 00:11:42.150 ⇒ 00:11:42.760 Robert Tseng: Yeah.
83 00:11:42.760 ⇒ 00:11:55.659 Abdullah Ahmad: That’s a great question, because that’s exactly what this little slide will, like, dive deep into, because it tends to quantify, essentially, those concerns. So, for example, if you look at the first and the second row, the first one is pure missing items.
84 00:11:55.660 ⇒ 00:12:09.890 Abdullah Ahmad: These are essentially items for which were missing, and the user could not find a substitute for them, essentially meaning that these orders were not complete, or these items were not delivered, and they contributed around, like, $6,500 worth of loss.
85 00:12:09.980 ⇒ 00:12:22.529 Abdullah Ahmad: Secondly, business-initiated cancellations, because when we looked at cancellations, we saw either they were being canceled within the first 5 minutes, or they were getting canceled, like, from 15 minutes onwards.
86 00:12:22.530 ⇒ 00:12:39.340 Abdullah Ahmad: So the 15 minutes onwards suggests, and the fact that there was no delivery information associated to those, it suggested that the order could not find the appropriate delivery driver for those, and the user eventually got tired and canceled those. So these resulted at around, like, $1,500 worth of loss.
87 00:12:39.340 ⇒ 00:12:45.979 Abdullah Ahmad: So the first two rows essentially showed the absolute loss that was experienced as a result of the business itself.
88 00:12:46.000 ⇒ 00:12:50.489 Abdullah Ahmad: But your question about, how we might be anticipating
89 00:12:50.650 ⇒ 00:13:05.279 Abdullah Ahmad: Complaints, as well as, like, late deliveries, which are also a part of the metric of the perfect scorecard. That’s where we look at the last three rows. These were complete… orders which had a complaint, had a total revenue of $6,000.
90 00:13:05.280 ⇒ 00:13:19.430 Abdullah Ahmad: Ones which had, like, late deliveries, 700. So these 3 items, we did not actually experience loss for it, but the important thing to emphasize here is yet.
91 00:13:19.430 ⇒ 00:13:34.020 Abdullah Ahmad: Because all of these three suggest, like, a subpar experience for the customer as a whole, and particularly in a market where we’re competing against Instacart, Uber, and a host of, like, other domestic, city-level delivery services.
92 00:13:34.020 ⇒ 00:13:43.339 Abdullah Ahmad: We can anticipate a further loss in these particular revenues, because it’s really easy for the user to switch from our service to the next.
93 00:13:43.340 ⇒ 00:13:48.200 Abdullah Ahmad: There’s a Salesforce report that looked particularly at technology-based delivery companies.
94 00:13:48.200 ⇒ 00:14:02.929 Abdullah Ahmad: And they found out around, like, 60-80% churn, which is extremely high compared to other businesses, and also the CTV, like the lifecycle value of the business itself, within 2 months. So customers don’t… 60-80% of the customers
95 00:14:02.930 ⇒ 00:14:08.880 Abdullah Ahmad: Might not use the service, like, for the next 2 months if they had a bad experience on the platform.
96 00:14:09.240 ⇒ 00:14:13.610 Abdullah Ahmad: Wanted to see if that answers that concern, or if you had something more specific.
97 00:14:13.900 ⇒ 00:14:15.190 Robert Tseng: Nope, yeah, this is great.
98 00:14:15.400 ⇒ 00:14:16.430 Abdullah Ahmad: Awesome, perfect.
99 00:14:16.580 ⇒ 00:14:30.579 Greg Stoutenburg: Abdul, I have a question here. You may have addressed this, and it just went past me, but looking at many of these categories that say failure mode, the only one that I see that explicitly calls out that it’s the conjunction of two other failure modes is the last one.
100 00:14:30.580 ⇒ 00:14:40.820 Greg Stoutenburg: And looking at some of the other ones, I just wonder, you know, I’m just thinking about this, like, as the user, what would make me complain? Well, one thing is the delivery was late, and that’s the next
101 00:14:41.580 ⇒ 00:14:56.959 Greg Stoutenburg: Or that it was canceled on me, or that an item was missing, right? So, I guess the question is, and, you know, you know the data set better than I do, how do these things interact, do you think? And what insights could we get from the answer to that question?
102 00:14:57.270 ⇒ 00:15:03.310 Abdullah Ahmad: Yeah, that’s a good question, and that’s why, like, in my analysis, I sort of, like, differentiated between the two when I was talking.
103 00:15:03.380 ⇒ 00:15:20.779 Abdullah Ahmad: Because of the first two line items, essentially, that is an absolute loss. We don’t really have to assume, like, if there would be churn specifically as a result of that. These were deliveries which were placed, but never really existed in the fulfillment as a whole. So they were never really got to our customers.
104 00:15:20.830 ⇒ 00:15:26.630 Abdullah Ahmad: The last 3 items, essentially, like, they were delivered, and we did generate the revenue for that.
105 00:15:26.700 ⇒ 00:15:42.629 Abdullah Ahmad: But the problem here is that we can anticipate churn because the customer was unsatisfied. So the first one is an absolute loss. We are trying to, like, make sure to recover that. However, the last three items, we’re trying to anticipate them as future losses.
106 00:15:42.690 ⇒ 00:15:52.009 Abdullah Ahmad: So the last three categories tend to overlap with each other, because the order can either have a complaint, or a late, or some combination between the two.
