Welcome back to the Upstream Leader Podcast. I’m Heath Alloway, your host for today’s episode. And our topic today should be a fun one: It is this idea of taking an idea and actually putting it into a successful startup. And my guest today is James Stapleton, the co-founder and president, CEO, of Codefi, and also the co-creator of the Southern Missouri Innovation Network. James, as always, great to see you. Welcome to the show.
Thanks, Heath. Really appreciate it. Really glad to have a conversation with you today. Those titles sound probably more impressive than I am, but I’m really happy to be on the podcast. So thanks.
Well, James, it was a bit of a tongue twister. I’m glad I got it out without bobbling it. So we’re in good shape. But James, something we like to start off with all of our guests just to kind of help our listeners get to know you a little bit: What really shaped you and molded you into the leader that you are today?
Yeah, I really appreciate kind of starting there. I think those kinds of things say a lot about a person and probably help listeners to kind of clue in on what makes them tick. And so I really think about a couple of different things. One personally, I guess I think about, you know, what the influences in my life have been. Obviously, my faith being a big driver of my desire just to do good, you know, honestly, in ways I’ve had opportunities to try to make the world a better place, to try to help people achieve more. And, you know, really just now, especially at this point in my life, focusing so much on really just how to help other people improve the quality of theirs.
And, certainly personally, a big part of that has been my wife, a partner of over, goodness, now almost 35 years retired public school teacher and teaching is something that we have shared a love for whether I’ve been in private businesses that I’ve owned myself, or in a traditional sense in my academic part of my career. Stacey and I love to teach love to try to, through teaching, really accomplish parts of our mission.
And I think professionally too, I’ve just been really blessed with These wonderful opportunities that I think in many ways aren’t things that I planned for or would have a thought would really manifest in my life. And it put me in these places where I could thrive in challenging scenarios in many cases, especially in my startup years, and even in the work we do now in Codefi, it’s challenging work, but, I’ve been put in those places and it gives me an opportunity, I guess, to do the best I can as a leader. So I think the combination of those things has really helped mold me.
Yeah. Well, I appreciate that, James. And so a couple of things you said is just that passion to do good and following your mission and, you know, working with startups, I know that is no easy task. And James, even with that, you know, I’m curious with what you see within the startup world, you know, what do you see as far as like success and failure rates? I think that may be a good starting point for the conversation because it’s exciting, but it can also be very challenging.
Yeah. I think a lot has been said about, you know, sort of failure rates. You know, for me, this journey started at a very young age. I didn’t grow up around business people. My parents were both kind of blue collar laborers. They, you know, didn’t have education past high school. So I’m one of those people that, you know, in a sort of cliché sense, met a guy when I was young, that really helped expose me to opportunities that the business world held. Then I immediately started learning that I had this unique sense about me that caused me to want to go try to build companies, to try to solve problems, and, you know, really at a young age when I didn’t really know what I was doing, but was really driven, began to learn about what the differences were, in terms of people as founders and companies in those paths to either success or failure.
You know, I think that most data indicates that within two years, early stage companies, 50 percent of them fail. And quite frankly, if you think about what happens in the first two years of a company, you know, I will say—starting a company that is a complex, perhaps technology-based company like the ones that we work versus starting a mom and pop retail or a service based organization that is built to be small and will stay small, those are kind of animals of a different type—but any company that fails in two years, it’s likely that the source of failure wasn’t about the execution or management or leadership. I mean, there isn’t that much time. It’s likely that it wasn’t a well thought out, well evidenced plan to begin with. And we deal with a lot of companies that if we inherit them after they have been formed and launched, you really struggle with answering the question, “Why did they do this?” You know, it doesn’t appear there was any evidence there was demand for the solution that they’re trying to sell to people. And, you know, maybe we can get into some of that more during our conversation. But obviously very high failure rate, especially, high tech, high growth companies, and much of that to do with really people building products and solutions that customers don’t care about.
