April 29, 2025 • 48 mins
Collin Graves shares his journey from Air Force mechanic working on B-1 bombers to founding successful cloud computing and data analytics companies. He discovered his entrepreneurial path by identifying specific pain points for construction companies, creating cloud-based file-sharing solutions, and eventually building North Labs, where his team develops data analytics systems that transform businesses.
• Built his first tech company while still in the military, focusing on cloud storage solutions for construction companies
• Learned cloud computing through self-teaching, becoming one of the first 10 fully certified AWS professionals worldwide
• Sold his first company in 2014, which led to a two-year non-compete agreement
• Founded North Labs in 2016, focusing on data analytics as a profit center rather than just cloud migration
• Helped a $7 billion manufacturing company reduce their scrap rate with a data solution that saved them $40 million in just one year
• Emphasizes that most companies already have the data they need but don't know how to leverage it
• Creates "command centers" that unify data across different systems to provide actionable business intelligence
• Recommends the book "Simplify" by Robert Koch and Greg Lockwood for business owners
• Currently races in two series including Radicals and as a reserve driver in the Lamborghini series
Connect with Collin Graves on LinkedIn or visit NorthLabs.com to learn more about how data analytics can transform your business.
From the Zoo to Wild is a book for entrepreneurs passionate about home services, looking to move away from corporate jobs. Chris Lalomia, a former executive, shares his path, discoveries, and tools to succeed as a small business owner in home improvement retail. The book provides the mindset, habits, leadership style, and customer-oriented processes necessary to succeed as a small business owner in home services.
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
could charge a few hundred grand a pop, and when
(00:02):
you're in your early 20s that'snot a bad gig with a few
employees.
So I sold that in 2020.
Speaker 2 (00:10):
What would you have done, Chris, in your 20s with
200 grand a pop?
I'm not sure, Alan.
Speaker 3 (00:17):
Welcome to the Small Business Safari where I help
guide you to avoid those traps,pitfalls and dangers that lurk
when navigating the wild worldof small business ownership.
I'll share those gold nuggetsof information and invite guests
to help accelerate your ascentto that mountaintop of success.
It's a jungle out there and Iwant to help you traverse
through the levels of owningyour own business that can get
you bogged down and distract youfrom hitting your own personal
(00:38):
and professional goals.
So strap in Adventure Team andlet's take a ride through the
safari and get you to themountain top.
Alan, we've got to rocksomething today.
We've got to get rolling.
We've got to get moving.
Man, I love that music.
Every time it gets me jacked up.
(01:00):
But before we get going thatfar, big Daddy had a big weekend
.
Speaker 2 (01:04):
Again I did.
Gee, what a surprise.
Speaker 3 (01:06):
Yeah.
So guess what I got?
To go out there and hang outwith my national nary people.
Speaker 2 (01:11):
By the way, listeners , you want to know how often I
come in and I see Chris and he'slike I've had a big week.
I'm kind of recovering rightnow.
I'm like that's every week.
Speaker 3 (01:21):
That's how the green room goes, like that until Alan
says cheers bro.
Speaker 2 (01:25):
Yeah, give him the little hair of the dog that bit
him.
Speaker 3 (01:27):
And I get going again and daddy's back up ready to
rock and roll.
Let me tell you about my week,though, man.
I went out to Austin, texas.
I met the great people ofNational Nary, the National
Association of the RemodelingIndustry.
I hate saying it, but it's Nary.
I'm on the national board doingthe committee work and I'm
actually the president here inAtlanta, and it was so cool to
(01:49):
see the artistry that thesepeople can perform in Austin,
texas, and Silicon Valley andPennsylvania and San Francisco
and New York City and Atlanta.
Of course, in Atlanta we wonsix awards.
I didn't win one of them, but Iwent up there and accepted one,
so of course I did, why not?
Speaker 2 (02:10):
So people put in the projects that they did, they put
in the projects they did, andthey put them up for national
awards.
Is there like an example youcan give us of something?
Oh, man.
Speaker 3 (02:19):
No, it's hard for me to explain it all.
I would tell you guys, go checkout uh, go check out naryorg,
and you can see some of thenational winners.
Some of these projects wereabsolutely stunning.
I mean a million and a halfdollar deal down to a fifty
thousand dollar deal and youstill sit there with your jaw
dropping going.
I can't believe theytransformed that space to make
it look that cool.
So being in the remodelingindustry and seeing what people
(02:41):
can do it definitely, definitelygets you going like, hey, I'm
with good people, so I had agreat time doing that.
But then Daddy had to get backto what he does best.
Speaker 2 (02:53):
Fast boats, loose women, booze gambling golf there
we go.
Speaker 3 (03:00):
Yeah, you got everything with the boat and we
put the boat away this weekend.
So I went to Lake Oconee, whichis Masters adjacent.
We had the Masters tournamentto document where we were, and
Rory McIlroy just got done,winning his career Grand Slam,
Colin you love that Best finalround ever.
Colin Graves has given us a.
He's got it.
We're going to introduce him injust a minute.
So we went out there and I flewfrom Austin, texas, at 530 in
(03:24):
the morning, got in the airplane, got back to Atlanta, drove out
to Oconee.
I said I went out there.
I changed my clothes, got outthere, boom, stretch, hit the
ball, bam.
I was teeing off at 11.
Speaker 2 (03:36):
Isn't it funny?
There's a lot of people here inGeorgia that do that.
It's like we're playing golfreal close to the masters, while
the masters is going on and you, you feel like you're part of
it.
Speaker 3 (03:42):
I call it the Masters adjacent tournament.
I mean I was among the GeorgiaPines.
We played through the same win.
Those guys played through onThursday.
Speaker 2 (03:50):
We played through the same.
Speaker 3 (03:50):
Yeah, you were an hour away, right, just an hour
away.
Yeah, because the deal is twoof us go to the Masters and four
of us play golf and check itout.
And so this year none of uswent to the Masters, because
everybody just wanted to playgolf, because we've been there.
Speaker 2 (04:03):
But again, when you see it on TV, it doesn't you
realize how much that hurts somepeople who are listening to
this you know, guys, if thathurts you, it should, because
I'm telling you, we are sospoiled, because I'm telling you
that is the closest place toheaven on earth I've ever been
in my life, other than Kiowa.
That was probably for me keela,anybody can get on to or at
least.
Speaker 3 (04:23):
But the masters, yeah , when you go in that place.
The first time I went on there,my buddy uh took me in there
and this is an experienced thing.
Before we get into talking tocolin, my buddy says let's go.
And I said, all right, great,we're gonna go.
And I had a number of chancesto go beforehand and I missed.
So we go in and we park atsomebody's front yard, which you
don't.
We came in at the bottom, where16 green is, and I'm thinking to
(04:47):
myself, oh my God, this placeis perfect In my head.
I'm like I wonder if theyactually whip the grass to make
it stand on attention, like ifthey're in the military.
And I was like, and I look overand I see these guys whip these
bamboo whips across the grassand knocked down the grass
clumps.
I'd never seen that my life.
And I'm like, oh my god, theydo.
(05:07):
Oh my god, oh my god.
And and I stopped and, uh, mybuddy had to stop and come back
and get me.
He goes chris, are you ready?
And he had to grab my hand,like like a little kid's, like
it's okay, you can come in.
Yeah, that's how hallowed it is.
So we got to see that chrisplayed a lot of golf, and and
then here we are getting backtogether again in studio with
(05:28):
Alan and we get to talk to thegreat.
Speaker 2 (05:29):
So I always just get the dregs of you.
I never get you at your peak.
I get you with the hangover youdo.
Speaker 3 (05:36):
And, and look at that , even that is a high for you.
It's still a lot.
All right, everybody, let's getinto it.
We got to talk to Colin Gray'smanaging partner at North Labs.
We're going to talk about data.
We're going to talk about howyou can use your data the right
way.
He's going to touch on some AIstuff.
But before we do that, colin,first of all, thank you for your
service and what you did.
(05:57):
You joke about being in the AirForce.
You joked about this.
I don't give two shits aboutthat.
You actually did it.
Thank you.
Great job, buddy I appreciate itgreat all right, let's jump
into this stuff, all right.
So, colin, uh, what's the bestscore you ever shot at the
masters?
Speaker 2 (06:13):
what, oh, I did not just do that so, but other than
that, he's done everything elsebetter than us, I think so.
I mean, we figured that out infive minutes before we got on
air.
Speaker 3 (06:24):
Yeah, when he started talking about the stuff he's
into, I'm like special forcesrace car driver got more hair
than we do.
Speaker 2 (06:30):
I mean, it's just, it's over we're gonna.
Speaker 3 (06:33):
We're gonna pin that race car thing.
I'm bringing that up later.
I want to talk a little bitmore about data before we get
there.
Okay, can we?
Speaker 2 (06:40):
I know, because I know you really like data and
I'm very leery of it.
Speaker 3 (06:43):
I know it.
So, colin, talk to us a littlebit about how you got into this
space and what you're doing, andlet's give a real background on
that.
Speaker 1 (06:51):
Yeah sure, first of all, great to be here.
Thanks for having me, and I'msure you extended more grace to
me than I deserve, but Iappreciate the kind words.
But yeah, long story short,I've been involved in the cloud
computing industry since itsinfancy.
I learned about it while I wasin the military, still just
(07:12):
turning wrenches on the B-1bomber in Ellsworth Air Force
Base, which translated quite abit to overseas duty, seeing as
it's the most active aircraftsince 9-11.
So I had one of the greatestpleasures of my life supporting
such an amazing aircraft.
But I was walking the flightline one day, dirty with grease
(07:34):
and hydraulic fluid, and my dadsent me a news article talking
about how Amazon was thinkingabout leasing data center space
to other companies per second,and I thought that was an
insanely novel idea.
This was back when, mind you,amazon was only a what?
(07:54):
$4 billion, $5 billion company,so they hadn't yet gone on
there.
Speaker 3 (08:00):
So give us a mark on that timeline, wise, because
this is yeah, so you want to ageyourself.
It's all about technology fromsince the time of technology.
Yeah, so seven, you're right,amazon wasn't what it is today.
A lot of us in 2025 are goingwell, amazon, you're like.
Of course, you're like no, itwasn't Amazon in seven.
(08:20):
So, all right, continue on.
I love this.
Speaker 1 (08:23):
Yeah.
So when you think about themagnitude of where Amazon is now
, when you think about all thecompute power they needed in
2007 to operate amazoncom andwhat would become AWS all of
that computing infrastructure,all that data center space they
are now adding that every singleday across the AWS
(08:45):
infrastructure, every single day.
And so, anyway, I read that.
I am not classically trained incomputer science or software
engineering.
I just thought it was a reallysweet idea and I liked Amazon
and liked what they were about,and I decided to dive into it
and learn more and I becameobsessed with it.
So I became one of the first 10fully certified AWS folks in
(09:08):
the world, started a company in2010 while I was getting ready
to transition out of themilitary.
That effectively what we builtwas Dropbox for construction
services companies to sharelarge files in the field, over
2G cellular.
This was before software as aservice and the likes of Dropbox
(09:31):
was a thing.
And, of course, I wasn't smartenough to think of a new
operating model, like DrewHouston, the founder of Dropbox,
who figured out hey, I canbuild this once and have
millions of people all consumethis infrastructure.
We were building it over andover again for companies, which
was a sweet little gig.
We could charge a few hundredgrand a pop, and when you're in
(09:54):
your early twenties that's not abad gig with a few employees.
So I sold that in-.
What would you have done, chris, in your twenties with 200
grand?
Speaker 2 (10:01):
a pop.
I sold that in 20.
What would you have done, chris, in your 20s, with $200,000 to
pop?
I'm not sure, alan.