107 00:15:52.030 ⇒ 00:15:58.660 Abdullah Ahmad: Hence, when we generated the perfect order, we did not distinguish them, we sort of, like, lumped them in together.
108 00:15:58.660 ⇒ 00:16:15.460 Abdullah Ahmad: And in the bottom line, also, when we were anticipating what the potential loss to the organization would be, we also aggregated those loss there together, because we’re trying to see it as an overall risk to the business itself, rather than identifying exactly separately.
109 00:16:15.860 ⇒ 00:16:22.710 Abdullah Ahmad: But when we go to the recommendations, like, I think, like, some of this will become clearer because they target each specific area, specifically.
110 00:16:22.990 ⇒ 00:16:27.140 Abdullah Ahmad: I’m not sure if I fully completed it, let me know if I have missed something there.
111 00:16:27.490 ⇒ 00:16:28.930 Greg Stoutenburg: Yep, that’s good, thanks.
112 00:16:28.930 ⇒ 00:16:35.189 Abdullah Ahmad: Awesome. Perfect. So when we look at our recommendations, we sort of, like, divide them, like, across timeframe, essentially.
113 00:16:35.370 ⇒ 00:16:38.430 Abdullah Ahmad: Primarily, first, we look at the quick wins.
114 00:16:38.430 ⇒ 00:16:58.009 Abdullah Ahmad: And here, the main, main focus that we want to, like, develop is a perfect order dashboard that essentially encompasses metrics not only for the perfect score, but at a granular level, both for stores and dashboard. This would be extremely useful for the operations team in order to identify in real time exactly where the bottleneck is.
115 00:16:58.010 ⇒ 00:17:00.820 Abdullah Ahmad: So they could allocate resources more efficiently.
116 00:17:00.920 ⇒ 00:17:13.659 Abdullah Ahmad: Secondly, within the quick wins, I think we already have the data of exactly what the missing items are across the grocery store, so we can share this information with them in order to make sure that they’re adequately stocked.
117 00:17:13.660 ⇒ 00:17:24.839 Abdullah Ahmad: So this not only just helps our business, we’re sort of, like, helping them generate more value as well by making sure that they’re stocked on the items which are, like, more regularly
118 00:17:24.839 ⇒ 00:17:26.850 Abdullah Ahmad: Requested, but not available.
119 00:17:27.040 ⇒ 00:17:31.789 Abdullah Ahmad: We then move into medium-term solutions, and this would take about 1 to 3 months.
120 00:17:31.880 ⇒ 00:17:41.289 Abdullah Ahmad: And the first one for this is an intervention for grocery store 2. We saw that Grocery Store 2 consistently falls below all other stores and all important metrics.
121 00:17:41.290 ⇒ 00:18:05.459 Abdullah Ahmad: And this is really important for us to consider, because every user who has a bad experience specifically for this grocery store has an impact on DoorDash as a whole, because we might be finding it hard to retain that specific user. So we need to evaluate, do we want to improve the performance of this specific, dispatching location, or do we want to, like, renegotiate our contract, or maybe look at another grocery store.
122 00:18:05.500 ⇒ 00:18:09.570 Abdullah Ahmad: So we do not continue to compound, like, these failures for our business.
123 00:18:09.940 ⇒ 00:18:10.719 Abdullah Ahmad: Yeah, secondly…
124 00:18:10.720 ⇒ 00:18:27.699 Robert Tseng: Sorry, sorry to cut you off. I just want to be mindful of time as well. I think… I think we’re good on the presentation. If anything, maybe we’ll ask… I have one more question that’s kind of stepping out of the role play a bit, and then I think we could… we could probably move on from the presentation.
125 00:18:27.990 ⇒ 00:18:37.590 Robert Tseng: Yeah, so, you know, I think… I think it’s great that you presented, like, short, medium, long-term kind of recommendations. I think oftentimes, like,
126 00:18:37.620 ⇒ 00:18:44.930 Robert Tseng: When we’re brought into a client engagement, they want to know the quick wins, and, like, they’re… that’s what they’re really focused on, you know?
127 00:18:44.930 ⇒ 00:19:05.610 Robert Tseng: Our average contract length is about 3 months, and so… for the first one, and then typically we try to renew to a 6-plus month contract, but it’s really important for us to get quick wins. So, yeah, let’s kind of, like, unpack kind of your quick win recommendation, especially the first one, perfect order rate dashboard. Let’s say that, you know, that gets approved, team’s working on it.
128 00:19:05.610 ⇒ 00:19:12.090 Robert Tseng: Oh, yeah, the owner is the analytics team, which is Braveforged. We are often the fractional analytics team for the client.
129 00:19:12.090 ⇒ 00:19:27.209 Robert Tseng: But in order for, you know, the… you know, for our work to, you know, be approved, it needs to be used by the ops team. And so, let’s say you run into a situation where an ops leader is,
130 00:19:27.590 ⇒ 00:19:31.779 Robert Tseng: Like, they have their own way of tracking,
131 00:19:32.070 ⇒ 00:19:42.980 Robert Tseng: their KPIs, they’re stuck in Google Sheets, spreadsheets, you, you know, the Brainforce team has already kind of, like, you know, fast forward to the future,
132 00:19:43.430 ⇒ 00:19:51.010 Robert Tseng: relaunched this new, you know, dashboard, and you’re struggling to get adoption. What… what would you… what would you do in that situation?
133 00:19:51.700 ⇒ 00:19:52.430 Abdullah Ahmad: Yeah.
