Building a Culture of Innovation: A Guide for Leaders

In this episode of UX Leadership by Design, Mark Baldino talks with Dave Seligsohn, founder of A2O Consulting, about creating a culture of innovation and driving business growth. Drawing from his rich background in education and leadership, Dave shares insights into the challenges small businesses face, such as breaking revenue ceilings, optimizing operations, and achieving growth. He highlights the importance of fostering innovation through intentional processes, forming dedicated teams, and leveraging data-driven decision-making. The conversation offers practical strategies for establishing an innovation pipeline, validating ideas, and navigating organizational challenges, making it an invaluable guide for leaders and entrepreneurs.

Key Takeaways

• The Cycle of Innovation – Effective innovation is intentional and embedded into company culture, driven by an innovation team tasked with surfacing, testing, and implementing ideas.
• Breaking Revenue Ceilings – Small businesses often face growth plateaus due to overreliance on founders; collaboration, delegation, and external advisors can help overcome these challenges.
• Prevention Over Cure – Leaders should prioritize continuous innovation to avoid desperation-driven solutions during crises.
• Structured Idea Validation – A systematic approach to market validation, involving customer feedback and financial analysis, reduces risk and ensures alignment with business goals.
• Leadership’s Role in Innovation – Leadership should sponsor and support innovation initiatives, but remain hands-off during idea generation to encourage creativity.
• The Power of Data in Decision-Making – Businesses must identify and focus on the most relevant data points to track progress and ensure operational efficiency.
• Overcoming Fear of Change – Allocating budget and fostering openness to new ideas are critical to embracing innovation as a business growth driver.

Resources & Links

• Connect with Dave Seligsohn on LinkedIn

• Connect with Mark on LinkedIn
• Fuzzy Math - B2B & Enterprise UX Design Consultancy

Transcript

Mark Baldino (00:03.79)
Hello and welcome to UX Leadership by Design. I'm Mark Baldino, your host. I'm also the co-founder of Fuzzy Math. Fuzzy Math is the user experience design consultancy that brings consumer-grade UX to business applications for B2B and enterprise tools. Today, I speak with Dave Seligsohn, the founder of A2O Consulting. And Dave specializes in business optimization and leadership development. And hey, we all need a little bit of optimization and leadership help, right? I know I do.

So honestly, this conversation really, really hits home. Dave's also a mentor with Score, which is an organization that we used really early on at Fuzzy Math for leadership mentorship. And Dave and I discussed some of the challenges that business leaders face in terms of stability and growth and maybe what are some of the sticking areas for many businesses in terms of growth. And this sort of naturally leads us into Dave's real passion. And that's his kind of take on innovation and doing innovation work.

and who needs it, which is a hint everybody does, and how to implement it, and what it means to have a cool kind of culture of innovation. But then Dave takes us step by step through his process of innovation. And it's process we can all grok, we can all get it. If you're a leader, your team, regardless of size, can be innovative. And for my design and product folks, you'll see a ton of overlap between the design thinking process, but with this operational component of product market fit and voice of customer.

And then like, how do you roll out new innovations at an organization and support it? And so again, the conversation was like very personally rewarding for me as I challenged myself about how innovative we are at Fuzzy Math and how innovative we can be. And guess what? We're doing 2025 planning right now. So it's like the perfect time to figure out budget and resourcing for doing innovation projects like this. So I just want to say thank you as always for listening. And I really think you're going to enjoy it.

Mark Baldino (00:01.421)
Dave, welcome to the podcast.

Dave Seligsohn (00:03.534)
Thanks, it's great to be here.

Mark Baldino (00:05.099)
I really appreciate your time today and I'm really excited about the conversation. We're going to get into some topics around innovation and making it work within organizations. So before we get there, would love, you have a super interesting background and path to where you are. And I feel like you're still one these people who's wearing like lots of hats in parallel with one another, which is really, really cool. So give the audience a sense of, yeah, where you've been and what you're up to now.

Dave Seligsohn (00:34.766)
Sure. My career started as a teacher and a principal in the school systems, taught some college classes and had the opportunity to leave and start my own business back in, gosh, don't know, 2008-ish. And so I took the leap and I started my own business and that quickly became helping other companies raise private capital, start and grow businesses, write business plans. And all of that led to what's become my passion kind of helping me to figure out and find my niche, which is

evaluating business and helping them overcome the gaps and issues that they're facing so that they can grow. And so I'm kind of equal parts operations, equal parts business development, and a whole lot of just really helping to make impactful difference for companies. So that's my path. I have served as a global partnership director. I have served as a chief products and strategy officer, as general manager. I have my own consulting company as a CEO. I'm on the board of a nonprofit that helps folks with

disabilities ensure that they have equal access to different locations, entities, stadiums, cities, whatever. So, and I'm also a score mentor, a certified score mentor. So that's a volunteer opportunity where I help entrepreneurs as a mentor, as a business coach for free.

