Pete Cuff
CEO, Future Solutions

Episode Summary

In this episode we talk to Pete Cuff, CEO at Future Solutions.

We start out with how Pete transitioned from integrating Podio into one business to being a platform provider to companies around the world.

We have a great chat about some of Podio’s core strengths and how it measures up against other systems, as well as why you may still chose to work with other systems and link them to Podio.

Show Links:
https://futuresolutionsonline.co.uk/

Transcript

Narrator: 0:00

Welcome to powered by Podio. Automation is everything. Supercharge your business with Podio. Get ready for another episode of supercharged with Jordan Samuel Fleming, your weekly dive in to the awesome impact workflow and automation can have on your business when it’s powered by Podio. Join us each week as we learn from the top Podio partners in the world as we investigate system integrations and add ons and hear from real business owners who have implemented Podio into their business. Now, join your host, Jordan, Samuel Fleming’s CEO of Gamechangers for this week’s episode.

Jordan: 0:44

Hey everybody. Welcome to this episode of supercharged. I’m your host Jordan Samuel Fleming here to talk all about the power of workflow and automation when your business is powered by Podio. Today’s guest is Pete Cuff from future solutions, a Podio partner based in the UK. Pete, welcome to the podcast. Introduce yourself to the audience.

Pete: 1:02

Hi Jordan. Hi everybody. Thanks very much for inviting me on. Um, I’m Pete. I run Future Solutions. We’re a company based, predominantly in the UK, but we have clients around the world and we specialize in helping organizations fix problems, identifying solutions for the future, which as you can, you can probably tell us where the name came from and we specialize in Podio platforms and Podio based solutions because quite simply we’ve never found anything that’s beaten Podio

Jordan: 1:38

As always, when I’m talking to a partner who is integrating Podio and when I was curious how you first found Podio, uh, what, what were you trying for, what you’re looking for and what, how did you realize the power of Podio?