Speaker 3 (10:07):
I don't know, you know what?
There's a reason God did notlet me have that much money
early on.
Speaker 2 (10:12):
God doesn't give you more than you can handle, Chris.
Speaker 3 (10:14):
That's why my first job was $38,000 a year
Apparently.
Speaker 2 (10:16):
Colin can handle much more than either you or I.
Speaker 1 (10:20):
Yeah, well, yeah, you still go through the bad
financial decisions.
Speaker 2 (10:25):
What kind of car did you buy?
I certainly did.
What kind of car did you buy?
Speaker 1 (10:29):
What'd you?
Speaker 2 (10:29):
buy What'd you buy.
Speaker 1 (10:32):
For me it was an Audi RS7 was my sort of bread and
butter.
I brought it back over fromGermany where my last base was.
I wrapped my time with with uhwith ramstein and with nato uh,
both of which are they're basedout of ramstein.
Uh shipped the rs7 over, wasliving in a crummy apartment on
(10:54):
grand avenue in saint paul,minnesota, and that first
snowfall came when the snow isup over the roof of your car and
I thought this, this is toomuch car to park on a public
street.
Speaker 2 (11:06):
So I sold it to my buddy.
Speaker 1 (11:07):
I just moved.
Why didn't?
Speaker 2 (11:09):
you just move.
Speaker 3 (11:10):
Yeah, I mean, all this time I'm thinking Collins
just got it going on.
Speaker 2 (11:15):
I'm like it's a pretty simple equation here.
Speaker 1 (11:19):
Yeah, yeah, you know, I was trying to finish up
finish up my degree and I soldit to a buddy for $3,000 less
than I bought it for and Ifigured that's a pretty good for
a car.
You're a good guy.
So, yeah, I sold that in 14,signed my life away in a
non-compete from 14 to 16.
I was young and naive.
(11:40):
I didn't know what anon-compete was.
I signed a non-compete thatsaid not only will you not start
a business in the tech space,you won't start any business for
two years.
So I consulted out in the BayArea with a few of the bigger
organizations out there, helpingthem with their journey to the
cloud.
Speaker 3 (11:56):
Consulted from Minneapolis or moved out there.
Speaker 1 (11:59):
I would.
Actually I would fly out thereevery week and I paid my buddy,
dan, who is chief of staff forone of the huge tech companies
out there.
I paid him $400 a month tosleep on his couch and eat his
groceries and I think theirhouse was like 16 grand a month
to rent out.
Uh, so I I had a pretty, prettygood deal, so it was cheaper
(12:20):
for me to fly in every week,crash on their couch and fly
home than it was to get a placethere, so you could have driven
the car out there.
Speaker 3 (12:28):
Let's go back to that experience.
Yeah, you could have driven the7-0.
You could have just left itthere, you know, what I'm saying
, not for nothing, man, I'mtelling you somebody in San
Francisco would have bought thatthing in a heartbeat.
Well, we're going to talk aboutthat later.
So again, here you go.
You signed the non-compete.
Here we are in 14.
No kids, no family, no wife.
Right, you're still doing yourthing.
(12:48):
Did you have a plan?
This is where I want to getback to this.
Did you have a plan?
Did you say, oh man, I'm goingto get here, I'm going to get to
this?
Or, with things just coming atyou, you're like I'm going to
take this problem and solve it.
Speaker 1 (13:03):
Take this problem and solve it.
Yeah, Honestly, the originalcompany was called Cloud CTO.
It morphed into that.
Originally it was supposed tobe just advisory for companies
to think about adopting thecloud, but the cloud was so new
back then that I was gettingchased out of boardrooms with
pitchforks and torches.
I mean, people were saying whothe hell are you Snot-nosed kid
(13:24):
telling me I need to abandon mydata centers so quickly?
I realized the only way we'remaking headway is with
construction companies, becausethey have a pain that can only
be solved with the cloud.
So we built that solution andthen just marketed the crap out
of it that.
Speaker 3 (13:48):
So you pivoted to that because you saw your
original idea was, you had theforesight to see that paying for
the cloud by the minute, orbasically renting the cloud, if
you will, and picking upsubsections was the way you're
going to go, and you saw thatthis was your niche, and so is
that how you started to figureout how to grow that one.
Speaker 1 (14:03):
Yeah, it was.
Once we had one successfulimplementation under our belt, I
knew that every other servicescompany that was thinking
logically needed this, becausethere's so much pain involved or
there was back in the day withneeding to make sure all of your
plans and diagrams are on yourLenovo laptop with the rugged
case on it before you load itinto the truck and go to the job
(14:25):
site.
And guess what?
You always forget something,and so the solution back then
was to drive back to home base,get it and come back to the job
site, and so you know.
It was simple in nature.
It didn't do backups oranything smart.
It was just a place to landyour stuff and make it
(14:45):
accessible over crappy cellularconnection.
Uh, it would still take threeminutes to download, right, but
that's.
That was a heck of a lot betterthan an hour and a half round
trip from.
You know a plot of land you'rebuilding on to home base, so um,
so how'd you get people to buyinto this?
Speaker 3 (15:02):
right, you had this great idea.
Let's talk about how you, youknow, how'd you get people to
buy into this?
Right, you had this great idea.
Let's talk about how you, youknow, how'd you get people to
buy it?
Because, back to being anentrepreneur.
Right, you got it.
It's cash is King, but you'vegot to have leads.
So sales is the number one.
She's the queen.
Yep, sales is queen.
How'd you find out how to?
How'd you figure out how tosell it?
Speaker 1 (15:19):
Let them try it.
So I I had spin off thesmallest, simplest bits of it.
We made clonable.
So when I was going into asales meeting with people, I
would spin off a clone for themwith their domain.
I'd stick their logo on it.
And while we're talking to someof the typically older gray men
(15:42):
in suits who had been doingthis for a long, time.
Speaker 3 (15:45):
Oh, you're talking about Alan, alan's old.
Speaker 1 (15:47):
I was referring to Alan specifically.
Speaker 2 (15:50):
I will be, I will take that, but anyway it was
sort of a.
Speaker 1 (15:55):
They didn't understand the philosophy of
what the cloud could do.
But if it, if I could show themand I would say you know I'm
going to, we got this.
You know, you got a 2G cellulardevice.
Go out into the parking lot,I'm going to load this file up,
you're going to watch itpopulate, you're going to
(16:16):
download it and you come backand tell me if it worked or not.
And that was that was reallywhat it took back then was them
just seeing it for themselves,and then they would piece
together all of theinefficiencies within their
business that they knew existed.
Speaker 3 (16:29):
Let's break that one down, because I love this.
This translates across anyindustry.
Anything you want to do, I knowyou want to talk data and we
will.
But you know what, colin?
What you figured out from beinga grease monkey on a flight
line and seeing some incrediblepeople, from being a grease
monkey on a flight line andseeing some incredible people is
that if you can give somebody asolution that makes their life
easier and then prove to them itmakes their life easier, it's
(16:51):
an easy, no-brainer sale.
Back to the uh, you know I'mthinking about it's the qbc
stuff.
Hey, I'm the big guy, so let'sgo back to this.
So you say hey, dude, I can sithere and talk all day long or
you can take this thing, go outinto the parking lot and 2g,
just so everybody uh gets a feelfor that.
2g.
Today we're all in 5g.
That's a big number, right.
(17:13):
Two to five, I think that'sthree more I do, I don't know
again it's this minis.
I don't know how to do it, soyou had to go out there and do
that.
How many times would they comeback in and go?
No shit, I think I, I, I thinkyou're full of shit, you're
lying to me, or how many timesthey come and go?
Speaker 1 (17:30):
got it, let's do it I mean there was, there was
always hesitation, just becausethe, the, the methodology was
new, right, the cloud was so new.
People just didn't really.
I mean people would literallylook up at this point, up at the
sky.
Some, some people still do thattoday.
Speaker 3 (17:46):
I do, guilty.
Speaker 1 (17:59):
Talking to old guys, groups who would come in and
they would design a solution forthem, and they'd say, okay,
cool, it's going to cost sevenfigures and here's what you'll
get.
And there's a lot of riskassociated with that, especially
when you don't understand theunderpinnings of what makes the
technology work.
So for me, I came in and said,look, yeah, I was early on in
this.
I've got a few turns of thelathe so far.
(18:21):
I built this thing.
It's self-contained andself-managed, so you don't need
to really worry about how itworks.
Similar to you don't thinkabout how your operating system
on your computer works At leastI don't.
So go out there and I'm goingto show you and you're going to
tell me if it solves your painor not.
Right, Imagine doing it fromyour 1500 truck at a job site
(18:44):
and you tell me if you thinkit'll bring value to your group.
And there's the occasionalcouple of them who are just like
, nah, we'll keep doing it theway we do it.
But yeah, a good number of themsaid you know what this is, I
get it.
And it's not theoretical andit's not just a 30 page
statement of work talking abouta consulting plan.
It's just something that'salready here that I can begin
(19:07):
leveraging tomorrow.
Speaker 2 (19:09):
So it's not really in the cloud.
Speaker 3 (19:10):
Huh.
Well, again you're pointing up.
Isn't that funny?
Everybody points up God cloud.
Speaker 2 (19:16):
Well, clouds are above us.
What happens if it's a clearday?
Speaker 3 (19:25):
There's no data, then I don't get data.
So I'm sure there's been a lotof that.
But think about if you could goin front of a customer or a
potential client and show themand proof of concept them that
quickly.
I think that's a genius sellingproposition.
Right, you came in, you did thepre-work, you walked into that
sales call and you had done thatpre-work.
Don't tell me that people don'tgo.
(19:46):
Huh, this guy actually listenedto me, because what do people
say, even in customer servicebut in sales, right, if you're
trying to sell me on something,prove to me you know who I am,
prove to me you know my biz andcollege, saying I'm going to
come in and show you not only doI know your business, but I
know how I can make yourbusiness better.
Speaker 2 (20:07):
I'm still and I get like this with every guest that
has a similar path.
Like you said, he's a guyturning wrenches on a B1 bomber
sees an opportunity.
We've all seen opportunities.
I mean, how many of us are like, oh, I got this idea, but we
never do anything about it.
So he has the idea, it's verytechnical, he's got to educate
(20:27):
himself, he's got to findsomebody probably to build the
program, then he's got toidentify who the market is and
then he's got to figure out howto get in front of these people
and he's got to figure out howto sell it.
I mean, it's just unbelievable.
It's a huge curve that you wentthrough in a really short
amount of.
I mean, did you have any sortof modeling, any sort of
(20:47):
coaching, any sort of mentoring,or did you just freaking brute
force it until you figured itout?
Speaker 1 (20:55):
Well, I mean, what I'll say is um, growing up,
honestly, I didn't know thatbeing an entrepreneur was an
option until my dad was braveenough to do it.
Um, dad was also army.
Um, he, he's still in bettershape than I am.
Uh, he's more disciplined thanI'll ever imagine being.
(21:16):
He had a storied career atmedtronic.
Uh, inventing pacemakers thathe he's got up on his patent
wall and he helped design thethe first wall the, the Keurig
coffee machine.
He worked with the contractmanufacturer who designed that.
Speaker 3 (21:31):
How about that, dude?
You're telling me thepacemakers and Keurigs are in
the same vein.
Yeah, get it.
It's like oh, did that vein?
Oh yeah, I got it All right.
Speaker 1 (21:41):
Yeah, but anyway, like you know, when I was All
right, let's go back to thisagain.
Speaker 3 (21:45):
So back to the entrepreneurial thing.
You didn't know it until yourdad did it, and then you went
huh, that's something.
Yeah, Was he the mentor?
Speaker 1 (21:53):
He was yeah, and he, and he still is to this day.
