Ever wonder what it would be like to leave a prestigious corporate role and head off to start your own venture? Today’s guest, Boaz Ashkenazy, did just that. He left his executive position at Meta to co-found Simply Augmented, an AI consultancy specializing in solving complex problems using generative AI. In this episode, Boaz shares his inspiring journey and the innovative strategies that have fueled his success in the fast-evolving AI landscape. Tune in to learn from a leader who’s made that momentous career transition and is now redefining what’s possible with AI!
In this episode, you’re going to learn:
- The inside story of transitioning from corporate role to entrepreneurship
- How to build an AI consultancy
- The importance of a customer-first approach in AI solutions
- Networking strategies for entrepreneurs
- How to leverage partnerships with major tech companies
- Ideas for managing intellectual property in consulting partnerships
- Boaz’s advice for aspiring consultants and entrepreneurs
Book your complimentary growth session call.
Connect with Boaz on LinkedIn.
Discover more about “Simply Augmented”
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Welcome to the Consulting Success podcast. I’m your host, Michael Zipursky, and in this show, we delve into the stories of top-tier consultants. You’ll discover the strategies, techniques, and mindset necessary to cultivate a thriving and lucrative consulting business. Join us for an enlightening discussion today with Boaz Ashkenazy, and prepare to elevate your consulting expertise to new heights!
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So don’t wait years to find clarity. If you’re committed and serious about reaching a new level of success in your consulting business, go ahead and schedule your free growth session. Get in touch today. Just visit ConsultingSuccess.com/grow to book your free call today.
In this episode, you will learn how Boaz Ashkenazy transitioned from a career at Meta to co-founding Simply Augmented, an AI consultancy. Boaz shares insights into leveraging AI to solve complex business problems, emphasizing a customer-first approach. He also discusses strategies for networking, building partnerships with major tech companies, and the challenges of leaving a stable corporate job to start a new venture. Additionally, Boaz provides valuable advice on navigating the consulting landscape, from understanding client needs to managing intellectual property in partnerships.
Connect with Boaz Ashkenazy.
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Boaz, welcome. You bring a wealth of experience. Quite a track record working at multiple different companies, Meta being one of them, people know as Facebook. So we’ll kind of explore that. You’ve also built some other companies, you’ve exited companies. Here you are today running an AI-focused consulting business, which you’ll do a much better job of explaining that, I’m sure, than I will. Yeah, I’m looking forward to diving in and learning more about your journey and how you guys are building the business today. Just to start off, maybe take a moment and just explain what does Simply Augmented do today?
Yeah. So Simply Augmented is an AI consultancy, and our expertise is really around helping companies figure out personal hard problems around GenAI. And I’m a co-founder of the business. So it’s not just me. I’ve got two amazing technical founders who are going into companies, understanding the opportunities inside businesses, trying to figure out where AI fits in, and then we deploy those solutions as well. So that’s one of the things that’s kind of unique, is that we can go in and talk about how it all fits together and how it integrates, but then we can also write the code of and build out the solutions and then manage those solutions as well.
Let’s hit the rewind button for a moment. And I know, as I mentioned, you were at Meta before, you’ve also had these other companies. Why do you decide to start this company specifically?
Well, this company that I’m running right now, in some ways, is kind of an extension from the work that I was doing at Meta. At Meta, I got hired to work on a team that was building productivity tools for employees. And I got hired right when the pandemic was in full swing. And so everybody was being sent home. The team that I was involved in, we were building out tools for all sorts of different departments in the organization, from security to facilities, data centers, people building headsets and all sorts of stuff. One of the engineers that I have in the company now, who’s my co-founder and VP of engineering, worked closely with me at Meta and so we left together to start. And so the idea there was really, can we take some of the learning from the work that we did at Meta and apply it and provide value in the marketplace to businesses, medium-sized businesses?
I love to understand, why do people leave a prestigious organization, likely great salary, comp plan, all that kind of stuff? In your specific situation, you’re in Meta. It sounds like you have maybe at first glance a fair bit of autonomy and freedom and so forth. Why did you and your co-founder decide to leave to start your own consulting business? What was going on? What did you see? Just take us back to that moment and share if you can, as much as you are able to, about the thought process there.
