High Agency

Mo Dhaliwal

[00:00:03] Welcome to High Agency, igniting conversations with inspiring people, leading transformative change. In our rapidly evolving business landscape, digital transformation has become a critical imperative for companies of all sizes. Studies show that 70% of organizations have some sort of digital transformation strategy in place or are working on one. However, the journey is far from simple. Only 16% of executives say their company's digital transformations have successfully improved performance or equipped them for long-term changes. At the heart of this transformation lies automation and artificial intelligence. Now, these technologies are reshaping industries with 45% of current paid activities potentially being automated by this technology. So, the impact is profound. AI could potentially deliver additional economic output of around $13 trillion by 2030, which boosts the global GDP by about 1. 2% annually. But for small businesses, the stakes are even higher. Because 80% of small business owners acknowledge the importance of digital transformation, many struggle with the implementation due to limited resources or expertise. And this is where automation agencies step in. Bridging the gap between cutting-edge technology and practical business applications. So, in today's conversation, we're going to explore how these trends are shaping the future of work and business operations. And learn about our guest, Joanna Lee, who is a co-founder of Switchboard, an automation agency. She's the COO, and in this role, she helps small businesses leverage automation and AI to boost efficiency. And with over a decade of experience in project development, she's also the CEO of Switchboard. Through her work in project management and user-centred design, Joanna combines her tech-savvy and operational expertise to streamline processes for growing companies. She's a Vancouver native with a global perspective. She's passionate about using technology to solve real-world business challenges. And she empowers teams to work smarter. And I'm told she also is really good at Mario Kart. Welcome, Joanna.

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Joanna Li

[00:02:19] Thank you so much, Mo.

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Mo Dhaliwal

[00:02:20] So, before we get into it. I think. Yeah. So when we first connected, I was already gushing to you about Switchboard, how much I appreciate the company and not only what you do, but how you do it. But before we get to that, I'm really curious about your story, because it is a very technical and potentially nerdy value proposition that you guys have. And so I feel like there might be actually some kinship here, but I'd love to hear about how you actually arrived at Switchboard. Like, what did you do before?

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Joanna Li

[00:02:55] Yeah, thank you for the question.

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Mo Dhaliwal

[00:02:57] Or as a little girl playing video games, were you like, one day I'm going to start an automation agency?

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Joanna Li

[00:03:02] I mean, the nerd level was real from the start. And I think I've always had a keen interest in, well, keeping up with my brother, for one, when it came to video games and just exposure to computers and technology. When, like, ICQ and all these things became really prevalent when I was coming up in high school. And so I entered a tech program. Which was the first of its kind when it started. It's now part of SFU's series, like, SEAT program for interaction design. And so just kind of leaning into this pretty early space when a lot of people didn't know what UX was. There wasn't job roles for that. I think they were still defining what that curriculum and the program was with the teachers that, you know, we had there. But it was a really eye-opening experience to pivot the conversation in tech around the user. And focus more on the user experience. And so it was just such a nice, I don't know, like, revelation in how to approach things. And it's not just applicable to tech. And I think that's where, you know, I was working actually in government at the time when I was still in uni. And I ended up, after I graduated, shifted into the immigration sector and helping work on some of their programming. And I think that was an interesting time because, you know, like, we were just developing websites that weren't just the Ministry of Attorney General's, like, page where, you know, users-not shining examples of UX.

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Mo Dhaliwal

[00:04:38] Exactly, right?

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Joanna Li

[00:04:39] I was like, why am I having to justify updating content for a program on the Ministry of Attorney General's website? No one is going to think to look there. So it was an interesting time because I think this was like that. A moment where digital transformation and government started. Like, the UK already had their portal that was an amazing best-in-class example for that time. And this is way back in, like, 2011, I want to say, maybe. So it was a real moment in time to learn about all the intricacies of government transforming and seeing all the different areas that needed to come together. But how challenging it was. Because you're also looking at a lot of infrastructure that's not ready to be just ported online. Like, you're having to do the groundwork first. And so, yeah, the WelcomeBC portal ended up being, you know, one of a really big resource in a lot of ways for newcomers to access things from different ministries. But not from a ministry perspective. It was about what does the user care about? How do I get a driver's license? Yeah. Yeah. How do I sign my kid up for school? It was really focused on the lens from their experience. So, I think taking that principle around user-centered design and user-centric focus just helps you think about people in a more empathetic way. And taking that principle into what I do has really been at the core of it. But at the same time, seeing these really big organizations like government where it's, you know, everything's organized by department. But at the same time, seeing these really big organizations like government where it's, you know, everything's organized by department. You have to write briefing notes for things to get things done. And it was just, you know, as a young person out of school, like, it's a confusing process. You're like, I don't understand why I can't just update this website. You know, like, why does a browser extension require, like, a one-year process through IT to get something done?