134 00:19:52.580 ⇒ 00:20:07.320 Abdullah Ahmad: That’s a really good question, because I think it’s a very practical question, because that’s what we suffered with the TikTok as well, that we can provide these solutions to the client team, but the question becomes, like, are they adequately using it or not? So the first and foremost is actually
135 00:20:07.570 ⇒ 00:20:11.909 Abdullah Ahmad: Creating the necessary metrics that we’re gonna use, like, in order to evaluate that.
136 00:20:12.080 ⇒ 00:20:25.489 Abdullah Ahmad: So for this particular purpose, when we’re looking at adoption, I want to focus on a few metrics. Number one would be the active dashboard users. Essentially, how many people are actually end up, like, using it on a week-over-week basis.
137 00:20:25.560 ⇒ 00:20:32.389 Abdullah Ahmad: If no one’s using it, there isn’t really a true value to the solution that we’re providing, even if it’s adding value to the organization as a whole.
138 00:20:32.500 ⇒ 00:20:43.110 Abdullah Ahmad: Second would be monitoring the number of self-service queries. Essentially, if we are using a dashboard, or it’s quite similar to the use as well, but this is more focused on if you’re creating
139 00:20:43.110 ⇒ 00:20:58.670 Abdullah Ahmad: database for them, and they’re using HypeSQL or some other platform in order to generate insights from there. So if they’re not using the dashboard directly, we’ll try to see, like, how many queries they’re making, and try to make use of, like, the infrastructure that we’ve created for them.
140 00:20:58.840 ⇒ 00:21:12.529 Abdullah Ahmad: Thirdly would be an automation rate, essentially seeing how much of the work, because once we create the solution, we might also, like, add, like, funnels and filters, which doesn’t really require a user to manually be observing this.
141 00:21:12.530 ⇒ 00:21:23.489 Abdullah Ahmad: So these things, essentially, this metric covers that area, that how much of the automation that’s being generated directly goes into the decision and analysis, like, at the end user stage, for example.
142 00:21:23.500 ⇒ 00:21:37.340 Abdullah Ahmad: So for us, like, the true goal would be maintaining these metrics, but secondly, at the same time, also produce some sort of an A-B test, which shows how these, some of the performance, like, changes across, the team as well when they make use of it.
143 00:21:37.340 ⇒ 00:21:44.039 Abdullah Ahmad: So, for example, you can see, like, the performance, the time it was taking to identify an escalation before these solutions.
144 00:21:44.040 ⇒ 00:22:03.689 Abdullah Ahmad: and at the same time, recalculate that metric after the solution has been in place, and essentially measure what the lift there has been after our solution has been… has been implemented. This can be a one-week to one-month experiment, and this would give, like, a better idea of exactly what the improvement was, and I think a better way of, like, showing the true value of the solution that we’re providing.
145 00:22:05.450 ⇒ 00:22:22.419 Robert Tseng: Okay, great. No, thanks for… thanks for that. I think, yeah, that’s super important because, yeah, like you said, if the stuff that we produce is not being adopted, we’re not going to get credit for it. It becomes hard. And, you know, as, you know, being in Brave Forge’s position, we’re… we’re consultants, and so.
146 00:22:22.940 ⇒ 00:22:41.129 Robert Tseng: We are external. As much as we are more embedded, we’re forward deployed, we’re all the buzzwords that you hear these days, but the default is that we do not, the default is that we do not exist in a client. So if we’re not advocating for our work, we’re not owning the change management.
147 00:22:41.130 ⇒ 00:22:57.599 Robert Tseng: Ultimately, when it comes to the end of the contract and the renewal’s not there, you know, the client is just gonna… if we… if they don’t know the value that we’ve brought them, we’re not gonna get… we’re not gonna get the renewal. So, I think, as much as the analysis is important, this is…
148 00:22:57.600 ⇒ 00:22:58.000 Abdullah Ahmad: to see more.
149 00:22:58.000 ⇒ 00:22:59.330 Robert Tseng: important.
150 00:22:59.330 ⇒ 00:23:00.560 Abdullah Ahmad: Okay, cool. I totally agree.
151 00:23:01.000 ⇒ 00:23:05.299 Robert Tseng: Yeah, so I think I want to save some time to pivot to, yeah, just more…
152 00:23:05.300 ⇒ 00:23:23.040 Robert Tseng: overall, like, you know, we have a couple different roles. You know, it’s not a traditional data analyst role we’re hiring for. I think the track that we have you interviewing for is what we call a client success owner. Have you… did you get a chance to discuss what that meant?
153 00:23:23.260 ⇒ 00:23:23.820 Robert Tseng: with,
154 00:23:23.820 ⇒ 00:23:24.340 Abdullah Ahmad: Yeah.
155 00:23:24.340 ⇒ 00:23:24.960 Robert Tseng: Yeah, okay.
156 00:23:24.960 ⇒ 00:23:34.439 Abdullah Ahmad: Yeah, exactly, yeah. So every interview that I’ve had, like, definitely were questions specific to that as well, and I can go a bit deeper into exactly how my experience aligns with those requirements.
157 00:23:34.850 ⇒ 00:23:42.210 Robert Tseng: Okay, yeah, I mean, I don’t necessarily need you to rehash things, but I guess Greg here is, like, you know, I think our…
158 00:23:42.720 ⇒ 00:24:04.690 Robert Tseng: poster child for a CSO, so I think, feel free to ask him any questions, because, you know, what he’s doing is probably very similar to, like, what you would come on to be doing. Obviously, everybody has certain spikes, and we want to basically design a role with you that works for you. But yeah, I think that’s kind of the perspective he can bring.