It’s interesting. I would probably give the credit to Ashwin, who is my co-founder. He was really excited about the idea of getting more involved in GenAI while we were working there. At the time that we were working there, OpenAI releases chatGPT, all of a sudden there’s this revolution of energy and ideas around AI. His background was in VR, AR and AI, and he really pressed me to leave and start this company. And at first, to be honest with you, I was not ready. Took him a little while to convince me. But most of it was around the opportunity and the energy around this particular technology and the excitement around being able to have an impact and do something. And also, I guess that was one. The second thing is I’ve spent my life running businesses, usually with other people, and there’s something really, really fun about starting a company and going to market and going after clients, and you get some of that in a big organization, but it’s not the same feeling and obviously very, very different in terms of scale between the two. But strategically, it’s fun to work with somebody else and go after an idea in an industry that is really exciting.
Yeah. When you said that you weren’t ready and your co-founder needed to kind of work on you and keep that conversation going, what do you mean by not ready? What were you thinking about or what was kind of holding you back from taking that leap of faith or just starting the next business? Because obviously this wasn’t going to be your first business, but what was holding you back?
I think this is true for a lot of people working at big tech companies. You get into a rhythm and there’s some comfortable feelings about working and getting a salary at these big companies. And so you have to think twice about taking that kind of risk again and going out and trying to make it work. This would be my fourth company and it’s hard. It takes a lot of work and it’s not easy. And I think a lot of your audience probably knows that. And so, yeah, it just kind of gave me pause to think about, “Okay. Do I want to do this again? But ultimately it matters who you’re working with, too, and your excitement around the partners. I know there’s a lot of people that go and do consulting with just one, but that’s never really been my interest. I’ve always wanted to do businesses with other people. That’s part of the fun for me. And so it’s really going to battle with the people that you want to go to battle with, I think is a big part of it.
Yeah, it’s, for me, very interesting. You mentioned that it’s very hard. And I think anyone who’s really spent some time building at least one business, if not multiple businesses, feels the same way that it’s hard. Yet here we are continuing to do it. We put ourselves in those positions where we know it’s hard, we know it’s challenging, there’s ups and downs all the time, but yet we still continue to do it.
I think anyone who’s really spent some time building at least one business, if not multiple businesses, feels the same way that it’s hard. Yet here we are continuing to do it. Share on X
Thinking about when you started Simply Augmented, when two of you went in to do this together. As you mentioned, this is now your fourth company. You’ve had at least one exit that I know of. I imagine that you’ve learned quite a few lessons over those years and building those multiple different businesses of what works, what doesn’t work. When you started this business, what principles or approaches were you bringing to this business that you are thinking either, “Let’s definitely avoid making these mistakes or let’s stay away from x”? And likewise, what were you thinking about, “We need to bring these principles in. Let’s make sure we do this stuff”? I’m interested in how you approached starting this business and with pulling in the lessons learned or mistakes made in the past.
Well, just to be clear, every day is a new lesson learned in this business. I have a third co-founder, his name is Larry, who has got a lot of experience. He’s also a serial entrepreneur and has been through lots of different interesting businesses. He teaches me new stuff every day. And so that’s the caveat is that every day is learning. And actually that’s part of the fun. And it’s not that you’re not learning things in large institutions, but I mean, the amount of learning that happens at these companies, especially when you’re going to market and trying to understand your customers, is massive.
One of the things that I tried to apply to this business, and I think that both Larry and Ashwin agree, is going to market and trying to understand customers and having discovery conversations and really listening to customer problems is a big, big piece, that’s one. Two, letting those problems drive and not having the technology solution drive. And that was something that I’ve learned along the way, for sure, but it really came to the forefront for me when I was at Meta. Well, I was hired by Facebook, and when I was there, the name changed. And when the name changed, all of a sudden the spotlight and the focus was on the metaverse. Everybody wanted a metaverse, including a ton of people inside the company. And in a lot of cases, the reason and the why for having a metaverse was very optical. There weren’t really, in certain cases, big problems that were being solved by that, but people felt like they needed that. And that’s just one example that’s happened in other businesses for me, where you’ve got ideas, they’re interesting, and sometimes sexy technical solutions. It’s not a good reason to build before there’s a real hairy problem to solve. And so I think that for us, when we go talk to customers, we’re just about problems first, always.