I mean, he, he, my dad's thesmartest person I know, and I've
met a lot of smart people inthis industry, but he's got
three master's degrees.
He's, he's just incrediblyintelligent.
And so he went from this, thiscareer, where you need three
master's degrees in engineering,to being a a master electrician
(22:13):
.
He said you know, I want to getout of the rat race, I want to
get into home services, and hestarted an electrical
contracting company that becamethe most popular electrical
contracting company in Minnesotaafter a few short years, and I
got to watch him do that.
Speaker 3 (22:28):
I got to watch him.
How am I talking to Colin?
I want to talk to his dad.
You could?
Speaker 2 (22:31):
be his dad, Chris, if only you applied yourself.
You know, what, Honestly, if Iquit?
Speaker 3 (22:36):
because I think your dad's a better.
I know your dad's in bettershape than I am, that's awesome,
all right.
So your dad was clearly yourmentor, so you would go to him.
But back to Alan's originalpoint, because I love to hear
this too and I think we all do.
Speaker 1 (22:54):
How did, how did you make that leap?
I mean, how did you keep movingup?
You know, I think there's.
There is benefit to being youngand dumb, Uh, and that's.
I think there's.
There's a lot of that.
I think people just apply itincorrectly a lot of the time.
But for it was like okay, Ihave a safety net with the
military, I flew for a living,or flew on planes for a living,
so my life was tax-free and perdiem money, so I knew that I
(23:18):
would be able to afford a10-hour-a-week engineer if I
needed help.
But for me it was really justlike I obsess over things that
I'm interested in, and I becameabsolutely obsessed over the
idea of learning how to createtechnology.
I'd never done it before, but Iwould.
We'd be flying over the countryof Africa with a bunch of Navy
(23:40):
SEALs in the back and I'd bestretched out in a hammock in
the tail cone of the one 30learning how to write Ruby code
or JavaScript.
Speaker 3 (23:49):
So the first thing I just told myself.
So you started a business andAlan asked so which one were you
?
Were you the technician, theone who was really technical?
Were you the?
Speaker 1 (24:02):
great sales guy, or were you?
Speaker 2 (24:03):
the manager.
Where were you?
I was the visionary.
Speaker 1 (24:05):
Yeah, I was the.
I was the visionary dreamer andstill am today.
I got good enough at thetechnology to make something
barely work.
I'll put it that way.
Speaker 3 (24:14):
So you hired for your weaknesses and you brought in
help or whatever, you contractedor whatever.
Speaker 1 (24:21):
Absolutely yeah, and I'll still do that today.
Right, I have to talk tech fora living, but you wouldn't.
None of my engineers wouldwould trust me to implement
anything for one of theircustomers.
So I knew that, if I couldunderstand technical nuances,
but speak, speak about thosedeeply technical things with
(24:43):
business stakeholders thatthat's where the money is made,
because business stakeholdersare the ones who write the
checks.
Speaker 3 (24:49):
So let's talk about this concept.
If you don't know the details,how can you be so good at
putting this in?
This is the interesting conceptthat I always think about, like
, hey, chris, you don't knoweverything about a house.
I'm like, yeah, but I reallyenjoy it.
Well, do you know everything?
No, that's what I count on myguys to do right At this point
in my life, in my career, whatI'm doing.
(25:10):
So, as you're doing that, howdo you know that these guys are
doing what you want them to doand how do you get them to buy
into what you're seeing?
Speaker 1 (25:21):
I educated myself enough to know, at least for the
early days of the platform,that what they were building was
legit.
I could read through their codeand understand generally.
Even if it wasn't optimized orperfect, I knew that it was
flowing how it needed to flow.
Speaker 3 (25:37):
All right.
So to your point then.
That's what I love, so youcould come in and let them know
every once in a while I'm thepirate of the ship and I'm the
lead of the ship, and every oncein a while, while I can dip in
and let you know that you didn'tdo it, just right.
So sharpen that up.
So they, they trusted you, theybelieved in you, and that's how
you get your team to kind offollow in Right Nice.
Speaker 2 (25:59):
So we fast forward to where you are today.
You're a data analytics guru.
Is that fair to say?
Speaker 1 (26:07):
I, I, I play a.
I play a guy who's a dataanalytics guru.
No, yeah, I mean, at this pointwe're coming on year 18 in this
industry.
It's come a hell of a long way.
Cloud is obviously a lot moreself-introductory than it was
back then.
People generally get it, and sonow, really, when I started
(26:30):
North Labs in 16, after thathiatus, I wanted to keep it
going, but I realized veryquickly that migrating cloud
systems or getting people intothe cloud is a very thankless
job.
It wasn't a profit center, itwas merely a conversation around
cost, and anytime you're onlyhaving a conversation around
(26:52):
cost, people are scrutinizinghow much time you're spending,
you're generating, and so I knewthat if I switched more into a
profit facing segment of thecloud market, that it would be
easier for me to have thosevalue-based conversations, and
that's why we very quicklydedicated ourselves to the
(27:16):
analytics and, yes, we weredoing AI and machine learning
way back then.
Obviously, it's a lot morepopular now, but we understood
that if we could use the data, acompany already had to help
follow how a dollar flowsthrough the business to increase
production efficiency, toincrease profits.
(27:39):
Now you are a strategic partnerto those companies and that's
where we went.
Speaker 3 (27:46):
All right, here's my big question.
Give me a good client who issomebody that says boy, I got to
have Colin Graves and tell ushow you took them from X to the
stratosphere of going to AugustaNational.
Speaker 1 (28:01):
So I've got a group in Minneapolis I can't name it
because they're not.
They're aligned with thedefense industry.
They came to us and they saidthey make like window films for
like UV protection and energyefficiency.
They do a lot of HVAC stuff.
They're a $7 billion Europeancompany.
Speaker 3 (28:18):
That's a B 7B.
Yeah, that's a.
Speaker 1 (28:20):
B Yep and they came to us and they said hey.
Colin, our, our scrap rate is24, meaning 24 of the time the
stuff coming off of our linesgets thrown into the scrap heap.
Wow, it's wasted money andthat's wow that sounds.
Speaker 3 (28:37):
Tell me one out of four.
Yeah right, I mean I'm again.
I'm really good at math.
Good job, chris.
Thank you yeah, all right.
Talk to us and so get the bigbrains on.
Chris.
Speaker 1 (28:48):
They had brought in other consulting firms to try
and you know, plan stuff out.
It didn't didn't really pan out.
I went in with my, my littleteam of you know.
My whole mission has been Iwanted to create the Navy seals
of the cloud uh, elite operatorswho just get shit done and
don't brag about it and don'tkill you with powerpoints.
Um, amen.
(29:09):
So we, we grabbed their data,we unified it into our system.
We quickly realized that itwasn't their practice in general
.
It was one what's calledextruder head on one of their
sub assemblies.
So it would.
It would coil out metal, right,it extrude metal filament when
(29:30):
that was getting too hot.
Everything that it touched thenthereafter was scrap because it
would burn the product.
So we realized that and that'swhere a lot of groups would stop
.
What we did was we implementeda system that would say all
right, when we're five degreesshort of that threshold, we're
going to notify someone.
When we're two degrees short ofthat threshold, we're going to
(29:54):
slow down the assembly line by50% until the extruder head
cools down, because 50% isbetter than 0%, right?
And then if it did reach thatthreshold, we would trigger an
auto shutdown of the line to atleast avoid all of that finished
(30:14):
material from getting burnedand thrown into the scrap heap.
But that one change.
We were in there for abouteight months.
It saved them $40 million inoperating income in year one.
Speaker 3 (30:26):
I got one word Badass Holy shit.
Is that two words?
That's one.
Oh my God, dude, that's awesome.
What a great story.
Because when you talk aboutdoing that, you got the
precursor.
You started to find because wealways talk about things,
especially when you startmeasuring your KPIs, key
(30:46):
performance indicators in yourbusiness Many of them are
lagging indicators, notprecursor indicators or future
indicators, and in your case,you found the future or the feed
forward lag.
That's an engineering.
Talk To it the feed forward.
Thank you for dumbing it downfor me.
Chris, I know I'm trying reallyhard, so that's amazing.
(31:07):
Wow, what a fun thing to workon and find and really dig into.
But it sounds so simple whenyou look at it in hindsight,
right.
Speaker 1 (31:16):
I mean it usually is.
It's just you're not.
You are.
Most organizations already haveall the data they need to run
their business more effectively.
They just don't know how toleverage it, because the
leveraging component of it isvery difficult to unify data
across systems, to create acommon operating picture of that
data and then to actually askthe right questions.
(31:36):
That's the biggest thing isthere's so many tools out there
that will show you one littlesliver of the universe within
Salesforce or HubSpot orwherever, and these companies
have been using that as aselling feature for a long time.
The problem is it's onlyshowing you the context that
exists within that tool, whichis a small fragment of your
(31:59):
entire value chain.
That tool can't possiblyunderstand how your business is
actually structured and actuallyoperates.
So by doing what we do, wecreate what we call a command
center.
So now, where all that dataknows how to speak to each other
and we're able to ask questionsthat involves data from
different domains and paint thatpicture for them, so today, how
(32:23):
many customers are you workingwith actively?
We've done over a thousandprojects for a little over 200
customers, lifetime Actively.
Right now we've got severaldozen, including our first
military contract.
So it only took me 17 years toland my first military.
Speaker 3 (32:43):
Way to go.
Way to get back there, man.
Yeah, I thought that'd be your,that'd be your cherry right.
Speaker 1 (32:47):
You're like basically success yeah.
Speaker 2 (32:50):
That's exactly what you say, Chris.
Overnight success 16.
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (32:54):
I do the same thing.
Yeah, I've been at, you know,big guy, so for me and here I am
yeah, look at me.
Oh, my god, you get your asskicked right.
Brother, I hear you.
Yeah, you wish.
Sometimes you kind of wish, youknow.
I'm gonna ask you this if youhad to go back to any point in
your career, money no object.
(33:15):
When did you have the most fun?
Speaker 1 (33:25):
flying, flying around with, with special operations
forces in foreign countries andI agree with you, know we, we
would being the air force right,you get access to a little bit
more budget than the rest of thebranches.
I think it's 50 51 cents ofevery dod dollar goes to the air
force you're, you're right, Ididn't know that, so Air.
Speaker 3 (33:43):
Force.
You're telling stories insidethe, but for many of the people
outside they don't know that oneI have a many friends who are
out of the Air Force.
But yeah, I know that.
Speaker 1 (33:51):
Yeah, I almost joined the Marine Corps and my Army
father grabbed me by theshoulders and said I will disown
you.
You're joining the Air Force oryou're not joining anything.
And I'm glad I did, because webroke down in the Seychelles
more than a, more than a halfdozen times during my scare
quotes for the listeners whenyou go back to a.
Speaker 3 (34:13):
So Colin's been at this for 17 years 16 years and
I've been at it for 17.
And I talked to many otherbusiness owners and I will tell
everybody the same story.
When you look back on it, yougo well today, no, screw that.
You're not as happy as today,is your?
Your the days you had when itwas very simple, when I was
turning wrenches or I was justout there and it was six o'clock
(34:34):
in the afternoon and I wasfinished something like, oh shit
, we're finishing something atsix o'clock in the afternoon,
but it's a bathroom and I'mwiping this thing down with my
guy.
That's the most gratification Icould have ever gotten.
Now I've grown to the point now.
Again, six million dollars doingall this.
I don't get to see all of itanymore.
But you ask me money, no object, I want to see that finished
(34:55):
product and I love it when I cansee it, feel it, touch it.
Wait, my, my kids always makefun of me when I walk into a
place.
My kids laugh.
They're like hey, dad, youalways have to rub your hands on
the walls.
