Talking to the $25/hr Shop Floor Worker Beat Every Spreadsheet

Sean Weisbrot: What's the hardest thing about what you do?

Dustin Snyder: Oh, man.

Dustin Snyder: The hardest thing about what I do. I think it's the it's balancing the the relationship piece with CEOs and founders and owners with the the difficulty of

Dustin Snyder: the information that I have to give them.

Dustin Snyder: When a when a founder

Dustin Snyder: or an executive has a hand in why human systems are breaking, and

Dustin Snyder: I have to help them connect those dots.

Dustin Snyder: It's, it's a pretty delicate dance,

Dustin Snyder: and it's one that just doesn't work if we haven't established a trust between us by that

Sean Weisbrot: I could definitely see why that would be difficult.

Dustin Snyder: point.

Sean Weisbrot: Assuming there is that that rapport, though, why is it still difficult?

Dustin Snyder: You know, it's just heavy.

Dustin Snyder: Right?

Dustin Snyder: You know, somebody puts their blood, sweat, and tears into something for years.

Dustin Snyder: Somebody grinds through difficult times with the team.

Dustin Snyder: Some maybe their name is on the building.

Dustin Snyder: You know?

Dustin Snyder: And somebody that's relatively new to the equation, comes in

Dustin Snyder: and essentially, you know, tells them that they've designed some systems poorly or made some big mistakes that are that are directly producing the outcomes that they're experiencing.

Dustin Snyder: You know, that's not a that's not a fun conversation to have.

Dustin Snyder: That's a pretty vulnerable thing that

Dustin Snyder: requires exercising a lot of emotional intelligence as a leader.

Sean Weisbrot: I can definitely

Sean Weisbrot: imagine that being difficult.

Sean Weisbrot: I know I've had conversations with business owners where

Sean Weisbrot: they're maybe not coming to me for advice, but but I may see a problem and state it, and

Sean Weisbrot: and sometimes, you know, people kind of clam up.

Sean Weisbrot: I do a lot of free mentorship on a platform called Growth Mentor.

Sean Weisbrot: And oftentimes, they're early founders.

Sean Weisbrot: That's why they're coming to me because maybe they can't afford someone,

Sean Weisbrot: and so this is a way for me to give back, because I'm just capable of helping them.

Sean Weisbrot: And my style is brutally honest.

Sean Weisbrot: I don't see there to be another way because

Sean Weisbrot: doing any any differently is a waste of everyone's time.

Sean Weisbrot: And some people love it. I've definitely had people go, holy crap.

Sean Weisbrot: I needed to hear that.

Sean Weisbrot: It's not what I expected.

Sean Weisbrot: It's, you know, but I it's what I needed.

Dustin Snyder: Yeah.

Dustin Snyder: Yeah.

Dustin Snyder: Yeah.

Sean Weisbrot: And some people hate it. Like

Sean Weisbrot: and, you know, my response is, look.

Sean Weisbrot: I'm telling you what you need to hear,

Sean Weisbrot: and this is the best free advice you're ever gonna get.

Sean Weisbrot: And, like, you could pay someone millions of dollars, and they probably still couldn't give you the clarity of advice I'm giving you.

Sean Weisbrot: So take it take it or leave it. But but, yeah, people either hate me or they they love me based on that.

Sean Weisbrot: So how how do you balance that?

Sean Weisbrot: Because I imagine there has to be a little bit of hand holding, but also a little bit of brutality.

Sean Weisbrot: Like, look.

Sean Weisbrot: You know, there's a problem.

Sean Weisbrot: Are we gonna handle this, or are we going to him and about it?

Dustin Snyder: Yeah.

Dustin Snyder: Yeah.

Dustin Snyder: I mean, I, you know, I certainly

Dustin Snyder: have that mentality too.

Dustin Snyder: You know, let's you know, we have this information.

Dustin Snyder: Now what are we gonna do with it? But,

Dustin Snyder: I think that the thing that makes simultaneously

Dustin Snyder: makes it challenging and makes it such a liberating moment for, leaders and founders is that,

Dustin Snyder: you know, the the human systems window that I'm opening for them is a whole set of information

Dustin Snyder: that they didn't have access to before.

Dustin Snyder: So it was a vantage point that they just couldn't see from where they were sitting.

Dustin Snyder: And so,

Dustin Snyder: you know, opening that and I used to phrase connecting the dots for them,

Dustin Snyder: showing them from the perspective of the frontline of their team,

Dustin Snyder: you know, which is not where they sit because, you know, they're in the they're in the the top seat, showing them that, hey.