I think a lot of people will resonate with what you just shared. Yet a challenge that people find themselves trying to kind of solve is how do you get yourself into the position where you can have those conversations. So I’m interested in your approach. Are you contacting just people that you know? Are you asking for referrals and introductions? Are you reaching out cold to people? How are you approaching people to have conversations where you’re finding it actually works?
I’m still experimenting, but there are two or three ways that have been working for me, and one is I’ve been doing this for a really long time, and I’ve got a deep network. So I, at first, immediately reached out to that network and started to have conversations without selling, but just talking about what I was thinking about doing, talking about the problems that they had – really going into discovery right out of the gate. And some of those conversations, by learning and discovering, turned into sales. So that was great.
Also, I have a podcast that I’m the host of that I started when I was at Meta. The podcast is called Shift AI, where I interview thought leaders in the GenAI space. I’m trying to elevate different kinds of thought leaders, and the show was picked up by a media organization in Seattle called GeekWire, and it’s syndicated through GeekWire and that’s created a lot of interest and awareness and buzz. And I’m finding that I get a lot of inbound because of that. And so that goes back to another premise that I have about how to go to market, and that is to provide free value. And that is definitely providing free value and putting that out there. I think people are getting value from it. I get a lot of feedback. It’s generating a lot of buzz and it’s helpful for the business, too. That’s the second way.
The third way is through partnership networks. We are an Azure OpenAI partner, also an AWS partner, Google Cloud partner. Through those partner ecosystems, we also are generating a lot of momentum around it, helping through building on top of existing platforms that differentiates us from a typical product company. We’re truly a services consultant, where we’re okay using existing products. And in this case, for GenAI especially, there’s existing foundation models, existing cloud services that we would be fools not to build on top of. Through those networks and those partnership programs, we’re able to leverage that and go to market.
For a moment, I’d love it if you could put on your scrappy, early stage Boaz building business hat for a second. If you didn’t have that deep network that you have right now, because some people will be in that situation who are joining us. They know they need to have more conversations, they understand the value of doing discovery, but they don’t have that deep network right now. What would you tell them? How would you approach creating the conversations that you know are necessary to grow the business, but again, you don’t have just ready access to it right away?
Yeah, that’s a really good question. And I do reach out cold to people sometimes, too. I ask for a lot of introductions. I really think that in this environment, providing more value at first is really the way to go, whether that’s on LinkedIn or TikTok or Twitter, thinking about what you want to put out there, the value that you want to put out there, and giving first, I always think will, at the end of the day, return you a lot more. I know it’s hard at first when you don’t have a track record, but if you can get out and be on panels and speak as much as you can for free and put yourself out there in the community, I think that there’s value there. And this is my personality, but I really like being in front of people. And I know that I spend most of my days on calls like this and on Zoom calls, but I really try to get out there in the community. And whether it’s happy hours or trying to go to conferences where I’m around other people, good things happen when I put myself in those situations. And so I think it’s easy to hide behind the computer screen, especially these days. And I encourage people to get out in the community.
Partnership Networks
100%, yeah. Talk to me about partner networks for a moment. I mean, you mentioned AWS, Azure, Google. So you’re connected with these well-known organizations so you can provide their services or use their technology and products for your clients and for projects. How do you get the most out of partner networks? Are you getting leads? Are they sending you leads? Do you have to be proactive? Just give a quick little summary of here’s the best practices, here’s what we find works to get the most out of these partner networks.
I think with the big providers, at first, you’re not really getting a lot of lead flow. And this is, I had another company that was affiliated with Microsoft where at first we thought, “Oh, we’re going to become part of the partner network and we’re going to get in there and all of a sudden the deals are going to start flowing.” But it doesn’t work like that. Over time you develop those relationships and you prove yourself out and then you can start doing more and more work. But it creates a lot of leverage to be able to build on top of platforms that you know are trusted, especially in the work that I’m doing now with security being on top of everyone’s mind.