So I said I just want to makesure they're all finished smooth
.
That's all I'm looking for.
Speaker 2 (35:10):
Right.
Speaker 3 (35:11):
So it's just a beautiful thing.
So, colin, you obviously havebeen grounded.
You got that, you're in.
What's going on?
How can people find you, howcan people find your company?
Because we've got to get to ourfamous four questions.
I want to hear about the racecars.
Oh shit.
Speaker 2 (35:26):
Hang on.
Speaker 3 (35:27):
We're going to have five questions.
We're going back to race carsShit, how can people find you,
colin?
Speaker 1 (35:32):
Sure, I am without social media other than LinkedIn
.
Colin Graves on LinkedIn TwoL's Graves like dead people
Always happy to connect.
Our website is Northlabscom and, yeah, that's where we exist on
the internet.
Speaker 2 (35:53):
What's the typical size of the?
I mean, it sounds like you'veworked with some huge companies,
but do you work with companiesof all sizes?
Speaker 1 (36:01):
We do as long as the use case fits.
I mean, we're definitely notthe cheapest group on the planet
.
Our smallest customer right nowis about $10 million in revenue
.
Our largest is $1.3 billion.
So we're across the gamut, aslong as the use case fits.
Our whole shtick is we bringpre-designed data solutions to
(36:25):
our customers based off ofindustry or function.
So think revenue, intelligence,hr analytics, but then also
packages for manufacturing,industrial, higher education,
biopharma, so we can plug thisstuff in and have it running
within 45 days as opposed to 12to 18 months you take all that,
(36:46):
that's impressive.
Speaker 2 (36:46):
He is impressive because he used words I didn't I
just want to do, I just want torebuke and rebuff, I just can't
believe it's not really in thecloud, but anyway, let's talk
when is so?
When are we going to hear aboutthe race cars?
All right, let's go.
Speaker 3 (36:58):
All right, colin, one of the things we talked about
before we got on the air wasthat you like race cars.
Speaker 1 (37:04):
I do like race cars.
Speaker 3 (37:05):
We have an affinity for that here too, so we want to
talk about that for just twominutes, because we're almost
running out of time.
Cool Go, what do you race?
Speaker 1 (37:13):
Yeah.
So I grew up racing go-karts,did some of the regional scene
for that.
I raced 600 600 classmotorcycles while I was in the
military, which?
Speaker 2 (37:24):
now makes my stomach do somersaults when I watch it.
Oh, thank god.
Oh my god.
Speaker 3 (37:27):
Those days like going on a 40 foot ladder for me dude
yeah no, I'm done, yeah, 24foot ladder.
No, I'm done too done with that.
Speaker 1 (37:34):
Yeah, and today I race in two series.
Uh, I race uh radicals, whichare uh sort of formula style
cars, high downforce, opencockpit, manufactured in Europe.
They are by far the mostpopular racing car, as far as
I'm concerned, these days.
Great way for people to getinto racing.
(37:56):
You go really, really fast andyou get that downforce effect
that you're usually missing onmost race cars.
And then I am.
I did just get accepted to.
I'm now a reserve driver in theLamborghini series with a group
called Dax and Gray down herein Scottsdale.
Speaker 3 (38:16):
All right, brother.
Well, when you make it to RoadAtlanta, you got to look us up,
man.
Because, I was waiting to hearabout that because I got a bunch
of buddies who are in the sscaand uh road.
Atlanta is right here outsideof atlanta, but actually, um,
only 30 minutes from where.
We live very close, and I havebeen there and I did not realize
how cool that industry was.
Yeah, I mean, I mean I grew upin a family that, uh, all we did
(38:38):
was work on cars and trucksbecause they were a trucking
family, and I decided to go tothe houses because that's all we
did was work on houses.
But that's where we are.
Let's get going.
Colin, give us a book you'drecommend to all of our audience
Show it.
Show it talk, it make it happenthis book is amazing.
(38:59):
Race it in.
Speaker 1 (39:00):
It's called Simplify by Robert Koch and Greg Lockwood
.
I'm reading it for about theninth time.
It really talks about positionsimplifying in businesses.
I think that particularlybusinesses in my industry try to
be too many things to too manydifferent buyers.
Try to be too many things totoo many different buyers so
(39:24):
they end up being nothing to noone, and so my core ethos has
always been solve one problemsuper well and everyone will
tell their friends about it, andthat's sort of the philosophy I
try and follow All right.
Speaker 2 (39:37):
The book is really geared towards what you're
offering your client base, or isit how you're running your
business as well?
Speaker 1 (39:44):
It's how you're running your business, too.
It's how you yeah, how do youharness your internal processes
to cater to a simpler messagethan you have today, right?
So it's really about how thebest businesses in the world, uh
, have succeeded over over time,right?
Speaker 3 (40:05):
by identifying.
Have you ever seen the movie?
Uh, beautiful mind.
Let me tell you about mybusiness a little bit.
Um, and I need to read thisbook called simplify because to
scale to, I mean, I mean, don'tget me wrong, guys are you
russell crowe with the writingon the windows and stuff?
Honestly, if you look at ouroffice here in the headquarters
(40:25):
at Norcross Georgia.
Yes, I've been in every windowand every whiteboard you could
ever find and I scribble theshit out of it and I've taught
my guys to do it.
But the same thing is that tobuild a complicated business is
hard to scale.
To build a simplified businessis easy to scale.
It makes your life easier andit's so hard to get away from it
and it's so hard to simplify.
(40:48):
And that's what Colin'sbasically telling you, and I
think that book will too.
You got to understand thatbecause it's hard to do it,
because you want to solve a lotof problems and I you know,
Colin, that's the one thing yougot from you, man, you love
solving problems.
Speaker 2 (41:07):
I problems and I you know, colin, that's the one
thing you got from you man, youlove solving problems, I mean
you have.
Speaker 3 (41:11):
You have all your life and we all love to solve
every.
He fixes things from b1 bombersto your data data, yeah, yeah,
I mean, he can do anything.
And your race cars?
Yeah, because he doesn't havepeople working on, well, maybe
he does something.
All right, should we ask thesecond question?
Sure?
Did you ever win a race?
No, I'm kidding.
Speaker 1 (41:24):
Not in the latest series.
I finished on the podium.
Speaker 3 (41:27):
Oh, there you go.
So you're shooting champagneeverywhere.
All right, nice, All right.
Number two question.
Speaker 2 (41:39):
I almost remember it we're customer service freaks.
Speaker 3 (41:42):
And what is a customer service pet peeve of
yours when you are the customer?
Ooh.
Speaker 1 (41:51):
Um, just had a snafu with, with uh, with capital one
not too long ago.
So this is, this is top of mindand it it does have to do with
data, I think.
But making me repeat the sameanswer every time, you transfer
me to the next guy who's tryingto help me solve something and
you make me answer the samequestions that he did, it makes
(42:13):
me absolutely blood boiling, mad.
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (42:17):
Yeah, that's a good one, and you can't blame the
people.
You got to blame the processbecause they don't know man, it
just sucks All right.
What's a favorite feature ofyour house?
Speaker 1 (42:26):
And where do you live ?
So I live in Scottsdale, that'sArizona.
Speaker 3 (42:31):
Scottsdale, Arizona.
Yeah, we're worldwide.
Speaker 1 (42:33):
Yes, scottsdale, arizona.
So I live squarely in thedesert.
Favorite feature of my house,uh, is our, is our front, is our
front family room, you knowit's?
Uh, it's where our our 14 monthold hangs out and plays, it's
where I keep all my wine oh wehave?
(42:55):
We have our nicest, our nicestleather furniture that the kid
likes to chew on uh, your 14month old plays with the wine.
Speaker 2 (43:03):
Is that what I'm hearing?
Speaker 3 (43:04):
100 all day long maybe in a couple years, huh
yeah well, not the best wine,but, uh, as an italian family,
um, they're very proud to saythat uh, chris started drinking
at six, eight, uh, six years old, and you were helping with the
bathtub wine.
I was helping with the bathtubwine where they're like heyito,
look at him, oh, he likes it, helikes it.
My eyes were coming out of mylike.
(43:26):
Just imagine the old cartoons,your eyes are over your head,
yeah, so that's awesome and a14-month-old.
Congratulations, brother,because Thank you.
Alan and I are on the other side.
Alan's waiting for grandkids.
Speaker 2 (43:37):
I'm going hold on.
Speaker 3 (43:38):
I got 10 more years.
I'm good Hang on.
Speaker 2 (43:41):
I don't think it's 10 , buddy.
Speaker 3 (43:42):
Oh, it better be 10, bro, you're in denial, I am in
denial, all right, last one,kyle.
Last question.
Speaker 2 (43:48):
You ready.
He's never had one of these.
You had to have it.
Speaker 3 (43:51):
He has a nightmare story.
Speaker 2 (43:52):
Everything he does works out.
Speaker 3 (44:03):
I don't know house.
Did you get death?
Speaker 1 (44:04):
dismemberment.
Did you shoot a nail throughyour hand?
Yeah, a hundred times.
Yeah, I've got uh.
So you're asking what's the,what's the worst thing?
Speaker 3 (44:08):
worst diy nightmare story.
Not a contractor, because I amone, I know we do a bunch of
something you did okay, um, well, I have.
Speaker 1 (44:18):
I have a scar on my cheek that's faded with time.
As DIY I was working on a plane, but I was working on it,
supposed to be working on itmyself.
I was inside of the over.
It's called the overwingfairing of the B-1.
So when it sweeps its wingsback to fly over the speed of
(44:38):
sound, the wings tuck into thisfairing.
It's got a bunch of hydraulicshit in it.
It's messy and nasty and loudand I needed to depressurize the
system.
All the systems are pressurizedfor fluid flow.
The plane can fly upside downall that stuff.
I had a very, very experiencedcrew chief come out and say he's
(44:59):
from the middle of nowhere,Louisiana.
He said hey, brother, I, I candepressurize that system for you
, hey watch this so you don'thave to, you don't have to crawl
down and do it yourself I saidsure to help you you know what.
You know what you're doing,let's go ahead and do it.
Well, there's two systems oneither side, one and four, and
two and three.
Well, I needed onedepressurized.
(45:20):
He depressurized four didn'ttell me I was screwing off the,
the hub of a reservoir.
There's a sensor inside of thereservoir for fluid quantity, uh
, but it had hundreds of psi ofpressure on it.
It exploded.
So it was like white hotshrapnel, uh, and you know.
(45:42):
So I'm working on this.
All of a sudden I hear a veryloud bang.
My vision goes white.
I thought I was dead for asecond oh no, my eyes rolled out
of the overwing fairing.
Thank god for osha.
I rolled out onto a standinstead of falling 16 feet to
the ground, and when I stood upI I climbed down the stand.
I turned and looked at Johnnywas his name and he looked at me
(46:04):
bug-eyed and I went what'sgoing on?
And I had literally a piece ofthe sensor hanging out of my
face.
Oh my God, I looked like acyborg and that was the last
time I ever trusted and didn'tverify.
So even now, today, I alwaystrust but verify.
No matter how much faith youhave in someone, it doesn't take
(46:26):
them that long to verify thatthey did the shit they said they
were going to do.
Speaker 2 (46:31):
Colin wins.
Three and a half years Colinwins.
That is incredible.
Speaker 3 (46:35):
He had shrapnel off an airplane, sitting at his face
, looking like a cyborg.
Speaker 2 (46:40):
It's the first time I've ever heard somebody say
thank God for OSHA, All right,but just the fact that it's a
classic Southern.
Hey, watch this.
I got this.
I got this.
Speaker 3 (46:52):
Hold my beer, hold my beer, I'll take the pressure
off.
I got you, bro.
You know what, alan Colin?