Dustin Snyder: This is,

Dustin Snyder: this is how things are actually happening on the ground.

Dustin Snyder: You know, as well intentioned as these decisions might have been,

Dustin Snyder: here's here's how we got to the outcome that we're currently experiencing,

Dustin Snyder: and here's the variables that we need to change in the design in order to drive a different outcome.

Dustin Snyder: So

Dustin Snyder: So I think it's, you know, it's just showing them a landscape that they've not seen before.

Dustin Snyder: And so that, that allows them to really

Dustin Snyder: have a heck of a lot more control than they did a moment ago.

Dustin Snyder: And so

Dustin Snyder: it just boils down to who they are and how they

Dustin Snyder: interpret new information if they have a fixed mindset where they don't want, you know, new data to make their decisions or when they have new data, you know, if they're able to really quickly, turn that into new and better decisions.

Sean Weisbrot: How can someone run a business of any size worth talking to you about and

Sean Weisbrot: not be capable of using data or not be open to to new data?

Dustin Snyder: I don't think it's I don't think it's so much about new data.

Dustin Snyder: I think it's about where the data's coming from.

Dustin Snyder: So, like, early companies tend to run on, like, founder proximity.

Dustin Snyder: Like, you're in every room.

Dustin Snyder: Decisions tend to happen by

Dustin Snyder: osmosis.

Dustin Snyder: Like, the culture comes from your actual physical presence.

Dustin Snyder: And none of that gets designed intentionally because it never had to be. Like, you were the system.

Dustin Snyder: And then growth just pulls you out of the rooms so that the thing that breaks

Dustin Snyder: just wasn't visible to you in the first place.

Dustin Snyder: So, you know, it's, it

Dustin Snyder: it's it's funny because it's simultaneously this very flattering thing.

Dustin Snyder: Like, hey.

Dustin Snyder: When things were working, it was all you.

Dustin Snyder: But now you are no longer, you know, directly involved in every facet of the business.

Dustin Snyder: You're getting things second and thirdhand.

Dustin Snyder: You're getting information through

Dustin Snyder: canned reports, or it's being filtered through multiple people.

Dustin Snyder: And so, you know, at that point, you're, you're having to

Dustin Snyder: trust that people are getting you objective information and people's experience of things, is now different from yours.

Dustin Snyder: So

Dustin Snyder: you're no longer the one directly interpreting the the data.

Dustin Snyder: So you've, you lose that, you lose that direct connection.

Dustin Snyder: Did I lose you?

Sean Weisbrot: No.

Dustin Snyder: I can't hear you anymore.

Sean Weisbrot: Some someone someone's trying to call my apartment.

Sean Weisbrot: And I'm sorry.

Sean Weisbrot: Give me one second.

Sean Weisbrot: My wife is supposed to take care of this.

Sean Weisbrot: Jolene?

Sean Weisbrot: Like, my wife's downstairs trying to find the person.

Sean Weisbrot: The person,

Sean Weisbrot: is calling me and texting me. And, like, I don't know where the hell my wife went.

Sean Weisbrot: She's

Dustin Snyder: Nope.

Dustin Snyder: Lost you again.

Sean Weisbrot: can you hear me now?

Dustin Snyder: Your audio cut out.

Dustin Snyder: Yep.

Sean Weisbrot: Yeah.

Sean Weisbrot: So essentially, this guy was delivering food, and my wife has all the details.

Sean Weisbrot: And I gave it to her to to go downstairs and get, and the guy is sitting outside calling me and messaging me.

Sean Weisbrot: And my wife's downstairs, and I don't know where the hell downstairs she is, but somehow,

Sean Weisbrot: the two of them can't see each other.

Sean Weisbrot: I have no idea what the hell is going on.

Dustin Snyder: That's alright.

Dustin Snyder: You gotta take a break?

Sean Weisbrot: No.

Sean Weisbrot: If my wife can't figure that out, then I don't know why I married her.

Sean Weisbrot: I'll let her deal with it. It's just that that he was calling the house.

Sean Weisbrot: You know, I'm just gonna I think he's just ran away.

Sean Weisbrot: It looks like he's I don't know what the hell is going on. I'm I'm sorry.

Sean Weisbrot: Give me a second.

Sean Weisbrot: I'm gonna just call him real fast, and I'm gonna just say what the hell is going on.

Sean Weisbrot: I'm sorry about this.

Sean Weisbrot: The the food was supposed to arrive thirty minutes before we started,

Sean Weisbrot: and then some guy, like, was screwing around.

Sean Weisbrot: He didn't pick it up. Hello?