But I also have talked to a lot of people, and for those that are looking to develop partnerships with smaller organizations, there’s still opportunities with small startups and software companies that are looking for channels. Maybe they’re not at the point in time where they’ve got a huge channel network, but they’re looking for opportunities to connect with people. And if you can trust them, then those are opportunities to go to market together sometimes there’s partnerships. I just started a partnership right now with a much, much larger consultancy where they’re looking for my expertise and my niche thing, but I can really help them, they can help me. And so we’re going to kind of go to the market together. Maybe I need to put in some time to do some demos, they’re going to put some time in to kind of put do some demos and together we can go out and try to win work together. I think those are opportunities to partner with others that really make a lot of sense.
Can you talk through a little bit of how you approach the structure of that type of a partnership with a larger consulting organization? People sometimes are concerned about, “This is going to impact my margin significantly.” Other people say, “No, I’m not going to change what I would typically charge. It doesn’t matter if it’s an end user client or if it’s another consulting business like an agency I’m getting work through.” How do you think about that? To just make sure that the economics makes sense because you’re working with– If they’re paying you less, you can’t take online projects, you don’t have the schedule, the time to work with maybe higher paying clients. How do you approach the economics of that and the thought process of, “Does it makes sense to get work through another consulting organization?”
Yeah, it’s a great question and I think that it really depends on the organization that you’re going to partner with. But ultimately the equation is, “Is there going to be a lot of learning here for me?” Because when I think about some of the big consultancies and why they would want to use me, in the case- in this business now, it’s because we have this very specific GenAI experience, but ultimately they’re going to want to do that themselves and they’re going to. And so it has to be a learning opportunity. So maybe I need to understand what it’s like to go after a bigger customer, what it’s like to be in a market that I’m not in right now and that this can help me do that.
If there is a lot of learning, I’m willing to sacrifice some of those economics because I know that ultimately the directed relationship with a customer is the way that I make profit and the way that I make the most money. So if I’m going to do that, I just need to optimize for something else. But I think there is a lot of learning. When I think about these enterprise markets, because for us, the sweet spot is a mid-market company, over 100 people, less than 1000 people. But when I think about going after a big enterprise customer, there’s just so much about that process that I don’t know a lot about. There’s just a ton of learning. Also, the hierarchy inside a big consultancy is just something I don’t have. There’s not the big partner down to the VP all the way through to the bottom. And I think there’s just a different motion when you’re functioning at that level. So to be a part of that somewhere in the rung, be a fly on the wall, massively interesting.
So what I’m hearing from you, just to summarize, it sounds like you’re saying that you’re willing to potentially be flexible on how you approach your fees for an engagement like that because of the upside of learning experience. The economics still have to make sense. You still have to defend your margins because you’re running a business, but you are open to adjusting your pricing a little bit because of the other upside that you would get from it.
More open. I think there’s still deal breakers, of course, but more open if it’s the right opportunity.
How do you think about IP? You just mentioned yourself that it’s very likely that a large organization is going to want to build out their own kind of capability in that area. You are being brought in because of your deep expertise. There’s going to be a sharing of that expertise, sharing of that IP to a degree as part of that project. How do you approach that to ensure that what you are bringing to the table is still part of you and your company as opposed to being pulled into the other larger firm.
Yeah, I think that in situations where you’re signing an MSA at a really, really big company, let’s say Meta or somebody like that, they are going to want to own the IP on what is being built. And I think in many of those cases that’s appropriate. For me, I want to be able to go on to the next customer and be able to use the expertise that we’ve developed along the way. When we write contracts, we try to specify out front that we may learn some things along the way and we don’t want that to inhibit us from being able to go to another customer. And I think for the most part, people understand that and they’re open to that. We sometimes have conversations about protecting certain aspects of what we’re building or in certain industries or for certain clients, and I’m willing to have those conversations, too. You never know what the intentions are on the other side. Sometimes people have interests that are not computing with you at the beginning and you really need to ask and say, “Where’s the hesitation? What are you trying to protect?” And the other thing too is that owning code, for people to own the code, that costs extra. And oftentimes people don’t want to pay that. And so you really have to ask the question. It’s like, “Why do you want to own the code?” And oftentimes that opens up a conversation that’s really, really interesting. It’s like, “Well, I don’t really want to own the code, but I don’t want you to go after these five customers.” You’re like, “Okay, let’s talk about that.”