159 00:24:04.690 ⇒ 00:24:19.079 Robert Tseng: And then, yeah, I kind of drive all of the, all of the sales, so, both on net new accounts, but also expansions. So, I want to ask a couple questions, you know, related to kind of how you can impact,
160 00:24:19.080 ⇒ 00:24:28.129 Robert Tseng: new revenue expansion opportunities for our org. Sarah Greg, I don’t know if you have anything you want to ask first, and then I can kind of jump back in.
161 00:24:28.130 ⇒ 00:24:49.539 Greg Stoutenburg: Yeah, I mean, this is directly relevant to recent experience, so, Abdullah, going… you know, you don’t even have to pull it up again, but just looking at the recommendations that you made, like, let’s just simulate. Let’s suppose that it is, we’re… we’re 3 weeks from the end of the contract with the client, and you just delivered these recommendations, and, you know, it’s one thing to go, hey, guys, fix this stuff.
162 00:24:49.540 ⇒ 00:24:50.430 Greg Stoutenburg: See you.
163 00:24:50.880 ⇒ 00:24:51.590 Abdullah Ahmad: I was like…
164 00:24:51.590 ⇒ 00:24:53.840 Greg Stoutenburg: And then it’s another to go…
165 00:24:54.180 ⇒ 00:25:00.280 Greg Stoutenburg: we, as, you know, use and the team, as in Brainforge, want to turn this into more revenue, right?
166 00:25:00.280 ⇒ 00:25:00.790 Abdullah Ahmad: them.
167 00:25:00.790 ⇒ 00:25:20.369 Greg Stoutenburg: us to do those things that you just outlined, and preferably as much as possible, and, you know, for a long time. So, thinking about, thinking about some of those recommendations up there, and, you know, this is the sort of thing that can take a long time, so it’s okay to just be conversational about it. What… I’d like to, hear from you what a
168 00:25:20.370 ⇒ 00:25:28.410 Greg Stoutenburg: What a pitch is, like, how would you pitch the things that you just described in the form of a new scope of work for the client?
169 00:25:28.760 ⇒ 00:25:47.039 Abdullah Ahmad: I see. Okay, yeah. That’s a really good question, and again, like, a very practical one, especially when we’re approaching the end of the contract itself. And I think two things are very important here. Number one, like, I think the CSO should really, truly, thoroughly understand exactly what the end goal for the clients is.
170 00:25:47.070 ⇒ 00:26:01.600 Abdullah Ahmad: And which sometimes end up being separate from the scope of work. And this issue exists when a client has a general sense of what they actually wanted, but the scope of work and the deliverables we’re providing does not really fully cover that.
171 00:26:01.820 ⇒ 00:26:19.220 Abdullah Ahmad: So in a case like this, and it might be happened because they might not still have a full understanding of exactly what they’re trying to optimize, so we need to take that role where we are wearing the hat of the client itself, so better be able to explain what the problem is even better than the client themselves.
172 00:26:19.240 ⇒ 00:26:28.300 Abdullah Ahmad: Secondly, like, this issue exists in a form of delta between the client expectation and exactly our deliverables, and that is a result of sometimes, often.
173 00:26:28.300 ⇒ 00:26:40.120 Abdullah Ahmad: also causing scope creep, which consistently happens towards, like, the life cycle of this. So I think, first and foremost, like, the CSO should be really well worth in understanding the desires and the needs of the client itself.
174 00:26:40.170 ⇒ 00:26:55.990 Abdullah Ahmad: Secondly, better understand exactly what the in-house capability of the team itself is, because this is where we can really come in. We are the external team. Like, as Robert mentioned initially, like, the analytics team, right? Might not be internally. That’s what the role for Brainforge itself is.
175 00:26:55.990 ⇒ 00:27:08.460 Abdullah Ahmad: So understanding exactly where those limitations are for the clients. So when we are providing these solutions, for example, one of the solutions that I was providing was, like, an AI-integrated recommendation system for the substitutes.
176 00:27:08.660 ⇒ 00:27:27.589 Abdullah Ahmad: a lot of teams might not have that, especially for smaller companies or the startups, for example. So we know that is a gap, like, physically, both, like, within, like, the technical capabilities as well, and also the client might not fully understand what’s the real value of it, because they haven’t worked with the AI-recommended systems before as well. So I think, like…
177 00:27:27.590 ⇒ 00:27:30.420 Greg Stoutenburg: Yeah, just to jump in there, what is the value of it to the client?
178 00:27:30.710 ⇒ 00:27:31.130 Abdullah Ahmad: Yeah.
179 00:27:31.130 ⇒ 00:27:33.670 Greg Stoutenburg: I think that’s the terms they’re going to want to hear it in, right?
180 00:27:33.670 ⇒ 00:27:34.180 Abdullah Ahmad: Exactly.
181 00:27:34.180 ⇒ 00:27:35.260 Greg Stoutenburg: Maybe.
182 00:27:35.460 ⇒ 00:27:51.820 Abdullah Ahmad: Okay, yeah, so it makes sense. So if I was to give the example of the currently what we had right now for the data, we saw that when an order was missing, when we made a substitute to it, there was a higher rate of complaints than when the order was missing and there was no substitute.
183 00:27:51.820 ⇒ 00:28:04.640 Abdullah Ahmad: So this pointed us to, like, something extremely important, which was that these drivers, they’re substituting 70% of the missing items, but they’re not substituting it with something that the client actually desires.