Pete: 1:51

Well, in order to kind of explain how future solutions came, I actually had to take a step further back than that, which is I joined a relatively small company called future foundations. Again, you can probably see a thing there in the naming and future foundations is a pioneering organization that specializes in youth leadership training, um, for young people around the world. And I joined to kind of help this relatively young company set up structures and processes and procedures and kind of be their techie guy, the finance guy, the Hr guy, all these bits and bobs and like, you know, like most small businesses, I think I ended up building quite a lot of processes and solutions in different things. So I had a solution in excel for that one word for that and an access database here or quickbooks solution there and it got to the point where all these kind of big chunky problems have been fixed, but they, they kind of stabilize the ship but now we needed so much documentation to explain how to do every piece because nothing talks to anything else and they were all isolated data silos and you know, quickbooks is great at being an accounting system but it’s not great at running your weekly team meetings. So you need another solution for that. And that was a word document with a template that everybody did and that needs to be saved on a file server. So that was somewhere else. And, and what was increasingly frustrated me was just, I just felt there must be this one system to rule them all. It must be this one thing out there that fixes this huge collection of problems that we’ve all fixed and solved, but into one place. Surely it must be out there. So I went searching for that solution. Um, I came across various things and I will spare you the names of the other things that we came across because some have been and gone, um, and we were using a, of having a meeting with one of our consultants, any we’re mapping up all of these systems up on the whiteboard and he just kind of got to things like office intranet, um, notes and things like that. And he said, oh, I think Podio could do that. Anyway, up to the big problem that we’ve got up here and Podio, Podio, that rings a bell, why does that ring a bell? And I went and looked at it and it turned out I had opened an account on Podio three years prior to that day. And I, I couldn’t believe it. Like it was my same password. It was definitely me and everything. I was like, what? Why am I dismissed this? And I went and had a look at it and basically what happened in that three year period is Podio had been bought out by Citrix and had quite a lot of money thrown at it. And it turned. And I reminded myself that three years prior to that point, I looked at Podio and went, oh, this has got potential that’s not quite there yet. It’s not quite there. And so I dismissed it and moved on and try to find the next thing. Um, but then I went, okay, well let’s give it another go. Let’s give it another go and see what it can do. And I had a kind of series of penny dropping moments. Oh, hold on. If that talks to that, then I could set this system up in that way, that does that thing that talks to that thing that moves that on, turns that off, etc. Etc. Etc. And we just absolutely realized that if this, this, and this is true, oh, hold on, we have something big here because this, this is the one system. So we began migrating our systems generally over and we started, started small. We went, let’s take our week, our team weekly, uh, meetings, um, process and bring that into Podio and just tell the whole team, we’re not using word document anymore. We’re using a thing called Podio. We’ve signed you All up here you go put your notes in here whenever you’ve got an action, create a task for it done. And we had people kind of going, okay, well we’ll give it a try, you know, but yeah, it’s another system that we’ve got to learn how to use. I was like, okay, but just trust me here this, this could be good. and so we had some initial pushback. One thing we should probably pick up later on this is when a new organization goes into Podio, the kind of cultural things that you need to think about as part of that process, but I think it’d be interesting to touch on later. Anyway, so sorry for the long explanation, but it’s kind of beginning of the journey into. So we started doing that one thing and then when people said, oh, but it’d be useful if that linked into our weekly objectives, like, right. So we’ll create a weekly objectives and we’ll put that in there and we’ll link it back to the weekly team meetings as well, our weekly objectives, if they link to our monthly objectives, to our quarterly objectives, to our annual plan, to our operational plan, etc. Etc. So we started layering and layering and layering and building all of these processes up in Podio and it snowballed. It snowballed so fast that are kind of gentle migration rollout plan that we had to Podio went out the window in about two months because we now just need you to go a million miles an hour on getting all of our processes in Podio as quickly as we could because the team were getting frustrated that it wasn’t all in one place all of a sudden. And they kind of expected it now to all be in this one face. But at this point, I’m still the chief operating officer for future foundations. So I’m working on this everyday building this company’s solutions, um, and developing these processes. And then what we found was a chief executive officer, John Harper, who is a who goes on and does Brilliant, brilliant meetings and presentations with clients was kind of doing this big, you know, we can do incredible training programs to change young people’s lives. And they said, yeah, fantastic. Okay, so we’ll need to think about how we do the sign up process and our system could do that. Anyway, back to these young people doing this amazing training and then they say, okay, yeah, yeah, but then we need to think about the invoicing – our system can do that. Anyway, back to the young people and this phrase of our system can do that Kind of kept slipping into his sales pitches to the point when the clients that we were trying to talk to you about youth training programs said, so what’s this system? You keep talking about it sounds incredible. It sounds like the best system on the planet. And we’re like, hold on. So we decided at that point, well let’s take a little. Let’s take a little here and go, well, what if we set up another company called Future solutions that is about helping organizations achieve their full potential and solve their problems and help them and fix both Today’s problems and future problems like prevent them from becoming in the first place and that is how we started future solutions and we would then make the decision that’s like, I need to go and run this full time now because we’ve grown so fast that it needs full time effort on this. We’ve never looked back. And so we now have these, uh, organizations all support that we’re supporting around the world, helping them do incredible things with incredible people.

Jordan: 9:19

So when you were doing that, uh, you know, I, I wouldn’t say that that’s a similar, the same journey that I’ve heard other partners a take, but there are similarities in the sense that almost every partner I’ve ever spoken to you found Podio because they were looking for themselves and then realized that, uh, that, that, that it was a solution or an opportunity to provide value to customers. Um, but if, if I’m, if you’re looking at your initial integration to yourself, I’m just, I’m just curious because you said you started small, but then it spiraled, snowballed very quickly. At that point, were you using a lot of the automation, um, provided by globiflow or were you, uh, like how did you manage that? Because I’ve certainly found when people are new to Podio, um, they tend to go over the top with automation. I’m thinking that it, wouldn’t it be awesome if we automated everything. I’m realizing that the human element becomes very annoyed when, when, when actually the system keeps throwing noise at them. So how did you, just out of curiosity, when you were developing that system, what, how did you step in the automation? Did you do it from the beginning to just step in and over time? What was your approach? Uh,

Pete: 10:41

well, yeah, we, we learned. I’m very quickly that globiflow’s power is basically what makes, what makes Podio utterly incredible as opposed to really good. So Podio on its own as a fantastic tool is a fantastic platform and obviously, you know, its simplicity and its ability combined is absolute strength. I completely agree that you can, there is a very real danger when people realize that they can automate everything that they do and automate everything. Now we did start slowly and for example, on the, I mentioned the first thing that we built was an app to track our weekly team meetings. Well, for example, we made that a recurring meeting. Now technically that is automation, but that’s Podio, you know, click this button to make it recurring, right? So it’s not really automation,

Jordan: 11:35

it’s not very good either. I got to tell you that the recurring meeting bullshit in Podio drives me nuts because it’s terribly implemented. But what that another point.

