Johnathon Claudius

I'm a big, like, atomic habits guy.

So, like, I think the systems that you build in your business are very, very important.

And probably didn't realize that as early as I wanted, but that's a pretty important one is building really strong internal systems.

I would say so like two things would probably be like finance and BD.

So like in the first year of the business, we were largely referral based business.

So like we didn't do any sort of proactive business development.

I think I think having full time business development staff is a big is a big up level, I think.

for us we were engineers so we're like i don't want to do that kind of stuff we're way more excited with the work and helping our clients achieve their goals but yeah you have to think about sales and you have to grow the organization over time so that was one that i think we got to a little bit late and then the other one was probably having a really strong finance apparatus i think

Knowing where the business is going day to day, getting in there and having a good sense of like what the P&L of the business is and what strategic decisions you can make cleanly was something I think we learned a little bit of the hard way.

But I think it was a really big growth experience.

Now we have like a finance team.

So like we feel like we're in a much better position to sort of like

drive the business forward.

And again, those are pretty boring.

I mean, I would say that those are not even security things.

They're just basic founder level stuff.

But I would say for a lot of our clients, like the the sort of the big one that I think our clients would probably agree with is getting the design phase right, you can get into a place where you you do a lot of the security, but you skip the design phase.

If you skip the design phase, you can end up building in a direction that's very indefensible.

So for a lot of our clients, like if we can get in early enough and have that conversation early, we can bring them toward a journey that feels very defensible over time.

I would say like FireDancer was a pretty good example of that where we were working with the FireDancer project for years and we built the sandbox around it.