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Mo Dhaliwal

[00:06:40] Sounds fairly soul-crushing.

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Joanna Li

[00:06:41] Yeah, it was a bit soul-crushing. And it's funny because I remember some younger interns coming in and worried they'd lose their sparkle if they ended up staying.

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Mo Dhaliwal

[00:06:52] You see the life go out of their eyes.

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Joanna Li

[00:06:53] Yeah, and it's not all bad. I think, like, I was fortunate that it was a good time to make real change and have impact because those resources really did have an impact. I mean, I remember getting letters from new immigrants who were like, 'thank you for these books and things' that, I mean, they were just to the minister, but I'll take it. I think it was just really an important time to just realize, like, you can just get it done. And honestly, a lot of those things were just reaching out to the different groups and pulling that content together so that we had a foundation, but also building those relationships across different ministries and organizations and whatnot to have it all come together. So that was kind of like a big catalyst for me of, like, the why. And, yeah, coming from that, I went into agency world because I was, you know, I just wanted. Different experience and agency world will do it. Yeah, it couldn't be a starker contrast from government life because the pace is so different. And I ended up working in the UK for like a year at a smaller startup agency or not startup. I guess they were about 12 people, but it was small and more of a print-focused design agency for real estate. And I was helping run their digital team. And so helping translate print designers to web/ web focus to do like, you know, marketing sites and whatnot. So that was it was definitely an interesting experience to see. Going from one extreme to the next and how it's really small business runs where your co-founders are also the ones doing the coffee runs and the, you know, buying toilet paper for the office, all those fun things. So it was just, yeah, a good eye-opening experience. And then when I came back to Vancouver, ended up at BlackRock. Last radius, again, like many Vancouverites. So many people have come from the last radius. As a project manager. Yeah. So I think that was also, again, another inflection point of a medium-sized, like organized or level-sized company, I guess, for the Vancouver office with a lot of process for us to manage and a lot more responsibility there. And then eventually moved to Metalab, which is another kind of BC-based product design agency and.

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Mo Dhaliwal

[00:09:21] So names like Blast Radius, Metalab, like these are fairly legendary agencies in a Vancouver context. And it's also interesting because both of them came up and made a huge impact. At different points in the sort of wave of technology and digital change and revolution that's been happening. So what was it like coming into and out of Metalab?

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Joanna Li

[00:09:47] Well. When I started at Metalab, it was about 50 people and grew to almost like 200. So it was an interesting time because I think, you know, you've got this big reputation of a company and, you know, it's really exciting; they were actually a pretty lean team, which is amazing because I think sometimes it is just focusing on the core values and the principles of what they're about. And I think they really leaned into doing interfaces and interaction design really well. And. And I think they really leaned into being quite humble about it, actually. And I think for me, when I came in, I noticed having been with bigger organizations, you can kind of see you at that point of scale when things start to grow and we're expanding our team in different countries and we're already a remote company with a couple like local offices. But it was an interesting challenge to not only create a culture, but also a standard and process around things. And we're still pretty scrappy at 50, you know, like things were still in Google Sheets and quite manual, like siloed systems. And I think timing has been such a key point in a lot of my tech, but ops journey as well, because when I started, you know, we had really disparate systems across project management, time tracking, revenue and invoicing and all these things were just quite separate. And so being able to bring it together. It was more of a passion project for me. It was side of desk because I was a project manager at the time.

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Mo Dhaliwal

[00:11:22] But so it wasn't like a mandate that was handed to you.

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Joanna Li

[00:11:24] That was just something that I think I could see it. I could see why there was such a disconnect between why resourcing didn't have the same numbers as our project managers. And, you know, like every startup, we're like, 'we care more about quality than making people track time.' And I'm like, 'well, but, you know, like then your responsibilities start to shift as the business grows.' And I think being prepared and organized, and having your data in a way that's like in sync makes sense versus having people manually do it in separate systems that aren't talking to one another. And I think seeing that was such a critical thing because it was part of everyday business when you're in a larger organization because these systems are already established. But starting it from scratch is another thing. And so, yeah, I helped roll out, I guess, the first version of our. Put together. Like PSA offering because, you know, for a lot of agencies that end up with really big products, they don't always use 10% of like at the time we were using like Mavenlink or something, you know, like that. And you're really only leveraging the product fully. Yeah, exactly. And then it becomes very burdensome to adjust because it gets expensive for these feature changes that should just you just want it to work. And so I think, you know, having rolled out that integration to create a PSA-like system for our team was kind of my the jump into the ops world for me. And then once I fully transitioned to the operations team, that's when like Zapier and Airtable were really coming on the scene. So that was a really exciting time to realize we can actually build a lot of this ourselves. Like, we're a product agency. We kind of take that approach to a lot of things. We take a lot of how we organize things and quite often it's not going to be a finished product. Everything is an iterative process to to managing these things. But one of our first big workflows that we built was to help our sales team help with their their pipeline to briefing the teams in to like once the work was one, translating that to a project and having that data flow more seamlessly. Versus. Having people, you know, manually creating all these templates and using the same like emails. And there was just so many repetitive tasks that people didn't need to be doing. And I think a lot of them want to focus on the networking and the the connection with with their prospects and not being in the day to day and the monotony of like saving sheets and Google Docs, you know?