Sean Weisbrot: Excuse me? Hello?

Sean Weisbrot: Hello?

Sean Weisbrot: Hi. Hello?

Sean Weisbrot: Hi. You you keep messaging me.

Sean Weisbrot: My wife is downstairs.

Sean Weisbrot: She's supposed to my my wife Now I now I now I, find this customer.

Sean Weisbrot: Okay?

Sean Weisbrot: Did you did you find my wife?

Sean Weisbrot: No. No. No. No.

Sean Weisbrot: No. You didn't? Now message give me an inbound for, your order.

Sean Weisbrot: I'm

Sean Weisbrot: I'm I'm sorry.

Sean Weisbrot: My wife is supposed to

Sean Weisbrot: I give you message.

Sean Weisbrot: Yes. I know.

Sean Weisbrot: I know.

Sean Weisbrot: My I know.

Sean Weisbrot: My wife went downstairs to meet you.

Sean Weisbrot: Message.

Sean Weisbrot: Restriction not go to the permission go to the inside.

Sean Weisbrot: I But I wait for outside long time.

Sean Weisbrot: My wife is downstairs to meet you.

Sean Weisbrot: You

Sean Weisbrot: have a I think you have a pink soap.

Sean Weisbrot: Yes. I gave it to my wife.

Sean Weisbrot: Hey. Can I talk with him?

Sean Weisbrot: Yeah.

Sean Weisbrot: What?

Sean Weisbrot: Hello?

Sean Weisbrot: Hi. Why does he not give you the food?

Sean Weisbrot: Hello?

Sean Weisbrot: Hey. You you are Sean?

Sean Weisbrot: Yeah.

Sean Weisbrot: More,

Sean Weisbrot: some oh, wait.

Sean Weisbrot: Wait.

Sean Weisbrot: One second.

Sean Weisbrot: One second.

Sean Weisbrot: I don't understand.

Sean Weisbrot: Okay.

Sean Weisbrot: They hung up. So I they they found each other, but I ask again, I don't know why it took ten minutes or fifteen minutes for them to find each other.

Sean Weisbrot: Anyways, I am so sorry about that.

Sean Weisbrot: That's horrible.

Dustin Snyder: It's alright.

Dustin Snyder: It happens.

Sean Weisbrot: Yeah.

Sean Weisbrot: I know.

Sean Weisbrot: It's just not professional.

Sean Weisbrot: Anyways, so the the food I ordered the food at noon because I knew I had an hour.

Sean Weisbrot: I ordered the food closest to us that would take the fastest to get here,

Sean Weisbrot: and then some guy drove around for twenty minutes.

Dustin Snyder: All good.

Sean Weisbrot: Before like, he was picking up the order for twenty minutes and then he disappeared and they found another person and then that person instantly wasn't able to bring the food until, like, 01:05.

Sean Weisbrot: And I was like, okay.

Sean Weisbrot: Well, I'll just I'll just eat.

Dustin Snyder: Yeah.

Dustin Snyder: Do you do you wanna

Sean Weisbrot: No. Well,

Dustin Snyder: do you wanna keep going?

Dustin Snyder: Or

Sean Weisbrot: yay.

Sean Weisbrot: Absolutely.

Sean Weisbrot: We'll keep going.

Sean Weisbrot: I'll eat later.

Sean Weisbrot: Don't worry about it. I just, you know,

Dustin Snyder: okay.

Sean Weisbrot: we're good.

Sean Weisbrot: Okay.

Sean Weisbrot: Do you remember the last thing you said so I can pick up from there?

Sean Weisbrot: Because I totally lost the train of thought.

Sean Weisbrot: I'm really sorry about that.

Dustin Snyder: Sure.

Dustin Snyder: You had asked, you know, why,

Dustin Snyder: why somebody in a executive or founder seat, would, have difficulty incorporating new data.

Sean Weisbrot: Right.

Sean Weisbrot: And you were talking about the source.

Dustin Snyder: And I was talking about how it's yeah.

Sean Weisbrot: Okay.

Sean Weisbrot: Give me a sec.

Sean Weisbrot: I'm gonna start on a new train of thought.

Sean Weisbrot: Why is it that businesses

Sean Weisbrot: struggle to handle these things as they grow when every founder, especially bootstrap founders, are taught to

Sean Weisbrot: remove themselves from the business in order to allow the business to grow.

Sean Weisbrot: So they're doing what they're told, but then everything breaks as they do it.

Dustin Snyder: Mhmm.

Dustin Snyder: I think that I think that a lot of times, the founders

Dustin Snyder: forget the level of exposure they've had to things that that other people might not necessarily.