Mark Baldino (01:48.643)
That's awesome. Well, I'm going do a little bit of a plug for Score, not because you asked me to, but because when we founded Fuzzy Math 15 and a half years ago, we met with Score folks before. We had two advisors and my partner, Kate, runs a dietetics and therapy practice and she has a Score mentor that she's used for years. And so it's really invaluable. I just want to thank you for giving your time back to advise folks. I do want to go back to the education.

Dave Seligsohn (02:06.968)
Cool.

Mark Baldino (02:17.197)
And just asking a question and maybe this, I don't if it's advice for people who are in a career path and in an industry and are seeing something that is maybe scratching and it's that's really different. And I don't know, was there like a progressive switch between the two? Did you just say, want to make this? Like, what's your advice to people who are finding themselves going in one direction? They're like, I think there might be something over here I'm interested in.

Dave Seligsohn (02:41.77)
was progressive. in fact, I had an opportunity to, partner with somebody and start doing some coaching, some business coaching while I was a principal. So a couple of nights a week, sometimes on Saturday, I started this little sidecar business. and eventually it grew in the demand was such that I had the opportunity to take the plunge and resign. So two things, if you have a passion, you think you want to do it. There's like, let's go find a way to do it as a sidecar.

Like you can do it while you're doing what you do. And if it shows, if it has something that makes, then let's go think about where's that tipping point where it's time to go turn that into actually a career change. And don't be afraid. I guess, you know, for me, I would rather try something and make a mistake than look back and wonder what if, like, what if I would have? I'd rather do it and fail. And not everybody's wired that way. But if you're wired that way, then I just say taking those steps is really helpful.

Mark Baldino (03:29.775)
for now.

Dave Seligsohn (03:35.244)
And there's no better way to determine if that new career path is meaningful than to sort of test the waters a little bit by doing a little bit of consulting, a little bit of project work, even volunteering to do something without even revenue, just to see if it's a thing and if it resonates and if you're making a difference. And that's kind of how I started.

Mark Baldino (03:51.139)
That's awesome. Well, congrats on the career. Thus far, when you're working with, if we can say on the small business topic a little bit, like, mean, listen, I was a design practitioner and then started a design consultancy, right? Very typical founder led business. I keep hitting lots of ceilings because I don't have experience. Business development is something I spent a lot of my time on 15 years into this profession and I spent zero of it when I started.

operations, I kind of got a little bit of just my makeup and personality. You're doing a lot for these organizations. Where are like common sticking points? it, do people need like help across all of them? Or are you finding like in these one or two areas is where people need the most help?

Dave Seligsohn (04:34.476)
Yeah, it really is. It depends on the kind of company, the kind of industry and the kind of leader. All those kind of different things kind of intersect. But I think, you know, there's a life cycle of a bootstrap company. And it's typically as I go find people that need my services, I contract with them, and then I do that work. While I'm doing that work, I'm not selling anymore. So when that work ends, I have no pipeline, and then I'm in a panic. And then I have to double down and I go try to sell some more.

and you're in this never-ending cycle and it's really hard to break through some of those ceilings, those revenue ceilings. It's hard to get above a couple hundred thousand. It's really hard to get above a million. It's super hard to get above four to five million and then 10 millions that next one. And there's always another ceiling until you get super huge. And the reason is because of the dependency on the owner to take on some of those tasks instead of either delegating or partnering with others or bringing somebody in that can help.

There are very few people that have all the skills needed in order to grow, run, manage, support, deliver an effective business, take care of the finances, make sure cashflow is okay, and think as a visionary. And so you need a team around you. And if you're a small business, sometimes that team has to come from advisors and mentors and outside people and there's your score again, but there's a lot of opportunity to partner. But I think that's really what it is, either...

Mark Baldino (05:44.399)
Yeah.

Dave Seligsohn (05:57.858)
We're struggling with our messaging and we're not growing the way we thought we can't close business or there's some operational inefficiency or there's something that's happening internally with our team and the way that we deliver that's not meeting our needs and we're not able to keep clients long term.

Mark Baldino (06:05.103)
Okay.

Mark Baldino (06:13.269)
Are you helping people, and maybe this is a difference between what you're doing for score versus kind of your own consultancy work. Are you doing for them or are you helping them like identify, you have a problem here, go find an advisor. You need outside helpers, like maybe both.