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Mo Dhaliwal

[00:14:11] Yeah, I mean, speaking of monotony, I'm seeing an interesting parallel there, though. Because. What you're describing from your experience in government of various departments, you know, maybe even within an agency or connecting with a variety of agencies, but the idea of needing to bring multiple stakeholders, multiple departments together to work on something and then recognizing that again later on in the technology realm. So you seem to have some sort of penchant for seeing that there's disparate parts that need to work together more harmoniously. Yeah. And is that is that. Is that from your education, is that from your experience? Like, where does that come from?

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Joanna Li

[00:14:50] That's an interesting question. I mean, I always I always say, like, I feel like I'm a systems thinker. I like to look at the big picture of things and the interconnected points. And so I'm not sure where that happened, actually, but somewhere along my career, I think it just like it became more obvious to just see where the disconnects were, where people weren't speaking to one another or this group wasn't speaking. Like if the data points are the same. If if if finance is. Needing the data from projects or resourcing, and that's going to be something that's important because not only we're going to be audited on this, like that's a critical thing we need to better align teams around the core focus and values and things. And that's a big part of bringing the infrastructure together. And yeah, I think a lot of startups end up focusing really in siloed domains because we're all focused in our lane. Yeah.

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Mo Dhaliwal

[00:15:50] And a lot of the gaps just get filled with human tasks. Exactly. Yeah. And it's something that I struggle with quite a bit because as an agency at Skyrocket, our work is understanding our clients, understanding what they're trying to do and then going to do that. Right. And over time, and I think any company can be guilty of this if you're around long enough, it's over time you build up. Yeah. A sort of internal bureaucracy. Yeah. And eventually that internal bureaucracy sometimes starts feeling like the work. Yeah. And the outcome isn't the work. Yeah. Right. And so we've kind of gone through that ourselves internally, where our internal bureaucracies around how we manage projects or how we define and try to manage work, we actually had to go through a period of kind of ripping a lot of that out.

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Joanna Li

[00:16:36] Yeah.

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Mo Dhaliwal

[00:16:36] And to sort of get lean again. Yeah. And get nimble, then look at and decide what tools we're using and how do they talk to each other? Yeah. But that's even when you're conscious of it. Mm hmm. Because I think in a lot of organizations, government especially, you know, I'm not going to keep shitting on government, but that's it's a it's a good example here. Right. But in government especially, you'll have people that are undertaking roles and performing a lot of actions without necessarily understanding what the value is of that action. Yeah. Right. Yeah.

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Joanna Li

[00:17:04] I think that's why I keep going back to the values, like the core values for the business, but also the 'why' when people don't know what the focus is anymore, like you're kind of losing the point. Yeah. Or why you're why you're doing anything. It's the driving point to just keep things simpler. I think we overcomplicate things quite often that we don't need to be. And I think focusing, you know, like the way we support our clients, too, it's like we're not in the weeds in the business in the way they are. We're coming in sort of as outsiders looking at it. And sometimes you need that perspective to pause and reflect whether businesses do that themselves. I'm not sure. Like, I think. I think everyone has a different approach to whether they do quarterly plannings or annual plannings on these things. But I think sometimes those resets are so pivotal to actually take a step back and ask, like, is this serving us? Are these things actually adding value and do they ladder up to the mission of this business? And so I think, yeah, quite often you can lose track of that really easily because we just get into the day-to-day of our work and just keep going without ever pausing to actually look. Take a look. At the system.