184 00:28:04.640 ⇒ 00:28:12.089 Abdullah Ahmad: So, in the short term, when we’re not looking at the full picture, we can be like, yes, we’ve recovered 70% of that revenue, which would have been a loss.
185 00:28:12.090 ⇒ 00:28:23.899 Abdullah Ahmad: But at the same time, we’re actually increasing a bigger long-term problem in which these customers will continue to churn because they’re getting subpar performance. So I think these sort of, like, insights really help there.
186 00:28:23.900 ⇒ 00:28:27.859 Greg Stoutenburg: Yeah, very good. Yeah, thanks. That’s my only question. Thanks.
187 00:28:28.020 ⇒ 00:28:28.650 Abdullah Ahmad: Awesome.
188 00:28:30.340 ⇒ 00:28:38.079 Jasmin Multani: Maybe I can ask one more question, because I do want to dig deeper on the upselling part, with clients.
189 00:28:38.960 ⇒ 00:28:58.359 Jasmin Multani: And some of your… what you mentioned was like, okay, some of these recommendations you’re pitching, they get built in the 3 to 12 month time span, but when we’re initially working with, clients, maybe they’ll… it’s a new relationship, and we need to prove our worth within 3 months before signing a contract.
190 00:28:58.440 ⇒ 00:29:04.960 Jasmin Multani: So how… thinking of that in mind, how are you gonna track for, hey, we’re…
191 00:29:05.180 ⇒ 00:29:17.169 Jasmin Multani: how are you gonna play those roles in parallel? Like, being able to deliver within the 3 months, but then how are you gonna look for those trades to make those up sales at the end of the contract, too?
192 00:29:17.610 ⇒ 00:29:31.699 Abdullah Ahmad: Yeah, okay, yeah, and I think this was the primary motivation when I was, like, designing these solutions as well, between, like, quick wins, like, medium and long-term. Essentially, because at the end of the day, we want to be making sure that we provide value to our clients as well.
193 00:29:31.700 ⇒ 00:29:38.369 Abdullah Ahmad: The complexity of those solutions, obviously, will depend a lot on the technical capabilities and understanding on the client side.
194 00:29:38.370 ⇒ 00:29:47.099 Abdullah Ahmad: So, for example, something as easy as, like, building a necessary dashboard or sharing data with the final clients or the grocery clients, for example, these can be quick wins.
195 00:29:47.100 ⇒ 00:30:09.810 Abdullah Ahmad: For the longer-term solutions, I’m sure that the clients would request also that these should be done at an earlier time period as well, but for us as Brainforge, like, where our work is our reputation, especially when we look at the NPS scores and how likelihood the client will be able to recommend this further, we also gotta be a bit prudent there to make sure that we can
196 00:30:09.810 ⇒ 00:30:24.079 Abdullah Ahmad: from our side try our best to really be able to provide that solution quicker, but at the same time, I think it’s very important to communicate the quality of that solution as well. We can let them know that we can, like, provide the solution instead of 6 months.
197 00:30:24.080 ⇒ 00:30:31.180 Abdullah Ahmad: Within the first 30 or 45 days, but also be very clear of exactly what the limitations of that would be.
198 00:30:31.180 ⇒ 00:30:39.109 Abdullah Ahmad: For example, if the client is just using Excel sheets, they do not have a centralized data frame or a database, like, either, like, in…
199 00:30:39.160 ⇒ 00:30:50.900 Abdullah Ahmad: Hive, SQL or something is they’re just working out of Excel sheets, essentially. We can create something very quick for them, but that solution won’t be scalable for them. It might cost them more later on when they try to upscale that.
200 00:30:50.900 ⇒ 00:31:08.849 Abdullah Ahmad: So I think communicating those sort of things is really important early on, and in my experience, that really helps with the client when you let them know, we can do the solution quickly, but this would be additional cost when you try to scale this, like, 6 months from now. Or, you can just do this contract, instead of, like, 30 days, do it for 90 days.
201 00:31:08.850 ⇒ 00:31:13.210 Abdullah Ahmad: And you will alleviate those additional costs that you will need in scaling and moving forward.
202 00:31:17.480 ⇒ 00:31:22.650 Abdullah Ahmad: Let me know if that was, if that covers also, if you were looking for something else specifically as well.
203 00:31:23.030 ⇒ 00:31:29.110 Jasmin Multani: I have one more follow-up question on clients, but Robert, Greg, do you have any other questions you want to ask?
204 00:31:30.080 ⇒ 00:31:31.340 Robert Tseng: Nope, you’re good.
205 00:31:31.690 ⇒ 00:31:39.020 Jasmin Multani: Okay, so one pain point I’ve seen as, like, an internal person is we’re working with so many different types of clients.
206 00:31:39.460 ⇒ 00:31:47.480 Jasmin Multani: And I… I definitely need to do a lot of context switching within the day.
207 00:31:47.730 ⇒ 00:31:54.029 Jasmin Multani: Based off of, like, what the client needs, how big the company is, and how intense,
208 00:31:54.410 ⇒ 00:32:03.309 Jasmin Multani: the client stakeholder is. So, what’s your strategy of being able to do different levels of hand-holding?
209 00:32:03.340 ⇒ 00:32:20.760 Jasmin Multani: And how are you going to staff up your time? And maybe this is more of a practical day-to-day question, because things move so fast, and the personality types that we work with are so different from company to company, so I am really curious about, like, you know, if someone… if a client is just
210 00:32:20.780 ⇒ 00:32:24.040 Jasmin Multani: known for being abrasive.