And I’ll just put the disclaimer on here that none of this is legal or financial advice. We’re just a couple of people having a conversation, everyone. So make sure to do your own due diligence and talk to professionals in that area.
Marketing and Sales
I wanted to ask you about your pipeline. So you shared, Boaz, that when you started the business, it sounds like initial clients came through your network and having those conversations, you also have the podcast you host that gets syndicated. You’re getting inbound leads from that. What else are you doing today, if anything else, that you would say is a significant contributor to leads opportunities? You mentioned the partner network as well. Anything that you haven’t yet maybe talked about that you feel like, “Yeah, this is working really well for us today.”
There’s two things that I’m working on. One is in its nascent stages and one I’ve done in the last, I don’t know, three months and it’s actually been working for me. So the one that’s actually been working for me is going on stage in the right kind of atmosphere to talk about the work that I’m doing. So conferences, presentations where I’m either on a panel or by myself on stage giving a presentation. If the right people are in the room, I’ve had really great luck, people coming up to me after and saying, “Hey, I’d like to talk more.” I was just recently in a conference in Manila, and it was just the right people were in the room, the message was resonating, and it turned into a bunch of work that deals were closed. I was also just in Europe, I was in Sweden presenting, and I got some inbound from that, too. There’s credibility when you get on stage in certain kinds of situations that I think is hard to measure. And I recommend that people think about, whatever they’re doing as a consultant, are there opportunities to provide value in that way?
The second thing, which is in its nascent stages that I’m trying to figure out, and honestly, in my previous businesses, I haven’t really done a great job of it, is PR. I know that if you get into the right publications, media, news, TV, you can see a ton of inbound. And I’m trying to figure out what is the right approach to that. How do I develop relationships with reporters and provide value? It’s the same kind of motion that I see with customers, give before you take, develop those relationships, provide value. And then if you can, usually, those reporters will come back later, and I’m trying to figure that out. I’ve got a friend of mine who has an amazing business called Delight Labs that is helping a lot of people and helping a lot of small to medium sized businesses on PR. And there’s a huge opportunity there because when that big hit happens, the spigots can really turn on. And that’s the other thing, too. I don’t know if I’m ready for the spigots to really turn on if it’s a big PR hit, but I’m trying to prepare myself for that.
You mentioned being in the right room speaking, which makes a lot of sense. How do you think about being in the right room? What’s the criteria that you’re looking for to decide, does it make sense for me in the case of traveling halfway around the world to Manila or to Sweden to be part of a talk or to be part of a panel? What are you looking for? Is it the type of person, the attendee in the room and their job title and the size of the organization that they’re working at, or what are those kinds of factors of criteria?
I think it goes back to understanding who your customer profile is, your ICP. And luckily, I’ve got two partners that push on me when people ask me to speak or do different things. And in the back of my mind, I’m always thinking, is this who we want to be talking to? And it hasn’t always worked out perfectly, but when I think about that, it’s helpful. And so if I go to a conference and it’s of the company size that we want to go after, or it’s the right mix of industries that we’re thinking about, that’s how I position it. And sometimes it can be massively targeted. Like you could say, “All right, I’m going after people in the professional services space. So I’m going to go to a professional services conference, and I’m going to apply to speak on this topic and see if I can make that happen.” I mean, I think that’s a great strategy. And sometimes it could be more broad. I mean, I’ve been at conferences like CES where it’s just everything for everybody. And when you do that, I think you do have to kind of get a little bit focused about what you’re doing because otherwise it’s really hard to spray the messaging and not hit the right folks.
Is there anything that you’ve done over the last maybe year or so from a marketing perspective, business development that you tried and just did not work at all.
I’ve really had a hard time with going cold on LinkedIn and sending out messages. Now, I’ve gotten a lot of acceptances, and sometimes it’s partly when you’ve been around a long time, I have people see the profile and they say, “Oh, I’ll accept.” But getting a meeting and getting a qualified prospect from spraying like that is really, really hard. And I know that there’s folks out there that send out a lot of cold emails and send out a lot of inmail messages. I just have not had a lot of luck with that. And I don’t know how authentic I feel when I do that. So I’ve been trying to kind of take it slower and reach out to people, try to get introductions, try to get warm introductions. That’s just, it’s definitely hard to scale that, but it’s worked better for me.