Mo Dhaliwal

[00:18:16] I think pausing to reset is important, whether that's I mean, we do quarterly planning and those are great, like day-long sessions where we get to stop and take a look at things. But this is also where, you know, I'm plugging agencies here a little bit, but this is also where an outside perspective is critical, right? Like one of my favorite things to say that I say all the time is that you can't cut your own hair, right? Well, I mean, you could give it a shot. You could try. Yeah. I've had some friends do it, questionably, but yes. And you can see the results, right? But, you know, for anyone that wants to be presentable, we tend not to cut our own hair, right? Don't do bangs during a pandemic. Because you need a perspective. You need somebody to actually look at you from the outside, right? And that's, you know, I think a big part of what I've been trying to actually even bring into Skyrocket as someone who was first introduced to agile project management like a decade ago. Yeah. And that's a perspective where, you know, whether you're looking at lean methodologies or whether you're looking at Scrum and Kanban and everything else, the crux of it at the end of the day was whatever action you're taking, is it something that is valuable to, you know, the end user, right? And many times we'll do many things that aren't valuable and there's no way of getting around that. You just have to do it, right? It's like the only valuable thing is putting food in my mouth. But unfortunately, I have to go to the grocery store, I have to do X, Y, and Z to make that happen. But at the end of the day, if I could just put food in my mouth without doing any of that, then that would be the value, right? And we don't necessarily break down all of the work and this is where that comment about bureaucracies comes in, right? Where the steps are so many and the connection from the work, from the value has actually been lost, the end user value has been lost. And now, that's the entire conversation is like, well, you know, and I think if you were to ask any small or medium-sized business of you know what should we offer? Automate and correct me if I'm wrong, but I bet that there's a lot of situations where they don't even know what to ask for because they do it that way and they don't know that there's an alternative.

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Joanna Li

[00:20:25] Exactly. And I think, too, with certain things that are kind of like AI can be a buzzword, too, for a lot of companies. So they might see something and be like, oh, I want to implement it. But, you know, actually taking a step back and looking at the overall strategy, like for themselves as a business, is really important to make sure that they're doing the right thing. And I'm sure it's serving them as well. And I think our approach at Switchboard to starting any engagement is going to be an initial strategy phase to do a deep dive, like discovery, to unpack like what the current state is to really understand the pain points, the issues, and then propose a bit of a roadmap to how you get there to help to help them focus and organize. Like, you know, business owners are really focused on their day-to-day things. They don't need to be worrying about 'how do I.' Like, like launch AI and, you know, maybe they want to do it and they can see the value, but they don't know how to get there. And so helping draw that path to delivering it, and also being that trusted partner to help them not only build and implement the technology and the solution, but also support them through the change management of it, to help train and onboard their team, and document processes, and work with them almost like an augmented ops team. You know, like a lot of small businesses don't have a dedicated ops team. And I think that's that's the interesting thing about hiring, I guess. I know plugs here, but I do. I mean, I'm biased. I, you know, having a team that has a diverse skill set of a technical, strategic and delivery lens is going to help you get results faster. And I think, in the long term, businesses see that ROI because you're more impactful in a shorter time frame and helping them focus. And, helping them get organized. And, quite often it's a relief for clients to feel like they're being project managed because they need that guidance themselves because they are dealing with a thousand emails a day and worried about going to this conference. I don't have time to do this. So just having someone who's taking care of that and kind of plugging them in when needed is kind of like a very I don't know. I've seen it be more impactful, like in the short time frame since we've like launched, just being able to support clients. In that way, which is pretty exciting.

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Mo Dhaliwal

[00:22:45] Yeah, I have no doubt of that. Like if AI is a buzzword, then a close second is actually digital transformation. Yeah. But that loses some relevance for small media businesses. Totally. Because the good thing is that they don't necessarily have the layers and layers of enterprise systems and software debt.

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Joanna Li

[00:23:06] All of that.

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Mo Dhaliwal

[00:23:07] Yeah. And there's so much technical debt and almost like the sort of calcification that forms that is so hard for large enterprises. To break up that they have to do something that's, you know, big and kind of traumatic, which is this digital transformation thing to try to break that up and get things moving again. And so small businesses aren't saddled with that always, but at the same time, they might not have the resources, time and like just the teams and, you know, reams of people internally to manage some sort of massive automation project. Right. And so there's a sort of a middle area where I see you guys fitting. Which is why I found the company actually so fascinating, where for a smaller media business that can't undertake what would normally be considered a big, you know, digital transformation project, and the thing that, you know, McKinsey and other agencies will, consultancies like that we'll talk about, but still want to improve things, still want to say, how do we get more of our people focused on doing the work rather than pushing the digital equivalent of paper around their desks? Right. So at what point did all of this sort of culminate for you? Yeah. Yeah. And you said, actually, you know, as a project manager, you've been kind of greasing the wheels and going in and kind of lubricating internal systems for a while. Yeah. But when did you realize that actually that was the entire value you wanted to create and put it into something?

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Joanna Li

[00:24:28] Yeah. Yeah, it's interesting because my co-founder, Justin, he also came from Metalab too and has a wealth of experience and way more technical than I am in this area. And so he actually started an agency prior to Switchboard and was doing solo, bootstrapping himself and, you know, there was definitely an increased demand for this big need that people didn't quite understand and ChatGPT had just like launched, I think, and all these things were kind of, again, a point in time culmination that made sense. But after doing it solo for a bit, he realized it's a lot to run an agency and it's a lot to take on and do well. And really level up the service that we want to be able to offer. And so, like, that's when he tapped my shoulder and, you know, I was so excited to team up with him because, I mean, I loved working with him at Metalab and we did a lot of great work together. And so just knowing someone who's also really passionate about this space is such a visionary and it really helps kind of spark, I think, in this area too. It's always nice to collaborate and bounce ideas off someone. So. Yeah, that was kind of the segue for my career path to take that on. But, I mean, it's still the first year of us running and so far I'm loving it. So no regrets there.