This has been amazing.
Go hook up Colin Graves onLinkedIn.
Guys, if you didn't learnsomething, man, this has been
dynamite, figuring out somestuff.
If you're not a 5 billiondollar company, you're not a 10
million dollar company, it don'tmatter.
Listen to what Colin talkedabout how he grew his business
(47:15):
to the point he was, and thereare some great lessons in there.
Man, pick it all up, make ithappen.
We gotta get back.
We're gonna come back next week.
Let's make it happen.
We got to get back.
We're going to come back nextweek.
Let's make it happen, Cheerseverybody, Thank you for
listening to this episode of theSmall Business Safari.
Remember your positive attitudewill help you achieve that
higher altitude you're lookingfor in the wild world of small
business ownership.
And until next time, make it agreat day you.
could charge a few hundred grand a pop, and when
(00:02):
you're in your early 20s that'snot a bad gig with a few
employees.
So I sold that in 2020.
Speaker 2 (00:10):
What would you have done, Chris, in your 20s with
200 grand a pop?
I'm not sure, Alan.
Speaker 3 (00:17):
Welcome to the Small Business Safari where I help
guide you to avoid those traps,pitfalls and dangers that lurk
when navigating the wild worldof small business ownership.
I'll share those gold nuggetsof information and invite guests
to help accelerate your ascentto that mountaintop of success.
It's a jungle out there and Iwant to help you traverse
through the levels of owningyour own business that can get
you bogged down and distract youfrom hitting your own personal
(00:38):
and professional goals.
So strap in Adventure Team andlet's take a ride through the
safari and get you to themountain top.
Alan, we've got to rocksomething today.
We've got to get rolling.
We've got to get moving.
Man, I love that music.
Every time it gets me jacked up.
(01:00):
But before we get going thatfar, big Daddy had a big weekend
.
Speaker 2 (01:04):
Again I did.
Gee, what a surprise.
Speaker 3 (01:06):
Yeah.
So guess what I got?
To go out there and hang outwith my national nary people.
Speaker 2 (01:11):
By the way, listeners , you want to know how often I
come in and I see Chris and he'slike I've had a big week.
I'm kind of recovering rightnow.
I'm like that's every week.
Speaker 3 (01:21):
That's how the green room goes, like that until Alan
says cheers bro.
Speaker 2 (01:25):
Yeah, give him the little hair of the dog that bit
him.
Speaker 3 (01:27):
And I get going again and daddy's back up ready to
rock and roll.
Let me tell you about my week,though, man.
I went out to Austin, texas.
I met the great people ofNational Nary, the National
Association of the RemodelingIndustry.
I hate saying it, but it's Nary.
I'm on the national board doingthe committee work and I'm
actually the president here inAtlanta, and it was so cool to
(01:49):
see the artistry that thesepeople can perform in Austin,
texas, and Silicon Valley andPennsylvania and San Francisco
and New York City and Atlanta.
Of course, in Atlanta we wonsix awards.
I didn't win one of them, but Iwent up there and accepted one,
so of course I did, why not?
Speaker 2 (02:10):
So people put in the projects that they did, they put
in the projects they did, andthey put them up for national
awards.
Is there like an example youcan give us of something?
Oh, man.
Speaker 3 (02:19):
No, it's hard for me to explain it all.
I would tell you guys, go checkout uh, go check out naryorg,
and you can see some of thenational winners.
Some of these projects wereabsolutely stunning.
I mean a million and a halfdollar deal down to a fifty
thousand dollar deal and youstill sit there with your jaw
dropping going.
I can't believe theytransformed that space to make
it look that cool.
So being in the remodelingindustry and seeing what people
(02:41):
can do it definitely, definitelygets you going like, hey, I'm
with good people, so I had agreat time doing that.
But then Daddy had to get backto what he does best.
Speaker 2 (02:53):
Fast boats, loose women, booze gambling golf there
we go.
Speaker 3 (03:00):
Yeah, you got everything with the boat and we
put the boat away this weekend.
So I went to Lake Oconee, whichis Masters adjacent.
We had the Masters tournamentto document where we were, and
Rory McIlroy just got done,winning his career Grand Slam,
Colin you love that Best finalround ever.
Colin Graves has given us a.
He's got it.
We're going to introduce him injust a minute.
So we went out there and I flewfrom Austin, texas, at 530 in
(03:24):
the morning, got in the airplane, got back to Atlanta, drove out
to Oconee.
I said I went out there.
I changed my clothes, got outthere, boom, stretch, hit the
ball, bam.
I was teeing off at 11.
Speaker 2 (03:36):
Isn't it funny?
There's a lot of people here inGeorgia that do that.
It's like we're playing golfreal close to the masters, while
the masters is going on and you, you feel like you're part of
it.
Speaker 3 (03:42):
I call it the Masters adjacent tournament.
I mean I was among the GeorgiaPines.
We played through the same win.
Those guys played through onThursday.
Speaker 2 (03:50):
We played through the same.
Speaker 3 (03:50):
Yeah, you were an hour away, right, just an hour
away.
Yeah, because the deal is twoof us go to the Masters and four
of us play golf and check itout.
And so this year none of uswent to the Masters, because
everybody just wanted to playgolf, because we've been there.
Speaker 2 (04:03):
But again, when you see it on TV, it doesn't you
realize how much that hurts somepeople who are listening to
this you know, guys, if thathurts you, it should, because
I'm telling you, we are sospoiled, because I'm telling you
that is the closest place toheaven on earth I've ever been
in my life, other than Kiowa.
That was probably for me keela,anybody can get on to or at
least.
Speaker 3 (04:23):
But the masters, yeah , when you go in that place.
The first time I went on there,my buddy uh took me in there
and this is an experienced thing.
Before we get into talking tocolin, my buddy says let's go.
And I said, all right, great,we're gonna go.
And I had a number of chancesto go beforehand and I missed.
So we go in and we park atsomebody's front yard, which you
don't.
We came in at the bottom, where16 green is, and I'm thinking to
(04:47):
myself, oh my God, this placeis perfect In my head.
I'm like I wonder if theyactually whip the grass to make
it stand on attention, like ifthey're in the military.
And I was like, and I look overand I see these guys whip these
bamboo whips across the grassand knocked down the grass
clumps.
I'd never seen that my life.
And I'm like, oh my god, theydo.
(05:07):
Oh my god, oh my god.
And and I stopped and, uh, mybuddy had to stop and come back
and get me.
He goes chris, are you ready?
And he had to grab my hand,like like a little kid's, like
it's okay, you can come in.
Yeah, that's how hallowed it is.
So we got to see that chrisplayed a lot of golf, and and
then here we are getting backtogether again in studio with
(05:28):
Alan and we get to talk to thegreat.
Speaker 2 (05:29):
So I always just get the dregs of you.
I never get you at your peak.
I get you with the hangover youdo.
Speaker 3 (05:36):
And, and look at that , even that is a high for you.
It's still a lot.
All right, everybody, let's getinto it.
We got to talk to Colin Gray'smanaging partner at North Labs.
We're going to talk about data.
We're going to talk about howyou can use your data the right
way.
He's going to touch on some AIstuff.
But before we do that, colin,first of all, thank you for your
service and what you did.
(05:57):
You joke about being in the AirForce.
You joked about this.
I don't give two shits aboutthat.
You actually did it.
Thank you.
Great job, buddy I appreciate itgreat all right, let's jump
into this stuff, all right.
So, colin, uh, what's the bestscore you ever shot at the
masters?
Speaker 2 (06:13):
what, oh, I did not just do that so, but other than
that, he's done everything elsebetter than us, I think so.
I mean, we figured that out infive minutes before we got on
air.
Speaker 3 (06:24):
Yeah, when he started talking about the stuff he's
into, I'm like special forcesrace car driver got more hair
than we do.
Speaker 2 (06:30):
I mean, it's just, it's over we're gonna.
Speaker 3 (06:33):
We're gonna pin that race car thing.
I'm bringing that up later.
I want to talk a little bitmore about data before we get
there.
Okay, can we?
Speaker 2 (06:40):
I know, because I know you really like data and
I'm very leery of it.
Speaker 3 (06:43):
I know it.
So, colin, talk to us a littlebit about how you got into this
space and what you're doing, andlet's give a real background on
that.
Speaker 1 (06:51):
Yeah sure, first of all, great to be here.
Thanks for having me, and I'msure you extended more grace to
me than I deserve, but Iappreciate the kind words.
But yeah, long story short,I've been involved in the cloud
computing industry since itsinfancy.
I learned about it while I wasin the military, still just
(07:12):
turning wrenches on the B-1bomber in Ellsworth Air Force
Base, which translated quite abit to overseas duty, seeing as
it's the most active aircraftsince 9-11.
So I had one of the greatestpleasures of my life supporting
such an amazing aircraft.
But I was walking the flightline one day, dirty with grease
(07:34):
and hydraulic fluid, and my dadsent me a news article talking
about how Amazon was thinkingabout leasing data center space
to other companies per second,and I thought that was an
insanely novel idea.
This was back when, mind you,amazon was only a what?
(07:54):
$4 billion, $5 billion company,so they hadn't yet gone on
there.
Speaker 3 (08:00):
So give us a mark on that timeline, wise, because
this is yeah, so you want to ageyourself.
It's all about technology fromsince the time of technology.
Yeah, so seven, you're right,amazon wasn't what it is today.
A lot of us in 2025 are goingwell, amazon, you're like.
Of course, you're like no, itwasn't Amazon in seven.
(08:20):
So, all right, continue on.
I love this.
Speaker 1 (08:23):
Yeah.
So when you think about themagnitude of where Amazon is now
, when you think about all thecompute power they needed in
2007 to operate amazoncom andwhat would become AWS all of
that computing infrastructure,all that data center space they
are now adding that every singleday across the AWS
(08:45):
infrastructure, every single day.
And so, anyway, I read that.
I am not classically trained incomputer science or software
engineering.
I just thought it was a reallysweet idea and I liked Amazon
and liked what they were about,and I decided to dive into it
and learn more and I becameobsessed with it.
So I became one of the first 10fully certified AWS folks in
(09:08):
the world, started a company in2010 while I was getting ready
to transition out of themilitary.
That effectively what we builtwas Dropbox for construction
services companies to sharelarge files in the field, over
2G cellular.
This was before software as aservice and the likes of Dropbox
(09:31):
was a thing.
And, of course, I wasn't smartenough to think of a new
operating model, like DrewHouston, the founder of Dropbox,
who figured out hey, I canbuild this once and have
millions of people all consumethis infrastructure.
We were building it over andover again for companies, which
was a sweet little gig.
We could charge a few hundredgrand a pop, and when you're in
(09:54):
your early twenties that's not abad gig with a few employees.
So I sold that in-.
What would you have done, chris, in your twenties with 200
grand?
Speaker 2 (10:01):
a pop.
I sold that in 20.
What would you have done, chris, in your 20s, with $200,000 to
pop?
I'm not sure, alan.
Speaker 3 (10:07):
I don't know, you know what?
There's a reason God did notlet me have that much money
early on.
Speaker 2 (10:12):
God doesn't give you more than you can handle, Chris.
Speaker 3 (10:14):
That's why my first job was $38,000 a year
Apparently.
Speaker 2 (10:16):
Colin can handle much more than either you or I.
Speaker 1 (10:20):
Yeah, well, yeah, you still go through the bad
financial decisions.
Speaker 2 (10:25):
What kind of car did you buy?
I certainly did.
What kind of car did you buy?
Speaker 1 (10:29):
What'd you?
Speaker 2 (10:29):
buy What'd you buy.
Speaker 1 (10:32):
For me it was an Audi RS7 was my sort of bread and
butter.
I brought it back over fromGermany where my last base was.