Dustin Snyder: So, like, there's this dilution math

Dustin Snyder: where, like, if you double your headcount in a year,

Dustin Snyder: that means most of your company has never worked under the original conditions when you were, you know, bootstrapping things.

Dustin Snyder: And so there's this tipping point where the ratio of some people who are, like, acculturated, to newer to the organization just flips.

Dustin Snyder: And the culture stops being transmitted and starts getting, like, averaged, which is is good because it forces you to

Dustin Snyder: to document and structure things in order to produce

Dustin Snyder: the, you know, the behavioral outcomes that you want in your organization.

Dustin Snyder: But it's,

Dustin Snyder: if you're not doing that, if you're still in this founder mindset where you're, you know, bootstrapping things and you're just running like a startup,

Dustin Snyder: you won't have people behaving the way that you want.

Dustin Snyder: And then you're sitting there wondering, like, why aren't they behaving like somebody who's been here since day zero?

Dustin Snyder: Because they haven't. Because they haven't had the same repetition of environment and information that that you've had.

Dustin Snyder: And then you also have this trouble where, a lot of the times, you'll have

Dustin Snyder: founders who say, oh, like, my original team

Dustin Snyder: can't scale with me, which, you know, sometimes that's correct.

Dustin Snyder: But a lot of times, it's just a a misdiagnosis.

Dustin Snyder: Like, when when growth starts to break things on the human side, founders tend to reach for this, like, person explanation.

Dustin Snyder: Like, oh, my VP, like, topped out,

Dustin Snyder: or this person can't operate at this new altitude.

Dustin Snyder: But, really, like, the environment mutated underneath that person, and the conditions that they were succeeding in have disappeared.

Dustin Snyder: So if you don't put mechanisms in place

Dustin Snyder: to bring that team along with you and all the value that they bring from having been around as long as they have, then

Dustin Snyder: the the same human looks like an a player at one stage and a liability at the next, and, really, nothing about them changed.

Dustin Snyder: But,

Dustin Snyder: otherwise, you're gonna end up cycling through your team.

Dustin Snyder: You're gonna you're gonna burn people out.

Dustin Snyder: You're gonna lose a lot of loyalty because people are gonna recognize that they're, you know, expendable at certain points.

Dustin Snyder: So you lose the the continuity of information and history and expertise,

Dustin Snyder: as you scale if you don't plan for

Dustin Snyder: how do I need to help this person adapt to the new environment.

Sean Weisbrot: How do you help people adapt to the new environment?

Dustin Snyder: You think about how it's gonna change.

Dustin Snyder: You think about, what competencies people are going to need.

Dustin Snyder: So, we hear a lot about,

Dustin Snyder: like, succession planning.

Dustin Snyder: Like, okay.

Dustin Snyder: If, you know, this person retires or if I lose this key employee,

Dustin Snyder: what are the what are the competencies that I need to have developed within the organization for people to continue to contribute

Dustin Snyder: and to have that operational continuity to have leadership of of different functions?

Dustin Snyder: But you also have to do that with your own people,

Dustin Snyder: kind of flip the script and say, okay.

Dustin Snyder: With my existing talent,

Dustin Snyder: what do I need to plan for?

Dustin Snyder: How is the environment around them going to be changing in the next six months, year, you know, three years?

Dustin Snyder: And what do I need to make sure is,

Dustin Snyder: what competencies do I need to make sure exist on this team so that I don't reach this point where, hey.

Dustin Snyder: We need to accomplish x. We need to break into this new market,

Dustin Snyder: or we need to make sure that we have deployed this this certain, you know, product type at a certain point.

Dustin Snyder: And

Dustin Snyder: I'm having somebody who, you know, has served the existing environment phenomenally for three years, and then we reach this point and all of a sudden they're struggling, you know, what did I do to invest in that person or develop them, or coach them into being successful in the new environment?

Dustin Snyder: I don't have your audio.

Sean Weisbrot: Sorry.

Sean Weisbrot: I've been, muting myself when you were talking to make sure I didn't have extra noise.

Dustin Snyder: Yeah.

Dustin Snyder: Gotcha.

Sean Weisbrot: Thank you for that.

Sean Weisbrot: So how could you possibly know

Sean Weisbrot: the future of every position for the company as you're focusing on trying to grow the company?

Dustin Snyder: Because that's the that's the job is to,

Dustin Snyder: you know, you you mentioned earlier founders are told to get out of the day to day, right, to delegate, to hand things off to people.

Dustin Snyder: And so you're not you shouldn't only be handing off,

Dustin Snyder: the tasks that are beneath you, but you should be handing off the tasks that pull you out of planning for the future.