Yeah. And James, you know, several things you said there, part of why I wanted to have you on the show is, you know, I’m passionate about what, what you do and what you’re working on through, through the Southern Missouri Innovation Networks. I think a lot of what we can talk about today, it correlates really well with what we see in the public accounting profession. You know, firms are in constant change, they’re launching new services, they’re trying to bring new ideas to their clients. So before we maybe get into that, share a little bit more about what you’re doing with the Southern Missouri Innovation Networks. I think that’ll be a good foundation for the rest of our conversation.
So we started Codefi about 10 years ago, and we really did so when we identified—in some of the work I was doing at that time for a federal government agency—we identified gaps in some of the economic and community development programs and services. Really, especially in smaller cities, smaller metros, in rural regions, or less populated areas, where there was a lack of knowledge and awareness about the technology economy and industry, and therefore, a lack of development in that area.
So you have one of the leading drivers of growth as a set of industries and sectors in the world, and certainly in our domestic economy, and you look up somewhere 10 or 15 years ago, and much of that growth had just kind of flown by a lot of communities like the ones we live in. While technology has been really integrating itself to every business, especially regional or larger businesses as a component of the economy that people are trying to work together to accelerate and catalyze, nobody was doing that. And since in my background, that’s one of the things that I’ve done and been able to do as an entrepreneur and working with other people in their companies, that became a challenge for me.
So we started Codefi in Cape Girardeau, where our headquarters still exists today. After the first year or so, we were lucky to be able to catalyze a big downtown development to kind of build around our kind of tech neighborhood concept, and really rejuvenated an entire intersection in a couple of blocks downtown that had the largest buildings in Cape that were in the community that had been empty for decades.
And so then about five years ago, Heath, we started talking seriously with Rachel Anderson and Allen Kunkel, the folks at the Jordan Valley Innovation Center and at Missouri State University—Rachel being the executive director of the e-factory about the specialized kinds of tech based economic development that Codefi did, and what it might look like to do more of that in Springfield. And the more that we started talking, we recognized that, you know, in between Cape and Springfield, the long 60, you know, really community after community that over time, many of those counties, had not prospered economically, as you know, there are a handful, way too many, economically distressed counties in that area. And so we began talking about what we might be able to do to work together, to try to not only for Codefi to move in and expand into the Springfield area, but do what we could to make a difference in the region in between.
And James, so I’m surprised I’ve never asked you this before, as many times as we’ve talked, but you know, one of the things we see in the public accounting world is when you say the word “innovation,” it’s probably, you know, most would say, “Oh, I’m an accountant. Maybe I’m not very innovative.” And I tend to maybe look at it a different way. So I’d love to hear when you think about these ideas and you think about a startup, how do you describe innovation and what is that?
You know, for me, I probably have a little bit of a narrowed definition, given the work I do in my background, but I really think about process—where we find a way to develop solutions to old problems. I mean, what’s most innovative, I think, in the truest sense is when we take something that could have broad-based value, you know, whether that’s a service or product, or not just think about that or do the research to design a solution, but I think part of being innovative is actually taking that to market. So where it really can have a positive impact on people and companies and communities. And so I think innovative people are people more times than not in the work I do, for some reason they’re kind of driven or I hear people say wired, you know, there’s a component about them where their eyes and ears are always open, looking for opportunities or where things are broken. You know, we walk through life every day and there’s a bunch of jobs we have to do—not just our vocations, but taking care of our families. And we use a bunch of services and product and tools to help us do that more efficiently, or to do it more enjoyably. It surprises me every day how many times a very basic thing that we’ve been doing the same way a long time, that somebody comes along and innovates a better way to do that. So I think they’re people that make that happen.
Yeah. And James, I love hearing you say that because the way you describe that, I feel like a lot of accountants, a lot of CPAs that are out there are actually in a lot better position to be innovative than what they even realize. And that’s finding issues, problems with their clients, looking for ways to take that and help them. I think there’s a lot of opportunity on the horizon. So, James, one of the things you mentioned earlier, kind of, you know, with startups, there’s success, but a high level of failure with that too. And I don’t know if high failure is even the right word, James, but I say it because I think we learn as we go through that every time and we can continue to get better.