I wrapped my time with with uhwith ramstein and with nato uh,
both of which are they're basedout of ramstein.
Uh shipped the rs7 over, wasliving in a crummy apartment on
(10:54):
grand avenue in saint paul,minnesota, and that first
snowfall came when the snow isup over the roof of your car and
I thought this, this is toomuch car to park on a public
street.
Speaker 2 (11:06):
So I sold it to my buddy.
Speaker 1 (11:07):
I just moved.
Why didn't?
Speaker 2 (11:09):
you just move.
Speaker 3 (11:10):
Yeah, I mean, all this time I'm thinking Collins
just got it going on.
Speaker 2 (11:15):
I'm like it's a pretty simple equation here.
Speaker 1 (11:19):
Yeah, yeah, you know, I was trying to finish up
finish up my degree and I soldit to a buddy for $3,000 less
than I bought it for and Ifigured that's a pretty good for
a car.
You're a good guy.
So, yeah, I sold that in 14,signed my life away in a
non-compete from 14 to 16.
I was young and naive.
(11:40):
I didn't know what anon-compete was.
I signed a non-compete thatsaid not only will you not start
a business in the tech space,you won't start any business for
two years.
So I consulted out in the BayArea with a few of the bigger
organizations out there, helpingthem with their journey to the
cloud.
Speaker 3 (11:56):
Consulted from Minneapolis or moved out there.
Speaker 1 (11:59):
I would.
Actually I would fly out thereevery week and I paid my buddy,
dan, who is chief of staff forone of the huge tech companies
out there.
I paid him $400 a month tosleep on his couch and eat his
groceries and I think theirhouse was like 16 grand a month
to rent out.
Uh, so I I had a pretty, prettygood deal, so it was cheaper
(12:20):
for me to fly in every week,crash on their couch and fly
home than it was to get a placethere, so you could have driven
the car out there.
Speaker 3 (12:28):
Let's go back to that experience.
Yeah, you could have driven the7-0.
You could have just left itthere, you know, what I'm saying
, not for nothing, man, I'mtelling you somebody in San
Francisco would have bought thatthing in a heartbeat.
Well, we're going to talk aboutthat later.
So again, here you go.
You signed the non-compete.
Here we are in 14.
No kids, no family, no wife.
Right, you're still doing yourthing.
(12:48):
Did you have a plan?
This is where I want to getback to this.
Did you have a plan?
Did you say, oh man, I'm goingto get here, I'm going to get to
this?
Or, with things just coming atyou, you're like I'm going to
take this problem and solve it.
Speaker 1 (13:03):
Take this problem and solve it.
Yeah, Honestly, the originalcompany was called Cloud CTO.
It morphed into that.
Originally it was supposed tobe just advisory for companies
to think about adopting thecloud, but the cloud was so new
back then that I was gettingchased out of boardrooms with
pitchforks and torches.
I mean, people were saying whothe hell are you Snot-nosed kid
(13:24):
telling me I need to abandon mydata centers so quickly?
I realized the only way we'remaking headway is with
construction companies, becausethey have a pain that can only
be solved with the cloud.
So we built that solution andthen just marketed the crap out
of it that.
Speaker 3 (13:48):
So you pivoted to that because you saw your
original idea was, you had theforesight to see that paying for
the cloud by the minute, orbasically renting the cloud, if
you will, and picking upsubsections was the way you're
going to go, and you saw thatthis was your niche, and so is
that how you started to figureout how to grow that one.
Speaker 1 (14:03):
Yeah, it was.
Once we had one successfulimplementation under our belt, I
knew that every other servicescompany that was thinking
logically needed this, becausethere's so much pain involved or
there was back in the day withneeding to make sure all of your
plans and diagrams are on yourLenovo laptop with the rugged
case on it before you load itinto the truck and go to the job
(14:25):
site.
And guess what?
You always forget something,and so the solution back then
was to drive back to home base,get it and come back to the job
site, and so you know.
It was simple in nature.
It didn't do backups oranything smart.
It was just a place to landyour stuff and make it
(14:45):
accessible over crappy cellularconnection.
Uh, it would still take threeminutes to download, right, but
that's.
That was a heck of a lot betterthan an hour and a half round
trip from.
You know a plot of land you'rebuilding on to home base, so um,
so how'd you get people to buyinto this?
Speaker 3 (15:02):
right, you had this great idea.
Let's talk about how you, youknow, how'd you get people to
buy into this?
Right, you had this great idea.
Let's talk about how you, youknow, how'd you get people to
buy it?
Because, back to being anentrepreneur.
Right, you got it.
It's cash is King, but you'vegot to have leads.
So sales is the number one.
She's the queen.
Yep, sales is queen.
How'd you find out how to?
How'd you figure out how tosell it?
Speaker 1 (15:19):
Let them try it.
So I I had spin off thesmallest, simplest bits of it.
We made clonable.
So when I was going into asales meeting with people, I
would spin off a clone for themwith their domain.
I'd stick their logo on it.
And while we're talking to someof the typically older gray men
(15:42):
in suits who had been doingthis for a long, time.
Speaker 3 (15:45):
Oh, you're talking about Alan, alan's old.
Speaker 1 (15:47):
I was referring to Alan specifically.
Speaker 2 (15:50):
I will be, I will take that, but anyway it was
sort of a.
Speaker 1 (15:55):
They didn't understand the philosophy of
what the cloud could do.
But if it, if I could show themand I would say you know I'm
going to, we got this.
You know, you got a 2G cellulardevice.
Go out into the parking lot,I'm going to load this file up,
you're going to watch itpopulate, you're going to
(16:16):
download it and you come backand tell me if it worked or not.
And that was that was reallywhat it took back then was them
just seeing it for themselves,and then they would piece
together all of theinefficiencies within their
business that they knew existed.
Speaker 3 (16:29):
Let's break that one down, because I love this.
This translates across anyindustry.
Anything you want to do, I knowyou want to talk data and we
will.
But you know what, colin?
What you figured out from beinga grease monkey on a flight
line and seeing some incrediblepeople, from being a grease
monkey on a flight line andseeing some incredible people is
that if you can give somebody asolution that makes their life
easier and then prove to them itmakes their life easier, it's
(16:51):
an easy, no-brainer sale.
Back to the uh, you know I'mthinking about it's the qbc
stuff.
Hey, I'm the big guy, so let'sgo back to this.
So you say hey, dude, I can sithere and talk all day long or
you can take this thing, go outinto the parking lot and 2g,
just so everybody uh gets a feelfor that.
2g.
Today we're all in 5g.
That's a big number, right.
(17:13):
Two to five, I think that'sthree more I do, I don't know
again it's this minis.
I don't know how to do it, soyou had to go out there and do
that.
How many times would they comeback in and go?
No shit, I think I, I, I thinkyou're full of shit, you're
lying to me, or how many timesthey come and go?
Speaker 1 (17:30):
got it, let's do it I mean there was, there was
always hesitation, just becausethe, the, the methodology was
new, right, the cloud was so new.
People just didn't really.
I mean people would literallylook up at this point, up at the
sky.
Some, some people still do thattoday.
Speaker 3 (17:46):
I do, guilty.
Speaker 1 (17:59):
Talking to old guys, groups who would come in and
they would design a solution forthem, and they'd say, okay,
cool, it's going to cost sevenfigures and here's what you'll
get.
And there's a lot of riskassociated with that, especially
when you don't understand theunderpinnings of what makes the
technology work.
So for me, I came in and said,look, yeah, I was early on in
this.
I've got a few turns of thelathe so far.
(18:21):
I built this thing.
It's self-contained andself-managed, so you don't need
to really worry about how itworks.
Similar to you don't thinkabout how your operating system
on your computer works At leastI don't.
So go out there and I'm goingto show you and you're going to
tell me if it solves your painor not.
Right, Imagine doing it fromyour 1500 truck at a job site
(18:44):
and you tell me if you thinkit'll bring value to your group.
And there's the occasionalcouple of them who are just like
, nah, we'll keep doing it theway we do it.
But yeah, a good number of themsaid you know what this is, I
get it.
And it's not theoretical andit's not just a 30 page
statement of work talking abouta consulting plan.
It's just something that'salready here that I can begin
(19:07):
leveraging tomorrow.
Speaker 2 (19:09):
So it's not really in the cloud.
Speaker 3 (19:10):
Huh.
Well, again you're pointing up.
Isn't that funny?
Everybody points up God cloud.
Speaker 2 (19:16):
Well, clouds are above us.
What happens if it's a clearday?
Speaker 3 (19:25):
There's no data, then I don't get data.
So I'm sure there's been a lotof that.
But think about if you could goin front of a customer or a
potential client and show themand proof of concept them that
quickly.
I think that's a genius sellingproposition.
Right, you came in, you did thepre-work, you walked into that
sales call and you had done thatpre-work.
Don't tell me that people don'tgo.
(19:46):
Huh, this guy actually listenedto me, because what do people
say, even in customer servicebut in sales, right, if you're
trying to sell me on something,prove to me you know who I am,
prove to me you know my biz andcollege, saying I'm going to
come in and show you not only doI know your business, but I
know how I can make yourbusiness better.
Speaker 2 (20:07):
I'm still and I get like this with every guest that
has a similar path.
Like you said, he's a guyturning wrenches on a B1 bomber
sees an opportunity.
We've all seen opportunities.
I mean, how many of us are like, oh, I got this idea, but we
never do anything about it.
So he has the idea, it's verytechnical, he's got to educate
(20:27):
himself, he's got to findsomebody probably to build the
program, then he's got toidentify who the market is and
then he's got to figure out howto get in front of these people
and he's got to figure out howto sell it.
I mean, it's just unbelievable.
It's a huge curve that you wentthrough in a really short
amount of.
I mean, did you have any sortof modeling, any sort of
(20:47):
coaching, any sort of mentoring,or did you just freaking brute
force it until you figured itout?
Speaker 1 (20:55):
Well, I mean, what I'll say is um, growing up,
honestly, I didn't know thatbeing an entrepreneur was an
option until my dad was braveenough to do it.
Um, dad was also army.
Um, he, he's still in bettershape than I am.
Uh, he's more disciplined thanI'll ever imagine being.
(21:16):
He had a storied career atmedtronic.
Uh, inventing pacemakers thathe he's got up on his patent
wall and he helped design thethe first wall the, the Keurig
coffee machine.
He worked with the contractmanufacturer who designed that.
Speaker 3 (21:31):
How about that, dude?
You're telling me thepacemakers and Keurigs are in
the same vein.
Yeah, get it.
It's like oh, did that vein?
Oh yeah, I got it All right.
Speaker 1 (21:41):
Yeah, but anyway, like you know, when I was All
right, let's go back to thisagain.
Speaker 3 (21:45):
So back to the entrepreneurial thing.
You didn't know it until yourdad did it, and then you went
huh, that's something.
Yeah, Was he the mentor?
Speaker 1 (21:53):
He was yeah, and he, and he still is to this day.
I mean, he, he, my dad's thesmartest person I know, and I've
met a lot of smart people inthis industry, but he's got
three master's degrees.
He's, he's just incrediblyintelligent.
And so he went from this, thiscareer, where you need three
master's degrees in engineering,to being a a master electrician
(22:13):
.
He said you know, I want to getout of the rat race, I want to
get into home services, and hestarted an electrical
contracting company that becamethe most popular electrical
contracting company in Minnesotaafter a few short years, and I
got to watch him do that.
Speaker 3 (22:28):
I got to watch him.
How am I talking to Colin?
I want to talk to his dad.
You could?
Speaker 2 (22:31):
be his dad, Chris, if only you applied yourself.
You know, what, Honestly, if Iquit?
Speaker 3 (22:36):
because I think your dad's a better.