Yeah, it’s the classic value over volume, right? When the value of an individual client is significant enough, it makes sense to spend the time to personalize, do your research, fewer interactions, but each one is more valuable than just going after a whole bunch of people through a more volume-based approach.
I’d love to understand a bit more of your sales cycle. What does the typical sales cycle look like? How long is it and what do the stages look like? Are you having two conversations? Is it 10 conversations? Over how long? Just paint us a bit of a picture of what that looks like today.
I wish it was two. They can be long. Ideally, in the perfect scenario, you have an introduction meeting where you talk about what you’re doing. There is a follow up meeting. Maybe a proposal gets written, there’s a follow up meeting, clarify the proposal and deals close, in a perfect world. What we’re experimenting with right now is packages that allow you to do some discovery as part of the proposal. So right now we have kind of a bronze, a silver and a gold package, and we present that to people. And there’s an audit of the business and an opportunity assessment of the business. So we can go in and we can look at all the aspects of the business and really understand the customer and then make recommendations for things that are particular to where AI fits in. That, for us, is kind of an opportunity assessment.
So that’s a paid, you said kind of three different levels, but as a paid, almost like a discovery offer, they would select which one of those makes sense. You go in and you do that, and then from there you’re going to use that to figure out what the next level of engagement looks like, how can we add a lot more value here for more of a full proposal.
But we’re upfront about what that full engagement could look like. It’s not a bait and switch. We’re saying, “Look, we’ll go in for a very low amount and we’ll do an opportunity assessment and audit. Understand that if this turns into a deployed solution, given all the maintenance and the upgrades and everything that needs to happen, there’s going to be a cost to that.” And so oftentimes we’ll put that cost out there because we are trying to disqualify- if you are too small and that number just seems like way too big, it’s not worth any of our time. But if we’re all on the same page and there’s alignment, I think it does make sense to walk before you run. And that’s why I like those paid assessments.
Give us a sense of the three options, the three different discovery offers that you have. What’s the price point of those? What’s the range there?
Yeah, it kind of depends on what we’re doing, but I would say like $4500 for the bronze, $8500 for the silver and starting at $30,000 for the gold and up. So that’s kind of where they land. Because you know, in deployment, depending on what you end up selecting through that assessment, there’s going to be different kind of flavors of AI once you really decide to operationalize.
And then when you move to the full engagement, what kind of range are those larger projects for you guys typically in terms of dollar value?
For us, typically, I would say between $25,000 and $250,000, which in the scheme of things for the GenAI projects that you see out there when you get into the Accentures and the McKinseys and those kinds of bigger projects, we’re talking about million dollar deployments, we don’t swim in those waters right now.
Right now being the key– Maybe at some point, if you choose to. It’s not always the right place to be.
And so how long are you finding on average does it take from that initial conversation to have somebody get started with maybe one of the bronze, silver, gold type of options?
Like I said, in a perfect world, that sales cycle can be 30 days to get people onboarded with maybe a smaller engagement.
But that’s the perfect world. What are you actually seeing though?
Yeah, I’ve seen it in less, I mean I’ve seen it in three to four weeks of a sales cycle. But I’ve also seen it in three to four months where you’re just trying to go after folks and the timing isn’t right. But I would say that in general, one thing that I’ve learned from previous companies is, if the timing isn’t right, you need to let go. And so that sales cycle might start again in six months, but it doesn’t need to be a nine month sales cycle on projects this size. If you go in and you talk to somebody and they’re not ready or they don’t have budget, well, then you’ve got to come back later. And I try to ask that upfront because I think that as consultants, one of the lessons that I’ve learned that I think would be good to pass on to the audience is that there’s a lot of hope that comes with the sales cycle where you hope they’re going to be ready. You never asked about timing and budget. You’ve got a stakeholder that thinks or that’s telling you that, “Yeah, this is great. I love it. This is going to be so good. We’re going to close this.” And you hope and you hope and you hope and you hope only to find out that they’re not a decision maker or only to find out that they actually don’t have budget. And so I’m trying to kind of qualify, disqualify early. “How big are you? Do you have a budget? Is this something that’s going to happen now or is this something that’s going to happen next year?” I think if you ask and if you’re honest with people upfront, they’re usually honest with you, and then you can say, “All right. Well, this sales cycle now has ended and sometimes it’s better to get a ‘no’ quick than it is to get a ‘no’ slow.”