But all of these startups, very similar to a CPA firm. Take launching a new service. They all start as an idea. Any advice that you could give to them on what should they be thinking about, what should they be looking about, really to increase their odds, and whenever they’re taking that idea and actually starting to put it into place?
Yeah. I really feel like this is the heartbeat of really what separates, you know, there’s fate and luck sometimes at play. And so sometimes people get lucky and there’s fate involved in, you know, we didn’t do the things the right way, but we still have success. And there are many of those stories out there, but by and large, it’s at that early stage where someone thinks they have an idea, where either the success can begin, or a path to struggle or failure begins. And I think we use a fairly sophisticated set of tools and frameworks at Codefi to help people kind of shift from thinking about an idea to really thinking about, you know, almost in a scientific method sort of way, really trying to learn as much about a problem, and the way the potential customers who live with that problem, that we probably know the problem better than the people that are experiencing it. And it’s in that insight when then we can design a solution that not only does the job for the people who need it, but thrills them. It’s one thing to deliver a service, you know, maybe as a firm where people are reasonably pleased. It’s another thing, and the impact to that firm is exponentially larger when they’re thrilled, where they just were totally unexpected in the quality of what the work was that was done.
And all too many times, we meet aspiring entrepreneurs or startup founders, and they bring with them something that we refer to as innovators’ bias. So they have an idea in our world. We deal with technology. So a lot of it’s software, a lot of it is microelectronics. And so they have an idea. And many times that idea is in search of a customer. The idea is clever. It may be innovative in the sense that somebody hasn’t done it that way before. But oftentimes, when we actually talk to people who we think would be the customer for that likely service or product, it wasn’t at all designed with them in mind.
So that bias, where people come to you and hit you, you know, if you’re a partner in a firm, somebody wants to talk to you all the time, that’s a startup guy or gal, and they’re like, man, I got this great idea. And they talk about, begin the conversation, telling you how the product works. Well, then you can tag them immediately as one of these people with innovators’ bias, because really what they should be talking about is the broad-based nature of the solution itself.
And James, I hate to admit it. As you define that, I think I fall in that bucket before. So that was a good learning point in our conversation. So James, when you say that, I’ve seen, well, actually, let me ask this first, before I get to the strategic planning piece of it: So how do you know, like in that stage, how do you know when it’s time to actually move forward, and actually take something to market?
We coach through a set of what we call sprints or short term experiments. And our goal, Codefi actually delivers a program called 120 day startup, and we deliver it now virtually across Southern Missouri and even outside of that region. But our goal in that program, crazy as it might sound, is to really develop demand for a product before we ever build it.
So when I was, you know, when I was young and kind of starting out in some tech entrepreneurial work, you know, kind of early 90s when the first tech bubble was really being born, we would just go off in a corner, a dark room somewhere, and start writing code and develop a product, and go to market, and hope before the secret got out that we could sell it to customers. And many times only to learn It wasn’t really designed with the feature and functionality that customers really wanted. And we don’t have to do that. You know, we really can incrementally gather data and let the data really drive us to what we should build.
And although we’re not talking about that now, part of what’s hard for a tech startup is to know what’s the minimum investment you can kind of make at the front end and really try to reduce risk. So instead of going off and building a big, elaborate, complicated system that would, you know, be the ultimate product that you would want to take to market, what is the minimum set of features and functions that you could design and deliver that a customer would pay for right away? And then you can really build the company from that point on the traction of that product and then keep building on that and you can see, you know, especially as accountant minded people start thinking, how we can minimize the risk of failure by not sinking so much cost into something that we’re not sure people are going to buy.
Right. I was going to ask this question a different way, but I’m afraid I’ll give away my answer. So I’m going to just ask it, maybe in a more simplified way, is whenever you’re working with a startup, what kind of guidance or what do you see that’s successful with strategic planning? And then I’ll tell you why I asked that question, but I’m curious to hear your response.
One of the things that I think is a misunderstanding about early stage companies, especially ones that are kind of ideas and just being formed, is that they’re similar to bigger companies for established customers. And I think many people think they’re the same thing, just a small version. And the truth is, what an early stage company is doing is searching for a monetizable business model that is kind of repeatable and scalable. It’s not operating and managing a business. It’s really a business façade in search of a business model, and as such, the most effective ways to plan are short term.