I know your dad's in bettershape than I am, that's awesome,
all right.
So your dad was clearly yourmentor, so you would go to him.
But back to Alan's originalpoint, because I love to hear
this too and I think we all do.
Speaker 1 (22:54):
How did, how did you make that leap?
I mean, how did you keep movingup?
You know, I think there's.
There is benefit to being youngand dumb, Uh, and that's.
I think there's.
There's a lot of that.
I think people just apply itincorrectly a lot of the time.
But for it was like okay, Ihave a safety net with the
military, I flew for a living,or flew on planes for a living,
so my life was tax-free and perdiem money, so I knew that I
(23:18):
would be able to afford a10-hour-a-week engineer if I
needed help.
But for me it was really justlike I obsess over things that
I'm interested in, and I becameabsolutely obsessed over the
idea of learning how to createtechnology.
I'd never done it before, but Iwould.
We'd be flying over the countryof Africa with a bunch of Navy
(23:40):
SEALs in the back and I'd bestretched out in a hammock in
the tail cone of the one 30learning how to write Ruby code
or JavaScript.
Speaker 3 (23:49):
So the first thing I just told myself.
So you started a business andAlan asked so which one were you
?
Were you the technician, theone who was really technical?
Were you the?
Speaker 1 (24:02):
great sales guy, or were you?
Speaker 2 (24:03):
the manager.
Where were you?
I was the visionary.
Speaker 1 (24:05):
Yeah, I was the.
I was the visionary dreamer andstill am today.
I got good enough at thetechnology to make something
barely work.
I'll put it that way.
Speaker 3 (24:14):
So you hired for your weaknesses and you brought in
help or whatever, you contractedor whatever.
Speaker 1 (24:21):
Absolutely yeah, and I'll still do that today.
Right, I have to talk tech fora living, but you wouldn't.
None of my engineers wouldwould trust me to implement
anything for one of theircustomers.
So I knew that, if I couldunderstand technical nuances,
but speak, speak about thosedeeply technical things with
(24:43):
business stakeholders thatthat's where the money is made,
because business stakeholdersare the ones who write the
checks.
Speaker 3 (24:49):
So let's talk about this concept.
If you don't know the details,how can you be so good at
putting this in?
This is the interesting conceptthat I always think about, like
, hey, chris, you don't knoweverything about a house.
I'm like, yeah, but I reallyenjoy it.
Well, do you know everything?
No, that's what I count on myguys to do right At this point
in my life, in my career, whatI'm doing.
(25:10):
So, as you're doing that, howdo you know that these guys are
doing what you want them to doand how do you get them to buy
into what you're seeing?
Speaker 1 (25:21):
I educated myself enough to know, at least for the
early days of the platform,that what they were building was
legit.
I could read through their codeand understand generally.
Even if it wasn't optimized orperfect, I knew that it was
flowing how it needed to flow.
Speaker 3 (25:37):
All right.
So to your point then.
That's what I love, so youcould come in and let them know
every once in a while I'm thepirate of the ship and I'm the
lead of the ship, and every oncein a while, while I can dip in
and let you know that you didn'tdo it, just right.
So sharpen that up.
So they, they trusted you, theybelieved in you, and that's how
you get your team to kind offollow in Right Nice.
Speaker 2 (25:59):
So we fast forward to where you are today.
You're a data analytics guru.
Is that fair to say?
Speaker 1 (26:07):
I, I, I play a.
I play a guy who's a dataanalytics guru.
No, yeah, I mean, at this pointwe're coming on year 18 in this
industry.
It's come a hell of a long way.
Cloud is obviously a lot moreself-introductory than it was
back then.
People generally get it, and sonow, really, when I started
(26:30):
North Labs in 16, after thathiatus, I wanted to keep it
going, but I realized veryquickly that migrating cloud
systems or getting people intothe cloud is a very thankless
job.
It wasn't a profit center, itwas merely a conversation around
cost, and anytime you're onlyhaving a conversation around
(26:52):
cost, people are scrutinizinghow much time you're spending,
you're generating, and so I knewthat if I switched more into a
profit facing segment of thecloud market, that it would be
easier for me to have thosevalue-based conversations, and
that's why we very quicklydedicated ourselves to the
(27:16):
analytics and, yes, we weredoing AI and machine learning
way back then.
Obviously, it's a lot morepopular now, but we understood
that if we could use the data, acompany already had to help
follow how a dollar flowsthrough the business to increase
production efficiency, toincrease profits.
(27:39):
Now you are a strategic partnerto those companies and that's
where we went.
Speaker 3 (27:46):
All right, here's my big question.
Give me a good client who issomebody that says boy, I got to
have Colin Graves and tell ushow you took them from X to the
stratosphere of going to AugustaNational.
Speaker 1 (28:01):
So I've got a group in Minneapolis I can't name it
because they're not.
They're aligned with thedefense industry.
They came to us and they saidthey make like window films for
like UV protection and energyefficiency.
They do a lot of HVAC stuff.
They're a $7 billion Europeancompany.
Speaker 3 (28:18):
That's a B 7B.
Yeah, that's a.
Speaker 1 (28:20):
B Yep and they came to us and they said hey.
Colin, our, our scrap rate is24, meaning 24 of the time the
stuff coming off of our linesgets thrown into the scrap heap.
Wow, it's wasted money andthat's wow that sounds.
Speaker 3 (28:37):
Tell me one out of four.
Yeah right, I mean I'm again.
I'm really good at math.
Good job, chris.
Thank you yeah, all right.
Talk to us and so get the bigbrains on.
Chris.
Speaker 1 (28:48):
They had brought in other consulting firms to try
and you know, plan stuff out.
It didn't didn't really pan out.
I went in with my, my littleteam of you know.
My whole mission has been Iwanted to create the Navy seals
of the cloud uh, elite operatorswho just get shit done and
don't brag about it and don'tkill you with powerpoints.
Um, amen.
(29:09):
So we, we grabbed their data,we unified it into our system.
We quickly realized that itwasn't their practice in general
.
It was one what's calledextruder head on one of their
sub assemblies.
So it would.
It would coil out metal, right,it extrude metal filament when
(29:30):
that was getting too hot.
Everything that it touched thenthereafter was scrap because it
would burn the product.
So we realized that and that'swhere a lot of groups would stop
.
What we did was we implementeda system that would say all
right, when we're five degreesshort of that threshold, we're
going to notify someone.
When we're two degrees short ofthat threshold, we're going to
(29:54):
slow down the assembly line by50% until the extruder head
cools down, because 50% isbetter than 0%, right?
And then if it did reach thatthreshold, we would trigger an
auto shutdown of the line to atleast avoid all of that finished
(30:14):
material from getting burnedand thrown into the scrap heap.
But that one change.
We were in there for abouteight months.
It saved them $40 million inoperating income in year one.
Speaker 3 (30:26):
I got one word Badass Holy shit.
Is that two words?
That's one.
Oh my God, dude, that's awesome.
What a great story.
Because when you talk aboutdoing that, you got the
precursor.
You started to find because wealways talk about things,
especially when you startmeasuring your KPIs, key
(30:46):
performance indicators in yourbusiness Many of them are
lagging indicators, notprecursor indicators or future
indicators, and in your case,you found the future or the feed
forward lag.
That's an engineering.
Talk To it the feed forward.
Thank you for dumbing it downfor me.
Chris, I know I'm trying reallyhard, so that's amazing.
(31:07):
Wow, what a fun thing to workon and find and really dig into.
But it sounds so simple whenyou look at it in hindsight,
right.
Speaker 1 (31:16):
I mean it usually is.
It's just you're not.
You are.
Most organizations already haveall the data they need to run
their business more effectively.
They just don't know how toleverage it, because the
leveraging component of it isvery difficult to unify data
across systems, to create acommon operating picture of that
data and then to actually askthe right questions.
(31:36):
That's the biggest thing isthere's so many tools out there
that will show you one littlesliver of the universe within
Salesforce or HubSpot orwherever, and these companies
have been using that as aselling feature for a long time.
The problem is it's onlyshowing you the context that
exists within that tool, whichis a small fragment of your
(31:59):
entire value chain.
That tool can't possiblyunderstand how your business is
actually structured and actuallyoperates.
So by doing what we do, wecreate what we call a command
center.
So now, where all that dataknows how to speak to each other
and we're able to ask questionsthat involves data from
different domains and paint thatpicture for them, so today, how
(32:23):
many customers are you workingwith actively?
We've done over a thousandprojects for a little over 200
customers, lifetime Actively.
Right now we've got severaldozen, including our first
military contract.
So it only took me 17 years toland my first military.
Speaker 3 (32:43):
Way to go.
Way to get back there, man.
Yeah, I thought that'd be your,that'd be your cherry right.
Speaker 1 (32:47):
You're like basically success yeah.
Speaker 2 (32:50):
That's exactly what you say, Chris.
Overnight success 16.
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (32:54):
I do the same thing.
Yeah, I've been at, you know,big guy, so for me and here I am
yeah, look at me.
Oh, my god, you get your asskicked right.
Brother, I hear you.
Yeah, you wish.
Sometimes you kind of wish, youknow.
I'm gonna ask you this if youhad to go back to any point in
your career, money no object.
(33:15):
When did you have the most fun?
Speaker 1 (33:25):
flying, flying around with, with special operations
forces in foreign countries andI agree with you, know we, we
would being the air force right,you get access to a little bit
more budget than the rest of thebranches.
I think it's 50 51 cents ofevery dod dollar goes to the air
force you're, you're right, Ididn't know that, so Air.
Speaker 3 (33:43):
Force.
You're telling stories insidethe, but for many of the people
outside they don't know that oneI have a many friends who are
out of the Air Force.
But yeah, I know that.
Speaker 1 (33:51):
Yeah, I almost joined the Marine Corps and my Army
father grabbed me by theshoulders and said I will disown
you.
You're joining the Air Force oryou're not joining anything.
And I'm glad I did, because webroke down in the Seychelles
more than a, more than a halfdozen times during my scare
quotes for the listeners whenyou go back to a.
Speaker 3 (34:13):
So Colin's been at this for 17 years 16 years and
I've been at it for 17.
And I talked to many otherbusiness owners and I will tell
everybody the same story.
When you look back on it, yougo well today, no, screw that.
You're not as happy as today,is your?
Your the days you had when itwas very simple, when I was
turning wrenches or I was justout there and it was six o'clock
(34:34):
in the afternoon and I wasfinished something like, oh shit
, we're finishing something atsix o'clock in the afternoon,
but it's a bathroom and I'mwiping this thing down with my
guy.
That's the most gratification Icould have ever gotten.
Now I've grown to the point now.
Again, six million dollars doingall this.
I don't get to see all of itanymore.
But you ask me money, no object, I want to see that finished
(34:55):
product and I love it when I cansee it, feel it, touch it.
Wait, my, my kids always makefun of me when I walk into a
place.
My kids laugh.
They're like hey, dad, youalways have to rub your hands on
the walls.
So I said I just want to makesure they're all finished smooth
.
That's all I'm looking for.
Speaker 2 (35:10):
Right.
Speaker 3 (35:11):
So it's just a beautiful thing.
So, colin, you obviously havebeen grounded.
You got that, you're in.
What's going on?
How can people find you, howcan people find your company?
Because we've got to get to ourfamous four questions.
I want to hear about the racecars.
Oh shit.
Speaker 2 (35:26):
Hang on.
Speaker 3 (35:27):
We're going to have five questions.
We're going back to race carsShit, how can people find you,
colin?
Speaker 1 (35:32):
Sure, I am without social media other than LinkedIn
.
Colin Graves on LinkedIn TwoL's Graves like dead people
Always happy to connect.
Our website is Northlabscom and, yeah, that's where we exist on
the internet.