Have you ever entertained or been in a situation where a buyer wants to just jump right in and go into the full engagement and not do one of the discovery offers? And if so, how do you handle that? Is that okay for you guys? Or do you tend to say, “No, we should really do this first”? What’s your thought process there?
I think it’s okay as long as they’re clear about what their problems are. And we probably still would do some discovery, of course, and try to understand what their tech stack looks like and what their data looks like and so on. But there are situations where people come in and I ask them, “Well, let’s talk about your problems. Do you have a growth problem or do you have a margin problem?” Because usually it’s one of the two, right? “So I have a growth problem and I’m really clear. I’ve got leads that are unqualified. I’m getting slammed by unqualified leads and it’s wasting my salespeople’s time. Can GenAI come in and help?” If someone has clarity like that, then it’s just much easier to go in and say, “All right. Well, let’s do a little bit of discovery and then start doing some evaluation.”
I still think that the validation part is important. And for our silver package, when we go in and do some assessment, we also are doing a bunch of testing. We’ll build solutions, we’ll build the back end, we’ll build a little bit of the front end too. And we’ll show that for their inputs there’s output that is meaningful to them, that’s going to have ROI. Because I think a lot of consultants in my space don’t do that. They come in, they put together a report, they’re smart, there’s consulting, there’s strategy, but they don’t build anything because it’s expensive for them. They have to go outside to get it built. We can do that. And that validation, I think, is important. So we would still do that in part of this bigger phase so that we can test, test, test, and then deploy.
Are you doing that also because you see that by providing that added level of value, even though it might mean that that initial kind of discovery project for you is going to be less profitable for you because you need to spend more time and resources going into it, but there’s a higher likelihood of that same client then moving to a full engagement and that larger project becomes significantly more profitable for you? Or is there some other kind of way of thinking around that?
It’s two things. One is when you do that validation, you get to see what success looks like early and there’s a much better chance that the metrics that you need later on are going to be good, which is going to generate more business with that customer, but then also give you use cases that you can then win work with other customers. The second thing is, especially in a space like I’m in, there’s a ton of hype. So there’s a lot of people out there that are saying that they’re experts in GenAI, but they’re not building anything. And so for me, creating that differentiation, which is like, “Hey, we’re engineers and we can build things and that’s valuable to you,” separates me from the 80% of the people out there that learn how to prompt engineer and all of a sudden they’re a GenAI expert.
Business Challenges
Right. And you said there’s a lot of those people out there right now.
I’d love to hear in the last year or so, or even as you’ve been building this business, what’s been one really big challenge for you, Boaz? Maybe even it’s still fresh for you today, something that you’re working through that you feel once you overcome it, you unlock, it takes you and the company to the next level. What kind of comes to mind for you?
Gosh, there’s so many challenges. And I’m not sure what’s the one that unlocks everything, but I think one of the hardest things for everybody is pricing and getting packaging right. And that’s one that I’m constantly thinking about. The other one is – I really, really struggle with this because I’ve talked to a lot of smart people that encourage me to do this – is focus. There’s this idea that if you just had that beachhead customer, that one industry or one vertical or one focus, if you just nail that first, the rest will follow. And it’s really, really hard to execute on that. You really want to be able to provide your service to a lot of different people and cast a wide net. And so I go back and forth on that. Should it be books first and then everything later, or is there a middle ground? So I’ll get back to you on that.
Okay.
I would also say the other big challenge that I face is how to go up market and how to do it the right way. What I find is that if I’m talking to the wrong customer profile, it’s a smaller organization that I know is not the right fit, how do I get them– how do I disqualify them quickly and how do I get upmarket? There’s a lot in my network that are not the right profile. And so for me, it’s like developing the relationships and spending the time prospecting to get the right circumstances in place. And I don’t know if you feel like that also, but prospecting can sometimes be the thing that you leave to the last, and I’m trying to force myself to invest in prospecting. You can get caught up in lots of other things in your business?