We work and coach founders to really work in kind of 90 day cycles. So don’t build big, elaborate, well written, comprehensive business plans, develop business model templates. And we use a tool we call a canvas, a business model canvas, and use that to really kind of formulate the experiments that you’re running on a 90 day period, do your planning pretty short term, so that you can continue to iterate your way to the traction and success you need. And then when the business begins to scale, there’s a transformation that takes place, or needs to, that is another really big hurdle for small, entrepreneurial companies. And that’s when it begins to grow up and it needs more managed, it needs the founder to take on kind of a new role as a CEO, and then planning at that point, take on more of the nature of an existing or longer term business.
James, I love the fact that how you answered that, because now I can share the rest of the story behind that—and for our listeners, we didn’t plan this ahead of time. But one of the things that like, that I’ll talk to firms about is I’ve seen the mistake where we’ll plan and plan and plan and plan some more, and then once you finally, make the decision to go, things don’t always go as planned. And it’s that, that action creates clarity kind of mindset. And I’ve seen exactly what you just said is like the first 90 days, it may not go exactly the way it looked or the way you thought, and you can spend so much time planning that it puts you in a standstill where six months or nine months goes by and you haven’t made any traction. So I love thinking about it and that, you know, 90 day increments, because things will, you’ll learn, things will modify, you’ll learn maybe what not to do and things that are working. So I love hearing you describe it that way.
James, one question that comes up quite often, like new service ideas in the startup side within firms is at what stage should they become profitable? And I don’t know if there’s a magic number on this, but when this is a cost versus investment kind of mindset. And so when should a startup or when should that new idea or new service start to become profitable in an organization?
I feel like this is really tied to the last question in many ways. So we kind of think about the early years in a company in a kind of an initial three year window. So I can’t help but kind of think about, you know, how many times people who are trying to get these companies off the ground get asked by a variety of folks to give them a five year set of performance or, you know, some kind of sales plan that has a five year time horizon. Not to mention a comprehensive business plan for some five year period. The truth is, most of those don’t stand up to that first customer interaction. I mean, all the plans you put together and you get in front of the first handful of customers, and you figure out none of those plans really make any sense anymore.
So we try to put people that are trying to build these companies on a three year initial window with the idea that I think an answer to your question, when do we need to be profitable? What does that traction roadmap look like? So we use a traction roadmapping tool, and we begin with the idea of what’s the minimum success that you want to have out of that company, in the case of the firm, that new line of service or product offering. So what would be the minimum revenue, sort of the basic economic units? In terms of basic economic units, what would success look like?
And then you can begin with a focus on all of the sort of elements of lead generation to conversion and acquisition of customers and clients. You can begin to work your way through a sort of funnel and really get a grip on the unit economics. The answer to your question is, well, it depends on what success you think you need to have. And then I think a lot of the companies we work with, it also depends on how you want to finance the work. If your minimum success criterion is a company that might be venture finance worthy, boy, that is a really high bar to set. I guess one thing, a lot of startup—aspiring startup founders don’t understand how big a marketplace you would have to have before you would truly be viable for real venture financing. You know, maybe a company that’s on a path to $100 million annual recurring revenue. I mean, that’s what gets VCs really excited. We’re not going to build many of those. There just aren’t many of those that happen.
If you start working your way backward from there, you know, if somebody wants to get to a $10 million annual recurring revenue, that’s a real business that can have substantial impact if you’re going to try to build it, kind of bootstrapping it and try to build it on growth, that traction roadmap looks a lot different, than if you’re going to try in various ways to use some aspect of debt to try to build that growth.
So this is a really long way, Heath, of saying it really depends. We coach tech startup founders probably do not get really interested in the idea that they can build the next unicorn, billion dollar company, but that they need to begin by trying to figure out how to make money. You know, really, if you can build a product or service that does generate a profit, the thing you can be safe in at that point forward is that you can continue to build on that. A lot of the failure early on comes from an aspiration maybe to build something bigger than a lot of the people we work with have the capacity to build.