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Mo Dhaliwal

[00:25:57] No, it's a company I was excited about when I first saw that you had launched. It was really fascinating to me because, again, you know, speaking from like a super nerdy perspective, as the founder of my own company and as somebody who's thinking about work, systems, and processes; like I'm somebody that will, you know, on a weekend be playing around with make. com and like tuning my little automations and things, right? Because it's fun as a technical hobbyist. But there's a profound implication to putting all of these tools together in an interesting way. And in some ways, it's kind of like the ultimate video game, right? Because it's people, it's resources, and it's leveraging different things to see how things will improve. What are the biggest challenges? What are the biggest challenges you guys have had in sort of playing this, you know, small, medium business video game of automation?

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Joanna Li

[00:26:48] Well, I mean, I think there's still always the underlying of any change, like management challenge. It's always going to be resistance to change, right? And I think for us, some of the big things for our clients are like, how do we successfully help them navigate that? Like the technical side is one aspect of building. And actually, we feel like usually. That's the simpler thing. But it's the business process side. It's the people side that is more of the layered challenge of helping people successfully implement things. And so, yeah, I think that's going to always be at the core of any successful implementation is like, is there actually adoption? And if you're worried about training your team, how can we support that? And I think, yeah, so much of any sort of change is really making sure; that you implement gets used or if not, like taking a step back and iterating, iterating and understanding where the gaps are. Yeah.

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Mo Dhaliwal

[00:27:51] Yeah. And no surprises. It's, you know, these are human systems at the end of the day. And there's going to be human challenges. Right. And they might be emotional or psychological. And it's interesting how often that actually comes up whenever we're talking about technical change. Yeah. Because the technical side can be figured out. Yeah. The unknown typically is the culture. And how do we work with the people? And this has come up a number of times. And I had a really interesting epiphany, actually just a little while ago, with a past guest, where we were talking about digital transformation and technological change, and how we need to bring people on board and what that takes. And I am someone that internally I had gotten to a point where I would have liked an allergic reaction to spreadsheets. Yeah. Because in my mind, if I saw somebody spending a bunch of time formatting, constructing, building these complex spreadsheets, I was like, 'That should be an API.' Right. That should be a dashboard. Why isn't this data plugged in, et cetera. And what this person kind of explained to me was that I was discounting the emotional need that somebody has to wrap their own heads around what's going on. Yeah. And that means they might need to build a spreadsheet. Yeah. And it doesn't mean that it has to be the core of the business or the system. But humans have our own needs. Right. And sometimes we've got to do things differently. Yeah. And we need to accommodate those. And one of the ways people do that. But in a knowledge working environment is by building complicated spreadsheets for themselves. Yeah. But how have you guys found any like cheat codes, any tricks, any ways of getting people on board, especially when you're talking about automation, which sometimes comes with new software, new systems, new ways of doing things. And you've got somebody in the office that's like, well, you know, I like to do it this way. Right. Or we've always done it that way.

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Joanna Li

[00:29:38] Yeah. I think it's also just putting it in front of people and showing them. I think for clients who are coming from really large spreadsheets, I'm just thinking of the call I had this morning, it was so complex because it's a whole scorecard algorithm that I'm not going to pretend to understand. But at the same time, when we brought that into Airtable and demoed what that interface looks like, it's simpler, right? Like you're not seeing the back end of how that calculation is working. You're just getting to use it. You're going to have to learn a new interface. But as soon as they see the value in that, like that's the proof point right there. And then it's just working with them to iterate on it. And I think, you know, for a lot of what we do, it's as kind of that advisor and consulting is just like breaking it down for them. They don't care about APIs. They don't care about the script you're using. We can nerd out and show them. Sometimes they're interested. And maybe when they take it on, like they might need to manage it. But, you know, when we're demoing things to our clients. Our clients are even just working across the internal team. Like we really leveraged the just experiment and testing and trying to see if that approach works and solves the problem. And just working through things in that iterative way. And so I just find like with this sort of opportunity with the software that we're using now, it just makes it so much easier. Like you said, like you can just be a hobbyist and tinker. And it's not like you're spending three months. And it's not like you're spending a lot of time and effort to build something that you might have in an enterprise way, right? Like in something that's a bit of a like beast of a program. But with a lot of what we do, it's a little bit lower stakes to experiment and just show and see if that thing's going to work. And usually it blows their minds because they're coming from pen and paper or a very manual way of doing something.