Dustin Snyder: So as you add layers to an organization,

Dustin Snyder: what you should be designing for is to keep

Dustin Snyder: the top level of the organization as far into the future as possible.

Dustin Snyder: So if your if your C suite is focused on day to day execution,

Dustin Snyder: then that means that the, you know, the directors or the managers beneath them are

Dustin Snyder: also basically doing the same job that the C suite are.

Dustin Snyder: So as you add layers, you want to be making sure that each successive layer is working farther into the future and thinking about these things and then helping the layer beneath them execute

Dustin Snyder: on something that's closer to the direct time horizon.

Sean Weisbrot: That certainly makes sense.

Sean Weisbrot: I I guess I I never really thought of it like that.

Sean Weisbrot: I guess I always thought of it as, yeah, you should add a manager when you need people that need to be managed.

Sean Weisbrot: I mean, obviously, people are looking at things differently now that, you know, AI and agents are are available.

Sean Weisbrot: But in a traditional human only structure, you know, system,

Sean Weisbrot: you know, you start off as yourself doing things, and then you hire someone because you can't do something anymore because you need to focus on something else, and you hand off things so that things get done.

Sean Weisbrot: And then when you have too many people doing that thing, you hire someone to manage that person.

Sean Weisbrot: And then when you need someone to strategize over how to do that thing, you hire someone to manage the manager, and that's when, like, you start to have problems.

Dustin Snyder: Yeah.

Dustin Snyder: And and that's the trouble is often people are thinking about layers of management as layers of tasks.

Dustin Snyder: And, really, you have to think about your organization as,

Dustin Snyder: as layers of time horizons.

Dustin Snyder: You know, your frontline is working on today, the things the things that are happening today.

Dustin Snyder: You know, if you add a supervisory layer above that, they should be thinking about, like, tomorrow and the week.

Sean Weisbrot: Mhmm.

Dustin Snyder: If you add a layer above that, they should be thinking about the month.

Dustin Snyder: If you add a layer about that, they above that, they should be thinking about the quarter.

Dustin Snyder: If the layer above that should be thinking about the year.

Dustin Snyder: And then once you get all the way to, you know, senior executives,

Dustin Snyder: they should be thinking in in terms of years, plural.

Dustin Snyder: So

Dustin Snyder: I think that's the big problem.

Dustin Snyder: When people design an organization,

Dustin Snyder: they think so much about tasks and the dotted lines between boxes of, you know, seats.

Dustin Snyder: What you should be thinking about when you're designing an organization is,

Dustin Snyder: is the whole point the organization exists, is to move a dollar from one side of the system to the other.

Dustin Snyder: And the whole the whole thing is designed to move money through it, to turn a customer order into a paid invoice.

Dustin Snyder: So, you know, that white piece of paper into a green piece of paper.

Dustin Snyder: And

Dustin Snyder: any point at which that snags in that system, you know, is is the problem of of human systems.

Dustin Snyder: So anything that's causing drag on on the dollars movement and slowing it down,

Dustin Snyder: is a is a human systems issue.

Dustin Snyder: And where the senior executives should be focused is

Dustin Snyder: on not on how is that dollar slowing down today,

Dustin Snyder: but where where's the threat to that dollar

Dustin Snyder: down the road, whether it's six months, a year, five years from now?

Sean Weisbrot: And so your goal is to help the CEO figure out where in the organization that threat lies, what time horizon that threat lies.

Dustin Snyder: Both both where in the organization and on what time horizon.

Dustin Snyder: Yeah.

Sean Weisbrot: And so how do you figure that out?

Dustin Snyder: I go into the organization.

Dustin Snyder: I use a diagnostic called workforce insight mapping.

Dustin Snyder: So that's designed based on

Dustin Snyder: all of the science that we have available to us now, which, the the science scientific field of human systems shows us that

Dustin Snyder: as much as we like to think we're captains of our own ship, human behavior, especially in group settings,

Dustin Snyder: is very much a predictable outcome.

Dustin Snyder: It's very much a hard science that can be mapped.

Dustin Snyder: You can understand why a group of people is behaving

Dustin Snyder: the way that it is, why you're experiencing these outcomes

Dustin Snyder: if you look at the variables within the environment.

Dustin Snyder: So what I do is I go into an organization,

Dustin Snyder: and I identify the root causes of the the behave the undesirable

Dustin Snyder: behavioral outcome that the CEO says, hey.

Dustin Snyder: We have this problem.

Dustin Snyder: We have employee turnover.