Pete: 11:47

so what we then started to do was go, um, things like we wanted to rotate the chair person. Yeah. So we decided at the end of each meeting who the next chair was going to be and we’ve then put that person’s Podio profile into a field. And then when the automation kicked in to say there’s a new meeting with a take the value of that field and put it in as the chair field the top of the next meeting. And that’s obviously a very simple automation, but it’s the kind of thing that made sure that people started to see the value of putting this into a structured system as opposed to Writing on a word document. The next chair is jeff and then jeff forgetting that he’s chair next time because his name isn’t in that field because jeff just turns up at 11:00 on a monday and says where’s the meeting? So we started very gently and then as we built in these more advanced processes, so things like our contracting for our, for our employees. So we had, we’ve had over the future foundations over the years has had about seven, seven or 800 employees. And so we’ve issued a lot of part time contract. So that was a very laborious process. It involved, I’m printing a, a 20 page contract twice, posting it out to the employees. This contract would terminate after 12 months anyway. So we had to do it every year for all of these employees. You can imagine the burden that was. And then when they signed the thing, they have to send it back through the post, which we then had to scan.

Jordan: 13:26

So right signature saved you hours a month.

Pete: 13:32

And it’s just that thing of when it was so plain to see now. And in fairness, you know, this was six plus years ago that we were doing all of that laborious stuff. Maybe even closer to 10 actually is what’s clear to me now is how on earth did we think that that was the right way to do it? Because now we don’t need to think about it. The system does it. It’s like, right? But I, I always kind of, especially when thinking things like Podio, Podio is fantastic at prototyping, so you’ve got an idea, build it, try it, see if it happens, learn from what it does, how it reacts, how other people use it, and then change it. Iterate, iterate, iterate, design, developed, change, move on and embrace change. Don’t fear it, don’t go god. It’s another system to learn. It’s like, no, it’s the core system that can be the one system you need to learn to enable you to do everything that you need to do across your business.

Jordan: 14:30

So I mean, that’s really, I mean, I, I would not disagree with that notion of, of, of prototype, iterate, iterate, but now let’s take that to clients because as a partner, you know, and you know, as, as someone who is maybe speaking to a company and then getting them to invest 15, 20, 25, $30,000, pounds, whatever, into you developing a system for them, I’m giving them an approach of iterate, iterate, iterate can sometimes be a little, uh, you know, a little, are you kidding? Are you building this thing for us or not? So how do you approach that? And when you’re talking to clients, how do you position the first thing you do with Podio? Because I think that’s often the first thing is the hardest. You get them rented. We just as a very quickly, I want to get to your story, but we’ve got a, we’ve got a surveying company in Texas, um, that we work with are awesome guys. And um, uh, they were very reluctant to go ahead in some ways because they had been burned before by other systems promising the world and, and not delivering and um, you know, so we decided on a first phase and now they’re like, man, we love this. We can’t wait for the next phase. But that first bit was a re, you know, getting those people to buy into a first phase is hard. So how do you approach that?