That’s a great answer. You raised another question. So going back to that cost mindset versus investment mindset. One of the questions we get to is in the, whenever they’re not profitable, it’s how much money should we be spending on marketing or lead generation? And what’s that magic number like? ’Cause you’ll hear like, well, I think we need to spend more so we can make more. And then others may say, well, wait a second. We’re not profitable yet. So any guidance you have around the marketing and business development side?
This is one of the hardest areas right now.
Is this another episode, James?
Yeah, this is, this is hard. And the reason I say that is because of how much it has changed so recently. If you think back to when social media really began to play into everybody’s thinking about, business development. So when we first started looking at Facebook and, you know, not so much Twitter, but Instagram and LinkedIn, and we thought that was a place to kind of build lead gen and funnel, you know, along with other traditional means and email campaigning. At that point, social media was very inexpensive, if not free from an advertising standpoint, and was highly effective. And then all of us ran to those channels, and over, you know, sort of supplied them with advertising, and they have every year become less and less effective, at least for many people and companies.
So I think we’re at a crossroads, actually, Heath, as we sit here today, you know, really looking at how effective those platforms are. We’re involved in a bunch of work using predictive analytics and, you know, what people are calling AI now—there are really good tools, learning language models that can help build really vast lists and help in the lead generation area. But I think this is going to be an area over the next decade or so that it’s going to go through a lot of change. We’re even seeing with a lot of the companies we coach, as silly as it sounds, kind of going back to old school, you know, kind of street team, finding customers where they’re at and introducing themselves to them.
I think definitely if you’re working with short term plans, the nice thing is the experiments you’re running with customer acquisition and business development, if you’re gathering data all the time, that really questions, you know, what is it going to cost for acquisition to a highly qualified lead and then potentially a customer, and you notice that, you know, in a short sprint in an experiment that all your assumptions were way off, you can adjust pretty quickly. I think that’s what it’s going to take moving forward. I think the old days of being able to kind of set something up, hit a button and let it run probably don’t generate very good returns anymore.
So in a way, James, if it’s working, do more of it. And if not move on to the next thing?
Probably the obvious thing to say, yes.
Well, you make some very valid points in there, James, and maybe for some when I think of CPA firms, when you’re talking, I think one of the most, I’d say, maybe easiest to market for a new service line is just their own current client base. They have opportunities within the raving fan clients to start there, and then build off that. So I appreciate the insight on that side.
James, one other question here, so thinking about, say, you know, a startup that’s done well, and I’ll just say maybe, let’s just use some numbers, maybe a service has grown to $3 million or $5 million and they’re seeing some success. One of the challenges we see is, um, sometimes the person that’s leading that is still doing a lot of the work. So they’re still serving clients. And at what stage, or what do you see successful is, when do they move out of maybe doing as much of the work and working on the service line or the startup to take it maybe from that startup stage to the next level? Any thoughts you have around that?
A really good question. You know, I think a lot of the companies we coach actually were really trying to work on fairly expansive growth. So we kind of work on a 5 to 10x year over year goal. And for established firms with a lot of clients and revenue base, that probably sounds like a tremendous amount, but when you’re first starting, 5x, 10x year, it’s kind of a pattern we work in. And I feel like when you begin, if you can get on a trajectory where you’re accomplishing that kind of growth at the place where you begin to see that soften, where you begin to question, like, what has changed? Why are we not continuing to grow? Probably a pretty good time to ask that question about the capacity of the leader or team that’s really driving the delivery of that service or product.
In the early stage startup world, we find all the time a founder has to wear every hat. You know, they’re in product development, they’re in marketing, they’re in sales, they’re in finance, and in fact, there’s a culture that begins to grow inside of these early stage companies where it becomes a big part of the culture, almost to celebrate the chaos that comes from that kind of environment. And it really, I will tell you from experience, and I’m still susceptible to this, even at my old age, there’s some fun, there’s a bit of a thrill, you know, really having to really grind it out sometimes, especially if you’re doing work you love. And it’s also really hard for especially inexperienced leaders to realize when they become a bigger part of the problem than the solution.