Dave Seligsohn (06:29.548)
Yeah, score has a methodology that is really about asking questions and not doing, it's helping to guide. It's giving experience. in, my consulting, I, there are a lot of consulting groups out there, not just myself, there's, there's a thousand of them for every square mile. think they're everywhere. but, a lot of people will evaluate your business and they give you recommendations and then you're on your own to go execute those. for me, my passion is evaluating the business.

Mark Baldino (06:44.993)
Yeah.

Dave Seligsohn (06:58.326)
making those recommendations to address the gaps that we uncover and then being a part of the solution. So I want to step into that business to help execute that solution, turn things around. And once you're confident in that, then hand that off, train or enable or work with somebody to hand that off so that they can run it long-term because I don't want to manage it long-term. But to be able to turn it around and execute that for me is super important. Long gone are the days where consultants would come in, evaluate a business and hand you like an 80 page report and you have to pay them tens of thousands of dollars.

I'm not all about that.

Mark Baldino (07:29.475)
Yeah, there's a lot of consultancies that have struggled very recently in the industry because that was kind of their model. And I think people need a little bit more vertical, I don't know, any more integration into actually helping solve for those problems. So that's awesome. You mentioned kind of growth and I know you're kind of big on helping organizations harness, embrace, utilize innovation. I think sometimes

And again, maybe I'm speaking out of sort of shock of the past few years where budgets have been a little bit more restricted. Maybe overspend during the pandemic has led to people cutting back post pandemic. And innovation is something that I think gets caught a lot, whether it's not a team or people, you know, maybe didn't have an organization, but the leadership talks about innovation a little bit less or.

We're going to do it, but we're not going to call innovation because that seems like a waste of time and energy. So it's kind of been, I don't, I shouldn't hear it a lot as much. And that's a shame because I firmly believe in like you in the power of innovation, but maybe you could kind of frame, this is putting two on the, two on the spot, but you're doing a lot of this work. Like, does that resonate? Are you seeing that with your clients or people shying away from innovation? Is it, does it, are people, is it the people have the wrong connotation of what it means to innovate?

Dave Seligsohn (08:52.544)
Yeah, I think so. I think that a lot of people assume that innovation is equatable with inspiration. Like, you're walking down the street and pop, there goes this amazing idea and now I'm going to go work through that. And I believe and I've seen and I've executed over time that there is an intentional process that you can embed within a company to create a culture of innovation where ideas are constantly being cycled through, surface tested.

Mark Baldino (09:01.411)
Mmm.

Dave Seligsohn (09:21.154)
validated and then the few that really seem to be to make to seem like they have possibility and those are those are kind of making their way down the funnel and there things that you test in and and test and operate on much more deeply and so I mean companies are at the speed of business today is ridiculous and so what you're doing today is not the thing that people need next year maybe not even in six months and so we've constantly got to be innovating not only on new products and services

but optimizing the ones we have and even in our internal process, you how do I leverage AI to be more efficient and reduce costs so that I can deliver the thing I deliver with lower cost and higher profit? I mean, that can turn out to be an innovation. So I think it's the creating that culture of innovation where the entire business sort of surfaces up those and that cycle is just embedded is super beneficial because even if it just surfaces one new thing a year, think about what that does to your sales team.

where every year they're getting their hands on one or two things that they can re-energize sales, that they can expand existing accounts. So it makes all the difference.

Mark Baldino (10:23.149)
Yeah, fair enough. If innovation isn't inspiration, you mentioned kind of cycles of change in a culture of innovation. How do you personally define innovation or how do you, I know there's a process which I'd love to get into in a minute, but how do you, what is innovation?

Dave Seligsohn (10:42.434)
To me, it's a culture, it's got multiple facets. There's a culture where new ideas are welcome. It's a company where time is allocated for finding and discussing new ideas. investment of time and money is made when certain criteria is met and expectations are strong that that idea can be something valuable. So it's all of those things put together.

and, and it's just sort of lived out within a business, but it doesn't start that way. Like any good practice that we have in our personal lives, it becomes habit and it becomes ingrained. But at first it's a really new thing and it has to be very intentional. know, innovation is, think Wayne Gretzky said it best. I don't pass the puck to the player. I pass the puck where the player's going to be. We all want to find the next thing. That's where the market's going, where our customers are going to be looking next. And if you can even just hit on some of those.

can transform the way your business grows and get you through those ceilings that we talked about earlier.

Mark Baldino (11:38.831)
Yeah, right on. Does every company, sometimes I like to ask guests when they're talking about a process or change, like what is the acute pain that this organization might be facing that's a trigger that they need to change, they need to do A, B, and C, right? For innovation, are there, is there like acute pain people are facing or do you actually have a, do you just believe everyone needs to be innovat- like you say culture, so I'm thinking like

It's not always all the time you're in this rapid like back and forth, like, nah, I'm not asking this question very well. Are there signs within an organization that they need to have a culture of innovation and is it a baseline that every organization does?