Pete: 15:57

Firstly, you, yeah, we talk about, we’re going to build for you this holistic system that is going to. If I ask you what is your biggest pain point right now about the way that you do business? Podio can fix that. But the way that Podio fixes that is that because the chances are that pain point is system x doesn’t talk to system y or this is completely isolated from everything else that we do. Or people are always doing this in different ways. And Podio just gives you that framework to be able to structure it whilst being incredibly flexible and dynamic in how you either solve that initial problem and all the different ways that you choose to do it or approaches or style or content or anything. And that’s the thing is it’s like saying if you, if you came to me and said as a, as a client, I, I want a mode of transport that will get me from a to b. I like wheels. So if there can be wheels on it, that would be great. Um, and I’d like to be able to sit on it. Cool. Then I will call that your kind of initial initial brief. Your initial project scope is mode of transport wheels. Sit on. Got it. Now we would flesh that out and make sure that we properly understand exactly what you mean by a wheel, exactly what you mean by acetol, that kind of thing. And say, okay, right, we will go and build that first version for you and I will then come back to you and go, tadah, here’s the thing you asked for. It’s a mode of transport. It’s got. It’s got wheels and it’s got a pedal. Sorry, it’s got a seat. I’m calling it a unicycle. Yeah. And I wanted a car. Yeah. And then you look at it and you go, cool. That does meet the brief. Um, it’s different to how I thought I was like, yeah, it probably is great. Tell me what you liked, what you disliked. I like the wheels, I like to see, but it looks a bit unstable, right? Let me see what I can do now. We’ll come back and I’ll build you a bicycle. I’ve taken you a unicycle and built it into a bicycle and you go. Fantastic. So I see the, I have to pedal. I didn’t really think I needed to push this thing, but okay, let’s automate it. Let’s check on an engine. Great. So noW you’ve got a motorbike and now what you will typically find is the people. I really like that. That is great. That is the motorbike. I would quite like. It’d be a bit more kind of sturdy. It looks like it’s gone from a unicycle to a bicycle to a to a motorbike because. great. Well if you want to we can just start again, but now we go, let’s please build me a motorbike and that is different version to

Jordan: 18:28

version two point. Oh, at this point we have learned and learned and learned and now we’re ready to do a big jump where we say, okay, we’ve learned all these lessons. We’ve learned the things that are good and the bad things we like. We don’t. So now we can build the two point zero with all of that informing us. So that two point, oh, is, is, is a system that is clean and, and, and built much more to way where the expectations are aligned.

Pete: 18:57

Exactly that. it’s that process of learning and why I’m saying it’s like iterating and iterating because even within those kind of chunky releases, as it were of going from unicycle to bicycle to motorbike, you might look at the unicycle and want to change the pedals. You might look at unicycle and Want to change the spokes. You might look at the unicycle insight to change the tire color, that’s all within that kind of iteration of the unicycle. You might then bring some of that over onto your bicycle design, or you might say, this is the perfect opportunity to get rid of that red tile that we don’t like anymore black tire on this, on this bicycle, and that. That for me is a huge sell to an organization is let’s identify and work out what you think, what you know to be true right now of what works and what doesn’t work for you and what you want this thing to be. Now let me show you some examples of other things that you might not even think is possible or know as possible that we’ve already done for other people in other ways. So for example, if someone goes, you know, we have a mailing list, we always send people a, um, an email on a, on a friday night. It’s like, great, okay. So you, you want your systems to be able to send emails on a friday night? Yes, please. Do you also want them to receive a text message? Oh, can it do that? And I thought, hold on, can’t do that. Well, the answer is, sorry to say, say it again. Of course it can. It can do whatever you want and we’re kind of better singing the praises of Podio here, but in fairness is probably what this podcast is really, really about is explaining because it’s so hard to explain what Podio is and that’s so challenging to get across is. Yeah, it’s a database. It’s a crm. Yeah, it’s mailing list automator. Yeah, it. It’s a project management tool. Yeah, it’s whatever you want, but for me, what Podio can be is let’s take, I think quickbooks or Xero or something like that is a good example. Those are very good. You know, an accounting platform is very good at being an accounting platform and pretty much not much else. What Podio can do is probably 80 or 90 percent of what quickbooks or Xero can do, but Xero. Podio can also be what asana is. Podio can also be what salesforce is, but who can also be insert x, y, zed other system here. That’s the real killer point. That’s, that’s the beauty of it and that you’ve got all of your systems in one place, in a consistent format and style, and it means that, um, you know, you can release a new feature, a new function, a new service within a organization, Podio platform, and their existing staff or existing users will already know how to use 80 percent of it because it looks the same. And I followed the same pattern in the same structure, in the same hierarchy and the same layout, and they can get to the same thing on their phone in the same way. And then all your doing is that 20 percent difference of this, the system x rather than system wide.