Dustin Snyder: We have people not showing up to work.

Dustin Snyder: We have, you know, disengagement.

Dustin Snyder: People aren't buying in on change.

Dustin Snyder: Whatever the issue is, I come in and I show the leadership team

Dustin Snyder: that I mapped the actual variables in the system that are driving the outcomes that they're they're experiencing, and I identify very surgically and specifically,

Dustin Snyder: here's the things we're gonna tweak to produce an entirely different behavioral outcome.

Sean Weisbrot: How much

Sean Weisbrot: effort on your part does it take to actually surface these these insights?

Dustin Snyder: It's funny.

Dustin Snyder: I I just got asked this question yesterday at lunch.

Dustin Snyder: I'd say, you know, it's a 500 person organization.

Dustin Snyder: That's about two weeks of time on the ground,

Dustin Snyder: and then I go back and do an analysis of the of the thousands of data points that have been gathered during that time.

Dustin Snyder: And so within within three or four weeks, it goes from the kickoff of the engagement

Dustin Snyder: to the executive team having a map of their human behaviors in their organization.

Sean Weisbrot: How heavily reliant

Sean Weisbrot: is your process on AI?

Sean Weisbrot: Because I mean, I imagine if you're sitting down with 500 people in you know, doing an hour interview on each person, that's not two weeks.

Sean Weisbrot: Right?

Sean Weisbrot: That's five hundred hours.

Sean Weisbrot: So how how can you manage that process so you can truly

Sean Weisbrot: reach the edges of the organization so that your information is, deeply accurate.

Dustin Snyder: Sure.

Dustin Snyder: So,

Dustin Snyder: the nice thing is I don't have to sit down with 500 people because you're right.

Dustin Snyder: That that would take, forever,

Dustin Snyder: and it it wouldn't produce better data.

Dustin Snyder: So I tend to sit down with about one in five employees.

Dustin Snyder: So if it's a 500 person organization, I tend to sit down with about a 100 people depending on how homogeneous the organization is.

Dustin Snyder: And each interview produces about 50 or 60 data points.

Dustin Snyder: And

Dustin Snyder: so then the analysis on those, so the the actual,

Dustin Snyder: formatting the data and the analysis of those,

Dustin Snyder: we do use AI now.

Dustin Snyder: So we have a enterprise account through Claude, through Anthropic,

Dustin Snyder: and and that has significantly sped it up. I mean, that was about two weeks of manual data formatting and crunching, to accomplish the analysis five years ago.

Dustin Snyder: And today,

Dustin Snyder: that the formatting happens in minutes.

Dustin Snyder: The analysis happens

Dustin Snyder: in hours.

Dustin Snyder: So we go from this data set of thousands of data points to, a fully

Dustin Snyder: categorized and very right for root cause analysis data set, in a day.

Sean Weisbrot: Wow. I was interviewing someone recently who puts together

Sean Weisbrot: events in cities between government officials and business leaders that are in order to help them

Sean Weisbrot: figure out together what are the problems plaguing their community that's preventing it from being more successful and and making citizens happier.

Dustin Snyder: That's really cool.

Sean Weisbrot: And he said that he used to have,

Sean Weisbrot: you know, like, interviews of those people on is it'd be like a one day event, like a whole day event.

Sean Weisbrot: And they would, you know, record everything.

Sean Weisbrot: They would interview everyone on top of, like, having them communicate with each other in larger settings, and he would put together all the data.

Sean Weisbrot: And he said that before AI, it would take sixty days to give them a report, and now it could be done in an hour.

Sean Weisbrot: So, basically,

Dustin Snyder: Yeah.

Sean Weisbrot: the day after the event, here's your report.

Sean Weisbrot: Go get to work.

Dustin Snyder: Yeah.

Dustin Snyder: It's it's incredible how much, data can be synthesized and and summarized.

Dustin Snyder: You know, pulling the the deeper insights, I think that's the the nice thing is that,

Dustin Snyder: AI is not quite there yet.

Dustin Snyder: That still does, you know, take some some judgment and experience and expertise.

Dustin Snyder: But,

Dustin Snyder: and and, you know, AI also can't sit down with employees and

Dustin Snyder: use the the techniques that we're using to to develop trust and and get the the level of information that they weren't comfortable sharing with, you know, senior leaders, you know, the day before.

Dustin Snyder: So, it's definitely

Dustin Snyder: revolutionized the analysis piece of what we're doing and, you know, and we invested a lot of money into the the the,

Dustin Snyder: the dashboard that we were using before.

Dustin Snyder: We worked with, a university to

Dustin Snyder: to put that together.