211 00:32:24.170 ⇒ 00:32:41.129 Jasmin Multani: does that mean that you’re gonna take away time and FaceTime from a client that likes us, and we have a good relationship with, or how are you gonna manage, allocating those resources, by bending at the will of the client, or being mindful of other people?
212 00:32:41.420 ⇒ 00:33:00.579 Abdullah Ahmad: Yeah, okay, yeah, interesting one, and I think, again, this happens a lot, especially when I… in my consultancy experiences, almost to an extent where I would say a client is, like, never fully happy, like, with every deliverable there is, because there’s a lack of alignment between their understanding, maybe, to an extent, or they’re just, like, trying to get the most out of the contract as well, right?
213 00:33:00.590 ⇒ 00:33:10.810 Abdullah Ahmad: I think the answer to this more than a business question might be a bit of a philosophical one, which is, like, the human soul wants to be heard more than it wants to be told what’s right.
214 00:33:10.810 ⇒ 00:33:23.810 Abdullah Ahmad: Right? So I think at the end of the day, when client is, like, making those complaints to us, I think it’s very important as a business to really give them that attention to truly understand that, because once they’re able to really get that out.
215 00:33:24.030 ⇒ 00:33:31.659 Abdullah Ahmad: that’s the only point we can, like, further developing, like, the next part of our relationship together. The question then becomes, at that stage.
216 00:33:32.040 ⇒ 00:33:47.790 Abdullah Ahmad: Okay, so now they have a concern with the product or the solution that we’re providing. How do we alleviate this? Two steps. Number one, try to adjust this within the current scope of work. This requires going back to the contract itself and, like, trying to find, like, those line items.
217 00:33:47.790 ⇒ 00:33:58.360 Abdullah Ahmad: which are broad enough in which we can integrate some of their newer concerns as well. If there isn’t space for that, I think it’s still not bad. If anything, I think is a really good
218 00:33:58.360 ⇒ 00:34:08.999 Abdullah Ahmad: opportunity, if anything. This is where you can really pitch in that this is what your scope of work initially was, and this is what is, like, fulfilling. But if this new request that you really have
219 00:34:09.000 ⇒ 00:34:21.629 Abdullah Ahmad: we can do this, this, and this, which is separate from the initial scope of work on which the management of the two teams have, like, already aligned on. I think it’s also really important when you’re working with clients, you’re essentially working with the
220 00:34:21.820 ⇒ 00:34:35.570 Abdullah Ahmad: people at, like, different level of seniority within that team itself. At the end of the day, it’s the highest level… it’s the hierarchy, right? At the end of the day, you’re trying to, like, satisfy the VP or the POC, essentially, who’s, like, managing the contract itself.
221 00:34:35.590 ⇒ 00:34:48.840 Abdullah Ahmad: Throughout it, you might be working with engineers, analysts, who might be only providing support in order to integrate the solution, not really the final goal of it. And I think this is important when we’re having those conversations.
222 00:34:48.840 ⇒ 00:35:13.810 Abdullah Ahmad: to pull in the engineers, or the analysts, or the strategy folks from the Brainforge side, so you’re better able to align with the audience as well. So it needs to have, like, a one-on-one match. If we’re giving an engineering solution, more than me, like, talking about the technical stuff, I need to have the technical engineering folk on the Brainforge side when we’re talking to the engineering folk on the client side as well. I think all of this, like, better helps, like, reduce, like, Chinese whispers.
223 00:35:13.810 ⇒ 00:35:22.269 Abdullah Ahmad: Also, and essentially, like, helping make sure that the conversation that’s happening, it’s within the same vernacular of the stakeholder that we’re talking to.
224 00:35:25.070 ⇒ 00:35:25.690 Jasmin Multani: Okay.
225 00:35:25.810 ⇒ 00:35:26.869 Jasmin Multani: That’s a good answer.
226 00:35:28.560 ⇒ 00:35:42.400 Robert Tseng: Cool. Well, yeah, we have probably a few minutes for you to ask any questions you want to. Yeah, I think that we don’t have to fill the time with our questions. We want to make sure that you feel like you get the good understanding of brain force that you need as well.
227 00:35:42.800 ⇒ 00:36:01.830 Abdullah Ahmad: Yeah, yeah, thank you so much for that. I had, like, a few questions, and definitely be mindful of time here, but I do understand, like, even though Brainforge might be in the early nascent stage of it, and I know, like, at that time, there are a lot of teething issues, and quite often a particular role that you’re hired for.
228 00:36:01.830 ⇒ 00:36:14.310 Abdullah Ahmad: you’re not really just working on that specific role, you’re trying to, like, manage the whole life cycle, especially, like, if the number of, like, other team members is constrained as well. So I’m also trying to understand, like, for the CSO role right now.
229 00:36:14.390 ⇒ 00:36:25.630 Abdullah Ahmad: What are the specific bottlenecks or concerns that you guys are particularly experiencing? And essentially, what is the true, really, skill set that will help, like, really
230 00:36:25.890 ⇒ 00:36:28.890 Abdullah Ahmad: Take it, like, from 0 to 100 for you guys right now.
231 00:36:32.770 ⇒ 00:36:36.069 Robert Tseng: I don’t… yeah, I was like, I don’t think I should answer that.