Jordan: 22:13

So now, um, let’s, let’s just go, uh, you know, uh, we, we did a, I just did a podcast recording the other day, um, with a WAUportal portal, which I know that you are a WAU, in fact your name dropped in that podcast. Yeah. It’s one of the partners that, uh, that they work with very closely. So, um, you know, one of the things about Podio obviously is the power innately built into it. One of the things about Podio is the power of integration to other systems and to add ons. And I think one of the misconceptions around that sometimes is because we spend all our time preaching just like we just have now together about how you can do everything, but sometimes another system should do something as well. And like Xero in quickbooks. It’s actually a good example. My accountant would kick my ass if I said, by the way, I’m going to do everything in Podio and you’ll never, you know, and not, not do not push the information to Xero because they’re sitting there going, ah, yeah, and taxes and how are you doing the hmrc submissions and all that.

Pete: 23:19

I’m sorry. That’s a really good point. Sorry I forgot to fill it to the end of my last point. And exactly that was worth trying to end up is yes, Podio can do 80 percent of what Xero can do, but you’ve got to also ask you the question, ask yourself the question, is it worth spending all that time and energy and effort trying to replicate exactly what a bespoke custom built purpose system is there to do and does well just so that it can all be in one place, probably not. Particularly when the tax laws change all the time, tax rates change all the time for let’s take in a payroll system. You could spend lots of time replicating the payroll system, um, it in Podio if you wanted to. I genuinely say don’t bother you know, there there’s a more cost effective given the amount of time it would take you to me, yes it will be yours. But is it worth it? I don’t think so. Is it worth, instead of linking your Podio platform to your payroll provider? That’s the answer.

Jordan: 24:25

Yeah, we, we, we, and, and there are automations and this is coming to the integrations and add on elements. There are automations you can do. I mean, with quickbooks and Xero would probably the two biggest we usually integrate with in terms of finance, um, uh, you know, because of the api abilities, uh, you know, we will often say to companies, Podio is the, is the, the workhouse, it’s the engine room of your business and I’m, we’re going to connect to Xero and we’re going to push automatically push and invoice creation out to Xero, do all that there. so we’ve got that for the accountant, suck that invoice back in and again, make Podio manage the, sending it, the, the, the, the, the triggering of when it’s paid to start a project and all that stuff. So, so we use, use the specific for when it’s needed to be, but let Podio drive that workflow heart. Um, in terms in integrations, um, you know, how do you see it, how do you, uh, you know, uh, what are your favorites? What do you see as really powerful things for your customer?

Pete: 25:34

Well, fantastic enabler for the integrations are the kinds of middleware platforms like zapier and Integromat, which enable with relatively little coding skill to, for you to be able to link system x system life. Um, and one of the reasons why we favor using those middleware, um, is simply because we don’t want to build and manage everybody’s Podio system. We don’t want to be the bottleneck that prevents them from, from growing and using this system and making it their own. So whenever we do Podio development work, whenever you do system development work, we are always looking for what is the way that we can, you know, not squirrel this away on a secret server somewhere where you’ve got to learn code to be able to change a date on a form or anything, but instead put it in plain sight and go, this is yours, this is your log in our log in. You gIve us permission to use your login and so forth. So Integromat it used to be zapier. I would say the Integromat has taken over as being a as well. Actually. Um, I think zapier now playing catch up to Integromat and it was definitely the other way around for quite a while. Uh, so I’m, I’m pleased that Integromat doing it and they’ve got a much more visual approach. Um, so we use, we use those two systems quite a lot for you mentioned WAU portal before.

Jordan: 27:07

Talk to me a bit about that because that means certainly WAU identified you as a, as a partner who really understands it and does a great job integrating it, and I think, um, uh, you know, we are in that podcast we try to, to show people why you’d want to use WAU e portal. Maybe talk to us a bit about how you’ve integrated, um, why you look at it, why you think it’s a good idea for certain clients that use case that you’re trying to solve just so people get a bit better understanding of that.