Dustin Snyder: But, you know, having had that for a couple years and then recognizing

Dustin Snyder: that it was it was essentially obsolete already

Dustin Snyder: and just having to make that pivot and say, okay.

Dustin Snyder: This is, this is something that we've gotta reinvest in because we're gonna get left behind if we don't fix this part of our business because, you know, you you should be able to get it to clients quickly.

Sean Weisbrot: Yeah.

Sean Weisbrot: I I love how you talked about the admin dashboard.

Sean Weisbrot: I when I had my last tech company,

Sean Weisbrot: I wanted to put together a dashboard with all the analytics.

Sean Weisbrot: And

Sean Weisbrot: I had to put a list together of all the analytics

Sean Weisbrot: for my team.

Sean Weisbrot: And it took them, like, a month to to put it all together, and then it would take another month to build the dashboard and, you know, the UI and plug everything in together.

Sean Weisbrot: This was six years ago.

Sean Weisbrot: And today, I

Sean Weisbrot: just tell Claude, okay.

Sean Weisbrot: I wanna put an analytics, and it says, okay.

Sean Weisbrot: Which software do you wanna use?

Sean Weisbrot: You know, I recommend Posthog.

Sean Weisbrot: And, you know, I have 10 different APIs that I'm using for, you know, that I'm paying for for tokens for different,

Sean Weisbrot: use cases and application and all this.

Sean Weisbrot: And I said, you know, I really need a dashboard.

Sean Weisbrot: And it's like, okay.

Sean Weisbrot: How do you wanna do the dashboard?

Sean Weisbrot: I said, just make it available inside of my own account.

Sean Weisbrot: Like, I don't want another another login.

Sean Weisbrot: I don't want a whole other repository.

Sean Weisbrot: I just want something simple.

Sean Weisbrot: It's like, okay.

Sean Weisbrot: It says, what do you want in the dashboard?

Sean Weisbrot: I said, I want this, this, this, and this.

Sean Weisbrot: Right?

Sean Weisbrot: I wanna see my analytics.

Sean Weisbrot: I wanna see my

Sean Weisbrot: in twenty minutes, it put together a dashboard that six years ago would have taken six months to put together, and it's fully functional.

Sean Weisbrot: It's pulling all of the APIs from all the things.

Sean Weisbrot: It's showing me trend graphs with number counts of all of the different things, of all the cohort analysis I wanted to put together, of all the life cycle I have you know, I I put together

Sean Weisbrot: a remarketing system and a feature system and a bug request system and a a deeply intelligent cloud chat that,

Sean Weisbrot: talks to the users.

Sean Weisbrot: It knows everything about their Stripe, like, history with us and their account details and their project history details.

Sean Weisbrot: Like, it knows everything, and you could talk to about everything.

Sean Weisbrot: And I put all of this stuff together.

Sean Weisbrot: I did all of this all of these things in, like, three or four hours

Dustin Snyder: Great.

Sean Weisbrot: that in the past would have been months and months and months of development time.

Sean Weisbrot: So,

Dustin Snyder: Yeah.

Sean Weisbrot: dashboards are amazing.

Sean Weisbrot: AI is

Sean Weisbrot: is amazing for helping that.

Sean Weisbrot: I guess that was a a rant, but also just, like, you know, appreciating AI.

Sean Weisbrot: With that in mind, you said something interesting I wanna push on. You said, I don't think the AI has the ability to build the trust with the human to find out the information that that they're telling us. And I

Sean Weisbrot: I think that's wrong.

Sean Weisbrot: Maybe today, but I think very, very soon, that's not gonna be true because AI is very good at making humans feel comfortable, and humans feel like AI isn't judging it because it's not another human.

Sean Weisbrot: So I feel like AI will be capable of doing that if it's not already capable now because I've had conversations with AI about things that I I don't really like to talk about with other people,

Sean Weisbrot: and AI has been extremely helpful for me in making decisions based on that.

Dustin Snyder: Yeah.

Dustin Snyder: Yeah.

Dustin Snyder: I think I think you're you're right that, you know, it's it's moving in that direction.

Dustin Snyder: If it's not there yet, you know, it certainly will be someday.

Dustin Snyder: Where the challenge lies is there is still a tremendous amount of, there's still tremendous amount of

Dustin Snyder: distrust when it comes to tech platforms that a company is deploying and the anonymity, the confidentiality of the interactions that you're having with that,

Dustin Snyder: which I think in in some cases is unfounded and in others is well founded.

Dustin Snyder: And it's impossible for employees to know the difference in which environment that they're in.