232 00:36:36.070 ⇒ 00:36:42.949 Greg Stoutenburg: Yeah, yeah, thanks for, yeah, thanks, Abila, for asking for me to get a performance review live during this interview.
233 00:36:43.370 ⇒ 00:36:59.610 Greg Stoutenburg: I mean, I think some things that, some things that are, you know, gaps are being sort of smoothed out are, like, the handoff from… like, two things come to mind. One is the handoff from CSO to sales.
234 00:36:59.910 ⇒ 00:37:00.760 Abdullah Ahmad: So…
235 00:37:01.270 ⇒ 00:37:17.479 Greg Stoutenburg: as a CSO, you’re kind of expected to have your finger on the pulse of the client, understand their needs really well, have some ideas, at least, for how we might meet their needs in the future, and look for those expansion opportunities, is one of the reasons why I asked you that question.
236 00:37:18.130 ⇒ 00:37:19.529 Greg Stoutenburg: Yup.
237 00:37:19.880 ⇒ 00:37:31.120 Greg Stoutenburg: But, like, getting that right, and then smoothing out what the pitch is, and really aligning it to, the client’s business is something that is kind of, like, being figured out. So…
238 00:37:31.630 ⇒ 00:37:42.889 Greg Stoutenburg: getting that skill set that’s good at, you know, putting your finger on that kind of thing, and also just being aware of it in general, right? Like, I… I mean, I’ve done a very small amount of sales before, but, like, I’m…
239 00:37:42.890 ⇒ 00:37:53.259 Greg Stoutenburg: I have to go out of my way to think about wearing that hat if I’m talking to the client, right? Like, if I’m just talking to the client because they have this data problem and you’re trying to solve a data problem, it’s easy to just be focused on that thing and really stay in the weeds.
240 00:37:53.260 ⇒ 00:38:07.850 Greg Stoutenburg: So something that is important in the role is, is sort of thinking more, more broadly than that, and having, like, a more future-oriented direction that’s really sensitive to the nature of the business and the client’s needs, beyond things that they have asked you for.
241 00:38:08.700 ⇒ 00:38:16.910 Abdullah Ahmad: I see. Okay. And just to follow up on that, so, like, I’m trying to get a sense of, like, how many individuals are working on one client-side contract.
242 00:38:17.400 ⇒ 00:38:32.909 Abdullah Ahmad: Primarily, like, if the CSO, like, are their main responsibility primarily to maintain that relationship and score those future contracts from them as well? Or is the CSO role also, like, directly hands involved, like, in a lot of, let’s say, like, the data side of things, creating these dashboards?
243 00:38:33.260 ⇒ 00:38:45.120 Abdullah Ahmad: creating, like, these, data pipelines that might be needed. Just, like, trying to get a sense of, like, how big the team currently is that’s dedicated to it. And essentially, what I’m trying to get at is, like, basically understand
244 00:38:45.120 ⇒ 00:38:58.120 Abdullah Ahmad: If you’re looking for a very specialized CSO, or is the more true value here is, like, someone who can really take ownership of the full lifecycle of it, and be able to contribute at different levels of that contract themselves as well.
245 00:38:59.110 ⇒ 00:39:04.899 Greg Stoutenburg: Yeah, I’ll, I’ll just touch a part of it, which is that as, like.
246 00:39:05.340 ⇒ 00:39:09.660 Greg Stoutenburg: My understanding is that a year ago, it was basically just Uto and Robert,
247 00:39:09.660 ⇒ 00:39:34.650 Greg Stoutenburg: running kind of everything. And so, like, things have continued to change over time, where roles are being divided up and, you know, responsibilities are changing and shifting. So, something that the team has is that everybody, regardless of what, we’ll say, additional position, like service lead or CSO, regardless of those you have, there’s some degree of technical chops. How critical those technical chops are can vary by
248 00:39:34.650 ⇒ 00:39:50.880 Greg Stoutenburg: project a little bit. I’m probably on the low end of technical chops for the team, but, like, the important thing for… is, like, just understanding the client’s needs and being able to drive the project forward. So, one thing that’s important is we’re not… you’re not in this bucket anyway. We’re not looking for,
249 00:39:50.880 ⇒ 00:40:04.970 Greg Stoutenburg: like, just a project manager. The technical competence is important, but, like, it’s… it really is mostly about that client relationship, but you’ll help deliver on the needs of the client relationship by actually understanding their needs.
250 00:40:05.410 ⇒ 00:40:12.780 Greg Stoutenburg: Got it. Or, for that matter, just like a small extension, right? You know, an individual contributor. You’ve assigned an individual contributor a ticket to, say, make a dashboard.
251 00:40:13.000 ⇒ 00:40:13.610 Abdullah Ahmad: If they.
252 00:40:13.610 ⇒ 00:40:26.300 Greg Stoutenburg: They then show you that dashboard, and you have no idea what you’re looking at, and then, well, okay, I guess they did it, I’ll show this to the client, right? Not good, right? So, you have to have at least the technical chops to be able to clear that sort of hurdle.
253 00:40:26.520 ⇒ 00:40:43.610 Abdullah Ahmad: Okay, amazing, amazing. And maybe the last one, maybe less of a question, more of, like, a statement from my side, like, I’m really hoping for an opportunity like this that really allows me, like, to contribute to areas just, like, separate from the CSO. If I’m, like, trying to, like, maintain, like, that relationship with the client.