Dave Seligsohn (12:22.296)
So two things in response to that. It's a good question. One is I believe that that should be a constant underpinning practice of every company, whether they have a need or not, that they're continually seeking out and surfacing and testing new innovations. And that's what I mean by that culture is there's the creation of it. We can talk about it more later, but there's a culture, there's an innovation team. Not everybody's on it, but those people are tasked with.

having to surface and test new ideas to see if they will make, if they make sense. Secondly, typically by the time a company realizes they need to innovate, it's often because there's a significant pain and it's kind of too late. Like they're doing it out of desperation. Not a great place to have to innovate when you're doing it out of desperation. Your customers are leaving, your revenue down, your profits down, you've had some turnover, and now you need to innovate to stay alive. That's hard to force innovation. And I think that's really the key is that

trying to force innovation. Sometimes you can hit on something, but it's not something that you can be confident in. It's not a consistent, reliable, happenstance. It's just like, really need something now. So bring something like it's not necessarily going to happen, but if you're continually working on and having at least some of your team working on keeping an eye towards what could be next, then you avoid having to be in that desperate place when you find it. And now that's acceleration. So instead of being negative and trying to get your head above water,

Now you're on your skis and you're accelerating instead. And so I think that's really the difference. Too many companies wait until they hit that struggle, that desperation point before they think about innovating.

Mark Baldino (13:54.543)
you

Mark Baldino (14:00.463)
Yeah, but there's like a selection bias. Like I run a UX consultancy. So generally the people that reach out to me need more usable products, more efficient products, the workflow is broken. They may be facing a threat from competitive existential or not. So they reach out to Fuzzy Math and we help them. do people come to you? People in a position of strength, like would the leadership think, I really need to be more innovative as a group? Maybe great leaders do. And that's the-

that may be a point here, but it's almost like I feel like people would be coming to you when they're starting to the ground sort of moving underneath them. They're a little bit nervous and like we need we need some change within this organization. So it's almost like the people who get it maybe are already there and don't need you or people who are just starting to feel like they need to kind of reach out to you. But I always feel like they're selection bias when people reach out to me as a consultant that they need my services. And so I'm wondering if you kind of feel the same way. Am I describing something that makes sense?

Dave Seligsohn (14:58.05)
Yeah, I mean, certainly more people will reach out when they feel pain, when they feel that need, but really good leaders will understand that if they create a constant cycle of innovation, it'll avoid the pain in the first place. So it's preemptive, preventative maintenance, so to speak, in terms of, you can go and take, we get vaccines so that I don't ever get that illness. I don't wait until I get that illness, but when I do, gosh, you better believe I'm going to the doctor and I'm getting everything I can to get rid of it.

I'd rather have it in advance so that I never get that way in the first place. And I think it's the same kind of process with businesses and leaders who are true visionaries, leaders who are constantly wanting to push the envelope, who are in a growth cycle. How are you going to grow except through innovating and continuing to stay afloat? Because otherwise, no matter how long your runway is, at some point it's going to run out if you don't have something new to offer or a new way to offer it.

Mark Baldino (15:49.148)
Yeah, fair enough. I couldn't agree more. And honestly speaking, as a business owner, I think the same thing. mean, fear is a great motivator, right? But it's also, and when business is shaky, it's like, okay, yeah, there's this stability we have to find, but we don't change the underlying mechanics of how we operate as a business. We're going to find ourselves in this cycle in the future. So let's break down the integration process, right? think people...

In my line of work, talk a lot about, you know, like the design thinking methodology. Some people think innovation, as I said, is kind of a, it's kind of a term they don't want to use because it sounds like it's hand wavy. But I know you have kind of a very robust process you bring your clients through and that you advocate for. And I'd love to have you break it down for the audience.

Dave Seligsohn (16:34.754)
Yeah. So, so for me, the innovation process is predicated on the creation of an innovation team. and if you have a decent sized company, that innovation team should be a, a stakeholder from each part of the business and ones who, know, you think personality wise or, or have a bent towards ingenuity and innovation. and they have very specific tasks. If you're a solopreneur, if you don't have a large team, you might find other solopreneurs and create an innovation team and meet once a month.

on yourselves across multiple businesses and try to do that. So it doesn't necessarily have to be a large company that can have an innovation team. It could be two or three people and it could be 15, 14, 15, 16 people. I don't think it should really be any larger, but it could be. And that innovation team, their job, first of all, is to listen. To listen to the ideas that their teams have, to listen to the ideas that their customer has, to...

pay attention to commercials and news and whatever's going on. And every time they happen to hear something to jot it down, to bring it back to the team when you meet on your monthly meeting. And so the first thing is we're creating this pipeline, if you will, the sales pipeline, if you will, of new ideas. And they're all at the top of the funnel. So we're not doing anything with any of them except we're noting them. And those ideas are, again, something brand new that we've never done before, but that still fits in with our mission and the purpose of our company.