Dustin Snyder: There are still a lot of environments where people just are not tech savvy.

Dustin Snyder: We still have, you know,

Dustin Snyder: a sizable portion of the workforce that just cannot interact with, computers and especially AI at the at the level that you would need to to get a good information.

Dustin Snyder: And then also when you're when you're do making it a self-service model and you're having somebody interact with, you know, an iPad or their their workstation or whatever the case might be, the,

Dustin Snyder: you're you're relying on that person to drive the interaction in a lot of ways.

Dustin Snyder: So when you when you come in with a preconceived set of

Dustin Snyder: information that you're interested in getting, you risk missing out on all the all the good stuff, really.

Dustin Snyder: There's this really famous example of of UPS in The United States years ago where they had an employee engagement survey, and they had the best results that they've ever had in the history of the company.

Dustin Snyder: And, like, two or three months later, they had a company wide strike

Dustin Snyder: because they hadn't asked about the things that were most important to the workforce.

Dustin Snyder: And then you also have you also have a lot of industries where people just don't aren't using computers

Dustin Snyder: in the ways that a lot of white collar professionals are.

Dustin Snyder: So, you know, the the energy sector, infrastructure, construction, manufacturing, fabrication, a lot of these industries, 90% of the workforce,

Dustin Snyder: is not really using a computer at that level.

Dustin Snyder: And if they are, it's in a very, basic interface that would be considered,

Dustin Snyder: you know, pretty ancient by, you know, like, white collar standards.

Dustin Snyder: So,

Dustin Snyder: the the HMIs that they're interacting with are are very rudimentary.

Dustin Snyder: So,

Dustin Snyder: and that's that's not their fault.

Dustin Snyder: That's just, like, where a lot of the tech is on that side of things.

Dustin Snyder: But,

Dustin Snyder: it's, so it's I think it's a trust thing as far as not not do I trust,

Dustin Snyder: you know, my personal chat GPT account even though, you know, heck, it might be, you know, uploading all that information to learn from and that might you know, if I run for office in ten years, is that all gonna come out publicly?

Dustin Snyder: You know?

Dustin Snyder: But,

Dustin Snyder: so it's it's not just that.

Dustin Snyder: It's it's trusting how the company is gonna use it and whether it's getting back to you.

Dustin Snyder: And

Dustin Snyder: because when I'm doing this, I'm not saying, you know, hey.

Dustin Snyder: Sean said x, y, and z because that's not relevant.

Dustin Snyder: That might just be Sean's opinion.

Dustin Snyder: Even if he's right, it might not be representative of the, you know, the whole workforce.

Dustin Snyder: What I'm looking for are the themes and patterns that rise to the top because I'm looking at systemic behaviors.

Dustin Snyder: Nobody brings me in because they have one bad Apple employee.

Dustin Snyder: They bring me in because 20% of their company are engaging in a behavior that's impacting their financials.

Dustin Snyder: You're, you're muted.

Sean Weisbrot: Sorry.

Sean Weisbrot: What's the most important thing you've learned from doing this?

Dustin Snyder: Oh, man.

Dustin Snyder: The most important thing?

Dustin Snyder: I think the most important thing is to just

Dustin Snyder: for me, you know, I got into this because I kinda self inflicted a version of this on, on myself before I launched WayForward.

Dustin Snyder: So I I came up as an operator.

Dustin Snyder: I I ran a 600 person manufacturing division as its as its president through a turnaround and an acquisition.

Dustin Snyder: So I've I've watched human systems strain under under real pressure from the inside.

Dustin Snyder: I've also been in the founder seat, not just in WayForward, but I built and sold, a hospitality chain.

Dustin Snyder: So

Dustin Snyder: in developing this methodology, it was I I self inflicted it, and I had to I had to kinda get over myself.

Dustin Snyder: I had to recognize that,

Dustin Snyder: I was not smarter.

Dustin Snyder: I was not making better decisions

Dustin Snyder: than I could have made if I sat down and talked to the

Dustin Snyder: people that were actually doing the thing that the company existed to do. I became a much better

Dustin Snyder: executive.

Dustin Snyder: I was doing better things at the market level.

Dustin Snyder: I was doing better things at the strategic level.

Dustin Snyder: When I

Dustin Snyder: spent started spending the majority of my time speaking to, you know, the guy that's making $25

Dustin Snyder: an hour on the shop floor whose job is hot, heavy, and dirty.

Dustin Snyder: And,

Dustin Snyder: I was able to learn more things from him about my own business than I would have been able to do looking at a spreadsheet sitting down with my CFO in the corner office all day.