Speaker 2 (35:53):
What's the typical size of the?
I mean, it sounds like you'veworked with some huge companies,
but do you work with companiesof all sizes?
Speaker 1 (36:01):
We do as long as the use case fits.
I mean, we're definitely notthe cheapest group on the planet
.
Our smallest customer right nowis about $10 million in revenue
.
Our largest is $1.3 billion.
So we're across the gamut, aslong as the use case fits.
Our whole shtick is we bringpre-designed data solutions to
(36:25):
our customers based off ofindustry or function.
So think revenue, intelligence,hr analytics, but then also
packages for manufacturing,industrial, higher education,
biopharma, so we can plug thisstuff in and have it running
within 45 days as opposed to 12to 18 months you take all that,
(36:46):
that's impressive.
Speaker 2 (36:46):
He is impressive because he used words I didn't I
just want to do, I just want torebuke and rebuff, I just can't
believe it's not really in thecloud, but anyway, let's talk
when is so?
When are we going to hear aboutthe race cars?
All right, let's go.
Speaker 3 (36:58):
All right, colin, one of the things we talked about
before we got on the air wasthat you like race cars.
Speaker 1 (37:04):
I do like race cars.
Speaker 3 (37:05):
We have an affinity for that here too, so we want to
talk about that for just twominutes, because we're almost
running out of time.
Cool Go, what do you race?
Speaker 1 (37:13):
Yeah.
So I grew up racing go-karts,did some of the regional scene
for that.
I raced 600 600 classmotorcycles while I was in the
military, which?
Speaker 2 (37:24):
now makes my stomach do somersaults when I watch it.
Oh, thank god.
Oh my god.
Speaker 3 (37:27):
Those days like going on a 40 foot ladder for me dude
yeah no, I'm done, yeah, 24foot ladder.
No, I'm done too done with that.
Speaker 1 (37:34):
Yeah, and today I race in two series.
Uh, I race uh radicals, whichare uh sort of formula style
cars, high downforce, opencockpit, manufactured in Europe.
They are by far the mostpopular racing car, as far as
I'm concerned, these days.
Great way for people to getinto racing.
(37:56):
You go really, really fast andyou get that downforce effect
that you're usually missing onmost race cars.
And then I am.
I did just get accepted to.
I'm now a reserve driver in theLamborghini series with a group
called Dax and Gray down herein Scottsdale.
Speaker 3 (38:16):
All right, brother.
Well, when you make it to RoadAtlanta, you got to look us up,
man.
Because, I was waiting to hearabout that because I got a bunch
of buddies who are in the sscaand uh road.
Atlanta is right here outsideof atlanta, but actually, um,
only 30 minutes from where.
We live very close, and I havebeen there and I did not realize
how cool that industry was.
Yeah, I mean, I mean I grew upin a family that, uh, all we did
(38:38):
was work on cars and trucksbecause they were a trucking
family, and I decided to go tothe houses because that's all we
did was work on houses.
But that's where we are.
Let's get going.
Colin, give us a book you'drecommend to all of our audience
Show it.
Show it talk, it make it happenthis book is amazing.
(38:59):
Race it in.
Speaker 1 (39:00):
It's called Simplify by Robert Koch and Greg Lockwood
.
I'm reading it for about theninth time.
It really talks about positionsimplifying in businesses.
I think that particularlybusinesses in my industry try to
be too many things to too manydifferent buyers.
Try to be too many things totoo many different buyers so
(39:24):
they end up being nothing to noone, and so my core ethos has
always been solve one problemsuper well and everyone will
tell their friends about it, andthat's sort of the philosophy I
try and follow All right.
Speaker 2 (39:37):
The book is really geared towards what you're
offering your client base, or isit how you're running your
business as well?
Speaker 1 (39:44):
It's how you're running your business, too.
It's how you yeah, how do youharness your internal processes
to cater to a simpler messagethan you have today, right?
So it's really about how thebest businesses in the world, uh
, have succeeded over over time,right?
Speaker 3 (40:05):
by identifying.
Have you ever seen the movie?
Uh, beautiful mind.
Let me tell you about mybusiness a little bit.
Um, and I need to read thisbook called simplify because to
scale to, I mean, I mean, don'tget me wrong, guys are you
russell crowe with the writingon the windows and stuff?
Honestly, if you look at ouroffice here in the headquarters
(40:25):
at Norcross Georgia.
Yes, I've been in every windowand every whiteboard you could
ever find and I scribble theshit out of it and I've taught
my guys to do it.
But the same thing is that tobuild a complicated business is
hard to scale.
To build a simplified businessis easy to scale.
It makes your life easier andit's so hard to get away from it
and it's so hard to simplify.
(40:48):
And that's what Colin'sbasically telling you, and I
think that book will too.
You got to understand thatbecause it's hard to do it,
because you want to solve a lotof problems and I you know,
Colin, that's the one thing yougot from you, man, you love
solving problems.
Speaker 2 (41:07):
I problems and I you know, colin, that's the one
thing you got from you man, youlove solving problems, I mean
you have.
Speaker 3 (41:11):
You have all your life and we all love to solve
every.
He fixes things from b1 bombersto your data data, yeah, yeah,
I mean, he can do anything.
And your race cars?
Yeah, because he doesn't havepeople working on, well, maybe
he does something.
All right, should we ask thesecond question?
Sure?
Did you ever win a race?
No, I'm kidding.
Speaker 1 (41:24):
Not in the latest series.
I finished on the podium.
Speaker 3 (41:27):
Oh, there you go.
So you're shooting champagneeverywhere.
All right, nice, All right.
Number two question.
Speaker 2 (41:39):
I almost remember it we're customer service freaks.
Speaker 3 (41:42):
And what is a customer service pet peeve of
yours when you are the customer?
Ooh.
Speaker 1 (41:51):
Um, just had a snafu with, with uh, with capital one
not too long ago.
So this is, this is top of mindand it it does have to do with
data, I think.
But making me repeat the sameanswer every time, you transfer
me to the next guy who's tryingto help me solve something and
you make me answer the samequestions that he did, it makes
(42:13):
me absolutely blood boiling, mad.
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (42:17):
Yeah, that's a good one, and you can't blame the
people.
You got to blame the processbecause they don't know man, it
just sucks All right.
What's a favorite feature ofyour house?
Speaker 1 (42:26):
And where do you live ?
So I live in Scottsdale, that'sArizona.
Speaker 3 (42:31):
Scottsdale, Arizona.
Yeah, we're worldwide.
Speaker 1 (42:33):
Yes, scottsdale, arizona.
So I live squarely in thedesert.
Favorite feature of my house,uh, is our, is our front, is our
front family room, you knowit's?
Uh, it's where our our 14 monthold hangs out and plays, it's
where I keep all my wine oh wehave?
(42:55):
We have our nicest, our nicestleather furniture that the kid
likes to chew on uh, your 14month old plays with the wine.
Speaker 2 (43:03):
Is that what I'm hearing?
Speaker 3 (43:04):
100 all day long maybe in a couple years, huh
yeah well, not the best wine,but, uh, as an italian family,
um, they're very proud to saythat uh, chris started drinking
at six, eight, uh, six years old, and you were helping with the
bathtub wine.
I was helping with the bathtubwine where they're like heyito,
look at him, oh, he likes it, helikes it.
My eyes were coming out of mylike.
(43:26):
Just imagine the old cartoons,your eyes are over your head,
yeah, so that's awesome and a14-month-old.
Congratulations, brother,because Thank you.
Alan and I are on the other side.
Alan's waiting for grandkids.
Speaker 2 (43:37):
I'm going hold on.
Speaker 3 (43:38):
I got 10 more years.
I'm good Hang on.
Speaker 2 (43:41):
I don't think it's 10 , buddy.
Speaker 3 (43:42):
Oh, it better be 10, bro, you're in denial, I am in
denial, all right, last one,kyle.
Last question.
Speaker 2 (43:48):
You ready.
He's never had one of these.
You had to have it.
Speaker 3 (43:51):
He has a nightmare story.
Speaker 2 (43:52):
Everything he does works out.
Speaker 3 (44:03):
I don't know house.
Did you get death?
Speaker 1 (44:04):
dismemberment.
Did you shoot a nail throughyour hand?
Yeah, a hundred times.
Yeah, I've got uh.
So you're asking what's the,what's the worst thing?
Speaker 3 (44:08):
worst diy nightmare story.
Not a contractor, because I amone, I know we do a bunch of
something you did okay, um, well, I have.
Speaker 1 (44:18):
I have a scar on my cheek that's faded with time.
As DIY I was working on a plane, but I was working on it,
supposed to be working on itmyself.
I was inside of the over.
It's called the overwingfairing of the B-1.
So when it sweeps its wingsback to fly over the speed of
(44:38):
sound, the wings tuck into thisfairing.
It's got a bunch of hydraulicshit in it.
It's messy and nasty and loudand I needed to depressurize the
system.
All the systems are pressurizedfor fluid flow.
The plane can fly upside downall that stuff.
I had a very, very experiencedcrew chief come out and say he's
(44:59):
from the middle of nowhere,Louisiana.
He said hey, brother, I, I candepressurize that system for you
, hey watch this so you don'thave to, you don't have to crawl
down and do it yourself I saidsure to help you you know what.
You know what you're doing,let's go ahead and do it.
Well, there's two systems oneither side, one and four, and
two and three.
Well, I needed onedepressurized.
(45:20):
He depressurized four didn'ttell me I was screwing off the,
the hub of a reservoir.
There's a sensor inside of thereservoir for fluid quantity, uh
, but it had hundreds of psi ofpressure on it.
It exploded.
So it was like white hotshrapnel, uh, and you know.
(45:42):
So I'm working on this.
All of a sudden I hear a veryloud bang.
My vision goes white.
I thought I was dead for asecond oh no, my eyes rolled out
of the overwing fairing.
Thank god for osha.
I rolled out onto a standinstead of falling 16 feet to
the ground, and when I stood upI I climbed down the stand.
I turned and looked at Johnnywas his name and he looked at me
(46:04):
bug-eyed and I went what'sgoing on?
And I had literally a piece ofthe sensor hanging out of my
face.
Oh my God, I looked like acyborg and that was the last
time I ever trusted and didn'tverify.
So even now, today, I alwaystrust but verify.
No matter how much faith youhave in someone, it doesn't take
(46:26):
them that long to verify thatthey did the shit they said they
were going to do.
Speaker 2 (46:31):
Colin wins.
Three and a half years Colinwins.
That is incredible.
Speaker 3 (46:35):
He had shrapnel off an airplane, sitting at his face
, looking like a cyborg.
Speaker 2 (46:40):
It's the first time I've ever heard somebody say
thank God for OSHA, All right,but just the fact that it's a
classic Southern.
Hey, watch this.
I got this.
I got this.
Speaker 3 (46:52):
Hold my beer, hold my beer, I'll take the pressure
off.
I got you, bro.
You know what, alan Colin?
This has been amazing.
Go hook up Colin Graves onLinkedIn.
Guys, if you didn't learnsomething, man, this has been
dynamite, figuring out somestuff.
If you're not a 5 billiondollar company, you're not a 10
million dollar company, it don'tmatter.
Listen to what Colin talkedabout how he grew his business
(47:15):
to the point he was, and thereare some great lessons in there.
Man, pick it all up, make ithappen.
We gotta get back.
We're gonna come back next week.
Let's make it happen.
We got to get back.
We're going to come back nextweek.
Let's make it happen, Cheerseverybody, Thank you for
listening to this episode of theSmall Business Safari.
Remember your positive attitudewill help you achieve that
higher altitude you're lookingfor in the wild world of small
business ownership.
And until next time, make it agreat day you.
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