They are optimizing or looking at something that we're doing already in a different way. They can be internal facing. They can be a new partnership that's going to expand something. So there's a lot of ways that that can go. And tracking those ideas in some type of document tracking form, spreadsheet, smart sheet, whatever, is really important into those categories. And so that team, when they surface, then the next thing that they do is they decide, hey, I really feel a passion. Each member of that team feels a passion about one or more of those.

and they commit over the next month that they're going to go spend, I limit it in most of the companies to two to four hours a month. That's it, per person. And so if two or three people want to collaborate and they want to investigate an innovation because they like the idea, combine their two to four hours each and maybe they get, you if there's three people that are doing it, you got, you know, six to 12 hours of work over the course of the month. And they're going to start doing some research. They're going to start seeing what it would cost. They're going to talk to sales and see what the opportunity might be.

Dave Seligsohn (18:56.684)
And you teach them how to create a really high level business case. And I call it innovation testing. so your innovation team surfaces ideas. They choose the ones that they're passionate about and they test them to see if it makes. And by make, mean, if it cost you 10 bucks, I can't make 10 bucks from it. I want to make a hundred bucks or 120 bucks. Right. So, so does it seem like the investment to get this thing off the ground is worth the return in the potential customers? So you would teach and enable them how to build this business case up.

Mark Baldino (19:10.927)
you

Dave Seligsohn (19:26.772)
Once they build that business case up and it passes muster, it comes down the funnel a little bit. Now then you take the best ones and you think about, okay, how do we dive deeper into this? These two really came, these two came down the funnel. These are both, they look like they're a good test. Now I as the leader of that innovation team or other people who are sponsors and executives jump in and they put their muscle behind it. And you start thinking about how we can understand what it's really going to take, what the true costs are, what the market opportunity is. You do voice of the customer.

And so you roll this out and some of your key customers and advisory boards, can say, hey, if we did this, would this be a value to you? What would your price point be? How much would you pay for it? What are some use cases that you think? Would you consider purchasing that if we rolled this out? And so you can kind of test the waters. Anyway, the innovation team is a driver behind this entire process of surfacing ideas, doing the initial testing, and then helping to support the deep dive investigation and the rollout.

Mark Baldino (20:08.079)
you

Try it.

Dave Seligsohn (20:25.528)
through voice of the customer and different pilot programs.

Mark Baldino (20:28.641)
That's awesome. And thank you for breaking it down very, very clearly. Does this always runs? Are we always adding to the hopper and then moving stuff down and adding to the hopper and then moving stuff down through the case? Okay.

Dave Seligsohn (20:39.906)
You got it always. And I don't get rid of the old things. just color code them like, know, hey, that one's grayed out because maybe two years from now, maybe it wasn't the thing today because the market isn't quite ready, but two years from now it is. So, you we got these running lists of all the ideas. I mean, think about just the value of that, of that library alone, of all these ideas that are surfaced. And then the ones that we test, you you have active ones that are being tested. You got ones that have said no to, and you got ones that are moving on and they're moving forward in the process. But yes.

This constant cycle is underpinning operations of your business continually.

Mark Baldino (21:14.713)
What is leadership's role during this process? After, are they just staying out? Are they actively involved? How do you see when is the best time for leadership to be involved?

Dave Seligsohn (21:28.738)
Yeah, I mean, I think you need a key leader or to bring somebody in who has a direct line to the leadership team, who's running and sponsoring this entire innovation team. You need somebody who's going to teach and train and hold them accountable for their stuff. And that needs to be some type of leadership role in there. But other than that, the leaders are all responsible for other things. And the time when you need to engage them is when you think you finally have one.

on a quarterly basis or twice a year, you need to have like a once leadership team meeting where you get to present a two or three ideas that you think you're gonna make, have them listen, have them ask questions, go back to the team, eventually have them vote. And then once we decide which ones we wanna go to market with, now there's this, we got the idea, now we're ready to go to market. That whole process is gonna take every member of the leadership team. You're gonna need sales, you're gonna need marketing, you're gonna need operations, you're gonna need to build stuff out, you're gonna need every piece of the business.

Mark Baldino (22:21.199)
you

Dave Seligsohn (22:21.846)
or drive through getting the thing ready to go to market. really there's not a whole lot of involvement outside of that initial sponsorship and their awareness and support of it. But once things come down the funnel and there's decisions to be made, we have to have that regular cadence where they're approving and asking questions.