And a lot of that then means that we’ve got to broaden the sort of capacity of a team to deliver. And then things like personal egos get in the way, and there are a lot of things I think that can personally limit us from doing what’s right in the company. And it can be a really sad, very stressful time for early stage companies, the forming teams, the co-founders almost never get through kind of that scale cycle together. You realize that many of the qualities and dynamics that worked really well in that kind of chaos driven time in the company aren’t well suited for that kind of growth phase. And that becomes a difficult time. You got to go find other people that can help and can be really disruptive for your personal and professional friendships, for sure.
Yeah. Well, James, I mean, something we haven’t talked about yet, but I think you’re starting to get into just the emotional side of a startup and then seeing success. And when you have went through the blood, sweat and tears and something is seeing success and what does that look like in the future, I can see how that can get very, very emotional at times. So appreciate the insight there.
James, as we wrap up here in the next couple of minutes, anything that we have not talked about that might be helpful for our listeners as they think about that startup mindset is, within their firm. Anything else that we should cover?
No, uh, Heath, the time has gone really fast. So I’ve enjoyed the conversation. I think that really the search for jobs that firms can develop services and products for, you know, the question becomes, how can that be an innate part of the culture in a firm? Obviously there’s a lot of work to do every day, and a lot of different sort of roles that generates, but who wakes up every morning in the firm trying to find the jobs where we can either break an existing solution to create a market opportunity for ourselves, or where we can become aware that either macro or micro factors are really driving the need for new solutions?
The wonderful thing about innovation is that I think just given the nature of how we live as humans, there is always going to be opportunity to create a new solution for frankly, an existing problem. So I think a lot of times it’s just a matter of whether or not that becomes a priority inside a firm. So kind of leave maybe with the idea that if there isn’t already that team that’s always looking for those opportunities, or it’s not high functioning, maybe there’s a consideration for that sort of internal “intrapreneurial” culture becomes a higher priority.
So James, how would you respond to this question: We’ve been successful, so why would we want to change?
Well, if we look at history, success isn’t something that’s permanent. You know, there just aren’t many examples where it lives very long. You mentioned the human side of all of this is kind of designed maybe to continue to try to be more and more comfortable. So when things feel like they’re going well, more and more of that just sets into our natural feeling and rightly so. You know, I think sometimes it’s, you gotta enjoy success. But, it’s not permanent. That’s for sure.
Yeah. Well, James, as we wrap up here, one thing we like to ask all of our guests, any resources, whether that’s books, podcasts, whatever it may be, that’s really just made a significant impact on your journey that you’d like to share with everyone?
Yeah, I appreciate that. About 15 years ago, Heath, I got to be a part of a group in the National Science Foundation that actually began doing a lot of the early work and rethinking how to start and how to coach people to start companies, especially kind of tech based companies. So there’s a whole line of publications, books and the like, around kind of the lean startup movement. And so I would suggest anybody that wants to read a little bit about how we’re thinking kind of modernly now, about the differences between building a startup and building and continuing to grow a business, you could definitely go out and take a look into that lean startup world.
There’s even a kind of division off of that referred to as a lean stack—an author, Ash Maurya, a young guy—not so young now, but was a young guy then from Texas who we worked with really closely on some of the tools that we use to coach. So yeah, the lean startup movement, I think would, some of your listeners would find kind of interesting in sharing more about the way we think and do things.
Very good. Thank you, James. So as we wrap up, Hey, if someone had a question or wanted to be in contact with you, James, what would be the best way to reach out?
I’d love to carry on communication with anybody who’d like to. Obviously, my LinkedIn profile is out there, and I’m happy for anybody to message me or email me at James@Codefiworks.com.
Well, James, I’ve enjoyed the conversation. I appreciate you investing the time to be here. I think the conversation will be very valuable for our listeners, and I think I jotted down a few notes myself. So, James, I appreciate the time.
Thanks for the opportunity, Heath.
Alright. Thank you. Take care.
You too.