Pete: 27:36

Okay. Well, I think it’s, it’s fair to say that Podio as a platform is, has got a very steep learning curve. hence the reason why, as I said, I looked at it first time dismissed, it, came back to it three years later, I still didn’t quite get it, played around with it for, you know, committed to playing around with it for awhile to go. Oh, and then I had penny drop after penny drop of how this stuff all fitted together now whilst now I can’t remember what life was like before Podio in the same way that when you say go onto facebook for the first time, you’ve got to understand what a post is, what a wall is, what a group is, wouldn’t you know, and all these different things and finding friends, making friends, photo albums and all that kinds of stuff. That now probably is quite intuitive. And again, you can’t remember what life was like before it, but at the time he had to learn. I would. I kind of put Podio in thAt, in that camp that once you get it, it all makes sense, but until you get it, it doesn’t. Now where for me were WAU portal comes in, is that everybody understands how to use a website. You intuitively know that if you go to know if you can open an internet browser in the first place and type in an address, you can get to a website and from there you point and click and you can’t really break things because it’s a website and people fundamentally get that. Whereas Podio is an incredibly powerful multi multichannel communication tool and project management device and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. All the things it can do and because it can do so much and because the vast majority of people who you would like your clients, your customers, you don’t want them necessarily to see everything that’s going on behind your, your project management curtain. You want to show them a few things. You want to show them the stuff that is relevant to them and because of the way that Podio is structured, you either need to add them into a workspace, in which case they can see everything that’s going on in the workspace or you need to share. Share with them One item where they can only see what’s going on. That one, if you want to share quite a few things with them and enable them to browse, that for me is WAU portal comes in because it basically puts a web skin, a website, skin layer over the top of your Podio platform so that then individuals can, uh, be allocated their sign in using their email and password where they will only see the stuff that is relevant to them as opposed to everybody else’s. So it means you can have all of your key information in one place. it also means you can again, a limitation of Podio and the user interface is that it looks the way it looks and there are a few hacks that you can use to make it look slightly different, but fundamentally, Podio looks like Podio. Whereas with WAU portal, you can customize all the colors. You can put slap your logo all over it. You can drive either drag and drop. I’m designers. You can put columns and rows and tabs and linked to referenced items and all these kinds of things. and it just means that it breaks down this barrier of, of understanding what is the data that you’re trying to convey. The other person just gets it because it’s there. So we’ve built quite a few portals now. One that’s probably, um, we’ve been working on for the longest is a portal design that is a twofold. So we’ve got one portal for parents and one portal for childcarers. And the idea is that it matches the backend system is matching the parents who need childcare, childcarers as child carers who are able to give it. And the child, the child care portal enables them to set up and provide, you know, the address, contact details, dbs, which is legal checks or provide their id, provide their bank details, all that kind of thing because that’s what they need to upload as a staff member. Whereas the parents want to upload, here’s the detail of my child is their strengths, their challenges, their opportunities, their ambitions, their blah blah, blah, blah blah. And then behind the scenes, the admin team for the organization are using Podio to match childcare a with child b to match them together. And go, you’re a great match, and now the parents can see that in their portal, the childcare can see that in their Portal, but they’re not overlapping on their, on their data. The parents can’t see the childcare is dbs information because they shouldn’t be able to the, the, the, um, parents banking details because they shouldn’t need to. But yet all of that data is in one place and that’s Podio. So, but again, that whole WAU portal sets up, we kind of help people shortcut it by going, we can create you a great looking portal and great function and that function is both portal based and podium based because we know how to set up Podio and once you know how to set up Podio properly and automate it properly than putting this nice looking skin over the top of it and setting that up, probably you’ve got this really full full packaged offer that you’re able to give to an organization saying, we can create you your custom built mega system, but it’s all yours. You want to change the layout. Go for it. If you, if you want to change the layout of the portal, go for it, go to portal, sign in, change it dumb. You don’t need to contact us, you don’t need to get permission. You don’t need to have an api key. You don’t have anything like that. Just go in, log in, change it, done. And that’s what, that’s the kind of solution we looked at it

Jordan: 33:32

and then, and then they did go in and login, change. It breaks something, delete something accidentally and call and beg. Well I was going to say the only bit about yours, the other bit about where you’re saying that as a fellow Podio partner who’s dealt with so many clients over the years, um, you know, it’s funny, I was last night, I was in this office until about 9:00 PM, 10:00 PM because I had a call with New Zealand with one of our clients. They’re a local government, a organization and, and uh, they were asking about changing some, some, some names about thIngs, changing things around. And I said, and we, we typically put people on support contracts just for that reason because what ends up happening is, you know, invariably I end up, I usually promote the concept of locking systems down, having clients in his light users and locking systems down. And it’s a different approach. both are, I can see pluses and minuses of both. I can see pluses of your approach, I can see pluses in my approach, but certainly what I’ve found is over the years I just got sick and tired of people breaking shit. And um, you know, because the automation sometimes can be conditional on search this for this exact name and you know, and that’s the, that’s the key. You can brale some things so I can see that I’m now. Oh, go Ahead.