Mark Baldino (22:38.849)
What are some common like challenges or pitfalls or ruts that people get in once they start this process?

Dave Seligsohn (22:45.32)
Worried about allocating time for it, which is why I limit it to two to four hours a month. I I think that's typical, but allocating time. Bringing in the right resource to lead the effort. And you may not have the right resource internally. So if I want to build this, I bring in someone like me? Do I bring in somebody else who can come in and embed and enable and train and organize this leadership team and then this, I'm sorry, innovation team, and then hand it off to somebody who can manage it long-term? That's hard. Having that innovation team be accountable.

Like for me, I'm okay. Like if you got so focused on client work and you didn't get to do your two to four hours this month, okay, do it next month. Like, like there's not an urgent driver to have a new innovation every single month. but at the same time, you gotta hold them to account to make sure that they're not spending 30 hours on this and not doing the work. And also that they are still engaged in spending work at all. budgeting is a big deal. and so I believe that at the time when you're setting your annual budget, that there should be a line item for innovation investment.

You may not use it all, but it should be set aside for that instead of robbing Peter to pay Paul. So like, Hey, we want to do this new idea. didn't budget for it. So how can we squeeze money out of other places and move it over here? That's it. That's an obstacle. And I would say that the biggest one that I've seen in my experience is taking a risk and pulling the trigger and stepping out onto the idea once it's ready to move forward, because it's no small thing to take a new product or service to invest in developing and building it out and rolling it out. And, you know,

Mark Baldino (23:52.771)
Yeah.

Mark Baldino (24:03.854)
Hmm.

Dave Seligsohn (24:14.434)
taking the chance that it's not gonna sell and that you've invested and failed. And you will sometimes, which is why it's good to have a conveyor belt. All your eggs weren't in that basket, there's other ones behind it, but being able to pull the trigger and actually go to market with something is really critical.

Mark Baldino (24:15.567)
you

Mark Baldino (24:26.479)
.

Yeah, fair enough. I took a sales course. I'm sort of still in it for a number of years. And we talk about like time, money, and change. And people always think that time and money are kind of the resistance. But actually, it's change. And if I'm trying to pitch somebody as an organization or as a leader and somebody's coming to me in my organization, the change is really the hardest one because you have to have a mindset of being open to ideas, as you said. Like this is part of the culture of innovation is people.

feeling comfortable in the space to generate new ideas. And then actually, you know, leadership being willing to make those changes and enact them, because it's scary. It's one thing to give somebody four hours a month to generate some ideas. It's another to say, we're going to operationalize this. We're going to go sell this. That's, you know, that has, as you said, there should be, but budget's a great one. Like as somebody who runs a business now and has always been very resistant to budgets, I think you're exactly right. We need to be able to carve out the time to actually spend to make this thing successful.

But that change is a hard thing for people to do, I think, in a lot of organizations.

Dave Seligsohn (25:31.63)
And I think there's typically leaders and most folks fall into one or two categories. They're either this daredevil type that goes and doesn't want to think, I don't need to, I'm going and I'm going to stumble all the time, but I'm just going. And then you have others that I'm not going to go anywhere until I understand all the details. And so this process takes care of both because we have that initial testing that slows us down, that makes us kind of validate things. But we also have a critical and a recurring point where we have to make a decision to move forward.

And so I think we have to support both sides of leadership and ownership in being able to help them feel comfortable whichever side they fall on.

Mark Baldino (26:07.779)
Yeah, fair enough. I'm the latter. Regretfully, I'm not a daredevil type, it's...

Dave Seligsohn (26:12.686)
I'm the former man. the former. I had to put some stuff in place to slow me down. I was told that if there's nothing broken, I might break something just so I have something to do. That's kind of my, yeah.

Mark Baldino (26:23.203)
Well, good on you. mean, think, you know, businesses maybe need a balance, but if I could ask a very selfish question, which is I'm just picturing running this at FuzzyMath. We're going through our yearly planning. We use EOS traction in terms of how we manage the business. And so we're doing our Q4 year review or planning for next year. And I'm like, this is a really interesting idea. We have internal initiatives and they're kind of spread out. This would be a nice way to structure some internal work around, can people help us innovate?

Dave Seligsohn (26:39.374)
Mm-hmm.

Mark Baldino (26:52.879)
how we do work, what we sell. And then I was following the process and then you got down to like go to market, market validation, customer fit. And I got like, I got, you know, I got really nervous because I'm like, how do I get that right in order to go to the next step to say, yeah, I'm going to actually, I'm gonna go ahead and allocate time, energy and operationalize this, make this a real thing. how do I do that step of market validation? I'm a small,

you know, 16 person firm, I think we can pull it off, but it's like, it scares me because I don't want to make too big of an investment in something and then have it not work. But I love the, I like the idea of following the funnel process.