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Mo Dhaliwal

[00:31:37] It was actually in one of Switchboard's. I think on your website, you have like an introduction deck or something, but I saw it somewhere. But there was this amazing slide deck, and one of the slides in there-when anybody shits on McKinsey a little bit, I'm always a fan of that. It's fun. It's easy. There's a target. But there was this one slide that actually had McKinsey advertising their digital transformation services and then a piece of McKinsey thought leadership that said 70% of digital transformations fail. And it's just a fantastic juxtaposition of what's actually going on. Yeah. In the world. But improving the value of what you're doing, because what you're describing is, you know, putting in front of somebody and showing it to them. But how do you explain that before you actually build it? Because having experienced it after the fact, that's, you know, the job's kind of done to some extent and now it's about sort of onboarding. But how do you tell the story beforehand?

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Joanna Li

[00:32:34] Yeah, it's interesting. I mean, the McKinsey deck thing is very apt. And I think, because you can. And being part of that government experience on the receiving end of those decks. You can see yourself in it. Great. It's a million-dollar deck. And now what? Right. Like, how do I actually build this thing? And for four clients, you know, we we kind of just get to the point faster, you know, like so that we can get them done. And I think part of that is just working more collaboratively with them. We have very engaged business owners who are part of it because they understand. The value of what we're doing or else they wouldn't have signed on with us, but you know it's in their interest to make sure that we're we're set up for success, too. And part of that is making sure we're speaking to the right people who are the the the business drivers, the decision makers and the subject matter experts in the organization for us to be able to actually make a recommendation that feels way more tactical and actionable. So I think that's. You know, we're not taking months to do something, we're taking weeks. And I think seeing that immediate return for them, they can see the value they can; they're already getting excited to how we're going to implement because that's good, that us automating and how their email generation leveraging AI is going to save them like hundreds of hours. You know, like that's the sort of thing that gets them excited. So they're motivated to roll things out with us. And I think that's a it's a closer working relationship than I think you can get when then maybe with larger organizations like the the magnitude of change, it's takes a it's a different approach completely. Right. And I think for me, that's why I'm very passionate about small and this midsize market, because it's exciting to see that it's very rewarding to see that change for business.

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Mo Dhaliwal

[00:34:33] That's clearly exciting to you because you're lighting up telling the story of, you know, might be faster and easier to start invoicing.

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Joanna Li

[00:34:39] Yeah, I mean, it's amazing. I'm. Yeah. We had a client who was like, yeah, we might be leaving some money on the table because we haven't invoiced and now there's sanctions in that country and now we can't collect that money. So there are real work like there are real business impacts there. They're not just trivial administrative things. These administrative things are like big dollars for companies. Yeah. Yeah.

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Mo Dhaliwal

[00:35:02] So switchboard, am I right in saying like this is your first foray into startup founder land?

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Joanna Li

[00:35:07] It is. Yeah. I mean, I've worked for startup. I've worked for startups and like, you know, but yeah, this is the first one.

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Mo Dhaliwal

[00:35:14] So, and how's it going so far? Like, what have been your biggest challenges today?

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Joanna Li

[00:35:18] I mean, just that transition from almost like IC to management at from my previous agency to to this. It's a it's definitely a different switch. You're wearing a lot more hats. You're kind of we've we've learned a lot from our experience working in agency, and that's I feel like gives us that leg up for sure of like just understanding how a business is run, but doing it is very different, like being in charge of the books and all these other areas. So it's it's exciting. I mean, I do. It's also really satisfying to be able to start from scratch with things and have no tech debt or any other process debt and just start to build things in your ideal state of like, what would I like to see? But it's also really exciting creating new career paths. For people who are interested in tech, but they don't know what that job looks like in the real world now, because this is a new space for a lot of people. But it's also giving opportunity for operations professionals who might have worked in a very siloed space. And so to me, it's very rewarding to be able to create different opportunities for people, but also offer something different that we haven't seen in the market yet for our clients.

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Mo Dhaliwal

[00:36:40] So from what you're describing so far, like this is one of those Steve Jobsian sort of quotes of, you know, connecting the dots, looking backwards, you leveraging what you learned at these various agencies and these different roles into your role at Switchboard and the founding of Switchboard. It makes a lot of sense. So you're leveraging a lot of the strengths and aptitudes you've built there. You're a year into it. What are the new things or the gaps that you saw in yourself that you had to fill and learn really quickly?

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Joanna Li

[00:37:08] Well, thank you. I told you before this podcast, having to be the face of something is very different for me as an ops person. I'm very comfortable behind the scenes and just like having impact in that way. So being conscious of like marketing efforts and all these other areas was definitely a new, new focus for me, but also just like other areas of running the business, having to do like reporting. And, you know, business, like business level board decks and all these things that are just not things I had to do before, but very fun to learn.