Pete: 34:51

I think we, we. So I said, you know, this is your system, this is going to be yours, et cetera. We then do also train up super users, so people who are allowed to see behind the curtain, they are allowed to access, but not everybody is allowed to access. And also for things that are kind of mission critical for exactly that thing, saying your typed in, it must be this exact phrase then that’s the kind of thing that in Podio say would be in the hidden field or would be having some kind of change lock on it to make sure that if it changed and it wasn’t by person x, then that will be reset back. Um, so we kind of do, we want, because I hear it all is, but until you are fully loving this and you’ve been doing this for years and they then we will help protect yourself from yourself. There’s no question that that is. We always say like, if you want to add something to Podio, go for it. You can add add, add, add is absolutely fine. If you want to delete something from Podio. Whoa, whoa, whoa. What do I do that. Let’s talk about it first. And if you want to change something that you know is. So, I mean we for example, we use category fields as trigger buttons all the time. And we, we kind of have a standardized approach, we say, right? We always put in a on like an action category trigger we put in a not done do it now, done button and it’s kind of red, amber, green, so you triggered to it now so that it goes onto done or and you know whether it’s ever been run before because if it has been written before, it’s on dme. If it hasn’t been done before, it’s not done and therefore you can filter and all those kinds of things and I know there are other approaches of just having one button that’s either on or off, but it’s harder to filter is we find it’s kind of less intuitive. It doesn’t show up on the views and the app on the app, on the left hand side as you know, as a category of what isn’t selected. So we found that it’s a better solution. But for example, we say, you know, don’t, if you see not done, do it now. Done broadly speaking, don’t touch. Those are the words. Those are the power words. The key words that help you know that that has an automated process. So don’t go play with it unless you really know what you’re doing and which case for it they found out, give us a call.

Jordan: 37:13

Absolutely. Well, I’m just finally, you know, I think that we’ll probably need to do a couple more episodes. There’s lots of stuff we can talk about over the time. Um, but in terms of this, uh, you know, how do people find you? How do people find you? Uh, what, what are you working on now are just kind of sum up, sum it up and take us out.

Pete: 37:34

Okay. Well, if you’re interested in some of this stuff we’ve talked about today, if you go to our website, which is the amount of margin natively named futuresolutionsonline.co.uk, you can have a look through some of our recent projects that have been working on. I’m a bit more about our methodology and our belief and how we put together the, the platforms that we do and some of the current stuff that we’re working on. actually, we’re working on quite a, quite a few portals at the moment with WAUportal stuff including a barrier to start work on a portal for supporting mba applications in, in the states. So people go into business schools in the states. I’m guiding people through that process and receiving feedback on their essays and um, application deadlines and things like that. Um, we are continuing to work with that child care company that I talked about before. It’s been a long ongoing iterative with them that’s going well. And another big one we’re doing at the moment is for a. We’re running a, the infrastructure behind young people from around the world submitting the project ideas for, um, areas that contribute towards the UN global goals. So there are 17 global goals set by the un about climate change and social society, uh, improvements. And we’ve been receiving hundreds and very possibly up to thousands of submissions from schools, school teams around the world. And that’s now a fully automated mega process that runs all year round as intakes them on a 12 month cycle and with different in input and outputs and sending them back feedback reports and all kinds of things so they’re looking to grow. That’s a and that’s just the top of my head of what we’re working on them and it’s always busy. Excellent.

Jordan: 39:36

Well, a, always a pleasure to speak with you Pete. I will be posting your website address on the podcast description so that people can listen to this, get intrigued and go directly to site. And as always, thanks very much for listening. Uh, Pete, thank you very much for participating.

Pete: 39:53

You’re very welcome. Thank you sir.

Narrator: 39:57

You’ve been listening to a supercharged with Jordan Samuel Fleming. Subscribe today on itunes, google play or spotify for your weekly dive into how you can supercharge your business by making it powered by Podio. Be sure to checkout our website www.WeareGamechangers.com where you can learn more and arrange a 30 minute call with Jordan to understand how Podio can supercharge you.

Jordan Samuel Fleming

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