Dave Seligsohn (27:31.598)
So a few things. I'm very familiar with the US. And when I've worked with the US companies, they actually made quarterly rocks that were annual rocks that were one to two new innovations per year kind of deal. And quarterly rocks were tied to either the surfacing of ideas, the go-no-go for ideas, that kind of stuff. So we embedded it in that process. Secondly, around your other question about, well, I just forgot what your other question was.

Mark Baldino (27:42.511)
Love it. Love it.

Mark Baldino (27:58.755)
my question was doing the product market fit step. It seems like a real, it seems like a challenge and how do I feel comfortable during that stage? No, you're good.

Dave Seligsohn (28:01.298)
I'll write the product. Yeah. Yeah. Thanks. Sorry about that. So, the product market fit. The best thing that I can say is once you hit a go, there's got to be some internal work that's done. Your investment is minimal, but you're going to build it out. You're going to build out framework. You're going to do a, get, get a test of it. Integrated technology. You're going to.

Create some process and templates. Like there's just our work and our time and you're going to go invest to kind of build out what this looks like. You're going to make it look pretty. You're going to create a presentation. You're going to give some examples, some use cases of what this looks like when it's rolling out. Then you go find yourself, you go invite people into an event. And these people are a combination of your current customers, potential customers, past customers, other people in the industry that you know. And then,

other types of executives and or leaders that you just trust their opinion and you think will give you some good feedback. And you invite them into this virtual meeting and you have them all up there and you present your idea. You give them the breakout time to kind of talk about the value of it and what holes they can put you in it. You ask them very specific questions and at the end you give them time to fill out a survey and that survey asks them things like is this something that you think would add value to your company and then what are some examples of how you think it might.

Would you pay this price point? you think, or here's the price point we're thinking. Do you think that that's reasonable, too high, too low, whatever? So you ask them for feedback. And so up till now, what I've spent investment in is building out the model and internally looking at what this could look like. But I haven't fully invested in a complete full-on go-to-market. And you let the people know this process, your feedback is going to be integral to our go-no-go decision about whether we're going to fully bring this to market or not.

So there's some sidecar impacts that this has, which is it brings your customers aligned. It lets them know that you're listening to their feedback and that if you go, it's because they said it. And if you don't go, it's because they didn't really see a value in it. You're not ignoring their voice. And so that voice to the customer piece kind of, doesn't, it doesn't solve it, but it helps create a little bit more confidence that there's a market for this thing.

Mark Baldino (30:05.411)
Yeah.

Mark Baldino (30:08.815)
you

Mark Baldino (30:14.575)
Yeah, right on. Thank you for laying that out in very, very specifics. I'm not going to say it still doesn't scare me as a business owner, but it does make me feel like that's something we could pull off. Advisors, friendly clients, maybe some net new kind of clients that we've talked to, but aren't in the fold right now and get a sense of it. And the truth is I preach this process with my clients all the time, which is talk to your customers, talk to your customers, talk to your customers, right? Get some ideas in front of them, prototype.

Like I said, the design thinking process mirrors this a little bit. so if I want to use a, I don't know if people still use this in the software development world, but eating your own dog food, I'm pitching this process. I should be utilizing it in my business as well. So I'm really, really excited about it. I know you also kind of have an interest in data-driven decision-making for organizations. And I'm curious how...

a line that is with innovation, is it a core component of it or do you see this as like two pillars that successful organizations have there, have a culture of innovation and maybe culture being data driven under science.

Dave Seligsohn (31:21.422)
So there are two pillars, but they definitely are integrated with one another. And I'm hoping that you listeners, whatever, have heard already the way data plays a part in innovation, because we talked about collecting all those ideas. We talked about validating and creating that high level business case and teaching and enabling your team.

to be able to do some of that high level testing and whatnot. And then collecting information through the voice of the customer and looking at your investment versus the potential sales and marketing opportunities. And then if you choose to go to market with this, if we're gonna build it out and we're gonna go sell it we're gonna build it, we need to track to the nth degree so that I know, is it doing what we thought it was gonna do? Did it do what we thought it was gonna do when we designed this thing and when we kind of projected out what we thought was gonna happen?

And if it is doing that, great. If it's exceeding that, awesome. But if it's falling short, how do we make adjustments very quickly? And how do we know that the adjustments is having the impact maybe on messaging or whatever it is, the channels that you're reaching out with, maybe you need to adjust those channels. Maybe you need different kinds of partnerships. Maybe you need to, I don't know, maybe you a strong selling point, a price point, and you have to change your price point. So I think data is very integrated. When it comes to data overall in a business,

I think most companies probably in the past have struggled with not collecting data. Now for a lot of larger companies, they collect too much data. And so, so for me, it's like, have, you know, 10,000 points of data on at any given time or on anything. But if I'm trying to do X, I might only need seven of those 10,000 to help me understand and track X, which seven of 10,000. how do I figure that out?