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Mo Dhaliwal

[00:37:47] Well, especially the era that you're in, because more than ever for, I think, companies of any size, frankly, CEO-led and founder-led marketing is a huge thing. Yeah.

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Joanna Li

[00:38:00] Right.

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Mo Dhaliwal

[00:38:02] So you were mentioning that this is your first podcast, but hopefully not the last one. You're going to have to do a lot more of these because. You know, founder-led marketing is the thing, so apparently you got to got to do it. But aside from, you know, coming into the front and kind of putting yourself out there, right, if I'm paraphrasing, but that's what I'm hearing from you is that you were more comfortable operationalizing things and kind of being tucked away in a room somewhere, wiring stuff together. And now you're being the face of something and really putting yourself out there. You know, what's. What's exciting you, like, what are you interested in, sort of learning next in your own leadership? And startup founder journey?

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Joanna Li

[00:38:41] I think being able to grow a solid team, like an empowered team, to do this work. I think it's interesting to be able to be able to find, you know, people with the values who get this work and who want to drive change in the way that we do is is going to be a big focus, and learning how to navigate that as, you know, running an agency in that way. But I think that's. It's probably going to be a big core of that, as well as like the the brand and marketing aspect. And, you know, for me, it's like you said, you know, the marketing space has changed a lot. I mean, I studied marketing way back in the day, too, and it's completely different game now with how social media and content marketing is driving things. So, yeah, there's a lot in there that I think we're we're going to be diving more into. And as we have. We've been. Really working on things like case studies and to really showcase to people what we do, because I think there's people who are engaged and already like interested in this work who might get it right away. But to see the value in a tangible way and like with real examples is really like how how you kind of get that critical mass. And so I think, yeah, building building the right brand and marketing approach, but also the team behind it, that's really going to be the core of what our business is going to be our service offering. Right.

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Mo Dhaliwal

[00:40:13] Yeah, I mean, I'm going to sound like a fanboy here again, but with Switchboard, one of the things I really like is that it's a such a technical value proposition, actually, right, automation, artificial intelligence. But you do such a great job of communicating your culture, right, because even how the company is showing up, there's a culture being communicated right, and moving forward, like my prediction for Switchboard is that the technical stuff is easy. Like, you guys are good. You'll continue being good at that. But the communication of culture would be my hope for you that you just really lean in on that because you're doing a great job of it so far. Did this just come naturally to you guys? Like, how did you just knock it out of the park on your first try?

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Joanna Li

[00:40:54] I don't I mean, I think we also have or just being ourselves, I guess, in some ways, I think our values are very much aligned with being very human. It's actually one of our core values. We do talk about like, you know, we're optimizing systems. But you're doing it for people. Yeah. Yeah. Right. Like we're not doing this to be more of a machine. So I think just people resonate and understand things better when you speak to them in a more human way. And that's why I think the storytelling aspect, the analogies to understanding tech, it can be very overwhelming. I mean, I won't say I'm the most proficient tech person either, I think, but it helps to break it down in a way that's more relatable and understandable for more practical applications. I think a lot of small businesses just get overwhelmed by it. They don't know where to start. And I think for us, it's very important, but also for the team culture, too. I think having empowered people who have those values, they're going to be interested in continuous learning. They're going to want to have a safe space to have that culture to do those things. And yeah, culture has always been very important. I think even when we came from Metalab, it was very much like when you're a remote agency, you kind of really need to lean into those other soft skills and other areas to create that point for collaboration and how people work together. So I'm really excited that that comes through. So thank you.

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Mo Dhaliwal

[00:42:19] Yeah, absolutely.  What was Metalab entirely remote?

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Joanna Li

[00:42:21] Well, we had an office, but primarily, yeah, very remote work culture. And so it was very foundational to us. It was a stark contrast for me coming from like those government days to everything's on Slack and I've never had to use so many emojis so quickly in my life. I think it really highlighted, you know, I always call myself a geriatric millennial, but like, honestly, I could not keep up with the speed of how people emote. And so I think there was like an unnatural like DNA that gets formed when people just feel comfortable with one another. You're creating that safe space for people to just share not just the work things, but the personal things. And it gives them space to to learn and grow.

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Mo Dhaliwal

[00:43:02] Yeah, yeah. And I think that is such a fascinating focus on like the. Focus on the humanity and the focus on the people, because there's a an interesting sort of parallel. I'm just drawing out of technology and even like the application of discipline, you know, individually. And the reason to apply discipline or the reason to, frankly, use technology is to take the basics of what you have to do in life and just get them out of the way. Right. So that you can spend more time being human so that you can spend more time actually living and expressing yourself and receiving what this life has to offer. Yeah, and that's still a tough sell to someone who thought that that was what work and life was, was to do the steps and do the things right. And the humanity of that story, like, do you have any interesting or recent examples of places you've gone in and kind of made that impact where you can show efficiency? Like you mentioned the invoicing and, you know, some money that might have been left on the table by somebody who didn't have efficiency. Yeah. But is there any recent example or story of where you were able to actually bring in some automation to, frankly, just save people the time so that they could just be people?