Yeah, no, it makes a lot of sense. I mean, I think we’ve, over the years, taken a similar approach to what you talked about earlier, which is really trying to give as much value as we can through our content. And so that’s why we have, and we’ve been publishing articles for many years on our website, written several books. We have the Consulting Success podcast. We have our YouTube channel. We’re doing a lot more videos these days. We’re running different online events. Doing that has kind of put us in the position where we have, luckily, a lot of good lead flow that comes to us. But even though we’re in that position, we’re still always thinking about we don’t want to rest on our laurels and become comfortable. We need to continue challenging ourselves and not having reliance on any one area inside of the business. And so we’re always testing new things, trying new things, often failing, but at the same time making some steps forward. And overall, over enough time, you start to see some pretty significant improvements. But, yeah, a lot of those things that you mentioned I think are going to resonate with many people joining us, because as you become more successful and more established, you’re going to get a lot more inquiries, and a lot of those inquiries aren’t going to be the right ones. So you want to have a good process to make sure that you don’t suck up a lot of your time or team members’ times talking to the wrong people.
I’ve got another hack for your audience that I recently experienced because it was another consultant that did it. I really liked it. I’ve tried a little bit of this, but I haven’t really done exactly what they did, but I really liked it. So I’m going to explain it. If others try it and it works for them, I’d love to know. So what they did was they went out in their community and timed their happy hours around bigger tech events. So they knew a tech event was coming. They went in and they kind of said, “All right. I’m going to do a happy hour at a local hotel/restaurant. I’m going to buy some hors d’oeuvres. It’s not going to cost that much money. Let’s say $500 to $1,000. I’m going to do that.” There were three partners in this. It was a marketing consultancy. And I’m going to kind of play it around this tech conference so that this is kind of one of the adjacent events. And then they invited a bunch of people just to have a conversation. So I got there because I was thinking I could learn something about marketing. So I got there. They had a bunch of hors d’oeuvres spread out. It was super casual in a corner of a lobby of a hotel, and the three founders were standing around and just having conversations. And I got a lot out of it as somebody that was just joining. They shared a few things. They were providing free value. The hors d’oeuvres were good. And when I actually talked to them after, they got like five really, really warm leads from that experience, and I think they closed two. And so when I think about that, it’s just like not that much money to stand around for 2 or 3 hours and have decent conversation. You’re giving free value, and that could turn into real business. So I really like that approach. It’s kind of hacky, but I love it.
Well, it reminds me, I remember reading Marc Benioff’s book about how he built Salesforce and he did something very similar, like this event hijacking. He’d find other larger events going on and make sure that they showed up there to get people’s attention away from that. So I think that’s definitely a proven approach that can work for many people. And I would just offer as well for everyone that the big thing from that, and you hit on this earlier as well, Boaz, is getting in front of people, getting away from just being behind a computer screen and putting yourself in close proximity with potential buyers. The more conversations you have, the more business you’re going to generate. And I think that over the years, there’s lots of great stuff that has happened through online and cloud and all that, but I think some opportunity has been lost. Back in the day, we would just go to more events, we would meet more people. We would kind of get out of the building because it wasn’t normal to just be staring at a computer all day long. And magic happens when you do that. That’s just where you get to rub shoulders and actually meet people. And the trust barriers are where they should be, were able to be broken down. So I think that’s for a lot of people, an opportunity that they could certainly lean into more.
So, Boaz, I know I’m looking at time here. I want to respect the time that we have in the calendar here. I want to thank you for coming on, sharing just a little bit about your journey and also making sure that people can learn more about Simply Augmented, what you guys are doing, and connect or reach out if they’re interested. Where should we send people? Where’s the best place for people to go to learn more?
Yeah, I think that going to simplyaugmented.ai, which is our website, and checking out what we’re doing there. We are on LinkedIn. I am on LinkedIn, so you can always reach out to me. And we have a podcast called Shift AI. It’s syndicated by GeekWire, so you’ll see us in GeekWire. And definitely go listen to the podcast. Reach out to me if you have any questions. Always happy to answer them. We’re on all the major social channels as well, Instagram, Twitter and so on.
We’ll link all that up in the show notes at Consulting Success
Boaz, again, thanks so much for coming on.
Yeah, it was really, really great talking with you. I love what you’re doing here and I really enjoyed the conversation.
Thank you.
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