Mark Baldino (32:42.671)
Hmm.

Mark Baldino (32:46.307)
too much, we've got too much, yeah.

you

Dave Seligsohn (33:04.566)
And so I've also developed a process that helps companies kind of figure out what's the most important thing to focus on and how do we drill down into the key questions that they ask themselves about that, about that priority and then what data supports each of those questions. And it's that data that we have to look at capturing and communicating out throughout the business.

Mark Baldino (33:24.867)
Yeah, fantastic. do. we went, the pendulum swung from not enough information to way too much in sorting through that. And I think, I think it is, it's incumbent upon leadership to, and EOS actually helps this for me at least is like, what are the key metrics I need to be monitoring for my yearly goals? What do I need to be monitoring on a quarterly basis? And then what are my, what we call kind of a scorecard on a weekly basis to really sort of figure out the business. So.

It's a challenge. It's not an easy thing and I think it's important to note that the more data doesn't mean you're going to make better decisions. It's kind of the right data, maybe the right time.

Dave Seligsohn (34:03.692)
Yeah. And I think, you know, in the data evaluation process, it's collecting information and data so that you accurately understand your current state. Because often we don't even understand our current state accurately. So the point that we're starting from isn't solid footing because we don't really understand exactly what's happening with our sales, our operations, our marketing, our profitability, our whatever, fill in the blanks of whatever those things are, our customer impact and their revenue, whatever.

And so once I understand clearly where I am, then I can start defining that future better state. And in that future better state, there's going to be data that's going to be inherent in understanding how we're moving from where we are to where that future state is. And we have to track those things. At the end of the day, we have to ask ourselves, here's my business right now. And if I do fill in the blank, if I do X, so what? What's different about my business with that than there is today?

And if we can't answer that question and we can't track whether that question is being answered effectively within our business, but we're still embarking on change, we're already setting ourselves up for failure.

Mark Baldino (35:09.175)
for failure. I like it. like it. Dave, I think that's a great place to sort of wrap up. And I know we covered a lot in in a half an hour or so and I really appreciate your time. You provide these services to clients. So I'd love to bring you some business if anybody listened to this and they think, you know, they could use help either being more data driven as we talked about towards the end here, or helping

sort of establishing a culture of innovation in organization. I hope they reach out. But more importantly, where can they find you, Dave, if want to reach out?

Dave Seligsohn (35:45.838)
Yeah, I appreciate you making the offer. And I also kind of chuckled when you said, anybody's listening. So maybe it's just me and you. And that wouldn't surprise me where people are.

Mark Baldino (35:51.407)
If anyone who's listening is, there was a second half, but maybe I didn't emphasize that enough.

Dave Seligsohn (36:02.03)
You know, for me, honestly, and this is sincere offer, I always enjoy having the conversation. And if somebody wants to talk through these things that cost anything, you know, just to have that conversation, to talk through possibilities, if that leads to work, that's great. If I can give you some insight and something that you can execute on, that's okay with me too. If you just want to talk about beard care, I'm happy to help talk about how to grow a nice healthy beard. I get a lot of compliments. But honestly, the easiest thing is LinkedIn. I'm on LinkedIn.

Dave Seligman on LinkedIn. I guess you can see my name at the bottom here underneath my head and, and or Dave at a two consulting.com pretty simple. A two letter a number two Lero. That's my methodology. It's called an assets to objective inventory taught to me by the guy that helped me to leave being a principal and start my own business. And it's the first step in my process is mapping your assets to your objectives, which we kind of talked about a little bit.

but adoconsulting.com. So that's easy. Or I guess you could reach out to Mark and he can put you in touch with me too.

Mark Baldino (37:05.143)
Either is fine. This is how we met. appreciate, I did some cold outreach on LinkedIn. I set a goal this year of having 365 meaningful conversations in the industry. And some of that was outreach around the podcast and we had a pre-call conversation. I appreciated that. I appreciate the time and energy you put into the call today. I'm confident that people are listening and I'm very, very hopeful that we can make some connections.

We'll definitely post your contact information when we send this out via the socials and on LinkedIn and hopefully make some introductions. But again, thank you for your time. Thank you for your energy today and for the advice. Much appreciated.

Dave Seligsohn (37:41.558)
My pleasure. Thanks for having me, Mark.

Mark Baldino (37:43.459)
You bet. Thanks, Dave.