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Joanna Li

[00:44:19] Yeah. Actually, one of my favorite clients, but I should have favorites, but they are a green surveying company and it's a family business and they and the father is passing down this business to his daughter. And this was really interesting because so much of how the business works was in his head and he was manually checking like 5,000 emails a day. And that is for someone inheriting that business, not something you want to maintain. And so I think it's been, I've noticed this actually now with a couple of clients, too, where when you're transitioning between leadership, that's usually a good moment to reflect and understand the business because you naturally have to. But also, it's. Yeah. A really big opportunity for them to unpack why was something done that way? And should it, should we keep doing in that way? Like is because, you know, oftentimes it doesn't make sense if it's not serving you. And so in this case, we ended up helping them find a better system to manage their 5,000 emails a day that they were manually tagging. And it was it always blows my mind because coming from tech, I'm always like it always surprises me. Some of these stories, too, where they'd have to send these emails. These reports and the surveyors would take a photo of the Excel spreadsheet to send it on WhatsApp to get it back to the to the, you know, for them to process everything. So there's there's just like this mix of tools without a real system in place. And even how rates and all these other areas of the business were decision points were being made there. Everyone had to step back to understand how was that actually done? And they realized that's all. Reliant on a person. Wow. Not a process. And so I think that's usually like, you know, when we're saying how a lot of this isn't necessarily just the technical side. It's the business process. It's the people side. It's it's helping them unpack those things so that you can get to a cleaner tool and data infrastructure, and helping them distill it down because it is overwhelming. It's a it's a pretty overwhelming conversation to have. And you can go into these like rabbit holes of discussion and not really have an outcome. And so I think for for us, you know, being able to help them build a first project to help them just streamline email intake has has actually really made a difference in how they're communicating. Things aren't being like the margin of error is less. We've been able to systematize things and have them communicate and threads in a different way. So, yeah, it's it's been really important to have them see firsthand like a quick win. Mm-hmm. And then help them also build an infrastructure for their other, you know, tools and process across the business for like sales to job management to invoicing. So, yeah, I think once they have the gateway.

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Mo Dhaliwal

[00:47:20] Yeah. And ultimately, that's that's moving the transition of succession for a family business.

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Joanna Li

[00:47:24] Yeah, exactly. I mean, they know there's a lot to do, but you have to start somewhere. And so without getting too overwhelmed, it's like putting a roadmap in front of them. This is how we're going to get there. And you're in this. You're in safe hands. We've got you like we're going to help you, like train your team and work through those different regional offices and work through the implementation planning. So I think, you know, for them, it's it's helped them be able to focus on the business in the day-to-day and not worry so much about like the overall process things and know that they can have someone that's going to help them do that.

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Joanna Li

[00:47:59] Mm-hmm.

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Mo Dhaliwal

[00:48:03] How much of your success would you attribute to being good at Mario Kart?

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Joanna Li

[00:48:10] Well, this is the perfect question. So much of it, I think. And I yeah, I mean, I was surprised in myself how much I would take Mario Kart so seriously. But I will say again, having an older brother where he was so good at all the video games. You need to just be really good at one thing.

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Mo Dhaliwal

[00:48:31] So you specialized early on.

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Joanna Li

[00:48:32] I specialized early on. I was all about mapping that feather efficiency to jump off that rainbow road. And I don't know. I guess it was like a subconscious thing that I didn't realize I was doing until I did it. But, yeah, there's some there's some sick drifting skills to say.

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Mo Dhaliwal

[00:48:52] I think we can draw a pretty, pretty straight line from that to Switchboard.

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Joanna Li

[00:48:55] Yeah. Yeah. It's all about the Tokyo drift. Absolutely. When you slide into first place.

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Mo Dhaliwal

[00:49:04] So for anybody that wants to learn more about you and what you're doing and your company, where should they go?

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Joanna Li

[00:49:09] Well, you can go to our website at withswitchboard. com or find us on LinkedIn. Also with Switchboard. And yeah, that's what we're going to be posting a lot more on our case studies and other examples. So just excited to get the word out there.

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Mo Dhaliwal

[00:49:25] And hopefully you're going to be talking. And speaking and sharing a lot more. Yeah, we'll get there. Baby steps. All right. All right. Well, thanks, Joanna.

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Joanna Li

[00:49:32] Thanks so much. Appreciate it.

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Mo Dhaliwal

[00:49:33] All right. Well, hopefully we've given you a lot to think about. That was High Agency. Like and subscribe, and we will see you next time.