254 00:40:45.080 ⇒ 00:41:01.540 Abdullah Ahmad: the idea would be, like, to taking, like, the real full, full ownership of that relationship to make sure that the higher leadership doesn’t have to be pulled into something. And quite often, that would require, like, taking some initiative, like, on their own side as well. So I’m, like, wanting to make sure that it’s…
255 00:41:01.610 ⇒ 00:41:06.520 Abdullah Ahmad: That a role like this really encourages initiative.
256 00:41:06.670 ⇒ 00:41:29.590 Abdullah Ahmad: As opposed to, sort of, just, like, waiting on a dedicated team to do something. Because if you… if I see, like, there’s a value that I could really add quickly, instead of, like, waiting for that team sprint to really open up, I would hope, like, since, like, my name is, like, representing that relationship with the client, to really have that flexibility and that openness, like, to take some of those initiatives myself, as opposed to, like, waiting
257 00:41:29.590 ⇒ 00:41:34.329 Abdullah Ahmad: For approvals, for team mandates also. I know, like, something like this, like, differs…
258 00:41:34.530 ⇒ 00:41:46.700 Abdullah Ahmad: organization by organization as well, but I’m really hoping for a team, like, which is small and expanding, there really are those opportunities to contribute in different spaces, and not just the CSO at the same time.
259 00:41:47.340 ⇒ 00:41:49.899 Robert Tseng: Yeah, yeah, so I can, I can speak to that. So…
260 00:41:49.900 ⇒ 00:42:09.630 Robert Tseng: you know, I think, Greg is kind of a… is our senior CSO, and then Jasmine is, like, a senior service lead, and so, you know, everyone speaks… everyone’s in front of clients. I think there are… you’ll probably kind of have to be inside to kind of better understand, kind of, like, the difference between an SL and a CSO, and these definitions are dynamic.
261 00:42:09.630 ⇒ 00:42:18.280 Robert Tseng: But what I see the vision of, like, a CSO, if you’re doing this job really well, then yeah, we want you to really own the relationship with the client. You can be completely hands-off.
262 00:42:18.280 ⇒ 00:42:43.229 Robert Tseng: CSOs are positioned to basically become GMs in this business, where, you have your own book of accounts. You can imagine yourself as, like, like a partner at, like, a traditional consulting firm. You have your book of accounts, and, you know, I… like, your time is leveraged by the number of, you know, by how well you influence those accounts. And so, we’re not expecting you to be, like, solely IC. I mean, you probably will start
263 00:42:43.230 ⇒ 00:43:04.270 Robert Tseng: That way, just to kind of get into the rhythm of things, and we didn’t even talk too much about, like, the way that BraveForge enables work with all of, like, the AI tooling and expectations that we have around using that. But I think, you know, I could see a future where, you know, if you’re crushing it as a CSO on, like, two clients.
264 00:43:04.270 ⇒ 00:43:10.089 Robert Tseng: Then, like, yeah, you just keep growing, you just keep growing. And we will staff the analysts, and…
265 00:43:10.090 ⇒ 00:43:29.060 Robert Tseng: and, and engineers under you, in order to keep growing your book. And so, yeah, you know, something that I’m thinking about is we’re now at a size where we’re entertaining M&A conversations. You know, I just got off a call with a group of other CEOs of other smaller, maybe smaller data agencies.
266 00:43:29.190 ⇒ 00:43:51.500 Robert Tseng: And I’m basically pitching them on, like, hey, come and be a GM for Brainforge. And, I think the CSO track is more of, like, an internal promotion path to get there, because I think you will really learn, like, kind of the way that we manage accounts in Brainforge, but I’m also open to getting there by bringing in outside people. So, I think that’s… that’s really kind of where we… where I see this role evolving to.
267 00:43:51.500 ⇒ 00:44:01.449 Robert Tseng: Whereas, like, you know, I think… yeah, so I think if you want to kind of stay on the more technical track, and you want to, like, own a particular domain, like, you are…
268 00:44:01.450 ⇒ 00:44:15.309 Robert Tseng: just, like, rock solid on a particular vertical, there’s also, you know, like, a good opportunity for you there, and I think that’s kind of where Jasmine is currently on right now. But yeah, I think that’s something that, you know, we’re open to
269 00:44:15.310 ⇒ 00:44:25.269 Robert Tseng: you know, adjusting if you’re in here and you’re like, you know what, CSO is not for me, and I’m better as a service lead in something, like, I think we can… we would be open to adjusting that as well.
270 00:44:26.070 ⇒ 00:44:36.890 Abdullah Ahmad: Okay, amazing, amazing. I’ll be mindful of time, I know we’re at it. I just, like, thank you guys, thank you so much for this time, and, like, this has been a truly very super interesting experience, like, talking to everyone.
271 00:44:37.050 ⇒ 00:44:44.069 Abdullah Ahmad: And it seems like the company’s, like, really, like, on its path of growing and onto the next thing, and I would really love to be a part of it.
272 00:44:44.940 ⇒ 00:44:48.720 Robert Tseng: Great! Alright, thank you so much for your time, Abdullah, and we’ll get back to you soon.
273 00:44:48.720 ⇒ 00:44:50.589 Abdullah Ahmad: Alright, thank you so much. Have a nice day, everyone.
274 00:44:50.590 ⇒ 00:44:50.960 Greg Stoutenburg: Yeah.
275 00:44:50.960 ⇒ 00:44:51.519 Jasmin Multani: Thanks, everyone.
276 00:44:51.860 ⇒ 00:44:52.860 Greg Stoutenburg: Take care.